by Sam Beard.

This interview is published in collaboration with Guan Kan Journal. Find out more about Guan Kan here.

Linda Jaivin’s Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China is a slim volume that tackles one of the most complex and paradoxical periods in modern Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution. The mental image that this period conjures for many of us is largely drawn from paintings of rosy cheeked workers raising their fists, stories of social turmoil, and the ideology and iconicity of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (or “Mao’s Little Red Book”). The reality was far more nuanced, chaotic, and confusing—and in the brevity and lucid pacing of Bombard the Headquarters, the paradoxes of the Cultural Revolution, and their impact on Chinese society, emerge in stark clarity. Jaivin’s retelling of this tumultuous decade blends its key political and historical moments with vibrant details and anecdotes that are rarely included in such concise accounts.
        I sat down for a video call with Linda Jaivin to discuss the book. As we set up the call, I spied a glimpse of her office—mountains of books, papers, and objects overflowing from shelves. Jaivin comments, ‘my desk is in the middle, surrounded by all this. So if we ever have an earthquake in Sydney and all of the bookshelves come down, there’ll be no finding me!’
        Before we begin, I mention that I’m researching the Stars (Xing Xing) art group—a group of Beijing artists that, from around 1979–80, staged several exhibitions that broke away from Maoist social realism and championed the work of young independent artists. And of course, Linda was there! She knew many of the artists and attended Xing Xing’s first official exhibition—mounted after a famed protest show, where artworks were hung on the fence of the National Art Museum of Beijing—, reporting on the exhibition for Asiaweek in 1980. The group’s activity coincided with the Beijing Spring (1978-79), which in itself is a complex period in post-Mao history closely tied to the final stages and ultimate conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. The tangled nature of modern Chinese history, and its astounding pace, makes Bombard the Headquarters! an all the more intriguing and timely overview.

SB: … That’s something that fascinates me about the Beijing Spring, that it is often conceived of in one of two distinct ways, either as the birth of the Reform and Open Up movement or the conclusion of the earlier period. Yet, to really understand the Beijing Spring fully, both ends need to be grappled with.

LJ: Exactly. And in fact, I did struggle with that. Bombard the Headquarters! is such a short book—and it had to be. The format was set by the original UK publisher, who are putting out a whole series of very short history books. So, I had to stick to this incredibly tight format. I had so much material on the Stars; I had quotations from Bei Dao’s poetry; and I really wanted to capture the cultural life of the period. But then I thought: maybe it’s more important to show the roots of all that—how it grew out of the culture of the educated youth who were sent down to the countryside, where they began writing poetry and passing it around. And it was more important, for my story, to kind of put the weight in there.

SB: Absolutely. That was one of the first questions I had for you: in approaching the Cultural Revolution within such a slim volume, what were some of your initial considerations or approaches? What were the major themes or ideas you really wanted to grapple with?

LJ: Yeah, I thought, Gee, this is going to be very, very difficult. What I really wanted to do was cover the broad sweep of the Cultural Revolution—the big events, the narrative of it. Initially, I didn’t quite take into consideration how twisted and complicated that narrative is. It wasn’t just like: this movement, then that movement, this event, then that reaction. Everything was going on at the same time. There were so many contradictory proclamations and contradictory directives. Different campaigns were launched and then didn’t quite finish. One campaign would still be going on when another one started. It was so messy. But one of the things I did want to paint, to describe, was the overall narrative—how the Cultural Revolution unfolded.
        Of course, I wanted to take into consideration some of the key players from the top—obviously Mao, Jiang Qing, and so on. I knew I would have to leave out a number of people who played important roles. However, those individuals weren’t the main movers in the end. At the same time, I wanted to be sure that I gave an impression of what was happening to ordinary people—the people being affected by these directives and campaigns. For example, you have Mao going after his political enemies, and then, at the same time, you have a translator in the Foreign Languages Bureau who’s suddenly told to stop working on a translation of an 18th-century novel. I thought: I’m going to take some peoples’ stories and weave them in to give a sense of what it was like—the real gritty details and the big sweep all in one.
        I didn’t want to overemphasise the theoretical debates behind the Cultural Revolution—just to give them enough airtime so that people could understand, for example, the implications of the Bloodlines Theory [a theory used to assess individuals’ revolutionary reliability or class guilt based on family background and to determine who could join the Red Guards and who should be targeted]. There were many discussions like that, so I had to be selective. I had to go into it and say, Okay, here’s an important one.
        It would have been really interesting to get into the weeds—if I’d had a huge book to fill, you know—about how some Red Guards argued for nonviolence in the very beginning of the movement. That would’ve been fascinating. But in the end, those factions lost. They lost pretty quickly. And so, they are pretty much irrelevant to the story. So, instead I mention that there was this argument between Red Guards: Do we use violence? Do we not use violence? Ultimately, it was Jiang Qing [Deputy Director of the Central Cultural Revolution Group and Mao’s wife] who conveyed messages to them that violence was acceptable.
        It’s also easy to get very carried away with Mao, because he’s just riveting—he’s really, really fascinating. And he is at the centre of a lot of it. At the same time, Mao would set off these... he was the big butterfly wing that sets off all the ripples of chaos. But you can’t make it all about Mao, because it wasn’t. It was about the whole country. 
        I also wanted to bring in seemingly unimportant yet fascinating details. I always have this instinct, and I try to stay in touch with it when I’m writing history in particular—if there’s something that’s relatively minor, but I find interesting, I just have to trust that other people are going to find it interesting too.
        For example, when I describe the birthday toast that Mao made to civil war. I could’ve dispensed with the scene by simply saying, At his birthday party, Mao toasted to civil war. But it was so much more fun to bring in Qi Benyu [a Party theorist] and have him describe the banquet, who was invited, what they were eating—because I find that interesting. So, it’s always a question of what is important? What is interesting? How do we keep the big picture, but also the little pictures, all going at once?
        Along with the key Party figures, there were some dissidents—the most famous ones probably being the ones I mention, like Yu Luoke with his criticism of the Bloodlines Theory, and Zhang Zhixin—oh my god, what she went through was horrific! I made sure to include them to give an idea of the debates going on at the time. So, it’s this balancing between the general and the particular, with a real sense of the importance of keeping things really interesting. 

