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China is steadily sliding deeper into the counterreform era. Economically, it is slowing down. Ideologically, it is closing up. Politically, it is steadily pivoting back toward personalistic one-man rule. As these trends deepen, Beijing's leaders are erasing core elements of both the reform and revolutionary eras, reviving ruinous Maoist governance practices of the 1950s, and turning back to China's imperial history in an effort to build a new ideological foundation for their authoritarian rule. Far from paving the way for China's twenty-first-century rise, Beijing's counterreforms are exacerbating its structural problems, weakening the nation and undermining its stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan (1889-1937), the Soviet Union's diplomatic representative, attempted to resolve the issue of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) in a peaceful manner by negotiating with Marshal Chang Tso-lin (1875-1928) of the Fengtian Clique. The negotiation process between Soviet diplomats, led by Karakhan, and the Fengtian Clique can be divided into six distinct parts: 1) a meeting in Mukden in August 1923, 2) the Borodin Proposal, 3) Chang's denial of the Sino-Soviet Agreement, 4) the signing of the Fengtian-Soviet Draft, 5) Moscow's rejection of the Fengtian-Soviet Draft, and 6) the confirmation of the Fengtian-Soviet Agreement. Throughout the negotiations, the challenges presented by warlordism and factionalism during the Northern period made it difficult for Soviet diplomats and the Fengtian Clique to reach a consensus on the specifics of additional clauses. However, due to the military threat posed by the USSR and the outbreak of the Second Zhili-Fengtian War, the Fengtian Clique was forced to yield. Although there are only minor differences between the Fengtian-Soviet Agreement and the Sino-Soviet Agreement, behind them lie the diplomatic efforts of Karakhan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality in the People's Republic of China from the Mao era to early Deng era (1949–c.90). I argue that, entangled with the multi‐centred global psychopathological regime of homosexuality, the psychiatric discourse in China perpetuated a medicalised concept of homosexuality from the Mao period through the early Deng years. This article further situates homosexuality in Mao's China in the socialist camp to call for a decentring historiography of modern homosexuality. It also contributes to the understanding of the continuity between the Mao era and the Deng era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologies to rationalize the use and allocation of labor were immensely impacting foreign technical attaches, young Tunisian economists and agronomists, and people at the periphery of state planning and within the state-funded university system and research centers. In reading these proposals against the grain, this article situates them in their social and political context and the constraints that context imposed: a hewing away from outright enthusiasm for Communist China within the state-funded research centers, and a warmer embrace within more independent fora. It also situates those discussions amid a Tunisian milieu wherein China was increasingly embraced for its support of Algerian national liberation, its own national liberation war, with its experience seen as a third way for the Third World against the industrial-heavy experience of the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a strong authoritarian state, what mechanisms hold political elites accountable and contain the state's predatory tendencies? We examine China's Great Famine of 1958–1961 to understand the variation of predatory behaviors across Chinese provinces. By exploring the Chinese Communist Revolution history and probing into over four hundred biographies of political elites in the newly founded communist state, we first document the revolutionary legacies on state building particularly political power configurations at the provincial level. We then employ a generalized difference-in-differences design and find that local representation—the extent to which local cadres were represented in the provincial authorities—enhanced provincial leaders' accountability to the general public and thus was associated with lower mortality rates, whereas central connections—the political ties between provincial leaders and powerful political elites in the central state—reinforced the accountability to higher-level political leaders and were associated with higher mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we as scholars of transnational US literary studies understand W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) outside the historical and racial context of the United States? Anyone familiar with the text will agree that it primarily focuses on the unique condition of African American existence or, as Du Bois himself puts it, "the strange meaning of being black" at the turn of the last century. But to what extent is this "black" experience historically, nationally, or even racially bound? An exploration of the impact of the Chinese translation of Souls in 1959 China reveals that the fluidity of historical, national, and racial boundaries goes beyond the limits of mere cultural negotiations. Situated in the critical formation of Afro-Asian engagements during the Bandung era and Du Bois's visit to China in 1959, Souls was pivotal to China's reassertion of what it means to be "black" on the global stage of proletariat revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as an administrative category has been used in Chinese official discourse since the early twenty-first century. It tends to standardise in a systemic vision what practices should or should not be included in the updated definition of Chinese tradition. The role played by the central government is of utter importance, drawing on China's administrative and legal framework. However, local dynamics and