Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution in China's Southern Periphery

In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party sponsored massive projects of knowledge production, mobilizing investigators across the country at local, regional, and national levels to collect information and survivor testimonies regarding events that had transpired prior to and during the Cultural Revolution. The purpose of these state-sponsored projects, such as the wenshi ziliao (cultural and historical materials) in which the People's Political Consultative Conference mobilized its networks at every administrative level to compile enormous amounts of detailed historical information, was to reconsolidate centralized party control over the country by achieving the CCP's version of political truth and reconciliation.One such project, the information generated from which forms the basis for Andrew Walder's narrative and argument in Civil War in Guangxi, involved central party authorities’ systematic top-down campaign of investigations into the extraordinary violence in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. As Walder explains, the investigators’ main objective, in the face of resistance from local cadres who had participated in this violence, was to ascertain the scope of the killings and identify the perpetrators, extending offers of compensation to surviving family members and purging perpetrators from the local party structure (201–4).The politics of knowledge production that informed and shaped these investigations and the nature of the information they produced is clearly important and is briefly noted by the author at the end of the book in the appendix, where he acknowledges that the “results were a product of a politically motivated investigation” and even reveals that “the analysis presented in this book largely echoes the primary conclusion of the investigation” (206). However, except for his brief acknowledgment in the appendix, Walder does not examine this key dimension of the project. Instead, he generally accepts the information generated from the investigations as transparently valid and truthful based on the sheer amount and detail of information that the investigators compiled. He reasons that the “extraordinary level of evidentiary detail lends them considerable authority” and “there are so many different types of evidence presented in the materials that it is difficult to imagine that this conclusion was seriously distorted by the political objectives of the investigators and their sponsors in Beijing” (206).The absence of a sustained critical approach to examining the politics of knowledge production that drove the collection of information and the conducting of interviews with traumatized survivors is unfortunately a missed opportunity that would have conceptually enriched the book's contributions and perspectives. There is also a surprising absence of engagement with the scholarly literature on the politics of knowledge production in the People's Republic of China that one would expect from a study that is so deeply immersed in and reliant on the information generated by this state-sponsored investigative project.That said, if the reader is interested in the rich contents of the eighteen volumes that this investigation generated and the story that they tell about the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi, this book will not disappoint. The author presents us with a painstakingly detailed and nuanced exploration of the data and narratives that the investigators produced, cross-referenced with other published sources and local histories that previous scholarship had coded and analyzed (24). Using complex and exhaustive coding and statistical analysis of this data for identifying regional variations in social and political dynamics, Walder reaches conclusions about the factors driving violence in Guangxi that challenge previous explanations by scholars who had not benefited from access to these materials. For example, as he discusses in chapter 1, previous scholarship on the subject had attributed the extraordinary scale and brutality of the violence in Guangxi, particularly against noncombatant “politically stigmatized households” in rural regions, to factors including communal conflict in local society that had grown out of ethnic tensions, economic backwardness, and geographical remoteness, and had “spun out of [the state's] control in remote rural communities as an unintended consequence of official rhetoric during a campaign to suppress an urban insurgency” (14).Through a close and comprehensive examination of the massive volume of province-wide and locally specific information about power structures, factional politics, and the identities of victims and perpetrators, Walder contends that the violence was, in fact, “not due to collective activity by ordinary rural residents that spiraled out of control, but was instead part of an organized, top-down campaign . . . implemented by rural militia under the command of military and security networks” that “reached across the province and entered deeply, if unevenly, into rural communities” (25). This involved what he describes in chapter 3 as a militarization of society in which “civilian officials were thrust aside,” “military officers formed ad-hoc committees to carry out government functions,” and “forces under the Military District, sub-districts, and PAD [People's Armed Department] were in a hierarchy” that “structured the province-wide conflicts between the Allied Command and April 22 factions” (the two major competing factions in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution) and “reached deeply into small town and villages” (62).The author suggests in chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5 that the strategic importance of Guangxi in Chairman Mao's campaign of support for Vietnam against escalating US intervention exacerbated the brutality of state suppression. The central party leadership applied intense pressure on the province's regional and local party structures to suppress factional conflicts at all costs and to impose militarized state control to ensure the uninterrupted flow of supplies across the border to Vietnam. Zhou Enlai warned delegations from both factions at a meeting on August 24, 1967, asking, “If rail traffic