Monday, February 11th, 2013 The Culture of Chinese Communist Resilience: Mining the Anyuan Revolutionary Tradition

Description

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources ? during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage”, on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly “Chinese”. Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of “political correctness” in the People’s Republic of China. Situated amidst the mountainous terrain of western Jiangxi province, the town of Anyuan [安源] was the site of the first Chinese Communist party cell dominated by industrial workers. Many of these workers, after being educated and inspired by the cultural products of the Anyuan workers’ club, went on to play major roles in the revolution as peasant organizers and political commissars. Once known as “China’s Little Moscow”, Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.

Elizabeth J Perry is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Born in Shanghai and raised in Tokyo, she holds a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and taught at the Universities of Arizona, Washington (Seattle) and California (Berkeley) before moving to Harvard in 1997. She has served as Director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies and as President of the national Association for Asian Studies. She is the author or editor of more than 15 books including, most recently, Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Harvard University Press, 2011) and Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2012). Her book Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford University Press, 1993) won the John King Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association; her article, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’ from Mencius to Mao ? And Now” (Perspectives on Politics, 2008) won the Heinz I Eulau Prize of the American Political Science Association.