Destabilizing Contradictions and Implosions II: Diachronic Contradictions

Abstract

This chapter explains the concept of “diachronic contradictions” that can make an entire enterprise of ideationally driven codification fragile. A case analysis of the “Li et al.” (or “Li Yizhe”) controversy during the Chinese Cultural Revolution is used to illustrate the implosive processes brought forth by the “diachronic contradictions” that had been accumulated into the idea system.

So far, we have attended to the contradictions that became unresolvable during a given timeframe, due to the ways in which the actors developed and forwarded their ideas within that timeframe. We may call these synchronically developed contradictions. Now, we should turn our attention to diachronically developed contradictions. By this term, I mean contradictions that grow out of the interactions of people, events, ideas, and statements over a much longer course of time. Under certain conditions, over time, these contradictions could become more intense, and even harder to resolve.

Accumulating Diachronically Developed Contradictions

As stated, because many synchronic contradictions were not internally resolvable, they were “resolved” only temporarily, by forceful suppression or by the judgment of an external authority. With this process, a variety of imposed interpretations and secondary ideas were generated. Therefore, if the heavy-handed forces or authorities who “resolved” those problems became challenged, so too would the imposed interpretations and their associated by-products.

In the Revolution, not only did those external authorities become challenged, they also actually experienced a phase of symbolic inversal: those who were at the top suddenly found themselves at the bottom of the moral ladder. Relatedly, this drastic rearrangement called into question whether these people’s past symbolic works—their classifications, their judgment, their imposed suppression—should be reexamined. Past irresolvable contradictions, in other words, might resurface from the ground up. And if a verdict of reversal was reached, say an all-out rehabilitation of groups of people was achieved, then a phase of symbolic reversal would occur—that is to say, the symbolic order that emerged later overturned the ones that had existed before.

This overturning sometimes took the form of a correction (including re-clarification). Corrective measures might seem to be too problematic, providing that they did not disrupt the core set of propositions and fitted images associated with the Revolution. Yet, as seen in the background theory debate, any new line of reasoning is likely going to be somewhat imperfect and vulnerable in itself. Moreover, given how confident, rigorous, and resolute the actors asserted these new ideas against the old ones, not only did they tend to disrupt the core set of propositions and fitted images of the idea system, they also laid the foundation for another round of disruption if they themselves are criticized and later overturned, in part due to their own imperfection and vulnerability. And when this happened, previously suppressed viewpoints and unresolved problems could then resurface, perhaps even acquiring new evidence. Thus, with each instance of major inversal or reversal, contradictions of past and present were compounded.

Within each set of existing, synchronic contradictions one could also find a reserve pool of previously suppressed (or unsatisfactorily resolved) contradictions being somewhat decompressed. The larger the pool of debates and histories the new ideas encompassed, the more potential there was for a new actor to harvest and organize these decompressed elements into diachronically accumulated contradictions that had an explosive presence on the front stage.

Series of National Dramas of Inversal and Reversal

In my judgment, such diachronically developed contradictions did not truly become threatening until around the end of the Cultural Revolution.

At the national level, the first instance of dramatic, symbolic inversal was seen in the first few years of CPC rule. A whole new world was introduced. Statuses were structurally inverted. Rich landlords were dragged down; intellectuals were reformed and reincorporated; poor peasants and workers elevated.

In these processes, some contradictions inevitably started to accumulate, due to the inherent weakness of the idea system. Cases of “good” landlords and “bad” peasants, which must have existed in significant quantities, were potentially poorly served by the aggregate classification built into the idea system. The disservice was likely suppressed in the interest of the grander scheme of objectives: to stabilize a newly unified nation and to institute a new revolutionary order. These suppressed contradictions receded into the background within the idea system. However, they quietly entered a reserve pool of unaddressed contradictions.

The second comprehensive wave of inversal and reversal developed around the beginning of the Cultural Revolution era of 1966. ¹ The Red Guards were mobilized to negate—and invert—the CPC cadres at all levels, including Peng Zhen and Liu Shaoqi. Although not as prominent as Mao, these cadres were placed on a pedestal as having been symbols of Revolution for such a long time. Liu Shaoqi—previously the president of China, author of How to Be a Good Communist and believed to be Mao’s chosen successor—was turned into a reactionary villain in a matter of months. He was fitted with the images of “Look Left and Actual Right,” “hidden enemy,” and a “spy.” Of absolute significance was that, by delegitimizing so many cadres, all their judgments, actions, and networks begged for reexamination and reverification.

The third wave came around 1970–1972. A good number of previously validated “true” revolutionaries—“Mao’s children” who helped to restore Mao’s power—were reidentified as conspirators, reckless ultra-leftists, or simply ignorant troublemakers. These figures tended to be the most radical and outspoken ones. The symbolic takedown of Kuai Dafu with Mao’s assistance, the breaking up of the Red Guard movement using the PLA, and the policies to send urban youths (Red Guards) to the countryside were key events in this phase of change. Even if their contributions were partially acknowledged, and there might indeed be economic and social reasons behind the decisions accompanying the political motives, the Red Guards’ actions were excessive and ill-considered, and therefore could easily be seen as deserving of control and punishment. All the deeds performed by the young Red Guards, including all the attacks they had made upon old cadres, warranted reexamination. Previously suppressed contradictions were thus raised. And the harshness of rural life, coupled with some backlash and mistreatment against them, prompted many to ask whether the Red Guards were used up and then discarded when their usefulness ran out.

The fourth wave of symbolic inversal and reversal took place shortly after the youths were sent away. Lin Biao, who headed the PLA, allegedly died in a plane crash following a failed attempt to assassinate Mao. Lin Biao was not a simple follower of Mao. He was often seen as an “exaggerated” embodiment of Mao—a more vocal, more resolute, and more explicit spokesperson than Mao, and an acknowledged successor. He helped to publish and distribute the Little Red Book, instituting with it the daily recitation rituals in the household. Yet he transitioned into becoming an absolute villain and enemy of Mao almost overnight.

There were further orders or phases at the national level—for example, the denegation of Zhou Enlai, the reinstatement of Deng Xiaoping, and the rise and fall of Jiang Qing’s statuses during the post-1972 Cultural Revolution years could all be considered fifth or sixth orders.

These diachronically compounded contradictions could have been mitigated by a variety of means—the most obvious one being to wait until sufficient time had passed for the collective memory of the events to fade from consciousness. The opposite had occurred, however. In later revolutionary discourses, they were evoked vividly at too fast a speed—with much intensity, data, and urgent relevance—before the collective consciousness could adjust. Old calculations were recycled into the forefront for each “new,” synchronic debate, rejuvenating their lives as new ideas. Double negatives turned into their tripled and quadrupled forms. Such dynamics were detrimental to the effectiveness, or even the sustenance, of the idea system.

The Li et al. (or Li Yizhe) controversy. To analyze this distinct kind of contradiction of view, I will use another episode in the latter period of Revolution: the controversy surrounding “Li Yizhe,” which started in Guangdong Province around 1973 or 1974—the period after the fall of Lin Biao and the advent of the Criticize Lin Criticize Confucius Movement.

Li Yizhe [李一哲] was not a person. It was a pseudonym of several coauthors: Li Zhengtian [李正天], Chen Yiyang [陈一阳], Wang Xizhe [王希哲], and Guo Hongzhi [郭鸿志]. In 1973, a 26,000-word big-character poster which spanned 67 pages was published in Guangdong. The essay written in the poster, which ostensibly criticized Lin Biao but was probably directed at the Gang of Four, incensed the movement leader Jiang Qing. Guangdong governments responded by holding several hundred criticism sessions attended by 10,000 people, ostensibly to publicly attack Li et al. Oddly enough, many of the struggle sessions were unlike others—taking a form close to a “real” debate format, wherein the main author Li Zhengtian often dominated the debate, or at least was given the floor to extendedly articulate his ideas.²

