Towards a thick description of Maoist discourse: with help from Zhao Shuli

Abstract

With a few exceptions much of the knowledge of modern China produced in the world either ignores or demonizes the Mao era. On the cultural front things are not much better, whether we are speaking of the 'Seventeen-year’s Literature' or the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The negation of the Mao or radical era is, in short, a crucial part of contemporary Sinological-orientalism. There is however a recovery and reorientation project underway that seeks to restore the complexity of the Mao decades and its pursuit of an alternative, agrarian, and socialist modernity. As part of this project I offer an appropriately Foucaultian and Marxist notion of Maoist discourse. By framing that era in terms of its past Maoist discourse we can at least begin to take the revolution and its culture more seriously in its own terms and self-understanding. This has the added advantage of explaining the productive power and subjectivity of Chinese Maoism and its culture without recourse to the Cold War/colonial notion of 'totalitarianism.' Yet Maoist discourse, like China’s 'alternative modernity,' remain concepts more often announced than substantiated. The rich, challenging work of the rural writer Zhao Shuli offers us an ideal case study of what Maoist discourse was in cultural-philosophical terms. The second part of this essay offers a reading of selected short fiction from Zhao in terms of how it draws on and illuminates Maoist discourse, resulting in a literary art of remarkable political complexity and contextual detail. With Zhao it is 'politics in command' in a genuine sense; this is not a flaw but its entire point.