"With increasing social
unrest and popular outrage at the party-state’s corruption, it is
probably too early for the masses to relegate Mao’s call to rebel to
the dustbin of history. As a former Red Guard, now a successful
businessman in Beijing, remarked to the oral historian Sang Ye: “If you
ask me to look back on it from my present perspective, I don’t think it
was all that different from today. If a time comes when rebellion is
justified again, I might be too old to get involved, but believe you me
I’m going to encourage my son to get out there and fuck them over a
bit.”
==
Uncivil war
By Geremie R. Barme
Published: August 25 2006 15:00 | Last updated: August 25 2006 15:00
Mao’s Last Revolution
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press ₤22.95, 752 pages
On August 18 1966, Mao Zedong reviewed a mass gathering of zealous young people in Tiananmen Square. At the last moment, he donned a People’s Liberation Army uniform and, although it didn’t quite fit his bulky frame, it marked both to his audience of more than a million Red Guards and to his colleagues standing on the rostrum with him, that the old guerrilla leader was launching a new campaign. It would become a war of all against all, a civil conflict unlike any other that China had experienced.
In China, August 1966 is known as Red August - hong bayue. For the supporters of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, red symbolised revolution and the ardour for uncompromising and radical change. For them the slogan of the day was “rebellion is justified”. But for those who were the victims of the opening salvos of that political movement, the harrowing weeks of verbal abuse, ransacking and murder made it “bloody August”. It was but a prelude to the long years of confusion and devastation that were to follow.
Mao’s Last Revolution is the product of years of research and reflection by two prominent scholars of China’s communist-era politics, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. Both had close encounters with aspects of the Cultural Revolution - MacFarquhar travelled to China and early on offered prescient analysis of the politics of the day; Schoenhals studied at a late-Maoist university. Like other foreigners who experienced China then, as well as countless Chinese, they were engrossed by the events of those years. For decades they have both pursued their interest, following the gradual revelations of participants, ferreting out internal documents and personal accounts in an effort to make sense of what happened over many years of writing.
This book is a meticulous rendition of elite Chinese revolutionary politics. It supplements MacFarquhar’s voluminous studies of the origin of the Cultural Revolution, and like his other works the detailed depiction in this book is judicious and painstaking. It is an account that puts other recent works on Mao’s grand revolution in the shade - one thinks in particular of Jon Halliday and Jung Chang’s bestselling “maledictory” on Mao.
Mao’s Last Revolution will be essential for students of the denouement of the Chinese revolution. However, this tome is not for the general reader. And while the authors are savvy connoisseurs of power politics, their work provides scant insight into the broader world of high-Maoist China.
It is frustrating that the authors give so little weight to the underpinnings of Mao’s last revolution; nor do they help the reader gauge the origins or extent of pent-up mass fury. On the ground, beyond the corridors of power, there was great popular resentment towards the socialist state’s callous rule. The party’s arrogant elitism, its entrenched system of privilege and the yawning gap between its high-minded rhetoric and day-to-day reality, all fed into a frenzy that not only created “bloody August”, but also eventually saw the country awash in blood.
The authors have their eyes set on elite infighting, and they traverse their chosen battleground with a staunch gait. It is a dour journey they make, one only occasionally relieved by touches of (gallows) humour, although humour - black rather than red - is a common feature of Chinese accounts of this wretched era. So, for example, it is a relief to encounter the authors’ comment on the murderous antics of the opportunistic Wang Li: “But if Wang was trying to jump on the bandwagon, he found that he had landed on a tumbril instead.”
For insightful and elegant writing on the Cultural Revolution, however, the work of Simon Leys (pen name for Pierre Ryckmans), the Australian-based Belgian sinologist, has yet to be surpassed. It is therefore surprising that, while many other non-Chinese accounts (some quite dodgy) are quoted in Mao’s Last Revolution, the remarkable books by Leys such as The Chairman’s New Clothes (1971) and Chinese Shadows (1975) are ignored.
Mao’s Last Revolution ends with the authors expressing their magisterial hope that, at some unspecified time in the future, a democratic China will confront the full history of this period and the legacy of Mao Zedong. In today’s post-socialist China, however, it is already evident that the Chairman and his history are so intermeshed with that country’s identity that perhaps even democracy will fail to exorcise his shade.
With increasing social unrest and popular outrage at the party-state’s corruption, it is probably too early for the masses to relegate Mao’s call to rebel to the dustbin of history. As a former Red Guard, now a successful businessman in Beijing, remarked to the oral historian Sang Ye: “If you ask me to look back on it from my present perspective, I don’t think it was all that different from today. If a time comes when rebellion is justified again, I might be too old to get involved, but believe you me I’m going to encourage my son to get out there and fuck them over a bit.”
Geremie R. Barme, a historian at the Australian National University, Canberra, co-wrote and co-directed “Morning Sun”, a documentary on the Cultural Revolution.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Comments