Morning Sun (2003, Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon and Geremie R. Barmé)
(available at http://www.morningsun.org/)
reviewed by Prairie Fire of monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com (slightly edited)
“You young people are full of vigor and vitality. You are full of life. You are like the morning sun. You are our hope.” — Mao Zedong
“When we saw the light of dawn, we felt as if this was the dawn of a new era for mankind. We felt we were about to embark on an unprecedented revolution. It would bring about a society that was truly egalitarian and democratic.” — ex-red guard Tang Rae
Morning Sun, directed by Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon and Geremie R. Barmé, is one of the few documentaries that examines China’s cultural revolution in any detail or complexity. It contains amazing footage of red guard rallies in Tiananmen, footage of Lin Biao, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Wang Li and Guan Feng. There is also footage from model operas and the mass movements. The film is worth watching for this footage alone.
The film mostly focuses on the height of the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1969. However, it also covers the events leading up to the cultural revolution: Liu Shaoqi’s rise after the Great Leap, Lin Biao’s elevation of politics in command in the PLA, Jiang Qing’s work in the arts and the rise of new proletarian culture, the building frustration with bureaucratic privilege and problems in education. It covers Liu Shaoqi’s suppression of students and the rise of the red guard and rebel worker movements. The campaign against the Four Olds that began in August of 1966 and the power seizures of 1967 are portrayed as a frenzy of violence. The mass movement power seizures ended and “consolidation” began as Mao shifted toward the cadres and against the mass movements late 1967 and through 1968. The film covers the rise of the cult. It covers rise of the PLA in politics and its role at the Ninth Congress. The film briefly covers Lin Biao’s fall and death in 1971. Except for Lin Biao’s death, the film skips the years of the early 1970s, except to comment on Nixon’s visits and the changes in Chinese foreign policy influenced by Zhou Enlai. It covers the counter-revolutionary demonstration at Zhou Enlai’s memorial on April 5th of 1976. It briefly shows Jiang Qing at the trial of the “Lin Biao and Gang of Four anti-party cliques.” The film is a good history lesson for so-called “Maoists” who have the simplistic notion that the cultural revolution was a single event running from 1966 to 1976, as though red guards were running around seizing power in 1976. The glory days of the cultural revolution existed between 1966 and 1969 or 1971, at the latest. The many phases of the cultural revolution will be an eye-opener to some. However, those who know something about this history will feel that the struggles involved are only barely touched on in the film.
The film is clear that the rebel movements were genuine expressions of discontent. However, rather than taking the Maoist view that the cultural revolution was a real struggle between two classes, the film instead characterizes these struggles in bourgeois terms. The film compares rebel youth to The Gadfly, a Russian tale of “revolutionary idealism and romantic love” dubbed into Chinese with a score by Shostakovich. The Gadfly is a Byronic hero, a scarred outlaw figure. He is contrasted by interviewees to the image of Lei Feng, implying that most of the youth were originally moved by only romantic notions of liberation and not moved by notions of proletarian dedication and discipline. Thus, the film peddles the revisionist criticism that the socialist conception of human nature and socialist art reduce life to stick figures. Yet the film reduces the cultural revolution to its own bourgeois stick figure explanations: teen rebellion, mob violence, religious fanaticism and lack of bourgeois democracy. One example of the film’s bourgeois outlook is given by ex-red guard Zhu Xue Qin’s description of his rebellion, “this was part of a universal and timeless adolescent impulse. If I was emerged in religious thinking, perhaps I would have become one of the faith.” The film constantly downplays class struggle. Yet the film’s view, albeit bourgeois, is not entirely negative. The film implies that the act of rebellion is deeply human, but the humanistic side was lost to extremism and conformity in the late 1960s.
According to the film, the world of the cultural revolutionaries lost all subtlety. Like a model opera, the world was stark, only black and white. The film fails to grasp that the starkness in socialist art is a way to draw out, to make visible, the underlying power dynamics that shape the world. People with pre-scientific and bourgeois outlooks fail to see the power struggles in the “everyday.” Rendering of the world in unequivocal terms provokes them into seeing through the bourgeois and pre-scientific matrix of the “ordinary” and “everyday.” The film documentarians fail to grasp the point of socialist art. What they fail to see is that the cultural revolution appeared to participants like a model opera because class struggle had become so acute. The film fails to connect how both socialist art and the phenomenology of the cultural revolutionaries traces back to the acute class struggle taking place.
