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Culture, Revolution, and the Times of History: Mao and 20th-Century China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2006

Extract

The recent spate of English-language exposés of Mao Zedong, most prominently that written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, seems to announce a culmination of the tendency towards the temporal-spatial conflation of 20th-century Chinese and global history. This sense was only confirmed when the New York Times reported in late January that George W. Bush's most recent bedtime reading is Mao: The Unknown Story, or when, last month, according to a column in the British paper The Guardian, “the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the ‘crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,’ linking them with Nazism…” The conflation, then, is of the long history of the Chinese revolution with the Cultural Revolution, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, of Mao Zedong with every one of the most despicable of the 20th century's many tyrants and despots. In these conflations, general 20th-century evil has been reduced to a complicit right-wing/left-wing madness, while China's 20th century has been reduced to the ten years during which this supposed principle of madness operated as a revolutionary tyranny in its teleologically ordained fashion. In this way are the dreams of some China ideologues realized: China becomes one central node through which the trends of the 20th century as a global era are concentrated, channelled and magnified. China isglobal history, by becoming a particular universalized analytic principle, in the negative sense. That is, universality becomes a conflationary negative principle.

Type
Remembering Jack Gray
Copyright
© The China Quarterly, 2006

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Julia Strauss for inviting me to participate in the China Quarterly forum on Mao Zedong. A draft of this paper was delivered at a workshop entitled “Is a history of the Cultural Revolution possible?” convened at the University of Washington, Seattle, 23–26 February 2006. I am grateful to Tani Barlow for including me in her project on 20th-century Chinese history, of which the workshop was a part; as well as to Alessandro Russo, Claudia Pozzana, and Wang Hui for their stimulating comments in the context of our discussions. I am as usual grateful also to Marilyn Young for her intellectual acumen and generosity.