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Fish in and out of water: Changing representations of the relations between the Chinese people and their Liberation Army (1966--1986)

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Fish in and out of water: Changing representations of the relations between the Chinese people and their Liberation Army (1966--1986)

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Content FISH IN AND OUT OF WATER: CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CHINESE PEOPLE AND THEIR LIBERATION ARMY (1966-1986) by Jeanette Barbieri A dissertation presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (POLITICAL SCIENCE) December 2005 Copyright 2005 Jeanette Barbieri UMI Number: 3219814 3219814 2006 UMI Microform Copyright All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. ii Dedication For David iii Acknowledgments Like any project that is years in the making, this one would not have been possible without the assistance of a great many people. My advisor, Stanley Rosen, has proved a mainstay of support among them with his useful readings of this work and his unfailing generosity with his time. Eugene Cooper’s enthusiasm for the project’s ideas and careful readings of its early drafts helped enormously in making sense of the soldiers’ stories. In early stages, Harvey Nelsen, Judith Grant and Daniel Lynch provided support above and beyond that requested of them. Essential also to the project’s completion has been R.H. Dekmejian’s unerring sense of the utility of gentle pressure in nudging the work along. Lei Guang always had a thought worth pursuing whenever he was consulted and John E. Wills and Alex Xiao similarly proved themselves valuable resources. On the ground in Beijing, London, and Hong Kong, Victor Yuan of Horizon Research, Katie Hill and Harriet Evans of the University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, Jean Hung of the University Service Center at Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Shen Mingming of the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University all facilitated smooth access to materials in their various collections. Supplementing the generous support of the Department of Political Science and East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California have been additional grants that have helped underwrite research across three iv continents. I’d like to thank the Unruh Institute and the Graduate School of the University of Southern California for providing me an opportunity to access the Chinese poster archives at the University of Westminster and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. My work with the Pacific Rim Council on Urban Development and Eric Heikkila helped underwrite some initial exploratory travel to establish the feasibility of this endeavor. I am similarly grateful to the University Service Center of Chinese University of Hong Kong for supplying sufficient funding to make a final sweep of its very extensive pictorials collection. Very materially helping out with accommodations to allow for these and other collection visits have been Chen Shu, Wu Qing, Stephanie Ho, David Hathaway, Lin Hsiu-ling, Lynn Sacco, Hoyt Sze, Liang Wei, Charlotte Furth, Liang Xiaojun, and especially Rebecca Shea. The technical assistance rendered by Gayatri Acharya and Venkatesh Sundararaman has been instrumental to bringing this dissertation to a larger audience than those that can access the screen of the laptop on which it was written. Yayoi Kato has proven herself to be similarly reliable in a technical crisis. My mother, who began her own doctorate after I did mine, supplied me with a flesh and blood model more accessible and real than the iconic figures examined in the following pages. It is difficult to say who won the competition between us to finish our degrees first. I will always remain grateful to Ayesha for seeing this project through to its conclusion. In every debt acknowledged above I v have incurred a larger obligation to David Bello, who’s helped shaped the life we’ve lived throughout this project, and without whom it and so much else would have been unthinkable. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vii Introduction 1 Chapter One Militarization and Its Icons in the Modern Chinese Nation 30 Chapter Two The Theory of Symbolic Violence in CCP Practice 77 Chapter Three Maoist Decade Pictorial Practice 139 Chapter Four Reform Decade Pictorial Practice 208 Conclusion 299 Bibliography 316 vii Abstract Like most Chinese nationalist groups from the late nineteenth century onward, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a militarized path to modernization. Long after the revolution was won, the CCP’s conviction that a militarized society was the instrument of national progress formed its fundamental ideological structure. This doctrine, the non-sectarian inheritance of over a century of Chinese nationalism, elevated the army to the apex of an ostensibly egalitarian society through a discourse of symbiotic unity with the masses that elided an actual imposition of a hierarchy. This dissertation examines the role of this discourse’s visual imagery, as manifested in “official” publications on the civil-military relations, in establishing and maintaining the new CCP hierarchy, whose ideological peak was literally embodied in the ultra-militarization of the Cultural Revolution. The dissertation further examines the significance of the ideological shift to reform and opening in 1978. I argue that this shift from military to civil dominance substantially arose from fatigue with a over a century of militarized modernizationist fervor, a fervor and a fatigue that I chart via the political posters and pictorial publications employed in this study as its main primary sources. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, which exposes the subtly coercive tactics employed to conceal hierarchical structures of dominance behind facades of neutral discourse expressed in quotidian text and imagery, provides the viii theoretical frame of reference. The dissertation, with due consideration of Confucian and Republican precedents, tracks hierarchical shifts in nationalism and ideology as expressed in the discursive modeling of Maoist political communication. These shifts are analyzed to show how CCP social hierarchy was constructed, concealed and yet continued from the Cultural Revolution’s discursive constructions of a radical army-mass egalitarianism to marketization’s successor discourse that disaggregated soldier from civilian through a general, and unprecedented, demilitarization of Chinese society. 1 Introduction Framing the Issue This study examines problems of ideology and nationalism through an inquiry into transitions in civil-military relations between the People's Liberation Army and the citizenry of the People's Republic of China from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) through the current reform period, which began in 1978. The shift from a militarized society in the sixties to a commercialized society in the nineties was the major social transition that occurred during these decades and it was accompanied by commensurate changes in ideological discourse and value orientation, both of which serve to maintain the legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party and to construct various civic identities compatible with its rule. As a supplement to the existing literature on state-military relations, I consider a third party to this relationship, namely Chinese civil society in general. I focus on the state's ongoing construction of congenial identities for its military personnel in dynamic interaction with their civilian counterparts and the means by which the state has continued to represent these varying identities to the populace at large as a fixed extension of the party itself. Civil-military discursive products from the Cultural Revolution through the early reform period express, through the conjunction of text and imagery, the 2 socio-political consequences of an ideological shift from a militarized revolutionary society where military identities were intended to embody strength through class purity to a commercialized society where strength is now predicated on nationalistic professional expertise. Close scrutiny of civil-military themes in Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) political art in particular reveals more than an overriding concern with unity in its promotion of various designs to achieve this end. Just as vividly, the pictographic expression of the people's relationship with their army also exposes ruptures along these manifold twists of social fabric. The ruptures appeared accidentally, however, in a design intended to present unity through uniformity. This preoccupation with an overarching theme of unity in civil-military pictorial representation appears somewhat curious in the context of the Cultural Revolution’s larger privileging of struggle and contradiction over harmony. 1 Ironically, the civil and military had to be symbiotically joined in a united front to conduct the symbolic struggle that would root out contradictions posed by class enemies and various other regressive forces. In other words, civil-military unity would enable divisive struggle against those social elements hostile to the new order embodied in this same unity that sustains progressive societal cleavage. 1 Lowell Dittmer, Ethics and Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Berkeley: Studies in Chinese Terminology, No. 19, University of California, 1981. 3 Chinese military institutions have proven as permeable to the reforms as any other organization and are thus unexceptional in this context. The military and its relation to the broader society, however, have played a uniquely influential role in modern PRC history. Indeed, civil-military relations, as reflected in state discursive products, such as official directives, journals, pictorials, posters and film, have been a fundamental indicator of a Chinese political system's viability throughout the twentieth century from the warlord period, through the Republic to the People's Republic. In this sense, Chinese society has been militarized in one form or another since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and militarization is the primary political mode in which the people of China have experienced, if not envisioned, modernity. The PRC, however, is distinct from its predecessors in that the government is completing the process of effecting an apparently successful transition from a primarily militaristic to a mainly commercialized, hence more civilian, society. This has created a dilemma for a communist party whose legitimacy was constructed during a long period of revolutionary militancy and whose ideological discourse, consequently, was predicated on anti-capitalist confrontationalism rather than managerial competence. The resulting problems in civil-military relations are, therefore, one facet of the larger legitimation crisis faced by the Chinese Communist Party in the wake of the reforms that persists to this day. 4 Relevant Literature Pictures remain an important medium to project official ideals in moments of rapid ideological reform. Though the reformist party-state’s failure to supply a meaningful and coherent legitimating set of ideas, or its "ideological vacuum," has been widely remarked upon, little scholarly attention in the west has been devoted to analysis of the efforts of China's party-state bureaucracy to craft a new ideology out of the remnants of the old. In contrast to the scant work on the current crisis of faith, much has been written on the revolutionary fixation that persisted amid the political vicissitudes of the Mao years. Among the many texts concerned with this subject, one stands out for its treatment of the deliberate construction and employment of Maoist ideology in the earliest years of its inception. A student of China's current ideological struggles would do well to begin with Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, which charts the development of Maoism in the caves of Yan'an. 2 Apter and Saich's work explores the creation of historical myths that articulate the Maoist socio-political ethics upon which a new political community was forged in a study that reveals the genealogy of the foundational values of the People's Republic of China. The authors describe Yan'an as a "logocentric" model, a site in which political concerns are privileged over economic ones, a hierarchy sustained in both Maoist theory and its practice. 2 David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994. 5 It is notable that this hierarchy will be turned on its head in the reform period, when economic results will determine political acceptability and a spirit of compromising expediency supplants perceived political purity. As a "logocentric" model, Yan'an would be poorly understood through a rational choice analysis predicated on assumptions of atomized self-interest rather than on those of the structuralizing power of discursive practice. Ideology as a specific application of this power is consequently more susceptible to discursive forms of analysis and this is precisely the justification for Apter and Saich's theoretical approach. The two authors examine Yan'an in an effort to construct a discourse theory of Chinese politics. Yan'an, as the ground of revolutionary myths, an early laboratory for communalism, and a totalizing educational project, or, in the words of the authors, "an instructional republic," seems ideally suited to their chosen mode of analysis. 3 Drawing on an eclectic collection of structural and poststructural theories advanced by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, historian Hayden White, and critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Apter and Saich attempt to show how stories of national loss, chaos, and salvation are strained through a sieve of a particular type of political logic that presents itself as a single correct revolutionary line. Through the telling and re-telling of such stories and the instillation of their political logic into the Yan'an community, the CCP generates symbolic capital, 3 Apter and Saich: 19. 6 Pierre Bourdieu's term for a semiotic endowment of prestige, which is, after all, the primary function of any discourse community. The CCP then transforms this symbolic capital, in a rather mysterious process somewhat dimly explained by the authors, into political power. Regardless of the opacity of the process, the graphically depicted relationship between soldiers and civilians illustrates how inequalities in the cultural or symbolic capital between the two spheres frustrate Cultural Revolution attempts to picture a stable model of civil-military symbiosis. Informed by many of the same cultural theorists and also, like many works on nationalism, by Benedict Anderson, Chen’s work on emulation models in the early Maoist period sheds some further light on the means by which the CCP embodied particular revolutionary values in propaganda figures that helped to construct a political culture and sense of community collectively articulated “through the combined narratives of individual and national liberation.” 4 As Chen notes, diversity continually hobbled the CCP struggle to impose coherence in Maoist exemplars. Such tension is readily discernible in the production and presentation of the Chinese People’s Volunteer heroes, the Chinese forces who fought in the Korean War, 1950-1953, at the immediate conclusion of the Chinese revolution that established the PRC in 1949. 5 Perhaps because soldiers towered 4 Tina Mai Chen, Reforming the Chinese National Body: Emulation Campaigns, National Narrative, and Gendered Representation in the Maoist Period, University of Wisconsin Madison History Dissertation, 1999: 4. 5 Chen (1999): 131-197. 7 above other models, their remoteness proved that much further removed from the masses of whom they derived and represented. Hung’s study of wartime popular culture complements the rhetorical focus of spoken and written discourse in Saich and Apter and Chen by encompassing visual cultural forms of propaganda cartoons as a contributory channel of political communication with which to militarize society and enlist its support for anti- Japanese resistance from 1937-1945. 6 Hung argues that the CCP victory over the Kuomintang in 1949 rests in part on its successful channeling of popular culture as a force to further its revolutionary agenda. 7 Assisting this process are visual representations of soldiers that raise the morale of existing troops while resonating with peasants sufficiently to induce them to enlist. 8 Methodology I track such representations and their shifts primarily by employing a methodology of discourse analysis, by means of which I conduct a transhistorical examination of a select group of graphic texts with respect to the way in which they reveal how the military views itself, how the party wishes it to be viewed, and the degree to which the wider realm of the target audience of civilian society 6 Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 7 Flath’s work on nianhua, the New Year folk print medium, similarly documents the appropriation of rural popular cultural forms by CCP propagandists from the 1940’s through the 1950’s. James A. Flath, The Cult of Happiness Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. 8 Hung, (1994): 94, 194. 8 graphically conforms to or deviates from these expectations. I chart ideological shifts, as reflected in visual and textual propaganda materials, primarily through shifts in political imagery and secondarily through corresponding shifts in rhetoric intended to amplify the pictorial representations it accompanies. While much has been written on the political legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party, little of that attention has focused on the mass media mechanics of this transhistorical process, which is especially visible and significant in terms of civil-military relations through its as yet unexamined graphic record. Without publishers' or other archives in China, gaining access to a comprehensive set of political posters is now impossible, and buying out the market supplies to supplement the collections that chance has largely shaped is beyond the modest means of most researchers. Consequently, the sample relied upon in this study comes from posters housed either in the most complete western archives of Chinese political posters in the UK and the US, namely the collection held by the University of Westminster in London and that of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, or those published in a handful of books cataloguing their images. This study is fortuitously able to take advantage of market reforms to gain access to posters made available by the interaction of major policy shifts, namely the reforms themselves, market forces driven by a nostalgic demand, and scholarly interest arising from a growing awareness of the significance of popular culture, and particularly visual culture, in the peasant 9 society of CCP China. It only now becomes possible, for these reasons, to conceive of and access these visual materials as artifacts. This study examines pictorial renderings and their accompanying verbal text from two sets of sources well endowed with Chinese communist civil- military icons, namely Chinese political posters and The PLA Pictorial, an illustrated monthly periodical on military life produced by the army for consumption within and beyond the armed forces. Like other serials in the constellation of national and provincial pictorials, The PLA Pictorial functioned as a gallery might in a capitalist state by showcasing art in a mass produced form. 9 Images selected among these two sets of sources contained explicit representations of mass-soldier relations, that is interactions between ordinary people, or masses, chiefly peasants, workers and youth, as opposed to elites, and common rank and file PLA troops. All works included contain figurative representations of ordinary soldiers and civilians. The task of distinguishing pictographically between soldiers and officers becomes more complicated after 1965 when military rank, and its paraphernalia, is formally abolished. Though distinctions persist beyond formal abolition, this sample includes images of figures generally represented as rank and file, excluding those identified in the text as commissars or elite in any respect. Criteria for selection included representations of general and public behavior 9 Ekaterina Degot, "The Collectivization of Modernism," in Boris Groys and Max Hollein, eds., Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era, Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 93. 10 modeling. Images between soldiers and their own civilian family members or private friends were excluded, for example, as they modeled appropriate familial relations of soldiers rather than mass-soldier relations more universally. While in some rare instances depictions of groups of soldiers or civilians were included without their counterparts, they were only selected if the image made an explicit statement on how soldiers and people related to one another, as when one group is depicted taking leave of one another, for example. Standing ambiguously between these two categories of army and civilian population is the People's Militia. Although most all soldiers emerge from the masses, once soldiers their identities and social roles divide sharply from those of civilians. Militia members' social categorization, in contrast, is primarily shaped by the labor in which they predominantly engage, agricultural labor in most cases, though it is important to note that, in Mao's view, "there is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier." 10 As soldiers had indeed long sustained themselves in remote postings by producing crops for their own consumption, it is not difficult to appreciate soldiers' familiarity with the peasants' lot. Still, as peasants tended not to undertake military duties in general, one wonders what it was Mao thought made them resemble soldiers. Nevertheless, their distinctions are blurred and combine harmoniously in the dual identity of peasant-soldier, or student-soldier. 10 Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, New York: Praeger, 1961: 73. 11 The same criterion of soldier-civilian interaction was imposed on the selection of images posters and pictorials alike, though the media remain quite different. Like political posters, The PLA Pictorial is an equally rich source modeling the naturalized 'like fish to water' relations between people and army. Though its publication was somewhat erratic in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, publication never ceased throughout the years covered in this study. Indeed, publication shrank to a slim vestige of its earlier diversity, disrupted by the chaotic conditions of the Cultural Revolution. Consequently, the impact of the diminished serials greatly increased. Amplifying the posters’ prominence was their positioning in a field devoid of significant alternative images during the Cultural Revolution years in which alternate forms of publication had largely been disrupted. Thus, posters effected a greater impact during this time than in subsequent years as they coexisted with competing visuals of the emerging “free” market. While posters are sometimes copied and further disseminated in the Pictorial, increasing their prominence and potency, the other images within its pages that often differ from those of the posters in form and content are nevertheless not without significant impact. Chief among these differences between poster and pictorial material is the military source of much of the illustrations. Soldiers' own artwork, though often touched up by professionals, mainly in the form of oils and watercolors, is sometimes published and particularly privileged during the Cultural Revolution as 'people's' or amateur art eclipsed professional work just as expertise was scorned 12 among other intellectual endeavors for the fresh ingenuity and political wholesomeness of the untrained mass approach. 11 Though the CCP anti-elitist stance had been deeply entrenched from its beginning, professional artists fall under sharpest scrutiny and attack during this era. Amateur artists became increasingly necessary to the Cultural Revolution as Mao felt professional artists, along with intellectuals, were suspect for their adherence to individual, rather than collective, endeavors. 12 Artistic vulgarity was now juxtaposed with militancy rather than aesthetic skill. 13 While the vacillation between "red" and "expert" currents in Chinese politics continued throughout CCP history, at least through the early reform era, this particular emphasis on mass art with its attendant disregard for technique was one initiated by the Great Leap Forward art directive stipulating that masses, here understood to include rank and file soldiers, be trained in artistic technique. 14 While authorship of the posters is frequently not attributed during the Cultural Revolution in which individual accomplishments were deemphasized, non-poster or photographic artwork reproduced in the pictorials is printed with authorial attribution. 11 Andrews discusses the turn from professional to soldier-peasant-worker art as part of the larger denunciation of expertise during the Cultural Revolution, when red became untrained, or informally trained. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1949- 1979, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 350. 12 Kraus points out that published amateur art did not reflect a meritorious sample of unschooled works, but rather a strictly vetted for politics product. Richard Curt Krauss, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004: 54. 13 Summary of the Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces with Which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted Chiang Ching, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968: 17 (hereafter, Summary). 14 Maria Galikowski, Art and Politics in China, 1949-1984, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998: 81. 13 Also included in the PLA Pictorial are lianhuan hua, the serial pictures akin to comic strips (which were occasionally printed on propaganda posters as well) and a good many photographs. 15 The photographs tend to accompany stories with fairly substantial amounts of printed text in contrast to the spare text of posters. As the text and the images together tell their story of soldier-mass harmony in the pictorials, these samples are understood as an organic whole and their text is read alongside the accompanying visual representations like the scroll painting and accompanying calligraphic poems of the imperial period. Though many of the visualizations contained in the pictorials are less intrinsically complete and independent of accompanying text, the themes and messages of the picture stories bear a remarkable similarity to those of the posters. Indeed, the very same images not infrequently appear in both media, their prevalence indicative of their iconic status. Even without relying on the words that frequently frame the images, pictorial art over these twenty years is extremely explicit. The political language of these visual artifacts articulates itself with resounding clarity, which is another factor in accounting for their popularity as a propaganda medium. Their embedded messages are easily read and hence, favored as a convenient vehicle of party ideology. 15 Chen quarrels with this problematic English translation of lianhuan hua, and its other common rendering, picture book, while acknowledging there is no adequate alternative. She relies on the term picture stories in her title. Shangyu Chen, Popular Art and Political Movements: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Chinese Pictorial Stories, New York University Program in Art Education Dissertation, 1996: 22. 14 Obviously, posters and pictorials did not constitute the entirety of the field of visual images produced by party, masses, and army to project a set of civil- military iconography. Diverse canvases from films to operas to postage stamps to schoolbooks to national monuments could have also been sifted for the stories they told of army involvement in society. Additionally, woodcuts, calendars and New Year pictures tell similar tales. Even consumer goods, from watches and clocks to porcelain ware, carry civil-military morality lessons painted onto their surfaces. 16 Across the board in Cultural Revolution China, the ubiquitous civilian adoption of everyday household goods like enamel mugs, duffel bags, blankets, and canteens in the army style all attest to the militarization of material culture. 17 16 The commemorative watches bestowed on soldiers who took part in the quelling of the Tiananmen protests come to mind as one such example. Another of an alarm clock with a face of little red book brandishing militants is included in a plate in Scott Minick and Jiao Ping, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990: 119. Wain includes a porcelain vase with an image of a soldier calling on an old peasant woman and her granddaughter; Zou Baolin, “Porcelain Vase Showing the PLA Supporting the Peasants,” Peter Wain, Mao: Art for the Masses, Revolutionary art of the Mao Zedong Era, 1950-1976, Cemaes Bay, Angelsey: Peter Wain, 2003: 38. For further examples of relevance in porcelain ware, see Fan Jianchuan, Wenge Ciqi Tujian, (Cultural Revolution Porcelain Wares), Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 2002. 17 Hooper laments the dearth of scholarship on the material cultural texts such as the poster and billboard, but a good deal of more recent research discussed above as well as that on badges, postage stamps, and papercuts complements some older work to address this issue. Beverley Hooper, “From Mao to Madonna: Sources on Contemporary Chinese Culture,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 22 (1994): 161. On Mao badges, see, for example, Melissa Schrift and Keith Pilkey, “Revolution Remembered: Chairman Mao Badges and Chinese Nationalist Ideology,” Journal of Popular Culture, 30 (Fall 1996): 169-97; Robert A. White, “Mao Badges and the Cultural Revolution: Political Image and Social Upheaval,” International Social Science Review, 69, 3-4 (1994): 53-70; Melissa Schrift, Biography of a Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001; and Robert Benewick and Stephanie Donald, “Badgering the People: Mao Badges, A Retrospective 1949-1995,” in Belief in China: Art and Politics, Deities and Morality, Brighton: The Green Center for Non-Western Art and Culture, 1996. On print forms of material culture beyond posters and pictorials, see James A. Leith, “Postage Stamps and Ideology in Communist China,” Queen’s Quarterly, 78, 2 (1971): 176-186; and Andrew Bolton, “Chinese Papercuts from the Cultural Revolution,” Arts of Asia, 27 (11-12, 1997): 79-87. 15 Nevertheless, taken together, posters and pictorials comprise a broadly disseminated canvas on which various party ideals are pictured for a mass audience. As states do, socialist China projected its power through a host of discursive practices. Though this study is concerned with visual culture, some graphic media have been excluded here for reasons of limited circulation and therefore audience. Others such as any extant preserved wall posters simply lack significant civil-military content and typically any pictorial content as well. 18 Further, unlike the other graphic forms listed above, wall posters were extraordinarily fleeting. Still other visual forms, such as the model operas of the Cultural Revolution, have been excluded for their failure to endure in their original formats during the two decades covered by this study. Recorded live performances, however, remain available on film. Posters and pictorials are the focus here for their broad base and relative longevity in a field of ephemeral political communication media. Pictorials were produced for soldiers' view to promote institutional pride and to showcase a particular military image to civilians. Though not accessible to all civilians, pictorials circulated broadly among soldiers. Posters enjoyed similar reach among the civil and military spheres alike. This is a distinct advantage over 18 Were it not the case, wall posters would be a problematic source as so few of them were documented and recorded. Most wall posters also lacked pictorial content. For a published sample of the contents of the ephemeral medium of wall posters in China through the Cultural Revolution period into the early reform era, see U.S. Department of Defense Intelligence, Wall Posters in the People's Republic of China: A Chronology, 1966-1979, Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1979. 16 postage stamps, which were without much currency in rural China, home to the bulk of the Chinese population, or monuments, inaccessible to those off site in a developing society in which most citizens lacked significant mobility. Unique among other visual materials depicting civil-military exchange, political posters enjoyed a comprehensive audience. Relations in poster propaganda were modeled for all Chinese citizens. Chinese Political Posters This study examines the text and images of a collection of visual propaganda that explicitly depicts the relationship between the rank and file PLA members and the masses. While civil-military relations are commonly understood as the interface between military and political leaders, the set of relations addressed here involves that between common soldiers and the masses, comprised in this context of the remaining two groups in the soldier-worker- peasant triumvirate of the Chinese Communist Party. Party and army both produced an abundance of idealized representations of mass-soldier relations to model behavior and shape perception for soldier and citizen alike in order to inculcate a sense of cooperation and unity. Much of this material took the form of propaganda posters, a medium valued not least for its reach, as well as for its broad spectrum of appeal. 17 Indeed, propaganda pictures represent 'the most widespread form of Chinese visual art." 19 In a political order rejecting "art for art's sake," as Maoist China in its reading of Marxism did, political art, whether in the form of socialist realism or revolutionary romanticism, or a combination thereof, was art and posters were both available and fashionable. 20 Mao intended Chinese contemporary art to bend itself to meeting the needs of the masses. "In the world today," he reasoned, "all culture or literature and art belongs to a definite class and party, and has a definite political line. Art for art's sake, art that stands above class and party, and fellow-traveling or politically independent art do not exist in reality." 21 Thus, art functions as media of social reproduction through the power of representation and emulation. All art, then, had a line, or in other words, constituted propaganda, and its aim was to serve the broad masses. Mao's line, of course, was the mass line and political posters became a nearly ubiquitous mass art form not long after his speech. Well-suited to meeting Mao's mass service dictate for all art, the poster grew increasingly useful to the state. Like one-of-a-kind wall posters, or dazibao (big character posters), that were comparatively spontaneously and unofficially 19 Kuiyi Shen, "Publishing Posters before the Cultural Revolution," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 12, 2 (Fall 2000): 178. 20 For a discussion of the Marxist underpinnings of Mao-era art directives, see Galikowski, (1998): 37-38. 21 Mao's explicit initial denunciation of "art for art's sake" is contained in his 1943 addresses, Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art. The above passage is taken from MacDougall, Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, Bonnie S. MacDougall, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies Press, 1980: 75. 18 produced, mass-produced propaganda posters were destined for public display and so could be viewed by large audiences without the need to be purchased by viewers. 22 Their rapidity of production particularly suited a political machine with constantly shifting ideological campaigns. 23 Posters proved themselves easily capable of immediate response to newly issued political promulgations. As work units typically prompted by ideological movements purchased posters, a single poster's audience tended to be work unit-wide. 24 Whether an individual bought a poster or saw a mounted poster on a bulletin board display did not alter the way it was viewed and understood. In a restricted physical field, propaganda posters consistently delivered political messages, often without a trace of ambiguity. The prominence of human figures allowed for in the posters perfectly met the needs of socialist model emulation campaigns, many of which had significant content to convey regarding mass-soldier relations. Posters were tantamount to socialist citizen conduct manuals. Ideal expressions, postures, even actions were fleshed out by the figures in the frames. Limited literacy posed no obstacle to message delivery as posters were spare with text and often provided a visual context that rendered accompanying slogans or exhortations redundant. Herein lies the practical (hence, anti-aesthetic) significance of repetition. 22 Still, the state encouraged private consumption of posters. Galikowski, 87. 23 Galikowski notes the speed with which messages were printed on posters, Galikowski, 98. 24 Shen, (2000): 181. 19 As with other visual forms, propaganda posters personalized the nation for illiterate rural populations otherwise disadvantaged in understanding some quotidian events in their locality in larger political terms. 25 Posters handily illustrated state mandated individual roles in various movements. Indeed, the poster became the party's ideological transmitter of choice during the Cultural Revolution, when the political graphic art form peaked in popularity. 26 As favored mass political communication trumpets, posters were ubiquitous. Their iconography abstracted experience and promoted civic identity. And unlike other popular art forms, visual print media could be both mass-produced and widely disseminated. Their appeal and persuasive power mobilized people effectively into mass movements. Signaling ideological shifts, posters were viewed with interest by a mass audience that struggled to lead politically respectable and otherwise productive lives. The revolutionary virtues written on posters promoted a morality that guided both thought and behavior, encouraging an identification with the nation. While the party had striven to maximize political communication through cultural forms from its inception, the rapidly shifting political campaigns of the Cultural Revolution placed a premium on such attributes. Though, as Dittmer points out, politics had “been ‘in command’ in all aspects of Chinese society since 1949…its pervasiveness was never so complete and intense as during the Cultural 25 Hung makes this point in his discussion of spoken drama in the War of Resistance. Hung, (1994): 76-77. 26 For a brief history of the political poster in PRC political culture, see MacDougall, (1980). 20 Revolution.” 27 Moreover, though Mao's talks at Yan'an made explicit his insistence on the politics inherent in art, the Cultural Revolution further politicized culture by intricate readings that identified politically dangerous currents in artists' intentions and creations. To wage his war of symbolism, "Mao sought ways to politicize and instrumentalize cultural and aesthetic discourses, and to subject intellectuals to incessant coercive thought-reform, self- incriminations, and persecutions." 28 Beyond heightening the politicization of culture, the Cultural Revolution succeeded in aestheticizing politics. 29 This aestheticization of politics combined with a militarization of the civil to give prominence to graphic militia models. Semi-detached from the PLA, the militia neatly embody dual civil-military identity. As a key component of Mao's strategy of guerrilla warfare, the militia was intended as a line of defense to fight in concert with regular armed forces, particularly in the event of invasion. It is for this reason that their images in pictorial propaganda are so commonly set on the frontiers and that militia members tend to be portrayed as frontier-dwelling ethnic minorities. Militia-PLA interactions, on frontiers or elsewhere, are included in the selections of this study, as the militia is considered a sub-set of civilians. Though the militia performs military duties, such duties do not constitute the bulk of its laboring responsibilities and the militia therefore lacks the privileges and 27 Dittmer, (1981): 108. 28 Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000: 118. 29 Liu, (2000): 155 and 187. 21 prestige that attaches to at least the Cultural Revolution PLA. Hence, the militia's identity remains distinctly civilian. Its images gradually fade in the reform period as the doctrine of People's War, Mao's guerrilla strategy which relied heavily on militia units, is jettisoned for People's War under Modern Conditions, a hollow and catch-all code for professionalization, which downplayed the significance of the militia and folded its units into the reserves. General Characteristics of Mass-Army Relations Images Analysis of the selected materials reveals some ninety-five categories of civil-military interaction over the two decades covered in this study by which the discursive norms for identity formation through representation are revealed. Ranging from servant to instructor to savior, the roles of civilian and soldier are often shared, sometimes reversed, but not necessarily mutual. Often one side takes an action that is done to or received by the other side. Various sorts of assistance rendered, including transactions involving education and health care, typically fall into a straightforward giver and taker formula. Actor and receiver can sometimes swap sides over time or repeatedly interchange roles within a given time frame, though certain designated roles remain the exclusive purview of one side or the other, at least in terms of the way masses and rank and file are depicted, if not in fact, throughout the two decades studies here. During the Cultural Revolution, depictions of such cross performances appear frequently. Still, even when roles reverse, they often do so unevenly. Thus it is that while 22 soldiers and masses teach one another, soldiers teach more often. In actuality, there are periods in the Cultural Revolution in which civilian teaching becomes quite exceptional. Similarly, turns are taken in hosting; the masses more frequently host visiting soldiers than the other way around in a pattern that holds constant across the period covered in this study. Some roles, such as tour guide or inspirational model, are evenly interchangeable, but these remain exceptional. Unsurprisingly for the privileged institution, most of the role exclusivity belongs to the army. Soldiers, while nursed by civilians, do not receive skilled medical treatment by non-military practitioners, though army medics repeatedly treat civilians in the pages of pictorials. Similarly, soldiers may grant significant gifts to civilians, but not receive them, however hard civilians press. The image of soldiers smilingly refusing gifts is as common as that of civilians gratefully accepting goods of the army. For their part the masses alone greet and see off soldiers. This latter exclusion may seem obvious, as soldiers are so much more itinerant than civilians, but in actuality there was a great deal of movement among many civilian groups, particularly among minors in the early years of the Cultural Revolution as Red Guards and sent down youth streamed through and on out of the cities. Even youthful enlistees are depicted in large public farewells, but locally stationed troops are never in the crowds. Their presence is only on the convoys pulling enlistees out of their hometowns. Also exclusive to the masses and particularly those of middle age or older is their role in imploring the rank and file to redouble their hatred for the enemy and to avenge the deaths of their 23 loved ones. In such scenes, the enemy to which the masses refer takes the form of a foreign foe, rather than the class enemy to be found closer to home, and its nationality, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution in which these depictions typically occur, a time when memory of the Korean War was still relatively fresh, is American. Additionally, soldiers remain the chief initiators of action in these exchanges across the years of this study. It is not just that the graphic art depicts soldiers exclusively performing deeds in actions to, on, and for the masses, picture soldiers are far more active than the civilians they interact with. While civilians occasionally take the lead in teaching stationed troops the local language, ferrying troops, or guiding them through unfamiliar terrain, such services have more to do with the extension of hospitality that hosts tend to offer any guest, military or otherwise. Soldiers, on the other hand, when they are not rescuing life-threatened citizens, bestow gifts on, deliver health care to, and reunite civilians. With a dynamism that befits the soldier-hero, soldiers tend to direct activities, whether adventurous or mundane, while civilians are more frequently acted upon. In those instances in which civilians take the active role, they often do so in order to celebrate, for example by greeting troops; implore, as in cases in which appeals are made to avenge deaths; study, as exemplified in visits to troops in order to learn army organization; or award the army in ceremonies honoring military achievements and demonstrating civilian appreciation for those 24 accomplishments. Thus, even comparatively infrequent depictions of civilian action initiation ultimately reflect military dynamism. In contrast, military action inclines towards the performance of practical assistance, providing services such as public works construction, provisions supply, or simple bicycle, electronics, or even shoe repairs, to civilians in need that underscores the grateful passivity of civilians in such exchanges. Still, some images of civilian-directed actions toward soldiers in which soldiers are depicted as unequivocal receivers of the actions persist in pictorial accounts. Sometimes these take the form of traveler services, though not in the manner of railway services ranging from ticket purchases to baggage assistance, the giving of directions, or lost and found services, including reunion with lost family members, both children and adult, provided by soldiers to masses on trains and in stations. Instead, civilians often provide refreshment, usually boiled water at makeshift stands, to passing troops. In addition, rides on trucks will occasionally be given to soldiers with errands in neighboring locales. And civilians will proudly deliver their enlisting children into the armed forces. Some of these civilian-led actions can also be taken by the military. Instances in which the respective sides take turns initiating action include providing inspiration or motivation to other collectivities, performing nursing and caretaking tasks, or issuing congratulations on major accomplishments. Though exchanged, these activities are often not identically replicated, however. While both sides teach the other, soldiers tend to propagate political thought and 25 strategy, while local civilians serve as cultural ambassadors, instructing troops in local custom and language. Similarly with caretaking, the military assist the elderly by supporting them as they walk, carrying their bundles, or seeing to their domestic chores. As elderly soldiers are in actuality demobilized soldiers, civilian caretaking revolves around the supply of mending linens and uniforms and fashioning simple shoes for the rank and file. 30 General similarities in seemingly mutually exchanged services such as these belie real differences in the nature of those services supplied. Joint endeavors, however, are not uncommon. Together masses and soldiers agitate during the Cultural Revolution to implement Mao's vision of Chinese socialism, propagandizing, rallying and executing political study tasks shoulder to shoulder. Both sides also share the weighty burden of border defense, patrolling and otherwise remaining vigilant in small, mixed groups. The necessary countryside occupations of fishing and farming more commonly executed in separate army and collective spheres are not infrequently performed jointly, as is production work in industrialized areas. Unlike production, agriculture falls within the category of military arts. Thus, agricultural livelihoods overlap across civilian and military domains. While soldiers do not generally engage in industry unless they are joining their worker comrades in the factories, agricultural labor, traditionally and up through the period addressed in 30 This prominent motif makes its way onto decorative porcelain vases during the Cultural Revolution. Fan, “Porcelain Vase with Decoration of Old Lady Cutting Shoe Patterns for Soldiers to Show Her Support for the Army,” (2002): 147. 26 this study in the form of tuntian agriculturally self-sufficient military frontier colonies, as mentioned earlier, has long been part and parcel of a soldier's duties. Joint civil-military agricultural labor under normal conditions, that is times without emergencies or natural disasters, only begins to appear in the pictorial propaganda record during the Cultural Revolution. Scenes representing soldiers working the land among civilians are situated in collective farms rather than army plots, projecting the message that soldiers assist in collective labor rather than a message of mutual assistance. Not limited to the formal or formulaic, mass-army encounters continue in less structured leisure activities. Representative soldiers and masses are depicted at leisure when their labor is done, relaxing and recreating in song or games, among various other forms of amusement. That these pleasurable activities often accomplish incidental tasks renders them all the more enjoyable. A case in point is the outing made of a necessity to gather mountain herbs for use in traditional medicine. Joint political study sessions in informal home or outdoor settings are presented as these same sorts of recreational activities that also happen to fulfill an obligation, giving the impression that such endeavors are spontaneous, voluntary, even indispensable to the maintenance of symbiotic intimacy between people and army dictated by Mao's writings on the subject. Together army and people celebrate holidays, harvests, the meeting of production quotas and other political milestones. Troops stationed on the frontiers understood as remote, and 27 therefore picturesque, scenery, are frequently presented joining in the rituals and customs of the exoticized local non-Han ethnic minority community. In addition to these mutually performed activities are those unidirectional services further restricted by gender, ethnicity, locality, or age. Gender specific action is exemplified in the case of civilian women sewing shoes or darning uniforms for soldiers. On the receiving side of this equation, only old, rural women are descended on in their courtyards by teams of soldiers performing chores that include firewood chopping and gathering, sweeping, water fetching, etc. Delimited by ethnicity are instances of frontier minorities serving as militia scouts and local guides or just as commonly language and culture instructors to troops stationed on the border. Other services, all of them performed by soldiers, are exclusively provided to children. Included among these are academic coaching, help with homework and so forth, and more generally mentoring, where soldiers provide role model adult companionship to youth in a capacity similar to that provided by social service male volunteers to fatherless boys in the west, though PLA "uncles" tend to provide these services to clusters of children at a time rather than one on one. Finally, there are interactions restricted temporally by the custom of the political era. Throughout the Cultural Revolution's heady political theatre of the streets, performances and political demonstrations are engaged in cooperatively, though even then the PLA was sometimes depicted marching for the masses while masses are seen only marching with the army, that is, never for the army or by themselves, while leisure pursuits are shared, not in 28 the early years of the Cultural Revolution or in the reform era, but between these times. Still, most commonly political spectacle represents a joint effort. Summary This dissertation examines shifts in the visually choreographed relations between Chinese civilians and their People’s Liberation Army over periods of ultra-militarization to marketizing reform, during which a model of complementary segregation supplanted one of harmonious symbiosis patterned on a militarized identity. Chapter One begins by explaining the significance of iconographic mediations of ideology. To historically contextualize military modeling, Chapter One then traces the intertwining of militancy and modernity in the post-dynastic Chinese nation and ends by providing an illustration of the means by which graphic depictions inscribe hierarchy in putatively egalitarian relations between Han soldiers and frontier indigenes. Chapter Two proceeds to discuss Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence as the means by which this visual domination is effected. A review of Confucian and Maoist understandings of the role of political art and culture reveals the mechanics by which symbolic violence effects a subjection of particular meanings that confer power and authority that impose and buttress existing social inequalities. Chapters Three and Four go on to explore pictorial art’s expression of particular hierarchies in civil- military encounters by examining a variety of motifs over decades of revolution and reform, respectively. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the 29 revolutionary fatigue that impelled reform, while assessing the many enduring representations that persist through marketization and how they inform a CCP iteration of the CCP’s “professionalized” armed forces’ relations with their civilian counterparts. 30 Chapter 1 Militarization and Its Icons in the Modern Chinese Nation Theory and Practice of Ideology and Nationalism This study intends to examine the legitimation process of CCP ideology under modern conditions of mass media, especially the opportunities provided by the mass production and distribution of images, as manifested in the political messages inscribed in pictorial propaganda. For the decades under examination, the ideology that informs party-army constructions and embodiments of compatible civil-military socialist identities is a primary object of study. The importance of this task becomes obvious when it is understood that while generally speaking, "Chinese culture is strongly visual and semiotically promiscuous," CCP political culture considered the visual cultural aspects of political communication as a primary tool of party legitimation and quite deliberately deployed culture as such a political instrument. 31 Moved not just by the practical considerations of reaching a largely illiterate rural population, the CCP also expended great effort on the development of visual imagery because "Mao and his followers seemed to believe that symbols and pictures were more potent than mere words." 32 In other words, imagery could bridge the social gap between literate and illiterate to create a new China unprecedented in both its 31 Bob Hodge and Kam Louie, The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture: The Art of Reading Dragons, Routledge: London, 1998: 8. 32 Hung (1994): 269. 31 degree of unity and extent of egalitarianism. Imagery’s significance in CCP political culture for forging a new China remains largely unexplored territory in part because of a similar gap, prevalent in scholarly circles, between the “high,” and fundamentally urban, culture of the printed word and the low, but by no means exclusively rural, culture of pictures. This study takes an advantage and a challenge from a comparatively recent transformation of elite academic culture, substantially enabled by the legitimation of mass media, to seriously consider material previously and easily dismissed as “mere” propaganda as the practical implements of the technology of political power under truly revolutionary conditions of Chinese modernization. 33 The concepts of both nationalism and ideology are primary components structuring my analysis and, consequently, merit closer examination. Ideology, or what Bourdieu would term “symbolic violence,” is the strategy through which the state attempts to gain and maintain a hold on both military and civil society through means other than direct coercion. Nationalism, either as Gellner’s social homogenizing force by which the state attempts to cultivate a population congenial to developmental labor, or Anderson’s collectively imagined hallucination enabled by the communicative potential afforded by the development of print-capitalism, remained a critical ideological force in 33 Adorno, for example, dismisses propaganda as a hollow product of the culture industry, or standardization of culture, without significance or meaning and therefore unworthy of inquiry. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry Revisited,” New German Critique, 6 (Autumn 1975): 14. 32 twentieth-century China. 34 I consider nationalism as currently the most important manifestation of such a functioning ideology in a developing country such as the People's Republic. This is not to suggest that nationalism played no role in CCP legitimation before the reform period or that it was monopolized by the communists. Nationalism was the common language of the Chinese elite throughout the Republican Period (1911-49) and was of course central to Maoist ideology, as evidenced perhaps most paradigmatically during the Anti-Japanese War (which formally started, rhetorically, for the CCP as early as 1932 and persisted through 1945). Nationalism was also the characteristic idiom of post- war CCP pronouncements like conventional appeals to the motherland, efforts to establish China as the leader of the "Third World," and party historiography that redefines the significance of events and the CCP’s own relation to them. Rather than increasing its ideological impact, nationalism assumed a markedly different form under the reforms. The internationalist and revolutionary nationalism, albeit one with a muted rhetoric of ultimate national dissolution, of the Mao years gave way to a more internally focused project of wealth and power accumulation with an ultimate end of national strength for its own sake. Carrying over from revolutionary to reform China is the rhetorical foregrounding of the twin state efforts of industrialization and improved agricultural output. Despite the underlying continuity of ideological practice that always privileges the state, there 34 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, New York: Verso, 1991: 44. 33 has been a noticeable, and inevitable, reformulation of ideological discourse from the rhetoric of revolution to that of reform. Attendant to that change has been a movement from a universal good to a greatly narrowed more individualistic focus. Indeed, nothing is more definitive of the shift in regimes from Mao to Deng than this reformulation. Deng's pragmatic abandonment of revolution entailed an ideological transformation of epic proportions in the PRC. Obviously, the introduction of a new set of socio-economic relations abbreviated as "marketization" necessitated an equally new justification. Much to the CCP's chagrin, substitutes for Maoism during the reform era, such as socialist pragmatism, neo-authoritarianism, and neo-conservatism, have failed to match the coherence, and resonance, of their predecessor. The same is true for the character of the nationalism that took shape in the CCP during Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. Though partly a holdover, albeit in altered form, from the earlier regime, nationalism has continued to buttress party support through the reforms. Reform era nationalism retained but a single element, namely the developmental imperative to construct a strong Chinese state, of an earlier discredited ideology that was more comprehensive and compelling. Stripped of its former emancipative teleology and lacking in grand ideals, post- Mao nationalism was fixed firmly in the realm of practical material life. Where the state once promised transcendence of the nation-state system itself and freedom, it now offered more mundane material advancement in their stead. 34 Not only was the Maoist formula of first spiritual transformation to realize material transformation inverted, the spiritual component had disappeared entirely from early reform official discourse. A few years later when the state attempted to revive a popular preoccupation with spiritual crisis in its 1982 socialist spiritual civilization, jingshen wenming, campaign, the arousal of social forces proved difficult. The crumbling of the old utopianism that had so powerfully mobilized direct participation in the revolution left an ideational vacuum that remained unfilled in post-Cultural Revolution party discourses of national modernization. Some argue that this transformed nationalism failed to cohere in an effective system that could comprehensively fill the party's ideological vacuum until the 1990's, a period beyond the scope of this study. Yet, whenever it supplies the main justification of a state, developmental nationalism on its own provides but a shaky and opportunistic support that rests on a state's impermanently sustainable delivery of economic growth and the maintenance of stability. 35 Though China's political identity as a nation that has suffered exclusion, imperialism, and other violations helps sustain party-state authority and rule, like nationalism, this identity persists from before the founding of the People's Republic and, though valuable as a mobilizing force in occasional political campaigns, it is insufficient as an enduring source of legitimation. History, in concert with a broad perception of social progress, sustains party rule when it 35 Yu Huang and Chin-Chuan Lee, "Media and the Rise of Chinese Nationalism in the 1990s," in Political Communications in Greater China, Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley, eds., RoutledgeCurzon: London, 2003: 55. 35 supplies a means of making a particular, state-sanctioned sense of historical experience. The heightened public perception of a nation under threat from external aggression and at times within endured from the Opium War of 1839- 1842 through the Cultural Revolution with fluctuations in intensity prompted by foreign aggression and Chinese political campaigns waged by the Boxers (1899- 1900), May Fourth intellectuals (1919), Kuomintang, hereafter KMT, and CCP. 36 Cultural Revolution denunciations of Soviet revisionism and US imperialism largely fell silent with the death of Mao in 1976. The notion now chiefly of an external, rather than homegrown, source of endangerment was revived in the 1990's with more resonance in response to a litany of grievances, mostly against the US, that included the rejection of Beijing's hosting of the 2000 Olympics bid in 1993, meddling in China's missile tests near Taiwan in 1996, perennial "human rights" criticisms, etc, in short, interference in matters of Chinese sovereignty. As China's reforms took hold and society demilitarized, the state's mobilizing power on the basis of its citizenry's outside threat perception somewhat diminished. Instead, feelings of foreign menace articulated in anti- imperialist and anti-hegemony discourses employed by the state, Chinese media 36 While some scholars term Chinese anti-foreign reactions Han chauvinism in a tradition that expands to include reactions against Manchus back into the pre-Qing dynasty (1644-1911) writings of Wang Fuzhi (1619-92), anti-foreign reaction to the Qing diminished as the Qing adopted Han cultural practices. Such efforts quelled rather than overcame anti-Manchu sentiment, which the Chinese revolution ultimately revived. Moreover, the anti-western discourse of the 19th century represents a particular response that has been echoed through to the present. For the lingering pre-Qing Han chauvinism argument, see Yu Huang and Chin-Chuan Lee, (2003): 64, following Dillon, M. ed., China: A Cultural and Historical Dictionary, London: Curzon, 1998: 330-1. 36 and academics often provoked popular outcries in more spontaneous mobilizations that the state was unable to control, as in reactions against the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Rather than accruing automatically to the advantage of the state, such surges in the salience of national unity imperatives can prove dangerous. The tide of popular outrage can easily turn against the state if it attempts to curb spontaneously nationalistic movements that may impinge on social order or disrupt foreign relations. As a result of this ideological weakness, since the death of Mao, the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist regime has hung on its economic performance without a very sturdy or cohesive epistemological undergirding. The Iconographic Mediation of Ideology Following the shift in national priorities from revolution to reform is a reshuffling of political imagery, a resource of critical importance in political communication and one employed by the reform party-state in its fumbling to erect a new ideological structure. Not least for their ability to convey complex ideas simply and widely, icons were valued by the CCP party-state in its efforts to socialize its citizenry. Their indispensability in part issues from their plasticity; icons are empty signifiers. Nowhere is this quality more manifest than in the endless appropriations made of Mao’s visage and figure, particularly after his 37 death that ended the Cultural Revolution in 1976. 