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Work, Art, Life: Christopher Connery reviews Benjamin Kindler’s Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution: 1942-1976

Benjamin Kindler, Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution: 1942-1976 (Columbia University Press, 2025)

What would literature and art be like in a utopian socialist society?  There is a long tradition of thinking, prefigured in Plato, and in strong form in the Marx of The German Ideology, and in Marcuse, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt School, that there might not be any, that the aesthetic dimension would be inseparable from the everyday, that creativity could find expression in all social activity.   

Marx and Engels’s social vision of art under communism had been predicated on the transformation of the division of labor:

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals. and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of the people is an effect of the division of labor. Even if in certain social relations everyone could become an excellent painter that would not prevent everyone from being also an original painter so that here too the difference between “human” work and “individual” work becomes a mere absurdity. With a communist organization of society, the artist is not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from the division of labor, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.1 

There were strong intimations of this direction in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the work the Soviet futurists, constructivists, and fellow travelers.  Sergei Tretyakov, translator of Brecht and ally of the Chinese revolution (he lived in China in 1924 and was one of the Soviet authors of the “Roar China” poems), eagerly anticipated the end of artistic production.  As Boris Pasternak wrote, “The only consistent and honest man in this group of negationists was Sergei Tretyakov, who drove his negation to its natural conclusion. Like Plato, Tretyakov considered that there was no place for art in a young socialist state.”2  Tretyakov, Meyerhold, and many others of their persuasion died in the purges. The consolidation of Zhdanovism in the 1940s, enshrining socialist realism and the CCCP’s direction of cultural work, postponed the aufhebung of the aesthetic to the distant future.   There was more urgent political work to be done.   Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko characterize the purpose of and reason for writing in the Soviet Union of Lenin’s and Stalin’s era as an effort “to systematize reality – Bolshevik experience – and also to manufacture subjects.”

Christian Sorace has usefully described the PRC’s “discursive state”, wherein “state discourse is invested with the power of shaping reality in accordance with broader cosmological- ideological visions and normative models of behavior”.3 This generative power of discourse inheres in the literary as well, particularly in the programmatic days of literary production before the Reform period.  The systemization of reality and the manufacture of new subjects—one way to describe the CCP’s Zhdanovist ambition for literary production in the period from Mao’s Yan’an Talks through the Cultural revolution—acquires, within the ambit of the discursive state, greater salience than in Soviet Union.  The study of revolutionary literature, then, would offer insights not confined to the realm of culture, but into reality-generation itself.

Benjamin Kindler’s Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942-1978 (Columbia, 2025) is in one sense a literary history, in that its focus is largely on literary works, roughly chronologically arranged, but as the title suggests, it sees literary production politically and philosophically, giving a privileged access to the architectonics of social and subjective construction.  Kindler is one of a small number of scholars publishing serious work on Chinese revolutionary philosophy—Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan in particular.  In Writing to the Rhythm of Labor, his periodization of literary production is at the same time a periodization of socialist construction at the level of politics and ideology, with its particular, and uneven temporalities.4  

Marx’s call for the overcoming of the division of labor was central to the Chinese revolutionary imaginary; this was one respect in which the Chinese revolution differed in emphasis from the Soviet predecessor, and the question of the division of labor is central to Kindler’s book.  Although the discourse of the Three Great Differences and their overcoming—mental/material, agriculture/industry, urban/rural did not become prominent until the late 50s in the commune movement, Kindler convincingly makes the problematic of mental and material labor central to his argument about the development of revolutionary literature from early 1940s through the 1970s, and with this emphasis takes us to the heart of what socialist transformation actually is.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor (first German-language publication 1970; English translation 1978), which has been undergoing a major revival in recent years due in part to the attention given by Slavoj Zizek, Alberto Toscano, and other contemporary scholars of “real abstraction”, consistently holds the Chinese Revolution as the living laboratory where the overcoming of this difference was firmly on the political agenda (though Sohn-Rethel was more interested in workers’ acquisition of technical and managerial knowledge, fostered in institutions such as the Cultural Revolution era’s Workers’ Universities).  Locating abstraction itself as a product of the antagonistic social division of labor between the mental and the material, Sohn-Rethel saw the overcoming of this division as the only genuine measure of a socialist classless society.   In his Introduction, Kindler sees a similar orientation toward this aufhebung of labor in the revolutionary feminism of He-Yin Zhen:

He-Yin Zhen’s demand for a universalization of labor marks the supersession of all those violent forms of bifurcation and difference that attend capitalist development and a recoupling of the universality of labor against the abstract form of universality that it assumes under capital, in which all forms of labor are rendered commensurable with each other under the wage form (14).

Labor, thus, would become coterminous with life, and the most politically significant cultural productions were those that engaged directly with the realm of the everyday. 

