In his new book The Cultural Revolution at the Margins (Harvard, 2014), Professor Yiching Wu discusses the Cultural Revolution and the young individuals at the grassroots level who made it possible. For this book, Professor Wu was awarded  the 2013 President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association (SSHA). The award is presented to acknowledge “an especially meritorious first book by a beginning scholar.” Professor Wu also runs difangwenge, which is known to be the largest Chinese language website on the Cultural Revolution. In this interview, he talks about his new book, the website, and how the Cultural Revolution affects contemporary China.

What motivated you to create the website?

Due to the censorship in China, it is difficult to publish works on the Cultural Revolution. As a result, people tend to write their recollections or transcribe their diaries and post them on forums. So there was actually a lot of information about the Cultural Revolution that was floating online, everywhere and nowhere. Many of the stories were useful because they were temporally and spatially specific. However, this information often disappears, either deleted or the website shuts down. My original intention was to gather this information and create a digital repository and organize them into different provincial forums. So that, let’s say, a student who is writing a thesis on Shandong, has available to her everything on the Chinese internet regarding the Cultural Revolution on Shandong. While my idea was for an open forum where people would go scavenge for stories and come back to share and contribute, the result was that I ended up posting 60-70% of the materials. The website has been in operation for 6 years and there are some people who are “builders” – they go out to search for things and come back and post them. They are largely amateur historians who are very good at collecting information and documenting events in great detail. While they are not card carrying scholars because they do not have extensive knowledge of fancy theories, they do very good work. I intended my website to be a space for this kind of work and also to broaden the idea of scholarship. This website has become, in all likelihood, the largest Chinese website on the Cultural Revolution. Many people know about it, despite it being blocked by the Chinese firewall. There are 50, 000 – 60, 000 unique visitors per month. It would probably be in the millions if the firewall was lifted.

How did the Cultural Revolution cause you to go on the intellectual detour that you mentioned in The Cultural Revolution at the Margins?

I was trained as an anthropologist. When I was writing my anthropology thesis, it was not on the Cultural Revolution at all, but about contemporary debates on the changing identity of Chinese intellectuals more than 10 years ago, when the so-called reform was hitting its bottleneck, with the inequality, rampant corruption and privatization. There was a lot of discussion on how to understand contemporary China. In that context, the Cultural Revolution and Mao era was a central component of that debate – how to understand contemporary China in relation to its revolutionary and socialist past. That became a very intense debate about whether the contemporary Chinese market reform has subverted the egalitarian legacy of China’s socialist and revolutionary past or rather the reform had saved intrepid socialism. From different political perspectives, the Cultural Revolution was a central piece in a larger debate about China’s present. That’s how I got interested in this debate. I was interested in what kind of history between the present and recent past, which was difficult and fun. It was fun to dig out this forbidden information.

As a known scholar on the Cultural Revolution, is it easy for you to travel to and around China?

While I don’t have problems with getting visas, the study of the Cultural Revolution is a sensitive topic in China. It’s difficult to publish books, for example. It would be impossible for my books to be translated and published in mainland China. Recently, a graduate student from Fudan University wrote me to say that he requested the Fudan University library to order my book, and the reply he received was “we apologize we cannot purchase this book because it’s forbidden from being imported.” My first reaction was “gee, why my book? Are my books being individually scrutinized? Am I much more important than I think I am?” But actually, Peking University library has an English copy of my book. It is not like the Chinese Ministry of Information has experts reading new English scholarship to decide which books are appropriate. It is just that at a particular entry point for importing, a screening is done and they decide whether or not the book is suitable. This topic is sensitive but there is still room to maneuver. So while I don’t have problems travelling to China, research there is always difficult. There are obstacles all the time when visiting libraries and archives. In the book, I mention that I had an encounter with the state police, and that incident just indicates that this particular subject is considered by the Chinese State to be important to national security.

Did being detained affect your later research?

It’s not being detained itself that affects the later research, it’s being a known entity to the authorities. When you visit a critical institution, then it is likely, and actually this has happened, that the institution will be visited by the authorities to ask about why I was there. Maybe there are more hidden obstacles of which I am not aware.

What is the difference, if any, between the way the Cultural Revolution is studied by Chinese scholars and Euro-American scholars?

It is currently a very small field outside of China compared to 30-40 years ago, when scholars who were studying China were de facto studying the Cultural Revolution. It is largely studied by sociologists and political scientists as for a long time, post-1949 was considered too recent for historians. Currently, we have a fairly small number of scholars outside China, probably a dozen or fewer, not including graduate students in this specific field. In China, it is also very small because of the state. However, there is huge interest in China about this kind of topic; there is a query for information that relates to the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era. The field is very small largely because of the lack of access to materials and data and the censorship on publication. If you’re a Chinese scholar and you write a book or article on the Cultural Revolution, it will be very difficult to get published in China, though not impossible. The entire journal can be shut down, and this has happened in multiple cases. Presses and publishes have also been penalized or shut down. The government never said that you cannot study the Cultural Revolution, but they control the output. So the problem is that for scholars, especially younger scholars, if you cannot publish, you cannot get promoted. For grad students, if you cannot publish, you cannot get a job. So naturally, people are discouraged from studying this topic. Except a small number of people who are senior enough and they are passionate enough about this topic to say “I don’t care”, and there are only a few, maybe three or four of them. There are also a number of people who pursue this topic out of personal interest and they do very good work.

The younger generations in China are largely unaware or apathetic about the Cultural Revolution, how do you feel about this?

The historical connections have been blocked or erased. The Cultural Revolution has been this hugely important event. It’s important not just because it was important then, but because it shapes the present. It is actually the agenda of my book, to show how it actually shapes the present. The historical amnesia is largely in effect because of state oppression and the increasingly fast-paced market society. The problem of revolution seems so distant; this is the age about smartphones, going to bars, and karaoke. History is very important for our understanding of the present, it provides a critical standpoint to think about alternatives and the problems in the present. The purpose of a book like this is to reconnect and to excavate that history, reconnecting the dots on a broken line, and to make history available.

How do you think this general disconnect is going to shape the future of Chinese politics?

This disconnect is not just about the Cultural Revolution, but a general sense of disconnect from history, and I think it creates a sense of complacency and an intellectual shallowness, which is a sense that “the only world I know is the one I live in and it is the best world”. A sense of history really helps to debunk that idea, provide perspective, and to explain how the world has come to this point.

In your book, you mention that when surveyed, many people reported feeling a sense of nostalgia about the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era, what part of the Cultural Revolution do you think people miss?

It is the idea of egalitarianism. The original intention of the revolution was to destroy social inequality, but things went terribly wrong. The immediate context of this nostalgia is the dramatic increase of the social and political inequality in China today, along with the widespread corruption and privatization of political power. The Cultural Revolution was unique because the bureaucracy was under severe attack by the people who were called upon by Mao, while this bureaucracy was also embodied and led by Mao. So in that sense, the supreme leader of the Chinese Party state unleashed a major assault on the party and state bureaucracy that he himself created and headed. It went terribly wrong, of course. The book talks about how it went terribly wrong and what kind of possibilities might emerge from that situation.

Join us on Friday January 23, 2015 for the Book Launch of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins

-written by Katy Wang, a fourth-year student majoring in English and Psychology  at the University of Toronto.

This article is part of a series of articles written by undergraduate students affiliated with the Asian Institute about Asian Institute affiliated faculty.