Search

The May 16 Notification, which set the agenda for the Cultural Revolution, named the movement's key targets as those “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture.” The ensuing uprising of students and workers, many of whom claimed to be the loyal “representatives” of revolutionary and radical forces at the grassroots of society, exposed the fulminating crisis of political representation under CCP rule. This article considers the Cultural Revolution as a manifestation of a continuing crisis of representation within revolutionary socialism that remains unresolved to the present day, as demonstrated by the tepid popular response to Jiang Zemin's “three represents” and widespread contemporary concerns about the Party's “representativeness” (daibiaoxing 代表性) in the wake of market reform. Although the Cultural Revolution enabled both public debate of and political experimentation with new forms of representative politics, the movement failed to resolve the crisis. The Party's lingering disquiet regarding issues of representation thus remains one legacy of the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Song Binbin, the daughter of prominent CCP politician Song Renqiong, has long been accused of having played a role in the death of Bian Zhongyun which took place at the Girls' Middle School in Beijing Normal University on 5 August 1966. In January 2014, she publicly apologized for the violence that occurred at her school during the summer of 1966. However, instead of applauding her act of contrition, rebel participants of the Cultural Revolution used the opportunity to criticize the sons and daughters of high-ranking cadres and to try to overturn the 1981 official evaluation of the Cultural Revolution by promoting a positive view of that period in Chinese history. This paper analyses the background, consequences and implications of Song Binbin's apology from a political science cum memory studies perspective. It argues, against the background of a changing political landscape in the People's Republic of China, that the memory of the Cultural Revolution remains a battlefield of divergent memory groups and multiple narratives. In the memory of today, the struggles of the Cultural Revolution have still not come to an end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics related to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966-1976.

This article focuses on the debate surrounding constitutionalism that has been driven by a constitutionalist alliance of media reporters, intellectuals and lawyers since 2010, and follows its historical trajectory. It argues that this debate forms a discourse with a structuring absence, the roots of which can be traced back to the taboos surrounding the Cultural Revolution, the 1975 Constitution, and everything associated with them. The absence manifests itself in the silence on workers' right to strike, a right which was deleted from the 1982 Constitution in an attempt to correct the ultra-leftist anarchy of the Cultural Revolution. Previous and in contrast to that, there was a Maoist constitutional movement in the Cultural Revolution, represented by the 1975 Constitution, that aimed to protect the constituent power of the workers by legalizing their right to strike. Today, we are witnessing the rise of migrant workers as they struggle for trade union reform and collective bargaining with little support from the party-state or local trade unions. In this context, a third constitutional transformation should be considered that is not a return to the 1975 Constitution but which instead adds some elements which protect labour's right to strike to the 1982 Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines documentary evidence that has emerged from the Chinese state archives showing that from the outset, the Great Leap Forward failed as a method for improving agricultural productivity; that its failure was quickly evident and purposefully ignored; and that the level of human suffering and death was greater than has been suggested. In addition, in contrast to the image of a strictly disciplined communist society in which errors at the top cause the entire machinery to grind to a halt, the portrait that emerges from archival documents is one of a society in deliquescence, as people resort to every means available to get by as well as they can. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most popular performing arts of China the inherent function of xiangsheng is entertainment. However, after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), xiangsheng was enlisted by the official propaganda machine as a tool for promoting political and social objectives. The transformation of xiangsheng was pioneered in the 1950s by the Small Group for the Improvement of Xiangsheng (Beijing xiangsheng gaijin xiaozu, hereafter referred to as "the Group"), who championed the merging of this grassroots people's form of entertainment, with a political agenda. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, xiangsheng was employed to mock and deride the Gang of Four; however, it was not until the middle of the 1980s that xiangsheng performance started to disengage from its official role and gradually resume its indigenous social function as genuine satire. In the recent decade, one emerging xiangsheng master, Guo Degang, has been very influential in carrying out this transformation. Just as the members of the Group shifted the social function of xiangsheng from entertainment to the political tool of "serving the party," Guo Degang has been turning its focus back to "serving the people" as a means of entertainment and social criticism. This article will examine how Guo has resurrected the essence of xiangsheng, successfully commercialized it in a market economy, and simultaneously deconstructed the official discourse through grassroots means. [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]

