Introduction

In analyzing the proceedings of the assembly, the main emphasis of this chapter will be on various discursive strategies whereby the theological polemics between the Ahmadis and their opponents were translated into legal jargon. Central to the process was the attorney general (AG), Yahya Bakhtiyar, who was assisted by the ulema members of the religio-political parties. The first section of the chapter gives details of the written statements read out by the Ahmadis and the rejoinder given by the ulema. This theological exchange helps establish the polemical nature of the argument which had been referred to the parliament to address. The gap between the legal acumen of the AG and specialized religious knowledge of the ulema, this chapter argues, shaped the process whereby the cross-examination of the heads of two Ahmadi groups took place and an attempt was made to adduce a precise legal argument from a medley of polemical debates. This requires delineating the AG's legal strategy through a detailed analysis of his cross-examination of Mirza Nasir Ahmad and his lengthy concluding speech at the end of parliamentary proceedings. The last section of the chapter will discuss how the “final solution” to the “90-year-old problem” — as the prime minister of Pakistan referred to it in his speech after the passing of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, declaring Ahmadis non-Muslims — foreclosed the possibility of according Ahmadis equal status as citizens or safeguarding their rights as guaranteed by the constitution of Pakistan even as a non-Muslim minority.

Introduction

Acts of violence, according to Nasser Hussain, cannot be divided into those executed under legal authority and those set against it. Hence, “the law in resorting to violence, a material act of killing, produces an intensified need for the external signature of legality in order to distinguish the two.” In other words, a violent situation, with or without the sanction of law, becomes a threat not to this or that property or individual right but to the law itself. Against this background, Hussain explains the setting up of inquiry commissions to probe violence. He gives the example of the commission set up after the Amritsar massacre of 1919 to look into the use of excessive force by General Reginald Dyer, who was responsible for killing hundreds of civilians that were violating a ban on public gathering. The official British concern was not about the number of people killed or their particular guilt or innocence, but the reasons for their death: “That is, it focuses not so much on the substance of Dyer's actions, but the logic with which they are explained. Everywhere in these official documents one finds confused answers to a question, sometimes tacit, sometimes explicitly asked: What is the proper object of martial law? It is answered by placing the massacre and martial law in the Punjab in its wider political context.”

The court of inquiry set up by the government of Punjab performed a similar function. It was not concerned with the killing of protestors; in fact it glorified those officers who were not reluctant to use legally sanctioned violence. The court of inquiry was instead mandated with the task of probing very much the same questions as suggested by Hussain: find out the circumstances in which the anti-Ahmadi movement had gained momentum to the point that it led to a breakdown in civil authority and investigate the recourse to martial law for its suppression. But while this chapter describes the setting up of the court of inquiry as an attempt to reinscribe state authority, it also details its defiance by the ulema and religio-political party leaders through various communicative techniques – which involved disrupting the smooth progression of court proceedings, ridiculing the court’s discourse on Islam and the use of rhetoric and satire.

French Maoism flourished in the decade between 1966 and 1976, coinciding precisely with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Having germinated slowly since the 1940s, French Maoism thrived in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split and as a result of converging international and domestic circumstances. It wilted in the wake of Mao’s death, amidst the ongoing decline in far-left activism in the late 1970s, and has largely faded, except for a residual cross-pollination in intellectual life that continues even today. The reception of Maoism in France, as elsewhere, was subject to the vicissitudes of “traveling theory” – the dislocation and creative appropriation that attended the translation of Maoist thought into different cultural contexts. Ironically, Mao’s rough-and-ready peasant communism proved especially influential because it took root among the intellectual elite, notably with students at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and among luminaries such as Louis Althusser, Jean-Luc Godard, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Philippe Sollers. Maoism arrived in France at a fortuitous time, its international promotion by China in the 1960s coinciding with openness in France toward alternative radicalisms. The efforts of the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, yielding the Little Red Book and, perhaps more importantly, the multi-volume Selected Works, coincided with domestic circumstances in such a way as to allow the seeds of la pensée Mao to fall in particularly fertile soil.

The rhetoric of revolution was a ubiquitous presence in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Red Guard papers exploded with such rhetoric. Revolutionary slogans, posters, and plaques were the indispensable props of rallies, demonstrations, and mass meetings. They dotted public spaces. The Cultural Revolution would not have been what it was without its rhetoric. Yet few scholars have examined how this rhetoric may be integral to the revolutionary process. By examining the uses of the Quotations from Chairman Mao, or the Little Red Book, in the Red Guard press, this chapter shows that Mao quotations, and revolutionary rhetoric more generally, were not meaningless propaganda, but a constitutive part of the factional dynamics of the revolution. My analysis will focus on two episodes of factionalism in 1967 in the city of Chongqing, which witnessed some of the most violent battles in the Red Guard movement in the entire country. Armed with Mao quotations, Red Guards and rebels engaged in intense verbal and physical conflicts. The combatants would recite Mao quotations to give themselves strength and inspiration. The escalation of Red Guard factionalism to violence had much to do with the intensification of this rhetoric of revolutionary violence. It seemed as if Mao quotations had taken on an incantatory power. I will argue that they were the core of an entire script of the Chinese revolution. This script took on its power because by the eve of the Cultural Revolution, it had been sanctified. Like the word “revolution,” Mao quotations became holy symbols of the Chinese nation. In the end, Red Guards made a revolution by performing the sacred script of revolution.

Religion as politics

Mao’s Little Red Book represented a scriptural authority and emanated a sacred aura during China’s Cultural Revolution. An intense religious atmosphere surrounded the activities and rituals of Mao’s words. Everyday life was immersed in study sessions, discussions, lectures, public performances of Mao’s poems and quotations, ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts, and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism. The study sessions may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism, which were not meant to disseminate knowledge and truths but to foster faith, loyalty, and conviction. And the rituals were widely diffused in popular life: the posting of Mao’s quotations on shop fronts, the singing and performing of quotation songs in the streets, the wearing of Mao badges, group sessions for discussing what lessons or wisdom one could learn from Mao’s texts. These activities can be described as a broad aesthetic experience aimed at converting individuals into true believers.

Mao’s Little Red Book was enveloped in a compelling aura of religiosity, and stood at the center of a massive movement. In her recent study Barbara Mittler draws our attention to a propaganda poster entitled “Let’s Set Off a New Upsurge in the Study of Mao’s Works.” The poster shows a group of people in a sea of pinkish flowers, with three major figures of worker, peasant, and soldier in front. Each member of this study group holds a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book in hand, all looking up with a smile to a bright future. All the books are open, suggesting that faithful readers have been intensely reading and studying. Rather than taking up the center of the poster, Mao’s works are spread out in copy after copy and in one hand after another. What is striking is not the elevated image of Mao’s book but its wide dissemination and populist following among the masses. The religious ambiance created by the repetitive book images and avid reading seemed to inspire confidence and faith in the future of the country.

Peru’s Maoist guerrilla movement, known as Shining Path, was far and away the most radical and violent in Latin America. The group’s founder and leader, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, claimed to be a devoted Maoist and a faithful interpreter of Mao Zedong’s ideology, strategy, and tactics as he directed a people’s war based largely in rural, impoverished, and predominantly indigenous areas of Peru between 1980 and his capture in 1992.

However, Guzmán was trained in China as a potential Third World guerrilla during several extended visits beginning just before the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and continuing during it, as were several other members of his organization. As a result, he and other Shining Path central committee members were much more influenced by the post-revolutionary ideological dogmatism of the Gang of Four than by Quotations from Chairman Mao, also known as the Little Red Book, or Mao’s reflections on the course of the Chinese revolution itself. However, by 1976 the Gang of Four had lost its struggle for political control in China, which meant that Shining Path was cast adrift and left to fend for itself.

From its founding in 1949, the young People’s Republic of China (PRC) fully recognized the importance of translation and treated it as a significant part of its cultural diplomacy and exchange. In hopes of creating a global language of Maoist revolution, the Chinese government subsidized the publication and distribution of numerous foreign-language publications, such as China Pictorial, China Reconstructs, and Peking Review. But none of these could rival Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book in visibility and influence. China’s Foreign Languages Press translated Quotations from Chairman Mao, otherwise known as the Little Red Book, into dozens of languages and arranged for global distribution of the book, and in the eight months from October 1966 to May 1967, the International Bookstore successfully sent copies to more than a hundred countries. This major translation undertaking was seen as an invaluable contribution to socialist internationalism and to the development of global revolution. This chapter details how, when, and by whom the text of the Little Red Book was translated, and how the book itself, as a material object, came to stock bookshelves around the world. Drawing on oral history interviews, memoirs, and archival research, this chapter argues that the global success of the Little Red Book should be seen as part of New China’s extended efforts to translate Chinese literature, revolutionary theory, and Mao’s works into different languages, potentially serving as a common and universal currency of revolution. In other words, the popularity of the Little Red Book in the 1960s was based on the cumulative efforts of the PRC since its establishment to build a global book distribution network through the International Bookstore, as well as its consistent emphasis on the role of translation in promoting Mao’s work under the auspices of the Foreign Languages Press. In my discussion, I am particularly interested in these two important institutions, which played crucial roles in promoting Quotations from Chairman Mao. The development of these two institutions and the evolution of some major policies related to the translation will be mapped out. Moreover, complementary to these two institutions, I will also discuss other ways of spreading the content of the Little Red Book to the world, such as radio broadcasts and by sailors.

Preface

The year 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao, commonly known outside China as the Little Red Book. At the height of its influence, the decade from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, this compact tome was the most printed book in the world. Official editions numbered well over a billion copies in three dozen languages, plus untold numbers of unofficial local reprints and unofficial translations in more than fifty languages. The book’s characteristic physical form – pocket-sized, bright red, clad in sturdy vinyl – reflected its practical origins as an ideological field manual for soldiers of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The canonical revised edition that first appeared in 1965 arranged its 427 quotations into 33 thematic chapters, presenting extracts from Mao Zedong’s writings and speeches from 1929 to 1964, ranging in subject matter from philosophy to warfare to art. This easily digestible format drew upon two distinct literary genres: an ancient Chinese genre of collected wisdom dating back to the Analects of Confucius, and a modern genre of ideological primers embraced especially, but by no means exclusively, by Marxist–Leninists around the world. After Mao’s death, the book’s unsystematic presentation of fragments torn from their historical and textual contexts was widely dismissed as a vulgarization of Maoism (not to mention Marxism). During Mao’s lifetime, however, his quotations were adapted in China and elsewhere for many uses and in many forms – as a little red book, of course, but also as rhetoric, art, song, performance, accessory, symbol, talisman, badge, and weapon.

West Germans bought over one hundred thousand copies of Mao’s book of quotations in 1967. Three editions were sold, each bearing a distinct ideological imprint. Alongside the familiar, plastic-bound edition of the Beijing Foreign Languages Press was a paperback published by the left-liberal Fischer Press. Translated and edited by West German students of Sinology, the Fischer edition provided a scholarly perspective on the Cultural Revolution that was broadly sympathetic, signaling its orientation with a cover photograph of a young girl and an elderly woman in a benign moment of intergenerational communication. The third edition of Mao’s book of quotations, published by the anti-communist Marienburg Press, had the title The Mao Zedong Breviary: Catechism of 700 Million. The editor, Kurt C. Steinhaus, both tapped into and reinforced racialized anxiety in his introduction, warning of a “Far Eastern-Asiatic system endowed with an inborn collectivism striving uncompromisingly for world domination.” The publishers declared that their goal in releasing the book was to “show Mao in all his severity.” “It is necessary,” they said, “to give Germans and Europeans the creeps.”