11 - The National Subsumes the Local: The Fifties

Summary

This chapter considers how revolutionary memory served as the cultural conditioning for key foundational aspects of the People’s Republic, starting with land reform. It aims to demonstrate how revolutionary memory served as a moral resource for those seeking to instil ideological discipline and justify radical intervention in communities by the revolutionary state, or by activists acting on its behalf, while also assisting the Communist program more generally in fostering acceptance of the New China’s growing pains along the way. The chapter opens by accounting for the potency of discursive strategies employed in the land-reform struggle sessions, which sought to expose the old society’s void of beneficial communal relations that the party structures and forms of association would step in and fill. The chapter also explores how revolutionary memory of the recent past, which suppressed the very possibility of community mutual aid and wider civic measures within the context of the old society, was foundational to the socialist imaginary as articulated through the rural cooperative movement.