Da jia hao tongzhimen and happy holidays everybody. It’s your host Drew Smith with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast here to celebrate with you the most wonderful time of the year, a time of warmth, cheer, and families gathered together to um celebrate their respective holidays to ring in the new year.

It’s uh going to be very special Christmas for us. you know, it’s going to be the first Christmas where uh my partner and I are engaged. There’s going to be a lot of warmth and cheer with the in-laws.

Um cuz I never told you guys this uh but uh my fiance spent a large portion of her childhood in the US while my father-in-law was getting his PhD at the University of Rhode Island. Um, so while they were there, they picked up the, um, habit of celebrating Christmas.

So, um, you know, we’re going to do Christmas this year. Uh, I just put up the artificial tree this morning, hung the lights in the tinsel, but uh I’m going to wait till the missus is back at my place uh in a couple of nights for us to put up like all of the little ornaments that come with it together.

Um, we’re also celebrating the fact that the great proletarian cultural revolution has now reached 3,000 subscribers.

I mean, granted, it’s no Joe Rogan podcast or last podcast on the left, but I mean, like, that’s not bad for a relatively new history podcast of less than 20 episode that’s covering a very, very niche topic in history. So, I think that’s going to call for a celebration in and of itself.

Well, you know folks, it is the most wonderful time of the year. And one of the best way to celebrate these holidays is with lots and lots of food. And while Mao was right that revolution is not a dinner party, he didn’t say that the holidays weren’t a dinner party. Kill me.

So, on our newest thematic episode of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast, we’ll be taking a look at food and cooking and how the cultural revolution influenced Chinese cuisine during those 10 years and beyond.

You know, a lot of pop history K through 12 textbooks and whack job YouTube quote unquote armchair historian channels like to claim that the cultural revolution was a time of brutal famine, often conflating anti-communist estimates of 20 million deaths by starvation during the great leap forward of 1956 to 1962 with that of the cultural revolution four years later, which by the way, statisticians and East Asian studies scholars these days now believe that the death toll of the great leap forward to be much much lower and to be more of the fault of natural disasters rather than communist party policies.

I remember um once someone told me on Twitter and I still if I dug up the quote. Famine was so widespread during the cultural revolutions supposedly that the Red Guards used to quote boil their daughters alive and serve them to their neighbors and vice versa end quote and that quote starvation was so rampant that all girls lost their periods end quote not just many not just some all girls lost their periods when I asked for a source on these materials, the person deleted the tweet and locked their account. So, I guess we’ll never know.

But seriously, the fact of the matter is this, folks. During the Cultural Revolution, people did what all humans do. They ate food. From scrumptious roast duck state dinners for Albanian dignitaries at Quanjude restaurant in Beijing to PLA soldiers on the Sino-Soviet border enjoying Dongbei style pork dumplings and spicy broth to Shaanxi peasants and communal kitchens on collective farms chowing down on some biang biang noodles after long days of fulfilling production quotas. Chinese cuisine has left an indelible mark on the cultural revolution and vice versa, as well as the memories of those who lived through it all.

So, put on the kettle, brew yourself up some oolong tea, log on to GrubHub or Meituan if you’re here in China, order a big old plate of your favorite goodies from your local takeout joint, and let me present to you guys a feast for the ears as we get into the GPCR podcast holiday special, food and cooking during the cultural revolution.

Now, for a bit of background, I should say that things were admittedly, I must admit, they were still a bit rough during the cultural revolution when it came to having enough food to go around the national table. Poverty alleviation and agricultural revitalization were only in their very embryonic stages by the mid 1960s.

After all, the cultural revolution was launched just a few years after a massive drought during the great leap forward. And then even before that they had faced the Shanghai revolution of 1911, the warlord era of 1916 through 1928, the Chinese people’s wars of 1927 through 1936 and 1945 to 1949, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and during all these wars and revolutions, China experienced five major famines and three epidemics, one of bubonic plague, one of cholera, and one of smallpox.

All of these conflicts and natural disasters had destroyed countless square kilometers of crop land, decimated the food processing industry, and completely disrupted food transportation from across the country. So, these folks, let me tell you, um, these folks were literally rebuilding from like they were in the basement and having to work their way up. They were not starting from the ground floor. They were starting from the basement.

So, rebuilding from 38 years of starvation was not going to be achieved in just a decade and a half, especially when 90% of the population lived in poverty. and the western capitalist powers were placing massive sanctions on quote unquote red China.

Still, as we will see, humans have a way of prevailing over adversity, especially when they have a socialist system in place. Rationing kept pantries sparse, but at least reasonably well stocked for what they had. And even when rations were tight, the Chinese people had unique ways to make delicious and wholesome traditional meals with minimal ingredients.

It also helped that in most collective farms and urban apartment complexes and workers dormitories, there were communal kitchens or cafeterias or canteens where everyone in the neighborhood would gather together to pull ingredients, take turns cooking for each other, and just share the wealth.

The cultural revolution did also face some problems with food distribution during the factional warfare of summer of 1967 through summer of 1968.

Thankfully though, it didn’t lead to any widespread starvation. Um Mao and Zhou Enlai realized that if factional warfare continued, it could lead to massive food shortages in the city. So when Mao called out the People’s Liberation Army to disband the rebel movements in 1968, he also made sure the PLA restored food transportation into urban areas that had experienced some form of food distribution disruption or another. And um it was actually in '69 that you see that rationing was eased up a good bit.

So, while we’re on the subject of rationing, I wanted to tell you guys about a very interesting thing about how rationing worked up until the 1980s in China. So, basically, everyone in China was on what we in America would like refer to as food stamps or EBT or SNAP depending on your what state you’re in in the United States. Um, every citizen got a booklet of what are basically were these little coupons um that you that would supplement your income. And I have a few of these rationing coupons and uh I will post a few of them up on my Twitter for you guys to see. You’ll it’ll they’re kind of very interesting. They’re very ornate. They’ve got like cute little pictures on them. Um, I’ll give you an example from the book I’m using for this episode, The Cultural Revolution Cookbook. Um, in Guangzhou in 1968, each adult got monthly coupons that you could trade in for 16 kg of rice a month, 600 gram of cooking oil, one catty of meat of your choice, beef, pork, or lamb, four large blocks of tofu, 10 eggs, and two fowl of your choice, duck, goose, or chicken.

Now, obviously, if you wanted anything else, you had to use your own cash from your state salary or pension. And of course, if you had kids, if you were a pensioner, you were disabled, your coupons would get doubled. Um, Hui and Uyghur Muslims got special vouchers that would get them extra beef and lamb, and PLA soldiers in their families got extra ration coupons.

Of course, it was by no means a perfect system. And it does sound rather meager to our western bellies, but you got to consider that putting things into context, this was a major step up in terms of food security for hundreds of millions of people.

And you have to remember that to many Chinese they truly believed what Lukacs said when you know even the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism. And indeed one of the most common slogans among rebel peasant factions in the countryside was it is better to grow socialist grass than capitalist grain.

The influence of food on the cultural revolution and the influence of the cultural revolution on Chinese cuisine is vast and can be found in the strangest of places. For example, you guys know the East is Red, which was the de facto anthem of cultural revolution alongside the international because the official anthem, March of the Volunteers, was deemed too nationalistic. And the composer actually was very pro-Liu Shaoqi.

Um, if I recall, I think he ended up dying in prison in 1969 in the cultural revolution. Um but yes, the east is red, you know. Dongfanghong.

Yeah. It has a funny origin. The original tune was originally a shi peasant love song called sesame oil. And it goes a little something like this, [Chinese singing] which translates roughly to

Sesame Oil Cabbage hearts.

I have stomach cramps from eating so many beans.

I feel like dying after not seeing you for three days.

Oo ohayo, oh, my third brother.

So when the Chinese Red Army got to Yan’an in the late 1930s, they would hear peasant women singing this song to pass the time while harvesting grain, picking vegetables, and cooking. And it went through several incarnations as anti-Japanese or anti-Guomindang songs until in 1945 it became the Maoist anthem we know today. The east is red.

