The Eyes of the Pineapple

The rigid apostolic line of Marxism-Leninism, with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution's addition of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing.

The Khmer Communists as I understand it, gained some interpretation of Communism, or rather its Bolshevised version, particularly its Asian variant called Maoism. Over the years there has been the view that the Cambodian Revolution was ‘Maoism writ large,’ and that its most extreme aspects, particularly a Communist refocusing on challenging the differences between the urban and rural, and the idea that the entire past should be jettisoned and society should start again from scratch, came from China’s Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t as destructive as that which happened in Cambodia, but it operated on the same basic principles, and Mao’s errors have not only been repeated by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea, but also in the Peruvian highlands controlled by Sendero Luminoso, and in present-day Bengal and Nepal, or gives food for thought if the contemporary Naxalite gains continue. This to me seems to be an oversimplification, when not taking into account not only the specifics of Khmer society and politics at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but actually assessing what happened during the Pol Pot regime, when Maoism, or a vulgarised version of it, was supposed to have been writ large. And to do this it would be worthwhile to know what actually happened in China during that turbulent period, and judge between the two for congruency.

The turmoil unleashed in China from August 1966 did cast its influence over Communists in other parts of Asia, but to what extent did this violent whirlpool in the current of the Chinese Revolution affect Cambodia’s own nearly a decade later? We know that with an economic recession in the 1960s, and with over a million ‘educated’ youth in the country, there grew an atmosphere of discontent regarding problems such as unemployment, concerns about Sihanouk’s repressive rule, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and which all touched in some way a milieu of radical educationalists active in Phnom Penh. Those to the left of Cambodia’s political spectrum were sympathetic towards events in China, and it would cause some unrest involving not only Cambodian youths but also students from the city’s Chinese community, but then nothing like the Red Guard violence seen on the streets of China’s cities. Not least because of the specific social conditions and government polices of the ruling Communist Party, that over the years had created something of a bulging dam, its waters finally released in a massive flood after August 22. With the passing of the Regulation of Strictly Restraining from Sending Out Police to Oppress the Revolutionary Student Movement, the cracks widened, and the dam finally gave way. The exciting and ‘revolutionary’ noise transmitted from China, was absorbed by people living beyond the borders of the People’s Republic, and attempts at imitation would be made even if the actual situation in China wasn’t fully understood. The contextual deployment of its ideas meant the adding of a superficial layer of radicalism upon differing social and political conditions. A matter of appearance, an olive green army uniform and a little red book, but little more than repeating revolutionary maxims, some Lin Biaoised rote learning in the High Stalinist vulgate, and perhaps a little fisticuffs as well. This happened in urban Cambodia too but as we shall see, there were some very serious and local political problems unrelated to the Sixteen Points. So, some background is needed on the urban situation regarding Phnom Penh leftists who were largely supportive of the Cultural Revolution, and inspired by some of its ideas, particularly the idea of mass democracy, and who would join Pol Pot in the maquis in the wake of the still little-known Samlaut Rebellion. A series of explosive events which fed a burgeoning late-1960s Khmer Rouge insurgency with fleeing educated radicals and angry peasants.

Educationalists and those intellectuals outside the mainstream politics of the National Assembly, particularly those possessing a French or Soviet education, would include those who not only supported Sihanouk’s ‘neutral’ foreign policy, the NLF struggle in South Vietnam, but also the Cultural Revolution. The Rectors of Cambodia’s two main universities (Keat Chhorn, from Kompong Cham, and Phuong Ton, from Phnom Penh’s Royal University) were examples of influential intellectuals on the side of the left. As Red Guard radicalism reached its peak, unrest too was evident particularly in Cambodia’s private schools, two-thirds of which were Chinese. The Chinese Embassy on Mao Zedong Boulevard would be a source of bombastic pronouncements and inflammatory leaflets. Youths and students stormed the head office of the rightist Sim Var’s newspaper Khmer Ekreach, trashed the place and tore down a portrait of the Prince. An interesting historical footnote concerns a 1967 telegram sent by the Peking branch of the Cambodian-Chinese Friendship Association to its counterpart in Phnom Penh, which cast aspersions about Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his conservative coterie. The outbreak of rural violence seen in the large-scale Samlaut Rebellion in southern Battambang in April 1967 (a baptism of fire for the Khmer Rouge) would be officially declared over in June, but the Sangkum’s increased hostility towards Cambodia’s leftists would ensure a flow of urban radicals from the towns and into the rural areas. There they would come into contact with a burgeoning and ragtag insurgency, loosely coordinated by the enfeebled shell of a clandestine political organisation familiar to many of them, but now renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and which Salot Sar (Pol Pot from 1969) was now the unseen, unheard of leader. Even the name of the Organisation would be, at times, unclear to a lot of them. In the wake of the rebellion, many peasant families had returned to their villages, but still maintained contact with, and offered support to, about 1500 peasant rebels who had become Khmer Rouge converts.

