Art as a Political Tool:
Class Struggle and the Art of the Cultural Revolution Period
The Move towards the Art of Class Struggle - The Art of the Cultural Revolution Period
The Move towards the Art of Class Struggle
In May 1958 the second plenary session of the Eighth Congress of the CPC approved ‘the general line’ on socialist construction, by initiating the nationwide Great Leap Forward and the movement to establish people’s communes. The population of the entire country was steeped in utopian fervor during the transition to ‘communism’ and only a few calm realists were unusually concerned about the consequences of the various movements Mao Zedong had launched, and from statistics they discovered the crisis that the economy, and even politics, faced. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China by the end of the year was sensitive to the fact that a problem was emerging, and from the first Zhengzhou meeting in November 1958 until the Lushan plenum in July 1959, a correction of the exaggerated and radical thinking implicit in the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the people’s communes had begun to be implemented, but this could not prevent the serious consequences of the imbalances in the national economy exposed by the end of 1959.
In July 1959, the Central Committee of the CPC held an enlarged meeting of the Politburo at Mount Lushan, determined to resolve the problems that had emerged in the economy. On the 14th, Mao Zedong read in the letter presented to him by his old comrade-in-arms Peng Dehuai that ‘the atmosphere of exaggeration has become universal’, ‘the fanaticism of the petty bourgeoisie has caused us to readily commit errors that are Leftist deviations’ and ‘the slogan that politics assume command cannot substitute for economic laws’. We can imagine how Mao was displeased by these views. Realizing that Peng had just returned from the Soviet Union where Krushchev had announced that China’s people’s communes were the illusory product of a myopic attempt to implement communism and had torn up the Sino-Soviet agreements on military technical assistance, Mao Zedong interpreted Peng’s views as an antagonistic political trial of strength, and he told those attending the Lushan Plenum that a political struggle had emerged at Lushan and that this was ‘a class struggle and a continuation of the struggle to the death in the process of the socialist revolution over the previous decade between the capitalist classes and the proletariat’. The Lushan Plenum saw those senior leaders who disagreed with the ‘Great Leap Forward’, notably Peng Dehuai, Huang Kecheng, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Xiaozhou, singled out as an ‘anti-Party clique’, and Peng Dehuai lost his position as Minister of National Defense to Lin Biao. In order to further consolidate the achievements in this political struggle, CPC organizations at different levels also launched a political movement against right-wing deviationists during 1959 and the beginning of 1960, designed to eliminate the influence of ‘right-wing deviationist opportunism’ emanating from the Lushan Plenum and to continue the Great Leap Forward. The bitter political struggle further strengthened Mao Zedong’s views on class struggle.
However, the rapid plunge in agricultural production and the serious famine compounded by three years of natural calamities that had resulted in the deaths of several tens of millions verified the authenticity of Peng Dehuai’s observations. At the beginning of 1961, in order to alleviate the serious economic crisis, the government implemented a policy of ‘fixing farm output quotas for each household’, and moved some of the urban population to the countryside in order to relax the pressure on grain which was in short supply. Some 7,000 local Communist Party cadres took part in the enlarged Party working conference held in Beijing from 11 January to 7 February 1962, at which the calamity was defined as ‘three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made’, and Mao Zedong headed a group of senior leaders who proffered self-criticisms.
In 1961, Chen Yi, on behalf of the Party, informed intellectuals that there was a political relaxation when he announced that the Party needed intellectuals. Chen Yi reassured intellectuals: ‘Ideological transformation relies in the main on personal awareness and requires that a person consider things carefully. It is not permissible to attempt to solve ideological problems using compulsory methods and pressure exerted by the masses’.[1] However, for intellectuals who had experienced the anti-rightist movement and earlier movements of political critique, there was lingering fear in the face of this news of political relaxation. On the contrary, those intellectuals who held positions in the government and Party organizations even criticized Mao Zedong and his policies in the form of essays and dramas. In 1957, Deng Tuo, who had been dismissed from his post as editor-in-chief of People’s Daily, Wu Han, deputy-mayor of Beijing, and Liao Mosha, an official with the United Front Work Department of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, published several dozen critical articles, under the pen-name Wu Nanxing in the journal Frontline edited by Deng Tuo, under the collective title Notes from Three Family Village. Deng Tuo himself also issued a series of articles under the title Evening Talks at Yanshan in Beijing Evening News and Beijing Daily. These implicitly critical articles specifically targeting mistakes in the Great Leap Forward and other policy errors were distributed throughout the government as classified publications. However, articles such as ‘Curing Alleged Amnesia’ and ‘Rule by Kings and Rule by Tyrants’ were quite obviously attacks on Mao Zedong’s autocracy and its consequences.
In the period prior to the anti-rightist movement, Mao Zedong had already discovered that dissenting inner-Party views and measures limited the execution and promotion of his own decisions. In order to extricate the country from the predicament brought by the Great Leap Forward, top leaders including Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun had supported and promoted the policy of ‘fixing farm output quotas for each household’ in the countryside in order to stimulate peasant production, but Mao Zedong was severely critical of this move. The inner-Party contradictions continued to simmer away.
In August 1962, at the Beidaihe working conference of the CPC Central Committee and in September at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Party Central Committee, Mao Zedong became convinced that there was a plot to restore capitalism, based on his reading of ‘right opportunism’ and ‘revisionism’ in the inner-Party, as exemplified by the emphasis by various leaders on the support for ‘fixing the farm output quotas for each household’ in the countryside, measures which he interpreted as capitalist, as well as his reading of the long speeches critical of him circulated by Peng Dehuai. Mao believed that the entire Party needed to pay close attention to the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and between the socialist and capitalist roads, and so he decided that a socialist education movement needed to be conducted. The Central Committee of the CPC successively issued three key documents: Decision on Several Questions in Present Rural Work (Draft), Concrete Policy Regulations on the Rural Socialist Education Movement (Draft) and Several Issues Raised in the Present Rural Socialist Education Movement that fanned the urban and rural socialist education movement for the four-year period from 1963 to 1966 (also known as the Socialist Education Movement or the Four Eliminations Movement).[2] ‘Class struggle’ was soon made the focal issue of this movement. Later, Zhou Enlai pointed out in his Government Work Report presented to the first session of the third National People’s Congress: ‘All intellectuals must not relax their efforts to transform themselves’, and through ‘their long-term involvement with the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, and their participation in the class struggle and in productive labor’, in order to ‘revolutionize themselves’. In this way, artists began forming teams to go to the rural villages and for a number of basic-level units they prepared pictorial village histories and family histories, as well as posters, comics, murals, decorated lanterns and blackboard newspapers popularizing knowledge of science, hygiene, and culture.
On 24 September 1962, Mao Zedong issued the slogan calling on people to ‘never forget the class struggle’ at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the CPC.
Mao Zedong had a thorough knowledge of Chinese history, and he well understood the viewpoint of those inner-party intellectuals who made use of historical allusions. The political crisis upset and worried him, and he warned people to not relax their vigilance, saying that class struggle requires that ‘we always discuss it, in every year’, meaning that interpersonal conflict will constantly appear and reveal every type of antagonism. Following such logic, people discovered in 1963 when reading the nine ‘open letters’ of the Communist Party of China discussing the CPSU that the ideological conflict between the two parties that had begun in 1960 had reached an implacable intensity, and the CPC was informing all Party members and the broad masses that the reforms of Krushchev and Tito in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and the attack on the personality cult had constituted a ‘modern revisionism’ far removed from Leninism. Mao Zedong reminded the entire Party that it must enhance vigilance, avoid ‘the nation-wide counter-revolutionary restoration of the old order’, and prevent the ‘Marxist-Leninist CPC becoming a party of revisionism and fascism’. The Socialist Education Movement which began in that year was designed to ‘uproot revisionism’. In September, the country entered a period of even more intense political struggle in which class struggle was regarded as ‘the key link’.
The proposal of the slogan ‘we must never forget the class struggle’ presented the Chinese Artists Association, as the art propaganda organ, with direct and concrete political tasks, and the Socialist Education Movement presented artists with ‘the task of determining how art could serve the nation’s 500 million peasants’. Constant political and study meetings inspired and roused artists to understand ‘service’ and ‘the major themes’. The working conference of the artists association held in December 1963 warned artists: ‘We must have a long-term stance regarding the way in which we engage with life, but we must also adapt to local conditions. If, for example, some comrades are elderly, frail or too busy, it will be difficult for them to endure long periods away, and so it would be better if they were organized to spend only a short time in the thick of life. Regardless of whether artists do this for a long time or go down for only a short time, they should pay attention to analyzing class situation, understand people in the context of the changes and development of society, and accumulate greater knowledge of life and struggle, as well as gather pictorial materials about people. Like writers who are familiar with their characters from many aspects, we cannot rest content with mere superficial treatment and must go beyond recording superficial images. We also cannot simply regard going into the thick of life as a preparatory course for creating art; in the process the artist must also pay attention to the transformation of his own thinking’.[3]
Some people hoped to invest sculpture with the same functions as propaganda and agitation that painting possessed. In the journal Fine Arts the sculptor Qian Shaowu called for the erection of ‘village history monuments’ which would demonstrate the political function of sculpture: ‘Firstly, it can expand the cultural position of socialism, carry images of socialist education directly to the peasants, and thus wrest from the temples of local gods and the temples of Guandi their position as bases of feudal superstition. Secondly, we sculptural workers can receive a concrete and vivid class education, allowing us to transform ourselves greatly along the worthy path of becoming more revolutionary. Thirdly, we can create a new national style by critically inheriting the traditional foundation, in order to better create new national forms, denounce ‘foreign’ forms, and accumulate experience for the nationalization of sculpture. Fourthly, by integrating our work, we can provide comparatively favorable conditions for entering the thick of life and combining with the working people. Fifthly, we can go down among the masses on a long-term basis, so that we can gradually produce good works which conform to nationalization and meet the requirements of the masses, and can train a group of sculpture workers who conform to the requirements of nationalization and mass popularization.[4] Whether as a result of the call of the sculptors, or the sensitivity of the art workers themselves, they further turned the object of sculpture towards the peasants themselves.[5]
At the beginning of 1964, the slogans calling for industry to study Daqing, agriculture to learn from Dazhai and for the nation’s people to learn from the PLA became slogans for people from all walks of life throughout the country, and the fields of literature and art were no exception. Like other literature and art organizations, the artists association called on artists to do their utmost to conduct propaganda work for the Party and socialism, and many of the works which appeared were propaganda tools in the new society was extolled. Most works were replete with images of workers, peasants and PLA soldiers. However, some intellectuals within the Party still demonstrated obvious inertia in the face of instructions issued by Mao Zedong, who on 27 June penned the following directive on Report on the Situation of the Rectification within the National Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Every Association:
For the past fifteen years these associations and the majority of publications they control (with the exception of a few good ones) basically (although there are exceptions) have not upheld the policies of the Party, have acted as bureaucrats and bosses, have failed to get close to the workers, peasants and soldiers, and have not reflected socialist revolution and construction. In recent years, they have unexpectedly descended to the brink of revisionism. If they do not earnestly transform themselves, there will come a day when they constitute an organization like the Petöfi Club in Hungary.[6]
Such a written instruction initiated a new political climate in the world of letters and arts, well-known members of which, including Xia Yan and Tian Han, as well as prominent intellectuals such as Yang Xianzhen, Sun Yefang, and Jian Bozan were attacked. Every propaganda organ let people know that the heroes of this era were Wang Jinxi from the Daqing oil field, Chen Yonggui from Dazhai village and Lei Feng from the PLA. Together they symbolized and represented the images of the worker, soldier and peasant that were to be propagandized and extolled. They were regarded as something that had never appeared in any literary or art form of the past.
