Download or read book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress written by Sijie Dai and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.
Download or read book The World Turned Upside Down written by Yang Jisheng and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution written by Lan Yang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book covers the choice of subject matter, authorship and readership of Cultural Revolution fiction. It analyses the characterization of heroes promoted in the literary and artistic field during this period. By comparing Cultural Revolution fiction with the fiction of the preceding period, with Soviet fiction, and with some traditional Chinese and Western fiction, this analysis emphasizes the ideological and cultural significance of the characteristics shown in the heroes personal background and their physical, temperamental and behavioural qualities, etc. This book will be of significant benefit to both students and scholars of Chinese literature, language and society.
Download or read book Cultural Revolution Manuscripts written by Lena Henningsen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Download or read book The Cultural Revolution written by Frank Dikötter and published by Bloomsbury Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mao s Last Revolution written by Roderick MACFARQUHAR and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.
Download or read book Contemporary Chinese Literature written by Y. Huang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-11-26 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a case study of four of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers and 'cultural bastards' - Duoduo, an underground 'misty' poet; Wang Shuo, a 'hooligan' writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old 'Red Guard' and new 'cultural heretic'; and Wang Xiaobo, a chronicler of Rabelaisian modern history.
Download or read book Wild Swans written by Jung Chang and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-20 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cowshed written by Ji Xianlin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and led to a ten-year-long reign of Maoist terror throughout China, in which millions died or were sent to labor camps in the country or subjected to other forms of extreme discipline and humiliation. Ji Xianlin was one of them. The Cowshed is Ji’s harrowing account of his imprisonment in 1968 on the campus of Peking University and his subsequent disillusionment with the cult of Mao. As the campus spirals into a political frenzy, Ji, a professor of Eastern languages, is persecuted by lecturers and students from his own department. His home is raided, his most treasured possessions are destroyed, and Ji himself must endure hours of humiliation at brutal “struggle sessions.” He is forced to construct a cowshed (a makeshift prison for intellectuals who were labeled class enemies) in which he is then housed with other former colleagues. His eyewitness account of this excruciating experience is full of sharp irony, empathy, and remarkable insights into a central event in Chinese history. In contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution remains a delicate topic, little discussed, but if a Chinese citizen has read one book on the subject, it is likely to be Ji’s memoir. When The Cowshed was published in China in 1998, it quickly became a bestseller. The Cultural Revolution had nearly disappeared from the collective memory. Prominent intellectuals rarely spoke openly about the revolution, and books on the subject were almost nonexistent. By the time of Ji’s death in 2009, little had changed, and despite its popularity, The Cowshed remains one of the only testimonies of its kind. As Zha Jianying writes in the introduction, “The book has sold well and stayed in print. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive. The present English edition, skillfully translated by Chenxin Jiang, is hence a welcome, valuable addition to the small body of work in this genre. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of that period.”
Download or read book Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung written by Zedong Mao and published by China Books. This book was released on 1990 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art in Turmoil written by Richard King and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution decode the rhetoric of China's turbulent decade. The many illustrations in the book, some familiar and some never seen before, also offer new insights into works that have transcended their times."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Life and Death in Shanghai written by Cheng Nien and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.
Download or read book The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History written by Joseph W. Esherick and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.
Download or read book The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Revised Edition written by Ruoxi Chen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation A classic of modern world literature, this collection of stories provides a vivid eyewitness view of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. For this edition, the text has been thoroughly revised and updated to Pinyin romanization. A new introduction reflects on the book's significance in the post-Tianamen era.
Download or read book Red China Blues written by Jan Wong and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer -- and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University -- her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock and roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War to seek asylum in China. Red China Blues begins as Wong's startling -- and ironic -- memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism that began to sour as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism and led to her eventual repatriation to the West. Returning to China in the late eighties as a journalist, she covered both the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown and the tumultuous era of capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In a wry, absorbing, and often surreal narrative, she relates the horrors that led to her disillusionment with the "worker's paradise." And through the stories of the people -- an unhappy young woman who was sold into marriage, China's most famous dissident, a doctor who lengthens penises -- Wong creates an extraordinary portrait of the world's most populous nation. In setting out to show readers in the Western world what life is like in China, and why we should care, Wong reacquaints herself with the old friends -- and enemies -- of her radical past, and comes to terms with the legacies of her ancestral homeland.
Download or read book A History of Modern Chinese Fiction written by Chih-tsing Hsia and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as a pioneering classic study of 20th-century Chinese fiction, this volume covers some 60 years, from the Literary Revolution of 1917 through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.'
Download or read book The Chinese Cultural Revolution written by Paul Clark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-24 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the Cultural Revolution through the conflict between innovation and a top-down enforcement of modernity.