37 Since the Cultural Revolution propagated Mao’s image into an inescapable graphic, the icon has been widely and variously deployed. Practitioners of the Chinese reform era studio art genre of Political Pop of the early reform period have slyly both commented on and contributed to the exponential expansion of significance of the Mao icon in the wake of its unmooring to the socialist project, a discussion to which I’ll return in the concluding chapter. 38 More often than any other form, Political Pop presents Mao as commodity, a generic product. 39 Indeed, Mao’s image demonstrates icons’ ability to unify even across class lines, a potential perhaps unintended by Cultural Revolutionary authorities responsible for the Mao image’s iconic elevation. This slipperiness is worth noting, too: icons, once established, elude the control of their architects. The illustrious career of the Lei Feng icon further demonstrates this dilemma. Attempting to avail themselves of their own icon’s mutability, orchestrators of CCP campaigns of the 1980’s seeking to revive and refashion the Lei Feng icon met with predictable difficulties when their audience 37 Barmé has produced a somewhat exhaustive reader that chronicles the Mao icon under marketization. Geremie R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. 38 Under market conditions, Political Pop’s cynicism richly rewards, building careers and fortunes for many of its practitioners. Some of the better-known of this set include Wang Keping, Zhang Hongtu, Yu Youhan, Wang Guangyi, and Geng Jianyi. 39 Articles discussing this phenomena and the Mao icon’s centrality to Political Pop include Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Art Journal, 58: 2, (Summer 1999): 46-59; David Clarke, “Reframing Mao: Aspects of Recent Chinese Art,” in Art and Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, (1996): 236-249; and Orville Schell, “Chairman Mao as Pop Art,” in Mandate of Heaven, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994: 279-92. 38 either insisted on adhering to earlier incarnations of the model soldier whose virtues had lost purchase or when the image had expanded to signify so many different and contradictory qualities that it ended in signifying nothing at all. I will discuss this latter phenomenon in some detail in the chapter on reform decade practice. 40 Charting the iconographic history of a set of prescriptive relations, embodied in a figure such as Mao’s or Lei Feng’s, for example, allows a glimpse into the mechanics of ideology. Under the reforms, icons of the Chinese socialist tradition such as the radiant red sun vanish from pictorial propaganda, while others, such as Mao portraits, appear with sharply diminished frequency and eventually in irreverent contexts that reconfigure their significance. Transnational socialist symbols like the multiethnic crowds attended by Chinese model soldiers, workers and peasants in Chinese landscapes were jettisoned in favor of an inconsistent constellation of formerly discarded populist national cultural icons and an emerging array of scientific and technological symbols. The ideological reforms ushered in by the Four Modernizations included shifts in both the messages contained in the CCP's propaganda and the medium in 40 Lei Feng’s problematic transformation into a paragon of reform values is recounted in several sources. See, for example, Stanley Rosen, "Appropriate Behavior under a Market Economy: An Analysis of Debates and Controversies Reported in the Beijing Youth Daily," in Chin-Chuan Lee, Power, Money, and Media: Communication Patterns and Bureaucratic Control in Cultural China, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000; Mei Zhang, “Official Role Models and Unofficial Responses: Problems of Model Emulation in Post-Mao China,” D. Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication, Stamford: Ablex Publishing Company, 2000; and Gay Garland Reed, “The Multiple Dimensions of a Unidimensional Role Model: Lei Feng,” Leslie Nai-kwai Lo and Man Si-wai, eds., Moral and Civic Education, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996: 254. 39 which those messages were delivered. Though the official discourse of the party- state continued to be expressed in party directives, news organs, and pictorial propaganda, increasing mass access to electronic media gave rise to an emphasis on electronic conduits of ideological exhortations. No less central to the party's transmission of political messages, visual texts increasingly took the form of video images, eclipsing the significance of the pre-reform-era propaganda poster print. Mass access to the means of producing electronic media similarly somewhat peripheralized print media and radio broadcasts that had formerly been exclusive organs of the state. It is not that all the old media, such as radio broadcasts for example, dropped out of use, but propaganda resources were increasingly devoted to electronic media, and this has a particularly deleterious effect on the traditional propaganda poster. The reforms have expanded electronic media's scope and appeal to the state's target audience, the citizenry, and this has in turn encouraged the state to avail itself of electronic media's perceived advantages as a propaganda tool. Further, the introduction of new media alters established iconography, burying or re-shaping old forms as it conjures up new ones. Accompanying these shifts in the media are, of course, changes in the message. In addition to conditioning people to the new socio-economic realities of the age of reform, the new lines adopted by the party are also intended to deal with the problems generated by the adoption of the reforms. Liberalization has given rise to corruption, splittism, crime, migration, and a host of other social ills, 40 all of which need to be addressed by the party. These consequent pressures result in state policies, which need to be disseminated, and in social responses to the changing situation. Some recent English language literature in Chinese politics, literature, art history, communications, and anthropology has begun to historicize aspects of official discourse as expressed in the disappearing medium of poster propaganda, and to apply the results of this analysis to contextualize the new messages and their media, particularly in the form of billboards. 41 Previous work had largely ignored pictorial elements of official discourse possibly because the historical trajectory of these elements, coterminous with the ideology they represented, was in its early and middle stages. With the decline of pre-reform and early reform ideology, and the corresponding disappearance of their attendant media, certain dimensions of official ideology have become more accessible and more significant to scholarly inquiry. This has encouraged an intensified examination of discursive political power in the PRC as a result of one of the more serious problems engendered by the reforms, namely CCP political legitimation. Among the many changes wrought by the ten years of turmoil that was the Great Proletarian Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the graphically represented relations between the People's Liberation Army, hereafter PLA, and the broad masses of Chinese society became increasingly interactive, 41 Steven Wayne Lewis, "What Can I Do for Shanghai? Selling Spiritual Civilization in China's Cities," in Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Michael Keane and Yin Hong, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. 41 interdependent, and symbiotic. Propelled by a sense of urgency to effect immediate social transformation into the communist classless ideal, Cultural Revolutionary forces (including Mao, the “Gang of Four,” who initiated cultural and political policies, and Defense Minister Lin Biao) exercised broad control of the state and imposed a set of cultural and military directives that militarized society and orders that extended the civilian authority of the army, further privileging an established elite institution. The ultra-militarization of the Cultural Revolution resulted from these complementary trends of army mimicry among civilians and military authority in civilian affairs. These alterations together blurred civil-military distinction and produced a visual cultural field of harmonious interchange and permeation wherein the two sides cooperated as putative equals. Yet even as this radical egalitarianism imbued the pictographic record, attendant images disrupted the fluidity of roles by displaying a clear hierarchy between ordinary soldiers and civilians with soldiers at the vanguard of society. Pictorial propaganda's representation of an idealized harmonious symbiosis between the rank and file soldiers and their broad masses helped to both establish and sustain the primacy of the military over the civilian realm. By presenting prescriptive images of interchangeable unity as natural and immutable, Cultural Revolution forces conveyed the inevitability of objective transformation, concealing actual power differentials between the two spheres while aborting the potential of alternative visions that would challenge this structure of dominance. Ironically, a Chinese socialist hierarchy, one privileging 42 the armed forces, replaces its capitalist predecessor to effect the elimination of class stratification. Thus, classless society was to be realized through militancy in an uneasy Chinese accommodation to socialist theory. My work intends to draw attention to the significance of the practical application of the aesthetic dimension of Mao Zedong's militancy for a general evaluation of Mao's political practice and its enduring legacy. To that end, I examine the specific graphic medium of officially produced political posters and other graphic content of the Jiefangjun Huabao, (People's Liberation Army Pictorial, hereafter PLA Pictorial), which provides a rich source of civil-military imagery. A number of photographers and artists, both amateur and professional, inside and outside of the army, working as either individuals or in groups together produce the political imagery of the CCP visual culture examined in these pages. This study understands the artists, editors, and journalists who jointly comprise the institutions that produce and select the work printed in civil-military themed pictorials and poster prints to be, in Polumbaum’s terms, “neither automatons nor free agents.” 42 Constrained by the shifting political imperatives of a Marxist- Leninist order that rejects political neutrality in either the arts or the mass media and instead adopts an instrumentalist approach to both realms, these actors obviously also seek to represent truths as they see them within these constraints. It is crucial, following Bourdieu, to regard official CCP cultural artifacts as 42 Judy Polumbaum, Of the Party, By the Party and for the Party—and the People: China’s Journalists in an Era of Reform, Stanford University dissertation, Stanford: 1989, 11. 43 mediated by the agents who produce them within state constraints and whose own interests are in many ways in conflict with those of the state. He explains: We must remember that ideologies are doubly determined, that they owe their most specific characteristics not only to the interests of the classes or class fractions they express (the function of sociodicy), but also to the specific interests of those who produce them and to the specific logic of the field of production (commonly transfigured into the form of an ideology of ‘creation’ and of the ‘creative artist). 43 Further complicating this endeavor, in the reform years, is the necessity to serve the market, in addition to the party and the people, or at least, themselves. Part of the problem of succeeding in this endeavor was the reforms’ introduction of the notion of a party and public interest at odds. This bind is encapsulated in Zhao’s manuscript title of Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. 44 Zhao refers in this instance to her own area of expertise, which is communications, but it applies equally to my expanded focus here that includes artists, as it does to intellectuals, or cultural workers more generally. As the official voice of the party, the media carried substantial authority and influence in constructing revolutionary citizenship. Obviously crucial to all modern political regimes, media influence held particular influence over Cultural Revolution politics. Dittmer characterizes the CCP’s investment in political 43 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson, ed., Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991: 169. 44 Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market and Democracy in China: Caught between the Party Line and the Bottom Line, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. This theme also organizes a recent anthology. Chin-Chuan Lee, ed., (2000). 44 communication as a fundamental reflection of the political culture of the era, which based political authority on a kind of conditioning effected through the production and consumption of prescriptively positive imagery that coalesces state and society: Authority seems to be based upon a morally consensual communication system. Solidarity is engendered through an interactive process of mutually reinforcing messages. For a government to be morally legitimate its citizenry must see, hear, and speak only good things about it. 45 Indeed, control of communication channels provided the foundation for Chinese political authority during the years examined here. Media control could enable the more comprehensive seizure of political power, as it did for the Gang of Four when it rose to a position of indisputable authority at the onset of the Cultural Revolution. 46 Symbolic authority under conditions of an official monopoly of political communication, while incomplete, could nonetheless remain distinctly powerful in mediating party directives and Maoist proclamations to the masses. 47 Much of this mediation was effected pictorially in a variety of forms including photographs, paintings, woodcuts, and lianhuan hua, or serialized moral narrative text and drawings of many of which have long, as Murray reminds us, “played a part in forming and disseminating social norms and political authority” 45 Dittmer, (1981): 111. 46 Ibid., 52. 47 Ibid., 94. Also, Patricia Stranahan, Molding the Medium: The Chinese Communist Party and the Liberation Daily, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990: 3. 45 in Chinese political culture. 48 Together these genres supplied a range of formats in which to visualize identities to be appropriated by state subjects for whom they were disseminated in posters and pictorials, as well as in countless other forms of material culture. By eliminating the inegalitarian aspects of the relations between the identities its political art offered, the CCP’s visual field invited the Chinese citizenry to imagine themselves as equal contributors to a narrative of national progress. The History of Militarization of Modern Chinese Society In an attempt to initiate a process of demystification, this study concerns itself with the evolution of that post-liberation revolutionary line into an ideology struggling more within the confines of global capital than against it as reflected in the imagery of civil-military relations. While this study takes pictorial propaganda rather than orally transmitted political narratives as its focus, the value reorientation between the two derives from the historical rather than rhetorical differences studied as the conditions have moved from a pre-Liberation to post-Liberation ideology, one in some sense that has already been transformed into political power. The shift retains the value of symbolic capital, now produced by a de-revolutionized developmental nationalism that substitutes for the former revolutionary currency. Despite the rhetorical retention of 48 Julia K. Murray, “What Is ‘Chinese Narrative Illustration,’” The Art Bulletin, 80, 4, (December 1998): 602. 46 revolutionary politics as encapsulated in Deng Xiaoping's 1978 exhortation as new head of the Central Military Commission to somewhat contradictorily "make the army a powerful, modernized, professional revolutionary military force," reforms deliberately undermined the army's revolutionary practices and stripped the institution of much of its political status. 49 Though now discarded, revolutionary imperatives had privileged the army and militarized social forces. Military institutions prove no less essential to more generically modernizing discourses of national strength and power. Yet even under the reforms the rhetorical commitment of those institutions to serve the broad masses endures. The quintessential role of the soldier, from the early years of party history to the present, is to serve the people, as Mao Zedong's now famous 1945 essay "On Coalition Government" attests. This army is powerful because all its members have a discipline based on political consciousness: they have come together and they fight not for the private interests of a few individuals or a narrow clique, but for the interests of the broad masses and of the whole nation. The sole purpose of this army is to stand firmly with the Chinese people and to serve them whole-heartedly. 50 Mao’s outlook arises from a position as a guerrilla writing on the battlefield under wartime conditions. In this formulation, the citizen-soldier would be complemented by and owe her/his service to a militarized society. Revolution’s intertwining with the birth of the modern Chinese nation reversed 49 Su Wenming, ed., China's Army: Ready for Modernization, Beijing: Beijing Review, 1985: 101. 50 Mao Zedong, "On Coalition Government," Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968: 302. 47 the customary low regard for the military, elevating the army over civil society even while claiming it existed to serve that society. This problem was one of the main contradictions that the Cultural Revolution had to deal with; a hierarchy had to be imposed in order to realize a classless society. This was, in many ways, the contradiction faced by the Chinese revolutionaries of 1911, who had to impose their own unequal socio-political hierarchy to realize a modern democracy. The revolutionaries of both 1911 and 1949 chose the military as their preferred means of attaining their political aspirations. The conflict between the Marxist theoretical teleology of class dissolution and the Chinese imposition of military privilege to achieve it arises directly from China's historical experience. Chinese twentieth century modernizers concluded that the nation had to militarize to modernize. The historical experience of the republican era which continued to resonate throughout the Mao years was in part a legacy of revolutionary experience distilled in the political thought of Sun Yat- sen. After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic, Sun felt that military rule would be the best means of consolidating power and supporting his Revolutionary Party's cultivation of civic identity. This "revolutionary government" would stabilize social conditions and prepare the Chinese nation's populace for modernizing reforms during a period of 48 indeterminate duration following the revolution as social conditions ripened to allow for democratic rule. 51 The Chinese conviction in a military path to modernization remained remarkably consistent throughout most of the twentieth century. Nothing short of war and a populace bent in the struggle, it seemed, would further national progress. Certainly the accomplishments attained through the turbulence of the first half of the last century engendered the revolutionary culture that predominated in the Mao years of the PRC. Speculating on the impact of the militarized striving for modernity, Lary and MacKinnon make further claims. “Perhaps the recurrent resort to violence in post-1949 China has more to do with the legacy of war than with other factors such as ideology,” they suggest. 52 McCord argues that the initial entanglement in military conflicts and civil wars arose from the fragmentation of political authority. 53 Indeed, political fragmentation was both cause and consequence of military conflict before that conflict ultimately resolved that fragmentation in a more lasting, though no less militarized way, with the CCP’s establishment of the PRC in 1949. For Waldron, it was the rampant militarism of the warlord period that hitched the resolution of the nation’s problems “to a rapid adoption of the radical and revolutionary 51 Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990: 295. 52 Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, “Introduction,” in Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, eds., Scars of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern China, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, (2001); 12. 53 Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism, Berkeley: University if California Press, 1993: 245. 49 vocabulary of the Left and a new receptiveness to the politics of the Left.” 54 Revolution relied on citizen-soldiers in its vanguard and depended on a militant populace in its rear to wage its struggles. Consequently, it is impossible to discuss the ideal role of the soldier in the visual codes of CCP propaganda without consideration of that role in dynamic interaction with civilians. In short, civil and military identities are mutually constituting and must be examined accordingly. Though the ways in which the army's social service or character may be rendered shift with the exigencies of the state in different moments of its history, as do notions of who the people include, no matter how it is understood, the measure of the soldier's value as the people's servant remains constant. The formula for just how the PLA might best serve what kind of people depends on the course of larger ideological debates. Thus, current identity formations determine the military's social role. The army labor in factories and communes purported to engender unity and, more obliquely, humility and gratitude, on the respective sides of soldier-laborer and worker-benefactor of that labor through the Cultural Revolution. Civil-military symbiosis was felt to ensure social harmony, national unity, and political wholesomeness by diminishing "mountain-top-ism," or elitism, bureaucracy, and formality. Thus, propaganda of the era depicts the two sides engaged in a cooperative effort to almost literally reconstruct and maintain the Chinese nation, 54 Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924-1925, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 10 and 211. 50 not by complementary labor, but by sharing the same tasks and completing them alongside one another. In such images, collective labor appears to extend beyond the collectives themselves in an arrangement of a literally joint endeavor between formerly functionally distinct social groups. Despite these shared endeavors, subtle distinctions between the two domains persist and prevent the merger of the separate identities. As Chinese political culture discharges its debt to revolutionary thought, the preoccupation with ideational transformation loses ground to one with material development. In Deng's pragmatic way of thinking, "the mission of socialism is the development of production potential. True socialism and communism are not poverty but the search for the fastest road to development." 55 Unlike Mao’s production focus on heavy industry, Deng’s encompassed light industry, thus initiating a shift in emphasis from production to consumption. To that end, specialization was encouraged. What was now felt to ensure the smoothest production was the strict separation of responsibility. Thus, soldiers somewhat ironically begin to model service to the people by dividing themselves from civilians. Direct civil-military interaction persists, but at a lesser frequency. Whether apart from or alongside the people, however, the soldier's overriding ideal remains service to the masses during both revolution and reform. 55 Taciana Fissac, “Social Anomie and Political Discourse,” in Taciana Fisac and Leila Fernández- Stembridge, China Today: Economic Reforms, Social Cohesion, and Collective Identities, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003: 160. 51 While the revolution-making that comprised the paramount military obligation to the people during the Cultural Revolution brought the army onto the factory floors and into the commune fields, the army's chief reform era imperative vis-à-vis the people of social order maintenance deprived the PLA of its primary agitational purpose for constant civilian intermingling. At once a necessary condition of sustained economic development and its result, as national defense was felt best secured through defense of stability, this mission was now the army's principle service to the masses, a condition articulated in civil-military imagery. Far more of a challenge for soldiers than revolutionizing the masses under the Cultural Revolution, enforcing stability under marketization demanded an infinite expenditure of effort under the geographical pluralism, economic disparity, and educational diversity reintroduced into Chinese society in general, and the armed forces in particular, by the reforms. In the army, this process of de- homogenization reversed a tradition of drawing officers from the rank and file, ultimately resulting in their sourcing from college-educated, urban populations, in a move that alienated the peasant-based ranks. Military morale further suffered from a reversal in economic and opportunistic disparity between the civilians and soldiers. Where the army had enjoyed higher pay and greater opportunities for advancement than civilians in previous years, civilians were outstripping soldiers in both respects in the early years of the reforms. 56 Against its own institutional 56 Jianxiang Bi, "The Clash of Family Values: The PLA's Grassroots Officer Couples," Journal of Family History, 25: 1 (January, 2000): 112. 52 interest, the military truly served the people by defending a status quo that demoted martial status. Its task proved increasingly difficult. Ironically, the reforms that had sought to stabilize a population reeling from a decade of revolution introduced measures that undermined sources of stability under those turbulent years. In response to changing societal conditions and in pursuit of an increasingly elusive social order, political art evoked distinct, but complementary civil and military toil. Early reform period graphic art directs various social forces to make distinct contributions to material socialist modernization, a ubiquitous exhortation in the pictorial propaganda produced by the party for both military and more general consumption. The erosion of core revolutionary values of voluntarism, class struggle, radicalism, iconoclasm, even the realization of communism when rhetorically, and paradoxically, justified under a market economy is sometimes reflected and sometimes reacted against in the civil-military graphic propaganda record. Once a joint venture of PLA and Chinese masses, class struggle is abandoned and class identity rendered meaningless after years of porous and arbitrary class labels and the downfall of the arbiters of classification, the ultra-left Gang of Four chief among them. As in many of its fellow post-socialist states, reform presented China with a host of new social problems. Marketization engendered not only the 53 material cost of unemployment, but cultural dilemmas of lost values and identity, resurgent commercialization, and mutating nationalism. 57 Disastrous campaigns like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution's ten years of turmoil had hollowed out Maoism's class struggle militancy, leaving "widespread disillusionment regarding open-ended political commitments and a pronounced cynicism toward those that claimed or appeared to perform good deeds." 58 The heavily promoted materialism of the reforms ultimately displaces the ideational focus of the earlier CCP years. Eventually, even ideology itself goes on the market, with rising consumption of nationalistic paraphernalia and both print and visual media, an appetite that extends to the heretofore discarded Maoist memorabilia of Mao badges, Red Guard armbands, political posters, etc. 59 By the 1990's, patriotism "becomes a highly saleable commodity." 60 The seemingly totalizing commercialization corroded revolutionary values of simplicity, frugality and selflessness, leaving what many feared was a moral vacuum in their wake. The masses’ fatigue with revolutionary altruism did not immediately engender a comparable civic virtue, but did foreshadow the conversion of this altruism into a commodity, a process initiated 57 See Aleš Erjavec for a comparison of socialist legacies and problems of transition in his "Introduction," to Aleš Erjavec, ed., Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 3. 58 Stanley Rosen recounts public opinion flowing against self-sacrifice and Good Samaritanism from 1982 in through the mid-nineties. Rosen (2000): 163. 59 Schrift and Pilkey, (1996): 193-4. 60 Yu Huang and Chin-Chuan Lee, (2003): 54. 54 in the 1980’s, that played on consumer nostalgia, a turn of events to which I will return in the conclusion. This transition in political economy is not without consequences for civil- military relations. By sharply dividing labor and de-valuing revolution as a creator of climates hostile to markets, capitalism separates soldier from citizen, herding troops back into barracks and divesting them of the authority that allowed for their ideological evangelism among other social forces. Citizens are relieved of their defense responsibilities as the militia shrinks in size and importance. The reform state urges citizens and soldiers alike to consider their social duties more narrowly as values of distinction replace those of uniformity. Marketization's dissolution of collectives and its attendant reintroduction of household responsibility diverts some focus to individual endeavor, thus atomizing a good deal of striving formerly undertaken more cooperatively. This effect is underscored by a heightened attention to material effects and a consequent discounting of ideational projects that formerly joined soldier and citizen. It is not until the reforms take hold that post-dynastic mainland China begins to envision a demilitarized means of national development and modernization. 55 Iconographic Issues Models The Chinese Socialist Model Soldier Socialist model figures tend to be associated in the popular imagination with China's comparatively "red," or revolutionary fervent, past, though this is a misconception. The prominence of models does not indicate a waxing of militancy in Chinese political culture. It is rather the type of model promoted that reflects the ideological bent of the nation in a given moment. Political campaigns to promote particular model soldiers come and go, but the propaganda device of the model itself endures, adapting its form to the requirements of the state and the imagination of both the publishing house workers who produce it and the sometimes formulaically requisite broad masses or consumer-citizens who inspire the art in general. Soldiers model technical ability or self-denial depending on the exigencies of the spirit of the time, concretizing and embodying abstract concepts now easily grasped. Like other models, soldiers translate party policies into codes of conduct. Thus are military models a constant throughout CCP history and even earlier. Pictographic and textual models reverberate throughout Confucian biography, which was valued as a means to set standards and inculcate moral teaching in order to further the paramount Confucian aim of producing suitable state subjects. Models propagated central state directives more effectively than the emperor's vermillion rescripts alone could. A convenient device for political 56 elites throughout the dynastic system, “exemplars…provide the bearings for contriving community.” 61 As visual propaganda was valued equally to words, portraiture complemented verbal biography and was no less crucial to this endeavor of political community building. Confucianism set great store in teaching not just by example, but by lived human experience related in portraiture and biography. Like Marxism, Confucianism asserts that social environment determines behavior and holds propaganda, or "education," to be indispensable in the political instructional process of subject construction. It dispensed with the ethereal figures of popular religion, promoting instead a series of earthbound creatures and their deeds in the practical, everyday world. The Maoist reliance on models to construct citizens in such a way as to be congenial to state interests derives from this Confucian legacy. Confucian moral education taught by example, thus encouraging imitation. 62 With their shared emphasis on self-cultivation, both Maoism and Confucianism presented emulation models to prompt comparison between the consumers and their model that would, in turn, inspire the consumers' internalization. 63 Reflecting public virtues, heroes served a vital function in political socialization. One tradition that arises from this emphasis is the lienü, or exemplary women, genre, which dates from the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) 61 Roger T. Ames, “New Confucianism: A Native Response to Western Philosophy,” Chinese Political Culture: 1989-2000, Armonk, NY: 2001: 78-79. 62 Börge Bakken, "Modernizing Morality? Paradoxes of Socialization in China during the 1980s," East Asian History, 2 (December 1991): 129. 63 Stefan R. Landsberger describes this logic in Chinese Political Posters from Revolution to Modernization, Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1998: 26. 57 text, Lienü Zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women). In some respects, the lienü models are more akin than earlier military models to CCP models, even male soldier models, as lienü and CCP model standards highlight relatively obscure, often common, and anonymous characters. This is not to say, however, that military models were an invention of Maoist China. An abundance of pre- modern model soldiers appeared in official biographies and popular cultural forms of story telling and opera, The Story of Yue Fei, a Song Dynasty general, being the most well known among them. Confucianism in many ways is both the target of the Cultural Revolution and the indigenous cultural tradition that distinguishes China from other nations and thus informs Chinese socialism. Nevertheless, the tension between these two roles did not prevent the CCP from adapting useful Confucian pedagogical tools. Maoist models departed from their predecessors both in style, by adapting Soviet socialist realist practices, and in substance, by inverting the Confucian emphasis on text over image. 64 This discursive inversion was, of course, the popularization of a definitive and constitutive practice of the traditional elite. The influence of modernity, particularly in the form of mass rather than elite media, is also apparent. By maximizing representation's transformative potential among illiterate audiences for political mobilization, the party 64 For a discussion of the effects of the Confucian exemplary model tradition on Chinese socialist models, see Stephanie Donald, "Children as Political Messengers: Art, Childhood, and Continuity," Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999: 84. 58 effectively exploited the “exemplary” power of traditional discursive practices unhampered by tradition. This quality further marks a major contrast between Confucian literati and Maoist revolutionary identity construction projects in the modern recognition of the necessity for mass participation. The socialist realist style of CCP graphic models sometimes allowed models a brief, digest form of biography in text that accompanied the image but often abstracted them from a fleshed out personality to an iconic class representative, an everywoman without story or individuality. In the hands of the CCP, pictorial propaganda became a medium through which to represent and so realize socialist modernity within a cultural framework that uses Chinese tradition rather than be used by it. Cultural Revolution artistic practice is an attempt to modernize Chinese tradition, and by extension Chinese people, for revolutionary purposes. Chinese socialist emulation models derive from several streams of influence, Confucian biography being only one of these. Others include the earlier, obvious Soviet model factory workers of earlier twentieth century Russian political art, which in China more often took the form of iconic peasant and soldier portraiture refracted through the Maoist lens of continual revolution in a predominantly agrarian society. Enlivening these stock CCP graphic forms was a Daoist penchant for dialectical tension appropriated by Mao and incorporated into his understanding of Marx’s dialectical materialism. This tension manifested itself in the situating of those forms in postures of struggle, particularly during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. Mao adhered to the Daoist 59 understanding of opposites as complements and contradiction as an ultimate deliverer of new forms. 65 Conflict, as both Daoist and Maoist engine of history, figured prominently in CCP model representation, as depictions of model demonstrations against imperialism and internal class enemies, model study sessions from elderly survivors of the bitter feudal society, and even model responses to natural disaster all attest. As conflict and struggle unite some social forces, just as they divide others, models in struggle remain cooperative amongst their proper peers and allies. Though it would seem that, as the abandonment of guerrilla warfare strategies would reduce military reliance on civilians, civil-military relations would lose their cooperative and informal facade, their seeming warmth and intimacy, this is not apparent in the pictographic record. Instead, civil-military mutual obligations continue to be pictorially rendered as essential to models of good soldier and good citizen alike. Military public service remains a central theme of the graphic record of civil-military interaction. The easy co-existence of the newfound appreciation for expertise alongside more personalistic and hence less professional interaction arises from the sustained popularity of informal civil assistance and exchange throughout the reforms alongside a rising conviction in the importance of military technical training. Exegesis of Mao for civilian erudition disappears over time, but soldiers' 65 Xing Lu, "The Influence of Classical Chinese Rhetoric on Contemporary Chinese Political Communication and Social Relations," in Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication, Stamford: Ablex Publishing Company, 2000: 11. 60 political campaigning and propagandizing does not. The campaigns shift, but the campaigning is a constant as soldiers turn their attentions from Mao's thought to the struggle against spiritual pollution. Political activities persist in the military, though campaigning comprises less of the activity in a given soldier's day than it had in previous years. Significantly, the tone of PLA political campaigning shifts from the advocacy of divisive struggle to unifying discourses that proscribe "splittism," or ethnic divisiveness and secessionist aims, and encourage broad cooperation. Army Service to the People In the pantheon of Chinese Communist Party models, the soldier's place has remained first among equals. At times the soldier often appears indistinguishable from her peasant-worker counterparts who all form the iconic triumvirate depictions of standard post-liberation through Cultural Revolution propaganda. Nevertheless, the straightforward hierarchy that positioned soldiers as elites among their broad mass peasant and soldier counterparts makes it reasonable to consider the soldier in a category outside of and apart from the masses. This is so despite the soldiers' origins in peasant and worker classes that comprise "the power base of the PLA," the peasants supplying the "core manpower resources" of the rank and file, and despite their likely return to those 61 classes once demobilized. 66 The CCP project to revolutionize its polity rendered such civil-military distinctions in the Mao years purposely and deliberately hard to draw. This militarization of twentieth-century Chinese society that ensued from the revolutionary struggle of the century's first half reached its logical extreme in the Cultural Revolution. Yet images of soldiers maintained subtle differences from workers and peasants. When depicted apart from its fellow standards in the triumvirate, the soldier, in contrast to the others, appears most commonly among the people. While workers are shown alone or among a like group driving industry forward and peasants are represented toiling happily together in the fields, the model soldier is seldom drawn outside of dynamic interaction with the masses. Even in the reform era when lone soldier images become more prevalent, accompanying texts allude to the people and the social benefits army activism bestows. Pre- reform era propaganda peasants and workers toil as a matter of course to develop the Chinese nation and in this way serve their fellow countrymen who labor beside them. Yet this relationship of providing and benefiting from altruistic labor between rural masses and their models is never explicit as is that between the rank and file of the PLA and Chinese civil society. 66 Bi, (2000): 96 and 110 62 Visual Codes and Civic Identity PRC civic identity construction is regulated through a well-established iconography. While some renderings of the idealized civil-military relationship as one of mutual side-by-side manual labor drop off with the passage of time, others, such as the army as lifesaver and rebuilder in national disaster, are more enduring, though this theme and others like it can become eclipsed by more pressing needs at times in which nature is comparatively quiescent. In times of particular ethnic unrest, for example, images of minority civilian-Han PLA cooperation on the interior borders become prominent. Pictorial symbolic imagery conforms to the ideological requirements of its political climate. It was therefore necessary to create a new pictographic revolutionary vernacular under conditions of the Chinese communist revolution, an idiom that Cultural Revolution artists drew upon and adapted to conform with the political exigencies of the day by centering Mao, targeting internal enemies, and flattening distinctions between genders and favored social forces, to name but a few. These new icons are properly introduced through integration with pre-existing symbols. The creation of this new militant vernacular would be the first step in the creation of new socialist women and men, a revolutionary people. Already well established by the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the new idiom built on available imagery and introduced new symbols of its own, the radiant red sun of the Chairman, and, to a lesser extent, the subordinate and dependent sunflower masses, being paramount among these. Cultural Revolution 63 official art was created under extremely rigid political production guidelines. All content to be considered “good” fell into the category of revolutionary art, as opposed to landscapes or abstract expressionism, labeled “not harmful” and “harmful” respectively. Consequently, revolutionary art flourished by building on its pre-CCP traditions. 67 The ultra-stylized and impersonal peasant-soldier-worker standards of the 1960's had been honed from socialist graphic figures of the preceding decades into immediately recognizable mass symbols. These iconic representative class models of the 1960's and 1970's fade from view in the 1980's as class struggle becomes irrelevant to the population and no longer politically desirable to the state in its reordering of priorities that places economic development above social change and consequently favors stability as an optimal environment to promote that development. The models' new era counterparts are more individually differentiated, both in outward appearance and social role, as the new age demands of its social forces, their expressions altered from fierce militancy to proud professionalism, thus reflecting the state's altered moral compass, formerly centered on revolution, though now resting on its antithetical managerial competence. Not just the substance, of course, but also the form of propaganda art evolves over time from woodcuts to posters to billboards. Still, while the propaganda medium may change, the state commitment to discursive control efforts, measured in the 67 Michael Sullivan, “Art in China since 1949,” China Quarterly, 159, (September 1999): 173. 64 resources expended on the project, remains high and stable, not only over the two decades of this study, but throughout the course of CCP history. It is ironic that as the materialist pragmatism of the reforms engender more utilitarian ethics, the state redoubles its propaganda work in its effort to reverse what it sees as civic disintegration, or erosion of revolutionary ethical subjects. Propaganda proves practical and remains relevant. Instability in CCP Imagery Still, though they are state-sponsored and a practice derived from a long tradition, China's more recent social engineering efforts lack consistency. State construction of civilian and military identity is full of contradiction, throwing up conflicting values in the same media throughout the same sources over the same period. A good soldier, even in the militant Cultural Revolution, is the daughter who lavishes care on her parents when on furlough, while a good soldier in that same time frame is also the daughter who opts to devote her leave time to the masses, thus forsaking her family. Competing claims on a pictorially documented soldier from his family and his pig-farming army unit situate this classic Confucian dilemma of being caught between state and family in a 1970’s PLA context. 68 The soldier returns to his village for a six-month leave, but his sense of duty causes him to fret over his 68 “Hong Xin Yong Xiang Hong Taiyang,” (A Red Heart Always Faces the Red Sun), Jiefangjun Huabao, 356 (February 1977): 34. 65 piglets’ welfare and return to base. Fellow villagers are said to remark that to become a soldier is to forget one’s family, but this soldier writes, “What is family?” Lei Feng provides an answer: “The PLA is family for revolutionary soldiers.” Thus, the soldier is solaced and his dilemma resolved in a predictable fashion. Though refracted through a CCP lens, such dilemmas parallel Confucian tensions between the conflicting obligations of filial piety and loyalty to the state. 69 Just a few years later, however, other pictorial accounts celebrate qualities of filiality and the maintenance of village ties in soldiers. A photograph captures Hu Deping’s loyalty to blood and place being rewarded with a greeting committee led by his parents with all villagers in attendance. 70 Here Hu Deping is on a joint mission to be filial in a traditional sense and also in the extended army sense. This latter aim is accomplished through his pictured good deeds to local parents of a revolutionary martyr, to whom he is said to be “just like a birth son.” Whereas the first image resolves tensions between conflicting obligations in favor of the army, these latter images suggest that PLA and family bonds do not compete with one another. Instead, it seems it is possible to have it both ways; i.e., to harmonize army and family obligations. Filiality and revolutionary homage reinforce one another. 69 Elvin explains the position of women caught between conflicting Confucian loyalties. See Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State in China,” Past and Present, 104 (1984): 111-152. 70 “Qing Jin Xinxue,” (Exert the Utmost Effort), Jiefangjun Huabao, 403 (January 1981): 17-18. 66 Cleavages like these abound in civil-military graphic texts. The contradictions both within particular compositions of civil-military ideals and between conflicting representations reflect tensions among their producers and state sponsors over how to visualize a proper state subject and whom a paragon might resemble. Far from resolving these tensions, fundamental changes in political culture instead either simply reproduce such tensions or substitute new sets of ideas in competition with one another. The case of the ethnic encounter motif of civil-military relations exemplifies the reproduction of a set of divergences, a continuity of contention in revolutionary graphics in the transition to the new reform era visual culture. Cleavages and Hierarchy in the Ethnic Encounter A different set of cleavages appear in the representation of soldiers’ relation to the status quo. PLA Pictorial portrays soldiers in the Cultural Revolution as a revolutionary vanguard and a stabilizing force necessary for the restoration of order, often on the same page. Ethnic contradiction also abounds in graphic accounts of civil-military material. Civil-military visual culture in the years studied here conveys a sense of Han homogeneity only disrupted by occasional visual intrusions signaled by conventions of minority ethnicity in dress, architecture, or itinerancy. Yet numerous ethnic features of border relations with locally stationed troops depict the nation as ethnically diverse while simultaneously portrayed as a 67 unified Han mass. Unless official media called attention to ethnic diversity to send a message of Han-minority fellowship and unity, ethnic identity and organization were strongly discouraged. The state felt constrained to visualize an almost “hyper-difference” to promote inter-ethnic harmony while it remained hesitant to remind viewers of ethnic distinction, asserting that ethnic struggles, like gender struggles, were “ultimately a matter of class struggle.” 71 Such CCP official logic renders ethnic (and gender) identity as a kind of a phantom, a false consciousness precisely because it illuminates hierarchies of ethnicity and gender the patriarchal Han state wishes to conceal in order to dominate the disenfranchised with their own consent. Were these relations more exposed, these social agents would doubtless be less forthcoming with their assent to the arrangement. Usually, civil-military frontier portrayals aggregate to convey the impression that minorities are civilians and soldiers Han. In positions of authority, a Han, and male, visual identity is generally projected in official media across the Cultural Revolution and early reform years alike. Still, projections of diversity can be found in profiles of token exemplary minority soldiers, which formulaically include accounts of these soldiers' identification with the PLA or the motherland, rather than a more divisively particular, and realistic, identification. Such a one is Nong-nian-yi 72 , an ethnic 71 CCP Center and Shaanxi Ankang District Committee, “No Ethnic Mass Organizations,” (March 1967), as translated in Michael Schoenhals, ed., China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969: Not a Dinner Party, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996: 56-7. 72 Tibetan transliterated names in Chinese characters are rendered here in pinyin with hyphens between each character. 68 Tibetan soldier stationed in Lhasa who devotes himself to the collection of Tibetan folk songs and performs for locals in uniform on the accordion. 73 An organic serviceman in the fish-to-water mold of civilian embeddedness at a time when that representation is in decline, Nong-nian-yi nevertheless retains the dual, and incongruous, identities of Tibetan and soldier. Other images that convey intimacy and shared values between minority civilians and Han soldiers serve a similar purpose. One photograph in a 1976 pictorial of a Tibetan mother merrily sending her son to join the army links ordinary Tibetans’ interests with those of the central government. 74 The caption notes that the mother, Fan-shen-nong-nu, who is photographed gesturing and smiling, has advised her son to train well in enemy-killing skills, and to devote his youth to making a political contribution to the proletariat, perhaps a not altogether natural plea for a marginalized peasant on a remote frontier. Models like Nong- nian-yi and Fan-shen-nong-nu are crucial to the state’s projection of these apparitions of ethnically diverse support of the central government and investment in its projects. Such representations conflict with, though they occur in easy proximity to, more subtle messages of Han homogeneity like those in the common borderland stories of the local ethnic minorities introducing the rank and file, always presumed Han unless otherwise noted, to exotic local rituals. In contradistinction 73 “’Xiangabadeng,’” (“Xiangabadeng”), Jiefangjun Huabao, 401 (November 1980): 20-21. 74 “Gao Yuan Zan Ge,” (Paean to the Highlands), Jiefangjun Huabao, 344 (January 1976): 25. 69 to the diversified military representation inherent to the images discussed above, these pieces instead portray soldiers as Han consumers of the exotic in their dealings with non-Han frontier peoples. Similarly, graphic accounts of soldiers as participants in song and dance performances and as audiences among minority civilians render the troops as Han ambassadors from the center. Whether soldiers perform for civilians, civilians for troops, or both sides perform together for mixed audiences, these images compel a formulaic coming together that is based on an appreciation of difference. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, symbiotic unity between soldiers and non-Han civilians is incompatible with other state messages about ethnic diversity and harmony, both of which discursive logics are predicated on fixed conceptualizations of immutable difference and an appreciation of what is foreign. The ethnic frontier remains impervious to symbiotically drawn notions of civil-military unity that are endurable. Instead, pictorial accounts present minorities as unstable class allies in a relationship of differentiated solidarity that is graphically sustained from the Cultural Revolution through the reforms. What’s more, these portrayals render that civil-military relationship as a particularly tenuous alliance, one in need of constant formalized interaction in structured song and dance or other cultural events to lubricate a stiff and awkward unity even during the reforms when the army and civilians segregate themselves from one another more generally, that is, among Han of both spheres. 70 This intractable division between the Han soldier representatives of the center on the civilian minority ground of the frontier becomes particularly apparent in Han PLA participation in the rituals of the locality in which the troops are stationed. Pictorial representation of troop participation in ethnic minority rituals, while more or less nonexistent during the Cultural Revolution, becomes an established motif during the early reform period, re-entrenching itself in the civil- military iconic canon after virtually vanishing during the Cultural Revolution. The motif’s return to prominence had less to do with fluctuations in projected frontier civil-military intimacy than with the difference in tone between the two periods that characterized much of the representational content of the two spheres’ interaction. Though Cultural Revolution authorities invested the border regions with a particular revolutionary significance for their putative intrinsically “mass” nature, images of Cultural Revolution activities seldom, or perhaps even never, modeled the comparatively neutral cultural rituals, instead bringing soldiers and civilians together for ulterior political purposes apart from those which constructed civil- military unity. One ambiguous image of soldiers and northwestern mountain frontier civilians, possibly Kirgiz, frolicking beneath a stream of spring water spurting out from an overhead gutter that was intended to re-direct the water appearing in 1971 might prove exceptional, if it does indeed constitute some sort 71 of structured cultural practice. 75 Otherwise, as seems more likely, pictorial propagation of civil-military frontier ritual involvement does not appear until the reforms. Thus, while the frequency of their interaction in the official graphic media remains relatively constant over the course of the two decades examined here, with some tapering off during the reform years, army involvement in minority ritual and other recreational pursuits that are otherwise aimless expands during the reform years. Ostensibly an opportunity for cultural exchange, civil-military interaction, and recreation, frontier civilian rituals, and the representation of army participation in them, more insidiously subjugate non-Han civilians through manifold means. The first instance involves a kind of accommodation to Hui culture within the army, in a depiction of a soldier gathering vegetables to prepare food in the Hui style that he has spent his free time learning, as the caption explains, to please the palate of a fellow soldier, who is Hui. 76 The image infers that the superior Han soldier is readily able to adapt to another culture. By the end of 1980, images of PLA involvement in borderland ritual begin to appear with a photograph of some likely Kazak men engaging in “sly goat skin,” a kind of martial art, as both bemused and intent PLA bystanders look on, one of whom 75 “Xueshan Youyi Quan,” (Snow Mountain Friendship Spring), Jiefangjun Huabao, 274 (November 1971): 30-31. 76 “Liandui Xin Fengshang,” (Troops’ New Prevailing Customs), Jiefangjun Huabao, 400 (October 1980): 19. 72 applauds. 77 As the accompanying caption explains, due to the ritual’s specific intention as an activity restricted to the bride’s male family members in this village community of Hui, Kazak, and Mongol shepherds, the army sits out here, merely observing the struggling combatants. In other instances, soldiers are portrayed more organically integrated into the community as active and enthusiastic participants in the rituals. A photograph in this genre recycled from a 1964 PLA Pictorial and reprinted in that same forum in a photographic retrospective in 1981 depicts a soldier cheek to cheek with a turbaned man as they drink from a single bowl and a gleeful crowd of bejeweled and turbaned villagers looks on. 78 Descending from his mountaintop base, the soldier had been greeted by a Lisu villager, who confers his highest customary honor on the serviceman, by offering him a “pair” drink of wine in which a couple of participants simultaneously imbibe from two sides of a single vessel. The image’s reprint nearly twenty years after the publication of the original signals the state’s restoration of an earlier project to model its army as both patron and consumer of exotic frontier peoples and their colorful rituals in which the army is simply and warmly included. Such exchanges increase through the early reform years so that by 1985 they represent 7.5% of all pictorial civil-military content in the Jiefangjun 77 “Zai Hanasi Hupan,” (On the Banks of the Hanasi River), Jiefangjun Huabao, 402 (December 1980): 42. 78 “Sanshi Nian de Huigu,” (Looking back over Thirty Years), Jiefangjun Huabao, 404 (February 1981): 5. 73 Huabao for that year. By this time, soldiers have become active participants in such time honored traditions as the southwestern Dai Water Splashing Festival, a ritual to mark the New Year by sprinkling water from basins to signify the sending off of the old and welcoming of the new. Soldiers appear completely interspersed in the crowds of splashers, their own basins also in hand. 79 Official early reform media somewhat heavily propounds images of water splashing rituals, which convey a requisite frontier civil-military intimacy without depreciating difference between them, all succinctly conveyed in the caption “Civil-Military Mutual Congratulations in Water Splashing.” 80 Imagery in this mode tends to convey lightheartedness, cultural exchange, acceptance, and inclusion all at once. The ritual’s significance of marking the new year supplies the Han soldiers with a comforting familiarity that allows for easier consumption of its less familiar specificities. Yet another southwestern minority New Year’s celebration makes room for soldiers, this time in a Bai ethnic minority context. 81 As part of the festivities for the March Festival, soldiers are photographed “jubilantly,” as the caption emphasizes, taking part in a horse race. Elsewhere a photograph captures young southwestern women extending a bamboo reed full of spring water horizontally at Han soldiers, one of whom bends to drink from it as the others smile on the scene in a shot entitled with the 79 “Daizu Poshui Jie,” (Dai Water Splashing Festival), Jiefangjun Huabao, 453 (April 1985): 38. 80 “Jing Hong (Keai de Zuguo),” (Scenes of a Flood: [Adorable Motherland]), Jiefangjun Huabao, 418 (April 1982). 81 “Baizu San Yue Jie,” (Bai March Festival), Jiefangjun Huabao, 453 (April 1985): 39. 74 prescriptively proper response: “Spring Water Moistens the Heart.” 82 Such scenes render the civilian minorities as cultural ambassadors and the soldiers as tourists, with the transitory presence and powerful resources that customarily appendage that identity. In so doing these representations sustain and extend circumstances that privilege the Han, military, and central state identities vested in the PLA figures pictured engaging in the non-Han rituals of the frontier. What is left out of such images signifies just as much as what is included. CCP reform era visual culture does not reciprocally project images of minority civilian participation in Han rituals. Though featured in the pictorial literature, army representations of Han rituals, such as weddings, take place without minority involvement. 83 Han soldiers are never depicted offering wine, candy, or paper lanterns to non-Hans in accordance with some of their own cultural customs. Perhaps Han rituals are felt to be natural and hence, not in need of the PLA’s cultural introduction, or it may be that predominantly Han army artists, editors, and photographers are reluctant to place Han rituals on an equal footing with those of China’s ethnic minorities. By exceptionalizing the non-Han soldier and exoticizing ethnic minority civilians, CCP political art imposes a Han Chinese representation of the nation even on the nation’s non-Han Chinese frontiers. 82 Liu Sigong, “Quan Shui Run Xintian,” (Spring Water Warms the Heart), “Laigao Xuan Deng,” (Selected Publications of Contributed Articles), Jiefangjun Huabao, 406 (April 1981): 44. 83 For one representative example of pictorial coverage of a Han wedding, see “’Xiao Shimo’ Yu Zhi Yin,” (“Little Grindstone” Meets One Deeply Appreciative of His Talents), Jiefangjun Huabao, 450 (January 1985): 20. 75 Celebrations of diversity notwithstanding, the state-controlled graphic media project a rigid ethnic hierarchy. That same effect is produced by the equally ubiquitous civilian minority- led instructional sessions of their native languages delivered to troops, which will be discussed at greater length in the reforms chapter. Typically such sessions take place out of doors, both during and after the close of the Cultural Revolution, which had denigrated formal education and elevated the informal arrangement of the outdoor session. Frontier troop study of local language shared its structure with the political study session and political meeting alike. Even after the rehabilitation of formal instruction under the reforms, minority language training for troops continued on the ground outdoors with nothing more than the customary aid of chalk and blackboard of its Cultural Revolution iteration. Though in the Cultural Revolution, all teachers not discredited taught in rustic settings, during the time of the reforms informal study and its practitioners both had lost their authority, a resource the frontier instructors had never been particularly well endowed with in the first place. Civilian minority language training extended to Han soldiers resident in their localities unites the minority civil and Han military spheres on the basis of reaffirming and even sustaining the difference between them. The cultural exchange arrangement that ostensibly allows the unskilled frontierspeople to gain face by adopting the authoritative role of instructor actually reinforces the troops’ dominance over the local population. This sleight of hand is achieved through 76 graphic representations that celebrate army patronage of minority language instructors rather than the voluntarism of their erstwhile teachers. Moreover, official visual culture elides the hierarchy it effects by presenting ethnic civilians in putative positions of power vis-à-vis their Han rank and file students. In actuality, because they impart local languages, the knowledge of which is perceived to be of little utility other than as a social lubricant with potentially hostile local populations, minority transmitters of those languages are consequently themselves devalued. By exploring these and other fissures in what may initially seem to be a seamless wall of propaganda, it is possible to reach a more nuanced understanding of the competing threads in the soldier-state discourse that belie a notion of propaganda as a stable construction of social relations. Messages contradict themselves however focused the effort to achieve ideological clarity that undergirds their production. 77 Chapter 2 The Theory of Symbolic Violence in CCP Practice Civil-Military Visual Propaganda An Enduring Legacy: Utopian Socialization and Traditionalism in Chinese Political Art Political art powerfully presents visions of the world as the artist, or artist's patrons or censors, believe it ought to be as social facts which viewers are intended to absorb and embody in their own human behavior. In doing so artists often consciously undertake to realize that ideal through realism intended to represent actual conditions as a mirror for public reflection and consumption. The impetus of social transformation undergirds a good deal of art, be it straightforward propaganda or fine art. Especially effective in Maoist China, this scaffolding owes its resounding success in sustaining support to a Confucian tradition that rejected the commonly held western division between reality and representation. In place of this binary, Confucian thinking "presupposes a natural bond and reciprocal interaction between symbols and things." 