The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
Other Palgrave Pivot titles

G. Douglas Atkins: T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth
Martin Barker: Live To Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting
Michael Bennett: Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts
Arthur Asa Berger: Media, Myth, and Society
Hamid Dabashi: Being a Muslim in the World
David Elliott: Fukushima: Impacts and Implications
Milton J. Esman: The Emerging American Garrison State
Kelly Forrest: Moments, Attachment and Formations of Selfhood: Dancing with Now
Steve Fuller: Preparing for Life in Humanity .
Ioannis N. Grigoriadis: Instilling Religion in Greek and Turkish
Nationalism: A “Sacred Synthesis”
Jonathan Hart: Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature
Akira Iriye: Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future
Mikael Klintman: Citizen-Consumers and Evolutionary Theory: Reducing Environmental
Harm through Our Social Motivation
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj: Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry
Ekpen James Omonbude: Cross-border Oil and Gas Pipelines and the Role of the Transit
Country: Economics, Challenges, and Solutions
William F. Pinar: Curriculum Studies in the United States: Present Circumstances,
Intellectual Histories
Henry Rosemont, Jr.: A Reader's Companion to the Confucian Analects
Kazuhiko Togo (editor): Japan and Reconciliation in Post-war Asia: The Murayama
Statement and Its Implications
Joel Wainwright: Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought
Kath Woodward: Sporting Times

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Spirit of Selflessness
in Maoist China:
Socialist Medicine
and the New Man
Christos Lynteris
University of Cambridge

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
© Christos Lynteris 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29382-4
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978-1-137-29383-1 PDF

ISBN: 978-1-349-45135-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: ./9781137293831
 Contents
Acknowledgements vi

List of Abbreviations viii

Note on Transcription ix

Introduction 

 The Sublimation of Skill 

 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

 Red or Expert? 

 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

Conclusion 

Index 

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831 v
 Acknowledgements
Research leading to this book was generously funded by
the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland as
well as by the Russell Trust, and was sponsored by a PhD
scholarship of the Department of Social Anthropology of
the University of St Andrews. An earlier version of this
work was presented as a paper at the Annual Conference
of the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS),
in September 2010 at Bristol, and consequently pub-
lished in the first issue of the journal of the Association.
(Lynteris, C. (2011) ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’:
Two Resurrections of the ‘Spirit of Selflessness’ in Maoist
China, Journal of the British Association for Chinese
Studies, Vol. 1 (December 2011) 21–49.) I would like to
thank all the participants of the panel for the valuable
discussion and comments.
This book was completed in the town of Ascona,
Switzerland, at the Centro Incontri Umani, under its gen-
erous Residential Fellowship in the spring and summer of
2011. I am deeply grateful to the Foundation and to Angela
Hobart in particular for this piece of earthly paradise.
I would also like to thank Laura Simona and Reto
Mordasini for their warm day-to-day assistance at the
Centro, and my co-fellows David Napier, Tania Zivkovich
and Smadar Lavie, as well as co-residents Anna Volkmann,
Tom Kennedy, Caroline Ifeka, little Sol and ‘Wagner’
for six months of inspiring discussions and conviviality
around Lago Maggiore.
I would also like to thank Roy Dilley for his inde-
fatigable support in following unconventional paths in
anthropology, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov for broadening my

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Acknowledgements vii

perspective on state-socialism, Igal Halfin for his bold critique on earlier

forms of this work and Caroline Humphrey for reading earlier forms of
the manuscript and providing vital advice and encouragement.
This book is dedicated to my companion, Stavroula K. Koutroumpi, with-
out whom writing would be a place of exile.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 List of Abbreviations
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CMA Chinese Medical Association
CMJ Chinese Medical Journal
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
KDPR Korean Democratic People’s Republic
(North Korea)
KUTV Communist University of the Toilers of the East
(in Moscow)
PLA People’s Liberation Army
PRC People’s Republic of China
TASS Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union
(state-monopoly information agency)
TCM Traditional Chinese Medicine

viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

 Note on Transcription
Transcription of Chinese words and names in the non-
quoted text of this thesis follows the Pinyin system.
However, especially as regards proper names, the tran-
scription follows the format of the original source and
its official translation, usually following the Wade–Giles
system. Thus, for example, Fu Lianzhang appears as Fu
Lian-Cheng.

DOI: 10.1057/
10.1057/9781137293831 ix
DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction
Abstract: In 1939 Mao Zedong wrote a memorial to the
recently deceased Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, a
medical volunteer in the Chinese Communist Eight Route
Army. The memorial contained a vital phrase, praising ‘the
spirit of selflessness’ of Dr Bethune, which would come to play
a crucial role in the contention of socialist ‘technologies of the
self ’ in China after the Communist takeover of 1949. The need
to decide the appropriate means and method for engineering
the New Man as a subjective prerequisite of state-socialism
was particularly stressed in the biopolitical field of medicine
and public health, where crucial questions were being posed:
how does one transform ‘bourgeois medicine’ into ‘proletarian
medicine’ and reactionary doctors into revolutionary
doctors? What is the new socialist state to do with the legion
of medical experts left behind by the collapsed Nationalist
regime? Should it integrate, reform or eradicate them as class
enemies? Of central importance to socialist governmentality
the answer to these problems relied discursively on the exegesis
of Mao’s memorial to Bethune, giving birth to two distinct
and conflicting ‘technologies of the self ’: self-cultivation and
self-abolition.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist

China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831 
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

On 12 November 1939, after having served as a medical volunteer for

almost two years in Mao Zedong’s Eighth Route Army, the Canadian
medical doctor Norman Bethune1 (b.1890) died of septicaemia in
Tanghsien County, Hebei Province. The blood poisoning resulted from
a cut on his finger, inflicted while performing surgery in the battlefield.
Not long after, on 12 December 1939, Mao wrote a short memorial titled
‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’.2
In fact, the Chinese Communist leader had met Bethune only once
and had sent him just a single letter in response to what appears to have
been a long string of epistles on the late doctor’s part. This did not stop
Mao from capitalising on the Canadian’s corpse and exalting ‘Comrade
Bethune’s spirit [and] his utter devotion to others without any thought of
the self ’, as against individuals ‘who are irresponsible in their work, pre-
ferring the light and shrinking the heavy, passing the burdensome tasks
on to others and choosing the easy ones for themselves’. The memorial’s
conclusion was meant as a eulogy as much as a catechism to embattled
Communists during the hardest years of the Second Sino–Japanese War:
We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With his spirit
everyone can be very useful to the people. A man’s ability may be great or
small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man
of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the
people.3

Published in the Communist-controlled areas of Northwest China at

the time, the memorial was, in its immediate context, little more than
a typical acknowledgement of the self-sacrifice of a man who, faithfully
keeping in line with Comintern orthodoxy, offered his medical skill for
the ‘cause’ of national liberation and socialist revolution.
And yet, over ten years later one phrase from this short piece would
provide the stage for a bitter struggle over the generation of the socialist
New Man in the People’s Republic of China: the spirit of absolute selflessness.

The New Man

Concerns over the generation of a new type of human who could carry
through the revolution and give it a concrete social form had been a
constant of socialist movements since the second half of the 19th century
in Europe.4 Far from mere utopian pondering, the debate regarding
the correct type of the New Man and the mode for his/her realisation

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction 

amounted to a political struggle for the determination of what, in Michel

Foucault’s terms, we can call the ‘technology of the self ’ necessary for
socialist emancipation.
Foucault famously defined technologies of the self as techniques
‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help
of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls,
thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in
order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality’.5 As Foucault’s own studies and research plans make clear,
technologies of the self must not be restrictively seen as individual inno-
vations, but, more often than not, as part of institutional narratives on the
goals effected (purity, wisdom, immortality etc.). Be it the Empire, the
Church or the Party, institutions aiming at the enclosure of subjectivities
in their programme of government have consistently shown interest in
the self and its generation. In the case of socialist oppositionist move-
ments, the enclosure of subjectivity through appropriate technologies of
the self had the benefit of securing group cohesion, secrecy and trust
vis-à-vis tendencies to abandon or betray the ‘cause’.
In the cases when socialist movements or parties actually assumed
mid-term or long-term power over given territories, concerns over the
correct technology of the self acquired unprecedented centrality and
force. With Bolshevik Russia as the central example, the consolidation of
socialist power in the form of a state rendered the debate over the New
Man a central attribute of governmental innovation and continuity.
In the case of Communist China, the centre staging of the problem of
the New Man was already in place during the Communist state-forma-
tions in Jiangxi (1931–1935) and in Northwest China (1935–1949). Still,
it would acquire a definitive form and significance after the takeover of
mainland China by the Communist Party in October 1949.
In this book I will argue that in the context of Chinese state-socialism,
and especially during the first 20 years of Chinese Communist Party rule
(1949–1969), Mao’s memorial to Dr Norman Bethune played a pivotal
role in the negotiation over the mode of generation of the New Man.

Two technologies of the self

My aim is to examine how, rather than leading to a single technology of

the self, Mao’s praise of Bethune’s spirit of selflessness actually opened

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

the way to two conflicting interpretations, or exegeses, one of which was

directly opposed to Mao’s own governmental aspirations.
On the one hand, according to the first interpretation of the coveted
phrase, under the new state-socialist reality, individuals needed to aban-
don the sterile egoism supposedly encouraged under the ancien regime,
and develop skills and aptitudes beneficial to the public good, by means
of ‘cultivating the self ’ and offering the fruit of this cultivation to the
interest of the toiling masses.
This is what I will call the ‘self-cultivation’ or sublimatory thesis on the
spirit of selflessness, which took central stage briefly after the Liberation
of 1949 and then again during the five years between the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution (1961–1966).
In opposition to this, a second interpretation of the spirit of selfless-
ness held that individuals had to get rid not simply of their egotistical
motives, but of their very self, becoming one with the masses whose
revolutionary potential was imagined by Mao to reside in their supposed
‘blankness’. This is what I will call the ‘self-abolition’ or abolitionary
thesis on the spirit of selflessness, which flourished with unparalleled
ferocity during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969).
Both these technologies of the self had roots deep in Chinese ways of
conceiving the self. Yet it was through the exegesis of Mao’s phrase on
Bethune’s spirit of selflessness that they would come to contend for the
position of the true mode of constructing the New Man, both product
and guarantor of state-socialism, in China. Here the term exegesis should
not be taken lightly or as a synonym of hermeneutics.

Exegetical governmentality

During his 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault

referred to state-socialism and its problem of governmentality.6 Foucault
noted that in the case of Marxist-Leninist regimes governmentality is
largely exegetical, i.e. based on readings and counter-readings of Marxist
texts. This, according to the French philosopher, was because Marxism
lacks a governmental blueprint unique to itself.
Seen from this perspective, Communist China should be considered
paradigmatic amongst state-socialist regimes. For the reliance of the
Chinese Communist Party on the exegesis of a wide variety of texts, far
and beyond the Marxist-Leninist canon, for the consolidation of a mode

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction 

of governmentality proper to state-socialism was indeed unique. From

1949 until at least the end of Maoism proper in 1976, the interpretation
of play-scripts like Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed from Office or folk novels
like the Dream of the Red Chamber and Water Margin, let alone actual
Marxist or Leninist texts, became repeatedly the focus of vitriolic inner-
Party struggles and widespread public strife.
Perhaps the exegetic habitus of Chinese Communism owes its per-
sistence to the millennia-long bonding of Chinese raison d’ état with
Confucian concerns regarding the atunement of words and deeds,
a problem that generated technologies of zhengming (rectification of
names), which Hall and Ames have recently analysed as a ritual organi-
sation of the relation between the self and the other.7 The campaigns
launched by the so-called Gang of Four (Mao’s wife and her ultra-leftist
company) against Confucianism8 (1974–1975), as well as the more recent
resurrections of Confucius as the patriarch-sage of China on the part of
the Communist Party9 add weight to this tentative hypothesis.
In this book I will try to underline the relation between the exegetical
operations on Norman Bethune’s memorial with this long and contested
philosophical legacy. My thesis is that the memorial’s ambivalent key-
phrase, the spirit of selflessness, played a crucial role in defining the
contours of the New Man in China. And yet, it remains unrecognised as
such in the long bibliography on Maoism, which usually bypasses it as
simply typical or doctrinaire.
No doubt, the uncanny ability of this obituary to end up comprising
one of the ‘constantly read articles’ during the Cultural Revolution is
easily overlooked among the catacomb of the victims of Maoism and
the excesses of grassroots militantism during what today’s Chinese state
apparatus calls the ‘ten years of chaos’. And yet, its exegetic efficacy as a
validator of both technologies of the self and their aspired state-socialist
governmentality renders it a unique ground for the examination of the
battle over the New Man in Maoist China.
In my examination of how the exegesis of Dr Bethune’s spirit of
selflessness functioned as a stage for the struggle between the ‘cultiva-
tion of the self ’ and the ‘abolition of the self ’, as technologies of the self
promoted by two distinct modes of Chinese socialist governmentality,
I shall take as my historical–ethnographic ground the way in which
this contention was acted out within the context of the medical and
public health apparatus of the People’s Republic of China between 1949
and 1969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Rather than merely reflecting my medical anthropological research

interests, the choice of the particular disciplinary field is based on its
unique importance for the project of state-socialism as a whole.

State-socialist biopolitics

A crucial yet scantily studied problem arises every time a revolutionary

formation deriving its legitimacy and self-perception from socialist tra-
ditions assumes long-term power over a territory and its population.
How should the victorious revolutionaries relate to the problem
of health, to medical science and its practitioners? Given the lack of
elucidation as regards this problem in the Marxist–Leninist canon, the
revolutionaries in power are faced with the task of fitting in categories
constitutive of the question in hand within the philosophical skeleton of
dialectical materialist thought. Is medicine inherently bourgeois, or is its
theory and practice originally progressive and only politically distorted
by its enclosure into bourgeois educational, clinical and governmental
institutions? Are medical doctors class enemies of the insurgent pro-
letariat, or should they be treated like other intellectuals as part of the
reformable ‘national bourgeoisie’?
This set of questions, which we can group as problems regarding the
nature of medicine and its practitioners, leads in turn to another series
of dilemmas, this time regarding the method of treating medicine and
doctors under state-socialism. If medical doctors are indeed malleable,
what measures and criteria should be applied to affect reform? How
should revolutionaries guard against the potential medical ‘fifth-column’,
in terms of both bourgeois doctors and bourgeois theory and work-style,
corrupting the revolution? Will bourgeois medical science eventually
give way to some sort of proletarian medicine? Should this be achieved
in leaps or gradually? Will bourgeois medicine mature into proletarian
medicine, or is a rupture necessary for its overcoming? And how should
these two processes alternate so as to guarantee that medicine not only
serves the revolution, but is also revolutionary in and of itself?
Of course these are questions that potentially apply to any scientific
discipline, from nuclear physics to genetics and from engineering to
botany. And yet medicine can claim a unique place amongst its siblings,
as necessarily implicated in this labyrinth of problems, due to the fact that
it forms the core of every modern state’s principal strategy as a way of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction 

rendering human potentialities an available labour power for exploita-

tion: biopolitics.
In yet another notion developed by Michel Foucault,10 biopolitics refers
to ways in which regimes of power constitute the population as both a
political and a scientific entity, whose study, regulation and control are
intricately enmeshed in doctrines and techniques of prevention (most
often of epidemics and scarcity).
A development on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics that bears direct rel-
evance to the problem of medicine in state-socialist regimes is attempted
by the post-Marxist author Paolo Virno who writes: ‘To comprehend the
rational core of the term “bio-politics”, we should begin with a different
concept, a much more complicated concept from a philosophical stand-
point: that of labour power’.11
Virno reminds us of a forgotten phrase from Marx’s Das Kapital:
labour power is ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabili-
ties existing in the physical form’.12 A few pages later, Marx clarifies his
statement: ‘When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of
labour, any more than we speak of digestion when we speak of capacity
for digestion’.13
For Virno the work of biopolitics is the transformation of all human
ability to the ability to produce and to exchange this ability-to-produce: ‘The
practical importance taken on by potential as potential (the fact that it is
bought and sold as such), as well as its inseparability from the immediate
corporeal existence of the worker, is the real foundation of biopolitics’.14
Yet here perhaps Virno goes too far towards labourism, taking the
worker as an essentialised historical subject. Lazzarato’s critique of efforts
to re-appropriate biopolitics into Marxist theory is thus pertinent – to
the extent that it reminds us that what is important is not ‘living capital’
but fields of forces or potentialities: ‘Political economy, as a syntagm of
biopolitics, encompasses power dispositifs that amplify the whole range
of relations between the forces that extend throughout the social body
rather than, as in classical political economy and its critique, the rela-
tionship between capital and labour exclusively’.15
In the case of state-socialism, where one does not have a commodity
market of exchange, the potentiality of medical skill and knowledge,
what we could call in paraphrasing Marx ‘[medical] labour as [medi-
cal] subjectivity’,16 i.e. the potentiality to produce and preserve health,
becomes an object of control and exploitation on part of the Party appa-
ratus of capture.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

The enclosure of medical practices, or to be more precise medical

capacity as such, by state-socialist biopolitics, is of course part of a much
wider aim of enclosing labour as a universal potentiality.
As several historians have demonstrated, the importance of biopolitics
to state formation and capitalist accumulation in modern China has indeed
been pivotal. Ruth Rogaski in particular has painstakingly demonstrated
the relation between the rise of what she terms ‘hygienic modernity’17 and
the transformation of the Chinese empire into a modern governmental
compound, indicating an intricate inter-determination between biopolitics
and processes of geopolitical contestation, as well as, capitalist accumula-
tion in the formative half-century between 1898 and 1949.
Set chronologically at the end of this ‘biopolitical dawn’ of Chinese
modernity, this book’s assumption is that the importance of the above
conjunction of biopolitics and the political economy assumes a unique
complexity in the case of state-socialism, where state power is established
and reproduced through its image as the liberator of labour.

The spectacle of emancipation

State-socialism is a condition under which, while the Communist Party

is kept in power through enclosing human potentiality in ever more
intense conditions of alienation and heteronomy, its legitimacy is directly
dependent on its ability to perpetuate the image of its role as the guardian
of the interests of the dispossessed: the guarantor of victorious Marxism.
In their Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine the Situationists18
warned us that the socialist pretentions of the Chinese Communist
Party should not be tackled as a problem of ‘ideology’, in the sense of
a discursive superstructure employed to obscure or distort the reality
of the economic infrastructure. State-socialism is dependent not on a
panoply of lies about itself, but on a spectacle that organises both the way
it appears and the way it is, interlinking the two in an unbreakable rela-
tion of mystification.
The spectacle of the revolution organises state-socialism as a social
relation. In other words, it determines how, as a mode of organising
power and production, state-socialism is acted out and actualised by its
subjects in everyday life, as well as, how this social production of the
state is ultimately mystified through its reification as a mechanism above
society itself and inherent to the human condition.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction 

This double movement of mystification constitutes the universal opera-

tion of the (re)production of the state. What differentiates state-socialism
from other forms of domination is that its spectacular ontogeny depends on
the ability to be experienced as the substantiation of ‘historical necessity’ –
the embodiment of history’s self-realisation or telos.

‘Work on the self ’

It is this teleological (if not necessarily messianic, at least outside

Judeo–Christian contexts) operation that renders the generation of the
New Man such a central attribute of state-socialism.
Under the definitive form of New Democracy,19 crafted by Mao in 1939
as a means of forging a United Front with the Nationalist Party against
the Japanese invasion, Chinese state-socialism promised ‘not only to save
China and lead it ahead of the West, but also to revitalise the Chinese
national heritage’.20
As both a telos and a restoration of humaneness, the Chinese socialist
New Man was a hybrid of two distinct philosophical traditions that merged
in an unprecedented tectonic collision: Confucianism and Marxism. As
Nivison and Wakeman have both demonstrated,21 this was a process centred
upon concerns over theory’s relative stance to practice, which in effect set
the self at the spotlight of the revolutionary process: ‘Instead of the question
“How can Marxist theory be translated into fact?” there now is asked the
question “How can I, a Marxist in name, become a true Marxist in fact?” ’.22
This book will demonstrate how this marked a radical shift of attention
to problems pertaining to the ethics of socialism, rendering Marxism a
‘personal philosophy’ that placed all the burden of veridiction on the
individual23 and its ‘work on the self ’.24 It was precisely in its ambiva-
lent ability to answer this political and ontological problem, that Mao’s
memorial to Bethune proved paradigmatic, generating ‘self-cultivation’
and the ‘abolition of the self ’, as alternative preconditions for the crea-
tion of the New Man.

Notes
 There are several biographies of Norman Bethune in English. As this book
is not concerned with the life of the Canadian doctor, but rather with the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

afterlife of his spirit of selflessness, readers interested in his biography are

advised to read the following volumes: Allan, T. & Gordon, S. (2009) The
Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune, Toronto: Dundrun Press;
Stewart, R. (2002) The Mind of Norman Bethune, Markham: Fitzhenry and
Whiteside.
 Mao Zedong (1939) ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’ (21 December 1939).
Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/
volume-2/mswv2_25.htm (Accessed: 1 March 2011).
 Mao Zedong (1939) op. cit. (Accessed: 1 March 2011). My emphasis.
 Cheng Yichong (2009) Creating the ‘New Man’: From Enlightenment Ideal to
Socialist Realities, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
 Foucault, M. (1988) ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in L.H. Martin, H. Gutman
& P. H. Hutton (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault,
Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, p. 18.
 Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93–94.
 Hall, D. L. & Ames R. T. (1987) Thinking through Confucius, Albany: State
University of New York Press.
 Wu Tien-wei (1983) Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, Contra-Confucianism in
Historical and Intellectual Perspective, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.
 Dirlik, A. (1995) ‘Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the
Reinvention of Confucianism’, Boundary 2, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn): 229–273.
 Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1977–1978, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 Virno, P. (2004) The Grammar of the Multitude, New York: Semiotext(e), p. 81.
 Marx, K. (1867) ‘Capital Vol. I’. Quoted In Virno, P. (2004) op. cit., p 81.
 ibid.
 Virno, P. (2004), op. cit., p. 83.
 Lazzarato, M. (2002) ‘From Biopower to Biopolitics’, Pli: The Warwick Journal
of Philosophy, Vol. 13 (Foucault: Madness/Sexuality/Biopolitics). Available
at: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics.htm (Accessed: 19 May
2011).
 Quoted in Virno, P. (2004), op. cit., p. 83.
 Rogaski, R. (2004) Hygienic Modernity, Meaning of Health and Disease in
Treaty-Port China, Berkeley: University of California Press. For an application
of biopolitical theory on Communist China’s birth control policies see: Susan
Greenhalgh, S. & Winckler, E. A. (2005) Governing China’s Population; From
Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 Internationale Situationniste (1967) ‘Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en
Chine’. Available at: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/11.China.htm (Accessed:
3 June 2011). For a fuller analysis of the ‘spectacle’, see Debord, G. (1967)

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Introduction 

‘The Society of the Spectacle’. Available at: http://library.nothingness.org/

articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 (Accessed: 28 July 2011).
 Mao Zedong (1940) ‘On New Democracy’ (January). Available at: http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/
mswv2_26.htm (Accessed: 14 April 2011).
 Nivison, D. S. (1956) ‘Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition’, Journal of
Asian Studies Vol. 16, No. 1 (November 1956): 51–74, p. 53.
 Nivison, D. S. (1956) op. cit.; Wakeman, F. (1973) History and Will:
Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 Nivison, D. S. (1956) op. cit., p. 54. Emphasis in original.
 ibid: 54.
 The notion of ‘work on the self ’ is taken from: Studer, B. (2003) ‘L’ Être
Perfectible: La Formation du Cadre Stalinien par la “Travail Sur Soi”,
Genèses, Vol. 51 (Juin): 92–113.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 1
The Sublimation of Skill
Abstract: At achieving power in 1949 the Chinese Communist
Party had no choice but to assimilate the pre-revolutionary,
Nationalist, medical apparatus into the new state structure; this
created a rift in the Party’s ideological hegemony. The Patriotic
Hygiene Campaign, Mao’s episodic public health response to the
alleged biological warfare attack waged against China by the
US in the context of the Korean War functioned was a means of
challenging the significance of medical expertise and promoting
the model of ‘people’s war’, or mass mobilisation, as the correct
way of constructing socialism in China. It was to this challenge of
medical authority that the first re-interpretation of Bethune’s ‘spirit
of selflessness’ was performed on part of the head of the medical
establishment. Fu Lien-chang subverted the memorial’s radical
semantic content by means of an exegesis that placed emphasis
on the accumulation of knowledge and skill as a prerequisite of
the selfless offering of one’s services to the masses. This technocrat
formula of sublimation dictated that in order to sacrifice yourself
for the masses, you first had to become someone worthy of being
sacrificed.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist

China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

We want to build a new national culture, but what kind of culture

should it be?
(Mao Zedong, 1940, The New Democracy1)

The conclusion of the Chinese civil war, with the thwarting of Nationalist
forces across the Chinese mainland and the institution of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) under the firm control of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, was an event unlike any other in the
history of socialist revolutions. Contrary to the Russian October, when
the Bolsheviks took power through a swift coup that allowed them to
consolidate their position in the dust of an already successful anti-mon-
archist revolution, the Chinese October was the result of more than 20
years of civil strife, urban uprisings and guerrilla warfare. As a result, the
men and women who found themselves in control of the vast Chinese
territories in October 1949 had been already running various forms of
mini-states, actually much larger than most European countries at the
time, such as the Jiangxi Soviet Republic or the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia
Border Region. Through these experiments with socialist state-forma-
tion, different modes of governmentality and biopolitical management
had emerged and contended, leading to the predominance of the so-
called mass line, which dictated a dialectical relation between the Party
and the subjects inhabiting the areas under its control:

All right leadership stems necessarily from the masses and is directed to
them. That means: take ideas from the masses (scattered, non-systematic)
and concentrate them (turn them through study to concrete and systematic
ones), then go to the masses and spread these ideas and explain them until
the masses embrace them like their own, upkeep them, and transform them
to action, thus examining their validity in practice. Then again gather the
ideas from the masses and again return them so that they improve. And so
on and so forth in an endless spiral, where ideas become ever more valid,
ever more vital, and ever richer. This is the Marxist–Leninist theory of
knowledge, our methodology.2

Yet, as the Communist Party assumed control of mainland China as a

whole, an old and sombre problem raised its head to face the unripe
conquerors. As Levenson has argued, since ancient times ruling China
as a state (guo) and being the sovereign of China as a civilisation (tianxia)
were clearly distinct notions and realities.3 The successful negotiation
of these two coordinates of governmentality, the consolidation of a

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

fecund relation between guo, as administrative control, and tianxia, as

political hegemony, was a top priority for every new dynasty, includ-
ing the Communist one. In order not only to reign but also to rule the
Communists had to conquer China not just militarily but politically too.
In this quest for hegemony one persistent obstacle consisted in the
remnants of the ancien regime, which, following the Republican revolu-
tion of 1911 the Nationalists had either failed to eradicate, or were simply
all too willing to recuperate under their increasingly militaristic raison
d’état. This essentially parochial enemy was no other than the landlords
and the culture of superstition, decadence and servility they embod-
ied and reproduced in daily social practice and interaction with their
dependents. The Land Reform Campaigns, launched by the Communist
Party both before and immediately after Liberation, hit hard on the pro-
ductive basis of this enemy,4 through the mass mobilisation of dispos-
sessed peasants who were encouraged to vent their anger and shuo kou or
‘speak bitterness’5 against their local tyrants.
Besides liquidating landlords ‘as a class’, these campaigns also had the
function of socialising poor peasants into socialist values and discipline,
through enclosing and ritualising their grievances in forms productive
for party hegemony. Fierce they were, yet in a much more profound way
these campaigns were actually conductive to the containment of grassroots
social violence within the bounds of a Party-sanctioned behavioural and
semantic norm. The work of these accusatory rituals6 was to transform self-
organised, autonomous social violence into political violence. This signified
the substitution of concrete local and particular forms of violence with a
uniform, transcendental and essentially abstract form of violence, a violence
irrespective of local causes and conditions, reflecting supposedly universal
macro-historical processes identified in a reified image of the class struggle,
which had little in common with the dynamic form originally conceived
by Marx. As a result, this transformation of social violence into political
violence rendered the interpretation of each and every violent act depend-
ent on the symbolic sanction of the Party as the sole authority on the laws
of the ‘historical process’ as defined by the class struggle.
This enclosure thus created a new master-signifier to which the duties
and bonds of filial piety, traditionally reserved for the patriarchal head
of the family, could be transferred. In this sense, we can say that these
mass campaigns were, in Lacanian terms, technologies of hysterisation
of class hatred, i.e. technologies aimed at enclosing genuine grassroots
rebelliousness into an anticipation of the Other/Party’s desire for power,7

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

into a mechanism for the achievement of a new form of filial bondage

and at the same time of a new form of the fetishised state.
At the same time, however, the achievement of political hegemony
over China faced a much more pertinent enemy: a wide scientific stra-
tum that had failed or simply not opted to follow the fleeing Nationalist
armies and remained at its post, forming the spinal cord of the state.
These urbanite specialists might have been deprived of their properties,
yet they possessed something far more valuable and at the same time
dangerous for the new regime: expertise.8
If this intelligentsia was vital for the continuity of the state, it was also
a terrible threat to the Party’s tianxia. How could the Communist Party
hope to rule ‘all under heaven’ when its core scientific apparatus was
composed of alien elements with an essentially bourgeois outlook? What
was needed was to train party-minded experts, in order to replace the
old guard, and to break its cultural hegemony over scientific research and
knowledge. Yet this was inevitably a long-term process that in the mean-
while left the party-state exposed to a potential scientific fifth column
in its ranks. This being an enemy who could not be liquidated without
the state collapsing with it, but who could not be tolerated without the
Party endangering its governmental discontinuity with the old regime, it
posed a unique problem for state-socialism.

