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Thomas Burnham, The Analogy Between the Cultural Revolution and “Cancel Culture:” A Historical Perspective

On July 4th, 2020, in the midst of the twin crises of a nationwide uprising against racial injustice and a global pandemic, Donald Trump stood before Mount Rushmore to tell the people of the United States that the greatest threat to its liberty and security was “cancel culture.”
Kaiser Kuo's ironic tweet responding to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

On July 4th, 2020, in the midst of the twin crises of a nationwide uprising against racial injustice and a global pandemic, Donald Trump stood before Mount Rushmore to tell the people of the United States that the greatest threat to its liberty and security was “cancel culture.”  He defined it thus:

“If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.  Not gonna happen to us!”

Delivering his speech uninvited on native lands, play-acting as a stalwart defender of American history against the iconoclasm of “leftists,” he proclaimed, “Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution.”

This was yet another instance of the sort of red baiting mixed with orientalism that has taken over in Washington.  With the defeat of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign, the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory became the Democratic Party’s electoral identity above and beyond any policies offered by its renegade progressive caucus.  Following the grand failure of the first impeachment attempt, now president-elect Joe Biden competed against Trump on his anti-Beijing credentials instead.  Since his election in 2016, American news outlets have repeatedly accused Trump of “kowtowing” to Beijing on everything from trade to human rights.  Adding to the din, a Biden campaign ad accused Trump of having “rolled over for the Chinese” in his catastrophic mishandling of Covid-19.  Not to be outdone, the Trump administration ratcheted up its own Sinophobia.

Against this, and against the backdrop of the nationwide protests after to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers last May, Trump’s invocation of China’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” on July 4th drew worldwide media attention.  The Cultural Revolution occupies a special place in the Western reactionary imaginary.  It conjures up images of thronging masses of young students dressed in military garb waving little red books and chanting slogans.  These red guards are imagined as a faceless mob setting fire to the Ming tombs and subjecting their elders to untold abuse.

In a recent piece for praxis on positions politics, Aminda Smith meditated on the abundance of unthinking comparisons between Maoism and Trumpism and found that those making such comparisons share one thing in common: an elitist allergy to popular politics. In a similar vein, this piece confronts how recent writing critical of the last year’s protest movement draws on imagery from the Cultural Revolution, focusing in particular on the analogy with “cancel culture.”  The analogy between the Cultural Revolution and cancel culture came to be because, for many in the West, both are synonymous with far-left politics.  Initially an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement, “cancelling” was meant to hold powerful men accountable.  Now, cancel culture has come to mean any censuring or even criticism done by the “left.”  Cancelling has come be seen as the worst aspect of the “left” even by elements of the left itself.

This analogy is becoming increasingly commonplace in conservative media.  A month prior to Trump’s speech, Kevin D. Williamson published an unstructured litany of conservative clichés in the New York Post, with everything from clueless references to Animal Farm and 1984’s “2 minutes hate” to vague allusions to life under the German Democratic Republic.  He titled the piece “Social justice warriors are waging a dangerous ‘Cancel Cultural Revolution’.”  In the wake of the “Harper’s letter,” National Review contributor Jonathan S. Tobin wrote that “the struggles of ordinary people who are being forced to suffer for not kowtowing to the Black Lives Matter movement or for voting for the wrong candidate don’t get noticed nearly as often.”  According to Tobin, everyone from museum curators to small business owners are being subjected to “Cultural Revolution-style struggle session and humiliation” at the hands of today’s red guards.

From this concern over the “cancelling” of “ordinary people,” the analogy seeped out of conservative media and into the wider political discourse.  After the president’s speech, Matt Taibbi posed the question, “If it’s not ‘Cancel Culture’, What kind of Culture is it?”  In this piece, he linked the red guards’ iconoclastic struggle against the “four olds” (old customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas) with the BLM-spearheaded movement to remove or topple monuments to Confederate military leaders and slave traders.

Since July 4th, the analogy has also drawn the attention of those directly connected to the experience of the actual Cultural Revolution.  Writing under the pen name Xiao Li, a second-generation Chinese American academic wrote a piece for Unherd titled “America’s cultural revolution is just like Mao’s.”  In it, Xiao Li briefly recounts the abuse suffered by their father during the Cultural Revolution and ponders whether or not BLM is the same as the red guards.  “To my father,” Xiao Li opines, “and indeed to many of his contemporaries, the answer is clear.  They had lived through it, and although they cannot put their finger on the why, they can feel a certain febrility in the air which reminded them of the events of half a century ago.”  Xiao Li ruminates that the red guards “came from privileged backgrounds” and that “today’s revolutionary vanguard is also made up of young, well-educated people, a disproportionate number hailing from elite educational institutions and working within elite professions.”  In a passage which betrays their ignorance about the critique of systemic racism at hand, Xiao Li continues:

“(T)he idea that elite Anglo-American institutions are filled with closeted racists, absurd though it is to anyone who has worked in them, became an article of faith overnight.  Whether it is in newsrooms, universities or progressive advocacy groups, the hunt for secret racists gives these would-be Selma marchers a sense of purpose.”

Having thus waved away the current protest movement, Xiao Li goes further, drawing direct parallels between the red guards and BLM:

“Eventually, the movement’s slogans make their way downstream to non-elite institutions and popular discourse.  In due course, no entity, however remote from the issue at hand, could refuse to make public statements in support of the movement.  In China, no book, be it about astronomy or sewing patterns, could fail to contain an introduction with fulsome praise for Chairman Mao, complete with quotations from his collected works.  Similarly, today businesses selling anything from teabags to maths degrees feel the need to bend the metaphorical knee to the protesters.”

Setting aside their misunderstanding of the neoliberal phenomenon of “woke brands,” it is clear that, without saying so in as many words, Xiao Li is denying the need for the BLM protest movement altogether.  To them, all it has done is brought us teetering on the edge of chaos ”just like” the Cultural Revolution.

On the other side of the Pacific, the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post Wang Xiangwei also wrings his hands about the specter of the Cultural Revolution.  Wang points to the perspective of the Hong Kong-based Asia Weekly, which wrote in July that “(t)he (BLM) movement has also emboldened extremist groups like Antifa, white nationalists and Boogaloo boys.”  In Wang’s characterization, “Some China observers also believe Trump is stoking racism and culture wars for political gain, but his assertion that the US is right in the middle of a cultural revolution is not far-fetched campaign rhetoric.”  However, musing on how the current leadership in Beijing reminds “many of the bygone era in which Mao was deified,” Wang sees the specter of the Cultural Revolution hanging over China as well.

The cover of the July 6-12, 2020 issue of Asia Weekly. "The Six Phenomena of the Cultural Revolution in the West: Facing the Crisis of Factional Warfare."

The Primordial Upheaval

Today, the leadership in Beijing views opposition elements through the lens of the Cultural Revolution.  Since the 1981 “Resolution Regarding Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” the Cultural Revolution has been officially understood as the “leftist aberration” in party history.  It is the primordial instance of dongluan (动乱 upheaval, turmoil, chaos) against which all social and political movements are compared, including the “rightist aberrations” of Tiananmen in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2019.  Another instance was the 2012 Wang Lijun incident which abruptly ended the career of princeling Bo Xilai.  Reflecting on the incident, Premier Wen Jiabao told the Chinese public that “(t)he pernicious and feudal influence of the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution has not been completely wiped clean” and “(h)istorical tragedies such as the Cultural Revolution may recur.”1

Since the 1981 resolution, even so-called “Maoists” maintain a complicated relationship with the memory of the Cultural Revolution.  As explored in Jude Blanchette’s China’s New Red Guards, with the coming of age of the post-Mao generation and with the growth of the internet, Maoism has made something of a comeback in China.  Today’s self-avowed Maoists use the imagery, slogans, and songs of the Mao era to conjure up patriotic sentiments.  They just as use the memory of the Cultural Revolution to tar their enemies in accordance with the official ideology.

