ABSTRACT
If it is repeated often enough will a truth-claim necessarily become a truth? Such appears to be the case with the verdict on historical Maoism. The demonization of the Mao era is a general, if under-explored feature of China studies and intellectual-political culture around the world – not least among liberal Chinese intellectuals.1 In this chapter I critique this production of truth about Chinese Maoism by documenting where it has occurred, and what new knowledge and figures of colonial discourse it turns upon. En route, I will argue that the “new” truth about the Mao era – perhaps not new but what was always already “known” or at least assumed by the U.S.-West – is an indispensible part of Sinological-orientalism. Indeed the demonization of Maoism is arguably the lynchpin of the entire discursive edifice surrounding the P.R.C. because it serves as what China is in the process of overcoming on its road to normality and political modernity. In that sense it is also a sign of what contemporary China still lacks. It is the presupposition of the construction of post-Mao China as becoming-the-same as “us.” The Mao era of socialist construction and mass mobilization is what China is recovering from; it is conceived of as some type of oriental aberration, a despotic nightmare from which it is still trying to fully awake; at the very least it is a space of negative difference from the present. Most simply put, the chief blame for China’s lingering history of political, economic, and cultural deformation and “lag” lies with Mao Zedong and his Party state. This in itself is a highly interesting formulation. It is certainly better, in a liberal-humanist-Cold War kind of way, than older traditions of blaming China’s problems on the Chinese character, race, or even Confucianism. But what it shares with such older views, in addition to an implicit teleology, is a refusal to take the actually existing, “Chinese” realities and views seriously as something other than negativity and lack. By this I mean that such views – the truth on Chinese Maoism – do not take the Chinese revolution or Chinese-Marxist developmental/constructive
efforts seriously. Not in terms of either what they achieved (or even failed in), what was attempted or intended, the complexities and ambiguities of what resulted, nor in terms of the self-understanding of the era and its partisans, actors, or witnesses. Nor do the complexities and differences of contemporary China fare too much better; it is allowed to be an emergent and rising economy, but not so much an emergent society (to put this more conventionally). By “taking it seriously” I refer then not only to the Maoist accomplishments – its other failures notwithstanding – in political economy or social development, and its achievements in egalitarianism and human welfare. I refer more fundamentally and conceptually to the ways in which that revolution and post-1949 trajectory until at least 1979 understood itself, so to speak: what it said and did, and what it was trying to do. I want to emphasize its positive record, surely, but also its positivity or complexity, including this level of self-understanding and discourse. Above all else, the hostile or demonizing knowledge about the Mao era is premised upon the negation of Maoist discourse itself. By that, and following the work of Gao Mobo among others, I refer to the rational-practical-affective framework that enabled people to make sense of their lives and world during the Mao years. I characterize this further below, momentarily. But it is the negation of this discourse that, in turn, allows the Mao era to be re-coded as totalitarianism, extremism, brainwashing, terror. Or in somewhat more sympathetic codings: as sheer, sublime utopianism or something like a spiritualistic apotheosis of collective desire. It produces the triumphalism of China discourse vis-à-vis the Mao era: that we now know the awful truth. That discourse and that whole era need not be taken seriously aside from its body counts because it was, in a word, fake. That is a view that can be easily verified by liberal intellectuals on the mainland and diaspora, or by self-professed “dissidents” of the current regime. (It is not I think controversial to say that these largely Westernized and English fluent Chinese intellectuals, businessmen, and artists represent China to the West.) But this shift and regime of truth is about still more than the triumph of de-Maoification, the market mentality, liberalism, American education, the Cold War victory of the U.S.-West, and so on: it reflects not only a Cold War perspective but – as my analyses below and throughout this book attempt to show – is also a colonial discourse that turns upon orientalist tropes about despotism, cruelty, passivity, and irrationality running rampant in China. It marks China’s essential difference from the normative U.S.-West, and again it is this Maoism that China must and is leaving behind. In short, this new knowledge of the Mao era marks the imbrication of Cold War (“totalitarian”) and colonial discourse within an orientalist production of knowledge. It is “new” in the sense that prior to the mid-1970s the “anti” views of the P.R.C. were always countered to a certain extent by the very visible specter of the Maoist revolution and discourse: their existence in China at least implied that the self-understanding of the Chinese – howsoever “brainwashed” – was different than that of the Cold War and racist discourse about Red China. There were far fewer “dissidents” and exiles, not to mention Sinologists, who could serve their representative functions.
