| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The memory of the Anti-Rightist Movement has long been a blind spot in Chinese debates, with historiography limited to elite politics and little engagement with the repercussions of the movement at grassroots level. However, the publication of Yang Xianhui's 2003 book, Chronicles of Jiabiangou, marked a turning point. Based on extensive oral history interviews, Yang's book makes a substantive connection between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the establishment of dedicated laojiao camps such as Jiabiangou in Gansu province. Documenting what he claims was a policy of dehumanization, he suggests that intellectuals were far from the only victims of a movement characterized by its extra-legal procedures. Ordinary people were often drawn into it and were more able than intellectuals to resist the legitimizing discourse of loyalty to the Party to which many intellectuals continued to cling. For Yang, the testimonies of the Rightist victims in Jiabiangou provide a fruitful field in which to investigate the breakdown of elementary social trust in society during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Situated ambiguously between oral history and literary intervention, Yang's work has, together with other recent publications such as Tombstone, contributed to reopening the debate on Maoism in Chinese society today
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