Guard Movement Research Articles

Demokrasi Dalam Menciptakan Pemilu Bersih di Kecamatan Mungka Kabupaten Lima Puluh Kota

Elections are one of the pillars of democracy that enable the realization of the people's right to determine their own destiny in order to form a democratic government. Through the active participation of students, the election guard movement aims to prevent manipulation and fraud, as well as ensure that the votes of each voter are respected and counted correctly. By overseeing the implementation of general elections, the aim is to create a transparent, fair and accountable environment. As for data collection techniques through observation and interviews in an effort to create clean elections, the community in Mungka District may face several obstacles. One of them is the low level of education and political awareness in several regions. This can leave society vulnerable to manipulation and abuse by irresponsible parties. Therefore, voter education and outreach about the importance of clean elections need to be a priority. Apart from that, economic factors can also be an obstacle for society in creating clean elections. The practice of money politics and misuse of resources in campaigns often occurs in environments with high levels of poverty. Effective voter education about their rights, the electoral process, and the importance of fair participation can help reduce election abuses. Socialization of anti-corruption programs and transparency in elections is also important to encourage responsible participation from all parties.

문화대혁명, 진보인가 반동인가? - 베이징 초기 홍위병 운동의 쟁점에 대한 재검토를 중심으로 -

This paper is an attempt to create a comprehensive survey of the modernity and universality that the issues and conflicts from the Cultural Revolutionary period hold from a new perspective through political keywords that are central and widespread in modern society. To achieve this, the paper puts its focus primarily on subjects regarding the Red Guard movement in the early days of the Cultural Revolution and at the same time, limits the area of study to Beijing to provide as much context as possible on the social conflicts of the time. The study especially focuses on the “fairness-justice” and “discrimination-hate” discourse-a core social discussion in Korean society today-as a medium to reinterpret the string of specific contexts. I consider these discussions as a form of “post-revolution discourse” encompassing the democratization process its outcome. “Post-revolution discourse” has been adopted as a means to readdress the Cultural Revolution because discussions concerning the Cultural Revolution can also be understood as a form of “post-revolution discourse” regarding the achievements of the 1949 Socialist Revolution. The objectives of social activism in the 20th century are relatively clear. It aimed to establish a just policy that would allow for a fair distribution of resources and the abolition of all discriminatory practices. China took the path of socialist revolution and Korea took that of democratic movements. While both countries’ movements bore fruit, both also had clear limitations. The question is: how should the social responses to the shortcomings be compared and evaluated? This is not, by any means, an attempt to equate China in 1966 and Korea in 2021, nor is it a bid to force ideological standards that distinguish revolutions and reactions upon each party. What this paper strives to accomplish is to investigate the possibility of utilizing different historical experiences as a cross-reference for pioneering interpretations, despite uncertainties as to what is truly revolutionary and what is reactionary.

A strategy choosing method for solving the problem of a guard movement while searching for a criminal under condi-tions of uncertainty

The work is devoted to the issue of the complex use of technical means and physical security forces while ensuring the safety of several objects located in the controlled area. The method proposed is for solving the problem of choosing a strategy for searching for a criminal by a security officer while minimizing the time of knowing the direction of movement of the first one to one of the two objects. The proposed method is based on a criminal search strategy implemented by the security guards movement control system, which includes two straight sections of their path, which are formed based on information from the security alarm sensors. A mathematical model has been developed for calculating the parameters of controlling the movements of a guard and an algorithm for the control system operation, which makes it possible to implement an optimal search strategy depending on the location of objects, a guard, a criminal, and information from technical means of protection.

