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.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History

The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History PDF

Author: Joseph W. Esherick

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780804767989

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Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.

Mr. Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution

Mr. Science and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: Chunjuan Nancy Wei

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0739149741

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China is emerging as a new superpower in science and technology, reflected in the success of its spacecraft and high-velocity Maglev trains. While many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may seem an unlikely era to explore for these insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars have called for re-examining Maoist science--both in China and in the West. At one time Western observers found much to admire in Chairman Mao's mass science, his egalitarian effort to take science out of the ivory tower and place it in the hands of the disenfranchised peasant, the loyal worker, and the patriot soldier. Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock have assembled a rich mix of talents and topics related to the fortunes and misfortunes of science, technology, and medicine in modern China, while tracing its roots to China's other great student revolution--the May Fourth Movement. Historians of science, political scientists, mathematicians, and others analyze how Maoist science served modern China in nationalism, socialism, and nation-building--and also where it failed the nation and the Chinese people. If the Cultural Revolution contributed to China's emerging space program and catalyzed modern malaria treatments based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, it also provided the origins of a science talent gap and the milieu from which a one-child policy would arise. Given the fundamental importance of China today, and of East Asia generally, it is imperative to have a better understanding of its most recent scientific history, but especially that history in a period of crisis and how that crisis was resolved. What is at issue here is not only the specific domain of the history of science, but the social and scientific policies of China generally as they developed and were applied prior to, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: Jacopo Galimberti

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-11-18

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1526117495

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This is the first book to explore the global influence of Maoism on modern and contemporary art. Featuring eighteen original essays written by established and emerging scholars from around the world, and illustrated with fascinating images not widely known in the west, the volume demonstrates the significance of visuality in understanding the protean nature of this powerful worldwide revolutionary movement. Contributions address regions as diverse as Singapore, Madrid, Lima and Maputo, moving beyond stereotypes and misconceptions of Mao Zedong Thought's influence on art to deliver a survey of the social and political contexts of this international phenomenon. At the same time, the book attends to the the similarities and differences between each case study. It demonstrates that the chameleonic appearances of global Maoism deserve a more prominent place in the art history of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: Frank Dikötter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Press

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1632864231

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The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Updated Edition

The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Updated Edition PDF

Author: Louise Slavicek

Publisher: Infobase Holdings, Inc

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1646936566

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As one of history's most horrific political upheavals, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when the Chinese Communist Party officially launched the radical movement on the orders of its autocratic chairman, Mao Zedong. He intended for the movement to revitalize China's revolutionary fervor while simultaneously accelerating the country's evolution into a true communist utopia. China's young people became the advance guard for this new revolution, forming themselves into paramilitary Red Guard units. These adolescent shock troops humiliated, beat, and murdered teachers, intellectuals, local party officials, and others whom they judged to be insufficiently devoted to Mao and his radical ideals. By the time the Cultural Revolution finally ended in 1976, it had claimed the lives of some 3 to 4 million Chinese and left many millions more physically or psychologically scarred. Illustrated with full-color and black-and-white photographs, and accompanied by a chronology, bibliography, and further resources, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Updated Edition provides a clear and comprehensive account of how this sweeping policy changed the course of Chinese history in the 20th century. Historical spotlights and excerpts from primary source documents are also included.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution

The Chinese Cultural Revolution PDF

Author: Paul Clark

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-03-24

Total Pages: 15

ISBN-13: 0521875153

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This book analyzes the Cultural Revolution through the conflict between innovation and a top-down enforcement of modernity.