China's cultural legacy and communism / edited by Ralph C. Croizier

This unique anthology is designed to show how the People's Republic has inherited what it describes as China's cultural leg acy' its museums and monuments, history and archaeology, philosophy and religion, language and literature, architecture and sci ence, opera, performing arts, painting, sculp ture, crafts, and cuisine.

China's 'cultural revolution' is not just a phenomenon of the late 1960's, nor a new phase of the Chinese Communist movement. In a larger sense, it is the continuing process of intellectual and artistic fermentation that began in the nineteenth century under the impact of Western economic and military pressures, ideas, and technology. The chal lenge of the West undermined the confidence of many Chinese in the relevance of their traditions for the modern world. The ques tion many of them raised-how to be mod ern and still Chinese-has an additional dimension for the Chinese Communists to day; they must also reconcile their genuine pride in the artistic products of China's elitist tradition with their Marxist vision of a new proletarian society.

In his brilliant introduction to this an thology, Ralph C. Croizier outlines the evolution of Chinese Communist cultural policy from the Yenan period in the 1930's and 1940's, through the Hundred Flowers Movement and antirightist campaign of the late 1950's, to the early 1960's period of recovery from the Great Leap Forward. In the epilogue, he traces the roots of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to Maoist fears, early in the 1960's, that fifteen years of Communist rule and education had failed to purify China of past 'feudal' tendencies, Western bourgeois influences, and revisionist trends within socialism itself. The very fact. that the Cultural Revolution has sought to exorcise these 'ghosts and demons' signifies that traditional Chinese culture remains a living force.