Rural Labor Intimacy: Socialist Collaboration in Land Reform Fictions of 1950s China

In Chinese craftsmanship history, collaboration between the blacksmith and the carpenter has been a stable and enduring tradition, as it is the foundation for the production of numerous handcrafted everyday appliances. Nevertheless, Sun Li’s (1913–2002) novella The Blacksmith and the Carpenter (Tiemu qianzhuan) presents a different picture. The ostensibly stable blacksmith-carpenter cooperation should have been reinforced through socialist campaigns that promote mutual cooperation and common progress among the masses of the same social class; however, in The Blacksmith and the Carpenter, rather than fostering a harmonious cooperative relationship between the carpenter and the blacksmith, those socialist reform movements destabilize it. Moreover, this contradiction seems to be intricately linked to a potential marital intimacy—the practice of matrimonially transforming the older generation of different families into the “father/mother-in-laws” (qingjia) of the younger generation between two families.

This paper investigates the tensions between the discursive collectivization and cooperativization that envisage collaborative working intimacy among laborers—as conceptualized by Chinese socialist campaigns during the early Mao era—and their practical forms in rural China. By examining the fictional works of Sun Li and his contemporaries that portray rural labor relationships during the Land Reform era, with a specific focus on Sun Li’s novella The Blacksmith and the Carpenter and Kang Zhuo’s (1920–1991) short story “Father-in-Laws” (Qingjia), I contend that the intervention of different kinds of kinship intimacy—including the marital intimacy indicated in both stories—into working relationships generates a form of “rural labor intimacy” in socialist China. This intimacy not only complicates working relationships among rural laborers, but it also provides an affective history perspective on communist propaganda for China’s modernization through numerous movements.