Chinese Cultural Revolution

Girl Under a Red Moon: Growing Up During China’s Cultural Revolution

In a small village called Yellow Stone, in southeastern China, Sisi is a model sister, daughter, and student. She brews tea for her grandfather in the morning, leads recitations at school as class monitor, and helps care for her youngest brother, Da. But when students are selected during a school ceremony to join the prestigious Red Guard, Sisi is passed over. Worse, she is shamed for her family’s past — they are former landowners who have no place in the new Communist order. Her only escape is to find work at another school, bringing Da along with her. But the siblings find new threats in Bridge Town, too, and Sisi will face choices between family and nation, between safety and justice. With the tide of the Cultural Revolution rising, Sisi must decide if she will swim against the current, or get swept up in the wave. Bestselling author Da Chen paints a vivid portrait of his older sister and a land thrust into turmoil during the tumultuous Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Bronze and Sunflower

When Sunflower, a young city girl, moves to the countryside, she grows to love the reed marsh lands – the endlessly flowing river, the friendly buffalo with their strong backs and shiny round heads, the sky that stretches on and on in its vastness. However, the days are long, and the little girl is lonely. Then she meets Bronze, who, unable to speak, is ostracized by the other village boys. Soon the pair are inseparable, and when Bronze’s family agree to take Sunflower in, it seems that fate has brought him the sister he has always longed for. But life in Damaidi is hard, and Bronze’s family can barely afford to feed themselves.

Hans Christian Andersen Award

This book is a focus book for August 2017’s My Take/Your Take and a WOW Recommends: Book of the Month selection for December 2017.

My Name Is Number 4: A True Story from the Cultural Revolution

Here is the real-life story about the fourth child in a family torn apart by China’s Cultural Revolution. After the death of both of her parents, Ting-xing and her siblings endure brutal Red Guard attacks on their schools and even in their home.  At the age of sixteen, Ting-xing is sent to a prison farm far from the world she knows, where she survives for six years. Eventually, people leave the countryside, and Ting-xing passes the entrance exam for Beijing University, the only person in the prison camp to do so.

World History Biographies: Mao Zedong: The Rebel Who Led A Revolution (Ng World History Biographies)

Born in Southern China in 1893, this farmer’s son would rule the world’s most populous country. The young Mao Zedong grew up in a world desperate to break with the ancient rules of the Qing dynasty. Mao challenged convention early in life, and was expelled from school. He joined China’s new Communist Party, and led China’s historic revolution. Hailed by many as a truly liberating hero, others demonized him as a brutal monster. This biography outlines the revolutionary life of the first leader of the People’s Republic of China and sets his march to power in the context of world history.

Mao and Me: The Little Red Guard

Chen’s book tells his story of growing up during the Cultural Revolution (between 1966 and 1976) in China.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 3, Issue 2

The Chinese Revolution And Mao Zedong In World History

Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Revolution, rescued China from years of corrupt rule, foreign domination, and civil war. Through Mao’s tactics of guerilla warfare and peasant support, China became a Communist nation in 1949. Mao unified China under a central government, yet the legacy of his achievements — and mistakes — still lingers. By isolating China for over two decades, Mao let it lag behind the progress made in other countries. In The Chinese Revolution and Mao Zedong in World History, author Ann Malaspina relates the history of the Chinese Communist party and the People’s Republic of China during the time of Mao Zedong. Key events include the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s helping China emerge from isolation by reaching out to the United States.

Mao’s Last Dancer

Chosen from millions of children to serve in Mao’s cultural revolution by studying at the Beijing Dance Academy, Li knows ballet would be his family’s best opportunity to escape the poverty in his rural China home. From one hardship to another, Li perseveres, never forgetting the family he left behind.

Little Leap Forward: A Boy In Beijing

A sensitively written, real-life sory about a boy called Litle Leap Forward, growing up in he hutongs of Beijing in the 1960’s, at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Little Leap offers children an intimate and immediate account of a child’s experiences as Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward policy tightens its grip on China.

Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution

Moying Li is twelve-years-old when Cultural Revolution sweeps China. In 1966 Moying, a student at a prestigious language school in Beijing, seems destined for a promising future. Everything changes when student Red Guards begin to orchestrate brutal assaults, violent public humiliations, and forced confessions. After watching her teachers and headmasters beaten in public, Moying flees school for the safety of home, only to witness her beloved grandmother denounced, her home ransacked, her father’s precious books flung onto the back of a truck, and Baba himself taken away. From labor camp, Baba entrusts a friend to deliver a reading list of banned books to Moying so that she can continue to learn. Now, with so much of her life at risk, she finds sanctuary in the world of imagination and learning.This inspiring memoir follows Moying Li from age twelve to twenty-two, illuminating a complex, dark time in China’s history as it tells the compelling story of one girl’s difficult but determined coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution.

Little Green: Growing Up During The Chinese Cultural Revolution

This first-person memoir tells the story of Chun Yu, who was born in a small city in China, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The streets were filled with roaming Red Guards, the walls were covered with slogans, and reeducation meetings were held in all workplaces. Every family faced danger and humiliation, even the youngest children. Shortly after Chun’s birth, her beloved father was sent to a peasant village in the countryside to be reeducated in the ways of Chairman Mao. Chun and her brother stayed behind with their mother, who taught in a country middle school where Mao’s Little Red Book was a part of every child’s education. Chun Yu’s young life was witness to a country in turmoil, struggle, and revolution — the only life she knew.