Abstract
The cult of personality surrounding Mao Zedong peaked during the initial phase of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR, 1966–1969). China’s youth was mobilised behind the Chairman’s call to ‘bombard the headquarters’, and eagerly took part in Mao’s revolt against his own party. The role of the young Red Guards caught not only China but the world’s attention. It seemed that they followed Mao not as a political leader, but rather as a god, ‘the reddest of red suns in all our hearts’. This chapter will examine the case for interpreting this phenomenon in terms of ‘political religion’. It will suggest that there is a strong case for arguing that the irrational and totalistic nature of the mass movement during the GPCR can be interpreted fruitfully as a secular theology. It urges caution, however, in using the term wholesale when considering the élite discourse which initiated the Cultural Revolution, and which did not seek actively to create a secular priesthood and religious community. It also suggests that the religious models most appropriate for comparison are not those of pre-modern China, but rather the European derived religious models which shaped Western political religions, and were well-known and understood by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
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Notes
See, for example, Frederick Teiwes with Warren Sun, ‘From a Leninist to a Charismatic Party: The CCP’s Changing Leadership, 1937–1945’, Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, 1995).
Emilio Gentile, R. Mallett (trans.), ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1/1 (Summer 2000), p. 39.
For innovative work on the impact of the Great War in East Asia, see Frederick Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA, 1999)
and Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge, 2005).
Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, 1996).
There is a wealth of scholarship on the May Fourth movement, including key works such as Chow (1960) and Schwarcz (1986). An attempt to bring together some of these threads of interpretation about the Movement and its legacy is Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford, 2004).
The new wave of studies from post-1949 archives show how local level society often changed less than the centralised state claimed. See, for example, Neil Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family (2000).
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© 2008 Rana Mitter
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Mitter, R. (2008). Maoism in the Cultural Revolution: A Political Religion?. In: Griffin, R., Mallett, R., Tortorice, J. (eds) The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230241633_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230241633_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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