History 287: Memory and Identity in the People's Republic of China

A potent, unbridled memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Blood Red Sunset is one of China's biggest bestsellers in history, selling more than 400,000 copies. It is the story of a young man filled with ideological fervor who wrote a petition - in his own blood - to join the revolution in rural northern China.

Captive Spirits is the gripping prison memoir of Yang Xiguang, a high school student who was arrested during the Cultural Revolution for writing a political essay. He spent the next ten years in a succession of Chinese gulags and vividly relates the poignant stories of his cellmates--activists, intellectuals, "rightists," thieves, and madmen--as well as his own intellectual and spiritual journey.

These short profiles are from a collection which aims to present the experiences and attitudes of a hundred Chinese from different walks of life as interviewed by Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye during a year on the road.

Zhou Xun is a lecturer in modern history at the University of Essex. She is the author of The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History.

In a conversational style and in chronological sequence, Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong recount their earlier lives in China from the 1950s to the 1980s, a particularly eventful period that included the catastrophic Cultural Revolution. Using their own stories as two case studies, they examine the making of a significant yet barely understood generation in recent Chinese history. They also reflect upon the mixed legacy of the early decades of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In doing so, the book strives for a balance between critical scrutiny of a complex era and the sweeping rejection of that era that recent victim literature embraces. Ultimately Ye and Ma intend to reconnect themselves to a piece of land and a period of history that have given them a sense of who they are. Their stories contain intertwining layers of personal, generational, and historical experiences. Unlike other memoirs that were written soon after the events of the Cultural Revolution, Ye and Ma's narratives have been put together some twenty years later, allowing for more critical distance. The passage of time has allowed them to consider important issues that other accounts omit, such as the impact of gender during this period of radical change in Chinese women's lives.

This is a first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed.

This volume is one of the first collections to reach the West of the stories, essays, and poems published by writers of the "Mao Generation"--the first generation of Chinese to grow up under socialism.

The sixteen stories collected in this remarkable book give firsthand accounts of daily life in contemporary China. From 250 interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Frolic has created charming vignettes that show how individuals from all parts of China led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest.

This is a collection of interviews with 26 writers of China's "zhiqing" generation, relatively young artists who participated in the Cultural Revolution as teen-age Red Guards.

This accessible autobiography is the true story of one girl's determination to hold her family together during one of the most terrifying eras of the twentieth century.

A personal account of growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China.

The work of ten writers - almost all under forty - who are widely regarded in Mainland China as the best of a new generation.

"The story of China's rights movement--a struggle for basic human rights and democracy that, despite harsh repression, has endured for more than a decade--unfolds in Xu Zhiyong's compelling personal memoir. In recognition of his work as an activist, lawyer, and founder of the New Citizen Movement, Dr. Xu was named one of Asia Weekly's People of the Year in 2005 and one of the Southern People's Weekly's Top Ten Young Leaders of China in 2006. His efforts have been considerably less well received, however, by the government of the PRC, and he has been arrested numerous times. Dr. Xu served a four-year prison sentence 2013-2017 for "gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place." His moving statement at the end of his trial, hailed as the China Manifesto, is included in To Build a Free China."

Presents fourteen candid first-person accounts of life during China's Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976.