Mao Period Research Articles

Homo(sexual) socialist: Psychiatry and homosexuality in China in the Mao and early Deng eras

AbstractThis article focuses on the relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality in the People's Republic of China from the Mao era to early Deng era (1949–c.90). I argue that, entangled with the multi‐centred global psychopathological regime of homosexuality, the psychiatric discourse in China perpetuated a medicalised concept of homosexuality from the Mao period through the early Deng years. This article further situates homosexuality in Mao's China in the socialist camp to call for a decentring historiography of modern homosexuality. It also contributes to the understanding of the continuity between the Mao era and the Deng era.

Justice for Whom? Redressing the “1975 Shadian Incident” in the Post-Mao Era, 1978–2019

The “Shadian conflict,” which erupted in 1964 and continued until at least 1975, was the largest religious resistance of the Cultural Revolution, but its local dynamics and sociopolitical impacts are significantly understudied. This article sheds light on how Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have dealt with Shadian Muslims’ petitions and requests for religious freedom from 1979 until 2019. It argues that the post–Mao Zedong CCP leadership has continued to implement the same mentality and methods as in the Mao period to deal with ethno-religious conflicts. At the center of this process lies the events of 1975 that have come to be known as the “Shadian incident” or “Shadian massacre,” in which around 1,600 Shadian Muslims were killed. The party’s approaches to redressing the events of 1975 have secularized and simplified the causes of the Shadian massacre and the religious requests of Muslim villagers by attributing the tragedy and villagers’ protests to factional struggles launched by “followers of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” and “a handful of chaos-making figures.” Embedded in ongoing struggles between vernacular and official narratives of the 1975 tragedy, the Shadian problem has resulted in unreconciled discord between the CCP, which prioritizes the Maoist class-struggle mentality, and villagers, who emphasize Islamic religiosity.

Trauma, Guilt, and Shame in Ba Jin's Random Thoughts

Trauma, Guilt, and Shame in Ba Jin's Random Thoughts Min Yang (bio) Random Thoughts (Suixiang lu) is the last major literary work that Ba Jin (1904–2005), one of the greatest modern Chinese writers and cultural icons, completed after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). It is also one of a few literary works to report the trauma of the Cultural Revolution that had troubled his generation of intellectuals. Ba Jin called his generation Children of the May Fourth Movement, or the May Fourth generation, in that they were enlightened by humanism, democracy, and science advocated during the May Fourth Movement from the mid-1910s to the 1920s (2009, 63). They emerged as predominant writers and cultural icons in the 1930s and 1940s, were recruited as sympathizers with or believers in socialism after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established its power in 1949, but were attacked in political movements during Mao's period between 1949 and 1976. During the Cultural Revolution, most of this generation became immediate targets of mass violence. Labeled as "cow ghosts, snake demons," they were dehumanized, humiliated, and tortured. The trauma they experienced beyond physical injuries inflicted deep wounds in their souls. This article takes Random Thoughts, a collection of 150 essays, as an example to study how the May Fourth generation who survived the Cultural Revolution recognized and coped with the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. I study subtlety and ramifications of narratives in the essays. I demonstrate that these essays, rather than consistently taking one particular narrative form, such as memoir, confession, or autobiography (Lin 1993, 172; Martine 1992, 227; Zhang 2015, 36; Chen 1996, 86), present peculiar fragmentations that feature inconsistency, dissonance, ambiguity, and repetition. I argue that these fragmented narratives suggest a deeply traumatized Ba Jin who endeavored, albeit painfully, to reconstruct his integrity, identity, and humanity, all of which were shattered during the Cultural Revolution. I also advance that this reconstruction transpires in a protracted and yet dynamic process in which Ba Jin coped with his post-traumatic guilt, which he initially denied, gradually explored, and eventually confronted in his protracted contemplation. [End Page 155] Ba Jin: From Anarchism to Communism Ba Jin (the pen name of Li Feigan) was born into an aristocratic family in Chengdu, which was strictly controlled by autocratic rulers and Confucianist values. In 1920, inspired by Emma Goldman (Russian anarchist, 1869–1940), the fifteen-year-old Ba Jin became an enthusiastic anarchist. He studied in Paris between 1927 and 1929, and during this period he completed his first novel, Destruction. Destruction provides a self-portrait of Ba Jin through a fervent anarchist protagonist who seeks his freedom by challenging the entire reality of the world (Song 2017, 333). In 1931, Ba Jin published his most celebrated novel, Family, which depicts contradictions between the young generation, who were enlightened by the May Fourth Movement, and the old generation, who repressed the young generation by patriarchal and feudal values. The novel expresses Ba Jin's rebellious and absolute refusal to compromise with feudalism, which shaped many urban young people's political attitudes in the 1930s (Rapp 2015, 3). Family and Ba Jin's numerous other literary works made him one of the most popular Chinese writers in the 1930s and 1940s, second only to Lu Xun (Kaldis 2016, 412). Given that Chinese anarchists originally were tied to the Nationalist Party (the opponent of the CCP before 1949) (Dirlik 1989, 420–21), Ba Jin's identity as an anarchist put him into an unsettled position requiring self-reformation and self-denunciation during Mao's period. Ba Jin launched a series of anti-anarchist activities in the 1950s. He aggressively revised his previous novels by removing the parts that embodied anarchism, and he wrote many essays and stories to extol communist war heroes and other new people of the socialist society. After his youth as an anarchist, Ba Jin made his peace with the CCP (Larson and Kraus 1989, 156). However, this peace did not last long. Ba Jin's self-denunciation and self-reformation did not spare him from verbal and physical attacks during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards (teenagers who were mobilized to conduct the massive violence...

Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? by Wang Xiaoping

Reviewed by: Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? by Wang Xiaoping Gal Gvili Wang Xiaoping. Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism: Renaissance or Rehabilitation? Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2021. Pp. x+388. US$167.00 hardcover, US$167.00 ebook. Wang Xiaoping is a prolific scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, [End Page 568] cinema, and culture and a keen observer and interpreter of contemporary academic debates in China. In English alone, Wang has published four books and numerous articles, and his output in Chinese far surpasses these numbers. In Chinese Literature and Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism, Wang embarks upon an ambitious endeavour: mapping the contours, the premises, and the impetus fueling Chinese literature, cinema, and cultural criticism from 1976 to the present. Wang reads poetry, films, short and long fiction, as well as a robust set of critical works in English and Chinese that all, in his thesis, engage an acute identity crisis China has been facing. Namely, Wang investigates literature, culture, and academic debates to search for an answer to the question: what constitutes Chineseness in the current era, in which China is both a Communist country and a major player in global capitalism? The answer is given through an extensive discussion and close readings of Chinese new poetry, 1980s Avant Garde Fiction, 1990s Historical Fiction, Six Generation Cinema, and critical essays and books by thinkers associated with the Chinese New Left and Liberal camps. Wang argues that Chineseness today is refracted in cultural texts as a dialectic between a socialist consciousness that harks back to the Mao era while looking forward to envision new possibilities, and a liberal mentality that draws upon both the Chinese pre-modern, mostly Confucian ethos and Western liberalism to forge a future for the Chinese nation. In a dense analytical narrative, Wang moves chronologically from the late 1970s to contemporary times, and examines each cultural phenomenon by loosely employing Raymond Williams’s concept of Three Cultures. Williams suggested, as early as the late 1950s, that the complex dynamic underscoring national cultures can be understood as a dynamic of triangulation between the dominant hegemonic culture, residual culture-a culture of a previous age that resides within the dominant national culture either as a fortification of or as a disruption to its values-and an emergent culture that generates new social structures and values and thus becomes a new force that challenges dominant culture. Wang adopts this framework for one main use: detecting residues of socialist culture in poetry, fiction, and cinema that had often been misread, in his view, as emblems of a new “free” expression that the end of the Mao era supposedly enabled. In the impressive array of texts examined, Wang identifies a slow “disappearance of idealism” (18) that nevertheless remains a fait accompli. Socialist themes, aesthetics, and value continually inform Chinese language literature and cinema even though they have diminished over the years. Juxtaposing, for example, in Chapters Six and Seven, the films Dirt (Toufa luanle 頭髮亂了, 1992) and The Making of Steel (Zhangda chengren 长大成人, 1997) with Lust/Caution (Se/Jie 色戒, 2007) demonstrates how, in Wang’s reading, even as thematic eulogizing of the revolutionary generation made way for more so-called universal engagement with espionage and sex, residues of the CCP/KMT conflict, with their radically different ideologies, still shaped the artistry and the reception of Ang Lee’s 2007 work. Indeed, as Wang states in the opening pages of the introduction, this academic study promotes a political agenda, which is calling for a “socialist re-orientation” [End Page 569] (313) that could carry forward, revitalized, the values of China’s socialist revolution. One way to move in this direction, this book suggests, is by revisiting contemporary culture and reading it through a lens that is sensitive to socialist undercurrents: While China’s postsocialism is, to a certain extent, characterized by pragmatism-a political principle practiced by Chinese politicians in the post Mao period in general, as well as the living conditions and life philosophy followed by the Chinese populace in their daily activities in particular-we must still pay close attention to...

Breaking with the Family Form: Historical Categories, Social Reproduction, and Everyday Life in Late 1950s Rural China

AbstractThis article explores the way PRC historians use analytical categories by looking at the emergence of a divide between production and the social reproduction of labor (all the work that goes into producing and raising laborers) that transformed and structured rural everyday life during the Mao period. Everyday life is historical, produced in different ways under different material conditions, structured and shaped by social forms in motion. Thus, it is not an analytical frame through which historians can view the real content of the Mao period underneath the thin veneer of Maoist high politics and its categories. This article therefore argues that everyday life, far from a sphere resisting the impositions and dictates of the state, is fully implicated in the political-economic structuring of society. This is a call to not simply replace an earlier social science focus on the political economy of the PRC with a bottom-up or empirical view of everyday life, recognizing that everyday life is already a structured terrain. Rather than bringing in social science analytical categories from the outside or searching for an empirical real view from below, we need to investigate the emergence of categories and social forms from the real material limits and tendencies of a rapidly changing PRC society.

Rethinking the Political Economy of Development in Mao's China

AbstractThis article examines two theoretical frameworks used to evaluate Maoist development. The first is based on neoclassical economic theory, and the second is rooted in the idea that the Chinese Communist Party made China into a state capitalist regime. Both these theoretical frameworks presume to know what economic practices the CCP should have engaged in and fault the Party for not conforming to their standards of judgment. This article finds this normative approach to analyzing Maoist development to be wanting for four reasons. In its drive to depict China as acting anomalously, this normative standpoint insufficiently attends to the empirical specificities of economic activities of the Mao era. It does not take enough into account how China's socialist identity shaped the CCP's economic initiatives. Nor does it dig deep enough into how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War influenced Chinese development. This way of writing the history of the Mao period also overlooks similarities between China and other developmental states in Cold War East Asia. This article calls on historians to adopt a different approach to the study of Chinese development and scour available documentation with the aim of comprehending the economic practices of Mao's China on their own terms.

Understanding the Nobel Laureate ‘Mo Yan’ Through His Fiction

One of the main characteristics of Contemporary Chinese Literature is that it has remained true to the time it represented. Although it has been used extensively to serve the political agenda of the Communist party on occasions, but it has managed to carry forward the idea of realism, which started to flourish during the May Fourth period. After the announcement of the policy of “Reform and Opening up” by Deng Xiaoping in the Post Mao period China, a brilliant story teller emerged from the rural area of Gaomi in Shandong province of China. This paper aims to understand the phenomena created by Mo Yan’s writings in contemporary period of Chinese literature. The paper initially has discussed the major trends in post-Mao period Chinese literature to provide the background for understanding the emergence of Mo Yan. The paper has tried to discuss the major trends in Mo Yan’s writings focusing on the fiction-world created by him in his novels. Then it has further analysed the characteristics of Mo Yan’s writings. Finally, through the analysis of available contents a conclusion has been drawn.

Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation: The Reassertion of Ideological Governance in Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. How can one make sense of what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing? This essay offers perspectives from the history of the Party and its notable style of rule: ideological governance through rectification (zhengfeng). This Party ‘statecraft’ which dates back to Yan’an in the 1940s and across the Mao period also draws on long-standing Chinese political norms. Xi Jinping is reviving a form of ideological governance in which only the Party can save China and only rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. It is Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation against the reform Leninism of the past three decades and its perceived failures to manage social tensions and Party corruption.

Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter by Lyle Fearnley

Reviewed by: Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter by Lyle Fearnley Katherine A. Mason Lyle Fearnley. Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 288 pp. In this exceptionally timely ethnography of avian husbandry and virological sciences in China, Lyle Fearnley answers a question that the catastrophic events of the past 14 months have rendered only more urgent: Why do viral pandemics always seem to come out of China? And what, if anything, can or should be done about it? “Seem” is the operative word here, and Fearnley smartly evades the question of whether China really is uniquely culpable, in any normative sense, for producing zoonotic viral threats like COVID-19. Instead, using H5N1 avian influenza as a prototypical example, he explores the scientific, discursive, and social origins and ramifications of this perception of culpability. When Fearnley refers to China as a “pandemic epicenter,” he means that this country—reviled, feared, and opaque as it continues to be in the eyes of much of the global scientific community—has become the epicenter of viral imaginaries. He then sets out to peel back the layers of those imaginaries, by undertaking comprehensive ethnographic inquiries into the science, animal husbandry, social relationships, and bureaucratic machinations that are implicated in the production and dissemination of Chinese poultry and their viruses. This clearly written, scrupulously researched and compelling account should be required reading for any scholar who is serious about understanding the dynamic interplay among viruses, animals, and people that are thought to be behind the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. [End Page 371] Fearnley’s account is divided into three parts: “Ecology,” “Landscape,” and “Territory.” In the first part, he traces the history of how influenza among domestic poultry came to be conceptualized as a dire threat to humans, and how Chinese duck farms and wild poultry sites came to be identified as the culprits. He considers the ways in which surveillance programs moved from laboratory to ecological landscape, breaking the bounds of carefully managed environments and leaning into the chaotic messiness of China’s bird-scapes. In Part 2, he takes readers to Poyang Lake, a freshwater lake in Jiangxi province which was identified as ground zero for the mixing and emergence of new avian virus strains. This is the part of the book where Fearnley really shows the power of ethnography to uncover critical missing pieces of epidemiological puzzles. At Poyang Lake, he discovers that the divides between commercial farms and small-scale backyard farms are not nearly as clear as they seem. Strict biosecurity blends together with casual kin-like relationships between farmers and poultry in ways that seem to elude both scientists and bureaucrats. In a chapter aptly entitled “Wild Goose Chase,” the lines between wild and domestic birds blend together as well. This raises the question—which he picks up again in a postscript written in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak—of how calls to eliminate the wildlife trade as a pandemic prevention measure can possibly be accomplished when it is not at all clear what counts as “wild,” or what farmers and scientists even mean by that word. Part 3, which digs into the training of veterinarians in China and the machinations of domestic and global animal health bureaucracies, serves as a helpful addendum to similar work on human health in China and beyond. Here Fearnley shows that many of the transformations that China’s (human) public health system underwent in the Mao period, early reform period, and post-SARS period were also mirrored in the animal health sector, with similar benefits and drawbacks. As professionalization efforts raised the educational pedigrees of veterinary officials in the 21st century, their connections to the animals and farmers they served weakened, to the detriment of animal health and pandemic preparedness efforts. What resulted was an advanced science that was increasingly incapable of meeting—or even understanding—the needs of the local agricultural sector. The conclusion to the book, which was written shortly before the arrival of COVID-19, is eerily prescient to read. Beginning with news of an outbreak of avian...

Searching for Fairness in Revolutionary China: Inheritance Disputes in Maoist Courts and Their Legacy in the PRC Law of Succession

This article examines how PRC judges ruled on inheritance disputes during the Mao period (1949–1976). In fact, China not only rejected a draft succession law in 1956, it also did not promulgate any law governing succession until 1985. In part, this has contributed to the conventional characterization of China in the Mao period as a “lawless society” dominated by radical Maoist and Marxist ideologies. By using newly available archival documents and internal publications of local courts and legal cadres, this article reveals that PRC judges rejected the codification of law because the legal principles stipulated in the 1956 draft succession law could not be applied to the complex social reality of rural China at the time. Therefore, court rulings became products of the long-standing efforts of judges to reconcile the principles of justice inherent in the 1956 draft succession law and complex social realities in order to deliver judgments that all litigants could accept as fair. This article highlights how such efforts finally led to a codified law of succession in 1985. Hence, the Succession Law of 1985 was not a departure from the previous “lawless” Mao era, but the completion of PRC judges’ long process of amending the “incomplete” 1956 draft.

