Heroes, Hooligans, and Knights-Errant: Masculinities and Popular Media in the Early People’s Republic of China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is an exploration of media and gender in urban and peri-urban China during the 1950s and early 1960s – specifically, the persistent trope of the “hooligan,” or liumang . Since at least the late imperial period, Chinese authorities had feared unmarried, impoverished, rootless men as the main source of crime, disorder, and outright rebellion. Yet such figures were simultaneously celebrated as knights-errant for their violent heroism in cultural works of enormous popularity across regions and classes. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party attempted to reshape society and culture after 1949, it condemned knight-errant tales and made hooliganism a crime. At the same time, the state tried to promote a new pantheon of vigilante-like men in the guise of revolutionary heroes. But the state’s control over deeply rooted cultural markets and their products was incomplete. Moreover, the same potent tools that had empowered the Party, in particular its rhetoric of revolutionary subjectivity and its harnessing of modern media technologies, were open as never before to being adopted by the very targets of its efforts at control and censure. Marginal masculinity in the early PRC, though in many ways continuous with that in China during the previous decades and centuries, marked a new epoch: men and boys deemed hooligans were able to speak out and defend themselves as heroes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".