Tiananmen shook the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to its core. The charge leveled against former general secretary Zhao Ziyang was that “[a]t the critical juncture involving the life and death of the Party and state, he made the mistake of supporting turmoil and splitting the Party, and he bears unshirkable responsibility for the formation and development of the turmoil. The nature and consequences of his mistakes are very serious.” The issues the Party faced, however, ran far deeper than even this charge suggested. Tiananmen threw open a whole series of questions that had been simmering just below the surface for years.

Does sex have a history? Almost any teenager coping with a parent who still lives in the dark ages will assure you that it does. But the history of sex is surprisingly difficult to study. Why? Lack of evidence. Most people keep their sex lives to themselves. What people write down, publish, and circulate may be sexual fantasy or invention, with plotlines designed to sell copy. This evidence can tell us a lot about what people like to read or watch or imagine, but little about what they actually do. Ironically, the most reliable evidence for a history of sex is the mass of material (by government officials, religious leaders, parents, doctors, and so on) telling people what not to do. We can be certain that some people were doing some of that.

Encountering an unfamiliar culture, the outsider looks for difference. Nowhere is difference more easily apprehended than in the arenas of gender and sexuality. In any cross-cultural encounter, gender roles and sexuality supply a medium for clarifying and symbolizing the essential cultural differences that separate “us” from “them.” So sex – that most intimate of acts – is ironically one of the first things we think of when we imagine the remote Other. Imperial expansion aimed at economic or political conquest therefore also, and inevitably, negotiates gender relations (Stoler 1991). In the history of Western colonialism, the gender models at the civilizing center were binary and heteronormative. Encountering Chinese culture, Europeans asked: What makes women women, and what makes men men, in this place? The civilizing projects of China's own late imperial government, and of China's contemporary Communist state, posed the same questions on the borderlands and in China's heartland itself. The effect of civilizing projects, in general, has been to masculinize the dominant metropole and feminize the colonized Other, as in Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby, quoted above. But gender bending and confusion can also arise. Who is liberated, who is modern, who is moral, who is perverse? Cross-cultural encounters also pose these questions and demand answers.

The body unadorned may have been meaningless, but things that covered and decorated the body were crucial markers of civilization and social hierarchy in late imperial times. Clothing, hairstyle, shoes, and badges – these gave the physical body its significance. The absence of proper adornment signaled savagery, barbarism, and backwardness. As Dorothy Ko (1997a:12) observed, commenting on late imperial culture: “Correct attire – headdress, dress, and shoes – was the quintessential expression of civility, culture, and humanity.” Every dynasty issued new regulations to stipulate how officials should display their status through costume, and which colors were reserved for the exclusive use of the imrperial family. Medallions on official gowns blazed the status of the wearer down to his level in the nine-rank bureaucratic system, and the number of claws on a gown's embroidered dragons signaled the wearer's degree of distance from the emperor himself (see Figure 21).

The “modern girl” of the twentieth century, sauntering along the street in Shanghai, proclaimed her distance from her backward country cousins and her membership in the modern world with her “natural” feet, her bobbed hair, and her tight-fitting, high-slit skirts (Figure 22). And women in post-1949 China dressed, up or down, in fashion constrained by the current political line.

Introduction

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was an attempt to shape the future of China. Its method was to change the nature of the Chinese people. It was to be a “great revolution that touches people to their very souls.” The masses were to liberate themselves by class struggle against the main target, “those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road,” These so-called Soviet-style revisionists were alleged to be seeking to corrupt the masses by using old ideas to restore capitalism. By transforming the ideological realm – education, literature, the arts – and embracing Mao Zedong Thought, the Chinese people were to inoculate themselves against poisonous contagion.

As we have seen, romantic love was far from a new theme in twentieth-century China's popular culture. For centuries, the tension between romantic love and arranged marriage supplied endless drama for opera scripts, novels, and short stories. During the Qing period, the Manchus campaigned against eroticism and sensuality in fiction and the theater, in part to enhance their claims to legitimacy. By attacking the “decadent customs” of the former Ming dynasty, the new Qing government presented itself as a regime dedicated to restoring the proper boundaries between men and women and to promoting the Confucian family system and its rituals. To some degree, Qing rectification movements, much like the sweeping anti-rightist campaigns of the Maoist period in the People's Republic, reshaped the content of literary and visual arts. Woodblocks for printing proscribed works were burned along with manuscript copies and published editions, so that many of these books are now known only from titles in bibliographies, or because they made their way into libraries outside of China (Ruan 1991:96–98). Much of the erotic painting and drawing that fills sinologist Robert van Gulik's famous book on Chinese erotica, for example, was copied in Japan, where it survived the Qing purges unscathed (Gulik 1951). Even so, and despite the Manchu court's efforts, fiction and drama from the Qing dynasty open huge windows on romantic love, sexuality, and gender performance under Manchu rule.

