Today is the 34th anniversary of 怀仁堂事变. It's possible that the modern Chinese term "事变" originated from Japanese Kanji "事変", which means an "alteration" or simply an incident that led to change.
It implies an abrupt or abnormal departure with historical implications.
In this case, I am talking about October 6, 1976, on which day a bloodless coup d'état launched by the PLA bosses and old Party honchos ended the most bizaare, most far-reaching, and many would say by far the most damaging experiment throughout China's three millenia of recorded history - The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
When we read about it, it reads like a dream. When our elders talk about it - actually they don't for no one particularly takes pleasure in recounting nightmares.
I'm actually old enough to remember a glimpse, just a glimpse of entire streets covered wall-to-wall with 大字报 (big posters with giant characters) on "down with the gang of four". Cartoons of 江青 (Jiang Qing) are for some reason seared into my mind.
Often when I rode streetcars through parts of Toronto where hand-made posters, crude advertising and anarchist slogans cover up every square inch of sidewalk walls, I wear a little smirk.
Mao's revolution sure as hell destroyed "class", so much so that it nearly destroyed the nation, even as China seems to be churning our new class divisions nowadays.
But then again, everywhere I go, even in the West, I sense class struggles among other things.
Is life just a Merry-Go-Round? Perhaps I am a Hindu at heart I just don't know it yet. Or didn’t my good book say there is nothing new under the sun?
Without Mao’s revolution I actually wouldn't be here because my folks would not have gotten married. They are from utterly divergent classes.
No one quite said the above to me explicitly ever, and that realization only "dawned" on me a few years ago ...
Did Mao and CCP 土改 (land reform) destroy the entire class of landlords? Yes, it seems.
But did it destroy serfdom? I’m not sure.
Did Mao practice reverse class discrimination (I mean the most blatant discriminations in the spirit of the Nazi Eugenic zeal minus the gas chambers)? Yes. And it seemed that he for a time replaced feudalism with “reverse feudalism”.
Did it achieve something? Hmm ... ask me that question in private.
Was it worth it? Simply, no.
Could it have been done differently and have achieved better results? Sure hope so.
Is it too late? Maybe.
Is it too late to "commemorate" it even if we still don't understand it? I don’t think so.
This is what I am doing, commemorating the "Thermidor" even if no one truly understands how things could go so far for so long.
People blame Mao (sure I do, too), and officially they still pin it on the “gang of four”. A few even blame Marx and Lenin. Now some mainland scholars have “gone to the source” and subtly attempted to bring in Robespierre to shoulder some “original sin”.
Is is just a case of making fresh use of “old dead white men”? I am not so sure.
After all, rumour has it when someone asked Zhou Enlai about the impact of the French Revolution, his reply was something along the line of “too soon to tell” …
It implies an abrupt or abnormal departure with historical implications.
In this case, I am talking about October 6, 1976, on which day a bloodless coup d'état launched by the PLA bosses and old Party honchos ended the most bizaare, most far-reaching, and many would say by far the most damaging experiment throughout China's three millenia of recorded history - The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
When we read about it, it reads like a dream. When our elders talk about it - actually they don't for no one particularly takes pleasure in recounting nightmares.
I'm actually old enough to remember a glimpse, just a glimpse of entire streets covered wall-to-wall with 大字报 (big posters with giant characters) on "down with the gang of four". Cartoons of 江青 (Jiang Qing) are for some reason seared into my mind.
Often when I rode streetcars through parts of Toronto where hand-made posters, crude advertising and anarchist slogans cover up every square inch of sidewalk walls, I wear a little smirk.
Mao's revolution sure as hell destroyed "class", so much so that it nearly destroyed the nation, even as China seems to be churning our new class divisions nowadays.
But then again, everywhere I go, even in the West, I sense class struggles among other things.
Is life just a Merry-Go-Round? Perhaps I am a Hindu at heart I just don't know it yet. Or didn’t my good book say there is nothing new under the sun?
Without Mao’s revolution I actually wouldn't be here because my folks would not have gotten married. They are from utterly divergent classes.
No one quite said the above to me explicitly ever, and that realization only "dawned" on me a few years ago ...
Did Mao and CCP 土改 (land reform) destroy the entire class of landlords? Yes, it seems.
But did it destroy serfdom? I’m not sure.
Did Mao practice reverse class discrimination (I mean the most blatant discriminations in the spirit of the Nazi Eugenic zeal minus the gas chambers)? Yes. And it seemed that he for a time replaced feudalism with “reverse feudalism”.
Did it achieve something? Hmm ... ask me that question in private.
Was it worth it? Simply, no.
Could it have been done differently and have achieved better results? Sure hope so.
Is it too late? Maybe.
Is it too late to "commemorate" it even if we still don't understand it? I don’t think so.
This is what I am doing, commemorating the "Thermidor" even if no one truly understands how things could go so far for so long.
People blame Mao (sure I do, too), and officially they still pin it on the “gang of four”. A few even blame Marx and Lenin. Now some mainland scholars have “gone to the source” and subtly attempted to bring in Robespierre to shoulder some “original sin”.
Is is just a case of making fresh use of “old dead white men”? I am not so sure.
After all, rumour has it when someone asked Zhou Enlai about the impact of the French Revolution, his reply was something along the line of “too soon to tell” …
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during 1981 public show trial - I actually remember Jiang Qing on TV, inexplicably even to myself:
