As one of the most destructive socio-political upheavals in the history of contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) incentivized people to snitch on each other to signal loyalty to the Party. This paper identifies the causal effect of exposure to Cultural Revolution on social trust, taking advantage of both cohort and regional variation. Specifically, the regional intensity varia...

How can we as educators address complex and controversial topics in the social sciences without encouraging simplistic responses and self-reproducing binary oppositions? Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of a fi rst-year writing seminar on the history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this article proposes novel approaches to overcome instinctive reactions to contentious topics. Arguing t...

This paper intends to construct a framework of understanding the Cultural Revolution and the complexities of such an event on the basis of historically novel forms of political, social and ideological relations. It brings the Cultural Revolution back in a good light so as to show its immense, autonomous historical importance as well as its continuing relevance. It studies and establishes the re...

In October of 2000, I launched a website, www.chinesememorial.org, to record the names of the people who died from persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Through years of research, involving over a thousand interviews, I had compiled the stories of hundreds of victims, and placed them on the website. By clicking on the alphabetically-listed names, a user could access a victim’s personal in...