An overview

The year 1958 began with the Chinese Communist leaders optimistic about their ability to lead the country up the path of rapid economic development and social progress. To be sure, not all Politburo members agreed on the best methods to use to accomplish these great tasks, but overall confidence was high and the degree of underlying unity clearly sufficient to enable the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to act in a consistent and decisive manner. Seven years later, deep fissures had rent this leadership to the point where Mao Zedong himself stood on the verge of launching a devastating attack against many of the colleagues with whom he had worked for more than three decades. That attack would, in turn, launch China into a decade so tumultuous that even in the early 1980s leaders in Beijing would look back to the eve of the 1958–65 era wistfully as the time when the Party's power, prestige, and unity had reached pinnacles. The eight years between 1958 and 1965 were a period of major transition in the Chinese revolution.

During the New Culture Movement (1915–1919), China's urban intellectuals rejected the Confucian family values espoused by the late imperial government. But the system they challenged was deeply rooted in local custom and lineage power. The Qing government had created an informal system of control that minimized reliance on punitive legal sanctions to maintain the family-based social order. In addition, as we have seen, the late imperial state stressed positive rewards and transformation through education, rather than coercion, to enforce its policies. The imperial government's exceptional success in spreading its messages internalized gender values, especially in women, who were honored for widow fidelity and even for martyrdom in resisting rape or asserting their sexual purity. Court records show individual women testifying to their deep commitment to chastity, not only as a matter of family honor but also as a personal individual responsibility, to the point where a woman would take her own life to express her moral conviction (Theiss 2004).

Sixty years is a long life-span for a revolutionary regime to survive and remain vigorous. The celebration in 2009 of the 60th anniversary of the Chinese communist conquest of power and the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was in stark contrast to the fate of its erstwhile Soviet “elder brother.” Despite suffering terrible human tragedies and political upheavals – notably, the great famine of 1959–61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 – the PRC had emerged as a powerful and dynamic country. The purpose of this volume is to chronicle how that came about. The purpose of this introduction is to proffer a hypothesis, based on that chronicle, to explain the Chinese success.

The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive account of sixty years of the politics of the People's Republic of China, 1949 to 2009. The first four chapters, covering the years of the Mao era and its immediate aftermath, 1949–1982, are drawn from Volumes 14 and 15 of the Cambridge History of China (CHOC). The fifth and sixth were commissioned for the first and second editions of this book to cover the Deng Xiaoping era. The seventh chapter was commissioned for this third edition to cover the final years of this cycle of Cathay.

The chapters drawn from CHOC were part of an integrated schema that included chapters on economics, education, culture, society, and foreign policy, but since “politics took command” of everything in Mao's China, these chapters on politics touch on those other topics as well.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which by official Chinese reckoning lasted from the beginning of 1966 to the death of Mao Zedong some ten years later, was one of the most extraordinary events of this century. The images of the Cultural Revolution remain vivid: the young Red Guards, in military uniform, filling the vast Tiananmen Square in Beijing, many weeping in rapture at the sight of their Great Helmsman standing atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace; veteran Communist officials, wearing dunce caps and placards defiling them as “monsters” and “freaks,” herded in the backs of open-bed trucks, and driven through the streets of major cities by youth only one-third their age; the wall posters, often many sheets of newsprint in size, filled with vitriolic condemnations of the “revisionist” or “counterrevolutionary” acts of senior leaders. The little red book carried by the Red Guards – a plastic-bound volume containing selected quotations from Chairman Mao – remains a symbol of the revolt of the young against adult authority.

The strict boundaries around young women that were supposed to keep them chaste and pure were the same boundaries that upheld the honor of the family in nineteenth-century China. These boundaries were as salient in the laws of the eighteenth century as they were in the upbringing of respectable women at the turn of the twentieth century, as Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai could testify. Tensions surrounding this ideal of female purity were thoroughly explored in early Chinese texts, one of the most widely read being the classic “Tale of Yingying.” Here is a synopsis of that story, written by a Tang scholar named Yuan Zhen (779–831): Yingying is a fair seventeen-year-old when her mother introduces her to the comely scholar Zhang, to whom the mother owes a favor. He falls in love at first sight and attempts to approach Yingying through her maid, Hongniang. Hongniang persuades Zhang to write love poems to Yingying to seduce her. This works so well that Yingying, after an initial display of outrage, climbs over the wall of her compound to Zhang's bed and sleeps with him. For the next month, he joins her secretly every night in the western wing of her home, where they make love. In the end, though, Zhang abandons Yingying for the capital, where he sits for the exams and rebuffs her tender letters. Stories of the affair spread throughout the capital, many of them richly sensual and romantic, some cruel and hurtful. Yingying ultimately marries another man, and Zhang another woman.