From September 1964 to July 1965, the national art exhibition reflecting the Socialist Education Movement was held. During those nine months, shows from China’s 26 provinces, totaling 2025 works, were put on display. ‘Many works reflecting the real struggles of the socialist era’ were displayed. Because the works embodied ‘creative methods embodying Chairman Mao’s method of combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’, the exhibition was deemed to be a success.[7]
However, in the requirement that art be coordinated with ‘Several Issues Raised in the Present Rural Socialist Education Movement’ and express the themes of class struggle, no work could compete with Rent Collection Courtyard which was completed in the space of only four months in the latter half of 1965.
As early as February 1963, summarizing the experience of the Socialist Education Movement launched by Mao Zedong in Hunan and the Socialist Education Movement in the Baoding area of Hebei, a working conference of the Party Central Committee proposed that class struggle be effectively grasped. Soon, all parts of the country began to ‘grasp’ class struggle. The enemy had now come into view and the sculptural works titled Sentry by Tian Jinduo and Naval Sentry by Kong Fanwei, both produced by the sculpture study class of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, reminded all who saw these sculptures that the enemy could in fact be standing before them. In fact, at this time ‘artists’ were not clear that Mao Zedong’s ‘enemies’ were in fact concealed at the center of the Party.
In 1964, an exhibition of sculpture from Sichuan was held in Beijing and, because of the enthusiastic representation of the images of workers, peasants and soldiers in that show, the art won official approval. In the March issue of 1964 of the journal Fine Arts, Liu Kaiqu published ‘Inspiring New Achievements in Sculpture’ in which he appraised the sculpture from Sichuan: ‘No matter whether the subject matter concerns our nation’s socialist construction and revolutionary tradition or the world’s revolutionary movements, all the artists have wholeheartedly molded images of workers, peasants and soldiers, and displayed the revolutionary and internationalist spirit of those who have mastered their own destinies. The works show strong vitality, the distinct emotions of the times and a strong militancy’. Later, the task of depicting class struggle in the sculptures called Rent Collection Courtyard could be entrusted confidently to sculptors from Sichuan.
The sequence of narrative tableaux that made up Rent Collection Courtyard was not attributed to particular artists by name, in conformity with the practice at the time of denying the idea of personal fame, but today we can list their names: Zhao Shutong and Wang Guanyi of the Sculpture Department, and their students Li Shaorui, Long Xuli, Liao Dehu, Zhang Shaoxi, and Fan Degao; participants from outside the school included Li Qisheng, Zhang Fulun, Ren Yibo, Tang Shun’an and the folk artist Jiang Quangui; taken part in the later stage of the work were Wu Mingwan and Long Dehui of the Sculpture Department, as well as their students Long Taicheng, Huang Shoujiang, Li Meishu, Mahetuge (Yi nationality), and Luojia Zeren (Tibetan). In June 1965, Sichuan provincial party committee entrusted the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts with the task of making the clay sculptures of Rent Collection Courtyard in a display hall created within the original manor of the landlord of Dayi and here the teachers and students embarked on their sculptural ‘class struggle’. The sculptural work made up of more than 100 life-size clay figures took only four months to complete, and they were arranged in the compound in Dayi of Liu Wencai, the Sichuanese landlord cum warlord.
The recreation of the figures in Rent Collection Courtyard was, according to an official statement, the reenactment of a story that had actually unfolded in this courtyard before 1949. Miserable peasants, men and women, old and young, paid their annual taxes to the landlord, after which they were left with nothing. Using false weights, the landlord left them so destitute that some were forced to sell off their children. Others were said to have been imprisoned in a water-filled dungeon, even though there is no evidence that such a dungeon ever existed. Others were even starved to death. In the final tableau of the 1965 work peasants with shoulder poles rise up to resist the landlord. After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution this story began to be transformed in line with the models established for the revolutionary opera works promoted by Jiang Qing. In the sculpture’s 1968 modification, the work concluded with peasants holding up political slogans and quotations from Chairman Mao. Rent Collection Courtyard was regarded as a ‘diorama of the old society’, directly reflecting class conditions and class struggle in the countryside of China before 1949. The sculptors hoped to ‘show the cruelty, as well as the weakness of the landlord class; they wanted to show the misery and suffering of the oppressed peasants, as well as their spirit of rebellion; they wanted to depict the local grim realities of that time, as well as hinting at the bright future’. ‘They not only wanted audiences to shed tears of sympathy for the peasants who suffered in the past, but also wanted to arouse the audience’s hatred of the old society and love of the new society’.[8] This was the express aim behind the creation of Rent Collection Courtyard, the artistic techniques and characteristics of which were deemed to be its narrative form, its use of local methods for fashioning Bodhisattva images by applying clay mixed with straw to a base, and the insertion of black glass balls into the figures to create shading and depth.
On 15 December 1965 the journal Fine Arts published six articles on Rent Collection Courtyard, appraised by the editors as follows: ‘The sculptures forming Rent Collection Courtyard, exhibited in the landlord’s manor in Sichuan’s Dayi, have been welcomed by the broad masses and have attracted great attention from artists. The works hold high the red banner of Mao Zedong Thought and uphold the Party’s direction in literature and art, through the spectacular victory in creating art that they represent. The works are the product of the glorious socialist education movement and also represent close cooperation with the basic tasks of the revolutionary struggle. From the lofty level of ideology, these works reflect the class struggle at the stage of democratic revolution in our country, show that the broad masses will never forget the class struggle and reveal the revolutionary will that can never tolerate the restoration of the old order based on the system of exploitation. The work’s ideological content and artistry are high, being the powerful weapon that will provide education in waging class struggle among the masses and provide the powerful impetus for the socialist revolution and socialist construction. This creative practice is the concentrated embodiment of the ongoing revolutionization of art workers, at the same time as it provides valuable experience for their continuing revolutionization’. On 4 January, 1966, an article by the Yan’an period sculptor and theorist Wang Zhaowen which was titled ‘A Sculptural Model: Visiting the Sculptures that Make Up Rent Collection Courtyard’, was published in People’s Daily and in it Wang simply stated: ‘This is a new achievement of the revolutionary literature and art serving the workers, peasants and soldiers, and is a great victory in our Cultural Revolution’.
In a similar vein the Yan’an artist Cai Ruohong published a timely piece in the 3rd issue of 1966 of Red Flag magazine which was titled ‘A Victory for Mao Zedong’s Literary and Art Theory: Comments on the Clay Sculptures of Rent Collection Courtyard’. Cai was directly heeding Mao Zedong’s Speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, when he wrote that the creation of Rent Collection Courtyard ‘solved a big problem with a work of sculpture, namely the problem of how sculpture serves 500 million peasants’. During the period when the movement for education in class struggle was in full swing, the exhibiting of Rent Collection Courtyard made an enormous impact. It was soon demanded that the entire work be reproduced and the task fell to the original sculptors assisted by a team from the sculpture studios of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Reproductions of some of the original Rent Collection Courtyard, together with photographs of the original work, went on display on 19 December 1965 in the China Art Gallery in Beijing, later moving to Shenwu Men in the Palace Museum, and every day thousands would visit the display. According to incomplete statistics provided in a Xinhua News Agency dispatch of 11 July 1966, the visitors exceeded one million persons. At the time, it was regarded as ‘a lively example of how sculpture could be revolutionized and as a milestone of epoch-making significance in sculptural art representing the glorious victory of glorious Mao Zedong Thought. Not only did it triumph over the works described as the pinnacle of foreign capitalist and modern revisionist sculptural art, but it also opened up a brand-new era for proletarian revolutionary sculpture art’. It had become ‘a fine school in class education and a living textbook of class struggle’.[9] As art, Rent Collection Courtyard remained into the 1970s as a thematically richer model than the later work Serfs’ Anger.
On 14 January 1965, the Central Committee of the CPC approved the ‘Concrete Policy Regulations on the Rural Socialist Education Movement’ which had been drafted in the main by Mao Zedong, and it was clear to leaders within the Party that ‘the focal point’ of the movement was ‘rectifying those holding power within the Party who were taking the capitalist road’, and they thereby understood that a disaster was fast approaching. In November, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, a new historical drama by the historian Wu Han, was analyzed by Yao Wenyuan as a reflection of this class struggle and named as a ‘poisonous weed’. Mao Zedong agreed with Yao Wenyuan’s analysis, pointing out simply: ‘The key to Hai Rui Dismissed from Office is the dismissal itself; the Jiajing Emperor dismissed Hai Rui, and in 1959 we dismissed Peng Dehuai, and Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui’.[10] China would move quickly from the critique of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office to the beginning of what was to be called ‘the Cultural Revolution’. Within a very short time, radical intellectuals such as Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Qi Benyu formed a new political grouping that provided the basis for the political clique of Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and Chen Boda. Zhou Yang and others who had been the executors of the literary and artistic theory of the Party would soon fall from power. Lin Biao, supported by Jiang Qing, began to build up his prestige and influence in the army, and in this year, people began to buy up copies of the red-covered Quotations of Chairman Mao that was so popular in the army. This was the sign that the army was beginning to exert political influence and the fields of literature and art began to accept the direct influence of the army rather than the cultural administrative departments. Prior to this, on 10 July 1964, the third fine arts exhibition of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had been staged in the China Art Gallery jointly by the PLA’s General Political Department, the Ministry of Culture and the Chinese Artists Association. During the exhibition, the Ministry of Culture of the PLA’s General Political Department organized a forum on the fine arts of the army. The national artists association invited those in charge of the branch artists associations to view the exhibition and attend the forum that ran from 17 - 23 July, and they also invited the Ministry of Culture of the General Political Department and army artists to send responsible persons to address artists in the capital in a series of seven sessions of reports on special topics. The 4th issue of 1964 of Fine Arts magazine introduced the exhibition and devoted the whole issue to a full discussion of ‘learning from the art of the PLA’. The exhibition was publicized in art circles for showing the experience of the army in revolutionizing art work. The art workers of the army, through their treatment of the themes of class struggle and the army’s life of struggle, were given the political task of demonstrating the firmly upheld political direction. In ‘introducing their experience’, the military representatives promoted their experience in the army mode of producing art which included the themes, tasks and overall arrangements put forward by the army’s leadership.[11] This resulted in the promotion of a “three-in-one combination” mode combining the ‘leadership’, ‘artists’ and the ‘masses’. The mode of organization described as a ‘three-in-one combination’ was described as ‘fully deploying the leadership, the artists and the masses to play active roles, as well as pooling the wisdom of all parties in the maximum concentration, so that all can play a positive role. In the arrangements of subject matter and theme, this mode can guarantee that works reflecting socialist life and struggle occupy the leading position and that the correct execution of the direction of literature and art serves the workers, peasants and soldiers, and serves socialism. The leadership issues themes and assigns tasks, specifically designed to match an artist’s specialty, thus guaranteeing the predominance of the themes and benefiting the diversification of the subject matter, and thereby helping to promote the premise of serving workers, peasants and soldiers and serving socialism, while letting a hundred flowers blossom in form and style’.[12] The organizational method based on the three-in-one combination was henceforth widely imitated, and for a time, the slogan calling for ‘strengthening the leadership of the Party and implementing the three-in-one combination’ became a favorite phrase among art bureaucrats. Many works were dubbed products of three-in-one combinations by art cadres. Hua Junwu even said: ‘Wherever a three-in-one combination has been successfully implemented, the creative work has been successful’.
