Huxian’s Foolish Old Men Create New Scenes: Huxian Peasant Paintings from the Cultural Revolution and their Ideological Discourses

Huxian Peasant Paintings are a product of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ostensibly painted by peasant amateur artists, they depict idealized peasants in rural China. The paintings were reproduced in large numbers and distributed as posters for the masses. Further evidence has shown that the amateur artists were in fact given detailed training by professional artists under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This paper seeks to analyze the images as important political texts from the Cultural Revolution because of the influence of the CCP. Using discourse analysis, this paper argues that these posters are an important discursive formation that allowed the CCP to transmit ideology to a largely illiterate or semiliterate rural population.

Control and Style: Discipline Inspection Commissions Since the 11th Congress

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000008481 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 97 ◽

pp. 24-52 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Graham Young

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Political Authority ◽

Chinese Politics ◽

Party Organization ◽

Party Leadership ◽

The legacies of the Cultural Revolution have been nowhere more enduring than in the Chinese Communist Party organization. Since late 1967, when the process of rebuilding the shattered Party began, strengthening Party leadership has been a principal theme of Chinese politics; that theme has become even more pronounced in recent years. It is now claimed that earlier efforts achieved nothing, and that during the whole “decade of turmoil” until 1976, disarray in the Party persisted and political authority declined still further. Recent programmes of Party reform, therefore, still seek to overcome the malign effects of the Cultural Revolution in order to achieve the complementary objectives of reviving abandoned Party “traditions” and refashioning the Party according to the new political direction demanded by its present leaders.

The Unique “Blooming and Contending” 1961–62

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000048980 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 37 ◽

pp. 54-83 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Merle Goldman

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

The Other ◽

Communist Regime ◽

Main Trend ◽

The One ◽

From its inception until at least the Cultural Revolution, the Communist regime in China has had a twofold aim for its intellectuals: it has sought to indoctrinate them with the exclusive ideologies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and it has tried to utilize their skills to develop an industrialized and modernized society. The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to implement these two policies by an insistence on the strict orthodoxy of thinking individuals, on the one hand, and by the encouragement of intellectuals to work creatively at their jobs on the other. This contradictory approach has resulted in a policy toward the intellectuals that has been alternatively severe and relaxed. Though the main trend is usually in one direction or the other, there have always been counter-currents present which can be revived when necessary.

The Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s: Prelude to the Cultural Revolution

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000047202 ◽

1967 ◽

Vol 32 ◽

pp. 3-36 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Charles Neuhauser

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Commedia Dell'arte ◽

Great Leap ◽

Great Leap Forward ◽

The 1960S ◽

The Great Leap Forward ◽

The recent events in China are surely drama of the highest order, but at times it has seemed that the actors themselves were not entirely sure who was writing the lines. In fact what we seem to be witnessing is a form of commedia dell'arte: improvisation within a certain tacitly understood framework. The cultural revolution appears to have taken new turns and to have broken into new channels precisely because the actors have been faced with new and unforeseen circumstances as it has run its course. No faction in the struggle has been able to impose its will on the Party or the country by fiat; new devices and stratagems have been brought into play in what has looked like desperate attempts to gain the upper hand. It has clearly been a battle of the utmost seriousness, but there appear to have been limitations on the resultant chaos. Economic disorganisation does not seem to have occurred on the scale of the later stages of the Great Leap Forward. Nor, despite the clashes, confusion and bitter infighting, have new centres of power, totally divorced from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself, arisen. The cultural revolution has been pre-eminently a struggle within the Party.

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

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741016001089 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 227 ◽

pp. 653-673 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Alessandro Russo

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Working Class ◽

20Th Century ◽

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Party Systems ◽

The Political ◽

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.

Military Regions and Provincial Party Secretaries: One Outcome of China's Cultural Revolution

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000015502 ◽

1973 ◽

Vol 54 ◽

pp. 294-307 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gordon Bennett

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Party Organizations ◽

Distribution Of Power ◽

Unexpected Findings ◽

New Distribution ◽

During the Cultural Revolution, “Party life” (tang ti sheng-huo) was temporarily interrupted when leading members of Communist Party organizations at all levels were called (or “dragged”) out to defend themselves against the criticisms of revolutionary mass factions. As these issues were resolved, new coalitions formed and Party organs were carefully restructured to reflect the new distribution of power. The analysis here is of the 158 secretaries and deputy secretaries elected by the new provincial committees of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 4 December 1970 and 24 August 1971. It yields some unexpected findings.

The Ninth Central Committee

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000010419 ◽

1971 ◽

Vol 45 ◽

pp. 37-56 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Donald W. Klein ◽

Lois B. Hager

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Central Committee ◽

Half Century ◽

History Of ◽

China Mainland ◽

In the half-century history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), only nine congresses have been held. Since six of these were convened during the first seven years, only three congresses have been held since the Sixth Congress in 1928. If the Seventh Congress in 1945 can be characterized as the consolidation of Mao's rule over the CCP, and the Eighth Congress in 1956 as the consolidation of the CCP's mastery over the China mainland, then the Ninth Congress, held in 1969, is the story of the victors and victims of the Cultural Revolution.

The Impact of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese Communist Party Machine

Asian Survey ◽

10.2307/2642161 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 8 (6) ◽

pp. 465-488 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Charles Neuhauser

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

The Impact ◽

The Cultural Revolution and the Attack on the “Three Family Village”

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000021755 ◽

1966 ◽

Vol 27 ◽

pp. 149-161 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Stephen Uhalley

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Communist China ◽

The current cultural rectification campaign in Communist China, which is to “sweep away all monsters” and “touch people to their very souls,” surpasses all previous campaigns in intensity, but more importantly it has revealed a serious political breach within the Chinese Communist Party itself.

The Chinese Communist Party and the cultural revolution: the case of the sixty-one renegades

Choice Reviews Online ◽

10.5860/choice.40-1091 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 40 (02) ◽

pp. 40-1091-40-1091

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

The Reign of Virtue: Some Broad Perspectives on Leader and Party in the Cultural Revolution

The China Quarterly ◽

10.1017/s0305741000032070 ◽

1968 ◽

Vol 35 ◽

pp. 1-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Benjamin I. Schwartz

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Chinese Communist Party ◽

Organisational Structure ◽

One of the most arresting aspects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been the confrontation between Mao Tse-tung (or the Maoist group) and the Chinese Communist Party. There is, to be sure, an area of vagueness and uncertainty concerning this whole matter. Have the Maoists attacked the party as such? What indeed is the party as such? The party may be conceived of as the sum total of its actual members—of its human composition. It may be conceived of in terms of its organisational structure—its “constitution,” rules and established mechanisms. To any genuine Marxist-Leninist, it is, of course, more than its cells and anatomy. It is a metaphysical organism which is more than the sum of its parts. The “soul” of this collective entity incarnates all those intellectual and moral capacities which Marx had attributed to the industrial proletariat.