A Discursive Talk on "Revolutionary Culture"

Liu Jiming, August 17, 2024, Honghu, Hubei

Honghu is the heartland of the Xiang-E Western Revolutionary Base Area [note: the revolutionary base established in the border region of Hunan and Hubei provinces in the late 1920s and early 1930s], and the birthplace of The Red Guards of Honghu Lake. Before coming to Honghu, most of you have probably seen the film The Red Guards of Honghu Lake — some of you perhaps more than once. I have lost count of how many times I have seen it myself.

The Red Guards of Honghu Lake was adapted from an opera created by the Hubei Provincial Opera Troupe. The troupe's predecessor was the Hubei Provincial Experimental Opera Troupe; it is now called the Hubei Provincial Opera and Dance Theatre — known for short as the Provincial Opera — located very close to Wuhan University, less than one bus stop away. After graduating from Wuhan University, I was assigned to the Provincial Opera as a playwright. When I reported for duty, the unit sent a logistics worker on a three-wheeled cart, who whisked me and all my luggage over to the Provincial Opera in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. I worked there for less than three years. With the exception of Wang Yuzhen, who played Han Ying and had been transferred to work in Beijing, I met nearly all the principal creators of The Red Guards of Honghu Lake — the playwright-lyricist-composers Mei Shaoshan, Ouyang Qianshu, and Zhang Jing'an; set designer Zhu Xiaodan; and in particular Xia Kuibin, who played Liu Chuang, and Liu Shuqi, who played Han Ying's mother. Xia and Liu were husband and wife, both warm and generous people. Not long after I arrived at the Provincial Opera, I was commissioned by a magazine to interview them, and I wrote a piece about their love story and their careers. More than thirty years have flashed by since then. After I left the Provincial Opera, I never went back. Xia Kuibin passed away in the 1990s; if Liu Shuqi is still alive, she would be well over ninety years old now.

Over these past few days I have been revisiting some of the classic arias from The Red Guards of Honghu Lake — "The Waves of Honghu Lake Roll On and On," "Strike Up the Clappers," and "I Long to See All the Toiling Masses Set Free." The Red Guards of Honghu Lake is adapted from an opera and contains many arias, but these three are the most celebrated — one can listen to them endlessly without tiring. I loved them as a child and can still hum a few bars today. Every time I listen to Han Ying, in her prison cell, pouring out her heart to her mother — those three refrains: "Mother, when I die, bury me beside the shores of Honghu Lake…by the roadside, on the high slope…" — and that final line, "I long to see the white bandits [note: a term for the Nationalist/KMT forces] wiped out, I long to see all the toiling masses of the world set free" — I cannot help but fill with tears.

This aria is what, in operatic terms, would be called an aria di bravura — a full-throated expression of the bond between mother and daughter, the hatred of class oppression, and the sublime spirit of a proletarian revolutionary who gives up her life for righteousness. In both content and musical form it achieves a state of consummate perfection: a classic among classics, and arguably the finest exemplar we have for the study of red classics and revolutionary culture.

But this has been a digression. Let us now turn to the matter at hand.

I. What Is "Revolution"?

Before we enter the topic proper, let us first clarify what revolution and revolutionary culture actually mean.

According to the mainstream definition, revolutionary culture is the product created by the Chinese Communist Party leading the people through the history of revolution, construction, and reform; it represents a sublimation of China's outstanding traditional culture and is the sum total of all material and spiritual culture gestated and formed in the practice of revolution, construction, and reform. It is capable of arousing the spiritual energies of the broad masses of the people, inspiring them to strive toward the comprehensive construction of a socialist modern country and the realization of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation — the Chinese Dream. The historical sources of revolutionary culture lie in the long revolutionary process of the Chinese people, encompassing specifically the culture that arose at different moments and under different conditions during the Agrarian Revolutionary War, the War of Resistance Against Japan, and the War of Liberation. In historical terms, revolutionary culture manifested as revolutionary values, revolutionary theory, revolutionary-era ways of life, and a symbolic system of revolutionary culture. In modern society, revolutionary culture inevitably takes on new characteristics and new forms by virtue of its national and contemporary character — chiefly comprising revolutionary spiritual culture, revolutionary relics and sites, revolutionary documents, and revolutionary cultural symbols.

