Da jia hao tongzhimen and welcome back to the great proletarian cultural revolution podcast with your host Drew Smith once again broadcasting from the ancient capital of Xi’an. It’s a rainy day here in the capital of the state of Chu of the state of Chin I should say. I’m chilling here with my little kitty buddy Mr. Shaudo and um I’m sipping on some suanmeitang which is some freshly made Chinese plum juice. Well, it’s from Beijing. Beijing plum juice. It’s a very refreshing summer sipping.

Oh, yeah. That’s the good stuff. So, we’ve uh just crossed the finish line of the end of the semester. Final exams just ended yesterday for my students, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t gotten around to grading them, but I’m pretty sure they did darn good. I’m very proud of them. I’m very proud of them.

After I get done grading and entering the grades into the university database and we release the grade final grades to the students, the Mrs. and I will be heading to Beijing for her cousin’s wedding and some warm summer fun.

Let me tell you though, Beijing in July is hot. It’s so bad. But, you know, that’s why um this month, this upcoming month, we will be skipping. We will not have an episode at the end of July. Um we will have our next episode will come out um Saturday, August 31st. So that’s when we will have our next episode.

So um let’s just get on right to the killing, my friends. Uh, how about y’all pour up a nice cold glass of suanmeitang, kick back, and let’s find out what happens next in the story of the great proletarian cultural revolution.

So, we begin here in Xi’an on May 1st, International Workers Day, the holiest day in the communist calendar. On that day, 300,000 people lined the streets and marched in a parade to welcome the establishment of the Shaanxi Provincial Revolutionary Committee headed by Rebel Cadre Li Ruishan. Shaanxi was really lucky.

Uh we actually were able to get a provincial committee dominated by rebel cadres and red guards and mass organizations and not the PLA. And same goes with the Xi’an Municipal Revolutionary Committee, which was firmly left-wing. Although unfortunately, a lot of the Shaanxi countryside would not be pacified until the end of July.

Speakers at the Xi’an rally which was held at the worker stadium which is literally right next to the gym that I go to pledged to eradicate the pernicious counterrevolutionary influence of Peng Dehuai, Gao Gang and Xi Zhongxun the father of modern-day Chinese president Xi Jinping.

On that same day in Beijing, half a million soldiers and civilians filled Tiananmen Square for the annual Mayday parade carrying red flags and singing the east is red. It was an epic affair lasting into the evening when Mao, Lin Biao and a host of top leaders agreed to greet the crowd on the Tiananmen rostrum.

But these Mayday celebrations were a mask over a revolution in disarray. The rebel movements that had carried the cultural revolution from the last week of May 66 onward had gone completely off the rails. And now things had come to a shrieking crescendo. Everywhere in the country, things had completely fallen apart.

On May 4th, Nanjing, soldiers were sent to break up a battle between the city’s good faction and its crap faction at PLA run factory number 3503 as the municipal revolutionary committee had hit a deadlock within its differing factions and was near to dissolving.

Fighting in Guangdong, Guangxi, Tibet, Xinjiang, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi had paralyzed the revolutionary process in many places, and the body count just kept stacking more and more up. Hundreds, it seemed, were dying each day nationwide. Vigilante killings and suicides of intellectuals and government officials spiked during May and June of this month.

Beijing Agricultural Institute lecturer Liu Zhongxuan was tortured for hours until he finally collapsed and died on May 2nd. On May 8th, after months of constant harassment, Lieutenant General Liu Peishan, who had just a few days before watched the Mayday parade from the Tiananmen Rostrum with Chairman Mao, killed himself.

On May 10th, branded as an active counterrevolutionary in Shanghai, uh, Shanghai Normal University, Huang Yaoting? committed suicide. On May 12th, in Harbin, middle school teacher Han Liyan (2 syllables given name) was thrown from the top of the school by his red guard students to his death.

On May 15th, in a rare flare up of violence in uh, Fudan University in Shanghai, chemistry professor Yan Zhixian? died after a violent struggle session at the hands of the Red Guards. There were also some rare killings at uh Xi’an Jaotong University. And I found another prominent 16 intellectuals and party officials killed in struggle sessions during the time, showing that the mass violence in early summer 68 was reaching a shocking amount of unseen violence since the prior two summers before.

