Wednesday, 8. August 2007, 23:56:43
Cultural Revolution
Chloé Froissart
China Perspectives n°42
July - August 2002At a time when China, after twenty years of reforms, is preparing for the fourth generation of Communist Party leaders to take power and sees itself increasingly acknowledged as a force in international diplomatic and commercial relations, a few voices are being raised in the interior of the country to recall, in the wake of Ba Jin((1), that the Cultural Revolution is a page of history that has never been turned. How could it be, when those events, over which the Party asserted its control in 1981 during the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee((2), remain a blank page, still devoid of meaning, in the collective memory? Chinese society has never been permitted to speak about this episode of its recent history, an episode that was both the hope and the tragedy of a whole generation and on the altar of which were sacrificed the lives and the destinies of millions. And for what, exactly? In the period following the Cultural Revolution, the Party rebuilt its power by reaffirming its control over history and memory: this was a fundamental element in its domination, preventing any political opposition from taking shape, while Deng Xiaoping recalled the regime’s unchanging foundations by setting out his Four Principles theory (1979)((3). It looked as though the Cultural Revolution, sinking into oblivion at the very moment when the social consequences of modernisation are investing the Maoist experience with renewed prestige, could be repeated.
That is what motivates the intervention of Xu Youyu, whose writing we are examining here. He was born in Chengdu in 1947 and has lived through all the upheavals that have punctuated the history of the People’s Republic and, in particular, the Cultural Revolution, in which he took part as a faction leader among the Red Guard rebels. During the back-to-the-countryside movement, Xu lived for three years in a village in northern Sichuan, and then returned to Chengdu where he worked as a labourer for six years. In 1977, he passed the first university entrance exam to be set since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the following year he joined the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Peking where he now occupies a research post in philosophy. Along with many young people who, having being sent to the countryside, opted subsequently for careers as intellectuals, Xu Youyu embraced the cause of liberalism after reflecting on his experience of the Cultural Revolution. Thus, during the 1980s, he took part successively in the thought liberation movement and the New Enlightenment movement((4) as a member of one of the best-known editorial committees, Culture: China and the World. Xu Youyu’s writing((5) is remarkable both as evidence of his systematic and long-term struggle to set down a non-official history of the Cultural Revolution and also for the special emphasis it puts on the role of memory and history in offering guidance to modern China and building a political opposition able to draw lessons from the past.
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Saturday, 23. June 2007, 05:55:16
Ideology, Media Control, Party Politics, Cultural Revolution
Bureau of Public Secrets
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
16 August 1967“Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine” was originally published as a pamphlet August 1967, then reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006).The international association of totalitarian bureaucracies has completely fallen apart. In the words of the Address published by the situationists in Algiers in July 1965, the irreversible “collapse of the revolutionary image” that the “bureaucratic lie” counterposed to the whole of capitalist society, as its pseudonegation and actual support, has become obvious, and first of all on the terrain where official capitalism had the greatest interest in upholding the pretense of its adversary: the global confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the so-called “socialist camp.” This camp had in any case never been socialist; now, in spite of all sorts of attempts to patch it up, it has ceased even to be a camp.
The disintegration of the Stalinist monolith is already manifested in the coexistence of some twenty independent “lines,” from Rumania to Cuba, from Italy to the Vietnamese-Korean-Japanese bloc of parties. Russia, having this year become incapable of holding a joint conference of merely all the European parties, prefers to forget the era when Moscow reigned over the Comintern. Thus the Izvestia of September 1966 blames the Chinese leaders for bringing “unprecedented” discredit to “Marxist-Leninist” ideas, and virtuously deplores the confrontational style “in which insults are substituted for an exchange of opinions and revolutionary experiences. Those who choose this method confer an absolute value on their own experience and reveal a dogmatic and sectarian mentality in their interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theory. Such an attitude is inevitably accompanied by interference in the internal affairs of fraternal parties.” In the Sino-Soviet polemic, in which each power is led to impute to its opponent every conceivable antiproletarian crime, being only obliged not to mention the real crime (the class power of the bureaucracy), each side can only arrive at the sobering conclusion that the other’s revolutionariness was only an inexplicable mirage, a mirage which, lacking any reality, has now reverted to its old point of departure. Thus in New Delhi last February the Chinese ambassador described Brezhnev and Kosygin as “new czars of the Kremlin,” while the Indian government, an anti-Chinese ally of this Muscovy, discovered that “the present masters of China have donned the imperial mantle of the Manchus.” This denunciation of the new Middle Kingdom dynasty was further refined the following month in Moscow by the modernist state poet Voznesensky, who, evoking the menace of a new invasion of “the hordes of Kuchum,” counts on “eternal Russia” to build a rampart against the Mongols who threaten to bivouac among “the Egyptian treasures of the Louvre.”
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Friday, 8. June 2007, 22:23:00
Cultural Revolution, Politics, Party Politics, Ideology
China Study Group
23 May, 2006On May 27, 1871, what Marx called the "final mass murder" of the supporters of the Paris Commune was carried out at a wall of the Pere Lachaise cemetery there. A plaque still marks the place of their martyrdom, now almost a century and a half old. With their deaths, the first revolutionary proletarian exercise of governmental power in the world came to an end. It had lasted only 72 days. Though the socialist side of the Commune was limited by both the composition of the working classes at the time and the nature of its leadership, it had nevertheless proven the capability of the proletariat for self-government, free from bourgeois control. It thus became enshrined as the initial example of "living" socialism, the realization in practice of the new form of social organization that Marx, Engels, and others had been predicting, advocating and mobilizing for over the preceding several decades.
