Cadre ethnographer: Chinese land reform novels and the making of socialist history

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zhou Libo’s Baofeng zhouyu (Hurricane) and Ding Ling’s Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang (The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River), both written in 1948 and dual recipients of the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951, were largely based on the authors’ own participation in the land reform movements of the Civil War. As socialist realist texts formulated through the ethnographic experiences of their authors – observation, fieldnotes, and first-hand accounts – these novels feature a geopoetics in which a new nation is constructed through the restructuring of its physical spaces. I analyze the land reform novels through their authors’ twin methods of knowledge production: an ethnographic approach to reconstructing the reality of land reform campaigns (the ethnographer) and the theoretical underpinnings of socialist realism as a narrative explication of the policy’s necessity (the cadre). The cadre ethnographer was an author who sought both to obtain knowledge and to effect a transformation of his object of study, a tension which in fact facilitated an embodied philosophy of history. As both inventor and chronicler, the cadre ethnographer reconciled the two halves of “socialist” “realism,” producing the method by which Maoist communism theorized its own historiographic authority as a narrative of socio-cultural transformation.