Staging Chinese Revolution

Staging Chinese Revolution PDF Author: Xiaomei Chen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question. Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

Staging Chinese Revolution

Staging Chinese Revolution PDF Author: Xiaomei Chen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question. Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

Staging the World

Staging the World PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822328674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
DIVAn historical analysis of how the Chinese constructed their understandings of their place in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries./div

Staging Revolution

Staging Revolution PDF Author: Xing Fan
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888455818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Staging Revolution refutes the deep-rooted notion that art overtly in the service of politics is by definition devoid of artistic merits. As a prominent component shaping the culture of the Cultural Revolution, model Beijing Opera (jingju) is the epitome of art used for political ends. Arguing against commonly accepted interpretations, Xing Fan demonstrates that in a performance of model jingju, political messages could only be realized through the most rigorously formulated artistic choices and conveyed by performers possessing exceptional techniques. Fan contextualizes model jingju at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics. Integral to jingju’s interactions with politics are the practitioners’ constant artistic experimentations to accommodate the modern stories and characters within the jingju framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty. Therefore, a thorough understanding of model jingju demands close attention to how the artists resolved actual production problems, which is a critical perspective missing in earlier studies. This book provides exactly this much-needed dimension of analysis by scrutinizing the decisions made in the real, practical context of bringing dramatic characters to life on stage, and by examining how major artistic elements interacted with each other, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes antagonistically. Such an approach necessarily places jingju artists center stage. Making use of first person accounts of the creative process, including numerous interviews conducted by the author, Fan presents a new appreciation of a lived experience that, on a harrowing journey of coping with political interference, was also filled with inspiration and excitement. “This fascinating study is ground-breaking and timely. Xing Fan masterfully demonstrates how the creative choices made by playwrights, directors, musicians, actors, and designers intersected with one another in creating an aesthetics of the model theater during the Cultural Revolution. A must-read for anyone interested in Chinese literature and drama, theater studies, and comparative literature.” —Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis “Though no longer in fashion, the model revolutionary operas of the Cultural Revolution are still occasionally performed. Xing Fan has done us a great service by analyzing them in detail and reminding us of their merits. I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging book and learned a lot from it. I recommend it strongly.” —Colin Mackerras, Griffith University

Staging the World

Staging the World PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383527
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In Staging the World Rebecca E. Karl rethinks the production of nationalist discourse in China during the late Qing period, between China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. She argues that at this historical moment a growing Chinese identification with what we now call the Third World first made the modern world visible as a totality and that the key components of Chinese nationalist discourse developed in reference to this worldview. The emergence of Chinese nationalism during this period is often portrayed as following from China’s position vis-à-vis Japan and the West. Karl has mined the archives of the late Qing period to discern the foci of Chinese intellectuals from 1895 to 1911 to assert that even though the China/Japan/West triangle was crucial, it alone is an incomplete—and therefore flawed—model of the development of nationalism in China. Although the perceptions and concerns of these thinkers form the basis of Staging the World, Karl begins by examining a 1904 Shanghai production of an opera about a fictional partition of Poland and its modern reincarnation as an ethno-nation. By focusing on the type of dialogue this opera generated in China, Karl elucidates concepts such as race, colonization, globalization, and history. From there, she discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the “discovery” of Hawai’i as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

China's Revolutions in the Modern World

China's Revolutions in the Modern World PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
China's emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation's "great rejuvenation," a story narrated as the return of China to its "rightful" place at the center of the world. In China's Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China's contemporary emergence is best seen not as a "return," but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today's capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China's successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.

The Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Revolution PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Mao's New World

Mao's New World PDF Author: Chang-tai Hung
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801449345
Category : Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Mao's New World examines how Mao Zedong and senior Party leaders transformed the PRC into a propaganda state in the first decade of their rule (1949-1959).

The Tragedy of Liberation

The Tragedy of Liberation PDF Author: Frank Dik�tter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620403498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
"'The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as a "liberation." In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence.' So begins Frank Dikötter's stunning and revelatory chronicle of Mao Zedong's ascension and campaign to transform the Chinese into what the party called New People. Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. Drawing on hundreds of previously classified documents, secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, eyewitness accounts of those who survived, and more, The Tragedy of Liberation bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history. Interweaving stories of ordinary citizens with tales of the brutal politics of Mao's court, Frank Dikötter illuminates those who shaped the 'liberation' and the horrific policies they implemented in the name of progress. People of all walks of life were caught up in the tragedy that unfolded, and whether or not they supported the revolution, all of them were asked to write confessions, denounce their friends, and answer queries about their political reliability. One victim of thought reform called it a 'carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind.' Told with great narrative sweep, The Tragedy of Liberation is a powerful and important document giving voice at last to the millions who were lost, and casting new light on the foundations of one of the most powerful regimes of the twenty-first century"--

China in Revolution

China in Revolution PDF Author: Mary Clabaugh Wright
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300014600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
“Great themes run through this book: local differentiation and societal integration, reform and revolution, innovation and renewal, conservatism and radicalism, tradition and modernity. All relate to the fascinating dialectic of Chinese history.” This comment by G. William Skinner aptly describes this pioneering volume in which twelve specialists in Chinese history discuss the great questions of history in the dramatic context of the “New China” of the early twentieth century. The work of young scholars from seven countries who have had access to Chinese, British, and French archives opened only in recent years, the book provides new findings that presage not only a reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1911 itself but also of the dynamic links between Imperial China and both the communist revolution of 1927-49 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of today. "An outstanding example of historians’ inquiries is this collection of essays by 12 authorities, brilliantly edited by Mary Wright of Yale. Brilliant because unlike most such cooperative endeavors, the studies in this volume focus on a single major topic, China in the years around the revolution of 1911. The papers vary in scope, from a general interpretation of the origins of the warlord armies, which were to dominate Chinese political life until the mid-twenties, to a fascinating reconstruction of events hour-by-hour during the first week of the revolution in the city where it began, Wuchang. . . . This important work is bound to have a great impact on our understanding of modern China, and will surely stimulate further research in the period."—New York Times Book Review "Will set a style for ten to twenty years hence by all scholars of the subject."—John K. Fairbank.

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World PDF Author: Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822393026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Throughout this lively and concise historical account of Mao Zedong’s life and thought, Rebecca E. Karl places the revolutionary leader’s personal experiences, social visions and theory, military strategies, and developmental and foreign policies in a dynamic narrative of the Chinese revolution. She situates Mao and the revolution in a global setting informed by imperialism, decolonization, and third worldism, and discusses worldwide trends in politics, the economy, military power, and territorial sovereignty. Karl begins with Mao’s early life in a small village in Hunan province, documenting his relationships with his parents, passion for education, and political awakening during the fall of the Qing dynasty in late 1911. She traces his transition from liberal to Communist over the course of the next decade, his early critiques of the subjugation of women, and the gathering force of the May 4th movement for reform and radical change. Describing Mao’s rise to power, she delves into the dynamics of Communist organizing in an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and Mao’s confrontations with Chiang Kaishek and other nationalist conservatives. She also considers his marriages and romantic liaisons and their relation to Mao as the revolutionary founder of Communism in China. After analyzing Mao’s stormy tenure as chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Karl concludes by examining his legacy in China from his death in 1976 through the Beijing Olympics in 2008.