What Is an Author during the Cultural Revolution?

UC Berkeley presents Xin Liu's talk about the making of authorship in today's China.

Colloquium: Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies 

Speaker: Xin Liu, Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Moderator: Max Auffhammer, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley 

This paper tries to show that there came, in the context of globalization when the original has become increasingly its own copy (e.g. Baudrillard’s simulacra), a very different making of authorship in today’s China, i.e. different from its Maoist past. The question of “what is an author?” therefore must be raised from the historical horizon of Maoism, and by such a question we mean to show how the function of authorship has changed in society, being different from its recent past. It is through the mirroring effect of the Cultural Revolution, when the literary and artistic authorship did not intend to mark any individuality, that we can comprehend adequately the cultural battles for so-called intellectual property rights, built in assumption of possessive individualism. The argument of the paper is that, only with reference to Maoism that denied not only the copyrights but also all the bourgeois rights, so called and proclaimed then, we may understand the function of authorship in today’s struggles for fame and economic gains, a new game invented for an older tradition, with America, representing modernity and development, taken up as a necessary example of hope and for imitation. As I shall argue, it is in the relationship of Maoism to the present regime that the functionary of authorship, the meaning of a peculiar kind of authority and power, can be understood.

This talk is part of the IEAS Residential Research Fellows series.