REVIEW: Ma Bo's Blood Red Sunset

Ma Bo
Howard Goldblatt, translator
Blood Red Sunset: A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
NY, NY: Viking, 1995, 371 pp. hb

reviewed by MC5 June 4, 2000

Ma Bo was a male Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China 
(1966-1976) and this book is about that period of time which Ma Bo 
spent mostly in Inner Mongolia with herders of the Mongol national 
minority.

MIM's 1999 Congress has already summed up the type of memoirs that 
the bourgeois press is cranking out with tremendous speed in 
connection to the Cultural Revolution: "the mode of production and 
structure of society with regard to patriarchy bored the rightists 
and ultraleftists during the Cultural Revolution. They also didn't 
like it when Mao kept telling them the enemy was only five percent 
of the party--and not a different five percent every day. They 
sought to bring about disunity in the proletarian camp by 
focussing on lifestyle questions." The memoirs being printed 
sometimes referred to as "survivor" literature or the like are the 
perfect genre for promoting the disunity of the proletarian camp 
if unchecked.

By its nature, any biography or autobiography will focus on the 
individual at the expense of class, nations and genders. Some 
authors will make up for that weakness while others will glorify 
that weakness by accentuating subjective and partial factual 
descriptions. Ma Bo is one of the many Chinese authors caught up 
in this sub-reformist trap, but the benefit of this book is that 
an astute proletarian reader can see all of what MIM is saying in 
one author.

Ma Bo was the son of Right-leaning high-ranking party officials. 
His mother was under criticism for a novel she wrote for the youth 
and his father once had the rank equivalent to an army commander 
(vice- minister).(p. 58-9) His young friend Xu Zuo who later in 
life proves to be Ma Bo's best --maybe life-saving --ally was the 
son of a former vice-minister who disgraced himself in the Great 
Leap. People whose parents achieved such rank were conservative in 
wanting to retain that rank and filled themselves with pride. Ma 
Bo said in regard to his first sight of the womyn he fell in love 
with, "Words fail me when I try to describe what it was like to 
see her all alone on the snow-covered steppe. I always believed 
that children of senior officials were leaves from the same tree. 
She and I didn't meet often, but I considered her a friend."(p. 
62) Her father was another very high official purged and then 
killed by the masses. Ma Bo openly defended her father as not 
being counterrevolutionary and got himself in trouble. The social 
background of Ma Bo's network and Ma Bo's obsession with it is not 
surprising, because the Western publishing houses always publish 
1000 memoirs of people of high social background for every one by 
people of proletarian background. The few things that Westerners 
read about China end up being by pre-scientific upper-class 
intellectuals of the "dissident" sort.

During the Cultural Revolution, Ma Bo's confusion in politics 
appeared almost immediately. He joined a conservative Red Guard 
organization designed to protect their party official parents from 
attack called the United Action Committee. Ma Bo does not fill in 
readers on this organization, so MIM will have to instead, because 
this organization is the key to Ma Bo's subsequent political 
development or lack thereof. The United Action Committee was the 
largest Red Guard faction in Beijing. It's leaders came under 
arrest at the end of 1966. Jiang Qing criticized the Beijing 
Garrison Command for supporting Ma Bo's Red Guard faction instead 
of the more radical Red Guards. Zhou Enlai also called on the 
military to stop supporting the conservatives and to help the 
leftists in the Red Guard movement to form the core of a united 
Red Guard movement. At the same time, Zhou Enlai pressed Mao 
successfully to release the United Action Commitee members under 
arrest. From this conflict, Ma Bo and others learned some of the 
distinctions in the central leadership in the party. In the 
critical struggle that required the conservatives to unite under a 
radical leadership core, the conservatives put forward different 
slogans. By this time they were happy to criticize Liu Shaoqi, 
because he was already a "dead dog," but instead of seeking a big 
struggle and big alliance to replace old power-holders,(1) the 
conservatives quoted Lin Biao that "'we should make ourselves the 
object of revolution. . . . If one does not revolutionize oneself, 
the revolution cannot proceed smoothly.'"(2) The intention of this 
statement issued at the height of ultraleftism in the Cultural 
Revolution was to keep the ultraleft from splitting the 
proletarian camp by finding fault with all their peers' individual 
behaviors. Instead, this statement and others failed to dig up the 
sub-reformist roots of rightist and ultraleft individualist 
thinking and led to a new wave of "self-cultivation," 
Confucian/Liu Shaoqi style. As a result, at this critical juncture 
of the revolution, the radicals dominated the media and all 
officials paid lip service to them, but power did not change 
hands: "all the vice-premiers survived, and their mass 
organizations also survived, so that the radicals gained nothing 
in terms of power."(3)

