Zed Books China and the New Maoists (Asian Arguments)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. China and the New MaoistsBy Kerry Brown, Simone Van NieuwenhuizenZed Books LtdCopyright © 2016 Kerry Brown and Simone van NieuwenhuizenAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-760-0ContentsAcknowledgements, Introduction, 1. The tale of the victim, Zhang Zhixin, 2. The Chairman's life after death, 3. Defender of the faith: Deng Liqun and leftism, 4. Maoism in motion: the red campaign of Bo Xilai in Chongqing, 5. Blurred lines: Mao, the CPC and Chinese society today, 6. Mad about Mao, Conclusion: Mao's second coming, Selected reading, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1The tale of the victim, Zhang ZhixinCalculations of Mao's victims reach into the tens of millions. This lamentable figure is simultaneously powerful and meaningless. Understanding one death carries impact. Statements of 30 million or more deaths as a result of policies laid at his door, or through the acts of agents appealing to him, can be seen as sterilized through abstraction.Understanding what it has meant to speak about Mao in the wrong way, at the wrong time, to the wrong people, means coming down to the specific – an individual case. While so many suffered their fate in silence in the years after the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, there were some who at least were able to leave some record of their suffering.Some time in 1968, in the north-eastern city of Shenyang, a member of the local propaganda department – a faithful Communist Party member since 1955 following her graduation from Renmin University in Beijing – reportedly let slip comments in a neighbour's house that she believed the wife of the country's supreme leader, Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), was no good.Jiang Qing, an actress from Shandong who had been active in the Shanghai film scene in the 1930s, had travelled to the revolutionary base of Yan'an during the Communist Party's most endangered years in the mid-1930s, and attracted the attention of its rising leader, Mao Zedong. Despite the initial opposition of his fellow leaders, Mao divorced his then (third) wife and married Jiang. But the agreement between Mao and his fellow leaders had been a simple one: the marriage was Mao and Jiang's personal business, and she was to play no public role.She abided by this broad agreement for most of the next three decades. There was no formal role akin to that of a 'first lady' in China for her to slip into in any case. The high-profile role of the Nationalist Party (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek's glamorous wife Soong Mei-ling in Taiwan was the exception that proved the rule, offering added incentive for the Communist Party to differentiate itself from its enemy rather than copy it. There was also the matter of a presiding patriarchal political culture militating against the idea in the first place. Despite the Party's support for gender equality once it came to power in 1949 (one of the first laws it passed, the Marriage Law, mandated equality between men and women), its leadership was overwhelmingly male dominated. Jiang receded from public view. Over this period, she also seems to have somewhat slipped from Mao's affections; his own doctor recorded Mao's promiscuity after 1949 with many of his serving girls, nurses and assistants.The Cultural Revolution, as its name implied, was during its initial stages a struggle engaged in the fields of art, music and, in particular, literature. The earliest salvoes were against writers accused of embedding secret, counterrevolutionary meaning in their works. It soon became quite clear that these arguments were merely a proxy for attacks that a frustrated Mao wanted to launch against harder political targets – most particularly his own second-in-command, Liu Shaoqi, and those around him who he thought were betraying the founding mission of the Party and forming a lazy, self-serving bureaucratic elite. In what quickly became a face-off between the Chairman and the very party he had been so instrumental in bringing to