One Maoist told Blanchette, “The internet is the new ‘big character poster.’”2  In 2011, this digital big character poster was put to work against the liberal economist Mao Yushi (no relation to the Chairman).  He had published a widely circulated article in the prominent Caixin newspaper titled “Judging Mao as a Man.”  As translated by Blanchette, Mao Yushi wrote,

“Some still view Chairman Mao as a god, however, and view any critical discussion of him as blasphemous.  If these people have their way, we will never be able to analyze him, never directly face his legacy, never question his spirit.  Fortunately, the average person is now able to form their own understanding of his legacy.”3

Mao Yushi’s piece continued into paragraphs of invective against Mao and his fourth wife Jiang Qing, the leader of the Gang of Four and avatar of the Cultural Revolution.  Zhang Hongliang and numerous other intellectuals associated with the leading “Maoist” website, Utopia (乌有之乡) vociferously condemned the piece online.4  They accused Mao Yushi of “deliberately stirring up trouble and creating turmoil (dongluan).”  A mass campaign was organized and a petition was drafted calling on his publication to be censored and for him to be tried for sedition.

This drew the ire of the late dissident Chen Ziming.  In his “Brief Analysis of Two Maoist Factions: Royalists and Rebels,” Chen too went back to the Cultural Revolution, but this time to dispel the mistaken belief that today’s Chinese Maoists are all the same.

“There are those who say that in their psychological state, language, and behaviour, Liu Siqi5 and Zhang Hongliang are the same as the red guards in the cultural revolution.  To this I say that although the red guards in the Cultural Revolution all wore red armbands, held up red books, and called ‘long live Chairman Mao’, the targets of their opposition and the goals for which they strived were in fact very different.”6

Chen then divides the red guards into two types: “rebels” (造反派) and “royalists” (保皇派).

The rebels, initially the darlings of Mao Zedong, were adherents to the democratic ideal of the Paris Commune and were stridently anti-bureaucratic.  These are the red guards of the bloody Red August when young students terrorized Beijing’s intelligentsia in 1966, or the 1967 January Storm during which the short-lived Shanghai Commune briefly stood to challenge to the party itself.

The royalists were the “upright seedlings of red roots,” or the children of prominent party members and military leaders.  According to Chen, they were the ones who “swept away all ghosts and monsters” and denounced their classmates as the “sons of bitches” on campus for whatever they saw as deviating from correct party doctrine.  For their relative material comfort and inherited political connections, they were “thrown into the cold” when Mao emphasized the anti-capitalist line in the early days of the Cultural Revolution.  However, as will be shown, they soon returned.

In Chen’s analysis, today’s royalists might be called “pro-party patriots,” or simply “right Maoists.”  Conservative in nature, they are committed to “protecting their fathers and mothers” and “defending the red regime from ever changing colour.”  They remain opposed to the “sons of bitches” on campus, except now they set their sights on “black lawyers” (human rights attorneys) and “reactionary literati” (academics and journalists), calling them “national traitors” instead of “ghosts and monsters.”

Chen writes that although Utopia accused Mao Yushi of “stirring up turmoil,” it is in fact these right Maoists who, “in harmony with official mouthpieces,” were reenacting the Cultural Revolution.  In the conclusion of his piece, he condemns them in the harshest way he can:

“As for these royalist Maoists like Zhang Hongliang, they are absolutely not part of the leftist camp.  They are a superficially left, but in reality they are a special detachment of the authoritarian right.  They are faithful disciples of the Nazis (National Socialists).  They are the backbone of Chinese fascism.”7

But what about today’s rebels?  According to the blogger Chen Chun, these “left Maoists” are not found concentrated in the well-to-do provinces and tier one cities or cosmopolises like Shanghai.  Instead, they are diffused across the distant backwaters and dilapidated third front zones like Xinjiang, Guizhou, Guangxi, Ningxia, or Henan.  Chen Chun, quotes an interview of his with a prominent left Maoist to explain their underrepresentation in Chinese political discourse:

“How could it be otherwise?  Left Maoists oppose capitalism and the status quo.  We’re the most dangerous group.  The liberals don’t like us, we are a headache to the authorities, why would they allow us any exposure?”8

Indeed, while the right Maoists are treated as a problem by the government insofar as they are more royalist than the king, the left Maoists (as well as Trotskyists, #MeToo campaigners, and the odd handful of sympathetic liberals) have no choice but to stay underground.

Examples of their brave efforts have been uncovered from time to time.  As told by Zhang Yueran in an excellent piece for Made in China titled “Leninists in a Chinese Factory,” state repression engendered a strategy among these left Maoists not unlike Leninist vanguardism.  Barely out of college, sacrificing their health and careers, these Leninists deliberately took on work in the most notorious factories.  Their aim was to agitate for the creation of independent labor unions outside of the officially sanctioned All-China Federation of Trade Unions.  This decade-long salting project culminated in a unionization drive at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology factory in June 2018.  The Jasic incident drew worldwide attention when scores of workers were arrested and when 22 members of the student-led Jasic Workers Solidarity Group were disappeared for their involvement.

Among the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group were several members of the Young Marxist Society at Peking University.  The Young Marxists came under heavy scrutiny after Yue Xin, a committed #MeToo activist and leading member of the group, published an open letter to current leadership in Beijing that August.  Soon after she too was disappeared.

The Young Marxists had also been attempting to mobilize on behalf of the underpaid and overworked janitorial and cafeteria staff of their university.  That September, university administration informed them that their group would be disbanded (cancelled if you will) and replaced.

In December, the old Young Marxists’ protested this decision on campus and were met with police batons.  Meanwhile, the new Young Marxist Society held their inaugural lecture on the value of neo-Confucianism for contemporary China. The new Young Marxist Society rejected their predecessors’ mass-based politics of class struggle, opting instead for an official interpretation of socialism as being about the orderly improvement of the people’s quality and the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”  Using quotes from Mao and Lenin to justify not reading either, the new Young Marxist Society directed a January 2, 2019 WeChat post against their predecessors:

“Comrade Lenin clearly instructed the youth that ‘to not have grasped mankind’s accumulated knowledge in becoming communists is to have committed a grave error’.  To believe that you do not need to comprehend all the knowledge that has produced communist doctrine (here meaning Chinese philosophy and history) and that to know the slogans of communism is enough is also an error.”

After quoting the 1981 resolution, the new Young Marxists then accused the old of being like the red guards:

“The decade of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ led our country’s economy to the verge of collapse, and we should take warning from this like we would from an overturned cart ahead of us, but you all are obsessed.  You oppose reform and opening, you want to drive backwards into history, to repeat history, to subvert the results of reform and opening, and to return China back again to that age of upheaval.  All those who today are striving with all their strength for a better life and a more prosperous China will never agree!”9

The new Young Marxists even went as far as to blame the old for worsening the lives of those – the factory workers, low-level university staff, and migrant laborers – on whose behalf they were beaten, arrested, and disappeared.  With their WeChat account long since banned, the old Young Marxists had no way of refuting these accusations.

The Shift from Chaos to Order Under the Red Flag

To understand the separate fates of the “royalists” and “rebels,” and to complicate the plethora of unthinking analogies made to the Cultural Revolution today, it is useful refer to the July 20, 1967 Wuhan Incident.

After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, two factions emerged in Wuhan.10  One was the rebel faction.  Composed of various worker- and student-led organizations, the rebels initially enjoyed the broad support of the Wuhan Military Region following Marshall Lin Biao’s ten-point order instructing the military to uphold the left.  When conservative elements of the military and local party bureaucracy declared organizations within the faction illegal, the rebels began mass protests calling for a purge of the Wuhan Military Region.

The other faction was the Million Heroes.  They drew on local party members and conservative elements of the military who secretly opposed the rebels.  As explained in Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhal’s definitive Mao’s Last Revolution,

“(T)he Million Heroes were denying the need for a Cultural Revolution, at least as far as Hubei was concerned….  The formal grounds of dispute between the rival headquarters were whether or not the Wuhan MR had genuinely supported the left.  In reality, the conflict pitted those who saw themselves as having a big stake in the pre-1966 political and social order against those who did not.”11

Largescale fighting broke out between the two factions in the spring of 1967.  In a desperate attempt to quell the fighting and defend itself against the rebels, certain divisions of the Wuhan Military Region began shelling factories and campuses.  Thousands died in the clashes.

