New Perspectives on the Chinese Revolution

New Perspectives on the Chinese Revolution PDF

Author: Tony Saich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-03-04

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1317463900

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These essays present fresh insights into the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from its founding in 1920 to its assumption of state power in 1949. They draw upon considerable archival resources which have recently become available.

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution

New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: William A. Joseph

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1684171148

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Since the Cultural Revolution, data have been uncovered to illuminate that tumultuous decade. In this volume 13 scholars examine the gap between the ideology of the Revolution and the harsh and contradictory reality of its outcome. They focus particularly on the violence, coercion, and constant tension between the need for centralization to enforce policies and the need for decentralizing decision-making if those goals were to be achieved.

New Perspectives on State Socialism in China

New Perspectives on State Socialism in China PDF

Author: Timothy Cheek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 131529351X

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Placing Chinese Community Party history in the realm of social history and comparative politics, this text studies the roots of the policy failures of the late Maoist period and the tenacity of the CCP.

China's Transition from Communism - New Perspectives

China's Transition from Communism - New Perspectives PDF

Author: Guoguang Wu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1317501209

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As China moved from a planned to a market economy many people expected that China’s political system would similarly move from authoritarianism to democracy. It is now clear, however, that political liberalisation does not necessarily follow economic liberalisation. This book explores this apparent contradiction, presenting many new perspectives and new thinking on the subject. It considers the path of transition in China historically, makes comparisons with other countries and examines how political culture and the political outlook in China are developing at present. A key feature of the book is the fact that most of the contributors are China-born, Western-trained scholars, who bring deep knowledge and well informed views to the study.

Eating Bitterness

Eating Bitterness PDF

Author: Kimberley Ens Manning

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0774859555

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When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared that "not even one person shall die of hunger." Yet some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion during the Great Leap Forward. Eating Bitterness reveals how men and women in rural and urban settings, from the provincial level to the grassroots, experienced the changes brought on by the party leaders' attempts to modernize China. This landmark volume lifts the curtain of party propaganda to expose the suffering of citizens and the deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China.

Mao's Last Revolution

Mao's Last Revolution PDF

Author: Roderick MACFARQUHAR

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 742

ISBN-13: 0674040414

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Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.

The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective

The Chinese Revolution in Historical Perspective PDF

Author: John E. Schrecker

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1991-01-17

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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This introduction to the social, political, and intellectual history of China offers new perspectives as it analyzes two crucial and interrelated questions. Schrecker proposes new approaches for conceptualizing and evaluating China's modern revolution and the long and often misunderstood Chinese past, clarifying a topic made more complex because the West and Western ideas have played crucial roles in the revolutionary process. The volume presents a concise history of China, reinterprets the revolution and its relationship to the past, and provides valuable insights into the problems of contemporary China. It is of importance for the general reader and should be useful as a text in courses in Chinese, comparative and world history.

China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: Woei Lien Chong

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9780742518742

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Treating China's Cultural Revolution as much more than a political event, this innovative volume explores its ideological dimensions. The contributors focus especially on the CR's discourse of heroism and messianism and its demonization of the enemy as reflected in political practice, official literature, and propaganda art, arguing that these characteristics can be traced back to hitherto-neglected undercurrents of Chinese tradition. Moreover, while most studies of the Cultural Revolution are content to point to the discredited cult of heroism and messianism, this book also explores the alternative discourses that have flourished to fill the resulting vacuum. The contributors analyze the intense intellectual and artistic ferment in post-Mao China that embody resistance to CR ideology, as well as the urgent quest for authentic individuality, new forms of social cohesion, and historical truth. Contributions by: Anne-Marie Brady, Woei Lien Chong, Lowell Dittmer, Monika Gaenssbauer, Nick Knight, Stefan R. Landsberger, Nora Sausmikat, Barend J. ter Haar, Natascha Vittinghoff, and Lan Yang.

The World Turned Upside Down

The World Turned Upside Down PDF

Author: Yang Jisheng

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 768

ISBN-13: 0374716919

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Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

Red China's Green Revolution

Red China's Green Revolution PDF

Author: Joshua Eisenman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-04-24

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 0231546750

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China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.