The Human–Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese...

transcript

The Human–Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection

of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese Theoretical Physics, and

Chinese Revolutionary Theory

Tina Mai Chen

Cultural Critique, Number 80, Winter 2012, pp. 151-181 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

DOI: 10.1353/cul.2012.0002

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Manitoba (1 Sep 2013 01:15 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/v080/80.chen.html

THE HUMAN–MACHINE CONTINUUM IN MAOISMTHE INTERSECTION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM,

JAPANESE THEORETICAL PHYSICS, AND

CHINESE REVOLUTIONARY THEORY

Tina Mai Chen

Twentieth-century science shared a belief with the century’srevolutionary projects in a dynamic malleability and Xuidity of formthat conjoined machines to human beings. Projects that developed outof this shared belief addressed issues of social organization, science,and creative imagination. Together, they invoked spatial alignmentsand embodied practices that reconceptualized the boundaries betweenhumans and machines. Throughout the century, East Asia, the SovietUnion, and the United States acquired meaning and form partially inrelation to the ways in which human–machines populated particularspaces. At the same time, who and what constituted humans, human-ity, and machines emerged out of interactions between interconnectedlandscapes and the creative imagination. The other articles in this clus-ter draw our attention to these dynamics in texts of science Wctionand animated television series. This article shifts our attention to theways in which revolutionary theory and scientiWc knowledge informedeach other and were mediated through transformation of the naturallandscape in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Mao Zedong, rev-olutionary theorist and leader of the PRC from 1949 to 1976, concep-tualized dialectical materialism as part of broader twentieth-centuryconversations about the potential for particular scientiWc methods,materials, and social organization to enable collective human libera-tion. As such, reading PRC popular cultural mediations of science andrevolutionary theory in a manner that is attentive to the operation ofhuman–machine continuums in the metaphors, visual imagery, rep-resentational bodies, and landscapes provides new insight into masssubjectivity in Maoist China.

Voluntarism, permanent revolution, and mass mobilization areconsidered key concepts in Mao’s articulation of socialism. Each drawsupon an understanding of materialist dialectics that productively canbe explored through a focus on a human–machine continuum. The spe -ciWc ways in which humans and machines interacted within Maoismto promote a process of qualitative transformation not only providesan alternative approach to study of Maoism. It also highlights theshared discursive terrain linking Mao’s interest in Japanese physicistSakata Shochi to circulation within the PRC of How the Steel Was Tem-pered, a Soviet socialist realist novel with two Wlmic adaptations. Thesetexts further resonate with representations of land-reclamation cam-paigns and the forging of collective forms that united tools and abledand disabled bodies as the basis for qualitative change in the PRC. Ahuman–machine continuum thus can be seen as central to socialisttransformation as envisioned by Mao.

PRODUCTIVE INTERSECTIONS, JUXTAPOSED TEXTS

Recent scholarship on nature in the Maoist period foregrounds thedevastating consequences of the modernizing claim that man can con-trol nature (Shapiro 2001). Scholarship on science in the People’s Re -public of China analyzes the intersection of modernization frameworkswith mass popularization and international circulation of scientiWcknowledge and culture (Johnson 2011; Schmalzer 2008; Schneider2010). This essay focuses on the highly politicized engagement withspeciWc scientiWc ideas that were encapsulated in Maoist dialectics andMao’s assertion that “human knowledge and the capability to trans-form nature have no limit” (Mao 1977, 138).1 In Maoist praxis, the linkedtransformation of man, nature, and society along an inWnite trajectorycan be unpacked through juxtaposition of: (a) Mao’s interest in Japa -nese theoretical physicist Sakata Shoichi; (b) the theoretical develop-ment of Maoist dialectics; and (c) mass subjectivity expressed throughland-reclamation projects. These strands informed one another andresulted in speciWc mass-cultural forms of embodiment that exempli-Wed the desired qualitative transformation of human and machineswithin a human–machine continuum.

The realm of science was central to the conceptualization of ahuman–machine continuum in Maoism. As Edward Friedman (1983)

TINA MAI CHEN152

argues, the optimistic engagement by Chinese intellectuals with therevolutionary transcendence of Einsteinism since the May FourthPeriod (1919–25) informed Mao’s ongoing interactions with physi-cists and electron theory. Analysis of Mao’s relationship with SakataShoichi, and Mao’s writings in which he invokes Einsteinian meta -phors, deepens our understanding of the political projects driven byMaoist dialectics, continuous revolution, and the unleashing of energyby mass mobilization. It also, as Friedman details, highlights geopolit-ical concerns associated with Cold War frameworks and Sino-Sovietrelations. As such, Mao’s relationship with Sakata Shoichi, as well ashis writings on the relevance of Sakata’s ideas to the revolutionarytransformation of China, is a point of entry for analysis of the multi-ple registers in which machines, humans, and nature—and the bound-aries between them—were developed in China in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cheng Yinghong (2006), in his analysis of Maoist cosmology as for-mulated at the intersection of science and ideology, quotes from Mao’s1964 comments on Sakata Shoichi’s writings and notes the extensionof Mao’s interest in physical science to cells and their origins. Notably,in these comments Mao referenced a Soviet female scientist who re -portedly had been working on making cells from noncellular material,a reference that draws out the blurred boundaries between organicand nonorganic form.2 Mao’s engagement with the creation of newforms—that is, qualitative change—and their localized transnationalreferents sit at the center of my analysis of the human–machine con-tinuum in Maoist China. As Cheng and Friedman clearly demonstrate,there existed a foundational cross-fertilization between key Maoistideological concepts such as class struggle and continuous revolutionwith his interest in theoretical physics. Recognizing this brings intoconversation texts more commonly located in distinct and separatespheres. Mao’s emphasis on inWnite divisibility functioned not onlyto drive projects for splitting existing forms within the realm of sci-ence, but also to underpin social experiments to create new forms thatcould be enabled by a process of splitting and divisibility, or throughcontradictions. A primary focus on human–machine forms and the cre-ative moments out of which they emerged suggests a productive jux-taposition of Mao’s writings inspired by Sakata Shoichi, the circulationwithin China of the Soviet socialist realist novel and Wlm Pavel Korcha-gin / How the Steel Was Tempered, and propaganda materials associated

THE HUMAN–MACHINE CONTINUUM IN MAOISM 153

with both land-reclamation projects of the mid-1950s and representa-tions of disabled bodies. The shared concerns evident in these differ-ent types of texts, campaigns, and audiences foreground the centralityof a human–machine continuum in the development of Maoist praxisand its discursive categories of subjectivity.

By the mid-1960s, many of the points of convergence between bod-ies, machines, science, and socialist spaces assumed easy cross-textualcoexistence. For instance, the November 13, 1964, issue of Peking Review,an English-language weekly magazine produced for international cir-culation under the control of the PRC, layered its general-interest sto-ries and photographic inserts so as to subtly make these connections.Two main sets of articles dominated this issue: celebrations associatedwith the 47th Anniversary of the October Revolution, which includedevents within the PRC as well as reports from Chinese delegates visit-ing Moscow, and visits to China by international digni taries from Asiaand Africa that were linked to the Second Conference of Non-AlignedCountries in Cairo. However, the photographs prom inently insertedinto the written account of Indonesian President Sukarno’s visit to thePRC were not of foreign leaders. Rather, two quarter-page photographsfeatured the Wreball and mushroom cloud produced by China’s suc-cessful explosion of its Wrst atomic bomb on October 16, 1964. The mag-azine did not include a story about the bomb, thus leaving readers tomake their own associations between this scientiWc accomplishmentrooted in the splitting of atoms and the surrounding text that linkedAsian–African–Latin American friendship to the practice of “Wghtingagainst all imperialists and neo-colonialists, Wghting for the establish-ment of a just and prosperous society and a new world of happiness forall mankind” (4). The magazine then concluded with regular columnson cultural exchange with China and “ The New Generation.” If onewas unsure about the embodied liberation that the October Revolutionand Asia–African–Latin American nonalignment produced, this lattercolumn relayed the story of twelve-year-old Zhao Xianghao. Para-lyzed in both legs since early childhood, Zhao overcame his physicallimitations with the help of his classmates, who voluntarily acted ashis “extra legs,” acts that inspired the generosity of people across thenation, including the workers and staff at an artiWcial-limb factory inthe provincial capital who provided him with a wheelchair, completewith a writing board that could be tucked away when not in use.

