The Cultural Revolution at the Margins

Yiching Wu

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674419865
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de China

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above, " and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.

CHAPTER ONE

THE UNTHINKABLE REVOLUTION

WHY SHOULD WE even bother with the dusty Cultural Revolution today? Nearly four decades after its end, there seems little left to be said about the origins, processes, and significance of this pivotal historical episode. Yet not so long ago, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was widely admired as one of the greatest and most important events of the twentieth century. Many viewed this tumultuous movement, which proudly announced itself as a mass war against social inequalities and bureaucratic privileges, as having raised a number of issues crucial not only to the modern Chinese Revolution in particular but also to the history of socialism and revolutions in general: How, for example, does a new privileged class rise at the very heart of a new revolutionary state? Is the aim of the revolution merely to build up the wealth and power of the nation, or is it to create a genuinely egalitarian society? Is a vanguardist party the most effective means of constructing a socialist society, or is that the initiative of the broader masses?

In the late 1960s, China’s Cultural Revolution generated worldwide interest and excitement. For many, the Cultural Revolution—its violence and cult fundamentalism notwithstanding—was a radical political event embodying a wellspring of revolt and new forms of collectivity that disrupted dominant political structures.¹ A symbol of revolutionary vision untarnished by bureaucratized Soviet socialism, Mao’s continuous revolution seemed to have tackled boldly the problem of how, after the revolution, the people collectively could secure and further advance the revolutionary cause. Attempting a “revolutionary reactivation of the Paris Commune,” wrote Alain Badiou, arguably the most important living French philosopher today, the Cultural Revolution marked the “ideological opposition between creative revolutionary Marxism and retrograde statism” and constituted “the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies.”² Maoism, in the words of Fredric Jameson, was “the richest of all the greatest new ideologies of the 60s,” and the Cultural Revolution marked the late 1960s as a political moment of “universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies.” The figure of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, for Jameson, “evokes the emergence of a genuine mass democracy from the breakup of the older feudal and village structures, and from the therapeutic dissolution of the habits of those structures in cultural revolutions.”³ In the radical political milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s, China’s Cultural Revolution seemed to support the belief of many left-wing intellectuals that revolutions not only are necessary but also can be genuinely revolutionary.

Like Mao’s preserved corpse in the Tiananmen Square mausoleum, however, the Cultural Revolution now seems more dead than ever. As China rises to become the world’s fastest-developing economy, the rusty nails of history seem to have been hammered into the coffin long ago. Although great historical events often lead to unsolvable controversies in historiography, with respect to China’s Cultural Revolution, as Italian scholar Alessandro Russo agonized, “one deals with an almost total intellectual block,… [and] a fundamental unanimity in discarding any hypotheses beyond the familiar ‘horrors of totalitarianism,’ leading ineluctably to catastrophe and disaster, essentially the worst repetition of the worst that had already happened elsewhere.” It is exactly this sense of frustration that led Russo to ask poignantly, “What makes it so difficult to discover any rational content in the Chinese Cultural Revolution?”⁴

For many, questions like this are a non sequitur because what has been called Mao’s “last revolution” was simply a case of revolutionary insanity, embodying nothing but chaos and violent destruction. The familiar motif of suffering and loss is typically articulated in the view that the episode resulted in nothing but “loss of culture and of spiritual values; loss of status and honor; loss of career and dignity; loss of hope and ideals; loss of time, truth, and of life; loss, in short, of nearly everything that gives meaning to life.”⁵ The Cultural Revolution has frequently been compared to the Nazi Holocaust. “When the history of the twentieth century is written,” the Chinese writer Feng Jicai wrote in his highly popular book Ten Years of Madness, “the most heavily laden language imaginable will be used to record its two greatest human tragedies: the atrocities of the Fascist reign, and the calamities of the Cultural Revolution.”⁶ “Another disaster like that would surely mean the destruction of our nation,” wrote Ba Jin, one of China’s most eminent writers, in his plea for the creation of a Cultural Revolution museum. “Everyone owes it to their children and the future to leave a monument to the harrowing lessons of the past. ‘Don’t let history repeat itself’ should not be an empty statement.”⁷ In isolating the past from the present, we are often led to view the Cultural Revolution as inexplicably extraordinary or mysterious—as “the era of madness” (fengkuang de niandai). The explanation of historical events as the result of insanity is really an indication of intellectual impotence; it is another way of confessing that we are incapable of offering intelligible explanations.