For writers to play a role in the transformation of labor and life, they would need, in terms Kindler elaborates from party theorist Zhou Yang, to “enter life”.  This entry into life was explicitly predicated on resistance to the division of labor, which meant that the position of the writer, or the writer as laborer, needed to be transformed at the same time agricultural society was being transformed into an “army of labor”.   The latter took, as Kindler acknowledges, non-socialist forms, building on cooperative modalities inherent in peasant life.  There were tensions in this project: “how to forge the otherwise fragmentary character of peasant labor into a collective body of labor power” (39), as well as the “uneasy relationship between the expanded productive power of collective labor on the one hand and its disciplinary power on the other”.   Disciplinary power commonly took the form of acceleration, and the period was full of exhortations against unproductive leisure activities—often gendered—and for an expansion of labor time. The disjuncture between the idea of the social transformation of labor power and the slow pace with which such transformations are actualized in real life creates temporal aporia which are reflected in the narratives.Kindler’s reading of Liu Qing’s 1947 novel, A Record of Sowing Grain, based on Liu’s practice of rural investigation during the cooperative movement, shows how the novel’s artificial and unsatisfactory external motivation for the transformation of rural social relations reflects the author’s—and the society’s—limited figuration of “life”: “At the level of content and form, the legibility of domestic labor would remain a challenge for socialist culture after this point, as well as the task of remaking ‘life’.” (47).  In Ding Ling’s fiction and reportorial work from the 1940s, however, the capacity for gendered affective sociality provides more fertile ground for the integration of “life”. Yet Ding Ling, like others, faced without final resolution the conundrum arising between the disjuncture between the lonely act of writing and the collective scene of social labor. Her famous line “I want to labor” was also a cry for the kind of transformation anticipated by Marx in The German Ideology. 

In the Yan’an period, the project of remaking life and labor was determined by its rural context.   The project of urban-based industrialization and the formation of a new working class brought the requirements of cultural politics closer to those of the Soviet Union.   This took institutional form in the summer of 1949 in the formation of what would become, in 1953, the Writers Association, a full-functioning ISA. The Writers Association combined the professionalization of writing with the persistence of the demand that writers “enter life”, i.e. industrial labor, but the terms of that entry could devolve easily into mere formalism.   The charge to make writing serve the formation and consolidation of the proletariat—Kindler’s second chapter is titled “Lazy Peasants, Productive Proletarians”—led to uneven results in literature, from the overly formulaic work of Zhou Libo to the more formally innovative work of feminist author Bai Liang. This chapter also treats the emergence of the worker-writer, an effort begun in the first half of the 50s under Ding Ling and others, and quickened in the second half of the decade, with the polemics around the newly emerged “amateur writer”, and debates about the extent to which a worker writer should remain connected to the scene of labor. Many of these discussions revolved around time: the time to write, and the productive use of that time. When time becomes the preoccupation of the state, however, that normally portends one thing: acceleration. This would of course become the salient dimension of the Great Leap period.

The literature of Great Leap acceleration included some formal innovations: an emphasis on the short or short short story, a form whose reading and production could be more easily integrated into the accelerating rhythms of labor. Of greater interest is the literary staging of waged labor and its connection to one of Kindler’s central thematics, that of “bourgeois right” (zichanjieji faquan). The discourse around “bourgeois right”, a theoretical consideration of the political/ ontological status of capitalist social and economic relations under socialism, revolved primarily around questions of unequally waged labor, but also around the political and class character of writers, whose insertion into the wage labor and pay-for-manuscript systems along Soviet lines was one source of questions about the class character of writing. The critique of waged labor, elaborated most forcefully by Zhang Chunqiao, represented the major departure from the Soviet model, and would grow in importance during the Cultural Revolution. 

The role of literature in the reproduction of socialism after the Great Leap takes shape within a complex and uneven temporality.  Kindler’s fourth chapter, “Reproducing Revolution: Cultural Reconstruction and the Aesthetics of Communist Heroism”, shows a double movement: a continued focus on the class character of writers and writing, and a re-professionalization of writing, which required greater urgency given the centrality of writing to the reproduction of socialism. The chapter begins with a close reading of a road not taken, in Ru Zhijuan’s 1960 short story, “All Quiet in the Maternity Clinic”, a text reproduced and widely discussed from 1962 on. The story’s setting within a maternity clinic—an actual scene of reproduction—was distinctive, but more so was its framing of the question of revolutionary continuity given the historical gaps between generations formed before and after the revolution. How, and by what means, was a revolutionary subject formed? The gendered complication of that question, evident in Ru Zhijuan’s story, gave way in mainstream 60s writing to a pervasive masculine version of revolutionary heroism. And as the struggle against Soviet revisionism took shape, amid more explicit warnings that the division between mental and material labor represented by the writer/ intellectual could be a dangerous locus of bourgeois tendencies, there was a more explicit effort to guide the political mission of literary work. Kindler notes that “[t]he visibility of the PLA as the locus of a struggle against bourgeois right provided the conditions for the promotion of selfless militarized discipline as a model for the transformation of the consciousness of labor, as well as being a model for the transformation of writing”. This orientation gave rise to the depiction of revolutionary heroes and models, and the various disjunctures that accompanied this prominence. A reading of Jin Jingmai’s 1965 The Song of Ou Yanghai shows how the novel stages the gap between heroic and quotidian temporality, but reaches its narrative resolution confined within the terrain of the heroic.  

