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HISTORY FOR THE MASSES
by Geremie R. Barmé*
Every policy shift in recent Chinese history
has involved the rehabilitation, re-evaluation and revision of history
and historical figures.
The early stages of the Cultural Revolution were preoccupied with
questions of political rehabilitation, (1) and even in the years
following the Cultural Revolution political rehabilitation similarly
affected virtually every aspect of society. Not only were older cadres
who had been purged or unaligned during the Cultural Revolution
gradually restored to power or posthumously honoured, but entire
historical epochs, figures, and even cultural forms, themes and styles
were 'rehabilitated'.
From the late 1970s onward the Chinese leadership spoke of its work of
righting past wrongs as 'bringing order out of chaos and returning to
the rectitude (of the past)' ( boluan fanzheng ). (2) This was
also described as 'giving things back their original appearance' or
'turning an inverted history on its head'. The rehabilitation process
that began in the early 1970s and continued until the early 1980s (3)
together with the 1981 Party resolution on history formed a theoretical
and practical background to the reform policies of the 1980s.
From the start, however, Deng Xiaoping and his fellows were concerned
that the nation 'unite as one and look to the future'. They wished to
avoid entanglement in historical minutiae and the settling of old
scores. The Party therefore attempted to define the parameters of
rehabilitation and debate rather than let the momentum of public,
intellectual and academic pressure lead where they might, as was to
happen, for example, in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. In this
context Deng Xiaoping's speech at the closing session of the month-long
work meeting held in preparation for the Third Plenum of the 11th
Congress of the CPC in December 1978 is of particular importance. The
title of the speech itself was an indication of its basic tenor:
'Liberate Thinking, Seek Truth from Facts and Unite and Look to the
Future'. (4)
Deng emphasized among other things that 'resolving questions left over
from the past, clarifying the achievements and errors of certain people
and correcting a number of major unfair, incorrect and false cases is
essential for the liberation of thought as well as for stability and
unity'. (5) Here the utilitarian dimension of the policy of
rehabilitation is quite obvious. Deng also stole a march on his critics
inside and outside the Party. He did this by emphasizing that the
entire leadership and not Mao Zedong alone had to take responsibility
for the errors of the 1950s and 1960s. (6)
One of the chief problems that the Chinese have had in coming to grips
with the problem of Mao is that, unlike in the Soviet Union, there is
no Stalin-Lenin dichotomy. Instead, a distinction is made between the
early and late Mao. Deng's strategy, moreover, has been to create a
collective body of 'Mao Zedong Thought' from which all unwanted
theories can be excluded and into which any number of revisionist
policies can be incorporated. As he stated in 1980, 'The banner of Mao
Zedong Thought can never be discarded. To throw it away would be
nothing less than to negate the glorious history of our Party... It
would be ill-advised to say too much about Comrade Mao Zedong's errors.
To say too much would be to blacken Comrade Mao, and that would blacken
the country itself. That would go against history'. (7)
Since expediency and the immediate need for 'unity and stability' were
the key motivations behind the late 1970s' Party revision of history,
Deng stressed that 'it is impossible and unnecessary for [these
questions] to be resolved to our complete satisfaction. We must
consider the broader issues, we can afford to be sketchy; it's
impossible to clear up every little detail, and unnecessary'.(8)
Setting the basic line on the evaluation of both Mao and the Cultural
Revolution, he made it quite clear that 'Mao Zedong Thought will
eternally be our ... most precious spiritual heritage'. (9) With such
words, he avoided a repetition of the kind of political and ideological
suicide committed by Khruschev when he launched his denunciation of
Stalin. (10)
Developments in the Soviet Union have had a crucial impact on Chinese
attitudes towards history. As Wen Yuankai, a leading Chinese thinker,
said in January 1989:
The bold measures which Gorbachev has
taken since assuming office have had an extremely profound and subtle
effect on China. Nearly all the reforming socialist nations are
presently re-examining their own histories, including the great
Stalinist purges. Every day new details are revealed, not only in the
Soviet Union but in other countries as well, including China. This has
made China reflect deeply on its own past. (11)
However, whereas Stalin and his henchmen are
now readily used to personify evil in popular Soviet thought and
culture, from the mid-1980s there has been a revival of the Mao Zedong
cult in China. In addition to mass-released cassettes with fresh
recordings of Cultural Revolution songs in praise of Mao and the
mass-produced, laminated portraits that went on sale starting in 1991,
the most substantial expression of the revival has been in publishing,
with numerous books on Mao authored by everyone from his last concubine
(Zhang Yufeng) to his bodyguard (Li Yinqiao). Liu Yazhou's book of 1990
The Square - Altar for an Idol , altogether is sympathetic
to Mao, depicting a great leader who finds that his people have failed
him as much as he has failed them. (12) So, too, have the controversial
reportage writers Jia Lusheng and Su Ya produced a remarkably
obsequious and purple prose-laden 'study' of the Mao cult. (13)
Rather than allow the momentum built up during the rehabilitation
process of the late 1970s to get out of hand, in 1981 Party leaders had
ordered the writing of a new and supposedly final verdict on post-1949
historical questions that, theoretically, would end all debate on
contentious major issues and ensure 'unity for the future'. (For an
alternative perspective on this, see Suzanne Weigelin-Schweidrzik's
chapter.) Hu Qiaomu, who had played a major role in the composition of
the 1945 resolution describing the history of the Party from 1921
onward as a 'history of Mao Zedong' (14) - a resolution crucial in
forming the basis of the Mao-cult from the 1950s - was assigned to
oversee the writing of the 1981 resolution. Thus one of the leading and
earliest architects of the Party's ideological mythology was put in
charge of historical interpretation once more. (In the late 1990s, Hu
led a group assigned to write the official history of the Party, while
Deng Liqun, Hu's chief assistant in this project and a man who came to
prominence as an underling of Chen Boda during the purge of Wang Shiwei
in 1942, oversaw the composition of the first history of the People's
Republic.) (15) The 1981 Party document gave what was intended to be
the final word on Mao Zedong's errors, the nature of the political
purges of the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution. It would provide the
theoretical basis for the 1987 purge of 'bourgeois liberalization' as
well as the Party's interpretation of the events of 1989 and the
justification for the post-Massacre purge.
