The Cultural Revolution and Overacting

The Cultural Revolution and Overacting PDF Author: Tuo Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739192914
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which took place in China between 1966 and 1976, was a major political and social tragedy in Chinese history. As part of an effort to understand how the state enforced control amid seeming chaos, this book looks at the ubiquitous revolutionary presentations and performances of power, such as political rituals, revolutionary rhetoric, and public gatherings, in people’s everyday lives during the Cultural Revolution as performances that contributed to the control of the Chinese people. In particular, this book discusses how the promotion of revolutionary models in real life contributed to people’s eagerness to perform the role of the ideal revolutionary, and how the possibility of complete revolutionary transformation, promoted by the state media, and the hard fact that no one was able to completely become a Maoist subject, who would be completely selfless and think and speak only Maoist teaching, subjected people to a state of becoming but never fully having become. The fear of failing in the Maoist transformation constituted the inner mechanism that propelled ordinary people’s radical revolutionary behavior. In addition, this book examines the audience’s reaction to Jiang Qing’s court performance in the trial of the Gang of Four as an anarchic liberation from the revolutionary performance of the Cultural Revolution. Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary criticism, this book reveals how people’s performances of their everyday life functioned as mechanisms of social control.

The Cultural Revolution and Overacting

The Cultural Revolution and Overacting PDF Author: Tuo Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739192914
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book

Book Description
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which took place in China between 1966 and 1976, was a major political and social tragedy in Chinese history. As part of an effort to understand how the state enforced control amid seeming chaos, this book looks at the ubiquitous revolutionary presentations and performances of power, such as political rituals, revolutionary rhetoric, and public gatherings, in people’s everyday lives during the Cultural Revolution as performances that contributed to the control of the Chinese people. In particular, this book discusses how the promotion of revolutionary models in real life contributed to people’s eagerness to perform the role of the ideal revolutionary, and how the possibility of complete revolutionary transformation, promoted by the state media, and the hard fact that no one was able to completely become a Maoist subject, who would be completely selfless and think and speak only Maoist teaching, subjected people to a state of becoming but never fully having become. The fear of failing in the Maoist transformation constituted the inner mechanism that propelled ordinary people’s radical revolutionary behavior. In addition, this book examines the audience’s reaction to Jiang Qing’s court performance in the trial of the Gang of Four as an anarchic liberation from the revolutionary performance of the Cultural Revolution. Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary criticism, this book reveals how people’s performances of their everyday life functioned as mechanisms of social control.

Agents of Disorder

Agents of Disorder PDF Author: Andrew G. Walder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067423832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Why did the Chinese Communist Party state collapse so rapidly during the Cultural Revolution? Consulting over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China, Andrew Walder offers a new answer, showing how the army, brought in to quiet brewing rebellions, escalated the violence that took nearly 1.6 million lives.

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution PDF Author: William A. Joseph
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684171148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
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.

The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Richard Curt Kraus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199921040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
China's decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the politics of China and the world. Even as we approach its fiftieth anniversary, the movement remains so contentious that the Chinese Communist Party still forbids fully open investigation of its origins, development, and conclusion. Drawing upon a vital trove of scholarship, memoirs, and popular culture, this Very Short Introduction illuminates this complex, often obscure, and still controversial movement. Moving beyond the figure of Mao Zedong, Richard Curt Kraus links Beijing's elite politics to broader aspects of society and culture, highlighting many changes in daily life, employment, and the economy. Kraus also situates this very nationalist outburst of Chinese radicalism within a global context, showing that the Cultural Revolution was mirrored in the radical youth movement that swept much of the world, and that had imagined or emotional links to China's red guards. Yet it was also during the Cultural Revolution that China and the United States tempered their long hostility, one of the innovations in this period that sowed the seeds for China's subsequent decades of spectacular economic growth.