TINA MAI CHEN154

The use of prosthetic limbs is of course a literal point of connec-tion between bodily Xesh and steel technology. In Maoist China, theexistence of human–machine hybrid forms also referenced mass mobi-lization linked to class struggle as the creative force out of which suchindividualized hybrid forms emerged. As I will discuss, the physicaland discursive hybrid human–machine forms that populated MaoistChina derived from a combination of recognition of the dehumaniza-tion resulting from feudalist labor exploitation and capitalist laborconditions alongside a belief in mass subjectivity and mobilization aspractices of liberation. As such, machinelike repetitive activities inthemselves were neither condemned nor celebrated; they acquired im -portance relative to the types of new bodily forms they imagined andcreated. Moreover, because Maoism espoused human voluntarism andthereby rendered people’s consciousness rather than material condi-tions as the motive force of history, the tempering of new bodies didnot necessarily require advanced technology, specialized knowledge,or an inventor’s genius. Rather, the human–machine continuum wasenmeshed within a form of mass subjectivity released from individuallimitations and thus able to become an expression of humanity. Thisexpression frequently took the form of writing and affective commu-nication in diaries or autobiographical accounts as represented andmediated through cultural heroes in China, including the Soviet heroPavel Korchagin.3 As in the example of Zhang Xianghao or Pavel Kor-chagin in Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, practices ofwriting emerged as markers of the successful reassertion of human-ity rooted in machinelike collective activities, the fusion of bodies tobasic essential tools, including hammer, sickle, earth, and the use ofprosthetic limbs where needed. The collective fusion reXected theprocesses envisioned by Mao that developed out of applying theoret-ical physics and Einsteinism to Chinese conditions and materialistdialectics.

SAKATA SHOICHI AND CELLULAR CHANGE IN THETHOUGHT OF MAO ZEDONG

In the world of physics, Japanese physicist Sakata Shoichi holds a placein the canon of atomic physics for the “Sakata model.” As a leading

researcher in elementary particles, Sakata developed in 1956 the Quarkmodel, which proposed quarks as the building blocks of protons, neu -trons, and lambda baryons. His theories and research were also centralto the development of now-accepted theories of neutron oscillation.Sakata’s approach to theoretical physics was informed by, and func-tioned to reinforce, his engagement with Marxism, as well as Engels’sDialectics of Nature (Sakata 1971). These ideas were developed duringthe rise of Japanese militarism in post–World War II Japan, historicalmoments marked by the beginning of the atomic age, the U.S. mili-tary occupation of Japan until 1952, the subsequent domination by theUnited States of Japan’s foreign relations, and the domestic erosion ofdemocratic practices in the name of stability and economic develop-ment. In this context, Sakata emphasized the importance of dem o -cratic principles in science, particularly through the development ofhis research group known as the Elementary Particle Theory Group.Moreover, he vocally opposed the use of atomic research for militarypurposes and he spoke out against U.S. imperialism in Japan andinternationally. In his speeches and policy reports on the democrati-zation of science and technology, he called for public disclosure ofatomic research and advocated for democratic management of researchand research autonomy (Low 2007). He was also active in the WorldCouncil of Peace meetings and was a delegate at various related con-ferences in the 1950s and 1960s. In this capacity, in 1963 he was partof the Kyoto Conference of Scientists, which issued a statement ask-ing that the PRC be admitted to the United Nations.4 He also attendedthe 1964 Peking Symposium as leader of the Japanese delegation.5 Inconjunction with Sakata’s address to this symposium, Mao directlyaddressed Sakata’s writings in a meeting with other Chinese leaders.This speech, which apparently referenced a Chinese translation of aRussian translation of Sakata’s writings that had appeared in a Sovietphilosophy journal, then became part of Mao’s writings circulated dur-ing the Cultural Revolution in the Red Guard publication, Long LiveMao Zedong Thought. The canonization of Mao’s comments on Sakatain the Little Red Book reXected a shared enthusiasm between Mao andSakata for inWnite divisibility and the ways in which it informed Mao’sideas on permanent revolution (Friedman 1983).6

What was it that interested Mao in Sakata’s writings, and how doesthis help us think about the human–machine continuum in socialist

TINA MAI CHEN156

China and its international cultural referents such as the Soviet novel and Wlms featuring Pavel Korchagin? The article to which Mao referredin 1964 originally was published in 1947 in the journal Chö-ryü andentitled “ Theoretical Physics and Dialectics of Nature.” In this arti-cle, Sakata put forward two interconnected arguments that resonatedwith Mao’s own thinking on scientiWc knowledge: the relationship be -tween theory and practice, and the nature and levels of (social) change.First, Sakata argued against positivism in science and the ways inwhich it was framed as the study of “nature in itself.” He counteredpositivist positions by noting that experimental physics and labora-tory work that split atoms was not about observing nature but aboutacting upon it. What was needed, he concluded, was both a material-ist dialectics and dialectics of nature, in which theories develop througha synthesis of apparently contradictory Wndings in research. Sakatathus embraced contradictions as a force of dynamism at all levels. Thesecond point Sakata emphasized was the way in which all levels of“motion” are interconnected, and that all of nature exists in a state ofceaseless Xux and unceasing motion. From here he argued that thelevels of motion—molecules, colloids, cells, organs, individuals, soci-eties—“are by no means mutually isolated and independent, but theyare mutually connected, dependent, and constantly ‘transformed’ intoeach other. . . . These kinds of transformations occur constantly, withthe creation of new quality and the destruction of others in ceaselesschange.” What Sakata sought to explain was that the accumulation oftransformations in quantity results in gradual qualitative change (suchas when energy is added to create an electron pair). In the article,Sakata located his ideas in relation to Hegel, Engels, and Lenin ondialectics, as well as scientists such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham,Paul Langevin, and even Robert Oppenheimer.

When Mao took up Sakata’s ideas, he interpreted the ideas througha broad materialist cosmology.7 He found in Sakata both theoreticaland empirical evidence for the correctness of a scientiWc method andlaws of nature expressed in materialist dialectics. In particular, Sakata’sWndings on constant motion, the interconnection between levels ofmotion, and the ways in which destruction alongside constant quan-titative change leads to qualitative change reinforced Mao’s own the-ories on continuous revolution, ongoing struggle, the mass line, and

the continuous remaking of individual minds and bodies as a meansfor social revolution.

The fusion of cellular change with societal change—and the mak-ing of new bodies, labor, and land formations—is evident in Mao’scomments on Sakata’s writings. Mao approached the interconnectedlevels of motion and existence and the ceaseless cycles of changethrough a notion of progress in which laboring human bodies werefused to the rudimentary tools and material conditions of work toproduce a full consciousness.8 He wrote: “ The tools of cognition shouldcomprise such things as the axe, machinery, etc. Man’s cognition stemsfrom practice. We use the axe and machinery to transform the world,and our cognition is thus deepened. Tools are extensions of humanorgans. The axe is an extension of our arms while the telescope is anextension of our eyes. The human body and its organs can all be ex -tended” (Mao 1964). A human–tool continuum that extended organsand developed cognition drew upon key concepts within Maoist the-ory while also foregrounding the centrality of the transformation ofphysical forms for social change. For scholars of human–machines andscholars of Maoism, however, this dimension is overlooked becauseof the focus either on futurist technologies (Bell and Kennedy 2000;Dinello 2006), conclusions about machinelike dehumanization of peo-ple in Maoism (Sigley 2009), or the Maoist championing of humanvoluntarism to mobilize people over technology (Meisner 1999). Yetwhen we consider land reclamation and projects to build major struc-tures in China in the 1950s within the context of Sino-Soviet relations,the multiple levels of meaning ascribed to the blurred boundaries be -tween human organs, nature, and tools appear centrally in the Maoistrevolutionary project.

