Where You Labor Is Where You Sing: The New Folksong Movement of 1958 and the Fissured Mediascape of Maoist China

Abstract

This article examines the New Folksong Movement (NFM) of 1958–1959, which was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign. It employs an analytical strategy called fissured reading, whereby a discursive assemblage that seems ideologically uniform can be made to reveal the myriad tensions that its own positive facade works to conceal. While the NFM seems suffused with songs of praise for the GLF, closer inspection reveals a project riven with tensions regarding the creative agency of the people, the persistence of “old” songs in popular culture, and dialects. Such methodological concerns were in fact foundational to modern folk study in China as it developed from the 1920s onward. Understanding such historical connections can help us rethink the cultural revolutions in modern China as fissured projects, with tense cracks just beneath their surface that indicate unresolved contradictions passed on from one generation of reformers and revolutionaries to the next.