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The Cultural Revolution at the Margins

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The Cultural Revolution at the Margins THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AT THE MARGINS THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AT THE MARGINS CHINESE SOCIALISM IN CRISIS YICHING WU Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Wu, Yiching. The cultural revolution at the margins : Chinese socialism in crisis / Yiching Wu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72879- 0 (alk. paper) 1. China— History—Cultural Revolution, 1966– 1976. 2. Hong wei bing. 3. Protest movements— China—Beijing—History—20th century. 4. Student movements— China—Beijing—History—20th century. 5. Po liti cal violence— China—Beijing—History—20th century. 6. Socialism— China—History—20th century. I. Title. DS778.7.W85 2014 951.05'6—dc23 2013042654 This book is dedicated to my parents, Wu Feng and Xu Guoguang A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre— a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world- view, and overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of dispersion. —Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge The history of subaltern groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unifi cation in the historical activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it therefore can only be demonstrated when a historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success. Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only “permanent” victory breaks their subordination, and that not even immediately. —Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables . .xi List of Abbreviations . .xiii Preface and Ac know ledg ments . xv 1. THE UNTHINKABLE REVOLUTION . 1 From the Margins: A Historiographical and Interpretive Detour 8 Plan of This Book 13 2. ENEMIES FROM THE PAST: Bureaucracy, Class, and Mao’s Continuous Revolution . 17 When Revolutionaries Became Rulers 21 Socialist Bureaucracy and Ruling- Class Formation 34 Class as Classifi cation 38 How the Old Bottle Spoiled New Wine 46 3. FROM THE GOOD BLOOD TO THE RIGHT TO REBEL: Politics of Class and Citizenship in the Beijing Red Guard Movement . 53 Proletarian Purity 56 Festivals of Red Violence 64 Birth of a Big Poisonous Weed 67 Rights and Class: Transgressing Maoism 82 x Contents 4. REVOLUTIONARY ALCHEMY: Economism and the Making of Shanghai’s January Revolution . 95 A Brief History of Economism 97 Crisis and Indeterminacy 108 Revolutionary Alchemy: “What Kind of Stuff Is Economism?” 120 The Making of a New Po liti cal Model 124 An Unstable Closure 131 In the Name of Proletarian Power 138 5. REVOLUTION IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION: Pop u lar Radicalization of the Cultural Revolution in Hunan . 142 The Great Retreat and Its Discontents 145 Resisting Demobilization: The Road to the Shengwulian 148 Co ali tion of the Disaffected? 159 “The People’s Commune of China” 170 The Universality of the Singular 184 6. COPING WITH CRISIS IN THE WAKE OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: The Historical Origins of Chinese Postsocialism . 190 Rebellion and Encompassment 190 Return to Normalcy 196 Continuing Crises 203 The Road to Brumaire: The Hegemonic Politics of Economic Reform 217 Epilogue. FROM REVOLUTION TO REFORM: Rethinking the Cultural Revolution in the Present . 223 Two Contrasting Chinas? 225 Ruling- Class Transformation: Overcoming the 1978 Divide 227 The Incomplete Continuous Revolution 235 Appendix: List of Selected Chinese Characters . 241 Notes . 245 Bibliography . 305 index . 329 FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1 Numbers of cadres, 1949– 1980 (in millions) . 25 Figure 2 The war of couplets over the issue of family origins, 1966 . 70 Figure 3 The Yu family, 1963 . 78 Figure 4 Shanghai’s January Revolution . 131 Figure 5 Yang Xiguang with younger sisters Yang Hui and Yang Xiaocheng in Wuhan . 173 Table 1 Rank and monthly salary scale of party and government workers, 1955 . 26 Table 2 The system of class labels . 40 Table 3 Average monthly wage, cost- of- living index, productivity, and gross industrial output, 1952– 1980 . 