Recent Chinese History Research Articles

Genotyping and population characteristics of the China Kadoorie Biobank

The China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) is a population-based prospective cohort of >512,000 adults recruited from 2004 to 2008 from 10 geographically diverse regions across China. Detailed data from questionnaires and physical measurements were collected at baseline, with additional measurements at three resurveys involving ∼5% of surviving participants. Analyses of genome-wide genotyping, for >100,000 participants usingcustom-designed Axiom arrays, reveal extensive relatedness, recent consanguinity, and signatures reflecting large-scale population movements from recent Chinese history. Systematic genome-wide association studies of incident disease, captured through electronic linkage to death and disease registries and to the national health insurance system, replicate established disease loci and identify 14 novel disease associations. Together with studies of candidate drug targets and disease risk factors and contributions to international genetics consortia, these demonstrate the breadth, depth, and quality of the CKB data. Ongoing high-throughput omics assays of collected biosamples and planned whole-genome sequencing will further enhance the scientific value of this biobank.

Catarrhine Evolution in China

Cattrthrines (humans and nonhuman primates) in Asia experienced similar migrating routes from Africa to East Asia but with different time frames during the Miocene and Early Pliocene. They dispersed and radiated in East and Southeast Asia during the Pliocene and Pleistocene so that one’s experiences of evolutionary development and biodiversity changes can mutually be interpreted for the others. Thus, it is necessary to jointly explore the issues in mainland China, the major part of East Asia. Their regional fossil diversity profiles during Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Early Holocene and extant distribution patterns of the primates are analyzed in this study. The results indicate that primate diversity reached the climax before the Early Holocene, which has unfortunately been shrunken gradually in the following Holocene, especially during the most recent Chinese history, so that many taxa are on the edger of extinction. That fossil age in Eastern and Central China is older than in Western China clarifies that, instead of from Africa, the modern human (Homo sapiens) evolved directly from H. erectus in the regions.

Visibility

Flyers that the artist Hồng-Ân Trương collected from 2018 announce rallies and calls to advance and unify the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), where she teaches. The flyers protest systemic racism, police violence, and threats against faculty and students. They express support for a Black doctoral student studying recent Chinese history, Maya Little, who had poured their blood and red ink onto a Confederate statue on campus.For the last twenty years, Trương has been engaged with politics—participating in protests and community organizing and producing texts, photographs, videos, sculptures, performances, and installations that reinvigorate the past and frame history and the present as the intersections of many narratives. Photographs Trương shared with me of her studio reveal piles of large-format negatives and test prints showing protests. A sign in one image reads “Power to the People.”Another shows an Asian man wearing a blazer and holding his bloody head as police officers constrain him.I had three video calls with Trương in February and March of 2021, from which emerged the following text addressing various historical and contemporary forms of activism, visibility, invisibility, identification, and nationalism. At the end, we address the March 16, 2021, murders of eight people in the Atlanta area, six of them Asian women.There was a student at the vigil who read a poem about being chosen first to be on an academic team and last to be your friend. My daughter going to kindergarten is already getting made fun of for her food. It’s just rice and vegetables. Every Asian person could tell you that same story about food. Another aspect of the narratives that have come out around these murders is the class piece. Asian Americans are working class too. These murders [in Atlanta] coalesce around a certain trifecta of white supremacy: racial hierarchies, class vulnerabilities, and the sexualization of Asian women rooted in violent, toxic masculinity and misogynistic ideology. The assumption by the general public is that these women are sex workers. Sex work should be decrimininalized, but this is not about whether or not they are sex workers. What we should be talking about is the fact they were killed because of that perception, and that perception is built into the foundation of American empire and colonialism.

