Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China: My Mother’s Long Journey

Abstract

Through autoethnographic accounts, this chapter explores Mother’s long journey in China’s Cultural Revolution and present-day market reform to examine the fraught relations between the party-state and its youth, between education and political socialization, between public values and authoritarian limits that continue to tug the social fabric of today’s China. I argue that the state works as a powerful pedagogical node shaping people’s sense of self, social change, and their own place in the midst of it. Nevertheless, life is a performative space of self-making, where one receives whatever comes and gropes to make better meanings out of it. Mother’s narratives highlight the state’s shifting modalities of power and illustrate that post-socialist conditions are mediated by the continual assertion of political authority alongside people’s creative agency.