Foreword: The Maoism of PRC History

Good PRC history is left history. But hear me out. I do not mean that all good PRC historians are leftist in their thinking, their politics, or their methods; they are not. Nor do I mean that all good PRC history advocates for left positions; it does not. But rather, good PRC history is left history because it takes seriously and elucidates the leftist logics that framed discourses and experiences in socialist China. It grants that Maoist (Maovian?) projects had logics and evaluates them on their own terms, rather than dismissing them as obviously illogical. As Kristin Stapleton and Michael Schoenhals have pointed out, Mao Zedong Thought is perhaps the most important of the theories that inform the study of PRC history (H-PRC 2016). Knowing what Mao and Maoists actually thought, as well as what they tried to do, is all the more important when today's dominant political and economic systems rely, for their very existence, on the falsification of the ideologies, Marxian and otherwise, that attempt to contest them and hold them accountable. Bad PRC history abets conservative and regressive politics by attempting to erase any positive aspects of the socialist project, by pretending it was irrational, and by demonizing, reductio ad Maoum, anyone who disagrees.

Good PRC history resists teleological interpretations of the past by recovering the "infinite possibilities" that Maoism once offered, and that many people pursued, often using Mao's ideas to take them places that even Mao did not want them to go (Badiou 2014; Karl 2010; Wu 2014). When good PRC historians dive into archives and oral histories, they attempt to recapture this history of possibility by moving within the mindscapes of Chinese Communism. They learn to think like Maoists, even as they question Maoist thought. Good PRC history, like Maoism, should make us question what and how we know.

Reading sources from the PRC past can challenge our assumptions about how the world is and how it could be. When we are mindful of our own presentist thought categories and work to ensure that we read the sources on their own terms, they can destabilize the naturalized narratives of capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism as well as the entities that benefit from some or all of those, including US-style liberal democracies and, importantly, today's proudly illiberal PRC state. As this issue discusses, however, despite important interventions over the past decades, reactionary, redbaiting visions of the socialist past still play an outsized role in PRC history, both in its academic and popular forms. The only way to balance the scales is to unearth and resuscitate the disruptive elements that the dominant emplotments of history necessarily conceal, cast aside, or name as imaginary.

The First Rule of PRC History: Social Science and Anti-Marxist Positivism

There is an ongoing battle over what PRC history is and should be, complete with camps and several casualties so far. One of the most widely cited visions for the field was articulated in 2016 by political scientist Elizabeth Perry. Her article included a swipe at "Sinological garbology" (buying or otherwise salvaging documents that have been thrown out by archives, institutions, and individuals), a method that counts among its practitioners such field-shaping senior scholars as Michael Schoenhals and Zhang Letian. But Perry suggests that garbology has led younger researchers astray, luring us into a "janitorial role." We seem content, she muses, to "grub for diversity in the dustbins of grassroots society" to tell interesting but ultimately unimportant stories of difference. Meanwhile, according to Perry, "social scientists" continue to do the far more significant work of exploring "the 'commanding heights' of the Chinese state and its policies" (2016: 116). Despite the janitorial metaphor, it is important to note that this critique could also apply to historians who do not do garbology but use similar kinds of grassroots sources from local PRC archives. Perry's concern is that historians, in general, seem to be focusing on minutiae rather than "overarching historical arguments." She notes that this might be "understandable and excusable" among historians working in China, "in light of political constraints," but that...