From 20 January to 20 February 1966, an exhibition of nianhua and woodblock prints produced in north China during the previous year and a conference were held, while strict political orders were issued to artists. This exhibition served as a political model for art bureaucrats attempting to make art serve the changing political struggle. In February 1966, it was clearly pointed out at the working conference of national artists association branches: ‘Make great efforts to emulate the PLA, North China, Sichuan and Shandong, who have all used Mao Zedong Thought to guide their creativity and works, and have correctly stressed politics’. The nianhua of Shandong, the exhibition of nianhua and wood-block prints from North China and the Rent Collection Courtyard clay sculptures from Sichuan thus provided models and templates as the nation’s politics entered white heat intensity, advancing into the violent storm that was about to break. Wang Zhaowen put it simply: ‘Rent Collection Courtyard closely conforms to the basic task of the present revolutionary struggle’.[13]
In its second issue of 1966, the journal Fine Arts made the following editorial comment, at the same time as the editorial board was organizing a discussion of the question of the relationship between politics and professional work: ‘For a long time, art circles have been divided on the principles guiding the relationship between ideology and technology, the relationship between politically red and technically expert … There is a struggle between two classes, two roads and two ideologies raging through our thinking affecting whether we give prominence to politics in our thought, lives, creative work, education and research, and whether we put Mao Zedong Thought in the position in which it commands everything, transforms everything and advances everything. This is the basic question determining whether or not we win a decisive victory’.
On 19-23 February 1966, the national artists association held a conference of its national branches in Beijing, and the summary of the meetings stated that the representatives unanimously agreed that: ‘Studying Mao Zedong Thought is the primary and basic task for all our work. The revolution in every region, creative field and team area is the result of the active study and application of Chairman Mao’s writings. Some comrades checking work over several years in a specific area now acknowledge that mistakes have emerged whenever the Party has not been properly heeded and politics have not been given prominence. In handling working relations between politics and the profession, and between art work and other revolutionary work, politics has not been given paramount prominence and artistic aspects have been inappropriately emphasized. It has not been grasped that people must be made more revolutionary, so that work is not divorced from politics and the revolution and the masses are not led along the wrong path. There has also been a lack of understanding of the new historical tasks of the socialist revolution and construction, and of how to develop the revolutionary tradition and carry the revolution through to the end. For a revolutionary, these are very serious lessons. The comrades are determined that in future work we must regard Chairman Mao’s writings as the supreme instruction for every type of work. We must diligently study how the PLA, North China, Sichuan and Shandong individually used Mao Zedong Thought to guide their art and work and correctly stressed politics. The leading comrades must provide leadership in learning to use Chairman Mao’s writings flexibly, and combine with the workers, peasants and soldiers, in realizing the revolutionization of our leading thought, and lead more revolutionary art teams into the field of battle’.[14]
On 7 February 1966, People’s Daily issued a long report titled ‘The Good Model of a County Party Secretary: Jiao Yulu’, which was a detailed account of the deeds of the Party secretary of Lankao county in Henan province, together with an editorial proclaiming ‘Learn from the good student of Comrade Mao Zedong! Emulate Comrade Jiao Yulu!’ In the process of socialist construction with ‘politics in command’, there had been no-one held up as a model cadre of the Party like Jiao Yulu, who had totally devoted all his own time and energy in very backward rural economic work and eventually died of illness. This was a symbol of the close relationship, like that between a fish and the water in which it swims, that the Party called for between cadres and the masses, and the image accorded with traditional Chinese ethics. Jiao had become a natural model whose virtues were extolled. Although dying in his sick bed, beside Jiao were Mao Zedong’s Selected Works and Liu Shaoqi’s How to Be a Good Communist. His working enthusiasm and strength were held to derive from Mao Zedong Thought, however, and not from Liu Shaoqi’s work. ‘Comrade Jiao Yulu flexibly studied and applied Mao Zedong Thought to his position, views and methods and he provides a valuable model we must follow forever’. A new hero was born, and the national artists association at its working conference in Beijing informed its branches throughout the country to study and engage in activities related to studying Jiao, issuing a letter to national art workers, declaring that it was revolutionary to study Jiao Yulu.[15] This letter laid out the present tasks for all artists in China.
From 18 April to 29 May, the Chinese Artists Association, after concentrating the work of artists throughout the country over several months, staged an exhibition in the China Art Gallery under the title ‘Chairman Mao’s Good Student Jiao Yulu’. On display were more than eighty works, including sculpture, nianhua, picture-story books, wood-block prints, drawings, oil paintings, traditional Chinese paintings, watercolor paintings and posters. From mobilizing the artists to create the works until the opening of the exhibition took less than four months, and the organizational work within such a short time had proven efficient. But the storm of the Cultural Revolution would unfold even more swiftly and violently. Those who had once firmly implemented the revolutionary road of Chairman Mao in literature and art would be unable even to protect, or fend for, themselves in the new revolutionary period which was about to begin, and to various degrees they would be criticized as bad elements of different categories, even if they had previously criticized others in political movements.
At the beginning of 1966, the journal Red Flag published the editorial ‘Politics is the commander and the soul’ on New Year’s Day. This was the signal that a new political movement would soon begin. ‘Politics’ after 1949 commanded literary and artistic work, but it was difficult to determine where ‘politics’ began and ended at different times, in different places and for different people. However, every politically perceptive person knew that ‘politics’ could guarantee that one would not find oneself held to be opposed to the people, progress, the revolution and the Party. Thus, from the 1950s until the Cultural Revolution, when politics was omnipresent, people were cautious in the extreme when discussing, considering and participating in politics. The requirement laid down by Party bureaucrats in charge of literature and art that artists ‘improve their political training’ (Zhu Dan) or ‘create politically commanding works’ (Hua Junwu) was quite understandable. People were also not at all surprised that an article by Fu Baoshi could be titled ‘When politics assume command, brush and ink change’.[16] However, while talking about politics might not be difficult, what was difficult was constantly understanding and participating in politics, and being able to survive in the complex political struggles. Understanding the new politics was now regarded as crucial. The vice-minister of the propaganda department of the North China bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC, Liang Hanbing reminded artists of this at the workshop conference (guanmohui) accompanying the 1966 North China nianhua and wood-block print exhibition: ‘To paint revolutionary works, one must first become a revolutionary’. At the same time one was required to understand that ‘to be a revolutionary one must first be prominent in politics, read Chairman Mao’s books, listen to Chairman Mao speeches, and act according to Chairman Mao’s instructions. This is vital, and it must be stated repeatedly, and repeated thousands of times. To be a revolutionary for a lifetime one must be prominent in politics for a lifetime, study Chairman Mao’s writings for a lifetime, always make Mao Zedong Thought the guide of all one’s actions, and make Chairman Mao’s books the highest directive in all work’.[17]
In this environment in which politics was so extremely emphasized, politics was already out of control.
The Art of the Cultural Revolution Period
In 1963 and 1964, Mao Zedong made it increasingly clear through Ke Qingshi’s report and in Report of the CPC Central Committee’s Propaganda Department on the Situation with the Rectification in the National Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Affiliated Associations that he had concluded that many departments are still ruled by ‘dead wood’, and that recently ‘each association has slid to the brink of revisionism’. As Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing had begun to organize critiques of a number of films: City of Endless Night, The Lin Family Shop, Stage Sisters, Red Sun, A Thousand Li against the Wind and The Enemy at the City Walls. Soon, with Mao Zedong’s approval and Kang Sheng’s support, Jiang Qing began to organize the criticism of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. Ke Qingshi passed away in April 1965, but with the cooperation of Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan whom she had previously known through Ke in Shanghai, Jiang Qing cooperated with Yao Wenyuan in writing an article that appeared under his name in the 1 November 1965 issue of Wen Hui Daily titled ‘Comment on the New Historical Drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’. From the following day until the 26th, the article was successively reprinted in Shanghai’s Liberation Daily, Zhejiang’s Zhejiang Daily, Shandong’s Dazhong Daily, Jiangsu’s Xinhua Daily, Fujian’s Fujian Daily, Anhui’s Anhui Daily, and Jiangxi’s Jiangxi Daily. Newspapers in Beijing, a city under Peng Zhen’s control, did not reprint the article in time and this reportedly angered Mao Zedong. Peng Zhen responded by quickly arranging its reprint in Beijing Daily and People’s Daily, but his attempts to remedy this error, albeit intentional, were too late. When the debate about this play had first surfaced during the political struggle of the Hundred Flowers, newspapers carried articles on both sides in the political struggle. On 21 December, in a discussion with Chen Boda, Ai Siqi, Hu Sheng, Guan Feng, and Tian Jiaying about Qi Benyu’s latest anonymous article attacking Jian Bozan and Wu Han’s article ‘Conduct Research on History for the Revolution’, Mao Zedong announced that he would authorize that Qi Benyu sign his name to the article attacking Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.[18] Now, Wu Han’s view provided the opportunity for a political struggle. Yao Wenyuan in his article hypothesized that Wu Han was using Hai Rui Dismissed from Office to suggest that Hai Rui wanted to ‘withdraw to his farm’, but at this time all rural land had become the property of the people’s communes, so how could the fields be given back to the landlords? This was obviously a question of class stance. Yao Wenyuan also suggested that Wu Han agreed to ‘reversing the verdict’ on Hai Rui, but in a country of the proletarian dictatorship, on whose behalf was any form of redress to be carried out? Obviously, in Yao’s view, Wu Han was calling for redress for those landlords who had lost their fields and the bourgeoisie who had lost their property, but such persons were the target of the dictatorship.