On July 20, Mao decided to go to Wuhan himself and to repeat his swim across the Yangtze.  With Mao in tow, Zhou Enlai and the Minister of Public Security went to Wuhan to attempt to resolve the situation to the military and the broader public’s satisfaction.  The mediation backfired, enraging elements of the military and the Million Heroes.  Rioting broke out which forced Mao to cut his propaganda tour short before he could repeat his swim.  He fled the city by plane in the middle of the night while agents of the Ministry of Public Security were kidnapped and beaten to a pulp by the Million Heroes, who were aided and abetted by a division of the Wuhan Military Region.

Having embarrassed Mao and enraged the Cultural Revolution Group, those leading elements of the Wuhan Military Region who had aligned themselves with the Million Heroes were reshuffled throughout the country or tried in kangaroo courts.  The Million Heroes collapsed as an organization.  The rebels celebrated the “second liberation of Wuhan.”12 However, this proved to be a pyrrhic victory.

Yu Ruxin believes that the Wuhan Incident “was a gigantic blow to Mao’s way of thinking” and was a watershed moment in the Cultural Revolution.

“It caused Mao to see a serious development taking shape and pressed Mao to rethink his original intentions.  The chariot of the Cultural Revolution suddenly changed course from ‘chaos’ ([dong] luan) to ‘order’ ([fa 法] zhi 治).”13

Prior to the Wuhan Incident, the Cultural Revolution was typified by the mass tumult of the Red August and the January Storm.  After, it was characterized by the creeping reconsolidation of military and state power as abetted by conservative factions and paramilitary forces.  A number of other “incidents” were to follow Wuhan in this reassertion of the status quo.

That winter, a “red storm” came to the border province of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.  In Guangxi, an urban student and worker-based rebel faction called the “4-22” opposed the military leadership of the province.  They enjoyed the public support of Zhou Enlai but were secretly opposed by the military and the “United Headquarters,” a pro-military faction composed of conservative elements of Guangxi society.  Conveniently for the military leadership and the United Headquarters, a rumor began spreading that the Kuomintang “Anti-Communist Salvation League” had somehow been revived and was organizing a revolt of the “five black categories.”14 The 4-22 rebels were labelled as part of this counterrevolutionary movement, and with the assent the military, the United Headquarters endeavored to liquidate them.  Entire families were wiped out by various means.  Despite targeting the “five black categories,” the majority of the casualties were among ordinary peasants and rural cadres who expressed support for the rebels.  Between 70,000 and 150,000 were killed in Guangxi over the course of the decade.15

Soon after the Wuhan Incident, the Beijing Military Region dispatched a new general to the Inner Mongolian Autonomous region to “uphold the left.”  In early 1968, the military initiated a campaign to “dig out the poison” of the “black line” of the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, a pro-communist, ethnically Mongolian political party which had long since become defunct.  The military and conservative red guard factions worked in tandem to root out this fabricated group of separatist counterrevolutionaries.  According to the Supreme Court of the PRC, 34,000 people were persecuted with 16,222 “persecuted to death.” 16  Mongol ethnic identity was treated as proof of membership in the non-existent organization.  Ethnic prejudice was conflated with Mao’s invocation for class struggle, resulting in entire minority populations falling under suspicion of being “traitors,” pro-Soviet “revisionists,” or backwards elements to be struggled against in the fight against the “four olds.”

Jacques Ranciere once wrote apropos of the Cultural Revolution that “there is no theory of subversion that cannot also serve the cause of oppression.”17  Following the Wuhan Incident, conservative forces throughout China were able to re-establish their grip on power by learning to speak the language of Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group.  They did this at the expense of the rebels.  Cast into the countryside, hounded into obscurity, and dead in their shallow graves, it was the defeated rebels who were assigned the full burden of guilt for this decade of turmoil by the 1981 resolution.

Conclusion

This narrative of the Cultural Revolution as a “white terror disguised in red garb” is not general knowledge.18 While some are passingly familiar with the personality cultism, anti-intellectualism, and iconoclasm of the period, most are unaware of tumult that took place between 1966 and 1976, much less how it relates to Chinese political discourse today.  Even fewer have paid close attention to the multiplicity of forces beneath Mao or the ethnic valences of the Cultural Revolution on the local level.  Yet many writers on both sides of the Pacific have uncritically accepted the findings of the 1981 resolution.  They reduce the Cultural Revolution to nothing more than a leftist aberration and the red guards to an undifferentiated, chaotic rabble.

On the one hand, there is the temptation to take the history of the Cultural Revolution as another good reason to dismiss the bickering about cancel culture as a bourgeois concern.  Indeed, how can the “cancelling” of prominent figures, online harassment (no matter how pervasive), or even the loss of income or employment begin to compare to violence and death on the scale of the actual Cultural Revolution?  For that matter, what comparison is there between “cancelling” and the mortal violence occurring in our own society?  What is being “cancelled” in comparison with being murdered by the police or armed militias?  Or being disappeared by the state?

On the other hand, it might be more useful to deepen the analogy instead of rejecting it out of hand.  As described above, following the Wuhan Incident, conservative forces across China were able to coalesce around opposition to fabricated enemies like the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolution Party or the Anti-Communist Salvation League.  The left was then recast as the right to satisfy the official ideology.  In partnership with the military and other local authorities, paramilitary groups were formed to wage counter-insurgency campaigns against entire populations labelled as “counterrevolutionary.”   The carnivalesque upheaval of the early days of the Cultural Revolution was able to be turned right side up again by the structural ability of conservative forces to bring themselves back into alignment with state ideology and surviving formations of power simultaneously.  Politically conservative or even ethnocentrist regimes of repression were cloaked in the radical language of Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group.  As is often said of right Maoists in China today, they “waved the red flag against the red flag” (打着红旗反红旗).  Barring genuine revolution, the tremendous violence of the rebels was impotent against this reconsolidation of political power built on the acquisition of Beijing’s left language by right forces.

Today, something similar is in progress after Trump’s own ridiculous attempt at “bombarding the headquarters.”  Having had their sacred Capitol desecrated by a different kind of royalist faction, Congress now has the bipartisan consensus necessary to legislate on domestic terrorism.  Regardless of the best intentions of *insert your favorite Democrat here*, there should be no doubt that such legislation would be primarily wielded in the interests of the neoliberal status quo.

However “cancel culture” is defined, it is a real phenomenon.  Glenn Greenwald, Taibbi, and others are right in their concern that the legitimization of any form of censorship will ultimately harm the left worst of all.  Nonetheless, whether Greenwald or Taibbi approve of “cancelling” as a tactic or not is irrelevant.  Precisely the sort of cancel culture Trump describes as performing rituals or facing persecution has been going on in Western academia and media since the McCarthy era.  Countless critical scholars and journalists have been hounded out of their fields while the media bias towards presenting “both sides” of an argument drags the political discourse further and further rightward.  The difference is that this cancel culture as wielded by the right – the red-baiting, the trumping up of groundless accusations, outright censorship – is done in alignment with capital and the status quo.  Whether they are subjected to the online struggle sessions or not, the right is armed, organized, and in alignment with the capitalist state.  To prove this, one may look no further than the vast gulf between the treatment of our own rebels and royalists made evident by the January 6 storming of the Capitol.

A different analogy from Chinese history may be useful for thinking about the left’s problem with “cancel culture.”  Towards the end of the War of Liberation against the Kuomintang (1949-1950), the Chinese Communist Party found itself tasked with implementing the promise of land reform to the long-suffering peasantry.  “Speak bitterness” meetings and efforts to “settle accounts” with rural landlords, collaborators, and rich peasants suspected of harboring pro-KMT sympathies flew out of the control of local party cadres.  This resulted in the beating and killing of many of these people by their fed-up neighbors.  The CCP leadership, in hopes of maintaining the countryside as a united front against the urban-based KMT (and setting aside its plans to liquidate landlordism later), emphasized the human rights of these targeted groups and encouraged cadres to provide them the means to transition out of their “bad” class status.

