Historical Context Nico A

Nico A
Red Scarf Girl
Historical context Practice

How did historical events influence the ideas in the novel?  What cultural issues may have influenced, challenged, or inspired the author?

Ji-Li Jiang, the author of Red Scarf girl wrote an auto-biography on her young life during the cultural revolution of China. To begin with, the cultural revolution began on 1967 and was ruled by Mao Zedong until his death in 1975. The Revolution began when Mao Zedong decided to begin a movement, in order to have a more communist rule. As seen in this book, children were taught that communism was good, and that any other right hand rule was evil. As seen on chapter 1 and throughout the book, even people with jobs that enriched the wealthy and took money from the poor had to be condemned for inequality. Even the people's family could be mistreated for having relations with the person. This event largely affected the book, due to the fact that Ji-Li Jiang lived in China during this time, and had a grandma which worked as a former landlord, a job that served unequal proportions. In the opinion of a professional, the author wrote this book in order to inform people on the existence of this period of time, due to the fact that many people are not familiar with the Cultural Revolution. Not only that, but it was less known of that there was inequality, during the movement for a government with more equality. For example, in the chapter, Red Successors, Ji is chosen to be a successor, but her opportunity is later revoked because of her family ties. As we can see here, an opportunity anyone could have taken was unallowed for Ji because of reasons she could not modify. As we can see from this, this book is a complete historical event, and influenced the author because of her position during this event.

All sources about the Cultural Revolution were retrieved from-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

http://www.china-mike.com/chinese-history-timeline/part-14-mao-zedong/