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.

The Making of Homo Socialist: The Discursive Analysis of the Ideological Production of Class in China, 1949–1976

Based on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years of socialist construction in China was based on the craft of making the Homo Socialist. The focus here is on how personal experiences were transformed into state-endorsed conduct via the discourse of class and class struggle. Over the course of the sociopolitical transformations leading to the Cultural Revolution, “class” changed from a socioeconomic designation to a political behavioral metaphor, and in the end a purely symbolic gesture; personal experiences were transformed from hallmarks of class privilege to virtual identification with imagined class struggle. And the peasants went from being “owners of bitterness” to “debtors of bitterness” on the way to becoming “sinners of the revolution”—who gradually submitted themselves to the regime in the name of revolution, liberation, and redemption. These transformations were realized through discursive practices connecting personally embodied experiences with the abstract Marxist theory of class and class struggle. Examining the shifting nature of class ideology production helps to explain how the Chinese Communist Party understood the effects of its governance and how people found class ideology meaningful to them, even when it reached the point of absurdity.

Class, Culture and Principles: Evaluating the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Basis of its Aims and Strategies

Culture in any society is inherited from the past as a form of tradition. It is an automatic and unconscious process. It is usually taken as supra-class unifying category which binds a community. China during Mao proclaimed that old culture serves the interests of the exploiting class and therefore the proletariat as an emerging class should struggle against it and impose its own culture. On this premise ‘the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was launched. Its aim was to ‘prevent the restoration of capitalism’ by revolutionizing people’s thinking to realize the communist goal of classless society. It lasted from 1966 to 1976, however, debates still continue regarding its aims, principles and practices and achievements or the damages it caused. This article attempts to explore what it actually wanted to accomplish and what strategies and measures were employed to materialize these aims. For this purpose it uses the documents published by the Communist Party of China during that period as the primary sources and judges them on the basis of Marxist socialist principles. The paper reaches to the conclusion that the Cultural Revolution adopted principles, policies and methods which accord with Marxism.

Opening Shot

Yuan-tsung Chen writes her memoir in the midst of growing unrest when in 2019 the Communist rulers try to pass an extradition law in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. To begin with, they set about “reforming” middle schoolers’ education— for instance, through the Orwellian rewriting of the history of the Cultural Revolution, from the ten-year-long “cataclysm” (Hao Jie—浩劫‎) to the ten years of “arduous exploration and development achievement.” Even according to the official death toll, 1.7 million people perished in the Cultural Revolution. The dead had families or relatives, friends or lovers, so how many more lives were ruined? Yuan-tsung simply cannot accept such a whitewashing without a guilty conscience. She is fully aware of the consequences of confronting the untruth. Nevertheless, she decides to write what she witnessed, saw, and understood as truth.

Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Yuan-tsung returned to Beijing in November 1960, but she could not forget what she had seen in the Red Flag Commune, and so she planned to circumvent another, probably worse catastrophe. She discussed options with Jack. Both agreed to leave China for Hong Kong, where Jack’s brother Percy ran the Marco Polo Club, a sort of bridge between Western businessmen and China. Jack would work as a freelance journalist. They consulted their friend Comrade Xia. Xia arranged for Jack to meet the foreign minister, Chen Yi, who liked to wear a French Beret. Chen Yi thought it was a good idea that Jack continue his work in a less restrictive environment. But Yuan-tsung and Jack disagreed on when to depart. She preferred 1965 and he, 1966. She was afraid that anything might happen in that one year.

The Mob Rule

In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out. Chen Yi, the foreign minister and Zhou Enlai’s right-hand man, sent a message to Jack, through Comrade Xia on a secret errand, that he would grant Jack an exit visa if he applied for one. But soon Mao’s Red Guards ran amok. Chen Yi was pushed aside. Jack, no longer protected by his family’s reputation and his own connections, was assaulted and not allowed to leave the compound of the Foreign Languages Bureau, where he worked on the English edition of the Peking Review. Yuan-tsung, however, was mobile. She went to see the Red Guards rally at Tiananmen; each of the participants held the Little Red Book, the compilation of Mao’s quotes.

The Secret Listener

From the time she was a girl, Yuan-tsung Chen had had a literary dream, and in 1950 she embarked on a literary career, a journey filled with thrilling and dangerous adventures. She went to Beijing and got a job in the Scenario Department of the Central Film Bureau, where she found herself in a front-row seat during China’s culture wars as Mao Zedong demanded that literature and art serve the Party, while writers wanted culture to be distinguishable from propaganda. Hence she became a secret listener. Purges ensued. She narrowly escaped the Anti-Rightist Purge of 1957 by marrying Jack Chen, who, because of his connections, had avoided political trouble so far. Mao’s “class war” continued. His Great Leap Forward caused the plunge in agricultural production and the greatest famine of the twentieth century. It led to Mao’s last and most violent purge, the Cultural Revolution. His hitmen, the Red Guards, viciously attacked Jack. Yuan-tsung went secretly to ask Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, for help. Zhou tried but failed to protect them. They were sent out of Beijing and consigned to a rural backwater village, cut off from all recourse to friends. But Yuan-tsung figured out a way to get in touch, right under the noses of the Red Guards, with Jack’s American brother-in-law and asked him to arrange a speaking tour for Jack. He did, and thus Jack was able to accept an invitation to lecture on Canadian and American campuses. After a tense wait, on the prime minister’s personal order Jack and Yuan-tsung got permits to leave the country.

The time–space tactics of Chinese Buddhist and Taoist believers under state–religion tension

This study explores the experience of elderly rural Buddhist and Taoist believers in communist China where the ruling party has maintained decades-long regulatory control over religion. Based on ethnographic observation and oral histories, the analysis begins with how the actors made sense of and coped in their relationship with the state during the fieldwork period (May–June 2020) when state regulations restricted public religious practice because of COVID-19. The analysis then looks back on how practitioners experienced tightening state ideological control from the early 2010s to before COVID-19; further back at the religious revival during the opening and reform (1980s–2010s); and finally, the Cultural Revolution period (1960s–70s) when strict atheistic measures were imposed. Their narratives reveal the practical logic (habitus) which practitioners used to mediate their resistance against and compromise with the authoritarian state. Specifically, four logical modes that involve actors’ different time–space tactics were identified, namely state–religion disengagement, state–religion enhancement, religious (dis)enlightenment, and karma. The implications of these ostensibly conflicting modes of thinking in mediating the actors’ resistance–compliance interface in contemporary China are discussed.