130 • A Face in the Crowd A Face in the Crowd: Imagining Individual and Collective Disabled Identities in Contemporary China † Sarah Dauncey Introduction Images of mass action, notions of crowd mentality, and the importance of group identification are extremely familiar to anyone acquainted with recent periods of modern Chinese history, and it is clear that the legacy of events such as the Cultural Revolution have influenced semantic and metaphoric reflections of group behavior to this day. 1 Some scholars have even argued that Chinese society has become acclimatized to the simplification of complex issues through the use of particular generalizing terminology such as propaganda slogans (Lu 2004), and that individuals have become attuned to recognizing “themselves” in archetypal representations, visual or otherwise, of functional constituencies—peasant, soldier, worker, cadre, intellectual, ethnic minority, for example—that are simultaneously anonymous and familiar (Saussy 2006: 261). What has yet to be ascertained, however, is whether similarly sweeping labels and archetypal representations apply to disability and disabled people in China today and, if they do indeed exist, where they originate, how they are articulated, and how disabled individuals and groups respond to them. † I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valu- able suggestions. I would also like to thank Tim Wright and Lily Chen for their feedback, which, as always, has helped to bring this work to fruition. 1 This is not to suggest that earlier imperial conceptualizations have not had an equally important part to play, as Haun Saussy (2006) shows in his brief but illuminating discussion of crowds, numbers, and the masses in China.