Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen - Tapa dura

This volume compares those active resistance movements which burst into public view with demands for change and "cultural resistance", which instead lies unspoken in everyday action. Robert Weller argues that certain areas of life defuse attempts at cultural domination by resisting and dissolving all unified interpretation. At the same time, however, they nurture inchoate alternative cultures of their own, and foster the potential to burst into open political resistance. Evidence comes from cases that range from a massive religious rebellion, to profiteering ghosts in Taiwan, to socialist culture in China after Tiananmen. Robert P. Weller is the author of "Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion", and editor (with Scott Gugenheim) of "Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asian, Europe and Latin America".