This year, 2016, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the official launch of the “Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976, hereinafter CR) in the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter PRC), and the fortieth anniversary of its official end announced by the Chinese Communist Party (hereinafter CCP). Modern China Studies has dedicated this special issue to remember this significant event of the PRC’s history.

The PRC was founded at the end of September, 1949 in Beijing, and is now of 66 years standing. While the decade of the CR merely occupied less than one sixth of the PRC’s history, its role far outweighs its temporal proportion.  To put it simply, the origins of the CR were clearly visible in the economic crisis and recovery during the early 1960s; major clues portending the CR were evident during the Great Leap Forward period; its patterns and methods were rehearsed in various movements during the early 1950s such as the Three-Anti, the Five-Anti, and the Anti-Rightists; its institutions and inner logic were well set up within the shadow of Yan’an during the 1940s.  In short, the origins of the CR can be clearly tracked in the so-called initial 17 years of the PRC (1949–1966), and they should be discussed in the historical context when Maoism was formulated in the 1940s.

The effect and impact of the CR, on one hand, are simply the denial of Maoist isolation policies and the establishment of reform and opening up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and thus China’s move toward industrialization and a market-orient economy. On the other hand, the legacy of the CR continued Mao’s party-state formula by insisting on the four up-holdings, and hence China’s return to its authoritarian pattern during the 1956–1966 period. This two-sided coin, minted via the CR, set up the so-called Deng Xiaoping Era. By this token, it can be deduced that Deng Xiaoping was the last and greatest beneficiary of the CR.

The farewell of the Deng Xiaoping era did not end the CR, at least not completely.  The hollowing of the official dogma, power struggles among the CCP centre, the arrival of globalization, and the bottleneck of economic development, rather stirred up various residual sediments left by the CR. The slogan “Singing Red and Smashing Black,” advocated by Bo Xilai, repeated a regional CR in Chongqing; nevertheless, the fact that Bo was accused of “bribery, corruption, and abuse of power” and consequently sentenced to life imprisonment worried many people, simply because Bo’s exploitation of the CR formula had been consciously ignored and set aside by the CCP.

The Xi Jinping regime was one that many had high hopes of bringing about some essential changes, and Xi himself expected to continue the vision, spirit, and courage of his deceased father Xi Zhongxun, a pioneering reformer in the Deng Xiaoping era. What ensued was more like disappointment and frustration.  Rituals, languages, formats, and even internal thinking ways of the CR were constantly exploited and endorsed. Many practices such as unusual power centralization as Xi being chair-everything-man, public and televised confessions, the collective declaration of loyalty, and the forbidding of open disagreement danced alongside the official rhetoric propagandizing the Xi authority, such as encouraging people to wear Xi Jinping’s badge and sing songs such as,” Each and every one loves Xi Dada” and “Surely must marry a man like Xi Dada.” The stench of a new cult of personality hovered like clouds over the moment in China.

Therefore, studies on the CR can be traced to cover the 1950s and extended to embrace contemporary events. Taken as a core and a major clue to understand the PRC, the studies of the CR need to dig far deeper before they can be said to be satisfactory.

The following review, while preliminary, may provide a basic profile for this field of research. One must bear in mind that the current studies of the CR constitute a certain interpretation of a highly debatable ideological term stemming from various political stances, especially in contemporary China. In this preface it is defined academically, whereas unavoidably, academic research is more or less involved with political orientation. As soon as the CR began, western observers and scholars started to collect and examine documents. Their analyses, though insightful in places, were understandably unable to reveal the basic profile of the CR, primarily due to timing and sources.  Chinese intellectuals as insiders of the CR began to reflect on and criticize it, especially after the Lin Biao Incident in September 1971. Nevertheless, their criticism was mainly inspired by an adherence to classical 

Marxism. The person who really established serious academic inquiry into the CR was Professor Roderick MacFarquhar, with his trilogy The Origins of the Cultural Revolution¹, whose work has left a long-lasting impact on the group of junior scholars who followed him in this field.  In China, there appeared a thriving but short-lived series of reflections, debates, discussions, and research before 1989. A History of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Wenhuadageming Shinian Shi) by Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi published in 1986 represented an early attempt and became a most popular read, and The Age of Great Chaos (Dadongluan de Niandai) by Wang Nianyi published in 1988 has been regarded as a prestigious academic research. However, voices were silenced after the Tian’anmen Crackdown in 1989, and the studies of the CR became a forbidden area of enquiry. Mentions of relevant figures, events, and the like were forced to adhere to the official representation, sometimes word by word, and occasionally even official statements stepped backward from the stance of Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China adopted by the CCP in 1981.