Nothing, however, could compare to the violence at Qinghua University, where, as I said in our last chronological episode, the Jingangshan Red Guards and the 414 Red Guards had gone to war in the last week of April.

Now, just a quick recap of the two sides. So, the 414s were the centrist faction that split off from the Jingangshan Red faction. They were more aligned with Zhou Enlai’s politics. They agreed with Zhou when he said that the cultural revolution was a revolution within a revolution led by the proletariat who were also the leading class of the preceding 17 years of the people’s republic.

As for the preceding 17 years of socialism, the overall class line was correct and stable. They believed and those who dominated were mostly from good classes. And uh you know the idea that the majority of cadres were at least they had good intentions. They may have had some mistaken lines but the idea was that the majority of cadres in China were good.

Thus, the 414 faction opposed the idea that the cultural revolution at their university should be a counterattack on the entire past, including the 1949 to 1965 period, and that wealth and power should be of course redistributed among the students. They maintained that although there were problems with the central political regime at school, changes should be moderate and must not overhaul the entire social political structure and that it should not be done exclusively through physical violence.

On the other side were the radical Kuai Dafu supporters of the Jinggangshan regiment red guards and called on their followers to completely smash the old Tsinghua. Their principle was wherever oppression is worst, revolution is strongest. Some people have translated it as wherever oppression is the worst, revolution must be the worst. Um, I think they could go either way depending on context.

For them, all Tsinghua cadres, 100% of them were corrupt because former university party secretary Jiang Nanxiang had set up his successors among the young party cadres. Thus, though the university leaders had already been toppled, the danger from the second and third generation of cadres persisted, even the rebel cadres.

In order to overthrow the past rule completely, Jinggangshan refused to give any power to the former cadres and insistently denounced anyone who had held power on campus since 1949.

Okay, so let’s do a little recap from last episode. The 100 day war, as it became known, at Tsinghua University campus began on April 24th.

Um, Kuai Dafu’s Jinggangshan red guards launched a preemptive attack on a building held by the 414 faction which was repelled by rocks and spears. In retaliation, the 414 ransacked the campus housing for faculty and staff, ferreting out any professor, administrator, or even lowly maintenance person who pledged loyalty to Jinggangshan. Jinggangshan returned the favor by attacking any faculty and staff possibly aligned with the 414.

Some faculty were beaten and thrown out of their apartment windows on to their death. Others committed suicide upon hearing the sound of the approaching mob kicking down the doors of apartment buildings.

On April 27th, the Qinghua campus was carved up into two zones held by the opposing factions. Just like at BeiDa, trenches were dug, sandbags were laid down, barbed wire was thrown about, windows and occupied buildings were fortified, and the Jinggangshan and 414s picked up their knives, clubs, spears, revolvers, and even some AK-47s, type 67 heavy machine guns, type 53 sniper rifles, and a couple of rigged up RPG7 rocket launchers.

Blood was drawn in the 100 day war at April 29th when 414 member Xie Jingcheng was killed. It began as a clash over rice from the student dining hall. Just before noon on that day, two truckloads of rice arrived from the city and proceeded towards a campus warehouse to unload.

The 414s, anticipating a protracted struggle with the Jinggangshan, set out in force to seize the trucks and bring the rice back to the science building which they occupied. Unfortunately, the Jinggangshan commanders realized what had happened.

They sent troops to seize the trucks, but they were driven off by the 414s, who came, who not only came out of the science building in force, but threw rocks and heavy objects from above. The Jinggangshan forces failed to get the rice, but they did capture two 414s as POWS.

Unfortunately, one of the trucks had run over Xie Jingcheng and crushed his skull. A few days later, the Qinghua 414s carried the corpse of Xie Jingcheng through the Tiananmen Square in a protest against the Jinggangshan group.

Meanwhile, Kuai Dafu left the campus in case the fighting backfired if the 414s won. And in case the central committee decided to blame Jinggangshan for everything, Kuai decided if I’m not there, I can’t be held responsible for events that occur in my absence. Though I’m in the clear, which uh I don’t know. I think uh that’s what you call a not cool move leaving you homies hanging like that.

A People’s Liberation Army propaganda team made up of Navy men arrived on campus at one point uh, upon hearing that a violent fight had broken out, and the team members rushed to the scene and try to dissuade the Jinggangshan regiment red guards from continuing. But unfortunately, they too were chased off the campus with knives and handguns.