Prior to this, in February, the Central Committee’s Cultural Revolution Group of Five, set up by Mao Zedong in 1964 and comprising Peng Zhen as group leader, Lu Dingyi as deputy leader, Kang Sheng, Zhou Yang and Wu Lengxi, issued its Outline Report on Current Academic Discussion, better known as the February Outline. This document acknowledged that the bourgeoisie was launching attacks in the cultural field, but argued that even though ‘reason’ could be used in the academic field the resolution required critique. On 5 February, this outline report was passed at the meeting of members of the standing committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee in Beijing presided over by Liu Shaoqi, but was not approved by Mao Zedong at all. On 16 April, Mao Zedong convened an enlarged meeting of members of the standing committee of the Political Bureau in Hangzhou, determined to cancel the decision of the Central Committee’s Cultural Revolution Group of Five led by Peng Zhen. The original document rescinding the Group of Five’s outline report was revised and transformed into the famous May Sixteenth Directive. At the same time, Jiang Qing, with the support of Lin Biao, drew up a report at odds with the February Outline with which Mao concurred. Jiang Qing’s document was titled Summary of the Army Literature and Art Working Conference Convened by Jiang Qing on Behalf of Lin Biao. On 10 April, this subsequently notorious Summary was printed and distributed throughout the entire Party as a document of the Central Committee of the CPC. This was the signal that Jiang Qing had been elevated from being an ordinary Party member to being legitimized as having the executive political authority of the highest echelons of the Party. The Summary was an important document which stated: ‘During the two stages of the revolution in our country, the new democratic stage and the socialist stage, on the battle-lines of culture there have been the struggles between two classes and two lines, namely the struggle for leadership in culture between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In the history of our Party, the struggle between ‘leftist’ and rightist opportunism has also encompassed the struggle between the two lines on the cultural battle front. …Chairman Mao’s On New Democracy, Speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art and ‘Letter written to the Yan’an Pingju Theater after seeing Bishang Liangshan’ are the most complete, comprehensive and systematic historical summaries of the two-line struggle in the battle line of culture, and they represent the inheritance and development of the Marxist-Leninist world outlook and theory of literature and art. … However, since the founding of the PRC these policies have not been implemented in the world of literature and art and a dictatorship has been exercised by an anti-Party and anti-socialist black line in total opposition to the thought of Chairman Mao. This black line is the literary and art ideology of the bourgeoisie and modern revisionism, and what is described as the integration of literature and art of the 1930s. Among their representative viewpoints are the theories of ‘writing about the truth’, ‘the broad road of realism’, ‘the deepening of realism’, their opposition to ‘subject matter determination’, their theories about ‘middle-of-the-road characters’, their opposition to ‘the smell of gunpowder’ and their theories about ‘the convergence of the Zeitgeist’. Yet these viewpoints were mostly criticized long ago by Chairman Mao in his Speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. In the world of cinema there are people who propose ‘heterodoxies’, by which they mean abandoning the road of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and waging a rebellion against the people’s revolutionary war.Under the influence or control of this counter-current of bourgeois and modern revisionist literary and artistic theory, for more than ten years there have been some fine works that extol heroic characters drawn from the workers, peasants and soldiers and serve the workers, peasants and soldiers, but they have been very few. Many works have been only middling, and there are those poisonous weeds that are anti-Party and anti-socialist. We must carry out a great socialist revolution in the battle line of culture firmly in accordance with the instructions of the Central Party Committee and totally eradicate this black line’.
Artists were thus told that the bourgeoisie’s ‘black line dictatorship’ had dominated literature and art for the previous seventeen years, and that the new art should be the art of the real proletariat and that the black line must be overthrown by a great socialist revolution in the battle line of culture. During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, the dictatorship of the Gang of Four claimed to inherit the mantle of the previous seventeen years of the proletarian dictatorship.
Jiang Qing’s emergence on 4 May at the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party alarmed people, and several days later, critical articles successively appeared in Liberation Army Daily, Red Flag and People’s Daily. However, on 16 May, the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed the May Sixteenth Directive, which announced: ‘Representatives of the bourgeoisie have infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and the various cultural circles, and they are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists who, once the situation is ripe, will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. These personages, some of whom have already been identified and thwarted by us and some have not but are those we still trust, have been trained, Krushchev-style, as our successors. Now they are dormant among us, and the Party committees must remain vigilant’.
The new Central Committee Cultural Revolution Group comprised thirteen people, including Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, and was responsible to Mao Zedong directly. Unlike the other Cultural Revolution group responsible to the Party Secretariat which had now been disbanded, this newly empowered political organ using the name of the Cultural Revolution became the real power centre in the CPC for the next few years.[19] Obviously, the group’s future goal was not merely to provide criticism in the ideological sphere, but to conduct a total cleanout of the Party organization.
The leading Party group of the Chinese Artists Association prior to 16 May, was still organizing the study of the February Outline, and formulating targets of academic critique for the current year. These were: first, Soviet revisionist art; second, bourgeois academic pedagogic thought; third, bourgeois formalist art; and, fourth, the political and artistic questions regarding youth and students in art circles. However, after the May Sixteen Resolution ‘unfurled on high the banner of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, launched ‘the critique of the bourgeois reactionary authorities’ and announced ‘the elimination of those representatives of the bourgeoisie who had infiltrated the Party, government, the army and the cultural domain’, the political situation throughout the country, beginning with the schools, began to descend into total chaos.
China’s ‘number one big-character poster’ was pasted up at the campus of Peking University on 25 May. Written by Nie Yuanzi as the representative of some of the university’s professors and students, the poster was directed against the Party Committee of the university. This move was tantamount to instigating radical action at other schools throughout China. On 1 June, people learned through newspapers and broadcasts that Mao Zedong had lent his support to this big-character poster, thereby legitimizing the masses to rebel spontaneously. At this juncture, the new Cultural Revolution Group had grasped the significance of the reports in People’s Daily and lent its support through the main Party newspapers and journals to the call for rebellion, which spread quickly through every large institution of higher learning in the country. Within only four days, rebel students had radicalized and were freely demonstrating, and rapidly set up their own organizations, the Red Guards.[20] A big character poster signed by an anonymous Red Guard of the middle school attached to Tsinghua University, titled ‘Long live the spirit of rebellion of the proletarian revolution’ appeared on that university’s campus on 24 June. By 23 July, the appearance of ‘The third discussion on Long live the spirit of rebellion of the proletarian revolution’ made it clear that the attempt by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to guide the direction of the student revolt through their work groups had failed to control the situation, and in the last few days of July the Red Guards felt that they could unleash a genuine and total ‘Cultural Revolution’.[21] In cultural and arts organizations, ‘the masses’ began to investigate and expose ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie who had infiltrated the Party, government, the army and the cultural domain, as well as ‘bourgeois reactionary authorities’, moving rapidly to subject these groups to attack. Events moved quickly in the arts. On 21 June, Cai Ruohong, Hua Junwu, Wang Zhaowen and Jiang Yousheng were temporarily relieved of their posts, so that they could undergo compulsory ‘self-examination’. On 12 July, People’s Daily published two articles, ‘Eliminate the Poisonous Influence of Zhou Yang from the Art Colleges’ and ‘Zhou Yang Has Perpetuated the Family Line for the Demoniacal Class Enemies of All Times and All Lands’. On 16 July, People’s Daily issued an article by the Woodblock Print Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts titled ‘Zhou Yang’s “Liberalization” Has Poisoned the Central Academy of Fine Arts’. Finally, on 28 July, Liberation Army Daily published the article titled ‘Thoroughly Expose the Vicious Face of the Three Family Village Black Painter Huang Zhou’.
The physical and mental trials endured by artists, especially older artists, during the Cultural Revolution is evident from the experiences of every teacher of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Wang Qi wrote in his memoirs that when the teachers of the school returned to campus after having spent time in the countryside during the Socialist Education Movement, they found that their liberty had been curtailed and that they were the subject of revolutionary attack:
As soon as we entered the gates of the school and were gathered in the auditorium, Colonel Cao of the PLA, who led the work team sent to occupy the Central Academy of Fine Arts, announced from the platform: ‘All teachers who have just returned from Xingtai must hand over all their diaries and note-books, and if they conceal anything, then they will be dealt with as counter-revolutionaries’…. Then, the students from the Woodblock Print Department summoned Li Hua, Huang Yongyu and me to the departmental office, where people were already lined up. When we entered, they shouted out in unison: ‘Overthrow the capitalist roader Li Hua!’ ‘Overthrow the reactionary authority Wang Qi!’ ‘Overthrow the reactionary authority Huang Yongyu!’ We were then subjected to a session of sustained and chaotic verbal attack, after which we were required to go to the corridor upstairs to participate in the students’ criticism and struggle session targeting Ye Qianyu.[22]
Ye Qianyu later wrote a shocking description of these events:
The first action of the Red Guards of the Academy of Fine Arts was to burn the old textbooks and teaching equipment, smashing the plaster casts and piling them up in the middle of the school grounds. They then gathered up the old lecture materials and art albums, throwing them onto a huge fire, and dragged the class enemies who had been labeled demons out from the ‘pens’ in which they had been imprisoned and made them kneel around the fire. The Red Guards proclaimed that we were the dregs of the old world who would be buried with it. The rebel group stood behind us, and if we made the slightest movement, a hand would reach out and wrench us back into position. As the fires burned more fiercely, we felt that our faces were being scorched. Kneeling beside me was the deputy director of the traditional Chinese painting department. He suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and could not kneel properly. He appealed to the rebels but they were unconcerned whether he lived or died, and the more he complained the more abuse he suffered. [23]
The circumstances of the southern artists were similarly shocking. Lin Fengmian not only had his house ransacked on several occasions but was also sent to prison for harboring ‘traitors’.[24]
On 8 August, the 11th plenary session of the CPC’s eighth congress passed Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, known as the Sixteen Items.[25] This document fully affirmed ‘the struggle to wrest control from those in authority taking the capitalist road, the critique of bourgeois reactionary expert authorities, and the critique of the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all exploiting classes’. The resolution demanded the reform of education, literature and art and all aspects of the superstructure incompatible with the socialist economic base. The document proclaimed the use of the ‘four bigs’ (i.e., big contention, big speaking out, big character posters, and big debate) in order to expose ‘cow ghosts and snake demons’. At the same time, the Resolution stressed ‘launching the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres’ to implement such a reform. On 18 August, Tiananmen Square was filled with a sea of people, when Mao Zedong celebrated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’s at a mass rally and received the Red Guards, students and teachers who had come to Beijing ‘to link up’ (da chuanlian). From 18 August to 26 November, Red Guards from all parts of the country held eight major parades in Beijing, in which the number of participants was estimated at 13 million. By the end of the year, the new Central Cultural Revolution Group demanded that Red Guards cease the ‘link-ups’ and return to their own areas to conduct struggles against local Party committees and those in power. In December, people could already read big-character posters criticizing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, revealing that there was a political split at the top. Mao now relied on Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and their allies. The political power and influence of the Central Cultural Revolution Group was now patently obvious. Lin Biao called on students to destroy ‘the Four Olds’ (old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits), and this gave the Red Guards carte blanche to engage in unfettered destruction. As a result, the whole country began to be engulfed in this destructive action. The Red Guards smashed up cultural relics, burned old paintings and destroyed religious facilities. They ransacked the houses of anyone they regarded as ‘cow ghosts and snake demons’, smashing up cultural objects and works of art. Any symbol of feudal culture, even an umbrella decorated with a dragon pattern used by a passerby to ward off the rain, could be smashed on the spot. On 23 November, as local temples were being destroyed, the boards proclaiming Confucius to be an ‘exemplary teacher for all ages’ in Confucian temples were consigned with other cultural relics to the raging flames. As each university descended into chaos, the professors and older painters of the nation’s art colleges (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts) were being taken out by the Red Guards to be criticized and struggled.
