In 1990 I interviewed elderly Chengdu people while researching city life in the early 20th century. Ren Zili, a leader of the city's YMCA before 1949, agreed to meet me at a teahouse in People's Park. As we sat in earnest conversation about the past, a young man approached and asked Mr. Ren to tell his fortune next. Ren Zili invited the man to be seated and proceeded to lecture him gently, in the orthodox language of the socialist state, about the evils of superstition. The man quickly fled, and we resumed our chat.

That episode resurfaced in my mind as I read Di Wang's new book on the fall and revival of Chengdu's teahouse culture between 1950 and 2000, a sequel to his The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (Stanford, 2008). Wang's two teahouse books show the importance of teahouses as public spaces across 20th-century Chengdu, a point that first really struck me when, long after our first interview, Mr. Ren showed me the tiny room where he slept and stacked his few personal belongings. Clearly it was no place for conversation. Wang's books highlight the many ways teahouses served people in the city over the decades: providing boiled water, popular entertainment and services such as ear-cleaning and fortune-telling, as well as space for socializing, dispute resolution and exchange of market intelligence and products.

The new book's introduction discusses the idea of public life and lays out the central arguments. The first three chapters address the growing state control over teahouses in the Maoist era, focusing respectively on business regulation, restrictions on performances and the impact of political campaigns on teahouses. The last three chapters, based in part on fieldwork, discuss the revival and transformation of teahouse culture in the years of “late socialism” after Mao's death.

In 1950, the new Chengdu government targeted teahouses as potentially troublesome spaces. Using the archives of several municipal offices that oversaw commerce and culture, Wang shows that the government required teahouses to register and report on the backgrounds of owners and employees. As his 2008 book documents, many teahouses had been meeting places for the brotherhood societies that pervaded pre-1949 Sichuan. Wang recently published a history of this organization, known as the Paoge (gowned brothers): Di Wang, Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939–1949 (Stanford, 2018). Stamping out brotherhood power was a priority of the fledgling state. City government also aimed to expand control over private economic activity. Wang examines how the old Teahouse Guild was replaced by a trade group completely subservient to the state. The number of teahouses plummeted. Amateur singers who performed in certain teahouses were investigated and told to desist. Public life died completely during the Cultural Revolution.

In regard to teahouses, Wang's argument about the death of public life in the Maoist period is convincing. It would be interesting, though, to learn more about other urban transformations and how they affected public life. Chengdu industrialized in the 1950s and 1960s. Some factories were staffed by importing whole communities of workers from other parts of China. Industrial danwei created a new sort of communal life, providing bathhouses and other amenities. Nutritionists promulgated a new diet for industrial workers, including “salty soda” (yanqishui), a socialist energy drink. When I first visited Chengdu in summer 1984, the city was awash with state-run “cold drink shops” (lengyin dian) selling salty soda, a phenomenon examined on a national scale in chapter six of Liang Yao's “Consuming Science: A History of Soft Drinks in China” (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016). Wang's sharp focus on teahouses leaves the rest of Maoist-era Chengdu rather blurry.

Chengdu's teahouses revived quickly after Mao died. The low cost of entry into the market permitted proliferation of teahouses in the 1980s, Wang argues, and a golden age of teahouse culture resulted. A rich public life, in Wang's view, seems to require thriving small private businesses. Gradually, cutthroat competition and the rise of television decreased the diversity of teahouse culture. “National culture” has inexorably shaped local cultures in its image, although Chengdu's increasingly numerous elderly people resist by spending their days in teahouses.

In his conclusion, Wang argues that Chengdu teahouses can be compared to the coffee houses of 18th-century Western European cities, which provided space for political discussions and fostered activism. Creation of a public sphere in Chengdu's teahouses, though, is not a prominent theme elsewhere in the book. Major political campaigns and movements in the city are noted primarily for their impact on teahouses’ ability to stay open and provide entertainment and a living to their staff. Whether or not teahouses played any role in events like the June 1989 upheaval, during which protestors were killed and the city's central department store burned down, is unclear. A discussion of migrant laborers’ use of urban teahouses in the reform era implies (but does not argue) that no tensions grew between locals and migrants over claims to space in the city.

Local politics animates an interesting final chapter on the reappearance of mahjong in the reform era. In 2000, a young mother sued a residential community for allowing people to gather in an activity room and play mahjong until late at night, keeping her family awake. Noise pollution was the ostensible complaint, but Wang argues convincingly that the case reflected a complex set of tensions about rights of the individual versus the collective and whether or not mahjong, so popular in teahouses, was sapping Chengdu people's energy and lessening the city's appeal to investors. Critics of mahjong and teahouses lost out, however. The Chengdu teahouse has today become a symbol of a relaxed life, which, as Wang observes, has its appeal among contemporary Chinese.