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

DEBATING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
China, either as tourists, students or migrants, and who complained (in
Chinese) that the exhibition was biased cannot be ordinary Chinese
either. These visitors used the general term Zhongguo renmin (the
Chinese people) as if their views represented those of everyone else in
China. They wrote that they themselves or family members or friends
of theirs had suffered an injustice because they were ‘sent down to the
countryside’ during the Cultural Revolution. As the majority of
Chinese live and work in the countryside – and did so before and
during the Cultural Revolution – should not these critics pause and
reflect before they declare that life in the countryside was inhumane?
The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution
It is therefore not surprising that some visitors questioned the moral
legitimacy of a Cultural Revolution exhibition. One visitor asked
whether one could imagine an exhibition like this for Hitler, Stalin, or
Pol Pot. The assumption, of course, is that the Cultural Revolution was
a type of holocaust and that Mao was a monster like Hitler. This is an
important question – one that has to be faced by Western and Chinese
academics alike. The label Shi nian haojie is frequently used to refer to
the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese media, in conversations and
even in official Chinese documents. Shi nian means ten years, referring
to the standard official Chinese periodization that the Cultural Revolution
lasted ten years. Haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modern
term for ‘holocaust’ or a traditional term to mean ‘great calamity’ or
‘catastrophe’. Though ‘holocaust’ is not usually explicitly used in the
West to refer to the Cultural Revolution, the sections of the Chinese
intelligentsia and political elite who go out of their way to denounce
the Cultural Revolution seem to be inclined to exploit the ambiguity of
haojie to denigrate the Cultural Revolution. The CCP, under the direction
of Deng Xiaoping, adopted a resolution in 1981 on the history of
the Mao era. In the resolution the Cultural Revolution is not referred to
as a ten-year haojie; but, by judicially declaring that the ten years of the
Cultural Revolution were the period when Mao deviated from Mao
Zedong Thought, the resolution opened a door for total denigration. 1
In her writings, Vera Schwarcz (1996 and 1998) specifically draws
our attention to the meaning of ‘holocaust’ in haojie when she talks
about the burden of the memory of the Cultural Revolution. Schwarcz
herself does not think a comparison of the Holocaust with the Cultural
Revolution is appropriate. In this connection it is worth noting that an
edited volume by Law (2003) is titled The Chinese Cultural Revolution
Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust. The book does not set to
prove the thesis that the Cultural Revolution was a holocaust, but
contains criticism that make implicit assumptions in that direction.
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