2020/09/17 by Huwy-Min Lucia Liu, Huwy-min Lucia Liu · 5 citations
Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #China #China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance #Chinese history and philosophy #Communism #Corporate governance #Economics #Identity (music) #Law #Management #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Public administration #Sociology #State (computer science) #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1017/s0021911820002260
published in The Journal of Asian Studies 80(1), 49-71 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.