MCLC: Maoism at the Grassroots

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Maoism at the Grassroots
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to announce the publication of Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China's Era of High Socialism. Featuring essays from an international group of scholars, the volume brings together a wide range of perspectives on everyday life, culture, and state-society relations in China during the Mao years. Several contributors are appearing in English for the first time, and we hope that you will find the research to be of interest.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Brown, Simon Fraser University
Matthew D. Johnson, Grinnell College
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674287204
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction [Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson]
Part I. Crimes, Labels, and Punishment
1. How a “Bad Element” Was Made: The Discovery, Accusation, and Punishment of Zang Qiren [Yang Kuisong]
2. Moving Targets: Changing Class Labels in Rural Hebei and Henan, 1960–1979 [Jeremy Brown]
3. An Overt Conspiracy: Creating Rightists in Rural Henan, 1957–1958 [Cao
Shuji]
4. Revising Political Verdicts in Post-Mao China: The Case of Beijing’s Fengtai District [Daniel Leese]
Part II. Mobilization
5. Liberation from the Loom? Rural Women, Textile Work, and Revolution in North China [Jacob Eyferth]
6. Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China [Sigrid Schmalzer]
7. Adrift in Tianjin, 1976: A Diary of Natural Disaster, Everyday Urban Life,
and Exile to the Countryside [Sha Qingqing and Jeremy Brown]
Part III. Culture and Communication
8. Beneath the Propaganda State: Official and Unofficial Cultural Landscapes in Shanghai, 1949–1965 [Matthew D. Johnson]
9. China’s “Great Proletarian Information Revolution” of 1966–1967 [Michael Schoenhals]
10. The Dilemma of Implementation: The State and Religion in the People’s
Republic of China, 1949–1990 [Xiaoxuan Wang]
Part IV. Discontent
11. Radical Agricultural Collectivization and Ethnic Rebellion: The Communist Encounter with a “New Emperor” in Guizhou’s Mashan Region, 1956 [Wang Haiguang]
12. Caught between Opposing Han Chauvinism and Opposing Local Nationalism: The Drift toward Ethnic Antagonism in Xinjiang Society, 1952–1963 [Zhe Wu]
13. Redemptive Religious Societies and the Communist State, 1949 to the 1980s [S. A. Smith]
Epilogue: Mao’s China—Putting Politics in Perspective [Vivienne Shue]
Notes
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Maoist state’s dominance over Chinese society, achieved through such watersheds as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, is well known. Maoism at the Grassroots reexamines this period of transformation and upheaval from a new perspective, one that challenges the standard state-centered view. Bringing together scholars from China, Europe, North America, and Taiwan, this volume marshals new research to reveal a stunning diversity of individual viewpoints and local experiences during China’s years of high socialism.
Focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to 1980, the authors provide insights into the everyday lives of citizens across social strata, ethnicities, and regions. They explore how ordinary men and women risked persecution and imprisonment in order to assert personal beliefs and identities. Many displayed a shrewd knack for negotiating the maze-like power structures of everyday Maoism, appropriating regime ideology in their daily lives while finding ways to express discontent and challenge the state’s pervasive control.
Heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions between official and popular culture were persistent features of Maoism at the grassroots. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories, teenagers penned searing complaints in diaries, mentally ill individuals cursed Mao, farmers formed secret societies and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercurrents were as representative of ordinary people’s lives as the ideals promulgated in state propaganda.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 22, 2015
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