In this cultural history, Paul Clark argues that the Cultural Revolution was much more than disastrous chaos. Rather than being a wasteland in which the arts were limited to a handful of hyperpoliticized model works, in Clark's view, the period witnessed considerable artistic innovation and success. Reminiscent of Joseph Levenson's argument in Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), Clark sees the Cultural Revolution not as a historical rupture, but as part of a long-term twentieth-century modernization project.
Clark's survey covers opera, film, theater, dance, fine arts, and literature. For Clark's purposes, “culture” does not include jokes, holidays, clothing, food, and other aspects of nonelite life. Thus, Clark's goal of going beyond elite politics to explore “what these years meant for the ordinary citizen” (p. 2) is stymied by his narrow definition of culture. Even so, Clark's book should put to rest the old canard that culture during the Cultural Revolution meant “eight-hundred million people watching eight shows” (ba yi ren kan ba ge xi, p. 2). Red Guards staged unique dramas, foreign films were screened, local troupes presented variations on the model works and created new productions, and sent-down youth circulated subversive writings. Especially after 1971, official and underground works expanded significantly. By taking the efforts of talented artists seriously and by bringing to light a rich variety of cultural offerings, Clark has filled a gap in our understanding of the period.
Some readers may complain that Clark's focus on artistic achievement turns a blind eye to the Cultural Revolution's repression and violence. While Clark is certainly aware of widespread suffering, only a few pages are devoted to disruptive persecution and factionalism in cultural work units (pp. 117–18). But this type of criticism is largely unfair. Clark's point is that exclusive focus on the period's horrors obscures important details of cultural production.
More troubling are shortcomings related to sources and methodology. Although scholarship on the Cultural Revolution remains constrained by political fears and closed archives, it is now possible to draw upon underground sources (diaries, manuscripts, and files sold at used book markets), archival documents (a number of archives have been quite open in recent years, especially with materials related to the cultural sphere), memoirs, and interviews. Recent works that best exemplify this trend include Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) and the essays in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006).
At first glance, Clark's sources seem impressive. I counted at least eight interviews in the footnotes, as well as five archival documents (four from the China Film Archive Library and one from Archives New Zealand), plus colorful observations from Clark's time as a student at Peking University in the mid-1970s. But aside from these examples, two types of sources dominate: articles from journals and newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, and recent books and articles by Chinese scholars. It is important to draw upon secondary literature, and Clark deserves credit for bringing the contributions of Chinese authors to an English-language readership. The trouble is that Clark tends to reproduce his sources' weaknesses, which include a lack of human color and personality, and a tendency to list names and titles encyclopedically.
This is a minor quibble compared with the half conclusions that appear when Clark uses contemporary sources but reads them uncritically, or when he fails to take the crucial second step of in-depth research necessary to grasp the Cultural Revolution's complex politics. For example, instead of speculating on the likely differences between Jiang Qing's original speech on Peking opera in 1964 and the official published version of 1967 (p. 275), why not track down the original source and resolve the question? Instead of accepting at face value a 1975 report about opera-singing villagers in suburban Tianjin and concluding that “[t]he results were impressive” (p. 82), why not go beyond the propaganda to ask what really happened? And instead of voicing suspicions about the authenticity of peasant paintings from Hu County in Shaanxi Province (pp. 208–9), why not get to the bottom of the story and explain how production actually worked?
The costs of staying safely on the surface are errors of fact: In 1975, Xiaojinzhuang was in Tianjin municipality, not Hebei Province (p. 104); Wang Guangmei went to Taoyuan, not the fictionalized Taofeng (p. 233). More importantly, Clark misses a chance to portray the full humanity and complexity of the Cultural Revolution. Clark's work is an important first step and a useful reference on the diverse culture of the period. However, only by digging deeper and making fuller use of grassroots sources can we better understand the era's tensions and contradictions.
