Ma Bo, Howard Goldblatt, translator

Blood Red Sunset: A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution NY, NY: Viking, 1995, 371 pp. hb

reviewed by MC5, June 4, 2000

Ma Bo was a male Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976) and this book is about that period of time which Ma Bo spent mostly in Inner Mongolia with herders of the Mongol national minority.

MIM's 1999 Congress has already summed up the type of memoirs that the bourgeois press is cranking out with tremendous speed in connection to the Cultural Revolution: "the mode of production and structure of society with regard to patriarchy bored the rightists and ultraleftists during the Cultural Revolution. They also didn't like it when Mao kept telling them the enemy was only five percent of the party--and not a different five percent every day. They sought to bring about disunity in the proletarian camp by focussing on lifestyle questions." The memoirs being printed sometimes referred to as "survivor" literature or the like are the perfect genre for promoting the disunity of the proletarian camp if unchecked.

By its nature, any biography or autobiography will focus on the individual at the expense of class, nations and genders. Some authors will make up for that weakness while others will glorify that weakness by accentuating subjective and partial factual descriptions. Ma Bo is one of the many Chinese authors caught up in this sub- reformist trap, but the benefit of this book is that an astute proletarian reader can see all of what MIM is saying in one author.

Ma Bo was the son of Right-leaning high-ranking party officials. His mother was under criticism for a novel she wrote for the youth and his father once had the rank equivalent to an army commander (vice- minister).(p. 58-9) His young friend Xu Zuo who later in life proves to be Ma Bo's best -- maybe life-saving --ally was the son of a former vice-minister who disgraced himself in the Great Leap. People whose parents achieved such rank were conservative in wanting to retain that rank and filled themselves with pride. Ma Bo said in regard to his first sight of the womyn he fell in love with, "Words fail me when I try to describe what it was like to see her all alone on the snow-covered steppe. I always believed that children of senior officials were leaves from the same tree. She and I didn't meet often, but I considered her a friend."(p. 62)

Her father was another very high official purged and then killed by the masses. Ma Bo openly defended her father as not being counterrevolutionary and got himself in trouble. The social background of Ma Bo's network and Ma Bo's obsession with it is not surprising, because the Western publishing houses always publish 1000 memoirs of people of high social background for every one by people of proletarian background. The few things that Westerners read about China end up being by pre- scientific upper-class intellectuals of the "dissident" sort.

During the Cultural Revolution, Ma Bo's confusion in politics appeared almost immediately. He joined a conservative Red Guard organization designed to protect their party official parents from attack called the United Action Committee. Ma Bo does not fill in readers on this organization, so MIM will have to instead, because this organization is the key to Ma Bo's subsequent political development or lack thereof. The United Action Committee was the largest Red Guard faction in Beijing. It's leaders came under arrest at the end of 1966. Jiang Qing criticized the Beijing Garrison Command for supporting Ma Bo's Red Guard faction instead of the more radical Red Guards. Zhou Enlai also called on the military to stop supporting the conservatives and to help the leftists in the Red Guard movement to form the core of a united Red Guard movement. At the same time, Zhou Enlai pressed Mao successfully to release the United Action Commitee members under arrest. From this conflict, Ma Bo and others learned some of the distinctions in the central leadership in the party. In the critical struggle that required the conservatives to unite under a radical leadership core, the conservatives put forward different slogans. By this time they were happy to criticize Liu Shaoqi, because he was already a "dead dog," but instead of seeking a big struggle and big alliance to replace old power-holders,(1) the conservatives quoted Lin Biao that "'we should make ourselves the object of revolution. . . . If one does not revolutionize oneself, the revolution cannot proceed smoothly.'"(2) The intention of this statement issued at the height of ultraleftism in the Cultural Revolution was to keep the ultraleft from splitting the proletarian camp by finding fault with all their peers' individual behaviors. Instead, this statement and others failed to dig up the sub-reformist roots of rightist and ultraleft individualist thinking and led to a new wave of "self- cultivation," Confucian/Liu Shaoqi style. As a result, at this critical juncture of the revolution, the radicals dominated the media and all officials paid lip service to them, but power did not change hands: "all the vice- premiers survived, and their mass organizations also survived, so that the radicals gained nothing in terms of power."(3)

Throughout China one faction of Red Guards arose to defend party members loyal to Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi etc. by deflecting the spear of attack away from party members. These Red Guards turned out to be the ones that would vacillate wildly from rightist to ultraleft, sometimes aping their radical counterparts in the process, thereby lending further to confusion and also discrediting the whole Cultural Revolution. In their original rightist mode, Ma Bo's type of Red Guard had nothing to say about the structure of society. In the ultraleft mode, they found flaw in everyone and tended toward anarchism. When Ma Bo got to Inner Mongolia, he and his friends took up anarchism in the first movement to criticize party officials.(p. 69) Whether in rightist or ultraleftist guise, the Red Guards of Ma Bo's sort left the power- holders and direction of society unchanged.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo's memoirs are very similar to those of the widow of N. Bukharin in the Soviet Union in that they both focus on persynal loyalties, integrity and other supposedly timeless and context-less elements of so-called character. Under this sort of thinking, there is no mode of production, only individuals of outstanding or weak "character." Someone who is loyal is loyal even if the one he or she is loyal to turns into Adolf Hitler. According to Ma Bo and his friend Lei Xia, the turncoat is lowest of low making all other categories of people look good. Ma Bo's memoirs are even worse than Anna Larina's, because she at least had some idea of the general line struggle over the direction of society and chooses to downplay the line struggles. Ma Bo either avoids all such discussion or was completely unaware of such line struggle.

Ma Bo may protest that he is reporting on his political life and so is not avoiding line struggle, but failure to take a subject matter to the level of what Mao called "rational knowledge" is indeed failure to present the line struggle to readers. All that Ma Bo does is show the subjective perceptions of a member of the pre- scientific intelligentsia who never engaged the line he presumably would have been attacking had he known how. Ma Bo knew enough to criticize Jiang Qing for being an "empress dowager" allegedly keeping Mao under wraps while she ran the show,(pp. 121-2, 132) but beyond that he knew nothing of the differences in direction offered by Deng and Jiang Qing. He even admitted to lying about not smearing Jiang Qing. He knew he did smear Jiang Qing and then denied it as a matter of pride. The reader is only lucky that Ma Bo admitted it in print. Ma Bo knew his fortunes improved when Jiang Qing's fortunes declined, but he did not know anything about the line differences. At the end of the book he is declaiming her again, with no substance: "'How could you have been such a fool, Chairman Mao, to marry someone like that? Your people are suffering terribly.'"(p. 364) Then he says, "'China, you cowered beneath the skirts of a witch.'"(p. 364)There was no mention of family farming, running industry for profit, pay incentives to increase work, allowing foreign exploiters use of Chinese workers, art in the service of proletarian politics etc.--the issues which divided Deng and Jiang.

It is not surprising to us that Ma Bo came from a fiction-writing family and his own mother criticized him for being stuck in bourgeois novels.(p. 185) Cultural intellectuals can do great damage to movements, and we refer to people like Ma Bo who may or may not be vaguely revolutionary at the level of emotions and feelings as the "pre-scientific intelligentsia." Ma Bo put in tremendous energy trying to be revolutionary and he definitely had his good side that served Mao's line, but on the whole his political consciousness never developed to channel his own tremendous energy.

On the plus side, Ma Bo was willing to criticize his mother's work, ran away to go fight U.$. imperialists in Vietnam (without succeeding) and above all, he took up the call to go to the countryside by volunteering for perhaps the most difficult assignment possible, the freezing cold of remote Inner Mongolia where the people lived a very poor life. He went from being an elite Beijing student to asking for permission to go to the most difficult military conditions in China.

