Released in 1955, flowers of the Nation (zu guo de hua duo) was one of the first children’s films produced after the founding of the PRC. It depicts an image of youthful innocence, beauty, vitality, and idealism that was to become an indelible part of the memories of the Red Guard generation. The most memorable part of the film is perhaps the theme song “Let Us Paddle” (rang wo men dang qi shuang jiang), sung by a children’s choir while the young characters of the film are rowing a boat on the lake in the famous Beihai Park in the center of Beijing. Many years later, in 2012, a blogger remembered: “This beautiful song drifted over my childhood and teenage years. The picturesque view of the White Pagoda gave me boundless imagination. Whenever I go to a KTV, I cannot help but request this song. When classmates hold gatherings and sing together, we often choose this song. Every time I listen to it or sing it, I am so inspired that tears roll down my face and the scenery in Beihai Park—‘the beautiful White Pagoda reflections on the surface of the lake’—will appear in my mind.”1 The title of the film, Flowers of the Nation, became the symbol of the young generation, the would-be Red Guard generation. It was the pride of the nation. This sense of pride was built into the identity of the generation. The song has a subtle message about the source of children’s happy life:
Having done the day’s homework,
We come here to enjoy happiness,
I asked you, my dear playmates,
Who has given us the happiness of life?
To the viewers of the film, the answer to the rhetorical question in the last line was self-evident: it was Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. As the blogger’s story shows, this song continues to be a favorite for the Red Guard generation sixty years later. It still moves people to tears.
Besides “flowers of the nation,” the young generation was also seen as “revolutionary successors.” Increasingly common after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, narratives about revolutionary successors had built to a crescendo by the eve of the Cultural Revolution. To the image of “flowers,” narratives about revolutionary successors added a tone of militancy and the sacredness of a historical mission. Stories of revolutionary violence, class struggle, martyrdom, and heroism saturated the media and everyday life in the years before the Cultural Revolution.
How did these images affect the young people? The previous chapter shows that Red Guards and rebels enacted a revolution in their verbal and physical battles, because the category of revolution had become hallowed in Chinese political culture, a central element in the imaginary of that political generation. This chapter explains how that political culture took on such power. Clearly, it is too simplistic to view it purely as the result of propaganda, because such a theory captures neither the complex context in which such powerful generational imaginary was produced nor the sense of agency that accompanied the socialization process.
Accordingly, I will argue that multiple conditions combined to produce the effects. My point is not that this generational imaginary was the cause of factional violence in the Cultural Revolution. In many ways, elements of this generational imaginary, such as a sense of idealism and a passion to change the world, were shared by youth in other countries in the same period. Rather, I argue that this generational imaginary was a necessary and important ingredient in the making of China’s Red Guards and rebels and that this ingredient worked because it was an integral part of a larger set of social and political circumstances.
Embodied Memories as Effects of Political Culture
Understanding the effects of the political culture of the early PRC on the Red Guard generation presents methodological difficulties. Official media material from the 1950s and 1960s, which is abundant, offers little information about how the political culture was received and experienced by its audiences. Even diaries from that period, which I have consulted as much as possible, have their limits when it comes to understanding people’s subjective experiences. As Sang Ye points out in his introductory essay written for an exhibition of Chinese diaries and notebooks, diaries could be sources of great personal danger when they could be seized by party officials and used as evidence against the diarist, as often happened in the Mao era.2 Under these conditions, writing down private thoughts and feelings in diaries took courage, and more often than not, diaries were written with potential public readers in mind. Still, diaries are priceless for gaining insights into the details of everyday life and for knowing some of the things the diarist did (such as “watched a movie”) if not what he or she felt and thought. My analysis therefore makes use of as many diaries as I can find for this period (see “Notes on Data” for details).
My main source of data in this chapter, however, is memory narratives. How people remember that political culture and what elements of it are remembered, I believe, reflects the influences of that culture. The assumption is that political culture works most effectively by coming to be embodied in its targeted audiences, through memories, emotions, and other forms of bodily behavior. This is the classical sociological question of how the social and symbolic worlds enfold themselves onto individuals and their bodies. Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman take this approach in their study of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Starting with Paul Connerton’s insight that societies remember through the incorporation of social memory into the human body (as well as through inscriptions onto cultural texts, e.g., monuments, and commemorative rituals),3 they argue that bodily complaints such as dizziness, exhaustion, and pain are expressions of social distress and suffering during the Cultural Revolution:
They are lived memories. They bridge social institutions and the body-self as the transpersonal moral-somatic medium of local worlds. The origins and consequences of these symbolizing sensibilities of lived distress and criticism reveal what those local worlds are about; how they change; and what significance they hold for the study of human conditions. That is to say, bodies transformed by political processes not only represent those processes, they experience them as the lived memory of transformed worlds. The experience is of memory processes sedimented in gait, posture, movement, and all the other corporal components which together realize cultural code and social dynamics in everyday practices. The memorialized experience merges subjectivity and social world.4
In the same way, I argue that for the political culture of the seventeen years prior to the Cultural Revolution to influence Red Guard behavior, it would also have to find its expression in embodied memories. Indeed, these embodied memories may persist to the present day. Thus, for example, to understand the prevalence of “red songs” in the popular culture of public square dancing in China today, it is essential to understand that for many of those retirees enthused about such public dancing, the tones and rhythms of the “red songs” are so much a part of themselves and their embodied memories that they are naturally predisposed to favor “red songs” over other musical genres in their daily dancing exercises. Following this reasoning, I will contend that the embodied memories of today, while inevitably reflecting contemporary conditions and concerns, may be studied as vindications of the powerful influences of lived experiences of the past.5
Retrospective accounts of members of the Red Guard generation, when touching upon the seventeen years before the Cultural Revolution or the processes and experiences of the Red Guard movement, are full of memories of the cultural symbols of the past. Particularly common are memories of heroic characters and famous scenes from films and literary works; memories of songs, music, and images; and memories of canonic texts such as Quotations of Chairman Mao and the Nine Commentaries.
