Above are photographs of the corpses of human beings
murdered during the Cultural Revolution. As can be
seen they were splashed unabashedly across a full page
of a Chinese newspaper of the time. The newspaper
article in which they appear was sent by a person
living in the P.R.C. Similar such articles have been
published here previously (1). More will follow.
In a recent paper (2) Dr. Youqin Wang writes of the
dichotomy that exists between the Chinese
government's official history of the Cultural Revolu-
tion and the "real" history. The former ignores the
scholarly purpose of truth-seeking. It cites to other
official accounts, thus completing the circle, rather
than to original documents like that above or to first-
hand interviews. The official account is not really
history at all but a sanitized account whose purpose
is not factual accuracy but regime protection.
The Chinese government's purpose is aided by the faux
academic efforts of foreign apologists such as Americans
Carma Hinton (3) Weili Ye (4), and the openly Maoist website
http://www.wengewang.org/, by the French philosopher Alan
Badiou (5), and others. These "useful fools"--to use Lenin's
phrase-- perpetrate their ideology-disguised-as-history on
insouciant Western audiences.
The real history is being written by Dr. Wang whose
website http://www.chinese-memorial.org/ is dedicated
to the memory of the victims of the Cultural Revolution,
by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (6), by
Jonathan Spence (7), Jung Chang (8), Hu Jie (9), and
Harry Wu (10), among others. Except for Hu Jie, all are
living in the West.
There is a desperate struggle for the past going on here.
The Chinese government is winning that struggle. It is very
big and very powerful. By contrast, "my voice is very weak"
is Dr.Wang's poignant description of her own brave efforts
and those of Hu Jie. For five years Dr. Wang's website has
been blocked by the Chinese government's censors. The
regime pulled Hu Jie's film from a showing at a film festival
at the last moment. Books by the scholars mentioned
above are, of course, banned also in the P.R.C.
It is not a given in human affairs that "the truth will out."
The Chinese government is winning, and there is
nothing impossible about its ultimate triumph. I
remember being struck by something that
Professor Macfarquhar wrote, that if there is to
be an historical accounting of the Cultural Revolu-
tion that it will only be done by the Chinese people.
On the YouTube site of Hu Jie's film Though I Am
Gone, a young person posted that he hadn't known
that there was such violence during the Cultural
Revolution. He has never seen the corpses in the
above photograph. There is now a generation of
Chinese coming of age in a more open China who
do not know what really happened during the
Cultural Revolution, during the far more
disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of the 1950's, or
for that matter during the entire history of the P.R.C.
At the beginning of the school day the morning after
Bian Zhongyun's murder, Liu Jin, one of the Red
Guard leaders of the school, made the official
announcement over the loudspeaker:
"Bian Zhongyun's dead. That's it. There is no reason
to talk about it."
That is the Chinese government's position on
history also. Obviously, that position has
grounding in the thinking of many individual
Chinese. Even today, the individual perpetrators
of Cultural Revolution violence go unnamed by
even those dedicated to historical truth. The
government will win the struggle for the past
unless enough Chinese people decide that that's
not "it," that there is a "reason" to talk about it.
-Benjamin Harris, J.D.
1. Public Occurrences. June 8, 2007.
2. Official History and Parallel History, Victims or No
Victims: The Antithesis in the Historical Writings of the
Cultural Revolution. China Perspectives October-November
2007.
3. Morning Sun (film), 2005.
4. The Death of Bian Zhongyun. Chinese Historical Review,
Fall 2006.
5. "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution." Positions,
Winter, 2005. Duke University Press.
6. Mao's Last Revolution. Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2006.
7. The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981), The Search for Modern
China (1991), Mao Zedong (1999), et al.
8. Mao: The Unknown Story. Anchor Books, 2006.
9. Seeking the Soul of Lin Zhao, 2004, Though I am Gone,
2006. (films)
10. http://www.cicus.org/. Troublemaker: One Man's Crusade
Against China, co-authored with George Vecsey. NewsMax
Media, Inc. 2002.
