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...