Am I Guilty Or Not

Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik

Department of East Asian Studies

University of Vienna

Currently: Madeleine R. Haas Visiting Professor

For Non-Western and Comparative Studies

BrandeisUniversity

COPING WITH THE TRAUMA:

Official and Unofficial Histories of the Cultural Revolution*

*Research for this paper was made possible through my stay as visiting professor for Non-Western and Comparative Studies at BrandeisUniversity during the spring term of 2005. I would like to thank Nancy Hearst who helped me through the library of the FairbankCenter and Felix Wemheuer, University of Vienna, for supplying me with some of the most recent publications on the topic. Preliminary versions of this paper were given at BrandeisUniversity on March 16, 2005 and at the FairbankCenter on May 2, 2005. I would like to thank Ralph Thaxton, jr. and Merle Goldman for providing me with this important opportunity to air my ideas and for their valuable comments.

This is a preliminary draft. Please do not cite without permission from the author.

“Am I guilty or not?“, this is the title Feng Jicai gave to the narrative of one Cultural Revolution survivor, at the time a young women doctor who killed her father by cutting his artery with a fruit knife when Red Guards were about to storm the house.

“My wound cannot be healed. After twenty years, I still cannot figure out whether I was right or not to kill my father. In the beginning, I was sentenced to life in prison, after smashing the Gang of Four I was released from prison and found innocent. Am I guilty or not?” (Feng Jicai 2001, 62)

The father had asked her to kill him and her mother before killing herself in order to avoid the next round of humiliation by the Red Guards. She did what she had been asked for while the Red Guards were already entering her house. Fearing that she would fall into their hands, she ran upstairs and jumped from the balcony not knowing what had happened to her mother who she had not had the time to kill as planned. It was years later that she found out that her mother, too, had tried to put an end to her life by jumping from the balcony. She had been left untreated and died a few days after the incident while her daughter was rescued in order to be punished.

This is the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. It is the fact that people did what otherwise they would never have done, and by doing what they did not only killed, wounded, humiliated, and traumatized other people, but traumatizedthemselves. The clear divide between victim and perpetrator is non-existent.

Although ever since the Cultural Revolution was officially declared to have come to an end in 1976, much has been written and said about this unprecedented event in 20th century Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution is rarely discussed as a traumatic historical event (Kleinman and Kleinman 1994, Schwarcz 1998). There is no adequate Chinese term for what we call “trauma”, and although the discourse of loss and grievance is reflected in many literary publications dealing with 20th century Chinese history, it is not a natural approach to the assessment of the Cultural Revolution. As a matter of fact, whether or not the many disastrous aspects of the Cultural Revolution should be taken into account is part and parcel of the process of contesting the memory of the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution as Trauma

Looking at 20th Century history as a history of trauma has become fashionable since the early 1990s for those who view the bloodshed, the violence and the hubris of mankind developed to a climax in this century. Trauma is ubiquitous, no part of the world that is not hit by great numbersof individual traumatization and that does not know war, revolt or revolution accompanied by traumatization (Herman 1997, Douglass 2003). At the time the trauma discourse was initiated by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century it was shaped by the experience and anticipation of disaster. However, optimism generated by revolutionary change and victory in war dominated the narrative of 20th century history until the second half of the century brought a change of mood that became more and more obvious the more the Cold War drew to an end. Paradoxically, the word trauma has only entered public discourse since the end of the Cold War and the victory of democracy in Europe and elsewhere. At the time dictatorship as the major reason for collective traumatization is replaced by a political system able to avoid politically induced trauma the word trauma is used more than ever before. Now everything that is frightening or shocking is traumatic.

In this paper, the Cultural Revolution is regarded as a traumatic event in the sense of an event that so far cannot be integrated into any of the existing narratives of recent Chinese history. We still cannot explain the rationality of this event, which means that neither we as non-participant observers nor the participants that went through the experience have been able to give an account of this event that would make it compatible with the continuity of 20th century Chinese history. The story of the young doctor killing her father is the individual trauma that in many different forms hit uncountable individuals at the time. The story is a story of traumatization, again in the very strict sense of the word. It is meaningless. For the narrator, what she did many, many years ago is still unexplainable, it is like a void in her life story she has to live with and which is surrounded by meaninglessness, contingency, fear and shame. The way she finds herself unable to integrate this maybe most important incident in her personal life story is reiterated uncountable times and forms the basis of the Cultural Revolution as a historical event of traumatic dimensions that is beyond explanation and meaning.

