Da jia hao tongzhimen, and welcome back once again to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast, with your host Drew Smith, once again broadcasting from the ancient city of Xi’an, once the Han and Tong capital of Chang’an. Um, it’s great to be back, as always. I know that we took a little break, I was busy, and our editor was busy, so, you know, we were all busy. Summer now is in full swing here, and we have finally finished with the semester at the university.

My students did really well, I’d say. They’re very smart young comrades and all that, but I could definitely tell they were all ready for this semester to be over. Definitely. And the seniors all had severe senioritis, because it’s spring semester, so they were all getting ready to graduate. But I’m so proud of them, man. They’re cool cats. They’re cool cats.

I’m going to Beijing through the 18th through the 23rd of this month to attend to some personal business, as well as blow off some steam. I’m going to go see some homies. We’re going to go see the wifey’s family, and it’s going to be good. It’s going to be good. I love Beijing. It’s my favorite city in all of China. It’s my favorite city in the world. Beijing, Moscow, Istanbul, Xi’an, and NYC, those are my favorite cities. No, no, no, not NYC. Copenhagen. Yeah, those are my top five favorite cities. Honorable mention to NYC, though.

The only thing is, is that, let me tell you, Beijing is so hot in July, and it’s humid. I dream of the day where I can someday go to Beijing when it’s not summer. But, you know, it’s going to be my sixth time going to Beijing, so that’ll be cool. Um, excuse me, I’ve been—I was working out real hard at the gym today. It’s been, uh, I was working my back and my biceps and triceps, and I’ve really started to kind of lock into my weight loss and bodybuilding.

I kind of let myself go this semester, because I got so locked into some projects, like a grant. There was this big grant application we were trying to push through, and I wrote not one, but two journal articles this semester, and I got them accepted and got them published in the US-China review, and that’s great and all, but I definitely let myself go. Don’t let yourselves go, guys. Always take care of your health, especially if you’re getting up there in years like me. All right, guys, well, enough of the personal updates.

Let’s go on ahead and get into it. So, in episode—in our last episode, episode 28, we left off with the ending of the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party of China, and it was a—we’ll say it was a partial victory for Chairman Mao and the left. If I want to recap, the PLA became inordinately powerful within the party, and, yeah, there was still a lot of unresolved contradictions boiling under the surface.

Even though it seemed like a very happy family reunion, it very much was not. But I would highly recommend, if you haven’t, stop this episode right now and go listen to episode 28. Otherwise, a lot of this episode will not make sense. Well, once the Congress was over, because it ended on April 30th, and then, of course, Mao decided to have a nice big old May Day celebration.

Got to love International Workers’ Day, and he really wanted to use May Day for diplomatic measures. So on May Day, he invited dozens of ambassadors from friendly or neutral countries to attend the International Workers’ Day festivities in Tiananmen Square, where he announced that he was going to be resending a lot of Chinese ambassadors abroad, and he apologized for a lot of the cultural revolution violence against foreign embassies.

And he declared that from May 15th to 17th of August, the People’s Republic of China would begin stationing more and more new ambassadors across 20 countries across the globe, except the Eastern Bloc countries. They would not be getting any new ambassadors. Only Vietnam got a new ambassador.

But the Soviets, East Germans, North Koreans, yeah, there was still absolutely no love. And let me tell you, the Sino-Soviet border conflict was still in full swing, with lots of minor gunfire exchanges being shot, you know, around Zhenbao Island in the month of May. There was still a lot of gunfire between both sides, although no casualties yet. Beijing did also make no overtures to the United States. Zhou Enlai instructed Lei Yang and other diplomats who were leaving for Warsaw.

Lei Yang was going to become the Charge d’Affaires for Warsaw, for the embassy in Poland. And he said, though, quote, “Pay close attention to developments in US policy.” After this meeting, Mao, Lin Biao, and all the ambassadors watched the May Day fireworks, and there were drums, gongs, and flag waving, accompanying, singing, and sloganeering, and it was just a good old-fashioned, nice, and big May Day celebration that you would expect from the cultural revolution era.

