Auntie Huang was wistful as we watched a couple of students stroll past in the grounds of Chongqing University, green with palms and willows and great thickets of bamboo. We had made ourselves at home in a little pavilion set upon the lake.
“Just like today’s young people, I wanted to do many things, like go to university, but I couldn’t,” she told me. “I was 18. I felt there was no hope. We had no hope at all. One person would cry and then everyone would start. It was dejection. Despair.”
In late 1968, the train and bus stations of Chinese cities filled with sobbing adolescents and frightened parents. The authorities had decreed that teenagers – deployed by Mao Zedong as the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution – were to begin new lives in the countryside. A tide of youth swept towards impoverished villages. Auntie Huang and her friends were among them. Seventeen million teenagers, enough to populate a nation of their own, were sent hundreds of miles away, to places with no electricity or running water, some unreachable by road. The party called it “going up to the mountains and down to the countryside”, indicating its lofty justification and the humble soil in which these students were to set down roots. Some were as young as 14. Many had never spent a night away from home.
These educated urban youth were to be reeducated. Their skills and knowledge would drag forward villages mired in poverty and ignorance, improving hygiene, spreading literacy, eradicating superstitions. But the peasantry’s task, in turn, was to uproot a more profound form of ignorance: the urban elite’s indifference to the masses. Mao had seized on the rural poor as the engine of revolution, bringing the Communist party to power. Now they were to remake this young generation – teaching them to live with nothing, to endure, even love, the dirtiest labour; to not merely sacrifice but efface themselves for the greater good. The reformed teenagers would bear his revolution to its ultimate triumph: a country whose society and culture were as communist as its political system.
“At the very beginning we were all idealistic. We wanted to make a difference to the countryside,” Auntie Huang recalled. But the villages were filthy and desolate, and the bone-thin peasants were unimpressed by the newcomers’ theories for grand improvements. The educated youth had been urged to remake the world; they began to wonder if they could change anything. Some of the farmers were openly hostile, and even the kindly ones grew exasperated. They didn’t need the extra hands, and didn’t want extra mouths to feed. These kids, for all their books and ideas, were slow and clumsy, had no feel for tools or land, wasted seed and couldn’t seem to manage moderate loads or uncomplicated tasks. Income was disbursed not according to need but to work contributions; the teenagers struggled to earn the points they needed to feed themselves, and the labour left them bruised and blistered. Many found that initial extra rations soon disappeared when drought set in, leaving them surviving on corn husks, as the peasants did. At first they might be billeted with families, but mostly they were packed together wherever room could be made: in old grain silos, toolsheds or shacks they built themselves, which “often resembled stables or even pigsties more than houses”, as the sinologist Michel Bonnin records in his book Lost Generation.
It is hard to imagine the relief when they finally put these painful years behind them. And yet, four decades later, Auntie Huang and her friends met up each week to play mahjong, eat hotpot, dance and most of all, to reminisce about those bitter days. I had encountered them by chance, as they rehearsed their steps in a park one afternoon. I had assumed they were all old friends, but in fact they had met online, drawn together solely by their experience of rustication. For the Educated Youth Friendship Group (I have altered its name, like those of its members, at their request) those years of struggle were their “spiritual wealth”, said Auntie Gu.
“We’re proud of being educated youth; it was something unprecedented,” she told me. “We know that nothing like it will happen in future.”
These were the children of the Cultural Revolution, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966 and ending only after his death 10 years later: a decade of turmoil, violence and stagnation. The movement was an emperor’s ruthless assertion of power, launched to destroy all opposition in the party after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward – his breakneck industrialisation campaign and collectivisation of agriculture, which had led to a catastrophic famine that killed as many as 45 million. But it was also a crusade to reshape hearts and souls as he had transformed China’s politics and economy.
To do so he employed the Red Guards, young political vigilantes – many in their early teens – who attacked teachers and scholars and destroyed cultural treasures. An estimated 2 million people would die, including Mao’s two heirs apparent, and some of China’s greatest artists and thinkers. As the violence rippled out, militias would take the lives of entire families, including infants, in remote rural areas. Accidents of birth, such as having a relative classed as a landlord or living abroad, could be as deadly as supposed political crimes. Tens of millions more people would be hounded. In Chongqing, the south-western city home to Auntie Huang and her friends, fighting between Red Guard groups descended into warfare. They had not played leading roles in that intense violence, but no one could escape it entirely: the factions, making full use of the city’s multiple munitions plants, battled with heavy weaponry and tanks – everything except planes, one resident told me.
But by late 1968, Mao had reasserted absolute authority and even he was tired of the chaos. The military reined in the Red Guards, in some cases by force. With universities and even schools still mostly closed and urban unemployment high, young people were left with little to do but look for trouble: hooliganism and, as one newspaper fretted, things that “do not lead to socialism”. Dispatching them to the countryside was a supremely pragmatic decision.
For the most part, the authorities today do not speak of the Cultural Revolution. The exile of the educated youth is the one aspect that is remembered in official discourse, even celebrated. Among their number was Xi Jinping: now China’s most powerful leader since Mao, but at that time, the adolescent son of a disgraced senior official, Xi Zhongxun. Propaganda has stressed how the leader grew and matured through his years in the countryside, but in truth the lessons he took from his family’s suffering appear more complex and ambiguous. When Xi Zhongxun and other party elders were rehabilitated after Mao’s death, they attempted to ensure that strongman rule could never return. They institutionalised and collectivised power: pursuing consensus and adopting unwritten rules such as term limits. Yet his son has dismantled the very changes designed to safeguard the party and country against a repeat of Maoism’s disasters.
Xi Jinping concluded, it seems, that stabilising China – and securing his own future – required not the dilution or containment of power, but its intensification. He is by no means Mao: most obviously, he has no taste for disorder. His country is far more educated, sophisticated and cynical. Yet he has concentrated power to an extraordinary degree. Late last year, at the party congress, he embarked upon indefinite rule with a norm-busting third term as general secretary.
In an age of increased repression, few air their concerns. But as the party congress opened in October, a lonely figure protested in Beijing: among the demands on his banners was “Reform, not the Cultural Revolution”. That call was taken up by others at the remarkable protests against the zero-Covid policy that swept through cities weeks later. The echoes of the past have not gone unnoticed.
It is impossible to understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. It shapes the country’s politics, economy and culture; its scar runs through the heart of society, and the soul of its citizens. It is the pivot between socialist utopianism and capitalist frenzy, between merciless uniformity and pitiless individualism. Its end marked the decisive turn away from Maoism, so thoroughly discredited by the toll it had taken. Its radicalism arguably birthed the pro-reform and democracy movement of the 1980s, culminating in the Tiananmen Square protests, but also contributed to the bloody crackdown that ended it. It has shaped unhappy families, the expectations of romantic love, the grasping for money, both bitterness and hope. It was the defining moment for the country. Subtract it and today’s China makes no sense: it is Britain without its empire, the US without the civil war.
Unfortunately, it is also impossible to fully understand the movement. Mao’s erratic nature, changing tactics and deliberately cryptic pronouncements; the political intrigues at the top of the party; clashing interests and motives at all levels of the movement, including petty grudges and banal ambition; the many stages through which it passed; its sheer scale – each one would make it hard to decipher. Together, they make it in many ways incomprehensible. (Even China’s supposed ideological brethren struggled to make sense of this mess: North Korean officials derided it as “a great madness, having nothing in common with either culture or a revolution”.)
In parts it looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century, though in China people killed their own kind – the line between victims and perpetrators shifted moment by moment. In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation. Unlike other tragedies under the Chinese Communist party, it was all-encompassing. No workplace remained untouched. No household remained innocent. “Complicity” is too small a word – comrade turned on comrade, friend upon friend, husband upon wife and child upon parent. Such intimate treacheries and abrupt reversals rent the very fabric of China, Confucian ideals of family obedience and newer communist pledges of fraternity.
Yet this era, which forged modern China, exists today largely as an absence. In the past it was discussed more widely, although never freely. Accounts of its horrors helped to justify the turn away from socialist orthodoxy to the market. Over time, fear, guilt and official suppression have pushed it into the shadows.
For Chinese rulers, history has often functioned as moral primer rather than archive. Even from its earliest days in power, the party understood that its rule depended not only on the promise of a better future, but also on a shared understanding of that pledge’s contrast with previous misery. It built twin Museums of Chinese History and the Chinese Revolution, and urged workers and peasants to “recall past bitterness and cherish present happiness”. Over time, the invocation of a historical mission – overthrowing foreign oppression, and returning China to greatness – has become louder and shriller, notably as economic growth has slowed. Xi has proved especially attuned to the past, invoking the warning of an ancient scholar that “to destroy a country, you must first destroy its history”. The party has been warned that “historical nihilism” is an existential peril on a par with western democracy.
