Elizabeth J. Perry
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 Communistsâ€™ creative development and deployment of cultural resources â€“ during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful â€œcultural positioningâ€ and â€œcultural patronage,â€ 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 â€œChinese.â€ 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 â€œpolitical correctnessâ€ in the Peopleâ€™s Republic of China. Once known as â€œChinaâ€™s Little Moscow,â€ 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.
Cultural,China,Nonfiction,Politics,History
Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition