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The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis by Yiching

Wu

Article in Twentieth-Century China · January 2015

DOI: 10.1353/tcc.2015.0008

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WU, YICHING, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 335 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

Yiching Wu’s The Cultural Revolution at the Margins traces the emergence and suppression
of a radical critique of state socialism during the Cultural Revolution, a critique that moved beyond
the margins of Maoist political thought. While many of the key groups and individuals that Wu
focuses on—for example, Yu Luoke (遇罗克 1942–1970), Shengwulian (省无联), and the Li
Yizhe group (李一哲)—have received significant attention, Wu argues against teleological liberal
interpretations of their work and situates them within a larger political narrative linking the
socialist and postsocialist periods. In this narrative, the reform period finds its origins in the
strategy of containment that the state developed to suppress these radical tendencies. By
placing the Cultural Revolution at the center of PRC history, therefore, this book has important
implications far beyond simply adding complexity to the story of the Cultural Revolution.
After a discussion of the historiography of the Cultural Revolution and the formation of
the state socialist class system in the first two chapters, the three principle chapters on the
Cultural Revolution look at the emergence of radical tendencies. Chapter 3 looks at the
development of the bloodline theory of class, in which one’s class was determined by that of
one’s parents, and the critique of that theory by Yu Luoke and his collaborators. Here we first
encounter Wu’s basic interpretive move. For Wu, Yu’s political manifestos were neither an
expression of particularistic interests nor a form of a liberal universalism, but rather a “class-
based critique” (90) of the inequalities at the heart of state socialism. Importantly, Yu did not
see this inequality as an outgrowth of the presocialist society; it was instead the product of a
new class system ruled over by “a new aristocratic stratum” or “new bourgeois elements”
(88). Wu also shows that Maoist leaders were not as critical of the bloodline theory as has
been supposed. Attending to this Maoist ambiguity on questions of class allows Wu to demarcate
the space between the radical critique at the margins and the Maoist leadership, who shifted from
support to containment and suppression of the radical tendencies. Yu himself was an early victim
of that suppression, arrested in January of 1968 and executed two years later.
Chapter 4 on economism and Shanghai’s January Revolution contains Wu’s most
significant reinterpretation. Contrary to most studies, Wu argues that the true radical moment of
Shanghai’s Cultural Revolution was not the January power seizures and the formation of the
Shanghai Commune but the economistic struggles of late 1966. As with his discussion of Yu,
Wu’s task here is to show that those struggles were not simply particularistic in intent or effect,
as the normal understanding of economism implies. Wu argues that “economism” is particularistic
under capitalism because, with the separation of the economic and political spheres, economic
demands remain isolated from political implications. Under the state socialist system, however,
without a clear separation between the economic and political spheres, economic demands
immediately called into question the basic social structure, founded as it was upon the direct
“extraction of surplus labor… through extraeconomic means” (107). The January power seizures
and Shanghai Commune became part of an emerging strategy of containment in response to the
economistic demands of the preceding months, a strategy that led to the restoration of political
authority. This containment, nonetheless, was contested and its meaning unstable, as the
Commune model remained an important symbol as the Cultural Revolution progressed.
Chapter 5 focuses on Shengwulian’s development of a radical tendency in Hunan in
response to concrete political circumstances during the period of movement demobilization. Yet,
 even though this tendency grew out of very particular and contingent circumstances, these
particularities were articulated as “a broader political critique” (181) that formed the basis
for a universalistic politics. Wu tells the story of Shengwulian in more detail than we have
heard before, and this allows him to intervene in academic debates on the relationship between
objective class position and factional politics, charting a middle path between interpretations that
argue for a direct relationship between the two and those that deny any relationship. Wu
argues that Shengwulian’s Yang Xiguang (杨曦光 1948–2004) produced the most developed
critique of the new social structure and its “bureaucratic capitalist” ruling class (185) by
drawing together the particularistic demands of different groups that made up Shengwulian.
Thus the process of articulation of particular demands is crucial to Wu’s argument. But
this process isn’t always so clear (it is most unambiguous in the Shengwulian case). Moreover,
the gap Wu attempts to maintain between the radical tendency that he traces and particularistic
interests, on the one hand, and a universalistic liberalism, on the other, is sometimes hard to
sustain. Thus, for example, the line between Yu Luoke’s critique of the bloodline theory and
liberalism seems very thin; also, the economistic demands discussed in the Shanghai case seem
in danger of collapsing back into a form of particularism.
In chapter 6, Wu tracks echoes of the radical critique in the 1970s writings—or “unstable
synthesis,” as Wu calls them (209)—of the Li Yizhe group, Liu Guokai (刘国凯 1945–), and
Chen Erjin (陈尔晋 1945–). In this chapter and the epilogue, the argument about the containment
and suppression of radical tendencies and “widespread popular discontent” (219) of the Cultural
Revolution is extended into the early reform period, suggesting that the postsocialist market
reforms were founded upon that countermovement. Wu disputes the view that postsocialism was
a simple restoration of capitalism based on pre-1949 “roots,” as William Hinton and others have
argued. Instead, Wu stresses the continuities bridging the historical divide of 1978, maintaining
that postsocialism grew out of the antagonisms of the socialist period, expressed as a struggle
between popular working-class pressure and bureaucratic containment. The specificities of the
relationship between the politics of containment and the particular economic direction of
postsocialism, however, are not fully fleshed out; nonetheless, this is a far more satisfying
political account than one that depends primarily upon shifts in leadership. Moreover, whether
considering the socialist or postsocialist periods, this book is sure to become central to discussions
on China’s political transformation.

ALEXANDER F. DAY
Occidental College
aday@oxy.edu

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