Organizer: Jie Li, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Lingchei Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
More than thirty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, is there
a more sober and in-depth popular understanding of the Maoist decades, or has
the recent past been purloined through nostalgia, sensationalism, and commodification?
How have revolutionary heroes been de-mystified or re-mystified, their legacies
re-evaluated and re-fashioned by latter-day or international admirers, emulators,
or detractors? How have ideologically inflected texts, images, and figures from
the 1950s and 1960s disappeared and reappeared in contemporary public spheres
and in different cultural contexts?
Bringing together retrospective renderings of Mao's legacy in literature,
cinema, intellectual discourses, and international politics, the papers in this
panel demonstrate that current representations of the Maoist years, particularly
among the generations who lived through them, are marked by a profound ambivalence
between the nostalgia for revolutionary idealism and the haunting knowledge
of unspeakable horrors. Combing through the past's vicissitudes, excavating
its relics, and re-reading its texts, such reminiscences constitute at once
a belated unlearning of totalitarianism and a work of mourning for the premature
demise of their youth. For those who must cross a cultural or generational gap
to access that era, on the other hand, its radical ethics and aesthetics may
inspire fascination and appropriations that transform the Maoist legacy to suit
the exigencies of their own historical circumstances. This panel will therefore
outline the temporal, spatial, and psychological spheres of influence cast by
Maoism as well as chronicle the individual or collective, arduous or effortless
feats of transcendence beyond those shadows.
Enhua Zhang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Ox ghosts and snake spirits”, originally a phrase characterizing
a poetic style in the ninth century, was taken out of its original text and context
to designate a downgraded social group during the Cultural Revolution. Ironically,
Old Ghost (alias of Ma Bo, son of famous Communist writer Yang Mo) who savored
all the bitterness of the Cultural Revolution, would identify himself with “ghost”.
As one of both the “lost generation” and the witnesses of the Cultural
Revolution, the Old Ghost is a perfect example to investigate the nexus or to
bridge the gap between Chinese revolutionary past and present. Thus, this paper
puts Old Ghost and his writings (Blood Red Sunset, Blood and Iron, and My Mother
Yang Mo) in the larger context from the founding of PRC to the contemporary to
delve into various issues concerning memory, writing, aesthetics, and ethics.
It discusses how the PRC sanctioned revolutionary classics shaped Old Ghost as
well as his generation’s sense and sensibility during their formative years.
However, his emulation of previous revolutionary models leads to his warped ethics
and aesthetics. As a product of Maoist China, Old Ghost has gone through molding
and melting from the socialist to the postsocialist era. Old Ghost is also a
case of triple hauntology; he is first haunted by PRC’s revolutionary past,
then by the Cultural Revolution. He himself continues to haunt China with his
writings and his own existence fashioning old while still young and claiming
to be a ghost while alive.
Mingwei Song, Wellesley College
Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934)
provided several generations of Chinese youths living in Mao’s era with
the most widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel
Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodox revolutionary
education and literary imagination during Mao’s reign. While the past
decade saw a reviving interest in Mao’s legacy, Pawel Korchagin has also
regained his popularity in Chinese media, with his name and image being appropriated
by numerous artists and filmmakers to portray the new generation’s self-fashioning.
The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s
heroic story reveal a huge gap between the Maoist ideology and the post-Cultural
Revolutionary ideas. This paper will look into the intricate relationships between
Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations,
through which I hope to achieve a better understanding of the cultural politics
of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings in a changing Chinese
society. The three parts of my paper will respectively examine: (1) the liberal
thinker Liu Xiaofeng’s essay “In Love with Tonya” (1995) that
tries to foreground the humanist and even liberal seeds buried in the original
novel, (2) Lu Xuechang’s film The Making of the Steel (1997) and its contribution
to the nostalgia for a better past, and (3) CCTV’s 20-episode TV drama
How the Steel Was Tempered (2000) as a commercialized adaptation that turns
the revolutionary bildungsroman into a sentimental melodrama.
Miaowei Weng, Washington University in St. Louis
This paper explores Communist China's propaganda techniques and practices
as its ways of penetrating Latin America during 1956-71. By examining Spanish
and Chinese reports and news in the media, radio, and pamphlets during this
period, as well as interviewing Chinese and Latin American old-generation leftist
intellectuals, I will look into how the Chinese propaganda package (generally
known as Maoism), including cultural exchange, printed media, radio, even political
tourism, was implemented, and how it was received and reacted by the affected
Latin Americans. The setting up of the first Communist China's Spanish program
in radio toward Latin America in 1956 marks the inception of the official propaganda.
This campaign waxed in the sixties with the split between USSR and China and
waned in 1971 when China proclaimed to cease as the U.S. and China thawed their
relations. Both Mao's World Revolution fantasy and Communist China's national
interests accompanied the process, taking this continent as an integral object.
This project will also consider these questions and attempt to provide some
answers: Has the legacy of this propaganda anything to do with China's practices
toward Latin America in the present when China's fervor toward this area resurrects
due to economic interests? To what degree the contemporary Latin American leftist
movements inherited legacy from Maoism?
Jie Li, Harvard University
In 1960, a young woman named Lin Zhao was imprisoned for having brazenly
criticized Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. Often deprived of pen and
paper, she used her blood to write voluminous poems and essays on the jail wall,
on bed sheets, and on her clothes, fighting for freedom and decrying despotism.
Executed in 1968, her legend of courage, famously retold in Hu Jie's banned
but widely circulated documentary, has become an inspiration to many intellectuals
in China and a focal point in the discussion of living in truth. Analyzing
Lin Zhao's extant writings, Hu Jie's film, and the testimonies of her family
and acquaintances, this paper inquires into the life and myth of this "Chinese
Joan of Arc" in the context of an impressive pantheon of modern women martyrs
who had sacrificed their lives for their ideals. While tracing out the genealogy
of her radical ideas and self-fashioning, the first part focuses on the unlikely
mixture of Christianity, Communism, and traditional Chinese cultural values
in her upbringing. The second part is devoted to her posthumous legend and
textual legacy. Fragmented, locked away, perhaps lost or destroyed, the fate
of her body of writing is so uncertain that whatever preserved through serendipity,
anonymous acts of courage, or oral transmission becomes gospel-like, even
if fiction sometimes intercepts testimony in attempts at apotheosis. Through
the biography and hagiography of this re-discovered woman martyr, this paper
will examine the contemporary Chinese suppression and reconstruction of memory
with respect to the Maoist era.
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