84 Accepting this bond, Confucianism rejects the notion of representation as one of many possible displays of an idea. Instead, art is understood to reveal, or embody, the morality of its author. In other words, art becomes another means of cultivating behavior 84 Liu, (2000): 24. 78 by example, or, in Confucian terminology, self-cultivation. Confucianism shares postmodernism's, as well as Marxism's, adherence to the notion that art and politics are mutually constituting, though it arrives at this view by means of an organic approach to human constructs, rather than a modern analytical approach. The presentation of ideals in representational forms, then, becomes a means of the realization of those ideals. Social conditions conform to the power of persuasive imagery and society emulates the models with which it is provided. The significance of this point of view for pictorial propaganda is immense. Chinese Marxist and Confucian understanding's of art's transformative potential reveal a sensitivity to cultural forms of identity construction. Both ideologies valued art for its instructive utility in individual reinvention. 85 Despite the CCP's revolutionary promise to root out the cultural legacy of feudalism and Mao's ostensible rejection of Confucianism in particular, as most dramatically evidenced in the direct attacks on Confucianism in the contra-Confucianist movement to discredit the former PLA commander Lin Biao in 1971, Confucian continuities abounded in CCP political doctrine. Tolerance of Confucianism was hardly in keeping with the Cultural Revolution's "Anti Four Olds" campaign to eradicate old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Nevertheless, the artistic tradition with 85 Vilma Seeburg, The Rhetoric and Reality of Mass Education in Mao’s China, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000: 89. 79 which Mao concerned himself was Confucian in the main, despite the competing ideological strains that informed it. 86 Situated historically at the end of a dynastic system that legitimated itself in Confucian terms, Chinese socialism unsurprisingly promoted many Confucian virtues, such as loyalty to the (party-) state, self-cultivation, and the quest for moral perfection, to name just a few relevant concepts. Yet another fundamental characteristic both ideologies hold in common is their intertwining of ethics and aesthetics, which arises from a keen appreciation of the transformative potency of didactic art. Though death knells have been rung on this “social function” of the Chinese artistic tradition, it is naïve to expect a complete severance of ethics from aesthetics to emerge as a consequence of the reforms. 87 Nowhere are the similarities between Confucian and Maoist thought more apparent than in the two traditions' common notions of cultural power and the state's need to harness that force for use in its social engineering projects. In addition, Confucianism and Chinese socialism share a preoccupation with terminology, attaching the right name to a referent that extends beyond names to images in CCP visual propaganda, a necessary innovation to broaden the party's reach to its largely illiterate masses. This process, the rectification of names, in Confucian parlance, represents the critical first step in actual Marxist positive praxis, i.e., the practical application of theory. Bourdieu shares the 86 Shangyu Chen, (1996): 22. 87 Zhilong Shen and Chunmei Zhao, “Aesthetic Education in China,” Journal of Multi-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Research in Art Education, 17 (1999): 99. 80 Confucian and Maoist conviction in “the reification of collective identities” through the power of naming, a process in which, he explains, “social agents struggle for what I have called symbolic power, of which this power of constitutive naming, which by naming things brings them into being, is one of the most typical demonstrations.” 88 Significantly, this conviction departs from the Marxist understanding of class, which issues out of social relations and labor. “Hence, a class,” for Bourdieu as for Marx, ‘is not ‘mobilized’ for a cause but is simply the result of a classification;” consciousness can only emerge from an initial act of naming. 89 Cultural Revolution authorities, for example, named counterrevolutionaries, thus conjuring them into existence. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, new authorities had supplanted the old and labeled them with the very name they had imposed on a different set of social agents. The fact that one of the first acts of the early reform regime under Hua Guofeng was to rename the ultra-Leftist Gang of Four “ultra-Right…a clique of counter-revolutionary conspirators cloaking themselves with Marxist theories” testifies to the social power invested in such political verbiage. 90 88 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Matthew Adamson, trans., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990: 54-5. 89 V.Y. Mudimbe, “Reading and Teaching Pierre Bourdieu,” Transition, 61 (1993): 154. 90 Hua Guofeng, “Political Report to the Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” (Delivered on August 12 and adopted on August 18, 1977), The Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977: 24-5. 81 Visual imagery names just as powerfully. A blue jumpsuit creates a worker or by extension the proletariat as a whole; the worker’s stance beside a soldier and a peasant transforms the worker into a constituent of the revolutionary masses, and so on with other political icons. Once those terms are fixed and the names or images attached to what they are intended to convey, both Confucian and Maoist traditions rely on repetition to inscribe an ideological code on their subjects. Thus repetition establishes a self-referential intertextual semiotic system. In Mao era visual culture, graphic images are often first published in poster form and are then reproduced from posters to serials. Some of these images are further reproduced within pictorial serials as images already in print there are reprinted in subsequent volumes in a kind of recycling that reworks increasingly familiar imagery into new constructs. The recirculation of imagery assists in the instillation of values inscribed therein as the dominant discursive forms attempt to hegemonize the Chinese visual field, thus creating an icon. Ultimately endeavoring to achieve political inculcation and socialization, both Confucian and Maoist traditions appreciate the efficacy of model emulation campaigns in cultivating proper state subjects, thus favoring the motivating power of the discursive ideal as an instructional tool to guide desirable behavior. Together these qualities further imbue cultural productions of both Confucian and Maoist ideologies with a similarity in their didactic tone. While this didactism embodied in their suspiciously euphoric representative models 82 grates on a western contemporary audience and thus appears anything but persuasive, it conforms to a long-standing Chinese tradition of heavy-handed artistic moralizing (only abandoned in the dominant culture of the west some time after the Victorian period) quite inspirational to its intended Chinese audience as numerous Cultural Revolution memoirs attest. 91 Writing on Maoist mass pedagogy, Seeburg lists normative molding first in a list of similarities between it and its Confucian predecessor: “1) the moral-political transformation was stressed above all other goals of education; 2) the curriculum emphasized social ideology as a political ethic; and, 3) the delivery structures …were informal though the instructional approach was formal” 92 Amplifying CCP political art’s Confucian legacy and its investment in the notion of art as an agent of social change was the western Marxist adoption of Hegelian objective idealism in its theory of art. Galikowski explains the significance of objective idealism as a strain of thought informing Socialist Realism thus: This approach takes the ideal world as the essence or foundation of the world we live in. Abstract ideas and concepts constitute the 91 See for example, Fan Shen, Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 2004; Ma Bo, Blood Red Sunset, Howard Goldblatt, trans,, New York: Penguin Books, 1996; Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991; Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A Memoir, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 and Yuan Gao, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. 92 Seeburg, (2000): 93. Similarities notwithstanding, there is no question that Maoist political socialization is more a departure from, than a revision of, Confucianism. Seeburg also finds greater dissimilarities between the two traditions, all of them having to do with Maoism’s rejection of Confucian meritocracy, or what she considers its substitution of political for intellectual virtue. A more significant divergence manifests itself in Mao’s elevation of the peasantry over the literati and his anti-intellectualism more generally. 83 foundation of practical existence...Objective idealism is in one way similar to the (Marxist) materialist approach in that it aims to present a mirror-image of the world, but of the ideal and not the material world. 93 Ultimately, objective idealism presents the ideal, or the theory, in order to transform the real, or the practice. Therefore, idealized projections are held to shape the material world in a process by which art as theory may direct actual practical life. One catalogue essay of a revolutionary art exhibit articulates this aspect of Chinese socialist aesthetic theory when remarking on Chinese painting in general. Wain explains that graphic depictions “are not simply photographic representations but are the embodiment of philosophy and feeling towards the subject. The subject is looked at from an angle of totality and not from the fixed- point perspective of the West.” 94 Transfiguration into the "proper" reality is achievable when representation (names) conforms to reality as it exists in the present. Traditionally, the holistic rectification of names in artistic representation translates into a representation ultimately reflected in society. Reflections of Civil-Military Encounters in CCP Political Art Objective idealism persisted in CCP civil-military modeling. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, graphic depictions of soldier-mass modeling and symbiosis had become ubiquitous. These state-sponsored graphic expressions of 93 Galikowski, (1998): 37-38. 94 Wain, (2003): 4. 84 civil-military uniformity and diversity were intended to discursively delineate roles and construct identities through a contested process that was in Mao’s time intended to militarize the civil, making it more amenable to revolutionary transformation thought necessary to both modernize and defend China. The consequences of the state's ideological turn toward reform for civil- military relations were plentiful. Many of the changes in political thought alienated China's citizenry, sometimes estranging the people from the army as much as from the state, which struggled to keep ideologically abreast of its market's development. In short, marketization requires specialization, which in turn produces isolation between the civil and military spheres. The narrowed mission of the soldier pulled the armed forces out of many realms of civilian life, sending the PLA "back to the barracks." Prevailing sharper social divisions curtailed the role of the militia in national defense as they prompted the army to more carefully, and hence professionally, attend to its defense burden. When soldiers do join forces with other citizens more and more it is to develop the economic infrastructure through civil works projects, enterprise building, or assistance at local markets rather than to foster socialism as the reform era progresses. Voluntarism gives way to timeserving as soldiers and civilians are portrayed more as docile rule-followers disinclined to take initiatives. The revolution and the call to continue its struggle grows faint while newer forms of civil-military interaction, such as army officers studying in civilian classrooms, compete for space in the pictorial pages. It seems quite suddenly that the duty of 85 class struggle is replaced by the mindless performance of a shrinking set of tasks. Images of class stratification in labor supplant earlier images of soldier-worker- peasant unified toil. Thus, as community boundaries tighten soldiers and people pull somewhat apart, soldiers serving the people best by generally remaining apart from them. The forms that inscribe this people-army relationship are many, ranging from now moribund poster propaganda to still thriving pictorial periodical literature and public service billboards. This and other media reveal a history of shifting values inscribed onto the civil-military relationship from the age in which society grew increasingly militarized, and the distinctions between people and army were muted as they struggled side by side, to the reform era in which distinctions are heightened, and the partnership to develop the nation is felt to be better served by the complementary efforts of each respective side. This showcasing of a deceptive and tense equality grew prominent as a result of a larger Cultural Revolution effort to level distinctions between leaders and masses. 95 Thus, the army, as an elite institution, assumes a more civilian, or common, mass aspect even as the citizenry's mimicry of the armed forces and more general militarization in society further enhances the prestige of that institution. 95 Shaorong Huang, "Power to Move the Masses in a Mass Movement: An Analysis of Mao's Rhetorical Strategies during China's Cultural Revolution Movement" in D. Ray Heisey, ed., Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication, Stamford: Ablex, 2000: 210. 86 Indeed, a blurring of military difference constituted the very aim of some Cultural Revolution poster art. One poster subverts a traditional Confucian wen- wu, or literary-military binary by expanding its stock categories through a deployment of customary wen-wu iconography. Peasants join soldiers on the military flank as unskilled workers stand in on the literary side as the texts proclaims its figures to be good at both wen and wu. 96 As soldiers were traditionally felt to be ill suited to literati study, their coupling with texts in and of itself civilianized their image. It should be noted that along with this foray into literature came an attendant heightening of status, for the wen was the privileged component of the binary. The nexus of these social militarizing and army civilianizing trends might be expected to have produced an erasure of the civil- military distinction and certainly would have done so were it not for the promotion to what Chen dubs the 'super model' status of model soldiers, which was an inversion of the traditional binary. 97 Only enhanced by the Cultural Revolution's putative leveling of social forces, the army's prestige ensures its separateness from the nation. Eventually this unsustainable discourse of civil- military sameness reverted from the Maoist symbiotic political landscape to one of complementary professional distinction in early reform era propaganda. 96 The print is reproduced in Hodge and Louie, 1998, Figure 6.1, p. 126. Hodge and Louie argue that although it challenges traditional categories, the poster ultimately privileges the literary over the military, marshalling the comparative elegance of the foregrounded 'literary' worker woman on the right and the corresponding sturdy figure in crude attire on the military's left side. The authors forget that sturdier physiques and inelegant attire were preferred fashions of the Cultural Revolution. Rather than an ordering of wen over wu, the soldiers reading a wall poster in the poster's background convey a tale of complementary qualities achieving a synthesis. 97 Chen, (1999): 302. 87 Functions of Military Propaganda Such representations of civil-military relations serve a multiplicity of purposes. Hung documents the use of propaganda as a morale boost to soldiers in the Japanese resistance during the late 1930's to the middle of the following decade. 98 Certainly some civil-military modeling, particularly in renderings of heroic rescue, seeks to invigorate professional pride. Portrayals of the voluntary extension of service between civilians and soldiers aim to unify the state's social and armed forces and to foster organic interdependence, while images emphasizing the mass quality of soldiers minimize their distinction from civilians and invite civilians to claim a kinship with an elite. 99 Civil-military propaganda sought to motivate the Chinese citizenry to take various actions, adopt a particular set of behaviors and internalize core nationalist and/or socialist values through its effort, however incompletely realized, to graphically elide hierarchy. Above all, CCP political art not infrequently aimed to foster civic identity congenial to the state's paramount project of an initially genuine socialist development and subsequent nominal one. From the earliest days of the People's Republic of China, the symbolic realm of performing and studio arts was taken extremely seriously. CCP leaders understood the vital role of culture in political transformation and consequently, 98 Hung, (1994): 94. 99 Such traits were stressed during the Cultural Revolution, when the army was an elite social force. PLA prestige has declined sharply throughout the reform period as social status grew more dependent on wealth and the material wellbeing of soldiers relative to those in other careers dropped. 88 communist revolutionaries had skillfully channeled and disseminated cultural production as part of the war effort. This was achieved in part through adoption of popular cultural forms such as performance traditions, particularly those in the northern Chinese Yange collection of dances, regional dramas, and folk songs appropriated by the party "as a propaganda medium and as the basis of a cultural mass movement," in addition to the graphic genre of New Year pictures and other graphic folk forms, to inscribe ideological messages concerning the worth of the party, the imperative of resistance to occupying Japanese imperialists, or the significance of national unity. 100 Chen Kaige’s 1986 film, “Yellow Earth,” of a communist soldier collecting folk songs in this same period dramatizes the party’s appropriation of rural popular cultural forms. Expressed in the folk idiom, socialist visual language could be very subtly introduced. 101 The CCP's ultimate victory over the KMT owes its success in some measure to the CCP's deft adoption and reworking of popular cultural practices, in sharp contrast to the KMT's clumsier handling of popular forms. By means of its tactic of appropriating existing media and iconography to propagate the party line and draw adherents, the CCP was able to achieve its goal of building a mass base in the countryside. "By the end of the war," Hung asserts in his study of the role of popular culture in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, 100 David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991: 115. Holm's study confines itself to the performing arts, thus excluding the graphic forms with which this study is concerned. 101 Andrew Bolton, “Chinese Papercuts from the Cultural Revolution at the Victoria and Albert Museum,” Arts of Asia, 27,( November/Decmber 1997): 80. 89 "they had become a formidable military and political force. Their ingenious use of popular culture to foster an image of a new China would soon contribute to their ultimate seizure of power." 102 Much of this achievement can be attributed to the new identities as nationalist, resister, collectivist, etc., the CCP fostered among the rural masses through the propagation of peasant heroes. These new socialist citizens held up as examples possessed qualities of diligence, activism, and courage. Having thrown off the yoke of feudalism, the new socialist farming people of the Chinese countryside had collectively become historical actors, masters both of their own fate and the fate of the nation. This heady new mass identity reversed the rule that urban elites determined rural conditions and tantalized the disenfranchised, many of whom perceived the CCP as deliverer of social justice through its promise of mass dominance over former power holders. Peasant heroes were hailed as emulation models not just for rural masses, but for all participants in the revolution, the myths of their heroism conveyed pictorially via folk forms that were easily mass producible like woodblock prints, as well as in poetry and newspaper articles. 103 Mao's, land reformer Peng Pai's, and others' strategic grafting of a rural face on Chinese communism underscored their movement's inclusivity, thus maximizing the potential of popular support for the revolution. The early Chinese communist movement's privileging of the rural resulted in the 102 Hung, (1994): 7. 103 Ibid., 263-266. 90 elevation of these popular cultural forms, and a further downgrading of elite culture, coming as it did on the heels of the New Cultural Movement's earlier discrediting of literati traditions. Despite the diminished interest in work in the traditional high cultural forms, the vogue for popular visual culture did not extend to an enthusiasm for crude standards. On the contrary, the 20th century Chinese enthusiasm for folk art forms engendered a shift in artistic style, rather than class struggle against elitist or decadent artists, which would include the substitution of professionals for amateurs, an overturning of the class of artists, or their substitution of those professionals for amateurs. Ironically, though art became a weapon of class struggle in the Cultural Revolution, discredited professional artists continued to shape cultural production. Despite the Cultural Revolution's derision of expertise in all things, art included, technical competence in art continued to be quietly valued sufficiently by artistic gatekeepers to necessitate professional touching up of amateur efforts that were to be publicized in exhibitions or serials' reproductions. 104 Thus, outsider art was in actuality more often a mimicry of unschooled art by professionals attempting to unlearn formalism and retrain themselves to produce artwork in a more primitive style. The resulting product, 104 Julia Andrews describes the resolution of the twin imperatives of amateur art promotion and technical strength in the form of "painting correction groups" wherein painters trained in the Socialist Realist style would repaint portions of amateur compositions, thus rendering the amateur works more suitable for exhibition and sometimes competition. Andrews, (1994): 359-60. 91 itself a sort of insider out art, increasingly coupled the rural with the revolutionary. These priorities, together with their graphic reflections, diminish in importance as the reform period ushers in a new appreciation of specialization that translates into a sharper division of labor. The civil-military pictorial propaganda charts a migration from ideals of unity through mimicry to those of harmony through the cultivation and employment of expertise. Consequently, the newborn soldier-technician replaces the soldier-cadre of Mao Zedong thought as technical training eclipses ideological rigor. Soldiers continue to be put forward as models for emulation, but now in more subtle ways, simply through portrayals of confident operation of complex technology rather than through heavy-handed campaigns exhorting the masses to "Learn from the PLA." Still, a disappearance of a people's soldier hallmark remains exceptional. More commonly, stock idealizations of civil-military relations share increasingly greater proportions of the field with soldiers who are distanced from civil populations as soldiers preoccupy themselves with more narrowly defined tasks of national defense while diminishing their engagement in national construction. Bourdieu’s Concept of Symbolic Violence This modernization program as a whole can be understood using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence,” particularly because he holds that it is "in the realm of symbolic production that the grip of the state is felt most 92 powerfully." 105 Symbolic violence refers to the state’s imposition of a social hierarchy, or structure of domination, on a potentially resistant populace through a “structure of meaning,” of primarily discursive practices, including aesthetic ones. 106 Words and images, rather than weapons, are the means of coercion. These discursive armaments are all the more effective because they can influence consciousness through the generation of images and symbols that by their comparatively passive nature can be more easily made to appear natural, and hence, more readily and unquestioningly internalized. This presentation of a particular set of interests as both natural and disinterested maintains power by foreclosing alternatives. Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence stresses the mediating role of cultural production in social reproduction. 107 Symbolic violence requires the concealment of hierarchy necessary to elicit the consent of those subjugated by it; it is a consensual arrangement and often obviates the need for material coercion, ‘as an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic), by virtue of the specific effect of mobilization.” 108 Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is particularly useful here in uncovering seemingly benign practices that 105 Pierre Bourdieu, "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field," George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999: 55. 106 Loïc Wacquant, "Pierre Bourdieu," Rob Stone, ed., Key Sociological Thinkers, New York: New York University Press, 1998: 217. 107 Gabriele Lokomski, “On Agency and Structure: Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s Theory of Symbolic Violence,” Curriculum Inquiry, 14, 2 (Summer 1984): 152. 108 Bourdieu (1991); 170. 93 coerce agents into desired behaviors or identities. These practices sustain hierarchy by concealing relations of dominance. For my purposes in this inquiry into Maoist Cultural Revolution practices and their Deng-sponsored reform responses, political art in the form of photographic and other pictorial imagery constitutes the symbolic violence of both the Maoist and early post-Mao Chinese state. These works’ state-sponsored graphic expressions of civil-military uniformity and diversity were intended to discursively delineate roles and construct identities through a contested process that was ultimately intended to promote national progress. Obviously, the Deng regime understood such progress differently from its predecessor. Where the reformist state looked to the fastest means to achieving domestic military and economic strength, the Maoist state had measured progress in terms of advancement on a Marxist teleological trajectory that insisted that a social rupture with established hierarchies as fundamental to both material and spiritual prosperity. To this end, Cultural Revolution authorities sought to militarize the civil, making it more amenable to revolutionary transformation. Reformers attempted to reverse these efforts, drawing sharp distinctions between the two civilian and military domains in the hope of stabilizing social order to cultivate a congenial climate to marketization. Pictorial modeling sought to steer behavior and identity into channels felt to facilitate state ends of rapid national development (now through markets) by representing its structures of domination as self-evident. Put 94 in a more conventional or neutral way, CCP propaganda art is an instrument with which to carry out political education, a source of cultural power available for state engineering of socially appropriate identities. Its potency derives from its naturalization of hierarchy that renders its targets accomplices to their own subjugation. This aim is accomplished less by the overtly propounded messages of political propaganda than by those messages effected through silences, absences, and naturalization, in other words, through covert expressions underlying the imagery that nevertheless impose social order, a kind of “common sense” embedded in visual culture that is more insidious as an unquestioned predicate to domination. Bourdieu’s logic asserts that particular meanings imposed benefit particular sectors of society, and thus accords with Mao’s, as well as Marx’s contention that all cultural production is classed. For Bourdieu, it is within the realm of the unquestioned assumptions and premises projected in symbolic forms that their more insidious and effective power to elicit complicity lies. Their seeming neutrality, against the acceptance of which Mao similarly contended, allows such messages to be easily accepted in a process that Bourdieu terms “misrecognition,” or the cloaking of ideology, whereby artifice is mistaken for nature. This is because ideology, as Bourdieu explains, “does not appear as such, to us and to itself, and it is this misrecognition that gives it its symbolic 95 efficacy.” 109 Bourdieu’s misrecognition is “akin to the idea of ‘false consciousness’ in the Marxist tradition…[that] denotes ‘denial’ of the economic and political interests present in a set of practices.” 110 Bourdieu posits that the success of interested actions pivots on misrecognition, or the denial of its interested dimension. Misrecognition, then, is a failure to perceive a violence that empowers its wielder precisely because the efficacy of the violence pivots on its reception as something altogether else. Extremism rather than scholarly restraint was the hallmark of the Cultural Revolution, and in this spirit the term “symbolic violence” is especially apt. Yet symbolic violence does not confine itself to militant terrain, or even to regimes invested in egalitarian discourse that are therefore less forthcoming about their intrinsic hierarchies. The fact that differentiated skill, merit, and rewards all became acceptable in the Deng years did not leave the reform state any less eager to conceal other hierarchies, whose justification lacked a direct basis in the state’s ethical calculus underlying its conveyed discourse. These included the military’s comparative advantage in resources allocated, the urban and coastal opportunity privileges, and the Han dominance over minorities, to name but a few. Though the “opening” aspect of the reforms causes the state to lose some media influence, its reliance on symbolic violence to cultivate desirable political subjects, in part 109 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology,” An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992: 250. 110 David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997: 89. 96 through the elision of inequality, in no way diminishes. On the contrary, because its efficacy rests on its concealment, the state’s monopoly on legitimate symbolic violence does not depend on a monopoly of overt media messages. Instead, the state can make use of a much more comprehensive visual arsenal of uniforms, labor associations, and social positioning to elide inequality and thus impose its preferred social order. Nevertheless, it is crucially important to relate the term to Maoist thought, particularly in order to explain the mechanisms by which Cultural Revolution political art created a discourse of civil-military symbiotic unity, as opposed to the complementary and cooperative unity of the reform era, that effectively empowered the armed forces. Moreover, Maoism retains a foundational relevance beyond the Cultural Revolution in which it reached its apogee and finally in many ways exhausted itself. Maoist CCP political culture continues to resonate beyond the death of Mao as a structure to which reform era innovations responded and on which they were overlaid. As a rigorous theorizer of practice who insists that theory maintain sufficient flexibility to be able to inform practice as conditions undergo change, Bourdieu is a good choice here with which to evaluate the words and deeds of Mao, whose conviction in the transformative power of practice led him to reject any theory that lacked applicability. 111 Both 111 Mao insists that "theory and practice must be united." Though similar citations can be found throughout his writings, the one selected here is from Mao Zedong, "Reinforce the Unity of the Party and Carry Forward the Party Traditions," 30 August, 1956, John K Leung and Michael Y.M. Kau, eds., The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949-1976, Vol. II, January 1956-December 1957, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992: 113. 97 Bourdieu and Mao call attention to the way in which cultural production mediates the structural and subjective realms. The two theorists of the practice of power also share a preoccupation with contestation in the cultural domain. Bourdieu’s focus articulates as a struggle over the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence…that is, of the power to impose (or even to inculcate) the arbitrary instruments of knowledge and expression (taxonomies) of social reality—but instruments whose arbitrary nature is not realized as such. 112 Thus, I make use of Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic violence" as a resource of the state and then examine that process in terms of Mao's understanding of the means by which cultural authority might produce a specific trajectory of political development. The above passage alludes to one of the more apparent divergences between Mao and Bourdieu in the latter’s concern with the unconscious apprehension of hierarchy exerted through symbolic forms. Nevertheless, both Mao and Bourdieu appreciated culture’s potential to mediate between the state and individual consciousness. Bourdieu's essay "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field" emphasizes the importance of state control of the nexus between the structural and subjective realms in order to realize and maintain dominance. State control of representation, for example, permits its use of aesthetics as a systematic, or structural and impersonal, means to construct and alter subjectivity in an apparently “natural” way: 112 Bourdieu, (1991): 168. 98 the state is an X (to be determined) which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population. If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity in the form of mental structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural. 113 It must be noted that Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, that at its most reductive operates as “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity,” always operates in tandem with a capacity for physical violence, which it augments, rather than substitutes for. 114 Their lack of physicality notwithstanding, symbolic structures complement, and possibly supercede, material ones to actively comprise and sustain power relations. 115 The state’s dual monopolies, then, of legitimate material and symbolic violence endow it with a great force with which to constrain social actors the state wishes to govern and discipline. This force, in turn, obviates the need for complete control of media, which slips away from the Chinese state during the reform period, in order to project its potential. The state, as the great fount of symbolic power which accomplishes acts of consecration, such as the granting of a degree, an identity card, or a certificate—so many acts through which the authorized holders of 113 Bourdieu, (1999): 56-57. 114 Bourdieu and Wacquant, (1992): 167. 115 Swartz, (1997): 5. 99 an authority assert that a person is what she is, publicly establish what she is, and what she has to be, 116 instead possesses and continually struggles over a far more generalizing and fundamental power in its monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence. The primary force represents “the power to constitute and to impose as universal and universally applicable within a given ‘nation,’ that is, within the boundaries of a given territory, a common set of coercive norms [no emphasis added].” 117 Fundamentally, for Bourdieu, symbolic forms legitimate social structures of domination. Sustainable inequality requires justification effected by cultural forms capable of eliciting the consent of the dominant and dominated to a given arrangement. Such an approach to social control is, of course, a totalizing one and can consequently often be characterized in an exaggerated fashion. Nevertheless, the important Marxist concept of totality is relevant here because of its contrasting emphasis on a relational understanding of the significance of social action in terms of the dialectics of the entire social structure as an explicitly human, and emphatically unnatural hence eminently malleable, construct. 118 Symbolic violence employs art to conceal the artificial foundations of an ostensibly “natural” social hierarchy. In this sense symbolic violence is antithetical to the 116 Bourdieu and Wacquant, (1992): 112. 117 Ibid. 118 Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984: 43. 100 Marxist ideal of explaining everything in an entirely transparent and accessible way, which in the Maoist iteration involved the development of art for the masses. Mao on Culture and Revolution The revolution’s specific and deliberate project to construct a mass culture outlined in Mao’s 1943 Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art implemented a wartime program in post-war society that constituted a peacetime militarization of culture. For Mao, however, the revolution had failed to achieve peace. As long as imperialism persisted, China would be at war on both international and internal fronts, hence the call for continuous revolution devised by a prescient Mao in the years preceding the CCP victory in 1949. In a global climate in which capital dominates, the survival of bad elements at home necessitated protracted struggle. 119 As part of that effort, the Talks spelt out the task of artists and intellectuals as "creating a work of literature and art which can awaken and arouse the popular masses, urging them on to unity and struggle and to take part in transforming their own environment." 120 Mao felt that artists had first to transform themselves into members of the masses and hence become mass artists. Again, identity construction supplies the foundation of social change. Mao’s vision of revolutionary mass culture fused popular art forms with revolutionary subjects. 119 Return of the Dragon: China’s Wounded Nationalism, Maria Hsia Chang, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001: 144-145. 120 MacDougall, (1980): 57 and 70. 101 The revolutionary subject, however, was dominant. This is nowhere more visible than in the grand iconography applied to the architect of Revolutionary Romanticism himself, Mao. Portraiture of Chairman Mao Zedong, commander in chief of the armed forces, permanent paragon of revolutionary citizenship, literally fills the household space vacated by religious icons banned by the party and is replicated publicly throughout the work unit, along village walls, in the pages of textbooks, magazines, newspapers, embossed on badges pinned on clothing, in short, everywhere, exhorting PRC citizens to class struggle to consolidate the gains of the revolution and hasten the classless utopia. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s visage was inescapable, even in the remotest corners of the nation, and his fundamental identity projected in CCP visual culture was that of a revolutionary, a soldier. Soldiers occupy a peculiar place in CCP propaganda as being at once of the masses and their vanguard. Their social role at least up through the reforms rested on a legitimacy that was mass based, that is, PLA soldiers, as members of a people's army, belonged to an institution based on the proletariat and the peasantry, which together comprise the Chinese masses. While soldiers' status as being of the people legitimated the institution of the army in China, the Maoist militarization of Chinese society that reached its peak in the Cultural Revolution ensured the privileging of the armed forces, positioning its members above those who did not belong to it. Soldiers were at once of the masses and its vanguard. 102 The Chinese communist revolution overturned not just a political order, but a whole set of social identities, substituting new hierarchies in place of those it toppled. Defining itself in opposition to the defeated 'old society,' the CCP exhorted its citizens to struggle to forge new senses of themselves in relation to the state, one another, and their labor. That process was to be achieved by means of a strategy of continual revolution and that doctrine of perpetual revolution normalized conditions of war albeit at times on a rather limited level. This militarization of society and its attendant glorification of the People's Liberation Army sought to transform citizens into revolutionaries. Under Mao’s leadership, the party urged all citizens to struggle, conferring the greater glory on those in the army, though militia members and even factory workers and commune member peasants were loosely understood as comrades-in-arms, through a discourse of unity in struggle, as well as a mass identification for the military. The PRC urged its citizenry to struggle to build socialism in a process that insisted on the dismantling of the old. The state demanded the participation of its totality in the struggle against the past, the struggle to modernize China. Maoist epistemolgy's point of departure in praxis demanded mass participation in class struggle, the smashing of some traditions, and the putative smashing of others, and socialist construction. As the formula had it, agitation aroused the masses into action, a learning process, which in turn engendered catharsis. Though long part of the Chinese socialist tradition, struggle, as a means of investing mettle, 103 gaining knowledge, and purifying society, became a constant practice of the Cultural Revolution. In particular, struggle served this experiential educational process as a method of promoting dialectical change. Mao’s conviction in material dialectics led him to view contradiction, universally inherent in things, as the motor of history. 121 Struggle, taken up by the masses, in the Chinese context essentially peasants and workers, who comprise the most suitable subjects to move history forward, therefore becomes the only means of progress. Mao contends that identity arises only in opposition to that with which it is in conflict, that is, identity issues out of struggle. 122 Mao’s foundational essay, On Contradiction, with its obvious debt to Marx’s, following Hegel’s, dialectics, and Daoism, establishes his law of unity in opposites, which advances that contradictory binaries are interdependent on one another for their very identity or conceptual existence. Struggle, in turn, ensures a mutability in human consciousness or identities that is determined through their contention with their antitheses and thereby accounts for progress. Mao explains, “Combination of conditional, relative identity with unconditional, absolute struggle constitutes the movements of opposites in all things.” 123 For Mao, identity formation, whether oppositional and antagonistic, or complementary and unifying, is always a process 121 Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960; 5-7. 122 Mao Zedong (1960): 55. 123 Ibid., 56. 104 of struggle. History scientifically determines the necessity, and possibility, of social revolution. From these truths as he saw them Mao’s emphasis on the subjective forces of history becomes apparent. Arguing against a more conventional reading of Marx, Mao insisted that human change was not dependent on technological or economic development, but a process that developed in tandem with these other processes. Thus, transfigurations in consciousness contained the potential to alter the course of history. It was for this reason that Mao ascribed a power and decisiveness to the role of superstructure in his revolutionary project. 124 Practically, such changes in human consciousness were to be actuated by praxis wherein cultural practice was to take the lead over theory. Mao’s attention to the superstructural realm reveals his faith in the potential of will and consciousness as vehicles for great social change. 125 Both his voluntarism and its reliance on the masses to take the necessary action to achieve great victories are apparent in his recounting of the fable, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” In the tale, an old man determines to move two mountains obstructing his way and commences digging 124 Schram’s reading of Mao’s On Contradiction finds a primacy of superstructure disputed by Healey. Healy acknowledges a fundamental concern with superstructure, but marshals Mao’s “The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to claim that though the superstructure possessed a measure of autonomy, that it also reflected changes in the base. Stuart Schram, Mao Zedong: A Preliminary Reassessment, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983: 75-6, 79; and Paul Healy, “A Paragon of Marxist Orthodoxy: Mao Zedong on the Social Formation and Social Change,” in Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Night, eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997: 118. 125 Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973: 8 and throughout. 105 with such conviction that he impresses the heavens, which delivers him two angels to complete his task. Mao’s allegorical reading equates the masses with the heavens and the twin evils of imperialism abroad and feudalism at home to the mountains, which he suggests are easily eradicated by determination. 126 As the above conclusion demonstrates, Mao’s reliance on the human factor for societal transformation continually rivets his attention to the realm of symbolic production. As its name suggests, the Cultural Revolution sought to overturn the symbolic realm of life through direct action. Kang notes how far from “scientific,” or orthodox Marxism, Mao’s activism was. “Mao’s privileging,” Kang notes, “of an activist epistemology of revolutionary practice in bringing about changes and mutations of contradictions…verges on voluntarism and subjectivism.” 127 His prescribed activism often took the form of mass criticism that was unfettered by the party administrative constraints established in the early years of the People's Republic. At its onset, the Chinese Revolution channeled its collective energies more to the problem of societal unification and consolidation of power than to the dismantling of power structures within the CCP's ranks that served in large measure as the impetus of the Cultural Revolution in later years. Its adoption of a United Front policy on those societal elements with whom the 126 Mao Tse-tung, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 3, Peking: People’s Publishing House, 1960: 273. 127 Liu Kang, “The Legacy of Mao and Althusser: Problematics of Dialectics, Alternative Modernity, and Cultural Revolution,” Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Night, eds., Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997: 237. 106 young state was in tension revealed an initially cautious and pragmatic accommodationism. To seize power, administrative organization had to be achieved and only the bureaucracies of competing regimes unraveled. The main CCP target in wartime China and immediately after the founding of the People’s Republic was an altogether external enemy. Whether the CCP intended to inculcate solidarity or symbiosis as part of its unification project, pictorial publications broadcast revolutionary norms for citizen strugglers and their army. Party representations of soldier-mass relations are most vividly conveyed in the visual propaganda of political posters and pictorial periodicals. Produced for a mass audience of which soldiers were included, these ideological productions sought to guide popular thinking and behavior in the exigencies of Chinese communist nationalism through the manipulation of a constellation of symbols. It is worth pausing a moment to examine more precisely what sort of an audience the CCP sought to reach with its aesthetic productions. CCP political art attempted to construct a collective subjectivity among its audience, which was conceived, during the Mao years as a more restrictive category of “masses” that later expanded during the early reform period to incorporate all citizens, including those formerly excluded on the basis of their harmfulness to the interests of the core masses in the Maoist sense, that is, soldiers, peasants, and workers. Zhou and Tong stress the link between the target audience and the identification with it on the part of its creator in Mao’s schema of aesthetic production. 107 Mao’s concept of audience is…both historically specified and socially defined, in the sense that it specifically refers to a social group that consists of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Therefore, Mao’s audience is at the same time a social and political concept, closely related to the notion of “the masses”, a collective audience rather than an individuated reader. To identify oneself with this collective audience is essential in Mao’s view on the function of cultural production…. 128 Just as Mao era official graphic media sought to create a national community of appropriate subjects in terms of their social identity, so too did reform productions. Post-Mao CCP imagery drew different figures into its national narrative, jettisoning the revolutionaries, downplaying the peasants, and propounding former targets of struggle like entrepreneurs and intellectuals, all of whom were cast, like their Maoist predecessors, in various configurations of dynamic interaction with their military fellow citizens. This project is less concerned with the effectiveness of that nationalist endeavor than its construction of a discourse of idealized civil-military relations, though these two subjects are necessarily interrelated. As Bourdieu reminds us, the “construction of the representation of the state… makes up part of the reality of the state itself.” 129 CCP visual propaganda depicting the mass citizen-soldier relationship reveals complex and competing sets of values that shift with party understandings of the needs of the nation. Throughout the course of its history up through the Mao years, the party’s explicit reliance on visual culture to promote 128 Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong, “The Problem of the Subject and Literary Modernity: Mao Zedong’s Theory of Art Revisited,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 32-33, (2000): 138. 129 Bourdieu in Steinmetz, (1999): 55. 108 desirable qualities in its citizenry derives from a Maoist understanding of connections between art, socialism, and ideology more generally. Yet, it was not only revolutionary China that attended to cultural concerns. Though Deng Xiaoping's economically reformist agenda was at least in part a reaction to Mao's privileging of culture, his "culturalist determinism," Deng's reaction did not neglect culture, but rather restored importance to a complementary economic focus, thus redirecting attention to the communist base without overlooking the superstructure, or culture. Culture, ideology, and political communication remained vitally important, but regime legitimacy and mass support increasingly depended on tangible material development that complemented state ideological efforts. In its own way, Deng’s program also constituted revolutionary change that visual culture would also help to model. By its very definition, revolution asserts the primacy of the new to justify its dismantling of the old. Twentieth century Chinese modernizers overwhelmingly advocated revolution, rather than reform, to build a nation out of the ruins of an empire. Underlying a range of movements from cultural nihilism to peasant rebellion, anti-traditionalism fueled China’s two twentieth century revolutions, both the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that toppled the Qing, China’s last, dynasty and established a republic, and the Chinese Communist Revolution that banished the republic to Taiwan and replaced it with a people’s republic in 1949. The revolution and its mission of social change did not end with the departure of the Nationalist army from Mainland China. Instead, the revolution’s 109 target merely shifted from a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” regime to “feudalism” itself, as embodied in the new polity’s undesirable class elements. Class struggle held out the promise of national salvation through a purification process that would effect modernization. Among an array of popular cultural forms including theatre, song, and, to a more limited extent, newspapers, pictorial propaganda played a crucial role in the agitprop of the Chinese communist revolution owing both to its easy replicability for mass dissemination and its accessibility to a largely illiterate population. By means of political messages mediated through poster prints and pictorial serials, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state exhorted its citizens to purge their body politic of its “bad elements,” and depicted the construction of a revolutionary paramilitary identity for Chinese citizens. This post-revolutionary revolution reached its peak in the Great Proletarian Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in which the CCP’s symbolic arsenal militarized society through a barrage of prescriptive imagery that asserted a radical symbiosis of soldiers and civilians. While militarization had been the primary political mode in which the people of China had experienced modernity, graphic representation of revolutionary citizenship helped to achieve and sustain the ultra-militarization of the Cultural Revolution. Militarism would summon the future by smashing the past, a message conveyed pictographically in woodblock and other poster prints and pictorial magazines, beginning as early as the May Fourth cultural movement 110 of 1919 that sought a complete rupture with traditional Confucian culture to realize enlightenment ideals and save the nation from dynastic rule and imperial domination. Pictorial propaganda proved ideally suited to support a culturally revolutionary path to modernity, just as it had helped sustain a cultural conservation in earlier years, though the revolution in culture was not without its limits. While Mao’s revolutionary platform jettisoned many cultural forms, it retained those elements of traditional culture that accorded with its internal and tactical ideals as Mao’s adherence to legalism and peasant rebellion both demonstrate. It also proved to be an effective medium in which to immediately and vividly express new cultural constructs, a canvas on which to flesh out revolutionary citizenship. CCP Cultural Control The Chinese Communist Party, established in the wake of May Fourth in 1921, continued and expanded this graphic tradition in opposition to both Nationalist domestic opponents and Japanese imperialists. The call to take up arms and join in the Communist struggle in Tang Yingwei’s 1936 woodcut, “Forward!” in a pictorial serial of the era depicted ordinary people transforming themselves into revolutionaries. Opportunities for such transformation abounded through the political and cultural struggle of successive leaders of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) and the ensuing war with the nationalists that ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. In May Fourth 111 terms, the future was imminent. Indeed by the early years of the PRC, the future had in some senses already arrived, as evidenced in the class inversions that replaced large landholders and capitalists with soldiers, peasants, and workers; in the unity of the broad masses comprised of the aforementioned triumvirate; and in the abundant harvests agricultural collectivization yielded. Smiles of “socialist ecstasy” underscore the value of these achievements. 130 As these and other accomplishments were credited to the revolution, their security and indeed further progress would rest on a first extended and then sustained revolutionary militarism. Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence reveals the mechanics by which depictions of civil-military equivalence under conditions of militarism elevate the armed forces and sustain that hierarchy once established. A central task of the Cultural Revolution was to reorganize society in order to develop new socialist citizens who would then emancipate the nation from the scourges of capitalism, feudalism, and imperialism that had hitherto impeded social progress. This was to be accomplished by means of a heightened militancy that would foster conditions of social turbulence necessary for subjectivity transformation that would be a condition of larger political change, while maintaining sufficient order to prevent a descent into anarchic chaos, or a degree of turbulence that simply destroys subjects without creating more progressive ones. 130 Schell, (1994): 250. 112 Essential to this complicated scheme were two foundations, namely, an army with unquestioning loyalty to Mao, the architect of the Cultural Revolution, and a popularly imagined mass-military symbiosis, the latter condition achieved by the deliberate erection of a constellation of discursive codes that imposed a broad uniformity of style to fuse the collective identity of the Chinese populace to the armed forces. To this end, symbolic strategies were aimed at imposing a particular vision of civil-military relationship, one in agreement with the interests and values associated with the particular position of those Cultural Revolution forces who produced them and one which attempted to create an illusion which suspends the competition of interests between the two realms. Chief among these were militancy in furthering the revolutionary agenda of class struggle and the promotion of the PLA. Images of civil-military harmonious interchangeability helped to mask the armed forces' increasing dominance of the civilian social order and to naturalize that hierarchy in order to gain complicity in it, particularly the complicity of those whom it disadvantaged. For Mao as for Marx, "genuine works of art were prefigurations of the normative society of the future." 131 By depicting the objective results of subjective transformation, political art asserts a "scientific" scheme of development that closes off trajectories that present alternate sets of power relations. 131 Ibid., 301. 113 As his 1943 "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art" makes clear, Mao categorically rejects the notion of politically neutral art divorced from its social conditions. 132 Like Bourdieu, Mao posits that realm of “pure culture” in which interests do not operate are complete fantasies. Both Mao and Bourdieu tend to reduce art to a site of struggle for competing interests. As “symbolic practices deflect attention from the interested character of practices and thereby contribute to their enactment as disinterested pursuits,” acceptance of neutrality in art is tantamount to complicity in the reproduction of the inegalitarian order it projects. 133 In Bourdieu’s terms, Mao is proposing to assert structural control over aesthetic production in order to dominate the subjective realm of identity formation for revolutionary purposes. Instead for Mao, art functions as media, or Bourdieu’s “nexus,” of social reproduction through the power of representation and emulation. In the "Talks," Mao discussed the need for party dominance of the cultural realm. For Mao, culture was invested with a critical importance as "both a means and an end in itself in constituting an alternative modernity." 134 Put another way, cultural revolution did not just agitate and rouse the masses for revolution, it constituted revolutionaries. Material social change depended on cultural change in a viewpoint that deemed transformation of consciousness a prerequisite for the alteration of objective conditions. Action and identity are 132 MacDougall, (1980): 75. 133 Swartz (1997): 90. 134 Liu Kang, (2000): xi. 114 inextricably linked; both are responsive to the persuasiveness of cultural productions. This emphasis on subjectivity, voluntarism, or will further reinforced during the Cultural Revolution, expressed itself practically in Mao's insistence on "constant struggle in the realm of the superstructure." 135 Consequently, during the heyday of Maoist idealism in the Cultural Revolution "Mao advocated his mission largely through symbolic maneuvers," 136 which included rituals of big character poster writing, troop review, swimming in the Yangtze in 1966, bestowing ceremonial gifts, which was also an imperial tradition, such as that of the Pakistani mangoes to the workers at Qinghua in 1968, and conducting various other political spectacles. 137 Images depicting these acts embodied the revolution in Mao and contributed to the cementing of mass revolutionary identity. Due in part perhaps to the semiotically “promiscuous" (Hodge and Louie, 1998) qualities of the Chinese cultural heritage, CCP political culture was acutely conscious of the power of symbols because CCP operatives, as well as their target audience, were all familiar with the old Chinese imperial elites’ emphasis on political ritual spectacle for both literate and illiterate consumption. In a syncretic mode of political thought, Maoism deployed a series of idealized identities, among whom 135 Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 168. 136 Shaorong Huang, (2000): 208. 137 Edelman discusses the ways by which political spectacle, in his work evoked by media news reports, constructs identity and meaning. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 115 Lei Feng was paradigmatic, indebted to both Confucian exemplars and Soviet Marxist models in support of state power on the cultural battlefield. From the beginning of his political activism, Mao understood that a cultural army, reinforced by such embodiments of revolutionary purity created by artists and intellectuals, would also be indispensable to the success and consolidation of the revolution. Of course, Maoist exemplar-models were also supposed to aid in the transformation of real Chinese people. The creation of a mass subject like Lei Feng was a mutually transformative exercise fusing intellectual progenitor and emulative audience into a coherent revolutionary mass. Specifically, the artist would be transformed by the labor of producing a subject of genuine revolutionary mass appeal and the audience is likewise transformed through consumption of the image that enables citizens to re-envision themselves. This dialectic of elite-mass interaction to produce a revolutionary populace that would render such distinctions meaningless was fundamentally based on the transformation of social identities. Explicitly encapsulated in the slogan, "great revolution touches people to their very souls," the call for the consciousness transformation necessary for the construction of new identity reverberated throughout the era's political directives. 138 The inculcation of a revolutionary identity in Chinese masses would link masses to the party-state and 138 Schram, (1989): 179. 116 mobilize social forces for revolutionary action. 139 Mao had infinite faith in the power of the collective will of the masses once reconstructed. 140 Dutifully propagated, his conviction was echoed in a characteristically unattributed column of revolutionary aphorisms in the journal Chinese Literature: A soldier will fight like a hero Only if on the thought of Mao Zedong he relies But armed with Mao Zedong's thought He can cross seas of fire, climb hills of knives 141 The ideological "arming" here equates to identity construction via textual practice that is reinforced by images. The iconography and slogans of the Cultural Revolution combine to invite participation in and identification with an empowering militancy. For Mao, in the Cultural Revolution as in the Chinese communist revolution, civil-military harmony would be crucial to success. Conditions of war demand that army and masses "draw close" in "an intimate, close relationship." 142 As Mao indicated in his key essay, "On Coalition Government," "The sole purpose of this army is to stand firmly with the Chinese people and to serve them wholeheartedly." 143 During the Cultural Revolution, it was felt that this service was best rendered through symbiotic unity, which actually denoted a civil-military hierarchy. 139 Kraus, (2004): 226. 140 Schram, (1989): 113. 141 "Revolutionary Aphorisms," Chinese Literature, 9, 1966: 142-146, as translated in Schoenhals, (1996): 190. 142 Mao Zedong, "On the Problem of Ideological Work," Wansui (n.d. 3) 153-163, in Leung and Kau, (1992): 453-454. 143 Mao Zedong, "On Coalition Government," Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 3, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967: 214. 