I arrived in Washington in April 1989, when the US capital had just reawoken from the snow and icy winds of winter. The city was full of warm breezes and sunshine, and countless kites danced in the air. I raised my head to look up at the kites and at the clouds away to the west. After watching for a while I sat down on the green grass, and thought about the oath which I had just read in the Jefferson Memorial--Thomas Jefferson's solemn promise before God. His oath protected the free kites and seemed to be written on their streaming silk ribbons.

The oath below Jefferson's statue reads:

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Pens turned into daggers

Whenever I visit a memorial, I always take special notice of the hero's motto. The insights of outstanding people give me much food for thought. But I don't recall ever being so moved by any quotation as by these words of Jefferson's. The moment I read them, my mind was filled with thunder as a swirl of rushing thoughts flooded into my head.

As a scholar with a classical Marxist training, I respect outstanding Western political leaders but do not adulate them, and I have always maintained a questioning attitude towards their thinking. But Jefferson's words struck a deep chord in me. In the instant after I read them, I wanted to shout out and beg politicians and thinkers all over the world to pay attention. As for those who had long been aware of his words, I wanted them to refresh their memories. I especially wanted my motherland to take notice, and I hoped our ancient mountains and valleys could echo my call, just as they echoed the innocent songs of my childhood.

This oath expressed the conviction of an American thinker, but it also embraced the entirety of my instinctive concerns and objections. For the last few years, my country's press has constantly attacked me, and still does so today. If I am guilty of anything, it is that I unambiguously censure and rebel against any tyranny over the mind. In other words, in the Eastern world I raise a voice like Jefferson's. However, the epoch which Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln together created tells us that to search for truth and to speak out the truth one believes in is a god-given right. It can never be a crime, and the iron fist of political tyranny can never be justly directed against the natural and sacred human mind.

Of course, if those who despise me regard me as a heretic, this not without cause, because I really am different from the political radicals who murder my country and people with dogma. My words have broken free from the deadly little framework which they prescribe, to expose how dogma has assassinated my country's vitality. I really do use my pen to resist, and if I had to express all my resistance in one simple phrase, then I would choose the words of this American thinker's solemn oath.

During the years of the preposterous and unprecedented Cultural Revolution, I finally realized that the difference between Mao Zedong and Karl Marx was that Mao extended the scope of the powerful machinery of the dictatorship of the proletariat from the political and economic sphere into the domain of the human mind. The idea behind his "total dictatorship" was that to expropriate the expropriators only economically and politically was a half-measure: only if they were also expropriated mentally and spiritually would the job be complete.

When mainland China's band of political fraudsters raised high the red banner of "total dictatorship," the minds of countless intellectuals groaned in the most abject despair in the dark corners of the "cowsheds" and prisons. One by one they changed their pens into daggers, which they thrust daily into their own and into others' chests. Coerced by slaves and sycophants, they cursed themselves and their compatriots in the vilest language. They confessed to being hidden traitors and members of counterrevolutionary gangs, to being hideous demons and monsters from hell, to being infamous bandits attempting to block mankind's progress into paradise. They were forced, by people who pursued them as if hunting wild beasts, to on the one hand confess to their own crimes, and on the other to take the pens with which they had diligently practiced from childhood and thrust their points deep into their own throats, and then into all their convictions of peace and mercy. They accused, denounced and confessed, stinging like maddened wasps at others' and their own souls with each word, not sparing even the long-buried corpses of their ancestors. Drugged by a magic draft which made them "forget all fear of pain or embarrassment," their minds were subjected to every kind of insult to their humanity. At that time I was still young, and I escaped the dreadful fate of many old scholars and authors. Like countless millions of my compatriots I merely injected my spirited youthful emotions to that unique system of thought, and became part of a unified political machine, making my mind utter unfeeling cries.

