Book Reviews : Qiu JIN, The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Distributed outside North America by Cambridge University Press. 279 pp., with bibliography and index. ISBN: 0-8047- 3529-8 (hc). Price: $45.00
Abstract
Book ReviewsQiu JIN, The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Distributed outside North America by Cambridge University Press. 279 pp., with bibliography and index. ISBN: 0-8047- 3529-8 (hc). Price: $45.00 SAGE Publications, Inc.2000DOI: 10.1177/0920203X0001400222 Kerry Brown Leeds University, UK The Cultural Revolution (CR) saw the creation of a whole family of languages associated with each of its separate periods. The (extremely violent) language promoted by the political center, and disseminated to the provinces from 1966 to 1969, was replaced from 1969 to 1971 by a more mundane, demotic campaigning language. An even stranger sub-dialect came into existence in 1971, ultimately directed at the supreme renegade and traitor Lin Biao and involving abstruse, theoretical references to anti-Confucianism. The CR also spawned a whole swath of languages after its conclusion-metalanguages which attempted to place, judge, repudiate or justify it, and which occurred either in fictional (the literature of the wounded) or factual (the 1981 Resolution on Historical Questions being the most powerful example) guise. > . Parallel to these, one can also plot the development about the CR in language other than Chinese. Geographically and culturally displaced, they offer an