Madeleine Thien's Chinese Encyclopedia: Facts, Musics, Sympathies

This article explores the “encyclopedic” properties of Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), seeking to define the novel as inherently comparative—that is, providing, in Edward Said's words, “a comparative or, better, a contrapuntal perspective” on the world with no need for a second counterpart text to draw cross-literary parallels. Written from a transpacific narratorial stance of a millennial Vancouver-based daughter of Chinese immigrants, the narrative communicates her secondhand knowledge about the traumatic twentieth-century history of the People's Republic of China, accumulated in multiple alternating substories of ordinary individuals’ “practical past” as opposed to official historiography. The article likens Thien's patchwork storytelling to Jorge Luis Borges's apocryphal “Chinese” encyclopedia and novel, to the premodern equation between language and reality discussed in Michel Foucault's “archaeology of knowledge,” to classical Chinese novels as described by Goethe and Franco Moretti, and to J. S. Bach's polyphonic layout of the Goldberg Variations. Constructing sympathetic networks of music and literature, Do Not Say We Have Nothing facilitates readerly immersion, yet its fictional storyworld may not feel universally plausible. Sharing its writer's experience of teaching Thien in Hong Kong, the article suggests that a critique of the novel's Western, nearly Orientalist standpoint with respect to sensitive issues of recent Chinese history does not dismiss the contrapuntal outlook Thien's readers are invited to adopt beyond their experiential backgrounds. Reading Thien, one learns to hear the world's polyphony. That, and not a comprehensive multitude of facts summarizing a national mentality and coherent knowledge about the world, makes Do Not Say We Have Nothing encyclopedic.

Issues of Elder Care among Migrant Workers in Contemporary Rural China: Filial Piety Redefined from a Foucauldian Perspective

ABSTRACT This article reports on research that explored rural migrant workers’ experiences of returning to their hometown to provide care for elderly parents diagnosed with cancer. The authors used a culturally integrated approach to Foucauldian discourse analysis to consider how 24 participants narrated their experiences of care in China. The discourse of care demonstrated a strong commitment to filial piety despite their unique care challenges, and this commitment was bolstered by discourses that emphasized how much parents had sacrificed, as well as by a persistent forgetting of experiences or background details that suggested any lack of parental sacrifice in recent Chinese history. Policy implications related to enhancing filial care are discussed.

The female element, primary identification, and creation in environment in contemporary China—relating and isolating

The author reviews the historical context for women in recent Chinese history, and applies ideas of several contemporary psychoanalysts to examine the female element in development, as well as the implications for the clinical situation. She particularly examines the mother–daughter element and aspects of primary identification in the female element of development.

Limited Regional Aerosol and Cloud Microphysical Changes Despite Unprecedented Decline in Nitrogen Oxide Pollution During the February 2020 COVID-19 Shutdown in China.

Following the emergence of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China instituted shutdown measures starting in late January and continuing into February 2020 to arrest the spread of disease. This resulted in a sharp economic contraction unparalleled in recent Chinese history. Satellite retrievals show that nitrogen dioxide pollution declined by an unprecedented amount (~50% regionally) from its expected unperturbed value, but regional‐scale column aerosol loadings and cloud microphysical properties were not detectably affected. The disparate impact is tied to differential economic impacts of the shutdown, in which transportation, a disproportionate source of nitrogen oxide emissions, underwent drastic declines (~90% reductions in passenger traffic), whereas industry and power generation, responsible for >90% of particulate emissions, were relatively less affected (~20% reductions in electricity and thermal power generation). A combination of anomalously warm and humid meteorological conditions and complex chemical interactions further decreased nitrogen dioxide concentrations but likely enhanced secondary aerosol formation.

Reconfiguring Chinese natures: frugality and waste reutilization in Mao era urban China

ABSTRACTThis article juxtaposes two conflicting images of China’s environment during the socialist Mao era. One is an influential scholarly account of environmental destruction due to Mao’s insistence that “man must conquer nature” (ren ding sheng tian). The other, provided by a longtime resident of Kunming, is an idyllic description of an urban material reuse system without waste. The different images involve variances in the very notions of nature and environment on which they are grounded. The former posits the Chinese tian as equivalent to a western environmentalist notion of nature, while the latter corresponds with a Marxist materialist notion that waste is part of nature’s bounty. I explore the politics of fixing translational equivalents in the interplay between history, memory, and power by focusing on excesses of each image: Mao’s tian as an impediment to cultivating collective agency, and forms of industrial pollution that were not signified by “garbage.” Kunming city government documents further highlight crucial rifts in material flows that unfolded through the Mao era, complicating both images. Ultimately, by probing shifting Chinese “natures,” I clear conceptual space for capturing the important roles played by waste matter and practices of frugality in shaping recent Chinese history.