Burnishing the party’s version of the past required forgetting as well as remembering. The official verdict on the Cultural Revolution was overseen by Deng Xiaoping, who was purged twice but subsequently became paramount leader and led China’s transformation. It acknowledged that the movement had caused “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” since the party’s ascent to power. It stated that it was “initiated by a leader labouring under a misapprehension and capitalised on by counter-revolutionary cliques”. (It was worse than a crime, then – it was a mistake). But no one was supposed to dwell on the suffering. Deng wanted to draw a line beneath it, telling those drafting the judgment that the aim was “to lead people to unite and look ahead”.
Yet some people persisted in looking back, and their numbers grew as the Red Guard generation aged. The Chongqing Educated Youth Friendship Group were unabashedly patriotic, and voluble in their admiration and support for China’s leaders. But their memories were not always so obliging. It was not simply nostalgia that drew them together, but ambivalence.
The first wave of memoirs and novels by former educated youth, from the late 70s onwards, attacked the pointlessness and hopelessness of rustication. (For the party, this “scar literature” had its uses, confirming the wisdom of their turn from Mao to market.) But just as the squalor of a run-down hamlet can appear picturesque from a distance, so rural exile began to look wholesome, even life-affirming, as it receded. In the early 90s, the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing held an exhibition of photos, reminiscences and mementoes of daily life from the Educated Youth. It drew 150,000 visitors in a fortnight, sparking similar shows and a fashion for reminiscence. Groups organised sentimental returns to villages. Tourist agencies cashed in.
It is not coincidence, perhaps, that the turn to the past came just after the massacre of 1989 had destroyed a compelling vision of China’s future and as mass layoffs caused by the restructuring of state-owned enterprises threw into doubt the sense of identity of many former educated youth. Nor that it thrived as China grew more consumerist, individualist, competitive and unpredictable. The sociologist Guobin Yang, analysing this shift, noted that it “contrasts a past viewed as containing beauty, meaning, and purpose with a present increasingly dominated by economic inequality and instrumental rationality”. And as this yearning for what had passed grew, the party began to discern its potency. Nostalgia for the hard times is not unique to China. But while the details of brutal murders have been buried, the story of the sent-down youth has become more prominent. Rustication was severed from its roots in fanaticism and repackaged as fresh air, comradeship and honest toil.
Xi’s creation myth is the story of his seven years in Liangjiahe, a village in north-western Shaanxi province, where he lived in a narrow, musty cave house carved out of the hillside. For him, it perhaps felt as much like escape as punishment. His father had already been purged, and Xi, too, had come under attack by Red Guards; friends say Xi’s own mother was forced to denounce her son. His half-sister reportedly killed herself, after years of political pressure.
“If I did not go I don’t even know if I would live or die [in Beijing], so isn’t leaving a good thing?” he once recalled.
Xi grew into manhood, hauling coal carts, building dykes and farming corn and potatoes. He endured the fleas, the biting cold, the monotonous diet and still more monotonous labour. He read books while herding sheep, or late into the night, cutting short his sleep. He helped the farmers to develop the place, reinforcing the riverbank to stop erosion. His exemplary dedication earned him the title of a Model Youth. He is said to have exchanged his prize – a motorised tricycle – for farming equipment to help the villagers. Even the local party secretary turned to him for advice. When he returned to Liangjiahe as China’s leader, in 2015, he portrayed the little village on the ochre-coloured Loess plateau as the place where his life had truly begun. “When I arrived at the Yellow Earth, at 15, I was anxious and confused,” Xi has written. “When I left the Yellow Earth, at 22, my life goals were firm and I was filled with confidence.”
His ascension turned Liangjiahe into an attraction. Thousands of visitors – mostly officials – came to inspect his old home and admire a well he had dug. The story testified to Xi’s grit, his discipline and his humility. His service emphasised his impeccable heritage, echoing his father’s revolutionary labours; it also proved that he was one of the masses. He had suffered, and he had risen above it.
In early interviews he had been more candid; over time, the official version lost awkward details. It wasn’t by chance that Xi found himself in an area where people remembered his father fondly and were inclined to look out for him. Nor was it so surprising that they called upon him with their problems; he was more likely to know someone who could help. While state media described how Xi could carry almost 100kg of wheat, villagers recalled the future leader sliding downhill on his bottom as he struggled to carry the pails that they shouldered easily.
But however you told it, the story was potent in an age where the gulfs between town and country, rulers and ruled, had expanded so fast, and where corruption was treated as a matter of course. It turned rural adversity into a triumph of communist spirit and discipline, in striking contrast to the lavish lifestyles that the party elite had come to enjoy. It emphasised that the leader understood what it was to struggle. It was also true. Xi had worked and studied hard; people seem to have liked and respected him. His experiences had given him a visceral understanding of the harshness of life at the bottom of society that few young people – or western leaders – could appreciate. Important as his privileges were, they could only temper the draining conditions and relentless graft. He remembered the shock of manure in the face as he cleared a blocked pipe. The food was bad and there was never enough of it, rest was scarce yet boredom rife. In the first few months, he and the villagers struggled to even understand each other’s speech. It was a lonely life.
Auntie Gu’s tender nature won over classmates and neighbours. She helped to harvest crops for an old widow neglected by her children. She and her friends taught village kids and put on musical shows for the farmers. There were moments of happiness and even amity. Yet cultures clashed. Farmers were shocked to see girls and boys out for walks together, however innocently, and disturbed as their influence rubbed off on village youths. Maoist puritanism, dismissing romance as a bourgeois snare, looked liberal beside the deep conservatism in parts of the countryside. “If country boys and girls were in relationships, they wouldn’t dare to look in each other’s eyes,” said Auntie Huang.
But the city girls, naive and far from their families, were easy prey for men. Often the victims took the blame – they were educated urbanites, while their rapists, being poor peasants or local officials, ranked higher in political class, which was as much a moral status as a social one. Malicious or obstructive officials had so many ways to make you suffer: refusing rations, assigning the worst jobs or accusing you of political crimes.
One of Auntie Huang’s classmates, sent down at 14, died in jail after he was accused of joining an anti-party organisation, in one of the era’s many paranoid campaigns. She lost another friend whose serious illness was dismissed as just a cold. Weakened by overwork and malnutrition, many succumbed to malaria, pneumonia and other diseases. Thousands more died “unnatural” deaths, usually in work accidents. Propaganda celebrated these pointless sacrifices, spurring children on to fresh acts of futility: one Shanghai teenager was lauded as a martyr for drowning as he tried to save wooden poles from a flood. A poster shows him amid the waves, head high and arm raised as he shouts a final exhortation back to watching comrades.
Looking back, the educated youth group mourned the missing friends, the lost years and the hardship, but they also saw the suffering as the real point of it all. They spoke of the era as veterans might talk of a war to younger men born too late to fight: with regret and sometimes scorn or anger, and disbelief that they had gone through it, but also with an unmistakable tinge of superiority. It had made them braver, stronger, more capable. They understood something no one else could, that no one ever would again.
Xi Jinping returned to Beijing in 1975, later than many of his peers, but to a plum position: as a student at a reopened university. Access was determined by political credentials. His family connections were presumably key, and he had managed to join the party after multiple rejections. But for most it took luck, ingenuity and an unyielding drive to escape the countryside. One of Auntie Gu’s classmates seduced a married man who was labouring alongside them, knowing that his long years in the army would allow him to settle in the city. He won permission to divorce his wife and then married the younger woman, leaving the countryside with her. “Then, not long after that, all the educated youth could go back. So she regretted it,” recalled Auntie Gu.
Auntie Huang had faced a dilemma of her own. Marriage in the villages drastically reduced your odds of finding a route home, but she and her prospective husband concluded they had little to lose – neither had the kind of worker, peasant or soldier credentials needed to get out anyway. They wed in the early 70s, and their son arrived soon after. When her home town needed workers a year or so later, she and her son had to go alone. It would be four more years before her husband could join them.
At first there were only a few ways to return to the cities. Solidarity fractured as youths competed for rare chances to escape the villages, such as jobs and university places. Bribes to an official or slandering a rival offered better odds than diligence alone. Girls were pressured to pay for their route home with sex. Some children were so desperate they injured themselves, hoping they would be allowed to go back on health grounds.
From 1975 the rate of returns picked up, though more than 2 million teenagers arrived in the countryside that year. Desperation slowly coalesced into mass resistance and, by 1978, open protest: educated youth began striking, demonstrating, writing pamphlets and occupying premises, demanding to go home. Their experience had toughened them – they knew they had to fight to get anywhere. Two years later, officials axed the rustication scheme, leaving almost a million mired in the countryside, by now married and with children, or defeated by their circumstances.
“It wasn’t easy when we came back, to fight our way back into city life,” said Auntie Huang. “We were not so young any more. We hadn’t had much education. Some of us had family and had to feed them at the same time as trying to learn the skills, working skills, to survive.”
