IFRAE Meetings

Presentation of the book by Xiaohong Xiao-Planes (Ifrae)"Socialist Revolution" in China: governance and discordances in discussion with Nicolas Werth (CNRS).

In an effort to win the country's independence and autonomy from the Western world and the USSR, revolutionary leader Mao Zedong led a continuous "Socialist Revolution" between 1949 and 1976. This book examines the forms of Maoist authoritarianism from a variety of angles - the arcana of party-state power, opposition within the system, the rebellious voices of ordinary people, and so on. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, the author delves into little-known second- and third-tier figures in the history of contemporary China, sheds light on a city (Shanghai) rather than a national history, as well as on a multitude of ordinary actors involved in the various Maoist moments. This decentering of the gaze enables us to go beyond the narrow framework of bureaucratic hierarchy and identify the presence of diverse individual and collective responses to the centralizing and hegemonic forms of the Maoist state. Despite a social control mingled with propaganda and political terror, post-1949 China was not devoid of diversity in behavior, nor of particularism and localism: faced with an omnipotent autocracy, individuals and communities were far from being as amorphous as long imagined. In this sense, the break with the histories of the late Qing and Republican eras proves less pronounced and less definitive.

Organized by Juliette GENEVAZ (Ifrae / Université Lyon 3)