‘Still the greatest.’ China remembers Mao but prefers to focus on his youth than later years

The duck was mostly eaten, the panel in the centre of the circular table had stopped moving and a man opposite was talking about his time as a Sent-Down Youth during the Cultural Revolution. Also known as Educated Youth, these were teenagers from the city who were sent to the countryside by Mao Zedong “to be re-educated by the poor farmers” from the late 1960s onwards.

Millions went to work on farms, including the young Xi Jinping, whose father was a celebrated revolutionary figure and a senior Communist Party official before he was purged and jailed during the Cultural Revolution. But some of the 16 million Sent-Down Youth worked as teachers in rural villages, educating the children of the poor farmers who were supposed to be re-educating them.

“Rural literacy improved during the 1970s and the people we taught were those who went to work in the cities in the 1980s and powered the industrial revolution,” the man said.

An academic analysis of Chinese local government datapublished in the American Economic Review in 2020 found that rural children exposed to Sent-Down Youth received more years of schooling. The study concluded that the urban youth not only raised the overall level of rural education but also reduced social inequality.

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The man said that although his parents had gone through a difficult, frightening time during the Cultural Revolution, he remembered it as a time of excitement.

“I think it depends on how you feel your life has turned out. If you’ve done well you think of your time as a Sent-Down Youth as a useful experience that toughened you up. But if you are disappointed with your life you will look back at that time and feel that chances were taken away from you.

“There is a gap in my education about the history of China before the 20th century because we were not allowed to read about it. But I think the generations that came later have a gap in theirs too because they don’t know about Mao.”

We were talking a couple of days before the 130th anniversary of Mao’s birth and although his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square was to be closed to the public for two days, there had been no public announcement about how the date would be commemorated. Every 10th anniversary has seen an official commemoration, and Xi led the previous one in 2013, soon after he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

The former Sent-Down Youth and the man next to him exchanged lines of Mao’s poetry which many Chinese people of their generation can remember like verses from the Bible or Shakespeare. “For me Mao is still the greatest. He always stayed close to the people, to the poor,” the man said.

Deng Xiaoping said that Mao was “70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong”, and this remains, more or less, the official view. Two television series commissioned to mark Mao’s 130th anniversary, one with 33 episodes and the other with 32, focus on his youth and official tributes avoid mentioning his final, more controversial years.

At Tiananmen Square on Tuesday, Xi and the other members of the standing committee of the politburo bowed three times before a seated statue of Mao. Later, at a symposium to mark the anniversary in the Great Hall of the People, Xi said Mao’s life “was one devoted to national prosperity, rejuvenation and people’s happiness”.

All Communist Party members must study Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, or Xi Jinping Thought for short. But Xi said that Mao Zedong Thought was “an invaluable spiritual wealth for our party and will guide our action in the long term”, adding that the best way to commemorate Mao was to advance his cause.

“Mao led the people in blazing a trail for adapting Marxism to the Chinese context, forging the great, glorious and correct [Chinese Communist Party] and founding the New China with the people being masters of the country,” Xi said.

“On the new journey we must never forget our original aspiration and founding mission, and must remain confident in our history and grasp historical initiative so as to steadily advance the great cause of Chinese modernisation.”