[In a two-volume tome, the
independent historian Yu Ruxin explains the crucial role of the military in
Mao’s stormy Cultural Revolution.]
The fruit of his long quest
was published
in Hong Kong this month, a 1,354-page history that sheds new light on
the central role of the military during the Cultural Revolution. The People’s
Liberation Army is widely known to have been called in to impose order, but Mr.
Yu also documents in meticulous detail how the military was also involved in
purges and political persecution.
“Through the Storm,” a two-volume
Chinese-language book buttressed with 2,421 footnotes, stands out all the more
these days, when the Chinese authorities are determined to erase the darkest
chapters of the party’s history.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, this
month celebrated
100 years since the founding of the country’s Communist Party. The
centenary has skipped over the political upheavals and mass suffering that characterized
the party’s earlier decades in power.
Mr. Yu, 70, said he was not an
opponent of the party, but that China should allow a candid accounting of the
Cultural Revolution, when 1.6 million people were killed, by some experts’ estimates.
“We won’t be able to truly absorb
the lessons of history, and history may just repeat itself,” Mr. Yu said in an
interview from Hong Kong. “It couldn’t possibly be exactly like the Cultural
Revolution, but something similar can’t be ruled out.”
Discussing such topics has
become increasingly
difficult in China in recent years. Historians and publishers have
come under intense
pressure to stick to the official line.
Still, Mr. Yu’s new book shows how
independent Chinese historians can slip past the barriers. He grew up in
Guangdong Province in southern China, moved to Hong Kong in the late 1980s, and
used earnings from a real estate business to fund trips to China for interviews
and document hunts.
By painstakingly recounting how
People’s Liberation Army forces became entangled in power struggles, Mr. Yu
said he wanted to challenge the widespread focus on the student Red Guards as
the key players who drove the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In China,
the authorities now treat the military as the guardian of a unified, top-down
order; Mr. Yu’s findings challenge that image.
Joseph
Torigian, an assistant professor at American University who specializes in
Chinese political and military history, said Mr. Yu’s book was an
“exceptionally valuable” achievement.
“You really need to spend years
slowly accumulating sources from a wide variety of places,” Professor Torigian
wrote in an email, “carefully putting the pieces together to get the basics
right, and only then drawing some hypotheses.”
Mr. Yu’s quest to make sense of the
Cultural Revolution began even before it was over. He was laboring in rural
Guangdong when he heard the news that Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen
successor-in-waiting, had perished in a plane that crashed while he was fleeing
China on Sept. 13, 1971.
For Mr. Yu’s generation, that
announcement was a stunning turning point. At the start of the Cultural
Revolution, many like him had been fervently loyal to Mao. But now the devoted
heir turned out to be, according to the party, a traitor.
“For us, it was like 9/11 was for
Americans — you never forget when and where you heard the news,” Mr. Yu said.
“We treated Mao as a godlike figure. Sept. 13 shattered that.”
The Cultural Revolution ended in
1976, after Mao died. Years later, after Mr. Yu had settled in Hong Kong,
Chinese historians were beginning to explore the strife of previous decades.
Under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party issued a resolution on history in 1981
that generally defended Mao’s legacy but acknowledged that he had made mistakes
in his later decades that led to immense suffering.
After that, Chinese writers
helped expose
the scale of Mao’s disasters, like the Great Leap Forward, when tens of
millions of villagers starved to death. Some were free-spirited academics or
journalists; others were retirees who had lived through the events they
dissected in blogs and journals.
“Their work really made a
difference,” said Sebastian Veg, a professor who studies modern China at the
School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. “They changed the way
that people talk about the famine. It’s no longer the ‘three years of natural
disasters,’ as official history put it, but a disaster of policies and
politics.”
Mr. Yu focused his research on the
less understood role of China’s military in Mao’s final decades. Mao could not
have started the Cultural Revolution without support from military leaders; nor
would it have ended without their role in arresting radical leaders after he
died in 1976, Mr. Yu said. The one book that had appeared in mainland China
about the People’s Liberation Army in the Cultural Revolution was withdrawn
from sale soon after appearing in 1989, he said.
“The role of the military in the
Cultural Revolution was much bigger than the Red Guards and lasted much
longer,” Mr. Yu said. “Look at most books, and you would never know that.”
He traveled across China, coaxing
50 or more aging former cadres and officers for interviews. He visited sites
like the abandoned
“atomic city” in northwest China, where vicious persecution disrupted
efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Above all, Mr. Yu sought to make
sense of Marshal Lin, Mao’s fallen successor. The party’s propaganda has
presented the marshal as a malevolent schemer; his downfall earned one sentence
in the official 531-page history of the party issued this year for the
centenary. Mr. Yu said Marshal Lin’s undoing was complicated because Mao had
regarded his successors as rivals.
Since Mr. Xi came to power in 2012,
Chinese officials have sought to tightly control the narrative of the Communist
Party’s history. Mr. Xi has cited the Soviet Union as a warning, arguing that it
collapsed in part because anti-party critics were allowed to tarnish its
legacy.
In Mr. Xi’s view, “too much debate
and pluralism about history distracts everybody from the central task of
China’s renaissance,” said Geremie R. Barmé, a historian of China and a fellow with
the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. “The past
must be determined and fixed, so that the possibilities for the future are also
limited to the party.”
Hong Kong, until recently a haven
for works that could not be published in the mainland, has not been
spared. A national
security law that Chinese leaders imposed on the city last year has
intimidated publishers. Chinese border officials in recent years stepped up
confiscations of forbidden books that travelers try to bring back from Hong
Kong, and the pandemic-induced freeze on travel further devastated sales, said
Bao Pu, a co-founder of New Century Press, the publisher of Mr. Yu’s book.
A decade ago, a book like “Through
the Storm” could have sold up to 80,000 copies, mostly to mainland Chinese
readers, Mr. Bao said in an interview. He will print only 1,000 copies, and he
could not find a vendor willing to display the book at the recent Hong Kong
Book Fair, he said.
Mr. Yu said that finishing the book
had become a personal mission, whatever the numbers sold. Writing it took seven
years, often in daily bursts of four or five hours, he said.
“I personally experienced that
decade, and if I weren’t able to make sense of it, then a big part of my life,”
he said, pausing, “would not have any meaning.”
