Women Who Rallied to the Republican Cause in Spain

 

The first thing I ever knew about the poet, journalist, and activist Nancy Cunard was a commanding broadsheet she dispatched in the summer of 1937, containing the challenge that, decades later, would spark the questions that prompted my book, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. She addressed it to many of the most important writers of Britain and Ireland, sometimes sending multiple copies with the idea that they’d pass them on. It made its way to George Bernard Shaw and Evelyn Waugh; to T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett; to Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay and the Woolfs; to Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden. It reached Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Pankhurst. It went to Vera Brittain and H. G. Wells; to Rosamond Lehmann and her brother, John; to Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland.
 
Nancy printed her missive in black and red and addressed it, broadly and grandly, to ‘the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’. Large type announced: THE QUESTION. Along the left-hand side of the sheet was added, vertically: SPAIN.
 
The Question (though technically there were two) appeared perfectly straightforward. ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’
 
Nancy assured her writers that she would publish the answers they chose to send, by which she meant: you are asked to state a position publicly. As far as she was concerned, not taking a position was impossible.
 
The project centered around her fundamental and appealingly simple belief in the value of taking sides, and on an arresting proposition: that history will sometimes present moments when convictions have to be decided upon, when lines are drawn that must be acknowledged.
 
The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals – including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader – attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany offered decisive material support to Franco’s side (the nationalists) while the Republican government received from its fellow democracies in France, the United States, and Great Britain only a queasy refusal to intervene. As the Republic battled to survive this well-resourced attack, relying on a tenacious popular resistance to the military takeover and on arms from Soviet Russia and Mexico, many observers understood the war as an opportunity to halt the global advance of fascism: one that their own governments seemed loath to take up.
 
Almost a year into the war, Nancy Cunard was framing things like this: ‘It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.’
 
These were the questions I had in response: what happens when the stakes of political life have become so high that people no longer feel neutrality is an option? Can the mere act of declaring a ‘side’ be of any value? And do writers really have any particular responsibility – or, indeed, any special right – to weigh in on the causes of the day? By the time I finished the book, many writers around the world had been asking themselves that final question. Just last year, PEN America held an ‘Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers’ in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet the crises deemed relevant to practitioners of literature went beyond the war. ‘In this moment of chaos and violence,’ the chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, said, ‘we can address what the role of the writer is, as we face down the rise of authoritarianism, disinformation run amok, social fissures that are widening here in this country, and a surge in book banning and threats against free speech.’ In the late 1930s, writers were mobilizing to address very similar trends, but not all of them agreed that it was their place to do so.
 
When the idea of a pamphlet announcing the partisanship of Britain and Ireland’s most eminent writers and intellectuals occurred to Nancy Cunard – who had already spent months in Spain as a journalist in 1936, and would return in 1937 and 1938 – she assembled twelve additional signatories (all of them male) to the questionnaire, but later claimed it solely as her own. It was she who drafted the questions, arranged for them to be printed in Paris, and came up with a list of recipients. Names kept on occurring to her, until she had mailed out over two hundred copies. The cooperation of the other signatories was in fact of little significance. ‘Had every one of them said “No”,’ she told a scholar in the sixties, ‘I should have made the little work all the same – and how! You see in those days there did exist ENTHUSIASM for what was felt to be good and right and true.’
 
Her enthusiasm, it turned out, was matched by others. The pamphlet eventually consisted of 148 replies, but at least twenty-five were left out for space, which implies that a great proportion of Nancy’s dispatches hit home. In London, the Left Review agreed to publish it. They printed 3,000 copies of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War and immediately sold out.
 
Nancy had not limited her outreach to writers she knew or to those she assumed would agree with her, but she was convinced that the results would overwhelmingly favour the Republic, and she was right. Of the printed responses, only sixteen chose neutrality, and just five were against the Spanish government. (The responses left out for space were all pro-Republican.) In Paris, she had sorted the answers herself, categorising them as ‘For’ the Republic, ‘Against’ or ‘Neutral?’ without adhering to any particularly discernible method, just as her basis for approaching respondents had hardly been scientific. Some of those who ignored her commands and chose to equivocate were overruled and placed in the ‘For’ pile, when perhaps they intended to be ‘Neutral’. On the other hand, there were statements published under ‘Neutral’ that could convincingly have been designated as ‘For’. And at least Nancy did allow for Neutral. The phrasing of her questions had been unashamedly leading. The point of the questionnaire was not to achieve a balance of opinion. The intention was to publish a declaration.
 
‘It is to be hoped that some methodical person has made a collection of the various manifestos and questionnaires issued . . . during the years 1936–7,’ Virginia Woolf later remarked, taking a very dim view of the ‘inquisition’ to which she felt herself subjected in those days. ‘Private people of no political training were invited to sign appeals asking their own and foreign governments to change their policy; artists were asked to fill up forms stating the proper relations of the artist to the State, to religion, to morality . . .’
 
Some of the hostile responders assumed that Nancy was asking them to choose between fascism and communism, which she wasn’t; others assumed she would leave out anything unfavourable to her pro-Republican position (their responses duly appeared in the pamphlet). Not everyone was convinced that the simple act of declaring themselves could be of much use. Rebecca West, sending hers in, worried that ‘six lines is terribly little and it sounds very trite and boring’. E. M. Forster could not share Nancy’s conviction ‘that manifestos by writers carry any weight whatever’.
 
Nancy’s questionnaire was in a sense asking too much and asking too little. It is all too easy to sit down in some quiet place, compose a few lines, and settle back satisfied in the fulfilment of a civic duty. ‘To scribble a name on a sheet of paper is easy,’ Woolf pointed out in the book she was writing that summer, but an expression of opinion was not ‘positive help’. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine intellectuals baulking at nailing their colours to the mast as publicly – or as simplistically – as Nancy wanted. A war in someone else’s country was surely more complicated than she was prepared to allow.
 
