Sexuality and the official construction of Occidentalism in Maoist and early post-Mao China

Abstract

In Occidentalism, Xiaomei Chen observes that the West was employed by the opponents of official institutions as a liberating force against the Chinese government in the post-Mao period. As her arguments are premised on the basis that the government views the West as the contrary, the book briefly delineates ‘official Occidentalism’ that serves for domestic oppression of its citizens, and occasionally cultural imperialism toward its socialist brother. Nevertheless, this observation, as she admits, does not intend to totalize all cultural aspects and diversities. Encapsulating highly controversial and contested categories, as well as complicated or even contradictory sentiments, sexuality broaches a new subject matter on the study of Occidentalism. Situated in the genealogy of representing the West in Maoist and early post-Mao China by the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, the People’s Daily, this article argues that, while sexuality had been silenced and suppressed under administrative penalties and Party disciplinary sanctions, it was powerfully embedded within and stereotyped by socialist ideologies, serving as a tool for the government to construct socialist superiority and capitalist inferiority, by means of which ‘new China’ gets healed from historical trauma, the socialist regime is justified, Western cultural imperialism is resisted, political allegiance is sustained, sino-centrism is re-established within the domestic sphere and the identity of the party-state is mediated. In doing so, the article aims to provide a theoretical construction of ‘official Occidentalism’ from the multiple lens of sexualities in Maoist and early post-Mao China.

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