Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jonathan Unger
The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. x + 382 pp. US$65.00 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback). Because of the headlong rush of events in China since Maos death, research about the Cultural Revolution turmoil of 196668 and about the 1970s period of radical policy-making has received short shrift during recent decades. It used to be that a period was most productively studied in detail once the dust had settled, years after the events. Thus a good deal of excellent research about the 1950s was conducted during the 1960s and 1970s, and much of the important work about the 1960s, including studies of the grass-roots upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, was carried out a decade later, during the mid- to late 1970s. But with a few exceptions, during the 1980s and 1990s the traumatic periods of the 1960s and 1970s were neglected by scholars. This lamentably leaves us with too little knowledge of what transpired at the grass roots during those two earlier decades of PRC history, with large areas of important research still left undone. It has been a missed opportunity. The Western-language research of the 1960s and 1970s was necessarily conducted from abroad through documentation and by interviewing migrs in Hong Kong. From the 1980s onward, researchers have been able to go directly to sources within China, which can provide considerably richer information than was available to the earlier generation of scholars. However, we have not taken advantage of this, and the chance to conduct interview research about the Cultural Revolution is now dwindling. The memories of participants in the Cultural Revolution disorder of 196668 are fading, and the older generation of participants has begun to pass away. The dearth of Western-language scholarship has been matched by a reluctance among PRC-based scholars to conduct studies about the Cultural Revolution turmoil, inasmuch as the government prefers that the Chinese people let sleeping dogs lie. In the 1980s the government designated publications about the Cultural Revolution upheavals of 196668 to be among the Four Nos, and