Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re featuring the Chinese business executive Weijian Shan’s 2019 essay on his memories of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—and how the period’s legacy continues to shape Chinese politics. As Shan observes, it was “a chaotic and brutal time of social upheaval,” one that is “still fresh in the memories of those who lived through it, including myself and many members of China’s contemporary ruling class.” To understand today’s China, “it helps to have a sense of what life was like in those dark, intense times.”
In 1966, China was still reeling from the effects of Mao’s ill-fated Great Leap Forward, a program aimed at transforming China through rapid industrialization that led instead to devastating famine, killing tens of millions of people from 1958 to 1962. Facing political challenges as the result of the program’s colossal failure, Mao sought a way to reassert his control over the Communist Party, and began advocating for class struggle and “continuous revolution.” By the summer of 1966, he had begun denouncing “bourgeois” infiltrators in the Chinese Communist Party—and encouraging students and citizens to criticize traditional authorities and party officials.
At the time, Shan was a student in Beijing. That spring, he had heard chatter about Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But “the revolution still seemed slightly distant to us—until, one day in June, it did not.” Fellow students had decided to leave class and participate in public denunciations; soon, staff members at the school began accusing each other of being “bad elements” and “class enemies.” “The school quickly descended into chaos,” Shan writes. Similar havoc spread through the country’s judicial and law enforcement systems, down to the streets: “Why should people stop at a red light, the symbol of revolution? No. Red should signal go and green should signal stop.”
But as thrilling and empowering as Shan found the early days of the Cultural Revolution, it soon turned ugly and violent. One evening, he witnessed several girls beating an old woman—their vice principal. “She did not survive that night,” Shan writes. “Mao had promised that the Cultural Revolution would bring ‘great chaos leading to great rule.’ But I had begun to think that it was leading only to more chaos.”
Estimates for the Cultural Revolution’s death toll range from hundreds of thousands to millions, with tens of millions being persecuted. Those who were denounced were subjected to public humiliation, torture, labor, or sometimes execution. In 1969, over ten million urban youths were sent to the countryside to do hard labor—including Shan, who spent six years toiling in the Gobi Desert, and Xi Jinping, now China’s president, who was also sent to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Today, the period’s legacy lives on in the debates about how to govern China—and where the country is headed. “Although most of them rarely discuss it publicly,” Shan writes, “the Cultural Revolution had a defining impact on many of the people who now lead China and the country’s biggest firms.”
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