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Introduction: Put Politics in Command Christopher Connery Introduction: Put Politics in Command Christopher Connery In a converted warehouse in the Putuo District of Shanghai, Liu Debao, former Red Guard and active in the “Sent Down Youth” alumni orga- nizations in Shanghai,1 maintains a warehouse of pre- 1978 memorabilia, mostly from the fifties and sixties, comprising everyday-life objects, com- plete issues of newspapers and unofficial publications, and, most impor- tantly, over three thousand reels of film, largely uncatalogued. A photog- rapher by profession and an insatiable collector by nature, he had noticed 1. This refers to movements that sent millions of young people who volunteered or were, more often, assigned by the authorities to terms in the countryside during the sixties and into the seventies, some to nearby communes and some to the edges of the country, in Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, and Yunnan. The groups coalesce around a variety of affective relationships to this time of their youth: some organize around social assistance to their former villages; some petition, protest, and pursue legal remedies for the services and benefits denied to them by the Shanghai municipal government; some gather in parks and other public places to talk, sing, and dance. For a history of the movement, see Bonnin 2013. A recent nine-hour documentary by Gao Zipeng and Wu Meng, Shanghai- ren (Shanghainese [2014]), documents the protest movement of Shanghainese returnees from Xinjiang over the course of the last few years. boundary 2 46:2 (2019) DOI 10.1215/01903659-7496960 © 2019 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/2/1/569078/0460001.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 2 boundary 2 / May 2019 that as the economic reforms were gathering strength, the culture depart- ments of various municipalities and counties were throwing out archived film footage of documentaries, instructional films, feature films, and news- reels from the pre- 1976 era and began to collect them, traveling great dis- tances to buy reels of film, even when he did not know their contents. His collection is probably the largest of its kind. Beginning around fifteen years ago, the warehouse became a sort of museum, and he would occasion- ally screen reels from the collection to a curious assortment of people: neighbors, film history buffs from the young Shanghainese culturati, left- ists of various ages and stripes, former Sent Down Youth, and occasion- ally foreign students or academics. He usually began the screenings, using one of the several film projectors he had salvaged from the era, with silent reels of Red Guard processions in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Begin- ning with the first Red Guard rally on August 18, 1966, Mao “received” over 12,000,000 Red Guards on eight occasions as they marched through the square, dressed largely in khaki uniforms, with red flags and red books raised high. The reels consisted largely of long takes of the marching masses with occasional close-ups, and in the dim space of the warehouse, crowded with bric- a- brac dense with nostalgia for a different age, the sea of khaki and red on the screen produced a mesmerizing reverie, accentuated by the lack of soundtrack. That was appropriate, because Mao himself was largely silent on these occasions, standing on the dais at the gate of the old imperial city and waving slowly to the sea of enthusiasm that emanated from below. There were no speeches, for it was the body of Mao that mat- tered. On one occasion, as reported in the November 18, 1966, edition of the Peking Review, he turned to other leaders assembled on the dais and uttered his famous line, to be reproduced in big-character posters and ban- ners throughout the country over the next few years, “You should put poli- tics in command, go to the masses and be one of them, and carry out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution even better” (nimen yao gao zheng- zhi guashuai, dao qunzhongzhong qu, ba wuchanjiejiwenhuadageming jin- xing dao di). Put politics in command! It of course has a strange ring today. At one screening, a young art student in the room considerably less mes- merized than some others voiced what I knew was a not uncommon senti- ment among her coevals, and said to Liu Debao, “I’m curious. When I look at those films what I see is a mass of brainwashed lunatics. It’s completely alien to me and I can’t understand it.” Liu Debao answered her, “Thanks for asking that, and I know that many young people think like you do. But you should understand that at that time we were young students—junior high Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/2/1/569078/0460001.