The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China. By Ma Jisen. [Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004. 466 pp. Hard cover $39.00, ISBN 962-996-149-0; paperback $25.00, ISBN 962-996-202-0.]

Extract

This superb history of the Cultural Revolution inside China's foreign ministry is a carefully documented account by a participant whose overriding concern is with the factual record and with setting it straight. Ma Jisen, who worked in the West European Department between 1952 and 1969, asserts that on a number of crucial points popular understanding of Mao's assault on revisionism remains shaped by what are really little more than “dramatically oversimplified… [and] brazenly distorted…cartoonized rumour accounts" (pp. 403–404). In support of this assertion, she adduces much new and powerful evidence, especially from the first years of the Cultural Revolution. The end result is a book that may well prompt many readers to seriously reconsider much of our accepted knowledge about what happened – and why – in those tumultuous years when the British Mission in Beijing was set ablaze, Chinese students waving the Little Red Book were roughed up by the KGB in Red Square, and Mao turned from obsessing about American imperialist paper tigers to describing (in conversation with Edgar Snow in December 1970) that country's Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, as “a good person (haoren), the number one good person in the world!” The author is not out to replace old myths with new ones. She finds no simple answers and, in fact, does not even seem to seek them. Much of the value of her work lies in the subtle way it brings to the fore the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution. On occasion, her raw data, her carefully selected illustrations from contemporary texts, speak only too well for themselves: “If you want peace, the revisionists will not let you have peace,” she quotes Foreign Minister Chen Yi as saying in June 1966 – then, a few lines later, she has him denouncing, in the very same speech, the revisionist fallacy of seeking peaceful co-existence (pp. 13–14).