Chinese President Xi Jinping’s drive to centralise power in his own hands, his elimination of term limits and thus the process of orderly succession, and (largely aspirational) personality cult draw comparisons with Mao Zedong. This occasionally leads to largely fatuous claims that he is ushering in a new “Cultural Revolution”, the political campaign that tore China apart in the final decade of Mao’s rule, 1966-76.
As many Sinologists and Chinese observers themselves have noted, Cultural Revolution comparisons might be more aptly applied to Trump’s United States. Like Mao, the US president is a god to his followers, attacks educational institutions and cultural elites, demonises political enemies and has no apparent empathy for his victims. Trump, of course, has none of Mao’s intellectual heft or ideological purpose: he is essentially, in journalist Kara Swisher’s phrase, a “coin-operated president”.
Trump is also unlikely to know enough about the Cultural Revolution to be influenced one way or another. As they say in films, any resemblance to real people or historical events is purely coincidental.
Xi, by contrast, understands the Cultural Revolution all too well. His family was victimised in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. His home was ransacked. His half-sister committed suicide. He was sent off to manual labour in the countryside. His experiences have given him an instinctive horror of the chaos and churn that comes from giving “the masses” their head.
Like Mao and every other post-1949 Chinese leader, Xi wants China to be an economically strong, internationally respected, socialist state. Unlike Mao, who told China’s youth that “to rebel is justified”, Xi urges them to study hard, marry and raise a family, and apply “positive energy” to the task of national rejuvenation.
Xi has even changed school textbooks to replace a passage from the ancient historian Sima Qian (c.145–86BCE) praising an historical rebel, part of Chinese students’ literary education in Mao’s day, with one praising a Han dynasty general famous for following orders. History, from the time of Sima Qian, has had a didactic purpose; this is a literal textbook example of Xi’s determination to control how Chinese people learn about history. One of his signature campaigns is that against what he calls “historical nihilism”, essentially telling China’s story, and that of the Chinese Communist Party in particular, in any way that differs from the official version.
In the immediate post-Mao era, there was an explosion of typically anguished, critical self-reflection that found expression in reportage, literature, art and film. The Chinese people were struggling to cope with the fact that in just ten years, nearly two million people had been murdered, executed or pushed to suicide by their own compatriots. Countless more suffered physical, psychological and moral injuries. Almost no one was left untouched.
In a major historical review in 1981, the Party admitted that the Cultural Revolution had been a catastrophe. They shielded Mao from copping the full blame by arguing that he had been bamboozled by “counter-revolutionaries”, a magically flexible word. It told the nation to move on, to focus on the opportunities offered by economic reform.
The Party’s tolerance for critical discussion of the Cultural Revolution lessened with the years and especially following the mass pro-democracy protests of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. It tripled down on “patriotic education” so that younger generations would only know Mao as a hero and the Party as a “Great, Glorious and Correct” nation-saving force.
It became increasingly difficult to discuss the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. These horrors, such as the brutal murders of entire families, student-on-student battles with automatic weapons, and even, in some parts, cannibal banquets, faded from view.
When novelist Liu Cixin submitted the future bestseller The Three-Body Problem to his editors, they asked him to put the scene of a Cultural Revolution struggle session, which (as in the Netflix series) originally opened the book, into the middle to avoid unduly attracting the attention of the censors. The era was gradually reduced to nostalgic, Vaseline-lensed images of city folk engaged in honest toil in the countryside, beguiling photos of young people with shining faces and Little Red Books, and the kitsch cultural heritage of revolutionary model operas and Mao badges.
Sometimes, what you don’t know will hurt you. The Party keeps a watchful eye on the neo-Maoist movement that has been bubbling along in the political margins since the 1980s, fuelled by anger at corruption and inequality as well as an idealisation of the Cultural Revolution as a time of egalitarianism and ideological purity. In December 2023, thousands of young people marched at Mao’s birthplace chanting Cultural Revolution slogans.
If this movement ever escapes the political margins, it will pose a wild card for Xi – just as his overturning of the process of orderly succession à la Mao is a wild card for China itself.
Linda Jaivin’s latest book is Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China, published by Black Inc.