Here is the context in brief. Jiang Qing had intended to wage a mass campaign to criticize Lin Biao’s assassination attempt. Another concurrent target was Confucius, deemed to be a promoter of feudal privileges and a slave system under the disguise of ethics and virtue. ³ Jiang tried to assert the connection between Lin Biao and Confucius, saying that he looked and acted like Confucius, and that he had promoted Confucianism. Jiang implicated Premiere Zhou Enlai by calling him “the chief Confucius of the Party” in early 1974. ⁴

Other published essays at the time, by those with close ties and probably behind-the-scenes collaboration, also hinted at such similarities. The description of Confucius “having fallen ill in bed at the age of 71… and still struggled to get up from bedrest to see the king of the State of Lu”⁵ was a thinly veiled reference to Zhou Enlai, who was in his seventies and had just been exhausted by cancer and its associated operations.⁶ If the interpretations of these essays were true, Jiang Qing was attempting to draw the following chain of linkages, by forming resemblance and equivalence among them:

• Lin Biao = Confucius = Zhou Enlai

But Li et al. established a different linkage. In their criticism of Lin, they linked it to the “Lin Biao System” [林彪体系]. And the Lin Biao System was specified in a way that would make it look like the leader of the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign—notably including Jiang Qing. The linkage was thus the following:

• Lin Biao = Lin Biao System = Jiang Qing

Here is how Li et al. constructed the “Lin Biao System” as an aggregate target. The Lin Biao System was a coded thing with a highly elastic definitional boundary—potentially encompassing a wide array of objects upon being stretched while retaining a solid symbolic anchor:

The reason why our “system” [体系] is scary is that we have proposed the “Lin Biao System” …. What is a “system”? It is all things relationally connected to a whole body—a total system. The Lin Biao system is Lin Biao’s set of theories; outlines and programs; route-lines; directions; policies; methods; Party style; academic style; literary style; and all things in the fields of politics, law, military, economics, cultural education that opposed the Party Central Committee and Chairman Mao, harmed the people, and poisoned the country. Six years ago, the complete establishment of Lin Biao’s “system” undoubtedly destroyed or even replaced Chairman Mao’s set [什么是“体系”?就是事物有联属关系的全体──全部系统。林彪体系就是林彪那一套包括理论、纲领、路线、方针、政策、办法、党风、学风、文风、作风, 在政治、法律、军事、经济、文化教育各个领域对抗党中央、毛主席, 祸害人民、流毒全国的东西。六年前, 林彪那一整套“体系”的确立, 无疑破坏了甚至取代了毛主席的那一套]. It was not until after the “September 13^th” incident [referring to Lin’s alleged failed assassination attempt] (it was a manifestation of the contradictions between Lin Biao’s set with the Chinese people being radicalized to the point of being absolutely irreconcilable), Lin Biao’s set of things began to be gradually destroyed and abandoned. Aren’t these the historical facts? ⁷

Upon defining the all-encompassing boundary of the Lin Biao system, Li et al. went on to describe this system’s heyday period of influence. The details included the permeation of revolutionary activities with “religious color and atmosphere” everywhere, displacing everything else. People were asked to demonstrate “cumbersome loyalty and filial piety—early prayer, late atonement, assembly, assembly, shifting, buying and selling, writing, calling, even eating, etc… In short, let the word loyalty [忠] occupy one hundred percent of the time, one hundred percent of the space, and such this-is-‘good’- that-is-‘good’ exercise is a ‘Left!-Left!-Left!’ competition, a race for ‘the-most, the-most, the-most’” [而这个“好”那个“好”的运动, 则是“左!左!左!”的比赛, “最、最、最”的竞争]. Many activities were condemned as “hypocritical,” “ugly,” “empty,” or “opportunistic” in nature, and they—by encouraging expressions like “Revolution exploded from the depth of one’s soul” [灵魂深处爆发革命]—replaced the more normal activities and patterns that existed prior to the Lin Biao system came into place. ⁸

As per the specific description of how the Lin Biao System had amplified and then replaced Mao’s system, we could see how Jiang Qing’s political activities could be a natural “lookalike.” This was not helped by Mao’s criticism of Jiang Qing’s deeds and behaviors—that she ran a “dunce cap factory,” that she had a “knife-mouth,” that she wanted to be a “backstage boss,” that she should read more books, and so forth.

