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essay about china in the 1930s and 1960s
social change in china from 1950 to 1960
china during the late 1940s
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The beginning of To Live also demonstrates a different lifestyle than the strict operatic performing path in Farewell My Concubine. The film fades into the 1940’s with a man named Xu Fugui, who was the son of a rich man. Gambling was his daily activity, and he would often put his risky intuitions above his wife and daughter. He was seen as arrogant through his self-satisfied facial expressions, up until the moment when his gambling opponent Long’er rigged the game of dice. After losing the game, Fugui’s quickly changed his egotistic gestures, which resembled shock and desperation, and he became homeless for a while. Soon after, he became an entertainer for local folks by using simple backlighting and puppets as shadows. It was part of the Chinese …show more content…
Fugui’s family was responsible for piling scrap iron in order for the government to produce steel weaponry against Taiwan. Fugui’s children, who were Fengxia and Youqing, worked hard during the day. They were extremely diligent and hardly got any sleep. During an instance where the son Youqing was called to report to the District Chief, he reported there only to be sleeping. Coincidentally, the District Chief crashed his Jeep into a wall, which killed Youqing. This was a moment in the movie where death was made an apparent and common theme. Through the past killings portrayed from the Civil War, the fellow gambler, and now Youqing, it showed how society was chaotic at that time. Frantically confused, Fugui order to hide the son’s body from the mother. This part of the movie had a depressing tone, and the emotions of the mother exemplified that through her shout and …show more content…
Chunsheng, who turned out to be the District Chief, apologizes to Fugui and his family for their loss at the gravesite. Traumatized, the family did not want his sympathy. It places heavy emphasis on Fugui, who is now poor. His son had just died. Fengxia’s sorrow was shown through her natural tears that ran down her face as the family was grieving for Youqing’s passing. In essence, life seemed to not be able to get any worse because of what had happened so far. However, hardships would continue to pour on him throughout the rest of the film. Moving on a decade to the Cultural Revolution, Fugui was forced to burn his prize possessions: his puppets. It was a way to express himself as well as earn a living. The puppets were seen as counter-revolutionary and all items of that sort had to be burned. Otherwise, one would face prosecution. The strict policies enacted by the Communist government caused Fugui and his family to live in a state of isolation. It is past the middle of the film now, where the daughter Fengxia is now grown up. Fugui, who was once a Nationalist soldier, meets with a local leader of the Red Guards named Wan Erxi. Fugui could never exclaim his participation in the Guomintang army during the Civil War because the Communists took over. Any opposition in the past or present can lead to resentment or even worse. The
...ution of Long Er. From the very beginning where Fugui only cared about living for wealth to the end of the novel where Fugui is only living for the sake of surviving; the execution scene drastically changes Fugui’s character via realization of his fortune to be alive, changing his purpose of survival, and how he is living his life now. If anything, Yu Hua also teaches a life lesson through the impact of the execution scene on Fugui. What can be extracted from the impact is that, many people only understand their meaning to survive when they see another person lose their life and connections can be made to the situation. With Fugui and Long Er, Fugui easily made the connection that he could have been the one dead if he was still wealthy but instead Long Er is the wealthy one. Therefore, Long Er is executed and Fugui now understands the value and fragility of life.
“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.
Chapter one, The Observers, in the Death of Woman Wang demonstrates the accuracy of the local historian; Feng K'o-ts'an, who compiled The Local History of T'an-ch'eng in 1673. The descriptive context of the Local History helps the reader to understand and literally penetrate into people's lives. The use of records of the earthquake of 1668, the White Lotus rising of 1622 and rebels rising vividly described by Feng the extent of suffering the people of T'an-ch'eng went through. Jonathan Spence stresses on how miserable the two-quarter of the seventeen-century were to the diminishing population of the county. The earthquake claimed the lives of nine thousand people, many others died in the White lotus rising, hunger, sickness and banditry. P'u Sung-ling's stories convey that after the loss of the wheat crops there were cases of cannibalism. On top of all of this came the slaughtering of the entire family lines by the bandits. The incredible records of women like Yao and Sun in the Local History present the reader the magnitude of savagery the bandits possessed. All of these factors led to the rise of suicides. The clarity of events Spence given to the reader is overwhelming.
To achieve this goal, he crafts a stylized capitalistic society that inflicts grave injustices upon his protagonists. The avarice inherent to this society governs everyday life within Street Angel. Xiao Hong, for example, lives with adoptive parents so corrupted by greed that they prostitute their older daughter, Xiao Yun. In a transaction that reflects the inhumanity of higher-level capitalism, these parents sell Xiao Hong to a local gangster. By juxtaposing the implications of this sale with Xiao Hong’s exaggerated innocence, Yuan appeals to his audience’s emotions, stoking anger toward social values that could enable such barbaric exploitation of the poor. Yuan employs a similar juxtaposition later in Street Angel, when Wang visits a lawyer’s office in a skyscraper – an environment so divorced from his day-to-day realities that he remarks, “This is truly heaven.” Wang soon learns otherwise, when the lawyer rebuffs his naïve plea for assistance by coldly reciting his exorbitant fees. The lawyer’s emotionless greed – a callousness that represents capitalism at its worst – contrasts strikingly with Wang’s naïve purity, a quality betrayed by his awestruck expression while inside the skyscraper. Again, this juxtaposition encourages the film’s audience to sympathize with a proletarian victim and condemn the social values that enable his
Much of Ai Weiwei’s activism and artwork has been influenced by his experiences growing up. Ai Weiwei lived through a tumultuous time in Chinese history, with the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Opening Up of China by Deng Xiaoping. Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing was a famous poet during the Cultural Revolution. However, he was targeted in the Anti-Rightist campaig...
