Red Guards Research Articles

The March Events and Baku Commune of 1918

This article investigates the March Events of 1918: city-wide fighting for control of Baku that involved the Bolshevik party, the Red Guards, and various Armenian and Azerbaijani militias. Besides many of these combatants, thousands of innocent Azerbaijanis and others (Caucasus peoples and Persians) perished in the hostilities. Focusing on the Events as an exercise of power and violence, I argue that the establishment of the Baku Commune (like the later formation of the multi-national Soviet Union) was indivisible from these circumstances of national and sectarian war. Drawing from Azerbaijani sources long-suppressed by the Communist regime, I recount some of the key contexts, mechanics, and legacies of the Events. As an elucidation of the facts, this study sets out to help historians calibrate their interpretations, better weigh the nature of Soviet power, and refine what we usually term “Armenian” or “Azerbaijani” aggression. These peoples were not preternaturally disposed to violence. Suffering was not the exclusive province of either community. Rather, political strategies have drawn them into cycles of violence and bonds of recrimination that have recurred sporadically into the present day.

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.

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton As I begin my service as editor of Twentieth-Century China with this issue, I feel honored to have the opportunity to contribute to this great journal and grateful to my immediate predecessor, James Carter, and the members of the Editorial Board for their support. One of my first scholarly articles appeared in volume 22 of the journal, back when it was called Republican China and edited by the late Stephen Averill. Working on revisions of my manuscript with Steve's wise and kindly guidance was a great foundation for a lasting friendship, and it is a pleasure to pay tribute to him in these pages. As I discovered many years ago, a strong journal can help build a scholarly community. In the case of TCC, our work benefits from the institutional framework offered by the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC). I hope to meet many of TCC's authors, reviewers, and readers at future meetings of the HSTCC. In the meantime, please contact me with any questions or suggestions you have about the journal. This issue begins with an excursion into the forests of Yunnan in the early twentieth century. Mark Swislocki analyzes village policies toward forest conservation and shows that village collectivities had a rich understanding of the significance of forests. Their concerns differed from those of national- and provincial-level forestry officials and activists, who were in the process of creating new tools to try to shape forests, including legislation and educational initiatives. Swislocki effectively highlights the value of forest history as a pathway to study the dynamics of community- and state-building, as well as for understanding China's environment. The next two articles explore aspects of culture before and after the year 1949. Weihong Du identifies a pivotal moment in the career of painter Xu Beihong that she argues had a transformative effect in the history of Chinese painting. Much struck by the comments of some of the Soviet citizens who came to see an exhibition of Chinese art that he took to Russia in 1934, Xu Beihong widened his painterly vision to take in working people and social struggle, creating works that helped constitute the canon of socialist art in the PRC. Guo Wu's article focuses on the Socialist Education movement of the early 1960s and its aftermath, showing how "bottom-up" history took shape and created a standard type of "recalling-bitterness" narrative, "blurring the line between fact and fiction." This development, Wu shows, is important for, inter alia, understanding the worldview of the Red Guard generation. The Korean War is the subject of the fourth article. Michael Sheng provides a detailed analysis of Mao's thinking about participation in the war and war goals, marshaling evidence to show that his decisions were influenced not only by global and domestic events but by his own emotional reactions to these events. Sheng's [End Page 193] work contributes to the worldwide scholarly effort to penetrate the secrets of Cold War politics and assess how the personalities of its major actors affected its history. Our book review editor, Susan Fernsebner, has worked with reviewers to bring us assessments of four new books in the China field, on topics including life and folklore in a north China Catholic community, Zhang Taiyan's Buddhism, opium consumption in republican Guangzhou, and contemporary society and culture in the PRC. The reviews are listed in the printed journal and available to all as a pdf online at www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/1521538514Z.00000000049. I am grateful to Susan for her contributions to the journal, as well as to James Carter, Maura Cunningham, and the staff at Maney for educating me and helping to make a smooth editorial transition. [End Page 194] Copyright © 2014 Twentieth-Century China

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...

Grieving at Chongqing’s Red Guard Graveyard: In the Name of Life Itself

This article presents a historical and ethnographic account of the event of mourning at the Graveyard for the Red Guards in Chongqing. Built in the Cultural Revolution to glorify about 450 Red Guards as “revolutionary martyrs”, this graveyard testifies to the tragic nature of their deaths, which resulted from fighting between two factions for their shared goal of “defending Chairman Mao”. The post-Mao reform negated the Cultural Revolution. In a way, their deaths and mourning their deaths were stigmatized, resulting in their “second death”, but recent important changes in Chinese society have allowed the resurgence of grieving for them, culminating in the granting of the official title of “cultural relic” to the graveyard. Opening up a space to contest their stigmatization and to invalidate the official judgement about the Cultural Revolution, this title signifies the rising imperative to account for every death in the name of life itself.

Book Review: Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens

Paul Clark, Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012.

Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution ed. by Alfreda Murck (review)

Reviewed by: Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution ed. by Alfreda Murck Richard King (bio) Alfreda Murck, editor. Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution. Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013. 248 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 978-3-85881-732-7. In August 1968, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong received a gift of man-goes from the visiting foreign minister of Pakistan, and passed the fruit on to the Workers’ Propaganda Team that had recently been sent to Qinghua University to quell the violent confrontations between Red Guard factions that were ravaging the campus. In doing so, Mao signalled his disaffection with the Red Guards, the youth vanguard he had unleashed against the state apparatus at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and declared his support for the proletariat and the military as forces of order and stability. The suppression of the Hundred Day War at Qinghua was a pivotal moment in the Cultural Revolution: the truculent and charismatic student leader Kuai Dafu, previously the darling of the Cultural Revolution Group appointed by Mao, was summarily removed and incarcerated, and the high school graduates of the Red Guard generation were dispatched within months to new challenges in villages and frontier farms. The Pakistani mangoes, exotic and virtually unheard of in 1960s China, briefly played an important role in Cultural Revolution discourse, as the physical expression of Mao’s love and concern for his people at a time when the Mao cult was at its most frenzied. The mangoes were transported nationwide, despite their deterioration in the summer heat; they were replicated in wax and placed in glass vitrines for presentation and display; paintings and photographs of the fruit became objects of veneration; and they appeared as an auspicious motif on the ubiquitous Mao badges, on quilts, on household goods, and on floats at public ceremonies. The events surrounding Mao’s golden mangoes can serve as a microcosm of the political maneuverings, the personality cult, the mass hysteria, the sporadic violence, and the devotional iconography of the early Cultural Revolution. They also remind us of the ephemeral nature of such obsessions: within a year, mango fever had subsided, its [End Page 143] artifacts no longer treasured. Half a century later, the art historian and curator Alfreda Murck dived into the dumpster of history (and the curio markets of Beijing) to retrieve the memorabilia of mango fever and mount an exhibition of her collection at the Museum Reitberg in Zurich. The volume under review contains the catalogue for that exhibition, prefaced by an introduction and six short essays placing the event in its historical, social, and cultural context. The essays in the first section of the book comprise a history of the student unrest at Qinghua, a memoir of mango celebration in a factory, analysis of the National Day Parade of October 1, 1968, a review of the role of food images in the history of Chinese art, a summary of a 1976 film attempt to revive mango fever, and a tracking of the changing images of the peasant and worker in contemporary China. Three of the essays are particularly notable here: (1) Xiaowei Zheng’s “Qinghua University and Chinese Politics during the Cultural Revolution” is a summary of events at Qinghua—a longer version can be found in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew C. Walder (Stanford, 2006)—with valuable material from the author’s interviews with Kuai Dafu and other participants. The essay is illustrated with photographs, including one of Kuai’s most notorious stunts, the public humiliation of Wang Guangmei, leader of an earlier “work-team” at Qinghua and wife of State Chairman Liu Shaoqi. (2) Daniel Leese’s “Designing Spectacles: The 1968 Beijing National Day Parade” is a careful exposition of that tightly scripted procession (with a mango-themed display on float three) and an analysis of what this and other public events reveal about contemporary policies and the stratification of power within the leadership and among the classes that formed the ranks of the revolution. (3) Adam Yuet Chau’s “Political Awakening through the Magical Fruit: The Film Song of the Mango is amply...

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

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

Playing the Language Game in China: On Perry Link’s: An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics

Playing the Language Game in China: On Perry Link’sAn Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics Paul G. Pickowicz (bio) Perry Link. An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. viii, 367 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn 978-0-674-06602-1. Reading Perry Link’s masterful and often amusing reflections on the social and political dimensions of spoken Chinese, I recalled at once a puzzling conversation I had in fall 1980 with a grisly old North China peasant. Our subject was the sudden and bewildering speedup in the collectivization of Chinese agriculture in mid-1955. Using plain language, the old-timer made it quite clear that, despite the reassurances of local Communist Party cadres, rank and file peasants were highly skeptical of—even frightened by—the radical new scheme. I asked why there were so many misgivings. He immediately answered, Tuzi weiba changbuliao! 兔子尾巴 长不了. I understood all the words (Rabbits can’t have big long tails!), but I was confused. We were talking about the socialist collectivization of Chinese agriculture and its economic, social, and cultural consequences, but now he was inexplicably going on about rabbits and their tails. No doubt neither of us was fully aware of it at the time, but the old man was playing what Perry Link calls “the Chinese language game.” Not only was the villager saying that the authorities were trying to do something that in his view ran counter to natural law, he delivered his folksy response in what Link calls the time-honored and powerful 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3 cadence of spoken Chinese. Many highly specialized books about post-Mao China are published these days. Given the increasing importance of China on the world scene, this comes as no surprise. There is a burning desire to better understand the seemingly ever-changing complexities of the place known as China. Most new books deal narrowly with the profoundly complicated high politics of the Communist Party, the dynamics of China’s domestic and international economic trajectories, or the various new directions taken in China’s regional and global diplomatic relations. A smaller number of books look at Chinese society and what might be called the downside of China’s astonishingly rapid development, highlighting [End Page 31] such pressing topics as environmental degradation, income and class polarization, food safety concerns, lawlessness, alienation, hedonistic consumption, and a crisis of values. An Anatomy of Chinese is a very different—and in many respects unique—contribution to the tidal wave of new literature on China. It is broad, interdisciplinary scholarship at its very best. Its most basic argument is this: if we really want to understand contemporary Chinese society, culture, economics, and politics, we must take a much closer look at a number of intriguing structures and tendencies deeply embedded in spoken Chinese and pay more attention not only to what people say but the way they say it. These partially hidden modes of expression convey their own meanings and project their own authority. It is important to realize that when my peasant friend used the 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3 cadence to say, “Rabbits can’t have big long tails!” he was knowingly or unknowingly playing the Chinese language game. Link’s remarkably accessible anatomy of spoken Chinese is really three short, interrelated books neatly combined into one. The issues are complex, but his prose is personal, conversational—even chatty. The first part deals with the fascinating topic of rhythm. Providing many colorful examples, Link demonstrates convincingly that a number of powerful rhythmic patterns are intimately associated with the way Chinese speakers deliver their words. The impact of these cadences involves much more than their lyrical charms. Indeed, these rhythmic patterns are so deeply entrenched in the language that they convey meaning and authority in their own right. One of the many patterns Link analyzes is the qiyan 七言 or “seven word” form mentioned above. This ancient 1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3 syllabic cadence is found everywhere in Chinese speech, and its prevalence is no coincidence. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when iconoclastic Red Guards praised Mao by chanting Dahai hangxing kao duoshou 大海航行靠舵手 (Sailing...

Nanjing's “Second Cultural Revolution” of 1974

AbstractChina experienced extensive civil strife in 1974, as elite factionalism during the “criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” campaign revived popular contention in the provinces. Past research has characterized these conflicts as a “second Cultural Revolution” – an offensive by resurgent red guards and rebels to resist the restoration of purged civilian officials to powerful posts. In Nanjing, however, the conflicts were of an entirely different nature. Civilian cadres directed the campaign against army officers who still dominated civilian government throughout the province. Popular protests in Nanjing were not led by former rebels, whose ranks had been decimated by unusually harsh military suppression campaigns, but were instead protests by ordinary citizens who had suffered in the purges and rustication campaigns of the late 1960s. While the campaign in cities like Hangzhou and Wuhan was an offensive by resurgent rebels against civilian officials, in Nanjing civilian officials used the campaign to ensure their victory over military rivals. The Hangzhou and Wuhan pattern revived the politics of the 1960s, while the Nanjing pattern anticipated the protests against Cultural Revolution abuses characteristic of the end of the Mao era.

From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming Hearts: Scientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision

From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming HeartsScientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision Jing Jiang (bio) In an essay published in 1972, Susan Sontag described China as “the country of science fiction, where everyone speaks with the same voice. Maotsetungized” (270). By the use of this term, she was referring to the way Mao Tse-tung had held captive the minds of so many Chinese people with his political vision, inciting them into a unified uproar. At the time, China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a movement that seems to be forever frozen in an image of revolutionary fervor, mass subjectivity, and the cult of Mao: a green sea of Red Guards, all wearing military-style uniforms, and all waving their pocketsize “red book” and collectively shouting out political slogans. In the eyes of an American writer watching from outside in, this was not an image of freedom, but, rather, this new form of mass subjectivity had an eerily mechanized feel to it. Hence the naming of China as the country of science fiction, a genre where the mechanized and human often merge. While Sontag uses science fiction only as a metaphor for Maoist China, in this essay I will turn literally to early Chinese science fiction. The body of science-fiction texts constitutes an important, though understudied, discursive site where notions of “Chineseness,” modernity, and human nature were first articulated, expanded, and subsequently consolidated into a vision of modern China. This vision is at once literary and sociopolitical, sentimental and scientistic, universal and national. Despite the exclusion of science fiction from the canon of modern Chinese literature and the sporadic scholarly attention it has received, science fiction enjoyed a privileged role in the project of mass [End Page 131] enlightenment at the behest of modern Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing and early Republican years. The translation into Chinese of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in 1900 introduced science fiction to China on a large scale, catapulting the reading, translating, and writing of science fiction stories and novels. The cultural luminaries who earnestly promoted or practiced the genre include Liang Qichao (1873–1929), the foremost intellectual leader of China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most celebrated writer of the modern period.1 Following his predecessors’ footsteps, Lu Xun in 1903 translated two more of Verne’s works, From the Earth to the Moon and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, from the Japanese translations. In the preface to the first work, Lu Xun gives what would in retrospect amount to a Chinese science-fiction manifesto, in which he attributes the ignorance of the masses to the paucity of science fiction in the Chinese literary tradition. He claims that the development of science fiction will guide the Chinese people out of their dark ignorance, and even goes so far as to link the rise of science fiction directly with the renaissance of the yellow race in the near future (Lu 1981, 151–52). In this preface, Lu Xun uses the term kexue xiaoshuo (science fiction) to name the new literary genre now imagined to be a potent tool for mass enlightenment, national strengthening, and racial rejuvenation. It is important to distinguish between this term and a later term, kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo (science-fantasy fiction), commonly abbreviated as kehuan xiaoshuo, which is the standard Chinese translation today for “sciencefiction.”2 This term did not appear until the 1950s, when science fiction texts from the Soviet Union were translated and introduced to Chinese readers on a massive scale, and it did not become widely used until after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Xiao, 20). For the first half of the twentieth century at least, the default Chinese term for “science fiction” had been kexue xiaoshuo, though kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo was also used sporadically. Aside from the occasional use of these other terms, between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the understanding of the mission and function...

Revolutionizing Antiquity: The Shanghai Cultural Bureaucracy in the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968

AbstractThis article examines the response of Shanghai's cultural bureaucracy during the Attack on the Four Olds, the Red Guard repudiation of old culture launched in the early years of China's Cultural Revolution (1966–76). It focuses on how local officials, acting in a space created by the Central Cultural Revolution Group and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, worked to control the damage wrought by the political campaign and justified their activities by adapting the rhetoric of revolution. Based on the archival documents of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture, this article traces the reinvention of the cultural bureaucracy and the subsequent shift in the language of preservation. It argues that during the Cultural Revolution, there was an institutionalized and ideologically legitimated movement to protect historic sites and cultural objects. Faced with the destruction of antiquity, Shanghai officials instead proposed its rectification, defending cultural relics in the name of revolution.

A Critical Introduction to Mao (review)

