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ABSTRACT
This article examines Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) from a macro historical perspective by showing its effect on what the author terms "the iron triangle"-China's long-lasting rigid triangular system of bureaucratic, ideological and military control under the aegis of the emperor. The author concludes by showing that the current effort of saving the Chinese Communist Party by Xi Jinping is in essence a cultural revolution in the making.
Keywords: Cultural Revolution, iron triangle, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping
Chairman Mao occasionally encouraged his comrades with the dictum that "out of bad things could come good things." It was his version of the possibility of learning from one's mistakes. The most prominent example of the soundness of Mao's saying occurred after his death, for most Western China scholars would agree that without the chaos and killing of the Cultural Revolution, there would have been no reform and opening up. As Deng Xiaoping and his surviving senior colleagues looked around East Asia after Mao's death, they realized that the catastrophe of the great famine of 1959-61 and the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution had meant that China had been totally left out of the modernization miracles that had been engineered in the old Chinese cultural area. One senior official told me that he had sent a memo to the leadership at that time saying that if China did not change radically, it would become a colony again: what kind of a colony or whose colony, he didn't know, but definitely a colony of some sort. Deng Xiaoping may even have feared that if the party did not rise to the challenge, it would be overthrown for failing to modernize China.
It was of course tragic that the Chinese people had to endure the massive trauma of the Cultural Revolution before they could be unleashed to transform their country. But a consideration of China's modern history reveals that basic transformations of China have only occurred as a result of traumatic shocks. During the 19th century the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional imperial system were revealed by foreign invasion and internal rebellion. The British led the way for European imperialist powers to force their trading systems upon the Chinese empire during the first...