Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz started a year-long seminar for their graduate students and these students were then encouraged to go off and do their own research projects. And they really are extraordinarily interesting – and very revealing. The essence of the book is that these are graduate students who are beginning to come to grips with how you use the materials which are all fragmentary and of very different types in order to study the Cultural Revolution.
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. But, in the dedication to historians of Chinese origin, we say that we dedicate the book to them because one day, when the archives are open, they will write it for themselves. From the information that’s available now, I think we’ve provided a pretty good account of the Cultural Revolution in that book. But the essence of the Esherick, Pickowicz & Walder book is that these are graduate students who are beginning to come to grips with how you use the materials which are all fragmentary and of very different types in order to study the Cultural Revolution. Only the one chapter I mentioned really goes into the mass violence, and I suspect that we may never, even when the archives are open, be able to fully estimate the number of people killed. All I think I would say with reasonable confidence is that far fewer people died during the Cultural Revolution than died as a result of the Great Famine of 1959-61.
So in China there is still a lot you can’t research on this period?
The Chinese authorities have effectively banned any academic work on the Cultural Revolution. In December 2006 I gave a lecture in Shanghai, in what I was told was the first seminar ever given anywhere in China on the Cultural Revolution. People who do research on the Cultural Revolution are forced to publish abroad, usually in Hong Kong or Taiwan – except in the case of a couple of very trusted Party historians, who have given semi-official accounts.
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Roderick MacFarquhar is Harvard University’s Leroy B Williams Professor of History and Political Science and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals; The Sino-Soviet Dispute; China under Mao; Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); The Politics of China 2nd Ed; The Eras of Mao and Deng, and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly, and has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of Parliament. His most recent, jointly-authored book on the Cultural Revolution, entitled Mao’s Last Revolution, was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2006.
