In the end, this was a sentence upon Teng, the indication of removal of support. The Centre was now the supporter of moderation, fairness to all national minority groups. And Teng, from being the chief prosecutor from 1967 to early 1969, had, by mid 1969,  become a new type of enemy. The issue of the political sensitivity of saying sorry, and how to say sorry, continues to this day, with a full account and rectification of the CR in IM still being awaited.

Essay Two

Language and Politics in the Cultural Revolution: the Case of Ulanfu in Inner Mongolia[1]

(From a talk given at the first international conference of Discourse Studies, Hangzhou, October 2004) 

The contest for power lies at the heart of the Cultural Revolution (CR), which ran in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1966 to 1976. On one level this period saw a power struggle between groups and factions. It was described contemporaneously as a battle between good and bad classes. Authority was questioned and redefined at every level. Space was created to attack Party structures. This conflict occurred through organisations, language forms, events and movements set up to carry the social programme inciting liberation through rebellion from the old world.

This conflict impacted on the relationship between the political centre in Beijing and the provinces. At this time the Centre[2] was preoccupied by `hidden enemies,’ and internal and external threats to the unity of the PRC. In the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), this `threat’ was given a unique interpretation. Underlying this was the sensitive and contentious issue of how to manage the identity of the ethnic minority of Mongolians there within a discourse asserting the dominance of class over all other forms of social categorisation. A specific treatment of Mongolians and assertions of Mongolian ethnic and political identity was promoted. All of these issues are distilled in the campaign against the predominant leader in the province, Ulanfu, who was felled in 1967.

History

Three events guided the CR in IMAR and supplied the framework for the movement locally, setting up its terms of discourse and power framework. All originated and were inspired in Beijing. The `16 Articles’ in 1966 resulted in the Qianmen Hotel meeting, held in Beijing from May to June 1966. This led to the removal of Ulanfu from his positions. In February 1967, central talks were convened between local groups and factions and the Central government (represented by Zhou Enlai). This culminated in the enormously influential `13^th April Decision’ on `how to handle the problem of IMAR.’ A new leadership in the region was imposed. Ulanfu was openly condemned. A raft of `rebellious groups’  were created which carried the movement. However, the implementation of the decision was unsuccessful. Inner Mongolians became increasingly chaotic, so much so that the Centre was forced to intervene after the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969. The leaders imposed in 1967 were removed. The area was physically reduced to a third of its original size (a move reversed in 1979).[3]

Class Versus Ethnicity

The key sites for conflict in the CR in IMAR were class and ethnicity. The tensions between the Centre and the locality was located in these two areas. The dominant ideology of the CR was a promotion of the Maoist interpretation of society based on class, and class struggle. The commitment in Mao’s canonical Selected Works and in the main media representing the Centre was to social classification according to class. In the first lines of the opening essay of his selected works, Mao had answered the question: `Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?’ with the five categories of people: Landlord and comprador class; middle bourgeoisie; petty bourgeoisie (including owner peasants, master handicraftsmen, lower level intellectuals, small traders); semi-proletariat (semi-owner peasants, poor peasants, small handicraftsmen, shop assistants, peddlers); and proletariat.[4] This was in 1923. Mao’s most lasting contribution was the application of these various categories to Chinese society, and a vision of the political impact of this. His description of the class-basis of society was to be the ideological template for the party, and, when the Party attained power, for the new country in 1949.

What competed with the hegemony of the ideology of class, was that of identity based on nationality, or ethnicity. There are three key terms in this discourse, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Frank Dikötter has written about the creation of a Han race, and of the evolution of terms to describe what it meant to be Han Chinese, from the late Qing dynasty.[5] But race is a contentious term – one dealing with the imposition of identity on groups based on claims of blood and biological kindredness from outside rather then self-designated. The Chinese, according to Dikötter, did create racial categories for Westerners, for instance, and for other Asians. Discussing how Han regarded national minorities within China like Mongolians can more effectively be viewed within the framework of ethnicity – of how groups defined and separated themselves from other groups. The Chinese term, shaoshu minzu – ethnic minorities – captures this. Ethnicity itself was conveyed in political discourse in the PRC through the very specific language of `national minorities.’

