Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia (review)

Reviews 73 also part of a continuing political and cultural debate in Asia that has become tied to an evolving Chinese identity as well as strategies to pressure Japan into concessions ofvarious kinds. Whether Chang is an unwitting pawn in this debate or a conscious contributor to it is unclear. However, the unsuspecting reader will have no idea that a book in English about a massacre that occurred sixty years ago has as much to do with a game ofcultural one-upmanship between China and Japan as it does with Chang's claim ofnot forgetting the past. Unfortunately, as long as writers like Chang continue to use questionable evidence and make unsubstantiated claims, there will be those in Japan who will deny the evidence as a means to refute the entire Massacre. The result is a nationalistic debate that helps no one understand the real dynamics surrounding that terrible event. Mark Eykholt Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology Mark Eykholt is the Director ofIntern Programs at the MITJapan Program and MISTI China Program, which send students to Japan and China on work and research internships. His researchfocuses on Hanking and Sino-Japanese relations. N OTE S 1. See the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, annot, comp., and ed. R. John Pritchard and Sonia Magbanau Zaide (New York: Garland, 1981), and compare pp. 40147-40148 with p. 41221. Timothy Cheek. Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xv, 390 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-19-829066-7. In a place and time when an identifiable intelligentsia remained an important part ofChina's political landscape, and propaganda work could still be undertaken as a worthy discipline for the intellectual in the service of the state, scholarcadre Deng Tuo and other loyal, educated Chinese endeavored to advance Mao Zedong's new China by didactic discussions of current social issues in the press. Timothy Cheek's Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China: Deng Tuo and the In-© 1999 by University telligentsia thoroughly examines this period and the events that led to its demise. ofHawai'i PressDeng's adult life and career serve as the time line along which Cheek traces the political developments in China that ultimately subverted the delicate balance between bureaucratic Maoism and faith Maoism, leading to a thirteen-year eclipse 74 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 ofthe bureaucratic form. In addition to the extensively researched historical narrative, Cheek presents literary evidence to support his contention that Deng remained loyal to China, to a reasoned, scholarly, Marxist approach to its social problems and their solutions, and to a Maoism balanced by sustaining the equilibrium between its institutional and charismatic forms. An appendix provides a comprehensive list of all the articles and prefaces included in Deng's Evening Chats at Yanshan and Notesfrom a Three Family Village, the two series for which he was denounced and later reviled in the press. Cheek also includes a detailed glossary and an exhaustive bibliography. The strength of this work lies in its careful examination ofDeng Tuo's writings as the gauge ofhis political thought. There is no room for speculation here: Cheek presents the reader with the debates that arose in the new China that produced Deng's commentary, which in turn became the basis upon which he was sidelined. Cheek discusses the social space Deng carved out and sought to preserve for himselfas events affecting his public life became more ominous. Deng maintained a comfortable, elite, daily life that included collecting paintings, calligraphy, and seals and conversing with other culturally adept friends about these and related topics. He continued to receive sizable royalties from publications and increasingly participated in travel to and enjoyment of the rich natural and cultural sights that are so abundant in China. Although the author describes this space, which became a virtual refuge as the critique against Deng mounted, Cheek does not examine this world ofprivilege as a possible source of the hostility . No cause beyond the content of Deng's political thought figures into Deng's suicide, which consequently appears unprovoked. The author does recount Deng Tuo's sudden summons to meet with Mao...