In the fifty years since its end, the Cultural Revolution has never been forgotten in China. But it is remembered selectively, and what is remembered depends on who does the remembering and when and is highly contested.¹ In broad terms, each decade since the 1980s has had a different memory politics. The general features of Cultural Revolution memories in each decade are significantly shaped by the politics of that period and the social conditions of specific units of the Red Guard generation as agents of memory.

As a result, contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are broken and fragmented. In some sense, they have fallen along the lines of factional divisions formed during the period of the Red Guard movement. This suggests that Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to exorcise the ghost of factionalism in the political campaigns following the end of the Cultural Revolution were not entirely successful and that the factional conflicts in 1966–1968 continue to haunt Chinese society and politics in the twenty-first century.

The memory practices concerning the Cultural Revolution lend support to an interactive theoretical model that integrates two competing perspectives in theories of collective memory.² In the presentist model, what is remembered of the past and how it is remembered depend on present circumstances and the mediated practices of memory.³ In the cultural model, “the present is rooted in the past” and the past “is in some respects, and under some conditions, highly resistant to efforts to make it over.”⁴ In an integrated model, memories of the past are the result of interactions between the deep-rooted character of past experiences and the conditioning of the present. Consistent with an integrated perspective, we will see how broad shifts in the national trends of memory narratives in the decades since the Cultural Revolution are significantly influenced by contemporary politics, but we will also see how the liminal experiences of the Red Guard movement and the sent-down period have not only left deep memories but in fact continue to shape thoughts and behavior today.

De-Maoification in the 1980S

The 1980s was a forward-looking decade, a period of consolidating a new regime of post-Mao leadership and jump-starting economic reform. Public memories of the Cultural Revolution were condemnatory and negative, reflecting the rising fortunes of party leaders who had been persecuted in the Cultural Revolution as well as general social discontent with the CR. The faction that emerged as the victors of the Cultural Revolution, represented by Deng Xiaoping at the top and by conservative Red Guards at the grassroots, dominated the narration of the history and memories of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Most memory stories are told by intellectuals and party cadres who were victimized in the Cultural Revolution.

In the late 1970s, as the Mao era came to an end, its history and memory became arenas of intense political struggle, and retrospective views of the CR reflect “the factional balance of power at the top.”5 The fall of Mao’s handpicked successor, Hua Guofeng, and the rise of Deng Xiaoping were played out in these symbolic struggles. One of the first feats Hua accomplished in his six years as China’s post-Mao leader (1976–1982) was the construction of the Chairman Mao Memorial in Tiananmen Square. In his maneuvers to undermine Hua, Deng similarly resorted to mnemonic struggles, though of a different kind. As Harry Harding puts it, Deng “encouraged popular pressure for a more explicit repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and a more rapid and thoroughgoing rehabilitation of its victims.”⁶

Popular pressures for repudiating the Cultural Revolution took two concrete social forms. One was the “literature of the wounded” literary movement, the other was the Democracy Wall social movement discussed in chapter 6. Works of the “literature of the wounded” tell stories of the victims of the Cultural Revolution, where the culprit was invariably Lin Biao and the “Gang of Four” and their zaofanpai followers, while the Cultural Revolution was dismissed as “ten years of disaster.” Although the term literature of the wounded applies mainly to works of art and literature, memoirs produced by party cadres and intellectuals who were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution fall under this category and were published in large numbers.

In comparison, the Democracy Wall movement was much more wide-ranging in its assessment and critiques of the CR. The wall posters and unofficial publications of the movement voiced alternative views. These alternative critiques were linked with demands for a democratic political reform, which could potentially undermine Deng’s own position. Consequently, as Kleinman and Kleinman put it, “when these popular expressions began to coalesce into the early phase of a movement for democratization, they were attacked. Thus the social memory of the Cultural Revolution was silenced or reworked in an authorized version.”7

In these two movements, then, mnemonic practices about the Cultural Revolution were appropriated as a means of winning political gains by the emerging Dengist regime. The CR was made to form a historical foil to the rise and moral rejuvenation of the post-Mao regime. Yet when popular grievances appeared to be going off political limits, Deng withdrew his support. Consequently, a more coercive regime of memory control shaped up.

Deng’s regime shaped the history and memories of the CR through party policies and political campaigns. The historic communiqué of the Third Plenum of the CCP Central Committee in 1978 stated that the problems of the Cultural Revolution “should be summed up at the appropriate time,”⁸ thus indicating that an official settling of accounts would take place sooner or later. Shortly afterward, a process of de-Maoification was initiated. In February 1979 an official party policy directive was issued to suspend distribution of the Little Red Book of Mao quotations.⁹ Another party directive was issued in July 1980 to cut back on “propagating individuals,” specifically minimizing the presence of Mao portraits and statues in public spaces. One month later, the National People’s Congress removed article 45 from the PRC Constitution, thus stripping citizens of the four “great freedoms” to speak out freely, air views fully, hold great debates, and write big-character posters. These “four greats” were the officially endorsed “weapons of struggle” in the Cultural Revolution and had provided some degree of legitimacy to all forms of social protest.¹⁰ Removing them from the constitution was another strike at the popular radicalism of the Cultural Revolution. A key document in the control of CR memory was the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC.” This document officially denounced the CR as a ten-year disaster for which Mao and a small handful of leftist radicals were held responsible. Mao, however, was partially absolved from his responsibility. His was not only “the error of a great proletarian revolutionary,” but he personally “led the struggle to smash the counterrevolutionary Lin Biao clique” and “made major criticisms and exposures of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and others, frustrating their sinister ambition to seize supreme leadership.”11

