Title: Chinese Society amid Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: The Roots and Nature of the Tragedy
Abstract: Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 432 pp. £22.50.Editor's Introduction: Frank Dikötter's landmark three-volume history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the era of Mao Zedong is a compendium of self-inflicted catastrophes. Tens of millions of Chinese died of starvation during the famines produced by Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s; vast numbers of others had already been killed during the rampantly violent consolidation of Mao's Communist regime in the early to mid-1950s; and nearly all of Chinese society was swept up in the systematic cruelty of Mao's Cultural Revolution. This forum deals with the last of these three periods, as recounted in the final volume of Dikötter's trilogy, The Cultural Revolution; A People's History, published on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution. An earlier forum on China's Cultural Revolution appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the journal, with five commentaries about Mao's Last Revolution, a sweeping political overview published by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals as a sequel to MacFarquhar's monumental three-volume survey, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Dikötter's The Cultural Revolution covers some of the same ground but adds a great deal about the disastrous impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese society, drawing on a remarkable panoply of archival holdings.When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the PRC was bitterly at odds with both the United States and the Soviet Union. The growing enmity between Beijing and Moscow gave rise to deadly armed clashes between Chinese and Soviet military forces along the two countries’ shared border in March and August 1969. Those confrontations were one of the factors that spurred Mao to seek a rapprochement with the United States, helping to offset the Soviet military threat. The U.S.-China rapprochement became a reality after Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon visited the PRC in 1971 and 1972 respectively. Even as the Cultural Revolution dragged on until Mao's death (albeit with less chaotic violence than in 1966–1967), China was fundamentally reorienting its strategy in the Cold War.We asked three experts—Sergey Radchenko, Joseph Torigian, and Radoslav Yordanov—to offer their appraisals of Dikötter's third volume. Their commentaries are published here along with a reply by Dikötter.— Mark KramerThe much‐awaited final volume of Frank Dikötter's trilogy on the history of Mao Zedong's China is not for the faint of heart. The first volume in the trilogy (Mao's Great Famine) was horrifying, and the second volume (The Tragedy of Liberation) showed that the catastrophe of the Great Leap had deeper roots than many had thought.1 Executions, torture, starvation, cannibalism, and … numbers, numbers, numbers: millions of lives falling into the dark chasm of non-being in a meaningless succession of shrieks. Even before I picked up the third volume I expected to be horrified again by the sheer cruelty of Mao's regime. Sure enough, beatings, rapes, torture, and murders are all there. But the systematic monstrosity that animated the earlier years of the Maoist experiment is not. Instead, the reader beholds a chaotic stage—a war of all against all, a bizarre, partly orchestrated, partly spontaneous rebellion that left the hierarchies of power in deep paralysis, a baffling spectacle that turned the whole society upside down, leading in the long run to anything but what Mao had expected when he issued his famous call to “bombard the headquarters.”What did Mao expect, and why did he unleash the chaos? Many a historian of the Cultural Revolution has tried to answer these questions, and so does Dikötter. There are no great surprises here. We learn that Mao wanted to “retain his position at the center” (p. 14). But why, in this case, did he not wrap up his revolution in late 1966 or early 1967, when his opponents, real and imagined, were already sidelined? Also, Mao evidently wanted to “shore up his own standing in world history” (p. x). But if so, why did he choose such a strange way of going about it—effectively destroying his own party? The book delves into these questions only superficially, probably by design. To the extent that Dikötter tries to unwrap the sordid mysteries of Mao's court, he shows that many of the early victims of the Cultural Revolution, including Liu Shaoqi, Wang Guangmei, and Deng Xiaoping, had viciously hounded others before being hounded themselves. There were no good guys, no martyrs unjustly prosecuted: just the stench of hypocrisy and back‐stabbing.For the most part, though, Dikötter is content with leaving the realm of high politics in deliberate vagueness. He is more interested in the grassroots; this is, after all, a “People's History.” We learn about the world as it looked from the