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.

The Cultural Revolution, Soviet Mentality, and the Order of Discourse

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-250
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Material Force ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

One of the main topics of theoretical discussions following 1968 was raised by Michel Foucault, who argued for the formative role of discourse - that discourse has regulating effects that extend not only to the structure of utterances, but also to speakers themselves. The shift in viewpoint that Foucault accomplished has provided a way to see discourse not only as a medium of power, but as power itself, a power that generates the subjectivity of those who use or gain access to use of a given discourse. Recognizing this power in discourse enabled Foucault to overturn the traditional conception of the individual as the ontological source of speech (“the creative force determining the initial position of writing”) and to redefine it as a function of the utterance itself that guarantees grammatical unity and the conceptual and stylistic cohesion of speech. This analytical perspective is applicable to the historical materials on the debates about the paths and methods of the Soviet cultural revolution that the victorious proletariat should employ in order to shore up the social victory of October 1917. The problems confronting Soviet theoreticians and agents of the cultural revolution had much in common with those that would be conceptualized later on in discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. The form of assimilation of this normative order and the mechanisms of ideological Interpellation, which imply the active involvement of Soviet citizens in production of discourses, are the central topics in this examination as they provide insight into how an idea becomes a material force and how it captures the masses. The immediate object of study is the worker and village correspondent (rabkor and selkor) movement of the 1920s as well as its understanding by theorists of the Left Front of the Arts

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.

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.

Revolutionary Literature under Mao

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard King
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This article includes literature (principally fiction, but also poetry, spoken drama, opera, and popular performances), cultural policy and debate, and the history of the Communist Party’s relations with cultural intellectuals for the years 1942–1976. The starting point is Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” delivered in May 1942, when China was politically divided and at war with Japan, and the period ends with Mao’s death in September 1976, an event closely followed by the arrest of his widow and her closest associates in a coup the following month. Mao’s “Talks” set the tone for the entire period, demanding the subordination of the arts to the Party’s mission as currently defined, and insisting that culture serve the Party’s constituency of “workers, peasants, and soldiers.” The “Talks,” variously interpreted, remained Party policy through the civil war period (1945–1949), and following the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. The new communist state established a Soviet Union–style cultural bureaucracy, and the most fortunate writers, performers, and artists were rewarded with official recognition and state sponsorship; also imported from the Soviet Union was the doctrine of socialist realism, with its requirement for loyalist and heroic works celebrating the nation’s prospective progress along the road to the glorious future of communism. Throughout the Mao era, the authorities sought to sponsor a new socialist Chinese culture, with varying degrees of tolerance for indigenous traditions and Western influence. The Communist Party and its leader believed in the power of the arts to support, and in the wrong hands to undermine, the cause of socialism; Mao intervened periodically in cultural matters, and many of the political campaigns that disrupted the period had cultural components. The effect of mercurial and often vindictive policy changes on writers and artists could be devastating: the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s last decade (1966–1976) saw the persecution of many of the nation’s leading cultural figures; virtually no writer or artist had an uninterrupted career. Chinese cultural histories customarily view the Yan’an and civil war period as distinct, and they divide the period from 1949 to 1976 into the seventeen years before 1966 and the Cultural Revolution decade that followed. Although this periodization overstates the discontinuity of cultural policy and artistic output, it will be observed for convenience here. A note on Romanization: English-language publications from China prior to 1979 use a modified, and inefficient, version of the now little-used Wade-Giles Romanization; after 1979, Chinese publishers converted to the now conventional pinyin Romanization. For Western scholarship or translations, the transition from Wade-Giles (in its more precise form) to pinyin took place at around the same time.

The Controversy Over Modernism, 1979–84

1985 ◽  
Vol 104 ◽  
pp. 641-656
Author(s):  
D. E. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The People ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

The leadership in literature and the arts that replaced the appointees of the “gang of four” in the late 1970s was formed of the old guard. Their policies were restorationist. They reversed the judgments of the Cultural Revolution, giving approval to all the theories then tarred black, notably “the broad road for realism” (which allowed for artistic diversity), “the deepening of realism” (which meant that not everything needed to be depicted as fine and dandy), and “middle characters” (intended to break the monopoly of proletarian heroes). They interpreted the principle that literature should serve socialism and serve the people relatively liberally. Serving the people meant “the whole people” (a formulation for which Zhou Yang had been condemned); and when the formula of “workers, peasants and soldiers” was repeated, it was pointed out that “workers” included brain workers. The enjoyment principle was also invoked.

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.

scholarly journals Zhao Jiping and the sound of resistance in Red Sorghum

2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-366
Author(s):  
Brian C. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Mo Yan ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Since seizing power in 1949, China’s Communist Party has exerted firm control over all aspects of cultural expression. This policy took its most radical turn in the mid-1960s when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), aiming to rid the country of bourgeois elements. The composer Zhao Jiping was a student at the Xi’an Conservatory during this period. He graduated in 1970, but was able to continue his studies only when the Central Conservatory reopened in 1978. On completing his studies, he established himself as a composer of folk-inspired music for film and the concert stage. This paper focuses on Zhao’s score for director Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang, 1987), a film based on the 1986 novel by 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan. While the composer enjoyed only limited recognition beyond China, he went on to score other successful films, among them Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Farewell, My Concubine (1993), and achieve success as a composer of concert music. The paper connects Zhao’s musical language to the impact of the Cultural Revolution by examining how in Red Sorghum his music was employed to evoke a virile image of rural China.

Christ in China

Worldview ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-22
Author(s):  
Miriam ◽  
Ivan D. London
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
New Research ◽  
Prayer Meetings ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

Christianity is a sleeper in China. It has not expired since the massive antireligious campaign of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, any more than has the traditional body of Chinese beliefs, ranging from philosophical Buddhism to primitive superstition. The Chinese landscape still abounds with gods, ghosts, and heavenly omens. And the church lives cautiously, but intensely, underground. The evidence suggests that wherever Protestant or Catholic belief once took hold, the faith is practiced to some degree; secret prayer meetings take place and young people are converted. The fact that the Peking Kuang Ming Daily of September, 27, 1977, published an article proposing new "research" efforts directed toward the criticism and the eradication of all religions, including Christianity, is sign enough that the central propagandists still see themselves as battling a live adversary.

Chinese Textbooks, Fourteen Years on

1980 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 535-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. F. Price
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
People’S Republic Of China ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Chinese Classroom ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

This paper is intended to serve as a contribution to the study of school textbooks in the People's Republic of China, and, in particular, as a first look at such books since the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Because of the nature of the sample it makes no claim to being definitive. But the near-impossibility of obtaining such books abroad and the dominant role they play in the Chinese classroom give the subject some importance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document