The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Nebulous Nexus : Modernity and Perlustration in Maoist China

På svenska

Author

Editor

  • Michael Kim
  • Yong-Woo Kim
  • Michael Schoenhals

Summary, in English

This chapter posits the existence of a nexus of modernity and surveillance in the People’s Republic of China in the untidy post-Liberation decade of the 1950s. It identifies the state’s interception and perlustration of ordinary people’s correspondence for the purpose of discovering what they were thinking as a central component of that nexus, and it illustrates this identification with contemporary data culled from a corpus of recently declassified intercept transcripts. It argues that the creation of an alternative modernity—labelled communism but defined by discipline and quantifiable order rather than simply by ”freedom from want”—was attempted by China’s then political leadership, but ultimately abandoned in favour of the quiet consolidation of really existing socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Department/s

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

53-70

Publication/Series

Mass Dictatorship and Modernity

Volume

#2 in book series "Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century"

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Topic

  • History and Archaeology

Keywords

  • Modernity
  • China
  • history
  • politics
  • Mao
  • mass dictatorship

Status

Published

Project

  • A Hundred Million Lives on File?––Confidential Records and Social Control in Mao Zedong’s China
  • Mass Dictatorships of the 20th Century

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-1-137-30432-2