This talk explores how notions of masculinity were shaped within the context of workshop cultures, homosocial interactions, and heterosexual relationships in the People’s Republic of China during the early 1970s. It draws upon the personnel dossier of a male worker from the Nantong Municipal Steel Rolling Mill, contextualised and corroborated with archival documents, contemporaneous operational manuals, heavy industry periodicals, textbooks, and newspapers. It argues that there were politically and socially conflicting notions of masculinity within the mill community that were ingrained via everyday work and life, and dynamically reworked by societal and industrial practices, in addition to social engineering efforts of the Chinese Communist Party. The proletariat, ‘rough’ manhood configured among men, and their interactions with women, which were reinforced by the mill’s homosociality, negotiated and challenged state visions that emphasized self-control and a strong work ethic

Amanda Zhang is Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck,
University of London. Dr Zhang is a historian of 20th-century China with a focus on gender and social history.