Revolutionary discourse in Mao's republic 9780674767799, 0674767799, 9780674767805, 0674767802

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REVOLUTIONARY

DISCOURSE IN MAO’S REPUBLIC

David E. Apter Tony Saich

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1994

Copyright © 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Apter, David Ernest, 1924— Revolutionary discourse in Mao’s Republic / David E. Apter, Tony Saich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-76779-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-76780-2 (paper) 1. Revolutions. 2. Revolutionary literature. 3. Discourse analysis. 4. Social movements. 5. Revolutions—China. 6. China— History—1937-1945. I. Saich, Tony. JC491.A58 1994 320.5'323'0951—dc20 94-4421 CIP

For Ellie and Yinyin

CONTENTS

ix

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.

xvii

Toward a Discourse Theory of Politics

1

1.

Fictive Truths and Logical Inferences

2.

Four Struggles

33

3.

Three Stories

69

4.

One Line

II. Yan’an

107 as a

Mobilization Space

5.

The Surviving Yan’anites

141

6.

The Terrain on the Ground

184

7.

Yan’an as a Revolutionary Simulacrum

224

III. The Power

of

Symbolic Capital

8.

Exegetical Bonding and the Phenomenology of Confession

9.

Foucault’s Paradox and the Politics of Contending Discourses 294

263

Appendix: Cadre Schools in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, 1935-1945

335

Notes

337

Index

391

PREFACE

What is the relationship between the power of radical ideas and the mobilization of political movements? “Les livres ont-ils fait la Revolu­ tion?”1 Few would doubt the appropriateness of the question or that the French revolution was, among other things, an intellectual revolution. The ideas mobilized against the Old Regime were transformed from philo­ sophical truths to political solutions—liberal monarchist, parliamentary, Jacobin—the most extremely radical versions of which (like the anarchism of Buonarotti or the communism of Babeuf) being the least intellectually nuanced. So important was the part played by ideas and more particularly books that Robert Damton speculates that “by following the flow of literature outside the law, one can find an unfamiliar route that led to the Revolution from the Old Regime.”2 However, the role played by books and pamphlets in the formation of new ideas ought not to be separated from the events leading up to and involved in the revolution itself. It is in the intertwining of events and ideas that people reinterpret their circumstances, and on occasion come to change them through revolutionary political action. In this regard the French revolution is by no means unique. Indeed, in all major revolutions a certain reciprocity will obtain between violent actions choreographed within master narratives and master narratives realized in the form of essential texts. In the interplay between them few events remain unexam­ ined. Even spontaneous narration spoken on the spot before a crowd, especially when it represents itself as some higher voice (to be disembodied from the clothes, posture, gestures of the figuring agent), may anticipate textual transformation. Body acts become anchored in language acts. Then, in the peculiar alchemy of transcription, violent events become experi­ ences, experiences become sequences, estrangements and intimacies be­ come the marks of punctuation, and a surplus of signifiers becomes embodied in a logic of meaning. Endow a subversive text with a surplus

