Not Zero-Sum: Perspective of an Ordinary Chinese American
In the era of Trump/Putin/Xi, an ordinary Chinese American's hope for solidarity (Chapter Three)
(Source: Fulton County Jail; YouTube “Chinese Backstreet Boys — That Way” screenshot; Wikimedia Commons)
← Chapter Two: Almost Friends - WWII
Chapter 3: We Are All Minorities - The Cultural Revolution
My earliest memories trace back to just over a decade after the Cultural Revolution had ended. By then, the more visible signs of an entire society in upheaval had largely disappeared, a testament to both Deng Xiaoping’s leadership and the resilience of the Chinese people. However, the clean slate was also deliberate. The Cultural Revolution was the elephant in the room that no one spoke about, systematically excluded from books, music, and any other records. It was as if that whole chapter of history had been buried deep beneath the earth with shovels—courtesy of the Chinese government. Yet, half a century later, interest in the Culture Revolution seems to have taken root. The stories continue to sprout, timely, as China shifts direction again under Xi Jinping.
Growing up, I caught bits and pieces of the notorious events through whispers of the underground. Over time, I learned the impact the Culture Revolution had on both my mom and dad’s families. My parents also shared anecdotes of their time in xiang-xia, the Chinese countryside: my dad recounted his hardships while my mom spoke of a simple life surrounded by all sorts of farm animals. I think their worldviews had been greatly influenced by their respective experiences during that tumultuous period. Despite persistent propaganda, my dad never held much reverence for Mao, in what was one of the first misalignments from my Chinese textbooks—the discrepancy between official narratives and personal truths.
If unearthing that those in power covered up mistakes represented a loss of innocence during my youth, then it became a perplexing question of how the Cultural Revolution could have happened in the first place when I got older. Unexpectedly, firsthand insights came in the aftermath of Jan 6th, as I witnessed the untroubled shift from victims to accomplices by most Republican representatives. With their heart set on majority power, these men of circumstances seemed to have grown dangerously indifferent to the distinction between politics-as-usual and rotting that had reached the core of American society.
In the wake of the Communists’ stunning civil war victory, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party, achieved god-like status in China. Sporting a slicked-back hairstyle that revealed a high forehead, Mao seemed to exude self-importance. His revolutionary thoughts—later branded Maoism—captured the hearts and minds of millions of common people and soldiers alike. His every utterance became gospel, bounded into the Little Red Book, an ever-present companion for the masses. However, while Maoism had served as the spiritual backbone that sustained the Communists in battles, it soon became apparent to government leaders other than Mao that those same ideologies were impractical and failing in actual implementation.
Under Mao’s rule, the decade post civil war saw several anti-rightists campaigns, bloody purges aimed at landlords, merchants, intellectuals, and just about anyone not fully onboard with communism. As the Communist Party tightened its totalitarian grip, policies shifted rapidly toward collectivization, or state-controlled production and redistribution, culminating in Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward program in 1958.
Anxious to display their enthusiasm and fearful of being labeled rightists, local officials competed to inflate crop yields and claim non-existent surpluses, which were then forcibly collected, leaving millions of farmers to starve. The Great Famine that followed, with death toll estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, stands as potentially the worst famine in human history.
As a result of the economic woes, Mao lost esteem among his colleagues. However, Mao’s standing among the people remained high due to party propagandas spinning his involvements. Mao’s influence over the people was so deep that the other party leaders felt obliged to uphold his status or risk losing party status. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, the next generation of leaders expected to succeed Mao and Zhou Enlai, sought to remove Mao from actual power as China’s head of state but maintain his ceremonial role as Chairman of the Party. However, feeling insecure about his twilight years as well as his legacy, Mao had other ideas, and he was going to leverage the revolutionary fervor of the people one more time.
In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Claiming that “representatives of the bourgeoisie” and “counter-revolutionary revisionists” had infiltrated party leadership, he incited students to mobilize and rebel against entrenched establishment. Schools were suspended nationwide, a hiatus that would last an entire decade for some. The older students formed radical groups known as the Red Guards.
Brandishing red armbands, the youth sought out their targets, unleashing adolescent terror on teachers, administrators, party members, and each other—a real-life reenactment of Lord of the Flies. With Mao backing the tumult, police and military were instructed not to interfere with student activities regardless of legality or criminality.
