Dr. Angie Baecker (University of Hong Kong)

This presentation examines the 1976 film Juelie 决裂 (“Breaking with Old Ideas”), a feature film depicting a fictional account of the founding of the Jiangxi Communist Labor University (江西共产主义劳动大学, or “Gongda” for short.) Like workers’ universities, Gongda gained prominence during the Cultural Revolution for its experimental approach to disrupting the divisions of labor that reproduced inequality. First established in 1958, Gongda was founded with the goal of producing new socialist workers. Its students were taught through a curriculum of “part-work, part-study,” and because it was registered as both a university and a production unit, the university supported its operations through the sale of products from its farms and factories.