Li et al. had further stretched and visually elaborated upon the meaning of elastic category, such as “the stubborn party who steadfastly support the Lin Biao System” [坚持林彪体系的顽固派] or those were “very reminiscent of all things during the days when the Lin Biao system reached its peak, the days of glory—the days when tens of thousands of citizens’ heads fell to the floor, and they, within the ‘total victory’ had achieved everything—status, privilege, power…even the whips to drive and beat the slaves, they were all treasures bathed in glittering haloes, not allowing a bit of desacralization from slaves” [他们在“全面胜利”中得到的一切──地位、特权…乃至驱打奴隶的鞭子, 全都是闪着圣光的宝贝, 不容许奴隶有一点亵渎]. The Chinese society that existed was then like a “heaven” in which Lin Biao regulated and governed the social relations. By analogy, Li et al. equated these people’s behaviors to those of supernatural deities who regulate the conduct in heaven, which did not match the image of revolutionaries—matching more with those who pretended to be revolutionaries.

Several sentences later, this critique was extended to the slogans of “anti-restoration” [反複辟] and “anti-tide-return” [反回潮]. Here is where the diachronically developed contradictions were brought to the forefront.

Initially around 1971, the term “restoration” seemed to specifically mean the restoration of capitalism. But by 1974, the term was likened to Confucius’ attempt to preach order, manners, and virtue against rebellions or chaos, which, in effect, was pushing to “restore a slave society,” “driving the vehicle of history backward.”⁹ Jiang Qing stated that there had always been people who wanted to create restorations in history, and when they do they tend to bring out the Confucius school.¹⁰

Jiang Qing was probably referring to the policy changes instituted by Zhou Enlai around 1972 to reverse some of the decisions and policies during the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, including rehabilitating and reinstating some high-level Party cadres and PLA officers, the most notable of whom was Deng Xiaoping in 1973, who had returned as vice-premier.¹¹ Coinciding with the timing of those cadres’ return to power, previously suppressed forms of art production—those that belonged to the “dark lines”—seemed to have reemerged as a returning tide, as did “capitalist revisionism.” One essay¹² described the pre-Cultural Revolution art scene (from 1949 to 1966) through a pair of matching classic idioms: “poisonous weed that grew in clumps, groups of demons and ghosts that danced chaotically” [毒草丛生, 群魔乱舞]. Art was used to serve a minority of people, promote the revisionist route-line, “rot and poison the masses, and serving as a warm bed to prepare the return of capitalism” [腐蚀毒害群众, 准备资本主义复辟的温床]. The call to revalue and reevaluate [重新估价] artworks during the 1949–1966 years—that is to say, to reintroduce and reintegrate some of them into today’s art institutions—was clearly an effort, mainly organized by rightists, to promote the return of anti-revolutionary elements.

To counteract this viewpoint, Li et al. used another way to define what happened during previous periods—hence another way of aggregating information. Li et al. pointed out that some critics who used the “anti-returning tide” slogan also described the “blood-boiling” [热血沸腾] and “red-fire era” [火红的年代] to be around 1971, and a period of returning tide and restoration around 1972. But Lin Biao had become the head of the opportunists within the Party [党内机会主义路线总头子] between 1966 and 1971. Lin Biao fell from the stage around 1971, and subsequently a “revival” started. The masses were already anti-restoration around 1966—and Lin Biao had inserted into the movement around 1969, pushed the restoration to its climax, and then stopped his involvement abruptly in 1972. Judged by the timing, then, the “anti-restoration” agenda was now in fact anti-anti-restoration [他们“反复辟”, 实际上是反反复辟]. And it was the people who were oppressed by Lin Biao, or victimized by his system, that were now suddenly asked to stop. Once again, if these conceptual back-and-forth discussions sounded confusing, it was likely to be due to the double- and triple-negations that were being utilized.

Li et al. used clever wordings to create a series of questions that rebut his critics. He asked:

Is the internal unity within the party, the army, and the working class that was destroyed by Lin Biao’s group not to be restored? Are not the “Three Major Styles” [三大作风] destroyed and abandoned by Lin Biao’s group, and the “Three Major Disciplines” [三大纪律] and “Eight Attention Items” [八项注意] of our army’s fine traditions not to be restored? Should we restore the true face of Party history and military history that have been beaten and distorted by Lin Biao’s group to the point of being unrecognizable?

Should we restore the direction of “Learning from Past Errors, Curing Illnesses and Saving People” and “Unifying—Criticizing—Unifying,” [团结──批评──团结”的方针] which had been replaced by Lin Biao’s group use of pressuring, arresting, beating, and killing? Should the literary and artistic creation policy of “Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism Integration” [革命现实主义与革命浪漫主义相结合], which was falsely changed by Lin Biao group’s “From Objective to Subjective” model, be restored? Should the education policy direction of “Virtue, Intellect, Body Comprehensive Development” [德、智、体、全面发展], which was replaced by Lin Biao group’s “Politics Impacts Everything” [政治冲击一切], be restored? A series of Party policies that have been trampled on by the Lin Biao group—reliance on the working class and the poor, middle peasants; the policies pertaining to cadres; the policies pertaining to intellectuals; the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages” policies; the overseas Chinese policies; various economic policies….Should they be restored? Should the “Five-Courage Spirit” [五敢精神] that had been suppressed by Lin Biao group’s geniuses be restored? Is it true the tens of thousands of fake cases from the central government to the local government created by Lin Biao’s group cannot be rereviewed or overturned? Is it correct that a large number of veteran cadres who have made these or those mistakes but have been attested to be loyal to the party after long-term tests should not be used again? Is it true that comrades such as Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang should not be allowed to enter the Central Committee at all? Even if they are given an exit road, is it true that the caps should be in the hands of the “masses” and be ready to put on them at any time again?”

Many of these questions were simply rhetorical. The “Five-Courage Spirit” and similar non-problematic items need not necessarily be undone. But Li et al.’s central message, to rearticulate it using our terms, was that by their aggregate statuses alone they were all part of the “Lin Biao System.” These questions were meant to exploit the diachronically developed contradictions maximally, revealing how dysfunctional the idea system had become.

At that point, there were plenty of precedents of political forces that had organized reversals which had themselves been reversed, and the pattern seemed to be ongoing. In the description by Li et al., if one were then to take seriously the task of criticizing the Lin Biao System, in too many cases they had to deal with the awkward situation of “there is you in me, and there is me in you” [批到了林彪体系你中有我、我中有你的那些人头上了]. In other words, if one criticizes the other in aggregate terms, one may well be including oneself as the object of criticism.

The meaning of phrases such as “restoration” and “anti-restoration” became almost impossible to process. Intuitively, one could form the image of restoring the power being taken away from the people or true revolutionaries. But when so many parties seemed to be potentially qualified for these definitions as well as their opposites—at least the intuitive connection between the terms and the specific kinds of people they intended to refer to was severed.

Aside from the case of the Li et al. controversy, there were a number of concurrent examples taking place around 1972–1979 that also attested to the growing ills of diachronically compounded contradictions. One noted national case was the story of Li Qinglin [李庆霖]—a symbolic hero who came to fame in 1973 when validated by multiple sides and had subsequently become a prime symbol of counterrevolutionary forces by 1976.¹³ Some interviews and autobiographies magnify these dynamics played out at the local, personal level, especially in the latter phases of the Revolution.