But in disputing the simplemindedness of such narratives, I believe that we also must not underestimate their remarkably tenacious ideological power. Since the early 1980s, there have been concerted efforts to reduce the extraordinary complexity of the Cultural Revolution to the simplicity almost exclusively of barbarism, violence, and human suffering. Flattening historical memory of the Cultural Revolution through moralistic condemnation and exhortation, these narratives not only deprive an immensely important and complex episode of modern Chinese history of its multilayered historicity but also provide the discursive ground for delegitimizing China’s revolutionary history of the twentieth century. For many, the disasters of the Cultural Revolution have become emblematic of the bankruptcy of the Chinese Revolution as a whole. The withering away of a grand twentieth-century revolutionary narrative must surely raise questions about the legitimacy of continuous revolution, and vice versa.⁸ Indeed, we know very well that one of the chief functions of ideology is precisely that it collapses historical temporality into a narrative of inevitable disaster (or progress), as though Marx always leads to Stalin, or the Chinese Revolution inescapably brings about the Cultural Revolution.⁹

Equally important, this simplifying logic also supplies the crucial justification for what often has been complacently referred to as China’s “second revolution,” that is, its transition to a market economy and incorporation into global capitalism. The Cultural Revolution serves as the pivotal historiographical category that grounds the historical and political meaning of the post-Mao reform and opening up. The hagiography of Chinese postsocialism—the triumphant “China model” of rapid economic development and apparent political stability—has thrived on a virtually inexhaustible stock of stories that portray the Cultural Revolution as an episode of unspeakable disaster. By making market reform and modernization appear both desirable and inevitable, post-Mao narratives of the Cultural Revolution are central to the construction of the historical identity of the reform era and legitimize the ideologically motivated discourse of transition.

What is puzzling is not that the dominant historical narrative involves political presuppositions. For better or worse, our readings of the past are vitally dependent on our experience of the present, and the act of writing history cannot transcend history and therefore is itself history. Nowhere is the tired dictum “Every history is a history of the present” truer than in the case of the Cultural Revolution. Its historiographical reception has closely mirrored the vicissitudes of contemporary politics. In this regard, Russo’s aforementioned intervention is indicative of a larger trend that has been emerging. Over three decades after China ventured down the path of capitalist marketization, the bleak reality of growing socioeconomic disparity, environmental degradation, massive layoffs of workers in state-owned enterprises, evisceration of social protections, rampant official corruption and illicit appropriation of public property, and superexploitation of rural migrant labor has led to the unraveling of the broad but fragile consensus regarding the direction and rationality of post-Mao reforms that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions of the 1980s. The erosion of the dominant historical narrative has been affected by the growing awareness since the late 1990s that reform and modernization have not delivered their promised common prosperity for the whole Chinese people, who have been increasingly polarized between two nations, one of a small number of the rich and powerful and the other of those who have lost out.¹⁰ In the late 1970s, China was undeniably one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, but in less than three decades, the country became, according to a leading expert on social inequality, “one of the most unequal societies in the world, with the fastest growing inequality recorded among major regions in the late twentieth century.”¹¹ It was estimated that in 2007 China had a Gini coefficient (a standard index of income inequality) of 0.496, surpassing even those of the United States, Brazil, and Uganda.¹² In 2011, according to a popular annual ranking of the wealthiest individuals in China, there were 271 billionaires in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (up from 189 in 2010), a higher number than in any other country except the United States.¹³ In 2009, several Chinese newspapers were censured by the government for reporting that wealth in China is concentrated in a small number of very rich people. The controversial figures, reportedly from official researchers, include a claim that 70 percent of China’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of just 0.4 percent of the population, and that 91 percent of multimillionaires are the children of top officials.¹⁴

The emergent context of widening socioeconomic schisms, increasingly sharp social and political antagonisms, and a pervasive sense of impending crises has brought such seemingly old, dusty subjects as the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution back to life and has endowed them with new political significance. The popular revival of Mao in the 1990s coincided with the Chinese government’s policy of accelerating privatization of the national economy, which unleashed massive corruption and dismantled the Maoist social compact of guaranteed employment and welfare (the “iron rice bowl”).¹⁵ Rather than the disaster that justifies the post-Mao turn toward the market path, the events of the late 1960s have become for a growing number of people an icon of inspiration and an alternative standpoint of political critique. The Cultural Revolution was launched over four decades ago in order to prevent the degeneration of Chinese socialism, which Mao foresaw as an imminent danger. After the end of the Mao era, however, this was precisely what happened as China under Deng Xiaoping—a prime target of the Cultural Revolution—embarked on a meandering path that has led to its incorporation into the capitalist world-system. There is clearly a historical irony here, if only in hindsight. Since the late 1990s, the Cultural Revolution, condemned as the “ten lost years” for much of the post-Mao era, has become the subject of renewed intellectual interest as scholars and critics attempt to rethink both the historical meanings and the contemporary political relevance of the period.¹⁶

