Qi Benyu came to work with Chairman Mao in 1950,
initially managing the books for him. In his later years, he wrote an article
looking back on his own development and considered himself a "private
disciple" of Mao's, so that he had the advantage of being close to him,
and he tried hard to follow Mao's reading process and, in particular, to learn
his ideas and methods.
From the perspective of Qi Lao's life, he truly achieved
the unity of knowledge and action, and practiced Mao Zedong's "Five Not
Afraids Spirit". During the Cultural
Revolution, Qi Lao, withstood the tremendous pressure from the officialdom,
firmly supported the masses to organize to criticize the various perverse
practices of the authorities. This became the thorn in the eyes of the majority
of the officialdom. He went to Qincheng Prison in early 1968 and stayed there
for 18 years.
In contrast to the end of Yao Wenyuan and Zhang
Chunqiao, who were in a similar position, Qi seems to have had the advantage of
being sent to Qincheng prison in early 1968, which was perhaps not so much
persecution as a real protection for him. Looking back on history today, we
will find that it is common for those who really stand on Chairman Mao’s side
to be beheaded and go to jail. Jiang Qing had been mentally prepared for this. The
only difference was when they entered the cell and how long they sat in jail.
Qi Benyu went to prison in 1968 and was released from prison in 1986. Zhang and
Yao both entered in 1976 and failed to get out for the rest of their lives.
First, Several positive interactions
between a good teacher and a good student
Mao Zedong was so diligent in his
study of Chinese history and politics that few professors who made a living
from history could compare with him, but it is true that Mao Zedong was not
given the title of professor by any institution, nor was he ever publicly
enrolled in postgraduate studies. Qi Lao, looking back on his own learning
process in his later years, said that he was only equivalent to a "private
disciple" of Teacher Mao.
However, Qi's enduring enthusiasm for history and the profoundly guiding role
of Teacher Mao in Qi's study of history was a healthy interaction that no pair
of good tutors and students could match.
In 1950 Qi Benyu went to work
beside Mao Zedong. His enthusiasm for learning history was extremely keen. In
the beginning, he managed the books for Mao Zedong, and was able to access
Mao's reading choices through the convenience of his work. He found whatever
books the Chairman wanted to read, and whatever annotations the Chairman had in
the book, he bought the book and copied it down. In this way, he followed the
Chairman's reading and study of history, and often read at night after his busy
work, so he had a deep understanding of the sense of history and politics of
Teacher Mao. Therefore, starting in 1963, when Qi Benyu started writing
historical essays, he was highly praised by Teacher Mao. The reason was nothing
else but that Qi Benyu had deeply internalized Mao Zedong’s thoughts, views,
and methods of viewing historical events and characters into his own way of
looking at history during the process of reading. Therefore, Qi Benyu’s views
and methods in his articles received high recognition by Teacher Mao. From his
essay criticizing Li Xiucheng's self-report in 1963 to his essay commenting on
Jian Bozan's
historicism in 1965, Teacher Mao gave unreserved admiration. Nominally, Teacher
Mao never formally enrolled Qi Benyu as a graduate student, but Qi's enthusiasm
for history and his fervent devotion to Teacher Mao's sense of history would
have dwarfed any pair of professors or graduate students.
In a series of interviews by Lao
Tian with Mr Qi Benyu in November 2012, he spoke of how he had been profoundly
influenced by Chairman Mao in his own thought formation process. When he first
joined Zhongnanhai, he was instructed to work with Tian Jiaying on the revision
of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong. He and Tian were so dedicated to this
that, in addition to scrutinising it, they adopted an innovative approach: one
person read it to another, often reading and listening to an article more than
ten times, and at the final stage, they had a sense of whether a punctuation
mark was appropriate. Qi said that after reading this way for some time, his
own thoughts were all those of Chairman Mao, and what the Chairman thought of
the workers and peasants, and what he thought of the intellectuals, naturally
became his own views. Qi joked that when members of the Cultural Revolution
Group supported the rebels in organising themselves to criticise the
powers-that-be, they were hated by the princelings and some people deliberately
despised him, saying that "Qi Benyu only had an administrative rank of
seventeen", but he actually served as Acting Director of the Central
Office and Director of the Bureau of Secretaries. What really made Qi proud was
that on 20 July 1966 the Central Committee decided to set up an editorial
committee for the writings of Mao Zedong, and he was one of the members of the
editorial committee for the anthology of Mao Zedong. This editorial committee
was headed by Liu Shaoqi himself, and the list included at least senior
officials from the Region and the Grand Military Region, in addition to Qi, who
was the only one not selected because of his high rank.
Qi mentioned one incident in
particular to illustrate why he was so fervently convinced by the Chairman's
ideas. In the middle of the revision of Mao's Selected Works, he read for the
first time an article written by Chairman Mao in a poor mountain valley in
northern Shaanxi - "The Chiang Kai-shek government is now besieged by the
whole people" (30 May 1947).
This article said, "The Chiang
Kai-shek government, hostile to the whole people, now finds itself besieged by
the whole people. On both the military and political fronts, it has met
defeats, is now besieged by the forces it has declared to be its enemies and
can find no way of escape." "There are now two battle fronts in China. The war between
Chiang Kai-shek's invading troops and the People's Liberation Army constitutes
the first front. Now a second front has emerged, that is, the sharp struggle
between the great and righteous student movement and the reactionary Chiang
Kai-shek government." "The march of events in China is faster than people expected. On the one
hand, there are the victories of the People's Liberation Army; on the other,
there is the advance of the people's struggle in the areas under Chiang
Kai-shek's control; both are moving at high speed." An incident is
mentioned in this article, which happened to be seen and heard by Qi Lao
himself, but his own views and feelings are worlds apart from the Chairman's.
On 4 May 1947, when Qi Lao was
passing by the Huangpu District Police Station, he witnessed the siege of the
police station by small businessmen organised by the youth gangs, and as a
result, he was affected by the incident and felt aggrieved. His mood at the
time was only very angry and resentful. He felt that the Guomindang regime was
unprincipled. It didn't make sense, this was purely from a personal point of
view and looking at the problem on a matter-of-fact basis. On the same matter,
Chairman Mao saw a bright future for the whole world and a general antagonism
between Jiang's regime (the pinyin spelling of Chiang Kai-shek is Jiang Jieshi - Trans.) and the people, and concluded on this - the failure of Jiang's
regime on the political front - and predicted that political failure would
hasten its military defeat. Qi Lao said that the siege of the police station
this time was not organized by the underground party, but by the Youth Gang. At
that time, the Jiang regime raised taxes in order to fight the civil war. The
hawkers rose up to express their protests, and the police suppressed the
protests, which naturally developed into a siege of the police station, with
the combined effect that the common people felt closer to the youth gangs than
to the Jiang regime. From this, we can
see that the people’s hearts are turned against the regime, and we can
appreciate the Chairman’s high and strategic vision of the problem, why the
masses have power and can also determine the rise and fall of the regime. Qi
Lao also commented that Deng Xiaoping and other people never valued the masses,
did not know what the political front was and always suppressed the masses in
the same way as Jiang Jieshi. In addition to ideological reasons, their vision was
too low and narrow, so they could not see the power of the masses, which is
also an important reason. After the comparison of this incident, Qi said he
only had a partial vision and a momentary feeling, and could not help but be
extremely impressed by the strategic vision of the Chairman and his breadth of
outlook. The ancient people said not to go outside and still know the world
affairs, but that is self-exaltation and just talk. People who really have a
strategic vision are rare, but there are indeed some, and Chairman Mao is that
kind of person who really can see from knowledge of the smallest things, an
insight into the future. It was later revealed that when Chairman Mao wrote
this article, he was in Yangjiagou in northern Shaanxi, having been driven out
of Yan'an by Hu Zongnan's army just four months earlier, and the entire civil
war situation in China was also one in which the Guomindang army was in full
attack.
For a long time afterwards, Qi Lao managed the
letters from the people for the Chairman. After Qi Lao had reported the
important socio-economic phenomena in his letters, the Chairman himself
approved many of them and handed them over to him. Qi Lao said that this was
not a coincidence, as his thinking and way of looking at issues were influenced
by the Chairman, and therefore the choice of many issues often fitted in with
the Chairman's thinking and received the Chairman's attention and therefore priority
approval.
In terms of general management of state affairs, Qi
Benyu's vision was already very close to that of Chairman Mao, so the documents
he submitted received more attention. At the same time, in the midst of
national political affairs in the 1950s and 1960s, the prevalence of
opportunistic behaviour in the officialdom was a major stubborn problem, most
notably the "five winds" that emerged in 1958 - the wind of pomp and
circumstance, the communist wind, the wind of specialisation of cadres, forced
orders and blind command - and in order to stem the tide of opportunism in the
officialdom, Qi Benyu once again stood closely alongside Teacher Mao.
In 1958 Deng Xiaoping, leading a few provincial
party secretaries who were at the forefront of the current boastfulness,
concocted a "Forty Articles of the Fifteen-Year Programme for Building
Socialism", which negated the yield increase target proposed in the
"Forty Articles of the Programme for Agriculture" formulated by Mao
Zedong in 1956, and proposed to raise per mu yield to four thousand,
five thousand and eight thousand jin in twelve years, and also
said that by 1967 it would reach 400 million tons of steel production. Mao
Zedong forcefully shelved this so-called socialist construction programme and
made counter-proposals telling these people to read, first of all, Stalin's
“Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union”, which did not work out
very well. To stem the tide of opportunism in official circles, Mao twice sent
Qi Benyu to the grassroots to find out what was really going on. In 1959, he
was sent to Dafeng Commune in Xinfan County, Sichuan, and he planted
experimental fields to see how much was the yield of an acre of field. The
final figure was arrived at according to the most scientific farming methods
and the best fertilizer input that local officials boasted about in newspapers,
by which the experimental fields were planted. The output was more than 300
catties of wheat and more than 700
catties of rice. At the Lushan Conference in 1959, Tian Jiaying also took this
figure (including the figure of output per acre that Qi Lao went to the labor
model Luo Shifa to find out), and argued with Li Jingquan, the boastful
provincial party secretary admired by Deng Xiaoping.
In response to Deng Xiaoping and
others sitting in their offices in the city and ruling by "taking things
for granted", Mao Zedong once again advocated the "style of
investigation and research" in the bureaucracy in 1961. At this time, Qi
Benyu was sent to the Changxindian Locomotive Factory. He saw that the
officials were all superficial, so on 12 May 1961, he wrote a document entitled
"Investigation on ‘Investigation and Research’" and sent it to the Chairman,
which said that "investigation and research are for solving problems, not
for plating things in a beautiful gold colour". Mao Zedong first praised
"Qi Benyu as a good comrade" in the comments, and then forcefully
instructed that "if the same bureaucratic, lordly and disgusting method of
investigation is still practised by the same people who went to the
Changxindian railway rolling stock manufacturing plant, the Party Committee has
the right to educate them. If dead bureaucrats are disobedient, the party
committee has the right to blast them away. At the same time, please use this
file as one of the teaching materials for the training investigation
team."
Teacher Mao's statement that
"Qi Benyu is a good comrade" was "corrupted" by the Central
Literature Research Office, which was determined not to issue it. This corruption can probably be
justified. If Qi Benyu was proclaimed to be a good
person, most of the officialdom would refuse to see it that way. There is
always a "dichotomy" of one kind or another, enough to reveal a
universal dark side, so a wise editor needs to be vigilant in erasing some key
elements. In Deng Xiaoping's time, the purpose and task of setting up several
official ideological institutions at the ministerial level was to rewrite the
Party's history, and in rewriting the Party's history, what they were trying to
cover up was the dark side of the officialdom, in contrast to Mao Zedong's
approach of launching the Cultural Revolution and asking the masses to rise up
and expose the dark side of the officialdom, which were two very different
positions and approaches from the one designed by Deng Xiaoping.