Uneasy consolidation in medicine

If one is to go back to the autumn of 1949 or even the winter of 1950

and read specialist journals such as the flagship of the Chinese Medical
Association (CMA), the Chinese Medical Journal (CMJ), he or she would
be hard pressed to perceive a revolution had occurred. For the first three
years of the People’s Republic of China, only hesitant editorials bore wit-
ness to the fact that something essential had changed. Everything else
continued as normal: doctors ran their private clinics and pharmacies
whilst researchers worked in their labs and presented their studies in
much the same spirit as in pre-revolutionary times. Here is an example
of the essentially defensive, and reluctantly pro-revolutionary discourse
adopted by the first editorial of the CMJ after Liberation:

The Chinese Medical Journal has a brilliant history of over thirty years.
It has contributed much not only to the development and promotion of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

medical education in China, but also to the raising and maintenance of a

high standard in the principles and practice of medicine among Chinese
medical workers. Indeed the Journal has played a vital role in dis-
seminating knowledge of the medical sciences besides being a real stimulus
to the medical profession in the pursuit of clinical and experimental
researches ... Science can grow only when it is rooted firmly among the peo-
ple. Only when working among the people and for the people can science
grow and flourish. The previous Chinese political system would not allow
science to develop among the people. The political system of New China,
on the other hand, is aimed at promoting science among the people and to
assist and foster our scientists to become scientific workers of the people
and for the people.9

This was hardly a satisfactory kowtow to Party power on part of the medi-
cal techno–scientific elite, which felt safe enough in the knowing that
the Communists had no choice but to fully incorporate the pre-existing
Nationalist apparatus of both applied and theoretical medicine, with the
exception of a handful of ‘famous physicians who had had close rela-
tionships with the “imperialists” ’.10 In fact, the Party’s reliance on what
effectively was a small army of politically and culturally alien scientists
was not a surprise but something long anticipated through the tactical
decriminalisation of intellectuals as ‘national bourgeois elements’ dur-
ing the civil war (esp. 1945–1949). Thus after Liberation, China’s medical
establishment remained under the control of medical experts, most of
who had been serving loyally under the Nationalists.11 This toleration of
Guomindang elements at the head of the medical establishment of the
young People’s Republic reflected the vital necessity of medical experts
for the new regime struggling to construct a comprehensive biopolitical
apparatus that could render China’s vast population scientifically intel-
ligible and politically manageable.
Such experts were desperately lacking within the Party machine, as
during the civil war the CCP had paid little attention to technical and
scientific issues. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had of course
developed excellent medical skills fit for the battlefield,12 while by 1945
the areas under the control of the Communist Party hosted five medical
teaching centres training physicians in Western medicine.13 Nevertheless
these otherwise significant developments had little bearing on organising
and controlling the complex public health milieu necessary to provide
biopolitical control over the vastness of Chinese society. The cooperation
of the Party with the old Nationalist medical apparatus was inevitable.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

Although in abstraction this might have been an acceptable thaw,

within the concrete reality of party-state politics it posed an acute politi-
cal problem. On the one hand, the battle-worn guerrillas were daunted by
these intellectuals in white, with whom they were ordered to cooperate.
Bo Yibo, a senior Communist leader at the time, wrote in his memoirs:
It was natural that after we entered the cities, our core leadership in various
fields was made up of cadres of worker and peasant origins who had just left
the battlefields ... these cadres mostly had a low educational level. They did
not have much contact with the intelligentsia in the past, and did not know
or understand the latter’s professional expertise, mentality and working
style.14

And on the other hand, the old medical elite was terrified itself by the
perceived vulgarity of the guerrillas and yet relatively comforted by the
European manners and urbane outlook of Soviet advisers and their tech-
nocrat allies within the Party itself, a fact that was to be perceived with
increasing anxiety as regards the achievement of hegemony of politics
over expertise.
Soon enough the legions of medical experts whom the Communists
were forced to recognise, carte blanche, as a ‘national bourgeoisie’ were
under threat of being (or worse, threatening to be) assimilated into an
unholy alliance between Soviet advisers and a minority of technocrat-
minded Party leaders, thus forming the basis for a ‘new class’ of urban-
minded experts, mirroring developments in the Soviet Union at the time.
And yet, at the time that this alliance seemed to be at the best position
of consolidating a relative governmental hegemony, with Soviet experts
in vital positions across the medical establishment actively propagating
an expertise-based biopolitical model,15 an unforeseeable event came to
shake all norms and conventions in the realm of medicine and public
health, putting the position of the old medical elite in peril.

Biological warfare
On 29 January 1952, two years into the Korean War, the Commission of
the Medical Headquarter of the Korean People’s Army issued the follow-
ing report:
On the morning of January 28, 1952, an enemy aircraft flew over territory
in the district of Ichon two or three times and then made off in a southerly

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

direction. On that morning, the weather was calm and misty. Towards
noon, the mist dispersed and on the snow at various points on the terri-
tory flown over by the enemy aircraft, the Chinese People’s Volunteers
found insects – flies, fleas, ticks, and spiders. About 14 hours later, fleas,
flies and spiders were found in the Evondi district. There was a greater
number of fleas than other insects; on one square metre, up to 10 could
be counted. The appearance of these insects in winter conditions on the
snow seemed extraordinary to the Chinese volunteers. Interested by this
fact, medical instructor Chang Cha Sin collected several species of insects
and took them to Im Guk Mop, the chief of the regiment’s medical centre.
The latter decided to verify the discovery of the insects and in the company
of the medical instructor Chang Cha Sin, set out at 17 hours for the place of
discovery.16

A series of subsequent investigations led to the confirmation of an

unusual appearance of insects impossible to reproduce at below-freezing
temperatures and climatic conditions. What is more, although no infec-
tious disease was reported amongst Chinese soldiers of the Volunteer
Army located in the area, ‘flies tested positive for cholera, which, apart
from an outbreak in South Korea in 1946, had been unknown in Korea
for sixty years’.17 Then, on 11 February, the Korean Medical HQ came
across a second case during which a flea specimen tested positive for
plague bacillus. When seven days later near the rail centre of Anzhou
in Northwest Korea more insects appeared, specimens were sent by the
Volunteer Army’s investigators to Beijing for testing alongside a report
stressing to the political leadership that if the tests proved positive ‘our
epidemic prevention and elimination work should be conducted imme-
diately and effectively ... and we need support of personnel and materials
from the Soviet Union’.18
It was 24 February 1952 when the Foreign Minister of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC), Zhou Enlai, overcoming his initial hesitation
and doubts on the seriousness of the emergency, made an official state-
ment in support of the Korean Democratic People’s Republic (KDPR)
Foreign Minister, who two days earlier had claimed the US were using
bacteriological weapons in Korea. The US Secretary of State, Acheson,
was quick to dismiss the allegations as politically motivated and scien-
tifically unfounded. In the midst of the crisis the medical apparatus of
the PRC was mobilised in an unprecedented way so as to consolidate its
position in the Korean theatre and the unfolding crisis in Manchuria.
Given the expert-centred policy followed by the Ministry of Health with

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

regard to the war in Korea, it comes as no surprise that the biological

warfare crisis itself was initially tackled by recourse to conventional
biomedical measures of control and containment:
Reviewing the disease prevention plan made by the PLA’s Department of
General Quartermaster, Zhou Enlai suggested that disease prevention be
conducted in a two-stage manner. The main objective of the first stage was
preparation and prevention, to be coordinated by the medical departments
in various military districts under the leadership of the general office of the
Central Military Committee. No massive mobilisation and border inspec-
tion were to be conducted in this initial stage.19

It is clear from all available documents that at this point the Party
regarded the suspected biological attack as a problem that had to be
resolved at the hands of experts. Thus, after the invasion of Chinese
airspace in early March, a directive given by Zhou Enlai on 9 March 1952
‘defined Korea as an ‘epidemic region’, Manchuria as an ‘emergent anti-
epidemic region’, the Northern, Eastern, South-central and coastal areas
as ‘anti-epidemic supervisory regions’ and the South-central interior,
Northwest and Southwest areas as ‘anti-epidemic preparation regions’.
Each region was assigned with different sets of tasks ... these measures
were implemented largely as military operations and were far from insti-
tutionalised social mobilisation’.20 On 14 March, the Communist Party
formed a Central Epidemic Prevention Committee in Beijing headed
by Zhou Enlai, and Guo Moruo, president of the Academia Sinica, and
Nie Rongzhen, acting chief of the General Staff, as vice-chairs – an ideal
technocratic alliance in three neuralgic nodes of governmentality. The
formation of this troika was communicated to local and provincial gov-
ernment bodies in a top-secret telegraph a few days later ordering anti-
bacterial measures and the institution of local anti-epidemic prevention
committees:
Since 28 January the enemy has furiously employed continuous bacterial
warfare in Korea and in our Northeast and Qingdao areas, dropping flies,
mosquitoes, spiders, ants, bedbugs, fleas in a very wide area ... examination
confirms that the pathogenic micro-organisms involved are plague bacillus,
cholera, meningitis, paratyphoid, salmonella, relapsing fever, spirochaeta
bacteria, typhus rickettsia etc. ... now that the weather is turning warm,
contagious disease and animal vectors will be active without restraint, and
serious epidemic diseases from enemy bacterial warfare can easily occur
unless we immediately intensify nationwide work on the prevention of
epidemic disease.21

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

And yet, amongst the high ranks of the Party a heretical report had been
circulating since 5 March 1952, discussing the successes and failures of
the anti-epidemic campaign and urging mass mobilisation so as ‘to con-
duct a massive movement for health and hygiene’.22 By April this report,
written by the Third Secretary of the CCP’s North China Bureau, Liu
Lantao, was made compulsory reading by local government bureaus:
‘Under Mao’s direction, the CCP anti-epidemic policy began to change
from a purely anti germ-warfare strategy into a policy for initiating a
nationwide mobilisation for social reform’.23 This was not to be achieved
through employment of experts and the top–down medicalisation of the
population, but through methods of mass mobilisation as invented and
practiced in Yan’an, a process aimed at changing ‘[w]orkers-peasants-
soldiers ... from passive objects of medical care into proactive fighters
that would use their healthy bodies to prevent potential diseases’.24
This generalisation of germ-warfare containment methods to the
entire field of public health was formulated and organised in terms
of a Patriotic Hygiene Campaign which engineered a vast biopolitical
response organised around the event of germ-warfare and the govern-
mental void perceived as the root of the crisis: technocratic elitism.

Patriotic Hygiene Campaign as people’s war

Consisting in the mass mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of civil-

ians in a battle against supposed disease vectors, the Patriotic Hygiene
Campaign of 1952 challenged the ability of the medical and scientific
elite to manage the epidemiological crisis, and promoted the Yan’an
model of ‘people’s war’ as a panacea for every problem facing socialist
construction in China.
The notion of ‘people’s war’ was a pivotal innovation of Mao recognised
as such even by the staunchest opponents of international communism,
like the Nazi legalist Carl Schmitt. Maoism essentially deviated from
Leninist orthodoxy in formulating an entirely new relation between war
and politics. Alain Badiou reminds us that in his 1936 Strategic Problems
of Revolutionary War in China, ‘Mao develops the notion that in order to
obtain perpetual peace, a new war must be invented’.25 Whereas Lenin
juxtaposed war and politics in order to impose War-Communism, Mao
juxtaposed two distinct kinds of war, military and political, in order to
impose Communist-War. For when Mao distinguished between military

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

and political war (alias bourgeois versus revolutionary war) what was
really stated was that the latter could persist only by the abolition of the
former: ‘We are for the abolition of wars; we do not want war. But war can
only be abolished by war. In order that there be no more rifles, we must
take up rifles’.26 The being-in-the-world of the revolution was according
to Mao not the recomposition of class under Party tutelage, following
Lenin, but the launching of a qualitatively different war, a ‘political war’
that would not only end all military wars, but would transform society
itself upon its form, unto the image of a ‘revolutionary war’, of a pro-
tracted ‘people’s war’, based not on weapons and logistics in a militaristic
sense, but on the force of the population itself: mass mobilisation.
As Robert Taber has shown in his classic, War of the Flea, Mao’s
military strategy was irrevocably tied to such methods of mass mobili-
sation.27 Following Lenin’s old dictum, Mao opted to trade space to save
time, furthermore using time to build up a will to resistance amongst
native populations. Hence while Mao’s military problem was ‘how to
organise space so that it can be made to yield time’, his political problem
was ‘how to organise time so that it can be made to yield will’.28 This
was the work of protracted warfare: ‘When the Red Army fights, it fights
not merely for the sake of fighting, but to agitate the masses, to organise
them, and to help them establish revolutionary political power; apart
from these objectives, fighting loses its meaning and the Red Army the
reason for its existence’.29 For Mao ‘people’s war’ was a great school of
mass mobilisation:

Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare ... A revolutionary

war is a mass undertaking; it is often not a matter of first learning and then
doing, but of doing and then learning, for doing itself is learning. There
is a gap between the ordinary citizens and the soldier, but it is no Great
Wall, and it can be quickly closed, and the way to close it is to take part in
revolution, in war.30

This was a completely unheard of method of warfare, where mass mobi-

lisation, learning through practice and fermentation with the ‘masses’
were the main tasks of the guerrilla. Thus, ‘time [was] required, not
alone for political mobilisation, but to allow the inherent weaknesses of
the enemy to develop under the stress of war’.31 In this way, the industrial
advantage of Japan would not be able to overcome the errors arising
from the prolongation of warfare, and would lead the invading empire to
defeat by exhaustion.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

We can thus summarise the strategy presented in Mao’s warfare writ-

ings as consisting in two major points: mobilise the masses so that the
war can turn into a revolution, and exploit the contradictions of the
enemy so as to immobilise its industrial advantage. Besides its strategic
advantage however, ‘people’s war’ instituted a sociology that defined
China as a society-at-war: to be social was to be at war. As a subjective
paradigm, ‘people’s war’ thus gave birth to ‘a combative conception of
existence, meaning that the totality itself – in each of its real fragments –
must be represented as a conflict’.32
Returning to the germ-warfare controversy of 1952, we can thus see
the application of mass mobilisation as having two effects, one strategic/
propagandistic and one sociological. On the one hand, the answer to
the persistent question, ‘if US germ warfare was indeed that widespread
and evil, why did it fail to cause any significant number of deaths?’ was
because ‘people’s war’ had rendered ‘bourgeois war’ harmless. In his
article ‘U.S. Imperialists Meet Double Defeat in their Bacterial Warfare’,
P. Z. King claimed: ‘In this new society with the great masses mobilised,
the medical and health workers could effectively use their strength, a
thing they could never have done under the old reactionary government,
and therefore great achievements were attained in anti-epidemic work’.33
King counteracted critiques of Chinese evidence of biological warfare,
which at the time argued, quite reasonably from an epidemiological
perspective, that if there had been such an attack, there should have been
hundreds if not thousands of deaths:

Such a mistaken viewpoint was due to the fact that they completely
overlooked China’s extraordinary progress in health and hygiene and the
tremendous power of the Chinese masses. The American imperialists did
not confess the fact of their failure; on the contrary, they alleged that the
hygienic conditions in China were very bad and stupidly claimed that the
occurrence of certain communicable diseases in China were ‘natural’.34

‘Their plot’, commended Wu Chih-chung in his ‘Reflection on Anti-

Bacterial Warfare’, ‘was defeated by mass mobilisation’.35 In the same
vein, Wei Hsi and Chung Huei-lan in their article ‘Peace and Pestilence
at War’ claimed:
The germ war has been defeated by the mobilisation of the whole people.
The Chinese and Korean peoples and their scientists have organised a
vast anti-epidemic network and have demonstrated to the world that, just
as American military power, can be defeated, Truman’s ‘new fantastic

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

weapons’, his invisible, ubiquitous deadly soldiers, can also be met and
challenged by conscious mass discipline, through effective measures of
hygiene, prevention and control.36

Headed by no less than Cambridge’s Joseph Needham, the International

Scientific Committee summoned to pass independent judgment on the
veracity of the Chinese allegations seems to have endorsed this, ratify-
ing mass mobilisation as a centrepiece of epidemiological efforts against
germ warfare:
 There is in China today a vast movement towards personal and
social hygiene, which is supported whole-heartedly by 500 million
people. A health movement on this scale is hitherto unknown in the
history of man.
 This movement has already helped to bring about a greatly
diminished mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases.
 It seems to us that it would be not only criminal but also futile to try
to exterminate such people by bacteriological warfare.37
Besides its strategic/propagandistic effect, as applied to biological warfare,
the rehearsal of ‘people’s war’ in terms of the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign
of 1952 had the function of reproducing the society-at-war discourse of
the pre-Liberation years, applying it to a context where ‘war’ came to take
a whole new panoply of meanings. Undermining the official strategy of
peaceful consolidation of class differences within state-socialism, this
struggle-centred sociology reminded the fellow-travelling intelligentsia
that the revolution was still a task to be completed, and enemies had to be
defeated in order for that ‘historical necessity’ to come true.
How did the medical elite respond to this unprecedented ‘people’s war’
attack on what Joel Andreas calls its vital ‘cultural capital’, the only resource
that could sustain its power and knowledge in the absence of any credible
political assets? No less by means of an act of recuperation of socialist
symbols and meanings, engineered by the President of the Chinese
Medical Association, Fu Lien-chang, which brings us to the first exegetical
resurrection of Norman Bethune’s celebrated spirit of selflessness.

Bethune’s first resurrection: the sublimation model

In December 1952 the President of the Chinese Medical Association, Fu

Lien-chang, delivered a commemorative lecture on the 13th anniversary

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

of Dr Norman Bethune’s death. The paper, which was subsequently pub-

lished in the CMA’s flagship journal, the Chinese Medical Journal (CMJ),
was titled ‘What We Should Learn From Dr Bethune’s Revolutionary
Humanitarianism’. It began typically, recounting Bethune’s deeds:
When our war of resistance to Japanese aggression broke out, he was sent
by the Communist Parties of America and Canada to China, where he led a
Canadian–American medical corps to help the Eight Route Army. Although
at the time we intended to keep him a Yan’an, he insisted on going to the
front; and on the mountainous regions of Shansi, Chahar and Hopei and
on the plains of Central Hopei he saved countless lives of the Eight Route
Army soldiers, enabling many to recover and continue fighting.38

Then, Fu made his exegetical move proper, in an attempt to provide an

official interpretation of Mao’s Bethune memorial article. According to
the CMA President, who had worked with Bethune ‘for a time’ back
in 1938,39 the first lesson to be learned from Mao’s Bethune memorial
was his ‘spirit of Communism and Internationalism’ while the second
was his ‘high sense of responsibility and devotion to his comrades’.40
Furthermore, Bethune was exalted for combining ‘knowledge with
practice’, a skill demonstrated by his construction of saddles for carrying
medical equipment to the front, as well as by his ability of engaging in
‘criticism and self-criticism’. According to Fu, Bethune’s practical stance
was exemplified in his supposed slogan: ‘Let us be ruthless in our criti-
cism, cruel to personal vanities, indifferent to age, rank or experience if
these stand in our way’.41 Fu’s lecture ended by proposing an ideologically
condensed exegetic formula that put emphasis on Norman Bethune’s
ability to identify his individual goals with the general interest of the
workers:
Comrade Bethune has no personal interests or private ends. His life is the
highest manifestation of the selfless spirit in that he had merged his per-
sonal interests and aims in the general interests and aims of the proletariat.
He has set an inspiring example.42

This is the first recorded reference in post-Liberation medical literature

to Norman Bethune’s spirit of selflessness or selfless spirit, as the key
phrase of Mao’s memorial. Following Fu’s reading, the selfless spirit of
the Canadian doctor was manifested in his ability to merge his per-
sonal goals with the general good of the proletariat. Put simply, in this
interpretation of Mao’s memorial, Bethune was rendered an enduring
example for communist health workers as a man who identified his

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

interest with the masses to the degree of disregarding death in order to

do his duty.
What we must note here is that nowhere in this discourse is there
evidence of emulation of the abolition of the self as a goal in and of itself,
or of personal interest being identified as a source of absolute evil. On
the contrary, in typical dialectical reasoning, Bethune’s achievement is
identified with the fact that he sublimated his personal interest into the
interest of the proletariat. Yet in order for this dialectical overcoming of
the personal ‘I’ (wo) to take place what was presupposed was, first of all,
a meticulous cultivation of individual virtue, and a resulting purity of the
self, reflected in its very overcoming. In other words, following Stalinist
dialectics (Diamat), the general interest (identified as the dictatorship of
the proletariat) was determined by individual interest in the sense that
the latter was always-already the quantitative precondition of the former
as a higher qualitative synthesis.
Rather than mere dialectical materialist gymnastics, however, this
reading of Mao’s memorial to Norman Bethune by Fu Lien-chang
should be seen as constituting a careful move of discursive domestica-
tion at a critical junction for Chinese governmentality. December 1952,
when Fu delivered his lecture, was less than a year after Mao’s launch-
ing of the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, which, as we have already seen,
threatened the entire architecture of medical expertise and authority
with a swift blow from the left. Seen in this historical context, Fu’s
exegetic choice must be admitted as carefully eclectic. Though one can-
not hope to dwell, as Arthur Koestler would have it, in the ‘grey foggy
landscape between [his] second and third lobe’,43 it is interpretively
safe to assume that Fu had very good sense in choosing to concen-
trate on the most radical passage of Mao’s memorial, containing the
controversial phrase on the selfless spirit or the spirit of selflessness of
Norman Bethune. For in this way he managed, for the moment at least,
to domesticate this phrase’s political potential, by reterritorialising
it within a familiar and orthodox dialectical framework of Hegelian
sublimation, a framework that posited the self and its cultivation as a
necessary prerequisite of any ‘selflessness’ meaningful to the synthesis
of public good.
This ability of Fu Lien-chang to recuperate the perilous potential of
Maoist governmentality in a way that minimised its detrimental effects,
as far as the medical elite were concerned, was equally demonstrated
during his talk to the 9th CMA Conference (14–17 December 1952),

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

where he addressed the problem of ‘how do we make effective the prin-

ciple of carrying out the people’s health work by actively taking part in
the mass health movement?’44 Fu’s answer demonstrated his unwavering
propensity to turn Maoism and the ‘mass line’ on their proverbial head:
Above all, we medical workers should play an active part in the movement,
sustain and add to its vertebrate strength ... there must be better guidance in
scientific and technical matters, and our specialists and health workers must
be right in the centre of the movement, gaining experience from among the
people, seeking after difficulties and providing solutions ... Health organi-
zations bring forth concrete health problems among the people that require
practical solutions and turn them over to the specialists, and the latter in
turn deal with these problems in the light of their experience gained from
working among the people – this is how scientific research is brought into
unity with the masses.45

Far from a mere ideological tactic of evasion, Fu’s Bethune exegesis thus
reflected a concrete class strategy on part of the medical technocracy
whose composition was seen as highly suspect by ‘the new political
elite’.46 Faced with the challenge of the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign,
Fu Lien-chang’s exegesis of Mao’s memorial aimed at defusing its most
radical potential, by recuperating the advocacy of the spirit of selfless-
ness into an exegetical matrix that put emphasis on being professionally
expert as the dialectical prerequisite of being politically red.
As such, Fu Lien-chang’s exegetic resurrection of Bethune’s spirit
of selflessness involved an implicit overture to the patron of scientific
experts and Mao’s alter ego in the Party, Liu Shaoqi, the alliance to
whom would later lead to Fu’s purge in the hands of the Red Guards.47 In
the following chapter I shall examine Liu’s prescribed mode of how to be
a good communist, self-cultivation, by excavating the Confucian roots of
this technology of the self.

Notes
 Mao Zedong (1940) ‘On New Democracy’ (January). Available at: http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/
mswv2_26.htm (Accessed: 14 April 2011).
 Mao Zedong (1943) ‘Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership’
(1 June). Available at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/QCML43.html
(Accessed: 5 March 2011).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 The Sublimation of Skill 

 Levenson, J. R. (1969) Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy.

Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Andreas, J. (2009) Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the
Origins of China’s New Class, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 Martin King Whyte (1974) Small Groups and Political Rituals in China.
Berkeley: University of California Press. See also Anagnost, A. (1997)
National Past-times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China.
Durham: Duke University Press.
 Lucas, C. (1997) ‘The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French
Revolution’, in: S. Fitzpatrick & R. Cellately (eds) Accusatory Practices:
Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
 Lacan, J. (2007) The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book
XVII. London: Norton.
 Andreas, J. (2009), op. cit.
 Anonymous (1951) ‘Our Journal’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 69, No. 1
(January–February): 1, p. 1.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) The Politics of Medicine in China: The Policy Process,
1949–1977. Boulder: Westview Press, p. 35.
 For a thorough look at power politics within medical organisations such as
the Ministry of Health see Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit.
 Taylor, K. (2001) ‘A New, Scientific, and Unified Medicine: Civil War in
China and the New Acumoxa, 1945–49’, in: Hsu, E. (ed.) Innovation in Chinese
Medicine. London: Routledge.
 Taylor, K (2005) Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–1963:
A Medicine of Revolution. London: Routledge, pp. 18–19
 Quoted in Andreas, J. (2009), op. cit., pp. 19–20.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 30.
 Endicott, S. & Hagerman, E. (1998) The United States and Biological Warfare:
Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, p. 6. See also: Ruth Rogaski (2002) ‘Nature, Annihilation, and
Modernity: China’s Korean War Germ-Warfare Experience Reconsidered’,
Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 61, No. 2 (May): 381–415.
 Endicott, S. & Hagerman, E. (1998) op. cit., p. 6.
 ibid: 8.
 Nianqun Yang (2004) ‘Disease Prevention, Social Mobilization and Spatial
Politics: The Anti Germ-Warfare Incident of 1952 and the “Patriotic Health
Campaign”’, Chinese Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall): 155–182, p. 169.
 ibid: 169–170.
 Quoted in Endicott, S. & Hagerman E. (1998) op. cit., p. 11.
 Nianqun Yang (2004) op. cit., p. 170.
 ibid: 170.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 ibid: 173.
 Badiou A. (2007) The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 35.
 ibid: 35.
 Taber, R. (1972) The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory and
Practice. Herts: Paladin.
 ibid: 48.
 Mao Zedong (1929) ‘On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party’ (December).
Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/
volume-1/mswv1_5.htm (Accessed: 15 May 2011)
 Mao Zedong (1936) ‘Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War’
(December). Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/
selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_12.htm (Accessed: 10 March 2011).
 Taber, R. (1972) op. cit., p. 49.
 Badiou A. (2007) op. cit., p. 37.
 ibid: 47.
 ibid: 48.
 Wu Chih-chung (1952) ‘Reflection on Anti-Bacterial Warfare’, Chinese Medical
Journal, Vol.70 (Supplement: Views of Chinese Scientists on U.S. Bacterial
Warfare): 61–63, p. 61.
 Wei Hsi & Chung Huei-lan (1952) ‘Peace and Pestilence at War’, Chinese
Medical Journal, Vol. 70 (Supplement: Views of Chinese Scientists on U.S.
Bacterial Warfare): 8–19, p. 8.
 International Scientific Committee (ISC) (1952) ‘Memorandum on the Public
Health and Hygiene Movement in New China’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol.
70, (September–December) (ISC-Report, Appendix PP): 641–650, p. 650.
 Fu Lien-chang (1953) ‘What We Should Learn From Dr Norman Bethune’s
Revolutionary Humanitarianism’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 71, No. 3
(May–June): 163–165, p. 163.
 ibid: 163.
 ibid: 164.
 ibid: 165.
 ibid: 165.
 Koestler, A. (1968) Darkness at Noon, New York: Scribner, p.16.
 Fu Lien-Chang (1953) ‘Association News: Summing-Up of the Ninth General
Conference of the Chinese Medical Association’, Chinese Medical Journal,
Vol. 71, No. 3 (May–June): 229–240, p. 229.
 ibid: 230.
 Andreas, J. (2009) op. cit.
 Anonymous (1978) ‘Editorial’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 96, No. 2
(February): 170–172.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 2
Self-Cultivation:
Confucian Roots
Abstract: The model of sublimation proposed by technocrats
and medical authorities was based on a ‘technology of the self ’
developed by Mao’s alter ego within the Chinese Communist
Party: Liu Shaoqi. Liu’ s immensely influential lectures ‘How to
Be a Good Communist’ provided a blueprint for self-cultivation,
reflecting a long and intertwined line of Confucian and Neo-
Confucian philosophies of the self, while being in dialogue with
the radical, anti-Confucian modernism of the New Culture
Movement. Liu’s self-cultivation model was based on notions
and interpretations of self-watchfulness, filial piety and virtue,
giving them new meaning and practical scope from a dynamic
Marxist–Leninist perspective. By bringing the Confucian ideal of
the ‘superior man’ in relation to the Marxist notion of the New
Man, and bridging personal transformation with social change,
Liu Shaoqi’s self-cultivation model became a unique way of
defining how Communists could, at the same and one time, be
ethical selves, imbued with traditional values of moral excellence,
and political selves, imbued with modern values of agency and
revolutionary will.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China:

Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831 
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

If I love the state, the state will love me; and if the state loves me, my
self is preserved. If by this means I pacify all under Heaven, I can
love all under Heaven; and if I can love all under Heaven, then all
who have blood and breath cannot but respect their kin, and if they
all respect their kin, then my self is preserved
(Wang Ken, c.15301)

Born in 1898, Liu Shaoqi joined the work-study group ‘New People’s
Study Society’ in 1917, before matriculating as a vocational student at
the Yude Middle School in Baoding in 1919.2 Withdrawing from school
in 1920, he studied Russian in Shanghai under the Comintern com-
missar Voitinsky and was accepted for study in Moscow’s Communist
University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in 1921.3 After his return to
China in the spring of 1922, he was quickly posted to the newly founded
Communist Party’s Secretariat of Chinese Labour Unions. Soon he
would be dispatched to organise the great strike of the Anyang miners
during the autumn of the same year. Spending the next three years in
the mines as a central Party organiser, he was then sent to Shanghai to
coordinate anti-colonialist agitation during the 1925 May 30 Movement.4
This activist profile was further fostered by Liu’s consistent work
amongst miners and factory workers throughout the bitter decade of
the 1920s.5 Thus, whilst Mao was preoccupied with what from a Marxist
perspective looked like little more than a quaint jacquerie in backwater
rural Hunan, Liu was busy acquiring direct experience of organising
and tempering industrial labour and the struggles arising out of the
contradiction between the ‘productive forces’ and the ‘relations of
production’.
After the 1927 massacre of communists and workers by the treacher-
ous Guomindang in Shanghai, Liu went underground and played a
pivotal role in the organisation of the Party and the labour movement
in Shanghai, Hubei, Tianjin and Wuhan, where he developed a unique
strategy of infiltrating yellow unions and turning them red.6 In February
1932, after a fall-out with Li Lisan’s ultra-leftist leadership of the Party,
he was sent to the rugged Jiangxi–Fujian border to act as labour com-
missar. In response to the Jiangxi Soviet Republic’s fifth encirclement
by Guomindang forces in 1935, he participated in the full course of the
meandering Long March, after which he returned behind enemy lines,
becoming the leading underground Party strategist until 1949.7

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

In this epigrammatic biography we can decipher the organisational

roots of Liu’s self-cultivation model: illegality rendered vital the suste-
nance of Party discipline in conditions of minimal communication and
strained command-control. Yet, at the same time, Liu’s model was also
sociologically acute, for it managed to relate to a new type of conscious-
ness spanning social classes across urban China.
This consciousness arose out of a disdain for the ‘idle classes’ and
was linked to a discourse that emphasised technical and professional
skill.8 An increasingly wide spectrum of technically skilled professionals
derived its identity vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie and Guomindang militarists
as a social force that was able to take over production and social organi-
sation from ‘social parasites’ and rationalise it.
Liu’s model of self-cultivation aimed to enclose this dissident conscious-
ness, providing with a concise technology of the self, which reflected a
long urban radical tradition overlooked by Mao’s guerrilla war-machine,
by incorporating Confucian discourses both understandable and
non-offensive to bourgeois intellectual allies of the Party. Recuperating
them dialectically, in terms of a new problematisation centred on Party-
formation, Liu’s political strategy engineered a dynamic social and politi-
cal alliance between skilled workers (such as engineers) and bourgeois
strata of technocrats, intellectuals and economic experts, which would
prove pivotal in the aftermath of the October 1949 Liberation.
I shall now turn my attention to the lectures delivered by Liu in the
summer of 1939 at Yan’an, the capital of Communist-controlled territo-
ries in Northwest China, collectively known by the explicit title, ‘How to
Be a Good Communist’. I will examine how these provided with a novel
and in many ways intriguing model for the New Man and his place in
socialist revolution – a blueprint on how Communists could, at the same
and one time, be ethical selves, imbued with traditional values of moral
excellence, and political selves, imbued with modern values of agency
and revolutionary will.

