The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations. No wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. – Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1848

Da jia hao tongzhimen and welcome back to another episode of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast with your host Andrew Smith broadcasting it again from my comfy office here in Xi’an.

I hope everyone's having a great spooky season. I know we are here. Um, we had a fun Halloween cookout at the Bahe River yesterday, which is a tributary of the Wei River, which so it's just to the east of Xi’an.

Uh, and we had a delicious Halloween themed dinner party at Mina’s, which is a western bar and grill kind of joint that's popular among the foreign devils here.

And uh you know, I got a busy busy week ahead of me as my students are doing their midterms, but they're awesome kids, so I'm not really worried about them doing badly in the slightest. So, we can definitely say life is good.

Um oh, how could I forget? Um if you haven't been keeping up with uh my Twitter feed, Youkun and I are engaged now. So, [laughter]

Um, now I have my closest comrade in arms and I going to tie the knot probably in like January 2025, sometimes. Yeah, sometime after Chinese New Year 2025.

Um, we'll fly to the States and uh have ourselves a wedding. So, for any of my US listeners, um, yeah, look for an invitation in the mail. [laughter]

Um, but let's put that aside and now let us move on to the rest of the story.

Now, this episode's going to be pretty theoretically meaty. I'm going to concentrate a little less on all the little things that happened. A lot of stuff went on, but I kind of want to deal with some sharp questions, especially when it comes to the question of how to properly make revolution after revolution.

In the wake of the botched ‘arm the left' campaign during August, three major issues came about in the period of late summer and early autumn of 1967 that challenged Chairman Mau in an unusual way.

And far from opposing the cultural revolution, we find at this point several forces begin to challenge Chairman Mao from an ultraleft, almost anarchistic or left communist standpoint. And that's where it gets really interesting. So, let's bring you guys up to speed and let's um let's wrangle with these ideas.

Let's start with how things were going in Xi’an. Yes, here in Xi’an. Uh in late August, a series of fierce struggles between the Workers Alliance faction, aka the West faction, led by Northwest University Red Guards, and the Workers General Headquarters, aka the East Faction, led by Xi’an Jiaotong University Red Guards, had reached its crescendo. And across September 1st and second, a series of pitch street battles took place primarily between rebel workers aligned with the two factions.

Most of the fighting took place in the city's industrial areas and involved not only small armed but rocket launchers, armored personnel carriers, and even a few small tanks. [gasps] It was quite a kerfuffle. Ended up with over a 100 dead and 290 wounded with much of Shian's industrial infrastructure put out of commission.

Enraged at the news of what we here in Xi’an called the 92 armed battle incident, Mao and Zhou called for a ceasefire that very evening. Mao, Zhou and others in the CCRG who were part of the Shani party apparatus thought it was senseless as both sides lines were read and left in content and they had only split after the January storm over petty differences such as proportional representation in any future commune or revolutionary committee.

On September 8th, both the East and West factions had their leaderships called to Beijing to take part in a two-month Mao Zedong thought study group and issue a self-criticism for ultraleft sectarianism.

And a few days later, both factions turned in their weapons to the Xi’an PLA garrison. After the 92 armed battle incident, Xi’an, and this is interesting, became a relatively peaceful place with little in the way of violence for the remainder of the cultural revolution and a grand alliance of the two factions was achieved that resulted in the creation of a sha revolutionary committee in May of the next year. However, much of the rest of the country was not so lucky in curtailing the problem of ultra-leftism.

The car will overturn if it runs too fast, Mao warned. It is therefore necessary to be cautious. Ma also expressed frustration about the stalling of the formation of any new revolutionary committees in the country, saying that he wanted at least 10 new provincial ones by February of 68. And Mao hoped actually to wrap up the cultural revolution by December of 1969, though that would remain to be seen.

So, like I said, I don't want to stay entirely linear for this episode, and I'm going to break down the rest of this episode into four main categories. The Wang-Guan-Qi clique, the May 16th conspiracy, the Shengwulian incident in Hunan, and Mao reaching out to foreign friends for ideological support. The reason I'm doing this is because I think each part is worth examining for specific reasons and ideas so we can dig into the deeper problems of each one and we can begin a conversation on what can be learned from each incident.

Now I will say that a lot of these were ongoing things. So we will not be discussing these things in their entirety. [snorts] Um, we will continue talking about these in the January and February episodes and then maybe even further in.

So, but let's at least get you guys started so that you will be familiar when we're talking about it in next episodes and so you guys can start doing your own research for our conversations in the Twitter comments and on our Discord server.

[clears throat] So, let's start with the Wang Guan-qi clique. [gasps] Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu were all members of the CCRG who had been OG propagandists going all the way back to the Communist Youth League back in the 1940s prior to liberation and the establishment of the People's Republic.

So, they had the street cred and the fervent zeal to make them great fire brands of the cultural revolution.

They had that fervent zeal yet, but too fervent and too zealous as you guys will soon see. In August, Qi and Guan had been extremely critical of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, feeling that the rebellion inside the Ministry had not gone far enough.

Wang joined in the criticism, saying that the whole ministry should be overthrown and replaced by college students. The [clears throat] three men were also cheering on the increasing problem of red guard attacks on foreign offices, embassies, and consulates, including those of countries that were friendly or at least neutral towards China.

So, for example, there were problems like attacks on the Cambodian embassy and a lot of the African embassies because yes, technically those were capitalist regimes. So yeah, a lot of the Red Guards were still attacking those places even though they were not imperialist or at least antagonist countries and Zhou was getting really tired of this and frankly so was a lot of the rest of the CCRG.

It didn't help that Wang, Guan and Qi were major proponents also of the looting of PLA garrisons by the red guards and rebel movements that Jiang Qing was trying to curtail. When push came to shove, Jang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda joined together and went on the offensive against the three men, bringing up the uncomfortable fact that Wang Li had had a conversation with newly appointed KGB chief Yuri Andropov several years ago, along with some other iffy, problematic statements and actions from his past.

Qi knew that he had to act to save his own skin as he realized that Wang and Guan were going down.

In a letter to Mao, Qi accused Wang Li and Guan Feng of thinking themselves more revolutionary than anyone else, leading to chaos in the ranks of the left. She gave a thorough self-criticism, but trying to distance himself from Wang and Guan, saying that they had made very grave errors and harmed the PLA.

Wang and Guan got the boot, were arrested, had to uh get uh put under house arrest at a villa outside of Beijing, and they were told to write thorough self-criticisms, [snorts] but she wouldn't be far behind them. But like I said, I'm going to tell you guys about that in the January or the February episode.

Next up, we have the curious case of the May 16th conspiracy. And this is a case personally I think Marxist historians need to put some more investigation into. And uh maybe we can go back to this in a mini episode before we wrap up the podcast here in a couple years, but I'm trying to get the basics down right here. At least up until the end of October of '67. [snorts]

In an important speech on September 5th, Jiang Qing told a Congress of Red Guards in Anhui province that the May 16th rebel organization in Beijing had been an actively counterrevolutionary ultra-left element attacking Zhou Enlai and the broader CCRG.

She said that beyond the May 16th core red guards in Beijing, the May 16th conspiracy was seeping into all aspects of government and the party and had to be stamped out. According to reports of an investigation by the CPC in the 1980s, the wave of arrest that swept the country in search of May 16th elements ended up in up to 1 million people arrested and held for questioning and possibly up to 100,000 people killed in struggle sessions or vigilante executions or having been driven to suicide.

While officially the investigation against the May 16th core red guards was ended by Xie Fuzhi in November of '67 in which he declared only about 60 members were counterrevolutionary. The paranoia of the ultraleft threat of the May 16th core lasted well into 1970 in some parts of the country.

And like when I say that it's a big it was a big thing. It was a big thing. Arrests included members of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, people on the editorial board of Red Flag Theoretical Journal, several employees of the various ministries who were declaring that Liu and Deng's clique uh you know were thoroughly toppled and thus the only way to continue the cultural revolution was to attack the centralist the centrist elements around Zhou Enlai and also by targeting the army.

Mao and Zhou definitely had their differences. And Mao was firmly to the left of Zhou and his cohorts, but Mao knew that the centrists were a necessary part of the revolutionary headquarters at that point, and he could not afford to lose them, at least for now, especially with him once again losing control of the cultural revolution to a full civil war.

You know, I right now where I'm at with my research, I honestly don't know what to make of the May 16th conspiracy as much of what I've been examining, the scholarship I've been examining has been through mainly Western and liberal dissident sources.

But um let's hope that maybe more conversations can be had about whether or not um the May 16th conspiracy really was the big spooky threat that the CCRG had deemed it to be or if it was a matter of a small handful of ultra radicals and the hunt for them just spun terribly out of control.

