The Past Is Not Another Country
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Chronology of Mass Killings During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Song Yongyi Thursday 25 August 2011
Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Song Yongyi Thursday 25 August 2011 Stable URL: http://www.massviolence.org/Article?id_article=551 PDF version: http://www.massviolence.org/PdfVersion?id_article=551 http://www.massviolence.org - ISSN 1961-9898 Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Song Yongyi The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a historical tragedy launched by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It claimed the lives of several million people and inflicted cruel and inhuman treatments on hundreds of million people. However, 40 years after it ended, the total number of victims of the Cultural Revolution and especially the death toll of mass killings still remain a mystery both in China and overseas. For the Chinese communist government, it is a highly classified state secret, although they do maintain statistics for the so-called abnormal death numbers all over China. Nevertheless, the government, realizing that the totalitarian regime and the endless power struggles in the CCP Central Committee (CCP CC) were the root cause of the Cultural Revolution, has consistently discounted the significance of looking back and reflecting on this important period of Chinese history. They even forbid Chinese scholars from studying it independently and discourage overseas scholars from undertaking research on this subject in China. Owing to difficulties that scholars in and outside China encounter in accessing state secrets, the exact figure of the abnormal death has become a recurring debate in the field of China studies. -
From" Morning Sun" To" Though I Was Dead": the Image of Song Binbin in the "August Fifth Incident"
From" Morning Sun" to" Though I Was Dead": The Image of Song Binbin in the "August Fifth Incident" Wei-li Wu, Taipei College of Maritime Technology, Taiwan The Asian Conference on Film & Documentary 2016 Official Conference Proceedings Abstract This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, the deputy principal at the girls High School Attached to Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death by the students struggling against her. She was the first teacher killed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution and her death had established the “violence” nature of the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution, the reminiscences, papers, and comments related to the “August Fifth Incident” were gradually introduced, but with all blames pointing to the student leader of that school, Song Binbin – the one who had pinned a red band on Mao Zedong's arm. It was not until 2003 when the American director, Carma Hinton filmed the Morning Sun that Song Binbin broke her silence to defend herself. However, voices of attacks came hot on the heels of her defense. In 2006, in Though I Am Gone, a documentary filmed by the Chinese director Hu Jie, the responsibility was once again laid on Song Binbin through the use of images. Due to the differences in perception between the two sides, this paper subjects these two documentaries to textual analysis, supplementing it with relevant literature and other information, to objectively outline the two different images of Song Binbin in the “August Fifth Incident” as perceived by people and their justice. -
Political Generations: Memories and Perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party-State Since 1949
Political generations: memories and perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party-State since 1949 Hexuan Zhang Taiyuan, Shanxi, China M.A. University of Virginia, 2013 B.A. Peking University, 2010 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology University of Virginia May, 2019 Committee members: Jeffrey Olick (Chair) Sarah Corse Yingyao Wang Brantly Womack I Abstract In this dissertation, I examine the three political generations that took shape during the rapid social changes and historical transformations in China since the mid 20th century. Drawing on Mannheim’s social-historical definition of generation, I identify these generations by the three major transformative events/processes each experienced during late adolescence and early adulthood: the founding of the PRC in 1949, the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, and the Tiananmen Crackdown in 1989. I address two research questions: how have the historical events and the Party-state shaped the life trajectories and generational habitus of each political generation, and how the concept of “political generations” can help analyze distinct views and narratives about “Guo Jia,” the state, and perceptions of state legitimacy. To answer these questions, I rely on two data sources: historical archives of official documents and 56 in-depth interviews in Beijing across the three political generations. I adopt an interpretive approach and use textual analysis to provide the historical contexts of the formation of political generations and their explicit views and implicit beliefs towards their past lived experiences and the Party-state. In general, I find that the historical events that happened during each generation’s formative years had a relatively more prominent and lasting impact on their moral values and worldviews, including their political and emotional engagement with the state and their perceptions and expectations of state legitimacy. -
