When below met above: Hand-copied novels of the Chinese cultural revolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis offers a critical examination of shouchao ben (hand-copied manuscript) novels in socialist China. Although the Chinese Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966–1976) is often researched as a period of political rigidity and cultural scarcity, hand-copied novels, among other popular cultures, circulated informally among youth and intellectuals. Drawing on manuscripts collected in China, I explore how the realms of popular literature and official literature interacted during this period. Through close analysis of key themes such as temporality, spatiality, and emotion, I demonstrate how so-called underground hand-copied literature engaged with aboveground literary norms instead of simply opposing them. I argue that hand-copied novels represent a vibrant cultural practice that blurred the boundary between state-sanctioned and popular literature, a binary that obscures the convivial coexistence of official and unofficial literary aesthetics. Chapter One focuses on The Second Handshake. The prevailing Mao style, with its emphasis on literature’s role in advancing socialist progress, promotes a futuristic temporality of socialism. I suggest that The Second Handshake presents an alternative, backward-looking temporality that almost resists socialism’s future-oriented vision. Chapter Two analyzes three novels depicting spectral, ghost-like female killers within the spatial logic of the spy thriller. As these texts imagine dangerous femininity and hidden spaces, the conspiratorial narratives resonate with state projects to construct underground living spaces and with the political rumors circulating at the time. I show that these hand-copied novels reflect a deep-seated paranoia of Cold War China, rather than remaining in an underground realm isolated from reality. This thesis moves beyond the dichotomy of underground versus aboveground when studying socialist China. In doing so, it joins the growing scholarship on the People’s Republic of China in rethinking the complexity of Mao-era cultural production
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".