This dissertation examines how the complex relations between the problem of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuozhe) and the challenges of socialist political economy were articulated and navigated in the Chinese Revolution. The point of historical and conceptual departure for this dissertation is Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art in 1942. I argue that the Talks provided a conceptual vocabulary for the problem of cultural production that revolved around the problematic of “life” (shenghuo) as the site of possibility for the fashioning of the culture worker under socialism. The demand that intellectuals “enter into life” (shenru shenghuo) necessitated that writers spend long periods labouring amongst workers and peasants, a demand that sought to suspend an understanding of the masses as a reified abstraction. By the same token, this demand called for a transformation of the culture worker, as well, which was to be felt at the level of subjectivity and embodied experience. The goal was that cultural production might itself be able to intervene in the production of new kinds of social relations, above all relations of labour. The dissertation demonstrates that, across the sustained cultural and economic experiment that was Chinese socialism, the cultural itself became reconfigured as a site of labour as it frequently placed demands upon intellectuals to give up a privileged existence, in order that their bodies and pens might move to a new set of social rhythms and temporalities.

This research examined the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in mathematics before and after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, specifically covering the periods 1952–1965 and 1977–1984. The central focus was on the organization, structure, and content of the examinations, as well as their influence on and interaction with Chinese people and society. A mixed methodology approach was employed, primarily comprising three steps: (1) scrutinizing the sources and coding the information into structured formats, (2) organizing the data and tracking trends and changes, and (3) synthesizing the findings to formulate conclusions. Key findings included: (1) An increase in the number of items from 1979 to 1984, attributed to the introduction of new question formats following international collaboration between China and the United States. (2) A shift in topic coverage from traditional to modern subjects after 1976, reflecting curriculum concerns raised by Chinese mathematicians who advocated for educational content to evolve with societal and human development. (3) A decrease in item difficulty during the post-war and post-revolutionary periods of 1952, 1953, and 1977, reflecting the education system’s recovery from disruption and generally lower quality of teachers and students. (4) A shift toward an exam-oriented approach in teaching and learning, with its negative ramifications leading to criticisms from Chinese society and the eventual abolition of the NCEE system in 1966.

This dissertation presents research on three topics relating to how education is linked to economic development in China. The data are obtained from the 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2013 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). The first essay examines the consequences of the Cultural Revolution. Using the 2003 and 2006 CGSS, the research is able to identify participants in a specific initiative, the “up to the mountains and down to the villages” movement (referred to as the Sentdown Campaign) and the length of time that they were involved in the initiative. The econometric results--including OLS, Heckit and 2SLS methods--provide evidence of substantial negative and long-lasting effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, labor force participation and personal income. Those who were involved in the Sentdown Campaign were found to be able to recoup some of these losses through the accumulation of education after they came back from rural areas, but these were generally not enough to compensate for the overall disruptions the Cultural Revolution caused on them. Furthermore, those who were sent down and stayed for more than five years in the countryside were not able to recuperate any lost years of schooling and, instead, suffered bigger losses in income than any of the other groups discussed in this essay. The second essay examines the attitudes of urban Chinese citizens towards migrants, as obtained using survey data from the 2005 CGSS. Estimating probit equations of the likelihood that the respondents in the sample had positive attitudes towards migrants, the research shows the connections between a range of explanatory variables and these attitudes. Educational attainment is not found to reduce negative attitudes towards migrants, a result that is different from the literature on the determinants of attitudes towards immigrants in recipient countries. The research also finds that as migrant presence grows in workplaces and neighborhoods, urban residents actually become more positive in their attitudes towards migrants. Gender is also found to have a significant impact on attitudes towards migrants. Men tend to have much more positive attitudes towards migrants, perhaps because social conventions frown against urban women having friendships with migrant men, or because the marriage market in urban China favors urban men marrying rural women. The third essay examines the role played by human capital in accounting for income growth in China between 2003 and 2013. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of the growth in individual hourly income shows that the overall role played by human capital on income growth in China during this decade is significant for men but not for women. For men, human capital accounts for 0.1796 in log-income change between 2003 and 2013, which given the total log-income change in this time period for men was 0.9160, represents close to 20 percent of the growth in income in the country. For women, the impact is small and actually negative, equal to -0.0433 out of the 0.8435 increase in log-income during the decade, a result that is mostly the outcome of declining rates of return to education among females.

In “Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France,” I examine how the two countries translated each other’s revolutions during critical moments of political and cultural crisis (the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement (1919), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and May 1968 in France), and subsequently (or simultaneously), how that knowledge was mobilized in practice and shaped the historical contexts in which it was produced. Drawing upon a broad range of discourses including political journals, travel narratives, films and novels in French, English and Chinese, I argue that translation served as a key site of knowledge production, shaping the formulation of various political and cultural projects from constructing a Chinese national identity to articulating women’s rights to thinking about radical emancipation in an era of decolonization. While there have been isolated studies on the influence of the French Revolution in early twentieth-century China, and the impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the development of French Maoism and French theory in the sixties, there have been few studies that examine the circulation of revolutionary ideas and practices across multiple historical moments and cultural contexts. In addition, the tendency of much current scholarship to focus exclusively on the texts of prominent French or Chinese intellectuals overlooks the vital role played by translation, and by non-elite thinkers, writers, students and migrant workers in the cross-fertilization of revolutionary discourses and practices. Given that potential solutions to social and political problems associated with modernity were debated through the recurring circulation of translations (and retranslations) of ideas such as “democracy”, “natural rights,” “women’s rights,” and so on, I examine: who was translating whom, and for what purposes? What specific concepts and values are privileged, and why? Taking translation and translingual contact as my point of departure, I illuminate how French and Chinese intermediaries envisioned and attempted to create a just society under fraught historical conditions.