Review of Mary G. Mazur, Wu Han, Historian: Son of China's Times (original) (raw)
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The China Quarterly, 2016
the practice of discrimination according to class background by 1937, under Mao, it persisted until the Cultural Revolution. The last third of the book is devoted to Walder's masterful analysis of the Cultural Revolution. After the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, Mao never felt confident of the loyalty of comrades like Liu Shaoqi, Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi. The Cultural Revolution was both a massive purge of "people in authority taking the capitalist road," and the destruction of the party-state bureaucracy by mobilizing student Red Guards against it. Walder's detailed account highlights significant facts: that the Red Guards were directed by the small group of Mao's loyalists (originally headed by Chen Boda, Mao's Yan'an tutor); that Red Guard factionalism was produced by this top-down manipulation rather than more deeply rooted conflicts among social groups; and that half of the Cultural Revolution's violent deaths (total of 1.2-1.6 million) occurred during 1968 when military-led organs of local power anxious to prove their own loyalty carried out a massive witch hunt including confessions forced by torture. The tragic consequences of Mao's rule for Chinese society come through vividly on every page of Walder's dispassionate and authoritative account. I hope that current and future generations of Chinese youth, who have been deprived of knowledge about Mao's China by parental reticence and politicized schooling, will have the chance to read it.
Culture, Politics, and Society in Late Imperial China (Autumn 2016)
This advanced undergraduate seminar explores key questions and problems in late imperial Chinese history from the end of the Ming dynasty until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. We will examine a wide array of themes, from the historiography of modern China to the history of mercantilism, global trade, and the rise of European imperialism, as well as debates about the East/West divide and the problem of metageography, Qing governmentality and foreign relations, and Qing expansion along the frontiers of the empire. We will then turn to examine the colonial encounter, internal unrest and rebellion, regional conflict and military modernisation, and how the Qing state endeavoured to confront these pressing challenges to its sovereignty. We will also explore themes such as the late imperial city, the social construction of gender, literary culture, the rise of nationalism, civil society and the public sphere, as well as late Qing reforms and the role of intellectuals within society. The aim of the course will be to help students develop a critical perspective on late imperial and modern Chinese history, and to understand the diverse approaches scholars have historically taken towards the field. We will therefore be reading a variety of academic books and articles that provide contrarian and contradictory viewpoints, and students will be encouraged to discuss and debate the relative merits of their positions.
Positions, 2012
In celebration of positions' twentieth anniversary, we propose to continue a discussion with Wang Hui, which originated thanks to the enterprise of this journal and the research activities that have pivoted around it. 1 Our previous trilateral exchanges were mainly focused on contemporary politics. 2 Here we offer preliminary remarks on Wang Hui's The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 3 an extensive work hailed internationally as a major historiographical and theoretical innovation. 4 We limit ourselves to speci c topics in the dense "General Introduction" ("Daolun"), a synthesis of the most relevant theoretical questions the author asked in the course of writing the four volumes of his monumental history of modern Chinese intellectuality. Wang Hui has entitled his introduction, which is readable as an autonomous text, "Empire or Nation-State?" for the foreign editions. 5 At its broadest, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought focuses on the following question: positions : .
The Rise of Political Intellectuals in Modern China
2015
The Rise of Political Intellectuals in Modern China offers the first English language account of how one of the most important movements in modern Chinese history affected the city of Wuhan. Shakhar Rahav highlights the critical role that regional intellectual networks played in shaping the particular form of national mass-politics that emerged during the 1920s. His book describes how modest organisations that started life in the university campuses and radical bookshops of a provincial city went on to play a seminal role in the establishment of the Communist Party. These intellectual networks represented a localised reaction to the May Fourth Movement (1919-21), a moment of political and intellectual awakening inspired by the mistreatment that China received at the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the apex of the broader New Culture Movement (1915-25). Given the vital importance attributed to these two movements, it is unsurprising that historians have chosen to revisit this momentous period on frequent occasions. In undertaking to write a new history of the May Fourth Movement, Rahav faced the formidable task of navigating an original path through ground already well covered by a capacious literature. It is testament to his considerable skill, and no doubt arduous intellectual labour, that he has managed to achieve this in at least two respects. He offers both a novel geographical location and an innovative methodological approach. As a result Rahav has provided valuable contribution to the historiography of early 20th-century China. Rahav redirects our attention away from the typical focus upon Beijing and Shanghai, to examine how the May Fourth Movement unfolded in the tri-city complex of Wuhan. This vast metropolis, located 600 miles inland in eastern Hubei, may not particularly well known today, yet it frequently found itself at the centre of political events in early 20th-century China. Decades ago William Rowe wrote a masterful two-volume history of late Qing Hankou, one of the three Wuhan municipalities.(1) More recently Stephen Mackinnon has described the experiences of the city as a centre for anti-Japanese resistance in 1938.(2) The period between these two studies remains relatively understudied. Although local scholars such as Tian Ziyu have described the events that transpired in Wuhan at the turn of the 1920s, The Rise of Political Intellectuals in Modern China offers the first opportunity for an English reading audience to learn about the fascinating intellectual climate in the city during this period.(3) Rahav does not simply rely upon a novel geographic area to lend his monograph originality. Instead he uses the process of relocation to advance an original