Ideology and Politics at Top and Bottom: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution

The year 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. While its commemoration will likely be sidestepped if not completely suppressed in China due to its highly sensitive and controversial nature, a series of books and articles are expected to come out from outside the PRC to address its historical significance and continued relevance today. Andrew Walder and Yiching Wu in their respective books explore the Chinese Revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution, from quite different angles, contributing to the ongoing debate about China’s revolutionary legacy with a potency especially visible at the moment when China’s postrevolutionary transformation seems to stand at a crossroads. Although Walder’s book encompasses the entire Mao era from 1949 to 1976, more than one third (five out of fourteen chapters) of the book is dedicated to the Cultural Revolution. The assessment of the Cultural Revolution constitutes a major part of his overall argument of Mao’s failed attempts to construct a new modern China—a “revolution derailed,” as noted in the title of the book. Wu, on the other hand, documents in great detail, with original archival research, a critical yet often neglected aspect of the Cultural Revolution, namely, the grassroots dissent from the “margins” (appearing also in the book title). This historical study of the young rebels is no less important for Wu as a historically grounded “dual criticism” of both capital and state power, or “the logic of bureaucratic domination and capitalist accumulation.”

Walder’s book is not intended for a specialized academic audience, and he acknowledges that the book both draws on his own research as a sociological and political historian and synthesizes existing scholarship in order to address both the scholarly community and the general public. The book covers vastly complex issues of nearly three decades of Mao’s China with a clear, coherent narrative, written in a lucid, jargon-free, highly accessible style. Walder’s argument is forthright and his assessment of Mao’s legacy is unrelenting, and yet the abundance of detailed, well-researched descriptions of political campaigns, crackdowns, infighting, economic and demographic data, and everyday life of the Chinese people—combined with his masterful storytelling talent comparable to that of Jonathan Spence, another prominent Yale historian of China—makes the work a highly readable and excellent textbook of Mao’s China with refreshing insights and a great deal of provocative ideas.

China under Mao begins with chapter 1, “Funeral,” a flashback reflection of Mao’s reign of the PRC, and ends with chapter 14, “The Mao Era in Retrospect,” where Walder summarizes his main arguments. Chapter 2, “From Movement to Regime,” lays out what Walder believes to be the essential ingredients of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its final victory in 1949: first, that the CCP won through conventional, large-scale warfare against its Nationalist enemy, rather than using the guerrilla tactics that the CCP was known for in both civil wars and wars against Japan; and second, that its military success, to a significant extent, shaped the CCP regime after 1949 both in its mentality and in regard to the behavior of its leaders. Walder argues that “[the CCP] was a militarized party engaged in all-out mobilization to support territorial conquest by a large modern army, and it formed the kernel of a new Chinese state” (p. 19). This militarized party apparatus turned out be one of the two “vitally important organizations.” The other pillar is the Soviet-style command economy, a radicalized yet rigidly dogmatic version of a socialist economy. Walder recounts its formation and vicissitudes in the following chapters: 3, “Rural Revolution”; 4, “Urban Revolution”; and 5, “The Socialist Economy.” Chapter 5 delineates the evolution of the party system from a revolutionary...