China's Lonely Revolution

China's Lonely Revolution
Author: Jeremy A. Murray
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438465327

Jeremy A. Murray's study of local Communist revolutionaries in Hainan between 1926 and 1956 provides a window into the diversity and complexity of the Chinese revolution. Long at the margins of the Chinese state, Hainan was once known by mainlanders only for its malarial climate and fierce indigenous people. In spite of efforts by the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese to exterminate Hainan's Communists, the movement survived because of an alliance with the indigenous Li. For years it persevered, though in complete isolation from Communist headquarters on the mainland. Using Chinese-language sources, archival materials, and interviews, Murray draws a vivid picture of this movement from the Hainanese perspective, and broadens our understanding of how patriotism, Party loyalty, and Chinese identity have been experienced and interpreted in modern China.

China's Lonely Revolution

China's Lonely Revolution
Author: Jeremy A. Murray
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438465319

Presents a new view of the Chinese revolution through the lens of the local Communist movement in Hainan between 1926 and 1956. Jeremy A. Murray’s study of local Communist revolutionaries in Hainan between 1926 and 1956 provides a window into the diversity and complexity of the Chinese revolution. Long at the margins of the Chinese state, Hainan was once known by mainlanders only for its malarial climate and fierce indigenous people. In spite of efforts by the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese to exterminate Hainan’s Communists, the movement survived because of an alliance with the indigenous Li. For years it persevered, though in complete isolation from Communist headquarters on the mainland. Using Chinese-language sources, archival materials, and interviews, Murray draws a vivid picture of this movement from the Hainanese perspective, and broadens our understanding of how patriotism, Party loyalty, and Chinese identity have been experienced and interpreted in modern China.

Revolutionary Transformations

Revolutionary Transformations
Author: Anja Blanke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2023-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009304119

Using first-hand material from Chinese archives that are no longer open to researchers, and bringing together a leading team of international scholars, this volume is a major contribution to the study of the People's Republic of China. Calling into question existing narratives on the foundational decade of the PRC, these essays present a nuanced consideration of China in the 1950s by integrating two periods that are often considered separately: the relatively 'happy' years 1949–1956 with the relatively 'unhappy' years from 1957 onwards. Exploring the challenges faced in constructing socialism, the transnational context, and early modes of PRC governance, the contributors highlight the ways in which China was shaped by diversity on all levels and scales in how socialism was enacted and experienced. These essays clearly demonstrate how the unevenness of Party control created discrepancies and variations between different regions and between the center and the locale.

Accidental Holy Land

Accidental Holy Land
Author: Joseph W. Esherick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520385330

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Yan'an is China's "revolutionary holy land," the heart of Mao Zedong's Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. Based on thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous field trips to the region, Joseph W. Esherick's book examines the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu.

Blood Red Sunset

Blood Red Sunset
Author: Ma Bo
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 385
Release: 1996-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0140159428

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

China 1945

China 1945
Author: Richard Bernstein
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307743217

At the beginning of 1945, relations between America and the Chinese Communists couldn’t have been closer. Chinese leaders talked of America helping to lift China out of poverty; Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries. By year’s end, Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines; official cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust, a pattern which would continue for a quarter century, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences. In China 1945, Richard Bernstein tells the incredible story of the sea change that took place during that year—brilliantly analyzing its far-reaching components and colorful characters, from diplomats John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service to Time journalist, Henry Luce; in addition to Mao and his intractable counterpart, Chiang Kai-shek, and the indispensable Zhou Enlai. A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines American power coming face-to-face with a formidable Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations.

Swimming to Freedom

Swimming to Freedom
Author: Kent Wong
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1647001862

When Kent Wong was a young boy, his father, a patriotic Chinese official in the customs office in Hong Kong, joined an insurrection at work and returned with the family to the newly established People’s Republic of China. Hailed as heroes, they settled in the southern city of Canton. But Mao’s China was dangerous and unstable, with landlords executed en-masse and millions dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward.

Heretics in Revolutionary China

Heretics in Revolutionary China
Author: Xuduo Zhao
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004547142

In this book, Xuduo Zhao revisits the early twentieth-century Chinese revolution by focusing on two forgotten Cantonese socialists: Chen Gongbo and Tan Pingshan. By analyzing a host of previously untapped primary sources, Zhao discovers a social democratic approach within the newly founded Chinese Communist Party and argues that its decline marked a key moment in the Chinese communist movement. The study of these two figures, and the ebbs and flows of their lives, reflects and reveals the fundamental tensions in the Chinese revolution which have shaped China’s political trajectory to contemporary times and the broader political, social, and cultural landscapes of Republican China.

How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp

How I Survived a Chinese
Author: Gulbahar Haitiwaji
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644211491

The first memoir about the "reeducation" camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao. Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the 'reeducation' camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell. These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders. The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.