Landscapes of the Chinese Soul

The Enduring Presence of the Cultural Revolution

Tomas Plaenkers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915550
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Psychology

This book documents the research project on the trauma of the Cultural Revolution in China and its intergenerational effects. It allows the reader to view the trauma through the perspective of 2,500 years of Chinese thought, and in the light of Chinese social history and governmental policy.

CHAPTER ONE


Negotiating the past: narratives of the Cultural Revolution in party history, literature, popular media, and interviews

Natascha Gentz

The following contribution concerns the reasons why the processing of the traumatic experiences of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has been so difficult for the country in political, social, and cultural contexts. The working through of such experiences generally depends on a supportive social environment that acknowledges the experience of trauma and, thus, permits traumatised persons to emerge from amnesia and confront what they have been through. Such a social consensus has not existed in China since the Cul tural Revolution. On the one hand, the political edicts of a socialistic dictatorship have defined the permissible ways of dealing with the past. On the other hand, due to the complexity of the circumstances, there is no consensus to date as to whether a confrontation with the past is even necessary or important. As the following discussion will show, political guidelines have not only had a restrictive effect but have also put their own definite stamp on understanding and interpretation of the events of the Cultural Revolution: a stamp reflected in culture, literature, film, and scientific debate. The effects extend beyond mainland China. In the West, too, many of these données have been absorbed and have influenced conceptions of this phenomenon.

The last part of this chapter offers a linguistic and content analysis of interviews with contemporary witnesses and their children (see the contribution of Plänkers, pp. 83–120) from these cultural, political, and social-historical perspectives. It will be clear that most of the interviewees have not arrived at a substantive political consideration of the events.

This gap is partly explained by the fact that open debate about the Cultural Revolution has been discouraged, both in its immediate wake and our own day. Thus, heightened censorship was imposed in 2006 to block any unofficial presentations, activities, or publications marking the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution’s onset. Nevertheless, the Cultural Revolution has been dealt with over the years in numerous unofficial publications, in literature and film, and even in public debate.

Discussions about how to interpret the Cultural Revolution and its effects take place in many forms and media and are often quite controversial. Scientific researchers, too, disagree about what triggered the “ten catastrophic years” and what the enduring consequences have been. Having gathered collective and individual voices in various media, I shall attempt to characterise this gamut of opinions and assessments and so to clarify the cultural background of our interview texts. Even though individual publications on the Cultural Revolution are restricted, even though public debate is discouraged and departures from the officially sanctioned interpretation might bring reprisals, the period is the subject of wide-ranging discussions in which distinct individual processing strategies are revealed. The Chinese Internet, which, in recent decades, has developed into an alternative realm for public debate and the articulation of dissent, offers an important forum. Despite the fact that the concept “Cultural Revolution” is taboo and supposedly subject to Internet censorship (Xiao, 2004), the abundance of search results shows that full control is lacking or impossible.

Whether and how historical accounts help shape cultural identity is a question that has been much discussed of late. Assmann’s distinction between cultural and communicative memory (Assmann, 2001) has been particularly influential. Communicative memory extends perhaps a century back and concerns events that have been directly witnessed, at least in part; it is nourished by personal experience and by the reports of others. Collective memory, on the other hand, is established by texts that have the status of Holy Writ and attain universal acceptance. The Chinese Party leadership’s attempt to crystallise the events of the Cultural Revolution in an untouchable political document (see text of the resolution of 1981, pp. 175–191) can be understood as a bid to establish a collective memory, and with it a unified political identity. The strategy was a partial success; many of the Party’s findings have entered into collective memory and also turn up in our interview transcripts. However, since the events are too recent to have left the realm of personal experience, a whole series of alternative reports, communicated in other forms, exists, constituting part of a communicative—that is, still negotiable—memory.

The attempt to establish a universally valid interpretation of the political turbulence of the Cultural Revolution was embodied in the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China”, approved at the Sixth plenary meeting of the Eleventh Central Committee (Resolution, 1981). With its publication on 1 July of that year in the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), it became the established study text for Party cadres and the masses. It presents the orthodox interpretation of the events and the sanctioned vocabulary (“ortholalie”, correct speech) for discussion of the events and their connections. A counterproposal was offered a few years later, in 1986, by historians Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, a husband-and-wife team; this document circulated only in samizdat, and brought house arrest for Yan Jiaqi during the campaign against “bourgeois liberalism”. Published in English as Turbulent Decade, the work appeared in Chinese in 1990 under the neutral title The Ten Years of the Cultural Revolution in China, and quickly became a best seller in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Yan & Gao, 1996). As we shall see, Yan Jiaqi actually did not stray far from the paradigm set by the Party. It is the historical writings of the Red Guards that openly challenge the Party’s interpretation.