The rehabilitation of individuals who suffered persecution in the Cultural Revolution and the criminalizing of perpetrators were implemented through public spectacles. In 1978 and 1979 numerous funerals and memorial services were held all over China for government cadres and intellectuals persecuted to death in the Cultural Revolution. Following the rehabilitation program, the new regime turned its attention to criminalizing the CR radicals, both top leaders like the “Gang of Four” and leading rebel Red Guards. The nationally televised trial of the “Gang of Four” in January 1981 marked the climax of this criminalizing project.¹²

At the end of 1983, an inner-party rectification campaign was launched to remove “three types of people” (san zhong ren) from official positions.¹³ Although the three types of people were identified as “followers of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, those seriously affected by factional ideas, and the ‘smashers and grabbers’ of the Cultural Revolution,”¹⁴ they were interpreted to refer broadly to Cultural Revolution zaofanpai rebels. Following the rectification, a nationwide campaign was launched in 1984 to “totally negate the Cultural Revolution.”

Ostensibly to root out Cultural Revolution factionalism, the campaign to cleanse “three types of people” was an inversion of the factional politics of the CR. An article published in a 1983 issue of Academic Forum, the official organ of the Guangxi Social Sciences Academy, alludes to the resistance the campaign must have met in Guangxi: “At present, Guangxi is cleansing ‘three types of people’ and handling those who seriously violated laws and regulations in the Cultural Revolution. This work is a struggle to overcome factional spirit with party spirit. Yet some people are spreading the view that “in the past, it was this faction that struggled against that faction. Now it is that faction that is struggling against this faction.”¹⁵

Despite some degree of resistance against the total rejection of the CR and despite the fact that leading rebel Red Guards such as Kuai Dafu, Nie Yuanzi and Han Aijing were imprisoned and their voices muted,¹⁶ the top-down de-Maoification campaign in the early 1980s worked in a post-Mao era when Maoist Cultural Revolution policies and ideologies appeared increasingly out of sync with the popular mood for political relaxation and economic development. In that sense, de-Maoification was intertwined with the cultural movement for a “new enlightenment” and “liberation of the mind” in the 1980s.17

Mao Fever in the 1990s

Reversing the cultural trends of the 1980s, the 1990s opened with a “Mao fever” and closed with a wave of zhiqing (sent-down youth) nostalgia, making it a backward-looking decade. In both these phenomena, strong nostalgic sentiments were expressed for certain aspects of the Cultural Revolution. Just a decade before, sent-down youth had protested vehemently for their right to return to the cities, while Deng Xiaoping launched a de-Maoification campaign. How to explain this reversal of public sentiments toward the Cultural Revolution?

Both Mao fever and zhiqing nostalgia reflected the social changes taking place in the 1990s and their impact on the psyche of the Red Guard generation. Since the two trends coincided with China’s transformation from a planned to a market-based economy, it is crucial to examine how and why the market transformation has influenced memory production. The economic reform in the 1990s marked China’s deeper entry into capitalism, the arch-enemy of the Cultural Revolution. The proliferation of Cultural Revolution memories was a critical response to the social consequences of the marketization of the Chinese economy.

The Mao fever is well documented in a volume edited by Geremie Barmé. Titled Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader and published in 1996, the volume contains English translations of Chinese media stories that present various perspectives about the meaning of the Mao fever. Barmé views it as a new kind of Mao cult, which is markedly different from the Mao cult of the Cultural Revolution.

There are multiple versions of the origin myth of the Mao fever. Some believe it arose out of a disillusionment with Western cultural influences that had dominated the cultural scene of the 1980s, a sentiment certainly endorsed if not promoted by the post-June Fourth Chinese leadership. Others trace the origins to the late 1980s, when growing social problems of corruption brought back memories of Mao’s crusade against bureaucrats. Perhaps the most fascinating origin story had to do with taxi drivers and is recounted by Barmé as follows:

According to a story that was to become one of China’s most widely told urban myths, the driver of a vehicle involved in a serious traffic accident in Shenzhen that left a number of people dead survived unscathed because he had a picture of Mao on the dashboard. Another version of the story claims that the accident occurred in Guangzhou and a whole busload of people were protected by Mao’s image. Shortly after the tale began spreading, laminated images of Mao appeared in vehicles in cities, towns and villages throughout China. These images were not unlike the St. Christopher medallions popular with European drivers or the Virgin Mary of the Highway images found, for example, in Brazil. Many of them showed Mao in the guise of a temple god or guardian spirit and were said to be capable of deflecting evil (pixie).18

The story allegedly happened in 1991. That would put it about one year later than another major event, a museum exhibition that opened on November 25, 1990, in Beijing dedicated to the history of the sent-down movement in the northernmost part of China. Titled “Our Spiritual Attachment to the Black Soil: A Retrospective Exhibition About the Sent-down Youth of Beidahuang,” it featured the history of the sent-down movement through displays of not only documentary descriptions but also old photographs and mementos of ordinary life from that historical period. Attracting 150,000 visitors,¹⁹ mostly former sent-down youth who had spent years in Beidahuang, the exhibition triggered the wave of zhiqing nostalgia that would sweep across China throughout the 1990s.