It is the aim of this paper to explore the way the Cultural Revolution is remembered, debated, contested and forgotten in order to test the hypothesis of the Cultural Revolution being a traumatic event in 20th century Chinese history. The basic assumption of this approach is that the traumatic character of a certain event can only be understood by the memory this event generates. There is no way to predict the traumatic character of an event, neither do we have reason to classify an event as traumatic before we know how those who participate in it react to it. The only way of reacting to an event of potentially traumatic character is through memory. This is also true for the many cases of traumatization which generate what one might conceive as forgetfulness. Leaving the fact aside that we know today that this kind of forgetfulness is not a definite loss of memory, I would suggest that forgetfulness is a form of memory generated by trauma and therefore in itself a sign of traumatization.

If we go back to the narrative of the Cultural Revolution survivor as transmitted to us by Feng Jicai (Feng Jicai 2001, 61-71) the experience of the Cultural Revolution is but an accumulation of paradoxes for which no explanation or resolution is available. At the time the young doctor talked to her parents on how to react to the Red Guards’ actions, death seemed to them the only possibility of evading what they anticipated as endless violence and humiliation. Only in death would they be able to preserve their dignity and avoid physical as well as psychic harm. Death was a logical answer to a social movement using terror to define the line between friends and enemies. However, the moment the plan was to be put into action the pragmatics of the situation made everything turn into its contrary. As a result, the loving daughter who had killed the father at his own request turned into a counterrevolutionary murderer. Her mother who did not take part in the murder and initially survived her attempt of suicide was left untreated and died although she had done no harm to anyone except herself. The daughter who had killed the father was given medical treatment and survived her suicide attempt although she should have paid for her act of murder with her own life according to the morals of the time.

The fact that she was convicted to life in prison was more of a relief to her than her rehabilitation after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Why? When she was a convicted murderer she believed that she had done right to kill her father, yet might have felt a certain relief by her punishment for an act that was basically immoral, even if - according to her logic - justified by the situation and the political implications. When she was rehabilitated, her original motivations were acknowledged and regarded as justified, and as a result she was said to be innocent. This gave her some kind of satisfaction, however left her alone with the unforgettable feeling of guilt for having committed patricide. With the reform bringing a better life to her and her family even the political justification for killing her father lost grounds. Seen from today’s perspective the Cultural Revolution is for her nothing but an episode which those who survived can forget in the face of all the progress that has been made ever since. It is only her personal guilt that makes this incident a disturbing and unforgettable factor in her life. Had she not killed her father, she could live without problems in the present.

No wonder that she shows all the signs of a post traumatic stress disorder that conventional wisdom would expect. She tells us about her dissociations, her flashbacks, her anxieties, her feelings of shame and guilt, and - as a form of embodied memory - about her attacks of high blood pressure every time she thinks back to what she went through during the Cultural Revolution. She also tells us how she had desperately longed for telling her story to Feng Jicai and then got so distressed before doing so that she wanted to cancel the appointment. Not once does she mention that anything of what she knows today had in the meantime ever been forgotten. The memory of what she had done and thought seems to have been with her all the time.

The story of patricide is part of what we might call autobiographic memory, and it is as individual as it can be. It is full of paradoxes and ambiguities, and no one would know how to help this woman solve her problems, except for advising her not to think of them too often. Forgetting would be the most pragmatic way of living with this story, even though we know that nothing is forgotten even if we happen not to spend any time thinking about it.

Although this story is so extraordinary that it seems by all means to be absolutely singular, it is emblematic for the Cultural Revolution as a traumatic event that is traumatic not only to the individual but to society as a whole.

Individual and Cultural Trauma

Arif Dirlik suggests that any attempt at trying to explain the Cultural Revolution has to go back to its original intentionality in order to reconstruct an image of the Cultural Revolution that is not distorted by the memory of it (Dirlik 2003, 158-183). To a certain degree, he suggests a methodology that is the exact opposite of what I am trying to do here. While I insist on the Cultural Revolution being a historical event of truly traumatic dimensions using today’s memories in order to make my point, Dirlik suggests that we have to go back to the documents of the 1960s and reconstruct their meaning in order to make meaningful what seems silly and senseless to all those who look back from today’s point of view. According to him, the Cultural Revolution was part and parcel of the overall project of inventing an alternative modernity for China and the 3rd World. It was this original intention that motivated so many people in and outside China to get involved in this project. And it is the fact that this project never became true that is the trauma:the trauma of defeat which is the trauma of disillusionment. This trauma is what according to Dirlik distorts memory. Instead of remembering the original intentions and all the positive steps that were made to put these intentions into practice people remember violence, bloodshed, corruption, sexual abuse, imprisonment and terror.

