How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities

Abstract

The Maoist regime has conventionally been understood as a totalitarian apparatus hostile to the individual. Yet the mass dictatorship also saw the proliferation of guidebooks on how to write a diary. This article is a pioneering exploration of these didactic texts, situating them within a longer Chinese tradition of popular subjectivation. A close reading of the guidebooks in light of their Republican predecessors suggests that the regime simultaneously anticipated the individual’s role as revolutionary agent of change and viewed it with trepidation. Prescribing paradigmatic frameworks for constructing socialist subjectivities, the manuals propagated journal-keeping as a political routine by which to shape the writer’s life and selfhood. Central in these teachings was the desire to mobilize yet monopolize the individual’s conscious agency. At once empowering and constraining, the “how-to” books rendered creative self-reflexivity indispensable—albeit dangerous—to the Maoist agenda, revealing a deep-seated anxiety of the state about socialism’s modern legacies.

Paradox of Revolution: A Communist Patient’s Management of Neurasthenia on a Spiritual Journey

“…In addition to this informed empiricist approach, we also pay attention to the dynamic characteristic of diarizing in Maoist China. In particular, we are inspired by Windscript’s (2021b) study of how to write a diary in Mao’s China. According to Windscript (2021b), diarizing in Mao’s era was not merely a political instrument to suppress the subject’s authentic self.…”

“…In particular, we are inspired by Windscript's (2021b) study of how to write a diary in Mao's China. According to Windscript (2021b), diarizing in Mao's era was not merely a political instrument to suppress the subject's authentic self. Instead, diary writing was often meant to mobilize the individual's conscious agency and reshape his/her selfhood in alignment with the political movements.…”

Benevolent Reeducation and Active Remolding: A Perspective from Liu Yuxuan’s Diary and Correspondence

“…However, writers’ understanding of the politics and social discourses around them affects their modes of expression in diaries and letters. For instance, the guidebooks produced in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) about using diaries to construct socialist subjectivities and for ideological purification effectively shaped the minds and means of expression of ordinary Chinese (Windscript, 2021). 3 Further, as indicated by Aaron Moore (2013: 11), “any diary subject to the gaze of others is likely to be edited by the author out of fear or simply to appeal to an intended audience.” It is reasonable to assume that such kinds of self-writing record only part of writers’ life experiences, innermost feelings, and social conditions.…”