La campanya d'Educació Socialista i les Quatre Neteges com antecedents de la Revolució Cultural

HUANG, S.-m. (1998). The Spiral Road. Change in a Chinese Village trough the eyes of a Communist Party Leader. Boulder, Westview Press. Pàg. 73.

"In September or October of 1964, a new political campaign was brewing in rural China. It was the Four Cleanups Campaign (siqing yundong), which was a part of the Socialist Education Campaign (shehui zhuyi jiaoyu). The purpose of this campaign was to re-educate or to weed out incompetent cadres in lower-level rural government units. Fifteen years had passed since the Liberation and the national leadership began to suspect that a lot of the original rural cadres had become corrupt since they held power for so long. The failure of the Great Leap Forward also contributed to morale and discipline problems among rural cadres. Three out of these four major 'cleanups' involved the rural political apparatus: local cadres or unit officials stealing public goods, accepting bribes, and abusing the work-point system. The last 'cleanup' was aimed at the impure elements, such as the sons or daughters of former landlords or rich peasants who might have sneaked back into the Party or cultivated friendships with rural Party cadres, thus regaining their lost power.
"The idea for this campaign came from then National Chairman Liu Shaoqi's wife, Wang Guangmei. In 1963, she collaborated with the first Party secretary of Hobei Province, Lin Tie, to carry out a campaign in a commune called Taoyuan Commune, in that province.

"You know," Party Secretary Ye turned to me and said in a serious tone, "the moment I was mature enough to participate in actual political campaigns was also the moment I lost much of my faith in politics. Several incidents occurred during the Four Cleanups Campaign that made me begin to question the means used to pursue our goals. The goal of this particular campaign wasn't bad. A lot of the original rural cadres were less than desirable and had indeed become corrupt. But in carrying out this campaign, many overzealous work teams often exceeded their authority. They encouraged members of the newly established Poor Peasants Association to attack the previous landlords and local cadres, even though they were not much better than those old cadres. Thus, there was a new reign of terror in the countryside, creating more friction at the village level.
"I still remember the first struggle session my teammates and I organized in that brigade. We used the brigade meeting hall to set up the podium, and to enhance our authority in the face of possible counter-attacks by former brigade cadres and landlords, we invited a high-level cadre from the prefecture government to come as an observer. The presence of this high-level cadre, we reasoned, would discourage any attempts by the former cadres to disrupt our meeting.
"The work team members and our superior from the prefecture office were seated on the podium. We ordered the Poor Peasants Association members to discuss past abuses of the five bad elements: the landlords, the rich peasants, the counter-revolutionaries, criminals, and rightists. We decided to attack the five bad elements first, to set an example for the villagers and to intimidate anyone who dared to challenge our authority. Members of the five bad elements were brought up to the podium and forced to kneel down facing the crowd.

"If we compare the actual practices of the Four Cleanups and of the Cultural Revolution, we can immediately see that in rural China, the Cultural Revolution was merely a continuation of the Four Clenups. To put it another way, we might say that the Cultural Revolution gave those who were defeated and humiliated during the previous campaign a chance to settle their old scores. Resentment and hatred in rural China had been cultivated and bottled up so much in previous campaigns that they could be ignited and exploded with a minimum inducement."