SB: Those descriptions really stood out to me. They really add to the vibrancy of your narrative, such as your account of the incident at the British Embassy.

LJ: The British Mission, as they called it.

SB: Yes, and you describe how the staff are sitting around drinking claret, waiting as the Red Guards are protesting out front, waiting to see if they’ll storm the Mission at 10:30pm as they’ve threatened …

LJ: And watching a Peter Sellers movie! That was very funny, because I thought: Okay, there are a lot of similar incidents I could focus on––they attacked the Indonesians, they attacked many, many different people for various reasons—but with the British Mission, there was that great detail including one from the book by the American teachers Nancy and David Milton who recalled how they had seen their students walking along with cans of petrol and, at the time, thought that the students looked like they were going on a picnic! But of course, they were off to burn down the British Mission. Those accounts give such a vivid sense of just how surreal things must have felt. Then, when I started digging into it more, I found several sources saying that the British diplomats were actually watching a Peter Sellers film when the incident took place. Someone had written something like, “Wouldn’t it be great to know the name of the Peter Sellers film?” And I thought—yes, it would be!
        I have an acquaintance who works at the Foreign Office in London. So, I got in touch with her. She was fantastic, and tracked down all this material, giving me a huge selection of documents. A lot of them were the diplomats’ own accounts, written after the fact for the Office’s files. And they aren’t closed files, so I was able to go through all this original material. That was really fun—even just finding out exactly what they were eating, what they were drinking. And when I discovered that the film they were watching was The Wrong Arm of the Law. I just thought, oh my god, that is so funny! So yes, it’s not the most important detail of the Cultural Revolution, obviously—but it’s such a great one.

SB: Absolutely. It really enriches things. One section that really got me thinking—towards the end—is where you begin discussing the contemporary ramifications of the Cultural Revolution. I was in China last year helping out on a student trip, and a couple of the students from WA had a really romantic idea of the Cultural Revolution. “Wouldn’t it have been amazing to live at a time when art had such a practical use?” And I just thought, wow—that’s such a romanticised reading. It really struck me. Are there any takeaways on the cultural-side of the Revolution that you hope readers might find?

LJ: I think the takeaway is that reading history carefully is terribly important. Even in China, there are young people who are romanticising the Cultural Revolution. It’s easy to get caught up in the romantic ideal of such movements—but only if you underplay its violence. And if the goal is some kind of revolutionary purity, as it was then, then the implications go well beyond the field of culture. I think people just need to read more history generally. Because it is very easy to make generalisations about history that are not only unhelpful for your own understanding, but also for how you approach politics and society more broadly. It’s interesting because my generation did the same thing. It was like, “Oh, the Cultural Revolution, isn’t it wonderful?” Completely misunderstanding it. Some students now might think, “well, culture got a lot of prominence,” and so on. And of course, we are living in this hyper-capitalist society where culture is just another product, which, I agree, is a terrible thing. But what you also have to understand—if you’re going to take the Cultural Revolution as any kind of ideal—is that artists and writers at the time couldn’t deviate one little bit from the political message. Those who did so got into trouble. Take the revolutionary model operas for example. The model operas were constructed so that if one was performed in one city and in a city hundreds of kilometres away, the patches on the peasants’ clothing would have to be in exactly the same place. There was no room for creativity. They were “models” in the industrial sense—something you make for replication. The replication had to be precise. And the other thing to understand about revolutionary culture—Cultural Revolutionary culture in particular—is that there is no ambiguity. There is no room for grey characters, doubters, oddballs, only villains, or heroes. They might have some sort of revelation or whatever, but there isn’t complexity. So, obviously, you couldn’t capture humanity. Because humanity is enormously complex. And really good art captures that ambiguity. You couldn’t have it.

SB: Oh, that’s such an interesting point. Another thing that really stood out to me in your account is how much the readings of Mao’s texts—which might have seemed black and white on the surface—inevitably led to so much misreading. The interpretation and misinterpretation really fuelled the chaos.

LJ: Mao’s pronouncements could become quite oracular. A lot of his writing—things like On Contradiction, and so on—offers broad principles on which to act, and the interpretation is left up to the individual. But in China, you really shouldn’t get that interpretation wrong. Still today, the Communist Party operates more or less on this principle. You’ll often hear people talk about a jīngshén (or ‘spirit’, the ideological intent of a directive) that has come down from above. For example, the central government generally won’t issue a specific directive to the media—like “you should write about feminism this way, and not that way.” Instead, there will be a general jīngshén that talks about values, or the need for a certain kind of social guidance. Everyone at the lower levels has to try to figure out what that jīngshén actually means for them and sweat buckets in the process. Because, if they get it wrong, they get punished. That is why you often see self-censorship in China. It is much easier not to do something than to take a chance, stick your neck out. And during the Cultural Revolution, that principle was in operation but on steroids. There is just no way you would want to do anything that contradicted one of Mao’s pronouncements.

SB: This is more of a question on style. You have a real knack for wit in your writing, which is quite consistent across the work of yours that I have read. I’m curious about your use of wit when writing history—it’s an interesting pairing and an enjoyable aspect of the book!

LJ: Thank you. I think I tend to see the odd side of things. I tend to notice where things bump up against each other in strange ways. So, it’s just instinct, I think. For example, when I was at the Sydney Writers Festival in May, I was on a panel. The person leading the panel asked, “What is the difference, in your opinion, between Mao’s personality cult and Xi’s personality cult?” And the answer that just popped into my head was: “Mao had a personality!” But in fact, that actually says a lot. Because Xi’s personality cult is a construct. It’s a very carefully managed construct. Mao’s personality cult was a construct too, but it took root in society because he was a genuine revolutionary hero. To the people of China, Mao had a real legacy. They knew he had been on the Long March, they knew he had fought, that he had been through all that. He declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen. So, even though he had done some pretty shitty things—the Great Leap Forward and so on—if the goal is to create a personality cult and amplify that sense of gratitude and make a leader into even more of a god, it’s easier when you’ve got that kind of background. Whereas Xi Jinping was the son of a persecuted official, who went to the countryside like everybody else and worked his way up—obviously with a bit of help from the family name. Xi did the hard yards of being the head of this district and that province. But it’s not such an awe-inspiring story.

SB: It’s much more of a bureaucrat’s journey, isn’t it?

LJ: Yes, it’s a bureaucrat’s journey, and Mao’s was a hero’s journey. Of course, Mao’s was exaggerated in many ways. I have a slide in one of the talks I give—it shows a very famous painting of Mao at the founding of the party in 1921. He’s standing up, orating, and people are looking up at him. That’s completely ridiculous. He was a very young party member. One of the youngest, if not the youngest. He wouldn’t have been the one standing up and declaiming while everybody listened. But he was at the meeting where the Communist Party was founded. So basically, it’s a cult that’s been developed, but it’s based on real events. He was one of the founding members. By the time we get to the Cultural Revolution, the young people really did see him as a hero. The reason that’s important in the Cultural Revolution is that he was able to mobilise people based on their belief in him—the young people thought he was in trouble and swore to protect him with their lives, calling themselves Red Guards. That’s pretty amazing, right? Can you imagine a group of people on a campus today getting together and so dramatically vowing to protect Xi Jinping? It’s just very different.

