A Sensational Encounter with High Socialist China
Paul G. Pickowicz with a Preface by Xi Chen
220 pages, papaerback
HK$198/US$29 ISBN: 978-962-937-433-4
City University of Hong Kong Press
Publication Date: October 2019
Purchase/Website Link: https://bit.ly/2mtLXHY
A Sensational Encounter with High Socialist China is a recollection of the historic visit of fourteen American students (and one Canadian) to China in 1971. The visit was one of the first approved for American scholars after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 and occurred prior to President Nixon’s famous trip (as well as that of a second group of scholars) in 1972. One of these students, Paul Pickowicz, kept a journal and photographically documented the trip. This book is a personal account of the events leading up to their visa approvals as well as those that occurred during the journey itself. The five senses are used to connect the reader to his experience and are placed in the context of a theatrical production. The images included have been selected from an archive at the University of California, San Diego, which digitized the author’s images as well as those of others in the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) taken during both the 1971 and 1972 delegations.
Contents
Overture: Hong Kong Setting the Stage
The Opening Number Act I: Touch
Act II: Sound
Act III: Taste
Act IV: Sight
Act V: Smell
Curtain Call: Hong Kong Again Encore
A Look Backstage
Author bio:
Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and inaugural holder of the UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History. He has authored, co-authored, and coedited various books, including Marxist Literary Thought in China (1981); Unofficial China (1989); Chinese Village, Socialist State (1992, winner of the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies); New Chinese Cinemas (1994); Popular China (2002); Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (2005); From Underground to Independent (2006); The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (2006); Dilemmas of Victory (2007); China on the Margins (2010); Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China (2011); China on Film (2012); Restless China (2013); Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013); Filming the Everyday (2017); and China Tripping (2019). He has won three distinguished teaching awards from the UC San Diego Alumni Association (1998), Chancellor’s Associates (2009), and Academic Senate (2003) and was honored by the German government in 2016 when it presented him with a Humboldt Research Award for lifetime accomplishments in research and teaching. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, National University of Singapore, University of Edinburgh, University of Heidelberg, East China Normal University, City University of Hong Kong, Ecole Normale Superieure (Lyon, France), and Hong Kong Institute of Education. He is associate producer of the documentary films China in Revolution, 1911–1949 (1989) and The Mao Years, 1949– 1976 (1994).