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Hibiscus: A Vessel of Literary Thought and Knowledge

Rujie Wang

College of Wooster

A Small Town Called Hibiscus by Gu Hua contains in it all the important ingredients of a good realist novel, the most important of which is its being a nexus between the past, present and future, and between what are recognized today as the discourses of liberalism and the New Left. 35 years has passed but there is still something exciting about the moment in which Gu Hua seizes the opportunity accorded to him by his place in time to do justice to history and to our memory. Hibiscus reawakens the hope for real social change by subjecting the past to a critical scrutiny. It rekindles the fond memories and dreams of millions of Chinese peasants yearning for the days of fanshen when they could own land and live off of their honest labor. It rescues and resurrects the faith in the ideals of liberating the people from tyrannical rules and achieving real social justice. It revives the critical spirit of the May Fourth by shining a bright light on situations of moral ambiguity. And most important of all, it resets the benchmarks of human right and dignity in the aftermath of Maoist revolution. It is therefore not far fetched to say that Gu Hua’s novel is like a vessel traveling through modern Chinese history, loaded with events, issues, discourses, and people that had shaped China as we found it in 1980. It is a milestone in Chinese literary history, signifying a new phase in the development of Chinese humanism that cannot begin if the human remains an enigma to man himself.

Gu Hua’s book is important not because it is an isolated literary event or a rare work of literary genius but because it offers a countervailing account of history and exposes Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism as a form of absolutism. However, this is not the accomplishment of one individual with intellectual daring, but an expression of the wisdom achieved by an entire generation of Chinese writers who lived through the Cultural Revolution. In the context of “scar literature”, Hibiscus is a critical reflection of the political intolerance during the preceding decades that would not have been possible before Mao’s death in 1976. It is into this new and open creative space that Gu Hua is invited to “present the past as an aberration that political change has now rectified”.[1] What Gu Hua captures in his novel, however, is far more than just an aberration being rectified by Deng Xiaoping’s call for economic reform. Hibiscus is a scaffold for debating social revolutions as a way to build modern democracies, and its dialogism brings to the fore competing voices and differing visions of China. In the context of the story, it is hard to not notice the “dialectical link between enlightenment and domination, and the dual relationship of progress to cruelty and liberation” as well as the link between Chinese communist revolution and other revolutions in the world.[2]

A Chinese writer, Gu Hua understands the historical origins and genesis of the events he describes in his novel, intimately familiar with the impulses and motives compelling the Chinese to actively join the communist movement and participate in such political campaigns as the Four Clean-ups and the Cultural Revolution. His knowledge of both Chinese and foreign masterworks of literature gives him insights into the changes in human relationship. That he is able to rise up and judge the recent past in which so many feel confused, betrayed or misled, is because he understands the psychic life of the individual and the phenomenology of the spirit, of which revolution and social change are but ephemeral expressions. “The great events of world history are at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the final analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”[3] The human relationships as elaborated in the novel bear the stamps of history and the town of Hibiscus is inextricably linked to such tumultuous events as the Land Reform, the Civil War, the communist movement, the Cultural Revolution, that are expressions of Chinese dreams for a better society. Gu Hua’s story only covers the time span of less than twenty years but the archetypal situation in which people are scapegoated through group violence thematically links it to other works of psychological realism. What happens to Qin Shutian and Hu Yuyin, targeted and persecuted for other people’s unfortunate conditions, says less about social programs that have gone awry due to bad political leaders than permanent and inherent human conditions that underpin revolutions world over.

