FRITZ STERN
527
My Chinese interlocutors talked openly of the cultural revolu–
tion: to exorcise the now-acknowledged horror, to welcome the
present relaxation, the uncertain atmosphere of a Chinese Thermi–
dor or a Chinese NEP? At times their talk seemed uniform, perhaps
almost prescribed: Was this a totalitarian repudiation of totalitarian–
ism? Yet I thought I sensed a genuine relief that madness and vio–
lence had not only ceased, about a decade ago, but that one could
now talk about the horrors of the past-with a passion that perhaps
had as much to do with the oft-expressed faith that it can't happen
again, as with the past itself.
My visit coincided with a carefully planned and executed rein–
terpretation of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman . He previ–
ously had been exculpated of the sins of the cultural revolution, but
in June 1981, after the most intense, two-year intra-party debate, a
new authoritative judgment was at last issued: it no longer accepted
the myth that the Gang of Four had unleashed the horrors and com–
mitted historic errors without Mao's awareness. The official state–
ment insisted that Mao's
thought
remained the inviolable guide to
revolutionary practice, but that his
thinking
in the last years of his life
had often been erroneous. Freely translated: the abstract dogma
remains, the policies that flowed from it were sometimes wrong.
Like many a Chinese emperor, Mao rests in his (Leninist) tomb,
part god, part man .
Great upheavals always raise questions of causality; the need to
acknowledge Mao's partial complicity so as to legitimate a radical
deviation from his path provided a further impetus to confront the
past. I was reminded of
1984,
that great essay on the centrality of
history; the degradation of history in a totalitarian society proves
how important history is to rulers who must control the past in order
to justify or legitimize the present. History becomes the politically
prescribed recital of a past adjudged to be politically useful. Any
sense of an authentic past is wiped out, and the people are force-fed
a dogmatic pabulum that is meant to strengthen their political ortho–
doxy. In a totalitarian country, history is at once worthless and
omnipresent; in a China groping for a less dogmatic future , the
present effort to reinterpret postliberation history might encourage a
slightly freer attitude toward the past. The traditional dogmas of the
Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history presumably would remain
sacrosanct; the principles of Marxism-Leninism are enshrined in the
constitution. But the openness to foreign ideas and to new, "bour–
geois" disciplines has probably led to some questioning of funda-