The Nine Commentaries
The Nine Commentaries (jiu ping) are a series of nine polemical articles that the Chinese Communist Party published in People’s Daily and Red Flag to attack Soviet revisionism between September 1963 and July 1964. Masterminded by Mao himself and drafted by CCP’s top theorists, the Nine Commentaries made ideological and media preparations for the launching of the Cultural Revolution. The core issues in these polemics concerned the necessity to fight Soviet-style revisionism and prevent its happening in China,6 the need to forestall the American strategy of peaceful evolution, and the urgency to cultivate China’s younger generation as the successors of China’s revolutionary cause.
The Nine Commentaries had profound influences on the Red Guard generation. Its polemical style and powerful rhetorical flourishes would soon become a model for Red Guard polemics. A notebook in the Cultural Revolution diary collection at the University of Melbourne was full of excerpts from the Nine Commentaries. That it was dated September 1968 suggests that, although the Nine Commentaries were published in 1963–64, they continued to be popular quotations and reading materials in 1968.
The Nine Commentaries are also among the most frequently remembered texts among the Red Guard generation. Authors of memoirs are still proud of how they used to be able to recite long, famous passages from the Nine Commentaries. They talk about how they were moved by the righteous indignation of the rhetoric, and the solemn and awe-inspiring voice of the famous broadcasters who read the Nine Commentaries on radio.
Qin Hui (b. 1953) is a well-known liberal intellectual and a professor of history at Tsinghua University. When the Cultural Revolution started, Qin was thirteen years old and had just graduated from elementary school and entered junior high school in his hometown Nanning. From then until he was sent down to a village in 1969, he said that he did not have a single day of real school, but spent all his time “doing revolution.” Qin wrote that he entered junior high school in earnest search of revolution. He recalls especially the influence of the Nine Commentaries:
At that time I already had “beliefs.” When I was ten years old, the blazing “open debate” against Soviet revisionism attracted me powerfully. To this day I remember the scene of my whole family sitting next to the radio and listening to the Nine Commentaries. Although I only had a vague understanding, the righteous and solemn tone of the broadcaster made me feel the power of “truth.” I was captivated. For a long time, I was able to recite fluently the Nine Commentaries and some articles in a volume of debate titled Proletariat of the World Unite Against Our Common Enemy. I still remember some passages clearly, such as: “Friends, comrades! If you are men enough, step forward! Let each side in the debate publish all the articles in which it is criticized by the other side. That is what we are doing, and we hope you will follow our example. If you are men enough, you will. But having a guilty conscience and an unjust case, being fierce of visage but faint of heart, outwardly as tough as bulls but inwardly as timid as mice, you will not dare. We are sure you will not dare. Isn’t that so? Please answer!”7 Whenever I think of these lines, a passion to debate people in defense of truth surges up from inside.8
Xu Hailiang (b. 1944) is a retired hydraulic engineer and hydraulic historian and the author of a memoir about the Cultural Revolution in Wuhan titled The Chronicles of East Lake. He says that for him the Cultural Revolution may have begun in the 1950s. At that time he was attending high school in Chongqing, and high school life was just as tumultuous as for those who went to high school in the early 1960s, because in the 1950s they were already hearing news about de-Stalinization and antiparty cliques in the Soviet Union, raising for them serious questions about the future of international communism. He remembers reading The Young Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong de qing nian shi dai) written by Li Rui and being inspired by Mao’s example of a poor young man trying to change China and the world. When Xu started college in 1963 at the Wuhan College of Hydraulic and Electrical Engineering, the historic debate between the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had just begun. He found himself fully devoted to studying the Nine Commentaries and believed that the style of the debate significantly influenced the polemical style of the Red Guard movement.9
Jin Shan (b. 1948) is a well-known sports commentator and researcher in the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. In a blog entry dated February 24, 2012, he wrote about how the voices of famous anchors broadcasting the Nine Commentaries on radio inspired him:
Beginning on September 6, 1963, the Central Committee of CCP, in the name of the editorial boards of People’s Daily and the Red Flag magazine, published a series of polemics against the open letter of the Soviet Communist Party. These polemics were known as the Nine Commentaries. It seems that as newspaper articles their impact was not so clear. But once they were read by Qi Yue and Xia Qing on the Central People’s Radio Station, they stirred up cities and villages all over the nation. Their eloquent and uplifting voices were imitated by many people. . . . Undoubtedly, the broadcasting of the Nine Commentaries at that time has become the collective memory of all Chinese above the age of fifty-five. In those years, in many large and small cities, it was almost as if everyone was reading the Nine Commentaries, everyone was listening to the Nine Commentaries, and everyone was talking about the Nine Commentaries. The broadcasting of the Nine Commentaries on Central People’s Radio Station caused huge enthusiasm in its audience. After the Fifth Commentary was broadcast, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yi went to the Broadcasting Bureau and received all the staff members of the Nine Commentary broadcasting team.10
