Cultural Revolution Era Research Articles

Piano practice of China’s Cultural Revolution era and students’ musical creativity / La práctica de piano con composiciones de la era de la Revolución Cultural y la creatividad musical de los estudiantes

This paper describes the impact of the performance of piano pieces of the Cultural Revolution era with distinctive artistic features on the development of creative skills among students in the People’s Republic of China. The study used the SME academic test to measure the development of creative thinking. To measure the effect of practising piano on musical prowess, a control test (according to the currently accepted academic programme) was performed at the end of the study. The responses were given by students from three universities in the PRC. The total number of participants was 315 individuals. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that there is evidence of the effectiveness of piano practices that are based on musical compositions from the era of the Chinese Revolution, in terms of their positive impact. Small B groups showed 11.8% higher performance than the control group. Group B students experienced a positive impact on their level of creativity as a result of practising the piano. The average degree of creativity increased by 2.6%, while the high degree of creativity increased by 3.6%.

Locating Lumumba

Abstract This article builds on Joseph Slaughter's call at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Meeting to be more aware of the “locations of comparison” that scholars of literature inhabit. Slaughter reminds us of World Literature's problematic emphasis on global marketability and translatability as well as its lack of attention to enduring postcolonial inequalities. I argue with Slaughter that an alternative conception of World Literature can be and has already been imagined. I show how during the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization competing visions for World Literature were proposed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I do this through a comparative study of three “peripheral” Cold War–era texts that foregrounded the figure of Patrice Lumumba, who was a recurring symbol of this other World Literature: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), the Cultural Revolution–era propaganda play Chidao zhangu 《赤道战鼓》 (War Drums on the Equator) by Li Huang and his collaborators, and Valerio Zurlini's 1968 Third-Worldist film Seduto alla sua destra (Black Jesus). These historical texts, I argue, ultimately point to the horizon of a World Literature and a Comparative Literature that have the ambition to never stop “locating” themselves.

REMEMBERING XIAO SHAN IN BA JIN ESSAYS THE WOUNDS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

The Cultural Revolution era was a dark period in Chinese history. The resistance to the power of Chairman Mao by literati people has resulted in deep wounds, as a result of intimidation, bad stigma, exclusion, and even imprisonment which often ends in death. Ba Jin's essay Remembering Xiao Shan can be seen as a mirror reflecting the deep wounds experienced by the author who is accused of being part of a counterrevolutionary group. Not only himself, but his beloved wife also had to bear the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. This study uses a hermeneutical analysis model to explore the author's "living world" in the text Reminiscing Xiao Shan about the sorrow experienced by himself, his fellow authors who were labeled as part of right-wing resistance, and the people he loved during repressive times under the control of Mao Zedong. The Cultural Revolution was long gone, but the wounds it caused were not easy to heal, and so Ba Jin documented it in the text in the form of an essay. In the end, time has proved that the idea of ​​resistance carried out by people like Ba Jin is irresistible, as has been proven by the current capitalistic economic style in China. The close people, even Ba Jin's wife were indeed neglected by the Red Guards, but their thoughts are still alive today.

KONFUSIANISME SEBAGAI SABUK PENGAMAN RRT

<p>The slogans propagated by Chinese leader Hu Jintao—namely “rise in peace”, “a harmonious socialist society”, and “a harmonious world”—reflects the country’s age-old Confucian values. Considering the fact that the PRC only recognizes communism as the state ideology and that Confucianism was subjected to harsh criticism during the Cultural Revolution era (1966–1976), the presence of Confucian values in PRC’s political propaganda becomes an interesting research topic. Both Confucianism and communism<br />put the state as the center of power and sovereignty. This research used the historicalchronological approach by examining the attitude of the PRC government towards Confucianism from 1980 to 2012. Results show that such a consistent philosophy has been successful in strengthening the government’s legitimacy. As it continues to rise, the PRC needs to adopt a robust philosophical basis such as Confucianism to serve as part of its soft power. Confucianism has been adjusted to the country’s current situations<br />and utilized so extensively for decades that it can be considered as PRC’s main vehicle for national development. This article examines and presents the historical role of Confucianism in PRC’s rise.</p>

1980년대 이레이(伊蕾) 詩공간 의식 연구

This study is about how Yi Lei, one of China’s leading female poetries, uses ‘space’ as a method for resisting social oppression and violence in the Chinese Cultural Revolution era. This paper categorizes the space represented in her poems into two different types: a woman’s body and house/bedroom. First, Yi Lei tries to transform the traditional meaning of a woman’s body from dependent and passive to independent and active space. Furthermore, she depicts the body as a place where male and female meet and become a complementary whole. Second, Yi Lei describes self-image presented in closed space, house/bedroom. She reveals a fact that traditional/social violence can be reproduced in the house, the closed space, but, at the same time, she makes a personal active voice, which is hardly heard in the era, in her room, the same closed space. She creates vitality and stories by filling the space with music and songs frankly, and by doing it, she heals her broken heart brought by being excluded and alienated from society. Yi Lei resists the social oppression, ‘censored freedom’, in the Cultural Revolution era by finding herself in her closed space.