The next battle took place in the pre-dawn hours of May 2nd when the Jinggangshan launched a surprise attack on the 414s who were holding the civil engineering building. But they too found themselves beaten back, but not without capturing a few more POWS which they held hostage.

Fist fights, knife fights, and other scuffles continued across the next two weeks. Although there was a lull on in the fighting on May 16th when there was a prisoner exchange. However, 10 days later, another 414 member was killed during a skirmish on campus, which led to yet another funeral parade through Tiananmen Square.

The fourth and final battle with what you might call cold weapons, aka knives, rocks, bottles, things that uh were not firearms, took place on May 30th. Again, it was the Jinggangshan that took the offensive. This time against the Bath House in the northeast sector of the campus, which was still held by the 414s, even though the Jinggangshan Red Guards had for some time held the old dining hall adjacent to it.

What Kuai had planned for May 30th, 1968 was not just an attack on the Bath House, but a general offensive that would finish off the 414s and leave the campus entirely within his hands. He hoped that by attacking the bath house with a small unit that the Jinggangshan would draw the 414’s main forces into a rescue attempt. Then the Jinggangshan units would then leap from hiding along the road and decisively kill the 414s who they outnumbered almost 2 to1 in that part of campus.

This plan however did not work. The alerted 414s discovered the Jinggangshan ambush in time and refused to walk into the trap. The fighting at the bath house itself also went awry when the 414 saw an opening. They pushed forward with a tank. Yes, a tank. Well, it wasn’t an actual tank. What it was was it was a tractor which they had put a bunch of armor on and a gun on it. It was made of a tractor welded over with steel plates.

Anyways, they started piling toward, you know, they started hauling ass towards the Jinggangshan fighters and one of the uh Jinggangshan regiment fighters got killed. Uh several Jinggangshan fighters took advantage of the pause to rush forward and they set the tank on fire with Molotov cocktails. So dang dang. Well, this was the last straw for the few remaining uh non-rebels on the campus.

The bloody battle I’ll just read from William Hinton’s 100 day war this part.

“The bloody battle of the bath house made no sense at all to any but the hardcore leaders of the two or factions. Uncommitted people who watched from the sidelines became angry and embittered, but they could find no way to stop the slaughter. The next day, most people left the campus with their bed rolls on their backs. Tsinghua, they said, was no longer safe for anyone. Students, staff, family members alike began a general retreat, leaving a shrinking core of activists, quote unquote, ‘to fight it out.’"

Uh, those who remain in the family quarters established their own self-defense units. They didn’t care what faction the student belonged to. They wouldn’t let any partisan into the residential area. And I think it’s important right now to point out that William Hinton points out in the book that quote

“Most students, staff, and lesser cadres at Tsinghua joined neither side of the struggle. Only a minority were consistently active. The bulk of the campus student population of 40,000 tended to be drawn in during the high tides of the movement only to fall into apathy or neutrality as the tides end. Towards the end when factionalism developed to the point of armed struggle only a few hundred people actually took part.”

Indeed what my other sources show that by the end of May, the vast majority of not just student teachers and staff but the vast majority of red guards from both factions just straight up packed up and left cuz they realized that this fighting was well just fucking stupid.

For as chairman Mao said, quote, “Factionalism shields counterrevolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries make use of factionalism.”

By June 16th, Qinghua University was using guns. Yes, Jinggangshan riflemen guarded the entrance to the campuses and snipers watched over the buildings controlled by 414 factions.

Some experimented with several small cannons and RPG7 rockets, but they had se uh one example is that they had such a fierce recoil that one flew into the campus creek when fired and was never recovered.

It’s kind of funny what they actually mention is so few were killed. This is what the 100 day war by Hinton says.

“So few were killed that it could only have been due to luck. For once the violent fighting began, neither say gave quarter.”

And I talked to um I talked to an old comrade who served in the military at the time. You guys might remember him uh from an earlier episode, Uncle G. Bing. He said that a lot of the reason that at the 100 day war there weren’t very many casualties is most of these kids didn’t know how to use these weapons.

Um they might have had some basic uh military drill training that you know for national defense or they might have been in militia for small periods of time. But overall, a lot of these kids didn’t even know how to load a gun, much less know how to uh steady up and fire an RPG7 rocket.