The problem of malleability

In the course of the first and most important lecture, titled ‘Why
Communists Must Undertake Self-Cultivation’, Liu placed the problem
of the self within what at first sight looks like little more than the classic,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Engels-inspired, dialectical materialist just-so story of the struggle

between man and nature:

In order to live, man must wage a struggle against nature and make use of
nature to produce material values. At all times and under all conditions,
his production of material things is social in character … In their ceaseless
struggle against nature, men ceaselessly change nature and simultaneously
change themselves and their mutual relations.9

Here, rather than taking the term ‘nature’ to mean the environment, we
must approach the notion critically so as to decipher in Liu’s discourse a
fecund tension between Marxist notions of malleability10 and Confucian
notions of cultivation. At the junction of this tension stood the notion of
‘struggle’ as the means of transforming human nature (xing).
With characteristic versatility, Liu took up the task to vernacularise11
the canonical, Comintern-approved, Marxist theme of the Promethean
‘struggle against nature’, exemplified in the writings of Engels, so as to
adjust its materialist dynamic to categories of Chinese spirituality based
on processes of self-transformation.
Pay attention to the following phrase from the above-cited paragraph:
‘In their ceaseless struggle against nature, men ceaselessly change nature
and simultaneously change themselves and their mutual relations’. Here
the ‘struggle against nature’ is dialectically transported from a mecha-
nistic stage of taming natural elements, such as electricity as a means of
changing the mode of production (Lenin’s famous ‘soviets plus electrifi-
cation’ formula), to an ontological stage of the relation of one to one’s self
and to others (‘change themselves and their mutual relations’), where the
aim is nothing less than the achievement of virtue (de).

The problem of virtue and will

The notion of virtue has a long history in China. If we are to pursue

Chinese technologies of self-cultivation to the slippery shadows of early
history, we have to look at 12th century BCE Shang divinatory bones and
shells, where one can find an early form of the word virtue (de), connot-
ing ‘a kind of power that accrued to and resided within an individual
who had acted favourably toward a spirit or another person’.12
Here, at the threshold of Chinese history, arose the notion of ‘moral
power’, which we find again on a 10th century BCE Western Zhou

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

bronze ritual vessel.13 There, inscribed six times in the form of de, virtue
is revealed as the principle bringing Heaven (tian) and humans (ren)
together via the sage-king Yu, who is established as the original keeper of
China on the condition of safeguarding the proper circulation of virtue
between Heaven and its subjects.
The efficacy of virtue as a reciprocal relation of mutual moral respon-
sibility in archaic China is further attested by the notion’s homonym ‘to
get’ or ‘to gain’ (de), which underlines the fact that ‘virtue is a kind of
power’14 that takes hold of people by creating an unbreakable bond of
debt, both the means and measure of human co-existence.
Based on available archaeological evidence, we can thus assume that
ante Confucius the notion of de signified a moral disposition, which
‘enabled [the ruler] to de ‘get’ the endorsement of various Nature and
ancestral spirits’15 in order to govern the land. By the time of the Zhou
dynasty, imperial governmentality and technologies of the self already
shared closely interdependent sets of principles and problems.
For it was believed that losing his moral power (de), the monarch was
bound to lose the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) to rule: ‘hence, the ming
(mandate) to rule passes from one ruler to another based upon their moral
worthiness to rule’.16 This was the ethico–cosmological matrix, which by
the 6th century BCE would provide the basis for the transformation of
the mutual debt of de into the leading principle of social life in China.
Upon this rich repository of concerns over the relation between
Heaven, virtue and governance, Confucius developed the first system of
self-cultivation and the ideal of the junzi, the cultivated-perfected man.
On the one hand, Confucius imbued tian with a plan for human beings,
which was no other than social harmony.17 This world-ordering oriented
tianming was effected through the endowment of certain persons with
virtue: ‘by revering and cultivating their de, such individuals or “gentle-
men” influence others to pursue the Way and inspire them to take up
their own moral self-cultivation’.18
The genealogy of this relation between Heaven, virtue and govern-
ance remains a complex issue for historians of Chinese philosophy. Yet
it is clear that by the time of Confucius what had began as a concern
over formal metaphysics, ritual taboos and prohibitions19 had acquired
a much wider social use, bringing governmentality and emerging tech-
nologies of the self in ever more intricate rapport.
As a result, virtue was naturalised into a gravitational force of attrac-
tion that rendered morally superior persons the epicentre of social and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

political life. Confucian metaphors of virtue as a force that ‘sway[s] the

masses as wind sways the grasses’20 and ‘attracts and retains good and
loyal subordinates and subjects just as the north star attracts and holds
the other stars in their orbits, circling around it’21 are important ethno–
historical traces of 6th century BCE elite understandings of de as a pre-
requisite of the monarch’s ability to ‘attract and retain capable ministers
and loyal subjects’.22
Twenty-six centuries later, this ethico–juridical concern would find
fertile soil in the need of the Communist Party’s leadership to distance
itself from the ultra-leftist Manichaeism of Li Lisan and take a most pain-
ful ‘step backward’ in the face of the 1935 Japanese invasion of the Chinese
mainland: forging a United Front with its nemesis, the Guomindang,23
and thus exposing Communist cadres to a range of noxious political and
cultural influences.
Aimed at filtering and purifying cadres exposed to this new nec-
essary yet corrupting cooperation, Liu Shaoqi’s technology of the
self was intricately linked with Confucius’ rendition of de, in that
it sought to bring about a synergic relation between self-cultivation
and socialist governmentality, with the aim of rectifying cadres’ non-
proletarian background, and the ‘class enemy’ residue this brought
into the Party.
The technology of the self that Liu endorsed was based on immers-
ing cadres of suspicious class origins in a long process of ‘steeling and
self-cultivation’,24 which would imbue them with the ultimate socialist
virtue, the complete perception and atunement of the self to ‘historical
necessity’ or the ‘laws of the revolution’:

An immature revolutionary has to go through a long process of revolu-

tionary tempering and self-cultivation, a long period of remolding, before
he can become a mature and seasoned revolutionary who can grasp and
skillfully apply the laws of revolution. For in the first place, a comparatively
immature revolutionary, born and bred in the old society, carries with him
the remnant of the various ideologies of this society (including its preju-
dices, habits and traditions).25

This implied that the ‘superstructure’ acquired a peculiar autonomy

vis-à-vis the ‘infrastructure’. If for orthodox Marxism the malleability
of human nature as a social relation was dependent on changing the
relation of man and nature in the realm of production, in Liu’s heretical
reading this materialist relation took form only within culturally specific

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

conditions, which, rather than being mere superstructures, possessed

autonomous agency over the social process and production itself.
Hence the transformation of the social organisation of production and
the transformation of the self as a social being were rendered mutually
dependent conditions of the struggle for socialism. This was a major
contribution as far as self-cultivation was concerned, for it related
directly to one of the most thorny and yet fecund aspects of Confucian
being-in-the-world: the relation of the self to the other.

Self and other in Confucian thought

The real innovation of Confucius as regards the problem of virtue was

to re-problematise it in terms of a set of moral practices, which Philip
J. Ivanhoe has aptly termed the acquisition model of self-cultivation.26
Confucius’s philosophical coup largely comprised in bringing the two
cardinal principles of virtue, learning (xue) and reflection (si), in a new
dynamic tension to each other.27
Discussing Confucius’s dictum, ‘study without reflection is a waste,
reflection without study is a danger’, Ivanhoe stresses the praxeological
aspect of Confucian reflection (si): ‘it means to keep one’s attention focused
upon and engaged with something, often a goal or ideal which one intends
to achieve’.28
As a result, Confucius’s insistence on practising and restoring the rites
(li) must be reconsidered in the light of this reflexive mode of self-culti-
vation. Shaping the character of their practitioners and observers alike,
rites (including both religious and everyday social and personal behav-
iour) were efficacious only to the extent that they became an occasion,
an object and a process of reflection: ‘Yan Hui asked about humanity/
benevolence (ren). The Master said, “to curb the self and turn to the rites
is humanity/ benevolence”’.29
Ivanhoe is ethnographically acute in observing that ‘this concern with
the details of life and the effects that they can have upon the formation of
character’ might seem a matter of taste to modern observers, but was a
component of vital moral importance for Confucian self-cultivation.30
The goal of this self-cultivation was a person who kept his or her virtue
within proper bounds of interpersonal interaction: ‘if one looses sight of
this aspect of the rites, one can mistake the task of moral self cultiva-
tion as primarily or exclusively a private, perfectionist concern’.31 As a

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

result, Confucian self-cultivation can be seen as a moral technology that

elevated everyday life to a ritual sphere of performative attuning (zheng)
between the self (ji) and the other (ren).
The importance of the role of the other here is vital. For, far from
reducing individuals to solipsistic navel-gazers or conformist drones,
Confucius’s ethical model set at the epicentre of subject-formation proc-
esses of desire, gratitude and mourning, that would become vital areas of
concern and debate regarding the cultivation of the self in the centuries
to come.
In fact, as Hall and Ames have extensively argued,32 any understand-
ing of Confucius’s rendition of the self is necessarily implicated in
‘clarifying [the] distinction between autonomy and uniqueness’: ‘while
the definition of the self as irreducibly social certainly precludes autono-
mous individuality, it does not rule out the second, less familiar notion
of uniqueness expressed in terms of my roles and my relationships’.33
Hence, within the contextual-self model of Confucius, one’s self-
consciousness does not arise from a selfish pejorative, or from an abil-
ity ‘to isolate and objectify one’s essential self ’.34 On the contrary, ‘one
is self-conscious … in the sense of being aware of oneself as a locus of
observation by others’.35 Rather than based on the principle of autonomy,
the self ’s main structural characteristic is its uniqueness, which arises
and becomes meaningful only in ritually structured relations with the
other as the ‘interdependent correlative’ of the self.36
Hence it can be argued that Confucian self-cultivation was based
on the idea of ‘achiev[ing] self-fulfilment in the company of others’,37
i.e. through and within a matrix of interpersonal associations whose
cardinal principle of sociality can be described as reciprocity in
uniqueness.
On the basis of this problematisation of the relation between self
and other, what De Bary has termed Confucian personalism38 largely
revolved around the virtue of filial piety (xiao) – often considered the
very foundation of classical Chinese ethics.39 As Nylan argues in his
critical discussion of Confucian piety and individuality,40 the importance
of Confucius as regards the ethics of filial piety lay with the fact that
rather than regarding the latter as the result of some process of moral
accumulation, the Master considered xiao as the root of humaneness/
benevolence (ren). With Confucius, ‘humaneness (ren) is identified as
the virtue of the son. The basis of this virtue is filial piety (xiao) which
makes a person truly human’.41

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

Thus, filial piety, a practice which in Lacanian terms renders the other
an Other,42 acquired the double hypostasis of being, on the one hand, in
its essence the root, and, on the other hand, in its everyday ritual per-
formance the means for the realisation of human society.
This notion of filial piety towards the big Other (father, emperor, hus-
band) was one of the great constants of Chinese culture throughout the
long millennia of imperial rule. Still, rather than constructing an imag-
ined continuity between Confucian and Communist self-cultivation,
what is important here is to recognise and evaluate a very crucial rupture
mediating between imperial and state-socialist ethics of the self. For it
was only through this breach with and negation of Confucianism that
self-cultivation could be resurrected by Liu Shaoqi, as a dialectical over-
coming of the contradiction between imperial thesis and its republican
antithesis.

Challenge and the return of the Other

In many ways the ushering in of modernity in China was concurrent

and conditioned upon a negation of the Confucian Other. As the work of
Peter Zarrow and Arif Dirlik43 elucidates, anarchist ideas had a formative
impact on Chinese notions of modernity. Filtered via Japan and Paris
through work-study groups44 attended by many future rulers of China,
including Deng Xiaoping, anarchism (wuzhengfu) instigated a sharp
anti-Confucianist critique of patriarchy and the family as the ultimate
sources of evil in Chinese society. The problem of the proper relation
between society and the state in radical thought at large was dominated
by the problem of morality.45
How should the morality of the self (side), or individual virtue, be
related to public morality (gongde), or public virtue? This was a most
Confucian problem, especially prevalent in the writings of the 19th-
century heretical scholar Kung Ting-an, a major source of inspiration for
late imperial modernisers like Kang Youwei.46 As such, it was reflected in
the concern of the organic intellectuals of the Empire over the lack of
gongde. According to their diagnosis, individualism rendered impossible
the construction of a national sense of ‘obligation and responsibility’ that
could counter colonialist expansion on the Chinese coast.47
For young and radical proponents of modernity this discourse, propa-
gated as it was by institutional intellectuals like Liang Qingqao, resonated

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

with deeply servile Confucianist overtones. The most systematic attack

against this form of voluntary servitude came from Paris-based Chinese
anarchists. Through their New Era magazine they presented Confucius
as a product of barbarity whose teachings reproduced a wide spectrum
of superstitions that led to all existing forms of repression and authority
in China.48
In the view of Chinese radicals, government and authority (qiangquan)
as a whole had perverted and alienated the humanity of the Chinese peo-
ple from its original benevolence (ren). Proponents of the restoration of
‘a natural state of affairs’ like Ma Xulun interpreted the problem of power
as a problem of culture or habit,49 a notion resonant with Neo-Confucian
concerns over the ‘tyranny of blind habit’ burdening individuals with
‘unconscious selfish motivations’.50 The social revolution was not simply
an act of abolishing external forms of tyranny (bureaucracy, the police,
the army, etc.), but above all a process of subverting the very desire for
tyranny (baozheng).
This process of de-habituation necessitated the engineering of a
public-minded revolution in the self, which could undermine the
culture of authority and pave the way for the peaceful emancipation of
humanity as a whole. One of the most important components of this
transformative process was the negation of filial piety: ‘Family revolu-
tion, revolution against the sages, revolution in the Three Bonds [ruler-
minister, father-son, husband-wife] … would help advance the cause of
humanitarianism’.51 As this negation was tacitly based on a belief in the
inherently benign nature humankind, the anarchist programme of social
revolution was above everything else a programme for the restoration of
humaneness/benevolence (ren).
If the negation of the Other had formative effects amongst urban
youth and intellectuals of 1910s and 1920s China, the effort to materialise
a tangible form of this new type of society proved decisively confounded.
As anarchists and other radicals started setting up experimental com-
munities in both urban and rural settings, practical limits of the mutual
aid programme they propagated were quickly reached, with production
and cooperation between members collapsing under the weight of
organisational demands. This gap between theory and practice opened a
space for the introduction of an ideological force that until then paled in
insignificance in comparison to its anarchist cousin: Marxism.
The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921 under the star of
two great Marxist ideologues, Chen Duxiu, the Beida academic and iconic

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

figure of the New Culture Movement who had previously urged to ‘smash
the Confucian shop’ and welcome ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’ to
China, and Li Dazhao, whose Kropotkean outlook allowed for an unprec-
edented vision of the peasants’ role in social and national emancipation.
What was unique to these two luminaries was their linking of ideol-
ogy and organisation52 – a conjunction that would make the Communist
Party ‘a beacon of coherence in a sea of political and ideological chaos’.53
The ability to provide with a visible and coherent organisational princi-
ple soon rendered anarchism obsolete and Marxism–Leninism victori-
ous amongst the radicalised population of China in the 1920s. Before
five years had elapsed from its foundation, the Chinese Communist
Party already figured as the main governmental opponent of the ruling
Guomindang.
Yet Marxism could not prevail based on a purely organisational
platform. Its potential supporters were deeply engrained in ontological
and ethical concerns that needed to be resolved in a concrete and prac-
tical manner. As regards the problem of the self, Marxism introduced
radical new elements that would dominate discussions on human nature
for decades to come. For the supporters of Lenin brought to China a
philosophy of the self that denied both Confucian traditionalism and
anarchist restorationism. According to Chinese Marxists, human nature
was not a given fact, but, following Marx’s 6th Thesis on Feuerbach, ‘the
ensemble of social relations’.54
This perspective introduced the radical possibility of changing human
nature. The task of the revolution was no longer to allow human nature
to flourish, to break the bounds of habits or oppression or to help it real-
ise its inherent potential – but to change it in and of itself. What Munro
calls ‘the principle of malleability’55 signposted a new era in thinking and
acting with the self in its relation to others.
The institutional context where this change of human nature could be
effected was characteristically Leninist and involved the transformation
of work-study groups that had flourished during the previous period
into the so-called small groups (xiaoju). Usually consisting of 8 to 15
members each, small groups quickly became the grassroots locomotive
of the Party. Abandoning mutual aid principles, their cohesion relied
on a demand for ‘group solidarity’, a process that in turn resulted in
the widespread adoption of a new formalised technique of bringing
the self in relation to the other: criticism and self-criticism (piping yu
tzu-wo piping). 56

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Criticism and self-criticism were processes of accusation and confes-

sion based on canonical texts as standards against which individual
behaviour was to be evaluated. These sessions provided with an alterna-
tive form of social relatedness no longer dependent on individual person-
to-person interaction but on organisational rules and rituals, sanctioned
by the word of the prophets of socialist utopia. Thus, self-consciousness
stopped being an end in itself and became instrumentalised into a means
aimed at an ultimate or final goal. Nothing could be more alien to the
cult of immanence of the New Culture Movement and its voluntaristic
appraisal of spontaneity, free voluntary association (lianhe) and personal
agency.57
Whyte’s classic study of small groups underlines that ‘xiaoju and the
political rituals carried on within them represent[ed] an attempt either
to pre-empt or to co-opt the autonomous primary groups which would
ordinarily exist in various organisations and throughout society’.58 As
a result, ‘[i]ndividuals [were] not left on their own to develop social
ties within an organisation but [were] formed into xiaoju’59 under the
increasingly draconian control of political commissars.
With their promise of ‘scientific’ certainties and a demonstrated
organisational rigour, Marxists quickly achieved a plentiful human
harvest. By recuperating and emasculating the anti-Confucian fervour
of radicals through the small groups apparatus, they provided with an
Other to which new filial ties could be structured: the proletarian revo-
lution as incubated and secured by the Party mechanism.

Cultivation as transformation

Liu’s self-cultivation must be placed within the context of this profound

recuperation and return to the Other, which can be condensed in the
formula ‘Confucius is dead! Long live Confucianism!’. And, at the same
time, it must be recognised that Liu provided with a nuanced strategy of
relating the self to the Other.
This was a process of cultivation as transformation incompatible with
the usual Leninist dogma that the formation of the New Man could
wait to occur until after the revolution. Both in Yan’an and in the White
Areas, the self-cultivation of revolutionaries was considered to be the
pre-condition of a successful revolution. And similarly, as we will see

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

in following chapters, the problem of the New Man remained a central

node of the social process in China after the 1949 Liberation, precisely
because this was not treated or experienced as the final Revolution,
but only as the first amongst a chain of necessary transitions towards
Communism.
Rather than depending on Soviet notions of the New Man, this process
of ‘cultivation as transformation’ owed its force to Liu’s ability to provide
solutions to a long Confucian debate on the transformational aspects of
motivational change, through the exercise of ritual propriety (li).
Discussing the Confucian notion of li and its embodiment by the self-
cultivated individual, the 20th-century ethical philosopher Tu Wei-ming
argues:
The practice of ritual, which involves such simple activities as sweeping the
floor and answering short questions, trains us to perform routine functions
in society as fully participating members. We learn to stand, sit, walk, and
eat properly so that we can live in harmony with those around us. We do so
not to seek their approval but to respond to the standards that have inspired
us to become an integral part of the community.60

The transformative bases of this abiding by community-structuring rites

were first propagated in a systematic way by the great Confucian Xunzi
as a negation of Mencius’ developmental model of self-cultivation. The
influence of this classical debate, and its problematisation of desire, was
crucial to Liu Shaoqi’s model of self-cultivation as ‘the remoulding of the
substance of mankind’.61
On the one hand, Mencius’s developmental model conceived self-
cultivation as following one’s xing. The particular notion has often been
translated as human nature, fuelling a long debate about the appropri-
ateness of this Greco–Roman concept as an ethno-historically accurate
rendering of the term.62 Xing, arising originally from the word sheng (to
grow), was a widely contested idea in 4th-century China. For Mencius
xing was imbued with four attributes, which he named duan or sprouts.
Each of the sprouts reflected a cardinal virtue: humaneness/benevolence
(ren), righteousness (yi), propriety (li) and wisdom (zhi).63
The sprouts should never be neglected, nor however should they be
forced to grow: ‘unless one has a lively and wholehearted involvement in
the moral acts he performs, unless one can, on some level, feel that one
should act in this way, they will not only fail to help, they may actually
hinder one’s effort’.64 Hence, in the Mengtze we read:

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

You must not be like the man from Sung. There was a man from Sung who
pulled at his rice plants because he was worried about their failure to grow.
Having done so, he went on his way home, not realising what he had done.
‘I am worn out today’, said he to his family. ‘I have been helping the rice
plants to grow’. His son rushed out to take a look and there the plants were,
all shrivelled up. There are some who leave the plants unattended, thinking
that nothing they can do will be of any use. They are the people who do not
even bother to weed. There are others who help the plants to grow. They are
the people who pull at them. Not only do they fail to help them but they do
the plants positive harm.65

One cannot pull the grass to make it grow, but must follow a process
of sustained and committed cultivation that involves the protection,
nurture and development of the sprouts.66 Here it is important to note
in passim that, far from a pedantic convention, the horticultural idiom
employed by Mencius was related to ways of perceiving the relation of
the body and spirit in the emerging Chinese cosmology and medicine.67
This is perhaps the reason why in Mencius self-cultivation takes the form
of nourishing (yang) one’s xing,68 through reflection or concentration on
his or her moral practices and their results.69
This practice of contemplation was supposed to lead to a sense of joy
or deep satisfaction that in turn nourished one’s ‘innate moral sense’.70
Based on this vital feedback, the cultivated person could then extend his
or her moral practices to other spheres of everyday life, thus developing
into ‘a full and reliable moral agent’.71
Van Norden has been careful to stress the importance of this act of
affective extension of ‘our innate but incipient virtuous reactions, from
the paradigmatic cases where we already have them to relevantly similar
cases where we should, but not yet, have the reactions’.72 Every virtuous act
produces a sentiment of joy and it is this that helps us extend our moral
practices to new spheres: ‘the joy of moral action nourishes our soul’.73
Whilst Mencius’s model of self-cultivation was developmental, Xunzi
opted for a transformational mode of self-cultivation, where the prob-
lem of desire played a vital role. Writing just after Mencius, Xunzi is
famous for his irreverent dictum xing e, often translated as: ‘nature is
evil’. Discarding this interpretation as imbued with too much Western
theological baggage, scholars have recently preferred to translate the
dictum as ‘innate dispositions are detestable’74 or ‘nature is crude’.75 Most
importantly, this aphorism directly antagonised the inherent goodness
of xing propagated by Mencius.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

Denying that ‘the development of morality is an organic process of

nurturing certain original sprouts’,76 Xunzi believed that xing could not
be treated as a natural reservoir of virtue. On the contrary it was to be
treated as the basis of a multitude of inherent desires (yu) that could not
be eradicated, and whose nature could not be fundamentally changed:
Those who say that we must eliminate desires to achieve order lack the
means to guide desire and are disturbed merely by the presence of desires.
Those who say that we must lessen desires to achieve order lack the means
to regulate desires and are disturbed by how numerous they are. Having
desires or being without desires are different categories, the living and the
dead not the ordered and the chaotic. Having few or many desires distin-
guishes different types and depends on a person’s dispositions. It does not
distinguish the ordered from the chaotic.77

We must be careful here. For Xunzi never held desire to be fine or crude
in and of itself, nor did he limit his critique of desire to selfish or self-
centred drives,78 as often mistakenly assumed. Rather, for Xunzi the
crucial moral problem of the human condition arose from the fact that
the natural tendency to fulfil one’s desire within a social environment of
limited resources inevitably led to social disharmony and strife.79
As a result, self-cultivation could be transformational only in a func-
tional and not a formal sense. In other words, one must strive to transform
not one’s innate dispositions but the way they are acted out socially. It is
through the praxis of artifice (wei), ‘the direction of one’s sentiments as a
result of the mind’s reflections’,80 that one can achieve moral perfection.
In this sense, the aspired goal of xing hua must be understood not as a
transformation or reformation of nature, implied by the literal translation
of the term, but as its overcoming: as a dialectical shift from the register of
nature to the register of culture.
If, following Xunzi, ‘our nature is endowed in us by Heaven, our disposi-
tions are the raw material of our nature [and] our desires are the responses
of our dispositions’,81 then the role of self-cultivation is to ritually rectify
or attune [zheng] our desires in a way that allows them to acquire new
functions in society that promote convivial harmony and order.82
Xunzi’s teaching in effect amounted to the premise that ‘although our
original selfish desires cannot be changed, these very desires, when com-
bined with intelligence (provided that we exercise it), can motivate us to
reform our character by adding new layers of motivations’.83 What played
a pivotal role in this process of re-motivation was the exercise of ritual
propriety (li), which in the Xunzi acquired a nurturing efficacy:84

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

How did ritual propriety (li) arise? I say: People are born with desires. If
these desires are not fulfilled [the object of desire] will surely be sought after.
If this seeking has no measure or bounds, contention will be inevitable.
If there is contention, then there will be chaos, and if there is chaos, there
will be difficulty and impoverishment (qiong). The ancient kings detested
this chaos. Thus they fashioned (zhi) ritual and propriety (liyi), and thereby
made divisions that nurture (yang) people’s desires and provide for their
satisfaction.85

As we can see here, rather than repressing or annihilating one’s desire,

self-cultivation was conceived as a transformational process of nurtur-
ing, in the sense of ‘developing new motivational dispositions’.86 Hence
for Xunzi ‘our inborn emotional desires are not intrinsically detestable. It
is just that in isolation they cannot perform their appropriate function’.87
Self-cultivation is achieved through the construction of ‘alternative moti-
vational structure[s]’,88 a craftsmanship similar to ‘tak[ing] a raw material
and shap[ing] it into the desired form’.89 Being the product of properly
cultivating what is naturally given, virtue (de) stems from the functional
transformation of the ritual structure (li) of self-other interaction.90

Liu Shaoqi’s theory of desire

These ideas had a direct and profound effect on Liu’s model of self-culti-
vation. In his neglected lecture ‘Opposing Hedonism’, Liu attacked ‘indi-
vidual hedonism’ as infectious: ‘once infected, a Party member can lose
his most valuable qualities: his sense of striving for progress, his sense
of responsibility and his sense of creation. He will become a backward,
futureless and corrupt person’.91 This contaminating ‘desire represents
peasants’ characteristic of backward ideological understanding due to
influences of the feudal class’s hedonism’.92 Isolated from the productive
process, such cadres are transforming themselves into ‘separatist[s] of
the society [sic]’.93
In his other curiously ignored lecture, ‘On Enjoyment and Happiness’,
Liu asked: ‘What is enjoyment? What is happiness? There are two sides
to life’s enjoyment, spiritual and material … between the two sides there
often are conflicts which find their expression in mental depression’.94
Liu proposes as a solution to this problem the integration of ‘spiritual
life … with material life on a material foundation’.95

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

The translation of this arcane dialectical statement is the following: ‘for

the enjoyment of material life, a Communist Party member takes not an
individual, but the whole class as his aim. His concern is the material life
of the entire proletarian class. As to spiritual life, he takes communism
and the communist cause as its content’.96
Thus, in a clear reflection of Xunzi’s self-cultivation thesis, the con-
tradiction between ‘landlord-bourgeois enjoyment’ and ‘proletarian
enjoyment’ was defined as the contradiction between those who enjoy the
suffering of others, and those who enjoy suffering for others.97
This bears direct relevance to Tu Wei-ming’s analysis of Confucian self-
cultivation as a practice which ‘begins with an awareness that learning to
be fully human involves pain and suffering’,98 a teaching particularly promi-
nent in Wang Yangming who ‘philosophized about the import of pain and
suffering for forming one body with Heaven and Earth and the myriad
things because he had embodied it in his quest for self-transformation’.99
In fact, as Nivison has noted, Liu’s insistence on suffering was directly
fuelled by the Long March experience and the retreat into the caves of
Yan’an as ‘trial[s] of endurance, indicating that the party’s task is now
to cultivate itself for future victory. Its position is that of the man who,
having been chosen by Heaven for greatness (as Mencius had said), is
first tested and steeled with suffering’.100
The fate of cadres who are ‘infected’ by ‘decadent’ modes of desire is,
Liu makes clear, but ‘extinction’, for ‘if a Party member happens also to
be caring for himself, he actually becomes an appendix of the landlord-
bourgeois class’.101 Corroded by individualism and a calculative attitude,
such people cannot uphold the truth, and they handle practical problems
only in terms of their personal loss or gain:

In studying Marxism–Leninism they do not make use of its principles

to criticize and repudiate whatever is backward in their own ideology,
but employ it as a weapon to further their own private ends, and this is
carried to the point where the principles of Marxism–Leninism are so
distorted by their old prejudices that these people can neither reach a cor-
rect understanding of these principles nor grasp the spirit and essence of
Marxism–Leninism.102

While the root of degeneration lay in the fact that Party members ‘carry
with them to a greater or lesser extent the thinking and habits of the
old society’, what seems to have been the most threatening condition
with respect to revolutionary purity was ‘success’. Party members should

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

engage in intensifying self-cultivation ‘so that they will not fall into the
rut of earlier revolutionaries who degenerated in the hour of success’.
Liu’s warning on this matter is at its most stern:
Comrades! Such persons are present in our Party! Their brains are soaked
through with the ideology of the exploiting classes. They even believe in
such sayings as these: ‘if a man doesn’t look out for himself, heaven and
earth will destroy him’; ‘man is an egotistical creature’; and ‘there is no
one on earth truly unselfish, and if there is, he is foolish and stupid’. They
use all these phrases of the exploiting classes in defending their egotistical
individualism.103

Thus, ‘tempering and self-cultivation in revolutionary practice and

tempering and self-cultivation in proletarian ideology are important for
every Communist, especially after the seizure of political power’.104
Why, one would like to ask, was ‘the hour of success’ such a big issue in
1939, when the prospect of even the slightest victory was not in sight? Rather
than simply reflecting Stalinist purges north of the border, this related to the
establishment of Communist power in Yan’an, and the political problems of
both bureaucratism and adventurism this brought about.
Here is where Liu’s discourse on self-cultivation achieved its vital
force. On the one hand, it cautioned against voluntarism, spontaneous
and hot-headed action, equating self-cultivation (again and again) with
tempering, and, on the other hand, it claimed that such intemperate
action necessarily leads to bureaucratic degeneration and cutting off
from the will of the masses. Thus, what Liu suggested was that those
who are today wild and impatient will tomorrow be the first to settle and
become reactionaries.
This logical bridge between opportunism and bureaucratism was
a vital contribution of Liu to the problem of socialist governmentality
and its relation to the technology of the self proper to Communists, far
surpassing Stalinist concerns over so-called tailism, ‘a lax revolutionary
method which allows mass enthusiasm to get out of hand’.105

Self-Watchfulness
In face of this double and interlinked danger, Liu stressed the impor-
tance of cultivating inscrutable ‘superior men’ whose faults, following
Confucius’ Analects ‘are like the eclipses of the sun and the moon. When
they appear, all men see them; when he corrects them, all men look up to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

him’.106 Once again resorting to the Confucian canon, Liu stressed that,
even when unsupervised, the true revolutionary is one’s own sentinel,
watching over his or herself even in solitude.
This self-watchfulness was a technology of the self deeply rooted in
Neo-Confucian philosophy, and above all the writings of Wang Yangming
(1472–1529) and his disciples, in their reflections on the Confucian
Doctrine of the Mean: ‘There is nothing more visible than what is secret,
and nothing more manifest than that which is minute. Therefore the
superior man is watchful over himself when he is alone’.107
Self-watchfulness would be a defining terrain for Liu’s vision of the
New Man, precisely because it related directly to one of the major prob-
lems in Chinese morality: the tension between desire and virtue. This
tension was particularly developed by Wang Yangming who contested
previous scholastic approaches to propriety (li) so as to place increased
importance on the intuitive bases of morality and self-cultivation.
Believing in the inherently fully formed morality of men, Wang argued
that ‘the task of moral self cultivation lies in the eliminating and obscura-
tion of selfish desires and allowing the mind in itself to shine forth in all
its glory’.108
Wang described the human mind as buried under the debris of selfish
desires and cravings. Self-cultivation for Wang was a process of extin-
guishing ‘selfish desires’ (yi su). Thus Wang adopted a technique of puri-
fication and purging of selfish desires whose goal was ‘the preservation
of the pure character of the mind in every aspect of one’s behaviour’:109
The critical defect for a human being lies in pride. A proud son surely will
lack filial piety for his father, a proud subject surely will not be devoted to
the emperor, a proud father surely will be unkind to his children, and a
proud friend surely will be dishonest. ... So all of you must recognize that
this human mind is in fact naturally fine and clear without any stains,
and it is selfless. You can have nothing in your mind, for once you have,
you will have pride. Take the sages of ancient times for example. The only
reason they were so perfect is that they are selfless. Selflessness begets
modesty. Modesty is the root of all goodness, and pride is the worst things
among all evils.110

Opposing abstract-intellectualist approaches of self-cultivation as a

contemplative practice, Wang propagated ‘the need for concrete practice
and the criticism of over-intellectualising one’s spiritual development
and pursuing it “in a vacuum” ’,111 thus building an onto-cosmology based
on ‘practice’.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

In fact, Wang’s self-cultivation was not horticultural but polemic. It

perceived the eradication of selfish desires as a war of eradicating rob-
bers and thieves:

One must, at all times, be like a cat catching mice – with eyes intently
watching and ears intently listening. As soon as a single [selfish] though
begins to stir, one must conquer it and cast it out. Act as if you were cutting
a nail into two or slicing through iron. Do not harbour it, and do not allow
it to escape.112

This is why will or commitment was such a central attribute to Wang’s

model of self-cultivation – a will against the surfacing of selfish desires
and habits, a commitment to remain alert guard ‘pure knowing’ (liang
zhi) and purifying one’s daily thoughts so as to restore the self into the
natural state of sagehood.113
The importance of this polemical model of self-cultivation for Liu
Shaoqi’s technology of the self as a mode of ‘cultivation as transforma-
tion’ cannot be overestimated. For Liu, the self had to be involved in
a constant process of sublimation, which excluded no experience or
practice, as long as they dialectically turned towards the production of
the general good (gong), the construction of social harmony. If ‘watching
oneself when alone’ was vital in this process, this was because it pro-
moted a unique framework of moral self-sustainability, especially vital
for underground work in the White Areas.114

The blueprint of sublimation

It must be stressed, however, that Liu was always careful to underline

that self-cultivation did not equal the annihilation of the individual
as such:

This by no means implies that our Party does not recognise, or brushes
aside, the personal interest of its members or that it wants to wipe out their
individuality. Party members do have their personal problems to attend
to, and, moreover, they should develop themselves according to their
individual inclinations and aptitudes. Therefore, so long as the interests
of the Party are not violated, a Party member can have his private and
family life and develop his individual inclinations and aptitudes. At the
same time, the Party will use every possibility to help members develop
their individual inclinations and aptitudes in conformity with its interests,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

furnish them with suitable work and working conditions and commend
and reward them.115

Further discussing the ‘spirit of enterprise’, espoused by liberalism to this

day,116 Liu commented:

While we are opposed to individualistic heroism and ostentatiousness, we

are certainly not opposed to a spirit of enterprise in the Party members.
The desire to make progress in the interests of the people is the most pre-
cious quality in a Communist. But the communist, proletarian spirit of
enterprise is entirely different from the individualist ‘spirit of enterprise’.
The former means seeking truth, upholding it and fighting for it with the
greatest effectiveness. It is progressive and opens up unlimited prospects
of development, while the latter offers no prospects even for the individual,
for people with an individualist ideology are usually driven by their per-
sonal interest into deliberately brushing aside, covering up or distorting
the truth.

