China Studies 40 Years After the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

2006 marks the 40th anniversary of an event that has profoundly affected both the P.R.C. and China Studies’ understanding of the Mao and post-Mao era: the Cultural Revolution. This international roundtable brings together distinguished scholars of both the era and of the field of China Studies itself, to reflect on current CR scholarship and its consequences for our knowledge of China and for China Studies. Some recent work, including the panelists’ own, suggests that the experience, historical record and legacies of the era do not in fact warrant the still influential view of the CR as an economic, political and cultural disaster. This work often draws on post-structuralist and other theories new to China Studies, and claims that the field needs to turn to such sources to better understand the era. And in new archival and ethnographic studies, such work argues that there were important socio-economic gains during the decade (e.g., in rural education and development), and that participants’ own self-understandings at the time were and in some cases still are both rational and positive, and at odds with later, negative understandings.

What, then, are the consequences of these new perspectives on the CR? Does China Studies need to shift its understanding of the era, and to what extent? How can one adjudicate between such opposed views of the CR? And between history and memory? If 'theory' is crucial to this work and viewpoint, then how can this be brought into the discipline? And which theories and methods should be explored?