The Making of Socialist Farm Workers: Cultivating Affective Attachment to the Great Northern Wilderness

• In Event: Feeling Food, Manufacturing Hope: Critical Studies in Affect and Labour

Abstract

This paper analyzes the identity reconstruction of war veterans in China’s efforts to achieve food security in the 1950s. In the hope of building socialist agricultural modernity to feed the war-torn nation, the PRC deployed 140,000 veterans from the 1950s to the 1960s to the marshland on its northeastern border, nicknamed Beidahuang (the Great Northern Wilderness), to establish army farms. By the 2000s, Beidahuang has become China’s largest commercial grain production base, with the capacity to sustain the total population in the four municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing and all Chinese army soldiers.
This paper examines early PRC propaganda materials on land reclamation to reveal the mechanisms of cultivating veterans’ affective attachment to the wilderness, the key to the celebratory transformation of Beidahuang to Beidacang (the Great Northern Granary). In the creation of a hero narrative, emasculated ex-warriors were transformed into production heroes who put down the sword to pick up the hoe in a war against nature. Glorified for “bleeding in the past and sweating in the present,” the identity reconstruction from soldiers to farm workers was accomplished in the narrative transition from injury to strength, belligerence to industriousness, and from hate to love. This paper, therefore, unpacks the affective charges in the discursive production of labor heroes to analyze the management of sensations and feelings in the making of socialist farm workers.

Author

• Xiaoping Sun, Saint Mary’s University