Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism ed. by Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson (review)

In her superb, succinct epilogue to this collection of essays by both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars of modern Chinese history, Vivienne Shue reflects on the belief by a large number of students of the People’s Republic’s history from 1949 to 1978, that the years immediately after this era were an intensely and ubiquitously politicized period, stating how limiting and unsatisfactory this attitude has proven to be in truly understanding the China that existed under Mao.

Not that the hand of politics in the Mao era was not heavy. There is plenty of evidence in this work of how far it penetrated into people’s lives. Jeremy Brown in his contribution, refers to the example of class labels, a critical issue for almost everyone after the revolution in 1949 because of the stricture by Mao that addressing class struggle was the core issue for society. But even in this area, there were strategies, subterfuges, and means by which people were able to negotiate new, more benign designations, as he demonstrates. Nothing in Mao’s China was quite as settled as it seemed. Shue recognizes this in acknowledging the parallel paths that many took away from what seemed, on the surface at least, the main direction of society under the guiding Chairman to an earthly, Marxist Leninist Maoist Utopia.

This tension between the “official” and the unofficial can be seen in a number of the contributions. Cao Shuji refers to the anti-rightist campaign from 1957 in which the public was invited to deliver opinions on how the new government had been performing. It was clear, according to Cao’s account of events in rural Henan, that the official strategy was to simply use this movement to coax doubters, dissenters, and potential saboteurs out of their hiding places. What is even more striking from his account is that the targets knew very well what the real objective of the Hundred Flowers campaign and its aftermath was—to expose their disagreement. Even so, in Cao’s brisk summary, “critics simply could not keep their mouths shut” (p. 79). Despite the costs, they opened up. For many, the result was years of persecution and discrimination. But it was a price they paid with their eyes wide open in what he calls an “overt conspiracy.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously defined a genius as someone who was able to think two wholly opposed things at the same time and believe both of them with equal fervor. It could be said that the Maoist era invited all to become something akin to geniuses, living parallel lives where they sought after wholly different things with equal commitment. Matthew D. Johnson’s contribution looks at the ways in which an “official” politically wholesome culture ran alongside a world of much less reliable written material, the latter being consumed with avid interest despite the difficulty of its production and the dangers of being caught possessing it. The immense efforts of the state to clamp down on these materials only seemed to make it more precious and popular.

For Michael Shoenhals, whose work over the last decade has looked at what he has labeled the archive of “garbology”—the reams of material that was of poor production quality and was largely consigned to the dustbin after the Maoist era ended, but serves as the most remarkable archive of the “hidden history” of the era—the parallel he draws is between the information-networked generation on social media in China now and the remarkable exchanges of intelligence and news that were practiced five decades ago in the Cultural Revolution with utterly different and far clunkier technology. The material he draws in, from rebellious Red Guard groups mostly in Beijing, often refers in detail to meetings with senior leaders up to and including...