window of a crowded train, bringing thousands of unwashed, hungry, but enthusiastic Red Guards to Beijing to worship Mao. We learn about the ransacking of homes, the thriving trade in Mao badges, the secret reading and hand‐copying of pornographic novels. In short, we learn about ordinary people living in ordinary places during extraordinary times. The perspective is refreshing, though not unfamiliar to connoisseurs of Cultural Revolution memoirs, some of which inform Dikötter's narrative. He also relies on his tried and tested method of extracting exciting stories and troubling statistics from the local archives across China, giving readers a seldom seen bottom‐up perspective.So, what is the big story? Two very important points that appear toward the end of the book underscore the magnitude of Dikötter's contribution to the literature. The first is that even at the height of absurd ideological campaigns there existed something he calls “the second society”: largely hidden from view but nonetheless evident in illicit transactions on the thriving black market, in the privacy of homes, among friends. People were living double lives: those same people who worshipped Mao in loyalty dances and memorized quotations from the Little Red Book secretly prayed to forbidden gods, listened to forbidden music, read forbidden books, and played forbidden games. “The Cultural Revolution,” Dikötter argues, “ran no more than skin deep” (p. 300). This helps explain why old China proved so resilient and sprang back to life after the Cultural Revolution. It never was extinguished, not by executions, not by hunger, not by endless brainwashing.The second point is that the Chinese people themselves buried the Maoist project by silent non‐compliance. It was the people who quietly redistributed the land that had been collectivized in brutal campaigns. It was the people who innocuously subverted the revolution by trading and bartering. “Real change,” Dikötter shows, “was driven from below.” Deng Xiaoping succeeded only insofar as he had “neither the will nor the ability to fight the trend” (p. 321). There is certainly something to this interpretation, though often the path of least resistance was precisely in defending the status quo. Perhaps Deng deserves greater credit for pushing aside the bureaucracy. Dikötter's own argument suggests that for every Bohemian slacker there was a committed revolutionary, and some managed to be both. But this is a part of a different story.As I turned the last page, I found myself wondering whether the big big question was left hanging. That question is: what, really, was the Cultural Revolution? Yes, Mao, yes power struggle, yes, mob violence, yes, brutality and misery, but there was something else. This was the only time in the PRC's tumultuous history (with the exception of the brief and tragic episode of 1989) when the ruling Communist Party's legitimacy was under serious threat. The fact that it was Mao who stoked the fire does not diminish the fact that the fire was fed by pent‐up grievances and frustrations at the grassroots. The Cultural Revolution undermined the existing hierarchies of power. To borrow Dikötter's final sentence, it “queried the monopoly of the one‐party state.” When students assembled in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, calling for democracy, the Chinese leaders feared a repetition of the Cultural Revolution. They had seen it all before. They ordered tanks to crush the unarmed protesters before the whole country was in flames. The headquarters, so relentlessly bombarded at Mao's behest 23 years earlier, stayed intact this time.The events of 1966 were of course very different from those of 1989. But perhaps there is still a connection between the two, one that points in the direction of the complex interactions between Chinese society and Chinese elites. These interactions hold lessons for the present not just in China but in much of the world.Frank Dikötter's The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962–1976, provides an accessible, eloquent, and brutal laundry list of the physical and emotional devastation suffered by ordinary Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. A powerful distillation of different types of material, the book is a searing and timely indictment of a period that in China remains politically sensitive and exceptionally difficult to research. Some may criticize the book for its relentlessly negative appraisal of a deeply complicated set of events and its lack of theory, but these problems are far from fatal. Dikötter's treatment of elite politics is sometimes questionable, but the book overall is a powerful chronicle of suffering.Like the first two books in Dikötter's trilogy—the first dealing with the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward and the second going back to the violence of the 1945–1957 period—A People's History draws not only on secondary material but on an extremely impressive collection of untapped archival collections to strengthen previous conclusions and introduce