What unfolds in the town of hibiscus is, among other things, a series of events that result in individuals or even social groups being scapegoated as a precondition to (re)establish social order. In discussing the mythical structure of the persecution stereotypes, critic Rene Girard talks about what he calls the victim signs by which people are selected as scapegoat because they are perceived as the moral and physical poisoning of the community. To Girard, human desires are triangular because they are usually borrowed from others whom we view as successful and want to imitate. The “mimetic rivalry” then in turn sets in motion sacrificial violence against those scapegoat victims whose removal would end conflicts and restore order. This is the subtext or palimpsest for Gu Hua’s fictional representation of revolution and class struggle; the same knowledge of mass psychology that underscores Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1963), a fictional representation of McCarthyism, and Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q (1921), a social satire of the 1911 Revolution. In all of these stories we find the mechanism of scapegoating and collective violence because of mimetic rivalry. The knowledge that people are predisposed psychologically to imitate one another and resort to collective violence to settle conflicts is a part of the literary imagination of Lu Xun and Gu Hua living 60 years apart from one another, as well as that of many Chinese writers living in the intervening years between the two. This is to say that this mode of literary knowledge of mass psychology informs both the political leaders organizing revolutions and the novelists writing a fictional representation of the revolutions.

To a degree, Mao’s political campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s as reconstructed in Hibiscus are recurrences of the 1911 Revolution as represented in True Story of Ah Q. In both Wei Village and the town of Hibiscus, we see revolution as a dystopia in which social change and revolution only unleash dark forces of aggression and self-destruction instead of freedom and progress. This reading takes no significance away from both works that are fictional elaborations of the Chinese revolution to honor the ideas of freedom, democracy and human dignity. The concern has been, for both Lu Xun and Gu Hua as writers of literary and psychological realism, that in China the fall of the monarch does not change the relationship between rulers and the ruled, and that in spite of violence and political rhetoric, real political change may not result. Ah Q is both the aggressor and victim in Wei Village convulsed by the Republic Revolution in which communal peace needs to be restored. The situation of Wei Village is the same as the dynamic of mimetic rivalry, when culture is eclipsed and becomes less differentiated, and when people are threatened by disorder and desperately seeking a scapegoat victim whose blood would help restore order in the community. Ah Q’s desire to become a revolutionary is borrowed from others like the rich Zhao family. Revolution for Ah Q is a way to be like Imitation Foreign Devil and Old Master Zhao who have wealth and women, which is the real reason for his elimination by the latter for being their rival. Ah Q’s desires to sleep with the maid, to be recognized as a relative to the Zhao family, and to join the revolution only intensify and exacerbate the mimetic rivalry. Since his dismissal from the Zhao residence, his reputation as a nuisance precedes him wherever he goes and makes him a convenient and perfect candidate for persecution when the time comes for people to select a scapegoat in a sacrificial crisis.

Even though Gu Hua’s realist story is set in the Maoist era, the reader is still able to detect the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and the dynamic of mimetic rivalry. In the red classics written and produced during the Mao era, men of revolution are often driven by their moral indignation for the predicament of poverty, and their political actions invariably appear justified by their compassion for the poor living in abject poverty. But in Hibiscus this is not the case. The actions of veteran revolutionaries—Li Guoxiang and Wang Qiushe—are motivated by envy, jealousy and personal vendetta. We no longer see the rotten and wicket life of the rich, often present in many red classics, that justifies the violence in Chinese communist revolution as well as the French and Russian revolutions.

That the wretched life of the poor was confronted by the rotten life of the rich is crucial for an understanding of what Rousseau and Robespierre meant when they asserted that men are good ‘by nature’ and become rotten by means of society, and that the low people, simply by virtue of not belonging to society, must always be ‘just and good’. Seen from this viewpoint, the revolution looked like explosion of an uncorrupted and incorruptible inner core though an outward shell of decay and odorous decrepitude; and it is in this context that the current metaphor which likens the violence of revolutionary terror to the birth-pangs attending the end of an old and the coming-into-being of a new organism once had an authentic and powerful meaning.[4]

