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

MAO: THE KNOWN STORY
shortened from two days to one. Then in 1996, the name of the holiday
was changed to the ‘day of harmony and understanding’ (a rough translation).
In 2004 under Putin the holiday was again changed by shifting
its date to 4 November and it is called something like ‘People Unity Day’
(Zhang Jie 2007).
Time magazine confidently declares that if they (the brainwashed
public?) ever get to read Chang’s ‘atom bomb of a book’, it will cure
them of Mao admiration. ‘Chang and Halliday have plunged a dagger
deep into the heart of the Mao legend, so deep it is hard to imagine
anything like a full recovery’, declares another reviewer (French 2005).
That explains why an intellectual scandal is not treated as such. Yes,
Mao has to be brought down. To have the portrait of Mao on the
Tian’anmen rostrum is offensive to all the cold-war knights, later
converted or not. Without a complete uprooting of the CCP in China it
is not yet the End of History. That is why, in spite of some acknowledgements
that Jung Chang’s historiography is faulty, almost all
mainstream reviewers nevertheless feel compelled to kowtow to the
theory that Mao indeed was a mass murderer (Williems 2005)
In this global climate of liberal democracy and neoconservative
market capitalism triumph, the fall of the Berlin Wall is not enough to
draw the final curtain. The Chinese still stubbornly remain ‘communist’
by refusing to dig Mao’s grave. Therefore, the Great Wall of China
is still to be brought down so as to bury revolution permanently. It is
here that we can see the significance of and connection with the way
the French Revolution is evaluated.
Furet and the French Revolution
Inspired by Furet’s work, Simon Schama (1989) suggests that the terrorist
zeal of the French Revolution created the political and ideological
precedents of the twentieth century totalitarian regimes and even of the
Holocaust. Furet’s basic argument is that there was not much socioeconomic
basis for the French Revolution, as the Marxist tradition would
have argued. Instead, the French Revolution took place largely because
of a political discourse, a popular Rousseauianism that was prevalent on
the eve of 1789, which, according to Furet, was dangerously illiberal and
therefore the cause of the Terror and violence following the French Revolution.
Furet’s criticism of absolutism, and especially his battle cry for
individualism, could not have come at a better time than during the
1980s when Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no society but
families and when Soviet Union was about to collapse.
In the Furet and Ozouf’s Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution
(1989), which was a publication phenomenon, ‘missing are virtually all
the major social groups that contributed to ... its felt effects; the nobility,
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