important new dimensions to the study of the Cultural Revolution.2 In addition, Dikötter skillfully incorporates material from self-published autobiographies and interviews.Dikötter uses this material most effectively to describe the experiences of ordinary people, who he believes “are often missing (p. xvii)” in the secondary literature. Space does not allow a full list of the fascinating new information he has uncovered in the archives, but some tidbits are especially juicy: an explosion of speculation and private entrepreneurship, including opium dens in Zunyi in the wake of the Great Leap Forward (p. 19); the discovery during the Socialist Education Movement of foreign magazines, anti-Communist publications, pro-American slogans, Confucian classics, religious revivals, bride purchasing, and students praising the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (pp. 30–32); the destruction of elements of Shanghai's cultural heritage, including thousands of books from the Jesuit Zikawei Library, the city's oldest temple, and all tombstones of foreigners (pp. 84–85); bizarre attacks on flower gardens and cats (p. 86); the shocking economic effects of the mass production of the Little Red Book and Mao badges (pp. 98–100); rampant crime and mob justice (pp. 147–148); new details on the hunger, diseases, persecution, and sexual abuse suffered by “sent-down youth” in the villages (pp. 197–200); the defeatist or “anti-CCP” attitudes of some individuals during the military confrontations with the USSR in 1969 (p. 211); the mass expansion of markets outside the state plan in the countryside as a result of the chaos wrought by the Cultural Revolution (pp. 224–225); and the shameful persistence of starvation and abject poverty in the countryside (pp. 263–264).Dikötter also debunks two alleged triumphs of the Cultural Revolution: hygiene and education. He refers to new research by Fan Ka Wai showing that traveling Red Guards contributed to a meningitis outbreak that killed 160,000, as well as other secondary material that, in Dikötter's words, shows that the “barefoot doctors” project was a sham (pp. 267–269).3 His own research revealed that in one city “so many doctors were arrested that the main hospital was almost forced to close down” (p. 238). With regard to education, Dikötter draws on a State Council document from the Shanghai Municipal Archive that indicates “by 1978, as a result of the Cultural Revolution, the rate of illiteracy or semi-literacy reached 30–40 per cent among children and adolescents in China. In parts of the country it was more than 50 per cent” (p. 288).Dikötter's book does a terrific job of meeting what Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder have deemed the “most obvious need” for historians studying the Cultural Revolution—“to address more directly the human cost of the period.” A People's History easily makes the case that for many people the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare. Although much material in China remains inaccessible, what Dikötter was able to collect through an admirable application of imagination and elbow grease, despite his status as a foreigner, suggests the possibility in the future of finding even greater horror. In fact, the content of the book strongly suggests that greater openness of the archives will not happen anytime soon, even if, legally, Cultural Revolution documents should be already available.According to the Archives Law of the People's Republic of China, “Archives kept by State Archives repositories shall in general be open to the public 30 years after the date of their creation,” but archives “involving the security or vital interests of the State” can be withheld longer, even indefinitely.4 The importance of this exception is particularly obvious when considered together with the Communist Party's increasingly strident identification of “revisionist” history as a threat to the regime itself. Chinese President Xi Jinping has referred to “de-Stalinization” as a central reason for the USSR's collapse, citing a nineteenth-century poet who argued that “In extinguishing the kingdom of men, the first step is to remove its history.”5 To be fair, Peking University professor Liang Zhu's definition of “historical nihilism” as “rejecting the [Communist] revolution; claiming that the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party resulted only in destruction; denying the historical inevitability in China's choice of the socialist road; calling it the wrong path; and [arguing that] the history of the Party and New China is a continuous series of mistakes” could just as easily be applied to Dikötter's own wok on this trilogy.6These developments mean the “depoliticization” of Maoist history in the years before Xi came to power, which some scholars believe helped create conditions for path-breaking archival work, now shows signs of reversing.7 Unsurprisingly, “the chatter on H-PRC, across the Twittersphere, and at academic conferences paints a grim picture of doing archival research in China.”8 As