reasoning sometimes occur off the beaten track. Shadow puppet troupes are a good example of a long tradition all over China that almost disappeared during the Maoist era, but which was resurrected during the 1980s, and is now listed internationally as a form of ICH. In Hua County (Huaxian), Shaanxi Province, one of the practitioners discussed in this article belongs to a family renowned for its puppets, and he has participated in the revival of shadow puppet performances. The second case examined here is of a troupe performing in the Yongxing Fang tourist area in Xi'an. The leader of the troupe is registered on the list of heritage transmitters at the provincial level. The discourse and practice of these two troupes exemplify different attitudes towards official recognition. Analysing the Huaxian shadow puppets, I will try to find out if ICH is only a new label stuck on an older tradition or if it has a deeper influence on the survival of living traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's foreign policy dramatically changed in the post-Mao era as Mao's ideological approach was replaced by an ambition for economic development gaining a share of the world economy. In the meantime, China has resorted to multilateral organizations and institutions to make an impact on international politics. The Chinese elite’s new strategic perception contributed to this shift. This article investigates the background based on which Chinese foreign policy shifted from ideological confrontation to participatory development as well as the role of multilateral organizations and institutions in this process. This research argues that multilateral organizations and institutions are very important in the post-Mao Chinese foreign participatory developmental policy. China's foreign policy will first move towards institutional participation and later towards institutional balancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a protracted struggle, in 1949 the Chinese Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies and took control of the mainland. After the possibility of recognition of the new regime was dashed by Communist mistreatment of American diplomats and other U.S. citizens, the U.S. government adopted a strong anticommunist position. Disgusted with Chiang and his Chinese Nationalist Party, it also turned its back on its wartime ally. Thus opposed to both Communists and Nationalists even before the final Communist victory, it launched a search for viable “third forces” (neither Communist nor Nationalist) it could support instead. Far from an “abstraction,” this quest constituted a powerful theme in the approaches of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department to China during the early 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water and soil conservation in the village of Dengjiabao in Gansu province, north-west China, gained nationwide renown through state-led campaigns against erosion during the 1950s. This was deeply interconnected with shifting conceptions of women's work and had far-reaching effects on their everyday lives. Investigation of these conservation programmes adds to recent efforts to integrate gender and environmental history. Since the gendered division of labour in rural China dictated that women should do the work of acquiring fuel and water, measures that conserved these resources brought genuine improvements for them. They also reshaped local marriage patterns by making previously resource-starved villages more attractive to young women from other areas. However, a dissonance existed between the official propaganda and the experience of conservation for rural women. Oral history interviews and archival documents show that balancing the demands of conservation work with household responsibilities intensified the pressures placed upon women. Mobilization for the highly militarized conservation campaigns that were an integral part of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), and the famine they helped to precipitate, subjected women to unprecedented burdens that affected their domestic lives and had an enduring effect on their health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the scope and quality of selected aspects and issues of relations between the German Democratic Republic (Gdr) and China in the 1950s and early 1960s. How was Chinese dictator Mao Zedong's Hundred Flowers Campaign perceived and interpreted in East Berlin, why and until when was Gdr leader Walter Ulbricht supportive of and indeed enthusiastic about Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward are among the questions this article will address and seek to answer. As it turned out, East German leaders' assessments and newspaper reporting on Mao's domestic and foreign policy and government propaganda did not in any way correspond with Chinese on the ground realities. The same was true for Chinese reporting and propaganda on Ulbricht's decision to divide Berlin with a wall in 1961: misleading and wrong reporting in support of a fair-weather friendship, in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split in early Sixties would turn into enmity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of Maoist China have suggested that workplace gender inequality was greater in rural areas than cities. One possible explanation is that this was a result of the different institutional arrangements that governed rural and urban spaces. Another alternative is that different ideologies were associated with different types of work irrespective of institutional context. This article examines this through an analysis of teachers in Guangdong and Jiangsu. Some teachers were employed by the state in the same way that urban workers were, while others were employed by village‐level administrations within communes. Levels of gender inequality were not majorly different between the two groups of teachers. In both groups there was a high degree of pay equality in comparison to other types of