This definition draws clear boundaries around the content and sources of revolutionary culture, but it is abstract, hollow, and in places vague. What, for instance, is revolution? What is the difference between proletarian revolution and bourgeois revolution? What are the distinctive characteristics of the New Democratic Revolution, the socialist revolution and construction, and the reform-and-opening period, each as led by the Chinese Communist Party? These questions all require concrete analysis.

Chairman Mao once wrote in his "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan": "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." [note: Mao Zedong, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," 1927] This is as true of proletarian revolution as it is of bourgeois revolution. It was true of the French Revolution that overthrew the feudal and despotic Bourbon dynasty, and of China's Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the decadent Qing imperial rule; it was equally true of Russia's October Revolution that overthrew the Tsar, and of China's New Democratic Revolution that overthrew the reactionary Nationalist government.

Revolution always replaces an old order with a new one; it represents a new social force and a new set of values; it represents the interests of the majority of the people. The bourgeoisie constitutes a majority relative to the feudal aristocracy, just as the proletariat constitutes a majority relative to the bourgeoisie. Revolution that represents the interests of the proletariat and the broad laboring masses is proletarian revolution; revolution that represents the interests of landlords, capitalists, and a privileged elite is bourgeois revolution.

In any era, revolution represents progress. The standard by which we distinguish revolution from counter-revolution, progress from restoration, is simple: does it represent the interests of the majority of the people? If so, it is revolutionary and progressive; if not, it is counter-revolutionary. And if a revolution that once served the majority of the people is made to serve a minority instead, that is counter-revolutionary restoration. This is the touchstone for telling true revolution from false, and with this touchstone in hand, no counter-revolutionary force — however it disguises itself in revolutionary language and however elaborate its pretexts — can conceal its true nature for long.

Revolution also embodies ideals and sacrifice. For the proletariat, the ideal is the realization of communism, and to struggle toward that ideal. Struggle entails sacrifice; sacrifice means bloodshed, means that many people pay with their lives. No one felt this more keenly and profoundly than Chairman Mao — his family gave six lives to the Chinese revolution. He left behind many timeless words on the subject of revolution: "Countless revolutionary martyrs have laid down their lives in the interests of the people, and our hearts are filled with pain as we the living think of them — can there be any personal interest, then, that we would not sacrifice, or any error that we would not discard?" "To forget revolution is to betray it." Even in his final years, the thought never left him: "How many people died to found the new China — some may have forgotten, but I have not."

Why are the colors of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China's flag a vivid scarlet, rather than rose or deep crimson? Because blood is only bright red when it has just left the body; before long it coagulates and turns deep red, or even black. The flag of our nation and our party is vivid scarlet, a color that embodies the founders' hope that the party and the country would preserve the revolutionary character forever — that, as they pledged at the party's founding and the founding of the state, they would continue the revolution and never capitulate. They did not wish the party or the country to change color: not to deep crimson, like a dried scab consigned to memory, enshrined in memorial halls and museums where it serves no living purpose beyond providing something to look at; and certainly not to pink, which is the color fashionable among the petty bourgeoisie — a color associated with consumption and lifestyle, entirely severed from any connection to revolution. We are presently submerged in a vast ocean of this latter color.