Thinking about national minorities derived, like class ideology, from the core works of Marx, Lenin, and the development of these in the USSR. In forging a unified Soviet identity, Lenin at first, and Stalin afterwards, had devised a particular treatment of how to create unity between the Russian ethnic majority and the many minorities that populated the newly created USSR terrain. Part of this process was the careful classification of which national minority groups existed in the USSR. The objective was to achieve the `fusion and convergence of peoples’ to achieve unity. Equality between minority groups was offered as a political strategy to appease and reassure them, and `buy’ their allegiance to the new state. `The basic tenet of this idea,’ as Lenore A. Grenoble said, `is that a completely new identity will be created by the fusion process, forging a new group, the…. Soviet people, a super-group which would represent the unification of the main different nationalities.’[6]

This concept of national minorities, of unification within a multi-nationality state is critical. It provided the basis of the management of the relationship between the majority Han and the PRC's various designated minorities. It set out the parametres of the sorts of identities allowed them, and their articulation. There was a history of how the terms of this discourse had been set and its vocabularies created. In the Republican Period (1911-1949), the canonical statement on the relationship between China’s national groups was contained in Sun Yatsen’s assertion of the equality of all groups `in the context of integration and eventual assimilation.’ The American `melting pot’ was a powerful inspiration for this model. According to Sun, there were five major ethnic groups: Han, Manchu, Mongols, Hui and Tibetans.[7] But as Bulag pointed out, the position of ethnic groups in China (beyond the Han) was different from America because for many of these (many more than the five ordained by Sun) there was a memory, sometimes very recent, of having been parts of independent or semi-independent territory.[8] For these minorities, the desire to preserve identity went hand-in-hand with control and special rights over specific territories. Central promotion of unification could therefore be read as trying to pursue a process of colonisation.[9] The Mongolians of IMAR fell into this category.

Mao had made explicit statements about the issue of national minority self-determination early in his career. In a declaration to the Inner Mongolian people in December 1935 he had stated that `only by fighting with us can the Inner Mongolian nation preserve the glory of the epoch of Genghis Khan, avoid the extinction of their nation, embark on the path of national revival and obtain independence and freedom like that enjoyed by the nations of Turkey, Poland, the Ukraine and the Caucasus.’[10] But such an explicit endorsement of support for the region’s independence was not elevated to official ideology in the canonical works of Mao Zedong published after 1949. From the 1950s the key label was `national minority’ (shaoshu minzu), placing groups within the greater entity of the new PRC. This was used ostensibly to guarantee some level of independence for these groups, and to satisfy their contending claims, whilst preserving national unity.  

In many ways, this was a dishonoured promise. The works of Mao that appeared in the official five volume Selected Works edited and sanctioned by the Centre (which should be regarded as one of the main distillations of ideological orthodoxy) contained few explicit treatments of nationality issues. Indeed the statement above is excised from them.[11] The treatise `On Coalition Government’ (originally published in 1945) contained a very short section on “The Problem of Minority Nationalities” in which all national groups within the PRC were assured equality and unity (but not autonomy).[12] By the time of Mao’s influential 1956 Statement, “On the Ten Major Relationships” the majority Han were instilled with the task of `actively help[ing] the minority nationalities to develop their economy and culture.’ But the `unity of nationalities’ was still important.[13] A year later in “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” Mao merely stated that `it is imperative to foster good relations between the Han people and the minority nationalities.’[14] The “Constitution of the Communist Party of China” adopted in September 1956 stated that `our country is a multi-national state... The Communist Party of China must make special efforts to raise the status of national minorities... The Party opposes all tendencies to great-nation chauvinism and local nationalism, both of which hamper the unity of nationalities.' [15]

This entered the local discourse in IMAR. In the quotes attributed to him in a 1967 pamphlet issued by the Hohhot Revolutionary Alliance Headquarters Mao Zedong spoke about the `Han having positively to help national minorities implement policies to develop economic and cultural construction,’ of `liberating the national minorities’ and of `us uniting with all national minorities, regardless of whether they are big or small…’[16] This sense of patronage was distilled in the metaphor of the PRC being a `great family’. The dominant ideology promoting the importance of unity, reducing nationality and minority questions to ones of class relations, effectively closed off the option of granting the larger freedoms for regions that Mao had talked of in 1935.

