Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism by Richard Curt Kraus

Author:Richard Curt Kraus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0231051824
Publisher: New York Columbia University Press
Published: 1981-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

He enumerated instances of victimization of young people from bad family backgrounds who were blocked from educational opportunities or job promotions. “If things continue to develop like this, how will they differ from the caste system of the blacks in the United States [and] the untouchables in India?”[27]

“The Theory of Family Background” concluded with a query. Why was it that bourgeois elements sought to oppress young people of bourgeois family background? The fact that they did so was proof that they were not members of the same class. They had discovered that the five red categories were easier to control than young persons who had been raised in a personal environment of class struggle. They were the ones who had taken the formula, father’s class designation equals child’s family background, and changed it to father’s class designation equals child’s class designation. In so doing, they sought to confuse the contours of class struggle in China, and they had succeeded especially well in the case of cadre children who had adopted the theory of blood relationships. Under these conditions, two new social strata had been formed: one a privileged stratum and the other a stratum subject to discrimination. This situation hurt the will of many revolutionary youth, and it caused the revolutionary ranks to grow smaller. Those whose oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisie had been greatest should be able to offer the staunchest resistance.[28]

Yu Luoke had initially drafted his essay early in the Cultural Revolution, in the summer of 1966, and it had been distributed as far as Tianjin, Wuhan, and Guangzhou by October.[29] But it was not until early 1967 that family background became the subject of an important national debate. Following the Red Flag New Year’s editorial attacking the “reactionary couplet,” Chen Boda encouraged a public discussion of the family background issue, indication that the radical leadership of the Cultural Revolution was prepared to weaken the “royalist” Red Guard organizations by allowing five-category youth to express their grievances.

In the course of this national debate, millions of youthful Red Guards learned that the Maoist leaders regarded the bloodline theory’s obsession with family background as a harmfully misleading substitution for the revolutionary tradition of class analysis. Defenders of natural redness were thereby deprived of their slogans and were compelled to advance their views more discreetly.[30] Yu Luoke’s essay was widely defended, although many who recognized the injustice of only considering family background also criticized his article for reducing the question of parental influence to insignificance.[31]

This debate on family background was not resolved in a clearly decisive manner. Public discussion came to an abrupt halt after April 1967, when Qi Benyu criticized Yu Luoke’s essay on behalf of the Cultural Revolution Group.[32] Although Yu’s advocacy of completely disregarding family background proved unacceptable to the Maoist leadership, the condemnation of natural redness continued, and by April, the Maoist view that behavior was the ultimate test for measuring revolutionaries was apparently gaining in acceptance.[33] Young people of bad family background had won a partial victory in this episode.

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