Throughout the Cultural Revolution, Ji Li Jiang, a young girl, was forced to choose whether to live with her family and face them getting mistreated and sent to jail, or to break away from her family with the goal to preserve her political future. Ji Li ultimately chose to move in with her family, choosing the more dangerous option.In the nonfiction novel, Red Scarf Girl, written by Ji Li Jiang. The main character, Ji Li Jiang, is forced to not take part in an audition because if she passes, the Red Guards have to do a political background check, which Ji Li’s family will not pass. This leaves Ji Li devastated and her view of the Communist Party changes over time. Ji Li’s opinion about the Communist Party changes over the course of her story by looking up to the Liberation Army dancers and Chairman Mao at the beginning because she felt like she could become a part of the Liberation Army, changing to not really supporting the party as they felt that they were treating her unfairly as her class status was holding her back, Ji Li finally realized that the communist party was bad as they were brainwashing everyone, manipulating them to confess to stuff that no one did and falsely blame others. …show more content…
A Liberation Army soldier! One of the heroes admired by all, who helped Chairman Mao liberate China from oppression and defeated the Americans in Korea. And a performer. to tell everyone about the new China that Chairman Mao had built and how it was becoming stronger and stronger.” (Jiang 6,7) This evidence demonstrates how much JI-li respects and looks up to the Communist Party and its leader, Chairman Mao, who she thinks is a hero for freeing China from oppression as well as offering the nation fresh hope for
In Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li is faced with the challenge of her life when she has to choose between her family, and a family figure, her country, although she really had known since the day she was eliminated from the audition she loved her family more than anything or anyone. She shows her diverging opinions forced by peer pressure throughout the book in the beginning, middle, and end. Her scrambled thoughts have to be pieced back together slowly, and are forced to make detours through the revolution, but finally are able to bubble up to the top and come out to the world. In this way Ji-Li discovers not the mind swept mind of Mao Ze Dong, but her true self, ,and is able to see that she could never do anything to hurt her family, nor break away from it, and that no one could take her family away.
The Red Scarf Girl take place during the Cultural Revolution, Ji-li and her family got caught in the savage change in china of the year 1966. Ji-li went through many hard struggles, as in losing and gaining friends, tough times with family, and because of her family, Ji-li was not allowed to do a lot of actives she wanted to do for examples; being a Red Successor and then a Red Guard. The reason there was a Cultural Revolution was because of Chairman Mao Ze-dong. The citizens trusted Mao with all of their hearts. China’s communities were brainwashed, so what’s good and what’s bad got all twisted around and if anyone contradicted what Mao said, that person would be jailed, tortured, or even killed; so he can keep a tight regain on the unfortunate
In Ji-Li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl, the story is set in Shanghai, China. In 1966, Ji-Li Jiang is a happy little girl of twelve years. She looks forward to a future working for Chairman Mao's New China and his Communist Party. However, her happy life is suddenly interrupted by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, a movement led by Chairman Mao, to remove all parts of capitalism in Chinese society. Her family becomes the target of government persecution, since her parents and grandparents are labeled as ''Black'', which means that they are opposed to the (Red) Communist Party. Ji-Li and her family become outcasts of society as they live in fear of arrest. Ji-Li realizes that the Communist Party and Chairman Mao prevented China from improving
In the novel “Red Scarf Girl” by Ji Li Jiang, the theory of Marxism is at play as Ji Li strives to help the reader understand the impact that the Cultural Revolution in China had on her family and on her country. By using the struggle between the social classes, Ji Li helps the reader gain a greater understanding of the negative impact that a corrupt government can have and often times does have on the lives of its people. As the reader moves throughout the novel, it makes sense why, by the end of the book, Ji Li Jiang would call China her country but America her home, for she came to understand just how much she appreciates freedom.
Revolution is Not a Dinner Party is about a nine year old Chinese girl named, Ling, and her parents live in China of 1972, while Mao Zedong is chairman. When a political officer named, comrade Li, moved inside of her apartment in her father’s study Ling starts to notice a lot of things happening around. All of her happy moments to fade because, Mao Zedong has a negative impacts on people except her neighbors the Wong family, they’re like family to them and agree on many things such as Mao Zedong not being chairman and moving to America is a good idea. Ling’s family wants to move to America for a better life, her and her father look in books to learn English and to learn more about America. Comrade Li is always telling Ling “Chairman Mao
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
Watch your classmates criticize your teacher; Watch your father being taken away, because of long dead relatives; watch you classmates humiliate you in front of the class; Watch yourself needing to choose between family and future; Watch yourself only watching unable to help. Unfortunate, that was the reality for Ji-Li Jiang. Red Scarf Girl is a memoir written by Ji-Li Jiang, regarding the China cultural revolution between 1966-1976. Throughout the book,Family is important in defining who people are in Red Scarf Girl.
Mao Zedong was a very influential man in history. He forever changed the face of Chinese politics and life as a whole. His communist views and efforts to modernize China still resonate in the country today. Jonathan Spence’s book titled Mao Zedong is a biography of the great Chinese leader. Spence aims to show how Mao evolved from a poor child in a small rural village, to the leader of a communist nation. The biography is an amazing story of a person’s self determination and the predictability of human nature. The book depicts how a persuasive voice can shape the minds of millions and of people. It also shows the power and strength that a movement in history can make. This biography tells an important part of world history-the communist takeover of China.
