Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
has a ‘callousness’ and ‘evokes the image of Oriental obliquity’ (Barmé
2005: 138). Chan (2006), in his coup d’œil review, shows unequivocally
that Chang and Halliday’s so-called ‘New information is manufactured
out of a manipulation of facts to such an extreme that they can no longer
be sustained by empirical evidence,’ and that the co-authors ‘prioritize
entertainment, sensationalism and titillation over historical accuracy’.
On one occasion, responding to the scholarly criticism, Chang
claims, correctly, that 90 per cent of the reviews of their book are positive
and that the reason why some academics are critical is that they
have to be critical in order to save face, or they would have to admit
that they have got it all wrong (Chang 2006b). Right or wrong, by the
end of 2006, The Unknown Story has already been translated into twelve
languages and 13 more language versions are being translated. The
book is on the bestseller list in every language version that has been
translated so far (Chang 2006b).
One has to wonder why The Unknown Story is so highly acclaimed.
Even the supposedly left-wing or progressive (whatever that means
these days) British flagship paper the Guardian takes the book tremendously
seriously. Perhaps a self-proclaimed serious paper also has to
fashion some market. ‘Together, however, they [Chang and Halliday]
make a formidable literary partnership, a yin and yang of exotic
glamour and scholarly erudition’ declares the Guardian (2005). A
Western yang and a Chinese yin together are really exotic, a fairy tale
of glamour. But scholarly erudition? You must be joking.
It is obvious that in writing her biography of Mao, Chang starts with
an attitude, an attitude of hatred and therefore the desire to bring
down Mao’s personality in the scale of history. This can be achieved
and all indications are that Chang already has. People, educated or
otherwise (and who would want to be told that they are not educated),
like ready-made and easily consumable commodities. Here is one.
Revolution: from farewell to burial
As we saw in Chapter 2, the ‘forward-looking’ neo-Enlightenment
Chinese intelligentsia bid their farewell to revolution only a few years
after its foremost leader, Mao, died in 1976. By the early 1990s the intellectual
climate internationally was such that a farewell was seen as not
intellectually rigorous enough. Revolutionary ideas and practices not
only had to be dead but also nailed into the coffin under our feet. There
was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The
communist party in Russia was dismantled under Yeltsin. Even symbols
of revolution had to be dismantled. In the Soviet Union the 7 and 8 of
November were public holidays to celebrate the October Revolution in
1917. In 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the holiday was
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