Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2007
This paper analyses the importance of love relations and sexuality in Soviet film for Chinese soc... more This paper analyses the importance of love relations and sexuality in Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet women across the Sino-Soviet border — in films and as part of film delegations — I highlight the international circuits of gender that shaped socialist womanhood in China. I examine Chinese discussion of Soviet film stars including Marina Ladynina, Vera Maretskaia, and Marina Kovaleva. I locate the movement away from 'fun-loving post-revolutionary' womanhood associated with Ladynina to socialist womanhood located in struggle and partisanship within the larger context of Maoist theory and Sino-Soviet relations. In my examination of debates over which female film stars were appropriate for China I draw out celebrated and sanctioned couplings of Chinese and Soviet film heroines, such as the links made between Zoya and Zhao Yiman. By looking at how Soviet film stars became part of Chinese political aesthetics, sexual...
Infused with the spirit of May Fourth critique of the enfeebled Chinese body politic of the past,... more Infused with the spirit of May Fourth critique of the enfeebled Chinese body politic of the past, a young Mao Zedong joined the chorus of intellectuals calling for renewed personal and national strength. In his 1917 essay "A Study of Physical Education," Mao stated, "There is a saying: 'Civilize the mind and make savage the body.' This is an apt saying. In order to civilize the mind, one must first make savage the body. If the body is made savage, then the civilized mind will follow." 1 He elaborated on these views on the interconnectedness of mind and body as he argued against the notion that persons with strong minds had weak bodies and those with robust bodies had deficient mental capacities. According to Mao, what was needed for perfection of body and mind was physical transformation that could elicit reconstitution of the mind. This dialectical relationship between body and mind advocated by Mao, albeit in pre-Marxian language, foreshadowed practices of body and education central positions 11:2
In 1950 a Wfteen-year-old female middle school student, Jin Miaozhen, wrote to the editor of the ... more In 1950 a Wfteen-year-old female middle school student, Jin Miaozhen, wrote to the editor of the Chinese Wlm journal Dazhong Dianying (Popular Cinema) to ask why the cover photographs of the previous three issues featured Soviet Wlms (Jin 1950, 28). The editor replied with an explanation of the guidelines: First, cover photographs represented the feature stories of each issue. In the weeks in question, the popular magazine introduced to Chinese readers the Soviet Wlms Nongjia le (Happiness of the Peasant Household) and Gongke Bailin (The Fall of Berlin). 1 Second, very few Chinese Wlms were being produced at this time. In one of the issues, he explained, the editors had intended to feature the Chinese Wlm Zhao Yiman, but the Wlm had not reached Shanghai in time and therefore could not be introduced as planned. Finally, the editor reminded the young student, all should study Soviet Wlm not only for its ideological and artistic merits, but because the Soviet Union was China's big brother. The issue, the editor insisted, was not whether Soviet or Chinese Wlm stars graced the covers of Dazhong Dianying, but whether or not the Wlms contained progressive messages. In this brief exchange, the editor of Dazhong Dianying summarized the role of Soviet Wlm in Chinese culture. Soviet Wlm provided socialist heroes and heroines through whom the Chinese could envision their future. The editor dismissed national borders as legitimate criteria for selection of feature articles and photographs. He privileged international socialism over nationalism to justify the strong presence of non-Chinese Wlms in the magazine. He argued that the Soviet Union, as an established socialist nation, provided China with
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, ... more This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, aimed at remedying lack of research on the years 19491979. The 'missing period' of PRC cinema has been hiding in plain sight. It is contem-porary audiences and scholars who have ...
... and a subtle appropriation of Moscow's role by China with respect to other Asian cou... more ... and a subtle appropriation of Moscow's role by China with respect to other Asian countries (Zhang, Zhang and Yao 2006). ... Burma imported Chinese documentaries marking National Day and MayDay celebrations for 19515314 and screened the full eight-film set entitled 1954 ...
... Dressing Female Socialist Citizens ... of the female model proves to be an instructive way to... more ... Dressing Female Socialist Citizens ... of the female model proves to be an instructive way to understand the relationship between clothing, color, and citizenship. ... longevity to the People's Republic of China, the peasant woman donned a cotton flower-printed top in cross-over style ...