So, that’s the reason why the Tsinghua 100 Day War didn’t have like hundreds of, you know, hundreds of deaths.

At one point in late June, the Jinggangshan’s efforts to enforce their siege resulted in yet another death when a second tank made by the 414s tried to run vegetables through the blockades of the science building for food. An armor-piercing shell that had been seized in South China from a shipment of supplies bound for Vietnam penetrated the tank’s armor plate and killed the crew.

So, it was pretty bad, y’all. It was pretty bad. And it’s it’s really sad because it’s kind of one of those things that you really definitely see that both sides, the vast majority of them had good intentions.

As one of the Tsinghua 414 said, “With regard to the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao had made it clear over and over that violent fighting was not correct, but we reasoned that this prohibition applied only to issues between factions of the people. Anything could be done to the class enemy and to us we were fighting class enemies.”

Well, as we will see next month, Mao will have a lot and I mean a lot to say about that when he finally pulls the plug on the Red Guard movement once and for all.

Now, to say that nothing good was going on during the months of May and June would be wrong, though. As I always say, as I always say, at the end of the day, the cultural revolution was more positive than negative.

Uh, along with the Shaanxi Revolutionary Committee being founded, a lot of stuff was going on. Um, on May 7th, the Heilongjiang Revolutionary Committee opened a school named after Mao’s May 7th directive, which allowed for rightist cadres to transform themselves via farm labor. And this would be the beginning of what we call the May 7th cadre schools. And uh we’ll get into that a little more in the next few episodes.

Uh I actually have an old comrade who was at the Yan’an May 7th Cadre School. Uh I’d love to get him on, but he’s a little he he said that he he he just doesn’t have time. He just doesn’t have time most of the time. Uh we’ll see though. We’ll see.

On May 8th, Mao and Lin Biao made an appearance in the great hall of the people for cadres and soldiers who were attending Mao Zedong Thought study classes and tried to transform their thinking away from factionalism and to yah uniting around an actual anti-revisionist Marxist politics.

On May 10th, the Liaoning Revolutionary Committee, headed by Regional Military Chief Chen Xilian, was inaugurated before 600,000 people in Shenyang. And of course on May 16th, the People’s Daily and Liberation Army Daily celebrated the anniversary of the May 16th circular which had launched the Cultural Revolution.

A few days later, Mao and Lin Biao and other top leaders appeared at a reception of 20,000 delegates from various revolutionary committees and cheered on the hopes that the revolutionary committees would be able to finally be fully consolidated by the end of the year.

And then I think one of the most interesting things was during the last two weeks of May. So my leftist listeners will know that in May of 68, Western Europe, particularly France, had blown up into a series of workers’ strikes and student strikes. Uprisings seemed to be spreading like wildfire around France, West Germany, and Italy.

And a lot of people were very optimistic about the uh potential and opportunities that May of 68 had. And you know it’s interesting because this was the time where you start seeing a lot of students. Now this had been going on for about a year or so year and a half in other countries but in France and other parts of Western Europe this is where you start seeing a lot of kids experimenting with Maoism. a lot of kids, a lot of students, a lot of young workers start checking out what Mao had to say.

And you really do in May of 68, you see uh students from the Sorbonne and other universities in France uh marching with Chairman Mao’s picture with little red books wearing Mao badges. And let me tell you, the Chinese, they loved it. They loved it.

Half a million Beijing workers and students put aside their differences on May 21st to support the revolutionary struggle in France. And across that week, millions of people in the provincial capitals, including here in Xi’an, took part in demonstrations and rallies supporting the struggle in France.

Indeed, the People’s Daily put out an editorial plotting the great storm of protest and said that this is evidence that there was no paradise left for imperialism.

So even amongst the squabbling and the breakdown of into factionalism that was now characterizing the cultural revolution, the tenacious - it’s like I said in the last chronological episode with the um the demonstrations in support of the um civil rights movement in the US, the tenacious and uncompromising proletarian internationalism and support for national liberation struggles and socialist struggles around the world.

You know, they never sacrificed that. They, most red guards never lost sight of the fact that they believed that the cultural revolution had to be a global revolutionary process.

On May 31st, after particularly fraught negotiations and widespread factional violence that had resulted in the deaths of thousands, a revolutionary committee to run Sichuan had finally been established and a ceasefire was called provincial wide.