On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, before a group of amateur writers, Zhou Yang declared that the amateur writer was the future of literary writing, and that the professional writer was destined to disappear entirely. With correct ideological and political leadership, writing would cease to be an individual affair and would “truly become part of the practice of the party, part of the revolutionary practice of the people and the masses”. (Zhou Yang, quoted on p. 175).  The burden placed on writers and writing was thus a great one, and one whose attainment, particularly given the limitations inherent to narrative construction itself, would be difficult to demonstrate. In the Cultural Revolution, the struggle against the literary scene as the location of bourgeois dictatorship reached an apotheosis, leading to the suspension of the Writers Association and the cessation of all state-sponsored cultural activity from 1966-1969. Kindler’s fifth chapter, “In and Out of Petersburg: Soul and Writing Under Late Maoism”, begins and ends with a discussion of the essay “Get Out of Petersburg”, where “Petersburg” is a metaphor for the literary and cultural ISA, viewed as a primary locus of “bourgeois right”. Though the ISA itself had been dismantled, the recrudescence of “bourgeois right” required continual monitoring.  Kindler’s chapter includes an extended and deeply insightful analysis of the thinking around bourgeois right, primarily through the successive versions of a textbook on political economy, whose final version appeared in September 1976. The textbook, starting with a consideration of the wage under capitalism and socialism, resulted in a picture of socialist society that was “a site of unevenness and as an ensemble of contradictions” (209). This unevenness placed unending demands on political work, since “the persistence of capitalist relations under socialism in the form of bourgeois right spontaneously produced ideological forces that themselves needed to be surmounted in order to transcend those capitalist relations… the restoration of capitalism was always imminent within socialist relations of production themselves”.    

A salient dimension of this uneven and contradictory scene was the theoretical recourse to “personification” (ren’gehua), whereby persons could be identified as “capitalist roaders” or revolutionaries. This had the potential to transform social relations into “problems of consciousness”, a politically ambiguous terrain. In Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, his study of the Cultural Revolution, psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton coins the term “psychism”, which involves a temporal short-circuiting of the social transformation process: “in its zeal to replace technology with mind, it tends to interfere with precisely the internal work necessary to accomplish real individual conversion and general social transformation…. the psychic work required for authentic inner change is in turn replaced by an image of the change having already taken place.5 In the terms of the bourgeois right discourse, this interiority is simply bourgeois subjectivity, and the wager of revolutionary literature was that the process of transformation could be taken up in other ways than an individualized, psychological framing of transformation. A common mode was the subgenre of the sent-down youth narrative. Kindler gives an extended reading of Zhang Changgong’s 1973 novel Youth, comprising a sent-down youth’s diary within a framing narrative.  Like other works of this nature, Youth stages its protagonist’s encounter with revolutionary models, an encounter that serves to figure the quotidian work of self-transformation. The diarist in Youth expresses that work as follows:

The advanced soldiers of the proletarian all have revolutionary tenacity.  Comrade Lei Feng praised the spirit of the screw, showing that in order to ram a nail into a board of wood, you need to rely on squeezing and drilling. Considering “squeezing” in terms of the problem of time: whenever there is the slightest free moment, it is necessary to occupy it with revolutionary content. Considering “drilling” in terms of one’s effort in work: any given matter requires repeated grinding, and constant initiative.” (182-183)

As Kindler writes, “the text, in these terms, comes to emerge as the site of multiple sites of copying and transcription” (183): textual processing as labor on the soul. The fruits of this labor, in the literature and theoretical work through the late Cultural Revolution, were figured in tropes of heroism, often mediated through texts or films, a heroism that inhered in the most quotidian dimensions of working life. Kindler ends his chapter with a reflection on the predicament created by the logic of personification: “these challenges could only be articulated in terms of psychic interiority, either in the form of a heroic subjectivity as the basis for the supersession of the wage form, or in the paranoid projection of writerly subjectivity as always already bound to the logic of capital.” (216) This is of course a different interiority from Lifton’s, but one that does not escape its political limits.

Alessandro Russo has suggested, though, that the image of the worker-hero had, as the Cultural Revolution progressed, lost considerable luster:

For the Maoists, a prerequisite for finding a new order was discovering how to remold the political role of the workers in the factories together with the entire state system. The rhetoric of the “marble man,” the “socialist labor hero,” the “model worker,” inspired by the Stakhanovism of the thirties in the USSR, was largely discredited by the events of 1966–1967, which revealed its disciplinary and anti-political nature. It was in fact used by the “loyalists” and by the Shanghai party authorities to quash the independent workers’ organizations. The canonical formula of the workers as “the masters of the state” remained empty propaganda if new forms of the relationship between worker and factory were not experimented with by going beyond the terms of the ordinary functioning of the “industrial danwei.”6 (Russo, 251)

The late Cultural Revolution reorganization of the factory, uneven though it was, was evident in initiatives such as the factory universities, as well as in the power of independent workers’ organizations, and the strengthening of workplace democracy in the late Cultural Revolution period, as documented by Joel Andreas,7 and these developments were somewhat at odds with the dominant trends of literary production.  Further research into unofficial publication might show evidence of alternative formal or subjective innovation.8

Kindler ends his book with a consideration of Ding Ling’s late (published 1978) Du Wanxiang, which he reads not in the context of the socialist hero bildungsroman, but as an exploration of the “time of communism”:

