The Chinese Communist Party’s history is full of forbidden subjects, and the most paramount of them is undoubtedly the Cultural Revolution.
In the 1980s, right after the publication of the “Resolution on Certain Historical Issues of the Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” at a 1981 CCP committee meeting, in which the Cultural Revolution was characterized as “totally wrong,” Chinese society was relatively free, and a number of historical works on the Cultural Revolution appeared, with “Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution” by political scientist Yan Jiaqi and his wife Gao Gao being most well-known and republished in Hong Kong by Ta Kung Pao. However, distribution of the article was prohibited after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre as the authors were labeled by the CCP as “masterminds” behind the events.
The history of the Cultural Revolution is sometimes written in the form of collected anecdotes. I have two such books in hand. The stories, though some may regard them as funny, reflect how crazy the Cultural Revolution was.
For example, the Red Guards accused Qu Yuan, a famous poet and politician from the state of Chu during the Warring States Period (476 BC–221 BC) who supported a union of the six states against Qin, of being a “fake patriot” who engaged in the “Seven Chinas” conspiracy and resisted the historical trend of “One China” represented by Qin that would soon unify China by annexing the other states.
Another example concerns Wing On (literally translated as eternal peace) a Hong Kong department store that has branches in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Shanghai Red Guards thought that the name Wing On was reactionary and had to be replaced. They considered options like Eternal Struggles and Eternal Red, and actually preferred Eternal Chaos, because Lin Biao, then the second most important leader next to Mao, said, “The world shall be in great chaos, the more chaotic the better.”
Why is Chinese history written in a form that ridicules national catastrophes? Are there similar book titles, such as. Jokes about Nazi Germany? I am not sure. This probably unique Chinese way of writing history deserves a deeper look.
In the preface of one of the books I have, writer Liu Shahe notes, “I think the farce of the Cultural Revolution is most suitable for laughing about and most inappropriate for serious discussions to tell black from white …. All the suffering turned out to be a wild dream. Idiots wake up feeling good about themselves, and think they are awake enough to make comments of various kinds, which is actually stupid.” What he means is that the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China, and the Chinese people are hard to fathom, and it is way too early to say that the way of thinking during the Cultural Revolution no longer exists.
In fact, the Cultural Revolution was not only about political struggles; essentially it was a way of everyday life. The following is an anecdote about a pale patient standing unsteadily on a bus. A young man near him was advised to give up his seat. The young man said, Who can afford to make a mistake of political stance? It’s not a big deal to give up my seat, but one’s ass also has a class character. Who can prove that he is not a landlord, a rich person, a counter-revolutionary, a bad element, a rightist, a spy, a traitor, or a stinking intellectual? All on the bus were speechless.
Isn’t such thinking absurd? Absurdity is everywhere in China in which politics permeates every corner of life. As Hong Kong is now part of China, the absurdity has spread to this ex-British colony. Recently, 14 secondary school students were suspended for three days for continuing to eat their breakfast when the national flag was being raised in a morning assembly. Although details told by the school and the students differ, the disproportionately—if not unprecedentedly—heavy penalty is almost certain to be political in nature.
Such absurdity is reminiscent of a popular anecdote about the Cultural Revolution. At many struggle meetings, participants sat on the floor, some on a newspaper. Later, when some people were found to be sitting on a picture of Chairman Mao, they were immediately turned from participants to victims of the meeting, and labelled as “counter-revolutionaries.”
Hong Kong people love the in-law joke, “If your mom and I fall into water, whom will you save first?” In new Hong Kong, when parents consider a school for their kids, they may similarly ask a principal “If the national flag and my kid fall into water, which one will you save first?” Answering “I would save the child first” is unlikely for any principal, as this may gain the school a headline in the fearsome leftist papers and in turn, invite political problems.
Though no satisfactory answer to the question is possible, such questions need to be asked. At least, they make us face the reality that a school in Hong Kong is no longer a safe place.
