Struggle sessions were usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, where "students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents".[6][9][10]Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support.[5][9][10] In particular, the denunciation of prominent "class enemies" was often conducted in public squares and marked by large crowds of people who surrounded the kneeling victim, raised their fists, and shouted accusations of misdeeds.[5][9][10][11]
Etymology
The expression comes from pīpàn (批判, 'to criticize and judge') and dòuzhēng (鬥爭, 'to fight and contest'), so the whole expression conveys the message of "inciting the spirit of judgment and fighting." Instead of saying the full phrase pīpàn dòuzhēng, it was shortened to pīdòu (批鬥).[9][10] The term refers to
class struggle; the session is held, ostensibly, to benefit the target, by eliminating all traces of
counterrevolutionary, reactionary thinking.[9][10]
History
Origins and development
Struggle sessions developed from similar ideas of criticism and
self-criticism in the
Soviet Union from the 1920s. Chinese communists resisted this at first, as struggle sessions conflicted with the Chinese concept of "
saving face". However, these sessions became commonplace at
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meetings during the 1930s due to public popularity.[12]
Struggle sessions emerged in China as a tactic to secure the allegiance of the Chinese people during the
Land Reform Movement (which ended in 1953).[13] That campaign sought to mobilize the masses through intensive propaganda followed by "speak bitterness" sessions (訴苦, sùkǔ, 'give utterance to grief') in which peasants were encouraged to accuse land owners.[14][15]
The strongest accusations in the speak bitterness sessions were incorporated into scripted and stage-managed public mass accusation meetings (控訴大會, kòngsù dàhuì). Cadres then cemented the peasants' loyalty by inducing them to actively participate in violent acts against landowners. Later struggle sessions were adapted to use outside the CCP as a means of consolidating control of areas under its jurisdiction.[16][17][18]
During the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), struggle sessions were widely conducted by the
Red Guards across mainland China.[3][4][9][10] In the early phase of the revolution (e.g., the "
Red August"), mass violence spread over campuses, where teachers and other educators were abusively subjected to frequent struggle sessions, humiliated, and beaten by Red Guards who were their students.[3][4][20] Top officials in the country such as
Liu Shaoqi,
Peng Dehuai,
Tao Zhu were "struggled against" (subjected to "struggle sessions") and persecuted to death during the revolution.[1][2][21][22] According to one source of the classified official statistics, nearly 2 million Chinese were killed and another 125 million were either persecuted or "struggled against" during the Cultural Revolution.[3]
After the Cultural Revolution, struggle sessions were disowned in China starting from the Boluan Fanzheng period, when the reformers, led by
Deng Xiaoping, took power.[23][24] Deng and other senior officials prohibited struggle sessions and other kinds of Mao-era violent political campaigns, and the primary focus of Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government shifted from "
class struggle" to "
economic construction".[25][26]
A struggle session of "San Jia Cun" (Three-Family Village) held by the military (1966), targeting three government officials of
Beijing:
Deng Tuo,
Wu Han, and Liao Mosha.[27]
Economic campaigns sought to improve conditions, often by increasing production in particular sectors of the economy.
Ideological campaigns sought to change people's thinking and behaviour.
Struggle sessions were similar to ideological campaigns, but "their focus is on the elimination of the power base and/or class position of enemy classes or groups."[29]
The process of struggle sessions served multiple purposes. First, it demonstrated to the masses that the party was determined to subdue any opposition (generally labeled “class enemies”), by violence if necessary. Second, potential rivals were crushed. Third, those who attacked the targeted foes became complicit in the violence and hence invested in the state. All three served to consolidate the party's control, which was deemed necessary because party members constituted a small minority of China's population.[16][17][18]
Both accusation meetings and mass trials were largely propaganda tools to accomplish the party's aims.
Klaus Mühlhahn, professor of China studies at
Freie Universität Berlin, wrote:
Carefully arranged and organized, the mass trials and accusatory meetings followed clear and meticulously prearranged patterns. Dramatic devices such as staging, props, working scripts, agitators, and climactic moments were used to efficiently engage the emotions of the audience—to stir up resentment against the targeted groups and mobilize the audience to support the regime.[30][31]
Julia C. Strauss observed that public tribunals were "but the visible
dénouement of a show that had been many weeks in preparation".[32]
Accounts
Anne F. Thurston, in Enemies of the People, gave a description of a struggle session for the professor
You Xiaoli: "I had many feelings at that struggle session. I thought there were some bad people in the audience. But I also thought there were many ignorant people, people who did not understand what was happening, so I pitied that kind of person. They brought workers and peasants into the meetings, and they could not understand what was happening. But I was also angry."[33]
^
abcSullivan, Lawrence R. (2011). "Struggle sessions". Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party. p. 390.
^
abLu, Xing (2004). "Denunciation rallies". Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. pp. 140–141.
^Fang, Jucheng; Jiang, Guinong.
"第九章 颠倒乾坤的"文化大革命"" [Chapter 9 The "Cultural Revolution" that turned everything upside down]. People's Net (in Chinese). Archived from
the original on 2007-02-21. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
^Lipman, Jonathan Neaman; Harrell, Stevan (1990). Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture. SUNY Press. pp. 154–157.
ISBN9780791401156.
OCLC18950000.
^Li, Lifeng (2015). "Rural Mobilization in the Chinese Communist Revolution: From the Anti-Japanese War to the Chinese Civil War". Journal of Modern Chinese History. 9 (1): 95–116.
doi:
10.1080/17535654.2015.1032391.
S2CID142690129.
^
abWu, Guo (March 2014). "Speaking Bitterness: Political Education in Land Reform and Military Training Under the CCP, 1947–1951". The Chinese Historical Review. 21 (1): 3–23.
doi:
10.1179/1547402X14Z.00000000026.
S2CID144044801.
^
abSolomon, Richard H. (1971). Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. pp. 195–200.
ISBN9780520018068.
OCLC1014617521.
^Yu, Frederick T. C. (1967). "Campaigns, Communications, and Development in Communist China". In Lerner, Daniel (ed.). Communication and Change in the Developing Countries. Honolulu, HI: East-West Center Press. pp. 201–202.
ISBN9780824802172.
OCLC830080345.
^Strauss, Julia C. (2011). "Traitors, Terror, and Regime Consolidation on the Two Sides of the Taiwan Straits: 'Revolutionaries' and 'Reactionaries' from 1949 to 1956". In Thiranagama, Sharika; Kelly, Tobias (eds.). Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 105.
ISBN9780812242133.
OCLC690379541.