East Wind Subsides: Disillusionment Experienced by Sent-Down Youth
Article by Shyh-Tse Linus Chiou
Abstract:
The origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution can be understood as a radical attempt to implement elements of mass democracy against the backdrop of what Mao Zedong considered to be an increasingly bureaucratized and revisionist Chinese Communist Party. At the forefront of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese students, who termed themselves the Red Guard, sought to transform society into a socialist utopia, inspired by the Paris Commune, under the direction of Mao. Red Guards often engaged in factional fighting over disagreements in implementing Mao’s vision. Nonetheless, Red Guards often possessed boundless revolutionary enthusiasm and went to extreme lengths to live up to the peasant-revolutionary virtues, including volunteering for assignments in the impoverished countryside. From October 1967 to the end of 1969, over 4.6 million middle school students were sent from urban residences to settle in the rural areas in “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages” campaigns.
This paper examines the memoirs of Rae Yang and Ma Bo– two fervent Red Guards who were posted in vastly different geographical locations but came to both experience anomie after an extended stay in the countryside. Furthermore, their two memoirs will be supplemented with various interviews provided by other former sent-down youth recorded in the University of Pittsburgh’s CR/10 Project to serve as a contrast to official propaganda published in the Peking Review during the Cultural Revolution.
The author takes a sociohistorical approach to understanding disillusionment experienced by sent-down youth, incorporating Durkheim’s conception of “anomie,” Weber’s “routinization of charisma,” and Andrew G. Walder’s “neo-traditional” authority that accompanied the routinization. Anomie was experienced by sent-down youth because of the unrealistic standards necessary for the prolonged adherence to such virtues, the Beijing establishment’s decision to discourage Red Guard militant idealism, the youth’s realization that virtutocracy was corrupted from within due to clientelism, and most importantly the need to form new values in order to thrive in the face of neo-traditional authority. The abrupt end to the Red Guards and the subsequent sent-down youth movement represent waning mass politics and the consolidation of the party-state bureaucracy.
Keywords: Red Guard, Disillusionment, Bureaucracy, Mao Zedong, Sent-down Youth, Anomie
Header Image Mao Zedong Statue: “Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought” by Gary Todd is licensed under CC0 1.0
Introduction
Despite its lofty ideological motivations, the policy of sent-down youth largely failed in its desired outcome– the formation of a new generation of Maoist revolutionary successors by eradicating bourgeois attitudes, such as disdain for manual labor, desire for individual career advancement, and a sustained bottom-up participation in politics. Former Red Guards like Ma Bo and Rae Yang, who volunteered to go to the countryside to mold themselves into the Maoist peasant-revolutionary archetype, soon found themselves disillusioned with the ideals upheld by Mao Zedong. Explanations of this disillusionment tend to focus primarily on the harsh material conditions of the countryside and the fact that urban youth were hardly suited to arduous manual labor. History provides several examples in which educated urbanite revolutionaries are forced to sustain themselves in the harsh conditions of the countryside while maintaining their ideological drive, such as the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Yan’an or the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency (Shah, 2019) in India. This paper will argue that the material conditions explanation alone is insufficient in explaining the disillusionment experienced by the majority of the Red Guard generation.
This paper is primarily concerned with delving deeper into the causes of disillusionment from a historical-sociological perspective by using Durkhein’s conception of “anomie,” Weber’s “routinization of charisma,” and Walder’s “neo-traditional” authority that accompanied the routinization.
Theoretical Framework
Anomie is defined as a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. Sociologist Émile Durkheim popularized the term in his study of how traditional sources of societal regulation–such as religion, government, and occupational groups– have failed to exercise moral constraints on an increasingly unregulated capitalist economy, leading to a drastic increase in suicides.
Weber described charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such, as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader (Weber, 1978). Charismatic authority is ephemeral and must either transform toward traditional authority or rational-legal authority; either way, it must be embedded within institutional authority. The transition from charismatic authority to other forms of authority is referred to as the routinization of charisma.
Accompanying the waning of charismatic authority was the emergence of “neo-traditional” authority. In Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry, sociologist Andrew G. Walder described the ideal type of Chinese industrial bureaucracy as akin to the Weberian patrimonialism– “it represents the patrimonial rule with modern bureaucratic form,” which Walder called “neotraditional” (Walder, 2011, pp. 251).
Image 1967 CHINA-CULTURAL REVOLUTION-COMMUNISM by manhhai is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Ideological Motivations of Sent-Down Youth Movement
Following the Hundred Flowers Campaign, official news lauded the efforts of a million office workers and intellectuals who had gone to the countryside and re-educate themselves by working directly with the peasantry. The flaws of the intellectuals that have to be corrected include “bookishness, or divorce from practice” and “separation from the masses” (Li, 1958).
