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In 'Useful Bullshit', Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- MAPS, TABLES, AND FIGURES -- PREFACE -- CHAPTER ONE. Introduction -- CHAPTER TWO. The State and the Family in Urban China: Beijing and Shanghai, 1950-1953 -- CHAPTER THREE. Between "Urban" and "Rural": Family Reform in the Beijing and Shanghai Suburbs, 1950-1953 -- CHAPTER FOUR. Family Reform in the Southwest Frontier, 1950-1953 -- CHAPTER FIVE. The Politics and Culture of Divorce and Marriage in Urban China, 1954-1966 -- CHAPTER SIX. The Family in Flux: Family and Personal Relationships in Rural Areas, 1954-1966 -- CHAPTER SEVEN. The Conservative Backlash: Politics, Sex, and the Family in the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1968 -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Conclusion -- AFTERWORD. Observations on State-Family Relations in the Reform Period -- APPENDIX. Texts of the "Decree Regarding Marriage" and the 1950 Marriage Law -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

AbstractThis paper explores the unusually weak voice of Chinese war veterans in post-1949 politics society and culture. Although Chinese movies and television often feature military-related themes, it is rare to find frank and politicized depictions of China's military conflicts. In this respect, China departs sharply from the former Soviet Union—China's Leninist model for most of its formative years—as well as Vietnam, European inter-war fascist regimes and democracies. This paper argues that the relative weakness of authentic military voices in China can be traced to several peculiar features of modern Chinese history. The nature of warfare in China, as well as the absence of a national army, veteran organizations and a consensus over the legitimacy about China's wars, has led many to question the validity of veterans' claims for a higher political and cultural status. Rather than allow veterans the space to portray war as they experienced it, intellectual elites in various cultural and propaganda offices dominate national war memory, presenting a simplistic and artificial rendering of China's wars.

This article examines the organizational origins of political vulnerability among Chinese military veterans between 1949 and 2006. Recently declassified sources from urban and rural archives show that many veterans, even as they were officially considered core members of the ruling elite and hailed as the "flesh and blood of the revolution," nevertheless experienced frequent humiliation and discrimination; few citizens sympathized with their plight. The argument here is that much of this mistreatment can be traced to the failure of the state to provide veterans with the opportunity to organize in the context of either fraternal organizations or quasi-autonomous federations. In this respect, their predicament is notably different from their counterparts in democratic, fascist, or corporatist systems, or in other Leninist regimes. Why have veterans in Taiwan, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union been allowed to form veterans organizations but veterans in the PRC—to their misfortune—have not? This article explains this anomaly.