I think uh we it's something that um further research needs to be dealt with. I will see what I can dig up by the time um February comes around.

Okay, now for the part that I really want to get into and that's the Shengwulian incident in Hunan.

Let me tell you guys about a group called the Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Great Alliance Committee. Uh, say that five times fast.

On October 10th, 1967, a meeting was convened in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, to consolidate a new headquarters of the most radical factions in Hunan Province.

While most of the rest of the country was seeing a rolling back of new mass movements and attempts to curtail the ultra-left ascending out of the party's control. Um, you know, the party was more in favor of establishing more revolutionary committees, but a great number of Hunan rebels were unhappy with the CCRG's seemingly, you know, centrist turn towards more moderate positions, especially in the wake of the Wuhan uprising and the arm theft campaign in July and August.

So, the Xiang River Spring and Thunder Red Guards, the East is Red Rebel HQ, the Red Flag Army, the Changsha Workers Headquarters, and the Chong Sha Peasants Headquarters, all came to the table to say that they would resolutely refuse to kowtow to the PLA loyal elements of the um Workers Alliance of Hunan, and that any attempts to scale back the revolutionary fervor would met with resistance, even if that meant going against Chairman Mao's current wishes.

As you guys will see in the next few episodes, Shengwulian begins to slowly part from orthodox Maoism and goes for a more left communist position, feeling that it was time for the Chinese people to part from the party, that the revolutionary committees were a right-wing retreat, and that the model of the Paris Commune or the Shanghai Commune would be better for China.

Many factions began to support the idea of abolishing the People's Liberation Army in favor of a more decentralized and autonomous People's Militia.

Eventually, this would culminate in a young college student named Yang Xi Guang catapulting to the top of the Shengwulian. And in January of the next year, he would publish a pamphlet called Whither China, a polemic that would essentially argue for this semi-anarchist position.

It's a pretty interesting document. And uh we'll go more into depth with what Whither China had to say in our January and February episodes, but for now I'll say that Shengwulian did not please the top dogs at all from the onset. Within a few days of their foundation, they [snorts] had declared themselves to be a new grand alliance that would act as a new organ of mass rule in Hunan Province. Something that infuriated Zhou Enlai who told them to scrap this ultra-leftist ideal and uh unquote and to consult with the PLA and CCRG further.

Shengwulian would continue agitating for their new firebrand synthesis of left communist Maoism, but they were denied a permit to hold a mass rally to announce their grand alliance. [snorts] And um a lot of scholars are split on the question of Shengwulian. Wu Yiching, an East Asian studies professor at University of Toronto, is highly sympathetic to them and makes that clear in his journal article about them and in his book, The Cultural Revolution in the Margins.

Stanford University sociologist Andrew G. Walder, on the other hand, um, writes that Shengwulian's opposition to quote 'a red capitalist class', and this is what Walder has to say. He said that 'he feels that it did not issue from a coalition of the marginalized, but was instead the product of a split over tactics within the rebel movement and a rhetorical framing of diehard resistance was not widely shared even within the splinter faction that generated the Whither China essay.' End quote.

Shengwulian gets a lot of sympathy in our modern era from uh a lot of Trotskyist and anarchist scholars obviously like the analytical Marxist and left communist and Bordigaist and council communist scholars also are very much in line with Shengwulian. It seems while other schools of socialist thought and uh even some liberal professors seem to echo the official condemnation of Shongulong, the modern-day Communist Party of China is unsurprisingly silent about the issue.

And the thing is, honestly, and this might be me just being the contrarian heretic, I don't think that the questions that Shengwulian were asking were necessarily wrong. The question of, you know, is Chairman Mao and is the CCRG going far enough to thoroughly uproot the red bourgeoisie from the party and keep us on the road to communism? That's a valid question and it's a question that in my opinion is still unanswered today.

The problem I personally have with Shengwulian is that they openly and ultimately advocated for an anarchist position that said the party itself was the problem. [snorts] They're basically going for what post-Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou is going for, who you know as a philosopher, I really respect Baidou but I ultimately disagree with him on the one hand I agree that there were far more capitalist roaders in the party than Mao thought, but on the other hand and I'm a firm believer that every revolution be it a bourgeois democratic revolution or a communist people's war or a cultural revolution after the establishment of socialism it needs a class vanguard leading it.

