Conflict Genres and Management Strategies During China’s “Ten Years of Turmoil”

Because China’s Cultural Revolution era unleashed a large amount of publicly expressed social and interpersonal conflict, it can provide a useful window on conflict management processes employed in China both historically and today. Using the extensive autobiographical literature that continues to be published by participants in the Cultural Revolution, this paper investigates the conflict genres that characterized the CR’s two major phases, and explores the rational basis of the conflict management strategies employed during the conflict episodes reported in these autobiographies. The paper concludes that many of the conflict genres and conflict management strategies are still used within Chinese society today, albeit in a less violence-prone form. Contemporary China is a complex nation whose 20th century history is filled with tumultuous conflicts. The overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the civil war between the communists and nationalists which ended with the communist party victory in 1949, Mao Zedong’s attempt to destroy traditional Chinese culture in order to try to create a utopian communist state between 1949 and 1976, and the economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era since 1978 have all contributed to deep fractures within Chinese society and promoted considerable potential for conflict both within the party leadership and among the people. In trying to understand Chinese approaches to social conflict, one significant window on the process concerns the conflict genres and conflict management strategies used during China’