The official limits imposed on the discussion of post-1949 history ran
into opposition from the very outset. One of the first public
objections came from the Shanghai-based veteran writer Ba Jin, who, in
essays written in 1978-79, had appealed repeatedly for the 'right to
remember'. (16) Despite the care taken by the leadership and Party
ideologues, the official view of the Cultural Revolution as an
historical 'blank spot' ( kongbai ), the call to 'liberate
thought', the official stress on practice being the sole criterion of
truth and particularly the 1981 document, all contributed in varying
degrees to the creation of new ideological spaces in which writers and
historian could pursue their work. In the late 1970s, the historian Li
Shu, as the new editor of the major specialist journal Historical
Research (Lishi yanjiu), called for a re-evaluation of major
historical questions, as did the Party theoretician Li Honglin, who in
1978 demanded a lifting of taboos on Party history. (17)
However, while their work was highly significant, academic historians
were not publicly prominent in the 1980s. They produced important
revelations on such subjects as the Chinese Trotskyites, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Anti-Rightist Movement as well as on numerous other
periods and incidents in the Party's history, material which has
continued to appear in specialist journals, even since the June 1989
purge. But novelists, journalists and a few academics writing for the
press, television or commercial publishers - despite what is often a
more sensationalist or less rigorous approach - have had a more marked
effect on the changing historical consciousness of the general
population.
By the early to mid-1980s, pressure for further political
rehabilitations reaching back to the 1950s and even earlier (first of
Hu Feng, then Yu Pingbo, and later of the film 'The Life of Wu Xun' and
Hu Shi) was threatening the legitimacy of the Party's entire post-1949
political and cultural line. Hu Yaobang, then Party General Secretary,
advocated new cultural and political policies, allowing a higher degree
of historical re-assessment than any other leader at the time. His
stance can be interpreted either as a direct challenge to the Party's
line on history as outlined in 1981, or as the inevitable outcome of
the extraordinarily contradictory elements of the Party's new 'liberal
Maoist' ideology. In 1986, Hu Qili, on behalf of Hu Yaobang, suggested
a re-assessment of all the Party's major intellectual and cultural
purges beginning with the 1940s (the denunciation of Wang Shiwei in
Yan'an being a case in point). (18) When Hu Yaobang was later attacked
for being indulgent toward 'bourgeois liberalization' and removed from
office, his attitudes towards Party history and culture were among his
crimes. It was the intellectual atmosphere he had helped create that
resulted in the appearance of many of the works discussed below.
Having noted this, it should not be forgotten that Hu Yaobang also had
had a key part in drafting the 1981 resolution on Party history and
that in 1980 he had overseen the first (albeit mild) purge of the
cultural world of the reform era, which included criticism of several
popular works dealing with the Cultural Revolution. And despite his
willingness in 1985 to confront the cases of Wang Shiwei and others, in
1986 he issued a directive warning that the depiction of historical
events and figures in literary works must accord with Party policy:
'These are not questions of artistic license, but issues of political
import and rectitude'. (19)
The years 1985-88 were, nonetheless, something of a watershed in terms
of media representations of history due in part to Hu Yaobang's
pronouncements and the appointment in late 1985 of Zhu Houze as head of
the Party's organs of propaganda. But if such political moves were
opening up the past to political re-interpretation, economic reform
opened up history to commercial exploitation as well.
One of the key catalysts of intellectual and cultural diversity in
China from the early 1980s onwards was provided by the partial reform
of the publishing industry. Encouraged to turn a profit, during each
period of relative ideological relaxation publishers have learned that
controversy and sensation sell books. Having been force-fed a unitary
view of history for so long, many people had developed an insatiable
appetite for alternative perspectives of any kind, no matter how
ludicrous or fictional. This helped foster the boom in reportage and
historical writing discussed below, as well as encouraging writers of
serious literature to look into the hidden corners of pre-1949 history.
Tabloids and monthly pulp magazines, meanwhile, have found the
publication of historical revelations and scandal most profitable.
The ideological backlash of the post-Tiananmen period provided those
who had been involved in prosecuting earlier purges with a convenient
excuse to oppose further historiographical license. (20) The prospect
of continued rehabilitations and re-evaluation of 1950s history posed a
direct threat to leaders still in power who had participated in the
past persecutions (including Deng himself, active in the Anti-Rightist
Campaign of 1957).
So long as publishers must show a profit, however, controversial
publications get produced, and the impact of such books can be massive.
The official indexes of books banned after June 4 were carefully
guarded so they would not fall into the hands of publishing
entrepreneurs, as the government well knew that the temptation to
produce pirate editions would be tremendous. Reading banned books
traditionally is a popular form of opposing authority: in traditional
China one of the great pleasures for a scholar-gentleman was described
as 'shutting one's door, turning away guests and reading banned books'
( bimen xieke du jinshu ). Whatever the wishes of Party elders,
revisionist writings on history continue to see the light of day.
