Niall Ferguson explains for Newsweek readers why we ought to be concerned that China’s latest crop of leaders came of age during the communist nation’s Cultural Revolution.
That it disrupted the lives of a generation is clear. Only consider its effects on the two men poised to inherit the top two positions of president and premier. Xi Jinping was a “princeling,” the son of one of Mao Zedong’s loyal lieutenants. He was just 15 when his father was arrested on Mao’s order. Xi spent the next six years toiling in the countryside of Yanchuan county in central China. Li Keqiang had a similar experience. No sooner had he graduated from high school than he was sent to labor in the fields of impoverished Anhui province.
To get an idea of what exactly this means, imagine Barack Obama feeding pigs in Iowa or Mitt Romney mending a tractor in Wisconsin. Except that no American farm could ever match the grinding hardship of a Chinese collective farm. …
… More than 40 years later, the historian Xu Youyu calls for a “total condemnation” (chedi fouding) of the Cultural Revolution. Yet his is a minority view. If you visit the National Museum of China in Beijing, you will find almost no reference to the Cultural Revolution. When I tried to interview Xu on the subject last August, we were kicked off the campus of the university where he teaches.
Even more remarkable is the evidence of a growing nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution. During my last visit to China, I ate dinner at a themed restaurant where the waitresses dress up like Red Guards and the floorshow features propaganda songs from the period. Incredibly, just 200 yards away from the graves of Cultural Revolution victims in Chongqing, I saw a group of middle-aged women singing some of these songs, including “Chairman Mao Is the Sun That Never Sets.”