External Sources of Contradictions: The Accumulation of Counterimages

So far, we have discussed the internal contradictions—that is to say, contradictions that are generated within the processual workings of the idea system. Another kind of contradiction has external informational sources that people see in everyday contexts—external encounters, events, incidents, evidence, facts, experiences, material conditions, and so on. These external elements departed from the fitted images of the acts, scenes, agents, agency, and purposes on which the revolutionary idea system depended. They made it harder for the “visualized” images to cohere and for reasonable ideas to form.

Although a sophisticated system of counter-ideas did not seem to be organized, fragmented pieces of counterinformation, counterimages, and counter-ideas appear quite frequently across the spectrum of sources that I have examined. They were very pronounced in biographical and autobiographical accounts published in Western sources, for understandable reasons. But they are also visible in a different way in many Chinese sources—with Mao’s description of the “mistake and trouble” he admittedly created being one, and the act of redressing previously indicted persons being another. A precise assessment of how extensively these counter-elements actually impacted the dynamic of the Revolution is not the subject of my attention. My objective in this section is to explore the forms of externally sourced contradictions which could threaten the ideationally coded idea system. Admittedly, my sources in these areas are much more indirect, and my interpretations more subjective and uncertain. But within the data limitation I operate, I posit that there are four types of such external sources.

A. Technical Inefficiency and Limitation

The first source of counterinformation, counterimages, and counter-ideas emanated from technical weaknesses. Setbacks like the Great Leap Forward counted as one—as it affected the production and delivery of physical goods. Various pristine images attached to the Mao-led campaign ended up being “proven” to contradict actual production records and the suffering everyone experienced. To what extent this instance created a long-term impact is complex. After all, productivity and quality of life did recover and then improve continuously during the Mao era. Also, subjects could mitigate this contradiction in various ways. Seeing the good-faith efforts from the regime to acknowledge and rectify its error could help; Han Dongping recalled that the central government did send relief grain to his village, which was located several thousand miles away.¹⁴ Seeing the mistake and the solution as a collective process—of which they are equal participants with the regime—is another. Yet another is comparative perception. Those three years might have been horrible and difficult, but at least one older subject thought that the times before the Liberation (during the warlordist era) were worse than those three years. He saw the cadres in his village going hungry along with the rest of the villagers—in other words, they did fit the revolutionary image.¹⁵ But we can be assured that if the regime had perpetually failed to deliver the physical goodness of the Revolution, the impact of the contradictions would have been severe.

What happened in the cultural domain is harder to distinguish. Of course, subjects who had little to begin with during times of war and chaos could be satisfied with the “new” collectivistic culture and its art productions. Even playing volleyball and raising chickens could be filled with broader cultural meanings. But by severely restricting and regulating the production of religion and art, it is likely that they do not provide a satisfactory replacement for some people, especially those who had once been rich, educated, and exposed to multifarious forms of entertainment, pleasure, food, art, and choices. Revolutionary arts and culture might satisfy existential anxieties, moral dilemma, humans’ beautiful weaknesses to an extent. And the revolutionary objective could be so grand as to appear and feel all-encompassing and ultimate. But for the artists who wished to break through all boundaries that perpetually existed and for traditional artists who wished to pass on and develop traditions, the revolutionary paradigm could become an inescapable prison—a counterimage to what it presented.

B. Hypocrisy and “Other” Truths

Some subjects in the Revolution observed instances of hypocrisy; that is to say, how codes were forcefully imposed on non-fitting information. Even for authors who were sympathetic to the Revolution, corruptions by official cadres and Red Guard revolutionaries were observed. Author Bai Di recalled the luxurious food served in the cadre parties during the Three Difficult Years.¹⁶ Other accounts contained many counterimages of the supposedly true revolutionaries, including Red Guard members who pocketed pearls and personal items during their ransacking missions; used their power to secure a free plane ticket for a friend by dishonestly claiming that she was “a “special observer” of the “revolutionary corps”; and how people of good connections could consistently have better tomatoes in the market.¹⁷ Far more serious examples have also been cited.