Assessing acid rain and climate effects on the temporal variation of dissolved organic matter in the unsaturated zone of a karstic system from southern China

Acid rain has the potential to significantly impact the quantity and quality of dissolved organic matter (DOM) leached from soil to groundwater. Yet, to date, the effects of acid rain have not been investigated in karstic systems, which are expected to strongly buffer the pH of atmospheric rainfall. This study presents a nine-year DOM fluorescence dataset from a karst unsaturated zone collected from two drip sites (HS4, HS6) in Heshang Cave, southern China between 2005 and 2014. Cross-correlograms show that fluorescence intensity of both dripwaters lagged behind rainfall by ∼1 year (∼11 months lag for HS4, and ∼13 months for HS6), whereas drip rates responded quite quickly to rainfall (0 months lag for HS4, and ∼3 months for HS6), based on optimal correlation coefficients. The rapid response of drip rates to rainfall is related to the change of reservoir head pressure in summer, associated with higher rainfall. In winter, low rainfall has a limited effect on head pressure, and drip rates gradually slow to a constant value associated with base flow from the overlying reservoir- this effect being most evident on inter-annual timescales (R2 = 0.80 for HS4 and R2 = 0.86 for HS6, n = 9, p < 0.01). We ascribed the ∼1 year lag of fluorescence intensity to the effect of the soil moisture deficit and the karst process on delaying water and solute transport. After eliminating the one year lag, the congruent seasonal pacing and amplitude between fluorescence intensity and rainfall observed suggests that the seasonality of fluorescence intensity was mainly controlled by the monsoonal rains which can govern the output of DOM from the soil, as well as the residence time of water in the unsaturated zone. On inter-annual timescales, a robust linear relationship between fluorescence intensity and annual (effective) precipitation amount (R2 = 0.86 for HS4 and R2 = 0.77 for HS6, n = 9, p < 0.01) was identified, implying that annual (effective) precipitation is the main determinant of DOM concentration in the aquifer. Conversely, the insensitivity of fluorescence intensity and fluorescence wavelength maxima to variations in the pH of local rainfall suggests that acid rain over the study period (∼pH 5.6 to ∼ 4.5) had no discernable effect on the quantity and quality of DOM in karst soil and soil solution, likely being strongly buffered by soil carbonates. Therefore, despite large increases in anthropogenic acid rain in recent Chinese history, hydrologic forcing is the predominant factor driving variations in DOM in karst aquifers.

British Cryptanalysis and China, 1937–1945: An Underused Source for Recent Chinese History?

This article discusses British cryptanalysis of Chinese diplomatic traffic, and of the diplomatic traffic of other states such as Japan and Afghanistan regarding China, between 1937 and 1945. The records are in the British National Archives HW12 series, which has not been thoroughly exploited by historians due to inadequate cataloging. The article shows how British and American views on the failings of Chinese communications security, which led to much-resented restrictions on Chinese diplomatic reportage and a general reluctance to share high-level information with China, were informed partly by the extent of Japanese mastery of Chinese traffic, which was in turn disclosed through British and American successes against Japanese communications. Finally, Chinese and Japanese efforts to court Muslim opinion internationally are discussed to illustrate how material in HW12 can make a useful contribution to the study of diplomacy and intrigue during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Considering postmodern cultural disconnects and cultural paradigms in Chinese dance creation through the lens of ArtsCross/Danscross

Abstract ArtsCross/Danscross created a visual juxtaposition of dance forms on a shared stage. The project not only reflected the cultural disconnects between Chinese and western dance creation, but also brought to light the hybridization of cultural states which were present within the project. Since we lack an awareness of the roots of western society and culture, the understanding of western modern dance that we have developed remains relatively general and one-sided. While we have sought wholeheartedly to apply modern dance choreography approaches to the creation of Chinese dance, we have not paid attention to, or sought to understand the emergence and spread of western postmodern artistic values, and this is the primary source of the cultural disconnects that were witnessed within the ArtsCross/Danscross project. In recent Chinese history, a hybridized cultural paradigm has evolved, characterized by imitation of the external/foreign and feelings of conflict towards the internal/self. In China’s dance field, the concepts of ‘modern’, ‘contemporary’, and ‘postmodern’ overlap and are difficult to distinguish. In reality, both ‘modern dance’ and ‘contemporary dance’ contain Chinese and western cultural elements, and constitute modern-contemporary ‘cultural hybrids’ of Chinese dance. Thus, there is an urgent need to establish a cultural attitude that witnesses cultural disconnects without misgivings, and which confidently faces up to the present. Postmodernism implies a questioning of, and a resistance towards the uniform ordering and standardization of the world. To some degree, it also represents a reformation of global diversity. Moreover, it creates a space for the development and survival of Chinese dance against the context of this process of reformation of diversity.

Climate change in Chinese rural village: is the community aware? A case study in Cuandixia, using the Photovoice method

Purpose In recent Chinese history, rural villages have suffered extensive depopulation due to the intensive urbanisation of the country. In the early 1990s, the rediscovery of villages for tourism purposes caused a change in approach to conservation policies and village management. Today, villages are subjected to climate change with mass tourism as a contributing factor. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether the village community is climate change aware and to identify best practises for it.

The 1911 Revolution: a reassessment

ABSTRACTWhy is the period from the Opium War through the Republican era in recent Chinese history treated by so many scholars of different stripes as a decline of China itself, rather than as a decline simply of the dynastic order? What is the nature of the Republican period? What role has the centralization and decentralization of power played through these years – and is it limited to the Republican period, or is it part of a much longer trend in Chinese history? Why have so many scholars fixated on the Opium War at the beginning of Chinese modernity? Mizoguchi asks these penetrating questions and makes telling comparisons with Japan over roughly the same period of time.

The influence of positive selection and trans-species evolution on DPB diversity in the golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana).

Genetic variation plays a significant role in the adaptive potential of the endangered species. The variation at major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes can offer valuable information on selective pressure related to natural selection and environmental adaptation, particularly the ability of a host to continuously resist evolving parasites. Thus, the genetic polymorphism on exon 2 of the MHC DPB1 gene in the golden snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus roxellana) was specifically analyzed. The results show that the 6 Rhro-DPB1 alleles identified from 87 individuals exhibit positive selection and trans-species polymorphism. The results also imply that although the populations of the species have experienced dramatic reduction and severe habitat fragmentation in recent Chinese history, balancing selection still maintains relatively consistent, with moderate DPB1 polymorphism. Thus, the study provides valuable information and evidence in developing effective strategies and tactics for genetic health and population size expansion of the species. It also offers strong genetic background for further studies on other primate species, particularly those in Rhinopithecus-a further endeavor that would result in fully understanding the MHC genetic information of the Asian colobines.

