Thought Reform and Cultural Revolution: An Analysis of the Symbolism of Chinese Polemics

1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Dittmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
Thought Reform ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Chinese Political Culture ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Although the major purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to transform Chinese political culture, the way in which this transformation took place has remained unclear. This paper attempts to understand cultural transformation as a process of interaction within a semiological system, consisting of a network of communicators and a lexicon of political symbols. The pragmatic aspect of this process is the outcome of an interplay among the intentions of the elites, the masses, and the target of criticism: political circumstances during the Cultural Revolution were more benign to the cathartic and hortatory intentions of the masses and elites than to the expiatory needs of the target. The syntactic aspect of the system concerns the relationship among symbols: These were found to form a dichotomous structure divided by a taboo barrier, which elicited strong but ambivalent desires to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. The semantic aspect of the symbolism refers to problematic dimensions of experience in Chinese political culture–the psychological repression imposed by a system of rigid social censorship, the political discrimination practiced against certain social categories, the persistence of differences in income or educational achievement in a socialist system–and suggests that these “contradictions” may be resolved by bold frontal assault.The symbolism of Cultural Revolution polemics has now become part of Chinese political culture. Its impact seems to have been to inhibit social differentiation (particularly hierarchical), to encourage greater mass participation, and to foster more frequent and irreconcilable conflict among elites.

scholarly journals LIU ZEHUA 劉澤華 (1935–2018)

Early China ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Yuri Pines
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Chinese Political Culture ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractThis obituary surveys the biography and major works of Liu Zehua, a leading scholar of China’s intellectual history, political thought, and political culture. It explores the impact of Liu Zehua’s personal experience, in particular the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, on his conceptualization of Chinese political culture as subjugated to the overarching principle of monarchism. Liu Zehua’s critical engagement with China’s past distinguished him from proponents of revival of traditional values and made him one of the powerful opponents of cultural conservatives in China.

Chinese Art of the Cultural Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The art of the Cultural Revolution in China, created during the ten-year period from 1967 to 1977, includes a large variety of visual materials in different media. Generally characterized by unambiguous and heroic images that appealed to the masses, these artworks became powerful tools of political propaganda. Most scholars attribute the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to the 1965 play HaiRui Dismissed from Office. Written by Wu Han, a local Communist official, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao Zedong. Though semi-retired in the early 1960s, Mao was determined to hold on to power by launching a new revolution to reawaken young Chinese people and root out the counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian elements in society. Under Mao’s directive, people, places, and things representing the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) were targeted and violently attacked by young people wearing red armbands and carrying the Little Red Book, a collection of quotes by Mao. Party officials, teachers, professors, authors, and artists had their homes raided and were publically dragged out by the Red Guards for public humiliation. In addition, historical and cultural sites were desecrated and vandalized. While the real violence only lasted the first few years, it set the tone of militarism and revolutionary fervor for the next decade, which permeated through all the arts.

Between Generations: Activist Chinese Youths in Pursuit of a Political Role in the San-fan and in the Cultural Revolution

1979 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 511-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Raddock
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Thought Reform ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Clear Line ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This paper attempts to assess just how much and in what ways behaviour has changed between the generation that experienced the Son-fan, Wu-fan Campaign in 1951–52 and the generation that pitched itself into the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. We focus in the first instance on the confluence of the San-fan with a thought reform movement in the schools in 1951–52, in which students “drew a clear line of demarcation between self and family,” often denouncing their parents, and in which a youth vanguard forced their teachers as well to criticize themselves. Impressionistic comparisons between that campaign and the Cultural Revolution of the ways in which adoles-cents tried to establish continuity between patterns of behaviour learned in childhood and adult social-political roles may reveal differences in the direction and nature of their rebelliousness and may reflect changes in family relationships and in socialization patterns.

Imperial Political Culture in the Modern Age

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Pines
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Power ◽  
New Age ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Chinese Political Culture

This chapter focuses on the modern trajectory of those major aspects of traditional Chinese political culture that discussed in the previous chapters. It shows that the concept of political unity remained the least affected by the advent of modernity. However, the principle of monarchism collapsed immediately with the advent of the new age, and the intellectual elite likewise saw a gradual erosion in their political power. Descending the traditional social ladder, the chapter arrives at two groups whose positions changed dramatically in the wake of the twentieth-century upheavals: local elites and the commoners. The first were, along with the emperor, the chief victims of China's entrance into modernity; the latter—now referred to in the modern parlance, as “the masses”—were supposed to be its major beneficiaries, and certainly gained a lot, though less than what might have been expected.

