Culture Doesn't Love a Revolution

Making time for a little background reading. Alright, making time for any reading, in between grading papers, grant applications, and special events. Ugh.

Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Culture of the Culture Revolution: Culture-Fail?

Clark's new book has the stated purpose of putting the "culture" back in "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," by looking at just how much drama, opera, dance, film and literature was produced between 1966 and 1976 in China, so it's really wrong to say the period was a time when no new works came out, as in the joke "Eight-hundred million people watched just eight operas." The introduction to the book piques my interest when it mentions memoirs published overseas like Wild Swans, which are enjoyed by non-Chinese as stories of suffering and survival, but too often serve to re-inforce a simple dismissal of Cultural-Revolution-era cultural production because the writers of these memoirs are all responding to power challenges with re-assertions of their own social status, not to mention "political propriety." Clark's implicit point is that such memoir authors choose an anti-Communist stance because they wish the situation in China would go back to the way things were before they lost their jobs - reasonable enough, I suppose. I've often wondered to what degree Six Chapters of a Cadre School could be compared to Wild Swans, and this insight from page three of Clark's book already helps me to begin asking the necessary questions: how anti-Communist is Six Chapters? To what degree is Six Chapters a re-assertion of social status?

Yang Jiang: Culture of the End of the Cultural Revolution

I've worked before to show that Six Chapters is anti-Communist. It's remarkable that it made it past the censors during the semi-crackdown that was going on, 1980-84, but I've felt that this must have been the case because government authorities didn't really grasp the irony in Yang Jiang statements. I quoted from Kong Qingmao's biography to help defend this hypothesis. I've also done a little work in the past to show how Yang Jiang uses highly elevated language; to do this all we have to do is see the ways in which it engages with traditional Chinese poetics. This last bit of work is drastically incomplete, but I've been very uncertain about how to proceed with it. I think Clark helps put me on firmer footing by asking me to compare Yang Jiang with writers who were active in the years after 1970-1, when the Cultural Revolution "insurgents" began to die down and allow for more literary production, both official and unofficial. Many of these writers were working memory literature describing their experiences at labor camps, and and least some of them apparently took an elevated tone that made reference to traditional literary forms. Clark asks us to think of these writers as "specialists trying to survive in challenging circumstances," and points in several cases to the very positive responses that they got from audiences. I wonder if Yang Jiang could help solidify a point that Clark makes all too briefly in the last two pages of his book: that the autonomy of writers in the 1980s is in part an evolution of writers from the 1970s who were struggling with recent memory and the desire to re-assert their own social and professional status. As Clark puts it, during the Cultural Revolution China was full of "specialists trying to survive in challenging circumstances."

Readers Just Want to Have Fun

The evidence of literary works in the early 1970s shows that even as early as 1970, there was a significant demand for books that were actually fun to read, as opposed to the "agitprop" that was typically force-fed to audiences in bookstores and schools. At the end of his introduction, Clark asks us to think of the Cultural Revolution as a "doomed attempt to combine the vernacular and the elitist in a modern project." Coming up: how Yang Jiang fits in the new, revamped and less brow-beaten "vernacular modernism" of a literary movement that starts during the last stage of the Cultural Revolution.