A Step Toward Understanding Popular Violence in China's Cultural Revolution

A LTHOUGH the dream of establishing a museum of the Cultural A~evolution (CR) in China is still difficult to fulfill,' the dream of an international CR school (wenge xue)2 has come true. Even in the absence of such a title, numerous scholars all over the world have been studying the unprecedented historical movement, the "ten-year great calamity" (shinian haojie) of the Chinese people. This article seeks to join this theoretical discussion, to add the voice of an anthropologist-eyewitness,3 and to highlight the violent characteristics of the CR, which were among the factors that held it together as a mass movement. This perspective emphasizes the role of the Chinese people as active agents, thus striving to understand the fundamental causes of the CR. In this article, I will first describe violent scenes and various contradictions/conflicts during the CR, and then through the examination of different approaches and theoretical orientations in both Chinese and Western literature (though I have no intention to attempt a comprehensive review) I will show what had been accomplished in the past in order to indicate the weak area in our studies. In the second half of the article I will develop an inadequately addressed dimension and introduce my argument.