Abstract
This article charts fluctuations in age consciousness during the waning years of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and its immediate aftermath. It argues that between 1973 and 1979, a dramatic shift occurred in normative perceptions of children and what the experience of childhood should entail. During the Cultural Revolution, the ideal child had a good class background, was anti-intellectual, and challenged authority. After Mao’s death in 1976, however, the new leadership reimagined children along more conservative lines. Their child was naive, studious, and, most importantly, politically disenfranchised. In juxtaposing the prevailing attitudes of these two periods, we witness a reorientation of childhood whereby the post-Mao leadership sought to move children away from revolution toward a more normative understanding of childhood that involved play, study, and growth into economically productive citizens. As a case study in what the ideal child was meant to be, the article examines the public life of Huang Shuai, a twelve-year-old primary school student who rose to national prominence in late 1973.
Chinese children, both real and imaginary, remain understudied subjects of historical inquiry. Yet the study of children and childhood contributes a number of important insights to our understanding of history. Steven Mintz, for example, persuasively argues that age can serve as a critical category of historical analysis. It is not only a chronological marker indicating physiological development, but also a subjective experience that influences the adults we later become. Age is an organizing category that is used to structure institutions such as the family, education, and youth organizations. It also reinforces a system of power and hierarchy linked to legal rights such as drinking, smoking, having sex, voting, and culpability for certain moral transgressions. By examining how a society structures the lives of its youngest members, we reveal how notions of age categories (e.g., “child,” “adolescent,” “youth,” “adult,” etc.) and age consciousness—what individuals thought constituted appropriate behaviors and achievements for people of certain ages—have changed over time (Mintz, 2008: 92; Chudacoff, 1992: 6–7).
The discursive use of children, through rhetoric and representation, can reveal much about a society’s age consciousness. As Anita Casavantes Bradford has shown, “children have played a constitutive role in the ideological labor through which different actors have pursued a range of modern nation-making projects” (Casavantes Bradford, 2014: 8–9). By imbuing society’s ideal attributes in the figure of the child, political actors mark “the boundary between those who do and do not belong to the community it represents” (11). In this way, individuals employ children in what Casavantes Bradford terms the “politics of childhood” to discipline other members of society “who have expressed non-normative ideas, beliefs, or identities, or to denounce behaviors that threaten the interests of those in positions of power” (12). Hence, an analysis of how political actors instrumentalize children—real and imaginary—in efforts to build nations, assault rivals, and galvanize mass support can help us understand how a society envisions, cultivates, and seeks to protect (or reenvision) its ideal child.
Childhood as a social construction and distinct phase of life separate from adulthood and devoted wholly to study, growth, and play only came about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Zelizer, 1994; Grossberg, 2003: 216). In the West, a number of issues led to the “discovery” of childhood. As Paula Fass illustrates, “the struggle over slavery, the development of humanistic sensibilities, and the sentimentalization of childhood” altered values and behaviors. Social and legislative movements that aimed to shelter children from market transformation “reserved in childhood an area of innocence.” The child thus became important “not for what he or she could contribute economically, but for the emotional satisfactions his cultivation could provide to the family” (Fass, 2003: 206). This process of “sacralization” helped lead to the conviction that children could only develop into productive and responsible adults if they enjoyed a “proper” childhood, which came to mean a protected period of development devoted to play, study, and growth.
Much as in Western Europe and North America, in China too conceptions of children and childhood were dynamic throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To get a better idea of what constituted a “child” 儿童 at this historical juncture, it is instructive to note a few examples of how prominent individuals and organizations conceptualized age categories. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967), for instance, considered boys and girls aged three to ten years 岁 to be young children, while those aged ten to fifteen were simply children (Cunningham, 2014: 79; Zhou, 2012). This coincided with the categorization of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which, during the Jiangxi Soviet period (1927–1934), placed those aged seven to fifteen in the Communist Children’s League (CCL) 共产主义儿童团 and others, aged sixteen to twenty-three, in the Adolescent Brigade 少队 (Zhonghua suweiai, 1933; Shaonian, 1934). During the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Chinese Boy Scouts maintained the age restriction of twelve to join and fifteen for enrollment in its paramilitary organization. At the same time, the Wartime Association for Child Welfare 战时儿童保育会, the largest child welfare organization of the period, provided relief and education to children aged fifteen and younger (Plum, 2006: 71–72).
While these examples suggest some consensus regarding the age limitations of biophysical children (Hsiung, 2005: xiii–xiv), age consciousness was in a state of flux throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. In traditional Confucian society, children (mostly boys) represented the preservation and continuation of the patriarchal line. As Angela Leung has demonstrated, the elite in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) began to see children as more than simply an abstract symbol of life, instead viewing them “as potentially useful or dangerous social elements in flesh and blood” (Leung, 1995: 262). In the early twentieth century, this outlook contributed to a rise in welfare programs that put children to work. Institutions such as the Shanghai Poor Children’s Institution 上海贫儿院 advocated the “transformative power of education and labor,” which aimed to combat the latent social parasitism that homeless children represented (Chen, 2012: 41; Plum, 2006: 268; Cunningham, 2014: 68). Simultaneously, education underwent dramatic changes following the establishment of a new system during the final decade of the Qing dynasty and throughout the Republican period (1912–1949). In primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions, students received training that endeavored to “create a patriotic, loyal, and morally grounded citizenry” (Culp, 2007: 28–40). During the second Sino-Japanese War, some adults argued that extraordinary times called for children’s direct involvement in war. Prominent intellectuals and child psychologists such as Chen Heqin 陈鹤琴, Zhang Zonglin 张宗麟, and Yu Wenwei 余文伟 argued that adults should recruit children into the military, where they would participate in combat and serve as spies (Plum, 2006: 239; Dan, 2008; Eastman, 1974: 48–49). Despite such rhetoric, however, the Chinese Boy Scouts maintained an age restriction on conscription. Doing so in order “to protect very young children from direct military combat” demonstrates that some adults believed children should be sheltered from the horrors of war (Tillman, 2014: 149–51). Alternatively, children were recruited for more “age-appropriate” labor-intensive activities such as procuring provisions, aiding the wounded, and cleaning away debris in war zones.
