Studies Of China And Chineseness Since The Cultural Revolution - Volume 1: Reinterpreting Ideologies And Ideological Reinterpretations

Why have the influences of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966–1976) in contemporary China been so pervasive, profound, and long-lasting? This book posits that the Revolution challenged everyone to decide how they can and should be themselves.

Even scholars who study the Cultural Revolution from a presumably external vantage point must end up with an ideological position relative to whom they study. This amounts to a focused curiosity toward the Maoist agenda rivaling its alternatives. As a result, the political lives after the Cultural Revolution remain, ulteriorly and ironically, Maoist to a ubiquitous extent.

How then can we cleanse, forget, neutralize, rediscover, contextualize, realign, revitalize, or renovate Maoism? The authors contend that all must appropriate ideologies for political and analytical purposes and adapt to how others use ideological discourses. This book then invites its readers to re-examine ideology contexts for people to appreciate how they acquire their roles and duties. Those more practiced can even reversely give new meanings to reform, nationalism, foreign policy, or scholarship by shifting between Atheism, Maoism, Confucianism, and Marxism, incurring alternative ideological lenses to de-/legitimize their subject matter.

Contents:

• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Editors
• Introduction: Is Cultural Revolution Still an Ideology? (Chih-yu Shih, Swaran Singh, and Reena Marwah)
• The Epistemic Chineseness in Ideology: A Study of Early Post-Cultural Revolution Period (Sreemati Chakrabarti and Rajiv Ranjan)
• A Revolutionary Afterlife: The Construction of a History of Chinese Atheism (T H Barrett)
• Understanding the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Japan (Takeshi Uemura)
• Constructing China in the Legacies of the Cultural Revolution: Neo-Confucianism, New Left, and Intellectual Realignment (Chih-yu Shih)
• Political Communication in Xi's China: Mao and the Cultural Revolution as Analogies for PRC Current Affairs (Florian Schneider)
• China Studies and China's Economic Transformation: Unlearning and Learning from the Cultural Revolution (Reena Marwah)
• A Study of the Emergence of New Chinese Vocabulary in the Post-Cultural Revolution Period (Avijit Banerjee)
• Index

Readership: Academics, policymakers, professionals, undergraduate and graduate students interested in China studies, China's cultural revolution, comparative politics, modern political thought, Chinese history, political theory, international relations.

Key Features:

• Provides insight into contemporary China caught by the triad of the Covid pandemics, US–China rivalry, and China rising
• Presents a pluriversal style of analysis to abide by neither Euro- nor Sino-centrism
• Traces the unuttered legacies in the nuanced after-streams of the Cultural Revolution without privileging any canonical narratives
• Enables multi-sited (e.g. China, Japan, India, and the US) and multi-disciplinary (e.g. history, politics, areas studies, economics, international relations, and linguistics) comparison of the impacts of evolving ideologies