Beginning in 1976, writers took up the events of the Cultural Revolution in the so-called Scar Literature, which was officially supported by the Party and the propaganda apparatus, so long as it remained within the limits set in the resolution (He, 1992). Deviant representations, such as Zhang Xianliang’s reports from labour camps, could only circulate underground (Kinkeley, 1991). After the end of the 1980s came a flood of autobiographical narratives of the Cultural Revolution, a bibliography of which would fill many pages. These accounts certainly reflect a strong urge to share and to process experiences, especially traumatic ones. At the same time, the narratives exhibit an astonishing conformity, showing the strong imprint of social and cultural context—the communicative memory.

The greatest variety of individual interpretations and processing strategies is found on the Internet, which (especially since that start of the twenty-first century) has become the dominant means of communication in China. The penultimate section of this chapter will deal with the ways this medium allows Chinese “net citizens” to gather information, argue, or work through grief.

Communist Party historiography

The Official Party Resolution

The “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” establishes the framework within which the causes, events, and consequences of the Cultural Revolution are to be assessed. Such Party resolutions serve to legitimise leadership changes and to portray these as the logical consequences of historical progress. The assumption is that the march of history, dictated by economic processes, leads to ever more evolved social forms. The model text for the drafting of such historically minded resolutions is the 1939 Soviet curriculum, “The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik), Short Course”; this circulated in China in millions of copies for decades and was, to some degree, the model for the first Chinese Party Resolution of 1945. Just as the Soviet course of study served to consolidate Stalin’s position after the “Great Purges”, the “Certain Questions” resolution of 1981 marked the definitive triumph of Deng Xiaoping over the Old Maoists around his predecessor, Hua Guofeng. In the Soviet curriculum, intra-Party conflicts were always defined as the struggle between “two lines”: a correct one, represented by the great leader Lenin and his follower Stalin, and the erroneous line of Party enemies; this pattern would be reproduced in explaining the Cultural Revolution.

The interpretative model of the “struggle between two lines” pervades all of the Chinese Party’s historical writing, including its explanation of the Cultural Revolution. Such a bipolar model naturally leaves no room for political debates and competing ideas. Since the resolutions are always written from the winners’ viewpoint, deviant opinions or alternative political strategies are cast as unsuccessful plots against the Party by its enemies.

Such Party documents are themselves the result of lengthy discussions and debates within Party committees. In this case, the deliberations lasted more than a year and involved over a thousand Party cadres and historians. The document was adopted in July 1981, approximately the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (Brady, 2008; Schoenhals, 1992). (Before Deng Xiaoping’s rehabilitation, Hua Guofeng and his so-called “Whateverists”, who maintained that whatever Mao Zedong had said and done was correct, had had their own interpretation to offer. They had blamed the Cultural Revolution on the “erroneous line” of Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and, later, Deng Xiaoping: an attempt, under cover of leftist rhetoric, to reintroduce capitalism.) The resolution of 1981 brought a fundamental change in that it assigned the central role in the Cultural Revolution to Mao Zedong. At the famous Third Plenary Meeting of the Eleventh Central Committee, in December 1978—still regarded as the turning point in Chinese politics—the way was paved for this development: “leftist” errors made before and during the Cultural Revolution were corrected, and the concept of class warfare was deemphasised in favour of the programme of the “Four Modernisations”. An important practical consequence was that class status was no longer noted in individual identification papers. The so-called “Gang of Four” were cast as the principal perpetrators; their trial began (four years after their arrest) in November 1980. Also called to account were other high-ranking cadres who had been involved in the Lin Biao coup of 1971, an attempted putsch against Mao that had led to Lin Biao’s death in a plane crash, though the exact circumstances are murky to this day.

