Professor Nicole Barnes is associate professor of history at Duke University, where she teaches courses on Chinese history. She has written extensively about public health and medicine in 20th century China, including the book Intimate Communities Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (2018).
As part of The Lemur’s interview series, Professor Barnes spoke to me about Maoist politics, the disillusionment of the sent-down youth, and alienation from party politics among Chinese youth today, among other topics.
We hope you enjoy.
The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
L: I want to start by talking about Mao as a figure. Obviously our class [People’s Republic of China 1949-Present], even though it focused mostly on social history, examined how his personality shaped that era. What do you think were the key attributes of that personality (particularly ones that people now might not think or know about) and how they put a stamp on the Maoist era?
B: In one of [Duke history PhD graduate] Rebecca Karl’s books she writes about the psychological effects of Mao having been born into a higher-level peasant household where his father loaned out money to their farming neighbors and forced Mao to be the one to go collect the debts. As a young boy, Mao had this repeated experience of knocking on his neighbors’ doors, noticing that they were living in greater penury than his family, and demanding money from them.
This gave him a kind of vitriolic hatred for his father and for the structures of oppression on people who were hard-working but poor in a way that he felt was not their own fault. I too come from a working-class family that takes great pride in work and being able to do real things in the world—my dad was a contractor who built whole buildings, my cousins are plumbers, and there are a lot of other contractors in my family—people who actually change the world with their hands and have a prideful attitude about it. To that end, I believe Mao was sincere in his love for the peasantry and in his desire for their liberation. But I also believe that once the Party was the party for all of China and he was its most-powerful titular head, he became consumed with the power itself. He was wrapped up in a structure that made him more and more megalomaniacal and paranoid about the ways that other figures, including Lin Biao (who you just wrote about!), might be trying to usurp that power.
I see him—almost—as a victim of this system. This is partly because I read his private doctor’s book The Private Life of Chairman Mao, which does not try to make an argument that he was innocent, and paints his whole portrait, good and bad all at once. There have been books that tried to pin it all on Mao—but that is totally false. It was a whole system—in a way, it’s kind of like Hitler—it’s not just him it’s the whole system, the whole society. Mao did not actually rule by fiat—there was a very large Communist Party ruling body, the Politburo and the Standing Committee. You still had to buy the political will of the people around you and Mao was very good at that but he was always paranoid about it being stolen from him.
L: Can you talk a little more about that paranoia?
B: Mao’s paranoia came from his early years. He was in his late twenties when he discovered the Communist Party, which was first founded in China in 1921. The founding members were the intellectual elite of that time—very erudite and well-spoken professors at Beijing University who were founding journals and publishing all the time. Mao’s exposure to the party began as a student worker in the library at Beijing University— he was literally stacking books as they were meeting and listening from the sidelines. So he always had a huge chip on his shoulder against professors and intellectuals because he felt himself to be on the outs as this peasant boy who was not at the core of the party until 1935—that’s a good fifteen years where he was not at the core.
From the era of the Jiangxi Soviet onwards, the core of the party moved into the rural areas. That was when Mao started to try to engineer moving the party towards the rural proletariat rather than the Soviet model of the urban proletariat as the vanguard.
He was on the outs, on the outs, on the outs, and it wasn’t until the Long March in 1934-1935 that he became the architect of CCP policy and ideology. It’s in that period that you see him shine and then in that Yan’an era he had already started the purges—
L: Against intellectuals?
B: Against other party members, a lot of whom were intellectual (classically, communist parties tend to attract intelligentsia first). But he retained this suspicion of them and this deep distrust which was rooted in this sense that he had long had to battle for recognition, and he was very bitter about it deep in his psyche because he was a very intelligent man, and very well-read, but not well-traveled, not cosmopolitan.
L: I was wondering about that because some of what we read in class indicated that there was kind of an irony to his anti-intellectualism—Mao himself wrote poetry and loved classic Chinese literature.
B: Yeah, he read all the time. He was a total book nerd.
L: He was an avid reader and he was also total obsessive purist about communist literature and doctrine. So for him to be a purist intellectual, but then totally deviate from it and attack other intellectuals—I buy that that comes from the early bitterness of when he first joined the party.
