Guobin Yang's Blog

I would like to continue discussions about the importance of the Chinese Cultural Revolution for understanding contemporary Chinese society and politics by posting here a book review I published in 2006. The book under review is a memoir by a former rebel leader in the city of Wuhan. It was published in Hong Kong and available in Chinese only. The memoir offers a view of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of a radical rebel who joined the Cultural Revolution as a loyal and committed activist but ended up in prison for 11 years. So it's the story of the transformation of a radical believer into a radical non-believer. To see the complexities of the Cultural Revolution from the perspectives of different actors involved, I will try to post more of this kind of stories in the future. So here it goes, below is my review of the memoir by Lu Li’an:   *** Outcry from a Red Guard Imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, by Lu Li'an and edited by Wang Shaoguang, Hon...

Fragmented Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution To continue the discussions about the Cultural Revolution generation I started here last week, I’d like to mention today that memories of the Cultural Revolution are fragmented by genres and social groups. Here is an incomplete list: a)      Official narratives (e.g. Jin Chunming’s Short History of the Cultural Revolution and officially endorsed memoirs). b)      Narratives by victims of the Cultural Revolution, mostly high-level officials and intellectuals. These appeared mostly in the 1980s in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution. c)      “Memoirs of exile”: These are English-language book-length memoirs published outside of China including such titles as Wild Swans. d)      Literature of “the wounded” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These include both prose, fiction, poetry, film, and drama. e)    ...

As Weibo (weibo.com) gets all the media and academic attention nowadays, we should not forget that Chinese-language activism on Twitter continues to be important. Some netizens are amphibious. They inhabit both Twitter and Weibo and tweet in both Chinese and English, serving as information brokers and translators. I have a chapter on Chinese-language Twitter activism forthcoming in Communication and Power in the Global Era: Orders and Borders , a volume edited by Marwan Kraidy. My chapter is titled " Power and Transgression in the Global Media Age: The Strange Case of Twitter in China." Here is the abstract: "Using the strange case of Twitter in China – strange because Twitter is blocked in China but still accessed by tens of thousands, this paper analyzes how Chinese internet activists cross the virtual borders to engage in radical Twitter activism. I argue that when skilled actors take advantage of international opportunities and global media to negotiate a constra...