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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
More recently, in one of the most popular electronic publications
produced by Chinese dissidents, Cai Yingshen states that Mao was
China’s Hitler and that the Cultural Revolution was the same as Nazi
fascism (Cai 2002). In Wild Swans, Jung Chang puts the Red Guards on
a par with Hitler’s Storm Troopers.
The post-Mao Chinese authorities have been telling the Chinese and
people all over the world that the Cultural Revolution was ten years of
calamities and that China’s economy was brought to the brink of
collapse during that period. However, when they first started their
journey to abandon the Chinese revolution they could not afford to be
seen as throwing away the whole package of China’s revolutionary
legacy. Their way of getting around this dilemma was to claim that the
period of the Cultural Revolution, when most of them were out of
favour, was an aberration and that the ideology of the Cultural Revolution,
if there is any for them, was misguided. Along similar lines,
most of the Chinese elite intelligentsia, who possess a dignified a sense
of owning Chinese history, keep repeating that the Cultural Revolution
was the darkest age of Chinese history (Ji Xianlin 1998).
The story propagated by the Chinese authorities and elite intelligentsia
spreads fast and wide among the non-academic community in
the West. This of course has much to do with the legacy of the cold war,
and the relentless push of democracy and a human rights agenda after
it. It was evident at the symposium sessions that took place during the
Seattle exhibition that once the ‘holocaust’ meaning of haojie was
accepted, anyone trying to say anything different about the Cultural
Revolution ran the risk of being accused of holocaust denial. At least
two visitors accused the Burke Museum exhibition of being ‘politically
correct’ though the ‘political correct’ line both in and outside China is
actually to condemn the Cultural Revolution.
There’s no doubt that many suffered and died during the ten-year
period. Some committed suicide, others died in factional fighting or
after being tortured. Some died because of the harshness of their
circumstances, and the lives of others were shortened as a result of
their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I myself was put
under house arrest when I was only a teenager and had to face struggle
sessions every night for two weeks for what now seem ridiculous
reasons. My whole family was affected as a result (Gao 1999a). Denunciation
and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution by those who
suffered in one way or another is understandable and can be an individual’s
way to cope and heal the emotional trauma. However, to
participate in the official project of reducing every thing to the label of
‘ten years of calamities’ is another matter.
Here I give just one example. One recent piece on the widely read
Chinese-language electronic journal Huaxia wenzhai (Chinese Digest),
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