The endeavor to unsettle the dominant ideological paradigm and historical narrative, however, faces an uphill battle. Obstacles include not only what Russell Jacoby diagnosed as “social amnesia”¹⁷—the past fallen prey to the social and economic dynamic of capitalist modernity and denuded of its critical content—but also, and equally important, the Chinese state’s aggressive attempts to police or suppress scholarship on the Cultural Revolution. Why do the powerful fear history and seek to dominate memory? In the case of the Cultural Revolution, the state’s intention is not mysterious. The history of the Cultural Revolution is censored for the unabashed purpose of curbing luan—“chaos” or uncontrollable public disturbances—and of preventing the repoliticization of a subversive or even potentially explosive subject at a time of prevalent social and political uncertainty, despite the appearance of economic prosperity. “The order of history,” to quote from the philosopher Eric Voegelin’s famous motto, “emerges from the history of order” and, I add, also from the history of quelling disorder. The contemporary political significance of the historical episode in question was revealed very clearly in the words of an officer of the Ministry of State Security, China’s secret police organ. This officer was in charge of a team of agents who detained me when I was researching the archives in Changsha, the provincial capital city of Hunan. After several days and nights of intensive questioning, the officer asked whether I understood why the study of the Cultural Revolution “has always been the concern of state-security organs.” After I expressed bewilderment, he replied as follows: “Let me explain why to you. The Cultural Revolution was an unprecedented social movement that negatively affected the lives of tens of millions of Chinese. It destabilized the party and disrupted the political life of the state. Now, when the course of ‘reform and opening up’ is not going too smoothly, when there are many disgruntled people for one reason or another, the hostile elements inside China and abroad will then attempt to take advantage of the memory and knowledge of the Cultural Revolution to make trouble for us. This is why the study of the Cultural Revolution is a matter of state security.”

The state’s concern for security may be justified by the ominous reality of proliferating social antagonisms in China. Nationwide, cases of “mass incidents”—a euphemism for protests, riots, and other forms of unrest—escalated from fewer than 10,000 in 1993 to 15,000 in 1997, 32,000 in 1999, 50,000 in 2002, 58,000 in 2003, 74,000 in 2004, and 87,000 in 2005.¹⁸ By 2010, the number of protests and riots reportedly had more than doubled again, to 180,000.¹⁹ The deep disaffection of those left behind by China’s rapid economic development is often rooted in a historical experience obscured by the dominant discourse. The danger posed by the country’s socialist and revolutionary past to the current sociopolitical order is evident, as shown in a popular ditty:

Beijing relies on the [Party] Center,

Shanghai on its connections,

Guangzhou leans on Hong Kong,

The drifting population lives by Mao Zedong Thought.²⁰

Since the late 1980s, China has witnessed “at first a fitful and then a nationwide revival of interest in Mao Zedong.”²¹ Fueled by simmering anger at corrupt officials and pressed by severe socioeconomic difficulties, workers at state-owned enterprises have responded with waves of protests that often appeal to notions of justice characteristic of the Mao era. “Cadre-masses relations have become extremely tense,” remarked a truck driver in the northeastern city of Shenyang, as recorded in Ching Kwan Lee’s study of labor unrest: “The most important thing is that today’s workers have no power, the power that Mao gave workers, the power to criticize the director and to write big-character posters. Now it’s illegal to write big-character posters. They will arrest you.” “If the Cultural Revolution came again,” another worker stated, “these corrupt cadres would all be executed many times.”²² Interestingly, similar political sentiments have been expressed in different ways by those who hardly admire the Cultural Revolution. If the rampant inequalities and the corruption of officials are not curbed, Premier Wen Jiabao warned ominously in 2012, “the Cultural Revolution may occur again.” “Every party member and cadre,” Wen solemnly urged, “must feel a great sense of urgency.”²³ Shortly after Premier W...