Da jia hao tongzhimen and welcome back once again to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast with your host Drew Smith broadcasting once again from the ancient city of Xi'an, the former illustrious Han and Tang capital of Chang’an. in the heart of Shaanxi Province, the red holy land of China.

Uh we've been doing well these past few weeks. Hope you guys have been too. Um as you guys have probably heard um from my podcast account, I've been super busy lately. Um I've been doing like a bunch of grassroots mass and propaganda work for the party lately. Um, we've been having midterms for my students and all sorts of crazy stuff's been going on.

Um, you know, it it actually has been a very interesting uh learning experience actually going out and doing grassroots work uh with the party. You know, I'm a Maoist. I feel like the Chinese Communist Party (note by editor: it’s CPC, not CCP, and it is still on the road, just not in your definition) is no longer on the socialist road. But one thing I learned is I think the vast majority of rank and file grassroots cadres are genuinely good people who want to make their communities better places. And uh you know that's uh it's really amazing how there are still some comrades on a local level that genuinely take way serve the people very seriously and uh are actually out there making things better for Chinese people and not just serving for their personal careers.

Um, otherwise, let's see. Uh, I went to a Halloween party where I dressed up as a red guard. And that with an authentic, uh, cap, armband, Mao badge, and little red book. And that was actually a pretty big hit at the party, if only because I was wearing like actual authentic garb from that time period.

Uh, Thanksgiving's coming up soon. And so, uh, the MS and I will be tucking into some classic Thanksgiving fair with a large group of my fellow American expats at Red Oak, which is a really upscale, uh, American bar and grill here in Xi’an. And, uh, it's doing a whole, uh, whole ass buffet tomorrow night. So, it's going to be fantastic.

Um, as for the holidays, uh, we're not quite sure what we're doing for the holidays, but we'll find something to get into. I think we'll do Christmas dinner at this one Shanghai style seafood buffet we recently discovered and enjoyed highly recently. So, there is that. There is that. But enough of the personal jibber. I know what you guys are here to talk about. I know what you guys are here to hear about.

And uh we're about to deal with some really heavy and gnarly topics today. Um, while you'd think that the factional warfare in China had finally ended, you'd think things would have finally calmed down, but no, not really. Um, things are about to get pretty hairy here in the autumn and winter of 1968. And the cultural revolution was without a doubt not over, my friends. Not over. it is continuing onward all by on very different terms.

What do I mean by this? Well, let's get into it. Okay, so we left off with the Red Guard and rebel mass movements having been disbanded.

And with that, the push for the revolutionary committees to be consolidated on every level was put front and center with the hopes of creating a grand alliance of all factions to solidify the final victory of the cultural revolution. At least that particular stage of the cultural revolution. Mao was very much open to having multiple cultural revolutions.

On September 1st, things got off to quite a start when recently demobilized red guards at Beijing University BeiDa decided to settle one last score before dissolving. Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, was supposed to be released from his dorm room turned jail cell with the dissolution of the Beida Red Guards.

But it seems that well whoopsy doodle, he had a little accident and his captors decided to free him from the captivity by throwing him out the fucking window. And in fact, to this day, Deng Pufang is still alive, but he's paralyzed from the waist down and currently serves as the chairman of the All-China Disabled Persons’ Federation, the main Communist Party mass organization for Chinese people with disabilities. So yeah, he is in a wheelchair the rest of his life because he got released from captivity through his window. So ouch. Oh, this tea is good.

Also during the first week of September, the Hainan Provincial Revolutionary Committee initiated a wave of mass arrests of Red Guards and rebels with over 5,000 ending up in prison and 700 being executed due to some local factions refusing to disband.

And this is actually something that really concerns me at this point, especially through September, October, and November of 68. Um especially with the way that things were handled in Guangxi, you know, and how horrible that went. Unfortunately, we're going to see a lot of this over the next few months in China where some rebel factions refuse to disband.

They refuse to believe that Mao would call for an end to the rebellion and the local provincial and re and municipal revolutionary committees deal with him in a very brutal, heavy-handed pan manner. Uh so and we're going to get into that in a few minutes. We're going to get into that in a few minutes.

On September 2nd, the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi were lit up with revolutionary enthusiasm as the final two provincial rebel revolutionary committees were finally established.