With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CC... more With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targetted patriarchy and gender inequality as antithetical to the new socio-political order it sought to create. The Party associated redefinition of female subjectivity with a promised socialist transformation. Through female model workers, the CCP pursued a proletarian-based socialist female subjectivity that reconstructed gender and social relations. Despite the publicity accorded to these women and their appearance in analyses of women in Maoist China, scholars tend to discount CCP feminism thus expressed and the women chosen to represent it. Scholars generally view official feminism as one-dimensional, at the service of the Party and socialism, and not primarily concerned with women's place in society. This article, however, offers a different interpretation of CCP advocacy of, and authority over, women's emancipation. I highlight the situated agency of female model workers by focusing on their multilayered lived experiences and on the multifaceted interactions between these women and state representation of them. Specifically, I reconsider female subjectivity in the 1950s by critically examining the limitations and promises of female icons in Maoist China as well as the structure and experience of state-sponsored feminism. Close readings of emulation campaign materials reveal multiple subjectivities forged at the nexus of state representation and women's experience, and within local and global struggles over gendered orders. The female tractor driver was among the most widely circulating icons of socialist modernity in the PRC. This typically young peasant woman with glowing sunburned face was portrayed sitting confidently atop a tractor,
This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, ... more This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, aimed at remedying lack of research on the years 19491979. The 'missing period' of PRC cinema has been hiding in plain sight. It is contem-porary audiences and scholars who have ...
Twenti eth-century science shared a belief with the century's revolutionary projects in a dynamic... more Twenti eth-century science shared a belief with the century's revolutionary projects in a dynamic malleability and Xuidity of form that conjoined machines to human beings. Projects that developed out of this shared belief addressed issues of social organization, science, and creative imagination. Together, they invoked spatial alignments and embodied practices that reconceptualized the boundaries between humans and machines. Throughout the century, East Asia, the Soviet Union, and the United States acquired meaning and form partially in relation to the ways in which human-machines populated particular spaces. At the same time, who and what constituted humans, humanity, and machines emerged out of interactions between interconnected landscapes and the creative imagination. The other articles in this cluster draw our attention to these dynamics in texts of science Wction and animated television series. This article shifts our attention to the ways in which revolutionary theory and scientiWc knowledge informed each other and were mediated through transformation of the natural landscape in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Mao Zedong, revolutionary theorist and leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, conceptualized dialectical materialism as part of broader twentieth-century conversations about the potential for particular scientiWc methods, materials, and social organization to enable collective human liberation. As such, reading PRC popular cultural mediations of science and revolutionary theory in a manner that is attentive to the operation of human-machine continuums in the metaphors, visual imagery, representational bodies, and landscapes provides new insight into mass subjectivity in Maoist China. THE HUMAN-MACHINE CONTINUUM IN MAOISM
This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930... more This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement across Chinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese. Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations to refer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we can learn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about the wartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic of territorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concerned with the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iteration and practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic with respect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding how the work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic is important because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundational to the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War world order.
Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet wo... more Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet women across the Sino-Soviet border -in films and as part of film delegations -I highlight the international circuits of gender that shaped socialist womanhood in China. I examine Chinese discussion of Soviet film stars including Marina Ladynina, Vera Maretskaia, and Marina Kovaleva. I locate the movement away from 'fun-loving post-revolutionary' womanhood associated with Ladynina to socialist womanhood located in struggle and partisanship within the larger context of Maoist theory and Sino-Soviet relations. In my examination of debates over which female film stars were appropriate for China I draw out celebrated and sanctioned couplings of Chinese and Soviet film heroines, such as the links made between Zoya and Zhao Yiman. By looking at how Soviet film stars became part of Chinese political aesthetics, sexuality and love emerge as more important to our understanding of womanhood in Maoist China than has been recognized by most scholars of gender in China. This approach therefore offers a new perspective on Maoist ideologies of gender with its emphasis on non-Chinese bodies as constitutive of gender subjectivities in Maoist China. I argue that while gender in Maoist China was primarily enacted on a national level, internationalism and international circuits of gender were central to its articulation.
