E232 Reading Guide for Son of the Revolution

Over the coming two weeks, we will be reading Son of the Revolution, an autobiography written by Liang Heng, a member of the "intellectual" class in Communist China (the PRC:  People's Republic of China). As we will learn in lectures, intellectuals (relatively well educated people with scientific or humanistic technical training) have been the most difficult for the communist government to come to terms with since the 1949 revolution. Liang Heng was able to write this vivid account of his life only because, through a set of unlikely circumstances, he met and married an American woman, Judith Shapiro (the account of their meeting, politically difficult courtship, and marriage is told in the final chapters of the book, which will not be part of the assigned readings, but which you're likely to find of interest).  After they came to the United States, Liang Heng wrote his book with his wife's help.

The political background for "Son" is a series of increasingly violent political "campaigns" orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party to increase their control over government and over the intellectuals. Liang Heng's account shows how these campaigns destroyed his family and undermined its original strong faith in communism. We will discuss the nature of these campaigns in detail in class. As you read Son of the Revolution, it may be helpful to have the following simple background chronology at hand:

1956-57   The government launches the Hundred Flowers Campaign which calls on intellectuals to criticize the government. The hope is that tension between the government and intellectuals can be reduced, but the criticism is so harsh that it leads to a backlash.

1957-58   The Anti-Rightist Campaign cracks down on those who had been willing to speak out during the "100 Flowers" (or forced to speak by "cadres"--local officials acting on behalf of the Party). Many lose their jobs and are sent to the countryside for political indoctrination.

1958-59   The Great Leap Forward: Mao's most radical program of economic reform. Its disastrous results,
including widespread famine, lead to Mao's temporary loss of power.

1963   The Socialist Education Campaign seeks to "re-educate" broad masses of intellectuals by relocating
them to the countryside to labor with the peasants, in this way developing a new "class consciousness."

1966     The outbreak of Mao's Cultural Revolution, designed both as a radical "cleansing" of communist
society and a means of bringing Mao back to paramount power. It disintegrates into several years of widespread and chaotic civil war.

As you read, pay attention to the shifting way in which Liang Heng and his family members regard Mao and the Communist Party. Think about whose views seem clearest at different times, and what sorts of pressures lead the others to have a distorted perspective. Ask yourself, as you read, is the communist government we see in this book one which reflects the ideas of Marx? Of Lenin? Is this more a communist state or a traditional Chinese Legalist state--minus Confucianism? Are there any "good guys" here?

Chapters 1-8. These chapters describe Liang Heng's childhood and the enormous stress he was placed under when his mother was arbitrarily labeled a "Rightist" (a right-wing anti-communist) after the 100 Flowers Campaign of 1957 and forced to undergo public humiliation. We see how politics led Liang's father to divorce his mother to protect the rest of the family. (What do you think of his father's decision?) The death of Liang's grandmother in 1960 reveals the impact of the famine following the Great Leap Forward. In 1962, a political terror--rumors of Chiang Kai-shek's return--leads to Liang's first experience living with peasants, away from his native city of Changsha. (How do the peasants differ from city folk?)   Not long after his return to the city, Liang gets his first taste of the power of corruption when he "bribes" his way into the elite Young Pioneers youth group, despite his bad "class background." This pattern of "going through the back door" (the popular name for bribery) becomes an increasingly prominent aspect of Liang's account, and remains one of the most important issues of the 1990s in the PRC.
    In Chapter 4 you will see the effect that the Cultural Revolution (CR) had on Liang Heng's life when it first exploded in Changsha in 1966. We will be discussing the CR a great deal, but the terrible impact that it had on Liang as a boy will leave a much greater imprint on your memory than anything I say in lectures or that you read in Fairbank. As you read about the initial days of the CR in this and following chapters, there are certain questions you need to ask: What sort of moral stress does this create in Liang Heng (what do you think about the way he and his family behave)? What sort of mass psychology does the CR reflect--what sort of society do participants see themselves living in and creating? How does this relate to "communism?" How is this movement "Chinese," in terms of what we know of traditional Chinese culture and of the sad story of China in the 20th century?

    Mao Zedong seems to have endorsed the CR as a means of destroying the faction of the Communist Party that opposed his radical approach to China's reconstruction. But once the youthful Red Guards had been licensed by Mao to take command of this mass movement, they carried it in directions that Mao clearly never envisioned, destroying not only a Party faction, but the coherence of the Party itself, the functioning of the government the Party controlled, and for a time the command structure of the PLA, the Party's army. In these chapters, we see how Liang Heng was caught up in the increasing chaos of these events. Initially, the CR was threatening to him because his father became one of its early victims, as we see in chapters 6 and 7. In chapter 8, we see Liang "escape" back to the countryside, where his simple status as a "city" person gives him relief from the terror of a "Rightist" identity. 

Chapters 9-16.  To Liang's own amazement, upon his return to Changsha, he found the opportunity to make up for his "poor class background" and actually join the CR as one of the youngest Red Guards, reenacting the Long March and seeing Mao in Beijing (ch. 9-10). How is Liang's sense of who he is and what is right to do changed by his "political" environment? What do you think of the role of Mao, as seen through the eyes of Heng and of his father?  In chapter 11, Liang bears witness to the sudden and terrifying disintegration of social order and political certainty as the Red Guard movement dissolves throughout China into a terrorist struggle among "revolutionary" street gangs. After 1967, the army was able to assert some control over the CR, and over the following years, while the Party and government slowly regained some structure, China underwent a long period of very gradual recovery towards centralized control. For Liang Heng, the earlier portion of this time was spent in a type of rootless existence that we rarely associate with China, but which was, in fact, very common among the urban lower class before the 1949 revolution. Ask yourself what unexpected aspects of Chinese society we see during this part of Liang's narrative--what sort of values do the people whom China's revolutions "left behind" seem to possess?
    The central portion of these chapters focuses on the "relocation" of Liang and his "re-educated" father to the countryside, as preachers of the gospel of Mao. The stories Liang recounts about those times raise the important issue of the relationship between Mao's "peasant revolution" and the real lives of peasants under Mao's version of communism. Nothing highlights this issue more clearly than the way in which Liang Heng's father, Liang Shan, struggles in good faith to serve as an agent of Maoist thought despite the gap between Maoist ideals and "revolutionary" practices in the countryside. Reflect on the way in which Liang Shan's attitude towards Maoist ideology changes over these chapters and over the course of the book. Are there parallels we might make between the way Liang Shan approaches Mao's teachings and the way that traditional scholar-officials may have approached Confucian ideology? Liang Shan is certainly a sincere Mao loyalist--but think about the way he is treated by people who have actually risen in the new revolutionary order, and are regarded socially as being supporters of Mao. If you recall the very short story of Kong Yiji, can we find meaningful parallels between Kong Yiji's situation and Liang Shan's (and differences too)?

Chapters 17-22.  In these chapters, after once again enduring accusations of counter-revolutionary activity, Liang begins to emerge from the bleakness of his life in the CR as a result of a completely fortuitous circumstance: his unusual height and talent at basketball. These chapters will illustrate for you the gradual turn that China began to make away from extreme Maoism and towards the "market interests" of the Deng Xiaoping era, which began shortly after Mao's death in 1976. You will also see the emergence of petty corruption as a dominant force.  In the final two chapters, you will see how Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's current economic transformation, became a personal hero to Liang.