Vivid scarlet is the keynote not only of the national and party flags, but of revolution itself. Deep crimson represents the past; vivid scarlet represents past, present, and future — it is the symbol of a revolutionary spirit that never dies. Not long ago, Guo Songmin [note: a well-known Chinese leftist commentator] came under attack from certain nationalist quarters for criticizing a film about the Battle of Hengyang [note: the Battle of Hengyang, 1944, a major engagement in the Second Sino-Japanese War]. He wrote an essay titled "Words of One Who Is Deep Red," casting himself as "deep red" and declaring his determination to defend the gains of the New Democratic Revolution. When I shared his post, I wrote: "If the achievements of the socialist revolution and the period of socialist construction are denied, what is the point of defending the gains of the New Democratic Revolution?" Why did I say this? Because the socialist revolution and construction on the one hand, and the New Democratic Revolution on the other, are mutually causal and mutually dependent. Without the New Democratic Revolution there could have been no socialist revolution and construction; and conversely, without the socialist revolution and construction, the New Democratic Revolution would not merit the term "new" — it would be no different from the succession of dynasties throughout Chinese history, each seizing power only to perpetuate it. So if the New Democratic Revolution is deep crimson, the socialist revolution and construction is vivid scarlet. Yet the mainstream discourse today — even among many mainstream voices — takes the position opposite to Guo Songmin's: they do not deny the New Democratic Revolution, but they deny the entire period of socialist revolution and construction from 1957 to the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. This is tantamount to denying the class character of the Chinese revolution — conflating proletarian revolution with bourgeois revolution, reducing communism to nationalism. It is the same as Song Jiang changing the name of Chao Gai's Hall of Righteousness to the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness. [note: an episode from the classical novel Water Margin (水浒传), in which Song Jiang renames the hall to signal his desire to submit to imperial authority, symbolizing the co-optation and betrayal of a genuinely rebellious movement]

Take one example: in recent years, mainstream media has loudly proclaimed the need to carry forward the red genetic heritage, yet the organs of power have repeatedly suppressed spontaneous grassroots red cultural activities, threatening and even persecuting their organizers and participants, to the point where many people who want to take part in mass red cultural activities must do so clandestinely, like underground party members in a wartime espionage drama.

This attitude toward red culture — that of Zhao Laotaiye and Lord Ye who loved dragons [note: two classical Chinese allusions. Zhao Laotaiye (Zhao the patriarch) refers to someone who claims protective authority, but in practice suppresses and bullies; Lord Ye, who loved dragons ( a proverb about someone who professes to love a thing but is terrified when confronted with the real thing) — is a genuine betrayal of revolutionary culture.

II. Revolutionary Culture, Traditional Culture, and Socialist Advanced Culture

In mainstream discourse, revolutionary culture is typically grouped together with traditional culture and "socialist advanced culture." The authoritative formulation runs as follows:

First, China's outstanding traditional culture is the crystallization of wisdom accumulated by the Chinese nation over the long river of history. It is manifested not only in the vast and magnificent body of cultural achievements but, more importantly, in the ideas, traditional virtues, and humanistic spirit that run through them. It illuminates the glorious history of the Chinese nation, embodies the great creative wisdom of peoples of all ethnicities, and constitutes the unique identity that distinguishes the Chinese nation and its people — formed through the processes of cultivating self, regulating family, governing the state, and bringing peace to all under heaven [note: 修齐治平, a Confucian ideal from the Great Learning]; of honoring one's position and staying one's course; of knowing constants and managing change; of opening up resources and accomplishing tasks; and of achieving merit and establishing a legacy.

Second, revolutionary culture comprises the ideological theories, value pursuits, and spiritual qualities cultivated and created in the great struggle of the party and the people since modern times and especially since the May Fourth New Culture Movement — for example, the Red Boat Spirit, the Jinggang Mountains Spirit, the Long March Spirit, the Yan'an Spirit, the Yimeng Spirit, and the Xibaipo Spirit [note: each of these terms refers to the revolutionary ethos associated with a specific location of historic significance in the CPC's revolutionary history]. Collectively it embodies the development and achievements of modern and contemporary Chinese culture under Marxist guidance, and expresses the unyielding, indomitable national character and heroic spirit of the Chinese people. Revolutionary culture is both a concentrated cultural distillation of the history of the Chinese nation's revolutionary struggles, and the primary expression of the Chinese spirit in the revolutionary era, bearing the aspirations of all peoples for a better life.