New Year editorials in People’s Daily and Red Flag on 1 January 1967 called for ‘carrying out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution through to the end’, and announced that ‘1967 will be the year in which the whole country will be engaged in class struggle in a comprehensive way’. On 11 January, People’s Daily published three articles calling for the bourgeois dictatorship of Cai Ruohong and Hua Junwu in the art world to be smashed: ‘The Art Program for Restoring Bourgeois Honors’, ‘Hua Junwu is the Old Boss Who Launches Anti-Party Black Painting’ and ‘Cai Ruohong is the Chief Ghoul in the Art World’. History was being again rewritten, this time by the Red Guards supported by Mao Zedong. Cai Ruohong (vice-president of the Chinese Artists Association) was charged with having resisted the new nianhua from as early as 1951, and Hua Junwu (general secretary of the National Artists Association) was described as a right-wing cartoonist of the Shanghai bourgeoisie of the 1930s, who had specialized in anti-Party caricatures. All art officials, including Cai Ruohong, Hua Junwu and Wang Zhaowen, and all artists with a reputation, including such luminaries as Pan Tianshou, Lin Fengmian, Liu Haisu, Ye Qianyu, Huang Zhou, Shi Lu, and Feng Zikai, were unable to escape harsh criticism and all suffered physical beatings of varying degrees of brutality. So thoroughgoing was this purge that even Qi Baishi, who had died several years earlier, was liquidated by posthumously Jiang Qing and designated an obsequious and servile ‘reactionary painter’.
By 1972, when the cultural group of the State Council sponsored a nationwide art exhibition in the China Art Gallery in Beijing commemorating the 30th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, art was more or less moribund. The illustrations on leaflets, newspapers, periodicals and restricted media issued in this period by the mass organizations of the streets and lanes, which largely comprised critical propaganda illustrations and pure cartoons, has been described by art historians as ‘the Red Guard art movement’.
Following the increase in attacks organized by the Red Guards, the official journal of the artists association, Fine Arts, ceased publication, and a large number of Red Guard art newspapers and periodicals and different types of exhibitions replaced the official exhibitions, as the official fine arts organizations were paralyzed completely.[26] On 23 May 1967, a total of 84 revolutionary rebel organizations in Beijing organized the Exhibition of Revolutionary Paintings Celebrating the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought, which was held the China Art Gallery, and several hundred wood-block prints, caricatures, posters and ‘new illustrated quotations’ were on display. By June, the Exhibition of Capital Red Guard and Revolutionary Rebels, regarded as an exhibition of works by Red Guards supported by Lin Biao and the army, was held in Beijing. The works exhibited distinct political concepts and symbols. Now the organizers were no longer the artists associations and the cultural administrative departments of the government, but the ‘Red Guard representative committee of the capital’s universities and colleges’ and the ‘Red Guard representative committee of the capital’s middle schools’. The content of the exhibition was divided into four major thematic sections titled: Long live the victory of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line; Overthrow China’s Krushchev; Sweep away all of society’s cow ghosts and snake demons; and, The glorious Red Guard movement has shaken the entire world. The works in the exhibition were mostly gouache and sculptural propaganda pieces.
In October 1967, an exhibition titled ‘Long Live the Victory of Chairman Mao’s Revolutionary Line’ was held at the China Art Gallery. More than 1600 pieces were on display, including traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, wood-block prints, posters, clay sculpture and technical art works. Bombard the Headquarters, the famous work by Wang Weizheng, was displayed at this exhibition. In fact, the painters had quickly mastered the technique of extolling the leader and powerful individuals by having golden sunlight radiating behind them, as in a stage scene where the director makes use of ‘backlighting’. The massive oil painting The East Is Red, shown at the exhibition, made use of this feature and in it we see the leader Mao Zedong with the new political forces - Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, and Jiang Qing – receiving Red Guards on Tiananmen gate. ‘Praising the victory of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line’ was the title of an article describing that exhibition, which was authored by the criticism group of the Revolutionary Planning Group of the Fine Arts System Directly under the Central Committee which appeared on 28 November 1967 in People’s Daily.
The most important work of that year was, in fact, in an exhibition titled ‘Mao Zedong’s Thought Gloriously Illuminates the Labor Movement of Anyuan’, held at the same time as the above exhibition in the China History Museum, and the work was titled Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan. This work, reproduced in several hundred million prints, was painted by Liu Chunhua (b.1944, Liu Chenghua), a student of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts.[27] In an age when the bourgeois notion of fame and gain was harshly criticized, this work was attributed at that time as follows: ‘Created collectively by students of Beijing’s colleges and executed by Liu Chunhua’. Although Liu Chunhua was a Red Guard of the academy’s Jinggang Mountain Platoon, the work was a political commission delegated by the rebel organization representing the Beijing Municipal Federation of Trade Unions, the Representative Federation of Red Guard Representatives, and the General Federation of Trade Unions. Jiang Qing decided that Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan and the piano cantata The Red Lantern were to be widely promoted as new achievements of the revolutionary cultural line of the Cultural Revolution. Reproductions of the painting were included on 1 July 1968 in People’s Daily, Liberation Army Daily and Red Flag and regional newspapers also soon ran reproductions of the work. Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan was subsequently printed in a range of formats. By October, the Beijing Fine Arts Packaging Industry Company had even issued reproductions of the work on iron sheeting. Liu Chunhua published an article in People’s Daily on 7 July titled ‘Extolling our Glorious Leader Chairman Mao Is Our Greatest Happiness’. In it he wrote:
We arranged Chairman Mao’s image in the most prominent position in the composition. Chairman Mao’s tall and strong image greets us and approaches us, as the sun rises in the sky before us and fills us with unbounded hope. Every gesture of Chairman Mao reflects the greatness of Mao Zedong Thought. The dynamic treatment is designed to give significance to every subtle movement of Chairman Mao: The slightly raised head and the neck turned back slightly prove that Chairman Mao is fearless in the face of danger and difficulties, can defy brutal suppression, dares to struggle and dares to win victory with his dauntless revolutionary spirit. His clenched left hand demonstrates that Chairman Mao is a man of resolution and is thoroughgoing, and that in making decisions he is not afraid of sacrifice and will clear away all obstacles and surmount every difficulty, in order to achieve his heroic ambition of liberating all the people of China and all people around the world with his faith in certain victory. The old umbrella he holds under his arm with his right hand demonstrates that Chairman Mao will brave the wind and rain, and endure every hardship for the revolution, and his arduous style of work will see him rushing everywhere, scaling mountains, fording streams and encountering difficulties. His sure step on the rough road shows that Chairman Mao will overcome all difficulties for us, blazing the trail along which we advance and leading us to victory. The autumn wind ruffles his long hair that is tousled because his busy work leaves him no time to comb it. His gown flaps in the breeze showing that these are uncommon times and the storm of revolution is approaching. We can see, in the rising of the red sun, that the mountainous area of Anyuan is bathed in a red dawn.
All political symbols and literary associations in this text were part of the basic logic of the art of the Cultural Revolution. Most painters were familiar with this logic and knew that only by conforming to this logic could they be in accord with the artistic criteria of the times.
With changes in the political situation, a large number of painters were engaged in presenting Mao Zedong’s image, and in later works in which Mao Zedong constituted the subject matter, it was very difficult for the leader to be presented as he had been in the 1950s, as affable, kind and approachable, now that his basic images had increased in stature and occupied centre stage, radiating red light. Artists had now been educated in the artistic ideology of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. Now, the stage effects of the model theatrical works promoted by Jiang Qing - strong backlighting, expanses of red or warm colors, modeling that expressed strength and revolutionary emotions and images of workers, peasants and soldiers surrounding the central character, had become the new artistic criteria. These criteria were simply summarized as ‘red, light, bright’ (hong, guang, liang) and ‘tall, big, total’ (gao, da, quan). Almost all of the CPC leaders who had been Mao’s associates in the revolution had been overthrown, and in the new history paintings only Mao Zedong, emanating red or golden light, remained. Such a style contrasted sharply with the Mao Zedong depicted by artists in earlier years. The leader had now been completely deified.
In January 1967, political power in Shanghai was captured in what was called the ‘January Storm’ and this was the signal that the rebellion and destruction of the Red Guards had come to an end. On 13 January, when Mao gave his assent to the proffered resignation of Liu Shaoqi and urged him to ‘study hard and look after his health’, the overthrow of the revisionists and the bourgeoisie in power was a fait accompli demonstrated by the new organizations. The next political task was establishing a new system of power. On 15 January, the Red Guards and Rebels organized groups to enter the headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal CPC Committee. People hailed the successful seizure of power, and four days later Zhang Chunqiao described this seizure as the January Revolution. He wanted people to believe that a ‘New Shanghai People’s Commune’, like the original Paris Commune, had been born. On 22 January, when the People’s Daily editorial ‘The great union of proletarian revolutionary groups has seized power from the capitalist roader bourgeoisie’ had been released, the struggle to seize power began to rapidly engulf the entire country.
