Who was responsible for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution?

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) :

Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Images:

There was no question that the responsibility for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, fell squarely on Mao Zedong’s shoulders. Professor Roderick MacFarquhar”s Week 40 series of video, lectures on the Cultural Revolution [ My Apologies, My Mistake: In my earlier Week 40 Short Response Question, I attributed this Video to Professor Bol], gave us all the clues of Mao’s scheming here:

                                        The Great Famine Video

·       The Great Famine (1959-1962), also initiated by Mao, caused some 30-40 million deaths, and Mao’s colleagues felt that maybe Mao’s hardline collectivization policies needed some tweaking. No one, of course, dared to openly criticize Mao’s thinking here, since his collectivist policies of putting the population into communes, give up their personal agrarian and other holdings, and produce industrial goods and services in the communes for the collective good of that commune etc., exacerbated the food supply situation, and serious droughts, floods and other natural calamities around this time, killed the millions.

·       Instead, Mao was paranoid, feeling that these people wanting changes were “revisionists”, now bent on”revising the holy doctrine of Lenin and Stalin” [Professor MacFarquhar’s quote]

·       The Chinese Revolution from 1949, when Mao Zedong took control of China, was based on the Soviet model, and Lenin and Stalin’s vision of Marxism. Russia to Mao, was thus “the motherland of the original revolution” [Professor MacFarquhar], and Lenin and Stalin’s policies and thinking were sacrosanct and inviolable to him.

                                             Nikita Khrushchev

·       When Nikita Khrushchev (April 15, 1894 – September 11, 1971) took over the Soviet Union after Stalin’s (1879-1953) death, he started his policy of détente with the U.S., and his policy of “peaceful coexistence” between the two nuclear powers – Russia and the U.S. – the latter mao’s arch enemy – Mao felt even more isolated, as he saw Khrushchev and his clique also betraying the theories of Lenin. When Khrushchev started criticizing Stalin for his criminal excesses during the latter’s reign, and pursued his “de-Stalinization” policies, Mao was further enraged by this about-turn.

·       So, at home, Mao began his Cultural Revolution to get rid of all these “revisionists” and suspected revisionists, since these, he claimed, had turned their backs on Leninism and Stalinism, and, instead, now splurge on the good life of the “bourgeois” and had to be gort rid of fast, before they destroyed his cherished revolution.

·       Mao started this Cultural Revolution purge by first getting rid of his top guys he suspected of “revisionist” and “deviationist” tendencies – what professor MacFarquhar termed “bombard the headquarters” – a very apt description for the other leaders of China – the “old guards” – he wanted to get rid of, including:

                                                   Liu Shaoqi

·       President Liu Shaoqi (arrested, beaten and imprisoned, died in prison in 1969);

                                                    Lin Biao

·       Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen heir-apparent, who died in a mysterious airplane crash in Mongolia on September 13, 1971, while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union – and from Mao clutches;

                                                  Deng Xiaoping

·       Deng Xiaoping (August 22, 1904 – February 17, 1997), first purged by Mao in April 1976, then bounced back in 1978 to become China’s paramount leader;

·       Plus “leaders of the various departments of the state and the party” (Professor MacFacquhar’s quote).

The Gang of Four:

                              Gang of Four on Trial: Left to Right:
                              Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, 
                              Yao Wenyuan, Jiang Qing (20/11/1980)

                               The Gang of Four on Trial, Parts 1&2,
                               YouTube 1980.

The “Gang of Four” was Mao’s frontline group to carry out his purges. They were the master planner, implementer, and executor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution purges. This name was given to a leftist political group composed of four Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members.

                                                    Jiang Qing

The leading figure in the GoF was Jiang Qing, Mao’s third and last wife, who became a member of the politburo in 1969. Her other three associates were all high-level officials by 1976 – Zhang Chuanqiao, a vice-Minister of the State Council, Wang Hongwen, vice-chairman of the CCP, Yao Wengyuan, a Secretary of the CCP in Shanghai. They also held many position in the Party, government and even the military. They wielded significant power during the Cultural Revolution, maintaining control over man of China’s political institutions, including the media and propaganda.

Jiang Qing initially collaborated with Lin Biao – Mao’s designated heir-apparent – to advance Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and promote Mao’s “cult of personality”. Later, she turned against Lin Biao, even Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

Jiang Qing’s central role in China during this Cultural Revolution period saw her encouraging the Red Guards to take action against Mao’s “reactionaries” after Mao himself went on gigantic rallies to get the Red Guards – made up mostly of university students – to help f=defend the nation, himself and his leadership against these “bourgeois” elements and eliminate them.

