Yang Jisheng’s masterpiece The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was published in 2017 in Hong Kong. The Financial Times called it “a work of breathtaking courage.” The journalist and historian lives in Beijing, where his books are banned and he was forbidden from leaving the country to accept an award for “conscience and integrity in journalism” at Harvard (for his 2008 history, Tombstone: The Great Famine; “I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book”). Jisheng wrote about Chairman Mao’s renewed 1963 attacks on literature and art in Chapter 1: Major Events Preceding the Cultural Revolution:
“The new round of criticism was sparked by two of Mao’s memos on reports by the Propaganda Departments literature and arts section. On December 12, 1963, Mao wrote, ‘The economic foundation has already changed for socialism, but the arts departments that serve as part of the superstructure for this foundation remain a major problem to this day… Many Communist Party members enthusiastically advocate feudalist and bourgeois art and not socialist art–isn’t that absurd?’ The second memo, on June 27, 1964, stated that China’s literature and arts associations and most of the publications they controlled had failed to execute the party’s policies and had ‘arrived at the brink of revisionism.’
Around the time of these two memos, criticism targeted the leaders of the Ministry of Culture and of key organisations, including Qi Yanming, Xia Yan, Tian Han, Yang Hansheng, and Shao Quentin. Many literary works were also criticized, along with certain viewpoints on literature and art, such as ‘writing about people who are neither heroic nor advanced’ and ‘seeing no harm in ghost stories.’
When listening to a report on November 1964, Mao said, ‘If the entire Ministry of Culture isn’t in our hands, how much of it is? Twenty percent? Thirty percent? Or maybe half? Is most of it our of our hands? It look to me as if at least half of it is. The Ministry of Culture has collapsed.’ This may be why the Cultural Revolution used the culture sector as its breaking point.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, played a crucial role in mass criticism in the literary and arts circles. In a speech at a national symposium of performers convened by Zhou Enlai on June 23, 1964, Jiang told workers in the literature and arts fields to ‘carefully orient themselves’: ‘Everything onstage these days is about emperors, generals, and ministers, gifted scholars and beautiful ladies– all that feudal bourgeois stuff. That’s not going to protect our economic base, but will sabotage it instead.’ On June 26, Mao wrote a memo on Jiang Qing’s speech: ‘Well said.’ Jian Qing described herself as the ‘sentinel’ of the ideological realm, and this was true; she was always monitoring the ideological realm on Mao’s behalf, and whenever she detected something new that went against Mao’s thinking, she would report it to Mao and launch a criticism.”
Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, translated and edited by Stacy MOsher and Guo Jian, English translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Photograph of Yang Jisheng on September 18, 2010 by Youxin Pavilion 用心阁
The Intermediate Period 