Overcoming class anxiety: the art of unintentional subversion in Mao's China

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we study the unintended subversion of official ideology among ordinary people in Mao’s China by analyzing the everyday life represented in the letters of a Shanghai worker who sought to overcome political anxieties by turning the political rituals, symbols, and tropes to his ends without resisting political mobilizations and challenging official ideology. By examining how the writer of the letters read Maoist political texts and employ political discourse in everyday life, we seek to explain how such a tactic of everyday politics differs from resistance and escape. We demonstrate that ordinary people could still find a way to transcend the political logic of the Cultural Revolution while outwardly participating in the revolutionary routine. This mode of unintentional subversion helps to explain how the Cultural Revolution ended without a major political upheaval against the Party-state’s official ideology.