EAI Seminar on Zoom
Organised by East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore
0:00:00
0:00:25 - Introduction by Prof Bert Hofman
0:02:02 - Seminar by Prof Andrew G Walder
1:00:59 - Q & A
Topic:
Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, 1967-1968
Speaker:
Prof 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
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.
About the Moderator:
Prof Bert Hofman, a Dutch national, is Director of the East Asian Institute at NUS and Professor of Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Before joining NUS, he was with the World Bank for 27 years, 22 of which in Asia, and 12 of which on China. Prof Hofman was the World Bank Country Director for China 2014-2019, the Country Economist 2004-2008, and the Chief Economist for the World Bank in the East Asia and Pacific region 2011-2014. He also worked on Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Mongolia. Before joining the World Bank, Prof Hofman worked at the Kiel Institute of World Economics, The OECD and NMB Bank (Now ING). He has extensive experience in advising governments around the region on a wide range of development issues, and published on fiscal policy, debt issues, and China’s and Indonesia’s recent economic history.
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