Literature
In the post-Mao era, the first popular vehicle for historical
re-awakening was the short story. Starting in 1978 a series of stories
appeared dealing with the sufferings of individuals during the Cultural
Revolution. They were called 'scar literature' or 'literature of the
wounded' ( shanghen wenxue ). (21) There were also fleeting
attempts in poetry and theatre directly to address problems created by
the Mao personality cult. The most noteworthy example of such poetry is
Sichuan poet Sun Jingxuan's 1980 'A Spectre Prowls Our Land', which
equates Mao and feudalism. (22) The harsh criticisms to which Sun was
subjected may have discouraged others from producing further works on
this theme. The army poet and playwright Bai Hua's early Eighties play
about the ancient kings of Wu and Yoe is another example. (Bai Hua is
best known for his screenplay 'Unrequited Love', which was denounced by
Deng Xiaoping in March 1981. 'Unrequited Love' has, as a subtext, an
attack on Mao, and pointedly ends with a symbolic setting sun.) (23)
The suppression of attempts to deal, in fiction and other ways, with
the historical problem of Mao set the stage in the late 1980s for a
popular revival of the Mao cult.
In late 1985, following a seminar on new research options for modern
literary studies, a group of Beijing University academics began
re-evaluating 20th-century Chinese literature. (24) They were building
on the considerable work done in collecting, collating and publishing
research materials in literary history from the early 1980s.
Ironically, it was the Party's invalidation of previous 'ultra-leftist'
policies that not only provided researchers and writers the leeway to
rewrite history in favour of the new dispensation, but to create new
histories and styles of historical narrative as well. Younger scholars
trained from the late 1970s onwards as well as middle-aged academics
were the chief beneficiaries of the nascent pluralism, but it was not
until mid-1988 that a concerted broad-based re-assessment of modern
literature and the Party's literary canon began.
The new historiographical movement was launched from Shanghai. Shanghai
wenlun , the arts journal of the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences, published a series of articles beginning in August 1988,
under the general title of 'Rewriting Literary History'. Edited by Mao
Shian and the academics Chen Xihe and Wang Xiaoming, this series
attempted a systematic critique of contemporary Chinese literature that
questioned the cornerstones of the Party's literary canon. Chen
remarked in the introduction to the series, which ran until late 1989:
The aim of this section is to enliven literary criticism and to make an
assault on the virtually immutable conclusions of our literary history.
In the process it is also our hope to whet the reader's appetite for
reconsidering the past. Of course, our aim is to have an impact on the
present. (25)
From the mid-Eighties, individual critics like Liu Xiaobo in Beijing
and Li Jie in Shanghai undertook independent analyses of literary
history and the predicament of contemporary culture. For a while, Liu
became a significant public figure, his views widely disseminated among
university students. Li Jie was less of a firebrand. (26) Another
academic, Xia Zhongyi, kept a low profile but launched one of the most
controversial attacks to date on Maoist literary theory, particularly
as expressed at the Yan'an forum in 1942. (27)
In terms of elite literature, writers of the 'roots' ( xungen )
fiction of the mid-1980s can be seen as attempting to find an
historical context and narrative for China's present state. From 1986
onwards many other novelists, including practitioners of the Chinese
'avant-garde' styles, also gradually developed an interest in
historical themes. This has produced a rich body of works set in the
Republican period, leading writers of such fiction being Su Tong, Ye
Zhaoyan and Zhou Meisen. (28)
In early 1991, the Henan writer Liu Zhenyun published a novel which
depicted the national character and tradition in a far more directly
negative light than anyone else had to date. Liu's Yellow Flowers
(29) opens in the early Republican period. It follows the internecine
strife of a village near Kaifeng all the way into the early 1980s. It
is a tale of personal alliances, betrayals, violence and mayhem woven
into a 'meta-discourse' of early Republican politics, the anti-Japanese
war, the strife between the Nationalists (KMT) and Communists and then
the political struggles of post-1949 China. Published in the Nanjing
literary journal Zhongshan as a prime example of 'new realism',
Yellow Flowers goes beyond the pedestrian paradigms of the
Anti-Japanese War, land reform and Cultural Revolution literature and
deals instead with the group psychology of one village throughout seven
decades of its history. (30) The result is both mordant and
'hyper-real'; it presents a historical landscape encompassing both
gloom and humour that goes beyond the obstinately harrowing fictions of
writers like Zhang Xianliang and Cong Weixi.
In terms of popular literature, however, the greatest commodification
of history occurs in the pages of weekly tabloids and best-selling
books about Cultural Revolution and Republican period scandals.
'Faction' and Mass Media Historians
The term 'mass media historian' is used by Stephen Wheatcroft to denote
the journalist-historians, film-maker-historians and ideologues who
helped awaken popular awareness of historical issues and whose works
also gave an important thrust to the development of independent
historiography in the Soviet Union in the mid- to late-1980s. (31)
Similarly, 'mass media historians' have played a crucially important
role in China since the late 1970s. From the mid- to late-1980s,
writers like Liu Binyan, Su Xiaokang, Dai Qing, Zhao Yu, Li Rui, Ye
Yonglie, Quan Yanchi, Liu Yazhou, Yan Jiaqi, Gao Gao and many others
have had a considerable popular impact. The works of many of these
writers were subsequently banned, but this was more because of their
activities in 1989 than inherent problems in their earlier writings.
These 'mass media historians' created a semi-official and at times even
unofficial forum for the airing of controversial questions. While some
have merely added footnotes to official history, or created wildly
colourful fictional accounts of certain figures, periods and incidents,
others have been involved in the creation of a 'parallel history' to
that presented by the Party.
