In reviewing a book on the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Maoist past, Fabio Lanza emphasized the need to ‘take the politics of the Maoist revolution seriously as politics, and not only as memory, trauma, or emotional attachments’.
The ‘traumatic’ view of the revolutionary era is, in fact, a leitmotif, obligatory, I would say, in much Chinese fiction and cinema since the ‘literature of wounds’, which has always functioned as a decorative element of the much more peremptory anathema of ‘total denial’, has been a crucial pillar of Chinese government discourse for half a century. However, this is not just a matter of historiographical censorship or self-censorship, so to speak, but of a highly topical prescription. ‘Complete denial’, in fact, essentially concerns a judgement not on the past, but on the present and the future. In other words, it denies in advance that the masses can play a role in politics and affirms just as completely that politics concerns the capabilities of the state and its officials exclusively.
To address politically the Maoist era, especially the Cultural Revolution, it is therefore necessary to affirm first and foremost the possibility that there exists today a politics capable of meeting the challenges of that era, capable of grasping its essential innovations without repeating the mistakes and dead ends that led to its failure.
Those who study modern and contemporary Chinese politics without subscribing to ‘total negation’ wonder, sometimes anxiously, whether there are new arguments in China today capable of affirming this possibility. The general picture of Chinese intellectuals today seems sadly caught up in a desperate fatalism, not unlike the disorientation that prevails elsewhere in the world. A more particular characteristic of the Chinese case, however, is the elimination of all political reflection on a crucial period in Chinese political history, the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist era. Chris Connery has written that critical thinking in China today, however one understands it, is at its lowest level in 120 years. The situation is confirmed by books on 20th-century China written by the New Left, which do not even mention the Cultural Revolution.
Yet despite a cultural establishment that is firmly aligned with the government’s agenda, there are new political arguments in China that deserve attention. There is certainly a level of informal reflection and discussion based on personal relationships, especially among young intellectuals, who are looking at both the present and the past with fresh eyes.
Qian Zhongkai’s text on Maoism, published in the latest issue of PRC History Review, has the potential to spark a debate that, I hope, will develop both in China and abroad. The most significant originality lies in its starting point: the most recent significant political event (albeit dating back to 2018), the struggle of the Jasic workers in Shenzhen and the students who went to show their solidarity. For Qian, the painful but instructive outcome of their defeat provides the basis for a political rethinking of Maoism.
Among the stylistic merits of the text is the theatrical dialogue between two characters, which introduces and accompanies the theoretical reflection. They are, not coincidentally, two political activists from two contiguous generations who, starting from a divergent assessment of the Jasic affair, discuss the political value of Maoism today. They are an old Maoist, rich in experience but cautious, risking immobility, and a young militant who went to support the Jasic workers, whose ardent desire to engage in revolutionary politics spills over into a tendency towards martyrdom as a testimony of faith.
The dialogues effectively outline the two poles of revolutionary political subjectivity in China today. On the one hand, the old Maoist reflects the sense of an epochal defeat, but is unable to examine its causes; on the other, the enthusiastic young man does not even consider the possibility that an epochal political defeat lies behind us. And yet, despite their subjective limitations, the two characters’ strength of conviction lies in speaking as militants, with authentic pathos, animated by a disinterested political desire, rather than as mandarins who calibrate every syllable to maintain their position in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
The two characters are debating the core of Maoism, namely the ‘mass line’, whose central internal contradiction concerns how to reconcile trust in the masses with the need for political organization. These are, in essence, the two poles of Mao’s position during the Cultural Revolution. In the Sixteen Points of August 1966, Mao fully articulates the fundamental issue at stake: ‘The masses are capable of liberating themselves, and no one can act on their behalf or in their place’. In February 1967, in a discussion with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on the Shanghai Commune, he asks, ‘What to do with the party?’
The strength of Qian’s text lies in its examination of the Jasic struggle and its defeat through this question. Conversely, it rethinks fundamental questions of the history of Maoism in light of the dilemmas of a significant moment in contemporary Chinese politics. Much work remains to be done, but Qian’s contribution is an essential first step in the right direction.
Qiang Zhongkai, “Maoism Moving as a Political Machine: A Reflection” was published on the PRC History Review, available here
Alessandro Russo is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bologna and author, among others, of Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Duke University Press, 2020).