Third, socialist advanced culture is the socialist culture — national, scientific, and popular — oriented toward modernization, toward the world, and toward the future, formed under Marxist guidance in the course of the great practice of advancing socialism with Chinese characteristics led by the party. It represents the progressive currents and developmental imperatives of the age.

With a little scrutiny, one can readily discern that the most salient feature of the formulations above is their abandonment of the Marxist perspective on class and class struggle, and of the analytical method of historical materialism, in favor of a state-nationalist standpoint. Within this framework, the characterization of so-called outstanding traditional culture — invoking the cultivation of self, the regulation of family, the governance of the state, the bringing of peace to all under heaven; the honoring of one's position and staying of one's course; the knowing of constants and the managing of change; the opening up of resources and the accomplishing of tasks; the achievement of merit and the establishment of a legacy — is manifestly written from the standpoint of the elite and the ruling class, and is diametrically opposed to the value orientation and even the aesthetic sensibility of revolutionary culture.

We often say that the Chinese Communist Party led the people to end thousands of years of feudal society and its man-eating system of exploitation, to overthrow the three great mountains of feudalism, bureaucratic capitalism, and imperialism [note: a classic formulation from the revolutionary period], to enable the laboring masses — long trapped at the bottom of society — to stand up and become masters, and to establish a socialist system of universal equality. This is one of the most essential dimensions through which to understand the Chinese Revolution, and it must inform our understanding of traditional culture as well. The Chinese Communist Party and the revolution it led emerged precisely when the feudal order and culture of thousands of years had reached the depths of decay and putrefaction, drawing their last breath. "The October Revolution sent us Marxism-Leninism" [note: a phrase from Mao Zedong's "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship," 1949]; the victory of the Chinese Revolution was also attributable to Marxism-Leninism and to Mao Zedong Thought, forged in the crucible of prolonged struggle — as were China's socialist revolution and construction. Our understanding of and attitude toward traditional culture must also be grounded in this dimension. Chairman Mao always spoke of inheriting traditional culture critically [note: a standard Maoist formula]; he never once placed traditional culture on an equal footing with revolutionary culture. Without critique there is no revolution. In the most fundamental sense, the victory — indeed the very legitimacy — of the Chinese Revolution rests upon the critique and negation of thousands of years of Chinese feudal order and feudal culture, not upon the Confucian-Mencian precepts of the feudal-era literati: those homilies about cultivating the self, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the realm. For a Communist who believes in Marxism-Leninism, the truly outstanding traditional culture of China is not Confucian culture, still less Daoist culture, but the culture of rebellion — exemplified by the Legalist tradition and by the peasant uprisings from Chen Sheng and Wu Guang [note: leaders of the first major peasant revolt in Chinese history, 209 BCE] to Li Zicheng [note: leader of the peasant rebellion that toppled the Ming dynasty, 1644] and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Yet in recent years, society has been swept up in a fever for the so-called revival of traditional culture, producing a raft of confused and even preposterous phenomena: a Confucius statue erected in a public square only to be removed a few days later; a craze for Han-style clothing [note: a fashion movement promoting historical Chinese dress]; primary school children made to recite the Four Books and Five Classics [note: the canonical texts of Confucianism]; women's foot-binding; a Shanghai advertisement a couple of years ago offering a monthly salary in the tens of thousands for a "kneeling domestic service" position; the "Maybach Young Master" being admitted to Tsinghua University [note: a reference to a much-discussed news story about a wealthy student admitted to a prestigious institution amid accusations of using family connections]; the demolition of statues of Li Zicheng and memorials to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. All of this is the result of feudal culture devouring and displacing revolutionary culture.