Roderick MacFarquhar has remarked, for whatever reason, Beijing has decided not to contextualize history by making a “look how far we've come” argument or by drawing a curtain between the Mao era and the reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Until such a fundamental change occurs, Beijing's flexibility on archives will probably remain limited. In the meantime, scholarship that refuses to give up, like Dikötter's new book, is extremely important.Some of the most tantalizing details Dikötter's book reveals are about the regime's failures to penetrate urban and, especially, rural society, as well as signs of dissatisfaction with the regime that at least sometimes sparked outright resistance. In this regard, Dikötter's book has strong similarities with another major new contribution, Maoism at the Grassroots, by Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson.9 Both books further substantiate earlier work by social scientists who, in the words of Brown and Johnson, concluded “state control was not always total or centralized but at times appeared limited and tenuous.”10 The impressive sources in books like A People's History and Maoism at the Grassroots suggest it may be possible to draw new, albeit tentative, conclusions about the nature of the Chinese regime instead of simply complicating the narrative. Unfortunately, as Elizabeth Perry has argued, it is unclear whether historians will choose to ask such big questions.11Although A People's History and Maoism at the Grassroots are both part of a trend that not only describes the everyday experience of ordinary people but also emphasizes their stubbornness and agency, Dikötter's book stands out for its almost uniformly bleak message. Its title and content suggest an intellectual debt to Howard Zinn's controversial polemic about U.S. history.12 After reading Dikötter's trilogy, some may wonder how such an apparently unambiguous disaster could leave such a legacy of ambiguous feelings among many Chinese. This is a legitimate point but is perhaps mitigated by three factors. First, Dikötter's latest book is not marked by especially aggressive language. The tone, as the writer Ian Johnson notes in his own review of the book, differs from that of the first two volumes of Dikötter's trilogy, and the use of this more measured language enhances the book's power.13 Second, unlike many books (including Zinn's) that attempt to tarnish historical figures or events, Dikötter does not simply offer the most tendentious interpretations of weak secondary source material. Instead, his book is scrupulously footnoted and researched (except with regard to some matters related to high-level politics, as discussed below). Third, as a horrifying chronology of undeniable abuses, Dikötter's book can and should play a central role in challenging nostalgic or propagandistic accounts of an extraordinarily grim period in China's history. Especially after recent incidents like the moves against China's only museum dedicated to the Cultural Revolution, the crackdown on the liberal history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, and even a Maoist-style concert held at the Great Hall of the People by the teenage group 56 Flowers, it is a good time to remember that the Cultural Revolution truly was a disaster caused by Mao—a conclusion, one should not forget, that was also reached by Deng Xiaoping and enshrined in an official decision on history in 1981.14Although Dikötter's primary concern is with the experiences of the “people,” some may criticize the book for lacking a new big argument. Like Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals in their Mao's Last Revolution, Dikötter concludes that Mao's thinking about class struggle and his desire to purge other members of the elite were key causes of the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on existing secondary literature, but at the same time making highly significant further contributions with new details from the archives, Dikötter shows how social tensions created by previous CCP policies helped set the stage for the Cultural Revolution, as well as how the extreme radicalism of post 1949 Chinese political history contributed to pressure from below for major change even before Mao's death.15 Readers in search of a rigorous social scientific explanation for the Cultural Revolution might seek out Andrew Walder's recent book.16 However, writing such a book was not Dikötter's intention; he instead wanted the book to be accessible to general readers, and the Walder and Dikötter books complement each other well because of their respective strengths. Dikötter's book is the business end of a failed revolution.Although Dikötter accurately identifies many of the dynamics shaping elite politics during the Cultural Revolution, in some cases he apparently has not quite kept up with the latest findings. Or at least he does not adequately convey that some of his conclusions are not supported by other important scholars. In a popular book no one would expect a conclusive resolution of