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

The history of Maoist China is usually told as a sequence of political campaigns: land and marriage reform, nationalization of industry, anti-rightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc. Yet for the majority of the Chinese population, the promise of socialism was as much about material improvements as it was about political change: a socialist revolution would bring about “two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones” (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua), 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 absence of such changes and the persistence of older patterns of material life under a new, socialist veneer. At the methodological level, we ask how Material Culture and Everyday Life approaches help us understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about. How do we read people's life experiences out of the material record of their lives?