His entry begins:
I have just read Kristen Ross's book May '68 and Its Afterlives (2002). The book shows that in the decades after 1968, mainstream social science has constructed a mellow and tame image of the May Movement as a student movement about lifestyles and cultural identity. Ross argues that this image distorted historical reality, contending that the May Movement was a violent, not tame, revolutionary movement about social equality rooted in the fundamental crises of capitalist society and involving broad cross-sections of French society, notably workers, but also farmers, as well as students.
I have always been struck by the numerous parallels in the social activism of the 1960s in Western societies and in China. It is sobering to realize that the mainstream image of the 1960s movements in the West is mellow and quiescent, whereas that of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution in China is just the opposite -- violent, bloody, and cruel. The unstated commonality between these two images is that neither has anything to do with revolutionary transformation. Ross's book shows how this image is false.[read on]
Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is coeditor, with Ching Kwan Lee, of Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China.Watch a video of Guobing Yang discussing The Power of the Internet in China, and read more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.
Learn more about Guobin Yang and his scholarship.
Writers Read: Guobin Yang.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