117 Mao and other Cultural Revolution forces waged the struggle to secure the power of symbolic violence by producing and disseminating explicitly politicized art. The graphic expression of Cultural Revolution era civil-military relations contained in state discursive products such as the political posters and various other pictographic forms reproduced in serialized pictorials, like the PLA Pictorial I examine here, represents symbiotic unity across a number of interactions, most of which were peculiar to the later Mao years. Thus born of both socialist and Confucian approaches, the twentieth century Chinese communist revolution took representation's revolutionary potential seriously by fostering the growth of mass art in a bid to invert social privileges by celebrating "low" art, disseminating artistic reproductions and fostering art among unskilled laborers. Cultivating mass culture entailed more than simply inverting the hierarchy of "high" and "low" art. In practical terms, this process involved taking advantage of modern developments in communication channels and mass production capacity to broaden the reach of its political message delivery system and thereby maximize representation's transformative potential. In the hands of the CCP, graphic propaganda becomes a medium through which to represent and so realize socialist modernity. As a forceful articulation of party promotions for its citizenry, propaganda art is an instrument with which to carry out political education, a source of cultural power available for state manipulation and control to create socially appropriate identities. Political art invests specific human interaction with larger social 118 meaning, which is vitally necessary to fostering collective identities. Aesthetic power's unique ability to instill a particular set of desirable norms in a given polity on a mass scale proves crucial to the state's marketization of identity. Chief among these values in much of the period with which this study is concerned were revolution and militancy. Proper identities are formed upon these two foundational themes. The PLA, indeed, the embodiment of revolution insofar as it is at once historical actor and living revolutionary symbol, becomes a pivotal institutional subject and producer of political art. Always a fount of political art, the PLA during the Cultural Revolution became a crucial front in the struggle to radically transfigure socialist art and literature, taking on the role of standard setter of an ideological line in graphic expression. The 1966 Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces in which National Defense minister and vice- chairman Lin Biao advised army cultural representatives to meet with Jiang Qing, Mao's wife and Gang of Four leader, provided the army a voice in the establishment of new ideological guidelines and stipulated that "The Liberation Army must play an important role in the socialist cultural revolution," citing the Military Commission's recently adopted "Resolution on Strengthening Political and Ideological Work in the Armed Forces." 144 Participants empowered themselves by authoring a summary of the forum's proceeds that was first 144 Summary of the Forum on the Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces with Which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted Chiang Ching, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968: 11-12. 119 personally revised and endorsed by Mao and then broadly publicized. The Forum was both a practical expression of Lin's "politics in command" priority for the military and a means of cementing Gang of Four ties with the army in a move that reinforced the Gang's revolutionary credentials and helped it to establish an institutional power base despite its rhetorical bent on smashing political institutions. Both the army's artistic mission and the cultural sphere's militancy represented developments arising from what Cheek terms faith, as opposed to bureaucratic, Maoism that predominated during the Cultural Revolution. 145 This army's elevated role of determiner of the ideological line in the arts established in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution helped accelerate an extant tendency to represent the soldier in political art. Invested with the hard power of the nation, soldiers were symbolically deployed in the state's projection and manipulation of its soft power. It was necessary for the population on whose behalf the revolution had been and was being waged to identify with the struggle, to see themselves on the side of the revolutionaries. To this end, harmonious and abundant interaction between the Chinese people and army were projected in pictorial propaganda. In this way, the nation, or revolution, as embodied by the army, is joined to the masses. Thus do the masses assume a revolutionary identity and internalize and embody a nationalist project as armed forces and society take on the appearance of an organic whole. Consequently, the crucial dimension of 145 Timothy Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao's China, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997: 220. 120 the subject of army-people relations is not neglected among other areas of ideological concern. Pictorial Propaganda and the Realization of the Future An ideological tool with which to forge a new society, propaganda, by its very nature, has much to say. However little its content can be taken at face value, to assume that propaganda, as an articulation of a fantasy of absolute state control, is a meaningless object of study would be an unreasonable dismissal of a unique source of state discourse. As a discursive category, visual propaganda functions as a means of social control and social reproduction. Through semiotic messaging encoded in its propaganda texts, the Chinese state attempts to engineer society, to mold groups into a set of behavior congenial to the state's blueprint of development and its notion of cultural harmony. Obviously representational, CCP political art foregrounds figures that carry out state projects or, less commonly, those institutions that exemplify them. The model collective Dazhai, discussed at some length below in the reform context of disappearing spatial models, presents an example of an institutional visual exemplar of socialist ideals, and indeed, almost a utopia in which human bodies signify no iconic or individuated forms except as constituents of a mass, and massive, endeavor. Despite the Dazhai exception, however, institutional representation remains marginalized in CCP visual propaganda, which favored compositions centered on the relations, activities, or 121 values of the human figures contained therein. Such compositional subjects model behavior for proper state subjects that are perhaps easier to emulate for their embodiment in human figures. Pictorial propaganda is both a reflection of actual relations the state, in order to maintain them, promotes and an ideal made generally accessible as a model for emulation. Not at all unique to the CCP, the behavioral idealism behind much of the model emulation drives has a long history in Chinese political culture. 146 One has only to recall the chaste widow cults of late imperial China and contrast them with the actuality of common widow remarriage in the same period to see that state’s stubborn promotion of idealized models is neither unique to, nor much altered by the Chinese communist project. 147 The propaganda endeavor constitutes the thrust of the party-state's political communication with its citizenry. Propaganda is an overt mission understood as a necessary, desirable and proper government engagement, with the aim of achieving ideological clarity in its message projection. This ideological messaging in turn serves propaganda's ultimate purpose of subject/identity formation. In the Chinese context, the term "propaganda" lacks its English 146 Xing Lu identifies moral idealism as "the core feature and purpose of Confucian rhetoric.” Lu (2000): 10. 147 For a more recent account of Qing dynasty (1644-1911) chaste widow cults, see Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women In China's Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 122 stigma, as Cheek, Hung and other have noted. 148 Its meaning straightforwardly connotes dissemination of information and is often more akin to "publicity." To that end, a key aim of the earlier social revolution in civic culture was the conversion of discredited, but vital, classes, such as artists and intellectuals, into the broad masses. Illegitimate classes prove crucial as negative examples. Herein lie the core contradictions of the state's identity formation project. The state produces identities that are antagonistic to "New China" in many respects. The role of artists and intellectuals was particularly important as creators and transmitters of ideological products that could promote revolutionization of all society. As more than gun-slinging armies would be necessary to win the Civil War and then consolidate it, Mao reasoned, a cultural army would also be indispensable. The new recruits for this army would necessarily preoccupy themselves with the popular art forms of the masses, a shift in focus to "low art" that had begun some twenty years before Mao's addresses on the subject in the New Cultural Movement of the 1920's and its project of "art for people's life," or as Mao understood it, art in the service of the people. 149 The artistic reorientation to popular art resulted from the urgency to turn China from a literati tradition now seen as regressive. Literati art, with its complacent subjects, supported status quo hierarchies and so produced only literati identities that are inimical to modernity. 148 Cheek, (1997), and Hung, (1994): 9. 149 See Gao Minglu, "Post-Utopian Avant Garde Art in China," in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, Aleš Erjavec, ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003: 248 for a discussion of the foundations of the CCP insistence on "low art." 123 Instead, socialist modernity required mass artists, whose task was to help revolutionize folk art, or failing that, to create art that was informed by folk art and replicated its easy mass appeal. Such changes would allow for the establishment of a people's art. The Politics of CCP Artistic Style Mao's ideas on art, many of which are spelt out in the Yan'an talks, transformed art in more ways than merely popularizing state-supported visual cultural forms. Equally significantly, Mao established a highly unstable set of criteria for proper artistic subject matter, effectively banning a range of genres deemed '"feudal" while dictating others intended to further revolutionary ideals and socialist modernization. Lacking depiction of human struggle carried out by the favored classes of soldiers, peasants, and workers, traditional landscapes, or shanshui, literally mountain and water, painting and flower-and-bird painting fell into disfavor in guohua, literally national painting, but better understood as traditional Chinese painting, an art form that continued to flourish, albeit under an altered set of guidelines under the party's watchful gaze and with its material, and organizational, support. 150 The CCP aim was not to jettison the guohua tradition, but to revolutionize it. Andrews explains the essence that was to be preserved in guohua's transformation: 150 Galikowski, (1998): 30. 124 In the People's Republic of China, guohua and zhongguohua commonly refer to works painted with traditional Chinese pigments on a ground of traditional paper or silk. The terms thus describe the medium and ground of the painting rather than the style. 151 Thus, the tradition is furthered only in the most minimal sense, that is, in the employment of specific materials, while the style undergoes a complete alteration to follow the Socialist Realism developed in the decades following the Russian Revolution by Soviet artists. China very faithfully mimicked Soviet Socialist Realism before intertwining it with some cultural reasoning more peculiar to Mao. Certainly the PRC retention of traditional Chinese pigments and paper with new socialist painting style adhered to Stalin's oft-quoted encapsulation of Socialist Realism as "national in form, socialist in content." That "'socialist content' included the whole gamut of ideological clichés: party spirit, progressiveness, popular spirit, etc." 152 As part of the party spirit was of course contained in its progressiveness, Socialist Realism necessarily had an eye to the future. Zhou Yang, China's vice- minister of cultural affairs and its most vocal transmitter of official art policy notes, its works "were good at combining the reality of today with the ideals of tomorrow." 153 Bonnel characterizes Socialist Realism's preoccupation with the future in even stronger, and more deceptive, terms, as "a new mode of visual 151 Andrews, (1994): 50. 152 Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China, New York: IconEditions, 1990: 147. 153 As quoted in Ellen Johnston Laing, The Winking Owl: Art in the People's Republic of China, Berkeley: University of California, 1988: 17. 125 representation which presented only the future--the future in the guise of the present." 154 The fundamental optimism about the time just ahead articulates itself unmistakably in the Socialist Realist canon. This projection of the future arose from a set of complementary aims. Among these was the revolutionary fervor to replace things old with those new, to create a new China, modern citizens, the new democratic culture Mao conceived and wrote of, etc. 155 This was to be accomplished at least in part through the dissemination of visual imagery that expressed a realization of these ideal forms. The "social-educational function" of Socialist Realism to transform first consciousness, then actual material conditions, required the invention of a mythical future to demonstrate both the potential of that future's realization and the progress already underway toward that effort. 156 The beauty contained in the ideal was felt to more powerfully advocate change than a presentation of the misery of actual present conditions. 157 Even so, the reflection of actual social conditions remained a significant component of the blended representation of the real and imagined in Socialist Realist art. Morozov recounts the Soviet debate about the proportion of realism to communist ideology and the sustained reverberation of that tension throughout the 154 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997: 105. 155 Mao Zedong, "Xin Minzhu de Zhengzhi yu Xin Minzhu de Wenhua," (The New Democratic Politics and New Democratic Culture) Zhongguo Wenhua,1: 1, (1941): 1-24. 156 Aleksander Morozov, "Socialist Realism: Factory of the New Man," in Boris Groys and Max Hollein, eds., Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era, Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 70. 157 Golomstock, (1990): 184-5. 126 Soviet era. 158 The Chinese names of "Revolutionary Realism," or Socialist Realism, and "Revolutionary Romanticism" to account for these dual strains in Chinese communist era art style reflect a variant conceptualization of utopianism inherent in Socialist Realism. In the official CCP discourse, Socialist Realism is lacking in utopian content and is therefore in tension with a complementary romanticism. 159 Seen to be scientific, realism was pitted against an irrational, though culturally potent romanticism not understood to be contained within the Socialist Realist tradition, but necessarily complementary to it. 160 The formulation of Revolutionary Romanticism as separate from revolutionary, or socialist, realism signifies a Chinese adaptation to earlier Soviet theories of Revolutionary Romanticism initially advanced by Andrei Zhdanov, Soviet ideology chief, in 1934, though they are often attributed in CCP organs to Guo Morou, chairman of the All-China Federation of Literature and Art Circles. 161 The PRC elevation of Revolutionary Romanticism to its own category apart from Socialist Realism marks the comparative significance of romanticism in its Chinese variant, an adaptation that fully accords with Mao's views on the proper position of art. In an oft-quoted passage from his "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art" Mao explains: "literature and art that have been more processed are more organized and concentrated than literature and art 158 Morozov, (2003): 64-5. 159 Laing, (1984): 30. 160 Andrews, (1994): 118. 161 Galikowski, (1998): 100; Laing, (1984): 30-31. 127 in their natural form; they are more typical and more idealized, and therefore have greater universality." 162 While the extent to which China adapted, versus copied, Soviet Socialist Realism is disputed, Chinese artwork's Revolutionary Romanticism far exceeds the "neoromantic tinge" of Soviet Socialist Realism. 163 Galikowski explains the distinction between Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism that divides Chinese practice of the form from its Soviet model: The difference between Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism is mainly one of degree--the latter involves an over- emphasis on the romantic dimension, often to the point of absurd and implausible over-exaggeration, whilst the former attempts to maintain some degree of balance between objective representation of certain features of reality and emphasis on specific aspects of that reality. Revolutionary Romanticism is more deeply rooted in the philosophical foundation of objective idealism than in materialism. 164 The comparatively romantic Chinese style emerged alongside other markers of Chinese distinction. Though Socialist Realist doctrine stipulated that art must reflect various national forms in its different contexts, Cultural Revolution radicals felt it was necessary to warn cultural workers of the inadequacy of a hewing too closely to the Soviet model, reasoning that: "Blind imitation can never become art." 165 The Chinese adaptation of the form was well underway before the Cultural Revolution. In a turn dating from 1960, the 162 MacDougall, (1980): 70. 163 Morozov, (2003): 71. 164 Galikowski, (1998): 102. 165 Summary, 14. 128 Sinicization of the adoptive Soviet style was most readily apparent in the folk art influence. 166 It is here in the idealized futurism of the visual cultural forms of Chinese peasant New Year pictures, calendars, and murals that that romanticism is most fully expressed. In addition to this injection of romanticism arising from the incorporation of such popular forms into formal Chinese aesthetics that marks the departure of Chinese Socialist Realism from its Soviet forbearers were differences resulting from the divergent natures of the two revolutions. In contradistinction to the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution was not an urban-directed affair. Consequently, the agrarian nature of the Chinese revolution exalted the peasant's position in CCP iconography, wherein peasants were both more central and more frequently depicted. Perhaps also Chinese Socialist Realism bears the mark of sustained support for and conviction in the Chinese revolution. Andrews argues that blind faith in the Maoist project imbued much Cultural Revolution art with a passion and sincerity more generally lacking in propaganda. "Much of the art of the Cultural Revolution was produced by passionately patriotic young artists and it sometimes emanates a sincerity that is possible only when the icon maker is a true believer." 167 166 The periodization in Andrews'. Julia F. Andrews, "A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China," in Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, eds., A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998: 6. 167 Andrews, (1998): 7. 129 Yet another important break from the Soviet style arising from dissimilarities between the two revolutions derives from the Maoist insistence on continual revolution. The Soviet institutionalization of power that ensured social order and relative bureaucratic stability was the antithesis of the CCP political style, in which institutions were sometimes dismantled as soon as they were erected. Perpetual revolution instead called for a sustained vigilance supported by a total militarization of all levels of society. This social fact promotes the maintenance of the natural heightened reverence felt for the military during wartime, in particular under conditions of foreign attack, a reverence that in turn produces an iconographic prominence of the soldier-hero that is more fleeting in the case of Soviet imagery, where the soldier's leading position in the hierarchy of classes of citizens rises and falls with the salience of the Civil War. 168 Whereas in the Soviet pictorial tradition the worker most frequently assumes the role of hero, in China's Mao years this privilege is conferred upon the soldier, regardless of whether the military is contemporaneously engaging a foreign enemy as it did in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and again in Vietnam in 1979. 169 Continual revolution ensured the PLA a position of privilege among the broad masses reflected in CCP propaganda of the Mao era. 168 Bonnell, (1997): 28. 169 As G nther notes, "It is no wonder that in a country that has included the origins of socialism in its flag, the working hero occupies the central position." Hans G nther, "The Heroic Myth in Socialist Realism," in Boris Groys and Max Hollein, eds., Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era, Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz, 2003: 116. 130 Conclusion The Mutual Constitution of the Soldier and Civilian This study scrutinizes all images and accompanying texts selected from posters and pictorials for the values they project in their depictions of civil- military relations. Particular attention is paid to the illustrated roles of soldiers and civilians and the ways in which their identities are mutually constitutive. During the Cultural Revolution, what makes a soldier a soldier has much to do with that soldier's dealings with the Chinese masses. The Chinese term for civil- military is junmin, or military-civilian, an inversion of both the western term and its implicit hierarchy. For many of the early years of CCP history, revolution was either being made or celebrated and this set of conditions glorified army and militarized society. Once victory was secured all the way up to the reform period, revolutionary soldiers were honored and the army became a particularly prestigious institution with which to be associated, with the army's status peaking during the years of the Cultural Revolution. As early stage purges threw the party into turmoil, the army moved in to assume roles in governance and social order. Mao incited students to rebel, but then relied on the army to quell rebellion when it either moved in undesirable directions or escalated out of control. Contributing to its prestige was the fact that the army was a safe haven from accusations of revisionism and rightism and consequently a safe model to revere and emulate. In response to its expanded role, the army grew in both size and stature. Much of its prestige arose from a reputation for honorable dealings with civilians 131 earned during the Chinese Communist revolution that sharply distinguished the Red Army from its enemy forces. Sometimes credit accrued simply by the army's failure to engage in actions commonly undertaken by other forces, Kuomintang or Japanese troops, on the ground in China. CCP forces earned admiration by refraining from rape or impressment, compensating peasants for provisions seized, not impressing the able-bodied into service, and respecting other property and social order in the places they passed through. This frequently passive benevolence, combined with an accretion of meritorious deeds in the form of deliverance from abusive power holders, be they other army's troops or local landlords, and the restoration of social order generated a wealth of societal goodwill. More active deeds of wartime heroism, protection from warlords, literacy training, or medical assistance further developed army public relations. Eventually, further credit would redound to the PLA simply on the basis of its striking success in a culture that customarily stigmatized armed force careers. The rapidity of social promotion for those in the military directly resulted from the institution’s discipline in its formative years. Observance of these sets of do's and don’ts in army-people relations set PLA soldiers off from other soldiers, though not always from civilians. During the Cultural Revolution when 'politics was in command' of the PLA as Lin Biao promised, what is stressed pictographically in the images is the extra-military obligations of army to people. Assistance with agricultural labor, propagation of political campaigns, or education are among the many reciprocal obligations 132 between masses and army. Soldiers study technology from workers, soldiers transfer technology to collectives; ethnic minority farmers teach soldiers language, soldiers teach Maoist thought, frontier populations patrol the border, etc. Civil and military work becomes more permeable during the Cultural Revolution. Soldiers’ obligations to the people extend far beyond defense, just as the people are expected to contribute to security enforcement. Another important mutual obligation between soldier and civilian, one in which their roles were interchangeable, was the endeavor to learn the historical lessons of the revolution. Each shares lived history with the other so that both sides might profit by the knowledge, particularly as their personalized accounts of struggle stand in for the collective struggle of all in the nation. 170 The cooperative effort between army and masses to liberate China from imperialist powers from abroad and "feudalism" at home left each side an opportunity to make sense of that shared struggle. Civilians address young recruits to relate their experiences of the bitterness of old society. Veterans of the revolution address school children to instill their particular understanding of that experience and connect that experience into other narratives. Thus, from stories told back and forth soldiers draw lessons of never forgetting class struggle and masses learn of strength in unity from soldiers. 170 Pickowicz depicts a similar process in which family narratives become national allegories in Chinese cinematic representations of the Sino-Japanese War. Paul G. Pickowicz, "Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance," in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and beyond, Wen-Hsin Yeh, ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000: 384-386. 133 This reciprocity of roles obscures distinction between the two identities to such extent that the difference at times only becomes apparent in the subtle order of initiation of activities, the modeling role the army plays to instruct and guide civilian behavior. While civilians may also model behavior that soldiers seek to emulate, their modeling function is not intrinsic to their civilian identity as it is to the military. When soldiers visit civilians to learn by their example, it is extraordinary. In contrast, in Mao's PLA that is to be "a big school," a soldier is automatically and naturally a model. Elsewhere among the extra-defense roles of soldiers to civilians, divisions are yet more clear-cut. Certain services from medical treatment to heroic rescue are exclusively within military purview. It is never workers or peasants who save soldiers. Workers and peasants may assist soldiers, but the glory of rendering civilian assistance in life and death situations or displaying decisive courage in those arenas is exclusive to the soldier, rather than a reciprocal favor. Even in more quotidian affairs, boundaries are closely circumscribed. Only the army provides traveler services on buses and at railway stations, just as only the masses, and particularly peasant women, make grass shoes for soldiers and mend their clothes and linens. Some of these distinctions are immutable in the period examined here between 1966 and 1986 despite the great social and political transformations between those two decades of Cultural Revolution and the marketization and opening up reforms. What gets stressed in these complementary roles shifts over 134 time, sometimes in obvious ways and often in those less expected. As 'expert' eclipses 'red' in politics, images of soldiers analyzing Mao Zedong thought for assembled masses give way to those of soldiers at university studying from civilian professors. With the rehabilitation of intellectuals and the attendant re- valorization of professionalism, the vogue for self-study and semi-literate educators dies out. "Freeing itself from the ideological influence of 'Leftism'" as party literature has it, afforded the PLA a means of "clearing the way for further progress." 171 In civil-military relations, this translates visually into the disappearance of certain images, like those of militant PLA leadership in civil- military political rallies, and the emergence of others in which civil-military distinction is more sharply delineated, such as that evident in the new motif of soldiers’ defense and protection of vulnerable women and children on the fringes of skirmishes that sometimes disrupt life on the southwestern borders. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the CCP disengagement with "Leftism" does not entail the strict separation between civil and military realms that obtains in the west. Western notions of military professionalism such as those depicted by Samuel Huntington subordinate the military to civilian authority and limit its role to a mission of a narrowly conceived understanding of security. In contrast, Deng's military reforms, commonly referred to in the west as "professionalization," but more typically and precisely rendered in Chinese as "regularization" or "modernization," reined the army in under tighter party-state 171 Su Wenming, (1985): 8. 135 leadership, but still allowed for the extra-military duties of constructing civil works and PLA training provided to non-military departments. 172 Moreover, long-held traditions of troop self-sufficiency persisted, further diverting labor away from defense in any strict sense. An enduring institution from pre-modern times, the tuntian military agricultural colony supported an expansionist Chinese state by posting troops on the frontiers where they were too remote from the central state's presence to be logistically supplied. Such colonies made farming a natural part of soldiering and the persistence throughout the reforms foreclosed the sort of military professionalization lauded by Huntington. Indeed, CCP and western understandings of regularization remain very far apart. Fundamentally, the CCP outlook on PLA training takes a long and comprehensive view to developing skills that will have dual civil and military applications so these skills can be made use of once the trained soldier is demobilized, resulting in training that combat focused troops would not ordinarily receive. 173 Consequently, for the CCP, the concept of regularization chiefly entails the removal of officers from positions of civilian leadership they held during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, regularized soldiers retain their "efforts to boost agricultural and sideline production...while training for combat at all times." 174 Additionally, the reformed PLA constructs public works, provides 172 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, New York: Vintage, 1957: 76. For examples of non-military work in PLA promotional literature produced for the overseas market, see Su Wenming, on the text of p. 48 and in the many illustrated plates that immediately follow. 173 Ibid., 49. 174 Ibid., 45. 136 disaster relief, participates in reforestation efforts and "spreads knowledge and culture." 175 Yet nowhere does the PLA mission diverge more sharply with the western professional army model than in its political duties. In partial fulfillment of these duties was PLA-civilian joint participation in the Spiritual Civilization campaign to promulgate "socialist moral standards and ethics." 176 As an institution that "enthusiastically propagates the Party's policies and principles among the masses," the reform-era PLA remains deeply politicized. 177 Still, the level of army politicization declines sharply under the reforms as professional training comprises an increasing portion of the soldiers' workload. Evolving civil-military relations contribute to the army's political distancing. Whereas the army's prestige among the larger population had rested on its political activism during the Cultural Revolution, it now depended on its political disengagement. Civilian expectations of the military had shifted, causing rank and file political agitation to discredit the army. Zheng explains the reform tensions in PLA politicization thus: The PLA in the Deng era...still faced its classic political dilemma: It was structurally difficult to disengage from CCP politics, and yet its active political role often brought more humiliation than glorification to the military institution. 178 175 Ibid., 44. 176 Ibid., 50. 177 Ibid., 51. 178 Shiping Zheng, Party vs. State in Post-1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 253. 137 Societal Militarization and the PLA Until the reform’s demilitarization, in effect an amputation from the PLA of its mass base, the armed forces enjoyed their position as institutional vanguard. Though technically inclusive of transformed intellectuals and formulaically inclusive of the military, China's masses, always depicted in the Mao years as iconic triumvirate of peasant, worker, soldier, contain an unequal unity of social forces. This exalted status of first among equals fundamentally lifts the soldier out of the masses, making it possible to examine the relationship between the civil and the military, however much of a people's army that military purports to be, and however much the party-produced symbolic rendering of that relationship sought to promote images of equality among various social elements. The myth of the social flat plane of post-revolutionary China was further belied by the social fact of rank and file PLA serving as living, itinerant models for emulation by the masses they encounter along the way, all the while claiming to be emulating those masses. Rigidly and iconically classed, models preclude realization of the utopian dream of "classless society" even as class distinctions are effaced by symbiotic trends brought about by the adoption of ultra-militancy. As society militarized, the PLA became a school for the entire nation, as Mao's famous dictum went. 179 Moreover, PLA soldiers are media for social militarization. Cultural Revolution pictorial art articulates the soldier's preeminence resoundingly even as its text 179 "Make Our Army a Great School of Mao Tse-tung's Thought," Peking Review, 9: 32 (5 August, 1966): 8. 138 presents a catechism of undifferentiated status among the sanctioned groups within the CCP body politic. 139 Chapter 3 Maoist Decade Pictorial Practice During the Cultural Revolution Maoist imagery, always heavily freighted, conveyed a plethora of meanings, all of which were linked by a claim to universalism in both chronological and ethnic terms. As the red, reddest sun, with burning rays emanating from his visage, Mao signified the revolution, both the one that was victorious and that which was yet to be won, the immediate past and the eternal future. Situating Mao among the polyethnic people of the Third World reinforced and extended his revolutionary authority, while also projecting an internationalist nationalism. Maoist nationalism envisioned China as vanguard of revolutionary communist movements, which the CCP assisted during the Cultural Revolution both materially and ideologically, across the globe. This nationalism’s extended focus centered on an aim beyond the immediate interest of the nation-state, whose utopic dissolution was a truism of the CCP’s official ideology. This somewhat nihilistic goal set the Cultural Revolution’s externally- preoccupied nationalism apart from earlier developmental nationalisms out of which it evolved. Despite its radicalism in this, and other, regards, Maoist nationalism hewed very tightly to developmental imperatives it shared with earlier Chinese nationalists, as its graphic and linguistic discourse attests. 180 180 This more pragmatic side to Maoist nationalism is often overlooked. Chang, in this regard, is typical. Even in acknowledging Mao’s accomplishments overall in economic and infrastructural 140 Somewhere between Mao and the people, soldiers modeled revolutionary citizenship for the broad masses. Soldiers occupy a peculiar place in CCP propaganda as being at once of the masses and their vanguard. Their social role at least up through the reforms rested on a legitimacy that was mass based, that is, PLA soldiers, as members of a people's liberation army, belonged to an institution based on the proletariat and the peasantry, which together embody the Chinese masses. While soldiers' status as being of the people legitimated the institution of the army in China, the Maoist militarization of Chinese society that reached its peak in the Cultural Revolution elevated the armed forces above all other social elements. The CCP’s success in the revolution by no means eliminated the necessity for vigilance. On the contrary, conditions called for a redoubling of militancy. In a piece that painstakingly distinguishes between Marxist militancy and “the bourgeois military line” of Lin Biao, Chan explains the CCP’s rationale for vigilance in the wake of liberation. “After the proletariat seizes power, because class enemies still exist at home and abroad, the whole proletarian party must continue to attach great importance to military affairs.” 181 The Chinese Communist Revolution overturned not just a political order, but a whole set of social identities, substituting new hierarchies in place of those it toppled. By the development, mass delivery of education and social services, and national unification, she fails to recognize Mao’s developmental outlook, stressing more the “voluntarism and adventurism” that undermined his developmental achievements and impulses. Maria Hsia Chang, (2001): 150-151. 181 Chan Shih-pu, Great Victory for the Military Line of Chairman Mao Tsetung—A Criticism of Lin Piao’s Bourgeois Military Line in the Liahsi-Shenyang and Peiping-Tientsin Campaigns, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976: 102. 141 time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao felt that a new internal enemy had developed in the form of socialist bureaucratic complacency in addition to old capitalist enemies who had only been incompletely rehabilitated or purged. Ultra- militarization, newly embodied in the militant masses of Cultural Revolutionaries, became the method to transform or eliminate these undesirable identities. During the Cultural Revolution, soldiers occupied the apex of the PRC social hierarchy. In motifs such as political study, border defense, and agricultural labor, soldiers and civilians were portrayed, at least superficially, in interchangeable positions, each side deriving its legitimacy from its proximity to and emulation of the other. All such portrayals, whether on the battlefield or at home, are constructed from military components. Children and adults militarized their daily dress. Soldiers “invaded” the collectives, toiling in agricultural labor side by side with peasants. Defense became everyone’s business as the Maoist guerrilla strategy of “luring the enemy in deep” relied on the watchful eyes of a rural militia. Besides arming themselves with weaponry, militia members and soldiers armed their consciousness with Mao Zedong thought as contained in the little red books that were wielded in study sessions and rallies of the endlessly shifting political movements alike. The act of reading itself was thus militarized as the books substituted for weapons in the choreographed marches and myriad forms of revolutionary performative pageantry. External factors, particularly the onset of the Cold War with flare-ups in both the Taiwan Straits and Korea, increased the new regime’s sense of urgency 142 for both military and social modernization. By the early 1960’s, US intervention in Vietnam exacerbated this situation. CCP authorities responded with a further militarization of society to protect the revolution’s achievements. Propelled by a sense of urgency to affect immediate social transformation into the communist classless ideal and to consolidate the accomplishments of 1949, Cultural Revolutionary authorities exercised broad control of the state and imposed a set of cultural and military directives that simultaneously militarized society and extended the civilian authority of the army, further privileging an established elite institution. The ultra-militarization of the Cultural Revolution resulted from these complementary trends of army mimicry among civilians and military authority in civilian affairs under both domestic and international pressures. Nowhere is this insistence on muted military distinction more apparent than in the Cultural Revolution, a moment in CCP history in which party army discourse increasingly civilianized soldiers by depicting them as ordinary citizens, even allowing them heretofore civilian governing responsibilities to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of the party-state in the Cultural Revolution's early period. This civilianization of army dovetailed with a militarization of civil society that resulted from the heightened demands of the era's campaigns to revolutionize society. At least in the cultural sphere, militarization gave rise to a backlash contemptuously characterized by early Cultural Revolution radicals as an "opposition to 'smell of gunpowder,'" that claimed Chinese "writing reeked of 143 gunpowder and our stage bristled with guns and that this was inartistic." 182 Critics of crude militarism in the arts were soon altogether silenced. The zenith of militarization during the Cultural Revolution resulted from a series of developments, only some of which had to do with the army's encroachment on civilian life. Paramount among these was the army's expansion to over 4 million by 1971, up from 2.4 million in preceding years. 183 The expansion was due in part to the equally significant militarizing factor of PLA penetration of formerly civil governance. Red Guard activities fomented sufficient chaos to make it necessary for the PLA to step in in 1968 to restore order. The PLA’s government presence became so extensive that "by 1971, military officers occupied approximately 50 percent of civilian central leadership positions and 60 to 70 percent of most provincial leadership jobs." 184 Even rank and file soldiers spent increasing amounts of time away from their barracks, whether engaging in overt political work or in physical labor not directly related to defense that heeded the call of then current ideological campaigns. Such incursions into labor formerly restricted to the civilian realm of society were not alone in contributing to the heightened prominence of the soldier beyond the army. Effecting the militarist turn in PRC society, a series of mass mobilization campaigns trumpeted the new order as they repositioned civilian and 182 Summary, 25. 183 Dennis J. Blasko, "Always Faithful: the PLA from 1949 to 1989," in David A. Graff and Robert Higham, eds., A Military History of China, Boulder: Westview, 2002: 252 and 256. 184 Ibid., 256. 144 military spheres of influence. The PLA began to possess a symbolic authority over the civilian realm as it increasingly became "the ideological and cultural mentor of the Chinese people." This shift in authority appears to have been quite calculated, although its precise chronology is disputed. Schram dates the shift from 1964, the year Mao launched the "Learn from the PLA" campaign that encouraged emulation of the military in all walks of life. 185 Sung locates this shift a year earlier, linking it instead to the Socialist Education Movement (1960-1966) in 1963, when it advanced a plethora of PLA heroes as models. 186 The significance of both these campaigns for the army’s assertion of symbolic authority is that all the products of state ideological apparati constructed and propagated to raise morale among the masses in 1964 and 1965 proffer socialist exemplars manifested primarily as military personnel to an unprecedented degree. 187 In response to these mobilizations, civilian endeavors to remake society in the army's image also accounted for a great deal of militarization. Revolutionary fervor required all citizens to associate themselves as closely with the military as possible in terms of dress, posture, speech, and organization. Rhetorically, conformity with this cultural imperative involved the substitution of a martial lexicon for quotidian speech. Rebels empowered themselves by assuming 185 Stuart Schram, (1989): 174. 186 Chao-sheng Sung, "The Parallel Relationship between the PLA Political Campaign and the Socialist Education Movement, 1960-1966," Asian Forum, 2: 3 (1970): 190. 187 Yuezhi Zhao, (1998): 28. 145 military organizational terms and all struggles became battles, skirmishes, insurgencies, and wars. 188 Popular sartorial militancy in the form of army-issue green cotton clothing and Mao badges completed the effect. Most civilians competed for affiliation with or physical proximity to the army in accordance with the Cultural Revolution political campaigns that urged citizens to model themselves on the army. Among these campaigns, the most paradigmatic example of army emulation is found in the 1967 campaign to "Learn from the Liberation Army in Political Work" wherein masses are exhorted to "give prominence to politics" in the manner and tradition of the PLA. 189 These later campaigns helped consolidate and sustain the radical militarism established by the movements of the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Resulting from these complementary trends of army mimicry among civilians and military dominance in civilian affairs was the ultra-militarization of the Cultural Revolution era. Portrayals of the Civil-Military during the Cultural Revolution Militarism’s meteoric rise and precipitous fall in a relatively brief span yielded significant consequences for modeled civil-military relations. At first envisioned symbiotically, civil-military unity begins to be promoted as a 188 Shaorong Huang, (2000): 210. 189 A complete English language translation of the "Learn from the Liberation Army in Political Work" booklet can be found in Michael Schoenhals' excellent reader of Cultural Revolution documents. Anonymous, "Learn from the Liberation Army in Political Work," in Michael Schoenhals, ed., China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-69: Not a Dinner Party, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996: 65-75. 146 complementary and attenuated relationship. Witness to this trajectory is the period of this study, from 1966 to 1986, encapsulating a decade of revolution substantially undone by a decade of reform that sought to dismantle the symbiotic model and replace it with one of complementary, but marked, distinction. The "ten lost years" of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that ended with Mao's death in 1976 were given over to an ostensible effort to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from becoming an agent of oppression in the form of a new ruling class. 190 To this end, the ideological campaign mobilized the combined social forces of masses, students and People's Liberation Army as a check against cadre elitism and social stasis. Though orchestrated in the main by a narrower set of elites than those the Cultural Revolution sought to overturn, with Mao leading the party, minister of National Defense Lin Biao leading the army, and the Gang of Four, Mao's wife Jiang Qing most prominently, leading the masses on the cultural front the campaign empowered youth, students, and army and altered their roles considerably in the process. Students were partly empowered and had their social identities transformed simply by adopting paramilitary ideology, language, costume and posture. In symbolically changing themselves into quasi-military Red Guard 190 The dates of the Cultural Revolution are in some limited dispute, though many Chinese and western scholars alike accept these parameters as given in the Resolution on CPC (Communist Party of China) History (1949-1981), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981 adopted by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on June 27, 1981. Others, Huang among them, understand the period as a three-year stretch from 1966-69 when its struggles raged most intently. Huang discusses this divergence of opinion, Shaorong Huang, To Rebel Is Justified: A Rhetorical Study of China's Cultural Revolution Movement, 1966-1966, Lanham: University Press of America, 1996: 2. 147 units, secondary school and university students forsook classrooms for the political struggles of the streets and the movements in the fields, sometimes directed by Mao and other times on their own initiative. The adoption of militant language proved significant to youth’s identity transformation, just as it did with other societal elements of Chinese citizens, at least with those not excluded by virtue of class or by holding positions at some point in the past now deemed to be counter-revolutionary. 191 Naming themselves “Red Guards,” “struggling,” “spreading revolution,” and visiting civilian “brigades” all contributed to this process of reinvention and militant empowerment predicated on an adversarial relationship to now defunct authority. 192 The violence contained in oaths such as “8.28 Fighting Squad swear to fight to the last drop of our blood!” and tales of bloodshed lent militant rhetoric a more than metaphorical credibility during confrontations that erupted in the early years of the Cultural Revolution before the PLA stepped in to quell disturbances. 193 Posture reinforced linguistic reinvention as physical gestures enhanced a militant affect. Marching, fist-raising, and fierce facial expression conveyed resolution, determination, and radicalism. Any instrument available, a Mao book if a gun weren’t handy, could be wielded like a weapon to most convincingly flesh out the requisite combative stance. Completing this physical affirmation of 191 Foundational texts on militancy in Cultural Revolution rhetoric include Dittmer, 1981 and Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies, Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992. 192 Dittmer notes the centrality of the adversarial posture to revolutionary identity construction. Dittmer, (1981): 1. 193 Ibid., 30. 148 nominal revolutionary transformation were requisite costume components of Mao badges, arm bands, belted jackets, army caps, satchels, and canteens, bayonets, etc. Militancy was thus both linguistically expressed and embodied in this set of icons and expressions that render its representation immediately recognizable. Youth swept into Beijing to exchange revolutionary experiences and swept out to the countryside to spread revolution. Student enthusiasm for their transformation was directly related to a shift in social power that inverted the previous order of which they formed the base. Formerly subject to the authority of teachers, parents, and party cadres as students, Red Guards sought a kind of liberation effected by the Cultural Revolution’s successful assaults upon their former masters’ influence and prestige. Though not an explicit target of Cultural Revolution campaigns, even parents lost jurisdiction of their children as the state separated many urban families by in a sense drafting and deploying their members to disparate remote postings to learn from the masses in these more politically pure locales, or at least providing opportunity and encouragement that facilitated student mobility while spurring them on to rebellion with slogans like Mao’s benediction to would-be youthful; agitators: “It’s right to rebel!” Such were the rewards and incentives available to the young for societal militarization. Cultural Revolution youth took on the trappings of a paramilitary identity to associate themselves, however tenuously, with the army, an institution of exalted status and certain legitimacy during those otherwise tumultuous years. In a decade in which 149 little remained constant but turmoil, the army’s dominance remained exceptionally and dependably stable. The armed forces swelled in both human resources and political importance as the Cultural Revolution produced upheavals in virtually every aspect of life in the People's Republic of China. The campaign inverted priorities to privilege the political over the technical, the personal over the institutional, the young over the old, the ideational over the material, the local over the central, and the army over the party. Tensions between such binaries had long predated the political turbulence and the early Cultural Revolution's reordering of power relations in no way resolved that uneasiness. Influence continued to be negotiated through the last Mao years, as well as through the reform years of this study straight through to the present. Some of the Cultural Revolution's inversions, such as the localities' increased power relative to the central state, have held in the intervening years between it and the present. The relative positioning of party and army, among others, has reverted to pre-Cultural Revolution balances, while still other power relations, such as that between personal and institutional sources of strength, persist in heated conflict. However impermanent some of them proved to be, these inversions had profound consequences for both actual civil-military relations and their representation. The Maoist guerrilla strategy of "luring the enemy deep" necessitated a reliance on the militia; consequently, militia-PLA joint exercises were extensively profiled during the Cultural Revolution. The state cultivated 150 militia identity to reinforce both mass vigilance and civil-military harmony at its most symbiotic. As political commitment became paramount, soldiers were portrayed at rallies, study meetings and primary schools implementing thought work with civilians, conveying the importance of interchangeable roles for soldiers and masses, the equivalence of thought work with defense, and the necessity of mass involvement in political campaigns. Here too the state fosters a particular identity, this time of activist soldiers. The mass character of these activist soldiers was stressed in the absence of rank designations, their engagement in agricultural labor alongside collective members, or sometimes soldier-worker joint engagement in production. The most eloquent reminders of soldiers' mass roots were portrayals of soldiers in the midst of transitioning from civilian to military life, leaving in army convoys as friends and family saw them off. Such underscoring of the organic relations between soldier and society promoted militancy, spread nationalist sentiment, and sustained a revolutionary authority in the ranks of the PLA, while disempowering cadres in governance, civil administration, and cultural institutions. Nevertheless, it was their simultaneous performance of civilian and military duties, rather than their civilian past and future that established soldiers' dual identities, and, in effect, produced a new social identity as part of the Cultural Revolution’s radical transformation of Chinese society. A somewhat atypical pictorial photograph captures the organic nature of the army quite effectively. Though published in a 1970 pictorial, the photograph 151 was taken several decades earlier, likely in the 1930’s during the anti-Japanese resistance. The black and white image exposes a bustling street scene wherein enlistees are rendered completely indistinguishable from civilians. Highlighting this mass effect, the caption provides an account of “local youth eagerly enlisting in a moving scene suffused with mothers sending their sons to strike the Japanese and wives sending their darlings to the battlefield.” 194 While the caption reinforces the image’s title of “Rely on the Peasants, Establish a Village Base,” it also reminds its reader that these soldiers are enlisting in a popular effort at the urging of the local community and that their origins and support, as much as the justice of their cause, is what makes them a people’s army. The intermittent historical gaze of the Cultural Revolution often lights on such images of the organic ties between soldiers and the people. The enlistment motif expressed as a community production and contribution of one of its constituent bodies fused the locality to the nation as it did the village to the army. Such depictions downplayed the bonds of blood, supplanting state and community ties for those of the family. The enthusiasm with which these organic soldiers are sent off expressed in the cheering crowds conveys an eagerness among the people for increasing connectivity with the PLA as the village’s youth becomes the place-based community surrogate. 195 By 194 “Yikao Nongmin, Jianli Nongcun Genjudi,” (Rely on the Peasants, Establish a Village Base), Jiefangjun Huabao, 280 (September 1970): 19. 195 Leith provides an imprint of the send off motif issued on a postage stamp on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Leith, (1971): 182. 152 situating the soldier at the crossroads of the civilian and military realms, these compositions reflect the mass base and mass identity overlay of the PLA just as they represent a popular armed forces. Not just to show the soldiers’ connection to the community, historical photographs frequently appeared in pictorials to depict various manifestations of civil-military unity during the Cultural Revolution through to the reform era. Those washing out distinction between the two spheres like that described above were much more prevalent during the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is worth making mention here of the way in which pictorial propaganda recycles historical imagery in an effort to both draw on and condition historical memory in order to invoke a particular notion of civil-military harmony, an effort sustained from the Cultural Revolution through the early reforms. Indeed, many of the same images recycle between these two modern historical epochs. Some of these images contain rousing historical, in the sense either of the reproduction of an earlier artwork, or in more recent work drawing on historical themes and depictions, scenes. Such themes often capitalize on the goodwill generated by what were commonly felt to be the good works of the communist forces during the war of resistance. Historical images not only evoke nostalgia for a remembered bond in resisting aggression, but also present the contemporary PLA as rightful heir to and deserving recipient of this popular support for a CCP mass army by seamlessly fusing the current, even post-socialist, armed forces to the pre-CCP Chinese communist armies. The past is mined repeatedly for both its associations and its 153 unifying power as a shared civil-military preoccupation in the present. Recalling the past functions as more than just a structuring epistemological activity between soldiers and their civilian counterparts, although this educational quality contributes significantly to its value. From their study of the past, the two sides are intended to draw the lesson of civil-military unity for mutual benefit and national strength. In addition to this inevitable conclusion of historical analysis, the experience of joint-study of the past in the present practically connects the two sides, thus reinforcing the theory of unity with the practice of uniting. A few further developments combined with this technique to further blur civil-military distinctions and build the symbiotically united ideal that remained a Cultural Revolution mainstay. Perhaps chief among these was the endless round of mutual emulation and legitimation activities encouraged between masses and military. Both sides formally sought inspiration from the other. For the army, this ritual frequently took the form of studying revolutionary spirit from workers at worksites. In one expression of this genre prominent enough to make the cover of the March 1972 issue of PLA Pictorial, a young servicewoman visits a factory to study “the extraordinary quality of an old worker’s bitter struggle.” 196 On another occasion, a group of Third Company Guards visits some shipyard workers 196 “Gan Dang Qunzhong Xiao Xuesheng,” (Sweet to Be a Small Student of the Masses), Jiefangjun Huabao, 298 (March 1972): 37. 154 “to study how their class position and labor determines their revolutionary spirit.” 197 Soldiers occasionally recount how such studies impact their own lives. Army physician’s assistant Ni Tianzhen sacrifices his free time to treat the masses as a way to repay workers who have served as his inspiration. Ni marvels at mass activists who disregard their own illnesses and industrial wounds in order to focus on production and so seeks to ameliorate their pains through his services. 198 Entitled, “Become a Person Who Is Useful to the People,” Ni’s 1973 photographic piece forthrightly conveys the notion that proper military models take their inspiration from the people, and respond in turn by serving the people. Yet another mark of soldiers’ admiration for the people is their solicitation of suggestions regarding the army from them. A 1971 pictorial photograph conveys the exuberance generated by all sides in one such exchange lifted from a piece on learning from the people’s example. 199 In other cases, soldiers are shot in rapt attention as peasants offer advice on military affairs. Intended to highlight the superficial social equality between the civil and military planes, these images instead call attention to cleavages between them. Part of what obstructs the equality project is the scheme’s location of the main actor in the soldier and the consequent mere relational importance of the masses. 197 “Xuexi Renmin Wei Renmin,” (Study the People as the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 296 (January 1972): 26 198 “Zuo Yi Ge You Yi yu Renmin de Ren,” (Become a Person Who Is Useful to the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 21. 199 “Xiang Renmin Xuexi de Hao Ketang,” (A Good Classroom for Learning from the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 295 (December 1971): 14. 155 This is precisely the case in Huang Shangkun’s photograph of an earnest looking soldier who listens to Mongolian shepherds’ ideas about their army as they laughingly, perhaps from embarrassment, supply their thoughts while looking somewhat insufficiently mindful of the seriousness of the occasion the soldier’s expression intends to impose. Rather than offering comment on the substance of the masses’ suggestions, these visual signifiers credit the grace of the armed forces, as elites, in listening to their humble petitioners who stand among their sheep on the plain. Further reinforcing the visual portrayal, the caption notes the “unassuming air and modesty” of the soldier’s attention. 200 Finally, such depictions also buttress the state’s ethnic hierarchy that places non-Han practices like Mongol pastoralism far below those of Han agriculture, traditional and modern. In a more general sense, pictorial art consistently represents the military taking the masses as their models. A case in point is a Yu Zhixue watercolor in the “Grassland Fish to Water Conditions (among the People and Soldiers)” series. The work depicts a pastoral scene of soldiers meeting up with shepherds on a grassland as a shepherdess guides a servicewoman’s hand to pet a sheep. The caption indicates that the soldiers are studying poor and middle shepherds. 201 Poor peasants’ modeling utility articulates resoundingly in a Dong Chensheng 200 “Xuexi Renmin, Ai Renmin,” (Study the People, Love the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 301 (May 1972): 5. 201 Yu Zhixue, “Caoyuan Yushui Qing,” (Grassland Fish to Water Condition <among Army and Masses>), Jiefangjun Huabao, 315 (August 1973): 45. 156 work depicting a farmer demonstrating an agricultural tool for an interested soldier at his side. The caption below tellingly reads: “A Model Poor and Middle Peasant Becomes a Teacher,” revealing wonder at the transformation. 202 Obviously, were teaching a natural role for such a figure as it is for soldiers, the caption would not remark on it. Here again an inversion of social hierarchy is apparent. For their own part, the people are no less inclined to take their cue from the army. Kong Fanrui’s oil painting reprinted in a 1972 pictorial conveys the popularity of army emulation very effectively. The composition consists of a line of soldiers marching in the background with a parallel line of children marching at what seems to be several feet apart in the foreground. The children’s clenched fists, arm bands, medic’s bags, satchels, and winter hats all combine to produce the impression of a parallel force in miniature as one of the soldiers, noticing the mini force, turns back his head and smiles his approval. 203 Only their lack of rifles and stature spoil the illusion. In many ways, children’s actual bodies became canvases for civil-military symbiosis into a militarized subject. Their childhood at once ensured the preservation of distinction while also effecting the illusion of homogeneity. 202 Dong Chensheng, “Gan Xiao Shenghuo Suxie,” (A Literary Sketch of Making a School from Life), Jiefangjun Huabao, 312 (May 1973): 45. 203 Kong Fan Rui, “Zhaoqi Pengbo,” (Full of Youthful Vigour), “Youhua Xuandeng,” (Selected Publications of Oil Paintings), Jiefangjun Huabao, 301 (June 1972): 31. 157 Along with children, all of society militarized and revolutionized together as the army rose in fashion and prestige. At the same time, the army became increasingly involved in aspects of civilian governance as mass struggles became more difficult for elite groups to control and the army was called in to restore order. In other words, as society became increasingly militarized the professional military became more important for limiting the destabilizing consequences of militarization. Moreover, the army took on more educational roles in the wake of the erosion of the authority of teachers and intellectuals. Thus, were cadre responsibilities added to existing extra-military PLA burdens of agricultural and some extremely limited production work. While some of these responsibilities accrued rather suddenly, many of the changes did not occur overnight, but over years, the “logical” outcome of the deliberate undermining of all legitimate social identities except military ones. The "Everyone a Soldier" campaign attempted to acclimate society to the erosion of civil-military distinction already underway in the 1950's. The campaign constituted an almost literal attempt to adapt to the absolute legitimacy of a single social identity, the soldier. Military rank designations, having been instituted since 1956, were dropped in 1965. And for more than a thousand years before the PLA's time Chinese soldiers had engaged in self-sufficient agricultural work in their frontier tuntian colonies, a condition that allowed for some considerable overlap between soldiers’ and common people’s occupations. Consequently, agricultural work was not traditionally seen to be in conflict with 158 military identity in the way that governance and industrial labor were. It was rather that as the Cultural Revolution approached and grew, soldiers were now depicted toiling the fields to assist peasants in the collectives. Soldier's labor shifts here, not to engaging in agricultural production, but engaging in agricultural production beyond military logistics. Soldiers now assisted communes to meet communes' production targets. It is worth noting that engagement in unskilled labor was encouraged for all social classes, not just the military. Mutual emulation, study, and admiration fostered a pictographic semblance and intimacy metaphorically conveyed as family. As one Mongolian peasant explains, “Chairman Mao’s troops of soldiers are quite intimate in our hearts. They’re like family, or something more than family.” 