Abstract
The medium of the ‘big-character poster’, as described by the Beijing publishers of Mao Zedong’s Works in the epigraph above, may be thought of as a 1960s Chinese equivalent of the political blogosphere of the twenty-first century. Permitting a curious blend of superficial freedom and openness to coexist happily with stifling political correctness, it gave impetus to a campaign that brought down many a corrupt politician as well as traumatised and victimised no small number of innocent ‘masses’. One way in which it did this was by not shying away from sex and gender, topics of considerable sensitivity hitherto taboo in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) political discourse. In this chapter, I attempt to illustrate this particular aspect of mass dictatorship in China by commenting on some recurring themes of gender and the male ‘class enemy’ and of sexuality and the revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) woman.
The big-character poster is … a powerful weapon for conducting debate and education in accordance with the broadest mass democracy. People write down their views, suggestions or exposures and criticisms of others in big characters on large sheets of paper and put them up in conspicuous places for people to read.
Mao Zedong (1958)1
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Notes
Mao Zedong, ‘Introducing a Cooperative’, in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), p. 404.
Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution3: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 465.
See David Jim-tat Poon, ‘Tatzepao: Its History and Significance as Communication Medium’, in Godwin C. Chu (ed.), Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns (Honolulu: East-West Center, University of Hawaii, 1978), pp. 184–221.
Leon Hurwitz, Historical Dictionary of Censorship in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 109.
See also Michael Schoenhals, ‘Demon-ising Discourse in Mao Zedong’s China: People vs. Non-People’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8(3–4) (September 2007), pp. 465–82.
On sex as a more wide-ranging subject in the Cultural Revolution, see Emily Honig, ‘Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Modern China 29(2) (2003), pp. 143–75.
Shanghai General Cultural Revolution Liaison Office of Returned Overseas Chinese (ed.), Zalan Liao Chengzhi de ‘xiao Guowuyuan’ (Smash Liao Chengzhi’s ‘Little State Council’) (Shanghai, 1967), pp. 11, 44.
See the unofficial Cultural Revolution-era chronicle posted at http://www.s-tang.net/viewthread.php?tid=166555 (accessed 30 December 2007); Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Vol. 1, p. 302.
For a general overview of how the subject of women’s sexuality had been discussed prior to the Cultural Revolution, see the study by Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
Wang Zhongfang, Lianyu (Purgatory) (Beijing: Masses Publishing House, 2004), p. 73.
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© 2010 Michael Schoenhals
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Schoenhals, M. (2010). Sex in Big-Character Posters from China’s Cultural Revolution: Gendering the Class Enemy. In: Lim, JH., Petrone, K. (eds) Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283275_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283275_12
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