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

INTRODUCTION
required for China to remain a socialist country and to achieve its
socialist goals. It was recognized that some CCP leaders were nationalist
revolutionaries who joined the CCP to fight imperialism and
‘feudalism’. Although these leaders tolerated land reform and nationalization
of capitalist industry with foreign connections, they did not
like the programme of rural collectivization and the confiscation of
properties owned by the Chinese nationalist capitalists. Liu Shaoqi, for
instance, did not even like the idea of agricultural co-operatives in 1951
(Tao 2003). There was, therefore, a danger that China would return to
capitalism unless there were a revolution ostensibly concerned with
changing cultural values and beliefs. And that was why it was called
the Cultural Revolution.
Within the conceptual framework of human rights and neoliberalism,
the revolutionary goals and strategy of the Cultural Revolution
are seen as pointless victimization of all the political and cultural elite.
It is either forgotten or ignored that at the time Mao stressed that those
who really wanted to restore capitalism were a tiny minority, about 1
to 2 per cent within the party; among this small percentage of ‘capitalist
roaders’, most could be educated to correct themselves and only
a few could not be changed. Among the small group of die-hard capitalist
roaders, Mao (1967a, 1968) stressed that their sons and daughters
should not be stigmatized as being the same as their parents. It was
clear at that time that the Cultural Revolution was aimed at educating
and was not meant to victimize a whole class of people. However,
today this kind of revolutionary conceptualization of tempering new
subjectivity is totally forgotten or has become an alien concept.
Just as there are alternative views to the official and dominant
judgements of the Mao era, there are also alternative views concerning
the ‘reform’ period. Take the case of rural migrant workers as an
example of how different conceptual paradigms can frame different
interpretations and understandings. Since the late 1980s, every year
approximately 100 to 200 million people from rural China have been
either looking for jobs or working in the cities. For many neoliberals,
such as Professor Qin Hui, this rural exodus has been the second liberation
for the peasants, because he says they now have the freedom to
move from rural villages to urban areas to work. For many rural
Chinese, however, this liberation is deceptive. It provides a sense of
freedom to the rural young, who really have no other choice. Teenagers
working for an average 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week to earn
about 600 RMB a month (a rate unchanged for more than a decade
until very recently) under dangerous and hazardous conditions – is
this really liberation? Mr Chen would certainly think so. Perhaps we
should consider whether those teenagers would feel more ‘liberated’
by going to school and college like their urban counterparts.
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