Re-forming the Chinese national body: Emulation campaigns, national narrative, and gendered representation in the early Maoist period.

摘要

Since 1949 the Chinese Communist Party utilised national propaganda campaigns to disseminate stories and visual representations of Chinese heroes and model workers. Lionization of individuals who had made extraordinary contributions to the building of a modern Chinese socialist nation created a phenomenon of heroism. This dissertation examines the materials produced by the CCP in conjunction with the phenomenon of heroism as a critical component of the political culture of 1950s China. I explore issues of nation building and citizenship during this historical period by asking the deceptively simple question: what type(s) of people were considered model members of the newly constituted Chinese nation?; The answer to this question demands attention to the often problematic relationship between Chinese nationalism, socialism, feminism, and international acceptance. I address these issues by reading propaganda materials as efforts to construct a Chinese “national body” (understood as the body of the model hero and the body politic). I argue that the CCP promoted an historically contingent and heterogeneous national body in the 1950s as it sought redress for various forms of oppression. This study reveals that the national narrative of the CCP in the 1950s incorporated a variety of differently gendered bodies while also struggling over the meanings of masculinity and femininity in a socialist nation. By the 1960s, however, the gendering of the national body in Maoist iconography acquired a more fixed form. I argue that the homogenisation of the national body by the late Maoist period had roots in the political culture of earlier emulation campaigns while also foreclosing alternative constructions of the national body circulating during the first eight years of the People's Republic of China.