Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … Dragons Village
On first glance, it would seem that the poverty of rural China would be an ideal place for individuals to sow communist ideology. The individuals in question were oppressed by crushing poverty, and had been treated in an inequitable fashion by the city dwelling, educated and urban classes by decades. However, to Chen Yuan-tsung's autobiographical work historical fiction, The Dragon's Village, demonstrates that land reform was hardly welcomed with open arms by the Chinese peasantry. Rather than acceptance, the individuals who took to the fields and rice paddies of China to spread the doctrine of communism, found a peasantry largely hostile to the ideology they espoused. The reasons for this difficulty included the still present but invisible class tensions between the two groups in opposition. The educated children of the urban elite who had adopted communism as the slogans through which to proclaim their adolescent rebellion had a great deal finding a convincing political tone to open the ear of the hungry and undereducated Chinese peasantry. According to Maoist doctrine, the working class was superior because it was the revolutionary class in Marxist dogma. However, the urban revolutionary children of the well-educated city dwellers saw these peasants only from a romanticized distance until they actually became a part of the world of the peasants. Because the urban teenagers had little idea of the realities of life of the peasants, little dialogue and exchange of ideas was possible between the two social orders until the urban teenagers had made themselves a part of rural life. Even then, although class tensions did not exist in Marxism dogma, in the real world class and gender prejudices prevented a full, deep and meaningful dialogue between these two groups.
The heroine of The Dragon's Village is Guan Ling-ling, originally from Shanghai. Guan leaves home to get a job at the Central Film...
She wishes to help the poor of China, in contrast to her family. However, her idealism is soon quashed by reality. She thinks that her decision to take part in land reform in a remote mountain village will be met with open arms by the farm laborers, who view this female teenager with a strange accent with great disdain. What does she know about their lives? The reader is sympathetic to the peasants, at least initially.
Guan is not entirely unsympathetic, however, because her commitment seems to be genuine, even if only in her own eyes. She has chosen to remain in China after the Communists assume power in 1949, even though her family and fiancee have fled to capitalist Hong Kong.
Her adolescent rebellion has taken the form of political commitment, rather than rock n' roll or unusual clothing, as it does with so many American teenagers. Guan views herself as superior to her bourgeois family, as more patriotic and more dedicated to the egalitarian Marxist ideals of the true China, of the true revolution. Furthermore, one of the reasons the peasants reject Guan is not only her urban background and her greater literacy, but also the simple fact that she is a woman, and a young woman at that. The difficulty she has being female in the new society she has chosen only intensifies the book's theme of how both rural prejudges as well as Marxist dogma inhibit a constructive form of political change in China.
The book The Dragon's Village thus does not idealize the peasantry any more than it idealizes the fervor of Guan's blind and ill-informed commitment to land reform. Were it to do that it would be just as false as the rigid ideology Guan and her urban compatriots attempt to inculcate in the remote peasant village…
This initial image of her early life sets up a clear portrait of the China Guan later hopes to change by going to the countryside. This China is patriarchal, as the women sit, waiting quietly to hear a man speak in the removed language of poetry. This China is hierarchical, as members of the urban class dine comfortably upon fine food. This is the food that the heroine of the book will later dream about as she starves in rural areas. (Chen, 1980, 280) Clearly, change is necessary in such an environment, and the protagonist's rejection of the trappings of such a life at first seems independent and admirable. However, the change created by land reform is no less absurd than the portrait of life in ostensibly communist Shanghai, in all of its near-aristocratic excesses.
Guan Ling-Ling's choice of a theater group to change the Chinese countryside is perhaps the most appropriate metaphor for the experiment in land reform in China of 1951. Rather than a desire for enacting changes necessitated by lived reality, ultimately only surfaces were examined by members of the group. Guan's decision, however heart felt, is really a performance, rather than a true impact upon the lived nature of rural life. The groups' ideology is valid, and its desire to sow a shift in ideology and to modernize the area through education and a shift in sexual as well as class dynamics is not unfounded. However, the medium and the language through which these ideals are communicated is fundamentally alien to the immediate concerns of the peasantry, which largely center around getting enough to eat, and obeying the dictates of nature, of getting crops planted, of sowing, and of protecting themselves against the elements.
The book is a story of miscommunication, of an ideology that is too rigid to change rural life, and of a group of individuals who cannot communicate in an effective fashion to a class of people whom they hope to serve. The revolutionary teenagers such as Guan do have some good ideas regarding equality of genders, class, and even in regards to how to restructure agriculture. But because of the class tensions that cannot be erased over the course of a performance, or even the course eof a few years, ultimately the voices of these teenagers fall upon deaf ears.
The earliest divisions of the temple still standing are the barque chapels, just in the rear the first pylon. They were constructed by Hatshepsut, and appropriated by Tuthmosis III. The central division of the temple, the colonnade and the sun court were constructed by Amenhotep III, and a later on addition by Rameses II, who constructed the entry pylon, and the two obelisks connected the Hatshepsut structures with the core
138). Despite the contribution these SEZs have made to the Chinese state, Becker cautions that such meteoric growth is probably not sustainable over the long-term. For instance, Becker points out that, "Technology is changing assumptions about the future of industrial labor needs. Recent studies suggest that the link between high growth and job creation may not continue forever. In the 1980s it took a 3% increase in economic growth
One of those buildings was the International Foreign Trade Center -- Shenzhen's first skyscraper and the tallest building in China (36). Hong Kong is commonly referred to as a place where "East meets West" because of its hybrid nature. That is, there is a culture mix occurring that is part traditional Chinese as well part British due to its colonization by the British. Hong Kong is quite a modern place,
Town/Village Development in the UK in the Medieval Ages Leicester Development in the Medieval Ages Leicester provides an excellent example of fort-settlement-town-city development through the Medieval Ages. Controlled at different stages by the Romans, Anglo Saxons, Danish and, of course, Great Britain, Leicester shows the combined contributions, primarily of the Romans, Anglo Saxons and British in its development. Realizing the importance of these contributions, the University of Leicester has undertaken various archaeological
Ly, Tran, and Ho Epochs The Dai Viet Kingdom had its origin in the middle of the 10th century until around the middle of the 11th century, when local chiefs were able to vie for control in what is now Land of Viet However, regionalism is the pattern. As the Northern Tang dynasty crumbled, it lost control over South (which are now parts of Northern Vietnam) The weakening of Northern Tang gradually led
Puff (the Magic Dragon)" by Peter, Paul, and Mary During the 1960s, one of the revolutionary developments that changed the landscape of American culture and history was the establishment of the Hippie Movement. The Hippies, as the people of this movement were called, popularized the "apolitical counterculture," wherein the Hippies did not subsist to "materialism, convention (of the society), and authority." Instead, they resorted to their newfound ideal of a