Description
Book SynopsisWhen the Chinese Communist Party assumed power, Mao Zedong declared that not even one person shall die of hunger. A little over a decade later, China was in the midst of the most devastating famine in modern history. Between 1957 and 1962 the years commonly associated with Mao's Great Leap Forward some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion.
Rather than exploring why party leaders stumbled so badly in their attempts to modernize China, the contributors to this landmark collection draw on newly available sources to show how men and women in rural and urban settings experienced the changes during this period. Eating Bitterness lifts the curtain of officially propagated images of mass mobilization to expose the uneven and deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China. It also illuminates the role that history writing and memory have played in shaping narratives of the recent past.
Trade ReviewAn important collection that contributes both new perspectives and rich data. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Great Leap Famine and the early years of the PRC.
-- Kathryn Egerton-Tarpley * The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 71, Issue 2 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction / Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer
1 Re-Imagining the Chinese Peasant: The Historiography on the Great Leap Forward / Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
2 Romancing the Leap: Euphoria in the Moment before Disaster / Richard King
3 The Gendered Politics of Woman-Work: Rethinking Radicalism in the Great Leap Forward / Kimberley Ens Manning
4 “The Grain Problem Is an Ideological Problem”: Discourses of Hunger in the 1957 Socialist Education Campaign / Felix Wemheuer
5 On the Distribution System of Large-Scale People’s Communes / Xin Yi
6 An Introduction to the ABCs of Communization: A Case Study of Macheng County / Wang Yanni
7 Food Augmentation Methods and Food Substitutes during the Great Famine / Gao Hua
8 Under the Same Maoist Sky: Accounting for Death Rate Discrepancies in Anhui and Jiangxi / Chen Yixin
9 Great Leap City: Surviving the Famine in Tianjin / Jeremy Brown
10 How the Great Leap Forward Famine Ended in Rural China: “Administrative Intervention” versus Peasant Resistance / Ralph A. Thaxton Jr.
11 A Study of Chinese Peasant “Counter-Action” / Gao Wangling
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