Throughout China one faction of Red Guards arose to defend party 
members loyal to Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi etc. by deflecting the 
spear of attack away from party members. These Red Guards turned 
out to be the ones that would vacillate wildly from rightist to 
ultraleft, sometimes aping their radical counterparts in the 
process, thereby lending further to confusion and also 
discrediting the whole Cultural Revolution. In their original 
rightist mode, Ma Bo's type of Red Guard had nothing to say about 
the structure of society. In the ultraleft mode, they found flaw 
in everyone and tended toward anarchism. When Ma Bo got to Inner 
Mongolia, he and his friends took up anarchism in the first 
movement to criticize party officials.(p. 69) Whether in rightist 
or ultraleftist guise, the Red Guards of Ma Bo's sort left the 
power-holders and direction of society unchanged.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo's memoirs are very similar to those of the 
widow of N. Bukharin in the Soviet Union in that they both focus 
on persynal loyalties, integrity and other supposedly timeless and 
context-less elements of so-called character. Under this sort of 
thinking, there is no mode of production, only individuals of 
outstanding or weak "character." Someone who is loyal is loyal 
even if the one he or she is loyal to turns into Adolf Hitler. 
According to Ma Bo and his friend Lei Xia, the turncoat is lowest 
of low making all other categories of people look good. Ma Bo's 
memoirs are even worse than Anna Larina's, because she at least 
had some idea of the general line struggle over the direction of 
society and chooses to downplay the line struggles. Ma Bo either 
avoids all such discussion or was completely unaware of such line 
struggle.

Ma Bo may protest that he is reporting on his political life and 
so is not avoiding line struggle, but failure to take a subject 
matter to the level of what Mao called "rational knowledge" is 
indeed failure to present the line struggle to readers. All that 
Ma Bo does is show the subjective perceptions of a member of the 
pre- scientific intelligentsia who never engaged the line he 
presumably would have been attacking had he known how. Ma Bo knew 
enough to criticize Jiang Qing for being an "empress dowager" 
allegedly keeping Mao under wraps while she ran the show,(pp. 121-
2, 132) but beyond that he knew nothing of the differences in 
direction offered by Deng and Jiang Qing. He even admitted to 
lying about not smearing Jiang Qing. He knew he did smear Jiang 
Qing and then denied it as a matter of pride. The reader is only 
lucky that Ma Bo admitted it in print. Ma Bo knew his fortunes 
improved when Jiang Qing's fortunes declined, but he did not know 
anything about the line differences. At the end of the book he is 
declaiming her again, with no substance: "'How could you have been 
such a fool, Chairman Mao, to marry someone like that? Your people 
are suffering terribly.'"(p. 364) Then he says, "'China, you 
cowered beneath the skirts of a witch.'"(p. 364)There was no 
mention of family farming, running industry for profit, pay 
incentives to increase work, allowing foreign exploiters use of 
Chinese workers, art in the service of proletarian politics etc.--
the issues which divided Deng and Jiang.

It is not surprising to us that Ma Bo came from a fiction-writing 
family and his own mother criticized him for being stuck in 
bourgeois novels.(p. 185) Cultural intellectuals can do great 
damage to movements, and we refer to people like Ma Bo who may or 
may not be vaguely revolutionary at the level of emotions and 
feelings as the "pre-scientific intelligentsia." Ma Bo put in 
tremendous energy trying to be revolutionary and he definitely had 
his good side that served Mao's line, but on the whole his 
political consciousness never developed to channel his own 
tremendous energy.

On the plus side, Ma Bo was willing to criticize his mother's 
work, ran away to go fight U.$. imperialists in Vietnam (without 
succeeding) and above all, he took up the call to go to the 
countryside by volunteering for perhaps the most difficult 
assignment possible, the freezing cold of remote Inner Mongolia 
where the people lived a very poor life. He went from being an 
elite Beijing student to asking for permission to go to the most 
difficult military conditions in China.

When he arrived in Inner Mongolia, he imagined himself to be one 
of the most radical of radical Red Guards and he beat up a herder 
in such a way that he believes he caused the man's subsequent 
death. As promised, Ma Bo did not varnish his account. Attacking a 
herder was ultraleft--seeing too many enemies-- and it 
demonstrated Ma Bo's lack of an overall view of society, a sense 
of its structure and who would be enemy and who would not be. In 
particular, we should stress that in handling the pre-scientific 
intelligentsia like Ma Bo, there is lacking a quantitative sense. 
Hence, when a herder expresses some bourgeois feelings, even 
slightly, Ma Bo pounces for the (physical) attack, because Ma Bo 
himself operates at the level of feelings.

By the way, Ma Bo appears to have been the strongest persyn in the 
whole book, as he demonstrates in wrestling matches, fights and 
physical labor--chopping down 400 trees a day for instance. His 
work ranged from lumber, to coal, to dynamiting to horse driving. 
In this regard, the book is not a run-of-the-mill whining of the 
pre-scientific intelligentsia. We gain some insight into manual 
labor from the perspective of the physically strong.