On graphs whose eternal vertex cover number and vertex cover number coincide

The eternal vertex cover problem is a variant of the classical vertex cover problem defined in terms of an infinite attacker–defender game played on a graph. In each round of the game, the defender reconfigures guards from one vertex cover to another in response to a move by the attacker. The minimum number of guards required in any winning strategy of the defender when this game is played on a graph G is the eternal vertex cover number of G , denoted by evc ( G ) . It is known that given a graph G and an integer k , checking whether evc ( G ) ≤ k is NP-hard. Further, it is known that for any graph G , mvc ( G ) ≤ evc ( G ) ≤ 2 mvc ( G ) , where mvc ( G ) is the vertex cover number of G . Though a characterization is known for graphs for which evc ( G ) = 2 mvc ( G ) , a characterization of graphs for which evc ( G ) = mvc ( G ) remained as an open problem, since 2009. We achieve such a characterization for a class of graphs that includes chordal graphs and internally triangulated planar graphs. For biconnected chordal graphs, our characterization leads to a polynomial time algorithm for precisely determining evc ( G ) and an algorithm for determining a safe strategy for guard movement in each round of the game using only evc ( G ) guards. Though the eternal vertex cover problem is only known to be in PSPACE in general, it follows from our new characterization that the problem is in NP for locally connected graphs, a graph class which includes all biconnected internally triangulated planar graphs. We also provide reductions establishing NP-completeness of the problem for biconnected internally triangulated planar graphs. As far as we know, this is the first NP-completeness result known for the problem for any graph class.

Red Guard Movement in the First Years of “Cultural Revolution” in China (1966—1967): View of Domestic and Foreign Researchers

The article analyzes the first years of “the cultural revolution” in China (1966—1967), characterized by high revolutionary activity of students and school youth, organized into groups of “red guards”, who were distinguished in their actions by extreme cruelty and fanaticism. From this point of view, the destructive actions of the red guards, which were of a terrorist and mass nature, highlight the main direction of their revolutionary strike, which was inflicted on the party and state apparatus of China. Mao Zedong is presented as the initiator of a mass movement of red guards who used monstrous terrorist methods to fight his opposition and all, from their point of view, not enough politically conscious elements. The hongweibing movement, considered as an instrument of Mao Zedong’s struggle with the opposition, allows to reveal in the course of research the personal qualities of a leader who, in the name of establishing his own cult, was not afraid to deliberately plunge the entire country into mass and deeply disorderly turmoil. The detailed description of Mao Zedong’s personal attitude to what is happening, based on documentary sources, reveals the deeply dictatorial and anti-democratic nature of his power, which was asserted in the first years of “the cultural revolution” with the help of the red guards movement.

Relationship between Alash-Orda and the White Guard Movement in 1918–1919: from Cooperation to Confrontation

Relationship between Alash-Orda and the White Guard Movement in 1918–1919: from Cooperation to Confrontation

Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolution and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan

This article explores how Japanese comic artists represented the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in popular print culture, especially lowbrow comic magazines. It posits that Japanese cartoonists in their role as both purveyors of everyday humor and keenly observant social commentators employed the imagery and rhetoric of the Red Guard movement to critique the conservative social and economic order of Japanese corporate culture during the late 1960s era of high-speed growth; moreover, it contends that there was a surprisingly receptive audience for such criticism among the rank-and-file “salarymen” of the urban Japanese middle class. Finally, the precisely informed humor found in these comics also suggests that their target audience possessed detailed familiarity with contemporary events on the continent and interpreted those events through a deeply embedded cultural framework of ambivalence concerning modern Chinese society.

Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence

<i>Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence</i>

Narrative fidelity to the Little Red Book in the framing efforts of the Red Guard Movement: A theoretical model for foundational documents

My research interests take strong cues from much theorizing performed within the social movement theoretical community. Building on framing insights pioneered by David Snow and Robert Benford, I focus on how much narrative fidelity a political activist’s speech has to culturally exalted primary source text(s); this is what I have termed foundational documents. I am proposing a foundational document theoretical model that interacts with novel concepts emerging among critical discourse analysts, and with insights produced within social movement studies under the cultural paradigm. This framework is intended to uncover resonating ideational elements within foundational texts. These are the crucial elements social movement entrepreneurs utilize in order to create culturally potent frame presentations.

Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder

Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder

Powerful Eurydice: The Female Voice in Eliade’s A Spiritual Adventure

In his novella Nineteen Roses, Mircea Eliade alluded to play about and Eurydice. He did indeed write this play in 1946. Mac L. Ricketts discovered it in the Eliade Special Collection of the University of Chicago library. In his introduction to the English translation (published here for the first time and before the Romanian original), Ricketts discusses the conception and writing of this play as it is described in Eliade's Journal. It seems that Eliade enjoyed the experience of writing it but at the same time was tormented by the inspiration for this serious drama as he calls it. Although Eliade had not found name for the female protagonist, she evidently personifies Eurydice. Eliade wrote of in his diary: Y, the woman, fascinates me. She is just as I saw her (qtd. in Ricketts).In 2005, the ambiguity around the existence of the play A Spiritual Adventure led the neo-fascist critic Claudio Mutti to interpret this then unknown play built as mise-en-abime of Eliade' s novella Nineteen Roses. In chapters from his book Mircea Eliade and the Iron Guard, Claudio Mutti surmises that the play Eliade mentions in Nineteen Roses (which turns out to be A Spiritual Adventure) is a marvellous book on the Captain (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu1). Mutti sees the play as tragedy about the Iron Guard and its leader (43). The author bases his argument on affirmations made by Eliade' s acquaintances and on the fact that 1938 was for Eliade traumatic year, due to his imprisonment in legionnaire camp in Miercurea-Ciuc, where he might have written the play Orpheus and and read it to his prison mates (Mutti 4445). Comparing Eliade' s novels The Forbidden Forest and Nineteen Roses, Mutti discovers change of attitude in the author's rendition of his historical experience:Pour reprendre la terminologie d'Eliade, Foret interdite est le roman de l'amnesie, tandis que Les Dix-neuf roses est le roman de l'anamnese. Avec le premier, l'auteur efface de sa memoire l'experience legionnaire et reporte sur Partenie-Ionesco ce qui lui appartenait lui, Eliade. Dans Les Dix-neuf roses, ecrit par Eliade quelques annees avant sa mort, le recouvrement definitif de la memoire est annonce : fut-ce dans les termes cryptiques d'un roman chiffre, Eliade revendique la periode de sa vie liee l'epopee legionnaire. (Mutti 47)To Mutti, the character Ieronim Thanase, who directs experimental theatre performances, evokes Julius Evola2 (48). Mutti can elaborate on play he has not read because of the ambiguity surrounding it and of Eliade' s long fascination with the Iron Guard movement. This capti vation with the fascist movement in Romania informs Eliade' s recurrent themes of the persecution of memory and of history. In Mircea Eliade: Le Prisonnier de l'histoire (2003), Florin Jurcanu analysed Eliade 's complicity in the fascist movement in Romania in the thirties and its consequences for his career. Eliade' s political affinities had tragic impact on his life - as can be discerned, however obliquely, in this newly discovered play.Nineteen Roses, the novella in which Eliade mentions the play A Spiritual Adventure, was inspired by the and Eurydice myth. A female character from fantastic world, Niculina, plays Eurydice in strange performances directed by an experimental theatre guru. She carries mysterious suitcase in which she hides book among two layers of veils. Anghel D. Pandele, the main protagonist, is writer who is helped by theatre performances to recover his lost memory. A young man, Laurian Serdaru, Niculina's fiance, knows lot about the play and claims to be the son of the actress and of the playwright Pandele. We learn that the actress meant to play Eurydice never managed to perform in front of audiences since the play had been cancelled. Laurian Serdaru and Niculina try to help Pandele recover his memory of events before Christmas night of 1938 through the magic performance of different play, directed by Ieronim Thanase (the name, inspired by Thanatos, bears connotation of death). …

From revolutionary rebels to a thinking generation: a reflection on China's Red Guard movement of the mid‐1960s

China's Red Guards fundamentally differed from the radical youths in the West in the 1960s. Whereas the youth rebellions in the West were largely “from the bottom up,” the Red Guard movement in China was an integral part of the Cultural Revolution – a political campaign organized “from the top down” by China's paramount leader Mao Zedong. Consequently, the Chinese youth movement of the 1960s did not entail “generational conflict” as happened in Western societies. On the contrary, it involved a dynamic of generational relations specific to Communist China. But the Red Guards in the course of their “revolutionary” experiences saw aspects of Chinese society that they could have never learned about in school; this exposure caused them to doubt the rosy picture of socialist China painted by state propaganda. As an unintended consequence, many of them ended up questioning the Communist faith, setting the stage for the rise of an independently “thinking generation.”

Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement, by Andrew G. Walder.

"Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement, by Andrew G. Walder.." Canadian Journal of History, 45(2), pp. 427–428

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION WARFARE AT BEIJING'S UNIVERSITIESFractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement. Andrew G. Walder

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssayTHE CULTURAL REVOLUTION WARFARE AT BEIJING'S UNIVERSITIES Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement. Andrew G. Walder Jonathan UngerJonathan Unger Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 64July 2010 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/tcj.64.20749253 Views: 77Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © The China JournalPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Yiching Wu The Great Retreat and its Discontents: Re-Examining the Shengwulian Episode in the Cultural Revolution, The China Journal 72 (Jun 2015): 1–28.https://doi.org/10.1086/677049

Fractured rebellion: the Beijing Red Guard movement

Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China's Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation's capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement's crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure. Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged conservative students against socially marginalized radicals who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar - largely defensive - motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion. Walder's nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China's Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.

Ambiguity and Choice in Political Movements: The Origins of Beijing Red Guard Factionalism

Theories about political movements typically posit models of actor choice that contain untested static assumptions about context. Short‐run changes in these contexts—induced by rapid shifts in the properties of political institutions—can alter choices and actors’ interests, rapidly transforming the political landscape. China’s Red Guard Movement of 1966–68 is a case in point. A generation of scholarship has attributed its violent factionalism to the opposed interests of different status groups. New evidence about the origins of the movement in Beijing’s universities indicates that to the contrary, factions emerged when activists in similar structural positions made opposed choices in ambiguous contexts. Activists subsequently mobilized to defend earlier choices, binding them to antagonistic factions. Rapid shifts in the contexts for political choice can alter prior connections between social position and interests, generating new motives and novel identities. Close attention to these contextual mechanisms can yield novel accounts of the nature and origins of political movements.

Fruitful Death: Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger on Human Sacrifice, 1937–1945

AbstractMircea Eliade, the writer and historian of religions, and Ernst Jünger, the hero of the Great War, novelist, and essayist, met in the 1950s and co-edited twelve issues of the periodical Antaios. Before they met and cooperated, however, and while the German writer knew about Eliade from their common friend, Carl Schmitt, they both dealt with the subject of human sacrifice. Eliade began to do so in the thirties, and his interest in that theme was at least in part an aspect of his political activism on behalf of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Iron Guard, the nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement lead by Corneliu Codreanu. Sacrificial ideology was a central aspect of the Legion's political theories, as well as of the practice of its members. After the Iron Guard was outlawed by its allies, and many of its members had been killed, and while the Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu was still fighting alongside the National Socialist regime in the Second World War, Eliade turned to other aspects of sacrificial ideology. In 1939 he wrote the play Iphigenia, celebrating Agamemnon's daughter as a willing victim whose death made the Greek conquest of Troy possible; and as a member of the regime's diplomatic service in Lisbon he published a book in Portuguese on Romanian virtues (1943), in which he presented what he called Two Myths of Romanian Spirituality, extolling his nation's readiness to die through the description of the sacrificial traditions of Master Manole and of the Ewe Lamb (Mioritza). Jünger's attitude to sacrifice ran along lines that were less traditional: possibly already while serving as a Wehrmacht officer, in his pamphlet Der Friede, the German writer attributed sacrificial status to all the victims of the Second World War, soldiers, workmen, and unknowing innocents, and saw their death as the ransom of a peace "without victory or defeat." In this article, the sacrificial ideologies of the two intellectuals are compared in order to reflect upon the complex interplay between traditional religious themes, more or less freely re-interpreted and transformed, political power, and violent conflict, in an age of warfare marked by fascisms and by the terrible massacre some refer to by the name of an ancient Greek sacrificial practice.

