Milton, David and Nancy Dall Milton

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David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton. The Wind will not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China, 1964-1969. New York: Pantheon, 1976.

Nancy and David Milton have put together a very accessible and interesting account of their experiences in China from 1964-1969, attractively named after a “favorite old saying of Chairman Mao.” While some readers may, at first glance, harbor reservations about the accuracy or validity of foreigners’ accounts for understanding the Cultural Revolution, the Milton book and others of its genre provide a critical frame of reference from which to reassess the key events and participants in the tumult. At least as useful as the accounts of xiaoyaopai (non-participants) in presenting a third-person perspective, foreigners’ eyewitness accounts of the Cultural Revolution are an interesting facet of what has been described as “a Rashomon story of gigantic scale and monumental complexity.” (Anne Thurston, Enemies of the People, p. 155)

Although the Miltons nominally aligned themselves with the Hongqi (Red Flag) faction at the First Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing where they taught English, and even wrote one big character poster, they were not deeply involved in the day-to-day affairs of the Cultural Revolution. As recently arrived foreigners, the Miltons were presumed to be ignorant of the intricate workings of Chinese political disputes, and were thus occasionally invited to struggle sessions, meetings and public dazibao viewings as part of their political education. For the most part, it seems that no official line dictated just what the role of China’s foreign residents should be in the Cultural Revolution. The Miltons’ account is interesting precisely because of the privilege and ambiguity of their position, which allowed them to correspond with teachers and students of both sides in the factional disputes—as well a circle of involved foreigners, like Anna Louise Strong and Sid Rittenberg—without being overly mired in political infighting of the day. To their credit, the Miltons acknowledge the limitations of the outsider’s view with the following: “Outsiders who share the visions but not the practical reality of a people involved in revolution tend to force their own visionary symmetry on a distant political process which, for the participants, constitutes a necessary disorder upon which social laws force their own end” (p. 361).

Some careful thought went into the crafting of this book, as evinced by the opening chapters on China’s continuous revolution and the significance of the conflict between “two lines” that influenced the decision to launch the GPCR. Nancy and David Milton also offer some broader insights into the significance of the Cultural Revolution for China’s world status and foreign policy in the seventies. However, at times their analysis seems to conjure up deceptively simple answers to difficult questions, and some of their generalizations about the GPCR are sweeping statements based only on a few supporting facts about elite politics and some reminiscences from their Beijing experience. With the exception of some laudatory remarks praising Shanghai’s January Revolution as the “apogee of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” (p. 193) and a brief summary of the Wuhan Incident, little is revealed about the GPCR in other parts of China other than the occasional rumor of violence. While this is by no means a fatal flaw, it does limit the scope and the narrative’s ability to invoke bold conclusions like the following: “China’s Cultural Revolution was the final act in a long process which, though generating universal concepts, served as the political cauldron for forging an independent and modern Chinese nation beholden to none and ready to compete with the largest states in the game of nations” (p. 377). In one instance, a statement that we now know to be clearly incorrect was used to support the image of China’s strong self-reliance: “[After the Great Leap] the Chinese did suffer from malnutrition in those [hard] years, but there was no famine” (p. 18). This could indicate that at the time, there were simply some issues that the narrators did not have clear information or knowledge about. Moreover, a large part of their analysis is caught up in the politics of Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, no doubt reflecting the preoccupation with foreign policy issues that colored the Cultural Revolution at the First Foreign Languages Institute.

Such shortcomings, however, should not detract from the main contribution of this book, which is a brief but fascinating glimpse at the dilemmas facing China’s foreign residents in the GPCR. Nancy and David Milton thoughtfully delineate the various classes of foreigners and their motivations, from the newcomers and itinerant teachers to “old hands”—who were sometimes Chinese citizens, Party members or even cadres—to foreign residents who sought to “divest their lives of the special privileges which the Chinese impose on all foreigners” (p. 215). Behind the story of the Bethune-Yenan Regiment, the first and only foreigners’ Red Guard organization, was what the Miltons describe as “an impressive representation of ‘world citizens’ who saw no reason not to take their place, insofar as that was possible, next to the Chinese rebels” (p. 215). The participation of foreigners in the GPCR, including the strange case of Sid Rittenberg’s brief takeover of Peking Radio, is a topic not often detailed in Cultural Revolution studies. The Miltons provide a good introduction to this topic, though more details on Bethune-Yenan and also the experience of their teenage sons (who attended Chinese schools with cadres’ children) would have further enriched their work.

In short, The Wind will not Subside is an engaging narrative that, while by no means a comprehensive survey, succeeds in providing a decent introduction to the topic of foreigners’ perceptions of the Cultural Revolution. If read in conjunction with others of its genre, this work of “hard-headed analysis and concise writing” (Graham E. Johnson, Pacific Affairs, 50.3, Autumn 1977, p. 503) may help paint a portrait of yet another player in the complex Rashomon tale that is the GPCR.

Dahpon Ho