Ma Bo, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and patriarchy

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). In a previous review, MIM handled Ma Bo's general 
lack of political development and unscientific view of life during 
the time he spent in Inner Mongolia with herders of the Mongol 
national minority. Here we handle his views of patriarchy. Ma Bo 
had a hard time with the opposite sex from fourth grade onwards. 
He was afraid of being called a "sex fiend." He wrote a self-
criticism in 1964 for his preoccupation with sex.(p. 24)

In the depths of his struggles in Inner Mongolia where he came to 
be known as an "active counterrevolutionary," he said only the 
thought of a pretty womyn he liked kept him alive. He constantly 
alternated between thinking he had higher revolutionary 
aspirations to thinking he went all the way to Inner Mongolia only 
to have the same obsessions with sex.(p. 25)

In his military unit, people were not allowed to start romances 
inside or outside the unit for at least three years. The order was 
in line with the push toward later marriages in China.(p. 175) We 
don't know if this was onerous to everyone the way it was to Ma Bo 
and presumably city youth, especially those from the pre-
scientific intelligentsia.

One interesting observation that Ma Bo makes is that in his 
constant search for approval from others, he often wished he was a 
womyn, because he believed people were nicer to wimmin than men, 
and in Ma Bo's case, the strongest man in the area and deemed 
threatening. From MIM's perspective, Ma Bo spent much too much 
time concerned about his self-esteem and not enough time concerned 
with his scientific understanding. His feelings led him astray 
often, landing him in fights and directing his political activity 
in a vacillating direction.

A related point is that Ma Bo says that party leaders tended to 
end up with pretty wimmin around them.  When the party leaders had 
sex, there ended up being a scandal and demotions, but nothing 
about the fact that pretty wimmin were well treated or hung around 
party leaders was wrong per se. Ma Bo felt discriminated against.

While Ma Bo's accentuated male features of muscle landed him 
harder and harder work and higher expectations, pretty wimmin 
obtained good treatment according to Ma Bo. "Pretty girls were 
always welcome in the offices of the men who ran the show; they 
were first in line for promotions and got all the cushy 
assignments. Unlike us boys, who worked our asses off for 
nothing."(p. 315) We suspect that Ma Bo's charge is true, at least 
in some locales in revolutionary China under Mao. (Today wimmin do 
a disproportionate share of China's field work, while men take the 
easy jobs in the city.) It would be difficult to detect and 
certainly impossible to prevent promotions of wimmin based on 
their looks. If Ma Bo's charge is true, this is an interesting 
example of how sexual privilege works according to the MIM line, 
but once again, MIM would say it does not mean the society is not 
going forward. For that matter, we are quite sure that although 
China made great strides statistically compared with pre-
revolutionary China and Asian societies that remained capitalist, 
wimmin climbing through the political ranks had yet to attain 
their 50% share.

On a related point, Ma Bo felt that wimmin still had old attitudes 
toward men. Ma Bo was the strongest person around, and hence if 
his accentuated male characteristics were attractive to the 
opposite sex, he should have had attention from wimmin, after his 
three years of service were up. Instead, he felt that "The local 
girls avoided you as soon as they heard you were a driver. They 
called us 'horse-ass nibblers.'"(p. 326)

MIM has no intention of implementing policies that forbid sex in 
the military or elsewhere. Only very narrow conflict-of-interest 
situations warrant not having romantic relations across 
professional boundaries.   Too much Christian-type energy gets 
wasted on sex issues that divert from scientific development.

Ma Bo's political leaders started dropping off like flies in sex 
scandals. Wang Wanping was a medical doctor in his military unit, 
Company Seven. Wang made up a story about rape by a national 
minority herdsman so as to explain why his girlfriend had to have 
an abortion.(pp. 174-5) Such things would happen even more often 
in the United $tates in any attempt to impose a sex-related 
behavior policy like the one in China.

Then Ma Bo's number one enemy political commissar Shen got caught 
having affairs.(pp. 216-7) He was replaced with Ma Bo's allies, a 
turning point in his struggle for rehabilitation.

One of the wimmin involved in the affair was known to be obsessed 
with joining the party. She received her application the day after 
sleeping with the party official in charge. When she criticized Ma 
Bo for being counterrevolutionary, Ma Bo dismissed it as coming 
from someone "who thought nothing of using her body to gain 
admission to the party."(p. 273) MIM trains its people in science. 
Whether or not someone used her body to join the party, her 
statement is either true or false independent of that fact. Ma Bo 
should have dealt with the substance of what she said about him. 
It is the bourgeoisie that benefits from obscuring the truth and 
making everything a question of individual motivations and 
personal attacks. When people are forced to line up on differing 
sides of great questions, it is the bourgeoisie that is going to 
lose. That is why the bourgeoisie sidetracks the people from the 
great questions and lowers them into personality conflicts.  Of 
course the people who make revolution are flawed at all times, but 
that does not mean the society cannot progress in spite of those 
flaws by applying science to class struggle. People are not born 
knowing how to manufacture penicillin and so are born with the 
flaw of being able to die from the slightest infection; however, 
the application of science lets people surpass the weaknesses they 
are born with or grow up with.

Only a generation earlier, wimmin in China did not aspire to 
careers of their own. Now according to Ma Bo, there are wimmin who 
not only want careers, but they set about aggressively to get 
careers in political power and use tools they shouldn't. That's 
not all bad.

MIM does not want to be relativist: Having sex with a man to gain 
a party membership application is wrong. However, in the scale of 
things, it's a less than secondary wrong. If the party or the 
revolutionary masses find themselves bogged down in examining 
cases like this, they will definitely throw out the revolutionary 
baby with the bath water.

The radical scientist asks right away, had this womyn had the 
opportunity to get an application from a womyn, would she have 
traded sex for power? Would her womyn political comrade leader 
have forced sex for the party application? In other words, if the 
structure of society were already correct, would this problem of 
trading sex for party applications still exist? MIM thinks not in 
most cases. Rather than focussing on what the individual did 
wrong, in millions of cases, we prefer to change the underlying 
situation and forget about the cases. It tires us out and 
distracts us from the things we have to do change the structure.

With regard to the social structure of China, if China had 
accomplished a 50% share of wimmin in political power, it might be 
time to crack down on wimmin like the one Ma Bo complained of. 
Alternatively it might turn out to be necessary to have one more 
radical structural change before all the wimmin trading sex for 
power disappear--not to mention the men who get involved in 
withholding power for sex.

Yet, since no modern society has achieved a 50% share of wimmin in 
political power, we do not know that there would be any wimmin who 
would trade sex for power once equality had been achieved. Ma Bo's 
complaint may only make the gender structure of political power 
worse and thereby increase the chances that wimmin trade sex for 
power. Since men currently monopolize political power everywhere, 
it is wrong to put wimmin or men under suspicion for political 
contact with each other. The structure has to be dealt with first, 
and only secondly or thirdly or fourthly the individual behavior 
of the tiny minority that will cling to the past no matter how 
easy it is to relinquish it once the structure of society has 
changed.