Hong wei bing, Beijing (Red guards, Beijing).


Book Description




The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China


Book Description

Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.




A Social History of Maoist China


Book Description

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.




Red Legacies in China


Book Description

What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.




Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace


Book Description

In Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan tells her personal story and the story of her generation of urban middle-school graduates sent to the countryside during China's Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan's book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would go on to lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-1979 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong's China. Book jacket.




In the Red


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A leading observer of Chinese literature, society, and politics lifts the veil on the culture wars that have raged between officials and dissidents in the period before and after the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.




Hidden Tibet


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This book traces the history of Tibetan statehood from ancient times to our days, describes the life of the Tibetans at the times of Feudalism and Socialism, the coercive inclusion of Tibet into People’s Republic of China, the suppression of the national liberation movement, the Cultural Revolution, and subsequent reforms. Many pictures and data concerning these events are being published for the first time.




Chinese Revolution in Practice


Book Description

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration. The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context. Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions.




In the Red


Book Description

China, Geremie R. Barmé notes, has become one of the greatest writing and publishing nations on the planet, and both cultural activists and the state are embroiled in debates about the production and distribution of its cultural products. But what happens when global culture and Chinese capitalist-socialism meet in the marketplace? In the Redinvestigates what goes on behind the rhetoric of the official Chinese government and the dissident community and provides a unique perspective on mainstream Western perceptions of cultural developments, artistic freedom, and popular lifestyles in China today. Illustrated with fascinating cartoons and photographs and rich with facts, anecdotes, and events, In the Red exposes the complex relationship between "official" culture (produced, supported, or sanctioned by the government) and "nonofficial" or countercultures (especially among urban youths and dissidents). Two key and contrasting events loom large in this narrative: the 1989 protests that ended with the June 4 massacre and a nationwide purge, and Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "tour of the south," in which he emphasized the need for radical economic reform. Although a level of political tolerance has evolved since the 1970s, Barmé sheds light on the significance of the intermittent denunciations of artists, ideas, and works.




The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History


Book Description

This vivid narrative history of Chinese intellectuals and public life provides a guide to making sense of China today. Timothy Cheek presents a map and a method for understanding the intellectual in the long twentieth century, from China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 to the 'Prosperous China' since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Cheek surveys the changing terrain of intellectual life over this transformative century in Chinese history to enable readers to understand a particular figure, idea or debate. The map provides coordinates to track different times, different social worlds and key concepts. The historical method focuses on context and communities during six periods to make sense of ideas, institutions and individual thinkers across the century. Together they provide a memorable account of the scenes and protagonists, and arguments and ideas, of intellectuals and public life in modern China.