Jul 17, 2017
at the bus stop - a particular mix of diesel and cigarette smoke and the morning light that reminds me of China
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at the bus stop - a particular mix of diesel and cigarette smoke and the morning light that reminds me of China
1.
How might photographs bear witness to the Great Leap Forward and Famine (1958-1962), and how can we explain the abundance of harvest images and absence of famine images? This talk traces the photographic practices and discourses of the Great Leap era by drawing on photography magazines from the period. Rather than totalitarian control over all cameras, both professional photojournalism and amateur photography proliferated as China began producing domestic brands. Yet patriotic rejection of the imperialist gaze of a “backward” China and the ideological disciplining of photographers at all levels inhibited the documentation of catastrophe. Photos served not only to record, but also to mobilize the masses to implement a utopian blueprint. Both inspiring and coercive in spreading ideological orthodoxy, photographic image and practice shaped people’s worldviews and influenced their behaviour. Not merely “fake” or “lies,” the period’s photographs were visualizations of projected hopes that were so brutally trampled with tens of millions of lives. [source]
2.
On a plane a few days later, I sat next to Evgeny, a fiftysomething photojournalist from Chita, near the Manchurian border. I told him about the time capsule. Suddenly, he said: ‘I regret my part in destroying the USSR.’ Had he been on the barricades in 1991? No, he replied. ‘But at some point in the 1980s, I began to take honest photographs. Empty shop counters, that kind of thing. Please understand, I wasn’t trying to exaggerate anything. But even so, had I known what it would all come to, I’d have kept them locked in my drawer.’ [source]
Professor Yu Yongquan (middle) and two assistants with one of the first batch of Apple computers in China (1982)
“There is a good saying: Computer science cannot be purely theoretical, but rather needs to be put to use in reality.” said Yu Yongquan. The lead-zinc mine in Renhua county, Guangdong is one of the largest lead-zinc ore deposits in China. Back then, the mine shaft bucket often got stuck. Acording to Yu Yongquan, “At one point, it was happening once a month.” At 380 metre underground, the 7 ton bucket carrying a load of 8 tons of ore, once stuck, easily led to safety problems. Each repair took up almost a week’s worth of time, which had a big impact on production. Yu Yongquan spent almost a year programming these Apple computers to design a mine shaft control system. After the system was installed, the mine shaft bucket failure rate was significantly reduced.
[source] via Everyday Life in Maoist China
I actually suggested NMC/MENA as another example but N disagrees bc he thinks that Orientalism was a such major intervention to the field of which a similar type/scale has not happened in EAS. which feels possible bc critical china studies is barely a thing
i.e. NMC scholars seem to be, as a group, less islamophobic than the general population whereas EAS more often seems to be... more racist????!
a less embarrassing/more embarrassing (??) version of this is how I can. not. let. go. of the fact that when I was a kid, my upstairs neighbour was named Liberation Wang.
During the 1960s and 1970s, millions of young Chinese people moved to the countryside to be tempered by the “three great revolutionary movements.” Originating in a May 1963 quotation from Chairman Mao, this became a stock phrase in the Cultural Revolution. But what were these three movements? The first two are familiar enough. Class struggle constituted political study meetings, criticism/self-criticism sessions, and violent and sometimes deadly assaults on people identified as “class enemies.” The struggle for production was manifested in back-breaking labor that defined life for rural people and offered a profound, and often bitter, lesson for sent-down urban- ites. But what of the third? Rarely discussed in secondary literature, the “great revolutionary movement” of scientific experiment was nonetheless a significant experience for millions of people in rural China, and especially educated youth. In some areas, as many as one-third of urban, sent-down youth participated in scientific experiment. Whether cultivating bacterial fertilizer in makeshift laboratories, observing insect behavior to develop more effective control technologies, or designing new agricultural machinery, youth provided key support to the state’s goal of transforming agriculture. And participating in scientific experiment presented opportunities for young people to pursue both intellectual and revolutionary dreams.
[...]
Charting the history of this third “great revolutionary movement” requires careful, but also creative, interpretation of available sources, which include published books and articles, posters, archival documents, diaries, handcopied fiction, memoirs, and interviews. Most of the books, articles, and even archival documents are easily identified as propaganda—that is, they were produced by state actors for the purpose of disseminating ideas the state wanted people to embrace. Despite their failure to portray reality, such sources are invaluable for the clarity with which they articulate the state’s voice and thus allow us to recapture the vision of science that state actors disseminated to Chinese youth, which differed significantly from the perspective dominant today. Today in China, as in the West, science is largely accepted as the province of professionals. Propaganda materials of the 1960s and 1970s present a very different perspective on science: as a “great revolutionary movement,” scientific experiment was depicted as part of a larger effort to overturn the authority of experts in ivory towers and to break down the division between mental and manual labor.
-- Schmalzer, Sigrid. “Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China.” Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism
A former Red Guard relates, “I believe many little girls and boys of my generation dreamed of being a geological prospector... Propaganda for recruiting young people to work in this area was very effective. When my neighbor’s daughter was accepted by the geology department of a prestigious university, we all envied her for her future prospects of an adventurous life.”
-- Schmalzer, Sigrid. “Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China.” Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism
The memoirs of former Red Guards frequently emphasize the joy they found in reading, but with the exception of Mao’s writings and technical manuals (such as those on scientific farming), there was little that was safe to read. Despite the danger, youth kept and circulated novels and other cherished books; many even copied such books out by hand. The most widely read of such handcopied literature was an unpublished novel by Zhang Yang entitled The Second Handshake (Di’erci woshou). The story revolves around two patriotic young scientists who fall in love in the early decades of the twentieth century. Fate separates them when the woman, Ding Jieqiong, goes to the United States to study and then to work on the atom bomb project, which she eventually exposes as a weapon for killing civilians. In 1959, she is reunited with her old flame in the fatherland—but too late to pick up where they had left off.
The book’s presentation of scientists as courageous, patriotic, and romantic clearly resonated with young readers. It also strikingly mirrored many themes found in state propaganda. But political leaders in 1975 saw too much that was threatening about the descriptions of American cities, the prominence of Premier Zhou Enlai (then out of favor with the radicals), and the risqué love scenes, which no doubt became more elaborate as copiers added their own details. Official critics blasted Zhang Yang for suggesting that science, rather than Marxism, would “save China,” a charge Zhang did not deny. Possessing the book brought the risk of imprisonment or worse, and Zhang Yang himself endured four years of prison. But in 1979, after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the birth of a new regime, China Youth Press printed 3.3 million copies of a cleaned-up version of the novel. By the late 1980s, it was “the most widely circulated story of any kind in the history of the People’s Republic.” That youth in the Cultural Revolution would choose such a novel in defiance of political authorities—and that of all the novels circulated one featuring heroic scientists would be the most popular—speaks volumes about their internalization of the value of science.
-- Schmalzer, Sigrid. “Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China.” Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism