Chaos as a Modernising Force for China?

The Chinese Cultural Revolution

a History

By Paul Clark, Cambridge University Press, 352pp

Reviewed: 29 November 2008

Chairman Mao launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, ostensibly to challenge conservatism and elitism within the Chinese Communist Party and to create a new culture of Perpetual Revolution in China. Its scope was limitless, challenging and disrupting all cultural norms in China’s social, economic, political and even scientific fields, as well as in the arts and intellectual life.

This is a very specific, almost clinical, review of what was going on in the production of Chinese public culture over that period – mainly the mass media of film and public performance, but also painting, sculpture and literature. The “consumption” side of the analysis is limited, since Chinese audiences had very little choice, heard no independent critical voices, and experienced saturation marketing of state-prescribed products.

Clark argues that this period is not simply to be written off as an unmitigated disaster. His case is that the peculiar circumstances of massive state intervention, absolutist control over the arts, and insistent didactic purpose, also stimulated or facilitated some significant development and “modernization” of arts practice in China.

It’s a controversial, almost revisionist case to be making in relation to the Cultural Revolution, which Westerners generally associate with bizarre extremes of dogmatism, vandalism, and dictatorship, backed by personal violence against any artist thought possibly sympathetic to “class enemies”.

Clark argues that the long denial of public self-expression generated a sub-culture of private and mainly passive resistance, which would flower dramatically in artistic innovation as the reins began to slacken from the late 1970s. Well, yes. The lotus does grow from the mud.

He aims to show that the Cultural Revolution was not a “sidetrack” on China’s road to modernity, but firmly “part of the process”. Since the same could be said of civil wars, religious revolutions, invasions, natural disasters and other cataclysms in the history of any human society, I found the argument interesting but not compelling.

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Richard Thwaites lived in China 1978-83, when the Cultural Revolution was known as “The Ten Years of Chaos”