X

Preface

of signifies and it becomes important twice: the first time as an act of ■writing (text as a metaphor of freedom), the second as an interpretation (text as a metonym for a theory). This double role of the subversive text applies particularly well to the Chinese revolution. Within the Chinese Communist Party, especially in Yan’an during the 1930s and 1940s, certain texts became both the insti­ gators and the objects of struggles, the outcomes of which would define new rules and roles and impose presumptive obligations both on party members and followers. To show how this occurred we too will follow an unfamiliar route in tracing the flow of literature outside the law. Although the literature of that time and place is rough and ready, more like the radicalism of Buonarotti or Babeuf, and lacks the kind of intellec­ tual pedigree Damton’s remark implies, we can nevertheless see how a surplus of signifiers came to be embodied in monographic texts bound together in the form of an inversionary discourse containing both disjunc­ tive ideas and a master narrative. Many of the ideas in this discourse were home-grown translations and in key respects anti-intellectual. Yet even though the Chinese revolution was in many respects more different than similar to the French or the Russian, it nevertheless derived certain powerful intellectual antecedents from both (not to speak of German, English, American, and Japanese influences) in addition to adding those of its own, as Jonathan Spence, Benjamin Schwartz, Joseph Levenson, and others have described so well. Indeed, perhaps no other major revolution relied more heavily on revolutionary discourse than the Chinese or took its ideas more seriously— so much so that, despite all the emphasis on class struggle and social contradiction, a good deal of the disposable power available to the com­ munists was based on a logic of belief and a belief in logic. A good many writers, artists, and journalists contributed to this dis­ course. In the Nym Wales archives at the Hoover Institution Library at Stanford University there is a Est compiled by Mao Dun, one of the more important writers of the period, of some forty distinguished intellectuals who were imprisoned, tortured, and one way or another ehminated by the Guomindang (GMD, or NationaEst Party) in its struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In its formative days the CCP was a party of intellectuals; and though the party changed radicaEy after Mao Zedong came to power, it remained perhaps the supreme example of a party of the word—to the point where we can speak of the Yan’anites as a chosen people. Mao belonged to a generation of politician-thinkers with cosmocratic impulses and a remarkable abihty to use ideas as action. This tradition

Preface

xi

included not only Lenin and Trotsky but also Gandhi, and subsequently influenced Nkrumah, Nyerere, Ho Chi Minh, and Cabral. Each of these revolutionary figures was, with varying degrees of sophistication, a pro­ ducer of political discourse, inversionary in purpose, rupturing in intent, and morally transformational. If the fate of their ideas was not a politically noble one, it was not for lack of trying. Despite often bizarre conse­ quences, their ideas embodied a good deal of the political yearning of the twentieth century. The Yan’an period in China is also worthy of study because it represents political yearning transformed into both a discourse and a discourse com­ munity bound together by what can be called symbolic capital. It also tells us something about the nature of personalized power cast in the form of depersonalized principle. The framework we use to examine Yan’an can apply to religious, ethnic, and other movements where people pore over texts in search of truths that take the form of binding obligations. Though Mao was no philosopher in the rigorous sense nor even a qualified theorist in the Marxist tradition, no Gramsci, Lukacs, or Lenin, he nevertheless made theory the basis of a politics of principled ideas of which he remained the consummate politician. Out of the terrible circum­ stances and conditions of life prevailing in China, Mao culled myths and stories, texts and logical prescriptions. In short, he created a utopic repub­ lic, instructional as well as military, which, though it lasted only a short while, from 1936 to 1947, came to represent the moral moment of the Chinese revolution.

is situated within two general areas of research. The first is comparative theory in political science/sociology/anthropology; the sec­ ond is China studies. The empirical focus is on social movements and revolutionary behavior; the analytical focus is on how people form morally purposeful discourse communities—what we call political discourse analy­ sis. Our concern is with how people interpret their experiences and create languages to express their interpretations—that is, the codes, lexical sys­ tems, and symbolic structures that enable them not only to take greater possession of their Eves and circumstances but also to transcend what might otherwise appear to be insurmountable difficulties.3 In addition, conditions are established for a “collective individualism.” We discuss these and similar ideas drawn from a variety of theorists in greater detail in Chapter 1. We also show explicidy how ideas and events become coded as both myth and theory. The disciplines of political science, sociology, and anthropology have Our

work

xii

Preface

been exposed, to some extent, to these and similar ideas less in the form of political discourse theory than in partial, fragmentary, and unsystematic ways. Even where discourse theory is recognized as such it is hardly considered respectable; there is a tendency to dismiss it as somehow vaguely belonging to “cultural studies.” Moreover, there is discourse theory and discourse theory. Some theorists rely heavily on literary analysis, the examination of texts and the search for hidden meanings. In such cases, the selection of which aspects of discourse theory to employ will depend on how well they decipher “hidden” meanings in “social texts.” But if this is to reveal something important about the way in which people go about their lives in a context of its meanings, empirical examination will be required—and that means field­ work. Indeed, some of the ideas applied here to the study of revolution were first formulated in conjunction with a field study of extra-institutional protest in Japan.4 Others were derived from a comparative analysis of violence using case materials. In the present discussion^ we have tri