Download or read book Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace written by Yihong Pan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan tells her personal story and the story of her generation of urban middle-school graduates sent to the countryside during China's Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan's book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would go on to lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-1979 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong's China. Book jacket.

Download or read book China s Sent Down Generation written by Helena K. Rene and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-29 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During China’s Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong’s "rustication program" resettled 17 million urban youths, known as "sent downs," to the countryside for manual labor and socialist reeducation. This book, the most comprehensive study of the program to be published in either English or Chinese to date, examines the mechanisms and dynamics of state craft in China, from the rustication program’s inception in 1968 to its official termination in 1980 and actual completion in the 1990s. Rustication, in the ideology of Mao's peasant-based revolution, formed a critical component of the Cultural Revolution's larger attack on bureaucrats, capitalists, the intelligentsia, and "degenerative" urban life. This book assesses the program’s origins, development, organization, implementation, performance, and public administrative consequences. It was the defining experience for many Chinese born between 1949 and 1962, and many of China's contemporary leaders went through the rustication program. The author explains the lasting impact of the rustication program on China's contemporary administrative culture, for example, showing how and why bureaucracy persisted and even grew stronger during the wrenching chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She also focuses on the special difficulties female sent-downs faced in terms of work, pressures to marry local peasants, and sexual harassment, predation, and violence. The author’s parents were both sent downs, and she was able to interview over fifty former sent downs from around the country, something never previously accomplished. China's Sent-Down Generation demonstrates the rustication program’s profound long-term consequences for China's bureaucracy, for the spread of corruption, and for the families traumatized by this authoritarian social experiment. The book will appeal to academics, graduate and undergraduate students in public administration and China studies programs, and individuals who are interested in China’s Cultural Revolution era.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Chinese History written by Michael Dillon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 1223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.

Download or read book The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era written by Xin Huang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women's life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century's major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women's liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.

Download or read book Memory Fluid Identity and the Politics of Remembering written by Li Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese Cultural Revolution is the single most important internal social event in contemporary Chinese history. The plethora of history, literary, and artistic representations inspired by this event are critical to our understanding of the diversified, often contested, interpretations of contemporary China. Li Li’s critical examination of autobiographic, filmic and fictional presentations in Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering: The Representations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in English-speaking Countries demonstrates that “memory works” not only reflect memories of those who lived through that period, but memories about their past, and, more importantly, about their identity remapping and artistic negotiation in a cross-cultural environment.

Download or read book Aspirational Chinese in Competitive Social Repositionings written by Jia Gao and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes in China. However, most of the literature has focused on either macro- or micro-level issues, and what has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary people has reacted to and influenced the changes. This inadequacy has affected our understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and the changing trends. Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and the evidence recorded in numerous recent publications and interview data, this book seeks to re-examine the ever-changing, but under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when the communist heir narrative was rebranded and utilised, to 2000, when Jiang Zemin formulated the Three-Represents theory to modify the ideological political thinking of China’s ruling elites. This analysis focuses on how a high proportion of aspirational citizens have kept repositioning themselves in China’s changing distributions of social resources and social structure, how their attitudes and behaviours have been shaped over time, what characteristics of their choices are at different stages, and how their preferences have resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

Download or read book Northeast Asia s Difficult Past written by Mikyoung Kim and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of memory in China, Japan and Korea involves a surfeit rather than a deficit of memory, and the consequence of this excess is negative: unforgettable traumas prevent nations from coming to terms with the problems of the present. These compelling essays enrich Western scholarship by applying to it insights derived from Asian settings.

Download or read book The Use of Mao and the Chongqing Model written by Joseph Y.S. CHENG and published by City University of HK Press. This book was released on 2015-07-10 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAO Zedong was a Chinese communist leader and founder of the People’s Republic of China. He developed his own ideology and methodology known as Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought, and his thought has a great influence in China or even overseas. This book aims at bringing together a group of scholars to address the uses of Mao in China (PRC) today with special reference to the Bo Xilai case. It also provides insights and detail on how and what we know about modern China. Contributing authors, including a number of French scholars, illustrate how Maoism influences and engages in government, business sector or social life. This timely volume will be of considerable interest to scholars, journalists, and those keen to better understand the changing values in China today.

Download or read book Shanghai Homes written by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

Download or read book Documenting China written by Margaret Hillenbrand and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documenting China brings together a series of linked texts, each one chosen for its impact when first published, and which together chart the core developments in twentieth-century Chinese history. With extracts spanning the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, popular culture, literary history, neo-nationalist discourse, and international relations, the book challenges advanced language learners to elevate their reading ability to the level necessary for handling real primary sources in an unmediated way while deepening their understanding of Chinese politics, society, and culture. Each chapter is structured around crucial passages from a core historical text, each chapter begins with an introductory essay in English that provides context for fully understanding the text, suggested further readings, and a glossary of key terms.

Download or read book The Lost Generation written by Michel Bonnin and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Generation is a vital component to understanding Maoism. The book provides a comprehensive account of the critical movement during which seventeen million young "educated" citydwellers were supposed to transform themselves into peasants, potentially for life. Bonnin closely examines the Chinese leadership's motivations and the methods that they used over time to implement their objectives, as well as the daytoday lives of those young people in the countryside, their difficulties, their doubts, their resistance and, ultimately, their revolt. The author draws on a rich and diverse array of sources, concluding with a comprehensive assessment of the movement that shaped an entire generation, including a majority of today's cultural, economic, and political elite.

