Abstract
This book is a reconstruction of the 10-year history of a rural county in China between 1966 and 1976, the so-called period of the Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Feng County is located in the middle of a tri-province area. It is the furthest western county in Jiangsu Province, and is adjacent to Shandong Province on the north and Anhui Province on the South. As the book indicates in its prologue, many of the researches and book manuscripts that have been done about the Cultural Revolution are about big cities and provincial capitals. Very little attention has been given to events at the county level, let alone in rural counties by Sinologists and other interested scholars. The truth is, there are over 2000 counties in China. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, approximately 80 percent of the population was living in rural counties. In order to gain a representative understanding about what really happened during the 10-year Cultural Revolution in China, county-level research and reconstruction of the history of that decade are essential. This book is a valuable addition to the repertoire of studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Since I am not an historian, I don’t have the expertise to comment on the methodology and historiography of obtaining materials and firsthand information in this context. But from a sociological perspective, personal interviews, key informants, personal diaries, working notes, and county archives are all valuable sources for reconstructing historical periods and events. What sets this study apart from others is that Dong and Walder picked out a marginal rural county and discovered some different patterns from those occurring in the big cities in China.
The first difference is that Feng County was a few months behind the national trend at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It started late and finished later than the rest of the country. Because of the small percentage of urban dwellers, the second difference is that the majority of the participants in the political movements and armed fights were rural farmers, unlike other parts of China where the major participants in violent fights were students and urban employees. The third difference is that the factions in Feng County were not divided by the “Kick” and “Support” factions of some ousted municipal top leaders like many provincial cities, nor were they divided by supporting or resisting military interventions. In Feng County, the Liansi faction was allied with the local military unit, the People’s Armed Department (PAD), which was subordinate to the Xuzhou Military Subdistrict under Nanjing Military District in Jiangsu Province; the Paolian faction was allied with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Unit 6174, part of 68th Army which was under the jurisdiction of Ji’nan Military Region, which was located in Shandong Province. This appears to be a very unique situation in that two factions in a county were divided by their support of local military forces on one hand and regional/national military forces on the other. The two civilian factions were like proxies engaged in conflicts between the two-level military forces, one local and one regional/national. The book did not explain nor elaborate upon these internal struggles within the military, but indicated that something of this nature was happening within the military itself.
The fourth difference is that most of the violent factional fights nationwide had subsided or ceased in 1968, yet the armed fights and clashes between the two factions in Feng County didn’t end until 1970, even after the establishment of the Feng County Revolutionary Committee in September 1969. As a matter of fact, the factional animosity and hatred lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Although Feng County’s factional fights were not the most violent and lethal compared with some other areas and counties in China, the length of factional animosity and hatred lingered for a longer time.
As a young teenager growing up during these 10 years in China, I witnessed several local armed fights as well as those in many other counties and villages during the Cultural Revolution. I grew up in Korla County in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwest China. Korla County (now a city) is the capital of the Bayingolun Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture. Between 1966 and 1967, the factional clashes and armed fights were at their peak. But most of the participants were young students and urban dwellers; rural dwellers were not involved in the fights and violence as in Feng County. One major reason was that there were enough urban students and workers/civil servants who were the major players. The other reason was that most of the rural population were ethnic Uighur, most of whom did not speak Putonghua (the official Chinese language), nor could the urban dwellers speak Uighur. The language barrier prohibited the Uighur from joining the urban people to form factions and participating in the violent fights.
When the Central Directives of “grasp revolution and promote production” issued in late 1967, most of the factional clashes subsided or stopped throughout 1968. Most of the public and railway transportations were restored, and my mother even dared to take me and my younger brother to make the over 2000-mile journey back to Beijing to visit her family in January of 1969. We took a bus to Turpan, where we took the train to Lanzhou, then to Xian and finally Beijing. During each transfer, we had several hours or a whole day to tour the cities. There were not many signs of armed fights in Lanzhou or Xian. When we arrived in Beijing, there were big crowds at the train station to bid farewell to the “sending-down” youth. From the end of 1968, Mao ordered the “Red Guards” and other urban youth who were over the age of 16 to go to the countryside to receive re-education from the farmers. That was another reason why the violent factional fights subsided in most parts of China. Then we visited Baoding in Hebei Province, a city near Beijing, Mancheng County, and several villages in the area during the early months of 1969. Besides witnessing a single gunshot in Mancheng downtown, we did not see any armed fights in these areas. Then on our way back to Xinjiang in April, we went to Fengzhen County in Inner Mongolia, Yinchuan City in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Lanzhou. Although I was a young teenager and did not do any deliberate research, I stayed in each village and county for weeks. While there, I experienced a normal life pattern and did not see any armed fights. All things basically went back to normal as K-12 schools reopened and urban employees were back to their work posts. Based upon my personal experience, Feng County was indeed an anomaly.
The interesting question we should ask is why the situation in Feng County was so different from other parts of the country? More specifically, why didn’t the authors mention the “Educated Youth Sending-Down” movement? Their key informant, Zhang Liansheng, and his other teammates should have been eligible as the sending down youth. Why didn’t they follow Mao’s teaching and how did they avoid this nationwide mobilization?
In the last chapter, the authors did ask two questions: “What were Feng County’s factional conflicts really all about? [and] Why did these factions form, and why did they prove so hard to reconcile?” (p. 177). But I don’t think the authors provided a satisfactory or an adequate answer. I believe the key answer is in their text, but they did not elaborate on this and just mentioned it lightly. That is, “many local party cadres and others still followed the rural custom of taking on nominal kinship with others (ren ganqin), or swearing oaths of brotherhood (bai bazi), and still others formed master disciple relationships (shitu guanxi) as part of training in martial arts” (p. 125).
Based on my own living experience in China and my sociological training, the key to Feng County’s uniqueness is twofold. One was the nature of the internal conflict within the military, which used civilian factions as proxies. Another was the nature of the rural participants who were farmers, being uneducated or less educated, less disciplined, and carrying on established traditions of simple love and hate feelings. Throughout the book, one often reads how most of the fights were about revenge and winning the upper hand. The original goal and purpose of their fights were thrown away very early on. This was why they could ignore all the cease-fire orders from the Central Government and the agreements of reconciliation between leaders of the two factions thus prolonging the armed conflicts much longer.