"eyewitness testimony" 40 years after the fact is easier to revise & re-invent than is a personal diary written during the period in the region. i won't compare one to the other directly, but even something as wobbly as "Holodomor" primarily persists & bases its "legitimacy" in "eyewitness testimony" made by kulaks' nephews & the sob-stories of Ukraine emigres whose families never lived in USSR. The historiography relies on the sensational nature of the claims more than it relies on historical primary source evidence.
Eyewitness testimony decades later is not a "primary source" because it's subject to much revision & interpretation in the intervening time. we never step into the same river twice and all that
At least some photos of hearts being cut out or some recording of this kind of Violent Struggle resulting in that kind of behavior.
government orders and police documents & newspaper articles & charters signed during the time would also give more life to this story, and not just root it all in incredible accusations made 15 years after the fact
Ok thank you for these responses. I will try and do some more research, I don't know much about China in general and its hard to assess this stuff without a better personal apprehension of the context. Books or docs you would recommend?
https://youtu.be/2MRejhXtm-A this entire documentary series (but that section of the Generator Factory in particular) gives more of a fly-on-the-wall perspective of life during the early-70s wind-down of CR
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D40A871D5709D130EACC0F537089B9CD guess it's all about who gets to decide what a nation's political values ought to be?
Gao writes in another work:
"Denunciation of Mao and Farewell to Revolution
Although publicly and officially Mao is not totally denounced, and although Mao’s portrait still hangs on the gate of Tiananmen and his body
still lies in state at the memorial hall in the middle of Tiananmen Square, a systematic dismantling of the ideas of Mao and Mao era policies has been taking place for decades. The unofficial verdict has been that Mao achieved nothing positive since 1957 when the Anti-Rightist Movement started. This is the well-known late Mao thesis propagated for instance by people like Li Rui (1999). In the West the onslaught against Mao has gone even further. Through publications such as memoirs, biogra- phies and popular media, Mao is portrayed as “a murderer, a torturer, an untalented orator, a lecher, a destroyer of culture, an opium profiteer, and a liar” in the words of Chang and Halliday (2005: 121). The Mao era was a period of political repression and economic disaster. The CR was a * holocaust * the darkest age in Chinese history, producing ten years of calamities.
The Chinese neo-enlightenment intelligentsia have caricatured Mao as one of the emperors in the long stagnant history of China, as if the 1949 Revolution did not take place, as if the idea of the French Revolution, the ideas of Marx and socialism and mass struggle against injustice and oppression all over the world, had never been around and were unrelated to China. Gao Hua, a prominent Mao historian, for instance, asserts that there is a “Mao way of thinking” that can be summarized as: (1) others cannot be trusted; (2) any means to fight your enemy is justifiable; (3) struggle is absolute, everything consists of the two opposites and everything is either black or white; and (4) violent action is the preferable option. For Mao, according to Gao Hua, one is judged by whether one wins, and the winner possesses morality. Gao Hua further asserts that the “Mao way of thinking” is essentially a local Chinese product, grown out of China’s vast fertile soil. The Mao way of thinking originated from ancient ruling techniques based on empiricism but is expressed in folk language and is the accumulated residue of grass-root rebellion culture and rogue elements in society (Gao Hua 2008)."
"eyewitness testimony" 40 years after the fact is easier to revise & re-invent than is a personal diary written during the period in the region. i won't compare one to the other directly, but even something as wobbly as "Holodomor" primarily persists & bases its "legitimacy" in "eyewitness testimony" made by kulaks' nephews & the sob-stories of Ukraine emigres whose families never lived in USSR. The historiography relies on the sensational nature of the claims more than it relies on historical primary source evidence.
Eyewitness testimony decades later is not a "primary source" because it's subject to much revision & interpretation in the intervening time. we never step into the same river twice and all that
At least some photos of hearts being cut out or some recording of this kind of Violent Struggle resulting in that kind of behavior.
government orders and police documents & newspaper articles & charters signed during the time would also give more life to this story, and not just root it all in incredible accusations made 15 years after the fact
Ok thank you for these responses. I will try and do some more research, I don't know much about China in general and its hard to assess this stuff without a better personal apprehension of the context. Books or docs you would recommend?
https://youtu.be/Xv_Uz5y4yJw this guy has several books that give the perspective of growing up during the time period
some books by Prof. Gao http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=F3B2B6834C81EF8F7315CB42A5FB7A29
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6782BE362481DEA9D8D6A89E3E68334F
https://youtu.be/2MRejhXtm-A this entire documentary series (but that section of the Generator Factory in particular) gives more of a fly-on-the-wall perspective of life during the early-70s wind-down of CR
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D40A871D5709D130EACC0F537089B9CD guess it's all about who gets to decide what a nation's political values ought to be?
Gao writes in another work:
"Denunciation of Mao and Farewell to Revolution Although publicly and officially Mao is not totally denounced, and although Mao’s portrait still hangs on the gate of Tiananmen and his body still lies in state at the memorial hall in the middle of Tiananmen Square, a systematic dismantling of the ideas of Mao and Mao era policies has been taking place for decades. The unofficial verdict has been that Mao achieved nothing positive since 1957 when the Anti-Rightist Movement started. This is the well-known late Mao thesis propagated for instance by people like Li Rui (1999). In the West the onslaught against Mao has gone even further. Through publications such as memoirs, biogra- phies and popular media, Mao is portrayed as “a murderer, a torturer, an untalented orator, a lecher, a destroyer of culture, an opium profiteer, and a liar” in the words of Chang and Halliday (2005: 121). The Mao era was a period of political repression and economic disaster. The CR was a * holocaust * the darkest age in Chinese history, producing ten years of calamities.
The Chinese neo-enlightenment intelligentsia have caricatured Mao as one of the emperors in the long stagnant history of China, as if the 1949 Revolution did not take place, as if the idea of the French Revolution, the ideas of Marx and socialism and mass struggle against injustice and oppression all over the world, had never been around and were unrelated to China. Gao Hua, a prominent Mao historian, for instance, asserts that there is a “Mao way of thinking” that can be summarized as: (1) others cannot be trusted; (2) any means to fight your enemy is justifiable; (3) struggle is absolute, everything consists of the two opposites and everything is either black or white; and (4) violent action is the preferable option. For Mao, according to Gao Hua, one is judged by whether one wins, and the winner possesses morality. Gao Hua further asserts that the “Mao way of thinking” is essentially a local Chinese product, grown out of China’s vast fertile soil. The Mao way of thinking originated from ancient ruling techniques based on empiricism but is expressed in folk language and is the accumulated residue of grass-root rebellion culture and rogue elements in society (Gao Hua 2008)."