Acerca del autor

Joseph W. Esherick holds the Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies and is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Paul G. Pickowicz is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Andrew G. Walder is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and Director of the Asia-Pacific Research Center.

De la contraportada

De la solapa interior

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................................ix1 The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History: An Introduction Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, Andrew G. Walder.............................12 Passion, Reflection, and Survival: Political Choices of Red Guards at Qinghua University, June 1966 July 1968 Xiaowei Zheng.....................293 To Protect and Preserve: Resisting the Destroy the Four Olds Campaign, 1966-1967 Dahpon David Ho................................................644 Mass Killings in the Cultural Revolution: A Study of Three Provinces Yang Su....................................................................965 The Death of a Landlord: Moral Predicament in Rural China, 1968-1969 Jiangsui He................................................................1246 Staging Xiaojinzhuang: The City in the Countryside, 1974-1976 Jeremy Brown......................................................................537 Labor Created Humanity: Cultural Revolution Science on Its Own Terms Sigrid Schmalzer...........................................................1858 To Be Somebody: Li Qinglin, Run-of-the-Mill Cultural Revolution Showstopper Elya J. Zhang.......................................................2119 The Sublime and the Profane: A Comparative Analysis of Two Fictional Narratives about Sent-down Youth Liyan Qin.................................240Contributors.......................................................................................................................................267Character List.....................................................................................................................................271Notes..............................................................................................................................................279Selected Bibliography..............................................................................................................................351Index..............................................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, Andrew G. Walder

The Cultural Revolution had a riveting impact on the fledgling field of contemporary China studies. When the red guards first made their appearance, research on the People's Republic was still in its infancy. Early studies of its polity, economy, and society described the organizations put in place near the end of the 1950s to mobilize the population for political campaigns and rapid economic growth. They also emphasized the distinctive ideology that shaped these organizations and the regime's efforts to indoctrinate the population and conduct ambitious political and economic campaigns. Divisions among the elite were already evident, and were expressed in several purges and campaigns against intellectuals. The operational codes of party and government bureaucracies-which struggled to balance the tension between political loyalty and professional expertise-were just becoming clear.

Yet shortly after these distinctive institutions were established, they were torn apart in the unprecedented upheavals that began in June 1966. The nation was rent by waves of civil strife that lasted more than two years, followed by harsh military repression and campaigns of political persecution that accelerated in intensity until they began to wane in the early 1970s. China remained unsettled politically in the immediate aftermath. Continued jockeying among elite factions coincided with frequent strikes and protest movements in the period prior to Mao's death in September 1976, and aftershocks reverberated into the early 1980s.

The effect on China scholarship was immediate. Franz Schurmann's monumental study of the regime's systems of internal communication and control, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, appeared in 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution began. He immediately amended his influential synthesis in an expanded edition two years later. His lengthy "Supplement" to the new edition began with a self-criticism, and is worth quoting at length:

The forces of Chinese society are equally as important as those coming from the structure of state power. I do not believe that this indicates a resurgence of the old social system, but rather that Chins major social classes (workers, peasants, and intellectuals) exert great pressure on the ideology and organization which direct that country. If revolution makes ideology and organization necessary to refashion society, the passage of time leads to a resurrection of the forces of society.... If I were to give the book a new title today, I would call it Ideology Organization, and Society in China. The original title testifies to the weight I assigned ideology and organization, and to China's Communist character. However, due weight must now be given to the resurgence of the forces of Chinese society.'

Michel Oksenberg concurred with this assessment and articulated a research agenda that guided much of the next fifteen years of social science scholarship on contemporary China, most of which focused on the decade after 1966.

The Cultural Revolution provided a remarkable opportunity to view the structure of Chinese society in the 1960s. Prior to 1965, that view was obscured by the carefully nurtured image of a monolithic society led by a unified, cohesive elite. In 1966-67, the image was destroyed, revealing that the rulers were deeply divided and locked in bitter struggle. As the rulers lost their ability to provide unified, coherent guidelines to the nation, the various segments of society became more able to pursue their own interests. As a result, the Cultural Revolution made it possible to analyze the concerns of the major groups in society and their relative abilities to achieve their interests.

This new emphasis was already evident in Ezra Vogel's Canton under Communism, an account of the new regime's efforts to consolidate political control and reorganize the society and economy of Guangdong: the book culminated in a chapter on the Cultural Revolution that interpreted the upheaval in precisely these terms.

While few doubted the sharp divergence of China under Mao from the patterns of Soviet Communism, students of the Soviet bloc were already critical of scholarship that emphasized regime ideology and mechanisms of political control. Independently of events in China-and before the Cultural Revolution-they called for attention to the conflict and pluralism behind the faade of totalitarian conformity. Without dramatic material of the kind provided by the Cultural Revolution, however, students of the Soviet bloc could fully pursue this agenda only in studies of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, or periodic upheavals in Poland. Among students of China, the Cultural Revolution bred a more intense engagement with the organization of society and the political forces that sprang from it.

Work inspired by this agenda continued to appear well into the 1980s. Scholarship about China during the Mao era was notable for its emphasis on the structure of society and what would later be termed state-society relations. Students of political participation examined the ways in which individuals and groups could pursue their interests within the evident constraints of political institutions. Students of political institutions looked closely for evidence of bargaining among bureaucratic interests and mass constituencies, both in the process of policy making and policy implementation. Students of the educational system and the occupational structure examined the career incentives that drove individuals into patterns of cooperation with or withdrawal from regime-sponsored political activity. Students of grassroots politics and economic institutions explored the ways that state institutions bred social networks and personal loyalties that served to extend the power of the state while at the same time blunting or diverting it. Others looked more closely at earlier periods of the People's Republic for evidence of collective protest of the variety that was so evident in the late 1960s. The result was a specialized scholarly literature that looked remarkably unlike anything connected with the term totalitarianism.

Although these studies were decisively shaped by the Cultural Revolution, they did not deal directly with the Cultural Revolution itself. This became a thriving sub-topic that focused particularly on the upheavals of 1966-68, and especially on the most visible protagonists: student red guards, worker rebels, and the mass organizations engaged in factional struggles. A major theme of this work-which appeared with greatest frequency from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s-was that the political struggles of the late 1960s expressed the conflicting interests of identifiable groups in Chinese society. Schurmann himself signaled this new emphasis on the importance of social forces when he spoke of the red guards: "in the Cultural Revolution, I believe that, no matter how much the students were guided from above, they basically expressed forces deriving from their own social class." Gordon White elaborated the idea in his lengthy analysis of a red guard tabloid that created controversy by taking aim at the political class labels employed by the regime and the hierarchy of status and privilege that they created. Hong Yung Lee found that the class background of students shaped their factional affiliation in the political struggles of the late 1960s, and Chan, Rosen, and Unger further elaborated the argument while taking issue with some of the specifics of Lee's formulations. This work inspired detailed studies of the structure of the educational system and the pattern of educational attainment, and in particular the system of class labels and its impact on education, student strategies, and careers.

Hong Yung Lee synthesized the underlying conception that united work in this vein: the Cultural Revolution created an opportunity for social groups to pursue their interests, and the conflicts expressed social differences that had emerged under Communist Party rule. Lee's work was firmly in the tradition of interest group politics: elite factions representing radical versus conservative tendencies made common cause with mass groups whose interests were aligned with elites seeking either to transform or preserve the status quo. Mass factionalism therefore expressed a struggle between the "haves" and "have nots": conservative factions were drawn from those close to the regime or who had benefited the most from its policies, and radical factions were drawn from those alienated from the regime or relegated to subordinate or disadvantaged positions within it. The significance of the Cultural Revolution was that it provided a window of opportunity for these underlying tensions to surface, and the conflicting interests to be expressed-even though the pursuit of group interests was masked in a political rhetoric that sought to justify private ends in the language of political ideals.

This agenda was pursued enthusiastically throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The Cultural Revolution proved a rich source of material on disadvantaged groups that briefly mobilized to redress their grievances: demobilized soldiers who had been shipped to remote state farms instead of receiving the urban job assignments they had expected; urban youth who had been part of the first wave sent down to the countryside in the early 1960s; and contract and temporary workers who were excluded from the pay and benefits enjoyed by those permanently attached to urban work units. Intellectual life was portrayed as a continuing contest between critical voices with patrons in the top leadership and establishment intellectuals with different patrons who encouraged their attacks on the critics. This was a portrayal of a China seething with social divisions and conflicts, with citizens eager to seize available opportunities to express their interests, mobilize to advance or protect them and, if necessary, do battle with their opponents. In order to penetrate to this underlying reality, one had only to look beneath a rather fragile faade of political rhetoric and totalitarian control.