They had suffered in the countryside for years; now they found they had little to offer the cities either. They had lost not only their sense of purpose but their opportunities. Competition for academic places was so fierce after the years of closures that only the most brilliant and determined got their chance. Younger, more polished potential employees were emerging from the schools. Some returnees took up casual low-skilled labour. The desperate resorted to sex work and crime. Others found that the hardship had fired them up. They became entrepreneurs, seizing upon economic reforms propelled in part by the authorities’ need to do something with them.
It didn’t strike the Chongqing group as curious that they now spent so much time dwelling on the place they had fought so hard and so long to escape. Those years of misery defined them, standing for self-sacrifice, community and grit. They had earned their homes, their restaurant dinners, their lipsticks and frilled sweaters. Their story was validated by their leader, who had struggled with them. While other parts of the Cultural Revolution were stamped down out of sight, deep into the mud of the past, this was elevated as part of the national story.
“It’s only because the decades have passed that we think about the good things when we recall it. At the time it was all very painful,” acknowledged Auntie Huang. “Life was so miserable – words cannot describe it. A lot of people can’t even tell others how miserable their experiences were. But people feel they need to pass on the spirit.”
It had meaning to them? It wasn’t, as some thought, just a waste of their best years, time stolen from them?
“Yes, I wonder that!” She seized the question. “I can’t decide. It was time wasted. But when I remember, it was like a treasury for me in some ways. I can’t say I don’t regret the experience. But I can’t say I’m ungrateful either. It’s something you can’t do anything about.”
She thought for a moment more and brightened: “The best part was that we went through so many hardships when we were young that hardships we met later seemed like nothing.”
It echoed Xi’s conclusion: “Nothing could be so hard as that.”
It was her smile that undid me.
This is an edited extract from Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, published by Faber on 2 February 2023.
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution. By Tania Branigan. The Guardian, January 19, 2023.
On October 9, 2021, LARB hosted a conversation with four scholars with recent work on the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Lingchei Letty Chen, Nan Z. Da, Frank Dikötter, and Jie Li. The panel was introduced by LARB Executive Director Irene Yoon and Humanities Editor Anna Shechtman. It was moderated by Nan Z. Da.
IRENE YOON: Good morning, I’m Irene Yoon, the executive director at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Thank you all for joining us for today’s event, “On the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Thought Exercises for the 21st Century.” This month here at LARB, we’re celebrating 10 years with what we’re calling the Semipublic Intellectual Sessions, a series that brings together some of our favorite writers, critics, scholars, and readers in sharp and thoughtful conversation about pressing issues of the day, from the state of cultural criticism to criminal justice reform; from the impact of big tech to the future of genetic editing. If you’re interested in learning more about some of these events, you can do so at lareviewofbooks.org/events. In the meantime, we’re pleased to welcome you to this very first satellite event of the Semipublic Intellectual Sessions, in which our distinguished guests — Lingchei Letty Chen, Nan Da, Frank Dikötter, and Jie Li — tackle the legacies and ongoing difficulties of public and scholarly apprehension of the Cultural Revolution today. I’d also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Nan and our wonderful Humanities Editor here at LARB, Anna Shechtman, for convening this fantastic panel.
ANNA SHECHTMAN: Thank you, Irene. This panel would not exist were it not for the creative vision of Nan Z. Da, who approached me this summer with the hope of bringing together authors and translators with new works apprehending the legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Nan is an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (2018) and is completing a book called The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. She is also the author of a beautiful and important essay in n+1 on the epistemological vacuum created in the wake of Maoist violence and Chinese state propaganda — and on the role of literary criticism in filling their historical and ethical voids.
Though
not everyone on this panel is a literary critic, we might think of the tools
she employs and promotes in that essay — intellectual discernment, inductive
and deductive reasoning, and disambiguation — as the methodological touchstones
for this panel on the Cultural Revolution, or what Nan calls “one of the most
cognitively difficult objects of our time.”
NAN Z. DA: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming today — and thank you to the editors of Los Angeles Review of Books for hosting this conversation and for framing it with such sensitivity. The video forum is a strange new form of broadcasting, and it’s a fitting medium for our conversation, broadcasting being a source of trauma and reclamation. I’m honored to be able to host today some of the most intelligent and unflinching historians of the Mao era. This is, of course, just a small group of people among a much larger community endeavoring to truly reckon with the Mao era and its large-scale crimes against humanity, which, because of their design, including failures of witnessing and failures of attestation, have caused a crisis of representational parity. To that end, for the sake of representational parity: first, we want to say that even the name itself, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, is misleading. It fails to acknowledge the degree to which what happened between 1966 and 1976 was an inevitable outcome, a tripling down of practices established in the earliest parts of the Mao era, and hardly the beginning of even that scale of destruction and mass mobilization. Nor is it, of course, the end.
With this caveat in mind: The Cultural Revolution, does not have enough representational parity in academia or the public sphere. Compared to, say, intra-ethnic persecution of Zoroastrians in Iran, for example, the Mao era and its atrocities and complexities have had plenty of coverage. But given 1.) the sheer scale — in volume and severity — of the purges, censorships, and social engineering campaigns that took place before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, 2.) the sheer difficulty of the undertaking, and 3.) the absolute relevance to our contemporary society, it has not been studied well enough or discussed well enough. Part of our purpose here is to say that all of this is understandable given what happened — to acknowledge that this was an event that took a long time to understand. Because falsification and distortion and manipulation of new media technologies figured in almost every layer of this world and its self-reporting, it will take a very long time to get it right.
The panelists here today will go over the challenges of historicizing and memorializing this period of history, and the moral and professional paradoxes of even trying to touch it at all, but one of the challenges worth mentioning now is the degree to which the harms and psychic infrastructure of the Mao era — the totalitarianism that by Juan José Linz’s definition meant the mobilization of citizens against one another, the near total collapse of the personal into the political and vice versa — all of this created victims who are still stigmatized. After all, this kind of harm tends to create people with whom you would not wish to associate — if that were not the case, there would never be any reason for its mitigation.
In the next hour and a half, which will include two rounds of conversation and a Q-and-A, we will be touching on the panelists’ recent books on Mao era and the Cultural Revolution’s intricacies and ongoing confusions, and the challenges of truth-telling that arise in connecting the personal to the political. It is important to know the details, which we will only be able to touch on. It’s important to know the sequences, which we won’t be able to touch on at all. Felicitous and infelicitous comparisons are made between our current society and the Mao era all the time; in order to judge their fairness, you have to immerse yourself in what is arguably one of the most cognitively difficult objects of our time, worth reexamining not only for the sake of justice and the historical record but also for our collective grasp of contemporary phenomena.
I will therefore begin by posing a straightforward question to our panelists, and begin with Profesor Dikötter. Who are you writing for? Who have you been writing for?
FRANK DIKÖTTER: You mentioned crimes against humanity, which I think is the key term here. And of course, these crimes start right after 1942 and go all the way up to the present. But who am I writing for? It’s very selfish. I write for myself to start with. I’ve always lived in fear of ignorance. If you are a historian of modern China, how can you live with yourself if you spend your career tiptoeing around all these crimes against humanity. Once you start working on this period, going to archives, you have the privilege to read through extraordinary amounts of material that comes straight from the party investigations into massacres in the countryside, detailed reports about a quarter of a million homes ransacked by Red Guards in Shanghai in the month of September 1966. What do you do once you’ve seen all of that? To me, it would be inconceivable that you then somehow let your notes gather dust. It is troubling for me that a historian might participate in the silence, become an accomplice to the silence, by not squaring up to the evidence and writing as one should about what one has discovered about this horrendous period. As Elie Wiesel once said, “The executioner always kills twice, the second time through silence.”
LINGCHEI LETTY CHEN: I’m not a historian, and I don’t always deal with archives, but I’m a literature professor, and I wrote this book, The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years, also for myself. It has been one way for me to understand the kind of propaganda that I was fed when I was growing up in Taiwan by the other side — by the Nationalist government, the Japanese government. I needed to know the truth of Socialist China. In my years of reading contemporary Chinese literature, I was struck by the grotesque imagery, the extreme hunger, the recurring nightmare. I began to ask myself this first very first question: What would be at stake if we did not take a humanist approach to understanding the millions and millions of Chinese lives that were lost? What would that do to us today and to our future generations? And this is really what motivated me to write this book. If I take this long stream of Maoist suppressions and persecutions and put it in the same category of the Nanjing Massacre, the Holocaust, and other genocidal events across the world, how would that affect our understanding of the Socialist period in China?
JIE LI:
Thank you for this great question, Nan. I’ve been thinking about this a lot,
and actually just listening to Professors Dikötter and Chen, I was thinking
about how I came to be interested in this period. I have family that lived in
the Shanghai homes that were ransacked in the Cultural Revolution. My
grandfather, he was always afraid that his house was going to be searched by
Red Guards, so he had actually destroyed his own college diploma. My father
didn’t even know that he had graduated from St. John’s College. And so I
started by writing my own family history, wanting to overcome my own ignorance
about the past by asking just family members what they had experienced, and
what their neighbors experienced, and that circle kept on expanding. So it was
a quest for knowledge.
