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The Chinese revolution and effects
The impact of the Chinese revolution
Social impact of chinese revolution
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Historical Criticism of Mans Fate
Man’s Fate is a fictional story based on the 1927 Chinese revolution in Shanghai. The main characters, Ch’en, Kyo, May, Katov, and Old Gisors represent different facets of Malraux’s belief system and personality.
The story opens where Ch’en is in the room of a sleeping man who he’s about to assassinate. The assassination of the businessman can be seen as the destruction of the capitalism Malraux saw as the cause of the “oppressed and exploited Chinese” (Greenlee 59). Malraux came from a broken home and had great empathy for the working class. As Ch’en is holding the dagger, he focuses on his victim’s foot because he is about to destroy a living thing. Ch’en is conflicted “…torn by anguish: he was sure of himself, yet at the moment he could feel nothing but bewilderment ” (3). We can see Malraux’s own conflict here. In 1923, Malraux made a trip to Cambodia where he and his wife, Clara, “...were arrested by the Surete and charged with archaeological theft a moral failure that Malraux now at last recognized in himself” (Lebovics)
Assassination and violence were a common occurrence in China during the revolutionary years. The peasants were abused by the wealthy citizens and landowners,...it was from among their relatives and protégés that those who oppressed and lived off the peasantry were recruited: the bailiffs and stewards who not only collected the rents and debts due to their masters, but also took a substantial cut for their own benefit; the tax-gatherers in whose registers the landlords’ holdings were on an authorized ‘special list’, allowing them to pay taxes in inverse proportion to their wealth, or not at all. (Chesneaux 81-82).
Malraux wants his readers to understand the reasons behind the revolt. Time and again, Malraux draws vivid scenes of violence and deprivation. The meeting place to which Ch’en flees after the assassination is that of a poor European shopkeeper, Hemmelrich. “At last a squalid shop ” (11). Kyo is the main character in the story; he is determined to do everything in his power to lead the Shanghai revolt. “Kyo was one of the organizers of the insurrection, the Central Committee had confidence in him.” (14). Kyo wanted to see fairness for the proletariats. Likewise, Malraux was involved in leftist politics.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
“It was not easy to live in Shanghai” (Anyi 137). This line, echoed throughout Wang Anyi 's short piece “The Destination” is the glowing heartbeat of the story. A refrain filled with both longing and sadness, it hints at the many struggles faced by thousands upon thousands trying to get by in the city of Shanghai. One of these lost souls, the protagonist, Chen Xin, was one of the many youths taken from his family and sent to live the in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Ten years after the fact, Chen Xin views the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution internally and externally as he processes the changes that both he, and his hometown have over-gone in the past ten years. Devastatingly, he comes to the conclusion that there is no going back to the time of his childhood, and his fond memories of Shanghai exist solely in memory. This is in large part is due to the changes brought on by the Cultural Revolution. These effects of the Cultural Revolution are a central theme to the story; with repercussions seen on a cultural level, as well as a personal one.
All trade in China was channeled through the city of Canton and was regulated by a group of Chinese merchants known as the “cohong” who imposed irregular taxes. No direct contact between the foreigners and Chinese were allowed. Such limitations and conditions caused dissatisfaction among the foreign merchants, in particular the British, who ...
Gandhi and Mao Zedong had different ideas when it came to the use of violence. Mao believed that “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” (reading packet, 12) What this means is that force is absolutely necessary and the outcome of force is violence. Mao is in total agreement with violence and sees the people opposing the movements he is favoring as “paper tigers”. As in, at first, these rebels might seem terrifying, but in reality, they are helpless and harmless. Mao actually blames the Hunan landlords and the higher, wealthier class for a bloody battle between the peasants and the landlords. He said that for a long time now, the wealthier class ha...
In his 1937 film Street Angel, Yuan explores the inequities facing Shanghai’s urban proletariat, an often-overlooked dimension of Chinese society. The popular imagination more readily envisions the agrarian systems that governed China before 1919 and after 1949, but capitalism thrived in Shanghai during that thirty-year buffer between feudalism and Communism. This flirtation with the free market engendered an urban working class, which faced tribulations and injustices that supplied Shanghai’s leftist filmmakers with ample subject matter. Restrained by Kuomintang censorship from directly attacking Chinese capitalism, Yuan employs melodrama to expose Street Angel’s bourgeois audience to the plight of the urban poor. Yuan presents capitalist Shanghai as a binary and deeply unequal society, at odds with the “more pluralistic sense of cosmopolitanism” desired by leftist filmmakers of the 1930s (Pang 62).
...tion that revolt against the imperial powers . Although there are some instances of Luxemburg’s ideas of finance capital in Shanghai, the revolt only proves that her belief in the demise of capitalism is incorrect. According to Luxemburg’s model one of the results of the revolts should be the end of capitalism (a least in Shanghai), instead the Chinese capitalists use the riots as an opportunity to promote domestic product and help foster Chinese capitalism.