In fact, if you guys want to watch the festivities, there is a YouTube channel. Unfortunately, it’s no longer updated, but they keep all their videos up. It’s called Revolutionary Force, and they have lots of old videos from the cultural revolution, and they have footage of the 1969 May Day parade. If you want to check out it, it’s really cool.

I would highly recommend watching it, just to get a taste of what May Day was like in 1969 in China. Then on May 4th, they celebrated the May 4th movement, and People’s Daily and Red Flag marked the 50th anniversary of it and said it shattered the 2000-year-old fetish of Confucianism.

But underneath it, a report of problems in propaganda work was criticizing how the Mao cult they felt had gone too far, with all the loyalty dances and people, like, in the morning, bowing before pictures of chairmen, before the working hours. You know, quotation, what did I say? Quotation competitions where people would just memorize and recite Chairman Mao’s quotations, but without really deeply understanding them.

The report also lists wasteful and political empty practices, like printing Mao quotes on pillows or wine bottles, or how a lot of places - they would just have these big megaphones in village squares that would just play recitations of Mao quotes, like, all hours in the day and night. And they said that was pointless. And also, there was, yet again, more talk of wrapping up the Mao badge industry.

Like I said, last episode, Zhou and Mao said, “Give us back our airplanes. You’re using too much aluminum that could be used for the Sino-Soviet conflict and preparing for possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the United States.” So, yeah, this, unfortunately, it, yeah, the Mao badge thing needed to die down.

As much as I love collecting Mao badges. Also, in mid-May, Zhou Enlai summoned leaders from Inner Mongolia to talk about how the hunt for secret Inner Mongolian People’s Party members and the broader cleansing of the class ranks campaign had gone way too far.

Way too far. And that it was time to stop the needless arrests, imprisonments, and executions. And he decided that he wanted to, he—Zhou called for stabilizing the region and to try to put a stop on the campaign, and basically said that, well, okay, guys, look, there may have been an Inner Mongolian People’s Party that was around, but you guys have probably gotten rid of them. Anything further is just going to be a needless witch hunt full of bloodshed. If you guys want, I would highly recommend going back to episode 21.

I have an entire episode dedicated to Inner Mongolia and what all happened there. It was rough. You know, I always like to say, I always like to say that Tibet and Xinjiang are an example of how to properly handle the national question under socialism, and Inner Mongolia is how not to handle the national question under socialism. It’s—things got pretty bad there. Like, definitely, that was messed up.

Meanwhile, Mao was attending a Politburo meeting on defense. He decided that it was time to freeze recruitment and conscription in the PLA ground forces and extend the Navy, Air, and Rocket Forces. He also called for the Politburo to reestablish the Central Military Committee’s General Office and a much more slimmed-down PLA General Political Department.

Then, on May 29th, 1969, after Mao and Zhou had had their respective meetings about Inner Mongolia and then the army, they convened a meeting with representatives from various departments of the party to trim down inner party bureaucracy.

But the question remained after the Ninth Congress: what to do with the Central Cultural Revolution Group? Was it still necessary now that the mass movements were over?

And while the CCRG was not outrightly named in the meeting documents, it was certainly on the chopping block in one way or another. And you notice, after May of '69, really after the Ninth Congress, the CCRG begins to slowly slow down its operations, convening gradually less and less and issuing less and less statements across the summer and early fall of '69. But we will get to the end of the CCRG in a little bit.

Some central government ministries and commissions were put almost entirely under military control due to this, including the Railways Ministry, Communications Ministry, Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the Xinhua News Agency, Central People’s Broadcasting, and various defense industry organs. And it’s kind of interesting, because they justified it in a weird way.

The three supports and two militaries operation, which you guys might remember being implemented in March of 1967, when Mao called for the PLA to support the left and the power seizures and to help, like, stabilize things after the January storm, it was re-invoked as justification across summer and autumn of '69, as a pretense to solidify army control across much of the government after the Ninth Congress.

And they basically said, oh, you know, yeah, it seems like the army is taking control of all these ministries, but don’t worry, it’s because we’re supporting the left. Well, you guys be the judge of that. You guys be the judge of that.

