SHSS

Puppet Animation in Socialist China: Realism and the Animated Feeling of Life

This essay is included in the special issue on "Animation, Media Technologies, and Nation-State" that I organized for the biannual journal Wenxue (Literature, 文学), published by Fudan University Press, 2019.

Thesis for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technologies
Master of Philosophy
2017

This thesis investigates socialist biopolitics and national subjectivity in relation to animal representations in Chinese media culture from the 1940s to the 1970s. Drawing upon biopolitical criticism and animal studies, the present thesis seeks to critically examine how animals, similar to human beings, were subjected to the biopolitical mechanism and hence became the objects of political strategy that contributed to the formation of national subjectivity in socialist China. It probes the biopolitical governance of animals by exploring pervasive animal representations across multiple media genres, ranging from posters to cartoons, picture-story books to animation. Rather than confining animals to the domain of metaphors, it pursues a materialist approach that considers how different media genres and their material specificities materialized animals which produced aesthetic and political significance.

The biopolitical governance of animals in socialist China was prominently manifested in two ways. First, the Chinese socialist state launched an array of mass mobilizations against animals and dehumanized class enemies which were bound up with the national subjectivation; second, the formation of national subjectivity epitomized by the creation of Socialist New Man was based on evolutionary thinking which attempted to rule out animalities from ideal socialist humans. By examining the governance of animals per se as well as their related representations in socialist China, this thesis argues that the formation of national subjectivity in socialist China hinged on the biopolitical division among species. Chinese socialist biopolitics necessitated the formation of the “pure” national subjectivity by attempting to draw a clear-cut conceptual human-animal boundary, ceaselessly creating a break between the collective socialist humans within and the dehumanized class enemies without. However, animal representations in socialist China offered a heterogeneous site where the biopolitical boundary was often re/negotiated, complicated and problematized, which in turn destabilized the unified national subjectivity. Proposing to problematize the biopolitical distinction, this thesis reveals a plasmatic imagination of national subjectivation in socialist China.

For socialist China, regulating the distribution of sounds and sound infrastructures was part of the nation-building project. During this era, building nationwide broadcasting networks was an important agenda for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize the labor force for agricultural and industrial modernization and to connect the individual with the collective and the national. To achieve an ideal distribution of national radio broadcasts, the Chinese socialist state not only controlled the content production and broadcasting infrastructures but also banned listening to so-called enemy radio (ditai)-Mandarin-based foreign radio stations that often targeted Chinese audiences with anti-Communist propaganda. Most enemy radio stations were those managed and controlled by Taiwan, the United States, the UK, and Australia, such as Voice of Free China (Taiwan), Voice of America (VOA), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and ABC Radio (Australia), among others. This chapter will hence focus on the state's attempts to control illicit listening in the historical context of Chinese socialism and its nation-building project in the 1960s and 1970s. In the international context, the 1960s and 1970s were also a time period when the politics of the Cold War generated the "airy curtains" of broadcasting warfare (Badenoch, Fickers, and Henrich-Franke 2013). The curtains of electromagnetic waves functioned as an airy break between the Eastern and Western Blocs, but it also paradoxically put them in communication through a process of mutual contamination. One of the most important defining features of high-quality broadcasting signals was that it enabled radio broadcasting to go across national borders. These borders are often demarcated by boundary lines, mountains and rivers, military units, immigration offices, and other institutional and material regimes-anything imagined to be "solid. " This ethereal quality of signals led to a celebration of radio broadcasting's deterritorializing capacity that problematizes the totalized imagination of nation, nationhood, and other kinds of supranational formations. However, recent studies on the materiality of media remind us that sounds and electromagnetic signals also have their infrastructural bases-radio stations, state institutions, antennas, wires, transmitters, receivers-that are no less solid or less material. Media scholars and