How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities

Abstract

The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual’s role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer’s life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual’s conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the “how-to” books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable—albeit dangerous—to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism’s modern legacies.

Keywords

diary didactic literature subjecthood Maoism socialist modernity

In the midst of sweeping efforts of Maoist China to construct a new socialist society, guidebooks instructing people on how to write a diary proliferated from the early 1950s to the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). They were directed at adult readers who, for the most part, were unaccustomed to indulging in autobiographical writing but now found themselves being urged to take up the practice and cultivate a socialist subjectivity. “Keeping a journal is not that hard,” the reader was assured. “It’s a bit like talking. Just write the way you talk” (Xia, 1964 [1963]: 5). But the overtly personal, subjective nature of the diary prompts a question about the didactic motives of the Maoist state. In the Soviet Union, diary-writing sparked concerns among the Bolshevik propagandists in the 1930s over its potential for nurturing the “bourgeois private self.”¹ Why would a Communist dictatorship such as that established in China in the middle of the twentieth century teach a “dangerous” literary form that seemed to foster interest in the self?

As an autobiographical genre of daily recording and self-reflexive writing (Lejeune, 2009; Sherman, 2005), the diary has widely been used for literacy, ideological, and political education. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the use of the genre in modern Europe, Meiji Japan, revolutionary and Soviet Russia, wartime East Asia, and the prisoner-of-war camps in China and North Korea for molding the character of the individual according to the dominant ideals of society or power (Baggerman, 2011; Piel, 2018; Moore, 2013: 18–54; Hellbeck, 2006: 37–52; Huxford, 2015). Neglect of the didactic discourse in the context of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) may be due in part to the fact that the sources are scattered, but passing references to diaries in the scholarly and popular literature also convey a widespread view that under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the diary fell victim to the state’s ideological monopoly, becoming a mere political instrument for suppressing the individual’s “authentic” self (Liu, 2013; Sang, 2015; Yang, 1994: 252–71; Wang, 2006, 2018).

A fruitful alternative to dismissing the Maoist didactics as simply a tool of totalitarian coercion would be to recognize their cultural-historical significance for understanding the workings and “worldviews” of the one-party regime. In a recent study on socialist Laos, Simon Creak, historian of modern Southeast Asia, argues that revolutionary teachings, though propagandist, prescribed conceptual and rhetorical frameworks for fostering new attitudes about self, society, and state power (Creak, 2018: 3). “[Saturated] in the language and values” of the ruling authorities, didactics produced in authoritarian regimes provide historians a lens through which to scrutinize the “intersections between socialist mobilisation, subject formation and state formation” (Creak, 2018: 5, 3). It is precisely because of their political nature that the Maoist diary guidebooks are a window on the role and place of the individual as imagined from on high.

The present article is a product of ongoing historical research into popular diary-writing during the Cultural Revolution, a pioneering inquiry into the Mao-era “how-to” books to examine how publishers conceived of the ideal diary and everyday selfhood within the state’s vision of revolutionary modernity. Previous research on the CCP’s idealization of the “new man,” drawing often on a structuralist conception of power and interpellation, has consistently interpreted the desire of the regime as a commitment to mold individuals into a collectivist “mass man” (Yu, 2015; Law, 2015: 43; Lynteris, 2012). The archetypical, state-designed new Chinese person has been understood as a selfless, public-spirited citizen devoid of autonomous individuality and creative agency (Yu, 2015: 29). Recent scholarship on the CCP’s cultural and educational program have brought valuable and nuanced insights into the primacy of identity and subjectivity as objects of revolutionary mobilization, highlighting the need of the party to cultivate active and creative citizens (Larson, 2008; Luo, 2016; Kubler, 2018; Cai, 2016; Schmalzer, 2016). Yet the specificities of what it meant to be a good socialist person remain insufficiently scrutinized within a reductionist, liberal framework of theories of totalitarian collectivism (Brown, 2018).

Inspired by the growing historical reassessment of the so-called mass totalitarian states (Suny, 2008; Corner, 2009; Hellbeck, 2009; Lim, 2011; Cai, 2016; Lüdtke, 2016), this article aims to shed new light on Maoist culture and politics by examining how creative and self-reflexive agency figured in Communist ideals. Following Cai Xiang’s 蔡翔 work in particular, I take Maoist discourse seriously and argue against the tendency to view the regime as intrinsically hostile to the production of “authentic” diaries and self. What the guidebooks reveal, rather, is a paradoxical doctrine of socialist self-actualization which sought to simultaneously cultivate and monopolize revolutionary agency. They show that the regime that produced them was an anxious one, conflicted about the capacity of writing subjects to serve as agents of revolutionary change. This anxiety, I further argue, was rooted in, although by no means exceptional to, Maoist state socialism’s uncomfortable relationship with the legacies of Chinese modernity.

Having long been used by the Neo-Confucians for teaching moral self-cultivation and self-discipline, diary-writing as a pedagogical method acquired new significance at the turn of the twentieth century due to a radical shift in Chinese attitudes toward what constituted an ideal person. As the syncretic new aspiration for an Enlightenment-style “citizen-subject” emerged in tandem with the rise of modern Chinese nationalism (Fogel and Zarrow, 1997), reform-minded cultural elites adapted the diary into a literary-pedagogical aid for cultivating a self-conscious “new youth.” Autonomous creativity, self-expression, and individualism were foregrounded as the key virtues to be strived for in keeping a journal. Within this context, stand-alone guidebooks targeting young and educated readers first made an appearance in the early 1930s, and subsequently proliferated. Maoist diary-writing guidebooks, if particular in their explicit political framing of the genre, owed their origin and development to a long-standing didactic tradition.

