Notes on Data
1. On methodological issues in the use of personal narratives and documents of life, see Alwin et al. “The Life History Calendar”; Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation; Laslett, “Biography as Historical Sociology” and “Personal Narratives as Sociology”; and Sausmikat, “Resisting Current Stereotypes.”
Introduction
1. He Shu, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 349.
2. The English translation is mine, with a few adaptations from the translation published in Tony Barnstone’s Out of the Howling Storm. See Gu Cheng, “Forever Parted.” Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of original Chinese texts cited in this book are my translations into English.
3. It is important to differentiate violence among Red Guard factions from the mass killing studied in Yang Su’s book. The mass killing in Guangxi, for example, happened mostly in rural areas and was organized by local authorities after the establishment of “revolutionary committees” as the new power structures. See Su, Collective Killings in Rural China During the Cultural Revolution.
4. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, 303.
5. Ibid. On important empirical studies of generational identities, see, for example, Schuman and Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories.” On regional differences of generational identities, see Griffin, “‘Generations and Collective Memory’ Revisited.” On a refinement of the theory of generations with a Bourdieusean perspective, see Eyerman and Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Generations.”
6. See statistics on student population in Yang Dongping, Jian nan de ri chu, 164.
7. See also Zhong guo bai ke nian jian, 536. Michel Bonnin argues that what he refers to as the “Cultural Revolution” generation does not include the rural student population or the university students. Nevertheless, he considers those who experienced the sent-down period but not the Red Guard movement also as part of the Cultural Revolution generation. Thus, for him, the Cultural Revolution generation includes all urban people born approximately between 1947 and 1960, because some born in 1960 were still sent down at the end of the 1970s. See Bonnin, “The ‘Lost Generation.’”
8. E.g., Leung, Morning Sun.
9. Li, and Schwarcz. “Six Generations of Modern Chinese Intellectuals.”
10. Liu Xiaofeng. Wo men zhe yi dai ren de ai yu pa [The love and fears of our generation].
11. Liu Xiaomeng et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi [A history of sent-down youths in China]. Bonnin, The Lost Generation.
12. Jin Dalu, Ku nan yu feng liu.
13. Chan, Children of Mao. Mi Hedu. Hong wei bing zhe yi dai Ashley and Jiang Mao's Children in the New China.
14. CCP Central Committee. “Resolution on Certain Questions.”
15. Chan, “Dispelling Misconceptions About the Red Guard Movement.” For the debate on periodization, also see Hao Ping, “Reassessing the Starting-Point of the Cultural Revolution.”
16. On France, see Wolin, The Wind from the East. On the United States, see Frazier, The East Is Black. On Brazil, see Langland, Speaking of Flowers.
17. Wolin, The Wind from the East, 354, 355.
18. Turner, The Ritual Process, 94.
19. For example, see Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics; Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture; Liu, Political Culture and Group Conflicts in Communist China.
20. Dittmer, “Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution,” 69.
21. Schoenhals, “‘Why Don’t We Arm the Left?’” MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution.
22. Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; Chan, Rosen, and Unger, “Students and Class Warfare”; Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution.
23. Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power.
24. See Dittmer, “Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution”; Perry and Li Xun, “Revolutionary Rudeness”; Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics and “Proscription and Prescription of Political Terminology”; Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Kerry Brown’s study of the purge of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party, however, emphasizes the role of language in the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution, showing how language was “intended to impact on and influence events in the negotiation and campaign to acquire power between various groups in the IMAR.” See Brown, The Purge of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party, 16.
25. Xu Youyou, Xing xing se se de zao fan.
26. Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margin s.
27. Walder, Fractured Rebellion; Dong and Walder, “Factions in a Bureaucratic Setting.”
28. Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics, 69.
29. Della Porta, “Violence and the New Left,” 383.
30. Ibid.
31. Steinhoff and Zwerman, “Introduction to the Special Issue on Political Violence,” 213.
32. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence.
33. Goodwin, “The Relational Approach to Terrorism,” 393.
34. Della Porta, “Violence and the New Left,” 390. Also see della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State.
35. On cultural theories of revolutions and social movements, see Goldstone, “Ideology, Cultural Frameworks, and the Process of Revolution.” Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions” and “A Theory of Structure.” Polletta, It Was Like a Fever.
36. Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, 225.
37. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
38. Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation.
39. Girard, Violence and the Sacred.
40. Hall, Apocalypse.
41. Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 124.
42. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, 29.
43. Ibid., 28.
44. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 5; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
45. Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn. Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, Social Performance.
46. On dramaturgical approaches to collective action, see Snow, Zurcher, and Peters, “Victory Celebrations as Theater”; and Benford and Hunt, “Dramaturgy and Social Movements.”
47. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
48. Thus, as Giesen puts it, “In their most elementary form rituals do not just describe or imitate an order of the external world that is also available by other representations. Instead, the ritual performance is the poesis of order and this order exists only because it is performed. Rituals are constitutive performances in the Searleian sense.” See Giesen, “Performing the Sacred,” 340.
49. Benford and Hunt, “Dramaturgy and Social Movements.”
50. Giesen, “Performing the Sacred,” 349.
51. Apter, “Politics as Theatre,” 227-28.
52. For sociological studies of the biographical consequences of political activism, see McAdam, Freedom Summer and “The Biographical Consequences of Activism.” Whalen and Flacks, Beyond the Barricades; Klatch, A Generation Divided. A major difference in the case of the Red Guard generation is that it experienced more than one decisive historical experience.
53. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 367.
54. Ibid., 372.
55. Roth’s study of charismatic communities provides support for viewing the Red Guard movement itself as involving an ideological charismatic community whose members, not just leaders, may be regarded as charismatic virtuosi. See Roth, “Socio-Historical Model and Developmental Theory.”
56. Kiely, The Compelling Ideal.
57. Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment.
1. Violence in Chongqing
1. September First Column of the Middle School Red Guards, “Wei you xi sheng duo zhuang zhi” [Death only strengthens the bold resolve], 3.
2. He, “Chongqing wen ge wu dou si nan zhe ming lu” [List of names of people killed in armed fighting in Chongqing].
3. Thus, in the same way that the Protestant ethic led individuals to rational, methodical moneymaking as a road to religious salvation, so a revolutionary ethic led China’s Red Guards to factional violence as a means of achieving revolutionary nirvana.
4. Chongqing da xue xiao shi bian ji zu, Chongqing da xue xiao shi [History of Chongqing University], 2:126.
5. Ibid.
6. In 1949, with the founding of the PRC, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party established six regional bureaus to provide regional leadership. Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Xikang, and Chongqing were under the leadership of the Southwest Regional Bureau. The bureau had its headquarters in Chongqing, which was then a direct-governed municipality (zhi xia shi).
7. The Sichuan provincial party secretary Liao Zhigao issued a “Decision on the Implementation of the Center’s May 16 Circular” that “disclaimed any need to criticize the party generally. Instead, Liao’s document borrowed the language and thrust of the prenatal Cultural Revolution and laid emphasis on rooting out incorrect thought among playwrights, scholars, novelists, and journalists.” Mathews, “The Cultural Revolution in Szechwan,” 98.
8. E.g., see “Sheng wei nei mu yi ban” [A glance at the inside story of the provincial party committee]. Jinggangshan zhi sheng, December 3, 1966, in Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 14093. Also see Ma, “Di tou ren zui, ge mian xi xin” [Lower my head, change my face and wash my heart].
9. Ma, “Di tou ren zui, ge mian xi xin.”
10. Lu, Sichuan sheng Chongqing Di liu zhong xue xiao xiao zhi [History of No. 6 Middle School in Chongqing], 21.
11. Wei, “Ren Baige ji qi tong huo shi zen yang zhen ya shan cheng wen hua da ge ming de” [How Ren Baige and his followers suppressed the Cultural Revolution in the mountain city], 4.
