Guide to Study History of Male Same-Sex Relation in China: Cultural Revolution

"Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to “wreak havoc under the heaven” when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government’s grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed.

The Cultural Revolution began as a “revolution from above,” and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution’s more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China’s state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy.

The mass demobilizations of 1968–69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later." -- from the Publisher

"Based on an unusually broad and deep range of primary sources (including work diaries, interviews with key informants and military officers, and official and unofficial documents), this book systematically examines the structure of political conflict in China’s the poor and relatively remote Feng County during the decade-long period that began with the Red Guard movement in 1966 and ended with the death of Mao Zedong and the "Gang of Four" in 1976. It is the first to focus on county-level politics during this decade, and it reveals a surprising level of social and political disruption that continued almost without end throughout the 10-year period. These dramatic events run very much against the grain of a longstanding scholarly consensus that the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were primarily an urban phenomenon. This rural county was as deeply disrupted by ongoing factional struggles as any documented locality in China. The book is structured chronologically, in short chapters that take the reader through the unfolding factional warfare that took place in the county, reflecting both on how the conflict reflected national trends during the period as well as and the ways in which Feng County’s experience appears to be unusual. Ultimately what emerges is a painstaking chronicle of how one rural county experienced the Cultural Revolution--illuminating the all-encompassing nature of the Cultural Revolution and bringing attention to the overlooked rural experience"-- from the Publisher

"The only complete history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, ’The World Turned Upside Down’ makes a crucial contribution to understanding the Cultural Revolution and its lasting influence today"--
As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Yang makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years’ lasting influence today. -- adapted from jacket