{"id":7038,"date":"2016-05-22T06:08:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T10:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/?p=7038"},"modified":"2016-05-25T06:15:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T10:15:31","slug":"new-book-by-guobin-yang-explores-the-red-guard-generation-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/new-book-by-guobin-yang-explores-the-red-guard-generation-in-china","title":{"rendered":"New Book by Guobin Yang Explores the Red Guard Generation in China"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"YangIn 1966 \u2014 exactly 50 years ago this week \u2014 Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong made a sweeping edict: China would purge its corrupt capitalist remnants and awaken to a new era of Communist ideology, true and pure. In heeding the call of the Cultural Revolution, China\u2019s youth formed Red Guard groups whose fierce adherence to Maoist ideology drove them to engage in an uncompromising purge of anything Confucian, Western, or bourgeois<\/em>. For several years, violence wracked China\u2019s cities.<\/p>\n

For young people coming of age at that time, life was profoundly different than that of generations before or since. \u00a0In his new book, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China<\/span><\/em><\/a>, Professor Guobin Yang<\/span><\/a> explores what happened to that generation and how their experiences shaped China for decades to come.<\/p>\n

In the book, published by Columbia University Press, Yang argues that the forces that made the revolution also set in motion its undoing. After two years of fighting, millions of Red Guard were ordered by Mao to be \u201csent-down\u201d to rural villages, partly as a means to control and curb the violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe type of political culture they grew up in was one of loyalty to Mao, to the revolution, to struggle against class enemies, to the collective complete sacrifice of the self,\u201d explains Yang, who is an Associate Professor of Communication and Sociology at Penn as well as a faculty member of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Center for East Asian Studies. \u201cBut because of the violence, they had a sense of disillusionment. After all the fighting, nothing seemed to have been achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sent-down youth were also woefully unprepared for the adjustment to rural life. They found rural China \u201cbackward\u201d and were unprepared to become peasants. The revolution had used the slogan \u201cDown with the self,\u201d and considered real life personal concerns to be bourgeois<\/em>. Yet, in one village, the village party secretary welcomed city youth\u2019s arrival by telling them that \u201cfarming is for yourself.\u201d The Red Guard generation was forced to think about its own day-to-day interests and came to appreciate the values of ordinary life rather than high-blown revolutionary ideals.<\/p>\n

It was also the beginning of an underground culture as former Red Guards began to pick up their books again to re-educate themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey questioned the revolution and its meaning, gaining a new understanding of themselves, their society, politics,\u201d says Yang. \u201cRural life was totally different than what they had learned in school before the Cultural Revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a generational transformation provides a foundation for both profound political and social change in China. Politically, Yang, says, the new outlooks of the Red Guard generation led to the first wave of popular protest for democracy from 1976 to 1980. This period marked the end of the Mao era and the beginning of the economic reform.<\/p>\n

\"Guobin

Guobin Yang, Ph.D.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the book, Yang also makes a link from the sent-down youth to the beginning of economic reform in the late 1970s, which was a reversal of the Maoist planned economy. The government began to recognize private business, but faced resistance. Entrepreneurship had too long carried a moral stigma of dishonor.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of the experience they had in the countryside, private enterprise was more acceptable to some members of the Red Guard generation,\u201d says Yang. \u201cMany of them had returned to the cities and couldn\u2019t find jobs from the state. That understanding of personal interest and working for your own money and happiness had become acceptable to them. It laid a social foundation for the economic reform to take off. Otherwise it would have been harder to move from a planned to a market economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In providing this new frame through which to view Red Guard activism, Yang \u00a0concludes the book by looking at the politics of history and memory, arguing that the generation\u2019s memories of that time \u00a0often depend upon which side they happened to have been on 50 years earlier.<\/p>\n

The release of Yang\u2019s book, called \u201ca major new study<\/span><\/a>\u201d by The Nation, coincided with the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As public debates about the contemporary ramifications of the Chinese Cultural Revolution exploded this month in the mainstream media, Yang\u2019s book makes a timely scholarly contribution.<\/p>\n

The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China<\/span><\/a> is available now from Columbia University Press.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.asc.upenn.edu\/news-events\/news\/new-book-guobin-yang-explores-red-guard-generation-china<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1966 \u2014 exactly 50 years ago this week … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,1669],"tags":[371,1670,323,401],"views":5547,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7041,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038\/revisions\/7041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}