Ulanfu as a Class Traitor

The campaign against Ulanfu, running from the `13^th April Decision’ in 1967, to the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969, had at its centre this accusation that there was a group in IMAR that articulated its identity on national minority terms not class ones. There is a simple way to illustrate this. The narrative of the PRC in 1949 was based on the freeing from oppression of underclasses by dominant ones. This was true whether the terrain was Tibet, Shanxi or Shanghai. There was no space for liberation by minority groups from majority groups. Proletariat were proletariat regardless of their national minority status. And they were committed to the same project  - the creation of a unified Chinese state, based on the ideology of class, and the narrative of liberation according to class labels.

The dialogues in 1967 between the Centre and the local groups, leading to the `13<sup>th</sup> April Decision’ had largely ignored this issue of IMAR being a special area. In those dialogues, the perennial question of `how to handle the problem of IMAR,’ was addressed in a way that simply ignored the fact that there was a major constituency in the area with their own claims to self-identity based on a separate language, and a nomadic rather than agrarian culture. In these dialogues, the issue was addressed purely through the conflict between local army groups, and other rebellious organisations set up and competing with each other in terms set out by the Centre. This is symbolised by the shooting in February 1967 of a student, Han Tong, by a PLA soldier. The Centre explained its intervention in this case because it was unacceptable for two `groups’ of good class background to attack each other.

All national groups that existed there were equal, and were, according to the official central political programme, committed to the same unified state. No credence was given to the idea that this unity was at the expense of the expression of national minority, and therefore ethnic, identity. The campaign against Ulanfu, which got into full swing in June of that year, showed that even in an environment where national minority (specifically Mongolian) aspirations were still an issue, this was not what was publicly admitted.  As in the central campaign against Liu Shaoqi, which offered a template of a movement to `uproot the small minority in the Party following the capitalist road’ the CR was aimed at felling Ulanfu and the leaders around him, predominantly within a discourse in which they were presented as being opposed to the hegemony of class ideology, and supporters of a narrative and counter-ideology which had, at its heart, support for old class structures and domination. 

The Attack on Ulanfu

On his death in 1988 Ulanfu was described in his official obituary as a `reliable communist soldier, distinguished Party and state leader, outstanding proletarian revolutionary, pre-eminent nationality work leader.’[17] But only 20 years before this he was viewed differently. He was `a counter-revolutionary revisionist,’ `minority splittist,’ `Mongolian trash,’ `an outright aristocratic herdlord’ married to a `dog wife.’ The invective reached its nadir in 1968 when he was referred to in rebellious group pamphlets as a `bastard’ and `common enemy.'

Ulanfu is central to an understanding of the CR in IMAR. He had played a major role in local politics and history from the 1930s onwards. He had headed the Party in the region, had been Chairman of the local civilian government, and taken the lead role in the military district.[18] This concentration of formal responsibilities in one person has never reoccurred in the area. Ulanfu had arrived at this through a history of interaction and service to the CCP. In Yan’an in the 1940s he reputedly helped the Party formulate their policies towards minorities. At that time he built a strong relationship with the leaders-to-be, Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi.[19] This paid off in the 1950s and 1960s, when his direct link to them, and his posts as alternate member of the Politburo and second secretary of the North China Bureau of the CCP, meant that he was able to lobby for interests he believed important for IMAR. But Ulanfu also had political capital of his own. He had joined the Party in 1925, and had impeccable credentials through his participation in the early revolutionary movements. He was originally a protegé of Li Dazhao, who was also influential in the early career of Mao Zedong. In addition to this, Ulanfu could claim to represent a further constituency, the Mongolians, who were important allies for the Communists in the Northern Chinese campaigns. Through this combination of positions and relationships, Ulanfu accrued influence and authority. He was central to the narrative of revolutionary history in the IMAR, and to its new identity. He had immense symbolic importance there.

But there was ambiguity and hybridity at the heart of Ulanfu's power. His political career fits into two narratives. One was the centrally sponsored version, in which he was seen as a model representative of the `national minorities,’ faithful to the project of the centralised (and overwhelmingly Han) Chinese state from its inception, a guard against splittism, and a preserver of `national unity’ (a narrative temporarily suspended in the CR but which returned in the late 1970s). The second was the localised version in which he promoted Mongolian interests in the region as far as possible in the face of demographic inequality (at that time, Mongolians made up only 10% of the population) and political reality. This meant acknowledging the general indifference of the only parties that might have helped IMAR become independent in the 1930s and 1940s, the Mongolian People’s Republic and the USSR).[20] The treatment of him in the CR showed this relationship at breaking point. The prime territory was the conflict over which should take priority, class relations or those based on national minority status (and therefore on ethnicity).[21]

The Attack on Ulanfu: Chronology and Structure of the Campaign

Ulanfu’s position on nationality was signalled as problematic as early as 1965 when he was accused of being `soft’ on Mongolian class enemies within the CCP.[22] In May 1966 at the Qianmen Hotel meeting of the North China Bureau, of which he was second secretary he was attacked for opposing the Centre (ironically by the then Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, who was himself about to become the chief `villain’ of the CR). Ulanfu’s failure to understand the key importance of class struggle according to Deng Xiaoping, another attendée of the meeting, led to his dismissal from his Party posts by the Centre in August.

The further meetings from February to April 1967 resulted in the `13<sup>th</sup> April Decision’ which sanctioned open attack on Ulanfu. Here the local campaign against him mirrored that against Liu Shaoqi and other key figures centrally. Before Ulanfu could be openly attacked a certain amount of preparation and management was needed. He was not named directly until 29<sup>th</sup> August 1967 when an IM Daily editorial called him `the key representative in the IMAR taking the capitalist, revisionist road.’ He was however directly named as early as June in rebellious group publications with more limited audience in IMAR.[23]

In material attacking Ulanfu toward the end of the period (winter 1967 to spring 1968) there was a more explicit mention of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party. Just as there had been a period when Ulanfu was under attack, but not yet overtly named, so one can plot a similar journey from the indirect to the direct explication of an `enemy’ counter-organisation. Although the campaign against Ulanfu continued well into the 1970s, the period of greatest intensity was ran from late 1967. After the spring of 1968 the IMPP, as a named entity, became the key element to the campaign in IMAR. Ulanfu from this stage merely came to represent or symbolise this.

A key feature of the campaign against Ulanfu was that his removal in 1966 was not just symbolic but physical. From then till his formal rehabilitation and return to public positions in 1978, he was not allowed back to IMAR. Most of the time he was either under house arrest in Beijing, or, towards the end of the CR, in Hunan.[24] Unlike Liu Shaoqi centrally, Ulanfu was not made available for denunciation or violence in person. This meant that he was an `invisible’ presence in the attack documents aimed at him. None were `performed’ before him or upon him, as some of the attacks on Liu Shaoqi and his family were. His absence restricted the opportunity to extend the violence of the language into violent actions on him as a person, and increased the symbolic aspect of the attack. Ulanfu’s voice in the CR was mediated through edited quotations from his own works and speeches, or simply through the attribution of words to him. His direct contemporaneous voice did not figure. He always spoke from the past, controlled and managed in the narrative in which he had been confined.

