Summer reviews and media coverage, & selected autumn events, related to my new book

Last time I was writing here was at the beginning of summer. Summer is now over and the fall semester has started. I thought I'd pull together some of the stuff out there on the web related to my new book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China.

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September 22, 2016

Cultural Revolution, Propaganda Art, and Historical Memories: Exhibition, Film Screening, and Lecture. Event at Columbia University.

September 21, 2016
"The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China." Department of Sociology colloquium, University of Pennsylvania

June 30, 2016

"Guobin Yang's The Red Guard Generation" (The Page 99 Test) 

June 18, 2016

"The Red Guard Generation Review" by Silvia Calamandrei. English translation of an Italian book review.

June 15, 2016

"How the Cultural Revolution Sowed the Seeds of Dissent in China." The New York Times Q & A with Chris Buckley.

June 10, 2016

"Radicalism and Factionalism of the Red Guards." Book review by Yang Zhang in Mobilizing Ideas.

Roundup of media stories on 50th anniversary of China's Cultural Revolution

May 15, 2016
Gerry Shih, Maoists Still a Force 50 Years after the Cultural Revolution

May 15, 2016
Guobin Yang, How the Chinese Cultural Revolution Came to an End

May 14, 2016
Chris Buckley, Fifty Years after the Cultural Revolution, a Son Awaits Answers on His Father's Death

May 11, 2016
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, How Will China Mark the 50th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution?

May 10, 2016
Ian Johnson, Q.&A.: Jeremy Brown on the Cultural Revolution at the Grassroots

May 6, 2016
Evan Osnos, The Cost of the Cultural Revolution, 50 Years Later

May 3, 2016
Helen Gao, Q.&A.: Roderick MacFarquhar on the Cultural Revolution and China Today

April 29, 2016
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China's Cultural Revolution (a review of two books)

April 19, 2016
A ChinaFile Conversation: Fifty Years Later, How Is the Cultural Revolution Still Present in Life in China?

April 4, 2016
Chris Buckley, Q.&A.: Xujun Eberlein on the Legacy of the Cultural Revolution 

January 26, 2016
Zha Jianying, China: Surviving the Camps (on Ji Xianlin's memoir)

July 20, 2015
Ian Johnson, Q.&A.: Andrew Walder on 'China Under Mao'

April 6, 2015
Evan Osnos, Born Red

December 4, 2014
Ian Johnson, China's Brave Underground Journal

Note: Please tweet me at @Yangguobin if you see recent pieces that are missing from my admittedly incomplete list here.

Some Additional Resources (a list of my favorites)

The best documentary film about the Cultural Revolution period is still Morning Sun.

The best short book on the Cultural Revolution is Richard Kraus's The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.

On the Cultural Revolution through the eyes of a child, read Chun Yu's stunning verse narrative Little Green: Growing Up in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The best film on sent-down youth is the classic Youth Elegy (青春祭，1985), available here on YouTube but with no English subtitles.

My favorite English-language memoir on the Cultural Revolution is Rae Yang's Spider Eaters.

My favorite Chinese-language memoir about the Cultural Revolution is Zhou Ziren's Personal Story of  a Red Guard Newspaper Editor (红卫兵小报主编自述) , published in 2006 to mark the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the CR. Here is a review by Hu Ping in Chinese.

My favorite online newsletters about the Cultural Revolution are Yesterday (昨天), collected here, and Remembrance (记忆), here. Both are in Chinese.

My favorite novel about sent-down youth is A Cheng's Chess Master.

My contributions to recent discussions about China's Cultural Revolution

Trying to Make Sense of China's Cultural Revolution (interview on NPR's Here and Now, May 13, 2016) Fifty Years Later, How Is the Cultural Revolution Still Present in Life in China? (A ChinaFile converation, April 19 2016)

Hot off the press: The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

This book took a long time to write. I like telling friends I've been withholding it for the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Now that the anniversary is this month, the book is just out. Here is the link to the Amazon book site.

China's Contested Internet: Historical Struggle and Uncertain Future

"China's Contested Internet: Historical Struggle and Uncertain Future"
-- link to an essay I wrote in March 2016 for The Futures We Want.

A Cultural Revolution Radical from Wuhan： The Story of Lu Li'an

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:

 

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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.

Source: Guobin Yang, 2006. Review of Yangtian changxiao: yige danjian shiyi nian de hongweibing yuzhong yutianlu (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. In The China Review Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 180-183.

Fragmented Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Fragmented Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

To continue the discussions about the Cultural Revolution generation I started here last week, I’d like to mention today that memories of the Cultural Revolution are fragmented by genres and social groups. Here is an incomplete list:

a)     Official narratives (e.g. Jin Chunming’s Short History of the Cultural Revolution and officially endorsed memoirs).

b)     Narratives by victims of the Cultural Revolution, mostly high-level officials and intellectuals. These appeared mostly in the 1980s in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution.

c)     “Memoirs of exile”: These are English-language book-length memoirs published outside of China including such titles as Wild Swans.

d)     Literature of “the wounded” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These include both prose, fiction, poetry, film, and drama.

e)     “zhiqing” (educated youth) literature of the 1980s. Overlaps with “root-seeking literature” of the type written by Ah Cheng (my favorite is Chess King).

f)      Nostalgic reminiscences of zhiqing in the 1990s. These are collections of short personal stories in Chinese. Numerous volumes were published in the late 1990s, when many members of the Cultural Revolution were laid off in the process of the privatization of state-owned enterprises.

g)     Memoirs by former rebel leaders. After the Cultural Revolution, many were indicted and served time in prison. Those who wrote memoirs (e.g. Nie Yuanzi and Kuai Dafu) defended their behavior in the CR.

h)     Documentary films about victims of the Cultural Revolution, such as Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (我虽死去) and Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (寻找林昭的灵魂).

i)       Web sites (blogs, online forums, etc) about the Cultural Revolution.   

j)   Virtual museums of the Cultural Revolution (e.g. here).

If you think of others, please let me know.

Sociologists often talk about collective memory, but it’s hard to talk about collective memories of the Cultural Revolution. There are really only fragmented memories. They differ by genre, social group, and even time. For example, memories of Cultural Revolution in the 1980s were different from the 1990s, partly reflecting what was politically permissible and partly because people’s memories of the past are shaped by their present experiences and concerns.