Confessions

Confessions
Author: Zhengguo Kang
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2007
Genre: Authors, Chilean
ISBN: 9780393064674

With clear vision this intimate memoir draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of "Liberation" in 1949 through the Tiananmen Square protests and after. The son of a professional family, Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao's China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at the age of twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor in Xian's Number Two Brickyard. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system, a story of hardship and poignance, of warmth and humor in the face of cruelty. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of party authority.

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China
Author: Kang Zhengguo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2008-06-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393069761

"A mesmerizing read…A literary work of high distinction.” —William Grimes, New York Times This “gripping and poignant memoir” (New York Times Book Review) draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of “Liberation” in 1949 through the post-Mao era. The son of a professional family, Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao’s China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at age twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life.

Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China

Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China
Author: Elisa Nesossi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-06-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317106059

The volume presents an extensive investigation into the process of reforms of detention powers in today’s China and offers an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding the reformist attempts. The chapters in this collection demonstrate that legislative and institutional reforms in this area result from political opportunities - openings and tensions at the central institutional levels of political authority - and contingent social and political factors. The book examines legal and institutional reforms to institutions of detention and imprisonment that have occurred since the 1990s, with a particular focus on the 21st century. Its content follows three particular lines of enquiry concerning the issue of deprivation of liberty in contemporary China. The first deals with the academic and theoretical debates on the subject of imprisonment and detention. The related chapters explain the difficulties encountered in this area of research and understandings of the discourses of reform through labour in Western and Chinese scholarship. The second deals with the specific issues of criminal and administrative forms of deprivation of liberty, examining in particular the institutional and legislative dimensions, considering the relationship between reforms and criminal justice policy agendas. The third assesses the meaning of institutional reforms in the context of the changing state-society relationship in contemporary China.

Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes

Thought Reform and China's Dangerous Classes
Author: Aminda M. Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013
Genre: China
ISBN: 144221838X

This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"--The prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smit.

Life Stories

Life Stories
Author: Maureen O'Connor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2011-08-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1610691466

Memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries represent the most personal and most intimate of genres, as well as one of the most abundant and popular. Gain new understanding and better serve your readers with this detailed genre guide to nearly 700 titles that also includes notes on more than 2,800 read-alike and other related titles. The popularity of this body of literature has grown in recent years, and it has also diversified in terms of the types of stories being told—and persons telling them. In the past, readers' advisors have depended on access by names or Dewey classifications and subjects to help readers find autobiographies they will enjoy. This guide offers an alternative, organizing the literature according to popular genres, subgenres, and themes that reflect common reading interests. Describing titles that range from travel and adventure classics and celebrity autobiographies to foodie memoirs and environmental reads, Life Stories: A Guide to Reading Interests in Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Diaries presents a unique overview of the genre that specifically addresses the needs of readers' advisors and others who work with readers in finding books.

The China Record

The China Record
Author: Fei-Ling Wang
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2023-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1438492286

The China Record provides readers with an ambitious, detailed, and wide-ranging examination of the People's Republic of China (PRC) under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) both as an alternative mode of political system and a distinctive model of socioeconomic development. Fei-Ling Wang assesses the record of the economy under the CCP, people's lives and rights, and China's spiritual and physical ecology. He focuses on issues of political representation, criminal justice, fiscal and monetary policies, state-led growth, living standards, academia and education, inequality and poverty, disaster relief and pandemic prevention, culture and ethics, and the protection of antiquities and the environment. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, The China Record seeks to provide a solid and balanced, yet unflinching, view about the nature, strengths, weaknesses, and implications of the PRC as an emerging superpower and a potential world leader. It is an effort to introduce a holistic evaluation of the CCP-PRC's overall efficacy, efficiency, power, sustainability, and desirability—or the lack thereof.

Chinese Revolution in Practice

Chinese Revolution in Practice
Author: Guo Wu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000970663

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration. The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context. Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions.

Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering

Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering
Author: Li Li
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2016-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004323554

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.

Crossroads and Cultures, Volume II: Since 1300

Crossroads and Cultures, Volume II: Since 1300
Author: Bonnie G. Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2012-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0312442149

Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World’s Peoples incorporates the best current cultural history into a fresh and original narrative that connects global patterns of development with life on the ground. As the title, “Crossroads,” suggests, this new synthesis highlights the places and times where people exchanged goods and commodities, shared innovations and ideas, waged war and spread disease, and in doing so joined their lives to the broad sweep of global history. Students benefit from a strong pedagogical design, abundant maps and images, and special features that heighten the narrative’s attention to the lives and voices of the world’s peoples. Test drive a chapter today. Find out how.

Historical Dictionary of Chinese Culture

Historical Dictionary of Chinese Culture
Author: Lawrence R. Sullivan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2021-03-29
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1538146045

Covering wide-ranging topics from the arts and entertainment to customs and traditions from the ancient imperial and modern eras, Historical Dictionary of Chinese Culture provides more than 300 separate entries along with a comprehensive chronology, glossary of Chinese cultural terms, and an extensive bibliography of Western and Chinese-language sources. Dictionary entries of the decorative and fine arts include ceramics and porcelains, handicrafts, jade and seal carving, jewelry, and painting. The literary subjects range from fiction to non-fiction, but especially poetry. Major entertainment venues of cinema and film, classical puppetry, and theater, both ancient and modern are also covered. In addition to the arts, the authors include major customary practices from childbirth and childrearing to marriage and weddings to funerals and burial practices. Other aspects of the culture are also examined, including crime, foot-binding, pornography, and prostitution, and the government policies aimed at their eradication. Throughout the text, Chinese-language translations of key terms are presented in italics and parenthesis, along with biographies of figures central to the creation of China’s magnificent cultural heritage.