Revolution Plus Love

Revolution Plus Love
Author: Liu Jianmei
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2003-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780824825867

In the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, a growing expectation of revolution raised important intellectual issues about the position of the individual within a society in turmoil and the shifting boundaries of political and sexual identities. The theme of "revolution plus love," a literary response to the widespread insurrections and upheaval, was first popularized in the late 1920s. In her examination of this popular but understudied literary formula, Liu Jianmei argues that revolution and love are culturally variable entities, their interplay a complex and constantly changing literary practice that is socially and historically determined. Liu looks at the formulary writing of "revolution plus love" from the 1930s to the 1970s as a case study of literary politics. Favored by leftist writers during the early period of revolutionary literature, it continued to influence mainstream Chinese literature up to the 1970s. By drawing a historical picture of the articulation and rearticulation of this theme, Liu shows how changes in revolutionary discourse force unpredictable representations of gender rules and power relations, and how women's bodies reveal the complex interactions between political representation and gender roles. Revolution Plus Love is a nuanced and carefully considered work on gender and modernity in China, unmatched in its broad use of literary resources. It will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of modern Chinese literature, women’s studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier
Author: Benno Weiner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501749412

In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

Poets of the Chinese Revolution

Poets of the Chinese Revolution
Author: Gregor Benton
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1788734688

How poetry and revolution meshed in Red China The Chinese Revolution, which fought its way to power seventy years ago, was a complex and protracted event in which groups and individuals with different hopes and expectations for the Revolution competed, although in the end Mao came to rule over the others. Its veterans included many poets, four of whom feature in this anthology. All wrote in the classical style, but their poetry was no less diverse than their politics. Chen Duxiu, led China’s early cultural awakening before founding the Communist Party in 1921. Mao led the Party to power in 1949. Zheng Chaolin, Chen Duxiu’s disciple and, like him, a convert to Trotskyism, spent thirty-four years in jail, first under the Nationalists and then under their Maoist nemeses. The guerrilla leader Chen Yi wrote flamboyant and descriptive poems in mountain bivouacs or the heat of battle. Poetry has played a different role in China, and in Chinese Revolution, from in the West—it is collective and collaborative. But in life, the four poets in this collection were entangled in opposition and even bitter hostility towards one another. Together, the four poets illustrate the complicated relationship between Communist revolution and Chinese cultural tradition.

Chinese Grammatology

Chinese Grammatology
Author: Yurou Zhong
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 023154989X

Today, Chinese characters are described as a national treasure, the core of the nation’s civilizational identity. Yet for nearly half of the twentieth century, reformers waged war on the Chinese script. They declared it an archaic hindrance to modernization, portraying the ancient system of writing as a roadblock to literacy and therefore science and democracy. Movements spanning the political spectrum proposed abandonment of characters and alphabetization of Chinese writing, although in the end the Communist Party opted for character simplification. Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and nonalphabet worlds. Yurou Zhong explores the growth of competing Romanization and Latinization movements aligned with the clashing Nationalists and Communists. She finds surprising affinities between alphabetic reform and modern Chinese literary movements and examines the politics of literacy programs and mass education against the backdrop of war and revolution. Zhong places the Chinese script revolution in the global context of a phonocentric dominance that privileges phonetic writing, contending that the eventual retention of characters constituted an anti-ethnocentric, anti-imperial critique that coincided with postwar decolonization movements and predated the emergence of Deconstructionism. By revealing the consequences of one of the biggest linguistic experiments in history, Chinese Grammatology provides an ambitious rethinking of the origins of Chinese literary modernity and the politics of the science of writing.

Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution

Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution
Author: Ching Kwan Lee
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.

Contemporary Chinese Literature

Contemporary Chinese Literature
Author: Y. Huang
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2007-11-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230608752

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.

Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution

Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution
Author: Jiwei Ci
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804723737

In this progression, which the author describes as the unfolding of the hedonistic potential of utopianism, Marxism became China's road to capitalism and consumerism.

The World Turned Upside Down

The World Turned Upside Down
Author: Yang Jisheng
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374716919

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.

The Cowshed

The Cowshed
Author: Ji Xianlin
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590179277

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.”