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2007
This paper analyses the importance of love relations and sexuality in Soviet film for Chinese soc... more This paper analyses the importance of love relations and sexuality in Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet women across the Sino-Soviet border — in films and as part of film delegations — I highlight the international circuits of gender that shaped socialist womanhood in China. I examine Chinese discussion of Soviet film stars including Marina Ladynina, Vera Maretskaia, and Marina Kovaleva. I locate the movement away from 'fun-loving post-revolutionary' womanhood associated with Ladynina to socialist womanhood located in struggle and partisanship within the larger context of Maoist theory and Sino-Soviet relations. In my examination of debates over which female film stars were appropriate for China I draw out celebrated and sanctioned couplings of Chinese and Soviet film heroines, such as the links made between Zoya and Zhao Yiman. By looking at how Soviet film stars became part of Chinese political aesthetics, sexual...
Infused with the spirit of May Fourth critique of the enfeebled Chinese body politic of the past,... more Infused with the spirit of May Fourth critique of the enfeebled Chinese body politic of the past, a young Mao Zedong joined the chorus of intellectuals calling for renewed personal and national strength. In his 1917 essay "A Study of Physical Education," Mao stated, "There is a saying: 'Civilize the mind and make savage the body.' This is an apt saying. In order to civilize the mind, one must first make savage the body. If the body is made savage, then the civilized mind will follow." 1 He elaborated on these views on the interconnectedness of mind and body as he argued against the notion that persons with strong minds had weak bodies and those with robust bodies had deficient mental capacities. According to Mao, what was needed for perfection of body and mind was physical transformation that could elicit reconstitution of the mind. This dialectical relationship between body and mind advocated by Mao, albeit in pre-Marxian language, foreshadowed practices of body and education central positions 11:2
In 1950 a Wfteen-year-old female middle school student, Jin Miaozhen, wrote to the editor of the ... more In 1950 a Wfteen-year-old female middle school student, Jin Miaozhen, wrote to the editor of the Chinese Wlm journal Dazhong Dianying (Popular Cinema) to ask why the cover photographs of the previous three issues featured Soviet Wlms (Jin 1950, 28). The editor replied with an explanation of the guidelines: First, cover photographs represented the feature stories of each issue. In the weeks in question, the popular magazine introduced to Chinese readers the Soviet Wlms Nongjia le (Happiness of the Peasant Household) and Gongke Bailin (The Fall of Berlin). 1 Second, very few Chinese Wlms were being produced at this time. In one of the issues, he explained, the editors had intended to feature the Chinese Wlm Zhao Yiman, but the Wlm had not reached Shanghai in time and therefore could not be introduced as planned. Finally, the editor reminded the young student, all should study Soviet Wlm not only for its ideological and artistic merits, but because the Soviet Union was China's big brother. The issue, the editor insisted, was not whether Soviet or Chinese Wlm stars graced the covers of Dazhong Dianying, but whether or not the Wlms contained progressive messages. In this brief exchange, the editor of Dazhong Dianying summarized the role of Soviet Wlm in Chinese culture. Soviet Wlm provided socialist heroes and heroines through whom the Chinese could envision their future. The editor dismissed national borders as legitimate criteria for selection of feature articles and photographs. He privileged international socialism over nationalism to justify the strong presence of non-Chinese Wlms in the magazine. He argued that the Soviet Union, as an established socialist nation, provided China with
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, ... more This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, aimed at remedying lack of research on the years 19491979. The 'missing period' of PRC cinema has been hiding in plain sight. It is contem-porary audiences and scholars who have ...
... and a subtle appropriation of Moscow's role by China with respect to other Asian cou... more ... and a subtle appropriation of Moscow's role by China with respect to other Asian countries (Zhang, Zhang and Yao 2006). ... Burma imported Chinese documentaries marking National Day and MayDay celebrations for 19515314 and screened the full eight-film set entitled 1954 ...
... Dressing Female Socialist Citizens ... of the female model proves to be an instructive way to... more ... Dressing Female Socialist Citizens ... of the female model proves to be an instructive way to understand the relationship between clothing, color, and citizenship. ... longevity to the People's Republic of China, the peasant woman donned a cotton flower-printed top in cross-over style ...
