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"Politics and culture China History 20th century."
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Gilded Voices
In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949, Qiliang He pieces together published, archival, and oral history sources to explore the role of the cultural market in mediating between the state and artists in the PRC era. By focusing on pingtan, a storytelling art using the Suzhou dialect, the book documents both the state's efforts to police artists and their repertoire and storytellers' collaboration with, as well as resistance to, state supervision and intervention. The book thereby challenges long-held scholarly assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party's success in politicizing popular culture, patronizing artists, abolishing the cultural market, and enforcing rigid censorship in Mao's times.
eBook
Words and Their Stories
In spite of dislocations and ruptures in China's revolutionary language, to rethink this discourse is to revisit a history in terms of sedimented layers of linguistic meanings and political aspirations. Earlier meanings of revolutionary words may persist or coexist with non-revolutionary rivals. Recovery of the vital uses of key revolutionary words projects critical alternatives in which contemporary capitalist myths can be contested.
eBook
Mao's New World
In this sweeping portrait of the political culture of the early People's Republic of China (PRC), Chang-tai Hung mines newly available sources to vividly reconstruct how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightened its rule after taking power in 1949. With political-cultural projects such as reconstructing Tiananmen Square to celebrate the Communist Revolution; staging national parades; rewriting official histories; mounting a visual propaganda campaign, including oil paintings, cartoons, and New Year prints; and establishing a national cemetery for heroes of the Revolution, the CCP built up nationalistic fervor in the people and affirmed its legitimacy. These projects came under strong Soviet influence, but the nationalistic Chinese Communists sought an independent road of nation building; for example, they decided that the reconstructed Tiananmen Square should surpass Red Square in size and significance, against the advice of Soviet experts sent from Moscow.
Combining historical, cultural, and anthropological inquiries,Mao's New Worldexamines how Mao Zedong and senior Party leaders transformed the PRC into a propaganda state in the first decade of their rule (1949-1959). Using archival sources only recently made available, previously untapped government documents, visual materials, memoirs, and interviews with surviving participants in the Party's plans, Hung argues that the exploitation of new cultural forms for political ends was one of the most significant achievements of the Chinese Communist Revolution. The book features sixty-six images of architecture, monuments, and artwork to document how the CCP invented the heroic tales of the Communist Revolution.
eBook
Maoism at the Grassroots : everyday life in China's era of high socialism
\"This edited volume explores the stunning diversity in behavior, outlook, and viewpoints at the grassroots level of society during the Mao Zedong era. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories, teens penned searing complaints in diaries, mentally ill individuals in the Beijing suburbs cursed Mao, and farmers formed secret societies, founded new dynasties, and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercurrents were at least as mainstream in people's everyday lives as the ideas found in Mao's Little Red Book or People's Daily editorials. Bringing together senior scholars and up-and-coming researchers from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, the book draws on rare documents to challenge top-down historical narratives. Focusing on crime, labels, and punishment; mobilization; culture and communication; and discontent, the chapters reveal how people individually and collectively negotiated structures of power. Bringing readers stories of aggrieved schoolteachers in rural Hunan, Uyghur officials in Xinjiang, armed rebels on the southwest frontier, and disaffected youth in Tianjin, the volume sheds light on the traumas and unexpected turning points during China's years of high socialism, raising the question of whether 'Mao's China' ever existed at all\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The color of success
The Color of Successtells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the \"yellow peril\" to \"model minorities\"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.
Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.
By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype,The Color of Successreveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
eBook
The Teahouse under Socialism
To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. InThe Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces-perfect sites for examining the social and economic activities of everyday Chinese.
Wang looks at the transformation of these teahouses from private businesses to collective ownership and how state policy and the proprietors' response to it changed the overall economic and social structure of the city. He uses this transformation to illuminate broader trends in China's urban public life from 1950 through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. In doing so,The Teahouse under Socialismcharts the fluctuations in fortune of this ancient cultural institution and analyzes how it survived, and even thrived, under bleak conditions.
Throughout, Wang asks such questions as: Why and how did state power intervene in the operation of small businesses? How was \"socialist entertainment\" established in a local society? How did the well-known waves of political contestation and struggle in China change Chengdu's teahouses and public life? In the end, Wang argues, the answers to such questions enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in the Communist state.
eBook