Here the term faction [factual fiction] is used as an equivalent of the
Chinese term jishi wenxue which includes reportage (a
generally heavily value-laden genre), biography, memoirs, special
reports as well as new journalism. (32) The 'scar literature' and 'in
memoriam literature' ( aisi wenxue ) of the late 1970s was, to
a great extent, the precursor of certain styles of faction. (33) From
1985 onwards, faction, especially what was known as 'problem
literature' ( wenti baogao wenxue ) and 'factual literature,' (
jishi wenxue ), was increasingly directed at the
mass audience. As the Shanghai critic Wu Liang Put it, it satisfied the
readers' natural curiosity and voyeurism in a way that serious
literature or even pap novels never could. (34)
From the mid-1980s, of the two traditional strands of reportage in
China - the social critique and the paean to socialism - the critical
achieved a new popularity. (35) This was widely seen as an outcome of
the increasing pressure within the society as a whole and among
professionals in particular for greater freedom of the press: a desire
for more untainted information about both historical and contemporary
social questions. The repeated attacks on reportage writer Liu Binyan,
and particularly his expulsion from the Party in early 1987 and
subsequent attacks on his work, certainly would have encouraged more
cautious writers to look for material which was topical yet
sufficiently removed from sensitive political issues to ensure safe
passage to publication. Younger writers, ranging in age from their
twenties to forties, had fewer concerns for political propriety. They
were less hesitant to reopen old debates or to discuss historical
events and personalities from new angles, They have been motivated by a
temptation to achieve fame through sensation as well as a desire to
learn more about the past in order to come to grips with contemporary
social and political reality.
Throughout 1986, the twentieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution,
numerous works on the 'ten years of chaos' were published, ushering in
the first solid wave of Cultural Revolution nostalgia and also
adumbrating the popularity of a new style of faction, historical
journalism ( lishi jishi ).
During the Spring Festival of 1986, the official televised Spring
Festival variety extravaganza featured arias from Beijing Revolutionary
Operas of the Cultural Revolution era. Tapes of disco versions of the
operas first produced in 1985, were sold nationwide. Similarly,
fictionalized accounts of Cultural Revolution events became a minor
industry. In 1985, Suo Guoxin, an army writer, published a popular
trend-setter of this type, Seventy-eight Days in 1967 - A
Record of the 'February Countercurrent'. (36) (Not a re-assessment of
history, Suo's book followed closely the official evaluation of the
'February Countercurrent'.) (37)
'Yibairende shinian' (One Hundred Peoples' Ten Years), edited by Feng
Jicai and published in major literary journals such as Shiyue
and Wenhui yuekan , belongs to the so-called 'veritable
record of oral statements' ( koushu shilu or jishi
) type of reportage popularized in China by Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye in
1984 in their Studs Terkel-style 'Beijing ren' (Chinese Lives). (38)
This form of oral history has been known in China for many years, and
was used to record histories of families, factories, army units, and so
on after 1949, with the purpose of illuminating the pain and suffering
of the 'bad old days' before the revolution. In his work, Feng Jicai
kept well within this tradition by adding at the conclusion of every
account a moral aphorism, transforming them into a series of cautionary
tales. (39)
Further publication of Feng's series was effectively stalled until 1989
by a Central Committee document issued by the Shanghai Publication
Bureau on 18 October 1986, in compliance with a directive from the
State Publication Bureau in Beijing which stated that all manuscripts
dealing with the Cultural Revolution, sex and the Anti-Rightist
Movement had to be submitted to the Bureau for approval before
publication. This was taken to be equivalent to a ban, for it was
understood that any manuscripts submitted would be confiscated.
Naturally, none were sent to Beijing; and none were published for a
time. (40)
Mud-raking vis-à-vis the past is not always a
controversial task, though, and many clever writers have exploited
Cultural Revolution materials for their own political and economic
profit. For example during the summer months of 1986, before the above
ban was supposed to take effect (not that it ever really did) Hu Yuewei
and Ye Yonglie, two of the most prominent writers of such pulp history,
published new works. (41) Their writings, while often quite sensational
in tone, and allowing considerable license when it comes to reproducing
the conversations and private thoughts of their protagonists,
nonetheless keep well within the parameters of the politically
acceptable.
This loose style of pop history is not limited to unabashed hacks like
Hu and Ye: even the much-vaunted history of the period, Gao Gao and Yan
Jiaqi's The Ten Year 'Cultural Revolution' suffers from such
flaws. (42) It should be noted, however, that this book is not merely
another pop history. It served definite functions within the context of
the contemporary debates concerning political reform. Many similar
works that 'used the past to serve the present' were produced by
liberal- or reform-minded intellectuals around this time. An example is
Ten Years of Unjust Cases published in December 1986, a
volume of essays covering cases of unjust imprisonment during the
Cultural Revolution produced by the Ministry of Public Security
publishing house with a foreword by Yu Haocheng, a leading advocate of
legal reform. (43) The editors explained that the volume was produced
to show the need for the rule of law and the protection of individual
rights.
One of the first notable examples of a new strain of writing about the
past, historical reportage ( lishi jishi ), was the Liberation
Daily reporter Qian Gang's 'The Great Tangshan Earthquake'
(Tangshan da dizhen), written for the tenth anniversary of the disaster
in 1986. Using masses of documentary material and interviews, it
attempted to go beyond superficial reporting to inform the reader not
only what had happened and its political shock waves but also to point
out its contemporary relevance. Also important and highly influential
was Hu Ping and Zhang Shengyou's account of the tragic Red Guard
link-up on Jinggang Mountain. (44)
Similarly significant was Ta Ying's 'Report on the War Prisoners of the
Volunteer Army' (Zhiyuanjun zhanfu jishi), which revealed the
previously unknown fates of Chinese soldiers on special missions who
were taken prisoner in the Korean War and re-evaluated those involved.
