Fabio Lanza

Revolution in the Quotidian is a history of Maoist urban space at the street level. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the ordinary, the mundane, and the urban were identified as the privileged sites of state intervention, and “socialist city construction” became a tool for communist leaders to implement radical changes in how people worked, produced, and lived. Through analyzing the transformations of the Haidian District in Beijing from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, this project traces how both government planners and mass movements used urban space and everyday practice to achieve political change. It illustrates how a unique—but largely unplanned—socialist space was produced by the interplays and struggles between living beings and abstract forces, and between the state and ordinary people.

In this workshop, we will investigate a series of documents produced out of a sample of well-defined “scenes of governing” in the People’s Republic of China. In consultation with our participants, we have selected a focused and manageable set of documents that emerge out of precisely those situations in which stated goals, techniques of implementation, and the grain of social life meet. We will read these texts with the intention of extracting from them something like a “taxonomy” or “tableau” of the elements (categories, methodologies, tactics, concepts, etc.) from which they are composed. Doing so would make possible the beginning of a historical genealogy of socialist governing in China, if such a thing can—after all—be said really to exist.