How Maoism was made : reconstructing China, 1949-1965 / Edited by Jennifer Altehenger, Aaron William Moore.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Altehenger, Jennifer, editor.

Moore, Aaron William, editor.

Series:

Proceedings of the British Academy ; 267

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communism--China--History.

Communism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (473 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : The British Academy, 2025.

Summary:

How Maoism Was Made features new scholarship on the early years after the Chinese Communist revolution, showing how ordinary people in China built socialism through their contributions to industry, science, and the arts.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title

Title page

Copyright information

Table of contents

List of Figures and Tables

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Early PRC Between Theory and Practice

Building a New China

How foreign scholarship made Maoism

Making the early PRC work

Part I: Society and Political Economy

1 Making a 'New Changsha': Reconstructing China's Devastated City, 1945-1959

Reconstruction under the KMT

Reconstruction under the Communist Government

Conclusion

2 Mediating Disputes, Making Minzu: Minoritisation on an Ethnocultural Frontier of Early Maoist China

Like brothers in an intimate and harmonious family

Unite with all who can be united

From tribal divisions to democratic unity

The herders unite hand in hand

Conclusion: Minoritisation in a time of great changes

3 The Political Economy of the Everyday: Theory and Praxis of the Urban Commune Movement

Forging a communal everyday

The cost of welfare

The people and the collective

Bourgeois right

4 Seeing Like the Maoist State: Peasant Resistance in Official Court Documents from the 1950s

Changing images of peasant-state relations of Maoist China

Peasant resistance and punishment by law

Overview of criminal cases in relation to peasant resistance in Y county

Qualitative analysis of criminal cases

'Illegal reseizing': Changes of class status and ex-post punishment

'Speculation': Enforcing the state monopoly for grain trade

'Sabotage': Damaging collective agriculture

Part II: The Revolutionary Self

5 The Final Revolution is in Our Hearts: Work and Study in the Personal Diaries of the Early PRC, 1949-1959

Essential reading: Central documents and the making of Maoist discourse

Democracy in action: Contributions and contradictions.

Further stoppages on the mass line: Gender, ownership, and performativity

Diarists

6 Brainwashing and World Revolution

Brainwashing and thought reform: Entangled histories

Thought work as global praxis

7 Constructing the Maoist Sexual Subject: 1950s Hygiene Guides and the Production of Sexual Knowledge

The historical context

Sex by the book

Defining deviance

Part III: Material Culture and Everyday Life

8 How to Standardise Life in 'New China': The Case of Furniture

Furniture for a 'new society'

Standardising furniture to manage labour: The case of Tianjin

Standardising furniture to make space: The debate in the Architectural Journal

9 Mass Muralism and Mass Creativity in the Early PRC

Mass art in the early People's Republic (PRC)

Theorising amateurism and amateur creativity

Mass muralism and the Pi County campaign, 1958

Debating aesthetic subjectivity

Maoism and Cold War creativity

10 An Unlikely Moment of Revival? The Return of Gods in Early 1960s Zhejiang

Surviving a decade of turmoil following 'liberation'

The formation of a religious revival in Mount Fang

The emergence of a ritual economy

A sudden end and the ensuing story

Conclusion: The ironies of revolution

Part IV: Expertise and Revolutionary Epistemology

11 How Geography Won the Battle and Geographers Lost the War

The many geographies of China

Geographers during the crucible of war

Building New China from the outside in

12 'Marvelling at a World so Changed': The Three Gorges Project in Mao's China

Making the Yangtze legible and controllable

Investigating and comparing proposals

Preparing and debating

Moving towards a Great Leap

The Cultural Revolution and the Gezhouba debacle

Conclusion.

13 Publishing as Making: Defining Knowledge and Cultivating Organic Intellectuals, 1961-1965

Organising knowledge production

Cosmopolitan knowledge and cadre power

Framing knowledge

Conclusion: Red and expert after Mao

Part V: Socialist Internationalism at Home

14 Plagues from the Skies: Bacteriological Expertise in the 1952 Germ Warfare Allegations

Domestic narratives of germ warfare and the ascent of bacteriology

The ISC and its 'mass of facts'

Facts and fictions: Capturing the allegations on film

Conclusion: Failures in fact-making

15 Soviet Books in Socialist China: Epoch Press and the Making of the Maoist State, 1940-1960

Pan-socialist propaganda in wartime China

Internationalism and sovereignty: In search of a new balance

Print and the making of Maoism

16 The Japanese and Korean Roots of Maoist Dance Education, 1951-1952

Theoretical foundations: Bringing 'New Dance' from Japan and Korea to China

Cultivating dancers for New China: Study and life in the Wuyunban and Wuyanban

Coda

17 Point Counterpoint: Temporal Interplay in the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions

Glossary

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780197268063

9780197268070

1-80596-097-0

0-19-726806-4

0-19-726807-2

OCLC:

1518630788