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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Chinese Personalities), under the editorship of Deng Liqun, Ma Hong
and Wu Heng (1991), the biographies of the ten marshals edited by Li
Yong (1993), and Anecdotes of and Meaningful Remarks by Well-Known
Cultural Figures: A Series (Yu Qing, 1994). Another series started since
1987 is the memoirs of the generals of the PLA, organized and
published by the official army publisher in Beijing. These party and
army officials usually have a special writing team with special funding
from the government. When Peng Zhen wrote his memoirs he had a
team of 40 to work for him (Xing Xiaoqun 2006). According to He Fang
(2005), who has researched the memoirs of CCP personalities for his
two-volume history of the CCP, very few memoirs can stand up to
documentary examination, and many of those who write do so not
only to glorify themselves but also to settle scores.
The ‘Grand Historian’ Sima Qian was supposed to have set up a
paradigm for Chinese historiography which depicts personality
vividly and provides realistic biographical accounts. However,
modern Chinese historiography is full of examples of depicting
personalities as caricatures, like Peking opera characters. Even Yan
Jiaqi (Gao and Yan 1988), who considers himself a serious political
scientist, now in exile, could not avoid this tendency in his portrayal,
for instance, of Jiang Qing. 3
Memoirs by veteran party leaders
Not surprisingly, most of the memoirs and biographies include something
about the Cultural Revolution. However, while writers like Ye
and Quan concentrate on personal lives to avoid political topics, social
themes or taboo areas of the Cultural Revolution, some sensitive
personalities themselves may avoid the subject of the Cultural Revolution
altogether when writing memoirs. Thus, Bo Yibo (1989, 1991 and
1993), Hu Qiaomu (1994), Shi Zhe (1991) and Li Weihan (1986) all stop
short of writing about the Cultural Revolution. Hu Qiaomu, who was
often referred to as ‘the pen of the Party’, confessed that events beyond
the 1950s were ‘too complex’ to write about. 4 Bo Yibo, on the other
hand, only promised follow-up volumes. Wu Lengxi (1995), the chief
editor of the People’s Daily from 1957 to 1966, on the other hand, only
talks in general terms in three pages about his dismissal during the
Cultural Revolution and the conspiracy by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing.
Deng Xiaoping’s daughter Deng Maomao, in her two volumes remembering
her father that were published with a great fanfare in the West,
does indeed devote the second volume to the Cultural Revolution
years (Deng 2000). However, a lot about the Cultural Revolution was
brushed aside, and in these memoirs she hardly says anything about
her father’s role in casting hundred of thousands innocent Chinese into
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