Films about Children, Youth, and War
The effective use of films for propaganda in the Maoist period is well recognized by scholars of Chinese cinema. As Xueping Zhong puts it, “the CCP had from the founding of the PRC looked upon film as an important propaganda (and entertainment) tool. As a result, films were made to be, either implicitly or explicitly, the discursive bearer of the CCP’s ideology.”11
In the 1950s and early 1960s, China produced about two hundred feature films, nearly half of which were war movies.12 In the same period, thirty-nine children’s films were produced, eight of which were war films.13 War films depict revolutionary heroes and martyrs in the War of Resistance against Japan and in the Civil War with the Guomindang troops. Not all films about children and youth had military themes; many of them were about socialist construction in the new China. Yet both types of films create heroic and idealistic characters for China’s younger generation to emulate.
War films were especially popular. They were didactic but entertaining, because the film professionals who made the films had war experiences themselves.14 Overall, as Ban Wang puts it, “Chinese revolutionary films had a tremendous and indelible emotional impact on audiences.”15 And, although they were ideological, many scenes provided emotional pleasures for viewers, allowing them “to enjoy a sensuous and aesthetic delight not dictated by political doctrines.”16 Table 2.1 shows a list of the films that are often mentioned in the retrospective writings of members of the Cultural Revolution generation.
Zhou Ziren was a student in Chongqing University at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and became the editor of the main newspaper of the August Fifteenth faction, August Fifteenth Battle News (featured in chapter 1). His memoir about his experiences during the period contains many stories and reflections about factional violence in Chongqing. Here is one:
Today, I still clearly remember an experience in Chongqing. It was at dusk and I forgot why, but I took a truck and went to the May First Vocation School on Shiyou Road. That place had been turned into the battle front of the two factions locked in armed struggle. There, the August Fifteenth had set up its headquarters for armed struggle for the Daping District. The dusky sky looked gloomy. On the small campus, the young boys and girls of the vocation school were preparing for war. They were in the prime of their lives. They should be wearing loose T-shirts or beautiful skirts and sharing their dreams and tender love with each other in the garden pathways at dusk. And yet, at this point, they were carrying stones in their dirty clothes and piling them in front of the building for military defense. Others were smashing the stones into small pieces and then carried them inside the building for use as weapons. Some girls were using their notebook paper to wrap limestone powder, one pack at a time. These were also to be used as weapons. All the windows were smashed and were sheltered only with straw curtains. This scene was every bit the same as that in the revolutionary film Tunnel Warfare, where the villagers were busily preparing to fight the invading Japanese troops.17
Li Musen, a leader of the August Fifteenth’s opposing faction Fight to the End (fan dao di), also wrote about factional battles in his memoir. He recalled that on August 13, 1967, his faction decided to attack the Jialing River bridge, which was guarded by its rival faction August Fifteenth. On the night of August 14, he and his comrades-in-arms transported heavy artillery to battle position using six trucks. At this point, he wrote, “I walked over to the Jiangbei District party committee compound to check out the best location for positioning the 12.7mm machine gun. . . . I chose a little hill on the right side. It was next to the auditorium. I set up the tripod next to the auditorium and placed the machine properly. I held the machine with my two hands. At this point, the shining image of the hero Chapaev shooting machine guns in the Soviet movie Chapaev appeared in my mind.”
My last story in this section is about a Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1958 and is currently employed in the international freight shipping business in his home town in Zhejiang. In his spare time, he blogs about books he has read, films he has seen, and about his childhood memories. I came across his blog accidently and then started communicating with him by e-mail. In one e-mail exchange, he wrote to me, “because of the rigorous and orthodox education I received as a child, there is more or less some kind of ‘red syndrome” (hong se qing jie) in my bones that will not be brushed away.”18 Both in his e-mails to me and in his blogs, he wrote about the deep influence films had on him. In a blog essay he posted on March 30, 2013, he wrote about his deep memories of the 1965 film The Young Generation: “Every generation has its own aspirations. Every generation has its own youth and ideals. If in the lives of many people there is always a book or a film that shapes their life trajectories, then undoubtedly in my own memory, one of the most memorable is the film The Young Generation.”