With the Communists taking control of the mainland in 1949, didactic books on diary-writing were reconfigured and repurposed, now at the service of the state’s agenda of making new socialist citizens. The ideals promoted in the new guidebooks differed from and yet, in key aspects, resembled those of earlier guidebooks. Considered in conjunction, these changes and commonalities complicate our understanding of the Maoist imaginations of selfhood. A close material and textual reading of the post-1949 instructional literature in light of earlier examples reveals the historical specificities of the revolutionary model, as well as an uneasy continuity between the two “diary regimes.”² I argue that Maoist anxiety over popular agency was a symptom of the party-state’s incapacity to resolve the contradiction arising from assimilating core modern values into state socialism. In line with growing scholarship critical of tendencies to collapse the early PRC decades into a uniform whole (Brown and Johnson, 2015: 3; Brown and Pickowicz, 2007), this article places particular emphasis on the subtle but revealing changes in the post-1949 texts, introducing nuance and exposing fissures in the post-Liberation paradigm.

Manufacturing Modern Subjects: The Rise of Popular Diary Education

In key respects, the Mao-era guidebooks were products of a radical paradigmatic shift in approaches to diary-writing in early twentieth-century China. Having long been used by the Neo-Confucians to conduct and teach moral self-cultivation,³ the diary in late Qing and early Republican China came to be associated with notions of individuality, psychological interiority, and authenticity of the self—rudiments of a modern, Enlightenment subjectivity called for by the Chinese national exigency of emancipating and “renewing the people” into “independent and free” citizen-subjects (Liang, 2000 [1902]; Chen, 1915).⁴ In the literary field, progressive writers of the New Culture and May Fourth era celebrated the diary as a form for liberating the author’s inner self from the “enslavement” of traditional cultural conventions for national salvation (Ng, 2003). In the pedagogical world, reform-minded educationists advocated the integration of diary-writing into school curricula during the mass education movements of the 1920s, believing that daily self-reflexive writing would foster in students a capacity for creative composition, independent thinking, and authorial self-expression (Liu, 2013).⁵

Stand-alone guidebooks to diary-writing, written mostly by left-wing intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism and communism, emerged around the early 1930s and proliferated in response to the booming interest in using journal-keeping as a means for youth subjectivation. Qian Qianwu 钱谦吾 (1900–1977),⁶ a leading figure of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers and a member of the young CCP, published quite possibly the first guidebook on journal-keeping in 1931, Methods of Writing a Vernacular Diary 语体日记文作法. This was followed shortly thereafter by He Yubo’s 贺玉波 Methods of Diary-Writing 日记文作法 in 1933; Lu Guanliu’s 卢冠六 Methods of Diary-Writing 日记作法 in 1934; Wu Zengjie’s 吴增芥 Methods of Diary-Writing 日记作法, which went through seven print runs between 1934 and 1940; and Zhang Kuang 张匡 and Zhou Langfeng’s 周阆风 1937 Instructions on Diary-Writing 日记指导, among many others.

Though written in a variety of circumstances, these early guidebooks shared the same didactic approach and aspiration. Championing the diary as a prose form of the everyday, they detailed the ins and outs of mastering the autobiographical form, often via lengthy expositions and rich examples of entries from published diaries of well-known figures. They foregrounded the diary’s elastic style and intimate connection to the personal realm as features conducive to producing conscious and creative writing subjectivity in young people (Qian, 1931: 9; He, 1933: 13–22). The diary writer was thus positioned by the guidebook author as an object of social-cultural reform, whose journalistic self-development would advance the making of the ideal national polity. This juxtaposition of the diarist’s everyday literary and cultural self-cultivation with the larger, if also distant, political blueprint of state-building, as we shall see, serves as a key difference from the later Maoist imagination of the writer’s place vis-à-vis the state.⁷

The diary’s association with the “authentic self” and the idea of personal and social transformations meant that the form was well suited to answering the needs of socialist New China to renew the people.⁸ Yet this heirloom was from the outset to be subject to denunciation and modifications in the PRC. In the new society, although the practice itself was considered useful, the old way of journal-keeping was viewed as a pompous bourgeois pastime. Hence its dismissal by a 1952 guidebook on everyday practical writing authored by a Qian Danian 钱大年, published by the Shanghai Masses Press: “In the Old China, many people indeed kept a diary. But they generally used the diary to exaggerate their strengths and good deeds while hiding their shortcomings and misdeeds. Writing such a deceptive and self-deceptive diary is a total waste of time. Absolutely useless” (Qian, 1952: 19).

New Guidebooks for New Socialist Diarists

The socialist way of diary-keeping, as it turned out, had much to do with investing this quotidian activity with new meanings, including redefining the teacher and the student. Diary guidebooks produced after the 1949 regime change show marked differences from their predecessors in terms of authorship, target audience, and formal composition, bespeaking an ideological commitment to serving the Maoist blueprint of national modernization. No longer composed by prominent left-wing writers who previously dominated China’s cultural stage as producers of knowledge, most of the post-Liberation “how-to” books were now by obscure authors—probably rank-and-file literary or media workers whose biographical details are today difficult to trace.

Tellingly, in a rare case of authorship by a well-known figure, the writer’s biography makes it clear that there was effectively a ghostwriter, in the form of the party-state. Comrade Guan Feng 关锋 (1919–2005), author of a How to Write a Diary that went through thirteen print runs of 310,000 copies in its first edition (1951–1954) before going into its second edition in 1955, had a long history of engagement with the CCP and compliance with the party line. Born a few decades junior to the May Fourth generation of diary-writing advocates, Guan served as a senior education official in Shandong before becoming a party theoretician and propagandist in the mid-1950s. While caution must be taken against drawing a simple equation between the Chinese government and its educational and publishing sectors (Chin, 2018; Peterson, 1997; Culp, 2019: 185–247), Guan’s authorship of perhaps the most popular diary guidebook of the Mao years suggests that diary education became a national political enterprise that escaped the control of the intellectuals. It was ultimately the ideological state that authorized and prescribed the cultural proprieties according to which writers produced the diary manuals in the People’s Republic.⁹ Even though the Guomindang, too, was a Leninist party with pretensions to ultimate cultural authority over social transformation, it never gained the dominance over intellectual life that the CCP achieved (Cheek, 2015; McQuaide, 2016; Pieragastini, 2018; Smith, 2012). Guan has no equivalent in the Republican period.