When he arrived in Inner Mongolia, he imagined himself to be one of the most radical of radical Red Guards and he beat up a herder in such a way that he believes he caused the man's subsequent death. As promised, Ma Bo did not varnish his account. Attacking a herder was ultraleft--seeing too many enemies- - and it demonstrated Ma Bo's lack of an overall view of society, a sense of its structure and who would be enemy and who would not be. In particular, we should stress that in handling the pre-scientific intelligentsia like Ma Bo, there is lacking a quantitative sense. Hence, when a herder expresses some bourgeois feelings, even slightly, Ma Bo pounces for the (physical) attack, because Ma Bo himself operates at the level of feelings.

By the way, Ma Bo appears to have been the strongest persyn in the whole book, as he demonstrates in wrestling matches, fights and physical labor--chopping down 400 trees a day for instance. His work ranged from lumber, to coal, to dynamiting to horse driving. In this regard, the book is not a run- of-the-mill whining of the pre- scientific intelligentsia. We gain some insight into manual labor from the perspective of the physically strong.

Right away, Ma Bo's expedition to Inner Mongolia is one of self- esteem and pride. He complains immediately that no one greeted him as a hero the way the people in the countryside greeted students from the cities in the newspapers.(p. 12)

Then following the practice of Red Guards in the cities, Ma Bo and Lei Xia search a herder's hut for hidden wealth and old world possessions. They found none and killed the herder's dog. Xu Zuo showed up to talk sense, but Ma Bo stood his ground. The herder was classed as a "poor peasant," but Ma Bo said it didn't matter and that the beaten man was beaten in such a way as to be OK later.(p. 18) Interestingly enough, the revolutionary committee in the locale backed Ma Bo up and put the man who cracked Ma Bo's skull in the fight under supervision.(p. 19) The account raises the problem of memoirs--that the other side is not heard.

In this case, there may be two sides not heard, the side of the herders and the side of the revolutionary committee on why this particular herder may have been suspect. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it does not matter whose side is correct: the strongest and wealthiest individuals always win when fights are reduced to a one-on-one level. Thus, the more he-said-she-said conflicts and rumors in the whole society, the better from the point of view of the bourgeoisie--if the oppressed and exploited take the bait. Spreading these memoirs does exactly that. The preferred course of the oppressed and exploited is to keep things focussed at the group level with a firm eye to numbers and overall direction while letting the bourgeoisie corrode itself with its own individualism, subjectivism and partial view of things.

The same thing in the United $tates is seen in cases of crime. Individual cases are handled incorrectly all the time. Witnesses have proved unreliable in about one-third to one-half of all situations. There is a tendency of individualists and pre-scientific people to focus on each case, instead of the statistics that show the United $tates is the world's imprisonment leader. While the disposition of each case is uncertain, the overall number of prisoners is not, but somehow ideology blocks the conclusions that would have to be drawn about the injustice system in the United $tates overall, while there is no shortage of opinion about the supposed crimes of O.J. Simpson or Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky.

Does MIM really know if Ma Bo deserved his arrest and subsequent rehabilitation or not? Certainly Ma Bo had his good side, but in the United $tates, he could have done a lot more prison time just for his numerous fights, never mind his criticisms of Jiang Qing and networking with reactionaries. As it was, Ma Bo was briefly arrested and then sent out to labor in the most difficult places in Inner Mongolia. He says in his diary of 1970: "Letting me live among other people but forbidding them to have anything to do with me is worse than dropping me in the middle of a desert. I'd love to find some sympathy somewhere; even pity would do."(p. 169)

Ma Bo tries to impress us with his sincerity. Everywhere throughout the book, he is looking at emotions, not results or direction. Sentences like the following abound: "I wanted to see if there was any sympathy hidden in her eyes, but she averted them."(p. 159) For Ma Bo, emotional contact with humyns was everything and without it he says he became a pure animal.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo had to be reminded that his ideas about humyn character are wrong. When Mao's right-hand Lin Biao attempted a coup and died fleeing, Ma Bo concluded that everything Lin ever did was wrong. The party had to tell him: "You can stop dreaming. Anyone who opposed Lin Biao before his fall from power is a counterrevolutionary."(pp. 224, 254) Across China, there were those like Ma Bo trying to say that Lin was always no good and they had been right to criticize him based on their presumedly constant persynal characters.

