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

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY I
proper settlement?’ Mao demolished Deng Xiaoping by saying to him
that ‘you Deng Xiaoping also had a nest and what you would do if
your nest was destroyed?’ Mao even said: ‘I welcome the fact that the
masses threw stones and waved their hoes as protest.’
This is one of the strategies that e-media participants employ to
counter the demonization of the late-Mao era: expose what has gone
wrong in the post-Mao era. Another such effort was made by Ping Gu
(2006), who laments the fact that post-Mao China has broken eleven
world records for bad governance. 7 Among these eleven are: the worst
healthcare in terms of fairness; the most expensive tertiary education
in terms of purchasing power parity; the greatest disparity between the
rural and urban; the worst environmental sustainability; the most
polluted country; the country most prone to mining accidents; the
country with the highest number of suicides; the most expensive
bureaucracy; the highest number of death penalties; and the highest
absolute numbers of illiterate or semi-illiterate adults. Some of these
world firsts were of course the same as in the Mao era, such as the high
rate of illiteracy in absolute terms, for the simple reason of China’s
large population base. But fairness in healthcare, affordable of education
for the majority, mining and work safety, the cost of bureaucracy
and levels of inequality were evidently better during the Mao era,
especially during the late-Mao years.
Challenging Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
As soon as Mao: The Untold Story appeared in English there was a fierce
debate in the e-media in Chinese. Unlike reviews in the West the
majority of the e-media participants were critical of Chang and Halliday.
One commentator says that the book takes the venerable Chinese
historiographic approach to its extremity and the result was a moral
tale. It is like the new Romance of Three Kingdom (Sannong Zhongguo
2006). Even Zhang Lifan, son of Zhang Naiqi, who was one of the three
most prominent victimized Rightists, could not help but join the criticism
of the book. Zhang fully supports Chang’s political stand, but has
to acknowledge that it is a pity that Chang wrote a fiction instead of a
history, a mistake that misses the chance of throwing Mao into ‘the
rubbish dump of history’.
Another widely circulated critique of Chang is by a self-proclaimed
science student in the UK, Jin Xiaoding. As discussed in Chapter 4, Jin
does not have to examine documentary evidence to point out the
logical contractions in the Chang and Halliday book. When Jin’s 17
questions were post in the e-media, Chang’s brother Zhang Pu participated
in the debate on behalf of his sister. However, his defence is seen
as a dismal failure by the e-media participants since he did not come
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