In hindsight, there are two striking features of this first wave of scholarship on the Cultural Revolution. The first is how firmly "society-centered" it was, and its sensitivity to the ways in which Chinese citizens at all levels consciously pursued their interests and participated willingly in the conflicts of the period. These conflicts were used as a window through which one could "read backwards" to the structure of the underlying society and its hidden tensions.

The second is how remarkably thin the evidence was for these interpretations. One has to admire the ingenuity with which authors reconstructed patterns of inequality and conflict from a relatively small number of interviews with migrs, and from scattered copies of red guard tabloids, critical wall posters and pamphlets, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and rare issues of local newspapers. All of this work proceeded without the benefit of the kinds of sources that scholars take for granted today: direct local interviews and oral histories with key participants; extensive collections of tabloids, pamphlets, speeches, and wall posters; published local histories, reference works, and official compendia of social statistics; and even survey research with retrospective questions.

Events in China after Mao soon pushed the study of the Cultural Revolution off center stage. For more than a decade it was the most topical of subjects, highly relevant to questions about the nation's current condition and future prospects. But after Mao's death Chinds unfolding transformation redirected the attention of the field: first to the tumultuous events from the Democracy Wall movement of 1978 to Tiananmen Square in 1989, and then to the accelerating economic and social transformation of China into the present century.

New Trends in Cultural Revolution Research

In the decades since the initial heyday of Cultural Revolution scholarship, the landscape for research on the subject has shifted dramatically, largely due to changes in China. Taken together, five trends have laid the foundation for a vigorous new scholarship on the Cultural Revolution that inevitably will look very different from the research of the first generation. First, there has been a steady increase in the documentation relevant to the activities of the elite in central and local bureaucracies: publications of entire series of formerly internal documents, organizational histories, diaries and chronologies of important officials, transcripts of their speeches and of meetings, and related reference works, diaries, and biographies. It is now possible to bring the political elite-and its extensive and intensive connections to grassroots organizations and individuals-back into the picture in a way that was never before possible. The regime-centered agenda of pre-Cultural Revolution scholarship can be pursued much more successfully than ever before, while synthesizing insights from this with the later society-centered perspectives. Second, there has been a steady cumulative increase in the availability of all the highly prized and once-scarce unofficial sources of information-"red guard materials" and accounts by ordinary participants-that were the staple of the first generation of research. The quantity of available documentation of this type has increased by several orders of magnitude. The third trend is the outpouring of revelations that began in the late 1970s and continued well into the 1990s about violence, torture, and murder. The victims, whose experiences were remarkably obscured in the first wave of research, have been forced back into the center of our attention, requiring extensive changes in our understanding of the politics of the Cultural Revolution and its social impact. Fourth, thousands of official histories and chronologies of provinces, cities, counties, districts, and universities have been published since the mid-1980s, and many of these cover in some detail the events of 1966-76. And last, but not least, a significant Chinese-language scholarship on the Cultural Revolution has appeared in recent years in the form of research articles, academic monographs, and reference works.

DOCUMENTATION OF ELITE ACTIVITIES AND BUREAUCRATIC OPERATIONS

Although the Cultural Revolution provided students of contemporary China with their first insights into the structure of society and its underlying social tensions, it also provided researchers interested primarily in the organization of the regime and its internal politics with an unprecedented view of this subject. Red guards and rebels dug deeply into official archives and published accounts of past debates and policy disputes designed to illustrate the perfidy of those being purged as capitalist roaders. These materials were the staple of the scholarly literature on regime-level politics for much of the next decade.

One of the unfortunate yet unavoidable features of scholarship on contemporary China is the relentless demand for a present-centered kind of "relevance": the need to understand where China is today and where it will likely go in the future. China has changed so rapidly that events even a few decades old soon appear irrelevant to the present. Leadership splits and maneuverings in the late Mao period seemed increasingly arcane in a rapidly unfolding political scene under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, with most of the principals long since imprisoned or dead. The subject seemed even more remote in the post-Deng, post-Jiang era.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.