Accompanying this shift of knowledge authority from the notionally free-floating intellectuals to the one-party state were notable changes in the diary guidebooks’ intended readership. During the New Democracy period (1949–1953), the production of the guidebooks adapted to the abstract ideology of the socialist regime to “democratize” knowledge about the diary from the province of the educated classes to everyone as the country’s destiny was determined anew. With “patriotic capitalists” and the “national bourgeoisie” allowed to play a role in making the new society, some publishers aimed at teaching diary-writing to the “broad masses”—“the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie”—who, together, formed the “people’s democratic dictatorship” of socialist New China (Hu and Seifman, 1976: 2–3; also see Karl, 2010: 74-75). A 1951 How to Write a Diary, authored by one Mao Xiang 毛向, and published by a private firm specializing in propagandist-educational materials, addresses en masse all those who have “turned over their life to become their own masters” 翻身做了主人 (Mao, 1951: 4).

But soon, publishers of the diary guidebooks shifted their target audience decisively away from the educated urban classes when socialist popular education consolidated its focus to making new cultural and political subjects—a “new type of intellectual 新型知识分子 of worker/peasant origin” (Renmin ribao, 1949b; also see Luo, 2016; Peterson, 2001; Xie, 2015: 46–58). As China’s “poor and blank” learned to master reading and writing during the ever-intensifying mass literacy campaigns 扫盲运动, diary-writing became a popular means for aiding proletarian-peasant subjectivation, used often as an instrument for, and an evidence of, successful socialist self-actualization at the grassroots.¹⁰ “New diarists” mushroomed among the proletariat and peasantry—social classes historically excluded, not just from the cultural form, but from participation in culture 文 altogether (Siu, 1990). And manuals reached out to them. Guan Feng’s How to Write a Diary (1952 [1951]), for example, was specifically aimed at “worker/peasant cadres with a low level of education,” “comrades who recognize around two thousand characters,” and “adult learners attending People’s Schools” 民校学员 as its intended audience (3, 28).

Both the change of political regime and changes within the regime are evident in the compositions of the post-1949 guides. The new vision for a revolutionary order and subject of diary-writing was often expressed in cover art drawing on a mix of socialist and traditional Chinese folk aesthetics to appeal to the rural readership. The front cover of Guan Feng’s 1952 guidebook features the iconic imagery of a “worker-peasant-soldier” alliance (see Figure 1), popularized in the Yan’an era and later widely used in propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution (Xiaomei Chen, 2011). The cover illustration of Yu Min’s 于民 1958 How to Write a Diary and Take Notes has a small emblem depicting a sturdy nib pen and blank notebook resting on a bushel of golden wheat under the upper half of a cog (Yu, 1958)—a variation on the combination of symbols found in the national crest (see Finnane, 2016: 774–75).

Figure 1.

Front cover of Guan Feng’s How to Write a Diary (Guan, 1952 [1951]). Author’s collection.

More commonly, guidebooks feature on their covers the iconography of a rural woman—a powerful signifier in the Maoist propaganda lexicon of the CCP’s “double liberation” of the historically oppressed class and gender (Tina Mai Chen, 2011). Xia Mingxu’s 夏明旭 1964 guidebook, for example, has a front cover in bright blue with an image of a young female diarist in peasant clothes (see Figure 2), reminiscent of the left-wing woodblock tradition developed in the 1930s (Tang, 2008). The peasant woman is seen as delighting in her diary at the writing table under the evening lamp. Holding the pen up to her chin, she looks at her open journal as if pausing to ponder what to write next. In the “liberated” People’s Republic, it was no longer the Confucian literati or the Republican educated elites who guarded the prerogative of the “technology of the self.” The new masters were the old “unwashed,” to whom the power of the pen was now entrusted.

Figure 2.

Front cover of Xia Mingxu’s How to Write a Diary (Xia, 1964 [1963]). Author’s collection.

Revolutionary Frameworks for Manufacturing Socialist Subjectivities

As publishers in the People’s Republic disseminated the “technology of the self” to the broader masses, they sought to transform the meaning and ways of diary-writing so as to manufacture a proper socialist subjectivity in the reader. Whereas the May Fourth writers valorized the journal for liberating the inner self from the constraints of traditional culture and ethics, revolutionary politics and literature dismissed the “inner self” as the locus of authenticity. The self needed to be oriented and positioned in relation to the social and political exterior—the state and state-authorized cultural figures—only then becoming a legitimate site from which to derive truth, authority, and meaning (Larson, 2008: 90–91; Cai, 2016: 168). Manuals on diary-writing prescribed conceptual frameworks and model narratives to place the writing subject firmly within, and at the service of, state ideology and national interests, thus instrumentalizing the diary as a political routine for socializing the writer’s sense of self and everyday life. But the blueprints for how to keep a diary also were altered during the first seventeen years of the PRC in response to changing contexts.

