The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History

by Paul Clark

A groundbreaking study of cultural life during a turbulent and formative decade in contemporary China, this book seeks to explode several myths about the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966–1976). Through national and local examination of the full range of cultural forms (film, operas, dance, other stage arts, music, fine arts, literature, and even architecture), Clark argues against characterizing this decade as one of chaos and destruction. Rather, he finds that innovation and creativity, promotion of participation in cultural production, and a vigorous promotion of the modern were all typical of the Cultural Revolution. Using a range of previously little-used materials, Clark forces us to fundamentally reassess our understanding of the Cultural Revolution, a period which he sees as the product of innovation in conflict with the effort by political leaders to enforce a top-down modernity.

Genres: China, History

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2008

About the author

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Reviews

[Kurt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kurt Fass

Paul Clark’s “The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History” is a detailed historical analysis intended as a scholarly review of how and why this authoritarian regime used and molded Chinese culture in its image. Clark begins to make an interesting point by claiming the May 4th Movement of 1919 in China as being the genesis of The Cultural Revolution. This origin for Clark is significant and echoes throughout his work. The key factor for the May 4th Movement was for China to progress further and reject its past. It should be remembered that before the turn of the last century, China was a deeply inward-looking society with little to no interest in the rest of the world. As he goes through the different events, he makes sure to show the cultural aspects. The different modes of art at the time would show the manipulation of culture as core building blocks for the state and tools for governing their people. What could be changed would be reformed. What could not would be destroyed.


Although I appreciated the author’s scholarly analysis and detail on certain artforms as these existed within The Cultural Revolution, I felt he missed the main mission of what a historian is supposed to accomplish. To me, it seems a historian should present a given event, describe it, and then connect what can be learned from it for people alive today. Clark’s way of looking at this subject is stale and flat since his viewpoint is blandly one dimensional. All in all, his approach is far too clinical and separate from the main significance of the actual occurrence of these events. He misses entirely the most likely core reason for The Cultural Revolution which was protecting Mao’s stronghold on power after his disastrous Great Leap Forward, resulting in over 50-million deaths. On this, Clark is silent. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to enrich themselves with important past events. For all of the things that Clark skips over, I rated the book two out of five stars.

[David Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Cultural Revolution covered an enormous amount of centrally driven change across China. Paul Clark has gone beyond the traditional writings about the Revolution which focus on the political and administrative issues or on the experiences of those who lived through it and managed to escape to write about it with the benefit of hindsight. But in his desire to cover the "cultural" aspects he appears to have fallen into the trap of largely limiting culture to the definition used by the Western arts establishment. Of the five chapters of examples, two are about opera (his "chosen specialist subject") and plays, one on film and one on literature. Fine art, architecture and the use of culture for the masses are relegated to the fifth chapter and are only sketchily considered. And yet art, architecture (particularly in great industrial works), ceramics, even clothes and badges, have always been an integral part of the use of culture for use in the propaganda required to create and establish a revolution. Such use of art for cultural change coupled with propaganda has always been a central tenet of Communist thinking - and interestingly still is in North Korea where it remains based on the Cultural Revolution experiences. A few pictures from the wide range of material about art in China would have instantly shown the book's limitations.
In 1940 Mao wrote that "revolutionary culture is a powerful weapon for the broad masses of the people" - not for the bourgeoisie whose approach the Party rejected.
What could be an important book is undermined by the author's self-restrictedlimited definition of culture. 60 pages of footnotes and two pages on propaganda are an inadequate basis for a proper analysis of Culture in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

[Shane Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really not what I expected. The book I thought was going to be about the history of the gruesome Cultural revolution was actually about the Culture that emanated from those lost years of 66-76. It spoke about Operas, Art, TV, Plays, Music that all combined to produce Mao thought....very turgid and depressing though the author cannot be faulted for that....can you imagine having Maoism forced down your throat every day for years??? Ouch....the book should have been advertised differently.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book tries to put the "cultural" back into the history of the Cultural Revolution. Studies of that moment in Chinese history often focus on the political dynamics, which makes this an interesting intervention in the comparative sense: so much of the politics of the 1960s in the US, e.g., gets obliterated by a fixation on the dynamics of culture (well, "counter"culture).

[Shanxing · Rating 3 out of 5]

good archive work and enthusiam and polemics, but lack critical depth