New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2021. 768 pp. US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 9780374293130.
Author Yang Jisheng, observer-participant during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, provides us with a privileged viewpoint on how China descended into the chaos of civil war. From his account, supported by extensive documentary evidence, we can enrich the lessons now accumulated from the previous work of other scholars. Importantly, it takes as a reference point the “anti-rightist” and forced march campaigns of 1957–1962. The party leadership responsible for the national catastrophe fended off critics (most notably, Liu Shaoqi for promoting “capitalist restoration”) not by backing away from the ultra-radical program but rather by deepening the “continuous revolution under [the guidance of] the dictatorship of the proletariat” (19). Here we find the prelude to the Revolution proper in the Socialist Education Movement (1963–1966). With an estimation of tens of thousands killed, it can be taken as a true dress-rehearsal. That is, far from a popular uprising, the continuation of the Revolution was a calculated maneuver by the leading inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party to consolidate its position.
Beginning in chapter 4, the account (much of it first-hand) of the waves of red terror and factional retribution, bewildering as their methods cruel, describes how the peculiarly virulent settling of intra-party scores of this kind is endemic to totalitarian systems. Readers will find their eyes turning away from the text in chapters that describe the sadistic violence perpetrated by all sides, that only came to an end with the death of the tyrant in 1976. In the end it is evident, by any objective measure, that none of the factions (neither their leaders nor the rank-and-file followers deceived into participating) deserve a positive historical judgement. At the same time it is correct to identify, as the core chapters do, the fuel that fed the rebellion of the various tendencies of the Red Guard: a deep resentment against the government apparatus responsible for the Great Famine/Leap Forward. Here, however, we take note of a departure from the absolute objectivity that is required in this case of urgent political assessment: an implicit bias finds its way into the detailed narratives, one that leans subtly, but unnecessarily, in the direction of sympathy for the far-left “rebel” detachments. We can understand how the gasoline, cynically supplied by Mao and Jiang Qing to persecute their opponents in the party echelons, kept the cities burning. But from the beginning the planned mobilization, that eventually got out of their control, was never about what it appeared to be in the exalted slogans at the street level. This minor defect aside, the study is framed correctly (by the preface, chapter 1 and chapter 29): that progress toward rule of law in China will depend on presenting the full and unvarnished historical record of the events culminating in 1976, thus gaining an understanding of how the great dictator and his party, from the 1950s onward, evolved toward outright despotism. While a degree of free discussion of the Cultural Revolution is permitted today, it barely scratches the surface so as to preserve the vestiges of the cult of personality.
Most of the bewildering characterizations of “counterrevolutionary,” “revisionist,” “right-deviating opportunism,” etc., were no more than arbitrary categories that served as tags devoid of meaning outside of the jockeying for polemical advantage. But one of the labels hurled at some factional opponents turned out to be strangely prescient: “capitalist-roader.” Some form of the Reform and Opening, putting an end to Mao’s two-decade voluntarist “hell on earth” (xxiii), ending definitively only with the purge of his closest followers, was almost inevitable, and would be implemented by a layer of the bureaucracy that had not completely lost its senses. It was as predictable as doi moi in Vietnam, Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall. With all its contradictions, the free-market road in China lifted the country—spectacularly, by all objective material measure—out of misery to economic super-power prosperity, a seeming “miracle … freeing the long-confined potential of China’s workers” (616). If not to the perennially maligned layer of “revisionists” grouped around Deng Xiaoping (for different reasons, deservedly so after Tiananmen 1989), the task would have fallen to others.
As chapter 29 outlines, new tasks face the fledgling movement for democracy. For a parallel proposal, readers are encouraged to study the text of Charter 08, the related observations of its principal framer, and the broader discussion of implications in the review of The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate in the China Review International (vol. 20, nos. 1-2). Even as a witness at Tiananmen Square to the repression of 1989, Liu came to recognize that there was something real, a kernel consisting of a new popular consciousness, in Reform and Opening, that would give impetus to a resurgence of this movement.
The concluding chapter graphically shows how the ruling bureaucracy consolidated its dictatorship as it singled out the Gang-of-Four aligned factions for punishment, to impose stability. The evidence of the massive expansion of internal security forces of the present regime while, not coincidentally, selectively appropriating features of personality cult-type governance, stands as one of the most important lessons of the historical period ending in 1976.
The most striking contrast of the book is revealed to us at the end, between the indoctrinated “rebel” Red Guards and the reform-minded vanguard of the April Fifth mobilization (in the wake of Zhou Enlai’s death) giving rise to the Xidan Democracy Wall of 1978, precursor to the movement of a generation with a completely different awareness, during the decade of the 1980s. The former were confused persecutors/victims imbued with the official state ideology of class struggle, the latter, self-educated and genuinely independent with a clear political program of their own. For the Democracy Wall movement, which had finally “liberated people’s thinking” (556), the Cultural Revolution was the last straw. As chapters 25 to 27 recount, it was the extenuating conditions of exhaustion, after twenty years of CCP-controlled “struggle,” that had finally come to a head.
Norbert Francis
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff