Transgenerational transmission of suffering: State violence, memory, and aspiration for alternative intimate lives in contemporary China

Abstract

In constructing a socialist order, Chinese state-raised political movements inflicted violence on families. Drawing on anthropological studies of violence, memory, haunting, affect, and transgenerational transmission, along with ethnographic investigation in Shanghai and Hunan, China, I demonstrate that individual experiences of political suffering will not be self-contained but inevitably be bequeathed to the offspring, shaping both intergenerational relationship and youth knowledge of intimacies. While most anthropologists have explained contemporary Chinese family intimacy through neoliberal cultures, economic privatization, and the one-child policy, I unravel a political history of affective undercurrents and its potential for generating a desire for nonnormative intimacy among the younger generation. I argue that generational relationships in the postviolence era are tripartite not bipartite; families’ aspirations and reproductive practices respond to an unfulfilled state-family reciprocity. This tripartite relationship further suggests that desire formation in socialist nuclear families differs from that in Freudian bourgeois families.