This dissertation is an intellectual history of the Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius Campaign in the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Campaign in the Republic of China (Taiwan), from 1973 to 1976. Utilizing archival sources from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, this dissertation is a cross-straits history of the last major campaign of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and of the Mao Zedong era, while also incorporating the broader Sinophone world by introducing the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Campaign at the end of the Chiang Kai-shek era of Taiwan's history.The chapters of this dissertation move from the grassroots upwards, starting in factories, moving up into government office and universities, to secret internal government reports and leading intellectuals. It incorporates declassified high-level governmental reports, local-level government documents, propaganda, popular media, and academic scholarship. Chapter 1 focuses on the political theory small study groups of Shanghai as sites of local knowledge production. Chapter 2 discusses and disentangles complex and seemingly contradictory rhetoric of the effort to criticize Confucianism in 1970s China. Chapter 3 introduces the first English-language history of the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Campaign, as well as how the nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan discussed and viewed the Cultural Revolution happening in the mainland at that time. Chapter 4 examines the ideas and writings of a leading intellectual figure behind the Cultural Renaissance, Ch'en Li-fu.My dissertation advances understandings in PRC History, Postwar Taiwanese History, the Cultural Revolution, Maoism, Chinese Nationalism, the history of communism, and the role of Confucianism in modern China. By introducing the Taiwanese and Nationalist Chinese reaction, my dissertation further expands on our understandings of the Cultural Revolution as a global phenomenon and major event of the twentieth century through the inclusion of the broader Sinophone world. This dissertation also shows that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait cannot be wholly separated in the history of Cold War-era China, as people on both sides believed themselves to be partaking in the same debate and spoke at each other in the same language.
Read
