session 7 readings (10/19 - mao's china)

[Anonymous]

Today, during my conference period, I read the tales of the Red Guard units throughout China, who's role [self-appointed, ostensibly] was, in part, to wander the Chinese countryside, purposely enduring the hardships they imagined that Mao's Red Army endured during the Long March of the 1930s, and spread "Chairman Mao's revolutionary doctrine and spirit" wherever they went. And I was reminded of similar marches sponsored by the nascent Nazi Party in Germany, circa 1927 (i.e., before the Party became the Germany's sole political leadership) who's mission and methods were quite similar. Unlike China, though, Germany had a long history of "wandering youth brigades" (Wandervögeln), whose role was to infuse the Nordic spirit of fitness and Germanic ethos into packs of kids, ages 10-18, both boys and girls, by planning and conducting many long-distance marches. When the Nazi Party began to infiltrate and take over these until-then-non-partisan Wandervögel brigades, they infused them with Nazi ideology, and had them modify their field equipment to match that of the army (Reichswehr). Like the Red Guards, they were being groomed, both physically and ideologically, to become the next ranks of politically motivated soldiers that would soon be sent on a mission of conquest. As a youth, it must be somewhat intoxicating for a government force to pander to your sense of self-importance and adventure, and it's easy to see why so many young people respond well to these influences. Especially if they are coupled with a de-emphasis on school matriculation and classroom lessons!

[Anonymous]

Unbelievable! Much has been written about Stalin's murder of 32,000,000 Russians and Ukrainians in the 1930s, peqsants who refused to go along with the whole "we're all one big happy commune now, so give up your cow!" act, and had their entire villages scheduled for mass starvation as a result. THIS famine, also deliberately induced, claimed a whopping 45,000,000 lives, and is virtually unknown in the West (in part, bc China was, and is, such a closed society). Thank the gods for men like Yang Jisheng for risking their lives to report what really happened. Soon will come a day when the original writings attesting to this monstrous occurrence are destroyed for good... rather surprised that has not already been done, frankly.

[Anonymous]

This week's readings and subsequent lecture are incredibly helpful for my classroom. As a World History and APWH teacher, I'm always trying to expand my collection of readings on major events in world history and taking this class was my attempt to beef up my units on Asia, particularly the Civil War in China and the rule of Mao Zedong. While the lecture notes and events discussed in class were pretty similar to what I've covered in my own teaching, the readings (Red Guards in particular) really helped me to gain insight into what it must have been like to be a young person during this time in history. I imagine the same would be true for my students, if not more so.

Coincidentally, the Practice AP Exam I helped my AP students take last week featured a DBQ Essay using documents about this exact topic. It featured press releases by the CCP, propaganda speeches given young Red Guards, and photos of a "struggle meeting" in which peasants beat their former landlords. I was able to see first had the misconceptions and misunderstandings students had with the documents, and luckily coming fresh out of our lecture on Monday night, I was able to clear some things up for them. Regardless, I'm excited to incorporate some of the images and readings from this week to help supplement the overall lackluster sections on modern Chinese history in our World History and AP World History textbooks.

Also, a HUGE THANK YOU to Stephanie (skroop) for including the link to those photo essay lessons. I printed them out for my Communist China unit next semester!

[Anonymous]

I found the outline provided offered some very valuable information in a very organized fashion. It will aid me in the timeline of events that have occurred.

[Anonymous]

The outlines provided will definitely come in handy for when covering this content with students. It does so in an organized fashion. The section on "Why did the CCP Win? would be helpful to use to cover historical perspectives, and have students analyze them and the context in which each person said it. As an extension, it would be also interesting to have students take on their own perspective on why they think the CCP won, and use evidence from the text to support their responses, as well as personal opinion based on why they feel they won. The selections on the different Red Guard experience are also going to be useful for students to read and dissect, and gain ideas on how the experience was under the revolution. The first selection "Long Live.." was especially interesting, especially how it has a questioning tone to it, something the students will engage with quickly since it is accessible.

[Anonymous]

Wow - that article was a punch to the gut. 45 million deaths - that's insane. The stories referred to in the article are sickening... children left in the mountains to die after begging for food, cannibalism, citizens tortured for declaring realistic harvests. I could barely stomach the article. I can't imagine reading the book. It's mind-blowing that when atrocities like this were occurring, leaders were saying things like, "That's right-deviationist thinking. You're viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter." Even Yang (at the time) was fooled and believed his father's death from starvation was a personal misfortune not the government's problem. Hard to believe even now, the government treats the famine as a natural disaster and denies the death toll. I'm glad Yang has the extreme courage to tell the real story.