This continued until, honestly, this kind of military rule continued on until August of ‘72, when the Central Committee and Central Military Commission jointly issued a document to end the campaign, as well as denounce Lin Biao’s machinations in making this happen. Although, I have to say, Mao and Zhou also, I think, share some of the blame, particularly with the May of 1969 meeting. After that, later that night, on May 29th, after that meeting finished up, Mao left Beijing for Wuhan, and he wanted to take a little vacation. And he gets to Wuhan, and something funny happens. He went to his guest house, and he found that it was completely decorated with quotations and portraits, and there was, like, a set of Mao badges for him. He was so annoyed by this. He instructed the attendants to take it all down and to, you know, all the presents needed to go. He just - he thought it was weird. You know, Mao, he was kind of okay with the cult of personality for a good while, because he thought, hey, you know, it’s a chance for my political line to be popularized among the people. But definitely, at least after April of ‘69, he got really annoyed with it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, on June 5th, 1969, an international meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, which you guys, some of my Communist listeners might remember what they have heard of, and it’s still going on today, the IMCWP, which is like the yearly meeting of the old pro-Soviet, the official Communist Parties of the world and Workers’ Parties. Some social democratic parties take part in it. You guys, if you’ve heard of the IMCWP, you know what I’m talking about. Well, this was the 1969 IMCWP Congress, and it was held in Moscow, but no delegates from China, Albania, North Vietnam, or Korea were present. Brezhnev addressed the meeting, and he immediately launched into an attack on Mao and advocated a “System of Collective Security in Asia.” You guys can gather what that meant. And it lasted until the 17th, when the CPSU, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, asked to put forward a resolution to vote to officially expel the Communist Party of China from the international communist movement. But surprisingly, the motion, you know, failed.

Actually, even some of the Warsaw Pact parties voted against it, feeling that, you know, hey, I think you were, they thought the Soviets were being a little too harsh. So that was interesting. While this was happening, the PRC Central Government State Council agreed to negotiate with the Soviet Union over Zhenbao Island, and they suggested resuming talks on June 18th. Chen Yi’s writing group of marshals began another course of study on international affairs, and they decided that, according to their [probability] conclusions, that actually nuclear war with the Soviet Union was still relatively low, and that negotiations would still be a good idea. They also felt that it was time to maybe talk to the Americans. After that, things got a little ugly on June 10th. At dusk, Soviet and PRC troops clashed in the mountains dividing Kazakhstan from Xinjiang, and a herdswoman named Sun Longzhen was killed in the shooting.

The next day, China issued a formal protest at the Soviet invasion of Xinjiang, but the USSR claimed that the Chinese herdsmen had crossed over into Kazakhstan and had fired on their soldiers. The next day, at a rally in Urumqi, shepherds involved in the clash denounced Soviet hyenas for laying claim to their traditional grazing grounds. So, yes, things, trust me, the Sino-Soviet border split was far from over.

But something interesting happened on June 17th. Back in Washington, American Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield sent a letter to Zhou Enlai, care of Cambodian Prince Sihanouk, sorry for mispronouncing, requesting a personal meeting to break the ice between Beijing and Washington. Zhou declined, citing America’s continuing presence on the island of Taiwan, but agreed with Mao that future talks with the Americans shouldn’t be out of the question, if only because it could put extra pressure on the Soviet revisionists. On June 18th, Soviet and Chinese diplomats met at Khabarovsk to begin negotiations over the Ussuri border river and particularly navigation rights, but again, it ended in a deadlock. Then, on July 20th, several hundred PLA troops seized the disputed Qiliqin Island Island on the Ussuri river, but Soviet forces opened fire and forced their retreat with no casualties. Then, in August, Nixon flew to Bucharest, Romania, to meet with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, with whom he ended up discussing China, and he asked Ceaușescu to forward a note of goodwill to Chairman Mao. Ceaușescu was kind of vague in his reply, just saying, “I will tell your opinion to the Chinese.” And it kind of left it at that. But it’s very interesting, because now Nixon is very, very serious about talking with the Chinese. On August 13th, a Soviet patrol approached PLA border troops and dug in near Tielieketi in Xinjiang. Each side accused the other of violating the border, and they opened fire. Two Soviet BTR-60 troop carriers outflanked the PLA position, and at 9 a.m., an intense firefight broke out, with both sides calling up reinforcements. After an hour of fighting, the PLA forces, mauled by two Soviet helicopters, collapsed, and around 30 Chinese troops and two Russians lay dead. Of course, naturally, there was a huge outrage. The next day, the People’s Daily claimed that in an ugly performance of self-exposure (projection), the USSR had admitted to colluding with US imperialism against China. Urumqi’s top officials told a rally that the Soviets coerced 60,000 people to flee to Xinjiang in 1962 and refused to send them back. Then, the next day, a second day of anti-Soviet protests again. Marchers swore to defend the sacred territory of the Chinese motherland to the last. Flipping back to Washington, on August 14th, Richard Nixon asserted that the US did not intend to join the Soviets against China during a national security meeting, but said that he would monitor the situation closely. Then, on September 9th, Mao, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai sent congratulations to Ho Chi Minh on the 24th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Unfortunately, the next day, Ho Chi Minh, who had been in ill health for some time, died of a heart attack. And this was big because it threw both the Soviets and the Chinese in disarray. They were both, you know, preparing for a potential attack against one or the other, but they had to stop, because they, of course, had to go to the funeral.

