Annotation A classic of modern world literature, this collection of stories provides a vivid eyewitness view of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution. For this edition, the text has been thoroughly revised and updated to Pinyin romanization. A new introduction reflects on the book's significance in the post-Tianamen era.
As China's centrally planned economy and welfare state have given way to a more loosely controlled version of "late socialism," public concern about economic reform's downside has found expression in epic novels about official corruption and its effects. While the media shied away from dealing with these issues, novelists stepped in to fill the void. "Anti-corruption fiction" exploded onto the marketplace and into public consciousness, spawning popular films and television series until a clampdown after 2002 that ended China's first substantial realist fiction since the 1989 Beijing massacre. With frankness and imagination seldom allowed journalists, novelists have depicted the death of China's rust-belt industries, the gap between rich and poor, "social unrest"—i.e., riots—and the questionable new practices of entrenched communist party rulers. Corruption and Realism examines this rebirth of the Chinese political novel and its media adaptations, explaining how the works reflect contemporary Chinese life and how they embody Chinese traditions of social criticism, literary realism, and contemplation of taboo subjects. This is the first book to investigate such novels and includes excerpts from personal interviews with China's three most famous anticorruption novelists.
The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Eight stories displaying anger, melancholy, and satire reflect the dissident literature of contemporary China and the reality of life during and after the Cultural Revolution.
This book is a timely and solid portrait of modern China from the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks that only provide narratives, this textbook fashions a new and practical way to study modern China. Written exclusively for university students, A-level or high school teachers and students, it uses primary sources to tell the story of China and introduces them to existing scholarship and academic debate so they can conduct independent research for their essays and dissertations. This book will be required reading for students who embark on the study of Chinese history, politics, economics, diaspora, sociology, literature, cultural, urban and women’s studies. It would be essential reading to journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businessmen and travellers.
John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date and provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.
Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30 years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cultural Revolution's massive and bloody assault on China's political and social systems.
Yan Jiaqi, one of the principal leaders of China's pro-democracy movement, and his wife, Gao Gao, a noted sociologist, set out to write a comprehensive narrative account of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, which occurred in the second decade after Mao Zedong and his comrades came to power. It appeared in Hong Kong in 1986, and was quickly banned by the Communist government. Not surprisingly, censorship and restricted circulation in China resulted in underground reproduction and serialization. The work was thus widely read, coveted, and appreciated by a populace who had just freed itself from the cultural drought and political dread of the event. Yan and Gao later spent two years revising and expanding their work. The present volume, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, is based on the revised edition and has been masterfully edited and translated by D.W.Y. Kwok in consultation with the authors. It makes available for the first time in English Yan and Gao's remarkable record of the traumatic Cultural Revolution decade and remains the only single-volume narrative history of the revolution written from an independent and personal perspective. It is a sweeping historical account, notable for its moral courage, for its empathy, for the significance of the questions it addresses, and for its sobering, ultimately tragic view of human behavior.
This book examines five of the most influential Chinese-born women writers of the post-war era: Nie Hualing, Yu Lihua, Chen Ruoxi, Li Li, and Zhong Xiaoyang. They have become a dominating force in Chinese literature today, although they presently reside outside their homeland. This book raises a clear and consistent voice in line with the literature of exile and self discovery. As these writers talk of the 'root'—the self, and their social, cultural, and historical identities— their varied voices share the unique characteristics of the literature of exile. These women, who continue to write in their native language, envision themselves as the literary mediators between their lost past and their newly adopted homeland. They compare each of these worlds in terms of the demons with which they have wrestled for identity, recognition, and freedom. The book is of interest not only to those with a particular interest in the phenomenon of these Chinese exiled intellectual émigrés and their role in the influence on the development of Chinese literature, but to those who seek to understand the development of women's studies and world literature as a whole, and the influence of East-West literary relations in particular.