 
Yet it’s not difficult to see why Nancy thought the project important. At the League of Nations in Geneva, she had witnessed the Republic’s fellow democracies still refusing to confront Germany or Italy over their ‘invasion’ of Spain. ‘While the powers pass resolutions,’ she had reminded her readers, ‘international Fascism kills.’ With so much relying on changing the narrative outside of the country, harnessing the opinions of articulate public figures – the publishers listed forty of them down the front cover – and having them sound the alarm in their cumulative authority was a sensible, even inspired, contribution. Her pamphlet was a signal that what was happening in Spain was a matter of gravity and relevance. The following year, Donald Ogden Stewart took up the idea and canvassed American authors in Writers Take Sides: Letters About the War in Spain from 418 American Authors. John Steinbeck and William Faulkner were among those who put their opposition to Franco on record.

 
Nancy wasn’t asking her respondents to merely lament ‘how wicked it all is’, as George Orwell would accuse her, but, in stating a side, to do something more difficult: to forsake such unimpeachable generalisations in favour of specifics. But in the pamphlet that emerged, the particularity of Spain – its history and traditions; the nature of its political scene – often fell by the wayside. Many took Nancy’s cue in using it as an opportunity to voice their suspicion of the fascist powers in Europe. Nancy had set up a symbol that allowed her correspondents to continue their own debates. To read the pamphlet is to see a cohort of writers pondering their place in the world.
 
When Nancy asked James Joyce for a response to the pamphlet, she received a strident telling-off. Joyce would provide no such thing, she later told his biographer, ‘because it [was] “politics”’. ‘Politics’ was ‘getting into everything’. T. S. Eliot replied to her request with the opinion that ‘at least a few men of letters should remain isolated’, claiming a special position for writers – a place above the fray. The author and traveller Norman Douglas, one of her closest friends, boasted, ‘If Fascists annoy me, I hop it. If Communists annoy me, I hop it,’ turning neutrality into merely the good fortune of having options.
 
But Nancy’s exhortation to writers was more than just a statement of faith in their influence. She also saw in fascism an implacable enemy of the arts. Most of her responders regarded fascism – particularly as demonstrated in the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini – as not just hostile to intellectuals and repressive of artistic freedom but antithetical to culture: mere ‘barbarism’, as Leonard Woolf and others put it. (As it happened, ‘barbarism’ was also how Franco described socialism.)
 
The poet Valentine Ackland expected both ‘reason and tenacious courage’ from artists: attributes required for making a stand. After all, the deployment of reason alongside the imagination helps us to make sense of phenomena confronting us. Writers, whether identifying as intellectuals or artists, are dealers in trust. They have to be able to convince, on some level at least, if they want their creations to move and engage. This, I think, is why Nancy saw writers endowed with a special responsibility towards truth, why they were the natural enemies of fascist movements that warped and suppressed it.
 
As any censor knows and fears, in the arts there are secret languages which can encode, and thus protect, independence; that can entrench dissent in realms where it is difficult to identify and impossible to root out. ‘A press is very dangerous!’ Nancy once wrote of her time as a publisher in the 1920s. ‘It means the dissemination of ideas.’ Responding to her questionnaire, Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine, pointed out that the aggressive aims of fascist states required a populace that was ‘rendered both warlike and servile’ – the ‘stultifying’, in other words, ‘of the human race’. When a system relies on the prevention of independent thought, the use of the intellect (the dissemination of ideas) becomes a primary form of resistance.
 
Adapted from Sarah Watling’s new book, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders, and the Spanish Civil War, published by Knopf

Sometimes Writers Have to Take Sides. By Sarah Watling. Time, July 13, 2023.

The Spanish war began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals—including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader— attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government. The reaction of foreign powers was significant from the start.

 
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany offered decisive material support to Franco’s side (the nationalists) while the Republican government received from its fellow democracies in France, the United States and Great Britain only a queasy refusal to intervene.
 
As the Republic battled to survive this well-resourced attack, relying on a tenacious popular resistance to the military takeover and on arms from Soviet Russia and Mexico, many observers understood the war as an opportunity to halt the global advance of fascism: one that their own governments seemed loath to take up.
 
Some months in, Nancy Cunard challenged her fellow writers to make public statements on the war in an urgent call that framed things like this:
 
”It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.”
 
This was where the Spanish Civil War began to matter to me. It happened that, when I first found this eye-catching statement, I was living through an era of national and international upheaval that made Nancy’s 80-year-old challenge snatch up my attention.
 
It was possible, in her day, to see democracy as a teetering edifice, a system that had outlived, even failed, its potential. Alternatives vied for dominance. The Great Depression in America, that “citadel of capitalism,” had not only destabilized economies around the world but shaken faith in the capitalist system itself—proving, to some minds, the validity of the Marxist theory that had predicted its collapse.
 
The twenties and early thirties had seen military dictators or  non-democratic forms of government gain the upper hand in a raft of countries: Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Japan, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and, of course, even earlier, Russia. By 1936, Germany and Italy had been governed by fascists for years. Their regimes found plenty of sympathizers in countries shaken by the First World War and ensuing Depression.
 
The British Union of Fascists, for instance, was already almost four years old. Nor was fascist aggression on the international stage something new. Italy had invaded Ethiopia in 1935; Germany was openly remilitarizing—something forbidden by the terms of the peace imposed at the end of the First World War. For some, the great dichotomy of the 1930s was provided by fascism and communism. For many others (including those who weren’t convinced of a meaningful difference between the two), Spain was perhaps simpler still: fascism or opposition to fascism.
 
By my day it had become fairly common to hear people drawing dark parallels with the 1930s: that decade in which Mussolini and Hitler crushed opposition and raised their armies, and Franco took over Spain, and “Blackshirts” marched in the streets of London. We thought we knew these facts, but it seemed they were losing their power to terrify or forewarn; that acknowledging them belonged to an old tyranny of decency and truth that others were ready to throw off.
 
It’s an absurd kind of grandiosity, in a way, to relate the darkest past to your own moment and its preoccupations. Yet I felt many of the things I had taken for granted dropping away around the time I first started reading about Nancy Cunard. Democratic processes, mechanisms of justice, truth itself: all were under renewed threat.
 
My country seemed a less moderate, less peaceful place than I was used to, and newly emboldened extremists were taking eagerly to the public stage. Inequalities of wealth and opportunity were widening. The urgency of the climate crisis felt increasingly clamorous. It was difficult not to simply feel hopeless; pinioned into a narrow space of outraged despair.
 
And yet, it was quite convenient to have so much out in the open. It was something to respond to. It gave Nancy’s uncompromising position a certain appeal—even offered, perhaps, a kind of permission. I kept remembering a feminist demonstration I had taken part in years before, when I was 21. Meeting friends in a park afterwards, one of them had punctured our exultant mood: the turn-out I’d bragged of was more or less meaningless, he opined, an act of preaching to the choir. What was the point when everyone on the march was already persuaded?

 
By 2019—a year in which, though abortion rights had just been extended in Ireland, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights could describe US policy on abortion as “gender-based violence against women, no question” and the anti-feminist, far-right Vox party made unprecedented gains in Spain, raising the uncomfortable specter of  Franco—the response I should have made was becoming clearer to me. My 21-year-old self had marched to give notice of her resistance. There was nothing to be gained by trying to understand the point of view we were protesting (that the way women dressed could provoke rape), but much to be risked from letting that idea exist in the world unchallenged.
 
Nancy’s “taking sides” has an air of immaturity about it, perhaps precisely because of the playground training most of us receive in it. So much prudence and fairness is signified by resisting these easy allegiances, by seeing “two sides to every story”—a terminology that tends to imply that truth or moral superiority can only ever exist in not choosing either one. And it was becoming clear that polarization serves the extremes best of all.
 
But something about Nancy’s construction spoke to me. It suggested that there is power in the act of taking a side; that there are moments on which history rests, when nuance or hesitation (perhaps or tomorrow) will prove fatal, when it is vital to  know—and to acknowledge—which side you are on.
 
The worst times can take on an appearance of simplicity and war is exactly the kind of aberration that removes options, leaving the single choice of one side or another in its place. Yet when Nancy and thousands of other foreigners to Spain acted voluntarily in support of the Spanish Republic, they made their beliefs public. Their actions proposed the worst times as periods of opportunity, too: invitations to reclaim principles from the privacy of our thoughts and conversations and ballot boxes, and make them decisive factors in the way we live and act.
 
This is why my book is not about the Spanish experience of the war, but rather about the people who had the option not to involve themselves and decided otherwise.
 
Writers are good for thinking through. I was interested in the question of critical  distance—whether it is always possible or even, as I’d instinctively assumed, always   desirable—and I could think of no better individual to shed light on this than a writer (or intellectual) in war-time.
 
But people from all walks of life understood the Spanish war as a question, a provocation that demanded an answer. Thousands from across the world volunteered on behalf of the Republic, going so far as to travel to the country as combatants and auxiliaries. Others declared themselves through campaigning and fundraising. Martha Gellhorn defined herself as “an onlooker”: I wanted to explore, too, the experience of people whose commitment drew them closer to the action.
 
Alongside her in this book are the British Communist Nan Green and her husband, George, who wrenched themselves from their children to volunteer with medical and military units in Republican Spain. There is a young African American nurse named Salaria Kea who saw her service there as a calling. There is one of the boldest photographers to contribute to the memory of the war: Gerda Taro, a refugee from Germany for whom the fight against fascism was personal.
 
They left their own accounts of the conflict, whether through images or text, and following their stories taught me much about how historical narratives are formed in the first place; why leaving a record can be one of the most instinctive, and contested, human impulses.
 
They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism.”
 
When I went looking for Salaria Kea, the negotiations and challenges her story had undergone became as interesting to me as the missing pieces. A woman of color deemed a political radical, a nurse and not a writer: hers was a voice that rarely received a welcome hearing. My book voices many of my questions, but with Salaria so much was unclear that I realized I could only tell her story by narrating the pursuit and leaving the questions open.
 
“Rebels,” like Franco, turn military might against the government they’re meant to serve. But I found that all the people I chose to follow fulfilled the word’s other definition, of those who “resist authority, control, or convention.” I wanted to know why they believed that the moment had come, with Spain, for taking sides.
 
Or, rather, I wanted to know how they recognized the Spanish war as the moment for doing something about the way their present was heading, and what “taking sides” had meant in practice. I wanted to know whether Nancy really thought the mere act of declaring a side could make a difference, as she suggested when she put out that urgent call. I wanted to know why she had addressed it specifically to “Writers and Poets.”
 
The Spanish war is often remembered for, and through, its  writers—and notably writers from outside the country. Of all the defeats in history, perhaps only Troy has been as well served by literature as Republican Spain was during and after the ascension of Franco, who would eventually rule in Spain for almost forty years. Countless novels and memoirs, a handful of them the greatest books by the greatest writers of their generation; reams of poetry, both brilliant and pedestrian, have preserved the memory of its cause.
 
As I read, I began to think that their authors’ position had something to say about the nature of writing itself. It seemed significant that each of the writers in this book saw themselves, whether at home or abroad, as an outsider. If not belonging was a fundamental part of that identity, taking sides on Spain only crystallized a series of pressing questions about the purpose and privileges of writers.
 
The 1930s was a decade of art colliding with politics, of artists determining to marry the two. Presented with the trauma of the Great Depression, the unavoidable phenomenon of Soviet Russia and the spread of fascism, there were journalists and poets alike who sought new modes and new material. Writers questioned their obligations to society, asked what art could achieve; they interrogated the intellectual life to expose its value and its limitations.
 