Ten Years of Turbulence

Ten Years of Turbulence PDF Author: Barbara Barnouin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0710304587
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Woei Lien Chong
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742518742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Treating China's Cultural Revolution as much more than a political event, this innovative volume explores its ideological dimensions. The contributors focus especially on the CR's discourse of heroism and messianism and its demonization of the enemy as reflected in political practice, official literature, and propaganda art, arguing that these characteristics can be traced back to hitherto-neglected undercurrents of Chinese tradition. Moreover, while most studies of the Cultural Revolution are content to point to the discredited cult of heroism and messianism, this book also explores the alternative discourses that have flourished to fill the resulting vacuum. The contributors analyze the intense intellectual and artistic ferment in post-Mao China that embody resistance to CR ideology, as well as the urgent quest for authentic individuality, new forms of social cohesion, and historical truth. Contributions by: Anne-Marie Brady, Woei Lien Chong, Lowell Dittmer, Monika Gaenssbauer, Nick Knight, Stefan R. Landsberger, Nora Sausmikat, Barend J. ter Haar, Natascha Vittinghoff, and Lan Yang.

The Unceasing Storm

The Unceasing Storm PDF Author: Katherine Luo
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN: 1771621877
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Just over fifty years ago, China’s Cultural Revolution began. The movement was intended to bring about a return to revolutionary Maoist beliefs and resulted in attacks on intellectuals and those believed to be counter-revolutionaries, capitalists and rightists; a large-scale purge in government posts; the appearance of a personality cult around Mao Zedong; and an estimated death count of between one and three million. When Katherine Luo moved from Hong Kong to mainland China in 1955 to study drama and opera, she hoped her ideals and patriotism might help to build her country. Like many citizens, she loved the motherland and admired its revolutionary leaders. After years of completely trusting the regime, rationalizing its decisions and betrayals, and criticizing herself for doubting the Party, she realized that no matter how much she loved China, it would never love her back because she had the wrong background—capitalist class origins and overseas connections. The Unceasing Storm describes Luo’s personal struggles—among other things, she was expelled from university, forbidden to marry her first love, and accused of being a spy—but it is also the memoir of a generation, representative of similar incidents occurring all over China. Luo’s colleagues and famous artists were dogged by their backgrounds—the unluckiest in the “to be executed, imprisoned or placed under surveillance” category; family members and teachers were labelled rightists; friends and war heroes were imprisoned; careers were ruined, families separated, ordinary people lifted to power one morning and destroyed overnight. Some of those with stories to tell perished, of those who lived, many prefer to forget, and others burned all written records to avoid being incriminated. When the people involved in the revolution have all died, it will be all too easy to forget or pretend it never happened. The Unceasing Storm is one step towards creating a truthful record of contemporary China.

Turbulent Decade

Turbulent Decade PDF Author: Jiaqi Yan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824816957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
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.

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632864223
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 stated goal of the Cultural Revolution 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. Frank Dikötter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era. 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. In short, they buried Maoism. 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.

The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution PDF Author: Hong Yung Lee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520310144
Category : Non-Classifiable
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Hong Yung Lee’s account of the Cultural Revolution illuminates its complexities and subtleties to an unprecedented degree. His primary concern is with the behavior of the masses once they were freed from party control, and his analysis of voluminous Red Guard publications highlights the different membership characteristics, positions, and strategies of both the student Red Guards and the worker Revolutionary Rebels, divided internally along a conservative-radical line. Rejecting the ideologically oriented assumption that workers and students of worker or peasant origin comprised the majority of the radical elements, Lee argues that students of bourgeois and other “bad” origins, workers in small factories, “sent-down” students, and demobilized soldiers were the radicals, whereas students from families with pre-1949 revolutionary careers and workers in large-scale and modern enterprises were found in large numbers among the conservatives. He contends that, contrary to some social science theories, the radicals were motivated by rational rather than ideological considerations, and that they attacked the status quo because it was they who experienced discrimination under the existing political system, whereas the conservatives generally belonged to favored social groups. Lee demonstrates that an adequate history of the Cultural Revolution cannot restrict itself to an analysis of policy difference among the elites, but must consider the behavior of the masses and their relationship with the elites. This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.