The Battle For China's Past Mao and the Cultural Revolution
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Debating the Cultural Revolution -- Introduction: who is writing history and who are the Chinese? -- The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution -- Violence, brutality and causes -- Constructive policies -- Destruction of Chinese culture and tradition -- Cultural Revolution and cultural creativity -- What is the Enlightenment? -- 2. Constructing history: memories, values and identity -- Introduction: speech act of identification -- From the wounded to the mentalité: the re-rehearsal of May Fourth -- Be American citizens in thinking -- Sinological orientalism -- Two whateverism -- The politics of joining the civilized world -- Media agenda and identification with the West -- Memoirs, values and identification -- The intellectual-business-political complex in contemporary China -- Conclusion: memories, identity, knowledge and truth -- 3. Constructing history: memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese -- Introduction: scope and rationale -- Memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in Chinese: a literature survey -- The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth -- Some common themes on Mao and the Cultural Revolution -- Memories as history -- Conclusion: discourse, narratives and memories -- 4. Mao, The Unknown Story: an intellectual scandal -- Introduction hyper-promotion of a book -- Scholarship, what scholarship? -- Misleading claims and absurd explanations -- Further evidence of 'scholarship' -- Further evidence of flaws and misleading claims -- Logical inconsistency within the text -- Mao, China's Hitler and Stalin -- Fairy tale and how scholarship changes -- Does it matter? -- It does not matter so long as the politics is right -- 5. Mao: the known story and the logic of denial
eBook, English, 2008
1st ed
Pluto Press, London, 2008