Sixty years ago, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade of fanaticism that consumed China. Perhaps 2 million people, from top leaders to impoverished farmers, were killed or driven to suicide for political “crimes” or their family background. Tens of millions more, including the father of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were hounded.
The party, and most of those who lived through the movement, prefer to forget it. But the years of chaos, violence, zealotry and stagnation, which ended only with Mao’s death, have left deep scars. Among the many victims was a factory worker whose young sons grew up to become celebrated artists. Their work addressed the devastation wrought by the era, including through satirical images of Mao.
Now the elder son, Gao Zhen, is paying. Detained since August 2024, he finally stood trial in March for “defaming national heroes and martyrs” – a law that did not exist when he made the sculptures, or even when they were displayed. The verdict has yet to be announced. As his brother, Gao Qiang, observed in a statement: “This situation is exactly what those works were meant to critique.”
Gao Zhen is not a political activist, but an artist. These works, born of family trauma, could hardly be more personal. The two brothers were always cautious in displaying art to which authorities might take exception; Guilt, which depicted Mao bowing to an image of their parents, was shown only in private. They drew back from more sensitive work as the political constraints tightened in China under Mr Xi. They also moved to the US. None of this kept them safe: Gao was arrested on a visit home to see family. There could hardly be a clearer example of how the space for not only dissent, but creative expression, has been squeezed.
The Cultural Revolution was the great rupture in communist China. It helped produce the abrupt post-Mao turn towards reform and opening. Yet six decades later, its legacy endures. It is evident in China’s culture, economy and politics, and above all in the psychological damage it wreaked. It was an era when obeying the political line – which shifted moment by moment – was all.
It was also, not unrelatedly, an era in which Mao’s credo that “there is no such thing as art for art’s sake” reached its apogee. Decadent western or classical works were excised or destroyed. A tiny, doctrinaire repertoire replaced them: “Only a solitary flower bloomed in the garden of Chinese arts, and even then it was made of plastic,” the scholar Ba Jin wrote afterwards.
The artistic, legal and personal realms where Chinese individuals carved out some space in the years after Mao’s death are once again tightly bound to the will of the party and the man at its head. In a petition for Gao’s release, artists, scholars and others from China described the case as “repeating the persecutions of the Cultural Revolution”.
Gao, now 70, is said to be in poor health. And once again, a child is paying for the accusations against his father. Gao’s wife, Zhao Yaliang, and eight-year-old son, Gao Jia – an American citizen – have not been permitted to leave China since Gao’s detention. Neither is accused of wrongdoing; neither was a witness in the case. They should now be allowed to return home, alongside the artist, who should never have been detained.