This passage bears witness to the importance of ‘mediation’ in Liu’s

model of self-cultivation. As Dittmer has noted,117 the fact that Liu’s only
surviving poem is about a bridge, cannot be taken lightly, especially
given the exegetic propensity of Chinese Communist politics.
Written in Moscow in 1921 and addressed to his brother, Kengyang,
Liu’ poem118 was in itself a carefully balanced rite of relating self to
other. Liu’s propensity ‘to mediate and formalise human contact … [by]
isolat[ing] disruptive emotions’119 was however more than a personal
ontological condition: it was an expression of Confucian riteness well
embedded in the Chinese intelligentsia, and absolutely vital to the
survival and perseverance of Party cadres during underground political
work in the White Areas.
In this sense, even when Liu stresses the ‘struggle’ aspect of self-trans-
formation in conjunction with the transformation of society, like he does
in his pivotal ‘On the Intra-Party Struggle’ speech to the Central Party
School (2 July 1942), his emphasis is always qualified by an insistence on
the ‘adherence to certain prescribed forms, while leaving the substantive
content of the argument open’.120
If the restoration of ritual form was a vital component of Liu’s technology
of the self and its corresponding socialist governmentality, this mediatism
and its corresponding emphasis on organisation was aptly reflected in the
crucial question over ‘principled’ and ‘unprincipled’ struggles within the
Party.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

For Liu this was an object-based distinction. Stressing the need for
a cautious approach to so-called intra-Party struggle, he reserved par-
ticular hostility towards the very notion of ‘struggle sessions’ or ‘struggle
meetings’, whose principal object was ‘not to discuss work accomplished
but to attack certain men, not to struggle primarily against issues but
against individuals, not to struggle against certain incorrect thoughts
and principles but against certain persons’.121 Liu argued:

In the first place, the term ‘struggle sessions’ is incorrect and inappropri-
ate. If there are ‘struggle sessions’, are there not also sessions without
struggle? … Such an attitude would be a mechanical separation of struggle
and cultivation. The object of the intra-Party struggle is the education/
cultivation of the Party and the cultivation of those comrades who commit
errors […] thus, cultivation and struggle cannot be considered separately.
Cultivation is a type of struggle, and struggle is a form of cultivation;
mechanical separation of the two is incorrect.122

Dismissing ‘struggle sessions’ as ‘a concrete manifestation of Party

sectarianism’,123 Liu stressed that the gravest mistake of these meetings
was that they obscured the fact that ‘intra-Party struggle is a struggle in
thought’, and ‘only after questions are resolved on the basis of thought
and principle can they be resolved in organisation and Party activities’.124
In other words, Liu held that mistakes could be corrected only through
the non-coerced voluntary transformation of thought and the correction
of ‘long cherished principles, views and prejudices’.125

Liu Shaoqi’s Confucian materialism

As Boorman has noted, two points need be stressed here: the empha-
sis Liu placed on self-examination, and the belief that ‘being a good
Communist is essentially a function of one’s state of mind, not the prod-
uct of particular economic or social circumstances. An individual may
acquire a proletarian standpoint and political outlook even though he
comes from a bourgeois class background’.126
To this effect, Liu evoked once again Mencius: ‘There is a saying
of Mencius “everybody can be a Yao or a Shun”. I think that was well
said. Every communist should keep his feet on the ground, seek truth
from facts, work hard tempering himself, work conscientiously at self-
cultivation and do his best to improve his own thinking and quality’.127

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

If Liu bore a grunge towards the classics and the sages, this was because
of what he saw as their exasperating abstraction:
When Zeng Zi, in ancient times, said, ‘reflect on myself three times a day’, he
was discussing self-examination. The Book of Odes in the famous lines, ‘As
knife and file make smooth the bone, as jade is wrought by chisel and stone,
referred to the need for help and criticism among friends’. What all this shows
is that very hard work and very earnest self-cultivation are essential if one is
to make progress. But the ‘self-cultivation’ perused by many people in the
past was generally idealistic, formalistic, abstract and divorced from social
practice. They exaggerated the role of subjective intentions, thinking that
so long as they had ‘good will’ in the abstract, they could transform reality,
society and themselves. Of course this is absurd. Our self-cultivation cannot
be done that way. We are revolutionary materialists; our self-cultivation can-
not be separated from the revolutionary practices of the masses.128

In qualifying Communist self-cultivation as distinct from ‘those meth-

ods of self-cultivation which are idealistic and divorced from the revo-
lutionary practice of the masses’,129 Liu gave an anecdotal account of a
Guomindang member who supposedly told him that the only Confucius
quote worth remembering is, ‘For him no food can ever be too dainty
and no minced meat too fine’.130 Liu retorted that using the ‘teachings of
the sages’ to deceive the masses was ‘typical of the attitude of the exploit-
ing classes of the old society towards the sages they “worship”’.
Here the lesson is quite clear: it is not the teachings of the sages that
are corrupting, but their deceiving use in the hands of the class enemy.
Liu was careful to note: ‘needless to say, when we Communists study
Marxism–Leninism and all that is best in our national heritage, we must
never adopt such an attitude’.131 The attitude towards Confucianism,
rather than Confucianism in and of itself, being the problem, the ques-
tion thus revolved upon how to render self-cultivation a technology of
the self fit for the material transformation of society.
Liu’s Confucian materialism in all its historical multi-layered com-
plexity was a unique vehicle for making the self serve the revolution
without compromising itself to total subordination or annihilation
before the big Other, i.e. the Party. This fine balance, achieved through
complex mechanisms of Confucian sublimation, was an ideal platform
for the cooperation of the technocratic and scientific intelligentsia with
the victorious revolutionaries after the 1949 Liberation.
By providing a cultural continuity within a new political framework,
bringing tianxia with guo into relation, Liu’s goal was to stimulate the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

political radicalisation of experts while inseminating revolutionaries with a

scientific culture they were lacking. This was a model that not only brought
cultural and political self in a fecund relation of mutual transformation,
but, at the same time, envisioned socialist governmentality as continuously
informed by dynamic processes of self-formation and reform.
Due to their well-reserved monopoly of skill, after 1949 medical
experts stood to benefit immensely from the adoption of this technol-
ogy of the self as the pre-requisite of the creation of the New Man. As
we shall see in the next chapter, this resolution of the tension between
political and cultural capital was to be tragically confounded, bringing
red and expert in direct conflict.

Notes
 In W. T. De Bary (1991) Learning for One’s Self: Essays on the Individual
in Neo-Confucian Thought, New York: Columbia University Press,
p. 163.
 Dittmer, L. (1998) Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (revised
edition), New York: M. E. Sharp, p. 9.
 ibid: 9–10.
 ibid: 11.
 Boorman, H. L. (1963) ‘How to Be a Good Communist: The Political Ethics
of Liu Shao-Ch’I’, Asian Survey, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August): 372–383, p. 374.
 Dittmer, L. (1998) op. cit., p 13.
 ibid: 14–15.
 Bergère, M-C. (1989) The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist: I. Why Communists Must
Undertake Self Cultivation’ (July). Available at: http://www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch01.htm (Accessed: 12 July
2011).
 Munro, D. J. (1971) ‘The Malleability of Man in Chinese Marxism’ China
Quarterly, No. 48 (October–December): 609–640.
 There is a long and complex debate amongst historians on the ‘sinification
of Marxism’. A good review and discussion is given by Arif Dirlik in his
book Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (Oxford: Rawman and Littlefield
Publishers). Dirlik proposes that what has often been talked about as
sinification was at the same time a vernacularisation of Marxism.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, p. ix.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

 Chan, A. K. L. (2011) ‘Interpretations of Virtue (de) in Early China’, Journal of

Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March): 134–150.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit.
 ibid: x.
 ibid: xi.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2007) ‘Heaven as a Source for Ethical Warrant in Early
Confucianism’, Dao: a Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 3
(September): 211–220.
 ibid: 213.
 Chan, A. K. L. (2011) op. cit., p. 137.
 Analects 12.19; quoted in Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit., p. xiii.
 Analects 2.1; quoted in Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000): xiii.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit., p. xiii.
 Coogan, A. (1994) ‘Northeast China and the Origins of the Anti-Japanese
United Front’, Modern China, Vol. 20, No. 3 (July): 282–314.
 Boorman, H. L. (1963), op. cit., p. 377.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) op. cit. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch01.htm (Accessed: 12 July 2011).
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit.
 Van Norden, B. W. (2007) Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early China,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit., pp. 2–3.
 Analects 2.1. Translation adapted with changes from Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op.
cit., p. 5.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit., p. 6.
 ibid: 5.
 Hall, D. L & Ames, R. T. (1998) Thinking From the Han: Self, Truth and
Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture, New York: State University
of New York Press.
 ibid: 25.
 ibid: 25.
 ibid: 26.
 ibid: 27.
 William Theodore De Bary (1991) op. cit., p. xi.
 ibid: 4.
 Holzman, D. (1998) ‘The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China’, Journal of the
American Oriental Society, Vol. 118, No. 2 (April–June): 185–199.
 Nylan, M. (1996) ‘Confucian Piety and Individualism in Han China’, Journal
of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 116, No. 1 (January–March): 1–27.
 Chan, A. K. L. (2011) op. cit., p. 140.
 Lacan, J. (1993) The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Psychoses,
Book III 1955–56, London: Routledge.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 Zarrow, P. (1990) Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, New York:

Columbia University Press; Dirlik, A. (1991) Anarchism in the Chinese
Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Scalapino, R. A. & Yu, T. (1961) The Chinese Anarchist Movement, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
 Dirlik, A. (1991) op. cit., p. 58.
 Wakeman, F. (1973) History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao
Tse-Tung’s Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 112.
 Dirlik, A. (1991) op. cit., p. 60.
 ibid: 98.
 ibid: 69–70.
 Nivison, D. S. (1956) ‘Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition’, Journal of
Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (November): 51–74, p. 59.
 He Zhen (31 August 1907) ‘Three Bonds Revolution’; Quoted in Dirlik, A.
(1991) op. cit., p. 98. Also see Zarrow, P. (1988) ‘He Zhen and Anarcho-
Feminism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4 (November):
796–813.
 Dirlik, A. (1989) The Origins of Chinese Communism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press; Schurmann, F. (1968) Ideology and Organisation in
Communist China, Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Dirlik, A. (1989) op. cit., p. 13.
 Marx, K. (1845) ‘Theses On Feuerbach’. Available at http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm (Accessed: 5 May 2011).
 Munro, D. J. (1971) op. cit.
 Dirlik, A. (1989) op. cit. pp. 175–176.
 ibid: 238; 240.
 Whyte, M. K. (1974) Small Groups and Political Rituals in China, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
 ibid: 10.
 Tu Wei-Ming (1985) Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation,
Albany: State University of New York, p. 97.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘The Class Character of Man’ (June), Collected Works of Liu
Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute: 321–326, p.
324.
 Ames, R. T. (1991). ‘The Mencian Conception of Ren xing: Does It Mean
“Human Nature?”’ in Rosemont Jr. (ed.) Chinese Texts and Philosophical
Contexts, La Salle: Open Court; Bloom, I. (1994) ‘Mencian Arguments on
Human Nature (Jen-hsing)’ Philosophy East and West, Vol. 44, No. 1: 19–53;
Kwong-loi Shun (1997) Mencius and Early Chinese Thought, Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
 Van Norden, B. W. (2002) ‘The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of
Righteousness in Mencius’. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 2,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

No. 1 (December): 45–77, p. 46. Also see: Angle, S. C. (2009) ‘Defining

“Virtue Ethics” and Exploring Virtues in a Comparative Context’, Dao:
A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September): 297–304.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2000) op. cit., p. 21.
 Mengtze 2:A.2
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought Of Mengzi
and Wang Yangming, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, p. 88.
 Shigehisa Kuriyama (1999) The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence
of Greek and Chinese Medicine, New York: Zone Books.
 Liang, T. (2009) ‘Mencius and the Tradition of Articulating Human Nature
in Terms of Growth’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China, Vol. 4, No. 2 (June):
180–197, p. 193.
 Liu Shu-hsien & Shun Kwong-loi (1996) ‘Some Reflections on Mencius’
Views of Mind-Heart and Human Nature’, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 46,
No. 2 (April): 143–164.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) op. cit., p. 89.
 ibid: 89.
 Van Norden, B. W. (2002) op. cit., p. 48.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) op. cit., p. 223.
 Hagen, K. (2011) ‘Xunzi and the Prudence of Dao: Desire as the Motive to
Become Good’, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 1
(March): 53–70, p. 53.
 Kodama, R. (1992) ‘Xunzi’s Thought’; Quoted in Hagen, K. (2003) ‘Artifice
and Virtue in Xuntzi’, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 1
(December): 85–107.
 Chong Kim-Chong (2003) ‘Xunzi’s Systematic Critique of Mencius’,
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 53, No. 2 (April): 215–233, p. 216.
 Xunzi: 22/111/4–6.
 Hutton, E. (2000) ‘Does Xunzi Have a Consistent Theory of Human Nature?’
in T. C. Kline III and P. J. Ivanhoe (eds) Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in
the Xunzi, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Corporation.
 Lau, D. C. (2000) ‘Theories of Human Nature in Mencius and Xunzi’, in
T. C. Kline III and P. J. Ivanhoe (eds) Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the
Xunzi, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Corporation.
 Munro, D. J. (1969) The Concept of Man in Early China. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, p. 80.
 Xunzi 22/111/14.
 Kline III, T. C. (2006) ‘The Therapy of Desire in Early Confucianism: Xunzi’,
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Vol. 5, No 2 (June): 235–246.
 Hagen, K. (2011) op. cit., p. 54.
 Hagen, K. (2011) op. cit.
 Xunzi K 19.1a.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 Hagen, K. (2011) op. cit., p. 66.

 ibid: 67.
 ibid: 68.
 Kline III, T. C. (2000) ‘Moral Agency and Motivation in the Xunzi’, In
T. C. Kline III and P. J. Ivanhoe (eds) Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in
the Xunzi, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Corporation, p. 157.
 Hagen, K. (2003) op. cit.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘Opposing Hedonism’ (1939), Collected Works of Liu
Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute: 95–98, p. 95.
 ibid: 97.
 ibid: 97.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘On Enjoyment and Happiness’ (date unknown), Collected
Works of Liu Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute:
89–94, p. 89.
 ibid: 89.
 ibid: 89.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘The Class Character of Man’ (June 1941), Collected Works
of Liu Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute:
321–326, p. 323.
 Tu Wei-Ming (1984) ‘Pain and Suffering in Confucian Self-Cultivation’,
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34, No. 4 (October): 379–388, p. 386.
 ibid: 387.
 Nivison, D. S. (1956), op. cit., p. 58.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘On Enjoyment and Happiness’ (date unknown), Collected
Works of Liu Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute:
89–94, p. 93.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) How to Be a Good Communist: IV. The Unity of
Theoretical Study and Ideological Self-Cultivation. Available at: http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch04.htm
(Accessed: 15 July 2011)
 Liu Shaoqi (7 August 1939) ‘Training the Communist Party Member’,
in Compton, B. (1966) Mao’s China; Party Reform Documents, Seattle:
University of Washington Press, p. 120.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist, I. op. cit., my emphasis.
 Nivison D. S. (1956), op. cit., p. 64.
 Analects 19.21. Quoted in Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist,
VI. A Party Member’s Personal Interests Must be Unconditionally
Subordinated to the Interests of the Party’. Available at: http://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch06.htm
(Accessed: 19 May 2011).
 ibid: (Accessed: 19 May 2011).
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) op. cit., p. 96.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots 

 ibid: 97.

 In Chen, L. (2007) ‘Research on the Issue of “Evil” in Wang Yangming’s
Thought’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China, Vol. 2, No, 2 (April): 172–187,
pp. 176–177.
 Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) op. cit., p. 101.
 In Ivanhoe, P. J. (2002) op. cit., p. 102.
 ibid: 121.
 Nivison, D. J. (1956) op. cit., 69.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist, VI.’, op. cit.
 Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 Dittmer, L. (1998) op. cit.
 Liu Shaoqi (1974) ‘On the Tientsin Bridge (1921)’, Collected Works of Liu
Shao-Ch’I (Before 1944), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute: 1.
 ibid: 149.
 Dittmer, L. (1998) op. cit., p. 147.
 Liu Shaoqi (1941) ‘On Inner-Party Struggle’ (2 July 1941). In Compton,
B. (1966) Mao’s China; Party Reform Documents, Seattle: University of
Washington Press, p. 206; translation amended.
 ibid: 207; translation amended.
 ibid: 207.
 ibid: 208.
 ibid: 208.
 Boorman, H. L. (1963) op. cit., p. 377.
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist, II. Be Worthy Pupils of
Marx and Lenin’ Available at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/
liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/ch02.htm (Accessed: 29 April 2011).
 Liu Shaoqi (1939) ‘How to Be a Good Communist, III. The Self-Cultivation
of Communists and the Revolutionary Practice of the Masses’. Available
at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/
ch03.htm (Accessed: 7 March 2011).
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 3
Red or Expert?
Abstract: Confounding technocrat aspirations by the mid
1950s, the Great Leap Forward was accompanied by a
series of ‘mass line’ policies in the realm of public health
that undermined specialist authority and promoted mass
mobilisation. This radical re-appraisal of individual
skill was in turn undermined by the collapse of the
collectivisation scheme and the dawn of an era of economic
rationalisation in the early 1960s. The resurgence of Liu
Shaoqi’s self-cultivation model was followed by a bitter
theoretical battle on Marxist dialectics, which reflected
itself on the crucial practical question of the proper balance
between professional skill and political commitment, or
expertise and redness. As Mao responded to the unfolding
‘red and expert’ debate in the field of medicine by attacking
the Ministry of Health as a ‘Ministry of Gentlemen’s Health’,
the medical establishment attempted to assimilate Mao’s
offensive by taking recourse to a reconciliatory exegesis
of Bethune’s ‘spirit of selflessness’ as a balanced model for
ethical and political action.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist

China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

The news that you are being given a new kind of treatment by ‘a
Bolshevik’, even if a former one, has really worried me. The saints
preserve us from comrade-doctors in general, and Bolshevik-
doctors in particular! Really and truly, in 99 cases out of 100 the
comrade-doctors are ‘asses’, as a good doctor once said to me. I
assure you that you should consult (except on minor complaints)
only first-class men. It is terrible to try out on yourself the inven-
tions of a Bolshevik!
(V. I .Lenin, 1913, Letter to Maxim Gorky1)

During the first years of the People’s Republic the endorsement of self-
cultivation as the technology of the self proper to socialist construction
allowed medical experts to continue being exactly that, specialised
medical professionals, without compromising their class privileges or
political position vis-à-vis the new regime. It was not by chance that
when discussing the role of Chinese Medical Association specialists in
the Korean War, Fu Lien-chang summed up their experience by means
of a discourse directly reflecting Liu Shaoqi’s self-cultivation formula: ‘In
the course of their work they have learned self-steeling and cultivation
and many of them have distinguished themselves’.2
This adoption of self-cultivation by medical circles went hand in hand
with a reliance on what Fu called ‘advanced Soviet medicine’.3 This was
a material reliance, in the sense that Soviet medical training and techni-
cal assistance in areas such as plague prevention in Manchuria played a
vital role in epidemiological control. But it was also a deeply symbolic
reliance, in that, by rallying behind the patronage of Soviets, the Chinese
medical establishment could both boost its dubious political credentials
and reproduce its technocratic power-base as a class. Fu’s praise of Soviet
medicine is characteristic of this strategy:

Soviet medical science is the most advanced in the world. It is based on the
scientific method of dialectical materialism and its development is closely
linked to the needs of the people. By mastering the science of dialectical
materialism we could actually and correctly understand the physiological
phenomena of the human body, investigate the causes of human disease and
proceed to work out effective methods of prevention.4

In the context of the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) this was a very
successful strategy, guarantying the inviolability of medical expertise

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

vis-à-vis the mass mobilisation model of socialist construction promoted

by Mao. Generously rewarded, by 1955 medical experts sought to further
consolidate their privileged position by massively joining the CCP, an
act encouraged by the Party itself in a vain hope of assimilation.5 In the
shadow of the rather vile purge of literary intellectuals at the time (the
Hu Feng Campaign), the acceptance procedures of medical experts ready
to humble themselves tactically before the Party were speeded up to a
miraculous 24 hours.6
Once again a rectification campaign had left the medical establishment
intact to such a degree that the dawn of the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’
(1956), meant to balance the alienation of intellectuals from the Party by
allowing them to express their grievances towards administrative rigid-
ness and dogmatism, found Fu Lien-chang so ‘dizzy with success’ as to
proclaim in his Presidential Address (July 1956):

From now on, while still concentrating on learning from Soviet medicine,
we must at the same time study and learn from medical achievements and
contributions of all other countries. We should learn not only from the
People’s Democracies but also from capitalist countries.7

Between 14 January and 20 January of 1956, over 1,000 cadres gathered

in a conference meant to tackle the problem of the intelligentsia. Zhou
Enlai set the tone by claiming that ‘the fundamental question concerning
the intellectuals now is that the forces of our intelligentsia are insufficient
in number, professional skills and political consciousness to meet the
requirements of our rapid socialist construction...’ .8
In effect opening the Hundred Flowers season, Zhou argued that
socialist construction was hampered due to cadres’ mistrust towards
intellectuals. Mao lent a hand in his closing lecture to the conference
by urging cadres ‘to strive to learn scientific knowledge, to unite with
intellectuals outside the party, and to struggle for the early attainment of
the advanced scientific levels of the world’.9
A new united front was in the making. This alliance of Party and
experts was to become an even more urgent task after Khrushchev’s
‘secret speech’ at the 20th Conference of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) and his levelling attack on Stalin. In his speech
to the Supreme State Conference, Mao qualified ‘all classes, strata and
social groups which approve, support and work for the cause of socialist
construction’ as ‘the people’.10

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

As MacFarquhar notes, the key phrase here is ‘construction’ rather

than ‘revolution’: ‘to be included among “the people” there was appar-
ently no requirement that one should support the socialist revolution’.11
Unity was stressed by Mao who urged that ‘the essential thing is to start
with a desire for unity’ while at the same time claiming that ‘never has
our country been as united as it is today’.12
Fu Lien-chang was a classic example of intellectuals convinced by the
Hundred Flowers Campaign to air their opinions, expressing the need
to rely more on Western medicine, even capitalist one. This was a time
when luminaries of the Chinese intelligentsia, such as Qian Weichang of
the prestigious Tsinghua University of Beijing, felt bold enough to argue
that ‘non-experts cannot lead experts’ and that ‘we need people who
have professional knowledge to express their opinions; we shouldn’t let
those who have no professional knowledge spout nonsense (wawa jia)’.13
During the Hundred Flowers experiment of 1956 and the ill-fated Party
Rectification Campaign in the spring of 1957, when Mao encouraged the
intelligentsia to extend its criticism to Party cadres,14 medical profes-
sionals came forward attacking the ‘anti-research bias’ of the political
leadership of the Ministry of Health, and criticising Party Committees of
bringing the Union Medical College to the brink of chaos.15 Countering
Mao’s analysis that the main problems in public health lay with unequal
distribution of resources, the medical establishment dug its feet in
its urban-power base by claiming that the real problem was ‘excess
demand’,16 i.e. no less than the sacred masses themselves.
Faced with the backlash, which immediately followed this liberal out-
pouring of criticism, the CMA and Fu himself would quickly resort to
what they thought was the safe haven of Soviet veneration and reliance.
In a move of self-defence and self-contradiction, on 19 October 1957 Fu
published a typically doctrinal article at the People’s Daily titled ‘Learn
from the Advanced Soviet Medicine with Resolution and Persistence’.
Reprinted as the feature article in November’s CMJ of the same year,
this tactical retreat explained how ‘we, medical and health workers, will
forever remember with gratitude all the aid that the Soviet Union has
given us’.17
Alas for Fu, developments in the wider political sphere were soon to
put his versatile spirit once again to the test, for, as Andreas has explained,
the Anti-Rightist Campaign was just the first shot in ‘a sustained assault
on the old elites and the cultural foundations of their power’.18 Already
after Khrushchev’s tour of China, and the dead-end in Sino–Soviet

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

relations this brought to the fore, the leftist Shanghai journal Wenhui
Bao put forward a critique that confounded the self-defence strategy of
the medical elites:

What methods should we use for prevention? There are two methods. One
method is the excessive worship of documents, the excessive worship of
the foreign, being divorced from production, and sitting and waiting for
patients to come; this is the bourgeois method. The other method is believ-
ing in the creativity of the masses … this is the way of the working class.19

This ominous new line would be fully realised during the terrifying sta-
tist experiment known as the Great Leap Forward, which marked three
developments directly threatening medical elite hegemony. These I will
briefly examine in turn: a) the anti-pest mass mobilisation campaigns,
b) the systematisation and re-introduction of Chinese medicinal practice,
c) the challenge of specialised medical practice on the operating table.

‘Farewell to the God of Plagues’

As early as 1955, the Central Committee of the CCP had set up a special
Nine-Man Subcommittee on Schistosomiasis. This was a body inde-
pendent from the Ministry of Health, whose political apparatchiks bit-
terly resented their exclusion from this frontline epidemiological battle.
Such was the tension, that the Minister of Health launched a personal
attack on the scheme, claiming that ‘there have also been many defects
in this work. In some areas, there was a lack of understanding of the
stupendous and complicated nature of the task, and this gave rise to a
feeling of hastiness and of an inclination to belittle the enemy’.20
This discursive assault was not left unanswered by the proponents of
the mass mobilisation model of public health, who counterattacked by
seeing the Vice-Minister of Health sacked, a time-honoured tactic of
‘killing the chicken to scare the monkey’. At the same time, a powerful
counter-discourse on skill and expertise was launched, marking the
inaugurating shot of a long struggle over what came to be known as the
issue of ‘red and expert’.
As David Lampton has demonstrated, medical luminaries who
opposed the anti-schistosomiasis mass mobilisation campaign were
explicitly attacked as ‘bourgeois experts’ whose reasoning was based on

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

the fact that ‘the Japanese had made a study of schistosomiasis for some
20 years and all their irrigation canals were built with cement, but even
they, with their few endemic areas, had not succeeded in eradicating
the disease’.21
This was taken as sufficient proof that these leading medical experts
‘did not believe in Party leadership …. They considered the Party
“unskilled” and not able to lead the “skilled”’.22 Far from being treated as
a limited issue over how or how fast to eradicate an endemic disease, this
was rendered a crucial question regarding who led public health policy.
The issue of ‘red and expert’, which soon became prominent in the
field of medicine, was for the first time expressed in a systematic way in
speeches by Liu Shaoqi and Guo Moruo in late 1957.23 By the end of January
1958 Mao made a first authoritative reference to the prickly topic:
Red is politics; expert is one’s job. To be only expert and not red is to be a
white expert [bai zhuan]. If one pursues politics so that one is only red and
not expert, doesn’t know one’s job and doesn’t understand practical matters,
then the redness is a false redness and one is an empty-headed politician.24

The distinction here is clear: whilst being red without being an expert
made one a vulgar politico, being expert without being red made one a
dangerous reactionary. While the former epithet was merely an insult,
the latter was a direct threat. This accusation was followed by a propa-
ganda campaign through the pages of the Red Flag attacking material
incentives (i.e. wages) as based on ‘bourgeois right’.25 Bearing the mark of
future Cultural Revolution mastermind Chang Zhunchiao, this did not
of course lead to the abolition of the wage system, yet it hastened the
promotion of ‘moral incentives’ and the ethics of ‘selflessness’ associated
with mass mobilisation.
Hence, by late 1958 and within the general mobilisation of the Great
Leap Forward, bolstered by Mao’s anti-intellectual remarks at the Chengdu
Conference26 the Subcommittee felt strong enough to stage an anti-
experts coup at the All China Conference on Parasitic Diseases held in
Shanghai. As an effect of this well-documented putsch, ‘the conference
enlarged the scope of the mass anti-parasite campaign and shortened the
time in which the total elimination of all five major parasitic diseases
[malaria, filiriasis, ancylostomiasis, kalaazar and schistosomiasis] was
now to be accomplished’.27
The first successful eradication of schistosomiasis, in Yujiang County
of Jiangsu Province, was such an important symbolic victory, that it was

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

celebrated in the, perpetually quoted, poem of Mao, Farewell to the God

of Plagues. One concrete reason for this passion with schistosomiasis was
that during the liberation of Shanghai by the PLA in 1949, thousands of
troops which were training in the city’s canal for waterborne battle in the
subtropical South suffered from schistosomiasis, forcing the training to
halt and transforming barracks into vast hospitals: in effect the disease
saved Taiwan, for it would take six months for the PLA to recuperate,
allowing the US Seventh Fleet to position itself between the marooned
Nationalists and Mao’s armies.28
This was a defeat hard to get over, but the passion with schistosomiasis
was not merely a symbolic result of Communist ressentiment towards
the remnants of the Guomindang across the sea. Here was in fact an
endemic disease that, on the one hand, seriously compromised agricul-
tural production, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and which,
on the other hand, technocrats and their Japanese scientific models were
proving consistently incapable to tackle.
It was on the basis of parasitology, as spearheaded by the battle against
schistosomiasis, that mass mobilisation (the anti-germ warfare model
of 1952) returned to the front stage of Chinese Communist biopolitics
by explicitly repeating the Five Annihilation Movement integral to
the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, under a new name: the ‘Four Pests
Eradication’ [chu si hai] Campaign aimed against rats, flies, mosquitoes
and sparrows.
Announced with much pomp at that Hangzhou Conference in January
1958, as part of the 12 Year Agricultural Programme,29 this was an epic
undertaking expressed in poetics of true Stalinist proportions: ‘In the
invincible spirit of “let mountains bow their heads and rivers make way”,
the people throughout the country have participated in the health cam-
paigns to eliminate the four pests and observe the rules of hygiene’.30 The
anti-parasitic delirium was further ratified at the All China Conference
on Parasitic Diseases in November 1958 that set a most unrealistic
goal for mass mobilisation: the eradication of schistosomiasis within
one year.31
Reports about eradicating ‘1,590 million rats, 1,650 million grain eat-
ing sparrows, 100,980,000 kgs of flies, and 11 million kg of mosquitoes’32
were standard discourse at the time, fuelling the imaginary of cleanliness
and purity with fantasies of fly-less cities and fly-less villages.33 Invariably,
these efforts were linked to the raising of local consciousness, aimed
at eradicating ‘superstitions’, ‘science-blindedness’ and symbols of the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

old society – a practice exemplified in the tearing down of 241 shrines

and 289 archways in ‘sanitation pace maker’ town of Foshan in 1959.34
In Chongqing alone, according to a report at the time, ‘almost half the
city’s two million people were engaged daily in fighting the four pests’.35
This was a move that directly contradicted the expert opinion that
‘a higher level of agricultural mechanisation was the prerequisite for
overcoming parasitic diseases’,36 an argument that clearly gave the advan-
tage to Soviet-led development and research.
Accompanying these mass campaigns were stories of peasant ingenuity
meant to put medical experts to shame. Referred in the medical litera-
ture of the Great Leap Forward as du or native methods, as in opposition
to yang or foreign methods, these were exemplified in Chee Teh-Sun,
who supposedly discovered a universal cure for snake bites,37 and in old
Mrs Ts’ao Yi-hsiu, who, after years of studying the living habits of rats
near her home in rural Yunnan, managed to invent rat-catching methods
that supposedly allowed her to eradicate 2,200 rats in 18 days.38
This further insult to specialist knowledge was directly linked to the
second systemic challenge to technocrat elite hegemony in the field of
medicine: the reinvention and canonisation of Chinese medicine.

