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

the broad masses of people. The process of attitude change, as seen for
instance in the case of Yang Fan, reflect a lot of what has been happening
in terms of understanding the Cultural Revolution unofficially. Yang
went to kindergarten, primary school and secondary school with Liu
Yuan and Bo Xicheng. 12 The three of them, according to Yang (2006),
went through a stage of fierce denunciation of the Cultural Revolution.
But now they have reached the stage where they, notably Liu Yuan and
Bo Xicheng, do not hate Mao for what happened, but see the Cultural
Revolution as failed idealism. Yang thinks that there are positive lessons
to be learned from the Cultural Revolution.
Wang Xizhe the dissident
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Wang Xizhe was a one of the famous co-authors of the Li Yizhe Posters
(a pamphlet criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the problems of
the Chinese political system that was circulated widely in the early
1970s) and is now a dissident in exile. Wang, however, still holds the
view that the Cultural Revolution led to some positive ideas and
democratic practices. In this respect he is in disagreement with other
Chinese dissidents. In one widely circulated piece, Wang (2006a) asks
the dissident Lin Feng, ‘Since we dissidents are supposed to oppose
whatever is proposed by the CCP and support whatever is opposed by
the CCP, why do you support the CCP when it denigrates the Cultural
Revolution?’ (for the dissidents’ Two whateverisms see Chapter 2).
Wang (2006b) also rebuts Han Zhu who asserts that the Cultural Revolution
was a populist Nazi movement. Wang should know because he
was first very active in Cultural Revolution activities and then wrote
one of the most articulate critiques of many aspects of the Cultural
Revolution’s developments.
Kong Qingdong and the cowshed
‘Cowshed’ is a term used by the Chinese to refer to a practice during
the Cultural Revolution when ‘the bad elements’ or niu gui she shen
(cow demons and snake ghosts, a traditional Chinese term referring to
folk tales about bad spirits that would do harm to the innocent and
weak) were sent to a camp to work and study in order to change their
mentality. The camp is then termed niu peng, a shed for ‘the Cow
demons’. Kong is an outspoken academic but very critical of the fact
that condemnation of niu peng (the cowshed) in memoirs has become a
fashion, similar to the Mao-era fashion of yi ku si tian (to recall the
bitterness of the pre-1949 life and to tell of the sweet life of today).
Nowadays, niu peng is portrayed as more horrifying than prison.
However, Kong (2006) argues that much of what happened at that time
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