The Revolution’s Two Bodies: Rethinking the Rise of China’s Cultural Revolution Activism

• In Event: 411 - Regular Session. Comparative Sociology: The Paradoxes of Success and Failure in Comparative Sociology

Abstract

Why did students participate in the Red Guard Movement (1966-1968) and rebel against the Party establishment during China’s Cultural Revolution? This paper answers this question by tracing Cultural Revolution activism to the ideological contradiction of the post-revolutionary state (1949-1966) and shows that the formation of political activism is a deeply embodying and embodied experience that derives from students’ re-appropriation of the Communist Party’s campaigns for ideological legitimation. I identify the missing link in the existing explanations of the Cultural Revolution activism. I support my model of embodied activism by documenting the ideological campaigns that the Party targeted at students to legitimate the routinization of its power and delineating the interactive mechanisms whereby students re-appropriated the Party’s charismatic discourse and formed their radical habitus through embodied practices, which predisposed them to answer Mao’s call for rebellion from above in 1966. The study shows how rebellion is possible even when an authoritarian party-state enjoys ideological hegemony and monopolizes organizational resources; it extends William Sewell’s theory of revolution as emerging from preexisting ideological contradiction by highlighting embodied practices and their transformation; it revises Weber’s theory of charisma and its routinization.

Author

• Xiaohong Xu, National University-Singapore