204 Proximity, chiefly in the agricultural realm, drove the projection of intimacy between the two sides and allowed for the representation of mimicry between them. Common in state-society characterizations, family metaphors position Mao or the party at the head with citizens as children. 205 Transferred to the civil- military realm, these structures often cast soldiers as the “uncles” or sometimes “aunts” of the children they often befriend, coach, or tutor. The terms selected of “shushu” for paternal younger uncle or “ayi” for aunt designates both the youth and the authority of the soldier relative to the child, at once conveying the 204 “Yimeng Shan Qu ‘Youyi Qu,’” (Yimeng Mountain District, ‘Friendship Channel’) Jiefangjun Huabao, 333 (February 1975): 22 205 Such characterizations represent an enduring representational feature of nationalist Chinese political culture. Kuo demonstrates familial metaphors’ commonality in Taiwanese mayoral campaigns of 1998. Sai-hua kuo, “’You’re a Little Rabbit in a Pack of Foxes’: Animal Metaphors in Chinese Political Discourse,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 31: 1 (January 2003): 72-100. 159 intimacy and leadership of the armed forces. Even more common is the designation of “son-brother soldiers” which refers to all members of the armed forces in general. The handy signifier connotes family membership that is sufficiently flexible to be incorporated across generational lines, though its gendered rigidity predictably assigns soldiers a male identity. Sometimes the army as a whole became a family, as in the case of its raising an orphaned child. 206 Elsewhere, the army and the people together form a metaphorically extended family. 207 Proximity, especially important in the agricultural realm after the family farms rolled into collectives, drove the projection of intimacy between the two sides and allowed for the representation of mimicry and familial harmony between them. Under conditions of isolation, such metaphors obviously become unsustainable, but agriculture affords an ideal setting to being citizens and soldiers together. Urban youth and intellectuals had not been furloughed to agricultural postings purely for purposes of punishment and exile. Beyond these considerations was a paramount drive to transform outmoded thinking in the new socialist citizenry. Mao's conviction in the regenerative power of manual labor logically sent much of its population down to the countryside, the field in which a seemingly infinite amount of labor was required to affect the material change of 206 “Zuo Yi Ge You Yi yu Renmin de Ren,” (Become a Person Who Is Useful to the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 21. It should also be noted that model soldier Lei Feng is an orphan given to making remarks that give the party as his parents. 207 Han Guangxu, “The Army and the People Are All One Family,” People’s Art Publishing House, 1975, as reproduced in Anchee Min, Jie Zhang, and Duoduo, Chinese Propaganda Posters, London: Taschen, 2003: 126. 160 increasing agricultural output. Among its many outcomes, this reasoning tightened the proximity of soldiers and civilians. Not just for civil-military harmony, proximity was mandated by the mass line in political communication, which viewed detachment as an unequivocal danger to party legitimacy and societal harmony. Intimacy served the dual purposes of keeping channels of transmission clear between groups in part to enable elite groups to determine the interests of their subordinates. Such is the reckoning wherein “the party is supposed to be able to define the general interests of the people by remaining close to them.” 208 By extension when applied to civil-military relations, mass line logic would suggest that interaction would allow for better understanding and consolidation of military authority over the civil sphere. Masses and soldiers were not only portrayed working more closely together, their work had actually become more interdependent. Here representation and social conditions proved to be in harmony. Propagating mass campaigns, for example, required the establishment of links between organized groups of peasants, workers, soldiers, and youth, just as border defense operations were structured to rely on joint regular and militia support, that in turn necessitated joint training. This is not to imply that there was no hierarchy in these closer relations, or that they were especially harmonious, as their representations suggest. Still, the images reflect an actual heightened inter- mingling and cooperation in new areas, as well as a concerted effort to 208 Yuezhi Zhao, (1998): 24. 161 disassemble the apparatus of all traditional identity markers and not just those dividing civilian and military realms. China's masses seemed to have adopted radical symbiosis as a survival strategy of the Cultural Revolution's many purges and capitalist roader hunts. Having been instructed to learn from the army, the uniform style most citizens conformed to was quite naturally a martial one. The militarization of society and the army's attendant effort to appear mass-like flattened superficial distinctions between soldier and citizen, woman and man, urbanite and villager, though erasure of social distinction is never really achieved. Posture, positioning, subtle sartorial custom, and behavior all serve to mark the alterity of the soldier even as prevalent fashions in dress, quotidian army labor, and military discourse cloak the soldier in a civilian guise. Though soldier and civilian alike donned green army-style tunics and trousers emblazoned with the requisite array of Mao badges, for example, enlisted soldiers tended to favor a particular style of badge, those portraits of Mao as soldier upon which the “Everyone a Soldier” motto was inscribed. The fastening of those badges to their collars further distinguished the actual rank and file from the rest of the broad masses. 209 It is important to note, however, that the collapsing of certain formerly sharper distinctions between the two realms does not imply a dismantling of hierarchy. Despite the Cultural Revolution's rhetoric of ostensible PRC privileged class equality among the peasantry and working class, the movement was no 209 Benewick and Donald, (1996): 36. 162 egalitarian process. The ten-year movement elevated the soldier, celebrated the rustic and made little headway on its putative project of promoting gender equity, which it sought to achieve largely by flattening gender difference. This, in turn was to be accomplished through the suppression of female gender that resulted from the promotion of an ostensibly neutral unisex style that was indisputably male. 210 Thus, as differences break down, the universal standard becomes a masculinized, militarized figure, quite consciously divorced from class, but not from gender hierarchy. Despite these efforts, however, the muting of femininity proved graphically unsustainable. 211 Chen points out that the CCP designed its uniform as part of its project of “cultivating disciplined desexualized subjects,” thus calling attention to the tension between the masculinized baggage that attends militarism and the desexualized ideal for all citizens. 212 She further cautions against mistaking graphic depictions of militarized female figures as an easily effected “masculinization of the female clothed body.” 213 As they had in attendant projects that sought to symbiotically transform revolutionary subjects by downplaying distinctions in class or ethnicity, cleavages 210 Mayfair Meihui Yang is one of several scholars chronicling these effects with respect to gender. See Mayfair Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and a Feminist Public Sphere in China," In Women and Public Sphere in Transnational China, Mayfair Yang, ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. See also, Harriet Evans, “’Comrade Sisters’: Gendered Bodies and Spaces,” in Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 211 Ip, Hung-Yok. "Fashioning Appearances: Feminine Beauty in Chinese Communist Revolutionary Culture." Modern China, 29, 3 (July 2003): 329-61. 212 Tina Mai Chen, “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao’s China,” Fashion Theory, 5:2, (2001): 163. 213 Ibid. 163 persisted in the texts. Still, revolutionary icons effaced gender differences by promoting a masculinized, militarized figure, quite consciously not a class, but neither a gender, neutral universal standard. Possibly to promote stability on the frontiers, or perhaps to promote an image of a diverse and expansive population, a curious exception to this difference-minimizing rule in official propaganda is ethnic identity markers. Both pre-dating the Cultural Revolution years and outlasting it to the present, the pan-ethnic unity imperative in official propaganda apparently trumps the promotion of militarized look alike soldier-civilian imagery. Publishing graphics of minorities in Han civilian dress would likely allow them to “pass,” thereby defeating the more primary purpose of projecting Han-minority civil-military fellowship. In portrayals of many minority peoples, visual texts could only employ costume distinctions to make the figures’ minority identities immediately recognizable to viewers. Ironically, ethnic minorities had to remain visibly different in order to model the significance of their own role in fostering symbiotic unity and to deflect attention from actual secessionist tendencies at worst, or less transgressive, but also undesirable, identities indifferent to the authority of the PRC state. Thus, minorities consistently connoted cultural diversity within a larger shared culture and political solidarity in the pictographic record. To propagate that message, the non-Han aspect of minority figures must be clearly conveyed. So it is that rather than exchanging their customary clothing for army wear like other civilians, civilian minorities don military paraphernalia 164 over their native attire, creating the appearance of a revolutionized, but still distinctly non-Han, minority, while minority soldiers of course wear uniforms identical to those of other soldiers. The Mao badge and ammunition belt affixed to the Mongolian guide’s native attire in a 1971 pictorial photograph typifies such represented hybridity in customary dress. 214 A similar effect is achieved by southwestern minority women’s adoption of army caps to complement their otherwise traditional attire, though their actual army exclusion prevents them from aping the red star affixed to the cap’s center, a mark reserved exclusively for soldiers. 215 Thus, the visual rhetoric of revolutionary China broadcast similitude and difference simultaneously and in perpetual tension across the figures of the PRC’s mass subjects. Such images are the visual results of what is currently called China’s “multi-ethnic society/state” (duoyuan minzu shehui/guojia) in a Cultural Revolutionary idiom. Proto-Symbiosis in New Opportunities: The Barefoot Doctor Campaign During the Cultural Revolution, official graphic art's proportional depiction of civil-military interaction rose to unprecedented levels. Some of its cooperative representations resulted from Cultural Revolution campaigns and therefore constituted newly established joint endeavors. In many cases, these 214 “Junmin Tuanti Bao Jiang Shan,” (Military-Civil Unity Protects Mount Jiang), Jiefangjun Huabao, 286 (March 1971): 39. 215 “Shan Beng Di Lie de Suo Ju: Ji Yunnan Xibu Diqu Kang Zhen Jiuzai de Zhandou” (Fear as Mountain Tumbles, Earth Shakes: a Report from the Yunnan Western Division Relief and Rescue Struggle) Jiefangjun Huabao 351 (August 1976): 42. 165 interactions cast civilians and soldiers in fairly rigid roles that were not at all interchangeable. The barefoot doctor campaign, with which the PLA was intimately involved, trained peasant paramedics to provide basic public health services at the grassroots level in rural areas. Coming into full fruition in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, the campaign presented one such new opportunity for interaction wherein soldiers shared medical training and locals led soldiers to remote areas to gather traditional Chinese medical herbs. Barefoot doctor exchanges conferred hierarchy by pitting military privileged and rare expertise against more commonly held and informally acquired local knowledge. Graphic discourse elided the two sides’ inequality under a wash of mutual humility. A 1976 watercolor of a grassroots clinic reprinted in a pictorial conveys this subtlety particularly effectively. 216 The clinic is more a site of medicine production and a medical supply station as barefoot doctors render most of their services in a house call, or at least a village call, format. Here two women are depicted in the clinic’s doorway as they return from the field. The soldier is taller and in uniform completely from the neck down. Atop her head is a wreath of ferns and shrubbery of the sort worn by guerrillas in areas of enemy surveillance. Outside through the doorway behind the women’s backs we can see a crew of laborers and soldiers who seem to be returning from 216 Guo Xianli, "Qujing,” (Learn from the Experience of Others), “Meishu Zuopin Zuan Deng: Xuan Zi ‘Zhongguo Renmin Jiefangjun Zhanshi Meishu Zuopin Zhanlan,’” (Publications of Selected Works of Art: Self Selections from “PLA Soldiers Works of Art Exhibition”), Jiefangjun Huabao, 345 (February 1976): 45. In this featured section of the pictorial, the artist’s army role is typically given; we are told Guo Xianli is a nurse and her sex is given as female. The other un- sex-designated artists featured in this forum are presumably male. 166 the fields, the soldiers all sharing the camouflaged headgear of the army medic that helps to mark them as soldiers when their figures are otherwise too indistinct in the background from civilians, while the peasants among them remain bareheaded. Her companion carries an ordinary wide-brimmed straw farming hat slung across her shoulder and is dressed in a hybridized costume of western shirt, flowing Han peasant trousers, and southwestern minority embroidered apron with sandals on her feet, the only militarized aspect of her dress being a red kerchief knotted beneath her collar. Both women carry medic’s bags, the soldier’s is canvas in contrast to the rigid bag of her civilian counterpart, who additionally totes a string-tied bundle in her left hand, while she gestures with her right hand as her counterpart smiles attentively. Though the soldier has the advantage of height, a broader smile, the uniform, and expertise recognized in her professional title of army medic, several elements of the composition cloak her superiority. Among these, the similarity of their medic’s bags and their shared task draw attention away from the women’s differences. Then too, the apparent sisterhood conveyed by their near proximity, rapt engagement with one another, and friendly smiles all suggest equality between the women. Accentuating this effect is the deliberatively ambiguous title of the work, “Learning from the Experience of Others.” Without clarification of who is learning from whom, the viewer is left wondering if the artist means to suggest that the socially inferior peasant is learning from her social superior, that the outsider soldier is learning from her local peasant companion, or if both 167 women are together learning from the broad masses they seek to serve in the field. Such ambiguity is helpful in presenting an already foreclosed possibility of equal authority as an actual social condition. In concert with the subtlety of the marked power differentials discussed above, the ambiguity conceals the soldier’s dominance over the civilian as it is both conferred and reinforced in the new arena of civil-military cooperation presented by barefoot doctor work. Also common are images that more directly represent army authority and expertise in medicine. Emblematic in this respect is “Practicing Acupuncture,” a composition in which a PLA woman cheerfully offers up her face to be pricked with needles by a frontier peasant woman trainee. 217 Underscoring the soldier’s instructional role is the literature in her hands to which she refers to structure her lesson. The soldier’s access to the authoritative text in both its printed form and the work’s explicit demonstration of her literacy, subordinate her pupil, whose access must be mediated through the visiting soldier. A wide variety of barefoot doctor training graphics yields similar effects, though many achieve this by projecting text and images in contradiction with one another. Such contradictions abound in one pictorial barefoot doctor photographic spread. Included is a shot of older, male soldiers instructing women in basic medicine. While the image conveys ignorance and subordination on the part of the civilians, its text calls attention to cooperation between both spheres in 217 “Shizhen,” (Practicing Acupuncture), in Stewart E. Fraser, 100 Great Chinese Posters, New York: Images Graphiques, 1977: 67. 168 a manner that implies that more equity obtains between the two sides. Another photograph in the piece shows a makeshift clinic worker studying from a soldier who joins him to make on the spot medical instruments in the street outside the medical station. Again, the text here alludes to the character of the station as a cooperative endeavor in contrast to the image’s assertion of a soldier’s confident and capable execution of a necessary task as a barefoot doctor passively studies the soldier’s effort. 218 Further ruptures between text and graphic emerge from those images conveying cooperative medicinal herb gathering and medicine making. Exemplary in this regard is a 1975 photograph foregrounding two figures: a militiaman in Han peasant attire at work at a mechanical grinder and a soldier beside him at table who seems to be dispensing various compounds into jars. Though the grinding work is arguably less skilled than the soldier’s apparent disbursement, both men are seated as they work with friendly smiles for one another that belie any suggestion that one side assumes more command of their effort than another. Also testifying to this implicit claim are the several soldiers and militiamen digging and perhaps foraging in seemingly equal measure. Their positioning suggests an equivalent harmony or even progression toward symbiosis that is supported by the photograph’s caption that reads: “Hand-making medicine 218 “Jiji Bangzhu Difang Ban Hao Hezuo Yiliao,” (Zealously Helping to Properly Establish Cooperative Medicine) Jiefangjun Huabao, 344 (January 1976): 11. 169 on one’s own.” 219 The composition typifies the genre in its contradictory message. At the mass level, represented by the multiple figures in the background, the viewer is assured that difference all washes out in the end. Yet the selection of images of specific relational examples that consistently privilege the soldier among the two, as exemplified by the pair of foregrounded medicine makers in the case above, diminishes the persuasive power of the egalitarian elements of these compositions. Amplifying this contradicted equivalency effect is the first half of the title of a brief article that accompanies the photo and a few others of the same army visit to local militia. Still, the title’s idiomatic phrase, “Work with Collective Wisdom and Concerted Effort,” rests uneasily with the short text that follows, which points up the soldier’s condescension in the visit. The text explains that all the initiative for the cooperation arises from the army. First, soldiers took up the burden of training militia near their encampment on their own. Instigated by a desire to mobilize the masses and raise the militia’s military skill, the army went to work. All the authoritative power here belongs to the soldiers, whose political and educational mission it is to raise the political and technical wisdom of their less fortunate fellow citizens. Again, while images convey egalitarian similitude, accompanying text reveals a power structure at odds with the picture that is both conferred and reinforced by the civil-military interaction pictorials display. 219 “Qunce Qunli Xue Baopo,” (Work with Collective Wisdom and Concerted Effort, Study Demolition), Jiefangjun Huabao, 246 (February 1975): 26. The demolition refers to some of the other activities jointly undertaken by soldiers and militia and photographed for the article. 170 Egalitarian attitudes typically accompany assertions of power in Cultural Revolution iconography. Despite a preponderance of images like those described above, some captions are more straightforward and instead reinforce in words what the image has already amply conveyed. An army medic’s field class to a group of Tibetan barefoot doctors exemplifies this more internally consistent, if nakedly hierarchical, alternative style in visual propaganda. 220 Here the soldier’s superiority is presupposed and the civilian students’ assumption of their submissive roles appears to represent a natural ordering of things. Indeed, the soldier as instructor remains a mainstay of Cultural Revolution iconography. In an age when it must not be forgotten that many intellectuals and otherwise high- skilled civilians had been stripped of all authority, scenes of soldiers teaching and transferring technology become ubiquitous. While soldiers tended to fill the modeling vacuum left by discredited intellectuals, inverse expressions are not uncommon among civil-military pictorial art with instructional imagery, with roles reversed when minority civilians teach soldiers their language as mentioned earlier, for example. 221 On the whole, however, contradiction proved more common than cohesion in the representation of the new field of joint endeavor presented by barefoot doctor activities. 220 “Daliang Shan Shang Song Yi Mang,” (Busy Delivering Medicine atop Mount Daliang) Jiefangjun Huabao, 349 (June 1976): 32. 221 In a Mongolian context, see for example “Ning Bu Aye de Xinyi,” (Grandfather Ning Bu’s Kindly Feelings), Jiefangjun Huabao, 323 (February1975): 23. 171 Continuity in Motifs of Civil-Military Interaction Other pictorial imagery reflected an increase of already common representations that were more one-sided and less cooperative. These included army service to the people in its varied expressions of disaster relief, public works construction, traditionally delivered and army medic provided health care, and rescue, to name but a few. This military assistance was complemented by an attendant rise in depictions of the people's extension of hospitality, transportation, nursing, and guide services rendered to soldiers. Alongside such complementary role representations appeared established motifs of shared activities, including celebration, production, and participation in ethnic minority rituals, among others. All such depictions convey a rising degree of harmonious engagement in customary interaction between the masses and the rank and file necessary to a projection of seamless unity. Soldier Service to the People: Tangshan While much of the graphic portrayal of civil-military unity during the Cultural Revolution took forms long established by the CCP, the frequency of their appearance ratcheted up, thus projecting a semblance of redoubled intimacy and interdependence between the masses and their army. Disaster relief provided one such arena to showcase this bond. Indeed, the field of disaster relief offered an ideal stage for all army-people services, requiring the above-mentioned 172 military labor in public works projects, rescue, and health services delivery, to name but a few. Although it was not desirable to provoke disasters to provide greater opportunity for the PLA to offer emergency services, much could be made of PLA involvement on those occasions of need that arose without contrivance. To this end, the Tangshan earthquake on 28 July, 1976, just months before Mao’s death in September, provided a handy context in which to demonstrate the PLA’s efficient and much-needed delivery of aid. Measuring 8.3 on the Richter Scale, the quake’s official death toll was reckoned to be 240,000, though some estimates exceeded three times that figure. Pictorial coverage commences immediately with the August issue of the PLA Pictorial, with a feature on some Yunnan-based troops’ relief effort that is matched by the support of the local base community. 222 Predictably, images convey heroic and noble motifs already familiar from earlier and lesser disaster responses. More than an opportunity for the army to demonstrate its willingness to sacrifice time and blood to people in a pitiable plight, the disaster provides yet another field of cooperative endeavor to join with masses outside the disaster area who quickly mobilize to provide their own relief services. Thus, taking pride of place in the Pictorial coverage is a rousing shot of southwestern minority people and soldiers together reading reprints of the central government’s telegraph of sympathy to the citizens of Tangshan, as they respond with their own proclamations of deep concern for their fellow country folk. In 222 “Shan Beng Di Lie de Suo Ju: Ji Yunnan Xibu Diqu Kang Zhen Jiuzai de Zhandou” (Fear as Mountain Tumbles, Earth Shakes: a Report from the Yunnan Western Division Relief and Rescue Struggle) Jiefangjun Huabao 351 (August 1976): 42-43. 173 keeping with the militancy of the time, the relief effort is expressed in terms of the battlefield, with the earthquake an event to be struggled and the combatants said to be “toughened” by their rite of passage through the many political campaigns, especially those of the last decade. 223 The text adjacent to the images further reports that citizens’ expressions of solidarity extended to their “sending pan- ethnic medical teams, their bosoms filled with warmth for the disaster victims they sought to cure.” 224 Unity in a larger sense, then, remains a crucial theme in Tangshan discourse, which promotes the regional, ethnic, and even international diversity of the volunteers who join together to supply aid there, in addition to the traditionally more prominently illustrated themes of civil-military accord. Visual representations of such diversity abound in the pictorial record. A good deal of the glory that accrues to soldiers in their Tangshan rescue mission, as with other disaster relief efforts, presents itself in the form of the gratitude dividend. The army’s strictly exclusive privilege, in turn, gives rise to yet another reserved provenance for the army in the form of the gratitude engendered by its heroic deeds. To maximize opportunities for the accumulation of such social capital, official media positions soldiers alongside the people they have saved. Soldiers are repeatedly depicted revisiting their beneficiaries to milk them of their gratitude. Those rescued are not allowed to lose sight of their debt to the army. A photograph of an army medic returning to call on and ostensibly 223 Ibid., 42. 224 Ibid. 174 check the progress of his “class brothers” wounded at Tanghshan typifies the motif. 225 Other images convey yet more civil-military engagement in the earthquake response, much of it of a more active and materially useful quality than those initial rhetorical responses. Some cleavage opens here between text, which devotes some length to a discussion of the importance of political will to the effort, and the images, which accord greater space to representations of more material developments. Interestingly, the immediacy of the need wrought by the devastation seems to produce an overall dampening effect on civil-military endeavors of a more purely spiritual nature. Soldiers and masses cooperate to clear rubble-buried roads, harvest wheat, and fix machinery. Yet again, civilians and soldiers interact even more extensively. Even at the close of the Cultural Revolution, the Tangshan earthquake supplies an arena for still further civil- military integration as the relief effort assumes a national priority and more and more troops and social forces are mobilized as a result. Yet not all of the army’s Tangshan labor is fully integrated with that of civilians. In addition to joint projects, the army provides its own aid, unassisted by mass volunteers, by supplying needed medical attention to those injured in the disaster. Judging at least from the pictorial record, civilian and military medical teams do not seem to be integrated on the front lines at Tangshan. Indeed, the 225 “Dizhen Jiu Shi Mingling Zaiqu Jiu Shi Zhanchang,” (The Earthquake Is Simply a Command, the Disaster Area a Battleground), Jiefangjun Huabao, 354 (November-December 1976): 40. 175 faces of soldiers remain far more predominant than those of the civilians who are sometimes among them engaged in relief work. More than anything else, visual representations of Tangshan overwhelmingly convey military, and only to a lesser degree civil-military, service to the masses. In either case, however, whether tending to disaster victims or working among civilian volunteers, the earthquake pulls civilians and army from more prosaic tasks, thrusting them still closer together in the process and consequently affording greater opportunity for the graphic representation of civil-military harmony. Pictorial Tangshan coverage continues for months in much the same vein, and in a less intense fashion, for a couple of years before fading out of circulation. With the accretion of such coverage, a very solid and eloquent symbolic unity was erected on the piles of rubble left by the earthquake. The People’s Reciprocal Services Just as crucial to the soldier’s services to the people in the projection of organic unity between masses and military were people’s reciprocal services provided to the army, though these are fewer in kind than those service the people receive and less fantastic than those the better endowed soldiers may offer to the masses. For the most part, reciprocations were not in any way equivalent between the two sides; the social positions of the corresponding groups determined the suitability of aid each participant might extend to the other. While some crossover customarily existed among exchanged services, the interchangeability 176 of a significant number of roles only becomes possible during the Cultural Revolution. Even during the Cultural Revolution, however, several distinct spheres remained and the increase in the representation of services traditionally offered by each side to the other created a bedrock of indivisible accord on which the symbiotic façade was erected and sustained. Reciprocity proved vital to that effort. Consequently, the people’s delivery of services to their army constituted a fundamental and expanded meta-theme of representational civil-military relations during that decade. Army services to the people discussed above consists of deeds conferring honor on the provider either because their practitioners must be highly skilled, as is the case with health care, or because their achievement brings glory, as obtains with most dimensions of public works projects and heroic rescues. The importance of such services contrasts sharply with those of a much humbler nature that civilians typically bestow upon soldiers. This is not to suggest, however, that soldiers do not perform menial tasks for the people. Neither street sweeping, nor barbering, nor minor repairs are too humiliating for soldiers to perform for the masses. 226 It is rather that because soldiers are empowered to achieve greater ends, their performance of these and other petty tasks become invested with greater significance. In contrast, people’s services to soldiers 226 For a fine illustration of the commonplace motif of barbering services, this time for a child, though adult trimmings are more typical, see Han Guangxu,s “The Army and the People Are All One Family,” (1975), in Min, Zhang, and Duoduo, (2003): 126. “Learn from Lei Feng” campaign coverage often includes army streetside free haircuts, as well as repairs of bicycles and shoes. Various enactments of these people’s services are pictured in “Zuo Lei Feng Shi de Zhanshi,” (Become a Soldier Like Lei Feng,) Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 14-17. 177 remain confined to the humbler sphere that largely revolves around their usefulness to itinerants as a settled local group. Typically, such services include transit and domestic welfare provision. While soldiers provide their own long-distance transit, neighboring civilians may assist with local transportation needs. Particularly useful in this regard are boats in remote outposts. Fortunately for local soldiers, the Tibetan villagers of Snow Mountain possess boats that enable them to become the soldiers’ willing ferrymen, their service captured in a 1973 pictorial. 227 Here Tibetans power two small rowboats carrying soldiers from one bank of the Niyang River to the other as a group of Tibetan civilians look on from the shore the boats have just left waving goodbye. Among other civil-military graphic materials, the piece in which the print appears adds to a preponderance of Tibetan-themed materials. Likely because tensions run higher between Tibetans and all representatives of the Han-dominated central state than they do for constituents of most other minority groups, Tibetans are even more over- represented than most non-Han ethnicities portrayed in harmonious interaction with the PLA. Less emblematic of such representations is the balance between civil and military services. A Tibetan ferryman photograph is one of three illustrating a piece on the depth of feelings between soldiers and ordinary citizens in the 227 “Xueshan Qing Shen,” (Feelings Run Deep on Snow Mountain), Jiefangjun Huabao, 315 (August 1973): 44. 178 village. The image is joined by two others. In the first of these, a soldier connects a light bulb to an electrical socket he has just wired, thus emblazoning a tiny room that was formerly dark. The illuminated smiles of two grateful denizens approve this developmental milestone, the woman of the two observers accentuating her appreciation with applause for the soldier. The second snapshot reveals construction of a barracks for the newly arrived soldiers. Local civilians participate in the project in nearly as great a number as their PLA co-workers for whom the building is being constructed. The accompanying text likens their relationship to that of a family, citing their mutual development and defense of the frontier as contributory to their deep proletarian friendship. 228 While generally the balance in services rendered accrues to the soldiers’ side in such portrayals, here perhaps the Tibetans are permitted to represent the more zealous of the two to underscore their enthusiasm for then as now locally unpopular Han rule. Incidentally, this example also represents a conservative or traditional continuity in Cultural Revolution iconography that offers images of harmonious relations between Han and minority peoples of the frontier virtually identical in spirit to the historical range of Han representations of such relations. In addition to providing local transport, civilians are well placed to offer guide services to soldiers, introducing them to sites of historical and political interest. Often women lead soldiers on such tours, as exemplified by a 1976 occasion where troops are paraded through a room in which Mao had once given 228 Ibid. 179 a speech nearly fifty years earlier. 229 On the other hand, old peasant men also frequently lead tours, as reflected in a photograph of many soldiers admiring an irrigation project established by Qin Shi Huang, China’s notorious legalist ruler who was much admired by Mao. 230 While tour leading is an instructional practice in which civilians assume dominance, this mode of service appears but infrequently in graphic portrayals, only often enough to foster an illusory notion of equal exchange between the two sides. By far a more frequently depicted exchange, civilian provision of refreshment and other domestic tasks largely confines their service to a more submissive sphere with the notable exception of those services to which more radical significance attaches. Women’s performance of domestic tasks for soldiers represents one of a multi-variant set of motifs among such services. Typically, women will wash and mend soldier’s bedding and uniforms, and sometimes make them grass shoes. 231 In one instance, a woman goes one step further and instructs soldiers in this art so that they make reproduce their footwear themselves as needed. 232 Her deeper purpose in this instructional exchange is revealed in the photograph’s caption, which explains that Instructor Ma Xiaji is in 229 Jiefangjun Huabao, 345 (February 1976): 10. 230 “Yanjiu Ru Fa Douzheng Shi wei Xianshi Douzheng Fuwu,” (Study the History of the Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism in Order to Serve the Present Struggle), Jiefangjun Huabao, 328 (September 1974): 12. 231 Very rarely an old male peasant offers grass shoes, as in “Huanghaichian Shao Yu Shui Qing,” (Fish to Water Friendship/Army-People Friendship at Huanhaichian), Jiefangjun Huabao, 294 (November 1971): 24-25. Images of women mending uniforms are far more ubiquitous, as in “Song Digua,” (Presenting Sweet Potatoes), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 31. 232 Jiefangjun Huabao, 345 (February 1976): 12. 180 some ways one of them, a Red Army veteran passing revolutionary tradition on to the current generation of soldiers. Another caption beneath an image of a ceremonial bestowal of grass shoes explains the ritual exchange’s significance directly in terms of the reproduction of revolutionary political culture by pronouncing that: “Revolutionary tradition raises new people.” 233 As conveyers of revolutionary history, women, and occasionally men, manufacturers and bearers of grass shoes assume an exceptionally empowered role in civil-military interaction. Exceptions such as these help support an impression of parity between soldiers and masses that in turn enables a smoother acceptance of hierarchy among those at its lower levels disfavored by it. Without an especially red and lofty ulterior purpose, but far more common, is women’s, and sometimes men’s and children’s, provision of refreshment to passing soldiers, which lacks the investment of weightier revolutionary torch bearing. Roadside stands with kettles, porcelain bowls, and, more meaningfully, enamel mugs, adopted by the people in imitation of their army, are frequently depicted in photographs and watercolors of women pouring drinks to quench the thirst of marching troops too busy to stop to retrieve and purify by boiling their own drinking water. 234 As a renewable resource, water 233 Lu, “Laigao Xuan Deng,” (Selected Publications of Contributed Articles), Jiefangjun Huabao, 327 (August 1974): 44. 234 See, for example, “Qing Yin,” (Please Drink), “Laigao Xuan Deng,” (Selected Publications of Contributed Articles), Jiefangjun Huabao, 346 (March 1976): 44 and “Renmin Gongbing Zou 181 may be accepted by troops schooled not to take gifts or supplies from the masses. It is therefore freely provided, not as a gift, but as a simpler gesture of goodwill in which nothing of significant material value is exchanged. In accordance with this understanding, only more limited symbolic capital accrues to peasant dispensers of drinks. Coupled with this expansion of established motifs of interaction so abundantly provided by the Tangshan earthquake and other Cultural Revolution events that shrunk the distance between the two spheres is the rise of a largely new set of roles that appear entirely interchangeable for both soldier and civilian. These images manifesting the idealized civil-military symbiosis depict soldiers and civilians jointly engaged in identical pursuits that would be carried out either separately, as is the case with agricultural work; or only by one side or the other, as obtains with primary border defense; or not at all, as occurs with the disappearance of the political ritual of spontaneous Mao Zedong thought study sessions at the onset of the reforms. Four interactive motifs between citizen and soldier project themselves across Cultural Revolution pictorial propaganda and combine therein to represent an ideal similitude. Yet close scrutiny of civil-military themes in CCP political art reveals more than an overriding concern with unity masquerading as egalitarianism in its promotion of various designs to achieve this end. Just as vividly, it also exposes Tianxia, Nali Xinku Na An Jia,” (The People’s Worker-Soldiers Go Everywhere, Wherever There Is Toil, There’s a Peaceful Home), Jiefangjun Huabao, 247 (June 1966): 44. 182 ruptures along these various cuts of social fabric that in turn reveal hierarchy. The multivalent interactions from which to examine the symbiotic unity that sustains the PLA's position of privilege among civilians include: 1) hosting; 2) border defense; 3) cooperative political study; and 4) agricultural labor. Emerging Motifs of Symbiotic Unity Hosting As Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence asserts, hosting, gift exchange and other activities seemingly innocent of ulterior purposes at once impose and conceal domination. While hosting tends to be represented as a straightforward exchange of hospitality between soldiers entertaining civilian visitors in their quarters and masses serving military guests in their homes, examination of such images in the aggregate reveals imbalance and inequality in the exchange that subordinates civilian hosting to quotidian occasions and reserves provision of necessary food, shelter, or information for military hosting. In practice, hosting proves a means of excluding civilians from opportunities to accumulate significant favor available to their military counterparts. The glory of dispensing hospitality to distressed masses is denied civilians as it is allowed the armed forces, even as both sides are depicted at home in deceptively equivalent acts of dispensing tea, comfort, and conversation to their respective guests. 183 Imbalance in the Exchange of Gifts Further exacerbating this inequity is the unevenness of gift exchange protocol between the two sides in accordance with the "San Da Jilü, Ba Xiang Zhuyi" (“Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention"), a Second Revolutionary Civil War era (1927-1937) dictum that commands soldiers “not to take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.” A series of illustrations in a 1972 Pictorial actualizes this code of proper treatment of civilians by displaying soldiers refusing gifts of peaches, returning borrowed picks, and compensating for items damaged. 235 The soldiers' refusal to accept gifts during hosting, in addition to reconstructing the traditional military identity that abuses or coerces civilian hospitality, denies civilian guests the opportunity to return favors extended to them, thus denying them an accumulation of symbolic capital, or, more simply, prestige that accrues to soldiers when they dispense gifts to the masses as they are frequently permitted to do under conditions of civilian hosting. In effect, civilians are still paying, albeit in a less straightforward fashion, for the maintenance of a military identity Wherever they come from, soldiers frequently are portrayed as representatives of the central state, its cultural ambassadors that not infrequently 235 "San Da Jilü, Ba Xiang Zhuyi," (Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention), Jiefangjun Huabao, 303 (August 1972): 14-15. See also, “The Soldiers Pass by the Apple Orchard. The Peasants Kindly Offer the Soldiers Some Apples. The Soldiers Adhere Strictly to the ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline’ and ‘Eight Points for Attention’ and Will Not Accept a Single Apple,” poster published as a teaching aid to accompany Chinese for Primary Schools text, by artist Fang Shicong, Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1974 as reproduced in Min, et al.: 126. 184 bring locals gifts from the Han core of iconic goods unobtainable in the remote locales frequented by soldiers. Peasants’ enlistment into the armed forces transforms their identity into one associated with national power. Regardless of the actual exchange or use value of the materials these formerly local, now national, representatives carry, such goods immediately delimit a marginality from a center and impose a crude and pitiable identity on their recipients by their symbolic projection of cosmopolitanism or sophistication and their relative rarity and unobtainability through means other than conferrals of gifts. These goods that soldiers bestow upon civilians are intrinsically more advanced and unequivocally superior, qualities to be appreciated quite apart from the trouble taken to deliver the goods in the localities in which they are presented. Soldiers’ access to such items underscores disparity between civilians and armed forces and thus constitutes a measure by which symbolic violence is exerted with the compliance of the civilian populace that the soldiers dominate. When graphically depicted, such exchanges tend to bear the common caption of “specially brought from the motherland,” usually to a locale’s poor and middle peasants, or to a particular ethnic group that inhabits a frontier posting. Gifts range from daily necessities, such as those soldiers brought to Wa minority peasants, which included a knife and thermos, to those delivered to facilitate a larger agenda, as in the case of the Ninth Company cadres’ bestowal of “fine” 185 seeds to the low to middle peasants of Awa Mountain. 236 Text accompanying images of the seed exchange attest to the twofold motives behind the gesture. Chief among these is the aim of “spreading word of the excellent circumstances of agricultural and industrial enterprise construction in the motherland,” though the goal of “mass borderland [agricultural] development” is also articulated. 237 Reinforced by their attendant text, these images present soldiers as instruments of development and channelers of enlightenment, while depicting the civilian peasant masses as passive, ignorant, and grateful. Here again symbolic violence sequesters civilians to an arena in which they remain disadvantaged. The code governing gift relations between the two sides allows soldiers to bring more to their relationship with civilians in hosting, a condition common to their role in similar motifs of border defense, political study, and agricultural labor. Such advantages are crucial to sustaining the soldiers’ dominance, indirectly or symbolically. In addition to inequity at the intimate and personal level of exchange, soldiers provide supplies to groups, while denying those groups the opportunity to reciprocate, governed as the soldiers remain by revolutionary custom. As with other gifts, donations of supplies raise the prestige of the givers. Of particular value in this regard are resources in short supply, such as potable water on islands. Photographs of army delivery of surfeit water to 236 “Laigao Xuan Deng,” (Selected Publications of Contributed Articles), Jiefangjun Huabao, 326 (July 1974): 44; "Awashan shang Yu Shui Qing," (Fish to Water Relations atop Mount Awa), Jiefangjun Huabao, 290/291 (July/August 1971): 30. 237 "Awashan shang Yu Shui Qing," (Fish to Water Relations atop Mount Awa), Jiefangjun Huabao, 290/291 (July/August 1971): 30. 186 local fishermen as the PLA leaves its post convey the merit soldiers attain in such exchanges. 238 Enhancing this effect is the caption below, which explains the sacrifice involved in the PLA’s accumulation of the supply. In its text, the soldiers are further credited with having used the resource only very sparingly throughout the course of their posting. A grateful fisherman recipient does not fail to appreciate the sacrifice, remarking that “the water represents a kernel of the red hearts of their family member PLA servicemen.” 239 This provision of necessary supplies represents an inversion of customary hospitality extension, with the locals receiving rather than dispensing aid to the outsiders. Thus is the credit for the aid still further extended. Pictorial graphics present hosting most frequently carried out by civilians, typically, as noted above, among ethnic minorities on the frontiers in picturesque settings anxious to welcome locally stationed troops and share their culture with them in rituals, song, meals, and conversation. Tea drinking in yurts gains particular currency during these years. For their part, when not ministering to the macro-developmental needs of the local populace, the troops are often represented bearing gifts of food or Mao books from the Han-dominated center. Such dubious images convey Han-minority fellowship, minority CCP nationalism, and national unity in breadth and diversity, in addition to the customary civil-military 238 “Donghai Qian Shao Jian Gang Cheng,” (Patrolling a Steelmaking City on the East Sea), Jiefangjun Huabao, 274 (March 1970): 36. 239 Ibid. 187 goodwill, and are typical of extremely disproportionate ethnic minority overrepresentation across civil-military pictorial materials. Conferring Mao Zedong thought on the dark masses further exalts the prestige of the armed forces as it subordinates the recipients of the texts. Predictably, soldiers’ ritualized delivery of Mao books to civilians in the countryside and cities follows the texts’ trajectory of fetishization over the Cultural Revolution years, with multiple images of handouts published across the Huabao in the late 1960’s that taper off to an image every other year or so published in the Cultural Revolution’s final stages. While texts are sometimes dispensed jointly with revolutionary committees at rallies, soldiers tend to “distribute the precious red books to family members” (here meaning the masses, rather than literal family) without the assistance of proselytizing civilians. 240 In hospitality exchanges, however, images represent soldiers alone bestowing texts on civilians, as one image depicts in a room where gleeful youth have just received a stack of texts from now empty-handed soldiers who are pictured applauding the magnitude of their own contribution. 241 In distinction to civilian-generated hospitality extensions to soldiers, army hosting is more likely to result from civilian-initiated visits with business purposes, such as studying army organization, or when civilians enter the barracks 240 For joint distribution of texts in Sichuan, see “Minjiang Liang An Hongqi Piao,” (Red Flag Wafts on Both Banks of Min River), Jiefangjun Huabao, 246 (November 1968): 29 or “Feng Zhan Hongqi ru Hua,” (The Wind Blows the Red Flag into Art), Jiefangjun Huabao, 259 (September 1968): 32. 241 “Womende Minggenzi,” (Our Lifeblood), Jiefangjun Huabao, (1967): 14. 188 as a refuge in times of need. This latter occasioned the accommodation of a crew of fishermen in 1973 portrayed as deeply grateful for the clean bunks with which they were supplied. 242 While civilian hospitality generally entails nothing more significant than the extension of courtesy to guests, army hosting tends to minister to those in search of that which is of primary importance, such as shelter and knowledge. During the Cultural Revolution, graphic representations of hospitality discursively coerce civilians into an acceptance of junior partnership with the armed forces. Border Defense As reliance on the militia rises, so does the emphasis on the shared civil- military burden of border defense grow extremely pronounced during the Cultural Revolution. This balancing out whereby army encroachment into the civil sphere is met by civil adoption of increased defense responsibility becomes especially prominent on the frontiers. Just as the ethnic minorities who dwell there are overrepresented, so too do the border regions loom large in the pages of pictorials, chiefly in the form of the vast hinterland, though the expansive coastline retains some coverage as well. In an age in which rustication provided a program of revolutionary transformation, remoteness took on a new significance as a site of political radicalism. 242 "Haishang Jun Min zhi Jia," (A Seaside Shelter for Soldiers and Civilians), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 31. 189 Part of what affixes radicalism to frontier associations has to do with the border areas’ relative underdevelopment and impoverishment. When discussing the Chinese masses generally, Mao reasoned that their ignorance and poverty were helpful to the revolution: Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are “poor and blank.” This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. 243 Thus, the “poorest and blankest” fringes of China’s countryside, by extension become the state’s political frontier, where the most fertile revolutionary ground is situated at the state’s remotest reach. Compounding the political pedigree of frontier conditions, the revolutionary dictate of mutual mass-PLA emulation especially heightened the prominence of the militia in the radical showcases of the frontier whose imagery became ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution. Consequently, whether for the locals or the sent-down youth, border residences tended to maximize opportunities for defense-oriented civil-military interaction, particularly in zones contiguous to active combat or skirmishes, such as on China’s South and Southeast Asian borders, or on its ocean frontier with Taiwan. Much of the civilian role centers around border guide services, a clearly hierarchical exchange in which local minorities share their local knowledge as 243 Mao Zedong, “Introducing a Cooperative,” April 15, 1958, as reproduced in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972: 36. 190 scouts and guides for stationed troops who are better trained and equipped should an occasion arise that might call for something more than surveillance. Portrayed as naturally arising from one's identity that in turn derives from one's environment, this local knowledge is hence devalued as unrevolutionary, since the Cultural Revolution authorities consider it almost an instinct rather than a skill acquired through political motivation. Often times the militia’s greatest asset to the regular armed forces appears to be its powers of observation. Though acting as scout is something a child can, and sometimes does, do, the militia tend to be depicted serving in this capacity more than in most others. A 1971 woodblock depicting a vigilant militiaman pointing out something that has been spotted far out at sea exemplifies this tendency. 244 The militiaman’s job is clearly to report to the soldier, who will then determine a course of action, and clear out of the way. With their local knowledge and experience, militia are portrayed as suited to detecting activities that are out of the ordinary. Local knowledge contrasts sharply with the itinerant troops’ ideologically driven formal acquisition of marksmanship, a skill for which training was required, but was generally applicable. This is to say nothing of the elite competition for opportunities to acquire such skills, nor of the accomplishment perceived once acquired. Because of these factors and others having to do with the power and resource cost and sophistication of their production, prestige 244 “Geming Chuantong Da Fayang,” (Thoroughly Carrying on the Revolutionary Tradition), Jiefangjun Hua Bao, 287 (April 1971): 45. 191 attaches to PLA weaponry. Consequently, rank and file arms displays to militia are met with awe in the photographed and illustrated record. A 1971 Pictorial photograph of a soldier in a trench flanked by two women in southwestern ethnic minority attire and a male peasant conveys the privilege of expertise in weaponry. The women hold their rifles proudly, if a bit awkwardly, while the soldier demonstrates some technique with a third rifle he holds. Though the title and text refer to Maoist exhortations for the militia and regular forces to train and defend the nation together, the photograph belies the text’s message of equality by representing the clear dominance of the formally skilled soldier. 245 This hierarchy is sustained in a particularly iconic oil painting reproduced on the back index page of a 1972 Pictorial depicting two women, one a soldier, the other a local woman, beside a horse stopping to admire a field of wildflowers. 246 In the composition, entitled "I Love the Frontier," both women are smiling, the servicewoman gesturing to call attention to the majesty of the scene before them, as the local woman looks contentedly on. The positioning of the figures, with the two women very close and the soldier slightly further forward; their postures of clasped hands and drawn together legs for the civilian as opposed to open arms and legs squarely set a bit apart for the soldier; and their expressions of demure closed-lipped smile versus wide open-mouthed smile all 245 “Junmin Tongxin Jiaqiang Zhanbei,” (Army and People Work in Unison to Strengthen Combat Readiness), Jiefangjun Huabao, 285 (February 1971): 20. 246 Zhang Minzhi, "Wo Ai Bianjiang," (I Love the Frontier), Jiefangjun Huabao, 300 (May 1972): 44. 192 reinforce the authority conferred by the soldier's uniform and by the propaganda materials partially unpacked from the horse's saddlebags. Reinforcing this dominance is the title, which must be spoken in the soldier's first person, for whom the primary identity of the locale in which the figures are situated is a frontier, a national border, or military outpost rather than a specific place, viewed less in relation to the nation than to its immediate environs, a home. Unlike the tension between text and image in the photograph, here the linguistic and pictorial symbols support one another’s meanings harmoniously. Here the servicewoman’s labeling of the figures’ setting and its significance silences her civilian attendant’s alternative means of making sense of the importance of the space and their position inside of it. The soldier retains the power of naming, in this instance, the place, an achievement explicitly sought after in Maoist, and even Confucian, political practice and one necessary to symbolic violence through the imposition of basic meaning. Further problematizing the conveyance of symbiotic unity through militia- army interactions is militia training, an unequivocally hierarchical exchange that always privileges soldiers. Though joint and interchangeable border defense imagery assumes a major role in the visual media of Cultural Revolution portrayals of the civil-military, this radical new genre emerges and continues to appear in a context dominated by more traditional representation of PLA training of militia forces. In concert with those ruptures discussed above that weaken the internal power of joint border defense representation, militia training’s sustained 193 dominance of the visual field significantly undermines the persuasiveness of militia-armed force equivalence. As with hosting motifs, those of militia training also graphically reveal armed force coercive dominance that is concealed by a veneer of equality in its representation. Political Study In the common cooperative political study motif, symbolic violence is exerted by the soldier’s adoption of the teacher role despite modeling of self and cooperative informal study in which all participants are students. A process in what Mao deemed to be “a socialist movement for the self-education and self- remoulding of the people,” ritualized political study organized masses into groups for what was intended to be individual consciousness-raising. 247 Unsurprisingly, this contradiction gave rise to many others, all of them imposing prevalent hierarchies endemic to Cultural Revolution groups and reflective of larger social conditions that elevated the armed forces and sustained army dominance over the civilian realm. Images of soldiers at the blackboard far outnumber those of workers and peasants standing before fellow participants. A great clamor rings through the text accompanying images of soldiers being taught Mao’s thought by peasants and workers, but the frequency with which the inverse images appear 247 Mao Zedong, “Speech at the Meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. in Celebration of the 40 th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution,” November 6, 1957, as reproduced in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972: 43. 194 makes clear that the former illustrations serve to conceal the latter reflection of actually subordinated civilians. Another mainstay of equivalent unity, the political study mate, whose rise and fall follows that of the cult of Mao, appears frequently in the Cultural Revolution era pictorial press. Indeed, in the early years of the Cultural Revolution when the PLA Pictorial, like many publications, was but irregularly issued, there was very little graphic civil-military content that did not represent soldier-worker or soldier-peasant jointly engrossed in reading and expostulating on Mao's texts, commonly outdoors, or, when indoors, in rooms ornamented richly with Maoist icons, however shabbily otherwise furnished. 248 For the first eight months of 1968, for example, there was no other pictorial content depicting civil-military interaction whatsoever that did not center around understanding, implementing and disseminating the word of Mao. Though closely related, political study sessions remain distinct from generic propagandizing activities, which tend to be itinerant projects lacking the individualized textual reading and analysis of the study session. Common to both propaganda activities and study sessions, however, was armed forces’ domination over civilian participants. Yet important differences between the two fundamental types of civil- military political activity during the Cultural Revolution persisted. Significantly, 248 A photograph of a 1973 interior to which a soldier on furlough returns home provides a rich glimpse of such a revolutionary domestic dwelling. Here an enormous portrait of Mao is flanked by a calligraphic couplet praising him and the CCP, with a bouquet resting on a chest directly beneath the portrait. Some clips from what seem to be revolutionary operas are pasted beside Mao. Very few furnishings, whether decorative or utilitarian, adorn the room. “Wode Jiaxiang’” (My Hometown), Jiefangjun Huabao, 308 (January 1973): 22. 195 political study sessions project an egalitarian quality between all participants absent in propagandizing, always shouldered by the enlightened, whether civil or military, on behalf of those in the dark, despite assertions of army reliance on study with peasants and workers in which soldiers derive "political nutrition from the masses." 249 This putative equality notwithstanding, however, more subtle distinctions in initiation of sessions, propagation of new directives, direction of group sessions, and frequently supply of texts all sustain army dominance in this motif as in others. 250 Thus, symbolic violence is transmitted more insidiously via military dominance in the political study sphere because it is effected not transparently, as in propagandizing, but within a discourse of complete equality that obfuscates hierarchy. Several conditions problematize political study’s egalitarian discourse and expose civilian subordination. Chief among these is the establishment of political study institutions. Only the army "opens a night school using Mao Zedong thought to brighten the minds of diverse border people" 251 as no school is needed by the army. Cultural Revolution graphics repeatedly portray servicemen as agents of enlightenment on China’s culturally underdeveloped non-Han frontiers. 249 “Jing Feng Yu, Jian Shimian, Jiji Canjia Shehui Jieji Douzheng,” (Undergoing Trials and Hardship to See the World, Enthusiastically Participating in Class Struggle), Jiefangjun Huabao, 352 (September 1976): 11. 250 The image contained in the following of a military transport unit's delivery of Mao texts is typical of many army text supply service scenes, as in the scene described in n. 26, "Yunshu Dui he Qingnian Dian" (A Transport Unit and The Youth Aspect) Jiefangjun Huabao, 333 (February 1975): 14-15. 251 "Yikao Renmin Zhagen Bianjiang," (Depend on the People, Take Root in the Borderlands), Jiefangjun Huabao, 285 (February 1971): 12-13. 196 Soldiers’ direction of political study subordinates civilians by foreclosing opportunities for civilians to build independent ideological authority, thus maintaining a state monopoly on the symbolic order through which violence, among other forms of power, can be transmitted. When Mao's words are read aloud, they are generally voiced by soldiers. This may arise from the practical circumstance of lower illiteracy rates among the rank and file than the broad masses. Regardless of the reasons behind it, the reading of these ritually potent texts confers power and subordinates the listeners. Just as proximity to the armed forces in study sessions sanctions as it dominates civilian ideological engagement, so does proximity to the revolutionary masses establish the armed forces' militant authority. Revolutionary identity rests upon civil-military unity in thought work. Agricultural Labor Still, as the success of ideological endeavors derives from a political consciousness informed by labor, civil-military intimacy on the mental plane is necessarily complemented by collectivity in both sides’ physical endeavors. As intended, the insertion of urbanites into rural fields as agricultural laborers complicates urban identity as it unifies armed forces and rusticates city-dwellers, the two itinerant populations at work in the fields of the countryside. The peasants, though glorified and romanticized in the Cultural Revolution, were not, of course, sent out of the fields to learn the ways of the cities; all positive transformative potential was believed to rest in rural conditions. 