COMPARISON

Comparison

Comparison

Introduction

Xie was born in Shangyu, Zhejiang Province, and spent his childhood in his hometown and attended primary school for one year there. In 1930s, he moved to Shanghai with his parents and continued his education. In 1938, he followed his father to Hong Kong and studied there for one year. When returning to Shanghai in 1939, Xie enrolled in Daxia Affiliated High School and Jishan High School. In leisure time, Xie took courses at Huaguang Drama School and Jinxing Film Training School. His teachers included Huang Zuolin and Wu Renzhi. Meanwhile, he participated students drama activities led by Yu Ling, and acted as Yue Yun in multi-stage play Yue Yun.

Discussion

Xie Jin in his movie decribed that The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was launched by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong to stem what he perceived as the country's drift away from socialism and toward the “restoration of capitalism.” The campaign, which was euphorically described at its inception by its progenitors as “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls” and which inspired radical students from Paris to Berkeley, is now regarded as having been a terrible catastrophe for the Chinese nation.

The origins of the Cultural Revolution can be traced to the mid-1950s when Mao first became seriously concerned about the path that China's socialist transition had taken in the years since the CCP had come to power in 1949(Barnouin, 1997). His anxieties about the bureaucratization of the party, ideological degeneration in society as a whole, and the glaring socioeconomic inequalities that had emerged as China modernized escalated through the early 1960s and propelled him to embark on a crusade to expunge the “revisionism” that he believed was contaminating the party and the nation(Brown, 2006).

Jin concluded that the source of China's political retrogression lay in the false and self-serving view of many of his party colleagues that class struggle ceased under socialism. On the contrary, the chairman concluded, the struggle between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies took on new, insidious forms even after the landlord and capitalist classes had been eliminated(Dittmer, 2001). The principal targets of Mao's ire were, on the one hand, party and government officials who he felt had become a “new class” divorced from the masses and, on the other, intellectuals who, in his view, were the repository of bourgeois and even feudal values.

Wheras Zhang decision to undertake the Cultural Revolution was strongly influenced by his analysis that the Soviet Union had already abandoned socialism for capitalism. alzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, translated from the original French (the book was a bestseller in France) is a tale centered on, of all things, the Cultural Revolution of China's Chairman Mao Zedong. Anyone who takes for granted the freedom from government that Western cultures enjoy would do well to read this book. But this wonderful novel (novella really) is not about politics,except in a cursory way; nor is it a treatise on the evils of China during the reign of Chairman ...