Much studied by literary scholars for its depiction of China’s idealistic youth right before the CR started,19 The Young Generation tells the story of Lin Lan and her brother Lin Yusheng. Lin Lan is a young woman in Shanghai who gives up a comfortable life and career opportunities to settle in a poor village in order to dedicate herself to socialist construction. In contrast, her brother Yusheng has worked briefly as a geologist in a remote Qinghai Province and, now back in Shanghai on sick leave, wants to get married and settle down in Shanghai instead of returning to his job in Qinghai. The film ends with Yusheng going back to Qinghai after reading a letter left for him by his biological parents written before they were executed in Guomindang’s prison. Mr. Zhang remembers that he was in elementary school when he watched the film, and the scene of Yusheng reading the letter always brought tears to his eyes; even after he grew up, when he watched this scene, he still felt deeply moved. Mr. Zhang wrote:
I can never forget the ending of the film—Lin Lan’s awe-inspiring words of farewell, delivered in [actress] Cao Lei’s youthful and sonorous voice. Perhaps for many people who came of age in that period, those words are an unforgettable part of our memory: “Good-bye, papa and mama. Good-bye Grandma Xiao. Goodbye, teachers and classmates! We’re leaving. We are going to assume our responsibilities on our jobs, just like seeds being scattered on earth. We will take roots, germinate, blossom, and bear fruits. Good-bye, we are setting off, bearing your hopes and blessings to create a beautiful future. Good-bye!”20
Music, Songs, and Images
Another source of influence for the Red Guard generation was music, songs, and images from posters and children’s picture books (lian huan hua). These cultural forms were used extensively by Red Guards in their verbal battles. Red Guard newspapers exploded with militant images and cartoons just as campuses and streets were often full of the blasting of Red Guard broadcasting stations. Music and battle songs would be broadcast mingled with verbal attacks and propaganda. The “Fight to the End” faction in Chongqing, for example, had its broadcast station in the post and telecommunications building in the center of the city near the Liberation Monument until the building was attacked and destroyed by the August Fifteenth on August 13, 1967.21
Stories of young Red Guards singing revolutionary songs in the face of danger were common in the Red Guard press and retrospective writings. One example is Zhu Qingfang (1951–1967) who died at age fifteen in a factional battle in Wuhan. She was then a junior high school student in Wuhan’s No. 8 Middle School and a supporter of Wuhan’s rebel organization Wuhan Workers Rebel Headquarters. On June 24, 1967, the Workers Rebel Headquarters, which was based in the Wuhan Workers Union Building, was attacked by its opponent Million Heroes. Million Heroes soon defeated the Workers Rebel Headquarters, but the Workers Rebels’ broadcasting station at the top of the building continued to blast out the rebels’ military song. According to the recollections of Yingji Changkong, a blogger who wrote about Zhu Qingfang’s death in 2006, the Million Heroes stormed into the broadcasting station and dragged a young girl out. The girl was Zhu Qingfang. Yingji Changkong wrote:
With crowds of Million Heroes pointing their lance at her chest, Zhu Qingfang was contemptuous and began to sing with deep emotion the popular revolutionary song “On Top of the Golden Mountain in Beijing.” As someone of the same generation, I can imagine what she was thinking at that moment. She must be thinking: In order to defend Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, I will view death as going home. She must be thinking: I’ll be like the little hero Liu Hulan, who died at my own age, and face the enemy’s murderous knife calmly. She must be thinking: After she dies, her comrades-in-arms will continue to fight for the revolutionary beliefs she deeply upheld.