197 Mao’s inversion of Marxist orthodoxy elevated the peasantry to revolutionary vanguard in his adaptation of the Marxist revolutionary scheme to China’s history of peasant rebellion that arises in the long-established Han tradition of sedentary agriculture. The agricultural labor might more properly be termed peasant labor for its inclusion of animal husbandry and fish farming with which soldiers assisted in addition to less cyclical and longer term public works projects of irrigation, well digging, building construction, etc., not discussed in the context of the seasonal work of food supply production. The performance of peasant labor by the inhabitants of the rural setting determines Mao’s location of radicalism there, and consequently fixes a decidedly farming face on the mass character. Fortuitously, agricultural laborers were placed to achieve two all- important Maoist objectives simultaneously: the material task of crop and meat production and the subjectively self-cultivational task of revolutionary identity construction. The caption explaining a 1976 pictorially published photograph explains all that can be accomplished through the joint civil-military agricultural labor depicted in the image beneath it. The field is an ideal site for soldiers, teachers, and students to together criticize right revisionists; train in revolutionary spirit while repairing farm tools; and contribute to agricultural production all at 198 the same time. 252 The field becomes the most important space for identity transformation and is, consequently, itself an important Cultural Revolution icon. The modeled revolutionary soldier-citizen of the Cultural Revolution derived from farming origins. To support the army was not only to love the people, as the slogan went, it was to be the people, to merge into a mass identity and be the people and the army at once, a concept illustrated in a 1969 pictorial photograph of a group of four soldiers and civilians exemplifying a slogan they appear beneath in fulfillment of the campaign urging symbiosis between masses and army. 253 Cultural Revolution forces rewarded soldiers for appearing more like the farmers they had previously been and civilians more like the soldiers they took as their model. Thus, the new radicalism entailed a tighter proximity of soldiers and civilians. Customarily, soldiers and masses inhabit two separate agricultural realms, i.e., the military agricultural colony and the collective farm, both of which functioned historically as collectives. During the Cultural Revolution, the army “invades” the collective, as reflected in the graphic proliferation of soldiers situated in collectives. While most images portray peasants and soldiers toiling side by side in the fields, attendant images expose soldiers telling the peasants what to do on the farms to increase production outputs. Masses and soldiers were 252 “Zuo Jiaoyu Geming de Cujin Pai,” (Faction for Education on Accelerating Revolution), Jiefangjun Huabao, 347 (April 1976): 30-31. 253 “Xinzhong Sheng qi Hong Taiyang: Taishan Yading Bu Yi” (The Rising Red Sun in One’s Heart: Mount Tai Doesn’t Budge), Jiefangjun Huabao, 265 (March 1969): 43. 199 not only portrayed working more closely together, their work had actually become more interdependent, albeit hierarchically so. Consequently, their identity reflects this myth of interchangeability in the popularity of military style clothing among the masses in the fields and the armed forces' occasional donning of civilian garb that blends them back into a mass identity. 254 Several components contribute to this effect. Wide-brimmed straw peasant hats sometimes substitute for army caps among soldiers, who also often remove their jackets when working in the fields. For their part, peasants included many components of the soldier’s attire into their daily wear. Even amidst such costume softening, some sartorial lines were rigidly observed in graphic accounts. Pictorials never presented soldiers completely disrobed of distinguishing gear, for example. On the other hand, as noted above, peasants never donned PLA caps adorned with the single red star at center. However relaxed from previous years, the dress code prohibited other adults from masquerading as soldiers, or soldiers from appearing as their future and former peasant selves. 255 Subtle distinctions that mark military identity invest soldiers with an authority that disrupts civil- military similitude and exposes the hierarchy that subordinates the civilian 254 One such example can be found in soldiers' adoption of Tibetan jackets on top of their uniforms as they join similarly clad peasants in the fields. “Xi Kan Jinri Xin Shannan,” (A Close Look at Today’s New Shannan), Jiefangjun Huabao, 344 (January 1976): 25. 255 An exception was made for children, who were obviously incapable of being mistaken for the real thing. For an illustration of the popular army uniform as child’s wear, complete with red star cap, see “Da Feng Lang li Lian Hong Xin,” (During the Storm we Steel Our Red Hearts), People’s Art Publishing House, 1976 as reproduced in Min et al. (2003): 276. 200 masses. The visual code inscribed this difference quite plainly on the figures of various PRC citizens. Despite some superficial manifestations of seeming erasure of distinction between the military and civilian realms, agricultural work does not in and of itself civilianize the army. Unlike production, agriculture falls within the category of military arts. Thus, agricultural livelihoods overlap across civilian and military domains. While soldiers do not generally engage in civilian industry unless they are joining their worker comrades in the factories, agricultural labor, traditionally and throughout the Cultural Revolution, in the form of tuntian agriculturally self-sufficient military frontier colonies, became part of the Cultural Revolution’s “useable past” that could link civil and military traditional identities together for revolutionary purposes. Joint civil-military agricultural labor under normal conditions, that is times without emergencies or natural disasters, only begins to appear in the pictorial propaganda record during the Cultural Revolution. Prior to the Cultural Revolution, China’s modernizers considered non-mechanized agriculture as symbolic of the nation’s backwardness. Cultural Revolution iconography posits a different perspective that reveals people being transformed by both traditional and mechanized agricultural labor into modern socialist citizens. Thus, the revolution’s authorities convert a modernizing weakness into a social strength to effect a modernization of social identities. 201 Scenes representing soldiers working the land among civilians are situated in collective farms rather than army plots, projecting the message that soldiers assist in collective labor rather than a message of mutual assistance. The one-sided benefits that accrue from such joint enterprise disrupt the image of cooperative labor exchange between the two sides. In the unrelieved context of the collective, military labor becomes a gift that cannot be reciprocated. As such, the gift of labor joins other offerings civilians are expected to receive without opportunity of return. Here again soldiers gain face at civilian expense. Also in tension with the equivalence of the two sides' agricultural work is the soldiers' consistently represented agricultural expertise on issues such as soil testing and wet rice paddy maintenance imparted to the peasants they toil alongside. 256 Indeed, agricultural cooperative labor during the years of the Cultural Revolution represents one of the most ubiquitous civil-military motifs in the graphic record. Particularly prominent during the 1970’s as more direct political work such as political study, rallying, and propagandizing began to wane, agricultural work pictographically united civilians and soldiers more than any other activity. Pictorials represented peasant-army field labor taking place side by side on collective farms often with each side engaged in the same unskilled, back- breaking task. Not pictured is the transience of the soldiers’ term of agricultural service. Here again the early seventies bring relief to the symbiotic field with 256 See "Yikao Qunzhong Baowei Bianfang," (Rely on the Masses, Safeguard Border Defense), Jiefangjun Huabao, 331 (December 1974): 16 and "Zhan Tian Dou Di Duo Feng Shou," (Combat Nature to Reap a Rich Harvest), Jiefangjun Huabao, 310 (March 1973): 25. 202 occasional technology transfers from army to peasantry to assist in increased crop yields. While army and peasantry sometimes make experiential and experimental efforts at cooperative agronomy studies, more often soldiers teach more experienced peasants innovations in agriculture. In this regard, a 1971 pictorial lianhuan hua is not atypical. The comic illustrates a zealous soldier’s arrival in a village in response to a directive from Mao on pig feed. Talking to the villagers, the soldier understands what is needed and quickly develops an acceptable feed, improves it further, and receives the obligatory expressions of gratitude from the villagers. 257 This sort of scheme, wherein the peasants articulate their experience to a soldier eager to carry out Mao’s deeds and clever enough to execute them, represents a common cooperative endeavor, though an unequal one, in which the peasants play a passive role and the soldier takes the initiative, applies research that considers the peasants, and gets the glory, the empowerment of recognition. Mass-Army Symbiotic Unity Cultural Revolutionary symbolic violence employs pictorial images to erect a naturalized façade of symbiotic unity between the army and the people intended to conceal domination by the former over the latter. Graphic representations of Cultural Revolution era symbiosis in the interactive motifs of 257 “Mao Zhuxi Zuo Shuo Wo Zuogan,” (Whatever Mao Says to Do, I Do), Jiefangjun Huabao, 284 (January 1971): 45. 203 hosting, border defense, political study, and agricultural labor disguise an entrenched hierarchy that privileges the military and subordinates the civilian, a hierarchy readily reflected in the militarization of society and the encroachment of the military in many formerly civilian realms, such as collective agriculture and education. Pictorial accounts record an actual heightened inter-mingling and cooperation in new areas, as well as a concerted effort to disassemble the apparatus of all traditional identity markers and not just those dividing civilian and military realms. Moreover, China's masses seemed to have adopted radical symbiosis in response to the symbolic, and physical, violence of the state as a survival strategy during the Cultural Revolution's many purges and capitalist roader hunts. Having been instructed to learn from the army, the uniform style many citizens conformed to was quite naturally a martial one. Though the symbiotic movement that militarized society and mass tinged the army heightened civil-military similitude, it fell far short of achieving its claimed erasure of social hierarchy. In even more obvious ways, ethnic difference persisted, marking the limits of Cultural Revolution radicalism. It must be noted that the Cultural Revolution’s ultra-militarization dictate of civil-military symbiosis did not constitute the sole unification discourse producing these effects. While it may seem surprising that unity remained a watchword under conditions of Cultural Revolution struggle, the two impulses were seen to be complementary components of a dialectical process Mao 204 encapsulated in “the formula ‘unity, criticism, unity.’ To elaborate, it means starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle and arriving at a new unity on a new basis.” 258 A 1968 Huabao photograph illustrates this rehabilitation and recounts the applied “unity, criticism, unity” scheme. Discredited during the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals and professionals were frequently targeted for criticism and struggle. One such figure, a Beijing army physician, is depicted beside a fellow soldier as both join masses at a work table. Accompanying text explains that she, like the soldier beside her, is learning from the masses in order to progress. 259 In contrast to her comrade, however, the physician is reported to have been criticized and subsequently to have purged herself of old thinking that would have resisted such mass proximity and authority. Models like the army medic convey the ideal transformation that begins with a false or coerced unity, then progresses to a genuine, organic unity through denunciation/criticism of the pretensions of initial conditions. The party has propagated messages urging both pragmatic unification, as it did with the Kuomintang Party in the United Front during the Anti-Japanese Resistance, and longer-term unification objectives, as it pursued in peasant support during the Chinese Revolution and as was graphically attested to have 258 Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” as reproduced in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972: 252. 259 “Jianjue Zou yu Gongnongbing Xiang Jiehe de Daolu,” (Resolutely Take the United Path with the Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers), Jiefangjun Huabao, 260 (October 1968): 44. 205 been achieved with the Beijing physician. Sometimes the CCP sought strategic alliances even with more broadly understood class enemies, as is articulated in Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art. There Mao advocates accepting the petit bourgeoisie, whom he regards as “also allies in the revolution (who) can cooperate with us on a long-term basis,” into the revolutionary ranks of the popular masses. 260 Mao even goes so far as to propose alliances with “the landlord class and bourgeoisie,” though he does not consider these groups constituent classes of the popular masses as he does the petit bourgeoisie. 261 Indeed, unification discourses in various forms have persisted since the establishment of the CCP in 1921 straight up through to the present seeking “to unite, and not divide, the people of our various nationalities,” 262 to “conscientiously get rid of every unhealthy manifestation in any link in our work that is detrimental to the unity between the Party and the people,” 263 in addition to those fusing masses to army. Though Cultural Revolution ideology insisted on symbiotic unity for all citizens as embodied in the revolutionary, the ideal remained elusive in a discourse riddled with ruptures. The soldier’s alterity remained easily distinguishable despite confoundingly homogenizing fashions in roles, dress, and 260 Mao Zedong in MacDougall, (1980): 65. 261 Ibid. 262 Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” as reproduced in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972: 48. 263 Mao Zedong, “Opening Address at the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” September 15, 1956, as reproduced in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972: 44. 206 habits. In the end, the muting of distinction proved harder to sustain pictorially than earlier citizenship identities that allowed for more diversity. Graphic portrayals of a deceptive and tense equality grew prominent as a result of a larger Cultural Revolution effort to level distinctions between leaders and masses. 264 Subsuming difference under blanket categories of ‘the people” or “the masses” sustained unequal power allotment by homogenizing social division and thereby concealing the clash of less communal interests. 265 Lifting that veil of uniformity would reveal actual hierarchy that privileged the military over other social groups. Thus, the army, as an elite institution, assumes a more civilian, or common, mass aspect even as the citizenry's mimicry of the armed forces and more general militarization in society further enhances the prestige of that institution. The same tendency repeats itself in the smaller context of officers and ordinary soldiers. Often pictorial text explains how much a man of the masses a particular soldier is. Mentioning the officer’s rank would have been superfluous, as his, certainly pictorially his, solitary visit to a particular place, his age, and the exclusively political nature of his mission would all trumpet his officer rank without need of words or uniform insignia. Officers and rank and file, as soldiers and masses, remained visually distinct despite Cultural Revolution policies and practices that attempted to level out their differences in a social field in which everyone was a citizen-soldier. 264 Shaorong Huang, (2000): 210. 265 Yuezhi Zhao, (1998): 31. 207 The military’s visually projected preeminence within a discourse of mass equivalence aided the Cultural Revolution social hierarchy in part through its elision of actual power differentials that helped to sustain the consent of the subjugated to an arrangement that disadvantaged them. Published Cultural Revolution political art depicting this relationship as one of symbiotic unity revealed fractures in its own internal discourse that obstructed an altogether effective conveyance of authorities’ ideals. These fissures eventually expanded and gave way to an oppositional discourse of complementary segregation between soldiers and civilians projected in reform era visual culture that was similarly not without its own set of unintended projections of hierarchical contradictions. 208 Chapter 4 Reform Decade Pictorial Practice The End of Revolution Militarizing trends begin to ebb with the death of Mao in September of 1976, an event that marks the conventional end of the Cultural Revolution. Within the next several months, the political tide turned sharply away from its revolutionary path. Hua Guofeng, Mao's chosen successor after the death and discrediting of Lin Biao, succeeded Mao, had the Gang of Four arrested and Deng Xiaoping was reinstated in all his former posts. Formerly advocated by Zhou Enlai and now prioritized by Hua Guofeng, the Four Modernizations in agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology constituted a deliberate retreat from the past revolutionary decade, despite some feeble rhetoric to the contrary. If the CCP’s “obligatory theme, that of scientific innovation under the revolutionary government” articulated at all during the Cultural Revolution, it did so with a muted voice in a discourse of hewing to “scientific socialism” without troubling much to defend or explicate the hermeneutics on which such assertions were predicated. 266 266 Kathleen M. Ryor, “Reflections on the Recent Past in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Transformations: Painters Examine Change in China, Chen Weimin, Liu Yang, Zhang Bin, Yang Yizhi, and Posters from the Gu Zhengqing Collection, April 5-May 9, 1999, Carleton College Art Gallery, Carleton: Carleton College, 1999: 11. 209 The death of Mao signaled an end to the cultivation of “newly emerging socialist things,” a code for all things revolutionary so celebrated during the Cultural Revolution that formed the constituent components of the period’s militarism. These reform era atavisms constituted a host of institutions, practices, and structures that both facilitated radicalism during the Mao years and served as a measure of socialist progress. The list includes much that is now stereotypical of the Cultural Revolution: class struggle, immense collectivization, mass ideological campaigns such as those to study Mao’s thought or denigrate Confucius, cultural products like the model revolutionary operas, and educational reversals that resulted in barefoot doctors, amateur artists, and rusticated youth. Collectively, the “newly emerging socialist things” had helped to establish the representational symbiotic ideal in pictorialized civil-military relations. Lacking purchase in the spirit of the new era, however, they quickly disappeared from the newly emerging visual culture of the reforms. Their disappearance cleared the way for the new ideal of complementary segregation and the rapidity of their demise signaled the party-state’s urgency to firmly establish an iconic canon to counteract the well-established traditional one. The graphically projected transition from revolution to reform civil- military relations is reflected in a series of departures and continuities from familiar Cultural Revolution forms of symbolic violence. Cultural Revolution authorities had exerted symbolic dominance by privileging the armed forces through a societal militarization effected, in significant part, by a discursive social 210 leveling that attempted to collectivize identity to such an extent that everyone was imagined as a paramilitary revolutionary, a soldier. The reforms introduced a decollectivizing project that atomized (“privatized”) mass identity and institutions. Consequently, official visual culture projected a demilitarized model of citizenship that sharply delineated the civilian from the military realm. The new ideal reflected a complementary segregation between the two spheres, one that replaced the former symbolic discourse of parity with differentiated rewards for differentiated abilities. Implicit in this scheme was a promise that the initial benefit of the few would later accrue to the many. The new code of symbolic violence in civil-military representation exercised itself through a series of motifs of disaggregated mass constituents of overlapping social groups and re-worked models like Lei Feng to discourage the high levels of contact between soldiers and civilians formerly promoted by earlier versions of mass models. The visible transitions between these pictorial civil-military representations are graphic gauges of revolutions in political culture. The major transition of the period under discussion is that from Maoist revolution to Dengist reform. Though they represented a package of ideas advocated by Deng Xiaoping and others long before the Cultural Revolution, the reforms were not officially introduced until 1978, inaugurating the first significant steps toward marketization taken. In a sharp reversal, Maoist romantic revolutionary ideology was jettisoned for Deng's pragmatically flexible "socialism with Chinese characteristics," which was essentially a means of accepting any 211 developments that furthered modernization, including opening to western capitalist nations. Already significantly underway by the end of the early reform years, integration with global capital did not lag far behind. The degree of contrast with the political culture of the previous decade almost cannot be overstated. Spending money went from a discouraged evil to desirable behavior as the state, independent actors and even the armed forces constructed a consumerist infrastructure. Distinctions in wealth, gender and profession became increasingly prominent and the geographical hierarchy became more stratified as coastal areas surged forward on their development trajectories while the interior lagged behind. Though development was and still is uneven at a general coastal/hinterland divide and within social groups in all areas, urban and rural development were not as disparate as they might have been. Instead, they somewhat balanced one another out, largely thanks to the engine of successful rural enterprises. The market's appreciation for expertise pushed people into increasingly specialized training and career paths, just as it re-emphasized distinction between the superficial figures of China's women and men. Defense became the exclusive responsibility of the armed forces. Itself responsible for some of these changes, the army slipped out of its grass shoes and away from a mass identity. For their own part, the masses retreated from their militarized roles as citizens. The transition from revolution to reform thus more than restructured relations between military and civilians, it reshaped their very identities, pulling 212 both sides away from practices of mutual emulation. Three quarters of a century of revolution had eroded the novelty promised by political struggle. Making revolution had become a quotidian affair. Ironically, halting revolutionary activity in the context to end the Cultural Revolution would now be truly revolutionary. Street battles, denunciations, exile, and pageantry had all become wearying. The current reform era’s colloquial reference to the Cultural Revolution decade as “the ten lost years” expresses the exhaustion of a citizenry of erstwhile combatants both dispirited by class struggle campaigns and disillusioned with the CCP’s failure to “move history forward.” Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 ushered in a set of marketizing reforms and passage into global capital that devalued revolution and reinvigorated its casualties in an apparently decisive rejection of the revolutionary state’s vision of a militarist modernism. Consequently, the pictorial record of graphically modeled citizenship is now embodied in enthusiastic consumers living in strict, civilian isolation from their newly professionalized military comrades. Formerly conceived of as militants, the people are re-drawn as consumers. 267 While Mao era projections of civil-military unity expressed themselves symbiotically, graphic representation of proper relations in the Deng years could only emphasize the distinction between the civil and military realms. Revolution becomes a “traditional” legacy that “modern” marketizing forces now struggle to overcome as progressive capitalism 267 Hooper notes the shift from a service to the people ethos to a consumer service under the reforms. Hooper (1994): 163. 213 replaces stagnant socialism. Recycled images, their militancy denatured, are now used to stimulate the consumption of nostalgia, the only acceptable (and marketable) manifestation of revolutionary fervor under the current system. Ideological Transition under Marketization The reformist turn in graphic renderings of political culture is reflected very clearly in one New Era (1978-1989) poster that exemplifies the way in which marketizing reforms altered demands of citizenship in political communication. In this 1984 poster that was reproduced in the PLA Pictorial some months after its initial publication, a blue modern history book held high in a grip and gesture familiar from the Cultural Revolution appears before a background of muted revolutionary scenes and an assertion that one must know one's history in order to love one's country. 268 The history book in blue, a color that formerly iconically marked the worker in distinction to the green of the soldier, replaces Mao's little red call to arms as the militancy of the revolutionary era is sublimated to academic diligence in an appeal that is only secondarily socialist. Indeed, 268 Sha De’An, Li Yang, “Ai Guo Shouxian Yao Zhi Guo, Zhi zhi Yu Qie, Ai zhi Yu Qie,” (To Love the Country, One Must First Know Its History—The Deeper the Knowledge, the More Eager the Love), January 1984 in Landsberger, (1995): 185. Landsberger also includes the poster in a well-edited exhibition also posted online, Stefan Landsberger and Hanno Lecher, “Books in Chinese Propaganda Posters: Objects of Veneration, Subjects of Destruction,” an exhibition at the Libraries of the Sinological Institute, Leiden University 7 December 2004 - 30 June 2005, where he somewhat curiously observes in its accompanying entry: “This changed atmosphere also saw a downplaying of the eminence of politics.” Though the poster clearly signals a changed politics, its publication rather testifies to the persistence of the prominence of political concerns than otherwise. The poster was also reproduced in full page format on the inside front cover, a conventional showcase for poster reprints, of the May 1985 issue of Jiefangjun Huabao. 214 revolutionary cooperation between the people and the army merely forms the background both literally and figuratively. The poster suggests that the revolutionary endeavor, along with its attendant relationships, belongs to the past. Revolution now is something better participated in vicariously. Reading revolution makes one a nationalist, just as practicing it formerly made one a communist. The revolutionaries' promise of a permanently deferred ideal future was no longer sufficient to ensure the cooperation of society in party projects. A perception of immediate progress, however uneven, on China's modernization trajectory had to be projected to secure social support. The reform era's promotion of materialism, with its attendant disempowerment of ideational concerns, helped to ensure the relevance of a strictly practical measure of state worth. A fatigue is manifested here that arises from waiting too long for the future. This accounts in part for the frenzied character of the reforms. Instead of collectively organized revolutionary activism to hasten the triumph of productive forces, reform era good citizenship demands consumption and the state now appeals to its constituents as the broader collective category of citizens rather than as specific socio-economic classes. 269 Messages on billboards, loudspeakers and in newspapers urge national development, now measured in terms of mass production and consumption. In as much of a 269 Lewis draws this conclusion in his discussion of the media messages of urban ideological campaigns. Lewis, (2002): 140 and 150. 215 departure from the past, mandatory political activities are relaxed. Thus marketizing developmental expedience substitutes for class struggle. As the state no longer urges citizens to play as active of a participatory role in its propaganda efforts that have dispensed with mass movements, most people find they have less at stake in the reform period campaigns. Indeed, the abandonment of the device of mass movements in politics in and of itself constitutes a substantial dimension of the reforms. The reforms mark a turn wherein politics shifts from its Cultural Revolution understanding as struggle into a cooperative compromise of managerial administration, most maneuvers of which citizens will not be privy to and may quietly sit out. 270 As opportunities for activist participation disappear, consumption offers some substitute outlets for political behavior. In the logic of the reforms, shopping and opening enterprises expand markets, generate wealth, and present the most suitable avenues of advancement of national development to which most citizens may properly contribute. In many ways, marketization's efforts to reshape Chinese revolutionaries into consumers produced social atomization, leaving the state without resources to effectively encourage collective action that was not accidentally so. Put another way, the CCP could encourage behavior congenial to marketization, such as consumption, that was necessarily individually accomplished and therefore collective only when viewed in the aggregate. The salience of many collective 270 Dittmer, (1981): 108. 216 identities like classes, communes, and for some, even work units diminished as old institutions collapsed under the weight of new economic pressures. Marketization therefore gave rise to the dismantling of many of the massive collectives, and of the collective life in general, of the previous era. In addition to being the socio-economic institutions they obviously were, the communes established in the late 1950's were also sites of ideational manufacture. Consequently, decollectivization involved more than just a dismantling of the administrative structure of people's communes. It was rather a process of the citizenry's withdrawal from active political participation, however orchestrated, that left them somewhat impervious to the political campaigns that had so oriented their daily lives in years past. Decollectivization engendered political disengagement in a process that rendered reform era citizenry unavailable for easy and immediate mobilization in ideological campaigns, which removed a necessary relic from the past. The demise of the utopianism that had operated along with force to drive collectivism and a range of political activism more generally deprived the citizenry of a meaningful rallying point at a national mass level. A reluctance to voluntarily participate in political life was in part a reflection of disenchantment with the eternally deferred promise of projects to drive historical progress rapidly. Fatigue, uncertainty, and upheaval during the state’s reappraisal of its own course further dampened political voluntarism among most elements of society during the early years of the reform period. 217 Adding to this fatigue is the apprehension of intellectuals in their relation with the state. As an equivocal target of the Chinese Revolution that culminated in the inception of the People’s Republic in 1949, intellectuals had endured purges and attacks that ill inclined most of them toward political activism in partnership with the party, even when welcomed back into its good graces. Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations signaled the state’s lifting of its stigmatization of intellectuals and its re-enfranchisement of them. The CCP formally reincorporated intellectuals into the ranks of the people by proclaiming them a part of the working class in 1979. 271 Nevertheless, in the immediate wake of the Cultural Revolution, it was obviously safer to remain politically aloof, in essence to avoid public life altogether, which was a radical departure for an intellectual identity long-predicated on political engagement and a complex, but interdependent relationship with the state. Other intellectuals who saw an opening to urge democratization elected to confront the party-state. 272 Whether in positions of withdrawal or confrontation, the early reforms saw intellectuals comparatively detached from the CCP even as the party pressed on with its effort to recruit them. The Cultural Revolution had driven a wedge between the state and its intellectuals into what had been an organic relationship at the birth of that 271 Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China from Revolution through Reform, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995: 145. 272 Bill Brugger and Stephen Reglar, Politics, Economy and Society in Contemporary China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994: 247-258. 218 state in a mold that shared many characteristics with their historical predecessors throughout much of the dynastic system. The realization of each of the Four Modernizations in agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology would all depend on intellectual actors who had been derided for their expertise and cast out of state projects in the previous decade. Because of the interference of this historical legacy of disenfranchisement, the reforms’ reliance on intellectual enlistment engendered a host of difficulties. With the enduring absence of the now rehabilitated and actively recruited, though still wary, intellectuals from various state-sponsored activities, a more generalized civic apathy ensues, as does a rechanneling of energies to private interests. This is not to suggest that private interests disappeared under Mao, but rather that internalized “socialist things” competed more effectively with private interests than reform efforts. Public disillusionment with mass campaigns loosened these tensions as people retreated more into the private. The transition left a vacuum in normative authority that alienated much of China’s populace from the state from which it had more customarily sought ethical guidance. The cumulative effect of too many failures like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and too complete of reversals in their wakes gave rise to increasing suspicion about party claims to ideological omniscience undergirding the “politics in command” model. 219 This suspicion, in turn, reinvigorates a stream of what Moody terms “antipolitics,” “a principled rejection of politics, at a minimum an attempt to keep those matters of legitimate political concern confined to the narrowest possible scope” in Chinese political culture. 273 To some extent, the political movement to restrict the boundaries of politics advocated a detachment of morality from politics, or at least a rejection of a political measure of morality, which would be achieved via a focus on “scientific” concerns like the market and socialism. Conservatives in the party worried that the divorce of politics from morality was combining with other conditions of the reforms to rob ethical concerns of their social relevance. 274 This perceived decoupling of ethics and politics represented a historic change from both modern and pre-modern times. Even without the political disregard of social ethics, a perceived crisis of a moral decline from selflessness to individualistic appetitiveness was felt to be already underway, an unavoidable consequence of opening the floodgates to capitalism. In the case of the reforms, this sense of decay ran deeper than a mere cultural lag following swift political transition. While to some extent, rapid social change tends to engender feelings of ethical erosion in general, the transition away from the revolutionary ethics of Maoism into Deng’s expedient mercantilism proved particularly acute in this respect. Its movement from collective structures and identities like communes and classes to individual or 273 Peter Moody, “The Antipoloitical Tendency in Contemporary Chinese Thinking,” Shiping Hua, ed., Chinese Political Culture, 1989-2000, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001: 162. 274 Ibid., 166, 180. 220 relatively disaggregated categories like households and citizens seemed tantamount to the abandonment of altruism for greed, just as Maoist discourse had positioned these polarities. Following Durkheim, Fisac terms this dislocation anomie, characterizing its manifestation in the transition from Maoism as an “ambiguity…where there is a …lack of normative structure or, relatively speaking, normative insufficiency… [that] served to legitimate social change without having to fall back on a radical disqualification of the past.” 275 Bourdieu regards anomie as a potential harbinger of a break with an old order and one that is itself bound to become institutionalized, and even eventually to engender another anomie in its demise as new forces arise in competition with it. 276 As indicators of contemporary anomie, Fisac considers a constellation of actual measurable social phenomena, such as corruption and suicide, as well as political discourses of Maoist nostalgia and nationalism, which she traces back to the earliest reform years before some of these particular phenomenological and discursive responses had arisen or at least while they were relatively inchoate. The identity loss that ensued from the erosion of iconoclastic and participatory Maoist socialism gave rise to a crisis of values, a crisis the CCP sought to address with its 1982 socialist spiritual civilization campaign, an effort 275 Fisac, (2003): 161. 276 Pierre Bourdieu, “Manet and the Institutionalization of Anomie,” Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson, ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1993: 252-3. 221 to maintain tighter social control in an era of rapid social change that was also an attempt to redress the alienation marked by Fisac that was then already underway. 277 The campaign employed a discursive perspective of balance to reason that material civilization could not develop without a commensurate spiritual growth. In this fashion it strove to recover some slippage of ideological moorings. The first among the two civilizations, socialist spiritual civilization sought to cultivate the skills and internalized ethical code perceived to foster implementation of the reforms, realized its twin, socialist material civilization. As fleshed out embodiment of this spirit, the perennially reborn army hero of the 1960’s, Lei Feng, was first resuscitated and then invested with expertise in both revolutionary and scientific ideas as he took on new targets of struggle in his crusade against corruption and poverty. 278 Paradoxically, socialist citizens were needed to carry out marketization. Four values were targeted for the reformation of a socialist identity in a market economy context: ideals, education, discipline and moral integrity. Obviously, the Cultural Revolution's promotion of self-study and rebellion had severely undermined discipline and education. Worse still for the reformist state, post- Cultural Revolution social malaise left many citizens disinclined to over-invest in ideals and uninterested in building up the sort of ethical integrity the state was attempting to instill. It is a measure of the depth of disillusionment that after a 277 Bakken, (1991): 126. 278 Beate Geist, “Lei Feng and the ‘Lei Fengs of the Eighties’—Models and Modelling in China,” Papers on Far Eastern History, 42 (September 1990): 105. 222 decade of the Cultural Revolution's lofty idealism, just four years later, the state felt it necessary to again promote ideals, though this time under conditions of social demilitarization. Moments beyond the close of a decade that was obsessive about ideals, citizens were left weary and suspicious of any extra-material concerns. A more cynical view would suggest that state media deliberately and actively cultivated the political disaffection and defeatism endemic to the post- Cultural Revolution period. 279 A quiet populace collectively convinced of the bankrupt futility of political activism would also provide a hospitable environment for marketization. Certainly an argument could be made that the party’s continued deployment of unconvincing socialist models achieved this desired end effectively through the example of Lei Feng. Refashioning Citizen-Soldier Lei Feng Whether effectively or otherwise, depending on how its end is understood, the state met the challenge of cultivating congenial dispositions in its subjects with graphically depicted emulation models as it had throughout its brief history. Some of these were newly invented, though others were reincarnations of their earlier, more familiar selves. Best known among these, Comrade Lei Feng enjoyed more than his requisite fifteen minutes of fame in the early reform period due to the three major campaigns that the soldier should properly serve the people 279 Moody (2001): 281. 223 by arresting the perceived ethical erosion generated by the reforms. A standard bearer of morals since Mao’s 1963 exhortation to the masses to “learn from Lei Feng,” the soldier nevertheless represented a collection of virtues such as blind obedience to CCP authorities and altruistic anonymity that in many ways had grown unfashionable during the Cultural Revolution. Unsurprisingly, Lei Feng, whose highest ambition was to serve as “a ‘rust-proof bolt’ in the socialist machine” 280 had competed less successfully with other models of the more iconoclastic and attention-grabbing “going against the stream” mold popularized by the Gang of Four. 281 After being briefly suppressed at the fall of the Gang of Four, however, Lei Feng was soon born again as a mold for a series of similar emulation models. 282 Lei Feng promotion dovetailed with a perceived breakdown in the social compact, with the first wave in 1963 a response to the famine produced by the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) and the 1977 campaign an attempt to assert some ethical continuity amidst tumultuous economic reforms. 283 Not representative of radical politics, Lei Feng lacked a taint among 1960’s figures that otherwise would have precluded his reform era resurrection. As a staunch Mao loyalist he offered reassurances of Maoist continuity while cultivating qualities felt to be useful in dampening iconoclasm to smooth the path of 280 “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” China Pictorial, 5 (1973): 9. 281 Geist, (1990): 97. 282 Chiang Chen-ch'ang, “The New Lei Fengs of the Eighties,” Issues and Studies, 20: 5 (May 1984): 23. 283 Ibid., 28. 224 marketization. His “impressive remarks” employing the screw or bolt metaphor for citizenship encourage diligence, faith, and obedience: “A screw has two advantages: It squeezes and it penetrates. In study, we must also encourage this spirit of the ‘screw.’ We must be good at squeezing and penetrating.” 284 Still, there were limitations to Lei Feng’s after-life traversal of time and space. The endless sacrifice for the attainment of spiritual perfection and denial of the legitimacy of the private sphere embodied in Lei Feng and other socialist emulation models like him rested no less uneasily with Dengist expediencies and the establishment of conditions like public disengagement with political activism which were sought to foster the transition to a market economy than it had with Cultural Revolution iconoclasm. 285 Deng’s “practice as the sole criterion of truth” placed a premium on deeds above words and consequently devalued the slogan shouting of mass movements, also de-emphasizing the beacon of Mao Zedong thought that had illuminated Lei Feng. Eventually, the model’s form became associated with new values that were alien to and inconsistent with the relics, diary and biographical accounts that up until the reforms had been his legacy. His awkward translation into the New Era hollowed out Lei Feng’s core values, thus making it easier for his audience to make sense of him in their own ways, often in opposition to those that were intended. A case in point is offered 284 Shen Zhengping, “Learn from Lei Feng, and Heighten Awareness of the Line,” Hong Qi (Red Flag), 4 (April 1, 1973): 36. 285 Mei Zhang discusses the difficulties of employing traditional socialist models to inculcate the values of an incongruous era. Mei Zhang (2000): 67-85. 225 by Reed’s recounting of an incident in which a respondent disputes an official characterization of soldiers in Tiananmen Square possessing “Lei Feng spirit” in quelling the disturbances, the respondent instead locating that spirit in ordinary citizens who materially supported the students. 286 This inversion embodied the Lei Feng spirit in civilians against the army. More and more, Lei Feng’s spirit was up for grabs. Still, in the main, Lei Feng was moving with the times, reinventing himself to pull away from class struggle to devote more time to the acquisition of skills that would be necessary to the generation of wealth under “commodity socialism” that was a newly expressed duty of citizenship. 287 He had become so detached from his actual historical conditions, his infamous diary so edited, that he had turned into a timeless embodiment of altruism otherwise mutable enough to represent whatever the changing situation required, even diametrically opposed ideals, if necessary, as witnessed by his 1990 conversion from a thrifty, revolutionary paragon into a model consumer and advocate of social stability. An exhausted model of a mutable constellation of virtues, Lei Feng had become an empty signifier. In the end, this very plasticity, when coupled with other media developments that allow for the rise of alternate unofficial models, empties his figure and ultimately the socialist model genre of their symbolic power. 288 Public skepticism with Lei Feng and models spawned in his image was already setting in 286 Reed, (1996): 254. 287 Ibid., 246. 288 Geist, (1990): 106-7, 114; Mei Zhang, (2000): 83. 226 in the early reform decade. 289 Though his form was reproduced in a new generation of models, the Lei Feng template was clearly inspiring little but fatigue in its intended audience. In many ways, Lei Feng had presented an ideal figure to model civil- military relations, not least due to his original story’s demonstration of social mobility in moving from the peasant he was born as to worker to the soldier he was at his death, the consummate organic serviceman. His poor peasant status combined felicitously with his orphaned condition, which left him a ward of the party-state. Together these elements of his background supplied a perfect pedigree for a pivotal figure versatile enough to model civil-military relations to his fellow soldiers while modeling civic behavior congenial to the state more generally for the masses, a paragon that no one in reality could possibly match. Despite his lack of credibility, official media deployed Lei Feng as a useful paragon to promote a range of civic virtues from altruism to diligence and even obedience which had been somewhat discredited during the Cultural Revolution. Lei Feng was heavily propounded in army pictorial literature during the political transition away from Mao at the dawn of the reform era in 1977. Three of the March issue of PLA Pictorial’s thirteen pieces had Lei Feng in their title, for example. Because of the model’s prominence in the early 1960’s and the return to fashion of some of his virtues, he was at once able to safely represent both change and continuity. 289 Rosen, (2000): 162-165. 227 Even so, what was stressed in these early reform visualizations were those qualities that had also been resonant with Cultural Revolution forces, though formerly unpopular services in a humbler vein are also included to a lesser extent. For example, the autobiographical account relayed in the panels of a 1977 lianhuan hua highlight his confrontationalism in the youthful punishments he exacted on landlords and his denouncement of the people’s sufferings before he enlisted in the army. After enlistment, his good deeds to civilians include his propagation of Maoist thought on railway cars, his disregard of his own ailments as he assisted workers on his day off, his additional volunteer labor to aid flood victims, and kindnesses to mothers with children. Cultural Revolution groups held several of these more individually oriented acts in contempt, including such services as guiding a mother and children home during a storm under protection of his raingear and supplementing a mother’s railway ticket purchase. The latter deed’s greater significance presents itself in his insistence on anonymity, another earlier virtue of more limited purchase during times of radical upheaval. When asked for his name and address so that the ticket purchaser may repay her lender, express her gratitude, and publish her benefactor’s deed, Lei Feng will only reply magnanimously that his name is PLA and his address “China.” 290 Lei Feng propaganda somewhat ironically valorizes modesty by rewarding the soldier’s disinclination to make a name for himself by imposing 290 “Mao Zhuxi de Hao Zhanshi—Lei Feng,” (Chairman Mao’s Good Soldier—Lei Feng), Jiefangjun Huabao, 357 (March 1977): 12-13. 228 fame on him. Perhaps the message here is that fame can only justly attach to those who do not seek it, if so, the party relies on a rather Taoist philosophy in its lesson of obtaining by not striving. By portraying his unassuming demeanor, other articles in that same issue largely follow suit, though the text-heavier pieces dare to inject more material that depicts Lei Feng as a docile party hack than the visualizations do, even going so far as to mention his ambition to be a screw in the party machine, a quality invaluable to reformist officials in a period of political transitions, just as it was despised by Cultural Revolution forces trying to purge subservience and provoke change in what was seen to be an overly complaisant party. 291 In the following years of the initial reform decade, a period roughly equivalent to that sometimes referred to as “the Four Modernizations period,” more precisely 1978-1989, Lei Feng’s utility as a civil-military model rarely reached anything approaching the prominence it enjoyed in the year following Mao’s death, or that which it had during the Cultural Revolution. 292 During 1983, for example, when Lei Feng became something of a poster boy for the official and more general promotion of socialist spiritual civilization, the campaign’s significance for issues of civil-military relations remained 291 See for example, “Lei Feng—Women Shidai de Yingxiong,” (Lei Feng—A Hero for Our Time), Jiefangjun Huabao, 357 (March 1977): 6-11 and “Xuexi Lei Feng Hao Bangyang Zong yu Renmin Zong yu Dang,” (Study Good Model Lei Feng Who’s Always with the People and the Party), Jiefangjun Huabao, 357 (March 1977): 22-23. 292 Landsberger adopts this periodization terminology to refer to the decade beginning with the official launch of the reforms in 1978. Stefan R. Landsberger, “The Future Visualized: Chinese Propaganda Art in the Modernization Era,” China Information (Leiden) 8, 4 (Spring 1994): 17. 229 inconsequential. This fact is reflected in the year’s issues of PLA Pictorial, which only featured a single piece with a Lei Feng theme. Moreover, that single March 1983 article, which featured soldier models in the Lei Feng mold, devoted very little of its space to civil-military imagery. Only one of the article’s four photographs contained civil-military action, a considerable decline from Cultural Revolution iterations that devoted at least half of their visual material to such content. By the end of the political transition decade in 1986, Lei Feng themed material had not appeared in a single of the year’s issues. Attendant to this decline was a precipitous drop in civil-military visual content overall, with a total of a mere 27 images of rank and file-mass interaction, down from a peak of 148 in 1969. The symbolic resonance of Lei Feng’s shifting significance in military- themed visual materials rose and fell through the reform period in concert with the vicissitudes of the representation of civil-military interaction. Some twenty years after his death, Lei Feng was supplying soldiers and other citizens a new way to understand their own interaction and its significance for the nation. Re-envisioning Nationalism Most fundamental to Lei Feng’s adaptation to a changing political climate was the atavism of his revolutionary fervency. The model’s abandonment of class struggle and Quotations from Chairman Mao reflected shifts underway throughout society more broadly struggling to come to terms with the absence of a national leader and his ideological accoutrements. This void left by the 230 disappearance of Maoist revolutionary identity was not meaningfully filled with substitutions like Deng Xiaoping's "socialism with Chinese characteristics," that echo of Stalin's "socialism in one country," though the convenient concept fundamentally diverged from Stalin's, and indeed any other regime’s understanding of socialism. Though it may indeed have proved useful in eliding a strict severance with the previous order that was felt to be necessary in legitimating the new course, party hesitancy in the transitional moment forestalled the emergence of more closed and comprehensible ideological positions. Formerly internationalist in scope with a plan to cultivate socialism first domestically, but ultimately abroad, nationalism now became insular, a project of strengthening China to build the nation, first and finally. Political art’s visual expression of revolutionary internationalist nationalism had been as plain as its replacement with a domestically limited diversity. Posters like the 1975 “Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Sea” had constructed a meaning for revolution that depended as much upon unification with revolutionary subjects of the Second and Third Worlds as it did upon struggle with class enemies. 293 The composition’s depiction of a female and a male Han worker posing amidst a group of African visitors to the Shanghai Tractor Manufacturing Factory reflects the importance of internationalist solidarity to the furtherance of revolution. 293 Kok Hong-wu, “Revolutionary Friendships Are Deeper Than the Ocean,” Shanghai: Shanghai Tractor Factory, Shanghai People’s Publishing House (August 1975) in Fraser (1977): 23. 231 Other representations depicted the PLA providing more personal assistance than the solidarity offered in the instances described above. Pictorial literature frequently depicts the bond of enemy hatred fusing foreign civilians to the PLA. This thread runs through historic accounts of the Korean War era, which resonate through the early 1980’s. One photo portrays an old Korean woman with a baby in a papoose grasping the shoulder of a Chinese People’s Volunteer (CPV) PLA soldier in order to compel him to hear her outrage and grievances accrued from enemy crimes. 294 The aid CPV troops provide Korean civilians can extend to life saving measures as it does when in an image of a CPV soldier saving an elderly Korean noncombatant by transporting him on his back out of harm’s way. 295 Though the image appears in a 1981 pictorial, its historical reflection references a revolutionary tradition that while glorious, already belongs to the PLA’s past. The shot falls squarely within a genre of crediting CPV’s for exceeding their duty in their heroic rescue of Korean civilians that began with graphic coverage of the Korean War. Some of their deeds martyrize the soldiers who fall, for example, trying to pull Korean noncombatants out of frozen rivers, as happens with model soldier Luo Shengjiao. 296 Luo’s “deep regard” for every “blade of grass, tree, mountain, and river in Korea” during his lifetime had expressed itself 294 “Chen Feng, Chuifuzhe Gaodi,” (The Morning Wind Breezes Past the Highlands), Jiefangjun Huabao, 400 (October 1980): 34. 295 “Zhandou de Zuji,” (The Footprint of Combat), Jiefangjun Huabao, 404 (February 1981): 18. 296 “Guojizhuyi Zhanshi Luo Shengjiao,” (Internationalist Soldier Luo Shengjiao), Jiefangjun Huabao, (October 1965): 30-31. 232 in Luo’s assistance to a Korean family with humble household tasks like those PLA forces supply to their own masses: sweeping, water fetching, etc. Luo is depicted further serving his beloved Korean people by gunning down Americans on the frontlines; such are the complicated duties of an internationalist nationalist soldier. His actions win him the esteem of the Korean people and the CCP designation of “Internationalist Soldier.” Contemporary images set in the present are of a markedly different cast. Rather than assisting neighboring civilians through a revolution, soldiers instead promote foreign consumption of Chinese industry. A 1982 pictorial photograph of a border defense inspection unit’s smiling exchange with visiting white foreigners more typically represents the reform era military interactions with foreign civilians. 297 In the immediate wake of the “opening” to the capitalist world, the importance of propitiating affluent white foreigners becomes a paramount duty for citizens with whom they come in contact. Soldiers take the vanguard in modeling courtesy and service, which in one instance assumes the form of a soldier holding the hand of a frolicking white boy in a railway station scene. 298 The caption explains that the soldier is looking after the child while the parent is away taking care of something, an inconceivable image during the Cultural Revolution. 297 “Weihu Zuguo de Rongyu he Zunyan,” (Uphold the Motherland’s Honor and Dignity), Chinese People’s Volunteer (CPV) PLA (April 1982): 2. 298 “Luohu Qiaotou,” (The Entrance to Luohu Bridge), Jiefangjun Huabao, 376 (October 1978): 18. 233 Such exchanges tend to ultimately promote national aims, like the development of China’s nascent tourism industry, rather than internationalist ones of furthering socialism that had characterized earlier interaction. In addition, the motif highlights the PLA soldier’s identification with the nation, especially in contact with international civilians. Here the army uniform symbolizes China. Consequently, the soldiers take the part of cultural ambassador layered over their chamber of commerce advocacy as tourism boosters. While PLA babysitting for foreigners would not be modeled for long after the initial opening to much of the west that was ushered in by the reforms, extra-defense roles such as these persist, despite conditions of both increasing segregation between the civil and military spheres and a heightened emphasis on the development of military expertise. The PLA Pictorial in various ways during the Cultural Revolution and reforms trades in the projection of civil-military friendship beyond China’s citizenry. Indeed, on some occasions the PLA Pictorial publishes pictures of friendly foreign armies assisting their own masses in celebration of a civil- military ideal that is much more frequently represented in the Chinese idiom. A shot of Korean soldiers and collective members appearing side by side, backs bent planting rice seedlings, in a posture almost iconically familiar from PLA representations exemplifies such features. 299 299 “Fazhan Tiyu Yundong Zengqiang Renmin Tizhi,” (Develop Sports and Improve the People’s Physiques), Jiefangjun Huabao, 342 (November 1975): 35. 234 Similar expressions of militant solidarity complemented these friendlier portrayals. The all-male revue of assembled Han Chinese, Africans, and Arabs with rifles and bayonets in hand held high above their heads demonstrates how the expansive notion of “the people” incorporates those class and nationally progressive allies beyond Chinese borders and inculcates an internationalist understanding of citizenship. By casting ethnically and nationally diverse figures into the body politic of the popular masses, such representations promote a sense of belonging in a progressive force that is not confined to the boundaries of a given nation-state. Text to the side of the image, echoed on a banner that forms the image’s background, proclaims a long life to Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism and then urges the world’s proletariat to unite, a typical message inscribed on internationalist civil-military imagery. 300 Often reprinted in pictorial serials, such posters projected harmony within diversity as they united nations, folding civilians and soldiers into a single mass. Once a ubiquitous feature of civil-military and national-international solidarity, just a few years after the death of Mao, such imagery disappears altogether from the military pictorial literature. Socialism was discussed more and more as something to be realized in China, as a national project. Thus, just as had happened in China’s internal institutional structures, even the state’s nationalist ideology divested itself of a broader collectivity within its own 300 “Makesi, Liening, Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui,” (Long Live Marxism, Lenininsm, and Maoism,) Jiefangjun Hua Bao, 286 (March 1971): 14-15. 235 international sphere. In this respect, the reforms engendered a symbolic revolution in the CCP visual culture that took as its subject mass-army relations. More than a CCP construct, national identity had been firmly established long before the revolution. Consequently, the dearth of enthusiasm for party campaigns did not carry over to dampen nationalist enthusiasm, which had been sustained throughout the Maoist era and beyond. Maoist nationalism's international ambitions of realizing socialism dropped away from the enduring tradition of cultural and developmental state-building. Nation and party remained semi-detached. With much of its former source of legitimacy stripped away, the state now owed its citizenry's continued fidelity to its own ability to deliver stability and prosperity, two burdens that the Mao era government was not obliged to carry. Significantly, the foundation of state support flipped from an ethical allegiance to a pragmatic and functional one. Thus did revolution ultimately engender its antithesis despite the endurance of a single party-state that retains its citizenry's support as a conflated stand-in for the nation. Civil-Military Relations under the Reforms Reform era thinking did not accord with the military activism of the Cultural Revolution. Even so, militarism’s effects, as with those of international solidarity, lingered into the early reform years, as evinced in the graphic persistence of militia prominence in a time of its actual decline. The vitality of border citizens’ vigilance articulates very clearly in a 1978 image of a frontier 236 peasant’s visit to the encampment to report on enemy activity. Surrounded by concerned troops, the peasant is portrayed being accorded the respect and friendship extended in the context of civilian involvement in defense characteristic of portrayals throughout the Cultural Revolution that promote such encounters in an effort to elide the clear hierarchy governing these exchanges. 301 Nevertheless, despite the testimony of this image and countless others like it then being published in pictorial literature to the contrary, civilians were already leaving defense to the soldiers. The decline of militarism eliminated a range of opportunities in which to unite civilians with the military beyond those that gradually disempowered the militia into an irrelevancy. At the most fundamental level, the removal of the semblance of radical equivalence between them that was the basis of societal militarism during the Cultural Revolution also eliminated an imperative and state sanction for each side to stay in close proximity to the other. No longer necessitating emulation of a counterpart, new conditions promoted distinction that was easier to effect apart. Instead, their mimesis was abandoned and the different spheres were graphically encouraged to divide labor and thereby develop expertise. Cultural Revolution slogans promoting iconoclasm such as Mao’s “It’s right to rebel!” gave way to those directing social agents to “Respect 301 “Aihu Qunzhong, Zunjing Jilü,” (Cherish the Masses, Respect Discipline), Jiefangjun Huabao, 371 (May 1978): 30. 237 discipline.” 