Online Session C2

Maoist Utopias on the Ground : Labour, Economy, Gender, and the TAZARA Railway

Work Report (Gongzuo Zongjie): Monitoring Labor in Socialist China 

Daniela Licandro

This paper explores practices of labor monitoring in 1950s China. As labor constituted one of the most important dimensions of socialist life, monitoring labor became crucial for meeting productivity standards and ensuring workers’ contributions to the building of a new socialist nation. The enforcement of specific directives and work standards managed through a hierarchical organization of work units such as factories, rural cooperatives, political and cultural institutions, was accompanied by the dissemination of self-examination practices that required individuals to critically reflect on their own work. Monitoring one’s performance then became a form of labor in and of itself that profoundly impacted the constitution of working subjects and working communities. Focusing on “work report” (gongzuo zongjie) as a distinct form within a wide array of socialist genres of life writing, this paper examines the intersection between the imperatives of monitoring labor and the promotion of new writing practices. The study of official guidelines on how to write a work report  will be coupled with the analysis of specific instantiations of work reports to shed light on the structural and linguistic features of the genre, as well as on its relation to the project of creating productive subjects and China’s socialist future. 

Leaping Forward in Nanjing: Urban Communes and productive peddlers, 1958-1960 

Katherine Molyneux 

During the Great Leap Forward (c1957-1962), a series of radical policy experiments attempted to realise Mao's vision of China’s communist future, reshaping Chinese urban culture in the process. Recent research has drawn attention to the impact of the expansion of state power into everyday life and of female employment in the cities (Ding, 2013; Lanza, 2019). Aiming to augment and complicate existing knowledge, this paper explores the reorganisation of the daily economy by the state and its social effects during the urban commune movement of c1958-1961 in Nanjing – a period marked by institutional efforts to turn housewives and itinerant peddlers into productive participants in a socialist workforce. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, I examine the loss of economic independence of petty merchants and handicraftsmen due to their temporary assimilation into state-sanctioned employment, and how they navigated this loss with limited means. In doing so, I show how the urban communes disrupted an extant independent economy of everyday exchanges between small merchants and housewives. Although the commune experiment was short lived, Mao’s industrial utopia fundamentally restructured daily life in the city, bringing it within the ambit of the state.

Women on the “New Socialist Countryside”: Body, Desire, and the Peasant “Other” in Female Sent-Down Youth’s Diaries 

Shan Windscript 

Between 1968 and the early 1980s, millions of young people in China were relocated from cities to the countryside as a result of Mao’s “Down to the Countryside” campaign. Known as zhiqing or “sent-down youth,” they were tasked with socialist self-transformation and agricultural modernization. Notably, this spatial shift also carried gendered connotations: the discourse of socialist modernization frequently positioned the countryside as the backward “other” both constitutive of, and threatening to, urban industrial modernity. This paper, based on unpublished diaries by female zhiqing and oral interviews with the diarists, explores the intersection of gender, space, and writing in women’s self-imaginings. Through a close reading of the sources, I show the complex role of the countryside in shaping the diarists’ construction of an ideal womanhood: on the one hand, diarists actively pursued a socialist, modern subject-position through narrating body and desire in hegemonic language; on the other hand, their self-narratives relegated the “rural woman” as their constitutive “other,” fixing it to a state of abjection. Ultimately, this paper shows that the the peasant “other” both enabled the diarists’ identification with state-socialist modernity and, paradoxically, reinforced their (dis)location, highlighting the diary’s propensity to amplify the tension and contradictions within women’s discursive subject-positionings.

Side by Side with African Brothers: Labor Experiences on the TAZARA Railway Construction Sites 

Aolan Mi 

This paper examines the ground-level experiences of 50,000 Chinese workers and technicians dispatched to East Africa from 1965 to 1976 for the construction of a railway, known later as the TAZARA Railway, linking Tanzania and Zambia. The railway, often regarded as a symbol and physical manifestation of Third World solidarity, played a crucial role in enabling two newly independent African countries to break free from their reliance on the colonial transportation network and to achieve economic self-reliance. However, scant scholarly attention has been given to the relationship between the railway’s ideological underpinnings and the everyday labor experiences of the rail workers at the construction site. Through an examination of memoirs, novels and poems written by rail workers who participated in the construction, this paper shows how a sense of Afro-Asian working-class brotherhood was constructed through literary representations of bodily interactions between Chinese and African rail workers, as well as through the transfer of technical and indigenous knowledge, offering new perspectives to understanding the technological utopia of Maoist China.