Some subjects knew of other truths than the ones ostensibly being promoted. A typical example of such individuals are those involved in backstage actions themselves. This included production team leaders and local commune participants who secretly knew that the numbers during the Great Leap Forward campaign were being artificially inflated.¹⁸ This also included those who actively took part in manipulating information to prosecute political enemies, and were doing so in the name of Revolution. Deep in these people’s minds, stocks of counterinformation, counterimages, and counter-ideas had mostly likely been seeded.

C. Relative Cruelty

The application of violence was uneven across geopolitical locations. One potential source of counterimage was from instances of serious cruelty—so extreme that they surpassed those committed by the “capitalists,” “nationalists,” feudal landlords, and other “enemies” that had been identified. Or they were so cruel that they surpassed what the Revolution ought to have looked like.

Wang Youqin collected and articulated a variety of accounts of cruelty, particularly directed toward intellectuals. To name just three, a mathematics professor from Beijing, Sun Meisheng [孙梅生], committed suicide by running toward a train. A witness remembered seeing his corpse at the funeral; the lower half of the body was essentially severed. The liver was exposed, and only one leg was left.¹⁹ A female secondary school teacher of English in the city of Tianjin [天津], whose last name was Gu [顾], died because, after being beaten, a Red Guard poured boiling water over her head.²⁰ A 44-year-old male foreign language professor in Beijing died in the camp because he was forced to drink polluted water from a ditch beside a chemical factory. And in Voices from the Whirlwind, an interviewee recalled that an eight-year-old girl was dragged to face the firing squad, in front of a large dirt pit. Her father pacified her by saying “No, child… don’t be scared. They’re teasing you. Those men didn’t really die.”²¹

The extent of prevalence and selective representation may be debated, but multiple sources have pointed to the fact that these acts were not isolated. Individuals in China might “see” these counterimages in a more isolated manner. But at least in areas or institutions where extreme cruelty occurred—in a completely disproportionate degree to the deeds—a stock of counterimages would be accumulated. Even if they were organized against the Party itself, they could cause disillusionment toward the elegant Revolution narrative that the Party promoted.

D. Growing Personal Competence

Lastly, a major source of counterimage could come from an unintended source—from revolutionary education itself. While the first generation of Chinese had to be taught about the Revolution, the younger generation learned to produce knowledge from the idea system itself, applying the discourse broadly. They could enter into dialogue fluently with revolutionary jargons, using them to frame the issues. They had learned to use language to arouse emotions. They had learned to unleash strings of accusations and idioms. Xiaomei Martell remembered being able to say, “Carry the proletarian Cultural Revolution to the end!” when she was about ten years old.²² Revolutionary language was a powerful tool for mobilization.

The broad competence could contribute to disillusionment, when the magic that brought so much cohesiveness to the idea system started to wear off. In a vignette recalled by Wei Yang Chao in Red Fire, which took place in late 1967 when he was around 15 years old, Wei verbally dueled with the young shop assistant back and forth using revolutionary language and Mao’s quotes as he sought to purchase a ballpoint pen. Requesting to see a variety of pens, according to the shop assistant, was an act equated with a display of “liberalism,” which was to be combatted. Refusing to show a pen was equated by Wei with her not being “responsible to the people.”²³

What we saw was a desacralization of the revolutionary language. And such desacralization could only come about with the competence of using the idea system for codification purposes. If “on a question of two lines there is no room for compromise” could be referred to in a matter as trivial as purchasing a pen, one wonders how diluted the idea system had become, and if this dilution came from their realization that anyone with some applicational skills could make up their own ideas about the “Revolution” through words. External reality did not matter that much; revolutionary codes could be tied to things of little substance. Counterimages and counter-ideas could thus be accumulated by these subjects who had extensive firsthand experience with using the revolutionary registers.