Peidong Sun
Fudan University, Shanghai, China
This paper explores the dynamic relationship between censorship and readership in the cultural governance of China. Using previously untapped CCP documents, private archival collections, oral history, personal and work journals, I examine the motivations, mechanisms, impact, and evolution of state censorship on personal readings during the Cultural Revolution. Specifically, I explore how books that were labelled “fragrant flowers” and “poisonous weeds” evinced the state’s cultural sensibility and its interactions with official censorship. On the one hand, through “singing red and striking black” (changhong dahei 唱红打黑), the system of cultural governance was made both normative and punitive: official censorship and self-censorship induced “political side-taking” (zhengzhi zhandui 政治站队) and “habitual following” (xiguan xing jingen习惯性紧跟) within the society, which in turn normalized political power and transformed censorship into a cultural norm. On the other hand, a thriving literary underground, as seen in the hoarding of forbidden titles and their partial unbanning since 1970, suggests the limitations of censorship and shows how networks of information percolated through official politics and entered everyday life through reading and writing.
Biography:
Peidong Sun is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Fudan University, researching history of everyday life in post-1949 China. She was an Edward Teller National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University from 2017-18, and a Visiting Scholar of the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 2016-17.