The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: The above story and characters come from the book
Born Red (1987) by Gao Yuan. (After the Cultural Revolution, the
author changed his name from Gao Jianhua to Gao Yuan.) It is his
nonfiction account of the events he participated in at his school during
the Cultural Revolution.
In essence, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attempt to try to alter
human nature itself. According to Mao, through millennia of
capitalism in various forms, humans had become individualistic and
conservative, bound to their social class. Mao wanted to wipe the slate

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clean and start over. As he explained it, “A clean sheet of paper has no
blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted
on it.” To get his blank canvas, Mao would have to shake things up on a
mass scale by uprooting old habits and ways of thinking and by
eradicating people’s mindless respect for those in authority. Once he
accomplished this, Mao could start to paint something bold and new
on the clean sheet. The result would be a fresh generation that could
begin to forge a classless society not weighed down by the past.
The events depicted in Born Red reveal in a microcosm the result of
Mao’s experiment—how human nature cannot be uprooted; try to alter
it and it merely reemerges in different shapes and forms. The results of
hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and development cannot
be radically reengineered by some scheme, particularly when it
involves the behavior of humans in groups, which inevitably conforms
to certain ancient patterns. (Although it might be tempting to see what
happened at YMS as mostly relevant to group adolescent behavior,
young people often represent human nature in a more naked and purer
form than adults, who are cleverer at disguising their motivations. In
any case, what happened at the school occurred throughout China—in
government offices, factories, within the army, and among Chinese of
all ages—in an eerily similar way.) Here’s exactly how Mao’s
experiment failed and what it shows about human nature.
Mao had the following specific strategy to enact his bold idea: Focus
people’s attention on a legitimate enemy—in this case, revisionists,
those who consciously or unconsciously were clinging to the past.
Encourage people, particularly the young, to actively fight against this
reactionary force, but also against any entrenched forms of authority.
In struggling against these conservative enemies, the Chinese would be
able to free themselves from old patterns of thinking and acting; they
would finally get rid of elites and ranking systems; and they would
unify as a revolutionary class with utmost clarity as to what they were
fighting for.
His strategy, however, had a fatal flaw at its core: when people
operate in groups, they do not engage in nuanced thinking and deep
analysis. Only individuals with a degree of calmness and detachment
can do so. People in groups feel emotional and excited. Their primary
desire is to fit in to the group spirit. Their thinking tends to be
simplistic—good versus evil, with us or against us. They naturally look
for some type of authority to simplify matters for them. Deliberately

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creating chaos, as Mao did, only makes the group more certain to fall
into these primitive patterns of thinking, since it is too frightening for
humans to live with too much confusion and uncertainty.
Look at how the students at YMS responded to Mao’s call for action:
When first confronted with the Cultural Revolution, they merely
transformed Mao himself into the new authority to guide them. They
swallowed his ideas with very little personal reflection. They imitated
the actions of others in Beijing in the most conventional way. Looking
for revisionists, they tended to base their judgments on appearances—
the clothes the teachers wore, the special food or wine they drank, their
manners, their family background. Such appearances could be quite
deceptive. Teacher Wen was radical in her beliefs but was judged a
revisionist based on her fondness for Western-style fashion.
In the old order, the students were supposed to give total obedience
to their all-powerful teachers. Suddenly freed from all that, they
remained just as emotionally tied to the past. The teachers still seemed
all-powerful, but now as scheming counterrevolutionaries. The
students’ repressed resentment at having to be so obedient now boiled
over into anger and the desire to be the ones doing the punishing and
oppressing. When the teachers confessed to crimes they mostly had
never committed, to avoid the escalating punishments, that only
seemed to confirm the students in their paranoia. They had shifted
roles from obedient students to oppressors, but their thinking had
become even more simplistic and irrational, the opposite of Mao’s
intentions.
In the power vacuum that Mao had now created, another timeless
group dynamic emerged: those who were naturally more assertive,
aggressive, and even sadistic (in this case Fangpu and Little Bawang)
pushed their way forward and assumed power, while those who were
more passive (Jianhua, Zongwei) quietly receded into the background,
becoming followers. The aggressive types at YMS now formed a new
class of elites, doling out perks and privileges. Similarly, amid all the
confusion the Cultural Revolution had spawned, the students became
even more obsessed with status within the group. Who was in the red
category among them, and who in the black, they wondered? Was it
better now to come from the peasantry or the proletariat? How could
they finagle membership in the Red Guards and garner that beautiful
red armband that signified revolutionary elite status? Instead of

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naturally inclining toward a new egalitarian order, the students kept
straining to occupy superior positions.
Once all forms of authority were removed and the students ran the
school, there was nothing to stop the next and most dangerous
development in group dynamics—the split into tribal factions. By
nature, we humans reject attempts by anyone to completely
monopolize power, as Fangpu tried to do. This cuts off opportunities
for other ambitious, aggressive people. It also creates large groupings
in which individual members can feel somewhat lost. Almost
automatically, groups will split into rival smaller factions and tribes. In
the rival tribe, a new, charismatic leader (Mengzhe in this case) can
assume power and members can identify more easily with the smaller
number of comrades. The bonds are tight and made even tighter by the
struggle against the tribal enemy. People may think they are joining
because of the different ideas or goals of this tribe or the other, but
what they want more than anything is the sense of belonging and a
clear tribal identity.
Look at the actual differences between the East-Is-Red Corps and
the Red Rebels. As the battle between them intensified, it was hard to
say what they were fighting for, except to assume power over the other
group. One strong or vicious act of one side called for a reprisal from
the other, and any type of violence seemed totally justified. There could
be no middle ground, nor any questioning of the rightness of their
cause. The tribe is always right, and to say otherwise is to betray it, as
Zongwei did.
Mao had wanted to forge a unified Chinese citizenry, clear as to its
goals, and instead the entire country descended into tribal battles
completely disconnected from the original purpose of the Cultural
Revolution. To make matters worse, the crime rate soared and the
economy had ground to a halt, as hardly anyone felt compelled to work
or manufacture anything. The masses had become even lazier and
more resentful than under the old order.
By the spring of 1968, Mao’s only recourse was to install a police
state. Hundreds of thousands were thrown into prisons. The army
virtually took over. To help restore order and respect for authority,
Mao converted himself into a cult figure, his image to be worshipped
and his words to be repeated like revolutionary prayers. It is
interesting to note how Fangpu’s form of repression at YMS—the

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torture, the rewriting of history, the control of all media—mirrored
what Mao was doing throughout the country. The new revolutionary
society that Mao (and Fangpu) had wanted now actually resembled the
most repressive, superstitious regimes of feudal China. As Jianhua’s
father, a victim of the Cultural Revolution himself, kept telling his son,
“A thing turns into its opposite if pushed too far.”