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Featured Review
| Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 693. $35.00.
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| The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976 in most accounts, including the one under review) was "a watershed, the defining decade of half a century of Communist rule in China," to quote the opening sentence of this volume. Roderick MacFarquhar has devoted most of his academic career to understanding the origins of this political movement, and has previously published three authoritative volumes covering the 1956–1966 period. In collaboration with Swedish scholar Michael Schoenhals, widely known in the China field for his dedication in ferreting out primary source materials from public flea markets and private sources within China, the two self-confessed "perfectionists" have produced their long-anticipated, much-delayed account, which will serve as a benchmark for future researchers on this subject. Given the complexity and ambiguities of the Cultural Revolution there can be no "definitive" account, and there are important areas that this volume does not cover, as well as some interpretations open to debate. However, the authors have clearly achieved their admirable goal of producing a single-volume history that simultaneously serves scholars, students, and the general public. Were one to read just one book on the subject, this is unquestionably the first choice. |
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Research on the Cultural Revolution has had an even longer history than the movement itself. Each of the scholarly "waves" has been heavily influenced by the methodological sources available to the researchers. Much of the earliest secondary analysis, relying almost solely on Chinese documents available outside the country, sought to make coherent sense of the event while it was taking place, and to explain—as MacFarquhar has attempted to do in each of his books on this subject, including the current one—why Mao Zedong decided "to tear down what he had done so much to create" (p. 3). Stuart Schram, for example, went back to Qing-dynasty China in the nineteenth century and the debates over the proper relationship between the "Chinese essence" and "Western learning" in his quest for the "origins" of Mao's motivation (Schram, Authority, Participation and Cultural Change in China [1973]). Significantly, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals conclude that this quest is now officially over, with Deng Xiao-ping's adoption of "market Leninism" initiating what is "a historic cultural revolution" and thus abandoning what has been a "vain search for a Chinese version of modernity that had preoccupied the nation's politicians and intellectuals for well over a century" (pp. 460–461). I will return to this argument. |
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By the mid-1970s, as the Cultural Revolution was nearing its official end, a new generation of graduate students went off to do fieldwork in Hong Kong, interviewing refugees and/or reading the increasingly available Red Guard tabloids. Now considered the "first wave" of Cultural Revolution scholarship, this body of work, based as it was on accounts from participants at the grass roots, generally adopted a bottom-up approach. Less concerned with the motivations of Mao and other elites and focused more directly on the conflicts between those satisfied with conditions in China and those who sought to use the movement—encouraged by Mao and his radical supporters, to be sure—to "rebel" (zaofan) against perceived inequities and improve their life chances, this body of scholarship revealed the underlying divisions in Chinese society, until then obscured by the tight control of information dispensed by the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda apparatus (Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study [1978]; Susan L. Shirk, Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China [1982]; Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960–1980 [1982]; Stanley Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism and the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou [1982]; Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation [1985]). |
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