Such writing 'used history to see people afresh, to establish a new
standard for judging people'. By discussing the fate of the prisoners
it allowed readers to use the information to make their own assessment
not only of the incidents depicted but the nature of China's socialist
revolution and the relevance of the past to the present. (45) Zhao Yu's
'Dreams of Greatness' (Qiangguo meng) and Li Rui's 'The Deep Earth'
(Houtu) (46) are both examples of works that dealt with unchanging
traditions, the historical roots of present problems, and the national
character.
Such themes are particularly evident in the work of the journalist Dai
Qing. Her research into the cases of Wang Shiwei and Chu Anping became
part of a personal quest not only to investigate major historical
incidents, but also to reveal how the Party systematically wiped out
alternative schools of thought through its purges of intellectuals.
(47)
Faction is generally regarded as having reached something of an apogee
in 1988-89. (48) Zhang Shengyou, a leading writer of reportage for the Guangming
Daily , remarked in March 1989 that Su Xiaokang's historical works
(in particular his On the Altar of 'Utopia' - Lushan in the Summer
of 1959) (49) comprised only a start: 'There is no way we can build
a modern structure on the ruins of old ideology. We have to be like
Gorbachev and engage in a large-scale reconsideration of history'. (50)
He noted that the success of 'River Elegy' had prompted television
stations to employ reportage writers to script new series. He thought
this new mass medium held out great promise for historical
investigations. In 1992, Zhang himself showed how reportage writers
could also turn their talents to showing up the old ideology by
scripting the sycophantic pro-Reform TV series 'Ten-year Tide' (Shinian
chao). (51)
The Soviet writer Anatoli Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat
(published in 1987), about the Stalin era, was quickly introduced into
China with excerpts, reviews and commentaries appearing in the literary
press from early 1989. (52) In a comment on Children of the Arbat
, Natalya Rubenshtein had remarked:
The revision of the past is a diverting pastime, but it has left the
leaders and heroes of Soviet society naked. Ever since Herzen and
Chernyshevsky the Russian novel has eagerly absorbed the social
pamphlet and the sociological tract, bearing on its covers the
evergreen questions 'Who is guilty?' and 'What is to be done?' These
questions are still on the agenda today. But another question has been
added to them: 'Was there another way?' In other words, was it
inevitable that the dictatorship of the proletariat should have turned
into a dictatorship of murderers? Was there, in history, another path
which remained unused? The answer to this theoretical question has a
practical significance. For on it depends the moral force - and staying
power - of the present leaders' mandate. (53)
This is precisely the direction the writings of Dai Qing, Su Xiaokang
and other relatively independent authors of 'historical investigative
journalism' were taking in the late 1980s. As to the reason for the
popularity of such writing, perhaps Rubenshtein's observation on
Rybakov's marked success in the Soviet Union is relevant: 'he does give
his readers a feeling of self-importance, by conducting serious
conversations with them on society and history'. It can be argued that
this is one of the reasons why Chinese writers like Liu Binyan, Su
Xiaokang and even Cong Weixi, an author of 'prison reportage', and
Zhang Zhenglong more recently (54) have achieved such extraordinary
popularity. They have used the medium of popular - even purple -
historical prose or investigative journalism to discuss issues of
general interest and relevance in a language and style that can be
tolerated, even sanctioned by the Party. They go a long way toward
satisfying a popular appetite that remains unsatisfied by official
communiqués.
Movies and Television Documentaries
Cinema was increasingly used in the last years of the Cultural
Revolution to reflect the political policies of the day with
considerable speed. In the mid-Seventies, films like Chunmiao
(Spring Seedlings) and Fanji (Counterattack) had been prominent
examples of radical Cultural Revolution policy and the fictional
justification of it, while others, like Chuangye (Pioneering),
had been identified with the Zhou Enlai-Deng Xiaoping camp.
A hiatus in film production after Mao's death was soon followed by the
production of cinematic works reflecting the new policies, including
that of political rehabilitation itself. The most obvious examples
include Xie Jin's 1979 Tianyunshan chuanqi (The Tale of Tianyun
Mountain) and Yang Yanjin's Kunaorende xiao (Troubled
Laughter). Another sub-genre of rehabilitation cinema that received
massive state funding were the films extolling 'revolutionary
historical themes' ( geming lishi ticai ), consisting
predominantly of tedious studies of the valour and achievements of Dead
Revolutionary Males (DREMS) such as He Long, Chen Yi and other victims
of the Cultural Revolution. (55) Even such products of a relatively
strict Party line, however, revealed the contradictions, follies and
tragedies created in the past by Party excesses and errors. While the
aim of such cinema was, in the words of one critic, to 'revive the
tradition of revolutionary realism and give history back its original
mien', (56) it tended to further undermine the Party's monopoly over
the past. The focus of such films remained educational and
propagandistic but the tales they told, no matter how overwritten in
favour of the status quo, could not help but warn audiences against
putting too much faith in the Party and its evanescent policies. The
more recent spate of revolutionary historical epics made between
1989-92 - ranging from the pro-Deng hagio-pic Bose qiyi (The
Bo'se Rebellion) to a plethora of Mao movies - reflect a more
deliberate policy of simply extolling leaders past and present,
expurgating from the record as far as possible the irksome
inconsistencies of historical fact.
