As anyone who has been to China in recent years knows, images of, and imagery from, the Communist Revolution remain ever-present in China's visual environment. From Cultural Revolution-themed restaurants to advertisements that recall socialist calls to action to the continued visibility of Mao Zedong, the enduring presence of the Communist revolution, and particularly the Cultural Revolution, is an easily observable and much commented on phenomenon. The topic of Jie Li and Enhua Zhang's important collection of essays is not, therefore, new, but its value comes from the way it puts into dialogue analysis of these legacies that might otherwise fall into separate disciplinary categories. By bringing together established figures from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this volume, which features art, architecture, film and media studies, literature and politics, reminds us that the multiple, overlapping and often contradictory legacies of the Communist Revolution continue to matter in contemporary China precisely because they have become infused into contemporary political, cultural and social discourse in so many ways.
In her introduction, Jie Li makes the argument that we need to think about Maoist legacies in the plural rather than the singular, and the book does an excellent job of articulating the many different afterlives of Communist objects and ideas. Like all of the best edited volumes, Red Legacies is better as a whole than the sum of its parts. While those with specific interests will be drawn to one chapter or another – students of politics, for example, will find Geremie R. Barmé’s investigation of the legacies of Maoist thinking in contemporary China illuminating, while literary specialists will enjoy Carlos Rojas's engaging analysis of the impact of Communist and capitalist ideologies on bodies in Yan Lianke's fiction – the real value of the volume comes less from the individual chapters, which are of mixed quality and relevance to the overall theme, and more from its collective ability to show the way that the Communist revolution continues to invade Chinese cultural life.
One of the reasons it does this so successfully is that it dispenses with the periodization that normally structures our understanding of 20th-century China. Essays cover periods from the 1920s to the present, reminding us that Maoism did not start in 1949, and nor did it disappear abruptly in 1976. Instead, the book is organized into five thematic parts, with 12 chapters in total, plus an introduction.
The first, “Red foundations,” investigates architectural legacies, looking at how changing political environments can alter the narratives surrounding historical spaces, while at the same times perpetuating certain visions of spatialized power. Denise Y. Ho's essay details the impact of politics on the creation of the monument or museum on the site of the First National Congress of the CCP, while Zhu Tao's essay argues that the architectural megaprojects that dot the urban landscapes of so many Chinese cities can be understood as part of the legacy of the socialist vision of urban construction, epitomized by the “Ten Great Buildings” projects of the 1950s.
The idea of a “socialist” way of viewing is expanded on in the second section, “Red art,” where Xiaobing Tang interprets Wang Guangyi's continued use of socialist icons and images as part of his attempt to retrieve the socialist visual experience as both a historical legacy and constituent part of contemporary Chinese cultural identity. Harriet Evans investigates the production of poster art, and she argues that artists were able to subtly express desires and aspirations at odds with the ideological dictates at the time. This ambiguity, inherent both in the posters and their reception by poster viewers, goes some way to explain their continued relevance and popularity today.
The ambiguity that Evans identifies is further drawn out in part three, “Red classics,” which features two essays on film – by Xiaomei Chen and Jason McGrath – and one on fiction by David Der-wei Wang. Wang argues that fiction is the form best able to capture the ambiguities inherent in memories of the period, as it can put forth alternative narratives that explore experiences of the time in ways that belie easy categorization. Chen looks at continuities, but also radical deviations of official filmic portrayals of Party history, while McGrath sees reuse and reaction in post-socialist filmmakers' approach to socialist realism.
The fourth section seems to fit into the book less naturally, as it is organized around the theme of “Red bodies,” and covers Mao impersonators (Haiyan Lee), and bodies in film and spectacle (Andy Rodeskohr) and fiction (Carlos Rojas). But the section has value for its reminder that the Communist revolution was experienced not just through cultural artefacts, but in a much more embodied way.
The final section features essays by Jie Li and Geremie R. Barmé. Jie Li looks at museums and monuments of the Cultural Revolution, and while her survey of existing memory places has some surprising omissions (such as Yang Peiming's Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Museum), her curatorial suggestions deserve deep consideration. In particular, she is surely right to argue that we need numerous memory sites (covering the totality of the revolutionary and Maoist eras) in order to account for the multiple memories of the time, rather than the single Cultural Revolution museum that Ba Jin so famously called for.
Overall, this volume argues convincingly that the cultural and political legacies of the Mao era continue to impact on contemporary China in manifold ways. Red Legacies does not pretend to capture all of these impacts, but can be seen as a starting point for further investigation. Its easily digestible chapters means it is well suited to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, but its ability to make cross-disciplinary and trans-historical connections means it is likely to be a useful resource both for cultural historians and those interested in contemporary China for years to come.
