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  3. Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China

Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China is a major series of ambitious works in social, political, and cultural history of socialist China. Aided by a wealth of new sources, recent research pays close attention to regional differences, to perspectives from the social and geographical margins, and to the unintended consequences of Communist Party rule. Books in the series contribute to this historical reevaluation by representing the most stimulating and rigorously researched works in the field to a broad audience. The series invites submissions from a variety of disciplines and approaches, based on written, material or oral sources. Particularly welcome are those works that bridge the 1949 and 1978 divides, and those which seek to understand China in an international or global context.

  • General Editors: Jennifer Altehenger, University of Oxford, Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago, Daniel Leese, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Michael Schoenhals, Lunds Universitet, Sweden, Aminda Smith, Michigan State University

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10 results in Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China

Making Mao's Steelworks
  • Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism
  • Koji Hirata
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • Located in Manchuria (Northeast China), the geopolitical borderland between China, Russia, and Japan, among others, Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang) was Mao-era China's most important industrial enterprise. The history of Angang from 1915 to 2000 reveals the hybrid nature of China's accelerated industrialization, shaped by transnational interactions, domestic factors, and local dynamics. Utilizing archives in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, Koji Hirata provides the first comprehensive history of this enterprise before, during, and after the Mao era (1949–1976). Through this unique lens, he explores the complex interplay of transnational influences in Mao-era China. By illustrating the symbiotic relationship between socialism and capitalism during the twentieth century, this major new study situates China within the complex global history of late industrialization.

How to Make a Mao Suit
  • Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976
  • Antonia Finnane
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949–1976), Antonia Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so-called 'Mao suit'. The time of the Mao suit was the time of sewing schools and sewing machines, pattern books and homemade clothes. It was also a time of close economic planning, when rationing meant a limited range of clothes made, usually by women, from limited amounts of cloth. In an area of scholarship dominated by attention to consumption, Finnane presents a revisionist account focused instead on production. How to Make a Mao Suit provides a richly illustrated account of clothing that links the material culture of the Mao years to broader cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.

Shanghai Tai Chi
  • The Art of Being Ruled in Mao's China
  • Hanchao Lu
  • Published online:
    21 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world's most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society - from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao's China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women's liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai's streets and back alleyways.

Reproductive Realities in Modern China
  • Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021
  • Sarah Mellors Rodriguez
  • Published online:
    19 January 2023
    Print publication:
    19 January 2023
  • Lasting from 1979 to 2015, China's One Child Policy is often remembered as one of the most ambitious social engineering projects to date and considered emblematic of global efforts to regulate population growth during the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich combination of archival research and oral history, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez analyses how ordinary people, particularly women, navigated China's shifting fertility policies before and during the One Child Policy era. She examines the implementation and reception of these policies and reveals that they were often contradictory and unevenly enforced, as men and women challenged, reworked, and co-opted state policies to suit their own needs. By situating the One Child Policy within the longer history of birth control and abortion in China, Reproductive Realities in Modern China exposes important historical continuities, such as the enduring reliance on abortion as contraception and the precariousness of state control over reproduction.

China's European Headquarters
  • Switzerland and China during the Cold War
  • Ariane Knüsel
  • Published online:
    21 April 2022
    Print publication:
    28 April 2022
  • During the Cold War, the People's Republic of China used Switzerland as headquarters for its economic, political, intelligence, and cultural networks in Europe. Based on extensive research in Western and Chinese archives, China's European Headquarters charts not only how Switzerland came to play this role, but also how Chinese networks were built in practice, often beyond the public face of official proclamations and diplomatic interactions. By tracing the development of Sino-Swiss relations in the Cold War, Ariane Knüsel sheds new light on the People's Republic of China's formulation and implementation of foreign policy in Europe, Latin America and Africa and Switzerland's efforts to align neutrality, humanitarian engagement, and economic interests.

Across the Great Divide
  • The Sent-down Youth Movement in Mao's China, 1968–1980
  • Emily Honig, Xiaojian Zhao
  • Published online:
    30 August 2019
    Print publication:
    19 September 2019
  • The sent-down youth movement, a Maoist project that relocated urban youth to remote rural areas for 're-education', is often viewed as a defining feature of China's Cultural Revolution and emblematic of the intense suffering and hardship of the period. Drawing on rich archival research focused on Shanghai's youth in village settlements in remote regions, this history of the movement pays particular attention to how it was informed by and affected the critical issue of urban-rural relations in the People's Republic of China. It highlights divisions, as well as connections, created by the movement, particularly the conflicts and collaborations between urban and rural officials. Instead of chronicling a story of victims of a monolithic state, Honig and Zhao show how participants in the movement - the sent-down youth, their parents, and local government officials - disregarded, circumvented, and manipulated state policy, ultimately undermining a decade-long Maoist project.

Borderland Memories
  • Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China
  • Martin T. Fromm
  • Published online:
    18 February 2019
    Print publication:
    07 March 2019
  • In the 1980s, as China transitioned to the post-Mao era, a state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. They took the form of written and transcribed personal testimonies of events that preceded the turmoil of both the Cultural Revolution and, in many cases, the Communist victory in 1949. Known as wenshi ziliao, these publications represent an intense process of historical memory production that has received little scholarly attention. Hitherto unexamined archival materials and oral histories reveal unresolved tensions in post-Cultural Revolution reconciliation and mobilization, informing negotiations between local elites and the state, and between Party and non-Party organizations. Taking the northeast Russia–Manchuria borderlands as a case study, Martin T. Fromm examines the creation of post-Mao identities, political mobilization, and knowledge production in China.

Curating Revolution
  • Politics on Display in Mao's China
  • Denise Y. Ho
  • Published online:
    16 November 2017
    Print publication:
    23 November 2017
  • How did China's Communist revolution transform the nation's political culture? In this rich and vivid history of the Mao period (1949–1976), Denise Y. Ho examines the relationship between its exhibitions and its political movements. Case studies from Shanghai show how revolution was curated: museum workers collected cultural and revolutionary relics; neighborhoods, schools, and work units mounted and narrated local displays; and exhibits provided ritual space for ideological lessons and political campaigns. Using archival sources, ephemera, interviews, and other materials, Ho traces the process by which exhibitions were developed, presented, and received. Examples under analysis range from the First Party Congress Site and the Shanghai Museum to the 'class education' and Red Guard exhibits that accompanied the Socialist Education Movement and the Cultural Revolution. Operating in two modes - that of a state in power and that of a state in revolution - Mao era exhibitionary culture remains part of China's revolutionary legacy.

Marriage, Law and Gender in Revolutionary China, 1940–1960
  • Xiaoping Cong
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    22 August 2016
  • Xiaoping Cong examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. Her book is an empirically rich investigation of the ways in which a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal, political and cultural exemplar on the national stage. This conceptually groundbreaking study revisits the Chinese Revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. Taking a cultural-historical perspective, Cong shows how the Chinese Revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements, and how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept of 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences with the tendency of the twentieth-century world, and that is a revolutionary legacy for China today.

Mao's Cultural Army
  • Drama Troupes in China's Rural Revolution
  • Brian James DeMare
  • Published online:
    05 April 2015
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015
  • Charting their training, travels, and performances, this innovative study explores the role of the artists that roamed the Chinese countryside in support of Mao's communist revolution. DeMare traces the development of Mao's 'cultural army' from its genesis in Red Army propaganda teams to its full development as a largely civilian force composed of amateur and professional drama troupes in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Drawing from memoirs, artistic handbooks, and rare archival sources, Mao's Cultural Army uncovers the arduous and complex process of creating revolutionary dramas that would appeal to China's all-important rural audiences. The Communists strived for a disciplined cultural army to promote party policies, but audiences often shunned modern and didactic shows, and instead clamoured for traditional works. DeMare illustrates how drama troupes, caught between the party and their audiences, did their best to resist the ever growing reach of the PRC state.