Another funny little thing is during the cold war the term quote goulash communism became a nickname for the reforms in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland and other Warsaw packed countries that allowed for limited market reforms and the restoration of profit in a way of building up the economy which you know goulash is a stew of often mismatched ingredients.

So during the cultural revolution when the communist party of China wanted to write polemics criticizing Krush and Breath or in particular the Hungarian Communist Party leader Jonas Kadar they um they had a bit of trouble. For one thing goulash doesn’t exactly translate or transliterate well into Mandarin. So instead they called it beef stew communism or dun niu rou gong chan zhuyi. So in Mandarin a slang term for revisionism is beef stew communism. Pretty crazy, huh?

More positive slang terms were coined from food as well. For example, if someone had a revolutionary red line and an enthusiastic attitude, that person would be declared to be quote as clear as tofu and scallions. Because tofu and scallions with sesame oil, if cooked just right, has a nice white and slightly translucent look to it. So, it was basically a way of saying that you were pure, unproblematic, stuff like that.

Um, another thing is is that names of dishes could also change due to political connotations. Uh, one of the most famous American Chinese takeout dishes, Kungpow chicken, is based on the Sichuan dish, gong bao jiding.

The problem is is that Gong Bao or Kungpao in Cantonese means palace guard, giving it a distinctly feudal connotation. So during the destroy the four olds campaign of 1966, kungpao chicken or gongbao jiding simply became known as hula jiding or spicy chicken and it remained that way until the 1980s.

The Chinese restaurant industry was heavily affected too. You might remember in episodes three and five of this podcast how during the destroy the four olds campaign, there was a whirlwind of changing anything that even had so much of a hint of the old society. And that was true of restaurant names and decor.

And in Beijing, there’s a famous mom and pop joint that’s been around for like literally centuries. It’s called Old Pockmark Mama Chen’s Tofu House. And I’ve never eaten there myself, but I hear it’s good. The lines are supposedly always out the door when you go there.

And it’s uh funny. In 1966, August of '66, some high school red guards decided that was too individualistic for a person’s name to be in a restaurant name. So they tore down the sign, hacked it to pieces, and forced the owners to change the name to Old Pockmarked Numbing Spicy Tofu, which if pronounced in a Beijing accent, sounds very similar to the original name. Uh, the name was changed back in the 1980s, but it’s just one curious story.

Now, one restaurant in Beijing that has massive importance to the story of the cultural revolution and to Chinese history in general is Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant. Now, there are several Quanjudes in Beijing and even around China. Um, I’ve been to the one in on Qianmen and I’ve been to the one by Wangfujing.

Um, personally I think the best one is the original one at Tianman Shopping District just behind Tiananmen Square Drum Tower. Um, it’s great stuff. Uh, it’s got a Michelin star in fact, but uh, both Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao cited both cited it as their favorite restaurant. So, it had the stamp of approval from some of the top dogs of the Central Cultural Revolution group.

In episode three, you I told the story of how Quanjude got the red August treatment. To quote myself in that episode, quote, "A few days after the August 18th red guard reception in Tiananmen, Quanjude Roast Duck restaurant was attacked by a coalition of 2nd, 25th, and 63rd middle school red guards.

They all smashed the old antique decor within the restaurant, demanded all the restaurant staff join them as rebel workers, and posted up portraits of Mao and various dazibao all over the walls of the restaurant. While the duck was supposedly still quite delicious, Quanjude was now a revolutionary and red restaurant, accessible to all citizens of the city and not just an exclusive five-star dining establishment.

Quanjude also becomes an important player in the later half of the cultural revolution, too, as it was Zhou Enlai’s favorite place to take foreign dignitaries and comrades out to eat when they would come to visit. So if Ho Chi Minh or Enver Hoxha or Kim Il Sung or Robert F. Williams, if they were in town, you could bet they were going to get some of that succulent sweet but crispy oven roasted goodness.

Quanjude was the place where Zhou took Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who died today by the way, rest in piss, out to eat when the US and China began to ostensibly warm up relations in 1972.