Mao’s use of cellular terminology in the 1960s resonated with theearlier use of similar metaphors that conjoined commentary on cor-rect socialist development to transformation produced through massmobilization. With regard to ideological struggles within the ChineseCommunist Party, Mao spoke of the parallels between the birth anddeath of cells as part of the natural cycle of growth and the “death” ofparts of the party that allowed for its continuous growth and evolu-tion. Such an organismic framing of Nation, State, and Party was notunique to Mao and can be traced back to reformers such as LiangQichao in the late nineteenth century (see Chang 1987) and Chen Duxiu

TINA MAI CHEN158

in 1915 (Chen 1915). The widespread adoption of Darwinian frame-works from the turn of the twentieth century and their prominencein the May Fourth Movement and subsequent Marxist discourses ren-ders it unsurprising that Mao naturalized the desired sociopoliticaldevelopmental trajectories through reference to biological processes.Through a set of logical connections from the cellular level to the indi-vidual to the collective, Mao articulated an interconnected system inwhich the “sloughing off” of degenerate cells was the contingency forgrowth.

Setting these comments into the context of Maoist praxis high-lights the ways in which materialist dialectics informed Mao’s thinkingon continuous cycles of birth, growth, and death. SpeciWcally, Maoistcellular analogy linked birth, growth, and death in a progressive rela-tionship that unfolded according to collective and revolutionary needs.At the societal level, Mao foregrounded a human–machine continuumas he conceptualized what constituted quantitative and qualitativechange in his Critique on Soviet Political Economy.9 He referred to changesin a factory or a military company through references to cycles ofreplenishment that echoed the cellular metaphors he employed else-where. In this instance, the working out of the theory of continuousrevolution appears not merely as an assertion of the existence of classstruggle in socialism but also as a naturalized process of renovationin which the replacement of parts—be they machinery or soldiers—within the whole was the precondition for the Wnal qualitative change.The grammatical structure of Mao’s comments in Critique is signiW-cant in this regard:

In any lengthy process of change, before entering the Wnal qualitativechange, the subject must pass through uninterrupted quantitative changesand a good many partial qualitative changes. But the Wnal qualitativechange cannot come about unless there are partial qualitative changesand considerable quantitative change. For example, a factory of a givenplant and size changes qualitatively as the machinery and other instal-lations are renovated a section at a time. The interior changes even thoughthe exterior and the size do not. A company of soldiers is no different.After it has fought a battle and lost dozens of men, a hundred-soldiercompany will have to replace its casualties. Fighting and replenishingcontinuously—this is how the company goes through uninterrupted par-tial qualitative change. As a result the company continues to developand harden itself. (Mao 1961/62)

To state that “a company of soldiers is no different” likens soldier to machinery, particularly as the paragraph concludes with the de -sired development and hardening of the company. The passage is strik-ing for the ways in which the parallelism equates men with machineand in which the continued existence of men depends on mechanicalupgrades. The human–machine continuum produced is not a dehu-manized alienated form, however; rather, this passage envisions mech-anized collective activities as the basis of social and human liberation.Moreover, the dialectic and uninterrupted processes of quantitativeand qualitative change across different forms opens up within theparagraph the possibility that the composition of the company doesnot change separately from the evolution of the factory. Rather, themilitary company and factory change alongside and in conjunctionwith each other.

Similarly, Mao’s comments in 1957 that spoke of a revolutionarysubjectivity forged in struggle against the Rightists used metaphorsand practices in which human–machine interchangeability was fun-damental to the creation of the revolutionary subject. In “Beat Backthe Attack of the Bourgeois Rightists” (1957), Mao wrote: “ Temper-ing means forging and reWning. Forging is shaping by hammering andreWning is smelting iron in a blast furnace or making steel in an open-hearth furnace. After steel is made, it needs forging, which nowadays isdone with a pneumatic hammer. That hammering is terriWc! We humanbeings need tempering too.” This passage does more than establishparallels between the making of steel and human beings; it weavesthe processes together through extratextual references in which thepneumatic hammer, the forging and tempering of steel, and massmobilization increasingly were integrated into daily life. As such,forging, tempering, cellular regeneration, and replacement createdhuman–machine and soldier-factory continuums that inhabited thesociopolitical landscape. The resultant mass subjectivity occupied ageopolitical terrain in which the Soviet Union existed as exemplarand enemy, a distinction that hinged upon the theory of continuousrevolution in socialism and its imagined embodied forms. The theoryof continuous revolution is the point of connection between SakataShoichi, Maoist notions of qualitative change, and human–machineformations prominent in land-reclamation projects.

TINA MAI CHEN160

FORGING THE HUMAN–MACHINE CONTINUUM THROUGHLAND RECLAMATION

The human–machine continuum in Maoism embodied faith in the mal-leability of form and a belief in the inseparability of science and ide-ology, organic and inorganic matter, individual and society. From thisperspective, nature also was subject to transformation and reconsti-tution as part of the process of creating new revolutionary subjects.The imagined revolutionary subject was a romanticized fusion of tech-nology, nature, and human labor; but it nonetheless is historically andtheoretically signiWcant because it imagined a mass subjectivity thatrefused liberal formulations of human autonomy and existence.10 Mao’s“war on nature,” in which he sought to tame rivers and transformlandscapes, was not only about implementing modernization pro-grams. It was also about the mutual transformation of land, machine,and human that together expressed and conWrmed scientiWc princi-ples and materialist dialectical approaches he believed were centralto social change and human liberation. For instance, immediately fol-lowing the founding of the PRC in 1949, the state initiated large-scaleprojects to modernize China and bring nature under control. One ofthese, the taming of the Huai River, described the multiple transfor-mations and participation of the people in this nationally coordinatedproject: “[The people of the region were] no longer isolated, no longerignored or oppressed but great, strong and self-reliant. The viewpointof the peasants themselves [was] no longer local. . . . They [knew] thatthe People’s Government had cut through all the old regional selWsh-ness to lay strong hands on the Huai and turn it from a tyrant into aservant of the people” (Fu Tso-yi 1952). The relationship between con-quering nature and conjuring into being “the people” as a collectiveforce in this case rested on the welding of bodies to one another tocreate a collective force of History. Press materials extolling the workof opening up land and building irrigation systems portrayed the mas-sive human efforts needed to triumph over nature as symbolic of thepotential of the strong socialist body to restructure the natural andpolitical environments alike. In the process, human–machine contin-uums were integrated into a newly naturalized landscape that was inconstant motion and that was also intimately tied to speciWc spatial

conWgurations informed by Mao’s interpretation of science, dialectics,and socialism.

Stories about entire units and tens of thousands of volunteersmobilized in the assault on nature often invoked an emerging relation-ship between mass mobilization of labor and machinery in nonurbansettings. In the early 1950s Xood-relief projects—particularly the con-struction of dams on the Huai, Chang Jiang, and Jin rivers—reportagewas characterized by descriptions that melded individual workers intohuman machines, which in turn became part of a larger ediWce thatconquered nature through a symbiotic relationship with steel. Report-ing on the completion of the Fuziling Dam in November 1954, for ex -ample, began by referring to the “countless examples of self-sacriWcingheroism” (“Giant Against the Flood” 1954). Even articles that sin-gled out individual contributions did so as a means to point to newhuman–machine forms. One such article related how Guo Rongwangused his body to breach a gap in the dyke, while others brought inbags of earth to shore up the dyke. As others joined Guo, his bodysymbolically melded into the modern ediWce of the dyke and he wasreferred to as part of a “human wall” (Wang 1954).