Beyond Methodological Eurocentricism: Comparing the Chinese and European Legal Traditions

The comparative study of Chinese and European legal history is arguably as old as the social sciences themselves. Comparisons between the “Chinese legal tradition” and European ones lie, after all, at the heart of Max Weber’s seminal studies on economy and society—hardly surprising, given Weber’s extensive legal background.1 In recent decades, comparative Chinese and European legal history, broadly defined, has thrived in both Chinese academic circles and foreign ones, across a number of disciplines, including history, law, economics, and sociology. This article reviews the basic trends in this literature and suggests avenues for future research, both thematic and methodological. Given its length limitations, it makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey of the “field,” if we can call it that. Rather, it seeks to highlight some of the major intellectual themes that, in the author’s perhaps idiosyncratic experience, scholars in the field have regularly grappled with, with varying levels of success. The goal, ultimately, is to discuss how progress might be made. Existing studies seem to fall, for the most part, into three general categories: the first, most densely populated category includes works that use comparative methods as an illustrative tool. Historical Chinese institutions are compared with functionally similar European ones, so that we can better understand their structure, operation, and, in some cases, origins—rarely are these works focused on better understanding European institutions. The second category, increasingly prominent in recent years, studies historical interactions between China and the West, including the translation of legal texts and treatises, imperial and colonial experiences, and disputes in the international legal arena. The third category includes what one might call “divergence studies,” which seek to explain how and, more importantly, why Chinese and European institutions differed, generally in the context of early modern global economic divergence. The first category, which has …

The discontinuous evolution of women’s fashion in China

Purpose– The aim of this study is to provide an understanding of urban Chinese women’s fashion consumption practices in light of major recent socio-historical events and to demonstrate that changes in fashion are not necessarily continuous, but rather can be discontinuous in the wake of radical disturbances.Design/methodology/approach– A phenomenological study was conducted that included group interviews with Chinese women belonging to three age cohorts who experienced different radical changes in recent Chinese history.Findings– This study provides insights into how fashion develops when radical economic and social shifts result in a discontinuous rather than continuous fashion evolution. In China, it can be seen that these radical ideological shifts had discontinuous effects on notions of beauty and how identity is expressed through fashion. The changes seen in the past 60 years or so – from the advent of communism in 1949 until now – cannot be explained by theories of imitation and distinction alone. The changes are also anchored to key socio-historic events, and were not necessarily an outgrowth of the period before, or class-based practices, but rather a response to social upheavals.Originality/value– This study provides a nuanced understanding of how tumultuous socio-cultural events affect how fashion is experienced in China, which allows us to contribute to the growing understanding of Chinese consumer culture, and demonstrate that the understanding of how fashion evolves needs to accommodate the upheavals in society over the past sixty years.

“It’s the context all the way down!”

Purpose – This paper aims to emphasize the importance of Chinese institutional contexts beyond “culture” by analyzing a few non-cultural institution-dependent contexts in Chinese HRM research, using an institutional theory perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review existing Chinese indigenous management research from an institutional theoretical perspective and provide a critique of the research from that perspective. Findings – Chinese contexts are more than Confucianism. Focusing on this aspect of culture without integrating other institutional contexts, while informative, is unlikely to identify and explain the uniqueness of Chinese individual and organizational behaviors. Informed by institutional theory, the authors examine how institutional language context influences Chinese institutional behavior. The authors also argue that the guanxi phenomenon is more strongly dependent on institutional forces than on culture in the recent Chinese history. Incorporating these “non-cultural” institutional contexts in research enables us to describe the “what” and explore the “why” and “how” in theory development, rather than placing value judgments on the institutional arrangements. Research limitations/implications – While societal culture provides an important institutional context, China’s broad culture is not unique among countries with similar Confucian traditions. Chinese management scholars are encouraged to be mindful of pervasive institutional contexts in exploring and theorizing local organizational phenomena. Research without considering non-cultural institutional contexts may prevent a finer-grained understanding of Chinese organizational phenomena for developing Chinese management theory, and it is unlikely to identify the uniqueness of Chinese organizational phenomena among countries influenced by similar Confucian cultural traditions. Originality/value – Built on previous literature, this paper is among the first to specify and examine explicitly non-Confucian Chinese institutional contexts as a basis for the exploration of Chinese organizational phenomena.

