How Mao’s Cultural Revolution Made War On The Private Mind

The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

When Jung Chang went on her first house raid as a member of Mao Zedong’s Red Guard, she was not prepared to see a middle-aged, disheveled, half-naked woman kneeling in a dimly lit ransacked room, shrieking “Red Guard masters! I do not have a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek! I swear I do not!”

The victim’s back was filled with bloody cuts from beating, and she banged her head so hard on the floor that blood oozed from her forehead. Jung further reported: “When she lifted her bottom in a kowtow, murky patches were visible and the smell of excrement filled the air.”

Jung feebly asked the woman’s torturer why they were using “violent struggle” instead of the “verbal struggle” Chairman Mao was said to prescribe. Others in the room agreed with her, but the tormentor immediately shut them down as potential class enemies: “Mercy to the enemy is cruelty to the people! If you are afraid of blood, don’t be Red Guards!”

The “struggle session” is a feature of totalitarianism widely practiced during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976.) It is a public exercise in ritual humiliation that serves to break down a person’s sense of self. Struggle sessions are intended to enforce compliance in a person’s thought processes as well as in speech and are therefore a weapon in the war against independent thought. They typically involve forced confessions, mob persecution, and violence. The Red Guards were Mao’s shock troops to enforce purity of thought and rid society of class enemies.

Mao was a founding member of the Chinese communist party in 1921. From then until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he played all the roles that led to his rise through the ranks: local party agitator, insurrection leader at the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927, founding member of the Red Army, and guerrilla fighter and strategist. By 1934, while he led the 5,600-mile “Long March” to escape and regroup after being outmaneuvered by Kuomintang forces during the Chinese Civil War, Mao was chosen to lead both the Party and the Red Army. His fortitude during the march became legendary.

Like so many totalitarian leaders before and after him, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party diligently cultivated a cult of personality around him. During the 1930s, the world communist movement hailed Mao as a “standard bearer of the movement.” Portraits of him were everywhere in China by his conquest in 1949. By the time he mobilized millions of young Red Guards in 1966, he was a virtual god.

Perhaps the utopian vision of the Chinese Communist revolution can be best described as a utopia of “pure Maoist thought.” It culminated in the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations. His sayings were committed to memory throughout society the way Bible verses might be

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