The list of foreigners who spent time in Spain during the war reads like a roll call of the most celebrated voices of the era: think of the Spanish war and I imagine you think of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, perhaps Stephen Spender, John Dos Passos, W. H. Auden. Delve a little further and you will find a far greater array of authors, including writers who were female, writers of color, writers who did not write in English (though the wealth of Spanish-language literature falls beyond the scope of a book interested in the outsiderness of writers).
 
They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism,” or because they believed in the liberal project of the Republic and wanted to raise awareness of its plight, or because they wanted to observe, or even participate in, the cause célèbre of the moment. They saw history coming and went out to meet it.
 
__________________________________
 

 

From Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling. By Sarah Watling. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
 
Why the Spanish Civil War Mattered to Writers on Distant Shores. By Sarah Watling.LitHub, May 15, 2023.

In early 1935, the novelist Josephine Herbst arrived in Cuba under false pretenses, traveling with accreditation from moderate magazines like the American Mercury that she wouldn’t be writing for, intending to reach the resistance. But the whole point of an underground resistance is that it isn’t easy to find.

 
The pose was lady journalist researching the island’s sugar industry. The reality was a commission from the Marxist-aligned New Masses to report on dissent against the harsh regime overseen by Fulgencio Batista. At the time, Herbst was a fearless short story writer and novelist of growing reputation, a woman who compulsively fictionalized the traumas and grievances of her life and background in novels such as Pity Is Not Enough and The Executioner Waits, and who had just begun to distinguish herself as an intrepid, politically committed, as-far-left-as-you-can-go journalist. If only the world weren’t so clamorous, Herbst could have gotten back to the novels she was meant to be writing. But she also believed that, without the clamor of the world, there would be no novels.
 
It took her weeks to gain the trust of the Cuban underground in 1935, weeks she spent interviewing local politicians and American businessmen, compiling a portrait of a country at the mercy of the United States’ business interests. All the while, she was seeking a way up into the mountains, where peasant rebels in a region called Realengo 18 were said to be holding out against sugar companies’ attempts to seize their land. At first, her contacts would only take her as far as Santiago, where the scarred bodies of the activists she met were explanation enough for their caution. Then, finally, there was a five-day journey on horseback up to what she described as “the secret mountainsides of ‘Realengo 18.’”
 
The area was so remote that she was the first foreign journalist ever to meet the people there, yet, armed and friendly, they expressed no sense of their isolation: Instead, she believed, they saw their struggle as part of a worldwide movement for change. “The district of Realengo is small in comparison to Cuba, and Cuba is only a tiny island,” she wrote in one of her articles, “but no one in Realengo feels alone in the fight for freedom. They talk too much of what is going on in the world. They know too much to be alone.”
 
This knowledge and these connections were important to Herbst. Over the previous few years, while covering the Great Depression-era radical organizing of American farmers, she had remarked on surprising collaborations. What made a white man from an old farming family find common cause with an impoverished Black sharecropper from Alabama? “Nothing except the conviction that their struggle against mass ruin is the same,” she once declared. Within the right kinds of alliances, Herbst believed, and with the willingness to struggle, was a solution not just to economic inequality but to imperialism and racial prejudice, too.

 
By the time Herbst got back to Havana from the mountains, everything had escalated. A general strike called in opposition to Batista’s repression triggered a violent clampdown. She was in a theater when a bomb went off outside. Most people stayed where they were; Herbst dashed out to find pools of blood on the pavement. She wrote up her articles while gunfire spat in the streets, then had them smuggled out of the country when the authorities restricted the mail. She soon followed, unable to do anything more while her contacts were being hunted down and disappearing.
 
Fortunately, it was not far from Cuba to an old friend’s bolthole in Key West, Florida. She spent a few days recuperating with Ernest Hemingway, then it was onward to New York, where she was due to speak at a writers’ conference in April.
 
Onstage at the Mecca Temple, she knew why she’d been asked—last-minute panic. The event was a great gathering of progressive American writers, and they’d forgotten to arrange a female speaker for the opening night. This was typical of the various communist productions she’d appeared at; they wanted her for her profile more than for her opinions. In 1935, she was, in the words of biographer Elinor Langer, “a leading lady” of the country’s radical left. That was partly due to her own work and reputation, and partly because her estranged husband, John Herrmann, had shifted his focus from literature to communist organizing.
 
As the fascist threat in Europe, and Joseph Stalin’s wary eye on it, prompted a new mood of broad leftist cooperation—often heralded as a “popular front”—Herbst’s political connections were bringing her to larger audiences. Yet she hated the “smuggies” of the left’s “New York political elite,” who went around giving stirring speeches to strikers on lives they knew nothing about. “Don’t get me wrong,” she would write years later, when such things were dangerous to admit, “I went as far left as you can go,” but she never counted herself among those she called “the Faithful” (and there’s no evidence that she ever actually joined the Communist Party). Perhaps her skepticism showed: A sketch of the conference speakers has the 43-year-old grim-faced beneath a wide, unlovely hat.

 
But one thing that did convince her was the fascist threat in Europe, and her mind quickly turned to the next subject for her foreign reporting. She had lived in Berlin briefly in the 1920s, ashamed of the affluence her American dollars brought her in the inflation-stricken city, and she knew that much had changed in the hungry, unsettled capital she had known.
 
Since Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, voices of domestic opposition had been falling ominously silent. By 1935, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was the only party allowed by law; Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp for political prisoners, was already two years old. The Nuremberg Laws would be instituted that September, stripping German Jews of basic rights. It was said that the Nazis had wiped out their opponents entirely, and if there was no one standing up to Hitler at home, there seemed to be little appetite for confronting him internationally, either. Herbst negotiated an assignment from the New York Post and headed for Berlin.
 
