Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Maoist Performance Culture in Beijing’s Public Parks

Challenging previous interpretations in terms of political expression or nostalgia, Casual Assemblies explores the seeming paradox of displaying political messages in the heart of the capital city while framing these gatherings as fun or self-entertainment – merely wan’r, in the language of parkgoers.

Over the past 30 years, China's public parks have been turned into stages for amateur performances of socialist anthems by self-organized retirees who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976). Challenging previous interpretations in terms of political expression or nostalgia, Casual Assemblies explores the seeming paradox of displaying political messages in the heart of the capital city while framing these gatherings as fun or self-entertainment – merely wan’r, in the language of parkgoers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, this book takes these claims to nonseriousness seriously. For at stake in these gatherings is the possibility of being nonliteral and reclaiming the sensuous pleasures of performing old tunes from “politics” (zhengzhi). This book theorizes casualness as a mode of engagement predicated upon the irrelevance of the correspondence between action and referential meaning. Through the making-casual of a cultural form once supposed to produce revolutionary commitment, parkgoers enact new experiences of being-in-public, togetherness, and shifting relationships to the Maoist past. This book will be of value to readers with a keen interest in China, scholars and students in anthropology and Asian Studies, as well as travelers who have witnessed these phenomena firsthand. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.