Um, allow me to copy and paste and do a quick recap from our episode on Tibet and Xinjiang during the cultural revolution. If you want more information about this, uh, please refer back to episode 14, which is on Spotify, Podbean, and um, a couple of other platforms.

After months of intense negotiations, the Tibetan Revolutionary Committee was founded with former members of the Maoist Rebel Gyenlo faction firmly gaining a majority of seats in the party and masses section of the 3-in-1 combination while former members of the conservative PLA-aligned Nyamdre nationally gained a majority in the army section. Major General Zeng Yongya was elected chairman, a moderate candidate who wanted to build a grand alliance between the Gyenlo and Nyamdre factions.

It was actually a major victory for Mao and the left wing of the Communist Party in Tibet. And with it, a large amount of new reforms and economic initiatives were able to be pushed in Tibet. 50,000 people that day took part in the rally to celebrate the establishment of the committee.

That same day in Urumqi, Xinjiang, 200,000 Xinjiang citizens of all nationalities traveled from all around the autonomous region to celebrate the founding of the Xinjiang Revolutionary Committee. Long Shujin, a general from Hunan who was a close associate of Lin Biao, was elected chairman of the revolutionary committee. Wang Enmao and Seypedin, the two main capitalist roaders in Xinjiang, who were close to Liu Shaoqi prior to 66, were elected as vice-chairman, but their powers within the reconstituted regional party committee and the military region command were severely diminished.

So it seemed for now the left had been able to win out against Wang and Seypedin and their gang and that Xinjiang had become firmly red under um Long Shujin and his crew.

In celebration of the full consolidation of the revolutionary committee cities committee system from the provincial level downward on September 7th a rally was held in Tiananmen Square in which over 500,000 people waving little red books and red flags and giant banners of chairman Mao listened to Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing speak on the overall victory of the revolutionary committees.

Zhou said in his speech, quote, "In the 20 months since the January storm, the whole country has once again become red, excepting Taiwan, which remains to be liberated."

Jiang Qing praised the Mao Zedong Thought workers propaganda teams for their work in stopping the factional war, saying that the working class had gone up onto the stage of history to lead the struggle, criticism, and reform of the superstructure.

The revolutionary committee system unfortunately was still uh quite a sight of raw and rough contradiction among the masses. Among the 29 revolutionary committees, only eight, Heilongjiang, Shandong, Shanghai, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Tianjin, Henan, and Hebei had local rebels or rebel party cadres as their chairman while the other 21 chairmen were all army officers.

These first revolutionary committee chairmen also became central committee members during the ninth party congress.

And given that the army had an unprecedented amount of control starting in autumn of '68 despite the fact that the rightists had not been fully fleeced from the ranks of the army officer corps and the army's party committees, uh you know, so there's that, indeed Xie Fuzhi feared that there would still be a possibility of ideological splits within the provincial revolutionary committees and felt that there was a need to constantly work on unity struggle unity within the working class at the forefront.

Mao also made sure to say in a meeting on September 21st that a national level quote “all-China revolutionary committee would not be desirable and that instead work should begin on reconstituting the national people's congress after the upcoming 9th party congress in April of the next year.”

A few days later, the National Day holiday was in full swing as on October 1st, Beijing celebrated the 19th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Mao and his entourage, flanked by all 29 provincial revolutionary committee chairman and most of the central committee watched as 100,000 people used colored cards to fill Tiananmen Square with the image of a sunflower which turned and faced Mao as the East is Red played throughout the city.

Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai made speeches calling for the preparation of a people's war in the event of a Soviet or US invasion of China. Crowds chanted repeatedly for an hour, "Down with the USA. Down with the Soviet Union, long live Chairman Mao. Long live the great proletarian cultural revolution."

That year's National Day Parade was made up of 400,000 marchers with giant models on floats, including the character Zhong, which is loyalty, giant volumes of Chairman Ma's works and massive mangoes.

That night, Mao and Lin Biao returned to the Tiananmen rostrum in the evening to watch fireworks and wave to the crowd as the masses continued to sing and shout their praises.

Sadly, things would take a very rough turn just as it seemed as things were settling down within the revolutionary order. Uh, today, my friends, we really have to talk about a very uncomfortable truth, and that's something called the Cleansing of the Class ranks campaign of 1968 through 1969.

