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

CONSTRUCTING HISTORY
Be American citizens in thinking
Just as our ways of talking depend upon the world, the world depends
our way of talking about it (Shotter 1990: 125). Therefore our way of
speaking becomes central because ‘We speak in order to create, maintain,
reproduce and transform certain modes of social and societal relationships’
(1990:121). Remembering is an ‘Accounting practice … within the
context of how people render what is otherwise a puzzling, senseless or
indeterminate activity visible as familiar, sensible, determinate and justified
commonplace occurrence’ (1990:123). ‘An account is not a description,
which by the provision of evidence could be proved true or false,
but it works as an aid to perception, literally instructing one both in how
to see something as a commonplace event, and, in so seeing it, appreciating
the opportunities it offers for one’s own further action’ (1990:123).
There is no ‘ghost in the machine’, there is no private ‘inner’ subjectivity,
radically separated from an ‘outer, public world’, and ‘memory, like
attention and perception, is selective’ (1990:128). When one remembers
one’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, there is no such thing as
‘retrieving’ in recall. Instead, recall constructs the memory. ‘If any single
theme informs of Foucault’s [1976] seminar, it is not a quest for political
theory, but an appreciation of historiography as a political force, of
history writing as a political act’ (Stoler 1995: 62).
Those who write memoirs and autobiographies of the Mao era in
general, and of the Cultural Revolution in particular, tend to recall their
memories with bitterness, condemnation and even horror as if what
happened was a nightmare from which they had just woken up. This is
because they are using the current discourse to identify with certain
values, doing that to construct the past. In this enterprise of constructing
the past through the discourse of the present, remembering the Cultural
Revolution as a nightmare identifies with the West, its values and its way
of life, especially these of the United States. This is not surprising due to
the hegemonic position of the West headed by the United States. The
political, economic and military superiority can easily be translated as
superiority in cultural and life value. These globally dominant values are
therefore taken as universally and transcendentally true.
The case of Li Yunlong, a Guizhou journalist working for the Bi Jie
ribao (Bi Jie daily), illustrates the point. Under the pen name of Ye lang
(night wolf) Li wrote an e-media chat piece in which he called on the
Chinese to become an American citizen in thinking (zai sixiang shang
jiaru Meiguo guoji). Li declared that he could not help but raise his head
to pay respect to the United States, a country that has a beautiful environment,
a developed economy, and freedom of speech and religion,
and that practises political democracy. The United States is a real
Meiguo (Meiguo is the Chinese translation of the United States which
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