At almost every juncture in history, Qi Benyu stood
in opposition to the dark side of the officialdom, and this was also the case
during the period of academic criticism between 1963 and 1965. In the
interview, Qi also pointed out that many of Yao Wenyuan's articles were written
"in deference to the orders of his superiors", typical of "literature
in compliance with orders", and that Yao Wenyuan had no responsibility to
be held politically accountable later on, but was merely the executor; Qi said
that he had done the opposite. The initial articles were written because he
felt he had something to say, so he should be held responsible for them.
After more than a decade of
reading under Mao's tutelage, Qi Benyu began the process of independent
thinking and expressing his thoughts through writing in 1963, initially
challenging the poor academic style of the historical community that fabricated
conclusions out of historical facts and materials, most typically Luo Ergang
and others who ignored the historical facts in “A Review of Li Xiucheng's
Autobiography”
and fabricated the so-called "pseudo-surrender theory" to
inappropriately exalt his performance after his capture. As a result, after the
publication of this article, Zhou Yang, the deputy minister of the Central
Propaganda Department, organized a large number of authorities to besiege Qi
Benyu, and used political power to protect the bad style of study in the
academic research field. Due to the timely intervention of Teacher Mao, this
siege was lifted and in the end, nothing happened. Teacher Mao later concluded
that "the Central Propaganda Department is the Palace of the King of
Hades," and Zhou Yang's poor performance should be one of the bases for
making judgments.
After Qi Lao criticized the poor
style of study in history, due to the intervention of the Chairman, all the authorities
refused to discuss it on equal terms after their loss of absolute superiority.
Therefore, the criticism of style of study had to come to an end and could not
go on. He also inadvertently shifted the battlefield, beginning in 1964-1965
with a strong dissatisfaction with the historical and methodological views of
the historical community, typified by his criticism of Jian Bozan. When Qi said
why he had written his criticism of Jian Bozan, he said that he had taken a
break during the Four Clean-ups period
in the countryside, when he had a severe bronchial problem and coughed up blood.
After he left work, he had ample time to read, first of all, historical papers
according to his own interests. Qi said that for a long time he had only been
reading books on historical theory and was unaware of the current state of
historical research. When he concentrated on reading papers from the historical
community, Qi said he was extremely shocked that many people in the academic
community had become quite rampant and blatantly opposed to Marxism and Mao
Zedong Thought, talking openly and in a light tone about class struggle and
historical materialism. In this way, he dragged himself through his illness
while reviewing materials and writing critical papers. As he had previously written
a paper criticising Luo Erzang, he was subjected to a collective siege by the
authorities of Zhou Yang's organisation (this organised siege died in an
"attempted" state due to Mao's personal intervention in the
discussion), so this time he was a little more cautious. The people who
criticised the bureaucrats were under siege by the official organisation, so
they had to be as cautious as possible and erase the critical edge of the
article beforehand.
When Zhou Yang organised the
siege by the authorities, he had sent the request report to the Premier for
approval beforehand. Qi Lao talked about how the attempted siege had little
impact on him personally: he was completely unaware of the initial stage of the
siege planning, and soon after he knew about it, Teacher Mao intervened and he
became the superior party instead; as a result his follow-up article came out
and Luo Ergang and others completely ignored it. Qi even lamented that he was
really interested in historical issues and tried to clarify some of them
through debates. But those authorities are different, either they speak with
absolute superiority and suppress you - as long as there is a slight disadvantage
they don't say a word, so that you can't find an opponent even if you want to
debate. Qi Lao also said that he admired the Premier's character, and that
while Zhou Yang, the party in question, did not say a word of self-criticism,
the Premier was completely different. In late April 1966 at the Jinjiang Hotel
in Shanghai, the Premier made a point of taking responsibility for the incident
and apologized to him in person. Many years later, Qi Lao still recalled with
great emotion how he felt at that time. A big person like the Premier still
remembered such a small matter a few years later and apologised to a young man;
in contrast, many big people in the officialdom, who had done a lot of illegal
and even criminal deeds, not only engaged in pushing up and pushing down in
order not to take personal responsibility, but also went to the extent of
systematically falsifying the history of the Party for this purpose.
Second, Mao Zedong's original design of
the Cultural Revolution - to support young people to rise up and seize
ideological leadership
It is often easy to acknowledge
and see the immeasurable importance of good teachers to the development of
their students. But the counter-effect of good students on their teachers is
equally powerful, something that is often easy to overlook. In retrospect,
fifty years after the Cultural Revolution, I am afraid that Mao Zedong over-optimistically
devised a 'low-cost revolutionary programme' to support small capital in
criticising big capital during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution. His
over-optimism of the "good students" and the resulting unreasonably
high expectations may have played a significant role. (See note 23 for the sense in which "capital" is being used here and elsewhere -Trans.)
Today, fifty years after the
Cultural Revolution, one cannot look back on Mao's original design for the
Cultural Revolution without admitting that it was partly out of the regard for,
and expectations of, his own students that he came up with his original design
for the Cultural Revolution. It was because Mao saw that "over the years,
the youth had made progress, it was some of the old professors who could not do
anything about it." Therefore, the original design of the Cultural
Revolution by Teacher Mao was to support the youth to rise up and criticise the
old professors who had no way out, and to try to use this to build socialist
ideological leadership. If Teacher Mao’s design had been implemented, it is
clear that the Cultural Revolution would have been an extremely low-cost
revolution - one that would have ensured the formation of a new leadership in
the ideological sphere without causing major social upheaval. However, such a
low-cost revolution model was of little interest, especially to the
officialdom, and academic authorities usually chose to reject academic debate
on an equal footing, so the design ran up against academic authorities in the
first place.
From 1949
onwards, the academic world, especially the historical world, has been lively
with debate and has produced the so-called 'five golden flowers' - the five
most popular fields of study. But such a lot of academic buzz was filtered out,
and in the middle of a talk, Mao only affirmed a mere three young people and
their critical writings. Reading these three essays over and over again (see
the extracts in the Appendix for the main content of the three essays), while
comparing them with the political practice of the Cultural Revolution, one can
see that the three young people's critical essays all point directly at the
unprincipled over-affirmation of the ruling class and its ability and
willingness to mediate social contradictions, and on the contrary deny the
historical and political subjectivity of the people. The policy of concessions
criticised by Sun Daren,
Qi Benyu's criticism of Jian Bozan's historicism, and Yao Wenyuan's attack on
Wu Han's play on Hai Rui all came together on the question of how to view the
historical (political) subjectivity of the people. Breaking the monopoly of
power by the powers-that-be and establishing the political subjectivity of the
people - especially the right to organise and criticise - was the joint point
issue in the political practice of the Cultural Revolution. Historical
experience and realpolitik were thus concretely twisted together.
On December 21, 1965. talking with Chen Boda, Hu Jie, Tian
Jiaying, Ai Siqi and Guan Feng on the issue of writing prefaces to classic
Marxist works, Mao Zedong said: “After the Peasant War, the landowning class
had only counter-attacked and there was no policy of concessions! The Secret
History of the Qing Palace was described by some as patriotic, but I see it as
a sell-out, a complete sell-out. Qi Benyu's article was very good, I read it
three times, the drawback was that it did not name names. Yao Wenyuan's article
was also very good, naming names, and it shook the theatre, history and
philosophy communities to their core, but it did not hit the nail on the head.
The main point is the 'removal of officials'. The Emperor Jiajing was only Hai
Rui's official, and in 59 years we were only Peng Dehuai's official, and Peng
Dehuai was also 'Hai Rui'." (The Chronicle of Mao Zedong, Volume 5)
According to Qi, Guan Feng once conveyed the Chairman's talk to him, and he was
incredulous at the time. Even if the Chairman was praising and encouraging
young people to speak, he would not have to read an article three times.
This excerpt is from official documents, so it is
incomplete and omits many key elements that prevent the reader from grasping
how an opinion is derived from the material. According to documents revealed during
the Cultural Revolution, there were other important aspects of this
conversation: "Some intellectuals, such as Wu Han and Jian Bozan, were
becoming increasingly unhelpful. Now there was Sun Daren, who wrote against
Jian Bozan's so-called 'concessionary policy' of the feudal landowning class
towards the peasants. After the Peasant War, the landowning class only
counter-attacked, how could they make any concessions? The landowning class
just did not make any concessions to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom." "Nowadays,
philosophers can't engage in philosophy, literary scholars can't write novels,
and historians can't engage in history; if they want to, they are emperors and
generals. Qi Benyu's article (referring to "The Study of History for the
Revolution") is well written, but the drawback is that it does not name
names. Yao Wenyuan's article (referring to "Review of the New Historical
Drama <Hai Rui Dismissed from Office>") has the advantage of naming
names, but it does not hit the nail on the head." "Young people are
prone to metaphysics and cannot speak of shortcomings. It's good to have some
experience. Over the years, the youth have made progress, it is some old
professors who have not been able to do anything about it. It is better for Wu
Han to go down and become a prefect than to be the mayor. It is also good for
Yang Xianzhen and Zhang Wentian to go down. This is how to really help
them." (1968 Chinese edition of Long Live Mao Zedong Thought, vol. 61-68,
pp. 246-248) There is something in the middle of this paragraph of Mao's that
is contrary to common sense; the statement that old professors have little hope
for academic and political progress and that the only hope was for young
people, a statement against common sense, which needs to be developed and
carefully dissected.
The average person, as a reader, is more likely to
trust the authority of authoritative professors and their research, and less
likely to pay attention to young scholars of lesser repute. Almost every
student who enters a university classroom is taught to pay more attention to
the top authorities in their field of expertise in the course of their studies
and research, and that the first solid step in writing a good paper is to grasp
the research and conclusions of the top authorities in the field before adding
new empirical facts that they have discovered and then to propose corrections
to the authorities' claims. This is in fact the most popular "academic
increment" in academic circles - any scholar's research has and can only
be recognized and cited in the circle if it is based on the "existing
academic stock" and then revised and advanced to produce a "new
increment" based on new facts. It is only when a scholar's research has
been revised and advanced to produce a 'new increment' based on new facts that
it can be acknowledged and cited within the circle. Generally speaking, the
so-called "academic stock" in Chinese academia mostly refers to the
theoretical and academic accumulation from Western academia. This method of
academic incremental research, as far as the current implementation is
concerned, requires that Chinese academic research be linked to the West. On
the basis of academic accumulation, it is very close to the various situations
revealed by "Orientalism", which is a colonial orientation in the
field of ideological research.
Teacher Mao's view is fundamentally different from
people's common sense and rules, and he is certainly dealing with very
different issues. Ordinary people who are concerned with history and learning
are trying to learn about the academic stock in the field of historical
knowledge production, and even if they are engaged in professional research,
they need to follow the groundwork on which to move forward. With the goal of
generating a new ideological leadership through a process of historical and
academic debate, Teacher Mao found two important things to be true: firstly,
the old professors with authoritative positions were largely unhelpful in
achieving this goal, and secondly, only young people could be counted on.
Let us see in detail how Mao criticised old
professors and rewarded young people (Mao's relevant ideas have been censored
so much in the official literature that it is impossible to get a full picture;
the following texts are quoted from the 1968 Wuhan edition of Long Live Mao
Zedong Thought, vols. 61-68; the Arabic numbers at the end of the paragraphs
are the page numbers in the book.):
Someone
called Sun Daren has written an article refuting Jian Bozan’s idea of the
feudal landlord class adopting a policy of concessions towards the peasants.
After peasant wars the landlord class would only counterattack and seek
revenge; there was never any question of concessions. The landlord class made
no concessions to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The Boxers first said: “Oppose
the Qing and eliminate the foreigners,” and later, “Support the Qing and
eliminate the foreigners,” thus gaining support of the Empress Dowager Cixi.
