How To Stand On Mao's Right
Harrowing excerpts about the Chinese Cultural Revolution from "The Man On Mao's Right" by Ji Chaozhu and their parallels to the modern American left
Comrades: We are all on Mao’s right, so we are counterrevolutionaries who must be denounced in struggle sessions.
Ji Chaozhu witnessed in graphic detail the birth of Communist China and its violent spasms. Born in 1929, he was forced to flee China as a boy to escape the Japanese invasion. He attended high school at Horace Mann in New York City and college at Harvard. In 1950, he betrayed his new country’s generosity and returned to China. He served as a translator for the CCP as it negotiated the end of the Korean War with America.
Ji quickly rose through the ranks to become the personal interpreter for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and other high ranking cadres for 20+ years. He was the first non-elite official to appear in a newspaper photograph next to Mao in 1971, hence the name of the book. He observed the Party’s machinations through the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Since the left always eats its own, he was purged and reeducated then rehabilitated. He met every US President from Nixon to Clinton and was appointed as China’s Ambassador to the UK from 1987-1991.
Ji’s memoir The Man on Mao’s Right is similar to Sidney Rittenberg’s The Man Who Stayed Behind. Both are cautionary tales of American-educated useful idiots who should have known better. Their naïveté turns into cynicism and self-preservation. Ji’s accounts of the cultural revolution are among the most graphic ever written. I will highlight them below.
Mao’s wife Jiang Qing was a toxic theater kid. You could describe Jill Biden and any DEI longhouse commissars the same way:
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had once been an actress, was now playing a major role in Mao’s plans. She was universally disliked by those who knew her. Paranoid, controlling, jealous, ambitious, childish, and manipulative, she had long ago ceased being a true wife and had become an attack dog of Mao’s. She would later say that she was Mao’s dog and she bit anyone he told her to bite.
Propagandists covered for Mao’s decline, just like MSM bootlickers said Biden was “sharp as a tack”:
Chairman Mao made his famous hour-long swim in the dangerously swift Yangtze River near Wuhan… Photos and newsreels of the 72-year-old swimming appeared around the world. Of course, the photos did not show that he was surrounded by bodyguards and other strong swimmers. Nothing Mao did was casual, and this publicity stunt was calculated to show that he was still strong and vigorous. The effect on his status with the population was electrifying. Lin Biao, who had been nurturing the cult of Mao, made a speech to the Politburo in which he declared, “Chairman Mao is a genius… One single sentence of his surpasses 10,000 of ours.”
The horror of the Chinese Cultural Revolution should be mandatory teaching in schools so it never happens again:
Entire libraries are filled with personal and official accounts of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution - the name given the decade between August 1966 and the death of Mao in September 1976. Millions died, and for every person who died an untold number suffered in some way. Like the European Holocaust of World War II, the Cultural Revolution was so horrific and irrational that people all over the globe wonder how it could have happened. So do we Chinese.
A leftist dictator weaponizes wokeness on campuses:
Mao had come back to town from his semi-retirement, gotten rid of anyone who had or might have challenged his renewed primacy, and replaced them with sycophants, fanatics, and yes-people who, with an eye on his inevitable death, jockeyed for political power. Mao had again scored a decisive and subversive victory by arousing the masses - only this time the masses were idealistic students instead of downtrodden farmers with mouths to feed. And they were given free rein.
Defund the Police and the Summer of Love:
The police were encouraged not only to stand back but to help foment the carnage. Security Minister Xie Fuzhi issued a memo to his police commanders in which he asked, “Should Red Guards who kill people be punished? My view is that if people are killed, they are killed; it’s no business of ours… The people’s police should stand on the side of the Red Guards, sympathize with them and provide them with information… about the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists.
Mass brutality and anarcho-tyranny ensued as the left ate its own:
What resulted from this combination of the youthful instinct to rebel and the utter lack of restraint resembled Lord of the Flies… It has been estimated that the Red Guards, some as young as 13, were responsible for the beating death of one person on every block in Beijing. This was going on all across the country. To use an American term for hooliganism, it was state-sanctioned “wilding” on a societal scale in the most populous nation on the planet. People were stopped on the street and interrogated about their backgrounds and often beaten, even if they had nothing to hide. Children turned in their parents, assisting in the mayhem. Colleagues turned on one another. Wives denounced husbands, and vice versa.
The second amendment prevented Kyle Rittenhouse and many others from the fate of Lao She:
One of the early victims of the Cultural Revolution was eminent 67-year-old writer Lao She, who was dragged from his Beijing home by mobs of Red Guards. Along with two dozen other intellectuals, they were taken to a former Confucian temple. Their heads were shaved while being beaten, punched, and screamed at… their faces were smeared with black ink (“black capitalist”). They were made to wear signs identifying them as demons and spirits, then beaten to a pulp. When Lao She was finally sent home, his wife had to cut off his clothes because they were so caked with blood. Medical treatment was out of the question. No hospital would dare admit him; no doctor would dare treat him. The next day, he managed to walk to a lake near the Forbidden City, where he drowned himself.
Chinese Boomers are similar to their American counterparts, just substitute “reactionary” with “racist”:
The Red Guards were the children of the revolution, most of them born at the time of liberation - China’s baby boomers. Now they had, with official encouragement, a revolution of their own to fight for Chairman Mao. Without supervision, they went on a rampage of destruction and death. Teachers were shot, buried alive, made to blow themselves up by sitting on packs of dynamite and lighting them. Husbands and wives were forced to beat each other, sometimes to death. The ways in which people were tortured and killed was limited only by the most sadistic of imaginations. A casual remark was all it took for the Red Guards to attack the home of a suspected capitalist roader, smash all their “feudal” and “bourgeois” belongings, and thrash the occupants. It didn’t matter whether it was an old man or the infant child of a “reactionary family”. There was no discrimination, and no one to appeal to.
Ji was given the Stalin comrade treatment and airbrushed out a photo when he had fallen out of favor:
Ji with Kissinger:
Ji translated for Mao’s last English-speaking visitor:
Hobnobbing with Presidents:
Remaining on Mao’s right in 2006:
DeepSeek has censored The Man To Mao’s Right, The Man Who Stayed Behind, and Tiananmen Square:
How To Groom Commissars (Part 4) - Sidney Rittenberg, "The Man Who Stayed Behind"
Comrades: Sidney Rittenberg is the original CCP baizuo useful idiot.
I remember when 51 members of the CCP’s intelligence community issued a statement denying Mao’s cultural revolution as being anything but clean and mostly peaceful.
I think the lesson of the Cultural Revolution and the Nazi era is that anyone can go down into that abyss. You also seem to say, and I agree, that the US narrowly avoided that fate. I would add, for now.