It's something I've mentioned briefly in some earlier episodes and I talked about its dire consequences in Inner Mongolia in my episode about that region. Um, but it's really in October of 1968 that the cleansing of the class ranks kicks heavily into high gear and becomes a rather excessively bloody affair.

Okay, in order to understand the cleansing of the class ranks, we need to rewind back a few months. On May 13th, 1968, Yao Wenyuan submitted a document called the experience of the military management committees of Beijing Qinghua printing factory in mobilizing the masses to carry out the class struggle against the enemy.

He sent this to Chairman Mao and Yao wrote, "This document summarizes some of the policies of what must become a cleansing of the class ranks." On May 19th, Mao commented on the document. “Yao Wenyuan, I suggest nationwide circulation, publication, and study of this document. It is the best written piece among all the relevant files you have sent me today.”

As a result, the ‘cleansing of the class ranks’ campaign was launched on May 25th with the circulation of the document. While the initial call to cleanse the class ranks was relatively vague and was simply a call to, you know, um, allow the rebels to ferret out the most obstinate and unrepentant of class enemies.

With the disbanding of the mass movements in July and August of 68, the campaign quickly became a means for local authorities to settle scores against former rebels in a very top-down manner under the pretext of consolidating the revolutionary committee system.

During the second week of October, Mao explained the campaign to an Albanian delegation led by Beqir Balluku, quote, "A failed class will still struggle, so we will never speak of final victory. Even after decades, we cannot speak of it or lose our vigilance. Those people still exist. That class still exists. The mainland has dregs of the Guomindang. Some people have drilled into our leadership organs or into local leadership organs. This time, we're cleaning them out one by one."

"This time has brought quite a major cleanup of the party, government, army, and the civilian population. They're cleansing and exposing themselves. If we're talking about 700 million people and out of and one out of a thousand of them are bad, this indicates that the contradiction between the enemy and us is serious. We'll probably have to continue cleansing the class ranks and perching the party for half a year or even a year, then things maybe will be able to keep quiet for about 10 to 20 years.”

That month was also when the 12th plenum of the eighth central committee of the CPC met and it issued a bulletin stating it is essential to continue continue earnestly cleansing the class ranks in the factories, people's communes, government organs, schools, enterprises, and state-run institutions as well as neighborhoods in order to unearth the smattering of remaining counterrevolutionaries concealed within the mass organizations.

And what's interesting is how people started reacting to this. Um with the military and civilian bureaucrats resuming their old ways, rebel factions actually still were able to launch quote "anti-restoration campaigns" in Shandong, Hubei, Gansu, Fujian, Jiangsu, Shaanxi, Heilongjiang, and other remote places. In fact, this is where it gets really interesting is in Shandong, it was launched by the chairman of the revolutionary committee of the province, Wang Xiaoyu.

And basically what happened was is Wang creates this thing called the verbal attack and armed defense general headquarters out of the people's militias and the cleansing of the class ranks uh mass dictatorship offices. And he made that them seize control of all the police stations from November of 68 through January of 69, alleging that they were compiling black dossiers on leaders of the provincial and municipal revolutionary committees in order to overthrow the revolutionary order.

And what's interesting is that Mao initially encouraged these anti-restoration campaigns um especially in an October 14th Red Flag editorial um where he called for an end to the rightist wind. But when it seemed like the campaign was looking to attack the entire quote ‘newborn red regime and undermine the revolutionary committees’, he said ‘opposing restoration is in fact restoration’.

And then Zhou Enlai came in and said some places are still carrying it on and wanting to seize power, but whose power are you seizing? Isn't it seizing power from the proletariat? And then unfortunately in many places the rebel factions were forced to stand down and those opposing restoration were suppressed in the name of defending the newborn red regime. So that sucks. And with that many more waves of arrests and executions began across the country. And it's actually pretty it gets bad, guys. Um, I know I remember something like 12,000 people died in just Inner Mongolia alone.

Um, I'm looking at this table from Andrew uh G. Walder's Agents of Disorder, which is, you know, gets really deeply into the power seizures and the revolutionary committee systems.

And one thing that stands out to me is that the actions of the revolutionary committees after the mass movements were disabled generated more reported deaths and imprisonments than the actions of the factional civil war. Um the thing is that and also what you notice that the political campaign of the cleansing of the class ranks was by far by far the single most important generator of casualties and victims.