Ex-red guard Zhu Xue Yang remarks on what the film sees as a paradoxically romantic and violent time, “the zeal for revolutionary ideals was accompanied by an underlying fear. It was a time of the poet and executioner. The poet scattered roses everywhere and the executioner cast a long shadow of fear.” Chen Boda, nominal head of the Cultural Revolution Group, quotes Lenin’s comparison of Bolsheviks to Jacobins in his 1944 essay on Mao’s Hunan Report. Mao’s Report was often alluded to during the height of the cultural revolution. “It’s excellent!” appeared in the Chinese press during period of red guard activism. Mass movement leaders rejected calls for “moderation” and non-violence according to the film. This radical sentiment was expressed in a red guard leaflet, “We revolutionaries are monkey kings. We will turn the world upside down… the messier the better.” The film sees this mix of idealism, rebellion and violence as paradoxical because the film fails to grasp the cultural revolution as a life and death struggle between two classes and what this inevitably means in the real world.
Song Binbin, known for having pinned a red guard armband on Mao, regrets the role she played. She states, “violence spread out of control like a plague.” More time in the film is spent describing the red guard and rebel worker violence than either the systemic violence of capitalism, the violence of Liu Shaoqi’s white terror, or, later, the rightist counter current violence against the mass movements. This leaves one with a skewed picture that the mass movement and its leaders were the main perpetrators of violence. In addition, the film spends a disproportionate time on the suppression of the counter-revolutionary demonstration at Zhou Enlai’s memorial in 1976. This emphasis on leftist violence is all out of proportion and is typical of narratives on the cultural revolution. Most of the interviewees are open rightists, revisionists or those who present themselves as onetime true believers who claim to now be disillusioned with socialism entirely. There is no reason to think that the interviewees have any special insight; anecdotal recollections are notoriously unreliable, they not a scientific basis for summing up something like the cultural revolution. Of all the interviewees, Liu Shaoqi’s wife, Wang Guangmei probably has the most air time. We get to hear Wang Guangmei whine about having to wear a ping pong ball necklace and her “humiliation” by Kuai Dafu, but she says nothing of her direction of the white terror at Qinghua or how the trend she represents dismantled socialism fully under Deng Xiaoping. Even if every act of violence of the cultural revolution years could be placed at the doorstep of the left, this blood would be a drop in the ocean compared to the horrors of capitalism inflicted on the Chinese people, a fifth of the world’s population.
In a similar vein, the film criticizes lack of bourgeois legality and lack of bourgeois democracy during the cultural revolution:
One interviewee says, “The people in power had always suppressed the masses while taking good care of themselves. So, when Mao said to overthrow those taking the capitalist road, all those in authority were dumped. The masses couldn’t careless who was taking the capitalist road. Initially, it was liberating. But, without the rule of law, the mob mentality took over.”
Another interviewee says, “The cultural revolution was the first time people had a chance to challenge the privilege of the Party, nobody had any legal protection..”
Li Rae, purged one time secretary of Mao, says, “the real problem of unrestricted power was never really addressed.”
Liu Shaoqi’s daughter, Liu Tiang says, “The words of a single persyn, of Chairman Mao, could override Party policy, and Party policy could override the law.”
Instead of examining these struggles through the lenses of class analysis, the film opts for cliche bourgeois reflections about violence and lack of so-called “democracy.” Contrary to the bourgeois view, the struggle between two antagonistic classes could not have been anything other than violent. Revolution is not a dinner party. Rather than seeing social change as a function of power struggles by groups, the film takes a naive bourgeois outlook. Abandoning power analysis, the film seeks answers about the cultural revolution in an eternal so-called “human nature,” in lord of the flies youth behavior and, typically, even sexual repression.
The film shows the heights of Mao’s cult of persynality. Ex-red guard Wang Lixiong compares the admiration of Mao to the admiration of rock stars. Clips of PLA soldiers allegedly curing deaf mutes through loyalty to Mao and the practice of acupuncture are shown to highlight the level the cult had reached as it filled the void after the end of the mass movements. This needs to be seen in perspective: Are not fraudulent claims of all kinds made even more often in the amerikan media?
Pre-science and religious thinking existed in China during the cultural revolution, just as it has in all societies. Capitalism is filled with cults of all kinds: religious cults, celebrity cults, political cults and even CIA pirate ship operations, fake-Maoist new age cult pyramid schemes. More pseudo-science and religious thinking exists in amerika today than existed in socialist China. In China under Mao, the masses strove to see the world through the lenses of power struggle and revolutionary science. In amerika, with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, people spend their time wading through tomes of how birthdays relate to love lives. Significant numbers of the Chinese masses, emerging from feudalism, entered the matrix of Mao’s persynality cult. However, from the standpoint of science, such is preferable to being in an Amerikan Idol matrix of western capitalism. There is a real criticism of the cult to be made. However, our bourgeois critics need to get a grip here and see this in perspective. Whatever errors were made in socialist China need to be seen in context and against the conditions in the rest of the world.