100 ABBREVIATIONS AC Author’s collection CCP Chinese Communist Party CCRG Central Cultural Revolution Group CCRM Center for Chinese Research Materials CMC Central Military Committee CRDB Chinese Cultural Revolution Database KMT Kuomingtang MZDWG Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao [Writings of Mao Zedong since the founding of the PRC] MZDZ Mao Zedong zhuan [Biography of Mao Zedong] PLA People’s Liberation Army PRC People’s Republic of China RMRB Renmin ribao [People’s daily] SMA Shanghai Municipal Archives SMPC Shanghai Municipal Party Committee WGHQ Workers’ General Headquarters ZYWXXB Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Selected important documents since the founding of the PRC] PREFACE AND AC KNOW LEDG MENTS The Cultural Revolution was arguably the most profound crisis that so- cialist China had ever undergone. The spectacle of widespread rebel attacks on the party-state authorities, instigated by the head of that apparatus, was extraordinary. In a letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, dated July 8, 1966, on the eve of the ferocious Red Guard movement, Mao Zedong remarked, “I pos- sess both some of the spirit of the tiger and some of the monkey. But it is the tiger spirit which is the dominant, and the monkey spirit secondary.” In traditional Chinese cultural symbolism, the monkey or Monkey King was the trickster fi gure that transgressed boundaries and defi ed authorities, while the tiger represented reverence for authority and imperial power. Dis- closing Mao’s complex state of mind as he was entering his last great battle, this intriguing statement marked Mao’s inherently contradictory role as both the chief of China’s Leninist party- state and the rebel leader, and un- cannily foreshadowed the zigzagging and volatile course of the Cultural Revolution, in which eruption and containment, pop u lar radicalization and po liti cal recentralization, and rebellion and suppression were closely intertwined. In this book, I tell the story of the disobedient, recalcitrant little monkeys or Monkey Kings that were unleashed and then herded back into the cage by Mao, the Great Leader. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, largely as a revolution from above, Mao had little sense of a clear- cut course of action. Although numerous Red Guards and rebels looked to the Maoist xvi Preface and Ac know ledg ments leadership for po liti cal guidance, the relationships between the purportedly omnipotent Mao and those who earnestly responded to his call were highly complicated and fragile. With the brief breakdown of the party hierarchy and propaganda apparatus, politi cal messages transmitted from above were interpreted in different ways by different agents. In responding to am- biguous or even contradictory central policies, rebel activists also responded to their own immediate socioeconomic and politi cal circumstances, and many who had long been discontented with China’s state- socialist institu- tions burst into the once tightly controlled po liti cal arena. Giving expres- sion to a myriad of grievances, the forces unleashed by Mao often took on lives of their own, and some young activists eventually began to question the dominant po liti cal order and challenge its fundamental ideological premises. The disorder caused by mass politi cal activism from below and power paralysis at the top created a momentous crisis that the Maoist leadership decided had to be resolutely resolved. This book is a history of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of its unruly margins, written with the purpose of better understanding and recuperating a moment of po liti cal and ideological possibilities that have been silenced in conventional history and understudied in existing scholar- ship. Exploring what may be considered a decentered account of the Cul- tural Revolution, this book attempts to give voices and historical visibility to those otherwise consigned to the peripheries of the movement, where the discontented, disadvantaged, and excluded pressed their demands by creatively exploiting the paralysis of the politi cal order. It explores how ruptural moments developed, po liti cal boundaries were reinterpreted and contested, transgressive forces were reworked or partially appropriated, and the dominant system, in neutralizing dissent or absorbing fi ssures, under- went transformations. With a focus on the rise and fall of the unruly and transgressive currents, this book argues that the more radical politi cal pos- sibilities of the Cultural Revolution were pressed by young grassroots crit- ics and activists who questioned the movement’s proclivity for attacking individual bureaucrats and putatively bourgeois ideas and customs. Their demo cratic and antibureaucratic impulses were accompanied by an acute concern with the orga ni zation of power in a socialist state. Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics cannibalized its own children and exhausted its once explosive energy. The demobilization of freewheeling mass politics after late 1967 constituted part of the process of restoring the centralized authority of the temporarily disabled party-state and became the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers that I argue eventually led to the historic changes in the
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