第4期 Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 29 (1), 2017 上

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Volume 29, No.1 (Spring 2017)
Defining the Modern Wenren and the Role of the White Female Body in Modern Chinese Literature and Art
Angie Chau
In this essay, Chau discusses the ways in which the white female body is depicted in the fiction and non-fiction writings of Fu Lei (傅雷, 1908-1966) and Xu Xu (徐訏, 1908–1980), and the paintings of Chang Yu (常玉, 1901–1966). For male travelers from China studying in France during the Republican period, the figure of the non-Chinese woman occupied a central role. From the foreign women that Fu Lei encountered on his ocean journey and the French love interests wooed by Xu Xu’s semi-fictional protagonists, to Chang Yu’s early female nudes, the white Western female figure embodies a range of feminine qualities and male anxieties, as imagined by the male travelers.
Chau argues that the modern wenren, in order to compensate for loss of domestic currency, gained cultural legitimacy from abroad by claiming discursive authority over the female Other through means such as social critique, self-exoticism, and aesthetic distortion. In these cases, the new perspective gained by the physical act of travel to Paris, the detached space of ultimate creative freedom, allowed the Chinese male travellers to imagine the possibility or potential of a renewed appreciation for wenren masculinity in the face of its declining popularity back at home in China. Through a process of double othering, the figure of the non-Chinese woman emerged as an affirmation of the social-cultural value of the modern wenren affiliate.
Socialist Modernity in the Wasteland: Changing Representations of the Female Tractor Driver in China, 1949–1964
Daisy Yan Du
Women’s relationships with agricultural technology in rural China gradually underwent transformation after the communist takeover in 1949. In traditional China, the gender-based division of labor, although remains an ideal, had often relegated rural women to weaving in the domestic sphere, while farming brought men into the public sphere. But Chairman Mao and his cohorts regarded the traditional family and family-based agricultural production as sites of patriarchal oppression and during the agricultural collectivization campaigns in the 1950s, Mao advocated that women should join socialist production in the public sphere. Women and men would do the same work in the fields and would thus be theoretically equal.
As a part of this campaign to modernize women’s role in Chinese society, numerous representations emerged featuring rural women doing men’s work. Women were pictured using machines traditionally associated with men, especially the tractor, one of the most advanced pieces of agricultural technology available at that time. Indeed, the female tractor driver became a popular symbol of the socialist new woman, and she was represented as playing an important role in the major effort to reclaim the wasteland of China on state farms. She appeared not only as a real person in photos, news reports and other official documents, but also as a fictional figure in literature, arts, and films. As a popular icon, she stood for the achievements of socialist modernity: technological modernization in agriculture (the use of the most advanced machine) and, more importantly, gender equality (women handling modern heavy machines as men did), which is the focus of this article.
Maoist discourse of gender equality advocated for the sameness and equality of women and men in the public sphere and encouraged gender-neutral representations. In fact, it has been a long-held belief that Maoist women were represented as masculine as part of the rhetoric of “gender erasure and desexualization,” which subordinated sexual and gender differences to class difference in socialist China. Although this argument has undoubtedly captured the general trend at that time, recently more and more scholars have begun to expand this view by revealing the subtle gender stratifications in Maoist representations. While these recent studies address socialist women in general, this article specifically focuses on the representations of the female tractor driver and highlights the roles of machines, technology, and socialist modernity in the (trans)formation of gender and sexual differences, a topic rarely discussed in previous studies.
To this end, this article establishes a dialogue with at least two strands of scholarship. The first one is the role of machines and technology in feminist (re)formulation of gender and sexual differences. The second is the study of women and Chinese (socialist) modernity. In engaging these studies, this article demonstrates that the representations of the female tractor driver from 1949 to 1964 were far more subtle and complicated than is generally recognized, despite the egalitarian and masculine ideals of official rhetoric. While the representations in the early 1950s might fit in well with the official discourse of gender erasure and gender equality, by the late 1950s there were more and more representations that constructed the female tractor driver as gendered in traditional configurations of femininity, which was the very antithesis of socialist modernity. The changing representations of the female tractor driver thus embodied not only the promises but also the limitations of socialist modernity at a time when China underwent drastic yet uncertain socio-historical changes at the threshold between the old and the new.
After the Commune: Postsocialist Collectivity, the Commodity, and Mo Yan’s People
Darwin Tsen
Collectivized agriculture, carried out under the name of the People’s Communes, only lasted for two decades in the People’s Republic of China, but its consequences were far-reaching. With the termination of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the Communes soon followed suit in 1978. The end of collective agriculture and the beginning of the Opening and Reform period meant that the sense of collectivity–an anchor of belonging in society for individuals and a necessary, normative component to society’s survival–that emerged under China’s Mao years was completely overhauled. How do individuals imagine themselves relating to each other and society after socialist practices waned in contemporary China? What imaginations of collectivity are available now, in the form of the novel?
This essay analyzes two of Mo Yan’s early novels, both published in the late 1980s, to explore the ways in which the village institution relates to the fictional collective and how such a relationship is mediated through specific commodities. When read together, Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads tell a story about how, after China’s decollectivization of agriculture, post-reform institutions and collectives gradually succumbed to the logic of the market. “After the Commune” argues that it is by aligning these texts with the historical referent of decollectivization in 1978, that we can better understand the relationship between Mo Yan’s artistic form and history and by extension, discover what his “people” reveal how Chinese collectivity as it is imagined in the post-reform era.