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clay dubeAn English translation of many Lu Xun stories is here: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/luxun-calltoarms.html
Film versions:
New Year's Sacrifice: https://www.amazon.com/NEW-YEARS-SACRIFICE-Bai-Yang/dp/B001E52UXA
clay dubeMao's lectures on Art and Literature (1942) still dominate Chinese governmental thinking on the role of art and literature, you can read extracts from them in the attached file.
Chen Jo-hsi (Chen Ruoxi, b. 1938) spent the cultural revolution. Her stories from that period were published as The Execution of Mayor Yin in 1978. Her story "The Big Fish" is included here. I've also included her story "Nixon's Press Corps." It begins by noting that everyone was brought along to the idea that welcoming the US president, previously condemned as the chief American imperialist, was an excellent idea. It highlights preparations for the visit, the effort to get the staging just right. After you read this story, please listen or read about Ted Koppel at the Ming tombs with Nixon.
NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7513855
Koppel told us the story as well: http://china.usc.edu/assignment-china-week-changed-world
Yu Hua (余华, b. 1960) is the author of many works, including op-eds in the the NY Times (e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/column/yu-hua). Included here is an excerpt from his novel, To Live. It was made into a famous film by director Zhang Yimou (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB7HYhUpDz8).
Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem made a big splash when it was published a decade ago. Here's a NY Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Mishra-t.html
Wolf Totem was made into a film and released by Sony: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/wolftotem/
Also -- for those who bringing popular culture into your teacher: Blake, C. Fred (1979), "Love Songs and the Great Leap: the role of youth culture in the revolutionary phase of China's economic development," American Ethnologist 6.1:41-54. Sample:
"Elder brother lives in Plum village south of the mountain
Little sister lives in Peach village north of the mountain
I want to sing elder brother a song of love;
The mountain is so high the sound is blocked.
I want to send elder brother a bouquet of flowers;
As I cross the mountain, everyone wonders how curious.
If this year the cooperative is established;
South and north of the mountain become one family.
Then I can see my love day and night;
And we can hear each other's heartfelt words."
edited by Clay Dube on 11/29/2016
clay dubeMany documents issued by the Chinese government are in the documents section of our website: http://www.china.usc.edu/section/documents-contemporary-china
Constitution, 1982 http://www.china.usc.edu/constitution-peoples-republic-china-1982
The Hukou system is all important in post-1959 China. (Chan article) The Great Leap Forward famine took 30-45 million lives (report on Tombstone). For the Cultural Revolution, much focus is on the red guards and their victims (Ebrey selections). Patriotic education has focused on the humiliation narrative (Kaufman testimony).
edited by Clay Dube on 11/19/2016
clay dubeHi Folks,
I needed to take out the videos in order to shrink the presentation so that it would fit. Do you include discussions about holidays, rituals, and myths in your classes?
clay dubeI've had to break the presentation into two parts and compress it for inclusion here. Please feel free to use this presentation with your students. Please let me know which if any slides are helpful. Please do not post the presentation to the public internet. It is for your use with your students only.
edited by Clay Dube on 11/19/2016
AnonymousI feel the biggest problem with Mao's views on art and literature is his insistence on fitting it into a series of categories intended to show that its purpose is to serve the proletariat. I get the impression he believes that any art that does not serve this specific purpose is counter-revolutionary. It has to be part of the political machine, or in the case of China, the communist philosophy he has adopted from Leninist thinking. He does not acknowledge that art might serve a higher purpose than to be a cog, a part in the revolutionary process. This seems to have the effect of making his viewpoint disjointed and uncoordinated. Art, when restricted to the purpose he defines loses its ability to reflect and comment on the society and circumstances that have inspired it in a meaningful way. When put under the strictures that Mao imposes, art devolves into a baseline style of propaganda that denies imagination, creativity and individualistic spirit.
This said, one has to admire the manner in which some of China's contemporary artists and writers have managed to maneuver through these constraints to produce art and literature which can still capture the mood and spirit of the Chinese people. This is particularly true when it comes to cinema and it's growth and development following the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s.
edited by jhayden on 11/21/2016
AnonymousMao wanted to reflect life from the proletariat point of view--allowing the voice of the voiceless to be brought to the forefront through art and literature. When discussing this in class I was struck between the similarities of Mao's "renaissance" and the Harlem Renaissance--which was occurring in America. I am a big fan of Langston Hughes and his work. One of the things that made him so popular was his use of regular vernacular and giving a voice to the common man.This is also much of the appeal of the art, music, and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Since both of these changes were going on at the same time but in different countries that had minimal contact with each other--I would like to understand what was happening at the time to bring on these changes. Prior to this time period novels, poetry, etc. were written by the highly educated and in the voice of the highly educated.
When evaluating the new art and literature, one of Mao's questions was "who does it serve?" Sadly, he quieted the voices of those that didn't say what he deemed appropriate which is how Ding Ling went from the highly favored to being jailed.
edited by thatch on 11/22/2016
AnonymousThe photo from Saturday's power point still haunts me. A chubby rice merchant smiling--surrounded by rice will a small, starving boy sitting in front of her. How could she do that? How could Mao with his belief that he was working for the people--take over and allow his people to starve? The article about the upcoming book Tombstone by Yang Jisheng gave more insight to the horrors and how they happened. He remembers looking back on his father's death as a personal trial, but not seeing it as a country wide problem. His reason, "I only knew what the Communist Party told me. Everyone was fooled." The Chinese government only admits to 20 million deaths, however, after his research he indicates the number is closer to 36 million.
