The Dialectics of History: Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution, and Xi Jinping

Mao Zedong, as a legendary Marxist of the last century, said in his self-evaluation in his later years, "I have only done two great things in my life: one was driving Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, and the other was launching the Cultural Revolution." Each of these two great things has had a profound impact on China, an impact that continues to this day, extending into the hearts of every Chinese person, and continuously shaping the spiritual core of everyone on this land of China. Here, I want to write an article to narrate how Mao Zedong's second thing, namely the "Cultural Revolution," went on to influence the current Chinese President Xi Jinping, and his views on and continuation of Mao Zedong Thought.

As early as 1962, before the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping's father, Xi Zhongxun, because of the novel Liu Zhidan case (which involved the history of the Northern Shaanxi Red Army and was linked to the Gao Gang case), became a victim of intra-party political struggle and was publicly denounced, and later controlled and imprisoned.

It is worth mentioning that the novel Liu Zhidan was originally intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the army; the Workers' Press invited Liu Zhidan's sister-in-law, Li Jiantong, to write a novel about Liu Zhidan. After extensive interviews and reviewing of materials, Li Jiantong revised her manuscript several times.

In early 1962, the fifth draft of the novel was completed. Li Jiantong sent the manuscript to old comrades who had previously worked in the Northwest Base Area for review, including the then Vice Premier of the State Council Xi Zhongxun, Vice Minister of the State Economic Commission Jia Tuofu, and Liu Zhidan's younger brother Liu Jingfan, among others.

The dialectics and irony of history: When reviewing the manuscript, Xi Zhongxun precisely demonstrated extremely high political sensitivity. He explicitly proposed: do not write the novel as "Northwest history," do not highlight individuals, but highlight Chairman Mao's correct line, and even suggested postponing publication. However, these efforts attempting to avoid falling into "mountain-stronghold-ism" and "sectarianism" (which was the characterization of Gao Gang in the Gao Gang case), were later accused in a reverse logic as a "carefully orchestrated anti-party conspiracy." When the legitimacy of a regime is highly dependent on ideological purity, any minor reconstruction of history (such as the novel's depiction of the Northwest Bureau) will be symbolized as a symbolic castration of the supreme power. Xi Zhongxun's tragedy lay not in that he did anything wrong, but in that at that specific historical juncture, a high-level "negative symbol" was needed to establish the legitimacy of the expansion of class struggle.

In the summer of 1962, newspapers and periodicals such as Workers' Daily and China Youth began serializing parts of the novel's chapters. Yan Hongyan, then First Secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee (a former Northwest Red Army general who historically had disagreements with the Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang systems on issues such as the purge of counter-revolutionaries in the Northwest Base Area), strongly opposed it after seeing the serialization, and wrote a letter to the Central Committee accusing the novel of trying to reverse the verdict on Gao Gang. This letter fell into the hands of Kang Sheng, who was deeply versed in the cruel logic of political struggle.

From August to September 1962, the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held in Beidaihe and Beijing. Facing the demands for fixing farm output quotas on a household basis proposed by the reformist faction within the party after three years of disasters, the Khrushchev-ization of the Soviet Union, and Peng Dehuai's "80,000-word letter," the combination of these three shook his political line. Mao Zedong felt that his political line had been shaken. Therefore, the main tone set by Mao Zedong for the meeting was to re-emphasize "never forget class struggle."

Under such an atmosphere, Kang Sheng (without having finished reading the whole book) submitted a slip of paper to Mao Zedong, on which was written that famous verdict that completely changed the fates of countless people: "Using a novel to carry out anti-party activities is a great invention." Mao Zedong read this slip of paper at the meeting and added: "To overthrow a political power, it is always necessary first of all to create public opinion, to do work in the ideological sphere. This is true for the revolutionary class as well as for the counter-revolutionary class. (This incident was also a part of the public opinion work of the ideological work for Mao Zedong's launching of the Cultural Revolution.)" Mao Zedong's words elevated the issue to a contradiction between ourselves and the enemy "attempting to subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat."

From then on, the novel Liu Zhidan was characterized as a tool for usurping party and state power. Xi Zhongxun was also dismissed and sent down because of this matter, and was subsequently imprisoned for 16 years. At this time, Xi Jinping was 9 years old; after his father fell from power and was driven out of Beijing, the whole family also moved out of Zhongnanhai. This was the beginning of his losing his status as a child of a high-ranking cadre and experiencing a drastic change in social class.

