Abstract
One of the most famous images of Mao Zedong during the seventeen years depicts his labor in the Ming Tombs Reservoir when he and other top government officials visited the construction site on May 28, 1958, at the close of the second session of the Eighth Party Congress. It was at that meeting that plans for the Great Leap Forward were unveiled. The Ming Tombs Reservoir project quickly became the symbol of the potential of the Great Leap Forward, and was documented in artwork including photographs, landscape paintings, drama, poetry, fiction, children’s literature, and a feature film. The Ming Tombs Reservoir project is the quintessential symbol of Great Leap artistic practice. Artists could represent the people actually changing the landscape of China through their labor, and place the accomplishment in the historical narrative of imperial oppression and liberation with Communist victory. In this concluding chapter, I turn to one of the accomplishments of the Great Leap, the construction of the Ming Tombs Reservoir, to initiate a reflection on the legacy of artistic practice from the early Maoist period.
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Notes
For a thorough discussion of the repercussions of the Great Leap Forward in one village, see Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 214–46.
See Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 142.
See, Xiao Bai and Cao Lian, “Feixing shizhang, (Airforce Division Commander)” in Shisanlin shuiku de gushi (Stories from the Ming Tombs Reservoir) (Beijing: Zhongguo shaonian ertong chubanshe, 1958), 48.
See David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity [1917–1941] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 26.
I discuss the formation of a comic identification that channels the viewer’s desire into the desire to participate in collective labor developed in socialist films in an article on the films of Zhong Xinghuo. See Krista Van Fleit Hang, “Zhong Xinghuo: Communist Film Worker,” in Zhang Yingjin and Mary Farquhar, eds., Chinese Film Stars (London: Routledge 2010), 108–18.
See Chen Bo, “Yu yueda, ganjin yuezu” (The harder it rains, theb greater our enthusiasm), in Shisanling shuiku gongdi shying zuopin xuan (Selections of Photographs from the Ming Tombs Reservoir Worksite) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1959). (the book does not have page numbers).
For a discussion of art documentaries in the Great Leap, see Meng Liye, Xin Zhongguo dianying yishu shigao, 1949–1959 (A history of the art of films from New China, 1949–1959) (Beijng: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2002), 286–89.
See M. Keith Booker, The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).
Kirk Denton’s study of Hu Feng and Lu Ling represents this direction. See Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
See Wang Hui, “The 1989 Social Movement and China’s Neoliberalism,” translated in Theodore Huters, ed., China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 110.
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© 2013 Krista Van Fleit Hang
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Van Fleit Hang, K. (2013). Conclusion: More, Better, Faster—the Ming Tombs Reservoir and a Different Path for Maoist Culture. In: Literature the People Love. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363220_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363220_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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