That the revolutionary terror is required to bring about social justice is precisely what is called into question and discredited in Hibiscus, which renders problematic the political assumptions in the vice of the rich and powerful, and the goodness of the poor. Revolution as it takes place in the town of hibiscus has terror and violence but not a wicket and oppressive life of the rich to justify them. A Mao loyalist and land reform activist, Wang Qiushe is dirt poor but far from being uncorrupted or incorruptible; he is lost in the twinge of envy for the power and privilege he is supposed to destroy, such as the stilt-house of the former despotic landlord. “That landlord had food, liquor, women . . . but all I can do is dream.” As a diehard revolutionary and foot soldier of Mao, he dreams of the life of the former landlord and “had slept there for two or three years and dreamed many a dream of cuddling a singsong girl or drinking and feasting. Lying there, he used to wonder how many women the landlord had taken to bed: young, middle-aged, plump, slim. Later on the fellow had died a painful death from syphilis. Serve him right! How Wang fancied the bed still smelt of cosmetics and scent.”[5] He persecutes his mimetic rivals in the name of fighting capitalism because he needs to build his political credentials in order to join Mao’s campaigns to eliminate “counterrevolutionaries”. When Ah Q faces his death, he is at least able to see himself as a victim of scapegoat, surrounded by his mimetic rivals ready to devour him like a pack of wolves. But Wang Qiushe experiences no such self-revelation; only those he terrorizes see him for who he is, a lunatic and sadist who joins the revolution for all the wrong reasons. He and Ah Q are footnotes to modern Chinese history in which social changes turn into a cultural schizophrenia. As captured in both realist works, the revolutionary subject disintegrates into Ah Q or Wang Qiushe for whom revolution means gaining revenge on the formerly powerful. The two protagonists making revolution on the rich, although living in different historical times, help situate the reader in a much larger context in which to understand the circumstances and irrationality of revolution and social change.

The revolutionary tactics such as “killing the chicken to frighten the monkey” at work in hibiscus are the same overarching principles as constellated in a sacrificial crisis. The events in the past two decades as reconstructed in the novel reveal mass hysteria in which Mao’s ideology of class struggle lends expression to the needs of the collective unconscious. What befalls Qin Shutian and Hu Yuyin, as well as others that belong to the Five-Categories (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, saboteurs, and rightists) dooms Ah Q as well who finds himself in the same situation in which the community is going through a purge of its poisonous and impure elements. Qin Shu-tian and Hu yu-yin fall scapegoat victims because they are resented for their ability to ameliorate better than others in the countryside, their self-reliance, industry, intellect, beauty and artistic gift. What is wrong is not so much Mao’s vision of China as a socialist country and egalitarian society but rather his political theories of oppression and exploitation that leaders such as Li Guoxiang use as categories for understanding and regulating the community.

This is the notorious Qin Shutian, Crazy Qin of Hibiscus. The poor and lower-middle peasants here, the revolutionary masses, hate landlords and rich peasants. But do you hate this class enemy? I call on all cadres, communists and Youth League members to say what you think of him.[6]

Li Guoxiang’s political speech to vilify Qin Shutian, in the context of the story told from the perspective of the persecuted, only renders problematic the theory of class struggle that she embodies. “In 1957, in the County Bureau of Commerce, I was in charge of investigating Rightists. In ’59 I joined the county committee to oppose Rightist trends. In ’64 and ’65 I was the head of the work team to ferret out class enemies and new rich peasants and to struggle against the old Rightists.”[7] Li Guoxiang’s image as a revolutionary helps expose the mythopoeia narrative of Maoism as flawed and responsible for many acts of aggression against the innocent and productive members of the community. What comes to light is that the poor whom Mao wants to empower through the communist revolution do not necessarily understand the need for freedom but only their self-interests as “the oppressed” like Wang Qiushe, still mesmerized by his past glory as a Mao’s loyalist and still trying to evoke revolution as a way to be like the rich, “Never forget class struggle!” “Every five or six years we’ll have a new cultural revolution.” This reference to Mao and the theory of class struggle is nothing less than full denunciation of the cultural revolution as hell on earth in which “ … truth and falsehood, good and evil, right and wrong had all been mixed in one simmering witches’ cauldron. The innocent had to put up with humiliation and drag out a wretched existence”.[8]

