How to study emotions in a historical context? Politics of fear in China’s Cultural Revolution

There is a growing interest in studying emotions in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Taken the Cultural Revolution as a case study, I will discuss how we can analyze historical events from a new perspective and how we can bring back the individual into the center of analysis. I will argue that emotions  help us to understand politics from “below”.

Mass movements like the Cultural Revolution generate fear and anxieties, and politics provides politically correct mechanisms and role models how we can cope with these overwhelming feelings. Consequently, the ideology of the Cultural Revolution creates a stable system of “emotional manipulation“ to exist, enabling authorities to open up spaces for individuals to perceive themselves in politically defined states of joy and frustration.

Based on analysis of published diaries of Red Guards and interviews in China, I will discuss some examples of these emotional manipulations and their long-term impact on individual identities.

Sascha Klotzbücher is an associate professor for Chinese Studies at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. After writing a PhD thesis on health care issues and conducting a project on health care for semi-nomadic Kazak pastoralists in Xinjiang, he was the principal investigator of the project “Our own shadow of the Cultural Revolution: Transgenerational transmission and the affective foundations of contemporary Chinese society” funded by the Austrian Science Foundation. Based on extensive conversations with family members in Wuhan between 2006-2021, the main results are published in a monograph in German in 2019 as his habilitation thesis. Sascha worked previously as post-doc assistant professor at the University of Vienna and as acting professor at the University of Göttingen, research stays in Wuhan, Shihezi, Taipei and Stanford.