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Chinese Revolution in Repetition: The Minority Question

Hyun Ok Park

in The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea

Chapter 5 interprets the involuntary recollections of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that arose among Korean Chinese while working in South Korea as a sign of the historical repetition of violence.

1964–1976: Cultural Revolution

Tom Buchanan

in East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925-1976

After 1964 many on the left in Britain became disenchanted with China. However, a core of supporters (including the British ‘Maoists’) grouped around the new Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding ... More

After 1964 many on the left in Britain became disenchanted with China. However, a core of supporters (including the British ‘Maoists’) grouped around the new Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). The central figures in SACU were the sinologist Joseph Needham and the economist Joan Robinson. The chapter charts the development of this organisation during the Cultural Revolution (when Anglo-Chinese relations were again in crisis) and also looks at the proliferation of small ‘Maoist’ movements on the left in Britain. In concludes with a discussion of the period 1970–76, culminating with the death of Mao Tse-tung, when improved diplomatic and cultural relations between Britain and China reduced the role of the solidarity movements.Less

The Cultural Revolution and Its Discontents, 1966–1969

Jeremy Friedman

in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World

This chapter analyzes Soviet foreign policy in the late 1960s during the period of Chinese eclipse, the result of the Cultural Revolution, and its failure to reestablish a united revolutionary front ... More

This chapter analyzes Soviet foreign policy in the late 1960s during the period of Chinese eclipse, the result of the Cultural Revolution, and its failure to reestablish a united revolutionary front under its own leadership. This period presented Moscow with new challenges resulting from its success in meeting an older one. The Soviet leadership had succeeded in fending off China, but these events led to tragic results in Latin America, Vietnam, and the Middle East. The Soviet solution to this would be control. If the Soviet Union was going to promote both anti-imperialism and détente at the same time, it would need greater control over its allies. This would be achieved by the only means available to the Soviet leadership: through the twin mechanisms of party and ideology, that is the same means the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) used to maintain control.Less

Folk Music and the Modern State

Rachel Harris

in Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang

This chapter examines the changes in Sibe folk music during modern times in China. It traces the brief history of musical reforms and the use of music in social reforms in Çabçal in the twentieth ... More

This chapter examines the changes in Sibe folk music during modern times in China. It traces the brief history of musical reforms and the use of music in social reforms in Çabçal in the twentieth century from the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution to the contemporary soundscape. The chapter considers Sibe shamanic ritual music on the national stage and the state of contemporary shamanic ritual in Çabçal. It argues that although a great deal of energy has been devoted to the reform and control of Sibe folk music in the twentieth century, wider issues of social change brought about by the Chinese Community Party (CCP) have played the decisive role in the changing patterns of musical behaviour and the impoverishment of Sibe folk music over the past few decades.Less

The Cultural Revolution and the Riots of 1967: From 1966 to 1976

Christine Loh

in Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong

This chapter explores the 1967 riots and the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Hong Kong. It also shows that by the end of the riots, the CCP's apparatus in Hong Kong was almost ... More

This chapter explores the 1967 riots and the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Hong Kong. It also shows that by the end of the riots, the CCP's apparatus in Hong Kong was almost completely destroyed with the Hong Kong community turning away from Marxism partially—Maoism totally. It starts by presenting the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eight months of disturbances had caused anxiety, distress, inconvenience, and economic loss to the Hong Kong community. During 1967, there was a net decrease in total bank deposits amounting to HK$243 million. The succeeding five years after the riots was a time when political, social, and economic conditions in Hong Kong had to be re-evaluated and the riots strengthened the hand of those who called for reform, which included professionals in social, medical, and educational work. Additionally, the riots of 1967 made the Hong Kong community reflect upon their sense of identity. Furthermore, the impact of the Riots on the local CCP is illustrated. Finally, the resolution on CCP history is given.Less

“Little Brothers” in the Cultural Revolution: The Worker Rebels of Shanghai

Elizabeth J. Perry and Nara Dillon

in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader

This chapter provides a clear picture of the worker rebels of Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was a period of extraordinary social turmoil. When Chairman Mao called upon ... More