This article explores the relationship between the sent-down youth movement and economic development in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. It examines ways in which sent-down youth themselves initiated improvements in rural life, and more importantly, how local officials used both their presence to acquire equipment and technical training and their skills and education to promote rural industry. The sent-down youth offices established in the cities and the countryside inadvertently provided connections between remote rural counties and large urban centres that enabled the transfer of a significant quantity of material goods, ranging from electrical wires and broadcast cables to tractors and factory machinery. Ultimately, we show how individual sent-down youths, their families, and both urban and rural officials – none of whom had a role in determining government policies – identified and made use of resources that those policies unintentionally produced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 17-year period China imported over 800 features from the Soviet bloc, Western Europe and beyond; these dubbed foreign films regularly occupied a third to a half of total exhibition time in Chinese theaters. Previous scholarship tended to rely on newspapers and journals of the time and emphasize the propagandist efficacy of these films. Based on government documents, film company records, and memoirs, I argue that foreign films both served and failed to serve the conflicting imperatives of program supply, diplomacy, and propaganda. As a result of these conflicting functions – in addition to their ‘foreignness’ – dubbed foreign films were sheltered from much of the censorship and denunciation inflicted on domestic productions; at times they could even betray their propagandist purpose and constitute a legitimate space of mild dissent against mainstream aesthetics and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1960 until 1965, the People's Republic of China (PRC) built a remarkably cordial quasi alliance with the Republic of Indonesia. At the same time, however, the years between 1960 and 1965 were marked by two large waves of anti-Chinese movements in Indonesia. Although more than half a century has passed since these events, our understanding of Chinese foreign policy towards Indonesia during these turbulent years remains incomplete. In 2008, the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives declassified for the first time documents produced during the years between 1961 and 1965. However, very recently in summer 2013, the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives re-classified the main body of its collection. Through examining this body of fresh but currently inaccessible official records, this article aims to bridge the gap between scholarly works on the PRC's diplomatic history and overseas Chinese history. By tracing the processes by which Chinese diplomats dealt with Sukarno, the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or the PKI), this article argues that the ambivalent Chinese alliance with Indonesia was shaped by three disparate pressures which interacted and competed with one another: the strategic need to befriend Third World countries, ethnic ties to the Chinese in Indonesia and ideological commitment to the international communist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the Chinese-Albanian relationship following following the Sino-Soviet split, and discusses how Albanian cultural imports helped influence 1960s China. Albania was unique in choosing China over the USSR after the split. After the split, the Soviets pulled their movies from China, and the Chinese turned to Albania to provide the Chinese people with films. Because of this signature status, Albanian cultural products enjoyed a practical monopoly on foreign movies and journals in 1960s China. The link to Albania served to legitimize the Chinese leadership's position that the USSR was not the only possible ally. This article demonstrates that over and above the relationship between the superpowers, the split also produced other unintended relationships on a variety of levels. Albanian images and customs become something of a fashion in China, even during the Cultural Revolution. In addition, this article demonstrates a widespread Chinese fondness for the Albanian movies of the 1960s, as well as an appreciation by several Chinese filmmakers for the influence of Albanian movie-making techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

