{"id":25347,"date":"2021-07-14T07:25:40","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T21:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?p=25347"},"modified":"2025-11-14T10:09:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T23:09:09","slug":"red-allure-the-crimson-blindfold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/journal\/red-allure-the-crimson-blindfold\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Allure & The Crimson Blindfold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spectres & Souls<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The ‘centennial month’ of July 2021 highlighted many aspects of Communist Party ideology and practice that, superficially at least, seem germane to the Xi Jinping era (2012-). For those with a longer perspective, and more retentive memories, however, the underpinnings of this year\u2019s pharaonic display of pomp and circumstance were evident (unavoidable, in fact) long before the advent of the man we think of as the Chairman of Everything.<\/p>\n

For example, attacks on ‘historical nihilism’ \u2014 that is the questioning of the Party’s monolithic version of history, the truth and everything besides \u2014 although called by other names, were frequent enough even in the 1980s; and the miscreant Liu Xiaobo was denounced in late 1989 for contributing to the intellectual nihilism that fed the popular uprising earlier that year. Red DNA \u7d05\u8272\u57fa\u56e0 h\u00f3ngs\u00e8 j\u012by\u012bn<\/em> might seem to be an inventive, Xi-era catch-phrase, but it merely encapsulates ideas and reflects practices that have been a significant feature of the lavishly funded patriotic indoctrination of China’s young people since the early 1990s. These, in turn, were part of the substantially Soviet-influenced patriotic education initiated by the Party in the early 1950s that built on over thirty years of history-as-propaganda, one of the masters of which was Mao Zedong .<\/p>\n

Indeed, the ‘historical imaginary’ that has been so prominent in the splendiferous celebrations of the party centenary in 2021 has been cultivated, curated, manipulated and refined for nigh on ninety years. Long before Xi Jinping became the uncrowned autocrat of China’s People’s Republic, the engineering of contemporary China’s ‘crimson blindfold’ was blinding people to the complex realities both of Communist Party and modern Chinese history. Indeed, purblind historical vision has always been a central feature of the country’s political life.<\/p>\n

The following essay offers a short report on the state of that ongoing process from an earlier vantage point.<\/p>\n

In my conclusion, I note that:<\/p>\n

‘The Maoist or red legacy is no cutesy epiphenomenon worthy simply of a cultural studies\u2019 or po-mo \u201creading\u201d, but rather it constitutes a body of linguistic and intellectual practices that are profoundly ingrained in institutional behaviour and the bricks and mortar of scholastic and cultural legitimization. It is a living legacy the spectre of which continues to hover over Chinese intellectual life, be it for weal or for bane.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the ‘new era’ of Xi Jinping, that spectre \u2014 one blithely dismissed as nothing more than ‘mere propaganda that no one really believes’ or overlooked with glib hauteur by bien pensants<\/em> in the Chinese world, as well as by clutches of academics, politicians, economists and journalists \u2014 now undeniably dominates the intellectual, cultural and political life of China. Its looming presence can no longer be denied, and its history, as well as the lacun\u00e6 that are integral to that history, demand sustained study.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The essay reproduced here was originally presented as a paper at \u2018Red Legacies in China\u2019<\/a>, a conference held at Harvard University. Organised by Jie Li \u674e\u6f54<\/a> and Enhua Zhang \u5f35\u6069\u83ef<\/a> and held on 2-3 April 2010, that gathering was jointly sponsored by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinology, the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.<\/p>\n

This revised text of that paper formed the final chapter in\u00a0Red Legacies in China:\u00a0Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Jie Li &\u00a0Enhua Zhang, eds, Harvard University Asia Center, 2016, pp.355-386). It is reprinted here as a contribution to ‘Over One Hundred Years’, a selection of essays on the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party that features in\u00a0Spectres & Souls: China Heritage Annual 2021<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

As I point out in the notes to this essay, my argument was a continuation of a series of observations that I had made since the early 1990s. Apart from my work on Dai Qing<\/a>, an ‘investigative historian’ active in the 1980s and New Ghosts, Old Dreams:\u00a0Chinese Rebel Voices<\/em><\/a> (1992), edited with Linda Jaivin, I had also compiled a short survey of the state of official and commercial historical writing titled ‘History for the Masses’ (published as a chapter in\u00a0Using the Past to Serve the Present<\/em><\/a>, 1993, pp.260-287). In my presentation at Harvard in 2010, however, I drew in particular on the following:<\/p>\n