The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China by David A Pietz

Reviewed by: The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern Chinaby David A Pietz E. Elena Songster (bio) The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China. by David A Pietz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 384. $39.95. David A. Pietz makes clear in this book that the Yellow River is not just any river. According to the first sentence, it ceased even being a river when, "In 1997 the Yellow River dried up" (p. 1). From this stark start, the reader is carried on a detailed, fascinating, and important journey from the river's ancient historical significance as the body of water that is credited with giving birth to China's civilization to the present crisis of water scarcity. The [End Page 621]Yellow River also is an engineering marvel. In long stretches, it is a hanging river, meaning it flows elevated above the land on either side propped up by the ancient technical ingenuity of dike construction. This unusual trait is the reason that the Yellow River is not only seen as the source of life in China, but also repeatedly has been the source of mass death. Dubbed "China's Sorrow," the river has offered the millions who have settled and farmed along its fertile banks the tragic pattern of repeated floods and periodic shifts in its course to the sea. This history of the Yellow River is also a history of China, not just as it is carved in the landscape of the North China Plain, but in what it reveals about major national events and the relationships that tie the people to their government and land. At the same time, in pursuing these concurrent foci, Pietz is telling the story of water, humanity's efforts to "order the waters," and how China came to find itself in such a dire water crisis. Throughout the book, he underscores the important point that the Yellow River and history are entwined not only in the past, but also in the future. After this long and careful study, Pietz is able to advise anyone interested in tackling the ongoing desperate water problems of the North China Plain that "the enduring legacies of the physical setting and cultural patterns will shape the parameters of available options" (p. 3). I advise anyone interested in any of these issues to read this book. There is much here for historians of technology to feast on, both in technology content and in historical context. The book is rich in maps and diagrams of various diking strategies over the centuries. Pietz includes extensive debates about silt and sluicing, dam designs, and the juxtaposition of scientific traditions—ancient Chinese and modern Western—which he finds in particular spots to be remarkably similar. Approximately one-quarter of the book is dedicated to the ancient and imperial eras. These are not merely background, but in some ways the most fascinating time periods and fundamental to Pietz's point that cultural traditions have longevity. In these early sections he demonstrates clearly the degree to which humans have changed the landscape long before mechanization, let alone modern industrialization. This study highlights the tremendous emphasis that new nationalists placed on learning and importing modern Western science to early-twentieth-century China. In devoting the middle sections to the Mao era (1949–76), Pietz makes several important contributions to the literature on this era and to the history of science and technology. Beneath the broad-stroke characterizations of the Mao period, Pietz reveals the persistent presence of Soviet influence and soviet-like approaches to engineering (even if they weren't called such) well after the Sino-Soviet split. He also notes the emergence of a distinctively Maoist approach to industrial growth that was linked closely to water management. The last section of the book grounds the rapid growth from the reform [End Page 622]era to the present day in historical context with attention to pollution, climate change, food security, and, importantly, the interconnection of China's water problems and the rest of the world. It is a must read for graduate courses on environmental history or modern Chinese studies and also workable for a more...

Environmental Degradation in China under Mao and Today: A Comparative Reflection

Abstract This essay reflects on the arguments made in two books on China’s environmental degradation, the first on the Mao period ( Mao’s War against Nature ), the second on contemporary China ( China’s Environmental Challenges ). It identifies continuities and discontinuities in the underlying forces driving China’s extreme environmental problems. Under Mao, the deep drivers of environmental harm included political repression, utopian urgency, dogmatic formalism and forcible relocations. Nowadays, drivers include globalisation, population increase, urbanisation, the rise of the middle class, challenges of governance and weak civil society, and the displacement of environmental harm across time and space. To what extent has China’s willingness to become the world’s manufacturing hub changed the basic dynamics of environmental harm in the country? Do themes such as lack of public participation and access to information, as well as the State’s need to secure resources in its border territories (and, now, overseas) point to continuities, even as the level of degradation has risen to levels unimaginable as China stood on the brink of reform in 1978? This essay argues that there are both continuities and discontinuities. It concludes with a discussion of the drivers of environmental protection, and an acknowledgment that the Chinese government is going to great lengths to deal with China’s environmental crisis. Although some drivers of environmental harm are intractable, others may yet be redirected and permit grounds for hope.