The re-education movements prior to the Cultural Revolution reveal (1) the Maoist ideal of a proper intellectual is one who is deeply connected to the masses, (2) from the official standpoint, laboring in rural villages and learning from the masses serve as effective remedies to bourgeoise attitudes and political mistakes, and (3) the larger sent-down youth movement during the Cultural Revolution was thought to have proven precedents.
Cultural Revolution and Mao’s Attempt to Reestablish Charismatic Rule
During his speech at The Tenth Plenum Of The Eighth Central Committee in 1962, Mao warned of a “possibility of the restoration of reactionary classes” and proposed a rectification campaign to address revisionist tendencies within the party (Mao, 1962). Mao’s suspicions about the direction of the party under the leadership of Liu Shaoqi began to surface. During the Socialist Education Movement, the distinctly populist and anti-bureaucratic aspects of Maoist thinking emerged while Deng Xiaoping and Liu blunted the radical thrust of the movement (Meisner, 1986). As a result of Mao’s desperation to reverse what he saw as revisionism, or what Weber termed “the routinization of charisma”, the crevice between Maoist and the Liuist elements within the CCP would widen leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
Thus, Mao’s reversal of this routinization eventually involved the removal of Liu from a position of power as well as consolidation of charismatic authority, which can be characterized as an attack on party bureaucracy, support for spontaneous mass movements, appeals for revolutionary fervor, and reinforcing the cult of Mao, thereby laying the foundation for Mao Zedong Thought as the only standard of truth.
Cultural Revolution’s failure to prevent the routinization of charisma
During 1968, the official line remained that “the current great proletarian cultural revolution is absolutely necessary and most timely for consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat, preventing capitalist restoration and building socialism” (Peking Review, 1968). However, large parts of the movement had gone out of control and far beyond the original intentions of the chairman.
Previously, Mao and the CRSG had emphasized mass democracy and appealed to anti-establishment tendencies by evoking the Paris Commune. After the destructive turmoil of factional fighting that preceded 1968, the focus shifted to establishing “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and consolidating power through the “three-in-one combination.” Furthermore, in light of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, interpreted as a sign that the Soviets were willing to use military force to impose their policies on the communist world, Mao concluded that China must prepare for war to resist Soviet Revisionism (Peking Review, 1968). As the domestic and international situations worsened, Mao had to reestablish the authority of the vanguard party and quickly put urban centers under control, relinquishing the prospects of completing the mass democracy experiment.
The party’s attempts to reestablish order and authority met grassroots pushback. For instance, Shengwulian, a radical Red Guard coalition in Hunan province, published Whither China? in 1968. In this pamphlet, Shengwulian argued that the party bureaucracy was a “Red capitalist class” and criticized the “three-in-one combination” as a means for these Red capitalists to restore their positions of power (Yang, 1968). In October of the same year, Shanghai’s Wen-hui Bao published an editorial questioning the legitimacy of new revolutionary committees– which were composed entirely of former cadres– due to a lack of mass representation (Milton, 1976). The subsequent arrests of the leaders of Shengwulian further demonstrated how the Party no longer tolerated radical rebels who still rallied behind Mao’s charismatic image to attack the CCP’s bureaucracy.
Anomie among Sent-Down Youth
The first stage of the Down to the Countryside Movement, starting in the latter half of 1967 to the spring of 1969, involved students who volunteered to be sent-down (Yang, 2016). The two main subjects of this study, Rae Yang and Ma Bo, both volunteered during this stage. The later stages involved authorities aggressively mobilizing and coercing students to leave the cities.
Both Yang and Ma worked vigorously during the start of their time. Yet, they soon became disillusioned. Sociologist Guobin Yang’s research shows this to be a widespread phenomenon, the abandonment of revolutionary socialist ideals, among sent-down youth (Yang, 2016). The sociological conditions for anomie arose for sent-down youth– the breakdown of societal regulative force for the moral needs of individuals that results in the “morbid desire for the infinite” (Durkheim, 1966, pp. 271). This desire for the infinite is best described by Rae Yang on her idealism, “Looking back on it, I think we wanted to change human nature. No more selfishness and me, me, me. We wanted to sacrifice ourselves for the liberation of mankind” (Yang, 2013, pp. 11). Paradoxically, it was the demands laid by and conditions created by the adherence to such impossible revolutionary virtues that would lay the foundation for anomie and the subsequent abandonment of these virtues.
