Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (Volume 24)

ISBN: 0520271904

Author: Perry, Elizabeth J.

Condition: New

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 Peoples Republic of China. Once known as Chinas 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.