Roger Cohen: China Remembers the Cultural Revolution
The tombstones loomed in the dusk, some of them rising more than 25 feet, each telling a forgotten story of China’s troubled history. I had come to find them because, for the first time, China has sanctioned the preservation here of a site commemorating the numberless victims of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution....
...[T]he decision, made last month by authorities in this gritty central Chinese city, to designate a cemetery containing the remains of 573 people slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution as an official relic worthy of maintenance is a significant opening.
That, it seems to me, is modern China: two steps forward, one back. For every new repression there is some relaxation, for every new abuse some advance....
Here in Chongqing, the Cultural Revolution took particularly devastating form as rival factions bent on demonstrating their devotion to Mao’s wild anti-capitalist, anti-rightist, anti-cadre purge battled each other. The local arms industry fed the frenzy: mass murder in the name of a personality cult....
The cemetery, with its 131 graves containing multiple victims, many of them young Red Guards, is a place of hushed mystery. A faded photograph of a young man, his features blurred, is propped against one tombstone. Ferns grow from the stones, weeds advance. Chinese characters peel away. “We can be beaten, struggled against, but we will never bow our revolutionary heads,” says one inscription. Another lists the ages of the dead: 49, 29, 45, 26, 51, 26....
I asked [scholar Chen Xiaowen] why this past still haunts a party that has hoisted China from destructive folly. “It’s a form of rule based on results, efficacy, not on democratic legitimacy,” he said. “So if you dig too deeply into the mistakes of the past, you make yourself vulnerable.”...
Read entire article at NYT
...[T]he decision, made last month by authorities in this gritty central Chinese city, to designate a cemetery containing the remains of 573 people slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution as an official relic worthy of maintenance is a significant opening.
That, it seems to me, is modern China: two steps forward, one back. For every new repression there is some relaxation, for every new abuse some advance....
Here in Chongqing, the Cultural Revolution took particularly devastating form as rival factions bent on demonstrating their devotion to Mao’s wild anti-capitalist, anti-rightist, anti-cadre purge battled each other. The local arms industry fed the frenzy: mass murder in the name of a personality cult....
The cemetery, with its 131 graves containing multiple victims, many of them young Red Guards, is a place of hushed mystery. A faded photograph of a young man, his features blurred, is propped against one tombstone. Ferns grow from the stones, weeds advance. Chinese characters peel away. “We can be beaten, struggled against, but we will never bow our revolutionary heads,” says one inscription. Another lists the ages of the dead: 49, 29, 45, 26, 51, 26....
I asked [scholar Chen Xiaowen] why this past still haunts a party that has hoisted China from destructive folly. “It’s a form of rule based on results, efficacy, not on democratic legitimacy,” he said. “So if you dig too deeply into the mistakes of the past, you make yourself vulnerable.”...