Xianlin Ji’s The Cowshed as a Study of Maoism as a Political Religion
The very prospect of speech vanished from Xianlin Ji as he inadequately burrowed into the familial walls of his home, the Maoist Red Guards demolishing his sense of identity and safety. Safety for an intellectual had become little more than a myth. Left powerless to stop the Red Guards, Ji was forced to submit for survival. Ji’s memoir, The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution highlights totalitarianism as a political religion because it details the cult-like replacement of traditional Chinese spirituality by a deified Mao and the Party as quasi-church together with dogmatic Maoist ideology. Ji as a scholar is conflicted by the application of his Buddhist teaching – “They may not have learned all that much about Buddhist history or beliefs, but they must have paid close attention to the Buddhist hell…” (2) – in the minds of his former students and in their betrayal, Ji is left with his poignant and raw thoughts. Replacing the triad of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism in Chinese spirituality was the deified form of Chairman Mao Zedong, immortal to his wayward followers while a source of immense anguish and suffering to the bourgeoisie. As such, Maoism functions as a de-facto religion, demanding devotion from the imprisoned elite. Ji elucidates the depths to which blind adherence to hard totalitarianism plunges its members, forcing them into an unbreakable cycle, a no-win binary of sufferer versus suffered. While the Chinese Cultural Revolution promised a plentiful and enriched existence, the ideal elements extended only to those willing to offer complete, undying allegiance to the movement. – Include data?
The Illusion of Progress as a Religious Trope in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
The lump in Ji’s throat nearly leaps through the page as tries to discuss the re-education camps that swept through China in the 1960s. In their revolutionary mindset, the peasants needed to teach the perfect way of thinking, to quash any counter-revolution. The unceasing march toward perfection has been a constant trait of totalitarian societies from the Hitlerian attempts at creating a master race to the so-called Great Purges of Stalinism. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was no exception. Rather than man being created in the image of God, striving for perfection through spirituality, the totalitarian system demands a measure of perfection through force. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn questioned the label affixed to these rudimentary endeavors for perfection, under an all-encompassing umbrella of progress. Solzhenitsyn wrote that, “Educated mankind readily put its faith in this Progress. And yet somehow no one pressed the issue: progress, yes, but in what? And of what?” (Solzhenitsyn, 544) With Mao Zedong firmly entrenched as the Great Leader in China and with the younger generation readily accepting his doctrine without so much as an inquisitive glance, Maoism became the de-facto replacement for traditional Chinese religion and philosophy during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.