Brutality and Civility in Early Reform-Era China: The “Five Emphases, Four Beautifications” Campaign

This article proposes an interpretation of the “Five Emphases, Four Beautifications” ( wujiang simei ) campaign that was launched in 1981, the first large-scale policy aimed at fostering “civilized” ( wenming ) behavior among citizens of the People’s Republic of China in the reform era. It argues that the campaign started as an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to settle norms of daily behavior and cultivate a new type of post-revolutionary political subject, against a backdrop of widespread concern about brutality, particularly among youths, which was framed as a deep-seated legacy of Cultural Revolution radicalism.