ANYUAN: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2012) seeks to answer the complex question of why the Chinese Communist revolution took such a different path from its Russian prototype. It suggests that a key distinction between the two revolutions lay in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources - during their rise to power and afterward. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage” on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades, and successors helped to construct a polity in which a once-alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly “Chinese.”