The Radical Students in Kwangtung during the Cultural Revolution

1975 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 645-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Yung Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political System ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Distinctive Character ◽  
The Status ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a large-scale self-examination by the Chinese of their political system, involving all the ruling groups as well as the whole population. Not only specific policy issues but also social. economic and political institutions and their value premises were subjected to this examination. Hoping to reverse the trend towards social restratification based on Party bureaucratism, Mao sought to build a mass consensus on the future direction of the revolution. However, in the process of “freely mobilizing the masses,” some social groups found that their interests called for a radical restructuring of the Chinese political system, while those of others lay in the status quo. As the Cultural Revolution (CR) unfolded, the masses and the elite further divided among themselves over the various issues: elite groupings took conservative or radical positions, and formed coalitions with corresponding sections of the masses. Consequently, the division between the radicals and the conservatives cut through both the elite and the masses and set in motion forces that gave the Cultural Revolution its distinctive character.

scholarly journals Three essays on the labor market in China

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Zixin Liu
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
College Graduates ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
College Admissions ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The Impact ◽  
College Premium ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying the impact of different policies in China on its labor market. In particular, we consider the impact of the Cultural Revolution on intergenerational mobility, the impact of college expansion on earnings and unemployment, and the impact of college expansion on migration. In the first chapter, we study the impacts of the Cultural Revolution on intergenerational and multi-generational educational mobility in China. We use a difference-in-difference method to show that the Cultural Revolution (CR) significantly reduced the advantage of having a more-educated father on a child's educational attainment. The impact of the CR on intergenerational mobility is identified by an index that measures for each individual the number of school years during which the CR restricted education access. The decline of the effect of father's educational level on children's college degree attainment is mediated through the likelihood of obtaining a high school degree, participating in the college entrance examination, and obtaining higher exam scores for those who take the exam. However, the Cultural Revolution did not fully eliminate the advantage of having a more-educated father on a child's educational achievement, nor did it reduce the effect of grandfather's schooling on a grandchild's educational achievement. In the second chapter, we study the short-term response of the labor market to an unprecedented expansion in the Chinese higher education system from 1999 to 2012 on labor market outcomes for young and older college graduates and non-college graduates. Using the number of provincial college admissions as a measure of college expansion, we identify the impacts of the college expansion on the college premium, unemployment, and skills used in first jobs. In the short run, the college expansion decreased the college premium and increased the likelihood of unemployment for new college graduates. Also, the college expansion reduced the cognitive skills used in college graduates' first jobs. The negative impact of the college expansion on labor outcomes is smaller for older college graduates. Our results are consistent with findings published in the 1970s focusing on the effects of the U.S college expansion. In the third chapter, we study the impact of aggregate college admissions on inter-provincial migration in China for different age groups. Examining migration propensity, we find that the college expansion has a direct "enrollment effect" and a "competition effect" on the likelihood of inter-provincial migration. College-bound students are more likely to migrate at ages 17-20 as college admissions in outside provinces increase; and college graduates are more likely to migrate after graduation as the number of local new college graduates increases. In addition, we identify a negative impact of local college admissions on migration at ages 17-20, reflecting the improvement in local educational and labor market opportunities. We also use a conditional Logit model to consider the choice of migration destination and identify how inter-regional differences in college growth affect the patterns of migration. These three chapters provide multiple policy implications as well as evidence for labor economic theories and hypotheses as they relate to China's labor market.

The Cultural Revolution, Soviet Mentality, and the Order of Discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-250
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Material Force ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

One of the main topics of theoretical discussions following 1968 was raised by Michel Foucault, who argued for the formative role of discourse - that discourse has regulating effects that extend not only to the structure of utterances, but also to speakers themselves. The shift in viewpoint that Foucault accomplished has provided a way to see discourse not only as a medium of power, but as power itself, a power that generates the subjectivity of those who use or gain access to use of a given discourse. Recognizing this power in discourse enabled Foucault to overturn the traditional conception of the individual as the ontological source of speech (“the creative force determining the initial position of writing”) and to redefine it as a function of the utterance itself that guarantees grammatical unity and the conceptual and stylistic cohesion of speech. This analytical perspective is applicable to the historical materials on the debates about the paths and methods of the Soviet cultural revolution that the victorious proletariat should employ in order to shore up the social victory of October 1917. The problems confronting Soviet theoreticians and agents of the cultural revolution had much in common with those that would be conceptualized later on in discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. The form of assimilation of this normative order and the mechanisms of ideological Interpellation, which imply the active involvement of Soviet citizens in production of discourses, are the central topics in this examination as they provide insight into how an idea becomes a material force and how it captures the masses. The immediate object of study is the worker and village correspondent (rabkor and selkor) movement of the 1920s as well as its understanding by theorists of the Left Front of the Arts

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