SB: Yeah, absolutely. You touch on that at the end of the book, where you describe this new kind of nationalism and rose-tinted desire to go back to the Revolution. It made me think of “Make America Great Again” and other manifestations of that kind of nostalgia—the intersection of nationalism and nostalgia.

LJ: It’s very interesting. I’ve written and spoken about this, about how Trump operates by keeping everyone around him nervous, like Mao did. One moment, someone is in his favour, then they’re not. And not being in his favour is actually quite a punishment. The way Mao could just switch, and suddenly everybody else was left flat-footed. Trump does the same. Mao demanded absolute loyalty, and so does Trump. There’s a lot of comparisons to be made. One of the lectures I’ve given a couple of times is Bombard the Headquarters: From Mao to Musk. Attacking the “deep state” is very much what Mao was doing. His version of the deep state was revisionism—where things get static and the revolution stops, and it falls victim to bureaucratisation, corruption, and everything else that characterises the ‘deep state’.
        Then there’s the whole thing about mass dictatorship. Mao was inspired by what was called the Maple Bridge experience. Basically, the idea is that it’s dictatorship over the masses by the masses themselves. The ‘masses’ police each other; they dob each other in, and in some cases, they bring them to justice. That reached its apotheosis during the Cultural Revolution, where the mob was the accuser, the interrogator, and the punisher. That was mass dictatorship. When Elon Musk knew he would be in charge of DOGE, there were people on X identifying various “woke” departments or jobs in the public service, including individual staff members, a lot of them women, calling for their sacking. These posts were amplified by Musk to all his followers, and many of them responded by sending these people death threats, rape threats, etc. That, to me, follows the model of mass dictatorship. I do not think you can say Trump equals Mao, or Mao equals Trump. However, it is very useful to look at parallels, and there are plenty!

SB: Oh, that's so interesting.

LJ: I mean, the big difference is that Trump stands for nothing except himself and his ability—and his family’s ability—to grift. But Mao cared about the revolution. He did have principles. He did have a goal that was bigger than himself. Now, that doesn’t excuse what happened. But when thinking about the parallels, you have to note that Trump stands for nothing, and Mao stood for something.

SB: With that in mind, are there any myths or common misconceptions about the Cultural Revolution which you hope to have challenged or corrected with Bombard the Headquarters?

LJ: That's an interesting question. I think one of the myths I hope the book dispels is that the Cultural Revolution was entirely directed from the top. Mao and Jiang Qing. The other is that it was entirely carried out from the bottom. The Red Guards. The reality lies in the complex dance between those two forces. You can see this in moments like Mao telling the youth, “Rebellion is justified,” while Zhou Enlai follows up with, “Yes, but only according to directions from the top.” Another thing I hope readers reflect on is how easy it is, including in contemporary Western societies, to get swept up in movements that promise clear answers to big questions. But those big questions rarely have black-and-white answers. The Cultural Revolution was full of conspiracy theories, one after another. It’s important to see how people can get caught up in that kind of thinking. I also hope readers think about the many Red Guards who later regretted what they did, or who at least reflected critically on their actions. With hindsight, we can begin to understand the dangers of mass movements, of ideological fervour, and of acting without deeply questioning why we believe what we do. Young people in Australia today have access to so much more information than the Red Guards ever did. That doesn’t mean we're immune to manipulation—but it does mean we have the opportunity to be more critical, more resistant, and more thoughtful in the face of it. And that ‘it’ could be, you know, anything from evangelical Christian cults to QAnon!

SB: Thanks again for speaking with me—one last question, and a sort of cheeky one! I’ve read several of your other books, recently including Confessions of an S&M Virgin. In the introduction of that collection of essays, you reflect on your move from more journalistic work about China to writing fiction, saying that: “For me, the movement from journalism to fiction seemed inevitable. Whatever I have worked on, it has been people who have interested me the most.” Now that you’ve moved from fiction back to writing about Chinese history, I wonder, what reflections do you have on the two modes of writing and your work looking back.

LJ: I think I’m still mainly interested in people, which informs the way that I write history. But yeah, fiction is incredibly hard. I think I did get better at it as time went on. Some of the earlier work makes me cringe a little bit! I tried very hard to write a (third) novel set in China. I worked on it from the late 1980s until about four years ago. I kept putting it aside, then picking it up again. And in the end—it just wasn’t working. I finally showed it to my agent and my publisher, and they were like, “Yeah, it’s not really working.” And I said, “I know. I just don’t know how to make it work.” So, I thought, okay, let me focus on non-fiction for a while. I’m now working on The Shortest History of Madrid. I love the format of writing short histories! I do have an idea for another novel though!