However, Mao also cautioned the cadres not to “pour cold water” on the energies of the masses.  Instead, he advised that efforts be made to redirect their wrath towards select elements, especially the semi-urban commercial landlords, with an eye to enhancing the unity of the countryside against the KMT-controlled cities.19

The primary criticism of cancel culture lies in the degree to which indiscriminate “cancelling” alienates elements of the people from themselves.  To join the right in decrying cancel culture as a whole and play into their blinkered deployment of an analogy with the Cultural Revolution is like pouring cold water on the energies of today’s movement for change.  What needs to be done instead is to redirect that energy in a way which fosters solidarity against the post-Trump status quo.

Notes

Thanks to Long Yang for his commentary and invaluable perspective on early drafts of this piece.

1 Yao Linxia, “Zhongnanhai Should Reflect on the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and Mao Zedong’s Sins” (姚临夏, “中南海更应反思’文革’和毛泽东的罪恶,”《DW中文》April 7, 2012). My translation.

2 Jude Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 4.

3 Mao Yushi, “Judging Mao as a Man: Only When Chinese Strip Away the Mythology Surrounding Mao Zedong Will we Understand his Terrible Legacy,” Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2011.

4 Mao Yushi was something of a whipping post for Utopia at the time and continues to be to this day.

5 Liu Siqi, the widow of Mao’s son Mao Anying who died in an American napalm raid in the Korean War, was among the family members of the Chairman who signed the petition against Mao Yushi’s publication.

6 Chen Ziming, “A Brief Analysis of Two Maoist Factions: Royalists and Rebels” (陈子明, “简析两种毛派：保皇派与造反派,”《爱思想》May 6, 2013).  My translation.

7 Parentheses and emphasis in original.

8 Chen Chun, “The Leftist Youth of This Era” (陈纯, “这个时代的左翼青年,” Matters, August 13, 2018).  My translation.

9 WeChat account of Peking University Marxist Society, “A Letter from the Peking University Marxist Society to Qiu Zhanxuan and Other Students” (pku马会, “北大马会致邱占萱等同学的一封信,” January 1, 2019).  My translation and parenthetical addition.

10For a deeper analysis of the Wuhan Incident, see Wang Shaoguang’s The Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995).

11 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006): 204-205.

12 MacFarquhar and Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution: 215.

13 Yu Ruxin, “The ‘8201’ and ‘8199’ in the ‘July 20th Incident’” (余汝信, “‘7·20事件‘中的’8201‘与’8199‘,“《爱思想》, November 13, 2013).  My translation.

14 Landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists.

15 Yan Lebin, “My Participation in Handling Issues Leftover from the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi” (宴乐斌, “我参与处理广西文革遗留问题,”《炎黄春秋》2012年第11期).  Anecdotal figures suggest far more were killed.

16 Bai Yintai, “The Unjust Case of the ‘Inner Mongolian People’s Revolution Party’ From Beginning to End” (白音太,  “‘内人党’冤案前后,”《炎黄春秋》2009年第8期).  This is almost certainly an undercount.  The civil society organization “32 Widows Appeal Mission” estimates that 40,000 were killed.  Hasige’erlei, “Personal Experience of the Injustice of the ‘Inner Mongolia People’s Revolution Party’ Incident” (哈斯格尔勒, “‘内人党‘冤案亲历记,”《炎黄春秋》2009年第1期).

17 Jacques Ranciere, Althusser’s Lesson, xvii.  Quoted from Jean Khalfa, “A Theory of Subversion that Could not Also Serve the Cause of Oppression,” Interventions, July 7, 2020: 2.

18 “Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China,” Chuang Vol. 1 (2016): 195. Available at http://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/ 

19 Yang Kuisong, “Early Post-War Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Land Reform Policy Changes and Origins: With an Emphasis on the Interpretation of Archival Documents” (杨奎松，“战后初期中共中央土地政策的变动及原因 – 着重于文献档案的解读“，《开放时代》2014/05).

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Aminda Smith: Donald Trump, Mao Zedong, and the Audacity of the Masses

Donald Trump’s political career has invited all kinds of analogies, some useful, most not. Among the most facile have been the attempts to portray the US president as a Mao-Zedong-like figure. The pundits who make Mao-Trump comparisons tend to be either a). China watchers or China scholars whose specific expertise is not in the history of the Mao era or Maoism, or b). experts, but from a relatively small group of outliers, well known for the distinctive rabidity of their anti-communist views. Most people who specialize in the study of Mao Zedong and his revolution see superficial links, if any, between the Chairman and Donald Trump. The men do indeed share a taste for power and adulation; a willingness to fabricate truths and discard evidence in pursuit of what they deem to be greater goals; and a high tolerance for chaos and violence in both rhetoric and reality. But those characteristics could be attributed to a great many powerful politicians and rhetoricians. In terms of actual politics, message, tactics, and even personality, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump are about as similar as chalk and cheese.

It is unhelpful, if not disingenuous, to draw comparisons between the two men. But thinking about Trumpism in light of Maoism does help us understand why Trump got more votes than any incumbent president in US history. The good news is – it’s not because all those voters are fascists. Rather, it’s that Trumpism, like Maoism, empowers the very people disempowered by the ideology of progressive, liberal, urban elites. It is the failure of liberalism, which time and again, throughout the modern era, has produced subjects who are vulnerable to forms of populist authoritarianism. But the fact that we might be able to compare Trumpism to Maoism, but not Trump to Mao, can also give us hope. It is the form, but not the content, that links the two. And this might mean that it isn’t the content of Trump’s politics, per se, that fuels his popularity. Indeed, many Trump supporters say just that – they note that they don’t always like the things he says; they just like that he says things. Trumpism, like Maoism, empowers people to speak. A politics of equity and emancipation could thus also mobilize massive numbers of people in the US, but it would have to simultaneously grant them the genuine political authority that liberalism denies them.

Take Melissa Carone, for example, the IT worker who was Rudy Giuliani’s star witness at a November 2020 hearing on voter fraud in Michigan. Liberals around the world took great pleasure in mocking Carone after she went viral for shouting down elected officials to allege that Detroit poll workers had counted tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots. In a piece for Slate, Lili Loofbourow urges us “not to laugh at the voter fraud cranks,” noting that Carone represents “a particular kind of American ‘authenticity” that liberals love to mock. (The hearing wasn’t even over before Twitter began demanding an SNL skit; the cast obliged the following weekend). According to Loofbourow, it is precisely the “mockability” of this authenticity that “is its potency,” but she warns us to resist the urge to parody because doing so gives such people a wider audience.  While I sympathize with the desire to stifle misinformation, ignoring the “cranks” or laughing at them are both manifestations of the way liberalism fails the majority and then abets the few in covering their tracks.

To elaborate, let me first ask what, precisely, is inherently or obviously mockable about Carone? Some of her claims were bizarre but familiar (food trucks smuggled in fake ballots), and others seemed more like misinterpretations by someone unfamiliar with the minutiae of electoral procedures— none of them were any funnier than the other tales we’d heard in the preceding weeks. Some commentators seized on her fabulously messy updo, striking eyewear, and perfectly applied dark red lipstick, but that particular expression of midwestern femininity is too common for its satire alone to propel a person to stardom. What is funny about Carone, it seems, is her audacity. As Loofbourow observed, Carone presents “a recognizable “type,” which is “as confident as it is ignorant, so righteous and blustery and simultaneously sincere and unhampered by facts or deference.” And Carone is just one in a long line of similar “types” who testified that they too had seen evidence of fraud and corruption. “Most weren’t quite as theatrical as Carone,” Loofbourow wrote, but they were all like her in that they were “clearly thrilled to be playing important roles, to matter, as they addressed lawmakers.” And that’s really the crux of it—what liberals find funny about Carone is that she thinks she matters.

