Customer Reviews

Shanghai Journal: An Eyewitness Account of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks)

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This book is a summary of the events of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, as recorded in wall posters at the university. The author and his wife were hired to teach at the Foreign Languages Institute in Shanghai, where they arrived in 1965, just as the Cultural Revolution began. For most of their stay at the Foreign Languages Institute, the Cultural Revolution was in full force, and their classrooms were consequently empty, so it appears Hunter and his wife had a lot of time to study the wall posters put up by the various factions around the university. This book summarizes or quotes many of those posters, so that the reader can get a taste of what the Chinese were writing to and about each other at the time.

There are little teasing tidbits of information that Hunter includes perhaps by accident, and never sees fit to explain. There is a black and white photo of a large group of students gathered outside, some sitting on the ground, diligently copying the words from a wall poster- -but why? What possible purpose could it serve? What was their motivation? Throughout the book, Hunter plays down the bad aspects of the Cultural Revolution- -he tells us there was very little real violence, and mentions only a few cases of students being sent into exile in far-away peasant communities. But then towards the end of the book, he also mentions that middle school students hadn't been attending classes and that classrooms had been vandalized. If things outside the university were as hunky-dory as he claims, whatever happened to the schools and the school kids? I think I would look elsewhere to get a more accurate understanding of what actually happened during the Cultural Revolution.

The blurb on the back of the book claims that this is a "fascinating and lively account", but I think a more accurate description would be "dry and propagandistic account". The author only spends perhaps a few sentences in the entire book describing his own experiences, and he tells us very little of what he saw, or what people were telling him (other than helping him understand the goings on at political meetings he was attending or posters he was copying). If you are interested in finding out exactly what was on those posters from the Cultural Revolution, with a special interest in the posters of Shanghai University, then this book could perhaps be a valuable source. But if you simply want to know what happened during the Cultural Revolution, why it happened, what people thought about it, and what happened to foreigners who happened to be there at the time, this book will tell you very, very little.