The Prince would accuse radicals in the capital, including those who had been most receptive to the politics of the Cultural Revolution, of being behind it. With the suspicion that the Chinese had been sponsoring attacks against his undemocratic rule, this nearly caused a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the two countries. Sihanouk was heavy-handed in his response. He suspended the activities of the Friendship Association, the national student union led by a Phouk Chhay, stopped the running of all private newspapers, and booted out from the National Assembly two leftist ministers; So Nem, of Public Health (and also president of the offending Association) and Chau Seng, minister for the National Economy. Sihanouk also had Phuong Ton arrested, and while also being rector of the Royal university, was also an associate of Marxist National Assembly deputy, Hou Youn, and the prominent teacher and activist on the left-wing of the old Democrat Party, Keng Vannsak. Phuong would later join the rebels. The Marxist Hu Nim, another deputy in the National Assembly, and like Hou Youn, a future high-level Khmer Rouge leader in the wartime front organisation, the FUNK, and the short-lived Communist government from April 1975, was also a vice president of the Association. It was Hu Nim, along with not only Hou Youn, but another Marxist deputy named Khieu Samphan, who Sihanouk would accuse of being behind the rebellion at Samlaut, placing him under increased police surveillance. The Prince would make a visit to Hu Him’s electorate on 30 September, at Chrey Vien, Kompong Cham province, to face the local inhabitants who had put together a petition which protested the suspension of the Cambodian-Chinese Friendship Association:

At present I find that China has made a serious change because she has given up peaceful co-existence and the five principles. China has changed her policy since the Cultural Revolution. There have been a number of Khmer who aid China. Phouk Chhay is the fiercest amongst this small handful of people who aid China. The most dissolute and dishonest is Hu Nim.

At this meeting, Sihanouk advised Hu Nim to disappear, referring to the other deputies, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, who fearing for their lives had already slipped out of the capital and gone underground, joining the growing rebel movement in the countryside. His threats would become more explicit on 5 October of the same year, when at a press conference Sihanouk again addressed Hu Nim and his associate Phouk Chhay:

In front of the people I told [them] I would prepare two files … I warned them that if they did not go to China, and if they continued their [activities], I would produce these files and they would have to face the military tribunal.

Hu Nim disappeared into the maquis on the 9 October, and he too, like Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, were believed to have been killed by Sihanouk’s police. Sihanouk and Lon Nol knew very well they were still alive and in hiding in the countryside, but these three would be known as the “Three Ghosts,” when they reappeared, this time with Sihanouk onside, as elite politics in Cambodia shifted, and the founding of the FUNK organisation in Peking saw the exiled Prince in 1970s wartime opposition to Lon Nol’s US-backed Khmer Republic. Soon after Nim’s disappearance, Sihanouk had Phouk Chhay arrested and condemned to death, but the sentence was later commuted to a prison term, which he served at Kiriom. In May 1970, he would be released by Lon Nol along with 486 political prisoners. He too, would join the rebels in the maquis, along with the likes of Nong Suon and Chou Chet, and found a place as a central committee member of the FUNK. Around the same time as Chhay, sacked National Assembly deputy So Nem was arrested, but I am unsure as to his fate. The other sacked minister, Chau Seng, fled into Paris exile. Speaking of Seng on 27 January 1968, Sihanouk said he should prepare to flee, because if he did not and the political situation changed, meaning Sihanouk himself took flight, Chau Seng would not last a day. Exact numbers are unavailable, and not all disappearances were reported by the police or official press, but from October 1967 to November 1969 the official total of those assumed to have fled to the maquis numbered around 80. It would be safe to assume many more went unnoticed. Civil servants, teachers, their students and family members, fled to join the Khmer Rouge rebels, forming the conclusion that, aside from a fear of assassination or being arrested on fake charges, only to be imprisoned or killed anyway, with the rebellion seen at Samlaut and the continuance of fighting in its wake against the armed forces of Lon Nol, revolution seemed to be in the air.