Exacerbated by anger at the young girl’s performance of fearlessness and contempt, the attackers killed her on the spot.22
One of the most thoughtful stories about the power of posters is told by Xiaomei Chen, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California at Davis who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. In an essay published in 1999, Chen wrote:
I have no doubt that in my unconscious, posters became indelibly inscribed as part of my childhood world of wonders, my wanderings, and the emotions associated with growing pains. My weekend visits to history museums in the early 1960s (before the Cultural Revolution when museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions were closed), included bus trips to the architectural marvels known as the “ten great buildings” (shi da janzhu), which were constructed in a very short period of time to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the nation’s founding. I do not recall whether special posters were prompted to commemorate endeavors of this sort, but these edifices constituted the setting for many posters; the most frequently used was the Great Hall of the People. Surely there would also have been commemorative stamps (jinian youpiao), souvenir badges (jinian zhang) and postcards that would have found their way into the treasured space of my messy drawers. In this way painting, poster, artifact, museum, and national identities and narratives all become blurred, coalescing into the most valued memories of my childhood.23
Biographies and Literary Works
Books had a special appeal to the Red Guard generation (if only because of the lack of them), and many of the personal stories of this generation are about reading experiences. As a sacred text propagated nationwide, the Quotations of Chairman Mao, or the Little Red Book, was memorized by millions and the ability to quote passages from it in the middle of mass debates in the Cultural Revolution could decide the chances of winning or losing an argument. Many retrospective writings also mention the influences of biographies of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mao Zedong, as well as works of literature. Cai Xiang (b. 1953), a literary critic at Shanghai University, recalls:
[In my memory], I saw a thirteen-year old boy walking toward me. . . . As I walked to him slowly, I saw again the spirit of that time, a red age of heart-throbbing thrill. At that time, we were no longer having classes. Teachers were busy studying, making self-criticisms, and exposing one another. We took to the streets and angrily stared at those wearing sunglasses, long hair, sharp-pointed leather shoes, and snow-white shirt collars. We condemned all these people as hooligans. We worshipped Pavel Korchagin [hero in the Russian novel How the Steel Was Tempered] and emulated everything about the young Pavel. To train our bravery and will, we lined up to jump off the balcony on the second floor of our building. We had our own organization and published our own newspaper. . . . All our sense of crisis was brought out by that age. We congratulated ourselves for finally encountering a revolution.24
Mr. Huang Zhenhai, a painter, was born in 1950 and was a junior high school student in Chengdu in 1966. In an interview published in a 2012 issue of the online Chinese journal Yesterday, he explained why people got involved in factional fighting: “The cause of factional warfare could be traced to the war education before the Cultural Revolution. When we were kids, we dreamed of fighting wars, because wars produced the heroes we worshipped. The favorite films of young boys were all war films.”25 In addition to war films, Huang mentioned the popular books they read, such as Red Crag and Red Sun: “These books were all about the war years. . . . Growing up in this kind of atmosphere, many of us hated the fact that we were born too late. Otherwise, we could have joined the war against Chiang Kai-shek or against the Japanese. Who knows, we could have been a Little Soldier Zhang Ga or a Li Xiangyang.”26
Xie Quan was a high school student in Chengdu at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He recalled that he devoted himself seriously to the Cultural Revolution and from the autumn of 1967 to spring of 1968 was engaged in “deep and fearless explorations in search of truth.” He remembered, however, that he was in a spiritual crisis on the eve of the Cultural Revolution: “Before the Cultural Revolution began, I was in high school. I was in a state of spiritual crisis. I didn’t know clearly why I was studying and did not have a clear idea of the meaning of life.”27
He recalled that reading the biographies of Marx, Engels, and Mao Zedong gave him a sense of direction. He wrote,
I really like this passage written by the young Engels: “My heart was often fermenting and boiling. My not-always cool brain was burning endlessly. I strove for great thoughts which would cleanse the dross of my heart and turn energy into fiery flames.” I wrote these words in my own notebook and felt that they subtly captured my own state of mind. At that time, I worshipped Marx and Engels for their spirit to pursue truth and devote themselves to truth, their great learning, and their noble aspirations. . . . At that time, I also read Li Rui’s book Mao Zedong and the Revolutionary Activities of His Youth. I very much enjoyed some of the passages in the book. As a young man, Mao Zedong once wrote in his notebook: “As an individual, I’m small; as part of the cosmos, I’m grand. As an individual, I’m but a physical being; as part of the cosmos, I’m a spiritual being.” These words left a deep impression on me. I especially liked an axiom which the young Mao Zedong praised highly: “Civilize one’s spirit, bestialize one’s body.” I asked a classmate who wrote good calligraphy to copy these two phrases for me. When he was writing, I asked him to reverse the order of the two phrases, because I thought what was especially innovative about this saying was the use of the word “bestialize,” which forms an interesting contrast with “civilize.”28
Crafting a Revolutionary Tradition
In his reflections on the Chinese student movement in 1989, the literary critic turned political dissident and Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo remarks that “in Communist China, there is no word more sacred or richer in righteous indignation and moral force than ‘revolution.’” He continues,
Although ten years of reform have attenuated the sacred quality of “revolution” and weakened the political culture built upon class struggle, we still worship “revolution” in our bones. We are still the “revolutionary successors.” As soon as we meet with a large-scale political movement, our enthusiasm for “revolution” swells; as soon as the kindling of revolution is lit, it burns—the fire rapidly becoming flames that reach to heaven, consuming everything. It does not matter whether the movement is of the extreme Right or the extreme Left, autocratic or democratic, progressive or regressive; “revolution” supersedes all. From within any tendency, it is possible to excite our frenzied worship of “revolution.”29
Liu then goes on to argue that the 1989 protest movement, in its sublime struggles for democracy, was also a revolution born out of the worship of “revolution.” Where did this worship of revolution come from?
