Reimagining Revolutionary Labor in the People's Commune: Amateurism and Social Reproduction in the Maoist Countryside

Abstract

This dissertation reveals transformations in the conceptual and cultural understanding of labor during the socialist period of the People’s Republic of China. This era witnessed radical transformations in expert cultures (bai) that were marked through their redefinition in proximity to the proletariat (hong) and the forms of labor with which they were associated. I argue that the introduction of the people’s commune (renmin gongshe) in 1958 precipitated the widespread reorganization of multiple sites of labor in the Chinese countryside, including those not traditionally recognized as productive in the Marxist account, such as medicine, amateur art, higher education, and the home. I explore new revolutionary epistemes of work through analysis of literature, film, fine art, and visual culture from the period.

In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I examine the processes by which professional cultures of work were converted into revolutionary cultures of labor, focusing on the transformation of medical and artistic labor through the figures of the barefoot doctor (chijiao yisheng) and the amateur artist. I argue that amateurism functioned as a means of converting highly professionalized, even rarified occupations such as the doctor or the artist, into practices of the everyday. The barefoot doctor redefined healing through their labor relationship with their communes, while the amateur artist transformed the specialized labor of the professionally trained artist into a productive leisure activity accessible to the worker, peasant, and soldier alike (gongnongbing qunzhong). In the third and fourth chapters, I examine attempts to disrupt the divisions of labor that reproduced social inequality through chapters analyzing the filmic depiction of the Jiangxi Communist Labor University (Gongda), and literature depicting rural women’s “liberation” from domestic labor. In Juelie, a fictional film from 1975 set at Gongda, college students combined intellectual and productive labor in a transformation of the student from the elite, bespectacled urban intellectual of the May Fourth era into a diffuse, pluralistic subject position embedded within the socialist project and its productive social relations. Short stories by the authors Ru Zhijuan and Li Zhun published during the late 1950s and early 1960s examined the social consequences of re-organizing domestic labor on rural communes, resulting in works of fiction haunted by the endless physical and metaphorical reproduction of women around the countryside. This dissertation describes how the work associated with each of these sites—medicine, fine art, education, and the home—was re-positioned through their relationship to agricultural or productive labor in a “laboring” of the cultures associated with each. Through the embrace of the rural female subject, I find that the structures of feeling sustaining these revolutionary attempts at reorganizing labor and society were ultimately produced through the gendering of revolution itself.