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Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China

New Book Published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press Explores Popular Memories of the Cultural Revolution

Woodrow Wilson Center Press has published a new book, Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, edited by Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang. It is copublished with Stanford University Press.

Popular memories of the revolutionary past have become a political and cultural force in China. Traumatic or otherwise critical memories make up part of this wave, but so does nostalgia, for a sense of collectivism and for feelings of freedom and progress. Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution is the first comprehensive study of how people today remember China's revolutionary epoch, from the time of Japanese imperialism through the Cultural Revolution.

Disenfranchised workers, rural women, and others whose experiences have often been overlooked are among those studied here. And a variety of media—films, photo exhibits, interviews, museums, and websites—help to shape their representations of the past. The result is an unprecedented and illuminating reappraisal of the multiple, layered, complex, and often contradictory recollections of the Chinese Revolution.

Ching Kwan Lee is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College. Both were fellows at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2003–4. Other contributors include: Anita Chan, Robert Chi, David J. Davies, Kirk A. Denton, Gail Hershatter, Kimberley Ens Manning, Erik Mueggler, Paul G. Pickowicz, Jonathan Unger, and Ban Wang.

Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution is distributed by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org or telephone 1-800-621-2736. The price is $60.00 for hardcover and $24.95 for paperback.