After returning to America, A and I have settled into a more regular routine, which means Chinese classes and yoga for her, and the dark unending cave known as the Beijing archives for me. My one New Year’s resolution was to be more forthright with my area of study and to cease obfuscating about what I am researching. To that end I told the archivists this week that I intend to study the Cultural Revolution. This garnered a very hesitant response, and I could tell that the archivists were on the verge of denying my request. Before they could drop the hammer I quickly asserted that I was a PhD student studying Chinese history (subtext: not a secret agent. I only function in that capacity in certain European countries). One of the archivists looked up at me and responded, “You study history? The Cultural Revolution is not history.”
If nothing else, post-modernism has taught us that history and the past are two wholly separate phenomena. The best historians bring a narrative structure to some small sliver of the past, and do it with a modicum of accuracy. There is no better way to describe the Cultural Revolution than as a massive political event that began 45 years ago, but that is absent from history. For all that people may talk about and write about the Cultural Revolution, it remains a taboo subject without an expressive outlet required for good history. And at a more basic level, archivists (and those above them) continue to deny access to information. So we’re left with memory (which forms the basic essence of the past), but not history (which attempts to synthesize information). In the case of China, the former is present and inexorably valuable, but the latter is sorely missing.
The Cultural Revolution is the closest China came to civil war since, well, the Chinese civil war. The problem, however, is that while the Chinese Revolution and the victory of the CCP has been well documented in history (albeit an adulterated state-driven version of that history) the Cultural Revolution was quickly swept under the rug in favor of quick modernization. While the History of the Cultural Revolution remains elusive, the memory of that event has proven powerful to the state, notable as a deterrent against unwanted protest, mass action and the Left. Any sort of Leftist tendency is often disrupted by the unspoken threat that the days of the Cultural Revolution may return. Hence the reason why China’s President constantly talks about a “creating a harmonious society” – and why he has slapped those words on everything in China. Compare that to the motto of the Cultural Revolution: “It is right to rebel.”
That doesn’t mean that in place of the Cultural Revolution there is only silence. Indeed, many people have risked quite a bit sharing their stories, and more people are willing to speak on the subject every day. As more material becomes available the Cultural Revolution will move out of the realm of memory and into the field of history. And that may actually be a bad thing. It depends on who does the writing, and how much the state interferes. The only thing worse than history denied is history ossified (a rhyme). Until we can match memory with documents, sources, texts and the various other materials that make historical pursuit a possibility, the History of the Cultural Revolution will remain unaligned with the past.