In the Autumn of 1972, many sent-down youth perished while trying to put out wildfires in Mongolia. Ma recalled “defiant, fearless youngsters” losing their lives due to the incompetence of the local leaders. The dead youth were honored as “revolutionary martyrs” and the reckless company leader was promoted. In response to this development, Ma wrote “It was even suggested that the fighting of this fire was another triumph of Mao Zedong Thought. As if the larger the number of deaths, the greater the revolutionary victory” (Ma, 1996, pp. 238~245). Another former sent-down youth, who was posted in Heilongjiang, recalled that there was not much practical value in putting out those wildfires. Nevertheless, the students enthusiastically joined in because “to die for revolution was glorious” (Gunn et al., 2020). These disastrous wildfires epitomized why the revolutionary standards set forth were impossible– either leading to the youth’s self-destruction or eventual anomie.
The adherence to these virtues was unstable, as moral regulative forces weakened in the wake of the chaos during the Cultural Revolution, but was only prolonged by a truly charismatic leader, whose influence was lacking in the insulated authority framework of the villages that tended to be neo-traditional following routinization of charisma. The breakdown of regulative forces within society was partly a result of the struggles between local cadres during the Cultural Revolution. Walder suggests that power seizures led by cadres led to the rapid collapse of the Chinese party-state in early 1967 (Walder, 2016). In some cases, the only political movements in the countryside were “cadres [who] struggled against each other” without the involvement of any sent-down youth (Zhang, 2016). As institutional regulative forces weakened on the local level, the values associated with the state ideology also attenuated, further corrupting virtutocracy. Sent-down youth could choose to continue upholding these virtues in a non-functioning virtutocracy or merely keep a facade of conformity when necessary while privately abandoning such virtues.
Furthermore, in a time when “serious readjustments took place in the social order,” (Durkheim, 1966, pp. 246) with the party actively seeking to dissuade further rebellions and restore order–i.e. routinization of charisma–students were more inclined to reexamine the virtues associated with revolutionary fervor.
Neo-traditional China and Paths of Advancement
On the one hand, anomie was driven by the routinization of charisma as Mao and the old Beijing establishment attempted to reestablish order in the Leninist vanguard party and crack down on mass political movements. Sent-down youth continued to pay attention to the political development in the country through radios and newspapers and observed that their Red Guard ideals of rebellion were now discouraged. On the other hand, anomie also drove further routinization as the party had to increasingly resort to neo-traditional authority as charismatic authority waned.
Despite officially upholding impersonal ideological standards of behavior, neo-traditional authority functions by systematically rewarding political loyalty. Among members of this society, conflict and competition persist at all levels with members pursuing their own interests often outside of formal regulations (Walder, 2011).
Maoists attempted to impose paths of advancement based solely on the nomination of peasants in theory. However, these nominations were influenced by a bureaucracy of local and regional cadres. The wielding of such power over the trajectory of the lives of sent-down youth encouraged clientelism and paved the way for corruption among the local cadres. In order for Rae Yang to find a way out of the village and back into the city, Yang’s mother “greased [the] palms [of government officials] and begged for mercy.” Yang observed the importance of utilizing connections when dealing with officials since “even the honest officials did not want to offend their superiors and colleagues.” For dishonest officials, gifts like baijiu and cigarettes went a long way (Yang, 2013). In the end, after navigating through a plethora of bureaucratic procedures, Yang was able to obtain an urban hukou.
For those who stubbornly adhered to the virtues of “revolutionary violence” (“it is right to rebel”), some were severely punished. Ma Bo was branded as a counterrevolutionary by a cadre with whom he was on bad terms and suffered social ostracism as a result. Even after experiencing indignation and being branded as a counterrevolutionary, Ma recalled that “the image of that blood red sunset was still with me years later, for I felt that I had proved my devotion to Chairman Mao”(Ma, 1996, pp. 177). Even though Ma still held Mao in high regard, he also expressed indignation due to the corrupt inner workings of local party members. To a certain extent, Mao retained his charismatic image to Ma, but Mao’s charisma could not extend to the Party’s. Despite demonstrating that he had changed his attitudes in line with official propaganda by increasing agricultural productivity and working tirelessly, Ma later realized that what really mattered was the personal connections to the officials and not the demonstration of virtues alone.
Conclusion
The sent-down youth period, occupying the interstice between Maoist radicalism and Dengist economic liberalization, served as an excellent case study on the change in zeitgeist following the routinization of charismatic authority to neo-traditional form. Overall, the paper bridged macro-narratives, changes in party policies and propaganda, and micro-histories, the memories of sent-down youth. Anomie was experienced by sent-down youth because of (1) the unrealistic standards necessary for the prolonged adherence to such virtues, (2) the Beijing establishment’s decision to discourage mass democracy, (3) the youth’s realization that virtutocracy was corrupted from within due to clientelism, and most importantly (4) the need to form new values in order to thrive in the face of neo-traditional authority. Despite Mao’s best efforts, charismatic authority remained ephemeral. The East wind subsides.[1]
Notes
- Two of Mao’s favorite sayings: “The East wind prevails over the West wind” and “The tree may prefer calm, but the wind will not subside”
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