With a flow of radicals into the maquis of rural Cambodia, it would be safe to suggest that there was a coalescing between these newcomers and those who, in other terms not related to the Cultural Revolution, formed a more moderate Maoist tendency led by Pol Pot, with the CPK’s armed struggle line, and who had left for the countryside and been in hiding since 1963, and although being aware of them, were not centrally involved with the turn of events as they unfolded in the capital (sketched above). Although the three National Assembly deputies, their associates and those in their sphere of influence, had a shared past with the Pol Pot group (student days in Paris and French Communist Party membership or marginal support), there was a real divergence in the Khmer Communist movement. There was never a general two-pronged strategy whereby radicals would remain in Phnom Penh, eyeing up ministerial portfolios, while another group moved out to the forests in order to ferment rural rebellion. It would be foolish to suggest this. But it becomes quite difficult to know to what degree the Cultural Revolution’s ideas, absorbed by the urban-based radicals would become an influence on the Pol Pot group when the former’s trajectories would cause them to meet their old friends in the maquis. There, in the maquis, there would be a “rectification of errors,” when the tiny Communist Party apparatus controlled by Pol Pot supporters would iron out differences with the newly arrived, and formulate a general line. But there is one event which seems to suggest a certain amount of autonomy was maintained by the ultra-Maoist newcomers, and their own political positions, at least for a small while, and this involves the curious case of a May 1970 Congress, separate to the CPK, revealing an organisation named the Union of People’s Struggle Movement. It can’t have lasted for very long, however, because it was never heard of again. But although the ultra-Maoist tendency represented by the radicals who fled from Phnom Penh did come into contact with and, as I said, coalesce with the Pol Pot group, and that some of them would later form the Democratic Kampuchean leadership, the survival of Khieu Samphan throughout the war and regime which followed, suggests that although being robust in their own positions, they could be counted upon when needed and that the Pol Pot line would be most dominant. How this reliability was ensured is open to guesswork, but given the rough treatment of a different set of arrivals, representative of an older Khmer Communist tendency connected to the Vietnamese in Hanoi, and Khmer Rouge practice in the years after they won power, we might assume a little forceful persuasion was used.

Now we need to look at the Cultural Revolution itself, what actually happened to Chinese society during it, and the Cambodian Revolution which followed nearly a decade after its most turbulent and radical period. There is the view that the Khmer Rouge were at least as antagonistic towards their cultural heritage as the Chinese, probably more so: hence the entire concept of Year Zero. That in both countries, the Party declared all preceding culture reactionary and attempted to physically and intellectually eliminate it. For a take on this concept see this older blog post. There is the also the view that although the Khmer Communists did try to exploit the old Angkor period as evidence that the Khmers were capable of economic miracles, in doing so they entirely altered its real historical significance, and that when they seized power the Cultural Revolution is clearly reflected in their slash’n'burn attitude to all the ‘Olds,’ from religion to the traditional family structure. The Khmer Rouge attacks against traditional institutions were local in character, not imported by the Chinese and then followed as if off a blueprint. In Cambodia, the attacks against minority groups, for example, weren’t due to placing special attention as such, but as part of the general aim of insulating all people from rival and alternative value systems which Angkar deemed incongruent with their own goal of building a pure, socialist Khmer. In the main, and in the war, they had their simple ‘uniform’ in more ways than one: black peasant clothes, or pyjamas, with the red-checked scarf/sarong krama worn as some kind of revolutionary insignia, and lastly sandals cut from car tyres. In the liberated areas they had a punishment, usually carried out against women, for deviating from this dress code. If defiant in wearing bright-coloured clothes, whether they be sarongs or dresses, or jewellery, and excessive ornamentation, or had elaborate hairstyles, they would be forced to have a bob haircut (admittedly a style from Maoist China yes), and be given the uniform. If they persisted in their resistance to the imposed norms, they would have their clothes painted black and be forced to wear them as a kind of humiliation. But this wasn’t just directed at minority groups whose cultures demanded they follow particular codes of dress.

