The press also followed Ma’s atonement closely. His life story was told with colorful flourishes, psychological intensity, and even cartoon illustrations in papers like the Shanghai-based Jiefang ribao 解放日報 (Liberation daily). 2Īfter his sentencing, Ma became, briefly, a center of attention in New China’s news media. Three weeks after the government brought charges, Zhou and Shen were sentenced to death, while Ma was assigned to three years’ reform through labor ( laodong gaizao 勞動改造) on a railroad in the remote mountains of Jiangxi. But he had “still been unrepentant” ( rengbu huigai 仍不悔改) after his release, seducing two women with Zhou Ruifu and twenty-eight-year old Shen Xiaoti 沈孝悌 as well as trying to sell off government bonds filched from his parents. Two years earlier, a district court in Shanghai had sentenced him to six months’ jail time for “congregating gangs to fight” ( jiuzhong oudou 糾眾毆鬥). Besides “frequently humiliating women in public places of entertainment” ( jingchang zai gonggong yule changsuo, wuru funü 經常在公共娛樂場所,侮辱婦女), Ma had taken valuables from his parents to cover his friends’ expenses. The indictment related that he had “stepped onto the path of corruption and decay” ( zoushang fuhua duoluo de daolu 走上腐化墮落的道路) at the instigation of another of the thirteen offenders, thirty-year old Zhou Ruifu 周瑞福.
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Ma stood apart from his fellow “hooligans” in age – the group’s average age was twenty-eight – and privilege: he was the son of a factory owner and an American-educated finance expert and had attended a prestigious secondary school. 1 Among these men was nineteen-year-old Ma Xiaoyan 馬小彦. In February 1955, the Shanghai People’s Court tried thirteen “hooligans and bandits” ( liumang daofei 流氓盗匪) who “not only did not reform their ways after repeated correction, but even more severely damaged social order” ( lüjiao bugai, erqie geng yanzhongde pohuai shehui zhixu 屢教不改,而且更嚴重地破壞社會秩序). Marginal masculinity in the early PRC, though in many ways continuous with that in China during the previous decades and centuries, marked a new epoch: men and boys deemed hooligans were able to speak out and defend themselves as heroes. Moreover, the same potent tools that had empowered the Party, in particular its rhetoric of revolutionary subjectivity and its harnessing of modern media technologies, were open as never before to being adopted by the very targets of its efforts at control and censure. But the state’s control over deeply rooted cultural markets and their products was incomplete.
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At the same time, the state tried to promote a new pantheon of vigilante-like men in the guise of revolutionary heroes. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party attempted to reshape society and culture after 1949, it condemned knight-errant tales and made hooliganism a crime. Yet such figures were simultaneously celebrated as knights-errant for their violent heroism in cultural works of enormous popularity across regions and classes.
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Since at least the late imperial period, Chinese authorities had feared unmarried, impoverished, rootless men as the main source of crime, disorder, and outright rebellion. This article is an exploration of media and gender in urban and peri-urban China during the 1950s and early 1960s – specifically, the persistent trope of the “hooligan,” or liumang.