Saving China’s muzzled past, one note at a time

For decades, Yu Ruxin, a businessman turned freelance historian, scoured second-hand book stalls across China for frayed and yellowed documents on the Cultural Revolution, a decade of mass political upheaval unleashed. by Mao Zedong.

The fruit of his long quest was published in Hong Kong this month, a 1,354-page story that sheds new light on the central role of the military during the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Liberation Army is widely known for being called upon to enforce order, but Mr. Yu also painstakingly documents how the military has also been involved in political purges and persecution.

“Through the Storm,” a two-volume Chinese-language book backed by 2,421 footnotes, is standing out even more these days as Chinese authorities are determined to erase the darker chapters of party history.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping this month celebrated the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party of the country. The centenary ignored the political upheavals and mass suffering that characterized the first decades of the ruling party.

Mr. Yu, 70, said he was not an opponent of the party, but that China should allow a candid account of the Cultural Revolution, when 1.6 million people were killed, by estimates by some experts.

“We will not be able to really assimilate the lessons of history, and history is likely to repeat itself,” Yu said in an interview from Hong Kong. “It might not be exactly like the Cultural Revolution, but something similar cannot be ruled out.”

Discussing such topics has become increasingly difficult in China in recent years. Historians and publishers have gone under intense pressure to stick to the official line.

Yet Mr. Yu’s new book shows how independent Chinese historians can cross barriers. He grew up in southern China’s Guangdong Province, moved to Hong Kong in the late 1980s, and used income from a real estate business to fund trips to China for interviews and research. documents.

In elaborately recounting how the People’s Liberation Army forces became entangled in power struggles, Mr. Yu said he wanted to question the widespread focus on Red Guard students as key players who drove the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In China, the authorities now treat the military as the guardians of a unified, top-down order; Mr. Yu’s conclusions challenge this image.

Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at the American University specializing in Chinese political and military history, said Mr. Yu’s book was an “exceptionally valuable” achievement.

“You really have to spend years slowly accumulating sources from a wide variety of places,” Professor Torigian wrote in an email, “carefully putting the pieces together to get the basics right, then only pulling a few hypotheses. “

Mr. Yu’s quest to make sense of the Cultural Revolution began even before it was over. He was working in the Guangdong countryside when he learned that Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s pending successor, had perished in a plane that crashed while fleeing China on September 13, 1971.

For Mr. Yu’s generation, this announcement was an astonishing turning point. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, many like him had been ardently loyal to Mao. But now the staunch heir has turned out to be, according to the party, a traitor.

“For us, it was like 9/11 was for Americans – you never forget when and where you heard the news,” Yu said. “We treated Mao like a divine figure. September 13 shattered that.

The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, after Mao’s death. Years later, after Mr. Yu moved to Hong Kong, Chinese historians began to explore the conflicts of previous decades. Under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party issued a resolution on history in 1981 that generally upheld Mao’s legacy, but recognized that he had made mistakes in his last decades that resulted in immense suffering.

After that, Chinese writers helped expose the scale of Mao’s disasters, like the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of villagers starved to death. Some were academics or free-spirited journalists; others were retirees who had experienced the events they had dissected in blogs and magazines.

“Their work really made a difference,” said Sébastien Végé, professor who studies modern China at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. “They changed the way people talk about famine. It is no longer the “three years of natural disasters”, as the official story says, but a political and political disaster. “

Mr. Yu focused his research on the less understood role of the Chinese military in Mao’s later decades. Mao could not have started the Cultural Revolution without the support of the military leaders; nor would it have ended without their role in arresting radical leaders after his death in 1976, said Yu. The only book to appear in mainland China on the People’s Liberation Army in the Cultural Revolution has was withdrawn from sale shortly after its release in 1989, he said.

“The role of the military in the Cultural Revolution was much larger than that of the Red Guards and lasted much longer,” Mr. Yu said. “Look at most of the books and you will never know. “

He has traveled across China, coaxing at least 50 former executives and aging officers for interviews. He visited sites like the Abandoned “atomic city” in northwest China, where brutal persecution interrupted efforts to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Above all, Mr. Yu sought to make sense of Marshal Lin, Mao’s fallen successor. Party propaganda presented the Marshal as a malicious schemer; his downfall earned a line in the official 531-page party history published this year for the centenary. Mr. Yu said the loss of Marshal Lin was complicated because Mao viewed his successors as rivals.

Since Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, Chinese officials have sought to tightly control the narrative of the Communist Party’s history. Mr. Xi has cited the Soviet Union as a warning, arguing that it fell apart in part because anti-party critics were allowed to tarnish its legacy.

According to Xi, “too much debate and pluralism over history distracts everyone from the central task of China’s rebirth,” said Geremie R. Barmé, Chinese historian and member of the Center on US-China Relations of the Asia Society in New York. “The past must be determined and fixed, so that the possibilities for the future are also limited to the party.”

Hong Kong, until recently a work paradise which could not be published on the continent, was not spared. A national security law that Chinese leaders imposed on the city last year has intimidated publishers. In recent years, Chinese border officials have stepped up confiscations of banned books that travelers are trying to bring back from Hong Kong, and the pandemic-induced travel freeze has further devastated sales, said Bao Pu, co-founder of New Century Press, publisher of Mr. Yu’s book.

Ten years ago, a book like “Through the Storm” could have sold up to 80,000 copies, mostly to mainland Chinese readers, Bao said in an interview. He will only print 1,000 copies and he could not find a seller willing to exhibit the book at the recent Hong Kong Book Fair, he said.

Mr. Yu said that finishing the book has become a personal mission, regardless of the issues sold. It took seven years to write it, often in daily bursts of four or five hours, he said.

“I personally lived this decade, and if I couldn’t make sense of it, then a big part of my life,” he said, pausing, “wouldn’t make sense. “