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

CHALLENGING THE HEGEMONY II
talk at the Yan’an Forum in 1942, and it was for this reason that the revolution
for artistic change was part of the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The fact
that the diagnosis was right has been proved by what has happened
since the post-Mao reform: the performing and visual arts have been
dominated by diwang jiangxiang, caizi jiaren (emperors, prime ministers,
generals, scholars and pretty women – Mao’s diagnosis of the pre-
Cultural Revolution arts). The majority of the Chinese – the rural people
– are bombarded with programmes that have nothing to do with their
own lives. For the elite of the artistic establishment, the very idea of art
expressing the life of the ordinary people is an anathema. For them, art
can only be created by and for the high class.
Mao’s ideas of art meant the end of the art world as we know it. The
example of Hao Ran, a well-known novelist in the Mao era is a good
illustration. Hao recollects that he was criticized soon after the death of
Mao and was not allowed to see foreign visitors, who were told by the
post-Mao authorities that Hao was a fraud, an illiterate whose books
were ghost-written by someone else (Cai 2006). 7 Hao himself, however,
has never regretted his work of revolutionary art and is proud of his
novels. He claims that his work made a positive contribution to the
Chinese people and the fact that a person like him can be writer of significance
is a miracle that can occur only in a country under leaders like
Mao. All these revisionist views are widely circulated in the e-media.
The issues of health care and education
The provision of healthcare and education to the vast majority of the
poor in the Mao era was a historic achievement unprecedented in
human history, an achievement that had to be admitted even by those
who hated the Chinese revolution. What is remarkable about these
achievements is that even the rural Chinese benefited from them.
Inspired by economic rationalism and with a declared aim of
making education and healthcare more efficient, the post-Mao Chinese
government have carried out reforms that reversed Maoist policies.
Guided by the principle of ‘entrepreneurizing education’ and ‘marketizing
healthcare’ (jiaoyu chanyehua, yiliao shichanghua), the post-Mao
authorities concentrate their meagrely allocated resources on the elite
schools and hospitals in urban centres while the rest were pushed to
the market for their own survival. Many of the e-media participants are
scathing in their criticism of these reforms.
The deterioration of healthcare and education services, especially for
the rural people, is an indictment of the post-Mao reform regimes in
Beijing. However, very few of the Chinese political and intellectual elite
want the comparison between the two systems to be made. What
happened to Professor Chen Meixia is a good example. in 2001 she wrote
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