As I was
writing, I also realized that I was also writing for my students and for my
children. I started from the position of a listener. I really want to listen to
more and more experiences from the entire revolutionary period, not just the
Cultural Revolution decade, and somehow pass that on. In my most recent book, I
have a whole section on notes for future curators. The whole book is based on
the writer Ba Jin’s call for a Cultural Revolution Museum to pass on memories
to future generations, but this is obviously not possible in China today. So
there is also that future audience in mind — and also the people who would be
carrying and collecting and passing on those memories.
There are some people who have very traumatic memories of this historical period, and there are many who also have very nostalgic memories. I find that to be a really interesting paradox. Is it that those who are nostalgic are merely brainwashed by the state? By the propaganda? Or is there some reason for their nostalgia? What is it that they have experienced? I started to realize that there are many Cultural Revolutions, that there are many different experiences of this period, and especially from the bottom up, it is extremely important for us to document and witness and pass them on.
NZD: You
have such a wonderful theoretical apparatus for talking about the unevenness of
the timing of the arrival of the Cultural Revolution itself. That for some people
it arrived in this way, at this moment; and that for others, it arrived much
later. And that the timing of the arrival of that severity is confused with
real nostalgia. I know this personally. My parents are like this. My mother’s
side of the family especially experienced real atrocities during this time, but
she loves the Yangbanxi, the model Peking operas that were performed at this
time. She loves them in a way that’s ungainsayable — that cannot be detached
from who she is. And these attachments are very, very painful because for this
generation, for people who are my age and your age and younger, the Cultural
Revolution might arrive even later in the kind of psychic terrors of the home
and parents who somehow internalized the mechanisms of this persecutory
apparatus, but who pass it on in a way that’s both historical and ahistorical.
I wish to ask a question now about the extent to which knowledge about the Cultural Revolution actually is suppressed. This is a very, very difficult question. From what I could gather, going back to China every year over the past decade, I’ve heard that it is taught, but that the manner in which it is taught, the scale, the account of cause and effect, and the level of participation is often wrong. There are many places where the accounting goes wrong, for example, in suicides — suicides being one of the easiest places to detach cause from effect. That’s just one example. So it’s talked about, but it’s also suppressed. It’s talked about sometimes opportunistically and suppressed opportunistically, so the degree to which the archive is or is not available is a real one. Could you speak on these lacunae and your own experience of it?
JL: If you go to Tiananmen Square and the National Museum of China looking for some kind of representation of the Cultural Revolution period, you will probably find it in the corner of the exhibition of the central permanent collection — like a single photograph of a Red Guard rally. It’s not emphasized at all. What we have, for the most part, is Socialist modernization and all the achievements of the period, and most of the exhibit actually doesn’t focus on the three decades of the Mao period at all.
But if you go outside of Tiananmen Square, even to the tourist markets, you’ll find a lot of memorabilia from that period on sale. And if you go beyond Beijing, there are places that are not necessarily called Cultural Revolution museums. They’re private museums called Red era museums, and there’s actually some kind of Red theme-park-like restaurant in every single city. There are propaganda posters decorating the walls, and there are waiters and waitresses dressed up like Red Guards and doing dances from the Revolutionary Period. There’s music playing from that period. So the Red era culture seems to be very much set up and reproduced in these nostalgic spaces.
If you actually talk to people there who are of a certain generation, they have really interesting memories of the periods, and there’s a lot of conversation going on. But it seems like each is remembering their own social groups and not really talking across the divide. So the memory of the Cultural Revolution is very fragmented, and oftentimes, the traumatic memories are not really in conversation with others. The peasants, workers, and soldiers each seem to have very different kinds of memories, so it really depends on where you are looking for memories of this period, and which are the most traumatic elements for different individuals. For some, it might be the sent-down youth movement, where urban youth were sent out to the countryside. But then for others, it might have been the Socialist Education movement, rather than the Cultural Revolution in the countryside, when work teams came, and there were the first cadres for workers, for students, and for peasants. The revolution arrived at very different moments. So I think that the memorial landscape is actually a very complicated one, that there is actually widespread popular memory, but manifested only in a way that doesn’t criticize the current Communist Party. So it’s not so much that there’s no talk about the Cultural Revolution, it’s just not official and not centralized.
LLC: You mentioned nostalgia, which is not a neutral concept. When people are feeling nostalgic about a particular past, it usually is a manifestation of how that particular individual feels about the present. And the kind of nostalgia for the Socialist period in China, I see that as quite intrinsically linked to our identities, to identity politics among different generations of Chinese who were at different stages in their life throughout the entire Socialist period.
Jie also mentioned that there are so many different Cultural Revolutions; different people have different memories of their experience during those 10 years. And so it seems to me there is a kind of parallax: depending on where you stand, where you were positioned, from where you look at the totality of the Cultural Revolution, you’ll get just a piece of it. So what do we do? What are what are our tasks for facing this surfeit of discourses? There’s still a whole lot of work that needs to be done. I personally believe in the testimonial function of literature, and I think we need to read deeper and between the lines of the literature written by Chinese authors to find a different interpretive frame.
FD:
Well, I am a historian, and I don’t really trust my own memory. I’m not quite
sure of what I said to my students a week ago, never mind 30 years ago when I
was a student. Do I trust my own memory? No. Do I trust yours? No, not really.
You can speak to people about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural
Revolution, but one thing is for sure, you will not be speaking to the dead.
The victims have gone, so there’s a discrepancy there between who you speak to
and who lived at the time. That’s the first thing you want to take into
account.
The second point really is that memory, a week after traumatic events, never mind 10, 20, or 30 years, is a very, very difficult object to study. I’ll give you one example, which is actually not from China, but it indicates the distance that there can be between something that happens and the memory of something. This was an interview conducted with a Jewish woman in Britain, who told her interviewer that she had managed to leave Nazi Germany in 1936 and had grown up in Britain. Now the historian started looking at her account and discovered that she had not left Germany in 1936, but she had gone to a camp with her family members, all of whom were exterminated. She managed to migrate to Britain, and she’d spent decades building up a story in her head to erase the Holocaust from her memory. That’s the extent of the trauma: the gap between the memory and the events is indicative of the pain of the trauma that some people have to live with.
Now, I would like to add one thing. Jie is absolutely right: it’s a big country. And even in a small country, there are all sorts of people from all walks of life. Some people managed to get through the Cultural Revolution without much damage, some of them actually thrived. So of course there’s the huge diversity of experience, and not just from city to countryside, but also what just happened to people: whether they were perpetrators who then became victims, or whether they somehow sailed through the whole thing without much impact, there’s an enormous task there to reconstruct that huge diversity of experience. But I would still maintain that the sheer wealth of material in the archives, including, of course, interviews with people of that time, is an unparalleled resource to gain a better understanding of that diversity under such difficult circumstances.
NZD: I don’t mean at all to discount these historiographic endeavors, but new students of history — and I consider myself a new student of history — should be made curious by some of these events because their unraveling requires inductive and deductive reasoning. Anna was so kind as to introduce my own thinking on this at the beginning. And I really believe this — there are moments where you must, because of the silence of the archive, work forward and backward from certain facts. So, for example, the Four Pests campaign should be so interesting to a student of history. Why is it that over a million sparrows were killed in the mass mobilization of a health campaign, but most of them were left uneaten during famine? A student of history ought to be curious about the historical sequence that led to that particular event, even if they cannot speak to the dead, right? That’s deduction: what had to have happened so that this bizarre thing could have happened?
And then
there’s induction: what kind of a world is created when you have a sentence
that begins, “Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?”? (1926) That’s in
Mao’s literature, a very early document written long before the Cultural
Revolution. But what kind of a world is engendered in this utterance is a
question left to inductive reasoning, as well as, of course, archival pursuit.
And so my next question has to do with some of the really intellectually
challenging parts of the work that you’ve all done, and I’ll begin by
mentioning Letty’s work, because in your work, Letty, you mention what a
problem of morality it is to touch the Mao era. It’s to reckon with morality’s
counterfeits; it’s to reckon with its abuses and its misuses and its truest
role in historiography, which is something that historiography wishes to
basically keep out, right? That we should be objective is to keep out the
variable of morality. Except that in this particular case, morality is so
important to understanding what happened, and because morality is so friendless
in its own way, that it becomes a cognitive difficulty. So, maybe I can ask you
this question: what is it about this work that is really so difficult for the
mind?
LLC: This was probably the hardest issue for me to grapple with when I was writing this book: the moral and ethical responsibility in bearing witness to a historical atrocity. That is what Freitas said: there are people that cannot speak for themselves; they rely on us, the living, to speak for them. We have to speak for them, and that is a moral and ethical responsibility. In terms of the Cultural Revolution itself, we have, years later, decades later, people coming forward to put forth their accusation or their confession and so on. We have to ask, and this is where the moral line becomes slippery, how do we bear witness to history when any individual could at one time be a victim and a perpetrator, a bystander and a collaborator? One person can be all of these, so for this individual, years later, to come forward and talk about his or her victimhood, how then do we read it? How do we understand it?