Beijing

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 5 photo : amy lantrip Notebook CHINA HAS A LONG AND RICH literary history with a well-preserved written language and a robust collection of premodern literary works. Recent Chinese history, however, has taken a toll on this long-admired tradition. In the early 1900s, the great Hanlin library of Beijing, which housed a multitude of rare manuscripts, was burned to the ground. The Cultural Revolution in China that raged from 1966 to 1976 resulted in many scholars being banished and even killed. Precious literary manuscripts were burned to ashes. Despite all these obstacles, Beijing has been a place of constant inspiration for premodern and modern Chinese writers, for example Cao Xuequin, Lu Xun, and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Mo Yan. During my travels in Beijing, I felt this atmosphere of continued literary appreciation . It was very common for people to have classical Chinese poems written in beautiful calligraphy on wall scrolls. Many buildings have inspirational quotes from famous writers on the outside. When I was traveling through one of the narrow alleyways, I saw a red gate with the paint chipping off, a very common sight in Beijing. But there was something different about this gate: a skinny tower was peeking over the top. My curiosity got the better of me, and I pushed open the gate. Inside I saw the concrete tower as tall as the trees that surrounded it: to the right was a small museum; to the left, a small bookstore. When I walked up to the tower, there was a plaque about the monument written only in Chinese. According to the description, an enlightened Buddhist monk had sat in that very spot and written a poem that would help anyone who read it achieve enlightenment. The museum describes how Beijing citizens raised money to build the monument and how it had been destroyed twice but was built back again. The monument dedicated to this Buddhist monk displays the appreciation that many Beijingers feel for the written word, the idea that poetry and stories can make the writer and the reader a better person . While most authors who write about Beijing describe its constant change, this monument shows something more enduring : Beijingers’ love of literature. Amy Lantrip is a WLT intern. A recent graduate from the University of Oklahoma with degrees in Chinese and Asian studies, she will pursue advanced studies in Chinese literature. city profile Beijing by Amy Lantrip WHAT TO READ Liu Heng Black Snow Howard Goldblatt, tr. Wang Shuo Please Don’t Call Me Human Wang Yuan Beijing Women: Stories Colin Hawes & Shuyu Kong, trs. Jan Wong Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found ...

Health Rights at the Juncture between State and Market: The People's Republic of China

This chapter examines transformations in China’s health system and analyzes those changes alongside health litigation to conclude that health litigation is not equity-promoting in China and has mixed prospects for becoming so in the future. After market liberalization in 1978, decentralization of financial responsibility to the local government led to fee-charging and the crumbling of Mao’s barefoot doctor system. Unaffordable care produced stark inequality inciting protest and violence. The Chinese government has responded in recent years with comprehensive health reform that promises universal coverage by 2020. But curiously, the plans are ambivalent regarding the main policy debate leading up to reform, i.e. whether to pursue a market or government approach in the health system. The health reform plans do however signal an intention to separate and disaggregate certain functions among different public and quasi-public actors. The sources of law undergirding health entitlements in China were scant until the recent health reform-related laws and regulations. Yet even with the new reforms, there are reasons to believe that health-related claims will not be easily justiciable. A tool wielded by a privileged few to negotiate one-off benefits, litigation often serves as an outlet ultimately deflecting pressure from the core problems of the health system because courts are hard-pressed to hold government actors accountable. Instead, they defer to other government organs or privately negotiated rights. There is a strong Chinese norm favoring equity in health care, but the norm is expressed politically rather than judicially. Major efforts to achieve health equity have been pursued as collective policies rather than as individual rights. Litigation and equity do not correlate in recent Chinese history and may even bear an inverse relationship: greater government involvement in the health system reduces the likelihood that health actors can be sued. This might change with health reform, but the prospects are mixed. On the one hand health reform embraces “separation” of health functions, so not all health actors will be associated with one monolithic government entity. This increases the need for the pluralism in accountability that courts could provide, and may also create space for actors to be sued without directly threatening government. Moreover, health reform will better define duties and rights politically so that courts will have the easier job of preserving, rather than spearheading rights, though the laws and policies of health reform are deliberately vague and deferential to local government in the definition of benefits.On the other hand, courts are still flawed and cannot take on established interests. Also I caution that without institution building to make political-administrative decision-making processes more participatory in China, active health litigation in China’s courts could reinforce a “vulgar” conception of health rights. Such a conception would exacerbate China’s affinity for defined contribution health coverage, its overemphasis on pharmaceuticals, and an impersonal “cookie-cutter” approach to medicine which assumes fungible individuals while neglecting the care ethic and other norms important to health care.

