The Little Red Guard

Author : Wenguang Huang
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2012-04-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101580660

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The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang Pdf

A Washington Post Best of 2012 pick Three generations of a family living under one roof reflect the dramatic transformations of an entire society in this memoir of life in 20th century China When Wenguang Huang was nine years old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she extracted from her family the promise to bury her after she died. This was in Xi’an, a city in central China, in the 1970s, when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But Huang’s grandmother was persistent, and two years later, his father built her a coffin. He also appointed his older son, Wenguang, as coffin keeper, a distinction that meant, among other things, sleeping next to the coffin at night. Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma’s burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Many years after her death, the family’s memories of her coffin still loom large. Huang, now living and working in America, has come to realize how much the concern over the coffin has affected his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family. Lyrical and poignant, funny and heartrending, The Little Red Guard is the powerful tale of an ordinary family finding their way through turbulence and transition.

Author : Jiang Hong Chen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 77 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1592700799

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Mao and Me by Jiang Hong Chen Pdf

Chens picture book memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China.

Author : Zedong Mao
Publisher : China Books
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : China
ISBN : 083512388X

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Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung by Zedong Mao Pdf

Author : Guobin Yang
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016-05-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231520485

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The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China by Guobin Yang Pdf

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.

Author : Alexander C. Cook
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2014-03-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107057227

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Mao's Little Red Book by Alexander C. Cook Pdf

On the fiftieth anniversary of Quotations from Chairman Mao, this pioneering volume examines the book as a global historical phenomenon.

Author : Andrew G. Walder
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674268180

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Fractured Rebellion by Andrew G. Walder Pdf

Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China’s Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure. Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged “conservative” students against socially marginalized “radicals” who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar—largely defensive—motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion. Walder’s nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China’s Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.

Author : Frank Dikötter
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 40,8 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 : Jude Blanchette
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : HISTORY
ISBN : 9780190605841

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China's New Red Guards by Jude Blanchette Pdf

In China's New Red Guards, Jude Blanchette illuminates two trends in contemporary China that point to its revival of Mao Zedong's legacy-a development that he argues will result in a more authoritarian and more militaristic China. This book not only will reshape our understanding of the political forces driving contemporary China, it will also demonstrates how ideologies can survive and prosper despite pervasive rumors of their demise.

Author : Fan Shen
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2006-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0803293364

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Gang of One by Fan Shen Pdf

The memoir of Shen, age 12 at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, recounts being complicit in arduous Red Guard activities that directly or indirectly led to several gruesome deaths of political "enemies"--And later falling in love with and marrying the daughter of a man brutally tortured and killed by one of his fellow Red Guards.

Author : Philip P. Pan
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : 9781416537052

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Out of Mao's Shadow by Philip P. Pan Pdf

An inside analysis of modern cultural and political upheavals in China by a fluent Beijing correspondent describes the power struggles currently taking place between the party elite and supporters of democracy, the outcome of which the author predicts will significantly affect China's rise to a world super-power. 125,000 first printing.

Author : Hans Granqvist
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1967
Category : China
ISBN : UOM:39015012191923

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The Red Guard by Hans Granqvist Pdf

Author : Nien Cheng
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Page : 561 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2010-12-14
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780802196156

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Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng Pdf

The national bestselling memoir of a woman’s resistance and struggles in Communist China—“an absorbing story of resourcefulness and courage” (The New York Times). A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In August 1966, a group of Red Guards ransacked the home of Nien Cheng. Her background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, and an employee of Shell Oil. When she refused to confess that any of this made her an enemy of the state, she was placed in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six years. Life and Death in Shanghai recounts the story of Nien Cheng’s imprisonment—a time of extreme deprivation which she met with heroic resistance—as well as her quest for justice when she was released. It is also the story of a country torn apart by Mao Zedong’s vicious campaign to topple party moderates. An incisive, personal account of a terrifying chapter in twentieth-century history, Life and Death in Shanghai is also an astounding portrait of one woman’s courage.

Author : Xiaosheng Liang
Publisher : Merwinasia
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1937385787

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Confessions of a Red Guard by Xiaosheng Liang Pdf

Unlike other accounts of the Cultural Revolution, novelist Liang Xiaosheng's Confessions of a Red Guard relates minor, intensely personal incidents affecting ordinary people during this extraordinary historical period. In the author's odyssey as a young Red Guard, he is witness to public humiliations of "counterrevolutionaries," real and imagined; a sex murder and the culprit's execution; a budding romance in a most unlikely place; stolen pleasures with forbidden books; the ecstasies and personal sacrifices surrounding a glimpse of Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Square; and a host of small ironies of life during a revolutionary movement.

Author : Yuan Gao
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 1987-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804765893

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Born Red by Yuan Gao Pdf

Born Red is an artistically wrought personal account, written very much from inside the experience, of the years 1966-1969, when the author was a young teenager at middle school. It was in the middle schools that much of the fury of the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard movement was spent, and Gao was caught up in very dramatic events, which he recounts as he understood them at the time. Gao's father was a county political official who was in and out of trouble during those years, and the intense interplay between father and son and the differing perceptions and impact of the Cultural Revolution for the two generations provide both an unusual perspective and some extraordinary moving moments. He also makes deft use of traditional mythology and proverbial wisdom to link, sometimes ironically, past and present. Gao relates in vivid fashion how students-turned-Red Guards held mass rallies against 'capitalist roader' teachers and administrators, marching them through the streets to the accompaniment of chants and jeers and driving some of them to suicide. Eventually the students divided into two factions, and school and town became armed camps. Gao tells of the exhilaration that he and his comrades experienced at their initial victories, of their deepening disillusionment as they utter defeat as the tumultuous first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to a close. The portraits of the persons to whom Gao introduces us - classmates, teachers, family members - gain weight and density as the story unfolds, so that in the end we see how they all became victims of the dynamics of a mass movement out of control.

Author : Yang Jisheng
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 768 pages
File Size : 54,8 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.