Rod MacFarquhar on The Cultural Revolution

We’re trying to understand the Cultural Revolution, these ten years of madness from 1966-1976, and your first choice is a new book, Fractured Rebellion, about the Red Guard movement in Beijing. Do you want to tell me why you chose it?

Andrew Walder, a sociologist at Stanford who wrote this book, has provided us with the first really detailed study of the Red Guard movement that we’ve ever had. There have been lots of books about the Red Guard movement; individual Red Guards who got out of China have written them. The most well-known is, of course, Jung Chang, who wrote Wild Swans,which was partly about her experience as a Red Guard. But what Walder has done is to look not just at the oral record – which he feels is often misremembered experiences – but also at the copious written record of the Red Guards, who published their own newspapers from very early on in the movement. And what he does for us is to destroy the hypothesis with which most of us have been working in trying to understand both the Red Guard movement and why it fell into internecine warfare after it had bombarded the headquarters of the universities and ministries and sent teachers and officials away. 

The old explanation was that there were two basic groups. One was more conservative, the earliest of the Red Guards. They were normally either members of the Communist Youth League or members of the Communist Party itself. Their Red Guardism was designed, in part at least, to protect what they thought were their natural Mao-given rights. They were going to be the inheritors, because they were often the sons and daughters of so-called ‘red’ families. They usually came from a revolutionary official background, and could trace themselves back to their parents or grandparents as peasants or workers, and they were defending an order that promised to give them power in due course. The more radical faction, on the other hand, was composed of all those people who had not been allowed to get into the Communist Youth League or the Party because of their ‘black’ background. They weren’t red at all because their parents or grandparents were landlords or bourgeois or rich peasants or managers of factories, etc. So this movement was, as social movement theory would suggest, a clash of interest groups. What Walder has discovered, and what Walder has, in my view, proved, is that it’s a much, much more complicated story. 

What did actually happen then?

In many cases it depended on what happened in the very early months of the Cultural Revolution, when so-called work teams of officials were sent to the campuses to restore order. If the work team defended the local party system in the university or college, one set of results ensued. If they actually dismantled the party system (which often was the case, despite the fact they were all members of the Party) then another set of results was predictable. It’s a difficult book to work with, because it’s as complex as life itself, and during the Cultural Revolution in China life was extremely complicated. But what Walder does is he follows each major university’s Red Guard movement through from its beginnings in 1966 through to 1968, when the Red Guard movement was, in effect, dismantled. And I think it’s a fascinating book, which only Walder – who has consistently over the years not been bound by pre-existing theories – would have been able to write.

Oh dear. Does that mean we’ll never be able to understand the Cultural Revolution?

Well, the Cultural Revolution is something quite different from the Red Guard movement…

Yes, what was the Red Guard movement?

Mao unleashed the Red Guards, encouraging them to attack authorities in universities and eventually in the government and in the Party because he wished to rear a new generation of revolutionary successors. He was bitterly disappointed when the Red Guards fell into internecine warfare and caused so much trouble that they had to be sent back into the countryside.

Was that the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution?

No, the opening salvo of the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s attack on the Beijing Party apparatus. He knew it was so powerful that no students could ever attack it by themselves. So he had to do the groundwork of attacking the Beijing Party and propaganda apparatus. That set the stage for lesser people to be attacked by the Red Guards.

Your second book is The Cultural Revolution as History.

This book is co-edited by two historians at UC San Diego and the same old Andrew Walder. Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz started a year-long seminar for their graduate students, which a number of us spoke at, and these graduate students were then encouraged to go off and do their own research projects. And they really are extraordinarily interesting – and very revealing. There is one, which I have assigned in one of my courses, which tells about the extent of mass violence, based on a number of provinces where this graduate student was able to get really detailed grassroots records. Another, which I’ve also assigned, is about someone who became a hero during the Cultural Revolution, because he had written to Chairman Mao. He was a poor person and he had written to Chairman Mao and got the local situation turned around as a result of his letter. But then he became a villain later on. It’s a complicated story, but it showed how, during the Cultural Revolution and, to be fair, even before in China, it was possible for someone to rise up very quickly and then, when the political wind changed, to be blown down.

For people who maybe don’t know so much about the Cultural Revolution, do you get a sense from this book – or any of the others – of the extent of the devastation during that period, the number of people killed?

I’m afraid I would have to refer you to a book which I co-authored to get that kind of information, and I know that’s not allowed.

Which book is that?

Mao’s Last Revolution, which I wrote with Michael Schoenhals.