CHINESE COMMUNISM and the RISE of a CLASSIFICATION EDDY U Luminos Is the Open Access Monograph Publishing Program from UC Press
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CREATING the INTELLECTUAL CHINESE COMMUNISM AND THE RISE OF A CLASSIFICATION EDDY U Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Creating the Intellectual The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Sue Tsao Endowment Fund in Chinese Studies. Creating the Intellectual Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification Eddy U UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2019 by Eddy U This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: U, E. Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism and the Rise of a Classification. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.68 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: U, Eddy, author. Title: Creating the intellectual : Chinese communism and the rise of a classification / Eddy U. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018055941 (print) | LCCN 2018059316 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520972827 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780520303690 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: China—Intellectual life—1949–1976. | Communism and intellectuals—China—History—20th century. | Social stratification— China—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DS777.6 (ebook) | LCC DS777.6 .U23 2019 (print) | DDC 305.5/5095109045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055941 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Lauren The word intellectual strikes me as odd. Personally, I’ve never met any intellectuals. I’ve met people who write novels, others who treat the sick. People who work in economics and others who write elec- tronic music. I’ve met people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I have never really understood what they do. But intellectuals, never. On the other hand, I’ve met a lot of people who talk about “the intel- lectual.” And, listening to them, I’ve got some idea of what such an ani- mal could be. It’s not difficult—he’s quite personified. He’s guilty about pretty well everything: about speaking out and about keeping silent, about doing nothing and about getting involved in everything. In short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a con- demnation, an exclusion . —Michel Foucault interviewed by Le Monde, April 6–7, 1980 Contents List of Illustrations xi Preface and Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations xix 1. Reexamining the Intellectual and Chinese Communism 1 2. The Birth of a Classification 21 3. Visible Subjects in the Countryside 42 4. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of a Registration Drive 68 5. Classification and Organization in a School System 92 6. An Open Struggle of Redefinition 114 7. Ugly Intellectuals Everywhere 135 8. The Intellectual and Chinese Society: From Past to Present 160 Character Glossary 173 Notes 181 Bibliography 197 Index 221 Illustrations FIGURES 1. Contemporary view of the church that housed the Lu Xun Academy of Arts 52 2. Commemorative inscription of Chairman Mao in Yan’an 64 3. Announcement regarding the Shanghai registration of unemployed intellectuals 78 4. The three literati in Third Sister Liu 147 5. Xiao Jianqiu and Tao Lan in Early Spring in February 154 TABLES 1. Number of Wenhui Daily articles with specific terms for educated persons, 1938–1957 80 2. Educational attainments of “unemployed intellectuals” by age (with percentage), 1952 81 3. Third Sister Liu performances in Shanghai, 1960–1962 142 4. Numbers of People’s Daily articles with specific terms for educated persons, 1976–2016 170 xi Preface and Acknowledgments This book grew out of a sociology graduate seminar that I took more than twenty- five years ago at the University of California at Berkeley. Titled Intellectuals and Politics, the course was inspiring not only because it included different research approaches and fascinating studies, but also because none of the writings seemed to be equipped conceptually to illuminate the dynamics leading up to the most violent episode against intellectuals in contemporary Chinese history. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution initiated by Chairman Mao in the mid- 1960s, countless intellectuals were attacked by student Red Guards. The victims included every conceivable type of person found in the literature on intellectuals produced inside and outside academia, such as reputed scholars and writers, uni- versity deans, state officials, and factory managers as well as primary school teach- ers, journalists, and performing artists. Although the precise number of fatalities would never be known, tens of thousands at least were beaten to death or hounded to suicide. The rest of the victims endured various combinations of corporal pun- ishment, coerced labor, and public humiliation. Besides college, secondary, and even primary students, the attackers included peers of the victims. Some of these peer assailants placed themselves at the forefront of the assaults; some plotted behind the scenes; some joined unfolding attacks to keep themselves safe. The boundaries between attackers and the attacked shifted back and forth while a reign of terror consumed property, dignity, and lives nationwide. During the last sixteen years, I published a series of articles that explore the his- torical background behind the brutality against intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. The articles focus on two things. First, the evolution of zhishifenzi (the intellectual or intellectuals) from a little-known expression in China during the xiii xiv Preface and Acknowledgments 1920s to a primary social identity of a heterogeneous population of people after the 1949 communist revolution. Second, the postrevolutionary struggle across state and society to define the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals as well as the social composition of this population. I trace how “intellectuals” as individuals and a population were constructed under the Chinese Communist Party, in contradis- tinction to conventional approaches that predefine the subject as critical thinkers, professional experts, or other kinds of persons. The articles reveal that individuals and organizations encountered the intellectual increasingly on many levels. As a subject matter, the intellectual turned up in party policies and leadership speeches, bureaucratic rules and personnel reports, newspapers and textbooks, government notices and pamphlets, radio shows and theatrical performances, and other medi- ums. As a person, the intellectual was eventually locatable across a wide range of circumstances: during high-level assemblies, political reeducation classes, land reform activities, and registration drives as well as within the state, the neighbor- hood, the family, and all sorts of workplaces. Under the party, the intellectual was woven into the fabric of everyday life, carrying in bodily, literary, aural, artistic, and other forms meanings and symbolisms inscribed upon the subject. Although I tried to connect the articles together thematically and analytically, what remained elusive was a genuinely coherent picture on how the intellectual was constituted, let alone one that clarifies twists and turns of the process and its implications for the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Each of the articles had been developed as an independent publication. They were not published in the order of the events. The study as a whole was always a work-in-progress. Building upon those articles, this book investigates the intellectual in twen- tieth-century China first and foremost as a classification of people deployed by the Chinese Communist Party on behalf of its revolutionary project. The latter, which I call Chinese Communism, was inspired as much as any other contem- porary project of communism by Karl Marx’s understanding of class struggle as the motivating force of history. Launched with the party’s formation in the early 1920s, Chinese Communism grew in fits and starts before maturing into a national military takeover led by Mao during the mid-century. The revolutionary project became a state pursuit and produced shortly afterward a nationwide elimination of private ownership and changes of governance at all levels. The party’s emphasis on class struggle fluctuated, reaching feverish heights during the Cultural Revolution before fading by the early 1980s, not long after the Chairman’s demise. From begin- ning to end, Chinese Communism nonetheless involved a top-down reordering of people into class subjects