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

INTRODUCTION
Another example of these polarized views occurred in December
2006, when Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Pufang, who was crippled at
the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, told a group of journalists
that the Cultural Revolution was not only a disaster for himself but for
the whole of the Chinese state and the Chinese people. This almost
routine response triggered hundreds of thousands of responses from
bloggers and chatrooms. According to an estimate on one website, Xin
lang wang, only two weeks after Deng’s remark there had been more
than 20,000 feedback entries covering a staggering 1,166 pages
(Blinders 2006). One e-media participant who claims to have witnessed
the incident states that Deng Pufang was not crippled because he was
thrown out of the window by Red Guards, as it is often claimed or
assumed, nor because he had jumped. Deng was trying to escape from
the room where he was confined by climbing down a sewage pipe.
When the old pipe broke, Deng fell onto the concrete below and crippled
himself (Ma Ming 2006). One seasoned e-media activist, Li
Xuanyuan, suggests that Deng Pufang should look into the official
statistics and consider how many migrant workers have been crippled
each year by mining accidents, or have had their fingers and arms cut
off in sweatshops all over China, especially in the developed areas of
the southeast coast. An overwhelming majority disagreed with Deng’s
viewpoint, indicating perhaps a more positive view of the Mao era
than was generally expected.
Considering that Roderick MacFarquhar of Harvard University, a
prominent scholar of the Cultural Revolution, fails to recognize that
there is a vast majority of people in China who not only remember the
era of Mao as ‘the good old days’, but who also like and admire the
man (Wu Yiching 2006), there is an urgent need to make available
much that is unknown to many. It is important to hear the voice that
may resonate among the vast majority of the Chinese, who cannot
simply be dismissed as ignorant and brainwashed. We need to remind
ourselves that in China, as in any other society, there was and there is
a social hierarchy, and that different perceptions by different sectors of
Chinese society should be considered equally legitimate. Many
Chinese expatriates such as Jung Chang dislike Mao because they or
their families were the victims of Mao’s theory and practice of class
struggle. On the other hand, people such as rural farmers and urban
workers might not have a reason to dislike Mao. For many of them
there may be reasons to think positively of him.
History is not simply a picture or reconstruction of what happened: it
is our present construction of the past. The way we construct the past
depends on how we conceptualize our world and ourselves in the present.
Therefore how one sees the worth of the Mao era depends not only
on what one’s present circumstances are but also on one’s present values
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