Twentieth-Century China

Abstract:

Providing a sound track to a previously silent historiography, this article excavates a media history of the wireless and wired soundscape in Mao-era China. In 1949, China had only about one million radio sets, concentrated in urban “bourgeois” homes, but the Communist Party quickly expanded its listening public through a “radio reception network” and by the 1970s had constructed a wired broadcasting infrastructure with more than 100 million loudspeakers that revolutionized time and space, politics and everyday life. Drawing on archives, gazetteers, memoirs, and oral histories, this article examines the state-sponsored development of radio broadcasting as well as grassroots listening experiences and practices. I argue that radios and loudspeakers— rather than enthralling the nation with the party’s monotonous voice—contributed to the Chinese revolution in heterogeneous ways, from political communication to labor mobilization, from propaganda to surveillance, from enhancing the Mao cult to engendering violence and terror.