With such an obsession on persynal character the whole way through the book, it is not surprising that the book missed completely on the larger issues. The book jacket denounces the environmental destruction wrought during the Cultural Revolution, but Ma Bo only mustered a paragraph or two of denunciation without the details, (e.g., p. 352) and in characteristic self-contradiction but consistent pride he says a few pages later: "The company had three buildings when we arrived; now the people were housed in nearly two hundred. There wasn't a single tree on the steppe when we arrived; now there was a line of them, all green and shiny, behind the company area. The herdsmen never ate green vegetables before we arrived; now the company could boast a fifty- acre truck farm, with turnips, squash, potatoes, and scallions. Those were the changes we wrought."(p. 363)

It is a measure of how shallow Western politics and media are that an accusation about an historical period's devastation of the environment is repeated so casually with so little evidence, taking advantage of the currents of anti- communism, individualism and fascination with upper- class "dissidents." Reading the latter paragraph from Ma Bo above, one could just have easily concluded that the Red Guard were green paragons.

Conclusion

The translation into English is lively, making full use of slang and idioms appropriate to young and middle- aged people of the United $tates today. It is also very graphic and unvarnished with frequent descriptions of feces and mucous. The book is very much a Western autobiography that Westerners will relate to very easily--unfortunately without getting too deeply into politics. We can only hope that it will raise some things that people will look into more fully later in life.

Notes: 1. Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, CA: 1978), pp. 192-8. 2. Ibid., p. 199. 3. Ibid., pp. 200-1.

[Another review of the Ma Bo book focussing just on patriarchy will appear in a subsequent issue of MIM Notes.]

Postscript on gender

reviewed by MC5 June 4, 2000

Ma Bo and patriarchy

In a previous review, MIM handled Ma Bo's general lack of political development and unscientific view of life during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976). Here we handle his views of patriarchy. Ma Bo had a hard time with the opposite sex from fourth grade onwards. He was afraid of being called a "sex fiend." He wrote a self-criticism in 1964 for his preoccupation with sex.(p. 24)

In the depths of his struggles in Inner Mongolia where he came to be known as an "active counterrevolutionary," he said only the thought of a pretty womyn he liked kept him alive. He constantly alternated between thinking he had higher revolutionary aspirations to thinking he went all the way to Inner Mongolia only to have the same obsessions with sex.(p. 25)

In his military unit, people were not allowed to start romances inside or outside the unit for at least three years. The order was in line with the push toward later marriages in China.(p. 175) We don't know if this was onerous to everyone the way it was to Ma Bo and presumably city youth, especially those from the pre- scientific intelligentsia.

One interesting observation that Ma Bo makes is that in his constant search for approval from others, he often wished he was a womyn, because he believed people were nicer to wimmin than men, and in Ma Bo's case, the strongest man in the area and deemed threatening. From MIM's perspective, Ma Bo spent much too much time concerned about his self-esteem and not enough time concerned with his scientific understanding. His feelings led him astray often, landing him in fights and directing his political activity in a vacillating direction.

A related point is that Ma Bo says that party leaders tended to end up with pretty wimmin around them.

When the party leaders had sex, there ended up being a scandal and demotions, but nothing about the fact that pretty wimmin were well treated or hung around party leaders was wrong per se. Ma Bo felt discriminated against.

While Ma Bo's accentuated male features of muscle landed him harder and harder work and higher expectations, pretty wimmin obtained good treatment according to Ma Bo. "Pretty girls were always welcome in the offices of the men who ran the show; they were first in line for promotions and got all the cushy assignments. Unlike us boys, who worked our asses off for nothing."(p. 315) We suspect that Ma Bo's charge is true, at least in some locales in revolutionary China under Mao. (Today wimmin do a disproportionate share of China's field work, while men take the easy jobs in the city.) It would be difficult to detect and certainly impossible to prevent promotions of wimmin based on their looks. If Ma Bo's charge is true, this is an interesting example of how sexual privilege works according to the MIM line, but once again, MIM would say it does not mean the society is not going forward. For that matter, we are quite sure that although China made great strides statistically compared with pre- revolutionary China and Asian societies that remained capitalist, wimmin climbing through the political ranks had yet to attain their 50% share.

