Heroes, Hooligans, and Knights-Errant: Masculinities and Popular Media in the Early People’S Republic of China

_full_journalsubtitle: Men, Women and Gender in China _full_abbrevjournaltitle: NANU _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1387-6805 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5268 (online version) _full_issue: 2 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (change var. to _alt_author_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (change var. to _alt_arttitle_rh): Heroes, Hooligans, and Knights-Errant _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 NAN N Ü 316 Nan Nü 19 (2017) 316-356 Wang brill.com/nanu Heroes, Hooligans, and Knights-Errant: Masculinities and Popular Media in the Early People’s Republic of China Y. Yvon Wang University of Toronto [email protected] Abstract This article is an exploration of media and gender in urban and peri-urban China during the 1950s and early 1960s – specifically, the persistent trope of the “hooligan,” or liumang. Since at least the late imperial period, Chinese authorities had feared unmarried, impoverished, rootless men as the main source of crime, disorder, and outright rebellion. Yet such figures were simultaneously celebrated as knights-errant for their violent heroism in cultural works of enormous popularity across regions and classes. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party attempted to reshape society and culture after 1949, it condemned knight-errant tales and made hooliganism a crime. At the same time, the state tried to promote a new pantheon of vigilante-like men in the guise of revolutionary heroes. But the state’s control over deeply rooted cultural markets and their products was incomplete. Moreover, the same potent tools that had empowered the Party, in particular its rhetoric of revolutionary subjectivity and its harnessing of modern media technologies, were open as never before to being adopted by the very targets of its efforts at control and censure. Marginal masculinity in the early PRC, though in many ways continuous with that in China during the previous decades and centuries, marked a new epoch: men and boys deemed hooligans were able to speak out and defend themselves as heroes. Keywords People’s Republic of China – masculinity – 1950s – hooligans © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/15685268-00192P04DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com09/23/202119 (2017) 316-356 09:16:13PM via free access _full_journalsubtitle: Men, Women and Gender in China _full_abbrevjournaltitle: NANU _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1387-6805 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5268 (online version) _full_issue: 2 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (change var. to _alt_author_rh): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (change var. to _alt_arttitle_rh): Heroes, Hooligans, and Knights-Errant _full_alt_articletitle_toc: 0 _full_is_advance_article: 0 Heroes, Hooligans, And Knights-errant 317 Introduction In February 1955, the Shanghai People’s Court tried thirteen “hooligans and bandits” (liumang daofei 流氓盗匪) who “not only did not reform their ways after repeated correction, but even more severely damaged social order” (lüjiao bugai, erqie geng yanzhongde pohuai shehui zhixu 屢教不改,而且更嚴重地破壞社會秩序).1 Among these men was nineteen-year-old Ma Xiaoyan 馬小彦. Ma stood apart from his fellow “hooligans” in age – the group’s average age was twenty-eight – and privilege: he was the son of a factory owner and an Ameri- can-educated finance expert and had attended a prestigious secondary school. The indictment related that he had “stepped onto the path of corruption and decay” (zoushang fuhua duoluo de daolu 走上腐化墮落的道路) at the instiga- tion of another of the thirteen offenders, thirty-year old Zhou Ruifu 周瑞福. Besides “frequently humiliating women in public places of entertainment” (jingchang zai gonggong yule changsuo, wuru funü 經常在公共娛樂場所，侮辱婦女), Ma had taken valuables from his parents to cover his friends’ expens- es. Two years earlier, a district court in Shanghai had sentenced him to six months’ jail time for “congregating gangs to fight” (jiuzhong oudou 糾眾毆鬥). But he had “still been unrepentant” (rengbu huigai 仍不悔改) after his release, seducing two women with Zhou Ruifu and twenty-eight-year old Shen Xiaoti 沈孝悌 as well as trying to sell off government bonds filched from his parents. Three weeks after the government brought charges, Zhou and Shen were sentenced to death, while Ma was assigned to three years’ reform through labor (laodong gaizao 勞動改造) on a railroad in the remote mountains of Jiangxi.2 After his sentencing, Ma became, briefly, a center of attention in New Chi- na’s news media. His life story was told with colorful flourishes, psychological intensity, and even cartoon illustrations in papers like the Shanghai-based Jie- fang ribao 解放日報 (Liberation daily). The press also followed Ma’s atonement closely. Reporters detailed that, shortly after being taken into the detention center, Ma saw himself in the headlines and began weeping in remorse. Readers were regaled with Ma’s experience of manual labor’s purifying pain while carrying thirty-two loads of 1 “Shanghai shi renmin fayuan gongsu” 上海市人民法院公訴 (Shanghai People's Censorate Public Indictment) 1955 February 5, reprinted in Wenhui bao 文匯報, 1955 March 11. 