Category: Unit III. War And Revolution

#312 Cultural Revolution as Memory: Though I am Gone

3/29/2018

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Discovery stations (continued from last class)

As a team, complete the following three tasks:
- Create a basic timeline that pieces together a chronology for the events around the room.
- Address the latter two questions from our initial walk-through, yesterday:
  - How might you summarize the cause of the Cultural Revolution?
  - What factors might account for the chaos and violence that occurred during the initial phase of 1966-68?
- Identify potential avenues for future investigation.

Discussion on Though I am Gone:

Why do you think Red Guards conducted "house searches" (chaojia 抄家) of authority figures like Bian Zhongyun? What might they have been hoping to find?
If you were a student at the school at the time, do you think you would have contributed to Bian Zhongyun's death? Stood by as a bystander? Or actively opposed the attack on her? Explain your answer.
Who does Wang Gong, Bian Zhongyun's husband, blame for the death of his wife? (see 8:29 in the video). Who do you think is at fault? Why?
How do you think Mao Zedong might have reacted if he had heard about Bian Zhongyun's death?
Why do you think Wang Gong, Bian Zhongyun's husband, acted as he did in keeping the posters up for “evidence”? Do you think you would have done the same if a family member was killed in a similar manner? Why or why not?
Wang Gong filed suit in court against one of the students who he believes was responsible for his wife’s death. Do you agree that the court system is an appropriate venue for seeking justice for those victimized during the Cultural Revolution? Would you recommend another path?
Why do you think there are so many Cultural Revolution victim narratives (like this film), and so few people willing to come forward to admit their role as victimizers? What do you think has happened to the victimizers in the years since?

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#310 "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!"

3/9/2018

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Personal reflection:

Start out by thinking about connections between what you read and your own experiences with propaganda. Were you ever exposed to propaganda growing up?

Discussion questions:

Describe the visual, audio, and textual aesthetics of the Lei Feng campaign that we examined for homework.
What are some of the values that “studying Lei Feng” might impart on young Chinese?
Where have we seen these values mentioned in our course so far?
What effects do you think this propaganda campaign actually had during the Mao years? What about in more recent years?
Andrew Jacobs, writing for The New York Times, reports that in 2012, efforts by the party to feature Lei were “met by snickers.” Assuming that the cynicism was indeed more widespread than during the Mao period, what factors might account for the change?

Comparison:

Having reflected on the “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!” campaign, identify another propaganda (or advertising) campaign from another context. Compare and contrast the aesthetics, messaging, and likely impact of the two campaigns.

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#309 Great Leap Famine, part 2

3/7/2018

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Backyard furnaces in Xinyang county, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward in 1959. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Investigation:

Authors:
- Who is Yang Jisheng? What other information can you find out about him, especially since 2012 when the second article was published?
- Who is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Why is Yang compared to him?
- Who is Ian Johnson? What authority does he bring to the subject?
Publications:
- What can you find out about The Annals of the Yellow Emperor (Yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋)? What happened to the publication since the interview with Yang in 2010?
- What about Global Times (Huanqiu shibao 环球时报)? What kind of stories does it typically report today? Is this article from 2010 representative of its current editorial stance?
- What important works—if any—have been published about the Great Leap since Johnson’s article was published in 2012? (Hint: try World Cat and Google Scholar).

Investigation reports:

Tell us what you found in your research on the authors and publications mentioned above. Also, share with us a little about your investigations last night. What interested you? What did you find?

Discussion:

Why is the famine so poorly understood in China today? What factors keep research and discussion about it suppressed?
Why do some Chinese, like Yang Jisheng, take enormous personal risk to research and publish on this topic? What do they want? Would it be better for people like Yang to simply move on and investigate other less controversial topics?
What is behind the conflict that Johnson points out between Yang and Dikotter? Is it important? Why or why not?

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#308 To Live

3/5/2018

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Scene from To Live. Character pose for wedding photo in front of the slogan "The working class leads in everything."

First, to use land as a way of viewing the changes that occured in China from 1949 through to the Great Leap Forward. We’ll pick up where we left off with “Constructing Socialism” (slides) and move to the Great Leap.

Second, we’ll reflect on To Live (Huozhe 活着, 1994).

What are your initial impressions? What stood out to you about the film?
Which events in the film do you recognize from our class readings and discussion?
This film (and the original novel by Yu Hua of the same title), was created in mainland China. What aspects of the film make that plausible? Why might the film have attracted a degree of controversy after its release?
In what ways does the film shed insight on the historical events that might be harder to discover from reading Wealth and Power or a typical primary source document?
Which character did you most relate to? Why?
What do you think is the central theme(s) that hold the film together?

Finally, take about 10 minutes to write a short scene that might have been cut from the film—it could be a scene from before, during, or after the main events of the film take place.

We will end class by sharing the scenes we have created.

