Description

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the Great Leap Forward (GLF; 1958-1962) to denounce British and American Imperialism and to realize a communist utopia. Such efforts to transform China from a socialist to communist society failed disastrously, leading to the Great Famine during which an estimated 40 to 45 million Chinese died. While recent scholarship has mainly focused on the GLF’s catastrophic effects on human suffering, which includes brutal attacks on villagers, ruthless sexual assault of women, and mass starvation and resulting cannibalism, less attention has been directed to the making of calamity where hundreds of intellectuals, high ranking officials, and rank-and-file bureaucrats carried out investigative research that directly impinged on policies of the GLF. Situating in Mao Zedong’s methodological directives of investigative research, I call upon memoirs, interview narratives, historical documents, and archival data to examine practices and implications of Dingxing Yanjiu (定性研究) by the intellectuals. My presentation is part of a large project on politics of knowledge production during China’s GLF where I compare and contrast investigative research conducted by the above mentioned three distinctive groups.

Through workshops, courseware and scholarly publications, Dr. Ping-Chun Hsiung has contributed to the development and practices of Qualitative Research in Canada, China, and at the international platform. She is currently examining the politics of investigative research during China’s Great Leap Forward. Her scholarship has been published in English and Chinese and been translated into German. The widely used courseware Link Lives & Legacies: An Introduction to Qualitative Interviewing covers theoretical and technical issues in qualitative interviewing.