Sonic Socialism: Radio and the Technopolitics of Listening in Maoist China

Speaker: Yu Wang, Cornell University

Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

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This talk is a condensed, selected presentation of my forthcoming book, Sonic Socialism: Radio and the Technopolitics of Listening in China, 1940-1976. In the book, I explore how radio unleashed its potential and limits in a series of engagements with the auditory sense and the production of reality during the Cold War. I ask: How did socialism manifest itself through sound and listening practices? What kind of technological and social relations did it inform? And how did such techno-sociological influence the forms of political consciousness? By unpacking radio technologies as socialism-that-was-made-durable, I reveal how diverse groups of listeners -from state authorities to institution actors and regular people- and their auditory practices actively constituted the daily experience of Chinese socialism. In so doing, this book reveals not only the ways in which auditory technologies informed socialism but also how the human ear became a critical site of auditory governance, informing the perception of reality, productivity, and social order.

About our speaker: Yu Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is deeply interested in the technologies of listening and their interaction with society and politics. His forthcoming book Sonic Socialism explores how listening to radio constituted the practice of everyday life in Mao’s China. His second book project concerns the global history of decibels, interrogating the layered, complex dynamics between the auditory sense and its standardization.