The Making of a Subcultural Revolution

The Making of a Subcultural Revolution Xiaobing Tang (bio) Paul Clark. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 368 pp. $88 (cloth), $26 (paper). Paul Clark. Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 294 pp. $90 (cloth), $30 (paper), $24 (ebook). To read the two most recent books by Paul Clark, renowned for his earlier contributions to the study of Chinese cinema, is to marvel both at his vast and enviable knowledge of the subject matter and at the vast and fast-changing landscape of modern and contemporary Chinese cultural experiences and expressions. It is to be constantly amazed by the dots that the cultural historian connects, by the different terrains that he leads us through, and by the expansive vistas that he brings into focus. Students interested in almost any aspect of modern and contemporary Chinese culture (from film to fiction to music to dance to bodybuilding) will appreciate the wealth of materials and references contained in these two volumes. Similarly, scholars of the Cultural Revolution and the developments since will have much to think about and to address, because what Clark presents here is a richer and more complex narrative of recent Chinese cultural history than has heretofore been packaged or popularized. It is a narrative that underscores the continuing evolution of modern Chinese culture in the twentieth century and beyond. [End Page 529] It makes good sense to read Clark’s examination of “youth culture” from the 1960s into the twenty-first century as a sequel to his patient cultural history of the Cultural Revolution, which focuses on the decade from 1966 to 1976. The “assertion of youth identity” that he reconstructs in the first main chapter of the 2012 study, for instance, originated with the rebellious Red Guards, who became “sent-down youth” in the last years of the 1960s. “The developments in these years,” states Clark at the outset, “laid the groundwork for the emergence of youth popular culture in the 1980s and later” (Youth, 10). This groundwork took the form of new spaces being opened up for youthful expressions, either of political idealism or of personal sentiments. Such new spaces, or domains of possibilities, receive careful investigation from the historian in the final chapter of The Chinese Cultural Revolution, where the structural tension between “public and private fictions” undergirds the narration of the ineluctable ending of the Cultural Revolution. Alongside a robust underground movement among the young of writing, storytelling, and even translation—which proved to be “in the long term the most significant” literary activity of the early 1970s (History, 226)—Clark also notes that many key and innovative writers of the 1980s and beyond, such as Han Shaogong and Jia Pingwa, made their literary debut in official publications in the final years of the Cultural Revolution. Yet these two studies are not conceived of or organized in the same way, as they tell of different subjects and have divergent plotlines. The history of the Cultural Revolution, as Clark narrates it, begins with the orchestrated efforts made by what he identifies, aptly and later in the book, as the “cultural insurgents” to modern Chinese opera in the first half of the 1960s. One plotline of this history therefore revolves around how these insurgents, headed by Jiang Qing with the backing of Mao himself, created model operas with tremendous resources at their disposal, sought to institute and perfect them, and mandated systematic transplantation of model opera aesthetics and creative methods onto other forms of cultural production. In the process, these “Cultural Revolution insurgents” or activists ascended rapidly as “power-holders” and authorities, eventually turning into desperate “defenders of Cultural Revolution faith.” It is, in other words, a sad tale of a radical avant-garde project betraying itself and growing tout court conservative and “decidedly rearguard” (History, 217–235). [End Page 530] The protagonist of the subsequent tale about youth culture is, by comparison, both more amorphous and yet more constant. Different youth groups or identities, from the Red Guards of the 1960s to the “post-1980” generation, are profiled and treated in turn, but the main story is how successive “youth...