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

CONSTRUCTING HISTORY
Western governments and some academics alike. The cultivated image
of America as the paradise for freedom and as the avenger against the
brutal Chinese political system is so strong that some members of the
Chinese elite would go as far as to support whatever the US government
says or does, and to oppose whatever the Chinese government
says or does. Their speech acts coordinate well with Western political
agenda that in China they are often referred to as fanshi pai (whateverists).
This crude adversarialism is nicknamed on the Chinese e-media
liangge fanshi (Two whateverism): whatever China does is wrong and
whatever the United States does is right. The logic is that since the
United States is the number one liberal and democratic country it
cannot do anything wrong, and since the PRC is ruled by a dictatorial
CCP it cannot do anything right.
A website contributor lists more than 40 ‘whatevers’, contrasting
attitudes towards the United States and China (Sumo3, 2004). These
include: whatever the US does is democratic and whatever China does
is dictatorial; every popular protest against the US government is an
exercise of democratic rights, and every Chinese protest against the
United States is parallel to the Boxer Rebels or Angry Young Men (fen
qing); whenever the United States increases military expenditure it is
for peace, and whenever China does so it constitutes a military threat;
whenever the United States does anything against China it is to protect
American interest, and whenever China does anything that it is not in
the interest of the United States it is xenophobia; whenever US civilians
are attacked it is terrorism, and whenever Chinese citizens are attacked
by separatists it is activity for self-determination; whenever the US
uses forces abroad it is to overthrow dictatorship and rid the world of
evil, and whenever China defends its own territory it is changing the
status quo.
After the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999,
which killed three Chinese and injured a dozen more, there were angry
and ugly demonstrations in the streets of some cities in China. Some of
the Chinese elite intelligentsia in and outside China responded to these
demonstrations by making two points which are very telling. The first
point is that the Chinese government should apologize and compensate
the millions of victims of the regime first before they had the
audacity to ask Washington for an apology. The second is that those
anti-US demonstrations were repeating the behaviour of the Boxer
Rebels (Cao 1999), irrational and anti-modern.
Some of the Chinese intelligentsia openly declare that they worship
America (An Qi 1998). One well-known Chinese dissident in exile
declared that he would rather be an animal in a foreign country than a
China person (Zheng 2004). When the invasion of Iraq started, one
dissident academic in Hong Kong said that he envied the Iraqis
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