Cultural Revolution Manuscripts

This book investigates handwritten entertainment fiction (shouchaoben wenxue) which circulated clandestinely during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lena Henningsen’s analyses of exemplary stories and their variation across different manuscript copies brings to light the creativity of these readers-turned-copyists. Through copying, readers modified the stories and became secondary authors who reflected on the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Through an enquiry into actual reading practices as mapped in autobiographical accounts and into intertextual references within the stories, the book also positions manuscript fiction within the larger reading cosmos of the long 1970s. Henningsen analyzes the production, circulation and consumption of these texts, considering continuities across the alleged divide of the end of the Mao-era and the beginning of the reform period. The book further reveals how these texts achieved fruitful afterlives as re-published bestsellers or as adaptations into comic books or movies, continuing to shape the minds of their audience and the imaginations of the past.

Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

“Cultural Revolution Manuscripts is an admirable and highly readable book. … Particularly valuable are her comparisons of variant forms … .” (Richard King, MCLC, Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, February, 2022)

“In her Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China Henningsen maps out and takes the reader on an exciting journey through a terra incognita in the literary universe of the twentieth century: hand-copied Chinese entertainment fiction circulating underground during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. A pathbreaking study, her book not only enriches our understanding of one of Chinese culture’s known unknowns (as we might choose to refer to it in twenty-first-century Newspeak), but also on a less serious note makes for a wonderful read in and by itself, containing as it does snippets from stories of murder and espionage, love and sex.” (Michael Schoenhals, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden)

“Meticulously researched and carefully argued, Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China makes a major contribution to the investigation of the cultural history of China’s Cultural Revolution. By conceptualizing ‘texts in motion,’ Lena Henningsen not only captures the important phenomenon of producing and consuming shouchaoben (hand-copied books), but also sheds illuminating light on our understanding of world literature and its significance to humanity.” (Shuyu Kong, Professor of Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Canada)

“Hand-copied books—shouchaoben—circulated far and wide during China’s Cultural Revolution. Including original literary texts, translations of forbidden foreign works intended to be read only by high-level cadres and entertainment fiction that did not meet socialist guidelines for good literature, the shouchaoben transcended official restrictions to bring new topics and sensibilities to readers. Lena Henningsen’s enlightening study shows how readers and writers bucked the system by literally taking things into their own hands.” (Wendy Larson, Professorof Modern Chinese Literature and Film, University of Oregon, USA)

“Mao Zedong, borrowing from Stalin, called for writers to be ‘engineers of the soul.’ Their job was to assure that the ideology of the state infuse the minds of the populace.  But at the height of Mao’s power, young people in China answered with their own texts, which they copied by hand and passed around. Lena Henningsen astutely calls these ‘texts in motion’—from pen to pen, hand to hand, genre to genre, eventually spreading to several media and all of China.” (Perry Link, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese, UC Riverside, USA)

Lena Henningsen is Professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. As a specialist of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Chinese literature, she has published widely on popular literature, reading culture and consumer culture in the People’s Republic of China. Her research has been supported by, among others, the European Research Council and the German Young Academy.