A Great Disorder Under Heaven

CHINA'S GREAT PROLETARIAN Cultural Revolution may never be fully explained to the outsider. An aura of mystery always remains, the legacy of the Western press's hazy early reports of the armies of the Red Guard marching back and forth across the nation, and Chairman Mao's heroic swim down the Yangtze--events without explanation, a massive eruption without obvious cause. In The Wind Will Not Subside, David and Nancy Dall Milton have made an effort to chronicle the course of the movement, from the first breath of internal debate through to the final turn to a new kind of foreign policy, an effort to explain the Cultural Revolution within the framework of China's history. But it is hard to tell whether any single work could fully explain how an entire population could be caught up in an argument so removed from our own experience.

The Miltons have a fairly unique perspective on the Chinese experience from 1964 to 1969. As Americans teaching English at the Peking First Foreign Language Insitute, they were in the middle of the factional disputes that tore apart university campuses throughout China, as well as being involved in the debates within Peking's small foreign community. Their narrative is interwoven with description of the events in their own microcosm of China's students, giving the book the sense of being a traveller's tale as well as a well-researched academic work. Like William Hinton's Fanshen, The Wind has an impact a straight history could not have achieved; but even the Miltons seem bewildered by many aspects of the Cultural Revolution, as if they, too, could not quite fathom the allegory and thetoric in which the debates were couched.

The basis of the dispute that started the upheavals lay in two conflicting theories of development prevalent in China in the early '60s. One group--supported by the Communist Party's leaders--held that the road to national economic independence lay in an emphasis on heavy industrial development, along the model of the Soviet Union. The other, led by Chairman Mao, considered ideology and participatory decisionmaking more important than economics, and found the proposed industrial path too dependent on the establishment of an elite group of technicians to be acceptable for a country whose goal was popular democracy in government. By the mid-'60s, Mao's followers had won out at least at the highest bureaucratic levels. What, then, caused the years of factionalism, and the disputes that culminated in closing all universities and allowing students to go out to the countryside and learn from the peasants, the backbone of China's population?

The Miltons are unable to fully resolve that question. Part of the answer, they suggest, lies in the desire of Mao and his closest associates to politicize the working masses and enable the Maoist leadership to recapture the straying devotion of his party. The Miltons cannot really explain how that desire was materially translated into the groups of Red Guards who took over the capital, who kept the population up at night with their loudspeakers blasting away at the ideological opponents; but it is clear they consider the dimensions of the revolution--which ultimately enveloped the national intelligentsia--to be the direct result of a power struggle within the highest echelons of the leadership, a struggle so violent it meant bringing all administrative functioning to an end for months, even years, until the battle was resolved.

The Miltons' analysis is not unique, nor is their discussion of it particularly revealing. But their chronology of the spread of the revolt against established authority, and their descriptions of the results of the dispute in their university show the extent to which the whole nation was engulfed in the fight against "elitist tendencies" within the Communist Party. Even the Miltons' children, then in junior high and high school, were caught up in the whirlwind. The Red Guard broke quickly into smaller factions, and every student, it seems, joined one or the other, and spent his time calling the others either ultra-leftists or revisionists.

The foreign community--housed in a huge complex built by the Soviet government in the '50s for Russian technicians--was gradually drawn into this Cultural Revolution. The Miltons describe the mass meeting and endless discussions of policy that arose as the theoretical dispute deepened. They never make clear what leadership there was within their community to overthrow-one gets the sense from the Miltons that the intial goal of the Cultural Revolution was soon lost, and the game became to call the other factions as many names as came to mind before they did the same to you.

It is unfortunate that the Miltons give this impression, for though the debates undoubtedly seemed pointless at times, there must have been more to them than the desire to write bigger and better large-character posters than your opponents. The Miltons fail to go into the ideological conflict very deeply, leaving the reader with little sense of the theoretical basis of the namecalling--one knows there was a great deal of commotion, but it seems to have been without reason. They offer an exact, detailed timetable, to be sure--they have researched the subject thoroughly, and each event is chronicled carefully and exactly--but at times it has little more substance than the Western press's descriptions of the Red Guard marching back and forth across China like tireless marionnettes.

Their description--and the real achievement of the Cultural Revolution--takes on more meaning when they describe a factory in Shanghai, a city that comes to represent for them the most revolutionary aspects of China's experience. In Peking, the revolution has been obscured by the constant discussion of their students, who cannot seek the release of action. At the factory, the Miltons met what they consider a true product of the Cultural Revolution--a young worker who has been elected foreman, who shows little of the deference to foreigners that characterized the older management, but whose capable leadership has made the factory more productive than it ever was before the uncrossable lines between management and worker were broken down. It is this kind of worker participation that Mao's clique hoped to establish, as well as ending the technocracy developed during the Great Leap Forward. What was hard to see in the schools and the Red Guards' marches becomes apparent to the Miltons in Shanghai, that there was an ideological purpose behind the rhetoric, and that that purpose did have a basis in the economy.

The Miltons try to avoid making judgments about the Cultural Revolution, which may be the reason for their analysis's lack of depth. They are, of course, full of admiration for the Chinese people, but they never seem quite comfortable with the extent of Mao's power, or with the Cultural Revolution's effect on foreign policy. For the six years of the raging debate, all energy turned inward, ambassadors were withdrawn; at the end, when the cultural group that led the fight against elitism decided the country needed time to rest, the debates ended, students were sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants," and a new line of foreign policy emerged. Mao announced his intention of fighting what he considered Soviet social imperialism at every step, and allowing Western economic imperialism to die of its own internal contradictions.

In a world the Chinese consider a "great disorder under heaven," the Miltons conclude the Chinese have found a safe course: to avoid alliances that could destroy their domestic balance, and to work within their boundaries to democratize their own bureaucracy. But their conclusion, like their book, does not explain the Cultural Revolution. The reader is still left wondering how so many people became involved in one of the greatest mobilizations of the century, and what that movement changed. It will take more accounts and more analyses, perhaps, to explain the urge to create such great disorder within the boundaries of one's own nation.