‘Why US and China are both stalked by concerns about the Cultural Revolution’

Deng Xiaoping: “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white
as long as it catches mice”

All this talk of America’s Great Cultural Revolution and how it’s like China’s of 1966-77, reminds me of my days working at a People’s Commune just outside Beijing in 1977. This was part of our our “open door schooling” (开门办学), a Cultural Revolution idea that I thought, then and in retrospect, was not too bad. We were sent our to work with the peasants, to learn from them, to find out about real life and natural-born revolutionaries. We loved it. Especially after the frigid cold of our classrooms, which following the Tangshan earthquake of November’76, were tents on the sports field.
Of all the class study I did at the Peking Languages Institute during those epochal years of 1976 and 1977, my most vivid memories were of those early spring days in ‘77 working the fields, picking and packing Jiucai, a kind of garlic-flavoured spring onion. And how difficult  it was. And how hard to understand the guttural peasant accents, right there in rural Peking, right by the modern mandarins and their pure Mandarin, these earth-beaten folk, leathery skin, hard hands, quick, shy smiles, their Chinese, their peasant language of rolled “r”s and swallowed vowels, nothing like our classroom teachers queen’s Mandarin.
We didn’t sleep at the commune. I guess there wasn’t enough room for us, and in any case they’d not have wanted the peasants to pick up any bad thoughts from we foreigners. They were, by the way, called “peasants” in the Chinese of those days, part of the favoured threesome of “workers, peasants, soldiers”.  We took meals in the fields. After two months I got the bill - 2 yuan 20 fen. Fifty cents. Cheap, even in those days.
On the bus one day I spotted a slogan painted on a village wall. It said — or had said — “sternly criticise the arch unrepentant capitalist reader Deng Xiaoping”. In those days there were no advertisements in China, anywhere. The only things on walls were propaganda. After a while you ignored them, just as the Chinese did, especially our peasant hosts. What caught my attention was the the three characters of “Deng Xiaoping” had been painted over but were still visible. What was painted over was another set of three characters —四人邦 — meaning “Gang of Four”. “Deng Xiaoping” in black paint, the “Gang of Four” in red paint. Look, and you see one version; squint, and you see the other.  The capriciousness of Chinese politics in one graffito.
I took a photo which I sent to a mate of mine in the media and it duly appeared in the Economist, with a caption to that effect — rhe capriciousness of Chinese politics in one picture.
So what I’m wondering is: if the US cultural revolution continues along the path of the Chinese one of forty-odd years ago, could it, too, suddenly flip on a dime? Could the woke-erati be painted over, overthrown by some counter revolution?
I doubt it for two reasons. One, things were really a lot worse in China of ‘76 than they are in America of ‘20. What Mao called “contradictions” in society had to become “acute” before action — or re-action— took place. Two: I suspect that if one delves into what’s going on in the US now we will find more differences than similarities between that and China’s GCPR.
Related: Wang Xiangwei article in this very issue in today’s SCMP
Earleir Post: Mao and American revolutions.