On a related point, Ma Bo felt that wimmin still had old attitudes toward men. Ma Bo was the strongest person around, and hence if his accentuated male characteristics were attractive to the opposite sex, he should have had attention from wimmin, after his three years of service were up. Instead, he felt that "The local girls avoided you as soon as they heard you were a driver. They called us 'horse-ass nibblers.'"(p. 326)

MIM has no intention of implementing policies that forbid sex in the military or elsewhere. Only very narrow conflict-of- interest situations warrant not having romantic relations across professional boundaries.

Too much Christian-type energy gets wasted on sex issues that divert from scientific development.

Ma Bo's political leaders started dropping off like flies in sex scandals. Wang Wanping was a medical doctor in his military unit, Company Seven. Wang made up a story about rape by a national minority herdsman so as to explain why his girlfriend had to have an abortion.(pp. 174-5) Such things would happen even more often in the United $tates in any attempt to impose a sex-related behavior policy like the one in China.

Then Ma Bo's number one enemy political commissar Shen got caught having affairs.(pp. 216-7) He was replaced with Ma Bo's allies, a turning point in his struggle for rehabilitation.

One of the wimmin involved in the affair was known to be obsessed with joining the party. She received her application the day after sleeping with the party official in charge. When she criticized Ma Bo for being counterrevolutionary, Ma Bo dismissed it as coming from someone "who thought nothing of using her body to gain admission to the party."(p. 273) MIM trains its people in science. Whether or not someone used her body to join the party, her statement is either true or false independent of that fact. Ma Bo should have dealt with the substance of what she said about him. It is the bourgeoisie that benefits from obscuring the truth and making everything a question of individual motivations and personal attacks. When people are forced to line up on differing sides of great questions, it is the bourgeoisie that is going to lose. That is why the bourgeoisie sidetracks the people from the great questions and lowers them into personality conflicts.

Of course the people who make revolution are flawed at all times, but that does not mean the society cannot progress in spite of those flaws by applying science to class struggle. People are not born knowing how to manufacture penicillin and so are born with the flaw of being able to die from the slightest infection; however, the application of science lets people surpass the weaknesses they are born with or grow up with.

Only a generation earlier, wimmin in China did not aspire to careers of their own. Now according to Ma Bo, there are wimmin who not only want careers, but they set about aggressively to get careers in political power and use tools they shouldn't. That's not all bad.

MIM does not want to be relativist: Having sex with a man to gain a party membership application is wrong. However, in the scale of things, it's a less than secondary wrong. If the party or the revolutionary masses find themselves bogged down in examining cases like this, they will definitely throw out the revolutionary baby with the bath water.

The radical scientist asks right away, had this womyn had the opportunity to get an application from a womyn, would she have traded sex for power? Would her womyn political comrade leader have forced sex for the party application? In other words, if the structure of society were already correct, would this problem of trading sex for party applications still exist? MIM thinks not in most cases. Rather than focussing on what the individual did wrong, in millions of cases, we prefer to change the underlying situation and forget about the cases. It tires us out and distracts us from the things we have to do change the structure.

With regard to the social structure of China, if China had accomplished a 50% share of wimmin in political power, it might be time to crack down on wimmin like the one Ma Bo complained of. Alternatively it might turn out to be necessary to have one more radical structural change before all the wimmin trading sex for power disappear--not to mention the men who get involved in withholding power for sex.

Yet, since no modern society has achieved a 50% share of wimmin in political power, we do not know that there would be any wimmin who would trade sex for power once equality had been achieved. Ma Bo's complaint may only make the gender structure of political power worse and thereby increase the chances that wimmin trade sex for power. Since men currently monopolize political power everywhere, it is wrong to put wimmin or men under suspicion for political contact with each other. The structure has to be dealt with first, and only secondly or thirdly or fourthly the individual behavior of the tiny minority that will cling to the past no matter how easy it is to relinquish it once the structure of society has changed.

Buy This Book