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

Conclusion: truth and belief
values of socialism and
China’s future direction
The image we usually have in the West of contemporary China is that
it is a highly regimented, regulated and strictly controlled society.
China is usually interpreted as a dictatorship (either party dictatorship
or personal dictatorship), or a country run by a state of factional politics,
or a state of ideological control. Clearly each of these approaches
offers some insight into the mechanism of Chinese politics, but what
actually happens is often the result of the interactions of many factors
that cannot be explained by a single conceptual model. Much of what
has happened in post-Mao rural China, for instance, is often the result
of unintended policy, and sometimes a result of lack of regulation or
management from the state. To interpret what happens at the grassroots
we need to have a much more sophisticated conceptual approach
that involves people’s truth and belief values.
Truth and belief values of a political discourse
We could advance our understanding of what has been happening in
China a step further by suggesting that the power of political discourse
at any given time may be too strong for a change at that particular time
until and unless the truth and belief values of that discourse are
discredited. A brief outline of the so-called rural reform will illustrate
the point. The household responsibility system (baogan zhi) that eventually
led to the collapse of the collective system was not conceptually
original, nor politically innovative. Before the system was officially
sanctioned all over the country many villagers practised baogan zhi in
various forms in many places on and off in the Mao era. It was off
sometimes when agricultural policy was more radical and on at other
times, depending also on inclinations of local leaders. 1978, two years
after the death of Mao and after the arrest of the Maoist radicals the
Gang of Four, is considered a watershed year of reform as it was then
that a resolution on rural China was passed by the central committee
of the CCP. But in fact that 1978 resolution explicitly stated that baogan
zhi was not allowed (bu xu). In a 1979 central government document
the word bu xu (not allowed) was changed to bu yao (do not); and only
in 1980 did a CCP document state that baogan zhi was sanctioned as a
kind of socialist responsibility system. It was not until the mid-1980s
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