Cultural Revolution

In China in Ten Words, Yu Hua treats the Cultural Revolution as the recurring structural backdrop against which today’s China is measured. He renders it as a “reading famine” — an era of intellectual scarcity that paradoxically sharpened his own creative instinct, since “ignorance engendering mystery” triggered imagination. He quotes Mao Zedong’s definition of revolution (“A revolution is not a dinner party… it is an insurrection, an act of violence”) and Mao’s binary logic — “We should support whatever the enemy opposes, and oppose whatever the enemy supports” — to characterize the period as “a simple era” painted in black and white, where “nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right.” Yu Hua draws a pointed continuity between then and now: writing big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution and keeping a blog today, he argues, are both attempts “to assert the value of one’s own existence.”

Context: The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was a sociopolitical movement launched by Mao Zedong to purge “counter-revolutionary” elements and reassert Maoist orthodoxy; it caused mass persecution, the closing of schools, and widespread social upheaval across China.

Where this appears

• China in Ten Words — the “reading famine” and black-and-white moral logic of the era; Yu Hua uses it as the structural frame against which post-Tiananmen, money-driven China is contrasted.