The invention of Traditional Chinese Medicine

The Great Leap Forward witnessed a major resurgence of native forms

of medicine. The emphasis on systemisation and integration of native
medical and sanitary systems of knowledge and practice into what
became Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was a top priority of
Maoist biopolitics:
Experiences of the past few months – reads the September 22 1958 Renmin
Ribao editorial – have again told us that to carry out the technical revolution
it is necessary to resolutely implement the policy of ‘combining traditional
and western medicine and following both tu (native) and yang (foreign)
methods’ and fully develop the communist spirit of cooperation.39

Claims regarding the ability of TCM to cure disease Western medicine

had no way of treating were usually part and parcel of a discourse which,
following the ‘mass line’, proclaimed ‘the treasure-house of traditional
Chinese medicine represents the highest achievements of human labour
and ingenuity’.40

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

The urge to integrate diffuse tu medical practices with the equally

diverse formal schools of medical theory and practice deriving from the
Neijing (Yellow Emperor Canon) into a unified body went hand in hand
with presenting Guomindang’s ban on native remedies as indicative of an
elitist technocratic policy which, if followed, would lead to defeat at the
hands of the looming forces of imperialism. Yet, the enclosure of these
discontinuous medical regimes into a concrete and measurable body of
knowledge, Traditional Chinese Medicine, was, as Unschuld, Scheid and
Taylor have shown,41 a discontinuous and conflicting process.
Of the highest scholarly quality, Taylor’s account of the adventures
of Chinese medicine in Yan’an demonstrates how, under the guidance
of Zhu Lian, Chinese medicine was transformed and invested with
‘people’s war’ metaphors and tropes42 and the inevitable Soviet-sanctioned
Pavlovian neurology.43 Yet after Liberation, the position of native thera-
pies within the established state-controlled medical sector was greatly
diminished.
It is indicative that during the first National Health Conference in
Beijing in 1950, Yu Yunxiu, the instigator of the notorious Guomindang
ban on native medicine, held an influential role, casting the shadow of
Japan’s modernisation model on the Ministry.44 Under Yu’s influence,
the Ministry of Health saw native medicine, just like the Guomindang
before it, as ‘a feudal society’s feudal medicine’ leading to degeneration
and disorder. Thus, if anyone was to practice native medicine, he or she
had to pass hard exams in Western medicine first, while older physicians
were required to be retrained at Ministry-controlled schools. What did
then mediate between these standard attacks against the alleged feudal-
ism and sectarianism of Chinese medicine and Mao’s celebrated 1958
calligraphy: ‘Chinese medicine is a great treasure-house and should be
diligently explored and improved upon’?
Scheid suspects a series of factors for this radical shift, amongst
which was the effort on the part of Mao to get rid of Soviet advisers’
dependence and control, and ‘to control and rectify “the undesirable
ideological tendencies of the Western-trained doctors” by counterbal-
ancing those with a profession more easily dominated precisely because
its dependence on tradition made it vulnerable in a society in the grip
of modernisation’.45
Already by 1953 Mao’s reproach of the medical establishment for its
bureaucratic slackness in integrating Chinese medicine had led to some
ripples of discontent.46 Yet it was not before 1955 that the entrenched

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

elitism of Guomindang-trained medical personnel took a serious first

blow when young doctors of Western medicine were forced to be re-
educated in Chinese medicine.47
Resentment amongst medical strata was high, as native medical methods
were considered both lame and backward. And yet, aided by self-criticism
rectification sessions,48 by 1958 an Academy of Chinese Medicine was
firmly established, publishing the first major textbook on TCM, the
Outline of Chinese Medicine, which did for native systems of diagnosis
and therapy what the simplification of characters had done for language:
reorganise and revalorise them in the context of New China.
On the one hand, it dusted away what were considered as decora-
tive and mystifying elements, rendering a highly aestheticised body of
power–knowledge into a primarily pragmatic–functional one. And on
the other hand, it provided a measure of correctness and professionalism
which allowed the Party to control what the Guomindang had failed to
eradicate, by enclosing native systems of illness and health, order and
disorder, into its biopolitical apparatus of capture.
This was a highly practical enterprise, spearheaded by a breakthrough
in wild plant pharmacology49 and ‘a considerable experimentation with
traditional herbs to treat schistosomiasis’.50 Following the publication
of a rather threatening Renmin Ribao editorial in January 1959 titled
‘Earnest Implementation of the Party’s Policy on Traditional Chinese
Medicine’, the process of integrating TCM within the corpus of official
medical practice took the form of a rectification campaign amongst
medical elites. Humbled, the Chinese Medical Association’s President,
Fu Lien-chang, had to admit: ‘rectification of the erroneous attitudes of
slighting traditional medicine has strengthened the unity of traditional
and western style doctors’.51

Ideological battle on the operating table

At the same time as developing anti-pest control though mass mobili-

sation and introducing TCM as a counterbalance to the monopoly of
medical expertise, the assault against medical experts took the form
of an attack at the very heart of its most arcane stronghold: surgical
operations.
During the summer of 1958, a story started circulating across China
in radio waves, newspapers, work-unit bulletins, and medical journals.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

The report of the Shanghai Second Medical College Committee of the

Chinese Communist Party began in striking tone:
The process leading to the saving of the life of Chiu Tsai-kang, steel worker
of the Shanghai Third Steel Mill, who was burnt by molten steel, was a
process of grave and intense struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois
medical conceptions and between proletarian and bourgeois therapeutic
methods. The outcome of this struggle had proved, once again, that a prole-
tarian party, and only such a party, is capable of leading every kind of work,
including the extremely exacting science of medicine, that today, even the
seemingly most complicated work of healing, only by departing from indi-
vidual effort alone and following the mass-line can more and better results
be gained faster and more economically.52

Chiu was admitted to hospital on 27 May 1958 with 89.3 of his body
surface burnt. Doctors ‘shook their heads hopelessly’, for according to
the estimates of ‘world authorities’, a phrase castigating both Western
and Soviet doctors, cases in excess of 80 burns could not be saved. In
conflict with these specialists, the Shanghai Party Committee criticised
the ‘ideological state’ of the specialists, and pointed out:
What could not be done in capitalist countries we could do, and what the
capitalist literature did not record we would record. This is possible because
our social system and theirs differ. The people burnt there are the exploited
workers. The capitalists whose only concern is for profits and more profits
will most certainly not expend money and energy to save a worker. No more
would the intelligentsia who serve the capitalists. Ours is a country where
the working class is the master. Ours is a hospital the sole aim of which is to
wholeheartedly serve the working people.53

In this way, brushing aside ‘expert defeatism’, the Shanghai doctors

sought to control septicaemia with the use of a bacteriophage, which
health staff bravely harvested through mass mobilisation in sewage col-
lection. Indeed, the experiment was successful and the patient’s feet were
saved: ‘This proved that in whatever work, medicine included, the objec-
tive condition must always be analysed, and major and minor problems
differentiated so that the major contradiction can be grasped and no
efforts spared to solve it’.54
In fact, the report argued, it was not lack of expertise or sophisticated
medical premises, but lack of social and political experience and ‘spheri-
cal understanding’ that inhibited health work: ‘They [the specialists] are
obsessed by their own work; they do not understand, and hold in contempt

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

and even deny the existence of others’ labours and achievements. They very
often know nothing of the lives of the workers, the peasants and the broad
masses, and care even less’.55 This so-called bourgeois selfish tendency was
contrasted to the ‘selfless noble traits’ of the worker-patient himself:
When his dressings were changed, Chiu Tsai-kang suffered intense pain,
but to the doctors he said, ‘Just so long as my eyes can see the steel, I don’t
mind the pain…’ and ‘Cure me. I’m needed in production. I can leave my
wife and child, but not my furnaces’, while to his wife he said: ‘You have
brought my pay, did you pay my Party dues?’56

Employing for the first time a discourse on ‘selflessness’, the report

implied that medical experts should be more like this simple worker:
The forward leap in medicine has encountered many obstacles. According
to some people’s way of thinking, ‘medicine is different from industry and
agriculture; it involves the life and death of human beings. Steel can be re-
tampered, crops can be re-sown, but a human life is given but once’. Behind
this lurks much of the bourgeois individualistic standpoint. The claim
that life is not a matter to tamper with only serves as an excuse for callous-
ness towards life. ‘Human life is given but once’ is an excuse to hide their
refusal to bear responsibility to the patient and refusal to actively serve the
people … ‘healing is very complicated business’ says another, ‘the changes
in the human body are unpredictable, how can you plan a leap forward
here?’ Behind this lurks the servile idea that science has already reached its
very peak and there is nothing more to be done.57

The report concluded: ‘During the two months fight to save comrade
Chiu Tsai-kang, the leading role played by the Party convinced the sen-
ior doctors and they acknowledged that: “it is true that diseases can be
treated by Marxism-Leninism,” and that “without the Party, intellectuals
like us could not possibly have broken out from the established rules of
bourgeois experts”’.58
Placed within the context of the contest over the correct mode of
socialist governmentality, the importance of Chiu’s treatment lay precisely
with the fact that it was a case within the strictest confines of technocrat
control: highly specialised surgery, an area dominated by and legitimating
medical elite power–knowledge, as testified by medical journal records
at the time abounding in ‘exotic’ articles on difficult ailments and opera-
tions, impaired limbs, burns, grafting, plastic surgery, etc. Waging war
on medical experts in the terrain of surgery was a surprise attack of true
guerrilla standing performed by their governmental rivals in the Party.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Medicine in the years of the famine

This counter-technocrat assault assumed new force after the Lushan

Conference debacle (July 1959) when Marshal Peng Dehuai’s critique of
the Great Leap Forward led to his dismissal and a vicious resumption of
the worst saltatory excesses of the collectivisation scheme.
As far as the field of medicine and public health was concerned, the
renewed polemic was summarised in May 1960 in the article ‘Advance
the Great Work of Protecting the People’s Health’ by the Vice-Minister of
Public Health, Hsu Yun-pei, who Lampton claims had been appointed to
bring medicine in line with the Party.59 Hsu’s intervention was an overt
attack against the medical elite’s efforts to retain its independence from
the Party apparatus: ‘In health organisations there used to be the errone-
ous view that health work is a special field of science which laymen are
not fit to lead’.60
In fact, the Party had more than just ideological reasons to be extra
mistrustful of the medical cabal. As the greatest famine in modern
Chinese history unfolded,61 the biopolitical apparatus was proving decid-
edly unable or unwilling to respond to the soaring crisis of mortality in
the countryside. In fact, ‘hospitals had become catalysts in the spread
of disease and death’,62 with doctors hoarding and diluting medicine for
personal profit while totally neglecting conditions of hygiene.
Moreover, the monstrous mismanagement of labour and land had also
led to a sharp decline in the cultivation and gathering of herbs and fungi
essential to Chinese medicine.63 As Dikötter has demonstrated though
painstaking archival research, it was thanks to the PLA that the Party
managed to contain outbreaks looming large during the Great Famine,64
by means of quarantine, isolation and other measures of medical polic-
ing popular with the previous regime.
Only with a thorough rectification campaign within medical circles
could these ‘erroneous tendencies’ be smashed. As a result, the Party
attempted to accuse medical experts for their reluctance to throw
themselves wholeheartedly into the struggle and merge with the Party
ideologically as well as organisationally: ‘there are still large numbers of
medical workers with serious bourgeois ideology and individualism that
have been a decided hindrance to the technical revolution’.65
These ‘bourgeois experts and intelligentsia’ were vilified for poison-
ing the masses with their ‘superstitious belief in foreign countries’ their
clique formation and their ‘making a mystery of science and treating it as

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

something esoteric meant only for the initiated few’.66 More specifically,
one of the leading rectification articles in the Chinese Medical Journal at
the time claimed:
In hospital work, for instance, we criticised the bourgeois ideologies and
practices of ‘dictatorship of experts’, supremacy of technique, disregard
of the patient’s needs and interest and neglect of preventive work … In
medical education, we have disregarded the bourgeois policy of letting
professors and experts run schools, disregarding the masses, and training
students to be proficient but devoid of proletarian ideology, thus divorcing
medical education from politics, the masses and reality … In the field of
medical research, there had been specialists in some places who monopo-
lised research work and suppressed new ideas and new forces. They worked
for personal glory and gain and had blind faith in foreign literature and
authorities.67

Yet this attack was ultimately unsustainable. In the summer of 1960 the
disastrous withdrawal of all 10,000 Soviet advisers from China drove
a crucial blow at mass mobilisation imperatives: with such a serious
haemorrhage of technocrat know-how, attacking experts could no
longer be afforded. It is characteristic that the once celebrated Nine-Man
SubCommittee against schistosomiasis rapidly collapsed into internal
dispute over the necessity of mass mobilisation only to plunge into pub-
lic silence after July 1960.68
As the famine entered its ‘third bitter year’, in 1961, with the number
of deaths surpassing, according to Dikötter’s recent estimate, 40 million
people, mass mobilisation became a logical contradiction in itself, and
the tide against expert hegemony came to an abrupt halt. This ushered
in a technocrat backlash, threatening to sweep away all professional–
revolutionary authority over socialist governmentality. Retreating into
the seclusion of shamed silence, Mao would not utter a single word on
medicine or public policy in public for the next four years.69

Technocrat backlash
As recorded in many studies, among which the third volume of
MacFarquhar’s The Origins of the Cultural Revolution remains the most
comprehensive, the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference following the
Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 saw a shift of overall policy away from mass
mobilisation towards a more technocratic mode of governmentality.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

With Liu Shaoqi playing a pivotal role in negotiating this shift in a way
that preserved Party cohesion,70 the Conference ushered in an era where
experts would once again take the reins of public health and medicine.
Armed with Leninist organisational rigour, within the next four years
a technocratic reconstruction programme managed to reverse the late-
1950s string of disasters and stand the People’s Republic on its proverbial
feet. The so-called san zi yi bao, or ‘four freedoms’ system, was based on
household output responsibility (baochan daohu), small-plot cultivation,
industrial rationalisation, economic incentive based labour, and market-
oriented production.71
This re-orientation in the organisation of the economy was aptly
reflected in a bold revision of the place of experts in socialist construc-
tion, with medical professionals receiving vocal support from high
officials like Tao Chu and Beijing’s almighty mayor Peng Zhen.72 The
‘Fourteen Articles on Science’ drafted in the spring of 1961 specified the
relation between professional expertise and ideological commitment or
‘redness’ as a dialectically interdependent one.
Dropping the derogatory term bai zhuan (white expert) not only disas-
sociated technical and scientific expertise from reactionary politics,73 but
also encouraged top Party leaders with a technocratic outlook, like the
Foreign Minster Chen Yi, to adopt an ever-bolder stance against leftist
anti-intellectualism. A decisive step for absolving experts from the stink
of ‘reaction’ came in 1961 when Chen Yi made the following statement in
his speech to graduates:
The principal time and the bulk of the effort of students in specialist schools
should be directed towards acquiring professional knowledge; one cannot
demand that they emulate students at party schools and devote their prin-
cipal time to studying politics and high-level Marxist-Leninist theory. Nor
can one expect them to do deep research into political theory and various
concrete policies (like the various policies of the communes).74

Chen Yi thus openly expressed his criticism against the hongtou zhuan-
shen (thoroughly red and specialised) formula, a compromise solution
characteristically expressed in the prudent article of the Vice-Minster of
Health, mentioned above:

Under the Party’s guidance and in the course of steeling themselves in

practical work in the outlying regions and mines and factories, our medical
and health workers have been totally transformed in political ideology. Not
a few of them after abandoning their bourgeois outlook have started on

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

the road of being ‘ideologically red and professionally expert’, step by step
dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to the service of the people.75
Brushing aside all diplomatic caution, Chen Yi made direct use of
Confucius in ‘express[ing] his disbelief that an individual would have the
time truly to become both a politician and a specialist’.76 Supported by
Marshal Nie Rongzhen and most importantly, if not always explicitly, by
Zhou Enlai, this revision of the appropriate relation between ability (cai)
and virtue (de), or simply expertise and redness, was followed by a major
publishing event.
After an illustrious edited republication in the Renmin Ribao in early
1962, Liu Shaoqi’s treatise ‘How to Be a Good Communist’ was reprinted
in no less than 18 million copies and was distributed as the economic
reform’s blueprint for China’s prospective Nepsmen.77 In this climate,
where self-cultivation once again became the paramount technology of
the self, Chen Yi would go as far as to defend individual talent before the
national playwrights’ conference, cracking a daring anti-collectivist joke
that would have been unutterable only a few months earlier: ‘The poems
I have published are simply mine alone. If you want to work with me, I
won’t do it’.78
The renewed compromise position between being red and being
expert was crucially informed by Liu Shaoqi’s model of self-cultivation
in that, besides designating distinctions between the proper way of being
expert and the proper way of being red, it involved a careful qualification
of the relation of the self with public good that once again centred on
sublimation.
Nowhere was this return to normality more striking than in the realm
of public health, where, with the anti-parasitic mass mobilisation experi-
ment of the 1950s collapsed and more and more ‘parasite-free’ areas
reinfected, no-nonsense scientific efficiency became the paramount
goal: ‘not only could China profitably draw upon the experiences and
discoveries of her own scientists, there was an increasing willingness to
tap the experiences and knowledge of the international scientific com-
munity. The number of foreign medical delegations to China reached an
all-time high in 1964.’79
Public health and therapeutic medicine were rationalised, bringing
about a radical ‘centralisation of management and economic control’80 in
hospitals and in the pharmaceutical industry, whilst medical education
consolidated its elite status and its ability to produce a new generation of
highly trained experts.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

All that the mass mobilisation proponents in the Party had envisioned
and fought for was slowly but with mathematical precision slipping
towards a revamped techno–managerial hegemony: ‘this was not socialism
with Chinese characteristics; it was simply the Soviet model modified’.81
This threat led Mao to launch a guerrilla attack on the field of education
and philosophy, which would soon reflect itself in medicine and public
health. At the centre of this campaign lay the seeds of a new conceptuali-
sation of the relation between expertise and redness and the kind of self
this entailed.

One divides into two

As Joel Andreas has argued in his Rise of the Red Engineers, what the
issue of ‘red and expert’ entailed was a struggle between political capital,
embodied by Party cadres with revolutionary credentials from the civil
war era, and cultural capital, embodied by experts and scientists with
professional credentials inadvertently linked to a classenemy status.
Throughout the Great Leap Forward the Communist Party had been
cautious to launch only qualified attacks against experts and expertise
as such. Unable to liquidate intellectuals ‘as a class’, on the one hand, it
promoted the ideal of ‘red and expert’ as a model of class reconciliation,
whilst, on the other hand, devising parallel techniques and methods
(such as the anti-pest mass mobilisation campaigns and the re-introduc-
tion of TCM), which could undermine old medical elite power through a
redistribution of scientific authority to young experts and Party cadres able
to grasp technical issues.
No doubt this was seen as a threat by medical elites, yet at the same
time it did not cease to ‘promot[e] elite convergence by encouraging the
new political elite to accumulate cultural capital and the old educated
elite to accumulate political capital’.82 Nonetheless, a crucial problem
remained: what defined this conciliatory motion between political
and cultural capital, or redness and expertise? What, so as to phrase
it in the terms of Maoist dialectics, was the principal aspect of the
contradiction?
In defining just that, and hence the actual way in which this contra-
diction should be resolved, the experts had an important asset in their
hands: Communist intellectuals who shared their technocratic perspec-
tive. The most important amongst these was Yang Xiazheng.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

Yang, who had been training cadres since Yan’an, held a precarious
position in the architecture of power and knowledge of the early PRC:
he was almost universally accepted as the highest authority in issues of
Marxist theory, yet he was awkwardly at odds with ‘Mao Zedong Thought’
and its dialectical acrobatics. This contradiction was to prove explosive
when, as director of the Central Party School, he openly attacked the
Great Leap Forward, claiming that ‘if this is communism, then beggars
who own nothing but an empty bowl and a pair of chopsticks reached
communism long ago’.83
Already in the mid-1950s, Yang formulated what came to be known as
the theory of ‘the synthesised economic base’, by arguing that the transi-
tion to communism consisted in a synthesis of socialist and capitalist
modes of production – a thesis exemplified in his 1955 article ‘On the
Question of the Base and the Superstructure during the Transition
Period in the PRC’.
A few years later, in 1958, he took a step further by publishing ‘A
Brief Discussion on Two Categories of Identity’, where, provoked by
the excesses of the Great Leap Forward, he rebuked Mao’s pet Hegelian
theory of the ‘identity of thought and existence’,84 thus in effect accusing
him of the ultimate idealist and subjectivist heresy: putting conscious-
ness before material conditions.
This outspoken hostility to Mao’s dialectics led to the suspension of Yang
both as director of the Party School and as a full member of the Central
Committee of the Party. Yet following the technocrats’ consolidation of
power after the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (1962), Yang was reha-
bilitated, assuming the role of deputy director of the School. From there he
resumed his critique of voluntarism, so as to provide a concrete Marxist
basis for the new ‘seek truth from facts’ governmental pragmatism.
His critique of the Great Leap Forward as ‘using the power of will to
create the world’ and as a deluded activity of ‘making history at will’
came under attack by Mao, who in December 1963 published his famous
‘Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?’ claiming that matter can trans-
form into consciousness and consciousness into matter.
At the same time, lesser figures of Marxist authority identified Yang’s
persistence on dissolving voluntarist illusions as a sinister urge for peo-
ple to abandon their ideals and conform to reality.85 The repercussions
of this in terms of the current political situation in China was a direct
denial of the possibility of self-reliance, a ‘philosophy of willing slaves’,86
which left no choice but to bow to Soviet-style ‘revisionism’.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

The fatal provocation, however, came when Yang delivered a much-

misunderstood (or simply slandered) lecture on April 3 1964 to the
Xinjiang chapter of the School. MacFarquhar87 argues convincingly that
during the particular lecture Yang never really defended the exclusive
priority of the dialectical formula ‘two unite into one’ [he er er yi] over
‘one divides into two’ [yi fen wei er], which Mao had advocated, albeit in
a largely proverbial context, back in 1957.
The ‘fission’88 notion of ‘one divides into two’ had its obscure roots in
a minute quote in the 38th volume of the Collected Works of Lenin: ‘the
knowledge that a united thing is divisible into two, one contradicting the
other … is the substance of dialectics’.89 Following Ch’i Chen-hai’s exegesis
in the Renmin Ribao (5 August 1964) this amounted to the following:

Whatever the thing may be in the world, it is always a case of dividing one
into two, namely splitting a united thing into two parts, aspects or tendencies
which are linked with, dependent on and, at the same time, repulsive and
oppose to, each other. Without these two aspects of mutual unification and
mutual struggle, things would be unable to exist and therefore develop.90

The language might not be exactly upbeat, yet the message was clear: the
principal law of dialectics was the contention rather than the synthesis or
overcoming of contradictory elements within each situation or condition.
In response to Yang’s argument that the synthesis of the opposites (two
unite into one) was historically manifested in situations like the United
Front between the Guomindang and the Communist Party against
Japanese imperialism, Mao famously retorted: ‘to synthesise is just to
eat the enemy up’. The repercussions of this debacle on the conciliation
between redness and expertise were immediate and profound.
On 19 January 1965 Shanghai’s Wenhuibao published an article by Li
Yu-shuo titled ‘Refuting Yao Po-mao’s Theory of “Complete Unity” of
Redness and Expertise’, where the issue of redness and expertise was
coherently connected with whether ‘one divides into two’ or ‘two unite
in one’. The subject of attack was Yao Po-mao, a defender of the combi-
nation of redness and expertise:

Comrade Yao Po-mao has concocted the so-called ‘two types of contradic-
tions’ to justify Comrade Yang Xiazheng’s ‘combine two into one’ theory.
To prove that the contradiction ‘with identity as its essential feature’ has
‘objective existence’, he cites the contradiction between redness and exper-
tise as an example. He maintains that the contradiction between redness
and expertise belongs to the category of contradictions ‘with identity as

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

their essential feature’ and that they are ‘completely united’ Further, he
says, ‘the struggle between two aspects of the contradiction will not result
in one aspect being ‘surmounted’, ‘eliminated’ and ‘overcome’ by the other
but in mutual promotion and common advancement.91

Employing Mao’s dialectics of contradiction, Li retorted that in the rela-

tion between red and expert, the position of the ‘leading position in the
contradiction’ is held by redness, accusing apologists of technocratism,
like Yao Po-mao, for reducing contradiction to ‘merely a merry-go-
round’.92 According to Li, the proper relation between the two is one
of ‘a combination through struggle and movement … The more they
struggle against each other, the more closely they are combined’: ‘The
transformation of redness and expertise is concrete. Through struggle
of mind those who are “expert but not red” are awakened and aroused
to cast away their erroneous ideas of giving importance to expertise to
the neglect of redness and head for the correct road of both redness and
expertise’.93
Similarly, in November 1964 Kao Ta-sheng and Feng Yu-chang criti-
cised Yao Po-mao’s thesis on the premise that the contradiction between
redness and expertise was a manifestation of the fundamental class
contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If one was to
hold that ‘the unity of redness and expertise is relative and their strug-
gle is absolute’, then he or she had no other option than to ‘handle the
contradiction between redness and expertise in a revolutionary way and
overcome the idea that unity of redness and expertise can be achieved
once and for all’.94
However arcane this philosophical struggle might seem, the regen-
eration of the debate over redness and expertise, taking front stage in
the press between December 1964 and March 1965, was far from lim-
ited to the calculation of the precise relation of the two contradictory
components or the legendary ‘principal aspect’ of the contradiction. On
the contrary, it introduced a discussion on the self that was to form the
basis for the self-abolitionary discourse and practices of the Cultural
Revolution.

