The Blank Exam: Crises of Student Labour and Activism in the late Cultural Revolution film Juelie

Abstract

Although ‘workers’ universities’ gained prominence during the Cultural Revolution, they were not the only experiment in moving beyond the elitist and ‘bourgeois’ values of the conventional university through the integration of mental and manual labour. Nor were they the earliest. First established in 1958, the Jiangxi Communist Labour University (江西共 产主义劳动大学, or ‘Gongda’), was one of the most notable attempts in this sense. Its students were taught through a curriculum of ‘part-work, part-study’ and, unlike other universities, Gongda was registered as both a university and a production unit, supporting its staff and students through the sale of products from its farms and factories. This essay looks at the Cultural Revolution’s larger intellectual project of integrating the labour of education with the labour of production through the lens of the 1976 movie Juelie, a feature film depicting a fictional account of the university’s founding. Through narrative references to the historic role students played in the Cultural Revolution, the film responded to the crises raised by student activism during the Cultural Revolution by reinscribing student subjectivity within the patriarchal and developmentalist structures of the state.