2 Renmin ribao 人民日報 (People's daily) 1955 March 19; Liu Sen 柳森. “Dangbao yu qingnian tanxin” 黨報與青年談心, in Yinhen: Jiefang ribao chuangkan 60 zhounian banmian jicui 印痕：解放日報創刊 60 週年版面集粹 (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian), 2009, 18; Yang Jieceng 楊潔曾 and He Wan'nan 賀宛男, Shanghai changji gaizao shihua 上海娼妓改造史話 (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian 1988), 198. Nan Nü 19 (2017) 316-356 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 09:16:13PM via free access 318 Wang Figure 1 Xu Fubao 徐甫堡, “Diaoyu” 釣魚 (Fishing), Jiefang ribao 解放日報, 1955 February 1. rocks and dirt on his shoulders during his first day on the railroad.3 Ma eventu- ally earned a citation for diligence, which he reported to his family, and the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Youth League (Gongqingtuan 共青團, henceforth CYL) sent him a note of encouragement. These letters were all reprinted in the national media,4 along with summaries of correspondence from readers recounting their “excitement and joy” (xingfen yukuai 興奮愉快) at Ma’s story and offering him their support.5 Ma’s fame culminated in a final re- demption: he was released early and apprenticed to a young model worker at a Shanghai textile-machinery factory (see below; Ma is on the left). Ma Xiaoyan’s tale is but one of an entire genre of redemptive bildungsro- mane told in China under early Communist rule. Ma does stand out, however, for being among the first youths who became national hooligan celebrities through their trespasses and subsequent salvation by the Party. Ma’s highly publicized downfall represented an important moment of transition in which the Party, as self-appointed leader of a new revolutionary state bound for 3 Zhongguo qingnian bao 中國青年報 (China youth daily), 1956 November 11. 4 Zhongguo qingnian bao, 1956 July 24. 5 Zhongguo qingnian bao, 1956 Aug. 23. DownloadedNan fromNü Brill.com09/23/202119 (2017) 316-356 09:16:13PM via free access Heroes, Hooligans, And Knights-errant 319 Figure 2 Zhongguo qingnian bao, 中國青年報 1956 July 24. socialist utopia, tried to remold many aspects of the daily experience and cultural representations of gender that had prevailed since at least late imperial times. Specifically, by creating narratives like Ma’s and reinforcing them with public applications of sanctioned violence, the Party-state sought to domesti- cate a longstanding, influential, yet threatening avatar of masculinity primarily identified with unmarried and socioeconomically marginal younger men and thereby generate a new Chinese socialist masculinity. To harness this physical- ly violent, sexually aggressive, and boundary-crossing masculine energy while curbing its challenge to political and legal authorities, the Party-state repur- posed both its positive, heroic associations with the xia 俠 (knight-errant) and its negative links to the predatory specter of the guanggun 光棍 (bare stick). On the one hand, the broad cultural popularity of these vigilantes was redi- rected toward a new pantheon of revolutionary martyrs and Party-loyalist heroes. On the other hand, longstanding fears around the dangerously rootless man, which readily slid into criminality if not outright rebellion, were folded into the definition of a term in use well before 1949, liumang or “hooligan,” which was expanded to become more nebulously inclusive than ever before. Existing studies of liumang have largely been either longue dureé compilations Nan Nü 19 (2017) 316-356 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 09:16:13PM via free access 320 Wang of shifting nomenclature or tightly focused accounts of the crime of hooliganism on the cusp of the early 1980s, when they were most visibly prose- cuted.6 In this article, I turn instead to cities of the early People’s Republic to exam- ine the earlier dual reinvention of knights-errant and bare sticks via the media to become hooligans or heroes, seeking to capture some of the complexity in the formation and propagation of a proper socialist masculinity. Ultimately, the case of liumang adds to a fuller understanding of what exactly did change during the assertion of purportedly revolutionary rule over China, and what did not. As scholars since the early 1980s have shown, there exists a compli- cated dialectic between hegemonic visions of ideal manhood and their trans- gressive counterparts; even apparently dominant types of masculinity are internally unstable and context-dependent,7 much less the refashioning of cat- egories like

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