Cultural Revolution

I was introduced to the study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by two long-time role models, Professors Shaojie Tang and Yongyi Song. Before I got into this field, for me, the term “Cultural Revolution” (Wenhua da geming) signified a mysterious decade that elder people mentioned but never really talked about. Instead of the political struggles among the leaders, I am more interested in ordinary people’s lived experiences during that chaotic decade. Consequently, I investigated the gender performance of the sent-down youth who voluntarily or compulsorily came to the Production and Construction Corps in the then underdeveloped Northeast China.

Based on the fieldwork, I co-authored an article “The Annihilation of Femininity in Mao’s China: Gender Inequality of Sent-down Youth during the Cultural Revolution,” and published it in China Information. In that article, we argue that state rhetoric appropriated a discourse of women’s equality to silence women and depoliticize gender as a political category. For urban sent-down youth, gender inequality was absent from public discourse, and conflict between the sexes was concealed by a state discourse that constructed class struggle as paramount. Gender as a category was credited with solely political and pragmatic meaning, and was utilized as a means for the communist government to achieve its own political and cultural utopia.