B: Yes, I think so. And bitterness about how hard it was for him to turn the party elite in the early days from the Soviet Comintern line to what he believed was more in keeping with Chinese society, which was 90% agrarian.
The other thing that was very formative was his work in the Anyuan coal mines, organizing coal miners. His famous quote that “revolution is not a dinner party” saying that violence is okay, and you need constant violent revolution and purging of internal enemies also came not just from his paranoia and his bitterness but his true life experience as a young adult organizer of very heavily oppressed mine workers. He decided that the blunt tools of violence were needed to effect social change—he was willing to see bloodshed, but to China’s sad demise. It was just not a good attitude for the head of state to have.
L: Do you think that if someone else, say Zhou Enlai or another top official, were the leader during the 50s and 60s, or if there had been more turnover, there would have been much less violence?
B: Absolutely. I really do. I really, really do. Zhou was a famously mild person. He was also more cosmopolitan: throughout the height of Mao’s rule it was Zhou who went overseas to important meetings like the Bandung Conference. He did all of the political negotiations with other heads of state; he knew how to do that soft power, diplomatic side of politics. When diplomats came into China, they saw Mao and were like, ‘what is this guy doing? He’s belching and farting and scratching his groin in front of us.’ He didn’t even look like a head of state. And he just wasn’t willing to even perform it.
L: One more question about Mao. During the Cultural Revolution, to what extent was there real demand and appetite for a “Great Helmsman” and an exciting revolutionary political movement among the Chinese people? And to what extent was that just manufactured? Obviously the Mao cult was popular for a time among the most zealous groups, like the Red Guards. But probably most people were either indifferent or hostile to it.
B: Yes. I don’t think I could give you percentages (and the Cultural Revolution is so difficult to study that many scholars just wont even touch it because it’s way too fraught and complex). For example, when I teach it in class, it is largely through memoir-reading. Every memoir has its own nuance—even two accounts by people who were in Shanghai the whole time may be radically different because every factor, like family background, gender, age, location, relationships at work and at school, shaped your experience so much.
Spoken like a true historian, I know—”there’s not broad-brush way to talk about it.” That said, there is kind of a broad-brush way to talk about it! Because of what you just insinuated, it was the youthful Red Guard generation that desired that kind of big movement. They were at the outset quite naïve about what they were asking for which came out rather ironically in the sent-down youth movement and rustication. It’s not until they get there that they realize ‘oh I’ve been a pawn in a big political game.’ And it was a very late awakening to what had been the reality all along.
But the reason, from my perspective, that they had this romance of a big revolution was that theirs was the generation that had been raised on the stories from their parents and grandparents of the Civil War and the War with the Japanese. In order to build a strong patriotic movement in the 1950s, the CCP built a romance out of the wars. Now I’m a historian of war—my first book was all about the war. I cried multiple times reading my documents—it was terrible. There is no reason to romanticize war, but the creation of a romance out of that war itself became a motivating tool for that young generation that literally went out and put on their parents’ uniforms and created those military-style armbands for themselves. They thought that they wanted that kind of thing until it became truly violent and there were graveyards of their buddies. By then it was way too late because they were wrapped up in the maw of this political machine that was going to use them in an attempt to resolve the top echelon’s political battles.
Something that also makes the whole Cultural Revolution somewhat more understandable as a phenomenon is the extent to which identity in Chinese society is rooted in your relationships to other people, and not just your family members. This too was a distinctive feature of Maoist society—everyone had a work unit in urban settings, and your relationships to your colleagues and co-workers were core to everything. The work unit was where you got your housing and health insurance and where your kids got their schooling. It was where you got your rations for food and where all your social events happened. It was your whole life.
So if those people come and seize you and start struggling against you, you are driven to the point of suicide because you suddenly feel like you have no reason to be. That in and of itself became its own kind of engine—the use of people’s personal relationships as weapons against them.
L: Thinking about the youth as a political class, maybe this is a way we can connect a few of these themes to present-day China. Young people in China seem very dissatisfied right now, particularly with the economy and the party elite under Xi Jinping. So it’s interesting to compare this big social movement of young people aligned with the political establishment under Mao to now, when young people in China seem so alienated from the party. How did that happen?
