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The book is set during the time known as the Cultural Revolution in China. The Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong "began in 1966 and continued until the dictator's death ten years later"

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Wikipedia

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (French: Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise) is a semi- autobiographical novella written by Dai Sijie, and published in 2000 in French and in English in 2001. A film based on his novel directed by Dai was released in 2002.

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It is diverse with snow-capped mountains, deep river valleys, broad basins, high plateaus, rolling plains, terraced hills, sandy dunes with many other geographic features and other landforms present in myriad variations. In general, the land is high in the west and descends to the east coast.

https://study.com/learn/lesson/ancient-china-geography-isolation.html

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Domestic developments

Readjustment and recovery

Mao’s death and the purge of the Gang of Four left Hua Guofeng, a compromise candidate elevated to the premiership by Mao following the purge of Deng Xiaoping, as the chairman of the CCP and thus the official leader of China.

Economic policy changes

In the late fall of 1976, the CCP leadership tried to bring some order to the country through a series of national conferences. They moved quickly to appeal to workers’ interests by reinstating wage bonuses. The economy had stagnated that year largely because of political turmoil, and Mao’s successors were anxious to start things moving again. Despite some uncertainty, Deng was rehabilitated and formally brought back into his previous offices in the summer of 1977.

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Although the Cultural Revolution largely bypassed the vast majority of the people, who lived in rural areas, it had highly serious consequences for the Chinese system as a whole. In the short run, of course, the political instability and the zigzags in economic policy produced slower economic growth and a decline in the capacity of the government to deliver goods and services. Officials at all levels of the political system had learned that future shifts in policy would jeopardize those who had aggressively implemented previous policy. The result was bureaucratic timidity. In addition, with the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, nearly three million CCP members and other citizens awaited reinstatement after having been wrongfully purged.

Bold actions in the late 1970s went far toward coping with those immediate problems, but the Cultural Revolution also left more-serious, longer-term legacies. First, a severe generation gap had been created in which young adults had been denied an education and had been taught to redress grievances by taking to the streets. Second, corruption grew within the CCP and the government, as the terror and accompanying scarcities of goods during the Cultural Revolution had forced people to fall back on traditional personal relationships and on extortion in order to get things done. Third, the CCP leadership and the system itself suffered a loss of legitimacy when millions of urban Chinese became disillusioned by the obvious power plays that took place in the name of political principle in the early and mid-1970s. And fourth, bitter factionalism was rampant, as members of rival Cultural Revolution factions shared the same work unit, each still looking for ways to undermine the power of the other.
Kenneth G. Lieberthal

China after the death of Mao

Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such massive forces against the system that he had created. The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals that Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. The agenda he left behind for his successors was extraordinarily challenging.

Domestic developments

Readjustment and recovery

Mao's death and the purge of the Gang of Four left Hua Guofeng, a compromise candidate elevated to the premiership by Mao following the purge of Deng Xiaoping, as the chairman of the CCP and thus the official leader of China. Hua tried to consolidate his position by stressing his ties to Mao and his fidelity to Mao's basic ideas, but many others in the top leadership wanted to move away from these issues, and Hua's position eroded over the remainder of the decade. Furthermore, Hua's successor as party chairman, Hu Yaobang, helped abolish the chairmanship in 1982 in response to concerns that one person might again become too powerful within the party; however, he remained as general secretary.

The ambivalent legacies of the Cultural Revolution were reflected in the members of the Political Bureau chosen just after the 11th Party Congress had convened in August 1977. Like Hua Guofeng, almost half of the members were individuals whose careers had benefited from the Cultural Revolution; the other half were, like Deng Xiaoping, the Cultural Revolution's victims. While a balance between the two groups would be reached only after a period of years, in the short run the tide quickly shifted in favour of the latter group.

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China - Consequences, Revolution, Impact

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China - Consequences, Revolution, Impact: Although the Cultural Revolution largely bypassed the vast majority of the people, who lived in rural areas, it had highly serious consequences for the Chinese system as a whole.

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Narrator - teenage boy named Ma

Luo - the narrators best friend

Little Seamstress - the daughter of a famous local tailor

Village Headman - leader of the village

Tailor - the only tailor in the mountain (father of Seamstress)

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was his first novel, and it won five French literary awards.

It has been translated into 25 languages as of 2017.

Dai lives in Paris and writes primarily in French, though he does possess a Chinese passport and can travel to and from China freely.

