Re-thinking the Cultural Revolution: The Red Guards and Beyond

Andrew G. Walder will speak about the Cultural Revolution in China at Harvard University.

China Lunchtime Seminar
The lunchtime seminar series offers an informal venue for visiting academics and practitioners to present their expertise on China-related issues to the Fairbank Center community.

Re-thinking the Cultural Revolution: The Red Guards and Beyond
Andrew G. Walder, Stanford University

The scholarly understanding of mass political conflict during the first two years of China's Cultural Revolution has undergone pronounced changes in recent years. Professor Walder will talk about how this understanding has changed, beginning with his recent book, Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement, and with his subsequent work on the power seizure and factionalism in Nanjing, and his new research project on the rapid spread of the movement throughout China's provinces, down to the level of rural counties.

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. A political sociologist, Professor Walder has long specialized in the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. He joined the Stanford faculty the fall of 1997, and previously held faculty positions at Columbia, Harvard, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His recent publications include Fractured Crusade: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009); The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited with Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz (2006); "Ambiguity and Choice in Political Movements:  The Origins of Beijing Red Guard Factionalism," in the American Journal of Sociology (2006); and "Nanjing's Failed January Revolution of 1967: The Inner Politics of a Failed Power Seizure;" China Quarterly 203 (2010).