The Cioran Exception

Emil Cioran, the Romanian philosopher living in France from the late 1930s until his death in 1995, devoted his life to what American novelist and critic William Gass has called 'a philosophical romance on modem themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease.' I A self-identified exile and iconoclast whose work varies in form from meandering philosophical essay to terse aphorism, Cioran refused to belong to any literary or philosophical movement in France although he lived in the heart of the literary sixth arrondissement in Paris for over fifty years and counted Eugene lonesco and Samuel Beckett among his close friends. He preferred solitude to affiliation and cultivated a reputation of mystery and notoriety as a literary genius, a Romanian transplant, and a misanthropic' penseur d' occasion' .2 Recent revelations about his experiences in Romania in the early part of this century, however, have shattered this image ofthe reclusive, timid philosopher whose imposed solitude and obscurity elicited unquestioned respect among the reading public. More precisely, his participation in the Iron Guard movement, a protofascist, anti -democratic movement inspired by mysticism and German National Socialism that reached its zenith during his adolescence and years as a college student in Bucharest, has caused a buzz of speculation and outrage. While Cioran may not have been a member of the Iron Guard, or the Legionary movement as it is also known, he did 'intensely experience the legionnaire phenomenon' as the author of one quite astute study of fascism's influence over young Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s put it. 3 The extent to which he became an enthusiast, for a time, of the movement serves as an important metric for Cioran' s capacity for negative passions, as his writing from this period demonstrates. I would hypothesize that the body of his work written in French after 1937 was a response to his involvement in the fascist movement in Romania during his twenties. Although undeclared as such, his post-Romania writing served as a lifelong attempt to rewrite thoughts once expressed publicly (which he regretted in retrospect) and as an attempt to exorcise demons that never ceased to plague him. Cioran's misanthropy, his

Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China (review)

Reviewed by: Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China Richard King (bio) Zhu Xiao Di . Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xiv, 255 pp. Hardcover $34.95, ISBN 1-55849-112-0. Thirty Years in a Red House joins an impressive and growing list of memoirs written since the mid-1980s by Chinese nationals born in the 1950s and now resident in the West, a list that includes Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro's Son of the Revolution, Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Gao Yuan's Born Red, Zhai Zhenhua's Red Flower of China, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Rae Yang's Spider Eaters, and Ting-xing Ye's A Leaf in the Bitter Wind. Typically, the authors of these memoirs recall a life of relative tranquillity disrupted by the Cultural Revolution; they describe Red Guard excesses and the persecution of their families followed by years of banishment from the cities to state farms and cadre schools; then they conclude with political rehabilitation and the decision to leave China, often with the help of a Western partner. Catering to an apparently insatiable appetite in the book trade for tales of communist brutality, each reveals to a target audience unfamiliar with Chinese history the extraordinary events of the Maoist period, attempting to make as much sense as can be made of an age of paranoia, injustice, and mutual betrayal in which they and their families were victims. A cursory look at Zhu Xiao Di's book confirms his place in the company mentioned above. The title is appropriately red, and there is a selection of photographs featuring the author's family in unsmiling group poses and the author himself, from infancy to adulthood as he returns from America to his birthplace. There is also the incorporation of the family saga into a conventional retelling of the history of the nation and the author's hometown, in this case Nanjing. Most of the authors offer much the same basic fare, each with his (or, more frequently, her) experiences and literary artistry providing the distinctive regional and personal flavor that brings the reader back for another course at the same table. Zhu's narrative presents the predictable stories of unjustified accusation, cruelty, and humiliation. The first heady days of the Red Guard movement and the mass rallies in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent "sending down" to the countryside—staples in the writings of his slightly older contemporaries—appear here vicariously, through the experiences of the author's sister. So much is predictable; but what distinguishes this book from the others is its extraordinary degree of filial piety: the book is at heart a eulogy of the author's father Zhu Qiluan, and of the class of establishment intellectuals of which he appears as a shining example. When the author expresses his determination, common to almost all autobiographers, to "set the record straight" (p. 159), and provide his version of the past, it is principally his father's record that he seeks to elaborate. [End Page 281] Zhu presents his father in the most romantic terms that his age and class permit: he casts him in the image of Zhou Enlai. Not only does Zhu senior bear a physical resemblance to the founding premier of the People's Republic, he also embodies the qualities that feature in the mythology that built up around Zhou— a man of culture at home among the intelligentsia, a leader maintaining an austere lifestyle, and a public servant exhausting himself for the welfare of the nation. As if resemblance to Zhou Enlai were not enough, the author likens his father to another hero of the pre-Cultural Revolution establishment, comparing his oratory to that of Shanghai mayor and foreign minister Chen Yi. Like other members of this class, writing since their rehabilitation in the late 1970s, the author implies that if only they had been allowed to maintain control of the Chinese state, all might have been well, and the disasters he recounts would have been averted. But the author's loyal and honest...

