MCLC: Culturing Industry AAS panel

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Yu Zhang <yuzhang6 at stanford.edu>
Subject: Culturing Industry AAS panel
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Dear All,

We'd like to call your attention to an AAS panel "Culturing Industry,
Industrializing Everyday Life in Maoist China". We look forward to an
intellectually stimulating conversation with those of you who are
interested in this subject.

See you in Philadelphia!

Sincerely, Christine Ho  and Yu Zhang

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Culturing Industry, Industrializing Everyday Life in Maoist China

Time: 1 pm- 3 pm, Friday, 3/28/2014
Location: Philadelphia Marriott, Room 401

Organizer: Christine Ho and Yu Zhang
Chair: Jacob Eyferth, The University of Chicago
Presenters: 
Yu Zhang, Stanford University
Tracy Ying Zhang, Concordia University
Christine Ho, Stanford University
Yishi Liu, Tsinghua University
Discussant: Jacob Eyferth

Industrialization in both capitalist and socialist societies is typically
understood to be an alienating, dehumanizing process with severe social
consequences. Yet industrialization was figured as central to socialist
narratives in the early state-building years of the Maoist era. How was
the industrial drive figured in Maoist culture as specifically socialist,
distinct from Soviet models and capitalist modernity? How are alternatives
to this apparent antinomy presented and represented? This panel focuses on
the culture of industrialization by examining the mediation, theorization,
and dissemination of industry as an affective experience. At stake are the
politics of an affective industrial culture: Maoist industrialized society
bridges the “cold face” of industry through emotional investment and
utopian visions of community.

Exploring the methodological possibilities opened up by the notion of
industrial culture, which encompasses design and cinema, technology and
craft, the everyday and the avant-garde, the following papers examine the
multiple dimensions of culture that shaped, and were shaped by, industry.
Reading against the machine aesthetic of industrialization, Yu Zhang’s
paper analyzes filmic celebrations of artisanal knowledge and labor. Tracy
Zhang’s paper traces the interaction between the art of human bodies and
politics, examining negotiations over the value and meanings of the
acrobatic body in Sino-US cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era.
Christine Ho’s paper provides the Cold War context of industrialization by
examining how domestic collective life and its design objects were
manufactured through industrial exhibitions. In a study of urban
development, Liu Yishi demonstrates that a conjunction of production
demands and architecture gave rise to the socialist built environment.


A Handmade and Homemade Industry in the Socialist Films The Young People
in Our Village and its sequel
Yu Zhang, Stanford University

Aiming for rapid economic growth and radical social and ideological
change, the Great Leap Forward Campaign continued to transform rural
material backwardness into the very condition that would stimulate the
creativity of the rural masses. Produced during the GLF and its aftermath,
The Young People in Our Village (1959) and its sequel (1963) portray the
ways in which rural industrialization merges with the everyday fabric of
village life, and through which the rural masses deploy artisanal skills
in their participation in an industrial enterprise. These films
demonstrate the necessity of turning labor into play, love into energy,
and repressive productivity into lively inventiveness. The shift from
manual to machine labor, in the film, reveals an isomorphism of a
handicraft and a machine.

I first deal with the cinematic representations in which the socialist
construction site is turned into a playground on which “the young people”
are passionately loving, excitedly playing, and energetically working.
Then I analyze how the film and its sequel foreground the inventiveness of
the rural artisans, discussing the intelligence of manual work revealed in
the film. I also demonstrate the other side of socialist practice,
highlighting the small-scaleness, the homemade, and the handmade as
distinct from monumentality that characterized socialist aesthetics. I
conclude this paper with a reflection on the underside of the homemadeness
and handmadeness that resulted in tremendous social disaster, and with a
comparative reading with the rural-subject films produced in Post-Mao
China.