The Mao fever has two faces, a government-sanctioned propagandistic Mao craze and a nonofficial and spontaneous Mao cult.²⁰ The government-sanctioned Mao craze culminated with the centenary of Mao’s birth in 1993, which was observed nationally with the issuance of Mao commemorative coins and stamps, movies about his life, the unveiling of his statue in his birthplace, a flourishing memorial literature, and reprints of Mao’s works and portraits.²¹ In 1989, 370,000 copies of the official portrait of Mao were printed. In 1990, 22.95 million Mao portraits were printed, of which 19.93 million were sold. Fifty million Mao portraits were printed in 1991.²²

Government sponsorship of a Mao revival in the early 1990s reflected the political exigencies in 1989 and 1990, especially a counteroffensive led by Chen Yun and other conservative party elders against Deng Xiaoping’s reform policy following the 1989 student protest. According to Suisheng Zhao, “Numerous articles published after June 1989 in Renmin Ribao, Guangming Ribao, Xinwen Chuban Bao (News and publication), and Zhen Di (Front) had simultaneously criticized the “cat theory” and sought to provide inspiration to a “Mao Zedong craze.” These articles promoted the “struggle against peaceful evolution” in an attempt to restore Mao’s ideas and discredit Deng’s reform policy.”23

If the government-sponsored Mao craze was rooted in an inner party factional struggle triggered by the political crisis of 1989, the populist Mao cult was a response to changing social conditions. That Mao became something of a guardian spirit reflected the growing sense of insecurity among the Chinese population at a time of accelerating change. It is for the same reason that a religious revival was taking place in Chinese society during the same period, with all kinds of qigong groups attracting large followings (from which Falun Gong would eventually emerge).²⁴

The Mao fever coincided with the commercialization of the culture industry in the 1990s. From the beginning of the economic reform, CR-related cultural products had occupied a central place in the development of the culture industry. In the field of literature, some of the most influential literary movements focused on the representation of the Cultural Revolution. Besides the “literature of the wounded” mentioned earlier in this chapter, these literary movements include misty poetry, root-searching literature, zhiqing literature, self-reflexive literature (fan si wen xue), and prison literature (da qiang wen xue). In reportage literature (bao gao wen xue), celebrity figures from the CR period are the subjects of numerous shorter or longer stories. In music, rock star Cui Jian makes explicit references to images of the Maoist era in his songs, such as those in the album The Egg Under the Red Flag. In painting, the political pop represented by Wang Guangyi’s parodies of Mao makes direct uses of CR images. In the filmmaking industry, major fifth-generation directors explored Cultural Revolution themes, from Chen Kaige’s King of the Children (1988), Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993), and Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994), to Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (1995).²⁵ In television drama, the first great success, Aspirations (ke wang), was set during the Cultural Revolution, airing in 1990. It was so popular that it reportedly forced some factories to change their work schedules so that employees could go home to watch it.²⁶

What about political control over the topic of the Cultural Revolution? In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the CCP Central Propaganda Department and the State Press and Publication Administration issued several directives concerning the publication of CR-related materials. One set of regulations, issued in 1988, states that “from now on and for quite some time, publishing firms should not plan the publication of dictionaries or other handbooks about the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’” and that “under normal circumstances, one should not plan to publish titles specifically researching the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’ or specifically telling the history of the ‘Great Cultural Revolution.’”27 A party circular issued in March 1992 concerning the commemoration of Mao’s centenary required works published in conjunction with the centenary “be strictly reviewed and approved according to the stipulations and guidelines that have been set out.”²⁸ In 1997 the State Press and Publication Administration issued more regulations about the reporting of “weighty and big” (zhong da) publication projects, including projects related to the CR.²⁹

Despite these restrictions, CR-related cultural products multiplied in tandem with the rise of a consumer society. Historian Jay Winter has argued that affluence is a precondition of the “memory boom” in the West. “Dwelling on memory is a matter of both disposable income and leisure time.”³⁰ He notes that economic growth and the expansion of the service sector after WWII increased the demand for cultural commodities such as those having to do with memory—books, films, television shows, and museum exhibitions about the past. Similarly, in China, growing affluence provides the disposable income and leisure time for people to dwell on the past.

Zhiqing Nostalgia

Zhiqing nostalgia started in the early 1990s and reached its apex in the late 1990s. The nostalgia is for a specific segment of the historical experience of the generation—namely, the sent-down movement. Although many former sent-down youth were involved in the Red Guard movement, that aspect of their lives provides relatively little of the “material” of zhiqing nostalgia. The Red Guard movement was officially denounced as a source of social chaos, and the label Red Guards took on negative connotations in the political discourse of the post-Cultural Revolution period. In contrast, the zhiqing identity does not have such politically negative resonance. If anything, the hardships of rural life gave the prolonged zhiqing experience a tinge of glory, making it the ideal material for nostalgia.

While elite writers published the zhiqing literature of the 1980s, ordinary members of the Red Guard generation produced the nostalgia of the 1990s by publishing personal memories, diaries, letters, and old photographs. One collection of essays, for example, was edited by a restaurant manager in Beijing. Among the contributors to the collection were four office employees, three accountants, three physicians, two associate professors, two journalists, two union officials, a newspaper editor, a nurse, a storage employee, a department store manager, a bus driver, an archivist, a laid-off worker, and a department store salesperson.31 Because its authors are so diverse, the cultural production of the zhiqing nostalgia takes on a distinct social character.

Zhiqing nostalgia is a phenomenon of civic association and voluntary organizing. The museum exhibitions mentioned previously were organized by former sent-down youth. They then functioned to bring together long-separated friends. Editing a book brought people together, as did social gatherings. As one interviewee told me, social gatherings became a more or less regular part of the lives of many members of their generation in the 1990s. Sometimes informal support groups could emerge out of these activities. Members of one such association I came across in Beijing in 1999 raised funds to support the children of the poor families among them.³² When the Internet became popular in the late 1990s, it became both a “virtual” gathering space for former sent-down youth and a digital archive for publishing and collecting their personal narratives.

Finally, the scope of the zhiqing nostalgia is matched by its emotional intensity. Documentary films of crowds at the museum exhibits captured the emotional encounters between old friends—tears were shed in abundance, hugs were long, photos were taken, conversations were endless.³³ The titles of the many published stories often refer to the past with such phrases as “emotional attachment,” “deep love,” “unforgettable joy,” “years of suffering and joy,” “yearning for the past,” “reminiscences in tears,” and so forth.

