BAY AREA, UNITED STATES—This year, 2016, is the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The 10-year period from 1966 to 1976 is viewed by communists as the most left period in post-revolutionary China, the farthest any society yet progressed toward trying to put ordinary industrial and agricultural workers in charge of running things. It is also the period of China’s history most attacked and slandered by the capitalists who now rule China.
These political traitors who still call themselves the “Communist” Party of China have grown incredibly wealthy at the expense of the working class. Most academics in Europe and North America are eager to amplify and spread the distortions and lies about the GPCR published by the capitalist scholars and politicians who dominate China today.
There is another side to the story. Gatherings in China celebrating the positive accomplishments of the GPCR, mostly low profile, have taken place in a number of cities. There have also been pro-communist gatherings in other countries, including the U.S. One in particular was held in the Bay Area of northern California in October.
The evening centered on reproductions of two giant character posters (dazibao), one written by communists from the U.S. who were living and working in China. One of the poster writers, in her 80s and wheelchair bound, was present at the conference. She was an inspiration to the younger generations present. In 1966, she wrote posters criticizing the Chinese authorities for giving them and other foreign “experts” special treatment, like better living conditions and no expectation for manual labor. They declared that they, too, aspired to be real revolutionaries and the special treatment undermined their political will and created a separation from the Chinese masses. The special treatment undermined internationalism.
At the event, many new publications were discussed about the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu (Harvard University Press, 2014) starts from the perspective that the restoration of capitalism began with Mao Zedong’s betrayal of the revolutionary aspirations of the masses of left workers and students mobilized in the first months of the GPCR. He writes, “Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics … exhausted its once explosive energy. … [and] eventually led to the historic changes in the social, economic and political life in post-Mao China.”
To find out more about the Cultural Revolution you can see three articles from PL Magazine, available on PLP.org:
The Gpcr & The Reversal Of Workers’ Power In China (1971)
Whither China? (1972)
Why Were Communist Revolutions Reversed In China And The Ussr?
Additionally:
The titles and brief summaries of the papers from the San Francisco Conference are now posted at www. wholeworldjustice.org