In 1956, the First Auto Works, the People's Republic of China's first automobile manufacturing plant, began production in the city of Changchun. The vehicles that rolled off its assembly line, most notably the 'Liberation' truck, became part of a growing transportation assemblage through which the socialist economy moved. The automobile drove many of the processes that were to define Chinese Communist rule, including the transformation of the built environment, the pursuit of industrial modernity, the coordination of the planned economy, and the division of city and countryside. Originally intended for the integration of industrial and agricultural sectors, motorised mobility was to become a means of state extraction in rural communes during the tragedy that was the Great Leap Forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spring-summer 1965 lay Catholics facing the pressures of the Socialist Education Movement in rural north China began to see visions and to preach. This article examines these events, their origins in local history, their relationship to the Chinese and international political context, and their interaction with the ongoing campaign that led into the Cultural Revolution. It argues that local context is crucial in understanding religious repression in the Maoist era and that these events are important to Catholics in the area today because the memory of them shapes ongoing relations between Catholics and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The takeover of the city by the People's Liberation Army in May 1949 marked the beginning of a process of transformation of all commercial and industrial companies in Shanghai. The funeral business companies represented a small sector, yet one that had great significance in everyday life. The CCP sought to control the private funeral companies almost as soon as it took over the city. The new authorities envisioned a radical transformation of the whole funeral business. While they exhibited remarkable efficiency in conducting the process of progressive elimination of many companies and placing the whole funeral business under strict guidance, the 'socialist transformation' resulted in a system riddled with inefficiency, mismanagement and mistrust. The CCP built on the experience it had acquired previously, but with Shanghai it also needed to adapt to the challenge of managing a large and complex metropolis. I argue that the CCP successfully enlisted the trade associations to implement its policy through means of ideological dominance, persuasion techniques, threat and sheer coercion. The short but strong protest of the former managers of companies during the Hundred Flowers Movement made visible the powerful political machine that drove their companies into public-private joint management, then full socialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By October 1953, when the Central Committee of the CCP formally decided to embark on the transition to socialism, the Chinese government already had overall control of the national economy. The newly announced 'General line of transition to socialism' heralded the incorporation of private industry into the national production plan, but it triggered all kinds of struggles in the course of public-private joint management. This paper takes a micro-level approach based on the study of one private company, Liu Hongsheng's Zhanghua Woollen Textile Company, from the perspective of the private enterprise itself. Despite its lofty ideals of eliminating private ownership, the Communist Party of China had to accommodate its policy to the reality that the recovery of the national economy required the input of the private economic sector. The paper argues that the capitalists supported the CCP's policy on the surface, but did their best to seek the development of their own enterprises. The CCP made concessions, but the basic thrust of its strategy remained geared towards the demise of private entrepreneurs. Even an influential ' national capitalist' like Liu had to hand over his enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Chinese American political organization Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party (CDCP) and its magazine "Chinese World," which opposed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist/Kuomintang (KMT) party. Topics include the relation of the CDCP to the Third Force wing of Chinese politics, a visit by KMT General Li Zongren to the U.S., and U.S. foreign policy toward KMT leader General Chiang Kai-shek. CDCP leader Dai-ming Lee is noted.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the state–church relationship in China entered a new phase. This article, which is substantially based on party reports and archival documents, attempts to reconstruct and assess the party-state's policy on Protestant Christianity from 1949 until the eve of the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957. The focus is not on the repeated dichotomy between ‘state’ and ‘religion’ but explores multiplicity and interaction as two possible aspects of the church–state relationship. The article investigates the following questions: what were the factors influencing the formation and development of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) policy on Protestant Christianity after the establishment of the PRC? Were there multiple actors within the party-state and Protestant Christianity? What kinds of relationships existed between the party-state and Protestant Christianity? Particular attention is given to how the CPC chose between ‘struggle’ (douzheng) and ‘unity’ (tuanjie) when dealing with Protestant Christianity under ideological constraints and complex political situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To win the hearts and minds of the Chinese people, Chinese Communist leaders launched a series of educational reforms to instill new socialist ideas and nationalistic fervor in kindergarteners immediately after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Under the strong influence of Soviet advisers and through a number of methods (games, singing, storytelling, site visits), Chinese kindergarteners were taught the nobility of labor, the sacrifice of soldiers, the grandeur of Tiananmen Square, the wise leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, and the evilness of enemies. However, contrary to the conventional view, this article argues that Chinese education officials and kindergarten teachers never blindly followed Soviet educational models. They appropriated Moscow's techniques to suit their domestic needs, which included promoting nationalist feelings among children to consolidate the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy and power. Ultimately, Chinese kindergarteners were turned into Party loyalists, not admirers of a foreign socialist model. Although the Party encountered difficulties in recruiting reliable teachers to implement its policies, it was able to impose nearly total control from above over the political content of kindergarten education. Under the one-party system, Chinese children were only taught what the Communist leaders wanted them to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural memory is accumulated from experience. Experience is closely intertwined with living environments. However, when environmental changes caused experiences to alter accordingly, the cultural memory had to be held up with represented interpretation. The case studied in this article is the "Meige Revival" of Chuxiong Yi people in southwest China. The "Meige" are ballads of Lipo and Lolopo, two branches of Yi. Their epic poem of Creation