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Revolution Essays
Putting Culture Back into
the Cultural Revolution:
Shifting Scholarly Views of
Chinese Art and Culture, 1977-2002
Jeremy
Brown
Who took the culture out of
Many scholarly works on the Cultural Revolution,
especially recent ones, dismiss the period’s officially stated goal of effecting
a cultural transformation. The real
story, the authors of such works claim, was a power struggle – and the official
ideology of heightening consciousness though cultural change was a simple tool
in this struggle. Some authors disparage
the entire nature of the Cultural Revolution’s ideological project as
paternalistic and restrictive, and scorn the artistic products of the era for
being dull, repetitive and hyper-politicized.
This view, reinforced by the post-Mao official Chinese repudiation of
anything related to the Cultural Revolution, remains dominant in the
field. Yet even more sensitive scholars
who recognize how this dominant paradigm limits our understanding of the
1966-1976 years still issue generally negative judgments of the Cultural Revolution’s
cultural mission and the works of art it engendered. I hold that these negative assessments can be
attributed to the liberal cultural predilections of most US-based academics,
and to reluctance in the academy to depart from visions of the Cultural
Revolution as a violent, irredeemable cataclysm.
This essay has three parts. I will first discuss the implications of the
tendency among recent works to ignore ideology and culture in favor of a focus
on personality and political power struggles.
Part two addresses the persistence of negative assessments of Cultural
Revolutionary art, even among promising newer books. Finally I will highlight instances where
scholars reveal the cultural complexity and diversity of
Lofty Ideological Transformation or Naked Power
Politics?
Most of the authors discussed in this essay agree that
the highly intertwined relationship between politics and the arts was a
defining characteristic of the Cultural Revolution, if not the entire history
of the People’s Republic of
Roxane Witke’s Comrade Chiang Ch’ing is representative
of earlier works that portray arts in the Cultural Revolution as the vehicle
for a genuine, clearly stated agenda of ideological transformation. Comrade Chiang Ch’ing is more a
biography than a scholarly work, and its principle mission is to shed light on
the life and ideas of Jiang Qing, one of the main leaders of the Cultural
Revolution. Nonetheless, as a historian
Witke is sensitive to intellectual debates and she includes extended analysis
of ideological issues in her book. She
understands the standard Marxist theoretical take on culture: that the
transformation of the “superstructure” (which Witke defines as “roughly
equivalent to our widest concept of culture”) must follow changes in the
economic and political bases of society (Witke 1977, 382). In this conventional view, structural
economic and political shifts are the preconditions for a change in
consciousness.
But during her many hours of interviews with Jiang
Qing in 1972, Witke confirmed that Jiang, the cultural commissar responsible
for the canonization of didactic revolutionary model works (yangbanxi),
had turned the Marxist conception of culture upside down. For Jiang Qing, only a remolding of people’s
consciousness through cultural offerings celebrating class struggle and worker-peasant-soldier
heroes could transform the other realms of Chinese society, including economic
life. Witke writes, “The idea that the
superstructure could lead the base was the most radical tenet of Chiang Ch’ing’s
Marxism” (Witke 1977, 413). The author
adds that this viewpoint, held not only by Jiang but also associated with Mao
Zedong and other cultural radicals, solidified during debates in the early
1960s and was fundamental to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.
The key here is that Witke portrays Jiang Qing’s
belief in the primacy of the superstructure as a legitimate, deeply felt and
reasoned viewpoint. The author argues
that Jiang’s drive for control over national culture can be explained by her
ideological views (Witke 1977, 384). That is to say, Jiang sought power not for
power’s sake alone, but in order to be in a position to transform the
superstructure through implementing her class struggle-based ideology in the
arts.
In many ways, Ross Terrill’s Madame Mao: The
White-Boned Demon (1984, 1992, 1999) is a response to Witke’s biography of
Jiang Qing. Terrill does all that he can
to debunk the self-serving biographical myths that Jiang spun to a somewhat
bedazzled Witke in 1972, but he also dismisses Jiang’s cultural policy and does
not address her “superstructure leads the base” formula. Following Witke, Terrill notes that in the
post-Great Leap Forward atmosphere of the early 1960s, Mao and his supporters,
including Jiang Qing, formulated leftist ideas on art reform, class struggle,
and anti-bureaucratism (Terrill 1999, 216).
