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A B C D E F G H  I  J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China

Year of Publication : 2003

Publisher : Chinese University Press, CUP

Review :

A young woman working on the office staff in the Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, and during the upheaval, was accused of connection to the secret, seditious “May Sixteenth Group” and was ruthlessly persecuted. She wrote nine letters petitioning Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to restore her good reputation. Now, she has written a book telling the story of the Cultural Revolution as she witnessed it in the Foreign Ministry during the ten tumultuous years.

Ma Jisen’s The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China is excellent at telling the details. It documents many of the unexpected and ironic twists and turns which occurred during the course of the cataclysm, even in such a highly hierarchic and disciplined bureaucracy as the Foreign Ministry. The narrative is especially good for the first three years of Cultural Revolution, in which the most anarchy and violence were manifested.

Like many other accounts of the Cultural Revolution, Ma presents the Foreign Ministry’s events in chronological order. But unlike many other Cultural Revolution memoirs, this book is not about a personal tragedy during the Cultural Revolution. It tries to provide a whole and relatively complete picture of what happened during the Cultural Revolution at one of China’s most strategic and sensitive government ministries. The “what happened” part includes not only official campaigns and ideological charades, but also, and more emphatically, initiatives and participation by rank and file staff members, students, and ordinary people who had grievances of all sorts. The author does not claim to be in possession of any as yet unrevealed secrets or insider information to share with the readers. Nonetheless, the very detailed accounts provided (such as the relatively full personal story of Zhang Dianqing) and a tendency to “view from the bottom up” come out as the most valuable and interesting aspects of the book. It explains to some extent how participants in the Cultural Revolution — officials and common folk alike — acted in the way they did: either rationally or zealously, given the unusual and often absurd situation they were in. Ma’s story conveys the passions and fanaticism of the time; on the other hand, the author’s narrative, even though it becomes emotional in a few places, is mostly calm and relatively impartial, a rare virtue among historical accounts of the Cultural Revolution.

For Cultural Revolution history, emotions and partialities become a problem especially when it comes to the question of political groupings and factions. Ma’s handling of the political split and struggles within the Foreign Ministry is thorough and evenhanded. In the book, we have a rare and precious account of the emergence, the rise, the fall, and later, tragically, the prosecution of the rebels in the Foreign Ministry. We have a vivid depiction of a socially and politically underprivileged group, who were already put down by the pre-Cultural Revolution status quo, being treated as scapegoats and prosecuted during the initial phase of the Cultural Revolution. The rebel group at the Foreign Ministry became the most fervent and radical nationwide, and was also known for its deep grievances against the party old guard at the Foreign Ministry, headed by Chen Yi. The author refrains from any critical comments on Chen’s heavy-handedness in putting down student rebellions on campuses during the initial period of the Cultural Revolution. However, we do learn from this book that cadres who sided with the anti-Chen rebels were all with severely punished during and after the Cultural Revolution.

Ma gets her materials from two sources: archives, including old publications, big character posters, and speech transcripts on the one hand, and personal accounts on the other. The author herself seems to have meticulously collected various official documents and speech transcripts, when she was working for the ministry. Ma also managed to interview at least a few key participants, such as Zhang Dianqing (p. 51), and Lin Gang (p. 126). Nonetheless, her work apparently does not set out to be academic, and it never pretends to offer the kind of detailed bibliographic references and careful footnotes that might be intended for specialized historians. There are a few minor errors in dates and documents: for example, the official publication of Mao’s “My Big Character Poster” was in the summer of 1967, not 1966 (p. 32), and the well-known keynote speech by Lin Biao on 1 October 1966 contained the phrase “bourgeois line against the revolution,” rather than “bourgeois counter-revolutionary line” (p. 33).

Ma does a good job of demonstrating the development and especially the winding down of the Cultural Revolution, and gives an account that challenges the official historiography of the so-called “ten years” of the Cultural Revolution. Between 1966 and 1976, the first two years contrasted sharply with the latter eight; and after 1976, at least in the Foreign Ministry, as we now know, the Cultural Revolution continued for several years in almost all its early dramatic forms (even though with an anti-climactic twist), such as persecution, petitions, reversal of cases, and suppression of dissent. Historians of the Cultural Revolution now have one more piece of evidence with which to challenge both the official periodization of the Cultural Revolution, and the idea that the Cultural Revolution was a single coherent event. ...................

Tong Xiaoxi
China Agricultural University