Everyday Maoism: Revolution, Daily Life, and Material Culture in Socialist China

Undergraduate / Graduate

The history of Maoist China is usually told as a sequence of political campaigns, from land reform to the Cultural Revolution. Yet for the majority of the Chinese population, the promise of socialism was as much about material transformations as it was about political change: a socialist revolution would bring better living conditions, new work regimes and new consumption patterns. If we want to understand what socialism meant for different groups of people, we have to look at the "new objects" of socialist modernity, at changes in dress codes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning - or at the persistence of an older material life under a new socialist veneer. In this course, we will analyze workplaces in order to understand how socialism changed the way people worked, and look at rationing and consumption in the households to see how socialism affected them at home. We will look at how specific objects came to stand in for the Maoist revolution, for socialist modernity, or for feudal backwardness. The course has a strong comparative dimension: we will read some of the literature on socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to see how Chinese socialism differed from its cousins. Another aim is methodological. How can we understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about? To which extent can we read people's life experiences out of the material record of their lives?