Maoism & The Chinese Tradition

Catalog description

This class examines approaches to “traditional” Chinese history and culture, as enacted in the Yan’an period, the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic,and the Cultural Revolution. During the course of our explorations, we will take aim at the purported existence of a unified, millennia-old “Chinese tradition” by considering how this invented notion was crucial to the iconoclastic intellectual movements of the early twentieth century. After all, calls to break with “tradition” necessarily presuppose that such a “tradition” exists—that is to say, they produce a notion of “tradition” only to denounce it. We will trace the cultural lineage of Mao and his -ism, loosely construed, back to this bait-and-switch. Indeed, we will see to what extent Mao-period characterizations of feudalism and the Old Society repeatedly reenact it. At the same time, we will see that the Communists were also at pains to maintain “traditional” cultural forms through processes of recuperation and reinvention. How do we make sense of this additional twist? And what does all this say about the status of Mao(ism) and the “Chinese tradition” today?"