Guobin Yang's Blog

Excited to know that the paperback of my book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China will be out in March, 2017. I had to come up with a very condensed version of the book description, and here it is: Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth performed an imagined revolution from 1966 to 1968 in order to prove their revolutionary credentials and enact a hallowed political mythology. As sent-down youth in the 1970s, they rejected their revolutionary idealism and embraced self-interest and the values of ordinary life, paving the way for the cultural and political movements of the 1980s. Yang shows that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are contested and often fall along the lines of political division that formed fifty years ago.   The book description on Amazon and on the web site of the press is like this: Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was unite...

Written for Issue No. 6 of Berggruen Insights, October 21, 2016 On January 13, 2008,  Southern Metropolis Daily  in the southern city of Guangzhou, China carried a story titled “The Rise of Internet Citizens: Don’t Even Think about Duping Netizens.” Referring to the many online protests in 2007, the story noted that in the internet age, netizens could no longer be hoodwinked by anyone. They would use online forums and blogs to voice their concerns and fight for social justice.  The word “netizens” in the title of the story, as was in public discourse at that time, carried a sense of solidarity.  Wangmin , or netizenry, had taken on the meanings of a collective identity in Chinese society. No matter how different they might be in other ways, netizens shared one distinct trait. Champions of marginal social groups, they were vociferous on issues of social injustice.  “Netizens” became a powerful collective identity through frequent netizen action – or what...

On Friday, October 7, 2016, I'll be giving a keynote speech at the workshop on " Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China ," organized by the Asian Studies Center, the China Council, and the Film Studies Program of the University of Pittsburgh. The title of the talk is: "Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Everyday Politics of Digital Life in China." On September 29, 2016, I gave a talk at the East Asia Center of the University of Virginia on " A Structural Transformation of the Chinese Virtual Sphere? Emotion, Reason, and Perverse Publicity ." Abstract:  This talk examines the hypothesis that the virtual sphere in Chinese cyberspace is undergoing a structural transformation in a perverted Habermasian sense. Whereas Habermas holds rational critical discourse to be the ideal in a democratic public sphere, in China today reason is mobilized as the main rhetorical resource for harnessing an emotional internet.  The transformation of the Chinese...

Last time I was writing here was at the beginning of summer. Summer is now over and the fall semester has started. I thought I'd pull together some of the stuff out there on the web related to my new book   The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China . *** September 22, 2016 Cultural Revolution, Propaganda Art, and Historical Memories: Exhibition, Film Screening, and Lecture . Event at Columbia University. September 21, 2016 " The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China ." Department of Sociology colloquium, University of Pennsylvania June 30, 2016 "Guobin Yang's The Red Guard Generation"   (The Page 99 Test)  June 18, 2016 "The Red Guard Generation Review"   by Silvia Calamandrei. English translation of an   Italian book review . June 15, 2016 "How the Cultural Revolution Sowed the Seeds of Dissent in China. "  The New York Times   Q & A with Chris Buckley. June 10, 2016 ...

May 15, 2016 Gerry Shih, Maoists Still a Force 50 Years after the Cultural Revolution May 15, 2016 Guobin Yang,  How the Chinese Cultural Revolution Came to an End May 14, 2016 Chris Buckley, Fifty Years after the Cultural Revolution, a Son Awaits Answers on His Father's Death May 11, 2016 Jeffrey Wasserstrom, How Will China Mark the 50th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution ? May 10, 2016 Ian Johnson, Q.&A.: Jeremy Brown on the Cultural Revolution at the Grassroots May 6, 2016 Evan Osnos, The Cost of the Cultural Revolution, 50 Years Later May 3, 2016 Helen Gao, Q.&A.: Roderick MacFarquhar on the Cultural Revolution and China Today April 29, 2016 Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China's Cultural Revolution  (a review of two books) April 19, 2016 A ChinaFile Conversation: Fifty Years Later, How Is the Cultural Revolution Still Present in Life in China? April 4, 2016 Chris Buckley, Q.&A.: Xujun Eberlein on the Legacy of the Cultural Revolution...

Trying to Make Sense of China's Cultural Revolution (interview on NPR's Here and Now, May 13, 2016)  Fifty Years Later, How Is the Cultural Revolution Still Present in Life in China?  (A ChinaFile converation, April 19 2016)

This book took a long time to write. I like telling friends I've been withholding it for the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Now that the anniversary is this month, the book is just out. Here is the  link  to the Amazon book site.

" China's Contested Internet: Historical Struggle and Uncertain Future " -- link to an essay I wrote in March 2016 for  The Futures We Want .