Affective Chinese Socialist Realism: A Reading of Zhao Shuli’s Sanliwan Village

Socialist realism grew out of the political agenda of educating the masses on the inevitability of class struggle and out of the need of mobilizing them to contribute to the building of a socialist society. The targets of education were not solely the illiterate peasants but also the intellectuals who needed to overcome their petit-bourgeois outlook. Scholarship has elucidated the limits and potentialities of socialist realism as an aesthetic practice at the service of a political project, but the question of how socialist realism sought to educate both peasants and intellectuals begs for reflection. Focusing on Zhao Shuli's (1906–70) 1955 socialist-realist novel Sanliwan Village, this article asks how the text responded to the task of transforming both the masses and the intellectuals. It argues that Zhao's text performs the process underlying the subject's transformation into a new socialist being. The analysis of nicknames, "cinematic storytelling," speed and rhythm, and of tools as "touching things" sheds light on the textual strategies that produce an affective narrative. As such, Zhao's novel points to socialist-subject formation not simply as an effect of discursive practices, but as the outcome of a renewed sensorial engagement with the material world.