Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China

My dissertation argues that radio played vital roles in state building and social integration in the 1950s and 1960s China. Radio as a technological infrastructure brought about a series of radical changes that fundamentally affected the state’s self-perception as well as its agenda in transforming everyday life. My dissertation demonstrates that the acoustic state heavily utilized the senses and techniques of hearing and listening. The state incorporated listening techniques into government bodies during the management of everyday life to inform, educate and mobilize the masses and to modernize the country. The techniques of speaking and their institutionalization in return signaled the state’s efforts to search for and naturalize a voice for its presence in daily life. The dissemination of the voice further gave birth to a new type of state-agents, the radio operators, who carried radio sets with them to areas beyond the reach of electricity. As radio became integral to listeners’ work and life, it triggered further political and social changes, one of which was that listeners learned to circumvent local authorities and contact the higher-level radio stations for solving their concerns. Listeners also became not only selective in listening to state-sanctioned programs but also curious enough to transgress the state’s acoustic boundary to listen to radio programs from abroad. Radio also played a crucial role in drawing the boundaries between enemies and people, which was crucial to the creation and maintenance of the socialist regime. Such transgressive listeners prompted the state to perceive sound as sovereign territory and consequently led it to territorialize sound to defend itself from the sonic invasion of capitalist countries. To conclude, radio not only equipped the state with new techniques of governance but also fundamentally changed the way the state interacted with the masses, reshaping socialist modernity and subjectivity.Ph.D