work. Other types of gender inequalities existed in teaching, but their effects were mitigated by the unintended consequences of structural changes in education during the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zhou Libo's Baofeng zhouyu (Hurricane) and Ding Ling's Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang (The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River), both written in 1948 and dual recipients of the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951, were largely based on the authors' own participation in the land reform movements of the Civil War. As socialist realist texts formulated through the ethnographic experiences of their authors – observation, fieldnotes, and first-hand accounts – these novels feature a geopoetics in which a new nation is constructed through the restructuring of its physical spaces. I analyze the land reform novels through their authors' twin methods of knowledge production: an ethnographic approach to reconstructing the reality of land reform campaigns (the ethnographer) and the theoretical underpinnings of socialist realism as a narrative explication of the policy's necessity (the cadre). The cadre ethnographer was an author who sought both to obtain knowledge and to effect a transformation of his object of study, a tension which in fact facilitated an embodied philosophy of history. As both inventor and chronicler, the cadre ethnographer reconciled the two halves of "socialist" "realism," producing the method by which Maoist communism theorized its own historiographic authority as a narrative of socio-cultural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. How can one make sense of what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing? This essay offers perspectives from the history of the Party and its notable style of rule: ideological governance through rectification (zhengfeng). This Party 'statecraft' which dates back to Yan'an in the 1940s and across the Mao period also draws on long-standing Chinese political norms. Xi Jinping is reviving a form of ideological governance in which only the Party can save China and only rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. It is Xi Jinping's Counter-Reformation against the reform Leninism of the past three decades and its perceived failures to manage social tensions and Party corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the most robust years of his career, 1949 to 1964, the artist Shi Lu 石魯(1919-1982) frequently painted young rural women. The appearance of peasant women in the art of the early Maoist period ostensibly demonstrates the suitability of the subject for visualising state policies that promoted social transformation and women's liberation. While participating in these nationbuilding efforts, Shi Lu's images of peasant women were also a product of global art historical influences, namely allegorical depictions, that manifested subtle influence on the development of twentieth-century Chinese art. The identity of the artist, a Yan'an cadre who provided creative and administrative support to the official art system, reveals how artists navigated political expectations as state functionaries while simultaneously defining them through artistic exploration. Through the case study of Shi Lu and the hybridised global artistic traditions that gave rise to the subject of young peasant women in Maoist China, this article reveals the porousness of an era that has been considered isolated from global currents outside of the Soviet sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the takeover of Beijing in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party started to provide public cultural goods for youth by organizing collective leisure activities, mostly on weekends and holidays. From 1953, the authorities took a more interventionist approach when they held collective leisure activities more often on an everyday basis after the Party realized that leisure was a field for Communist education. Although the Party expected youth to live in a planned and regular way, discontent sprang up in 1956 when young people found they could not master their leisure time because there were too many mandatory activities, and many work units forced people to attend organized leisure activities collectively. The Party, as a result, decided to 'let people plan their time freely' by reducing unnecessary meetings in leisure time, allowing voluntary participation of leisure activities, and letting Party committees make overall leisure arrangements in local work units. Instead of challenging the legitimacy of political intervention in their leisure time, young people got accustomed to a new pace of life favoured by the regime: doing the right things at the right time, in the right place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even before formal diplomatic recognition, efforts by the Chinese Communist Party and cultural mediators such as friendship associations, ideological allies, and luminaries with a keenness to explore New China paved the way for formal state-to-state relations. This essay focuses on the three important case studies of Mexico, Ghana, and Italy to highlight the global reach of Maoist cultural diplomacy across three continents. Each case represents a rich example of different modes of cultural diplomatic engagement between China and these countries at different stages of development, with a view to painting a fuller picture of Maoist China's global turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the appeal exerted by Maoist China upon a broad category of Arab onlookers from the mid-twentieth century onwards. It accomplishes this by focussing on the writings of two categories of observers: short-term visitors, who had experienced China through government-organised planned tours, and long-term residents, foreign experts, who had been recruited by the Chinese state as language instructors, translators and editors. Across the ideological spectrum and with a high-degree