History's most preposterous record of tyranny

When the banner of tyranny over the mind was raised high, all the books containing petals of human warmth were banned, and all the poems acknowledged the world over as the height of truth, goodness and beauty were regarded as poisonous weeds of the feudal and bourgeois classes. Not even Shakespeare and Tolstoy were spared. Dante, author of The Divine Comedy, was cast into the inferno, and the innocent Venus and Mona Lisa were given the ugliest of names. We were only allowed to read the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. Thus on the one hand we experienced the destruction of the raging storm of class struggle, and on the other hand we suffered an unbearable drought of the soul. The great hunger and thirst which this desert-like aridity brought made my own and my contemporaries' lives suddenly shrink like the mummies in an ancient Egyptian tomb. Nonetheless, my eyes still burned like beacons, and they read a record of tyranny over the mind which is not to be found in any of the treasure-houses of human culture. This record was written in the most bizarre book in human history, created in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. Every page was ghastly to read, and every page forced me to think rebellious thoughts. I wager that there are no thinkers of any other country under the blue sky who could have read that realistic blueprint of tyranny over the human soul as deeply and completely as me and my contemporaries. In terms of medicine, it contained all the pathogens of the human spirit; in terms of psychology, it contained all the perversions of the human psyche; in terms of religion, it contained all the devices of the devil; in terms of anthropology, it contained all the vestiges of bestiality in the human genome; and in terms of culture, it contained the accumulated dregs of all that is evil in human nature.

In the years when that tyranny was in force, there was not a single real intellectual who was able to lift his head and look calmly all around. They could only bow their heads, on which had been placed caps labelled "bourgeoisie," and look at their own pitiable toes. Those scholars who had furtively published articles about human nature and humanism became "bandits" to be denounced by all and sundry. The sane minds who had cautiously whispered that socialist countries need "love" too, became the concentrated targets of all hatred. The machine of dictatorship forced them to bow their heads lower than anyone else. The upright minds who had disseminated humanism were rewarded with out-and- out bestiality. In the 1960s, I never came into contact with humanism. I just ignorantly followed the tide and shouted the slogans of class struggle. Hence when I was made to bow my head, I could still open my eyes to read this preposterous, realistic book and gain a deep understanding of a wrongful era, and see how it turned the noble human race into a pack of dogs with their heads drawn in and their tails tightly between their legs, pitiful housepets who feared a beating every minute. If one wanted to escape this fate, if one didn't want to keep one's tail between one's legs, then one had to bare one's razor-sharp teeth and turn oneself into a wolf who ruled over the dogs and tore mercilessly at their flesh. I saw some people who had been called poets also become this kind of wild beast. Their bared teeth made a deeper impression on me than the stair-like lines of their poems.

I read that record of tyranny for ten years. I used up almost all my youth before I was through. When I read the final page, I had entered middle age. I hate that time, but I also recall it with gratitude. All the absurd events of that era make me deeply aware of the frailty of human nature. Just by passing through the dark cave of tyranny, humans are transformed as if by magic into cattle or ferocious beasts, and in an instant the results of millions of years of evolution turn to ashes on the cave floor. If humans lack the awareness to protect their minds, they will be doomed to suffer an immense disaster. To return to the world of beasts is so easy.

Freedom is worth more than a jewelled crown

Because I have lived under the sway of a tyranny over the mind, I understand its power. Today I have lifted my head from under the shadow of that tyranny and gained the right to my own human instincts, but I have the responsibility to inform those who have not experienced it. There is nothing poetic about my tale, but neither is it adulterated with falsehood. I must use accurate language to explain that the tyranny over the mind invented and created by one part of the human race is like an infinite coffin. It turns the whole human race into corpses, by first making corpses of their liveliest, noblest minds. Once the human mind, which has come into being over millions of years, enters the coffin of the spirit, life completely loses all consciousness of love. This is something which people who are happy may perhaps be unable to appreciate. I am sure that for me to tell this to people today is more important than the pretty and colorful words contributed by poets.

