Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

Conclusion

283 The common characterization of Mao’s revolution as a struggle against Chinese culture, originating with the iconoclasm of the May Fourth era and culminating with Red Guard rampages against the “Four Olds”— Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas—has until quite recently discouraged serious investigation of the culture of the revolution itself. Whether or not Mao Zedong and his comrades succeeded in delivering a deathblow to tradition was often debated, but that they fully intended to do so was less often questioned.1 In the influential interpretation of historian Joseph Levenson, traditional Chinese culture had lost all value for twentieth-century Chinese thinkers and activists. The intellectual and moral vacuum created by the exhaustion of the Confucian tradition, Levenson contended, was precisely what persuaded politically concerned Chinese to embrace a Marxist alternative. In comparing the course of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Levenson stressed the more natural and culturally congruent origins of the Russian variant of Communism: Russians and Chinese . . . came to their revolutions from different points of departure. Russia was part of Europe; China was all of China. . . . [In China] Marxism had its appeal as a compensation for the lost values of Confucian civilization, not (like its Russian appeal) as the culmination of a civilization to which the intelligentsia subscribed . . . . And so in China, as a resolver of the dilemma of cultural malaise, Marxism was really a deus ex machina; while in Russia, a Marxist resolution might seem to issue from the logic of the drama.2 According to Levenson, then, Marxism in China was an artificial substitute for a discredited Confucian tradition rather than an organic outgrowth of indigenous cultural impulses, as had been the case in Russia. Conclusion 284 / Conclusion Writing in 1965, Levenson presented his argument at a moment when China stood at the threshold of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, poised, it seemed, to jettison any lingering remnants of its outmoded past. Today, however, a comparison of the trajectories of the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions, with the hindsight afforded by an additional half century of history, has given rise to a rather different understanding. As Thomas Metzger observes of contemporary Chinese intellectual discourse, “it has become almost a cliché to view Maoism and the Confucian tradition as a single if evolving amalgam.”3 Now that a Communist political system has persisted in China for decades after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Chinese Communism appears less contrived than it once did. The durability of the Chinese Communist political system—when contrasted with the sudden collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—lends credence to the possibility that its resilience may reflect the recognition and redirection , rather than the wholesale rejection and replacement, of China’s rich cultural resources. Although one would be hard-pressed to find many (or perhaps even any) Communist “true believers” in China these days, the impact of generations of both top-down and bottom-up efforts to interpret Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideas in terms of familiar frameworks should not be underestimated. This process of cultural translation was critical to the victory of the Communist revolution and remains central to the nationalist/revolutionary authority that underpins the political system today. It helps explain how a Communist party-state that was in fact an alien import both ideologically and institutionally—a deus ex machina, as Levenson so aptly put it—came to be accepted as recognizably “Chinese.” “socialism with chinese characteristics” Since the establishment of the PRC, a succession of state-sponsored initiatives and societal responses served to render the new order culturally consonant—or, to borrow the phrase that Deng Xiaoping applied to his economic reforms, to create “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The decision in 1949 to occupy, rather than eviscerate, the symbolic center of imperial Chinese power—Tiananmen and the Forbidden City that stretched behind it—acknowledged that the architecture of the past offered a supple scaffold on which to construct a very different political system.4 Even the Cultural Revolution, despite its frontal attack on the Four Olds, drew power from both elite and popular traditions.5 The Conclusion / 285 intense religiosity of that era, moreover, bestowed upon Mao Zedong and his thought a sacred authority that is now worshipped in local temples across China in what Timothy Cheek characterizes as “an astonishing syncretism of twentieth-century ideological politics and long-standing Chinese religious folkways.”6 The Beijing Olympics in 2008 provided a graphic demonstration of the PRC’s...