Suchergebnisse

Fanshan is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. --from publisher description.

This article defends Mao Zedong's legacy against the charges supporting the widespread view of Mao as a despot: first, that he is responsible for all the euphoria & excesses of the Great Leap Forward & the organization of people's communes, which, according to standard views, led to a collapse of production & finally to famine in China, & second, that Mao is responsible for the extremes of violence & all the personal tragedies that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. It is argued that severe class struggle was built into the modern, post-liberation history of China, so that no person, no group, no party, & no faction had a free hand to apply socialist policy, & that the tragedies & casualties on all sides resulted from the friction at the interface between new domestic classes as they struggled for hegemony over society, above all inside the Communist Party. Finally, it is argued that Mao's prediction, that in a world dominated by powerful imperialist states no capitalist road is open to China, will turn out to be as true today as it was when he formulated it in the 1920s. T. K. Brown