Yet according to Terrill, from the beginning of her involvement in
cultural policy in the 1950s, Jiang Qing did not believe in, and probably did
not even understand, the ideology she espoused.
He writes:
One can
understand the “leftism” of Jiang Qing only by translating two key political
concepts into the meaning they had within her personal universe: communism
meant power; class struggle meant revenge (Terrill 1999, 172).
In addition, Terrill argues that Jiang Qing saw model
opera as a “tool for her climb to power,” and goes so far as to conclude that
Jiang’s “personal drama was the key to the Cultural Revolution” (Terrill 1999,
219, 263n).
Terrill’s emphasis on power, revenge, and personal
ambition as the central factors in Cultural Revolution politics holds great
sway in recent scholarship on the era.
Duowe Fokkema, in her chapter on “Creativity and Politics” in volume 15
of the Cambridge History of China, argues that a struggle for power
subsumed ideological reform during the Cultural Revolution; in a separate
chapter on “The Succession to Mao and the End of Maoism,” MacFarquhar writes
that “the fate of China was settled by the ambitions and intrigues of a very
small group of desperate leaders and their families” (CHC 1991, 601,
326fn71). In this version of the
Cultural Revolution put forth by both academics and mass-market biographers,
ideology and genuine policy disputes take a backseat to power-hungry
personalities.
What is behind this shift from taking revolutionary
ideals seriously, as Witke does in her 1977 treatment of Jiang Qing, to the
dominant 1980s and 1990s strategy of ignoring ideology in favor of personal
ambition and power struggles? The answer
is in the timing and the sources. Witke finished her book just after Jiang Qing and the rest of the “Gang
of Four” were arrested and vilified in a mass campaign. But even after the arrests, new chairman Hua
Guofeng continued to affirm the goals of the Cultural Revolution. The meaning of Jiang’s downfall for the arts
world was not entirely clear. When we
remember that some contemporary scholars consider dating the end of the
Cultural Revolution at 1978 instead of 1976, it makes sense that Comrade
Chiang Ch’ing would reflect the important continuing ideological debates of
its time.
Witke’s willingness to address the ideological aims of the Cultural
Revolution also stems from the sources available to her when she wrote the
book. Her primary source – and the
book’s biggest liability as well as its main strength – is the voluble Jiang
Qing herself. Thus, Witke relies on her
conversations with Jiang (these were actually quite circumscribed when the
topic came to the Cultural Revolution) and Jiang’s published speeches on art
and literature, which were meant to serve as ideological study guides. Interestingly, even in 1972 the author got a
clear sense of Jiang Qing’s drive for power, but based on the documentary
record and Jiang’s utterances at the time, Witke understood ideological
transformation to be the purpose behind Jiang’s ambition.
Later works, such as Terrill’s Madame Mao, were written in an
atmosphere of official repudiation of the Cultural Revolution. Why bother giving credence to ideas about
creating art for the masses, upholding worker-peasant-soldier heroes, stressing
class struggle and the like when the revolutionary model works had all but
disappeared under a torrent of new, individualistic art? What’s more, Terrill could turn to the reams
of newly available anti-Gang of Four screeds in both the
To be fair, the weight of Terrill’s often questionable
and unverion or who threw themselves – for
whatever reason – behind “ultra-left” policies.
What’s more, if we limit our analytical toolbox to gossip, personality,
and cynical power struggles (not that these implements should be left out of
the box altogether), we further marginalize
Assessing Cultural Revolutionary Art
Scholars who work on the Cultural Revolution should
also pay more attention to historical context.
Two recent works that remember history, Chen Xiaomei’s Acting the
Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China and
Julia Andrews’s Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of
The fairness and attention to historical detail
employed by Chen and Andrews is a welcome contrast to more conventional attacks
on Cultural Revolutionary art. Terrill’s
criticisms that “the Red Lantern sprang forth to bore a generation of
theatergoers” and that thanks to Jiang Qing’s drama reforms, “the minds of
Chinese theatergoers were reduced to mashed potatoes” are typical (Terrill
1999, 223, 226), as is Michael Schoenhals’s charge that texts on culture are “predictable, uninspired, unconvincing, and ugly” (Schoenhals 1996,
186). Although Chen Xiaomei brings
another set of sometimes ill-fitting analytical baggage to bear in her Acting
the Right Part, her analysis of model theater provides a more well-rounded
picture and exposes the danger of dismissing Cultural Revolutionary art offhand.