The self under attack

In December 1964, Beijing’s Zhongguo Qingnian Bao dedicated its pages

to what it called the ‘forum on the question of being red and expert’ or

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

‘how to deal with the idea of “politically passable, professionally profi-

cient and living well”’.95 In that special issue, the journal presented such
a well-rehearsed spectrum of views on the subject, that it is it hard to
believe that the ‘opinions’ offered so liberally were in fact more than
pre-fabricated editorial pieces. The supposed stimulus of the discus-
sion was a letter by Comrade Ch’in Jung-hsiu of the Pressure Processing
Department of Beijing’s Iron and Steel College. This expressed in an
ideal–typical manner the technocrat position on the issue of redness and
expertise that needed rectification.
The technocrat thesis consisted in three points:
a Although we are still required to carry out the revolution now, yet
the principle work is to carry out construction … hence there is
no need to make political requirements too strict, and it will do if
we are passable politically. ‘Passable’ means that we must support
the Party and socialism, or it can be said that we must not take the
anti-Party and anti-socialist stand.
b Politics is empty, but professional work is solid. Only professional
work can make contributions to socialist construction and directly
and truly serve socialism.
c When you are professionally proficient and make contributions, it
goes without saying that the state and the people will take account of
you and pay you well.96
A similar stand was presented a few days later under the name of T’ien
Ho-shui, supposedly a Beijing student, who, based on the premise that
‘man’s time is limited and his energy is also limited’, proposed that ‘we
must implement necessary division of labour. For persons handling
social sciences and persons specialising in political work the demand for
redness must be high. For persons handling natural sciences the demand
for expertise must be high, and the demand for redness may be somehow
lower’.97
No doubt, nobody could be so naive as to write letters like this – not
with the hindsight knowledge of what happened to similar explosions
of frankness during the 1950s. Yet this is how the proponents of redness
wanted to portray the obstinate experts: as arrogant and apolitical crea-
tures that relish in their specialisation and demand moral and monetary
reward for being part of an essentially bourgeois elite. The staged responses
to the particular letter are characteristic of this strategy. The main type of
response was the confessional one, such as the one supposedly given by

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

Tai Chih-fen, a young technician of the Design Institute for Non-Ferrous

Metallurgy.
Tai deplored taking pride in wasting state money to construct decadent
lavish lighting equipment for a Shanghai factory’s barbershop. What is
significant here is that instead of simply confessing his wasteful work-
style, Tai based his self-criticism on the very notion of the self, involved
in this ‘waste’:

When I designed these things, although I argued superficially that I aimed

at serving the workers and making them comfortable, I was actually ren-
dering a service to ‘myself ’. Bourgeois individualism always influenced me
in my work … If it was a big job, I would set my mind at making a success of
it, thus creating an ‘exemplary masterpiece’ for the electrical industry and
erecting a ‘monument’ for myself.98

It is important here to clarify that this narrative against self-interest was

not generated in the context of the ‘Learn from Comrade Lei Feng’ cam-
paign, which has fascinated Western analysts for decades.
Lei Feng was a soldier from rural Hunan who is said to have died in
August 1962 at the age of 22 when the army truck he was driving hit
a telephone poll.99 Based on the publication of his supposed diary, Lei
Feng became the focus of a viral campaign, after editors of the Zhongguo
Qingnian Bao proposed Lei as a model of self-sacrifice fit to bolster the
spirit of the PLA in a time of grave uncertainty.
As MacFarquhar claims, the essence of this campaign was the instiga-
tion of ‘total loyalty, devotion and obedience to Mao and the party at a
time of crisis’.100 As such, the aspect of selflessness was only secondary to
the one of party-mindedness.
In contrast, the critique of the self already present in the above debate
on redness and expertise possessed the seeds of a discourse that empha-
sised not the primacy of devotion to the big Other, but rather the neces-
sary denial of the self as a symbolic field identified with the class-enemy
quality per se: property.
I will return to this discourse in the next chapter to see how it
acquired an unprecedented and unforeseeable force with the outbreak
of the Cultural Revolution. For the moment, however, the question we
need to ask is how this turn in the ‘red and expert’ debate was reflected
on the realm of medicine. It is here that we shall discover the recurring
role of the resurrection of Bethune’s spirit of selflessness in the realm
of medicine.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

The Ministry of Gentlemen’s Health

The abandonment of redness and mass mobilisation in public health,

which began in 1961 as a silent consensus amongst medical experts and
their political supervisors in the Ministry of Health, had evolved into
a public rebuttal by 1964. Encouraged by the overall technocratic high
tide, Chien Xinzhong went as far as to claim that ‘[the] health movement
of the masses, due to lack of scientific knowledge, is as good as formal-
ism …. When the dust of the earth if fanned up, that gives people more
chances of inhaling viruses and spreads tuberculosis’.101
When in January 1964 Nine-Man Subcommittee broke its four-year
long silence, it was only so as to rule against the use of mass mobilisation
in the fight against its very raison d’être, schistosomiasis.102 The whole ‘red
and expert’ issue, which had started in 1958 as a critique of politically
aloof intellectuals, had come full round. The technocratic managerial
outlook of medical experts, and their focus on industry and the cities
had reached its zenith.
These grave developments did not elude Mao’s attention, who, follow-
ing his largely ignored call for mass campaigns in public health, on 26
June 1965 famously accused the Ministry of Health of working ‘for 15 of
the total population of the country and that this 15 is mainly composed
of gentlemen, while the broad masses of the peasants do not get any
medical treatment’.103 Calling it the ‘Ministry of Gentlemen’s Health’, Mao
attacked medical elites:

They work divorced from the masses, using a great deal of manpower
and materials in the study of rare, profound and difficult diseases at the
so-called pinnacle of science, yet they either ignore or make little effort to
study how to prevent and improve the treatment of commonly seen, fre-
quently occurring and wide-spread diseases.104

As a result, a series of counter-technocratic articles started trickling

in the medical periodical press. A November 1965 article titled ‘Utilise
Mao Zedong’s Thinking to the Full in Treating Burned Patients’, mobi-
lised the collective imaginary already cultivated by the 1958 steel worker
case in order to argue for a true medical application of ‘one divides to
two’ dialectics.
The problem facing the Burns Ward of the Department of Traumatology
and Orthopaedics of Beijing’s Jishuitan Hospital was burn-related sep-
ticaemia, and in particular the fact that septicaemia develops mostly

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

in young and aged patients and most often during the early stage rather
than the late.
In order to solve these questions, the doctors took recourse to Mao’s
‘On Contradiction’, ‘which teaches that the fundamental cause of the
development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contra-
dictoriness within the thing’.105 The article explained:

External causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the
basis of change, and external causes become operative through internal
causes. Applying this to our clinical practice, we realised that the unity of
opposites is formed by the effect of the germs and the defensive reaction
of the body, both of which can influence the occurrence and development of
infection and septicaemia in burns. The germs are the external cause, while
the resistance of the body is the internal cause. The entire wound surface
may be contaminated with bacteria, but whether or not septicaemia occurs
is determined by the resistance of the individual which is the decisive fac-
tor. The reason why septicaemia occurs mostly during the early phase is
because precisely at this time the body resistance is lowest and germs can
easily invade the body.106

This in turn led the team to systematise a model of septicaemia-prevention

measures that consisted of: a) strict isolation of the patient, b) ‘correct
handling of the wound surface to protect the eschar and to utilise it as a
protective barrier’,107 and c) guaranteed good nutrition, sleep and overall
environment for the patient. The potential clinical uses of the ‘one
divides to two’ principle were fully propagated regarding the ‘correct
handling’ of the eschar:

Chairman Mao’s idea of looking at a thing with a ‘one divides into two’
viewpoint teaches us to observe things in a dialectical way and to avoid
one-sidedness and dogmatism. We came to realise that the eschar, if it is
correctly handled, can under certain circumstances play a useful function
in protecting the body and preventing infection. In clinical practice we
encounter two kinds of eschar: one is dry eschar with a hard surface and few
bacteria. Dry eschar constitutes a protective barrier which makes it difficult
for bacteria to invade into the body and patients having this kind of eschar
are usually clinically stable and rarely develop septicaemia. The other kind
of eschar is damp, sloughing and liquefying. Germs easily multiply in it.
Patients with wet eschar are clinically unstable and often develop serious
infection. They have severe toxaemia and are apt to develop septicaemia.
The task of the doctor is to promote the transformation of wet into dry
eschar and utilise its favourable aspects.108

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

It is doubtful that, at the time, the Chinese Medical Association hierar-

chy took seriously such attacks on its technocrat hegemony. On the one
hand, it was fully aware that besides rhetoric the ones who waged real
organisational and operational power in these socialist-glossed stunts
were the experts. And on the other hand, it was fully able to devise a
variety of ways for countering this rhetoric while seemingly engaging
with it in a constructive way. As we will see in the next chapter, whilst
these seemed ingenious tactics at the time, it would not take more than
a year before they proved totally useless if not incriminating with the
dawn of the Cultural Revolution. For the moment, however, we need to
take a closer look at the experts’ last stand before the cataclysm.

The experts’ last stand

With Mao’s agenda not looking like a serious threat, given the preva-
lence of Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen in state politics at the time, medical
experts felt confident enough to treat Mao’s attack tactfully by means of a
strategy based on rhetorical compromise and discursive enclosure. This
is evident in that in April 1966 Huang Chia-ssu, could proclaim:
We are going to concentrate our strength on developing research related
to the often seen and common ailments, because this is what affects the
greatest number of people, and at the same time we also must give great
attention to the research of complex diseases like tumours, heart attacks,
and hereditary diseases.109

Under Huang, small groups of doctors would make village tours, but
these stays were short and on a rotating basis, reflecting the general
resistance on the part of experts to be ‘sent down’ and waste their skill110
on what they considered rustic backwaters soon to be overtaken by tech-
nocrat modernisation.
Hence, as Lampton has exhaustively argued between June 1965 and
June 1966 the medical leadership tackled of Mao’s criticism by employ-
ing at least 12 tactics:
a Redefinition of what the ‘masses’ actually means.111
b ‘Admit to more errors than accused of, many minor in nature, and
then “solve” them’.112
c Redefinition of the ‘primary contradiction’ not as between city and
village but as between ‘man and disease’.113

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

d Convince Mao that his policy would alienate his most valued social
allies.114
e Render the realisation of medical expert’s policies a precondition for
Mao’s leaps.115
f Setting up model-units ‘and then proclaiming them a success while
assuaging the professionals assigned to them’.116
g Exaggeration of the budget necessary for reform.117
h Linking expert policies with ‘a sacrosanct organ or personality’.118
i Selection of what medical unit or organisation would perform its
self-criticism and how.119
j Propagation of the unique nature of medical expertise and its
indispensability, by arguing that ‘a political instructor … can teach
Marxism-Leninism but cannot remove a tumour from a patient’s
body’.120
k ‘Flood[ing] lower-health units with directives forcing them to set
priorities’.
l Claiming that ‘Mao’s policy was unclear and more time was needed
to study it’.121

The self-confidence of medical experts in performing all these audacious

political and discursive tricks stemmed from the fact that throughout
the various purges of the past two decades they had come out largely
unscathed. Moreover, when people with real day-to-day power like Peng
Zhen claimed that ‘priority must be given to making urban health work a
success. Only after the cities have been put in order in this respect can we
proceed to work the rural villages’,122 the medical leadership must have felt
safe to simply engage in its old discursive tactics of domesticating Maoist
cries of radicalisation.
It is within this context that we must examine the second official
medical reference to Mao’s Bethune memorial to appear since Liberation,
comprising a return to the sublimation exegetical resurrection of his
spirit of selflessness that I examined in Chapter 1.
Despite the annual memorial services in his honour, if one exam-
ines the full record of official medical journals between 1953 and 1965
he or she will be unable to find a single feature article referring to the
heroic Canadian doctor. What urged the reprinting of Mao’s memorial
in November 1965 in the Chinese Medical Association’s flagship, the
Chinese Medical Journal becomes clear in the editorial accompanying
the reprint.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

In all probability authored once again by the acting head of the Chinese
Medical Association, Fu Lien-chang, it attempted to provide de novo a cau-
tious interpretation of the controversial tract on the spirit of selflessness:
Mao bids the Chinese people to learn from Comrade Bethune his spirit of
internationalism and communism, his selfless spirit of doing everything for
the benefit of others, his high sense of responsibility and warm-heartedness
towards the comrades, and his spirit of ever seeking fresh knowledge and
improving his professional skill … Following the teaching of Chairman
Mao Zedong, the Chinese people have learned from Comrade Bethune and
are marching along the road of ‘red in politics and expert in profession’.123

Fu’s revamping of Bethune’s 1952 exegetical resurrection thus placed the

emulation of Norman Bethune’s spirit of selflessness within the context
of the red and expert debate, in a way that treaded a fine line on the
subject.
Claiming that Mao’s memorial urged medical workers to be ‘red in
politics and expert in profession’, the editorial adopted a calculated atti-
tude towards the bitter battle between proponents of professional skill
or ability (cai) and proponents of mass mobilisation and revolutionary
virtue (de) in command of health issues.
The Chinese Medical Journal’s November 1965 reprint of the editorial
on ‘In Memory of Norman Bethune’ must thus be seen as a renewed
attempt of domesticating the radical potential of the memorial, which
was once again being widely propagated by the proponents of redness, by
reterritorialising it within the old dialectical schema originally proposed
in December 1952 under emergency conditions by Fu Lien-chang.
It is within this contestation of power and knowledge that we must
place the radical shift of Bethune-related exegesis away from the cultiva-
tion of the self and the sublimation of professional skill into proletarian
interest, towards the abolition of the self and professional skill as forms
of private property and as obstacles to the construction of a classless
society, which took central stage in December 1966 at the peak of the
Cultural Revolution.

Notes
 Lenin, V. I. (1913) ‘Letter to Maxim Gorky’ (early November). Available at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/nov/00c.htm (Accessed 25
July 2011).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

 Fu Lien-chang (1953a) ‘Association News: Summing-Up of the Ninth General

Conference of the Chinese Medical Association’, Chinese Medical Journal,
Vol. 71, No. 3 (May–June): 229–240, p. 231.
 Fu Lien-chang (1953b) ‘Learning from Advance Soviet Medicine’, Chinese
Medical Journal, Vol. 71, No. 4 (July–August): 241–247.
 ibid: 242.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) The Politics of Medicine in China: The Policy Process,
1949–1977, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 49–50.
 ibid: 52.
 Fu Lien-chang (1956) ‘Presidential Address’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 74,
No. 5 (September–October): 413–423.
 Quoted in MacFarquhar, R. (1974) The Origins of the Cultural Revolution,
Volume 1: Contradictions Among the People, 1956–1957, New York: Columbia
University Press, p. 34.
 ibid., p. 35.
 ibid., p. 184.
 ibid., p. 184.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1974) op. cit., p. 185.
 Quoted in Andreas, J. (2009) Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural
Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, p. 35.
 Andreas, J. (2009) op. cit.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 83
 ibid: 83.
 Fu Lien-chang (1957) ‘Learn from the Advanced Soviet Medical Science with
Resolution and Persistence’, Vol. 75, No. 11 (November): 869–872, p. 869.
 Andreas, J. (2009) op. cit., p. 41.
 Wenhui Bao (29 September 1958) in Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., pp. 85–86.
 Lampton D. M. (1972) ‘Public Health and Politics in China’s Past Two
Decades’, Health Services Reports, Vol. 87, No. 10 (December): 895–904, p.
682.
 Lampton D. M. (1972) op. cit., p. 682.
 ibid: 682.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1983) The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Volume 2: The
Great Leap Forward, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 346.
 Quoted in MacFarquhar, R. (1983) op. cit., p. 28.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1983) op. cit., p. 107.
 ibid: 40.
 Lampton, D. M. (1972) op. cit., pp. 679–680.
 Berry-Caban, C. S. (2007) ‘Return of the God of Plague: Schistosomiasis in
China’, Journal of Rural and Tropical Public Health, Vol. 6: 45–53, p. 45.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1983) op. cit.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 Anonymous (1958) ‘Outstanding Achievements in Health Work in 1958’,

Chinese Medical Journal Vol. 71, No. 12 (December 1958): 582–586, p. 582.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 117.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1983) op. cit., p. 582.
 Horn, J. S. (1970) Away with All Pests: An English Surgeon in People’s China,
1954–1969, Monthly Review Press.
 Anonymous (1960) ‘Urban Sanitation Pace-Setter Foshan’, Chinese Medical
Journal Vol. 80, No. 6 (June): 564–566, p. 565.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1983) op. cit., p. 22.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 117.
 Anonymous (1959a) ‘Big Impetus to Traditional Chinese Medicine’, Chinese
Medical Journal Vol. 78 No. 1 (January): 98–100, pp. 98–99.
 Tsao Yi-hsiu (1959) ‘Living Habits and Activities in Field Rats’, Chinese
Medical Journal Vol. 78, No. 2 (February): 144–147.
 Anonymous (1959b) ‘Let the Technical Revolution in Medicine,
Pharmacology and Public Health Blossom and Bear Fruit’, Chinese Medical
Journal Vol. 78, No. 1 (January): 1–3, p. 2.
 ibid: 3.
 Unschuld P. U. (1985) Medicine in China, a History of Ideas, Berkeley:
California University Press; Scheid, V. (2002) Chinese Medicine in
Contemporary China, Plurality and Synthesis, Durham: Duke University
Press. Taylor, K. (2005) Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China,
1945–1963, London: Routledge (Needham Research Institute Series).
 Taylor, K. (2005) op. cit., p. 19–24.
 ibid: 26–28.
 Scheid, V. (2002) op. cit.
 ibid: 70.
 Taylor, K. (2005) op. cit., p. 42–43.
 Unschuld, P. U. (1985) op. cit.
 Taylor, K. (2005) op. cit., p. 97–98,
 Cheng Tien-hsi (1963) ‘Insect Control in Mainland China’, Science, New
Series, Vol. 140, No. 3564 (April 19): 269–277.
 Lampton, D. M. (1972) op. cit. p. 677.
 Fu Lien-chang (1959) ‘Achievements of the Association in the Past Ten Years’,
Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 79, No. 5 (September–October): 208–218, p. 213.
 Shanghai Second Medical College Committee of the Chinese Communist
Party (1958) ‘The Fight to Save Steel Worker Chiu Tsai Kang’s Life’, Chinese
Medical Journal, Vol. 77, No. 11 (November): 414–426, p. 414.
 ibid: 414.
 ibid: 415.
 ibid: 417.
 ibid: 418.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

 ibid: 419–420.
 ibid: 419.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 120.
 Hsu Yun-pei (1960) ‘Advance the Great Work of Protecting the People’s
Health’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 80, No. 5 (May): 405–414, p. 407.
 Dikötter, F. (2010) Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most
Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, London: Bloomsbury.
 ibid: 274.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 172.
 Dikötter, F. (2010) op. cit., p. 276.
 Anonymous (1959c) ‘Let the Technical Revolution in Medicine,
Pharmacology and Public Health Blossom and Bear Fruit’, Chinese Medical
Journal, Vol. 78, No. 1 (January): 1–3, p. 2.
 ibid: 2.
 ibid: 2.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 131.
 ibid: 132.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Volume 3: The
coming of the cataclysm, 1961–1966, New York: Columbia University Press.
 Schurmann, F. (1968) Ideology and Organisation in Communist China,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 143.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., pp. 97–98.
 In MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., p. 101.
 Hsu Yun-pei (1960) op. cit., p. 406.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., p. 101.
 Boorman, M. L. (1963) ‘How to Be a Good Communist: The Political Ethics
of Liu Shao-Ch’i’, Asian Survey, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August): 372–383, p. 374.
 In MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., 246.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 144.
 ibid: 144–145.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., p. 470.
 Andreas, J. (2009) op. cit., p. 62.
 Schoenhals, M. (1992) ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Critique of the Great Leap Forward’,
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July): 591–608, p. 600.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., p. 393.
 Lu Lu Yuchun & Shen Guohui (1965) ‘Refuting Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s
Fallacious Argument Against Revolutionary Activity’, Wenhuibao (March
15). Available at: http://marxistphilosophy.org/lushen1.pdf (Accessed: 30 June
2011).
 ibid.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 Noumoff, S. J. (1967) ‘China’s Cultural Revolution as a Rectification

Movement’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 40, No. 3/4 (Autumn 1967–Winter
1967–1968): 221–234, p. 226.
 Quoted in Ch’i Chen-hai (1964) ‘Whatever the Thing, It Is Always a Case of
Dividing One into Two and not “Combining Two into One”’, Renmin Ribao
(5 August 1964).
 Ch’i Chen-hai (1964) op. cit.
 Li Yu-shuo (1965) ‘Refuting Yao Po-Mao’s Theory of “Complete Unity” of
Redness and Proficiency’, Wenhui Bao (19 January).
 Li Yu-shuo (1965) op. cit.
 Li Yu-shuo (1965) op. cit.
 Kao Ta-sheng & Feng Yi-chang (1964) ‘Refute the “Combine Two into One”
Theory Over the Contradiction Between Redness and Proficiency’, Beijing
Ribao (15 November).
 Anonymous (1964) ‘Editor’s Note: How to Deal with the Idea of “Politically
Passable, Professionally Proficient and Living Well” – Forum on Question of
Being Red and Expert’, Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (24 December).
 Ch’in Jung-hsiu (1964) ‘Letter from Comrade Ch’in Jung-Hsiu’, Zhongguo
Qingnian Bao (24 December).
 T’ien Ho-shui (1964) ‘When One Cannot be Both Red and Expert’,
Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (24 December).
 Tai Chih-fen (1964) ‘It Is Not All Right for One to Be Politically “Passable”’,
Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (24 December).
 Sheridan, Mary (1968) ‘The Emulation of Heroes’, China Quarterly, Vol. 33
(January–March): 47–72.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) op. cit., p. 339.
 Quoted in Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 173.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 173.
 Mao Zedong (1965) ‘Directive on Public Health’ (26 June 1965). Available at:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/
mswv9_41.htm (Accessed: 26 May 2011).
 Mao Zedong (1965) op. cit.
 Burns Ward of the Department of Traumatology and Orthopaedics of
Beijing’s Chishueit’an Hospital (1965) ‘Utilize Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought to
the Full in Treating Burned Patients’, China’s Medicine Vol. 84 (November):
707–713, p. 709.
 ibid: 709.
 ibid: 709.
 ibid: 710.
 Zhongguo Xinwen (5 April). Quoted in Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit, p. 191.
 Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., pp. 195–196.
 ibid: 209–210.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Red or Expert? 

 ibid: 210.

 ibid: 210.
 ibid: 210.
 ibid: 210.
 ibid: 210–211.
 ibid: 211.
 ibid: 211.
 ibid: 212.
 ibid: 212–213.
 ibid: 213.
 Quoted in Lampton, D. M. (1977) op. cit., p. 193.
 Anonymous (1965) ‘Norman Bethune, the Great Champion of
Internationalism’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 84, No. 11 (November): 71,
p. 71.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 4
Abolishing the Self as
Private Property
Abstract: Chapter 4 bring At the dawn of the Cultural Revolution,
December 1966, the People’s Liberation Army Daily produced an
editorial piece through which the ‘spirit of selflessness’ of Dr Bethune
assumed an unprecedented revolutionary and collectivist force. This
‘mass line’ exegesis identified skill and expertise as forms of private
property, only to proceed to an even more radical identification of the
‘self ’ in and of itself as a bourgeois relic. What followed was a series
of attacks in the medical press against Liu Shaoqi’s ‘self-cultivation’
model, propagating the abolition of the self as the only true way to the
New Man. In the course of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969), this
new doctrine was applied to a wide spectrum of clinical operations,
from tumour removal to the control of diabetes, which were rendered
battlefields for proving the Maoist truth about the ‘self ’ as against
technocrat biopolitics. In turn, medical doctors were called to
embrace self-abolition, in the image of Dr Bethune, and engage in
long processes of confession and rectification against the ‘self ’ as the
ultimate enemy of socialism.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China:

Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

On 21 December 1966 a Jiefangjun Bao (PLA Daily) editorial, commemo-

rating the 27th anniversary of Bethune’s death, declared that ‘this great
work provides us with a powerful weapon to eradicate self-interest and
foster public interest’, helping communists ‘to sweep away the filth in the
depth of our souls’.1 The editorial claimed that the change in perspec-
tive regarding the self ‘is a change in class stand and class sentiments, a
change in the basic attitude towards life, society and all things, a change
in the essentials of one’s thought’.2
It added that ‘the kernel of the proletarian world outlook is the con-
cept of complete devotion to the public interest, the concept of saving
people wholeheartedly, the communist spirit of utter devotion to others
without any thought of the self ’, whereas ‘the kernel of the bourgeois
world outlook is the concept of self-interest, selfishness, advancing one’s
own interests at the expense of others, and extreme individualism’.3
As the new socialist society was in need of ‘men of a new type’,4 the
struggle against the self would ‘not cease as long as classes and class
struggle exist’.5 The PLA editorial, which was reprinted in all major
medical journals at the time, explained:

Private ownership has been in existence for several thousands of years;

the concept of self-interest of the exploiting classes, which upholds pri-
vate ownership, has the deepest influence over people. It is a stubborn
enemy that permeates everything. It may be thoroughly repudiated on
one particular question and in one particular form today, but tomorrow
it will appear again on another question and in another form. Therefore,
the struggle to eradicate self-interest and foster public interest needs to be
carried out repeatedly and continually, throughout one’s whole life. Each
comrade, new or old, of whatever class origin, must wage such a struggle
conscientiously.6

It is clear that this exegesis of Mao’s memorial to Dr Bethune was far

removed from the one provided in 1952 by Fu Lien-chang or the one
repeated, in all probability by Fu again, in the 1965 Chinese Medical Journal
editorial on the memorial. In fact, the editorial must be seen as a radical
shift in the ‘red and expert’ debate. The debate had come into the direct
focus of political criticism in the realm of medicine during a two-legged
conference held on 17 January and 13 February 1966 in Beijing.
Although under-represented in the official medical press, the ‘Ministry
of Health Meetings on the Study of Mao Zedong’s Works’, headed by Vice-
Premier Lu Ting-yi, were attended by more than 10,000 medical workers

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

of Beijing. In fact, they proved decisive in settling the ‘red and expert’
debate in the field of medicine and public health. A highlight of these
meetings, the Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
staged a careful speech on ‘correctly handling the relation between politics
and profession and integrate politics with professional work’. Conducting
her self-criticism, and admitting that she had overemphasised profes-
sional/expert work, the professor declared that ‘technical skill, however
high, could not prevent slips or errors in clinical practice; more important
was wholehearted devotion to the service of the people’.7
It was accordingly decided that ‘medical workers, being a body of
intellectuals, were most liable to individualism, looking down upon the
working people, being afraid of difficulties, arrogance and subjectivism’.8
Overcoming ‘bourgeois individualism’ and eradicating ‘arrogance and
view of the achievements and shortcomings of their own and others’
were set in unambiguous tones as the ultimate aim of the medical
profession.9

Skill as private property

What crucially distinguished this debate from the PLA’s December 1966
editorial on Bethune’s spirit of selflessness was its focus on individualism
rather than the self. The debate effectively reproduced earlier fears that
lack of Party-oriented discipline would lead into a state of generalised
anomie, where, to use Mao’s distinction, non-antagonistic contradictions
would collapse into antagonistic contradictions.
Concentrating on the problem of individualism as a problem of order,
this narrative was still only secondary to the ‘serve the peasants’ rheto-
ric pervading pre-Cultural Revolution medical literature. Thus, in the
leading article by the Minister of Health, ‘Prelude to the Great March
of Orientating Health Work Towards the Rural Areas’ (April 1966) we
read that ‘in the struggle against disease, the subjective world must be
remoulded simultaneously with the objective world’10 and that ‘one
must place a strict demand on oneself and must persist in conscientious
ideological revolution. Only by doing so can one gradually get rid of
bourgeois individualism and clarify the basic question of whom to serve
and how to serve’.11
The problem here was clearly ‘bourgeois individualism’, as defined by
Liu Shaoqi, and not the self in and of itself, which still held a positive

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

content or potential, so that ‘specialisation should be combined with

versatility’.12
On the contrary, for the December 1966 PLA editorial, ‘private
property’ had taken the place of ‘individualism’ as the epicentre of the
problematisation of ‘selfishness’, on the basis of a radical identification of
professional skill with symbolic capital.
What mediated between the usual castigation of individualism and
the novel castigation of the self was the politically hot summer of 1966,
when the attempted ‘red and expert’ compromise was hit hard by the
repudiation of Liu Shaoqi’s ‘work team’ strategy of resolving contra-
dictions in the Beijing University, signifying the dawn of the Cultural
Revolution.
The side-lining of Liu’s consolidation strategy opened the way for
unprecedented uncertainty in the realm of politics, a gap covered by a force
which in the looming chaos manage to present itself as the guarantor of
revolutionary authenticity: the People’s Liberation Army. As MacFarquhar
has argued, ‘it was Lin Biao’s success in projecting an image of the PLA of
selfless egalitarianism [that] resulted in the extraordinary decision to make
the PLA a model for the nation, extraordinary because in a communist
country the model institution should of course be the party’.13
This PLA-centred narrative on revolutionary and national authentic-
ity placed unprecedented emphasis on the antagonism between public
and private interest. This trend was reflected in other current texts like
the Jiefangjun Bao’s November 1966 editorial, ‘More on Promoting the
Concept of “Public”’, which targeted skill as a form of private accumula-
tion of capital:

Medical workers who believe that ‘one who has technical skill has all’ and
consider skill as an inalienable private property that may lead to fame and
fortune, those who think only of their personal gain or loss and not the
interests of the people, and those who still have idealistic, subjectivist and
metaphysical tendencies, and believe in foreign patterns and formulas.14

Similarly in another Jiefangjun Bao editorial, reprinted in December

1966’s China’s Medicine, we read: ‘what is the essence of the old ideas,
culture, customs and habits? In the last analysis, it boils down to the
concept of private ownership, or in one word, of “self ”’.15
The identification of self and its skills with private property (zhishi
siyou) was linked to the distinction of manual and intellectual labour,
the negation of which found a popular metaphor in the intelligentsia’s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

fear of dirt, a theme reproduced within and outside the medical press
throughout the Cultural Revolution.
Joel Andreas recounts the story of Wei Jialing, a descendent of a
Guomindang high official family, who learned ‘not to look down on
working people, people whose bodies are dirty – they are the ones who
are transforming the world’.16 It was in fact a passage by Mao himself that
formed the exegetical basis of this discourse.
Confessing his feelings as a student that ‘intellectuals are the only clean
people in the world’, Mao tells us that doing manual labour was undigni-
fied to the extent that even carrying his own luggage without the help of
a coolie before his classmates was frowned upon. Finally, Mao describes
the transformation he underwent through revolutionary experience as
an interdependent process of a ‘change in feelings’ and ‘a change from
one class to another’:

I came to feel that compared with the workers and the peasants, the unre-
moulded intellectuals were not clean and that, in the last analysis, the work-
ers and peasants were the cleanest people, and, even though their hands
were soiled and their feet smeared with cow dung, they were really cleaner
than the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.17

Following Dittmer’s commentary on the particular passage, for Mao this

transformation of the fear of dirt into an admiration of manual labour
and the transformation of his admiration towards intellectual labour
to a disdain of the ‘real dirt’ of the bourgeoisie comprised a necessary
condition for his transformation from a petty-bourgeois intellectual to a
proletarian revolutionary.
This then implied a technology of the self where ‘the nature of man’
was determined by one’s ‘class feelings’, a theme comprehensively based
on Neo-Confucian notions of self-transformation, which we have already
examined. What differentiated Liu Shaoqi’s model of ‘ego-adaptation’,18 to
Mao’s model was the latter’s distinct immediatism, which has often, even
systematically, been misread as some kind of rampant voluntarism.
As Andrew Walder has staunchly defended, the idea that Mao diverted
from Marx’s anthropology in considering consciousness, or superstruc-
ture, as primary to material conditions,19 or infrastructure, is mistaken.
Rather than adopting some vitalistic voluntarism, Mao’s theory of prac-
tice recognised in Marx’s materialism what both orthodox Leninists and
liberal–bourgeois critics failed to see: the lack of determinism20 between
production and human life.21

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

Thus breaking with Stalinist brands of dialectical materialism, Mao

re-established the dynamic ambivalence in the relation between the
forces and the relations of production: ‘different relations of produc-
tion ... necessarily produce human beings with different understandings
of their social relations with each other’.22 This dialectical reasoning thus
allowed the overcoming of Liu’s concern with change in human nature,
and a relocation of the problem of the New Man as pertaining to change
as human nature.
Consistent with Marx’s processual ontology (humaneness as a social
relation), the great innovation of Mao was the transcendence of Stalinist
economism and the appraisal of practice as moulding social and indi-
vidual consciousness: ‘Man’s social practice is not confined to activity in
production, but takes many other forms – class struggle, political life,
scientific and artistic pursuits’.23
It is this insistence on practice that generated Mao’s immediatism, in
terms of a theory of knowledge which required one’s direct involvement
with an object or process. It is in this, immediatist emphasis of Mao’s
Marxism that the great rift with Liu Shaoqi’s overall perspective on
socialist governmentality, and especially on the generation of the New
Man was located.
With mediation seen as an obstacle rather than as an instrument for
the operational connection between theory and practice, Maoism ren-
dered the ‘bridging’ approach of Liu the apogee of compromise with the
class enemy within state-socialism.

Self-cultivation attacked

The opportunity for this radical turn on the issue of the self was found
in the spring of 1967, as a response to the ‘February reactionary wind’,
the conservative backlash against the ‘January Storm’, the attempted
takeover of Shanghai by rebels envisioning a Chinese version of the Paris
Commune.24 It was at that moment that a direct and relentless attack
was launched against self-cultivation as a kernel of counterrevolution.
Paradigmatic of this was China’s Medicine feature reprint of ‘Get Rid of
Self-Interest, Forge a Great Alliance of Revolutionary Rebels’:
Unless we seize power from ‘self-interest’ in our minds and get rid of ‘self-
interest’ in our minds, we will not be able to seize power from the handful of
persons in the party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road . . .