The Labels for Ulanfu

Ulanfu’s `name,’ his reputation, needed careful handling. Its devaluation and destruction took preparation. A strategy was needed to disempower him in the new discourse. The various labels used for Ulanfu in the material issued locally from 1967 to 1968 indicate the pre-occupations of the campaign against him:

1) July 67     The oldest and biggest splittist in IMAR

2) July 67         A princely aristocrat (wanggong guizu) worming his way into the Party

3) Sept 67       Counter-revolutionary revisionist, splittist element Ulanfu

4) Sept 67       The chief representative of China’s Khrushchev in IMAR

5) Sept 67        A power holder in the Party (dangquanpai) taking the capitalist road

6) Sept 67        The typical dutiful son (xiao zi xisun) of landlords, herdlords, and capitalists

7) Oct 67 A jackal from the same lair (yiqiu zhehe) as Liu Shaoqi

8) Oct 67 The modern Genghis Khan

9) Oct 67 A representative of the nobility inside the CCP

10 ) Oct 67      The sworn enemy of the working people of all nationalities

11) Oct 67       A time-bomb (dingshi zhadan) buried in the northern border region

12) Oct 67       The representative within the Party of Inner Mongolian feudal herdlords, landlords, bureaucrats and upper class clergy

13) Jan 68        The arch criminal destroying the national minority policies in the district, cities and the autonomous region. The black hand of IMAR

14) Jan 68       The watchdog for feudal herdlords

15 )Feb 68      The biggest rightist in the IMAR CCP

16) Feb 68      Scum of the Mongolian nationality (menggu minzu de bailei)

17) Feb 68       The sworn enemy (bugong daitian de sidi) of all nationalities

18) April 68    Careerist, schemer, double-dealer (liang mianpai)

19) May 68      Chief representative of the nationalist counter-revolutionaries in IMAR

20) May 68      The backstage boss of cow ghosts and snake spirits (niugui-sheshen)

21) May 68      The black manipulator of landlords, rich [peasants and herdsmen], counter-revolutionaries, [as well as] bad and rightist elements

These labels illustrated the two narratives in which Ulanfu existed: those which are lifted from the discourse of the Centre and those that relate specifically to the situation in IMAR, and made little sense applied outside it. 18, for instance, was used about Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in the central campaign, as was 21. Reference in 12 and 14 to the category of  `herdlords’ (muzhu) was specific to IMAR. Similarly, reference to Ulanfu as the `Ghenghis Khan’ of the modern times was also a label originating locally. Between these two categories fell a number of labels lifted from the central discourse and adapted to local use, 3 and 4, for instance, which placed Ulanfu in a hierarchy of villainy directly related to the `bad elements’ he represented at the Centre.

These labels showed the importance of class classification in the condemnation of Ulanfu. Eight of the labels (3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 19 and 21) condemned Ulanfu because of his representing the rights of specific bad classes. But others focused on the condemnation of Ulanfu’s `nationalism.’ He was simply a `national splittist element’ (minzu fenliezhuyi fenzi). The reference to Genghis Khan belonged to this group. Ulanfu was labelled as the enemy of `all national groups.’ These labels also showed a process of increasingly free and unbridled attacks on him, from the formulaic labels in 1 and 2, to the outright and contemptuous denunciations of 16, and 18. They plot the process whereby someone’s social face and influence was dismantled. They represent the gradual devaluation of the `currency’ of Ulanfu’s authority. They stand in fact as the material indications in this discourse of his loss of formal power in the region.

We come back to class however. In an area with significant numbers of national minorities like IMAR, the assertion of standard central class labels was problematic. At the root of this lay the different histories and cultures between the Han and Mongolian. In the IMAR many Mongolians were not, historically, economically dependent on settled agrarian cultivation as the Han settlers were. They were mainly pastoralists and their relationship to the land and ownership of it was therefore different.[25] This left the Centre with a choice: either special terms needed to be created in public discourse to convey (and accept) this difference, or the central categories were rigidly imposed. There was a long history of the process of management of these two competing pressures. The CR saw the peak of the latter option, but it had been a contentious issue since 1949. In the initial stages of the land reform movement in the 1950s, redistribution of land was based on classifying people in IMAR according to class labels from the discourse of the Centre. But the blanket imposition of these labels was unsuccessful. A Party document in 1949 admitted that local unrest was common because of this process: `In the pure and semi-agricultural pastoral areas, the pastoral economy has suffered severe damages. IMAR had few tenant Mongolian farmers. Pastoral farming was ill suited to land reform.’[26] So initial policies of equal treatment based on the centralised class ideology had to be adapted to the local situation. The discourse was adapted and localised.

In the CR such accommodation disappeared. The attack on Ulanfu saw people divided into two broad categories: national ones, and those applicable to specific local conditions. These are set out thus:

Table 1: Attack on Ulanfu Material: Differences in Class Nomenclature between the Centre and IMAR

National class labels (used locally)	Purely local class labels
`Landlord’ (dizhu)	`Herdlords’(muzhu)
`Rich peasants’ (funong)	`Rich herdsmen’ (fumu)
`Capitalists’ (zibenjia)	`Herder-workmen’ (mugong)
`Colonisers’ (zhimin)	`Herders’ (mumin)
`Proletariat’ (wuchanjieji)	`Nomadic herders’ (youmu)
`Bourgeoisie’ (zhongchanjieji)	`Lamas’ (lama)
	`Princely aristocrats’ (shangceng wanggong guizu)
	`Poor herdsmen’ (pinku mumin), also conveyed by the Mongolian term yadumalaqin
	`Poorish  herdsmen’ (zhongdeng mumin) also conveyed by the Mongolian term yadulikemalaqin

* Both transliterations from Mongolian words into Chinese characters.

The attempts to articulate and accommodate `special' local circumstances and deal with them within the central discourse can be located in this vocabulary. These attempted to convey to the audience in IMAR the real social and cultural situation there.  They demonstrated the attempt by the Centre, ongoing since the late 1940s when the land reform programme was instigated, of imposing a sense of identity rooted in class, not ethnicity. 

This process had the potential to cause great conflict. The use of central terms based on `class' labels, while superficially an attempt to accommodate the specifics of IMAR, was underpinned by the Centre’s claim that class analysis had universal criterion. Class terms had to be accepted as unconditionally true. In the CR, where the discourse and ideology of class reached its most extreme form, the IMAR was not seen as a `special’ area. Such special areas did not exist. In this context, wanting local adaptations to the master terms only betrayed a darker purpose - the desire for independence.

This was the basis for the main accusation against Ulanfu.  In presenting nationality considerations as equal to or more important than class ones Ulanfu had betrayed the Centre’s ideology. The Centre presented class ideology as being `in the best interests’ of the audience in IMAR, whether they were Mongolian or Han Chinese. But it is a fact that the campaign there saw overwhelming violence against a far larger proportion of Mongolians than Han. The language of class and its hegemony was used to attack the national minority, Mongolians, and frame them as enemies. This condemnation of Ulanfu’s `minoritising’[27] policies in the CR also played to Han grievances over how they had been treated in the early land reform campaigns, and threatened over their status in the IMAR as it was. Despite what it said about the primacy of `national unity,’ the CR campaign exacerbated this conflict.

Ulanfu’s Counter-Ideology

Ulanfu was presented not just as having destructive, negative influence but as representing and promoting his own `counter-ideology’ articulating and materially embodying the primacy of `nationality' over `class' in a common language. In `Criticise Ulanfu, Encourage Battle,’ published in August 1967, the attack essay referred to the following `Ulanfu’ counter-policies:

·        `Don’t struggle, don’t distinguish, don’t divide according to class‘ (bu dou, bu fen, bu hua jijie): the assertion of the special social composition of IMAR, based on ethnic, not class, composition.

·        `Stable, broad, long’ (wen, kuang, chang’): this originated in Ulanfu’s prescription that the revolution in IMAR should be slower because it must be `stable, with broad policies, and last longer.’ This was seen in the text as demanding policies different from those implemented in areas where the Han were in the majority.

·        The `theory that revolution harms production’ (`geming pohuai shengchan’ lun): an attempt not to implement full-scale revolution by pretending that such a re