Abolishing the Self as Private Property

Abstract

Chapter 4 bring At the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, December 1966, the People’s Liberation Army Daily produced an editorial piece through which the ‘spirit of selflessness’ of Dr Bethune assumed an unprecedented revolutionary and collectivist force. This ‘mass line’ exegesis identified skill and expertise as forms of private property, only to proceed to an even more radical identification of the ‘self’ in and of itself as a bourgeois relic. What followed was a series of attacks in the medical press against Liu Shaoqi’s ‘self-cultivation’ model, propagating the abolition of the self as the only true way to the New Man. In the course of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), this new doctrine was applied to a wide spectrum of clinical operations, from tumour removal to the control of diabetes, which were rendered battlefields for proving the Maoist truth about the ‘self’ as against technocrat biopolitics. In turn, medical doctors were called to embrace self-abolition, in the image of Dr Bethune, and engage in long processes of confession and rectification against the ‘self’ as the ultimate enemy of socialism.