Memories are a representation. You cannot say that it is my memory, therefore I possess the authentic truth. No, memory is your present-day reconstruction of what you think has happened to you. And that is why I think that for us to understand historical documents and archival materials is very important, but we also need to understand how memory functions, and how memory is a representation through language. Let’s not forget the mediation of language. So then, circle back to this question of morality and ethics. When you are writing your memory of what happened to you and what you witnessed, how do you write it? How do you represent your memories? When any person steps forward to say, “I’m a witness to a historic event,” that person is automatically charged with an ethical responsibility.
JL: On this note of memory, I think there’s also memory in the making. It’s not just retrospective memories, but it’s also the way that some people in their own time are trying to anticipate how the future will remember them — and how they’re trying to bear witness to their time, and pass on their witnessing into the future. One of the figures I treat is a student, Lin Zhao, who was writing in prison in her own blood, hoping that her writing would circulate beyond the prison archives and be read by the future. Filmmakers have taken her testimony and made it available to a broader public. So memory is not necessarily opposed to the archives, but archives are also a form of memory that only really becomes living memory if it is actually used by historians and made available to a wider public.
In terms
of speaking for the dead, that’s definitely a really important ethical
responsibility. A lot of parallels have been made between what happened in
China and the Holocaust, and I know that’s a very important paradigm for my
understanding about how to memorialize this period. But I think that one really
key difference is that the victims and the perpetrators are not very clear cut
in the Chinese case. And oftentimes, those who are revolutionaries will be
revolutionized in the next cycle. Accounting for this past also means
accounting for violence and trying to understand how that violence even
occurred, how people can become violent, and that means actually understanding
mass participation in the revolution. Why were there so many supporters? Were
they directed by Mao? Was Mao so powerful that he mobilized so many people?
What is it that enabled this? And this is not something I worked on in Utopian
Ruins, but something I’m working on now is thinking about the Chinese
revolution also as a media revolution. What were the mass media that enabled
that kind of mobilization? What was the role, for example of loudspeakers?
You mentioned the Four Pests campaign, which I’m actually very interested in now, especially the sparrow campaign. The sparrows were killed primarily by noisemaking, so people were actually being directed by loudspeakers to make noise all day long until the sparrows fell from the sky. I think it was 2.1 billion sparrows killed, which is four times China’s population, so on average, every Chinese person killed four sparrows in 1958. Violence through the noise of loudspeakers being used as a weapon was pervasive in the first years of the Cultural Revolution. It was almost a soundscape of loudspeakers that generated violence, terror, but also in a sacred acoustic landscape, promoted the Mao Code, and so on. So I’m really trying to understand what are the mechanisms of horror and what motivated people to participate — including the ideals, including the really genuine beliefs.
We’ve been talking a lot about testimony, and one of the findings for me is that these testimonies sometimes have turned into testimonies of revolutionary faith, almost like a religious kind of manifestation: “I believe in the utopian visions that have been put forward by Mao and also the mass media, so we’re going to make that come true, regardless of the costs.” Or if you think about a word like the purge, purge is a really interesting word because it means cleansing. And oftentimes, the greatest violence happened during these almost, I would say, utopian quests to cleanse the ranks of the people, and to make sure there are no more class enemies. So understanding the motivations of the masses, and not just elite politicians, is extremely important for understanding this historical period.
NZD: One thing that you mentioned in your book, which I thought was really important, was the scale of media, of technological manipulation, that begins very early. One of the most striking pictures from your book is Chairman Mao taking part in volunteer labor at the construction site of the Ming Tombs, Water Reservoir, and this is 1958. By 1978, the person who’s standing next to him has been edited out. This is just a tiny, tiny example of how difficult the whole thing is, and tossed in with that is this real ambiguity about moral panic, right? Because on the one hand, people will say in an unconsidered way that persecutory regimes begin with moral panic, which is both true and not true. Because of course, for the victims, for people who are trying to do right by themselves and by their lives, the immediate feeling of the times is moral panic. You are morally panicked; you are responding too hastily to haste. You are confused, literally confused, by what has just happened in front of your eyes. Can that kind of moral panic be disambiguated from a calculated program of persecution that is often called moral panic, but instead is just iterating over human behavior looking for pre-political or political inclinations that then can be delivered to the prosecution? In essence, these are two very similar mechanisms. The feeling is very similar. But of course, media changes and surveillance make the determination even more difficult.
Frank, I’m returning to you one more time to ask after a concrete example of a practitioner’s difficulty in the writing of your history.
FD: I’m not sure I’ve got a real practical example, but the immensity of the task is daunting. You must bear in mind that when it comes to the issue of motivation — did some people truly believe in these ideals? — you are faced with a methodological problem. The problem is that I don’t know what you believe. And you will not find out what people at the time believed. This is particularly true with dictatorships: you can talk about what Germans believed or did not believe under Nazi Germany, or what Soviet citizens believed or did not believe under Stalin, or under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, but you will not find out. There is no freedom of speech, and nobody is at leisure to openly proclaim what they believe. You do what you’re told to do. It may very well be that there are true idealists, I have no doubt. I’ve no doubt that there were opportunists as well as thugs, who eagerly embraced the cause during the Cultural Revolution. But there’s a simple methodological point that you’re not able to truly find out and prove it, you can only go by what people do.
Now, the
point of history is not to judge other people. Lin Zhao, mentioned by Jie, is,
of course, well known for having written her testimony in blood in prison, but
she tortured people described as landlords in the early 1950s. She participated
eagerly in that revolution. So the point really is not that we are living in a
world in which we judge as historians, but we’re here to understand the key
values. We need empathy: feel the pain, but also feel what it is to torture
someone else and then go back home.
And then the final point, as the case of Lin Zhao indicates, many people are both perpetrators and victims. This reminds me of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who managed to survive Auschwitz and wrote very searingly about the experience of the Holocaust. He pointed out that the very victims themselves become perpetrators, if only by keeping a little bit of food for themselves and not sharing it with others. He called it a grey zone. In other words, not a world of white and black, perpetrators and victims, but a gigantic grey zone. And that’s what I would call the Cultural Revolution, as well as the preceding decades: a grey zone.
AS: I
will interject here with a few questions from the chat. This is from Dora
Zhang: “I’d love to hear the panel’s thoughts on the challenges of talking
about the Cultural Revolution and its legacies, specifically in the West. The
critique of this period has been co-opted by the right, often made
opportunistically and in bad faith. At the same time, many Western leftist
intellectuals have found the Cultural Revolution to be a source of inspiration,
often with limited knowledge about what actually happened. Today, there are
also young Chinese diasporic people who have glommed on to the CCP in the name
of a critique of Western US imperialism. How do we cut through all of this talk
about the Cultural Revolution on its own terms, especially in the current
climate of Sinophobia?”
NZD:
Thank you for that question. In this past year of the pandemic, I’ve actually
learned quite a lot about systemic racism. What does it really mean to
outsource your disregard for other people’s lives because of their race or
ethnicity — to outsource that disregard or outright animosity to systems
working exactly as they should, or systems evolving to work in a particular
way? And I don’t know how to answer some of your other questions, Dora, but I
think that there’s this discrepancy between theory and praxis. That’s always
been true in our discipline, but also in academia at large — whose theory is
being paid out by whose lives? Rey Chow has this wonderful line from Writing
Diaspora, where she talks about the eroticism that is built into Western
fetishization of the successes of the Mao era — that eroticization being a
paying out in real lives of an idea, of someone else’s idea, a thought
experiment. So this divide is an East-West divide; it’s a hegemonic divide,
actually. There are many ways to think about how that disregard, how that
callousness, can manifest in discourse and in institutional practice.
LLC: And if I may jump in to answer Dora’s question, I don’t think we can ever talk about the Cultural Revolution on its own terms. It’s impossible. And I’m not even sure if trying to talk about the Cultural Revolution on its own terms is necessarily a productive exercise. I don’t think so. And that is why today we have discussed or alluded to the Holocaust and other different frameworks, because something as complex and as long-lasting as the Mao era has to be understood vis-à-vis something else. The historical incident has to be in contextualized.
FD: This is very tricky. You cannot suppress truth because you are fearful of what your political opponent might do with it. It’s not a good excuse. You cannot tiptoe around crimes against humanity, committed anywhere on this planet, just because you fear that someone on the right or in the middle or on the left might do something with that truth that you don’t like. It’s not, I think, a very productive way of going about it. I would say one of the great issues about these crimes against humanity committed in the People’s Republic of China, and in other socialist countries, is precisely that so little has been written about it because there is the fear that the right might use it somehow to uphold this neoliberal model, or whatever the current theory might be. It’s a very dangerous thing to think because, as I said, you become, then, an accomplice. You contribute to maintaining silence over something. So I understand it is politically difficult, but silence is not an answer.