 As I watched this story unfold, I was reminded of a mid-century porter from China’s Shanxi Province; he was a bit like Melissa Carone in that he became famous for his dogged political accusations, which many around him found outlandish. At the time of the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, Zhang Shunyou was in his late twenties. He had a job driving a cart and hauling wares for a small-time grain merchant named Song Yude. Zhang later claimed that when the new government launched the “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” in 1952 and invited citizens to report any such elements, Boss Song began acting shifty. According to Zhang’s account, Song counterfeited travel permissions for himself and his employee, moved his operation from one province to another, and changed his name. “I began to suspect that Song Yude was not a good fellow,” Zhang told authorities, adding “I thought I should report him.”

Zhang’s experiences as he later narrated them run counter to what we usually assume about the Maoist era; it took him months to get anyone in the Party bureaucracy to investigate the case. Zhang did his own research and collected testimonies from others, including accusations that Song was a former landlord who had once killed an innocent peasant. Yet no one would take Zhang seriously; he was turned away from dozens of government units, in large part because officials at all levels questioned his credibility. Zhang did finally find a champion in Central Committee member, Liu Lantao, who saw the potential links between Zhang’s account and the central government’s ongoing efforts to attack the corruption and malfeasance that plagued the bureaucracy. But just as Rudy Giuliani seemed skeptical of Melissa Carone’s political passions, Liu Lantao was apparently skeptical of Zhang Shunyou’s motivations. Historians  later discovered that top officials had conducted an investigation in an attempt to discover the “truth” behind Zhang’s political zeal. A number of theories circulated, and, although Liu Lantao excised the information from the nationwide propaganda campaign, the behind-the-scenes verdict was that Zhang had accused Song for personal reasons, not political ones.

In Mao’s China, as in Trump’s USA, grassroots zealots often baffle people, including the politicians and theorists who sell the ideologies that appear to motivate the zealotry. A common explanation – ideologues don’t believe their own rhetoric and are amused/discomfited when others do – might work in some cases, but most recent studies of the Soviet Communist Party or the US Republican Party suggest that there are more true believers among the elite than the cynics allow. The reason that even other true believers tend to read people like Carone and Zhang as cranks, cynics, or some combination of the two, is probably deeper. In the capitalist globality that produced Liberalism and Marxism, the idea that capitalism is a total system, such that all of human behavior can be understood as part of or analogous to economic activity, is entrenched in modern consciousness. Even the Maoists, with their exceptionally powerful thought reform abilities, seemed unable to completely root out all of the corollaries to the notion that societies are markets and people are self-interested profit-loss calculators.

In this market-consciousness, utility and value are often conflated with self-interest and cynicism, which leads to the conflation of use-value and exchange-value. So, ideology, for example, becomes like a currency, not valuable in and of itself but only as a means to acquire something else, the thing that has the “real” value. We see this interpretation clearly in many of the set pieces oral historians collect from onetime Maoists. I spoke to a former red guard, for instance, who told me that during the Cultural Revolution she had been an ardent radical, but she now spoke of that radicalism as a currency. “I got good at quoting Chairman Mao,” she said, “because it was useful to do that.” I suspect, however, that her hindsight undervalues what Maoist ideology gave to its speakers, because she went on to say that Mao’s words “gave me the right to speak and the power to win arguments. People were more likely to listen to me because they were afraid to ignore Chairman Mao.” If we were to say that her comments revealed a utilitarian deployment of Maoist language, that would be an understatement at best. For this woman, who said that before the Cultural Revolution, she was “someone with no status . . . someone whom no one paid attention to,” the power to be heard, to have her opinions warrant consideration, had a value far more profound than the price of the goods and privileges it might have allowed her to purchase. It transformed her into someone whose ideas mattered.

That market-consciousness can take the investiture of epistemological authority and render it as merely a superficial and often cynical currency exchange is part of what makes liberal ideology so formidable. In recent weeks, as the punch-drunk post-election hilarity ensued, and so many of us were in stitches over satires of conspiracy theorists, I thought of another figure of fun, also from the history of ideology: the most memorable relic of the Korean War brainwashing episode might be the cinematic scene in which the Chinese psychiatrist, Dr. Yen Lo bragged about his thought reform prowess, saying of The Manchurian Candidate: “His brain has not only been washed, as they say. It has been dry-cleaned.” My students and I all laugh every time I show this clip in class, but people once took brainwashing very seriously. In the 1950s and beyond, everyone from the CIA to the Chinese Communist Party was convinced that communist thought reformers had transformed the minds of US prisoners of war, causing them to side with the communists and attack the US for its imperialism. By the 1990s, however, the scholarly consensus, among both US and China-based historians, was that “brainwashing” had largely been a figment of an overactive “American” imagination. This presentist misremembering goes against a great deal of evidence suggesting the Maoism did indeed transform people’s thinking and their actions. It forgets the vast number of ideological converts around the world (from anti-imperialist freedom fighters to French intellectuals). It evades the way Mao’s ideas invigorated radical politics in anti-racist, feminist, and lgbtq liberationist movements and elides the direct links (inspirational and practical) between the Maoist state and revolutionary organizations such as the Black Panthers. But in market-consciousness, brainwashing can only be a joke, a tinfoil-hat conspiracy, because Maoist ideology was simply a currency, which “brainwashed” POWs wielded out of self-interest and/or coercion. Even better than defeating your challengers is convincing the world they don’t exist. If all competing ideologies can be reduced to currencies traded within a liberal-capitalist totality, then that totality appears as the only ontological reality, to which there is, as Margaret Thatcher loved to say, no alternative. Turning Trumpism into a set of bizarre conspiracy theories and then mocking their adherents serves that same agenda.

The value of ideologies, in part, is that they offer epistemologies and lexicons, which people can use to think through and discuss concepts that are otherwise difficult to articulate. The danger of ideologies is also that they advance particular epistemologies and lexicons, so that when one becomes dominant, all others will appear, by definition, as illogical and false. Trumpism, like Maoism, was born and thrives because people are deeply dissatisfied with liberal and neoliberal ideology, and many have caught on to the way it vanquishes its challengers by making them into jokes.

If we don’t like the “truths” that people like Melissa Carone use Trumpism to claim, we might start by trying to figure out what they want to say. It seems to me that Carone and her Trumpist comrades have a litany of valid and legitimate grievances. They rightly see that ordinary people are utterly disempowered in this so-called democracy, that we are indeed being defrauded by global alliances between corporations and states, that many of our political leaders are corrupt and do regularly cover for each other, and for other elites, as they commit heinous crimes. Liberalism does not offer the conceptual tools to make sense of those truths; indeed it is designed to conceal them.

Figures like Mao Zedong and Donald Trump harness that broader discontent, and they distill complex affective and libidinal responses to very real injustices into easy to grasp ideas. Their power lies in their ability to create memes that anyone can use to participate in knowledge production and successfully make claims to political and epistemological authority. Whether people such as Mao Zedong or Donald Trump “believe” their own rhetoric, whether or not they think that Zhang Shunyou or Melissa Carone matter, is of little consequence in the end. Maoism and Trumpism make Zhang and Carone matter, precisely because ideology is collectively produced and only tangentially connected to individual ideologues. Indeed, ideology is not ideology unless it is collectively fashioned and practiced by the many – if there were no Maoists, for example, there would be no Maoism, only the writings of Mao Zedong; and if there were no Trumpists, Trump would be no more than an angry  twitter troll. At the grassroots level, in Mao-era villages or factories, or on Trumpist (social) media, the political knowledge associated with these leaders can be quite far afield from any of their actual words or deeds. The millions of people who participated in spreading Mao’s image around the world did as much if not more than the man himself to create the meanings associated with global Maoism in the 1960s. And MAGA warriors, Q-adherents (or the Q-curious) have done as much if not more to create the Trumpism that is spreading around the globe today.