Despite the disparate nature of age consciousness, one feature in particular connects these fragments: their insistence on linking children to the nation and politics. As early as the New Culture–May Fourth period (1915–1923), adults began connecting children to national survival. It was Lu Xun, for example, whose The Diary of a Madman ended with the clarion cry “Save the children!” For him and many of his contemporaries, children, yet to be tarnished by the corruption of traditional Chinese culture, came to represent the future of the nation (Jones, 2011; Xu, 2007). This rhetoric continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s as “child” became synonymous with phrases such as “the lifeline of the nation” 民族的命脉 and “the restoration of the nation” 复兴民族 (Plum, 2006: 106). At the same time, the Guomindang (GMD), or Nationalist Party, referred to children as “new masters” of the Chinese nation 新主人. Likewise, the Communists called youngsters in their border regions “inheritors of the revolution” 革命接班人.
These examples were far from rhetorical flourishes. Children’s bodies were pulled into the service of politics on countless occasions, continuing after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Throughout the 1950s, children not only attended mass denunciation rallies, often having to bear witness as their mothers and fathers were publicly beaten and humiliated, but also participated: they took the stage and “spoke bitterness” against the accused (Zhu, 1999: 55–56; Li, 2003: 125; Strauss, 2006: 907–8). In this context of internal class struggle, adults viewed children as enemies of the people alongside their parents. Schools such as Beijing’s Yuying Primary School accepted only children from good class backgrounds throughout the 1950s (Wu, 2014: 56–57). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), children were employed for a variety of political purposes. Kindergarten teachers wrote plays denouncing counterrevolutionaries, recruiting their students as actors. Parents forced their sons and daughters to join the Young Pioneers or Little Red Guards out of fear the children might be targeted for failing to participate in the “rituals of communist childhood” (Wen, 1994: 2–4). Most disturbingly, children of bad class background came to symbolize both the mass oppression of the past and political threats to the future. This period abounded with slogans and theories that implicated children in their families’ supposed crimes (Wen, 1994: 7; Wu, 2014: 54). 1 The lucky ones were cursed at, spit on, beat up, expelled from school, or sent down to the countryside for hard labor. Those not so fortunate were stabbed, shot, or pushed off cliffs. As scholarship on mass killings has shown, children as young as 38 days were murdered alongside their parents (Yang, 2006: 96–123).
Most studies of Chinese childhood during the Cultural Revolution fall into two groups. One group looks predominately at the discourse of childhood within the arts, literature, and film. The other focuses overwhelmingly on children as a homogenous social group within specific contexts, particularly education. While these studies have provided pathbreaking insights, many of which I borrow here, a lack of sources in addition to persistent notions within the discipline as to the concrete contributions children as historical actors make to history have resulted in a paucity of attention to individual, flesh-and-blood children.
To correct this imbalance, my study here examines the public life of Huang Shuai 黄帅, a twelve-year-old primary school student who rose to national prominence in late 1973. Through my telling of Huang’s story, I make several arguments. First, both the Cultural Revolution’s radicals and post-Mao conservatives utilized a politics of childhood—with Huang as their centerpiece—to bolster particular views of childhood that served contemporary ideological and political needs. Second, I show that through reading differing usages of the politics of childhood, we witness a dramatic shift in age consciousness. During the Cultural Revolution, the ideal child had a good class background, was anti-intellectual, challenged authority, and prioritized politics in the classroom. After Mao’s death in 1976, however, the new leadership reimagined children along more conservative and economically productive lines. Their child was naive, studious, and, most importantly, politically disenfranchised. I also demonstrate that while Huang was indeed a flesh-and-blood child, her public life resembled in uncanny ways the major revolutionary motifs that dominated the cinematic productions of the period. In this regard, I argue that it was through the cultural and political production of Huang that “radical” and “conservative” factions articulated adult concerns, both directly to one another and to a wider public (Donald, 2000: 40).
Finally, this study makes use of content and discourse analysis, which I have applied to my reading of a variety of sources. I have chosen documents that transgress the Cultural Revolution–Reform era divide, with the explicit intention of bringing to light continuities and ruptures that an otherwise compartmentalized chronology might obscure. In addition to examining over two dozen newspaper archives, I have also consulted memoirs, the Song Yongyi Chinese Cultural Revolution database, and over 200 primary school textbooks from several major urban areas. The two largest textbook archives I have consulted are located in Stanford’s East Asia Library and the Steven W. Mosher collection at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
Education and Politics in the Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath
Across China, most schools closed in June 1966. This early phase of the Cultural Revolution is well known today for its violence, much of which took place in educational institutions. From June 1 to June 25, 1966, for example, 994 people were beaten and struggled against in primary schools in Beijing alone. In late August, Red Guards held a mass denunciation rally to humiliate and physically abuse thirteen city education officials. In the two weeks that followed this rally, Beijing’s western district witnessed the deaths of approximately a hundred teachers and school officials, with the number of those injured “too large to be calculated” (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006: 126).
Although schools began to reopen in 1969, education remained heavily politicized. When in session, school administrators implemented a simplified curriculum, favored the admission of red classes, namely workers and peasants, and encouraged students to challenge the authority of teachers (Teiwes and Sun, 2007: 56). These policies remained in effect until 1972, when Premier Zhou Enlai, with Mao’s support, launched efforts to correct these perceived excesses. In late spring of that year, the State Council Science and Education Group endorsed Zhou’s policy package, which sought to reincorporate the intelligentsia into society, raise educational and professional standards, and reopen universities (Teiwes and Sun, 2007: 57). These reforms were short-lived, however, as another shift in the political winds cut short their widespread implementation (59).
