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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
It is certainly not an accidental attribute that Jung Chang felt more
at home in the West (Chang 1991) and that Chai Ling and Li Lu, two
well-known Tian’anmen student protest leaders, are now respectively
a company executive and a stockbroker. 6 Those who became Christians
also include one of the writers of the He shang script, Yuan Zhiming,
who apparently has become a full-time preacher, and the active emedia
dissident Ren Bumei. For these Chinese expatriates their
identification with Western political and cultural values goes hand in
hand with their criticism of China’s past or present.
Many in the West are concerned that the CCP is too rigorous in
oppressing freedom in China and that China is still an enclosed society.
In other words, they are worried that China does not identify with the
West enough and believe that is why China cannot be modern (Hutton
2007). In fact they need not worry. It is not just the expatriate Chinese
in the West who want to identify with the West in their constructing of
contemporary Chinese history. The mainstream Chinese intellectuals
and professionals inside China have been trying to fulfil the same
historical task. Some of these engineers of intellectual discourse, such
as the whateverists examined above, may be considered to be on the
fringe of Chinese bureaucratic establishment, but there are also many
influential public figures who may be considered Americans in
thoughts. Below are just a number of examples.
The issue of whether the collapse of communism in Russia initiated
by Gorbachev and pushed through by Yeltsin was a success or failure
is controversial in China because either way it has implications for
interpreting China’s reform and for its future direction. It is in this
context that Ma Licheng and Lin Zhijun (1998) argued in their influential
book Jiaofeng (Frontal Engagement) that whoever argues against
the Russian reform is against the reform agenda in China.
Along similar line, Li Shenzhi, who served as Vice-President of the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the first President of the
Chinese Association of American Studies, and who is considered the
godfather of liberalism by many in China, asserted that Lenin was
responsible for discontinuing Russia’s process of modernization
(Yiming 2003), that Mao was a bandit, warlord and tyrant and that
China had to change, either through peaceful evolution or violent
revolution. Li also declared that if China wanted to modernize it had
to follow the United States and had to be prepared to be the grandson
of the United States (Zhang Deqin 2006). In case any reader fails to
appreciate what Li meant, it is worth pointing out that in the Chinese
cultural context, to be someone grandson is to submit to an authority
for wisdom and control.
Zhang Xianliang, a prominent novelist, argues that market capitalism
is the best and 10,000 years (not just three cheers) to private
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