In the relatively tolerant political atmosphere of the New Democracy period, the CCP’s hopes of building a united socialist front meant cultural self-regulation in cities dominated by capitalist enterprises. Many urban-based media and cultural professionals in the early 1950s carefully aligned their works with the new ideological order so as to make them politically acceptable and to ensure their legitimacy (Chin, 2018; Schmalzer, 2007). Mao Xiang’s effort to transform the diary from its former individualistic mode to a collective-national mode is an example. Opening with a salute to the “bright and prosperous” New China, his 1951 How to Write a Diary is premised on the idea that “individuals are members of society [. . .] whose personal freedom should be subordinated to collective freedom” (Mao, 1951: 1). He advocated a five-pronged strategy for cultivating an outwardly oriented and forward-looking approach to journal-keeping. Writers should use the diary to record the “shared life of the individual and the masses”; should adopt the principle of “seeking truth from facts” and render their lives realistically—unlike the “fictitious” and “narcissistic” diaries of the “dominant and exploitative classes of the old society”; should write to check and improve their thinking in order to “keep up with the advancing society”; should examine their merits and faults “on a daily basis” because “we who live in this collectivist society must be responsible to society”; and should write to improve their vernacular literacy skills so as to help achieve “the urgent cultural task of reconciling [written and spoken] Chinese in New China” (1–4).

Attacking the old paradigm while pointing to the external world—the masses, society, the progress and future of New China—as the ultimate telos and proper point of personal writing, Mao Xiang calls on the reader to cultivate a self that is integral and in service to the nation. Such idealization of the self resembles the ethics of “self-work” in Stalinist Russia. It is indeed useful to engage with the self, but only insofar as it is done for the purposes of propelling social progress, fostering social responsibility, and advancing national cultural construction (Kharkhordin, 1999). The function of the diary in larger projects of character remolding, evident in earlier phases of the genre’s existence in China, was thus retained but modified, reflecting the Communist regime’s political ambition of nationalizing individual consciousness.

The diaries cited in Mao Xiang’s guidebook provide examples of, and further specifications for, “new democratic” self-fashioning. Ideal everyday subjects of New China are presented as individuals endowed with “correct” progressive and collective thinking. A peasant diarist recounts in his journal thoughts and activities of national-ideological significance: his engagement in physical labor and political meetings; his faith in the power of collective action rather than in the Bodhisattva when fighting against natural disaster; his euphoria upon hearing about the “heroic deeds of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in North Korea”; and his gratitude to Mao Zedong and the party for turning the peasants into masters of the land (Mao Xiang, 1951: 53–54). He writes about personal happiness too, as he does on the day his daughter is born; but the personal is, again, intertwined with state politics, imbued with the new regime’s gender policy: “I’m feeling so happy. Others like sons, I like daughters. Men and women are now equal, there are no differences [between the two sexes]” (53). At the same time, the lack of female models in the guidebook makes it clear that this reference to gender equality is little more than lip service paid to the new order: the only woman included among the fourteen model diarists, Vera Inber, is a long-dead poet of early Soviet Russia.

Other writers understood that integrating the large population of newly literate worker-peasants into New China would take more than simply inculcating in them a collective and progressive way of thinking. In the series of campaigns launched by the CCP for collectivizing the countryside, one central aspiration was to turn the peasants, who were considered to be family-oriented, undisciplined, and culturally ignorant despite their historical significance to the Chinese revolution and their “moral superiority” over the urban intellectuals, into an organized and useful socioeconomic force for rural transformation (Cheng, 2009: 78–83; Cai, 2016: 44–65). Not only should the new peasants be aware of their role as national-political subjects, they should also perform these roles. Revolutionary subjectivity was not to remain abstract; it had to be realized in the concrete action of everyday rural production, self-regulation, and self-criticism.

Guan Feng’s frequently reprinted How to Write a Diary gave expression to this ideal. While the valorization of collective consciousness remains strong, at the heart of Guan’s guidebook is a grounded, utilitarian doctrine of diary-writing as a productive tool of managing and disciplining the writer’s everyday life. Foregrounding the journal’s ideological as well as economic significance, Guan instructs his readers that writing a diary is a useful practice for improving one’s “memory,” “thought standard,” “work competence,” and basic “writing skills” (Guan, 1952 [1951]: 1). But unlike Mao Xiang, who links socialist self-work with the abstract ideal of advancing the nation, Guan defines the purpose of daily self-improvement in materialist terms: the diary should be used for practicing literacy because “writing is a vital tool [. . .] for work and everyday life” (1–4); the content of the diary should encompass “work-related,” “thought-related,” and “study-related” matters because these constitute a “major part of [. . .] revolutionary workers’ lives” (7–9).

In addition, and importantly, whereas Mao Xiang teaches that the purpose of daily self-examination is to better society, Guan takes an inward spiritual turn, in true revolutionary style. Invoking Mao Zedong’s maxim that, to maintain ideological purity, party members should criticize themselves as regularly as washing their faces (Mao Zedong, 1965b, 1965a), Guan advises that thought improvement in diary-writing means ideological “purification” of the self: “we must constantly improve our ideological understandings by sweeping bad things off our mind. [. . .] One must examine one’s shortcomings everyday—as regularly as one washes one’s face. Meanwhile, we must also engage in criticism and self-criticism. This should be a major concern to us revolutionary comrades, and [should be] the main theme of our diary” (Guan, 1952: 8–9) The reader is instructed here to undertake a ritual of daily self-transformation rooted in religious and revolutionary traditions. This mode of diary-writing as a means of self-discipline and daily introspective surveillance resembles the spiritual conventions of seventeenth-century Neo-Confucians and Puritans—linked here by their shared moral anxiety over the inner condition of the self (Wu, 1979; Wang, 2014: 5; Botonaki, 2004). The CCP shared this emphasis on inward vigilance, confession, and transcendentalism as it sought to govern people’s “affective lives” through promoting a this-worldly ascetism, from the Yan’an period through to the PRC era (Sorace: 2019; Apter and Saich, 1994; Goossaert and Palmer, 2011; Kiely, 2014: 242–54, 282–84). Guan’s guidebook shows the influence of these cultural traditions. Peasant-diarists must revolutionize their mind and oversee their ideological “salvation” in the absence of formal supervision, by consciously and regularly interrogating, disclosing, and disposing their inner “sins.”

