Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:14:06.673Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Reaching Urban Youth

from Part III - Maoist Narratives in the Forties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2022

Pierre Fuller
Affiliation:
Sciences Po, Center for History, Paris
Get access

Summary

Continuing the exploration of Maoist narratives in the 1940s, this chapter considers urban youth as an audience on the eve of the 1949 Communist victory. It does this by examining publications of the Central Party Propaganda Department for the Jin Cha Ji (Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei) border region, an office that would evolve into the Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) at the end of the decade. The chapter’s focus is the magazine of the regional youth association, Minzhu qingnian (Democratic Youth), and considers three types of texts that convey revolutionary messaging in different registers: the youth magazine’s biographical sketches put faces to the injustices of society; its empirical survey essays conveyed the scale of those injustices within a wider social structure; and its theoretical essays placed those injustices in a grand sweep of history. The chapter considers the role of outrage in Maoist storytelling, which it achieved by adding a moral charge to Marxist or materialist history, a charge grounded in older, more familiar and more accessible Chinese dialectics of good and evil. In this way, the magazine allows us to complete our charting of the pedigree of Maoist sociology on the eve of the 1949 revolution.

Type
Chapter
Information
Modern Erasures
Revolution, the Civilizing Mission, and the Shaping of China's Past
, pp. 199 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×