The “Gang of Four” was finally arrested on October 6, 1976, which generally is acknowledged as the end of the Cultural Revolution.

At the Fifteenth Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress of the CCP, the Standing Committee declared the innocence of President Liu Shaoqui, who was persecuted to death by the Red Guards orchestrated by GoF during the Cultural Revolution.

The Gang of Four was put on a public show trial on November 20, 1980, and, when questioned by the Court prosecutor, Jiang Qing absolved herself from all the GoF atrocities, claiming “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite!”

On January 15, 1981, the sentences were handed down: Jiang and Zhang were sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve. Wang was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Yao received a 20-year imprisonment sentence. There was no appeal process.

On January 25, 1983, both Jiang and Zhang’s death penalty were commuted to life imprisonment. On May 14, 1992, Jiang committed suicide in a hospital, after being released on medical grounds.

The Red Guards:

The Red Guards (pinyin: Hong Wei Bing) were the storm-troopers, the shock troops that Mao unleashed in August 1966 against the party apparatus throughout China. Egged on by Jiang Qing, Mao’s third and last wife, and her Cultural Revolution Group (CRG) lieutenants, the Red Guards – consisting mostly of young university students – were given a carte blanche to purge all “anti-Party and anti-socialist bourgeois authorities” and to “drag out” and “strangle” any Provincial party leader who “stands in the way of the great Cultural Revolution.” The Red Guards then vowed to “turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos, and make a tremendous mess, the bigger the better!”

They kept their word. During the latter months of 1966, China was convulsed by a frenzy of Red Guard activities. Some nine million provincial youths came to Beijing to conduct “liaison” with Mao. At the same time, elite Red Guards from Peking University, Tsinghua, Peking Aviation Institute, and other institutions in the capital fanned out into the provinces to organize local militants for their all-out assault on the Party apparatus.

The Red Guards’ atrocities included: vandalizing bookstores, libraries, museums, churches, temples and monuments, breaking into private homes to destroy old books, Western-style clothing, paintings and art objects. The Red Guards defaced or destroyed 4,922 out of 6,843 temples, shrines and other heritage sites in China during their frenzy. Red Guards attack intellectuals, professionals, and anyone who had contacts with the West, or represented traditional Chinese culture or religion. Hundreds of thousands were beaten, tortured or sent to hard labor camps for their “bourgeois” living and thoughts.

However, serious difficulties beset the Red Guards movement from the very start:

·       The “instructions” given to the young fanatics by the Central leaders were purposely vague and all-inclusive. They were strident exhortations to “rebel” against anyone or anything the Red Guards believed to be antithetical to the new Maoist order.

·       Many Peking Red Guards who visited other cities attempted exercise control over local cultural activities, and were strenuously and violently resisted by the local, leading to fights.

·       In other provinces, officials organize theor own Red Guards for the specific purpose of defending the Party apparatus against these outsiders’ onslaughts.

By early October 1966, it was clear that the Cultural Revolution was not going according to plan. Mao then established the Revolutionary Rebel organizations, consisting primarily of workers – rather than students – in industrial, mining, Party, and governmental organs throughout the country in order to boost the Red Guards and erode the bases of support for local authorities. The “Rebels” proved that they could tear down established structures very effectively, but they were incapable of working together to build Mao’s new order.

Likewise, their “power seizures” were often accompanied by much bloodshed and violence, in almost every province and major city, like Shanghai.

A major reason for the failure of many “power seizures” was the fact that a given Rebel faction or alliance usually attempted to seize power only for itself. A second problem again centered on what Mao meant by “power seizures.” The self-seeking behavior and actions of these “revolutionary young generals” were out of control. The Revolutionary Rebels had failed, as had the Red Guards before them.

The basic problem appeared to have been Mao’s reluctance to acknowledge that much of the fighting – among the various factions of the Red Guards, and the Rebels, and between the Red Guards and the Rebels – was the result of the deep split within the ranks of the “revolutionary Left” itself.

Mao’s disillusionment with the Red Guards became apparent after their dismal, self-seeking performance during the initial “power seizures” of early 1967, and was intensified by their indiscriminate internecine warfare during the following summer. The Red Guards, as a terror device, had outlived their usefulness.

The Ordinary Chinese who sometimes betrayed their own families and colleagues:

Thousands of ordinary Chinese – professionals, bureaucrats, intellectuals and anyone – were forced to make and signed public confessions of their “misdeeds”, “deviationist” and “bourgeois” tendencies, and were also forced to implicate their family loved ones, friends, relatives and colleagues. They were the innocent ones, and definitely were not responsible for the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They were the unfortunate victims.