12. Li, Qin li Chongqing da wu dou [My personal experiences of major armed fighting in Chongqing].
13. “Li Jingquan yan xing lu” [Words and deeds of Li Jingquan], Jinggangshan zhi sheng, November 26, 1966, 4. In Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 14093.
14. Xin, “Chu bu jian cha” [Preliminary self-criticism].
15. “Chongqing da zhong xue xiao Mao Zedong zhu yi hong wei bing zong bu xuan gao cheng li” [Maoism Red Guard headquarters of the universities and middle schools in Chongqing inaugurated], 1. “Li ji xian qi yi ge gu li zi nü can jia Mao Zedong zhu yi hong wei bing de re chao” [Immediately launch a hot tide to encourage children to join Maoism Red Guards], 1.
16. He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 25-30; Xin, “Chu bu jian cha”; Ma, “Di tou ren zui, ge mian xi xin.”
17. This account about the June 18 incident is based on stories published in the anniversary issue of the incident in August Fifteenth Battle News, June 18, 1967. See Zhou, ed., Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao, 215-16.
18. Ibid. See also Chongqing da xue xiao shi bian ji zu, Chongqing da xue xiao shi, 2:127.
19. Ibid., 2:128.
20. Vice mayor Ma Li would later call this strategy “suppressing the revolution by promoting production” (ya ge ming, cu sheng chan). See Ma, “Di tou ren zui, ge mian xi xin.”
21. On August 15, 1966, four thousand students from Chongqing University, forty students from the Sixth Middle School, and seventy students from the Middle School attached to CTJC gathered in CTJC for a mass meeting. See “815 shi hua” [History of August the Fifteenth], 2.
22. Ibid., 3.
23. Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu [Personal story of an editor of a Red Guard newspaper], 41–45.
24. In reality, the petitioners would walk for some distance and then take the train to Beijing. Taking “long marches” in emulation of the famous long march of the Red Army was an ascetic practice during the period of da chuan lian (大串联) for the “exchange of revolutionary experiences.” It became popular after national newspapers reported the feats of fifteen students from the Dalian Mercantile Marine Institute who walked over five hundred miles from Dalian to Beijing in October 1966. The story appears in English in the October 28 (1966) issue of Peking Review and has the following descriptions:
The 15 young revolutionaries set out with a heroic spirit on the morning of August 25. Fearing neither wind nor rain and taking neither vehicles nor boats, they walked over mountains, swam across rivers, and travelled through 21 counties and cities and one reclamation region in Liaoning and Hopei Provinces. They faced the world and braved the storms as they marched over the vast land, they passed a severe test of their revolutionary will.
When they encountered gales and downpours on their journey, they recited together Chairman Mao’s poem: “The Red Army fears not the trials of a distant march; To them a thousand mountains, ten thousand rivers are nothing. . . .” In marching against wind and rain, they also loudly sang We Love Chairman Mao Most and other revolutionary songs. When big rivers cut across their route, they encouraged each other with the great examples of Chairman Mao swimming in the Yangtse and his majestic poem “I care not that the wind blows and the waves beat; It is better than idly strolling in a courtyard.” They swam across the rivers, and said: “Chairman Mao swims in the Yangtse even at the age of 73. We are New China’s future seamen who should all the more be tested in great storms.
25. “Wang Li, Qi Benyu jie jian Chongqing shi zhong xue sheng hong wei bing bei shang gao zhuang tuan de jiang hua” [Speeches given by Wang Li and Qi Benyu at the meetings with the gao zhuang delegation of middle school students from Chongqing], in Hong wei bing zi liao xu bian, 1992, 4:2374.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 2376.
28. Radio transmitters evoked the image of enemy agents secretly communicating with their commanders. According to Chongqing shi zhi (vol. 14), within two years after Chongqing was taken over in 1949 by the new PRC government, the Chongqing public security authorities cracked many cases of secret agents planted by the Jiang Jieshi regime and captured eight radio transmitters used by these agents. See Chongqing shi zhi [Gazette of Chongqing city], 14:29.
29. Tao, “Tao Zhu tong zhi jiang hua” [Comrade Tao Zhu’s speech], 4:2294.
30. Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu, 20.
31. Zhou Ziren’s diary contains detailed descriptions of the street demonstrations on December 6 and the memorial service on the following day. See Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu.
32. Ibid., 23.
33. White, Policies of Chaos.
34. Joint interview conducted by author and Sun Peidong, March 12, 2015, Beijing.
35. August Fifteenth Battle News, January 21, 1967, 1.
36. He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 150.
37. August Fifteenth Battle News, May 26, 1967. In Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 1625.
38. This was the pattern in border and frontier provinces like Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, and Guangxi. The reason for this, according to Xu Youyu, was that the central elites in Beijing did not want to see serious social disturbances in border regions. For reasons of national security, central leaders refrained from taking drastic steps to destroy the conservatives who were backed by local party and military leaders. See Xu, Xing xing se se de zao fan, 63.
39. Ibid., 101.
40. He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 110–13.
41. Xu, Xing xing se se de zao fan, 115-21.
42. “Jian jue an zhao Mao zhu xi de gan bu zheng ce ban shi” [Resolutely follow Chairman Mao’s cadre policy], August Fifteenth Battle News, March 3, 1967, in Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 1584.
43. Huang, Wo zen me cheng le Jiang Qing de gan nü er [How did I become Jiang Qing’s goddaughter], 133.
44. Li Zimao, “You guan wu dou de yi xie si kao” [Some thoughts on armed fighting].
45. October 5 Storm, February 20, 1967.
46. “Ge lian hui bi sheng” [The United Revolutionary Committee will surely triumph!].
47. Zhou, diary entry March 6, 1967, in Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu, 74.
48. From late February to the end of March 1967, however, a nationwide crackdown on radicals took place as a result of party policies from the top known as the “February suppression of counterrevolutionaries.” With the support of the local military, the August Fifteenth in Chongqing went after the “Smashers” relentlessly, leading to the arrest and persecution of individuals and the disbanding of organizations affiliated with the Smashers. By April 1, 1967, when this crackdown was finally halted, again by fiat of a policy statement from the top leadership, 2,253 people had been arrested, 36 organizations were disbanded by public security authorities, 82 organizations were “smashed” by other organizations, and 146 organizations had voluntarily terminated themselves. See He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 149–50. The halting of the crackdown led to the release of the arrested personnel and the regrouping of the disbanded organizations. Reborn from the suppression, the Smashers launched counterattacks against the United Committee with new determination.
Theexperiences of suffering from suppression sealed the split between August Fifteenth and the Smashers and exacerbated the violent confrontations that would soon follow. But the split between the two camps continued to be defined by ideological differences. Indeed, the experiences of suffering deepened and magnified these ideological differences. Thus the sacred code of revolution continued to be a powerful influence on factionalism. In fact, it became more fatal and uncompromising, as it was now given a new layer of reality by the experiences of political oppression.
49. According to a story published on June 29, 1967, in Angry Brows (横眉), a tabloid edited by the August Fifteenth faction, its opposing faction, Fight to the End, had a military division with the following units: 1. reconnaissance unit, 2. communication unit, 3. explosion unit, 4. commando unit, 5. cover unit, 6. medical unit, and 7. security unit. See “Fan ge ming wu zhuang bao dong de zui e ji hua” [The evil plan for a counterrevolutionary armed riot], in Zhou, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao, 8574. August Fifteenth had two military units, with the code names Unit 301 and Unit 302. Unit 301 was responsible for off-campus combat; Unit 302 was responsible for on-campus combat and security.