I must emphasise the urban character of the Cultural Revolution. The shock troops of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, and whose fighting would be both against the existing structures of the state and – with the general emergence of two coalitions of factions vis-à-vis who and to what extent the state should be attacked and restructured – also between themselves, were mainly urban Chinese youth: middle school and university students and industrial workers. Not rural people. Their big battles, both physical and political, were fought in the cities not the villages and fields. The Khmer Communists came to power when it was on wane after pretty much a decade. It can’t have been a high point of influence for the Khmers. Not after Chinese rapprochement with the United States. The same country which had unleashed upon rural Cambodia up to 1973, and the upon the Khmer Rouge liberation army, one of the most brutal onslaughts in modern warfare. With keeping in mind what happened above, regarding two Khmer Communist tendencies coalescing in the maquis, then as for Chinese influence, Pol Pot visited the PRC in 1965, when the Cultural Revolution was yet to begin, and perhaps a lasting influence on him instead, was the Socialist Education Movement occurring at that time, the lacklustre impact of which would partly help contribute to bringing about the great tumult the following year, with the drive to reassert the Chairman’s leading position in the Party. There was also, in September 1965, the publication of Lin Biao’s pamphlet Long Live the Victory of People’s War!, which galvanised Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries throughout the developing world.

The violence and turmoil created by the Red Guards reached its peak early on, and in its next violent phase, by the late 60s, the next actors on the scene were not the peasantry, but the army. Whatever you may think of this ‘revolution’ I personally don’t think it was akin to some sort of superstructural sweeping brush, but a ‘bottom-up’ purge, instigated for cynical reasons by Mao and his pals, but difficult for them to control once momentum got going and millions of people who had spent years frustrated by the negative effects of government social labelling and campaign politics aimed at intimidating people into acting in ways they disliked, and an inability to express themselves politically in a meaningful way, exploded in a manner which couldn’t be predicted so easily. There was the sending of urban people to the countryside to engage with, at times, heavy agricultural labour, but not under the supervision of the peasantry, as in Cambodia. The send-downs weren’t something created during this period but had been going on for years before it, and the manner and purpose of these was different to the decision by the Khmers to empty the cities and towns, and their populations sent en masse to the countryside. In China the send-downs could be anything up to a few months to permanently, but they supplied the countryside with technical and administrative knowledge and personnel who, either enthusiastically or grudgingly, would help among other things to supervise the peasantry for the state. The opposite happened in Cambodia, in general, where people from urban areas were viewed and encouraged to be viewed as decadent, corrupted and forced to work under people with an educational level far below some of them. The Cultural Revolution did benefit rural Chinese, in that both the cities and these send downs who came from them furnished a revival of modernisation programs which transformed some areas and living standards did actually rise for peasants with the development of agricultural industries, and the new educational and skills/training opportunities that went hand in hand with that. While the creation of industry was in my opinion always the wider aim of the Khmer Communists, the cities from 1975 were for the time being left out of the pressing matter of increasing agricultural output. This was to be the base on which to build that future industry. The Khmer Rouge would come to disregard, but not always, old-society technology, technical knowledge and skills. They placed great emphasis on working elan, that is, the steering of a huge amount of unskilled human labour in matters of building new infrastructure in an ad hoc fashion, by trial and error. And as far as I am aware, the Chinese Communists, even when having a rural focus, never had a policy to force all people down to the social and material level of a poor peasant as a pre-condition for putting into place a program intended, as silly as it may seem, to rapidly bring modernity. And lastly, the elite leaders of the Cultural Revolution, the ultra-Maoists in the CCP, would set up their power base in that most modern of Chinese coastal cities, Shanghai. One of the original Sixteen Points called for the attack of the existing structures of the state and a seizure of power by proletarian revolutionaries, not peasants. And this would be attempted in places like Shanghai. The old guard of the CCP did have an aversion to such literal signs of bourgeois decadence as neon lights, and which littered that city when the peasant troops recruited on the North China Plain rolled into China’s urban areas to help secure the victory of 1949. The CCP was initially focused on the cultivation of China’s minuscule proletariat and expanding it further, following a Soviet (or Stalinist) model of urban-led industrial development. A change of direction would later occur after their so-called Transition to Socialism period, with the distinctly Maoist Great Leap. But somewhere like Shanghai, or even just any city, becoming a centre of political radicalism is something that would perhaps make a rigidly trained Khmer Rouge cadre feel at the least uncomfortable, at the most disgusted.