Cultural Revolution

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  9/22/2021
  

  Rebel is Right: Reassessing the Cultural Revolution

  by Chaohua Wang

  A new book by the Chinese scholar Yang Jisheng examines the Chinese Cultural Revolution's lasting impact on the Communist Party, concluding that the generation of party leaders who experienced it were indifferent to utopianism but deeply attracted to the exercise of absolute power. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/25/2021
  

  Yu Ruxin is Rescuing China’s Muzzled Past, One Footnote at a Time

  “We won’t be able to truly absorb the lessons of history, and history may just repeat itself,” Mr. Yu said in an interview from Hong Kong. “It couldn’t possibly be exactly like the Cultural Revolution, but something similar can’t be ruled out.”

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/1/19
  

  A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia

  by Amy Qin

  The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.

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• 3-5-18
  

  Xi’s Family History May Be a Key to His Power Grab

  by Tom Clifford

  As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution he learned that high status couldn’t protect even his father, a hero of the revolution.

• 
• SOURCE: Shanghaiist
  7-14-17
  

  Tsinghua University cancels professor's Cultural Revolution history class

  The course was taught by a philosophy professor.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  10-2-16
  

  Fate Catches Up to a Cultural Revolution Museum in China

  A memorial site, a labor of love and loss that took decades to open, has been covered with propaganda posters and shut down after 11 years.

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• SOURCE: Asia Society
  8-31-16
  

  Frank Dikötter says China's Economic Reforms Actually Started During the Cultural Revolution

  Deng Xiaoping gets the credit, but shouldn’t.

• 
• SOURCE: The Daily Beast
  6-2-16
  

  The Return of the Cult of Mao

  As the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, massacre approaches, China is still trying to come to terms with the contradictory legacies of Mao and Deng.

• 
• SOURCE: NYT
  6-26-14
  

  Graduates’ Red Guard Photos Cast Doubt on What They Learned

  The photographs show a young man, held down in a bowing position by what appear to be five Red Guards, the youthful fanatics who terrorized China in the name of Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1-13-14
  

  Bowed and Remorseful, Former Red Guard Recalls Teacher’s Death

  Growing numbers of aging Red Guards have declared their contrition for violence perpetrated from 1966.

• SOURCE: ArtDaily
  8-15-13
  

  Aging Chinese apologise for Cultural Revolution 'evil'

  BEIJING (AFP).- As a teenager radicalised by China's Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongbing denounced his mother to the authorities. Two months later a firing squad shot her dead.Now after more than 40 years of mounting guilt, Zhang has ruffled the silence that cloaks China's decade of turmoil with a public confession.Such rare apologies have been welcomed as a potential gateway to the collective soul-searching that could bring healing -- but is blocked by a ruling Communist Party whose critics say is unwilling to confront its own responsibility."Back then everyone was swept up and you couldn't escape even if you wanted to. Any kindness or beauty in me was thoroughly, irretrievably 'formatted'," Zhang told the Beijing News last week."I hope that from my self-reflection other people can understand what the situation was like at that time."...

• SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
  3-27-13
  

  China's Cultural Revolution: son's guilt over the mother he sent to her death

  They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her.Fang Zhongmou's execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child.More than four decades on, Fang's son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic....