/lit/ - Literature

Wow, I want to have FUCK with the cultural revolution!

the big book of reddit

>>15848912
Ooga booga me see qt asian commie girl me commie now

>>15848912
>>15848912
I'm curious too. I've heard some interesting things about it when all we were ever told was "CCP incompetent people starve on purpose". Is there a book on this that looks at why this was carried out, without the usual western Liberal sentimentality?

Imagine sticking your head up that skirt and having a nice long sniff haha wouldn't that be crazy haha

>>15848918
>>15848942
>>15849001
>>15849346
Pplease i just want boooksz

>>15849179
Mao was a simple man.

if your looking for a romanticized version the only one I know of is Mao's little red book. Other than that, you can easily find information on the countless millions of people who were murdered by the state in the name of the state and for the betterment of the state. If you wanna understand the true nature of "cultural revolution" and the key if not defining role that state-sanctioned slavery and slaughter plays in it, I recommend Gulag Archipelago, an account of the Soviet slave labor camps from a man who somehow survived it.

>>15849393
take your meds Jordan

>>15849393
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung does not provide an account of the cultural revolution, romanticized or otherwise, as it predates it. You are a pseud.

>>15849393
>Gulag Archipelago

Not even the author's wife believes that shit

Take your meds

>>15849417
>>15849434
>>15849522
your dole dippers, retard

>>15849393
dullard

Is Frank Dikötter's trilogy on Mao-era China any good?

Can I pretend that's a boi? Is that ok?
That's a boi in my eyes.

>ideally looking for a mostly unbiased account
this is like looking for an "unbiased account" of the holocaust, unsurprisingly most writers without allegiance to the regime responsible generally share a negative attitude toward it

if you're a commie larper and want to read a defense of the Cultural Revolution for the sake of arguing with nazi larpers on the internet i recommend Gao Mobo's The Battle For China's Past and Han Dongping's Unknown Revolution (you might just want to skim them for talking points, because without context you won't really appreciate these) - there were also quite a number of glowing contemporary accounts of it, I believe that William Hinton wrote one, but like others he changed tune when the Party declared it to be a disaster. If you want a Pro-Soviet, Anti-Cult Rev account read Palme Dutt's Whither China essay: https://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/1967/whither-china.htm

If you're a normal person who just wants to read about the Cultural Revolution you have plenty of choices: there are countless personal memoirs about individual experiences of the Cult Rev (I recommend Ji Xianlin's The Cowshed), there are countless scholarly works on the period (I recommend Wu Yiching's The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, Alexander Cook's Cultural Revolution on Trial and Yang Su's Collective Killings in Rural China) as well as grand overviews by writers like Frank Dikotter, Roderick MacFarquhar, Andrew Walder and Yan Jiaqi

my overall favorite is Tan Hecheng's The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent Into Madness During the Cultural Revolution

>>15848912
gib source on the pic

>>15849793
Not OP but thanks for this effortpost my friend, very informative and I like how you accommodated many different perspectives

>>15849805
idk just seems to be some generic art from online. I googled "female red guard painting" because i remembered the image and figured i needed some coomerbait to get the thread going

>>15849793
OP here. thanks!

bump

>>15849793
I am but a humble anon, giving thanks for your effortpost

>>15849793
thanks for the effort post senpai. mao's china is one of the mor complicated episodes of the 20th century so i appreicate these recs. i am a socialist myself but we do need to reckon Mao.

Question, in vincent Belvins new book the Jakarta Method he posits that the CIA backed genocide in Indonesia made Mao extremely paranoid of the Americans doing the same thing in China an began the cultural revolution to purge these possibly counter revolutionary and dangerous elements. How do you feel about this take as a seemingly well read person on red China?

>>15849179
If you want a completely unbiased tldr it's basically : Mao was a retard who thought he was pushing the country into modernity, but because he was such a retard he did the reverse.

>>15848912
mao zedong thought is the real red pill

bump

>>15849602
bumping this because the covers look good

>>15848912
English by Wang Gang. It takes place in Xinjiang too which is cool.

>>15849602
Communist here,

Yeah the books rock. He had unprecedented access to the archive and used it to confirm everything we suspected: the cultural revolution was a enemy-less civil war Mao unleashed to regain power in the party.

Dikotter is a huge anti-communist, but I don't think there is a better book on the Great Leap or Cultural Revolution (haven't read the other one). As a communist, my take away was that Mao is a brilliant dumbass, and we need to structure our party so that the stupid whims of one hyper-competent yet also incompetent individual cannot override the entire intelligent planning divisions.

>>15848912
>innocent
>feminine
>young
>naive
>seductive
>weak
What an apt painting

>>15852077
This is what we're told about the "Rash Advance" but it like everything that has sent my antenna off I assume this too is western Liberal narrative-history and a truly unbiased look into the RA and CR would show intricate political and social causality, regardless of what the effects were on the receiving end.

>>15855738
This sounds more plausible.

>>15848918
Is that a Disco Elysium reference?

Simon Leys

I just bought Stanley Karnow's Mao and China: A Legacy of Turmoil for cheap at a thrift shop. I'm sure there are more authoritative texts on the subject matter, but I've read Karnow before and he seems OK as long as you keep in mind that he's a yank ultimately writing from a yank's perspective. Interested in this thread.

>>15848912