This is no longer a unified or synchronized temporality unified under the state, including in the form of the Writers Association as ISA, in the interests of a project of development, but rather in the mode of a disjuncture from the state, and in the inauguration of a long, stretched temporality, in which we pursue the cultivation of communist relations in the space of the everyday” (233)

Literary explorations of the time of communism persist after the end of the revolution, in China and elsewhere, albeit uncoupled from an ongoing revolutionary project.   In a development that might surprise those earlier advocates of the worker-writer, Zhou Yang’s amateur ideal, Chinese workers’ cultural production has over the last fifteen years flourished to a degree unprecedented in history. This has been not only on social media—the narratives, podcasts, musical performances and dance videos that fill Weibo, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and other platforms—but in a wide range of published fiction, testimonial, auto-ethnography, and poetry. The reader curious about the lives of the ubiquitous kuaidi delivery drivers, for example, could consult delivery driver Hu Anyan’s Wo zai Beijing song kuaidi (I do express delivery in Beijing)9 or one of Wang Erdong’s award winning poetry collections. Wang’s 2023 collection Gai zenyang jiang yige kuaijian digei ni (How to send an express package to you) is divided into four parts—collection, intermediation, transportation, and delivery—followed by a chapter glossing professional terms from the industry—packaging filler, electronic waybill, reverse logistics, et al –with short explicatory poems.10 This summer (August 2025), Zhang Sai’s Zai gongchang mengbudao gongchang: ruci gongzuo ershi nian (In the factory you don’t dream of factories: twenty years of work like this) was published to great acclaim in a prestigious literary series.11 Better known in the west are worker-writers such as Xu Lizhi (d. 2014), whose poems of the Foxconn assembly line acquired special poignancy after his suicide, and Fan Yusu, part of the group associated with the New Workers Literature journal based in Picun, Beijing, whose 2017 short memoir Wo shi Fan Yusu (I am Fan Yusu) became an internet sensation after her writing appeared on WeChat.  Wu Feiyao and Qin Shaoyu’s award-winning 2017 documentary Wode shipian (The verse of us) focused on six worker-poets, including Xu Lizhi, and stimulated a nationwide discussion of the “literariness” of worker poetry. The aesthetic debate was fairly uninteresting, due in no small part to the predictable wenren (intellectual) gatekeeping element. Although worker-writer production flourished, the movement to foster a worker’s culture, represented by Picun and a handful of other NGOs, had mostly collapsed by the end of the 2010s, victim to both state repression as well as developments internal to the groups themselves

Politically, the stakes in workers’ cultural production often centered on recognition, in some cases explicitly referring to the social status of work, labor, and cultural production in the socialist period. Here the effects were more muted. Although one of the most popular songs performed by the Picun New Workers Art Troupe, “Laodongzhe zan’ge” (Ode to the Laborers) had as a refrain a line often uttered by Xi Jinping, “laodong shi zui guangrong” (work is glorious), workers’ cultural production in the twenty-first century—whether tragic, humorous, reportorial, or sensational—just as one would expect, finds little glory or dignity in actual working life.  In its location within the everyday, though, this work holds open the space where the seeds of social transformation could sprout.

Christopher Connery, UC-Santa Cruz

 

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Fabio Lanza reviews Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past

Hang Tu. Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series. Harvard University Press, 2025. 326 pp. Hardcover $52.95

In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu reframes the complex intellectual and political landscape of the post-Mao decades, shifting emphasis away from what he describes as “ideological” positions and focusing instead on the role of emotions. He asks, “How does emotion—as a constellation of affective intensities, moral sentiments, and political judgments—factor in the post-Mao political debates about China’s revolutionary past?” (3) Tu argues that, “By analyzing how rival memory projects stirred up melancholy, guilt, anger, and resentment, the polemics surrounding the country’s past cannot be properly understood without reading for the emotional trajectories of the post-Mao intelligentsia.” (8)

The book attempts to answer why “emotion” is a good entry into this material. Each of the five chapters is devoted to a set of intellectual/literary figures of the post-Mao era as well as a corresponding set of emotional attachments and sentimental approaches to the Maoist past. Tu moves from Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s differing conceptions of enlightened emotions, one based on pleasure the other on guilt (Chapter 1), to the elevation of the scholar Chen Yinke into a liberal martyr and a symbol of scholarship against politics (Chapter 2). Leftist melancholia is the topic of chapter 3, examined through the connection between Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen and Shanghai novelist Wang Anyi. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to the “right” of the political spectrum and focus on conservative thinker Liu Xiaofeng and the neo-nationalists of the China Can Say No phenomenon.

Tu starts by postulating that previous scholarship has viewed the intellectual and political articulations of the post-1978 era as produced solely by “rational deliberation” or logically embraced political ideologies. That, in turn, has produced an artificial separation between the rational and the emotional, and reduced the debates of the 1980s and 1990s to “stark polarities: liberty versus equality, modern versus anti-modern, and forgetting versus remembering.” (13)  Against this backdrop of hyper-rationality, Tu proposes instead to analyze those various -isms not solely as the product of rational deliberation, “but also as sensorial, affective, and emotive utterances deeply informed by personal desires, shared feelings, and moral sentiments,” (15) in particular the feelings connected to the legacy and the memory of the Maoist revolutionary past.

This emotional-rational dichotomy is largely a straw man. Few scholars frame political positions as simply the result of “rational deliberation” or the appeal of political ideology simply in terms of logical choice. Even less is this true for the post-Mao period, where the emotional legacy of the past has loomed very large and of course has contributed to the political choices actors make. So why does Tu need this false dichotomy? Postulating a fake dichotomy between reason and emotion, ideology and feelings, Tu successfully removes politics – as collective practice, shared experience, and communal ideation – from the post 1978 debates. He thus successfully depoliticizes not only the post-Mao era but the Maoist revolution itself. If mass politics is the site of irrational passion, depoliticizing allows historical actors to be rationally emotional without being political. And in that, Tu’s re-proposition of the emotion-rational dichotomy reprises its long and fraught history in Cold War orientalism, when it was deployed to separate the logical, democratic, appropriately thoughtful West and the irrational, emotional, and unruly East.

As Tu states, throughout the book, “Mao’s revolution” serves as “a generic term to designate a constellation of sociopolitical events, values, and memories” (4). Maoism is described as a quasi-religion, as brainwashing, as trauma, and Tu also repeatedly mentions something called the “Maoist sublime,” without ever explaining what that might have been.  This is a way to erase the complex historical experience of the Chinese revolution and to empty that experience of any political significance. This is most evident in the first chapter on Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, who famously and explicitly bid “farewell to revolution.” Tu uncritically espouses Li’s concept of “the double bind of enlightenment and national salvation” (30) and accepts the completely ahistorical view that connects May Fourth iconoclasts to the children of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who “both sought a ‘cultural-intellectualistic approach’ to political ills, fueled by ‘obsession with youth’ and “destruction of the past.” (47-48). The decades-long Chinese revolution is flattened by erasing any historical difference (1919 becomes 1966) and by reducing politics to irrational youthful emotions and destructive feelings.

Tu actively embraces Li’s politics of depoliticization, even when he cites the Chinese New Left’s criticism of Li and Liu’s thesis “as a thinly disguised neoliberal schema to ‘depoliticize’ radical thinking and legitimatize ‘end-of-history’ liberal triumphalism.” (47) Interestingly for a book about the debates of the post-Mao era, the New Left is left to haunt the books as a specter, appearing here and there, usually as a critical voice, only to be dismissed and banished to oblivion. Indeed, any direct engagement with the Chinese New Left would require taking the politics of the Maoist revolution seriously as politics, and not only as memory, trauma, or emotional attachments.

Does Hang Tu consciously adopt the politics of depoliticization and Sentimental Republic? I cannot say. But with the excuse of recovering an emotional dimension to post-Mao China that nobody actually has ever denied, Tu effectively flattens historical complexities into a story about the passions of a few individuals. To be clear, there is nothing wrong in an approach that centers affects and emotions, and there are excellent histories of emotions; here however, this approach serves mainly to produce a simplified and depoliticized depiction and to reduce profound political and intellectual differences to emotive responses. It’s all about the vibes.

In addition to the flaws in the main argument and analysis, I also want to highlight a glaring omission: Tu does analyze the work of one female writer, Wang Anyi, but he does so only through her relationship with Chen Yingzhen. That relationship developed after their participation in the 1983 Iowa writing program. Curiously, nowhere in the book does Tu mention that Wang went to Iowa with her mother, Ru Zhijuan, an important writer and editor in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s; nor does he mention that Wang and Ru wrote a memoir together about that trip. In a book ostensibly about the political memory of the Mao period, this critically relevant source is never mentioned. Instead, Wang Anyi’s approach to the revolutionary past is refracted through her relationship with the (male) Taiwanese leftist, Chen Yingzhen.[1] To be sure, this was a crucially influential relationship, but Wang and Ru’s own words, which are available, are absent. The silence about Wang and Ru is quite significant, especially in what is already a male-centered book.[2]

This review was originally commissioned by Twentieth-Century China, but it was rejected (in a slightly different version) as too harsh and straining “the bounds of collegiality.”

Notes

[1] Carlos Rojas, “Mothers and Daughters: Orphanage as Method,” Chinese Literature Today, Volume 6 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2017.1375283

[2] Tu’s evident neglect of gender issues is on display again, for example, on p. 3, where he labels the speech of the famously emotional Chai Ling on the eve of the June Fourth massacre as “hysterical.”

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P. Kerim Friedman, Yes, “Taiwan Can Help,” but not if it continues to ignore Palestinian voices

On July 6th, according to a report by Jordyn Haime in the South China Morning Post, Taiwan’s official representative to Israel, Abby Ya-Ping Lee, pledged to support a medical center in a settlement community in the occupied West Bank. After the report became public, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) told United Daily News that the matter was still under discussion and that funds had not yet been promised. That is fortunate, because if they had, it would be a gross violation of international law as well as international norms.

It would not be the first time that Taiwan and Israel found themselves standing together in defiance of these norms. During the Cold War, Taiwan was paired with the apartheid states of Israel and South Africa as a trio of “pariah states.” South Africa and Taiwan have since shed their authoritarian pasts, emerging as liberal democracies. They have also each undertaken a process of transitional justice in order to reckon with these histories. But while South Africa has extended that reckoning to the international arena, accusing Israel of apartheid and leading the charge against Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Taiwan has limited its own version of transitional justice to domestic politics.