A number of the earliest films of the 'fifth generation' directors who
ushered in a new trend in Chinese cinema cast their stories in the
historical past of the Party. This is true, for example, of Zhang
Junzhao's Yige he bage (One and Eight) and Chen Kaige's Huang
tudi (Yellow Earth), films that caused considerable controversy by
reinterpreting elements of what can be called the Party's 'creation
myth' of the Anti-Japanese War period and the Communist base in Yan'an.
But they were not the only ones to engage in this project. At times
changes in official policy have necessitated a recasting of history in
ways that have had a mass impact.
Following the increasingly conciliatory line towards the KMT government
in Taiwan during the mid-80s, films and publications were produced that
gave a fuller picture of the Anti-Japanese War . Taierzhuang zhi
zhan (The Battle of Taierzhuang) made in 1986 is an example. One of
the most costly war epics made in China to date, it cast the KMT army
in a positive, even heroic light in its battle with the Japanese. Prior
to this, although specialist historical materials had gradually
acknowledged that the Communists did not prosecute and win the war
against Japan single-handedly, this was a watershed in terms of the
mass media. Thus, although the film was part of a new propaganda
strategy towards Taiwan it led the public to reconsider central
elements of the party's history, and one of the cornerstones of the
Party's claim to historical legitimacy, in a new light - with
unpredictable consequences.
The fate of films that attempted a re-evaluation of history before the
party was ready for it can be seen in the 1985 ban against Wu Ziniu's Gezishu
(The Dove Tree). An anti-war film based on the Sino-Vietnam conflict of
1979, it reportedly deals sympathetically with the enemy. Production
was stopped during filming. By the early 1990s, China's renewed
friendship with Vietnam, on the other hand, forced one aspiring
film-maker to cancel plans for an epic film portraying the Vietnamese
in a negative light.
Many other films, particularly those dealing with the Japanese, have
suffered from similar shifts in foreign policy. This is also true of
documentary films; TV documentaries in 1985 of Japanese war atrocities,
in particular the Nanjing Massacre, to some extent fired the first
anti-government student protests of that time (the protests were
initially aimed at Japan's 'new [economic] invasion' of China).
A number of Soviet films played a considerable role in popularizing
historical debate from the mid-80s. Of these, the most often mentioned
is Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance . A thinly veiled critique of
Stalin, it had created a sensation in the Soviet Union. Chinese
commentators were particularly interested in the fact that the film
went beyond earlier works to delve 'deeply into the psychological
make-up of the national culture so as to reveal the causes of the
historical phenomenon of the personality cult.' (57)
The discussion of historical themes and the
nature of the Chinese national character (guominxing) became
a central feature of TV documentaries in the late 1980s. In 1988,
'Heshang' (River Elegy), a six-part documentary, exploited the medium
of television to present its own highly controversial view of Chinese
history and its contemporary relevance. Seen by a number of critics as
a natural corollary to the style of reportage and faction that had
become increasingly popular since 1985, (58) 'River Elegy' also
introduced to a mass audience some of the most unorthodox debates of
the cloistered academy. This marriage of mass media and pop scholarship
had an immense impact throughout China. Although the series was
virulently denounced after June 4 1989, and its writers variously
purged, detained or forced into exile, it has led to many imitations
which in turn reflect a number of political and intellectual agendas.
The two most noteworthy post-1989 TV history documentaries are 'On the
Road', screened in August 1990 and the final episode of 'Tiananmen',
banned in early 1991. 'On the Road' (Shijixing - sixiang jiben yuanze
zonghengtan) was produced by the Ministry of Propaganda as an obvious
riposte to 'River Elegy'. The ideologue Deng Liqun acted as the series'
general adviser. (59) One of the chief script writers was Qin Xiaoying,
an historian and sometime 'liberal intellectual' formerly employed by
the Academy of Social Sciences. Each of the four half-hour episodes
highlights one of the Party's Four Basic Principles, with a commentary
and images that interpret the history of the past 150 years as a
process leading to inevitable socialist victory in China. The opening
sequence uses a pop song over images of Marx, Lenin, Mao and Deng
Xiaoping, affirming the apostolic succession within the historical
enterprise of revolution. The pop star Liu Huan sings:
You are a seed of fire, igniting this slumbering land [image of Marx]
You are a prophesy, describing the path for all human ideals [cut to a
picture of Lenin]
You are a banner, fluttering in the wind to face all on-coming storms
[portrait of Mao]
You spoke a truth, you are a banner, having fallen and risen, but
emerging victorious [Deng Xiaoping, shown bobbing up and down in the
water as he does the breast stroke]. (60)
The opening sequence of the eight-part documentary 'Tiananmen', which
was completed in May 1991, is radically different in both style and
significance. It shows an artist retouching parts of the massive
portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs on Tiananmen: a stroke to the eye, a
brush to the nose, and then a caressing limning of the tell-tale mole
on the chin. (Before 1 May and 1 October each year, the portrait is
changed for a cleaned and retouched replica.)
'Tiananmen' was produced and directed by the young film-makers Shi Jian
and Chen Jue who work for Chinese Central Television. Using the
production name of 'The Structure, Wave, Youth, Cinema Experimental
Group' (61) and availing themselves of the privileges and opportunities
provided by their high-profile station, Shi and Chen spent some three
years working on the project. 'Remembering Things Past' (Wangshi), the
eighth and final episode of the series with a narration written by an
academic, Guang Yi, is the most important in the context of 'using the
past to serve the present'.
