Texts of Class Struggle: Exhibitions from the Socialist Education Movement to the Cultural Revolution

• In Event: Rhetoric and the Politics of Control in Maoist China

Abstract

On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, propaganda all over China intensified its stress on class education. As the Socialist Education Movement unfolded, with its rectification and anti-corruption campaigns in both countryside and city, it was accompanied by activities meant to cultivate class consciousness. One such activity was the class education exhibition (jieji jiaoyu zhanlan, or jiezhan), which took place in the smallest units—village, factory, classroom—and in turn were gathered into large-scale displays at the municipal and provincial level. Throughout, the goal of the jiezhan was to warn against persistent class enemies and persuade viewers to engage in class struggle. Using archival materials collated by Red Guards who later critiqued the jiezhan, this paper examines Shanghai’s class education exhibition. These documents demonstrate how exhibitions served as up-to-the-moment texts of class struggle, how viewers responded to the political lessons therein, and how jiezhan were later read by out-of-town Red Guards as a barometer of local conditions. Linking jiezhan to the Red Guards’ own exhibits of their “revolutionary achievements,” this paper suggests that by showing individuals’ possessions and writing display boards that were assiduously copied, exhibitions provided a template for house searches and big-character posters. With newly-collected counterrevolutionary evidence and personal denunciations, Red Guard exhibitions thus served to prove the rightness of Cultural Revolution’s rebellion.

Author

• Denise Y. Ho, The Chinese University of Hong Kong