And at that point in China, the Communist Party of China still had a sizable amount of revolutionaries still leading it that made it a salvageable project.

So I think Mao was correct in allowing the party form to continue leading the cultural revolution and allowing himself to continue having the final say. It's not an easy choice, but it's the best the revolution could do at that point, considering the material conditions that China found itself in in the world at that point.

Well, speaking of the world, September and October of 1967 were also interesting because it was a time where Mao wanted to take the cultural revolution on the global offensive.

China wasn't entirely cut off from the outside world, but diplomacy and relations with pro-Chinese and pro-Albanian communist parties in the West had [clears throat] definitely taken a backseat to the struggle on the home front in many senses and most foreign friends and comrades who had been living in China at the time had been called home in 1966.

Um, the only notable exceptions I know of is um [clears throat] I know that Sydney Rittenberg, the American communist, he was allowed to stay. A lot of the defectors from the Korean War, um, they were allowed to stay. Uh, I know that Vietnamese international students were allowed to stay. I know that for sure. Um, and it didn't help. Anyways, I digress.

It also didn't help that the violence against diplomats by university and high school red guards had become such a common problem after the sacking of the British consulate. So, like I said earlier, even many countries that were neutral towards China were beginning to pull their diplomats out of Beijing. [snorts]

So Mao called, cranked up the charm, and started inviting some of his old homies to come hang out at the crib. For one thing, the Canton Fair was declared in September to be relaunched that November. And uh which if you don't know what the Canton Fair is, it's this massive trade show that happens every year in Guangzhou, has happened since I think the 40s that brings international businesses from all over the world to showcase and sell their products to the East Asian market. It's a pretty big deal and it even rivals the Tokyo and Singapore showcases. [snorts] um having the Canton Fair still be open for business in such a wild and unstable time um showed that it was still safe for foreigners to do business in China, however limited in scale at that point.

Um, I do know that at that time China started putting more railroads and other kinds of infrastructure down in places like Tanzania, other East African countries with interest free loans alongside hefty donations of little red books and Mao badges of course.

Um, Mao also let groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine open up some official offices in Beijing as lies on stations and you know from where he could uh float them some cash and weapons for the national liberation struggle cuz you know what are friends for now also had diplomatic groups and delegations of revolutionaries from Vietnam, Congo, Pakistan and Japan, Romania, Mauritania and Luxembourg visit him, bestow great praise upon him and toast the successes of the cultural revolution.

And a lot of my listeners will find this particularly juicy. Among this group of international friends was a delegation of Peruvians from the Communist Party of Peru Bandera Roja faction. All of whom spent about five or six weeks studying in Beijing. Among these Peruvian comrades was a charismatic philosophy professor from the Peruvian highlands of Ayakucha named Dr. Abimael Guzman who well let's just say he becomes quite the important character in the epilogue and aftermath of the story of the cultural revolution and the consolidation of post-Mao global Maoism.

On the last day of September Mao was in an important meeting with Albanian Premier Mehmet Shehu. [snorts] this was important as Albania was China's only remaining ally in Eastern Europe and Albania had not sent any official diplomatic delegations to China since the launch of the Cultural Revolution in spring of the prior year.

There he asked for Mao and the Chinese to provide an Albanian translation of the Little Red Book, which Mao agreed to, but warned the Albanians to not be dogmatic with his works. Quote, "See if you find my quotations useful. China's experience may serve other countries, but they must judge this for themselves." End quote. It was an overall positive meeting that showed that, you know, China wasn't entirely isolated from the world at that point.

And uh it was important because like I said, China needed all the support from the outside world that it could get with Mao admitting to Shehu that China's civil war had gotten much worse with so many arms in the hands of rebels.

And you know, say what you will of the Communist Party of China. uh you know, but like for whatever mistakes and wrongdoings that occurred during the cultural revolution, one thing that they never wavered from was their strong unconditional principles of proletarian internationalism and the belief that the working class has no nation, that all revolutionary struggles are interconnected, etc., etc.

National chauvinism and xenophobia were still major problems in Chinese society. That is no doubt and it can be seen in the actions of some of the red guard factions in Beijing who were just striking out at literally any foreigner they saw.

But at the end of the day, the cultural revolution central group and uh the party center, they never tailed those sentiments and always worked to uproot them and keep China at least somewhat tethered to the international struggle and a sense of we're doing this for global communism.

Now, on to my full analysis of the state of the cultural revolution in early autumn 1967.