It was against this background that the orthodox interpretation of the Cultural Revolution was fashioned and adopted. The main problem was how to assign blame for the era now known as the “ten catastrophic years”. Since Deng Xiaoping’s leadership was, above all, concerned to establish social order and stability in order to guarantee the efficient implementation of his reforms, it was deemed unwise to probe too deeply into the causes of complex factional battles and their roots in society and the population as a whole. Neither could Mao Zedong be assigned the role of chief culprit, as Jiang Qing tried to do in her defence at the trial; the dethronement of this absolute leader, the Founder of the People’s Republic, the creator of Mao Zedong Thought, would also endanger social stability. A carefully calibrated solution was arrived at, one that indeed acknowledged leftist errors on Mao’s part during the Cultural Revolution, but offered the excuse that Mao, at the end of his life, could no longer distinguish right from wrong. This was described tellingly as a “tragedy”, and Mao’s overall contribution to social progress was assessed with the formula “70% positive, 30% negative”. Even this early, the Communist Party of China suggested that Mao be identified as a “tragic hero”. As demonstrations in 1975 against the “Gang of Four” had shown, there was widespread discontent about the excesses of the left-wing leadership, implicitly including Mao. The resolution attempted to shield Mao from popular resentment by acknowledging his errors but assessing them as marginal in relation to his achievements.

The Cultural Revolution was now interpreted primarily as a power struggle within the political elite. This was also a way of denying or papering over real social conflicts. The crude division into “good” and “bad” was also applied to the population at large. People in general—that is, the masses—had been misused and manipulated by the leadership; they were innocent and belonged to the Good. By freeing individuals from personal responsibility, this interpretation secured people’s solidarity with the government and their active co-operation in the modernisation project. In the process, the “manipulated” masses were once more deprived of a voice—especially the young generation of the Red Guards, who never appear in the document under that name.

The greatest simplification in this picture is this: it portrays the Chinese population as a unified, immature mass, blatantly contradicting the then still formally acknowledged division of people into classes with specified backgrounds. Yet, it was just these differing class backgrounds (boiled down during the Cultural Revolution into two labels: “Red” and “Black”) that had provided the basis for the battles of Red Guard subgroups with one another, and of the Red Guards with different governmental power centres. The division of society into classes that competed with one another for prestige, positions, and privileges—incipient in the 1950s—was continued in an extreme form in the Cultural Revolution; the Red Guards themselves split into Rebels and Conservatives, who respectively attacked older leaders or their newer replacements. As Anita Chan has persuasively described in various publications on the Guards, the camps recruited their members from all segments of society, disregarding the boundaries of schools, universities, work units, cities, rural collectives, counties, and provinces (compare Chan, 1985, 1992; Chan, Stanley, & Unger, 1980). That serious social conflicts had arisen through the competition of interest groups, leading finally, with the support of a divided elite incapable of governing, to violent confrontations—this was not a story deemed advisable to tell.

Still more politically charged—and simply ignored in the retrospective political accounting—was the role of the Red Guards in general and of the Rebel group within them in particular. The Cultural Revolution began above all as the expression of a battle between the underprivileged classes (represented by the Rebel Guards) and the privileged classes (represented by the conservative Guards). Among the Rebel Guards were groups that understood themselves as independent social movements, and which, for the first time in the history of the People’s Republic, were in a position to act autonomously: to conduct political meetings, to publish pamphlets, and to lead public discussions. An example of the mature, political mind-set of the young generation is the text “Whither China” (He, 1996; Unger, 1991), a 1968 pamphlet that earned Red Guards member Yang Xiguang ten years in prison. For Yang, the great problem in China lay not in a conflict among different classes but in the alienation of Party and government from the masses, in the accumulation of power and privileges by the Party, and in the development of a “red class” of powerful bureaucrats. Thus, blind worshippers of Mao had turned into the sharpest critics the system had ever had. Most of them went on to be prominent in the first democracy movement in the early 1980s.

The political explosiveness of these activities is reflected in the fact that in 1983, seven years on from the official end of the Cultural Revolution and over a decade after the peak period of Rebel activism, campaigns against former Red Guards were still going on. It is echoed again in the way the government equated the student demonstrations of 1989 in Tiananmen Square with the activities of the (Rebel) Red Guards.

Even the temporal definition of the Cultural Revolution as “ten catastrophic years” is significant. From the people’s perspective, the Cultural Revolution took place in the years 1966–1969, the years of mass rampage. Mao’s directives began to apply the brakes in 1968, and Lin Biao declared ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Cultural Revolution and cultural regression
• Chapter One Negotiating the past: narratives of the Cultural Revolution in party history, literature, popular media, and interviews
• Chapter Two The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as an experience of contingency
• Chapter Three Red terror: the experience of violence during the Cultural Revolution
• Chapter Four The Cultural Revolution in the mirror of the soul: a research project of the Sigmund Freud Institute
• Chapter Five Psychic trauma between the poles of the individual and society in China
• Chapter Six The Chinese Cultural Revolution: a traumatic experience and its intergenerational transmission
• Appendix 1: Selective chronology of events in the history of the People’s Republic of China
• Appendix 2: Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China
• Index