Chen, a professor of comparative literature, the daughter of theatrical
luminaries from “Chinese theater’s golden age of the 50s,” and a former
participant in a Cultural Revolution propaganda team (xuanchuandui),
uses the methodology and language of cultural studies in her book. She treats revolutionary model theater as
part of a legitimate body of artistic work and discusses how the models fit
into a long history of politicized theater reform that spanned the Republican
and early PRC eras. In the book’s
prologue and first two chapters, Chen paints a complex picture of culture
during the Cultural Revolution. She
argues that the model works came about through a long process of collaborative
reform and revision – they did not represent a radical rupture from earlier
theatrical works, nor was an ambition-obsessed Jiang Qing their sole author.
As a first-hand consumer of Cultural Revolutionary theater, Chen
demonstrates that the model works and their associated photo albums, children’s
books, and posters were a source of immense enjoyment and entertainment and
even held an erotic appeal for some (Chen 2002, 37). She
treats Cultural Revolutionary art as more than a top down imposition on the
“mashed potato” minds of the Chinese masses.
Through their participation and consumption, Chinese people added to and
changed the cultural offerings of the time.
Thus for the author, model theater played a dual role: it reflected the
“cultural and ideological dynamics” of its time, and it also “significantly contributed
to the ways in which
Julia Andrews’s discussion of painting during the
Cultural Revolution is a fine complement to Chen’s work, for Andrews also places
art in a historical context and notes the impact of wide grassroots
participation in cultural enterprises.
Yet in the end, for all of their historicization and insightful
analysis, both authors, especially Chen, conclude with generally negative assessments
of Cultural Revolutionary art. Before
discussing what might be behind this widespread scholarly criticism, I will
touch upon Andrews’s contributions.
In her study of the relationship between painting and
politics from 1949-1979, Julia Andrews regards the Cultural Revolution within
the larger cultural history of the PRC.
For Andrews, the 1966-1976 period cannot be seen as an isolated
anomaly. The styles and methods of Cultural
Revolution paintings were based on earlier PRC art; and artistic products from
the Cultural Revolution also laid the groundwork for the art of the 1980s
(Andrews 1994, 316). Like Chen’s outline
of the process of model drama creation, Andrews’s identification of long-term
artistic trends that continued throughout PRC history departs from the
conventional 1966-1976 periodization.
Andrews also identifies several important trends in
the arts that contribute to a more complex understanding of Cultural
Revolution. First, because of a
widespread turn away from science and economics after 1966, many ambitious
young people pursued careers in the arts.
Second, populist art policies spread official painting all over
Even for sophisticated recent scholarly works such as
those of Andrews and Chen, there is always a moment of pause when it comes to
pinning a final judgment on Cultural Revolutionary art. Andrews and Chen, who seek to rescue painting
and theater of the period from the margins of scholarly discourse, are not
entirely comfortable enacting a full-scale rehabilitation. In particular, Chen’s naked enthusiasm for
Chinese theater in its 1950s “golden age” and for the torrent of anti-Gang of
Four dramatic works from 1978 to 1980 exposes her hesitance at embracing the
ideological project central to Cultural Revolutionary arts. One of her most damning accusations is that cultural ideologues used model plays and ballets “to divert the
attention of the populace from their severe poverty” (Chen 2002, 78).
Why do scholars who take culture and ideology seriously (instead of
resorting to immediate dismissals) generally sound negative in their final
assessments of the Cultural Revolutionary arts?
Even the sympathetic Witke, who ruminates at length on Jiang Qing’s theoretical
and theatrical contributions, issues a negative judgment on the entire
enterprise. She concludes that a
totalitarian political system is universally at odds with artistic independence
(Witke 1977, 179). The common assumption
– one that I happen to share – is that an artist’s creative autonomy, free from
political mandates on acceptable content or style, is essential to a healthy
cultural sphere, whether in
This type of projection is even more understandable when we realize that
if academics like Andrews, Chen, and Witke had been Chinese university
professors in 1966, they would have suffered violence and humiliation for
trumpeting the value of artistic freedom.
