PPLMEC
Practices and Politics of Listening in the PRC

Listening to History

This interdisciplinary project explores the politics and practices of sound and listening in the Mao era People’s Republic of China (PRC), their interpretation and their impact on social and intellectual change.
It does so through an innovative three-tiered analysis of the use and apprehension of sound at state, local, and individual levels.
Sound played a central role in state-building in the Mao era. Radio, megaphones, fixed speakers, and recording technologies were used to relay messages to audiences beyond the literate, to pass on Mao’s voice, and as weapons against class enemies. In the process, the primacy of text over voice was inverted as a literati culture built on quiet study became a land of sound and voice.

This study, by drawing in underexplored elements to deepen our understanding of the rising international power of the 21st century, will contribute to both the fields of modern Chinese social and political history and sound-studies.

It offers also the first system-wide attempt to study how state goals for sound met local and individual conditions, and how cultures of listening were negotiated through this process. For Chinese history, it explores a neglected aspect of the relationship between citizen and state in the formative years of the new global superpower. The sensory focus of the project will also help to deepen understandings of the politics and culture of the PRC.

The project will advance our understanding of China’s history in a global context and complement an expanding body of research that offers an understanding of the impact of modernity on everyday life from a non-Western perspective.

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Events

file pdf 15-16/05/2025 - international workshop "Sonic Histories of East Asia. Thinking History Through Sound", Venice
This workshop included participants from China, Korea, the United States, and across Europe. It connected scholars working on diverse regions and historical periods through a focus on sound. 		868 KB

Principal Investigator

Dayton Joseph Lekner

Dayton Joseph Lekner

Dayton Lekner is a historian of the People’s Republic of China.
His forthcoming book “A Hundred Flowers: How Literature Shaped Maoism” (Cambridge University Press, 2025) describes the creative interplay between political and literary fields during the Mao era.
From that focus on textual creativity and circulation he has now turned to sound with a study of sonic statehood and subjectivity in 20th Century China.
His work has appeared in “Modern China”, “Twentieth Century China”, “The Journal of Chinese Cinemas”, and the “Journal of Asian Studies”. He is also editor of the online journal and website “Revisiting the Revolution”.