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Michael Schoenhals, Ed. China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969:
Not a Dinner Party.
Michael Schoenhals’s documentary history of the first years of the
Cultural Revolution is a success on two fronts.
First, it serves as an invaluable text for introducing
Schoenhals divides the book into three parts, all of which consist of
short primary documents accompanied by brief commentaries and explanatory
footnotes. Part One, “Intentions and
Consequences,” includes 1966 pronouncements by Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and Zhou
Enlai, along with 15 other dry official proclamations and articles. The documents illustrate an initial plunge
into “extensive democracy” and “bombarding the headquarters” in 1966 and 1967,
then a pullback as the center attempted to rein in “excessive democracy” (see
Document 9, banning nationwide organizations, and Document 11, proscribing
“ethnic mass organizations,” for example), and finally damage control in 1969
as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) commenced rebuilding both itself and a
polity wracked by social disorder.
The main strength of the volume lies in Part Two, “Effects and
Consequences,” which includes sections on party purges, rebellion, culture, the
economy, and Sino-foreign (mis)perceptions.
From protest letters urging restraint and questioning the top leadership
(Documents 27 and 29, both of which landed their authors in prison), to
Part Three, “After the Event,” combines official, post-1976 verdicts on
the Cultural Revolution with individual reminiscences and displays the editor’s
sensitivity toward differing historical interpretations. Yet the sudden jump from 1966-69 to post-1976
documents reveals the book’s main flaw – it all but completely ignores the
years from 1970 to 1976. Unfortunately,
Schoenhals’s silence on the 1970s perpetuates an already existing bias in the
historical field toward the exciting, tumultuous, and relatively document-rich early
phase of the Cultural Revolution. However, the 1970-1976 period was twice as
long, and certainly just as influential on the development of Chinese society,
as the earlier stage. Although
Schoenhals acknowledges that many characteristics of the Cultural Revolution
continued past 1969, his complete inattention to the Lin Biao affair, the Gang
of Four, rapprochement with the United States, or anything else during the
seven long years between 1969 and Mao’s death, is disappointing.
In addition, while most of the rich and excellently translated primary
documents stand alone, oftentimes Schoenhals’s commentary is too cursory, or
even worse, dismissive. For example,
while undergraduate readers will surely be moved by the gut-wrenching depiction
of Vice-Premier Bo Yibo’s torture and incarceration, the lack of background
information provided on Bo’s status, expertise, and political background make
the story seem like just another struggle session against some old man. In another oversight, Kuai Dafu, the author
of Document 25, is described by Schoenhals as simply “a twenty-one-year-old
student” in
In spite of this shortcoming and an ill-advised, sweeping dismissal of a
document praising cultural revolutionary model operas as “predictable,
uninspired, unconvincing, and ugly” (p. 186), China’s Cultural Revolution
is still an important teaching resource and a valuable contribution to Cultural
Revolution studies. No other
English-language work provides such a wide-ranging, comprehensive, and
engrossing collection of primary sources on the period. In a review, John Gittings wrote that the
book “peers into odd corners as well as plotting the main highways and should
amply fulfill its purpose” (China
Quarterly 152, Dec. 1997, pp. 883-885).
Jeremy Brown
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