A kind of cross-temporal and cross-cultural solidarity among
intellectuals who espouse the liberal notions of individual creativity and “art
for art’s sake” links the authors of recent Western scholarly work to their
Chinese counterparts who suffered greatly in the Cultural Revolution.
Of course academics rally to decry threats to academic freedom, but it
is important to recognize how this phenomenon might bias scholarship on the
period. It is ironic that the so-called
“liberal” critique of Cultural Revolution-era culture actually restricts what
scholars can say about the period. For
example, revisionist works that do not dwell excessively on the violence and
restrictions that were a part of artistic life during the Cultural Revolution
have been rejected for publication by top American academic presses. Why?
Such works apparently paint too rosy a picture of the period (a member
of the University of California Press review committee for Picturing Power:
Posters of the Cultural Revolution, reported that the manuscript was turned
down for this very reason; the book was eventually published by Rowman &
Littlefield; personal communication, 18 Nov 2002).
It is potentially misleading to omit mention of the Cultural
Revolution’s violence and suppression of creative freedom. However, the academic establishment’s
practice of requiring manuscripts to publicly bemoan the period’s excesses has
its own perils. To insist that
scholarship on the Cultural Revolution must adhere to the
violent/disastrous/culturally-stultifying paradigm ends up limiting our
understanding of the multiple ways in which people experienced the ten years.
Recognizing Diversity: A New Direction for Cultural
Revolution Scholarship?
“Complex” and “diverse” are not
terms generally associated with art produced during the Cultural
Revolution. But almost in spite of
themselves, and with little analysis or commentary, many of the authors
discussed in this essay mention cultural forays between 1966 and 1976 that went
far beyond the limited repertoire of the model works. Such glimpses of little-known operas, films,
and performances reveal the persistence of local cultural initiatives,
particularly during the 1970s. The presence
of unique local art suggests that the Cultural Revolution period was more
diverse and complex than is conventionally thought.
In his Madame Mao, Ross
Terrill perhaps unintentionally contradicts his general portrayal of the
Cultural Revolution period as a complete artistic vacuum overseen by Jiang
Qing. He mentions a controversy over the
1973 film Song of the Gardeners, a local Hunanese production that
features heroic teachers cultivating their young charges. Jiang Qing attempted to suppress the film,
but after Hunanese officials screened it for an appreciative Mao in
Witke and Chen Xiaomei both mention
in passing another product of increased local cultural activity around 1973:
the
Finally, William Hinton’s 1971
visit to Zhangzhuang in
These manifestations of local
artistic initiative should serve as a reminder that beneath both high-minded
official proclamations and dirty elite power plays, cultural life
survived. Scholars like Hinton, Chen,
Terrill, Witke, and Andrews should be commended for bringing this phenomenon to
light. But the lived experience of local
cultural creativity in film, opera, and drama throws into question many of the
central issues that preoccupy these authors.
To be sure, ideological strictures and power politics, along with
widespread violence and censorship, were important factors that colored arts
and culture between 1966 and 1976.
Nonetheless, only by highlighting arts at the local and grassroots level
can we begin to capture the diversity and complexity that characterized life in
References
Andrews, Julia. Painters and Politics in the People’s
Republic of
Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater
and Popular Drama in Contemporary
Evans, Harriet, and
Stephanie Donald, eds. Picturing
Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution.
Fokkema, Douwe. “Creativity and Politics.” In The Cambridge History of China,
Vol. 15, The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions Within the Chinese
Revolution, eds. Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank.
Hinton, William. Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a
MacFarquhar,
Roderick. “The Succession to Mao and the
End of Maoism.” In The Cambridge
History of China, Vol. 15, The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions
Within the Chinese Revolution, eds. Roderick MacFarquhar and John K.
Fairbank.
Schoenhals, Michael,
ed. China’s Cultural Revolution,
1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party.
Terrill, Ross. Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon. Stanford:
Witke, Roxane. Comrade
Chiang Ch’ing.
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2003. All rights reserved.
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