of consistency, these diverse onlookers articulated highly romanticised images of Maoist China as a model for post-colonial modernity. These sympathetic imaginaries, the paper argues, stemmed less from a systematic engagement with Chinese realities on-the-ground, and more from a sense of anxiety over the Arab world. Maoist China was in essence reconceptualized as a 'homeland that could have been,' offering lessons as well as hope for the future as filtered through the ideological biases of these observers. The paper discusses the writings of short-term visitors and long-term residents through a broader retelling of the history of the Arab diaspora in Maoist and early post-Maoist China. It also utilises previously neglected sources, most notably the China-centric works of Salamah 'Ubayd (1921–1984) and Hadi al-'Alawi (1932–1998), in presenting its key arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article explores the connection between the carceral strategy utilized by the Chinese government and the social structure in the Mao era. From Mao's view, thought reform and profit-seeking were the two primary goals of the Chinese socialist prison. Yet, by placing the system of labor camps and post-release management into a broader context, this Article demonstrates that the system was designed to make inmates depend on the socialist settings through the measures of party-state apparatus, prisoner cards and dossiers, classification of prisoners, hard labor, and thought remolding. Those measures had their counterparts in the general social structure in communist China, like work unit, household registration and political dossier. In addition, the unique feature of punishment-profit nexus made the system of labor camps and post-release management crucial for the purposes of economic development and political control in Mao's time. In conclusion, the system of labor camps and post-release management was an integral part of the greater social control mechanism in Chinese society during Mao's time. It was designed and operated in a way to reform an ill population into qualified workers so as to fit socialist requirements and maintain social stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by presenting a paradox, wherein Protestant converts during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) proclaimed to turn to a faith that had been deprived of authorized forms of religious mediation. Inaccessible to religious authorities, Protestantism was differentiated from Chinese popular religion by its repudiation of material images, but nonetheless, Protestants developed ways to practise their faith that included the improvizational handling of materials. Dematerialization and rematerialization worked together to forge a semiotically defined Protestant identity in which oral communication with the divine took precedence over tangible religious objects. This semiotic feature accorded Jesus with enduring power and divinity that could not be deprived by the devastation of religious buildings, icons, and scriptures, giving Protestantism an edge over local cults. Employing Webb Keane's concept of semiotic ideology, I demonstrate how Protestantism maintained its distinctness and began to grow in the absence of the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about the Lu Jiamin's Wolf Totem, a 2004 fictional autobiography based on his experience of the cultural revolution. It discusses the awards won by the book including 2005 Twenty-First Century Ding Jun Semiannual Literary Prize. It mentions the wolves' symbolic or metaphoric qualities explained in the book.

This article investigates socialist China's pedagogic treatment of individuality between 1949 and 1958, with a focus on the debates concerning 'all-round development' and 'teaching in accordance with aptitude', two principles that clashed regarding students' individuality. It reconstructs how educational bureaucrat and theorist Zhang Lingguang spearheaded the debates in People's Education, China's leading educational journal. Building on the existing idealistic, critical and cultural perspectives on the debates, this article offers an analysis of power dynamics on three levels. Interpersonally, bureaucrats and ideologues were in conflict with ordinary teachers from local schools. Institutionally, People's Education mediated between the Ministry of Education and teachers nationwide, while managing its accountability. (Inter)nationally, the debates were conditioned by the changing Sino–Soviet relationship, and by the Hundred Flowers Campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During China's First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), a state purchasing monopsony on grain injected sudden, concentrated spurts of cash into the rural economy. Grassroots cadres faced a new problem: peasants with too much cash burning a hole in their collectivized pocket were prone to "spontaneous capitalist tendencies," including high-interest lending, hoarding, and black-market activity. By examining previously unused documents from the Wenzhou Party Committee, this study explores the role of " huilong "—the return flow of cash into the coffers of the People's Bank of China—as a tool of local governance to mitigate such tendencies. Ultimately, the study shows that illicit economic activity was not merely a function of capitalist ideology but was a structural side effect of the planned economy itself. Regional authorities recognized this. Their attempts to curb capitalist behavior reflected a sophisticated appreciation of the perils of excess money and an almost monetarist policy prescription to counter them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 a list of books related to history, international relation, and the political systems of China. They include "The Birth of Communist China," by Charles Fitzgerald, "Policies Toward China: Views From Six Continents," edited by A. M. Halpern, and "Ideology and Organization in Communist China," by H. F. Schurmann.