Similar language that erased individual human bodies in the nameof collective human–machine forces that tamed nature in epic talesappeared in accounts of land reclamation and the opening up of waste-land. In August 1955, the Communist Youth League issued a call forthe youth of China to “march forward and conquer wasteland” (Shang -wan de qingnian zhiyuan kenhuangzhe zheng kaituo de huangyuan).This call resulted in a mushrooming of wasteland cultivation unitsthroughout the nation as youths tackled hardships while engaging inthe “glorious work” of opening up virgin land. Although organizedas cooperatives, the units simultaneously were referred to as “shocktroops.” Their efforts to remake space acquired battlelike dimensionsin the press (“Zhengfu shahuang de yingxiongmen” 1955). The cross-references linking companies of soldiers, interior change, and factoriespreviously noted in Mao’s Critique on Soviet Political Economy echoesthe militarized language associated with these projects. Moreover, bothMao’s Critique and the land-reclamation projects broaden the spatial ref-erences through which human–machine continuums acquired mean-ing and form to include Sino-Soviet relations, rural projects to controlnature, and internationally circulating theories on cellular change.

TINA MAI CHEN162

The militarized language used to describe the movement to reclaimwasteland forged temporal connections between pre- and post-1949wartime conditions, including the anti-Japanese war of resistance andthe Korean War, and spatial connections rooted in land-reclamationefforts in the Soviet Union and China.11 This fostered within socialistChina a particular model of military masculinity while also invokinga discursive construction of the body in which bodies and small-scaleinstruments, including guns, hammers, and axes, were interdependent.During the Korean War, accounts of war heroes often detailed the rela-tionship between the soldier and his gun, including the stroking of thegun, its place alongside the soldier, and the constant contact betweensoldier and gun.12 The continuous close proximity of gun/hammer/ax to the human body—and its potential for bringing about partialqualitative change—can also be seen in stories of land-reclamationunits who sacriWced sleep to work longer hours. A series of paintingsentitled “A Day for Land Reclamation Unit Members” reproduced inZhongguo Qingnianbao (China’s Youth) in 1956 included two paintingswith this theme (“Kenhuangduiyuan de yitian” 1956). The Wrst depictedthree youths rising while others slept; the second painting showed aunit leader searching out unit members during the night when he dis-covered that, rather than sleeping, the youths were working throughthe night. In the illustrations of these workers, whose predominantlymale bodies stood on the ground attacking tree roots with hammersand pickaxes, the body and tool became one. The aesthetic is one inwhich: (a) the tool does not weigh on the body because the tool ful-Wlls the body and makes it whole; (b) the need for cycles of work andrest is replaced by a constantly mobilized “machine”; and (c) this islinked to an emotionally engaged humanity that links the leader andlaboring young bodies.

For these young Chinese, sleep disappeared from the activities of the human body, alongside the dissolution of individualized spaceaway from work. In this daily routine, the tools of the laboring bodyincreasingly were cemented to the subjectivity of the body so thatsubjectivity did not exist for the body without its tools. The hammerand ax were, as Mao suggested, the tools for transformation of con-sciousness, body, and society. This conjoining of tool to body was fur-ther reinforced by accounts of individuals who found themselvesinjured or had lost limbs and who requested prosthetic limbs so that

they could continue work. While stories featuring persons with dis-abilities were more limited, they often appeared alongside or embed-ded in collective stories so that a qualitative distinction did not alwaysexist between bodies with prosthetic limbs and those whose hammers,axes, and guns had become part of their bodies.

Finally, articles and photographs in national and provincial pressesthroughout the mid- and late 1950s featured commemoration of unitsor individuals (named or unnamed) in the form of statuary or otherpublic displays that provided a public aesthetic of human–machinefusion. Three notable characteristics stand out. First, the persons fea-tured in statues produced in the 1950s and 1960s almost always heldin their hands the tools of their trade. As the worker, peasant, and sol-dier are the most common categories of representation, the hammer,ax, and gun predominate; but other tools may include brooms andwelding torches. Second, the tools take on a form of weightlessnessbecause the body is never constrained or burdened by holding the tool.Third, the linear Xow and aesthetic form of the statues create a circuitthat extends the body through the tool and returns from tool to bodyso that an organic connection is established between tool, body, andcollective activity. The bas-relief Wgures at the base of the Monumentto the People’s Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square and the stat-ues at Zhongnanhai and outside Mao’s Mausoleum are only some of themost well known of these statues that forge bodies and tools together.

Photographs, posters, and statuary created a visual aesthetic of ahuman–machine collective that resonated with textual reports in whichthe limits of the physical body frequently were remade. Much like instories of individual heroes engaged in various forms of labor, openblisters and sores as bodily signiWers of struggle with the past to forgethe future were common features in accounts of youths participatingin reclaiming wastelands. While the act of labor and confrontation withnature occupied a central position in a narrative structure that enabled(human) liberation, the resultant body existed along a human–machinecontinuum. “Every person became like a clay Wgurine,” related onearticle (“enhuangduiyuan de yitian” 1956).

The clay Wgurine in Maoist visual culture was not an inert Wgure;nor was it a Wgure with a clearly demarcated individual body. Rather,as in monumental structures and public art, multiple bodies carryingsmall instruments of labor (usually hammers and axes) characterized

TINA MAI CHEN164

Statue outside Mao’s Mausoleum, Beijing (Photo by Tina Mai Chen)

Statue outside the Military History Museum, Beijing (Photo by Tina Mai Chen)

statuary of the period. These bodies engaged in forward motion as acollective force, with the arms of individuals and their tools mergingtogether as they worked. To describe the youths in the sandy waste-lands as clay Wgurines thus encouraged a bodily form in which therewas no clear demarcation between the human body and the instru-ments of opening up the wasteland—the picks and axes. Rather, onewas the extension of the other, and each individual was connected tothe next. As Mao wrote in 1963: “Why must a true collectivist demandhumility from himself? . . . [H]e knows that work is constructed likea huge machine with its wheels, screws, steel frames, and other partsof different sizes and shapes, each being indispensable. . . . For theperfection of the revolutionary work, he must co-ordinate his ownwork with that of others. He must feel that he cannot bear to be leftout of the collective.” This collective formed out of a human–machinecontinuum in which human bodies and tools were coordinated andwelded together.

HOW THE STEEL WAS TEMPERED:PAVEL KORCHAGIN’S QUALITATIVE CHANGE

It is in this aesthetic and discursive context that the Chinese state’spromotion of the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered and the 1957Wlm adaptation, Pavel Korchagin, can be understood. While othershave considered potentially subversive readings of gender relationsand sexuality in the novel and Wlm (He 2010; Yu 2003), I want to discussKorchagin within the analytic framework of human–machine contin-uums in Maoist China. Pavel Korchagin in the Chinese context broughttogether the human–machine continuum as a condition and expressionof human voluntarism, with commitment to permanent revolutionwithin the shifting spatial alignments of socialism. Because perma-nent revolution and voluntarism were key concepts differentiating theinterpretations of socialism articulated by Mao, Joseph Stalin, andNikita Khrushchev, Mao’s understanding of the relationship betweenphysical and cellular forms, laws of nature, and mass subjectivity werealso part of these broader debates within socialism. In the Chinesecontext, therefore, the human–machine continuum that Korchagin em -bodied also reXects the forms of quantitative and qualitative change

TINA MAI CHEN166

that Mao advocated in part through his engagement with physics andSakata Shoichi.

