The Historical Models for Violent Solutions in Maoist China and After

Kooperation

Asien-Orient-Institut – Sinologie und UFSP Asien und Europa

Ort

Universität Zürich, Raum RAA G-15, Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich

Beschreibung

On the basis of previous research into the demonological messianic paradigm and its impact on Maoist campaigns until the early Cultural Revolution, the significance of rumours with violent consequences in Chinese culture (or any culture), and the popularity of divine justice as a model for “speaking bitterness” in the early 1950s, this lecture will look at the issue of continuities as well as disjunctions in the role of violence in China after 1949.

Barend Ter Haar is Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford, teaching with a strong focus on cultural and religious history. His most recent publication is Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).