Seeking Pleasure in Peril: Male Same-Sex Relations during the Cultural Revolution

This article is part of a larger research project that traces the history of male same-sex relations in China during the Mao era, a topic on which virtually no scholarship is currently available. The Chinese government named the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) “ten years of turmoil” in its aftermath. Stories circulate widely about men who were labeled as sodomites, humiliated and tortured in public, and sentenced to hard labor; some reportedly were beaten to death or committed suicide during this period. Using oral history and archival cases collected by the author, this article complicates this narrative about the Cultural Revolution by documenting different experiences of sexual awakening, ingenuity, and resilience of those men as well as their fear, misfortune, and tribulations. Despite all the risks of being arrested, interrogated, and disciplined by the authorities, clandestine sex between men persisted in both private and public spaces throughout this tumultuous period.

Beyond Bias: Critical Analysis and Layered Reading of Mao-Era Sources

Scholars of Mao-era history adopt a wide range of approaches to the selection and treatment of source material. Some scholars regard published sources as propaganda, and therefore as biased and unreliable. For many, archival sources are the gold standard; others question the reliability even of the archive and favor materials that escaped the filtering fingers of the state to be found in flea markets or garbage piles. Avoiding the false choice of either accepting sources as received wisdom or dismissing them as biased, the author argues that how scholars read their sources is more important than which they keep and which they throw away. She advocates for a layered approach that accounts for contexts of production and circulation, and further emphasizes the need to make this process of reading sources visible in our writing. A critical, layered reading of three unlikely sources demonstrates the myriad possibilities for analysis that combines the empirical, the discursive, and the self-reflexive.

The Chinese Communist Party's Nervous System: Affective Governance from Mao to Xi

In its one hundred years of existence, the Communist Party of China has experimented with how to connect its narratives of legitimacy to people's affects. In this essay, I trace the conceptualization of gratitude, from its repudiation in the Mao era as a vestige of feudalism and imperialism to its return in the reform era as a re-verticalization of Party sovereignty. The paper addresses four examples of gratitude work: Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Yang's short-lived critique of gratitude in the name of a different conception of popular sovereignty; the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake as a day of gratitude; the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang who are taught to be grateful to the Communist Party in a campaign of religious de-radicalization; and the refusal of gratitude in quarantined Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these cases, the Communist Party's sovereignty stands at the threshold between bio- and necro-politics, promising life and salvation in the midst of death and destruction.

Echolocating the Social: Silence, Voice, and Affect in China's Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns, 1956–58

What is the catalytic element that brings about widespread participation in a mass campaign? Is it ideology? Self-interest? Emotional states of fear, hatred, or love? Taking into account the recent proliferation of sound studies approaches to the history of the People's Republic of China, this article explores this question through the sonic experience of the campaign. Previous studies of the soundscapes of the Mao era have focused upon state initiatives of sound-borne propaganda and their role in the transmission of revolutionary ideas. Using a case study of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns of 1956–58, I examine the reception of such propaganda with a focus on silence, sound, and voice and their affective qualities. Through the use of diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews, I explore the extra-linguistic aspects of the campaign to ask what, outside of revolutionary words and emotions, brought the subjects of a campaign from silence to vocal participation.