MCLC: Grassroots Turmoil in China’s Cultural Revolution

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Grassroots Turmoil in China’s Cultural Revolution
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to bring your attention to the latest essay published on Chinoiresie.info. It is text the seventy-seventh George E. Morrison Lecture given last week at the Australian National University by Jonathan Unger—a half century-perspective on the Cultural Revolution.
Here follows a brief abstract:
After Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, vast numbers of students, workers, peasants and other ordinary people divided into hostile groups that violently fought against each other for more than a year and a half. Each group claimed it was fighting out of loyalty to Mao’s teachings. But research by the speaker that included a large number of in-depth interviews in the 1970s and 1980s with former participants in these conflicts revealed that the fighting between groups was actually the consequence of mounting tensions within Chinese society prior to the Cultural Revolution. The upheavals in the Cultural Revolution pitted those who had earlier been favoured by Communist Party policies against those who had been disfavoured. But the nature of grievances and antagonisms differed from group to group—be they students, workers, peasants or government office workers. As a result, there were a number of different types of upheavals, generated by different reasons, in different sectors of society. Examining these provides insights into the complex fabric of Chinese society under Mao.
You can find the full text at his link: http://www.chinoiresie.info/grassroots-turmoil-in-chinas-cultural-revolution-a-half-century-perspective/
Best regards,
Ivan Franceschini (ivan.franceschini at anu.edu.au)
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 10, 2016
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20161110/1d0833f1/attachment.html>