Cao Zhenglu waged an intense battle against the demonising of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Bankruptcy of Modern China with his novels resurrecting the message of Mao
Cao Zhenglu was a popular contemporary Chinese realist writer from Funing, Jiangsu Province. He was born in Shanghai in September 1949. He was member of the Chinese Writers Association, taught at Shenzhen University. On December 28th, in 2021, he expired.
Cao Zhenglu was a dedicated exponent of realism whose writings explore observations on life. His works explored the serious real-life issues of society. Simple and unadorned style of language and intense feelings of human concern and compassion characterised his writing.
Nature of Writings
His work marked a critical commentary of the social and human costs of China's market reforms, navigating the struggles of laid-off state workers and migrant labourers, while coherently re-evaluating of the Maoist socialist era.
Cao’s writings intensively explored the socioeconomic fallout of privatization and globalization, explicitly addressing phenomena like laid-off workers and the exploitation of factory labourers and frequently gave a voice to those alienated by the Chinese economic miracle, highlighting income inequality and the loss of working- He frequently gave a voice to those left behind by the Chinese economic miracle, highlighting income inequality and the loss of working-class dignity.
Stark realism, detailing workers' lives, focuses on the pains of reform, revealing "shifts in the wind" and Awakens attention to underclass suffering and In-Depth Analysis of the Fate of the Working-Class Core themes characterised his works. Adhering unwaveringly to the workers' standpoint, exposing organised oppression (such as policy traps leading workers to mortgage their homes yet lose control rights), focusing on the inevitability rather than contingency of underclass suffering, and calling for "attention to remedies. “Rejected by the mainstream literary circles, his works serve as a model of "underclass literature," though he himself was self-critical of reducing underclass narratives to mere "suffering themes."
Starting point as writer
Cao Zhenglu started his writing career in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. He was not one of the young radicals sent down to the countryside to compose poetry, but a straitlaced hack. He clawed his way up to a post in the cultural bureaucracy, heading a municipal branch of the Writers' Association in Anhui. A stint at the Lu Xun Literary Institute and his elevation to a more central Writers’ Association was the driving force of his career. Like many other writers in the 1990s, he began to write more overtly commercial work, intended to be harnessed into other branches of the cultural industries, where the audiences expected less staid work.
In the early 2000s, he was dispatched to an academic post in Shenzhen, and he fell in with a loose community of writers that formed around Left Bank Culture Net. Left Bank was one of many online left spaces, like like Huayue Forum Maoflag, and Utopia Left Bank hosted explicitly political work. Much of it was nakedly leftist polemics and field reports, with only a tiny semblance of literary fiction. Cao Zhenglu transcended the leftist milieu to produce enduring, original, and entertaining work.
Summary of Novels
His novel ‘Wen cangmang’ (Asking the Boundless—an allusion to a line from one of Mao's poems, "I ask, on this boundless land, who rules over man's destiny") has a Taiwanese-owned factory in Shenzhen as the central pivot around which different characters revolve inter-playing their roles in the larger context of "investment." This novel has been marked as "the first novel that uses Chinese reality to explain Das Kapital."
In 2004, he published a groundbreaking novella titled ‘There’, an intensive navigation of laid-off workers in a northern factory town, which unfurls the tragic decline of a trade union cadre during the structural reform of state-owned enterprises. It's a unique exploration of post socialist China. Although it was celebrated at the time, twenty years have passed, and it is mostly placed in obscurity outside of leftist circles.
Cao Zhenglu: A "Milestone" Continuing the Left-Wing Tradition revived left-wing literature after a 30-year interruption and marked the starting point of new left-wing literature, directly engineering the underclass literature boom after 2004.
His list of works includes the short story collections Beginnings and Mountain Ghost. His novella collections include As Long As You’re Still Walking, My Second Father, Nale (also called Internationale), Selected Novellas of Cao Zhenglu, and Neon. His novels include Anti-corruption Instructions and Not Your Average Dark Horse. He has also published the Non-fiction novel Notes on a Monster Tamed and the theoretical study The Development of New Era Novel Art, as well as released the films The Wind Lightly Blows and I Am Also Romantic, and the TV dramas Fallen Leaves and The Young Have Come to the Organization Department Again. He has also been involved in the writing of more than ten other TV dramas. All these works combined total more than 3 million words.