This chapter provides a clear picture of the worker rebels of Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was a period of extraordinary social turmoil. When Chairman Mao called upon the masses to bombard the headquarters, they often did so with a remarkable vengeance. However, the most notable aspect of Shanghai's worker-rebel activism was not their violence, but their pursuit of political power. The workers were content to adopt the fraternal appellation of little brother. After the January Revolution of 1967, worker rebels at the instigation of Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Hongwen augmented their political influence through a variety of programs: worker representatives, workers' Mao Zedong thought-propaganda teams, workers' theory troops, workers' new cadres, and worker ambassadors. Having operated on the fringes of orthodox society for many years, Shanghai's worker rebels seized the opportunity presented by the Cultural Revolution to forge a new brotherhood based on a common quest for political inclusion. In addition, despite the overwhelmingly male composition of their leadership ranks, the workers did permit women to take charge of male subordinates.Less

From the ruins of heaven on earth

Jenny Lin

in Above Sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai

Chapter One examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi, before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi ... More

Chapter One examines pastiche in the shopping mall and cultural heritage site Xintiandi, before discussing the site’s buried modern art histories marred by cross-cultural conflicts. Xintiandi physically surrounds China’s first communist meeting site of 1921, today memorialized as a museum. The complex was designed with reference to the vernacular homes of its formerly foreign occupied French Concession setting, and is officially celebrated for its “East-meets-West” and “Old-meets-New” architecture, even while the construction demolished most of the site’s existing homes and dislocated thousands of working class residents. This chapter analyzes how Xintiandi’s seemingly benign East-meets-West façades mask collusions between the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic state power and capitalist development, while romanticizing Shanghai’s modern cosmopolitan legacy. The chapter analyzes examples of Xintiandi’s repressed cultural histories, including the revolutionary art and design experiments of Pang Xunqin, founder of the 1930s avant-garde collective, The Storm Society, leftist writings and art promoted by Lu Xun, and the major Cultural Revolution Era debate sparked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary, Chung Kuo Cina. The chapter argues that the official admonishment of Shanghai-based cultural projects by Pang and Antonioni speak to collisions between Shanghai’s semi-colonial past, Maoist socialism, and Cultural Revolution Era totalitarianism that still resonate in Shanghai today.Less

Can Private Museums Offer Space for Alternative History?: The Red Era Series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster

Kirk A. Denton and Sebastian Veg (eds)

in Popular Memories of the Mao Era: From Critical Debate to Reassessing History

This chapter examines the Red Era series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a privately-owned complex of museums not far from Chengdu. Denton analyzes the curatorial techniques used in the exhibits and ... More

This chapter examines the Red Era series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, a privately-owned complex of museums not far from Chengdu. Denton analyzes the curatorial techniques used in the exhibits and the ways they negotiate commercial interests, a sense of intellectual integrity to be true to the past, and state imposed limits on how the Cultural Revolution can be remembered in China.Less

Liberation, Maoist Campaigns, and Cartoons, 1949–1976

John A. Lent and Xu Ying

in Comics Art in China

When the Communists triumphed in 1949, they held congresses to discuss how to implement Mao’s thoughts on art, expressed at Yan’an seven years before―art was to be an ideological weapon to promote ... More

When the Communists triumphed in 1949, they held congresses to discuss how to implement Mao’s thoughts on art, expressed at Yan’an seven years before―art was to be an ideological weapon to promote Communist and nationalist causes, made accessible to and understandable for the masses. For the first twenty-seven years after Liberation, cartoonists had to align themselves with the Party or government on the Korean War, the Maoist movement against writer/critic Hu Feng, and Mao’s “The Hundred Flowers,” anti-Rightists, and “Great Leap Forward” campaigns. Uncertainty and turmoil kept cartoonists cautious and insecure, futilely trying to abide by shifting policies on the relationship between art and politics. These campaigns culminated in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which unleashed monstrous forces that seriously altered all aspects of China, especially artists and intellectuals. Rebel groups burned art, physically attacked artists, and destroyed their organizations. Many cartoonists were victims of these onslaughts; they were denied the right to draw, arrested, jailed, or sent to the countryside to do hard labor for very long periods. However, cartooning continued in various forms throughout this decade.Less

Extracting Revolutionary Spirit: Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun and Anchee Min's Red Azalea

in From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China

This chapter examines the work of filmmaker Jiang Wen, In the Heat of the Sun (1994), and expatriate writer Anchee Min, Red Azalea (1994). Both Jiang Wen and Anchee Min link sexual desire with the ... More

This chapter examines the work of filmmaker Jiang Wen, In the Heat of the Sun (1994), and expatriate writer Anchee Min, Red Azalea (1994). Both Jiang Wen and Anchee Min link sexual desire with the spirit of the revolution and apply a mystical approach that signals an underlying concept of transcendence. In the Heat of the Sun offers a novel interpretation of China's Cultural Revolution and rewrites the dominant narrative of trauma, violence, and dislocation. Red Azalea tackles an overarching mysticism that unites and expresses both revolutionary spirit and sexual desire while creating an imaginary spiritual Maoism out of and as resistance to political Maoism. It also describes the Cultural Revolution experience as profoundly, if secretly, sensual and erotic. Anchee Min associates sexual liberation with political progressiveness and argues that the defunct Chinese revolutionary state has lost its spirit, thus becoming hypocritical and essentially false.Less

Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards

Emily Honig

in Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader

This chapter explores some of the complexities of the articulation of gender identity during the Cultural Revolution by focusing on one particular issue: women's participation in the widespread ... More

This chapter explores some of the complexities of the articulation of gender identity during the Cultural Revolution by focusing on one particular issue: women's participation in the widespread violence that accompanied the Red Guard movement when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. On the surface, Red Guard violence was gender blind; there was nothing gendered about either its perpetrators or victims, whose class identity and political affiliation were far more salient. However, personal accounts and memoirs of the Cultural Revolution reveal that its violence was in fact deeply gendered, sexualized, and enmeshed in contested notions of masculinity and femininity. This does not mean that violence was about gender, but rather that its practice and representations had clearly gendered dimensions. Women may have acted like men and engaged in the same forms of violence as men, but the meanings and implications of their experiences were profoundly different. Furthermore, the chapter explores the meanings people ascribed to female violence, and the role of that violence in the remapping of male and female identities in the Cultural Revolution.Less

Mao's Fisnal Crusade: Purifying the Revolutionary Tradition

Elizabeth J. Perry

in Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

This chapter provides a novel interpretation of the Cultural Revolution as a quasi-religious movement in which the Anyuan parable figured centrally, and it argues that this invested China's ... More

This chapter provides a novel interpretation of the Cultural Revolution as a quasi-religious movement in which the Anyuan parable figured centrally, and it argues that this invested China's revolutionary tradition with unusual emotional power.Less

Half the Sky:: Mobility and Late Socialist Reflections

Helen F. Siu (ed.)

in Merchants' Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

This chapter demonstrates the various mobility strategies of women in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is characterized by the unusual power of the official rhetoric ... More

This chapter demonstrates the various mobility strategies of women in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is characterized by the unusual power of the official rhetoric of revolution, which pushed capitalism to the extreme opposite side of the party line. The rhetoric surrounding the image of the steel maiden demanded conformity, but through the women's individual strategies of using this image, they found fulfillment in their own complicated lives.Less

Social Backgrounds of China and Taiwan

C. Y. Cyrus Chu and Ruoh‐Rong Yu

in Understanding Chinese Families: A Comparative Study of Taiwan and Southeast China

This chapter provides some macro statistics and a review of historical events to help the reader understand the pace of social and economic development in Taiwan and China. In general, Taiwan had a ... More

This chapter provides some macro statistics and a review of historical events to help the reader understand the pace of social and economic development in Taiwan and China. In general, Taiwan had a relatively stable development path, from poor to rich and from traditional to modern. The Chinese society in Mainland China was more volatile, mainly due to upheavals of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the impact of the one‐child policy. It is explained when these events happened, how they affected the macro social background, and how micro family decisions were influenced.Less

The Chinese State’s Turn to Law and Rights

Ya-Wen Lei

in The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China

This chapter illuminates the contentious culture and practices based on the law and rights, discussing why and how law and rights became a critical part of China's political culture and a central ... More

This chapter illuminates the contentious culture and practices based on the law and rights, discussing why and how law and rights became a critical part of China's political culture and a central theme in China's contentious public sphere. First, the chapter briefly situates the PRC government's turn to law and rights, as well as the rise of legal and rights consciousness, in a longer historical context. Then it traces how a series of problems that emerged following the Cultural Revolution motivated the government's turn to law and rights, as well as its campaign to transform Chinese people into legal subjects. Finally, the chapter describes law dissemination on the ground and its consequences. Because the chapter serves to explain the rise of China's contentious public sphere in the post-2005 period, the focus is primarily on developments in China's legal system before the mid-2000s.Less

The Politics of Authority

Lisa Rofel

in Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

This chapter traces the contours of “politics of authority,” arguing that despite their wholehearted rejection of Maoism, workers whose class status and gender identity were initially formed during ... More

This chapter traces the contours of “politics of authority,” arguing that despite their wholehearted rejection of Maoism, workers whose class status and gender identity were initially formed during the Cultural Revolution even now reiterate certain fundamental elements of those politics through the way they perform at work. Their actions both call forth and challenge disciplinary measures by the state. The politics of authority, moreover, reflect a distinctive interpretation of power that distinguishes these workers as a cohort from either older women workers, who felt liberated by Liberation, or younger women, who entered the factory in the 1980s. These politics informed a specifically Maoist vision for reaching modernity that differed markedly from both the project of the early 1950s and the post-Mao imaginary.Less

New China

Stanley S.K. Kwan and Nicole Kwan

in The Dragon and the Crown: Hong Kong Memoirs

This chapter discusses China's condition after the Japanese invasion, after the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. In ... More

This chapter discusses China's condition after the Japanese invasion, after the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. In this chapter, the account of the so-called emerging New China is told and narrated through the visit of Stanley Kwan to his native homeland. Embarking on a journey back to his homeland, Kwan saw a stark contrast between the People's Republic of China and the British colony of Hong Kong. While Hong Kong's economic conditions improved after the war, the so-called New China was in stagnation, frozen in time even after the efforts to revive the economic conditions of China. While China had began to forge friendships with other countries, particularly with the U.S. who was in good relations with the government of Taiwan (the ousted China's government), China had on a few occasions struggled to fight the diminished yet still proliferating Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution was finally contained, China began to pave its path as one of the leading manufacturing places in the world. With Britain's lease about to expire and with the increasing ties of Hong Kong to mainland China, many of the businesses in Hong Kong started to return to their mainland roots. Combining the economic development of China and the China-Britain initiated talks that would return Hong Kong to its motherland, several businesses moved to China. This posed a great problem for the Hang Seng Bank. With its affiliation with the Americans and British and with its “keep China at a distance” policy, Hang Seng was caught in a tug of war; between its relations with foreigners and with its need to forge relations with the now developing China. Despite an uneasy situation between Britain and China, Hang Seng celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1983.Less

China as the ‘Wave of the Future’: The Chinese Politico‐Economic Model

Rosemary Foot

in The Practice of Power: US Relations with China since 1949

This is the last of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It focuses on ... More

This is the last of four chapters focusing on America’s perceptions of China’s capabilities, and dwelling on the correspondence between those perceptions and the projected consequences. It focuses on US perceptions of the political economy of China from the 1950s to 1978 and its perceived consequences for China’s capabilities both internally and as a political and economic model for other developing countries. Although the decline in Beijing’s hard and soft power resources did not follow a linear trajectory, the apparent overall weaknesses of its economy eased America’s fears about the Third World impact of its politico-economic model, and also reduced concerns that any contact between Washington and Beijing would raise the prestige of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the point where its path to development would be revived as a serious source of inspiration in large parts of the developing world. The chapter dwells primarily on China’s perceived soft power attributes. The different sections look at domestic order and advancement in China in the 1950s, the Chinese model under stress from 1959 to 1965, the impact of the early Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s, and restabilization and re-emergence in 1969–78.Less