State power and personal sovereignty in the Cultural Revolution

How do people cope? How do different people cope differently with the biopolitical projects of state? These questions are the subject of this paper. I will attempt to answer these in the context of the Cultural Revolution, Chinaʼs period of violent political upheaval and socialist reform that took place between 1966 and 1976.

The Cultural Revolution also forms the background to English, a semi-autobiographical novel by Wang Gang (2009), situated in Chinaʼs far-western Xinjiang province. The author tells the story of his growing up in Ürümqi, capital of Xinjiang province. At the time of the Cultural Revolution Ürümqi was a “bleak backwater” in the authorʼs own words.

The authorʼs experiences in Ürümqi, a backwater on the periphery of Chinese state, means that the experiences described in English are both particular to Xinjiang as well as general to other Chinese ʻperipheriesʼ. They are particular in that Xinjiang at that time had a tendency to bring certain types of people together – a point that I will come back to later. At the same time, as a reviewer of the book points out, “there might be thousands of ʻLove Liusʼ in other parts of China”. Love Liu is the protagonist of English. Itʼs through his eyes, and the relationships he builds with the people around him – his parent and other adults, his classmates and friends, his teachers and his English teacher in particular – that Wang Gang provides a glimpse at what life was like in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

Various reviews, taking a perspectives on these relationships, have been published following the English translation of the book. Particularly noteworthy is Danweiʼs interview with the author. I will instead situate my analysis in a reading of the Cultural Revolution as a biopolitical project of the state.

• Download ‘State power and personal sovereignty‘ as a .pdf document.
• Leader image taken from Baidu Baike.

Since I’ve enrolled into my master programme – Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam – I’ve had very little time to post new articles to my blog. Hence this experiment, in which I publish my academic writing to my blog.