Chinese Revolution is about making the entire country into Communists and killing each and one the people who hates Mao Tse-Tung. Mao Tse-Tung is the leader of China at this time who believes in equality and everyone should have the same rights. The Red Guards is a military group in which includes a group of children that eliminates the Chinese population due to hatred for Mao. If any of these events happen to our generation, most youth are smart enough to know that Mao is a bad leader and killing innocent people by the case of bitterness for Mao is wrong. The Chinese youth got swept up in the Cultural Revolution by Mao because the youth were easy to persuade into doing something. To expand this idea further, the Chinese youth weren’t old enough, not on this specific age, to realize whether Mao’s actions were virtuous or inaccurate. On the other hand, they thought that working for Mao and joining the Red Guards will help their country out, but they never knew the truth behind Mao’s plans. The truth about the Cultural Revolution was to kill anybody that gets in the way of Mao’s plans and destroying all the old buildings so that it would be replaced with new buildings or reconstruct the old buildings to become brand new again. In addition, the Chinese youth had no idea that joining the Red Guards will give a highly chance of getting killed. In other words, the adults were smarter than the youth because joining the Red Guards means the opposite of helping the country out. Mao just made them think that joining will help their country, even though it was the other way around like someone apologizing to their neighbor in which manipulating their minds that they’re now cool, but they were still rude to them afterwards. To repeat this, t...
Zhu Ying was a member of the military’s theatre troupe, and about to be a member of the party, until she refused to sleep with party members. After that, they transferred and then imprisoned her. While her role in the military could have made Zhu Ying an androgynous figure, an emblem of communist gender equality, the party’s expectation that she have sex with party members makes her a sexual object, which is its own form of feminization. Zhu Ying is allowed to retain her femininity only if she consents to being a sexual object; when she does not, she is sent to be a laborer, and later imprisoned. Moreover, by being separated from her boyfriend, her chance at domestic happiness is taken away. After imprisonment, she has no opportunity to fill the traditional female role of marriage and children (which she may or may not have desired). Thus, the party halts the “natural” order of marriage and
There is no denying that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao Zedong changed the course of the history of China and shaped the China the world sees today. The amount of lives, cultural traditions, and differing intellectual thoughts that were lost and destroyed as he strove to meet his goals for the country can never be recovered or replaced. However, it had been asserted that one of the more positive effects of Chairman Mao on the people of China was his somewhat radical opinion of woman. Prior to the Communist Revolution, women’s role in Chinese society was almost completely limited to life within the home and focused on supporting their family and being submissive to their fathers and husbands. Chairman Mao realized that women were one of the oppressed groups in China that could be utilized to increase his control over the country. While women’s rights still have a long way to go, it can definitely be said some of Mao’s polices advanced Chinese women in ways that would have been unimaginable before his rise to leadership. The more relevant questions are regarding Chairman Mao’s intent behind these polices and if they were destined to fail from the start due to the cultural and political climate in 20th century China.
Dressed in the drab military uniform that symbolized the revolutionary government of Communist China, Mao Zedong's body still looked powerful, like an giant rock in a gushing river. An enormous red flag draped his coffin, like a red sail unfurled on a Chinese junk, illustrating the dualism of traditional China and the present Communist China that typified Mao. 1 A river of people flowed past while he lay in state during the second week of September 1976. Workers, peasants, soldiers and students, united in grief; brought together by Mao, the helmsman of modern China. 2 He had assembled a revolutionary government using traditional Chinese ideals of filial piety, harmony, and order. Mao's cult of personality, party purges, and political policies reflect Mao's esteem of these traditional Chinese ideals and history.
For example, he writes that he disagreed with Nie Yuanzi as he saw her actions as contradictory to the direction of the revolution, and against his understanding of Marxist-Leninist Communist leadership (The Cowshed, 33 - 34). He maintains that his peasant background and positions as university professor and union leader should have been evidence his support of Communism instead of a capitalist intellectual (The Cowshed, 61 - 62). From this, we see that Ji Xianlin’s critique of the the Cultural Revolution and Red Guards was as much rooted in its inhumane treatment of people, but instead in the fact that the actions of the Red Guards was not
Her passion for her beliefs were remembered and set as examples for other Chinese citizens. Although Mei-ling did not stay in China like her sister, she moved to other parts of the world and kept on impacting people overseas. As she began to see beyond the refined view of China, she worked with the International Red Cross Committee and British United Aid to China fund, attributing to an important role in international relations. “Through the late 1960s she was included among America’s 10 most admired women”(Cultural China). Through Taiwan and America, Mei-ling was able to help and inspire people without the use of her husband’s government.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, beginning as a campaign targeted at removing Chairman Mao Zedong's political opponents, was a time when practically every aspect of Chinese society was in pandemonium. From 1966 through 1969, Mao encouraged revolutionary committees, including the red guards, to take power from the Chinese Communist party authorities of the state. The Red Guards, the majority being young adults, rose up against their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Following Mao and his ideas, The Red Guard's main goal was to eliminate all remnants of the old culture in China. They were the 'frontline implementers' who produced havoc, used bloody force, punished supposed 'counter revolutionists', and overthrew government officials, all in order to support their 'beloved leader'.