Abstract
“Eight hundred million people watching eight shows” is a cruel joke about the barrenness of culture during the Cultural Revolution. But in recent years, scholars such as Paul Clark and Barbara Mittler, among others, have demonstrated that there was life—and much of it quite interesting and vibrant—in the proverbial cultural desert. In his book The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Clark offers insights into cultural innovations and professional perfectionism beyond the conventional narratives of elite power games in high places. Listening attentively beneath the loud noise of propaganda to the muffled music of artistic experiment and innovation, Clark shows that an undercurrent of cultural life was still going on, and creating a new aesthetics.1 Taking a long view of China’s revolutionary history, Barbara Mittler, in her A Continuous Revolution, decries the myth that the Cultural Revolution is something radically new and disruptive.
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Notes
Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 64–78.
Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics: From East to West,” New Left 41 (2006): 31.
For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999).
Cao Tianyue, ed., Modernization, Globalization and China’s Path of Development (Xiandaihua, quan-qiuhua yu Zhongguo daolu) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2003).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 12–13.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 66.
For an excellent discussion of China’s nationalism and foreign policy, see Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy,” The China Review 1(1) (2001): 1–27.
Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1989), 130.
Shaoguang Wang, “The Structural Sources of the Cultural Revolution,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered, edited by Kam-yee Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 241–258.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History ofthe World, 1914— 1911 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 444–447.
Ibid. For a recent collection of essays about how Mao’s red book of quotations was disseminated and studied by political activists around the world, see Alex Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Amin argues that the loss of the revolutionary vocation through the welfare state and Fordism makes revolution impossible in the West. See Amin, Delinking, 12. Giovanni Arrighi makes a similar point in his monumental The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994), 320–321.
Vicky Randall, “Using and Abusing the Concept of the Third World: Geopolitics and the Comparative Political Study of Development and Underdevelopment,” Third World Quarterly 25(1) (2004): 43.
For a reliable source of information and history, see Aidan Foster-Carter, “North Korea: Development and Self-Reliance: A Critical Appraisal,” in Korea: North and South: The Deepening Crisis, edited by Gavan McCormack and Mark Selden (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 115–149.
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© 2016 Ban Wang
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Wang, B. (2016). Third World Internationalism: Films and Operas in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In: Clark, P., Pang, L., Tsai, TH. (eds) Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463579_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463579_5
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