Right away, Ma Bo's expedition to Inner Mongolia is one of self-
esteem and pride. He complains immediately that no one greeted him 
as a hero the way the people in the countryside greeted students 
from the cities in the newspapers.(p. 12)

Then following the practice of Red Guards in the cities, Ma Bo and 
Lei Xia search a herder's hut for hidden wealth and old world 
possessions. They found none and killed the herder's dog. Xu Zuo 
showed up to talk sense, but Ma Bo stood his ground. The herder 
was classed as a "poor peasant," but Ma Bo said it didn't matter 
and that the beaten man was beaten in such a way as to be OK 
later.(p. 18) Interestingly enough, the revolutionary committee in 
the locale backed Ma Bo up and put the man who cracked Ma Bo's 
skull in the fight under supervision.(p. 19) The account raises 
the problem of memoirs--that the other side is not heard. In this 
case, there may be two sides not heard, the side of the herders 
and the side of the revolutionary committee on why this particular 
herder may have been suspect. From the point of view of the 
bourgeoisie, it does not matter whose side is correct: the 
strongest and wealthiest individuals always win when fights are 
reduced to a one-on-one level. Thus, the more he-said-she-said 
conflicts and rumors in the whole society, the better from the 
point of view of the bourgeoisie--if the oppressed and exploited 
take the bait. Spreading these memoirs does exactly that. The 
preferred course of the oppressed and exploited is to keep things 
focussed at the group level with a firm eye to numbers and overall 
direction while letting the bourgeoisie corrode itself with its 
own individualism, subjectivism and partial view of things.

The same thing in the United $tates is seen in cases of crime. 
Individual cases are handled incorrectly all the time. Witnesses 
have proved unreliable in about one-third to one-half of all 
situations. There is a tendency of individualists and pre-
scientific people to focus on each case, instead of the statistics 
that show the United $tates is the world's imprisonment leader. 
While the disposition of each case is uncertain, the overall 
number of prisoners is not, but somehow ideology blocks the 
conclusions that would have to be drawn about the injustice system 
in the United $tates overall, while there is no shortage of 
opinion about the supposed crimes of O.J. Simpson or Bill 
Clinton/Monica Lewinsky.

Does MIM really know if Ma Bo deserved his arrest and subsequent 
rehabilitation or not? Certainly Ma Bo had his good side, but in 
the United $tates, he could have done a lot more prison time just 
for his numerous fights, never mind his criticisms of Jiang Qing 
and networking with reactionaries. As it was, Ma Bo was briefly 
arrested and then sent out to labor in the most difficult places 
in Inner Mongolia. He says in his diary of 1970: "Letting me live 
among other people but forbidding them to have anything to do with 
me is worse than dropping me in the middle of a desert. I'd love 
to find some sympathy somewhere; even pity would do."(p. 169)

Ma Bo tries to impress us with his sincerity. Everywhere 
throughout the book, he is looking at emotions, not results or 
direction. Sentences like the following abound: "I wanted to see 
if there was any sympathy hidden in her eyes, but she averted 
them."(p. 159) For Ma Bo, emotional contact with humyns was 
everything and without it he says he became a pure animal.

Not surprisingly, Ma Bo had to be reminded that his ideas about 
humyn character are wrong. When Mao's right-hand Lin Biao 
attempted a coup and died fleeing, Ma Bo concluded that everything 
Lin ever did was wrong. The party had to tell him: "You can stop 
dreaming. Anyone who opposed Lin Biao before his fall from power 
is a counterrevolutionary."(pp. 224, 254) Across China, there were 
those like Ma Bo trying to say that Lin was always no good and 
they had been right to criticize him based on their presumedly 
constant persynal characters.

With such an obsession on persynal character the whole way through 
the book, it is not surprising that the book missed completely on 
the larger issues. The book jacket denounces the environmental 
destruction wrought during the Cultural Revolution, but Ma Bo only 
mustered a paragraph or two of denunciation without the details, 
(e.g., p. 352) and in characteristic self-contradiction but 
consistent pride he says a few pages later: "The company had three 
buildings when we arrived; now the people were housed in nearly 
two hundred. There wasn't a single tree on the steppe when we 
arrived; now there was a line of them, all green and shiny, behind 
the company area. The herdsmen never ate green vegetables before 
we arrived; now the company could boast a fifty-acre truck farm, 
with turnips, squash, potatoes, and scallions. Those were the 
changes we wrought."(p. 363) It is a measure of how shallow 
Western politics and media are that an accusation about an 
historical period's devastation of the environment is repeated so 
casually with so little evidence, taking advantage of the currents 
of anti-communism, individualism and fascination with upper- class 
"dissidents." Reading the latter paragraph from Ma Bo above, one 
could just have easily concluded that the Red Guard were green 
paragons.

Conclusion

The translation into English is lively, making full use of slang 
and idioms appropriate to young and middle-aged people of the 
United $tates today. It is also very graphic and unvarnished with 
frequent descriptions of feces and mucous. The book is very much a 
Western autobiography that Westerners will relate to very easily -
- unfortunately without getting too deeply into politics. We can 
only hope that it will raise some things that people will look 
into more fully later in life.

Notes: 1. Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural 
Revolution (Berkeley, CA: 1978), pp. 192-8. 2. Ibid., p. 199. 3. 
Ibid., pp. 200-1.

[Another review of the Ma Bo book focussing just on patriarchy 
will appear in a subsequent issue of MIM Notes.]