Smoking, Discipline, and Desire: Re-Coding the Political Body from Lu Xun’s Iconography
August 27, 2025
People today argue heatedly about whether murals of Lu Xun¹ should depict his classic image of smoking. Opponents regard the reproduction of such a vice as a stain upon Lu Xun’s purity of stance and a denigration of his character, aimed at invisibly weakening his revolutionary force. Others sharply counter that the perfection of Lu Xun’s moral integrity into a pure image is in fact a neutralization, ultimately serving conservative rulers. Smoking, undeniably, was historically a signifier produced by the political mobilization of the body, yet today it has become a token for signaling political allegiance. This inversion of causality indicates, in effect, the ebbing of the political itself. What seems to me most worthy of inquiry is the coding of smoking as a politicized act—or, more broadly, the coding of politicized bodies and desires—under what kinds of pressures it is situated. For instance: at what point did the political image of leftist revolutionaries shift away from asceticism, moving instead toward the exuberant vitality inscribed by smoking and drinking—practices once condemned as the decadent habits of corrupt rulers? And how did the bodily aesthetics of right-wing reactionaries evolve into increasingly ascetic forms, as in the Nazi ideal of restraint and purity? I would surmise that behind this lies not only ideological struggle but also a re-encoding of the body and desire: revolution requires charisma², while reaction demands order.
On the one hand, leftist revolutionaries often initially appeared in ascetic guise. In early propaganda photographs of Lenin and Trotsky, the body was plain, life was simple, pleasure was shunned—set in contrast to the decadence and parasitism of their capitalist adversaries. Asceticism itself became political capital, symbolizing revolutionary purity and discipline. But from the mid-twentieth century, the situation began to change. In the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War, cigarettes were nearly indispensable for soldiers and workers. The state distributed them on a mass scale; on the battlefield, cigarettes stood alongside bread and vodka as symbols of morale and collectivism. The Communist Party never implemented anything like the Nazi anti-smoking campaigns; on the contrary, tobacco taxes became an important fiscal resource. In the Chinese Communist regime, tobacco was almost inseparable from politics. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping were all heavy smokers; cigarettes circulated as gifts between cadres and the masses, becoming part of political ritual. In postwar guerrilla movements and Third World liberation struggles (Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba, guerrillas across Latin America and Africa), there emerged a new vitalist image: cigar smoke curling, rugged combat poses, heavy drinking, brotherly camaraderie. Within this revolutionary romanticism, bodily indulgence and perilous enjoyment became signs of “vitality,” even entwined with sexual attractiveness—a motif especially prominent in the imagery of the 1968 generation. Revolutionary legitimacy was thereby partially transmuted into vitality and passion: no longer “restraint,” but an impassioned impulse to resist oppression, justifying rebellion through desire or, as Schopenhauer would call it, the will-to-life³. This resonated closely with the countercultural movements and the existentialist vitalism of the postwar era.
If the Nazi anti-smoking campaigns can be seen as an effective form of biopower—where discourses on producing healthy racial offspring reinforced authority—then the postwar embrace of smoking and drinking by the left may be read as a counter to this all-pervasive biopower. Through gestures of self-expenditure or over-burning (a near cliché of revolutionary charisma resides in their willingness to “burn themselves up,” to devote life to a non-utilitarian, passion-filled cause), revolutionaries rejected incorporation into the state’s carefully calculated health-and-efficiency regime, declaring the body to be individual, passionate, and irrational. Overall, in this confrontation, the rhetorical strategies mobilized differ: reaction emphasizes discipline and order, while revolution foregrounds impulse and resistance. The former deploys a repertoire of ascetic signifiers; the latter, antagonistically, creates a repertoire that affirms desire. Yet these bodily aesthetics are not simply opposed, but at different historical moments have borrowed, appropriated, and even exchanged their political efficacy.
Returning to Lu Xun’s mural image: opponents of his smoking depiction, whether or not they realize it, seek to fashion him as a pure, healthy figure whose spiritual value can be safely invested in by posterity—an asset folded into the national narrative, an innocuous idol for veneration, ultimately in the service of biopower. Advocates of preserving the smoking image, on the other hand, in resisting this “body as asset,” unwittingly summon back the “body as sovereignty.” Yet this discourse of defiance and anti-institutionality cannot help but be entangled with historically gendered participation, reinforcing the misogyny inherent in such masculinized passion: for the sake of struggle, they are willing to exalt the cigarette as a “phallus of power,” a gesture of intellectual virility hurling the harshest provocation against a decrepit, feminized old culture. (sic)
1. Lu Xun occupied an unmistakably leftist position, but his relation to the Chinese Communist Party was marked by distance and tension. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he openly supported progressive causes, collaborated with leftist cultural groups such as the League of Left-Wing Writers, and defended young writers persecuted for their radicalism. Yet he was deeply skeptical of party orthodoxy and organizational discipline. His sharp critiques of sectarianism, bureaucratism, and formulaic “revolutionary literature” soon estranged him from Communist cadres. While celebrated by many younger Marxist intellectuals as a revolutionary mentor, Lu Xun himself resisted assimilation into the party’s cultural machinery, insisting that literature must remain critical, satirical, and uncompromising toward all forms of authority. His works consistently retained a restless, counter-appropriative edge, shaping his paradoxical stance: committed to social transformation but unwilling to yield to a party-centered conception of literature.
2. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969).
4. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
5. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241–42.
6. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
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