The Glorification of Ignorance

Re-reading Jung Chang's classic on China's recent history and its relevance to today

It is not often I read books again, for the simple reason that there is so much new stuff coming out, there is just no time for it. But last week I grabbed Jung Chang’s ‘Wild Swans’ from the shelves which I read when it came out in 1991, largely to prepare myself for my then imminent departure to Hong Kong: I needed to beef up on China. It was a phenomenal read and my reason for going through it again some thirty-two years later was because China is now such a defining piece of our world, but also to grasp again the grisly chapter that was the Cultural Revolution as I see parallels to it in today’s world.

The story describes the history of China from the fall of the emperor in the early 1900s to the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, by following one family through three generations. The youngest, Jung, is now in her early seventies and living in the UK. She starts the book by describing the near medieval circumstances in which her grandmother grew up in Northern China and how eventually the family was swept up into the Communist revolution in 1949. With the latter the stage is set to take the reader on the journey of her parents who became high ranking officials in the Communist Party in Sichuan province where they rose up the ranks not long after Jung was born there in 1951. But however promising the revolution seemed at the time, ending poverty and building a more equal society, the struggles within the party set China on a downward spiral and it took Jung’s family with it.

One of the things growing up in the last quarter of the 20th century was the total lack of understanding we had of what was really happening in China as it transformed itself into a modern nation. We were fully up to speed on the horrors of Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent of the large scale terror Stalin had unleashed on Eastern Europe. But Mao and the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) where unknown territory, and if they were discussed it was quite often in a positive way. The progressive hippie generation of the 1960s took a liking to the Mao outfit and his ‘Little Red Book’ with quotations and it all became part of counterculture in the West. The embrace of communism was seen as a way out of capitalism and all its evil side effects, the new China was a case study of the best way forward. Except of course that it wasn’t.

The core thing to understand is that the making of modern China post-1949 was a continuous battle between two factions within the ruling Communist Party. The hardline ideologues under Mao on the one hand, and the more pragmatic folks like Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi on the other. It is important to note that the current president, Xi Jinping, hails directly from the pragmatist clan. In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward with its core goals to collectivize and industrialize the economy. It was a disaster of epic proportions which resulted in mass starvation and unrestrained terror, the victims of which are estimated to be in the tens of millions. The pragmatists seized this disaster as a way to reassert themselves, sideline Mao, and steer the country away from the chaos and deprivation and create a more mixed economy where mistakes of the past were not to be repeated. It worked for a short while until Mao conspired to frustrate progress by launching the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1966. His goal was to reassert power and take revenge and in doing so he effectively sent China back to the gutter for the next ten years.

This phase saw unrestrained totalitarian communism in all its guises take control of society. Students, military, young people above all, were given full authority to physically destroy everything that was ‘old’ and ‘bourgeois’. From the pragmatic political leaders to art to libraries, to indeed rooting out trees and entire grass fields as unnecessary capitalist luxuries. Utter destruction created a full and deliberate march to nihilism. Millions were tortured, murdered and exiled and as always in scenarios like this mediocre and often sadistic people emerged to take control of society and started settling personal scores. One of the first victims was a school vice principal in Beijing who was beaten to death by her students, a harrowing account of her last day gives you a feel of the brutal and all-encompassing force that had started to rule China.

The social and physical fabric of society was destroyed and the individual ceased to exist in a process ideologically cloaked in ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. Endless rallies with red banners and slogans whipped up the population into a fanatical and murderous frenzy that at times had to be reeled in by Mao and his cronies in order to prevent a loss of control and total descent into the abyss. It is Jung in her book who points out how this effectively brainwashed the entire Chinese population into believing the most absurd concepts while stifling any progress. It was the ‘glorification of total ignorance’ as she calls it and it enabled one of the most gruesome chapters of the 20th century to unfold itself. It was dark and retrograde.

Jung’s family did not fare well in those years. The parents were removed from their government jobs, imprisoned, tortured while the children were left to figure things out on their own, largely. In particular the journey of her father, Wang Yu, is one that will bring you to tears. A meticulous man who deeply believed in the communist revolution and in Mao, was rapidly deposed, imprisoned while suffering multiple mental breakdowns until a number of years of forced labour effectively ensured an early death. A fate that befell a large number of the pragmatist leaders, even some of Mao’s closest collaborators like prime minister Zhou Enlai were barred from urgent medical treatment as a way to spite and coerce them. Jung and her mother and siblings were able to wrestle their way out of their destroyed lives once Deng reasserted control in the late 1970s and sanity in China was steadily re-established. The price they and millions of Chinese paid was exorbitant.

The totalitarian madness where the core goal is to destroy objective knowledge and replace it with questionable ideologies recurs from time to time in history. Mao, Stalin and Hitler drove these to their extremes. But in today’s world we are not immune to it. If we see how certain theories are being promoted at universities and other institutions you cannot help but notice the parallels of groupthink where more and more people are forced to go along, to get along. Jung’s book is replete with party officials and others who no longer saw a way out and committed suicide. One of current president Xi Jinping’s sisters was one of them. It is not far-fetched to see how a recent suicide in Canada fits exactly the same pattern of isolating and marginalizing critical voices. We need to understand how these things operate and in the end destroy individuals and make free and open societies defunct. Jung’s book is an instructive manual and warning to us all.

The other link from Jung’s work to today is Xi Jinping’s rule. The book clearly unveils how the journey of communism in China with a goal of egalitarianism was still built on ancient cultural traditions. Communist party leaders and their offspring to this day are treated as a distinct royal class who, even in adverse circumstances, can often count on reverence and potentially unusual economic rewards. Titles are not important, but ancestry is.

Mao’s image still hangs over Tiananmen Square near fifty years after his death. Xi Jinping whose family was, like Jung Chang’s, persecuted during the Cultural Revolution has embraced him none the less. The Communist Party of China is an institution designed to survive and govern all else, at whatever price. Each period brings us a new approach and a new set of operators, but as long as Mao’s is revered as the unifying force behind modern China, authoritarianism will continue to be its defining characteristic. From the broad strokes of history to the individual level that Jung describes we can see how a system can survive any challenge, at any price. When western media call Xi Jinping ‘emperor’ it is not only an allusion to China’s past. It is exactly what he is, today. All of this is instrumental in understanding present day China and our own future. Do read the book.

Notes: Jung Chang’s book was a success and she continued by co-writing a massive biography of the man himself called Mao: The Unknown Story with her husband, Jon Halliday. If you are interested in more general history books on both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, then Frank Dikötter is your go to writer/historian. He has recently published some great books. From a previous generation of China experts Jonathan Spence is worth reading.