Why did all this happen? How to account for the rise of zhiqing nostalgia?

Nostalgia and Destabilized Identities

China in the 1990s saw unprecedented changes in all areas of social life. As the country shifted from a planned to a market economic system, its economy took off, but new social problems, such as unemployment and increasing social inequality, followed. These economic developments are accompanied by the rise of new cultural values, notably materialism. As a value system that reifies goods and possessions, materialism had fought a losing battle against revolutionary asceticism in the Maoist period, but the tide has turned. The contemporary culture of materialism appears in many forms, consumerism being its most conspicuous incarnation.

Rapid social change can disrupt the continuity of life and strain identities. Members of the Red Guard generation are among the most vulnerable to such change. By 1990, the average age of former sent-down youth was about forty. Most had been back in the cities for a decade or more, and they had not found the process of settling back to urban life easy.34 When they first returned, many had difficulty finding jobs, housing, or marriage partners. Nevertheless, despite these challenges, members of the generation did not despair. Having returned from a difficult period of their lives, they looked forward with hope to a future of material prosperity. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of them had settled back to routine urban lives.

Into the 1990s, these lives began to come unsettled again as a result of new social transformations. One of the most serious problems facing this generation in the late 1990s was unemployment caused by the restructuring of state-own enterprises.³⁵ According to some estimates, former sent-down youth accounted for as much as 40 to 60 percent of the total laid-off workforce in 1998.³⁶ The depths of the psychological consequences of unemployment are hard to gauge. For many people, being laid off from work was an entirely new and unexpected experience in a socialist society that had at least nominally tried to provide job security. In 1999, at the height of the unemployment wave, an interviewee described to me how she felt after losing her job for the first time in her life:

Since I was a child, I have never had the feeling that there was no place for me to go. As a child, as soon as I woke up in the morning, I had to get up to hurry to kindergarten. Then elementary school, middle school. On the farm, I got up and went to work. At college, I got up and went to class. . . . There had never been a time in my life when, waking up in the morning, I had nowhere to go. In February last year, the company where I worked was disbanded. After that, there were days when I woke up in the morning and found I had no place to go. I had never had that kind of feeling [sobbing]. So I lay in bed and thought to myself: I have been a hardworking person since elementary school . . . this is not my fault, many other people have lost their jobs. . . . Yet despite such thoughts and self-comforting, I really felt bad, to be honest. From morning until night, there was nothing I could do. There are many books in my house, and I could read if I wanted to. Yet I always felt that my heart had lost its anchor, as if I were riding a bottomless boat. I felt empty in my heart, hollow and empty.³⁷

Changes in cultural values also disoriented the zhiqing generation. Lu Xing’er, a zhiqing novelist whose works mostly concern the life experience of her generation, expresses this sense of disorientation in 1998 in the following words:

At that time [1986], I was still full of pride for our generation. My stories about our generation are optimistic and cheerful. . . . My characters have knowingly inherited the tradition, yet under the burden of history they still unequivocally yearn to accept and create a new life. For a generation that links the past, the present, and the future, the combination and conflict of the old and the new manifest themselves in thoughts of the most complicated and helpless kind. In 1986 and 1987, there still seemed to be various ways of resolving these problems. In the past year or two, however, rapid changes in the economy, consciousness, ideas, and human relations have exacerbated the problems to such an extent that they have become bewildering. Problems can be faced and solved. When they begin to bewilder, so that people are at a loss what to do about them, then they become the most profound predicaments. We find ourselves in such predicaments now.38

Lu sees her own career of novel writing as an endless search for a sense of self: “I often cannot see myself clearly. . . . Up to this day, it seems that I still have not formed a clear ‘self.’ . . . I’m still growing, struggling and wandering in the sea of life; I’m still searching all around me for a beacon. . . . I sometimes wonder: how much and how profoundly life has changed me. . . . I’m like a meteor unwilling to fall into oblivion and determined to plot my own orbit in the limitless expanse of the universe.”³⁹ Through her creative sensibility, Lu articulates a generational phenomenon. More than any other social group in contemporary China, the Red Guard generation finds itself again in the vortex of social change and in renewed struggles against disruptions of identity. In these struggles, the past becomes a vital source for coping with the present.

Connecting the Present to the Past

One way of managing identity crisis is to reestablish connections with the past. Among former sent-down youth, pilgrimages to the places to which they had been sent became common in the 1990s. In many cases, these are literally sentimental journeys in search of the self. One person explains the motives for such a visit:

Before I knew it, the bus had entered the region that was both familiar and strange to me. What was it that lured me back to this familiar land? . . . Because here were the traces of my past life that I was in search of. Here was the land that had a very special place in my heart. The people here had treated me like a member of their own families. In these hills I had left behind sparks of my life. Here I spent the unforgettable golden years of my life. Without the bygone days that I spent here, my current self would lose its meaning.40

The discoveries made on these sentimental journeys are mixed. A woman I interviewed in Beijing talked to me excitedly about one such trip, which she undertook in 1998 with dozens of other former educated youth. “Oh, the crowd,” she said. “All the people were out in the streets to greet us. We couldn’t hold back our tears at seeing our old friends.”⁴¹ She clearly felt great joy and excitement; the warm reception helped to validate her identity. In Beijing my interviewee worked as an accountant in a local hospital and faced uncertainty in her employment. Back where she once lived as a sent-down youth, she could at least temporarily leave behind her disciplined lifestyle and reexperience emotional solidarity among old friends and acquaintances.