‘Seizing power’ led to irreconcilable struggles and conflicts between different factions. Wherever there was power it had to be seized and struggles to seize power could break out anywhere, eventually resulting in armed conflict, but this was not the result that Mao Zedong had expected. Suddenly, Mao Zedong was demanding that this situation be changed because the enemies in his Party who had been ‘those in authority taking the capitalist road’ had already been rooted out, and the political task of the Red Guards had been completed. Now there was no need for the student movement to cause more chaos. On 22 February 1967, the Red Guards from all higher educational institutions in Beijing held ‘an assembly of Red Guard representatives of the capital’s universities and colleges’, at which they proclaimed their unity under the banner of ‘the supreme headquarters’ of the Party Central Committee headed by Chairman Mao. In March, the Red Guards all over the country who had ‘linked up’ were ordered to return to their schools and initiate ‘a return to classes to make revolution’. The ‘educational revolution’ had begun. The leaders of regional Party, government and army organs, as well as of schools and other organizations were to be arrested and returned to their own locales where they were to be subjected to beatings and criticism by local rebel factions. The arrest of traitors throughout the country got under way in June with physical punishments and imprisonment. Any semblance of order came completely unstuck as different political backgrounds led to different views. Even Mao was targeted. On 22 July, in a letter presented by the Chengdu Red Guard Troops to Chen Zaidao, the following phrase appeared: ‘Eliminate the dictator whom the world has never seen from the face of the earth’. This led to Mao Zedong’s refusal to ever cross the Yangtze River again. In the summer of 1968, the endless stream of documents calling for the end of hostilities which emanated from the Central Committee gradually brought the more extreme fighting spirit of the revolutionary rebel factions to an end, and Mao Zedong sent workers as Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams into the schools to prevent acts of violence by the students, and the political situation underwent a massive change. On 22 December, People’s Daily published an article titled ‘We also have two hands and won’t stay idle in the city’. The large numbers of urban students and school leavers were ordered successively to go down into the vast countryside, to settle there and support themselves by working. They had fought in the frontline of the proletarian revolutionary struggle, but now their consciousness was regarded as being less than that of the peasants and they had to submit to re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants. Mao Zedong’s classic injunction that ‘it was necessary that the masses of school leavers go to the countryside, to accept re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants’ became the subject matter and content of posters and other propaganda forms.
Paintings which urged school graduates to accept education in the countryside and contribute to agricultural construction soon made their appearance. Among the many paintings reflecting the theme of urban youth going to the countryside to participate in labor and class struggle were: Liu Bairong’s oil painting titled There Is Nothing to Fear When Nurtured by the Sun, and We Dare to Dedicate Our Youths to the People (1969); Chen Yifei and Xu Chunzhong’s gouache work Chairman Mao’s Red Guard: Learn from the Model of Revolutionary Youth, Comrade Jin Xunhua (1969); Ma Zhensheng’s woodcut print Liangshan Needs You; Wen Chengcheng’s guohua work Before Entering University (1972); Xu Juntao’s guohua painting Youth League Representative (1973); Zhou Sicong’s guohua painting The Pines of the Changbai Mountains (1973); Zhou Shuqiao’s oil painting Spring Breeze Willow (1974); and Xu Kuang’s woodcut Poem of the Grassland (1976). Many of the paintings treating the themes of educated youth in the countryside provided unique memories of this phase of history. The history of China’s ‘educated youth’ is a complex spiritual history, and in subsequent years its ‘dark side’ and associated problems would be exposed. However, many of the works reflecting the spirit of the educated youth were not entirely false. Tenderness, romanticism, poetic sensibilities and honest purity were frequently revealed through these works, demonstrating that the idealism of this period was not subjected to rational analysis.
In April 1969, the CPC held its ninth congress and the leadership of the Central Committee was formed from the representatives of different political forces - Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and some of the surviving older generation of revolutionaries.[28] That year was one of great tension because the Sino-Soviet split had led to territorial disputes and armed conflict, and Mao Zedong had warned the army to prepare for war. A gouache work of the following year which took the Sino-Soviet Zhenbao Island incident as its subject matter, and Yan Jian and He Kongde’s Life Goes On, the Conflict Continues was fondly remembered by artists for its consummate skill and technical expression. In March 1971, an exhibition of art works by artists from the navy brought the chaotic situation that prevailed through amateur exhibitions back under official control and the more than 200 works on display saw these naval artists come under the scrutiny and guidance of the leadership, including Lin Biao. Although this was an age in which workers, peasants and soldiers were encouraged to become art workers, the high degree of technical proficiency evident in the oil paintings revealed the participation of professional painters. At this time, the person responsible for the collectively created works by the naval artists was the painter Lü Enyi, who had completed a number of works in the early 1950s based on themes of military life. What was different from the past was that he now had to meet the needs of this special political period, keep his identity hidden and become an ordinary people’s soldier oblivious to career success, which was training and participating in the creation of works that extolled the leadership and the PLA. The works by him included in the exhibition were simply attributed to an anonymous ‘naval art worker’.
Regardless of how complex and difficult it was to contain inner-Party political struggles, February 1972 saw a major historical change when Mao hosted a visit from Richard Nixon, which demonstrated that Mao was exhausted by the political movements he had orchestrated and directed. Internationally China had lost the support of the Soviet Union, and domestically the people were deeply mired in political struggles and cruel carnage. Within the Party, former comrades-in-arms had become sworn enemies and the successors whom Mao had trained had betrayed him. Mao Zedong wanted to change this situation, and the Sino-American Shanghai joint communiqué indicated that China intended to talk once more with the west. Because the political system concealed political struggles, people knew no more than they did in the past about ongoing inner-Party political struggles. At this juncture, Mao Zedong remained ‘the reddest sun’ in the people’s hearts, even though it was the political clique headed by Jiang Qing who politically needed ‘the sun’ to shine on the people.
An art exhibition on 23 May 1972 commemorating the 30th anniversary of Chairman Mao’s speech to the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art opened at the China Art Gallery in Beijing. This was the first official exhibition held since the national fine arts exhibition of 1964, and there were more than 270 works on display during the two months’ duration of the show, including traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, wood-block prints, nianhua, posters, watercolor paintings and paper-cuts.
Tang Xiaohe in his painting Advancing through the Wind and Waves (1971) took Mao Zedong’s swim in the Yangtze River as his subject matter. The painter sought to evoke the towering image of Mao Zedong of the Cultural Revolution period accompanied by Red Guards and PLA soldiers, and he even made use of photographs of the swim. This is a passionate and uplifting scene, and as the painter saw it, there had never been a leader who could rival Mao Zedong for the power to create history, nor had there been any historical event as magnificent as the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong’s impressive physique seems irresistible, in contrast to the soldiers and Red Guards surrounding him who seem so short, as Mao summons people to come and brave the waves. This was how people during this period generally perceived their leader. Later, Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li completed another work treating the same subject matter and titled Growing Up among the Wind and Waves. This seems to be a more tenderly conceived work. Also on display was Chairman Mao Inspects a Guangdong Farming Village by the Guangdong painter Chen Yanning, which was a history painting that took for its subject an inspection trip made by Mao in 1958 to the Tangxia production brigade on the outskirts of Guangzhou as its subject matter. The painter was absolutely clear about how the leader was to be depicted -- occupying the central position, tall and strong, his face glowing with radiant health. This work left a lasting impression on audiences at the time because of its strong modeling and its very interesting brush strokes. Many young lovers of painting saw something in such works by Chen Yanning that was different in expression from the oil paintings they had previously seen. The composition of Chairman Mao in the Great Production Drive, jointly painted by Zhang Ziyi, Cai Liang and Chen Beixin, was a similar work adhering to the basic principles that guided art during the Cultural Revolution. The guohua painting New Year in Yan’an was another work depicting the leader and revolutionary themes introducing realist techniques to the traditional painting style. Many Shaanxi painters worked as part of ‘creative groups’ led by the Party, and went to live in Yan’an where they drilled, studied and trained like soldiers, enduring hardships and inspections so that they could better understand revolutionary history and art. Regardless of the subject matter, Mao Zedong occupied the central position in their compositions and the people surrounding him in these works underscored his qualities of leadership.
Painters were obviously already able to utilize Jiang Qing’s aesthetic formulae of ‘red, light and bright’ or ‘tall, big and total’, exemplified in the central positioning of the leader, the radiant sunlit background, the congenial atmosphere and the dramatic enthusiasm of the scene. In visual reception, Mao Zedong was no longer a person among other people, but a worshipped deity within a specifically determined space. For whatever reason, Hou Yimin, who had been politically persecuted for his work Liu Shaoqi in Anyuan, and some other artists including Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun, collectively completed We Must Carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End (1972) . The dazzling sunlight, the red rays and the sculptural modeling of the leader in this work all made it a typical example of Jiang Qing’s aesthetic formulae of ‘red, light and bright’ or ‘tall, big and total’, and these painters were well aware of the political power from which these aesthetic principles emanated. In the flood of excessively ‘red, light and bright’ or ‘tall, big and total’ works, Mining Copper at Hukou, attributed to the Liaoning Province Propaganda Gallery Art Creative Group but in fact painted by Wu Yunhua, won the commendation of the entire judging panel because of its intricate detail and compelling strength. This painting which took as its themes ‘grasping the revolution and promoting production’ created its fundamental political tenor through the use of vibrant blended colors, but audiences were invariably drawn in by the beaming safety helmets, the tough faces and the water coming through the cracks in the mine wall. The deepest impression created by Pan Jiajun’s I Am the Seagull were the torsos clad in army uniforms soaked by the driving wind and rain, even though the red glowing faces remained characteristic of the aesthetic of that period. Tang Xiaoming’s portrait of Lu Xun in oils, The Eternal Battle, made a deep impression because of the skill of its expression and its grey tones. Everyone was familiar with Lu Xun, but for painters at this time there were political considerations in adopting him as subject matter; through his composition Tang showed the early Lu Xun’s criticism of Zhou Yang, which was used four years later to attack Deng Xiaoping.[29] Audiences might not understand the painter’s starting point, but in an age when works with fierce colors and formulaic composition were ubiquitous, they saw in Tang Xiaoming’s Lu Xun someone whose coloring and temperament conformed to what was expected of human nature. In the same exhibition Woman Committee Member and Militia of Humen were other influential works. In the field of guohua painting, Yang Zhiguang’s New Recruit at the Mine and Inspired Words, painted with Ou Yang, also became representatives works of the late Cultural Revolution period because of their vivid depiction of character and flowing brushwork, and Lin Yong’s New Song of the Battlefield expressed warmth in its mood and its political position through the gathering of fishermen and soldiers. The violent storms of the revolution had temporarily abated and the passage of time revealed people needed more tender feelings. The techniques for expressing tenderness, as the yearning for truth, extended a fresh aesthetic atmosphere, particularly for young painters who could absorb these interesting elements into their works. In this period, the technical methods of Guangdong painters provided a subtle aesthetic trend: Highly skilled modeling, graceful brush strokes, compellingly veracious colors and plots that avoided big themes, as exemplified by the unique composition and finely wrought pleated clothing of Chen Yanning’s New Doctor in the Fishing Port (1974), which became a model work imitated by many young painters. People were quick to notice that artists were now signing their works using their own names.
