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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
only ambition and pleasure was to frame the good and the honest. For
a long time and with the exception of few writers such as Guan
Weixun, Wen Feng and Zhang Zhenglong, Lin Biao was depicted as a
liangmianpai (double-faced cheat). Lin Biao said all the good words that
could have been said in public and did all the wicked deeds that could
have been done behind the scenes (haohua shuojing, huaishi zuo jue). 18
It is true that Lin praised Mao with extreme flattery but not
subservient language (Teiwes and Sun 1996), but Lin was also one of the
very few people who dared to confront Mao and did so on several occasions.
For instance, during the Long March soon after the Zunyi Conference,
Lin Biao wrote a letter demanding that Mao give the command of
the army to Peng Dehuai because Lin thought Mao had made the Red
Army soldiers move forwards and backwards without any apparent
strategy. On the May Day parade in 1971, Lin broke away from the usual
protocol of arriving earlier at the Tian’anmen Rostrum to meet Mao.
Instead he kept Mao waiting by arriving late. Then he left earlier, deliberately
without saying anything to Mao. On the other hand, Lin Biao
was never reported to have attacked Mao behind Mao’s back.
In these Chinese writings, the politics was played out as court
intrigue. The narrative is a copy of the classic Chinese novel of Romance
of the Three Kingdoms, only the three kingdoms are not states but three
CCP leadership compounds: Zhongnanhai (where Mao and Zhou
lived and worked), Maojiawan (where Lin Biao lived) and Diaoyutai
(where Jiang Qing and the Cultural Revolution Small Group worked).
By the same token, the question of policies and ideas is irrelevant. The
19 years of PRC history from 1957 to 1976 are seen simply as a succession
of Mao’s consistent errors, stupidity and fantasies, which were
made use of by the evil people surrounding him, but luckily resisted
and corrected by the wise, the educated – the best people in Chinese
society – who were later vindicated.
The big picture of China in the international environment of the
cold war is ignored. The issue of alternative models for modernizing
China is never considered. A whole range of social and political issues
in such a complex society is irrelevant. The affirmative policy towards
women in society is now forgotten. 19 The attempt to reform the educational
system (Pepper 1996) was interpreted as simply intended to
destroy China’s education. The policies to narrow the gap between
mental and manual labour, between the urban and the rural, and
between industry and agriculture were anti-intellectual and antihuman.
The experiment to reform literature and art, notably in the
Peking opera (Dao 1994), so as to reverse a thousand years of practice
of writing about and writing for the elite is seen simply as a plot to
make everyone ignorant, and is depicted in black and white terms as
cultural obscurantism.
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