The so-called "socialist advanced culture" refers to "the great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics" and does not encompass what is commonly called the "first thirty years" — the Mao era. This period is officially designated in the history of the CPC, of the People's Republic of China, and of socialism as "the period of socialist revolution and construction," and should by rights belong to both revolutionary culture and socialist advanced culture. Yet it has been expelled from both categories. This is untenable by any logic of history or political ethics, and yet it has somehow become the mainstream narrative — truly baffling. Though on reflection, one can begin to understand it. The two periods before and after reform and opening up may both fall within the history of the People's Republic, but in their economic foundations, political institutions, and overall ideology, they have undergone a fundamental reversal. The post-1978 era, rather than developing on the foundations laid by the first thirty years, developed precisely through the negation of those thirty years. The mainstream, in fact, regards reform and opening up as a world-historical transformation — a "revolution" in its own right, to be spoken of in the same breath as the founding of the party and the state. It is, in other words, another way of saying "farewell to revolution" and "de-revolutionization."

More than a decade ago, I gave a talk at Shanghai's "Urban Literature Forum" in which I compared the cultural character of the two thirty-year periods from a literary-sociological perspective: "In the interval from 1949 to 1979, 'the people,' 'the collective,' 'workers, peasants, and soldiers,' 'the proletariat,' 'equality,' and 'communism' were the core value symbols of the mainstream ideology. The slogans of that era — 'the individual submits to the collective,' 'be content to serve as a screw in the machinery of socialism,' 'devote the finite span of life to the infinite service of the people' — and the heroic model figures it put forward — Wang Jinxi [note: the famous "Iron Man" oil worker], Jiao Yulu [note: a model county party secretary celebrated for selfless dedication], Wang Jie, Lei Feng, and the heroic sisters of the grasslands [note: two young Mongolian girls celebrated for protecting a flock of sheep at the cost of their own safety] — as well as fictional characters such as Liang Shengbao in A History of Entrepreneurship, Gao Daquan in The Radiant Road, and Xiao Changchun in Bright Sunny Skies — all powerfully embodied the emotional tenor of the age. After 1979, this situation was completely overturned. A succession of terms that had long been subject to criticism — terms representing bourgeois values and ways of life: 'the individual,' 'human nature,' 'individualism,' 'humanism,' 'personal interests,' 'liberation of individuality,' 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'competition,' 'getting rich first,' 'the law of the jungle,' 'survival of the fittest' — were rehabilitated as emblematic markers of 'the emancipation of thought' and became the dominant vocabulary of the New Period."

From all this it is clear that "socialist advanced culture" is in essence a deconstruction of socialist values — and a deconstruction of revolution. The mainstream intellectual establishment called it "disenchantment" and the "New Enlightenment" [note:  an intellectual movement of the 1980s that sought to resume the liberal and humanist project of the May Fourth era]: stripping away the spell cast by revolution, completing the enlightenment project of democracy and science that May Fourth left unfinished. What it amounted to in practice was the construction of a bourgeois ideology upon the ruins left by the negation of communist revolution. These arguments were concentrated in the writings of liberal scholars such as Li Zehou, Liu Zaifu, and later Zhang Ming [note: three influential Chinese intellectual figures associated with liberal and humanist currents of thought since the 1980s], and constituted the dominant intellectual current of the 1980s.

For a long time we lived in the social atmosphere of the post-1980s. It was only with the new century — when nationalism displaced liberalism as the new intellectual mainstream — that some things began to change. The state ideology took traditional culture as its mainstream culture to be promoted and shaped, and in this respect it could be said to represent a negation of the mainstream culture of the 1980s. But this act of negating liberalism only to retreat into so-called traditional culture — a tradition that had been subjected to fierce critique by the May Fourth movement, by the New Democratic Revolution, and by the socialist revolution following the founding of the People's Republic — has no progressive significance whatsoever. On the contrary, it represents a regression.

