The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent Into Madness During the Cultural Revolution by Tan Hecheng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bureaucratic Nightmares

Tan blames the official Chinese administrative Bureaucracy, because of its existence, its persistence, and its peculiar significance, for the lethal insanity of the Cultural Revolution . But I don't buy it.

Bureaucracy doesn't explain the emotional intensity, the physically violent ferocity, the sudden eruption and equally sudden cessation of what was essentially a gang culture among the various factions of the Red Guards.

Bureaucracy doesn't account for the holding of family grudges for decades and yet the failure to remember the civic horror of the destruction of virtually all institutional life immediately upon the return to somewhat normal living conditions.

Bureaucracy doesn't produce the evident hatred or the techniques of masochistic torture that millions of so-called 'black elements', former landed peasants and their children, endured.

Bureaucracy isn't instinctively on the lookout for the creation of a defenceless scapegoat in these 'black elements' as a response to obviously false rumours.

Bureaucracy, if anything, remembers, it doesn't forget. It likes things documented and in triplicate, and with clear authorisation by the rules stated in codes, and regulations, and statutes and precedents. Yet these are entirely absent in the execution of almost every aspect of the craziness of 1967.

Bureaucracy has an organisational solidity, a pyramidal stability that ensures the consistent transmission of orders and directives from the top of the pyramid to its foundations. This is not the way in which the Cultural Revolution, according to Tan's own account, was thrust upon the country from Mao. Communication with Beijing was not through 'proper channels' but via publicly broadcast directives which were interpreted in widely different, often contradictory, ways throughout the country.

The Bureaucracy was Mao's target, Tan says. Why would the Bureaucracy lead the effort to ensure its own destruction; and when that effort ultimately failed, proceed to business as usual as if no such effort had ever taken place? Why would it continue to promote the cult of Mao afterwards?

Almost as an aside, Tan says "The tragedy of China is that experience has accustomed our people to disaster and bloodshed, and even to apathy and forgetfulness." This is a heart-rending cry of cultural despair and the reader is brought almost to tears by Tan's twenty-year long crusade to overcome both apathy and forgetfulness among his countrymen, more than forty years after the events themselves. But how on earth can Bureaucracy be blamed for the inuredness of an entire nation to disaster and bloodshed. Surely Bureaucracy would provide the archival means for analysing, debating, and, in a sense, reliving these experiences however terrible.

Yet another incidental remark seems out of place to me. Tan thinks that "It's not death that's at issue, but how it happened and for what reason." I read this as the motivation for the book. He researches and writes, in other words, in order to understand. But not to achieve justice for either the dead or the still living who will soon be dead. His intention is not even to assist in creating a programme so that the horror can't happen again. Is there some sort of peculiar Chinese rationalism that finds it sufficient to merely understand in order to be at peace after such national trauma?

If the uncovering of the reasons (and by reasons I think he means individual motivations rather than institutional logic) for these deaths rather than the deaths themselves are what is most important to Tan, I must confess to being on a different moral planet. It seems to me that Tan wants to ensure that the deaths are recorded in history, as having occurred. But he also expresses himself as if he is writing into a particularly Chinese cultural sensitivity which prohibits him, and many of the subjects he has interviewed, from expressing personal outrage and desire for revenge at specific perpetrators. It seems as if it is more important to see the motivations of these criminals as a sort of cultural mistake that has to be recognised before any reforming or judicial action can be considered.

(I have the same sense of someone sitting on the writer’s shoulder, when reading Catholic theologians who are trying terribly hard to articulate a new theological idea without arousing the Vatican censors. It's as if the writer is not merely trying to find the least offensive formula, but also trying to disguise his own efforts at self-restraint)

This cultural reticence to blame and punish specific individuals for real criminal acts, combined with the quick facility to blame groups like the 'black elements' for obviously fictional cultural deviance, and summarily kill them on account of it, is deeply disturbing. Perhaps it is connected somehow to the Chinese penchant for giving poetic titles and slogans to often horrific social events: The Great Leap Forward, Smashing the Four Olds, Sweeping Away All Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, Rectifying The Class Ranks, or, one of the most disturbing, The Celestial Maiden Scattering Flowers for the use of dynamite to execute political class-enemies. Perhaps metaphor in Chinese both promotes and inhibits rationality.

A related mystery which Tan refers to but which he doesn't think needs explaining is the fundamental non-rationality of responses to the conditions at the time. He indicates, for example, that, "One of the key characteristics of the Cultural Revolution was constant reversals." The reversals he refers to range from policy directives from central government that contradicted each other from week to week, competing factional groups which were approved as orthodox one week and condemned as 'capitalist-roaders' the next, orders given at one level countermanded or cancelled at another level. Mob-rule is rarely logical. But the frequent shifts in direction of official Party policy were drastic and continuous. Yet people continued to respond to them until they were stopped by the army. Yet another consequence of metaphor?

This general attitude toward one's countrymen: socially deferential and reserved but simultaneously unconcerned about individual well-being, even death, combined with the capacity for violent and emotional arousal may well be a misconception on my part. The apathy that Tan criticises may be a preferred option if it is not. His nightmares about Bureaucracy run amok justify just about any coping strategy that is at hand.

In any case, for the moment I can find no better way to express my confusion. Tan's work is undoubtedly courageous and important. But it is courageous and important in ways that are beyond my ability to appreciate. One can only wish him and his fellows good luck… and great fortitude.

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