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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
West. Quan’s account is insightful because it reveals the role of other
players. Moreover, it reveals, from a bodyguard’s point of view, the
consequences of breaching the accepted norms and values of maintaining
unity at least on the surface, and of respecting hierarchy in
Chinese political culture.
There are other valuable insights and information found in these
memoirs and biographies. For instance, Wu Lengxi’s memoirs clearly
show that the theory of revisionism and continuous revolution articulated
in the Nine Commentaries on the Soviet Union’s Revisionism of
Marxism-Leninism was not an excuse for power struggle but a result of
serious ideological consideration in the context of what was happening
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Wu De’s oral history account
(2004) shows that for Mao at that time there was a genuine fear of a
revisionist coup, though clearly from hindsight there was not even an
attempt at one. According to Wu De, General Ye Jianying had shuffled
the Beijing garrison, ordered two divisions of the field army to Beijing
under instructions from Mao and Lin Biao. It was only after the general
had taken control of the public security in the capital in May 1966 that
Mao felt it was safe for him to return to it.
Wu De (2004) also reveals that Mao actually advised Li Xuefeng,
the new boss of Beijing after the downfall of the former Mayor Peng
Zhen, to go to Inner Mongolia or Tianjin to escape the heat of the
mass movement as the Cultural Revolution unfolded. Clearly, Mao
wanted to protect the party officials, or at least some of them, but at
the same time he wanted them exposed and criticized by the masses.
This is also shown by Mao’s talk about Jian Bozan, the well-known
historian of Beijing University. Mao said that Jian wrote so many
books that we could not criticize him since we had not read them. We
had better let the students who read him do the criticism, Mao said.
Mao applied the same mass line with the issue of education reform.
He said that as we did not know the profession we had to rely on the
masses, that is, the students and teachers to carry out the reforms;
hence the rationale for closing down schools before the students had
a say on education reform.
Some of the memoirs, biographies and autobiographies by army
officers reveal that though they never wanted to question their loyalty
to Mao they passively resisted and actively undermined some of the
Cultural Revolution efforts. For instance, some army officers recalled
how they did not like Jiang Qing or Yao Wenyuan’s instruction to criticize
Deng Xiaoping (Xiao Ke 1997, Wang Ping 1992, Li Zhimin 1993
and Yang Qian and Zhang Zuoguang 1987). According to Xu Hailiang’s
recent interview study, in the Wuhan Incident of 1967 the army
officers of the local garrison not only kidnapped the Cultural Revolution
radicals Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi but also directly challenged Zhou
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