After the Qing dynasty had suffered defeat at the hands of imperialism the
Dowager Empress and the Emperor ran away, and Cixi started to “support the
foreigners and eliminate the Boxers”. Some people say that the Inside Story
of the Qing Court is patriotic, but I think it is treasonable – out-and-out
treason. Why is it that some say it is patriotic? Merely because they think
that the Guanxu Emperor was a pitiable man who, together with Kang Youwei,
opened a few schools, formed the New Armies and put into effect a few
enlightened measures. 246
If you study a little modern history you will see
that there was no such thing as a "policy of concession". The only
concessions were made by the revolutionary forces to the reactionaries. The
reactionaries always counter-attacked and sought revenge. Whenever a new
dynasty emerged in history, they adopted a policy of "decreased labor
service and taxation". This was because the people were very poor and
there was nothing to take from them. This policy was of advantage to the landlord
class. 247
Not to reform arts faculties would be terrible. If
they are not reformed, can they produce philosophers? Can they produce writers?
Can they produce historians? Today’s philosophers can't turn out philosophy,
writers can't write novels, and historians can't produce history. All they want
to write about is emperor, kings, generals and ministers. Qi Benyu's article
(referring to "Study History for the Sake of the Revolution") is excellent,
I read it three times. Its defect is that it does not name names. Yao Wenyuan's
essay (referring to his review of the new historical drama "Hai Rui Dismissed
from Office") is also very good:…its defect is that it did not hit the
crux of the matter. 247
Our comrades likewise have dual nature, correct and
incorrect. Don't you have a dual nature? I know I have. Young people easily
make the mistake of being metaphysical: they cannot bear to talk about their
shortcomings. People improve with experience. In recent years, however, it is
the young who have made progress; the hopeless cases are some of the old
professors. Wu Han is mayor of a city. It would be better if he were demoted to
being head of a county. It would be better if Yang Xianzhen and Zhang Wentian were
demoted too. That is the only way we can really help them. 248
Mao Zedong: Speech at the Hangzhou Conference
(December 21, 1965)
Now there is to be a revolution. A few people
should be protected, such as Guo Lao and Fan Lao, and the others should not be
protected. Launch young people to challenge them by name. They stir up the
struggle first. We struggle in the newspapers.
From now on, we should do a bit of criticising
of the work done in each 5 or 10-year periods, discuss the pros and cons, and
train successors. Otherwise, everything will fall into their hands… Old Fan is
very fond of emperors, kings, generals and prime ministers. People like him,
including persons of the emperor-king school are very fond of emperors, kings,
generals and prime ministers and they opposed the 1958 method of studying
history. When criticising, one must not shoot off blank cannons, one must study
historical data. This is a serious class struggle. Otherwise, revisionism shall
emerge. It is this group of people who will be the ones to come up with
revisionism in the future. For example, Wu Han and Jian Bozan were all opposed
to Marxism-Leninism. They were members of the Communist Party; Communist Party
members who nevertheless opposed the Communist Party and opposed materialism. 255
The young people’s articles must not be suppressed,
regardless of whether they contain good things or bad things. For Wu Han and Jian Bozan, don't deprive them
of the right to eat, what does it matter. Don't be afraid of provoking people
like Luo Erzang and Jian Bozan.255
Don’t suppress the young, let them come on out. Qi
Benyu criticized Luo Gang, Qi is a staff member of the Office of Letters and
Visits of the Central Office, Luo is a professor. Whether it is good or bad,
don’t suppress it... Who is the authority now? It's Yao Wenyuan, Qi Benyu,
Yan Da. Who melts who, is not yet resolved. We don’t want these people to take
over. The young, those who are less
learned, have a firm stand, who are politically experience and determined
people should take over. 256
If Qi Benyu and others want independence, want to
be independent of wrong things, you, the Minister for Propaganda, should not
suppress them! The students want to rebel, and they should be allowed to do so.
The cultural revolution should be a mass movement and students should be allowed
to speak out…Wu Han and Jian Bozan relied on history for their bread and butter.
The students have read the history of the Ming, but Wu Han has not read it! 257
Mao Zedong: Speech at the Enlarged Meeting of
the Political Bureau of the Central Committee
(March 20, 1966)
Our policy of enlisting intellectuals after
liberation has had its advantages and disadvantages. Now it is the bourgeois
intellectuals who hold real power in the academic and educational circles. The
deeper the socialist revolution went, the more they resisted and the more their
anti-Party and anti-socialist face was revealed. People like Wu Han and Jian
Bozan were Communist Party members, but anti-communist, in fact they were Guomindang
people. There is still very little awareness of this problem in many places,
and academic criticism has not yet been carried out. Everywhere we must pay
attention to the people in whose hands the schools, newspapers, journals and
publishing houses are held, and we must carry out a practical critique of the
bourgeois academic authorities. We need to train our own young academic
authorities. Don't be afraid of young people breaking the "law of the land"
and don't suppress their manuscripts. The Central Propaganda Department should
not become a rural work department. 257-258
Speech (excerpt) at the enlarged meeting of the
Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee (March
17-20, 1966)
People who confiscate and suppress the manuscripts
of the leftists and protect the rightists are of the university clique. The
Central Ministry of Propaganda is the palace of the prince of Hell. It is
necessary to overthrow the palace of the prince of Hell and liberate the Little
Devil. I have always advocated that whenever the central organs do something
wrong, it is necessary to call upon the local authorities to rebel and attack
the central government. The local areas must produce several more Sun Wukongs to vigorously create a
disturbance at the palace of the king of heaven… To protect the left, we should
cultivate the left in the Cultural Revolution. 258
Mao Zedong: Summary of Conversations with
Comrade Kang Sheng and others (March 28-30, 1966)
As a matter of fact, those party people in
authority taking the capitalist road who support the bourgeois scholar-tyrants,
and those bourgeois representatives who have sneaked into the party and protect
the bourgeois scholar-tyrants, are indeed big party tyrants who have usurped
the name of the party, have no contact with the masses, have no learning at
all, and rely solely on “acting arbitrarily and trying to overwhelm people with
their power.” 260
Hold high the great banner of the proletarian Cultural
Revolution, thoroughly expose the bourgeois reactionary stand of those
so-called "academic authorities" who oppose the party and socialism,
thoroughly criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the
sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art, and
publishing, and seize the leadership in these cultural spheres. To achieve this,
it is necessary at the same time to criticize and repudiate those representatives
of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army
and all spheres of culture, to clear them out or transfer some of them to other
positions. Above all, we must not entrust these people with the work of leading
the Cultural Revolution. In fact many of them have done and are still doing such
work, and this is extremely dangerous. 260-261
Mao Zedong: May 16th Notice for the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) A few words added to the
16" notice (16 May 1966)
It should be said that it was the
historical scholarly critical writings of Qi Benyu and Yao Wenyuan, among
others, that gave Mao great confidence that they could be used to establish a
new ideological leadership that would contribute to the needed political
understanding through the advancement of historical research and thus
contribute to political improvement under socialist conditions.
Third, "History as a political
research method" in the light of the changes in the field of historical
research after the Cultural Revolution
After 1949, Marxist historiography, which had been
established during the Nationalist era, had now entered the pantheon and become
the overarching interpretive framework. Those who had contributed to the
formation of this interpretive framework were now absolute authorities, and difficult
to challenge. According to popular belief, these top authorities are
collectively known as the 'Five Old Men of Marxism-Leninism' - Guo Moruo, Fan
Wenlan, Lu Zhenyu, Jian Bozan and Hou Weilu. In this way, Mao-era historiography presents
two contrasting phenomena: the imperial history in terms of data collection and
research methods, and the 'five-stage view of history' in terms of
interpretation methods. To borrow from Braudel, the former is a
short-term history of events, the latter is disguised as a long period of
structural history. The more serious problem is: an uncontrolled inflation of
event history to swallow up long time periods. The devouring of the long period
by the short period is concretely expressed in Jian Bozan and Wu Han as the
search for the 'positive results of the class struggle' in specific members of
the ruling class, for which Wu Han describes the Qing officials as the decisive
subject, and Jian Bozan more generally proposes a 'policy of concessions
".
The formation of overwhelming authority and its
hegemony in the academic arena has a significant negative effect, even from a
purely academic point of view. The French scholar Bourdieu saw the academic field as
a field of competition, where the entrance of each individual and the
competitive strategy he adopted depended on his own stock of capital, and
where, in general, it was usually the large capital that had the monopoly and
tended to break the rules and conventions, which in academic terms manifested
itself in a reckless and arbitrary approach to the relationship between
material and conclusion, without respecting the rules of logical reasoning. When
small capital entered, it had to rely on improving the quality of its products
to compete with large capital for scarce discourse. Wu Han's arbitrary
exaltation of Hai Rui and Jian Bozan's arbitrary denial of the peasant wars
were both manifestations of an inherent causal relationship with big capital
and monopoly status. In Mao-era China, this monopoly of big capital came partly
from the fruits of its own efforts - the academic status it had established in
the past - and partly from the unprincipled support of powerful figures, as
Teacher Mao later loudly put it, "Down with the King of Hell, liberate the
Little Devil! ", referring to the power behind big capital and its
unprincipled support for academic monopoly status. Qi Benyu criticized
Luo Ergang for ignoring the facts and insisting on Li Xiucheng’s
“pseudo-submission theory”. Luo Ergang’s method of managing history reflects
the arbitrariness of ignoring key historical data in the evaluation of
historical figures. This criticism is well-documented, but it has been roundly
attacked by the authorities of the Ministry of Propaganda which organized a
group of authorities to besiege Qi Benyu, which very specifically revealed the
power factor behind the monopoly status of big capital.
Qi Lao said, Zhou Yang had organised a large number of people
to besiege me, and I did not even know about it at first, so I did not feel any
psychological pressure at all. As a result, when the Chairman found out about
it, he deliberately accessed the photocopy of "Li Xiucheng's autobiography"
published overseas, and finally wrote a sixteen-word endorsement: "
It is written in black and white, there is irrefutable evidence, loyalty to the
king is unfinished, it’s not fit to be a model." After these people saw
the criticism, they even blocked it from me, and I had never seen the original
copy of the Chairman's criticism. Later, it was Deng Liqun, who also worked for
the Red Flag magazine, who told me that it was not the question of loyalty, but
of its still continuing, and only then did I know exactly what the sixteen-word
comment on the report was.
To borrow Bourdieu's terminology, Teacher Mao
apparently concludes that academic progress is achieved through the challenge
and subversion of big capital by small capital over and over again, a
conclusion that seems very close to American history of science professor
Kuhn's 'paradigm shift theory'. In this way, it is more
effective to support the growth of small capital than to preserve the monopoly
of big capital in terms of academic progress, and let us see what Teacher Mao
had to say about this.
"Don’t suppress the young, let them come on out.,
" Mao Zedong said in the middle of an interjection at the Hangzhou
conference on March 20, 1965. “The young, those who are less learned, have a
firm stand, who are politically experience and determined people should take
over. " At an enlarged meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo
in Hangzhou on 16 April 1966, Mao said, "I don't believe it's just Wu
Han’s problem. This is a struggle that touches the soul, is ideological, and
touches a wide range of people in the government." (P1407). On June 10,
1966, Mao Zedong called the heads of the region to Hangzhou, saying, "We
must build up the core of leftist leaders in the movement so that these people
will hold the leadership. Don't discuss any qualifications, rank or prestige,
otherwise we still won't be able to occupy this cultural position. A group of
activists have emerged from the past struggles, and a group of activists have
emerged in this movement; rely on these people to carry the cultural revolution
to the end." (Wang Renzhong's diary, 11 June 1966) [P1417 in Mao Zedong's
biography]. For more than a year, Teacher Mao had been thinking about how
to support young people so that these people could complete the Cultural Revolution’s
aim of “promoting proletarian thought and destroying bourgeois thought”, and he
personally devised the method of cultural revolution to support small capital
and criticise big capital, and therefore, repeatedly notified authorities at
all levels and all localities of this.
Deng Xiaoping seems to have had a fundamentally
different view, believing that small capital was a disproportionate threat to
big capital, and according to Deng, Bourdieu's summary of the competitive
strategy of the academic world was also utterly wrong. At that time, the small
capital could bully the big capital at will and as a result, the big capital
was at a loss as to what to do. According to the recollections of those who
were there, Deng Xiaoping's speech at this meeting of the Central Secretariat on
March 3, 1965, under the chairmanship of Deng Xiaoping, ......, not only talked
about the deviations of the social and educational movement at Peking
University, but also about the tension caused by the overwhelming struggle in
the academic and cultural circles at that time. He said: Now people are afraid
to write articles, afraid to write plays, and afraid to publish books. Only
soldiers are being played on the stage, only battles are being performed. How
can a film be so perfect? This is not allowed to be played, that is not allowed
to be played. Those 'revolutionaries' grabbed people by the scruff of the neck,
trying to make a name for themselves by criticising others and stepping on
their shoulders to get on stage. He proposed to put the brakes on it quickly.
It was also stipulated in the minutes of the Registry meeting that 'the Four Clean-ups
should stay with teaching',
'academic criticism should stay with the flourishing academic research and
literary creation circles', 'one cannot demand that plays and works be perfect
' and 'future criticism of well-known figures must first be reported to the
central government for approval'." [Gong Yuzhi, 'The February Outline' and
a trip to the East Lake, in Centennial Tide, No. 4, 1998]. Whether or not there
is any basis for Deng Xiaoping's claims, it is this calibre of material and its
conclusions that are woven into the history of the Party and State today. If
Deng Xiaoping's claim is credible, it is clear that it essentially relies on
the fact that the Central Propaganda Department and others only supported small
capital, not the monopoly position of big capital, an aspect for which the
minimum evidence is currently lacking.
The debate in historiography on the eve of the Cultural
Revolution and the problems it involved were not only a problem for Chinese
academics, but also for the West. In 1958 the French scholar Braudel formally
introduced the concept of the long period, underestimating the traditional
short period and event history approach beyond measure: “An event may have many
concomitant meanings, it sometimes serves as a witness to some profound
movement, and by all sorts of far-fetched causal reasoning - -Historians of the
past have been happy to subsume long periods of time outside themselves. It can
be prolonged indefinitely, freely or reluctantly linked to a series of other
events or hidden realities that can never be separated again. ...... In fact,
the historiography of the last hundred years, with the exception of
artificially disconnected histories and isolated long-duration interpretations,
has been almost exclusively a political history centred on 'major events'. The
content and object of historical research has been short periods of time, which
is perhaps the ransom paid by scientists in the last hundred years for further
mastery of the necessary research tools and rigorous research methods." [(French)
Fernand Braudel, "History and Social Science: The Long Time", edited
by Cai Shaoqing, "Recreating the Past: A Theoretical Vision of Social History",
Zhejiang People's Publishing House 1988, pp. 51-52] Braudel is very subtle, he
does not say outright that the historical research of the last hundred years is
all nonsense, but that nonsense still serves some purpose, equivalent to "
ransom" or "tuition fees".
In Mao's time, China had limited academic exchanges with
overseas, and was unable to keep abreast of the rise of the French Annales school and its criticism and disparagement of "event history" and
"political history". In the context of the debates in the historical
community on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, it is clear that the three
young people praised by Mao were downward-looking in their approach to history,
focusing on the subjectivity of the people at the bottom, opposing the overemphasis
on the emperor and the ruling class, and rejecting frivolous and arbitrary
interpretations of structures by the event and political history method, which
is precisely the approach and direction that some of the older professors were
happy to uphold. In the history of events and political history, historiography
is often permeated with the subjective preferences of individual scholars and
therefore full of arbitrariness when making interpretations, due to the
distancing between the framework and the materials and the failure to reveal
deep social structures. Jian Bozan's arbitrary interpretation of the
consequences of the Peasants' War and Wu Han's arbitrary exaltation of Hai Rui
in isolation from the material and historical reality are, in addition to
personal subjective reasons, objectively flawed in their methodology. Mao's
criticism of Jian Bozan and Wu Han for working only with emperors and generals
refers to material concerns, but these men 'crudely' linked the material of
emperors and generals to the interpretive framework of the 'five-stage view of
history', drawing on the ideas of Bordieur, the giant of the French Annales
school The problem with the historiographical approach of these two men was
that they used short periods of event history material to force an analogy and
interpretation to the structural framework of the Five Stages theory, which is
typical of far-fetched cause and effect reasoning. In addition to academic
hegemony and its corrupting monopolistic character, the unprincipled official
support for the authorities worsens the bad academic culture, which is often
prone to interpretational arbitrariness by swallowing up long-time structures
with short-time events, and it is precisely because of the flaws in the method
of governance that these critics often find it difficult to defend themselves
convincingly and, as a result, promote an opportunistic choice: academic
authorities refuse to speak after losing their absolute superiority. As a
result of this, it was interpreted as a stubborn political stance that refused
to listen to criticism.
Having despised short time periods and event histories, Braudel
himself recommends the long time period approach to explaining the power of
deep structure, "The long time period is the most useful channel for
social science to engage in observation and reflection together throughout the
long river of time. (75)" To do this, the deep structure of society needs
to be revealed and "'structure' ...... is at the forefront of the long
time problem. In examining social issues, 'structure' refers to an organic,
tight and fairly fixed relationship that develops between reality and the
masses in society. For us historians, structures are undoubtedly architectural
elements, but even more so, they are very durable realities. There are
structures that, by virtue of their longevity, become constant factors that are
passed on from generation to generation, unbroken: they hinder or shape the
progress of history." "Admitting long periods of time to the study of
history is not playing around. It is not simply a matter of expanding the scope
of research and interest, nor is it an option that is merely beneficial to the
study of history. For historians, embracing long periods of time means changing
styles, positions and ways of thinking to understand society with a new
perspective. The time they have to become familiar with is a time that passes
slowly, sometimes close to stillness. At this level - and no other - it becomes
legitimate to move away from strict historical time and to enter and exit
through the gates of historical time with new eyes and with new questions. In
short, with the historical level, the historian can accordingly rethink the
historical totality. Starting from this half-static deep layer, the thousands
of layers created by the fracturing of historical time can easily be
understood: everything is transferred from the semi-static deep layer." [(French)
Fernand Braudel: "History and Social Science: The Long Time","
Cai Shaoqing, "Recreating the Past: A Theoretical Vision of Social
History", Zhejiang People's Publishing House, 1988, pages 54 and 57].
To reveal the deep structure of history involves the
question of the subjectivity of the people, and there is great difficulty in
presenting such a history, says Bordieur: "Each of us is aware that there
is a history of the masses outside his own life, and is apt to admit that the
masses have a powerful driving force on history, but is not easy to see the
direction or the laws of that force. " (ibid., 63)
The dominance of event and political history in
Mao-era history, and its simple submersion in structural revelation, was indeed
a major flaw. At the same time, the monopoly of big capital in academic field
has largely worsened the style of scholarship, with some of the most powerful
voices in the field often breaking free from the rule that "the material
should explain the conclusion" and interpreting historical events and
figures at will, even to the extent of "playing with historiography".
In this respect, the performance of some authorities is not much different from
that of today's entertainment directors, who must add the element of beauty to
their films in order to attract audiences, with Jian Bozan touting Wang Zhaojun and Guo Moruo pushing for
Cai Wenji
in an unrestrained manner, out of touch with historical reality. This
extreme lack of academic rigour was, to a large extent, inseparable from the
monopoly position of big capital has that ‘no-one dares harm me’. The poem 'The
Tomb of Zhaojun' by Jian Bozan reads: 'The great map of the Han Dynasty is
written in the pages of history, and the Great Wall is covered with smoke and
wind for ten thousand miles.’ How can you make a good pipa, when the sound of
arrows has been silent for fifty years?
According to Lao Tian, Hu Hanxie went south to the Han Dynasty because
of the Huns’ civil strife, and for this reason there was an urgent necessity to
form a prosperous Han Dynasty. It was not because the peace policy was very
successful. The historical understanding promoted in this poem has indeed
reached the point of "frivolity".
How to view political subjectivity, which is closely linked
to the historical subjectivity of the people, is a theme that runs through the
decade of the Cultural Revolution. At the Lushan Conference in 1970, Lin Biao's
group and his followers used "Mao's genius" as evidence to deny it,
and in refuting this delusion, Mao distinctly put forward the stark contrast
between "whether heroes make history or slaves make history". After
Deng Xiaoping took power, in 1979 some officials in the historical field began
to explicitly "stand up" for the Lin Biao clique, and the famous Mr.
Li Wei wrote several articles on "On the Creation of History and
Others" (Li Wei's anthology of essays contains four more on the same
topic), rejecting Mao's views and partially reviving those of the Lin Biao
group.
According to Wang Ruoshui,
the effect of Li Wei's essays was so good that "after these essays by Li Wei,
although there may still be differences of opinion on the subject, that old
proposition that 'the people are the creators of history' or 'the people are
the masters of history ' can no longer have a market. This is a credit to Li
Wei." [Wang
Rushui: Materialist View of History and the Creation of History, Li Wei
Memorial Collection Editorial Group, "Li Wei Ten-Year Festival" China
Social Science Press, 1998, p. 193].
In France, the concept of the long period and the
idea of combining historical research with the social sciences, promoted by Bordieur
and others, gradually became mainstream by the late 1970s. [‘The concept of the
"long period", which in the 1950s was only a predictive formulation,
has today (1978) achieved a full victory, but at the same time has become
mundane and is often opposed.’ Michel Vovelle: Historiography and
the Long Time, above, p. 132] In China, on the contrary, with the complete
repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, the structural tendency to repudiate
historiography, supported by Li Wei and others in power, nevertheless
prevailed, and Chinese historiography moved against the historical tide,
backwards towards the history of events and political history, and
incidentally, even the relatively empty framework of structural historiography
that existed before the Cultural Revolution gradually disintegrated, and
historiography research became completely fragmented.
Because in order to deny that the people make history, it is
necessary to establish the narrative of the creation of history by heroes or
elites, for quite some time, many people in history circles have focused on the
study of "civil society", which is equivalent to establishing the conclusion
that "capitalists create history". In contrast to the reality of
modern Chinese history, this academic effort encountered insurmountable
obstacles. Starting from the Westernization Movement in the second half of the
19th century, the achievements of capitalism in China were extremely limited.
By 1949, the total accumulation of industrial capital was only 12 billion yuan.
After the Communist Party rejected the landlords, rich peasants and
capitalists, the number of newly formed fixed assets during the First Five-Year
Plan alone was more than four times this number.
Thus, in order to establish the idea that capitalists make
history, it is necessary to thoroughly "blacken the Communist Party",
and even if the figures of capital accumulation under the Communist regime are
large, there will certainly be an excessive moral price to pay - for example,
by saying that the Communist Party deprives the peasants and engages in a
scissors policy, that the Communist Party is a fascist, etc. In short, the
theme of elite history-making is difficult to establish without taking the
blackening of the Communist Party through to the end. While this effort has
encountered major academic difficulties, it has had no small success in
political propaganda, with CCTV, the high-profile media outlet under the
Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department, strongly supporting
"Towards the Republic",
and denying the role of all revolutions, including the Communist revolution, in
advancing history.
