Cultural Revolution

Video: Ian Johnson on Sparks, his look at China's Underground Historians

Ian Johnson, speaking about his book Sparks at the USC U.S.-China Institute on 2023-10-16.

November 14, 2023

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson spent a decade researching the work of these unofficial historians of China's recent past. This compelling study introduces readers to writers, filmmakers and artists, determined to preserve stories about mass movements that affected millions but get scant attention in the party-state's official history.

September 4, 2019

The USC U.S.-China Institute and Asia Society hosted a talk with Weijian Shan, one of Asia’s best-known financiers, as he recounts his remarkable personal story of his exile to the Gobi Desert for hard labor at the age of 15 amidst the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

March 27, 2017

Guobin Yang examines the factional violence in the Red Guard movement as well as the de-sacralization of that revolutionary culture throughout the 1970s and the rise of a new wave of protest that inaugurated the democratic movements of the reform era.

May 23, 2016

The famed 60 Minutes journalist passed away May 19. Safer, a Canadian, and posed as a tourist in 1967 to gain entry. His report for CBS, Morley Safer's Red China Diary, was broadcast in 1967. He spoke with USCI about the experience for Assignment:China.

Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution, 2011

January 1, 2011

Daniel Leese's book was reviewed by David Buck for the History of Asia discussion list.

CIA, Mao's Cultural Revolution - Origins and Development, Oct. 6, 1967

October 6, 1967

In the midst of China's Cultural Revolution, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency prepared a report on the forces leading to the launch of the Cultural Revolution and its first year. It was written by Philip L. Bridgham. This report was declassified in 2007 (40 years after its preparation). Bridgham published a versions of this in The China Quarterly.

Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins - Chinese Socialism in Crisis, 2014

Yiching Wu's book was reviewed by George Reeve for the History of Socialism discussion list. It is reprinted here through Creative Commons license.

Free One-Day Workshop: Remembering the Cultural Revolution

The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China

Please join the USC U.S.-China Institute for a book talk by Guobin Yang. The first part of the book offers a new explanation of factional violence in the Red Guard movement and the second part of the book chronicles the de-sacralization of that revolutionary culture throughout the 1970s and the rise of a new wave of protest that inaugurated the democratic movements of the reform era.