Another idea that emerges from Gu Hua’s novel is that of culture, not just Maoism, as a form of neurosis. A penetrating analysis of social change, the story unfolds concurrently on two levels of meaning: the social reality of Mao’s revolution and the psychological principle of pleasure. The correlation between the political passion and sexual pleasure enables the reader to be conscious of the sadistic and masochistic tendencies behind every social interaction. The words and deeds of the two revolutionaries—Li Guoxiang and Wang Qiushe—lead the reader to discovering the pathology of the Maoist revolution. Both are ideologically committed to a form of asceticism that Maoism in the 1960s has become which glorifies self-denial and self-sacrifice while it censors or even criminalizes the pursuit of freedom and happiness. At the beginning of the story, Li Guoxiang is transferred from the county’s bureau of commerce to lead the Four-Clean-ups movement in Hibiscus. “In her private life, Li Guoxiang often found herself stranded, but politically she forged full-sail ahead.”[9] Her authority as a public official to regulate the free market in Hibiscus allows her to act out her sexual frustration as a private individual with no luck of finding a mate. Greater the frustration, severer the aggression against people like Sister Hibiscus Hu Yuyin, which is a source of perverted pleasure for this miserable and lonely person. Her resolve to persecute Hu Yuyin and her husband Guigui for the crime of being the new rich originates from and reinforces her jealousy and envy of Hibiscus Fairy who is married and owner of a rice-beancurd stall. It is against the backdrop of this psychological reality and its dynamism that the fictional events are set in motion, where everyone is dictated and exercised by the economy of pain and pleasure. A woman “whose whole youth had been a series of frustrated love affairs”, Li Guoxiang defends herself against such negative feelings and undesirable motivations by attributing and projecting them onto her shadow the beancurd beauty that “did attract attention with her black eyebrows, big eyes, face like a full moon, high breasts and graceful figure,” whose “flesh is as white and tender as the beancurd she sells”. Likewise, Wang Qiushe’s own sense of insecurity and vulnerability get projected onto Qin Shutian and Hu Yuyin who become the dumping ground for all his negative feelings and emotions. When they request his permission to be married, he lashes out at her, “Diehard rich peasant! Slut! Bitch! I’ll tear out your tongue! . . . Send in some militiamen! Bring wire! Strip the rich peasant woman naked and wire her breasts!”[10] The aggression towards Qin Shutian and Hu Yuyin is a good indication of self-denial on the part of Wang Qiushe and Li Guoxiang as ordinary human beings, who also have illicit sex but would turn down Qin Shutian’s request for permission to marry Hu Yuyin. “Secretary Wang, we’re still human beings, aren’t we? However bad, we’re still human! And even if we were cocks, hens, geese or ganders, who could stop us from mating?”[11] In Hibiscus, the project of communist modernity is not only repressive but also diabolical when the on-going revolution is aimed at eliminating all and every trace of individual difference and choice fundamental to Man.

Important to modern Chinese humanism are recognitions of basic human needs; for this reason some people even refer to May Fourth movement as a cultural renaissance in which to find the human. Hibiscus situates the reader in the same new humanism in which Lu Xun 60 years ago thinks of traditional Chinese society as a form of cannibalism. In Lu Xun’s novella Soap (1924) we find a Confucian scholar Si-ming whose austere morals are but a veil over his depraved state of mind. His purchase of a bar of scented soap for his wife is made after he sees a young woman beggar being verbally insulted by a group of youth who have made lewd comments that it wound be fun to bathe and scrub this girl clean with a bar of soap. On hearing his indignation towards the youth, the wife realizes that his purchase of the soap is an enactment of the fantasy of the girl as a sexual object. His lust for the young woman panhandler is projected onto his shadow, namely, those who are rude to the young girl begging for money and food to save her grandmother. This mechanism of self-defense is used to deny having undesirable feelings by projecting them onto others. The way Si-ming idealizes the beggar as a paragon of female virtues and filial piety allows him to live in denial. But his interest in the girl is no purer than nor dissimilar from that of those he refers to as “low-life” who eroticize and sexualize the beggar in the street. The soap is emblematic of his sexual desire for women in distress. Likewise, he disparages those educated schoolgirls wearing short hair and walking in twos and threes freely in the street, calling them worse than lawless bandits. Lu Xun understands very well that the power of civilization can be repressive and that “… all the things we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization”.[12]

