The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact

2003 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 74-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Walder ◽  
Yang Su
Keyword(s):  
Human Impact ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Rural China ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local State ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
Political Persecution ◽  
Additional Assumptions ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Information extracted from 1,520 county annals published after 1987 is used to estimate the timing and impact of the Cultural Revolution in rural China. Outside observers initially concluded that the movement had little impact on remote rural regions, while early post-Mao revelations suggested that the opposite was the case. Adjusting for the tendency of shorter accounts to report fewer casualties, and with additional assumptions about under-reporting in the longer and more detailed accounts, the authors derive an estimated death toll of between 750,000 and 1.5 million, a similar number of people permanently injured, and 36 million who suffered some form of political persecution. The vast majority of these casualties occurred from 1968 to 1971, after the end of the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict and the establishment of provisional organs of local state power.

A Decade of Upheaval

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Walder ◽  
Dong Guoqiang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This book chronicles the surprising and dramatic political conflicts of a rural Chinese county over the course of the Cultural Revolution. The book uncovers a previously unimagined level of strife in the countryside that began with the Red Guard Movement in 1966 and continued unabated until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Showing how the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were not limited to urban areas, but reached far into isolated rural regions, the book reveals that the intervention of military forces in 1967 encouraged factional divisions in Feng County because different branches of China's armed forces took various sides in local disputes. The book also lays bare how the fortunes of local political groups were closely tethered to unpredictable shifts in the decisions of government authorities in Beijing. Eventually, a backlash against suppression and victimization grew in the early 1970s and resulted in active protests, which presaged the settling of scores against radical Maoism. A meticulous look at how one overlooked region experienced the Cultural Revolution, the book illuminates the all-encompassing nature of one of the most unstable periods in modern Chinese history.

scholarly journals Zhao Jiping and the sound of resistance in Red Sorghum

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-366
Author(s):  
Brian C. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Mo Yan ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Since seizing power in 1949, China’s Communist Party has exerted firm control over all aspects of cultural expression. This policy took its most radical turn in the mid-1960s when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), aiming to rid the country of bourgeois elements. The composer Zhao Jiping was a student at the Xi’an Conservatory during this period. He graduated in 1970, but was able to continue his studies only when the Central Conservatory reopened in 1978. On completing his studies, he established himself as a composer of folk-inspired music for film and the concert stage. This paper focuses on Zhao’s score for director Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang, 1987), a film based on the 1986 novel by 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan. While the composer enjoyed only limited recognition beyond China, he went on to score other successful films, among them Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Farewell, My Concubine (1993), and achieve success as a composer of concert music. The paper connects Zhao’s musical language to the impact of the Cultural Revolution by examining how in Red Sorghum his music was employed to evoke a virile image of rural China.

Opening Shot

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Yuan-tsung Chen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Legislative Council ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
Middle Schoolers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Exploration And Development ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Yuan-tsung Chen writes her memoir in the midst of growing unrest when in 2019 the Communist rulers try to pass an extradition law in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. To begin with, they set about “reforming” middle schoolers’ education— for instance, through the Orwellian rewriting of the history of the Cultural Revolution, from the ten-year-long “cataclysm” (Hao Jie—浩劫‎) to the ten years of “arduous exploration and development achievement.” Even according to the official death toll, 1.7 million people perished in the Cultural Revolution. The dead had families or relatives, friends or lovers, so how many more lives were ruined? Yuan-tsung simply cannot accept such a whitewashing without a guilty conscience. She is fully aware of the consequences of confronting the untruth. Nevertheless, she decides to write what she witnessed, saw, and understood as truth.

Powerful Speech: Remembering the Long Cultural Revolution in Yunnan

Inner Asia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
State Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Northwest Yunnan ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractIn anthropological and historical accounts of the Maoist period, memory emerges as both a method and a problem for research. This article explores Nusu elders memories of the Mao era in the highlands of northwest Yunnan, along the Burmese border. Nusu refer to the bitter events of 1958 to roughly 1978 collectively as the Cultural Revolution . Their autobiographical speech blends the socialist genre of speaking bitterness with distinctly Nusu forms of lament. Their strategies of memory in particular, their counter-chronological narratives, strategic omissions, and reinventions of the past evade questions of guilt to assert themselves instead as victims. This article traces the internationalisation of state power and appropriation of state rhetoric in Nusu elders memories of the Long Cultural Revolution in Yunnan.

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