historiographical debates on each and every important question, and perhaps Dikötter has read some of the new literature and decided he does not support the conclusions. As I see it, however, his positions on some issues need to be further refined.Dikötter concludes that “Mao felt personally threatened by deStalinization” (p. x) and that “In 1956, some of the Chairman's closest allies had used Khrushchev's secret speech to delete all references to Mao Zedong Thought from the constitution and criticize the cult of personality. Mao was seething, yet had little choice but to acquiesce” (p. xii). However, the respected Chinese historian Lin Yunhui has argued that the decision to exclude Mao Zedong Thought in the party charter (not the constitution, as Dikötter writes) at the 8th Party Congress was unrelated to the influence of Khrushchev's secret speech and denies that Mao's political position was weakening. Even before Iosif Stalin's death, Mao had already suggested no longer using the phrase “Mao Zedong Thought.” The party understood the removal of the phrase from the party charter in 1956 as a sign of respect for previous great Marxist scholars. Moreover, Mao's cult was not criticized—Deng Xiaoping explicitly stated at the 8th Party Congress that the CCP never had a problem with a cult of personality.17 Dikötter also dates Khrushchev's announcement of peaceful coexistence to two years after Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Soviet Party Congress (p. x). However, this idea was stressed with great fanfare at the same congress (although it also had appeared even prior to Khrushchev's coming to power in statements by Georgii Malenkov).Dikötter's contention that the 20th Soviet Party Congress had an immediate impact on Mao's thinking toward Moscow is also problematic. Dikötter's position, which is shared by Lorenz Lüthi, has been challenged in recent years by scholars such as Austin Jersild, Shen Zhihua, and Xia Yafeng, who maintain that the 20th Party Congress had no immediate effect on Sino-Soviet relations.18 At the time, Mao did not yet oppose peaceful coexistence, and the evidence “seems to indicate that he was not worried that de-Stalinization might have serious consequences for Chinese society. He even consented and appreciated this.”19 Despite this reservation on timing, most scholars, including me, do believe that Khrushchev's speech and de-Stalinization did eventually have an important impact on Mao, but only when he looked back on it years later.Dikötter subscribes to the view that Mao's position was weakened by the Great Leap Forward and concludes that “Mao was hardly paranoid in believing that many of his colleagues wanted him to step down” (p. xii). However, the “weak Mao” thesis has been debunked by many important scholars.20 Almost no evidence suggests that Mao's ultimate authority was ever in question. Lin Yunhui writes that “no matter whether Mao Zedong's opinion was correct, other leaders with different opinions could only do a self-criticism. Defending the personal authority of Mao Zedong meant defending the ‘big picture,’ it meant defending the interests of the ‘party.’”21 Qian Xiangli agrees As Mao Zedong's authority grew by the day, and the authority given to him by the system became stronger and stronger, in most situations, people primarily respected the opinion of Mao Zedong and believed the opinion of Mao Zedong has natural correctness. But when there really were different opinions, they would never be expressed openly. Therefore, in the party's history “opposition power” never existed.22As an example of potential outright opposition to Mao, Dikötter writes that at the 7,000 cadres meeting “Peng Zhen, it was alleged, intended to confront the Chairman” (p. 11). Dikötter subsequently refers to “Peng Zhen's attempt to discredit the Chairman” (p. 14). In fact, Peng was a particularly loyal follower of Mao, and the content of Peng's speech at the meeting was almost certainly suggested to him by the chairman himself.23Any work on the Cultural Revolution must come to grips with the difficulty of correctly assessing the role of Lin Biao, the defense minister who had seemed to be Mao's heir-apparent. Many important parts of this story remain unclear and open for debate. For example, a masterful recent evaluation of all the available evidence on Lin's departure and death shows it is still almost impossible to guess with any certainty what happened that fateful night.24 Dikötter adopts the traditional view of Lin as power hungry, writing that “the marshal … exploited the turmoil to expand his own power base, placing his followers in key positions throughout the army” (p. xv).Unfortunately, this characterization does not fit with, or even acknowledge, the massive outpouring of new material on Lin that has appeared over the last few years.25 Nor does it mention other interpretations of Lin, which are generally supported by the newly available evidence. Scholars such as Wang Nianyi, He Shu, and Chen Zhao label Lin Biao a member of the “Watch and See Faction” () or “Avoid