Although efforts to craft a revolutionary tradition had been an integral part of the process of the Chinese revolution, the most systematic efforts started in the Yan’an period.30 After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, such efforts took on a new urgency. A new revolutionary regime must not only rebuild economy and society but must also establish and maintain its political legitimacy through culture work such as the building of traditions. Constructing a revolutionary tradition became an essential part of this effort. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, as Perry puts it, “China had embarked on a sacred revolutionary crusade to save the nation and the world from the perils of Soviet ‘revisionism.’”31
This tradition celebrated martyrdom and revolutionary heroes, exalted class struggle and violence as a necessary means of revolution, and glorified death for the cause of revolution. The entire education of the Red Guard generation in the seventeen years prior to the Cultural Revolution, whether it was formal school education or informal education through films, arts, and children’s picture books, was suffused with these messages of heroic martyrdom.32
Chang-tai Hung’s study of political culture in the early PRC may be read as a work on the building of revolutionary traditions. The five parts of the book cover 1. the utilization of space such as the building of the ten monumental buildings in Beijing; 2. celebrations such as parades and revolutionary dances; 3. the treatment of history in museums and paintings; 4. the use of visual images in depicting war, resistance, heroes, and enemies; and 5. the building of memorials in celebration of heroes. Hung shows how Chinese leaders in the early years of the PRC mobilized both traditional and new cultural forms to construct a tradition of revolutionary heroism and glory and affirm the legitimacy of the new regime. The chapter on the “cult of the red martyr,” for example, shows that part of the new political culture was about the creation of a national institution in celebration of heroes who died in China’s revolutionary struggles. Called the “red martyrs,” this institution took on the quality of a political “cult,” calling on citizens to worship and emulate the red martyrs. Hung shows that the building of this “cult” was a top-down political project of the CCP created through a whole set of practices consisting of the establishment of a Martyrs Memorial Day, the building of war memorials, the publication of martyrs’ biographies, and even public trials of “counterrevolutionaries” charged with murdering communist martyrs.33 By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, an edifice of “revolutionary tradition” had been erected.
The institutions and practices of the “cult of the red martyr,” built in the 1950s, did not just remain in place during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was in fact the ultimate manifestation and proof of the profound effects of the revolutionary tradition. Of all aspects of the Cultural Revolution, the factional battles were the manifestations in their most concrete form. They reenacted familiar scenes in the representations of war and revolution that had become an integral part of the social and mental landscape of the Cultural Revolution generation prior to the Cultural Revolution.
Tradition Building as Person Making
Hobsbawm identifies three overlapping types of invented traditions: “a) those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour.”34 He finds that type a) was prevalent, while types b) and c) were implicit or derivative from type a).
Types b) and c) were evidently more important in China in the years before the Cultural Revolution. The building of the Chinese revolutionary tradition, such as the remaking and sacralization of the political space of the Tiananmen Square,35 had everything to do with legitimizing the new revolutionary regime and its political and moral authority. It also aimed explicitly at the remaking of citizenry, or rather the making of a new citizenry.36 The prime target of this political project was the Red Guard generation, the first cohort “born under the red flag.”
The Chinese Communist Revolution had started as a youth movement, and the Communist Party had always relied on youth as revolutionary vanguards. In the decade after the communist victory, the question of cultivating revolutionary successors took on unprecedented urgency.37 The socialist state devoted great attention to the making of the new socialist person.38 Thus, from early on, efforts to craft a revolutionary tradition in the period before the Cultural Revolution went hand in hand with political designs to cultivate revolutionary successors.
In the 1950s, shortly after the founding of the PRC, the “First National Conference of Cadres Involved in Adolescents’ and Children’s Work” formulated the educational objectives of the new nation: “Our educational aim is to nurture the new generation in correct ideological consciousness and revolutionary qualities, to give them basic cultural and scientific knowledge and healthy bodies, in short (to bring up) virtuous and wise future masters of a new society, outstanding sons and daughters of new China.”39 Throughout the period, but especially after 1956, an intense social and political atmosphere was created for the cultivation of the young generation as revolutionary successors. An editorial (June 1) in a 1959 issue of People’s Daily claimed that children were “the army for building communism in the future.” Another called for “stories about the revolutionary struggle and heroic and exemplary exploits in actual life” (June 1, 1960).40 In his analysis of the “revolutionization” campaign in the early 1960s, Townsend writes,
In short, Chinese youth were given a clear message to revolutionize themselves through study, struggle, and self-cultivation. They received, too, a list of the virtues they were to develop and the evils they were to oppose. But the revolutionary struggles in which they were to steel themselves were non-existent, and the evils were pervasive phenomena scattered throughout society without connection to specific classes or social strata. During the Great Leap, revolutionary spirit could be cultivated and used in a struggle against nature and all manifestations of conservative thought. By 1962, however, nature had proved unconquerable and some of the “conservative” notions of 1959 had acquired official sanction. The problem that lay beneath the propaganda appeals of 1962 was how youth were to revolutionize themselves in a non-revolutionary situation.41
The Red Guard cohort was cultivated as revolutionary romantics. According to a study of elementary school readers in use between 1957 and 1964, the political and behavioral values being taught included 1. devotion to the new society, 2. benevolence of the new society, 3. glorification of Mao Zedong, 4. the evils of Guomindang China, 5. social and personal responsibility, 6. achievement and altruistic behavior.42 The ideal socialist person would have an unquestioning belief in the Communist leaders and the socialist state and be ready to make self-sacrifices for their sake.43
A careful study of the emulation of heroes published in early 1968 shows that Chinese political culture prior to the Cultural Revolution had built an image of revolutionary heroism that directly fed and fired Red Guard factional struggles. Analyzing the diaries of officially promoted heroes, Mary Sheridan wrote that “a hero openly courts death, and when it comes it elevates him to a higher plane. There is a thrill of achievement which overrides the sense of loss . . . for a revolutionary hero, death holds neither pain, nor fear, nor disfigurement. Transfixed by inner visions, the hero watches himself pass into immortality. He dies in spiritual certainty.”44 This revolutionary romanticism had always been in the Maoist vision of revolution. Sheridan further wrote, “but in the Red Guard period this proclivity for the images and symbols of romanticism was carried to new extremes: (1) youth as the ideal condition of life; (2) the Faustian struggle to break through the physical constraints of tradition and old age by returning to or emulating the condition of youth; (3) destruction and renewal through perpetual rebellion of younger generations against older; (4) the glorification of death and sacrifice; (5) freedom conceived as service to an immortal ideal.”45
This extraordinary identification with the socialist state was characteristic of Chinese youth before the Red Guard movement. Patriotism had been a dominant force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. It was a major inspiration for Chinese youth dedicated to national liberation and modernization. The socialist state successfully inducted this historical energy into new circumstances and transformed it into a passion for the socialist state and its charismatic leaders.