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Friday, 8. June 2007, 22:12:12
Ideology, Party Politics, Politics, Cultural Revolution
by Arif Dirlik
China Study Group
31 dec, 2006I take it that this occasion on the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution is not a commemoration-which would distance it too far into the past to have any relevance to the present, or a celebration-which would bring it too close to the present as if it might be directly relevant, but an opportunity to reflect on an event of great historical significance, which raised questions which may be as relevant as ever, and perhaps more so than they ever have been. I would like to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on two aspects of the Cultural Revolution that I think were parts of a single revolutionary project: the part played in social transformation by culture(as it is integral to social consciousness), and, a vision of development that was both the condition and the anticipated result of such social transformation.
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Friday, 8. June 2007, 22:04:03
Ideology, Party Politics, Politics, Cultural Revolution
China Study Group
23 May, 2006This essay was prepared for the June 9-10, 2006 Hong Kong Conference: “The Fortieth Anniversary: Rethinking the Genealogy and Legacy of the Cultural Revolution” sponsored by the China Study Group, Monthly Review, and the Contemporary China Research Center of City University of Hong Kong. It was translated from the French by Shane Mage.
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Monday, 4. June 2007, 23:46:28
Human Rights, Politics, Activism, ABSURDIST
...
EastSouthWestNorth
Translation by Roland Soong
AsiaWeekly (Chinese)
June 10, 2007If the June 4th incident is vindicated, that would imply that democratic rule will arrive soon in mainland China. This is the assessment of the Chinese democratic movement veteran Ren Wanding. He said: "When will the Chinese Communists vindicate June 4th? According to past practice and historical experience, it is not likely that the leadership will vindicate the June 4th incident. This is an old Chinese Communist rule. For the longest time, they will not vindicate any past political mistake. If we vindicate June 4th today, we will expect to have democratic reforms tomorrow and we won't wait. Therefore, the authorities will be very careful."
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Tuesday, 5. December 2006, 17:15:26
China Watch, Ideology, Cultural Revolution
Translated by Ken Knabb
Bureau of Public Secrets“Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine” was originally published as a pamphlet August 1967, then reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967). (It's slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).The international association of totalitarian bureaucracies has completely fallen apart. In the words of the Address published by the situationists in Algiers in July 1965, the irreversible “collapse of the revolutionary image” that the “bureaucratic lie” counterposed to the whole of capitalist society, as its pseudonegation and actual support, has become obvious, and first of all on the terrain where official capitalism had the greatest interest in upholding the pretense of its adversary: the global confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the so-called “socialist camp.” This camp had in any case never been socialist; now, in spite of all sorts of attempts to patch it up, it has ceased even to be a camp.
Read more...
Friday, 1. December 2006, 19:46:52
Cultural Revolution, Activism
By Robert Marquand
Staff writer
The Christian Science Monitor
Nov 29, 2006"I never meant to stay in China.... I never even meant to go to China."|BEIJING丨 The contradiction defines Sidney Rittenberg's life and world. Mr. Rittenberg knows China's epic Communist revolution intimately, not as a witness, but a participant - often on the wrong side of history.
Not many people can still close their eyes and recall playing cards and folk dancing with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the young rebels in the bean-oil lit caves of Yanan. But Rittenberg can. The idealistic Jewish boy from Charleston, S.C., stayed behind when the US Army left China, dreaming of a new social order where skin color and ethnicity wouldn't matter.
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Monday, 27. November 2006, 19:57:59
Cultural Revolution, Social Elite
By Jun Zhang
The Cultural Revolution as HistoryChinese History Research
University of California, San Diego
Fall 2002
Scholars have concentrated on the study of Cultural Revolution for many years. The most influential works are done from so diversified perspectives--political science, history, sociology and education----that sometimes it is difficult for them achieve the agreement in some fields. The sophisticated Red Guard factionalism is one of them. Numerous literatures about the Red Guard factionalism have been produced in sociology, history, political science and education fields. Four of them[1] were selected for analysis in this paper: Lee’s (1978) works: The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study, Unger’s (1982) book: Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, Rosen’s (1982) works, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou, and sociologist Walder’s (2002) works: Beijing Red Guard Factionalism: Social Interpretations Reconsidered. The former three were produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the latter is a quite new research.
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Friday, 17. November 2006, 17:00:14
Cultural Revolution, China Watch, Activism
By Jehangir S. Pocha
The Boston Globe
August 29, 2006BEIJING Li Qingyou vividly recalls the hot summer day 40 years ago in Tiananmen Square. He was among the one million members of the new cadre of radical students called Red Guards who stood at rapt attention and waved their Little Red Books as Mao Zedong exhorted them to destroy China's "Four Olds" - old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.
The historic mass rally was the first under the Cultural Revolution, Mao's effort to rid the country of its feudal past and create an agrarian utopia. Over 10 years, it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and scarred China's national psyche.
It is an anniversary that the government would prefer that Li, a 55-year-old retired factory manager, and other Chinese forgot.
The government, which still reveres Mao, has taken few steps to redress the wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, leaving many Chinese of that generation, including former members of the Red Guards, struggling to make sense of the madness that enveloped their nation and the trauma it inflicted.
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