The Cultural Revolution in China was led by Mao Zedong, due to this Liang and many others faced overwhelming obstacles in many aspects of their life such as work, family and everyday encounters, if affected everyone’s families life and education, Liang lets us experience his everyday struggles during this era, where the government determined almost every aspect of life. The beginning of the book starts out with Liang’s typical life, which seems normal, he has a family which consists of three children, two older sisters and him the youngest, his two sister’s reside in Changsha 1. his father has an everyday occupation working as a journalist at a local newspaper. Things start to take a turn early in life for Liang Heng, his family politics were always questioned, the mistake made by one of his family members would impact his entire family and it would be something they would have to suffer through, it was impossible for them to live down such a sin.... ...
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
The Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu is an autobiography, majorly about Shen Fu’s love life and his marriage to Chen Yun, a smart girl he falls in love with as a child. Throughout the Six Records of a Floating Life, different situations faced by the couple can reflect to the family structure of the peasants at the time. Shen Fu was born in an official family which works for the government. Although his family was not at a very high status, they do care a lot about the reputation of the family, and they also care a lot about manners. Chen Yun, according to Shen Fu, is a very smart and well-mannered woman, she thinks a lot about Shen’s family, and always try to do her best for them. Chen Yun’s father died when she was 4 years old, which
The author begins the story with a strong statement, “I found myself in a Chinese funeral parlor because of a phone call I made to my cleaning lady” (Schmitt); it takes the reader right into the funeral parlor and draws the reader into the story: how she got to the funeral parlor and what she doing there was the question I had. She starts the story with some background about how she got to China. Then moves on to the funeral that was happening in her neighbors’ home. She describes how the family was grievously weeping as she was walking toward her apartment. She noticed what happened and wonder why they were weeping. “Do you know why the neighbors are very sad?” she asked her cleaning lady.
In 1911, a nationalist political party was founded by Sun Yat-sen, but was governed in China by Chiang Kai-shek. Sun wanted to make China free, strong, and successful by following his three principles. “Our Party [the Guomindang] takes the development of the weak and small and resistance to the strong and violent as our sole and most urgent task. This is even truer for those groups which are not of our kind if they are not our kind, their hearts must be different”. What Zuo Zhuan is trying to say is that we, the Guomindang, take in the defenseless, hopeless, and feeble and transform them into powerful figures. If you don’t join our organization than you would be considered a weakling. This caught the Hui peo...
In Pa Chin's Family, he portrays a traditional Confucian family battling to keep their traditions and their way of life in tact, amidst the deep upheaval and civil disorder gripping China. Pa Chin clearly portrays a family of which the Venerable Master Kao rules supreme at the expense of his family. The Kao family runs into several set backs such as suicide, death, depression, unhappy marriages, family conflict, and lack of respect for elders that undoubtedly lead to the unraveling of the Kao family. One significant reason the Kao family fails to maintain its integrity and way of life is because of the clash between Confusion traditionalism and Chinese cultural modernization. One of the main driving forces in disruption in Kao family tradition would have to be the rebellious youth, Chueh-min, Chueh-hui, and Chin in particular.
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).
Mao’s Thoughts turned into the focal agent manual for all things in China. The power of the Red Guards surpassed that of the armed force, nearby police powers, and the law by and large. Chinese people expressed their thoughts and were disregarded and openly assaulted, with commendation for Mao being drilled in their place. Individuals were urged to censure social organizations and to scrutinize their guardians and educators, which had been entirely taboo in conventional Chinese society. Anchee min was also affected by this. She was scared so much she was fearful of death. She stated “A farm that produced nothing but weeds and
At the beginning of the novel, Wang Lung accepts his peasant lifestyle, but still yearns for financial stability and happiness. Initially, Wang Lung’s life consists of two priorities; he must aid his aging father and tend to ...
Everyman is one of the earliest morality dramas. A morality drama where the main character meets with a moral decision or decisions. In Everyman, the protagonist Everyman goes through his last day alive trying to atone for his sins. In the play, he meets several other characters that symbolize different components of life. In doing so, he tries to have them go with him to meet with God, but most of them will not walk with him to meet death except good deeds. In the play, the author’s perception of Death is that he is a mighty messenger of God and he gathers every man to pay for his sins. The author also leads the reader to understand there are two different types of death; physical and spiritual.