On 8/28/23, Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:

Part One

Thought Reform and Cultism

Part One Chapter 1 Chinese Communist Thought Reform

_ Chinese thought reform was the subject of my first research study, in a sense my initiation into the realm of psychological history. I was fascinated by the process on two levels. The first was the individual experience of each Chinese or Western person I interviewed, which raised questions about the ways minds could be manipulated and altered and about distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to individual change. These were questions at the heart of my profession. _

_ But I was equally impressed by the larger historical spectacle of hundreds of millions of Chinese people subjected to a vast compulsory movement of "re-education" -- universities, schools, special "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organizations, and neighborhood groups. What was the historical significance of such intense political "psychotherapy" applied to citizens of the largest society on earth? I came to recognize thought reform as a project of political purification on a scale never previously attempted anywhere. _

_ Indeed, I have come to view the thought reform process as a form of psychological apocalypticism, of bringing about the "death" of all ideas and ideologies prior to those of Mao Zedong and providing a "reformed" remnant (in this case a very large one) to preside over further Maoist purification -- of China, and perhaps of the world. I was studying not only individual change in worldview and identity but a grandiose and coercive effort at a historical "new beginning." _

_ In that way, thought reform had a cultist element of Chinese society turning inward on itself. From 1948 through the 1950s, several thought reform-driven national campaigns took place, such as the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries, Three-Anti, Five-Anti, and Anti-Rightist campaigns. Of particular interest was the "Hundred Flowers Movement" ("Let the hundred flowers bloom[13], let the hundred schools of thought contend"), which encouraged intellectuals to speak frankly about their criticisms of the regime. But authorities were surprised by what they had let loose, and turned the event into a trap. Those who had spoken out critically were subjected to fierce condemnation, with their position in society newly imperiled. Those initial criticisms were significant: one professor, in his response, said, "I find the term _thought reform_ rather repulsive.... I am not aware that there is anything wrong with my thought." And another put it into language I use in this book: "I think a Party leading the nation is not the same as a Party owning the nation." Such critics made it clear that difficulties can occur for those who seek to "own" human minds or reality itself. _

_ Yet, in the mid-1950s, at the same time I was probing these matters in my Hong Kong research, American travelers to Hong Kong told me about McCarthyism back home and its own assault on minds and on reality. Senator Joseph McCarthy and those who followed or were influenced by him were making wild accusations of Communist association against public figures, teachers, and writers. Subscribing to the wrong magazine might result in being fired from one's job. _

_ That message, when combined with my everyday experience of thought reform's punitive distortions, gave me the sense that the whole world had gone mad, that there was a pandemic of assault on mind and reality. _

_ Thought reform, then, is an extreme version of ever-present human tendencies to contrast one's own purity with the impurity of all else; and on that basis to justify one's claim to the ownership of reality. _

Chinese Communist Thought Reform _First published in 1961_

When confronted with the endless discussion on the general subject of "brainwashing," I am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it."

Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a questionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject.

Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era -- the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brainwashing, the process that gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of _sixiang gaizao_ (variously translated as "ideological remolding," "ideological reform," or as we shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human manipulation ever undertaken. To be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas, inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate -- a more total -- character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and ingenious psychological techniques.

When I began my study of Chinese Communist thought reform in the 1950s, the Western world had heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the coerced bacteriological warfare confessions[14] and the collaboration obtained from American (and other United Nations) prisoners during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary collages," prisons, business and government offices, and labor and peasant organizations. Thought reform combined this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only did it reach one-fourth of the people in the world, but it sought to bring about in everyone it touched a significant personal upheaval.

Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: _confession_, the exposure and renunciation of past and present "evil"; and _re-education_, the remaking of a man in the Communist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals -- intellectual, emotional, and physical -- aimed at social control and individual change.

When I arrived in Hong Kong in late January 1954, I soon found out that those who had undergone this experience fell into two broad groups: Western civilians reformed in prisons, and Chinese intellectuals who had undergone their reform in universities or in "revolutionary colleges." As I immersed myself in interviews with both groups, I was fascinated on two levels. The first was the nitty-gritty experience I studied with each Chinese or Western person I talked to, which led immediately to fundamental psychological questions about ways in which minds can be manipulated and changed, and about capacities to resist such manipulation. Also involved were important distinctions between coercive and therapeutic approaches to bringing about change. These questions are at the heart of my profession and have significance for the way we live in general.

But there was another level to thought reform: its visionary or transcendent characteristic, the specter of hundreds of millions of Chinese people -- in their neighborhoods, schools, and places of work -- caught up in a compulsory movement of purification and renewal. What did it mean for such an extreme ethos to dominate an entire vast society?

