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

CONSTRUCTING HISTORY
Enlai when he went to Wuhan to deal with the Wuhan situation. In fact
the Incident, which took place under Mao’s nose, was intended to give
him a warning, as the army officers knew he was in Wuhan at that time
(Xu 2005). Mao indeed took notice of the warning and the Cultural
Revolution radicals Wang Li and Guan Feng were dismissed not long
after the Incident.
Conclusion: discourse, narratives and memories
Just as there is reason to question the historiography approach taken
by the Confucian scholars, so there is no reason not to question
contemporary memoirs, biographies and autobiographies whose
approach is similar. Even in the Western context, where there is a
higher degree of scholarly scrutiny, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies
cannot be taken at face value. As the distinguished English
biographer Richard Holms says, ‘biography is essentially and by its
very origin disputable’ (Hacking 1995:238). That this is the case can be
demonstrated by a book in this genre that is widely known in the West,
Wild Swans by Jung Chang. In a fine study of Chang’s Wild Swans and
Yang’s Spider Eaters, Kong argues that Chang’s memoirs are ‘selfinvention’,
‘idealized self-justification’ (Kong Shuyu 1999:241), and
‘full of imaginative reconstruction of events, using hindsight to alter
her recollections’ (1999:246). Chang ‘has altered her story to suit the
wishes of hindsight and her market audience, and … her memory has
changed past events to make her behaviour seem more decisive and
less shameful’ (1999:247).
Throughout this book, I have consistently argued that how one
understands the Cultural Revolution depends on what theoretical
framework or approach one adopts. The discourse that was taken for
granted at the time of the Cultural Revolution can be judged very
differently when different approaches are employed. By this I mean the
logic, the rationale and language at the time when history was taking
place can either be judged on its own terms or on different terms. On
its own terms of the Cultural Revolution discourse, the Chinese people
and the Chinese leadership were rational beings like any other and had
a set of beliefs and perceptions to regulate their behaviour.
Now the dominant beliefs and perceptions are different and therefore
it is to be expected that writers of biographies, memoirs and
autobiographies use contemporary beliefs and perceptions to write
about past history. The term theoretical framework can be replaced by
another term, ‘interpretive category’, used by Hacking when he talks
about memory restructuring. Hacking argues that we have a tendency
to specify the past through actions that fall under a new interpretive
category, and to think of actions or incidents as ‘semantic contagion’. If
[ 63 ]