Chinese individualization, revisited

The article critically examines the application of the individualization thesis to China. Factors presented in support of the case for Chinese individualization are shown to be either ambiguous or, on examination, counter-indicators. Family transformations from the Mao period to the present maintain family obligation. Labour migration, rather than leading to individualization expresses family commitment. Rights awareness similarly provides no clear evidence of individualization while rural and labour struggles around collective rights do not support the thesis.

The Beijing Consensus and Possible Lessons from the 'Singapore Model'?

This paper suggests that there is very little substance to the so-called Beijing Consensus. Instead, China's political system is simply the consequence of the communist triumph over the Kuomintang, and her economic approach the reversal of the disastrous policies of the Mao period coupled with lessons learnt from the economic development of other Asian economies including Singapore. As Singapore is often touted as a model for China, this paper sets out an important but often underappreciated element that underpins Singapore's success, namely its democratic system of government. It suggests that this may be the most important lesson that China can learn from Singapore.

From factory to field: Waste-water irrigation in China's early socialist cities

Abstract In the 1950s, cities in China began experimenting with waste-water irrigation as a solution to environmental problems emerging from rapid urban and industrial growth. This paper explores the reasons behind the promotion of this technology and the difficulties encountered in implementing it. I argue that growing interest in waste-water irrigation can best be understood in the context of national development strategies and the political-economic conditions of the early Mao period. Building on a long tradition in China of using human waste as fertiliser, waste-water irrigation in the 1950s and early 1960s was seen as forward-looking and modern, yet still consistent with the principle of frugality promoted by the state. It was also understood to be a mode of metabolising urban wastes that would enhance links between town and country, as well as between workers and peasants - two of the 'Three Great Differences' (or antagonisms) that Chinese socialism sought to eliminate. The paper uses the concept of 'metabolism' as a frame for understanding the promotion of wastewater irrigation during its experimental period despite uncertainties regarding the ecological effects of newly established circuits of waste and water that were reconnecting parts of urban China with their surrounding rural hinterlands.

State and Society in China’s Environmental Politics

It is increasingly common to encounter headlines detailing China’s environmental woes and the social action that has appeared as a result. These headlines run side-by-side with stories of China’s continued economic growth and rise in global prominence. The fact that these two issues are connected is not lost on Chinese citizens or the Communist Party of China. The way these competing, though related, issues are addressed by state and society in China is of central concern to the country as well as to the global community. Though the topic of environmental degradation and social response has been previously explored by many academics in the context of China, the issue has gained a broader audience. The three books under review generally seek to reach this broader audience and to address key tensions in China’s environmental governance, providing insight into changes in state–society relations. There has been an opening of social space in China over the last twenty years, allowing for increased public activism related to environmental issues, at a scale unimaginable even thirty years ago. The nature of this space, however, and the political context in which it has emerged, are contentious. Judith Shapiro provides an overview of the broad spectrum of related issues involved in China’s Environmental Challenges, using a textbook format to introduce the key debates regarding environmental governance in China. Following her now seminal study Mao’s War Against Nature, Shapiro’s newest book draws on a historical view of environmental issues in the country; shifting

A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 by John Craig William Keating (review)