In 1957, the Soviet Wlm Pavel Korchagin, based on Nikolai Ostrov -sky’s 1933 socialist realist novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, became acenterpiece in urban and rural areas. While Korchagin’s sick and blindbody frames the Wlm and novel, the weak body is juxtaposed to visualimages and a narrative that celebrates an enduring humanity forgedthrough the Party, the military, the construction of the railroad, and lit-erary production. To understand the human–machine continuum inlate-1950s China, several aspects need to be considered surroundingthe importance of Korchagin as a visual reference and model. First, atthe height of Sino-Soviet friendship in the early 1950s, an earlier Wlmversion of Pavel Korchagin circulated brieXy alongside translations ofOstrovsky’s novel. The inspiration drawn from Korchagin in 1950, how-ever, was less connected to permanent revolution and the voluntarismthat featured prominently in the CCP framing of the 1957 version ofHow the Steel Was Tempered. The latter Wlm followed the 20th Party Con-gress in the USSR in 1956, at which Khrushchev articulated his policyof de-Stalinization and when, in China, Mao advocated for agriculturalcooperatives and permanent revolution. These divergent trajectoriesresulted in increased tensions between the Soviet Union and Chinathat culminated in the Sino-Soviet split in 1961. During the periods of friendship and enmity, Pavel Korchagin occupied central—albeitchanging—roles in the articulation of Chinese socialism.13 Because Maoenvisioned a transformation of the human body as being at the centerof healthy socialism, and because he approached the blurring of formand physical limits through an analytic and political commitment todialectical thinking, visual imagery of human–machine continuumswas part of the cultural terrain of theoretical debates in socialism. By1961–62, one of Mao’s primary criticisms of the Soviet Union was thatit “walked on one leg,” whereas socialist countries must walk on twolegs. In his Critique of the Soviet Political Economy, Mao characterized theSoviet Union as “standing on one leg,” a phrase he used to de scribethe emphasis on technology and cadres over politics and masses.14

The problem, Mao asserted, was that the Soviet Union claimed steelwas the foundation and machinery was the heart and soul.

The appeal to metaphors that portrayed the Soviet Union as un -balanced and limping along drew on notions of the healthy body of

socialism as being fully formed. As is well known, Mao argued thattoo much reliance on heavy industry and not enough faith in the powerof the people produced a lumbering (and potentially disWgured) social-ist body politic. To Mao, it was not enough to champion structuressuch as the Fuziling Dam that overshadowed the people or an ediWceor massive machinery that dominated bodies and landscape. Maounderstood that such mechanization was one facet of modernization.The other “leg” was a combination of light industry and mass mobi-lization in rural settings, or a “leg” derived from a hybrid body inwhich the individual tools of labor became extensions of a body hard-ened by revolutionary consciousness and practice.

In the post-1956 period in the PRC, the Soviet hero Pavel Korcha-gin embodied the “Chinese leg” because he was extolled for his rev-olutionary consciousness forged through an “extension of his organs,”voluntarism, and continuous commitment to revolution. In some ofthe most memorable and individualized scenes of the Wlm, Pavel sac-riWces his stricken body as he insists, much like the Chinese youthengaged in land-reclamation efforts, on continuing the work regard-less of the weather or his physical exhaustion. In numerous scenes, heis shown with pickax in hand. He continuously raises it above his headand lowers it to the ground. Even in the Wlmic scenes leading up to hisphysical collapse, the pickax becomes increasingly melded to his body.It functions as a walking stick as he limps along; it is what enableshim to reach his place amid fellow workers. The ax also functions asan extension of his body because it is the point of repeated contactbetween his body and the land that is being forced to yield to the steelrailroad. Yet the ax is not the only point of contact; Korchagin’s dilapi-dated boots, missing most of their soles, mean that his body is separatedneither from the elements nor the land, thus completing the visual con-tinuum of land-machine-body. Nature and land seep into Korchagin’svery being as his body simultaneously merges with the pickax. In theprocess, his body experiences metamorphosis; it undergoes quantita-tive and qualitative change in a dialectic interchange with the landand tools. As a body whose transformation reflects the continual par-tial quantitative and qualitative change that Mao advocated, Korcha-gin captured the imagination of the Chinese people and the state.

The celebration of Korchagin in the PRC in the mid-1950s thuswas not a simple case of transnational socialist visual culture. Pavel

TINA MAI CHEN168

Korchagin and the fusion of tools to his disabled body symbolizedthe power of changing consciousness and the remaking of subjectivitythrough labor that was central to Mao’s critique of the Soviet Union,Maoist campaigns to be “red and expert,” and the theory of continu-ous revolution. Korchagin’s hybrid form was not about fusing thestrong body to the most modern equipment as an agent of utopianfuture; it was about the internalization by a disabled body of low-technology everyday tools. As a disabled body on Chinese soil, Korcha-gin challenged the Soviet framework wherein steel was the foundationand machinery the heart and soul. Instead, his representational bodyexempliWed the Maoist emphasis on politics and the masses. Korcha-gin’s transformed body indeed was the revolutionary heart and soul.His unfailing dedication to the revolution was also important in Sovietsocialism, as evidenced by the place of Ostrovsky’s novel in thesocialist-realist canon of the USSR in the pre–World War II and imme-diate postwar period;15 but in the context of post-1956 China, locatingthe heart and soul in revolutionary praxis rather than machinery waspart of divergent ideological dynamics within the competing social-ist projects. This context rendered disability and its connection tohuman–machine continuums signiWcant to Maoism.

Disabled bodies are often considered anathema to the socialist andsocialist-realist vision of Mao’s China. In fact, Chinese Wlms duringthis period rarely included disabled bodies, either in positive or neg-ative form (Dauncey 2007).16 The emphasis on the strong, healthy bodyas a metaphor for China’s future predominated in visual culture rang-ing from Wlms to propaganda posters to theater and opera. In someinstances, disabled bodies were the objects to be saved and liberatedby Mao Zedong Thought. One well-known example is of deaf-mutechildren featured in a 1969 media campaign that claimed the childrenhad been “cured” at a special school through the unorthodox medicalmethod of study of Mao Zedong Thought. Other stories circulated inwhich Mao Zedong Thought similarly made whole the disabled bodyby returning sight either literally or Wguratively. The emphasis on re -storing the disabled body to its full form means that the stories rein-forced rather than challenged the primacy of a strong, healthy, wholebody. Yet some cases, including the Soviet Wlm Pavel Korchagin, intro-duced alternative bodily forms to the Maoist visual and political dis-course. The presence of this body on the Maoist landscape can be

attributed to its hybrid human–machine structure. It is a body whosemissing limbs, lack of sight, or other disabilities have been displacedby the literal and Wgurative extension of the human organs with in -struments of productive labor—whether ax, machinery, or pen—andwho, through these transformations, expresses an alternative liberatedhumanity developed out of a combined scientiWc and revolutionaryimagination.

Mass-circulated texts routinely linked Pavel Korchagin to disabledChinese bodies that were inspired by Korchagin and whose produc-tive role in society was claimed through a similar metamorphosis ofthe physical body. In a number of articles and letters to the editorpublished in conjunction with the serial publication of Ostrovsky’snovel How the Steel Was Tempered and the 1950 release in the PRC ofMark Donskoy’s Wlm of the same name (USSR, 1942), disabled indi-viduals spoke of the impact of Korchagin on their lives. One personinjured in a car accident wrote on October 1, 1949, in Renmin ribao thatdespite his initial anger at his situation he had now resolved to over-come all difWculties and work to serve the people because he had readHow the Steel Was Tempered (“Bao’er geiyu wo de liliang” 1949). In an -other, a young reader, Zhou Wufang, responded to the story of ZhaoGuailan, a woman who lost her left hand in a factory explosion andovercame depression after reading the story of Korchagin. Havingfallen ill for over a year, Zhou had been inspired by Zhao’s story andrecommended that she also read How the Steel Was Tempered becausethe disabled Pavel had overcome his difWculties to contribute to therevolution. In these early references to the novel and the release of theWrst Pavel Korchagin Wlm, the emphasis was on Korchagin as a char-acter who could heal the soul, a person who could restore the desireto live. He embodied revolutionary spirit because he demonstrated toinjured Chinese that even their broken bodies had a place in socialistsociety. These articles focused on changes in an individual’s mentalstate occasioned during hospital stays and established parallels toKor chagin’s own recovery in the hospital after nearly losing his eyein battle and his subsequent suicidal thoughts.

