Professor Shelley Hawks

sdhawks@bu.edu

is assistant professor of social science at Boston University, College of General Studies.

Among the stops on a recent CGS-sponsored trip to China was the Giant Panda Research Center in Chengdu. Visitors who give a donation to Panda research have the opportunity to hold a two-year-old panda!

Like many Americans, I was not exposed to Chinese history until relatively late in my education. During my college years, I took a history course focusing on China’s Communist Revolution. China’s anguished transition from a traditional society to a modernizing nation has captivated my interest ever since.

I began my study of Chinese language (Mandarin) the year after graduating from college. Chinese is not an easy language to learn for most Americans but it is not as difficult as it might seem. It’s best to start at a young age. It’s really hard to make significant progress until you immerse yourself within a Chinese-speaking environment in either P.R.C. or Taiwan. Convinced that learning Chinese is a crucial task for the next generation because of China’s rising world stature, I’ve encouraged my two sons, Sam (11) and Johnny (9), to learn Chinese. When they ask me why they spend their Saturday afternoons in a classroom learning Chinese, I tell them it’s because we plan to go to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Arguably no period in Chinese history is more dramatic or baffling than the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Why Chairman Mao instigated a revolution that shook his own party to its very foundations and robbed the most talented intellectuals of his generation of their productive life has yet to be adequately explained. My book in progress, Painting by Candlelight during the Cultural Revolution, offers a fresh perspective and a new approach to this important question of why a Cultural Revolution.

By the early 1960s, Mao perceived his revolution to be under siege by reform-minded pragmatists within the Chinese Communist Party, a prospect even more threatening to Mao since his ideological rival, Nikita Krushchev, seemed to be leading the Soviet block in a similar direction. Mao formulated a pre-emptive attack not only against “Soviet-style revisionism” but against the remnants of a philosophical and social system still deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, Confucianism. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was designed to achieve a total ideological house-cleaning. Mao feared the erosion of the revolutionary legacy he had built. For Mao’s generation of revolutionaries who came of age during the New Culture Movement (c. 1916-21), China’s Confucian tradition was considered a poisonous legacy. Mao’s revolutionary vision had been defined in opposition to Confucianism’s emphasis on the family, education, intellectual leadership and a robust ethical system. To finally cut the moorings that still connected New China to its Confucian past, Mao was willing to plunge Chinese society into violence and chaos. His stature and authority was so immense among China’s youth that a few simple pronouncements from him could incite a feverish revolution that did not truly end until his death.

During the Cultural Revolution, Maoist radicals attacked traditional Chinese painters, many of whom were actually loyal Communists, with special ferocity. The six painters in my study (Shi Lu, Pan Tianshou, Huang Yongyu, Li Keran, Feng Zikai and Li Kuchan) were among the most innovative and independent-minded of the relatively few artists in the People’s Republic of China who still painted using the inherited format of brush and ink. They were highly-regarded teachers and administrators within China’s top art academies when the persecution began in 1966. Based on unfair charges related to their paintings or their personal lives, these artists were incriminated and removed from their families. Their experience over the next decade was an emotionally wrenching one. They were sometimes beaten by their own students or criticized by their own colleagues or family members.

Shi Lu, "Fighting in Northern Shaanxi," (1959), ink and color on paper, Museum of Chinese Revolutionary History

The most dramatic story of persecution and resistance in my forthcoming study relates to the immensely talented painter and poet, Shi Lu (1919-1982). Shi Lu was a Communist Party member and one of the nation’s most highly regarded painters until 1964 when his painting “Fighting in Northern Shaanxi.” (1959) came under criticism for having positioned Chairman Mao on the edge of a cliff in a back-facing posture. Shi Lu energetically defended his painting and refused to make revisions to a painting that he considered a reverent portrayal of the Chairman whom he deeply admired. As his career spiraled downward, Shi Lu suffered a mental collapse. He was still recuperating in a psychiatric institution in 1966 when Red Guard radicals imprisoned him and subjected him to repeated struggle meetings and beatings.

Shi Lu, "Confucius," black and red ink on paper, private diaries circa 1974, Collection of the artist.

After several years of brutal treatment, Shi Lu escaped from confinement and wandered in the wilderness of Sichuan province. During his escape in 1969 he composed an important poem entitled “Repairing Heaven.” My translation of this poem will be included in an article entitled “Summoning Confucius: Inside Shi Lu’s Imagination during the Cultural Revolution” to appear in Ralph Croizier and Richard King, eds. Cultural Production during the Cultural Revolution (University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming). In this article, I also discuss a series of drawings and paintings honoring Confucius that Shi Lu created once he was allowed to return home in 1970. Shi Lu resuscitated the spirit of China’s most famous philosopher as a kind of self-emblem. He used Confucius’s persona to affirm the value of tradition and ethics as protest against the Cultural Revolution’s exterminatory impulses.

Visual art has generally been undervalued by academic scholars as a resource for historical investigation. Historians generally consider documents to be true documents only if they are written in prose. However the Cultural Revolution would scarcely be “researchable” if scholars were to limit themselves to these conventional methods. Even today in 2005 access to most P.R.C. archives related to the Cultural Revolution remains severely restricted. Even if one were to have access, the chaotic temper of the times was such that important things were rarely written down and what was written was heavily politicized or censored. In response to this unpromising situation for researching the Cultural Revolution “lost decade,” I formulated an alternative research strategy that gives weight to unconventional source material such as painting inscriptions, privately written poetry, diary entries, and retrospective accounts by participants and witnesses. By making use of such private sources, it is possible to piece together an authentic narrative of what it felt like emotionally and psychologically to experience the persecution of the Cultural Revolution period.

The life experience of painters or poets has generally been considered the exclusive province of art historians or literary historians. Though I am a historian by training and inclination, my work experience in the both the commercial art world in New York and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, instilled in me a special appreciation for the importance of art and creativity in contemporary life. I aspire to bring my knowledge of China’s artists to bear on important historical questions that have yet to be sufficiently addressed or explicated in the historical literature on twentieth-century China. My current research interests include creative autonomy, privacy, and particularly protest and dissent within Chinese twentieth-century society.