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

Based on primary sources pertaining to the village of Zhaitan, this thesis studied the economic transition of households in a village in the south of Anhui Province as they went through the revolutions, political movements and reforms of the twentieth century. The transition was divided into four periods, corresponding to four of the chapters of this text. The first period was from 1927 to 1949, on which I depicted the household economy in a village that had not yet experienced intervention by the powers of the state; the second period was from 1949 to 1962, during which the Land Reform and the cooperative movement were the most significant revolutions in the rural area. The third period was 1963–1978, when the commune system was adjusted in response to the failure of the Great Leap Forward and was continued stably from then on. The last period was the reform period which ran from late-1978 until 1992. During this period, the collective system was abandoned and state control on the rural economy was gradually loosened. In the course of transition of the household economy in Zhaitan, I focused on the conflict between the growing population and the limited resources of the village. Before the 1949, the solution was to go into businesses outside the village; in the 30 years after 1949, under the framework of the collective system and the control of the state command, the peasants managed to develop labour-intensive production to meet the needs of the growing population; in the reform period after 1978, with the overall withdrawal of state intervention in rural areas, the tension was finally released through the market and the development of industry. The experience of Zhaitan reveals that the change of land ownership did not make a difference to the economic condition of most households if the land area was much less than what was needed. It also shows that the collective system of agriculture, however, could promote agricultural production, and thus brought about positive effects on the condition of each household through centralised management of the labour force and the land. Last, but not least, the overall boost to rural household economy is relient on the development of the industry to complete the transfer of rural workforce from the agriculture.

Based on newfound family letters, factory archives, oral history, and offiicial publications in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, this dissertation examines how urban Chinese families weathered the economic aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution by negotiating with the austerity measures, official ideology, and street-level bureaucracy. Such multivalent negotiations gave rise to "xiaokang", a “Confucianized” doctrine of depoliticized economic development, providing a durable basis for socialist China’s integration with the capitalist world order. A Shanghai-focused history of urban household economy and grassroots ideology in socialist China, this dissertation explains how urban families shaped modern China’s state-society dynamics and charted China’s unique transition away from Communism. Urban families’ experiences in late Maoist China were profoundly shaped by “revolutionary austerity”, characterized by ideological mobilization of urban families to bear the costs of Mao’s continuous revolution. By separating millions of teenagers from their families, the send-down youths movement (1968-1980) marked the austerity's apex. Instead of continuing the revolution, the send-down youths movement and other revolutionary austerity measures transformed urban families into smaller, more efficient, and depoliticized economic units. Once the ideologically disillusioned and economically strained sent-down youths negotiated the difficult bureaucratic terrain to achieve family reunion, they reinvested the virtue of sacrifice to the “possessive vision” of family life and the cultivation of their single child. By examining eight collections of Mao-era family letters in the context of larger historical processes, this dissertation demonstrates a significant shift in the late Maoist household economy and grassroots sentiments undergirding China’s "xiaokang" ideology.

大躍進運動，貫徹烏托邦主義，結合毛澤東及其追隨者賦予的闡釋，加上嚴格管制的官方宣傳體系與人民對理想的渴望，演變為大規模集體狂熱運動。對共產主義世界、烏托邦理想的期待與將國家推往急速發展的思想，這種思想化為多樣化的語言論述，藉由傳媒大肆散佈，並形成獨樹一幟的語言風格。 本研究分為五個章節，除導論簡述本文研究要旨外，首先將說明革命語言與中國共產黨之關聯性，定義革命語言的基本內涵，並說明中共革命語言的形成。其次說明中共宣傳的策略與手段，對意識形態及語言的散播發生何種影響。而後進入研究核心，以《人民日報》、《紅旗》文獻與《紅旗歌謠》新民歌，歸納大躍進革命語言的構成內容，並依據前文歸納，分析革命語言的特徵。 / The Great Leap Forward carried out Utopia doctrine, combined the explanation that Mao Zedong and his followers offered to, in addition, the official propaganda system that control strictly and aspiration of the people about ideal, developed into extensive collective's fanatic movement. The expectation of communist world and Utopia ideal, thought of push the country to develop rapidly, the thought turned into variety of languages, spread out by the media, and formed the language style of taking the course of its own. This research is divided into five chapters, except that the introduction, at first will prove the relation of revolutionary language and the CCP, define the basic intension of the revolutionary language, and explain the forming revolutionary language of CCP. Secondly, to show that CCP’s propaganda tactics and means how influenced ideology and language. And then enter the core of studying, in the documents of " People's Daily ", "Red Flag "'and new folk songs of " Red Flag Ballad ", sum up the composition content of the revolutionary language of the Great Leap Forward, and according to preceding paragraphs, analyze the characteristic of the revolutionary language.