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The article discusses the impact of political upheaval on the economic situation in China. The conflict between the Maoists and Liu Shao-chi, head of state and former heir-designate to Mao, has impeded the country's economic development program. The important issue in the fight between the Maoists and Liu-ists is economic policy. Both camps have launched their propaganda to criticize economic and political doctrines of each party. The anti-Maoists oppose the opening up of a free market in the country and Mao Tse-tung's view of modern enterprise. An overview of China's economic condition under Chairman Mao, including foreign trade with leading Western industrial nations and agricultural production, is presented.

The article presents author's insights about the reshaping of the Chinese society in China. The author stresses that the conflict between U.S. and China could bring danger of war on both countries, where emotionalism is one of the contributing factors of the conflict. Chinese government aims to increase the material well-being of their citizens for them to achieve greater freedom among other countries. Reshaping of the Chinese society emphasizes social development among Chinese. However, reshaping process of the country are manipulated by individual leaders which has caused hazy and unreal. Furthermore, economic develop has caused decline on the motivation for government to increase the population of the country.

The article offers information about the nationalities in China. Reportedly, about six percent of the Chinese population belongs to the national minorities, where more than 50 are separately recognized nationalities. The national minorities are classified into two divisions such as northern and southern. About 74 percent of the languages used in the country belongs to the Sino-Tiberan family that include Sino-Thai, Miao-Yao, and Tibeto-Burmese. Islam is the largest and the minority religion of the country among other religion including Huis, Kazakhs, and Tadjuks. Furthermore, the social structure of the national minorities include the nationalities with developed system of feudal landlordship, nationalities with prevailing system, and nationalities where slavery existed.

This article takes Shanghai as a case study to look at the home life of what the Chinese Communist Party officially categorized as “national capitalists” in China from 1949 to 1966. Contrary to the long-standing perception in both academia and popular writings that former capitalists were purely victims of the revolution, this study shows that as far as material comfort was concerned, the old rich still lived an infinitely better life than most Chinese at the time, despite the constant political campaigns against them. The persistence of bourgeois lifestyles under communism was an outcome of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front policy, as well as an ingenious use of government policy and programs by capitalists to preserve a way of life that was politically condemned. “Bourgeois comfort” under Mao represented a deviant and dissident undercurrent that helped prepared the way for the remarkable return of opulent lifestyles in post-Mao China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using new archival materials, internal publications, and gazetteers as its sources, this article studies the conduct of disaster governance in Tianjin city during the Great Leap Forward famine from 1958–1962. The city was organizationally well able to implement disaster relief efforts, and early on it took a number of measures to control and mitigate the food crisis that began in the city in early 1959. However, Maoist campaign-based disaster management could not work well when other campaigns were prioritized in its stead. Lacking central sanction for a major disaster relief effort, city leaders resorted to strategies that prioritized its residents over suburban peasants and outsiders. The city actively sought resources from outside while trying to prevent their outward flows. The city's own production of vegetables must not be overlooked as one of the reasons for better survival rates among urban residents, but even this policy was hampered by other Great Leap Forward initiatives. In the case of Tianjin, urban disaster governance of the famine was inward-looking and, at the same time, constrained and reliant on the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on two main communist regimes, the Soviet Union (USSR) and China, that were affected by the greatest famines of the twentieth century. It compares the famines that hit the two countries in time of peace, the USSR in 1931-1933 and China in 1958-1962. It informs that in both cases, a similar development strategy led to excessive transfers of resources from agriculture to heavy industry.

