Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao's
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Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China by Yu Wang A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctoral of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Yu Wang 2019 Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China Yu Wang Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Toronto 2019 Abstract My dissertation argues that radio played vital roles in state building and social integration in the 1950s and 1960s China. Radio as a technological infrastructure brought about a series of radical changes that fundamentally affected the state’s self-perception as well as its agenda in transforming everyday life. My dissertation demonstrates that the acoustic state heavily utilized the senses and techniques of hearing and listening. The state incorporated listening techniques into government bodies during the management of everyday life to inform, educate and mobilize the masses and to modernize the country. The techniques of speaking and their institutionalization in return signaled the state’s efforts to search for and naturalize a voice for its presence in daily life. The dissemination of the voice further gave birth to a new type of state- agents, the radio operators, who carried radio sets with them to areas beyond the reach of electricity. As radio became integral to listeners’ work and life, it triggered further political and social changes, one of which was that listeners learned to circumvent local authorities and contact the higher-level radio stations for solving their concerns. Listeners also became not only selective in listening to state-sanctioned programs but also curious enough to transgress the state’s acoustic boundary to listen to radio programs from abroad. Radio also played a crucial role in drawing the boundaries between enemies and people, which was crucial to the creation ii and maintenance of the socialist regime. Such transgressive listeners prompted the state to perceive sound as sovereign territory and consequently led it to territorialize sound to defend itself from the sonic invasion of capitalist countries. To conclude, radio not only equipped the state with new techniques of governance but also fundamentally changed the way the state interacted with the masses, reshaping socialist modernity and subjectivity. iii Acknowledgments Finishing up this dissertation has taken a bit longer than I originally anticipated. I was admitted to the Ph.D. program in 2012 to further expand my project on a topic in late Qing legal history. This anticipated trajectory went awry at a conference dinner in summer 2013. While chatting with a professor about researching in mainland China, I was told that PRC history was the most urgent subject that historians could do because many witnesses of that period are aging and dying without their accounts of the history being recorded. PRC historians, he added, had an extra duty to rescue history from time. Now, sitting at the table and finishing the last pages of my dissertation, I think PRC history may not be the most important subject a historian can do, but definitely one of the most difficult to wrestle with, in both the ivory tower and reality. At that time, I was very interested in sound studies, a field that I was fascinated with after taking a film class for my M.A. program at Dartmouth College. My first visit to the Hebei Provincial Archive allowed me to check out their collection on radio broadcasting, with files dated from 1949 to the 1990s. The first few hundreds of pages I read, copied and xeroxed there allowed me to zoom in and take a closer look at the intersection between politics and technology and their acoustic consequences. Coming back from the field, I started to prepare myself for the forthcoming comprehensive exam and oral defense. I still remembered how Professor Yiching Wu was shocked when realizing that I was going to do something entirely different from the exam questions on the day of the defense. Professor Li Chen, who is my supervisor, has been not only sympathetic to my topic but also generously supported it. Despite his busy schedule, he has spent many hours carefully and patiently reading, editing, and commenting on various versions of chapter drafts. His insights were instrumental to the current shape my dissertation is taking. I also thank Professors Tong Lam, Andre Schmid, Thomas Lahusen, and Yuzhou Zhong for reading earlier chapter drafts of my chapters and offered valuable insights. The inspiring conversations I had with Professors Ruoyun Bai and Ping-chun Hsiung allowed me to think about my research from the perspectives of media scholars and sociologists. My appreciation also goes to the Critical China Studies group, particularly Professors Joan Judge, Josh Fogel, Meng Yue, and Evie Gu, where I received critical and yet positive feedbacks on my writings, and to Professors Andrew Jones from UC Berkeley, Xiaobing Tang from the University of Michigan, Nichole Huang from the Hong Kong University as well as Cheng-pang Yang from the University of Toronto for reading and commenting on my papers at the AAS conferences in the iv past few years. Xi Chen and Yunwen Gao have read three chapters in our online workshop over the past few months. Ling Kang, a colleague and soul mate, read whatever I sent to him and always returned insightful comments in time. Chris C.P. Cheng in my cohort was of great help in reading and editing several chapters as I try to pull them together. I appreciate the research support I received from various institutions and individuals. It would be impossible to write this dissertation without the help from the Hebei Provincial Archive and Shijiazhuang Municipal Archive. I also want to thank Jackson Yuebin Guo, Nan Hu, Vaclav Zheng, Mengran Xu, Shan Huang, Ruiqi Hu, Lübing Pan, and Jing Xu for helping me securing important resources that were used in various parts of this work. Spending time with Meaghan Marian, Zhipeng Gao, Yu Wang and Gary Wang always made me feel supported and good. While trying to complete my dissertation, I have welcomed my son Kyle and daughter Zoe to this world. Doubtless, they took much of the time which would otherwise go to the writing of my dissertation. But the joy and laughter I have had with them has led to believe at least there is hope with the younger generation. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, Jingcai Wang and Guimin Zhi, who loved and cared about me with all their heart while I was away in another country. The most important support, of course, comes from my wife Yueran who was patiently listening to me talking about my work, life as well as the translucent future. v Table of Contents Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China ............................. i Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China ............................ ii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 Radio, Technopolitics, and the Economics of Shortage ..................................................1 1. Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 1.1 Revisiting Radio in Cold War China ...................................................................................3 1.2 Turning to Radio Archives...................................................................................................8 1.3 Chapter Outline ..................................................................................................................12 2 From Cadres to Labor Models: Technopolitics and the Transformation of Radio Operators, 1949-1957 ................................................................................................................17 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................17 2.2 At the Bureaucratic Margins ..............................................................................................21 2.3 De-bureaucratization, Mobile Operators, and Flexible Practices ......................................30 2.4 The Craft of Model-making ...............................................................................................39 2.5 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................46 3 Radio Programs and the Hermeneutics of State Power ............................................................48 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................48 3.2 The Rise and Fall of the Rotating Program .......................................................................49 3.3 Keynote Sounds and the Discovery of Peasants ................................................................62 3.4 The Emergence of Rural Power Conflicts .........................................................................71 3.5 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................81 4 Forging the Socialist Voice: the Natural Tone and its Politicization ........................................82