Cultural Revolution Manuscripts

This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The narrative has two parallel lines of development, which constantly interact with each other: the political transformation of China during the critical dozen years 1977-89; and the cultural movement itself. The latter is followed from an abortive attempt in 1982 to publish the minjian journal Youthful Manuscripts, through the blossoming of many popular cultural enterprises, including the potent River Elegy television series, and finally to the Tiananmen tragedy, at which point the two lines of development finally coalesced. The book is filled with details, including the background, character, and personal connections of a large number of people who are related to the movement, which make interesting reading and can be a useful source for further studies.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution occurred in the second decade after Mao Zedong and his comrades came to power in 1949. A comprehensive narrative account of this colossal event, written by Yan Jiaqi, one of the principal leaders of China's pro-democracy movement, and his wife, Gao Gao, a noted sociologist, appeared in Hong Kong in 1986 and was quickly banned by the Communist government. Not surprisingly, censorship and restricted circulation in China resulted in underground reproduction and serialization. The work was thus widely read, coveted, and appreciated by a populace who had just freed itself from the cultural drought and political dread of the event. Yan and Gao later spent two years revising and expanding their work. The present volume, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, is based on the revised edition and has been masterfully edited and translated by D. W. Y. Kwok in consultation with the authors. Following Professor Kwok's eloquent introduction and a short foreword in which the authors analyze the basic causes of the Cultural Revolution, Part One of the narrative focuses on the years 1965-1967. In two short years, Mao managed to turn public opinion against Liu Shaoqi, president of the Republic, and launch the Cultural Revolution. The reader is introduced to the Red Guards and encounters the cult of personality, the first resistance to the Cultural Revolution, the attack on Zhou Enlai, and the persecution and death of Liu Shaoqi. Part Two examines the rise and fall of Lin Biao during the years 1959-1971. Lin's bid for power, which began with the consolidation of his personal clique in the army and mass-level persecution in the late stages of theCultural Revolution, ended in a failed coup and his death in an air crash. Part Three follows Jiang Qing from 1966 to her arrest in 1976 for her part in instigating mass violence and the persecution of key figures, including Zhou Enlai. During this period, the political fortunes of Deng Xiaoping rose and fell for a second time, the first protest at Tiananmen Square in 1976 ended in a bloody suppression, and that same year the Gang of Four were arrested. Unlike social scientific treatments of political phenomena, Turbulent Decade includes little discussion of economics, still less of international relations, and no institutional analysis. Instead, the authors' fervent belief in the truthful telling of history through its leading personalities pervades the work.

Publisher description

The Cultural Revolution, which occurred between 1966 and 1976, was a major unforgettable event in modern Chinese history. For more than thirty years, the prevalent view of the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese Foreign Ministry has been that the rebels controlled the Foreign Ministry in August 1967 and caused the many excesses in foreign affairs such as the burning of the British mission in Beijing which isolated China from the rest of the world. The author of this book challenges this point of view. The book gives a factual account of the course of the ten-year Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry, based on documents issued during the Cultural Revolution, talks by Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, and the manuscripts of the people concerned, as well as interviews with Foreign Ministry staff members who personally took part in the events.

The Chinese Communist system was from its very inception based on an inherent contradiction and tension, and the Cultural Revolution is the latest and most violent manifestation of that contradiction. Built into the very structure of the system was an inner conflict between the desiderata, the imperatives, and the requirements that technocratic modernization on the one hand and Maoist values and strategy on the other. The Cultural Revolution collects four papers prepared for a research conference on the topic convened by the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies in March 1968. Michel Oksenberg opens the volume by examining the impact of the Cultural Revolution on occupational groups including peasants, industrial managers and workers, intellectuals, students, party and government officials, and the military. Carl Riskin is concerned with the economic effects of the revolution, taking up production trends in agriculture and industry, movements in foreign trade, and implications of Masoist economic policies for China's economic growth. Robert A. Scalapino turns to China's foreign policy behavior during this period, arguing that Chinese Communists in general, and Mao in particular, formed foreign policy with a curious combination of cosmic, utopian internationalism and practical ethnocentrism rooted both in Chinese tradition and Communist experience. Ezra F. Vogel closes the volume by exploring the structure of the conflict, the struggles between factions, and the character of those factions.

China is emerging as a new superpower in science and technology, reflected in the success of its spacecraft and high-velocity Maglev trains. While many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may seem an unlikely era to explore for these insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars have called for re-examining Maoist science--both in China and in the West. At one time Western observers found much to admire in Chairman Mao's mass science, his egalitarian effort to take science out of the ivory tower and place it in the hands of the disenfranchised peasant, the loyal worker, and the patriot soldier. Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock have assembled a rich mix of talents and topics related to the fortunes and misfortunes of science, technology, and medicine in modern China, while tracing its roots to China's other great student revolution--the May Fourth Movement. Historians of science, political scientists, mathematicians, and others analyze how Maoist science served modern China in nationalism, socialism, and nation-building--and also where it failed the nation and the Chinese people. If the Cultural Revolution contributed to China's emerging space program and catalyzed modern malaria treatments based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, it also provided the origins of a science talent gap and the milieu from which a one-child policy would arise. Given the fundamental importance of China today, and of East Asia generally, it is imperative to have a better understanding of its most recent scientific history, but especially that history in a period of crisis and how that crisis was resolved. What is at issue here is not only the specific domain of the history of science, but the social and scientific policies of China generally as they developed and were applied prior to, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

Collection of true stories of people who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976.