Living with the Party: How Leisure Shaped a New China

ISBN-13: 9789819902071 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 284 str.

Yifan Shi

Opis

This book explores the subcultures, cultural trends and regulations of leisure and subcultures among young people in Beijing from 1949 to the 1980s. It complicates our understanding of the successes of the CCP and the nature of those successes—more a synergy or synthesis than victory over society or defeat. It argues that while the CCP aimed to direct the most private sphere in people’s everyday life (i.e., leisure), it did not achieve this goal by coercive means, but by appealing ways through organized leisure activities. This book suggests that although elements of youth subcultures can be observed throughout the Mao era, we should not treat them as a way of passive resistance. Instead, we must position these subcultures between different layers of the Party’s leisure regulation to examine what the CCP actually achieved. Many people who engaged in subcultures defied the blatant politicization of their leisure, some might have defied the process of collectivization, but few defied the process of institutionalization during which people did not find state intervention contradictory to their own way of pleasure-seeking. This book also suggests that instead of regarding the Deng Xiaoping era as a breakaway from Maoist interventionist rule, we need to see the historical continuity as revealed by the Party’s uninterrupted policy of leisure regulation. Thought provoking and at times amusing, this book will interest sinologists, historians, and scholars of China's social form.

Spis treści

Table of Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of Acronyms

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 A Happy New World: The Communist Takeover of Leisure

Chapter 3 Temporal Politics in Beijing, 1949–1956

Chapter 4 Youth Subcultures, Leisure Regulation, and Community Life, 1955–1962

Chapter 5 Anxiety about Difference: Politicization and Stratification in Leisure, 1962–1966

Chapter 6 Exiting the Revolution: Alternative Ways of Life and the Institutionalization of Leisure, 1966–1976

Chapter 7 Epilogue

References

O autorze

​Yifan Shi is Assistant Professor of modern Chinese history and politics at School of Politics and International Relations, East China Normal University. 

Blurb

This book explores the subcultures, cultural trends and regulations of leisure and subcultures among young people in Beijing from 1949 to the 1980s. It complicates our understanding of the successes of the CCP and the nature of those successes—more a synergy or synthesis than victory over society or defeat. It argues that while the CCP aimed to direct the most private sphere in people’s everyday life (i.e., leisure), it did not achieve this goal by coercive means, but by appealing ways through organized leisure activities. This book suggests that although elements of youth subcultures can be observed throughout the Mao era, we should not treat them as a way of passive resistance. Instead, we must position these subcultures between different layers of the Party’s leisure regulation to examine what the CCP actually achieved. Many people who engaged in subcultures defied the blatant politicization of their leisure, some might have defied the process of collectivization, but few defied the process of institutionalization during which people did not find state intervention contradictory to their own way of pleasure-seeking. This book also suggests that instead of regarding the Deng Xiaoping era as a breakaway from Maoist interventionist rule, we need to see the historical continuity as revealed by the Party’s uninterrupted policy of leisure regulation. Thought provoking and at times amusing, this book will interest sinologists, historians, and scholars of China's social form.

Yifan Shi is Assistant Professor of modern Chinese history and politics at School of Politics and International Relations, East China Normal University.