B: That is a long and complicated story. Xi Jinping is much more ideologically radical and willing to use state discipline than his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. I first started going to China under Jiang Zemin and later, all of my time living in China for my dissertation and book research was under Hu Jintao—everything felt much more open and relaxed. Now, under Xi Jinping, you can tell you are under a locked-down society (and I have not even been to China since before COVID). When I was there, circa October 2019, I noticed a lot of disaffection with the party already but it is certainly not universal. Some of the things Xi Jinping has done have actually gained him a lot of loyalty, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. His early fights against corruption gave me shivers down my spine because it was so like Mao, to slap a label on your political enemies that is palatable from the people’s standpoint, and then you just do these instrumental purges of anyone who stands in your way. Classic Mao playbook.
And just like with Mao I think there was some sincerity in it, because political corruption in China was so bad. Do you remember that day in class when I told the story about the Taiwanese realtor in the L.A. area I met who told me that people from China come to buy multi-million-dollar homes in cash.
L: Yes. And in New York City the most expensive real estate is being purchased by Chinese nationals. I guess it’s still pretty much impossible to get privately wealthy in China outside of having some relationship with the government.
B: Yes, and the necessary ties to politics for all of that wealth are more of a Xi Jinping thing. Before him, there was a massive amount of wealth and capital being accrued by a group of people that was leaving China and people were bitter about it. Many people were very happy to see Xi start fighting that corruption. So the notion that the youth are disaffected from the party is a complicated thing.
Yes, there’s the “lie-flat” and “let it rot” movements—young people who have decided, ‘I’m not even going to try to hustle, because the hustle is rigged.’ I totally get that, but it is far from the universal experience. There are a lot of people who still support the party. And the trade war is just firing up Chinese nationalism, which has been distinctively cultivated by the party since 1950 and much more so since Tiananmen as a volatile sentiment as well.
The “lie-flat” movement had already started before COVID but it got so much stronger afterwards because virtually every Chinese city, not just Wuhan and Shanghai, was under COVID lockdown for a significant period of time. It was very hard for all those hundreds of millions people who could not even go out on their balcony. And then the “blank page” protest and the way the Xi Jinping administration responded, which was a young child’s tantrum of ‘okay, now there’s zero support.’ From 100% protection and lockdown to zero support and ‘we’re just going to stand by and watch people die.’ And then the economic disasters, too.
That said, I have extreme doubts that anything truly revolutionary will come from Chinese youth today.
L: Why? What are the biggest obstacles to a coherent movement of the disillusioned in China today?
B: There are a few reasons. In part, I think it’s because the disaffected are far from the whole. In part, it’s because a lot of the disaffection is similar to the early Tiananmen protestors—it’s about their own privileges and economic futures. They don’t feel confident that they can work hard to get into college, work hard in college, get a great job, be better off than their parents. That’s pretty much an urban bourgeoisie aggravation, to put it very bluntly! It’s not about the fate of the whole nation.
L: It’s about jobs, housing—
B: Right, those are valid concerns for an individual but are not something you can build a whole movement on successfully. But the third reason, which is the biggest reason, is the strength of artificial intelligence surveillance in China. Everyone is digitally face- and iris-scanned. You can’t jaywalk across the street with 300 other people without getting a ticket. The level of surveillance is just out of this world and it’s only going to get worse. So there is literally no room for any kind of true protest movement to be born in China. This is not the Tiananmen era, unfortunately. Very unfortunately.
L: I was wondering if, in addition to the prospects for change or revolution between the Tiananmen generation and today, you could also compare the two generations in terms of the disposition of young people more generally? What are young people in China today like? And where are they looking to for inspiration or influence on how to view their futures?
