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.
Der Autor setzt sich äußerst kritisch auseinander mit der Rolle der Kommunisten in der chinesischen Revolution, mit den Wesensmerkmalen der maoistischen Außenpolitik sowie der maoistischen Wirtschafts- und Entwicklungsstrategie nach 1949, mit der Repressionspolitik der Kulturrevolution und der Nach-Mao-Ära, mit der Modernisierungs- und Wirtschaftsreformpolitik der Deng-Ära sowie mit der Entwicklung des Rechtssystems und der politischen Repression der Demokratischen Bewegung seit 1978. (BIOst-Klk)
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
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