While the Cultural Revolution was really aimed at elite politics—Liu and Deng, among others, were imprisoned and replaced with Mao’s allies—the movement soon engulfed all levels of society. Any person with any status became a potential target for bourgeois and anti-revolutionary suspicion, and suspicion was as good as conviction in most cases.
The accused were tried at struggle sessions—shaming hearings reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials. Bent over on makeshift stages, the public enemies were forced to extend their arms behind their backs in a posture known as the jet-plane. Condemnatory posters dangled from their necks, as they faced uninhibited abuses from the mob-like crowd. The audience typically consisted of students, friends, co-workers, and others who had gathered to witness the spectacle. As they shouted, threw things, and physically assaulted their victims, growing more and more frenzied over time and progressively bringing out the worst in each other, most of the audience felt righteous, channeling frustrations from their own lives after years of failed government policies, and were ignorant—until they became the ones kneeling in the front.
For the accused, it was a maddening experience pitting survival instincts against principles. They were expected to “confess” evidence to their own crimes, self-criticize, and for bonus points “expose” others (the closer the relationship the higher the bonus) who had also committed anti-revolutionary crimes. How their performances were received often determined their immediate fates. Sometimes there were beatings, and sometimes the accused were beaten to death. The more principled victims often did not survive.
From 1966 to 1976, millions of families across China experienced violence, imprisonment, and death—including my own. On my father’s side, my great-grandpa had his business (a hospital) and house confiscated, literally becoming homeless overnight. One of his sons was thrown into jail and later committed suicide. Another daughter hung herself. Other relatives would not take him in for fear of implications. These things happened despite the fact my great grandpa had risked his life hiding injured Communist soldiers and donated large sums of money to the Communist cause during WWII.
On my mother’s side, my grandfather was tied up and paraded through several struggle sessions. He was fortunate that some of his students were courageous enough to defend him, likely risking their own lives. He was also fortunate that his superior had committed suicide jumping off a balcony, sobering the zeal of other students. And my grandfather had fought for the Communist cause when he was still a teenager.
For ten long years, the people lived under the constant weight of mutual surveillance. The fear of being targeted kept everyone perpetually guarded, hiding behind masks that never came off, evolving from precautions to habits to character, sunken into the soul. The oppressed environment drove “people endlessly trying to prove their allegiance to the Chairman”—similar to North Koreans’ adulation for Kim Jung Un today. While it may have seemed comical to the outside world, it was perhaps necessary on the inside, where the smallest liberty misconstrued, the slightest misunderstanding unattended, or the tiniest achievement begrudged could turn catastrophic. The brightest people turned inward, striving to contain their glow, struggling to preserve sanity.
Meanwhile, China’s sputtering economy faltered further. Xenophobia led to discontinuations of key foreign imports, students frequently disrupted factory productions, and talent shortage affected just about every industry as engineers, doctors, scientists, and managers were often the targets of the revolutionary struggles, exacerbated by the closing of schools that stemmed the flow of new talent. The combined effects resulted in double-digit percentage declines in industrial productions during the most fanatical years.
As the people and the economy suffered, the only beneficiaries from the chaos were Mao and his sycophants (although none of Mao’s opportunistic allies would lead good consequences in the long-run). Within the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, critics of Mao were wiped out. Liu Shaoqi, who had been acknowledged as Mao’s successor in 1961, died in labor camp in 1969 after he was denied medical treatment. Deng Xiaoping, who would later emerge as China’s transformational leader, narrowly survived the purges, owing in part to the protection afforded by Zhou Enlai. As Mao’s longtime #2 during WWII and the Chinese Civil War, Zhou navigated the treacherous political landscape with pragma, faithfully executing Mao’s radical agendas while discreetly shielding figures like Deng.
Having cleansed his peers, Mao turned his attention to the younger generation. Declaring that “privileged” urban youth needed to learn the value of manual labor, Mao launched the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” campaign in 1968. My parents were among the 17 million youths compelled to trade city life for rural farms, where they would be re-educated by peasants, often in the form of crushing labor compounded by malnutrition and harsh living conditions. In parallel with re-education, traditional Chinese literature, along with all Western works, were banned and destroyed to eradicate their “evil influences” on society.
