Tutorial Assignment for HIST 270 China in the World, Term II, Week 8
from Esherick, Ancestral Leaves, chapters 10-13 (PRC Period)
This book is a “biography of a family”, roughly from the 1850s to the 1980s. Chapters 10-13
take the Ye family from @ 1936 on the eve of WWII in China, through Civil War, the
establishment of the PRC in 1949 and through Mao’s terrifying campaigns between 195769, and the recovery from them.
This part of the book has even more characters and the names are confusing similar, so
focus on the brothers—as Esherick does—each in their own trajectory. It is not necessary
to remember their names (and two, Ye Duzheng, the patriotic meteorologist who came back
to New China in 1950 from Chicago and Ye Duzhuang, the hot-headed agronomist who had
studied in Japan, but always worked in China—have almost identical names!). Follow the
characters by what they do and where they went.
The chronology for the 20th century on p. 116 is still useful, as is the handy chart of the Ye
family branches in the PRC on p. 233.
Discussion Questions
1. Esherick concludes the book by noting the Ye family lived through three periods of
“great turmoil”—we focused on one previous example, the Taiping Rebellion in the
mid 19th C. in an earlier assignment. The current chapters take us through two
upheavals: war in the Japanese invasion (1937-45) and civil war (1946-50). The first
question to consider is: how does the experience of war affect the various Ye brothers
and sisters and their own families? How does the family respond to this second
period of turmoil differently from Ye KunWhat changes from the preceding years?
What is new? What’s “Chinese” and what’s “foreign” in their lives?
2. What is “family” for the Ye’s in these years? How does family life change through war
and in the new PRC? What is the effect of political struggle in the Hundred
Flowers/Anti-Rightist Campaigns in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in
the 1960s on these families?
3. How do various Ye brothers and their families deal with “foreign things” during the
Mao years? What’s the problem with foreign ideas, connections, having studied
abroad or having worked with foreigners before 1949? Does foreign = bad for all the
Ye brothers (or any)?
4. What image of “China in the world” from 1850 to 1980 does Ancestral Leaves give
you?