Affective and Effective Socialist Realism: Nicknames, Cinematic Storytelling, and Temporal Composition in Zhao Shuli’s Sanliwan Village

Chinese socialist realism grew out of the political agenda of educating the masses on the inevitability of class struggle, and out of the need of mobilizing them to contribute to the building of a socialist society. Scholarship has variously elucidated the limits and potentialities of socialist realism as an aesthetic practice at the service of a political project, but the question of whether or how socialist realism mobilized people begs for more reflection. This paper investigates the efficacy of socialist realism as a technology of education and mobilization through a fresher reading of one of the hallmarks of socialist-realist fiction, Zhao Shuli’s (1906-1970) Sanliwan Village (1955). More specifically, it explores how Zhao’s text performs, structurally and formally, the process underlying the subject’s transformation into a new socialist being. The analysis of features such as the usage of nicknames, the adoption of “cinematic storytelling,” as well as the artful handling of speed and rhythm in the temporal composition of the novel, sheds light on the textual strategies that produce an affective and effective narrative. As an affective narrative, the novel ultimately points to socialist realism’s apparent effort to present socialist-subject formation not simply as an effect of discursive practices, but also as the outcome of a heightened material and affective engagement with the outside world.