Factory Humanisms: Technical Aesthetics, Sino-Soviet Encounters, and the Fashioning of the Postsocialist Factory in Reform-Era China

The reemergence of aesthetics in China’s early reform period witnessed a wide-ranging embrace of the early Marxist vocabulary of species-being, alienation, and unalienated labor, in tandem with a wave of interest in developments in Soviet aesthetics that had arisen over the 1960s and 1970s. Above al...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modern China 2025-01, Vol.51 (1), p.34-68
Main Author: Kindler, Benjamin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Alienation
Humanism
Maoism
Marxist analysis
Postcommunist societies
Reforms
Vocabulary
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Summary:The reemergence of aesthetics in China’s early reform period witnessed a wide-ranging embrace of the early Marxist vocabulary of species-being, alienation, and unalienated labor, in tandem with a wave of interest in developments in Soviet aesthetics that had arisen over the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, Chinese aestheticians were enthused by the Soviet field of “technical aesthetics,” which marked those currents in Soviet aesthetic thought that extended the possibilities of beauty beyond the delimited space of the artwork or literary creation to envision how factory labor might become an aesthetic process, simultaneously productive and artistic. By tracing the trajectory of these currents of aesthetic thought against the background of Marxist humanism, I show the ways in which Soviet–Chinese aesthetic encounters conditioned the fashioning of the post-Maoist factory as creative space and the postsocialist figure of the human as creative laborer.
ISSN:0097-7004
1552-6836
DOI:10.1177/00977004241259381