Modern Erasures: Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China’s Past by Pierre Fuller

Abstract

How should we account for the violence and destruction unleashed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong in the 1960s? Most observers viewed the Cultural Revolution as an extreme manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party’s quest to free the country from imperialism and to build a new society. They usually explained its violence as a result of Maoist China’s rejection of everything old and Western, Mao’s own power struggle, his revolutionary romanticism, the simmering tensions within the country’s social fabrics, or some variations or combinations thereof. Fuller, however, takes a different tack. From his vantage point, the entire Chinese revolutionary project, spanning the years from around 1920 to the 1960s and culminating in the Cultural Revolution, was the by-product of a specific form of “revolutionary memory.” Indeed, the project “was in practice less a defense of the local from imperialism than an outgrowth of colonial modernity” (292). In his venturesome analysis, “the left-right political spectrum collapses and Maoism assumes a striking proximity to rival ideologies” (292). His thesis is, to be sure, provocative. How exactly does Fuller make his case?Fuller begins with the epistemic violence that was constitutive of colonial modernity. More specifically, he focuses on “erasure” as a form of violence (hence the title of the book)—that is, the ways in which twentieth-century colonial discourse systematically removed any reference to, or acknowledgement of, the existence of indigenous communitarian and charitable relief during times of natural disaster in China. Fuller drives this point home by examining the coverage and reporting of the Haiyuan earthquake in northwestern China in 1920 as part of a “sociology of the Chinese” produced by Westerners (108). It had far-reaching consequences: First, such erasure was instrumental in popularizing the common Western representation of the Chinese as uncivilized people who lacked humanity, compassion, and a sense of common good. Second, it enabled Westerners to present themselves as the sole progenitor and provider of charity and assistance—the embodiment of human compassion—to those in need of aid. Third, and most important for Fuller’s argument, this colonial discourse was internalized by many members of the Chinese elite from around the time of the May Fourth movement (1919) onward. Critiques of the Chinese people’s inherent character deficiencies and moral failures, easily found in publications by Westerners since the nineteenth century, became increasingly commonplace among indigenous writers, commentators, artists, political leaders, and activists.Many of those texts portrayed the vast and highly populated Chinese rural area as a bastion of backwardness where communal bonds and public morals did not exist in any meaningful sense, where human fellowship and compassion from the haves to the haves-not was glaringly lacking, and where life was a constant state of struggle for sheer survival with no help in sight (except perhaps from foreign communities). According to Fuller, the political and intellectual elites, including Communists, based the construction of what he calls revolutionary memory on the basis of such representations of Chinese social life. The result was a metanarrative with its own set of vocabularies and discursive conventions designed to tell the story of a China in modern times in desperate need of social renewal and regeneration (in contrast to “communal memory,” which was more localized in nature).Drawing upon an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Fuller runs through a litany of materials, ranging from Mao’s famous 1927 report about the Chinese peasantry to Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Good Earth (New York, 1931), educational and popular journals, village drama, and woodcuts to delineate the fueling and dissemination of revolutionary memory.It is next to impossible to do justice to many of the nuances of Fuller’s argument in a short review. Undoubtedly, his claim, shared by other scholars, that Chinese indigenous elites adopted a Western representation of Chinese ills, has the ring of truth. That said, skeptics are unlikely to be swayed by Fuller’s leap of logic and bold assertion of an affinity between colonialism and Maoism, which represents the violence of the 1960s as “what Maoism most closely shares with the colonial project” (7). The effects of epistemic violence or erasure were beyond question, but so were the material circumstances—war, trauma, and social dislocation—that many Chinese experienced at the time. Although Fuller’s focus is decidedly not on the “reality” of those decades (13), the question of whether Maoism was a product of colonial discourse or a reaction to material deprivation will remain a topic to be debated for years to come.