The episode is a meditation on the history of Beijing in the 20th
Century, the subtext of which is a 'reflexive comment' on the events of
1989 by indirect reference to earlier historical events, dates and
personalities. Following the official rewriting of the 1989 Protest
Movement and the production of a plethora of books, articles and
telespecials on 'the true mien' ( zhenxiang ) of what happened,
it is easy for any alternative historical work to draw disquieting
parallels between the past and the present, The narrator notes:
This is a city that has inherited numerous written documents and oral
tales from its past, No matter how people today wish to judge it all,
the moment the gates of memory are opened, life, history and personal
fate flow forth, demanding attention... History, like life itself, can
be savoured.
When he lived in Beijing, Lu Xun commented on the Twenty Four Dynastic
Histories: 'History records the soul of China, pointing out the future.
Yet because it is overwritten and laden with rubbish, it is hard to see
what is actually there. Like the moonlight seen reflected on moss
through the leaves of a tree, all you can make out are shifting
shadows'. (62)
The episode plays on the symbol and significance of May Fourth, the
seventieth anniversary of which came in 1989. Images of the original
patriotic movement are followed immediately by a commentary on its
legacy and the December 9 Movement of 1935. (It should be recalled here
that the first patriotic anti-government student demonstrations in the
People's Republic occurred in 1985 as a commemoration of this
movement). Film and photographic images of the police crushing the 1935
movement have a particularly strong resonance for those who experienced
4 June 1989:
May 4, 1919: This is a date that has left a mark on modern Chinese
history.
December 9, 1935: This is another. Yu Xiu, a participant in the 9
December demonstrations recalled many years later: 'It was the middle
of winter, and the streets were particularly cold that morning. The
trams rattled past, as if to emphasize how empty the streets were...
Suddenly from an alley near Gangwashi, a phalanx of students appeared.
Waving their arms they shouted: 'Down with Japanese Imperialism! '
'Oppose Special Treatment for North China!' 'Stop the civil war, unite
against Japan!' Then they sang the 'Song of the Volunteers'. This broke
the morning silence of Xidan'.
There are detailed written records, but the pictorial images we have
are incomplete, making it hard to reconstruct the actual events of the
day. The students proceeded to Xinhua Gate to present a petition. The
authorities' response was unconvincing. Yu Xiu records: 'The leaders of
the Beiping Student Union declared an end to the petitioning and called
for demonstration to begin. The students joined ranks behind their
school flags. With written slogans leading the way they marched away
from Xinhua Gate along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. They were blocked
by armed police near Liubukou. When they forced their way through some
students were beaten or hacked to death by bayonets. There was an
uproar and the shouting of slogans could be heard from all quarters. A
fire engine appeared and water cannon were aimed at the amassed
students. They were dispersed for a time, but they soon regrouped and
proceeded. Although their ranks had been broken, the demonstrators
continued, arms linked'. It is a grim recollection, and the images are
unclear. Yet the sensations and the details they present are
undeniable... A new tradition was born, one that belongs to the young.
Theirs is the voice of China's modern history.
This episode is studded with self-important yet powerful comments on
the role of history. For example, a little further on comes the remark:
Recollection is painful. But for the living, forgetfulness is more
fearsome. These images and comments are all true. They are a harsh
reality, one that lives on through the scattered remnants of passing
time.
The episode ends with a few words about Tiananmen Square, the camera
moving slowly over the heavily-scuffed paving stones ... stones also
marked by the frantic wheeling of the tanks when they occupied the area
and crushed tents on the morning of 4 June. The sequence following this
shows a woman walking out of Tiananmen amidst a crowd of people. The
commentary scrolls slowly over the last sepia-tinted shots:
Sometimes the pace of history is rapid, at other times it is painfully
slow. Regardless of this, with time the meaning of the past gradually
gains clarity.
It is impossible to say just how many people have walked over the
stones of the square since they were first laid. If you have walked
here, or if you return, stop and meditate for a moment. Many things
from years past will gradually take shape in your mind's eye...
Perhaps you will hear the events of a distant past recount to you some
hope, long-born, and now clearly calling out to be heard. As life needs
to be heard, as the months and days need to be heard. As time itself
needs to be heard, in all of its detail...
Today continues, every moment so very real.
Our present travails will also be remembered and commented on. Today
too is life, a witness...
Attempts to have the series screened at the 1992 Hong Kong
International Film Festival were stymied by Beijing. As mentioned, an
official TV version of the events of April-June 1989, with a contrary
message, was produced for repeated screening in China and also for
international consumption, the Chinese authorities even attempting to
get this 'documentary' aired on foreign television. This too was a form
of media history, a product that would be more familiar to Winston
Smith and his colleagues in 1984's Ministry of Truth than any other
produced in China in recent years.
Soap Operas
The recasting of history for mass consumption is not limited to
propagandistic or art-cinema documentaries. TV soap operas also weave a
mythology of the past for present-day audiences, influencing historical
consciousness in many ways.
The fifty-part soap opera 'Aspirations' (Kewang), televised in late
1990, follows the fate of two families from the Cultural Revolution up
to the 1980s. One of the most popular series of its kind, 'Aspirations'
featured the loves and tragedies of a working-class urban family. Most
Chinese commentators saw its immense success as due to nostalgia for
the perceived simplicity and honesty of relationships in China before
the introduction of mercantile competition and money-grubbing. (63) In
terms of mass perceptions of history, there are a number of other
noteworthy elements in the scenario.
The Party and its intrusive organizations are virtually absent,
although the series' creators are careful to make one of their positive
characters a workshop supervisor (Song Dacheng) and solid Party member.
