The Cultural Revolution

Author : Frank Dikötter
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2016-05-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781408856512

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The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter Pdf

Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing' , this is the final volume of 'The People's Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture. Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao's regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light. Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter's extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking 'People's Trilogy' is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People's Republic of China.

Author : Yang Jisheng
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 768 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780374716912

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The World Turned Upside Down by Yang Jisheng Pdf

Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

Author : Roderick MACFARQUHAR,Michael Schoenhals
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 742 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674040410

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Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MACFARQUHAR,Michael Schoenhals Pdf

Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.

Author : Zedong Mao
Publisher : China Books
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : China
ISBN : 083512388X

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Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung by Zedong Mao Pdf

Author : Michel Oksenberg,Carl Riskin,Ezra F Vogel
Publisher : U of M Center for Chinese Studies
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-08
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780472038350

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The Cultural Revolution by Michel Oksenberg,Carl Riskin,Ezra F Vogel Pdf

The Chinese Communist system was from its very inception based on an inherent contradiction and tension, and the Cultural Revolution is the latest and most violent manifestation of that contradiction. Built into the very structure of the system was an inner conflict between the desiderata, the imperatives, and the requirements that technocratic modernization on the one hand and Maoist values and strategy on the other. The Cultural Revolution collects four papers prepared for a research conference on the topic convened by the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies in March 1968. Michel Oksenberg opens the volume by examining the impact of the Cultural Revolution on occupational groups including peasants, industrial managers and workers, intellectuals, students, party and government officials, and the military. Carl Riskin is concerned with the economic effects of the revolution, taking up production trends in agriculture and industry, movements in foreign trade, and implications of Masoist economic policies for China's economic growth. Robert A. Scalapino turns to China's foreign policy behavior during this period, arguing that Chinese Communists in general, and Mao in particular, formed foreign policy with a curious combination of cosmic, utopian internationalism and practical ethnocentrism rooted both in Chinese tradition and Communist experience. Ezra F. Vogel closes the volume by exploring the structure of the conflict, the struggles between factions, and the character of those factions.

Author : Joseph W. Esherick,Paul G. Pickowicz,Andrew G. Walder
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : HISTORY
ISBN : 080476798X

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The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History by Joseph W. Esherick,Paul G. Pickowicz,Andrew G. Walder Pdf

Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.

Author : William A. Joseph,Christine P.W. Wong,David Zweig
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684171149

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New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution by William A. Joseph,Christine P.W. Wong,David Zweig Pdf

Since the Cultural Revolution, data have been uncovered to illuminate that tumultuous decade. In this volume 13 scholars examine the gap between the ideology of the Revolution and the harsh and contradictory reality of its outcome. They focus particularly on the violence, coercion, and constant tension between the need for centralization to enforce policies and the need for decentralizing decision-making if those goals were to be achieved.

Author : Martin Singer
Publisher : U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES
Page : 123 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472038145

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Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China by Martin Singer Pdf

The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes. Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.

Author : Roderick MacFarquhar
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 500 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : History
ISBN : 0231057172

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The Origins of the Cultural Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar Pdf

The second volume in a trilogy which examines the politics, economics, culture and international relations of Chines from the mid-1950s to he mid-1960s, this volume tells the story of the Great Leap Forward--Mao's utopian attempt to propel China economically and socially into the twenty-fist century by mobilizing his nation's greatest asset: its disciplined, manpower. The effort produced economic disaster and political dissension, and helped to precipitate the Sino-Soviet split. Today's leaders point to it as the beginning of two decades of national trauma, which ended only after the death of Mao and the purge of the Gang of Four. Those leaders have recently authorized the release of a mass of new documentation in the form of political reminiscences, economic statistics, and leaders' speeches. This volume is the first scholarly work to use the new material comprehensively, weaving it into the narrative along with the contemporary record and the revelations published in Red Guard newspapers during the cultural revolution. The result is the most detailed account and analysis to date of what went wrong and why.

Author : Richard Curt Kraus
Publisher : OUP USA
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2012-01-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199740550

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The Cultural Revolution by Richard Curt Kraus Pdf

Examines the radical Chinese Communist movement called the Cultural Revolution, a period of suppression so controversial in China, that the Chinese government forbids a full investigation into it even 50 years later. Original.