Getting Involved Faction” ().26 Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun portray Lin as a reluctant man who was dragged into elite politics against his will.27 Even if not everyone is convinced of this revisionist viewpoint, it at least bears mentioning.28The latest evidence necessitates reevaluations of specific events related to Lin. Dikötter writes that “Mao, on the advice of Lin Biao, removed Luo Ruiqing as chief of staff of the army” (p. xx) and that “Mao was easily swayed, relying on Lin Biao far more than on Luo Ruiqing” (pp. 44, 45). However, we now know the situation was more complicated. For example, the extremely important memoirs of Qiu Huizuo, one of Lin's top deputies in the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution, claim that the stubborn and bossy Luo was widely disliked by many of the marshals (including Ye Jianying, but especially Nie Rongzhen) and that Mao was troubled by Luo's relationship with Marshal He Long, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. Lin, who deeply respected Luo's abilities, merely tried to fulfill Mao's wishes after realizing what the Chairman wanted.29 We still do not have decisive proof that this was the case, but at the very least a variety of new evidence casts serious doubt on the notion that Luo was blameless, that Lin was entirely at fault, and that Mao was passive.30Dikötter also claims that a rivalry between Lin and Luo began in 1959 after the Lushan plenum, when they became defense minister and chief of staff, respectively (p. 44). But according to Qiu, it was Lin who nominated Luo, who came from the same military faction, or “mountaintop,” to the position.31 Even after Mao warned Lin about Luo's prickly character, Lin stood by his decision.Dikötter also suggests that Luo and Lin differed on military doctrine: Lin Biao's answer was to advocate the primacy of man over weapon. Luo was disdainful. Ideology was paramount for Lin, who distributed the Little Red Book to the army in 1964 and promoted the slogan “Politics in Command.” Luo was appalled. (p. 44)This view is hard to reconcile with recent work by Ding Kaiwen and Sima Qingyang, who use a wide variety of sources to show that Lin, a practical man with real warfighting experience, never adopted such a radically binary position and that his thinking on military doctrine, including on political work, was not fundamentally different from Luo's.32 Dikötter's assertion that Lin opposed better relations with the United States is also based on flimsy evidence (p. 245).33Dikötter's account of He Long's removal from the leadership is somewhat problematic: What also sent ripples through the military ranks was the treatment of He Long, a flamboyant, legendary marshal whose signature in the early guerrilla days had been a butcher's knife. He was senior to Lin Biao, and enjoyed widespread support in the army. In December dozens of Red Guards tried to track him down, although Zhou Enlai managed to shelter him in his personal residence. (p. 130)Dikötter is absolutely correct to note He's popularity in the military, and He did take over running the daily affairs of the Central Military Commission in March 1962 because of Lin's illness.34 However, to say He was “senior” to Lin is not accurate. Lin was still minister of defense, and he ranked third out of the ten marshals—He Long was only fifth. Dikötter's description of Zhou as He's savior is also misleading. He Long showed up at Zhou's home uninvited, Zhou ultimately forced him to be taken into custody, and Zhou played a major role in the investigation report on He's crimes.35Dikötter's description of military factions is also somewhat inaccurate. He writes that “Mao instead propped up the Fourth Front Army, led by Marshal Xu Xiangqian, and the Second Field Army, which had served under Deng Xiaoping” (p. 173). However, most of the Fourth Front Army became the 129th Division (in 1937), which then became the Second Field Army (in 1949). Therefore, these veterans mostly belonged to the same “mountaintop.”36Dikötter also makes questionable judgments about the relationship between Zhou Enlai and Mao's wife, writing that “Jiang Qing took the lead in trying to expose the premier” (when the 16 May Circular of 1966 appeared a year later on 17 May 1967; p. 233). Although Dikötter does note Zhou's praise for Jiang at one point (p. 172), he does not quite recognize the extent to which recent evidence suggests the two had an extremely ambiguous relationship. Zhou played an absolutely critical role in building up Jiang's authority, and Jiang warned others not to attack Zhou.37 According to the new memoirs of Qi Benyu, a member of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, Zhou and Jiang agreed more than 80 percent of the time. Because among the top leadership only Zhou strongly supported Jiang, it would not have made sense for her to attack him.38 Zhou treated Jiang so courteously that he once even stopped a Pol
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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