We’re ‘all in’ on this one, but we’ll need your help!

We’re ‘all in’ on this one, but we’ll need your help!

History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhoea and the Art of Words

The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades.

Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class - By Joel Andreas

Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class - By Joel Andreas

Legal Thought and Legal Development in the People's Republic of China 1949-2008

The People's Republic of China has experienced a chequered legal history. Modern Chinese law has been marked by radical discontinuities with the past. The Chinese dynastic empires used to have elaborate legal codes and highly developed bureaucracies for administration, but as imperial rule came to end with the 1911 Revolution, Chinese law entered era of doubt about its own past, uncertainty and attempts in Westernization, modernization and reconstruction, first by drawing inspiration from Continental Europe and Japan in the Republican era, and then from the Soviet Union. After a brief attempt in the mid 1950s to establish a new socialist legality modeled on that practiced by the Soviet Union, China saw two decades of deteriorating standards of legality ending in total lawlessness in the Cultural Revolution era of 1966-1976. In 1978, the Dengist era of reform and opening began. The last thirty years have seen not only rapid economic development in China, but also significant efforts in the reconstruction and development of its legal system. These efforts were guided by and reflected a new and continuously deepening understanding of the value of law and legal institutions and of the Rule of Law on the part of the scholarly and governing elites of China which has also spread and penetrated among the populace, civil society and the mass media. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the history of legal thought in the PRC, and to review how such thought has produced an event of epic historic proportions. This paper is divided into the following parts. Part I divides the legal history of the PRC into several periods, and describes the legal thought of each period. Part II reviews major legal developments in China, including both the making of laws and the building of legal institutions. Part III reflects on the characteristics and achievements of the Chinese project of legal development in the last three decades as well as its limitations. Finally, part IV offers a few concluding remarks.

The Elite Class Background of Wang Shuo and His Hooligan Characters

The Cultural Revolution provided a unique environment for children of the political elite to develop a new kind of hooliganism and a youth counterculture that contradicted Mao’s aim to empower them for making revolution. The author challenges a view commonly held by Western commentators and scholars that Wang Shuo is a writer of “common man” fiction by highlighting the aristocratic background of his Cultural Revolution-era hooligan characters. In the post-Mao era, these former aristocratic youth hooligans tried to adapt to the new environment of growing commercialism and materialism. Some successfully joined the new elite through legal or illegal means, while those who failed to do so became marginalized and even impoverished. The author argues that it was the latter who felt the need to develop to perfection the skill of fast talk and an irreverent, knowing, and playful attitude, which helped them to maintain a sense of superiority. Glorified byWang Shuo in his stories and commentary, the hooligan characters captured the imagination of many Chinese, especially the younger generations who feel marginalized and alienated, by legitimizing their desires and frustrations and by subverting the dominant ideology and culture.

Determinants of China's import demand for Australia's iron ore

This paper analyzes China's imports of iron ore from Australia, using annual time series data for the period 1973–1996. Considerations include variables affecting iron ore trade between the two countries, such as the previous trade volume, GDP growth rate and steel production in China, labor disputes in Australia, the relative price of Australia's iron ore to the world average, and Chinese government policies. Results indicate that China's import of Australia's iron ore is positively affected by the volume of steel production in China and Chinese government's policy following the cultural revolution era. Increases in the relative price of Australia's iron ore and labor disputes measured by the working days lost in Australia appear to reduce China's import demand.

Images of Women in the Fiction of Zhang Jie and Zhang Xinxin

Zhang Xinxin and Zhang Jie are two contemporary Chinese women writers. They began to publish in the post–Cultural Revolution era, and became well–known in the early 1980s for their fictional depiction of the problems of urban intellectual women attempting to resolve conflicts between love and career, love and marriage, and ideals and reality. Although the works of both authors present a limited challenge to traditions they believe have served to oppress women, a clear generational difference is perceptible in the attitudes they each express through their characters. Zhang Jie, born in 1937 and reaching adulthood in the idealistic climate of the 1950s, presents characters strongly influenced by both Confucian morality and socialist ideals, while Zhang Xinxin, who was born in 1953 and grew up during the Cultural Revolution period (a disillusioning experience for most of her generation), presents characters who show little enthusiasm for political ideals and are less constrained by traditional morality.

The revival of China's organised Labour 1973-86

This paper analyses the development and role of Chinese trade unions in the post Cultural Revolution era. The growth of organised labour fronz virtual dissolution in the late 1960s is charted at national and enterprise level. The text outlines significant post 1973 trade union involvement in industrial welfare, education and productivity. The current status of wage fixation and grievance handling in Chinese labour relations is also explored. The paper concludes by appraising Chinese trade unionisrn and its relationship to industrial policy in recent times.