Such journeys can also be frustrating. Some aspects of the past, once dear to the heart, may have changed beyond recognition or have been erased. Xiao Fuxing, a well-known writer of the Red Guard generation, describes his feelings upon finding that the grave he had traveled a long way to visit had disappeared:

Both the grave and the gravestone were gone. Only a patch of wild grass stood swaying in the lonesome wind. This was a female educated youth. I was once on the same team with her. At that time, she was not yet twenty years old. In front of her grave, we once held a solemn funeral. . . . We mourned the dead, held a memorial service for her, made her our model, and promised we would never forget her. We planted several poplar saplings to show that we would always stand by her. Alas, everything was gone now. The grave had been leveled, the trees cut. I had come to visit an old friend, only to find my heart broken. I lowered my head in shame.⁴²

Here nostalgia took an unexpected twist, as yearning for the past was confronted by cold reality. Efforts to renew personal links to the past were thwarted by the discovery that the past had been literally erased. It dawned on the writer that his generation now faced the danger of being left out of history. At that point the sense of personal identity crisis characteristic of this generation in the 1990s turned into a generational identity crisis. As a writer, Xiao has devoted much of his life to writing stories about his generation in the hope that “when history gently turns its pages” it will not “casually omit us.”⁴³

The other way of connecting with the past is remembering. Remembering may take different forms, such as exhibitions and museums. Several museum exhibitions in China’s major urban centers in the 1990s helped to build the national wave of zhiqing nostalgia. The power of these exhibitions derived from the connections they established between the present and the past, but also because, as David Davies shows, they created spaces for former zhiqing to talk about past experiences.44

Another form of remembering is the social gathering of former sent-down youth. A reencounter with old friends is a double meeting: it is an encounter with an old self as well as with the present self, as the following passage makes clear:

At the time of our reunion, many pairs of eyes look into each other in search of something unspoken. Our past appearances and images . . . have become vague and hazy . . . we all look old now! The pretty faces of yesteryear are now mostly darkened with pigmentation. A sculptor named Time has jokingly and relentlessly carved stories into the faces of this generation. Some sad thought surges into my heart: we don’t want old age, yet we cannnot sell it; we want youth, yet cannot buy it. Women are grieved to tears, as if they have lost their lovers; men also want to cry, but they have no tears.⁴⁵

Writing and publishing personal narratives is also a form of remembering. In the zhiqing nostalgia of the 1990s, ordinary people, not cultural elites, became the authors of nostalgia narratives. Numerous collections of personal narratives were published by former zhiqing. Many more appeared in blogs and keep appearing until today. An analysis of three collections of zhiqing narratives I conducted shows that although the themes in these collections are quite wide-ranging (e.g., marriage and family life, love and death, conflict and friendship, hard labor, poverty, joy, loneliness, freedom, hunger, bravery, adventure), three are especially prominent, namely, suffering and misfortune, humanity, and meaning and purpose.⁴⁶ These experiences of the past are contrasted to the commercialism of the present. In this sense, the zhiqing nostalgia is less about the past and more about the present. Their narratives of past sufferings are often associated with a sense of pride in the ability of the generation to undergo these sufferings with courage or resignation and a mixed sense of sacrifice and achievement. The narratives of zhiqing nostalgia produce a collective critique of the dilemmas of a rapidly modernizing present.

A Second Red Culture Revival

The first fifteen years of the twenty-first century in China was neither forward-looking nor backward-looking, but oriented to the present. The Chinese party-state was obsessed with maintaining social stability in a time of rising unrest. The wealthy middle class was preoccupied with consumerism if not hedonism. The disadvantaged segments of the population found their voices online and in the streets. Under these conditions, party leaders promoted a new red culture. Making a mockery of the militant red culture in the 1950s and 1960s, this new red culture celebrates not violence or revolution, but harmony and stability.

The official promotion of a red culture in the 2000s was paralleled by the appearance of an unofficial memory culture. Former rebels who were suppressed and scapegoated as the perpetrators of the violence of the Cultural Revolution by the post-Mao regime began to tell their side of the story by publishing memoirs and oral histories. This was due to the emergence of a network of Cultural Revolution “folk researchers” (min jian wen ge yan jiu zhe) and the opportunities of publishing online and outside China.

Insofar as the main supporters of the new red culture are the princelings and second-generation reds, who were likely to be among “old Red Guards” (lao bing) in the Red Guard movement, one might view the revival of red culture and the appearance of rebels’ memoirs as the factionalized memories of two rival constituents of the Red Guard movement: the “old guards” and the rebels.

In a 2012 article, Willy Lam dates the beginning of the new wave of Mao fever to 2008 and its culmination to the festivities surrounding the ninetieth birthday of the CCP on July 1, 2011. Although a new red culture had been in the making before 2008, I agree with Lam that 2008 was an important turning point. From the vantage of 2016, however, the end point of Mao fever would not be the ninetieth birthday of the CCP in 2011. It turns out that after Xi Jinping took office in November 2012 as China’s new top leader, the Mao fever heated up instead of cooling down. As of this writing, the new red culture is running strong, with no end in sight.

Compared with the Mao fever in the early 1990s, the one that started in 2008 has clear signs of a top-down political campaign. Soon after he became the party secretary of Chongqing in November 2007, Bo Xilai decided to make “red culture” a core element of his efforts to build a Chongqing model. Shortly afterward, he launched a campaign to “sing red songs” and “crack down on black [criminals]” (chang hong da hei). The campaign to “sing red songs” was supposed to revive China’s revolutionary culture to counter the corrosive influences of contemporary commercialism and consumerism. Red culture was billed as the core of new socialist values, and inculcating these values was seen as necessary for building a harmonious and prosperous society, a new vision propounded under President Hu Jintao.

