The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution

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Cultural Revolution



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5.0 out of 5 starsI love underdog stories (who doesn't
ByGodfree Robertson June 28, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
I love underdog stories (who doesn't?) and this is a great one. Instead of being authored by one of China's 1% (who did suffer during the Cultural Revolution), it's written by one of the 99%, who benefited. If you enjoy hearing both sides of an argument before you make up your mind, you'll enjoy this fine book, which is simultaneously scholarly (the author is a professor of history who teaches in the USA) and first hand. Quite wonderful.
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5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars
Byphcopleon January 20, 2018
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
Great book on correcting myths about the Chinese Revolution. Absolutely a must read.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA splash of cold water reality for Mao's naysayers. ...
Bysleepvarkon November 22, 2014
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
A splash of cold water reality for Mao's naysayers. Just one of a growing corpus of works that point out the lack of historical and biographical credibility of Jung Chang's Mao: the Unknown Story.
My own research shows that there was indeed a 20th century Chinese character that deserved the demonization Jung Chang dealt out, but it wasn't Mao. Her description fits Chiang Kai Shek to a T. Her book bagged the wrong target.
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3.0 out of 5 starsFlawed defense of the Cultural Revolution
ByM. A. Krulon October 20, 2008
Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase
Mobo Gao, who holds the chair in Sinology at the University of Adelaide and is known for his thorough, Hinton-like study of Gao village (Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China) during the modern period, wrote "The Battle for China's Past" out of frustration over the anti-Mao consensus prevailing among specialists and popular views alike. For this reason, the book is on the one hand a defense of the Cultural Revolution's successes, particularly in the immense Chinese countryside (where the vast majority of the people lived at the time), as well as an attack on popular writers and colleagues on the history of modern China for failing to look critically at anti-Mao sources.

Interspersed between some generic considerations on points of view in historiography are, for this reason, solid and readable attacks on two very popular history works on the Maoist period: Chang & Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" (Mao: The Unknown Story) and Li Zhisui's "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" (The Private Life of Chairman Mao). He reveals, as most competent experts in the field have done, the Chang & Halliday book to be a string of lies and made-up nonsense, with unscientific use of sources and misleading if not outright fraudulent attributions. It is indeed much to be regretted that this poor and incompetent book has had such a popular impact. Li's work is critically examined, in particular with an eye to refuting Li's claims about his closeness and intimacy with Mao, and his low office not allowing him nearly as much access as he would have needed to have to write the things he did.

So far, so good. The book suffers however from significant flaws. The first is the excessive reliance on vague and altogether rather dubious sources: Gao seems particularly impressed by what he calls the "e-media", and half the book is taken up by discussing what people have been posting in favor of Mao on various internet fora. It is however not explained what the value of these statements are and why anyone should care about them, especially since anyone can post anything on the internet. It makes a silly impression for Gao to lambast others, sometimes remarkably pedantically, in their use of sources, and then to go on to demonstratively include large amounts of internet posts and emails. What is also annoying is the enormously large amount of obscure Chinese sources used, partially as a result of this approach, which makes it impossible for anyone to properly estimate the relative value of the claims made on his part. Indeed the level of detail in the book is often very high, with relatively little being explained, so that one wonders exactly what kind of public this book was written for. An index of Chinese names and terms at the back does help a little, but not enough by any stretch to alleviate this. The third problem is the lack of structure of the book - a part of it consists of articles Gao had already written on Chinese history-writing, a part of it of the "e-media" stuff mentioned above, and part of it on random observations about how authors get the Mao period wrong, often in useless detail.

The book is not bad as such, and Gao is clearly motivated to write it out of a very palpable sense of frustration and anger with anti-Mao ideology, but it still leaves much to be desired. Especially considering the import of the topic, it is too bad that the only really interesting considerations, namely why Maoist policy can be seen as having made a great improvement for most people despite the Great Leap Forward and so forth, are quoted only from Amartya Sen! Indeed Gao would probably have done his case a lot more good if he had arranged his criticisms of Chang & Halliday and Li around a more systematic discussion of that topic.
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5.0 out of 5 starsFrom Branddenotes.blogspot.com
ByJ.P. Frankson October 13, 2008
Format: Paperback
The book's thesis: that the dominant narrative about China in the US is also the dominant narrative about China in China. In China, it is dominant in the sense that it reigns supreme within the brains of the elite, who dominate the media and academia in a far more direct fashion than in the U.S. So foreign scholars who read the most easily accessible Chinese sources are reading sources from those Chinese who supported Mao's revolution only insofar as it was the most likely to succeed at ejecting foreign imperialists (the Japanese, British, etc.) and allowing the Chinese elite to make China a strong country in the sense that the U.S. is a strong country: in that its elite would have sway on the international scene, while the majority of China's people would eke out a more or less marginal existence. The Chinese writers foreign scholars read are those that Mao called "capitalist roaders," in that they wanted for China to take the capitalist road to national greatness, rather than the socialist road which would distribute wealth more evenly, thereby frustrating the emergence of a stratified Chinese elite who would then enjoy a sufficient concentration of resources to wield some power on the international stage - like in the old days.