In the debate in this field of
historical research, there is another unspoken methodological issue: history as
politics and political science as history. In China today, many people advocate
so-called "top-level design" and "governance mechanism"
studies, methodologies that had no place in Mao's time, not so much because of
the insistence on the mass line in Mao's time, but because of the
methodological rejection of the possibility of "norms divorced from
process" (Mannheim's phrase), and the rejection of any
system designed out of thin air. It is in this sense that history, as a
method, has never been more instructive for political improvement, as it seeks
to observe the relations of interest between the various classes and groups
interacting in society and the ways in which they interact with each other. It looks
for new possibilities in the process of interaction between groups. In this
sense, as a method of history, its guiding role for political improvement has
never been higher. The American scholar Wallerstein
recognises only one social science - the historical social science - and Marx
and Engels have spoken on various occasions about the uniqueness of the
historical science, which is in fact a methodological vision: politics must be
discussed on the empirical basis of social and historical processes, the
process of social evolution, to borrow Bordieur's terminology. The role and
relevance of the various structural elements in the middle of the process of
social evolution need to be presented in a factual way. The attempt to
establish the idea of the capitalists creating history at the expense of the
"black communists" in the study of modern Chinese history today is
precisely an attempt to omit the most important structural elements in the historical evolution process for the study of the history of
events, with the aim of trying to arrive at the "middle period" - the
historical and political legitimacy of the emergence of new social classes - and
even the long period.
The Cultural Revolution originated from criticism
in the historical field. It was not accidental. It was a methodological
reiteration. It is in this field of critical examination that the old authority
and its shortcomings and limitations were particularly serious. The position of
academic authority strengthened by the ruling position of the Communist Party
had worsened the political sense and direction of historical research. In
order to protect Wu Han, Peng Zhen went so far as to drag the Ministry of Propaganda
into issuing a separate policy for this purpose, which went beyond an error of public
power like using the legitimacy of the regime to reinforce the status of
academic authority, and was a typical manifestation of "public power
legislating for private needs". Peng Zhen, in order to 'protect Wu Han to
the death' (Mao's words), even devised the 'February Outline', which was a ‘melee’
and a 'leftist rectification', which is evidence of the fact that academic and
political degeneration are mutually reinforcing, and a most pernicious
manifestation of it.
Peng Zhen himself and his poor performance were not
the problem. As Mao Zedong said "Peng Zhen is a tiny figure who has wormed
his way into the Party, nothing more, and just one finger will push him
down." The problem was that Peng Zhen's performance represented a constant
orientation of power combined with academia and academia serving the needs of
power, based on the performance in the field of historical research - the main
tendency both before and after the Cultural Revolution was to deny the
historical and political subjectivity of the people and to elevate the
historical subjectivity of the ruling class in an unprincipled manner, in
isolation from historical sources, according to Mao Zedong's s statement
"This is the law of class struggle, which does not depend on the will of
the people." (Long Live Mao Zedong Thought, vol. 61-68, p259) This needs
to be taken seriously.
Why revolution and history are timeless
The real evolution of society constitutes true
history, and the recording and interpretation of this evolution becomes
historiography, which, in addition to being oriented towards the past, also needs
to assume responsibility for the future, where one needs to develop a
theoretical understanding based on historical experience to guide interventions
in future evolution.
After the introduction of Western scholarship into
China in the early twentieth century, the study of Chinese history was largely
integrated into an academic framework of interpretation based on Western
historical materials, a limitation or general trend that has remained unchanged
to this day. Professor Zhang Kaiyuan, who later turned to the study of civil
society, described the differences in understanding and debates in the field of
Chinese historical studies as nothing more than "Westerners fighting
Westerners ". Bordieur sees the study of the history of events since Ranke as 'the ransom paid by
scientists over the last hundred years for further mastery of the necessary
research tools and rigorous research methods', and for the field of Chinese
historiography, in addition to this problem, there is an urgent need for a theoretical
self-awareness that goes beyond Orientalism.
In terms of grasping historical materials, Teacher
Mao's diligence far exceeded that of most history professors. As recalled by Pang
Xianzhi, who managed the books for Teacher Mao, the two main official
historical materials, “Zizhi Tongjian” and the “Twenty-four Histories”, Teacher
Mao read the “Zizhi Tongjian” seventeen times and the Twenty-four Histories
more than once. So far, I have not heard
of any university history professor who is more diligent in reading history
books than Teacher Mao. Moreover, since the mainstream of historical studies in
Mao's time was a kind of event history under the guise of structural history,
with military and political weighting particularly heavy in short periods of history,
the vast majority of history professors were in essence not very knowledgeable
about politics and the military, which happened to be Teacher Mao’s area of
expertise as well. It was because of his familiarity with historical sources,
and his insight into misinterpretations of them, that Mao was able to easily
determine that Wu Han himself had not read the History of Ming, but that one of
his students had. In terms of material grasp and military-political knowledge,
the study of history in the Mao era was particularly unsatisfactory to Teacher
Mao himself, who had long been concerned with the so-called revolution in
history, to put it bluntly, because the reality of the situation was desperate.
Teacher Mao's comments about some old professors were, to be precise, not so
much disappointment as despair. It is precisely because of his despair for the
authoritative professors in the field of history that it is possible to
understand why Mao was so enthusiastic about the progress shown by young
people, and he praised Qi Benyu to such a degree that Qi himself found it
difficult to understand.
History and progress and real improvement in
politics require overcoming the resistance in existing social structures in
order to open up the way forward. The same is true of the cognitive process,
which is the view of a revolutionary and the proper meaning of the so-called
revolutionary line. What has happened to the post-1979 historical studies,
which have left behind the guiding ideology of the class struggle for the
argument that historical progress is driven by big figures and their actions,
and the process of historical rewriting that highlights capital and capital
accumulation as the driving force of historical progress in the study of modern
history?
The slogan "Farewell to Revolution" is a
real revolution in the way of thinking, which means that history does not need
to exclude structural resistance in order to move forward, and that the study
of history no longer needs to present the interplay of opposing and
contradictory social forces, so that the so-called progress or regression of
history will originate in the preferences and needs of the people, especially
the big shots. Such historical research and interpretation would be extremely
'free' - historical research concentrates on the big personalities and their
psychological activities, thus explaining historical processes and major
events, and historians are given a huge amount of paper power -the freedom to
define and evaluate the psychological states of historical figures, and the
considerable freedom to causally link them to the historical process to arrive
at any interpretation they like.
On the other hand, it happens to be absolutely true
that any attempt to envisage a low-cost revolution will not succeed. Before the
Cultural Revolution began, Teacher Mao devised a cultural revolution in support
of small capital to criticise big capital, with no effect. He supported Qi
Benyu, broke up the siege by the organising authorities of the Ministry of
Propaganda, and helped him to gain an equal opportunity to dialogue with the
old professors. He did not forget to warn Qi to take care to convince people
with reason - don't expect to change someone's lifelong views all at once, for
what would be the result? The old professors, having lost their dominant
position, refused to dialogue on an equal footing and were determined not to
speak, as was the case with both Luo Erzang and Jian Bozan, and Wu Han was no
exception. The dialogue on an equal footing between young people and old
authorities that Mao expected to advance the progress of understanding through
academic debate ended before the debate had even begun. Qi Lao said that he was
very naive at the time, and that he had searched carefully for historical
materials in preparation for a good debate with Luo Erzang and others, only to
have Luo and others either refuse to debate or assume a low profile and admit
their mistakes, and then not bother to speak. Qi described his feelings at the
time as "being at a loss for words" (Lu Xun's verse). It seems that
competition in the academic arena has strong similarities with competition in
the market economy, where large enterprises with monopoly status are most
concerned with their own monopoly status and monopoly profits, and have little
interest in technological progress. The same is true of competition in the
academic arena, where small-capital scholarship is more prescriptive than
larger capital, as Qi Benyu discovered back then, and as Meng Xiangcai, a
graduate student in the Department of History, recalls, Ning Ke (a teacher in
the History Department of the Beijing Normal University), who also advocated
historicism but lacked the status of large capital, was very different from
Jian Bozan: "Ning Ke's views were not all wrong, but he overemphasised
historicism. Jian Bozan speaks of historicism with insufficient theoretical
arguments; Ning's arguments for historicism are much more in-depth." (Meng
Xiangcai:
The Qi Benyu I know, in The Historian's Journal), tenth series, Shandong
People's Publishing House 2007).
Later, Teacher Mao personally led the drafting of the
"February Outline" to criticize Peng Zhen, dismissed the five-member
leading group of the Central Cultural Revolution, and issued the "May 16 Circular".
The secretaries of the provincial and municipal party committees in various
places became the implementers of this policy.
The result of the implementation was that Wang Guangmei’s “moving
stones”
and Liu Shaoqi’s appreciation of the “anti-rightist” experience became
mainstream: various lower-level officials hated by their superiors were
selected as targets for “moving stones”, or students who criticised the working
group on the basis of facts were branded as rightists, and these two models
became the mainstream of the movement. And at the central level, senior
officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yi, Bo Yibo and Li Xuefeng
all swarmed to actively embrace these two modes of movement that embodied
serious political alienation. As a result, the Cultural Revolution had to
undergo a second transformation, with Teacher Mao and Premier Zhou supporting
the Cultural Revolution Group to come out in support of the masses, allowing
them to organise themselves to criticise the political alienation created by
the combination of bad cadres in the officialdom and horseshit-style activists
in the civil society.
Up to this point, each of the groups involved in
the Cultural Revolution had their own petty agenda, the common denominator
being that they had "zero revolutionary potential" and had proved
themselves and the forces they chose to rely on incapable of making any
positive contribution to genuine political improvement. It was absolutely
necessary to find the critical power of the people and support it to grow. For
this reason, the “Sixteen Articles”, the guiding document of the Cultural
Revolution, was re-drafted, and the members of the Cultural Revolution team
became active executors who supervised the implementation of
policies—supporting the growth of the rebels, a critical force that originated
from the people
The forced transformation of the Cultural
Revolution meant that Mao's design for a low-cost revolution, in reality,
suffered its first setback. According to Mao, it is always the facts that come
first, and then the concepts. It is a general rule of understanding that the
maturation of theory lags far behind the process of accumulation of experience,
as often quoted by Hegel: Minerva's owl takes off in the dusk. The low-cost revolution devised by
Teacher Mao attempted to facilitate the advancement of awareness and the
establishment of a new type of ideological leadership, which in effect required
the owl of Minerva to take off in the early morning, and was difficult to
achieve in practice. Moreover, in the case of the political game process of the
Cultural Revolution, the analysis of the phenomenon by awareness also needed to
conform to the constraints and needs of the realpolitik game and could
not be summarised and expressed in terms of the depth achieved by awareness.
The Cultural Revolution group fully
supported the rise of the rebels and their criticism of the bourgeois
reactionary line, while the bourgeois reactionary line had an inherent
association with the ruling and conservative groups, which in turn strongly opposed
the rebels and the Cultural Revolution group. In this way, those two separate
groups that carried out the capitalist-reactionary line now turned into
hardcore anti-Cultural Revolution forces, whose resistance and joint suppression of the rebel faction largely characterised the basic face of the Cultural Revolution. By the summer of 1967, all sections and groups in the
country had become involved in "this serious exercise" and had chosen
to take sides and perform according to their instinctive needs and interests.
The Cultural Revolution, with its powerful opposition, was at an impasse and
there was no chance of a "leftward break", or rather, the social cost
of a hard leftward break would have been too high to bear. Thus, the option of
breaking to the right, dominated by the powerful forces of the anti-Cultural
Revolutionaries, moved forward step by step. Teacher Mao and Premier Zhou, for that matter, should have
had a clear understanding and more consciously dismissed the option of breaking
to the left. After Mao's return to Beijing at the end of September 1967, he was
asked in person why Wang Li and Guan Feng had
been isolated and censored, to which Mao replied: "The time has come when
heaven and earth are all working together, but the heroes are not free.” In the
course of the subsequent Cultural Revolution, the rebel factions were subjected
to harsh and prolonged repression, a self-confirmation of the fact that the
powers-that-be, together with the conservatives, had been given the opportunity
to break the game to the right.
