Evolved in the 60s (1966-1976), the Cultural Revolution opened a mysterious and deep chapter not merely in modern Chinese history, but also in World history. Cultural Revolution's core is violent. This phenomenon hit deeply into china's political and economic system, society's order, and cultural tradition. Millions of people had been sacrificed in this huge and irrational ritual. Yet, the illusive impression towards this Cultural Revolution doesn't result from people's scattered or mixed up memories, but from the way China dealt with it. For forty years, the collective memory of the Cultural Revolution has been fading. However, massive trauma still remains. Memories of this Cultural Revolution provides not only the research of Cultural Revolution but also gives a way to peep through via its special narrative mode and depth, avoiding political testifying. Whether those writers use "Transcendental skill" (like Jung Chang, Xu You Yu), " Reproductive method" (like Ji shian Lin, Yang Jiang), or the "Hemi-Transcendental skill" (like Pa Kin, Yang Xiao Kai) that involves above mentioned techniques, they all faithfully show us their personal philosophical thinking of that special time. Using four dimensions as reference: social status in the Cultural Revolution, writer's nationality, writer's identity (official scholar/ free writer), and area of publication, this thesis will show how the prevalent western social science value affects those people who have experienced this Cultural Revolution. Finally, this thesis shows how one's identity can be regarded as a writing strategy. History can be a mentor to the future. For truely healing the trauma, we shouldn't forget such important experience. By their retrospection, people who lived during that period lead readers into that special irrational, rush, unprecendented period.

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Based on the theory of pedagogic discourse developed by Bernstein, this thesis proposes a framework to analyse the relationship between the production of intellectual discourse and the Chinese State. The framework is developed on the basis of the theory of the pedagogic device developed by Bernstein and a comparison of the theoretical approaches adopted by Bernstein, Bourdieu and Foucault. The thesis then identifies three different dominant ideological positions in China between 1949 and 1993. They are, namely, traditional collectivism (before the Cultural Revolution), radical collectivism (during the Cultural Revolution) and regulated individualism (after the Cultural Revolution). The empirical work is a study of the most important education journal, jiaoyu Yanjiu (Educational Research) published by the Central Institute of Educational Research. The journal was created in 1978 by the Institute to support the new education reform initiated as part of the Post Cultural Revolution reform in China. Two major empirical studies are conducted. The first analysis is on the editorials published by the journal. The second analysis is on the papers published by the journal on moral education. Essentially, the paper argues that the reform policy in China introduced by the Chinese Government in 1978 had necessitated a fundamental shift in what constituted the core elements of the dominant ideological positions of the State. This involves certain elements of autonomy introduced to the intellectual field. But the exercise of the newly granted freedom is conditional. This fundamental shift led to a shift in the modality of controlling the intellectual field exercised by the State and has an effect upon the ways in which educational theories are produced and reported in the journal.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

 This narrative study examines the consequence of the Cultural Revolution experience for the 1966-1976 primary school students, who are labeled as Little Red Guards. They retrospectively identify both gains and losses from their schooling experience during the Cultural Revolution, which contrasts with the traditional victim image of the Red Guard generation. This study focuses on the coexistence of their positive and negative voices, specifically asking how are the positive and negative voices formed in the narratives of the former Little Red Guards, and what are the perceived gains and losses over time. The field work was conducted in Beijing in 2009 and 2010. Data was collected through oral histories and analyzed relying on the method of personal narrative analysis. Forty-nine informants participated, and twenty-six cases were selected as major data sources. Given the range in participants’ ages, selected cases are classified into three groups: 1966 senior primary school students (Group-A), 1966 junior primary school students (Group-B), and students who enrolled in primary school in the 1970s (Group-C). Furthermore, due to their subjective voices, the narratives are also divided into four sub-categories: positive, negative, neither (neither-positive-nor-negative) and both (both-positive-and-negative) voices. The oral data is presented with impressive moments, events, and episodes (at the factual level), and their reflections and self-generalizations (at the interpretative level). Data analysis suggests that the positive and/or negative voices are closely linked with students’ past position in school, which involved three roles: activists, students with a bad label, and ordinary participants. The activists basically hold positive points due to their student leader experiences as well as the beneficial social practices they engaged in. The labeled students tend to put forward totally negative accounts because of excluded experiences, characterized by alienation, discriminations, and frustrations. The ordinary participants, on one hand, assign negative comments to the meaningless social practices they participated; on the other hand, also highlight untended positive consequences for their later life. The findings reveal two determining themes within the diverse narratives: involvements in the political activities and participation in social practice. The two themes indicate two significantly hidden tissues: ideological awareness (IA) and practical awareness (PA).Working as the internalized predisposition, IA and PA expose the embodied history of the former Little Red Guards and a historically embedded process of their self-construction. Concerning the revolutionary context of the 1966-1976 education reform, this study combines and integrates IA and PA as constituting a revolutionary habitus (RH).The positive accounts relating to IA and PA display an elaborative meaning of RH; whereas the negative narratives concerning IA and PA demonstrate the restrictive meaning of RH. Therefore, the potential gains lie in the attainment of strong confident leadership and pragmatic social practice; while the losses refer to the formation of a pervasive sensitivity to political issues and a destructive recognition of the practical-oriented education. The finding of RH also stimulates more reflective thinking about the legacy of the 1966-1976 radical education reform, from the perspective of former Little Red Guards. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Wang Xiaobo is a Post-Mao novelist whose works have prompted tremendous attention from the intellectuals and the public after his death. The straightforward representation of sex in his fiction is often considered as one of the sources that contribute to his “liberal spirit”. This is because many of Wang Xiaobo’s stories full of sexual depictions are set during the Cultural Revolution. But Wang Xiaobo’s ambiguous manipulation of the relationship between sex and the power makes his resistance to authoritarianism a tricky issue. On the one hand, his nonchalant attitude to both sex and politics can be interpreted as a mocking of the Maoist ideology. On the other hand, the author’s detachment from the political background and the protagonist’s sexual carnival in the rural areas can be considered as indifferent to the Cultural Revolution. The engagement with Maoist ideology in the theoretical framework of suppression/revolt cannot give a satisfactory answer to the role of sex in his fiction. This thesis amends this framework by taking other elements than Maoist discourse into consideration. / Graduate

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

One of the most fashionable impressions about the legacies of French May ’68 lurking in our capitalist society nowadays is perhaps the view that this historic episode has greatly inspired a chain of sexual liberations and anti-authoritarian lifestyle revolts within the realm of modern Western cultures. However, without actually questioning the ideological implications behind this liberal-libertarian ethos, the above convenient historical verdict may still help perpetuate the predominant logic of late capitalism and the concurrent status quo. Historically speaking, during the heyday of the worldwide leftist insurrections of the 1960s, the events of ’68 were never simply an isolated First-World phenomenon. Deeply entangled with the empirical lessons of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, May 68 in France has radically invoked and manifested many profound social queries and contestations against both the capitalist universality and the emerging Soviet revisionist thinking for two decades. In this dissertation, my primary research focus is precisely to call into question, through the optics of their inherent “Chinese connections,” the dominant narratives about the movements of May ’68 as merely a smoothening agent of massive “cultural reforms” in the capitalist West, instead of a continuous response toward the Maoist egalitarian principles that keeps incessantly catalyzing genuine political transformations in the sphere of global communitarian and quotidian practices. By analyzing and rehistoricizing a variety of cultural texts that include travel writings, memoirs, novels and films in relation to the subversive spirits of ’68, this study aims to reopen their heavily forsaken sociopolitical significances in order to recast some of the truly alternative historical imaginations of this epoch. Unlike the predominant methodologies of historiography and intellectual histories which usually marginalize cinematic texts as largely “illegitimate” data for the serious investigations of the sixties, this thesis particularly emphasizes the extensive study and critical reexamination of many insufficiently discussed or widely misinterpreted filmic representations of “China” that were produced by a large group of Western filmmakers such as Bertolucci, Godard, Antonioni, Casabianca, Viénet, and Yanne, under the adoptions of different art forms and genres between the 1960s and the 2000s. While the overreliance on European cinematic representations of China may potentially risk becoming a blind repetition of many contemporary capitalist stereotypes about the Maoist influences in May ’68 at the expense of those greatly innovative and dialectical Sino-Western encounters during the same period, this thesis also seeks to cautiously retain and reinscribe the latent heterogeneous, antagonistic, and historical Chinese characters long pertaining to the ensemble of the so-called “French Theory” advanced by Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, and others since 1968, so as to retrieve certain unrealized revolutionary potentialities of the latter beyond the reigning ideological confines of neoliberalism today. I argue that this seemingly “redundant” or “generic” gesture of constantly delinking the multiple creative novelties adhering to the aforementioned Western cultural representations of “China” from the unique intellectual innovations of ’68 is highly crucial here, insofar as such excessiveness of negativity and refusal may nonetheless offer us a chance to persistently (re)search for some even better forms of emancipatory possibilities to come.

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