Long considered to be “private,” intimacy denotes closeness of bodily interactions, epistemological understandings, and emotional bonds. Recent scholarship reconsiders the assumption that privacy is the reverse of the public. Following this insight, we focus on intimacy in twentieth-century, Chinese, historical and cultural labor relations. Our session proposes a category we call “labor intimacy.” Labor intimacy, in our view, helps to expose paradoxes and nuances inherent within labors’ big power dynamics and its gender divisions. While labor intimacy is our common focus, each of us situates analysis in a different arena; war, military relations, rural socialism, and revolutionary intelligentsia. We believe that the lens of labor intimacy sheds light on who could be intimate with whom and in what manner—a matter that has been intricately linked to the historical formation of subjectivity and modernity in China during the twentieth century.

So, we valorize and analyze an affective grid structuring labor-centered China history. Two panelists take as their foci literal battlefields, across China and abroad during the first half of the twentieth century. They ask: In what distinct ways did intimacy impact combative versus non-combative work? Inside what appear at first sight to be intimate military collectives, how do individual identities arise? Analyzing two world wars’ battlefields, one closely reads a journal written by a Chinese laborer and examines the “intimate alienation” he experienced while laboring on the transnational, multiracial battlefield of the First World War; the other addresses female ties in a women’s war zone service corp stationed on the Chinese battlefield during the Second World War. Each historicizes military labor intimacy’s racialized and gendered dynamics respectively. The other two panelists examine labor intimacy in the context of Chinese revolutions during the People’s Republic of China (PRC) era, tightening focus to a national scope. While each exposes intricate relatedness of labor relations, both show why emotion, affection, disaffection and so on, are crucial to understanding revolutionary history and intellectual life. The third paper analyzes “rural labor intimacy” as a way that local familial affinities in the 1950s disrupted the labor cooperation envisioned by socialist reforms. Non-kin female closeness, the final paper argues, evoked in the repetitive figuration of the “bosom friends” helps explain crucial qualities of individual attachment found widely in the history of the Chinese Revolution.

Our common question is why the intimacies we locate in race and diaspora, individual and collective, kinship and socialism, gender and revolution are crucial; how our argument that labor intimacy lies at the heart of Chinese modern labor history can be made. Who could foster a sense of closeness with whom, across what existing social logics, and how labor practices bound people together are the larger social dynamics we follow and believe help historians to explain how personhood, revolutionary subjectivity and labor practices got reestablished in twentieth century Chinese politics and social life.