The Tiananmen generation was shaped by Western culture in profound ways because of what that culture was like at the time—it offered a promising alternative to corruption, inflation, and political unfreedom. But now, because of the intense competition between the U.S. and China, and because the U.S. is no longer a beacon of the great alternative of liberal democracy, has that changed? In fact, there are so many similar issues for young people in the U.S. as in China, like access to quality housing and a good job market—do you think that sense of there not being a clear promising alternative has shaped the defeatist attitude among some Chinese youth today? It’s no longer as simple a story as it was in 1989 of ‘we don’t have rights and freedoms in China; they do in the United States, so therefore we want to be like them.’ And for Chinese youth today, what do alternative systems look like?
B: That makes sense. And it’s more than just China-U.S. It’s also India with the rise of Modi. There have been rightist authoritarian leaders elected in so many countries. For sure, educated young Chinese follow U.S. politics very closely and it has got to be demoralizing and instructive for them to see what has long been considered the exemplar of liberal democracy produce what we have produced. Any educated Chinese person is also very aware of anti-Asian racism. So in a way there has got to be a sense of vindication when our system produces a total disaster.
L: There were two DKU students in my U.S. political history class in the fall, during the lead-up to the election. They were almost expressing pity for our chaos and uncertainty— there was kind of a mutual sense of us each having problematic systems, far from the cleaner story of “you live behind an Iron Curtain.”
B: Yeah, it’s complicated. You’re right—there is no one answer to the story. In the 1980s, Western liberal democracy and the opening up of the communist system was the answer. It’s so much more complex, now. All kinds of different political systems across the world have produced the same kind of turn to rightist dogmatic politics that the Chinese people have long known. The inspiration is not going to come from the U.S.— Trump’s trade war is making anti-American sentiment spike through the roof. The first iteration of the trade wars, when I was there in October 2019, was already making it hard for Americans living in China. They were immediately feeling a colder shoulder among Chinese colleagues and friends. The more you push them, the more the youth are going to side with China and their own people.
L: When we talked about 1989 in class, you stressed that it was not just a democracy movement, but also an anti-corruption movement. Protestors also felt hurt by inflation and the turbulence of the economic transformation of “opening up.” But in China in the 1990s and the early 2000s there was almost a new, post-Tiananmen social contract, where the government said ‘OK, stop protesting, and we’ll offer you the opportunity to make money, get ahead, own a home and build a family’ (although the one-child policy was still in effect then). And that “Chinese dream” lifted millions of people out of poverty, and basically produced a middle class. That arrangement seemed to work for a long time.
B: Yeah, about 25 or 30 years, a very long time.
L: What’s the state of that “social contract” in China now, when the economy seems much less miraculous, and there is now ballooning wealth inequality and an ultra-wealthy quasi-oligarchic Chinese billionaire class? What has that done to the feasibility of social mobility in China today?
B: Most people are absolutely depressed by it. It is so incredibly hard to survive in a Tier 1 city, for sure. There are people who say that Tier 2 and 3 cities—
L: What are the tiers?
B: So the tiers are based on levels of economic and infrastructural development. Beijing Shanghai, Guangzhou are all Tier 1. Tier 1 cities put the entire United States to shame. The train stations are massive and shiny and the trains run exactly on time. The train attendants are in perfectly manicured suits. They have to satisfy beauty and weight requirements. And in those cities, if you have the means to access it, your style of life is almost unparalleled to anywhere on Earth.
But that’s certainly not all of China. Apartments cost an exorbitant amount. Groceries and clothes are getting more and more out of reach for the average Chinese citizen. People will borrow by any means from their entire large families to buy one tiny apartment and get their kid in the right school to try to scramble ahead. But that lifestyle is incredibly hard. There’s the famous 9-9-6: 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. six days a week are the average working hours for a white-collar job in China. That’s why the “lie-flat” movement emerged, because young people are saying ‘now you’re asking me to work that hard and I can’t afford an apartment. When I could afford an apartment and a car and get my kid into a good school, I would be willing to work like that. But now you’re asking me to work like a beast and I still get nothing.’ So I sympathize with that sentiment—God, I wouldn’t want to subject myself to that. But they are all locked into a system that they can’t overturn or even adjust. The disaffected youth do not have a way to protest it and meanwhile just to survive they have to hustle so hard and work so much that what time and energy do they have to do it, right?
L: Thanks for talking to me, Professor Barnes.
B: Thank you.
Interview conducted by Zachary Partnoy