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

a spiritual thing will turn into a material thing. If we seize power with self-
interest in our minds, even though power is seized it may still degenerate
into bourgeois political power.25

The association of Liu Shaoqi and his policies with the issue of the self
in effect provided a ‘materialist’ basis for the association of the self with
private property: ‘All negative tendencies spring from the mode of small-
scale production and the bourgeoisie’s insatiable longing for fame and
material gain. All of them can finally be attributed to “self-interest” ’.26
Extending this reasoning, the same article further claimed:
This ‘self-interest’ is precisely the bourgeois headquarters in the minds of
many comrades. The struggle for power between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie is also going on in our minds. Unless the ‘power’ in our minds
is seized by the proletariat, that is to say unless the headquarters in our
minds are occupied by Mao Zedong’s thought, then it will be of little con-
sequence even if we do seize power from those in authority who are taking
the capitalist road [i.e. Liu Shaoqi].27

Such discourse was far from an isolated incident in the period immedi-
ately following the ‘February reactionary wind’. In May 1967 a concen-
trated effort to discredit the technocrat technology of the self culminated
in the simultaneous publication in Hongqi and Remin Ribao of a scathing
editorial titled ‘Betrayal of Proletarian Dictatorship is Essential Element
in the Book on “Self-Cultivation”’. The editorial, reproduced in all medi-
cal journals, began with the following paragraph:
The book on ‘self-cultivation’ of communists is the representative work of
the top party person in authority taking the capitalist road. It is a big poi-
sonous weed opposed to Marxism-Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought. Its
poison has spread throughout China and the world. It must be thoroughly
criticised and repudiated.28

The editorial sought to place the blueprint of the technocrat technol-

ogy of the self within a wider context of demonology of anti-orthodox
renegades:
‘Self-cultivation’ of this kind can only ‘cultivate’ philistines who will not
take part in revolutionary war and do not want to seize political power!
The philistine products of such ‘cultivation’; are no communists at all, but
social-democrats of the Second International .... ‘Self-cultivation’ of this
kind can only ‘cultivate’ a Bukharin type of person who goes in for capital-
ism instead of socialism or a Khrushchev type of person who rejects the
dictatorship of the proletariat and works to restore capitalism!29

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

This demonisation of Liu Shaoqi was consistent with the new turn in
the depiction of what Tung has called ‘the hidden enemy of the prole-
tariat’30 from a figure which though in the wrong was able to transform
him or herself and ‘be brought back to the socialist current’31 to what in
Carl Schmitt’s terminology we would call a foe rather than an enemy.32
According to this philosophical distinction, if the ‘enemy’ is a figure
or tendency to which one can relate dialectically, the ‘foe’ is a figure of
absolute otherness to which one can relate through annihilation.
Unlike the original ‘hidden enemy’ of the first years after Liberation,
this new foe-figure was harmful not in its ability to engage in sabotage,
but rather in its propensity to poison the people’s hearts and minds
(xin).33 What is more, its ability to achieve this depended directly on the
remnants of the self amongst the masses.
The argument of the protagonist of the play ‘Song of the Dragon River’
is revealing: ‘every class has its own concept of the self and selfishness.
Chih-t’ien, the enemy has used your selfishness, and your selfishness
has given cover to the enemy!’34 In fact, it was no less than the lingering
remnants of Confucian thinking among the masses that rendered Liu’s
self-cultivation heresy so dangerous:
This sort of description of communism is nothing new but has existed from
ancient times. In China, there are such descriptions in the passage about
‘great harmony’ in the chapter entitled ‘Li Yun’ in the Book of Rites ..., in
the Journey to the Land of Peach Blossoms by Tao Chien, and in the Book of
Great Harmony by Kang Youwei .... In the opinion of the author, communist
society is a bed of roses, without darkness or contradiction; all is well, with-
out the existence of opposites. Society will thereby cease to develop. Not
only will society never change qualitatively, but it seems it will never change
quantitatively!35

The way to counter this ‘slave mentality’36 corroding doctors with a desire
for what Feng Teng had called, ‘happiness in normal life’,37 was to adopt a
combative stance, employing methods of ‘people’s war’ that, on the one
hand, purged the very self as reactionary, while, on the other hand, ren-
dering medicine into a ‘medicine at war’ both with the disease at hand and
with the erroneous methods and self-interest propensities of doctors.
The last point can be best appreciated if we consider the case of
Chang Chiu-chu, the wife of a railroad worker who was admitted to a
Peoples’ Liberation Army hospital in 21 February 1968 suffering from a
45kg retroperitoneal neurofibroma, after being refused treatment by the
‘specialists’ and ‘authorities’ of a big civilian hospital.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Taking tumours by force

Declaring that, despite not having the facilities of the big hospital, they
had the revolutionary spirit to take up the task, the PLA doctors,

dared to destroy bourgeois and foreign dogmas and old conventions and
thoroughly smash the counter-revolutionary revisionist line in medical and
health work advocated by China’s Khrushchev [i.e. Liu Shaoqi] and with the
heroic spirit that vanquishes all surmount every difficulty to win this battle
in defence of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line.38

Mirroring the 1958 steel worker discourse, the PLA doctors undertook
‘to overthrow the erroneous diagnosis made by ‘“specialists”’ and
‘“authorities”; but also to discard all the old restrictions and foreign
conventions and break through all difficulties to perform the operation
successfully’.39
After ‘deepening [the patients] hatred’ towards Liu Shaoqi and
‘propagat[ing] Mao Zedong Thought, so as to build up the patient’s
confidence in combating the disease’,40 on 23 March 1968 they decided
to proceed to operate on the patient. Following a series of loyalty ritu-
als like singing The East is Red and pledging ‘to practice revolutionary
humanitarianism’ (a direct reference to Bethune’s memorial), they set to
‘conquer the disease’41 and ‘the tense battle began’.42
Up to this point, it all sounds like no more than a recombination, albeit
in a rather panegyric manner, of all the above-mentioned elements of
revolutionary medical discourse. Yet here, when the scalpels come out,
a brand new element entered the scene. For at exposing the tumour, the
doctors came across a most difficult problem:

Its surface was covered with numerous blood vessels which spread like a
spider’s web, the large blood vessels being as thick as a small finger. The
anterior part of the tumour was adherent to the peritoneum. A part of the
lower portion of the tumour protruded towards the vesicterine pouch and
adhered to the uterine cervix. The posterior part of the tumour adhered
to the spinal column, the fatty capsule of the left kidney and the ureter.
At the base of the tumour, there were many blood vessels running into the
tumour.43

The solution sought was to emulate Mao’s thought. Not in some gen-
eral manner like keeping the interest of the masses in mind, nor in the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

usual performative sense of the time, like singing (again and again) a
few verses of The East is Red, but in a truly operational way that brought
Maoist ritual to a whole new level:

Acting in accordance with Chairman Mao’s military principle ‘attack

dispersed, isolated enemy forces first; attack concentrated, strong enemy
forces later’, we decided to divide the adhesions around the tumour first.
Although it took more time, in order to minimise the blood loss and avoid
injury to the surrounding tissues and viscera, the adhesions were divided
bit by bit with gauze rolls held in clamps. Since there were a large number of
blood vessels over the surface of the tumour and it was difficult to identify
whether they belonged to the tumour or to the viscera, in the course of the
separation, we carefully scrutinised every blood vessel and stopped the
bleeding at each point.44

The operation was successful and the patient was saved through waging
‘people’s war’ against her ailment. Yet, the whole incidence might have
been a quaint episode of little importance if a belligerent Soviet reaction
had not transformed it into a central issue on the biopolitical scene. In the
follow-up article of the Health Section of the PLA Unit, ‘Our Revolutionary
Scalpel Terrifies the Soviet Revisionist Renegades’, we read:

While the broad masses of our people were extolling and rejoicing in our
achievement, TASS the mouthpiece of the Soviet revisionist renegade
clique came out and frantically attacked us for ‘depending on Mao Zedong
Thought to perform an abdominal operation’ and ‘attributing all suc-
cess to the wonderful efficacy of Mao Zedong Thought. By such dirty
calumnies they vainly attempted to belittle our brilliant achievement and to
disparage the great thought of Mao Zedong. But the Soviet revisionist ren-
egades’ wailing and teeth gnashing, slanders and curses, proved precisely
that our achievement like the thrust of the dagger, has jangled their nerves
and pierced their hearts.45

Here, the article dealt an exegetic coup regarding the causes of this cam-
paign of vilification, by connecting the hostile, ‘social-imperialist’, Soviet
response to the issue of technical expertise:

The Soviet revisionist clique is a handful of fetishists who worship technique.

According to them nothing can be accomplished without technique. Hence
in their view, that a small health section like ours ‘without the necessary
technical equipment’; should presumptuously undertake ‘an exceedingly
complicated abdominal operation was sheer recklessness’. These shameless

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

scoundrels viciously attacked our putting politics in command as ‘violating

the objective law’. Actually what it violated was merely their sacred ‘law’ of
‘mammonism’.46

Attacking ‘bourgeois egotism’ and Soviet material-incentive policy as

‘roubles in command’,47 the article concluded by stressing that, although
the PLA doctors merely managed to remove a body tumour, their
‘revolutionary scalpels [are ready to remove] from the globe imperi-
alism, revisionism, and all reactionaries – this huge tumour which
endanger the lives of the people of the world – wholly thoroughly and
completely’.48
This kind of polemical discourse reached its paroxysmal zenith with
the famous case of ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ curing ‘deaf-mutism’, 49
and the equally renowned case of curing unstable diabetes mellitus by
means of Maoist dialectics. The second case was described in several
medical articles of the time, such as Chang Tze-han, Yang Teh-ching
and Tu Jui-fen’s China’s Medicine July 1968 contribution ‘How We Have
Struggled Against Unstable Diabetes Mellitus in the Light of Mao Zedong’s
Thought’.
If the March 1968 neurofibroma case resorted to Maoist guerrilla
tactics to decide on the modus operandi of surgery, the July 1968
diabetes case engaged in an operational application of Maoist abstrac-
tion, in order to control metabolic stability. Taking the ‘people’s war’
discourse of the neurofibroma case to extremes, the doctors claimed:
‘Testing for urine sugar several times a day is just like reconnaissance
before the army fights a battle. Its purpose is to discover the position
and strength of the enemy so as to enable us to make correct decisions
and annihilate him’.50
Saturated in dazzling guerrilla war metaphors, this genre would
come to dominate revolutionary medical literature during the rest of
the Cultural Revolution. Through such ‘guerrilla operations’ and ‘going
down to the villages and up the mountains’ (xiaxia shangsha) in order
to serve the poor peasants, doctors had to cast away their self, smash
privilege (dapo tequan) and merge with the masses. This directive reached
its apex in the formation of the little-studied yet significant barefoot doctor
movement, which saw the training of a veritable army of Mao-minded
paramedics (approximately numbering one million between 1968
and 1970, and 1.3 million by 197351).
This mass mobilisation programme included professional doctors who
were being ‘sent-down’ for political re-education through practice in

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

agricultural or industrial work, who generally functioned as supervisors

to the newly trained paramedics.52 Many more victims of ‘re-education’
through becoming barefoot doctors were urban youths, especially after
Mao’s move to contain Red Guard activity and massively sent trouble-
some young men and women to the countryside.
In this context of ‘thought-reform’, the spectre of Norman Bethune
was paraded again and again in medical journals and hand-outs, where it
was systematically bonded with two other articles written by Mao, ‘Serve
the Peasants’ and ‘The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains’,53
into a discursive compound, a catechism for both establishment doctors
and their barefoot paramedical counterparts.
These formed the ‘three always read articles’, which were to be the
guidelines for the remoulding of experts throughout the Cultural
Revolution. Under the star of Bethune’s second resurrection, medical
periodical literature at the time came to be dominated by a large corpus
of personal stories and narratives aimed at the rectification of medical
doctors.
These narratives can be classified into stories of spontaneous emulation
and stories of reform. The former gave supposedly authentic accounts of
medical doctors originally and spontaneously committed to serving the
people and emulating Norman Bethune’s spirit of selflessness. The lat-
ter portrayed an initially selfish medical doctor who ends up repenting,
confessing his or her bourgeois outlook, and rectifying himself or herself
according to the selfless spirit of Dr Bethune.

Spontaneous emulation of selflessness

Spontaneous emulation stories aimed to demonstrate how ‘one must first

continuously destroy self-interest and foster devotion to the public inter-
est, resolutely fight the bourgeois ideas of fame and wealth and criticise
and repudiate the bourgeois purely professional viewpoint’.54
A prototype of spontaneous emulation stories is the article titled ‘A
Propagandist of Mao Zedong Thought and a Close Friend of the Poor
Herdsmen’, which appeared on December 1968 in China’s Medicine. The
article presented the story of Li Feng-ming, a devoted medical worker
at the Haipei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture suffering from displace-
ment of an intervertebral disc. The article portrayed how Li Feng-ming
exemplarily persisted in his efforts to cure minority peasants, despite the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

fact that this required riding a horse over difficult terrain, which further
worsened his orthopaedic condition:

Each time he reached a destination he experienced a severe pain in his loin,

which sometimes rendered him unable to walk for a moment. However,
simply ignoring his discomfort, he would enter the tent, refuse all offers of
drink and rest, and lose not time in treating the sick, explaining the ‘three
constantly read articles’ to the herdsmen.55

In short, this article, like all similar stories of spontaneous emulation,

portrayed devoted doctors, as everyday embodied resurrections of
Bethune’s spirit of selflessness,56 treating patients in remote rugged areas
of China. This narrative reached its zenith in the description of the
Chinese medical missions to Africa, where armed with Mao Zedong’s
Thought the ‘angels in white’, as an article calls them, reattached severed
arms, restored vision to the blind,57 and generally performed the whole
array of dialectical materialist miracles.58
At the same time, stories of spontaneous emulation portrayed how
the ethic of socialist-minded doctors, and above all the new paramedi-
cal force of barefoot doctors, broke with ‘the influence of the counter-
revolutionary revisionist medical line advocated by China’s Khrushchev,
Liu Shaoqi and company’.59
Time and again in such stories of emulation the high-brow attitude of
university-trained ‘leather shoe’ doctors was condemned, or presented
in a darkly light as an obstacle to the new spirited doctors on the field:
‘The revolutionary proposals of the young fighters were nipped in
the bud for the time being by the handful of capitalist roaders in the
Party’.60
Seen as the instigator of ‘leather shoe’ attitudes, Liu Shaoqi was
personally accused as ‘consistently opposed the orientation of medicine
serving the vast rural population, claiming that health work must be
made a success in cities before health work in the countryside could
be dealt with effectively’, thus fostering the theory of ‘indirect service
to five hundred million peasants’ which meant ‘direct service to the
bourgeoisie’.61
On the opposite end of personalisation, Norman Bethune figured
consistently as the ultimate prototype for selfless medical workers. What
is striking is the description of the man and his deeds, which assumes
true cult dimensions, in opposition to the sober accounts of pre-Cultural
Revolution medical literature.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

Bethune’s spirit cult

Throughout Cultural Revolution medical literature, Norman Bethune was

described as a larger-than-life figure, urging his medical colleagues: ‘You
should use me as you use a machine gun’.62 This is the first time that such
extensive narratives about the heroic deeds of the doctor were offered in the
medical press, with equally sensational paintings and drawings accompany-
ing them. One such homage to Bethune was offered by China’s Medicine on
November 1967, with no less than 15 Bethune-related pictures, all with cap-
tions underlining his spirit of selflessness. One must stress here the corporeal
metaphysics underlining this narrative by means of a graphic example:
Many of the hospital staff had already given blood for the wounded. This
time Comrade Bethune insisted that his own blood be used for his class
brother. But because of his age and weak health, the other would not agree.
‘Don’t delay’, he said. ‘My blood is of the “O” type and can be used on any-
body. The army men give their lives and blood for the country, Can’t I, who
work in the rear, give some blood too? Let’s loose no time in saving this
wounded comrade’. Lying down, he bared his arm. The blood of Comrade
Norman Bethune, a fine son of the Canadian people, was slowly transfused
into the vein of a Chinese people’s fighter. The blood of this internationalist
fighter gave the Chinese soldier his second life.63

The cult of Bethune’s spirit of selflessness flourished during the Cultural

Revolution, when, amongst other things, an exhibition in his memory
was organised in Beijing as part of the 28th anniversary of Mao’s memo-
rial article, under the sponsorship of the PLA. With one million visi-
tors, the exhibition was mirrored in scores of smaller cities and towns,
setting up a cross-country spectacle of the ethics of selflessness: ‘the
exhibition showed how Bethune paid meticulous attention to the needs
of the wounded always adapting his medical work to the conditions of
battle’.64
This Bethune cult, all but forgotten today in the shadow of Mao’s
personal phantasmagoria, was systematically reflected in the above-
mentioned spontaneous emulation stories spanning the medical press
at the time. In an article titled ‘The Spearhead Squad Youth Medical
Workers Nurtured by Mao Zedong’s Thought’, for example, a case of
acute appendicitis complicated by localised peritonitis is recounted. Due
to a flood hampering transport to a hospital, the local doctor decided
to operate the case in her home: ‘The great image of Comrade Bethune
operating on the wounded in a small broken-down temple sprang to

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

their minds .... With two planks serving as an operating table and a flash
light for illumination, a successful operation was performed under the
guidance of Mao Zedong’s thought’.65
Yet, not everyone seemed ready to spontaneously emulate the selfless
spirit of Norman Bethune. For medical doctors who lacked in spontane-
ity, emulation had to take the more painful road of self-criticism.

Confession against the self

References to Bethune were not lacking in medical self-criticism stories

of reform, fuelling the ever-growing genre of repentance and rectifica-
tion that dominated the Cultural Revolution press. A prime example of
such medical articles is the one authored under the name of Wu Tse-
min. In graphic autobiographical style, Wu’s narrative begins by relat-
ing how he was sent to the Dongjingcheng People’s Commune, set in
a deep mountain ravine in Ningan County. There, embedded in a Red
Flag Production Brigade, Wu confesses that he was unable to think of
anything besides lamenting how his medical career was being wasted.
Forced into the accommodational inconvenience of a room in a poor
peasant’s house, Wu hardly got sleep on his first night of service. Rather
than spontaneously emulating the spirit of selflessness, he grieved: ‘What
would be my future, I thought, if I worked in this place?’66 Next morning
Wu was greeted cordially by the villagers, and yet, he ‘took no interest in
them or their chitchat. My only thoughts were of going back to Mutankiang
where I had come from’.67 Following his selfish, ‘leather-shoe’ impulses, the
following morning Wu deserted his post and headed back home. Yet, back
at his parents’ house, he failed to find the reception he expected:
At daybreak the next day, I left for home without a word to anyone, on my
arrival at home my mother was greatly surprised and asked me why I had
returned. When I told her my reason, she expressed her strong disapproval.
In the evening when my father came back from work his first words on see-
ing me were: ‘Why have you come back? You left home only two days ago’.
I started to tell him of my dissatisfaction with my assignment but he did
not let me finish. Indignant, he said: ‘You have just started to work and you
complain at this and that. You must go back tomorrow.’68

Remembering the bitter times suffered by his family under the ‘old
society’, and recalling how they were eventually saved by Mao, Wu con-
tinued: ‘Thinking of Chairman Mao’s benevolence (ren), of the training

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

of the Party had given me ... I shed tears of remorse. I saw my error’.69
Looking up to the portrait of the omnipresent Chairman, Wu took a
life-changing decision: he dedicated himself to reading ‘the two brilliant
articles – Serve the Peasants and In Memory of Norman Bethune’.
Shedding ‘bitter tears of remorse’ for the self-centred abandonment of
his duties, Wu took the way back ‘down’ to the Dongjingcheng People’s
Commune. Selfless as they were, the villagers warmly welcomed him and
thus, Wu settled in, resolute in his decision to be the first doctor to ‘serve
the people’ in the particular ravine. Yet, in a fable-like manner, a series
of problems started cropping up, tempting him back into a self-centred
outlook of the world:
One day a young student called me to treat uncle Wang Chin-tao ... suffering from
acute gastroenteritis. As I attended him, I had the uncomfortable feeling that the
patient might vomit and soil my clothes. At this moment, however, the heroic
image of doctor Norman Bethune emerged before me. I thought to myself: Uncle
Wang was my class brother and I must do everything I could for him. So I gave
him an injection, and then cleaned up the room and bathed him.70

No doubt Wu was happy to see Uncle Wang recover. Still, upon return-
ing to his hut, the young doctor fell into deep reflection: ‘I struggled with
myself over my fear of dirt’, he wrote, arguing that Mao’s aforementioned
confessions regarding dirt were ‘a precise criticism of my bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois thoughts. What were dirty were not the peasants but
my own ideas’.71 As a result, his experience with Uncle Wang made Wu
engage in a profound mode of self-watchfulness as regards his relation
with the peasants:
Treating Uncle Wang had made me realise that although I was an intellec-
tual who had come to the countryside to work among the former poor and
lower-middle peasants everyday, I had not merged with them in my think-
ing and feelings and had not thoroughly changed my stand and attitude,
and thus could not serve them with heart and soul.72

The Neo-Confucian technique proved fruitful: Wu decided to stay at

Dongjingcheng People’s Commune and spent the next few years helping
the peasants, ‘serving them wholeheartedly’, just as Norman Bethune’s
memorial dictated. This did not mean, however, that the New Man in
Wu had been fully achieved.
One day in 1965 the secretary of the commune’s Party committee pro-
posed to Wu to become the first half-time doctor, half-time farm worker
in the commune – a further, drastic levelling of his elite status as part

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

of the intelligentsia. Overcoming his doubts about the propriety of the

arrangement, Wu concluded:
Without integration with the masses, how can I be a real revolutionary?
Half-time medicine, half time farming makes an intellectual better able
to identify himself with the masses of the peasants, better able to remould
his world outlook and better able to serve the people and is an important
means of promoting ideological revolutionisation.73

Wu took up the task, and yet, always self-watchful, he still felt he could
not fully integrate with the peasant masses:
Because I had a big ‘self ’ in my mind, I had not changed my world outlook.
I resolved that I must solve this problem in this Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution. I explained to my wife what I had in mind. I started by saying
that there were two kinds of power to be seized during the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution – one from those in authority taking the capitalist
road, and the other from the ‘self ’.74

As a result, Wu asked his Brigade to earn his work points and labour as
a common commune member, in the hope of shedding the last traces of
his former specialisation and separation from the masses. Soon, as in all
fables, an excellent opportunity appeared for our protagonist of confes-
sion, so as to prove his rectified heart and mind (zhengxin):
As it happened the brigade needed someone to take care of the pigs. I
insisted on taking the job and refused to listen to the objections of some
of the commune members and cadres who thought that the work was too
dirty and tiring for a doctor to do. I stood firm in my decision to do his
work because I thought that it would be very beneficial to my ideological
remoulding and would temper me in physical labour.75

Summarising the teaching of his efforts to integrate with the soiled yet
pure masses at the Dongjingcheng People’s Commune, Wu concluded
his autobiographical article in a programmatic charade against the self:
Combating self-interest and fostering devotion to the public interest
requires a long course of repeated ideological struggles. Each step forward
has to be made through struggle with the ‘self ’ .... In the struggle between
the two classes, two roads and two lines I must destroy self-interest and
cultivate devotion to the public interest, make revolution in the very depths
of my soul in order to thoroughly remould my world outlook.76

Wu’s story reproduced the prominent technology of the self amongst

medical doctors at the time, ruling that since ‘matter can be transformed

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

into consciousness and consciousness into matter’,77 the ‘fight self-inter-

est, repudiate revisionism’78 mode of rectification should be based on
constant confession. In a similar vein, Chao Chun-hsien, a head nurse at
the PLA’s No. 208 Hospital wrote characteristically:
I asked myself, ‘Are you a true Communist? Why do you worry about
your personal honour at every turn?’ I begun to realise that my honours
were just extra baggage on my back which weighed me down. He who is
an individualist cannot be considered a true Communist and he would be
bound to become irresponsible in is work .... Through a series of ideological
struggles I came to recognise selfishness as most harmful bacteria which
can paralyse one’s revolutionary will if left unchecked.79

Chao’s narrative may contain an usual medicalisation of the self as a

problem, even referring to one’s greater or lesser ‘immunity to bourgeois
ideology’80 and to self-criticism as ‘weeding out the root of ideological
diseases’,81 yet it is typical in that it is based on a discourse of debt, guilt
and repentance:
Once I heard that one of our patients was not used to sleeping on a soft bed
but because I was busy at the time I neglected it. Lying in bed that evening,
I thought this over and over again. Because the hospital was far from my
home, I thought at first that I could attend to the matter the next day, but
then I realised that that wouldn’t do. I couldn’t simply think of myself having
a sound night’s sleep unmindful of the patient’s comfort [sic]. If I did that,
it would not be completely and thoroughly serving the people. So I quickly
dressed myself and went to the hospital and put some wooden boards on the
patient’s bed so that he could sleep well. Only then did I feel reassured.82

From an anthropological perspective, as reflected in the second coming

of Bethune’s spirit of selflessness, this will to no-self was predicated on
techniques and practices of purification and purging, thus ratifying
Noumoff ’s identification of the Cultural Revolution as an unprecedented
movement of mass rectification.83

Rectification as purification

Rectification is a dispositif of great historical depth in China. According

to the Confucian classics, a vital technology for the maintenance of
an efficacious relation between the self, truth and the other was the
rectification of names (zhengming). Rather than forging a rigid linguistic

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

conformism, as often believed, zhengming was a dynamic negotiation of

values and practices.
Taking the practical ethics of Confucian philosophy seriously, Hall
and Ames claim that ‘naming for Confucius cannot simply be a process
of attaching appropriately corresponding labels to an already existing
reality’.84 Instead zhengming must be seen as part of ‘the performative
force of language’, its ability to realise the world through interpreting it’.85
Hall and Ames explain: ‘the extent to which one is able to influence the
world is a function of the extent to which one can articulate his mean-
ing, value, and purpose in such manner as to evoke deferential responses
from others’.86
For Confucius the ordering of names, as Hall and Ames prefer to trans-
late zhengming, had a performative rather than a referential or reductionist
effect: ‘when the exemplary person (junzi) puts a name to something, it
can certainly be spoken, and when spoken it can certainly be done’.87
Hence zhengming, the ‘performative force of naming’,88 must be under-
stood as a method of ritually organising the relation between the self
and the other with respect to the truth and in quest of the preservation
of social harmony. It is thus imperative to consider that, in the context
of socialist governmentality, rectification assumed a central function
as a result of what Mao and his comrades in arms saw as a profound
dissonance between ‘names’ and ‘things’, or ascribed roles/ theory, and
actually existing political performance/ praxis.
The Rectification Campaign (zhengfeng) was unleashed between
1942 and 1944 in Yan’an as a process through which the Party sought to
guarantee that the ‘conformity of consciousness’ to the ‘objective laws of
the development of things’ was not jeopardised by the so-called errone-
ous tendencies lurking in cadres’ ‘subjective activity’.89 Apter and Saich
accordingly claim that in its employment of criticism and self-criticism,
‘the Rectification Campaign was a method unique in the degree to which
it sought to penetrate the world as it appeared to be and reshape it as a
“true world” that conformed to a logical image’.90
The ontological efficacy of both the original Rectification Campaign
at Yan’an and its various resurrections leading to its proper second
coming and totalisation during the Cultural Revolution was that it was
performed and experienced as a process of perpetual purification.
In this respect Maoist zhengming must be understood within the con-
fines of what Alain Badiou has described as the ‘relationship between
the passion for the real and the necessity of semblance’.91 As the French

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

philosopher notes, for revolutionary modernity, ‘every force is localis-

able, or effective, through a form that nevertheless cannot decide upon
meaning. This is why one must maintain that this is precisely the energy
of the real that presents itself as a mask’.92 This necessity of semblance is
the other side of the revolutionary passion for purity or purging, because
the will to be pure can endure only through a regime of perpetual lack
constituted by the necessity of impurity.
Purification, writes Badiou ‘is a process doomed to incompletion, a
figure of the bad infinite’; it is what is absolutely present and yet perma-
nently incomplete, for ‘to purify the real is to extract it from the reality
that envelops and conceals it’.93 If there were a completion, then the scis-
sion vital to the revolutionary project would cease, and we would at once
find ourselves in the realm of eschatology, in the realm of a restoration
to a finite parousia, where, to remember Louis de Saint-Just, the revolution
would be frozen.
Consequently, Badiou argues, ‘precisely because what drives it is not
the ideal but the real, [revolutionary] thought must seize hold of appear-
ance. To achieve this, it is necessary to destroy every density, every claim
to substantiality, and every assertion of reality. It is reality that constitutes
the obstacle to the uncovering of the real as pure surface. Here lies the
struggle against semblance’.94
Thus, we must conceive rectification not in terms of the creation of
symbolic capital, but in terms of the creation of debt as the only touch-
ground finality in an unfinalisable anti-dialectic dance of substitution
between form and content, concreteness and abstraction, theory and
practice, means and ends, subjectivity and objectivity, mask and face.
In this sense, if for Liu Shaoqi there was only one class proper, the uni-
versally potential stance of a professional–revolutionary, for the Maoists
the only real class was the universally actual reality of the class-enemy.
If according to the self-cultivation model everyone could become
a professional–revolutionary (the New Man), according to the self-
abolitionary model everyone always-already was the class-enemy (the
Old Man). In this sense the abolitionary model was closer to Mencius’s
notion that ‘ontologically we are irreducibly human, and existentially
must struggle to remain human’.95 Tu Wei-ming reminds us of a crucial
Mencian passage:

Humanity subdues inhumanity as water subdues fire. Nowadays those

who practice humanity do as if with one cup of water they could save a

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

whole wagonload of fuel on fire. When the flames were not extinguished,
they would say that water cannot subdue fire. This is as bad as those
who are inhumane. At the end they will surely lose (what little humanity
they have).96

In this sense, the struggle for the realisation of one’s humaneness (in this
case, proletarian outlook) was rendered an ontological precondition for
the ‘enlargement of the Way’97 (i.e. socialism).
Seen as a mass rectification movement exercised not vertically, by
decree of some sovereign power, but horizontally, in a disciplinary fash-
ion between individuals mesmerised by the collective illusion of state-
socialism, the Cultural Revolution was aimed at no less than salvaging
one from the classenemy qualities of one’s own self.

