Abstract
Daniel Leese, winner of a European Research Council Junior Grant for a project on transitional justice in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, has produced a very helpful and much-needed book on the Cultural Revolution. This monograph is written for a wide readership and for those interested in China, and can be put to very good use in undergraduate courses on China because it provides an overview of the state of the art of research on the Cultural Revolution. This is the first book of its kind on the Cultural Revolution in German, and I would definitely recommend it as a reference book for students engaged in Chinese studies and beyond.
The book is divided into six chapters covering the period between 1966 and 1976. It starts by discussing changes in the image and perception of the Cultural Revolution both inside and outside China, explaining how the Cultural Revolution has been an object of unending debate despite the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to make the topic a taboo since the publication of the Resolution on Some Questions Regarding the History of the Party since the Founding of the PRC (关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议) in 1981. Leese rightly explains that, despite the overall rejection of the Cultural Revolution as a political strategy as well as a political movement, certain elements of nostalgia have entered the wider discussion. After providing a chronology of events, Leese embarks on explaining the reasons and ideological foundations of the Cultural Revolution, taking a multidimensional approach which includes power struggle, ideological considerations and social issues. Chapter 3 then goes into some detail in trying to explain what happened immediately before the decision of 16 May 1966 and during the first months of the Cultural Revolution, focusing on the period when work groups were in charge and when they organized students to criticize their teachers and professors. Chapter 4 discusses the period after Mao Zedong had taken the decision to focus on ‘capitalist roaders’. Chapter 5 examines the circumstances after the 9th Party Congress and the attempts to repress the movement including the Lin Biao affair. Chapter 6 deals with the issue of how Mao Zedong’s successor was decided on, the rapprochement with the United States and other capitalist countries, as well as the impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s economic development.
This book not only describes the different phases of the Cultural Revolution, but also discusses controversies in research, and its final chapters raise certain questions which require thorough research in the future. In this context, Leese makes a strong case for more in-depth research on regional varieties of the Cultural Revolution, a topic which has gained in importance in the last few years. He is critical of the lack of opportunities to openly discuss the Cultural Revolution in the PRC and advocates a sound historical approach to this period of PRC history. However, there are certain aspects which, to my understanding of the ongoing discussion, should have been included.
Quite surprisingly, the author accepts the dictum of the 1981 Resolution which defines the Cultural Revolution as a period of 10 years. As a matter of fact, before 1976 no discussion of the revolution has ever accepted this periodization, and one of the issues we must understand is why the CCP insists on looking at the Cultural Revolution as ‘10 years of chaos’. Although he refers to the 1981 Resolution and mentions the discussion of Cultural Revolution participants on the so-called ‘two revolutions’, he does not include the many Chinese-language publications from inside and outside the PRC published in recent years, despite the CCP making it a taboo in the PRC.
The state of the art of research on the Cultural Revolution included in this book is mostly based on English-language publications and a selection of German-language contributions to the discussion. By choosing to use secondary literature, Leese has overlooked two major issues. One is most prominently discussed by Xu Youyu, which is the question of why Mao’s idea of launching the Cultural Revolution found so much resonance among the population of the PRC. To my mind, this is a question of significant importance which we must understand in light of the increasing nostalgia surrounding this period of PRC history.
The second issue was raised by Wang Meng, who argued in a recent publication that not only should we know more details of what happened at different localities and different times during the 1966 to 1976 period, but also that we have to go beyond the theoretical explanations given by Mao himself in order to gain a deeper understanding of the many different aspects of the Cultural Revolution. This implies that we must put the Cultural Revolution in its international context rather than look at it as a ‘Chinese’ event and that we should develop a comparative perspective as a basis for theorizing the Cultural Revolution. Despite the fact that there is still a lot more to know about the Cultural Revolution in order to come to terms with this highly complicated period of PRC history, I would agree with Wang Meng that only a theoretically sound approach to the Cultural Revolution can help us deepen our understanding of Maoist as well as post-Maoist China.