Um, in fact, up to over half of the 183,000 deaths recorded in local annals are that are tied to a specific event or period of time. 50% of them are attributed to the class cleansing of the class ranks campaign. 13.4 million people were arrested and no fewer than 42% uh were generated by the cleansing of the class ranks and that usually all of those it says according to what I'm seeing as much as yeah as much as 75% of deaths and uh yeah about 42% of arrests were generated after the formation of the revolutionary committees. So, yikes.

Um, one place I was looking at said that there was something like um 200,000 - someone predicted that or estimated there was about 200,000 people killed from during the all-around civil war and factional warfare, but that 250,000 were executed during the cleansing of the class ranks.

Although Walder has calculated at least 183,780 executed by the cleansing of the class ranks campaign, but he says that 75.3% were killed after the disbanding of the Red Guard movement. So yikes. Um, one thing that he mentions is that the cleansing of the class ranks reached more parts of the country, at least on the local and village and county level, than the 1967 power seizures than the January storm. And it was conducted even in regions that never reported any factional warfare activity.

And according to him, quote, "The annals from 89% of all localities reported activity related to the cleansing of the class ranks, compared to 81% that reported power seizures during the January storm, 70% that reported insurgent activity, and 60% reported violent factional battles. April to October 68th was the high tide of the campaign spread. The median date was August. Fewer than 6% of reports occur prior to the month and a local revolutionary committee was formed and more than half of reports within the first 5 months of its establishment.

Um and what Walder and Esherick and um Xiao, a lot of these scholars make a very interesting point is that the cleansing of the class ranks campaign compared to the Red Guard movement is a lot like it's more like the the Soviet great terror of 1937 through 1938. It's more like a Yezhovschina style great purge. Although um Walder believes that the cleansing of the class ranks generated a much lower death rate than the great terror did.

Um, one interesting example to me is um how the cleansing of the class ranks campaign uh went in Shanghai.

If we go and look at Perry and Lu's text proletarian power, the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, we see Shanghai has a really interesting example of the cleansing of the class ranks. Um, across August through December, the Red Guard organizations in Shanghai were actually rather gradually disbanded on Mao's order and college and middle school students were assigned jobs or sent up to the mountains and down to the villages.

Uh, more on that in a little bit. However, and um what’s interesting is to see contrasting with the rest of the country, the rebel worker mass movements in Shanghai remained politically influential for much longer and with far greater impact than the student red guards in Shanghai.

And compared to the rebel worker movements in other cities in China, because, after the Mao Zedong Thought workers' propaganda teams were sent out, essentially the rebel worker uh organizations were either disbanded or had to merge with the propaganda thought teams.

Whereas in Shanghai, the Shanghai revolutionary rebel workers headquarters still stayed intact officially and organizationally well into the mid 70s.

So how about that? So it's interesting how the cleansing of the class ranks campaign did not demolish the workers headquarters in Shanghai.

Um, as we have seen in the case of the Mao Zedong Thought propaganda troops, um, contacts between former student militants and rebel workers, uh, really still did continue even after the demobilization of the Red Guard movement. Um, and like I said, a substantial number of former Red Guards were assigned to factory work at the time, and they ended up linking up with the rebel workers headquarters.

Um, one thing that Perry notes is that having quote, "Having experienced the heady exhilaration of political activism and revolutionary responsibility, these youngsters were reluctant to withdraw from political engagement. Boasting literary schools well above those of the average factory worker, more than a few former Red Guards now working in the workplaces took charge of propaganda activities in their new work units. By late November of '68, virtually everything published in the press in the name of the workers was really being written by former red guards or by radical intellectuals and journalists affiliated with the Shanghai Writers Rebel Union." So, huh.

And um so when a new Shanghai and like I said the rebel workers HQ was still very very influential. In fact when elections were held in November of '68 for a new Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. The Shanghai Revolutionary Rebel Workers HQ won once again in a landslide victory winning 35 of the 45 seats.

Still, still the cleansing of the class ranks did take a toll on industrial workers as well as former red guards. As Wang Hongwen noted in at the end of November of '68, quote, "The number of workers ferreted out in the past two months has been greater than the entire previous two years." Wang went on to say about the cleansing of the class ranks campaign and this is pretty shocking that Wang, you know, he would go on to be one of the gang of four.

