ABSTRACT
Although they claimed victory over the “Nationalist reactionaries,” “American imperialists,” and “Soviet revisionists,” the Communist regime worried about international enemies of all sorts. Even within China, after a series of collectivization movements and purification campaigns, prime targets in previous Communist revolutions such as landlords, capitalists, and rightists did not seem to disappear, but lurked among the people as if they would put their reactionary ideology into action at any time. The Communist regime lived in anxiety and paranoia that the enemies from the past would return.9 They were haunted in both practice and discourse. In the aftermath of “the ten years of calamity,” the Cultural Revolution itself has become a haunting object in both the real life and the memory of Chinese people. First, in everyday life, sent-down youths and rehabilitated intellectuals cannot forget their Cultural Revolution experiences, which evoke bitterness and tears more than sweetness and laughter. Second, in terms of social hierarchy, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the most important Party leader after Mao, due to his contribution to ending the so-called “ten years of calamity” and opening China to the world. Third, in the symbolic space, the Cultural Revolution has been a leitmotif of cultural production. Almost no literary movement or cultural phenomenon since the late 1970s has not responded to it, directly or indirectly.10 However, except for denouncing it in the immediate aftermath to legitimize Deng’s government, the Party barely gave any attention to the Cultural Revolution afterward. There are no official commemorative activities, which is unusual given the prevalence of commemorative culture in China.11 The recollections and research that are conducted are done by individuals rather than institutions. The Cultural Revolution is a paradox: present, sometimes immanently so, in public life, yet repressed officially. It is ironic that it lives on like a specter, haunting and possessing Chinese people today as previous revolutions haunted the Cultural Revolutionary China of the past. The people’s conscious or unconscious responses can be seen as an effort to exorcise the spirits of the Cultural Revolution. There are two meanings behind phantasmatic space in the Cultural Revolution.12 One is that the movement transformed China into a phantasmagoric space that covered the three types of spaces I defined at the beginning of this book: geographical, social, and symbolic. First, everyday physical space was filled with so-called “ox ghosts and snake spirits.” For those put into these categories, China was as macabre as the inferno where cursed ghosts and spirits reside. Second, normal social order was turned upside down. Under the aegis of absolute proletarian authority, law and order gave way to the abusive power of those who were entitled to act for the proletariat, e.g., Red Guards and insurrectionist workers. This created extreme chaos, analogous to a disorderly hell. Third, spirits of previous revolutions were dominant figures in cultural production. All model plays featured heroic characters in the previous revolutionary wars against the Japanese or the Nationalists. The other meaning of phantasmatic space in the Cultural Revolution is that the movement itself continues to live as a spirit in Chinese society and to possess
people from time to time. In other words, products of the Cultural Revolution persist like phantoms, as living objects like human beings and inanimate objects like restaged model plays and their reincarnations.13 These phantoms sometimes achieve a conspicuous presence in mainstream mass culture.14 I take two exemplars-each living a lasting afterlife in one way or another-to illustrate the phantasmatic space of the Cultural Revolution. Old Ghost (Lao Gui, alias of Ma Bo) was one of the generation born at the time of the founding of the PRC, and he grew up with the revolutionary sagas about the past of the Republic that were prevalent in the culture. Motivated by these models, Old Ghost participated in the revolutionary feast by mimicking his predecessors. He organized a small group of friends to march from Beijing to the revolutionary Mecca, Yan’an. Then he led the group to the southern frontier with the intention of joining the Vietnamese in their fight against the American imperialists. Repatriated by the frontier troops, he did not give up the idea of defending the country. He and his comrades went to Tibet to obtain arms in order to protect China from Soviet invasion. When all these plans fell apart, he volunteered for the Construction Corps in Inner Mongolia and spent several years there. In the 1980s and 1990s, Old Ghost finished two autobiographical accounts of his personal experiences, including his formative years in Beijing, his exploration of the Chinese frontier, and his hard times in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution.15 His narratives describe a revolutionary prodigal son’s odyssey on the Chinese mainland. Nonetheless, his retroactive engagement in a revolution has lost its authenticity. In Xue yu tie (Blood and iron), he compiles a comprehensive list of revolutionary sagas that influenced him deeply. This book also shows that Old Ghost is possessed by the revolutionary spirits glorified by the People’s Republic. The way he names himself reveals this self-identification. He has become old while still young, a ghost while alive. Old Ghost is a perfect example of the phantasmatic operating on the level of the personal psyche. The second example is the story Hongse niangzi jun (Red detachment of women, dir. Xie Jin, scriptwriter Liang Xin, 1961). Set in the 1930s on exotic Hainan Island, the film Red Detachment of Women tells the story of Wu Qionghua, who grows from a peasant girl with a personal vendetta to a Communist fighter pursuing liberation for all humankind. The film was adapted into a ballet and became popular in China during the Cultural Revolution. Following its restaging as a model play in the late 1980s, Red Detachment of Women-by now one of the orthodox Red classics-was repopularized in the nostalgic fever of the mid-1990s when a nine-episode TV drama, Qiongzong nübing (Women soldiers of Hainan Column, dir. Yu Yehua, 1996), came out. The show appeared to be a sequel to Red Detachment of Women and related how the women’s column fought the Japanese during the invasion of Hainan Island. The title was changed to Red Detachment of Women when the series was released on VCD/DVD, most likely for marketing purposes. Subsequently, the new millennium saw a surge of new adaptations of “Red classics.” A 21-episode TV remake of Red Detachment of Women became the focus of the controversy surrounding the adaptation of these works in 2004. Meanwhile, two writers of the TV series collaborated on a
novel, which was published the same year. Lawsuits about copyright and contracts were filed around the novel publication and the TV production. As a performative spectacle, Red Detachment of Women experienced a continuous reincarnation and reconsumption as a gendered revolutionary romance from a socialist context to a postsocialist one. It has become a kind of spirit of the Cultural Revolution and continues to haunt China at the institutional level. In this chapter I analyze Blood and Iron and Red Detachment of Women side by side, although there is no direct influence of the former upon the latter. Aside from artistic details, Red Detachment of Women is similar to other works produced in the 17 years between 1949 and 1966 in terms of didacticism, narrative structure, and characterization.16 The Red classics were created using similar formulas and agendas to convey the central message: Had the Chinese Communists not gone through fire and water, China’s happy present would have been impossible; only the Chinese Communist Party can save China. Old Ghost does not directly refer to Red Detachment of Women in his book, likely because he is more interested in the male experience than the female one. Despite the presence of Hong Changqing, the positive, heroic male lead in the women’s detachment, the story does not appeal to Old Ghost. Immersed in a revolutionary culture, he is either not interested in Wu Qionghua’s feminine beauty and the hidden romance between Qionghua and Changqing, or consciously suppresses his sensibilities since they do not conform to the puritanical principle of life during the Cultural Revolution.