I kind of want to go back. I mentioned Wu Yiching and his cultural revolution at the margins book as a framework. I want to use it as a framework. While I ultimately disagree with a lot of Wu's conclusions, I think it's a useful book to read because it's informative and it asks a lot of important questions about where Mao stood in terms of the mass movements in late 1967.

Even if I think Wu is wrong on the answers, at this point of the cultural revolution, we're left with the question of whose cultural revolution is it anyway? After all, people were beginning to wildly interpret Mao's directives in so many different ways. Indeed, you know, one thing that Woo mentions is how the word counterrevolutionary.

It was never precisely defined and could mean just about anybody to different factions. Determination of class formations became haphazard and very informal.

By separating himself above the party, Mao in fact did not become an all powerful autocrat, but au contraire set in motion new dynamics that meant that Marxism was no longer under the monopoly of the party and rather something that could be directly grasped by the masses.

However, the problem is that the ultra-left wing of the cultural revolution had no viable alternatives to the party state model. No major alternative economic ideas, no comprehensible social programs, power seizures, and local scale revolts that were led by ultra-left factions often left power vacuums that were easily rolled back by the PLA or by rightist factions with the correct connections.

There were no institutional relations of political participation or governance that could be put in place by a group like say Shengwulian. At the end of the day, things still needed to get done and the ultraleft didn't have a program, didn't have a basic plan on how to keep everyday things going.

Woo posits that and I'm quoting here quote ‘socialism without substantially meaningful democratic institutions and active popular participation is not only ethically indefensible but also historically unfeasible.’ End quote.

While I don't disagree and I think that Mao is on to something that Mao unintentionally smothered a lot of potential advances in socialist experimentation in math's role, the fact of the matter is is that at this point, the Red Guard movement was spiraling out of control with mass killings and guerrilla warfare being senselessly utilized across the first half of 1968 to resolve what I feel were far too often non-antagonistic contradictions.

To repeat what Mao said, a car will overturn if you drive it too fast. The cultural revolution at the end of the day still needed the party and the army to keep any momentum going. So, that's just my thoughts. What do y'all think? [snorts]

All right. So, now here's the part of the podcast where I reach out to my listeners and ask them for some help. If anyone knows anything about how to build a proper YouTube channel, please contact me via Discord at ----------

Email me at culturalrevolutionpodcast@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter because I'm thinking about making YouTube my [snorts] main home hub now. I've been putting it off for months now and it's mainly just because, well, I don't know where to start. I don't know how to make a video with a static image. I don't know how to build a solid sustained community via YouTube. I don't know how to do promotion.

I'm at a total level zero newbie when it comes to YouTube stuff. If anyone anyone out there has some good tutorials, guides, whatever, or just individual pointers, let me know. Cuz number one, not everybody has Spotify. And in terms of like our community, the community that we've built that I love so much.

Um, with the way that Twitter is going, I just don't know how much longer it's feasible to sustain our little crew staying on that platform. You all, you all know what I'm saying. Just Elon's running that platform into the ground and it's just getting so toxic. It's just, you know, so let's let's put our heads together and uh figure out some viable alternatives, particularly, you know, around YouTube.

All right, folks. Well, I better head out here for the afternoon. Um, the misses is going to be rolling by and I'm pretty much done with work for the day. We got some stuff to do and I didn't have much for lunch. So, I'm still a bit hungry.

So, until next time, be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and endure difficulty to win victory. Zai jian.

Today's sources include:

Mao's Little Red Book, a global history by Alexander C. Cook

The cultural revolution in the foreign ministry of China by Ma Jisen.

Agents of disorder inside cina's cultural revolution by Andrew G. Walder.

Fractured rebellion the Beijing red guard movement by Andrew G. Walder.

The cultural revolution at the margins. Chinese socialism and crisis by Wu Yiching.

The great retreat and its discontents. Examining the Shengwulian episode in the Cultural Revolution by Wu Yiching.

The world turned upside down. A history of the cultural revolution by Yang Jisheng.

Mao's last revolution by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals.

The Shaanxi provincial archives. The policy of the military supporting the left in the spread of factional warfare in China's countryside. Shaanxi 1967 and 1968 by Shinichi Tanigawa and

the Marxist Internet Archives, Peking Review Archive and Chinese Communism Archive.

All right, thank you so much everyone and I will see you next month with our holiday special about food and cooking during the cultural revolution.