The Art of Cloning: Creative Production during China's Cultural Revolution by Laikwan Pang (review)

There was an old scholarly prejudice that everything about the Cultural Revolution is worth studying except its culture. The cynical understanding of Maoist culture as ideological indoctrination found its empirical supports from the memory politics of the post-Mao generation who uncritically dismissed this tumultuous period as a "cultural desert." Nevertheless, Mao's skewed cultural practice has raised crucial questions not only to the contested meaning of Maoist aesthetics in particular but also to the function of art in socialist revolution in general. How did a soul-transforming project to empower human agency, democratize cultural production, and formulate a brand new proletarian worldview result in an aesthetical and political failure? With the revival of interest in political culture, recent years have witnessed a succession of monographs on the culture of the Cultural Revolution—Barbara Mittler's comprehensive survey of major art forms, Daniel Leese's historical study of the metamorphosis of Mao Cult, and Yiching Wu's sharp interpretation into the grassroots Maoism at the margins, to just name a few. Laikwan Pang's timely intervention into the art of revolutionary models renews the field by theorizing the dialectics of artistic creativity and political command in Maoist cultural production. Informed but not exhausted by post-Marxist/poststructuralist theories of agency, Pang is dedicated to dispelling the simplified understanding of Maoist culture as lifeless uniformity.

Pang is particularly interested in the process of subject formation—understood as the ways in which "individuals interact with the dominant ideology to acquire a sense of self." Pang's theorization of agency is caught between two paradigms: the Althusserian view of a passive individual interpellated by ideological apparatus on the one hand, and the Gramscian understanding of hegemony as a synthesis of coercion and consent on the other. For Pang, Mao's shifting stance between bottom-up liberation and top-down control provided individuals with chances to tweak power hierarchy. Thus, the main goal of Maoist cultural politics—unification (一元化 yiyuan hua)—was never fully realized. Rather, cultural governance under Mao involved a constant interplay between "the integrity of the whole" and "the autonomy of the parts."

Pang further (re)conceptualizes the term "mimesis" to theorize this ambivalent situation. She defines mimesis as a "process of social formation or social healing" that helps the people "develop bonding and submit to the dominant ideology." Here, the Durkheimian concern for collective solidarity is complicated, if not compromised, by the voluntarist impulse to seek genuine identifications from the individual. On the one hand, one loses independent judgment under Maoist totalistic governance; on the other hand, by emulating, rather than obeying, Maoist commands, one regains cognitive and active agency and disrupts unified conformity. The power of mimesis, as Pang argues, is of crucial importance in understanding the politics of copying in Maoist society. Maoist propaganda actively promoted a wide range of models—model plays (樣 板戲 yangbanxi), model idols (模範 mofan), and leader cults (領袖崇拜 lingxiu chongbai). Ironically, the proliferation of these models, which supposedly required stringent emulation, caused their diversification and distortion by the masses.

Chapter 1 starts by outlining the aesthetic principles of Maoist art. The instrumentalization of art led to its predictability, revealed in the regime's doctrinal call for "Three Prominences" (三突出 santuchu), "Tall, Big, Complete" (高, 大, 全 gao da quan), and "Red, Bright, Shinning" (紅, 光, 亮 hong guang liang). Meanwhile, this socialism realism was infused with a "Maoist romanticism"—a conglomerate of Mao's voluntarism, avant-gardism, and revolutionary romanticism of the thirties. This aesthetic structure encouraged people to transgress and rebel while sought to contain political subversion within the party's political scheme. Pang furthers her analysis by investigating the undergirding cultural economy behind aesthetics in chapter 2. Contrary to the capitalist cultural industry that accumulates private capital, socialist cultural production is meant to advance the Maoist collective. This fundamentally transformed authorship from talented individuals into a sublime but anonymous collective—the revolutionary masses. Moreover, authorship and readership became intertwined with each other in the participation...