No, not everyone who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution thinks it was a “horror.” On the contrary, there are other voices with a very different understanding. But they generally do not get heard, precisely because these voices do not fit into and serve the dominant, anticommunist narrative.

Tens of millions of young people took active and conscious part in the Cultural Revolution. They joined a mass movement and struggle to combat capitalist restoration and to further revolutionize society. For many of these people, this was a profoundly transformative experience—a period of history, a time of their lives, that continues to inspire them.

Read the interviews with these witnesses to and participants in the Cultural Revolution. These are people who took up the great debates, answered the call to go to the countryside to learn from and share knowledge with peasants, and who were involved in an unprecedented process to change society and thinking.

• Learn about how the Cultural Revolution affected attitudes towards gender and how young women were being empowered to participate in society in an all-around way.
• Find out about the revolution in art and culture.
• Hear what it was like for a young peasant to participate in the Cultural Revolution at the grass-roots village level.

These participants in the Cultural Revolution are now scholars in the U.S. They convey not just their “lived experience” but the essentially liberating character of the Cultural Revolution. They uphold the Cultural Revolution, but have their criticisms as well. Their voices and scholarship challenge the widely promoted, anti-Cultural Revolution “memoir” literature that passes as historical fact and final verdict.

You need to hear these voices.

Listen to Dongping Han and Ann Tompkins, interviewed on KPFA-San Francisco by Peter Phillips of the Project Censored Show about their experiences during the Cultural Revolution in China.

Watch videos of the presentations at the major symposium on the Cultural Revolution, held in Berkeley, California in 2009, “Rediscovering the Cultural Revolution: Art and Politics, Lived Experience, Legacies of Liberation”: 

Art and Politics in the Cultural Revolution

International Impact and Historical Significance of the Cultural Revolution

Read Their Interviews

Read excerpts from interviews with people who grew up in the cities and in rural China, and who discuss the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution:

Dongping Han, Professor of History, Warren Wilson College: on his book The Unknown Cultural Revolution

Bai Di, Director of Chinese and Asian Studies, Drew University: on growing up in revolutionary China

Wang Zheng, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Michigan: “We had a dream that the world can be better than today”

Books by first-hand observers of the Cultural Revolution

Gao, Mobo C.F. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

Han, Donping. The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.

Xueping, Zhong, Zheng, Wang, and Bai, Di, eds. Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.