Eating Bitterness

Kimberley Ens Manning is an associate professor of political science at Concordia University. Felix Wemheuer is an assistant professor in the Department for East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna.Contributors: Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Richard King, Xin Yi, Wang Yanni, Gao Hua, Yixin Chen, Jeremy Brown, Ralph A. Thaxton Jr., and Wangling Gao

• Introduction / Kimberley Ens Manning and Felix Wemheuer1 Re-Imagining the Chinese Peasant: The Historiography on the Great Leap Forward / Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik2 Romancing the Leap: Euphoria in the Moment before Disaster / Richard King3 The Gendered Politics of Woman-Work: Rethinking Radicalism in the Great Leap Forward / Kimberley Ens Manning4 "The Grain Problem Is an Ideological Problem": Discourses of Hunger in the 1957 Socialist Education Campaign / Felix Wemheuer5 On the Distribution System of Large-Scale People's Communes / Xin Yi6 An Introduction to the ABCs of Communization: A Case Study of Macheng County / Wang Yanni7 Food Augmentation Methods and Food Substitutes during the Great Famine / Gao Hua8 Under the Same Maoist Sky: Accounting for Death Rate Discrepancies in Anhui and Jiangxi / Chen Yixin9 Great Leap City: Surviving the Famine in Tianjin / Jeremy Brown10 How the Great Leap Forward Famine Ended in Rural China: "Administrative Intervention" versus Peasant Resistance / Ralph A. Thaxton Jr.11 A Study of Chinese Peasant "Counter-Action" / Gao WanglingBibliographyIndex

An important collection that contributes both new perspectives and rich data. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Great Leap Famine and the early years of the PRC.- Kathryn Egerton-Tarpley (The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 71, Issue 2)