CrossAsia Talk: Tang Sanjiao: Lives in Mao-Era Militias under the Mass Mobilisation and Militarisation Context

Mr. TANG Sanjiao (University of Auckland, New Zealand), scholarship holder of the grant program of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, will give a lecture on his current research topic „Lives in Mao-Era Militias under the Mass Mobilisation and Militarisation Context“ on 14 May from 6 pm (CET). The lecture will be held in person at Simon-Bolivar-Saal (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Haus Potsdamer Straße, Potsdamer Str. 33, Berlin-Germany) and online via Webex (link: https://spk-berlin.webex.com/spk-berlin/j.php?MTID=mb45155323f93fd69b19743762bff8de9). This lecture will be held in English and take place in cooperation with the “Wissenswerkstatt” (https://blog.sbb.berlin/wissenswerkstatt-mai-24/)
Abstract:
In China today, the younger generations are having militarised experiences. Admittedly, military training is a routine thing for students in many countries. Currently, the reviving nationalist trend is making the Chinese young people’s military training different. On the video-sharing platforms popular in China, such as Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), with keywords like “students’ military training,” tens of thousands of videos are well-received. As vividly shown in the videos, the Chinese young people, including children in kindergartens, were learning to have simulative combat with imaginary enemies. Indulging them in burning passion, the younger generations feel as if they were glorious soldiers fighting for the nation.
Surprisingly, many of these young people’s grandparents had paralleling militarised lives when they were young. It was the experiences of being involved in the Mao-era mass mobilisation and militarisation, becoming members of Mao’s militias. In the early 1960s, despite the famine causing tens of millions of deaths, the country was celebrating its militias nationwide maintaining a scale of over two hundred million members. In the mid-1960s, Chinese residents were mobilised to “prepare earlier for fighting a war, a big war, and even a nuclear war.” Resulting from the mass mobilisation and militarisation, as demonstrated by a well-known slogan, seven hundred million Chinese people had all “become soldiers” (qiyi renmin qiyi bing). While it was rhetorically exaggerating, it indicated that the younger generations in Mao’s China were involved as the core forces in the militias.
Through revisiting the experiences of joining Mao-era militias, this research aims to reconsider the legacies of Mao-era mass mobilisation and militarisation. How did the lives in militias shaped their adolescence and early adulthood physically, psychologically, and profoundly? Benefitting from unique sources in the Berlin State Library, this project intends to answer these questions.
The results of the project contribute to understanding the mass-based legacies of Mao-era mobilisation and militarisation. Paying attention to the transgenerational resonance on young people’s involvement in war-preparing campaigns, it helps rethink today’s China, which is an urgent task for not only academics but also analysts and policy-makers worldwide.
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If you have any questions, please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
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