In 2022, at an academic conference at Tsinghua University, I argued that within the grand narrative of the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution was a continuation of the revolution of 1949 — one might even say that 1949 was the "cause" of the 1966 revolution, and the 1966 revolution was the "effect" of 1949. Without 1949 there could have been no 1966; and conversely, without 1966, 1949 would have lost its bearings and its "great communist ideal." This is why Mao Zedong said: "The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. With the victory in the nationwide war came only the first step in a ten-thousand-li long march. The road ahead is longer, the work ahead greater and more arduous." [note: paraphrase of passages from Mao Zedong's "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China," 1949] It is why he felt that he had accomplished two great things in his lifetime: founding the new China, and launching the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution sought to resolve the universal problem that arises on "the morning after" a revolution, but perhaps the effort was too forceful — like a rocket that burns out before delivering its payload to the intended orbit — with the result that "the years after the revolution reverted to the years before the revolution." This tendency persisted into the second decade of the twenty-first century. From that point to the present, with the rise of nationalism as its defining marker, China and the world have entered a state of equilibrium — a temporary balance between left and right political forces, a balance that is both the product of fierce contention and compromise among various economic, social, and ideological currents, and the result of authoritarian and elite political forces exercising strong control and ideological manipulation over the general public. "Centrist politics" may be effective in terms of state governance, but it is profoundly conservative and mediocre in cultural terms. Unlike either "right" or "left" political formations, unlike the bourgeoisie or the proletariat in their ascending phases — each of which possessed a sharp class character and far-reaching political ideals — centrist politics is ambiguous in values, irresolute in action, wary of and resistant to any political practice that can be labeled left or right. It cobbles together conservatism, pragmatism, statism, nationalism, and elitism, suppresses democracy in the name of democracy, negates revolution in the name of revolution, and constructs a supra-class hybrid ideology. The mainstream academic definitions of revolutionary culture, traditional culture, and "socialist advanced culture" are the classical expression of precisely this hybrid ideology.

This tendency to substitute nationalist narrative for class narrative is most starkly embodied in literature and the arts. In virtually all film and television productions today, the heroes of the New Democratic Revolution are landlords and capitalists — invariably portrayed as men of magnificent integrity, devoted to the people and to the nation. The poor have been reduced to extras: a shuffling parade of servile, obsequious figures, trailing behind their masters with a "yes, sir" and "yes, young master" on their lips at every turn. All the classic character configurations we know from the red canon have been completely upended: Southern Tyrant and Wu Qionghua from The Red Detachment of Women; Huang Shiren [note: the villainous landlord], Yang Bailao, and Xi'er from The White-Haired Girl; Feng Lanchi and Zhu Laozhong from Red Flag Manuals; Han Laoliu and Zhao Yulin from Tempest [note: all iconic pairs of villain and revolutionary hero from landmark works of socialist realist literature and film].

As for works reflecting the first thirty years: to say nothing of the early scar literature, even in novels and films produced in recent years, any character who believes in communism and upholds class struggle is invariably depicted as selfish, morally deficient, an "ultra-leftist" figure of buffoonery. The ideological opponents of such characters, by contrast, are all upright, righteous, endlessly persecuted — an image diametrically opposed to that given to us by the literary works of the first thirty years: the Gao Daquan of The Radiant Road, the Tian Chunmiao of Spring Sprouts, and the real-world heroic models who emerged in those years — Lei Feng, Wang Jinxi. A few days ago I came across a post on Weibo noting that in a film about the War of Liberation, when People's Liberation Army soldiers charge the Nationalist positions, their battle cry is "For the…rejuvenation…advance!" One netizen quipped in the comments: "Give it a few more years and the War of Liberation will probably be renamed the War of Rejuvenation." If it were renamed that, it might actually be more absurd than it sounds — because the predecessor of the Nationalist secret police, the Military Statistics Bureau, was originally called the Revival Society. [note: 复兴社 (Fùxīng Shè), literally "Revival/Rejuvenation Society," was a fascist secret society founded within the Nationalist Party in 1932] Call it the "War of Rejuvenation" and you'd practically have one side fighting on behalf of the other.