Xi Jinping, the current leader of China, came of age during this period marked by personal and family struggle. Xi’s father, then a senior leader in the Communist Party, had been politically purged, and one of Xi’s sisters succumbed to relentless persecution. Forced to publicly denounce his father, Xi was sent to a remote village where “the intensity of the labor shocked [him].” After initially running away from the hardship, Xi eventually hit a turning point, and he began to embrace his circumstances. The experience of overcoming adversities would lay the groundwork for Xi’s ascent to China’s highest office.
Despite my disagreements with many of his policies, I found Xi’s discipline and deft touch in interpersonal relations impressive. Former Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, said as much in his book The Avoidable War, and President Obama had also noted Xi’s swift consolidation of power back in 2014. Yet, as Xi pursues an authoritarian vision for China, I cannot help but wonder whether the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution had not robbed him of his idealism.
When Mao died in 1976, the Cultural Revolution finally came to an end. The movement had begun to weaken in the last few years when Mao and his allies’ in-fightings spilled into public view, shedding light on its true purpose. Over the years, as more and more perpetrators joined the camp of victims, the critical mass of public opinion gradually shifted. While four of Mao’s top lieutenants, known as the Gang of Four, attempted to continue the movement, they did not hold the same sway with the people. Instead, the Gang of Four was arrested by the military, and Deng Xiaoping returned to power, rising from prison to take on the Herculean task of turning China around.
It’s difficult to assess the overall impact of the Cultural Revolution and its residue effects 50 years later. Unlike other unfortunate events in history that might be quantified through the count of lives lost or the dollar worth of property damaged, the Cultural Revolution depraved the very soul of society—a total perversion of its values, traditions, and justice. The leader intentionally misled his followers and encouraged the people to attack one another for his own political gains, causing traumatic experiences for millions of households and severing the bonds among friends, co-workers, and even relatives. For a generation of young adults, the Cultural Revolution took away their idealism and replaced it with manual labor in the countryside—their faith in a boundless world shaken. It’s ironic that Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution in an effort to secure his place in Chinese history, but it instead became the singular episode that tarnished his legacy the most. However, while Mao was the main culprit, his supporters—people who knowingly perpetrated injustice when they were in the camp of the majority and their own interests were not harmed, many who ultimately became victims themselves—were also complicit.
While the chaos of the Cultural Revolution may seem as irrelevant as contemporary North Korea, there are more similarities to conditions in the US than we might expect as a result of the 2016 election—the coarsening of society, the divide between people, the perversion of truth, the political party beholden to its leader, the excessive egocentricity of the political leader, the instigation of violence…
These developments tested American foundations—I drew hope from the courageous individuals who, irrespective of political leanings, stood firm for their beliefs, valiantly resisting the rising current of self-interest over principles. However, what concerned me was the lack of consequences (thus far) on the attempts to intimidate these guardians and dislodge America’s checks and balances. It opens the door to future attacks and reframes our mindset on what is considered acceptable behavior. Already, I see signs of deterioration seeping through: a sharp increase in hate crimes, an intrusion on the Capitol where we all lost something, and voting laws intended to restrict democratic turnouts—similar in concept to censorship in China—have been passed in 18 states and counting.
The voting laws, to me, epitomize the tribalism mindset—the us vs. them mentality—that haunts American politics today and leads to inevitable declines tomorrow. It’s effectively today’s majority saying instead of using power to do good for everyone, I’m going to use it to ensure I stay in power, marginalizing those who didn’t vote for me, and violating their fundamental right in a democratic society. If I manage to stay in the majority, then I can perpetuate the status quo where the rules are bent in our favor, and the minority has no avenue to effect change and bring justice.
It seems like a good deal for the majority, though obviously not the professed ideals of democracy, except there’s a catch—the truth is we are all minorities. Whether you are white, black, hispanic, asian, gay, straight, young, old, rich, poor, tall, short, chubby, skinny—whether you are dinning at a restaurant, watching movie at a theater, or vacationing at a scenic spot—we are all minorities in some shape, form, or circumstance, vulnerable to others’ actions and discretions. Unless we each make the choice to exercise power with empathy, mercy, and humanity, we are all susceptible to its apathy, ruthlessness, and cruelty. And if we only take turns abusing power, unleashing our inner madness, then where we end up is a majority of simultaneous perpetrators and victims—like the survivors of the Cultural Revolution.