Reviewed by: A Critical Introduction to Mao Jing Li (bio) Timothy Cheek, editor. A Critical Introduction to Mao New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xxi, 392 pp. Paperback, $27.99. ISBN 978-0-521-71154-8. When the Great Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Bo Xilai, eighteen years old at the time, eagerly joined the rebellion as a leading Red Guard. As it happened, Chairman Mao’s revolution-within-a-revolution did not work out too well for Bo personally, whose father, a veteran Communist and vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, came to be persecuted as a “capitalist roader.” Labeled the son of a chief class enemy, Bo Xilai sat through reform study sessions and toiled quietly at a factory for much of a decade. The experience, however, did not destroy Bo Xilai’s admiration for Mao. While serving as the CCP party boss in charge of Chongqing, the largest city in Southwest China, Bo made quite a name for himself by promoting many of Mao’s ideas, countering the market-oriented liberal reform in the post-Mao era. In particular, the so-called Red Song movement that Bo launched, in which large numbers of Chinese gathered to sing the praises of Mao, the Communist Party, and socialist China, caught on in Chongqing and in other parts of the country. Bo created such a stir with his Neo-Maoist platform that Henry Kissinger, who likes to ingratiate himself with China’s top leaders and rising political stars, made a trip to Chongqing, where he attended a Red Song chorus with tens of thousands of singers. The recent removal of Bo from his post in Chongqing, under mysterious circumstances, has generated much anger and agony across the country, which testifies to his popularity among China’s new left. So, thirty-five years after his physical demise, Mao lives on and serves as a key link between history and contemporary China. These two incarnations of Mao — the historical figure and his legacy in the present world — are the subjects addressed in A Critical Introduction to Mao, a collection of essays edited by Timothy Cheek. As Cheek notes in the preface to the volume, “The book . . . [End Page 39] seeks to present the historical Mao and explicitly juxtaposes that Mao with the very significant but importantly ahistorical Maos that so deeply concern millions of people across the globe today” (p. xi). Penned by leading scholars on Mao and modern China, the essays collected in this volume cover Mao in various historical stages and multiple aspects of his personality and policies. Together, the experts tell a story of Mao and his legacy that is rich, complex, and thought-provoking, which effectively dispels simplistic notions about Mao that are still widespread in the West and China itself. In their presentation of facts and ideas, the authors draw from both primary sources and secondary literature, including many that became available in recent times, which make their writings up-to-date and substantial. This enables readers, as authors have intended it, to learn not only what we know about Mao but also how we get to know what we know (p. xii). The book also provides an annotated list of additional readings, which comes in handy for those who want to explore the covered subject further. A Critical Introduction to Mao contains a total of fourteen articles. Timothy Cheek leads off with an essay that highlights major themes inspected in the book. Joseph Esherick follows with an overview of Mao’s revolution in the larger context of twentieth-century China. Seven other experts then examine Mao chronologically and topically. Brantly Womack covers Mao from the 1920s to 1937, focusing on Mao’s transition from an urban radical to a rural revolutionary, a key development that secured Mao’s position as the top Chinese Communist leader. Hans van de Ven considers events in the period from 1937 to 1956, which features tension between Mao’s sinicization of Marxism and his search for modernity. Michael Schoenhals completes the chronological coverage with what he terms “consuming fragments” of Mao in the chairman’s last twenty years. The grouping of the years from 1937 to 1956 as...

Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond

This case study investigates, from the perspectives of politics, ideology, social psychology, and culture, the many layered meanings interwoven into the quasi-uniform that Chinese Red Guards invented and donned during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), one of the biggest political tragedies of the twentieth century. The Red Guards were inspired and encouraged by Mao Zedong and a few of his cohorts, and were essentially self-invented urban adolescents with various social backgrounds and political motivations. The Red Guard's attire that took form by mixing some parts of the uniform of the People's Liberation Army—grass-green jacket, soft cloth cap with red star insignia, belt with a broad metallic buckle, and the self-made red armband—served as a crucial means of inventing and shaping their group identity and their ideological pursuits. Politically, their attire signaled the Red Guards’ support of Mao in his war against the “capitalist roaders.” Ideologically, it symbolized the Red Guard community's favor of utopian, egalitarian, socialist ideals exemplified by the army; socio-psychologically, the quasi-uniform was a trope of those young rebels’ repressed cravings for authority through imitation. Culturally, this set of sartorial signs simultaneously figured many submerging desires for heroism and pleasure seeking, hero worship and self-fulfillment, collective narcissism and revolutionary romanticism. By retracing and reconstructing historically nuanced messages that are interwoven into the quasi-uniform of the Red Guards, this study helps us to understand the unique role that clothing plays in forging a mass political identity and movement.

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.

HISTORY AND INCOMPLETENESS

ABSTRACTVera Schwarcz's Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden examines the moral, philosophical, and historical meanings of a garden built by a Manchu Chinese prince, subsequently destroyed by British imperialists, commandeered by Red Guard radicals, and finally transformed into the grounds of an art museum. Reading Singing Crane Garden in the context of Schwarcz's previous writings on Chinese intellectuals and Jewish traditions, as well as insights provided by critical philosophers and geographers, this essay explores the moral and ethical dimensions of locating history in specific “emplacements”. The argument begins by examining the phenomenology of place articulated by Edward Casey, weaves through discussions of Chinese spatiality, embodiment, and garden aesthetics, and comments on Schwarcz's study of broken monuments and stele through comparisons with Classical Chinese writers and the contemporary American poet Louise Glück. Comparisons are made between the destruction of the garden by the British forces of James Elgin, the murder of the journalist Thomas Bowlby, and the purging, imprisonment, torture, and brutality against scholars and intellectuals by the Red Guards under Mao. The essay closes with commentaries on Schwarcz's reflections concerning continuing global atrocities, and new insights into the ways that understanding landscape architecture as a form of history can bring meaning to questions of memory, loss, and the desire to evoke unrecoverable experiences.

Sixties

Sixties