The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics"

This book brings together research on China’s “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to their re-emergence in the reform era. It critically investigates the changing nature and significance of China’s “red classics” at each point of their (re/)emergence in three key areas: their socio-political and ideological import, their aesthetic significance and their function as a mass cultural phenomenon. The book is organised in two parts in chronological order covering the Maoist period and post-Cultural Revolution respectively, and includes a representative range of genres including novels, short stories, films, TV series, picture books (lianhuanhua), animation and traditional style paintings (guohua). The book illuminates important questions such as: What determined what could and could not become a “red classic”? How was the real revolutionary experience of authors shaped by the regime to create “red classic” works? How were traditional forms incorporated or transformed? How did authors and artist negotiate the treacherous waters of changing political demands? And how did the “red classics adapt to a new political environment and a new readership in new millennium China? While most of the chapters focus primarily on one of the two periods under consideration many also follow the fate of their subject through both periods, creating overall a highly coherent overview of the changing phenomenon of the “red classics” over the seventy-five years since the Yan’an Forum and in the process simultaneously tracing the changing dynamic between the CCP and these classic narratives of the communist revolution.