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

8 Challenging the hegemony:
contrary narratives in the
e-media (II) – the Mao era
Introduction: history in socioeconomic context
One of the easily accepted arguments in attacking Mao the man is that
he was a person of no original ideas, whose dark political manoeuvring
was simply aimed at gaining and maintaining personal power.
Looking from a perspective of this power struggle thesis, all the costs
and victimizations on the trail of Mao’s political action were not only
senseless and distasteful but actually evil. In Chapter 7 I have focused
on how e-media participants challenge this accepted evaluation of Mao
the man and some issues related to the Cultural Revolution. One
attempt in challenging the power struggle thesis is to bring the twoline
struggle thesis back into the big picture. I find the two-line
struggle thesis very convincing and believable because it fits more with
documentary evidence and because it has more explanatory power in
revealing the behaviour of the actors both at the top and at the lower
levels at the time. It is more convincing and believable also because it
involves politico-socioeconomic history instead of personal intrigues
at Mao’s court. In this chapter we will see how e-media participants
challenge the mainstream wisdom on the Mao era by relating to the big
pictures of political, social and economic issues.
The state of the economy in the Mao era and during the
Cultural Revolution
Ever since the arrest of the Cultural Revolution radicals immediately
after the death of Mao in 1976 (so immediate that Jiang Qing is reportedly
to have protested that Mao was being betrayed when his dead
body was still warm), there has been manufacturing of claims to show
that Mao did not know and furthermore did not care about China’s
economy, that the Gang of Four deliberately wanted to destroy China’s
economy and that towards the end of the Cultural Revolution the
Chinese economy was on the brink of collapse.
Deng Xiaoping was the architect of the fabrication of this truth.
Deng (2007) claimed that the Cultural Revolution held China up
(danwu) for ten years and that for 20 years after 1957 China politically
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