[Anonymous]

Like every other Chinese story I have read so far, Big Fish is another a depressing story. Just the was it makes you feel from very happy to very sad really fast. Big Fish shows how the Chinese want to sometimes portray what they are not, a rich abundant society. They put up a show to give the American newspaperman a show and make them see that their society is just as great as that of America. It makes me a little angry that the man didn't even get his money back at the end of the story. I think this will be a great story to teach in an English class about tone and imagery, given all those feeling that the story made me feel, and all those great descriptions of the market place to convey a rich and abundant place.

[Anonymous]

Just saw this lesson plan, and if I was teaching High School it will be great. The Chinese's cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward are two very interesting topics.

[Anonymous]

This piece details some of the rationale behind the Red Guards, and it speaks on their experiences. For example, one of the excerpts talks about the conditions that led to the formation of the Red Guards. They speak of the experiences of people starving before the liberation and this seems to help to set a base to rationalize the movement that goes on to be explained later on in these pieces. By and large, it seems that from the stance of the Red Guards, they tend to strive to live a simple life at the service of the people they want to liberate. This is seen in how they detail how they aim to clean and improve any town they visit, and how they are thrifty and resourceful with their resources such as food. One of the details I found to be most striking was the bit about the performance they mounted as they traveled. I wonder if these were done this way to access a large portion of the masses who did not know how to read. Additionally, these reminded me of the farmworker's movement in California. Juan Valdez's Teatro Campesino used plays to access the farmworkers who did not have the literacy skills to read about the issues.
edited by nramon on 1/10/2016

[Anonymous]

The two texts that particularly intrigued me in this set of readings were "Nixon's Press Corps" and "Red Guards." It was refreshing to read a literary interpretation of the Chinese peoples' perspective of the great strides Nixon made for the U.S. which had been long at work trying to get a foothold into China. The inability of Westerners to understand how to approach cultures vastly different from their own would be sadder if it wasn't so bull-headed.

The "Red Guards" piece was also striking because it reminded me of the vast resources fledgling young minds that can be most easily exploited by despotic regimes to meet their nefarious ends. I couldn't help but draw a parallel to George Orwell's forebodingly prophetic book 1984 in which children are trained at an early age to look out for signs of anarchy or non-conformity to such an extent that even parents who have been turned in by their children take pride in their offspring's unflinching ability to tow the party line.

[Anonymous]

I googled 'how many characters', and up popped ' how many characters are in the Chinese alphabet?' I don't miss going to the library and searching through card catalogs for books where I MIGHT find the information I needed! Thank god for the internet, and back to the main trail. Chinese characters are logograms, or Hanzi, or at least that is what I learned from wikipedia. They are also referred to as CJKV characters, because some portion/version of them are used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. "Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world."

[Anonymous]

The stories in the article are very disturbing. The children that were left in the mountains to die from hunger, citizens were tortured for declaring realistic harvests, and cannibalism. These acts are very sad and difficult to process. It's amazing that even Yang was fooled to believe that his father's death from starvation "was a personal misfortune" and not the government's problem and not because of the lack of governmental actions to aid the citizens. It's difficult to comprehend today that the government treated the famine as a "natural disaster and to deny the 45 million deaths is unimaginable. I'm pleased to know that Mr. Yang had the courage to tell the real story about how 45 million Chinese citizens perished during the famine.

[clay dube]

Hi Folks,
We'll begin by finishing our discussion of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, but will then focus on China from 1949-1976. Please read the following pieces and please use this section of the forum to discuss the readings and ideas we talk about on 10/19.

Dube - outlines, voices from the civil war, post-1949 movements
Branigan - about Yang Jisheng and his book Tombstone on the Great Leap Forward famine
Chan - about the hukou system that did so much to shape life chances for hundreds of millions of people
Dube - ideology in the dictionary
Ebrey - Red Guards
Ebrey - Victims (often of the Red Guards)

Optional - two short stories by Chen Jo-shi, a writer from Taiwan who went from the US to China to take part in the Cultural Revolution. She wrote these stories after leaving China.

I hope you'll read these materials ahead of the discussion in class. It would be useful if you brought the quotations handouts (the Dube selections above). We'll also watch a couple of short clips from a wonderful film, To Live.
edited by Clay Dube on 10/17/2015

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