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

literally means ‘beautiful country’). ‘I wish to migrate to that country
but could not,’ he laments. ‘What should I do? I have decided to
become its citizen in my thoughts’ (Ye lang 2005).
Sinological orientalism
Professor Jiao Guobiao of Beijing University bemoans how unfortunate
it is that the United States had not, during the Korean War,
marched straight to Beijing to take over China. He swears that if he
had the power he would turn China into the 51st State of the Union.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Jiao posted a poem on
the e-media in which he declared that if he was called he would serve
in the US army without the slightest hesitation. But he could only
wish to be a US soldier in his next life (Xiao Ling 2005). Not surprisingly
in 2005 Professor Jiao was invited to visit the United States for
six months by the US National Endowment for Democracy to
research the subject of ‘The Chinese News Industry: Past and Present’
(http://www.zonaeuropa.com/ 20050328_3.htm). 3
This identification with Western values confirms the Sinological
orientalist (Vukovich 2005) view of oriental despotism (Wittfogel 1957).
Leon Trotsky called Stalin an ‘Asiatic’ who, like other Asiatic leaders,
was cunning, brutal and peasant (Trotsky 1967). Marx’s proposition of
the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, a convenient way of avoiding the
discussion of evidence that might be messy for the grand history of teleological
human development, differed very little from the views of
Hegel, Montesquieu, Smith and many other thinkers (Anderson 1974) in
relation to China. Oriental despotism reached its logical conclusion
when Wittfogel, a communist defector turned cold warrior, preceding
Feng, applied the concept of despotism to ‘China, Tsarist Russia, Persia,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Incas, even the Hopi Indians of Arizona’
(Cumings 2005). However, the veteran theme of the Oriental other takes
on some variations when applied to the Cultural Revolution.
In contemporary Western images of China, the Cultural Revolution
is a potent symbol of the ugly face of Chinese society, as the
Nazi era is a symbol of the ugly face of German society. The
Cultural Revolution has been a lucrative tool for the West in its
critique of the Chinese government; it has given the West the
moral high ground in this debate
(Brady 2002: 95)
Two whateverism 4
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Chinese in and outside China who want to identify with the globally
dominant values are not only encouraged but constantly promoted by
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