Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation PDF
Preview Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation
CHILDREN OF MAO Also by Anita Chan CHEN VILLAGE: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao's China (with R. Madsen and J. Unger) ON SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY AND THE CHINESE LEGAL SYSTEM (co-edited with S. Rosen and J. Unger) CHILDREN OF MAO Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation Anita Chan M MACMILLAN I:> Anita Chan 1985 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985 All rights reserved . No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1985 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chan , Anita Children of Mao. 1. Political socialization-China- History-20th century I. Title 306' .2 JA76 ISBN 978-1-349-07319-1 ISBN 978-1-349-07317-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07317-7 For my parents, Chan Chok-hon and Ko Kwan-ying Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 POLITICAL EDUCATION AND CHARACTER FORMATION IN PRIMARY SCHOOL 11 3 THE POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION OF ADOLESCENTS 52 4 THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A TEST OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM 124 5 POLITICAL DESOCIALIZATION: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION'S AFTERMATH 185 6 POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION AND THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY IN CHINA 204 Notes and References 226 Select Bibliography 242 Index 250 VB Acknowledgements The writing of this book has been a valuable experience, not only in wrestling with sociological concepts but also in sensitizing me to the tone of life in modern China. In Hong Kong, I am indebted to all of those who allowed me to interview them and who shared with me some of their deeper feelings. My appreciation goes also to the dozen and more young emigrants from China, including several of the interviewees, who became lasting friends and who, during long informal discussions, provided repeated insights about Chinese soci- ety . In particular, Huang Wangchao has contributed a number of crucial ideas and formulations to the study. Above all, heartfelt gratitude goes to Professor Ronald Dore, my doctoral supervisor, who provided stimulating guidance and encour- agement from the initial conception of the project onward . I am indebted also to my husband Jonathan Unger for sharing his exten- sive interview notes with me, for the many hours of discussion we have had and for reading and providing suggestions on the manu- script. So too, Stanley Rosen, Rudolf Wagner, Paul Levine and Richard Kirby are owed thanks for reading and commenting critically on sections of the original manuscript. My friend Ng Chung-yin, another reader, helped introduce me to a deeper understanding of politics in general and Chinese politics in particular. The fieldwork was conducted in office-space provided by the Uni- versities Service Centre in Hong Kong, whose staff are owed appreci- ation for their helpfulness . The University of Kansas and its Centre for East Asian Studies graciously provided office-space and typing facilities. My thanks go also to Maureen Dickson, Nancy Kaul and Sandee Kennedy for typing the successive drafts. viii 1 Introduction I constantly had been studying Mao's works. So I often gave other people the first choice of a good place to sleep and carried them water to drink - showed my good heart. It was so natural. I'd been a Study Mao's Thought Counsellor for so many years and had studied revolutionary models like Lei Feng, Wang lie, Norman Bethune and Zhang Side; I had absorbed it from them. I followed their example and let Mao's thought influence my behaviour. I was studying and using Mao's thought in a lively manner. Scepticism is aroused when one comes upon such proclamations in the Chinese mass media of the 1960s and 1970s. The fervor seems affected, overblown and unbelievable, and might easily be dismissed as clumsily contrived propaganda. Yet this quotation is not taken from any official Chinese publica- tion. It is from a taped conversation in 1975 with a young woman in Hong Kong - recounting, ironically, her behaviour while in a Chinese prison. Her political commitment to Maoist teachings had been shared , in the course of growing up, by most of my interviewees, all of them emigrants of the Red Guard generation. The acting out of this devotion is known in China as 'political activism' . This book will examine how and why some of China's urban young people became fervent political activists, why so many became zealous Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, and why they divided into rival factions that battled each other in defence of Chairman Mao. The study will also be delving into the social psychology of this first generation brought up under socialism: with findings some readers may find controversial. In the course of my research, I gradually but ineluctably have been drawn to the conclusion that young interview- ees of very different dispositions had shared in what the Frankfurt School of social scientists has called the 'authoritarian personality'. It shall be observed , moreover, that the authoritarian beliefs and emotional needs that these young people held in common were not so 1 2 Children of Mao much a product of their parents' influence but rather a product of their political socialization! at school. And it shall be seen that those young people who strove hardest to live up to the Maoist credo, and who therefore were officially recognized as political activists, tended to develop more highly authoritarian personality traits than their less devoted or less politically successful schoolmates. I am not suggesting, however, that the school authorities or the Communist Party leadership had consciously tried to instill in the children the extreme form of authoritarian traits that surfaced in the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution . Party educators had been bent merely on encouraging highly moralistic and disciplined behaviour that was in keeping with the teachings of Mao. But we shall see that the very system by which these teachings were promoted created competitive aspirations to prove personal devotion, instilled exagger- ated needs to conform to political orthodoxy, and encouraged strong prejudices against outcaste groups. In the urban high schools of the 1960s, I shall show, the 'authoritarian personality' became the domi- nant social character of these children of Mao - with devastating results in the Cultural Revolution. It shall also be seen that personality traits, once formed , are not necessarily permanently fixed. In the emotionally shattering after- math of the Cultural Revolution fighting, the same young adults became politically 'desocialized' . With peer-group constraints disin- tegrating and their ideological beliefs thrown sharply into doubt, their conformity to the authoritarian social character tended to fade. I do not want to dwell long here on the themes of the authoritarian personality and its erosion, before laying out my evidence about the effects of political socialization on the Red Guard generation. The book's concluding chapter will attempt to put the empirical data in theoretical perspective, and at that point readers will be able to judge for themselves whether my conclusions are convincing. METHODOLOGY AND SAMPLE I was drawn to this study of Chinese youths after several brief encounters in Hong Kong in 1971 with a small group of young people who had just come from China. Cantonese myself, brought up in a British colony perched on China's coast, it was astonishing to me to encounter the vast difference between these former Red Guards from Canton and us Hong Kong young people . The accent of Cantonese that they spoke was not in the slightest different from ours, but that
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