Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.

Based on a unique survey of Chinese respondents, the authors find that participation in social movements during the Cultural Revolution was motivated by the desire to improve social status or maintain existing positions in the social hierarchy. A strong relationship is noted between factional alignment and family background in provinces immersed in class-based struggle; however, the association becomes nil in provinces where sectarian struggle was grounded in class. The authors assert that the social conflict school has failed to adequately examine sectarian internecine fights among rebels in attempts to explain the mass movements, while the political process school has ignored fundamental social conflicts embedded in Chinese society. Potential pitfalls likely to confront future mass movements are identified.

Using a social movement perspective, this monograph demonstrates the differences between the Return to the City Movement by the Chinese educated youths - the only successful social movement by the Chinese people since the establishment of the communist regime - and the Down to the Countryside Campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. Grounded in data collected via an unprecedented survey research effort involving respondents who lived through these historic events, the monograph explores the emotional impact upon the educated youths of being forced to the countryside, the directions and forms of their resettlement, work, income, mentality, marriage/love, and relationship with local peasants while in the countryside, timelines and methods involved in returning to the city, their final occupations, children’s fulfillment, current perceptions of urban life, evaluation of the campaign and their experiences in the countryside. The authors also summarize the lessons learned from the Return to the City Movement, providing references for Chinese social movements in the future.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.

Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.

"Tsou, one of the country's senior and most widely respected China scholars, has for more than a generation been producing timely and deeply informed essays on Chinese politics as it develops. Eight of these (from a wide variety of sources) are gathered here with a substantial new introduction. Tsou considers events not simply from the point of view of a widely read political scientist (even political philosopher) and a concerned Chinese, but also in the light of history, the dynamics of Marxism-Leninism, individual personalities, and humane realism."—Charles W. Hayford, Library Journal

Thirty years ago, China was emerging from one of the most traumatic periods in its history. The Chinese people had been ravaged by long years of domestic struggle, terrible famine and economic and political isolation. Today, China has the world's second largest economy and is a major player in global diplomacy. This volume, written by some of the leading experts in the field, tracks China's extraordinary transformation from the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao, to its dynamic rise as a superpower in the twenty-first century. The latest edition of the book includes a new introduction and a seventh chapter which focuses on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, the godfather of China's transformation, under his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed. The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy. The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.

The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge.