When the Chinese Cultural Revolution began in 1966 as a “revolution from above,” the relationships between Mao and those who responded to his call were highly fragile, and political messages were interpreted in different ways by different agents. In responding to contradictory central policies, grassroots activists also responded to their own socioeconomic and political circumstances, and the forces unleashed by Mao often took on lives of their own. As Yiching Wu shows in The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, new this month, the disorder caused by mass activism from below and power conflicts and paralysis at the top created a genuine political crisis, the suppression of which became the starting point for a series of measures that eventually led to the momentous changes in Chinese politics and society a decade later.
Below, HUP Editorial Assistant Shan Wang relates a bit of family history that Wu’s work on the tangled ideology of the CR has helped bring into focus.
In a scene from the 1965 Chinese animation film Havoc in Heaven, the Monkey King Sun Wukong enters the undersea realm of the Dragon King in search of a weapon befitting his stature. Preternaturally strong but also enormously arrogant, Wukong poo-poos the best of the Dragon King’s offerings, until the King challenges Wukong to pluck from the seafloor a ten-ton pillar used to stabilize the oceans, certain that Wukong wouldn’t be able. Not only does Wukong lift the pole, he is also somehow able to control its size. The Dragon King looks on in anger and disbelief as Wukong swims back up to land with his new weapon in hand, leaving in his wake the now-turbulent waters of the Eastern Sea.
Havoc in Heaven, which I watched regularly growing up without realizing the precarious political backdrop against which it was released, was the last film my great grandfather Wan Laiming directed as head of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio before studio operations came to a standstill in 1966. When the first half of the film was released in 1961, state and public reception was glowing, but by 1965, when the second half was completed, it became impossible not to recognize in it revolutionary undercurrents. At first, Mao was compared favorably to the mischievous Sun Wukong, wreaking havoc in “Heaven,” overturning the Chinese bourgeoisie. But by the same metaphor Mao had also plucked away the country’s “stabilizing pillar” with his disastrous Great Leap Forward. By the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s China could be seen as “Heaven,” Mao himself its stuffy Jade Emperor, and the disenfranchised groups living under his regime, the monkeys.
In his preface to The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, Yiching Wu quotes a letter from Mao Zedong to his wife during the earliest days of the CR: “I possess both some of the spirit of the tiger and some of the monkey. But it is the tiger spirit which is dominant, and the monkey spirit secondary.” At the heart of Wu’s book, however, is the idea that as the Cultural Revolution progressed, rebel groups that had initially sought political direction and nurturing from Mao began to develop lives of their own, their goals deviating from those of the dominant political order. These rebel groups, to apply traditional Chinese mythology, were the disobedient monkeys to Mao’s dominant tiger spirit, and Mao became eager to quash their activities.
For all its historical significance and its role in shaping the political and economic climate of China in the decades following, the Cultural Revolution is still insufficiently understood, in great part due to China’s suppression of any sort of open dialogue on the CR. Wu’s book takes a less-traversed approach to making sense of the turmoil unleashed in 1966 by foregrounding the radical political ideas that emerged (and gained real momentum) during several key episodes: the Beijing Red Guard movement, the January Revolution in Shanghai, and the Provincial Proletarian Alliance. These early events of the CR are well known and well-studied, but Wu highlights their fascinating trajectories: young critics and activists, initially spurred to action by Mao’s attempted reforms, began to challenge Maoist Thought, pushing for more radical political change, far more radical than Mao was prepared to accept.
For Wu, “margins”—referring variously to groups of people and to ideas—are “liminal spaces that are more open to exploration and play of thought, thereby making possible critical reflections on society and politics.” As he writes in the book:
Despite the omnipotence (and omnipresence) of Mao and his infinitely mythologized Thought, this stress on the primacy of the doctrine, as well as its coherence, seems to be too hasty and leaves a number of important questions to be answered. For example, is the center of the Cultural Revolution…all that matters to our understanding? What about its contradictory effects and the contingent and protracted historical processes in which events unfolded, unforeseen forces were unleashed, and new ruptures emerged? And more important, what about its edges, or that which lies on its margins?
I had always known that my great grandfather was not a political man, certainly not a member of the “margins” featured in Wu’s new book. Moreover, most Chinese-language biographies written about him completely skip over the period of the Cultural Revolution—unsurprising given the inclinations of Chinese officialdom to bury and forget the era. Wan Laiming was an artist who happened to head an animation company with his brothers, and he regarded his responsibilities simply, as a cartoonist who created joyful works. Even during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, he continued making animations as part of the only remaining film company during the Occupation. But his animations were nuanced, precise, and unrelentingly intricate; with a runtime of over an hour and a half, Havoc in Heaven was his crowning achievement.
Mao at first undoubtedly liked the paradigm of the rebel monkey, defying and defeating the stodgy gods, who are so stuck in their ways of governing they don’t see how ridiculous their customs are. In the second half of the film, the Monkey King Sun Wukong is shown becoming increasingly unruly. His demands are insatiable even after he claimed the pillar in the sea for his weapon. He accepts a position in Heaven, but leaves when he discovers it was created to appease him. Wukong is given a second slightly improved position, but that too is not enough, and he flies to Heaven in a rage to trash an Imperial feast being held without him. The Jade Emperor—who in the film bears a mole strikingly similar to the one on Mao’s chin—orders military action to stamp out Wukong for good (spoiler alert: Wukong triumphs, after several more rounds of havoc). Like Wukong and his legion of monkeys, the movements Wu describes in his book were facilitated by the central leadership, but when they spun out of Mao’s control, he moved swiftly to suppress them.
Havoc in Heaven was banned less than a year following its full-length release, and the entire animation industry was shuttered, its writers and animators sent to the countryside alongside millions of others to “learn labor” on farms and in factories instead.