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This essay focuses on the cultural representation of hands as a lens through which to examine the reappraisal of manual labor in the Mao era. Efforts to represent labor as “glorious,” I argue, required a two-pronged transformation from existing dominant discourses. First, cultural producers aimed to reverse the assumption that labor was “dirty” by rebranding workers’ hands as physically and ideologically pure against the polluted bourgeoisie. Second, I draw upon the Arendtian distinction between “labor” and “work” to argue that labor was transmuted from cyclical, meaningless toil into durable and expressive “work” through magical representations of the peasants’ touch. However, efforts to glorify labor as a clean, durable craft in the volatile political climate of the socialist period presented major challenges. Through careful analysis of a 1952 war poster Mao’s  Quotations , shifting depictions of night-soil collector Shi Chuanxiang, and Zhao Shuli’s 1960 short story “The Unglovable Hands,” this essay illustrates how cultural producers grappled with unstable allegiances and paradoxes in the Party line, with hands repeatedly emerging as a fault line on which critical questions converged and political battles were waged.

Hands at Work Labor, Hygiene, and Mechanization in Maoist Culture