has won much attention. During the Cultural Revolution, Meige had been banned and nearly died out. After the Cultural Revolution, Meige had again regained significant status. To save and preserve Meige, the State Council of China listed Meige in its second batch of intangible cultural heritage in 2008. Meige, before and after the revival, carries two different kinds of memories. Traditionally, Meige was a type of melody that accompanies the customs of Lipo and Lolopo. On the occasions of life rituals, Meige was recited during the rituals, or sung as a duet in everyday life. There were also Meige gathering, where people sang in celebration joyously. This is the traditional memory of Meige. With the passing of time, the native language and traditional society of Lipo and Lolopo gradually disappeared. Currently, the only thing that can summon Lipo's and Lolopo's memory is a Meige compilation published in mandarin in 1959. Although a significant publication in Yi folk literature, this reconstructed version is not a rigorous verbatim documentation. On the contrary, it was a new creation, published in mandarin. Meige, reconstructed this way, can neither be recited nor sung in duets. However, the reconstructed Meige has become a performance act on stage. To promote tourism, the public sector recreates a Meige culture atmosphere. This is the new memory of reconstructed Meige. For Lipo and Lolopo, whose native language environments had changed, the re-presented and re-constructed Meige culture serves the public sector's purpose to control their memory. Meige plays an important role in building a collective identity. In this article, I study the process of Meige revival in Chuxiong Yi to explore the different aspects of memory construction in different time and cultural backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a unique aspect of gendered socialism by examining the competing narratives of the state and individuals' oral accounts, particularly the stories of former singing girls and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres. During the socialist transformation of the 1950s, singing girls-turned-revolutionary artists, as popular performers and new socialist women, found mutual interests with the CCP: political propaganda for the Party, making profit for the troupe, and self-transformation for the girls. This article argues that the Party and former singing girls enacted a uniquely gendered socialism by continuously deploying the singing girls' cultural and financial influence colored with their erotic image. In addition, this essay treats oral history as a process of identity and history construction rather than as 'fact.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Mao Zedong's armies swept to victory in 1949, thousands of Guomindang (KMT) troops fled into northern Burma. The newly independent country they entered was near collapse. Burma had not recovered from the devastation of World War II and also faced two communist rebellions and several insurgencies in ethnic minority areas. The KMT troops complicated Burma?s relations with the new People?s Republic of China (PRC), fed traditional suspicions of the Siamese, and poisoned relations between the United States and Burma for years to come. This article explores the dynamics of the KMT issue, how it bitterly divided American diplomatic opinion, and how it was temporarily resolved in 1953 and 1954. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting an historical approach, this essay reexamines the national minority films produced between 1949 and 1966 in socialist China with a focus on its role in the Chinese Communist Party's political project of building an ideal socialist citizenry. Shifting the critical anchoring of the national minority film from questions of representation to those of performance and spectatorship, it points out that cross-ethnic performance embedded within film narrative and discerned by historically situated audiences simultaneously constructs and deconstructs ethnicity, thus encouraging a transformative recognition across the ethnic boundary. Ultimately the national minority film models fraternity of citizenship essential to creating socialist subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chinese Revolution, Korean War, and McCarthyism loomed large over Kennedy administration assessments of Chinese intentions in Vietnam. The president and his advisors disagreed over the exact nature of the Chinese threat, but they uniformly believed in a dangerous, expansionist China. Their assessments promoted cautious escalation in Vietnam, where Kennedy sought to avoid “losing” another Asian country to Communism without provoking another war like Korea. This, in turn, promoted Chinese militancy. Central to Kennedy administration thinking was the idea that Vietnam served as a test case for Beijing’s more radical foreign policy line vis-à-vis Moscow. This article traces the development and influence of such assessments. It also argues that the China factor informed Kennedy and Johnson administration notions of credibility. Holding back or reversing Communist gains in Asia by supporting Saigon offered these administrations the chance to kick once and for all the “who lost China” stigma that had haunted the Democratic Party since 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to retrace the making of the 1954 U.S.-Taiwan military alliance and shed new light on the Taiwanese perception of the issue. As will be revealed, the conclusion of the 1954 defense treaty between Washington and Taipei was not only a result of the American Cold War strategy in the Far East, as the numerous existing historical literature have admirably depicted. It was also a representation of Chiang Kai-shek’s sophisticated military diplomacy, involving the role of a hitherto little-known group of Japanese then serving as his “unofficial” advisors. New historical evidence also suggests that, in this military diplomacy, Chiang played with the United States, for signing a defense pact was originally not one of his priorities. Rather, what Chiang had initially sought from America was the means by which to rearm his forces so as to strengthen his position to launch a military recovery of the mainland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The worldview as reflected in the textbooks of the People's Republic of China during 1949–1966 centred on Party-led nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. This article emphasizes both the continuities and changes in nationalist ideology during the Republican and Maoist periods. First, textbooks in Maoist China presented the imperialist powers as shifting away from Britain, Russia and Japan under the KMT government and towards the United States (since 1949) and the Soviet Union (since the 1960s), and emphasized class struggle. Second, the CCP had far greater control over the production of textbooks than the KMT. In this sense, the CCP truly carried out “partified” (danghua) education, a goal shared by the KMT which it never had the ability to achieve. In addition, “the language of Cultural Revolution” appeared with the outbreak of the Korean War. In other words, the education that cultivated revolutionary successors began in the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented in which the author reflects on several time periods in his life, including his childhood in China during the establishment of Communist Party control, his family's emigration to the United States and his enrollment in the New York City Public School system, and his dissertation research in Moscow, Russia, as part of an academic exchange program.