Guan’s approach to diary-writing is built around the expectation that writers will be committed to leading an organized, productive, and ideologically pure life in the socialist here and now. His model diarists epitomize this ideal. Li Yugui, a literate female villager and a “winter school” 冬学 teacher, showcases her socialist subjectivity in an entry about women and peasant education. She recounts how she successfully overturned an attempted arranged marriage by standing up for the principles of gender equality and freedom in marriage. In the aftermath, she reflects on the incident in relation to her work, concluding on a revolutionary note: it is important to mobilize village women, young and old, to “attend the winter school [. . .] in order to transform their worldview through education” (Guan, 1952: 22). Li’s male counterpart, a village cadre, Zhang Xiuping, embodies the virtues of self-criticism, “hardworking and plain living,” and self-education. He blames himself for his subordinate’s weaknesses; travels on foot to meetings in distant towns instead of asking for a bicycle from the government; and determines to spend more time studying official documents and directives (23–24). Peasant diarists should realize the grand vision of socialist national construction in their thoughts and actions.

The methods of socialist diary-writing and the ideal of a productive and disciplined “agrarian proletariat” were by and large retained in subsequent years, though with modifications appropriate to new cultural and political exigencies as they emerged. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), the CCP’s dream to surpass the “capitalist West” through collectivizing rural labor saw not only a heightened emphasis on productivity but also a “huge injection of utopian enthusiasm” and romanticism into the existing imaginary of the socialist peasant, in order to accelerate the assimilation of the rural into the national structure (Cai, 2016: 59; Manning and Wemheuer, 2011). This is reflected in Yu Min’s slim 1958 manual, in which Yu called for a “salt of the earth” type of rural producer who is also optimistic and idealistic. While appropriating many details from Guan Feng’s text, Yu makes considered changes to render journal-keeping a useful practice for aiding “industrial and agricultural production” in the “all-encompassing age of the Great Leap Forward” (Yu, 1958: 10–11). He devotes two pages to the importance of recording the daily weather at the beginning of each entry because weather is “closely related to agricultural production” (9–10). Yu also argues the importance of seeing the “big picture” in ordinary life. His two anonymous peasant diarists are shown as happily and ideologically committed to the people’s commune system. One of them lauds the establishment of the village commune as “another step on the road to Communism”; the other records that everyone was grateful to Chairman Mao and the CCP for the bountiful supply of “delicious food” at the “clean and friendly” people’s canteen (7, 14).

This utopian “proletariat” survived the Great Famine as an ideal but was repurposed toward a new revolutionary goal. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, China emerged from Mao’s disastrous campaign as the “only true vanguard” of the world Communist revolution (Radchenko, 2009: 72; Scarlett, 2018). Yet what appeared to be soaring confidence masked the CCP’s growing anxiety over the twin threat of internal “revisionism” and capitalist “peaceful revolution” chipping away at the party’s political order (Cai, 2016: 357–402, 394). To overcome this political anxiety, the party launched a series of campaigns in the early half of the 1960s aiming to weave the Maoist ethics of “never forget class struggle” into the fabric of people’s everyday life so as to buttress socialism from below. In particular, as Cai Xiang has shown, bourgeois self-interest or desire was targeted as one of the key obstructions to the revolution (the other being located within the party) (357–402). To be a socialist individual now was to embody a “life politics,” whereby one’s mundane private affairs could be repurposed to serving the “big affairs of the state” (394). Accordingly, the ideal subject was reshaped, now imbued with the revolutionary desire to serve the public good selflessly and to actively annihilate bourgeois individualism in his or her day-to-day life (see Guan, 1963; Cai, 2016: 394).

During this period, the diary gained unprecedented popularity in China. The state capitalized on it as a tool to propagate the “life politics” of progressive role models, and enthusiastic masses embraced it as a method of composing their own “bright red history” of revolutionary self-transformation. In the midst of the high-spirited “learn from Lei Feng” campaign, pivoted on the publication of Lei’s personal diary, Xia Mingxu published his manual on journal-keeping in December 1963, promoting the ideal socialist subjectivity with a powerful line-up of grassroots individuals (Xia, 1964 [1963]). Spanning less than forty pages, Xia’s guidebook opens with a short token introduction to the established way of diary-writing, followed by a staggering collection of twenty-two entries, each written by a real-world “hero” whose details—commune, production brigade, occupation, and name—are provided at the end of the entry.

In this idealized world, readers are taught how to selflessly serve the collective common good and fight class enemies of socialist revolution—both around and within them—in everyday contexts. Chen Minzhong, an uncorrupted party branch secretary, recounts a former landlord’s scheme to bribe the commune leaders into releasing a plot of land he had owned before Liberation. “Everyone must sharpen their vigilance [. . .] [against] class enemies,” Chen warns his party comrades. “Do not let them engage in any [capitalist] restorationist activities” (Xia, 1964: 12–13). Chen Zhiping, on the other hand, is an example of fighting class enemies within. Confessing that he has become uninterested in physical labor since being elected accountant of his production brigade, Chen records his party branch secretary’s words: “We cadres must never forget our class origins 老本行.” Presently, Chen recalls his life before Liberation—“I was subjected to the oppression and exploitation of landlords and reactionaries”—and concludes with repentance and determination to “actively participate in [future] labor activities” (15–16).

