When the Chinese communists came to power in 1949, they promised to 'turn society upside down'. Efforts to build a communist society created hopes and dreams, coupled with fear and disillusionment. The Chinese people made great efforts towards modernization and social change in this period of transition, but they also experienced traumatic setbacks. Covering the period 1949 to 1976 and then tracing the legacy of the Mao era through the 1980s, Felix Wemheuer focuses on questions of class, gender, ethnicity, and the urban-rural divide in this new social history of Maoist China. He analyzes the experiences of a range of social groups under Communist rule - workers, peasants, local cadres, intellectuals, 'ethnic minorities', the old elites, men and women. To understand this tumultuous period, he argues, we must recognize the many complex challenges facing the People's Republic. But we must not lose sight of the human suffering and political terror that, for many now ageing quietly across China, remain the period's abiding memory.

When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared that "not even one person shall die of hunger." Yet some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion during the Great Leap Forward. Eating Bitterness reveals how men and women in rural and urban settings, from the provincial level to the grassroots, experienced the changes brought on by the party leaders' attempts to modernize China. This landmark volume lifts the curtain of party propaganda to expose the suffering of citizens and the deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China.

An authoritative study of food politics in the socialist regimes of China and the Soviet Union During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.

When the Chinese communists came to power in 1949, they promised to 'turn society upside down'. Efforts to build a communist society created hopes and dreams, coupled with fear and disillusionment. The Chinese people made great efforts towards modernization and social change in this period of transition, but they also experienced traumatic setbacks. Covering the period 1949 to 1976 and then tracing the legacy of the Mao era through the 1980s, Felix Wemheuer focuses on questions of class, gender, ethnicity, and the urban-rural divide in this new social history of Maoist China. He analyzes the experiences of a range of social groups under Communist rule - workers, peasants, local cadres, intellectuals, 'ethnic minorities', the old elites, men and women. To understand this tumultuous period, he argues, we must recognize the many complex challenges facing the People's Republic. But we must not lose sight of the human suffering and political terror that, for many now ageing quietly across China, remain the period's abiding memory.

Nach 1968 brach in der Neuen Linken Europas ein regelrechtes Mao-Fieber aus. Der Weg derjenigen, die der maoistischen Utopie ihr Leben widmeten, fuhrte an der gesellschaftlichen Realitat vorbei und hinterliess, wie Gerd Koenen es ausdruckt, ein "schwarzes Loch" in der eigenen Biographie. Tausende Akteure, einige von ihnen heute Teil der gesellschaftlichen Eliten, waren und sind von diesem Scheitern betroffen und mussen bei der Rekonstruktion ihrer Lebenslaufe damit umgehen. Dieser Band untersucht, warum sich in den 1970er Jahren so viele Menschen fur die chinesische Kulturrevolution begeisterten. Wie unterschiedlich konstruierten sich die Linken im deutschsprachigen Raum ihren Maoismus und ihre Kulturrevolution? Warum konnte der chinesische Sozialismus sowohl in der Kommune I, als auch den K-Gruppen oder der fruhen RAF uberhaupt zum Bezugspunkt werden? Wie erinnern sich Zeitzeugen heute an ihre maoistische Vergangenheit? All diese Fragen verfolgt dieses Buch.