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#304 Yan’an and Rectification

2/26/2018

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Sami Thomas public history presentation

Andrew Lim public history presentation

Check for Understanding

Initial discussion:

What does it mean to speak of literature and art as performing a social or political function?
Who is to decide what specific functions literature is to perform? The writer? The reader? The state? The dominant ideological apparatus?
Mao believes that literature is class-based and that it is disingenuous to pretend good literature is universal and timeless. Give arguments for and against these assertions.
Mao pins his hope of the revolution on the peasants of rural China rather than the exploited proletariat in major cities. How does such a view shape his literary and artistic policies?
Wang Shiwei, Ding Ling, and a few other writers came under strong criticism from the CCP in 1942. Why do you think the CCP leadership might have singled them out for criticism?

Rectification simulation:

You will be assigned a role: Pro-Wang faction, Anti-Wang faction, or intermediary.
As soon as you are assigned your role, meet within your groups. The anti-Wang faction will also select one of its members to serve as chair of the assembly. Once that person is selected, they will run the remainder of the simulation, guiding the proceedings, adding or subtracting rules as they wish.
While the factional meetings are going on, indeterminates should circulate between the two opposing factions to learn about their positions and strategies. They should also feel free to express their own concerns, raise questions, and engage the two factions in discussion. To win the indeterminates over to their side, both factions should answer the indeterminates’ questions as fully as possible without jeopardizing their strategies, while taking care that whatever they propose during the rest of the session will address the concerns raised by the indeterminates. The instructor should also circulate to answer questions as needed.
After an appropriate interval determined by the chair, the full group will meet to debate the future of Wang Shiwei. The chair will then moderate the debate with the time that remains.

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#303 Mao Zedong’s Rise to Power

2/22/2018

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Public history presentation by Chloe Powell

Discussion on Mao Zedong’s early life and rise to power:

To what extent should historians (and biographers) seek to make sense of adults based on their upbringing? Were you convinced by arguments such as “By Mao’s own account, from his earliest years he was constantly on guard against the tyranny of his father, who regularly beat him. . . . It is hardly surprising, then, that his fraught relationship with his stubborn, powerful father bred within him a deep-seated antiauthoritarianism” (Schell and Delury, 200).

What might it mean to describe Mao’s early writing (and arguably much of his later writing) as “romantic”? How might we reconcile such a description with his commitment to the supposedly “scientific” nature of Marx’s theories?

What factors do you think were most important in leading Mao to communism? In other words, what was appealing about this radical ideology for him?

How did Mao come to place his revolutionary hopes in China’s rural masses? How might we reconcile such a commitment with Marx’s own dismissal of the peasantry when he described them as the “homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” 1852). What did Mao see in the peasantry? Why do you think Marx had been so quick to dismiss them as revolutionary actors?

Since Joseph Schumpeter first coined the concept of “creative destruction” in the 1950s, it has become almost universally accepted as a model of economic transformation. What do Schell and Delury mean when they associate Mao with this concept? How might it be different than the market-oriented sense that Schumpeter introduced the term?
What does Mao mean by “contradictions” (maodun 矛盾)? What significance does he place on the concept and are you convinced by his approach?

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#301 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek): The Generalissimo

2/21/2018

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Brief background

Jiang Jieshi was classically educated, though rose to power mainly through the military ranks of the Guomindang (much like Yuan Shikai, who had been born nearly thirty years earlier).
By 1924, Jiang had been appointed as first commandant of the elite Whampoa (Huangpu 黄埔) Academy.
When Sun Zhongshan died the next year, Jiang emerged as his successor.
Led the Northern Expedition (beifa 北伐) in 1926-27 and established a new national government based in Nanjing.
In the mid-1930s, he promoted the “New Life Movement” (Xin shenghuo yundong 新生活运动)
Japan soon encroached on Chinese territory, seizing Manchuria between 1931-33 and then escalating a full-scale war in July 1937.
Jiang initially focused his attention on the Communists, though after the Xi’an Incident in December 1936 he grudgingly agreed to a Second United Front with them to fight Japan.
Jiang’s wartime government at Chongqing was marred by economic crisis, low army morale, and rampant corruption.
After Japan was defeated in 1945, the Guomindang gradually lost ground until Jiang was forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949.

Jiang Jieshi through the frame of a virtual gallery

With a partner, conduct a virtual “gallery walk” (Google Doc) through the maps, images, and excerpts collected. Consider:
- Note the important elements that stand out in the gallery. Identify patterns you see emerging as you link up this exhibit and your reading last night.
- Based on those observations, what new questions do you have as a historian and where might you go to get answers to those questions?
Rework the gallery:
- Based on those questions, what do you think you might add or subtract from this gallery if you were to prepare a public history exhibition? What factors might drive those decisions?
If World War II had not broken out in 1937 in China, what kind of future do you think the future of Jiang’s Guomindang government might have looked like? How might it be similar or different from the China that emerged under the leadership of the Communists?

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#312 Cultural Revolution as Memory: Though I am Gone

#310 "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!"

#309 Great Leap Famine, part 2

#308 To Live

#304 Yan’an and Rectification

#303 Mao Zedong’s Rise to Power

#301 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek): The Generalissimo

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