The Past and the Punishments (review)

288 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments. Translated by Andrew Jones. Honolulu : University ofHawai'i Press, 1996. 277 pp. Paperback $14.95, isbn 0-8248-1782-6. This coUection ofeight short stories and noveUas by Yu Hua (b. i960), one of the prominent New Wave writers (xinchao zuojia, or avant-garde writers) who emerged in the second halfofthe 1980s, represents a promising development in contemporary Chinese fiction. These eight stories and noveUas are: On the Road atEighteen (Shiba sui chumenyuanxing), Classical Love (Gudian aiqing), World Like Mist (Shishi ruyan), The Past and the Punishments (Wangshiyu xingfa), 1986, Blood and Plum Blossoms (Xianxie meihua), The Death ofa Landlord ( Yige dizhu de si), and Predestination (Mingzhongzhuding)—aU written between 1987 and 1992. Except for Predestination, I think the anthology is weU chosen. The members ofthe New Wave mainly draw their inspiration from such foreign writers as Franz Kafka, Kawabata Yasunari, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alain Robbe-GriUet, whose works were translated into Chinese in the 1980s. Besides Yu Hua, others who represent this group include Ge Fei, Hong Feng, Sun Ganlu, Bei Cun, and Lu Xin. Yu Hua is better known outside China, dianks to Zhang Yimou's film To Live (Huozhe), which was based on Yu Hua's novella with the same title. Reading diese stories, the reader can feel the resonance ofKafka. In an article "The Legacies ofKawabata and Kafka" (Collected WorL· ofYu Hua [Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 1995], vol. 2, pp. 294-297), Yu Hua acknowledged fhat he was gready inspired by Kafka's fiction. Indeed, die title story The Past and the Punishments clearly resembles Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Yu Hua's fiction is abundant in diemes ofviolence, crime and punishment, anxiety and obsession , and pain and guUt. In his early short story On the Road at Eighteen, the helplessness ofthe naive protagonist in the face ofviolence and die indifference of the driver already foreshadow his later preoccupations. While Yu Hua borrows a great deal from Kafka, he by no means loses sight of the Chinese situation. The recent past, particularly the Cultural Revolution, runs through many ofhis stories. An outstanding example (the best in this anthology ) is the story 1986. Why 1986? It may be that Yu Hua had in mind the powerful precedent ofGeorge OrweU's 1984, written in 1948. By reversing "86," we have 1968—the most violent period of fhe Cultural Revolution. It may be that the year 1986 situates the story in a time detached from the recent past—now the© 1997 by University daughter is in her twenties and fhe memories ofher long-absent father gradually ofHawai'iPressfacje awaV- xhe final two pages ofdie concluding section of1986sum up with Reviews 289 ironie restraint but devastating precision what the translator in his postscript aptiy caUs "a historical amnesia ofthe post-Mao economic boom" (p. 271). Classical Love and Blood and Plum Blossoms demonstrate Yu Hua's deconstruction ofthe traditional patterns ofthe knight-errant's revenge theme and the "talented scholar and beautiful lady" theme in classical vernacular fiction. The Death ofa Landlordis an overturning ofthe CCP's hero myth by making a dandy (the landlord's son) sacrifice himselfby leading Japanese soldiers to a remote district. World LikeMistpaints a living heU haunted by mysterious ghosdy forces. The power ofYu Hua's fiction lies in its abUity to lead fhe reader to a world that defies social norms and which uncovers horrifying and disturbing visions. The New Wave writers, who were mostiy born in the early 1960s, can be considered fhe third generation of Chinese writers since 1949. The first generation consists mainly offhose "rightist" writers who were purged during the 1957 AntiRightist Campaign; the second generation consists mainly ofthose Zhiqing(sentdown educated youths) who were involved in the Red Guard Movement (19661968 ) and were subsequendy sent to the countryside. The least affected by Maoist indoctrination, the New Wave writers have been fortunate to escape the deprivation ofeducation suffered by the Zhiqinggeneration. They have also been fortunate to be able to read (mosdy in Chinese translations) previously unavailable foreign works. With fewer preconceived notions ofliterature, and in a less oppressive atmosphere...