Love is counter-revolutionary

The argument

Romantic love, desire - the importance of these pales in comparison to the importance and joy that serving the state brings. People in the People's Republic of China were expected to renounce romantic love, seeing it as a "psychosomatic activity that consumes energy and wastes time". That characterisation carries the argument's central move: it treats love not as a moral failing but as an inefficiency, a drain on finite personal resources that could otherwise be directed elsewhere. Romantic love places the importance of the individual over that of the collective. The objection on this view is structural rather than puritanical. An attachment to one particular person creates an obligation that competes with obligations owed to everyone else, and a society organised around collective purpose cannot allow such a private claim to take precedence over the shared one. Physical attraction and love when choosing a partner should not be considered material; the only way to ensure a partnership that is "forever green" is to ensure both parties have "revolutionary feelings". The reasoning applies a test of durability. Attraction is held to be temporary and therefore an unreliable foundation for a lasting union, whereas shared political commitment is something both parties continue to hold and to act on, so a partnership resting on it is argued to be the more stable of the two. The only authentic, real love is love of the cause and the state. This is the area in which citizens should direct all of their passion, and citizens should be able to completely focus on work in the day without being distracted by romantic love. The claim is not that passion should be extinguished but that it should be redirected: the capacity is treated as fixed in quantity and variable in its object, so whatever is withheld from private attachment becomes available to collective work. As an account of what love is, it shows how completely the concept can be shaped by the society that holds it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the example illustrates an ideological attempt to suppress or redirect romantic love, which actually presupposes that romantic love exists universally and had to be actively discouraged — one does not campaign against something culturally non-existent. That a regime tried to replace private love with love of the state is evidence of politics acting on a shared human emotion, not of the emotion itself being culturally constructed. The persistence and eventual resurgence of romantic love in China, despite official disapproval, suggests it is a robust cross-cultural phenomenon that ideology can shape but not create or abolish. So the case may support 'love is a societal tool,' a sibling position, more than it shows the underlying notion of love is genuinely culture-specific rather than universally felt and variously governed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A campaign to suppress romantic love presupposes that it exists and is felt strongly enough to require discouragement, which points to a universal emotion being governed rather than to a culturally constructed notion. [Rejecting P2] Romantic love persisted and resurged in China despite official disapproval, suggesting ideology can shape but not create or abolish it, so the example does not show the notion of love is genuinely culture-specific.