Schoenhals, Michael

views updated

Schoenhals, Michael

PERSONAL:

Education: Earned degree from Stockholm University, 1987.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden. E-mail—mschoenhals@silkroadstudies.org; michael.schoenhals@ostas.lu.se.

CAREER:

Lund University Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund, Sweden, professor of modern Chinese society; Institute for Security and Development Policy, senior research fellow. Visiting professor at Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, 2004-05; visiting scholar at Contemporary China Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2005-06.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Researcher of Excellence Award, Swedish Research Council, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Saltationist Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward 1958, Foereningen foer Orientaliska Studier (Stockholm, Sweden) 1987.

Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California (Berkeley, CA), 1992.

(Editor) China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1996.

(With Roderick MacFarquhar) Mao's Last Revolution, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Contemporary China and Its Outside World, edited by Zhu Jiamu, Dangdai Zhongguo Chubanshe (Beijing, China), 2006. Member of the editorial board of Pacific Affairs, China Quarterly, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies,European Journal of East Asian Studies, and Contemporary Chinese Thought.

SIDELIGHTS:

Michael Schoenhals, a Swedish writer and educator, is the coauthor of Mao's Last Revolution, an "exhaustively researched" account of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, observed Washington Post Book World contributor Orville Schell. In the work, Schoenhals and Roderick MacFarquhar examine Mao Zedong's repressive ten-year social experiment and political campaign, extending from 1966 to 1976, that resulted in the persecution, imprisonment, and death of millions. According to New York Times Book Review critic Judith Shapiro, "Mao's Last Revolution provides a detailed account of the salvos, currents, countercurrents, conspiracies, waves, cleansings and purges for which the era is known." "Using sources that range from official party and government documents to letters, diaries and interviews with surviving participants and victims," noted a contributor in the Economist, "the authors document the orders that went out, the mayhem that resulted and the fear it all struck in the hearts of people across the country." "A feast for the student of China," remarked Ross Terrill in the Weekly Standard, the volume "is a challenge for the general reader. Authoritative and tightly documented, it is rather dense with political maneuver and Communist gobbledygook. But it is fluently written, and it tells the known truth about the Cultural Revolution at a time when the Beijing regime cannot bring itself to do so." In Schell's opinion, Schoenhals and MacFarquhar "have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China's odyssey through those tumultuous times."