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

CONSTRUCTING HISTORY
once a teenage rebel and wrote one of the most radical revolutionary
pamphlets, Whither China, at the age of 17, in his then name Yang
Xiguang. Yang then went to the United States and did his PhD in
economics at Princeton. He was later converted to Christianity and had
a successful career as an economics professor at an Australian university.
Before his unfortunate death in 2005 Yang tirelessly advocated
neoliberal economic policies for China.
The most successful, that is the most popular and influential,
memoir is surely that by expatriate Chinese Jung Chang. Chang naturally
assumes that students of peasant background are ‘semi-literate’
and had ‘little aptitude’, while she was clever and deserved the best,
including a generous Chinese government scholarship to study in
Britain. Chang claims that she was the victim of a brutal regime but, In
fact, as well as being a Red Guard, Jung Chang was the privileged
daughter of China’s Communist elite. It is a peculiarity of the reception
of Wild Swans that it was told and read as a story of great personal
suffering, when its author grew up with a wet-nurse, nanny, maid,
gardener and chauffeur provided by the party, protected in a walled
compound, educated in a special school for officials’ children. As a
Grade 10 official, her father was among the 20,000 most senior people
in a country of 1.25 billion, and it was in this period that children of
‘high officials’ became almost a class of their own. Still, the enthusiastic
Western audience of Wild Swans found something to identify in Jung
Chang’s perennial fear of being reduced to the level of the rest of the
population, shuddering with her at the prospect that ‘Mao intended
me to live the rest of my life as a peasant’ (Heartfield 2005).
It was during the supposedly most difficult times of her family that
Chang managed to leave the countryside a few weeks after she was
sent down, become a barefoot doctor, an electrician and then a university
student, and finally receive a generous scholarship to study in the
UK, the kind of career moves that were dreams for millions of young
Chinese, all accomplished during the Cultural Revolution years before
her father was officially rehabilitated.
For anyone to consider that such a personal account of contemporary
China is less political is an illusion. There is no personal account
outside the political context, and ‘the personal can be political in a very
literal sense’ (Fitzgerald, 1999: 6). This is worth pointing out because
few actually realize that ‘all histories of China are partly autobiographical’
(Fitzgerald 1999: 8). They are ‘autobiographical’ not only in the
sense that writers such as Jung Chang and Nien Cheng write about
their lives from which histories emerge, but also in the sense that their
memoirs are artefacts which are the results of cultural exchange
between China and the West in such a way that foreign readers and
writers participate in making Chinese history.
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