Education as a Continuation of Revolution: Everyday Life and the Communist Education of Petty Urbanites in 1930s China

Abstract

This paper explores the context and the process by which culture became integral to revolution in the early years of the Chinese Communist Revolution. It draws attention to the educational program that a group of urban-based Communist intellectuals initiated among urban laborers and other workers after the Nationalist Party’s suppression of the Communist labor movement in 1927. Rather than an economic and political revolution, these Communists envisioned a “cultural and thought movement” that would transform laborers’ ways of seeing and living everyday life. By guiding workers’ literary writings and provoking social scientific and philosophical discussions, they worked to transform workers’ consciousness about their everyday experiences. They believed this consciousness would engender resistance to capitalist oppression in incremental and concrete ways and that a political and economic revolution would emerge from these daily actions at an opportune time.