Social Suffering and Political Confession

This book closely examines one relatively small but significant political phenomenon — Suku in Revolutionary China through a matrix of western social theory: Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum. By interpreting Suku from the joint perspectives of political identity and subjective psychological identity, the aim of the book is to postulate a new paradigm for discussing social suffering and collective confession in a political context that represents the radical transformation in China's modern history. This book presents an analysis of the transformation of identity from the traditional to the modern, both for the individual peasant and for the state of China.