Pitt resource: Growing collection of video interviews on the Cultural Revolution

[clay dube]

The Cultural Revolution affected hundreds of millions of people and changed China in dramatic ways. How is it remembered by those who lived through it? There are many memoirs touching upon it. One of the first in English was Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro's Son of the Revolution. Recently, Guobin Yang published his study of red guards and political activism in China that draws on many interviews with Cultural Revolution participants (interview: https://china.usc.edu/guobin-yang-discusses-his-book-red-guard-generation-and-political-activism-china  lecture: https://china.usc.edu/video-guobin-yang-discusses-factional-violence-red-guard-movement )

The University of Pittsburgh has created a tremendous resource called CR/10, the cultural revolution in memories. It includes dozens of video interviews with people who participated in the cultural revolution. A transcript is available for each interview. The CR/10 in the title refers to the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution. Each interview is also 10 minutes long.

http://culturalrevolution.pitt.edu/

You can use a map tool to select interviews from particular provinces.

This is a wonderful resource. My only hopes are that it continues to grow and that a keyword index or search tool be added.

[Lin Kuang]

Thank you again, Dr. Duke for the valuable resource provided here to help us understand the Chinese Cultural Revolution better with the study of Guobin Yang's new book " The Red Guard Generation and Political Activitism in China", which provided us insightful facts about the event. Even though I was born into the middle of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but we were too young to understand what was going on at that time. I knew for sure our parents named their children as " WeiBing" or XiaoBing" in pride to honor the Red Guards. My brother has HongBing as his name, and so many of our neightbors and friends. For elementary schools, students with three good virtues, academy, and physical Education would be qualitied to join as a Little Red Guards wearing the triangular red scarf , which was a corner of the National Flag with our heros' blood who sacrified for our country as we were told at the ceremonary. We viewed this as a great honor and rewards for us, which helped students behave well, achieve better for their full developments. When we moved to middle school, then we were encouraged to join the youth league as one of the requirements to uplift our social status eventually to the communist party member. I actually have very strong interest to study further about the event that I was so fanscinated about when I was young. As Guobin Yong indicated " Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 - 1968, enacting a political mythology that envouraged violence as a way tp prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government", which guided me out of the darness of our generation becasue I would have difficulties to understand the outcome of the engouraging violence tp prove one's revolutionary credentials at that time because we thought that was super fun to ride on FREE trains to Beijing to meet our Chairman Mao.

[Author]

Posts