University of California Press eScholarship editions in process

Chinese calligraphy has traditionally been an emblem of the ruling class and its authority. After a century of mass revolution, what is the fate of this elite art? Richard Kraus explores the relationship beween politics and the art of writing in China today to explicate the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture. His study draws upon a wide range of sources, from political documents, memoirs, and interviews with Chinese intellectuals to art exhibitions and television melodramas.Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders gave calligraphy a revolutionary role, believing that their beloved art reflected the luster of authoritative words and deeds. Calligraphy was joined with new propagandistic mass media to become less a private art and more a public performance. It provided politically engaged citizens with subtle cues to changing power relationships in the People's Republic.Claiming neither that the Communists obliterated traditional culture nor that revolution failed to relieve the burden of China's past, this study subtly examines the changing uses of tradition in a modernizing society

Light from the East: travel to China and Australian activism in the long Sixties

Throughout the "long Sixties" a diverse array of Australian activists traveled beyond what was popularly known as the "bamboo curtain" into the People's Republic of China (PRC). This paper will argue that they found not the monolithic "red menace" presented by media and government, but an often contradictory set of images mediated by their own political agendas and the changing nature of Chinese politics. More than useful idiots, these radicals took important political lessons from their Chinese counterparts, engaging in a largely unacknowledged process of transnational exchange. Through investigating three key groups of antipodean travelers - Communist Party members in the 1950s, student and worker revolutionaries in the late 1960s, and Indigenous activists in the early 1970s - it is possible to understand how not only their diverse political agendas, but also the changing realities of Chinese domestic and foreign politics, impacted on the lessons they took home. Drawing on memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles as well as archival sources, a light will be shone on this period of political and cultural exchange across seemingly impassable Cold War boundaries, illuminating Australia's often forgotten involvement in the Sixties experience