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205 In the spring of 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.1 Intended to cultivate “revolutionary successors” by giving young people a taste of the hardships that the rapidly aging revolutionary generation had endured in the course of its battle for power, the new mass campaign was supposed to prevent Soviet-style revisionism by promoting authentic proletarian culture. Millions of student Red Guards from across the country streamed to the sites where Mao and his comrades had once engaged in revolutionary struggle in hope of thereby acquiring their own proletarian bona fides. As a cradle of the Chinese Communist labor movement, Anyuan was a natural focal point for the campaign. The state-orchestrated attack on Communist Party vicechairman Liu Shaoqi as “China’s Khrushchev,” charged with having committed counterrevolutionary crimes dating back to his days at Anyuan, further ensured that the coal mining town would be a touchstone of national political contention and controversy. If the early years of the PRC had left any doubt, however, the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution made clear that outsiders’ interest in Anyuan had less to do with advancing the aspirations of the proletariat than with using (and misusing) their history to serve other agendas. Despite its ostensibly proletarian objectives, the Cultural Revolution brought the workers of Anyuan few tangible benefits aside from increased national (and international) notice. And yet, paradoxically, that era has been seared into the collective consciousness of Anyuan residents as a moment of immense pride, as a time when Chairman Mao reasserted the dignity and revolutionary authority of the Chinese working class in general and the Anyuan workers in particular. The nostalgia that many local inhabitants today express openly for that (now officially discred6 Mao’s Final Crusade Purifying the Revolutionary Tradition 206 / Mao’s Final Crusade ited) period, and for the man whose machinations lay behind it, speaks no doubt to dissatisfaction with aspects of the post-Mao reforms. It also points, however, to the powerful impact of effective cultural patronage on popular memories and mentalities. Although the cult of personality developed for Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution mirrored the earlier Stalinist cult of Liu Shaoqi in many respects, it drew from deeper and more diverse sources of inspiration. The Mao worship seen in China today reflects—albeit in refracted form—the lasting impact of Cultural Revolution rituals. The fervor of the Cultural Revolution evinced a distinctly religious quality. Spearheaded by sanctimonious Red Guard students and PLA soldiers, Mao’s final crusade bore more than a passing resemblance to a fundamentalist revival. Like other “great awakenings” in history, the movement was led by a messiah seeking to purify and preserve his true faith against the dual dangers of complacency and heresy. Haiyan Lee observes of Mao, “a godhead figure, he mobilized the Red Guards to ‘reproletarianize ’ the Party like a prophet calling on the salt of the earth to rechristen a corrupt world in a millenarian uprising.”2 The impact of the experience, again like other religious revivals, long outlived the high tide of evangelical zeal.3 red guard rampages Anyuan was introduced to the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution by Red Guard emissaries from the capital. In October 1966 the first Red Guard contingent, from the Beijing Mining Academy, arrived in Pingxiang County to “exchange revolutionary experiences” (chuanlian) and spearhead a “destroy the old, establish the new” (pojiu lixin) campaign. The first mission of these evangelists was to exorcise “false gods.” After putting up a big-character poster proclaiming that “Liu Shaoqi is a scab who sold out the workers,” the Red Guards ordered all Anyuan residents to remove any pictures or other images of Liu Shaoqi within twenty-four hours. At first Anyuan workers were reluctant to accept direction from these callow outsiders. Unwilling to turn their backs on a man whom many regarded as their benefactor, locals gathered in front of the workers’ club to debate the student zealots from Beijing. One incensed old miner, to the crowd’s amusement, pointed out that the Red Guards had not even been born in the 1920s and thus could not possibly know much about Liu’s activities at Anyuan. He thundered, “We order you to get the hell out of Anyuan within twenty-four hours!”4 Mao’s Final Crusade / 207 Like the rest of the country, however, Anyuan could not swim against the national tide for long. Liu’s defenders at Anyuan were silenced, and the northern Red Guards recruited local...

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