Thammasat University students interested in history, China, political science, geopolitics, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 23 September Zoom webinar on Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985.

The event, on Monday, 23 September 2024 at 9am Bangkok time, is presented by the School of Humanities, and Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=96091

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the legacy of Mao Zedong.

The event website explains:

The Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, presents:

Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985

Speaker:

Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Associate Professor of East Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Respondent:

Angie C. Baecker, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Moderator:

Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Excessive worry. Persistent unease. Disquiet. Torment. A brain disorder. Just another ordinary feeling. Based on Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s new book, this talk will address the competing connotations and nomenclatures of the anxiety in “Anxiety Aesthetics” in twentieth-century China. Arguing that anxiety offers a crucial frame for perceiving the specificities of both contemporaneity and creative practices in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Lee hones in on the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, the Beijing Spring, as both a springboard and specific site for post-revolutionary transformations. How does anxiety inscribe art forms generated by socialist histories? How does anxiety, in turn, socialize art?

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

With any questions or for further information, students may write to

gchallen@hku.hk

Last year, on the website of Foreign Policy Magazine, an article was posted:

Mao’s Legacy Is a Dangerous Topic in China

Discussing the Cultural Revolution has become increasingly risky.

“For Chinese people, history is our religion,” the intellectual Hu Ping has argued. “We don’t have a supernatural standard of right and wrong, good and bad, so we view History as the ultimate judge.” The Chinese Communist Party has finessed this tradition. It sees history not as a record, still less a debate, but a tool. It can be adjusted as necessary yet appears solid and immutable: Today’s imperatives seem graven in stone, today’s facts the outcome of a logical, inexorable process. The contingencies and contradictions of the actual past are irrelevant. The truth is what the Party says, and what the Party chooses to remember.

Its current narrative is enshrined in the National Museum of China. It stands in Tiananmen Square, directly opposite the Great Hall of the People, where grand political ceremonies are held; across the way hangs the portrait of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong, stretching 4.5 by 6 meters and reputedly 1.5 tons in weight. The picture morphed through a few incarnations before Mao approved its final template at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Now it is replaced with an identical version each year, just before October’s National Day celebrations. At least one spare is kept at the ready in case it is damaged, as in 1989, when dissidents pelted it with eggs (and paid with years in prison). Come what may, Mao continues to surveil his successors and his country. Most assume that the picture will hang there as long as the Party hangs on to power, so symbolic that the leadership would never dare remove it.

For centuries, this part of the city has been the political heart of the nation. The square lies in front of the Forbidden City, home of the emperors, on Beijing’s north-south central axis. Under Mao its size was quadrupled to 400,000 square meters, making it the world’s largest city square. The Great Hall of the People and what were then the twin Museums of the Chinese Revolution and Chinese History were completed in the same year, 1959, as part of a monumental building program marking the Party’s tenth year in power. It had established already that its rule depended not only on the promise of a better future, but also on a shared understanding of that pledge’s contrast with former misery. So the grand museums were erected, and workers and peasants were encouraged to dwell on long-gone injustices in rituals of “recalling past bitterness and cherishing present happiness.” The people were still developing their political consciousness. Sometimes they included the terrible famine just past in their list of miseries, but officials would quickly set them straight, reminding them that Past Bitterness meant the years before the Party came to power.

For Chinese people, Tiananmen Square is their history. It saw the nationalist student protests of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Mao’s proclamation of the founding of the People’s Republic thirty years later, the mass rallies by Red Guards. Foreigners mainly associate it with the bloody crackdown on the protests which erupted here in 1989, attacking corruption and demanding reform and even democracy. When Chinese troops launched the final assault to clear the square, hundreds of soldiers poured in from behind the museum building.

Turning its guns against its citizens finally demolished the Party’s mandate: its claim to serve the people, already fatally undermined by the Cultural Revolution. Its rule now rests upon its promise of economic well-being and its restoration of national pride. The more conflicted and uncertain the former, with China’s years of double-digit growth rates well behind it and the effects of rapacious capitalism glaring, the more essential the latter. Since 1989 the Party has redoubled its commitment to patriotic education, portraying the Communist triumph over foreign aggression. It has rewritten textbooks and opened a swathe of red history sites. Officials and schoolchildren are bussed to places such as Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace, and the former revolutionary base at Yan’an. […]

The official Party verdict on the Cultural Revolution called it a catastrophe, which isn’t surprising. By the time it was formulated, Deng was in charge. He had been purged not once but twice, and his son has used a wheelchair since “falling” from a third-floor window while imprisoned by Red Guards. But Deng didn’t want to brood on what had happened: “The aim of summarizing the past is to lead people to unite and look ahead,” he instructed those drafting the judgement. It acknowledged that the events had caused “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” It was “initiated by a leader laboring under a misapprehension and capitalized on by counter-revolutionary cliques.” Laboring under a misapprehension. It was worse than a crime, then; it was a mistake. Mao’s errors were acknowledged but could not be dwelled upon.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Party had no other way to square this circle: Mao was both Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. Chinese communism’s triumphs and disasters cannot be separated; he stands for both and still commands love and respect from many. To cut him off would saw away the roots which anchor the Party’s power, as well as raising dangerous questions about other leaders’ failure to stop him. Cloaking the Party in Mao’s aura also veiled its rejection of its past and its adoption of the things it once sought to destroy. Instead of acknowledging its turn to the market, the Party proceeded as though nothing had happened: Deng said his reforms were upholding Mao Zedong Thought. Mao’s preservation, psychically and even physically, made sense in terms of the Party’s own past: the Lenin/Stalin dilemma. But it addressed a larger problem too. Allowing people to judge their history acknowledges their right to judge things in general. Permit them to repudiate Mao, and they may repudiate you.  

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)