From the end of the 1990s, with the popularization of the Internet, numerous witnesses and researchers on the CR have taken advantage of the opportunity offered by a period of economic priorities and political relaxation to collect and compile primary sources. The database on the CR compiled by Song Yongyi, for instance, together with many other database projects, has helped to put in the cornerstones for future scholarly exploration. Official publications of party and state leaders’ memories and works have presented a great opportunity to cross-check controversial narratives.  Some key witnesses of the CR such as members of the so-called “Lin Biao & Jiang Qing Anti-Revolutionary Clique,” who survived their prison terms and began their memories as early as the late 1980s, have provided invaluable sources, clues, and challenges, certainly not without their own stances or biases. Likewise, their familiar members, assistants, and personal staff have also produced many books and articles on certain issues, sometimes leaving us with invaluable clues, antidotes, footnotes, and contexts.  Local leaders and participants, especially former Red Guards and Educated Youth, joined the trend and produced numerous memories and texts. Furthermore, some breakthroughs have been made in studying major leaders and events including but not limited to Mao Zedong, Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, Ye Jianying, Chen Boda, and the Lin Biao Incident, to list but a few.  And by breakthrough it means much discussion, debate, and disagreement rather than consensus.  More importantly, an interdisciplinary approach has been adopted and diverse topics have been attended to, which has begun to transcend political and economic history and top-down and elitist approaches. Social history, cultural studies, art history, gender perspective, and micro-studies have merged in the pursuit of understanding of the significance of the CR.

With all kinds of progress, the current situation is yet unsatisfactory.  In China, it is a fact that studies of the CR remain a forbidden city, and research in this area is almost impossible to publish. Internationally speaking, concerned scholars usually work with their own interests and topics, and hardly form an influential team.  As far as research achievements are concerned, while the chronology of the CR now is clear, there are few influential monographs devoted entirely to the CR. (This, of course, might be too difficult a task.)  Most scholarly works, unfortunately, remain at the stages of collecting and analysing sources on certain topics.  

In addition, interdisciplinary research as a recent attempt requires expansion and deepening, and scholars across the world need greater interaction and collaboration to make any headway.  Finally, as the CR and Maoism were not confined within the territory of the PRC, one may wonder what kind of pattern, paradigm, or theory scholars may yield to transcend the Chinese experience for global implications, such as studies on the French Revolution have done?   It looks to be that we are far from such a goal.

It is a great pleasure to have Professor Roderick MacFarquhar so kindly share his article in this special issue. The article, originally provided to Shiso, a Japanese magazine, was translated into Japanese and Shiso published its Japanese version, with its original English version in this special issue.   Professor MacFarquhar envisioned an iron triangle to conceptualize the imperial system: the emperor at the apex, the Confucian mandarinate, namely, the bureaucracy, and Confucianism as the state ideology being the two sides, with the military and police as the forces of repression at the base.  Hemmed in by the triangle were the Chinese people. Professor MacFarquhar employs the concept of this iron triangle to analyze how the destruction of any of its sides during the many reforms and revolutions from the late nineteenth century onward resulted in chaos and war, including Mao’s CR and Deng’s reform. When the iron triangle is applied to the current time, he warns that the anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping “suggest(s) that another Cultural Revolution in underway.”²

It is an honour that Mr. Li Honglin, whose recent pass away at 91 during our editing of this issue is a great loss, was also among our contributors. Mr. Li served as Deputy Head of the Theory Bureau of the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP and had experienced most political and theoretical movements since the 1950s, and was extremely familiar with the CCP ideologies and theories. He had been studying the CR and PRC history for years, and his chronology of the CR in this issue offered many insights and much inspiration for future research.

We are also indebted in this special issue to many other contributors who are either well-established or promising junior scholars. Professor Song Yongyi, with his own enthusiasm, passion, and insight, re-examines the Mao-Lin Split, arguing that the matter of a successor to a successor constituted a key reason for Lin Liguo, Lin Biao’s over-talented son to arouse Mao’s envy and suspicion. Professor Liu Jian follows the chronology of the arrest of the Gang of Four by Hua Guofeng and his fellows, and reaches a new and inspiring conclusion that the arrest indeed violated the party constitution and procedures. Shen Xiaoyun scrutinizes various sources on the rise and fall of Tao Zhu at the beginning of the CR, and points out that Mao was the black hand in the fate of Tao Zhu, Jiang Qing the key persecutor, and Zhou Enlai a nuanced manipulator.

The local and peripheral aspects of the CR have been especially attended to in this issue. Dong Jo Shin examines how Mao Yuanxin became involved in the CR in Yanbian, a Korean ethnic periphery in Jilin Province, which not only accumulated political capital for Mao’s move to the prince of Northeast, but also left a long-lasting impact on the self-consciousness of the local Korean people. Agnes I. F. Lam and Cathryn H. Clayton focus on Macau, a tiny Portuguese colonial port-city where mass protests and rioting targeted at buildings and symbols of Portuguese rule erupted into the so-called 12.3 Incident in the 1966–67 transition and how the incident developed into an intriguing drama of anti-colonial political discourse, anti-KMT political action, and Cultural Revolution-style political tactics.

Mr. He Shu, based on his personal experience, shares vivid memories of researchers, events, and the current situation of CR studies in China. The names of many of the CR scholars mentioned are new to us, and deserve our sincere respect.  Professor Shaomin Li also shares his years as an art solider during the CR, contributing to the understanding of how art and politics were bonded to form what came to be known as Proletariat cultural art. Seki Tomohide’s review essay introduces the achievements, problems, and prospects of the studies of the CR by scholars in Japan during the last three decades, and Lu Minling reviews a book by Mr. He Shu on the armed fighting in Chongqing during the CR. Both of them help to update the studies of the CR in different areas, regions, and countries.

The publishing of this special issue was met with enthusiastic offers from contributors to submit articles for which we are deeply grateful. It is a great pity that other outstanding submissions have not been included, due to space constraints in the issue. It is hoped that this special issue will encourage subsequent anthologies and further research.