Late Maoist Culture

J. F. Jenner suggested that being Chinese in the twenty years from 1956 involved "making conscious choices to do things the hard way." (The Tyranny of History - The Roots of China's Crisis, The Penguin Press, 1994)

Like the city kids sent to remote parts of the countryside at the end of the 1960s who deliberately did farm work with their bare hands instead of using tools, and "who did not rest from the mid-day sun in summer, and who gloried in making the most meaningless of sacrifices."

Few could have been more pointless than the self-destruction of a former Red Guard (Red Guards pictured) who drowned in August 1969 in an attempt to recover from the river a floating telegraph pole that was no longer part of a communication network, but was simply a length of driftwood.

The incident was given the full treatment by the propaganda authorities, who made no attempt to hide what by any standards but Maoist ones would have been a waste of a young life.

"They turned it into an act of martyrdom. It was almost as if the very disproportion between the possible gain and the actual loss was something admirable in itself and another sign of a national moral superiority: nowhere else in the world could match the pure revolutionary dedication of China's proletarian youth armed with the invincible thought of Mao Zedong."

Such deaths did not seem unusual or shocking in the late 1960s after years of "purposeless killings" during the countless persecutions during the Cultural Revolution.

Indeed, the willingness to undertake and "exact sacrifices that benefited nobody" was an outstanding feature of late Maoist culture, Jenner argued.

Jenner concluded that the converse of this was that rational cost-benefit analysis of anything was made very difficult for over twenty years from the mid-1950s.