So he was, you know, he's a big dude in this situation. He said, quote, "This is an evil rightist wind whose obvious characteristic is a repudiation of the revolutionary rebels, a repudiation of the January revolution, and an attempt to reverse our verdict on the bourgeois reactionary line on the capitalist roaders. the traitors, the secret agents, and is a plot to destroy the revolutionary committees organizationally as a nationwide movement.”

Though um as we will see in the next uh chronological episode, the cleansing of the class ranks campaign generally was wound down during the winter of early 69 and uh early spring of 1969. By then, Mao, uh you know, according to what I'm reading, appears to have felt that it had gone way too far, particularly in uh Inner Mongolia.

In a Zhongfa (central speech?) address in late December of '68, Mao addressed the revolutionary committees and military control committees all over China, noting, quote, "Among those who have committed capitalist roader errors, the arch unrepentant ones are only a small minority, while those who are capable of accepting education and correcting their errors are a majority. Hence, comrades, you should not automatically assume that all of those who had been capitalist roaders are bad people."

With that, the cleansing of the class ranks was quickly wound down and its excesses uh sweeped uncomfortably under the rug.

Although it should be noted some sporadic cases were seen in isolated parts of the country by the People's Liberation Army in 1970 and 1971.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that there is little in the way of Marxist historiography of the cleansing of the class ranks campaign. Indeed, it wasn't until I started reading about the cultural revolution on a scholarly basis in graduate school that I even heard about the cleansing of the class ranks.

Various summations of the cultural revolution by Maoist parties such as my alma mater, the revolutionary communist party USA and other rim organizations such as the communist party of Peru almost entirely omit the very existence of the cleansing of the class ranks campaign from their entire narrative, which bothers me greatly because obviously this is something that caused a lot of struggle and it seems like it genuinely negatively affected the left during the cultural revolution especially further down the line and it seems like a lot of innocent people got killed or imprisoned because of this. So why why aren't we Maoists or why aren't Marxists more broadly discussing this?

In the battle for China's past, Dr. Gao Mobo states “violence such as the cleansing of the class ranks movement in 1968 was premeditated. But this movement was not meant to result in the physical elimination of class enemies, though this clearly happened. In any case, much of the violence that took place during the late 60s was not initiated by either the Red Guards or the rebels or by Mao. In fact, many of the rebels became victim themselves in campaigns such as against the May 16th elements," unquote.

Obviously, more work needs to be done on this particular uh part of the cultural revolution, especially on the part of the international communist movement and Marxist scholars within academia. To fully sum up what went so terribly wrong during the fallen winter of 1968 and 1969 and how it could have potentially contributed to its overall defeat 8 years later.

Oh, and um also I almost forgot to mention it's interesting how I when I was looking through the Xi’an municipal and county annals at the Shaanxi provincial archives. The cleansing of the class ranks campaign seems to be relatively bloodless in our city with the exception of one very very glaring exception. Xi’an Jaotong University. Um JaoDa, as we call it here in Xi’an, is Xian's best university. It's considered let's see uh as of the last Shanghai ranking which is like the big ranking for all the universities in China. Shanghai ranking had it as the ninth best university in all of China.

So it's up there with like BaiDa and Qinghua, uh Renmin uh Renmin University, Beijing Normal University when it comes to the elite institutions of learning here in China. And according to the records I was reading at JaoDa, I found that over 100 professors were executed by order of the municipal revolutionary committee or died of vigilante torture at the hands of local grassroots cleansing of the class ranks activists.

Um just as an aside, there would be basically there was kind of these um grassroots activist groups called mass dictatorships groups, mass dictatorship groups that were often mobilized by the people's liberation army to cleanse the class ranks. Um so you know I'm wondering why was there such a massive amount of bloodshed at JaoDa compared to say uh where I teach Northwest University where no professors were executed.

I was unable to really find any answers nor could I uh find any eyewitnesses who could be reached for comment or you know at least willing to comment but I will let you guys know if I find out anything.

Well, while all this was happening, the final fall of Liu Shaoqi, the former president of the People's Republic of China and China's number one capitalist roader was finally consolidated.

On October 31st during the plenum of the central committee, the 12th plenum endorsed a report called the crimes of the renegade trader and scab Liu Shaoqi, finally officially naming him as the Communist Party's number one capitalist roader.

Now, I know a lot of you guys are thinking, wait, there was this huge mass movement for the past, you know, 2 and 1/2 years against him. What do you mean finally naming him? Well, here's the funny thing.

