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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Seeing the past from the present: a hole in the discursive
hegemony
Since the neoliberal guru Milton Friedman’s first visit to China in 1980,
there has developed a neoliberal dynasty (Kwong 2006) that has exercised
what Wang Hui (2004: 9) called a ‘discursive hegemony’ over
intellectual discourse for over a quarter of a century. According to the
idea of development embodied in this discourse, a generation of
Chinese has to be sacrificed, and those who are to be sacrificed are the
50 million workers who lost their jobs, plus 800 million peasants (Li
Yang 2006). One economist, former Dean of the prestigious Guanghua
Management Institute at Beijing University Li Yining, argues that all
welfare measures should be abolished so as to maintain work enthusiasm.
Another economist thinks that Chinese society can progress
only if the gap between the rich and poor is increased (Li Yang 2006).
Only recently, since the leadership changed from Jiang Zemin/Zhu
Rongji to Hu Jintao/Wen Jiabao, has there been concern that China
might be Latin-Americanized (Caoyan Jushi 2005). Dissenting voices
have now begun to crack a hole in the hegemonic discourse of ‘efficiency
first and nothing else matters’ (Liu Guoguang 2005 and Wang
Hui 2006).
In summary, the intellectual consensus of ‘development no matter
what’ has broken down. Now Mao’s legacy has started to be looked at
a little more seriously. The past can be viewed positively now because
the failure of the present is obvious even to some of the political and
intellectual elite, such as Professor Liu Guoguang (2005), who used to
be staunch supporters of Deng Xiaoping but now begin to question the
capitalist road that Deng has taken.
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