Chairman Mao's Children

Generation and the Politics of Memory in China

AvBin Xu

Häftad, Engelska, 2022

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Beskrivning

In the 1960s and 1970s, around 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to rural villages and China's frontiers. Bin Xu tells the story of how this 'sent-down' generation have come to terms with their difficult past. Exploring representations of memory including personal life stories, literature, museum exhibits, and acts of commemoration, he argues that these representations are defined by a struggle to reconcile worthiness with the political upheavals of the Mao years. These memories, however, are used by the state to construct an official narrative that weaves this generation's experiences into an upbeat story of the 'China dream'. This marginalizes those still suffering and obscures voices of self-reflection on their moral-political responsibility for their actions. Xu provides careful analysis of this generation of 'Chairman Mao's children', caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2022-12-15
Mått:152 x 229 x 15 mm
Vikt:420 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:288
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781108928786

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Mer om författaren

Bin Xu is Associate Professor at Emory University, and the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Cultural Sociology and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association.

Recensioner i media

'Questioning the mythologizing of the Educated Youth experience as embodied by elites such as Xi Jinping, Bin Xu gives us well-rounded portraits of losers as well as winners of this Cultural Revolution policy, while making a major contribution to the sociological study of the construction and consequences of memory.' Thomas Gold, University of California, Berkeley

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction; 1. Winners' stories; 2. Unequal memories; 3. The wasted years and a land of wonder: The literary memory; 4. Regretless Youth and Long Live Youth!: Exhibits and museums as sites of memory; 5. Nostalgia, resistance, and the pursuit of happiness: Generation and memory in groups; 6. 'Comrades from five lakes and four seas!': When groups chuanlian (link up); Conclusion; Appendix: Methods and data.