From 1966 to 1968, youth in urban China were embroiled in factional battles in what many of them believed to be a revolution of a lifetime. Guobin Yang explores how this factional violence was the result of the enactment of China’s earlier revolutionary tradition, and how echoes of this tradition persist in online forums.
Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Yang’s research bridges the Cultural Revolution, critical social theory, social movements, activism, and media and politics in China. His recent books include, “The Power of the Internet in China” (2009), and “The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China” (2017), both from Columbia University Press.
The “Harvard on China” podcast is hosted by James Evans at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies