Moulding the Socialist Subject
Moulding the Socialist Subject

Author: Xiaoning LU

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9004423524

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What role did cinema play in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of shaping ideal socialist citizens in the early People’s Republic? In Moulding the Socialist Subject, Xiaoning Lu deploys case studies from popular film genres, movie star culture and rural film exhibition practices to argue that Chinese cinema in 1949–1966, at once an important political instrument, an enjoyable yet instructive form of entertainment, and a specific manifestation of the socialist society of the spectacle, was an everyday site where the moulding of the new socialist person unfolded. While painting a broad picture of Chinese socialist cinema, Lu credits the human agency of film professionals, whose self-reflexivity and individual adaptability played an intrinsic role in the Party’s political project.

China and Post-Socialist Development
China and Post-Socialist Development

Author: Andrzej Bolesta

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2014-11-19

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1447321529

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The re-emergence of China as an economic superpower during its systemic transition is an astonishing phenomenon. China and Post-Socialist Development is the first comprehensive attempt to frame China’s advancements within the context of the East Asian developmental miracle, against the background of post-socialist transformation, asking how has it happened and where does China go from here? In this book the author argues that as China transits from central planning to market, it tries to imitate the institutions and policies of Japan and South Korea during their high growth periods of the second half of the twentieth century. China’s approach – broadly in opposition to the neo-liberal doctrine – has brought impressive results, leading the author to make important predictions about the future. This book is for everybody who is interested in China, development and post-socialist transformation.

Education in/for Socialism
Education in/for Socialism

Author: Tom Griffiths

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 131735303X

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This book re-examines aspects of historical socialism, and includes case studies of education within twenty-first century socialist and post-socialist contexts shaped by the trajectories of historical socialism. Through these case studies, contributions offer insights into key questions: How are education systems and student subjectivities shaped by post-socialist trajectories and current regional politics, economics and resistance movements? How do sedimented socialist discourses and geographies alter and contest the ‘neoliberal child’ and ‘childhood’ in post-socialist education? How have disjunctures between the rhetoric of historical Marxism-Leninism and the practices of educators, students and student political organizations played out under socialism, and what could we learn from that for our present? How much emancipatory potential is there in the theories and practices of (popular) education for combatting injustice in the absence of mass, revolutionary political parties? Above all, this volume affirms the need to move beyond simplistic accounts of historical socialism and post-socialist transitions. By exploring how socialist trajectories remain influential and have potential in our current contexts, this book contributes to the work of politically engaged educators working to re-imagine and reconstruct education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Working the System
Working the System

Author: Qiliang He

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 9888805606

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In Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966, Qiliang He inquired into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949–1976) by studying five preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would make them victims under the system. In short, Qiliang He argues that the filmmakers not only worked under the socialist system imposed upon them but also worked the system in their best interests. “Through five chosen filmmakers’ creative control and their negotiation of their professional status within China’s newly adopted socialist system, the author presents a compelling case that illustrates how individual filmmakers constantly adjusted themselves professionally and ideologically to survive in a fast-changing industry and a highly politicized society.” —Lin Feng, University of Leicester “This book is a strong example of how much more we can learn about Mao-era Chinese culture if we approach it less as alien due to Cold War prejudices and instead think of artists as creating under professional constraints in China just as they do everywhere.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota

Agents of Subversion
Agents of Subversion

Author: John P. Delury

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-10-15

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 150176599X

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Agents of Subversion reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release. Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.

Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era of Normalisation, 1969–1989
Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe in the Era of Normalisation, 1969–1989

Author: Kevin McDermott

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-10-31

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 3030982718

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This edited collection represents the first comprehensive volume in English on the crucial, but under-explored, late period in the history of East European communism. Focusing on developments in Czechoslovakia from the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 to the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of November 1989, the book examines a broad range of political, social and cultural issues, while also analysing external perceptions and relations. It explores the concept of ‘normalisation’ in historical context and brings together British, American, Czech and Slovak experts, each with their own archival research and particular interpretations. Overall, the anthology aims to assess the means by which the Prague Spring reforms were repealed and how Czechoslovakia was returned to a ‘normal’ communist state in line with Soviet orthodoxy. Key themes include the Communist Party and ideology; State Security; Slovak developments; ‘auto-normalisation’; women and gender; cultural and intellectual currents; everyday life and popular opinion; and Czechoslovakia’s political and cultural relationship with the USSR, the GDR, Poland and Yugoslavia. The volume sheds light on the process of decay of the Czechoslovak communist regime and the reasons for its ultimate collapse in 1989.