For scholars who rely on state archives, the news out of China in recent years has been grim. Once open archives are now effectively closed, often without specific plans to reopen. Other archives set arbitrary limits on the amount researchers may copy. Previously available documents sometimes disappear from electronic searches. And once again scholars need advance notice of their arrival, a letter of introduction, or both to gain access. These limits are particularly stringent for materials from the socialist era, 1949–78.
Yet as one door to the study of the socialist era closes, another opens. Chinese universities themselves have begun to embrace the formal and systematic study of the socialist era as history. Leading universities now employ scholars writing books and articles, training graduate students, and even giving undergraduate lectures about once taboo topics such as the Cultural Revolution. And thanks to the advent of book and material search engines such as Kongfuzi wang 孔夫子网 and flea markets trading in discarded work unit records, universities and individual scholars have begun to assemble their own collections, circumventing the restrictions imposed on state archives.
In recent years, East China Normal University (ECNU) has led the way in developing PRC history. The university's Centre for Cold War International History Studies (Lengzhan Guoji Shi Yanjiu Zhongxin 冷战国际史研究中心), founded in 2001 under the direction of Shen Zhihua, now commands an international reputation for high-quality scholarship on the era, with a steady stream of influential publications such as International Cold War Studies (Guoji lengzhan yanjiu 国际冷战研究) edited by Li Danhua, international projects with the Woodrow Wilson Cold War Studies Initiative, and ranks of young scholars.
More recently, the study of PRC history has broadened beyond elite politics to include social, cultural, and economic topics. ECNU has again been at the forefront, hiring the prolific and wide-ranging historian Yang Kuisong. Yang, along with film and cultural historian Zhang Jishun, founded ECNU's PRC History Center (Zhongguo Dangdai Shi Yanjiu Zhongxin 中国当代史研究中心). The center is off to a fast start and has already begun to acquire, edit, and publish its own collections of archival documents. It has also begun to host and co-host international conferences in Shanghai and abroad. Indeed, full disclosure: UCSD's Modern Chinese History Graduate Program has just begun a five-year collaboration of joint graduate conferences on PRC history, sharing not only research findings but also graduate training methodology and conference cultures.
But the telltale sign of the arrival of PRC history within China appeared on the other side of Shanghai at the once stodgy Department of History at Fudan University. Now its History Department even teaches undergraduate courses on “The Mao Era,” a politically acceptable catchall for controversial topics (the Chinese equivalent to a course called “The Reagan Era” that focuses on the Iran-Contra Affair or the savings and loan crisis). Fudan has started to corner the market more specifically in Cultural Revolution historians. Indeed, Fudan is quickly making Cultural Revolution history into a subfield of PRC history. (One could say that a field such as PRC history is not really a field until it has a subfield.) Fudan's growth of multigenerational talent began quietly with Jin Guangyao's extensive oral history research and initial instruction on the Cultural Revolution. More recently, the department has lured Dong Guoqiang—known for his collaborations with Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder—away from Nanjing University.
The clearest evidence of the institutionalization of PRC and Cultural Revolution history at Fudan University is the hiring of Sun Peidong, a sociologist with extensive experience conducting interviews. Sun holds PhDs in sociology from Sun Yat-Sen University and from The Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po), and conducts broad-ranging research on contemporary social life, institutional change, historical sociology, and cultural sociology. Her most recent book is Shishang yu zhengzhi: Guangdong minzhong richang zhuozhuang shishang (1966–1976) 时尚与政治: 广东民众日常着装时尚 (1966–1976) [Fashion and politics: Everyday clothing fashions of the Guangdong masses (1966–1976)]. The book will be of interest to those interested in the Cultural Revolution, everyday life in urban China, and particularly fashion.
Sun's research, which relies heavily on interviews with the relatives of her former students, makes three contributions to the study of the Cultural Revolution. First, she continues the trend toward augmenting early, politically focused histories that, aside from elite maneuvering, often lacked the voice of ordinary people and their experiences. She finds that what actually mattered to many of her subjects was being fashionable, and they were prepared to go to great lengths to be fashionable. Sun's female subjects learned about politics—and feminism—through clothing. As one observed, during the Cultural Revolution, women's clothing was no longer about looking attractive to men but rather for their functional purposes related to work. “I had never thought about clothing and fashion in this way” (p. 257).
People's Liberation Army (PLA) outfits were in hot demand, allowing wearers to associate themselves with a powerful organization and, as one informant explained, protect oneself from bullying and other threats (p. 290). But, as with so many sought-after consumer goods, PLA clothing was not easily or openly available in markets. As one subject recalled, when he was young, he badly wanted an army uniform. So, he and countless others made or bought fake PLA outfits in underground markets. Of course, context mattered. People who were labeled as in the five black classes (hei wu lei 黑五类） would not dare wear army styles or even PLA caps and shoes, though there was no specific rule forbidding them. Red Guards, however, forced the tacit sumptuary law (pp. 120–21).
Secondly, Sun's book addresses the imbalance in coverage of the Cultural Revolution, which, despite notable recent exceptions such as rural violence, focuses on the Cultural Revolution in Guangdong, particularly Guangzhou. But her most original and compelling contribution is her coverage of fashion. Sun demonstrates that the postsocialist (1978–) explosion—really, obsession—with fashion did not emerge out of nothing but rather was alive and well even during the height of the anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–76). Sun demonstrates the myth of homogeneity, while highlighting the critical role played by the state rather than the market in defining the underlying categories of fashion. Indeed, the five major styles embraced in Guangdong Province all have direct or indirect associations with the state: military uniforms; “Mao suits,” worn by cadres; state enterprise blue worker uniforms (gongren zhuang 工人装); Lenin coats (Liening zhuang 列宁装); and Red Guard outfits (Hongwei zhuang 红卫装).
Sun's subjects reveal countless examples of the intersection of politics and fashion. In the fall of 1966, for instance, Red Guards took to the streets to attack manifestations of the “four olds” (sijiu 四旧) in clothing. They used an ink bottle to examine women's pants, stopping women on the street and asking them to drop an ink bottle down their pant legs from the waist. If the pant legs were wide enough to let the bottle drop all the way down the leg, they were allowed to pass. Otherwise the pants were destroyed on the spot (p. 124).
Finally, Sun's book raises many interesting questions worthy of further investigation. In chapter 6, “Discipline and Resistance”—which might be the most interesting part of the book—Sun discovers and analyzes anti-mainstream fashion, beginning with “revolution” on the collars, subtle changes made to make fashion statements, to small yet significant efforts to achieve beauty or femininity. Even more provocatively for those of us who assume the major strands of modern Chinese consumerism emanated from Shanghai, Sun argues that Shanghai was unfashionably late: Guangdong led the fashion revolution of the postsocialist era.
Doing research in China is rarely as pleasant as a dinner party. The ever-shifting state regulations restricting access to state-run archives are enough to make researchers lose their appetites. But the proliferation of “backdoor” routes to accessing historical materials, the growing ease of interviewing, and, above all, the program-building activities and publications of Chinese scholars provide hope for the new field of PRC history.
