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

INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 opens with a debate on the Cultural Revolution and asks
whether it was ten years of catastrophe (shi nian haojie), who were ‘the
Chinese’ who were adversely affected by it, what were the causes of the
violence, and what was the extent of violence, whether there were
constructive achievements during the Cultural Revolution and if so what
were they, and what was the impact on Chinese culture and tradition.
This chapter argues that the Cultural Revolution, while very violent,
was not a ten-year calamity for China; that the party and elite intelligentsia
cannot speak on behalf of all Chinese; that the causes of violence
were many and the extent of violence has been exaggerated; that there
were many constructive and creative developments during the Cultural
Revolution that have been ignored or denigrated by the post-Cultural
Revolution narrative; and that the destruction of culture and tradition
has been exaggerated. Much of the discussion focuses on the debate over
the question of cultural and religious destruction in Tibet. A major argument
is that this was not a result of ethnic strife or Chinese chauvinism
or imperialism, but due to the theory of class struggle and was justified
by a Marxist interpretation of historical progression. In this regard, this
chapter will render support to scholars such as Sautman (2006) who
argues that the Western world in particular has been hugely misled by
claims of the Tibetan exiles that ethnic or cultural genocide has been
committed there, and that the same conception that should inform our
opinions about China generally applies with regard to Tibet. That
conception is that the oppression of the old society was much more
widely experienced by its majority over many centuries than any of the
mistakes made during the course of transforming Tibetan society.
Chapter 2 develops the argument that memories are not only
about events, but also constitute a form of knowledge. The narrative
of atrocity of the Cultural Revolution is not just a retelling of past
experience but also an act of identification with certain political and
cultural values. From the literature of the wounded (or ‘scar literature’)
to the ‘calamities’ discourse of the Cultural Revolution, the
retelling of the past can be seen as an act of political identification
with certain hegemonic Western political and cultural values. It was
a neo-Enlightenment act to retrieve what was seen as being abandoned
by the May Fourth Movement: the striving for a Western
vision of humanism and democracy. Since the late 1990s the denunciation
of the Cultural Revolution and the era of Mao has gone hand in
hand with the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism. By analysing
the phenomenon of the ‘Two whatevers’ (whatever China does is
wrong and whatever the United States does is right) among Chinese
neoliberal dissidents, the chapter advances the argument for a correlation
between the condemnation of socialist revolution and the elite
desire for political and cultural value identification with the West.
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