As a result, Taiwan’s Cold War legacy still haunts its international relations, leaving it unable or unwilling to speak out against the genocide in Gaza, even as it offers support to Ukraine against Russia. As an American Jew who is also a Taiwanese citizen, I have repeatedly tried to speak out against this silence. I would like for my fellow Taiwanese to be confident enough in their place on the world stage, in the vibrancy of their culture, and in their democracy that they could find the voice to support the Palestinian cause. Instead, I find Taiwan seemingly willing to break international law in order to provide direct support to the occupation.

Why this disconnect between Taiwan’s stated values and its behavior in the Middle East? Some possible answers suggest themselves. One is that Taiwanese see Israelis as kindred spirits. They see in Israel’s ability to stand up to its Arab neighbors a model for their own struggle against China. There is also a pragmatic angle: like Israel, Taiwan is dependent on US military support and weapons sales to protect their border. They dream of a Taiwanese “Iron Dome,” even though it would be unlikely to work against China.

But there is another reason as well. Anthropologists talk about a process called “schismogenesis,” by which groups seek to differentiate themselves from rivals by taking up contrary cultural practices and political alignments. Think of the Yooks and the Zooks in Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book: one eats their toast with the butter on the top, the other with it on the bottom. I think something like this has hurt support for Palestinians in Taiwan. If the Chinese are for it, the logic goes, then Taiwan must be against it. While it is true that China has been a vocal supporter of a ceasefire, and has helped broker an agreement between Hamas and Fatah, the reality is far more complicated, given China’s long-term, close relationship with Israel. Chinese tech firms are involved in the surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories, deploying technologies that were first tested in East Turkistan, as part of policies that were, in turn, inspired by Israel. 

Unfortunately, such complexity gets lost in Taiwanese discussions of the matter. One can laugh with netizens who scoff at China’s support for Palestinian sovereignty, asking why they don’t support a “two-state solution” for Taiwan and China? But such a framing has the effect of erasing Palestinian voices from the discussion. The idea, put forward by one opinion writer, that China and Hamas have formed an evil and mutually beneficial alliance is not far outside mainstream discourses in Taiwan. A MOFA official went so far as to suggest that Haime’s story was deliberately timed to undermine Taiwanese sovereignty because it was published on the eve of a pro-Taiwan statement by the Israeli parliament. 

This obvious effort at deflection should give Taiwanese pause. It is reminiscent of how the  anti-imperial left in the US downplays Taiwanese voices when talking about cross-strait relations, reducing everything to a power play between the US and China. “Policide” refers to efforts intended to destroy or deny the existence of a political entity. It is what China is trying to do in Tibet, East Turkestan, and Taiwan, and it is what Israelis are trying to do in Palestine. Just as wearing a keffiyeh or a watermelon pin is an actionable offense on US college campuses or at work, so too is waving a Taiwanese flag at the Olympics or anywhere in China. Both countries are victims of efforts to suppress overt symbols of their sovereignty. Similarly, when pundits and politicians flatten geopolitics to a great game between world powers, they aid and abet this process of policide. Taiwanese should think twice before participating in such erasure.

True, one should be careful not to exaggerate the similarities. Taiwan is a highly functioning, democratic state with a thriving economy and de facto political relations with most of the world’s nations, while Palestine is under direct military occupation, divided between two geographic entities (Gaza and the West Bank), each with different ruling bodies, and even during times of relative peace can hardly be said to function as a truly independent state. Despite that, China has actually been much more successful in restricting expressions of Taiwanese statehood than Israel and America have been able to do with regard to Palestine. 146 out of 193 nations recognize Palestine, while only 13 UN states (and Vatican City) recognize Taiwan. 

The success of such policide in the international arena is concerning because it is laying the groundwork for something much more violent, just as the policide of Palestine makes possible the continued genocide in Gaza. The related term, “politicide,” refers to the genocidal destruction of the people associated with a political entity. Politicide does not always follow policide, but policide can certainly make politicide easier. The Palestinian exception to free speech enables the genocide, just as denying Taiwan a seat in the UN makes it that much easier for China were it to decide to take the country by force.

Taiwan’s exclusion from the World Health Organization (WHO), a form of policide enforced by China, became a major issue during the COVID crisis. In response, Taiwan used its excess capacity in producing personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as its effective pandemic response experience, to promote itself as a “force for good in the international community.” They even coined the slogan “Taiwan can help.” Viewed in this light, MOFA spokesman Hsiao Kuang-wei’s蕭光偉 claim that donations to settler hospitals are simply part of Taiwan’s ongoing strategy of providing humanitarian medical aid is almost understandable. That is, until you realize the context. In 2024 the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory “not to render aid or assistance to illegal settlement activities, including not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the occupied territories.” Although Taiwan is not a member of the UN, it does generally seek to respect international legal norms, and it seems clear that financial assistance to the Nanasi Medical Centre at Sha’ar Binyamin would be in violation of those norms.