With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CC... more With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) targetted patriarchy and gender inequality as antithetical to the new socio-political order it sought to create. The Party associated redefinition of female subjectivity with a promised socialist transformation. Through female model workers, the CCP pursued a proletarian-based socialist female subjectivity that reconstructed gender and social relations. Despite the publicity accorded to these women and their appearance in analyses of women in Maoist China, scholars tend to discount CCP feminism thus expressed and the women chosen to represent it. Scholars generally view official feminism as one-dimensional, at the service of the Party and socialism, and not primarily concerned with women's place in society. This article, however, offers a different interpretation of CCP advocacy of, and authority over, women's emancipation. I highlight the situated agency of female model workers by focusing on their multilayered lived experiences and on the multifaceted interactions between these women and state representation of them. Specifically, I reconsider female subjectivity in the 1950s by critically examining the limitations and promises of female icons in Maoist China as well as the structure and experience of state-sponsored feminism. Close readings of emulation campaign materials reveal multiple subjectivities forged at the nexus of state representation and women's experience, and within local and global struggles over gendered orders. The female tractor driver was among the most widely circulating icons of socialist modernity in the PRC. This typically young peasant woman with glowing sunburned face was portrayed sitting confidently atop a tractor,
This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, ... more This issue is part of a three-issue series on the 'missing period' in Chinese cinemas, aimed at remedying lack of research on the years 19491979. The 'missing period' of PRC cinema has been hiding in plain sight. It is contem-porary audiences and scholars who have ...
Twenti eth-century science shared a belief with the century's revolutionary projects in a dynamic... more Twenti eth-century science shared a belief with the century's revolutionary projects in a dynamic malleability and Xuidity of form that conjoined machines to human beings. Projects that developed out of this shared belief addressed issues of social organization, science, and creative imagination. Together, they invoked spatial alignments and embodied practices that reconceptualized the boundaries between humans and machines. Throughout the century, East Asia, the Soviet Union, and the United States acquired meaning and form partially in relation to the ways in which human-machines populated particular spaces. At the same time, who and what constituted humans, humanity, and machines emerged out of interactions between interconnected landscapes and the creative imagination. The other articles in this cluster draw our attention to these dynamics in texts of science Wction and animated television series. This article shifts our attention to the ways in which revolutionary theory and scientiWc knowledge informed each other and were mediated through transformation of the natural landscape in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Mao Zedong, revolutionary theorist and leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, conceptualized dialectical materialism as part of broader twentieth-century conversations about the potential for particular scientiWc methods, materials, and social organization to enable collective human liberation. As such, reading PRC popular cultural mediations of science and revolutionary theory in a manner that is attentive to the operation of human-machine continuums in the metaphors, visual imagery, representational bodies, and landscapes provides new insight into mass subjectivity in Maoist China. THE HUMAN-MACHINE CONTINUUM IN MAOISM
This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930... more This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement across Chinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese. Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations to refer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we can learn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about the wartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic of territorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concerned with the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iteration and practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic with respect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding how the work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic is important because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundational to the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War world order.
Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet wo... more Soviet film for Chinese socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at the movement of Soviet women across the Sino-Soviet border -in films and as part of film delegations -I highlight the international circuits of gender that shaped socialist womanhood in China. I examine Chinese discussion of Soviet film stars including Marina Ladynina, Vera Maretskaia, and Marina Kovaleva. I locate the movement away from 'fun-loving post-revolutionary' womanhood associated with Ladynina to socialist womanhood located in struggle and partisanship within the larger context of Maoist theory and Sino-Soviet relations. In my examination of debates over which female film stars were appropriate for China I draw out celebrated and sanctioned couplings of Chinese and Soviet film heroines, such as the links made between Zoya and Zhao Yiman. By looking at how Soviet film stars became part of Chinese political aesthetics, sexuality and love emerge as more important to our understanding of womanhood in Maoist China than has been recognized by most scholars of gender in China. This approach therefore offers a new perspective on Maoist ideologies of gender with its emphasis on non-Chinese bodies as constitutive of gender subjectivities in Maoist China. I argue that while gender in Maoist China was primarily enacted on a national level, internationalism and international circuits of gender were central to its articulation.
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