A Year In Upper Felicity

Last updated

A Year In Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution is a book written and illustrated by the Communist (see biography [1] ) journalist [2] and author Jack Chen. Published in May 1973, [3] the book chronicles a year spent in a rural Chinese village (Upper Felicity) during the Cultural Revolution. It was based upon the author's stay in the village during 1969-1970.

Cultural Revolution socio-political movement in China

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in China from 1966 until 1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Mao Zedong Thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. The Revolution marked Mao's return to a position of power after the failures of his Great Leap Forward. The movement paralyzed China politically and negatively affected both the economy and society of the country to a significant degree.

Jack Chen is the son of the Chinese Trinidadian lawyer and Republican-era Chinese foreign minister Eugene Chen and his French-Creole wife Aisy.

Eugene Chen Chinese revolutionary

Eugene Chen or Chen Youren, known in his youth as Eugene Bernard Achan, was a Chinese Trinidadian lawyer who in the 1920s became Sun Yat-sen's foreign minister. He was known for his success in promoting Sun's anti-imperialist foreign policies.

The book is organized around the four seasons. It describes the day-to-day life of rural Chinese peasants, and how city dwellers (such as the author) were sent to live and work with peasants to further the supposed imminent Socialist revolution that dominated Chinese politics in the 1960s.

Peasant member of a traditional class of farmers

A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or farmer, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their personal status: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.

Jack Chen wrote a number of other books about life in China, including: [4]

Zhejiang Province

Zhejiang is an eastern coastal province of China. Zhejiang is bordered by Jiangsu and Shanghai to the north, Anhui to the northwest, Jiangxi to the west, and Fujian to the south. To the east is the East China Sea, beyond which lie the Ryukyu Islands of Japan.

Maoism Political theory

Maoism, known in China as Mao Zedong Thought, is a communist political theory derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong, whose followers are known as Maoists. Developed from the 1950s until the Deng Xiaoping reforms in the 1970s, it was widely applied as the guiding political and military ideology of the Communist Party of China and as theory guiding revolutionary movements around the world. A key difference between Maoism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism is that peasants should be the bulwark of the revolutionary energy, led by the working class in China.

Related Research Articles

Mao Zedong Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who became the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. During Mao's lifetime the Western media universally rendered his name as Mao Tse-tung, using the then common Wade-Giles system of phonetic spelling.

William H. Hinton American writer

William Howard Hinton was an American farmer and writer. A Marxist, he is best known for his book Fanshen, published in 1966, a "documentary of revolution" which chronicled the land reform program of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the 1940s in Zhangzhuangcun, sometimes translated as Long Bow Village, a village in Shanxi Province in northern China. Sequels followed the experience of the village during the 1950s and Cultural Revolution. Hinton wrote and lectured extensively to explain the Maoist approach and later to criticize Deng Xiaoping's market reforms.

Chen Boda, was a secretary to Mao Zedong and a prominent member of the radical leadership during the Cultural Revolution, chairing the Cultural Revolution Group.

<i>Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress</i> semi-autobiographical novel by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Dai Sijie, and published in 2000 in French and in English in 2001. A film based on his novel directed by Dai was released in 2002.

Down to the Countryside Movement Exile of Chinese urban youth to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution

The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, often known simply as the Down to the Countryside Movement, was a policy instituted in the People's Republic of China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of what he perceived to be pro-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there. In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas as a result of the movement.

The Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927, known commonly in China as the April 12 Purge or April 12 Incident, was the violent suppression of Communist Party of China (CPC) organizations in Shanghai by the military forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang. Following the incident, conservative KMT elements carried out a full-scale purge of Communists in all areas under their control, and even more violent suppression occurred in Guangzhou and Changsha. The purge led to an open split between left and right wing factions in the KMT, with Chiang Kai-shek establishing himself as the leader of the right wing faction based in Nanjing, in opposition to the original left-wing KMT government based in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei.

<i>Yellow Earth</i> 1984 film by Chen Kaige

Yellow Earth is a 1984 Chinese drama film. It was the directorial debut for Chen Kaige. The film's notable cinematography is by Zhang Yimou. At the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony on 27 March 2005, a list of 100 Best Chinese Motion Pictures was tallied, and Yellow Earth came in fourth. The film was produced by Guangxi Film Studio.

Ji-li Jiang Chinese American writer

Ji-li Jiang is an author. She is most famous for the memoir, Red Scarf Girl, as well as The Magical Monkey King. She grew up and lived in Shanghai, China in a large apartment with her family.

<i>Will the Boat Sink the Water</i> book

Will the Boat Sink the Water?:The Life of China's Peasants, is a 2006 non-fiction book authored by husband and wife team Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. It is the English translation of Zhongguo Nongmin Diaocha, published in Chinese in 2004.

Chen Yonggui Chinese politician

Chen Yonggui was a Chinese politician. Though he was an illiterate peasant, he became a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China and Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China because of the leadership he provided in turning Dazhai into a model for socialist agriculture.

<i>Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out</i> book by Mo Yan

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a 2006 novel by Chinese writer Mo Yan. The book is a historical fiction exploring China's development during the latter half of the 20th century through the eyes of a noble and generous landowner who is killed and reincarnated as various farm animals in rural China. It has drawn praise from critics, and was the recipient of the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2009. An English translation was published in 2008.

Wu Chuntao is a Chinese author and journalist best known for co-authoring the award winning Will the Boat Sink the Water with her husband, Chen Guidi. Born into a peasant family in rural Hunan province in 1963, Wu is a member of the Hefei Literature Association, and a recipient of 2004 Lettre Ulysses Award. Her investigative reportage has also earned her recognition from the U.S.-based journal Contemporary Age.

Liu Shaoqi 2nd President of the Peoples Republic of China

Liu Shaoqi was a Chinese revolutionary, politician, and theorist. He was Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1954 to 1959, First Vice Chairman of the Communist Party of China from 1956 to 1966 and Chairman (President) of the People's Republic of China, China's de jure head of state, from 1959 to 1968, during which he implemented policies of economic reconstruction in China.

Liu Geping

Liu Geping was a Chinese communist revolutionary and politician of Hui Muslim heritage. He is best known as the founding Chairman of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and later for seizing power in Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution, where he made himself the top leader of the province.

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a 1966 book by William H. Hinton that describes the land-reform campaign during the Chinese Civil War conducted from 1945 to 1948 by the Chinese Communist Party in "Long Bow Village". Hinton lived in the village in spring and summer of 1948 and witnessed scenes described in the book and recreates earlier events based on local records and interviews with participants. He explains party strategy to present the campaign's successes in building a revolutionary consciousness and a power-base among the poor peasants, but also its errors and excesses, especially the violence toward rich peasants and landlords. Fanshen has been compared to Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China and characterized as "perhaps the book that most changed American cold war perceptions of the Chinese Revolution."

Chen Junsheng was a Chinese politician. As a provincial official in Heilongjiang in the early 1980s, he distinguished himself as an advocate of the household responsibility system, resulting in the implementation of the reform in China's last bastion of collective agriculture. Consequently, he was elevated to the national government and served as Secretary-General of the State Council (1985–1988), State Councillor (1988–1998), and Vice Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (1998–2002).

References

International Standard Book Number Unique numeric book identifier

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.

  1. ↑ INSIDE THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION by Jack Chen.
  2. ↑ A year in Upper Felicity: life in a Chinese village during the cultural revolution. Google Books. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  3. ↑ "A Year in Upper Felicity". Amazon.com. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
  4. ↑ "inauthor:"Jack Chen"". Google Books. Retrieved 10 October 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.