Laikwan Pang - The art of cloning: creative production during Chinas cultural revolution

I f we compare todays China with the country of fifty years ago, it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that Maoist China produced identical subjects. In the 1950s, the Chinese people were already described as blue ants: they all dressed the same, looked the same, and walked the same. Entering the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which officially began in 1966, this uniformity seemed to extend from the look to the mind, and people thought and acted in ways that connected them with Mao and unified them. It could be seen as an immaculately monotonous world, one full of repetition and imitation. There were clearly people who were out of line with the mainstream, but the price was often too high, and the pressure too intense, for anyone to flaunt difference. Indeed, many displayed very little resistance against the call for uniformity.

From the outside, it is easy to conclude that this uniformity resulted from fanatical politics, an authoritarian government, and a compliant people with a submissive history. This book will explore all of these issues. However, a closer look reveals that this world of uniformity also offered a diversity of cultural experiences and an obscure sense of freedom. During the Cultural Revolution, ordinary Chinese citizens read many books, traveled to different parts of the country, and engaged in various kinds of cultural production. Their lives were not necessarily more deprived or boring than ours, which are diverse mainly because of different versions of pseudo-individualized cultural consumption. Other than the models of trauma and victimization, how can we account for the individuals who conceptualized themselves as autonomous, despite being highly conformist?

Let me begin with an example. Those who grew up during the Cultural Revolution are now in their late fifties or sixties, and among the more educated we find a common nostalgia for their Cultural Revolution reading experiences. Writers from Han Shaogong to Bei Dao, from Zhu Xueqin to Wei Guangqi, and from Wang Anyi to Zhi An all meticulously recount the books they read and how they read them. Through an intimate description of their book lists, these intellectuals demonstrate the autonomy they were able to exercise in an age of extreme control. They also prove an insight into their intellectual independence, realized through their unique efforts to acquire knowledge without any institutionalized schooling. But behind the discrete accounts of epistemological pursuit, a common pattern of emotions can also be found among these stories, characterized by similar excitement and pleasure among the authors about reading, exchanging, and copying books. Recent research shows that a vigorous independent reading culture developed during the Cultural Revolution, and people were exposed to a wide variety of books circulating around. But there was also considerable overlap in the books the educated youth read, such as the so-called yellow-cover or grey-cover books published in the early 1960s for the partys internal reference only. These banned books they read with such excitement were those already preselected by the party. In these personal tales, we can find a subtle dialectics of individuality and collectivity: on the one hand, below the surface of extreme uniformity there was enough space available for individuals to articulate their personalities; however, on closer inspection, these so-called individualities were not that distinguished from each other. Even these rebellious acts were conducted within a highly homogenous environment, and each persons private experiences and independent actions were also shared widely among the same generationthese individuals are both unique and not so unique.