Master for Quark6
Special feature s e Finding a Place for v i a t c n i the Victims e h p s c The Problem in Writing the History of the Cultural Revolution r e p YOUQIN WANG This paper argues that acknowledging individual victims had been a crucial problem in writing the history of the Cultural Revolution and represents the major division between the official history and the parallel history. The author discusses the victims in the history of the Cultural Revolution from factual, interpretational and methodological aspects. Prologue: A Blocked Web topic “official history and parallel history” of the Cultural Memorial Revolution. In this paper I will argue that acknowledging individual vic - n October of 2000, I launched a website, www.chinese- tims has been a crucial problem in writing the history of the memorial.org , to record the names of the people who Cultural Revolution and represents the major division be - Idied from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. tween the official history that the Chinese government has Through years of research, involving over a thousand inter - allowed to be published and the parallel history that cannot views, I had compiled the stories of hundreds of victims, and pass the censorship on publications in China. As of today, placed them on the website. By clicking on the alphabeti - no published scholarly papers have analyzed the difference cally-listed names, a user could access a victim’s personal in - between the two resulting branches in historical writings on formation, such as age, job, date and location of death, and the Cultural Revolution. -
GREGORY BENFORD - Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
GREGORY BENFORD - Ten Thousand Years Of Solitude ONE OF THE chores of physics professors everywhere is fielding telephone calls which come into one's department. Sometimes they ask "What was that I saw in the sky last night?" -- to which I reply, "Could you describe it?" This makes for quick work; usually they've seen an aircraft or Venus. Sometimes calls are from obvious cranks, the sort who earnestly implore you to look over their new theory of the cosmos, or their device for harnessing magnetism as a cure to the world's energy needs. These I accord a firm diplomacy. Any polite pivot that gets one off the line is quite all right. One of the few rules we do follow is that one may not deflect the call to another professor! In 1989 I got a call which at first seemed normal, from a fellow who said he was from Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then I sniffed a definite, classic odor of ripe crank. "Let me get this straight," I said. "The House of Representatives has handed down a requirement on the Department of Energy. They want a panel of experts to consider a nuclear waste repository and assess the risks that somebody might accidentally intrude on it for . ." "That's right, for ten thousand years." I paused. He sounded solid, without the edgy fervor of the garden variety crank. Still . "That's impossible, of course." "Sure," he said. "I know that. But this is Congress." We both laughed. I knew he was okay. So it came to be that a few months later I descended in a wire-cage elevator, clad in hard hat with head lamp and goggles, and carrying on my belt an emergency oxygen pack. -
T H E a Rt a N D a Rc H a E O L O Gy O F a N C I E Nt C H I
china cover_correct2pgs 7/23/04 2:15 PM Page 1 T h e A r t a n d A rc h a e o l o g y o f A n c i e nt C h i n a A T E A C H E R ’ S G U I D E The Art and Archaeology of Ancient China A T E A C H ER’S GUI DE PROJECT DIRECTOR Carson Herrington WRITER Elizabeth Benskin PROJECT ASSISTANT Kristina Giasi EDITOR Gail Spilsbury DESIGNER Kimberly Glyder ILLUSTRATOR Ranjani Venkatesh CALLIGRAPHER John Wang TEACHER CONSULTANTS Toni Conklin, Bancroft Elementary School, Washington, D.C. Ann R. Erickson, Art Resource Teacher and Curriculum Developer, Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia Krista Forsgren, Director, Windows on Asia, Atlanta, Georgia Christina Hanawalt, Art Teacher, Westfield High School, Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia The maps on pages 4, 7, 10, 12, 16, and 18 are courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The map on page 106 is courtesy of Maps.com. Special thanks go to Jan Stuart and Joseph Chang, associate curators of Chinese art at the Freer and Sackler galleries, and to Paul Jett, the museum’s head of Conservation and Scientific Research, for their advice and assistance. Thanks also go to Michael Wilpers, Performing Arts Programmer, and to Christine Lee and Larry Hyman for their suggestions and contributions. This publication was made possible by a grant from the Freeman Foundation. The CD-ROM included with this publication was created in collaboration with Fairfax County Public Schools. It was made possible, in part, with in- kind support from Kaidan Inc. -
