This provides a brief outline of the book’s structure, discusses some terminology, and provides three reasons for writing the book. It also mentions three disputes that concern Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and which reappear throughout other chapters in the book. The first is the intractable Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan over which nation should possess the former princely state of J&K – or, since the late 1950s, how and where they should divide this disputed entity. The second is the dispute between India and its state of Jammu and Kashmir about this state’s integration into India. The third concerns whether residents within the geo-political sub-region of the Kashmir Valley, the real Kashmir after which the princely state took its popular name of ‘Kashmir’, want their region to remain with India, unify with Pakistan, or become independent from both nations.

This chapter examines Maharaja Hari Singh, his personality and influence, his regime and administration, and his options for J&K’s status in 1947. In particular, it looks at the option of independence for J&K and Hari Singh’s (non-)efforts to obtain this status, as well as the personalities and factors that ultimately ensured that he acceded to India in 1947.

This chapter examines the British Indian Empire, relevant aspects of its administrative structure, and the positions of India’s politicians and princes in the hasty and purgative – for the British, at least – decolonisation processes of 1947. It explains that, during 1947, there were differing ideas about the Indian princes’ legal positions and post-British options, including in relation to independence or otherwise, considerable politicking by politicians – all of whom were Indians until 15 August 1947 – and much uncertainty and upheaval for many subcontinetals, including J&K-ites. One of the most significant of these J&K-ites was Maharaja Hari Singh, the person charged, and empowered, to decide J&K’s post-British future by making an accession. As this chapter explains, the British decolonisation of their substantial Indian Empire in 1947 enabled him to seriously contemplate and envisage independence for J&K.

This chapter provides important historical and social background about J&K and its administrative structure, as well as some geo-political observations about this princely state. It explains why the princely state was popularly, but confusingly, called ‘Kashmir’ not ‘Jammu’, why the Kashmir region was the most important region in J&K, and why, in 1947, subcontinental politicians desired Kashmir and wooed Kashmiris. The chapter’s other observations chiefly concern the Kashmir region and Kashmiri Muslims’ relationships, or not, with other J&K-ites. In particular, this chapter comprehensively explores the significant and ongoing issues of Kashmiri identity and Kashmiri nationalism and why these are important factors within J&K. The discussion includes examining why Kashmiris have long believed in, and supported, a Kashmir ‘nation’. This dynamic is important to understand as it helps to explain why Kashmir enjoyed greater status and was more significant politically in 1947 than either the Jammu region or the Frontier Districts region. In that tumultuous year, the major ramification of Kashmir’s importance was that people were focused almost exclusively on this region and its residents. The other areas of J&K appeared to be peripheral. Additionally, in 1947 and thereafter, Kashmir and Kashmiris quickly came to dominate politics in J&K and in relation to the Kashmir dispute.

How should we measure the time of a Maoist campaign? What is the legacy for its authors and for China today? This concluding chapter reviews the major themes of the book. It also explores the tensions between linear and circular conceptions of time, how they shaped the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns, and what this watershed period in modern Chinese history can tell us about the agency of the writer in contemporary China and the role of literary circulation in the perpetual reimagining and rewriting of the Chinese state.

Can individual writers change the national climate? Following Mao’s comments on the “poetry case,” Liu Shahe and Shi Tianhe took divergent paths in dealing with the local literary establishment and finally with the shift from Hundred Flowers to Anti-Rightist campaign. Their strategies in response to the unfolding campaigns reveal that the year 1957 marked a critical transformation in the way Chinese writers perceived the relationship between their own use of language and the social reality of which, and into which, they wrote. The “poetry case” also taught Mao and the Party leadership that a liberal policy toward literary production and loosened censorship did spur creativity but fostered the growth of linguistic and social networks that they could neither mediate nor compete with in kind.

The final chapter looks at how Sino-North Korean relations changed after the Cold War. Both sides continued to find the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship useful even as they went in very different political and cultural directions during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the People’s Republic of China, according to Mao Zedong himself, literature was to serve politics. But where did the ideas of politics come from, and how did they circulate throughout the state? This book is an exploration of the literary aspects of a political campaign and how literary practice shaped Maoism and the Chinese state. The spring of 1957 found China in the midst of a great bloom. Floral themes and imagery permeated texts across genres of poetry, journalism, political speeches, and fiction. They decorated covers of literary journals, fabric for dresses, and even architecture. Where did these flowers come from? What happened to them in the second half of the year during the Anti-Rightist campaign? This chapter introduces the major questions of the book through the story of the young Shanghainese poet Xu Chengmiao. Through Xu’s poetry and life we explore the flowering of China and the broader question of how individuals participated in Maoism.

Where did these flowers come from? They have been traced back to the poet Allen Ginsberg and his November 1965 call for “Masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to be arranged at the frontline of protests. But ten years earlier, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the power of flowers had already been put to work. In fact, it was the potency of the flower in China, its ability to do things, to move, and to move people, that not only foreshadowed but had helped inspire Ginsberg and his movement. And it was Mao, not Ginsberg, who Hoffman cited in the last sentence of the quote above. In China, in the years 1954–58, floral arrangements, motifs, illustrations, fashion, and even architectural decoration, were to be found in virtually every sphere and level of society. Flowers decorated the stage as Chairman Mao spoke to the political elite; they appeared not only in newspaper headlines, in the decorative illustrations of magazines and journals, in cartoons, in song, and in poetic paeans to the young nation, but also in private diaries and letters and in poetry and big-character posters (dazibao 大字報) expressing dissent and anger. Where did these flowers come from?

What happens to their words after a writer has been purged? How does the literature of one campaign lay the foundation for the politics of the next? This chapter follows the fate of images rendered heterodox by those such as Fei Xiaotong and Liu Shahe in the period following the labeling of these writers as “rightist” and their ousting from the national literary community. It applies Abby Warburg’s conception of “social memory,” in which the re-adoption of symbols in visual art reflects a process of storing and releasing “mnemic energy,” to the circulation of texts following the shift to the Anti-Rightist campaign. It argues that the continued circulation of literary imagery reflects not only a literature capable of resurrecting memoires, as Reinhart Koselleck suggested, but an inner-literary memory. It also shows that as writers rejected the imagery of Fei’s “spring chill” and Liu’s “Pieces of Plants,” they created a literary bridge between the bucolic splendor of the Hundred Flowers and the supernature of the Great Leap Forward.