JL: Just quickly, I think that comparisons can be productive, as well as unproductive. It is productive when you also point out the differences rather than just the similarities. What is it that reminds you of the Cultural Revolution at this particular moment? I think that when the statues came down last year, for example, racist and Confederate statues came down, and there were a lot people who experienced the Cultural Revolution and the smashing of the Four Olds campaign, and I think the trauma of that made them react against this sort of monument war. But to say that this is like the Cultural Revolution, I don’t know if that’s so productive. I think it’s more productive to ask them what kind of monuments should be placed there in their place. And then we can actually look at various cases of how people have dealt with difficult pasts. Because there was a reason for that violence against the statues that have been toppled. I think the main question is actually, if the Cultural Revolution is brought up as a hot topic that’s relevant to the present, what exactly is relevant? And we have to point to the differences as well as the similarities.
NZD: I
think there’s also a lack of knowledge on both sides. People who have
experienced extreme-left totalitarian regimes tend not to know what
extreme-right totalitarian regimes feel like, viscerally. Although we know that
documents from Nazi Germany had arrived, and Schmittian forms of thinking
continually arrived in Socialist China. And so the methods of persecution are
not clear cut; a lot of what happened in China from 1949 to 1980 and beyond,
are modeled after extreme-left and extreme-right regimes. But still, I think
there’s a lack of adequate appreciation of other traumas among people who survived
the Cultural Revolution. It’s a lack of appreciation in both directions: a lack
of appreciation that [an analogy] might be over-scaled — it might be escalated
for no reason — and that we’re witnessing a kind of scare tactic; but also lack
of appreciation of the fact that what is happening [elsewhere] can be a
combination of regimes. It can be Maoist, parts of it; parts of it can be
expressions of the excesses of late capitalism; parts of it can be the worst
vulgarities of American racial neoliberalism. So things become more and more
complex. But I agree with Frank as well, that the fear of the immediate
political interpretation can be parochial and can perpetrate an injustice of
scapegoating. Many of those who suffered the most during the Cultural Revolution
were somehow “reactionaries” when, in fact, many of them were liberal
progressives. So that label itself [reactionary] often makes no sense. Again,
the imperative is always to be as detailed and specific as humanly possible.
AS: We have another question from Luming Zhang about how or whether women experience the Cultural Revolution differently from men. She says, “Jie Li mentioned the role of the mass media in mobilizing the masses, and it reminds me that the scope of mass media is different in rural and urban space, in private and public space. So, for example, can we ask how housewives experienced the Cultural Revolution?”
JL: I think that the best book that would address, not how housewives experienced the Cultural Revolution, but how rural women experienced the Mao era would be Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory. One of the most interesting conceptual distinctions that she made was between campaign time and domestic time — that women don’t remember the campaign so much as their own life cycles. Among the rural women that she interviewed in China during the 1950s, especially their experience of collectivization had to do with their own lifecycle and their own gendered experiences.
We were
talking about how the revolution did not arrive at the same time in the same
places, and maybe for those who went who were in Yan’an in the 1940s, they had
already experienced a kind of revolution in their souls, or a Cultural
Revolution in the 1940s. And then for others, the revolution came to them in
the 1950s and ’60s; maybe in the countryside, they really felt the impact of
the revolution during the land reform in the ’50s and in the Socialist
Education movement prior to the Cultural Revolution. I’ve actually been working
on both the spread of loudspeaker networks and also film networks, and cinema
really only arrived in the most remote areas of the countryside in the 1970s.
So for some very marginalized rural folks, they had never seen these films
until Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, promoted the revolutionary model works. And so
they got exposed to revolutionary culture and ideas much later on through the
medium of cinema. So how mass media spreads really does have an impact on when
and how people experience the revolution.
NZD: So it’s a really good question because of the gendered nature of the idea that the atrocities themselves were very yin. They are, in a different cosmological order, figured as feminine, because they hide what they do; they’re backstabbing; they’re backhanded. And, of course, there’s also this extraordinary association of identity with socialism, which, even in my own family, growing up and being taught to sing 红色娘子军 , The Red Detachment of Women, or watching partisan films — The Dawns Here Are Quiet [1972], Walter Defends Sarajevo [1972] — these partisan films that figured women in authentic heroic roles are really important to self-identity well after the Cultural Revolution. And again, this is just to underscore the difficulty of it, they continue to be transmitted by people who really bore the brunt of the [Mao era].
LLC: I
constantly go back to my reading of Chinese postmodern literature, in which
women are often cast as, not exactly feminine, but as extremely capable caregivers.
They would steal, they would rob, they would do all kinds of things to provide.
Of course, there is the belief or doctrine that “women can hold up half the
sky,” so yes, I think women experienced revolution very differently.
NZ: I
don’t mean to sideline Frank here, as I’m sure he has very important things to
say. But it’s actually a much harder question than one might think. Some of the
worst crimes were perpetrated by school girls, so it really puts pressure on
the way we think we can look at different -isms with moral clarity. Do we have
time for one more question?
AS: Yes, this a question from an anonymous attendee who is asking about whether there’s a meaningful difference between the top-down suppression or erasure of archives, and what they call the “kind of paradoxical forgetting-not forgetting that Benedict Anderson draws out in Imagined Communities, that which must be covertly preserved, but overtly forgotten in the formation of national identity.”
LLC: The government’s deliberate erasure of archival evidence and material is done with the intent to eradicate, but in terms of the forgetting — remembering the dynamics between remembering and forgetting in what we call the formation of memory — that’s different. These are two different matters. In my understanding of memory theories, what we call what we remember is actually what’s left of what we have already forgotten, and that is memory. So the mechanism of memories is always a constant tug and pull between remembering and forgetting, and that is a very different issue from the government’s purposefully closing down archives and burning books. These are two very different issues.
FD: I’m not entirely sure I understand the question. I’m always very suspicious of theory and abstraction. I mean, an archive is a real thing. Once you start talking about archives as a metaphor for something else, it all becomes very slippery. In particular, I’m keen on bearing in mind that we’re talking about real people, not some theoretical thing about memory. But what I find interesting is that both after Franco in Spain, but also after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Poland, these two countries were free to examine their past, but more or less remained silent for a decade or two. Such was the trauma. In other words, Poles and Spaniards who have the freedom to examine their own past, to interrogate each other, to go to the archives and read material, to write up their memories, they don’t do this, to a great extent, for a decade or two. That’s the amount of time it takes for this to somehow settle — for people to establish some sort of perspective and distance and to gain the courage to go back into the past and to look at these crimes against humanity.
So imagine what that means in the PRC, where to this day, it is pretty much a taboo to peer into the past. And when I say the PRC, you can add Hong Kong right now. As you know, the museum for Tiananmen in Hong Kong has been closed down recently. So we are seeing memories very gradually being officially erased. You have to bear in mind that it takes a lot of work — and a lot of freedom and space and perspective — to actually start wrestling with these issues.
JL: There’s definitely state-sponsored amnesia, but I would say that at an everyday level, because of a lot of the violence and denunciations from the Cultural Revolution — between people who know each other, between even family members, between people who live in the same community, and neighbors and colleagues — if these issues are brought up, then it’s like the continuation of the earlier conflicts that there has been a deliberate hope to forget, to put that contentious past behind themselves, so that they can still live together.
It’s not like those people who betrayed each other and denounced each other are living and working separately. They still have to live and work together. So the time that’s also needed is not just for processing psychologically the trauma that has happened, but also to let the wounds heal a little bit so that the social fabric doesn’t tear apart. And I think that actually gets into the production of the archives, because the production of the archives actually is full of violence to begin with. Everyone had to write these denunciations of each other. My grandfather told me that he was asked to write about his cousins — to write about his Nationalist past — and that was a denunciation enough that it caused him to be exiled to the countryside where he eventually died in a labor reform camp. And so what we see in the archives are truly sort of the remnants of human life. They’re not just there; they’re not just representations.
Because there’s so much violence going into the archives, it also raises the question of how do we then read this stuff. Sometimes one of the reasons why I wasn’t able to reproduce materials from archives was that they said, “Well, there’s a name.” There are issues of privacy; these archives used to belong to someone else, and sometimes their existence has to do with the fact that people have been forced to denounce or report on each other. In some ways, all of these words are written in blood, not just the ones that are literally written in blood.
NZD: I really can’t think of a better way to close than that. In this circle, we are speaking with people who have extensive knowledge of these events, but if you just poke a little bit outside of the circle, there’s very little knowledge of these events — regardless of your politics, regardless of where you stand, regardless of your own line in this trauma. To risk an understatement, the Cultural Revolution is not a very clean thing to tackle. We just hope that you will read these books, and, if there’s someone in your intellectual community who has real testimony to give, who’s trying their best to reckon with the past, we hope that you will extend your hand to them and not avert your gaze. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you to the Los Angeles Review of Books.