Berlin was a risk. It could be dangerous to go there, and there was no guarantee she’d find anything to report. Exiles had furnished her with contacts, but these came with warnings attached: People might have disappeared, or her drawing attention could cause them to.
 
In Germany, it was summertime, and everything was now as neat and orderly as the world had been led to believe. Yet Herbst sensed “a changed and sick country,” a smothered one. Describing attributes that supposedly give dictatorships their appeal, she also confronted the costs at which they are achieved. “On the surface, things appear cheerful,” she reported. “Boys bicycle on country roads. Who sees a concentration camp? Yet silence is over the very countryside. … Talk does not bubble up anymore.”
 
Fear stalked her in Berlin, just as it had done in Cuba and would, for a time, in Spain, where she traveled the following year to witness the country being bombed by German and Italian planes during its civil war. The courage it took to find these stories came not from the absence of fear but the unceasing struggle with it. From Germany, she sent a letter to her old friend Katherine Anne Porter, knowing it was risky to write too freely, trying to psych herself into courage: “Everything very quiet, muzzled in fact, but no more of that until I see you again. I felt dreadfully depressed at first, did even this morning with a kind of horror of being alone that goes to the very bone. I’m not sure I can pull off the business here and am not going to be frightened if I don’t. I am not going to be terrified of failing for the moment.”
 

Herbst had gone to Germany intending to lay her ear to the ground and listen for the sound of resistance; eventually, at a whisper, she heard it. She set up secret meetings and was told about suppressed strikes and workers who defiantly attended the funerals of murdered comrades; she began to pick up jokes that expressed discontent with the regime and learned of opposition leaflets cascading from waterspouts into the street with the rain. She managed to uncover a hidden reality of opposition to the Nazis—not from the conservative aristocrats who would be commemorated for their belated intervention against Hitler, but from housewives on buses, industrial workers, brave leaflet circulators and slogan painters. She wrote a report that ran over five consecutive days on the New York Post front page, called “Behind the Swastika.” Long before many others realized the danger, she urged her readers to look behind the facade and question the image the dictatorship wanted the world to see, producing an outsider’s portrait of Germany under the Nazis that now stands as a warning against the dismantling of democracy.
 
Disillusionment, poverty and the hostilities of the McCarthy era would later do much to silence Herbst, but to the end of her life in 1969, she remained proud of her work before World War II. In 1942, she was removed from her job on the German desk of the war propaganda agency in Washington. Two investigators took her through a long list of accusations. (She was cleared of wrongdoing but never got her job back.) “There were a good many of these charges, linked to the events of the ’30s and the role I had played in connection with each,” she would later recall, “and given them in bulk, I was impressed by the record.”
 
Adapted from Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Writers, Outsiders and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling. Published by Knopf, 2023.
 
How Josephine Herbst, ‘Leading Lady’ of the Left, Chronicled the Rise of Fascism. By Sarah Watling. Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2023.  

 

There is a photograph taken by Gerda Taro in August 1936 that shows a woman kneeling on the sand of a beach outside Barcelona, holding a handgun. She is leaning forward, aiming directly out of the square frame of the shot, the barrel of the gun in a line with her mouth. The overalls she is wearing are baggy and a little rumpled, but the lines and angles her form creates are bold. The photo is taken from low down – I imagine Taro lying flat on the sand, facing her subject from the side – so that small stones by the woman’s bent leg stand out more sharply than the buildings smudged into the distance. The overcast sky and its gathering clouds, gives the picture a momentous feeling.
 
The photograph was first published in the French magazine Vu and it represents something of what felt, to contemporary observers, most revolutionary and most worth fighting for in the embattled Spanish Republic. Only a few weeks before it was taken, a group of military generals had attempted a coup to overthrow Spain’s elected government. Sufficient forces rallied to the defence of the government to prevent the coup from succeeding immediately, despite the fact that the rebels soon had substantial support from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Instead, a civil war erupted, unleashing, in Catalonia, a simultaneous social revolution – one of the features of which was new liberties for women. The woman aiming a gun on the beach was a recruit for the militias being formed to defend the Republic. For the rest of the world, this was something shocking – something newsworthy – which is no doubt why Taro chose to capture the scene on her first wartime visit to Spain.
 
Taro was an antifascist and a refugee from Nazi Germany; the Republican cause mattered to her on a personal level. I think the subject of this picture would have excited her too. She was far from the only female press person to travel to Spain to cover the war (among photographers, the Hungarian-born Kati Horna springs to mind) and some of them – Taro perhaps most of all – took enormous risks to cover the conflict. One of the notable characteristics of the Spanish Civil War was the new way in which it was covered: technological advances gave photojournalists smaller, lighter cameras that could get them closer to the frontlines. Taro took the beachfront photo using a Rolleiflex with film that could be changed quickly and that focused quickly; she later switched to a Leica.

 
A photograph taken by Robert Capa in 1936 gives us a glimpse of the conditions. Capa and Taro had met in Paris, where they had both gone into exile, and soon lived and worked together. (It was in Paris that they put aside their birthnames of Gerta Pohorylle and Endre Friedmann for the new professional identities of Capa and Taro.) Capa’s photograph shows that not all of Taro’s pictures were taken from the safety of training sessions. This is an action shot. It shows Taro taking cover on the Cordoba front, crouching behind a Republican soldier. She looks up, eyes wide with anticipation – perhaps even fear – alert for danger overhead, her throat bared to the camera like an expression of her vulnerability. It’s all the more haunting when you know what followed: her mortal injury the following year, as she covered the chaotic Republican retreat from Brunete. She is thought to be the first female war photographer to have died in the field.
 
The romanticism of Taro’s picture of the militiawoman is, to me, powerful, but also troubling. War is not beautiful, yet the photograph is. There is something unseemly about viewing, for example, Taro’s photographs of refugees in Almería in a gallery setting – in admiring the excellence of the composition. This was never Taro’s intention. She saw herself as a journalist rather than an artist, calling on France, Britain and the United States to recognise what was being done to Spanish people by Franco and his allies, and to protest against it.
 
