Abstract
The year 2016 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. In China, the event was celebrated with … silence. No official commemoration or academic conference was held and media outlets were ‘invited’ not to tackle the issue. Since the death of Mao and the subsequent anti-Maoist purge symbolised by the fall of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, Beijing has repudiated the Cultural Revolution and tightly controlled debate and publications about the issue. Unfortunately, despite its epoch-making nature, the event was rarely or very timidly commemorated in the West, due in part to the very limited research about the topic and China’s ongoing propaganda in the twenty-first century. The double opportunity to deepen our grasp of this complex but understudied period and to support the Chinese scholars who are struggling to pursue their research in an increasingly hostile environment was, thus, indisputably missed.
In France, it is surprisingly not the established Asian studies departments which arranged the largest conference on this subject but the University of Lorraine’s Mediation Research Center. The book under review is the result of that event which gathered more than 20 speakers in Nancy in early December 2016. Two points are especially noteworthy: first, more than half of the speakers were Chinese. This is rare enough to be underlined. Owing to logistical problems, restrictions and pressures imposed by the Chinese government and a certain apathy on the part of Western academia, most scholarly events included, at best, a few Chinese scholars. Second, the more seasoned Chinese contributors were all highly rated within their own field. Without going through the whole list of speakers, mention must be made of three researchers associated with Shanghai-based Fudan University (four if we include Jin Dalu who retired from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and worked closely with Fudan staff) as well as notable independent researchers like He Shu and Wu Di, who jointly created the electronic journal Remembrance in 2008, the first publication dedicated to bringing out excerpts of memoirs and interviews of Cultural Revolution protagonists. Interestingly, the former group of academics have tried unsuccessfully to set up a department devoted to the study of the Cultural Revolution, whereas the latter two had to close down their online journal towards the end of 2017. All this testifies to the significance of the individuals who gathered at this conference.
On the French side, the most innovative contributions undoubtedly are the articles describing the relationship of the French Right with Mao’s China. Over the past few years, publications have mushroomed and discussed French Maoism in length, although often with limited depth. My own research shows that attraction to Maoist China, both in France and overseas, by and large predates the Cultural Revolution and, more importantly, was not exclusively limited to the radical Left. In this respect, reading the ‘rightist’ literature, for example the books of Roger Massip from Le Figaro, as well as periodicals such as the Revue des Deux Mondes or the Jesuit periodical Etudes, is very instructive and offers a much more nuanced picture of French sensitivities in the 1960s and 1970s. The two contributions of Olivier Dard and Gilles Richard go in this direction and discuss, on the one hand, the ways some Extreme Right writers used China as a tool to pursue their own nationalistic agenda and, on the other hand, dwell on the ties of the Jeunes Giscardiens (‘Young Giscardians’) with China. Amusingly, several of these then young and liberal activists have maintained a relationship with China to this day: Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who refused the position of French ambassador to China in 2010 under President Nicolas Sarkozy and retired from politics in 2017, is now president of the French think tank ‘Prospective and Innovation’ which is committed to strengthening economic relations with Africa and China. Incidentally, he informally served as ‘special emissary to China’ for French President Emmanuel Macron during his recent visit to Beijing.
It is impossible to summarise the content of the 20 articles gathered in the book. We will instead highlight a few interesting points raised by the authors. He Shu, a leading independent researcher based in Chongqing, reminds us that ‘research conditions [in China] are challenging. We [researchers] have no access to archives, it is hard to organise seminars and conferences, financial aid is very limited and it is very tough to publish articles and books, without even mentioning the multifarious pressures we have to bear’. Historians, he adds, therefore find it difficult to get rid of the habit to serve the government’s political aims. Political content has changed but, in the face of an obvious lack of access to primary sources, historians continue to promote biased theses and jump to unfounded conclusions instead of trying to ‘scrupulously look for evidence’ (p. 100). It is an important reminder, insofar as most Western scholars too have based their work on secondary sources which fitted their understanding or political views instead of questioning the reliability of the sources used. For instance, the memoirs of Deng Xiaoping’s daughter or Mao Zedong’s former physical doctor are continuously cited in Western literature despite their dubious and very subjective narratives.
In another chapter, the sociologist Erik Neveu argues that ‘the socio-history of the Cultural Revolution is very much a work in progress… It has improved through the collection of memoirs and objectivation of the human cost and violence of that decade’. However, Neveu indirectly criticises the canonization of Simon Leys’s central thesis: ‘can we indefinitely content ourselves with the machiavelian – and maybe also lazy and spiteful – explanation of the Cultural Revolution that consists in presenting it as a chess game played by party leaders with millions of pawns?’. The author legitimately points to the well-documented work by Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun (2000) on the Shanghai Commune that clearly shows the relative but real autonomy of workers who were exasperated by persisting inequalities, the omnipotence of bureaucrats and the constant rejection of their claims. Many memoirs corroborate this statement. Interestingly, Neveu suggests that sinologists might want to draw from recent historiographic advances about the French Revolution, as demonstrated in the works of Jean-Clément Martin and Timothy Tackett. The latter historian claims that ideologies do not bring about revolution but are in fact weapons used by actors already stirred into action by social or political injustice (p. 225–6). This is somewhat the process described earlier in the book by former Party School historian Bu Weihua, when he describes the formation of the Beijing Red Guards, which took place before the official launch of the Cultural Revolution.
If the topics discussed are not always particularly innovative (for instance, Antonioni's movie 'Chung Guo' or Maoist activist in Northern France), the articles are very well written and many are unique in their approach or focus: for example, Chongqing armed conflicts and death toll, the evolution of the Cultural Revolution, the evolving stance of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association, and the intricate connections between anticolonialism, the Cultural Revolution and the Algerian War as seen through the experience of the influential activist and writer Jean-Luc Einaudi.
As the contributions are numerous and the topics diverse, the book lacks a certain unity. Grouping together articles per theme (e.g., art, French political life, Chinese politics, etc.) and adding an introduction for each section would have helped readers to understand the bigger picture and situate the articles within larger historiographic trends. This said, the book is original, extremely informative and strongly recommended for art and politics students interested in mass movements, Maoist China and contemporary France.