The Cultural Revolution in Context: The View from Political Culture

Was the Chinese Cultural Revolution a revolution in culture?  More precisely, did it represent a fundamental break with the past, or was it part of a longer, “continuous revolution” in Chinese political culture?  Recent scholarship has challenged the idea that the “ten years of turmoil” was a radical rupture in modern Chinese history.  Examples abound.  Elizabeth Perry’s book looks at the historiography of the mining town of Anyuan to show how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) successfully drew on traditional culture to create a new socialist culture.  Barbara Mittler’s recent work locates the culture of the Cultural Revolution within a long twentieth century arc of revolutionizing Chinese culture.  These and other examples highlight the continuity of the Cultural Revolution within a broader cultural context.

This presentation also offers as a new case study the Red Guard exhibition, or the public display of objects searched out and confiscated from the homes of alleged class enemies.  At first glance, Red Guard exhibitions seem to epitomize the radical, bottom-up image of Cultural Revolution action: violent intrusion on people in their own homes, a shameful display as part of a struggle session, mass action against hidden counterrevolutionaries.  But on further investigation the Red Guard exhibition reveals two complications.  Firstly, this phenomenon was ordered and organized.  How much of Cultural Revolution culture is therefore top-down vs. bottom up?  Second, it is directly linked to class education exhibitions in the 1960s and even the 1940s “new exhibits” of landlords in the liberated areas.  How was the revolutionary repertoire of this period cultivated by the political culture that preceded it?  The aim of this case study is to prompt discussion of how to characterize and periodize the Cultural Revolution, both within the longer Mao era and its own decade.