In: Cornell scholarship online
In 'Useful Bullshit', Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era.
Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens-police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups-have responded.
"Examines what happened when the Chinese government encouraged millions of its citizens to read, listen to, and pose questions about drafts of new constitutions, and the implications of such constitutional talk for how we understand political legitimacy and the origins of constitutionalism. Drawing on multiple archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, as well as insights from the philosophy of language, this book provides new interpretations of the role of law in China, popular constitutionalism, and the legitimacy of the Communist Revolution from the perspective of those who experienced it"--
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