Cultural Revolution memoirs and Histories

[Understudy]

I've been doing a good bit of reading recently on the Cultural Revolution, on both the physical history and the stories that have survived. I am particularly interested in the decades that followed and the long lasting effect that the Cultural revolution has had on China's development. Here are a few of the things I have read so far-

Mao's Last Revolution (Macfarquhar)

Mao Zedong and China in the 20th Century (Rebecca E. Karl)

Apologies Forthcoming (Xujun Eberlein)

Out of Mao's Shadow (Phillip P. Pan)

Socialism is Great (Zhang Lijia)

These were very good, though the Books by Karl and Pan are amazing. Anyone else have other books that they would recommend along these lines?

[YuehanHao]

Thanks for posting the list. I also have read Mao's Last Revolution, and found it interesting. I may check on whether I can locate a few of the others at the library.

Two books containing personal stories from this time period I would recommend are

* Ten years of madness, oral histories of China's Cultural Revolution, Feng Jicai, 1996.

* In Search of My Homeland, Gao Ertai, 2009.

The former contains recollections from a number of different people (mainly those severely tormented, but possibly even a tormentor or two - don't remember), and though my memory of the details has grown hazy, a chilling, haunting sensation still abides when I think upon the staggering scale of (what we might boastfully call) inhumanity.

The latter individual account of an artist's sufferings (which actually began in the late 1950s, but continued on through the 60s) I read more recently and found vividly written and quite moving as well.

约翰好

[amandagmu]

To balance out the scar literature and get the views of people who were actually on the other side (for example, high school students who participated in some of the public humiliations of their teachers or left on buses to the countryside) I recommend the following:

Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era(ed. Wang Zheng et al) - especially Wang Zheng's essay: "Call me qingnian but not funu"

Growing Up in the People's Republic: Conversations between Two Daughters of China's Revolution

Both of these are obviously more focused on women's lives and the second one is broader than just the CR, but they are both very fascinating and, imo, not mainstream at all.