Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Let’s go on to the book about Shanghai, Proletarian Power.
This book by Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun is very important. Elizabeth Perry has worked on Shanghai for many years and has had tremendous access to Shanghai archives – I’m sure not all the Party archives, but enormous access. What her book reveals is that Shanghai was very exceptional during the Cultural Revolution. We are used to the idea that the Red Guards wiped out whole administrations in cities and in provinces, and then, as they were sent away to the countryside because they were being too destructive, the army took over. Shanghai was the one exception. The Red Guards in Shanghai, aided and abetted by the Red Guards from Beijing who came down to help them, failed to overturn the Shanghai Party officials. So they had to turn to the workers, led by a factory security man, Wang Hongwen, who later become number three in the Party [the youngest of the Gang of Four], to help them out. Therefore Shanghai is the only city where the movement that toppled the Party was in fact a workers’ movement, not a Red Guard movement.
Why is that significant?
Because the whole thing is called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – and so in this one city, this one great city of China, the proletariat actually did seize power.
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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.
