Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace

Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace

Author: Yihong Pan

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780739140925

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In Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan tells her personal story and the story of her generation of urban middle-school graduates sent to the countryside during China's Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan's book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would go on to lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-1979 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong's China. Book jacket.


Encyclopedia of Chinese History

Encyclopedia of Chinese History

Author: Michael Dillon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 1223

ISBN-13: 131781715X

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China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.


The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era

The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era

Author: Xin Huang

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1438470622

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This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women's life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century's major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women's liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.


Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering

Memory, Fluid Identity, and the Politics of Remembering

Author: Li Li

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-06-21

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9004323554

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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.


Aspirational Chinese in Competitive Social Repositionings

Aspirational Chinese in Competitive Social Repositionings

Author: Jia Gao

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 183998290X

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In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes in China. However, most of the literature has focused on either macro- or micro-level issues, and what has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary people has reacted to and influenced the changes. This inadequacy has affected our understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and the changing trends. Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and the evidence recorded in numerous recent publications and interview data, this book seeks to re-examine the ever-changing, but under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when the communist heir narrative was rebranded and utilised, to 2000, when Jiang Zemin formulated the Three-Represents theory to modify the ideological political thinking of China’s ruling elites. This analysis focuses on how a high proportion of aspirational citizens have kept repositioning themselves in China’s changing distributions of social resources and social structure, how their attitudes and behaviours have been shaped over time, what characteristics of their choices are at different stages, and how their preferences have resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.


Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past

Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past

Author: Mikyoung Kim

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-06-30

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 023027742X

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The problem of memory in China, Japan and Korea involves a surfeit rather than a deficit of memory, and the consequence of this excess is negative: unforgettable traumas prevent nations from coming to terms with the problems of the present. These compelling essays enrich Western scholarship by applying to it insights derived from Asian settings.


The Use of Mao and the Chongqing Model

The Use of Mao and the Chongqing Model

Author: Joseph Y.S. CHENG

Publisher: City University of HK Press

Published: 2015-07-10

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9629372401

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MAO Zedong was a Chinese communist leader and founder of the People’s Republic of China. He developed his own ideology and methodology known as Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought, and his thought has a great influence in China or even overseas. This book aims at bringing together a group of scholars to address the uses of Mao in China (PRC) today with special reference to the Bo Xilai case. It also provides insights and detail on how and what we know about modern China. Contributing authors, including a number of French scholars, illustrate how Maoism influences and engages in government, business sector or social life. This timely volume will be of considerable interest to scholars, journalists, and those keen to better understand the changing values in China today.


Shanghai Homes

Shanghai Homes

Author: Jie Li

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-11-18

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0231538170

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In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.


Documenting China

Documenting China

Author: Margaret Hillenbrand

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0295805005

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Documenting China brings together a series of linked texts, each one chosen for its impact when first published, and which together chart the core developments in twentieth-century Chinese history. With extracts spanning the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, popular culture, literary history, neo-nationalist discourse, and international relations, the book challenges advanced language learners to elevate their reading ability to the level necessary for handling real primary sources in an unmediated way while deepening their understanding of Chinese politics, society, and culture. Each chapter is structured around crucial passages from a core historical text, each chapter begins with an introductory essay in English that provides context for fully understanding the text, suggested further readings, and a glossary of key terms.


The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation

Author: Michel Bonnin

Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

Published: 2013-08-07

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 9629964813

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The Lost Generation is a vital component to understanding Maoism. The book provides a comprehensive account of the critical movement during which seventeen million young "educated" citydwellers were supposed to transform themselves into peasants, potentially for life. Bonnin closely examines the Chinese leadership's motivations and the methods that they used over time to implement their objectives, as well as the daytoday lives of those young people in the countryside, their difficulties, their doubts, their resistance and, ultimately, their revolt. The author draws on a rich and diverse array of sources, concluding with a comprehensive assessment of the movement that shaped an entire generation, including a majority of today's cultural, economic, and political elite.