Coping with the Cultural Revolution: Contesting Interpretations

This article looks at the public process of dealing with the Cultural Revolution. This process began in 1976, and although many people inside and outside of China claim that there has been no public discussion of this event in the PRC, a closer look at events since 1976 reveals the contrary. The Cultural Revolution is indeed a major topic of public debate. even though the Chinese Communist Party would prefer for it to fall into oblivion. This article analyses several major contributions to the public debate about the Cultural Revolution. It starts with a discussion of the attempt of the CCP leadership to frame the memory of the Cultural Revolution by launching the campaign to criticize the ”Gang of Four” and by passing the ”Resolution on Some Questions Concerning the History of the Party since the Founding of the PRC” in 1981. It argues that the CCP changed its strategies several times, but has been consistently unable to monopolize public memory of the Cultural Revolution. Although the majority of publications from the PRC strongly criticize the Cultural Revolution as ”ten years of chaos,” there seems to be a growing minority holding a more positive view of the period from 1966 to 1976. These views are mostly aired by overseas Chinese and are made known to the public in China through the Internet. Despite the control of the internet by PRC authorities, these views have permeated into the public discussion in the PRC and have influenced official as well as unofficial historiography of the Cultural Revolution. This article discusses the public debate on the Cultural Revolution in the PRC in terms of a trauma process in which victims and victimizers aim at redefining an identity for the traumatized collective that would be instrumental in repairing the social fabric violated by mass violence during the early phase of the Cultural Revolution. It shows that the CCP leadership felt compelled to define a memory frame of overall complicity out of fear of continuous factional conflicts. However, instead of bringing about reconciliation, this strategy has impeded the process of working through trauma. That is why the debate on the Cultural Revolution is at the same time everywhere and nowhere. People shy away from settling their personal accounts and therefore keep silent on this issue; at the same time, a public discussion goes on but still has not reached the point where it can help to overcome factionalism and propose an assessment of the Cultural Revolution that can claim consensus. The Party is too weak either to create amnesia or to impose its memory frame on the people. The participants can drive the discussion on the Cultural Revolution onwards, but their memories are so fragmented that so far they can only contest the officially held view without replacing it by some other frame. The process of working through the trauma of the Cultural Revolution has not yet come to end.