Abstract
In August 1968, a 400-page anthology of reportage, essays, eulogies, poems, proclamations, drawings, photographs, letters and more was published in an initial print-run of 10,000 copies by a grand alliance of social organizations in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, southwest China. The anthology bore the title For Truly Great Men Look to This Age Alone: A Heroes’ Register from the Great Cultural Revolution in Yunnan.1 Students of Chinese, or revolutionary, literature are unlikely to have taken note of it: its aesthetic value was already limited when it first appeared, and it has not increased since. It hardly merits a mention in histories of literature.
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Notes
Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, in Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank (eds), The Cambridge History of China: Volume 15, The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution 1966–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 215.
Quoted on p. 64 of Jack Hitt (ed.), In a Word: A Dictionary of Words that Don’t Exist but Ought to (New York: Dell, 1992)
Compare Timothy Cheek, Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2002), pp. 127–159.
Liu Gao and Shi Feng (eds), Xin Zhongguo chuban wushi nian jishi (Chronicle of Fifty Years of Publishing in New China) (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1999), pp. 406–407.
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)
Compare Li Yuan, Zhi weishi: Yan Hongyan shangjiang wangshi zhuizong (The Truth Alone: Tracing General Yan Hongyan) (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 2003)
Ding Longjia and Ting Yu, Kang Sheng yu ‘Zhao Jianmin yuanan’ (Kang Sheng and the ‘Trumped up Case of Zhao Jianmin’) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1999).
For a provocative discussion of the Global War on Terrorism from the perspective of the Cultural Revolution, see Michael Schoenhals, ‘The Global War on Terrorism as Meta-Narrative: An Alternative Reading of Recent Chinese History’, Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2008), pp. 179–201.
Cf. Michael Schoenhals, ‘Demonising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China: People vs Non-People’, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 8, Nos. 3–4, September–December (2007), pp. 465–482.
This is a discursive mine-field into which only the truly brave (alternatively the politically very correct) dare venture. For a relevant, but superficial, discussion of popular depictions of women in the Cultural Revolution that makes no attempt at comparisons with the present, see Michael Schoenhals, ‘Sex in Big-Character Posters from China’s Cultural Revolution: Gendering the Class Enemy’, in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone (eds), Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 237–257.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 6.
From the CCP Central Committee’s 1981 ‘Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’, excerpted in Michael Schoenhals (ed.), China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 297.
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Schoenhals, M. (2013). The Masses in Their Own Write (and Draw): A Heroes’ Register from the Great Cultural Revolution in Yunnan. In: Schoenhals, M., Sarsenov, K. (eds) Imagining Mass Dictatorships. Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330697_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330697_13
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