Technocratizing Design: Zhang Ding and the Leipzig Fairs
Christine I. Ho, Stanford University

In the early nineteen-fifties, China participated in several trade fairs
held in Moscow, Czechoslovakia, Vienna, Paris, among others, to promote
her domestic exports.  The trade pavilions, designed by Soviet-trained
experts, presented carefully selected exhibits that mixed industrial and
agricultural products, design objects, and mass-produced crafts against
backdrops of Soviet-inflected photomontage.  This paper focuses on China’s
pavilions at three Leipzig Fairs in 1951, 1953, and 1954 as a means of
examining the flow and exchanges that formed international socialist
culture, how domestic collective life was defined as an outgrowth of
socialist industrialization, and the emergence of exhibition and design
culture in midcentury China.

In part indebted to China’s earlier participation in the World’s Fairs,
the design of the trade pavilions of the Leipzig were designed to stage
the Sino-Soviet friendship, but sought to both align and differentiate
Chinese socialist modernity from the Soviet model through recourse to
architectural referents. The stylistic choices made by the designers and
participating governmental organs encapsulated particular political
tensions that were international and domestic in scope: first, the
philosophical problem of representing consumption and socialist industrial
society as distinct from the capitalist experience, and secondly, to
demonstrate the global contemporaneity of international socialist model
while insisting upon the singularity of the Maoist experiment.  Focusing
on Zhang Ding (1917-2010), an important industrial and craft designer of
the mid-twentieth century, this paper also looks at how the pavilions were
structured as “filmic” spaces, providing guided navigations that later
would be translated into exhibition techniques for modern Chinese museums.


Building Socialist Danwei: A Case Study of the Public Space of the Auto
City in Changchun
Yishi Liu (liuyishi at tsinghua.edu.cn)
School of Architecture, Tsinghua University

Changchun was the capital city of Manchukuo (1932-45), a Japanese colonial
state in Northeast China. During the first years of the PRC, the outskirts
of Changchun was chosen by the Commission of the first Five-Year-Plan
(1953-7) as the site for the First Automobile Works (FAW), a key project
of Maoist industrialization with substantial Soviet support. In the 1950s,
the PRC regime reorganized the urban society into self-sufficient
communities affiliated to production or administrative units, called the
danwei system. The FAW was one of the largest and earliest of its kind in
China.  Under Chinese socialism, the design of city layout was an integral
part of the all-encompassing state planning of the society and economy in
light of the Soviet Union experiences. By analyzing the physical layouts
of the residential sectors of the FAW, I hope to illustrate how socialist
ideologies of egalitarianism, collectivism and corporate lifestyle were
materialized in these standardized factory compounds, creating a growing
network of interconnected “public spaces” which effectively compressed the
residents’ private life and visually embodied the new concept of “the
public” as the “owner” of the factory as promoted by the Communist Party.


Bending the Body for China:
The Uses of Acrobatics in Sino-US Diplomacy during the Cold War
Tracy Zhang, Concordia University

This presentation examines negotiations over the value and meanings of the
acrobatic body in Sino-US cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era.
Since the 1950s, Chinese communist leaders identified acrobatics as a tool
of propaganda. However, the extent to which acrobatics could be used to
glorify the proletariat in "new China" was disputed at the peak of the
Cultural Revolution (1966-1971). As a result, many acrobatic troupes were
closed down; star performers were ordered to labor from dawn to dusk in
factories or in the countryside. Nonetheless, an agreement on reviving
“traditional acrobatics” was reached after President Nixon watched an
acrobatic performance in Shanghai, and in 1972 a state-run acrobatic
troupe went to the United States to promote Sino-US friendship.

Under what political-social and physiological conditions did acrobats
prepare for their American tour? How was the local understanding of
Chinese traditional art translated into an “oriental performance” that
enchanted the American audience? Drawing on oral history interviews and
archival data, this presentation aims to answer these questions. It will
also reveal how acrobats’ embodied practices on and off the stage
constituted multiple sites and politics of cultural diplomacy at a
delicate moment of the Cold War.