The triumph of socialism over bourgeois individual desires reaches an apex in the finale of Xia’s guidebook, where a young village woman, Gu Zhenzhen, puts national interest before marriage. Upon receiving the news that her lover has enlisted in the PLA, Gu resolutely decides to postpone their wedding for the benefit of “production, study and life” because “[our] love is based on revolutionary [principles]” (Xia, 1964: 36–37). Her sweetheart does not disappoint, concurring with her opposition to the traditional value of early marriage: “Even getting married at thirty would not be too late. Now that we are young and strong, we should focus on our study and labor [productivity] so as to contribute more to the socialist cause” (37). Smashing feudalism and bourgeois individualism in one blow, the revolutionary lovers emerge into socialist modernization as participating national subjects.

Love for socialism and revolution knew no bounds, transcending geographical boundaries. Yu Lushao’s 余鲁苕 1964 How to Write a Diary concludes with an entry by an “educated youth” who voluntarily returns to his birth village to engage in rural construction after finishing school in the city. Reflecting upon his new life as a “first-generation new peasant,” the youth took to poetry to express the sublime marriage between his mundane provincial self and the divine world of revolution:

Standing inside my house gate,

I see the entire globe;

My feet are on home soil,

My heart embodies tianxia.

(Yu, 1964: 36)

Hopes and Uncertainties in the New Socialist Subject

On the whole, the how-to books of Maoist China encapsulated a discourse of political subjectivation that sought to recalibrate the conceptual core of Republican diary-writing to the advantage of the socialist state. This project was premised on a two-fold imperative. On the one hand, the guidebooks commanded writers to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of bourgeois individualism, and deliver themselves over to the new society as productive, energetic beings; on the other hand, they prescribed ideologized frameworks by which diarists were to actualize their everyday selves as subjects and objects of the ruling order. New China’s “liberated” writing subjects were not meant to be free, but to be simultaneously activated as revolutionary actors of change and governed by their internalized official prescriptions, becoming “ideological [agents],” to borrow Jochen Hellbeck’s phrase (Hellbeck, 2009: 56).

This seemingly paradoxical desire to encourage and limit the individual’s capacity for self-construction within the state’s conditions has often been interpreted through a structuralist framework in which Maoist politics is reduced to a totalizing force for “disciplining the individual and regulating society,” and the individual subject to a mere effect of power or Althusserian interpellation (Yu, 2015: 3). One way to avoid the pitfall of reductionist determinism in understanding revolutionary political culture is to recognize the centrality of conscious human agency to the state-sanctioned process of self-becoming.¹¹ As shown in all the guidebooks, the “new diarist,” though subsumed within, and subordinated to, the established norms, was never expected to be totalized into a “mass man” devoid of consciousness and self-determination. Rather, the books aimed to repurpose the individual’s capacity for intentionality and conscious action to serve the Maoist order.

This reflects the party-state’s desire to control what Jerrold Seigel, prominent intellectual and cultural historian, calls the “reflexive or self-positing” dimension of selfhood, or what the social-political theorist Alex Callinicos reclaims as the “enduring human nature” of “embodied agents” from structuralists and poststructuralists’ elision (Siegel, 1999: 285; Callinicos, 2004: 17–25, emphasis in the original). What the guidebooks aimed at was to produce active diarists capable of genuine independent and critical thinking within, and in relation to, the ideological structures set by the state. Even when socialist self-making became entangled with the state’s ambition to collectivize private desires during the 1960s, manuals still clung to the dream of diarists exerting determination and volition in their self-collectivization. Such was epitomized in Gu Zhenzhen’s willful act of agency in choosing to delay marriage for national construction. Hence Cai Xiang’s assertion that, “in producing the collective, socialism was also producing the individual” (Cai, 2016: 23).

This incompleteness of Maoist power was not so much the result of an inborn ideological fallacy or absurdity. Instead, it was a manifestation of a larger issue, illuminating the deep-seated anxiety of the Maoist regime about its ideal socialist subject’s modern legacies. Wang Hui and Cai Xiang, among other scholars, have demonstrated that China’s revolutionary modernity, for all its antagonism toward bourgeois capitalist modernity, carried within itself traces of its nemesis: its relentless drive for modernization, progress and the future, its sociopolitical egalitarianism, and its valorization of consciousness and action as the constituents of the Maoist version of what Marx called “new-fangled men” (Wang, 1998; Cai, 2016: 6–7; Li, 2012). The appropriation of the progressive, emancipatory, and humanist impulses of modernity within Mao’s vision of modernization helped the revolutionary state establish legitimacy and achieve its national goals, but it also generated many contradictions and conflicts.

For one thing, the modern spirit of the “socialist subject” meant a capacity for the self to transform existing norms and make revolution through class struggle, but it also meant that the self could never be totalized by power, thus posing the potential to destabilize the ideological unity and hegemony of the new order (Siegel, 1999: 299). Marx saw in this “unstable” modern self a future of communist revolution (Berman, 1998: 124). Mao, and other twentieth-century revolutionary leaders as well, adopted that vision but wanted to bypass the “depths of modern fragmentation and disunity” as they leapt from “feudalism” to socialist state-making (124). Thus, in incorporating modern subjectivity into the cultural and political imaginary of the “new socialist person,” the party-state, Cai argues, increasingly felt the need to condition the individual within the state’s limits, which in turn indicated growing concern about the potential of the everyday self as revolutionary weapon to backfire (Cai, 2016: 146–53, 168–75, 186–88, 347–50). If, in the 1950s, this concern was relatively mild, overshadowed by the high hopes for achieving national aims, by the 1960s it had grown into acute anxiety after years of popular mobilization which had produced the conditions for the self to fracture the ideological and political society envisaged in the preceding decade (357–402). It was the inability of the CCP to resolve the conceptual dilemma posed by the modern legacies of socialism that precipitated calls for self-revolution in the early 1960s, paving the way for the Cultural Revolution, where “class enemies” were located even deeper, within every person’s “soul.” The Maoist guidebooks on how to write a diary embodied the regime’s hopes and uncertainties about their own ideals.

