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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
ferment. Items such as cloth buttons, stamps, dresser drawers, and rice,
oil, and meat coupons were indeed artefacts of daily life; and yet the way
these ordinary objects were made expressed extraordinary ideological
content. The resulting combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary
is clearly illustrated by, for instance, the message ‘the masses of people
have unlimited creative powers’ that appeared on a bus ticket, an envelope
that had the slogan ‘increase vigilance to defend the Motherland’
written on it, a mirror table that carried the reminder ‘never forget class
struggle’, and cigarette packages that instructed smokers to ‘support
agriculture on a great scale’.
The Seattle exhibition deliberately avoided any interpretation or
evaluation of the items on display or of the Cultural Revolution itself.
Thus the display items were accompanied by little in the way of
commentary; the objects themselves were expected to speak to the
audience. As if to further distance itself from evaluation, the exhibition
presented the recollections of two people who voiced opposing positions
on the Cultural Revolution. The first recalled the Cultural
Revolution with nostalgia, saying that Mao’s ideals were good for ‘us
average people’, while the other indignantly condemned the Cultural
Revolution as ‘barbaric’ and a period of ‘red terror’. That the exhibition
did not take a conspicuous stand against the Cultural Revolution
clearly annoyed many visitors, if comments left in the guest book are
any indication. Some accused the exhibit of trying to be ‘politically
correct’; others were frustrated that they left without any clear understanding
about whether the Cultural Revolution was good or bad;
some registered their complaints that the exhibition was too positive
about the Cultural Revolution. One unhappy visitor wrote two
sentences in Chinese characters in the guest book, the first of which
declared that: ‘The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were a disaster
for the Chinese people.’
Along similar lines a couple of visitors, who identified themselves
as ‘American physicians’, wrote that when they visited China they
heard people describe their experiences of the Cultural Revolution as
‘terrible’. Those American physicians suggested other visitors to read
Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai.
This is interesting and instructive because it indicates that Jung Chang
and Nien Cheng are standard references when the Mao era and the
Cultural Revolution are under consideration. It probably did not occur
to those visitors that the exhibition was not meant to show that the
claims of people like Jung Chang and Nien Cheng had any legitimacy.
The Chinese hosts of visiting American physicians might not view the
Cultural Revolution in the same way that an urban worker or a rural
farmer would; nor would anyone classify Jung Chang and Nien Cheng
as ordinary. Visitors to the exhibition who came to Washington from
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