5. China: The Visible Hand of the State

During the period of the Cultural Revolution, “… the Red Guards turned to destructive activities that led to a brutal reign of terror, breaking into the homes of wealthy families, intellectuals and officials, destroying books and manuscripts, humiliating, beating and even murdering the inhabitants, and continually claiming to be carrying out the revolutionary attack against the ‘Four Old Men’: old ideas, old culture, old rights, old habits. These young students, boys and girls alike, whose ages ranged from nine to eighteen, roamed the streets with their red bands on their arms, harassing and imparting their own moral justice to anyone who showed the slightest hint of foreigners or foreigners intellectualism” (Fairbank & Goldman, 2006).

During the climax of the Cultural Revolution, at the 9th Congress of the Chinese People’s Party in April 1969, new party statutes were presented, stipulating that General Lin Biao, in his capacity as Vice Chairman of Chairman Mao, was “the closest comrade in arms and successor to Comrade Mao Tse – Tung” (Fairbank & Goldman, 2006).

The Gang of Four were a group of Chinese Communist Party leaders accused of the excesses committed during the Cultural Revolution. The group consisted of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who was in charge of the cultural apparatus of the State, as well as three radical intellectuals, leaders of the CCP in Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen. In this group is included Lin Biao, military strategist and forerunner of the Cultural Revolution and the Third Front, who compiled all the quotes from Chairman Mao in the Little Red Book. The Gang launched a series of theses on alleged “new mutations” in class relations in the period of socialism. By “new mutations” they meant that veteran cadres had become “leaders following the capitalist path,” that veteran workers had become “beneficiaries of vested interests,” that young workers were “even worse,” that poor peasants and lower-middle peasants were “lagged behind ideologically” from the socialist revolution and, in short, that intellectuals were “stinky people number nine” (after the eight types of class enemies: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, rightist noxious elements, renegades, secret agents of the enemy and inveterate leaders followers of the capitalist pathway) (Bettelheim, Rossanda & Karol, 1978).