50. He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 190.
51. Ibid., 197.
52. Ibid., 203.
53. Ibid., 206.
54. “Chongqing shi di fang zhi bian zuan wei yuan hui,” 410.
55. Hung, Mao’s New World.
56. Schoenhals, “‘Why Don’t We Arm the Left?,’” 286.
57. Based on a story published in the inaugural issue of Shan cheng nu huo on August 14, 1967.
58. The number of casualties is based on He, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan, 197. He surmises that the two deaths on the side of August Fifteenth might have been caused by friendly fire due to the confusion of the situation.
59. Mao, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, 182.
60. Ibid., 173–74.
61. On the history of the Little Red Book, see Leese, Mao Cult. On religious aspects of the Mao cult, see Landsberger, “Mao as the Kitchen God” and “The Deification of Mao.”
62. August Fifteenth Battle News, June 16, 1967, 2.
63. Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, 69.
64. Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu, 141.
65. Ibid.,145.
66. “Li Shengpin lie shi gei yi wei peng you de yi shu” [A will left to a friend by martyr Li Shengpin], August Fifteenth Battle News, August 8, (1967), 3. In Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 1668.
67. Wu, Wu Mi ri ji xu bian, 8:173–74.
68. He, “Chongqing wen ge wu dou si nan zhe ming lu.”
69. Qian, “The Way Our Generation Imagined the World.”
2. Flowers of the Nation
1. Source omitted to protect anonymity.
2. Sang, “Memories for the Future.”
3. Connerton, How Societies Remember.
4. Kleinman and Kleinman, “How Bodies Remember,” 716–17.
5. There is a long-time debate about whether the present or the past has more influence on people’s memories. A view that emphasizes the importance of the present is considered to be a presentist and constructionist perspective, whereas the view that stresses the persistent influence of past experiences is sometimes called the cultural perspective. For a review of the debate, see Schwartz and Kim, “Introduction.”
6. For a historical analysis of Mao’s concern with the dangers of revisionism, see Esherick, “The ‘Restoration of Capitalism’ in Mao’s and Marxist Theory.”
7. This is an incomplete but otherwise accurate recall of a text, not from the Nine Commentaries, but from the so-called Anterior Seven Commentaries. The Anterior Seven Commentaries were seven polemics against Soviet revisionism (but without naming the Soviet Union) published prior to the publication of the Nine Commentaries. See Cui, Wo suo qin li de zhong su da lun zhan [The Sino-Soviet Polemics I personally experienced]. The English translation quoted here is from “More on the Differences Between Comrade Togliatti and Us,” Peking Review 6, nos. 10, 11 (March 15, 1963): 56–57. The complete original text, from the same translation in Peking Review, is as follows:
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, and let the people in our own countries and the whole world think over and judge who is right and who is wrong. That is what we are doing, and we hope you will follow our example. We are not afraid to publish everything of yours in full. We publish all the “masterpieces” in which you rail at us. Then, in reply we either refute them point by point, or refute their main points. Sometimes we publish your articles without a word in answer leaving the readers to judge for themselves. Isn’t that fair and reasonable? You, modern revisionist masters! Do you dare to do the same? 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!
8. Qin, “Chen zhong de lang man” [Heavy-burdened romance], 286.
9. Xu, “Wo de wen ge jian wen” [What I saw and heard in the Cultural Revolution].
10. Jin Shan, “Wu shi nian qian ying xiang le yi dai ren de fan su jiu ping” [The anti-Soviet Nine Commentaries that influenced a generation of people fifty years ago].
11. Zhong, “‘Long Live Youth’ and the Ironies of Youth and Gender,” 159. Also see Denton, “Model Drama as Myth.”
12. Hong, “The Evolution of China’s War Movie in Five Decades.”
13. Zhang, Zhong guo shao nian er tong dian ying shi lun [A historical study of children’s films in China], 37.
14. Hong, “The Evolution of China’s War Movie in Five Decades.”
15. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 125.
16. Ibid., 147–48.
17. Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu, 162–63.
18. E-mail communication, December 22, 2014.
19. See Chen, “‘Playing in the Dirt.’”
20. Source omitted to protect author anonymity.
21. He Shu, Wei Mao zhu xi er zhan.
22. Source: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_48fe5da801000mct.html (accessed December 28, 2014). Also see Hai Yan [Storm petrel], special issue in commemoration of the death of Martyr Zhu Qingfang, June 24, 1968.
23. Chen, “Growing up with Posters in the Maoist Era,” 109.
24. Cai, “Shen sheng hui yi” [Sacred memory], 254.
25. Huang, “‘Jie wa’ de wu dou” [The armed fighting of street kids].
26. Both Little Soldier Zhang Gar and Li Xiangyang were popular heroes in the war films of the time. See Huang, “‘Jie wa’ de wu dou.”
27. Xie, “Wo zai wen hua da ge ming zhong de jing li” [My experiences in the Cultural Revolution], 145.
28. Ibid., 148.
29. Liu, “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution,’” 309.
30. Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic.
31. Perry, Anyuan, 241.
32. Although I focus on the common core of this revolutionary tradition, this does not presume that the Chinese revolutionary tradition was uncontested in the process of its construction. Perry’s work on the construction of the revolutionary tradition in Anyuan provides an illuminating example of the contestations in this process. See Perry, Anyuan.
33. Hung, Mao’s New World.
34. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 9.
35. Wu, Remaking Beijing; Lee, “The Charisma of Power and the Military Sublime.”
36. Cheng, Creating the New Man.
37. Townsend, The Revolutionization of Chinese Youth, 46.
38. Ridley, Godwin, and Doolin. The Making of a Model Citizen in Communist China; Cheng, Creating the New Man.
39. Cited in Scott, Chinese Popular Literature and the Child, 272.
40. Ibid.
41. Townsend, The Revolutionization of Chinese Youth, 49.
42. Ridley, Godwin, and Doolin, The Making of a Model Citizen in Communist China, 186.
43. There is no reason to assume that such an ideal person ever existed. However, interview data suggest that many youth had taken these values to heart. See Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture.
44. Sheridan, “The Emulation of Heroes,” 60, 61.
45. Ibid., 71.
46. See MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward for a detailed study of one of these catastrophic projects.
47. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 76.
48. Qian, “The Way Our Generation Imagined the World,” 525–26.
49. Ibid., 528.
50. Mao’s theory of permanent revolution was spelled out in a speech delivered on January 28, 1958, and publicized by Liu Shaoqi in May 1958. The idea of permanent revolution had its origin in Marx and Trotsky. For Trotsky, who had the most elaborate formulation of the concept before Mao, the revolution would be “permanent” in two respects. As Meisner puts it, “First, a revolution in an economically backward land could not be confined to any distinct ‘bourgeois-democratic’ phase, but would proceed ‘uninterrupted’ to socialism. Second, a revolution could not be confined to a single nation; the survival of a revolution in a backward country was dependent on the timely outbreak of socialist revolutions in the advanced countries for only in an international revolutionary context could the permanence of the revolutionary process be maintained.” See Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 194.
Fundamentally different from Trotsky’s view, Mao’s theory of permanent revolution was that the whole revolutionary process, until the realization of communism, is characterized by an endless series of social contradictions and struggles. In his Revolutionary Immortality, Robert Lifton offers a psychohistorical explanation of Mao’s theory and practice of permanent revolution. Commenting on the ongoing Cultural Revolution, Lifton wrote:
much of what has been taking place in China recently can be understood as a quest for revolutionary immortality. By revolutionary immortality I mean a shared sense of participating in permanent revolutionary fermentation, and of transcending individual death by “living on” indefinitely within this continuing revolution. . . . Central to this point of view is the concept of symbolic immortality I have described in earlier work: of man’s need, in the face of inevitable biological death, to maintain an inner sense of continuity with what has gone on before and what will go on after his own individual existence.
See Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, 7.
51. MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward, 17; Shen and Xia, “Hidden Currents During the Honeymoon.”
52. Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 174.
53. MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1: Contradictions Among the People, 314.
54. Ibid.
55. Mao, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, 165.
56. Shen and Xia, “Hidden Currents During the Honeymoon.”
57. Perry, Anyuan, 157.
58. Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War; Tucker, The China Threat.
59. Bo, Ruo gan zhong da jue ce yu shi jian de hui gu.
60. MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward, 264.
61. Ibid., 368.
62. MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 3: The Coming of the Cataclysm, 371.
3. Theory and Dissent
1. Song and Sun, Wen hua da ge ming he ta de yi duan si chao [Heterodox thoughts during the cultural revolution].
2. Berlinerblau, “Toward a Sociology of Heresy, Orthodoxy, and Doxa.”
3. For an English translation of the full text, see Peking Review, no. 33, August 12, 1966.
4. After Mao died and Deng came to power, Deng put forward “four basic principles” to uphold in 1979: “Uphold the socialist road, uphold proletarian dictatorship, uphold the leadership of the Communist Party, uphold Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought.” The similarity between these principles and the Cultural Revolution orthodoxy is only too clear. Although Deng was denounced as a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution, after he came back to power, he upheld basically the same orthodoxy as Mao. This “coincidence” is most ironic, because Deng completely rejected the Cultural Revolution. Yet it is most revealing about the nature of government in China: Those in power cannot reject China’s political system without undermining their own position. Thus to strengthen their position, they will strengthen the system.
5. According to Lee, the Cultural Revolution followed a set of rules of the game, which could not be violated. He lists six of them, one of which being that no one should “openly challenge the raison d’être of the Cultural Revolution.” See Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 343–44.
6. Xu, “Yi duan si chao he hong wei bing de si xiang zhuan xiang” [Heterodox thoughts and changes in the thinking of Red Guards], 268.
7. Walder, “Cultural Revolution Radicalism,” 59.
8. Wang, “‘New Trends of Thought’ on the Cultural Revolution,” 198.
9. Ibid., 214.
10. Zheng, “‘Wen hua da ge ming’ de ba li gong she qing jie” [The Paris Commune Complex in the ‘Great Cultural Revolution].
11. Jin Dalu, “Shanghai wen ge yun dong zhong de ‘qun zhong bao kan’” [“Mass newspapers” in Shanghai’s Cultural Revolution].
12. Zhong gong zhong yang guan yu bao zhi wen ti de tong zhi (Zhongfa 67, no. 9).
13. Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao II.
14. Twenty volumes were published in 1975, eight volumes in 1980 and 1992 respectively, and twenty volumes in 1999. These fifty-six volumes contain 1,564 titles of Red Guard publications. In 2001, forty volumes of Red Guard newspapers in the Beijing area were published, which contain 456 titles. In 2005, fifty-two new volumes were published, containing 1,135 titles. Altogether, these Red Guard publications contain a total of 3,155 titles. Different issues of the same title may appear in volumes published in different years. Thus some titles may have been counted more than once.
15. Chongqing xin wen zhi bian ji bu, n.d., 132.
16. Chengdu shi di fang zhi bian cuan wei yuan hui, ed., Chengdu shi zhi, 108.
17. Jin, “Shanghai wen ge yun dong zhong de ‘qun zhong bao kan,’” 3.
18. “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” 8.
19. Wang, “Mao zhu xi zui zhu yi zaofanpai bao zhi.”
20. Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 277.
21. Jin, “Shanghai wen ge yun dong zhong de ‘qun zhong bao kan,’” 3.
22. Dou pi zhan bao, July 5, 1967, in Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 4062.
23. Xu, Da yue jin yun dong zhong de zheng zhi chuan bo [Political communication in the Great Leap Forward campaign].
24. Gao, Hong tai yang shi zen yang sheng qi de [How did the red sun rise].
25. Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 485.
26. Xin Nankai, May 22, 1967, in Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 19559.
27. Ibid.
28. Yu, Wei bei wei gan wang you guo [Dare not forget worrying about the country even in a lowly position], 82.
29. Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, 60.
30. Lee calls it the “December black winds.” See Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 125. In their Wen hua da ge ming he ta de yi duan si chao, Song and Sun call it the “November black winds.”
31. Xin Beida 1210 zhan dou dui, “Chan chu Yilin-Dixi de da du cao” [Uproot Yilin-Dixi’s big poisonous weed].
32. Pi pan “hu shan xing” lian luo zhan, “Che di qing suan Beijing da xue ‘Jing Gang Shan,’ ‘Hong Lian Jun’ de bie dong dui—‘Hu Shan Xing’ de fan ge ming zui xing.” [Thoroughly settle account with the counterrevolutionary crime of “To the Tiger Mountain”—a special action team associated with Peking University’s “Jinggang Mountain’ and ‘Red Alliance Army”]. Xin Bei Da, February 1, 1967, 1–4.
33. White, Policies of Chaos.
34. For a discussion of these class labels, see Unger, Education Under Mao.
35. Ya, “Out of the Conscience of an Intellectual”; Mu, “Si shui liu nian” [Years flowing by like water].
36. For more on the original essays written by Yu Luoke and recollections by his friends and family after the Cultural Revolution, see essays in Xu, Ding, and Xu, Yu Luoke.
37. My account of the founding of the April Third and April Fourth factions is based on Bu, “‘Wen hua da ge ming’ zhong Beijing de ‘4.3’ he ‘4.4’ pai” [The April Third and April Fourth factions in Beijing during the “Great Cultural Revolution”].
38. While two violent conflicts happened in April and May respectively, the violence got worse in the months of July, August, and September. See ibid.
39. Zhao Zhenkai. “Zou jin bao feng yu” [Walking into the storm], 251.
40. CCP Central Committee, “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” 8.
41. Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 19909.
42. Yang, “‘Zhongguo xiang he chu qu?’ da zi bao shi mo” [The story behind the big-character poster ‘Whither China?’].
43. Yang, “Whither China?,” 184.
44. Ibid., 194.
45. Unger, “Whither China?,” 23–24.
46. Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins.
47. Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 1:26.
48. My own translation; original in Song and Sun, Wen hua da ge ming he ta de yi duan si chao.
49. Unger, “Whither China?,” 27.
50. Ibid., 31.
51. Lu, Yang tian chang xiao, 202.
52. Ibid., 203.
53. Xu Xiao, Ban sheng wei ren, 147–48.
4. Ordinary Life
1. Mao, “Dialogues with Responsible Persons”; also see Russo, “The Conclusive Scene.”
2. Educated Youth Office of the State Council, “Er shi wu nian lai zhi qing gong zuo de hui gu yu zong jie” [A review and summary of the work on educated youth in the past twenty-five years].
3. London and London, “China’s Lost Generation,” 18.
4. Ibid. A sociological study conducted at about the same time makes a similar point, noting especially that sent-down youth “read with eagerness any underground literature they could lay hands on.” See Chan, Children of Mao, 187.
5. Weber, Economy and Society, 2:1197.
6. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 211.
7. Ibid., 211–12.
8. Ibid., 213.
9. De Bary, Self and Society in Ming Thought and Learning for One’s Self; Tu, Humanity and Self-Cultivation; Elvin, “Between the Earth and Heaven.”