The “Taiwan can help” slogan was designed to fight against Chinese policide of Taiwan which, among other things, excludes Taiwan from a seat at the World Health Organization. So it is ironic, to say the least, that this very same policy would help serve Israel’s politicide of Palestinians in the West Bank. How can Taiwan hope to be seen as a “force for good” when it undertakes such actions against the backdrop of the ongoing genocide in Gaza? Taiwan needs to stop acting as willing participants in Israel’s policide of Palestine. Silencing Palestinian voices will only hurt its own battle to be heard over Beijing.

P. Kerim Friedman (傅可恩) is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University(NDHU) in Taiwan.

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BDS Korea, Manse to Intifada: A Report on March 1, 2025 from Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea

Known as the March First Independence Movement, an unprecedented wave of mass protests with people shouting dongrip manse 독립만세 (long live independence) swept across Korea on March 1, 1919. On this day, religious leaders and students stood against Japanese colonial rule and declared Korean independence, sparking uprisings far and wide. The movement lasted for three months, with an estimated 1,900 protests all over the country. Met by violent and brutal repression from Japanese colonial authorities, the movement did not immediately lead to Korean independence, but it served to inspire and give hope to independence fighters and activists beyond the Korean Peninsula. 

Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea (PPS), also known as BDS Korea, observed the 106th anniversary of the March First Movement in 2025 by inviting Saleh, a Palestinian refugee currently living in Korea, to speak about Palestinian prisoners. People gathered at SALT, a community space located only a few hundred meters from Seodaemun Prison (today a historical site and museum), where an estimated 3,000 Korean independence fighters had been held, tortured and killed. The goal of the gathering was to connect the Palestinian liberation movement to Korea, showing that history is not simply past, but remains relevant, affecting the material conditions today.

After all, what does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement in the present day, when survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery and forced labor from the Asia Pacific War have still not received a proper apology or compensation from the Japanese government? What does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement when in 2023, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol repeatedly emphasized the need to hold hands with Japan and put the wounds of the past behind us? Without proper reparations for historical injustices, the past cannot be put to rest.

On the occasion of March 1st, 2025, Saleh shared the fact that there are more than ten thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails. Thousands are held under administrative detention without charge or trial for terms that can be renewed indefinitely. Prisoners are subjected to physical and psychological torture, including sexual violence, solitary confinement and medical negligence. The longest serving Palestinian prisoner is a man named Nael Al-Baghouthi who was first imprisoned in 1977. He served 34 years before being released and then re-arrested, for a total of 45 years behind bars. Some Palestinians are even given sentences that are thousands of years long. Israel is also notorious for trying minors in military courts.

The occupation uses imprisonment as a way to break people’s spirits and crush the liberation movement. However, Palestinian prisoners not only survive, but find ways to sustain life and hope even from their cells. As Saleh explained, although the occupation “may succeed in shackling bodies, it remains powerless to imprison minds and willpower.” To give an example, Hassan Salama, serving a life sentence for his pro-Palestinian activities, managed to get engaged while in prison. Gufran Zamil, a Palestinian woman inspired by his story, proposed to marry him, though they had never met and may never meet. This has given Hassan renewed strength and inspiration, to know that there is someone waiting for him on the outside, that there is life beyond prison.

In a similar vein, there are prisoners who smuggle out their sperm in order to start a family (even from prison). While imprisoned for two decades, Abdel-Fattah Kamel Shalabi and his wife were able to conceive through such methods using artificial insemination. In 2024 upon his release, Shalabi was able to meet his ten-year-old son for the first time. Israel seeks to deprive Palestinian prisoners of freedom and life, including the ability to get married or have a family. But through these acts of resistance, Palestinian prisoners claim their right to life and demonstrate that their spirits will not be broken. 

Many Palestinians also engage in hunger strikes, as one of the only ways to assert their agency in prison. Khalil Awawdeh was arrested in 2021 initially with a 6-month administrative detention that kept being renewed with no trial or charge. He went on a 127-day hunger strike, until he received confirmation from Israeli authorities that his administrative detention would not be renewed. He was released in 2023. 

It is not difficult to draw parallels between the situation of Palestinians and Korea’s independence movement. Many Korean independence fighters were also labelled terrorists, tortured and killed for their actions. One well-known independence fighter, Nam Ja-hyeon, went on a hunger strike after being tortured by Japanese prison guards for six months. She was eventually released, but died soon after. This March 1st, we remembered these anti-colonial fighters who gave their lives for Korean liberation and independence, and we honored their legacy by standing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

Despite Korea’s painful history of colonization, experiences that still inform today’s political landscape, the South Korean government under Yoon Suk Yeol chose to align itself with perpetrators of colonial and imperialist violence. In fact, the far-right, anti-impeachment, pro-Yoon protesters are often seen holding the South Korean flag alongside the American flag, and increasingly the Israeli flag. Supported by ultra-conservative Christian sects, the Korean political right fully aligns itself with the US, believing that US imperialism keeps them safe from the so-called bogeymen, namely North Korea and China.  