There was no rule of law, as the courts, judges, law books, had all been destroyed by the red Guards, judges beaten and terrorized, and sent to hard labor camps. So these thousands of innocent Chinese of various backgrounds were forced to confess on trumped-up charges, devoid of any legal basis, and families were split up and killed. It was chaos and anarchy as the Red Guards’ activities spiraled out of control, and unfortunate families – any family – were simply targets of the Red Guards’ fury.

Does It Matter?

Yes, it mattered a great deal to every human being in China. If anything, the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s ( through his wife Jiang Qing) employment of the Red Guards to terrorize his “enemies” resulted in some 500,000 unnecessary deaths.

Worse, as shown above, the Red Guards were fighting among their different units for control of a particular locality, and fighting against the local Party officials who resented the Red Guards’ interference in their affairs and activities. Industrial production plummeted, and the economy continued its tailspin during Mao’s reign.

To a great extent, these costly failures had severely damaged the CCP’s legitimacy, and it would no longer enjoyed the trust and absolute power it had – especially during this “ten years of madness” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and his Red Guards.

Historical and priceless relics and artifacts in museums and homes throughout China, and even in Tibet, were destroyed by the Red Guards in their frenzy to get rid of the “old order” on Mao’s authority – and these were China’s cultural heritage and could never be replaced.

What other aspects of the Cultural Revolution should we also pay attention to?

The Cultural Revolution set off by Mao was mainly his power struggle to retain his authority – and he used this forum to get rid of his enemies, and perceived enemies, labeling this clique as “revisionists” and living the “bourgeois” life. It is incredible that his charisma, and with the help of the Gang of Four (headed by his wife Jiang Qing) and their control of the state propaganda machine, was able to summon over one million students and other activists to each of his eight rallies he orchestrated in Peking.

He felt the CCP had degenerated, that it had abandoned Marxism as a theoretical guideline, and that Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” program, and his “peaceful coexistence” approach with his arch enemy the United States, spelt the doom of traditional Marxism as espoused by Lenin and Stalin, and branded Khrushchev a traitor to the Communist cause.

The Cultural Revolution has taught us that leaders like Mao was paranoid, and what he unleashed through his Red Guards, he was unable to control properly, and innocent thousands died at his hands.

It is thus no wonder that his actions here invited severe criticism, after the Cultural Revolution died down in 1976. Mao’s vision, his ideology, his philosophical conception, may have reflected popular sentiments in China during his reign, after a century of struggle.

Nonetheless, his glaring mistakes and the terrible costs to the nation – The Great Famine arising from his Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) program, that killed anything from 30-40 million people, and which historian Frank Dikotter asserted that coercion, terror and systematic violence were its very foundation, and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings in human history”, his “anti-rightists” campaign, the “Hundred Flowers Movement 1956”, and this Cultural Revolution, were designed primarily to flush out his enemies to distract for his own mistakes, and to maintain and consolidate his power and leadership forever.

These aspects of purges, killings, to flush out enemies seemed to be prevalent in Communist societies, since leaders, like Mao, had absolute control of the economy and country, and being overly paranoid, are prone to take these killing fields measures from time to time – as we see these in Russia during Lenin and Stalin times for example, Pol Pot’s “Killing Fields” in Cambodia, and even in Germany during Hitler’s time.

Present-day China obviously is uneasy with Mao’s Cultural Revolution and other excesses, and thus very little original research is possible, as government archives are as good as closed to Chinese and foreign researchers. These are areas where researchers want to pay more attention to – to find out why and how Mao went the ways he did, and that his Little Red Book may contain beautiful quotations, but not all are followed to its entirety even by himself.

May 19, 2015.

“In 1942, Mao Zedong issued his “Talks on Yan’an Forum of Art and Literature”. In 1966, 24 years later, he launched the Cultural Revolution.

What connection do you see between his views of art here and the function of art during the Culture Revolution?

Mao Zedong’s “Talks on Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” May 1942:

In the excerpt we are given by Professor Kirby on Mao Zedong’s “Talks on Yan’an Forum of Art and Literature” which he issued in May 1942 – 24 years before he launched his Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), we can see that his ideas of art, literature and culture had formally and firmly crystallized here.

In this excerpt, we can discern his thoughts:

·       “revolutionary art and literature should create all kinds of characters on the basis of actual life, and help the masses to push history forward.”

·       “artists and writers can create art and literature ……..that can awaken and arouse the masses, and impel them to united and struggle to change their environment.”

