I
would like to continue discussions about the importance of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution for understanding contemporary Chinese society and politics by posting
here a book review I published in 2006. The book under review is a memoir by a
former rebel leader in the city of Wuhan. It was published in Hong Kong and
available in Chinese only. The memoir offers a view of the Cultural Revolution
from the perspective of a radical rebel who joined the Cultural Revolution as a
loyal and committed activist but ended up in prison for 11 years. So it's the story of the transformation of a radical believer into a radical non-believer. To see the
complexities of the Cultural Revolution from the perspectives of different
actors involved, I will try to post more of this kind of stories in the future.
So here it goes, below is my review of the memoir by Lu Li’an:
***
Outcry from a
Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, by Lu Li'an and
edited by Wang Shaoguang, Hong Kong: The
Chinese University Press, 2005, 656pp, US$23 (Paperback), ISBN:
962-996-250-0
Memoirs about the Chinese
Cultural Revolution fall into at least five types. There are those written by
persecuted intellectuals, by high-level party leaders, by ordinary individuals,
by the English-writing Chinese diaspora, and by former Red Guard leaders.
These memoirs present different images of the Cultural Revolution
depending on the authors' individual experience and the audience targeted.
Readers of this journal are perhaps most familiar with the profitable industry of
English-language memoirs. With a few exceptions, personal accounts by
former Red Guard leaders are conspicuously missing. This leads
to the curious phenomenon that the story of the Red Guard Movement, arguably the most
important aspect of the Cultural Revolution, is told mostly by those on the
periphery, not in the centre of the storm. Lu Li'an's memoir thus fills a
yawning gap. His is the story of an influential rebel leader in the city of
Wuhan, itself a major battleground of the Cultural Revolution.
Rebel leaders were of various
stripes. Some rose to important positions of power in the Cultural
Revolution but were indicted at the end of it. Nie Yuanzi, Kuai Dafu, and Tan Houlan
in Beijing were perhaps the best known examples. Others were taken
into custody in the middle of the Red Guard Movement or during the
period of "cleansing of class ranks" but were rehabilitated after the
Cultural Revolution. Lu Li'an belonged to this second group. But Lu differed
from most Red Guard leaders in a crucial way. He was among a small handful
who took the Cultural Revolution so seriously that they sought
theoretical foundations and practical means to transform it into a real
revolution — a fundamental change in the national power structures and social
structures. Lu's memoir provides a gripping account of how he came to this
position and what disasters his words and activities brought to him and
some of his fellow rebels.
Cultural Revolution memoirs,
especially those in English, have been subject to such critical scrutiny
that they seem to suffer from a sort of "credibility crisis."
But if readers bring with them a healthy lens of scepticism and an appreciation of
the differences between historical evidence and personal memory,
memoirs can offer powerful insights into the meaning of historical
experience. I find Lu's account credible. He apparently chewed over many
details of his life during his eleven years in prison. Indeed, because of the
repeated interrogations he was subjected to, he was forced to recall detail
after detail over and over. Furthermore, many of his key activities involved
other historical figures and therefore are verifiable to some extent. And
finally, the book is carefully edited by Wang Shaoguang, author of two books on
the Cultural Revolution and a leading expert on the Cultural Revolution
in Wuhan.
The book consists of two parts.
Part One takes the story from Lu's childhood to July 1968, when he
was kidnapped by an opposing faction. Lu devotes relatively little space —
one chapter out of a total of twenty-four — to his childhood years. He was
born in 1946 and started junior high school in 1959. He remembered not
having enough to eat during the "three years of natural
disaster," but clearly he had fond memories of his school days. He was a good
student and athlete in junior and senior high school.
Lu's college life coincided with
the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. He started college in the autumn of
1965, at the Central China Institute of Technology (CCIT) in his home
town. Before the end of his first year, the Cultural Revolution was in full
swing. As in other schools and universities, a work-team came to CCIT to guide
the Cultural Revolution, The workteam encouraged students to expose
"bad elements," thus creating conflicts among students. Initially Lu was
more of a spectator, but his sympathy lay with the student minority under
attack by the work-team. One evening, he and two female classmates went to
watch the two camps debating with each other. One of the girls
prodded him, "Aren't you a good speaker? Why don't you step forward and
talk some?" (p, 70) Lu did, and as a result, he turned from a spectator into
an active participant.
One may argue that Lu stepped
into the political storm quite accidentally. There is nothing
more natural than when a young man is goaded into action by a young
woman. Perhaps herein lies an insight into political activism. Perhaps it is
small social interactions like these, as much as socio-structural factors like
one's family background, that create the immediate motivations for
participating in politically risky activities. And onee the first step is taken, the
next becomes easier. Time and again, Lu remembers how he felt a sense of
pride and empowerment because of the encouragement he received from
classmates for a speech he made or a wall-poster he put up and how
this sense of empowerment radicalized him further. Every small incident of
social engagement took him one step deeper into the vortex of the
political storm. Below is an abbreviated inventory of his major deeds:
- In
late August 1966, he put up his first wall-poster, a critique of a speech made in
his university by the Governor of Hubei province. He denounced the
Governor's speech as a defence of the workteam.
- In
November 1966, having been excluded from Red Guard organizations
because of his family background, be went on a long march to Yan'an
with a team of 45 school mates. They walked long distances in
emulation of the Red Army soldiers of an earlier age.
- Upon
returning to Wuhan in January 1967, Lu Li'an joined the ranks of the
rebels and in time started his own rebel organization called "New
CCIT Daredevils," which gained considerable influence.
- After
the downfall of the conservative organizations in July 1967, Lu disbanded his rebel
organization and started a study society in order to make theoretical
preparations for a new stage of political struggle. He named it the Society of
the Plough.
For this last activity, Lu Li'an
was to be imprisoned for eleven years, from 1968 to 1979. What about
Lu's study society was so terrifying that he was subjected to such harsh
punishment?
Chapter Six of the book, on the
rise and fall of the Society of the Plough, provides an answer. We
see here how Lu Li'an wrote a manifesto declaring the will of a small
group of individuals to carry the Cultural Revolution to the end, how he
gathered with his friends to study the works of Karl Marx and Mao
Zedong, and how he proclaimed in his articles that the next stage of
the Cultural Revolution would be a peasant war. None of these, taken alone,
looked particularly radical or subversive. All seemed to be consistent with
the official ideology, perhaps even more so than the official rhetoric. To
the central authorities, however, this was the most terrifying thing. Like
others of his ilk, such as Yang Xiguang in Hunan province, author of the
influential essay "Wither China," Lu Li'an took the values of the ruling
class more seriously than the power elites themselves. He was challenging
the ruling elites by holding them up to their own criteria of Marxism and
Mao Zedong Thought. As political theorists have warned us, this
critique from within the hegemony constitutes a most powerful kind
of political dissent. This explains Lu's downfall.
Lu Li'an was imprisoned without
any formal charge. The second part of his book details his humongous
sufferings as a political prisoner. It is a heart-rending story of how a
thinking and feeling human being struggled to remain human in the dehumanizing
and maddening prison-cell of a world.
In one of the most touching passages
of the book, Lu writes that from the solitude of his prison, he would
often look at a distant mountain, admire its seasonal change of colours, and
envy the shadowy human figures coming and going freely on the mountain
slope. It was this undying desire for freedom that sustained him
through the long years. He vowed to himself one day that if he lived to leave
the prison, he would tell his story to the world. It is a historical irony
that Lu could not publish his book in mainland China. The Chinese University
Press deserves applause for making this valuable book available.
