|
|
The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price:
$27.95
Asia Trips Trips Price:
$20.45
Your Savings: $ 7.50 ( 27% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Pluto Press
|
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 941
EAN: 9780745327808
ISBN: 074532780X
Label: Pluto Press
Manufacturer: Pluto Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 280
Publication Date: 2008-02-20
Publisher: Pluto Press
Studio: Pluto Press
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
|
Mao and his policies have long been demonized in the West, with the Cultural Revolution considered a fundamental violation of human rights.
As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues that most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policies. Under Mao there was a comprehensive welfare system for the urban poor and basic health and education provision in rural areas. These policies are being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism.
Offering a critical analysis of mainstream accounts of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution, this book sets the record straight, making a convincing argument for the positive effects of Mao's policies on the well-being of the Chinese people.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Flawed defense of the Cultural Revolution
Comment: Mobo Gao, who holds the chair in Sinology at the University of Adelaide and is known for his thorough, Hinton-like study of Gao village (Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China) during the modern period, wrote "The Battle for China's Past" out of frustration over the anti-Mao consensus prevailing among specialists and popular views alike. For this reason, the book is on the one hand a defense of the Cultural Revolution's successes, particularly in the immense Chinese countryside (where the vast majority of the people lived at the time), as well as an attack on popular writers and colleagues on the history of modern China for failing to look critically at anti-Mao sources.
Interspersed between some generic considerations on points of view in historiography are, for this reason, solid and readable attacks on two very popular history works on the Maoist period: Chang & Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story" (Mao: The Unknown Story) and Li Zhisui's "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" (The Private Life of Chairman Mao). He reveals, as most competent experts in the field have done, the Chang & Halliday book to be a string of lies and made-up nonsense, with unscientific use of sources and misleading if not outright fraudulent attributions. It is indeed much to be regretted that this poor and incompetent book has had such a popular impact. Li's work is critically examined, in particular with an eye to refuting Li's claims about his closeness and intimacy with Mao, and his low office not allowing him nearly as much access as he would have needed to have to write the things he did.
So far, so good. The book suffers however from significant flaws. The first is the excessive reliance on vague and altogether rather dubious sources: Gao seems particularly impressed by what he calls the "e-media", and half the book is taken up by discussing what people have been posting in favor of Mao on various internet fora. It is however not explained what the value of these statements are and why anyone should care about them, especially since anyone can post anything on the internet. It makes a silly impression for Gao to lambast others, sometimes remarkably pedantically, in their use of sources, and then to go on to demonstratively include large amounts of internet posts and emails. What is also annoying is the enormously large amount of obscure Chinese sources used, partially as a result of this approach, which makes it impossible for anyone to properly estimate the relative value of the claims made on his part. Indeed the level of detail in the book is often very high, with relatively little being explained, so that one wonders exactly what kind of public this book was written for. An index of Chinese names and terms at the back does help a little, but not enough by any stretch to alleviate this. The third problem is the lack of structure of the book - a part of it consists of articles Gao had already written on Chinese history-writing, a part of it of the "e-media" stuff mentioned above, and part of it on random observations about how authors get the Mao period wrong, often in useless detail.
The book is not bad as such, and Gao is clearly motivated to write it out of a very palpable sense of frustration and anger with anti-Mao ideology, but it still leaves much to be desired. Especially considering the import of the topic, it is too bad that the only really interesting considerations, namely why Maoist policy can be seen as having made a great improvement for most people despite the Great Leap Forward and so forth, are quoted only from Amartya Sen! Indeed Gao would probably have done his case a lot more good if he had arranged his criticisms of Chang & Halliday and Li around a more systematic discussion of that topic.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From Branddenotes.blogspot.com
Comment: The book's thesis: that the dominant narrative about China in the US is also the dominant narrative about China in China. In China, it is dominant in the sense that it reigns supreme within the brains of the elite, who dominate the media and academia in a far more direct fashion than in the U.S. So foreign scholars who read the most easily accessible Chinese sources are reading sources from those Chinese who supported Mao's revolution only insofar as it was the most likely to succeed at ejecting foreign imperialists (the Japanese, British, etc.) and allowing the Chinese elite to make China a strong country in the sense that the U.S. is a strong country: in that its elite would have sway on the international scene, while the majority of China's people would eke out a more or less marginal existence. The Chinese writers foreign scholars read are those that Mao called "capitalist roaders," in that they wanted for China to take the capitalist road to national greatness, rather than the socialist road which would distribute wealth more evenly, thereby frustrating the emergence of a stratified Chinese elite who would then enjoy a sufficient concentration of resources to wield some power on the international stage - like in the old days.
Gao makes this case, and then demonstrates how on the most loosely regulated media, internet websites, a coterie of intellectuals representing an arguably much larger segment of the Chinese population convincingly argue that under Mao's leadership, China made incredible economic advances that formed the foundation for China's recent GDP growth spurt.
Most interesting excerpt:
"A good test case would be to compare China, the largest communist country, with India, the largest democracy, using labels for convenience. The Novel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes the point that although India never suffered a 'politically induced famine' like the Great Leap Forward in China:
'[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million] a year during the same period. ... Thus in this one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from 'this failed capitalist experiment' (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be attributed to the 'failed communist experiment' all over the world since 1917." (Black 2000)"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