·       Mao felt the workers, peasants and soldiers then were involved in a lifelong battle with their feudal landlords, but they remained illiterate, and “badly need a widespread enlightenment” and such culture, knowledge, art and literature “would heighten their passion for struggle ……..and thus enable them to fight the enemy heart and one mind.”

If I may be allowed to quote further from this Talks on Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature, we can get the full spectrum of his thinking on art, literature and culture for the masses of people in China, especially, to him, “the workers, peasants and soldiers,” since, each of these passages quoted below reinforced fully his original thinking on these subjects:

·       “Our purpose is to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people, and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.

(From Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” May 1942, Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 70).

·       “Our literary and art workers must accomplish this task and shift their stand; they must gradually move their feet over to the side of the workers, peasants and soldiers, to the side of the proletariat, through the process of going into their very midst, and into the thick of practical struggles, and through the process of studying Marxism and society. Only in this way, can we have literature and art that are truly for the workers, peasants and soldiers, a truly proletarian literature and art.” [my own emphasis]

(From Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, May 1942, Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 78).

·       “All our literature and art are for the masses of the people, and, in the first place, for the workers, peasants and soldiers; they are created for the workers, peasants and soldiers, and are for their use.”

(Selected Works, Vo. III, p. 84).

·       Mao a bit later in this Talks stressed that literature and art for these classes of workers, peasants and soldiers, are geared to political lines and thinking, and this delineation is paramount and come first:

·       “In the world today, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. [my own emphasis]. There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from, or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.”

(Selected Works, Vol. III, p. 86).

·       “In literary and art criticism, there are two criteria – the political and the artistic …..What is the relationship between the two? …….each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria. But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first, and the artistic criterion second.” [my own emphasis].

In all the above quoted passages from Mao’s Talks, and the given excerpt from Professor Kirby, we can discern Mao’s thinking – although rather repetitive – that literature and art must be created for the masses of the people in China, and, more so, for the “workers, peasants and soldiers,” who are, to Mao, the “storm-troopers” of the Chinese revolution, and the flag-bearers who make up some 70-80% of China’s population, and who will lead the fight to oust their common enemy – the feudal landlords who, at less than 10% of the population, control 90% of the country resources, and especially the very limited arable land in China. Mao’s adherence to the rural poor who will eventually take over the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in China, was in stark contrast to the traditional Marxist-Leninist theory that the urban proletariat will be the vanguard of the revolution to topple the feudalistic landlords and gentry who control the nation.

To Mao – and he was right – the “workers, peasants and the soldiers – were his main concern and thrust, and literature and art that he wanted to see and produced must adhere to political line first, and artistic views, abilities then follow.

In fact, as early as January 1940 – some 2 years before his famous “Talks on Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” Mao Zedong had enunciated his thinking:

Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes, and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.”

(“On New Democracy” January 1940, Selected Works, Vo. II, p.382).

The Function of Art during the Cultural Revolution:

In view of the above authoritative Mao statements on art and literature, the role of these two aspects and culture during the Cultural Revolution was thus framed totally in the vision of Mao – there would be no other ways art, literature and culture could be interpreted and/or performed, and all such cultures would have to toe his/Communist Party lines. Pain, imprisonment, torture and death would befall anyone who disobey, and any works of art and literature not considered “Maoist” would be destroyed by his avaricious and rampaging Red Guards.

The Cultural Revolution was the time for Mao and Jiang Qing and her Gang of Four to manipulate and guide the choice of cultural resources available. This is especially true when local operas and traditional themes and techniques in opera, literature, comics and paintings, as well as foreign so-called “capitalist” or “revisionist” art, were no longer available.

From the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife, had overall influence on both politics and cultural policy; herself trained as an actress, she directed many aspects of cultural production, especially the revolutionary operas and ballets that came to be known as “model works” and, eventually, her “Eight Model Plays” were the only ones allowed to be shown and seen by the public during the Cultural Revolution.

Some recent writings on the Cultural Revolution have stated that, while all the ”model works” culture were propaganda, they claimed they saw some artistic production value – especially in the plays’ use of oral histories with musicians and composers, as well as memories of people who had lived through the period. These authors claimed this was good art, popular, and have remained so, and were also considered innovative. Luden Y., “Making Politics Serve Music: Yu Huiyong, Composer and Minister of Culture” The Drama Review, 2012, was of the view that the musical scores of Yu Huiyong, the principal composer behind the “model works”, “represent the peak of artistic achievement during the Cultural Revolution”.