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 Connery / Introduction: Put Politics in Command 3 school or senior high school—and we were struggling against power in our schools and in our cities, and it was a difficult struggle. So to be in Tianan- men Square with a million comrades, and to know that Chairman Mao him- self was with us, gave us a lot of strength for the work that we were doing.” In a politicized era, tropes such as “manipulation”—the consensus view of the Cultural Revolution today is that the young activists were mobi- lized and controlled by forces at the center—cannot capture the dynamic all- pervasiveness of the political. And political time has a spatial dimen- sion as well. Squares, homes, schools, workplaces, and formerly intersti- tial spaces are repurposed for struggle, discussion, communication, and excess. The sparks of mobilization find ready fuel in institutional and social combustibility; latent fissures become glaringly real. Mobilization was a central component of political life in China in the revolutionary period, and while it was in many cases the modality of state authority, the dynamics of mobilization commonly exceeded its explicit linguistic or programmatic con- tent, providing points of reference and a discursive field within which move- ment struggles were articulated in a variety of ways. Yiching Wu’s recent book, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, shows how mobilizational programs articulated at the center—struggle against the bourgeoisie, antibureaucracy, antirevisionism—not only served the state mobilizational function but engendered a host of unintended and sometimes unwelcome consequences among the diverse revolutionary movements. Elizabeth Perry and collaborators have documented the vari- ous ways in which the dynamic of mobilization traversed the pre- and post- reform periods, retaining, to some extent, formal efficacy even in recent times when it would seem to most that it is the economic and not the politi- cal that is most firmly in command (Heilman and Perry 2011). In her dis- cussion of mobilization in the reform period, Perry’s work refers primarily to mobilizational efficacy in the differential implementation of central state development- oriented programs in various localities rather than to scenes of political struggle as such. But the point was that reform- era economic reorganization frequently needed the quickening of “Mao’s invisible hand.” For much of PRC history, mobilizational goals had a dual character, expressed in the ubiquitous two- part slogan “Carry out the revolution and grasp production.” During the reform period, and intensifying after the early 1900s and beyond, the constriction of this energy into the field of the eco- nomic represented a developmentalist hegemony that consolidated the dual character of earlier mobilization discourse into the sphere of production alone, even though this could take the quasi- political discursive form of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/46/2/1/569078/0460001.pdf by guest on 03 October 2021 4 boundary 2 / May 2019 “national development.” The discrepant and contradictory elements of the earlier doubled character had come to the fore in the decade between 1958 and 1968, the period from the Great Leap Forward through the early years of the Cultural Revolution—a period of both economic and political crisis. This consolidation—from production/revolution into production alone—was facilitated at the onset of the reform period by the party- state’s repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, whose excesses and degeneration made it easy for the state to enlist popular support for this turn away from the political as it had been actualized in the earlier period. (See Yiching Wu’s essay in this issue.) Wang Hui identifies the discursive field in which mobilizational lan- guage operates today as “depoliticized politics,” a condition typifying parlia- mentary democracies as well as nominally socialist China: Contemporary China’s depoliticization process is yet another kind of “political exchange” process: the old political elites’ efforts to trans- form themselves into representatives of special-interest groups while still holding on to political power. Thus, special interest groups and transnational capital must pass through a “depoliticizing” exchange process in order to get the support of the power appa- ratus. Because marketization reform is a process promoted by the state, multiple aspects of the state power apparatus are, in the name of modernization and reform, collapsed into the economic sphere. (In a state- party system, this must include the political party appara- tus as well.) Thus the “political exchange” becomes a “depoliticized power exchange.” Its primary form has been the “reform of property rights,” which has led to large- scale interest- motivated reorganiza- tion. (Wang 2006: 694) A context for much of the work presented in this issue is the ambigu- ous and contradictory state of the political in China today, for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is simultaneously a party of depoliticization, as in Wang Hui’s sense above, and the operator of the master discourse of the political, thus placing Chinese citizens’ engagement with the political squarely within the terrain of its prior negation or deferral.
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