The Cultural Origins of the Cultural Revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gender Analysis ◽  
Feminist Revolution ◽  
Cultural Origins ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Locating a turning point in socialist film industry in 1964, this chapter demonstrates a crucial moment when a socialist feminist revolution of culture was replaced by the ascending Cultural Revolution in the cultural realm. An anti-feudalism agenda was defined as revisionist and bourgeois by radicals in the CCP in their propagating of a Maoist class struggle. Underlying the political maneuvers were personal animosities that led to Xia Yan’s downfall and Jiang Qing’s ascendance to the power center.The chapter presents a gender analysis of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary model theaters and suggests a re-location and re-periodization of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the cultural realm in 1964.

Nanjing's Failed “January Revolution” of 1967: The Inner Politics of a Provincial Power Seizure

2010 ◽  
Vol 203 ◽  
pp. 675-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Guoqiang ◽  
Andrew G. Walder
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractScholarship on factional warfare during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution has long portrayed a struggle between “conservative” factions that sought to preserve the status quo and “radical” factions that sought to transform it. Recent accounts, however, claim that the axis of political conflict was fundamentally transformed after the fall of civilian governments in early 1967, violating the central tenet of this interpretation. A close examination of Nanjing's abortive power seizure of January 1967 addresses this issue in some depth. The power seizure in fact was a crucial turning point: it removed the defenders of local authorities from the political stage and generated a split between two wings of the rebel movement that overthrew them. The political divisions among former rebel allies intensified and hardened in the course of tortuous negotiations in Beijing that were buffeted by confusing political shifts in the capital. This created a contest that was not between “conservatives” and “radicals” over the restoration of the status quo, but about the respective places of the rival radical factions in restored structures of authority.

The Chinese Army after the Cultural Revolution: the Effects of Intervention

1973 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 450-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellis Joffe
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Short Term ◽  
People's Liberation Army ◽  
People’S Liberation Army ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Whatever may have been the objectives of the principal participants in the Cultural Revolution, there can be little doubt that they did not include what turned out to be, at least in the short term, the most striking and significant outcome of the upheaval: the rise of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to a pivotal position in China's power structure. Compelled to intervene in the political process when the disruptive effects of the struggle reached dangerous dimensions, the army gradually ascended to the commanding heights of political power in the provinces, and acquired a substantial voice in the policy-making councils of Peking. When the Ninth Congress of the Party finally met in April 1969 to write the epilogue to the Cultural Revolution, it was the PLA rather than the Party that held most of the key positions of power in China.

scholarly journals Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20th Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractA number of prolonged political experiments in Chinese factories during the Cultural Revolution proved that, despite any alleged “historical” connection between the Communist Party and the “working class,” the role of the workers, lacking a deep political reinvention, was framed by a regime of subordination that was ultimately not dissimilar from that under capitalist command. This paper argues that one key point of Deng Xiaoping's reforms derived from taking these experimental results into account accurately but redirecting them towards the opposite aim, an even more stringent disciplining of wage labour. The outcome so far is a governmental discourse which plays an important role in upholding the term “working class” among the emblems of power, while at the same time nailing the workers to an unconditional obedience. The paper discusses the assumption that, while this stratagem is one factor behind the stabilization of the Chinese Communist Party, it has nonetheless affected the decline of the party systems inherited from the 20th century.

The Impact of the Cultural Revolution in China on the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sneath
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Inner Mongolia ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Autonomous Region ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultural Revolution. Hyer and Heaton are concerned primarily with the power struggles within the political apparatus, and they include no first-hand or eyewitness accounts. The paper gives no indication of the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon the great bulk of the population of the I.M.A.R., either Mongolian or Han Chinese. However, the article does carefully document the rapidly changing tide of Inner Mongolian government policy and the emergence of populist groups which challenged the political establishment, over the period 1965 to 1968.

Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation

1974 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 203-224
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Events ◽  
People's Congress ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Different currents appeared to be at play in the political events of the quarter, with many of the trends being unclear or only barely discernible. One expected event which did not take place was the convening of the National People's Congress; the absence of which is also giving grounds for believing that many political problems remained unsolved. While it appeared, particularly in the field of foreign relations, that the post-10th Congress leadership, dominated by Chou En-lai and including in the second rank many of those prominently abused during the Cultural Revolution, remained firmly in control, there also appeared to be a re-emergence of some of the ideological formulations of the Cultural Revolution. The slogan “going against the tide is a Marxist-Leninist principle,” which had been attributed to Mao during the 10th Congress in August, was frequently repeated, although with markedly different emphasis in different provinces, and the war-cry of the Cultural Revolution, “to rebel is justified,” reappeared, although without national prominence. Some of the more abstruse press discussion even suggested the possibility that Chou En-lai himself was under pressure despite the apparent dominance and security of his position.

Licensed contacts and beyond

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Cultural World ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Despite the restrictions, there was a small amount of ongoing personal contact, at least before the Cultural Revolution. Almost without exception, these friendships were with people who, as diplomats expressed it, were ‘licensed for contact’ with foreigners. Usually from the academic or cultural world, they often had long-standing Western connections which were virtually impossible to maintain in the new political environment. In the political environment of the Mao era—and even for a while beyond—ongoing personal correspondence between a Chinese person and a Western diplomat was highly unusual.

A Collective ‘I’ and Its Contending Readings

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-138
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Imagination ◽  
Party State ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Chapter 5 investigates the television serial drama Sent-Down Youth to discover how personal memories are used to provide pedagogical lessons and to build up a collective imagination of the past. The television drama is presented as a critique of the Cultural Revolution against the backdrop of the rising fever for the ‘Red Culture’ campaign in Chongqing, but it also exalts the idealism and altruism of the Cultural Revolution generation and criticizes materialism in contemporary society. Socialism here is associated with idealism, collectivism, and passion. However, the audience may also apply their understandings of the political context and personal memories to decode the representation, producing diversified and contested readings of the television drama. Television—being state owned and the mouthpiece of the party-state—both limits and enables the proliferation of multiple personal memories and discourses about the past and the present.

“Contradictions between the People and the Enemy”

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-206
Author(s):  
Xiaoqun Xu
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Crime Prevention ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Political ◽  
Procedural Law ◽  
The People

Chapter 7 presents the Maoist theory of class struggle and its manifestation in dealing with common crimes and political offenses by legal (and extralegal) and judicial (and extrajudicial) means. Such practices originated in the pre-1949 revolutionary experiences and culminated in the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The chapter explains the reasons why the CCP did not find it necessary to have a criminal code and a criminal procedural law, and how the mechanisms of social engineering that the CCP designed and developed helped social control and crime prevention. It traces the rationales and practices of “reform through labor” and “reeducation through labor” during the Mao era and after. It describes the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s that reached the point of lawlessness in the Cultural Revolution.

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