Some scholars now even think that the Cultural Revolution was “fun” to many, as many different needs were served by the official propagated culture during this period: that is, those who like Beijing opera would be able to see the revolutionary operas; those who preferred ballet, it was available; those who loved symphonic music would have something for their tastes. They thus claimed that these makers of Cultural Revolution propaganda art knew how to combine different genres and different types, to make sure they will capture the audience successfully.

These recent thinking appears to me to be rather sanguine. However much, the “workers, peasants and soldiers” loved one of the most famous operas in “Eight Model Plays” – the Legend of the Red Lantern – for example, or, equally, enthused about the glorious ballet The Red Detachment of Women – one has to remember that during this long period – from 1966 to 1976 – a period of ten years, there was nothing else for these workers, peasants and soldiers, and, in fact, all other citizens in China, to see, as these eight operas and two ballets dominated the stage in all parts of China!

Thus, is it any wonder that the joke “Eight Hundred Million People Watched Eight Shows” (Bayi ren kan bage xi) came about? Or, as Professor Kirby put it simply in his video lecture:

“And people saw them over and over and over and over and over again. And then they saw them again. Ultimately, the masses were not amused.”

These recent authors obviously, has not lived through the ten miserable years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution – when the masses of the people, and, in particular, the workers, peasants and the soldiers – had no entertainment at all but forced to watch these operas and ballets over and over and over and over again – besides reciting and memorizing Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations! If one looked at the musical scores for The Red Detachment of Women – which we did earlier in this Course – and, forgetting the propaganda value of this opera – one cannot helped but be mesmerized by its combination of Chinese and Western symphonic music to underscore the play – but, as said, watch it a few thousand or million times and then pass your final judgment!

The function of art during this Cultural Revolution was subjugated to the political needs of Mao and the Communist Party. The excesses of the fanatic Red Guards and the equally strident and frenzied students, who tore up and destroyed a huge part of China’s illustrious past cultural heritage – both from government archives, libraries, and from private collectors’ homes – cannot in any way, be called “creating the new and make revolution” as some recent authors reasoned, since, what was destroyed, could never be replaced, and these lost parts of China’s cultural past had disappeared forever. It was the Cultural Revolution’s wholesale destruction of traditional Chinese culture, it offered little new culture, save for its propaganda purpose and value.

                

“Read the following passages from Chen Duxiu’s “Call To Youth” written in 1915. Who are the “slaves” that the author is referring to? What is Chen Duxiu’s criticism of China in the 1910s?”

Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 陳獨秀
Chen in the First Nanjing Prison in the spring of the 26th year of the Republic [1937]
Secretary of the Central Bureau of the Communist Party of China
In office July 1921 – July 1922
Chairman of the Central Executive Committee
In office July 1922 – January 1925
General Secretary of the Central Committee
In office January 1925 – July 1928
Succeeded by	Xiang Zhongfa
Personal details
Born	8 October 1879 Anqing, Anhui, Qing Dynasty
Died	27 May 1942 (aged 62) Sichuan, Republic of China
Nationality	Chinese
Political party	Communist Party of China
Alma mater	Waseda University

Chen Duxiu
Simplified Chinese	陈独秀
Traditional Chinese	陳獨秀
[show]Transcriptions

Original name: Qingtong
Simplified Chinese	庆同
Traditional Chinese	慶同
[show]Transcriptions

Courtesy name: Zhongfu
Chinese	仲甫

Document C: “Call to Youth” (Original)

The Chinese compliment others by saying, “He acts like an old man although still young.” Englishmen and Americans encourage one another by saying, “Keep young while growing old.” Such is one respect in which the different ways of thought of the East and West are manifested. Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. …

Alas! Do these words really fit the youth of our country? I have seen that, out of every ten youths who are young in age, five are old in physique; and out of every ten who are young in both age and physique, nine are old in mentality. … I carefully propose the following six principles, and hope you will give them your calm consideration.

1. Be independent, not servile. … The history of modern Europe is commonly referred to as a “history of emancipation”: the destruction of monarchical power aimed at political emancipation; the denial of Church authority aimed at religious emancipation; the rise of the theory of equal property aimed at economic emancipation; and the suffragist movement aimed at emancipation from male authority. …

2. Be progressive, not conservative. … it is plain that those races that cling to antiquated ways are declining, or disappearing, day by day, and the peoples who seek progress and advancement are just beginning to ascend in power and strength. … All our traditional ethics, law, scholarship, rites and customs are survivals of feudalism. When compared with the achievement of the white race, there is a difference of a thousand years in thought, although we live in the same period.

