The Final Struggle

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Dong Guoqiang ◽  
Andrew G. Walder
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Jiangsu Province ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
Radical Group ◽  
Push Out ◽  
Party Work

This chapter illustrates how the local standoff was broken in the last three months of 1974. At a central party work conference in mid-October, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao, ranking central leaders associated with the radical group that had supported Mao Zedong in launching the Cultural Revolution, harshly criticized the crackdown against May 16 elements in Jiangsu Province. This was part of their drive to push military officers out of revolutionary committees in the wake of Lin Biao's purge. It was also due to their perception that the crackdowns were part of a military effort to persecute genuine rebel groups who had spearheaded the mass movements that they had sponsored back in 1967. The veteran cadres who now headed Jiangsu immediately relayed these instructions to party committees across the province, because it helped them push out lingering army control over civilian administration. In December of 1974, Shao Wen was transferred far away from Feng County. However, the new county leaders seemed indifferent to Paolian's grievances against Liansi. This is the primary reason why, after these leaders were later attacked by Liansi at the end of 1975 and early 1976, Paolian did not actively defend them. The chapter then looks at the death of Mao and considers the final major campaign to rid leading bodies across China of individuals who had risen into positions as a result of their earlier factional activity.

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.

Chinese Art of the Cultural Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Ma
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The art of the Cultural Revolution in China, created during the ten-year period from 1967 to 1977, includes a large variety of visual materials in different media. Generally characterized by unambiguous and heroic images that appealed to the masses, these artworks became powerful tools of political propaganda. Most scholars attribute the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to the 1965 play HaiRui Dismissed from Office. Written by Wu Han, a local Communist official, the play was a thinly veiled critique of Mao Zedong. Though semi-retired in the early 1960s, Mao was determined to hold on to power by launching a new revolution to reawaken young Chinese people and root out the counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian elements in society. Under Mao’s directive, people, places, and things representing the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas) were targeted and violently attacked by young people wearing red armbands and carrying the Little Red Book, a collection of quotes by Mao. Party officials, teachers, professors, authors, and artists had their homes raided and were publically dragged out by the Red Guards for public humiliation. In addition, historical and cultural sites were desecrated and vandalized. While the real violence only lasted the first few years, it set the tone of militarism and revolutionary fervor for the next decade, which permeated through all the arts.

Dongfang Bubai, Online Fandom, and the Gender Politics of a Legendary Queer Icon in Post-Mao China

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Egret Lulu Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Professional Status ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Complicated Case ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
High Age

This chapter studies the gender politics of a legendary queer icon, Dongfang Bubai, in post-Mao China. In Jin Yong’s original novel (1967–1969), this character is a self-castrated man who satirizes Mao Zedong and his Great Cultural Revolution, and then Tsui Hark’s film (1991) cast a female star into this role, invoking Hong Kong’s postcolonial experiences. In Yu Zheng’s television drama (2013), this character was changed to be a woman played by a female star. Yet, this seemly conservative change did not stifled fans’ queer reading tactics in cyberspaces. Using internet ethnography, the author found that at least three reading tactics had emerged: (1) gay readings which imagine Dongfang Bubai as a gay lover even though now a female role played by a female star; (2) heterosexual readings which understand Dongfang Bubai as a “leftover woman,” which is a newly coined term that stigmatizes those unmarried highly educated women with relatively high age and high professional status; (3) lesbian readings which celebrate transgressing both incest taboo and heterosexuality but at once reject gay readings. By studying the complicated case of Dongfang Bubai, this chapter contends that there are simultaneous symbiosis and conflicts of queer and nonqueer articulations in fan cultures.

The Performance of Industry During the Cultural Revolution: Second Thoughts

1986 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 625-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Michael Field
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Mao Zedong, dissatisfied with the growing ossification of the Party and government bureaucracies, in the spring of 1966 launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He believed that China's youth required a “revolutionary experience” to renew their faith in a revolution that had taken place before most of them had been born or were old enough to remember. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) quickly became a period of widespread, often violent, social upheaval that affected the performance of industry.

Latin American Studies in China during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 141-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mao Xianglin ◽  
Shi Huiye
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Five Phases

China’s Latin American studies during the Cold War can be divided into five phases. Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai showed concern for the development of Latin American studies in China. These studies were suspended during the Great Cultural Revolution. The field developed significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, with three academic associations being established and the five major systems of Latin American studies beginning to take shape. After 2000, Sino–Latin American relations entered a new era, and the first 10 years of the century saw their rapid development, opening broad perspectives for the field. Los estudios latinoamericanos en China durante la Guerra Fría se pueden dividir en cinco fases. El presidente Mao Zedong y el primer ministro Zhou Enlai mostraron interés en el desarrollo de dichos estudios, pero estos se suspendieron durante la Revolución Cultural. Posteriormente, el campo se desarrolló de manera significativa durante los años setenta y ochenta gracias al establecimiento de tres asociaciones académicas y conforme se consolidaron los cinco sistemas principales de estudios latinoamericanos. Después del año 2000, las relaciones entre China y Latinoamérica entraron en una nueva fase, y la primera década del nuevo siglo atestiguó un rápido desarrollo que expandió las posibilidades en el campo.