In mid-1973, Mao re-embraced radical leftist policies of the late 1960s, and duly withdrew his support from Zhou’s earlier efforts. While the debate on the existence of “leftist” and “rightist” political factions is still ongoing, there is no denying there were sharp ideological and policy differences among Politburo members. 2 “Leftists,” such as Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Yao Wenyuan, and Zhang Chunqiao—known after their arrest in 1976 as the Gang of Four—spearheaded the policies of the Cultural Revolution’s early years. These Politburo radicals vied with conservative “rightists,” such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, for reasons beyond just the implementation of their agenda. Taking advantage of Mao’s new position in mid-1973, the radicals launched a “second Cultural Revolution,” a major aim of which was to rollback Zhou’s curbing of the revolution’s earlier education policies (Teiwes and Sun, 2007: 118; Dong and Walder, 2012: 894). With Mao’s backing, the radicals achieved this in part by extolling a “go-against-the-tide spirit” 反潮流精神.
In the run-up to the August 1973 Tenth CCP Congress, go-against-the-tide was initially embodied by Zhang Tiesheng 张铁生, a youth sent to the countryside in 1968 as part of the “up to the mountains, down to the villages” 上山下乡 movement. The sent-down movement was the central government’s attempt to remove the Cultural Revolution’s most passionate perpetrators—its youth—from the urban crucibles of violence that students helped to create. In the first seven years of the sent-down movement, which began in 1967, twelve million urban youths, about 10% of the urban population, were displaced to the countryside (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006: 251–52). As the story goes, Zhang’s disillusionment with the university system’s overreliance on exam scores to decide matriculation hit its peak in July 1973. To express his discontent, Zhang handed in a blank physics exam paper, on the back of which he had written a scathing criticism of the current system. With the support of the radicals, Zhang’s story made national headlines. On August 16, 1973, just one week before the Tenth Congress, the People’s Daily printed an editorial lauding his efforts to instigate the “abolishment of the old entrance examinations.” The article concluded that the submission of the blank test paper was a “direct attack” on the “old thoughts and conventions” of a “reactionary and backward current” (Renmin ribao, Aug. 16, 1973). This language, which employed the rhetoric and tropes of the Cultural Revolution’s early phase (1966–1968), sought to stigmatize Zhou’s policies by associating them with “feudal practices.” Simultaneously, the radicals launched the go-against-the-tide movement to garner mass support for their assault on rightist policies. Beyond making national headlines, high-ranking government officials featured go-against-the-tide in their speeches during the Tenth Congress, solidifying its legitimacy as a movement against conservatism (Wang, 1973; Zhou, 1973).
In addition to espousing a go-against-the-tide spirit, the radicals enlisted “revisionism” 修正主义 as another motif with which they would battle the conservatives. For Mao, revisionism represented a dissipation of the revolution’s momentum and a drive to undercut its achievements. Earlier Mao had defined revision as “not wanting struggle, and not wanting revolution” (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2006: 24). Like many other political and social categories in the Cultural Revolution, “revisionist” was applied indiscriminately to anyone and anything deemed to be a potential enemy of the people. In the context of the mid-1970s, however, the radicals’ use of the phrase “revisionist line on education” 修正主义教育路线 explicitly targeted conservative efforts to curtail the policies of the late 1960s.
Even though the period from the Tenth Congress until late 1974 witnessed a significant increase in radical power and authority, conservatives such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping retained important and influential positions. The radicals exercised influence over the realms of media, culture, and education, whereas the conservatives played prominent roles in foreign policy and the economy. Radical influence only began to wane in late 1974, when consolidation 整顿 became the prevailing theme in elite politics. Mao’s directive for consolidation emphasized “stability and unity” and boosting the national economy—both priorities of the conservatives (Teiwes and Sun, 2007: 246). That the radicals’ authority had begun to wane became evident on May 3, 1975. At a high-level meeting, the last Mao attended before his death, the Chairman excoriated the radicals on a number of accounts, including ideological flaws and the factionalism of the 1974 campaign (248, 297–302). Despite these charges, however, the radicals remained powerful, only being completely removed from office with their arrest in October 1976, one month after Mao’s death. During these final years of the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath, a new leadership emerged. The post-Mao regime began to take shape in the late 1970s, and would ultimately be led by the Eight Elders 八大元老, a group of senior statesmen of which Deng Xiaoping was the most eminent (Dillon, 2014: 265). Following a decade of tumult, the new leadership set about legitimizing its correction of the Cultural Revolution’s excesses and its reshaping of society by discrediting the policies and “atrocities” of its erstwhile rivals.
A Revolutionary Childhood: Huang Shuai, 1973–1976
On November 27, 1973, an article slated for publication in Beijing Daily was circulated via Internal Reference 内部参考, the CCP’s top-level confidential news circular (Beijing Municipal CCP Committee, 1987). The article, titled “The Letter and Diary Passages of a Primary School Student,” immediately caught the attention of Chi Qun 迟群 and Xie Jingyi 谢静宜, cadres who answered directly to Jiang Qing, a highly influential Politburo member and Mao’s wife. 3 It detailed the recent experiences of Huang Shuai, a fifth-grade student at Beijing’s Zhongguancun Number One Primary School. In the letter, the twelve-year-old girl candidly divulged recent hardships in her quest to “assist” her schoolteacher. Having been “enlightened” by stories of Red Guards who successfully “helped” their teachers by exposing their faults, Huang sought to make a similar contribution by criticizing her own teacher. She therefore included in her daily writing exercises three “suggestions” for her teacher.
