Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wang, Aihe

Titel

From Totalitarian to Utilitarian: The Coupling of Mao’s New Man and the Liberal Old Self

Ist Teil von

• Society (New Brunswick), 2016-04, Vol.53 (2), p.188-203

Ort / Verlag

New York: Springer US

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article investigates the conceptualization of the socialist subject – Mao’s New Man – in American Sinology. Rather than an empirical study of the Maoist subject itself, it situates this conceptual trajectory in the larger histories of global politics and the Anglophone public imagination of Mao’s New Man. Tracing this conceptual history from the field’s origin in a Cold War totalitarianism paradigm to the present, it argues that the conceptual basis for diverse definitions of Mao’s New Man is not the pre-modern Chinese self, but its modern other – the liberal subject as an autonomous, rational actor. All subsequent generations of Sinologists have defined their works against this totalitarian image, insisting that China was an exception from totalitarianism. They have never unpacked its conceptual other – liberalism and its ontology of human nature as a coherent individual driven by self-interest – which has persisted in shaping the field’s analytical vocabulary and the public imagination.