How popular Confucianism became embarrassing

Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (58) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Steinmüller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Central China ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Everyday Action ◽  
Public Evaluation ◽  
Main Entrance

In the past, most farmhouses in central China had an ancestral shrine and a paper scroll with the Chinese letters for "heaven, earth, emperor, ancestors, and teachers" on the wall opposite the main entrance. The ancestral shrine and paper scroll were materializations of the central principles of popular Confucianism. This article deals with their past and present. It describes how in everyday action and in ritual this shrine marked a spatial and moral center. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the ancestral shrines and paper scrolls were destroyed, and replaced by a poster of Mao Zedong. Although the moral principles of popular Confucianism were dismissed by intellectuals and politicians, Mao Zedong was worshipped in ways reminiscent of popular Confucian ritual. The Mao poster and the paper scroll stand for a continuity of a spatial-moral practice of centering. What has changed however is the public evaluation of such a local practice, and this tension can produce a double embarrassment. Elements of popular Confucianism (which had been forcefully denied in the past) remain somewhat embarrassing for many people in countryside. At the same time urbanites sometimes inversely perceive the Maoist condemnation of popular Confucianism as an awkward survival of peasant narrow-mindedness—all the more so as Confucian traditions are now reinvented and revitalized as cultural heritage.

Creating From Ashes: Huang Zhongyang’s Memories of The Shadow of Mao

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 234-255
Author(s):  
Gail Chin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
History Painting ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Cultural Workers ◽  
Oil Paintings ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
Communist Leader ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images

As new immigrants to Canada, Regina painter Huang Zhongyang and other cultural workers add to our diverse visual heritage. Although he left the People’s Republic of China after the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his memories of senseless violence, with Communist leader Mao Zedong pitting neighbor against neighbor, son against father, scarred his psyche, which he has turned into oil paintings. These paintings of Huang’s memories of the Cultural Revolution rarely are displayed publicly, except occasionally. The intent of this article is to discuss his paintings in relation to actual events during the 1960s to 1970s. History painting, a 19th Century European genre, has become a bygone category of art, but in the hands of Huang, memory, a postmodern concern, is aroused by these very poignant images often created after popular images taken from newspapers and television, thus reflecting the contemporary interest in photographs.

Chinese Military Modernization in the 1980s

1982 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Additional Benefit ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
General State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Military Modernization ◽  
Chinese Military

Since the deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1976 and the ensuing concentration on the Four Modernizations, increased attention has been paid to whether, and to what extent, China will be able, or wish, to bring its military machine and its military strategy more closely in line with that of “advanced” countries. The term usually applied to this question is “military modernization.” Such a term possesses the advantage of pointing to how changes in military investments are related to the Chinese Communist Party's overall programme of general economic recovery after the Cultural Revolution and how military affairs fit into the Party's plans for the next two to three decades. Extending the meaning of the concept and relating it to the general state of China's political economy has the additional benefit of drawing attention away from exclusive emphasis on one component of Chinese military affairs, “people's war,” that overworked and by now sterile term to which both Chinese practitioners and western analysts were slave for the past four decades. “People's war” as a strategy and a useful concept continues, but it is no longer the umbrella term for understanding Chinese military issues. Indeed, it has been modified by the Chinese themselves, under the rubric” people's war under modern conditions.”

scholarly journals Red Guard Movement in the First Years of “Cultural Revolution” in China (1966—1967): View of Domestic and Foreign Researchers

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 346-366
Author(s):  
V. V. Bondareva
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Personal Attitude ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
Red Guards ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The article analyzes the first years of “the cultural revolution” in China (1966—1967), characterized by high revolutionary activity of students and school youth, organized into groups of “red guards”, who were distinguished in their actions by extreme cruelty and fanaticism. From this point of view, the destructive actions of the red guards, which were of a terrorist and mass nature, highlight the main direction of their revolutionary strike, which was inflicted on the party and state apparatus of China. Mao Zedong is presented as the initiator of a mass movement of red guards who used monstrous terrorist methods to fight his opposition and all, from their point of view, not enough politically conscious elements. The hongweibing movement, considered as an instrument of Mao Zedong’s struggle with the opposition, allows to reveal in the course of research the personal qualities of a leader who, in the name of establishing his own cult, was not afraid to deliberately plunge the entire country into mass and deeply disorderly turmoil. The detailed description of Mao Zedong’s personal attitude to what is happening, based on documentary sources, reveals the deeply dictatorial and anti-democratic nature of his power, which was asserted in the first years of “the cultural revolution” with the help of the red guards movement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document