The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History

By Paul Clark

The Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, conventionally dated 1966-1976, has generally been studied narrowly as a political event. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's Mao's Last Revolution (2006) is probably the best political history of these years. Yet the movement was also an attempt to create a modern socialist culture. Clark (Univ. of Auckland), author of two highly regarded studies of Chinese cinema, has put culture back into the Cultural Revolution. Here he focuses on opera, film, dance, music, fine arts, architecture, and literature of the period, examining audience response as well as the work of artists, performers, and writers. The culture of this period was highly politicized, of course, subjected to obsessive standards of ideological correctness or heresy. Those who took risks and failed suffered greatly, and the range of works approved for public consumption--"eight hundred million people watching eight shows"--was limited indeed. But cultural production in the Cultural Revolution also drew upon decades of experimentation and shaped the development of Chinese culture after the 1970s. Clark's work is an important contribution to scholarship on the Cultural Revolution.

Check Catalog