10. Lin, “The Suicide of Liang Chi”; Alitto, The Last Confucian; Chien, Chiao Hung and the Restructuring of Neo-Confucianism in the Late Ming; Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis.
11. Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 30–31.
12. Quoted in Lo, K’ang Yu-wei, 41.
13. Gao and Yan, 1966–1976, 40.
14. According to Liu Xiaomeng, from 1950 to 1966 altogether 41.9 million elementary school graduates could not enter junior high, 8.01 million junior high students could not go on to senior high, and 1.37 million senior high students could not go on to college. The total number was 51.2 million. During the same period, employment increased by 35.95 million. Thus there were about 15 million students waiting for employment. See Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 859.
15. The editorial drew criticisms from students, parents, and teachers. In several cases students even launched class strikes protesting against this policy. See Ding, Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 93–94.
16. Ding, Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 107.
17. Du, Feng chao dang luo.
18. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 863.
19. For histories of the sent-down movement, see Du, Feng chao dang luo; Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi. For an early English-language analysis, see Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages. For recent studies, see Pan, Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace; and Bonnin, The Lost Generation.
20. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi.
21. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai [A generation known as Red Guards], 153–54.
22. Ibid., 253.
23. Yang, “The Liminal Effects of Social Movements.”
24. Hong, “Dujiashan shang de xin she yuan” [A new farmer in Dujiashan village].
25. Ding, Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 444.
26. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 163.
27. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages, 50.
28. Bonnin, The Lost Generation.
29. Focus group interview, March 13, 2015, Beijing.
30. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 287.
31. Ibid., 294.
32. Shi, Zhi qing ri ji xuan bian [Collected diaries by educated youth], 38.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Ibid.
35. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 273.
36. Shi, Zhi qing ri ji xuan bian, 57.
37. Personal correspondence, March 30, 2000.
38. For example, a local Red Guard newspaper published on November 14, 1967 listed “20 crimes of being selfish,” which claims that “selfishness” is the source of all evils. See Song, Xin bian hong wei bing zi liao III, 14612.
39. Jin, Ku nan yu feng liu, 117.
40. Ibid.
41. Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian, 61.
42. Jin, Ku nan yu feng liu, 123.
43. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 314–15.
44. Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian, 162.
45. Ibid., 91.
46. Xin, Sui yue liu hen [Remains of the day], 217.
47. Shi, Zhi qing ri ji xuan bian, 25.
48. Ibid., 185–86.
49. Ridley, Godwin and Doolin, The Making of a Model Citizen in Communist China.
50. Liu, Political Culture and Group Conflicts in Communist China.
51. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 297.
52. Interview, June 21, 1999, New York.
53. That the category of “the people” is always a stake of political struggle is of course well known and is not confined to Mao’s China. For a sociological discussion, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Uses of the ‘People.’”
54. Interview, June 21, 1999, New York.
55. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 339–40.
56. Ta lu ti hsia k’an wu hui pien [Collection of mainland underground publications], 15:19.
57. For a general study of the reform, see Baum, Burying Mao. For studies of how state reform policies transformed urban life, see Ikels, The Return of the God of Wealth. For studies of bottom-up sources of economic reform, see Coase and Wang, How China Became Capitalist; and Tsai, Capitalism Without Democracy.
58. Parish, Chinese Rural Development; Kelliher, Peasant Power in China; Walder, Zouping in Transition.
59. White, Unstately Power.
60. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 651.
61. Ibid., 680, 686.
62. Ibid., 728.
63. Ibid., 731.
64. Zhang, “1978.”
65. Yang, “‘We want to go home!’”
66. Gold, “Urban Private Business and Social Change.”
67. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 811.
68. By semiprivate business, I refer mainly to what is called the min ban qi ye (collective-run enterprises). Thomas Gold defines them as “cooperatives formed by young people waiting for work who raised their own funds.” See Gold, “Urban Private Business and Social Change,” 162. By private business, I refer to what Solinger calls practices of the “petty private sector.” This sector consists of “the very small-scale commercial activity that individual peasants, peddlers, young people without state-sector jobs, and retired persons engage in at fairs, on city streets, or as itinerant hawkers in the rural areas.” See Solinger, China’s Transition from Socialism, 250.
69. E.g., see Hershkovitz, “The Fruits of Ambivalence”; Solinger, China’s Transition from Socialism, 233.
70. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 866.
71. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 362.
72. Solinger, China’s Transition from Socialism, 250.
73. Tsai, Capitalism Without Democracy.
74. Interview, April 25, 1998, New York.
5. Underground Culture
1. On the New Culture movement and the May Fourth movement, see Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment and Mitter, A Bitter Revolution.
2. Interview, July 11, 1999, Beijing.
3. On the underground cultural activities during the Cultural Revolution, see Link, “Hand-copied Entertainment Fiction”; Crevel, “Underground Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s;” Emerson, “The Guizhou Undercurrent”; Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution; and Zhu, “Si xiang shi shang de shi zong zhe” [The missing thinkers in intellectual history].
4. See, for example, Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian [Collected letters by educated youth] and Zhi qing ri ji xuan bian [Collected diaries by educated youth]; and Xu, Min jian shu xin [Letters from among the people].
5. One letter collected in Min jian shu xin runs up to ten pages in print. See Xu, Min jian shu xin, 223–33.
6. See, for example, Bei Bao, The August Sleepwalker; Morin, The Red Azalea; and Barnstone, Out of the Howling Storm.
7. This includes the “misty poetry” of the late 1970s and 1980s as well as the less “artistic” amateur works that were published in the 1990s more as historical records than as works of art.
8. The CD album of sent-down youth songs, titled Zhi qing lao ge [Old sent-down youth songs], was issued in 1998 in Guangzhou.
9. Link, “Hand-copied Entertainment Fiction.”
10. Zhou Lijing, “Zhang zai chuang ba shang de shu” [Trees growing out of scars].
11. Internal publications” (nei bu shu ji) were published for a limited readership, usually cadres and professional researchers. From 1949 to 1979, 18,301 titles of “internal publications” were published. See Zhong hua ban ben tu shu guan, Quan guo nei bu fa xing tu shu zong mu.
12. Zhang, “Wo liao jie de ‘huang pi shu’ chu ban shi mo.”
13. See Ren, Sheng si bei ge [A song of life and death].
14. Yang, Wen hua da ge ming zhong de di xia wen xue [Underground literature during the Cultural Revolution].
15. Yin, Shi zong zhe de zu ji [Footprints of the missing].
16. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.
17. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
18. Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian [Collected letters by educated youth], 114.
19. Zhang, “‘qing shu’ yi jiu” [Memories of “affectionate letters”], 104.
20. Shu, “Sheng huo, shu ji yu shi” [Life, books, and poetry].
21. Xu, Min jian shu xin.
22. Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian, 337.
23. The three collections are: Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian; Lu, Sheng shi zhen shi de [Life is real]; and Xin, Wu hui nian hua [Years of no regret].
24. Shi, Zhi qing shu xin xuan bian, 18.
25. Ibid., 47.
26. Ibid., 38.
27. Dang dai zhong guo cong shu bian ji bu, Dang dai zhong guo de chu ban shi ye [The publishing industry in contemporary China], 2:400-2.
28. Ibid., 2:403.
29. Dang dai zhong guo cong shu bian ji bu, Dang dai zhong guo de chu ban shi ye [The publishing industry in contemporary China], 1:78.
