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Debunking Maoism in the Name of Revolution

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Debunking Maoism in the Name of Revolution Debunking Maoism in the Name of Revolution: A Confucian Endeavour Presentation at the Conference “Backward Toward Revolution: A Festschrift to Celebrate the Scholarship of Professor Edward Friedman” Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 24 October 2009 Guo Jian, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Quite consistently, Ed takes a normative stand on revolution. He believes that revolution is the invention of the means to defeat injustice, to end oppression, to attain freedom and dignity. His notion of revolution is Hegelian, and Platonic, too: he sees revolution as rooted in the very nature of the human species, in its desire to transcend extant inhuman constrictions, to liberate itself from the shackles of its own creation.1 Earlier this year, when Ed sent me his article “Rethinking Revolution,” I thought that I pretty much shared all of Ed‟s views, but I was not sure about this one. We then had some email exchanges that seemed to me to characterize differences between a skeptical empiricist and an idealistic rationalist. I cited Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu‟s well-known work Farewell to Revolution but fell short of endorsing their preference for reformism.2 Rather, I took an easier position of a liberal-minded linguist: if most language users take “revolution” in a formal way—a drastic and fundamental change in whatever direction—then the normative connotations a few people embrace eventually would not hold. But Ed wrote upon return from a conference on revolution, “Every time a speaker on Cuba referred to the repressive state as THE REVOLUTION I died.” Despite my skepticism, Ed‟s notion of revolution somehow stuck in my mind and began to haunt 1 me. But I didn‟t really think much of it until a chance brought two of us together in Beijing this past summer. It was a fairly cool day in late June. As Ed and I walked out of Xihua Hotel after a visit to Mr. Yang Jisheng, the author of an investigative study of the Great Leap famine, at the office of the Chinese journal Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋), I asked him, “What shall I write for the October Fest? How about you and our Wisconsin China seminar?” “No,” he said, “No. Write something about China.” “Think of something about China,” he said again as he waved for a taxi to stop and left in it. That was the moment, I think, when I first saw a possible connection between Ed‟s attachment to revolution and that of the contributors and readers of Yanhuang Chunqiu, one of the very few still readable journals coming out of mainland China. Yanhuang Chunqiu is an austere-looking monthly with clear liberal leanings. It focuses on modern Chinese history, especially the history of revolution. Its typical contributors and readers are a unique group of intellectuals and veteran revolutionaries in at least their late 60s and older who see themselves as “true at both ends” (两头真). At one end was their youth in which they dedicated themselves truly to what they believed to be a noble cause of revolution, battling against tyranny and injustice under both corrupted governments and the Japanese military power and fighting for a free, democratic new China. At the other end is their old age, the present moment, when they look back and reflect on their middle years with much disillusionment and regret: the long years in which so many crimes were committed in the name of revolution and in which they were misguided and unwittingly betrayed their early selves. In the meantime, however, their youthful dream of justice and freedom is revived, and for the sake of that dream, their dedicated efforts resume. Prominent among the people in this group are Li Shenzhi, He Jiadong, and Li Rui. 2 One finds a perfect illustration of this phenomenon in a two-page article in the February 2008 issue of Yanhuang Chunqiu which, despite its brevity, prompted unprecedented enthusiastic responses from the readers. The article, written by the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Xinhua News Agency Mu Guangren and edited by Yang Jisheng, is entitled “Ostrovsky: „What We Have Built Is Completely Different from What We Strove for!‟”3 Nikolai Ostrovsky was a well-known Soviet revolutionary hero, whose autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1932-1934) inspired idealistic youths towards revolution in Russia, in China, and in many parts of the world. In the last days of his short 32 years of life, however, Ostrovsky learned about the persecutions of his former comrades during the beginning stage of Stalin‟s purge, and he expressed profound disillusionment and protested Stalin‟s betrayal of revolutionary ideals in those words that Mu Guangren put in the title of his Yanhuang Chunqiu article. What Mu does in the article is not just to tell the Ostrovsky story but to reflect upon the Russian-Chinese parallels in the tragic life-long journey of revolutionary-minded intellectuals. What he emphasizes is not just the discrepancy between “what we have built” and “what we strove for” but also a reaffirmation of “what we strove for.” In other words, rather than rejecting in toto the revolution for which most of the Soviet and Chinese 20th century was known, he is offering a critique of the dark legacies of Stalin and Mao in the name of revolutionary ideals they betrayed. This was that “something about China” that made me reconsider Ed‟s musings of revolution. Here are two better known examples. Liu Binyan, a most unrelenting critic of Mao‟s China, launched his criticism from what he believed to be a perspective of true communism; he remained a revolutionary all his life. Du Daozheng, editor-in-chief of Yanhuang Chunqiu, dismissed the CCP‟s post-1949 legacy and called for a return to the program of “New 3 Democracy” of the 1940s that inspired revolutionary youths of his generation but was abandoned by Mao as soon as the CCP took power.4 Considering the context of the current conference, one is tempted to say that Du‟s proposal is almost one that goes “backward toward revolution.” Motivations seemed to differ significantly in the three cases I have just cited. Mu Guangren‟s piece begins by quoting a well-known passage from How the Steel Was Tempered: “Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past . .”5 His reflections, and the resonances of his readers‟ too, on the Chinese-Russian parallel, the parallel of their lives and Ostrovsky‟s life, showed a yearning for a meaningful life as well as a deep fear for a wasted life, an anxiety that was intensified by the bleak reality of post-revolution Soviet Union and China and betrayed by the fact of his omitting the second half of the passage: “so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world — the fight for the Liberation of Mankind.”6 In other words, there are complex psychological forces behind their will to believe in revolution. We see less of this in Liu Binyan. His being forced into silence in his middle years—between the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the end of the Cultural Revolution—also saved him from a fall into ideological confusion and self- betrayal that most of his former comrades experienced during that period. So, rather than “true at both ends,” he seemed consistent in his firm belief in his version of communism as contrary to a Maoist fallacy. Finally, Du Daozheng‟s embrace of the program of “New Democracy” both articulated and abandoned by Mao could be at once a reaffirmation of his earlier faith and a strategy for promoting political reform; he might hope to achieve the latter end by evoking democratic ideas and ideals from the legacy of the CCP itself. As delineated above, each of the three cases of veteran revolutionaries is rather unique, but they have one thing in common: they 4 remain faithful to the idea of revolution. They share the goal of democracy with intellectual elites like Li Zehou, Liu Zaifu, and Fang Lizhi, but, rather than rejecting revolution itself as Li, Liu, and Fang did, they denounce Maoism in the name of revolution. This is also to say that they share Ed‟s normative stand on revolution and would agree with Ed that as the means to defeat injustice and oppression, revolution is not dead. In China‟s case, reclaiming it against a Maoist fallacy could be a way to democracy. It seems to me that such efforts to define, differentiate, and reclaim can be aptly called “Confucian.” They are Confucian endeavours in at least two ways. First, in rectifying a name （正名）by redefining it, historicizing it, and reclaiming it, as Confucius himself did with his ideal of humaneness （仁）as evidenced in the rites （礼）of Zhou, they are trying to salvage what may still be a useful concept from the past for the purpose of informing the action of the present and clarifying the vision of the future. Second, the effort to uphold and clarify the notion of revolution is heroic; the odds against it, like the challenges Confucius met for his own life- long effort, are so enormous that one may call such efforts Quixotic. On the one hand, there is the popular aversion to revolution after a tumultuous and violent 20th century gave it a bad reputation. On the other hand, “revolution” or “revolutionary,” like “left,” “radical,” and “liberal,” is among the most confusing terms today even for those who embrace them.
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