Pulling Strings at the Margins: Blind Storytellers and the Politics of Survival in Socialist China, 1938–1977

This article examines the mobilization and governance of blind storytellers in Southeast Shanxi from 1938 to 1977, arguing that disabled bodies occupied a structurally ambivalent position within the Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary project. Their mobility, endurance, and bodily labor enabled the extension of state power into rural society and were endowed with political value. However, these same qualities proved increasingly incompatible with socialist labor regimes organized around standardized productivity and administrative control. As a result, blind storytellers were progressively reclassified from effective propagandists into marginal or welfare-dependent subjects. Drawing on local archives and oral histories, this article shows how revolutionary inclusion did not resolve social difference but reorganized it, producing new forms of differentiated value and exclusion. The case of blind storytellers thus reveals a fundamental tension within socialist governance between incorporation and control.