Nation begins to question Mao's cultural atrocity

BEIJING - The frightened figure in the picture is a Chinese opera star. His hair is grasped tightly in a Red Guard's fist and he is being denounced during the Cultural Revolution, the ideological frenzy which destroyed millions of lives in China between 1966 and 1976.

The image is one of hundreds of engravings on cold grey tablets that make up the exhibits in China's first Cultural Revolution museum, near Shantou in the Guangdong district.

"There is Chinese proverb which says you should use history as a mirror," Peng Qian, a former Deputy Mayor of Shantou, said. Peng, persecuted during the revolution, was the driving force in setting the museum up.

"History is a warning to us not to make the same mistake twice. We don't want to go back down that path. We're getting about 1000 visitors a day and it's extremely important in education terms, inspiring in fact," Peng said.

The Cultural Revolution was one of the darkest periods of recent Chinese history. Forty years ago this year, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered a return to ideological roots, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in 10 years.

The period remains deeply divisive. In 1999, US-based academic Song Yongyi was arrested while studying the revolution and charged with stealing state secrets. He was released a year later after an international outcry.

The Communist Party still does not accept responsibility for events in the revolution, and the Shantou museum does not have official backing.

There has never a been proper study of what happened during the period, and children are taught little.

A quote from the party's Central Committee, reprinted at the museum, does, however, accept that errors were made. "History has judged the Cultural Revolution as a mistake by the Leaders that brought great disaster to party, nation and people," it says.

The hundreds of engravings in the museum come from a 1995 book called Cultural Revolution Museum, published by Yang Kelin in Hong Kong.

There are shocking images of teachers and intellectuals in dunce hats being led out by farmers, and a "rightist" being carried out in a basket, having suffered a beating.

Another chilling sight is a picture of Shang Guanyunzhu, a Shanghai actress who is believed to have had an affair with Mao. She committed suicide by jumping out of a window to escape the hectoring by Red Guards.

A tablet shows a large demonstration in Beijing in 1966, when millions of young people waved their "Little Red Books" of Mao's thoughts.

The Cultural Revolution declared war on "bourgeois culture", and there were a lot of casualties among the musicians and artists of China. There are depictions of the taunting of professors at the Shanghai Music College. Seventeen professors, spouses and students committed suicide, while many others were imprisoned. "Under heaven, all is chaos," Mao once wrote.

Another panel shows the arrest and public humiliation of China's state President, Liu Shaoqi, denounced as a "capitalist roader" and badly beaten before dying in custody.

Mao is the exhibition's central figure.

One panel shows him swimming in 1966, a display of the 72-year-old's health and vigour. It goes on, however, to show his creeping decrepitude between 1966 and his death in 1976.

However, Mao's face still stares out across Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and he features on many banknotes.

Many leaders in the Communist Party also suffered during the revolution, including the man referred to as the architect of China's modern era, Deng Xiaoping. There is a statue to him outside the museum.

Party official and museum benefactor, Ren Zhongyi, who died last year, is quoted in the building. "With history as a mirror, under no circumstances must we allow the tragedy of the revolution to be repeated."

One visitor said she was born in 1966 and was too small to know what was going on. "But this museum is meaningful. We need more places like this so Chinese people can know our history," she said.

- INDEPENDENT