The article discusses the 1963 international sports competition known as the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta, Indonesia. According to the article, the event enabled teams from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to compete in a significant international sports competition. The article discusses the challenge to the organization the International Olympic Committee (IOC) posed by GANEFO, political conditions and the Communist Party in the PRC, and sports as diplomacy.

The article discusses the historical context of the Korean War, particularly the shift in democratic support for Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to Chinese Communists led by Communist leader Mao Zedong. It examines the Cold War-era foreign policy of then-U.S. president Harry S. Truman and the policies of then-U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson, relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union, and Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung.

In 1957, there was a great change in CPC's policy to intellectuals, who were grouped into "bourgeois class". This kind of policy inversion does not happen overnight from the perspective of class attribute definition on intellectuals since the foundation of People's Republic of China, which is caused by CPC's judgment on the attribute by applying the view of world, its less confidence on intellectuals, its focus on class struggle, and its alertness to their critical nature. It is of significance to correctly orient their roles and status in building the current socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of how Tang Dalang, a famous Shanghai tabloid writer in Republican China, accommodated the new CCP regime after he became the general editor of the tabloid newspaper Yibao (1949-1952). Current studies portray social and intellectual elites as accommodationists in the early years of the Communist state. Tang's case points to the powerful agency of the accommodators. Tang took an instrumental approach in responding to the new Communist state. He employed a confessional narrative that effectively secured his political standing with the CCP while at the same time asserting his 'bourgeois' literary identity. This study reveals the strength many Chinese had to frustrate the CCP's attempt to transform their minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Chinese government's efforts to develop Y-10 commercial airplanes from the 1950s through the 1970s. The role that the Chinese ruler Mao Zedong's government policies, including China's economic policy, played in China's failure to develop Y-10 airplanes is discussed. The article relies heavily on what is referred to as the Determinant Model of the economist Michael Porter. The relationship between China and the Soviet Union, including the former's purchasing of high technology from the latter, also discussed. An overview of the impact that Mao's education policies had on China's ability to develop commercial airplanes is provided.

Data from in-depth interviews of 80 elderly women and men, conducted during the 2000-2003 period in urban China, shed light on married individuals' lived experiences with women's liberation and gender equality under Chinese state socialism during the 1950s. When individuals' experiences are placed in a broad historical context, urban Chinese women's liberation appears as an integral part of nationalist and class campaigns and attendant freedom from family patriarchy. Subsequently, women's family autonomy and individual freedom yielded to renewed collective efforts channeled through the discursive space of gender obligation equality. This led to a dual gender configuration. At the state level, both genders were molded into state persons, whereas in the home, traditional gendered roles remained rather intact. The experiences of urban Chinese women and men marked different state-society relations and alternative trajectories of women's liberation and gender equality from those followed in the industrial West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Chinese technolinguistic experimentation in the Maoist or early Communist period, focusing on an innovation that rearranged Chinese characters on typewriters into natural-language clusters to enhance adjacency and proximity of characters found next to each other in writing. It comments on the development of moveable-type printing and typewriting and reflects on the linguistic technology known as "predictive text." The author also addresses human-machine relations in Chinese typing schools.

The article discusses the Chinese program "Making Green the Motherland" initiated by Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong in 1956 to promote gardening and the creation of public urban spaces in Socialist China as part of what later became known as the Cultural Revolution. It considers socialist goals of the Maoist era between 1949 to 1978, modernity, and Western influences upon Chinese civilization. The relationship between peasants, collectivization, and self-reliance in the political goals of embracing agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry as economic development projects is explored.

