Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Tania Branigan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324051965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Winner of the Cundill History Prize Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 “Masterful and crystalline. It feels as if Joan Didion turned her powers of observation on China.” —Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Ambition An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens. “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Tania Branigan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324051965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the Cundill History Prize Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 “Masterful and crystalline. It feels as if Joan Didion turned her powers of observation on China.” —Evan Osnos, National Book Award–winning author of Age of Ambition An indelible exploration of the invisible scar that runs through the heart of Chinese society and the souls of its citizens. “It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,” Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Red Memory

Red Memory PDF Author: Tania Branigan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783352661
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKAn indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of sil[Bokinfo].

RED MEMORY

RED MEMORY PDF Author: TANIA. BRANIGAN
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783352654
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Red Legacies in China

Red Legacies in China PDF Author: Jie Li
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684171172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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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.

The World Turned Upside Down

The World Turned Upside Down PDF Author: Yang Jisheng
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
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.

Art and China's Revolution

Art and China's Revolution PDF Author: Melissa Chiu
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN:
Category : Art, Chinese
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Takes an in-depth look at the period between the 1950s and 1970s, focusing on the formation of a new visual culture and how it was given priority over artistic traditions such as ink painting. This was part of a broader national program to modernize China, and it had a great impact on artists and their work.

Red Shadows: Volume 12

Red Shadows: Volume 12 PDF Author: Patricia M. Thornton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316604755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
China's convulsive Cultural Revolution was conceived in 1966 as a 'great revolution that would touch the people to their very souls'. How are we to assess its impact fifty years on? In this volume, leading social and political scientists, historians and anthropologists examine the long-lasting consequences of the political, social, economic and cultural upheaval unleashed by Mao Zedong. Contributions from authors working within and outside the People's Republic of China consider the impact of this tumultuous mass movement from perspectives as diverse as market-based economic reform, clothing and fashion, the grassroots movements of late 1960s across the globe and the so-called 'lost generation' of sent-down youth. We find that collective and personal memories of the Cultural Revolution and its enduring institutional and social legacies continue to exert a profound effect on China and the Chinese people today.

Forbidden Memory

Forbidden Memory PDF Author: Tsering Woeser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640122907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet's remaining lamas and scholars. Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived. In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People's Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. Found only after his death, Woeser's annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors. Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture. Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today. Access the glossary.

Blood Red Sunset

Blood Red Sunset PDF Author: Ma Bo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140159428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A searing first hand account of China's Cultural Revolution that joins the ranks of great memoirs such as Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans and A Chinese Odyssey First banned in its native land, this earthy, unflinching memoir has become one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of China. In 1968, a fervent young Red Guard joined the army of hotheaded adolescents who trekked to Inner Mongolia to spread the Cultural Revolution. After gaining a reputation as a brutal abuser of the local herd owners and nomads, Ma Bo casually criticized a Party Leader. Denounced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and betrayed by his friends, the idealistic youth was brutally beaten and imprisoned. Charged with passion, never doctrinaire, Blood Red Sunset is a startlingly vivid and personal narrative that opens a window on the psyche of totalitarian excess that no other work of history can provide. This is a tale of ideology and disillusionment, a powerful work of political and literary importance. “A deceptively straightforward story carried forward by deep currents of insight.”—The Washington Post “A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing…echoing the realities of contemporary China.”—Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
ISBN: 1632864231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic 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. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.