Before the Law: Literary and Art Works and People’s Sovereignty around Land Reform

Abstract

This paper focuses on imaginative representations of peasants at the “gate” of the law in fiction and graphic arts in different periods, exploring the visualization of regimes and the ways to express the relationship among party, nation and peasants. By imagining and portraying the peasants who “saw” the law in liberated areas, Zhao Shuli’s novels and Gu Yuan’s woodcuts demonstrate changes in the peasants-law relationship—a process the Chinese peasants underwent from merely “seeing” the law in the Republican era to “seeing and participating” in judicial activities in the Yan’an era. As narrative elements and epistemological devices in novels and graphic artworks, objects such as the “gate” play an important role in representing such changes of productive relations.

Key words： peasants; law; door; the people’s sovereignty