So, on September 4th, Zhou Enlai arrived in Hanoi with a delegation to pay respects to Ho Chi Minh and laid a wreath on his coffin. But Zhou returned from Hanoi to Beijing before Ho’s funeral on the 6th, deliberately avoiding Soviet Premier Kosygin and the Soviet delegation. And during the funeral, it’s kind of funny, there were some Chinese delegates there, but they all sat firmly way on the other side of the Soviets. Like, they were giving them the cold shoulder.

But Alexei Kosygin asked his hosts, the Vietnamese, to relay a request to the Chinese for a meeting with their senior leaders. And despite his fears that the Soviets could use the opportunity to launch a nuclear attack, Mao agreed. Zhou Enlai should meet with Alexei Klysygin in Beijing. So, on September 11th, Premier Kosygin flew from Hanoi to Beijing. PLA units surrounded the airport and prepared for an inevitable attack by Soviet special forces.

But everything was calm, and inside Beijing Airport, Zhou Enlai and Kosygin came face to face and discussed the Sino-Soviet border conflict and the wider ideological conflict within the international communist movement. Zhou told Kosygin that China had no desire for war, but if the Soviets struck their nuclear bases, China would fight them to the end. And with that, the meeting ended very tersely.

The next day, the Central Cultural Revolution Group, after being China’s most powerful body since May of 1966 until the 9th Congress, finally shuttered down and declared its dissolution. Then, on the 13th, Zhou reported to Mao in Hangzhou about his meeting with Alexei Kosygin, and Mao simply approved with a simple agreed.

Then, on September 17th, a panel of four marshals of the PLA submitted a report advocating for a strategic approach to Sino-American-Soviet relations, suggesting that China could benefit from playing the American card. Then, on October 1st, National Day, of course, you know, they had to have a big old parade, but this was a very different one.

Yes, it was the 20th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, but from the Tiananmen rostrum, as Beijing Revolutionary Committee Head Xie Fuzhi opened the National Day celebrations in front of a rally of 100,000 people, helicopters were idling around the Tiananmen Gate in case the leadership needed to evacuate, and a PLA special forces cell was stationed on the rostrum, because they thought that maybe the Soviets would nuke the, they would nuke the parade.

After the 21-gun salute and the national anthem, Lin Biao made a speech saluting the revolutionary proletariat and praising Mao’s genius leadership, of course. A huge parade with floats, including a ship on a sea of ribbons and a giant statue of Mao, pulsing with yellow sunbursts, marched through Tiananmen Square. Also, that day was interesting because the first line of the Beijing subway, which connected a suburban barracks to the central Beijing train station, opened to mark National Day. So, you know, Red Line 1 was open on that day.

And I like, personally, I love the Beijing subway. It’s so nice. It gets you everywhere in the goddamn city. It’s fast, it’s always on time, it’s clean. I love the Beijing subway.

