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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
of the May Fourth Movement of Enlightenment. Later, since the 1990s,
as the cold war appeared to come to an end and as market capitalism
took root in China, the narrative developed further towards the political
act of identification with the neo-Enlightenment of liberal
democracy and market capitalism. It is this act of identifying with
dominant political and cultural values in the West that orientates the
remembering of the Cultural Revolution.
What is the departure point of those who want to identify with the
globally dominant political and cultural values? While the Japanese who
wanted to identify with the West (out of Asia and into Europe) took their
departure from the ugly Asia, Michel de Certeau’s conceptualization of
‘place’, the Chinese who want to identify with liberal democracy and the
values of market capitalism take their departure from ‘time’, their ugly
past, including the very recent past. To the Japanese then, ‘to kill the
Chinese is throwing off Asia in every conceivable way’ because China
was the anti-West and anti-modern (Dower 2006). To the Chinese now,
condemning the Cultural Revolution is throwing off the ugly past in
every conceivable way.
The ‘making of history’, as Certeau gives it as a title of a chapter in
The Writing of History, deals with the present as much as with the past.
What is required of the present is the framework to construct the past.
The writing and debates about the Cultural Revolution are political
speech acts of identification. This chapter aims to demonstrate how the
identification with the dominant values of liberal democracy and
market capitalism (the present) and the remembering of the Cultural
Revolution (the past) are connected.
From the wounded to the mentalité: the re-rehearsal of
May Fourth
Shanghen wenxue, the scar literature or literature of the wounded,
emerged almost immediately after the Cultural Revolution as a series
of first-person accounts in the form of short accounts, usually authored
by zhiqing (educated youth) sent to the countryside or state farms in
border regions. Prominent writers include Liu Xinhua, Zhang Xianliang
and Liu Xinwu. 1 The so-called scar literature was initially
encouraged by the Chinese leadership to place blame at the door of the
Gang of Four for whatever was considered wrong or bad in China at
that time so as to legitimize the destruction of Maoist policies. It was
the emergence of the scar literature that symbolized the beginning of
the condemnation of the Cultural Revolution both in and outside
China. Subsequently another literary genre, known as reportage (Link
1983a, 1983b), also helped the progression of denunciation of the
Cultural Revolution and denegation of the era of Mao.
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