With the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations following the deathof Stalin in 1953, however, Korchagin was further appropriated forthe Chinese revolution. In this context, the hybrid nature of his body,rather than simply embodying a revolutionary mind, became more

TINA MAI CHEN170

pronounced. A number of articles published in 1954 in People’s Dailymade explicit the ways in which Korchagin countered Soviet revision-ism and Soviet-style “walking on one leg.” One article emphasizedpassages in the novel where Korchagin engaged in self-criticism andtempering. This included a conversation with Rita in which Korchagincriticizes his earlier revolutionary romanticism.17 He ends his exchangewith Rita by stating: “I will stand for what is most important in TheGadXy,18 for his courage, his supreme endurance, for the type of manwho is capable of enduring suffering without exhibiting pain to alland sundry. I stand for the type of revolutionary whose personal lifeis nothing as compared with the life of society as a whole” (Ostrovsky1952, 260–61). The elision of the individual body in the name of thecollective is a central theme of socialist realist literature. What is notableabout How the Steel Was Tempered, and this passage in particular, is thefocus on the transformation of self and the explicit recognition of ten-sions between revolutionary romanticism and tempered bodies. Theseissues resonated with Mao’s 1957 comments about forging and tem-pering in the context of the anti-Rightist struggle. Korchagin’s solu-tion at this point in the novel and Wlm parallels campaigns initiatedin the PRC by focusing on how he can contribute as a laborer (evenafter having been declared unWt for military duty). These articlesmoved early 1950s narratives that focused on the mental struggle tocope with a disabled body. Chinese propaganda regarding How theSteel Was Tempered after Stalin’s death often relocated sick or disabledbodies in productive, laboring spaces such as factories or other workenvironments, just as Korchagin himself tried to do until his bodygave out and precluded his physical presence in these locations (Ren-min ribao, January 25, 1954, 1; Renmin ribao, May 16, 1954, 6).

With the 1957 release in the USSR and PRC of Pavel Korchagin(Bao’er Kezhajin), the second Wlm adaptation of Ostrovsky’s novel, thehistorical contexts of the emerging Sino-Soviet split, as well as cam-paigns to reclaim wasteland and encourage rural mass mobilizationover heavy industry, became more pronounced in Chinese accountsof the relevance of Korchagin to China. In an article by a representa-tive of the Jiangsu broadcasting station, Chen Yuhe listed among the unforgettable moments in the Wlm the process of degeneration ofKor chagin’s body. Yet as the body became weaker, Korchagin’s spiritstrengthened so that he gave unmatched service to the Party (Chen

1957). Furthermore, for Chen Yuhe, the linkages between Korchagin’s disabled body and the 1957 political campaigns to “go to the coun-tryside” relocated Korchagin within the Chinese landscape that wasbeing reclaimed for socialism. The illustrations accompanying ChenYuhe’s article included one of Korchagin charging on the battleWeldand one where he is huddled with three comrades while working onthe railroad. The article acknowledged Korchagin’s increasingly lim-ited mobility but sought to recall the moments when he, along withhis pickax, was remaking land and body. Other articles about the Wlmsimilarly remarked that the youth of China could learn from Korchaginof the importance of going wherever the revolution and Party neededyou, whether to the countryside or a factory, the city or the moun-tains, and to serve resolutely in whatever capacity one is able (“Bao’eryongyuan wuzhe women qianjian” 1957).

Despite these connections that privileged the hybridization ofKorchagin’s body with the pickax, the Wlm stills reproduced in thenational press did not always extol his upright body. Rather, the Wlmbegins and ends with Pavel meekly lying in bed, weakened and im -mobile. This image was frequently used in Chinese press materials.His inability to see or move parallels the conditions under whichOstrov sky wrote the semiautobiographical novel. In this instance, theturn to writing as an expression of revolutionary spirit when the bodycan no longer physically engage in labor was a further hybridizationof the body and extension of the organs through revolutionary tools.Both Soviet and Chinese formulations of art and literature as politi-cal labor, and Mao’s insistence that the power of the pen could be asimportant as that of the gun, increased the signiWcance of the debilitatedbody of Korchagin/Ostrovsky, pen in hand, writing with a make shiftstencil to keep lines separated. This fusion of body, writing imple-ment, and revolutionary resolve further evidenced the changes takingplace at the individual and collective level as Korchagin/Ostrovskystruggled to write the story of a hero who had not abandoned the rev-olutionary spirit. In the framing scenes of the Wlm, the pen became atool, which was sutured to the body until even the suturing failedbecause he was unable to hold a pen. At this time, Korchagin dictatedthe story, making the physical act of writing a collective effort. Kor-chagin’s revolutionary spirit could only be fully expressed, in the end,

TINA MAI CHEN172

when the expression was enabled by a larger entity. Korchagin’s tem-pered body ensured that the disabled body, having undergone con-tinuous qualitative and quantitative change, continued in another,altered form for the future. Having shed body parts and functionsassociated with a healthy body, the body now took its place in the col-lective that was formed through the extension of organs and everydaytools as the basis of practice and cognition. In this sense, the makingof prole tarian literature, as both Lenin and Mao wrote, was furtherevidence that bodies like Korchagin’s acquired full subjectivity as cogsand wheels in the entire revolutionary machine (Mao 1942).

The novel thus reinforces Mao’s own understanding of the waysin which qualitative change was to take place and the revolutionarymachine tempered. Mao’s insistence in Critique of Soviet Political Econ-omy that socialist subjectivity is created through uninterrupted partialqualitative change forged through Wghting and replenishing the com-pany is crucial for understanding Korchagin’s role in the PRC. More-over, linking this passage from Mao’s Critique to passages from Howthe Steel Was Tempered shows how the human–machine continuum ap-pears as a key component of collective subjectivity articulated in Mao-ism. The replacement of parts in the evolution of the whole is evidentin Korchagin’s own physical deterioration alongside his nurturing ofTaya as wife and political actor, and Korchagin’s explanation of thisrelationship in a letter written to his brother just before he becameblind:

Life continues to press down on me on the health front dealing me blowupon blow. Barely have I struggled to my feet after one blow then another,more merciless than the last, lays me low. The most terrible thing is thatI am powerless to resist. First I lost the power of my left arm. And now,as if that were not enough, my legs have failed me. I could barely moveabout (within the limits of the room, of course) as it was, but now I havedifWculty in crawling from bed to table. And I daresay there is worse tocome. What tomorrow will bring me no one knows. // . . . In the eveningsI lead a study circle of Communist youth. These young comrades are mylink with the practical life of the Party organization. Then there is Taya,whose political education and general enlightenment I am doing mybest to promote. And then of course there is love, and the tender caressesof my little wife. Taya and I are the best of friends. . . . Taya is followingthe path I myself took to the Party; for a time she worked as a domesticservant, and now has a job as a dishwasher in a public dining room(there is no industry in this town). // The other day she proudly showed

me her Wrst delegate’s credentials issued by the women’s department.This is not simply a strip of cardboard to her. In her I see the birth of thenew, and I am doing my best to help in this birth. The next step is workin a big factory, where as part of a large working community she willgradually attain political maturity. (Ostrovsky 1952, 327–28)

Korchagin’s characterization of Taya as “the birth of the new” drawsout the cycles of death and birth that Mao believed essential to a healthyParty–Nation–Revolutionary State. Korchagin’s body thus is not onlyfused to the tools of his expression but also to the reconstituted largercollective. This occurs in speciWcally gendered terms in which the malebody of Korchagin nurtures the female body of a peasant womanthrough the appropriate stages of “forging” and “reWning” so that shetoo may participate in tempering steel and transforming herself intoa tempered body according to the model laid out by Korchagin. Withinthe context of Maoist China in the mid-1950s, the emphasis on stagesof labor, forging of the body in relation to work and collective spaces,as well as the recognition of the cycles of rebirth render this novel cen-tral to the articulation of Chinese socialist modernity and the human-machine continuums that populated the transformed spaces of itsenactment.