3. Be aggressive, not retiring. … Stated in kindly terms, retirement is an action of the superior man in order to get away from the vulgar world. Stated in hostile terms, it is a phenomenon of the weak who are unable to struggle for survival. … Alas! The war steeds of Europe are intruding into your house. Where can you quietly repose under a white cloud?

4. Be cosmopolitan, not isolationist. … When a nation is thrown into the currents of the world, traditionalists will certainly hasten the day of its fall, but those capable of change will take this opportunity to compete and progress. … When its citizens lack knowledge of the world, how can a nation expect to survive in it?

5. Be utilitarian, not formalistic. … That which brings no benefit to the practical life of an individual or of society is all empty formalism and the stuff of cheats. And even though it were bequeathed to us by our ancestors, taught by the sages, advocated by the government and worshiped by society, the stuff of cheats is still not worth one cent.

6. Be scientific, not imaginative. … The contribution of the growth of science to the supremacy of modern Europe over other races is not less than that of the theory of the rights of man. … Our scholars do not know science, therefore they borrow the yin-yang school’s notions of auspicious signs and of the five elements to confuse the world and cheat the people, and the idea of feng shui to beg for miracles from dry skeletons (spirits).

Source: Chen Duxiu, founder and editor of New Youth magazine, faculty member of Beijing University, and a founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Originally published in New Youth magazine in 1915.

Chen Duxiu, the New Youth, and The New Culture Movement:

The New Culture Movement in China started around 1915, with the publication of the journal New Youth in Shanghai. Chen Duxiu (October 8, 1879 – May 27, 1942), the Chinese revolutionary socialist, educator, philosopher and author, who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (with Li Dazhao) in 1921, was the founding editor of the New Youth (Xin Qingnian) magazine (which he subtitled La Jeunesse in French), and later in 1920, the founder also of the New Youth Society. He was stumped and angry against then-President Yuan Shi-kai’s capitulation and appeasement in signing major portions of Japan’s 21 Demands.

Japan’s 21 Demands:

Japan, under Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu and Foreign Minister Katō Takaaki, drafted the initial list of Twenty-One Demands, which were reviewed by the genrō and Emperor Taishō, and approved by the Diet. This list was presented to Yuan Shikai on January 18, 1915, with warnings of dire consequences if China were to reject them.

The Twenty One Demands were grouped into five groups:^[2]

• Group 1 confirmed Japan's recent seizure of German ports and operations in Shandong Province, and expanded Japan's sphere of influence over the railways, coasts and major cities of the province.
• Group 2 pertained to Japan's South Manchuria Railway Zone, extending the leasehold over the territory for 99 years, and expanding Japan's sphere of influence in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, to include rights of settlement and extraterritoriality, appointment of financial and administrative officials to the government and priority for Japanese investments in those areas. Japan demanded access to Inner Mongolia for raw materials, as a manufacturing site, and as a strategic buffer against Russian encroachment in Korea.^[3]
• Group 3 gave Japan control of the Hanyeping mining and metallurgical complex in central China; it was deep in debt to Japan.
• Group 4 barred China from giving any further coastal or island concessions to foreign powers except for Japan.
• Group 5 was the most aggressive. China was to hire Japanese advisors who could take effective control of China's finance and police. Japan would be empowered to build three major railways, and also Buddhist temples and schools. Japan would gain effective control of Fujian, opposite the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan).

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Twenty-One Demands

Knowing the negative reaction "Group 5" would cause, Japan initially tried to keep its contents secret. The Chinese government attempted to stall for as long as possible and leaked the full contents of the Twenty-One Demands to the European powers in the hope that due to a perceived threat to their own political and economic spheres of interest, they would help contain Japan.

Japanese ultimatum

After China rejected Japan's revised proposal on April 26, 1915, the genrō intervened and deleted ‘Group 5’ from the document, as these had proved to be the most objectionable to the Chinese government. A reduced set of "Thirteen Demands" was transmitted on May 7 in the form of an ultimatum, with a two-day deadline for response. Yuan Shikai, competing with other local warlords to become the ruler of all China, was not in a position to risk war with Japan, and accepted appeasement, a tactic followed by his successors. The final form of the treaty was signed by both parties on May 25, 1915.

Katō Takaaki publicly admitted that the ultimatum was invited by Yuan to save face with the Chinese people in conceding to the Demands. American Minister Paul Reinsch reported to the US State Department that the Chinese were surprised at the leniency of the ultimatum, as it demanded much less than they had already committed themselves to concede.

On January 18, 1915, Japan presented to President Yuan Shi-kai its 21 Demands with requests that would have turned China into a de facto Japanese protectorate.

