Thought Reform and the Unreformable: Reeducation Centers and the Rhetoric of Opposition in the Early People's Republic of China

Abstract

This essay explores records from Beijing's efforts to intern and reform the city's "lumpenproletariat" after 1949. Connecting these reports to central government directives about national thought reform policy, I show that reeducators and their superiors discoursed in detail about the existence of resisters, who opposed and defied the government, but whom reformatory staff explicitly labeled as non-enemies. The case of Beijing reformatories suggests that anti-state, but non-counterrevolutionary resistance was an important symbolic and rhetorical category, central to the Chinese Communist Party's articulation of its own purpose. In the context of reeducation, opposition to the party-state constituted evidence of a founding "truth": feudal, imperialist, and capitalist oppression had so damaged the Chinese nation that only a radical and revolutionary transformation could save it. Over the course of the 1950s, reading and analyzing resistance in this way led policy makers to redefine "The People" as well as the social place of individuals accused of activities like prostitution, begging, and petty crime.

Narrative Rehabilitation: Manifestation of Chinese and Western Reform Ideals and Practices

“…However, the goal, methods, and processes related to the Chinese penal demand for an offender to change his narrative takes a different form than the treatment-based demand made in the Western context. For example, writing about the reeducation of sex workers in the earliest years of the PRC, Smith (2013, p. 212) uncovered information from the Beijing city civic bureau archive ( Beijing shi minzhengju ) showing that “reeducators claimed that their most effective study materials came [. .…”

Building a ‘Lofty, Beloved People's Amusement Centre’: The socialist transformation of Shanghai's Great World (Dashijie) (1950–58)

“…In practice, the party also consistently stressed the primacy of political and cultural transformation along with economic change: ‘if you want to turn the body ( fanshen , a metaphor for economic transformation), you have to turn the mind ( fanxin ), turn from the head and the feet will follow’ (DeMare 2015: 15). The ties between politics and culture were embodied in the CCP's numerous transformation measures, such as ‘thought reform’ (Smith 2013b, 2013a), an organized, institutional adult re-educational regime that was sometimes simplistically referred to in the West as ‘brainwashing’.…”