From a factual and legal point of view, supporting the growth
and expansion of the rebel faction was not only not wrong, but also in line
with the basic duties of the Cultural Revolution groups since the
transformation of the Cultural Revolution. The problem lay in the political
aspect, as all classes and groups had been involved in the Cultural Revolution
manoeuvres, the overwhelming strength of the anti-Cultural Revolutionaries and
the extremely inadequate integration within the Cultural Revolutionaries had
determined that the possibility of breaking to the left was extremely small and
the cost of breaking to the left was too high. There was nothing inherently
wrong with "seizing a handful of people in the army", on a factual
and legal level, but this option did not have the corresponding conditions for
implementation. In the absence of other organised forces sufficient to maintain
a minimum of order, the military as the central guardian of order cannot be
shaken. To "seize a handful of people in the army" carried through to
the end means, in effect, to consolidate an extremely inadequate rebellious
core and to dismantle or even suppress the majority in power to achieve order,
an option with an unbearably high moral cost. Shanghai was exceptional in that
Wang Hongwen, under the leadership of the General Department of Labour, first
smoothly absorbed the conservative majority among the people, then quickly
achieved internal integration within the General Department of Labour, and also
used forceful means to break up the external opposition - the Shang Chai Union
Department and the Branch Union Station, creating a relatively unified
situation of mass power. Under
the political situation, most cadres could only rationally choose the
three-step policy of "review, emergence and union" and chose to
cooperate with the rebels, eventually having the prerequisites to break the
deadlock to the left - to restore order without having to suppress the regime
and the conservatives. Shanghai was the exception to the rule of the 'rebel
faction' during the decade of the Cultural Revolution.
The members of the Cultural Revolution Group were caught up
in a partial view of the issue of arresting a handful of people in the army, and
did not see the structural contrasts in the overall situation, so the choices
they made were extremely blind. From an administrative perspective, the
Cultural Revolution Group did not make a single mistake in continuing to
support the rebels, but from a political perspective, the mistakes of the members
of the Cultural Revolution Group were clear - they did not understand the
various implications of breaking left and right after the Cultural Revolution
had reached a stalemate, and in particular, they did not understand what
preconditions were needed to break left.
In turn, the prolonged and harsh repression of the members of
the Cultural Revolution groups and the rebel groups they supported was largely
a counter-evidence that low-cost revolutions were not established, that
quasi-classes existed in a communal society that defended vested interests and
power, and that anyone or any group that questioned their dominance would be
suppressed by them without mercy. In this way, the Cultural Revolution was like
a self-fulfilling prophecy: through an exercise, especially by the
anti-Cultural Revolutionaries, it was made abundantly clear that in the midst
of a socialist state, political improvements that truly benefit the majority
must also come at great cost to overcome resistance from the privileged
classes, and the Cultural Revolution showed how great this resistance was. Because
the resistance to progress was too great to overcome, as with all revolutions in
history, many martyrs had to pay a huge price after the revolution suffered a
setback. Qi Lao's 18 years of unjust imprisonment and Zhang Chunqiao's and Yao
Wenyuan's lifelong failure to gain freedom were all part of the huge price of
this attempted revolution.
The criterion for success in life today is to be promoted and
made rich, and in that sense Mr. Qi Benyu's life was a tragedy. To be more
precise, Mr. Qi Benyu is a victim of history, and it should be added that he
did not suffer primarily for his own personal reasons, but for the power of the
people - first and foremost, the power of the people to criticise those in
power. As a victim, he first spent eighteen years in prison, and when he worked
in the Shanghai Library after his release, he still remembered the teachings of
Teacher Mao - to re-evaluate historical figures using the materialistic view of
history as a guide. He retired on the lowest retirement salary in Shanghai (he
was officially approved as a retiree with just over one year's service). For a
scholar, he was also subjected to a long blockade by both government and
academia: more than thirty years after his release from prison, not a single
word signed by Qi Benyu has been published in the official mainland media.
Mr. Lu Xun said in
"Miscellaneous Writings at the Pavilion – ‘Have the Chinese lost their
self-confidence?’", "Since ancient times, we have had men who worked doggedly
in silence, men who have worked stubbornly at the risk of their lives, who
strove to save others, who braved death to seek the truth …Even the standard
dynastic histories, which are really family records of emperors, princes,
ministers and generals, cannot conceal their glory: these men are the backbone
of China." Qi Lao is clearly the kind of person whose glory cannot be
concealed by the endless slander of official and authentic history, and the
kind of person who, according to Teacher Mao, has broken away from the people
of low tastes. “We
must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit
everyone can be very useful to the people. A man's ability may be great or
small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of
moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the
people." [In Memory of Norman Bethune]
Did the
Cultural Revolution succeed or fail? How much was gained at such a great cost?
These crucial questions have often provoked heated debates and even emotional
confrontations within left-wing circles.
On September 24, 1962, while presiding over the opening
session of the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee at Huairen
Hall in Zhongnanhai, he said, "In Europe, after the overthrow of feudalism,
there were several restorations and reversals of fortune. This kind of reversal
is also possible in socialist countries." [The Chronicle of Mao Zedong,
vol. 5, p. 151]
According to Teacher Mao, it is
difficult for a socialist revolution to succeed at one go. The key reason is
that people's understanding of progress requires both positive and negative
experience and lessons in order to reach a stable consensus. Therefore, it is
meaningless to argue about the success or failure of the Cultural Revolution at
any one time and place in the face of the historical trend of tortuous
progress. This is the result of the "quick victory theory" thinking.
The establishment of the socialist system and the process of restoration are
directly proportional to the difficulty of people's ideological progress. Therefore,
the right attitude is: not to let the sacrifices of our predecessors be wasted,
but to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors and carefully draw lessons
and experiences, so that our comrades and the price they paid will be as
beneficial as possible to the growth of awareness and, as a result, to end the
pre-civilisation era more quickly towards a true human civilisation. In the
sense of growth in awareness, the Cultural Revolution, as an exercise in
reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the fighting forces and the parties
involved, had great potential for advancing the progress of awareness, and we
need to carry this forward today, following in the footsteps of our
predecessors.
In the tortuous path of progress in understanding, no matter
how great the failure, any effort that helps to raise awareness and helps to
shape the pursuit of human civilization more quickly is a historic success, and
in this respect, Qi and his comrades have established a monument that will last
forever. On the day of the real triumph of socialism, perhaps a "pantheon
of sages" will be established, following the example of the people of the
French Revolution, to record the pioneers who made a unique contribution to the
emergence of mankind from barbarism, and both Teacher Mao and his graduate
student, Qi Benyu, should be eligible for inclusion.
Wherever there is oppression, there will be
resistance. This is like the interaction of action and reaction forces in physics, and Teacher Mao said: "Do we want a revolution in a
hundred years? Will there be a revolution in a thousand years? There will
always be a revolution. It is always a part of the people who feel oppressed,
the small officials, students, workers, peasants and soldiers, who don't like
the big people oppressing them, so they want a revolution." [CPC Central
Committee document, Zhongfa [1976] No. 4, Mao Zedong's instructions from
October 1975 to January 1976, compiled by Mao Yuanxin]
The road of revolution cannot be straight. In 1935 Teacher
Mao criticised one way of thinking: "The forces of the revolution must be pure, absolutely pure,
and the road of the revolution must be straight, absolutely straight. Nothing
is correct except what is literally recorded in Holy Writ. The national
bourgeoisie is entirely and eternally counter-revolutionary. Not an inch
must be conceded to the rich peasants. The yellow trade unions must be fought
tooth and nail. If we shake hands with Tsai Ting-kai, we must call him a
counter-revolutionary at the same moment. Was there ever a cat that did not
love fish or a warlord who was not a counter-revolutionary? Intellectuals are
three-day revolutionaries whom it is dangerous to recruit. It follows therefore
that closed-doorism is the sole wonder-working magic, while the united front is
an opportunist tactic."
(On the strategy against Japanese imperialism, December 27, 1935) During the Cultural
Revolution, "I am the only Leftist" was the number one obstacle
preventing the rebels from completing political unity, and there are many
netizens in today's left-wing circles who have this kind of shut-door style or
political cleanliness. During the Cultural Revolution, the change in the
members of the Cultural Revolution group was also evident after the criticism by
Teacher Mao.
Mao's opposition to "seizing a handful of people within the
army" and to directing the criticism of the Cultural Revolution at the
majority of those in power and the conservatives, was not due to a lack of
factual and legal grounds, nor was it a mere tactic, but because: the
manifestations of these phenomena of political alienation and their
personalised agents were all inherently in line with the law of social
differentiation. To solve the problems caused by the law of social
differentiation, it is necessary to genuinely achieve this by raising people's
awareness, and that uniting the 95 per cent of cadres and the masses is not
just a matter of words, but an absolutely necessary requirement. The lack of
consensus between the majority in power and the conservatives has, to a large
extent, determined the direction of the political game and movement of the
Cultural Revolution, as well as the impossibility of the problem being solved
without the majority being aware of it. For this reason, not only did the
Cultural Revolution need to be redirected or forcibly ended, but it was also
inappropriate for judgements based on facts and law to be publicly
communicated. When Lao Tian repeatedly read the article "Marching along
the path opened up by the October Socialist Revolution" published on 6
November 1967, he used to be very puzzled as to why the article did not cite
the emergence of the Cultural Revolution in China to develop its argument, but
instead told a lot about how the Soviet Union had turned into a revisionist
country, when it was known that the old military leaders' suppression of the
masses and the manipulation of the conservatives in power to distort the
general direction of the movement were much stronger evidence to argue for the
resistance of the social structure. It was only much later that it became clear
that, although the article was intended to summarise the practical experience
of the Cultural Revolution and to provide a preliminary theoretical
distillation, it was not possible to stand in opposition to the majority of
those in power and the conservatives, even though they were opposed to the
Cultural Revolution, and to make accusations. However, what was absolutely
necessary at the time to bend the truth is no longer needed today, and we are
in a position to stand on the shoulders of our predecessors and take our
understanding a great deal further.
The facts of the Cultural Revolution
and the post-Cultural Revolution are both verifying those things that Teacher Mao
told us in advance: "We must
acknowledge that classes will continue to exist for a long time. We must also
acknowledge the existence of a struggle of class against class, and admit the
possibility of the restoration of reactionary classes. We must raise our
vigilance and properly educate our youth as well as the cadres, the masses and
the middle- and basic-level cadres. Old cadres must also study these problems
and be educated. Otherwise, a country like ours can still move towards its
opposite. Even to move towards its opposite would not matter too much because
there would still be the negation of the negation, and afterwards we might move
towards our opposite yet again. If our children’s generation go in for
revisionism and move towards their opposite, so that although they still nominally
have socialism, it is in fact capitalism, then our grandsons will certainly
rise up in revolt and overthrow their fathers, because the masses will not be
satisfied.” [Mao Zedong: Speech at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth
Central Committee (Huai Ren Tang, 24 September 1962, morning), in Long Live Mao
Zedong Thought, vols. 61-68]
Even Confucius recognized that "the four seas
are poor and the sky is in permanent ruin" - a ruling class that leaves
the people without a way out will certainly be doomed, so the potential for
revolution is always determined by the compatibility of the interests of the
ruling class with those of the ruled class. Teacher Mao believed in revolution,
just as he believed in the inevitability of restoration. The ruling class of
the restoration, characterised mainly by its monopoly of political power and
class interests and its exclusion of the majority's demands for political
emancipation and economic advancement, inevitably stood in opposition to the
majority, which created its own antagonists - revolutionaries - and it was
historically inevitable that Sun Tzu would rise up in revolt and overthrow Lao
Tzu. It is history that completes this cycle, so
that the Cultural Revolution is immortal, and so are those of its victims, who
will light the way forward for all those who come after them.May 9, 2016
Appendix:
Excerpts from the arguments of Yao Wenyuan, Qi
Benxuan and Sun Daren
Yao Wenyuan: Review of the new historical drama
"Hairi Strikes"
It shows that the Dismissal of Hai Jui does not
present "the internal struggle of the feudal ruling classes" as the
author claims but molds in every possible way for our audience today a hero who
determines the destiny of the peasants.