All of this makes clear that what is called "socialist advanced culture" amounts in practice to substituting a nationalist narrative for a class narrative. Nationalism presents itself as a tolerant, centrist politics, but its essence is the negation of class narrative. Like liberalism, nationalism is an opponent of revolutionary culture — one standing on the ground of the nation-state, the other on the ground of the individual. Recently, some people have attacked Mo Yan online for supposedly smearing the Communist Party and the Eighth Route Army and have spoken of suing him. Their nationalism leads them to misfire entirely against Mo Yan, because Mo Yan himself is a compound of nationalism and liberalism. His humanist rhetoric in an inscription at the Liaoshen Campaign Memorial Hall [note: one of the decisive campaigns of the civil war], and his critique of agricultural collectivization and the People's Commune system in his Nobel Prize-winning novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out — all of this represents the mainstream consensus of Chinese cultural circles since the 1980s. How could you possibly sue him, or argue him into submission? But this episode also reveals the enormous fractures and tensions between nationalism, class narrative, and liberalism — in both mainstream and popular discourse — and these three forces and the struggle among them may well become the principal contradiction of Chinese society in the period ahead.

This is my understanding of the relationship between revolutionary culture and traditional culture, and socialist advanced culture.

III. How Should Revolutionary Culture Be Promoted?

The reason for arriving at a correct understanding of revolution and its relationship with traditional culture and socialist advanced culture is precisely to enable the promotion of revolutionary culture.

So then: how should revolutionary culture be promoted?

Let me offer a few personal thoughts.

1. Be vigilant against the abstraction, museumification, and commercialization of "revolutionary culture"

By "abstraction and museumification" I mean: evading the proletarian character of the Chinese Revolution; hollowing out and emasculating its concrete content; reducing it to a de-revolutionized, neutralized, nationalist narrative — treating it like an exhibit behind museum glass, severing any connection or association it might have with living reality.

By "commercialization" I mean the red tourism craze that has flourished in recent years. From Jinggang Mountains to Yan'an, from the site of the First National Congress of the CPC in Shanghai to South Lake in Jiaxing [note: Nanhu, where the First National Congress concluded in 1921], the proliferation of red scenic sites across the country has become a swarming magnet for tourists. In the midst of this tourism boom, revolution has been deliberately packaged as a symbol laden with commercial properties — serving only to be looked at and to satisfy curiosity — while the historical and contemporary significance it embodies has been completely obscured and distorted. Last year, in a public lecture for the first cohort of the Renjing Academy writing program [note: a reference to Liu Jiming's own literary education initiative, Renjing Yuan, named after the novel Human Realm, I described something that illustrates this perfectly. Everyone knows that Great Changes in a Mountain Village is a red classic; its author Zhou Libo was a native of Yiyang in Hunan province. As the birthplace of that novel, Yiyang is also the place where Zhou Libo spent the longest time living among and learning from the common people, and many of the characters in the novel can be traced to real-life models in the area. In recent years, in an attempt to boost the local economy, the village where Zhou Libo lived and worked has been developed into a red tourism destination oriented around consumption, with numerous scenic spots named after places and characters from Great Changes in a Mountain Village. Not long ago, the local government, in conjunction with the Chinese Writers' Association, launched a "New Great Changes in a Mountain Village" initiative, hoping to leverage Zhou Libo's name and the novel's influence to develop a red tourism cultural industry. What they apparently failed to consider is that Zhou Libo and Great Changes in a Mountain Village depict the great practice of the broad peasant masses, under the leadership of the Communist Party, carrying forward the collectivization movement and ultimately establishing the People's Commune — setting out on the path of socialist collectivism. Yet the rural areas of the entire country, including Yiyang in Hunan, following reform and opening up, took precisely the opposite road from the peasants in Great Changes in a Mountain Village: they dissolved the People's Communes, reverted to the "small-peasant economy" (the go-it-alone household system) that had prevailed for millennia, and scattered the organized peasantry back into a pool of loose sand, returning to the small-peasant economy that had persisted for thousands of years. This means that the agricultural collectivization movement that Zhou Libo and the writers of his generation sang of with such passion and into which they threw themselves body and soul is no longer the new world that the emancipated peasants of Tempest had hungered to build, but a return to the "old world" that those same peasants had smashed through blood and sacrifice.

The "New Great Changes in a Mountain Village" project in Yiyang is no isolated case within the national red tourism boom — it is, on the contrary, highly representative. It shows that red tourism, carried out under the banner of revolutionary culture, has become a pawn in the consumer market of the government-capital nexus, and has nothing to do with the original aspirations of the Chinese Revolution.

What is historical nihilism? This is a living, breathing textbook of historical nihilism. In recent years, the mainstream media has made a great show of criticizing historical nihilism, previously pinning the crime on public intellectuals. Now that most public intellectuals have retreated into silence, the charge can no longer be pinned on them — and yet historical nihilism continues to intensify. We find that the real practitioners of historical nihilism are not the public intellectuals at all, but the institutions of the state itself.

Reducing revolutionary culture to a consumer product is a new form of historical nihilism and an inevitable consequence of the global expansion of capital. Far from achieving the effect the mainstream claims — spreading and elevating revolutionary culture — it only accelerates the deepening crimson and the pinkification of revolution, turning it into a culture of consumption.

2. The only effective path to promoting revolutionary culture is struggle

We said that vivid scarlet is the color of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Revolution, symbolizing the blood and lives of countless martyrs. Blood is vivid scarlet when freshly shed — not pink, not deep crimson. The essence of red is revolution; the essence of revolution is struggle. China's New Democratic Revolution, its socialist revolution, and its period of socialist construction all achieved their victories through struggle of the most grueling and indomitable kind. This is why, at the end of Hao Ran's Bright Sunny Skies, the protagonist Xiao Changchun reflects: "Life is struggle!"

In an era that has bid farewell to revolution and consumed revolution, the promotion of revolutionary culture cannot rely on lectures and sermons alone — it requires struggle in practice: unambiguous, unwavering, without compromise. Without struggle there is no revolution. The bourgeoisie verbally repudiates all revolution — especially proletarian revolution — but no one is more skilled at revolution than the bourgeoisie; every gain the bourgeoisie has achieved to this day has been won through revolution, not through the "gradual reform" it preaches. The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a fight to the finish — it admits of no mutual benefit, no win-win outcome. If the proletariat does not wish to remain forever the slaves and the harvested leeks [note: 韭菜, a popular internet metaphor for people exploited repeatedly, like a fast-regrowing crop that gets cut again and again] of the bourgeoisie, its only path is to rise up and struggle. There is no other way. Lenin said that revolution is the locomotive of history; social progress is won through struggle. Against the bourgeoisie and feudalism, against every institution, culture, and force that oppresses and exploits the proletariat and the laboring people — in all such struggles, strength and inspiration must be drawn from revolutionary culture. The forms of revolution are many and varied. In the present moment, denouncing and bringing charges against the reactionary elements who demolish statues of Chairman Mao is one form of struggle; exposing through writing the lies and crimes of the capitalist-power-elite complex; supporting and standing in solidarity with those who report corrupt officials and predatory professors; standing with the grassroots masses in their fight to defend their rights — these are all forms of struggle as well.

Only in the unceasing practice of struggle can the soul of revolution and its true original aspirations be reactivated and reawakened; only then can revolutionary culture return from the museum to living reality, and be transformed from a bourgeois consumer culture back into a weapon of proletarian struggle. This is the mission that every believer in communism and every inheritor of China's socialist revolution and construction must undertake. Young people especially should embrace this mission actively and with initiative.

This is the one and only effective path to promoting revolutionary culture.

Editor: Red Star Shining Source: Published with the author's permission