I encourage you guys to look at old issues of Peking Review in English or if you can read Chinese, People's Daily, Liberation Army Daily, um, or Hongqi, Red Flag Journal, you'll notice that up until October 31st, they never actually say Liu Shaoqi's name when they talk about the number one capitalist roader. They always call him by the pseudonym China's Khrushchev.

They never say Liu. The only time you'll see Liu specifically named as China's Khrushchev during that time is if you find local Red Guard periodicals and zines. But the national press, the state-owned press always called him just simply China's Khrushchev or China's number one capitalist roader.

So finally they had given officially the name to Liu. Liu Xiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping that day officially lost their uh posts. A resolution to expel Liu from the party forever was passed with only one exception that of Chen Shaomin the vice chairwoman of the all China Federation of Trade Unions. When she passed her abstention, Kang Sheng castigated her asking why she would not vote for Liu.

Despite Kang's prior lobbering and with her, she told her him simply, "This is my right." Kong sat back down in silence, but later he arranged Chen to be sent to work on a farm in Luoshan County, Henan Province of later in that year as a way of punishing her for not voting the way he wanted.

The next day, all newspapers printed the official verdict on Liu Shaoqi, calling him a scab and a traitor, finally naming him as the open China's Khrushchev.

On the second, Liu Shaoqi's expulsion was announced over the radio. Liu was played the broadcast from his hospital bed at the prison and he began to shake and vomit. Meanwhile, Deng Xiaoping was ordered to pack his bags to leave house arrest and go work in a factory on in uh was it Jiangxi? Yeah, Jiangxi Province.

Meanwhile, a few a few weeks later on the 12th of December 1968, an evening radio broadcast transmitted a new directive. Now, educated youth should be going to the countryside to receive re-education from the peasants. The next day, newspapers published Mao's call for educated youth, especially cadres’ children and former red guards, to receive education by living among the rural poor.

In Jinan, 820 urban educated youth followed Mao's directive and they packed their bags and left for the countryside as the first model youth group of youth. In Hangzhou, the next day, some 2,000 youth gave up their urban residency to start new lives laboring in a rural Heilongjiang commune.

In the end between December of 1968 and December of 1979, over 17 million kids would be sent to work in the mountains and in the countryside or in urban factories if they were lucky. And you know, if I have time, I want to do a uh episode on that because and maybe I could get my father-in-law to talk about it because he became a sent-down youth in the last year of the cultural revolution when he was 14.

Um, so I'll see if he wants to talk about it with you guys. I'll see if he wants to talk about it with you guys. And like I said, we're going to talk a lot more about the sent-down youth, the up to the mountains and down to the countryside movement uh across across the rest of the podcast because it's actually a pretty interesting um development and it goes on for such a long time.

Even after the cultural revolution during the Hua Guofeng period, the down to the countryside campaign continues onward until Deng Xiaoping initiates the reform and opening up and sends everybody back home.

All right. Um some other miscellaneous points uh to go through and this is interesting is you know as I always say even during the worst of the cultural revolution good things were happening uh during that time proletarian internationalism towards revolutionary national liberation struggles and left-wing movements in Congo, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Vietnam Palestine and Yemen were given a great amount of ideological and financial and even military support.

The struggles of the oppressed peoples in the United States were put front and center and closer attention was paid to the new pro-Beijing parties and pre-party found nations for nations being founded around the world especially on December 26 1968 when a professor named Jose Maria Sison decided to convene a congress that reconconstituted the old Filipino Communist Party.

On that day, the Communist Party of the Philippines was born and it's been uh a very important actor in global Maoism ever since. Uh also at that time the Tanzania Zambia Railway aka the Tazaro railway or the Uhuru railway was beginning to be constructed by Chinese workers and engineers as a gift to the republics of Tanzania and Zambia.

That way they would not have to rely on having to trade with Rhodesia or South Africa and other such regimes. So that was a very big thing of international friendship and a lot of East Africans still are very thankful to China to this day for what they did with the Tazara Uhuru Railway.

Um, another thing that to note was that in 1968 there was a bumper harvest.