In the early episodes set during the Cultural Revolution, politics is
kept in the background with the merest hint coming from the
(background) 'red noise' of radio editorials, street broadcasts and
tattered dazibao . Political language is only used in an ironic
or sarcastic fashion; no street committees or their old ladies pry into
the lives of a family that literally picks up a child on the street and
fails to inform any authorities that they are keeping her. Nor are
there any personnel files, Party committees or security offices; and
there is no mention of the endless political campaigns that, if nothing
else, would have impinged on lives through propaganda blackboards,
meetings and study sessions. The intellectuals suffer as a result of
vaguely defined Cultural Revolution policies, but none of the massive
social and political prejudice aimed against them is ever verbalized.
When the intellectual father is rehabilitated it is in vague terms.
While this deprives the series of veracity, it makes it politically
acceptable in these sensitive days and to an extent timeless as well.
One critic noted that the creators of the series had relinquished an
ideal opportunity to attempt a mass media historical reflection on
history from the 1960s to the 1980s. Instead they chose to play on
emotion, abandoning all but the bare bones of historical detail in
favour of a sentimental plot. (64)
Conclusion
In June 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev said that 'if we start trying to deal
with the past, we will dissipate our energy'. (65) However, by early
1987 his stance had changed, possibly as a result of the new historical
consciousness fostered by the Soviet media. In February 1987, at a
meeting with Soviet journalists, Gorbachev made the oft-quoted
statement that 'there should be no forgotten names and blank pages
[white spots] in Soviet history'. (66) Over the years the most
extraordinary and wide-ranging re-evaluations of Soviet history have
taken place. In China a similar process began in the late 1970s, and
despite numerous political upheavals, it continues today.
The opposition to exposing and re-evaluating the past in both the
former Soviet Union and China was summed up in the sentiments of the
one-time Politburo member Igor Ligachev who cautioned against the past
as a 'chain of errors', (67) as well as historians who saw a crucial
function of history as being to inculcate 'among the younger people a
sense of historical responsibility for and pride in their homeland, in
its heroic history and the present day'. (68)
In China, the elders in the post-1976 Party leadership belong to the
original generation of revolutionaries who founded the People's
Republic. Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Peng Zhen, Li Xiannian, Bo Yibo,
Yang Shangkun, Wang Zhen, and many others were participants in the
major incidents and decisions in the Party's history, both before and
after 1949. The interpretation of these incidents and decisions
therefore often touches on questions related to the legitimacy of Party
rule today. Even when their direct personal interests are not involved
in an issue of 'classical Party history' (1920s, '30s or '40s), the
Party leaders often have 'filial connections' or loyalties to deceased
Party elders, former superiors or friends, and these hidden connections
can still hinder a more frank and complete re-evaluation.
Against these factors stand the influence of the economic reforms on
the publishing and media industry, as well as the work of foreign,
emigré or dissident writers and historians. Available to
specialists in journals or libraries, or translated and printed in
tabloids and books for the general public, the introduction of
independent views has continued to spread historical pluralism.
Moreover, as observed, the need to 'woo' Taiwan has helped spur a
re-evaluation of Chiang Kaishek and the Nationalist Party, in
particular with regard to their role in the war against the Japanese.
Some of the Communist Party's most important claims to being the sole
representative of nationalism are linked to that war. Until the
mid-1980s the Nationalist war effort, which was considerable, was
ignored or distorted. Since then books and films in which the
Nationalists are portrayed as patriotic heroes have abounded. (69) This
has led to radical changes in popular perceptions of the past and
therefore helped clear the way to creating a positive view of Taiwan
today, and of everything the island represents: democratization, a
market economy, and so on. What essentially originated in the early
1980s as a political ploy to bring the Nationalists to the negotiating
table has had an unexpected and unsettling effect on the Mainland.
In preparation for the reunification of Hong Kong with the Mainland in
1997, there are indications that the Chinese authorities are going to
launch a propaganda offensive that will justify in historical terms the
steps they want to take with Hong Kong. In late 1990, for example, the
British authorities in the territory were cautioned to be careful as to
how they commemorated the ceding of Hong Kong in the 19th century, and
much was made in the Mainland media of the 150th anniversary of the
Opium War.
During the 1989 Protest Movement, one group of writers in Shanghai
called directly for an independent right to history. In a petition in
support of the students in Beijing signed on 13 May, they said:
Writers must have the freedom to analyse, explain and publish their
views on all aspects of Chinese reality both historical and present, in
particular political incidents. For a Party official to use his
position or administrative powers to restrict or interfere with writers
or deprive them of their freedom of expression or of publication is not
only an abuse of power, but illegal. (70)
While the sprouts of independent historiography have appeared in China,
both in specialized and public forums, the approach of most writers is
still influenced by the dictum of 'using the past to serve the
present'. Various schools of thought, factions and lobbies tend to see
their writings in terms of how it can reflect and influence their
contemporaries. It may still be some time before we see the emergence
of a school of historiography - either academic or popular - devoted to
'history for history's sake'. In the meantime, most writers of popular
history are consoling themselves with making a fast buck.
HISTORY FOR THE MASSES
, Geremie R. Barmé
(from Jonathan Unger, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present
, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, NY, 1993. Reproduced with permission from
the author.)
*My thanks to Linda Jaivin and Jonathan Unger
for their comments on this chapter.
For full notes, see Jonathan
Unger, ed., Using the Past to Serve the Present , M.E. Sharpe,
Inc., Armonk, NY, 1993. Available at Amazon.com:
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