Anyuan

Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

Elizabeth Perry, Elizabeth J Perry, Elizabeth J. Perry

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780520271906
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520954038
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists' creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful "cultural positioning" and "cultural patronage," on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly "Chinese." Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of "political correctness" in the People's Republic of China. Once known as "China's Little Moscow," Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Rehearsing Revolution
• 2 Teaching Revolution
• 3 China's Little Moscow
• 4 From Mobilization to Militarization
• 5 Constructing a Revolutionary Tradition
• 6 Mao's Final Crusade
• 7 Reforming the Revolutionary Tradition
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography of English-Language Sources
• Index