What was it like to undergo rectification at Yan’an, and what role did the emotions of Party members play in this foundational campaign? In the latest issue of Revisiting the Revolution, Huang Daoxuan addresses these questions through what he calls a “xinling 心灵” history of rectification. Rendered into English by Dayton Lekner, Timothy Cheek and Nathan Gan, Huang’s text portrays a campaign that was extraordinarily ambitious in its goal of forging “transparent” revolutionaries, but which precisely for this reason could not rely on external force alone, requiring a self-aware desire for
H-PRC is the H-Net presence of the PRC History Group, a network of scholars with interests in the history of the People’s Republic of China. We define history broadly, to encompass a wide variety of disciplinary approaches, and we understand the history of the PRC to include eras prior to the official change of state power in 1949.
Mao era models, such as the indefatigable Lei Feng, were engineered by the Party Center and distributed uniformly throughout the PRC, right? Not quite.
In this issue of Revisiting the Revolution, we bring you Liu Yajuan’s study of the “Zhang Shunyou Incident,” in which Liu connects local and central politics through a granular exploration of the making (and unmaking) of a national model.
Elegantly translated by Damian Mandzunowski and Liu Chang, the text here shows not only variation across local production and reception of such models, but also the uneasy relationship between the fictive model
I'm pleased to announce the publication of my new book, A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
A much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines China’s unique political-legal culture.
To many outsiders, China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from a skewed understanding of China’s