For my second semester in the United States, my family moved to an intermediate school district that was half white and half Mexican in the urban Houston area. Being new and different, and not speaking English very well, I became an occasional target of a group of Mexican kids. One day, while being made fun of and having been taught to always stand up for myself, I combined the few English words I knew and shouted: “Mexicans are all bitches.” In my animated state, I had missed that Steven, another Mexican kid whom I respected and had always treated me with kindness, had just come into hearing range. The other kids immediately turned to him and prompted “Did you hear what Jerry just said?”
Steven paused, looked me in the eye, saw my anguish, looked at the other kids, and said: “Yeah Mexico is full of great beaches, so what?”
In that moment, I felt both shame and gratitude, and I understood then that there was always a choice, and that Steven had chosen the better path.
Aftermath
In one of his first acts as the leader of China, Deng Xiaoping reopened schools and reinstated the university entrance exam, repaving the path for millions of young adults to attain higher education. Having secured China’s future, Deng turned his attention to restoring the economy and society at large. The previous two decades of disorder had left the people disenchanted with communism, and they welcomed the shift from ideology to pragma that characterized Deng’s leadership. Regarding China’s economic system, Deng once said: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat.” With that remark, Deng unlocked the door on economic reforms that would take China from planned market to free market, transitioning from communism toward capitalism, or socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Politically, Deng was merciful to his opponents. Despite his own sufferings during the Cultural Revolution—his eldest son became paraplegic when he was thrown out the window of a four-story building—Deng sought no personal vendetta. Instead, he focused his energy on righting the ship.
And so it was under Deng’s steady guidance that stability gradually returned to China. For the first time since the beginning of the 19th century, a few decades prior to the Opium Wars, it felt like China was on the right trajectory, with a sustained runway for improved prosperity. The timing couldn’t have been better. China’s revival coincided with globalization, and the two symbiotic catalysts inter-looped in a virtuous cycle that would lift the world economy to new heights.
*I wrote this chapter in early 2022, when Xi had removed presidential term-limits but not yet secured a third term.
Chapter Four: “The World is Flat” →
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Chapter Three End Notes + 2025 Commentaries:
For the sketch of the Cultural Revolution, I didn’t rely on a single main source, but rather pieced the information from various different sources, including firsthand stories from my parents and grandparents—some that I had heard as a kid, and some that evolved over the years.
For a more in-depth view, I recommend the book Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret. It not only features authentic stories from his Chinese classmates on life during the Cultural Revolution, but also does an excellent job painting China’s transition under Deng Xiaoping, a setting that I found intimately familiar (Pomfret attended Nanjing University just a few years before I was born).
The New Yorker’s article “Born Red”, an insightful profile of Xi by Evan Osnos, guided the paragraph on Xi’s struggle during the Cultural Revolution. Australia ex-Prime Minister’s characterization of Xi can be found in his book The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China, as noted. Obama’s characterization of Xi can be found in multiple news articles, including the one from Reuter by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland (https://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/04/us-usa-china-obama-idUSKCN0JH21420141204/).
Further exploration: book - Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China by John Pomfret, TV show - the first episode of Netflix’s Three-Body Problem, movie - Farewell My Concubine
2025 Commentaries:
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the wheels of history has been churning hard—whether it’s the potential for widespread corruption and international isolation that led to China’s demise during the Opium Wars era, or 20-year-olds’ as executors of government mandates that drew eerie parallels to the Cultural Revolution in China and Fascism in Germany. While I normally believe it would be good for younger generations to have greater influence on the path we take toward the future, early 20 seems a bit too young, nor do I have faith in the current administration to provide good guidance.
Since the inauguration, there has been a general sense of falling; I think we recognize the slippage, but haven’t gathered enough will to stop it. Some people who voted for Trump and lost their jobs as federal workers are waking up to the fact that they are minorities too. Some other people have begun peaceful protests seeking to translate recognition into action. They face a similar challenge as universal solidarity across national borders—how do we make our presence felt?
Being Asian-American and living outside of California is rough especially as someone who also has to deal with identity issues as you have alluded to in the articles so far. Trump being elected again by the majority of American swing state voters is going to accelerate America’s decline, which is also good for China regardless of opinions about that country. Just also be careful about Trump finding an excuse to send Asian-Americans to internment camps in case things escalate with China. After all you’re all the same to him and ICE.