To think about Pavel Korchagin’s disabled body and its links totechnology/steel and nature is not only to think about how the bodyuses technology; it is also about how scientiWc knowledge and mate-rialist dialectics acquired meaning and form in the PRC. For the mostpart, the scientiWc and theoretical debates were limited to academicsand inner-party dialogues. That did not mean, however, that a prac-tice stemming from the concerns that conjoined Sakata Shoichi’s the-oretical physics to Mao’s understanding of continuous revolution,social change, and dialectics did not infuse mass culture and everydaylives. Maoist land-reclamation and “to the countryside” campaignsare meaningful in relation to the texts associated with Korchagin be -cause the texts emerge as examples of “real socialism.” In essence, fora mass audience, the translation of the dialectics of nature and theo-retical physics promoted understandings of science and technology aspotentially liberating; state policies grounded in modernization theoryand the desire to conquer nature; and the radical reconceptualizationof the relation between human, land, and technology/steel that rec-ognized these interconnections as essential to collective identities.

TINA MAI CHEN174

CONCLUSION: TEMPERED STEEL, TEMPERED BODIES, ANDTHE EXTENSION OF (REVOLUTIONARY) ORGANS

By way of conclusion, it seems appropriate to address questions ofalienation, machines, and labor and to consider what distinguishes thehuman–machine continuum in Maoist praxis from the alienated bodyof capitalism critiqued by Karl Marx. In Capital: A Critique of PoliticalEconomy, Marx wrote: “Large-scale industry was crippled in its wholedevelopment as long as its characteristic instrument of production,the machine, owed its existence to personal strength and personalskill, [and] depended on the muscular development, the keenness ofsight and the manual dexterity with which specialized workers . . .wielded their dwarf-like instruments” (Marx 1990, 504). From Marx’sperspective, when the worker’s capacity for labor was transformedinto a series of practices that abstracted the personal from the social,then the machine appropriated the abstract body and humanness be -came redundant (see Chakrabarty 2000). Susan Buck-Morss furtherdevelops this line of thinking, with reference to Walter Benjamin, asshe writes: “Under conditions of modern technology, the aesthetic sys-tem undergoes a dialectical reversal. The human sensorium changesfrom a mode of being ‘in touch’ with reality into a means of blockingout reality” (Buck-Morss 2002, 104). She then answers the question con-cerning how to distinguish Soviet modernizing processes from thosein the West by drawing attention to the temporal differences. Shepoints out that the cult of the machine in the Soviet Union precededthe machines themselves, while in Western capitalism machine cul-ture was adaptive to an already existing level of industrialization. InWestern capitalism, “ The worker’s adaptation to the machine was awork requirement, but it was also a mimetic defense. Human roboticsfunctioned as a form of armor. As in nature, where an animal changesits physical attributes to mimic its external environment, the workerwho turned her/his body into a machine with deadened senses wasprotecting against the shock of the machine itself.” In contrast, Buck-Morss argues, the pretechnological conditions in the early Soviet Unionmeant that the cult of human-as-machine sustained a utopian meaning.This was perhaps best summed up by Aleksei Gastev, the director ofthe Central Institute of Labor (founded in 1920), whose poetry spoke

of machinism as producing a new human sensorium of electric nerves,brain machines, and cinema eyes (ibid.).

The insistence of the senses as being enlivened through performingmachinelike actions and transforming the body into machines foundutopian expression where machine culture did not already exist. Thiswas true of the Soviet Union in the 1920s as well as China in the 1950s.The repetitive nature of collective labor and the extension of organsto render everyday technology part of the body were part of a projectin Maoist China to enliven the senses, render them aware of a futurereality, and to conjure this reality into being. The aesthetics, therefore,promoted bodily forms whose senses of pain and fulWllment werepronounced because the bodies themselves were juxtaposed to thecapitalist deadening of senses. This utopian vision did not necessar-ily require fully formed healthy bodies because it placed great valueon cellular transformation and collective form and the sensual expe-riences of these aspects of the future human–machine. Moreover, inthe context of the geopolitics of late 1950s and early 1960s in China,this alternative human–machine continuum functioned as a utopianalternative to Stalinist practices around heavy industry. Individualslike Pavel Korchagin and Chinese youths who struggled against naturewith machinelike precision acquired signiWcance because their bod-ily joints appeared as points of fusion for human and machine, indi-vidual to collective, people to History, and the October Revolution toMaoist China. In short, they steeled their bodies for the future andagainst the past; but they did so in ways that suggested not the sub-jection of the human body to massive machinery as is often noted ascharacteristic of socialist revolution in China and the Soviet Union.Rather, they blurred the boundaries of body and machine and soughtto claim a feeling human–machine continuum for the revolutionaryproject. Mao brought together speciWc scientiWc and revolutionaryprojects that animated the twentieth century in which he saw a promisefor and commitment to qualitative change. The resulting metamor-phosis of body, labor, social organization, and technology inspired amassive human and political experiment in the People’s Republic ofChina from 1949 to 1976 that ultimately conjoined utopia to dystopia.But what we also see in the human–machine continuum in Maoism isthe desire to envision spaces, subjectivities, and the boundaries ofhumanity differently; and to render explicit the politics that conjoined

TINA MAI CHEN176

science and revolutionary projects in twentieth-century dialoguesthrough a concern with making a new humanity responsive to par-ticular geopolitical experiences of mechanization and modernization.

1. This quotation is from Mao’s “Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems ofSocialism in the USSR.” Mao’s talk was likely delivered in November 1958 andpublished in 1959. The 1967 version of Long Live the Thought of Mao Tse-tung givesthe Reading Notes date as 1960 and the 1969 edition as 1961/62.

2. This reference is mostly attributed to the discredited and recently de -ceased Olga Lepenshinskaia.

3. The expression of emotion and desire to be a “cog in the revolutionarymachine” is most often associated with the diary of Lei Feng. Most interpretationsof this text offer a critical assessment of the authenticity of the emotional devotion.Here I am not claiming an authenticity or inauthenticity of feelings and text butinstead am developing an analysis of human–machine continuums and the role ofwriting in expressing a mass subjectivity deeply imbued with emotion and affect.

4. At the time, the United Nations’ seat was held by the U.S.-backed Republicof China (Taiwan) rather than the PRC.

5. The topics included in the Peking Symposium were: natural science, agri-cultural science, medical science, political science and law, economics, philoso-phy and history, education, and philosophy and literature.

6. SigniWcantly, Sakata Shoichi and Mao did not express similar views onatomic energy and arms, given that 1964 also brought the highly visible test ofChina’s atomic bomb and the suggestion in the Peking Review that science thusunleashed would underpin changes in the geopolitical order.

7. An issue for further study is how these ideas positioned Mao in relationto Lenin and Bogdanov’s discussion of materialist dialectics and the role of con-tradiction and struggle in development (on Lenin and Bogdanov, see Mansueto1996). Given Bogdanov’s inXuence on systems theory as well as his assertion that“being is Organization,” these issues are beyond my immediate focus here on thehuman–machine continuum. This differs from what Aihe Wang (2000) identiWedas a “common dialectical process of mutual production and transformation”between cosmological structures and imperial politics in early China.

8. See also Mao (1961/62), in which he wrote: “‘The machine and tractor sta-tions are important tools for carrying through the socialist transformation in agri-culture.’ Again and again the text [Soviet Political Economy] emphasizes howimportant machinery is for the transformation. But if the consciousness of thepeasantry is not raised, if ideology is not transformed, and you are depending onnothing but machinery—what good will it be? The question of the struggle betweenthe two roads, socialism and capitalism, the transformation and re-education ofpeople—these are the major questions for China.”