To criticize the communist revolution is a lot harder than to indict Confucian tradition as the cause of China’s stagnation and backwardness. The radical and totalistic anti-traditionalism that emerges from the May Fourth intellectual enlightenment is a logical reaction to China’s subjugation to the West’s political, military and economic control. The birth and developments of communism is therefore a product of Chinese modernity, necessitated by the social and historical circumstances that launch revolutions in other parts of the world as well. As a humanist Gu Hua is interested in the irrational factors of the psyche that contribute to the deification of the State and the dictator. For this reason, his Hibiscus is both modern and radical in that “If we can see socialism as a historically ‘rational’ project of modernity in certain circumstances, no matter how ‘irrational’ and maddening the circumstances of this rationality were or always have been, we may be ready to acknowledge the fact that socialist realism is, after all, a radical form of modernism and a radical formulation of the mainstream Enlightenment idea of modernity.”[13] The people, events, discourses, and issues implicated in Gu Hua’s story contribute, directly or indirectly, to the indignities that people have suffered during the Four-Cleanups and the Cultural Revolution. Hibiscus questions and decries the theory of class struggle that is meant to free the human through democracy and secularism. The political theory as developed by Mao has prevailed because it offers a new sense of social justice and calls for the poor and downtrodden to make revolution on the rich and powerful. As a political ideology, Maoism provides a meaningful context for analyzing the rural reform to empower the land-less and land-poor against the landlord class. This version of social justice is at once humanizing and brutal. It calls for the violent overthrow of the old social order, and to abolish economic classes, which Mao the idealist sees as endeavors to dignify human existence. Within this political perspective, the dignity and equality of the poor and powerless are achieved through a collective violence against and destruction of the landlord class and the national bourgeoisie. The new communist humanism is thus historically grounded in the realities of the revolution, the Land Reform, the War against Japanese Aggression, and the Civil War. It gives rise to both savagery and barbarity of wars and violent class struggle on the one hand, and the gentle and empowering ideal of man no longer kept lowly and undignified by his social disadvantages on the other.

Within the confines of world revolution, Gu Hua’s work is written to show the gap between theory and praxis, restaging or redefining democracy, human dignity, freedom, and social equality. In the story, Wang Qiushe is a lazy-bone, freeloader and parasite who “longed for another Land Reform, when he could get more fruits of victory”.[14] He and Li Guoxiang are extremely zealous in the application of the “proletarian dictatorship” over those enemies of the state. In this sense Gu Hua’s fictional narrative creates considerable latitude in which to interpret Chinese communist revolution and Maoism as a travesty of social justice. Hibiscus adds another chapter and sequel to the fanshen movement originally aimed to liberate millions of landless and land-poor peasants hoping to have a good life. In Gu Hua’s grassroots account of life in Hibiscus we find nothing like what American writer William Hinton saw in the 1940s:

Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese Revolution created a whole new vocabulary. A most important word in this vocabulary was fanshen. Literally, it means ‘to turn the body,’ or ‘to turn over.’ To China’s hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. It meant to throw off superstition and study science, to abolish ‘word blindness’ and learn to read, to cease considering women as chattels and establish equality between the sexes, to do away with appointed village magistrates and replace them with elected councils. It meant to enter a new world.[15]

What Gu Hua contributes to our understanding of Chinese communist revolution since the time of the Land Reform is a new and different account of it that challenges the founding myth of the PRC. The terror tactics used by those like Wang Qiushe and Li Guoxiang to protect the fruits of fanshen are seen totally unwarranted, let alone justified, when they are largely incomprehensible and irrational to those living in Hibiscus.

So the town’s appearance was revolutionized. And an even more thoroughgoing revolution took place in the relations between the townsfolk. A system of public security was instituted: visitors had to register, people making a trip had to ask for leave, and in the evenings militiamen patrolled the town. At both ends and in the center of the street there were three ‘impeachment boxes’ and no action can be taken against those who wrote anonymous letters accursing their neighbors. Failure to report an offense was itself a crime, while informing on others was laudable and would be set down to your credit in your file, in addition to which you would be commended and rewarded. … Even in the daytime neighbors stopped calling on each other to avoid making off-color remarks which might be reported and land them in trouble. The townsfolk had liked to be neighborly and treat each other to snacks, but now that bourgeois humanism was under fire, they pricked up their ears and strained their eyes to keep close watch on each other.[16]

This is hardly the “terror of virtue” necessary to achieve equality and bring about justice. The reader sees how people betray one another and inform on loved ones out of fear. Party leader Li Mangeng stops seeing Hu Yuyin because he is afraid of being guilty by association with the “new rich” and the daughter of a prostitute. Out of fear to ruin his future within the party, he agrees to inform on Hu Yuyin who asks him to keep the money she has made because she is too scared to keep it herself. To remove Gu Yanshan, the official in favor of Hu Yuyin’s entrepreneurship and willing to sell her rice from the grain depot, Li Guoxiang insinuates that the two have had illicit affairs even though Gu Yanshan is sexually impotent. Hu Yuyin’s husband Guigui commits suicide because they are scared of being labeled the profiteers, ashamed of themselves for having some money and glad they have no children that would have been classified as little Five-Categories element. Mao’s communism as reconstructed in Hibiscus is a form of terror by which wealth is socialized and making money is criminalized. The picture Gu Hua paints is one in which the dream of communism becomes a horrible nightmare in which good and strong people are terrorized into submission and scapegoated by those that are weak.

The “fanshen” myth as exposed and challenged in the novel shows the violent origins of the People’s Republic of China founded on the promise to democratize the country. Democratic revolutions, especially the ones with much violence and destruction, always challenge the old cultural sensibilities and negotiate the whole of the social compact that determines the point up to which rule is legitimate and revolt criminal but beyond which rule is unwarranted and revolt heroic. It is in this respect that Gu Hua’s story opens up spaces for debating and rethinking democracy, violence, revolution and social justice, bringing these important issues to the world and bringing the world home. As an account of communist revolution in rural China in the 1960s, Hibiscus is an attempt to raise questions about how to produce social justice and how much terror and violence is necessary in a revolution to achieve social change. As such, Gu Hua’s work establishes points of comparison and contrast between Chinese communist revolution and the French revolution in which terror is just as important as other revolutionary ideals such as Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, as Mark Twain eloquently puts it:

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we should but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with slow death by fire at stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the cold and real Terror—that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.[17]

Twain’s view on the French revolution as a form of liberation is clearly driven by his compassion for those living in abject poverty and deprived of basic human rights. But in Hibiscus town the only people living in misery and deprived of human dignity are those like Hu Yuyin and Qin Shutian who fall victims of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The body politic as it exists in Gu Hua’s fictional town, though predicated on the compassion for the poor, turns out to have greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself. In a different way, questionable characters such as Wang Qiushe and Li Guoxiang show just how cruel ‘the poor’ can be, driven by “that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness”. Although the violence and terror used to maintain order in Hibiscus are far milder in scale and intensity compared to the reign of terror during the French revolution, they are still permanent ingredients of modern revolutions worldwide regardless of their social and historical origins and circumstances.

As a vessel traveling through the turbulent years of rapid and sometimes catastrophic social change, Hibiscus shows us a town populated by the casualties of communism as a global phenomenon. The book records one of many historical moments in which we observe what Michael Moses calls “the emergence of a world literature” and the text helps us “conceptualize the globalization of culture in the modern era”. What happens in Hibiscus enables us to understand “the great costs, paid in blood and pain, that the peoples around the world have rendered to settle accounts with history.”[18] Gu Hua’s dramatic representation of China’s modern experience to build a nation-state must be understood in the comparative context of world revolutions because what Gu Hua does in his work is essentially restage what Hannah Arendt calls “the social question” central to all revolutionary theories. By portraying Mao revolution in the 1960s as a dystopia in which the politics of liberation produces a travesty of justice, Gu Hua is making the case Arendt has made in discussing the French and Russian revolutions, namely, that laws of necessity should not be introduced into the realm of political theories predicated on the notion of freedom, and that poverty is an inherent human condition and therefore categories of economic oppression and exploitation should not be the chief categories of revolutionary thought. What takes place in Hibiscus exposes the fallacies of Maoism that poverty is what men of revolution need to eliminate as agents of history. The strife in Hibiscus over who is entitled to own what property, or who is better-off economically than others, decries the flawed logic underlining the Four-Cleanups and the Cultural Revolution in which “….instead of freedom, necessity becomes the chief category of political and revolutionary thought”.[19]

The epiphany that the reader achieves is not just what it is like to live through Mao’s years but also the general conditions of human life in a community. Written for the most part from the perspective of those being scapegoated and persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, the novel shows how one’s ability to excel could be perceived as threatening and significantly limited in democratic revolutions. In other words, human community in the modern time, in Maoist China and Christian West alike, tends to maintain order by restricting the power and freedom of those who have much to contribute to what D.H. Lawrence refers to as “mastery, lordship, and human splendor”. For Lawrence, the spirit of democratic revolution is but an expression of “the religion of the self-glorification of the weak, the reign of the pseudo-humble.” About the triumph of secular humanism in the West over the power of kings and aristocrats, Lawrence says the following to disparage a state of affairs not too different from what we see in the town of Hibiscus where no one is allowed to be different.

There’s no getting away from it, mankind falls forever into the two divisions of aristocrat and democratic. … We are speaking now not of political parties, but of the two sorts of human nature: those that feel themselves strong in their souls, and those that feel themselves weak. … So that religion, the Christian religion especially, became dual. The religion of the strong taught renunciation and love. And the religion of the weak taught down with the strong and the powerful, and let the poor be glorified. Since there are always more weak people than strong in the world, the second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will triumph. If the weak are not ruled, they will rule, and there’s the end of it. And the rule of the weak is Down with the strong.

They [the poor] had a will to destroy all power, and so usurp themselves the final, the ultimate power. This was not quite the teaching of Jesus, but it was inevitable implication of Jesus’ teaching, in the minds of the vast mass of the weak, the inferior. Jesus taught the escape and liberation into unselfish, brotherly love: a feeling that only the strong can know. And this, sure enough, at once brought the community of the weak into triumphant being; and the will of the community of Christians was anti-social, almost anti-human, revealing from the start a frenzied desire for the end of the world, the destruction of humanity altogether; and then, when this did not come a grim determination to destroy all mastery, all lordship, and all human splendor out of the world, leaving only the community of saints as the final negation of power, and the final power. … The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. For a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But the willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. The will only listen to the call of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferiror and even base politicians. Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred ‘will of the people’ becomes blinder, baser, colder and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant. When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break.

