WINNER — 2020 Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title During the Mao years, laughter in China was serious business. Simultaneously an outlet for frustrations and grievances, a vehicle for socialist education, and an object of official study, laughter brought together the political, the personal, the aesthetic, the ethical, the affective, the physical, the aural, and the visual. The ten essays in Maoist Laughter convincingly demonstrate that the connection between laughter and political culture was far more complex than conventional conceptions of communist indoctrination can explain. Their sophisticated readings of a variety of genres—including dance, cartoon, children’s literature, comedy, regional oral performance, film, and fiction—uncover many nuanced innovations and experiments with laughter during what has been too often misinterpreted as an unrelentingly bleak period. In Mao’s China, laughter helped to regulate both political and popular culture and often served as an indicator of shifting values, alliances, and political campaigns. In exploring this phenomenon, Maoist Laughter is a significant correction to conventional depictions of socialist China. “Maoist Laughter brings together prominent scholars of contemporary China to make a timely and original contribution to the burgeoning field of Maoist literature and culture. One of its main strengths lies in the sheer number of genres covered, including dance, traditional Chinese performance, visual arts, film, and literature. The focus on humor in the Maoist period gives an exciting new perspective from which to understand cultural production in twentieth-century China.” —Krista Van Fleit, University of South Carolina “An illuminating study of the culture of laughter in the Maoist period. Focusing on much-neglected topics such as satire, jokes, and humor, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of how socialist culture actually ‘worked’ as a coherent, dynamic, and constructive life experience. The chapters show that traditional culture could almost blend perfectly with revolutionary mission.” —Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis

Situating my study in the current scholarship of comedy and Chinese cinema, Chapter 1 historicizes the genre of comedy and provides an overview of its definitions in both Western cinema and Chinese cultural criticism. Using Unfinished Comedy -- a 1957 satire banned before its completion -- as a starting point, Chapter 2 revisits the crisis of the genre in the early years of the PRC and examines the tensions between artistic autonomy and the control of the authorities through a case study of the director Lü Ban. Chapter 3 looks into the mechanism of how ideal social relations were imagined and articulated in eulogistic comedy. Chapter 4 focuses on dialect comedies and film adaptations of folk comedies across regional divisions, which engage a complex dialogue between the local and the national. Chapter 5 examines how filmmakers tried to fuse satire and eulogy in lighthearted comedies of family life and work life. The epilogue reflects on how comedy films transcend a binary opposition between propaganda and entertainment, and it seeks to prompt further studies on the resonance of films from the Mao era in contemporary China.

This book explores xiangsheng, one of the most popular folk art performance genres in China, its enlistment by official propaganda machine after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its revival in popularity under Guo Degang and his Deyun Club. Just as the 1950's saw the shift of xiangsheng 's social function from entertainment to the political tool of ‘serving the party’, Guo Degang has completed the paradigm shift by turning its focus back to ‘serving the people’ as a means of entertainment and social criticism. This volume examines how Guo has resurrected the essence of xiangsheng, successfully commercialised it in a market economy, and simultaneously deconstructed the official discourse through grassroots means.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Quotations from Chairman Mao, this pioneering volume examines the book as a global historical phenomenon.

In SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows how the Chinese experiences of living with SARS can reshape global feelings toward pandemic social life and foster greater fellowship in the face of pandemics.

This book launches an ambitious reexamination of the elite politics behind one of the most remarkable transformations in the late twentieth century. As the first part of a new interpretation of the evolution of Chinese politics during the years 1972-82, it provides a detailed study of the end of the Maoist era, demonstrating Mao's continuing dominance even as his ability to control events ebbed away. The tensions within the "gang of four," the different treatment of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and the largely unexamined role of younger radicals are analyzed to reveal a view of the dynamic of elite politics that is at odds with accepted scholarship. The authors draw upon newly available documentary sources and extensive interviews with Chinese participants and historians to develop their challenging interpretation of one of the most poorly understood periods in the history of the People's Republic of China.

This book offers the first comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the way Chinese humor fits into broader discourses on Chinese identity and modernity in an increasingly globalized world throughout the period of modern China. It brings together the expertise of scholars from a variety of disciplines – history, literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and the study of popular culture – to examine the many forms and modes in which political humor is expressed in modern China: films, cartoons, the visual arts, oral performances and online satire.​