The lesson linking the two movements is that the masses matter, and when we are mobilized and demand to be heard, we can create powerful change, for better and for worse. Zhang Shunyou did succeed in his campaign against his allegedly counterrevolutionary employer; Song Yude was executed in 1952. Melissa Carone and the other voter fraud activists have come extremely close to overturning an election. They’ve got almost half of our elected representatives to publicly promote the idea that the democrats stole a presidential win. As Dahlia Lithwick emphasized, supreme courts denied voter fraud claims by small margins, meaning that almost half of our highest judges might have awarded a victory to Trump. Those truths are not funny at all. And Donald Trump could never have done that without all of the many Melissa Carones. Rudy Giuliani’s “shushing” of his star witness is a small but important reminder that the ideologues and their consiglieri actually have very little control over what the masses do with the ideology the masses produce.

There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen when a “smarter Trump” comes along, one who can play the game better and tip those legislative and judicial scales in his favor. But neither Trump nor anyone else can actually do that alone. They need us, the masses. If more people refuse populist authoritarianism, it will be because they have another powerful ideology instead. Economics need to be part of the package (we all know that Floridians voted both for Donald Trump and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage). But money won’t be enough, because we know – even if we can’t quite conceive of it with our market consciousness, and even if we can’t quite articulate it with our capitalist lexicon – that we are not solely economic subjects. Financial insecurity is only one of the many consequences of the fact that most of us do not have the epistemological tools, the language, or the political authority to identify, articulate, and demand restitution for the ways we are disempowered by our economic and political institutions. What we all want, most fundamentally, is to matter. And until we all do, none of us will. 

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Chenshu Zhou, “76 Days: Can the Dead Speak?”

76 Days, a feature-length documentary film focusing on the initial coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city Wuhan, has been making the rounds at film festivals around the world since September. Unlike Ai Weiwei’s Coronation, which offers a more comprehensive picture of the same subject, 76 Days devotes most of its screen time to one intensive care unit inside a hospital in Wuhan during its 76 days under strict lockdown. Weixi Chen, a journalist for Esquire China, and a local photojournalist credited as “Anonymous” shot the footage, which Hao Wu (director of The People’s Republic of Desire and All in My Family) then edited from his home in the United States.

While the pandemic continues to rage in many parts of the world (including the US), 76 Days is timely, topical, and, despite its limited perspective, relatively informative. For those still insensitive to the reality of the novel coronavirus and for those curious about what goes on behind the closed doors of ICUs, 76 Days is a valuable record of the early stage of the pandemic. Yet watching it as a narrative film, I also find 76 Days to be underwhelming, if not troubling at times. Beyond its immediate topic of the coronavirus, it raises both old and new questions about representation in our now distantly connected world that are worth a closer look.

In several ways 76 Days frustrates expectations. Despite featuring a tense, dramatic scene as its trailer, most of 76 Daysfeels rather quiet. Inside the ICU, there isn’t the chaos one might expect. Patients await their fates in hospital beds while medical workers go about attending to them in a more or less routine manner. It is not that we do not witness emotional outbursts or heart wrenching moments, like when an old man who keeps trying to “escape” suddenly breaks down saying he knows he is dying, or when the head nurse sorts through the belongings of the dead. But overall the mood is not dramatic, and it is clear that Wu aimed not to dramatize (by not including a soundtrack for example). This in itself is refreshing and demystifying. After all, not everyone has time to be sentimental in the face of death. (The contradictory message, of course, is that the marketing of this film clearly privileges intensity and chaos.)

Yet the everyday routineness of ICU life also disrupts any sense of time passing. For a film that foregrounds time in its title, Wu made the interesting decision not to time stamp the film but only use the footage itself to suggest time. During most of the film, one thus only gets a vague sense of where one stands in the 76 days. Whenever a specific date is referenced, it feels surprising. At least to this viewer, knowing how long a patient has spent in a hospital matters, and for the film not to provide that it is very unsatisfying. Without the clear progression of time and a strong narrative, 76 Daysalso feels more like raw footage than a finished film.   

The truly troubling part of the film, however, is its portrayal of the patients with more severe symptoms. I am the kind of person who usually cries at everything, whether it’s a six-year-old playing the guitar or John McCain’s concession speech from 2008. I started 76 Days preparing to tear up, but it did not happen. Part of it, I suspect, is due to the difficulty of connecting with the people being filmed over PPE and face masks that hide their faces. During the first 30 minutes of the film, it was difficult to remember who was who and to recognize their faces or voices. Meanwhile, my viewing was frequently interrupted by another unanticipated and uncomfortable thought: did the “subjects” give their consent to be included in the film? For those who can no longer give consent, did their families give consent?

What is undeniably visible in 76 Days are aging, unconscious, and dying bodies lying silently in their hospital beds. There are shots of swollen hands (both pre-and-posthumous), dirty fingernails, wrinkled, yellowing faces with dents from repeated intubation. These images are extremely hard to look at. They unmistakably show us what illness takes away – your dignity as a human being, your individuality, everything that makes you who you are beyond the physical mass of a body that you can no longer control. Are these images there to shock viewers into awareness? Yes, coronavirus is ugly, death is ugly, and there is proof. But my immediate reaction was to turn to my husband who was watching the film with me and said: “if I am ever in a similar situation and if I die, please remember that I do not give consent. I don’t ever want people to see me like that.”

There is one patient who is identified by name in the film. In one scene, she is shown lying in her hospital bed unable to speak while several medical workers surround her and tell her things will be ok. Later we find out that she has passed away and we get a scene of the head nurse handing her belongings to her daughter outside of the hospital. Somehow not knowing whether she was ok with her last moments being shown in this film and whether her family is ok with it really bothers me. Perhaps she didn’t mind it. Perhaps her daughter was even glad that she could at least get a glimpse of her mother in the hospital bed since she could not visit her in the ICU in real life. I wish I knew. I wish I knew more about who she was and what she did before she became a sick body in a film, a number in a pandemic. But I don’t. I don’t know if she felt violated with the camera of a stranger pointing at her in her most vulnerable moments.

What seems likely (unless the filmmakers say otherwise), rather, is that the absence of the need to obtain consent was fundamental to how 76 Days could come into being in the first place. As mentioned earlier, 76 Days was a result of trans-pacific collaboration. Without Wu’s intervention, footage might have stayed footage, or it might lose its independence, become subsumed by bigger narratives of the outbreak more acceptable to both the Chinese state and its people (as in several recent Chinese tv series that dramatize the event). Without Chen and Anonymous, Wu of course would have nothing to work with. I’d like to believe that Wu would have wanted to go to Wuhan if he could have. In an interviewwith the Toronto International Film Festival, Wu was asked about the issue of access. The interviewer was gesturing toward a comment on China’s control of information. But Wu, instead, shared that he had tried to film at hospitals in New York, which he found to be extremely difficult. “It would be more difficult here because of the HIPPA laws,” he said. 

What is implied is that there are no such laws in China, and it was easier to gain access there. But aren’t privacy laws precisely what prevent documentary filmmakers from looking at their stories merely as stories, and their “subjects” as merely characters in a film?

The ethical dilemma of photographing and documenting human suffering is not something new. If consent was necessary for someone to be included in an image, we probably would not have seen a lot of the iconic images that have changed the world, such as the “Napalm Girl” shot by Nick Ut during the Vietnam War. So perhaps the more important question is, does the violation, assuming that in itself it is never ok, lead to something important? Is it a worthwhile price to pay for greater empathy and justice? (Does the greater good even justify the taking of someone’s image if they adamantly refuse to be photographed and filmed?)

French philosopher Jacques Rancière offers a surprising but useful way to think about these questions. In an essay called “The Intolerable Image” (included in the book The Emancipated Spectator), Rancière expresses skepticism at the assumption that making an image so full of pain to the degree that it is intolerable for the spectator can necessarily lead to guilt/indignation and then action. Without a pre-existing political movement that contextualizes the pain, he suggests, the link between knowledge and practice is tenuous. But this also does not mean that images are inherently impotent. Rancière argues against those maintaining that the ubiquity of intolerable images desensitizes us, banalizes horrors while there is always something at the heart of the horror that is unrepresentable (the Holocaust being a prime example). For Rancière, images are potentially transformative; their capacity to effect change is tied to their ability to draw out new configurations of “what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought, and consequently a new land of possibilities. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated.” In other words, strong authorial intentions backfire; what is seen as a strength of images is the indeterminacy of meaning, which invites curiosity and contemplation.

