![]() ![]() An increasing body of archival images (mostly undated or unauthored, from untraceable sources) have appeared on media websites, in WeChat public accounts, across the frames of amateur photos and educational videos (about Maoism or Chinese revolution), and in the digital flea markets, particularly among the stock photos of e-commerce platforms like Kongfuzi or 7788. One might readily access the images of pidouhui by way of, either the group of Chinese films marked as “the underground,” both the banned drama films (such as Blue Kite 1993, Farewell, My Concubine 1993, and To Live 1994) and the independent documentaries (such as 1966 My Time in the Red Guards 1993, Though I am Gone 2006), or dissent artists’ personal testimonial artifacts (Wang Shui-bo’s Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square 1998, Liu Dahong’s Childhood series 2013, and Zhang Xiaotao’s The Spring of Huangjueping 2016) (4).īesides, pidouhui has become even more visible and materially accessible not just abroad but also within China, with the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically. Received as the pervasive and the mundane during the Chinese Great Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and also the period’s iconic form of violence, pidouhui has been a politically verboten image in China, with varying degrees of restricted circulation across time. Such a scene visualizes and frames an open spot where the line of demarcation between the “people” as enclosure and their “enemies” as the center is drawn both spatially and symbolically, and the question of membership must be at stake. Pidouhui stands out as one of the most spectacular icons of China’s socialist class struggle, with a few highly visible formal elements: gesticulating and slogan-shouting masses, the objects of the struggle with their heads hung or kneel down (sometimes also wear the “dunce caps” or hold their arms in a humiliating and painful position called the “jet plane style”), big sign boards with a denunciatory label written on it and with the person’s name crossed out, among others. ![]() ![]() Comparable to the Soviet phenomena that ranged from shop-floor scapegoating to agitation trials, pidouhui incorporated theatrical elements and seemingly judicial procedures, such as interrogation, trial, and punishment. By staging and choreographing class struggle as a sight to be seen, pidouhui referred to the session of mass gathering in which those labelled as “class enemies” were accused and tormented in public. Pidouhui is an elaborate assemblage invented during the heyday of Chinese socialism, as well as a constellation of generic practices that caused ordinary people to commit extraordinary (bodily, linguistic, or symbolic) violence in the name of pursuing people’s justice. The brutality of class exorcism in China was specifically manifested in pidou 批鬥 (denouncing and struggling) or pidouhui 批鬥會 (struggle sessions), as coined by the Chinese Communist Party. ter Haar suggests as the Chinese “demonological paradigm” from a religious perspective (2). I describe the preoccupation with such practices in the Chinese revolution as “class exorcism,” a working concept inspired by both Peter Baehr’s sociology of unmasking and what Barend J. In China, popular practices of unmasking, accusing, and expulsing class enemies ( jieji diren 階級敵人) functioned as guarantee of the continued purity and transparency on which the China’s communist revolution and its permanent revolution after 1949 depended (1). Identifying who was “inside” and who was “outside” of the proletarian masses is a matter of violent urgency for the Marxist class struggle.
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