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'Prepare for War': Civil Defense, Population Dispersal, and Tianjin's Cultural Revolution

'Prepare for War': Civil Defense, Population Dispersal, and Tianjin's Cultural Revolution

A talk by Jeremy Brown (Simon Fraser University)

Thursday, April 24, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
UCLA

 

 

 

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, residents of the port city of Tianjin mobilized for war against the Soviet Union and the United States. Thousands of families were forced to move to suburban villages or remote provinces, ostensibly to disperse the urban population and reduce damage from the anticipated bombardment of China’s densely inhabited eastern seaboard. This talk draws upon archival documents, personal letters, petitions, and interviews to examine who left Tianjin, what impact these displaced families had in villages, and how the dispersed population fought to regain urban residency as the course of the Cultural Revolution and geopolitics shifted during the 1970s.

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Jeremy Brown is Assistant Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. He is editor (with Paul G. Pickowicz) of Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China  (Harvard, 2007), and author of "Staging Xiaojinzhuang: The City in the Countryside," in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford, 2006). His dissertation focuses on crossing the rural-urban divide in Mao’s China.

For more information please contact

Richard Gunde
Tel: 310 825-8683
gunde@ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies

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