Much to Huang’s dismay, however, her writing had unintended consequences. Immediately after reading the assignment, the teacher derided Huang for “maliciously attacking” her and “challenging [her] credibility.” Moreover, the teacher singled out Huang for public ridicule, routinely criticizing her in front of the class, posting her diary passages on the class bulletin board for all to see, and inciting her peers to laugh at and call her names. This treatment prompted Huang to write to Beijing Daily for guidance on how best to deal with her predicament. More than simply “seeking advice,” the tone of Huang’s letter carried a tinge of fervent revolutionary flair. Her letter accused the teacher of “spiteful retaliation” and “suppressing democracy.” “I am a Little Red Guard 红小兵,” Huang wrote, “who ardently loves the party and Chairman Mao. All I have done is write my innermost thoughts and feelings in my diary. Still, these past few months my teacher has refused to let this go. I am unable to eat and find myself awaking in the middle of the night sobbing frantically.” Despite these psychological hardships, Huang concluded, “My efforts will not be repressed. . . . I will continue to voice my opinions!” (Beijing ribao, Dec. 12, 1973; Renmin ribao, Dec. 28, 1973). Wanting to learn more about this girl, whom they believed exhibited the quintessential characteristics of a go-against-the-tide child, Chi and Xie arranged to meet Huang on December 5, 1973. At the meeting, Chi and Xie extolled Huang as a heroine of the go-against-the-tide movement and the hope of the revolution in education (Cheng, 2001: 448). Although the historical record offers nothing more concerning this meeting, it is clear that the radical establishment took a liking to Huang. Within a week of the meeting, she had become a revolutionary star.
With first-generation Red Guards, like Zhang Tiesheng, well into their twenties and displaced to the countryside, the radicals needed a new crop of children to rise up and support their political agenda. It was in this context that Huang Shuai became the poster child for the radicals’ second Cultural Revolution. On December 12, 1973, Huang’s letter and six excerpts from her diary dating from September 5 through October 19 were published in the Beijing Daily. The editorial accompanying Huang’s letter presented her complaints as indisputable evidence of “a major problem with the revolution in education.” “On the battlefront of education,” the Beijing Daily wrote, “the pernicious influence of revisionism has yet to be eliminated; the old traditional mindset is still obstinately entrenched” (Beijing ribao, Dec. 12, 1973). That Huang Shuai was bold enough, the editor continued, to challenge her teacher and “strike out at the revisionist line on education” clearly reflected “the nurturing of Mao Zedong Thought.” As with Zhang Tiesheng’s case, the Beijing Daily employed the rhetoric and tropes of the Cultural Revolution’s early years. Unlike Zhang, however, Huang was hailed as “the new face and spirit of the next revolutionary generation” (Beijing ribao, Dec. 12, 1973).
Huang’s letter struck at the education hierarchy with its hostile invocation of shidaozunyan 师道尊严, or veneration for the way/wisdom of the teacher, which called for children across the country to challenge authority. An idiomatic term authored by Mencius’ contemporary and ideological rival Xunzi, the expression dates back to China’s Warring States period (475–221
Following the republication of her letter in People’s Daily on December 28, periodicals and radio and television stations extolled the “activist” Huang Shuai as the new kid on the block to challenge authority. At the behest of the State Council Science and Education Group, which only a year earlier had endorsed policies that aimed to reverse the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, education bureaus across the country organized teacher-student study groups to learn from Huang’s example (Renmin ribao, Dec. 28, 1973). Schools responded by making Huang Shuai a model for all students to emulate. They took as study material the December 28 People’s Daily article that included Huang’s letter and later reprinted the material in textbooks (Guangdongsheng, 1975; Guangming ribao, Feb. 13, 1974; Guangming ribao, Feb. 14, 1974). Lanzhou’s Number Twenty-Four Middle School even went so far as to assign “What Can We Learn from Huang Shuai?” as an essay topic. Over 1,300 of the school’s students wrote compositions that touched on such issues as going against the tide, the correct way to observe discipline, the importance of raising one’s political consciousness, and student-teacher cooperation (Guangming ribao, Feb. 13, 1974).
Schools across the country were quickly awash in tides of revolutionary rhetoric exclaiming “destroy shidaozunyan,” “sweep away the restoration of capitalist influence,” and “criticize the resurgence of the revisionist line on education” (Beijing Municipal CCP Committee, 1987). As in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, schools descended into chaos. Students once again took to criticizing their teachers by writing big-character posters (Guangming ribao, Jan. 12, 1974). Teachers “were ridiculed, desks were torn out of classrooms, windows and glass shattered, and school property utterly demolished” (Beijing Municipal CCP Committee, 1987). In Beijing, an estimated 200,000 square meters of schoolroom glass were broken in the few short weeks after the publication of Huang’s letter (Beijing Municipal CCP Committee, 1987). Throughout the country, primary school students wrote to People’s Daily with accounts of how learning from Huang Shuai had inspired them to take action against the “pernicious influence of revisionism,” which their teachers had come to embody. Such children proclaimed that Huang had motivated them to “shed their sheepishness” and “become revolutionary path breakers” (Renmin ribao, Feb. 11, 1974). Once again, “cadres were unable to manage, teachers were unable to teach, and students were unable to study” (Beijing Municipal CCP Committee, 1987).
From the initial publication of her letter in Beijing Daily on December 12, 1973, until the radicals’ political demise in October 1976, Huang was an absolute media darling. Her name was mentioned in 57 People’s Daily articles, including two front-page spreads and two half-page pictorials (Renmin ribao, Dec. 28, 1973; Renmin ribao, Feb. 11, 1974). These pictorials included photographs of Huang at school alongside her classmates, and discussing the revolution in education with lower-level primary school students (Renmin ribao, Jan. 11, 1974; Renmin ribao, June 1, 1974). Beyond the People’s Daily, Huang’s name peppered headlines across the country. From Guangzhou to Tibet, 28 major local newspapers republished her letter to Beijing Daily. 4 Huang was even discussed outside the PRC, receiving three mentions in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. In popular print culture, Huang featured in 24 books, including such titles as The Little Generals Who Dared to Go Against the Tide, Continue Until the Very End the Proletarian Revolution in Education, and Carry Forth the Revolutionary Spirit of Going Against the Tide (Ganyu fanchaoliu, 1974: 17, 22; Ba wuchanjieji, 1974: 32, 37, 44; Fayang fanchaoliu, 1974: 42).