Loyalty to Mao and practicing Maoism are not the same thing. This is something that is often confused, even by those calling themselves “Maoist.” Maoists face the truth about the successes and failures of the great social experiments in China from 1966 to 1976. Maoists are revolutionary scientists, not merely fans of Mao. Maoists don’t cherry-pick historical facts to soft-peddle errors by the Maoist camp in those years. Even among those calling themselves “Maoist” today, the cult of persynality still casts a long shadow. Maoists should be clear on this: The cult of persynality is fundamentally opposed to the goals of communism. However, it might be expedient to embrace the cult in certain circumstances. Again, it comes down to the issue of proletarian power. If the cult can be means toward that end, then it is not necessarily a bad thing. If it gets in the way of that end, it becomes a tool of reaction. The cult may have been necessary to dislodge Liu Shaoqi, but it also was turned against the left. Did not Hua Guofeng use the cult to suppress the leftists in 1976?
The film correctly highlights the role of Lin Biao in the cultural revolution and his role in promoting the cult. It also highlights the demoralization that the masses faced following the end of the mass movements in late 1967 and 1968 and Lin Biao’s downfall in 1971. Liu Tiang says, “Lin Biao was the one who attacked my father [Liu Shaoqi] most viciously. And, then, suddenly, Lin Biao was not chairman Mao’s successor. He had been plotting to assassinate the chairman? This had a profound effect on how the people saw the cultural revolution.” The film does not weigh-in on the fishy story about Lin Biao’s alleged coup.
If there is one theme in the film, it is that revolutions eat their own. Some of the first red guards, the sons and daughters of “red” backgrounds were swept away as the tide turned against them when the Cultural Revolution Group refuted the red lineage theory. Ex-red guard Yu Luowen, “what Jiang Qing said then really appealed to the common people. She criticized the saying ‘father a reactionary, son a bastard.’ She said, ‘that’s garbage.’ Her apparent outrage made us feel that she was our savior.” Like the earlier red guards criticized by Jiang Qing, latter red guards also ended up on the losing side in late 1967 and into 1968. One of the interviewees criticized the Cultural Revolution Group for taking no responsibility for the fires they had helped fan, even as Mao later sought to put out the fires in late 1967 and 1968. Many in the Group and their allies fell from power for the “excesses,” including Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu, and later, in all probability, Chen Boda and Lin Biao. As the tide turned in late 1967 and 1968 and the mass movements and some of the leftists were purged, one interviewee felt betrayed by Jiang Qing who, like Chen Boda and Lin Biao, had taken very militant stances in support of the mass movements but now changed her tune a bit. Opportunism was a big problem within the Maoist camp and hurt the struggle for socialism. Later, there is the trial of the “Lin Biao and Gang of Four anti-party cliques.” And, finally, even Mao falls posthumously as Deng Xiaoping’s counter-revolution runs its course. Maoists don’t see this as a case of revolutions eating their own. Rather, Maoists see this as the result of life and death struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. In the real world, revolutions are messy affairs.
The film quotes Lin Biao that the spiritual atom bomb of Maoism is the most powerful weapon. It is a weapon that the imperialists are unable to wield. Ex-red guard Li Nayang, “We were taught at a young age the purpose of life was not to seek happiness for yourself, that was embarrassingly vulgar. A glorious and fulfilling life can only be achieved by dedicating yourself to a great revolutionary cause.” Even though this film has obvious flaws, it still has educational purposes for serious students of Maoism. Because of the film’s bourgeois approach and the complexities it raises, it is probably not the best way to introduce people to the cultural revolution. The film ends ambiguously with a Maoist sentiment, “The specter of Mao is never far away. When people feel oppressed and powerless, when a system permits no legitimate protest or dissent, Mao emerges as a possibility, a champion of “it’s right to rebel!’”
***
Also see: Two Roads Defeated part 1; Two Roads Defeated part 2; Two Roads Defeated part 3; Mao Declassified; Some of Us reviewed (Part 1); Some of Us reviewed (Part 2);Some of Us reviewed (Part3); A Maoist-Third Worldist Review of Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past; In memory of the great Lenin..; Some lines within the CCP in the Maoist period; Shubel Morgan video On the Theory of Productive Forces; The Essence of “Theory of Productive Forces” Is to Oppose Proletarian Revolution; The Lin Biao Centennial, hooray!; Lin Biao excerpt on the TOPF with important commentary by Prairie Fire; Mao’s Bloody Revolution Revealed (with Philip Short, 2007); Really supporting the GPCR vs. Opportunist Yapping;Morning Sun (2003, Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon and Geremie R. Barmé); Subel Morgan’s Series On “On the Theory of the Productive Forces”