On the
Chinese Cultural Revolution: Thought Exercises for the 21st Century. By Lingchei Letty Chen, Nan Z. Da, Frank
Dikötter, Jie Li. Los Angeles Review of Books, October 22, 2021.
In September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong, their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”
Editors at the
influential French periodical Tel Quel learned Chinese in order to translate
Mao’s poetry. One of them was the feminist critic Julia Kristeva, who later
travelled to China with Roland Barthes. Women’s-liberation movements in the
West embraced Mao’s slogan “Women hold up half the sky.” In 1967, the Black
Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale financed the purchase of guns by
selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. In 1971, John Lennon said that he now
wore a Mao badge and distanced himself from the 1968 Beatles song “Revolution,”
which claimed, “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain’t going
to make it with anyone anyhow.” But the Rolling Stones’ Paris concert was
Maoism’s biggest popular outing. July, who, with Sartre, later co-founded the
newspaper Libération, asked the throng to support French fellow-Maoists facing
imprisonment for their beliefs. There was a standing ovation, and then Mick
Jagger launched into “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Western
intellectuals and artists would have felt much less sympathy for the Devil had
they heard about the ordeals of their counterparts in China, as described in
“The World Turned Upside Down” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a thick catalogue
of gruesome atrocities, blunders, bedlam, and ideological dissimulation, by the
Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng. Yang mentions a group of elderly writers in
Beijing who, in August, 1966, three months after Mao formally launched the
Cultural Revolution, were denounced as “ox demons and snake spirits” (Mao’s
preferred term for class enemies) and flogged with belt buckles and bamboo
sticks by teen-age girls. Among the writers subjected to this early “struggle
session” was the novelist Lao She, the world-famous author of “Rickshaw Boy.”
He killed himself the following day.
There were
other events that month—“bloody August,” as it came to be called—that might
have made Foucault reconsider his view of Maoism as anti-authoritarian praxis.
At a prestigious secondary school in Beijing, attended by the daughters of both
Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, students savagely beat a teacher named Bian
Zhongyun and left her dying in a handcart. As detailed in a large-character
poster that was adopted by cultural revolutionaries across China, one of the
indictments against Bian was her inadequate esteem for Mao. While taking her
students through an earthquake drill, she had failed to stress the importance
of rescuing the Chairman’s portrait.
Red
Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university
students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over
China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically
assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after
1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the
struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish
accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks.
Such pictures, and others, in “Forbidden Memory” (Potomac), by the Tibetan
activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region
that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser
describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign
to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four
Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting
classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier
in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized
monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a
tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who
devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are
Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female
lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before
a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.
Closer to
the center of things, in Xi’an, the Red Guards paraded Xi Zhongxun, a stalwart
of the Chinese Communist Revolution who had fallen out with Mao, around on a
truck and then beat him. His wife, in Beijing, was forced to publicly denounce
their son—Xi Jinping, China’s current President. Xi Jinping’s half sister was,
according to official accounts, “persecuted to death”; most probably, like many
people tortured by the Red Guards, she committed suicide. Xi spent years living
in a cave dwelling, one of sixteen million youths exiled to the countryside by
Mao.
According
to estimates quoted by Yang, as many as a million and a half people were
killed, thirty-six million persecuted, and a hundred million altogether
affected in a countrywide upheaval that lasted, with varying intensity, for a
decade—from 1966 to 1976, when Mao died. Mao’s decrees, faithfully amplified by
the People’s Daily, which exhorted readers to “sweep away the monsters and
demons,” gave people license to unleash their id. In Guangxi Province, where
the number of confirmed murder victims reached nearly ninety thousand, some
killers consumed the flesh of their victims. In Hunan Province, members of two
rival factions filled a river with bloated corpses. A dam downstream became
clogged, its reservoir shimmering red.
In 1981,
the Chinese Communist Party described the Cultural Revolution as an error. It
trod carefully around Mao’s role, instead blaming the excesses on his wife,
Jiang Qing, and three other ultra-Maoists—collectively known, and feared, as
the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader supervising this
pseudo-autopsy, had been maltreated during the Cultural Revolution, but he had
also abetted it, and was eager to indefinitely postpone close scrutiny. He
urged the Chinese to “unite and look forward” (tuanjie yizhi xiang qian kan).
As class struggle gave way to a scramble for upward mobility, the sheer
expediency of this repudiation of the past was captured in a popular pun on
Deng’s slogan: “look for money” (xiang qian kan).
In the four
decades since, China has moved from being the headquarters of world revolution
to being the epicenter of global capitalism. Its leaders can plausibly claim to
have engineered the swiftest economic reversal in history: the redemption from
extreme poverty of hundreds of millions of people in less than three decades,
and the construction of modern infrastructure. Some great enigmas, however,
remain unsolved: How did a well-organized, disciplined, and successful political
party disembowel itself? How did a tightly centralized state unravel so
quickly? How could siblings, neighbors, colleagues, and classmates turn on one
another so viciously? And how did victims and persecutors—the roles changing
with bewildering speed—live with each other afterward? Full explanations are
missing not only because archives are mostly inaccessible to scholars but also
because the Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a civil war, implicating
almost all of China’s leaders. Discussion of it is so fraught with taboo in
China that Yang does not even mention Xi Jinping, surely the most prominent and
consequential survivor today of Mao’s “chaos under heaven.”
Notwithstanding
this strategic omission, Yang’s book offers the most comprehensive journalistic
account yet of contemporary China’s foundational trauma. Memoirs of the
Cultural Revolution, first appearing in the nineteen-eighties, belong by now to
a distinct nonfiction genre—from confessions by repentant former Red Guards
(Jung Chang’s “Wild Swans,” Ma Bo’s “Blood Red Sunset”) to searing accounts by
victims (Ji Xianlin’s “The Cowshed”) to family sagas (Aiping Mu’s “The
Vermilion Gate”). The period’s outrages animate the work of many of China’s
prominent novelists, such as Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Su Tong, and, most
conspicuously, Yu Hua, whose two-volume novel “Brothers” includes an extended
description of a lynching, with details that seem implausible but that are
amply verified by eyewitness testimony.
Yang provides the larger political backdrop to
these granular accounts of cruelty and suffering. At the outset of the Cultural
Revolution, he was studying engineering at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua
University, and he was one of the many students who travelled around the
country to promote the cause. In 1968, he became a reporter for Xinhua News
Agency, a position that gave him access to many otherwise unreachable sources.
This vantage enabled him to write “Tombstone” (2012), a well-regarded history
of the Great Famine, caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The new book is almost
a sequel, and Mao remains the central figure: China’s unchallenged leader, as
determined as ever to fast-forward the country into genuine Communism. With the
Great Leap Forward, Mao had hoped to industrialize China by encouraging
household steel production. With the Cultural Revolution, he seemed to sideline
economic development in favor of a large-scale engineering of human souls and
minds. Social equality, in this view, would come about by plunging the Chinese
into “continuous revolution,” a fierce class struggle that would permanently
inflame the political consciousness of the masses.
Yang
describes the background to Mao’s change of direction. The spectacle of
Khrushchev denouncing Stalin, in 1956, only to be himself removed and
disgraced, in 1964, made Mao increasingly prone to see “revisionists” at every
turn. He feared that the Chinese Revolution, achieved at tremendous cost,
risked decaying into a self-aggrandizing, Soviet-style bureaucracy, remote from
ordinary people. Mao was also smarting from the obvious failure of his economic
policies, and from implicit criticism by colleagues such as Liu Shaoqi, China’s
de-jure head of state from 1959 onward. Yang describes, in often overwhelming
detail, the intricate internal power struggle that eventually erupted into the
Cultural Revolution—with Mao variously consulting and shunning a small group of
confidants, including his wife, a former actress; China’s long-standing
Premier, Zhou Enlai; and the military hero Lin Biao, who had replaced Peng
Dehuai, a strong critic of Mao, as the Minister of Defense in 1959, and
proceeded to turn the People’s Liberation Army into a pro-Mao redoubt.
Sensing
political opposition in his own party, Mao reached beyond it, to people
previously not active in politics, for allies. He tapped into widespread
grievance among peasants and workers who felt that the Chinese Revolution was
not working out for them. In particular, the Red Guards gave Mao a way of bypassing
the Party and securing the personal fealty of the fervent rank and file. As the
newly empowered students formed ad-hoc organizations, and assaulted
institutions and figures of authority, Mao proclaimed that “to rebel is
justified,” and that students should not hesitate to “bombard the
headquarters.” In 1966, he frequently appeared in Tiananmen Square, wearing a
red armband, with hundreds of thousands of Red Guards waving flags and books.
Many of his fans avoided washing their hands after shaking his. Mao’s own hands
were once so damaged by all the pressing of callow flesh that he was unable to
write for days afterward. Predictably, though, he soon lost control of the
world he had turned upside down.
