Organizer and Chair: Michael Schoenhals, Lund University
As the Cultural Revolution becomes firmly lodged in the historical as opposed to the contemporary political realm, and as the Chinese government begins to relax some of its previously draconian control of the raw data—including that still lodged in the memories of participants—prospects for serious scholarly research on the final decade of Mao’s rule are better than ever. Despite the fact that major archives remain closed to both Chinese and Western independent scholars, the central issue facing students of the Cultural Revolution is no longer one of coping with a dearth of incomplete information, but—on the contrary—one of establishing control over sources that are overwhelming in their diversity and complexity. The new data not only makes it possible to provide more accurate answers to old and familiar queries; more importantly, it also provokes new questions and tentative answers.
The papers in this panel each introduce a new corpus of data and assess its importance for research. The nature of the data ranges from new "official" publications on Zhou Enlai—writings that add new dimensions of complexity to this most enigmatic of cultural revolutionary personalities—to a gigantic collection of Red Guard newspapers of unprecedented completeness recently made available to the international scholarly community. A paper dealing with the hitherto largely unexplored relationship between Red Guard organizations and specific central government leaders illustrates the kind of research that has recently become possible with the help of oral sources and interviewing inside China.
Controlled "Freedom of Expression": The Rise and Fall of the Red Guard Newspapers
Yuan Zhou, University of Chicago
"Red Guard newspapers" refers to the many newspapers that were published by mass organizations during China’s Cultural Revolution. Emerging first in the summer of 1966 and ceasing publication mostly by the fall of 1968, such newspapers serve as permanent testimony to the most dramatic, turbulent, and violent period of the Cultural Revolution. With an estimated total of several thousand titles published all over China, they recorded—act by act, scene by scene—countless important events as they were unfolding. Because of their local and "mass organization" nature, they provide particularly rich accounts of the Cultural Revolution at the street level (i.e. the movement in society at large) and in places far from the center stages of Beijing and Shanghai. In addition to their value as primary resources for research, the unprecedented phenomena—in an otherwise tightly controlled political system—of the mushrooming Red Guard press, deserves serious research.
Based on eight hundred titles of Red Guard newspapers (a large number of them only recently having become available to overseas scholars), this paper attempts to analyze the role and functions that Red Guard newspapers played during the Cultural Revolution as well as their archival and resource value for research on the Cultural Revolution.
Contradictory Images from Diverse Sources: The Role of Zhou Enlai in the Cultural Revolution
Yong-Yi Song, Dickinson College
The role of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in the Cultural Revolution has always been regarded by scholars inside as well as outside China as a particularly thorny issue. Since the 1980s, some new memoirs, new interviews of participants, and reprints of CCP leaders’ speeches delivered to the "masses" during the Cultural Revolution have appeared in the West, providing valuable new sources for the study on Zhou. At the same time, the Chinese government—which opposes or seeks to prohibit independent research on the Cultural Revolution—has published around two to three hundred new "official" memoirs, biographies, chronicles, collected works, articles, and films by and about Zhou in the Cultural Revolution.
These overwhelming new sources of two different kinds, the contents of which are often at variance and sometimes highly contradictory, are making the study of Zhou and other CCP leaders more complicated than ever. A careful comparison of new sources for textual research, as well as a reexamination of the historical context has begun to permit a clearer picture of Zhou’s role in the Cultural Revolution to emerge. At the same time, new questions arise: how does one best employ some of the new sources and what are the more productive approaches they permit for a reexamination of the Cultural Revolution?
Organizations of the "Old" Red Guard and their Relations to the Top Leadership: The Case of the "West City District Picket" and "United Action Committee"
Hongbiao Yin, Peking University
Beijing’s "West City District Picket" (Xijiu) and "United Action Committee" (Liandong) were the most important organizations of the "old" Red Guard. They had a major and controversial impact upon the Red Guard movement, and their roles and relations to the top level of the Communist Party attracted considerable attention. This paper is based on new texts that have come to light in recent years and on accounts provided by former organization members, many interviewed for the first time.
The Picket tried to play a leading role in the Red Guard movement, but its policies did not conform to Mao’s intentions. Its declarations furthermore contradicted its actions, especially concerning the use of violence. It was directly guided by Zhou Enlai, leading members of the State Council and the Beijing Party Committee.
The United Action Committee was poorly organized and in many cases simply represented a banner under which "old" Red Guards in opposition came together. Its formal documents were few, and many so-called Liandong documents that bore its name had not actually been sanctioned by the organization. No high-ranking leaders are known to have directly and actively supported the Committee, but in the so-called "February Adverse Current," vice premiers Li Xiannian and Nie Rongzhen expressed their sympathy for it. This helped secure the release from prison of many of its members in the spring of 1967.