"A Cigarette for Sukarno ... Brought Disgrace upon the Chinese People"—A Review Essay on the Cultural Revolution

312 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 "A Cigarette for Sukarno . . . Brought Disgrace upon the Chinese People"—A Review Essay on the Cultural Revolution Sebastian Heilman. TurningAwayfrom the Cultural Revolution: Political Grass-Roots Activism in the Mid-Seventies. Stockholm University, Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Occasional Papers 28. Stockholm: Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholm University, 1996. 44 pp. issn [Occasional Papers ] 0284-1541. Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun. Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997. xiii, 249 pp. Hardcover , ISBN 0-81-3321-65-4. Paperback, isbn 0-81-3321-66-2. Michael Schoenhals, editor. China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1969: Nota Dinner Party. An East Gate Reader. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. xix, 400 pp. Hardcover, isbn 1-56-3247-36-4. Paperback, isbn 1-563247 -37-2. Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao. Turbulent Decade: A History ofthe Cultural Revolution . Translated and edited by D.W.Y. Kwok. SHAPS Library ofTranslations . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996. xxv, 659 pp. isbn 082 -4816-95-1. How to bend the mind around a momentous event? This is not simply a historiographical question. It is also a philosophical and moral dilemma. How to conceive the massive upheaval in China that started in 1966 and how to convey its scope and purpose in words? This is the challenge that lies at the core of the four works reviewed here. The authors wrestle with it disparately from Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao's massive epic to Sebastian Heilman's short essay on grassroots activism. Yet whether many words are used or few, the question remains. D.W.Y. Kwok (Yan and Gao's translator) acknowledges this problem by claiming that the Cultural Revolution "defies to this day an informed general understanding" (p. xi). This acknowledgment, however, masks more than it reveals. If a historical event resists understanding, why draw the reader into such a convoluted tale? If under-© 1998 by University standing ¿s possible, then why not press on to some form ofcritical understandofHawai 'i Pressm8? Heilman, too, would deflect us from this taskby reiterating the worn-out claim that we have only "scarce sources" (p. 2) from which to fathom the full scope of the Cultural Revolution. Features 313 A concrete rebuttal to this point ofview is to be found in Michael Schoenhals masterly edited volume ofprimary sources as well as in Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun's work on the movement's significance in Shanghai. Schoenhals and Perry and Li show us that it is not onlypossible but indeed necessary to conceptualize momentous events. Each author manages to carve up the massive subject ofthe Cultural Revolution into comprehensible elements and thereby invites critical reflection on fragments ofhistorical memory that continue to trouble China even today. "A cigarette for Sukarno" is one such shard. This bit ofthe past was the subject ofa vicious harangue against Wang Guangmei (the wife ofLiu Shaoqi) that took place on the Qinghua University campus on April 10, 1967. The cigarette comes up explicitly in the documentary reader by Schoenhals (pp. 101-115) and not at all in the sympathetic account ofWang's troubles discussed at length by Yan and Gao (pp. 93-144). I am focusing on this fragment ofhistory because it highlights the dilemma of critical thought. Thirty years after the event, we are finally in a position to rethink the Cultural Revolution and make sense of the "logic" that made one cigarette appear as the source of"disgrace" for a whole people. How had China become so vulnerable and her private and public "demons " so powerful? To ask such questions is to redefine the meaning ofhistorical monumentality. In Nietzsche's words, it means looking at great events not as "our loudest but our stillest hours."1 The very distance that we now have from the hellish noises of1966-1969 creates a space for critical reflection. It is possible now to discern meaning where meaninglessness once prevailed. Historical significance, however, is not simply the by-product ofthe passage of time. To be sure, the three decades that separate us from the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution have led to the discovery of...