scholarly journals Living in Mao’s China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Foreign Correspondents ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Foreign Expert ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

During the Mao era a small number of Europeans lived in the PRC – most of them for two or three years, a few for the whole period. This article focuses on those who, unlike diplomats and a handful of foreign correspondents, worked or studied in Chinese institutions: ‘foreign comrades’ (both long-term residents and sojourners), ‘foreign experts’ and students. The article shows how the everyday lives of these Europeans were strongly influenced both by Mao era’s ‘politics in command’ environment and by PRC policies that utilised them for political and pragmatic purposes while at the same time marginalising them from everyday Chinese life. It also illustrates the divisive impact of Maoist politics on each group. The Cultural Revolution brought a temporary halt to both the foreign expert and student presences in China, as well as being a traumatic period for the foreign comrades.

China and International Relations

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-302
Author(s):  
Michael B. Yahuda
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

These last ten years have witnessed a remarkable development of Chinese academic writing on International Relations. The late Premier Zhou Enlai had recommended the expansion of such studies in 1964 on his return from a tour of Africa after having found the relevant Chinese expertise weak and ill-informed. But the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 not only prevented that development, but along with most other intellectuals those few scholars engaged in the subject were humiliated and persecuted. Since 1977, in common with the other social sciences, International Relations has begun to flourish. Although it is a fairly new independent subject of study more than five hundred scholars are engaged in a variety of research institutes and several universities offer courses in it. As in the other social sciences, research in International Relations is carried out under the general guidelines of serving China's long term policies of modernization and the open door.

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.

Interactions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

To outsiders, the long-term residents seemed tightly knit, conscious of their group identity and wary of Westerners who did not share the mantle of ‘foreign comrade’ or ‘international friend’. But the small community also had its internal dynamics, reflecting the length of time that people had spent in China as well as their nationality, personality and political attitudes—even within the socialist range. The turbulent politics of the era, including the Sino-Soviet split, also impinged on relations within the community, while the Cultural Revolution had a dramatic impact on individuals’ lives when their official designation as comrades and friends became subordinated to that as suspect foreigners.

Powerful Speech: Remembering the Long Cultural Revolution in Yunnan

Inner Asia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-182
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
State Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Northwest Yunnan ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractIn anthropological and historical accounts of the Maoist period, memory emerges as both a method and a problem for research. This article explores Nusu elders memories of the Mao era in the highlands of northwest Yunnan, along the Burmese border. Nusu refer to the bitter events of 1958 to roughly 1978 collectively as the Cultural Revolution . Their autobiographical speech blends the socialist genre of speaking bitterness with distinctly Nusu forms of lament. Their strategies of memory in particular, their counter-chronological narratives, strategic omissions, and reinventions of the past evade questions of guilt to assert themselves instead as victims. This article traces the internationalisation of state power and appropriation of state rhetoric in Nusu elders memories of the Long Cultural Revolution in Yunnan.

scholarly journals “I Do Not Really Belong Out There Anymore”

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olaug S. Lian ◽  
Geir Fagerjord Lorem
Keyword(s):  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Illness Experiences ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
Medically Unexplained

In this article, we explore relations between health, being, belonging and place through an interpretive thematic analysis of autobiographic text and photographs about the everyday lives of 10 women and men living with medically unexplained long-term fatigue in Norway. While interpreting their place-related illness experiences, we ask: How do they experience their being in the world, where do they experience a sense of belonging/not belonging, and why do places become places of belonging/not belonging? The participants describe experiences of (a) being socially detached and alienated, (b) being imprisoned, (c) being spectators who observe the world, and (d) senses of belonging. They describe senses of being and belonging/not belonging as closely attached to physical and symbolic aspects of places in which they reside, and they wistfully reflect on the question of “why.” The study illustrates the influence of experienced place—material as well as immaterial—on health and illness.

The Second Society

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-198
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Political Reforms ◽  
House Churches ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This chapter uses a variety of primary sources, from party archives to published memoirs, to undermine the picture of mass obedience that is sometimes thought to have characterised the Mao era. The Cultural Revolution aimed to transform every aspect of an individual's life, including their innermost thoughts and personal feelings, but in many cases it only managed to create the appearance of conformity. People fought deception with deception, lies with lies and empty rhetoric with empty slogans. Many were great actors, pretending to go along, knowing precisely what to say when required. They often managed to keep a diversity of cultural traditions alive, reading forbidden books, listening to clandestine radio or opening house churches, sometimes even performing traditional opera with the connivance of local cadres. But paradoxically, the very existence of this 'second society' also allowed the regime to indefinitely postpone meaningful political reforms.

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.

scholarly journals From Beijing to Palestine: Zhang Chengzhi's Journeys from Red Guard Radicalism to Global Islam

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-911
Author(s):  
Julia Lovell
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Zhang Chengzhi ◽  
Red Guard ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Mao Era ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This article traces the intellectual evolution of Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948), a contemporary Chinese poet, novelist, essayist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, from Mao-era radicalism to Islamic internationalism. Allegedly the inventor of the term “Red Guard” in the context of the Cultural Revolution, he has remained an unapologetic defender of Mao and of the “Red Guard spirit” since the 1960s. In 1987, meanwhile, Zhang converted to an impoverished and ascetic sect of Chinese Islam, the Jahriyya, and since the 2000s he has become one of China's most prominent spokesmen for global Islam. This article explores how Zhang has reconciled his zeal for Cultural Revolution Maoism, on the one hand, with Pan-Islamist positions on the other. Although Zhang's stance suffers from undoubted contradictions and inconsistencies, his career and beliefs illuminate the complexities of the legacy of Mao's and the Cultural Revolutions, of Chinese intellectual dissidence, and of the contemporary trajectories of Chinese internationalism and global Islam.

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