The conflict of the play unfolds itself around the
theme of "return of land." Although Comrade Wu Han says in the
preface that the play "has been revised to take the suppression of despots
as the main theme," yet in actuality, the seizure of land is the cause of
all grievances, and the action "to suppress the despots" and
"redress grievances" also centers on the "return of land."
"Return of land" is portrayed as "a means to help the poor
peasants" and is also responsible for the dismissal of Hai Jui—the climax
of the conflict in this play.
The play makes this special statement through
"Villager A": "We are all tenants of the House of Hsu." It
wants the audience to remember that it portrays the struggle between the poor
peasants and the House of Hsu and other retired officials and corrupt
officials, and that Hai Jui stands on the side of the tenants of the House of
Hsu.
The Honorable Hai does not belie the hope of the
public, and as soon as he assumes office, he "decides in favor of the
people." He not only curses "the genuine sharp dealers who practice
usury and take over land by force," and encourages the peasants "to
make complaints" against them, but also displays a democratic spirit in
court by finding out the opinions of "the elders" of the petitioners.
The peasants ask Lord Hai Jui to order the House of
Hsu and the "families of retired officials" to return the seized
land. So Hai Jui issues an order "requiring all families of retired
officials to return within ten days all the land which they have seized from
the law-abiding people."
After "the return of land," the sharp
class contradictions abruptly cease to function. The "villagers"
kowtow to Hai Jui and say: "Because the decisions of Your Honor are in
favor of the people, the poor people south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze
River will see better days in the future."
The author makes the poor peasants express their
"gratitude" and joy by "singing together" a sing in
glorification of the honest, incorrupt official. They sing: "We see the
blue sky today and must work diligently to rebuild our homes and gardens. With
land we shall be properly fed and clothed and a good life will unfold before
us."
The play tells people that although the feudal
system is still intact and the ruthless oppression and exploitation of the
landlords still exists, so long as we handle things in the same way as Hai Jui,
the peasants' problems of "land" and "food and clothing"
can also be solved, and "a good life" lies "before us."
The play also lays emphasis on portraying how Hai
Jui "avenges the people" and executes the "corrupt
officials" en masse. It gives repeated publicity to "the need of
reopening misjudged cases," and Hai Jui's determination "to pacify
the anger of the people." He wants to "sweep away all wicked
officials" and "exercises no leniency in the enforcement of law to
pacify the anger of the people." The actions he takes in the play include
beheading Wang Mingyou, magistrate of Huat'ing hsien; sentencing Sung-chiang
Prefect Li P'ing-tu to "dismissal and imprisonment pending the receipt of
the Imperial verdict"; and hanging Hsu Ying, son of Hsu Chieh.
In Comrade Wu Han's own words, so that "Hai
Jui's departure will not present a dismal gloomy aspect, I decided to have Hsu
Ying sentenced to death." In this way, Hai Jui terminates his official
career and becomes a hero who has triumphantly resisted the feudal Imperial
Court.
At the end of the play, Hsu Ying is executed, Hsu
Chieh faints away, and the new governor is thrown into consternation. But Hai
Jui holds high the official seal, stands erect, and declaims: "A virtuous
man stands with his head reaching the sky and his feet on the earth." Inwardly,
he tells himself: "I have triumphed."
The author has also "triumphantly"
completed his task of molding his own hero.
In this play, only Hai Jui is the hero. The
peasants can only air their grievances to their lord, beg "their lord to
make decisions in their favor," and entrust their own destinies to the
"Honorable Hai." In order to make the image of Hai Jui stand out
against all other feudal officials, all the principal officials in the play are
portrayed as bad characters. Hai Jui's wife and family dependents are wise
people who want to protect themselves, and only his mother backs him up. Hai
Jui goes it alone in making a great economic and political revolution.
Some bureaucrat-landlords in rural areas also seized a lot of
land. The land owned by Xu Jie alone was put at 240,000 mou in some cases, and
400,000 mou in other cases— equivalent to about one-third or one-half of the
acreage of arable land in Songjiang county under the jurisdiction of Shanghai
municipality today.
Hai Rui's statement that "the common people cursed and
resented the large numbers of estates and slaves owned by the retired officials
in Huading" was a portrayal of the sharp class struggle which he saw with
his own eyes. The concentration of land accelerated the sharpening of the class
contradiction between the peasants and the landlord class. Large numbers of
peasants went bankrupt and fled, many fields were left uncultivated, and
"the landless people could only work as hired farmhands for other
people" (Records of Huading County).
Surrender of land was mainly implemented in two ways. One way was
for the powerful landlords to instigate the lackeys—who were related to the
original landowners in some ways—to "surrender" such land to
themselves. Such land was taken away from the "rich families" which
originally owned it, and the lackeys who "surrendered the land"
became the caretaker or sublandlord of such land.
The other way was for the middle or small landowners, rich
peasants, individuals, or the few small holders to surrender their land to the
bureaucrat-landlords with the object of evading heavy official corvees and
taxation. The reason was that the "Ming Code" provided that officials
enjoyed the privilege of exemption from official corvees and taxation to
varying extent according to their ranks, and the landowners could evade such
official corvees and taxation by placing their land under the names of
bureaucrat-landlords. The bureaucrat-landlords took advantage of this, and
seized the land owned by the middle or small landowners, rich peasants, or
small holders who sought to evade official corvees and taxation…
Because most land was owned by the landlords and rich peasants,
the land seized by the bureaucrat-landlords was in most cases property of the
middle or small landowners or rich peasants.9 This was the essence of the
matter.
The Biography of Hai Rui says:
Therefore, the rich often surrendered their
land to the officials, and would rather work as rent-paying tenants to evade
their major duties. This was called surrender of land. Because of this, once a
scholar passed the examination of the second degree, he often acquired the land
surrendered and became a rich man. Once the downfallen officials regained their
offices and power, they often behaved like the upstart officials, and looked
upon the annexation of land as a matter of course. When those with power and
influence took over the estates they wanted, nobody would dare to refuse.
This seriously
jeopardized the interests of the middle and small landowners and rich peasants,
and also seriously affected the financial receipts of the Imperial Court.
Did Hai Rui require the landlords to return land to the peasants
when he called on the retired officials to return their land? No.
Both the Ming History and a number of biographies of Hai Rui
clearly state that Hai Rui called on the retired officials to return the land
"surrendered" to them…
Hai Rui told us in his Governor's Proclamation that all the
measures issued by him as governor sought "to pacify the public by getting
rid of old abuses and to restore the established laws of our ancestors."
Now, in the Ming Code formulated by the "founder of the
dynasty," there was such a provision: "Those who surrender the land
under dispute or the land of other people as their own properties to the
officials in power, and those who receive such land shall each be punished with
one hundred strokes of the cane and three years of imprisonment." Was this
not precisely the contradiction which Hai Rui had to handle?
The Ming Dynasty had long ago laid down this law against the
surrender of land for the purposes of alleviating contradictions within this
class, guarding against the acute development of annexation, and facilitating
the consolidation of the dictatorship of the whole landlord class. This law
later existed only in name. Hai Rui had done nothing more than oppose the
surrender of land within this sphere. How can it be said that he "decided
in favor" of the peasants south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River?
Did Hai Rui oppose "usury" with the "poor
peasants" in mind?
It is best to quote the statement made by Hai Rui to refute Dai
Fengxiang's attack against him. He said:
In past years, when collecting grain, the
grain officials often deducted first their private debts before they turned
over grain to the government. The wealthy aristocrats also forced settlements
at harvesting time. Since private and public interests were dealt with side by
side, the payment of grain tax could hardly be fulfiled. It is my opinion that
the grain tax must be paid before private settlements can be made, and it is
not my intention to prohibit the settlement of debts.
The "public side" meant the feudal Imperial Court, while
the "private side" meant the landlords and the local bullies. Hai Rui
made it known that he was not against exploitation by rural landlords and the
granting of loans. He only opposed the monopoly of the fruit of exploitation by
the big landlords in the countryside so as to solve the problem of financial
income for the Imperial Court.
Hai Rui never thought of basically solving the contradiction
between the peasants and the landlords. He only wanted to ease this
contradiction…
The portrayal of
Hai Rui is representing the interests of the peasants seeks to confuse the
enemy and ourselves, to obliterate the essence of the dictatorship of the
landlord class, and to prettify the landlord class…
A historical play
needs to be processed artistically and recreated. We do not expect a new
historical play to agree with history in every detail, but we do expect that
the class stand and class relationship of the characters portrayed therein
should agree with historical facts…
The laws and
courts of the feudal state and the officials who rule over the people—including
"honest, incorrupt officials" and "good officials"—can only
be the tools of the dictatorship of the landlord class and can never transcend
class, nor can they serve the ruling class as well as the ruled class….
the Dismissal of
Hai Rui tells us: No! The "honest, incorrupt officials," are not the
tools of the landlord class but are in the service of the peasant class. You
see, Hai Rui in the play is an ambassador of the feudal dynasty, but he wages a
fierce struggle against Xu Jie and represents the interests of the poor
peasants.
In this struggle,
"honest official" Hai Rui is on the one hand portrayed as a great
hero who safeguards the interests of "the tenants of the House of Xu"
and all poor peasants. He is opposed to other officials who implement the
dictatorship of the landlord class, and the contradiction between the
"honest, incorrupt officials" and the "corrupt officials"
is portrayed as the contradiction between the protection and the suppression of
the peasants as well as the contradiction between the return of land to the
peasants and the seizure of land from the peasants. We can see nothing of the
role played by the "honest, incorrupt officials" in consolidating the
dictatorship of the landlord class.
On the other
hand, all peasants are portrayed as a passive lot devoid of any spirit for
revolutionary struggle. Their sole role is to kneel before the "Honorable
Hai," beseech him to redress their grievances, and look upon the
"honest, incorrupt official" as their savior.
Obviously, as the
author of the Dismissal of Hai Rui sees it, the motive force for propelling
history forward is not the class struggle but "honest, incorrupt
officials." There is no need for the masses to rise and liberate
themselves, for with the blessings of an "honest, incorrupt official,"
they can promptly lead " a good life."
In this play, the
"honest, incorrupt officials," law, and courts—which are the tools of
the dictatorship of the landlord class—are all prettified as things which
transcend class and their existence is divorced from and independent of the
dictatorship of the landlord class. The play publicizes that there is no need
for the oppressed people to make revolution, to go through any serious
struggle, and to smash the state machinery. Provided they bow and kowtow to the
"honest, incorrupt officials" and abide by the "law" of the
feudal dynasty, they can wipe out the corrupt officials in one stroke and
"lead a good life."…
Hai Rui was an
influential historical character. As we see it, he was a more far-sighted
personality among the landlord class during the decline of the feudal society.
He was loyal to the feudal system, and was a "loyal official" of the
feudal dynasty. He perceived some phenomena of the sharp contradiction between
the peasant class and the landlord class at his times. In order to consolidate
the feudal rule, weaken the resistance of the peasants, alleviate the sharp
class contradictions, and uphold the fundamental interests of the feudal
dynasty, he dared to wage a sharp struggle against some groups or measures
which endangered the interests of the feudal dynasty.
Originally published on November 10, 1965;
Reprinted in the People's Daily on November 30, 1965
Sun Daren: How should the "concession
policy" be evaluated?
Sun Daren, then an assistant professor in the
Department of History at Shaanxi Normal University, published an article in a
special issue of the Guangming Daily on 22 September 1965 entitled "How
should the "concession policy" be evaluated", which was a representative
example of a disagreement with Jian Bozan's views, and thus this was a
representative article that disagreed with Jian Bozan's views, and thus
attracted a great deal of attention and discussion in the academic community.
