Class, Culture and Principles: Evaluating the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Basis of its Aims and Strategies

Culture in any society is inherited from the past as a form of tradition. It is an automatic and unconscious process. It is usually taken as supra-class unifying category which binds a community. China during Mao proclaimed that old culture serves the interests of the exploiting class and therefore the proletariat as an emerging class should struggle against it and impose its own culture. On this premise ‘the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was launched. Its aim was to ‘prevent the restoration of capitalism’ by revolutionizing people’s thinking to realize the communist goal of classless society. It lasted from 1966 to 1976, however, debates still continue regarding its aims, principles and practices and achievements or the damages it caused. This article attempts to explore what it actually wanted to accomplish and what strategies and measures were employed to materialize these aims. For this purpose it uses the documents published by the Communist Party of China during that period as the primary sources and judges them on the basis of Marxist socialist principles. The paper reaches to the conclusion that the Cultural Revolution adopted principles, policies and methods which accord with Marxism.

After Babel in China

When George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation was published in 1975, the excitement and controversy generated by this book in the West were naturally unknown in China since the country was still in the thrall of the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, the subsequent journey of After Babel to Chi­na seems to be unimpeded, though apparently belated, which is understandable, given the fact that the Chinese Cultural Revolution only came to an end in late 1976, prior to which the conditions for accepting such Western theoretical works did not exist. This paper will present a succinct trajectory of the reception of After Babel by reviewing how some of the key concepts of Steiner’s hermeneutic theory were and are perceived and adapted to the Chinese environment. The travel of Stei­ner’s theory to China will be briefly sketched, followed by accounts of different in­terpretations of Steiner’s chapter “The Hermeneutic Motion” and a discussion of the various attempts to supplement and expand it in a critical light. Some specific examples concerning English-Chinese and Chinese-English translations are dis­cussed in order to illuminate the relevance and applicability of the theoretical con­cepts con­tained in After Babel for addressing some of the fundamental issues per­tain­ing to translation.

Female warriors: a reproduction of patriarchal narrative of Hua Mulan in The Red Detachment of Women (1972)

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the CCP officially claimed that Chinese women achieved an equal position as men, and the Confucian patriarchal family was deconstructed. This article is an ongoing exploration of Maoist gender discourse by analysing the image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera film, The Red Detachment of Women (1972) which was made and popularised during the Cultural Revolution. This article finds that Maoist gender discourse failed to deconstruct the Confucian patriarchy. The image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera films was a reproduction of the patriarchal narrative of Hua Mulan, which served an ethical symbol of loyalty and filial daughter in the discourse of Confucian patriarchy. Similar to Mulan, the masculinised image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera films cannot be identified as a feminist representation yet a cultural and ethical symbol of filial daughter that leads to women’s subordination to men’s needs.