2016-17 marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. AFE is offering a re-examination in two strands: one strand will consider the political and social ramifications of the movement through independent reading of China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed, by Andrew Walder, with 4 webinars with the author. The second strand, will read literary and autobiographical accounts of life under Mao in four different periods, from 1949-1980, divided among four book group offerings. Teachers are free to participate in all just one or all 5 of the reading groups offered in both strands.
The Dragon's Village is the autobiography of a young, wealthy urban teenager who stays behind in Shanghai, after her family leaves for Hong Kong with the arrival of the Communist forces in 1949, and volunteers to help with the revolution in a rural village. An account of the land reform period of the early 1950s. The author, Yuan-Tsung Chen, is a Chinese writer living in Taiwan.