Download or read book Anthropology of Childhood and Youth written by Geoffrey Vitale and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Anthropology of Childhood and Youth, author Geoffrey Vitale shows the ways in which people understand, raise, and educate children and youth differently from century to century and from country to country according to the culture, lifestyle, politics, and economics of their place of origin. He also introduces the reader to the manner in which professionals relate to these matters, with a focus on an anthropological perspective. Vitale discusses similar problems and matters for inquiry a thousand years apart, and separated by oceans. The adoption or abandonment of children, for instance, created problems of inheritance, sexual relationship, and family support and integration in Ancient Greece, just as it does today in contemporary Japan. The author therefore, proposes a flexible tour of human society, intended essentially to introduce the reader to points of view, strategies, and approaches that go beyond the purely domestic, both in place and time—which may introduce new ideas and present new theories and diverse understandings. Anthropology of Childhood and Youth establishes the work of a wide range of specialists and familiarizes readers both with their skills and their writings.

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 The China Race written by Fei-Ling Wang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following its two prequels, The China Order (2017) and The China Record (2023), this book analyzes the China Race, the global competition for power and leadership between the US-led West and the People's Republic of China. Considering the organizational options and optimality with respect to human civilization, Fei-Ling Wang discusses two alternative world orders: the Westphalian System of international relations and a centralized world political unification. Both are feasible and existed before, but with drastically different desirability. The rising power of the PRC state has consistently and methodically sought to recenter and reorganize the world to safeguard and promote its autocracy and, ultimately, build a world empire. Examining the nature, aims, means, accomplishments, pitfalls and failures of Beijing's foreign policy and the state of and developments in Sinology and the West's China policy, Wang focuses on the existential PRC-USA rivalry and proposes a holistic strategic framework, discussing three ranked objectives, for the West and the world, including the Chinese people, to manage, benefit from, and prevail in the China Race.

Download or read book Building New China Colonizing Kokonor written by Gregory Rohlf and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Amdo and Qinghai in the 1950s examines rural resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan cultural borderlands in the 1950s. More than 100,000 eastern Han and Hui Chinese were sent to Qinghai province—known in Mongolian as Kokonor and Amdo to Tibetans—to plow up new fields in areas that were being incorporated into the Chinese state for the first time. The settlers were to bring their skilled labor, literacy, and modern thinking to “backward” Qinghai to fully exploit its natural resources of oil, natural gas, gold, and empty lands for the benefit of the industrializing nation. The book is a social and political history of resettlement, focusing on the people who were moved and the overall impact the program had on the province. It is a frontier history, but it also narrates a story of state building in modern China that spans the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first.

Download or read book Popular Memories of the Mao Era written by Sebastian Veg and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume provides an overview of new forms of popular memory, in particular critical memory, of the Mao era. Focusing on the processes of private production, public dissemination, and social sanctioning of narratives of the past in contemporary China, it examines the relation between popular memories and their social construction as historical knowledge. The three parts of the book are devoted to the shifting boundary between private and public in the press and media, the reconfiguration of elite and popular discourses in cultural productions (film, visual art, and literature), and the emergence of new discourses of knowledge through innovative readings of unofficial sources. Popular memories pose a challenge to the existing historiography of the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China. Despite the recent backlash, these more critical reflections are beginning to transform the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Public discussions of key episodes in the history of the People’s Republic, in particular the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, the Great Famine of 1959–1961, and the Cultural Revolution, have proliferated in the last fifteen years. These discussions are qualitatively different from previous expressions of traumatic or nostalgic memories of Mao in the 1980s and the 1990s respectively. They reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the authoritarian control over history exercised by the Chinese state, and often they make use of the new spaces provided for counter-hegemonic narratives by social media and the growing private economy in the 2000s. Unofficial or independent journals, self-published books, social media groups, independent documentary films, private museums, oral history projects, and archival research by amateur historians, all of which analyzed in this collection, have contributed to these embryonic public or semi-public dialogues. “An excellent guide to the independent journalism, cultural production, and amateur histories that are transforming the mainstream narrative of the Mao era in China. Rich in detail and sound in analysis, these studies document the emergence of critical memory in Chinese society. A valuable resource for students and scholars.” —Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia; author of The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History “Popular memories of the Mao era are signposts of contemporary politics and culture. This volume features exciting new research by distinguished scholars. Extremely rich and readable, the chapters in this collection illuminate both China’s past and present. A timely and important contribution.” —Guobin Yang, University of Pennsylvania; author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

Download or read book Golden Silk Smoke written by Carol Benedict and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-04-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China’s highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing from a wealth of historical sources—gazetteers, literati jottings (biji), Chinese materia medica, Qing poetry, modern short stories, late Qing and early Republican newspapers, travel memoirs, social surveys, advertisements, and more—Golden-Silk Smoke not only uncovers the long and dynamic history of tobacco in China but also sheds new light on global histories of fashion and consumption.