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This book offers a new analysis of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution. Under the Chinese Communist Party, the intellectual was never simply an outspoken scholar, a browbeaten artist, a supportive official, or any kind of person facing an increasingly powerful political regime. The intellectual was first and foremost a widening classification of people based on Marxist thought. As the party turned revolutionaries and otherwise perfectly ordinary people into subjects identified locally as intellectuals, their appearance profoundly affected the political thinking of the party elites and how they organized the revolution, as well as postrevolutionary Chinese society. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a fascinating journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, official registrations, organized protests, work organizations, and theater productions. The book lays out in colorful details the formation of new identities and new patterns of organization, association, and calculus. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the impact of which is still visible in globalized China.

The detailed portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and revolution and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The authors spent a decade interviewing villagers and rural officials, exploring archives, and investigating villagers with diverse resources and cultural, traditions, and they vividly describe both the promise and the human tragedy of China's rural revolution. Exploring the decades before and after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, they trace the growing economic desperation and cultural disintegration that led to the revolution, the reforms undertaken by the Communist leadership that initially brought economic gains and cultural healing, and the tensions that soon developed between party and peasantry. They show that the Communist antimarket and collectivist strategies which culminated in the imposed collectivization of 1955-56 and the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, clashed with cherished peasant cultural norms and economic aspirations. Eventually the party's attack on peasant values and interests, the authors find, produced a rupture that threatened both developmental and socialist goals and destroyed the democratic potential of the revolution at its best. -- Provided by publisher

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1 Agricultural Science and the Socialist State -- 2 Pu Zhelong: Making Socialist Science Work -- 3 Yuan Longping: "Intellectual Peasant" -- 4 Chinese Peasants: "Experience" and "Backwardness" -- 5 Seeing Like a State Agent -- 6 The Lei Feng Paradox -- 7 Opportunity and Failure -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Sources -- Index

Representing a lifetime of research and writing by noted historian Arif Dirlik, the essays collected here explore developments in Chinese socialism and the issues that have occupied historians of the Chinese revolution for the past three decades. These incisive essays range from the origins of socialism in the early twentieth century, through the victory of the Communists in mid-century, to the virtual abandonment by century's end of any pretense to a socialist revolutionary project by the leadership of the CCP. All that remains of the revolution in historical hindsight are memories of its failures and misdeeds, but Dirlik retains a critical perspective not just toward the past, but also toward the ideological hegemonies of the present. Taken together, his writings reaffirm the centrality of the revolution to modern Chinese history and the ongoing relevance of Marxism in grasping the flaws of capitalist modernity

At the time the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issued its now-famous Circular Notice of 16 May 1966, which roundly criticized Peking's Mayor P'eng Chen and thereby ushered in a dramatic new stage of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a large-scale and intensive Socialist Education Movement was still being implemented systematically in the Chinese countryside.

The achievements of the Chinese Communist regime over the past 20 years are impressive, whether seen in terms of the Communists' own ideology or of universal human desires for security and material sufficiency. Under the Party's leadership, the Chinese people have unified their nation, constructed a considerable industrial base, transformed their country's internal distribution network, explored thoroughly for the first time China's natural resources, overcome the threat of famine, begun to master the field of nuclear energy, and accomplished many other changes which reflect favourably on China in comparison with other nations that have set for themselves equal or lesser goals in a similar period of time. This is not to deny shifts and setbacks in the general strategies for socialist construction. The capital-intensive industrialization of the first five-year plan moved to the labour-intensive industrialization of the Great Leap and culminated in the balanced strategy which emerged after 1962 of building the agricultural prerequisites for industrialization. The failure of the Great Leap may have cost China as much as a decade in terms of a potential time schedule for development, but it is important to stress the achievements of the economic plan which followed the Leap.

In the Chinese theory of the "triple revolution" the three major stages of the entire period of the PRC's existence were named as follows: 1) the "revolution of the seizure of power", which led to the overthrow of the old regime and the establishment of a new one; 2) the "revolution of reform", which paved the way for self-improvement and development of the socialist system; 3) a "transitional or transformational revolution", which completes the primary stage of building a socialist society. The dates of the turning points of a revolutionary nature are considered to be 1949 (the proclamation of the PRC), 1978 (the beginning of the policy of "reforms and opening-up"), 2012 (the holding of the 18th Congress of the CPC).

The revolution of 1949 was of a new democratic nature and consolidated a socialist orientation. However, soon after the revolution, during the lifetime of Mao Zedong, the leftist course won and all phases of socialist construction (the policy of "new democracy", socialist transformations and the transition to communism through the "cultural revolution") were passed in an accelerated mode. The program of market reforms and the "mixed economy" launched at the end of 1978 made it possible to increase economic potential and raise living standards, but resulted in a number of negative consequences of the "loss of the banner", i.e. deviation from the ultimate goal of socialist construction. The coming to power of the fifth generation of Chinese leaders in 2012, led by Xi Jinping, was marked by a significant adjustment of the policy of "reform and opening-up" and the implementation of a number of important social transformations, including the fight against corruption and poverty. China's "own path" can be seen as a transition from "state capitalism" to "market socialism" with features of specific convergence and growing socialism. Given the complexity of China's current internal and external situation and the difficulties of a "trailblazer," the implementation of the new strategy will be far from cloudless.