Then, in the evening, Mao watched fireworks from the Tiananmen Rose Drum alongside Lin Biao, and then he met with an Algerian government delegation. And Mao and Zhou said something interesting.

The Algerian government asked Mao and Zhou if the Cultural Revolution was finished because of the 9th Congress, and they said it’s winding down but has not completely finished. But, you know, as you can see, things are far from over.

On October 11th, Wu Han, if you guys remember, way back in episode one, the ex-Beijing Vice Mayor whose historical play ‘Hai Rui dismissed from office’, which, you know, was one of the opening shots in the Cultural Revolution, finally died in prison.

On the 13th, Mao, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai and others agreed that the party leadership should vacate Beijing before Soviet diplomats arrived on October 19th to finalize a ceasefire. The next day, Mao and Lin Biao appeared at the Great Hall of the People to a PLA audience who chanted, “Long live Chairman Mao,” and waved the little red book. But Mao and Lin Biao made it clear to still be prepared for war.

Then after the meeting, almost all top leaders were told to leave Beijing for destinations individually chosen by Mao, anticipating a Soviet strike on Beijing. Mao left for Beijing for Wuhan by train. Various other leaders started dispersing across China, but Zhou Enlai and Huang Yongsheng stayed in Beijing to hold down the fort, so to speak.

On the 15th, the Politburo briefly met with Zhou Enlai, and Zhou Enlai conveyed Mao’s view that having the leadership concentrated makes them vulnerable to an atom bomb. Lin Biao and his wife Ye Qun flew to Suzhou on Mao’s orders, but Zhou was the one in charge of the leadership evacuation plan. On the 16th, Chief of Staff Huang Yongsheng set up a command center and readied several PLA corps to defend any anticipated Soviet invasion routes.

The State Council and the CPC General Office secretly moved their staff out of Beijing into 100 underground silos in Beijing’s Western Hill. Zhou Enlai’s military affairs small group and the Central Military Commission relocated to an old Civil War headquarters complex in the Western Hills.

And then the Ministry of Public Security moved prisoners out of potential targets in Beijing’s smaller county jails, and some had their executions expedited.

One of these prisoners that was evacuated from the Central Beijing prison was none other than Liu Shaoqi. He had to be moved from his prison hospital. He was basically paralyzed, unable to speak, but he was stretchered onto a plane, escorted by Central Case Examination Group men, and they sent him to the prison hospital in Kaifeng, which is in Henan Province. I’ve been to Kaifeng. It’s a beautiful city.

Then, on October 18th, Lin Biao called something called his first verbal order, and that basically was a directive that scattered all of the main PLA officer corps across China.

And you think, okay, that’s exactly what they were doing, right? Well, what is interesting is that Lin was basically moving his personal enemies, including a lot of the left wing of the PLA, to other parts of the country, and he wanted to have them stay there permanently so that they would be out of the way. And a lot of people, and this actually comes back to bite Lin in the ass when he, you know, when he has his fall from grace.

When in Wuhan, Wang Dongxing showed Mao, Lin Biao’s first verbal order, and Mao actually became very angry. He threw it into a trash bin and said, “Burn it,” and he lit it with a lighter, and it was just, yeah, he was actually pretty mad. He knew what was going on.

Lin, the next day, learned of Mao’s displeasure with his first order, and he rushed to have it rescinded, but it was too late. They had already mobilized 940,000 troops to do this whole thing. And it’s interesting, while not all PLA officers were treated badly when they were moved from the capital, this is what Frederick Hughes says in his work on Lin Biao.

They were under certain restraints, and some suffered from inadequate medical treatment. The possibility that Lin Biao was to some degree responsible for the harsher aspects of their situation cannot be ruled out. Yet there is an obvious wish on the part here of the marshals, not only to glorify Zhou Enlai, who played a key role in securing the return of some of them to Beijing for medical treatment, but also to resolve Mao of any responsibility.

But whatever the actual responsibility for any hardship suffered, order number one itself is best understood as a response to the Mao-driven Politburo interpretation of the international situation. End quote. So, yeah. And the thing is, is this, you know, this is really where things start to go wrong between Mao and Lin.

