Post-socialist modernization in 1980s Chinese radio dramas
Creators: name: Xu, Ke
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: My close analysis of early post-Mao Chinese radio drama in the following chapters carries three thematic concerns. Firstly, I examine how the “foreign” was constructed in the early post-Mao radio dramas through sound elements including humanvoice, music, and sound effects. Secondly, I highlight the intertextuality in Chinese radio drama by tracing cultural and literary references that cross the borders of language, media, and literary genres. Lastly, I reflect on the cultural modernity of the early post-Mao era as I put radio drama against the backdrop of modern popular culture that emerged in the republican era and compare evolving interpretations of modernization in the republican era during socialist revolutions and in the post-Mao era. In the first chapter, I argue that legacies of socialist radio infrastructure and listening culture developed during Maoist revolutions and political campaigns benefited the dissemination of popular literary culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s through radio drama, a newly revived subgenre of literary radio programs. Through examining how up-to-date recording and sound engineering technologies helped to invent the sound of Chinese science fiction, I highlight the importance of intermedial exchanges in the development of Chinese science fiction as a popular multimedia genre. Chapter Two focuses on radio drama adaptations of a 19th-century European novella. This chapter also considers Chinese radio drama adaptations of 19th-century European literature in the early 1980s. While closely analyzing radio drama texts, I trace the roots of Western romantic love in the context of Chinese popular culture. Comparing these adaptations to translated romances of the Republican era as well as Maoist revolutionary romanticism, I argue that the destigmatized literary genre was an indispensable part of post-socialist cultural reform. My criticism of the post-socialist cultural imagination of romantic love is based on an analysis of how it was reconstructed acoustically through the popularization of new voices and music. Building on urban modernity studies of Chinese metropolises, especially Shanghai, I focus on collaborations between Shanghai radio stations and dubbing studios to illustrate the vibrant cultural exchanges across domestic cultural institutions in the early 1980s. Through a comparative close reading of the Chinese radio drama produced in the early 1980s and Stendhal’s novella written more than one and a half centuries earlier, I explore nuances in the process of translation and radio drama adaptation. While comparing these two texts, I examine themes including dislocation, revolution, and the rise of the bourgeoisie to explore the limits and nuances of the “great thought liberation movement” led by intellectuals and social elites that took place shortly after the Cultural Revolution. This chapter relocates and contextualizes literary adaptations of European romances in the early 1980s, exploring its connections to interpretations of Western literature and popular romantic novellas in the Republican era. Through comparison of themes, character portrayal, and structures of feeling in these romantic stories, I contend that the 1980s modernization in aesthetics and gender identities did break some taboo topics of the Maoist era, but still had limitations when it comes to issues including domestic gender roles as well as social and cultural expectations circumscribed by modelheterosexual conjugal relationships. Chapter Three explores cultural exchanges between China and the West in the early post-Mao era through the lens of translated foreign radio dramas. Using Arthur Miller’s visit to China in the 1980s and Chinese radio drama’s debut at international radio conventions as examples, I complicate the cultural psychology behind the “Occidentalism” of post-Mao China. Rather than seeing modernization and westernization as synonyms, I trace their implications in the context of the late 1970s and early 1980s China, when both terms were marked with post-socialist characteristics. As the relationship between binary pairs like tradition/ modern, and Eastern/ Western became increasingly dynamic and unstable when used to circumscribe culture in the 1980s, “Occidentalism” became as much a critique of the cultural other (Western culture/ modernity) as of the self (modernization in China/ traditional culture). With careful analysis of sound acting and music interludes in these radio dramas, I discuss how acoustic features of these radio dramas propel the cultural imagination of the foreign. Finally, I use theories from translation studies to develop an interpretive framework for understanding foreignness as a cultural imagination that serves the subjective formation of the self rather than an objective portrayal of the other. Chapter Four explores radio dramas that feature overseas Chinese and foreigners in China. Analyzing the overwhelming number of scientists and engineers in these stories who chose to return to China after receiving higher education in the West, I examine the tensions between intellectuals and the state as well as Chinese and “foreigners” (wai guo ren) in the post-Mao era. Examining these two pairs of identity anxieties, I deconstruct the discourse of postsocialist modernization by comparing it to hegemonic patriotism and racial nationalism.