30. Ibid., 1:429.
31. Ibid., 1:431.
32. Liu and Shi, Xin zhong guo chu ban wu shi nian ji shi [Chronicles of fifty years of publishing in new China], 140.
33. Stealing and borrowing were apparently not the only means of obtaining forbidden books. In some cities, especially in the 1970s, there were black markets where such books were traded, but the scale of these markets was small and, in any case, books on black markets were beyond the means of the poor youths. In Shanghai, for example, a copy of Anna Karenina with a cover price of 3.8 yuan sold for 10 yuan on the black market. See Dang dai zhong guo de chu ban shi ye, 2:429.
34. Zhu, Lao san jie cai fang shou ji [Notes on interviews with the old three classes], 216.
35. Ibid., 216.
36. Bei and Li, Qi shi nian dai [The seventies], 170.
37. Zhu, Lao san jie cai fang shou ji, 213.
38. Jin, Dong fang shi ri tan, 187.
39. Wang, “Qiu zhi qu shi,” 97.
40. Hao, “Liu dong de shu” [Mobile books], 21.
41. Ibid., 22–23.
42. Several essays in a volume edited by Liao Yiwu recount stories about small circles of underground salons in Beijing. See Liao, Chen lun de sheng dian [The fallen altar]. The products (especially poems) of these underground circles are dealt with in Yang, Wen hua da ge ming zhong de di xia wen xue; and Yin, Shi zong zhe de zu ji.
43. Because access to internal publications was limited to high-level cadres, children of such families were more likely to have access.
44. Mi, Hong wei bing zhe yi dai, 297.
45. Wang, “Qiu zhi qu shi,” 94.
46. Du, Hun duan meng xing [Broken hearts, awakened dreams], 126.
47. Liao and Chen, “Lin Mang fang tan lu” [Interview with Lin Mang].
48. Ibid., 286–87.
49. Han, “Man chang de jia qi” [A long vacation], 579.
50. Ah, “Ting di tai” [Listening to the enemy’s radio station], 150.
51. Ren, Sheng si bei ge, 20.
52. Zhang, “Three-Horse Carriage,” 202.
53. Wang, “Wo ai ni Beidahuang” [I love you, Beidahuang], 300.
54. Interview, July 28, 1999, Beijing.
55. Correspondence to author from Ji Liqun, May 12, 2000. Ji is the author of “Cha dui sheng ya” [Life in the countryside].
56. Mu, Huang ruo ge shi [Like another world], 121.
57. Shi, Shi Zhi de Shi [Forefinger’s poems], 47.
58. Ge, “Guo Lusheng zai Xinghua cun” [Guo Lusheng in Xinghua Village], 63.
59. Unpublished interview with Sun Hengzhi and Chen Suning conducted by Sun Shuangyun, March 1, 2009.
60. Ji, “Cha dui sheng ya,” 18.
61. The leading figure of these groups was Ren Yi, author of the famous “Zhi qing zhi ge” [A song of sent-down youth].
62. The most comprehensive account of the “salon” activities in Beijing and Shanghai as yet is found in Yang, Wen hua da ge ming zhong de di xia wen xue. While these salons emerged among Red Guards in the later stage of the Red Guard movement, they continued to exist intermittently through the rustication period and became more active when educated youths returned to Beijing for vacations. See Ji, “Cha dui sheng ya.” For a study of similar activities in Guizhou, see Emerson, “The Guizhou Undercurrent.”
63. Ji, “Cha dui sheng ya,” 18.
64. Liao and Chen, “Lin Mang fang tan lu,” 286.
65. Duo Duo, “Bei mai zang de zhong guo shi ren (1972–1978)” [The unknown Chinese poets (1972–1978)].
66. Huang, A Bilingual Edition of Poetry Out of Communist China, 47.
67. Shi, Shi Zhi de Shi, 88.
68. Ibid., 10.
69. Xu, Min jian shu xin, 162.
70. A well-known commercial area in Beijing, later to be the site of the Democracy Wall movement.
71. Yang, Wen hua da ge ming zhong de di xia wen xue, 157.
72. Ibid., 158.
73. Note again the class undertones of this poem. The bourgeois taste celebrated in the poem was surely the taste of youth from privileged families. The pride in a hairstyle done by a barber on Xidan Avenue could only come from someone who not only had the privilege to live in Beijing but also the luxury to enjoy Beijing’s best in a period of material scarcity.
74. For an analysis of the core collective values promoted in socialist China, see Ridley, Godwin and Doolin, The Making of a Model Citizen in Communist China.
75. Yang, Wen hua da ge ming zhong de di xia wen xue, 424.
76. On the Li Yizhe poster, see Chan, Rosen, and Unger, On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System.
77. See letter written by a sent-down youth in 1969 in Xu, Min jian shu xin, 89–95.
78. The most influential document on agricultural reform, titled “Studies of Peasant Problems,” was written by Zhang Musheng (张木生) as early as in 1968. He was sent down before the Cultural Revolution in 1965. In the countryside, he and a few friends started a farm to put into practice their ideas about scientific agriculture, but the experiment failed. Like many other youths that had been sent down, when the Cultural Revolution came, he left his village. When he returned, he was surprised to find that the village agricultural output had significantly increased, because the village leader had been bold enough to experiment with household economy when the entire country was busy with the Cultural Revolution. This inspired Zhang to ponder about agricultural reform. He argued in his essay that the fundamental cause of China’s agricultural problems was the collective system of “people’s commune.” He proposed that some form of household economy based on market principles might have its advantages. Zhang initially formulated his ideas in private conversations with friends and then wrote them down in a letter to a friend. Soon the essay went into underground circulation in hand-copied manuscripts and provoked discussions. The would-be reformist party leader Hu Yaobang allegedly read the document and held it in high regard. After the reform started, Zhang was among the first researchers to be recruited into the Institute of Agricultural Economy in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. On Zhang Musheng, see Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi, 637–43.
79. Chen and Jin, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy.
6. New Enlightenment
1. See, for example, Heilmann, Turning Away from the Cultural Revolution in China.
2. Pan, Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace.
3. The most absorbing narrative and analysis of the student movement in 1989 remains Craig Calhoun’s Neither Gods nor Emperors. On the concept of cycles of protest, see Tarrow, Power in Movement.
4. On Chinese politics at the end of the Mao era, see Teiwes and Sun, The End of the Maoist Era.
5. Chen, Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals, 5.
6. As in almost all cases of popular protest in China, the authorities being challenged by the protest claimed there were black hands behind the scene. This was the case with the April Fifth movement as well as the student movement in 1989. Following the repression of the protest, China’s official media hinted at the possibility of a high-level plot with Deng Xiaoping as the backstage mastermind. The limited scholarly literature on this movement suggests that it was more of a case of popular protest with organizational structures rooted in informal social networks and China’s work unit system. On the April Fifth movement, see Forster, “The 1976 Ch’ing-ming Incident in Hangchow”; Louie and Louie, “The Role of Nanjing University in the Nanjing Incident”; Dong and Walder, “Foreshocks.” On 1989, see Black and Munro, Black Hands of Beijing.
7. Yuhuatai is a memorial site dedicated to China’s revolutionary martyrs, much like the Monument of People’s Heroes in Beijing.
8. Dong and Walder, “Foreshocks.”
9. Cited in Louie and Louie, “The Role of Nanjing University in the Nanjing Incident,” 347.
10. Ibid., 333.
11. The poem has four lines: “I feel sad, but hear the screams of a devilish ghost, / I want to cry, but hear the laughter of the wolves, / Shedding tears, I condole the death of a hero, / Raising my eyebrows, I pull my sword from its sheath.”
12. Chen, Jin ji lu, Du li lu [A brambled road, an independent road]. Chen Ziming’s memoir about this episode of his experience is also contained in Widor, Documents on the Chinese Democratic Movement, 115.
