Skip to content

Centre for Cultural Research and Development 文化研究及發展中心

Factory Humanisms: Imagining the Post-Socialist Factory in China’s 1980s

Keywords

The Chinese cultural and intellectual scene of the 1980s was marked by an intense proliferation of interest in the figure of the human (ren). In sharp distinction from the theoretical anti-humanism of the Maoist period, a range of theoreticians and writers drew on the categories offered by Marx’s early writings, such as the 1844 Manuscripts, including notions of species-being, creative labour, and alienation. This project takes the emergence of a humanist Marxism at this historical juncture as a point of departure for thinking about the transformation of the factory and its workers during this crucial decade. The figure of the human served as the legitimating category for a whole range of intellectual and cultural discourses, encompassing not only from theoretical debates within Marxism but also the newly-emergent management practices of behavioural science, industrial design, and workplace psychology. By tracing the post-socialist articulations of the human, this study shows the entanglements between humanism on the one hand and the developmental temporalities of the post-revolutionary era on the other.

Principal Investigator:
Benjamin KINDLER