And if I recall correctly, I might be wrong on this, it’s it was at a dinner party at Quanjude that the famous picture of Nixon fumbling with his chopsticks was taken. But I might be wrong about that because there were actually several Peking duck banquets during the Nixon-Mao meetings. Some of them took place at Quanjude. Some of them took place at Zhongnanhai. So if anyone knows the specifics of that, I want to say it was taken at Quanjude, but I might be wrong. Let me know on my Twitter account or in the Discord.

You know, another thing that I was wondering is I wonder if Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA or chairman Gonzalo of the Communist Party of Peru ever got the Quanjude treatment when they came over to China? Because I mean I know that the Black Panthers and a lot of the, you know, anti-revisionist Marxist Leninist organizations, they got treated to dinner there during foreign friendship tour. So I mean who knows maybe they did. Just kind of a funny idea of seeing Chairman Gonzalo and Bob Avakian chowing down on some on some roast duck. Yum yum yum.

Um, there were even signs of the cultural revolution in how people slaughtered animals. So, um, if I may quote directly from the cultural revolution cookbook, quote, "In one commune, the peasants found a novel way to express fidelity. They shaved the character for loyalty on the heads of the best pigs. Before anyone slaughtered a loyalty pig, it was custom to proclaim his or her devotion to Chairman Mao.” End quote

I’m assuming this took place probably in like late 67 or any time during 1968 when the big loyalty to Chairman Mao campaigns were in full swing. Um, we’ll be talking about those loyalty campaigns a little bit more, especially with my thematic episodes about Mao badges, the Little Red Book, and music during the Cultural Revolution, because that stuff, that stuff just gets buck wild. Let me tell you that.

Speaking of wild forms of loyalty, let me tell you guys about the mangoes. Yes, the mangoes.

At one point in the cultural revolution, there was a wave of Maoist mango mania that I could honestly do an entire episode on because of how well frankly goofy the reverence for mangoes got because of their association with chairman Mao.

So what happened was on August 5th, 1968, the foreign ministry of Pakistan sent a massive box of mangoes to chairman Mao. There were far too many for Mao to eat. So as a gesture of goodwill, he sent them to the Maoadong thought propaganda teams at Qinghua University, who were groups of rebel workers sent in to restore order between feuding Red Guard factions on campuses.

The propaganda team saw this as a symbol of both Mao’s generosity and of Mao’s endorsement of them over the now fractured and dying Red Guard movement.

And soon the story of Mao’s gift of mangoes to the workers swept across the country. Some of the workers preserved the mangoes in formaldehyde or preserved them in wax and sent them to tour the country where they would be greeted by throngs of crowd and great fanfare.

People who did eat the mangoes claimed to have experienced miraculous healing benefits from them. From curing tooth aches and gout to even curing deafness and blindness.

Mangoes were everywhere. Wax and plastic replicates became household decorations. Mango themed bed sheets and tapestries were found in many homes. And mango scented or flavored everything could be found in supermarkets across the country. I even have several Mao badges from late 68 and early 69 which have plates of mangoes displayed prominently under Mao’s face.

The funniest thing to me though is the giant mango float that was part of the 1968 National Day parade at Tiananmen Square. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love mangoes. They’re one of my favorite fruits. But yeesh, that’s just crazy, y’all.

However, out of all culinary phenomena during the cultural revolution, I have to say that the down to the country side campaign of 1968 through 1976 was almost certainly the one that had the greatest impact on Chinese cuisine during that period and even into the modern era.

When Mao broke up the Red Guard movement in summer of 68 and decided to scatter millions of China’s youth across the countryside to work alongside the peasants, a large cross-pollination of cuisine occurred.

Sent-down youth Guangzhou brought Cantonese recipes to rural Guizhou and kids from Qingdao got to learn traditional Uyghur cooking while out working on collective farms in Xinjiang. Exchange of recipes became a common thing as these young comrades were taught traditional cooking methods by the peasantry.

And after the cultural revolution, many went back to their home cities and opened up restaurants in which they would serve up the recipes they learned while working in the countryside.

You know, life could be really tough out there on the collective farms, but many Chinese who lived during that time actually fondly remember that delicious country cooking their peasant hosts’ families would provide to them.