Parallel to this passion was a utopian vision of the future. Gloating over their recent revolutionary victory, Chinese communist leaders imagined the imminent realization of Marx’s vision of a communist society. National projects of industrialization were launched to accelerate this process.46 With an historical identity of revolutionary vanguards, Chinese youth were the “moral elect” to whom the call of utopianism appealed directly. As Mi Hedu puts it,
The political education that was poured into us in the 17 years before the Cultural Revolution played an important role in forming our world views. In short, it was a Marxist idealism and a sense of social responsibility and mission centered upon the theory of class struggle. . . . The excessive political education cultivated a grandiose political zeal in our generation, which, compared with other social groups, was much more radical and had a much stronger sense of political participation and sense of intervention in social life.47
How did top-down approaches to the building of a revolutionary tradition and the molding of revolutionary successors appeal to their targeted audience? Two factors were indispensable to the success of these policies. One was the multiple, all-encompassing cultural forms that were mobilized for the molding of the youth just discussed. The other was the social world of the youth, which gave a sense of reality to the narratives of revolution by creating a sense of enchantment and danger.
A Social World of Enchantment and Danger
The idyllic and romantic atmosphere of the film Flowers of the Nation shows that the youth of the Red Guard generation lived in a fairy-tale world in the 1950s and early 1960s. This was a world of enchantment, mesmerization, and danger, one that combined a sense of infinite possibilities and hopes with a sense of danger and threat. It was this world that gave reality, urgency, and potency to the political culture of that historical era. These two worlds were juxtaposed in the mass media campaigns, policies, and the entire cultural atmosphere of that time. The result was a peculiar way of imagining the world and imaging the purpose of life. The liberal intellectual Qian Liqun conveys the sense of danger in his essay “The Way Our Generation Imagined the World”: “In the 1950s and 1960s, Mainland China underwent two external embargoes—the blockade by the Western societies led by the United States in the 1950s, and the blockade by the international communist movement led by the Soviet Union. This had a profound impact on the thoughts, characters, culture, and psychological structures of the intellectuals who grew up during these twenty years. Even to this day the impact has not yet been adequately appreciated.”48
Qian’s essay also captures that sense of enchantment in his generation: “In our minds, the world consisted of ‘oppressors and the oppressed,’ the former being our enemies and the latter our brothers, sisters, and friends. Our ideal and our historical mission was to eliminate all of that, both in China and abroad: all the phenomena of oppression, exploitation, and slavery. Perhaps it was a Utopian ideal and pursuit, but we were utterly sincere. We tended to view international issues as extensions of the national issues, and this way of thinking is a particular trademark of our generation.”49
The construction of this social world was influenced by Mao’s theory of permanent revolution and Mao’s perception of domestic trouble and international threat in a cold war context.50 Propagated in 1958, Mao’s theory of permanent revolution reflected his deep anxieties over and contradictory assessments of the conditions of Chinese socialism. The completion of the first Five-Year Plan in 1956 was hailed as a milestone, marking the young nation’s successful transition into the stage of socialism in the Marxist vision of human progress. Mao was apparently euphoric about China’s economic achievements. On his Moscow visit in November 1957 to attend the Conference of World Communist and Workers’ Parties, Mao heard Nikita Khrushchev’s speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, when Khrushchev pledged that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in major industrial indicators in fifteen years. In his own speech Mao surprised his fellow communists from around the world by boasting that China would surpass the United Kingdom in fifteen years.51 He returned from his Moscow visit to prepare and launch the “Great Leap Forward” so as to leapfrog China from socialism into what utopian Marxism viewed as the final destiny of humankind—communism.