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Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is an award-winning author and filmmaker. Caught up in China’s Cultural Revolution, he was "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974, and spent time working in a camp in a rural part of Sichuan province. After his re-education, he completed high school and university in China before departing for France in 1984 on a scholarship. He directed his first film in 1989. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was published in France in 2000. The translation became a national bestseller in America.

https://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm/author_number/696/dai-sijie

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Dai Sijie biography: Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is an award-winning author and filmmaker. Caught up in China’s Cultural Revolution, he ...

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article :

https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution

video:

https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/cultural-revolution

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Background

During the early 1960s, tensions with the Soviet Union convinced Mao that the Russian Revolution had gone astray, which in turn made him fear that China would follow the same path. Programs carried out by his colleagues to bring China out of the economic depression caused by the Great Leap Forward made Mao doubt their revolutionary commitment and also resent his own diminished role. He especially feared urban social stratification in a society as traditionally elitist as China. Mao thus ultimately adopted four goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China's youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, health care, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization of the country's urban youths. They were organized into groups called the Red Guards, and led by students such as Song Binbin. Mao ordered the party and the army not to suppress the movement.

Mao also put together a coalition of associates to help him carry out the Cultural Revolution. His wife, Jiang Qing, brought in a group of radical intellectuals to rule the cultural realm. Defense Minister Lin Biao made certain that the military remained Maoist. Mao's longtime assistant, Chen Boda, worked with security men Kang Sheng and Wang Dongxing to carry out Mao's directives concerning ideology and security. Premier Zhou Enlai played an essential role in keeping the country running, even during periods of extraordinary chaos. Yet there were conflicts among these associates, and the history of the Cultural Revolution reflects these conflicts almost as much as it reflects Mao's own initiatives.

The early period (1966-68)

Mao's concerns about "bourgeois" infiltrators in his party and government-those not sharing his vision of communism-were outlined in a Chinese Communist Party Central Committee document issued on May 16, 1966; this is considered by many historians to be the start of the Cultural Revolution, although Mao did not formally launch the Cultural Revolution until August 1966, at the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee. He shut down China's schools, and during the following months he encouraged Red Guards to attack all traditional values and "bourgeois" things and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao believed that this measure would be beneficial both for the young people and for the party cadres that they attacked.

The movement quickly escalated; many elderly people and intellectuals not only were verbally attacked but were physically abused. Many died. The Red Guards splintered into zealous rival factions, each purporting to be the true representative of Maoist thought. Mao's own personality cult, encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for 1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.

During the earliest part of the Red Guard phase, key Politburo leaders were removed from power-most notably President Liu Shaoqi, Mao's designated successor until that time, and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. In January 1967 the movement began to produce the actual overthrow of provincial party committees and the first attempts to construct new political bodies to replace them. In February 1967 many remaining top party leaders called for a halt to the Cultural Revolution, but Mao and his more radical partisans prevailed, and the movement escalated yet again. Indeed, by the summer of 1967, disorder was widespread; large armed clashes between factions of Red Guards were occurring throughout urban China.

During 1967 Mao called on the army under Lin Biao to step in on behalf of the Red Guards. Instead of producing unified support for the radical youths, this political-military action resulted in more divisions within the military. The tensions inherent in the situation surfaced vividly when Chen Zaidao, a military commander in the city of Wuhan during the summer of 1967, arrested two key radical party leaders.

In 1968, after the country had been subject to several cycles of radicalism alternating with relative moderation, Mao decided to rebuild the Communist Party to gain greater control. The military dispatched officers and soldiers to take over schools, factories, and government agencies. The army simultaneously forced millions of urban Red Guards to move to the rural hinterland to live, thus scattering their forces and bringing some order to the cities. This particular action reflected Mao's disillusionment with the Red Guards because of their inability to overcome their factional differences. Mao's efforts to end the chaos were given added impetus by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which greatly heightened China's sense of insecurity.

Two months later, the Twelfth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee met to call for the convening of a party congress and the rebuilding of the party apparatus. From that point, the issue of who would inherit political power as the Cultural Revolution wound down became the central question of Chinese politics.

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Cultural Revolution | Definition, Facts, & Failure

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The Cultural Revolution was the upheaval launched by Mao Zedong during his last decade in power (1966-76). Though it was intended to renew the spirit of the Chinese Revolution, it instead had detrimental political, social, and economic consequences for China. Read more about the Cultural Revolution here.

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/41984/dai-sijie/

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Dai Sijie is a Chinese-born filmmaker and novelist who has lived and worked in France since 1984. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was an overnight sensation; it spent...

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WCVycG7Ejvlp-g7iv1G6NaHzXQoBEuxX/view?usp=sharing