Notes
 Anonymous (1967) ‘Study In Memory of Norman Bethune’ (Reprint of 21
December 1966 People’s Liberation Army Daily editorial), China’s Medicine,
Vol. 5 (May): 327–333, p. 328.
 ibid: 328.
 ibid: 328.
 ibid: 329.
 ibid: 329.
 ibid: 329.
 Anonymous (1966) ‘News and Notes: Ministry of Health Meeting on Study
of Chairman Mao’s Works’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 85, No. 4 (April):
271–273, p. 271.
 ibid: 272.
 ibid: 272.
 Chi’en Hsin-chung (1966) ‘Prelude to the Great March of Orientating Health
Work Towards the Rural Areas: Some Questions Concerning the Work of the
Rural Mobile Medical Teams’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 85, No. 4 (April):
209–222, p. 212.
 ibid: 214.
 ibid: 216.
 MacFarquhar, R. (1999) The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Volume 3: The
coming of the cataclysm, 1961–1966, New York: Columbia University Press,
pp. 436–437.
 Anonymous (1966) ‘News and Notes: Ministry of Health Conference on
Political Work’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 85, No. 5 (May): 345–346, p. 345.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

 Anonymous (1966) ‘News and Notes: Decision on Studying Chairman Mao’s

Works’, Chinese Medical Journal, Vol. 85, No. 3 (March): 205–206, p. 203.
 Andreas, J. (2009) Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the
Origins of China’s New Class, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 77.
 Quoted in Dittmer, L. (1998) Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
(revised edition), New York: M. E. Sharp, p. 163.
 Dittmer, L. (1998) op. cit., p. 162.
 Walder, A. G. (1988) Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in
Chinese Industry, Berkeley: California University Press, p. 145.
 Ollman, B. (1971) Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society,
Berkeley: Cambridge University Press.
 Walder, A. G. (1988) op. cit., pp. 146–147.
 ibid: 149.
 Mao Zedong (1937) ‘On Practice; On the Relation Between Knowledge and
Practice, Between Knowing and Doing’ (July). Available at: http://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.
htm (Accessed: 10 June 2011).
 Perry, E. & Li Xun (1997) Proletarian Power, Shanghai in the Cultural
Revolution, Boulder: Westview.
 Third Headquarters of the Capital’s Red Guards (1967) ‘Get Rid of “Self-
Interest”, Forge a Great Alliance of Revolutionary Rebels’, China’s Medicine,
Vol. 2, No. 3 (March): 201–205, p. 201.
 ibid: 205.
 ibid: 205.
 Editorial Departments of Red Flag and People’s Daily (1967) ‘Betrayal
of Proletarian Dictatorship is Essential Element in the Book on “Self-
Cultivation”’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 86, No. 7 (July): 530–537, p. 530.
 ibid: 532.
 Tung, C. (1973) ‘The Hidden Enemy as Villain in Communist Chinese
Drama’ Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 (October): 335–343.
 ibid: 338.
 Slomp, G. (2009) Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
 Tung, C. (1973) op. cit., p. 341.
 ibid: 341.
 Editorial Departments of Red Flag and People’s Daily (1967) op. cit.,
pp. 533–534.
 Andreas, J. (2009) op. cit., p. 114.
 Fokkema, D. W. (1966) ‘Chinese Criticism of Humanism: Campaigns Against
the Intellectuals 1964–1965’, China Quarterly, No. 26 (April–June): 68–81, p. 71.
 Health Section of a PLA Unit Under the Peking Command (1968a) ‘A
Battle Under the Guidance of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought: Successful Removal

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

of a 45KG Retroperitoneal Neurofibroma’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 87, No. 8

(August): 458–472, p. 461.
 ibid: 463.
 ibid: 463.
 ibid: 466.
 ibid: 467.
 ibid: 468.
 ibid: 468.
 Health Section of a PLA Unit Under the Peking Command (1968b) ‘Our
Revolutionary Scalpel Terrifies the Soviet Revisionist Renegades’, China’s
Medicine, Vol. 87, No. 8 (August): 473–478, p. 473.
 ibid: 476.
 ibid: 477.
 ibid: 478.
 Shi Liu & Szu Chi (1968) Using Mao Tse Tung’s Thought to Open Up
a “Forbidden Zone” – Curing Deaf-Mutes’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 11
(November): 641–646.
 Chang Tze-han, Yang Teh-ching, Tu Jui-fen (1968) ‘How We Have Struggled
Against Unstable Diabetes Mellitus in the Light of Mao Zedong’s Thought’,
China’s Medicine, Vol. 11 (July): 400–407, p. 402.
 Taylor, K. (1994) The History of Barefoot Doctors, Thesis: Department of the
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.
 Taylor, K. (1994) op. cit.
 Mao Zedong (1944) ‘Serve the People’ (8 September). Available at: http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/
mswv3_19.htm (Accessed: 3 March 2011); Mao Zedong (1945) ‘The Foolish
Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’ (11 June). Available at: http://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_26.
htm (Accessed: 6 March 2011).
 Chao Ying (1968) ‘How I Have Striven to Be a Revolutionary Doctor
Boundlessly Loyal to Chairman Mao’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 9 (September):
537–544, p. 537.
 Anonymous (1968a), ‘A Propagandist of Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought and a
Close Friend of the Poor Herdsmen; the Story of Doctor Li Feng-Ming
Working on the Grassland’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 12 (December): 750–756,
p. 752.
 For an anthropological discussion of Maoist ‘exemplars’ in Inner Mongolia,
see: Humphrey, C. (1997) ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse
of Moralities in Mongolia’, in S. Howell (ed.) The Ethnography of Moralities,
London: Routledge: 25–47. However tentatively, I would like to suggest
that figures of unilateral emulation like Lei Feng and figures of ambivalent
emulation cannot be collapsed into a single notion of an ‘exemplar’.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Abolishing the Self as Private Property 

 Anonymous (1968b) ‘ “Thanks Mao Tse-Tung for Sending Us Such Fine

Doctors!” Mauritanian People Praise Chinese Medical Team’, China’s
Medicine, Vol. 11 (November): 673–675.
 On the notion of Mao’s ‘miracles’, see: Urban, G. (1971) The Miracles of
Chairman Mao, London: Tom Stacey.
 Anonymous (1968a), op. cit., p. 754.
 Section of Politics and Education Under the Revolutionary Committee of
Shanghai First Medical College (1968) ‘The Spearhead Squad Young Medical
Workers Nurtured by Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 12
(December): 724–734, p. 725.
 Anonymous (1967) ‘China’s Khrushchev Resurrected PUMC to Advance
Revisionist Line in Education’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 12 (December): 890–892,
p. 892.
 Anonymous (1967) ‘A Great Internationalist Fighter’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 11
(November): 822–829, p. 823.
 ibid: 825.
 Anonymous (1968c) ‘Norman Bethune – Internationalist Fighter Imbued
with Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 7 (July): 371–385. p. 378.
 Section of Politics and Education Under the Revolutionary Committee of
Shanghai First Medical College (1968) op. cit., p. 731.
 Wu Tse-min (1968) ‘How I Have Studied and Applied Chairman Mao’s
Teachings in My Work as a Rural Doctor’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 87, No. 5
(May): 276–284, p. 276.
 ibid: 276.
 ibid: 276.
 ibid: 277.
 ibid: 278.
 ibid: 278–279.
 ibid: 279.
 ibid: 281.
 ibid: 282.
 ibid: 283.
 ibid: 284.
 Revolutionary Committee of Nanchang County, Inner Mongolia (1968) ‘How
Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought Has Brought About Stupendous Changes in the
Health Picture of a Commune Production Brigade’, China’s Medicine, Vol. 4
(April): 229–241, p. 229.
 Section of Politics and Education under the Revolutionary Committee of
Shanghai First Medical College (1968) op. cit., p. 727.
 Chao Chun-Hsien (1968) ‘How I Grasped Living Ideas in My Work as a
Nurse’, China’s Medicine (October): 99–106, pp. 99–100.
 ibid: 101.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

 ibid: 106.
 ibid: 102.
 Noumoff, S. J. (1967) ‘China’s Cultural Revolution as a Rectification
Movement’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 40, No. 3/4 (Autumn 1967–Winter 1967–1968):
221–234.
 Hall, D. L. & Ames R. T. (1987) Thinking through Confucius, Albany: State
University of New York Press, pp. 268–269.
 ibid: 269.
 ibid: 269.
 Quoted in Hall, D. L. & Ames R. T. (1987) op. cit., p. 270.
 Hall, D. L. & Ames R. T. (1987) op. cit., p. 270.
 Mao Zedong (undated). Quoted in Scharm, S. R. (1969) The Political Thought
of Mao Tse-Tung, London: Pelican Books, pp. 134–135.
 Apter, D. E. & Saich, T. (1994) Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 265. See also: Seybolt, P. J. (1986)
‘Terror and Conformity: Counterespionage Campaigns, Rectification, and
Mass Movements’, 1942–1943, Modern China Vol. 12: 39–73.
 Badiou, A. (2007) The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 47.
 ibid: 51.
 ibid: 64.
 ibid: 64.
 Tu Wei-ming (1984) ‘Pain and Suffering in Confucian Self-Cultivation’,
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34, No. 4 (October): 379–388, p. 381.
 ibid: 381.
 ibid: 381.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Conclusion
Abstract: Contending for the proper mode of generation of
the New Man in the People’s Republic of China, self-cultivation
and self-abolition, as two conflicting ‘technologies of the self ’,
underlined distinct Marxist–Leninist approaches as regards
the dialectics between class actuality and potentiality. The
battle for the New Man revolving around the valorisation of
the revolution and one’s debt to it, as both an achievement and
a promise, established a total architecture of subjectivation
whose kernel, a dispositif determining the relation of the self to
the party-state, was the ‘spirit of selflessness’.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist

China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831 

 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

During his 1980–1981 lectures to the Collège de France, Michel Foucault

argued that ‘we cannot understand the revolutionary individual and what
revolutionary experience meant for him, unless we take into account the
notion or fundamental schema of conversion to the revolution’1. Hence
state-socialism presents us with an anthropological problem that forces
us further afield than the usual social analytical compromise between
Marxist and post-structuralist perspectives of the state: when conversion
to the revolution becomes a governmental dispositif, and thus an appara-
tus of counterrevolution, what processes of self-formation does it put in
place?
As we have seen in the course of this book, between 1949 and 1969 two
technologies of the self contended for generating the New Man in the
People’s Republic China. Each related to a distinct mode of governmen-
tality, and each was embedded in a distinct way within Confucian and
Neo-Confucian legacies of enclosing the self in a relation to the Other.
Rather than a problem of philosophical dichotomy, what we have
been studying in the course of this book is a problem of the organisa-
tion of power. For during the period studied (1949–1969) the process at
stake, the generation of the New Man in Maoist China, was predicated
on different modes of ‘conversion’ to the extent that these corresponded
to dialectically interdependent and antagonistic practices of loyalty.

Strategies of loyalty – strategies of enclosure

Both during the years of Yan’an and immediately after Liberation, loyalty
(zhong), a notion central to Confucian filial piety, was generated through
a relation of debt first towards the guarantor (in the case of Yan’an) and
then towards the creditor (after 1949) of emancipation2, in both cases the
Chinese Communist Party, who had to be repaid (and repaid, and repaid ...)
through a performative cultivation of the self into ‘living Marxism’.
This ‘self-cultivation’ in effect amounted to a sublimation of one’s
individuality to an imagined collectivity, where the demand of the Other
(the Party) was experienced as the offer of the self. Failing to perform
this identification was seen as an incapacity to recognise the self in the
Other, a moral sickness with almost physiological effects: ‘Personal
worry about gain will always be able to take possession of your mind,
and this mind will then increase daily, completely gnawing away your
body and mind, leaving you only a husk’3.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Conclusion 

Imaginarily ‘forged in the blood of revolution’4, this ontological debt-

bondage formed the very fabric of what Nivison has called the ‘structure
of Confucian-communist morality’. As a result, we can say that between
1949 and 1966 the generation of the New Man was seen as a predicate of
the Party’s promise to actualise socialism. In that sense, it was performed
as part of a programmatic and conditional trust of the self to the Other.
On the contrary, during the Cultural Revolution the generation of
the New Man was based on the identification of the already successful
revolutionary event and its now threatened truth-for-all5 with the person
of Mao. Its performance was, in this sense, part of a retrospective and
unconditional act of trust of the self to the Other.
If, in fidelity to the Party’s emancipatory promise, one had to cultivate
the self in order to be included in the desired state of humaneness/
benevolence (ren) of the future society, in contrast, in fidelity to Mao’s
emancipatory achievement, one had to abolish his/ herself in order to
‘merge’ in the humane/benevolent aura of the original creditor. If in the
first case one’s self was a productive asset for the revolution to be con-
cluded, in the second case it was an excremental excess of the revolution
already achieved.
As the apex of Chinese Communism, a movement that, in the words
of Michael Dutton, ‘pronounced the word materialism while simultane-
ously whispering in tongues the word sublime’6, the Cultural Revolution
transformed debt towards the future into guilt towards the past. It thus
signalled a mass ritual destruction7 of the only accumulated asset worth
being guilty about in China at the time: selfhood.
We can thus accept the following. The first technology of the self, engi-
neered from a technocratic perspective, defined one’s conversion to the revo-
lution as consisting in the adoption of the position of the only class proper,
the universally potential stance of the proletariat. The second, engineered from
a ‘mass line’ perspective, conceived this conversion as a process of eradicating
the only real class, the universally actual stance of the classenemy.
It is from this subtle yet profound difference that my concluding notes
on ‘technologies of the self in Maoist China must proceed.

Actuality and potentiality

When dealing with the relation between actuality and potentiality, one is,
knowingly or not, always-already placed within the vortex of Aristotle’s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

discussion of time and change8. So as to resist this Eurocentric reduc-

tion of the analysis of technologies of the self in Maoist China into yet
another footnote of the Physics, we need to take an informed distance
from this perspective.
If Chinese Communist technologies of the self differed with regard to
their focus on the potential and the actual, this does not mean that these
two poles were experienced as related in a dichotomous way. Were we
to adopt such a model of actuality/potentiality, we would have to accept
that the way in which the two technologies of the self sought to gener-
ate the New Man converged only as regards their arche (the actuality of
the Old Man) and their telos (the potentiality of the New Man). In that
case, the ‘self-cultivation’ model and the ‘self-abolition’ model would
never meet in the process of achieving the realisation of the potential-
ity of humaneness/benevolence (ren). They would simply be divergent
pathways of achieving a kinesis from A to B.
What I want to argue here, contra this Aristotelian reading, is that the
relation between actuality and potentiality was a far more intertwined and
ambivalent one, where the flow of subjectivity between the Old Man and
the New Man was in fact always elliptical and productively inconclusive. It
was this circuital ambivalence that allowed the contestation between the
two technologies of the self in the first place. Based on their corresponding
governmental outlook, each technology worked back on the problem of
the relation between self and state in a way that gave priority to different
qualities of the dialectical circuit between actuality and potentiality.
From one vintage point, the revolution generated a constitutive onto-
logical potentiality: under state-socialism everyone was able to become-
proletariat, the New Man. In contrast, but complimentarily, from another
vintage point, the revolution revealed a constituted ontological actuality:
everyone always-already was the classenemy, the Old Man.
Enclosing the self within the potentiality of the New Man, as a govern-
mental strategy, ‘self-cultivation’ constituted a primitive accumulation
of human potentiality focused on producing, as we have already seen,
a constitutive relation of debt to the Party. On the other hand, enclosing
the self within the actuality of the Old Man, ‘self-abolition’, as an alter-
native governmental strategy, consisted in a primitive accumulation of
human potentiality focused on producing a constituted relation of guilt
exclusively towards Mao himself.
What made the dialectic between the two moral dispositions9 possible
was, first, the actual existence of a revolutionary subjectivity across social

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Conclusion 

strata in China, and second, the tacit consensus that this subjectivity had
to be domesticated, and the prospect of a radical anti-Confucian moder-
nity, as generated within the New Culture Movement, deferred.
For proponents of the technocratic apparatus of capture, the self
should be allowed to flourish according to the version of Neo-Confucian
cultivation crafted by Liu Shaoqi: as the finest fruit of state-socialism.
For proponents of the ‘mass line’ apparatus of capture, the self had to be
abolished like a Neo-Confucian noxious desire, as the point de blocage
inhibiting access to the object of humane/benevolent desire: the always-
already deferred classless society, as mythically embodied in Yan’an.
If the former technology of the self generated symbolic debt on part
of an elite of otherwise class-suspicious experts towards the salvatory
potential of the revolution, the latter created guilt as the universal condi-
tion of selfhood under conditions of a revolution which was imagined
as, on the one hand, completed whilst, on the other hand, always left to
be redeemed10.

Battle for the New Man

Through the course of this book I have examined the contestation

between ‘self-cultivation’ and ‘self-abolition’ based on the exegesis of the
‘spirit of selflessness’ of Dr Norman Bethune. This battle for the New
Man in Communist China must not be reduced to a teleological proc-
ess. As François Jullien notes, ‘the originality of the Chinese lies in their
indifference to any notion of a telos, a final end for things, for they sought
to interpret reality solely on the basis of itself, from the perspective of a
single logic inherent in the actual process in motion’11.
War being conceived from Sun Tzu to Mao ‘from the perspective of
propensity and a shaping of effect’ rather than from the viewpoint of
finality12, the battle for the New Man was not about making means (self-
formation) meet ends (state hegemony) but about defining the ability to
seize, at one and the same time, the process and the form13 of the relation
between the self and the state.
The strategic efficacy14 of the two technologies of the self in their antago-
nistic inter-position consisted in establishing a total architecture of subjec-
tivation, an all-inclusive apparatus of capture of subjectivity. This dispositif
was no other than the ‘spirit of selflessness’, whose economy determined
the possibility and impossibility of selfhood in Maoist China. Outside its

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

dialectic, subjectivity as a propensity for humaneness/benevolence (ren)

was unintelligible – and socialism, as the relation between self and the
state articulating this Confucian value into modernity, unreachable.

Notes
 Foucault, M. (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1981–1982, New York: Picador, p. 208.
 Dutton, M. (2004) ‘Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred’, Public Culture,
Vol. 16. No. 2: 161–187, p. 171.
 Ming-ts’ao, ‘Lun shen-tu’. Quoted in Nivison, D. S. (1956) ‘Communist Ethics
and Chinese Tradition’, Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 16, No. 1 (November):
51–74, p. 71.
 Dutton, M. (2004) op. cit., p. 172.
 Badiou A. (2007) The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press.
 Dutton, M. (2004) op. cit., p. 183.
 ibid: 178.
 Coope, U. (2005) Time for Aristotle, Physics IV. 10–14, Oxford: Clarendon,
Oxford University Press.
 The term here being a loan from Jullien, F. (1999) The Propensity of Things:
Towards a History of Efficacy in China, New York: Zone Books.
 For a discussion on redemption as, ‘what makes creation comprehensible,
that which gives it its meaning’, see Agamben, G. (2009) The Signature of
Things, New York: Zone Books, p. 107.
 Jullien, F. (1999) op. cit., p. 17.
 ibid: 37.
 ibid: 78.
 From Jullien, F. (1999) op. cit., p. 33.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Index
actuality and potentiality, see
under Liu Shaoqi; New
Man; proletariat
All under Heaven (tianxia)
13–15, 51–52
anarchism 37–40
see also anti-Confucianism
see also under human
nature
Andreas, J. 23, 61, 74, 94
see also capital
anti-Confucianism 5, 29, 37–38,
39, 40, 119
apparatus of capture 7, 40 67,
119–120
Aristotle
actuality and potentiality
117–118
Badiou, A. 20, 108–109
barefoot doctors 100–102
and ‘leather shoe’ doctors
102, 104
Bethune, N. 1, 2–5, 9, 12, 23–26,
58, 79, 83, 84, 90, 91, 92,
98, 101–104, 105, 107, 119
cult of 103–104
see also In Memory of
Norman Bethune; spirit
of selflessness
biological warfare (also germ
war) 12, 17–23, 64
biopolitics 6–8, 13, 16, 17, 20,
64, 65, 67, 70, 90, 99
DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
and labour power 6–8. see
also Foucault, M.
capital
accumulation of 7, 8, 93
cultural and political 23,
52, 74
symbolic 2, 93, 109
capitalism 60, 61, 68, 75
capitalist roaders 95–96, 102, 106
Chen Duxiu 38–39
Chen Yi 72–73
Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12,
13–15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21,
26, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 40,
44–46,48–50, 51, 60, 61,
62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70,
72–73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79,
92, 93, 95, 96, 102, 105,
108, 116, 117, 118
China’s Medicine (Journal) 93,
95, 100, 101, 103
Chinese Medical Association
(CMA) 15, 23–25, 59, 61,
67, 82–84
Chinese Medical Journal
(CMJ) 15–16, 24, 71,
83–84, 91
Civil War, Chinese 13, 16, 74
White Areas 40, 48, 49
class enemy 6, 15, 34, 45, 46,
51, 74, 79, 95, 109, 110,
117–119

 Index
class feelings 91, 94, 105
see also under Mao Zedong
class hatred 14–15
class struggle 14, 23, 60, 91, 95, 97, 106
classless society 84, 119
Comintern 2, 30, 32
confession 40, 78, 90, 104–107
Confucius
Doctrine of the Mean 47
on humaneness/benevolence
35–36
and the rectification of names
108
as ideological residue 97
and ritual propriety (li) 35, 41, 49
on self and other 35–36
on virtue 33, 35, 36
see also under self-cultivation
see also anti-Confucianism
consciousness 31, 36, 40, 60, 75, 94–95,
106–107, 108
contradiction 30, 45, 68, 74, 76–77, 81,
82, 92, 93
counterrevolution 95, 102, 116
criticism and self-criticism 24, 39–40,
51, 61, 67, 79, 83, 92, 104–105,
107, 108, 110, 117
cultivated man/superior man (junzi)
29, 33, 46–47, 108
Cultural Revolution 4, 5, 63, 71, 77, 79,
82, 84, 90, 93–94, 100, 101, 103,
104, 106, 108
as rectification campaign 107, 110
debt 14, 33,109, 115
and guilt 107, 116–119
desire 14, 38, 43, 47, 48, 97, 119
see also under Liu Shaoqi; Wang
Yangmin; Xunzi
dialectics 25, 26, 31, 32, 37, 43, 45, 48, 58,
72, 74–77, 80, 81, 84, 95, 97, 100,
115, 116, 118–120
see also contradiction; one divides
into two
dialectical materialism 6, 25, 32, 59,
95, 102
dirt, fear of 93–94, 105, 106
see also under Mao Zedong
Eighth Route Army 1, 2
elite, medical 16, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 61,
62, 65, 66–67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78,
80, 105–106, 119
emancipation 3, 8–9, 38, 39, 116,
enclosure, of subjectivity 3, 14, 116–117
see also apparatus of capture
enemy 22, 76, 90, 91, 97, 99–100
see also class enemy
Engels, F. 32
event, revolutionary 117
exegesis
of the spirit of selflessness 4, 12, 23,
83, 84, 91, 94, 99, 119
see also under Fu Lien-chang;
governmentality
expertise 15, 17, 25, 58, 59–60, 62,
67–69, 72–74, 76–79, 83, 99
see also red and expert
experts 1, 12, 15–20, 26, 31, 52, 59–63,
65, 67–74, 78, 80, 82–84, 92,
101, 119
‘white’ 63, 72
see also red and expert
filial piety 14, 36–37, 38, 47, 116,
Foucault, M. 3, 4, 7, 116
Fu Lien-chang 12, 23–26, 59–61, 67,
84, 91
germ warfare, see biological warfare
good, individualvsgeneral/public 4, 24,
25, 48, 73
governmentality
exegetical 4–5, 49
imperial 33
mass line 20, 25, 69, 118
socialist 1, 3, 5, 6, 13–15, 34, 39,
46, 49, 52, 69, 71, 95, 108,
116, 118
technocratic 17, 19, 25, 71, 75, 118
Great Leap Forward 4, 62, 63, 65, 70,
74, 75
DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Index 

Guomindang 1, 9, 12, 13–15, 16, 30–31, labour

34, 39, 51, 64, 76, 94 division of 78, 93, 94, 106,
and medicine 16, 66–67 power, see under biopolitics
Lacan, J. 14–15, 37
habit, problem of 34, 38, 39, 45, 48, 93 Lampton, David 62–63, 70, 82
harmony, social 33, 41, 43, 48, 97, 108 Lei Feng 79, 112 n.56
hedonism 44–45 Lenin, V. I.
hegemony 12, 14–15, 17, 62, 65, 71, 74, and dialectics 32, 76
82, 119 and medicine 59
Hongqi (Red Flag) 96 and war 20–21
human nature (xing) Levenson, J. R. 13
and anarchism 38 Li Dazhao 39
as change 95 Li Lisan 30, 34
and class 94 Liang Qingqao 37–38
malleability 6, 32, 39, 43, 95, Liberation, first years following 4, 14,
as a social relation 34, 39 15, 16, 24, 31, 41, 51, 66,
see also under Mencius; Xunzi 97, 116
humaneness/benevolence (ren) 35, 36, Lin Biao 93
38, 41, 104, 110, 117, 119, 120 Liu Shaoqi
see also under Confucius and actuality–potentiality 109
Hundred Flowers Campaign 60–61 and bourgeois individualism
92–93
ideology, bourgeois vs proletarian as China’s Khrushchev 96–98, 102
45–46, 49, 70, 71, 72, 107 and the CCP 30–31, 72, 82, 93
immediatism 94–95 Confucian materialism 50–52
Imperialism on desire 41, 44–46, 49
American 16, 22 economic reforms 72
Japanese 76 How to Be a Good Communist 26,
Soviet 99–100 29, 31–32, 73
individualism 37, 45, 46, 49, 70, 79, 91, on Intra-Party Struggle 49–50
92–94, 107 mediatism 49, 94–95
as bourgeois ego(t)ism 4, 46, 100 on Mencius 50
intellectuals 6, 15–17, 31, 37, 38, 60, 61, 63, and ‘red and expert’63
69, 72, 74, 80, 92, 93–94, 105–106 against sages 51
see also under Mao Zedong on the ‘spirit of enterprise’ 48–49
interest, self vs public 2, 4, 24–25, see also under self-cultivation;
48–49, 79,84, 91, 93, 95–96, 97, self-watchfulness
98, 101, 106, 107 Long March 30
Ivanhoe, P. J. 35 and suffering 45
loyalty (zhong) 116–117
Japan 2, 9, 21–22, 24, 34, 37, 63, 64, Lushan Conference 70
66, 76
Jullien, F. 119 Ma Xulun 38
MacFarquhar, R. 61, 71, 76, 79, 93
Korean War 12, 17–23, 59 malleability, see under human nature
see also biological warfare Mandate of Heaven (tianming) 33

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
 Index
Mao Zedong
cult of 103
debt and guilt towards 79, 117–118
and dialectics 75–77, 81, 92,
94–95, 108
Farewell to the God of Plagues 64
on fear of dirt 94, 105
and intellectuals 60, 61, 63, 82–83,
94, 101
In Memory of Norman Bethune 1,
2–5,9, 12, 24–26, 83, 84, 91, 98,
103, 105
on socialist construction 13,
60–61
Thought 75, 96, 98–104
and TCM 66
on war 9, 20–22, 31, 99, 119
Where Do Correct Ideas Come
From? 75
see also Ministry of Health
Marx, K. 7, 14, 39, 94–95
Marxism 5, 8, 9, 30, 32, 34, 38, 39, 40,
52 n.11, 75, 95, 116
Marxism–Leninism 4–5, 6, 13, 20, 29,
39, 40, 45, 51, 69, 72, 83, 94, 96,
115
mass line 13, 26, 58, 65, 68, 90,
117, 119
mass mobilization 12, 14, 20–23,
58, 60, 68, 71, 80, 84, 100–101
in anti-parasitic campaigns 62–65,
67, 73, 74
masses 4, 12, 13, 21, 22, 25, 26, 34, 46, 51,
61, 62, 70, 71, 80, 82, 97, 98–99,
100, 106
memorial, to Dr Bethune see In
Memory of Norman Bethune
under Mao Zedong
Mencius
on desire 41
on human nature 41, 42
on inhumanity 109–110
theory of sprouts 41–42
see also under Liu Shaoqi; self-
cultivation; Xunzi
mind (xin) 47, 50, 77, 97, 106, 116
Ministry of Health 18, 61, 62, 66, 70,
91, 92
Mao’s attack on 58, 80–82
modernity 8, 37, 109, 119, 120
national bourgeoisie 6, 17
nature, see human nature
Nationalist Party of China, see
Guomindang
Needham, J. 23
Neo-Confucianism, see Wang
Yangming
New Culture Movement 29, 39, 119
and cult of immanence 40
New Man 1, 2–5, 9, 29, 31, 40–41, 47, 52,
90, 95, 105, 115, 116–120
and actuality–potentiality 117–119
vs Old Man 109, 118
NieRongzhen 19, 73
Nivison, D. S. 9, 45, 117
one divides into two 74–77
applied in medicine 80–82
see alsoYang Xiazheng
Patriotic Hygiene Campaign 12, 20,
26, 64
Peng Zhen 72, 82, 83
Peng Dehuai 70
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 16, 64,
70, 79, 91, 93, 98, 99, 100, 103
people’s war 20, 21, 22, 23, 66, 97,
99, 100
and society at war 22–23
see also under surgery
practice, philosophy of 9, 13, 21, 24, 35,
37, 38, 41, 42, 45–47, 51, 94–95,
100–101, 108–109
private property, see under skill
professional revolutionaries 71, 109,
proletariat 6, 40, 45, 68, 71, 77, 94,
97, 110
and actuality–potentiality 117–119
dictatorship of 25, 96,
and interest 24, 25, 84, 91, 96
propensity 119–120
DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

purification 34, 47, 48, 107, 108, 109
see also Badiou, A.
purity 3, 25, 45, 64, 109
rectification 34, 43, 66, 71, 78, 90, 101,
104, 106
campaigns 60, 61, 67, 70, 108–109
of names (zhengming) 5, 107–108
see also Cultural Revolution
Red Army(Chinese) 21
Red Guards 26
red and expert 26, 52, 58, 62, 63, 71–74,
76–79, 80, 84, 91–92, 93,
see also under Liu Shaoqi
remoulding 41, 92, 94, 101, 106
RenminRibao (People’s Daily) 61, 65,
67, 73, 76
revolution 2, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23,
31, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 51, 61, 65,
70, 78, 92, 106, 109, 116, 117–119
see also Cultural Revolution
schistosomiasis 62–64, 67, 71, 80
self-abolition 4, 5, 9, 25, 77, 84, 90, 91,
100, 104–107, 109 117–119
self-criticism, see criticism
self-cultivation
attack against 95–97
in Confucius 32–33, 35–37, 46–47
in Liu Shaoqi 29, 31–32, 34, 37, 40–41,
46, 48, 58, 59, 73, 90, 96, 119
in Mencius41–43, 45
in Wang Yangming 47
in Xunzi 42–44
self-watchfulness
in Liu Shaoqi 29, 46–47, 50
in Wang Yangming 47
selfishness 48
as disease 107
Situationist International 8–9
skill 2, 4, 7, 12, 16, 24, 31, 52, 58, 60, 62,
63, 82, 84, 92
as private property 92–95
small groups (xiaoju) 39–40
socialist construction12, 20, 59, 60, 61,
72, 78
DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831
Index 
Schmitt, C. 20, 97
Soviet
experts and advisors 17, 65, 66
medicine 59–62, 66, 68
revisionism 74, 75, 99–100
Union17, 18, 46, 60, 61
spirit of selflessness 1, 2–5, 10 n.1,
12, 23–26, 58, 79, 84, 90, 92,
101–104, 107
as dispositif 115, 119–120
see also under exegesis
Stalinism 25, 46, 64, 95
state
fetishism 8–9, 14–15
socialism 1, 3–9, 15, 23, 95, 116,
118, 119
subjectivity, revolutionary 3, 118–120
sublimation 4, 12, 23–26, 29, 48–50, 51,
73, 83, 84, 116
surgery
burns 67–69, 80–81
and dialectics 81, 100
as people’s war 99–100
and selflessness 69, 100
Soviet critique of 99–100
tumour operation 90, 98–100
technocrats 20, 29, 51, 58, 64–66, 69,
71–73, 77, 78, 80, 82, 96, 117, 119
as ‘new class’ 17, 19, 26, 59, 74–75
see also red and expert
technologies of the self 1, 3–5, 26, 29,
31, 33, 34, 46–49, 51, 52, 59, 73,
94, 96, 106, 115, 116–119
see also Foucault, M.
Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM)
65–67, 74
United Front 9, 34, 76
violence, social and political 14–15
voluntarism 40, 46, 75, 94
voluntary servitude 37–38, 75, 97
Virno, P. 7
virtue (de) 25, 32–37, 41–44, 47, 73, 84
see also under Confucius
 Index

Wang Yangming negation of Mencius41–43

on desire 47–48 on ritual propriety (li) 41
and selflessness 47 see also self-cultivation
on suffering 45
see also self-cultivation; Yang Xiazheng 74–77
self- watchfulness Yan’an 20, 24, 31, 40, 45, 46, 66, 75, 108,
will 21, 29, 31, 46, 48, 51, 75, 107, 116, 119
109
see also virtue Zhou Enlai 18–19, 60, 73

Xunzi
on desire 42–44
on human nature as evil 42

DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831