Gao makes this case, and then demonstrates how on the most loosely regulated media, internet websites, a coterie of intellectuals representing an arguably much larger segment of the Chinese population convincingly argue that under Mao's leadership, China made incredible economic advances that formed the foundation for China's recent GDP growth spurt.

Most interesting excerpt:

"A good test case would be to compare China, the largest communist country, with India, the largest democracy, using labels for convenience. The Novel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes the point that although India never suffered a 'politically induced famine' like the Great Leap Forward in China:
'[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million] a year during the same period. ... Thus in this one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from 'this failed capitalist experiment' (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be attributed to the 'failed communist experiment' all over the world since 1917." (Black 2000)"
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4.0 out of 5 starsVery useful study of lies about China
ByWilliam Podmoreon July 10, 2012
Format: Paperback
In this fascinating and entertaining book, Mobo Gao, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Adelaide Confucius Institute of the University of Adelaide, contests the demonisation of Mao and the Chinese revolution. He shows how all too many writers lie about China.

He has a chapter on the debate about the Cultural Revolution, two chapters on how history is constructed and two chapters on Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: the unknown story. He also has a chapter each on Li Zhisui's fiction The private life of Chairman Mao, contrary narratives on the Cultural Revolution, contrary narratives on the Mao era, the urban-rural divide, the battle over China's history, and the values of socialism and China's future.

He points out that Kong Shuyu noted that Jung Chang's best-seller Wild swans is `self-invention', `idealized self-justification', and `full of imaginative reconstruction of events, using hindsight to alter her recollections'. She `has altered her story to suit the wishes of hindsight to make her behaviour seem more decisive and less shameful'.

Chang and Halliday's book on Mao was accurate in only one respect - when they called it a `story'. There are huge gaps between their sensational claims and their uncheckable references. Andrew Nathan of Columbia University said it was hard to know which of the many sources they gave for an event was relevant and concluded, "many of Chang and Halliday's claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence."

For example, they claimed that the diplomats Archibald Clark Kerr and Lauchlin Currie were Soviet agents. But, as James Heartfield pointed out, "It does not fill you with confidence in Chang and Halliday's research to discover that outside of far-right websites, nobody believes that either Baron Inverchapel or the New Dealer Currie were Soviet agents, not even the authorities that they cite." Chang and Halliday are very poor historians.

Chang's father was Deputy Minister of the Propaganda Department of Sichuan province, though she lied that he worked in the Public Affairs Department. She has inherited his taste for propaganda. Their book is a hymn of hate against China. It is a scandal that such a shoddy book has sold so well.

Gao points out that from 1965 to 1985, China's GDP grew by 7.49 per cent a year, as against India's 1.7 per cent. The great mass of China's people gained from the revolution: in jobs, higher wages, welfare, health and education.

But, with the capitalist-roaders in charge, exploitation has come back. In 2004, in a Puma shoe factory run by a Taiwan businessman employing 30,000 workers in Guangdong, the average hourly wage rate was 31 US cents, while the company made $12.24 per worker per hour. Working hours were 7.30 am to 9 pm; sometimes workers had to work on till 12 pm, at the same hourly rate, or none. They slept in the factory compound, 12 people to a room, one bathroom for 100 people. They were not allowed to talk at work or to leave the compound without permission. There were no health and safety regulations. This is capitalism's ideal. It is what Mao fought to prevent.
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1.0 out of 5 starsThis is NOT a good history
Byharry williamson November 6, 2012
Format: Paperback
Just read the incredibly selective 'A Battle For China's Past' which attempts to rethink the history of the cultural revolution relative to the problems of modern day China. There are MANY problems to this text. The authors underlying rhetoric; trying to downplay the cultural revolution by challenging our 'accepted viewpoint' that Mao was a a force for bad; constantly referring to there study as seeking objectivity or the brightside of the mass famine of the cultural revolution by arguing that it had a positive effect; claiming- never with sources- that the cultural revolution " inspired the idea of popular democracy"; labeling anti-Maoist texts as "neoliberal hegemony" and claiming that these western takes of the cultural revolution are no more than modern Chinese view exported to the west; constantly using the phrase: "Many others would argue," without citing anyone; this incredible downplay of the reeducation camps through Marxist ideology - a viewpoint which the author is obviously attempting to convey:
"the experience is now narrated as ‘detention in a labour camp’, and a violation of fundamental human rights. But for Mao and others at that time, and for many even now, it was intended to create new subjectivity. It was intended that the urban and social elite would experience physical labour so that they would be able to understand and empathize with the reality of life of the majority of the people. It was meant to be an approach to a new way of governing and governance."
The author constantly attempts to conceal their subjectivity by questioning the viewers OWN subjectivity- this can clearly be seen throughout the first half of the book!
I understand the author is trying to refute a viewpoint that is against the 'accepted viewpoint' of Mao (which, in fact, is not so accepted in China as he attempts to argue - the huge portrait of Mao that still resides over Tiananmen square being evidence) but he does so with far too much passion for this to be considered historical!
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5.0 out of 5 starsA good book
ByM. Gyurikon January 21, 2009
Format: Paperback
This is a good book. I read it over the summer. It's filled with information. It presents both sides of the arguments the author presents. It's definitely worth buying.
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