China’s Cultural Revolution Creeps Out of the Shadows

In America we have an expression called “the elephant in the room”, which refers to a topic that everyone knows about but no one wants to discuss because it’s too awkward. Many families have such elephants in their homes, and China also has several in its modern history, most of which are off limits for public discussion.

But at least one such elephant, the Cultural Revolution, seems to be quietly coming into the open these days through a growing number of documents and other materials making their way out of the attics and storerooms and into low-key public displays.

This kind of discussion seems both healthy and necessary, especially for an older generation of people whose lives were thrown into turmoil by the Cultural Revolution that ran from 1966 to 1976. For the younger generation that has only heard about that tumultuous time, this growing series of displays could serve as a valuable history lesson about the dangers of extremism during mass political movements.

My first encounter with this nascent public openness came during Chinese New Year this year, during a daytrip with some older Shanghainese friends to the small historic water town of Jinxi . About an hour drive from Shanghai, Jingxi is like many other historic small towns in and around Shanghai, framed by small networks of picturesque canals lined with low brick buildings and mazes of narrow alleyways.

We were wandering through Jinxi after lunch that day when I spotted a Cultural Revolution Museum, one of many small, privately run museums in the town. None of my older Shanghai friends wanted to go inside, so I went in and had a quick look by myself. The whole display was predictably rather crude, consisting of propaganda posters and a few newspapers on the wall, and porcelain cups and bowls with revolutionary slogans in glass display cases.

Something about the display seemed unusual, though I couldn’t figure out exactly what that was right away. It wasn’t until we were on the road back to Shanghai that it suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time during my nearly 20 years in China that I’d seen Cultural Revolution relics in any kind of public display.

One member of our small group, a man in his 60s who lived through the Cultural Revolution, told me such displays were just starting to come out of the shadows in China. But he was also quick to add that most were similar to the one in Jinxi, consisting of crude collections of artifacts in private museums run by entrepreneurs in small, rural areas safely away from big cities like Shanghai.

I didn’t think much more about it until a few weeks ago, when I read a news report about a big new batch of documents that were recently released by the Shanghai city government, including some from the Cultural Revolution. Some of those items were now on display at one of the city’s archive museums (档案馆), the report said.

The Cultural Revolution element of the news was mentioned at the end of the article, almost as an afterthought. But it caught my attention since it came so close to my Jinxi experience.

So I made a trip down to the archive museum and, sure enough, the Cultural Revolution items were there on the third floor amid a series of displays on Shanghai’s history after the Communist victory in 1949. The Cultural Revolution section was rather small, consisting of just 9 or 10 objects, including 6 photos, an edition of a newspaper published by the Red Guards and several arm bands worn by those same Red Guards and other revolutionaries.

Most notably, the display also included a famous editorial from the November 10, 1965 edition of local the Wenhuibao newspaper, which is well known among older Shanghainese and is generally considered to mark the official start of the Cultural Revolution in the city.

I mentioned this mini display and the newspaper editorial to an older reporter I know who actually worked at Wenhuibao during that time to gage his reaction. He acknowledged the newness of this kind of public display, but I was a bit surprised by his broader dismissiveness of not only the display but the whole period in general.

In many ways, his reaction was typical of the general sentiment towards that period by the older generation that lived through it. When asked about it, most people from that time will generally offer some broad comments about how chaotic it was, but don’t want to say much more. Perhaps it’s similar to recent chaotic periods in the west, such as the US war in Vietnam, which everyone acknowledges but few people want to talk about.

As a result of this silence, people born in China after 1970 know little about this period, even though all have heard of it and most can sense the huge impact it had on their parents and others from that generation. I’m always just a bit surprised that young Chinese don’t ask their parents more about that time, especially since it’s been an acceptable topic for private discussion for decades even though it remained off-limits in public forums.

I’m also not sure why this elephant from China’s past is suddenly creeping out of the shadows at this particular time, even though I think it’s a very positive step. My guess is that it’s a combination of factors, including the arrival of a new generation of more open-minded leaders who realize that China can only move forward by coming to terms with some of the more controversial periods from its past.

I suspect another major factor may simply be the passage of time. At this point some 36 years, or more than half a generation, have passed since the Cultural Revolution ended, and four decades have passed since the most tumultuous time at the movement’s beginning.
With so much time gone by, the period has moved safely into the history books for many of the people who experienced it. That distance should hopefully pave the way for some healthy and open discussion about this important but also difficult time in modern Chinese history that continues to have such a profound influence on the modern national psyche.