Urban Revolution : People's Communes in Beijing

Lanza explores radical attempts to remake Chinese cities during the Great Leap Forward in the first English history of urban collectivization. Through the universalization of production, the collectivization of life, and women's liberation, he argues that the limits of Maoism's ambitions are evident in the daily reality of urban residents.

During the Great Leap Forward (1958–62), the collectivization of the Chinese countryside had catastrophic results, but how did this short-lived political experiment reshape urban life? In the first English history of urban collectivization, Fabio Lanza explores the most radical attempts to remake cities under Mao. Examining the universalization of production, the collectivization of life, including communal canteens and nurseries, and women's liberation, intended to transform modern urban life along socialist lines, he shows how many residents, and women in particular, struggled to enact a radical change in their everyday lives. He argues that the daily reality of millions of city residents proved the limitations of an effort that tied emancipation to industrial labor and substituted subjugation to the assembly line for subjugation to the stove, confronting some of the crucial contradictions of the socialist revolution.