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.

The article talks about Chinese dance during the era of Third Worldism between 1949 and 1965. Topics discussed include the Cold War stereotypes about American dance in China, including their coverage of by dance research journal "Wudao" in China; the lack of revolutionary ballet in Mao-era China; and the Asian dance taught at the Beijing Dance School in 1950s.

Chinese philosophy of value arose from reflection on the Cultural Revolution and an inherent need amidst the implementation of reform and opening up, and it was directly triggered by extensive discussions about the standard of truth. The development of the philosophy of value over the past forty years shifted from value to evaluation before moving on to the research topics of values, in particular core socialist values. Currently, its major characteristics are the unity of theoretical logic and practical logic, the mutual interaction between and enhancement of the study of the philosophy of value and research on Marxist philosophy, and exchanges and dialogues with foreign philosophies of value. Its main achievements in the philosophy of value include the implementation of a subjective paradigm based on the theory of practice and the theoretical construction and clarification of core socialist values. Future directions for the development of the philosophy of value include improving subjective interpretation on the basis of the theory of practice, deeply exploring value concepts and value principles in the new form of civilization, and bringing the philosophy of value into interaction with multidisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article explores the traits and aspects of private children's libraries in China. Topics discussed include information on Baby Cube Children's Library, a private membership library, dominant model of private libraries in the country, and activities offered by libraries. It also mentions the stigma created by the Cultural Revolution in China.

This article is an exploration of media and gender in urban and peri-urban China during the 1950s and early 1960s – specifically, the persistent trope of the “hooligan,” or liumang. Since at least the late imperial period, Chinese authorities had feared unmarried, impoverished, rootless men as the main source of crime, disorder, and outright rebellion. Yet such figures were simultaneously celebrated as knights-errant for their violent heroism in cultural works of enormous popularity across regions and classes. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party attempted to reshape society and culture after 1949, it condemned knight-errant tales and made hooliganism a crime. At the same time, the state tried to promote a new pantheon of vigilante-like men in the guise of revolutionary heroes. But the state’s control over deeply rooted cultural markets and their products was incomplete. Moreover, the same potent tools that had empowered the Party, in particular its rhetoric of revolutionary subjectivity and its harnessing of modern media technologies, were open as never before to being adopted by the very targets of its efforts at control and censure. Marginal masculinity in the early PRC, though in many ways continuous with that in China during the previous decades and centuries, marked a new epoch: men and boys deemed hooligans were able to speak out and defend themselves as heroes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the becoming of contentious political events through the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966). The conditional theory of structural causation and the rational choice conception of agency that have complemented each other in current scholarship have left missing links between elite conflict and mass mobilization. Examining the dialogic struggle among various actors involved in the process helps to overcome the teleological explanation of the rise of the Cultural Revolution and brings to light the politics of interpretation in constructing its meaning. The perspective shows ideological contradictions in the status quo ante to be important sources for change in an uncertain and destabilizing situation. The event thus did not result from the realization of actors' fixed goals but was an emergent process of the disarticulation of structural contradictions, in which actors' active appropriation and changing deployment of cultural repertoires were critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the circulation and consumption of foreign literature in socialist China, showing that even during the most xenophobic times of High Maoism, Chinese readers had access to foreign literature through a variety of channels. An unstated though widely shared commitment to the intrinsic value of foreign culture, I argue, reveals deeply ingrained cosmopolitan practices that belie a nationalistic surface rhetoric. To trace the interest in and commitment to foreign literature, this article inspects three distinct yet overlapping modes of literary circulation: the private sphere, the restricted public sphere of internal publications, and the open public sphere. Access to foreign literature was limited, but the flow of transnational culture never stopped, as editors and readers alike perpetuated an intellectual framework that was grounded in the valorization of