It seemed that China’s censors had finally muzzled Yang Jisheng (楊繼繩), the famed chronicler of the Mao era.
Last year, he had finished writing a widely anticipated history of the Cultural Revolution. However, officials warned him against publishing it and barred him from traveling to the US, he has said, and he stayed muted through the 50th anniversary of the start of that bloody upheaval.
Now Yang has broken that silence with the publication of his history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, a sequel to Tombstone (墓碑), his landmark study of the famine spawned by Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) policies in the late 1950s.
Illustration: Mountain People
The 1,151-page book is the latest shot fired in China’s war over remembering, or forgetting, the dark side of its communist past, a struggle that has widened under hardline Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
“I wrote this book to expose lies and restore the truth,” Yang writes in the book, which has been quietly published in Hong Kong, beyond the direct reach of Chinese censors. “This is an area that is extremely complicated and risky, but as soon as I entered it, I was filled with passion.”
Since Xi took power in 2012, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have denounced historians who question the party’s lionization of its past and exhume grim events like the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started in 1966, opening a decade of purges and bloodshed.
Tens of millions were persecuted and perhaps 1 million or more people were killed in that convulsive time.
However, officials say dwelling on such events is subversive “historical nihilism” aimed at corroding the party’s authority.
In a sign of how Chinese politics has chilled, Yang has said little publicly about the book.
“Since the book was published, I’ve been told not to discuss it with foreign media,” he said in a brief telephone conversation.
He would not say whether he had authorized The World Turned Upside Down to be published in Hong Kong.
“There’s quite a lot of pressure,” Yang said. “I just wanted to restore this big story and the facts behind it, to recover the history.”
Yang, 76, was a university student in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution erupted. He threw himself into the early phase, when Mao unleashed student radicals to purge school leaders and CCP cadres.
Yang later worked as a journalist for Xinhua news agency, watching as the fervor of the Cultural Revolution fractured into disarray and disillusionment.
After a career in journalism, he turned to writing histories of contemporary China.
Up until several years ago, Chinese newspapers and magazines still published laudatory profiles of Yang, but now he is often denounced by Maoists emboldened by the hardline pronouncements.
Party journals have attacked his conclusion that up to 36 million people died in a famine from 1958 caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s reckless attempt to leap into a communist utopia, which Yang chronicled in Tombstone.
That book was published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008.
“Yang Jisheng is not a historian,” an editorial in the Global Times, a pro-party Chinese newspaper, said last year. “He leaves the impression that he’s not interested in history, and virtually all his later works display strong political tendencies.”
Last year, Yanhuang Chunqiu, a liberal-leaning Chinese history magazine where Yang was long a chief editor, was taken over by editors much more willing to toe the party line.
The changed atmosphere was also evident when a court in Beijing ordered a historian to apologize for questioning the party’s heroic account of a 1941 battle in the war against Japan.
Last year, too, Chinese media mostly stayed silent about the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution. An exception was an editorial in the party’s main newspaper, the People’s Daily, which urged citizens to look to the future.
“Chinese political culture, both past and present, insists that the legitimacy of rulers depends on an immaculate record of what they have done,” said Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written widely about Chinese culture and politics.
“They’re afraid that telling the truth about those events pulls the rug on their right to rule,” he said. “They want to be damn well sure that history stays inside its box.”
Now that The World Turned Upside Down has appeared in stores, the next battle will be over whether people get to read it in China, where such books are banned.
The book began appearing late last month in Hong Kong, which keeps its own system of law, including much greater freedom than is found in China.
That freedom has shrunk in recent years. Publishers there have been spooked by the 2015 abduction to China of five Hong Kong booksellers who pedaled lurid, poorly sourced potboilers about China’s leaders.
Even so, Hong Kong remains an enclave for books banned in China. Piles of Yang’s book in bookstores there suggest that mainland readers have been buying copies to sneak across the border, despite customs checks.
“Mr Yang’s work is quite influential inside China,” said Guo Jian (郭建), who with Stacy Mosher translated Tombstone into English and is translating The World Turned Upside Down with Mosher.
“Yes, some of his books, including Tombstone, are banned on the mainland,” Guo said. “But an electronic version of Tombstone has been floating around since 2008, and an enormous amount of pirated copies has been distributed by small book vendors.”
Guo, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, said the abridged translation of Yang’s latest book would include about two-thirds of its original content.
“We expect to publish in 2019,” Eric Chinski, editor-in-chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said in an e-mail.
The company also published an abridged translation of Tombstone in 2012.
Yang’s book is by no means the first history of the Cultural Revolution; several were published under official auspices in China in earlier decades as the Chinese government tried to confront the ordeal of the era.
However, in recent years, the party has become much more wary about allowing such research. Many younger people have only a sketchy idea of what happened when Mao started the Cultural Revolution to purge China of what he saw as threats to the purity and survival of his revolution.
Yang “wanted his readers to remember the tragedy of the past, whether it was the Great Famine or the Cultural Revolution, to reflect on it, to make sense of it, so that the tragedy would not repeat itself,” Guo said.
“He considered this task of a conscientious rememberer to be all the more urgent now in the face of the officially enforced historical amnesia in China,” Guo added.
Yang did not have extensive access to archives for his new book, as he did when he wrote Tombstone.
Instead, he drew on hundreds of memoirs, histories and studies, many published in Hong Kong or available online, and there are fewer revelations than in his previous book.
As in other recent scholarship, Yang emphasizes that much of the worst bloodshed came later in the Cultural Revolution, when Mao brought back the military and party apparatus to brutally enforce order.
“It’s fair to say this is a work by an eminent journalist, rather than a product by an academic historian,” said Warren Sun (孫萬國), a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
He said he had read some draft chapters of Yang’s book, and found a few debatable claims.
However, Yang “was working under very difficult conditions, and thus deserved great respect for his moral courage,” Sun said.
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