ABSTRACT
This chapter facilitates the understanding of Chongqing's Red culture campaign by discussing the framework for studying social movements in China. It draws on studies of a most important movement in the recent history of the Republic of China, that is, the Cultural Revolution (CR), to illustrate how the interaction between the state and the individual participants have been tackled in past research. The chapter studies on social movement provide a rich source of theoretical framework for the study of social mobilisation in the case of Chongqing's Red culture campaign. It discusses the 'state-society' framework in China studies. Studies on the interaction between the Party-state and its people are often underpinned by concepts of domination and resistance. The chapter also draws on Baudrillard's concept of simulation to characterise Chongqing's Red culture campaign to decipher the interactive relationship between the political power underpinning the campaign and the practice of the ordinary participants.