13. Ben bao ping lun yuan, “Shi shi qiu shi, you cuo bi jiu” [Follow the truth, correct mistakes].
14. Chen explains the changing meanings of these publications in the following words: “These mostly mimeographed journals were at first referred to by the government as minjian chubanwu, publications of the people, then termed zifa chubanwu, spontaneous publications, then changed to dixia chubanwu, underground publications. Finally, after the arrest of Wei Jingsheng . . . they were denounced as fandong kanwu, reactionary publications. Nevertheless, all the editors preferred to call their journals minban kanwu, publications by the people or unofficial journals, so as to indicate their difference from the official ones.” See Chen, Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals, 2.
15. The term min zhu qiang (民主墙) was not an invention of the Democracy Wall movement, but had appeared in 1957 during the “Hundred Flowers” period. See Liu, “Beijing da xue ‘min zhu qiang.” For English studies of the Democracy Wall movement, see Nathan, Chinese Democracy; Seymour, The Fifth Modernization; Goldman, “Democracy Wall”; Finkel, Splintered Mirror. The most comprehensive collection of primary documents from the Democracy Wall movement is Ta lu ti hsia k’an wu hui pien [Collection of the mainland underground publications].
16. On November 29, American journalist Robert Novak told the crowd at the Tiananmen Square that Deng Xiaoping thought the democracy wall was a good thing. See Brodsgaard, “The Democracy Wall Movement in China.” According to Ruoxi Chen, John Fraser of the Toronto Globe and Mail took American syndicated columnist Robert Novak to see the wall on November 26. People learned that Novak might see Deng the next day. Novak promised to return to tell of his interview with Deng. The next day, Novak went on his tour of China and Fraser showed up at the wall on his behalf. He told the people that Deng had declared the Xidan Democracy Wall to be “a good thing.” See Chen, Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals, 12; also see Fraser, The Chinese, 245.
17. Chen, Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals, 15.
18. The inaugural issue of Explorations contains Wei Jingsheng’s article “The Fifth Modernization,” which had first appeared on December 5, 1978, on the Democracy Wall in the form of a poster.
19. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 23–24.
20. Ta lu ti hsia k’an wu hui pien, 7:193.
21. Huang, “Awakening,” 43.
22. This is not to deny that, in rising to power, Deng encouraged these popular protests as a way of delegitimizing his political opponents. Yet a conspiracy theory can only go so far. It is the interactions between elite politics and popular action that seemed to be central here.
23. This account is based on Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi [A history of the educated youth in China], 723–48.
24. Gold, “Back to the City”; Mclaren, “The Educated Youth Return”; Yang, “‘We want to go home!’”
25. Gold, “Back to the City,” 763.
26. While in Beijing the center of the Democracy Wall movement was the section of wall in the Xidan area, in Shanghai it was the People’s Square.
27. Ya, “Ren quan yi shi zai zhong guo de jue xing” [The awakening of human rights consciousness in China].
28. Bin Yang argues that the success of the sent-down youth protests in Yunnan had to do with Yunnan’s strategic location on the eve of the Sino-Vietnamese War, which would break out in mid-February of 1979. During this time of border crisis, Chinese leaders apparently did not want to see the aggravation of domestic trouble. See Yang, ‘“We want to go home!”
29. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 196.
30. Ibid., 206–9.
31. Benton, Wild Lilies, Poisonous Weeds, 87.
32. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 220.
33. Liu et al., Zhong guo zhi qing shi.
34. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 212.
35. Benton, Wild Lilies, Poisonous Weeds, 106.
36. Tao, “Letter of Proposal.”
37. Chen, Democracy Wall and the Unofficial Journals, 36.
38. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 221.
39. Heilmann, “The Social Context of Mobilization in China,” 11–12.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Ibid., 7.
42. I compiled the information based on sources in Hu et al., Kai tuo [Exploration], 341.
43. On the continuity and its limits between the 1989 protest and earlier movements, see Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors, 164–65.
44. Ibid., 299.
45. Whittier, “Political Generations, Micro-Cohorts, and the Transformation of Social Movements.”
46. Liu, “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution,’” 309.
47. Ibid., 310.
48. Yang, The Power of the Internet in China, chapter 4.
49. See Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors, 201–11.
50. It is for this reason that when Internet discussion forums became popular, postings in these online forums were compared to wall posters.
51. Pan, “‘San jiao di’ de xian shi yu ji yi” [The reality and memories of the “Triangle”].
52. Kraus, Brushes with Power, 98.
53. Barmé, “History Writ Large.”
54. See http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/The_Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon (accessed August 17, 2015).
55. Calhoun and Wasserstrom, “Legacies of Radicalism.”
56. Han, Cries for Democracy, 136.
57. Mitter, A Bitter Revolution.
58. Ibid., 232.
59. Bei Dao, The August Sleepwalker, 33.
60. Morin, The Red Azalea, 107.
61. Calhoun and Wasserstrom, “Legacies of Radicalism,” 35.
62. See Xu, “Qi meng de zi wo wa jie.”
63. Klatch, A Generation Divided.
64. See Xu, “Qi meng de zi wo wa jie.”
65. These changes are examined in Yang, The Power of the Internet in China, chapter 4.
7. Factionalized Memories
1. On the memory battles over the Cultural Revolution, see, among others, Gao, The Battle for China’s Past. On how memory of the Mao era may vary with gender and locality, see Hershatter, The Gender of Memory.
2. Schwartz and Kim, “Introduction.”
3. For example, see Zelizer’s studies of photography as a shaping force of memory. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget and About to Die.
4. Schudson, “The Present in the Past Versus the Past in the Present.”
5. Dittmer, “Rethinking China’s Cultural Revolution Amid Reform.”
6. Harding, China’s Second Revolution, 61. On the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution in the early years after Mao’s death, see Forster, “Repudiation of the Cultural Revolution in China”; Munro, “Settling Accounts with the Cultural Revolution at Beijing University.”
7. Kleinman and Kleinman, “How Bodies Remember,” 713.
8. Dittmer, “Rethinking China’s Cultural Revolution Amid Reform,” 7.
9. Barmé, Shades of Mao, 55.
10. See CCP Central Committee, “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” 6–11.
11. CCP Central Committee, “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party.” Harry Harding suggests that this “document marked the Party’s formal acceptance of Deng’s political and economic program. It repudiated the Cultural Revolution and the ideological tenets connected with the later years of Mao Zedong.” See Harding, China’s Second Revolution, 64–65.
12. See A Great Trial in Chinese History.
13. Citing official sources, Richard Baum notes that about forty thousand people were expelled from the Chinese Communist Party during the campaign, 25 percent of whom belonged to the “three kinds of people.” See Baum, Burying Mao, 168.
14. Forster, “Repudiation of the Cultural Revolution in China,” 6.
15. Shu, “Zeng qiang dang xing, gen chu pai xing” [Strengthen party spirit, eradicate factional spirit], 6.
16. Resistance may be seen from a circular issued by the Central Office of the CCP concerning the demolition of Mao status. An English translation of the directive is available in Barmé, Shades of Mao, 133. Han was sentenced to fifteen years in 1983; the other two each got seventeen years. See appropriate entries in Chao, Wen hua da ge ming ci dian [A dictionary of the Great Cultural Revolution].
17. On intellectual movements in the 1980s, see Wang, High Culture Fever; Calhoun, Neither Gods Nor Emperors; and Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.
18. Barmé, Shades of Mao, 22.
19. Jin, Shi yun yu ming yun [Social and personal destinies], 3.
20. Barmé, Shades of Mao, 4–5.
21. Scharping reviews twenty-eight works of the memorial literature on Mao and lists several Chinese-language bibliographies on the Mao literature. See Scharping, “The Man, the Myth, the Message.”
22. Barmé, Shades of Mao, 9.
23. Zhao, “Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour,” 743–44.
24. Yang, Religion in China.
25. According to Xudong Zhang, The Blue Kite and To Live, among others, “mark and culminate a cultural and intellectual trend of pursuing cinematic narrative of a traumatic experience of the past or, more precisely, a visual reconstruction of the national memory through a post-revolutionary catharsis of trauma.” See Zhang, “National Trauma, Global Allegory,” 624.
26. Huang, Dang dai zhong guo da zhong wen hua yan jiu [Studies of popular culture in contemporary China], 58.
27. CCP Central Propaganda Department and State Press and Publication Administration, “Guan yu chu ban ‘wen hua da ge ming’ tu shu wen ti de ruo gan gui ding” [Regulations governing the publication of books about the ‘Great Cultural Revolution.” In PRC State Press and Publication Administration Policy Laws and Regulations Section, Zhong hua ren min gong he guo xian xing xin wen chu ban fa gui hui bian (1949–1990) [Operative press and publishing laws and regulations of the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1990]. For an English translation, see Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, 310–12.
28. The English translation of the document is reprinted in Barmé, Shades of Mao, 237.
29. Xin wen chu ban shu [State Press and Publishing Administration], “Tu shu, qi kan, yin xiang zhi pin, dian zi chu ban wu zhong da xuan ti bei an ban fa” [Measures for reporting major projects in the publication of books, magazines, audiovisual and digital publications]. In Zhongguo chu ban nian jian ed., Zhongguo chu ban nian jian. Beijing: Zhongguo chu ban nian jian she, 1998, 238.
30. Winter, “The Generation of Memory.”
31. See chapters in Lee and Yang, Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution.
32. Wang, Ke shu hui wang cheng gu xiang [The temporary abode that we now call our hometown].
33. Interview, July 28, 1999, Beijing.
34. Lao san jie [The old three classes].
35. Chen, “Lost in Revolution and Reform.”
36. Li, Da dao chao tian [The open road].
37. Interview, July 24, 1999, Beijing.
38. Lu, Sheng shi zhen shi de [Life is real], 201.
39. Ibid., 165.
40. Yan, “Ta zai shen qing de re tu shang” [Stepping onto the heart-warming land], 225.
41. Interview, July 29, 1999, Beijing.
42. Xiao, Chu mo wang shi [Gently touching the past], 359.
43. Ibid., 362.
44. Davies, “Visible Zhiqing.”
45. An, Zhi qing chen fu lu [The rise and fall of sent-down youth], 194.
46. Sun, Qing ji huang tu di [Emotional attachment to the yellow earth]; Wang, Ke shu hui wang cheng gu xiang; and Xin, Wu hui nian hua [Years of no regret]. The stories in the first two collections focus on northern Shaanxi and Beidahuang in Heilongjiang Province. The third, Years of no regret, covers various regions, but most of the stories are about villages in Liaoning Province. I have also examined dozens of other similar collections, but found no significant differences among them in subject matter, theme, or style. Overall, these three collections are typical of this particular genre of nostalgic literature produced in China in the 1990s. For details of my content analysis, see Yang, “China’s Zhiqing Generation.”
47. Zhou, “Chongqing de ‘chang, du, jiang, chuan’ yu guo jia wen hua ruan shi li” [Sing, reading, storytelling, and disseminating red culture in Chongqing and national soft power], 92.
48. “Why Is Chongqing So Red?”
49. Lam, “The Maoist Revival,” 12.
50. On media coverage of the scandal, see “Bo Xilai.”
51. See Li, “Xi Jinping ken ding Chongqing chang hong ge xing wei” [Xi Jinping affirms singing red songs in Chongqing].
52. Demick, “China’s Xi More Maoist Than Reformer Thus Far.”
53. Roberts, “Xi Jinping Is No Fun.”
54. Osnos, “Born Red.”
55. Meng and Nan, “Loyal to Mao’s Legacy.”
56. Zhao, “Zou jin bao feng yu” [Walking into the storm], 263.
57. Song, “Lao san jie xiao you yu lao shi jian mian hui fa yan” [Speech at meeting of old three classes alum with their teachers].
58. Zhou, Wen ge zao fan pai zhen xiang [The historical truth about rebels during the Cultural Revolution], 329.
59. Chen, “Ji qing yu ku nan bing cun de li shi, duan bu hui mo ran wu hen” [A history combining passion and suffering will surely not be silent and traceless].
60. Liu, “Ju you li shi jia zhi de yi ben xin shu” [A new book with a historical value].
61. E.g., see Hong, Mi mang [Lost]; Huang, Wo zen me cheng le Jiang Qing de gan nü er [How did I become Jiang Qing’s goddaughter]; Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu [Personal story of an editor of a Red Guard newspaper]
62. Schoenhals, Ji Yi [Remembrance].
63. He, “Fa kan ci” [Inaugural statement].
64. Song, “Lao san jie xiao you yu lao shi jian mian hui fa yan.”
65. Qi Zhi, “Song Binbin dao qian zhi hou.”
Conclusion
1. Kleinman and Kleinman’s study of embodied memory of the Cultural Revolution finds that their subjects’ bodily complaints, such as dizziness, exhaustion, and pain, are expressions of social distress and suffering experienced during the Cultural Revolution. See Kleinman and Kleinman, “How Bodies Remember.”
2. For example, see Calhoun and Wasserstrom, “Legacies of Radicalism”; O’Brien and Li, “Campaign Nostalgia in the Chinese Countryside”; Perry, “‘To Rebel Is Justified’”; Lee, Against the Law; Calhoun, “The Cultural Revolution”; Frazier, The East Is Black; Ross, “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West”; Wolin, The Wind from the East.
3. Kuai Dafu had to move from place to place (Beijing, Shandong, Jiangsu) before he finally settled in Shenzhen. See Xu, Qinghua Kuai Dafu.
4. This is not to say that there are no other traditions to draw on. Students in 1989 drew on the traditions of the French Revolution and the May Fourth movement. The Democracy Wall activists drew on their immediate predecessors in the April Fifth movement in 1976. Activists in the twenty-first century learn the repertoires of contention from international NGOs and global activists. And earlier traditions of the Chinese communist revolution, such as Anyuan workers’ strikes, continue to provide cultural resources. For a comprehensive treatment of the revolutionary tradition’s relationship to protest, see Perry, Anyuan.
5. On the May movement in France, see Touraine, May Movement. On alternative activist media, see McMillian, Smoking Typewriters.
6. E.g., see Gamson and Wolfsfeld, “Movements and Media as Interacting Systems”; and Koopmans, “Movements and Media.”
7. See, for example, discussions about the relationship between mainstream media and the Internet in the creation of online protest events in Yang, The Power of the Internet in China.
8. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors.
9. McMillian, Smoking Typewriters.
10. Zhou, Hong wei bing xiao bao zhu bian zi shu.
11. See, for example, Liu Qing’s account of his encounter with Chen Erjin and how the April Fifth Forum published Chen Erjin’s essay on class privileges. Liu, “Chen Erjin.” Also see Xu Xiao’s account of the editorial activities of the journal Today: Xu, Ban sheng wei ren [Half of my life].
12. Walzer, The Revolution of Saints; Moore, Moral Purity and Persecution in History.
13. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, 217.
14. Ibid., 230.
15. Walder, “Political Sociology and Social Movements.”
16. Li, “Jin qian ming ge ming hou dai xiang ju xin chun tuan bai hui” [Close to a thousand offspring of the revolution gather for New Year greetings].
17. Zhao, “Zou jin bao feng yu” [Walking into the storm], 263.