The Vietnam War and China's Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964–1966

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenz Lüthi
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Third Line ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Defense Planning ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This article traces the origins, development, and demise of the Third-Line Defense project in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1964 to 1966. Responding to the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War, Chinese leaders decided to transfer strategic military and civilian assets from the vulnerable coastal and border provinces to the country's interior. Following the dispatch of U.S. Marines to Vietnam in March 1965, the PRC proceeded with the construction of provincial Third-Line Defense projects. In the end, the Third-Line Defense project fell victim to Mao Zedong's ideological radicalization in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution. The article uses documentary evidence from Chinese provincial archives as well as published collections of Chinese documents.

Report on Primary School Mathematics Education in the People's Republic

1984 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Robert L. Madell ◽  
Jerry P. Becker
Keyword(s):  
Mathematics Education ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
School Mathematics ◽  
National Council ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Primary School Mathematics ◽  
Mathematics Educators ◽  
The U.S ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In 1980, fourteen American mathematics educators visited the People's Republic of China. The visit, sponsored by the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association, followed a fall 1977 visit sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Madell and Becker 1979). But significant changes have occurred in China since then. Of particular interest to teachers is that the system of education, jolted by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), is now being thoroughly reorganized.

A Testament to a Dying Vision of America

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 285-295
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Musiał
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
History Of ◽  
National League ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
The U.S

This article is a review of The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home (2019) by Heath Hardage Lee. The book presents a popular history of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an organisation that advocated for the rights of American prisoners of war captured by North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The Return of Advertising in China: A Survey of the Ideological Reversal

1990 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 485-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Stross
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
The Third ◽  
Socialist System ◽  
Advanced Capitalist ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

During the 1980s, bracketed by the Third Plenum in 1978 and the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, China edged, step by step, away from the orthodoxies of the Cultural Revolution, and each reversal excited a certain amount of commentary both within and without China. As time passed, and the list of reintroduced institutions and practices grew ever longer, habituation reduced the surprise of succeeding announcements. But the reintroduction of advertising, a cental totem of advanced capitalist culture, occupied a particularly significant place on the list because its reappearance in China forced the Chinese to reconsider distinctions that had formerly been drawn between capitalist and socialist societies. For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption. This was especially so in the late 1960s during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space. When advertising was officially reintroduced in 1979, and its sanctioned scope expanded beyond industrial goods, the state faced a daunting ideological task: rebuilding a case for advertising in a socialist system that had long defined itself as one that did not need commercial exhortation. In essence, it had to sell the legitimacy of selling.

‘Line Struggle‘ in Theory and Practice: The Origins of the Cultural Revolution Reconsidered

1977 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 675-712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Dittmer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
World View ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Western View ◽  
Foreign Policy Strategies ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The extent to which the Cultural Revolution has transformed the world-view of the Chinese masses remains among the psycho-cultural imponderables, but clearly it has revolutionized the western view of Chinese politics. The dominant pre-1966 image of a consensual solidarity disturbed only rarely by purges, also handled in an orderly way by a consensus excluding only its victims, was challenged by a sudden multitude of polemical claims to the effect that a struggle for power and principle had been raging behind the scenes for decades. This struggle was characterized as a “struggle between two lines”: a “proletarian revolutionary line,” led by Mao Tse-tung, and a “bourgeois reactionary line,” led by Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiaop'ing. This struggle allegedly represented a deep underlying ideological cleavage within the leadership that had repercussions on every aspect of Chinese life: foreign policy, strategies of economic development, techniques of leadership and administration, pay scales and living standards, delivery patterns for education, medicine, and other services; even scientific method. Allegations concerning this struggle were supported by a wealth of documentary evidence, culled from hitherto confidential Party and government files. Initially greeted with scepticism among western journalists and academic circles, some variant of the “two lines” paradigm has made increasing inroads into our attempts to understand the origins of the Cultural Revolution. The time has come to re-evaluate the conception of a two-line struggle in retrospect and to try to determine just what it means and how it functions.

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