His most recent novel published in 2011, ‘Minzhu ke ‘(‘Lessons in Democracy’) Cao’s novel resurrects the meaning the Cultural Revolution in terms of its aims, processes, contradictions, and significance, and forges a link with the contemporary problem of China's path today. It was an extensive exploration that re-evaluated the history, contradictions, and legacy of the Cultural Revolution.
He previewed it through the lens of modern China, making a statement that the social gap and exploitation of the 1990s and 2000s are evidence to the need of ordinary people for mechanisms to fight wealth inequality. It serves as a reappraisal of the Cultural Revolution that is a critical examination of the decadence, corruption, and ideological failures of the leadership, rather than the Red Guard and other grassroots activists, who are presented as fairly chill and bookish, or at least justified. The story unfolds an objective historical process. If you chronicle the major events of the Cultural Revolution and put them in order, one can gain an insight into the relationships between the events and their logic of development. Although the story was set in a small city, what happened there was not very different from what happened elsewhere, such as the sending of work teams to middle schools and colleges, the arrest of anti-revolutionary rightists, how the Red Guards and rebels formed, how the army supported the left, and how the Revolutionary Committees were established.
It's no mystery why Cao was unable to find a Mainland publisher, and had to go to Taiwan to find anyone willing cooperate with him. The book offers a potential solution to political deterioration in contemporary China, where the Party and new economy millionaires and billionaires are either colluding or contending in a struggle for power or both, and the vast majority of people are completely kept in obscurity from the political process. The protagonist of Democracy Classes is a young Red Guard named Xiao Ming:
Like all other practitioners of the Mao cult, Xiao Ming cites the quotations, shouts slogans, attacks the administration, and writes a diary. Yet in addition to reading Mao's texts, she also reads Marxist volumes, such as Engels' Gotha Program. Aspiring to emulate the Paris Commune, , she intensely examines issues of popular democracy and engages in constant discussions with her associates and friends, bringing to the fore questions of capitalism and socialism and the plight of the ordinary people.
It recalls the mass campaign that orchestrated people to exercise their democratic rights to speak out and rebel, to critique and to protest, and to publicize their views... The class on democracy also symbolises a thoughtful, educational process based on reading, studying, and discussing. A telling episode toward the end of the novel sums up this lesson. Reflecting on her experience in the Cultural Revolution as minzhu, Xiao Ming realized that minzhu literally means that people are masters of their own destiny and should participate in the mission of shaping their own affairs. Rather than being blindly guided by the Little Red Book, it is an imperative task to initiate active study, discussion, and argument in seeking the truth. ... In a dialogue with a friend with a dogmatic belief in Mao's words, Xiao Ming says that she had a revelation: any one of Mao's statements about the revolution can be contradicted by another.
Views on Cultural Revolution
Cao diagnosed the Cultural Revolution as an expression of the working class's desire for equality, making a distinction of this aspect from the intellectual elite's narrower desire for constitutionalism. He analysed that the Cultural Revolution was a positive and creative, if flawed, move for democratic equality. He believed that modern capitalist elites degrade it to protect their wealth, and that ordinary workers view it as a weapon for the majority to challenge authority.
Cao rebuked the demonization of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, arguing that political and economic elites "muddled reality" and "hid the historical process" to justify their own capitalist crystallisation and preserve their status quo.
Cao argued that modern critiques of the period often obliterate historical realities and mislead the youth by stripping away its ideological objectives
Cao Zhenglu in high volumes praised the Cultural Revolution, saying explicitly that “those who castigate the Cultural Revolution have muddled reality, hidden the historical process, and misled the youth of today.” But it is a way to talk about modern problems:
After I experienced capitalism, and understood the political, economic, and cultural logic of capitalism, my feelings on this issue began to change. I began to reconsider mass struggle, a tactic that we had abandoned as something worthless. But this is the very thing that ordinary people often talk about: What would happen if another Cultural Revolution occurred? Democracy is something that the intellectual elite hunger for, but democracy is also something that the workers and peasants desire, however the content of the concept varies among the two groups. The elite want constitutionalism, in other words the rights of the minority to be heard. Workers and peasants desire equality, the right for the majority to be heard. In this way it is correct to understand the Cultural Revolution as “lessons in democracy.” There was no teacher in this class, we learned from each other, we liberated each other, and then chose which path we took. As to people that explain the Cultural Revolution as a power struggle and demonize China’s leaders ... their arguments are so weak they do not require a rebuttal
Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist Thanks information from Dylan Levi King in ‘Let's read Cao Zhenglu and lament the demise of the social novel in Substack, and Reading Cao Zhenglu / What is New Left literature? ’and Vero publishing
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