The material culture of Maoist China has long been overlooked, notably because of the scarcity of available commodities. But precisely because objects were rare and difficult to obtain, people attributed significant meanings to materials. This shared assessment led two historians of modern China, Jennifer Altehenger (Oxford University) and Denise Y. Ho (Yale University), to gather a group of scholars to discuss Mao's China material culture (i.e. objects that are made and used). This book is the final result of a conference series that took place between 2017 and 2019. How were things produced? How did they circulate? How were they used? Paying attention to the material landscape is a stimulating way of studying people's experience of Chinese socialism.
The first two chapters illustrate how state authorities tried to imbue familiar materials with new meanings. Chapter one (Jennifer Altehenger) explores this process with the example of bamboo objects – bamboo being a local material with a long history. Chapter two (Cole Roskam) deals with bricks and how they materialized socialist modernity. Bricks became popular because they could be made widely available; their preponderance in China's built environment came to signify advances in construction as well as material constraints. Chapter three (Christine I. Ho) explores intellectual discussions about how to create design and design pedagogy for socialist China, a process that took place in many other countries in search of their indigenous identity which, as in Mexico or Japan, fostered folk craft movements. What should a socialist object be, and what should it look like? For Chinese intellectuals, Chinese socialist design was intricately bound up with folk-national handicraft, but plans proved difficult to enact once state collectivization and centralization obliterated those traditions.
Chapter four (Emily Wilcox) deals with dance props, from fans and scarves to tea baskets and water buckets. Props were an indispensable part of performances as dance was institutionalized to be an important component of China's socialist culture. They played a key role because they served as “object mediators,” material objects that allowed dancers to embody socialist ideas. Dance props provided a physical medium through which urban and rural performers interacted with one another and urban dancers learned to portray rural characters on stage. Chapter five (Jie Li) considers the infrastructure used by mobile projectionists who travelled around the country to show films outdoors: generators, projectors, screens and films, as well as bamboo clappers and lantern slides. Cinema is looked at as a medium that transmitted propaganda to mobilize the masses, while projectionists, like dancers, are examined as mediators between objects and bodies. In chapter six, Denise Y. Ho talks about “outside objects,” carried or mailed from Hong Kong and Macau to mainland China. Despite border controls established after 1949, members of the diaspora continued to visit relatives and send “small packets” to their families. Here, objects materialized and reconfigured social relations. In the same way that the material technology of cinema mediated propaganda, mailed goods transmitted messages – “material propaganda” – that ran contrary to that of the state.
For many people, everyday life was marked by material shortages, at a time when the regime was promising abundance. Chapter seven (Laurence Coderre) traces how the problem of plenty and need was theorized and explained to a general audience. In chapter eight, Madeleine Yue Dong deals with the transformation of Beijing's food industry and landscape in the 1950s. Although citizens’ food experience was changed, consumers continued to have opinions about produce and made choices where they could. Chapter nine (Jacob Eyferth) deals with the material divide between rural and urban China. While urban residents could consume luxury objects like wristwatches or bicycles, China's rural material culture was made up of non-commodified produce and products grown on local land and fashioned from local resources. Chapter ten (Covell F. Meyskens) studies the Second Auto Works factory in rural Hubei as a case study of material austerity and reveals that not everyone could adjust to such harsh material conditions.
Overall, the ten chapters lead to some important results. First, they reveal the contradictions of the first three decades of the PRC. The regime did not assume scarcity as a goal; on the contrary, its appeal and legitimacy relied on the promise of plenty for all. But it needed to demonstrate abundance, whether real or promised, and at the same time distinguish it from consumerist excess. Representations of material plenty worked together with actual scarcity to produce a culture where sacrifice was valorized. Second, the book shows how objects of different kinds became political. Some were seen as symbols of national achievement (bamboo and bricks), others – such as objects sent from Hong Kong – were associated with the enemy. Third, several chapters challenge the perceptions that China was a complete autarky or that its connections were limited to the confines of the socialist bloc. In reality, China was part of a global system; its international relations influenced people's everyday lives, from screenings of foreign films to food shortages exacerbated by the export of grain.
In addition to the variety of subjects covered, the richness of the book – and the pleasure derived from reading it – lies in the wide range of sources used: Party publications, popular media, general magazines, professional journals, comic books, technical manuals, as well as guidebooks, texts written by intellectuals, propaganda posters, films or customs regulations. The reader travels from rural to urban China, from construction sites to restaurant kitchens, from cinemas to car factories. This book confirms how important it is for historical research to draw on a wide variety of sources to capture the depth of everyday life.