The USA is a very young country. It is blessed by heaven, for apart from its rich plains and its east and west coasts, it has benefited from an accident of history: its founding fathers quickly realized that they must reject any tyranny over the human mind. This awareness is of immeasurable value. It prevented them from madly and foolishly using the power of their political authority to unleash a revolution to destroy conscience and thought. I have now been in the USA six years, and I always look with questioning eyes to search for its faults. I see that the US is no utopia. This enormous machine powered by money is full of laughable examples of the tyranny of the machine. The stench of money which wafts through the streets and offices often stifles me. But they would never think of regarding "total dictatorship" as a sacred banner, and their ideology has never imprisoned the human mind in cowsheds and pigsties. Their overdeveloped technology and employment system also causes the alienation of part of the human mind, but in their laws and attitudes they protect the dignity and value of the human soul. Any mind can freely develop its own voice. The enormous machine of state is absolutely unable to interfere with the beating of any artery. The right which they give to the soul is the right never to be interfered with, never to be violated, never to be enslaved. It is the right to sing as freely as the birds flying in the mountains. This right is placed above everything. I should state frankly that I envy this right. It has more value than any jewel-encrusted crown. And what pleases me is that they actually write Jefferson's motto on the memorial's guest book, to let people collectively reject all tyranny over the human mind.

It is six or seven years since I visited the Jefferson Memorial. These past few years I have been to many parts of the world, but I can never forget that visit to Washington, and I can never forget Jefferson's oath. The grass there has turned from yellow to green and from green to yellow, but every spring exuberant kites fly in the sky there. I seem to see how the pioneer's words of conviction are written on the streamers of each of the kites. When I think of this a wish rises in my heart: I hope that every human mind can be as free as those kites, for the sky and the earth are theirs. Any attempt to ride roughshod over them in any way should by now have become a bizarre story of the past.

(Liu Zaifu/United Daily News, 16 May 1996/tr. by Robert Taylor)

Why Did Mao Zedong Start the Cultural Revolution?

A full 30 years have passed since the start of the "Cultural Revolution," which was personally initiated and controlled by Mao Zedong. The directive issued on 16 May 1966 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is taken as the official start of the Cultural Revolution. The arrest of Jiang Qing and the other members of the "Gang of Four" after Mao's death in 1976 is seen as its official end.

The ten-year Cultural Revolution was formally repudiated and defined as a period of "internal chaos" by the 3rd Plenum of the CPC's 11th National Party Congress Central Committee, and is widely termed a "disaster." Mainland intellectuals rank the Cultural Revolution with Hitler's fascist atrocities as one of the two greatest disasters visited on humanity this century. The CPC's authoritative official theorist Hu Qiaomu has also described the Cultural Revolution as a disaster "unparalleled in a thousand years of Chinese or even world history."

By initiating this "revolution," Mao not only destroyed those people he saw as his political enemies, but also unleashed an unprecedented wave of frenzied persecution throughout the land. According to an unpublished mainland document, during the Cultural Revolution there were over 1.3 million "abnormal deaths," i.e. deaths from various kinds of violence. Just the indictments for the trials in 1980 of members of the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing factions cited more than 740,000 victims of persecution, of whom over 34,700 had died. From the state president down to ordinary citizens, being labelled a "counterrevolutionary" would at the very least bring one public humiliation and criticism, and at worst one might be killed and one's family's and friends' lives blighted.

But unlike the crimes of the Nazis, which were long ago consigned without dispute to the pillory of history, 30 years on this unprecedented disaster in China is still the subject of unresolved doubts and controversy, the focus of which is the evaluation of Mao. The communist authorities in mainland China continue to spare no efforts to maintain Mao's exalted status and to gloss over his monstrous crimes, refusing to rattle at his halo, and even overseas some people are enraptured by Mao's nationalism and idealism, and blind to his basically treacherous and despotic nature.

The debate over Mao's reasons for initiating the Cultural Revolution is an example. Some commentators take the view that the way Mao gave the people the right to "rebel" and called on them to rise up against the bureaucracy which oppressed them, undoubtedly constituted a democratic movement. And Mao's rapprochement with the USA during the Cultural Revolution and his resolute opposition to the Soviet Union was even more a demonstration of national moral courage. People who take this view believe this is the reason why Mao is popularly deified to this day.