Time moved to 1966, and Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution with the starting point of "preventing capitalist restoration, maintaining the purity of the party, and seeking China's own path for building socialism."

In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were mainly headed by conservative factions holding the extreme bloodline theory of "if the father is a hero, the son is a good fellow." They would directly define a person based on their birth background. Because of his father's relations, the 13-year-old Xi Jinping and his family were all implicated, and as the eldest son, he was heavily targeted for public denunciation. In one of the denunciation meetings, he was forced to wear a heavy iron dunce cap weighing over ten kilograms; the hat was so heavy that he could only support it with both hands. In another large-scale denunciation meeting, he was denounced on stage, and his mother was also forced to follow along and shout the slogan "Down with Xi Jinping."

Besides this, he was also detained for a long time in a study class at the Central Party School specifically dealing with children like him. There, he was required to read and recite Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung for long periods every day, and write self-criticisms and confess his crimes in conjunction with the quotations.

By 1968, the Cultural Revolution had lost control in many directions. The continuous escalation of the scale of armed struggles among Red Guards, the internal fighting between Red Guards, and the collapse of social order brought about by the Red Guards' internal fighting all made Mao Zedong very disappointed with the Red Guard movement. Mao Zedong himself said, "There is no fundamental conflict of interest within the working class."

In December 1968, to resolve the chaos and restore order, Mao Zedong issued the directive: "It is highly necessary for educated youths to go to the countryside to receive re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants." This launched the vigorous "Down to the Countryside" movement.

Combining historical materials, the reasons Mao Zedong decided to launch this movement were, on the one hand, to solve the employment and feeding problems of tens of millions of youths stranded in the cities, alleviating the pressure of an urban economy on the verge of collapse. On the other hand, Mao Zedong was always vigilant against the emergence of "revisionism." He believed that divorcing from manual labor would lead to the ideological degeneration of the youth, hoping that by letting youths eat, live, and work together with the vast peasantry, he could narrow the "Three Major Differences (the difference between city and country, between worker and peasant, and between mental and manual labor)," and cultivate revolutionary successors with firm will. This point also highly aligns with the original goal of the Cultural Revolution, and can even be said to be a practical movement derived from the Cultural Revolution.

For Xi Jinping, who was at the center of political persecution at the time, signing up to go to the rural areas of Northern Shaanxi (the old revolutionary base area where his father had once fought) was both a response to the state's call and, to a greater extent, the only survival strategy to escape Beijing, this political meat grinder. He later recalled that on the train leaving Beijing, everyone else was crying, and only he was laughing.

But the realistic countryside was not a romantic revolutionary holy land. Flea bites, extremely scarce diet (eating chaff and swallowing vegetables), arduous physical labor, and terrible living conditions all made him, who had been accustomed to living in a high-ranking official's family in the capital since childhood, unable to adapt. (This was also the survival reality of the majority of rural peasants at that time.) He could only face it with an escapist mentality, feeling in his heart that the current rural life was only temporary, so much so that he picked up the habit of smoking to gain more resting space. This also caused the villagers to hold a deep prejudice against him as a "young master." Ultimately, a few months later, he made the decision to escape back to Beijing.

However, returning to Beijing, Xi Jinping did not find sanctuary; instead, because he was a "backflow population" without a Beijing household registration, he was arrested by the police station as a blind migrant, locked up in a "study class" for several months, and forced to engage in heavy physical labor such as digging sewers.

When educated youths went down to the countryside, their Beijing household registrations would be forcibly canceled, and their files and household registrations entirely transferred to the rural areas. In an administrative sense, they were no longer "Beijingers" and lost the qualification to legally reside in the city. At that time, cities implemented an extremely strict system of state monopoly for purchase and marketing and a rationing system for materials. Without a Beijing household registration, grain coupons, oil coupons, and cloth coupons, etc., would not be issued. People who flowed back to the city could not buy a bite of food even if they had money, making it completely impossible to survive independently. The city's neighborhood committees, residents' committees, and police stations formed a tight surveillance network, conducting surprise household registration checks at any time. Once a "backflow population" without a household registration was found, they would be directly arrested and sent into a "study class" or a detention center.