Mao's Failure, Deng's Success
MAO'S FAILURE, DENG'S SUCCESS Roderick MacFarquhar Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard University June 24, 2010 Revolutionaries have to be optimists as well as believers, and revolutionary leaders have to be able to inspire their followers, convince them that "Yes, we can!" How could they endure years of struggle on a long march towards a seemingly ever-receding promised land without believing, as Mao Zedong put it during the darkest days of the Chinese revolution, that "a single spark can start a prairie fire?" During the anti-Japanese war, Mao laid down that in the aftermath of defeat, a communist should correct his ideas "to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by 'failure is the mother of success' and 'a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit."1 Twenty years later, during the upheaval within international communism brought about by Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian revolt, Mao remained determinedly optimistic, claiming that bad things can be turned into good things ... In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results. More than two thousand years ago Lao Tzu said: "Good fortune lieth within bad, bad fortune lurketh within good."2 Alas for Mao, not only was Lao Tzu right, but, more importantly, Mao's countrymen and his successors did not agree with him as to what constituted good and bad things. On his deathbed, Mao claimed that the Cultural Revolution was one of his two major lifetime achievements, the other being the victory that brought the communists to power in 1949.3 But within the utopian vision of Mao's Cultural Revolution, egalitarian and collectivist though it was, lurked the seeds of its antithesis, the Chairman's bête noire, the helter- skelter capitalism of the Deng Xiaoping era. -
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION at the GRASS ROOTS Jonathan Unger
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AT THE GRASS ROOTS Jonathan Unger The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. x + 382 pp. US$65.00 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback). Because of the headlong rush of events in China since Mao’s death, research about the Cultural Revolution turmoil of 1966–68 and about the 1970s period of radical policy-making has received short shrift during recent decades. It used to be that a period was most productively studied in detail once the dust had settled, years after the events. Thus a good deal of excellent research about the 1950s was conducted during the 1960s and 1970s, and much of the important work about the 1960s, including studies of the grass-roots upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, was carried out a decade later, during the mid- to late 1970s. But with a few exceptions, during the 1980s and 1990s the traumatic periods of the 1960s and 1970s were neglected by scholars. This lamentably leaves us with too little knowledge of what transpired at the grass roots during those two earlier decades of PRC history, with large areas of important research still left undone. It has been a missed opportunity. The Western-language research of the 1960s and 1970s was necessarily conducted from abroad through documentation and by interviewing émigrés in Hong Kong. From the 1980s onward, researchers have been able to go directly to sources within China, which can provide considerably richer information than was available to the earlier generation of scholars. -
Mao's War on Women
Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 8-2019 Mao’s War on Women: The Perpetuation of Gender Hierarchies Through Yin-Yang Cosmology in the Chinese Communist Propaganda of the Mao Era, 1949-1976 Al D. Roberts Utah State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Roberts, Al D., "Mao’s War on Women: The Perpetuation of Gender Hierarchies Through Yin-Yang Cosmology in the Chinese Communist Propaganda of the Mao Era, 1949-1976" (2019). All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 7530. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/7530 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAO’S WAR ON WOMEN: THE PERPETUATION OF GENDER HIERARCHIES THROUGH YIN-YANG COSMOLOGY IN THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA OF THE MAO ERA, 1949-1976 by Al D. Roberts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in History Approved: ______________________ ____________________ Clayton Brown, Ph.D. Julia Gossard, Ph.D. Major Professor Committee Member ______________________ ____________________ Li Guo, Ph.D. Dominic Sur, Ph.D. Committee Member Committee Member _______________________________________ Richard S. Inouye, Ph.D. Vice Provost for Graduate Studies UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY Logan, Utah 2019 ii Copyright © Al D. Roberts 2019 All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Mao’s War on Women: The Perpetuation of Gender Hierarchies Through Yin-Yang Cosmology in the Chinese Communist Propaganda of the Mao Era, 1949-1976 by Al D. -
