The Cultural Revolution as a crisis of representation

Abstract

The May 16 Notification, which set the agenda for the Cultural Revolution, named the movement's key targets as those "representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture." The ensuing uprising of students and workers, many of whom claimed to be the loyal"representatives"of revolutionary and radical forces at the grassroots of society, exposed the fulminating crisis of political representation under CCP rule. This article considers the Cultural Revolution as a manifestation of a continuing crisis of representation within revolutionary socialism that remains unresolved to the present day, as demonstrated by the tepid popular response to Jiang Zemin's "three represents" and widespread contemporary concerns about the Party's "representativeness" (daibiaoxing 代表性) in the wake of market reform. Although the Cultural Revolution enabled both public debate of and political experimentation with new forms of representative politics, the movement failed to resolve the crisis. The Party's lingering disquiet regarding issues of representation thus remains one legacy of the Cultural Revolution.