Industrialization as Imagination and Reality
Writing Factory History from Below in Maoist China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6007928 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zhaojin Zeng (Texas A&M University – San Antonio, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern China (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00977004251371536 |
| OpenAlex | W4414886279 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
This article examines how the masses documented their experiences through writing by focusing on the Write Factory History Movement from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. It traces how factory workers and grassroots writers, under the coordination of the Chinese Writers’ Association and its local branches, collaborated to produce novels, prose, wall paintings, and other literary forms. Drawing on factory history manuscripts, work group reports, literary magazine commentaries, and other local sources, I analyze the processes, strategies, and consequences of this mass writing endeavor for narrating China’s industrial transformation. I argue that these writing efforts, by weaving workers’ literary labor into the complex processes of China’s industrialization, reshaped Chinese historiography and literature from below. Through their literary production, workers contributed to the rise of a new socialist genre known as “mass history” that intertwined individual accounts with collective experiences, factuality with narrativity, and historical records with literary imagination. By foregrounding factory history writing as both a cultural practice and a historiographical intervention, this article reveals the tensions and compromises embedded in mass literary authorship and offers new insights into the politics of writing history in socialist China and its enduring legacy
China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture
Writing to the Rhythm of Labor
Multiplicity in Uniformity
China’s Good War
Reinventing Modern China
Mao's Cultural Army
The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History
A New Literary History of Modern China
Maoism at the Grassroots
Self-Cultivation of the Socialist New Person in Maoist China
The origins of the Cultural Revolution, 2
Mass editing, mass writing
Where You Labor Is Where You Sing
Between Tradition and Revolution
Maoist Miniatures
Maoist Discourse and the Mobilization of Emotions in Revolutionary China
The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses
How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China
China under Mao
From Unitary Plurality to Plural Unity
When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |