Violence, Periodization and Definition of the Cultural Revolution

Violence, Periodization and Definition of the Cultural Revolution
Author: Joshua Zhang
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004360476

This book recounts two deaths, the murder of Mr. Wang Jin by 31 Red Guards in the Nanjing Foreign Language School, where the senior author was a young student at the time; and the earlier murder of Mrs. Bian Zhongyun of the Girls School affiliated with the Beijing Normal University in 1966. The book is a history of two small incidents in a massive social injustice and also an attempt to understand the Cultural Revolution (CR) within the framework of modern social movement theory. The book elaborates on the sources of violence in the CR, and the definition and periodization of the CR (that is, what was it, and when did it begin and end?).

Mobilization, Factionalization and Destruction of Mass Movements in the Cultural Revolution

Mobilization, Factionalization and Destruction of Mass Movements in the Cultural Revolution
Author: Joshua Zhang
Publisher: Remembering Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2020-06-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.

The Down to the Countryside Campaign and Return to the City Movement

The Down to the Countryside Campaign and Return to the City Movement
Author: Joshua Zhang
Publisher: Remembering Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Using a social movement perspective, this monograph demonstrates the differences between the Return to the City Movement by the Chinese educated youths - the only successful social movement by the Chinese people since the establishment of the communist regime - and the Down to the Countryside Campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. Grounded in data collected via an unprecedented survey research effort involving respondents who lived through these historic events, the monograph explores the emotional impact upon the educated youths of being forced to the countryside, the directions and forms of their resettlement, work, income, mentality, marriage/love, and relationship with local peasants while in the countryside, timelines and methods involved in returning to the city, their final occupations, children’s fulfillment, current perceptions of urban life, evaluation of the campaign and their experiences in the countryside. The authors also summarize the lessons learned from the Return to the City Movement, providing references for Chinese social movements in the future.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography
Author: Matthew Himley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429784082

This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled. The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life. This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.

How to Make A Mao Suit

How to Make A Mao Suit
Author: Antonia Finnane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009359959

Revisionist history of the transformation of clothing in China during the Mao years, 1949-1976.

Disoriented Disciplines

Disoriented Disciplines
Author: Rosario Hubert
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810146576

An urgent call to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively, in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice. Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial. Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.

A Social History of Maoist China

A Social History of Maoist China
Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107123704

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.

Maoism at the Grassroots

Maoism at the Grassroots
Author: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674287207

Maoism at the Grassroots challenges state-centered views of China under Mao, providing insights into the lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. It reveals how ordinary people risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities, despite political repression and surveillance.

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution
Author: William A. Joseph
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1991
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Since the Cultural Revolution, data have been uncovered to illuminate that tumultuous decade. In this volume 13 scholars examine the gap between the ideology of the Revolution and the harsh and contradictory reality of its outcome. They focus particularly on the violence, coercion, and constant tension between the need for centralization to enforce policies and the need for decentralizing decision-making if those goals were to be achieved.