On 1 October 1973 the highly regarded National Exhibition of Picture-story Books and Chinese Paintings opened at the China Art Gallery in Beijing. At the exhibition a number of works demonstrated how the use of realist techniques was changing the basic nature of traditional Chinese painting: Chen Yanning’s Long March Diary; Zhao Zhitian’s Daqing Workers Know No Winter; Wang Yingchun and Yang Lizhou’s Endless Quarry; Zhang Yongxin, Wang Qilu and Zhao Huasheng’s Steel Sentinel; Hou Jie and Yan Sheng’s Volunteer Bicycle Attendant; Tang Daxi’s The People’s Apples; Yang Xiaoli and Zhu Licun’s Water for Uncle; Quan Tai’an’s Sending Son to Serve the Peasants; Liang Yan’s Applying to Join the Party; Xu Juntao’s At the Youth League Meeting; Zhou Sicong’s The Pines of the Changbai Mountains; and, Ou Yang’s The Gosling Spreads Its Wings. At the same time as painters sought to handle accuracy in their modeling, they also succeeded in retaining the interest created by their brush and ink. At the same time, although the subject matter included many aspects of political life during the Cultural Revolution period, the works generally demonstrated a retreat away from the emphasis on big themes and the aesthetic of ‘red, light and bright’. In landscape painting, Guan Shanyue’s Green Great Wall, Wang Songyu and He Jianguo’s Taming the Flood, Song Wenzhi’s Morning in Taihu, and Lin Ximing’s New Song of Taihu provided a final summary of the movement for the transformation of Chinese painting, by meeting the political demands of a particular period and filling an aesthetic bill that could never be repeated.
The China Art Gallery held an exhibition of art works on 1 October 1974 from all over China to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic. The exhibition put 647 works on display, including Chinese paintings, oil paintings, wood-block prints, sculpture, nianhua, picture-story books, propaganda posters, lacquer paintings, water colors, gouache works and paper-cuts. People’s Daily cooperatively provided an affirmative appraisal of the political thought and technical level of the works in the exhibition. However, people could sense that a more relaxed political climate prevailed from the inclusion in the exhibition of Farming the Sea, an oil painting by Tang Jixiang, and a batch of new landscapes reflecting rural construction. There was a very obvious increase in the number of works in which women, children, fishing folk and ethnic minorities provided the subject matter, indicating that painters wanted to widen the parameters of art. However, the success or otherwise of a painter still seemed to be determined by some special destiny, as for example when Jiang Qing stood in front of the painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland by Shen Jiawei and said that it was not easy for an educated youth to paint such a work. Shen’s painting won special approval and hundreds of thousands of reproductions of the work were distributed far and wide.
Two exhibitions that embodied the substance of worker, peasant and soldier arts in this period were the exhibition of Huxian peasant paintings in October 1973 and the exhibition of workers’ paintings from Shanghai, Yangquan and Lüda, which was organized by the cultural group of the State Council and held at the end of 1974 in the China Art Gallery. At exhibition, amateur and professional painters presented a large number of works depicting workers, peasants and soldiers engaged in production, construction and political struggle, while the style of the peasant paintings suggested a lack of training in realistic depiction and appeared naïve, rather like the peasant paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. What was interesting was that critics gave positive professional endorsement to the peasant paintings created according to the given themes: ‘Comrade Liu Zhide’s painting Old Party Secretary took pains to portray a veteran cadre stealing a spare moment from his toils to eagerly read the works of Marxism-Leninism. His attention is so utterly drawn in and distracted by the revolutionary truths in the book he is reading that he has forgotten to strike the match he is holding to light his pipe. How well this detail is caught!’[30]
In fact, in the Cultural Revolution period, a large number of peasant artists had received training from local professional art teachers. As the fundamental unit of government, the people’s communes often ran art classes for peasants, and teachers from art colleges, such as Xi’an College of Fine Arts, Zhejiang College of Fine Arts, the Central Academy of Fine Arts and other art institutes, as well as art cadres from county cultural centers, participated in providing technical training for peasant artists, as in Huxian. In an era that required models, Huxian became the exemplar emulated by professional and amateur art workers. Compared with the peasant paintings produced during the period of the Great Leap Forward, the peasants during this period seemed to have grasped painting skills and techniques to varying degrees, and the rude naivety of the amateur painter seems to have been greatly diminished in these works. It would also seem that the political ideology of this period required more technical rather than conceptual support.
Universal themes in the art of the day were mass criticism movements, industrial construction, displays of achievements, and the struggle against an imaginary enemy, but people were still able to see the individuality in works such as Spring Rain -- the cold mood revealed through the warmth and the crystal-clear and transparent drops of water.
From the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution into the first half of the 1970s, many of the older generation of painters successively died. On 11 May 1968 Xiao Chuanjiu passed away; on 29 January 1970, Chen Banding and Ni Yide passed away; on 28 December 1970 Chen Yanqiao died; on 5 September 1971, Pan Tianshou; on 23 May 1973, Wang Shikuo; on 15 September 1975, Feng Zikai; and in November, Li Hu passed away. Over time a contingent of new artists had been continuously developing. Of the artists participating in art exhibitions from 1972 to 1975, it was rare to see any artist who had earlier made a name for painting works on revolutionary or historical themes. Against a background in which political subject matter determined everything, old guohua painters found it difficult to offer up constantly works that met the needs of the ever-changing political situation, so the young people who had the opportunity to receive an art education in the 1950s and 1960s were the main force filling this need. Their understanding of art derived from a college education and publications produced in an age of political and social turbulence, and the exhibitions organized by the artists associations all heeded the spirit of the Central Committee. The artists were sensitive in their technical expression, but their ideology was imbued with the inertia induced by the need to serve politics. They surreptitiously browsed old art albums that had been branded ‘feudal, bourgeois and revisionist’, but they were completely ignorant of any open artistic language. They knew the names of all the Russian and Soviet artists that had been taught in the 1950s and 1960s, but they knew nothing of the creative history of many Chinese painters of the 1930s and 1940s.
Many years later, in 1992, Cai Liang, who had been recognized by Xu Beihong as an outstandingly talented painter, had this to say: ‘The Chinese artist possibly has no particular artistic view, because he can never free himself from the principles governing art which are formulated by the Party, and even when he has some tiny vision of his own it must be slotted into a particular system. If wanted to express some viewpoint, then he would have to work in accordance with the dictates of his conscience’.[31]
Artists or art workers constantly took their orders from art officials and the spirit of the Central Committee, but they knew almost nothing about the political struggles raging in the senior levels of the leadership. At the same time as the seeds of a new sensibility were sprouting, new historical factors were constantly coming into play. After the Lin Biao incident in September of 1971, Mao Zedong attempted to restore as much as possible the political resources he had once squandered. However, the tenth congress of the Party (August 1973) conferred greater ideological power on the reformed political grouping known as the Gang of Four - Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Jiang Qing. In January 1974, they made use of the opportunity presented by Mao Zedong’s critiques linking Lin Biao and the doctrine of Confucius and Mencius and the movement to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, to attack Zhou Enlai. They made use of the hotel refurbishment overseen three years earlier by Zhou Enlai to launch an attack on what they defined as ‘black painting’. From 15 February to 5April, an exhibition of black paintings was held at the China Art Gallery in Beijing, later moving to the Great Hall of the People. On display in this exhibition organized by Jiang Qing were 215 works, and in showing these works to the public, the only motivation was hunting down the painters (‘the black hands’, heishou) and hounding Zhou Enlai from the political stage. By 1975, Mao Zedong had lost faith in the Gang of Four and he invited Deng Xiaoping, who was at that time working as a peasant in Jiangxi, back to Beijing to once again take charge of government work, and he began to accept advice on restoring economic construction. He explained to Deng that he was very dissatisfied by the current state of literature and art: ‘There are too few model operas, and the tiniest mistake is harshly criticized’, so that ‘people are too afraid to write articles or plays’. He also acknowledged that there was no fiction or poetry to speak of.[32] In the same month, Mao even complained to Jiang Qing: ‘There is no poetry, fiction, essays or even literary criticism’. Mao Zedong now realized that there was a dearth of literature and art.
The more relaxed political atmosphere in 1975 was embodied by two events, an exhibition of Canadian landscape paintings (16–30 April) and of Australian landscape paintings (2–17 September) held, respectively, at the China Art Gallery and the Cultural Palace of the Nationalities in Beijing. However, Mao Zedong continued to waver in his assessment of the work of Deng Xiaoping, and the Gang of Four made use of Mao Zedong’s comments on The Water Margin to launch a campaign against Deng. They interpreted Mao to be saying that it was not permissible for those in authority to continue to travel the capitalist road.
1976 would prove to be a gloomy year, as well as marking a turning point. Zhou Enlai passed away on 8 January, and on 21 January, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party appointed Hua Guofeng as acting premier, replacing Deng Xiaoping. Taking advantage of the traditional custom of offering sacrifices to ancestors and sweeping graves on the Qingming Festival (5 April), students, PLA soldiers and citizens from all walks of life began to lay wreaths on 19 March in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the center of Tiananmen Square. This event, ostensibly cherishing the memory of Zhou Enlai, saw more than two million people enter the square until 4 April, and the monument was surrounded by an ocean of wreaths with people addressing the crowds, delivering memorial speeches and poems, and expressing their discontent and condemnation directed towards Jiang Qing and her colleagues. On 7 April, Xinhua News Agency published the resolution ‘cancelling all Deng Xiaoping’s posts inside and outside the Party’. In July, Zhu De passed away, and in August, the Tangshan earthquake resulted in the deaths of more than 200,000 people. On 9 September, Mao Zedong passed away, and then on 6 October, the 8341 Army commanded by Wang Dongxing oversaw the arrests of the Gang of Four: Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. History changes because of the people’s will, actions, and destiny, and absolute trust in a conception of history based on essentialism, which had prevailed for so many years, had now been challenged.
NOTES:
[1] Guangming Daily, 3 September 1961.
[2] Denoting the political campaigns from the Small Four Clean Outs (Xiao Si Qing) movement (cleaning out work points, cleaning out accounts, cleaning out stock in warehouses and cleaning out property) to the [Big] Four Clean Outs movement (cleaning out politics, cleaning out the economy, cleaning out thought and cleaning out organizations). On 15 December 1966, the Central Committee of the CPC issued its Instruction on the Rural Proletarian Great Cultural Revolution (Draft), which included the Four Clean Outs movement in the Cultural Revolution, at the same time as it marked its conclusion.
[3] See: ‘Go into the thick of life and strengthen our reflection of the socialist era: Report on the working conference of the artists association branches’ (Shenru shenghuo, jiaqiang fanying shehuizhuyi shidai: Meixie fenhui gongzuo huiyi baodao), Fine Arts (Meishu), January 1964.
