The Battle for China's Past by Mobo Gao

Acknowledgements     xi
Introduction     1
Debating the Cultural Revolution     13
Introduction: who is writing history and who are the Chinese?     13
The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution     15
Violence, brutality and causes     17
Constructive policies     19
Destruction of Chinese culture and tradition     20
Cultural Revolution and cultural creativity     28
What is the Enlightenment?     30
Constructing history: memories, values and identity     31
Introduction: speech act of identification     31
From the wounded to the mentalite: the re-rehearsal of May Fourth     32
Be American citizens in thinking     37
Sinological orientalism     38
Two whateverism     38
The politics of joining the civilized world     38
Media agenda and identification with the West     41
Memoirs, values and identification     42
The intellectual-business-political complex in contemporary China     45
Conclusion: memories, identity, knowledge and truth     45
Constructing history: memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese     48
Introduction: scope and rationale     48
Memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese: a literature survey     49
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth     53
Some common themes on Mao and the Cultural Revolution     54
Memories as history     61
Conclusion: discourse, narratives and memories     63
Mao, The Unknown Story: an intellectual scandal     65
Introduction hyper-promotion of a book     65
Scholarship, what scholarship?     66
Misleading claims and absurd explanations     71
Further evidence of 'scholarship'     73
Further evidence of flaws and misleading claims     74
Logical inconsistency within the text     75
Mao, China's Hitler and Stalin     77
Fairy tale and how scholarship changes     78
Does it matter?     79
It does not matter so long as the politics is right     80
Mao: the known story and the logic of denial     81
Introduction: Mao the known story, a general outline     81
Evidence of the known story     82
So what was the problem?     84
The famine death toll     85
The economy in the Mao era     87
The yardstick of Hitler: a favourite European comparison      88
Mao's personality: the known story     89
The logic of denial of the known story     90
Academic reception     91
Revolution: from farewell to burial     92
Furet and the French Revolution     93
Is revolution inevitable?     94
An alternative model of development     95
How a medical doctor doctors history: a case study of Li Zhisui     97
Introduction; expatriate Chinese memories - a literary phenomenon     97
Memories and the politics of knowledge production     98
The book     99
Knowledge gap     100
Knowledge production and the market     101
The logic of the differences in two versions     101
Who is to be fooled and why?     102
Protests from the insiders     103
Was Li Mao's personal physician?     103
How much did the doctor know?     104
What did the medical doctor know about politics?     105
The politics of sex     106
History as doctored by the doctor and his US mentors: a critical analysis     107
Conclusion: history what history?     115
Challenging the hegemony: contrary narratives in the e-media (I) - Mao and the Cultural Revolution      117
Introduction: emerging contrary narratives     117
Media effect, public space and e-media     118
Ma Yinchu, population control and elite attitudes     120
The credibility of Li Rui     121
Challenging the late-Mao thesis     123
Challenging Jung Chang and Jon Halliday     125
Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the Great Leap Forward     126
Debates on issues related to the Cultural Revolution     128
Disagreement between Mao and Liu Shaoqi: the two-line struggle thesis     128
Other unofficial views of the Cultural Revolution     132
Sea change of attitudes     133
Wang Xizhe the dissident     134
Kong Qingdong and the cowshed     134
Memoirs of different narratives     135
Challenging Wang Youqin     135
Conclusion: the question of truth     136
Challenging the hegemony: contrary narratives in the e-media (II) - the Mao era     137
Introduction: history in socioeconomic context     137
The state of the economy in the Mao era and during the Cultural Revolution     137
Manufacturing truth     147
Signs of a re-evaluation of Jiang Qing     148
The issues of health care and education      151
A re-evaluation of Kang Sheng?     154
The Chinese themselves say so     155
Manufacturing truth and e-media counter-action     155
The legacy of Mao and the e-media     156
Conclusion: voices from the bottom for a battle that has just begun     157
The problem of the rural-urban divide in pursuit of modernity: values and attitudes     159
Introduction: the year 2003     159
The rise of China, but the risk of collapse     159
The urban-rural divide     160
Three stories of rural pain     161
Rural Chinese: beasts of burden on whom modernity is built     163
The rural-urban divide: values and attitudes     165
Post-Mao reforms: myths versus reality     167
Conclusion: the state and the countryside     171
The battle of China's history: seeing the past from the present     173
Introduction: a little incident     173
Three questions about the post-Mao reforms     174
Is China a capitalist country? And does it matter?     177
Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?     185
White cat, black cat: the argument of efficiency versus fairness     189
Seeing the past from the present: a hole in the discursive hegemony      190
Conclusion: truth and belief values of socialism and China's future direction     191
Truth and belief values of a political discourse     191
Truth and belief value of exploiting the peasantry     192
Do the values of socialism matter?     192
Learning from past failures     193
The socialist truth and belief value of land ownership     194
The socialist truth and belief value of labour law     196
The socialist truth and belief values of healthcare and education     197
The battie of China's history     198
China's future direction     200
Notes     202
Glossary of Chinese terms and names     211
Bibliography     222
Index     266