Heroes of China's Great Leap Forward: Two Stories

About the Editor, Production Notes, Back Cover

Richard King is director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives and associate professor of Chinese in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria. His research is on twentieth -century Chinese literature and the arts, particularly from the Mao era, and Asian popular culture. He has translated the work of a number of contemporary Chinese authors, including Snake’s Pillow and Other Stories: Tales from Jiangnan by Zhu Lin (1998) and Chaos and All That, a novel by Liu Sola (1994). He is also the editor of Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 (2010), and Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (2002, with Timothy J. Craig). A B O U T T H E E D I T O R King / Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward Cover and interior design by Julie Matsuo-Chun Display type in Memphis; text in Warnock Pro Printing and binding by Sheridan Books, Inc. P R O D U C T I O N N O T E S F O R “The careful, accurate, and lucid rendition of these two stories allows scholars and students to mine the mentalities and conceptual worlds of the cataclysmic Great Leap Forward campaign.Together they provide a very useful window into China’s greatest self-made disaster in the 20th century and the sense made of it at the time and immediately after.” —Timothy Cheek INSTITUTE OF ASIAN RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward presents contrasting narratives of the most ambitious and disastrous mass movement in modern Chinese history. The objective of the Great Leap, when it was launched in the late 1950s, was to catapult China into the ranks of the great military and industrial powers with no assistance from the outside world, but it resulted in a famine that killed tens of millions of the nation’s peasants. Li Zhun’s “A Brief Biography of Li Shuangshuang,” written while the movement was underway, celebrates the Great Leap as it was supposed to be: a time of optimism, dynamism, and shared purpose. In contrast, Zhang Yigong’s short novel The Story of the Criminal Li Tongzhong, written two decades later, was one of the first works published in China to suggest a much darker side to the Great Leap. Although Zhang stopped short of portraying the horrors of famine, his tone of moral outrage provides a rejoinder to the triumphalism of “Li Shuangshuang.” The stories are accompanied by an introduction to the Great Leap and portraits of the two writers, including their recollections of that traumatic time and the creation of their very different heroes. CHINESE LITERATURE / HISTORY ISBN 978-0-8248-3402-9 9 780824 834029 9 0 0 0 0 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu RICHARD KING is director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives and associate professor of Chinese in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria. UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I PRESS Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 COVER ART: Poster collectively created at the Central Arts and Crafts Institute. Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishers, April 1960. Photograph by John Roche. The title at the top in the style of a paper-cut reads “People’s Commune.” The slogans at the sides are: (right) “Everyone praises the service station” and (left) “Their work is enthusiastic and comprehensive.” COVER DESIGN BY JULIE MATSUO-CHUN ...