The other day , a young manager came up and showed me a book he was reading . It was a memoir of a Chinese woman , recalling her life during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. Having a glance at the cover of the book displaying a Chinese girl with a red scarf on her neck , I realized I should have known what the book was about, because the author is at the same age as I and both of us experienced the same history. The young manager told me from the book he learned that during the Revolution, people ,especially those young people with sleeve emblems “ Red Guard ” or “ Little Red Guard ”( red guard of Chairman Mao Zhedong ) were crazy under the political slogan “ Break Away the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) “ , downing with those who were classified as “ Class Enemies — landlords, rich peasants , bosses, anti-revolutionists and right- wing- elements, etc, parading them through the streets and denouncing them publicly , searching their houses and confiscating their possessions, cutting their longer and narrower trousers which were regarded as in Capitalist Living Style…… That is ridiculous ! Of course , when I asked for his opinions after reading this book, the young man showed naturally his feeling of repugnance or loathing like all readers do.
Yes , it is a human catastrophe and a shame of China. It had a pernicious influence on the society of the contemporary China even in the world . But when we are learning this historical event , we should not notice just the history facts themselves or be abhorrent of people’s ridiculous behaviors. We should ask more “ Whys ” .
The Cultural Revolution happened in China had very complicated social , political, ideological and cultural background and historical factors . This event had not only relations with Chinese people’s methods of thinking deeply rooted by feudal ideas of thousands of years , but had also a great relation with theories of the international communist movement which was one of the results led by the capitalist industrialization .
As I know , nowadays, many Chinese young people learn little from this history, they cannot realize that it is the feudal thoughts that prevent us from pursuing freedom of democracy and they ignore the serious facts in which human rights are trampled by the dictatorship . But on the other hand, young people in the West are lack of knowledge or experience of socialism ,communism even capitalism itself . They just condemn the communist as an evil , but ignore the fact that there are many communist features in today’s capitalist system, too.
If we do not learn lessons from the history, we would duplicate our mistakes and tragedies would be repeated . If we consider our problems with illogical ideas or prejudices , we cannot choose a better system for ourselves. This could happen in China, but it can happen everywhere in the world, too. Some crazier behaviors would appear in other places. Many current conflicts in the world present the same universal problems . So only with an insight into all those historical causes , can we have an entire and clear understand of this historical event itself and only with this kind of understanding , can we choose better life for ourselves.