As I proceeded with the work, I realized that one of the main causes for confusion about thought reform lay in the complexity of the process itself. Some people considered it a relentless means of undermining the human personality; others saw it as a profoundly "moral" -- even religious -- attempt to instill new ethics into the Chinese people. Both of these views were partially correct, and yet each, insofar as it ignored the other, was greatly misleading. For it was the combination of external force or coercion with an appeal to the inner enthusiasm through evangelistic exhortation which gave thought reform its emotional scope and power.

Coercion and breakdown were, of course, more prominent in the prisons, where brutal treatment that constituted torture was frequent, while exhortation and ethical appeal were especially stressed with the rest of the Chinese population; and it becomes extremely difficulty to determine just where exhortation ends and coercion begins. I could observe that thought reform was by no means a casual undertaking but rather a systematic and widespread program that penetrated deeply into people's psyches.

I found it very important to consider what was behind thought reform, what impelled the Chinese Communists to carry out such extreme measures on such an extensive scale. The complexities of their motivations will be discussed later on; but it is necessary for us now -- before getting to the prison experiences of Westerners -- to know something about the Chinese Communist philosophy or rationale for their program.

The leading Chinese political theorists, although reticent about technical details, have written extensively on general principles. Mao Zedong himself, in a well-known speech originally delivered to party members in 1942, laid down the basic principles of punishment and cure that are always quoted by later writers. To overcome undesirable and "unorthodox" trends, he specified that

...

two principles must be observed. The first is, "punish the past to warn the future" and the second, "save men by curing their diseases." Past errors must be exposed with no thought of personal feelings or face. We must use a scientific attitude to analyze and criticize what has been undesirable in the past ... this is the meaning of "punish the past to warn the future." But our object in exposing errors and criticizing shortcomings is like that of a doctor in curing a disease.

The argument continues as follows: the "old society" in China (or any non-Communist society anywhere) was (and is) evil and corrupt; this is true because of the domination of the "exploiting classes" -- the landowners and capitalists and bourgeoisie; everyone has been exposed to this type of society and therefore retains from it "evil remnants" or "ideological poisons"; only thought reform can rid him of these and make him a "new man" in a "new society." And long philosophical treatises emphasize the need to bring the "ideology of all classes" into harmony with "objective material conditions" -- or in other words, to blend personal beliefs with Communist-implemented social realities.

In prison environments, Western civilians (and their Chinese cellmates) encountered a special penal version of these principles:

...

All crimes have definite sociological roots. The evil ideology and evil habits left behind by the old society ... still remain in the minds of some people to a marked degree. Thus if we are to wipe all crimes from their roots, in addition to inflicting on the criminal the punishment due, we must also carry out various effective measures to transform the various evil ideological conceptions in the minds of the people so that they may be educated and reformed into new people.

Penal institutions were referred to as "re-education centers," "meditation houses," or even "hospitals for ideological reform." Westerners spent most of their time -- one to five years of imprisonment -- essentially devoted to "solving their cases"; and they were not tried or sentenced until just before their release. The large-scale policy of "reform through labor" -- the use of prisoners in labor battalions -- was mostly reserved for the Chinese themselves.

In the penal institutions it was made clear that the "reactionary spy" who entered the prison must perish, and that in his place must arise a "new man," resurrected in the Communist mold. The environment did not permit any sidestepping: the prisoners were forced to participate, drawn into the forces around them until they themselves began to feel the need to confess and to reform. In all of this it is most important to realize that what might be seen as a set of coercive maneuvers, the Chinese Communists viewed as a morally uplifting, harmonizing, and scientifically therapeutic experience.

This penetration by the psychological forces of the environment into the inner emotions of the individual person is perhaps the outstanding psychiatric fact of thought reform. The milieu brings to bear upon the prisoner a series of overwhelming pressures, at the same time allowing only a very limited set of alternatives for adapting to them. In the interplay between person and environment, a sequence of steps or operations -- of combinations of manipulation and response -- takes place. All of these steps revolved around two policies and two demands: the fluctuation between assault and leniency, and the requirements of confession and re-education.

[left off page 29] [this is as far as i got before the next book started, which is “opening our minds” by jon atack. 2023-08-28]

13: "Let the hundred flowers bloom": See the pamphlets "Contradiction" and "The Storm" (China Viewpoints: Hong Kong, 1958); Benjamin Schwartz, "New Trends in Maoism," _Problems of Communism_ 6 (1957):1-8.

14: the coerced bacteriological warfare confessions: A later study argued that America actually engaged in experimental biological warfare. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, _The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis Indiana University Press, 1998).