At first sight, this argument sounds reasonable. The original intentions of the Cultural Revolution created the victims that eventually regained power after 1976. They interpreted the Cultural Revolution as “ten years of chaos” and by this initiated a process of forgetting what the Cultural Revolution was all about when it first got started. However, Dirlik’s assessment of the debate in the PRC is not true in the sense that the issue of the original intentions is not being spoken about. Even if we look into the very official party historiography publications we will find many direct and indirect hints at an ongoing discussion about the “origins of the Cultural Revolution” (Zhang Hua and Su Caiqing 1999). Many articles appear that discuss the theoretical and political foundations of the Cultural Revolution. And even if they do not directly take up those points that Arif Dirlik would like to see as the “original intentions”, these articles show very clearly how much the end of the Cultural Revolution was different from when it was first launched. Xi Xuan and Jin Chunming write a whole chapter in their book “Short history of the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’” in which they tell their readers what they are not supposed to think about the Cultural Revolution. Among the topics they discuss is the idea that the Cultural Revolution could have had the intention to struggle against bureaucratism (Xi Xuan and Jin Chunming 1996,361-363), that the idea of “capitalist roaders” was not altogether wrong given the development of post-Mao reform (Xi Xuan and Jin Chunming 1996, 363-365) and that it was to be positively assessed because of the participatory possibilities it opened to the people (Xi Xuan and Jin Chunming 1996, 365-370). Unofficial historiography as to be found in many articles in the internet is very much focused on the question of “original intentions”. As a matter of fact, and I will show this later in more detail, one of the most important conflicts concerningthe assessment of the Cultural Revolution is whether or not it was “wrong” to begin with. On a more abstract level, the discussion about alternative modernities is still going on even if the Party leadership does not support this idea.

What Dirlik rightly hints at is the “turn around” which made the beginning of the Cultural Revolution so different from the end and which is reflected not only in the official and unofficial histories of the Cultural Revolution, but also in the autobiographic narrative of the woman doctor. This turn around has traumatic dimensions for Dirlik, and although he obviously dislikes the Mao-centered approach to post-49 history, he cannot but point his finger at Mao as the main responsible for this turn around. How come, asks Dirlik, that Mao who knew that the Cultural Revolution was all about establishing a new power structure decided to help re-establishing the old power structure that had nearly been destroyed in the initial phase of the Cultural Revolution? Why did he who initiated the Cultural Revolution lead it to defeat long before he and his followers had been defeated? (Dirlik 2003, 171-177) This defeat is traumatic - if I read Dirlik correctly - because it was unnecessary, meaningless (Dirlik 2003, 167), if not inexplicable. Because of Mao turning against the initial intentions of the Cultural Revolution what was true in 1966 turned out to be wrong in 1976. In both cases, the participants of the movement held true what they were told to be true and reacted by their participation to the mobilization efforts. Even though the “truth” of the beginning was juxtaposed to the “truth” at the end, both “truths” were so convincing that they compelled people to action. Xu Youyu who is most active in reflecting on how memory evolves from the Cultural Revolution comes to a similar conclusion when describing the difficulties his generation has in facing the Cultural Revolution:

“The main thing is that we have to admit that our generation was deceived…Our idealism and our enthusiasm were instrumentalized. The Cultural Revolution did not develop according to our ideals, it went into the opposite direction of progress for mankind.” (Yu Youyu 2001)

What seems to be forgotten then is not the turn around itself,it is the ambiguity generated by this turn around. It consists of the fact that the two “truths” not only replaced each other by the time the Cultural Revolution was declared to have come to an end, they coexisted and have coexisted ever since. In the case of the patricide, it is the moral truth that a daughter should not kill her father versus the pragmatic truth of avoiding terror and humiliation; in the case of the Cultural Revolution it is the utopia of an alternative modernity versus the pragmatism of a mass movement getting out of control. If Dirlik is correct in assessing that the driving force behind the Cultural Revolution that made so many people respond to Mao`s initiative was this longing for an alternative modernity, the trauma could very well consist in the collective experience of disillusionment. The idea of an alternative modernity is part and parcel of understanding Chinese history as different from the European development. It is part and parcel of a project of defining the identity of the Chinese in terms of their particularity and difference. It is the remedy Chinese intellectuals invented in order to overcome the humiliation China had to suffer by the West bringing the empire to an end (Cohen 2002). If the political, economic and social dynamics of the Cultural Revolution made people believe that this hope would never come true they not only lost an ideal, but saw their feeling of collective identity fundamentally destroyed.