Unfortunately, the new leader of Sichuan, the chairman of their provincial revolutionary committee was Zhang Guohua, who if you guys remember was the Han nationalist general that had ruled Tibet for so long. So, you win some, you lose some.

But on that day, he told a crowd of 500,000 that the establishment of the revolutionary committee was not the end of class struggle, but a start of new battles. The good thing is that the rest of the standing committee for the revolutionary committee was all rebels and rebel cadres. So at least they had that.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, outside of Tsinghua, Nie Yuanzi had claimed that 1,200 Beijing University Jinggangshan Red Guard members, cuz remember that was different from the Qinghua Jinggangshan Red Guard members. They defected to her new BeiDa commune red guards and were undergoing thought reform.

And it seemed like during the last weeks of June that the factional fighting at BeiDa, which hadn’t gotten as violent as Qinghua, which but it was still pretty bad. It was still pretty bad. It looked like things were going to be able to uh be smoothed over a lot more quickly.

In Harbin, over 100,000 people paraded with a large assortment of oversized Mao portraits and a huge model of the character for loyalty on June 21st, and the Harbin radio called for more members of mass organizations to be part of the leadership of Heilongjiang, training them to help govern.

So, you know, this is really interesting. In Heilongjiang, the revolutionary committee was very much about bringing the masses in to more direct democratic rule. And there was a lot of interesting experimentation with new forms of democracy in Heilongjiang.

Uh, I really I’d love to go up to Harbin and, you know, take a look at those archives and talk to some people up there and really see, you know, what was going on there cuz, you know, there was the Shanghai commune and but there was also the Harbin commune if you guys remember in episode 8. So, it would be interesting to look at that.

On June 30th, Mao received members of the Central Cultural Revolution group to Zhongnanhai and held a lecture there. There he did say something interesting. He said, “Remember that everyone makes mistakes, even you and even me.”

And he even said that he believed that Deng Xiaoping was not a traitor, just someone who had made terrible errors and needed to be won back over to the revolutionary line.

Later that day, um 20,000 soldiers and cadres undergoing Mao Zedong Thought study classes for thought reform were waved at Mao and Lin Biao and Lin Biao declared that many of those who had been forced to attend Mao Zedong study classes had been rehabilitated and there was no need to purge them or struggle against them. So that’s where we stop.

So you know I’ll just uh throw out some ideas some offer some very peaceful analysis. I’ll save a lot of my analysis about this about the events of this episode for our August episode when we deal with the fallout of the 100 day war.

It is really sad about how you know the mass movements that had brought such interesting and dynamic changes to China had you know come down to this. But as I have shown you guys, at the end of the day, outside of the student factionalism, a lot of good stuff was still happening.

There was still internationalism. There were still reforms going on at the top. People were being rehabilitated rather than being killed in struggle sessions in many places. Yes, a lot of people were dying in struggle sessions, but a lot of people were just given the chance to rehabilitate through Mao Zedong’s thought study classes. So, you know, it’s one of those you’ll win some, you’ll lose some. I have a lot of thoughts, but I kind of want to save that for our more substantial and meaty next episode.

All right, y’all. Well, hey, I have to bounce. It’s 11:13 a.m. here in Xi’an. I need to start um chopping up the veggies and uh heating up the chicken for lunch with the misses. Uh hope you guys have a great rest of the summer. Please stay cool and have some good travels. work hard, play hard, and uh get ready for the episode at the end of August when we get deep into the cultural revolution’s darkest hour and the end of the red guard movement.

But until then, be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

Sources for today’s episode include

The 100 Day War: Cultural Revolution at Qinghua University by William Hinton.

Passion, Reflection, and Survival: Political Choices of Red Guards at Qinghua University 66-68 by Zheng Xiaowei.

Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G Walder.

The World Turned Upside Down, A History of the Cultural Revolution by Yang Jisheng.

Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhal.

Turbulent Decade, A History of the Cultural Revolution by Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao.

A Historical Dictionary of the Cultural Revolution by Guo Jian, Yongyi Song, and Yuan Zhou .

Not a Dinner Party, China’s Cultural Revolution 1966 to 1969 by Michael Schoenhals.

Collective Killings in Rural China During the Cultural Revolution by Su Yang.

The Shaanxi Provincial Archives and

the Marxist Internet Archives Peking Review Archive.

All right, guys. Have a great day.