302 These developments in turn fostered an exclusivity and a set of conditions under which each side was encouraged to hew to its own kind. Thus, their labor became segregated as each side retreated to its own sphere of toil. Moreover, the legitimacy conferred from one side to the other weakened under conditions discouraging emulation. Because of this effect, ritualistic exchanges in which each side, though far more frequently the army, visited its counterpart, either to derive inspiration or to observe the embodiment of revolutionary spirit, ceased. Another part of the retreat, and one of immense significance, resulted from the removal of activities that were new to the Cultural Revolution, like political study, that had expressly joined the soldier and civilian. Paradoxically pursued cooperatively in a tradition and exercise of self-cultivation, political study fell out of favor as a pictorially represented cooperative endeavor. No longer mandated to be a significant portion of the quotidian obligations of ordinary citizens, the demise of political study closed off a category of activities formerly engaged in cooperatively thereby fostering conditions of autonomy between the two domains. An interesting effort to retain the civil-military motif of political study presents itself in the form of a national affairs study session. A single shot of a newspaper reading session between a civilian nurse and a soldier in the classical pairing of one civilian, one military in a traditional interior is identical to the now 302 Shaorong Huang translates this in a less orthodox fashion in the title of his manuscript, To Rebel Is Justified, (1996). 238 obsolete joint political study representation except that the newspaper has replaced Mao’s writings as text and national affairs have replaced Mao Zedong thought as object of inquiry. The caption tells the reader that the paper is read for the higher purpose of “studying the nation’s great affairs.” 303 The photograph is exceptional for more than its atavistic retention of the mutated political study motif. It also stands alone as an example of amateur study between civilians and soldiers, a broader category of interaction now also outmoded. With their own separate realms in which to cultivate their differentiated expertise, soldiers and civilians are no longer represented cooperating on these sort of self-cultivational endeavors. The decline of political activism closes off yet another avenue of interaction. Far more frequently than otherwise, graphic portrayals of marching and rallying were pictured to have been undertaken collectively by both spheres, here as elsewhere with each simultaneously lending credibility in its proximity to the other. The decline in the salience of classes under the reforms eliminated the formulaic genre of iconic class triumvirates that had repeatedly joined soldier to peasant and worker in revolutionary visual culture. Thus, the reformist de- emphasis of classes that would smooth marketization entirely removed another space that projected unity between those classes that were favored by militants and thus altered their identities. The ultimate collapse of the iconic triumvirate 303 “Zhenzhi Chonggao Aiqing,” (A Sincere and Lofty Love), Jiefangjun Huabao, 377 (November 1978): 33. 239 that had been initiated as an expansion to include intellectual figures contributed to an accretion of events that were visually segregating soldiers from civilians. 304 The same is true for propagandizing activities more broadly, many of which included the dissemination of printed political materials to remote sites in the countryside. Here again the decline of a category of political activity effectively eliminates yet another field on which civil-military unity had been graphically constructed. The effective ending of mutual emulation, defense, agricultural labor, and political activity considerably shrunk the pool of opportunities for civilian and soldier to come together. This is not to suggest that popular opinion supported a western military model. On the contrary, civilians expected the army to perform rescue operations and reconstruction in the wake of natural disasters, along with a host of other activities normally considered beyond the scope of an armed force in the “professionalized” mode. Many of the remainder of these interchanges beyond the bounds of the professional model even include recreational and cultural exchanges. Nevertheless, despite the persistence of extra-defense activities beyond the Cultural Revolution, these duties now compete with security imperatives far less effectively, as the visual record attests. Overall, soldiers appear more frequently engaged in military operations as they are not so much assisted as appreciated by civilians in the rear. Additionally, army political 304 As Landsberger points out, the intellectual is squeezed into the triumvirate in 1980. Stefan R. Landsberger, “Role Modelling in Mainland China: The Visual Dimension,” in Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, eds., Norms and the State in China, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993: 375. 240 engagements radically diminish, relieving soldiers from a host of activities ranging from rallying, to propagandizing, to site visiting, to soak up revolutionary spirit from workers as street scenes empty themselves of demonstrating troops and revolutionary icons recede into the background. Mao books, no longer dispensed by army to masses and no longer clutched through many daily duties, now rest in army classrooms where they share space increasingly with technical manuals. Civilian training occupies graphic soldiers less than formerly as projects like barefoot doctor training fall from army purview. Perhaps most dramatically of all the effects of the displacement of politics is the retreat of the militia. The militia fades from view as main force units rise in prominence. These societal changes were reflected not just in the PLA Pictorial, but in other CCP pictorial literature with a broader range as well. In many ways, such sources are a better measure of the decline of revolutionary salience as they reflect the prominence of military graphics in an arena that is not devoted to military coverage. While it is difficult to extrapolate very narrowly about larger domestic Chinese political culture from a content analysis that exclusively surveys mainland magazines produced in English intended as to showcase the PRC in a particular light for foreign consumption, demilitarization is nevertheless strikingly reflected in periodical content of the Peking Review, China Pictorial and China Reconstructs, the party’s three main international glossies. Therein military content diminishes from 6.7% in 1969 to 1.5% in 1974 and .5% in 1978, 241 as Liang demonstrates. 305 Service to the people themes remain high, as they do in the PLA Pictorial over this temporal span albeit in a drastically refigured representation, though continuing the revolution themes dropped precipitously from 1969 to 1978 in a shift correspondent to that in the PLA Pictorial. 306 Demilitarization of the Social Sphere Demilitarization, which eroded an unprecedented array of symbolic opportunities by which to exert military dominance, effectively disempowered the armed forces vis-à-vis civilian society. As the more privileged “equal” in the partnership between the two spheres of citizens, the military had dominated its civil counterpart at least in part through a pictorial discourse of symbiotic unity that concealed hierarchy through its assertion of parity and equivalence. The reforms’ substitution of the overarching civilian model of citizenship for the soldier model engendered a renegotiation of the army’s social value. Like the peasantry, the armed forces’ power and prestige would now rest more on its ability to generate financial capital, rather than just the symbolic capital it produced so abundantly during the Cultural Revolution, and more broadly on its ability to associate itself with qualities that had gained currency in the reforms. 305 Lih-Kae Liang, Magazine Propaganda of the People’s Republic of China: A Content Analysis of Peking Review, China Pictorial, and China Reconstructs, 1969, 1974 and 1978, MA Thesis, Central Michigan University, 1979: 28. 306 Ibid., 47. 242 Equally determinant of the army’s institutional and social status would be its development of a monopolized category of defense expertise, a factor that would to some extent enable its own economic enterprise. Ironically, whereas military dominance had formerly depended on its mimicry of and integration with civilian sectors, its ability to compete with other social forces would now pivot on its maintenance of a realm of exclusion from those forces. Consequently, civil- military visual propaganda begins to produce civil-military interaction that articulates the division between the two realms in addition to decreasing content of civil-military interaction overall as a represented proportion of armed force visual imagery. Discrete military skills begin to be represented on display for civilian wonder. Whereas Cultural Revolution embodiments of masses and soldiers blurred difference, these new visualizations of army feats performed for civilian amazement drew attention to distinction. The intent of the photograph included in the 1978 PLA Pictorial, for example, seems intended to express the shock and awe effected on local civilians by army parachuters. 307 The sight of the soldiers’ colorful parachutes billowing in the desert wind as one soldier comes to ground seems to have literally stopped a northwestern ethnic minority man in his tracks as he passes. Another soldier with a clipboard who has rushed to the landing site testifies to the importance of the feat. In addition to the skills and possibly 307 Zhang Bingfa, “Laigao Xuan Deng,” (Selected Publications of Contributed Articles), Jiefangjun Huabao, 376 (October 1978): 45. 243 perceived courage involved in parachuting that separate masses from soldier is the gear, which renders the soldiers’ figures hardly human, and certainly not conventionally civilian. Exclusion from the civil sector would both foster the growth of expertise and provide the armed services with a comparative advantage under conditions in which it was no longer otherwise institutionally favored. Under the changed conditions of the reforms, both sides would be better positioned to succeed apart. Disaggregating the Masses Nevertheless, the reforms did not entirely eclipse ideational components of intrinsic PLA worth. Army service to society, for example, continued to be a theme stressed in pictographic modeling. Part of what changes in this service during the reforms is the target of military service. Just as the reforms split larger collectives into smaller enterprises, so do they disaggregate the masses. Graphic and rhetorical propaganda do not unproblematically complement one another in CCP propaganda. One key instance of disruption is expressed in the depiction of the masses. Though the masses are seldom disaggregated rhetorically, visual depictions more frequently present sub-sectors of the people. Zhao argues that the rhetorical attachment to the broad categories of “the masses” or “the people” arises from the terms’ effectiveness in concealing competing claims by 244 homogenizing them. 308 Perhaps the visual individuation prevents image fatigue. Regardless, graphic accounts more often allow one element of society, whether an individual or group, to stand in for the whole, or at least the whole whose needs must be considered. 309 Reform representation begins to break down the groups exemplified by such iconic figures. Pictorial representation not only splits civilians and masses into more discrete categories, the masses’ Cultural Revolution composite of soldier, peasant, worker loses its relevance as competing social categories become more atomized. Gradually, the social rhetoric inscribed in civil-military imagery refocuses its gaze on subjects identifiable in features other than revolutionary social force membership determinants. Consequently, military service to “the people” becomes a bit more individuated. People who had been “visually indoctrinated into seeing themselves as part of a whole” began to be disciplined by official visualizations of themselves as constituents of more specialized and therefore fragmented units into a wider range of self-conceptualization. 310 In addition, the old categories of soldier, worker, peasant that together comprised the masses give way to new social elements, some of whose former relevance had been predicated, like the elderly 308 Yuezhi Zhao, (1998): 31. 309 “The broad masses” remains a more complicated term than “the people” as Mao makes clear in his 1945 essay “On Coalition Government.” The masses more narrowly construe those progressive forces of history that remain contingent on their place and moment. Mao understood these to be the soldiers, peasants, and workers, essentially in that order of priority, in his own historical context. 310 Verity Wilson, “Dress and the Cultural Revolution,” Valerie Steele and John S. Major, eds., China Chic: East Meets West, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999: 182. 245 and youth, on their membership in revolutionary categories. Others, such as intellectuals and entrepreneurs, who had been defined in opposition to these categories, were now visually depicted as necessary facilitators of, rather than obstacles to, national, indeed, even socialist, progress. Among the host of policy changes enacted by the third plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee was the re-enfranchisement of formerly discredited groups of Chinese citizens into the ranks of the people. Schoenhals discusses the divergence and re-convergence of the two sometimes discrete categories of citizen (gongmin) and people (renmin), tracing CCP history up through the early reform period in which The People, slowly and almost imperceptibly, ceased to be used with reference to only the ninety-five percent ‘on our side’ and became (again) synonymous with the entire population or citizenry…With most of its negations altered, redefined or destined soon to become anachronisms, the People itself became a progressively less clear-cut concept, and it began to mean what Bo Yibo in 1949 had said specifically it did not, i.e., the citizens of China. 311 The people in whose interests it remained the armed forces to serve expanded accordingly. Thus, some of the people who are served by the reform army appear different from their Cultural Revolution predecessors. Yet there is more continuity in the visual record than rhetoricical shifts might suggest. In addition 311 Michael Schoenhals, “Non-People” in the People’s Republic of China: A Chronicle of Terminological Ambiguity, Indiana East Asian Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China, Paper #4, Bloomington: Indiana University East Asian Studies Center (July 1994): 24, 27. The “95% on our side” alludes to Mao’s repeated proclamation that 95% of China’s populace was “good,” which left only 5% considered evil. 246 to serving the masses, as signified in the broadest revolutionary terms and represented by standard icons of generic green-uniformed soldier, blue overall- clad worker, and usually white kerchief-crowned peasant, or in composite aggregation represented by a multitude, soldiers in smaller scale compositions directed their attention to figures representative of somewhat narrower cross- sections of those groups, such as travelers, youth, the elderly, and women, whose significance to the military was no longer determined by their relationship to the revolutionary triumvirate. 312 Though graphic media continued to associate individual figures with larger wholes, the wholes were becoming smaller units of different, or minimally more salient, identities than in years past. Along with this disaggregation came differentiated representational modes of army interaction that transformed the identities of both the civilians with whom the PLA engaged and the rank and file itself as the imagery attempted to inculcate a new set of behaviors and values that would foster congenial citizenship identities under the reforms. As the masses abandon revolution, new practices overlay entrepreneurial or intellectual identities onto their former state sponsored identities, which persist through the early reform 312 For a representative work of the iconic class triumvirate, see Rudong District Art Course for Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers, “Party Members Must Be Progressive in Their Attitude to the Proletariat,” Jiangsu Province: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 1971, in Min, Zhang, and Duoduo, (2003): 240. The most iconic examples of the multitudinous presentation of human figures on a landscape that effaces individual differentiation, see Chang Yi-ching, “Tachai,” Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House (May 1975) as reproduced in Fraser (1977): 29. For a more generic Cultural Revolution iteration of the Chinese landscape tradition, see Xian Mechanical Works Art Group, “Don’t Depend on the Gods,” Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House (April 1975) in Fraser (1977): 49. 247 years, though they are less determining. Close examination of army interaction with various social categories reveals both continuity and change from the Cultural Revolution service to the people ideal. Most of the changes in civil-military representation arise from the naturalization of increasing social differentiation and hierarchy. Pictorial representations of civil-military relations became increasingly reliant on notions of differentiated authority between various social spheres as symbiotic unity was supplanted by complementary solidarity. Under these conditions, civilian and military spheres become somewhat more estranged, though they are depicted as properly so. In some ways, however, new army engagement entails old-style interaction. New graphic depictions of soldiers constructing capitalism in the countryside ironically represent the army furthering the reformist agenda of enterprise development by straying outside of its strictly understood realm of expertise and continuing to co-mingle with civilians. Similarly, the cultivation of expertise leads the army to graphically seek intellectual instruction, again forging new contact with civilians. Overall, however, official media pictures the PLA colliding with civilians in comparatively extraordinary or accidental circumstances, thus presenting civil-military interaction as appropriate more in atypical circumstances and as less of a norm. All of these shifts in representation combine to yield a markedly different discourse of symbolic violence. Whereas during the Cultural Revolution discursive constructions of radical egalitarianism between soldiers and the 248 masses, though not the whole of PRC citizenry, both elided and sustained inequality, the reform visual logic advanced several notions of social order and justice, all of them antithetical to the axiomatic truths of Cultural Revolution authorities, but in their own way equally necessary to the sustenance of dominance. The first of these celebrated the acquisition of private wealth, which would necessarily ensure a greater measure of private poverty. The next notion, inherent in the expedient undertone to the reforms, valued expertise above adherence to Maoist dogma. Deng Xiaoping’s oft-quoted remark as to the insignificance of the color of the rat-catching cat most succinctly encapsulates this particular sharp reorientation of values. Yet another important reversal follows from this prior position, in this instance having to do with conviction in meritocracy. As expertise ostensibly resulted from studied effort, was in higher demand, and was more greatly valued, rewarding superiority in skill would be appropriate. 313 Finally, came the reasoning that uneven development and enrichment would ultimately benefit those initially left behind. This trickle down sort of scheme provided the fundamental logic of the special economic zone that was also reflected in another famous Deng slogan: “Let some people get rich first.” Taken together, these ideas represented a transformed code of symbolic violence that elicited the compliance of those it subjugated through a discursive 313 Deng Xiaoping, “Respect Knowledge, Respect Trained Personnel,” Excerpt from a Talk with Two Leading Comrades of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, (24 May 1977), http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/dengxiaoping/103392.htm: 1. 249 construction of propriety based on market logic. This logic included dispositions indicating that wealth generation depended on uneven development and that rewarding that which is scare and in demand is natural. Such notions were reflected in manifold motifs in civil-military modeling, some of which include soldiers’ increasing and humble engagement with intellectuals and entrepreneurs, increasing portrayals of soldiers actively defending vulnerable citizens, and their disengagement with backward rural locales. The army moves from revolutionary mentorship in symbiotic imagery to a newfound ideological support of marketizing facilitation in a complementary and segregated model. A useful way to examine these reassembled representations of civil-military identity formation and hierarchy under the reforms is by closer inspection of a variety of more individuated components of the masses. Soldiers encounter disaggregated constituencies of the expansive category of “masses” transfigured by the reforms into an equivalence with citizens. These overlapping constituencies included: 1. travelers; 2. the elderly; 3. youth; 4. women; 5. entrepreneurs; and 6. intellectuals. Travelers Thus, many of the same social elements continued to be portrayed as recipients of army services to the people. Perhaps among the most iconic of this genre of representations sustained through the political transition is the looked- after traveler. As with the elderly and youth, travelers offer the army an opportunity to construct itself as a vehicle of necessary social services. Official 250 media in this representational tradition, which predates the Cultural Revolution, portrays soldiers providing services to travelers ranging from offering their seats on buses to assistance tracking down relatives on arrival at their destination. Though, as mentioned earlier, this category of service flags somewhat during the Cultural Revolution when more time was devoted to political activism and larger social elements trumped the relevance of narrower groups, it nevertheless persisted at a lower level of frequency. A pictorial piece on troops stationed at the Beijing train station with shots of troops leading political study sessions and carrying the bags of alighted passengers, for example, departs very little from graphic iterations of such services in the early 1960’s or in the eighties. Though less current than then more prevalent anti-authoritarian imagery, the subservience of the services photographed in conjunction with the piece’s title of “Advancing Unity through Modest Self-Effacement and Care” testify to the persistence of this strain of more humbling and presumably endearing services even at the peak of the Cultural Revolution when it faced competition from less gentle acts of social change than those of avuncular political study guidance. 314 Such pieces flow in a constricted but otherwise uninterrupted stream of similar imagery, and fall firmly within this shared and sustained tradition, though they depart from this tradition in their manifest support for the emerging tourist industry. 314 “Qianxu Jinshen Tuanti Jinbu,” (Advancing Unity through Modest Self-Effacement and Care), Jiefangjun Huabao, 284 (January 1971): 36-37. 251 Further fleshing out army service to travelers is pictorial material in 1965, 1977, and 1982, all of which depicts soldiers assisting passengers in trains, buses and, less frequently, boats. 315 A multitude of humble acts fell into this category of service. Some common gestures included volunteering to wait tables in the dining car; dispensing potable water; assisting those in need, usually the elderly, infirm, or women with children, to transfer to local transportation; directing the lost; or helping with bags as passengers board and alight. 316 All presented the soldier as a public servant of the traveling masses. Such assistance extends to the extremely personalized service of reuniting families even before the death of Mao. Typically, pictorial accounts of such service commend soldiers for their embodiment of the Lei Feng ideal. An example of a grandmother whose grandson has been restored to her at the docks is emblematic in this regard. Soldiers on either side of her carry the child and her bundle, freeing her up to convey her palpable relief and gratitude. 317 While such graphic narratives conventionally begin with travelers meeting up with soldier Good Samaritans on docks, or at bus and rail stations, one pictorial photo spread recounts a soldier’s interest in an old woman’s origins who had been separated from family in Hebei on her way to Sichuan some thirty-six 315 Incidents on boats unsurprisingly tend to involve the navy. See for example “Zuo Lei Feng Shi de Zhanshi,” (Become a Lei Feng Style Soldier), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 16. 316 Zhou Lishun, “Ai Renmin Qinqin Kenken,” (Love the People Diligently and Conscientiously), Jiefangjun Huabao, (May 1965): 9; “’Lei Feng Ban’ zai Douzheng zhong Qian Jin,” (‘Lei Feng Squad” Advances in Struggle) Jiefangjun Huabao, 358 (April 1977): 15; and “Tamen Shen shang Shanyaozhe Gongchanzhuyi Sixiang de Huo Hua,” (Their Spirits Glitter Communist Thought Sparks), Jiefangjun Huabao, 424 (October 1982). 317 Jiefangjun Huabao, 352 (September 1976): 13. 252 years earlier. Here again history ties the soldier to the civilian as it presents an opportunity for a soldier to act decisively in the present to correct the injustices of the past. Thus, the soldier metaphorically travels back in time to enable an actual joyous journey to be taken in the present temporal realm. In a twist of the motif, the pictorial narrative begins with a shot of the soldier who is stationed near the woman’s present residence poring over papers at a desk and ends with another of the woman joined with relatives at a Hebei courtyard feast, thus ending rather than beginning with a journey. Yet, the story maintains convention by ending as all such accounts do, with the soldier locating the family “on his own time,” the woman traveling to meet them, and proclamations that the PLA have emancipated her and that they are also like family to her in every respect. 318 This kind of more personalized service, even with larger historical significance, was but infrequently represented during the Cultural Revolution. The PLA’s pictorial extension of services to travelers throughout the two decades examined here sustains an army hierarchy over other sectors of society as they wash in and out of the places they travel between. Established within the sites of traveler movement, the troops are positioned to afford travelers assistance that the travelers cannot reciprocate, all the while facilitating the free flow of traffic essential to marketization in general and the development of tourism more specifically. The extreme version of this frustrating predicament is expressed in 318 “’Zhanshi Gongcheng Shi’ Deng,” (“Soldier Engineer Instructor,” Etc.), Jiefangjun Huabao, 351 (August 1976): 45. 253 Lei Feng’s refusal to permit the possibility of reimbursement to the woman for whom he purchases a train ticket. Lei Feng, and by extension, other graphic soldiers at travel hubs across China, deny their civilian patrons the social capital of compensation for the good turns done them. The elderly are in this same dilemma of being extended assistance without possibility of return. The Elderly In addition to the traveler within the comparatively private category that constitutes one of the sustained beneficiaries of army service to the people, the elderly and youth both remain in positions of graphic prominence as recipients of small military services. Indeed, as the former instance demonstrates, services in both categories often overlap. A fairly consistent handful of images depicting assistance to the elderly with various household responsibilities are published in the PLA Pictorial each year throughout the course of the two decades examined here, with that tally dropping off over the last few years of the initial reform decade. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the elderly in receipt of PLA assistance tended to be identified in soldier, peasant, worker terms. Typically those served were identified as peasants, workers, or veterans, whereas reform representations simply referred to the figures as “the elderly” or old men or women, indicating that age alone determined their worthiness of patronage. Revolutionary status prefixes like “poor peasant” or “worker” had become 254 irrelevant. Thus, in an exception to the differentiating visual and rhetorical effect of reform era visual culture, the elderly are portrayed less distinctly as a group. Soldiers tended to the elderly at home most commonly by delivering them a variety of services more easily accomplished by the robust, or supplying an extra hand when a single-handed task is too cumbersome. A typical depicted service rendered to the elderly entails drawing well water or fetching water from other sources. One reform era illustration of an Eighth Route Army boy soldier carrying buckets on a shoulder pole his frame was almost too small to support exemplifies this genre in an altogether classic product of lingering socialist realism. 319 Yet other mainstays of elderly aid include sweeping courtyards, grinding grain at millstones, or even loading grain onto reindeer in one instance with a Northeastern peasant. 320 In the interest of promoting better relations with rather crucial frontier minorities, soldiers will even lend a hand to old women by holding draped yarn so that it may be balled up. Li Jie’s award-winning woodcut offers this actualization of the soldier’s commitment to the elderly in a composition that seats the soldier on the carpet cozily beside a contented woman in northwestern minority attire. 321 319 Sun Ziqi, “Xiao Ba Lu,” (Little Eighth Route [Army]), Jiefangjun Huabao, 438 (December 1983): 20. The historically themed rendering of civil-military relations received top prize in the National PLA Artwork competition that year. 320 “Zhu Lu Xing An Fang E Jia,” (Undertaking Road Construction, Peacefully Visiting an Ethnic Orochen Manchu Family), Jiefangjun Huabao, 377 (November 1978): 17. 321 Li Jie, “Zoufang,” (Paying a Visit), “Quanjun Banhua Zhanlan Zuopin Xuan,” (Selected Works from the PLA-wide Woodcut Exhibit), Jiefangjun Huabao, 402 (December 1980): 21 255 Other motifs portray the itinerant elderly assisted by soldiers whilst away from home. Pai Zhang’s painting of a soldier walking along an urban sidewalk with an old woman on his arm and a little girl clasping his free hand, “Helping the Old and Young on a Journey,” articulates the soldier’s obligation to young and old civilians on journey alike. 322 Yet another example in this mode appears in an etching reproduced in a 1983 PLA Pictorial. Zhu Hengan’s “Passing Shower” depicts an elderly produce vendor caught in a downpour beside her bicycle with which she transports her baskets of vegetables. A passing soldier holds an empty upturned basket above her head, offering them both protection from the rain and bringing them in cozy proximity to one another. More than a simple message about soldiers’ custodianship of elderly women abroad, the image also suggests PLA support for marketization, its approval of entrepreneurship, and its sustained support of agricultural labor, as most vendors at this time are also the growers of the produce they market. Youth The prominence of youth service portrayals follows the same trajectory, retaining a steady presence through most of the period discussed here with a tapering off toward the end of the first reform decade. Like the elderly, youth too become disassociated with the revolutionary triumvirate, within which youth had 322 Pai Zhang, “Fu Lao Xie You,” (Helping the Old and Young on a Journey), Jiefangjun Huabao, 371 (May 1978): 19. 256 been typically visualized as junior masses, i.e., peasants, soldiers, and workers in miniature, during the reforms. Such representations simultaneously present a revolutionary heritage, commitment, and succession. The Cultural Revolution frequently represented children as junior classed figures rather than simply children of no discernible revolutionary category, though their clothing readily marked ethnicity, just as it had in more radical times, as they were represented during the reforms. Unlike the elderly, who become less distinct iconographically, youth are differently distinguished under the reforms. Their youth becomes more prominent as their social status grows muted, except in terms of their ethnicity, which remains consistently marked in graphic imagery from years before the Cultural Revolution through the early reform period. Typical in this regard is Zhang Dongbing’s 1973 poster “Sun and Rain Nurtures New Buds” of the bustle at an extracurricular children’s palace. 323 Several of the children form squads on the grounds of the palace, each squad in its own uniform and carrying its own placard. The “Learn from the Army” squad appears in green army uniforms, the “Learn from the Workers” squad in blue overalls, and the “Learn from the Peasants” squad less explicably in light button- down shirts with the red neckerchiefs of the Young Pioneers tucked into dark trousers for the boys or skirts for the girls. Each squad is attended by a male adult from the group studied; the peasants by a man and woman, each of whom wears 323 Chang Tong-ping, “Sun and Rain Nurtures New Buds,” Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, Shanghai Fine Arts Press (July 1975) in Fraser (1977): 65. 257 more typical clothing for their group, the man in blue padded Mao jacket and woman in print padded jacket with white kerchief tied round her head. These depictions, and those of children in sailor and army uniforms that were also common, present children as miniature representatives of the revolutionary triumvirate. Like those of the elderly defined in similar terms, they gradually disappear during the reforms. Marketization has no need for a national militia and must cultivate and reproduce social categories beyond those of peasants and ordinary workers. Unlike services to the elderly, however, PLA interactions with youth tend to be much more narrowly circumscribed; the overwhelming majority of images depicted revolve around tutorial instruction, a condition that obtains throughout the early reforms. Close inspection of these depictions reveal both continuity and change from their Cultural Revolution predecessors. Huang Chensheng’s 1981 watercolor of a single soldier reading from a Lei Feng book to a crowd of northwestern minority and Han children as they fly model planes, examine specimens under a magnifying glass, fill beakers, sketch at easels, pet a lamb, and take notes updates the soldier-coach model. 324 The coach continues to guide children, the fruits of which are expressed here in very different terms from those of militancy typically inculcated during the Cultural Revolution. Instead, the 324 “Jingli! Xiaowai ‘Gardener,’” (Salutations! Extracurricular “Gardener”), Jiefangjun Huabao, 408 (June 1981): inside back cover. 258 composition illustrates manifold artistic and intellectual pursuits the soldier’s coaching may help develop. Typical reform era tutorial depictions depart from their predecessors more fundamentally, however, by arising more from extraordinary conditions in which the army is superiorly equipped to deliver instruction, as under combat conditions, for example. This genre can expand to the establishment of a school, as it does when Vietnamese bombs destroy an old school in a Yao mountain community. In this motif, one pictorial story depicts the familiar Cultural Revolution scenes of soldiers instructing groups of children out of doors as well a portrayal of a soldier offering one-on-one coaching to another child by lamplight, in addition to less common depictions of soldiers escorting children to school under an unanticipated bombardment. 325 In contradistinction to the more casual and often disdainful attitude regarding formal education that prevailed in the Cultural Revolution, formal instruction here becomes too vital to be interrupted even by warfare. Upon hearing of the destruction of the school, the soldiers are said to exclaim, “We can’t let the children lose their school!” Later, once the school has been re- established and the children find themselves under artillery attack, the soldiers see to it that lessons continue uninterrupted after shepherding the students safely to class and despite the persistence of enemy fire. Reflective of more than a 325 Liu Danzu, Xiong Jinghua, and Dai Tianrong, “Zhandi Xiao Xue,” (Battleground Primary School), Jiefangjun Huabao, 460 (October 1985): 20. 259 revolution in thinking on education, this attitude manifests a restoration of earlier foundational army roles as custodians of rear area civilian welfare. Though less typical of youth army services in official visual culture, sometimes accounts depict servicemen dispensing haircuts to children. A serviceman said to be emulating Lei Feng by doing the people good deeds, which here are cited as the usual chopping firewood, grinding grain, drawing water, and sweeping courtyards, is photographed cutting one boy’s hair street side as his last boy “client” admires the soldier’s handiwork in a hand-held mirror a little way off. 326 Similar scenes are replicated in other media contemporary to the period. Hang Guangzhou’s 1973 poster portrays a boy, the soldier’s kit on his lap and toy rifle in hand, receiving a haircut from a smiling soldier in a room whose lattice window reads “Support the Army, Love the People.” Entitled “Army and People Are One Family,” the print most emblematically represents the haircut service motif. 327 So iconic was the poster that it was reproduced within another representation, this time in PLA Pictorial, where it formed part of a composition in which it was photographed pasted to the wall in an interior scene for a story modeling a different dimension of army service to the people. 328 The image’s reflection within a similarly themed reflection signals the stabilization of the new iconography. 326 “Zou Lei Feng Shi de Zhanshi,” (Becoming a Lei Feng Style Soldier), Jiefangjun Huabao, 309 (February 1973): 17. 327 Hang Kwang-chou, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, September 1973 in Fraser (1977): 64. 328 Jiefangjun Huabao, 351: 45. 260 Apart from explicit services rendered to children, however, are various other activities that showcase soldiers as friends of and examples to youth more generally. Many of these revolve around cooperative endeavors with sent-down youth, whom soldiers teach to lay landmines and perform sentry duties, supply with Mao books and agricultural tools, work with on agricultural projects, and even recreate with on tea breaks. 329 Throughout the Cultural Revolution, while soldiers and “educated youth” are often portrayed as equal contributors to shared tasks, in actuality soldiers take advantage of the authority vested in their uniforms and their seniority in years to maintain dominance over the youth. Easily accomplished, this dominance articulates in teaching, where soldiers assume additional authority as instructors; supply, with soldiers as bestowers of texts and tools; or defense, in which the soldier’s expertise, the youths’ revolutionary fervor notwithstanding, counts for more than any quality both groups might be said to have possessed in equal abundance. Reform era visual culture replicates this hierarchy, but without the corresponding discourse of symbiosis. In this regard, army artist Shen Genyuan’s painting “Baogao!” (Reporting [for Duty]!), which was published in a 1981 PLA Pictorial illuminates a marked reversal from earlier childish emulations of 329 “Reqing Zhichi Shehuizhuyi Xinsheng Shiwu,” (Warmly Support Newly Emerging Socialist Things), Jiefangjun Huabao, 344 (January 1976): 10; “Zhishi Qingnian de Hao Zhanyou,” (The Good Army Buddies of Educated Youth), Jiefangjun Huabao, 347 (April 1976): 28; and “Qun Ce Qun Li Fen Yong Xiang Qian,” (Mass Policy, Mass Power Forging Bravely Onward), Jiefangjun Huabao, 297 (February 1972): 14-15. 261 soldiers. 330 Here a bare-chested southwestern minority boy in turban and loincloth with rifle slung across his chest stands and salutes an amused soldier, who bends forward and affectionately crooks a finger to sweep a lock of hair from the boy’s forehead. In contrast to earlier works like “Sun and Rain Nurtures New Buds” that had represented childish mimicry much more completely, here the effect is visually conveyed by means of the sole prop of rifle and a single straightforwardly subordinate gesture of salute. The effect produced by the visualization of a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the object of emulation and the subject who apes it is even more comical than earlier childrens’ embodiments of army emulation could sometimes appear, though always with an undertone of respect. The smile of approval the soldier gives the miniature PLA forces he spies marching in parallel to his troops in “Full of Youthful Vigor,” discussed in the previous chapter, is very different from the one bestowed on the boy in the turban. 331 Cultural Revolution portrayals took children’s revolutionary identity much more seriously, depicting children in PLA uniform right down to the ammunition belts in scenes of live shooting practice, 332 militarized drills, 333 or even at play. 330 Shen Genyuan, “Baogao!,” (Reporting [for Duty]!), “Kunming Budui Meishu Zuopin Xuan,” (Selections from the Artwork of Kunming Troops), Jiefangjun Huabao, 420 (June 1982): 36. 331 Kong Fanrui, “Zhaoqi Pengbo,” (Full of Youthful Vigour), Jiefangjun Huabao, 301 (June 1972): 31. 332 Zhang Enliang, “Red Flowers Blossom on the Former Battleground,” Liaoning: Liaoning People’s Publishing House, (1972) in Min, Zhang, and Duoduo, (2003): 74. 333 Chao Dezhao, “Learning How to Prepare for War,” Tianjin: Northern District House of Culture, Tianjin People’s Art Publishing House (1972) in Min, Zhang, and Duoduo, (2003): 75. 262 As Donald contends, Cultural Revolution poster children might appear at a glance to be playing, but more careful examination reveals that they are actually in a kind of revolutionary training. Their figures’ direct participation in revolutionary action substantiates the ideal that “every generation is red.” 334 One anything but playful poster illustrates this revolutionary apprenticeship in a menacing scene of children taking a pitchfork, snowballs, and what appear to be firecrackers to an “intellectual” snowman. The image resoundingly manifests the gravity with which children’s militant identity is visualized. 335 In contrast, the humor of the 1980’s works derives from their lack of even a semblance of equivalence inherent in those earlier, and comparatively convincing, representations of children as soldiers. In part this humor has been made possible by the demotion of youth overall in society. While the Cultural Revolution’s inversion of authority engendered youth-empowering institutions like the Red Guards and to some extent the rusticated youth, its collapse divested youth of its temporary authoritative resource and restored social power to society’s more senior members, thus re-subjugating youth to traditional authority as an object of affectionate comedy. “Baogao!” reflects the reform era reversion to customary norms and responds to the liberalization that lifts the Cultural Revolution requirement that children be taken as seriously with gentle mockery. “Baogao!” typifies a reform 334 Donald, (1999): 89. 335 “Punish the Rascal!,” House of Culture of the Xiong, Ren Jixue, Hebei: Hebei People’s Publishing House, in Min, Zhang, and Duoduo, (2003): 63. 263 era turn in representation of kids as kids, rather than militarized adults in miniature, or small rebels. His authority evident in both the child’s salute and the soldier’s stoop to acknowledge it, the serviceman unapologetically dominates the boy. Here again the motif departs from Cultural Revolutionary forms, which would have been at some pains to conceal a hierarchy that had now become acceptable and indeed, almost natural. As the painting also demonstrates, reform era army-youth friendship tends to involve local youth and soldiers, rather than sent-down educated youth, the social category of rusticated youth no longer relevant. Then too, in the reform era the soldiers’ friendship with and modeling for youth is often represented as arising from somewhat accidental contact rather than resulting from shared projects as was typical of earlier iterations of this motif. Finally, in contrast to more active services to youth and the elderly, these reformed expressions of friendship to youth appear with even greater frequency during the early reform years after an initial decline for the first few years of the reforms. In their revised form the images convey the proper tone of army patronage without servility. Moreover, their expression of mutual affection from somewhat of a distance fosters feelings of unity under conditions of segregation. Youth-army representation moves from its Cultural Revolution iteration as partner, in the form of sent-down youth, or junior soldier-militia member, in the figures of younger children, into a more distinct group of civilians whose 264 protection, nurturing, and patronage, more than role modeling, are to be supplied by the army. Earlier modes of symbolic violence exerted their efforts on representing youth as the social equal of the soldier. In contrast, reform depictions visually disciplined youth to subject themselves to the authority of their seniors. Youths’ visual confinement back to their customary haunts of playground and school discouraged rebellion and fostered the resumption of obedience to adult authority. These attitudinal and spatial transformations would promote an optimal environment in which markets might flourish by ensuring a necessary stability. Women More of a qualitative change occurs in soldiers’ services to women as a group than in categories of travelers, youth, and the elderly, all of whom were already treated as distinct categories of civilians meritorious of various army services during the Cultural Revolution, even if their revolutionary identity, or potential, outranked these competing, and more temporally restrictive, memberships. This largely stems from a new motif of service wherein the soldier becomes protector of women specifically, who are now portrayed as more in need of such targeted defense than men. Their new representation as a particularly vulnerable category of civilians presents itself in sharp contrast to women’s militant and fearless representation as revolutionaries. Moreover, their depiction in such motifs governed by their fear and always among children, whom they 265 seem powerless to comfort, infantilizes women. Though these newer representations do not emerge until the end of the initial reform decade and even then, they occur but infrequently, their appearance nevertheless reflects a significant reversal in a fundamental dimension of women’s identity as gendered civilians. The first of these images to appear in the PLA Pictorial depicts a mother and children in a pram receiving shelter in a sudden downpour from a soldier who drapes his poncho over the pram and huddles in to ride out the storm with his gratefully dry charges. 336 Similar in both composition, theme and even title to “Passing Shower,” in which a soldier shelters an old woman as discussed above, “Shower” departs from Cultural Revolution depictions of non-elderly women civilians who were made of sturdier stuff. Graphic accounts portrayed these earlier women as more apt to tote rifles and patrol the forest alongside their PLA comrades. They did not look to male soldiers to keep them dry in inclement weather. Indeed, they were drawn seeking out turbulence rather than military ports in a storm. A few years later this motif of special protection reappears, this time as a gathering of women and children among soldiers all seated in small clusters reading books in a tropical forest setting. 337 The caption explains that the women 336 Cheng Baohong, “Zhenyu” (Shower), “Wuhan Budui Meishu Zuopin Xuan,” (Selections from Wuhan Army Unit’s Artwork), Jiefangjun Huabao, 421 (July 1982): 27. 337 “Laizi Guangxi Yunnan Qianxian de Baodao,” (Report from the Frontlines in Guangxi and Yunnan Provinces), Jiefangjun Huabao, 444 (June 1984): 7. 266 and children have fled to the army encampment seeking protection from menacing artillery fire that the accompanying article identifies as Vietnamese. The women’s position behind the soldiers in the forest reinforces the textual message of their having sought and received protection from locally stationed PLA troops. Their demeanors appear calm, a mark of confidence in the capabilities of their defenders, though their typical Han clothing and hair ornaments make them appear out of place and vulnerable, strangers to the guerrilla terrain of the jungle. This vulnerability separates them from Cultural Revolution predecessors, who were far more likely to have been at home in the forest as either natives to that realm or as sent-down educated youth who had volunteered to go there. The militia women with whom soldiers often collaborated had consequently radiated a strong sense of belonging to their particular environments. This tougher Cultural Revolution feminine ideal presents itself in the revealingly titled work, “Bravery and Grace Go Together,” which celebrates a very different model of feminine civilians. 338 Liu Fanying, Bei Kaixing, and Ma Hu’s collaborative poster depicts a women’s militia unit drilling with satchels of explosives quite fearlessly in a snowstorm. Without hats, gloves, or scarves, the women charge and crawl through the snow, their expressions registering a determined resolve to complete 338 Liu Fanying, Bei Kaixing, and Ma Hu, “Bravery and Grace Go Together,” Beijing: Peking People’s Publishing House (November 1975), in Fraser (1977): 75. 267 their task and their movement assured as reflective of a people’s organic relationship to a place. Instead of appearing frail and frightened vis-à-vis the soldiers, earlier figures like these had been pictured in either worn and faded militarized work clothes or in attire more indigenous to local minority populations with a native ease and familiarity with their setting. Rather than supplicants in search of protection, women of the Cultural Revolution era civil-military visual culture appeared as the relatively equal and willing partners of the army in joint revolutionary endeavors, which frequently extended to their paramilitary activities as members of the militia. As these outmoded revolutionary figures disappeared, differently feminized and more army-dependent than interdependent female civilians begin to emerge in their place. Represented provision of this newly necessary service altered the identities of soldiers in addition to those of the women they served. Here as in the extension of army protection to schoolchildren under fire discussed above, soldiers become proud protectors of a populace under external enemy attack, rather than the senior partners of a militarized populace in national defense undertakings. While civilian women interacted with soldiers of both sexes extensively throughout the Cultural Revolution, graphic accounts of their interaction tended to promote a vision in which gender was neutralized, as discussed above. Clothes became unisex and were cut loosely enough to conceal figurative differences, pregnant figures were entirely excluded from propaganda materials, labor was 268 drawn less divided, and so on. This is not to suggest, however, that propaganda succeeded in erasing gender distinction. Instead, competing signals in the form of hair length, minority dress, subdivisions of labor, and countless other markers continued to broadcast difference all too clearly. The provision of food and drink for soldiers, for example, though not exclusively, still tended to fall to civilian women, as did services such as mending, sewing, and shoemaking. Yet these services were not the exclusive provenance of women. Men, for example, sometimes met soldiers with cups of tea or water and soldiers sometimes darned blankets and clothes, in a graphic context that attempted to downplay gender alterities. As with most other distinction, reform era visual culture played up gender difference. Women civilians went from being symbiotic stand-ins for male soldiers to being an unequivocally visually distinct category of the masses, a canvas on which to project soldiers’ valor. Intellectuals Unlike women in the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals, as constituents of a discredited class like capitalists against whom it was necessary to struggle, had been largely absent from visual accounts of mass-soldier engagement. Whereas women had been represented less distinctly as a category, intellectuals’ distinction had been highlighted as an evil to be struggled against, visually excluded from the arena of the chosen social categories. In contradistinction, intellectuals, alongside 269 capitalists, had constituted the discrete discursive categories of society that persisted into the reforms, which reversed the fortune of these groups’ status. Frequently the targets of rallies, they were often condemned in absentia by more putatively progressive elements of society. Indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals provided a point of unification for soldiers and civilians who came together to denounce intellectuals in solidarity with one another for their purported arrogance, disdain for physical labor, and alienation from the masses from which they remained excluded. Keeping intellectuals down united soldier and civilian while buoying their own social status. The ideological pragmatism that informed the reforms, as articulated in Deng’s contention “that quality professional work is itself a reflection of political loyalty,” however, assigned new relevance to intellectuals. 339 While Mao’s thought had proved itself ideologically flexible, or pragmatic, to contour to a changing set of circumstances through his several-decade term at the lead of the CCP, it nevertheless remained bound to a justification on the basis of revolutionary principles to which Deng had no particular allegiance. 340 Instead, Deng’s novel abandonment of struggle reestablished a demand for expertise possessed by the intellectual class, placing a premium on their social status. Like entrepreneurs, intellectuals were necessary 339 Lieberthal (1994): 146. 340 Xin offers a pragmatic reading of Maoist ideology. Jianfei Xin, Mao Zedong’s World View: From Youth to Yunnan, Lanham: University Press of America, 1998: 15. On this same point, Schram notes that Mao’s flexibility exposed him to (Soviet) charges of unprincipled opportunism. Stuart Schram, “Mao Tse-tung,” A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991: 334. 270 to the reforms. The state therefore began to encourage their development, prominence, and reproduction. As part of that effort, their graphic rehabilitation casts them in new configurations of contact with the military, even as military contact with civilians more generally continues to decline. Perhaps the most immediately apparent manifestation of the intellectual’s reintegration into the good graces of the party state are official graphics of class icons, which briefly before their disappearance during the reforms expand to include intellectuals, generally embodied in a male figure, as are all the others but the peasant icon, and designated by glasses and sometimes a lab coat. The aptly titled “Work Hard for the Prosperity of One’s Country” significantly draws such a subject into the iconic narrative of national progress. 341 As a group legitimated by the reform party state, intellectuals were now a meaningful subsection of civilians, part of the people the army remained duty-bound to serve. The model army of official media presented itself cultivating and possessing expertise in technical and defense related fields increasingly during the reforms as a portion of its representation overall. This new pursuit of formally acquired knowledge constituted a complete reversal from that of the Cultural Revolution. While soldiers had commonly collaborated with civilians on technological developments in agronomy or defense related industry during the 341 “Fenfa Tuan Qiang,” (Work Hard for the Prosperity of One’s Country), Jiefangjun Huabao, 372 (June 1978): 27. 271 Cultural Revolution, graphic portrayals characterized their pursuits drawing on mass ingenuity, rather than relying on more studied social elements. Cultural Revolution authorities had prized the innovative freshness and class-determined socialist intuition of the amateur worker, soldier, or peasant, whose wit like their consciousness arose through labor. Still, these earlier collaborations, though often presented as collective study sessions, tended to represent soldiers as directors of their joint inquiries and providers of technology transfers to peasants and workers. As with political study sessions, graphic portrayals of cooperative technical study presented egalitarian relations in an effort to elide hierarchies. The persistence of power differentials wherein the army subjugated its civilian partners was manifest in myriad conditions such as initiation of the sessions, positions of the subjects, and conveyance of knowledge, among other determinants. Apart from their ostensibly egalitarian joint studies, soldiers often approached peasants and workers directly either to teach them or to learn practical techniques from them in pictorial accounts of such exchanges. Typical of such portrayals is a pictorial story on mass-army collaborative research designed to “Promote What Is Beneficial and Abolish What Is Harmful for the Benefit of the People.” 342 Soldiers are photographed among collective members in the field as they together examine the effectiveness of new forms of 342 “Chu Hai Xing Li Zaofu Renmin,” (Promote What Is Beneficial and Abolish What Is Harmful for the Benefit of the People), Jiefangjun Huabao, 306 (November 1972): 43. 272 herbicide with beakers and other equipment at the edge of a field. Another photograph in the piece captures an urban setting of a mixed group squatting at the edge of a waterway and includes a caption explaining that the group is analyzing liquid waste in an effort to determine its composition. Full of workers, soldiers, and peasants in lab coats, the only legitimate intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, such imagery propounds notions of amateur intellectual achievement and the wisdom of drawing on the observational powers of those who have gained knowledge through labor. The pedigree of military status supplies sufficient credentials to direct research and study. Notably, though the mass and army figures in both images squat together with reasonably equal access to the specimens, authoritative lab coats, and equipment, the piece presents soldiers initiating all of the collaboration. Without this fundamental initiative on the military part, these images imply, the collaborations would never have a chance to yield the sort of fruitful results for which society must be grateful to the military. Moreover, pictures of the new civil-military intellectual cross dressers reflect the influence of the revolution in education on civil-military interaction. The radicalization in education advocated a more experiential and physical way of knowing that was to be accomplished in self-study or ad hoc small group study wherein progressive elements of society brought their perspectives to bear on a given problem. Formal education was seen as a kind of indoctrination for which a ready antidote presented itself in the form of reeducation received from poor 273 peasants via rustication for sent down urban youth. 343 Such tendencies contributed to a then current general celebration of coarseness putatively intrinsic to the masses that had come to be associated with militancy and its attendant denigration of high culture. 344 The experiential and physical epistemology prevalent during the Cultural Revolution gave way to a more customary understanding of how knowledge was acquired through formal study, which was essentially a distillation of direct observation recorded in books and transmitted by formal tutorials, reading, and mimicry. Cultural Revolution authorities had presented intellectuals as obstacles to knowledge who interfered with revolutionary understanding arising from direct experience. Intellectuals were condemned for attempting to mediate in this process with their scholasticism. The reforms’ prioritization of scientific and technological development, which was the underpinning of the other three modernizations as well, however, overturned radical anti-intellectualism and in so doing restored the authority of intellectuals that had been stripped during the Cultural Revolution. While there had been much reference to scientific principles during the Cultural Revolution, its science tended to be one of Marxist historical materialism rather than the natural and applied sciences championed by the new 343 Lan Yang, “The Ideal Socialist Hero: Literary Conventions in Cultural Revolution Novels,” Woei Lien Chong, ed., China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002: 186. 344 Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun, “Revolutionary Rudeness: The Language of Red Guards and Rebel Workers in China’s Cultural Revolution,” Jefferey N. Wasserstrom, Twentieth Century China: New Approaches, London: Routledge, 2003: 221-236. 274 scientism of the reform era. 345 Unless practiced by the self-taught and completely practically applied, natural science was eclipsed by comparatively revolutionary or intrinsically socialist endeavors. The former condemnation of its academic and engineering practitioners as the “the stinking number nine” among discredited social elements, along with that of academic culture more broadly, which had been dispensed with in the Cultural Revolution campaign to “do away with the four olds” in ideas, culture, customs, and habits, had been completely reversed by the entrenchment of the new reform era ideology. Thus, conditions altered to allow for graphically modeled collaboration between soldiers and intellectuals, who had been completely estranged during the Cultural Revolution. Official media begins to present intellectuals, who by the inauguration of the Four Modernizations in 1978 were recognized as legitimate producers and transmitters of knowledge, together with soldiers, who are also in pursuit of expertise that is produced and circulated by intellectuals. The early reform decade witnessed a complete correlation between disappearing images of mass-soldier technical research and rising depictions of soldiers engaged in formal study and in consultation with intellectuals. Such interaction, however, hardly constitutes army service to intellectuals, unless patronage can be considered a form of service. Intellectuals, it appears, are serving the army, as both remain fixed in roles that are complementary and distinct. 345 Hua traces the rise of scientism in China’s early reform period, and additionally its tension with humanism. Shiping Hua, Scientism and Humanism: Two Cultures in Post-Mao China (1978- 1989), Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 275 In such positions, however, the two sides can be seen to collaborate on research. The pictorial sketch, “Scale the Summit,” a kind of shorthand for the reformist slogan “Scale New Heights in Science and Technology,” sets the tone for their newly emerging cooperative occupation of the formal academic realms of laboratories, libraries, and classrooms. 346 Almost a collage of figures engaged in various academic pursuits, it nonetheless combines military and civilian figures about the business of research and development. Some figures peer into microscopes, others into academic books, with the potential fruit of their labor in plain view in the form of a rocket launching in the background, a techno-futuristic touch endemic in the visual culture of the era, which is rife with the cluttering harbingers of the bright future as symbolized by giant atoms, rockets, and airplanes. The future’s relocation to the urban realm of the laboratory and university, always an urban institution in Chinese history, from its former residence in the agrarian heartland is nowhere more evident than in these representations of soldiers among intellectuals in place of their former cohabitants, the peasantry. Here an image of a soldier in the sky looms even larger than the rocket in an effort to visually locate the soldier as the pivotal figure in technological progress, though this effort is contradicted by the necessary civilian intellectual counterparts at the composition’s base. As “Scale the Summit” and numerous other works like it make plain, intellectuals have replaced the broad masses as the army’s mutually legitimating 346 “Pandeng Dingfeng,” (Scale the Summit), Jiefangjun Huabao, 372 (June 1978): 27. 