I find it interesting that he thinks his book will be allowed on the mainland in ten years. I have my doubts. The country is hiding the truth--I would be surprised if they would let the truth be told. This puts Mao in such a terrible light--worse than the lame "mea culpa" document (that declares that Mao made some mistakes, but overall did a lot of good for the country) can cover for.
AnonymousSeeing the two sides of Nixon visiting China is revealing. The article written by a Chinese woman juxtaposed with the audio by Ted Koppel (aired in 2007--talking about the 1972 visit) showed how China tried to make itself look perfect. From the article's standpoint--the people of their small village had to make everything look perfect--school and work was suspended the day before so everyone could pick weeds, tend lawns, and take down their drying racks. It was interesting to see the fear from the one woman that refused to take her drying rack down. She received multiple visits--even veiled threats. All because the government wants to look like everything is perfect. From Ted Koppel's perspective the country was "profoundly depressing". He spoke of the indoctrination and almost rabid desire of self sacrifice (he hadn't met Chen Ruoxi). The story he told of the picnics were very telling. The press corps was taken to a park and he thought it was awfully cold for so many families to be out there picnicking and snapping pictures. He and his cameraman waited until most of the press was gone and watched as trucks pulled up and collected the cameras and "actors". Chen Ruoxi saw through what the government was doing--didn't anyone else find it odd to pretend so much?
Anonymous"[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind."
Mao's view on art is manipulative and offensive. What is wrong with art for art's sake? We discussed this in class--I agree that any artist (writer, musician, etc) is showing their art through their particular lens of experience and world view. Mao's view doesn't allow that. He only allows art that answers the question "Who does it serve?" correctly. To Mao art only served to further his political agenda, strangely, to the harm of those he was claiming to serve. Similarly, he starved millions to serve his political purposes. The more I am learning about him and his views--the more frustrated I become.
When I first saw that we were going to study Mao and his views on art--I thought it was going to be something like Hitler and his stealing/preservation of art. This is something completely different. To Mao art, in all of its facets, was just another form of propaganda.
AnonymousOne has to sit back and chuckle at the level of commercialization that has been applied to the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Talk about pie-in-the-sky (pun intended) as regards to moon cakes. It's actually somewhat comforting to think that we in the United States are not alone when it comes to a basic premise of human nature. Just as we take our own holidays and come up with hundreds of different ways to make them into a profitable endeavor, so to do the Chinese. The variety of styles and symbols put into and onto this celebratory crusty confection confers considerable commercial content to the conundrum of communist and capitalist confrontation concerning creative cooking.
AnonymousRemember, that being members of the official White House press corps, these reporters were already inured to seeing past the obviousness of a photo or press op. Only those willing to make a determined effort could remember exactly what propaganda was and recognize it. It's something that is repeated time and again throughout modern history where what is seen on the surface is assumed to be the truth.
AnonymousMao’s views on art and literature were a reaction to what he felt was the function of art in “capitalist” societies. He decried “art for art sake” because he felt that it ultimately served the interests of the bourgeoisie. “But all classes in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second...What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form.” Mao wanted to codify artistic expression into the aforementioned criteria: unity of politics/ art, unity of content/ form. This monolithic view reminds me of the medieval orthodoxy that limited artistic expression to religious content. In a sense, Mao’s Talks at the Yennan Forum accomplishes the same goal; by uniting the role of art and literature with the goals of the revolution, Mao creates a vehicle for evangelizing his communist ideology.
AnonymousFamine is something that is not supposed to exist in the modern world. Technologies like the Haber process allowed agricultural productivity to increase exponentially over the last century, yet people still starve. The reasons for famine tend to be more about conflict than the ability to produce food.
In the case of China’s great famine—the worst in recorded history—famine resulted from a failure of government. As Mr. Dube explained, Mao was an “old man in a hurry” and he wanted to catch up to the West. Mao knew it wouldn’t be easy, and he was prepared to make sacrifices (you gotta break a few eggs…), but the scale of the disaster is mind boggling. If we go with Frank Dikötter’s number, 45 million Chinese died in just 3 years. That’s getting close to the total deaths in WWII.
It’s hard to imagine the horror that one person experiences when dying of starvation. I find it impossible to get my head around the fact that a number greater than the population of California perished this way less than 60 years ago.
AnonymousExploring a culture through the arts makes accessible qualities that cannot be quantified in the black and white texts of historical fact telling. The Film To Live was window into a world that is the mirror opposite of Western Culture. It helps to not just understand the what but the why, the subjective and the visceral. Without giving away plot points that were sometimes heartbreaking, this film is a great way to travel through the milestones discussed in class such as The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution or even to look at ways being labeled a “capitalist” impacted citizens much in the same way being labeled a “communist” destroyed lives here in the U.S. The film really makes the hardships of The Cultural Revolution accessible to those who would otherwise not have a point of reference. Zhang Yimou was banned from making films for two years after this film was completed. When I think of Zhang Yimou’s work I automatically default to House of the Flying Daggers. These films are so visually different I think that its not only a testament to how he’s evolving as a filmmaker, but also how he is being shaped as a storyteller evolving as an artist within the confines of Chinese Censorship. What I find interesting about the film is that the lead character Fugui (Ge You) is not featured on the movie poster, but is replaced by his wife Jiazhen (Gong Li) who was also banned from making films as a result of her role in this film. Ultimately, the film does a wonderful job at taking an intimate look at the human beings caught in the middle of an ideology who simply want To Live.
edited by rcharles on 11/27/2016