Performances of Resistance: Communist Hunger Strikes and Demonstrations in Nationalist Prisons, 1928–1937

P e r fo r m a n c e s o f R e s is ta n c e : C o m m u n is t H u n g e r Strikes and D e m o n s tr a tio n s in N a tio n a lis t Prisons, 1928-1937 by Jan Kiely The history ofCol11lllunist prison resistance in the 1930s·.has long been submerged in the reductive narratives of revolutionary romanticism. Popular fictionalized versions of the sort found in the well-known novel (1958) and film (1959) The Song of Youth and. memoir literature alike··have largely been directed to support Maoist and, later, Dengist political mythologies. Indeed, the great number of prison reminiscences published after 1978 were clearly aimed at reversing Cultural Revolution historical verdicts, like the. "Sixty-One Renegades 'Case," with an eye to raising the non-Maoist "White area urban struggles" to parity with the Long March or Yan' an in the history of the revolution . Such texts tend to declare every hunger strike a "victory" and every moral choice to have been as simple as "Red" and "White."1 All is not lost, however, for those of us who wonder what these experiences and events were really like, how imprisoned Communists actually acted, and what may be learned from these episodes. Memoirists, of course, have a habit of remembering details that do not necessarily fit into their themes and judgments. When such evidence is cross-read with official archival documents and journalistic accounts and the dissonances in the record are closely interrogated , it becomes possible to start peeling back later imposed narratives. What is ex:posed, however, is not merely a sense of the grim, irresolute experiences of political prisoners-though that is surely revealed-but also long-concealed processes , narratives andcultural practices of the time having little to do with the historiography of the revolution. A range of sources, for instance, reveal that only the rare hunger strike lasted as long as six days and most ended after two or three. Why was this? Even allowing for the weakened condition of most prisoners, it seems these strikes were never undertaken with a persistence to the brink of death. On close examination, there are a number of explanations for the short duration of hunger strikes; the most significant of these is that they were not mortal standoffs between the powerful and the desperate, but primarily a form of political theater. Since, at least, the rise of the· influence of Clifford Geertz on historical studies, historians of many parts of the world have made much effective use of theatrical terms to illuminate forms of political practice. For historians of modTwentieth -Century China, Vol. 29, No.2 (April, 2004): 63-88 64 Twentieth-Century China em China, for instance, mention of "political theater" might evoke images of imperial court ritual or student and/or worker demonstrations. But not all political theater in modem China was street theater or dramas set within the halls of governance. In this study, I argue that most Communist-led prison hunger strikes and demonstrations in the 1930s were carefully calibrated· performances of resistance intent on a limited act of communication to several imagined audiences . As such, first, they were framed-restricted, enabled, shaped-by a complex set of institutional and social contexts. The diverse array of institutions' of detention and custodial punishment in Nationalist China constituted the defining stage settings for these acts of resistance. Second, imprisoned Communists acted, as best they could, in accordance with a range of conceptual templates or "scripts" of how properly to conduct resistance. Some of these were Partydirected strategies, but many derived from culturally engrained narratives that were, in Alan Taylor's term, "woven into life" in this period.2 And all were a kind of ordered paradigm of identity performed in a manner to effect meanings of particular relevance within the specific social-cultural setting. In the third and fourth sections of the article, I examine how the performances shaped by these scripts and settings sought, like all performances, to communicate with audiences that the performers conceived of as unified collectivities that would respond in certain...