The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Mobo Gao

Author:Mobo Gao [Gao, Mobo]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2015-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Debates on issues related to the Cultural Revolution

In previous chapters, I have argued that Chinese memoirs, autobiographies and biographies either assume or argue that Mao’s motivation for the Cultural Revolution was a personal power struggle. All developments subsequent to the downfall of Liu Shaoqi were more or less explained by this power struggle thesis. Along these lines, the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius in the early 1970s, for instance, is said to be Mao’s scheme to overthrow Zhou Enlai. However, e-media participants have begun to question the power struggle thesis. In an article published in the e-media, Xiao Yu (2000) quotes Fan Daren, one of the important polemics writers during the above-mentioned campaign, to dispute the claim that the criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius had anything to do with Mao’s intention to target Zhou Enlai. Fan, the main writer in the team writing under the pen-name of liangxiao (two universities), which consisted of academics from the two top universities of Beijing and Qinghua, testifies that the writers in the team did not intend to criticize Zhou Enlai when they were writing articles to criticize Confucianism, that they were not told to do so, nor was it even hinted that they should.

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