The Beijing University Student Movement in the Hundred Flowers
The Beijing University Student Movement in the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957 Yidi Wu Senior Honors, History Department, Oberlin College April 29, 2011 Advisor: David E. Kelley Wu‐Beijing University Student Movement in 1957 Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................................. 4 Chapter 1: The Hundred Flowers Movement in Historical Perspective..................... 6 Domestic Background.......................................................................................... 6 International Crises and Mao’s Response............................................................ 9 Fragrant Flowers or Poisonous Weeds ............................................................... 13 Chapter 2: May 19th Student Movement at Beijing University ............................... 20 Beijing University before the Movement .......................................................... 20 Repertoires of the Movement.............................................................................. 23 Student Organizations......................................................................................... 36 Different Framings.............................................................................................. 38 Political Opportunities and Constraints ............................................................. 42 A Tragic Ending ................................................................................................. 46 Chapter 3: Reflections on -
Red Scarf Girl
A Facing History and Ourselves Study Guide Teaching RED SCARF GIRL Created to Accompany the Memoir Red Scarf Girl, by Ji-li Jiang A Facing History and Ourselves Study Guide Teaching RED SCARF GIRL Created to Accompany the Memoir Red Scarf Girl, by Ji-li Jiang Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. For more information about Facing History and Ourselves, please visit our website at www.facinghistory.org. The front cover illustration is a section from a propaganda poster created during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1968), the same years Ji-li describes in her memoir. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China 1949, government and party officials used mass- produced posters as a way to promote nationalism and convey the values of the Communist Party. Propaganda posters were especially important during the Cultural Revolution, and this poster represents many dominant themes of this media: the glorification of Mao, the color red symbolizing China and the Chinese Communist Party, and the depiction of youth as foot-soldiers for the revolution. The slogan on the poster expresses a popular anthem of the era: Chairman Mao is the Reddest Reddest Red Sun in Our Hearts. -
Ancient China from the Neolithic Period to the Han Dynasty
Ancient China From the Neolithic Period to the Han Dynasty Asian Art Museum Education Department Ancient China: From the Neolithic Period to the Han Dynasty Packet written and illustrated by Brian Hogarth, Director of Education, Asian Art Museum with generous assistance from: Pearl Kim, School Programs Coordinator, Asian Art Museum Michael Knight, Curator, Chinese Art, Asian Art Museum He Li, Associate Curator of Chinese Art, Asian Art Museum John Stuckey, Librarian, Asian Art Museum Lisa Pollman, Graduate Student, University of San Francisco Whitney Watanabe, Graduate Student, University of Washington Deb Clearwaters, Adult Programs Coordinator,Asian Art Museum Rose Roberto, Education Programs Assistant, Asian Art Museum Portions of this packet are based on lectures by Michael Knight and Pat Berger at the Asian Art Museum, and particularly the writings of K.C. Chang, Tom Chase, Wu Hung, He Li, Robert Murowchick and Jessica Rawson. (For a complete list of sources, see bibliography) Photographs of Asian Art Museum objects by Kaz Tsuruta and Brian Hogarth Archaeological photos courtesy of: Academia Sinica, Republic of China China Pictorial Service, Beijing, PRC Cultural Relics Bureau, Beijing, PRC Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan, PRC Hamilton Photography, Seattle, WA Asian Art Museum, February 20, 1999 Contents Introduction: Studying Ancient China Historical Overview: Neolithic Period to Han Dynasty Archaeology and the Study of Ancient China Ceramics, Jades and Bronzes: Production and Design Three Tomb Excavations Importance of Rites Slide Descriptions Timeline Bibliography Student Activities ANCIENT CHINA Introduction–Studying Ancient China This teacher’s packet accompanies a school tour program of the same name. The tour program emphasizes ancient Chinese ceramics, bronzes and jades in the collections of the Asian Art Museum from the Neolithic period (ca.