Bypassing the issue of consent, Rancière’s approach is a practical one that we can apply to assess the efficacy of 76 Days. Does the film draw out new configurations of what can be seen and thought? Did it succeed in reshaping the system of representations (or “the dispositif of visibility” in Rancière’s words) that sustain our sense of the reality surrounding the coronavirus pandemic? I’m afraid 76 Days does not let me see past how the severely ill and the dead appear on screen with no voice and no privacy laws to protect themselves. If the message of the film is simply that medical workers tried their best, patients strived to survive, COVID-19 is a tragedy, and death is ugly, I’m not sure if it is worth it to traffic individual suffering in such a blunt way. After all, as Rancière also writes:

We do not see too many images of suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak.”

76 Days, in my view, accumulates more such nameless, voiceless bodies without a greater trade-off. Given how timely the film strives to be, perhaps rather than watching it as a documentary film with grand artistic ambitions, it is more appropriate to think of it as the visual equivalent of a news report, as journalism. It reveals, observes, and informs – to a certain extent. That’s that.

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Poems by Kim Nam-ju (translations by Kevin Michael Smith)

Kim Nam-ju (1945-1994), born in Haenam, South Cholla Province, was a leading leftist poet associated with South Korea’s minjung or “people’s” movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. He was one of 36 individuals convicted by the military government for involvement in the National Liberation Front, an illegal, underground organization agitating for national reunification, and spent the years 1980-88 in prison in Gwangju. His sentence was spent writing dozens of poems commemorating the Gwangju Massacre of May 1980 and protesting his incarceration, South Korea’s military dictatorship, the north-south division system, and US neocolonial domination of the country. With the help of comrades both inside and outside, Kim was able to sneak these poems secretively out of prison for publication. Following his pardon in 1988, he resumed his writing and political activities until his death from cancer in 1994. 

My Name

My name
is red tag 2164
My age
I was in my mother’s belly as Japanese imperialism was chased out the back door
I came out into this world as US imperialism raided through the front door
a so-called “liberation baby”

You ask where I live?
My address is Gwangju City, Munhŭng-dong 88-1
2 S. H. 41 is my house and my room and my toilet

You ask where that is?
My time my place
a day with no sunrise a night with no moon or stars
a cave smaller than 3 meters squared
My freedom?! That’s 24-hour confinement
no make that 365-day confinement
no maybe it’s a 5,475-day grave

My clothing
only a single blue jumpsuit
My food
only three dented nickel dishes
My shelter
only a straw cushion and blanket

I’m “not allowed”
not allowed to t’ongbang1 with the next cell
not allowed to look inmates in the face once in awhile
I’m not allowed
not allowed to leave my designated seat without permission
I’m not allowed
not allowed to lie down or doze off outside of sleeping hours
I’m not allowed
not allowed to possess writing utensils or paper without permission
I’m not allowed
not allowed to read or try to read a book without permission
I’m allowed
allowed to report anyone violating the above conditions immediately to the officer in charge

You ask who I am?
You ask who I am and what I did to live this way?
You, you’ve heard them before
due to American beef imports the price of Korean cattle has plunged
crushed below that is a farmer groaning
those groans belong to my father
You, you’ve heard them before
because they shared the workers’ lives of pain they were accused of being hired illegally2
the pleas of a sexually tortured college girl
those pleas are my sister’s
You, you’ve seen it before
refusing to live like a slave exploited to the maximum
a worker declaring human equality by burning himself
that immolation is my little brother’s
You’ve seen it clearly before
the screams of a mountain village woman raped by American GIs on a “team spirit” mission
those screams are my aunt’s
You right now like every hour of every day
you can see it hear it in your house on your street
down every road you’ve ever walked
your compatriots, no different from your own sons and daughters
you’ve seen them and heard their cries
Let’s rip to shreds the XXX,3 puppet of US imperialism!
Long live the anti-fascist democratic struggle!
Long live the anti-imperialist national liberation struggle!
That chant is mine
mine and my friends’ and my neighbors’ 

 

Father and Son

My son
         you asked
                       your dear father

Shouting Chosŏn
                        Independence
                                           Forever
Arrested by the
                    Chosŏnin4
                                 police detective
Interrogated by the
                          Chosŏnin
                                       prosecutor
Convicted by the
                       Chosŏnin
                                    judge
Under surveillance by the
                                    Chosŏnin
                                                 prison guard
                      10 years
                                  behind bars
Of this dear father
                          you asked
                                       in prison!
This father’s youth
                         gone
                               gray-haired
straight
          from that same prison!

Yelling Anti-American
                              National Liberation
                                                         Struggle
Arrested by the
                     Korean
                              police detective
Interrogated by the
                          Korean
                                   prosecutor
Convicted by the
                       Korean
                                judge

Now under surveillance by the
                                           Korean
                                                    prison guard

Like this you asked
You said nation fear masses love
My compatriot thrown into prison
Who can be comfortable in their own bed you asked
What’s money, law, power, status you asked
What’s a life what’s living you asked

 

T’ongbang
For memory’s sake

Exactly one knock that makes “k”
Knock, knock if two then “n”
Knock knock knock three that’s “d”
Zip if there’s one stroke then “a”
Zip zip if two then “ya”
Zip zip zip three makes “ah”
And so on vowels and consonants together forming syllables
Like this we start the t’ongbang

––Mister, for which incident are you in here?
––The South Korean National Liberation Front incident, sir.
––Ah! Is that right? I’m remembering it now, I’m proud of you, I’ll bet you went through a lot of hardship for that. I expect you’d have some company but just how many of you are there in here?
––Including the women, altogether there are 36 of us, sir.
––Ah! There are women as well? They must have been sent to the women’s block then. I apologize, I should have introduced myself sooner, I’m Yu Han-uk from Sinŭiju,5 what is your name, sir?
––Is that so? I am Kim Nam-ju from Haenam in Chŏnnam province, sir.
––Forgive me for asking, Mr. Kim, but how many years did you get?
––15 years, sir.
––Oh, really! Be especially mindful of your health, then. Does that room not leak water?
––It does leak; the ceiling is all rotten. But this can’t be a place for people to live. It’s no more than a coffin for laying corpses.
––That’s right, it truly is a coffin. Moreover, it’s a coffin on which rain drips. Because we are human we can manage to survive this place, but if it were a goose or chicken or some such caged animal it would have perished right away. Mr. Kim, you must move your body around in order to stay alive. If you don’t move you will not survive. Plenty of people go crazy or have their blood pressure burst in here.
––Yes, I understand well, sir. How long have you lived this life?
––Me, is it me you’re asking? It’s been a full thirty years.

 

Inside and Outside

eating
sleeping
shitting
this is my freedom
here I’m also inside
there I’m outside too
an animal’s freedom

swindling
cheating
stealing
this is my freedom
here I’m also inside
there I’m outside too
law of the jungle

there’s nothing
to read the books I want
to write the essays I want
to say what I want to say
there’s no such freedom
not here inside
not there outside
human freedom

at the top sits the capitalist boss
below the workers carry the weight
one country but two kinds of citizens: owners and slaves
a country split in two in such a country I’m
eating
sleeping
shitting
an animal’s freedom
swindling
cheating
stealing
it’s the law of the jungle
all for one
and one for all
working
singing
fighting
there’s no such freedom
not in prison
not outside 

 

Things Have Really Changed

Under Japanese imperialism if Chosŏn people
shouted “Long Live Independence!”
Japanese policemen would come and take them away
Japanese prosecutors interrogated them
Japanese judges put them on trial

Japan withdrew and the US stepped in
now if Koreans
say “Yankee Go Home”
Korean police come and take them away
Korean prosecutors interrogate them
Korean judges put them on trial

Things have really changed after liberation
because I shouted “Drive out the foreign invaders!”
people from my own country
arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial

 

Notes

1 T’ongbang (通房) refers to the morse-code like system of communication among prisoners characterized by patterns of knocks and strokes on the prison walls, in use since the Japanese colonial period, and, as evidenced by Nakano Shigeharu’s 1930 poem “Finally from Today” (Iyoiyo kyō kara), among Japanese political prisoners as well.