Um there was major water conservancy projects that brought a lot of irrigation uh to remote parts of China, it brought clean drinking water. Uh a lot of desert and rocky mountainous areas were finally able to grow crops. Crop production actually doubled during 1968 all across uh China despite the fact that there was a drought in southern China. And usually when a drought hits southern China, there is, you know, if you look back in in history, it almost always results in a horrible famine that kills hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.

But not this time, baby. The drought, the 1968 southern China drought produced no famine and no casualties, which was the first time in Chinese history.

Another thing that I want to talk about is the May 7th cadre schools. Um the May 7th cadre schools were basically where rebel cadres and the most obstinate rightist cadres uh ultra-left cadres and rightist cadres were sent to labor in the fields alongside the peasantry and the sent down youth or to uh work in factories and transform themselves into revolutionary cadres and revolutionary intellectual rituals.

The reason they were called the May 7th cadre schools and not like the October 5th cadre schools was because in May of '66, a week before the cultural revolution was initiated, uh Mao said that he want sent out a report saying he wanted the army to act as an educator for the masses and that China should become one big this was the May 7th circular that the um that China should become one big school where soldiers would learn politics and engage in production, cadres would learn politics and engage in production and students and workers would learn military affairs from the army.

And uh he it was also in the May 7th circular prior to the May 16th circular that he said uh all education must be revolutionized. So in honor of this May 7th circular in September and October and November of ' 68 they initiated the May 7th cadre schools which lasted until 1960 uh 1976.

Um, with that, um, another thing I should also say is that at the end of the day, the revolutionary committees, at least on a local level, were still a good exercise in democracy, uh, direct democracy, you could even say.

I'm looking at um recently I reread Maria Macciocchi's daily life in revolutionary China which was about her travels through China in 1970 and 1971 and she gives a lot of great eyewitness testimony on how revolutionary committees were elected directly by the people and how they were able to really connect with the masses, how voting took place within revolutionary committees.

Um yeah, it's it's a really interesting it's a really interesting um look at how even at the end of the day, there were good things about the revolutionary committees. Make no mistake, as much as I criticism as I have of the Revolutionary Committee system, and it could have gotten a lot better, it wasn't entirely without merit.

All right. Well, my friends, with that, we conclude our long and wild look at the most intense and most radical year of the entire cultural revolution. 1968, the year that shook the world.

And let me tell you, you know, as someone who's really interested not just in the cultural revolution, but also like global Maoism, global student and worker radicalism, national liberation movements, and you know, the global 60s.

Let me tell you, a lot of my friends ask me, uh, Drew, out of all the years in human history that you're most interested in, if you could choose one year to study for the rest of your life, which one would it be? And I always say unequivocally, 1968, 1968 was one hell of a year.

Whether it was in, you know, it was in Chicago during the DNC demonstrations, uh whether it was in Paris in May of '68, whether it was the Red Guard factional warfare in summer of 68, just wow, what an amazing, you know, the the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Just wow, what an amazing year it was. What an amazing year it was. Too bad I was born in the wrong time. Too bad I was born at the wrong time.

All right, my friends. Well, um, next month will be our next thematic episode. We'll be eating some dim sum and having a bit of a Cantonese delight as we are finally, after all these years of doing this podcast, I'm finally getting time to taking a look at the cultural revolution in China's third largest city, Guangzhou.

So, next month we will be having Guangzhou during the cultural revolution. Um, then in January we will not be having an episode because I will be traveling to the US to visit my family. Um, we might have one in February if I can if I can find time. I might still be in the US. Like I said, it's been 5 years since I've seen my family. So, uh, I really need to make up for lost time.

Um, I will say though that at at the very least by March, we should be having our first episode about 1969 where we will be discussing the, um, 9th Congress and the Sino Soviet border war.

So, uh, be on the lookout for that. And um I guess until then from the ancient city of Chang’an, my comrades, I say Zai jian.

Sources for today's episode include

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

The Battle for China's Past, Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Dr. Gao Mobo.

Turbulent decade, a history of the cultural revolution by Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao.

Agents of Disorder Inside China's Cultural Revolution by Andrew G. Walder.

China's Cultural Revolution 1966 to 1969. Not a dinner party by Michael Schoenhals.

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

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

The Cultural Revolution at the Grassroots by Jonathan Unger, Marxist Internet's Archives, Peking Review Archive, Shaanxi Provincial Archives,

and Reassessing the Cultural Revolution by Lucian W. Pye.

All right, guys. Have a good day.