Beyond such symbolic displays, South Korea actively profits from supporting US imperialism. South Korea is one of the many countries that supplies weapons to Israel, and is one of the only countries that actually increased their weapons sales to Israel during the ongoing war against Gaza. Korean conglomerate Hanwha Aerospace, known as the “Lockheed Martin of Asia,” signed partnerships with Israeli defense companies, Elbit Systems and Elta Systems, in 2021. Its market value jumped 69% in 2023 to $7.8 billion. Other South Korean companies have also profited from the Israeli occupation, notably HD Hyundai, whose excavators are being used to destroy Palestinian homes and build Zionist settlements. 

It is shameful that the South Korean government, a nation with its own history of colonization, would align itself with the US and aid and abet the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is precisely why Korean solidarity with Palestinian liberation is rooted in mutual struggle against imperialism. Though South Korea is in collusion with the US empire as a client state, it is simultaneously a victim of US imperialism. Just as Israel serves as a US proxy in the Middle East, South Korea too serves as a proxy in the Indo-Pacific region. The US military has maintained its presence and influence in South Korea ever since the liberation (and division) of Korea in 1945. This not only led to the Korean War, but the violent suppression of protests and civilian massacres such as the 1948 April 3rd Jeju Massacre were aided and abetted by the US military in Korea. In more recent times, the presence of US military camptowns has also led to sexual violence against women, as well as environmental destruction due to base constructions. 

These are not issues of the past but ongoing ones that impact the here and now. In fact, as recently as March 2025, a bomb was “accidentally” dropped on the South Korean city of Pocheon, during the US-ROK joint military exercises, damaging 163 buildings and injuring over forty people. Though Koreans are supposed to accept US military presence because it allegedly makes us safer, what actually happens is that bombs are dropped on our own land and people. The US missile defense system, THAAD, is another case in point. Despite being useless in defending against missile attacks from North Korea, it was deployed in 2017 while former President Park Geun-hye was undergoing her impeachment trial. Through its advanced radar capabilities, it is able to spy on China, serving US interests. In short, THAAD benefits US security priorities, while the Korean people are the ones who pay the price, especially those subjected to state violence for their sustained resistance against THAAD’s deployment. 

Despite national liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945, Korea remains divided in a precarious state of truce with an ongoing US military presence on the peninsula. Koreans, therefore, know very well that a ceasefire in Palestine is only the beginning. A lasting peace requires the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestine, a permanent lifting of the blockade, and a complete dissolution of Zionism as a political project whether within Israel or beyond. Only a fully free, self-governing, autonomous Palestinian state can bring about true decolonization and liberation. 

This requires the end of US support for Israel. So long as the US has vested security interests in the region, it will continue to find proxies in the Middle East, just as it has with Korea in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, the largest overseas US military base is located in South Korea, near Pyeongtaek. This is precisely why our struggles are interconnected. As long as US interests govern the region, the Korean Peninsula can never freely and autonomously exercise its sovereignty. Korean activists therefore strive to sever links to US imperialism, not only for the sake of Korean self-determination, but also for the liberation of Palestine.

In this vein, BDS Korea’s main goal is to serve as a bridge between Korea and Palestine since its formation in 2003. Members travel to Palestine to organize with activists on the ground. BDS efforts range from pushing South Korea to impose a military embargo on Israel, to boycotting Israeli products, and severing Korean academic and business ties with Israel. Though Korea and Palestine are geographically distant, and our respective national issues may seem unrelated on the surface, not only do we share histories of imperialist violence but our current-day struggles are deeply intertwined. BDS Korea, along with other organizations in Korea and beyond, will continue the struggle from this corner of the world until Palestine is free from the river to the sea. 

BDS Korea is a feminist organization that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. Since its founding in 2003, BDS Korea has aimed to bridge Korea and Palestine, working tirelessly to inform South Korean society of Israel’s colonization, apartheid and military occupation of Palestine.

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Gail Hershatter, Gao Xiaoxian: A Short Remembrance

I first met Gao Xiaoxian in 1992 at a conference at Peking University, but even before that I had heard about her extraordinary work with the Women’s Federation and her deep knowledge of life in the Shaanxi countryside. In our first conversations, we talked about our shared interest in the history and changing social landscape of rural China in the 1950s, and we decided to work collaboratively to investigate the changes that those years had brought to farming women. Beginning in 1996, we made six interviewing trips to various villages in Guanzhong and Shaannan, talking to women about farming, childbirth, marriage, childrearing, social roles, and the profound changes in women’s lives brought about during the collective era.

The rural women we interviewed were some of my best teachers, but the most astonishing aspect of this project was the chance to work with Xiaoxian. Her curiosity, enthusiasm, intelligence, and deep sense of care for the people whose lives she was investigating were extraordinary. For me, she became the model of an ethical engaged scholar-activist, devoted to getting to the root of problems that continue to make women’s lives difficult, but also delighted by the variety and creativity that she found among women in the villages. 

After a day of interviewing, we would take long walks in the evening and discuss what we were learning, and with almost every sentence she spoke I would learn something about a new way of looking at the world. She was a talented teacher. She also helped to make the lives of countless women better with her work on gender and development, her training programs on domestic violence, and the many research projects she organized both during and after her time at the Women’s Federation.

Gao Xiaoxian has left us too soon. But as I think about the many people she taught and influenced and inspired, I can truly say that she lived a life of great significance. I grieve her passing and I honor her presence in the world. May her memory be a blessing to all of us.