Bo’s campaign used CR-style methods to mobilize Chongqing residents to join in the group singing of “red songs.” According to one estimate, by the end of 2010, Chongqing had organized 155,000 red song–singing events. By per-head count, these activities involved almost all of Chongqing’s adult population. In addition, 170 million text messages of “red classics” were reportedly sent to and by Chongqing residents on their mobile phones and the online texting service QQ.47 In May 2009, 13 million mobile phone subscribers in Chongqing received Bo Xilai’s personal texting, in which he shared a few of his favorite Mao quotations and commented, “These words are very concise, very true, and very elevating.”⁴⁸ In its scale, the “red culture” campaign in Chongqing approached the proportions of the Cultural Revolution. Bo Xilai seemed to have tried to play the role of Mao in mobilizing participation through personal charisma and mass campaigns.

The red culture renaissance in the 2000s had complex social and political roots, but, as in the case of the Mao fever in the early 1990s, it was related to factional struggles within the Chinese communist party. According to Lam, “Implicit in the princelings’ re-hoisting of the Maoist flag is a veiled critique of the policies undertaken by Hu and his CYL Faction, which seem to have exacerbated the polarisation of rich and poor and spawned a kind of crass commercialism that runs counter to Maoist spiritual values.”⁴⁹ But, more important, Bo Xilai attempted to mobilize public support in his desperate bid for a top leadership position in the upcoming eighteenth CCP congress.

Bo Xilai met his downfall in a public scandal in 2012,⁵⁰ while Xi became the CCP leader late in the same year. Yet the ousting of Bo Xilai only ended the red culture campaign in Chongqing, not the national red culture renaissance. As CCP vice chairman, Xi Jinping had already shown his support for Bo Xilai’s red culture campaign by touring Chongqing in December 2010 and speaking about “affirming the practice of singing red songs and studying [Maoist] classics . . . as a means of pursuing education in [Marxist] ideals and beliefs.”⁵¹ After Xi became China’s supreme leader, he took the red culture campaign to a new level, going beyond the public fanfares of culture and red tourism and reaching into the realm of ideology, education, and the organization of the Chinese communist party. Xi’s leadership style takes on a populist approach reminiscent of Mao in the Cultural Revolution. Called “more Maoist than reformer” by the Los Angeles Times,52 Xi revived the Maoist practice of self-criticism as a method of curbing corruption among party officials.⁵³ Maoist political practices such as the “mass line” are brought back to official discourse, while the notion of civil society came under attack in the summer of 2013 as a Western import that ill fits Chinese reality. Indeed, by 2014 China’s minister of education was publicly warning educational institutions against “allow[ing] into our classrooms material that propagates Western values.⁵⁴ Although nurtured in the shadows of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, this deep fear of Western values follows in a direct lineage with the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, Xi’s promotion of the idea of a Chinese dream, especially the use of the language of a great national rejuvenation after a century of national shame and humiliation, follows after an earlier Maoist language of anti-imperialism and national independence.

There are complex reasons why red culture is being promoted in recent years. The reason most relevant to the theme of this book is that the proponents of this new wave of red culture, whether it is Bo Xilai or Xi Jinping, are themselves members of the Red Guard generation. Bo and Xi are not the only princelings to promote the new red culture, however. Many other second-generation reds have expressed explicit support of it. Although his father Marshall Chen Yi suffered persecution in the Cultural Revolution, Chen Xiaolu still considers Mao a great leader, as does the daughter of senior general Xu Haidong, who died in political exile in Zhengzhou during the CR.⁵⁵

Why are they still adamant supporters of a political culture that brought misfortune and even disaster to their own families? One reason is that they have an emotional attachment to a culture in which they had come of age. This applies not just to the princelings but to other segments of the Red Guard generation as well. I personally know someone whose mother died of persecution in the Cultural Revolution but who continues to have a strong emotional attachment to those revolutionary years because he once felt a deep sense of freedom and exhilaration as a high school student freed from schoolwork and able to roam the country freely.

By promoting red culture, the princelings show support for a political regime to which they feel a sense of entitlement and ownership. Many members of the Red Guard generation experienced disillusionment and a sense of betrayal by the communist party they had pledged their loyalty to; when their parents came under attack, children of elite cadres resisted, as I have shown in chapter 3. Yet the sense of privilege and superiority derived from being children of elite families has never disappeared. When the “old guards” of the Red Guard movement were losing out toward the end of the Red Guard movement, they vowed to make a comeback, claiming, “In twenty years’ time, we will know who the real winners are.” “You may have pens (bi gan zi), but we have guns (qiang gan zi). Let’s see who rules the tianxia in the future.”⁵⁶

It seems that this mentality persists among the princelings. If so, then the promotion of red culture is only a subtle way of promoting their own entitlement to the power of the regime.

The Rebels are Back

While red culture has become the “main melody” in the public memories of the Maoist past, the memories of former rebels have added discordant tunes to the main melody. In the Red Guard movement, rebels came onto the scene by challenging and thwarting “royalists,” “conservatives,” and “old guards.” Today’s former rebels and princelings would likely be opponents in the Red Guard movement period. In this sense, the factional rivalry of the past has persisted down to the present day.

Earlier in this chapter, I noted that rebel leaders were mostly criminalized toward the end of the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to many years in prison. The collective memories of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s were dominated by narratives of trauma and condemnation. There were few memoirs from the “losers” of the Cultural Revolution—the rebels and alleged followers of the Lin Biao and Gang of Four “anti-party clique.” Since the 1990s, but especially since the 2000s, many of these people have begun to accept interviews or publish memoirs. Because these narratives deviate from the official line, they are nonmainstream or alternative. They include mainly two types, those written by former zaofanpai and those by top party leaders accused of being followers of the Lin Biao and Gang of Four clique. I will discuss narratives by former rebels only, since they are the members of the Red Guard generation and not the party leaders.

Recently, many people who belonged to rebel organizations in the Red Guard movement have spoken out by publishing diaries, blogs, essays, and book-length memoirs. Among the nationally famous “five Red Guard leaders,” one of them, Tan Houlan, died of cancer in 1982 and did not seem to have left behind any personal writing. Nor was Tan prosecuted due to her terminal illness. The other four were tried, convicted as “counterrevolutionaries,” and sentenced in 1983. Because they had all been detained in or around 1970, their term of imprisonment was retroacted, so that with a fifteen- or seventeen-year term when they were sentenced in 1983, they only had several years left to serve in prison. Han Aijing was sentenced to fifteen years and released in 1986 upon serving his prison term.57 Wang Dabin was sentenced to nine years and released in 1983. Kuai Dafu was sentenced to seventeen years and was released in 1987. Nie Yuanzi was sentenced to seventeen years and released on medical parole in 1984. All four of them have spoken out, Wang Dabin and Han Aijing through interviews and Nie Yuanzi and Kuai Dafu through their memoirs, published in Hong Kong.

Many other former rebels have also published memoirs. By my count, there are now book-length memoirs of former rebels in the following provinces or direct-governed municipalities: Anhui, Beijing, Guangzhou, Guangxi, Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu, Shandong, Shanghai, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Zhejiang. These narratives contain detailed accounts of the authors’ experiences from childhood through the Cultural Revolution. Their views toward violence are, not surprisingly, critical and negative. Their assessments of the Cultural Revolution, Mao, and zaofanpai, however, are not all the same. Some are still believers in Mao and the legitimacy of the Cultural Revolution. They feel that as a group, zaofanpai has been wronged and made into the scapegoat for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

Zhou Lunzuo, a former rebel in Chengdu, Sichuan, has the following to say in the afterword to his book about zaofanpai in the Cultural Revolution:

The main thing that motivated me to do this [write this memoir] is naturally not any utilitarian need, which has long died out. It is rather an inexpungible indignation. Since the 1980s, intellectuals within the establishment, on the margins of the establishment, and even outside of the establishment, have all distorted the popular dimensions of the Cultural Revolution and demonized the popular rebellion to such an extent that I felt the horror of a dirtied conscience. When people talk about the zaofanpai of the past, they are almost unanimously denunciatory, which makes me see even more clearly the seriousness of the nation’s amnesia.⁵⁸

Chen Yinan, a former rebel from Changsha, Hunan, writes in his preface to Yang Zengtai’s memoir:

The rebels’ movement in the Cultural Revolution was a history of specific social circumstances of the time combining both passion and suffering. However, because of the authorities’ deliberate suppression of the history of the Cultural Revolution and the propaganda used to demonize the Cultural Revolution zaofanpai as a whole, even today, 38 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, many people, especially young people born after the Cultural Revolution, know the Cultural Revolution zaofanpai only through the distorting propaganda, which is far from historical truth, if they know anything at all.59

Liu Xigong writes in a review of Shi Minggang’s book Shanxi in the Cultural Revolution:

About fifty years have passed. Many of those who personally experienced the Cultural Revolution are older than sixty years; some are in their seventies or eighties. Those things of the past are carved in their bones and hearts. Yet young people today know very little about that past; many people have forgotten about it and official histories have distorted it. Those who personally experienced it still remember it, understand it, and talk about it, but there is not much time left. The urgency of time and the demand of history compel the contributors to this book (who all experienced the CR) to write with an attitude of “salvageing” [history] and with a strong sense of responsibility to try to leave behind a truthful history of the Cultural Revolution in Shanxi. . . . The official history institutions and research institutes in Shanxi, in accordance with the needs and intentions of the authorities, distort history, cover up the evils, and magnify the “good deeds” of some politicians who did evil in Shanxi. . . . Those who experienced the Cultural Revolution are witnesses to history. They must speak out without hesitation in order to reveal the truth and correct the distortions.⁶⁰

Others feel that they had gone through a ludicrous tragicomedy in which they played the role of willing pawns, but, despite self-ridicule and critical reflection, the detailed accounts of the passions, energies, and even sufferings of the past convey a subtle sense of pride that they had lived through epoch-changing times.⁶¹

Given the political limits on Cultural Revolution discourse, how is it possible that the expression of alternative memories has taken on the scale of a minor social movement in the past decade? Certainly, it attests to the depth of the impact of the historical experience on the personal trajectories of the authors involved. Another reason is that most of them have retired in recent years. With retirement, there is more time on hand and less concern with the political risks of writing—a retired person cannot be fired. The most important reason, however, is the appearance of networks of minjian Cultural Revolution researchers inside China, minjian in the sense that they cannot publish or discuss their research in open and mainstream channels in mainland China. He Shu and Wu Di are two of the most influential ones. The two of them have been long-term researchers on the Cultural Revolution. They have each developed an informal network of researchers, authors, and former participants who share an interest in collecting, preserving, and studying the histories and memories of the Cultural Revolution. In this sense, they are memory entrepreneurs of the Cultural Revolution.

A Chongqing resident, He Shu has devoted himself to the study of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing and Sichuan. His book on armed fighting in Chongqing was published in Hong Kong in 2010. For many years he has not only encouraged former rebel leaders in Chongqing to write memoirs but has also edited many of them. Wu Di is a retired professor of film studies in Beijing. Wu became interested in researching the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia when he was a sent-down youth there. He published a book on this topic in Hong Kong in 2010.

