Questioning the Revival

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-33
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Gildow
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
Buddhist Monasticism ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

A common narrative of Buddhist monasticism in modern China is that monastic institutions were virtually eliminated during the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976) but have undergone continuous revival since that time. This simplistic narrative highlights differences in state-monastic relations between the Maoist and post-Maoist eras, even as it oversimplifies various developments. In this article, I analyze the notion of revival and assess the state of Han Buddhist monasticism in the prc. My focus is on clarifying the “basic facts” of monasticism, including the numbers and types of monastics and monastic institutions. I draw on studies published since Holmes Welch’s works as well as on my own fieldwork conducted in China since 2006. This article questions the revival metaphor and shows that it is misleading. First, as Welch noted for the Republican period, recent developments are characterized by innovations as much as by revivals. Second, evidence for the growth of monasticism from around the year 2000 is weak. Yet in two aspects, monasticism today revives characteristics of Republican-period monasticism: ritual performance is central to the monastic economy, and Buddhist seminaries are important for monastic doctrinal education.

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.

Beyond Nostalgia

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-92
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In Chapter 3, 11 Flowers represents personal and fragmented memories of the Cultural Revolution from an 11-year-old boy’s perspective. These memories challenge the monolithic narrative of history and the Maoist rhetoric of revolution. At the same time, this fragmented narrative mode enables individual agency in narrating and constructing history. In addition, through portrayals of everyday life in the Maoist era, the film reveals how the dominant ideology at that time was strategically misinterpreted by ordinary people and was dispersed in everyday life. Socialism, in this context, becomes a mystery, a joke, and a traumatic awakening. In the lm, art possesses enlightening power for the 11-year-old boy, who begins to obtain self-awareness through painting. The film thus conveys the director’s authorial enunciation and his belief in art as a form of liberation, not only for a boy in the Cultural Revolution but also for Wang Xiaoshuai as a film-maker. The shifting trajectory of Wang’s film-making—from independent to art house—alludes to the shifting relations between film-making, the state, and the market. In 11 Flowers, personal memories become the hallmark of Wang’s auteur expression.

Public Space for Memory in Contemporary Civil Society: Freedom to Learn from the Mirror of the Past?

1999 ◽  
Vol 160 ◽  
pp. 1019-1035 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary G. Mazur
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
The Past ◽  
30Th Anniversary ◽  
Great Wall ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

On 17 May 1996 at the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution, a group of about 40 people met in the number two crypt at Babaoshan national cemetery on the western outskirts of Beijing where the ashes of China's highest elite are interred. They met at that particular time in memory of four men who had been declared traitors and enemies of the state in 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In this crypt are kept the ashes of three of the men, Deng Tuo, Wu Han and Liu Ren. The ashes of the fourth, Liao Mosha, were scattered, according to his wishes, at the foot of a tree beneath the Great Wall.

scholarly journals The Fragility of Identity and the Imagination of Otherness in Bai Hua’s novel The Remote Country of Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-91
Author(s):  
Tânia Ganito ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Chinese Author ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Drawing on The Remote Kingdom of Women (1988), the novel written by Chinese author Bai Hua (1930-2019), this essay examines how post-Mao China articulated the notions of memory and identity, as well as of belonging and othering, as an attempt to overcome the state of fragility caused by the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the post-revolutionary growing influence of Western culture. It proposes to explore the way some of the literary works produced during this period were to promote an encounter between a fragmented yet hegemonic culture and the cultures of the internal ethnic Other, and how this encounter between majority and minority subjects was to highlight precisely the condition of fragility that underlies the very concept of identity. Keywords: China; Literature; Bai Hua; Identity; Majority; Minorities.

Curb that Enticing Tone

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hon-Lun Yang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Open Policy ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This chapter examines music censorship in the People’s Republic of China and its relationship to socialist ideology. After assessing the ideology of socialist music in the PRC, the chapter provides some examples of music censorship during the country’s history. It then highlights some of the intricacies and complexities in present-day music censorship in the PRC, including censorship on the Internet. It considers the musical genres that were taken out of the PRC’s soundscape, including Shanghai pop, and the return of pop-style songs after the Cultural Revolution following the adoption of the Reform and Open Policy. It analyzes the factors that explain why rock and roll never quite overcame its marginalized status in the PRC and has always been treated with caution by the state. The chapter concludes by focusing on music censors and censored music in the PRC.

Newborn Socialist Things

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Coderre
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Contemporary China is seen as a place of widespread commodification and consumerism, while the preceeding Maoist Cultural Revolution is typically understood as a time when goods were scarce and the state criticized what little consumption was possible. Indeed, with the exception of the likeness and words of Mao Zedong, both the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption miraculously sprang fully formed. In Newborn Socialist Things, Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Cultural Revolution to show how it paved the way for commodification in contemporary China. Examining objects ranging from retail counters and porcelain statuettes to textbooks and vanity mirrors, she shows how the project of building socialism in China has always been intimately bound up with consumption. By focusing on these objects—or “newborn socialist things”—along with the Cultural Revolution’s media environment, discourses of materiality, and political economy, Coderre reconfigures understandings of the origins of present-day China.

The Fall of Lin Piao

1973 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 427-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Bridgham
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Effective Control ◽  
The People ◽  
New Republic ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

By 1964 Mao Tse-tung had lost effective control over much of the Party hierarchy set up by his “successor,” and also over the state administrative apparatus… Liu Shao-ch'i and his like-minded comrades utilized the Mao cult in theory and slighted Maoism in practice… Mao was convinced that the people and Party rank and file were with him but were misled by his disloyal opposition. … Edgar Snow, “Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution,” inThe New Republic, 10 April 1971.

Cultural Christianity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Chow
Keyword(s):  
No Value ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Faith Community ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Formative Years ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This chapter focuses on Christian intellectuals born in the 1950s and having spent their formative years experiencing the Cultural Revolution firsthand. The chapter examines the unique development beginning in the late 1980s when a number of Chinese academics looked towards Christian theology as a way to facilitate the search for modern China—many of whom found no value in being part of any local faith community. The chapter draws on the rise of Sino-Christian theology or Sino-Christian studies and focuses on two of the most important ‘cultural Christians’ (wenhua Jidutu), Liu Xiaofeng and He Guanghu.

scholarly journals History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhoea and the Art of Words

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geremie R. Barmé
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Word Images ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades.

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