So, if you ever find yourself in urban China and you find an authentic halal place that’s run by a Han Chinese family, or if you ever wonder why certain types of like tropical seafood from places like Hainan or Fujian are very popular in inland areas like Hunan or Shaanxi province, well, thank the ‘down to the countryside’ campaign for that.

Um, so before we finish this episode, I want to give you guys a couple of recipes for some desserts to add to your holiday table over the next few weeks.

Y’all are going to love these. Uh, Chinese people eat them in their households during the wintertime as snacks, and you can also find them like sometimes on street carts, selling them alongside roasted yam and corn on the sidewalk in a lot of Chinese cities. So, uh, let me give you guys some authentic Cultural Revolution Christmas munchies right here.

All right, so here’s my recipe for sesame seed candy. So, our first recipe is a very common sweet treat in China. It only takes literally two ingredients, but watch yourself. Watch yourself. It’s a bit tricky because you got to watch out not to overcook either the sesame seeds or the syrup. So listen real closely.

Um, so you get one cup or 120 gram of sesame seeds and one cup or 250 gram of sugar. Then using a flat pan, toast the sesame seeds over medium heat.

Um, you’ll know they’re done when you can smell their fragrance and a few seeds pop and begin to jump out of the pan. Remove them immediately from the pan.

Then place a wok over medium low heat and add the sugar very slowly. And then stir it thoroughly until it melts into a syrup. When no more white granules are visible, then add the seeds and mix well.

Then pour the mixture into individual molds. Um like the bottoms of the cups of a cupcake tin or um you know something like that. If you want it to be round, um, then allow it to sit or, you know, either on a window sill or in the refrigerator or something like that for 10 minutes until the individual pieces have solidified. Then remove and serve.

Um, you can make these in batches and give them out to your friends and family and comrades. And I bet they’ll love it. And I bet you can’t eat just one.

Oh, and hey, remember what I said about mangoes? Well, I got you guys a mangoes and sticky rice uh one. So, it’s a good southern Chinese dessert that was commonly popular during the cultural revolution due to the mango mania. And uh I think honestly it would go great with any western holiday spread. Uh especially if you like rice pudding um and stuff like that, I think you’ll like it and Chairman Mao would approve.

So here’s uh mangoes and sticky rice. So you’ll need one cup or 200 gram of sweet rice or what’s called sticky rice or glutinous rice. Then you’ll want um three cups of um or 750 milliliters of cold water. You’ll want one large ripe mango. Then 2 to 3 tablespoons or 30 to 45 milliliters of sweetened condensed milk. Or if you’re like me, the same amount of coconut milk mixed with two teaspoons or eight grams of sugar.

So wash and drain the rice. Soak the rice in the water in a pot. You know, put maybe put it in uh a rice cooker for 10 minutes. Bring it to a boil. Um, then after about five or 10 more minutes, let the rice absorb all the water. Remove from the flame. Allow to cool.

Then slice the mango in half. Remove the pit and uh cut the fruit lengthwise. So each is about half an inch or 1.5 cm thick and the full length of the fruit, removing the peel in the process.

Um, when the rice has cooled somewhat but is still warm, put it on a serving plate and then arrange the mango pieces around it, then drizzle the coconut or condensed milk over the rice and the fruit and then serve it. And uh, let me tell you, it’s tasty. It’s pretty tasty. Pretty simple, but pretty tasty.

All right, my friends. Well, it’s time for us to wrap up this episode and uh, get some holiday planning done. I wish you all a very very happy holidays and a very happy new year.

Um, next month we will not be having an episode because I will just be so busy with administering final exams and tying up all the loose ends of fall semester 2023 here at Northwest University. Uh we will return at the very end of January to continue with our chronological episodes as we discuss the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968.

So until next time comrades, zai jian.

Sources for today’s episode include

The Cultural Revolution Cookbook: Simple, Healthy Recipes from China’s Countryside by Sasha Gong and Scott D. Seligman and

Savoring the spice in Kung Pao Chicken. A special segment on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Zai jian