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2. Yuan Shikai

   Former President for Life
3. Yuan Shikai was a Chinese general, politician and "emperor", famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor, his ...Wikipedia
5. Born: September 16, 1859, Xiangcheng County, Henan
6. Died: June 6, 1916, Beijing, China
7. Presidential term: March 10, 1912 – December 22, 1915
8. Spouse: Lady Yu (m. 1876)
9. Parents: Yuan Baozhong
10. Children: Yuan Kewen, Yuan Keding,Yuan Keliang, More

The Japanese requests included five groups of secret demands that became known as the 21 Demands, and these were:

·       Groups One and Two were designed to confirm Japan’s dominant position in Shandong, southern Manchuria, and eastern Inner Mongolia.

·       Group Three would acknowledge Japan’s special interests in an industrial complex in central China. Group Four forbade China from giving any further coastal or island concessions to foreign powers except for Japan.

·       Group Five – the most outrageous – required China to install Japanese advisers who could take effective control of the Chinese government, economy, and military!

These demands, if accepted, would have had a similar impact to that of what the Japan-Korea annexation Treaty had on Korea in 1910. These notorious demands were issued at a time of shifting balance of power in East Asia. With the Qing dynasty’s humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), regional dominance for the first time, had now moved from China to Japan. Japan’s ambitions were further emboldened by its decisive victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which affirmed the Japanese presence in south Manchuria and Korea.

The 1911 Revolution in China brought an end to the Qing dynasty and ushered in the Republican era of Dr Sun Yat-sen in China, but China remained a pushover from Western powers. Furthermore, Yuan’s ruling status itself was shaky, due to constant threats from competing local warlords.

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2. Sun Yat-sen

   Medical practitioner
3. Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary, first president and founding father of the Republic of China, and medical practitioner. Wikipedia
5. Born: November 12, 1866, Zhongshan
6. Died: March 12, 1925, Beijing, China
7. Buried: Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Nanjing, China
8. Spouse: Soong Ching-ling (m. 1915–1925), Kaoru Otsuki (m. 1903–1906), Lu Muzhen (m. 1885–1915)
9. Organizations founded: Kuomintang,Sun Yat-sen University, More
10. Children: Sun Fo, Sun Jinyuan, Fumiko Miyagawa, Sun Jinwan

World War I granted Japan a perfect opportunity to push the envelope even more with China. As the war was underway in Europe, the Japanese hoped that other major powers would show little interest in countering Japanese expansion in China. For these reasons, Japanese Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki was convinced that the filing of this 21 Demands ultimatum, buttressed by its war threats, would force China to accept all its demands.

Not surprising, Yuan, who had no intention of risking war with Japan, accepted the ultimatum on May 9, 1915. The final form of the treaty was signed on May 25, 1915. Even with the removal of the most odious provision, however, the new treaty gave Japan no more than what it already had in China. Yuan, whose credibility and popularity as a leader was further weakened as a result of his appeasement policy, viewed accepting the treaty as a “terrible shame” (qichi daru), and made May 9 as China’s National Humiliation Day. The 21 Demands gave rise to a considerable amount of public ill-will towards Japan, and the upsurge in nationalism is still deeply felt today in China’s handling of Sino-Japanese relations.

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference and The Treaty of Versailles:

Detail from William Orpen's painting The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919, showing the signing of the peace treaty by the German Minister of Transport Dr Johannes Bell, opposite to the representatives of the winning powers.

"The Big Four" made all the major decisions at the Paris Peace Conference (from left to right, David Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy,Georges Clemenceau of France, Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.)

Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference 1919.

The Paris Peace Conference (January 18 to June 28, 1919) triggered off in China a nationwide call for an injection of new culture into old China. China had then dreamt of ridding themselves of all symbols of their semi-colonial status, and they thought and were particularly interested to regain control of Qingdao and Shandong province - then ceded to Germany.

However, at The Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris on June 28, 1919 with the Allied Powers, signifying the end of World War I, Germany was forced to give up Shandong Province, but the Chinese delegates were asked to sign this Treaty and cede the Shandong Province instead to Japan! Over 6,000 Chinese college and professional school students marched in Beijing to protest the possible signing of this Treaty, and Chinese students besieged the Chinese embassy in Paris to persuade the Western signatories not to sign – but to no avail! President Wilson of the U.S., at this Conference, acquiesced to the Japanese position, as, to him, Japan was much stronger, and more important than China, and his appeasement policy did not go down well in China and even in his United States. Chinese nationalism proved to be too heavy a pressure to the U.S., France and Britain, and Shandong province was eventually returned to China – in 1922!

