PPLMEC · Politics and Practices of Listening in Mao era People's Republic of China.

Politics and Practices of Listening in Mao era People's Republic of China.

This interdisciplinary project explores the politics and practices of sound and listening in the Mao era People’s Republic of China (PRC), their interpretation and their impact on social and intellectual change. It does so through an innovative three-tiered analysis of the use and apprehension of sound at state, local, and individual levels. Sound played a central role in state-building in the Mao era. Radio, megaphones, fixed speakers, and recording technologies were used to relay messages to audiences beyond the literate, to pass on Mao’s voice, and as weapons against class enemies. In the process, the primacy of text over voice was inverted as a literati culture built on quiet study became a land of sound and voice. While we know of the material conditions of state use of sound, no study has sought to understand either the intellectual history behind state initiatives or the social and cultural impact of this effort. Understandings of listening, sound, and the individual reflected in state initiatives are unexplored, as are how ways of listening transformed in response. The state had clear goals, but how people apprehended or misapprehended sonic propaganda, how they contested or worked around the sounds controlled by the state, remains to be explored, as does how sound, soundscapes, and listening were negotiated between state and citizen in the Mao era. Sound-studies as a field has matured and its approaches and theories may be applied to the PRC, but thus far it has been so directed in very few cases. Sources for studies of sound in the PRC have previously been limited. However, now we have available state, local, and individual sources that enable such a study to proceed. This study, by drawing in underexplored elements to deepen our understanding of the rising international power of the 21st century, will contribute to both the fields of modern Chinese social and political history and sound-studies. Modern Chinese history, with a few notable exceptions, has largely remained a visually or textually oriented endeavour. Sound studies, for its part, has remained largely Eurocentric. Uniting the two will interrogate the assumptions of, and return important results to, both fields. For sound-studies, it offers, through the counter-example of China, an opportunity to explore which aspects of listening and making sound are universal, and which are culturally and historically contingent. It offers also the first system-wide attempt to study how state goals for sound met local and individual conditions, and how cultures of listening were negotiated through this process. For Chinese history, it explores a neglected aspect of the relationship between citizen and state in the formative years of the new global superpower. The sensory focus of the project will also help to deepen understandings of the politics and culture of the PRC

Data: CORDIS, © European Union