Remoulding minds in postsocialist China: Maoist reeducation and twenty-first-century subjects

Abstract

Thought reform (or ‘brainwashing’, as its critics labelled it in the 1950s) has been the Communist Party's most direct and explicit effort to refashion Chinese people. Since 1949, China's government-run reeducation centres have been dedicated to the production of ideal citizens. The discourses those institutions have produced highlight significant changes in the way the state has imagined its model (and anti-model) subjects as the People's Republic made its transition from Mao-era collectivism to contemporary postsocialism. This article traces official discussions about thought reform's ideal outcomes from the revolutionary period (1946–1978), through the reform era (1979–1989), and into the postsocialist present (1989–2012). It argues that in the early years of the revolution, thought reform was designed to be a homogenizing process aimed at uniting ‘the great masses of the people’ through a history of shared national suffering. In today's postsocialist reformatories, however, narratives of individualized agency dominate discussions about reeducation. Reeducators treat their targets as social problems, but the agents of the state do not see society as the most important cause of unlawful behaviour. Contemporary internees are undergoing Maoist thought reform, but reeducators seek to craft subjectivities that Mao would have found objectionable.