Many men are socialists out of perverted power lust. And this form of lust is diabolical, deadly, it is a fearsome form of hate. Even Lenin was pure hate. The rest of the bolshvists are usually impure hate. It comes from the perversion of the nature of power in a man. … Lenin was a pure a poet of action as Shelley was of words. … He was, in a sense, the god of common people of Russia, and they are quite right, in the modern sense, to worship him. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. And Lenin wanted above all things to give them their daily bread. And he could not even do that. What was love in theory became hate in practice.[20]

Lawrence’s critical view on modern democracies confirms, among other things, the affinity between Chinese revolutions and the social changes in other parts of the world in modern times. His objections to socialist democracies as “anti-human” or even “destructions of humanism” are also vindicated in the way Gu Hua critiques Chinese socialism as flawed social experiments that end in the eclipse of reason and the birth of a totalitarian dictatorship. The town of Hibiscus represents the democracy of thou-shall-not that amounts to a collection of weak men like Wang Qiushe shouting “Down with the strong!” It is a human community where the poor rally themselves around the hatred for the rich and become united by the cult of Mao as a god.

The novel ends when the Cultural Revolution is over, and with it the persecution of the “landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, saboteurs, and rightists”. The right people are in power again; Li Mangeng is now the Hibiscus brigade party secretary, Gu Yanshan, the secretary of the town committee, and Qin Shutian, the deputy head of the county’s cultural center. The reader is left with a sense that history will not repeat itself because “we have learned a bitter lesson”. Through the eyes of these new leaders we come to see the beginning of an end to a terrible era. Watching Wang Qiushe fading into the distance, Qin Shutian says the following with confidence and finality, “Nowadays aren’t there raving lunatics wandering through most cities and towns? They’re the knell of a terrible, tragic age”. A new age dawns bright and sunny as the story ends, inviting the Chinese to fulfill their destiny as a people in what has become 35 years of rapid economic reform to improve the material life of the people. To a degree, the novel, by realigning the Chinese revolution with cultural developments and trajectories in other parts of the world, has anticipated the profound changes and stunting growth of China in more ways than one, which is why the significance of the story has not diminished with time. The latest humanistic developments in economy, politics, and the arts only continue to augment the meaning of Gu Hua’s seminal work each time the issues of equality, freedom, democracy and revolution re-present themselves and become more intensified in the course of China’s on-going reform. The work by Gu Hua writing in a specific time period in China has made possible a variety of ways to imagine the human as separate from as well as belonging to other Hibiscus communities in the world.

Selected Bibliography:

1. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution, Pelican Book, 1963
2. Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat, John Hopkins UP, 1986
3. Gu Hua. A Small Town Called Hibiscus, Panda Books, 1983
4. Hinton, William. Fanshen, Vantage Books, 1966
5. Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum, 1993
6. Jung, Carl. Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man, 1934
7. Lawrence, D.H. Apocalypse and Writings on Revelation, Cambridge UP, 2001
8. Larson, Wendy. “Introduction: Wang Meng and the Modernist Controversy in Contemporary China” in Bolshevik Salute by Wang Meng, 1989
9. Moses, Michael. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. Oxford UP, 1995
10. Xudong Zhang. “The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese Socialist Realism” in Socialist Realism without Shores. ed. Lahusen and Dobrenko. Duke UP, 1997

 

 

[1] Wendy Larson, Bolshevik Salute, p.140

[2] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.169

[3] Carl Jung, Meanings of Psychology for Modern Man, p.149

[4] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p.106

[5] Gu Hua, A Small Town Called Hibiscus, p.72

[6] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p.90

[7] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p. 136

[8] Gu Hua, A Small Town, 137

[9] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p.27

[10] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p. 200

[11] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p. 192

[12] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.37

[13] Zhang Xudong, Socialism without Shores, p. 283.

[14] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p. 39

[15] William Hinton, Fanshen, p.vii

[16] Gu Hua, A Small Town, p. 131.

[17] Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,

[18] Michael Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, p.xvii

[19] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p.64

[20] D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and Writings on Revelation, p.71-7