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Afterlives of Chinese Communism
Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world- renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.
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Sinology in post-communist states : views from the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Poland, and Russia
\"Drawing on extensive historical studies of the lives and works of distinctive yet understudied sinologists in the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Poland, and Russia, this volume takes readers on a journey of exploration and rediscovery of post-communist sinology-an important topic that we know surprisingly little about. After the end of the Cold War, the China Studies research agenda in these four countries has evolved divergently without any apparent shared orientation, despite the previously shared socialist and Communist legacies. Contributors draw on case studies to illustrate how sinologists in these countries actively use diverse approaches to map China's modern evolution and deconstruct stereotypical notions of China's rise in the twenty-first century. These hallmark studies also reveal sinologists' deep engagement with the Chinese humanities. The conclusions in this volume have major implications for the evolution of intellectual history and its analysis, by emphasizing the importance of individualized agency to the practice of post-Communist sinology as both a statement of identity and a strategy for survival during tumultuous political times.\"--Back cover.
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Socialism vanquished, socialism challenged : Eastern Europe and China, 1989-2009
This book examines the 20-year aftermath of the 1989 assaults on established, state-sponsored socialism in the former Soviet bloc and in China. It brings together prominent experts on Eastern Europe and China to examine the respective trajectories of political, economic and social transformations that unfolded in these two areas, while also comparing the changes that ensued within the two regions. The volume features paired comparisons, with one chapter on the countries from the former Soviet bloc and one on China for each of the following themes: the reinstitutionalization of politics, the recasting of state-society relations, the reform of economic systems, changes in economic behavior, and transformations of social institutions. Even if they differ in their specific substantive focus and in their disciplinary grounding, the chapters share a concern with the fate of the state in postsocialism. They elaborate on topics such as the transformations of the old socialist state and its nature, activities and roles; civil society before and after 1989; the ways in which the state has, or has not acted to encourage new forms of economic behavior; and the state's responsibility for novel societal trends, whether in family formation, in protest or in inequality. The volume challenges claims of the unfeasibility of comparing across these divergent contexts by uncovering insights about political models and economic patterns that have emerged in the grand project of the transition from socialism.
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Reinventing Chinese tradition : the cultural politics of late socialism
\"Yan-an, China was the main organizing site of Chinese communism from 1935 to 1949. As the final destination of the Long March and center of the 'red bases,' it acquired mythical status during the Maoist period as the symbol and epitome of the Communist Party's triumph. Yet in the post-Mao period, Yan-an's significance diminished, along with its role as an emblem of revolutionary heroism. In this study, Ka-ming Wu presents an ethnographic account of contemporary Yan-an. She looks at Yan-an today to see what happened to that society and culture in the post-socialism era. Wu examines new dynamics between state and society in light of how rural residents in northwest China make sense of rapid social changes. Under Mao, Yan'an's rural culture was stripped of its spiritual contents and reorganized around socialist, anti-imperial rhetoric to glorify communists' socioeconomic reforms. Since the 1980s, rural Ya'an has been reimagined as a hinterland of ancient cultural traditions. Wu documents how revivals of rural practices are reworked within the socialist legacy, including folk paper-cutting, a local form of musical storytelling, and spiritual cults of local deities. Even though Mao had repressed these practices, surprisingly their current revival has brought out the sacredness or urgency of the revolution's legacy. Instead of assuming that ascendent market forces have replaced state socialism, the dominant line about post-Mao China today, Wu probes the various cultural practices in contemporary Yan'an that evade total commercialization. She contends that this public realm contains powerful religious and ritual practices that produce new forms of meaning out of turbulent rural conditions and new dynamics of state-society relations in the post-socialist era\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Legacies of totalitarian language in the discourse culture of the post-totalitarian era
This book is unique in its kind. It is the first scholarly work to attempt a comprehensive and fairly detailed look into the lingering legacies of the communist totalitarian modes of thought and expression in the new discourse forms of the post-totalitarian era. The book gives also new and interesting insights into the ways the new, presumably democratically-minded political elites in post-totalitarian Eastern Europe, Russia, and China manipulate language to serve their own political and economic agendas. The book consists of ten discrete discussions, nine case-studies or 'chapters' and an 'introduction.' Chapter 1 discusses patterns of continuity and change in the conceptual apparatus and linguistic habits of political science and sociology practiced in the Czech Republic before and after 1989. Chapter 2 analyzes lingering effects of communist propaganda language in the political discourse and behavior in post-communist Poland. Chapter 3 analyzes the legacy of Soviet semantics in post-Soviet Moldovan politics through the prism of such politically contested words as 'democracy,' 'democratization,' and 'people.' Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the way in which communist patterns of thought and expression manifest themselves in the new political discourse in Romania and Bulgaria, respectively. Chapter 6 examines phenomena of change and continuity in the socio-linguistic and socio-political scene of post-Soviet Latvia. Chapter 7 analyzes the extent to which the language of the post-communist Romanian media differs from the official language of the communist era. Chapter 8 examines the evolution of Russian official discourse since the late eighties with a view of showing 'whether or not new phenomena in the evolution of post-Soviet discourse represent new development or just a mutation of the value-orientations of the old Soviet ideological apparatus.' Chapter 9 gives a detailed and lucid account of the evolution of both official and non-official discourse in China since the end of the Mao era.
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Varieties of post-communist capitalism : a comparative analysis of Russia, Eastern Europe and China
\"This book intends to be a contribution to the 'varieties of capitalism' paradigm. The theoretical background is Weber's theory of legitimacy. Was communism ever 'legitimate'? What kind of legitimacy claims were made in the transition from communism to capitalism? Central Europe was closer to the Western 'liberal' model. Russia built capitalism in a patrimonial way. China followed its own unique way; some called it 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. Putin experiments with an innovation for post-communist capitalism. He confronts the 'oligarchs', reallocates property from those who challenge his political authority to old and new loyal ones. In the conclusion the central question is to what extent 'Putinism' is a generic model for post-communist capitalism?\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Desiring China : experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture
Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such \"desiring subjects\" is at the core of China's contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era.
Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China's entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women's museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.
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Red memory : the afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
\"'It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,' Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia. Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Postsocialism and cultural politics : China in the last decade of the twentieth century
In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's \"long 1990s,\" the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state's cultivation of a market economy, the aggressive neoliberalism that accompanied that effort, the rise of a middle class and a consumer culture, and China's entry into the world economy, Zhang argues that Chinese socialism is not over. Rather it survives as postsocialism, which is articulated through the discourses of postmodernism and nationalism and through the co-existence of multiple modes of production and socio-cultural norms. Highlighting China's uniqueness, as well as the implications of its recent experiences for the wider world, Zhang suggests that Chinese postsocialism illuminates previously obscure aspects of the global shift from modernity to postmodernity.
Zhang examines the reactions of intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers to the cultural and political conflicts in China during the 1990s. He offers a nuanced assessment of the changing divisions and allegiances within the intellectual landscape, and he analyzes the postsocialist realism of the era through readings of Mo Yan's fiction and the films of Zhang Yimou. With Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Zhang applies the same keen insight to China's long 1990s that he brought to bear on the 1980s in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms.
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