Assumptions like these fly completely in the face of the facts. The causes behind the Cultural Revolution can be traced back to the 1956 congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Khrushchev denounced the dead Stalin. The anti- communist uprisings which subsequently swept through Poland and Hungary sowed the seeds of the Sino-Soviet split. They clearly also sowed the seeds of the later collapse of the Soviet Union.

As the heir to Stalinism, Mao naturally took this especially to heart. From 1959 when Communist China and the Soviet Union fell out, to the Chinese communists' vehement campaign in the early 1960s to "criticize and oppose revisionism," a clear thread was visible throughout, as expressed in the slogan which rang into every corner of mainland China with the new flag of the Cultural Revolution: "Down with Chinese Khrushchevs large and small!" Mao's "May 16 Directive" also stressed particularly that "characters like Khrushchev are sleeping in our midst." The campaign was intended to overthrow the "revisionist elements" lurking in the ranks of the Party and government. The Chinese Khrushchev Mao had in mind was his heir apparent, Liu Shaoqi. There is now evidence that Liu really did not approve of Mao's anti-revisionist line, and Deng Xiaoping has shown by his actions since the Cultural Revolution that he really is a "capitalist roader." Therefore Mao's initiating the Cultural Revolution was entirely an attempt to maintain a rigid Stalinist system, and in no way intended to give the people democracy.

In terms of China's prior internal situation, the reasons for the Cultural Revolution are connected with the "Great Leap Forward" campaign. That campaign, for which Mao's recklessness was largely to blame, led to the great famine of 1959-61 in which at least 20 million people died. The famine provoked factional struggles within the CPC. Mao used dictatorial methods to suppress the Peng Dehuai faction which pleaded on behalf of the people, but the ascendancy of the Liu-Deng pragmatist faction gave Mao an uneasy sense that he would lose his supremacy. Therefore he joined forces with Lin Biao and by a rapid series of actions, used his status to whip up an "anti-revisionist" struggle within China. Thus when the Peking Opera "Hai Rui Ba Guan" ("Hai Rui is Removed From Office") was criticized as being a plea on behalf of the disgraced Peng Dehuai, it lit the fuse which set off the Cultural Revolution.

As Li Zhisui, who served as Mao's personal physician for 20 years, rightly asserts, the reason Mao so ruthlessly persecuted party leaders whose views differed from his own was that he feared they would castigate him after his death, just as Khrushchev had denounced Stalin.

This was a state of mind typical of traditional Chinese emperors. They all hoped that their achievements and fame would be venerated. When Mao gave an interview to the US author Edgar Snow in 1964, he revealed a feeling that things were coming to an end. He saw a world trend towards casting off communist totalitarianism, and his domestic policies had had enormous negative consequences. His feeling of having no way forward can be imagined. But he was not ready to throw in the towel. He was a fighter who had never admitted defeat all his life, and more importantly he had at his disposal the absolute power which the CPC's system gave him. So he decided to embark on a last-ditch struggle. In his letter to Jiang Qing at the time of launching the Cultural Revolution, he predicted that after his death, the rightists were sure to come to power.

These were the reasons behind the start of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966. We can see that it was the result of Mao Zedong's deliberate scheming. In a dictatorial society in which the CPC's rule was absolute, to dupe the students and youth of the country was a very easy matter indeed.

The first big-character poster, personally approved by Mao Zedong, was pasted up at Beijing University. It was covered in lists of the "Counter revolutionary" crimes of people criticized at "struggle meetings."（courtesy of Chinese Refugees Relief Association）

In the Cultural Revolution, the call to "read Chairman Mao's works, do as Chairman Mao says, and work according to Chairman Mao's instructions" was not merely a slogan, but an article of faith. Intellectuals were forced to give up independent thought. （courtesy of Chinese Refugees' Relief Association）