Using a Chinese peasant woman, Hu Xinkui's ..., as a looking lens, this article unfolds the socio-cultural change of rural China in the transitional period from around Liberation in 1949 up to 1978, and even into the twenty-first century, covering a wide range of issues regarding footbinding, child brides, forced conscription, bridal lamentation, communist collectivization, and a series of political movements such as land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, the Four Clearing-ups Movement, and the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants Association. Hu Xinkui, born in 1934 in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province in south China, was a child bride who was promoted as a director of Women's Affairs after Liberation because of her suppressed inferior status. It was also because of the Liberation-implemented new marriage law that laid the foundation for her husband to divorce her in 1959, for the reason of her apparent infertility and lack of romance, as well as her concern for an unmarried brother, which preoccupied her to the detriment of her own marriage. She remarried in 1964 and retired from her active political life after she had children; since then she has committed herself to being an extremely hard-working housewife. With her husband being an active and honest party cadre (including being the deputy to the 9th Party Congress in 1969), she had to find every possible source to maintain the family finance in order to receive a great deal of visiting guests and peasants, at a cost of neglecting the education of her children, two of whom were addicted to gambling. Her life story manifests how an ordinary village woman engaged with local women's expressive traditions, called ...(women's script) and ... (women's song), and how her personal life changed along with the transformation of China. Also worth noting, the life history interviews with Xinkui were conducted in the company of her daughter and son-in-law, who have assisted my nüshu research for more than a decade -- and they had never learned about Hu Xinkui's past until then. Their participation throws additional reflective light on Xinkui's life experiences in China's changing rural context. With Hu Xinkui's life history as the axis, this article aims to draw attention to the life narrative approach as a tool for collecting ethnographic data and to bring about a rethinking of its use as a conceptual framework. Recognizing the possible limitations of life narrative in terms of its partiality, lapses, mistakes, and exaggeration, I employ narratives from multiple subjects and diverse resources (e.g., literary composition, local oral traditions, and historical documents) to open up the dialogical horizon of a life narration. I demonstrate that life history as a lived experience and an account of life not only speaks to a person's lifeworld; it is also an intertextualization of the voices of multiple subject-positions: narrating subject, addressee, researcher, and the embedded context. In the case of Hu Xinkui, her life narration not only encodes her history and historiography, but also manifests how the next generation, especially her daughter, decodes her story and writes it onto their own. Life narrative in this sense is a convergence of history and culture, whereby history continues and culture persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses relations between peasants and intellectuals in China and examines the impact of land reform on those relations between 1946 and 1952. Particular focus is given to the role played by Qinghua University professor Wu Jingchao within the land reform movement. Issues related to social inequality under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and national identity in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are explored. Other topics include class loyalty, the revolutionary elements of land reform movements, and class identity among Chinese students.

During the years of 1955–1969, the Xingkaihu labor camp in China’s northeastern borderland of Heilongjiang Province detained large numbers of social undesirables, a considerable portion being charged with political offenses. The authorities used them as forced laborers for land reclamation and other projects in conjunction with “ideological remolding.” This research examines the experiences of intellectual political inmates in Xingkaihu. They suffered physically and psychologically. Their attempts to redeem themselves exacerbated their misfortune and came to define one aspect of the tragedy of intellectuals in Mao’s China. I also outline the development of Xingkaihu, its managerial features, and the camp authority’s alleged efforts to remold the inmates ideologically through combined use of indoctrination, manipulation, intimidation and coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the change of political regime on the Chinese mainland in 1949, new values and attitudes have been consciously introduced by the Communist Party. The family institution has undergone a rather drastic alteration not only in form but also in composition, structure, roles of its members and especially in values and patterns of mate selection and marital adjustment. According to traditional Chinese social values, one should marry a person of relatively similar social background consistent with the concept of homogamy discussed by Burgess and his associates. This paper is a discussion of the new trend toward political homogamy which often results in the emergence of inter-class marriage. Along with the new freedom in mate selection, there are numerous incidents of romantic love involving individuals of different background and education. Under the reeducation of Party leaders, a new value based on political compatibility in socialist ideology has been stressed with reference to the establishment of a new family. Equality of the sexes through the participation of women in labor will liberate them from the traditional shackle of dependence on men.

Investigates the impact of the events of 1966-1976 under Mao Zedong on Chinese culture and society. Work motivation instilled by the decade on the country's people; Factors that created the political disillusion among the youth; Aspects of Chinese society overlooked by foreign researchers.