Eating bitterness [[electronic resource] ] : new perspectives on China's Great Leap Forward and famine / / edited by Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910789825503321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Vancouver, : UBC Press, c2011
• ISBN: 1-283-05429-9; 9786613054296; 0-7748-1728-3
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (333 p.)
• Collana: Contemporary Chinese studies, , 1206-9523
• Altri autori (Persone): ManningKimberley Ens <1970->; WemheuerFelix
• Disciplina: 951.05
• Soggetti: Famines - China - History - 20th century; China History 1949-1976; China Politics and government 1949-1976; China Economic policy 1949-1976; China Social conditions 1949-1976; China Economic conditions 1949-1976
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Re-imaging the Chinese peasant : the historiography on the Great Leap Forward / Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik -- Romancing the leap : euphoria in the moment before disaster / Richard King -- The gendered politics of woman-work : rethinking radicalism in the Great Leap Forward / Kimberley Ens Manning -- "The grain problem is an ideological problem" : discources of hunger in 1957 socialist education canpaign / Felix Wemheuer -- On the distribution system of large-scale people's communes / Xin Yi -- An introduction to the abcs of communization : a case study of Macheng County / Wang Yanni -- Food augmentation methods and food substitutes during the great famine / Gao Hua -- Under the same Maoist sky : accounting for death rate discrepancies in Anhui and Jiangxi / Chen Yixin -- Great Leap City : surviving the famine in Tianjin / Jeremy Brown -- How the Great Leap Forward famine ended in rural China : "administration intervention" ; versus peasant resistance / Ralph A. Thaxton Jr. -- A study of Chinese peasant "counter-action" / Gao Wangling.
• Sommario/riassunto: When 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.