This dissertation asks what happened when the Chinese socialist state sought to build a cutting-edge telecommunications system with its unparalleled power of mass mobilization. By investigating the state-sponsored popularization of radio technology and expertise as well as its unexpected consequences from the 1950s to the 1980s, it offers a new understanding of Chinese socialism as a mass technological project.
Unlike the conventional historiography focusing on political campaigns and social turmoil in the People’s Republic, it shows how socialist China turned a poorly educated populace into skillful technologists by promoting affordable and accessible technology. As radio was the most important telecommunications tool for much of the twentieth century, the socialist state developed its radio technology and industry by counting on the masses to produce and disseminate knowledge and design and construct infrastructures.
With the availability of radio sets and loudspeakers, a new model of sonic governance was devised to gather information from individual listeners and to refashion the state’s perception of its subjects. However, radio listeners also used their newly acquired devices and know-how to circumvent and destabilize the state’s information control by listening to foreign radio stations.
Bringing together radio history, the history of technology, and the social history of control and resistance, “Revolution on the Air” redirects the scholarly attention on Chinese socialism away from its institutional organizations to its infrastructural and material base, charting a new narrative of modern Chinese history with an emphasis on previously ignored actors and through a technological perspective.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/twnx-4x80 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Yang, Yingchuan |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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