JOHN CRAIG WILLIAM KEATING, A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989. Studies in Missionaries and Christianity in China. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012. xii, 305 pp. US$85 (hb). ISBN 978-1-61146-090-2 This book aims to fill a gap in the study of Christianity in China through a case study of a single church that was the largest Protestant church before 1949 (p. 228). Prominently situated across from People’s Square in Shanghai and topped by a huge neon cross, Moore Memorial church (MMC or Mu’en tang 沐恩堂) has been a central site for Chinese Protestantism in the missionary, Mao, and reform eras. Before 1949, MMC missionaries testified against British forces that had killed Chinese, upending claims that all Protestant missionaries supported colonial domination against rising Chinese nationalism. After 1949, the church was a launching pad for Chinese pastors who assumed national leadership in the official ‘‘patriotic’’ religious association for Protestants, the Chinese Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement association (TSPM, or 中國基督教三自愛國運動協會). The book draws on missionary papers written before 1949, official Chinese government documents (including some from the Shanghai Municipal Archives), and Chinese church records, or whatever survived the Cultural Revolution. The author also conducted more than forty interviews in Chinese and in English with surviving church members, leaders, and others associated with the congregation in China and in the United States. Each chapter also references a surprisingly wide array of books and research articles. Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the history of Protestant Christianity before 1949 and then in 1950 and 1951, when the church ran its own affairs. Chapter 4 examines the key part played by Jiang Changchuan 江長川, an MMC pastor from 1936 to 1941, whom Keating helpfully labels a ‘‘shrewd operator’’ (p. 245) for sending private messages of concern to foreign missionaries at the same time that he was publicly attacking them for foreign imperialism (pp. 95–96). Chapters 5 and 6 cover the church in duress from 1958 to the end of the Mao period in the late 1970s. Chapter 7 discusses the reopening of official churches from 1979 to 1989, and chapter 8 summarizes the book’s findings. One overall finding is that neither severe critics of the official church as a regime ‘‘puppet’’ nor its supporters have gotten the church-state story right (p. 226). After such a tantalizing judgment, however, Keating ultimately finds that MMC people made compromises but were ‘‘genuine’’ Christians (p. 228). While this conclusion is not especially unusual, the book is still helpful for adding new fuel to ongoing debates in church-state relations and offering many details that made reading it a pleasure. Scholars have proposed a range of explanations for the growth of Protestant Christianity, because numbers have exploded more than seven-fold in thirty years, by the most conservative, Party-state estimates (a careful 2011 Pew survey puts the increase at nearly twentyfold in thirty years, to 58 million Protestants in official and unregistered ‘‘house’’ churches). The TSPM claims that the indigenous and united character of the church is responsible for this rapid growth, which Keating dismisses because many official churches retain Western styles of worship, and 228 BOOK REVIEWS services are often divided by denomination within a single church. MMC itself holds ‘‘amalgamated’’ (p. 191) worship services and congregants prefer the Western hymns, rather than Chinese ones (pp. 185–186). Keating also rejects the idea that Protestants who attended illegal gatherings in the 1970s later filled official churches in the 1980s (p. 191), because he imagines that, if this were the case, then in the 1980s illegal gatherings should have ceased while official churches should be full. He ignores the possibility that Chinese who became Christians during the 1970s when no public worship was allowed came to enjoy the ‘‘safety’’ of reopened official churches. New Christians then took their places in unregistered gatherings. Instead, he prefers the explanation that the relaxation of the socio-political climate has allowed Protestant numbers (along with those of other religious groups) to rise, but this does not explain why Chinese should choose Protestant Christianity over many other religious alternatives. Another fascinating dimension...

Global social issues: an encyclopedia

The essays in this volume aim to reconceptualize he political economy of the People's Republic of China by highlighting the changing character of urban-rural and state-society conflicts in the era of Mao Zedong's leadership and in the post-Mao reforms. While noting China's economic achievements, the analysis underscores major ironies of the mobilizational collectivism of the late Mao period as well as the conflicts being played out in the reforms centered on the countryside and China's international economic relations in the 1980s.

Collectivism and Productivity in Rural Development: The Chinese Experience

This paper investigates the Chinese experience in col­ lective farming during Mao's period. The relationship between collectivism and productivity, efficiency, and labor incentives are examined in a comparative frame­ work between the collectivization and the privatization years. The author argues that there is insufficient evi­ dence to support the conventional view that rural col­ lectivism directly generates the problems of lack of work incentives or the inefficient use of resources. In other words, the problems in the collective period are not necessarily generated by the collective practice itself

Han-Tang Zhongguo Gudianwu and the Problem of Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Dance: Sixty Years of Creation and Controversy

In 1979, after twenty-one years of political reeducation, Chinese classical dance professor Sun Ying (孙颖, 1929-2009) returned to the Beijing Dance Academy to instigate reform in the field of Zhongguo gudianwu , the official national dance form of the People's Republic of China. In creating the Han-Tang style of Zhongguo gudianwu , Sun challenged accepted notions of Chineseness within the field, especially the idea that Chinese indigenous theater, or xiqu , should serve as the primary foundation for a distinctively Chinese national body aesthetic. While Sun's alternative vision of Chineseness produced extensive controversy, this controversy is not antithetical to the historical aims and assumptions of Zhongguo gudianwu . Since the founding of the field in the early 1950s, practitioners of Zhongguo gudianwu have treated Chineseness as a subject for creative invention, interpretation, and debate; therefore, Sun's work is not a post-Mao phenomenon but rather an extension of the art and politics of the Mao period.