Between Undercurrent and Mainstream: Hand-copied Literature and Unofficial Culture during and after the Cultural Revolution

Based on newly available source materials and recent research by other scholars, this article revisits the “hand-copied book” phenomenon during and after the Chinese Cultural Revolution and views it in a new light. By treating this phenomenon as a sociocultural practice and emphasising the more popular entertainment-oriented genres among hand-copied books, the article underscores the complexity of unofficial culture that goes far beyond concepts of elitist resistance and oppositionality. Moreover, it brings a trans-temporal perspective to the study of the production and reproduction of hand-copied books and examines the social signification of these books, including their state “coronation”, ongoing literary debates and commercial “repackaging”, which extended well beyond the Cultural Revolution into the Reform era. The article proposes that in order to better understand the cultural power and social significance of hand-copied literature, we need to extend the analytical frame to the more recent period, which gives us evidence of the interconnections and continuities, as well as the disjunctions, between cultural production and consumption in different historical periods of China’s socialist regime.