Life and Death in Shanghai

"I think it’s right that Graham Peck was disappointed by the Cultural Revolution . This, of course, was essentially a revolt by Mao against his own party. Mao on one level fears that he is being sidelined by his own party, and on another level feels that the revolution had lost steam 17 years in. A new generation had been born that didn’t remember the struggles of 1949 and it was time to revitalise them and get them on the streets, to feel what a real revolution was like. That was Mao’s intention, and the results – from what we know – pleased him greatly, but they were much more explosive and wide-ranging than perhaps even he would have imagined, with terrible consequences for a very wide variety of people. This is a different sort of book from the perhaps overly wide range of Cultural Revolution misery memoirs that we tend to have on our bookshelves. I think a lot of these misery memoirs are published almost in a rather prurient way, as a means of trying to persuade Westerners that Chinese are really very different and “other” from Westerners, who would never do anything so irrational. I think it just takes a very brief glance at many aspects of Western history to realise that there’s plenty of irrationality there as well. What I think makes Nien Cheng’s book rather different is it suggests a universalism about the possibility of any society suddenly turning itself upside down. That’s also true of many of the finest memoirs of the Third Reich – not that they suggest something very specific about Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany, but rather that any society given the wrong sort of stimuli could end up in that situation. One of the ways in which the book becomes human and sympathetic is that, unlike some of the memoirs which distort the way in which the dynamics of the period operated, Nien Cheng doesn’t make herself a terribly sympathetic character. When you read through it, you won’t exactly find yourself cheering for the Red Guards, but she does take some care to show why, from the point of view of these young, relatively impoverished teenagers living in Shanghai, the lifestyle of someone with international connections and beautiful possessions might look in many ways very alien and even hostile from everything they had been taught. In other words, the Red Guards are monstrous but she doesn’t make them into monsters. Nor does she make herself into a put-upon heroine, even though she spends a very long time in prison and clearly is treated very badly during the Cultural Revolution – her daughter is killed by Red Guards. It’s an appalling story. You don’t find in the end that it’s infused by self-pity, and that I think makes it a very powerful piece of writing. I think it’s not accidental that it was one of the first of these books to come out [published in 1987], and there was a bit more of an outpouring of these kind of things in the 1990s, so it was one of the first."