The Mob Rule Continued

In 1967, during a mutiny known as the Wuhan Incident, Zhou Enlai flexed his political muscles and pacified the insurgent commanders. Mao felt threatened. Yuan-tsung’s friend Courtier Yu, her direct link to Zhou, warned her that she had been caught in the crossfire of a huge power struggle between Zhou and Mao. Zhou wanted to reach an understanding with the West that would lead to the lifting of its trade sanctions against China. Mao, however, wanted to resuscitate the Great Leap Forward. Yuan-tsung’s best bet was Zhou. If Zhou prevailed, he would use Jack’s knowledge of English and Western culture to explain his open-door policy to the West. In return Jack and Yuan-tsung would get their exit visas. Courtier Yu arranged a meeting at a place near Badaling where Yuan-tsung could take her plea directly to Zhou.

From the Magic Circle into the Great Famine

Yuan-tsung awaited her fate, sure that it would be the same as that of her immediate boss, Director Wang, who had been driven to suicide, but Jack came to her rescue. They reconciled and got married in 1958. She lived a privileged life in his “magic circle,” which, up to that time, was untouched by either purges or famines. But in that magic circle, she watched with terror and apathy as the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the ensuing Great Famine unfolded. Feeling it morally wrong that she did not suffer with the others, she volunteered in 1960, the worst famine year, to go to a famine-devastated rural area, the Red Flag People’s Commune. To survive, she had to hunt for food like the other villagers.

Vida y muerte en las embarcaciones castellanas entre los siglos XIII y XV. Una aproximación desde fuentes legales y cronísticas

Despite the fact that historical studies on the navy and navigation in the Middle Ages in general and in Castile in particular have taken a great leap, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, studies related to the living conditions and mentalities of personnel shipped do not seem to have had the same interest. Here we present some aspects, brushstrokes drawn from legal and chronological sources. Legal sources offer us a way to approach living conditions on merchant ships. The chronicles offer information on the dangers derived from direct combat action at sea, the influence of meteorological conditions, as well as related to the recruitment and supplies of the embarked personnel. Pese a que los estudios históricos sobre la marina y la navegación en la Edad Media en general y en Castilla en particular han dado un gran salto, no sólo cuantitativo, sino también cualitativo, los estudios relacionados con las condiciones de vida y las mentalidades del personal embarcado no parecen haber tenido el mismo interés. Aquí presentamos algunos aspectos, pinceladas extraídas de fuentes legales y cronísticas. Las fuentes legales nos ofrecen una vía de aproximación a las condiciones de vida en embarcaciones mercantes. Las crónicas ofrecen información sobre los peligros derivados de la acción directa de combate en la mar, la influencia de las condiciones meteorológicas, así como relacionada con el reclutamiento y suministros del personal embarcado.

The Secret Listener

From the time she was a girl, Yuan-tsung Chen had had a literary dream, and in 1950 she embarked on a literary career, a journey filled with thrilling and dangerous adventures. She went to Beijing and got a job in the Scenario Department of the Central Film Bureau, where she found herself in a front-row seat during China’s culture wars as Mao Zedong demanded that literature and art serve the Party, while writers wanted culture to be distinguishable from propaganda. Hence she became a secret listener. Purges ensued. She narrowly escaped the Anti-Rightist Purge of 1957 by marrying Jack Chen, who, because of his connections, had avoided political trouble so far. Mao’s “class war” continued. His Great Leap Forward caused the plunge in agricultural production and the greatest famine of the twentieth century. It led to Mao’s last and most violent purge, the Cultural Revolution. His hitmen, the Red Guards, viciously attacked Jack. Yuan-tsung went secretly to ask Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, for help. Zhou tried but failed to protect them. They were sent out of Beijing and consigned to a rural backwater village, cut off from all recourse to friends. But Yuan-tsung figured out a way to get in touch, right under the noses of the Red Guards, with Jack’s American brother-in-law and asked him to arrange a speaking tour for Jack. He did, and thus Jack was able to accept an invitation to lecture on Canadian and American campuses. After a tense wait, on the prime minister’s personal order Jack and Yuan-tsung got permits to leave the country.

La vulnerabilità come “ritorno del rimosso” e la nuova domanda di senso durante la pandemia da Covid-19

The great leap forward of medicine in the twentieth century contributed to the myth of the repression of vulnerability accompanied by the illusion of individual control and self-determination. However, epidemics, like major natural disasters, have continued to act as elements capable of upsetting scientific optimism. The Covid-19 pandemic, with its uncertain causes and unpredictable effects, has led to authentic demythologisation and caused a “return of the repressed”: a feeling of vulnerability along with dramatic awareness of our mortality. This phenomenon has been accompanied by a re-emerging demand for meaning, which has led to a more direct confrontation with the drama of suffering and the need for a personal relationship with the sacred, finally rediscovering the public dimension of prayer. Firstly, the article outlines in its essential features the ambiguity of the pre-pandemic cultural horizon. Secondly, it analyses the characteristics of the rise of a new sensibility, by referring also to the notion of prayer as a “political issue” coined by Jean Daniélou.

“Building Communism”

In 1958–1959, Khrushchev launched his program for the “full-scale construction of communism.” Not coincidentally, in the same time period, China’s Mao launched his disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” Yugoslavia generalized its program of “workers’ self-management” as a blueprint for the communist world moving forward, while North Korea presented the late-Stalinist policy of monolithic, terroristic control as the only true path to communism.