Saturday, January 8, 2022: 1:50 PM
Galerie 6 (New Orleans Marriott)
This study of the Cultural Revolution in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture shows the premeditation of Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group in the purge of ethnic Koreans and the role of Mao Zedong Thought in ethnic persecution. I argue that Mao intended to purge the ethnic Korean leaders because of their objections to the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and this political action soon expanded into ethnic persecution of the Koreans because the purge of the Korean leadership meant the end of their autonomy. In 1966, Chairman’s only adult male relative, Mao Yuanxin, was sent to Yanbian by Jiang Qing. As Mao Yuanxin started abolishing all the political legacies of the ethnic Korean leaders, his purge developed into ethnic persecution in Yanbian. Especially, his ideological attack on the ethnic Koreans’ privileges in Yanbian caused havoc on their cultural and political autonomy. In an ideological reversal, the Maoists in Yanbian turned Mao’s pre-1949 slogan “the class struggle takes the form of a national struggle” into a radical assertion that “ethnic contradiction is class contradiction.” Mao’s word was originally an appeal to Yanbian residents to regard their economic struggle with Japan as part of China’s broader national struggle but, with this new twist of rhetoric, it became a theory for criticizing their alleged deficiencies in class consciousness. The Maoists also invoked the doctrine of historical materialism to denounce Korean culture by characterizing it as an ethnic superstructure incompatible with China’s national economic base. They also charged that the Korean ethnic autonomy served to advance the narrow interests of a few to the detriment of the nation at large, in particular the Maoist vision of national unity. The Cultural Revolution in Yanbian reveals the inconsistencies between the Maoists’ universal ideal to liberate all exploited people and their ethnocentric methodology.