Speaker:

Professor Andrew G Walder
Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor, Department of Sociology, Stanford University, USA

Date & Time:

Friday, 5 May 2023
9:00 am – 10:30 am

Video recording:

Please click on https://youtu.be/notAashJMoEon or visit EAI’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/EastAsianInstituteNUS.

Abstract:

During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. Why? One explanation posits a process of collective killings focused on rural households categorised as class enemies by the regime. This view draws parallels with genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda and similar settings. New evidence from classified investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide counter-insurgency campaign carried out by village militia. The unusually high death tolls were generated by an organised effort that resembled the massacres of communists and other leftists coordinated by Indonesia’s army in 1965.

About the Speaker:

Andrew G Walder is the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His recent publications include Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution (Harvard 2019) and (with Dong Guoqiang) A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China (Princeton, 2021). This talk is based on a book published by Stanford University Press in March 2023: Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution in China’s Southern Periphery.