transnational culture and that predated the People's Republic's founding in 1949. These findings call for a reevaluation of Chinese socialist cultural consumption and production from a transnational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chairman Mao’s era, the politics of Chinese translation in general and literary translation in particular was played out in various and often incomprehensible forms. This was largely due to Mao’s conception of translation as political vaccination, which was derived from his political dialectics that had, in turn, been developed from diverse political and philosophical sources. By revisiting what actually happened to translation in the China of the time, the article examines Mao’s problematic and self-contradictory dialectics that constituted the larger Chinese context, which created different dimensions of the politics of translation, in an attempt to draw attention to what might be termed the political dialectics of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the intervention of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the Korean War in 1950-1953. It looks at the various claims of experts including Allen S. Whiting, Melvin Gurtov and Gerald Segal regarding the potential reasons behind China's intervention such as a reaction to a perceived security threat, and the U.S. decision to cross the 38th parallel. It examines the impact of the war on Chinese domestic affairs, and why Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong wanted to send Chinese troops to Korea in July-August 1950.

This study examines the fact of representation of ethnicity in the People’s Republic of China. The present ethnic configuration, centred on a re-categorization of the population, came to be accepted by ordinary people in Chinese society as the result of the multiple projects in association with state-making and nation-building. This paper delineates how the projects in question came about, especially the one focused on the investigation of ethnic minority social history. It examines the way in which narrating and representing ethnic minorities officially took place and how the representation of ethnic minorities functions in the construction of the Chinese nation. It argues that representation for ethnicities focused on how to locate each of them at a certain stage of social development, conceptualizing the Chinese nation in a framework of brotherhood in order to include those excluded by the mainstream throughout history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

Contrary to its initiators’ intentions, the Cultural Revolution laid political foundations for a transition to a market-oriented economy whilst also creating circumstances that helped to ensure the cohesion and survival of China's Soviet-style party-state. The Cultural Revolution left the Chinese Communist Party and civilian state structures weak and in flux, and drastically weakened entrenched bureaucratic interests that might have blocked market reform. The weakening of central government structures created a decentralized planned economy, the regional and local leaders of which were receptive to initial market-oriented opportunities. The economic and technological backwardness fostered by the Cultural Revolution left little support for maintaining the status quo. Mao put Deng Xiaoping in charge of rebuilding the Party and economy briefly in the mid-1970s before purging him a second time, inadvertently making him the standard-bearer for post-Mao rebuilding and recovery. Mutual animosities with the Soviet Union provoked by Maoist polemics led to a surprising strategic turn to the United States and other Western countries in the early 1970s. The resulting economic and political ties subsequently advanced the agenda of reform and opening. China's first post-Mao decade was therefore one of rebuilding and renewal under a pre-eminent leader who was able to overcome opposition to a new course. The impact of this legacy becomes especially clear when contrasted with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, where political circumstances were starkly different, and where Gorbachev's attempts to implement similar changes in the face of entrenched bureaucratic opposition led to the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rhetoric and reality of the Cultural Revolution as an international phenomenon, examining (through published and oral histories) the ways in which it was perceived and interpreted beyond China. It focuses in particular on the diverse impact of Maoist ideas and practice on the counterculture movement of Western Europe and North America during the late 1960s and 1970s. Within Europe, Cultural Revolution Maoism galvanized Dadaist student protest, nurtured feminist and gay rights activism, and legitimized urban guerrilla terrorism. In the United States, meanwhile, it bolstered a broad programme of anti-racist civil rights campaigns and narrow Marxist-Leninist party-building. Despite Mao's hopes to launch a global permanent revolution, it appears that, over the long term, enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution in Western Europe, the United States and parts of South-East Asia helped to splinter the radical left and assisted the right in consolidating its power throughout the 1980s and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]