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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
of scientific progress at this time. Particularly notable for popular scientific
education is the science of paleoanthropology. Guided by the theory
that labour creates and defines humanity, and that labour is the driving
force behind human development, and that therefore the labouring
masses are the bearers of the torch of science, popular science such as is
exemplified by the magazine Fossils emerged in spite of resistance from
the elite intelligentsia (Schmalzer 2006).
Mao’s political experiment, the Cultural Revolution, like all other
social revolutions before it, claimed many victims. It did however, again
like other social revolutions, have some positive outcomes. It encouraged
grassroots participation in management and it also inspired the
idea of popular democracy. The mass criticism practised in the era of
Mao in general and during the Cultural Revolution in particular, though
ritualized and mobilized from the top, did provide a rich repertoire of
protest techniques (Perry 2003). ‘Members of the Red Guards were not
just passive followers of a charismatic leader, but agents actively
involved in a variety of ideological disputes and contests for power’
(Calhoun and Wasserstrom 2003: 251). The Chinese were not the brainless
masses manipulated by a ruthless dictator so often portrayed in the
Western media. They must be seen as agents of history and subjects of
their own lives like any other people. Anyone who seriously believes in
the inherent value of individualism, in the self-evident truth of the
human pursuit of happiness, or the universal value of human rights and
democracy should be sympathetic with this position.
In the area of industrial development, Mao took a strongly socialist
view, concerning himself with eradicating the usual divide between the
rural and urban. Under his leadership a strategy was developed and
implemented to trial a decentralized non-Soviet form of industry
programme. It was proposed that the rural population could become
industrialized without a need to build cities or urban ghettos, a strategy
initiated during the Great Leap Forward, shelved because of the famine
disaster, but picked up again during the Cultural Revolution. As Wong
(2003: 203) shows, by the end of the decade of the Cultural Revolution in
1979, there were nearly 800,000 industrial enterprises scattered in
villages and small towns, plus almost 90,000 small hydroelectric stations.
These enterprises employed nearly 25 million workers and produced an
estimated 15 per cent of the national industrial output. This development
provided the critical preconditions for the rapid growth of township and
village enterprises in the post-Mao reform period.
In much of the literature that is reviewed and discussed in this book,
the Cultural Revolution is conceptualized as a personal power struggle
by Mao, who manipulated the party, the army, the students and the
Chinese people. However, what was proclaimed and recognized
during the Cultural Revolution was that a continuous revolution was
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