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

Li was once openly challenged when he was an invited speaker at
the highly acclaimed Yuexi Seminar Series in Zhengzhou. As he was
repeating his usual anti-Maoist stand by claiming that the upright
and honest Peng Dehuai had been victimized at the Lushan Conference
in 1959 by the dictator Mao, some members of the audience
asked why Li and his follow anti-Maoists did not want to mention
the fact that it was not Mao but Liu Shaoqi who condemned Peng
first in 1959 and then again in 1964, or that the latter wanted to plot
with the Russians so that a Chinese coup similar to that in Russia
would take place. Li was also asked why he did not want to mention
the fact that both General Su Yu and Zhang Qian made the explosive
claim that the Russian ambassador to China approached the then
Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi about such a coup, 5 and that Zhang
Wentian and Kang Sheng claimed that Peng actually said that ‘Russian
soldiers should be invited’ to solve China’s problem. 6 For once Li
was lost for words (He Yuan 2007).
Challenging the late-Mao thesis
CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY I
Dai Yugong (2006) confronts the late-Mao thesis head on. He argues
that the practice and ideas of the later Mao are more valuable to
today’s China than those of the early Mao. Along these lines a widely
circulated e-media piece cleverly titled ‘Mao’s Commentaries on the
Current Affairs in China’ (Wuyou zhixiang 2006) uses Mao’s words to
comment on some of the salient social developments in post-Mao
China. In the area of education the blatant disregard for the education
opportunities of the majority and single-minded concentration of
resources on the privileged few in post-Mao China has attracted most
criticism by the e-media participants. There is discussion of the privileges
of students in the so-called key schools, who enjoy the latest
computers, piano rooms and sports centres in stark contrast to the situation
in rural China where the poor cannot afford even a simple
textbook in the twenty-first century, and in that context Mao’s directive
on 14 June 1952 that guizu xuexiao (aristocratic schools) should be abolished
is cited. The issue of study methods is raised – the way that
students at school are fed too much book knowledge, and that the
workload demanded from them is too heavy – and Mao’s comment on
21 December 1965 is cited, in which he warned that the educational
system did not teach much that was useful, that the way so much book
knowledge was used and the way discipline was imposed damaged
students’ health; that is exactly what has been happening since the end
of the Cultural Revolution.
The practice of maintaining well-resourced schools for the political
and intellectual elite started in the early 1950s. After the disaster of the
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