2 This refers to student activists who left college to organize factory workers by not disclosing their college backgrounds to employers and getting hired as workers themselves, a common tactic of the 1970s and 80s minjung movement in South Korea.

3 This word was (self) censored in the original.

4 I have chosen not to translate the Korean term Chosŏnin (朝鮮人), which literally means “people of Chosŏn,” using the former title of Korea’s ruling dynasty (1392-1897), by which the Japanese also referred to Korea during the colonial period (1910-1945), and which is still officially used in North Korea. Leaving the term untranslated preserves Kim’s contrast in the original between the colonial period and the contemporary term referring to (South) Koreans, Hangukin (韓國人).

5 Sinŭiju is a city in the far northwest of North Korea along the border with China, near where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea. The date of this poem from the late 1970s implies that the prisoner with whom Kim is speaking, Yu Han-uk, was apprehended shortly after the 1950-53 Korean War for espionage or related activities on behalf of the North. To this day several such long-term North Korean political prisoners remain in South Korean jails.

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Critical China Scholars, Open Letter to Monthly Review

Dear friends at Monthly Review,

As scholars and activists committed to charting a course for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left in the midst of rising US-China tensions, we write in response to your recent republication of a “report and resource compilation” by the Qiao Collective on Xinjiang.

We fully acknowledge the need for a critique of America’s cynical and self-interested attacks on China’s domestic policies. We are committed to that task. But the left must draw a line at apologia for the campaign of harsh Islamophobic repression now taking place in Xinjiang.

Qiao’s “report” is written in a style that is sadly all too common in leftist discussions of China today. While the report “recognize[s] that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique,” it finds no room for any such critique in its 15,000 words. Eschewing serious analysis, it compiles select political and biographical facts to suggestively point at, but not articulate, the intended conclusion – that claims of serious repression in Xinjiang can be dismissed.

We wish it were the case that talk of internment camps was a myth, fabricated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. But it is not. Problematic links do exist between individual activists and organisations and the American security state, and there have been errors and misattributions in reporting on Xinjiang. The applicability of terms such as “genocide” and “slavery” can be debated. But none of this should permit agnosticism, let alone denialism, towards what is clearly a shocking infringement on the rights of Xinjiang’s native peoples.

Since 2016, Xinjiang has seen a massive expansion of its security infrastructure, featuring a network of camps that mete out a punishing program of political indoctrination, compulsory language drills, and workhouse-style “vocational” training. Internees range from party members deemed disloyal, intellectuals and artists whose work has sustained the distinct non-Chinese cultural identities of the region, through to those thought to display signs of excessive piety. In the same period Xinjiang has seen a surge in incarcerations, with Muslim Uyghurs imprisoned for as a little as encouraging their peers to observe their faith. Others, meanwhile, have been sent to the Chinese interior, as part of non-voluntary labor programs designed to instill factory discipline into Xinjiang’s rural population. In some cases, these workers have been sent to factories linked to the supply chains of Western corporations. 

Families inside Xinjiang have been torn apart, with some 40% of school-age  children now enrolled in boarding schools, and many growing up in state orphanages. Outside China, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others live with the trauma of not knowing the fate of their relatives.

While elements of these policies call to mind the excesses of past ideological campaigns in China, they occur today in new conditions of rapid capitalist development in Xinjiang, intended to turn the region into an economic hub of Central Asia. The link here between capitalist expansion and the oppression of indigenous communities is one the left has long been familiar with. To fail to recognise and critique these dynamics in this case is a form of wilful blindness.

There are various ways in which the politics of the Qiao Collective abandons what should be key principles of an internationalist left today, but we wish to highlight one in particular: their treatment of the issue of “counterterrorism.”

Qiao would have us believe that the PRC’s “deradicalization” campaign stands in “stark contrast” to American policies in the War on Terror. On the contrary, China’s deradicalization discourse represents a deliberate appropriation of Western counterterror practices. In his speeches, China’s President Xi Jinping himself encouraged officials to adapt elements of the Western-led War on Terror since 9/11.

The authors of the report are aware of these precedents, citing Western policies to preemptively identify those “at risk” of radicalization and intervene. They make note of France’s highly intrusive deradicalisation policies, as well as Britain’s Desistance and Disengagement Programme, part of the notorious Prevent Strategy. (To this list we could of course add the abuses of counterterror policing in the US, Australia, and elsewhere). Astonishingly, though, they cite these policing techniques not to criticize them, but simply to accuse the West of double standards: China, they complain, has received a level of criticism that these European governments have not.

This is entirely disingenuous on Qiao’s part, a deflection worthy of the Chinese state media that they frequently cite. The left, along with Muslim advocacy groups, have long called for an end to these Islamophobic policies, resting as they do on a bogus association of Islamic piety and/or anti-imperialist views with a proclivity to anti-social violence (see here for a recent example of such a call). Would Qiao then be happy for China to receive only the same level of criticism, and face these same calls?

Judging from their report, they would not. The entire thrust of their report is instead to normalize harmful paradigms of “deradicalisation” and “counter-extremism” as an acceptable basis for a state to engage its Muslim citizenry.

Qiao is evidently impressed by the fact that “Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil” stand in support of China at the United Nations. We are not so impressed. These local “campaigns against extremism” have replicated the worst violations of America’s War on Terror, and often in collaboration with it.

One example Qiao gives here is Nigeria, whose counterterrorism Joint Task Force was accused by Amnesty International in 2011 of engaging in “unlawful killings, dragnet arrests, arbitrary and unlawful detentions, extortion and intimidation.” Another is Pakistan, which the US commander-in-chief in Afghanistan once praised as a “a great ally on the war on terror,” and whose air and ground forces are responsible for serial abuses against civilian populations.

The incidents of violence against ordinary Chinese citizens that Qiao cites should of course not be dismissed: we must criticize those who engage in terrorism, while at the same time recognizing the social conditions that produce it, and pointing to the need for political solutions.

Qiao, by contrast, directs us toward the murky world of “terror-watching” punditry that has arisen in symbiosis with the two-decade-long Global War on Terror, and has provided justifications for that state violence. One of the authorities they cite on terrorism in Xinjiang is Rohan Gunaratna, a discredited figure who made his name in the 2000s urging America and its allies to invade Muslim-majority countries and enact repressive security laws at home. If Gunaratna and his ilk are our friends, the left will have no need of enemies.

Uncritically invoking China’s “terrorism problem,” and downplaying the severity of Beijing’s response to it, paints a left-wing façade on a global discourse of counterterrorism that poses a threat to Muslim communities everywhere. The struggle against anti-Muslim racism and the devastating effects of the ongoing War on Terror is international, and our solidarity in that struggle must extend to its victims in China.

For these reasons, we find it regrettable that you have chosen to give wider audience to the Qiao Collective’s “report and resource compilation.” In recognition of the existence of alternative perspectives on the left, and in the interest of debate, we hope you will also publish this letter alongside it.

We look forward to future opportunities to collaborate on critical left analysis regarding China and the US-China conflict, and we hope you will contact us whenever we can be of assistance. To find out more about the Critical China Scholars and our activities, please see our website, which includes video recordings of past webinars.  

In solidarity,

Joel Andreas

Angie Baecker 

Tani Barlow

David Brophy

Darren Byler

Harlan Chambers

Tina Mai Chen

Charmaine Chua

Manfred Elfstrom

Christopher Fan

Eli Friedman

Jia-Chen Fu

Daniel Fuchs

Joshua Goldstein

Beatrice Gallelli

Paola Iovene

Fabio Lanza

Soonyi Lee

Promise Li

Kevin Lin

Andrew Liu

Nicholas Loubere

Tim Pringle

Aminda Smith

Sigrid Schmalzer

Alexander Day

Rebecca Karl

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Ralph Litzinger

Christian Sorace

Jake Werner

Shan Windscript

Lorraine Wong

David Xu Borgonjon

For the Critical China Scholars

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