A Hundred Flowers

Dayton Lekner is a historian of twentieth-century China.

• Acknowledgements;  Prologue; Buds introduction; Part I. Flowers: 1. Who wrote the campaign?; 2. Mao Zedong, Guo Moruo, and Sino-Soviet propagation; 3. Springtime for Mao: Ai Qing, Zhou Shoujuan, and the writing of a season; 4. Community Gardens: movement and meaning among the flora; Part II. Weeds: 5. Grass: Biodiversity and reactions to the hundred flowers; 6. Thorns: botanical imagery as critique; 7. Early Spring: Fei Xiaotong and climate control; Part III. Weather: 8. Amateur Meteorology: the two rivers of Sichuan and an absence of rain; 9. Late Spring: Centre-Provincial Climatology and attempts to change the weather; Part IV. Seeds: 10. What gets left behind: history, memory and Image; 11. Who gets left behind: Wu Mi and the split life of a poet; Conclusion: campaign, literary, and historical time; Bibliography.

'Like his subjects – the Chinese writers whose metaphors fuelled the Hundred Flowers movement of the 1950s – Dayton Lekner has a way with words. Writing with laugh-out-loud wit, Lekner reveals a complex literary ecosystem full of bravery, treachery, uncertainty, and, above all, a dynamic interplay of ideas and personalities.' Jeremy Brown, author of June Fourth