Treaty of Versailles

Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany[1]
Cover of the English version
Signed	28 June 1919[2]
Location	Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, Paris, France[3]
Effective	10 January 1920[4]
Condition	Ratification by Germany and four Principal Allied Powers.[1]
Signatories	Central Powers  Germany[1] Allied Powers  United States[1]  British Empire[1]  France[1]  Italy[1]  Japan[1] Other Allied Powers[show]
Depositary	French Government[5]
Languages	French and English[5]

Germany after Versailles:

  Administered by the League of Nations

  Annexed or transferred to neighboring countries by the treaty, or later via plebiscite and League of Nation action

  Weimar Germany

Map of Shandong province showing the areas annexed by Germany and Britain prior to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles 1919.

Images of Shandong Province:

What is Chen Duxiu’s criticism of China in the 1910s?

Chen Duxiu and his “Call to Youth” Magazine:

It was in these terrible and humiliating contexts that Chen Duxiu wrote his “Call To Youth” manifesto in 1915, berating Chinese citizens for being spineless and mere “slaves” to Japanese and Western power hegemony, and that it was time for them to rise up and changed their way of thinking.

He was also aware that despite Chinese political changes from empire to republic, China still remained weak and could not protect its own sovereignty. Now that they had no Manchu government to blame, Chen and his cohorts began to search from within the Han culture for areas to work on, and their attention fell on the various aspects of Confucian culture, including Confucian subordination of women to men, children to parents, extended family where elderly male members reigned.

Chen was born to a wealthy family, but, like most, he received traditional Chinese education (his own grandfather tutored him in Chinese classics, such as the Four Books) early on, but he did not have much luck with China’s imperial exams. So he turned to pursue a more modern education first in China, then in Japan, where he soon embraced ideas of Western democracy, equality and science.

From these education, what China needed to save itself, Chen Duxiu came to believe, was not the “old and rotten” relics of Confucianism, but de xiansheng (Mr. Democracy) and sai xiansheng (Mr. Science), as he later wrote for the New Youth magazine:

“We are convinced that only those two gentlemen can cure the dark maladies in Chinese politics, morality, learning, and thought.”

In 1915, not long after he returned to China, Chen Duxiu issued his famous “Call To Youth” article, published in the inaugural issue of the New Youth magazine, which he framed in the by-now familiar evolutionary concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Besides this passage we are asked to comment on – where Chen talked of emancipation of the self, and be free, and not be treated as ‘slaves” blindly following others, and attacking the Confucian thinking of “loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness….as a slavish morality” and that such persons with no independent thoughts were spineless and unworthy – Chen lamented the fact that the Chinese admired the old, whereas the Westerners admired the young, and here, in this same article, he went on to expound what youth, as opposed to age, meant to the (Chinese) society:

Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life…….in the process of metabolism, the old and rotten are incessantly eliminated to be replaced by the fresh and living……..if metabolism functions properly in a society, it will flourish; if old and rotten elements fill the society, then it will cease to exist.”

Chen then went on in this same article and called on the young people in China to be:

·       “independent not servile”;

·       “progressive, not conservative”;

·       “aggressive not retiring”;

·       cosmopolitan, not isolationist”;

·       “scientific, not fanciful.”

Among his many grand beliefs and ideals that Chen proclaimed in this manifesto for the inaugural issue of the radically new literary journal were the necessity of destroying the old, in order to create the new, and a utopian vision of a future “ideal new era and a new society” which “are to be honest, progressive, positive, free, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance………in short, happiness for the whole society.” 

Chen’s manifesto here also called on the Chinese people “to give up the useless and irrelevant elements of traditional literature and ethics, because we want to create those needed for the progress of the new era and the new society.”

The New Youth magazine, which Chen Duxiu ran in the foreign concessions in Shanghai, became one of the earliest and most important platforms for the translation of Western literature, and it became the leading voice of the New Culture Movement. Traditional Chinese literature, some of Chen Duxiu’s writers argued in their New Youth articles, did not play any positive role in Chinese society. To them, Western literature was about human life, whereas Chinese literature talked little about such life; Western literature aroused human sympathy, whereas Chinese literature, they argued, were so self-absorbing; Western literature, they claimed, nurtured the development of human individuality, whereas Chinese literature favored breathing through the noses of the ancestors”!

Such unreserved adulation of Western literature at the expense of traditional thousands-of-years Chinese literature may sound naïve and simplistic today, yet back then, it was argued, that such unmitigated zeal was needed to push forward the literary revolution deemed a critical and central part of the New Culture Movement.