Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes

Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes PDF Author: Aminda M. Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144221838X
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"--The prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smit.

Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes

Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes PDF Author: Aminda M. Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144221838X
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"--The prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smit.

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism PDF Author: Robert Jay Lifton
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807882887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
Informed by Erik Erikson's concept of the formation of ego identity, this book, which first appreared in 1961, is an analysis of the experiences of fifteen Chinese citizens and twenty-five Westerners who underwent "brainwashing" by the Communist Chinese government. Robert Lifton constructs these case histories through personal interviews and outlines a thematic pattern of death and rebirth, accompanied by feelings of guilt, that characterizes the process of "thought reform." In a new preface, Lifton addresses the implications of his model for the study of American religious cults.

The Teahouse Under Socialism

The Teahouse Under Socialism PDF Author: Di Wang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This text explores urban public life through the microcosm of the Chengdu teahouse. Like most public spaces, the teahouse was and still is an enduring symbol of Chinese popular culture, stemming back centuries and prevailing through political transformations, modernization, and globalization. The time period covered begins basically with the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949-50, goes through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era.

Wild Swans

Wild Swans PDF Author: Jung Chang
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439106495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author. An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraordinary lives and experiences of her family members: her grandmother, a warlord’s concubine; her mother’s struggles as a young idealistic Communist; and her parents’ experience as members of the Communist elite and their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution. Chang was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen, then worked as a peasant, a “barefoot doctor,” a steelworker, and an electrician. As the story of each generation unfolds, Chang captures in gripping, moving—and ultimately uplifting—detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her own family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

Time and Language

Time and Language PDF Author: Ori Sela
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824894588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
China’s past and present have been in a continuous dialogue throughout history, one that is heavily influenced by time and language: the temporal orientation and the linguistic apparatus used to express and solidify identity, ideas, and practices. Presenting a host of in-depth case studies, Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History argues for and demonstrates the significance of “New Sinology” by restoring the role of language/philology in the research and understanding of how modern China emerged. Reading the modern as a careful and ongoing conversation with the past renders the “new” in a different perspective. This volume is a significant step toward a new historical narrative of China’s modern history, one wherein “ruptures” can exist in tandem with continuities. The collection accentuates the deep connection between language and power—one that spans well across China’s long past—and hence the immense consequences of linguistic-related methodology to the comprehension of power structures and identity in China. Each of the essays in this volume tackles these issues, the methodological and the thematic, from a different angle but they all share the Sinological prism of analysis and the basic understanding that a much longer timeframe is required to make sense of Chinese modernity. The languages examined are diverse, including modern and classical Chinese, as well as Manchu and Japanese. Taken together they bring a spectrum of linguistic perspectives and hence a spectrum of power relations and identities to the forefront. While the essays focus on late Qing and early twentieth-century eras, they refer often to earlier periods, which are necessary to making real sense of later eras. The methodological and the thematic do not only converge, but also generate a plea for fostering and expanding this approach in current and future studies.

The Emergence of Global Maoism

The Emergence of Global Maoism PDF Author: Matthew Galway
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501761846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Emergence of Global Maoism examines the spread of Mao Zedong's writings, ideology, and institutions when they traveled outside of China. Matthew Galway links Chinese Communist Party efforts to globalize Maoism to the dialectical engagement of exported Maoism by Cambodian Maoist intellectuals. How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin? Galway analyzes how universal ideological systems became localized, both in Mao's indigenization of Marxism-Leninism and in the Communist Party of Kampuchea's indigenization of Maoism into its own revolutionary ideology. By examining the intellectual journeys of CPK leaders who, during their studies in Paris in the 1950s, became progressive activist-intellectuals and full-fledged Communists, he shows that they responded to political and socioeconomic crises by speaking back to Maoism—adapting it through practice, without abandoning its universality. Among Mao's greatest achievements, the Sinification of Marxism enabled the CCP to canonize Mao's thought and export it to a progressive audience of international intellectuals. These intellectuals would come to embrace the ideology as they set a course for social change. The Emergence of Global Maoism illuminates the process through which China moved its goal from class revolution to a larger anticolonial project that sought to cast out European and American imperialism from Asia.

Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China

Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China PDF Author: Elisa Nesossi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317106067
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The volume presents an extensive investigation into the process of reforms of detention powers in today’s China and offers an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding the reformist attempts. The chapters in this collection demonstrate that legislative and institutional reforms in this area result from political opportunities - openings and tensions at the central institutional levels of political authority - and contingent social and political factors. The book examines legal and institutional reforms to institutions of detention and imprisonment that have occurred since the 1990s, with a particular focus on the 21st century. Its content follows three particular lines of enquiry concerning the issue of deprivation of liberty in contemporary China. The first deals with the academic and theoretical debates on the subject of imprisonment and detention. The related chapters explain the difficulties encountered in this area of research and understandings of the discourses of reform through labour in Western and Chinese scholarship. The second deals with the specific issues of criminal and administrative forms of deprivation of liberty, examining in particular the institutional and legislative dimensions, considering the relationship between reforms and criminal justice policy agendas. The third assesses the meaning of institutional reforms in the context of the changing state-society relationship in contemporary China.

The Tragedy of Liberation

The Tragedy of Liberation PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408837595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The second installment in 'The People's Trilogy', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank Dikötter 'For anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading' Anne Applebaum 'Essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions' Guardian 'Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order' Timothy Snyder In 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life. In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweaves the stories of millions of ordinary people with the brutal politics of Mao's court. A gripping account of how people from all walks of life were caught up in a tragedy that sent at least five million civilians to their deaths.

The Coming Collapse of China

The Coming Collapse of China PDF Author: Gordon G. Chang
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812977564
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.

Making It Count

Making It Count PDF Author: Arunabh Ghosh
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069119971X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
"Among the biggest challenges facing leaders of the newly established People's Republic of China (PRC) was how much they did not know. In 1949, at the end of a long sequence of wars, the government of one of the largest states in the world committed to fundamentally re-engineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no hard, reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is a history of attempts made to resolve this "crisis in counting." Drawing on a wealth of official, institutional, and private sources culled from China, India, and the United States, the author explores the choices made and the effects they engendered through a series of vivid encounters with political leaders, professional statisticians, academics, ordinary statistical workers, and even literary figures. Early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the middle of the 1950s. A series of unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were, in turn, overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), when both probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an essentially ethnographic enterprise. The author argues that this history, usually narrowly described as a universal, if European history, cannot be understood without acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences which not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes the wider developments in the history of statistics and data. For historians of China and social science, and political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists studying modern China"--