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 Memories of the Cultural Revolution written by Luo Ying and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a work of narrative lyricism and an act of personal courage, this memoir in verse documents the human cost of a period of political turmoil in China’s recent past. Luo Ying—the pen name of Huang Nubo, a celebrated poet, Forbes billionaire, and mountain climber—draws readers into the depths of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) by rendering its defining moments in his life with devastating precision and clarity. The narrative poems that make up Memories of the Cultural Revolution combine the ardor of youthful experience with the cooler insight of mature reflection, offering a nuanced picture of life in the midst of historic change. The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” marked a critical passage on China’s road to modernity, as momentous for the world as it was for one boy caught up in its throes. In poetry that juxtaposes the political and the personal, the social and the individual, Luo Ying depicts a time when ultraleftist mass movements and factional struggles penetrated the deepest level of private daily life. In bleak yet vivid portraits of his mother, father, classmates, and coworkers, he reveals how the period indelibly marred him. “I am a red guard just as I always was,” he writes. Giving voice to the inner life of a man haunted by his experiences, Memories of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to a traumatic time when ideology threatened to crush individuality. Luo Ying’s poetry stands as eloquent testimony to the power of the individual voice to endure in the face of dire social and historical circumstances.

Download or read book Red Shadows Volume 12 written by Patricia M. Thornton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Re envisioning the Chinese Revolution written by Ching Kwan Lee and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of contemporary memories of China's revolutionary epoch, from the time of Japanese imperialism through the Cultural Revolution. This volume examines the memories of a range of social groups, including disenfranchised workers and rural women, who have often been neglected in scholarship.

Download or read book Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution written by Jing Meng and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution argues that films and TV dramas about the Cultural Revolution made after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 tend to represent personal memories in a markedly sentimental, nostalgic, and fragmented manner. This new trend is a significant departure from earlier films about the subject, which are generally interpreted as national allegories, not private expressions of grief, regret or other personal feelings. With China entering a postsocialist era, the ideological conflation of socialism and global capitalism has generated enough cultural ambiguity to allow a space for the expression of personalized reminiscences of the past. By presenting these personal memories—in effect alternative narratives to official history—on screen, individuals now seem to have some agency in narrating and constructing history. At the same time such autonomy can be easily undermined since the promotion of the sentiment of nostalgia is often subjected to commodification. Sentimental treatments of the past may simply be a marketing strategy. Underplaying political issues is also a ‘safer’ way for films and TV dramas to secure public release in mainland China. Meng concludes that the new mode of representing the past is shaped by the current sociopolitical conditions: these personal memories and micro-narratives can be understood as the defining ways of remembering in China’s postsocialist era. ‘Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution takes a comprehensive look at contemporary screen depictions of the Cultural Revolution. The book convincingly ties close readings of the works analysed with broader social and cultural phenomena that already are hot topics of study and debate, offering something original while also being closely engaged with existing scholarship.’ —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota ‘Breaking through the tired dichotomy between personal and collective narratives, individual memory and grand history, this refreshing book sheds much light on film memories of the Cultural Revolution in the post-socialist millennium. In a limpid and engaging style, Jing Meng probes memory’s nostalgia and imbrication with the collective destiny, and critiques the personal focus aligned with neoliberal economy and commodification.’ —Ban Wang, Stanford University

Download or read book Music as Mao s Weapon written by Lei X. Ouyang and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X. Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to explore both the Cultural Revolution's effect on those who lived through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised by this phenomenon, including: What did the revolutionization look, sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an experience over time? Perceptive and provocative, Music as Mao's Weapon is an insightful look at the exploitation and manipulation of the arts under authoritarianism.

Download or read book Forbidden Memory written by Tsering Woeser and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China written by Guobin Yang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.

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 Chairman Mao s Children written by Bin Xu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s and 1970s, around 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to rural villages and China's frontiers. Bin Xu tells the story of how this 'sent-down' generation have come to terms with their difficult past. Exploring representations of memory including personal life stories, literature, museum exhibits, and acts of commemoration, he argues that these representations are defined by a struggle to reconcile worthiness with the political upheavals of the Mao years. These memories, however, are used by the state to construct an official narrative that weaves this generation's experiences into an upbeat story of the 'China dream'. This marginalizes those still suffering and obscures voices of self-reflection on their moral-political responsibility for their actions. Xu provides careful analysis of this generation of 'Chairman Mao's children', caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

Download or read book Memories of the Revolution written by Holly Hughes and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scripts, interviews, photos, and critical commentary documenting the riotous beginnings of this long-lived experimental theater space for women

Download or read book Red Legacies in China written by Jie Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Cultural Revolution Cookbook written by Sasha Gong and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years ago, Sasha Gong and Scott D. Seligman collaborated on a groundbreaking cookbook that told the story of China's chaotic Cultural Revolution (1966-76) through its cuisine. During that period, approximately 17 million city youth were "sent down" to the countryside to "learn from the peasants," and they discovered that toil in the communes was arduous and food was scarce. But many also learned that remarkably tasty and healthy dishes could be prepared with the fresh, wholesome ingredients available down on the farm. They learned to coax peak flavors and maximum nourishment out of unprocessed foods, fresh from the fields, ponds and streams and devoid of artificial preservatives. The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, which told their stories, immediately became the best-selling Chinese cookbook on Amazon.com and quickly sold out its first print run. The authors were not prepared for the incredible success it has enjoyed since then. Now, in a Tenth Anniversary Edition, the authors have taken suggestions from readers and added new material. The recipes are all entirely authentic and easy to prepare in an American kitchen. Many are vegetarian, and none of them requires exotic ingredients. You can find everything you need in a well-stocked grocery store. The step-by-step instructions are easy to follow, and short cuts and substitutions are suggested. Readers are also treated to many inspirational stories - about Chinese food, about the Cultural Revolution and about living in the Chinese countryside - bringing the wonderful recipes, and that extraordinary era, to life.

Download or read book States of Memory written by Jeffrey K. Olick and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-21 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies over time. Integrating theories of memory and nationalism with case studies, these essays stake a vital middle ground between particular and universal approaches to social memory studies. The contributors—including historians and social scientists—describe societies’ struggles to produce and then use ideas of what a “normal” past should look like. They examine claims about the genuineness of revolution (in fascist Italy and communist Russia), of inclusiveness (in the United States and Australia), of innocence (in Germany), and of inevitability (in Israel). Essayists explore the reputation of Confucius among Maoist leaders during China’s Cultural Revolution; commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States Congress; the “end” of the postwar era in Japan; and how national calendars—in signifying what to remember, celebrate, and mourn—structure national identification. Above all, these essays reveal that memory is never unitary, no matter how hard various powers strive to make it so. States of Memory will appeal to those scholars-in sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history-who are interested in collective memory, commemoration, nationalism, and state formation. Contributors. Paloma Aguilar, Frederick C. Corney, Carol Gluck, Matt K. Matsuda, Jeffrey K. Olick, Francesca Polletta, Uri Ram, Barry Schwartz, Lyn Spillman, Charles Tilly, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Eviatar Zerubavel, Tong Zhang

Download or read book Blood Red Sunset written by Ma Bo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-07-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book A Continuous Revolution written by Barbara Mittler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as pure propaganda, was liked not only in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering this art--music, stage works, posters, comics, literature--in its longue durée, Barbara Mittler suggests it builds on a tradition of earlier works, allowing for proliferation in contemporary China.

Download or read book When Huai Flowers Bloom written by Shu Jiang Lu and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against China's turbulent years between the early 1960s and the late 1970s, When Huai Flowers Bloom is the literary memoir of a young girl who manages to sustain love, imagination, and strength during this most chaotic time. With twelve separate yet interconnected stories, Shu Jiang Lu alternates between storyteller and listener as she relays haunting memories and explores the devastating effect of Mao's anticultural Cultural Revolution. Lu weaves together the voices of multiple real and fantastic characters: her parents and their treasured yet forbidden bookcase; the mysterious vendors beckoning from Pear Flower Alley; the immortal martial hero; the reactionary opera singer and the black demon novelist; the whispering ghost and dancing fairy; and the author herself, discovering her storyteller's voice in the military camps of her youth. When Huai Flowers Bloom is a poignant, persistent journey toward voice and freedom.