Late in
1966, the younger Red Guards were challenged by an older cohort, who formed
competing Red Guard units; they, in turn, were challenged by heavily armed
“rebel forces.” All factions claimed recognition as the true voice of the
Chairman. By early 1967, workers had joined the fray, most significantly in
Shanghai, where they surpassed Red Guards in revolutionary fervor. Mao became
nervous about the “people’s commune” they established, though he and his
followers had often upheld the Paris Commune, from 1871, as a model of mass
democracy. So ferocious was one military mutiny, in Wuhan, that Mao, who had
arrived in the city to mediate between rival groups, had to flee in a military
jet, amid rumors that a swimmer with a knife in his mouth had been spotted in
the lake by Mao’s villa. “Which direction are we going?” the pilot asked Mao as
he boarded the plane. “Just take off first,” Mao replied.
Growing
alarmed by the sight of continuous revolution, Mao tried to restore order in
the cities, exiling millions of young urban men and women to the countryside to
“learn from the peasants.” He purged Liu Shaoqi, who died shortly thereafter,
and Deng Xiaoping was sent to work in a tractor-repair factory in a remote
rural province. Mao increasingly turned to the People’s Liberation Army to
establish control. He replaced broken structures of government with
“revolutionary committees.” These committees, dominated by Army commanders,
were effectively a form of military dictatorship in many parts of China. Partly
in order to keep the military on his side, Mao named his Defense Minister, Lin
Biao, as his official successor, in October, 1968. But a border conflict with
the Soviet Union the following year further expanded the military’s power, and
a paranoid Mao, soon regretting his move, sought to isolate Lin. In an extraordinary
turn of events, in 1971, Lin died in a plane crash in Mongolia with several of
his family members; allegedly, he was fleeing China after failing to
assassinate Mao.
Prompted,
even forced, by internal crises and external challenges, Mao opened China’s doors
to the United States and, in early 1972, received Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger in Beijing, much to the bewilderment of those in the West who had
seen China as leading a global resistance to American imperialism. (When
Kissinger flattered Mao, saying that students at Harvard University had pored
over his collected works, he demurely replied, “There is nothing instructive in
what I wrote.”) The following year, Mao brought back Deng Xiaoping, entrusting
him with China’s ailing economy. Then he changed his mind again, once it became
apparent that the lingering malevolence of the Gang of Four was causing people
to rally behind Deng. Mao had just re-purged Deng and launched a new campaign
against Deng’s “capitalist roading” when, in September, 1976, he died. Within a
month, the Gang of Four was in prison. (Jiang Qing, given a life sentence,
spent her time in jail making dolls for export, until authorities noticed that
she embroidered her name on all of them; she killed herself in 1991.) The
Cultural Revolution was over, and Deng was soon ushering China into an era of
willed amnesia and “looking for money.”
The surreal
events of the Cultural Revolution seem far removed from a country that today
has, by some estimates, the world’s largest concentration of billionaires. Yet
Xi Jinping’s policies, which prioritize stability and economic growth above
all, serve as a reminder of how fundamentally the Cultural Revolution reordered
Chinese politics and society. Yang, although obliged to omit Xi’s personal
trajectory—from son of Mao’s comrade to China’s supreme leader—nonetheless
leaves his readers in no doubt about the “ultimate victor” of the Cultural
Revolution: what he calls the “bureaucratic clique,” and the children of the
privileged. Senior Party cadres and officials, once restored to their
positions, were able to usher their offspring into the best universities. In
the system Deng built after the Cultural Revolution, a much bigger bureaucracy
was conceived to “manage society.” Deeply networked within China’s wealthy
classes, the bureaucratic clique came to control “all the country’s resources
and the direction of reform,” deciding “who would pay the costs of reforms and
how the benefits of reform would be distributed.” Andrew Walder, who has
published several authoritative books on Maoist China, puts it bluntly: “China
today is the very definition of what the Cultural Revolution was intended to
forestall”—namely, a “capitalist oligarchy with unprecedented levels of
corruption and inequality.”
Yang
stresses the need for a political system in China that both restricts arbitrary
power and cages the “rapaciousness” of capital. But the Cultural Revolution has
instilled in many Chinese people a politically paralyzing lesson—that attempts
to achieve social equality can go calamitously wrong. The Chinese critic Wang
Hui has pointed out that criticisms of China’s many problems are often met with
a potent accusation: “So, do you want to return to the days of the Cultural
Revolution?” As Xi Jinping turns the world’s largest revolutionary party into
the world’s most successful conservative institution, he is undoubtedly helped
by this deeply ingrained fear of anarchy.
Outside
China, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution is even more complex. Julia
Lovell, in her recent study, “Maoism: A Global History,” demonstrates how
ill-informed Western fervor for Mao eventually helped discredit and divide the
left in Europe and in America, enabling the political right to claim a moral
high ground. Many zealous adepts of Maoism in the West turned to highlighting
the evils of ideological and religious extremism. Sympathy for nonwhite victims
of imperialism and slavery, and struggling postcolonial peoples in general,
came to be stigmatized as a sign of excessive sentimentality and guilt. This
journey from Third Worldism to Western supremacism can be traced in the titles
of three books from the past four decades by Pascal Bruckner, one of the French
dabblers in Maoism—“The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt” (1983),
“The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism” (2006), and “An Imaginary
Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt” (2017).
Misperceptions
of China abound in this sectarian discourse. As the Soviet Union imploded after
a failed experiment with political and economic reform, China, the last
surviving Communist superpower, was presumed to have no option but to embrace
Western-style multiparty democracy as well as capitalism. But China has managed
to postpone the end of history—largely thanks to the Cultural Revolution. In
the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his hopeful plans for
perestroika and glasnost, the Communist Party and the military had faced little
domestic challenge to their authority since the death of Stalin; along with
bureaucratic cliques that had serenely fattened themselves during decades of
economic and political stagnation, they were able to contest, and finally
thwart, Gorbachev’s vision. In China, by contrast, such institutions had been
greatly damaged by the Cultural Revolution, with the result that Deng, setting
out to rebuild them in his image, faced much less opposition. Class struggle
during the Cultural Revolution had left the old power holders as well as the
revolutionary masses utterly exhausted, desperate for stability and peace. Deng
shored up his authority and appeal by reinstating purged and disgraced
officials and by rehabilitating many victims of the Red Guards, including,
posthumously, the novelist Lao She.
During the
worst years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had rejected all emendations to his
economic playbook. Even when China seemed on the verge of economic collapse, he
railed against “capitalist roading.” Deng not only accelerated the
marketization of the Chinese economy but also strengthened the party that Mao
had done so much to undermine, promoting faceless officials known for their
administrative and technical competence to senior positions. China’s unique
“model”—a market economy supervised by a technocratic party-state—could only
have been erected on ground brutally levelled by Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“History,”
E. M. Cioran once wrote, “is irony on the move.” Bearing out this maxim,
cultural revolutions have now erupted right in the heart of Western
democracies. Chaos-loving leaders have grasped power by promising to return
sovereignty to the people and by denouncing political-party apparatuses. Mao,
who was convinced that “anyone who wants to overturn a regime needs to first
create public opinion,” wouldn’t have failed to recognize that the phenomenon
commonly termed “populism” has exposed some old and insoluble conundrums: Who
or what does a political party represent? How can political representation work
in a society consisting of manifold socioeconomic groups with clashing
interests?
The appeal
of Maoism for many Western activists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies came
from its promise of spontaneous direct democracy—political engagement outside
the conventional framework of elections and parties. This seemed a way out of a
crisis caused by calcified party bureaucracies, self-serving élites, and their
seemingly uncontrollable disasters, such as the endless war in Vietnam. That
breakdown of political representation, which provoked uprisings on the left,
has now occurred on an enlarged scale in the West, and it is aggravated by
attempts, this time by an insurgent ultra-right, to forge popular sovereignty,
overthrow the old ruling class, and smash its most sacred norms. The great
question of China’s Maoist experiment looms over the United States as Donald
Trump vacates the White House: Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly
start destroying itself?
The
Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is,
at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual
ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the
nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation,
financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to
Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily
lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes
and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their
basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity
for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic
machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and
their sponsors.
In 2010,
Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing
politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an
ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political
parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external
inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.”
Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred
ruling class and its cherished monuments.
Trump
failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on
them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of
the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether
assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C.,
took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly
delighted in chaos under heaven. Order appears to have been temporarily
restored (in part by Big Tech, one of Trump’s enablers). But the problem of
political representation in a polarized, unequal, and now economically
debilitated society remains treacherously unresolved. Four traumatic years of
Trump are passing into history, but the United States seems to have completed
only the first phase of its own cultural revolution. ♦
What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for
Our Current Moment? By Pankaj Mishra. The New Yorker, January 25 , 2021.
