Anyuan - Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (Electronic book text)

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese CommunistsOCO creative development and deployment of cultural resources OCo during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful cultural positioning and cultural patronage, on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly Chinese. Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of political correctness in the PeopleOCOs Republic of China. Once known as ChinaOCOs Little Moscow, Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.