Abstract:

This thesis investigates socialist biopolitics and national subjectivity in relation to animal representations in Chinese media culture from the 1940s to the 1970s. Drawing upon biopolitical criticism and animal studies, the present thesis seeks to critically examine how animals, similar to human beings, were subjected to the biopolitical mechanism and hence became the objects of political strategy that contributed to the formation of national subjectivity in socialist China. It probes into the biopolitical governance of animals by exploring pervasive animal representations across multiple media genres, ranging from posters to cartoons, picture-story books to animation. Rather than confining animals to the domain of metaphors, it pursues a materialist approach that considers how different media genres materialized animals which produced aesthetic and political significance.

The biopolitical governance of animals in socialist China was prominently manifested in two ways. First, the Chinese socialist state launched an array of mass mobilizations against animals and dehumanized class enemies which were bound up with the national security dispositifs; second, the formation of national subjectivity epitomized by the creation of socialist new man was based on evolutionary thinking which attempted to rule out animalities from ideal socialist humans. By examining the governance of animals per se as well as their related representations in socialist China, this thesis argues that, while the Chinese socialist biopolitics necessitated the formation of the “pure” national subjectivity by attempting to draw a clear-cut conceptual boundary between humans and animals, this boundary was often complicated and problematized due to the vital human-animal connection that was mediated and materialized in these representations.