Jeremy Brown

Gebundenes Buch

City versus Countryside in Mao's China

Beschreibung

The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. This powerful work of grassroots history traces the origins of China's rural-urban divide back to the Mao Zedong era. Harrowing accounts reveal how Chinese people fought back against policies that pitted city dwellers against villagers. The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. As this powerful work of grassroots history argues, the origins of China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the Mao Zedong era. While Mao pledged to remove the gap between the city worker and the peasant, his revolutionary policies misfired and ended up provoking still greater discrepancies between town and country, usually to the disadvantage of villagers. Through archival sources, personal diaries, untapped government dossiers and interviews with people from cities and villages in northern China, the book recounts their personal experiences, showing how they retaliated against the daily restrictions imposed on them while traversing between the city and the countryside. Vivid and harrowing accounts of forced and illicit migration, the staggering inequity of the Great Leap Famine and political exile during the Cultural Revolution reveal how Chinese people fought back against policies that pitted city dwellers against villagers.

Autor

Jeremy Brown is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Simon Fraser University. He is co-editor, with Paul G. Pickowicz, of Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China (2007) and has published articles in Late Imperial China and The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 270
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. September 2012
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 490g
• ISBN-13: 9781107024045
• ISBN-10: 1107024048
• Artikelnr.: 35303636

Rezensionen

'This is a well-written, often bitterly ironic, account of an extraordinary period in the development of modern China, but one which, in many ways, built the booming economy that we are confronted with in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As Brown concludes, the shadow of the Maoist era still casts itself across events even today, and this book does an excellent job of reminding us of this.' Kerry Brown, Asian Affairs