In 2008 He Shu and Wu Di launched Ji Yi (Remembrance), a “self-run, irregular, nonprofit electronic publication” (自办的不定期、非赢利的电子刊物) devoted to research on the Cultural Revolution. Michael Schoenhals characterizes it as “an electronic journal edited by Cultural Revolution historians in China in the May 4th tradition of the joint intellectual venture that does not so much put a premium on uniformity of opinion—and even less on common party political affiliation—as on a shared desire to explore a subject without prejudice in the pursuit of historical truth.”62 The semi-underground character of Remembrance puts it in the lineage of the unofficial journals during the Democracy Wall, though of course the production and distribution processes are very different now, with computerization and Internet connection.

In 2012 He Shu decided to produce his own journal, titled Zuo Tian (Yesterday), whose mission is to “save Cultural Revolution memories, collect Cultural Revolution material, exchange related information, and promote Cultural Revolution research.”⁶³ Wu Di continues to produce Remembrance. As of this writing, the latest issue of Remembrance I received is no. 126, published on March 15, 2015. The latest issue of Yesterday is no. 48, published on March 30, 2015. With each of these 174 issues running from 60 to 90 pages, the two journals have together produced over 10,000 pages of documents. Although the contents cover a good variety (e.g., research reports, news items, conference notes, book reviews, and archival documents), the majority consists of “documents of life,” such as oral histories, memoirs, diaries. Both Remembrance and Yesterday carry many special issues, such as on “The Cultural Revolution in Shanxi,” “The Cultural Revolution in Guangxi,” “The Cultural Revolution in Qingdao,” “Armed Fighting in Chongqing,” “Oral Histories of Students and Teachers in Nanjing University,” “Marriage and Dating in the Cultural Revolution,” and so forth. Some of these special issues feature the research output of local researchers who, like He Shu and Wu Di, began to study the Cultural Revolution in their own cities or provinces after retirement, suggesting that the networks of Cultural Revolution researchers are a national phenomenon. These researchers combine the hobby of collecting with research and writing and in this way have both discovered and preserved new historical documents and produced a reservoir of oral histories and memoirs. In some cases, as in Chongqing, small circles of researchers and authors were former comrades-in-arms during the Red Guard movement. Common experiences of the past and current interests and circumstances bring them together.

The Difficulties of Apology

I cannot end this chapter without examining the politics of apology. Despite the horrendous consequences of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government has never made an official apology to the victims and their families. Instead, Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, and zaofanpai were turned into the scapegoat, with Mao being all but exonerated in the “30 percent bad and 70 percent good” assessment of his life’s work.

Thus, when Chen Xiaolu, son of Marshall Chen Yi, issued a personal statement on August 20, 2013, to apologize to his former teachers and classmates for the harms he had done them in the Cultural Revolution, it made international news. Chen was a student leader in Beijing’s No. 8 Middle School in the Red Guard movement period. He said that during his term as the head of his school’s revolutionary committee some teachers and students were subject to mass criticism and labor reform. For that, he wrote, he was directly responsible and he offered his apologies.

Chen’s apology was applauded by many as a good first step, but rebuked by others as opportunistic and insincere. The polarized responses to Chen’s apology are symptomatic, as would become even clearer half a year later when an even more contested case of apology happened. On January 12, 2014, former students of the Experimental Middle School of Beijing Teachers University organized a meeting with their former teachers at their alma mater, whose school principal Bian Zhongyun was cruelly beaten to death by girl students on August 5, 1966 (the school was formerly a girls’ school). Thirty-one former students, now in their sixties or seventies, attended the meeting, while twenty-three former teachers were present, the oldest among them ninety years of age. At the meeting, two former student leaders, Liu Jin and Song Binbin, read statements of apology for the violence in August 1966. Song Binbin’s statement includes the following: “Please allow me to express my eternal condolences and apologies for the late Principal Bian and allow me to express my deep apologies to Hu Zhitao, Liu Zhiping, Mei Shumin, Wang Yubing, and other school leaders and their families for not giving them good protection. These are the pains and regrets of my entire life.”64

Song Binbin had been embroiled in a long drawn out controversy implicating her as a key culprit of Bian Zhongyun’s death, but she had refused to speak up until then. Like Chen Xiaolu, she apologized for failing to protect her teachers in her capacity as a student leader, but she did not plead guilty in the death of Bian. And, as in the case of Chen’s apology, Song Binbin’s apology prompted broad public response. Trying to sort out the numerous positions in these reactions, Wu Di, the editor of Remembrance, which published the transcript of the entire meeting on January 12, 2014, finds that there are five broad types of responses—those who approve of Song’s apology, those who disapprove of it, those who condemn it, those who thought that Song’s apology is not good enough, and those who use the occasion to promote their own agendas. Within each of the five categories, Wu identifies multiple subtypes.⁶⁵

The public controversy prompted by these two prominent cases shows the difficulties of public apologies. The reason seems to be rooted in the factional conflicts of the past. The primary division in the responses to these public apologies is aligned with old factional politics. Those who disapprove of Chen’s and Song’s apologies, according to Wu Di, include second-generation reds like Chen and Song, who were likely to be members of the “old Red Guards” in the earlier period of the Red Guard movement. These people fear that Chen’s and Song’s apologies may implicate other former “old guards” who had committed violence in the Cultural Revolution and prompt a demand for public apologies on a bigger scale. Loyal Maoists, nowadays nicknamed Mao zuo (Maoist leftists), disapprove of their apologies, but for different reasons. They do not want such apologies to lead today’s younger generation to reject Mao and the Cultural Revolution. But then liberals are also critical of Chen’s and Song’s apologies, contending that these gestures of apology may simply be a strategy to exonerate other second-generation reds from the violence they committed during the Cultural Revolution. The irony is that the intense controversy over these two apologies mirrors the factional divisions formed during the Red Guard movement. It is in this sense that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized. And it is in this sense that the politics of the Cultural Revolution have continued to the present day.