Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

How do we explain the unexpected longevity of the Chinese Communist political system? One answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists' creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. She will speak at UC Berkeley.

How do we explain the unexpected longevity of the Chinese Communist political system? One answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – 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 construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as essentially “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 contested touchstone of “political correctness” in the People’s Republic of China.

Speaker/Performer: Elizabeth Perry, Government, Harvard University