Organizer: Wang Zheng, Stanford University
Chair: Emily Honig, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussant: Wendy Larson, University of Oregon
Our goal in organizing this panel is to initiate discussions on an understudied social category—youth—in modern China. Previous scholarly inquires have looked into some aspects of youth, such as student movements, Red Guards movement, and sent-down youth (zhiqing). To date, a conceptualization of this meaningful social category in twentieth-century China has not yet emerged. The three presenters on this panel begin this original inquiry with an interdisciplinary approach.
Zhong Xueping, a comparative literature professor, approaches the subject by analyzing Chinese films made during the Mao era. Her analysis of the cinematic construction of youth contrasts with historian Wang Zheng’s investigation of the official discourse of youth in the Mao era. Examining different social realms with various methods, the two presenters share a common interest in exploring gender implications of the construction of youth. Together, they broaden the scope of the study of the Mao era by highlighting some important issues that have never been raised by China scholars. Sociologist Wang Lihua’s study of contemporary youth journals presents an interesting comparison to the two papers on the Mao era. In an era of market economy, the official ideology of youth no longer claims the dominance. The new dynamics in the contested site of youth tell us not only about the complexity in post-Mao China but also question many assumptions about the Mao era.
Senior Chinese literature professor Wendy Larson serves as discussant.
Qingchun Wansui and Its Ironies: Youth, Gender, and Chinese Films of the 1950s–60s
Zhong Xueping, Tufts University
If "youth" in the May Fourth intellectual movement represented the new and the modern that aimed at smashing the old and the traditional, "youth" in the Mao era continued this modern function but did so on a much larger and grander scale with heavy ideological demarcations. As the Mao era stands being accused of having sacrificed the "youth" of millions of Chinese people, the issue of youth itself and its various implications remain under-explored.
In this paper, I will explore this issue in Chinese films made during the 1950s and 60s. For the panel presentation, I will focus on one or two films. Placing the films against their specific historical context, I will examine their cinematic language in conjunction with the youthful characters, especially female young characters, to see in what ways the cinematic constructions are in fact a mixture of conflicting implications. I will argue that, while on one level, young (female) characters are always heavily ideologically marked, on another, the ostensible ideological demarcations cannot fully prevent fantasies about youth from being smuggled onto the screen. And it is this mixture and the film’s manifested fantasies, more than the CCP’s ideological slogans alone, that helped construct youth and its gender implications in the Mao era. And my interest is to see what kind of fantasies they were, how they were represented and received, and how we are to understand their implications.
Call Me Qingnian But Not Funü: Gender Implications of the Construction of Maoist Youth
Wang Zheng, Stanford University
The dominant image of the Red Guards in English literature reduces youth in the Mao era to a tool of Mao’s political struggle. Much remains unknown about this heterogeneous cohort that experienced the dreams, dramas, and "turmoil" of the era during their formative years. This paper introduces a gender dimension to the study of the Maoist youth. Focusing on the discursive construction of qingnian in the Mao era, I ask how and why "qingnian" (youth) differs from "funü" (women) in the official rhetoric, and what are social implications of the differences between the two discursive categories? I will examine not only official rhetoric but also official organizations such as the Young Pioneer and the Communist Youth League that provide institutional bases for enactment of the state ideology of youth. Recently published memoirs by Chinese authors of this cohort are also analyzed to illuminate a multi-faceted process of constructing youth in which gender, age, family background, and geographic location intersect and generate diverse relations between the individual subject and the dominant discourse.
I argue that Maoist qingnian was a gender neutral normative prescription that offered young women a more privileged position in comparison with the gender specific state construct funü. Although this privileged position was curtailed by party manipulation, and competing gender-biased ideologies and practices, it nevertheless presented a meaningful shift in gender production whose effects are yet to be understood.
Contesting Sites: Social Construction of Youth in the 1990s
Wang Lihua, Northeastern University
How do we understand the category of Chinese youth in the 1990s? Does the category characterized by a non-gender specific identity suggest some similarities between the Maoist era and the current period of a market economy? In this paper, I will provide insights into these issues through an analysis of articles from Chinese Youth, Youth Digest, and Youth Time—journals published in China from 1990 to 1998.
I argue that although the category of youth is age-based, social construction of this category creates multiple identities situated in changeable locations. For example, literature on youth reflects normative prescriptions on how to become a Chinese, a good person, a competitive wage earner, a filial son, a real man, a good woman and a young wife in the 1990s.
Based on these readings, I emphasize three major points: (1) the interplay between traditional practices and customs, Mao’s socialist ideas, nationalism, and capitalism constitutes the basis of the social construction of youth; (2) the existence of various ideologies and multiple identities creates moments of unstable situation within the category; (3) youth has been constructed in both gender and non-gender specific terms. Through this study of the current social construction of youth, I hope to question and rethink the argument that gender equality was derived from a non-gender based category of youth during the Maoist era.