It was exactly after the failure of this escape that he realized that under the urban-rural dual system of the time, even the former elite, once losing the protection of the system, had absolutely no dignity in the face of the "blind migrant" style social bottom. This allowed him to directly touch the most real material production foundation of Chinese society at that time. The only way out was to directly face the most abrasive reality.

He returned to Liangjiahe once again, having no choice but to accept the scarcity of material reality, but spiritually. Educated youths in the same village recalled that when Xi Jinping went to jump the queue, he brought two large suitcases of books, among which the most numerous were the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. In the cave dwelling without electricity, he read the Selected Works of Mao three times under a kerosene lamp. From the realistic heavy labor, and the in-depth communication with the people at the bottom, he went on to layer by layer internalize Mao Zedong's dialectics. He stayed there for seven years, during which he preliminarily participated in politics and improved the living conditions of the local villagers.

Mao Zedong's fundamental purpose in launching the Cultural Revolution in his later years was to break the systemic shell of the Soviet-style "revisionism" within the vanguard party, which was gradually alienating and possessed a tendency towards a bureaucratic privileged class. The profound meaning of this historical exploration was recognized by Xi Jinping—who had experienced systemic exile during his years as an educated youth and ultimately found his own value among the masses of the people—namely, the fatal danger of the political party becoming divorced from the broad masses of the people. In his long-term grassroots practice, Xi Jinping not only inherited Mao Zedong's keen insight into the underlying contradictions of Chinese society, but furthermore recognized under new historical conditions: under the encirclement of global capitalism and the impact of the market economy, maintaining a vanguard political party with powerful mobilization capability and a high degree of centralized unity is the only cornerstone for resisting being swallowed by the logic of capital and defending the socialist regime.

He experienced the disordered state of past mass movements, profoundly realizing that external impacts lacking strict organization not only cannot establish new relations of production, but on the contrary will weaken the dictatorship of the proletariat itself; but at the same time, he also deeply knows the cyclical crisis of bureaucratic system ossification and degeneration. Therefore, he did not retreat to traditional bureaucratic rule, but made a dialectical sublation: elevating and internalizing the 'external mass rebellion' of the Mao Zedong era into the 'party's self-revolution' of the new era. He utilized the practical methods of the mass line (such as campaign-style targeted poverty alleviation), coordinated with strict party discipline inspections, to temper and reshape the vanguard. His and Mao Zedong's goals are historically identical—both lie in preventing the degeneration of the party; but he used the disciplinary revolution within the political party and the elevation of national governance efficacy to replace extra-systemic destruction, defending and strengthening the entity of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a new historical context."

In July 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution and also on the eve of a gigantic turning point in the history of New China, in Luoyang, Henan. Xi Zhongxun, who was undergoing labor reform, specifically called his eldest son Xi Jinping, who was attending university in Beijing, to his side. According to the record of a precious memoir from a person involved, in this room that was like a steamer, the father and son, bare-chested, amid the strong smell of sweat and tobacco, completed an extraordinary political handover.

For this conversation, Xi Zhongxun deliberately sent away his second son Xi Yuanping, who was excited about discussing the mass movements on the streets of Tiananmen (namely the April Fifth Movement commemorating the death of Zhou Enlai), and asserted that his two sons "would not walk the same path in the future." Subsequently, in this small room with no outsiders, this former senior CPC leader, like a strict feudal patriarch, demanded his eldest son recite the entire contents of Mao Zedong's On Contradiction, On Practice, and even the four volumes of the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. When bystanders felt this was unreasonable and thought it was deliberately making things difficult for a son doing hard labor every day, Xi Zhongxun gave an extremely profound answer: "Young people's potential is limitless... If learned well, one can govern the country and bring peace to the world; if learned poorly, then it will bring disaster to the country and the people. From a young age, one must have the concept (reverence for heaven and earth), and cannot be without law and without heaven."

This article is one I composed by combining some historical materials I recently consulted plus a bit of my own thinking from a Marxist perspective. Everyone is welcome to discuss.Besides, this article when published at /marxism caused me to be banned by them, the reason they gave is "revisionism"

The memoir in the final part is from Yang Ping: The Father-Son Affection Between Xi Zhongxun and Jinping The article was written by myself and translated using AI, and I will post the link to my original Chinese manuscript here "