Suchergebnisse

This article presents a historical and ethnographic account of the event of mourning at the Graveyard for the Red Guards in Chongqing. Built in the Cultural Revolution to glorify about 450 Red Guards as "revolutionary martyrs", this graveyard testifies to the tragic nature of their deaths, which resulted from fighting between two factions for their shared goal of "defending Chairman Mao". The post-Mao reform negated the Cultural Revolution. In a way, their deaths and mourning their deaths were stigmatized, resulting in their "second death", but recent important changes in Chinese society have allowed the resurgence of grieving for them, culminating in the granting of the official title of "cultural relic" to the graveyard. Opening up a space to contest their stigmatization and to invalidate the official judgement about the Cultural Revolution, this title signifies the rising imperative to account for every death in the name of life itself. (China J/GIGA)

Through an example of the prohibition against dating in a technical school in southwest China in 1978, this article analyzes how three intersecting forces - the ideology of socialist collectivism, the structure of the work unit system and the socialist sovereign ownership of the body - account for sexual repression in the Maoist period in China. Rather than being an ahistorical, essential component of Maoist socialism, sexual repression (psychic and social) was a historically specific and complex phenomenon. The transformation of sexual repression at a historical moment took the form of an assemblage of the return of love discourse and an emergent desire-centered subjectivity in the great transformation from Maoist socialism to the post-Mao reform period.

Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China's profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.