The Great Peasant War broke through the feudal net
and fundamentally changed the relationship between the landowners and the
peasants, which allowed the peasants to gain their freedom. On the contrary,
after the failure of the Peasant War, the feudal regime's "policy of concessions"
was in essence to deprive the peasants of this freedom they had gained and to
put them back into bondage.
The interests of the hostile classes are that you
die and I’ll Iive, and they fight against each other. The feudal landlord class
would never have any "concession policy" towards the peasants. What
kind of policy the feudal regime adopted depended not on revolutionary
pressure, but on the class interests of the landlord class at that time, that
is, on the nature of the landlord class.
From Sun Daren's “How Should the ‘Concession Policy’
Be Evaluated?”
Jian Bozan put this forward in his 1951 book On
Peasant Wars in Ancient China. He said: "After each great uprising, the
new feudal ruler, in order to restore the feudal order, had to make some
concessions to the peasants, which meant that the exploitation and oppression
of the peasants had to be reduced to a greater or lesser extent, thus reducing
the restraint of the feudal relations of production on the productive forces
and making it possible for the productive forces of feudal society to continue
to develop again, thus pushing Chinese history forward, and thus every peasant
insurrection or peasant war in Chinese history is, so to speak, a milestone in
the forward development of Chinese feudal society."
In 1961, he added and amended this issue in his
article "Preliminary Views on the Handling of Certain Historical
Issues". The feudal ruling class, he said, "doesn't give in to every
peasant war, they don't give in to those small local peasant wars." Whether
to let or not, and how much to let, depends on the situation of class
confrontation, on the change in the contrast of class forces brought about by
the peasant war." The influential Outline of Chinese History, which he
edited, contains similar arguments. A number of people in the historical
community agree with his views. Some even summarise it as follows:
"Revolutionary struggle - forced concessions, further struggles - further
concessions" is a rule that drives the peasant wars.
Qi Benxuan: Study history for the sake of the revolution
We acknowledge the historical role of a few
outstanding figures among the emperors and generals, but we know that they were
outstanding because some of their activities were objectively in line with the
requirements of social development or objectively in line with certain
aspirations of the people. We have always believed that the people are the
masters of history, and that the few outstanding figures among the emperors and
generals are, in the final analysis, merely representatives of the ruling
class, and that their historical role is but a drop in the ocean compared to
that of the people, or to that of the great revolutionary leaders who stand at
the front of the locomotive of history. Only the masses of the people, and
those who are the true leaders of the revolution, are the great heroes most
worthy of our passionate praise. We recognise the historical role of a few
outstanding figures among the emperors and generals, but we know that they,
like all figures in the ruling class, were also oppressors and exploiters of
the masses, and that in offering something new to history they were often
accompanied by brutal oppression, exploitation and acted in the current
interests of the rulers. Therefore, when commenting on their historical role,
we should also expose and criticise their atrocities of oppression and
exploitation as necessary. Of course, sometimes, in order to focus on a particular
aspect, it is possible to focus on their progressive aspects; for those
historical figures among them whose merits outweigh their faults, a realistic
historical assessment should be made on the basis of their entire historical
activities, rather than being arbitrarily harsh on just one point. However, in
any case, we should not exaggerate their historical role in an unprincipled
manner, or praise their civil and military achievements in a far-fetched
manner, or even whitewash and justify their historical sins.
The history of class society is the history of
class struggle, and to understand the history of class struggle, one has to
study both sides of the class conflict. Emperors, kings and generals or other
antagonists are representatives of one side of the conflict, and without
studying them well, one cannot understand the other side of the conflict well
either. The debate in history on the question of emperors and generals reflects
the fact that there are still problems in the direction of research on this
issue; to solve this problem is not to retreat in the face of research, but to
do such research well with a proletarian position, perspective and methodology.
Just as the ruling class and the emperors and
generals of feudal society cannot be correctly understood without the class
perspective of the proletariat, the peasant class and peasant wars of feudal
society cannot be correctly understood without the class perspective of the
proletariat.
You see, the peasants rebelled in order to rise to
power and become the new nobles and emperors, and their programme of struggle
was again feudalistic. If this is really the case, then what irreconcilable
class antagonism and irreconcilable class struggle exists? How can we imagine
that the millions of serfs, starving, tossing and turning, struggling to the
death, when they are forced to rise up and fight for their lives against the
feudal landlords who are exploiting and oppressing them, are thinking of how
they can become the lords who are being opposed by the masses? Existence
determines consciousness. The economic position in which each class finds
itself determines its own ideology. The exploited position of the peasantry, as
a class, fundamentally determines the ideology of rebellion against the
landlords, while the landlord class, in an exploitative position, can only
produce the ideology of oppression of the peasantry. Of course, the peasants in
feudal society were in some ways influenced by the ideology of the ruling
class, so in their struggle programmes there were often things that reflected
the ideology of the feudal ruling class; and in the course of the development
of the peasant revolutionary movement, there were often cases where members of
the revolutionary leadership were transformed into feudalists, or where the
revolutionary leadership was usurped by elements of the landlord class, so that
the peasant revolution became a tool for the feudal ruling class to change the
dynasty. This historical fact, as Comrade Mao Zedong has analysed, is due to
the constraints of historical conditions. As for some things in the peasants'
revolutionary struggle programme which reflect feudal thinking, they are not as
important as their revolutionary slogans of "equal division of wealth ",
"equality of the rich and the poor", "having fields to plough
together" and "having food to eat together". The claim that the
peasants rebelled for the sake of promotion and wealth is a complete distortion
of the peasant revolutionary movement.
The criticism of so-called ahistoricism in
historical research is, at first glance, confusing. But we only have to look into
the facts to understand that the ahistoricism in historical studies in recent
years has been none other than the phenomenon of glorifying the emperor and
denying the peasant movement. The emergence of this ahistoricism is not, as
some have accused, due to the proletariat's increased class perspective, but,
on the contrary, to the lack of a proletarian class perspective.
Note: Qi Benxuan's Study of History for the
Revolution was published in the 13th issue of Red Flag magazine in December
1965
In
June 1957, Mao told Wu Lenxi, who was
about to take over as editor-in-chief of the People's Daily, "You have to
be fully prepared for the People's Daily, to be prepared for the worst, and to
be prepared for the 'five not afraids'." These 'five not afraids' are:
one, to not be not afraid of dismissal; two, to not be not afraid of expulsion
from the party membership; three, to not be afraid of divorce by one’s wife;
four, not to be afraid of going to jail; five, is not to be afraid of being
killed. With these ‘five not afraids’ as preparation, dare to seek truth from
facts, dare to adhere to the truth.”
Jian
Bozan (14 April 1898 - 18 December 1968) was an ethnic Uighur, native of
Taoyuan County, Changde, Hunan Province [1] . He was a famous Chinese historian
and social activist, a renowned Marxist historian, one of the important
founders of Chinese Marxist historical science, and an outstanding educator. Jian
Bozan was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. On December 18, 1968, the
Central Task Force forced Jian Bozan to confess under the pretext of giving an
account of "problems concerning Liu Shaoqi". He and his wife, Dai
Shuwan, committed suicide by taking sleeping pills.
Luo
Ergang (January 29, 1901-May 25, 1997), from Guixian County, Guangxi, famous
historian, expert on the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and military
historian in the late Qing Dynasty.
Li
Xiucheng (1823-1864), a native of Fujian County, Guangxi, was a God-worshipper
who joined the Taiping Army in September 1851 and was crowned King Chung in
December 1859. He was an important general in the late Taiping revolution.
Written in his own handwriting during his capture from 30 July to 7 August 1864,
the Autobiography is an account of the leader of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom,
Hong Xiuquan and the whole process of Li's own participation in the revolution.
It is a valuable source for the study of the Taiping Revolution and Li Xiucheng.
Qi Benyu wrote a review of Li’s Autobiography, and the struggle around this is
described in Qi’s Memoirs (Chapter 17) which can be accessed from here (戚本禹回忆录（2016） (marxists.org) )
by running it through an online translator.
Also known as the socialist education
movement, from 1963 to May 1966, a campaign to clean up politics, the economy,
organizations, and ideas was carried out in some rural areas and a few urban
industrial and mining enterprises, schools and other units. This movement
played a definite role in solving problems in cadre style and economic
management.
Chairman
Mao used a
Chinese idiom, “Light and thin”, (the pinyin is qing yáo bo fù), meaning to
reduce bondage and taxation. It comes from the Han Dynasty book Zhaodi Ji.
Mao used several idiomatic
expressions here in four lots of four-characters, and the one referred to by
Deng Liqun reads “zhong wang bu zhong” where the first “zhong” means loyalty,
and the second (with “bu” - “no” or “not” - in front of it) means “the end”.
If, as Qi Benyu says, he had never seen the 16-character expression, but only
heard of it, then because of the homophones with their different meanings, he
could have taken it to mean “loyalty to the king is not loyalty”, instead of
Mao’s intended “loyalty to the king is not finished”, which would clearly refer
to the survival of feudal attitudes.
Wang Zhaojun (circa 54 BC - 19 BC), famous as
one of the four beautiful women of ancient China. She was sent by Emperor Yuan of
the Western Han Dynasty to marry Chanyu Huhanye of the Xiongnu (Hun) Empire in
order to establish friendly relations with the Han dynasty through marriage.
She had four children by that marriage, but after her husband’s death, was
ordered by the Han to follow Xiongnu custom and marry the eldest brother of her
late husband.
Michel Vovelle (6 February 1933 – 6
October 2018) was a French historian who specialised in the French Revolution. He was closely
associated with the revisionist Communist Party of France.
"Towards the Republic" is a
Chinese modern history drama co-produced by China Central Television, Beijing
Tongdao Film and Television Production Co., Ltd., China International
Television Corporation, Changsha TV, etc. It was filmed in Beijing on October
8, 2001 and premiered in 2003. The film depicts the events that led to the
overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China by
Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang. Similar to the film “The Inside Story of the
Qing Court” which Mao and Qi Benyu said was “out-and-out betrayal”, the TV
series was praised by bourgeois
cultural circles for “playing a role in opening the way for China's political
reform. In the play, Li Hongzhang, who has always been criticized as
"betraying the country and seeking glory", is described as a patriot
who is concerned about the country and the people; the "cruel-hearted"
Empress Dowager Cixi is a far-sighted politician; and Yuan Shikai became a
reformer of the princes and courtesans. And Sun Yat-sen, who has always been
portrayed as a great man, has also become a flesh-and-blood and easily
impulsive revolutionary idealist.” Others
praised it as “criticizing autocracy and advocating democracy” and
said that it “gave Chinese people a lively democracy education lesson … and
objectively set the stage for the reform of China's political system.”
Meng
Xiangcai was born on February 5, 1940 in Linyi, Shandong. He graduated from the
History Department of Shandong Normal University in 1964 and then went to the
Chinese Academy of Sciences as a graduate student. He is currently a professor
and doctoral supervisor of the Department of History of Shandong University. He
is also the secretary-general of the Chinese Peasant War History Research
Association, the vice chairman of the Chinese Qin and Han History Research
Association, the vice chairman of the Shandong History Society, and the vice
chairman of the Shandong Peasant History Research Association. He has long been
engaged in the teaching and research of the history of Chinese thought and the
history of pre-Qin, Qin and Han.
Two Chinese ancients with competing
philosophies. Sun Zi (Tzu) was a Chinese general, military
strategist, writer, and philosopher who lived in the Eastern Zhou period of
ancient China. Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of
War, an influential work of military strategy that has affected both Western
and East Asian philosophy and military thinking. Lao Zi (Tzu) was an ancient
Chinese philosopher and writer. He is the reputed author of the Dao De Jing,
the founder of philosophical Taoism, and a deity in religious Taoism and
traditional Chinese religions. Laozi takes adversity in stride, recognizing
that all force eventually defeats itself. This is the logic behind wú wéi or
“non-doing,” often misinterpreted as inaction rather than its true meaning of
non-interference.