Taro’s reputation diminished after the war, at least partly because she was overshadowed by Capa’s fame, but a number of discoveries in recent years have helped to revise the picture. Taro’s biographer Irme Schaber has done much to illuminate the facts of her life, and when collections of Capa and Taro’s negatives from Spain emerged in the 2000s, many photographs that had been previously attributed to Capa were found to have been taken by Taro, helping to secure her reputation as one of the most interesting photographers to cover the conflict. The pictures she took in Spain chronicle moments of exhilarating possibility and of appalling tragedy – which also makes them a fitting chronicle of Taro’s life.
 
Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling will be published by Jonathan Cape in February.
 
The unflinching gaze of Gerda Taro. By Sarah Watland. Apollo Magazine, January 26, 2023. 

The most famous chroniclers of the Spanish Civil War may have been male writers such as George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. But a new book reveals the contributions made by a band of brave and brilliant women. These include everyone from the maverick poet and activist Nancy Cunard to journalist Martha Gellhorn and the young Jewish photographer Gerda Taro.
 
Guest: Sarah Watling - journalist and author of of ‘Tomorrow Perhaps The Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War’ (Penguin)
 
Women writers and rebels in the Spanish Civil War.  Credits:  Sarah Dingle, Presenter; Julie Street, Producer
 
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, May 18, 2023.

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’
 
Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it. Most fought in the communist-controlled International Brigades, but others went to report on the conflict as part of ‘fact-finding missions’, or simply to show their support for the Spanish government’s cause.
 
The experiences of a number of these visitors, witnesses and reporters are described in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future (the title taken from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Spain’), by Sarah Watling, the author of Noble Savages, the prize-winning biography of the bohemian Olivier sisters. Its characters are not the familiar ones of Auden, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and George Orwell. Instead, Watling’s study marks her determination to write women into the history books.
 
This is not to say, of course, that women have been invisible in the literature of the Spanish Civil War, particularly not this celebrity cohort, which includes the heiress to the Cunard shipping empire, the daughter of a baron, and a number of prominent writers. Nevertheless, as Virginia Woolf (one of the book’s subjects) remarked, war is generally a male affair, and women’s roles often get downplayed or glossed over. Watling points out that the German photojournalist Gerda Taro and the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn were for many years overshadowed by Robert Capa and Hemingway, their more famous partners; and I suspect that few are aware that the first British volunteer to be killed in Spain was Felicia Browne, a sculptor from Slade School of Art.
 
Like almost all of those who went to Spain in the 1930s, the women portrayed in this book ‘had a choice not to involve themselves, and decided otherwise’. While Woolf’s inclination was to ‘fight intellectually’ (she tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her nephew Julian Bell from volunteering), others became more emotionally and practically immersed in the Spanish Republic’s struggle. They included Gellhorn, every bit as determined a supporter of the cause as Hemingway. Just as strong-minded was the eccentric Nancy Cunard, who, like Gellhorn, personally witnessed the war’s appalling realities. She frantically tried to spur others into feeling the same outrage, sending out an infamous questionnaire to 200 writers, demanding that they take sides. The overwhelming majority did, even if Orwell, scarred by his experiences of fighting in Spain and irritated by what he saw as Cunard’s simplistic, presumptuous questions, responded: ‘Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish.’
 
Given Orwell’s outrage over the partisan nature of the foreign media’s coverage of the war, it’s not surprising that many believed strongly that no one could really understand what was happening in Spain if they hadn’t been there. Watling quotes Josephine Herbst, an American novelist turned campaigning left-wing journalist, who explained: ‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because.’ The radical lesbian and devout communist Sylvia Townsend Warner felt the same way, attending a congress of writers in Republican Spain alongside her partner Valentine Ackland. The couple discovered in revolutionary Barcelona the liberty to live their lives together in a way denied them at home.
 
Yet if going to Spain allowed some women freedoms and opportunities formerly forbidden them, it also presented familiar problems. There was not only a constant risk of unwelcome sexual attention, but also the fact that ‘closed doors could be found in the most open male minds’. The British communist Nan Green followed her husband George to the war, having reluctantly taken the heart-rending decision to leave their two children behind. Her sacrifice was rewarded by a vicious campaign against her by one of the most senior British communists in Spain, who falsely accused her of Trotskyism. Similarly depressing is the account of Salaria Kea, ‘the only female African-American nurse to volunteer in Spain’. The prejudice she suffered before, during and after her time there was shocking – though, as Watling dryly notes, ‘probably not very shocking to a black woman living in 1930s America’.
 
These are interesting and colourful characters, and Watling seems to have chosen them because they were all outsiders – individuals who ‘resisted in some way the lives they had been offered’ (though this could be said about most who volunteered.) She readily admits to ‘a weakness for people with an instinct for rebellion’; but while her portrayals are sympathetic, they are not uncritical.
 
She has researched her subjects carefully, and this is a serious, scholarly work, which also brings her group of writers, poets and activists vividly to life. As she explains: ‘I wanted to know what it had meant to take a side, and how it had been done, and I wanted to know what writing had to do with it.’ Many – and not just writers – will feel that these are questions well worth asking.
 
The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain.  By Richard Baxell. The Spectator, February 25, 2023. 

‘Me, I am going to Spain with the boys,’ Martha Gellhorn famously told a friend in 1937 as she boarded a ship sailing from New York to France. ‘I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.’ She knew perfectly well with whom she was going: Ernest Hemingway, who was on the point of abandoning his second wife for her. They were off to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Franco’s Nationalists were making steady gains against the army of the legitimate republic. But it is the women, not the boys, about whom Sarah Watling writes here: the reporters, photographers and authors for whom the Spanish conflict became, in the later words of the American novelist Josephine Herbst, the most important event ‘in the life of the world’, a ghastly, menacing foreshadowing of the war to come.
 
Along with Herbst, fresh from writing about Batista in Cuba, and Gellhorn, now twenty-eight and the author of a much-praised book about the Depression, The Trouble I’ve Seen, there was Nancy Cunard, the daughter of an American heiress and an English peer; thin-lipped, with a small head, cropped hair and outlandish clothes, she went to Spain as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press. There were also a 22-year-old black American nurse, Salaria Kea, who had been working in a hospital in Harlem and fighting her own battles with racism; the bestselling novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘quick, dark and lean; bespectacled and frizzy of hair’, a lesbian and a communist with a ‘flair for heckling’, who travelled with her partner, Valentine; and Nan Green, who had run a second-hand bookshop in the Caledonian Market in London and whose husband was serving as an ambulance driver. And, in this war in which the picture was as important as the word, with magazines on both sides of the Atlantic giving considerable space to illustrations, there was the tiny – barely five foot – photographer Gerda Taro, who looked like a boy and had red-blonde hair. Taro, who had spent time in a prison in Leipzig for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, travelled to Spain as the companion of the more famous Robert Capa. All of them, Watling writes, ‘saw history coming and went out to meet it’.
 
What drew Watling to these women was that they chose not to be dispassionate but to take sides, rejecting what Gellhorn dismissed as ‘all this objectivity shit’ in their support for the Republicans. Only Virginia Cowles, a secondary character here, whose book Looking for Trouble is one of the best memoirs of war reporting ever written, tried to cover both sides, which made her universally suspect. The rest of them filed stories and pictures about horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the Nationalists, of which there were many, and turned a blind eye to the cruelty of the Republicans, whose deep divisions (and many acronyms) left them confused. All extolled participation, along with the need to take note of and not run from what was happening in Spain.
 
In 1937, Cunard, who believed passionately in the power of the arts, sent a message to over two hundred well-known writers with a question: were they for or against the legal Republican government of Spain? Their answers, published as a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, were as positive as she had expected: only five of the 148 whose responses were printed declared themselves against it. ‘Every man to his battle,’ she wrote. ‘This is yours.’
 
Another of Watling’s characters is Virginia Woolf, not long back from driving with her pet marmoset through Germany, where she had become caught up in a deeply alarming rally welcoming Hermann Göring. Woolf did not go to Spain but thought about it obsessively. She filled her notebooks with clippings relating to the war, while mourning her nephew Julian Bell, killed driving an ambulance for the Republicans, and railing against the brutal, masculine culture that had nurtured war.
 
The women Watling has chosen to describe were brave. They made heroic efforts to get themselves to the front and sent back anguished reports of refugees strafed by Nazi bombers, small children killed as they played in the streets and liberated prisons where they had discovered evidence of torture. Herbst had trouble finding a niche for herself among the cliquish foreign reporters who gathered around Hemingway in the Hotel Florida in Madrid, where celebrities were revered and animosities simmered. When she finally reached the front line she found the earth often ‘streaked with the slime of dead things’. The intrepid, reckless Taro was killed when a tank collided with the car to which she was clinging. She was a remarkable photographer, though her true talent did not come to light until the 1990s, when a cache of her negatives was discovered.
 
Group biographies are notoriously hard to write. But Watling knits together with considerable skill the details of her characters’ lives and adventures in Spain, bringing them alongside each other in set pieces, then following them individually as they move through the war, file their stories, leave and return. She also intersperses her narrative with perceptive commentary. Each of these women, as she shows, battled with her own demons. Gellhorn fretted about getting old and not being able to write; Nan Green struggled with the loss of her husband, killed on the last day of the war; the extraordinary Cunard constantly feared that she might not be able to ‘tell the truth’ and wondered how to raise money for the defeated Republicans, many of whom crossed over the border into an unwelcoming France and later died in concentration camps.
 
Each of these women, too, in her own way, was sustained by a desire, in the words of Gellhorn, to make ‘an angry sound against injustice’. As Josephine Herbst would write, with wry hindsight, ‘People cared. It was a decade when people believed in the possibility of their own powers.’

Welcome to the Hotel Florida. By Caroline Moorehead. Literary Review, February 2023. 

 
Nigel Townson’s history of modern Spain begins with disaster – or, more specifically, with the Disaster. When an ignominious defeat in the 1898 Spanish-American war lost the country its last major colonies, a crisis of confidence followed, and the ‘Generation of 1898’ set about trying to diagnose Spain’s problem. Since the scope of Townson’s book runs from that year to ‘the present’ (roughly the spring of 2022), there are plenty of crises to cover.
 
Spain has been unfortunate in its governments. The Penguin History of Modern Spain is a chronicle of ineffectiveness and corruption at the highest levels, and of failures to implement reform. As such, it sometimes reads like a history of missed opportunities. The monarchical Restoration regime proved unable to rise to the challenges of the years after 1898 and was overthrown by General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s coup of 1923, returning the army to its position of ‘political protagonism’.
 
Authoritarianism gave way to the Second Republic and a ‘wave of euphoria’ in 1931 (sending Alfonso XIII into exile), only for those great hopes to degenerate into civil war five years later. Decades of the repressive Franco regime followed the Republic’s defeat in 1939, ending only with the dictator’s death in 1975. Even the triumphant return of democracy has been marked by economic turmoil, political scandal and violence (the rise of ETA is covered in detail).
 
But as Townson, who teaches at Complutense University of Madrid, is at pains to point out, this hardly sets Spain apart from the rest of Europe. Violence, political chaos, corruption and economic suffering may have been features of the country’s 20th century, but they were not uniquely Spanish. Townson diagnoses a widespread tendency to view the country as an anomaly within Europe. As he puts it: ‘Spaniards’ long-standing sense of failure was the product not only of comparisons with other nations but also of an awareness of the way in which foreigners viewed them.’ He takes foreign historians to task for their obsession with the Spanish Civil War (this reviewer may be implicated as the author of a recent book about people obsessed with it), and aims to provide instead a synthesis of the ground breaking work done by Spanish historians since Francoist censorship came to an end – much of which has yet to be translated into English. These historians are, it seems, less burdened by a conviction of national failure.
 
If, chapter after chapter, the point begins to feel somewhat laboured, treating Spain ‘in relation to the much broader reality of Europe’ is illuminating. A comparison of the country’s economy with that of other southern European nations reveals ‘the narrative of economic failure’ to be a myth. Setting the arrival of the Second Republic within the context of a Europe in which most of the new republics of the 1920s had already been ‘swept aside by a tsunami of right-wing authoritarianism’ is a useful reminder of just how vast the challenges facing it were both at home and abroad.
 
Indeed, Townson’s placing of Spain’s history in a wider setting exposes the fact that all too often when we talk about ‘Europe’, what we mean are France, Germany and Great Britain. (At other times, as when comparing the ‘far greater autonomy of the Spanish Church’ under Franco to its counterparts in the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, a divergence that is hardly surprising, the comparison feels less relevant.) Townson bludgeons the narrative that ‘Spain is different’ – as the 1960s tourist campaigns put it – so relentlessly that occasionally one feels an urge to whisper, asa mother to a child in a school competition: ‘but you are special!’
 
The book offers a detailed survey of political, economic and social history, illuminating many of the trends, tensions and power players that have influenced the course of Spain’s modern era. The Catholic Church, Catalan and Basque nationalism, a legacy of clientelism, an endlessly fractured left and frequently embattled middle ground, and the peaks and troughs of working-class activism all receive space. Townson’s attention to economic, political and structural developments means that he sacrifices some of the pleasures of narrative and character: there are too few individual portraits and little scene-setting. This can result in sudden leaps: Primo de Rivera, for instance, who ruled Spain between 1923 and 1930, is gone in a sentence. It’s clear why he was forced to resign, but readers might be interested to know what actually happened.
 
On the other hand, Townson has made an effort to look for Spanish women – easily disregarded in a patriarchal society – and finds them in observers, protestors and historical actors. He describes, for example, the women in Madrid in 1917 who blocked the city’s tram tracks with telegraph poles (and, where necessary, their own children) during a strike, without, according to a bewildered police agent, ‘letting a single man join their groups’; and the efforts of the nationalist Sección Femenina during the Civil War. He does not assume that the effects of any given phenomenon on Spanish men is the same as their effects on Spanish society, but broadens the picture (if only by sex) on numerous occasions.
 
Any vestiges of romance lingering over the Spanish Civil War are stripped away. Townson emphasises the Republican government’s failure ‘to uphold law and order or to govern in a democratic manner’ prior to the Nationalist coup (though the generals attacking it could hardly be seen as democracy’s saviours). Franco’s regime did not merely undo the progressive reforms the Republic had accomplished, thus returning the country to the 1920s, but represented ‘a political rupture that was far deeper than that of Primo de Rivera’ in its assault on ‘Spain’s constitutional, parliamentary and electoral traditions’ (not to mention its suppression of civil society itself).
 
Even so, Townson argues, rather than taking Spain out of step with Europe, this was more a kind of catching up with all the other lost democracies of the late 1930s. By the time the Allied victory in the second world war did make the Francoist repression (and Axis connections) look incompatible with the prevailing mood in western Europe, the Cold War allowed for Franco’s rebranding as a friendly fellow anti-communist, and for a corresponding ‘global integration’ for Spain, crowned by its entry to the UN in 1955. 
 
Even where Spain has been seen as a positive model for the world (as with its swift and relatively peaceful transition to the present democracy), Townson’s conclusion that it ‘fits well into the pattern of European democratisation’ may read a little deflatingly for what most would consider a remarkable achievement – though he is willing to admit that Spain’s transition was ‘sui generis’. In fact, the oversimplified view of an uneven and imperilled process as one of straightforward success, he implies, underplays the victory of Spaniards in preserving a democracy that they had overwhelmingly wanted.
 
The book’s conclusion is perhaps inevitably sombre, covering the 2008 recession, corruption scandals, 2017’s ‘far-reaching crisis’ in Catalonia, and Covid, not to mention a newly ‘fragmented political landscape’, from which both Podemos and Vox have emerged. That said, there have also been moments when Spaniards have, once again, provided a model of political engagement for outsiders. The ‘15-M’ youth protests of 2011 tapped into a disillusionment and outrage that was widespread internationally; their initiative of occupying sites in major cities was seized upon elsewhere, most famously in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
 
The ‘new era of hung parliaments and coalition governments’ may be alarming to anyone with an eye on history – Townson points out that Podemos and the PSOE’s coalition government, formed after the November 2019 election, is the first in Spain since the 1930s – but the country’s hard-won democracy is on firmer ground than it has ever been. Townson’s boast for Spain is that it is now a lot ‘like all other European democracies’ – which may not be a dazzling accolade, but is a success surely worth a little conformity.
 
The Penguin History of Modern Spain: 1898 to the Present/ Nigel Townson. Allen Lane, pp. 400, £30
 
The Spanish Civil War still dominates our perception of modern Spain. By Sarah Watling. The Spectator, April 8, 2023. 

The Tragedy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

 

From a distance, you might have mistaken them for teenagers, though they were in late middle age. It wasn’t just the miniskirts and heels on their slim frames, or the ponytails and flaming lipstick, but the girlish way the women held hands, stroked arms, massaged shoulders, smoothed sleeves and straightened bag straps, giddy with affection. Their makeup was heavy, with boldly pencilled brows, and their long hair tinted black or dyed brassy blond – recreating a youth that had never been theirs to enjoy.
 
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.