From early 1974 until late 1976, Huang Shuai was everywhere. In addition to having various media syndicates retell her story throughout the country, she made a wide variety of television, film, and public appearances. Less than two months after the initial publication of her letter, Huang made what appears to be her first televised appearance, starring in a “Red Guard Program” (Guangming ribao, Feb. 13, 1974; South China Morning Post, Dec. 20, 1974). On June 1, 1974, “Huang Shuai” was portrayed in numerous plays at festivities throughout the nation to celebrate International Children’s Day (Guangming ribao, June 2, 1974). Impersonated on stage, Huang Shuai was reified as the quintessential embodiment of a revolutionary child. She also made a number of high-profile public appearances. In July 1974 in Beijing, she participated in a nationwide swimming event held simultaneously in other major cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, and Nanning, an event that aimed to promote the Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius movement (Guangming ribao, July 17, 1974). In October 1974, Huang attended the official gala celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (Renmin ribao, Oct. 1, 1974). According to one newspaper, Huang was easily the youngest of 4,500 prominent personalities attending the anniversary reception (South China Morning Post, Dec. 20, 1974). In January 1976, Huang had the honor of representing the city of Beijing at a “Sent-down Youth Oath-Taking Rally” (Guangming ribao, Jan. 20, 1976). Other notable public appearances include the 1974 and 1975 official May First festivities and the memorial services for Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976 (Guangming ribao, May 2, 1974; Guangming ribao, May 2, 1975; Renmin ribao, Jan. 16, 1976; Renmin ribao, Sept. 19, 1976).
As a model child, Huang joined a pantheon of Chinese exemplars. Scholars such as Amy Olberding (2008) and Linda Zagzebski (2004) have argued that the conceptualization of model individuals follows a specific process. In her examination of the Analects, for example, Olberding argues that exemplars are the origin of a particular theoretical vision, one that begins with observation and then proceeds to theorization (Olberding, 2008: 626). In contrast, the CCP’s deployment of its exemplars, such as model workers and labor heroines, reverses the dialogic nature of observation and theorization. Throughout the CCP’s history, Communists theorized—along Marxist-Leninist lines—the crucial traits and experiences one must possess in order to be exemplary. Indeed, the heroes and heroines that graced the silver screens of the Cultural Revolution were required to adhere to Jiang Qing’s principles of portraying the “three prominences” 三突出 and “lofty, noble, and perfect” 高大全 characters. The former privileged revolutionary heroes and heroines over all other characters, and the latter mandated that all central characters be “tall, lofty, and committed whole-heartedly” to the revolutionary cause (Liu, 2009). The task of (re)constructing a model Communist was aided by the fact that many of the chosen exemplars of the pre- and post-1949 periods—individuals such as Liu Hulan 刘胡兰, Dong Cunrui 董存瑞, and Lei Feng 雷锋—rose to prominence only posthumously, and thus could be manipulated as needed to fit the ideological exigencies of the moment.
Børgen Bakken has argued that exemplary individuals—fictitious, dead or alive—have served a wide array of purposes. They represent order, counteract uncertainty, and model particular courses of action that aim to promote and reinforce normative behaviors. The fact that Huang was a live, flesh-and-blood child, however, allowed her to fulfill roles that neither the dead nor artistic creations could. Bakken’s reading of Chinese exemplars suggests that the “gap between fiction and life” may have presented problems for “moral educators” who sought to discipline society through stories of altruistic, military suicides or didactic literary tales. By presenting an individual whose ascendance to the apex of socialist perfection had strayed too far from reality, those in power had reached beyond the achievable experience of their readers. Therefore, in order for the radicals’ narrative to be most effective, they required a model who came “from below”; someone who possessed the “social and cultural moorings” that made the presentation of their exemplarism both stable and realistically capable of internalization. The selection of Huang as the model child, then, provided an alternative to the ideological fragility of traditional, posthumously constructed models that had been constructed “outside” society itself (Bakken, 2000: 169–79).
In her role as the poster child for the “second” Cultural Revolution, Huang Shuai modeled behaviors that sought to discipline society. In addition to attacking the revisionist line on education, Huang, in a fashion suspiciously similar to Jiang Qing, also served as a cultural critic and so-called advocate of women’s rights. She extolled the “successes” of Mao’s line in literature and art by endorsing films and plays that adhered to the revolutionary genre while ridiculing those that did not (Beijing ribao, June 9, 1974; Guangming ribao, Jan. 31, 1974; Guangming ribao, Aug. 11, 1974; South China Morning Post, Feb. 12, 1974). And in the run-up to the 1974 International Women’s Day, on March 7 Guangming Daily lambasted the Confucian principle of “ignorance is the virtue of women” 女子无才便是德. The article praised Huang as a “prominent example” of her generation whose “disposition, temperament, and perseverance in the face of adversity candidly reflected the fighting spirit and revolutionary capability of the new Chinese woman” (Guangming ribao, Mar. 7, 1974).
As a representative of the “new Chinese woman,” Huang and her appearance should be observed carefully. Take, for example, two photographs of Huang that appeared in People’s Daily, both of which exude the “three prominences” mentioned above. Figure 1 shows Huang (center) sitting in class among other students. Aside from the iconic red scarf, Huang’s appearance stands in stark contrast to her classmates’. Her hair is cropped short whereas the other girls have long hair pulled back into a single pony tail or two braided pleats. The light color of Huang’s shirt makes her stand out further as those around her are dressed in dark colors. In Figure 2, we see Huang (center, facing the camera) speaking to younger students. In comparison to the long-haired girls wearing floral-patterned skirts, Huang sports short hair and trousers. Huang is also the tallest of all children present (including the boys). In regard to the framing of the children’s body language, the other students have crowded around Huang to listen intently, portraying her as the central authority. In both photographs, Huang not only exudes a distinctly boyish appearance but also an assertive role, occupying the center of each photograph and commanding the viewer’s attention. While the historical record does not indicate whether these photographs were staged, that her body appears to have been purposefully masculinized warrants further comment.
