Modern Erasures

Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China's Past

Pierre Fuller

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781316515723
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009028110
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Modern Erasures is an ambitious and innovative study of the acts of epistemic violence behind China's transformation from a semicolonized republic to a Communist state over the twentieth century. Pierre Fuller charts the pedigree of Maoist thought and practice between the May Fourth movement of 1919 and the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 to shed light on the relationship between epistemic and physical violence, book burning and bloodletting, during China's revolutions. Focusing on communities in remote Gansu province and the wider region over half a century, Fuller argues that in order to justify the human cost of revolution and the building of the national party-state, a form of revolutionary memory developed in China on the nature of social relations and civic affairs in the recent past. Through careful analysis of intellectual and cultural responses to, and memories of, earthquakes, famine and other disaster events in China, this book shows how the Maoist evocation of the 'old society' earmarked for destruction was only the most extreme phase of a transnational, colonial-era conversation on the 'backwardness' of rural communities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Part I Seeing and Not Seeing
• Part II Revolutionary Memory in Republican China
• Part III Maoist Narratives in the Forties
• Part IV Politics of Oblivion in the People’s Republic
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index