Peng grow up in a very poor background. The family did not own any land; they have to work for landlords as tenants. Life was tough, until the New China was established in 1949. Peng, a 14 years old boy back then, and his family were allocated their own land, and had been living happily in the new Communist regime ever after. He was ready to put the dark memory as a tenant behind him, until he was called on to the stage of to speak twenty years later.
It was the winter of 1966, the heydays of the Cultural Revolution. The whole country was busy clearing out the ‘demons and evils’, i.e., the rich, the educated, or the elites in general. On that day, they were battering a guy who used to be the largest landlord in Peng’s village. Former tenants of this landlord were called on to the stage, and tell their stories about how evil the landlord was in the past, in tears and curses. The landlord was kneeling in the centre of the stage. The crowd was big and excited, often cheered when stories reached peaks, coupled with some beating on the landlord part. It was a great show and everyone was excited except for the poor guy who has been beating brutally both emotionally and physically.
When it is Peng’s turn, he told the crowd how tough life was in the old days – they did not have enough food for most of the time, not to mention clothes to keep them warm in winter. Of course, all of these sufferings was caused by the greedy and evil landlord, who took all of the best farmland in his village. Things went very well until the end of the story, when Peng unwisely added the following comment: “Actually he (the landlord) was not that bad, because he did feed us with meats when we were working for him to harvest the crops. That was always the best meals that I had for the whole year.”
The crowd went silent for a moment, and then roared back. Obviously, Peng was deeply confused, or even brainwashed by the ‘demons and evils’. How can a landlord be ‘not that bad’? They must be evil! They were the cause of all the sufferings and the dark days in the old China. They must be treated as cruelly as possible, so that they can learn their lessons, and be good person again, if ever possible (because they are so rotted!). The meeting turned into a mass public critic and education session for Peng, one of the most terrifying experience in his life. If not were his very poor background, which effectively classified him in the best category of citizens in China, he could be expelled to some remote hinterland to be ‘re-educated’ or even prosecuted. He never spoke a single kind word about any landlords ever since.
Chairman Mao and Hitler did something remarkably similar. Both of them successfully dehumanized their targets. For Hitler it is the Jews. He depicted them as evil and greedy. Chairman Mao push the game to another level: to dethrone the existing authority and the classes who controlled the wealth of the society, he depicted all landlords to be evil and greedy as well. Later when he needed to consolidate his power, or to weaken the power of the new elites, he made the whole country to believe that they are evil as well.
This raised two important questions. First, why is it important to dehumanize their targets. Secondly, and more importantly, why the public are so easy to be fooled? Isn’t that obvious that both Jews in Germany and the elites in China are human beings who worked very hard to earn their standings in the society?
To dehumanize one’s targets is essential when one wants to treat them inhumanly. If one wants to kill someone or to take her belongs illegitimately, she has to be terrible human beings. In a famous battle between American army and Indian aboriginals, American soldiers basically needed to shoot Indians at blank point. The Indians stood no chance because their arrows and spears were no match to their riffles. It is effectively a slaughter. However, the soldiers used an average of 252 bullets to wound ONE Indian. They might be too terrified to aim. But it is more likely because shooting at real person like themselves is fundamentally inhuman; and a normal person cannot bring himself to such a cruel act. They were effectively aiming at somewhere else instead of the Indians. Both Chairman Mao and Hitler knew very well that if they want to take away wealth from the elites and take control of the country, the most efficient way is to do it by force. By dehumanizing the elites, they provide the public with a legitimate reason to act inhumanly towards them, so that they can harden their heart and pull the trigger. Hitler is considered as a criminal only because he lost the war; Chairman Mao is still worshipped because he was a winner. A large chunk of human history was written by winners, not for justice.
Secondly, the public were not fooled. They simply accepted the dehumanization to justify what they wanted to do and what they actually did. Life is short; everyone wants a better living. Life is also unfair as there are always some ones who were born with a silver spoon in the mouth. When wealth distribution is so divided, climbing to the higher level of the wealth ladder looks almost unattainable. This invites resentment, naturally. When a legitimate reason is given to take a share of the wealth of the elites, it’s simply too tempting to turn down, although down deep one knows it is not the right thing to do.
Down deep, we are all decent human being. All of us want to be treated with respect, and want to treat others equally as well. So even if Hitler and Chairman Mao give their soldiers the excuse to pull the trigger, deep down they know they did something terribly inhuman. This is why most of those people have trouble to talk about their past. If they really believed what they did, they would be in blunt denial; if they really believed that they were fooled by their leaders, they would be angry about their leaders. Instead, they choose to remain silent. The pain of revisiting such a confusing and brutal memory is almost unbearable, so much so that people would rather to avoid the topic all together.
This applies to by-standers as well. After all, they did not take any action to stop those inhuman acts. Even if they were confused at the moment of the acts, they have sufficient time and space to reflect on the events, and it is not difficult for them to see the ridiculous of the dehumanization. The experience will be firstly confusing and ultimately demoralizing.
Research in psychology and education has already established that the period around 14 years old is the most important time in our life to establish values and beliefs. For example, football fans often established their life-time loyalty to a team when they are around 14 years old, when the team happened to be one of the top performers of the times. The Cultural Revolution is between 1966 and 1976. People who were 14 years old during that period of time are between 64 and 54 years old now, in 2017. This is a group of people who went through one of the most inhuman periods of time in modern China’s history. They have trouble to believe in humanity, because they have endured, imposed, or witnessed those inhuman acts. The consequences of losing one’s belief in humanity is detrimental, if not devastating. In general, such individuals tend to response to extrinsic incentives (i.e., money or promotions) primarily, and have difficulties to see larger causes than one’s own life. Philanthropy by these individuals is often self-serving and with strings attached; social responsibility is often considered as a mean to public relationship.
The impact of these group of people is far reaching and long lasting. They turned 24 to 34 when China started to open its door and experiment market economy, 34 to 44 when China’s economy growth started to lead the world, and 45 to 55 when a sizable middle class started to form. In other words, they are the key players and main beneficiaries of almost all important stages in the last fifty years of China’s history. Most importantly, some of them have been teachers and most of them have been parents for the last forty years or so. They passed down their values and believes to several generations. We certainly need to wait for the Cultural Revolution generation to die off before we can talk about this history openly and impartially. We might need a much longer time to gradually wash away the direct and indirect effect of the Cultural Revolution.
Bear this in mind when working with Chinese entrepreneurs. Their default system is attuned to extrinsic incentives primarily. Long term commitment to a project or an idea is likely to be a hard sell. This is particularly frustrating in the real estate industry, where projects often have broad social implications and viable business relationship usually takes a long time to form. This is not stereotyping, but generalization for efficiency sake. Chines businessmen are not born short-sightedly. This is not a cultural issue, but largely the aftershock of the dehumanization events during the cultural revolutions. However, one does need to find ways either to aspire them (which in my opinion is very difficult), or meet them half-way. The effect of this dramatic episode of China’s history, after all, will not be rectified in the short-run. It will take decades to wash away.