276 social authority. While the soldiers’ presence suggests a nationalist purpose to the intellectuals’ research, proximity to the intellectuals and their accoutrements of texts and lab equipment as they are rising in importance to the state helps secure a significance to the army in the reforms and ensure that it isn’t left behind as an institution. This time, however, the mimicry is much more one-sided, the hierarchy more exposed. Official media depicts soldiers as they don lab coats and adopt the reading habits of intellectuals, but intellectuals appear content to remain distinct, leaving the burden and culture of defense altogether to the armed forces. Again as before, hierarchies persist within collaborative representations. Here, however, the army depends on the lead of the reinvigorated intellectuals, rather than dominates them as it had them and other social forces during the Cultural Revolution, bereft as the reforms left the troops of their dominance’s sustaining discourse of symbiotic harmony. Certainly vis-à-vis intellectuals, its replacement of complementary segregation disempowered the armed forces. In the graphically expressed intellectual-army relationship drawn under the reforms, a hierarchy is inverted, just as it was in the encounter with youth. Its historically subordinated role is therefore imposed on the military. The PLA’s disadvantage is particularly made manifest in army study from intellectuals. Soldiers interact with intellectuals by studying from them either formally or otherwise in a process that qualifies the soldier to become the junior research partner of the intellectuals in the above sketch. During the reforms, even formally trained intellectuals begin to be represented conducting informal study 277 sessions, demonstrating the intractability of this enduring Cultural Revolution tradition. No less remarkable is the form’s adaptability; it has become standardized so that it can be infused with vastly different content. An encounter with the prominent model, Zhang Haidi, a paraplegic in receipt of army medical care who shot to national prominence in 1983, exemplifies informal civilian intellectual coaching of soldiers. A dual-use model, Zhang Haidi promoted both intellectuals and the notion that the disabled could lead active, fulfilling lives, this latter purpose presumably for the consumption of disabled Vietnam veterans, for whom Zhang Haidi is the only so targeted civilian model. 347 A PLA piece portrays Zhang providing English instruction to her nurse from her hospital bed, thus proving Zhang’s, and by extension all disabled citizens’, social usefulness and her determination to repay the army for all its meticulous care. 348 Informal though it may be, such civilian language instruction to soldiers presents very differently when it issues from Han intellectuals than when it does from ethnic minority peasants, who are also frequently portrayed passing along language instruction to those members of the armed services with whom they come in contact. 347 Landsberger, (1993): 375. Zhang Haidi may also serve to warn the state of the danger of promoting living models whose unpredictable lives may find themselves in the spotlight at awkward times. Her widely reported suicide attempt problematizes the message of the great possibility of satisfying lives for the disabled, as Rosen (2000) notes. For a fictional account of the pressures of assuming the burden of a Chinese socialist emulation model in English, see Qiu Xiaolong, Death of a Red Heroine, New York: Soho Press, 2000. 348 “Dangdai Bao Er Zhang Haidi,” (Present Protection of Zhang Haidi), Jiefangjun Huabao, 429 (May 1985): 14. 278 Students do not always appear as the inferiors of their instructors, as PLA minority language learning demonstrates. The imposition of hierarchy depends at least in part on the relative authority intrinsic to each side and the value of the knowledge the instructor has to impart. In contrast to the seriousness with which the army nurse pursues the study of English, the language of global capital already perceived to be crucial in the early years of the open-door policy to western capitalist nations, soldiers receiving more obscure language lessons take it all as great fun. Representations of this motif that persist from the Cultural Revolution into the early reforms project more a sense of the good-naturedness of the soldiers for their willingness to learn an unimportant language, all in the interest of smoothing frontier mass-soldier relations, than a recognition of the favor conferred on soldiers by their erstwhile instructors. In this vein is a photograph of a soldier seated on the ground outdoors who is surrounded by a group of Wa ethnic minorities of southwestern China. All assembled are smiling and laughing, which would not convey language study without the image’s accompanying caption informing readers that the soldier “studies the Wa language during the intervals in which he has no labor obligations.” 349 Typical of such tutorial captions is the attention to the good deed of the soldier in condescending to study the minority language and the consequent silence on the Wa instructor’s perspective, rather than the merit in the local community’s willingness to impart lessons. This Cultural Revolution framing of 349 “Zhagen Bianzhang,” (Take Root in the Borderland), Jiefangjun Huabao, 314 (July 1973): 36. 279 minority language tutorials extends into the reforms. Here both form and content persist into the new era. Several examples echo this hierarchy in which the normally understood provision of service is reversed to cause the student to be represented as conferring a favor on the instructor. Another such representation depicts a Yao woman translating some Chinese terms into the Yao language for the benefit of assembled soldiers. Underscoring the perception that Chinese minority languages lack value is the caption’s seemingly necessary explanation to account for the soldiers’ pastime that “studying minority languages improves the quality of mass work.” 350 No commensurate caption bothers defending the utility of English study. The fact that such language instruction does not issue from intellectuals further devalues minority language knowledge for its humble source. Exceptions can be found in the representation of hierarchy in the minority language peasant study motif, but only when competing identities of higher stature conflict with those of the frontier ethnic. More solemnity, for example, marks the transmission of written Mongolian, presumably as it emanates from a veteran of the revolution that brought the CCP into power in 1949 who must be accorded more respect. 351 Here the caption breaks the mold of extolling the student soldier and instead lavishes praises on “Grandfather” Ning Bu for his 350 “Yu Shui Pian,” (Fish to Water Feature), Jiefangjun Huabao, 368 (February 1978): 24. 351 Jiefangjun Huabao, 323: 23. 280 warmth. Moreover, Ning Bu’s veteran status makes it unnecessary to justify the soldiers’ engagement with him and his language. Thus, despite the occasional overlap in the labor and part they play among the troops, the rigidity of social distinctions delineating intellectual and peasant identity of the Cultural Revolution persists into the reforms. Yet it reproduces itself in these later iterations with an inverted hierarchy both reflective and constitutive of a simultaneous demotion of the peasantry and promotion of intellectuals, prompting soldiers to pull somewhat apart from the former and to draw closer to the latter even as they withdraw from civilians in general. Visualizations of formal intellectual training to servicemen also became more prominent. The Cultural Revolution had closed universities. When they re- opened, soldiers also occasionally went back to school to attend classes taught by civilian professors. In one instance, soldiers are photographed receiving sketching instruction in a classroom where they draw from a bust reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, an aesthetic model that would a few years earlier have been taboo for a host of reasons. 352 Even so, such instances remain rare in the early reform years. Another factor that must be noted, more so in formal study than in research collaboration, is that studying from intellectuals rather connotes intellectual service to the army than the other way around. Unlike that of the 352 “Jun Yi Xin Miao She,” (New Talent in Military Arts Groups), Jiefangjun Huabao, 411 (September 1981): 17. 281 elderly or youth, who take more from the army than they give, intellectuals’, even for those like Zhang Haidi, debt is rather on the other side during the reforms. Without reciprocal services to offer, even in limited instances, army patronage as students reinforces the authority of intellectuals. Furthermore, such patronage promotes the new ideal of complementary solidarity between intellectual masses and soldiers by projecting a relationship that is based on a differentiated sphere of influence and authority between them. Finally, while soldiers and civilians across the course of the two decades examined here take the part of both student and instructor, the reforms reverse the predominance intrinsic to Cultural Revolution imagery of soldiers as instructors of the masses by presenting a preponderance of media picturing soldiers as the students of intellectuals, if not the masses more generally. Entrepreneurs Representative of the most radical shift from earlier standards among the other civilian categories, graphic relations between army and entrepreneurs are decidedly different from those between intellectuals and soldiers. The reforms open a new front in service to the people, this time extending assistance to those masses now scheming to get rich. Party state media represents the PLA in various helpful postures intended to further the private interests of civilians, now seen to dovetail with those of the state. Reasoning that private growth fosters national 282 development, the military appears eager to contribute to the nation by promoting the expansion of the private sector, especially on its traditional agricultural turf. Revamping collective structures constitutes the first step in this process in the initial years of the first reform decade. During this time, the PLA is repeatedly presented as an engine of rural economic development and an architect of reforms in particular agricultural communes. A 1981 PLA Pictorial story cast soldiers in this light as saviors of the Shanxi Province Rongrenbao collective with their sharp eyes focused on profit. 353 To this end, the army introduces sidelines and the concept of diversification. Soldiers and peasants are pictured hauling goods on horse-driven carts as part of their sideline in transport services. Moreover soldiers encourage commune members to use their land to yield different kinds of production. Among the uses suggested is tree planting, both for tree farming and for the establishment of fruit orchards. Soldiers also introduce fish farming. The pictures recount a narrative of progress over the course of three years as these and other army-initiated reforms are implemented, causing the ecstatic appearing peasants to remark that all of their newfound prosperity is owed to PLA sweat and painstaking care. Instead of following the Cultural Revolution script that cast the army as revolutionary vanguard, soldiers in the official media of the reforms take on new roles to spearhead decollectivization, generate capital, cultivate entrepreneurs, and expand markets. 353 “Ding Dian Zhiyuan Junmin Qing Shen,” (Arranging for a Little Aid Deepens Civil-Military Sentiment), Jiefangjun Huabao, 403 (January 1981): 32-33. 283 The more limited, but still fundamental PLA achievement in the narrative recounted above has been the transformation of the collective institution into a profit-oriented enterprise. The introduction of tree farms, orchards, and fish farms arises from these agricultural outputs’ ability to fetch higher market prices for the resources expended to produce them than the grain that had formerly been the commune’s chief agricultural output. Similarly, the introduction of a transport business is designed to maximize utility of capital investment in order again to realize profit, putting resources to use when they would otherwise be idle in order to generate income without need of additional expenditure. Representations of soldiers’ attention to efficiency surface with the rehabilitation of entrepreneurs. Symbolically, the PLA returns to the collective under the reforms not to appear as one with the commune member masses and certainly not under the auspices of learning anything from them, but as an agent of their enlightenment and a missionary spreading the reforms throughout the countryside. All semblance of symbiosis vanishes in such visual imagery. Neither army nor peasantry is attempting to emulate the other. Instead, they are cooperating in the project to foster the development of a new category of citizenship identity, the developmental entrepreneur. The reforms made it possible to be a good citizen, a patriot, and even, eventually, a party member while also retaining a capitalist identity. Lam explains the intertwining of these roles thus: 284 to become a member of the burgeoning Chinese middle class is not just to ascend the economic ladder, it also means to uphold the state’s post-revolutionary political ideal and participate in the patriotic cause of making China a modern nation-state. 354 Some evidence exists to suggest that an entrepreneurial sense of self had begun to cohere toward the end of the scope of this study. Dickson’s recent work on PRC entrepreneurial citizenship identity finds that entrepreneurs embraced a kind of collective sense of self around 1989. 355 These entrepreneurs’ shared beliefs and interests began to cohere over the initial reform decade discussed here. Certainly the graphic media of the decade leading up to the identity’s adoption, if one accepts Dickson’s findings, positively modeled entrepreneurial figures in dynamic interaction with the army as the two sides cooperated to foster the development of markets. By suggesting a state sanctioned way of imagining private interest as the national interest, the symbolic violence embedded in pictorial imagery of soldiers and entrepreneurs furthered the CCP aim of bringing the entrepreneur back into the societal mainstream. To this end, illustrations of shrinking proximity between the troops, whose uniforms represented national allegiance, and entrepreneurs, whose projects were driven by personal gain, effectively married the private and public realms, greed and altruism. This 354 Tong Lam, “Identity and Diversity: The Complexities and Contradictions of Chinese Nationalism,” Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jenson, eds., China beyond the Headlines, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000: 158. Lam further characterizes the bourgeoisie’s position as one “caught up in a dilemma between” pressures to merge with global capital and take pride in Chinese exceptionalism, though these two demands are not necessarily at odds with one another. 355 Bruce Dickson, “Do Good Businessmen Make Good Citizens? An Emerging Collective Identity among China’s Private Entrepreneurs,” Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in China, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002: 259. 285 proximity in the visual culture of official media allowed the army to appear to be associated with those social forces responsible for generating growth in the reforms and thus to continue to appear to be on the ideological cutting edge. Additionally, proximity to entrepreneurs helped to picture the military as an economic elite just as political status and wealth were becoming increasingly intertwined. Along with intellectuals, entrepreneurs remain exceptional among civilian groups for their utility to the armed forces during the early reform years. The graphic record of their interaction attests to a reform inversion of hierarchy that subordinates the soldier to this rising social force. In the first years of the Four Modernizations, this symbolic violence is exerted by representations that fix the soldier as a handmaiden of marketization, rather than its engine, a portrayal reserved for the full time and professional entrepreneurs rather than the soldiers who dilettantishly dabble in business as either the entrepreneurs’ apprentices, or sometimes for only ephemeral moments, their coaches. One of the ways in which this is effected is through the symbolic establishment of military involvement in facilitating the adjustment to socialism under market conditions in the rural sphere, the historical base of the army and the zone in which it maintains its most significant presence and has the greatest influence. Graphic media depicts the army assisting the peasants-cum- entrepreneurs by restructuring their institutions to adapt to marketization, a process transformative of peasant identity as socialist citizens as much as it is one of institutional revolution. It is an effort intended, not to bring the civil and 286 military spheres closer together, but rather to buttress communal self-sufficiency so that the members of collectives may develop expertise in their own enterprises that in future will not be reliant on PLA aid and guidance. In other words, the aim is to cultivate a quality that will enable future segregation between the military and civilian realms. Hence, the army becomes a catalyst for the reforms and in so doing transforms idealized representational civil-military relations from a symbiotic unity to a complementary solidarity model. As part of that project, pictorials depict the army forging ahead in its expansion of the reforms. The first task of priming large collective institutions for marketization underway, the army now lends its vision in determining plans for business ventures in the private sector, transferring its focus on the collective to the household economic unit. The military’s mysterious authority in this realm presumably derives from the holdover of PLA rural authority generated in its Cultural Revolution heyday. A collection of photographs in a 1984 PLA Pictorial spread tellingly entitled “Soldiers, Our Family,” actualizes the armed force commitment to fostering entrepreneurship by taking Auntie Li through every step of her transformation from collectivist peasant to mass rural businesswoman. 356 356 “Auntie” Li is so designated as she is older than the rank and file troops. It is a common term of respect from juniors to their senior women and is not especially evocative of the family metaphor made use of in the piece’s title. In contrast, the family metaphor of the title represents part of the traditional conceptualization of idealized civil-military relations that transcend the temporal scope of this study in which the feelings and concern each side express for one another are expressed in familial terms, connoting the highest degree of regard. “Zhanshi A Women de Qin Ren,” (Soldiers, Our Family), Jiefangjun Huabao, 446 (August 1984): 2-6. 287 Initially, Li Shuxia is pictured flanked by a couple of soldiers beside her seated on the ground adjacent to a wood. Li appears rapt, absorbing the advice proffered by one of the soldiers, who is gesturing to explicate his idea. The caption reads: “Coming up with New and Better Ways to Do Things, Helping Auntie Li by Brainstorming To Figure out a Get Rich Scheme.” Eventually, they hit upon an orchard, thus reapplying a by now winning formula, and help the family with its spring sowing in addition to putting in fruit trees, the advantage to which, it is claimed, apart from their income-generating potential, is that they will beautify the environment, a priority new to the reforms and a shared concern of soldiers and civilians as presented in the visual culture of the era. Thus, having come up with a plan, the soldiers are at the Li family household’s disposal to implement it. Soldiers are photographed with Li family members dragging carts of night soil to fertilize the large, blossoming plum trees, their bloom symbolizing a coming prosperity. 357 This pictorial narrative of business planning, agricultural restructuring, and ultimate progress in landscape beautification and profit-making seems unachievable in such a brief sequence without army assistance. Once again, the soldiers return to work the fields with the masses, but this time army labor supports private enterprise instead of state communes. Somehow soldiers assign themselves to furthering the realization of private interests as a means to advance 357 The plum blossom’s “five petals symbolize the five gods of good luck.” Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983: 239. 288 national interests. Indeed, soldiers facilitate the process of peasant transformation into entrepreneurs. Many of the specific tasks, such as sowing, planting, and fertilizing, with which soldiers are represented assisting the Li family, are familiar from Cultural Revolution imagery of joint civil-military agricultural endeavors. Also familiar from that time are representations of soldiers as people’s servants who perform personal tasks discussed above for the elderly, whose grain is milled and courtyards are swept by soldiers; or youth, who sometimes receive private remedial instruction on a voluntary basis from soldiers. Nevertheless, two significant differences emerge in the entrepreneurial representations. First of all, unlike her weaker and needier fellow civilians who receive personalized army support, Auntie Li is able-bodied, residing in her native community among other able-bodied family members who are available to assist her. Why Auntie Li is singled out for so much unremunerated and personalized PLA assistance rather than some other peasant with get rich dreams never becomes clear. This would be unimaginable during the Cultural Revolution, when the merit of civilian claims on the army not only absolutely excluded serving the interest of private profit, but also were trumpeted in each representation of aid in terms of their social status. Also, PLA efforts to assist groups like the elderly or youth are intended to sustain them. In contrast, the purpose behind Auntie Li’s military assistance is to help her prosper, to amass 289 capital and in so doing to assign her a new identity vis-à-vis both state and society, in short to create a capitalist. The confluence of forces that together comprise marketization significantly reshaped graphically depicted civil-military relations. The expedience of the Dengist “socialism with Chinese characteristics” mantra of the reforms, which allowed a “cat” of any political hue to catch a “mouse,” inverted former priorities in a manner most succinctly encapsulated in the “politics in command” dictum. This in turn shuffled a number of hierarchies that had been constitutive of the power relations that had determined the face of civil-military unity during the Cultural Revolution. The anti-authoritarian carnival-like inversions produced by the “ten years of chaos” were reverting to a more customary order with relatively older intellectual and party elites back in control, the cultural and industrial centers of gravity devolving back to more urban and coastal locales, and guns once again restricted to the army. Fundamental to this restored power equation was the relative importance of political credentialing to expertise. The privileging of the former over the latter had reverberations for all forms of socialist modeling. Losing Ground for Civil-Military Unity Chief among these was the demise of the once ubiquitous pastoral landscape in visual propaganda on which much of the foundation for symbiotic unity had been constructed. The poor and unskilled peasantry of China’s rural 290 ground diminished in intrinsic political worth; now the relevance of the farming class would depend on its success in generating capital through the development of new rural enterprises or through agricultural production recently restructured into a household unit of production format. Thus, was the rural domain divested of its previous worth as consecrated radical ground and even the symbolic location of the future’s inevitable utopia. 358 The collapse of this vision is manifest in the disappearance of the countryside as spatial model formerly predominant in visualizations of Chinese socialist idylls. Conclusion: Departure from Dazhai An icon in this genre, the Dazhai collective constituted a Maoist iteration of the Soviet Potemkin village. Dazhai represented the agricultural twin of the other iconic spatial model of production, the Daqing oil fields of Liaoning whose rapid development was applauded in the pictorial language of the Cultural Revolution, albeit to a lesser extent than Dazhai. The revolutionary caves in the communist base camp at Yan’an could arguably represent a spiritual site to complement these two institutional locales whose transformation of their native landscapes testify to the material achievement of collective endeavor. Dazhai’s ubiquitous image provided a key symbolic space on which soldiers and masses came together, as much of the Cultural Revolution’s political art demonstrates. Simply titled “Dazhai,” a poster published at the height of the campaign to “Learn 358 Stefan R. Landsberger, (1993): 370. 291 from Dazhai” exemplifies the expression of the radical potential of collective endeavor invested in the Dazhai model. The poster instructs its viewers as to the possibility of cooperative endeavor under socialist guidance with its depiction of impossibly lush terraced agriculture in the Shanxi province terrain that had been historically unyielding. Like all those in the Dazhai genre, the print expresses a conviction in boundless progress and in the possibility of an ultimate human triumph over nature in a composition full of human figures rendered as ants without much assistance from mechanization. 359 Their labor on the site transforms both landscape and consciousness, constructing new identities alongside the freshly dug fields. As the reforms progressed, graphic forms abandoned Dazhai’s cultivated fields that had, like their figurative counterparts, served as socialist models. Rural terrain had formerly supplied literal ground for civil-military unity as well as a canvas on which to visualize the future. The reforms’ emptying the fields out of political evangelists, however, caused the agricultural space to lose its significance as a site of revolutionary praxis. In keeping with these developments, the new spatial model relocated itself to the urban environment, the reform’s preferred setting of the future. 360 359 Chang Yi-ching, “Tachai,” Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House (May 1975) as reproduced in Stewart E. Fraser, (1977): 29. 360 Landsberger notes the transference of visual propaganda from a rural to an urban sphere during the reforms. Landsberger, (1993): 373 and Landsberger, (1995): 83. 292 As a result, the army lost a good deal of the authority it had enjoyed at least in part by virtue of its former integration into a more important sector of society in the countryside. The lack of skills predominate in rural areas no longer an asset sought by the army in choosing its mass allies, the army retreated from the instructional exchanges with peasants that had helped to sustain army dominance among them. Just as the farm had been spun off from the collective, so was the soldier decoupled from the farmer. Each side pulled away from the other to perform duties more narrowly circumscribed without overlap between the two spheres. Even as troops continued to occupy the same rural terrain of the farming hosts and even when troops engaged in the same agricultural labor to supply their own existential needs, the worksites of each realm remained segregated. Industrial nationalism entirely eclipsed the Maoist agricultural nationalism, driving Fordist cleavages through all separate spheres of social production. Thus, although rural enterprises in some sense built on a 1960’s “third-line” tradition of locating industry in remote areas, industrial developmental nationalism fostered urbanization and divided civil from military spheres in the countryside. This separation of peasant and soldier, the two formerly fundamental elements of the civil-military partnership, set the example for military relations with all other social groups. Graphic depictions of symbiotic unity gave way to those of complementary solidarity wherein unification might most appropriately be realized through a narrowing of responsibilities on each side that eliminated 293 much of the overlap between them. The duties each part performed and the physical spaces they occupied strictly segregated soldier from civilian, thus undoing the work of the previous decade, though its desired end had never been wholly sustained in the visual realm, as the ruptures in its pictorial presentation of equivalent harmony between the two realms demonstrate. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, symbiotic unity between the two spheres remained a problematically projected ideal in the graphic record. Visual propaganda’s earlier representation of seamless unity remained a mere ideal. Indeed, the social stratification effects of symbolic violence, which systematically subordinated all other social elements to the military in the underlying theme of Cultural Revolution representation, indicates that a genuine abolition of the civil-military distinction was never actually intended. Rather, the state’s aim was the regulation of society in response to hostile anti-revolution conditions at home and abroad. This representation was also an attempt to effect a mass transformation of various social identities rooted in traditional society as the prerequisite for the socialist modernization of China. Nevertheless, professionalization, hence elitism, was a prerequisite for modernization, socialist or otherwise. As Strand and Chan note in their reflection on Chinese militarism from the close of the dynastic system to the end of the Cultural Revolution, “The distinction between civilian and military realms is 294 often blurred, and yet it is possible to discern a definite professional current throughout the PLA’s history.” 361 One example of the way in which this current manifests itself can be found in civil-military exemplar Lei Feng. Lei Feng hagiography publicized at the height of the Cultural Revolution stressed qualities both red and expert. This insistence on including expertise along with revolutionary will demonstrates the persistence of professionalizing qualities within a rigidly dogmatic political culture ostensibly obsessed with the political. 362 Other distinctions marked by dress, labor, and prominence in graphic representation further reflect cleavages that disrupt the sustainability of the pictorially projected symbiotic ideal. In this sense, contradictory messages in propaganda materials reflected the inevitable conflict between modernization’s necessary specializations and socialist ideals of a classless society. This sometimes manifests itself in conflict between text and imagery intended to convey civil-military symbiosis. Indeed, images often contain messages relevant to, but significantly different from, the main content of their accompanying titles, captions, or articles. Even when they do not conflict, textual accompaniments to images can diverge significantly in their content. For example, action in the pictures more predominantly tends to express soldiers’ good deeds, while articles more frequently conclude with the gratitude of the civilian beneficiaries of the good works. This same reversal of 361 David Strand and Ming K. Chan, “Militarism and Militarization in Modern Chinese History,” Trends in History, 2: 2 (1982): 67. 362 Shen: 38. 295 significance repeats itself in the hosting motif, which is often represented visually in very different terms from its textual discourse. Visuals tend to portray masses hosting, while the text tends to present these interactions with a focus on the initiation taken by the servicemen in calling on the people of a region in which troops are stationed. Overall, however, official value propagation in the visual messages of Cultural Revolution imagery often conflicted, reflective, perhaps, of Mao’s oracular propensity to contradict or reverse himself. The Cultural Revolution’s depiction of interchangeability between civil and military realms notwithstanding, representation of that ideal had been complicated by the perhaps oxymoronic expression of competing claims inherent in a socialist (read classless) modernization. A 1973 poster of workers in a cotton mill illustrates this contribution as professionalism’s sustained presence throughout the radical egalitarian peak in PRC history, while it also seems to imply incongruously that revolution is not for the people. Its title instructs its viewers that “Military Training Is for Revolution—Spinning and Weaving Are for the People,” juxtaposing the revolution-making realm from the popular one and thus dividing the labor accordingly. 363 By the reform era, however, it becomes difficult to discern whether revolution, or any form of armed struggle, is now for soldiers. 363 Yung Son-chin, Military Training Is for Revolution—Spinning and Weaving Are for the People,” Shanghai Weaving Work Committee Art Group, Shanghai Peoples Publishing House, Shanghai Fine Arts Printing Press, March 1973 as reproduced in Fraser, (1977): 47. 296 As the militant moment lapses in Chinese history, even the army retreats from combative posturing. Professionalism, detectable within as well as between various forms of textual propaganda, is the social reassertion of the fundamental role of class distinction in the process of modernization. Professionalization is the main distinction between the two realms of army and society. The reforms, as a higher stage of modernization, simultaneously restore an openness to civil-military difference that had persisted in muted form throughout the Cultural Revolution and accelerate those tendencies that produce it. Both of these changes become immediately apparent in pictorial renderings of civil-military interactions. Perhaps most striking among a catalogue of divergences from previous imagery is the disappearance of the revolutionary subject. Again, the egalitarian nature of this subject, however illusory, is critical to its rise and disappearance. Struggle had united soldier and civilian on political battlefields across a range of activities from rallying to propagandizing to revolutionary spirit studying junkets. Not only did marketization eliminate those formerly unifying activities, it also herded the two sides into separate spheres by dismantling some of their communal habitats, such as the collective, first and foremost among these. Soldiers and civilians continue to interact, but the dissolution of militancy substantially weakens the engine that had driven much of their former cooperation. Depictions of such a process of separation or professionalization are manifestations of a new focus of symbolic violence; one that more openly reflects 297 and naturalizes hierarchy under the reforms. This hierarchy is not a return to pre- revolutionary tradition, but it is rather an inversion of revolutionary norms, which have now become the “old society.” The immediate justification is technological advancement. Defense is visualized less as a production of political will and as more of a science. Political art paints new icons to shape emerging forms of citizens felt necessary to the statist furtherance of development. Former tensions between categories of civil-military ties give way to new illustrated oppositions. In previous years, much of what was contested were two graphic streams of representation in uneasy coexistence, one that depicted humbling exchanges of mutual service, such as soldiers sweeping peasants’ courtyards or having their clothes mended by the (women) people, or those in which soldiers and masses performed ostensibly identical tasks together, many of them agitational in nature. 364 Both streams subtly invested greater authority in army figures by myriad seemingly innocuous measures. These included representing the soldiers as initiators of all the positive actions, endowing the army with the means to present gifts and services of greater value, or denying civilians access to symbolic capital, to name but a few. The first of these streams called attention to the reciprocal provision of services differentiated by group, namely military or civilian, and maintained the 364 Geist discusses the Gang of Four’s attack on cultural forms that were not explicitly revolutionary in nature in the context of its rejection of the docility of the Lei Feng model. Geist, (1990): 104. 298 greatest degree of continuity with longer established visual traditions. The second, on the other hand, pictorially suppressed distinction while presenting the two sides as a single, largely undifferentiated mass. The reforms mark a turn wherein agitational and defense collaborations disappear and displays that heighten distinction replace symbiotic representations. Imagery of collaboration persists, but its setting shifts from the state collective fields to the private market and its frequency has declined. Civil-military collaboration no longer presents as a quotidian affair. Moreover, in contrast to earlier depictions, the actors involved retain a differentiated identity presented in dress, behavior, and language across a range of interaction. In addition to these transformations, pictorial accounts portray new fields in which soldiers and civilians share concern and take action, such as social welfare projects more broadly construed than those that had strictly limited themselves to provision of immediate material necessities. Although hierarchy, here enabled through symbolic violence, is more overt in reform era propaganda, there is enhanced concealment of the unfair inequalities inevitably produced by such a hierarchy behind a façade of “universal” prosperity that is synonymous with modernity. It is important to note that modernity is depicted under the reforms mainly as being rich and powerful, conditions which require complementary and often more numerous groups of poor and dominated, both of which, of course, remain invisible casualties of modernization. 299 Conclusion Graphically modeled civil-military relations demonstrate substantial continuity and change over the two decades of revolution and reform examined in these pages. Among notable transformations is the decline of the visual megaphone of mass communication, the Chinese political poster, already moribund in the initial years of the reforms. Despite its disappearance, however, civil-military imagery finds new forms on which to project itself, including billboards and internet, in addition to print pictorial serials, all of which ensure that the visual field does not constrict under marketization. If canvases abound for prescriptive imagery, so too do party-state efforts to model an ideal relation congenial to its perceived interests, which have transitioned from a radical symbiosis between soldiers and civilians into a “professionalizing” model of complementary distinction. Such interests naturally elevate various groups at various times while subjugating others and are effected in part through visualizations that attempt to elide this domination. Revolutionary Fatigue and Reform Symbolic violence in civil-military pictorial forms endures under conditions of societal demilitarization fostered by the reforms, which themselves arise out of a revolutionary saturation and fatigue that found its expression after 300 the death of Mao. Coming at the close of a decade of ultra-militarization so radical it was almost certain to eventually engender its antithesis, Mao’s death provided an opening for collective acknowledgements of and reactions to a mass fatigue of militancy, a catalyst for the coming upheaval expressed in the all- encompassing watchword of reform and opening. Transformation in symbolic violence issues from its reshuffling of privileges accorded to various social agents. Marketizing demilitarization ushered in by revolutionary fatigue inverts the hierarchy that privileges army over civilian society, and particularly hoists entrepreneurs and intellectuals into positions of prominence over their more rustic armed predecessors. Overnight it seemed the nation’s revolutionary romance had been forsaken for shameless materialism, albeit a version of materialism presented as a felicitous dovetailing of individual and state interest. The market disempowered many social forces, such as the peasantry, whom it also disarmed, inhabitants of the hinterland, in addition to the rank and file of the military. Indeed, a kind of counterrevolutionary “fanshen” was effected as all the interests of all these now comparatively disenfranchised groups had been promoted by the CCP revolutionary project in general and the Cultural Revolution in particular. Their domestic opponents, on the other hand, were rehabilitated and these intellectuals, capitalists and rank and file party cadres all enjoyed superior opportunities for advancement during the reform period. This inversion of the formal hierarchy of symbolic violence is, consequently, reflected in the official graphic record, 301 particularly by a diminishing prominence in iconic peasants, soldiers, and workers. Among these shifts, the soldier’s retreat from the everyday visual field on widely circulated objects like the reform period version of the 10-yuan bill depicts a striking military absence in contrast to its Cultural Revolution iteration. The soldier’s absence in official pictorial forms in general, and in the completely ubiquitous medium of paper currency in particular, divorces the soldier from the iconic masses as each social category becomes increasingly segregated from the others in the newly prescribed orthodoxy of complementary unity. Whereas the militarization of society and the army's attendant effort to appear mass-like had flattened many superficial distinctions between soldier and citizen, woman and man, urbanite and villager, reform logic demands specialization and distinction. Now graphic accounts march the soldiers back into the barracks and disarm the masses on their farms and in their factories as they abandon the militia along with the revolution. An urgency to make up for lost time in the race to integrate into the global market impels yet another wholesale rejection of the past in an inverted echo of the Cultural Revolution’s strain of cultural nihilism. This results in sudden transformation of the official visual field. Here aesthetic fatigue has an accelerating effect that produces a “relative” innovation in imagery. I stress “relative innovation” for the reform images that replace the revolutionary ones are repackaged from May Fourth era ideological themes of science, technical 302 progress and cosmopolitanism. Where political art had once concerned itself with the avant-garde, it now turned to the slightly more distant past to break with the recent past, jettisoning radicalism for conservatism that is mainly radical only in its rejection of revolutionary values. Indeed, the revolutionary period of the first seven decades of the twentieth century, rather than the centuries of imperial rule that preceded it, now constitutes the past that China must modernize. Shifts in PRC political culture inverted previously held notions of tradition and novelty. What had been previously held as radical had become an entrenched dogma that liberalizing forces sought to supplant with notions that were earlier derided for their traditionalism. The reforms dismantled the party’s own carefully constructed socialist hierarchy by rejecting establishment values and overriding the CCP’s solid, if rather recently entrenched traditions. What they promoted in place of those ideals that emerged in the years preceding the People’s Republic and took hold as absolutes in the Cultural Revolution were a set of pre- revolutionary values devoid of any specific association with the party. Indeed many of the reform values more strongly resembled ideologies the party was founded to combat. The recent and radical past now belonged to the PRC’s tradition with which the reforms broke to adopt many norms of an earlier social code previously rejected for its conservatism. Consumption replaced frugality, as specialization overtook mass ingenuity, and detachment supplanted political activism in CCP visual modeling. 303 The radical turn away from socialist ideals of collectivity and equality and toward an atomized appetitiveness that would inevitably exclude large numbers of people spawned a predictable backlash. Reform fatigue began to manifest itself. The rapidity and severity of the shift ensured that even its beneficiaries would lament the end of a heroic era and yearn for its remembered youthful freedom, at least for the generation of urban youth who were sent down to the countryside to both learn from the peasants and more importantly to empty the cities of the chaos-wreaking Red Guards. As the Cultural Revolution recedes, the substitution of pragmatism for idealism engenders a nostalgia for a purity, perceived as lost, in an ironic conservative impulse to cling to a radicalism gone stale. This revolutionary nostalgia can also be understood in terms of fatigue with the post- revolutionary order, rather than a reinvigoration of revolutionary fervor. Nothing manifests this tendency more clearly than the commodification of radicalism abetted by the revolutionary chic. The hawking of revolutionary relics and quasi- revolutionary experiences inverts radical values by putting them up for sale. The wedge that economic reform and opening to the west drove between the revolution and reform eras created an opportunity to remember fondly the mid-sixties through the seventies. This nostalgia helped to retranslate select Cultural Revolution icons on the basis of their flexibility in expressing the revolutionary fervor of the past in a form congenial to the changed values of the capitalist present. The retranslation peculiar to the reform era refracted these icons’ political significance, now largely manifested on the mass level as 304 nostalgia through commodification, which also smoothly reconstructed the identity of “the revolutionary masses” as a mass market. Nevertheless, an important continuity, with the various pasts of China’s twentieth century, persists as mass consumption becomes increasingly identified as the main signifier of the country’s transhistorical and transideological goal of successful modernization. Complementary Interaction without “Professionalization” Like so many other continuities in civil-military relations from revolution to reform, models carry over again from the Cultural Revolution to marketization. Perhaps more notable than the changes between the two eras overall is the continuity of symbolic appeals even as new forces rise up to deploy them. During the reforms, some of these state models are appropriated by agents hostile to them and articulate as a resistance and challenge to state authority. The movement that positioned itself in Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 represented the most notable of these reform era efforts. There, as Hauser notes, the events of resistance were given a complexion and succeeded in gathering support because they were able to invoke significant symbols of national identity and unity that inspired onlookers to actually conceive of themselves as part of a different and dignified alternative community. 365 365 Gerard A. Hauser, “Communication of Cultural Memory and the Reconstitution of Society,” Sarah Sanderson and Donald P. Cushman, eds., Political Communication: Engineering Visions of Order in the Socialist World, Albany: State University of New York Press, (1992): 172. 305 Indeed, it may be that the state’s modeling too powerfully persuaded many soldiers that interference in that affair in obedience to commands to crush the rebellion was simply unthinkable. Ideally, professionalization dispenses with such qualms, though a professional model in a classic sense has not to date been adopted by the PLA. While in a civil-military context, complementary distinction involves a comparative desegregation from the Cultural Revolution model, soldiers and civilian modeling continues to portray the two sides as proximate and interactive. Pictorial depictions of civil-military interaction persist in stressing soldiers' fulfillment of extra-military obligations toward civilians and civilians' demonstrations of gratitude and respect throughout the professionalizing reforms that ostensibly aimed to depoliticize and specialize China's armed forces. Indeed, images of soldiers coaching youth, providing social services to the elderly, and performing tasks for citizens of all ages, ranging from personalized assistance through complimentary haircuts and bicycle repair to construction of public works projects, all remain prominent through the early reform period and beyond. Thus, professionalization in this context cannot be understood as an abandonment of the 'servant of the masses' ethos. Despite stated reform goals of downplaying voluntarism, spiritual development that proceeds without heed to economic conditions, and revolution making, soldiers continue to be portrayed engaging in good deeds, befriending youth and providing disaster relief. Lewis documents the state's sustained promotion of model citizen conduct throughout the 1990's and beyond in 306 Shanghai. Under conditions of increasing alienation between the state and social forces in the wake of the reforms, the state remains convinced that models are still a necessary and relevant tool of ideological education, though soldiers are no longer quintessential models for civilians. The state achieves this continuity of model projection in part by transferring its visual messages from political posters to billboards in the city center. The model emulation campaign's continuity into the new era most likely owes more to propaganda's perceived currency in countering the post-Mao disillusionment in civic projects than any inertia or other failure to overturn the model emulation tradition. 366 Under such conditions, Mao’s image and other revolutionary iconography lose their immunity to the market and become commodities. Commodification of revolutionary imagery here represents fatigue in a capitalist idiom, even as the revolutionary period is re-experienced through its nemesis, capitalist mass consumption. Disenchantment with the failure of the revolution to fulfill promises made in many aspects of its culture, wielding its relentless revolutionary imagery, creates an initial fatigue with both this same imagery and the society it is supposed to engender. Furthermore, the gap between such imagery and social reality becomes too obvious for ideological structures to effectively contain. Such fatigue in turn energizes the search for an alternative society, which will also rely on images, both new and old in various forms. Such variety is necessary for a number of reasons, but is particularly important to forestall a serious generation 366 Lewis, (2002): 143. 307 gap that can undermine the new ideology. The young have no directly experienced past to be nostalgic about and the old must be convinced that their own youth was not a complete waste. Yet this new society of market reform in China, due to the very urgency created by disenchantment with its predecessor, also wears out its welcome, particularly among the older segments of the population already suspicious and weary of drastic change in general. Nostalgia is the ideological device employed by the newly marketized society to palliate these old misgivings. The market simply capitalizes on the nostalgia produced by this new fatigue by commodifying this emotion in order to strengthen itself through the depoliticization, or more accurately, repoliticization, of its revolutionary predecessor. This de/repoliticization is the practical and critical function of the new ideology, which works to prevent a revolutionary resurgence that would threaten marketized society. De/repoliticization is also possible because most consumers of revolutionary nostalgia are too old and fatigued to take up the struggle again. Thus hollowed out of their inspirational meaning, revolutionary icons can now be marshaled to drive consumption, encourage obedience to authority and foster stability, in short, for purposes completely antithetical to the revolutionary project they once signified. 308 Markets Appropriate the Revolutionary Past Reform appropriations of Maoist iconography in visual and conceptual structures are apparent in both official graphic political media and in the artists who are comparatively independent of the state, however tightly tethered they find themselves to the international art market they produce for. Both state cultural producers and their private market counterparts distort the Maoist canon in service to their ideological and profit oriented ends. Joining them in the mining of radical CCP iconography are rising entrepreneurs, who exploit the images to either draw consumers and move product, as the businesses of Cultural Revolution themed restaurants and tea houses do, or to motivate a workforce. In one such instance, a Chengdu entrepreneur plastered his real estate development company with Cultural Revolution slogans and posters to “inspire his employees to be loyal and hardworking.” 367 How effectively these discursive artifacts evoke their desired response is difficult to gauge, but they clearly resonate with the authority figures who deploy them. What is easier to discern and appears common among the state ideological apparatus, Chinese artists independent of it, and entrepreneurial poachers drawing on the same aesthetic tradition is the shifting utility of Cultural Revolution imagery and its deliberate deployment to elicit a nostalgia that can then be capitalized on in one fashion or another. 367 Shengtian Zheng, “Searching for the ‘Lost Chapter’ in the History of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 2002: 11. 309 Certainly the practitioners of what came to be termed Political Pop are the masters of this game as they recycle Maoist icons. There is a profound and perhaps not unintentional irony in the commercial appeal of the genre’s play on the artificiality of both capitalist advertising and socialist propaganda appeals. While Political Pop exposes the underlying similarities of both political models, it does so by reworking standards of the Maoist revolutionary canon. Though its political repositioning Mao and other revolutionary romantic subjects became had grown somewhat stale by the close of the 1990’s, the movement reached its apogee at the end of the early reform era that concludes the period examined here. Political Pop’s prominence just ten years after a time when the images of its palette retained their sacredness marks the distance both political and pop culture had traversed in those few years. Political posters instrumentally aided this process of recontextualizing and reconfiguring the previously inviolate imagery of the past. Because posters attained a ubiquity in the Cultural Revolution era so pronounced, their presence alone is often sufficient to conjure up a period set, an effect employed reasonably successfully in several Cultural Revolution themed restaurants and tea houses that sprung up in major Chinese cities and grew in popularity as the Mao years receded. Significantly, marketization transformed the political poster's social significance. The space opened up by the reforms that first engendered this nostalgia then allowed for its commodification has helped preserve some of the material employed in this study. It is ironic indeed that the capitalism and its 310 attendant commodificaton so decried in the posters serve as the surest means of their preservation, even if largely outside of China. There could be no nostalgia for the relics without the recession of and departure from the past, just as the nostalgia inflates their value and ensures their market. Unconcerned with the preservation benefits of the contemporary fascination with an earlier Marxist aesthetic, Morozov complains of what he sees as a misplaced enthusiasm: What is most worrying...are the various attempts at commercializing the products of Socialist Realism. It is no secret: before our very eyes Socialist Realism is being turned into a fashionable label in mass culture and is also becoming an exotic, alluring dish on the menu of discerning intellectuals. No one seems to mind if works of art come onto the market that all decent people were ashamed of back when they were made. 368 It is precisely this dovetailing of investment of market value with a redirection of academic attention to popular culture that ensures the pre-conditions for the establishment of an archive. Separation from the commodified cultural forms in this case is necessary to their marketability. In addition to temporal separation, the vogue of Maoist aesthetic forms also depends on the disappearance of an outmoded political culture in the fabric of mainland Chinese public life that is inscribed on those relics, and the extinction of their once ubiquitous political medium. In the early reform years, posters begin to deliver markedly different messages from previous 368 Morozov, (2003): 64-5. Andrews argues that belief in the integrity of both the artwork and its mission of socialist guidance informed much Chinese Cultural Revolution political art in the socialist realist tradition and consequently distinguishes Chinese cultural products of the era from their Soviet counterparts to which Morozov chiefly refers. Andrews, (1998): 7. 311 years. Marketization dramatically transformed public space, first in the urban political landscape, then gradually spreading throughout the country. The explosion of popular media products in the form of television, film, and periodical literature, to list but a few categories, expanded venues for ideological message delivery as they eroded the state’s monopoly of broadcast visual culture. 369 Thus, marketization causes discrete political propaganda to lose its domination of the visual field. 370 Instead, the market merges the state sector’s political interests with the private sector’s economic interests until these interests become indistinguishable, as manifest in Deng Xiaoping’s proclamation that “to get rich is glorious.” With the state advocating for the generation of wealth, which will necessarily engender disparity, and consumption, it becomes increasingly difficult to tease CCP propaganda out from corporate advertising. New Media and Persistent Visual Modeling The introduction of markets ushered in unofficial counterweights to official artists and media in the form of market-shackled, if otherwise independent, journalists and professional artists, both of whom had established a significant presence as early as 1978. 371 Even more significantly, commercialization opened the floodgates to market advertising that now shared 369 The evolution of CCP propaganda under conditions of marketization is charted in Geremie Barmé, “CCP™ & ADCULT PRC,” The China Journal, 41 (January 1999). 370 Stig Thøgersen, “Challenges to the Chinese Party-State,” Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and Bertel Heurlin, eds., China’s Place in Global Geopolitics: International, Regional and Domestic Challenges, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002: 167. 371 Christopher J. Smith, China in the Post-Utopian Age, Boulder: Westview Press, 2000: 453. 312 space with political advertising, a better term for what propaganda becomes when it finds itself in more strident competition with other effective sources of publicity. Public service message-bearing billboards and broadcast public service announcements gradually replaced posters, with these new forms both more adept at and intent on concealing their ideological purposes. Media had undergone its own revolution as a result of the introduction of a market economy under which electronic forms increasingly supplanted printed materials like poster prints and pictorials, though it must be noted that pictorials both endure in their traditional print format, as well adapt to market and technological developments by supplying a requisite electronic online version adopted by all serial publishers. 372 The poster proved less adaptable to the new media climate. While posters are haphazardly preserved in sometimes ephemeral electronic websites, such sites archive a dead medium. Before their production ceased in the 1990's, PRC political posters commanded an enduring presence in popular CCP political culture. A new woodblock-produced medium after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, posters were published by both civil publishers such as Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House and military enterprises like the Political Department of the Zhejiang Military Region of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Posters published during the Cultural Revolution, whose normal print run typically extends to about 372 PLA Pictorial hosts a fine website with a frustratingly shallow archive. Its issues accessible on the site only go back to 2000. See http://www.plapic.com.cn/. 313 300,000, though some exceeded 2 million copies, as well as the reform era years discussed herein never made their way into a systematic archive in the PRC. This gap is possibly owing in some part to a kind of planned obsolescence of the political campaigns they promoted, or perhaps because of the posters' complete identification with disruptive social movements people had so wearied of by the end of the Cultural Revolution. 373 Those extant have survived randomly in the homes or work units of consumers and collectors, as well as in the hands of memorabilia merchants who hawk, and reproduce, them in shops and markets. More than the marketization of China’s economy drove reform era commodification of posters and other Cultural Revolution relics. The passage of time and the distancing of the Maoist order so marked in the new era combined to engender a nostalgia for what was now seen as a simpler and purer time. The consequent rise in value of graphic artifacts ensured preservation of those that remained and the confluence of this preservation with a western scholarly turn toward popular culture and political communication quite literally created spaces for archived political posters. Now held in institutes, universities or museums, all of them, at least to my knowledge, outside of China, Chinese visual political propaganda collections reside within reach of many scholars and particularly within reach of those scholars working in the West. Thus, academic interest ensures preservation and some access to the medium in its original form. Still more accessible are those digitized posters available on a number of both 373 Wain, (2003): 45. 314 commercial and non-commercial websites, though most of the sites' entries have limited scholarly utility as the images tend to lack citations. 374 Finally, several private collections have been published in book form, often with accompanying essays and translations of the text beside the glossy color plates. 375 Some of these are in catalogues of exhibitions staged with private collections. 376 Militarized civil-military relations pictured in posters and elsewhere have been overturned to allow for marketization, a process furthered by civilian dominance of society, thus reversing the order of symbolic violence. By sharply dividing labor and de-valuing revolution, i.e., through excessive specialization of labor, capitalism separates soldier from citizen, herding troops back into barracks and divesting them of the authority that allowed for their ideological evangelism among other social forces. Citizens are relieved of their defense responsibilities as the militia shrinks in size and importance. The reform state urges citizens and soldiers alike to consider their social duties more narrowly as values of distinction 374 One of the more comprehensive sources for Chinese propaganda posters with PLA content is a Russian website, "Weapons Gallery," http://weapons.hotmail.ru.propaganda_e.html. Unfortunately the text in the images is too small to read and no translations of the text or citations are provided. The Longbow Group of documentary filmmakers maintain a website introduced in tandem with their 2003 film on the Cultural Revolution, "Morning Sun," www.morningsun.org, which is an excellent archive of song lyrics, textbook excerpts and poster art, among other materials. The most comprehensive sites exclusively dedicated to Chinese political posters are those of Stefan Landsberger, www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/, and of the University of Westminster, www.wmin.ac.uk/china/home.htm. 375 Among the most comprehensive of these are: Fraser (1977); Lansberger (1995); Evans and Donald (1999); and Min, Duo, and Zhang (2003). 376 Some of these exhibitions without publication in the above books include “The Political Body: Posters from the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s and 1970s,” The Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, (15 April-25 June 2004) and Patricia Powell, Shitao Huo, Mao's Graphic Voice: Pictorial Posters from the Cultural Revolution, Madison : Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin--Madison (1996). 315 replace those of uniformity. Marketization's dissolution of collectives and its attendant reintroduction of household responsibility divert some focus to individual endeavor, thus atomizing a good deal of former work to encourage modernized forms of collective cooperation. Widely disseminated and easily accessible visual media help to naturalize such conditions and thereby cultivate acceptance of them insofar as they are perceived as immutable. Symbolic violence waged in part through pictorial imagery in the civil-military motif helped sustain a militarism when the CCP felt that militarism would expedite modernization. As party-state and popular disenchantment with militarism receded, pictures offered an alternate vision of the present and future, one in which the markets of a demilitarized society would deliver a heretofore unacceptably distant national development. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Barbieri, Jeanette (author)

Core Title Fish in and out of water: Changing representations of the relations between the Chinese people and their Liberation Army (1966--1986)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art History,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,OAI-PMH Harvest,political science, general

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Rosen, Stanley (committee chair), Cooper, Eugene (committee member), Grant, Judith (committee member), Lynch, Daniel (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-599267

Unique identifier UC11341078

Identifier 3219814.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-599267 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3219814.pdf

Dmrecord 599267

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Barbieri, Jeanette

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA