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

would also argue that the increase of grain production had more to do
with the improvement of infrastructure such as irrigation, technological
breakthrough such as better seeding and availability of chemical inputs
such as fertilizer and insecticide.
Education and revolution in the big picture
Analytical discussion of the ideas and practices of education in the
Mao era is also circulated in the e-media. For instance, Cheng and
Manning (2003) argue that education reform under Mao was in fact not
something crazy worked up by a fanatical Mao. It is in fact within the
tradition of Marxism and the Western radical criticism of education for
its elite and urban orientation, its neglect of practical skills and its separation
of school from society and education from work. In China the
criticism started with the May Fourth Movement, and Cai Yuanpei, the
president of Beijing University, for instance, advocated work–study
programmes. Marx of course envisaged ‘well-developed men’ in
communist society, ideas inspired by the French Revolution to create
‘new men’. In the early Soviet period the first commissioner of Soviet
Education, Anatol Lunacharski, issued a report on education that
enunciated seven basic principles with an emphasis on an ‘early fusion
of productive labour and academic institutions: and school as a
productive commune’. V.N. Shul’gin, director of the Institute of School
Methods in Moscow, even argued that children should not grow up in
schools nor in kindergartens, but in the factory, the mill, the agricultural
economy, the class struggle. Mao’s idea that labouring people
ought to ‘be simultaneously intellectuals while the intellectuals should
also be labourers’ was just a natural progression along these lines.
Mao’s epistemological assumption can clearly be seen in one of his
major works, On Practice, which claimed that true knowledge comes
only from practice and that productive activity is the fundamental
source for learning.
A re-evaluation of Kang Sheng?
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
There was even a call to rehabilitate Kang Sheng, who has been
portrayed as an evil character in the literature in both Chinese and
English (Lin Qingshan 1988, Byron 1992), given his role in Yan’an in
pursuing suspected spies that victimized many. According to Wang Li
(2006), Kang Sheng was not only a very cultured man but also a moderate
during the Cultural Revolution. Kang was not a cold-blooded KGB
monster as he is popularly portrayed. To illustrate, Wang reveals that
Kang Sheng once protected Deng Tuo during the anti-rightist movement.
At some stage at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution Kang
[ 154 ]