The Master Narrative of How to Write a Diary

But the question remains as to what aspect, exactly, of this socialist subject was seen as dangerous, if the individual was not rejected outright as an object worthy of mobilization. Cai Xiang does not explicitly name the root source of the party’s anxiety beyond his recognition of the “problems of modernity” (Cai, 2016: 341). Nonetheless, the teachings of revolutionary diary-writing make clear what is possibly implied in Cai’s argument: the party-state feared what it had always sought—conscious, creative human agency. In their attempts to constitute the ideal socialist subjectivities in the readers, the didactic books envisaged failure as often as they did success.

This combined sense of anticipation and trepidation is nowhere better illustrated than in the guidebooks’ teachings about the composition and style of diaries. For all the distinctions in their aspirations and standards, the PRC’s publishers shared the desire of their Republican counterparts to foster creative and self-reflexive writers. Indeed, as Jochen Hellbeck has argued, ideological self-becoming should be understood as a “creative task,” one that demands the individual to “[pour] considerable subjective labour” in realizing its actualization within power (Hellbeck, 2009: 55–56). Unanimously rejecting passive journal-keeping, PRC instructors urged readers to avoid robotically recording insignificant events, instead promoting originality and the ability to think reflexively as essential for the development of meaningful personal narratives and a subjective voice.

As Mao Xiang takes the reader further into his guidebook, the author begins to render individualism and spontaneity as key constituents of the socialist “new diary.” Good journal-keeping is not just about “upholding the correct stance and views” or adhering to the principle of “seeking truth from facts,” Mao Xiang (1951: 5–6) explains. It is also about “adopting a narrative focus” according to one’s own occupational circumstances and being open to change:

Everyone’s life is different according to their occupation. [. . .] So, every person’s diary should be different in content and focus. [. . .] Diary-writing is not the same as bookkeeping. [. . .] We should be flexible and quick to adapt to change 机动灵活. (5–7)

Spontaneity and creative subjectivity cannot flourish within strict stylistic conventions. Mao Xiang understood this. In teaching the methods and styles of diary-writing, the author is at pains to promote creativity, while circumventing the pitfall of endorsing alienated bourgeois subjectivism. At one point, he anticipates and assuages the reader’s anxiety about literacy: “The modes and styles of writing a personal diary shouldn’t be uniform. In other words, we don’t really need to pay too much attention to modes and styles” (Mao, 1951: 8). At the same time, Mao uses sample diary excerpts to demonstrate what this socialist sense of creative freedom really means. Below is one of Mao Xiang’s samples, cited to illustrate how to write an “impressionist [or reflective] diary” 感想体. It is titled Singing in Shanghai, and written by a Ye Zhen at the dawning of the new age:

The Liberation of Shanghai brought to the city’s music industry freedom of singing. [. . .] Under the previous reactionary government, the people of Shanghai did not have the freedom to sing. For singing a song in protest against starvation or in support of democracy, they could be arrested and killed. [. . .] Soon after Shanghai was liberated, amateur vocal groups have mushroomed in various factories, schools, and institutions. Everywhere can be heard the tunes of new songs. [. . .] Everyone feels that New China is happy, lively, and free!

The New Chinese music stresses the “correctness of content” and the “expression of emotions.” It is “daring and pungent, unrestrained from fixed forms.” [. . .] Many people who were not qualified in the past to compose music have now had the audacity to try [. . .]

I love singing, but I can’t sing well. So, I’ve been learning every day from the singing team of [Shanghai] People’s Radio Station. I’ve learned a lot. Now I can sing a solo. I am so happy!

Ye Zhen, December 4, 1949. (Mao, 1951: 8–13)

The excerpt may seem too good to be real, but one can see clearly in its idealism how creative self-articulation is both sought after and dictated by a socialist ideology predicated on proletarian egalitarianism. Within this framework, the formerly voiceless, the “silent majority,” gain a new voice—for themselves and as an integral part of the larger collective.

The concurrent need to constitute and control a conscious writing subjectivity formed the basis of other Maoist diary manuals, in spite of the shifting political situation and frameworks. For example, Guan Feng, in his guidebooks, also accentuates the necessity of reflexive agency in constructing meaningful narratives. Devoting two sections to the topic “think before [you] write,” Guan speaks of reflective thinking as a powerful means for finding meaning in prosaic everyday life. He points out the obstacle first:

Many comrades who keep a diary often wonder: ‘I sleep, get up, eat, work, study [. . .] [Every day,] life is full of the same old stuff, [. . .] what is there to write about?’ In fact, this is because they have not thought [about their life] consciously enough. (Guan, 1955: 10)

What Guan means by thinking “consciously” is an active, inquisitive, and introspective mind purposefully transforming the mundane into meaningful narratives:

Is life mundane and routine? No, it’s not. As long as you are willing to think carefully, you can notice many new things and issues that have passed unnoticed. [. . .] Eating, sleeping, getting up, or doing chores at this hour and that minute are, of course, not worth writing about. However, if, for example, you stayed up all night ruminating about a certain matter, you should write [in your diary] about that matter as well as the outcome of your thinking, [. . .] therefore transforming it into an important, meaningful event. (Guan, 1955: 10–12, 10)

At the same time, the propagandist, drawing an imaginative connection between food and the Korean War, commands readers to seek out higher meaning in their ordinary life:

As for eating, [. . .] say, today, [you and your] comrades donate your coupons for non-staple foods to the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. Although that leaves everyone with less food at mealtime, they eat [what they have] with more relish than usual. How would you feel about this? What would the others say? Things like this would all be worth writing down. (Guan, 1955: 10)

By teaching the importance of reflexive thinking while inculcating the collectivist virtue of sacrificing self-interest for the greater good, Guan’s instructions epitomize the dual aspiration to foster and exploit individual agency within the hegemonic ideological edifice of the state.

The Communist regime’s obsession and paranoia with the individual’s active agency provide a plausible explanation for the disappearance of diary guidebooks as a publishing genre under Mao. As the Cultural Revolution descended into mayhem in 1966, the individual’s private self 私我 was officially declared an enemy of the state—an “ideological virus that would disintegrate the socialist public ownership system and subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Renmin ribao, 1967).¹² In this period, the idea of self-cultivation was widely criticized as a Confucian vestige revived by Liu Shaoqi—by now an “enemy of the people”—whose 1939 speech, “How to Be a Good Communist,” foreshadowed his ultimate demise (Lynteris, 2012: 90–114). As the differences between self-mobilization and self-annihilation began to converge and blur with increasing violence and intensity, “a revolutionary reconstitution of society” or the “common ruin of the contending classes” was envisaged to take place within the individual. It was probable that, in this context, propagating the hows and whys of reflexive diary-writing was seen as unnecessary or, indeed, as too risky.

At some point between 1966 and 1967, the publication of diary guidebooks petered out, not to resume until the 1980s. In their place rose mass-reproduced diaries of officially sanctioned role models as a means of propagating the Maoist archetypes of being. The published model diaries, themselves a popular pedagogical and propagandist genre in China since the early 1900s, evaded the tricky paradox concerning mobilizing individual agency as a means of destroying the “private self.” Instead of seeking to cultivate a revolutionary subjectivity within the self as did the guidebooks, these new model diaries served as what Francesca Dal Lago terms “metapictures” and “metatexts” to stimulate mimetic replication of the ideal capacities embodied in the authorized “others” (Lago, 2009).

Conclusion: Anxious State

Enclosed in the how-to books of Mao-era China are traces of a state-individual relationship more complex than popular assumptions would suggest. Far from being just a propaganda apparatus designed to erase the individual’s “authentic self,” the didactic texts, previously untapped by historians, reveal an ideological state conflicted about the promise of its envisaged new socialist subject. Having appropriated the cultural mechanism of popular diary education from their Republican predecessors, Communist instructors were quick to reconfigure the genre to serve the new exigencies of social engineering, extending their pedagogical outreach into the wider and lower realms of society.

In prescribing paradigmatic frameworks conducive to the making of socialist subjectivities for national construction, the guidebook authors found themselves in the inescapable position of having to harness and contain the diarists’ agency according to terms set by the state. At once empowering and constraining, the guidebooks underscore conscious human agency as an indispensable—albeit dangerous—constituent of the ideal new socialist diarist. This shows that the regime was both desirous and fearful of creative and self-reflexive writing subjects—the modern, Enlightenment ideal that Republican diary instructors had long ago instilled into the Chinese imagination. Ultimately, the guidebooks expose the coexistence of faith and suspicion, of desire and concern, within an otherwise seemingly homogeneous ideological system centered on social mobilization. This complicates the mainstream conception of the Communist state as a totalitarian apparatus striving to homogenize the people into a collective “mass man.” A cultural-historical analysis of the “how to write a diary” genre uncovers an ambitious but overlooked enterprise of popular subjectivation mired in the uncertainties about how to realize the revolution at the ground level.

In the end, taking the Maoist discourse seriously to observe how individual agency once figured in the ideals of the Communist regime is not simply a matter of historical exploration of the workings of power and ideology. Nor is it an attempt to salvage the past out of rose-tinted nostalgia. Recognizing the generative and subjectivizing ethos of revolutionary political culture is a necessary first step for us to develop a genuine understanding of why so many ordinary people chose to participate in the Maoist cause. They were not—never were they expected to be—passive victims of “brainwashing.” They saw in the revolution the promise of political participation and the possibility of being subjects of history in the making.¹³ The fact that their master narrative also belied the state’s agenda to monopolize and exploit their agency only confirms the insecurities of the party-state, reminding us of where the real power lies. At a time when China is swept up in the double maelstrom of global capitalism and CCP authoritarianism, an examination of the Maoist regime’s flawed dreams of social transformation gives us all the more reason to recuperate socialism’s humanist, egalitarian core, to strengthen the conviction in people’s potency as agents of change, and to renew belief in the potential of everyday men and women to shake up the powers that have both produced and confined them.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article has been many years in the making. I thank Antonia Finnane for her support, guidance, and feedback along the way, and for her meticulous editing of the final drafts. I express my sincere gratitude to Katharine McGregor, Max Kaiser, and Jimmy Yan for generously reading and commenting on drafts of this article; to my colleague at Nanjing University, Wang Nan, for providing research assistance in China; and to my students, Hamish Clark and Conna Speelman, for their valuable criticisms and comments during our discussions. The final drafting of this article benefited greatly from the feedback of Julie Kalman—my mentor assigned by the Australian Historical Association in 2018 as part of a writing bursary scheme. The article could not have come to fruition without the sharp insights of the anonymous referees and editor, Kathryn Bernhardt, and the scrupulous copyediting by Richard Gunde. I express my heartfelt appreciation and thanks to them.

Author’s Note

An earlier version of this article was awarded first prize in the Best Postgraduate Essay Prizes competition at the New Zealand Asian Studies Society’s Conference, convened at the University of Otago, Dunedin, November 27–29, 2017.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was made possible by funding from the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (with the support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation), and the Norman MacGeorge Scholarship, the University of Melbourne.

Notes

Author Biography

Shan Windscript is a final-stage PhD candidate in history at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines unpublished personal diaries written by ordinary Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution and, more specifically, how everyday writing shaped the construction of revolutionary selfhood within, and beyond, state ideology.

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