On the 19th, Soviet diplomats landed uneventfully in Beijing, and Lin Biao, having followed their progress from takeoff, fearing that it was actually a trick and they were going to nuke Beijing, finally rested.

But while Lin seemed to have averted political disaster, he had really pissed Mao off, and in less than a year’s time, the fracture between Mao and Lin would become even bigger and completely irreparable at the Lushan Conference in September of 1970. And Lin would begin to be gradually exposed for the sycophant and secret capitalist roader that he was.

But we’ll get to that in our next two chronological episodes. So, on October 20th, the Soviet negotiator sat down with the Chinese team led by Qiao Guanhua to discuss the border. And, well, after a day-long meeting, they came to a resolution. They didn’t really resolve the border dispute, but they decided that it really wasn’t worth starting World War III over this. So, they thankfully just called it quits and pulled back their forces from the Ussuri River.

Although, I should make it very clear, I should make it very clear that the threat of war between the Soviets and the Chinese - it was always kind of looming there. It always was looming, and you will still see a lot of saber rattling between the two sides across 1970 through 1976. And even during the early reform and opening up period, there’s some tense situations. But, like I said, we will get into that later.

Okay. So, after the Sino-Soviet border conflict was thankfully diffused before it got really bad, on November 12th, 1969, in a prison hospital in Kaifeng, Liu Shaoqi’s eyes became unresponsive and his lips blue.

And with that, early the next morning, the man who was once meant to succeed Mao, but who had become China’s number one capitalist roader, finally died. The next day, Liu Shaoqi’s bodyguards located Liu’s body that had been dumped into a basement corridor.

They put some clothes on him and cleaned the blood off of his face, because it seems, what I’ve heard is that the nurses and doctors kicked his body around after he had died.

But I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’ve only heard that from one source. Then, on November 14th, before dawn, Liu Shaoqi’s body was taken away in an army jeep with his feet sticking out, and he was secretly cremated under a false name. And his ashes were dumped into a river. So, with that, Liu Shaoqi went into history, for better or for worse.

Honestly, if you’re going to ask me, I’m going to say, for worse. And I’m glad that he did not end up succeeding Mao. But, unfortunately, the fight against the capitalist roaders in the party has just begun. On December 1st, 1969, the Chartered Affairs of the PRC Embassy in Poland invited the US Ambassador Talks back to talking, back to the negotiation table, I should say, which marked a significant step towards improved relations. And with that, it seems that 1969 ended on a peaceful but tense note.

But, my friends, I should say, while it seems that the revolutionary aspect of the Cultural Revolution was done, I would beg to differ. This does not mean there was no more further social and economic transformation at the grassroots or developments in Marxist theory, or that there were absolutely no mass democratic practices on the local level.

You know, it was a slower and steady level, but the Cultural Revolution was still ongoing. One thing I noticed is that I’ve been reading a lot of Old People’s Daily back issues. And, for example, in one PLA propaganda team at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science, the cadres were going through a whole campaign to struggle, criticize, and reform their thinking.

And there was a lot of debate and wrangling around the meaning of Chairman Mao’s theories and how to come to a higher understanding of Marxism to transform the sciences in China. And, yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. It was also a time where you see across the latter half of 1969 was a large-scale debate on how to repudiate the theory of productive forces that continued to spring up within the factories and collective farms.

And the party center greatly approved of this. Communist workers and peasants fought to grasp the essence and forms of revisionism so as to identify it with their own workplaces and within themselves so as to continue the struggle against the regeneration of the bourgeoisie within their ranks, showing that the revolution within the revolution was still continuing in earnest.

Another big thing that came across the latter half of 1969 was the workers’ universities in the factories. Now, the workers’ universities movement started in early autumn of '68 after the Red Garden movement had been disbanded. And the first one was founded in September of '69 in the Shanghai Machine Tools Factory. But it really didn’t start taking off as a nationwide phenomenon until they got the blessing of the party press in July of '69.

After that, hundreds of workers’ universities were set up to be affiliated with state-owned enterprises where employees of these enterprises could learn new technical skills, study Marxist philosophy and revolutionary history, and debate how to run the factory better.

These new kinds of workers’ universities would come to be a major point of revolutionary development and mass struggle and mass criticism across the latter half of the Cultural Revolution. And I’m going to try to maybe dig deeper into them in some of our episodes about the early 1970s.

During the fall and winter of 1969, the People’s Militia began to be reconstituted once again and put more directly under the command of the People’s Liberation Army, with the exception of one place, and this was a very crucial exception, Shanghai.

There, the workers’ general headquarters, which was one of the few rebel groups that was allowed to stay active after August of '68, continued to hold de facto power over the People’s Militia, something that would cause the militia there to have a very different, far more radical leftist line. And this would eventually come to clash, literally, with the party apparatus after Mao’s death.

One thing that I wanted to mention, and this is very interesting, is I was looking through some stuff about Sichuan from some Chinese sources.

And it seems that, according to some press clippings that I found from Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Cultural Revolution database, some battles, some low-level fighting between former rebel groups lasted in rural Sichuan until August of 1969. I thought that was really interesting.

But, you know, there was still a lot of good stuff going on. You know, like I said, there was the workers’ universities, there was that fight against the theory of, that mass campaign against the theory of reproductive forces.

There was a lot of improvements in the economy because now that there was no more disruption by mass rebellions within the workforce, you know, the economy stabilized and got better. Wages went up, supply chains once again were reestablished, and everything kind of just began to stabilize. Shortages lessened and rationing measures were lifted.

There was a lot of advances in the production of medicines such as insulin. There were new advances in fertilizer and agricultural machinery. And just, yeah, the economy in the latter half of 1969 was really good. There was also a lot of expansion of the Barefoot Doctors program. And you see a lot of former Red Guards and former rebel hospital workers that had been demobilized the year before, remobilized to become Barefoot Doctors in the countryside.

And it really revitalized the healthcare system in the Chinese countryside and kind of set the basis for a lot of new hospitals and doctor’s offices and clinics that are still around today. So how about that? How about that? All right, my friends. Well, that is 1969, in the summer of '69. Yes, 1969 is brought to a close.

Next month, we’re going to be doing a really fun thematic episode. We’re going to be doing China and Albania. Yes, by popular demand, I was going to do this last year, but things came up and I kind of had to get busy with other topics and projects at work. But yes, we are going to finally talk about Sino-Albanian relations during the Cultural Revolution. We’re going to have a really great time with that.

I’m really excited. We’re going to have a lot of fun. And then, of course, in September, we will be switching to our chronological episodes will become annual. By that, I mean that we’ll be going year by year. And I mean, I know this sounds like a shock because

I’ve been doing like the every two months or every four to six months.

But honestly, you know, a lot, like not as much happens on a monthly basis across 1970 through 1976. Maybe we’ll split up 1976 a little. We might make that into a two-parter because that gets pretty wild and crazy, the end of the Cultural Revolution.

But 1970, we are going to make January through December of 1970 an entire single episode. But that’s still going to be cool because we’re going to be talking about what the interregnum of sorts of the Cultural Revolution was like and the Lushan Conference of September of 1970, where Mao and Lin have a serious falling out.

All right, my friends. Well, it is now 7:30 and it’s a good time to kick back with a movie and a little snack and cuddle with the cats. And yeah, so I will talk to you guys later.

And let me just say, once again, from the ancient city of Xi’an, I say, zaijián! Today’s episode’s sources were

Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution by Yang Jiaqi and Gao Gao.

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

The Tragedy of Lin Biao: Riding the Tiger during the Cultural Revolution by Frederick Hughes.

Proletarian Power Shanghai During the Cultural Revolution by Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun.

The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Gao Mobo.

The Unknown Cultural Revolution by Han Dongping.

The Sino-Soviet Border War of 1969, Volume 2, by Dmitry S. Rabushkin.

The Marxist Internet Archives Peking Review Archives, the People’s Daily Archives, Shaanxi Provincial Archives, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Cultural Revolution Database, and

Restoring Chaos to History: Sino-American Relations in 1969 by Lorenz M. Lüthi in the China Quarterly. All right, guys, have a great day.