stops, what impressions will this give the Vietnamese people?” (87).Walder argues that the central party authorities’ focus on Guangxi as a primary target of militarized suppression on account of its strategic proximity to the escalating conflict in Vietnam contributed to the party's top-down authorization and mobilization of intact military structures of state power, extending across the province and deeply down to the local level through “rural militia forces” and “specially formed ‘picket corps’” “under the direction of the PAD or Revolutionary Committees” (162), to carry out violence against politically vulnerable households on an exceptionally gruesome and intensive scale that is described in chapters 6 and 7. In chapter 5 and the epilogue, Walder notes in the data a pronounced increase in violence in 1968 following the Guangxi Preparatory Committee's falsified report to Beijing in mid-May about a counterrevolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the party that had “branches throughout Guangxi” and was “linking up with local April faction affiliates,” the Preparatory Committee's May 20 “directive to local Revolutionary Committees and PAD officers that ordered a campaign to eliminate this underground conspiracy” with a focus on “former class enemies in politically stigmatized households,” and the central party's harsh July 3 response that “largely accepted the Preparatory Committee's characterization of the political situation in Guangxi” and “removed constraints on the use of overwhelming repression” (111, 115).His fine-grained and nuanced analysis of the data and narratives, especially in chapters 7 and 8, enable him to explore diverse regional variations and local particularities of how events played out across the province, indicating that, contrary to previous explanations, the brunt of Cultural Revolution brutality in Guangxi stemmed not from factors that eluded party control but rather from the top-down, systematic exertion of state power. If anything, he argues based on this data, “what spun out of the Nanning authorities’ control were not rural communities, but their own military and civilian apparatus of repression, which reached deeply into villages” (170). Further exacerbating the violence, Walder contends, was the alignment of this militarized state apparatus with one of the rival rebel factions, the United Alliance, against the April 22 faction, which he discusses in chapters 5 and 6.At the same time, based on his analysis in chapter 2 of the political alliances that both factions cultivated with contending sides of a split party leadership, the author argues that the interfactional rivalry was the product of a split that ran through the party and military structure, at least initially, rather than the opposition between the political establishment and antiestablishment radicals. “The political orientations of rebels,” he writes, “were the product of choices made in the wake of the collapse of existing structures of power, where it was highly uncertain which choice would lead to favorable political outcomes for anyone, and where signals from the ultimate arbiters of success or failure in Beijing were ambiguous, mixed, and unpredictable” (32).Walder's own analysis, however, indicates that however rebellious against the party establishment both factions initially may have been, the central party's decision to reinstate the “establishment” military leader of Guangxi, Wei Guoqing, ultimately positioned the United Alliance faction, which supported Wang's reinstatement, on the proestablishment side against the April 22 faction, which opposed his retention of authority, though the author does present examples in chapter 4 of party leaders and PLA units that continued to side with the April 22 faction long after Wang's reinstatement. This factional split around the figure of Wei, as Walder details in chapter 6, had serious consequences for the alignment of militarized state power at the local level against the April 22 faction and against noncombatant politically stigmatized residents who were swallowed up in the brutal suppression campaigns.The book's main contribution, therefore, lies in its extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive examination of the enormous volumes of data and narratives that resulted from these investigations carried out by the central government in the early 1980s. It sheds light on an interesting and important, albeit largely post–Mao party sanctioned, interpretation of the horrific violence that engulfed large swaths of Guangxi urban and rural society during the bloody military suppression of Cultural Revolution rebel factions in 1967–68. Rather than social chaos and communal conflict that spiraled out of the state's control due to factional breakdown of the social and political order, Walder pries open an alternative view, as presented by the information that the investigators generated, of an intact line of administrative command that was largely responsible for engineering the scale of brutality, operating within the geopolitical context of proximity to the escalating Vietnam conflict and Mao's determination to force Guangxi into line with his project of resistance to US imperialism.While this narrative and interpretation is certainly of significant value for our understanding of on-the-ground events and political processes during this period of the Cultural Revolution, the absence of a sustained critical perspective on the politics of knowledge production that informed this interpretation is troubling. In identifying harsh top-down processes of state suppression as the main cause for the violence, Walder does not appear to recognize the irony that the investigations in the early 1980s that were responsible for the material on which he relies were, in some ways, the product of yet another wave of central party–sponsored top-down suppression targeting Guangxi, albeit this time aimed at punishing local and regional authorities who had participated in a previous iteration of suppression and compensating their victims. A more fleshed out analysis would have integrated analysis of the data and narrative resulting from the investigations with a closer look at the political processes that shaped the planning and implementation of the investigations and the nature and scope of information that they generated.