Project Title 

Telephone Girls Moving Towards Innovation: Revisiting the Socialist Gendered Technoculture in Maoist China (1949-1960)

Research Topic

Min's project explores the gendered technological culture and women's subjectivity in socialist China. Taking the Maoist-era telephone girls as a lens, this project will undertake a critical analysis of the state-led re-gendering of technology from the 1950s to the 1970s. Rather than employing a binary framework that simplistically categorises women's experiences as either exploitation or emancipation, this project seeks to examine the multifaceted subjectivities of women within the complex intersections of nationalism, socialism and feminism.

Min’s project is funded by AHRC Studentship

Supervisors

Professor Bingchun Meng & Dr Dylan Mulvin

Biography

Before joining LSE, Min obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Journalism and Communication from Peking University, China. During her six years at Peking University, she developed a keen interest in the history of China's socialist revolution and construction period, which she pursued through active engagement with the South Gate newspaper reading group.

Her undergraduate thesis employs a critical discourse analysis of the CCP's rhetoric of "Glorious Domestic Labor" during the period 1956-1958. It examines the CCP's approach to the contradiction between women's social work and housework and explores a potential avenue for women's empowerment that diverges from the Western women's liberation trajectory. Specifically, it analyzed two stories from the People’s Daily that promote men's participation in domestic labor, which imply that class politics in Maoist China began to change traditional gender relations. This research was awarded the Top Undergraduate Thesis Award in Beijing and subsequently published in Journalism Evolution.