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

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY I
e-media despite continuous official attempts of censorship, including
arrests of Internet users. By 2003 there were reportedly 70
million registered users of the Internet in China. According to what
is still an emerging research (Hughes 2003, Hughes and Wacker
2003, Chase and Mulvenon 2002, Kalathil and Boas 2003), Internet
access can be a potent tool for change in attitude, values and even
social structures.
The widely publicized case of Sun Zhigang provides evidence that
the e-media does indeed play a very influential role. In June 2003 Sun,
a rural migrant, was arrested, detained by the police and then beaten
to death in Guangzhou for no reason other than the fact that he was not
carrying the right papers with him. The news was exposed by Southern
Metropolis Daily and was spread by the e-media, which were flooded
with protests. The Chinese government ordered an investigation of the
case and finally enacted a law that abolished the notorious detention
centres targeted at migrant workers. Though one cannot say for certain
that e-media protests were the direct cause of this very significant
change, which affected tens of millions of migrant workers, it certainly
played a key role as catalyst.
There has been another example in 2007. Having failed to find any
conventional ways to get themselves heard, 400 fathers signed an
Internet petition that asks the public to rescue their children working
in illegal brick kilns as slaves. The e-media publication led to national
outrage, so much so that the central government had to intervene to
rectify the slave labour situation in China (Bu Luo 2007).
It is within the context of this great surge of e-media that the
hegemony of the public space by the state media and official media
has been challenged. It is within this context of challenge that the emedia
counter-narratives of Mao, the Mao era and the Cultural
Revolution emerged. In this chapter, the first part of a study of the
e-media challenge to the mainstream narratives, I examine how
attempts are being made in the e-media to re-evaluate Mao and the
Cultural Revolution. In the second analysis of the e-media challenge
in the next chapter I will outline some of the main arguments for
repudiating the mainstream narrative regarding issues of the
Chinese economy, the Great Leap Forward, Jiang Qing, healthcare,
education and so on. Obviously the issues of the two chapters overlap
and the discussion of the state of the economy cannot be separated
from the evaluation of Mao. Even so, the issues are divided
between two chapters here so that each chapter is not too long and
that the discussions can be structured for easy reading. E-media
coverage in these two chapters focuses on the Internet, excluding
any coverage of media such as SMS (mobile phone short message
service), MSN and QQ. 1
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