The Communist programs of Russia and China both appealed to a wide range of audiences but they focused primarily on the working class, or also known as the proletariat class. First, the Chinese worked on creating a conscious working class, making sure that they understood how low they were on the social ladder so that discontent could form, fueling the revolution (“Communism in China”, 3...
Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathon Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984)
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
One of the main causes of the Revolution was the issue of the estate system in conflict with the desires of the social groups (i.e. nobility and th...
The upper class men had all the wealth in the world at the tips of their fingers while the lower classes didn’t have two pennies to rub together. “… The rich should share with the poor, especially those rich persons who had acquired their property from trade or had otherwise won it from the poor.” (#8) The favoritism is eye-catching, it says that the nobles had won the land from the peasants but stereotypically upper classes have had the land in their family for generations. The trade among the people was unfair to the farmhands. The farmhands fashioned the land and “they were supposed to be brothers with one another” (#8) they should have the right to property and not have to just work it for the lords. On the contrary the upper class “purchased this right for a considerable sum of money… [if the peasants want to be released from their duties to us, nobles, then] the peasants shall pay us a reasonable amount of money.” (#4) Until the sharecroppers started attacking the nobles they “looked on, unaware that misfortune was creeping up on [the peasants]” (#11) Instead of the peasants adopting and modifying their way of life they challenged the nobles to a war and lost. A total amount of the souls that were consumed by the sinful acts of the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants was 100,000.
“The social causes by the Russian revolution mainly became of centuries of domination over the lower classes by the Tsarist regime, and Nicholas’s failures in World War one.”5 As the rural agricultural peasants had been limitless from serfdom in the year 1861, the peasants still refused paying redemption payments to the state and demanded to be the private owner of the land that they worked. The only problem was further compounded by the never lasting failure of Sergei Witte’s land reforms during the early twentieth century. Peasant disturbances increased which sometimes ended up becoming revolts, with only the goal of securing the ownership of the land they worked. At that time Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, which made up one and a half percent of the population owning twenty-five percent of the land.
In Man's Fate, Andre Malraux examines the compelling forces that lead individuals to join a greater cause. Forced into a life of contempt, Ch'en portrays the man of action in the early phases of the Chinese Revolution. He dedicates himself to the communist cause. It is something greater than himself, a phenomenal concept that he has fused into. It is something for which he will give his life. How did this devotion come about? A combination of his personality, his interior life, as well as society's influence, molded him into a terrorist. Ch'en is self-destructive; he is controlled by his religion of terrorism and his fascination with death. He is representative of the dedicated soldier who begins as a "sacrificial priest" (4) and ends as a martyr. After all, the ideologies of communism and terrorism were practically a religion to those involved in the revolution.
Through the description of the characters the reader understands better the conflict between the protagonist Mr. Chiu and the political system represented by the policemen. Mr. Chiu, with a “thin jaw” (4) and worried by a bad liver and acute hepatitis appears to be weak. His wife whose cheeks are pale wears “glasses”(4), which could be perceived as a sign of fragility. They live a comfortable life as indicated by the fact that they own a color TV, something that only a certain elite could own at the time of the story. However, even she looks sick: she suffers from a headache. The couple obviously belongs to the intellectual elite and it helps justifying the policemen’s behavior towards them: during and after the cultural revolution, the relationship between the government and the intellectuals was not among the most pleasant. It is easy to understand that an uneducated people is easier to rule than a well-informed one. Even Chiu asse...
What is revenge? Revenge is an action of hurting or harming someone to retaliate for an injury or wrong suffered at his or her hands. In ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold’, the theme of revenge is the primary reason behind the unfolding of the entire narrative. The play is set in a Latin American society, where actions taken to in order to avenge honor and virginity are completely justified. In Latin America, vengeance is sought against those who speak or act against someone else. And in extreme cases, revenge leads to mobs, and sometimes-even death. The latter was exactly what happened in the case of Santiago Nasar. The murder committed by the Vicario brothers, Pedro and Pablo Vicario, was an act of revenge against Santiago Nasar, because they believed that he took away their sister’s virginity. In a Catholic society, when a woman is not a virgin before marriage, her entire family is defamed in front of the entire society. Honor killing is “permissible” in such cases. But if it was only the Vicarios holding a grudge against Santiago, why didn’t the rest of the society bother informing Santiago about the planned murder? Why didn’t Victoria Guzmán, despite knowing everything, inform her master about his doomsday? Why did the Vicario brothers think that the Arabs were taking revenge from them? Why didn’t Father Amador and Colonel Lazaro Aponte take stricter measures against the murderers?