[4] Qian Shaowu, ‘Let sculpture serve the five hundred million peasants: A proposal’, (Rang diaosu wei wuyi nongmin fuwu: Yige jianyi), Fine Arts (Meishu), February 1964.
[5] Qian Shaowu, for example, created a relief sculptural work in Jianming commune, Zunhua county, Hebei province, using the peasant Wang Guofan as his subject matter. The work was well received by the local peasants. Jin Bang’s ‘Mountain man’ (Shan li ren) was a small colored sculptural work that ‘through the story of moving stones and the carved figural images, served as a condensed expression of the indomitable spirit of our country’s peasants in the great enterprise of constructing socialism without fear of the difficulties they might encounter’. From: Fine Arts (Meishu), June 1964. Long Qiyin’s sculpted bust titled ‘Model worker Li Shunda’ (Laodong mofan Li Shunda) ‘described the purity and humility of Li Shunda, as well as his intelligence and far-sightedness’. Another sculptural work, Hao Jingping’s ‘Lao Huang Zhong’ depicted Old Huang Zhong ‘holding a sickle with the light shining on his upper torso which ripples with strength. The smile that wells up from within him characterizes his good natured approach to competitiveness’.
[6] Red Flag (Hongqi), 1967:9.
[7] ‘Retrospective and future of the national art exhibition’ (‘Quanguo meizhan’ de huigu yu qianzhan), Fine Arts (Meishu), 1965:6. Later, during the early period of the Cultural Revolution, nation-wide chaos halted art exhibitions and national art exhibitions were only resumed in 1972.
[82] Rent Collection Courtyard Sculptural Creative Group, ‘The conception and design in creating the sculptural group Rent Collection Courtyard’ (Shouzu yuan nisu chuangzuo de gousi sheji), Fine Arts (Meishu), 1965:6.
[9] ‘Mao Zedong’s thought on literature and art achieves another glorious victory in the new era of proletarian sculptural art’ (Mao Zedong wenyi sixiang qude you yi guanghui shengli kaipi le wuchanjieji diaosu yishu de xin shidai), People’s Daily, 12 July 1966.
[10] In fact, it was in 1959 that Mao Zedong affirmed the courage of Hai Rui in daring to directly remonstrate with the emperor, and his secretary Hu Qiaomu encouraged Wu Han to write an article proclaiming the ‘Hai Rui spirit’. At the same time as Wu Han wrote the papers ‘Hai Rui scolds the emperor’ (Hai Rui ma huangdi) and ‘A discussion of Hai Rui’ (Lun Hai Rui), he also completed the drama Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Hai Rui baguan).
[11] Xu Yan, ‘There are many advantages in ‘putting forward themes, assigning tasks and providing overall organization’’ (‘Chu timu, fen renwu, tongchou anpai’ haochu duo), Fine Arts (Meishu), 1964:4.
[12] Cai Ruohong, ‘There are three excellent aspects of the Shandong nianhua’ (Shandong nianhua you san hao), Fine Arts (Meishu), 1965:1.
[13] Wang Zhaowen, ‘A sculptural model: Visiting the sculptures that make up Rent Collection Courtyard’ (Diaosu biaobing: Canguan Shouzu yuan nisu qunxiang), People’s Daily, 4 January 1966.
[14] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1966:2.
[15] This letter was published in the Artists Association’s organ Fine Arts on 15 February, only eight days after the report and editorial appeared in People’s Daily.
[16] On 15 July, the 9th issue of Fine Arts reprinted the 15 July editorial from People’s Daily titled ‘Raise the level of political and artistic training of literature and art cadres’ (Tigao wenyi ganbu de zhengzhi xiuyang he yishu xiuyang), and at the same time published an article by Shao Yu titled ‘struggle to improve ideas on fine art creation and to raise artistic levels’ (Wei tigao meishu chuangzuo de sixiang, yishu shuiping er douzheng). In its 1955:12 issue, Fine Arts published Zhu Dan’s article ‘We must improve political training’ (Bixu tigao zhengzhi xiuyang) and its 1959:1 issue published Fu Baoshi’s article ‘With politics in command, the brush and ink are different’ (Zhengzhi gua le shuai, bimo jiu bu tong). In 1966, Fine Arts published Hua Junwu’s article ‘Create art with politics in command’ (Yi zhengzhi tongshuai chuangzuo). In fact, articles expressing this basic idea published between 1949 and 1976 are too numerous to mention.
[17] Fine Arts (Meishu), 1966:1.
[18] The original stated: ‘Qi Benyu’s article was very good. I read it three times, but the shortcoming is that he did not put his name to it. Yao Wenyuan’s article was also very good and it was signed. It will really shake up theatrical, historical and philosophical circles, but it does not touch on the crucial issue, which is the dismissal from office. Hai Rui was dismissed from office by the Jiajing Emperor, and in 1959 we dismissed Peng Dehuai from office. Peng Dehuai is Hai Rui. The Lushan plenum was to continue for two weeks, but it was quickly concluded once Peng Dehuai went on the attack. He said: ‘You attacked me for forty days in Yan’an and now you want to attack me for twenty days!’ But he was attacking me. Later, despite the objections raised by Peng Zhen and the others, Qi Benyu succeeded in publishing ‘The reactionary nature of Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor and Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ (‘Hai Rui ma huangdi’ he ‘Hai Rui baguan’ de fandong shizhi) in People’s Daily and Guangming Daily on 2 April 1966, after Peng Zhen himself had been ‘dismissed from office’.
[19] The May Sixteenth Resolution stated that the original Cultural Revolution Group of Five and its executive offices had been disbanded, and a new Cultural Revolution group set up under the jurisdiction of the standing committee of the Political Bureau. The new group appointed by Mao Zedong was headed by Chen Boda and comprised ten members, including Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu and Wu Lengxi. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were deputy leaders of the group. In August, because Chen Boda fell ill, Jiang Qing took over his job and was called ‘first deputy leader’. After several of the top leaders, including Liu Shaoqi, were purged from the inner-Party, the Cultural Revolution group in January and February of 1967 successively replaced the CPC Central Committee’s Secretariat and Political Bureau. A congratulatory telegram of 11 January 1967 to the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Rebel Organizations marked the emergence of the Central Cultural Revolution Group backed by the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council. Almost all the documents issued during the course of this year in the name of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (Zhongyang Wenge) were issued with the authority of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee. In April 1969, the five members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group all entered the Political Bureau and in the arrangement of newspaper reports Jiang Qing was ranked sixth. The group which had been formed temporarily for political struggles was rapidly disbanded because once its members had gained control of the Political Bureau their ideological pronouncements could be issued in the more authoritative name of the Central Committee.
[20] On 29 May, seven or eight students of the middle school attached to Tsinghua University, including Bu Dahua, Wang Ming, Luo Xiaohai and Zhang Chengzhi, went to the site of the Old Summer Palace to discuss further work in the rebel movement (zaofan yundong) that had already broken out and they decided to use big-character posters to further the fierce class struggle and ‘establish Mao Zedong Thought as the absolute authority’. They decided to adopt Zhang Chengzhi’s proposal and use ‘Red Guard’ as the name of the pseudonymous author of their big-character poster. On that day, they even read out a ‘Red Guard’s oath’ in which they swore to rely on Mao Zedong and attempt to liberate the whole of mankind.
[21] It is both absurd and interesting to note that in the more than fifty days when they were in control of operations, the work teams listed more than 10,000 students at 24 institutions of higher learning as Rightists. From this it would seem there was no possibility of retreat in the struggle between the Red Guards and the work teams, who were fearful that an anti-rightist movement would again emerge.
[22] Wang Qi, Storms in the Ocean of Art: Wang Qi’s Memoirs (Yihai fengyun: Wang Qi huiyi lu), Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1998, pp.267-268.
[23] Ye Qianyu, Years of Dramatic Change (Xixu cangsang jiliunian), Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 2006, p.326.
[24] During the later stages of the Anti-Japanese War, Lin Fengmian’s student Deng Jie would often hide in Lin’s home, in order to avoid being captured by the KMT. After 1949, Deng Jie became a minister in the Ministry of Light Industry, and once went to Shanghai to visit Lin Fengmian’s home. In the Cultural Revolution, Deng Jie was condemned as a traitor. Lin Fengmian was implicated and spent four years in prison.
[25] In July 1966, Mao Zedong was very displeased with the results of the work teams sent out by Liu Shaoqi, and returned to Beijing from Hangzhou. On 8 August, the plenary session of the Eighth Central Committee began but was attended by only half of the members of the Central Committee and alternate members, as well as by representatives of the teachers and students of the institution of higher learning in the capital. The plenary session approved the Political Bureau’s decision of May to dissolve the positions on the Secretariat of Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun, as well as alternate secretary posts. Liu Shaoqi fell from the second to the eighth ranking, and Lin Biao took up Liu Shaoqi’s original position. Mao Zedong’s slogan calling for industry to emulate Daqing, agriculture to emulate Dazhai and the whole country to learn from the PLA was affirmed by the plenary session. Perhaps Mao Zedong regarded this revolution as the rebirth of the revolution of earlier years, and the plenary session in its Sixteen Items (Shiliu tiao) used the same language that Mao Zedong used in his 1927 article ‘Report of an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan’ (Hunan nongmin yundong kaocha baogao): ‘The revolution cannot be so refined, so gentle, so warm and good, so respectful and accommodating’. This sentence became a favorite of the Red Guards for a long time.
[26] See: Wang Mingxian, The Red Guard Art Movement (Hongweibing meishu yundong), appended chart titled ‘Details of the Names of Periodical and Publishing Units of Red Guard Art Newspapers and Periodicals Published in the Beijing and Tianjin Regions in 1967’ (1967 nian Beijing, Tianjin bufen hongwei bing meishu baozhi gailan baokan mingcheng chuban danwei chuban qingkuang).
[27] The artist’s original name was ‘Liu Chenghua’ When the first batch of reproductions was printed, his name was written as ‘Liu Chunhua’ by mistake, but he subsequently continued to use this name.
[28] Subsequently, Lin Biao’s burning ambition to become the chairman of state and seize power led to the coup 13 September 1971, the failure of which spelled out the end of the group.
[29] In 1976, this work was re-published as a centerfold.
[30] People’s Liberation Daily (Jiefangjun ribao), 6 March 1974.
[31] Cai Liang, Cai Liang zuopin ji: Youhua juan (Anthology of the works of Cai Liang: Oil paintings), Hangzhou: Zhongguo Meishu Xueyuan Chubanshe (China Art Academy Publishing House), 2000, p.7.
[32] Mao Zedong’s Writings on Literature and Art (Mao Zedong wenyi lun ji), Beijing: Central Documentation Publishing House, 2002, p.231.