9. This text is alternately dated 1960 or 1961/62.10. I am not suggesting uncritical approaches to Maoist environmental

degradation and modernizing imperatives that perpetuate exploitation of natureor human beings. The point is to contextualize human–nature interactions withinthe human–machine continuum, which I explore here.

11. I discuss the discursive connections between Soviet and Chinese landreclamation below. SigniWcantly, mid-1950s projects in the USSR and PRC to re -claim land were also linked when Soviet residents of China returned to the USSRfor land reclamation and the related diplomacy.

12. See “Xiong Zhongguo renmin zhiyuanjun zhijing jinian zhiyuanjun chuguozuo zhan yi zhounian” (Salute to the People’s Volunteer Army, Commemoratingthe First Anniversary of the People’s Volunteer Army Entering War), Zhongguoqingnianbao, October 23, 1951. See also Stories of the Chinese People’s Volunteers andA Volunteer Soldier’s Day (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1961; 1956).

13. On the changing meanings of Soviet Wlms in China during Sino-Sovietrelations, see Chen 2004.

14. By 1966 and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese studentwho had been studying in the Soviet Union but was compelled to return to Chinareported that capitalism was coming to power in the USSR and leaders were turn-ing to cheating, corruption, stealing, and luxurious lifestyles. She further indi-cated that Soviet newspapers insisted that the spirit of Pavel Korchagin was out ofdate in the current Soviet Union.

15. On Korchagin in the USSR, see Lilya Kaganovsky (2004) and Krylova(2001).

16. Dauncey emphasizes that few examples of disabled bodies appear inChinese-produced Wlms during the Maoist period. The exceptions to this ruleinclude Jiangnan in the North (1963), in which the wife of the hero goes blind overthe course of the Wlm as well as the documentary-style Wlm A Song of Triumph for Chairman Mao’s Proletarian Line on Public Health (1969) and the documentarythat accompanied the campaign related to the curing of deaf-mute pupils (1969)(for viewing, see http://www.danwei.org/featured_video/mao_zedong_thought_cures_deaf.php [accessed March 23, 2008]). While Dauncey is correct, her conclu-sions are limited because of her reliance on a national framework to the exclusion ofimportant non-Chinese Wlms that featured disabled bodies such as Pavel Korchagin.

17. Rita is Pavel’s second love, which is unfulWlled because both chose toleave personal ambitions unspoken within the context of commitment to the party.His Wrst love is Tonya, a bourgeois girl, and his third love is Taya, a simple peasant“girl” whom he marries and nurtures to “political maturity.”

18. The GadXy, a novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich (1897), is the story of ArthurBurton and his transformation from an innocent youth to an outspoken revolu-tionary in Italy in the 1830s and 1840s. Notably, the GadXy is mutilated and madelame when he Xees to South America. The novel and the Soviet Wlm adaptation(1955) were popular in China as well.

TINA MAI CHEN178

Works Cited

“Bao’er geiyu wo de liliang” (Pavel gave me strength). 1949. Renmin ribao, October1, p. 4.

“Bao’er yongyuan wuzhe women qianjian” (Pavel will always be at the forefront!).1957. Dazhong dianying, 10–12.

Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy. 2000. The Cybercultures Reader. New York:Routledge.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2002. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia inEast and West. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. “Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital.”Public Culture 12, no. 3:653–78.

Chang Hao. 1987. Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Chen, Tina Mai. 2004. “Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Filmsand Popular Chinese Understanding of the Future in the 1950s.” Cultural Cri-tique 58, no. 1:82–114.

Chen Duxiu. 1915. “Jing gao qing nian” (Call to youth, September 15, 1915). InChen Duxiu zhuozuo xuan, 3 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe,1993), 1:129.

Chen Yuhe. 1957. “Dao nongcun qu! Bao’er•Kezhajin guangan (Go to the coun-tryside! Impressions of Pavel Korchagin).” Dazhong dianying, 13.

Cheng, Yinghong. 2006. “Ideology and Cosmology: Maoist Discussion on Physicsand the Cultural Revolution.” Modern Asian Studies 40:109–49.

Dauncey, Sarah. 2007. “Screening Disability in the PRC: The Politics of LookingGood.” China Information 21, no. 3:481–506.

Dinello, Daniel. 2006. Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology.Austin: University of Texas Press.

Friedman, Edward. 1983. “Einstein and Mao: Metaphors of Revolution.” ChinaQuarterly, no. 93 (March): 51–75.

Fu Tso-yi. 1952. “Ending the Flood Menace.” China Reconstructs. January–February,p. 10.

“Giant Against the Flood.” 1954. China Reconstructs. November–December, p. 29.He, Donghui. 2010. “Coming of Age in the Brave New World: The Changing

Reception of How the Steel Was Tempered in the People’s Republic of China.”In China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present. E. Thomas P. Bernsteinand Huay-yu Li, 393–420. Lanham. Md.: Rowman & LittleWeld.

Johnson, Matthew D. 2011. “ The Science Education Film: Cinematizing Technoc-racy and Internationalizing Development.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, no.1:31–53.

Kaganovsky, Lilya. 2004. “How the Soviet Man was (Un)made.” Slavic Review 63,no. 4 (Autumn): 577–96.

“Kenhuangduiyuan de yitian” (A day for land reclamation unit members). 1956.Zhongguo qingnianbao. January 20, p. 4.

Krylova, Anna. 2001. “‘Healers of Wounded Souls’: The Crisis of Private Life inSoviet Literature, 1944–1946.” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 ( June):307–31.

Low, Morris. 2007. “Shochi Sakata: His Life, the Sakata Model, and His Achieve-ments.” Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement, no. 167:1–8.

Mansueto, Anthony. 1996. “From Dialectic to Organization: Bogdanov’s Contri-bution to Social Theory.” Studies in East European Thought 48, no. 1:37–61.

Mao Zedong. 1942. “ Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.” In SelectedWorks. Vol. 3. Beijing: Peking Foreign Language Press.

———. 1957. “Beat Back the Attack of the Bourgeois Rightists.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_65.htm (accessed January 23, 2012).

———. 1961/62. “Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Soviet Political Economy.”http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_64.htm (accessed May 16, 2010).

———. 1963. “The Centre’s Instruction on Learning from Each Other and Over-coming Complacency and Conceit.” http//www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_09.htm

———. 1964. “ Talk on Sakata’s Article.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_28.htm (accessed March23, 2008).

———. 1977. A Critique of Soviet Economics. Trans. Moss Roberts; annotated byRichard Levy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes.Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Meisner, Maurice. 1999. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic ofChina. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press.

Ostrovsky, Nikolai. 1952. How the Steel Was Tempered, Parts 1 and 2. Moscow: For-eign Languages Publishing House.

Sakata Shoichi. 1947. “Theoretical Physics and Dialectics of Nature.” First pub-lished in the journal Chö-ryü. 1942. Transcription by Andy Blunden. www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/ch01.htm.

———. 1971. “Historical Introduction. My Classics—Engels’ ‘Dialektik der Natur.’”Supplement of the Progress of Theoretical Physics, no. 50. www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/ch03.htm.

Schmalzer, Sigrid. 2008. The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Iden-tity in Twentieth-Century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schneider, Laurence. 2010. “Lysenkoism and the Suppression of Genetics in thePRC, 1949–1956.” In China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present. Ed.Thomas Bernstein and Li Hua-yu. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

Shapiro, Judith. 2001. Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Rev-olutionary China. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sigley, Gary. 2009. “Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of TechnoscientiWc Reasoningin Contemporary China.” positions: east asia cultures critique 17, no. 3:537–66.

TINA MAI CHEN180

Wang, Aihe. 2000. Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Wang Nung. 1954. “Fighting the Big Flood.” China Reconstructs. November–December, p. 10.

Yu, Miin-ling. 2003. “A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China.” RussianHistory 29, no. 2:329–55.

“Zhengfu shahuang de yingxiongmen” (The heroes of conquering the sandy waste-land). 1955. Zhongguo qingnianbao. December 22, p. 1.

The Human–Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese...

Documents