Xingsu "xinren": Zhonggong xuanchuan yu Sulian jingyan by Yu Miin-Ling, and: China's Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination by Yan Li (review)

Given the China–Russia rapprochement at present, it is the right time to look back at the honeymoon period between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and beyond. Historians, especially those specialized in early PRC years, have long focused on the Soviet–PRC relationship in general and Soviet specialists' contributions to China's industrialization and economic development in particular. Over the years, meanwhile, scholars have produced a wide array of works concerning the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) mobilization of the masses to advance its nation-building agendas. The production of the two books under review—Yu Miin-ling's Shaping the New Man and Yan Li's China's Soviet Dream—results from the intersection of those two lines of thought. They are groundbreaking scholarly works that provide compelling studies on Sovietculture's role in making a new Chinese nation and molding a modern, revolutionary citizenry in Mao's China.

Shaping the New Man focuses on the introduction of Soviet cultural products (fiction, textbooks, songs, and films) and practices (the model laborer and gender reconfiguration) and their sinification. Inspired by Louis Althusser's "ideological state apparatus," Yu attempts to show how the Chinese were "hailed" to be "new men" during Mao's times. While Yu gives a full-length explanation of what the "new man" was and what it stood for as a key part of state propagandist campaigns, she promises to examine the responses at the grassroots level to such apropaganda.¹ Ineach of her seven case studies, the author traces cultural products/practices to their Soviet antecedents or archetypes. Such transnational and transcultural comparisons are indisputably the book's greatest strength. The chapter about the model laborer (laodong mofan) in Mao's China (chap. 6), for example, links the CCP's political movements of rewarding "model laborers" to Stakhanovism in Stalin's Russia. I have not seen such a detailed analysis of the connectedness between the two elsewhere.²

The most impressive part of Shaping the New Man is that about the introduction of the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Gangtie shi zenyang lian cheng de 鋼鐵是怎樣煉成的) and its protagonist, Pavel Korchagin (chap. 1). In this chapter, the author somehow delivers her promise to show the readers not only how the book was transferred to China but also how the readership received it. Yu finds that passionate readers of this novel were motivated not necessarily by socialist heroism but by romantic love between Korchagin and his ex-girlfriend, Tonia. At a time of sexual repression, Tonia had become an icon of feminine beauty and bourgeois sentimentalism that aroused male adolescents' sexual impulses across China.³ The gap of the political authorities' intention and readers' interpretations well explains why How the Steel Was Tempered, a highly politicized literary work, gained unmatched popularity in several decades.

In other chapters, by comparison, Yu is less successful in exploring consumers' reception of cultural products/practices imposed by the Party. The author's inability to address the reception, reinterpretation, and even reworking of those products/practices, in my view, is the book's major weakness. Such a weakness stems from, first of all, the author's choice of primary sources. Evidently, Yu has been better at using publications than archival records (although she does list a number of archival sources in the bibliography) and interviews. The inadequate use of such sources precludes real-life audiences in Maoist China from speaking out on their own behalf. The chapter about How the Steel Was Tempered is more successful precisely because Yu is capable of citing memoirs of readers with diverse backgrounds, allowing her to investigate the latter...