First image of Huang Shuai to appear in People’s Daily. Renmin ribao, January 11, 1974.
Second image of Huang Shuai published in People’s Daily. Huang with other students on International Children’s Day. Renmin ribao, June 1, 1974.
Here I would like to suggest that Huang’s body became a declarative statement to the political establishment in two ways. First, the choice to champion Huang Shuai as the ideal child may have been one of Jiang Qing’s many efforts to prove her worth as Mao’s heir. As Jin Chunming has shown, Jiang was a devotee of imperial China’s only female sovereign, Wu Zetian (r. 690–705). Wu was featured prominently throughout the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign, which, as we have seen, was concurrent with Huang’s rise to fame (Jin, 2013). By advocating that women play strong leadership roles (e.g., Wu Zetian as empress of China, Huang Shuai as the ideal child), Jiang may have been pleading her case to succeed Mao as the party’s Chairwoman. Second, Huang’s masculinization may have been symptomatic of the leftist challenge of conservative notions of gender. Tani Barlow and Madeleine Yue Dong have suggested that leftist female intellectuals adopted androgynous norms in part to challenge the “gendered and commercialized embodiment of modernity” that they believed would “devour the spirit of the revolution” (Luo, 2008: 285; Barlow and Dong, 2005). As the radicals launched the 1974 campaign specifically to combat the revolution’s perceived dissipation as instigated by conservatives pushing economic modernization policies, it is suggestive that Jiang Qing would fashion her ideal (female) child after such norms. More subversively, Huang may have been used to emasculate certain men throughout society. Louise Edwards and Lili Zhou, for example, have argued that imperial Chinese orthodoxy deployed narratives of “crisis femininity” 危机女性 whereby women participated in battle both alongside and/or as surrogate men in order to shame listless males into action (Edwards and Zhou, 2011; Naftali, 2014). In this case, Jiang Qing may have taken a page from the imperial playbook by using Huang as an exemplar: that a girl was capable of so flawlessly articulating criticism of revisionism may have been Jiang Qing’s most insidious attack against the likes of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. The “conservative” right was being outplayed not just by a female, but by a female child.
Still, the radicals’ portrayal of Huang as a representative “feminist” and “child” is replete with ironies and contradictions. The masculinization of Huang’s body and the placement of her image at the center of revolutionary discourse rendered her powerless as an exemplar of gender equality. More problematic was that as the ideal go-against-the-tide child, Huang went with the flow by faithfully promoting the party line. Her manner of speaking, as reported by various media syndicates, conformed to adult norms. In fact, one reporter perspicaciously observed that Huang’s “precocious skills as a polemicist” made her sound remarkably like a People’s Daily editorial writer (South China Morning Post, Feb. 12, 1974; South China Morning Post, Feb. 18, 1974; South China Morning Post, Dec. 20, 1974). The reporter may not have been far off the mark.
In a peculiar way, Huang seemed to perform public life. In fact, a close reading of her story suggests that her public persona had a mimetic quality, resembling in many ways the heroes and heroines of the Cultural Revolution’s major literary and cinematic productions. It is well known that Mao’s 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature and Jiang Qing’s dictums on art and literature shaped creative expression throughout the period. Yet the tropes that dominated the Cultural Revolution departed significantly from those of the PRC’s first seventeen years. With regard to how cinematic portrayals of young characters shifted during these periods, Liu Hongqiu’s study of war-themed films is suggestive (Liu, 2009). In her study of the films Little Soldier Zhang Ga 小兵张嘎 (1963) and Red Sparkling Star 闪闪的红星 (1974), Liu argues that age became obfuscated as an organizing category. As the plots to these films have been well studied elsewhere, I will refrain from rehearsing them here (see Farquhar, 1999; Liu, 2009; Xu, 2011; Naftali, 2014). Most pertinent to our discussion is how Pan Dongzi, the young protagonist of Red Sparkling Star, differs from his pre–Cultural Revolution peer, Zhang Ga. In short, Pan displays the revolutionary realism and romanticism that dominated the Cultural Revolution era (Farquhar, 1999: 284). He has no mischievous or playful qualities. He commits no lapses of judgment. He does not require any education. In fact, the only experience that drives any sense of Pan’s character development is class struggle.
The same is true of Huang Shuai. We will remember that Huang was first presented to the public via a Beijing Daily article recounting the struggle between her and the teacher. Huang’s impetus for “correcting” her teacher’s perceived faults was her love for the party and Chairman Mao. As with Pan Dongzi, there is a discernable absence of play in the media’s portrayal of Huang’s life. As we have seen above, Huang’s participation in leisure activities such as swimming, watching films, and reading literature all had a specific political purpose. In these ways—her dress, speech, and behavior—Huang conformed to adult norms. As the ideal child, Huang’s public life from late 1973 to 1976 would suggest that, at least as far as her benefactors—elite politicians—were concerned, age had no salience as a category of organization. To put it another way, an individual’s status as a “child” did not preclude him or her from adult political activities. That children continued to be intrinsically connected to endeavors such as inciting revolution, struggling against teachers, and (de)legitimizing government policies supports this article’s argument that Chinese childhood remained overtly linked to politics well into the 1970s. Twentieth-century China’s trend of conspicuously politicizing children was curbed only following the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution.
From the Business of Revolution to the Business of Childhood, 1977–1979
Following the arrest of the Gang of Four, the post-Mao leadership began working to rescue the institution of education from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. From late 1977 through 1978, People’s Daily published nine articles accusing the Gang of Four of instrumentalizing Huang Shuai as a vehicle to “fabricate a host of false issues within the line on education” (Renmin ribao, Nov. 25, 1977; Renmin ribao, Dec. 24, 1977). These articles claimed that the radicals had used Huang to batter Zhou’s policies just as these policies had “begun to take hold and rejuvenate schools.” Through Huang, People’s Daily claimed, the radicals had “decimated an excellent school environment” and subjected countless cadres, parents, and students to “unprecedented bitterness” (Renmin ribao, May 21, 1978). This repackaging of Huang’s case as another “atrocity,” however, was not done solely with the intent to delegitimize Cultural Revolution policies. It was also an attempt by the new government to reorder age consciousness, and hence childhood, by delineating what it deemed to be the appropriate roles, behaviors, and responsibilities of the country’s children.
People Daily’s investigation into the “Letter and Diary Passages of a Primary School Student” began by disputing the document’s authenticity. It claimed that Huang’s “so-called ‘letter’” had “undeniably been written under the direction” of her father (Renmin ribao, May 21, 1978). The details of the investigation revealed that in the two months before Beijing Daily first published the letter, the father had a public disagreement with Huang’s teacher. Following a heated exchange, the father inquired with various parties into the teacher’s professional and political affiliations, most likely with the intent of using information gathered against her. The newspaper’s most damning claim, however, was that the father had written to the local party branch expressing his dissatisfaction with Huang’s teacher. In this letter, Huang’s father supposedly included phrases that appeared verbatim in Huang’s missive to Beijing Daily (Renmin ribao, May 21, 1978).
People’s Daily supported its allegations by targeting Huang’s diary, which it alleged to have acquired and carefully looked through. The article stated that the passages included in Beijing Daily’s December 1973 publication were distortions concocted “with the explicit intention to hoodwink the public.” The diary excerpts before September 4, for example, demonstrated no evidence that Huang was discontented with her teacher. On the contrary, multiple excerpts noted the teacher’s candor and helpfulness. Huang’s diary even notes, per People’s Daily, that on at least one occasion Huang had fallen victim to her own pride, leading her to rebuff the teacher’s guidance. Elsewhere Huang recalled her own unwillingness to conscientiously complete an assignment. After having been corrected by the teacher, however, Huang “recognized the error of [her] ways” and set about more diligently completing her school work. The article concluded that the diary, which was kept as a school assignment, included many of the teacher’s handwritten remarks, all of which were positive and constructive (Renmin ribao, May 21, 1978).
Several aspects of People’s Daily’s treatment of Huang are worth considering. By claiming that her father had ghostwritten the infamous letter, the article stripped Huang of any agency her representation may have had. People’s Daily asserted that several issues proved she could not possibly be the author. First, the article alleged it was preposterous for any “fifth-year primary school child” to have possessed such a “serious political disposition.” “If a child goes overboard in criticizing his or her teacher,” the article stated, “we can only say that the student is acting immaturely. Any excessive criticism coming from a child can only be the result of adult instigation.” To this, the article added that the style in which the letter was written raised additional suspicions about Huang as the author. In particular, People’s Daily argued that the concluding sentence of the letter was too long and the grammar too complicated to have been written by a primary school student. To support this, the article copied from Huang’s diary several entries not made public in 1973 that demonstrated her incorrect usage and misspellings of Chinese characters. Finally, the article attacked Huang’s character by disclosing that as a fifth-year student, Huang “had yet to join the Little Red Guards,” a fact, the paper believed, “illustrative of serious character faults” (Renmin ribao, May 21, 1978).
Through its attacks on Huang, People’s Daily demonstrated the new leadership’s conceptualization of age consciousness. As we can see from its language, the article contended that children are naive, easily manipulated, and lack the knowledge to correctly express their thoughts. Most surprising is its blatant rupture with Maoist ideology in its articulation that children are incapable of developing a “serious political disposition.” That children are unable to meaningfully participate in politics may sound sensible to today’s reader, but an unconventional reading may interpret this deviation from Maoist ideology as an attempt to disenfranchise a social group that—for the better part of a decade—had significant political clout. When we consider that, at least as early as 1966, children were denouncing teachers, writing criticisms for public consumption, marching in the streets, and sending adults—sometimes their own parents—to their deaths, the repudiation of children’s political agency marks a significant departure from Maoist notions of age consciousness.
It is worth noting that Huang’s father was not the only male to play a crucial role in the closing scene of this revolutionary drama. In early 1979, Huang participated in the reintroduced university entrance examination 高考. Her final score of 320 satisfied the criteria for entrance to her top choice, the Beijing Institute of Technology 北京工业大学, yet she was rejected on account of the still palpable “popular indignation” that resulted from her association with the Gang of Four. It was only in early September of that year that Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, who was then the head of the Propaganda Department and of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, personally intervened to defend Huang. In an editorial published on September 8, People’s Daily spoke against those who desired to punish Huang alongside the Gang of Four, commenting that “at the time, Huang Shuai was only twelve. She had been used by the Gang of Four, and in all reality was herself just a victim” (Renmin ribao, Sept. 8, 1979). In full accordance with university standards and policy, the paper announced, Huang would be treated like any other student, and hence matriculated to the Beijing Institute of Technology.
It is significant that two males played major roles in this closing chapter of Huang’s public life. The immediate post-Mao reappraisal of Huang indicted her father for playing a central role in her supposed crimes. For this, officials revoked his party membership and sent him to prison. As discussed above, by blaming Huang’s father the new leadership indicated its refusal to acknowledge children as capable of meaningful political participation. At the same time, the party reorganized age as a salient category of organization by subjugating Huang to the vindictive whims of her father. A similar dynamic played out with Hu’s involvement. In contrast to Huang’s father, however, Hu stepped in as the benevolent state patriarch, who not only absolved Huang of her crimes but also restored her reputation by declaring her to be nothing more than a “child” and “innocent victim.” Huang’s father and Hu Yaobang, then, acted to reorder traditional age-based hierarchies whereby children defer to their elders, with regard to both punishment and absolution for their moral transgressions.
Strong evidence of the new leadership’s project to redefine childhood can also be found on the covers of primary school textbooks. To illustrate this point, let us look at two small samples of textbook covers. The first set of textbooks was published between 1968 and 1976, and the second from 1978 and 1979. In the first collection, Mao, revolution, and involvement in politics are the dominant motifs. Figure 3, for example, shows Mao looming large over a group of marching, stern-faced children, who carry copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao and government directives. While Figures 4 and 5 do not feature Mao on the cover, they include two of his quotations. In all six of these images (Figures 3 through 8), children participate in political activities. In Figure 7, for example, children are writing and posting big character posters under the slogan “Seriously study theory pertaining to the dictatorship of the proletariat!” In Figure 8, four children have gathered to hear another speak. Gathered in front of a billboard, the four sitting children are listening as a boy interprets current events, fist clenched tightly and raised to the sky.
Primary school textbook covers from 1968–1976. Steven W. Mosher uncataloged textbook collection, Hoover Institution Archives.
The second collection of textbook covers shows children engaged in activities that today’s reader is likely to deem more congruent with contemporary expectations. Figures 9 and 13, for example, portray children playing. In the former, one girl chases butterflies while the other two—clearly displaying some degree of affection—gaze at recently picked flowers. Figure 14 provides a glimpse into a classroom as three students sit at the front, listening intently to the teacher’s lecture. Figures 10, 11, and 12 display the symbols of the Four Modernizations such as scientific equipment and modern buildings and transportation. In all of these covers, children sport the happy, playful, and inquisitive expressions adults would expect from young, primary school–aged children.
Primary school textbook covers from 1978–1979. Steven W. Mosher uncataloged textbook collection, Hoover Institution Archives.
There is a pronounced difference between these two collections. Whereas the Mao-era textbooks espouse revolution and engagement with politics, the post-Mao covers have clearly shifted to motifs centered on play, education, and building a modern society. While there are sharp differences in backgrounds and color schemes, this deviation is exemplified in the dramatic change of the children’s bodies. More often than not, the children of the Mao-era covers are serious and hard-nosed, assertively postured, uniformly clothed, and charging forward. In the cases where their body language is more reserved, as in Figures 7 and 8, their reservation is likely indicative of momentary political introspection. Post-Mao children, on the other hand, are colorfully dressed, cheerful, studious, and, in the boys’ cases, playfully mischievous. In contrast to their Mao-era peers who hold in their hands the symbols of revolution (e.g., Quotations of Chairman Mao, the highest directives 最高指示, rifles, spears, etc.) the post-Mao children enjoy butterfly nets, flowers, chalk and blackboards, books, and pencils.
Despite the stark contrast between these two collections, we should note that one important item managed to survive this turbulent transition: the emblematic red scarf. Worn by Chinese Communist League members as early as the mid-1920s (and still worn by the Young Pioneers today), the red scarf, symbolically stained with the blood of martyrs, represents for Chinese children the victory of the Communist revolution. That the post-Mao children in the images discussed here still wear the red scarf indicates that while the experience of childhood was undergoing dramatic changes, its fundamental goals had not: to produce children loyal to the Communist Party.
While our discussion of these images has focused on representations, we should not forget that real children used these textbooks. As Pierre Bourdieu argued, education plays a prominent role in socializing children, inculcating them with the skills, ideas, and values deemed crucial for society’s reproduction (Bourdieu, 1990: 41–46). While an extended analysis of the contents of these textbooks must be reserved for elsewhere, it is worth noting that the Cultural Revolution–era primary school curriculum began teaching politics 政治, 正文 in year one. The post-Mao curriculum, on the other hand, began political education only in middle school. This observation, coupled with the fact that children enrolled in primary school between ages six and eight, and middle school twelve to thirteen, suggests not only a shift in age consciousness, but also an alteration of age categories whereby post-Mao “children” got younger. In other words, while primary school “children” may have been too young for political education, middle school “adolescents” were not.
Epilogue
In 2008, Party leaders were scrutinized for the scandal surrounding Lin Miaoke 林妙可, the nine-year-old girl who opened the 2008 Beijing Olympics with a rendition of Ode to the Motherland. As it turned out, Lin was lip-synching to the voice of seven-year-old Yang Peiyi 杨沛宜. At the last minute, high-level party officials dismissed Yang from the honor of representing her country on the global stage because they thought that she was not pretty enough. More recently, children have been targeted through acts of gruesome violence, as is evident in the string of attacks on kindergartens and primary schools that plagued the country from March 2010 to December 2012. In the last several years, the mainland’s plan to require Hong Kong to adopt the Patriotic Education curriculum has incited much anger. Residents of the special administrative region protested these attempts in mid-2012 and again in late 2014 as part of the Umbrella Revolution, claiming that the curriculum was a ploy by Beijing to brainwash their children. All of these recent events speak to the continuing ways children are made to serve the agendas of adults.
This article has demonstrated that a dramatic ideological shift in age consciousness occurred between the waning years of the Cultural Revolution and the late 1970s. It has argued that from 1973 to 1979 adults began rethinking what it meant to be a child and what childhood as a phase of development should entail. While from 1973 to 1976 “leftists” sought to shape children in a fashion that would perpetuate the policies of the Cultural Revolution’s early years, the post-Mao leadership wanted childhood to be devoted to growing into economically productive citizens. In a broader historical context, this reorientation of childhood marks a significant rupture with twentieth-century China’s inclination to directly involve children, real and representational, in political affairs. Yet this rupture was not without its continuities, as most evident in children’s display of the red scarf: a symbol that reminds children of their role in the Communist revolution and the future of the nation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following individuals for their feedback on this article: Emily Baum, Jeremy Brown, Anita Casavantes Bradford, Karl Gerth, Fabio Lanza, Tom Mullaney, Paul Pickowicz, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Zhang Jishun, and the two anonymous referees for Modern China. A special thanks to Peter Braden, Matthew Wills, and Yidi Wu, who have scrutinized multiple iterations of this article. Thanks also to University of California San Diego, the Stanford University East Asia Library, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, the Center for Asian Studies at University of California Irvine, and Charles and Ann Quilter for research funding. The contents of this article were developed under grant #84.015A from the U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and the reader should not assume endorsement by the federal government.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The contents of this article were developed under grant #84.015A from the U.S. Department of Education.