“Making” Capitalism
Erin MacDonald
CHN: 388W
February 18th, 2014

About two pages into the section titled Smashing the Four Olds of Gao Yuan’s book Born Red, I came across two sentences that really caught my attention. This part of the section highlighted a conversation between a group of Red Guards who had gone into a small town and came across some peasants selling various home-grown vegetables out of wheelbarrows on the street. These Red Guards proceeded to ask each other “Aren’t they [the peasants] making capitalism?” (pg. 87) At first glance, I attributed the odd wording of the sentence to be an example of what I would call “Chinglish” which can be described as a poor translation from a Chinese word or phrase into English. However, as I read down the page a bit more, I came across another instance of this odd phrasing where the Red Guards referred to those peasants as “making” capitalism; they had approached a man selling eggplants from the man’s own garden and proceeded to ask him directly, “Who allowed you to make capitalism?” (pg. 87) I surmised at this point that Gao Yuan had not merely translated his choice of words poorly but had in fact used the phrasing “making capitalism” intentionally.
Gao Yuan’s deliberate description of the peasants to be “making” capitalism made me question whether or not there was any significance behind his particular choice of words. What did the Red Guards mean by saying that those peasants were “making” capitalism? Can capitalism be “made” as something such as a bowl or a chair can be made? How would someone actually go about “making” capitalism? What does that even mean given the context in which Gao Yuan described it? While there is no way for me to know exactly what Gao Yuan meant when he described that scene in that particular way, I have come up with my own personal explanation as to what I believe it may have represented in the context of the Cultural Revolution. If we take the phrase “making capitalism” as it stands on its own, it seems as if capitalism itself is a physical entity that can be made or destroyed at will. The way Gao Yuan used capitalism in this section of his book takes on almost the same identity as other physical things such as a book (or an eggplant in this case). When described in this way, capitalism is no longer an ideology but becomes something that has turned physical in nature. When the Red Guards had persecuted the peasants for selling their own vegetables on the street, they weren’t just accusing them of engaging in capitalist behavior, but were actually accusing them of making capitalism. The vegetables that the peasants were selling were not merely a product of capitalism or capitalist behavior, but were the physical embodiment of capitalism itself.
By giving capitalism an almost personified identity, it takes it from being mere ideology and transforms it into something tangible. This tangibility gives capitalism a larger sense of importance with regard to the Cultural Revolution as a whole because it becomes something that the people now have the power to create or destroy at will. In general terms, an idea is not nearly as powerful as something physical. An idea is easy enough to create and to talk about but spread amongst a large population it becomes at risk of getting lost in translation, if you will. However, if the idea (capitalism) takes on a physical form, the role it plays in a given society (China’s Cultural Revolution in this case) becomes twice as powerful. In the way Gao Yuan describes it, capitalism is not just a mere definition of a political ideology but is a physical representation of that ideology. Another way to look at is as how statues of Chairman Mao were treated and represented in society during the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese people saw the statues not just as an artistic representation of Mao but as a small piece of Mao himself. The same can be said for the vegetables that the peasants were selling: as a piece of capitalism as an entity.
Given the context in which capitalism is depicted in Born Red, the questions posed above can therefore be answered. Because the Red Guards referred to the peasants as “making” capitalism, it can be understood that they believed capitalism to not merely be an idea or a style of behavior but as an actual physical entity that could be created (or destroyed). The next question as to how exactly would one go about “making” capitalism exactly? By “making” (or growing in this particular case) vegetables from personal gardens without the consent of Mao and the presiding Red Guards. If we assume that this is how the communist Red Guards looked at and treated the unauthorized cultivation and sale of vegetables then one thing can be ultimately understood; it was not the growing and the selling of the vegetables, but the physical vegetables themselves that are not capitalist but instead are capitalism.