The 1956 crisis in Hungary had a profound impact on China's domestic politics. It played a formative role in the evolution of Chinese policy as top officials critically reviewed the Stalinist experience of governance. Intellectuals and students began to doubt the efficiency of the party's rule, while Mao Zedong rejected meaningful reforms of institutional socialism in favour of ‘soft’ means of conscripting the intellectuals and ‘remoulding’ popular thought. Having opened up the party to criticism from outside, Mao cited the risk of domestic opponents fomenting a Hungarian-style crisis in China in terminating the Hundred Flowers campaign and moving to a programme of ideological purges in the summer of 1957, which paved the way for a massive economic campaign in 1958.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michurinist biology was introduced to China in 1948; granted a state supported monopoly in 1952; and reduced to parity with western genetics from 1956. The Soviets exported it through the propaganda agencies Sino Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) and VOKS (Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries). China's Ministry of Agriculture achieved broad public awareness and acceptance of Michurinist biology through a translation, publication, and Soviet guest speakers campaign - all managed by a team of agriculturalists led by Luo Tianyu, a veteran CCP (Communist Party) cadre. The campaign grew exponentially, but did not affect university or Chinese Academy of Sciences biology. Luo Tianyu's failed attempt to force Michurinist biology on a Beijing university triggered its second stage: monopoly status and a ban on 'Mendelist-Morganist' biology in teaching, research, and publication. The CCP Central Committee supported this policy believing that Michurinst biology would increase agricultural production for the forthcoming first Five Year Plan; whereas, western genetics had no practical value. Michurinist biology flourished at all levels of education, research, and science literature; Western genetics was completely shut down. This only began to change when the CCP Central Committee became wary of China's dependency on Soviet technical expertise and failure to fully utilize that of China. Change was further promoted by significant attacks on Michurinist biology by Soviet and East German biologists. Soon, these developments informed China's 'genetics question,' which became a test case for larger questions about the definition of science and the relationship between scientists and the state. Under the guidance of Lu Dingyi's Central Committee Propaganda Department, the CCP eventually decided that, henceforth, science controversies would only be resolved by the science community; and that monopolies or ideological orthodoxies would not be imposed on science. At the same time, the CCP rescinded Michurinist biology's monopoly and the ban on western genetics. By the mid-1960s western genetics had successfully restored itself, largely due to the leadership of C. C. Tan, a former student of Dobzhansky. Michurinist biology's presence shrank and it became marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between ethnic configuration and state social policy in a Chinese context. Why did the Chinese communist government have to implement a preferential policy towards ethnic minorities, and to what extent has this policy come to reshape peoples’ consciousness of their group membership? As well as analysing the reasons and intents of the Chinese Communist Party when dealing with the minority issue before and after it attained power, this paper argues that categorizing of the population served to establish the state apparatus. Why the project of ethnic identification was first initiated in Fujian (a province best known for its overwhelming Han culture) is also discussed. By unfolding the process of searching for ethnic representation in Fujian in the early 1950s, this paper further argues that the major concern of the party-state regarding ethnic minorities is to hold onto its power. Finally, this paper documents how government agents, when investigating ethnicity, interacted with the local population. The Fujian case implies as well as exemplifies how ethnicity can be invented, constructed or reconstructed as a particular representation in relation to state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article investigates the political and diplomatic factors influencing the prospects of North Korea's post-2002 experiment with market-oriented economic reforms. Comparing the North Korean situation with the experiences of Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam, it concludes that a certain degree of political liberalisation, the successful normalisation of P'y[ocheck]ngyang's relations with the US, South Korea and Japan, and the decoupling of foreign economic assistance from military negotiations are essential preconditions of a successful reform process in North Korea. In the absence of these preconditions, economic crises alone are insufficient to stimulate a comprehensive reform programme, although they might inspire certain superficial corrective measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of the Cultural Revolution in China. It presents extracts from focus group discussions on changes brought by the Cultural Revolution to the country. It discusses the relationship between the history of modern China and international politics. The relationship between personal biography, historical events and mediated interventions, and cultural objects is also discussed.

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.

The article discusses the relationship between sport and the Chinese state in the 1960s, with a particular focus on sports militarism and the role of elite sport competitions in Chinese foreign diplomacy. According to the authors, Chinese authorities reacted to the Sino-India border conflict, the breakdown of relations between China and the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War by developing a program of military sport which would train its citizens for military service. It is suggested that People's Republic of China (PRC) leadership also focused on improving their elite sports programs in order to participate in international competitions which supported the country's relationships with newly independent nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The 1962 Asian Games are discussed.

This paper investigates the roles of excessive investment and compulsory saving in causing China's great famine during the period of 1959-1961. China initiated its ambitious industrialization campaign in 1958 under the false illusion that the agricultural sector would be able to provide sufficient savings. When the illusion proved to be false, a large number of industrial projects were left incomplete. However, since the economic returns for completing the half-done projects were high, central planners maintained high levels of grain procurement and urban labor force to complete these projects, even when famine became widespread. In addition, some political factors also contributed to the insufficient response by the central planners to the famine. The high grain procurement enforced by the State, compounded by other factors such as weather calamity, caused the most deadly famine in human history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]