Author : Melvyn C. Goldstein,Ben Jiao,Tanzen Lhundrup
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2010-10-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520267909

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On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet by Melvyn C. Goldstein,Ben Jiao,Tanzen Lhundrup Pdf

This resource revisits the Nyemo incident, which has long been romanticised as the epitome of Tibetan nationalist resistance against China. The authors show that far from being a spontaneous battle for independence, this event was actually part of a struggle between rival revolutionary groups and was not ethnically based.

Author : Alessandro Russo
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2020-08-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781478012184

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Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture by Alessandro Russo Pdf

In Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture, Alessandro Russo presents a dramatic new reading of China's Cultural Revolution as a mass political experiment aimed at thoroughly reexamining the tenets of communism. Russo explores four critical phases of the Cultural Revolution, each with its own reworking of communist political subjectivity: the historical-theatrical “prologue” of 1965; Mao's attempts to shape the Cultural Revolution in 1965 and 1966; the movements and organizing between 1966 and 1968 and the factional divides that ended them; and the mass study campaigns from 1973 to 1976 and the unfinished attempt to evaluate the inadequacies of the political decade that brought the Revolution to a close. Among other topics, Russo shows how the dispute around the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was not the result of a Maoist conspiracy, but rather a series of intense and unresolved political and intellectual controversies. He also examines the Shanghai January Storm and the problematic foundation of the short-lived Shanghai Commune. By exploring these and other political-cultural moments of Chinese confrontations with communist principles, Russo overturns conventional wisdom about the Cultural Revolution.

Author : Alfreda Murck
Publisher : Scheidegger and Spiess
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : China
ISBN : 3858817325

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Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution by Alfreda Murck Pdf

"Accompanies the exhibition of the same name: Museum Rietberg Zürich, 15 February to 16 June 2013".-- National Library of Canada.

Author : Jacopo Galimberti,Noemi de Haro García,Victoria H. F. Scott,Marsha Meskimmon
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2021-06
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1526117487

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Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Jacopo Galimberti,Noemi de Haro García,Victoria H. F. Scott,Marsha Meskimmon Pdf

This lively anthology explores the impact of the art, images and ideas associated with Maoism on artistic practices around the world from 1945 to the present. It establishes that the chameleonic appearances of global Maoism deserve a more prominent place in the study of art history.

Author : Jiaqi Yan,Gao Gao
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 706 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0824816951

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Turbulent Decade by Jiaqi Yan,Gao Gao Pdf

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution occurred in the second decade after Mao Zedong and his comrades came to power in 1949. A comprehensive narrative account of this colossal event, written by Yan Jiaqi, one of the principal leaders of China's pro-democracy movement, and his wife, Gao Gao, a noted sociologist, appeared in Hong Kong in 1986 and was quickly banned by the Communist government. Not surprisingly, censorship and restricted circulation in China resulted in underground reproduction and serialization. The work was thus widely read, coveted, and appreciated by a populace who had just freed itself from the cultural drought and political dread of the event. Yan and Gao later spent two years revising and expanding their work. The present volume, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, is based on the revised edition and has been masterfully edited and translated by D. W. Y. Kwok in consultation with the authors. Following Professor Kwok's eloquent introduction and a short foreword in which the authors analyze the basic causes of the Cultural Revolution, Part One of the narrative focuses on the years 1965-1967. In two short years, Mao managed to turn public opinion against Liu Shaoqi, president of the Republic, and launch the Cultural Revolution. The reader is introduced to the Red Guards and encounters the cult of personality, the first resistance to the Cultural Revolution, the attack on Zhou Enlai, and the persecution and death of Liu Shaoqi. Part Two examines the rise and fall of Lin Biao during the years 1959-1971. Lin's bid for power, which began with the consolidation of his personal clique in the army and mass-level persecution in the late stages of theCultural Revolution, ended in a failed coup and his death in an air crash. Part Three follows Jiang Qing from 1966 to her arrest in 1976 for her part in instigating mass violence and the persecution of key figures, including Zhou Enlai. During this period, the political fortunes of Deng Xiaoping rose and fell for a second time, the first protest at Tiananmen Square in 1976 ended in a bloody suppression, and that same year the Gang of Four were arrested. Unlike social scientific treatments of political phenomena, Turbulent Decade includes little discussion of economics, still less of international relations, and no institutional analysis. Instead, the authors' fervent belief in the truthful telling of history through its leading personalities pervades the work.