Selected Sources Related to China S Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Selected Sources Related to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Chang, Jung. Wild Swans. New York: Doubleday books, 1992. The forceful story of

three generations of women in China, spanning the twentieth c4entury, with highly personal accounts and compelling narrative.

Cushing, Lincoln and Ann Tompkins. Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007. This recent publication draws on the Chinese Poster Collection of the UC Berkeley library. Hundreds of posters, grouped by themes are included in this book. The authors also include two excellent introductory essays and a useful bibliography.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, ed. Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook. New York: The Free Press , 1993. An excellent resource for primary source material from Shang Dynasty divination records to student manifestos at Tiananmen Square. Contains a number of interesting sources from the Cultural Revolution.

Evens, Harriet and Stephanie Donald, eds. Picturing Power in the Peoples Republic of China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield publishers, 1999. This work contains eight essays that explore various themes found in Cultural Revolution posters, from a general introduction to the role of women in posters to the deification of Mao Zedong.

Jicai, Feng. Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China’s Cultural Revolution. San Francisco, CA: China Books and Periodicals, 1996. This work offers sixteen individual accounts of personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Some are very graphic, all are provocative.

Laing, Ellen Johnston. The Winking Owl. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.This is a seminal work in the field of art in the People’s Republic. The author traces twentieth century roots of poster art to Europe and explores the many themes that posters took before, during, and after the Revolution.

Pietrusza, David. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. World History Series. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1997. This short work (96 pages) is written for the adolescent reader and provides a good introduction to anyone approaching this complex topic for the first time.

Roberts, J.A.G.. A Concise History of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. A short history of China from prehistoric times to the present, about one-third of the book is devoted to the twentieth century. This offers a good general overview of the long history of China.

Spence, Jonathon D. Mao Zedong. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. This short biography does a fine job of introducing the reader to Mao’s life and the forces that shaped his personality and actions.

Spence, Jonathan D. and Annping Chin. The Chinese Century: A Photographic History of the Last Hundred Years. New York: Random House, 1996. This work offers a compelling visual record of the Chinese experience in the twentieth century, as well as an informative text. Excellent sections on both the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

Videos

To Live. Dir. Zhang Yimou. With Ge You and Gong Yi, Century Communications, 1994. This feature film explores the life of a Chinese family across three decades of Communist rule. Touching and poignant, this movie offers a unique view of the revolution of 1949, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

1949- The Great Leap. People’s Century 1900-1999. Dir. Jennifer Clayton. WBGH Boston Video, 1999. This episode is part of a much broader series on the twentieth century. This installment on China offers a succinct overview of the events from 1949 through the death of Mao. Interesting interviews and personal accounts are shared throughout the presentation. 60 minutes.

China- A Century of Revolution. Dir. Sue Williams. Winstar Home Entertainment, 1997. Three volumes: 1) China in Revolution 2) The Mao Years 3) Born under the Red Flag. The second episode pertains to events in China from 1949 until the death of Mao Zedong. This two hour presentation is full of information, offering much more in-depth commentary than the Peoples Century video. Excellent interviews with a variety of people. This video gives a pretty complete overview of the topics under discussion.

Web Sites

The Chairman Smiles. This excellent site from the International Institute for Social History contains Chinese posters divided into three groups (Early Years 1949-1965, Cultural Revolution 1966-1976 and Modernization 1977-1997) as well as Soviet and Cuban posters.

Powers of Persuasion: Posters from World War Two. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/powers_of_persuasion/powers_of_persuasion_home.html. Nothing Chinese here, but this collection from the National Archives offers over thirty posters from the USA in World War II. This can be useful if you wish to wake comparisons about propaganda campaigns in different places and times.

Picturing Power: http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/poster/PictPow1.html This collection of about 70 posters from Ohio State University is arranged in four chronological units panning the period from 1963-1979. It also contains short, but informative descriptions of each poster.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/wwii-posters/: This site contains teaching resources to accompany the Powers of Persuasion collection.

Chinese Posters.net.

“chineseposters.net is dedicated to the Chinese propaganda poster as it has been produced from 1925 till the present day. These posters literally cry out to be seen. We present them in a gallery of highlights, in web exhibitions ("To Read Too Many Books is Harmful"), and in themes. The site provides related images as well as additional information in artists' biographies, a bibliography and a selection of texts on Chinese art, propaganda and posters. “

Morning Sun. . This site from the National Endowment for the Humanities is the companion to a documentary of the same name. The site explores the Cultural Revolution through all manner of primary sources (film, audio recordings, personal accounts, newspaper editorial and photographs.) It is rich and deep and offers a unique insight into the period.

The China Beat: An April 25, 2008 article entitled “Five Sites for Lesson Plans and Teaching Materials on China”, offers not five, but six great sites for Asia educators to explore. Five are devoted to Asia while the sixth offers a unique world history curriculum that deserves a glance.

Mr. Klus’ Small Collection of Mao Badges:

This site contains my own collection of 45 Mao Badges, professionally photographed and carefully described. The collection includes pins done in aluminum, bamboo and porcelain along with a short essay describing the badges and some of their common features.

Other Resources of Interest

Demystifying the Chinese Language: A Curriculum Unit for Elementary and Secondary Levels. Standford, CA: Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Educaton (SPICE). 1995.

This curriculum packet offers instructional guidelines and materials for teaching a numbers of elements about Mandarin Chinese, such as pictograms v. ideograms, simple v. compound characters, the evolution of modern characters, and traditional v. simplified characters. With clear teaching instructions and large, reproducible resources, this resource offers several lessons that can be used by anyone, regardless of their previous experience with Mandarin. The goal of this package is not to teach students Chinese, but rather to help them make sense of a language that, appears quite different from English, but actually shares several common principles. ($34.95)

Get Talking Chinese: Mandarin Chinese for Beginners. New York: Dorling Kindersley Limited (DK). 2007

This is a fun little book that can be very useful in teaching some basic concepts about Mandarin along with a small vocabulary. Basic information about Pinyin, tones, characters and how to build them and grammar lead into many lessons using simple vocabulary. The accompanying CD can be very useful in guiding correct pronunciation. ($12.99)

Chinesepod. This is a language-learning site for studying Mandarin.

Free daily podcasts offer lessons that range from absolute beginner (“Newbie”) to quite advanced. Podcasts usually consist of a short dialogue enunciated and explained by a Chinese woman and an English man. For a basic subscription ($14/month) you can also download a pdf of the lesson in Chinese characters with English translation.

Zhongwen.com.

This site is a Chinese dictionary. Type in a word in English and it shows you a list of Chinese equivalents, in both pinyin and simplified character. It also provides and explanation of each character, the character’s other uses and an animation of the strokes in writing the character. Chinese words or characters can be searched for by pronunciation, radicals or stroke count. There is much more at this site, but the dictionary is great.

The Art of Propaganda: Nationalistic Themes in the Art of North Korea.

North Korea continues to employ propaganda techniques that were used during the Cultural Revolution. This site offers a long essay that describes the nature of the art and its purposes, as well as a picture gallery with many examples of contemporary art.

World History for Us All. http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/.

This site offers an innovative (and FREE) world history curriculum that is worth exploring in its own right. In particular, it has excellent units on Korea, China and the Mongols.

Korea Academy for Educators.

This California-based organization is committed to helping teachers gain the materials needed to teach about Korea. The website offers lots of Korea-based resources and lessons, as well as links to other excellent sites.