MCLC: China waits for apology on CR

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China waits for apology on CR
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (4/9/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/yu-hua-cultural-revolution-nostal
gia.html

China Waits for an Apology
By Yu Hua 

BEIJING — In 1970, when China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution,
Zhang Hongbing, a 16-year-old in Guzhen, a county in Anhui Province, made
a fateful decision. During a family debate that year, his mother, Fang
Zhongmou, had criticized Mao Zedong for his cult of personality. Her son
and his father, believing her views to be counterrevolutionary, decided to
inform on her. She was arrested that same day.

Mr. Zhang still recalls how his mother’s shoulder joints gave a grating
creak as her captors pulled the cord tight. Two months later, she was shot
to death.

In 1980, four years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural
Revolution, the verdict on Fang Zhongmou was reversed. A local court
declared her innocent.

In the months and years that followed, Zhang Hongbing and his father
scrupulously avoided all reference to this episode. Only in retirement did
his father raise the subject: As an adult at the time, he took
responsibility for what they had done.

In 2013, the Chinese media reported the lifelong regrets of Mr. Zhang,
then 59 years old. For years he would often break down in tears, howling
and wailing. “I see her in my dreams,” he said, “just as young as she was
then. I kneel on the floor, clutching her hands, for fear she will
disappear. ‘Mom,’ I cry, ‘I beg your forgiveness!’ But she doesn’t
respond. Never once has she answered me. This is my punishment.”

Why, in those dreams, does Ms. Fang never say a word to her son? It’s not,
I think, that she wants to punish him, for she knows that the true blame
lies with others — with those who were in power at the time. She — like
the souls of all who perished during the Cultural Revolution — is awaiting
their apology. She has been waiting for 44 years.

Recently, some who abused others during the decade-long Cultural
Revolution have come forward in the media or on the Internet to apologize
to their victims. Now retired, they express repentance in part because
they cannot excuse what they did, in part because they are disturbed by
efforts to put a positive spin on the Cultural Revolution. They have
voluntarily confessed to shameful acts, in the hope that young people
today will understand the grim history of that era. But the voices of the
contrite do not carry far, quickly submerged among the flood of reports on
international crises and domestic incidents, entertainment news and sports
events.

In contrast to these conscience-stricken individuals, the Communist Party
has never had trouble forgiving itself for the appalling blunders it has
committed during its 64 years in power, and it tries hard to erase from
the historical record all traces of those errors. In the immediate
aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, many sought to repudiate it, but
when our leaders realized that this kind of critique detracted from their
own authority, they immediately suppressed such criticisms — quashing them
so thoroughly it was as though they had never been voiced.

So in official discourse there is no truthful accounting of the Cultural
Revolution, and it is only in society at large that discussion of it
sometimes surfaces.

Now, helpless and indignant in the face of such ugly modern realities as
environmental degradation, income disparity, pervasive corruption, theft
and murder, drug abuse, human trafficking, land seizures and forced
demolitions, many who lived through the Cultural Revolution have begun to
wax nostalgic. That’s because, when Mao was lord and everyone was under
the regime’s thumb, social problems were not so widespread and
contradictions were not so acute.

Since efforts to confront the Cultural Revolution have so long been
stifled, people born since then have no idea what happened. In June 2012,
members of the graduating class of Central China Normal University in
Wuhan took a graduation photo, all dressed in Red Guard uniforms. To these
young people, the Cultural Revolution seems to have been nothing more than
one huge party. Canny businessmen have latched on to this, using the
Cultural Revolution to peddle their wares. Last August, on my way to
Hangzhou Airport, I saw a huge billboard on the expressway that featured a
female Red Guard, arms outstretched. “Comrades, here I am!” she cried.

China’s dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands has ramped up
anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese population. In September 2012,
there were anti-Japanese protests in more than 50 cities. Japanese
restaurants and Japanese cars were attacked, and Japanese businesses were
set on fire. At the same time, many films and TV productions set against
the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 have been made in
China’s largest film studio: Hengdian, in Zhejiang Province. There’s a
joke that more Japanese have been “killed” at Hengdian than at all the
actual battlefields put together — more, even, than the total population
of Japan.

In today’s China, more and more people speak in positive terms about the
Cultural Revolution and hanker for a return to that era. Most of them
don’t really want to turn the clock back: It’s mainly their
dissatisfaction with current realities that fuels their interest in
revolution. The itch for revolution, of course, may have different
triggers. Some people are alienated by the increasing materialism of
Chinese society, but many more are outraged by the emergence of interest
cliques that marry political power to business profits. Even those who
totally reject the Cultural Revolution are, in their own discontent,
coming to think that its real mistake was the timing: It’s now that we
need a Cultural Revolution.

Yu Hua is the author of “Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden
China.” This essay was translated by Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.