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

Introduction
In 2004 at a friend’s party I met a Mr Chen, an energetic recent migrant
from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his late fifties. Chen
works for a profitable company in Australia and his main task is selling
timber products to China; he mentioned to me that he was in the
process of signing a large deal. Chen was confident that in 20 years
time China would overtake Japan economically and he talked about
how China has been developing fast and so on. In order to quell what
I thought was an unbalanced enthusiasm, I mentioned that China was
not a high-tech producer, but just a place for foreign companies to
exploit cheap labour – the assembling factory of the world. I pointed
out to him the fast-emerging social inequalities: that a rural migrant
worker may have to work 16 or more hours a day for seven days a
week to earn about US$80 a month, and that perhaps this is not something
that can be called ‘development’. Chen replied: ‘$80 is good
enough for a peasant.’
I could not help but ask: ‘Would you accept that kind of payment
and life?’
‘That is not the same. Tamen suzhi di [they are low quality people],’
he said.
Then the topic turned to what I was going to do in China for my
research. I said I would like to go back to Gao Village area to find out
what the rural people think of the Cultural Revolution. He was
genuinely surprised:
‘To study the Cultural Revolution? Why do you want to find out
what the rural people think? Rural China was not much affected [by
the Cultural Revolution].’
I replied that: ‘The majority of Chinese are in rural China. If rural
China was not much affected by the Cultural Revolution, why do you,
the CCP and many of the elite intelligentsia keep repeating that the
Cultural Revolution was a ten-year calamity for China?’ To which
Chen said, ‘You have very strange concepts.’
This book is about such ‘strange concepts’, so strange that they challenge
the mainstream orthodox narrative; it questions many ‘truths’
told in memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, both in Chinese
and English. It endeavours to find out whether these perspectives,
which are officially considered to be unorthodox and ‘strange’, may be
widely shared by most ordinary people in China, the farmers and
workers. If they are, the book aims to analyse the reasons behind this
gap between the official and unofficial, and between the mainstream
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