While preparing to launch China into a communist society, Mao was burdened with worries about both domestic challenges and international threats. This led to a series of polices and campaigns aimed at forestalling Soviet-type revisionism and American imperialism. First was the perceived danger of Soviet revisionism to the international communist movement. De-Stalinization by Khrushchev led Mao to fear a future de-Maoization in China. Such concerns were exacerbated by the large-scale popular demonstrations in Poland and Hungary at the end of 1956. Reflecting on these events, Mao was quoted as saying: “It is destined that our socialist revolution and reconstruction will not be smooth sailing. We should be prepared to deal with many serious threats facing us both internationally and domestically. As far as the international and domestic situations are concerned, although it is certain both are good in a general sense, it is also certain that many serious challenges are waiting for us. We must be prepared to deal with them.”52
To forestall similar happenings in China, Mao decided to reform the party. A rectification campaign was launched in May 1957, calling for a “hundred flowers” to bloom. In a short period of five weeks, intellectuals and students poured out so many pent-up grievances against the party that the party hurriedly gathered itself together to fight back. As a result, about four hundred thousand rightists—persons who had spoken against the party—were seized and subjected to punishments, including imprisonment.53 From the unexpected and unprecedented outspokenness of the intellectuals, Mao and other Chinese party leaders derived the message that “it would be extremely hazardous to base the country’s economic future on their skills.”54 Mao’s hope rested on the young generation.
On his same visit to Moscow in November 1957, at a meeting with Chinese students studying in the Soviet Union, Mao expressed his faith in China’s young generation in the following terms: “The world is yours as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hopes are placed in you.”55 These remarks were to inspire millions in the following years to live up to Mao’s high expectations. That Mao made these remarks in the context of the imminent Sino-Soviet split and Mao’s prediction of a third world war added a somber premonition to what may now sound like simple words of encouragement to young people.56 As Perry notes in her study of the construction of the Anyuan revolutionary tradition, paranoid as those warnings about “hidden counterrevolutionaries” and “secret agents” may seem today, “events on the ground at the time did lend some credence to these dire admonitions. In the early years of the PRC, the Communist Party’s hold on power appeared more tenuous than is sometimes remembered.”57
The international environment became more treacherous in the years after the 1957 Moscow conference. In May 1957 the Nationalists in Taiwan reached an agreement with the United States that permitted the emplacement on Taiwan of U.S. matador surface-to-surface missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into the Chinese mainland. The most serious event was the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958, which, according to recent studies, almost pushed the world to the verge of a nuclear war. Although Jian Chen argues that China’s abrupt bombing of the Jinmen Island, an outpost of the Guomindang regime in Taiwan, was Mao’s strategy of using anti-imperialism to mobilize domestic fervor for the Great Leap Forward, Nancy Tucker shows that American policy makers seriously considered the possibility of launching nuclear warheads at targets in mainland China.58
Although the military crisis ended soon when China abruptly stopped shelling Jinmen Island, Mao came to be preoccupied with the threat of “peaceful evolution.” According to the memoirs of Bo Yibo,59 who was the PRC’s first minister of finance and then a vice premier from 1957 to 1966, although Mao paid attention to the U.S. secretary of state John Dulles’s strategy of “fading” Chinese communism through “peaceful evolution” as early as in 1953, it was not until 1958 and 1959 that Mao brought up the issue of preventing “peaceful evolution.” By then the mass protests in Poland and Hungary and the de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union had convinced Mao that the American strategy of peaceful evolution was already taking effect.
Other developments further enhanced the Chinese regime’s perception of threat. In September 1959, the Soviet leader Khrushchev met with President Dwight Eisenhower on a visit to the United States. He then briefed Chinese leaders that Eisenhower wanted peaceful coexistence. The Chinese leaders did not share Khrushchev’s view. Chinese analysis of the situation pointed to the “irreconcilable hostility of the imperialists to the socialist camp.”60 Eisenhower’s strongly worded State of the Union address in 1960 served to confirm Chinese fears. Then on July 16, 1960, the Soviet Union notified the Chinese Foreign Ministry of its decision to withdraw Soviet advisers from China, marking the final rupture between China and the Soviet Union. From 1961 to 1963, while President Kennedy was in office, American commitment to South Vietnam increased. After Lyndon Johnson assumed office, the American commitment escalated. Johnson and his advisers “came to see the struggle in Vietnam as one which the West had to win.”61 Subsequently, Chinese aid to North Vietnam increased.
By 1964 the Chinese foreign minister was assuring foreign experts that “the Chinese were prepared for attack by the United States from the south, the Russians from the north, and the Japanese from the east.”62 On April 12, 1965, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued a directive on preparing for war.
It was in this tense international context that China waged its sustained polemics against Soviet revisionism, flooding the nation with warnings of imminent danger. And it was this social world that made texts such as the Nine Commentaries and films like Tunnel War fare so meaningful and relevant to the youth of the time.
