Things matter. In the past several years, an entire interdisciplinary field of “thing theory” has developed fresh ways of thinking about objects and things. In this context, things have come to be seen as more than objects, connoting instead a “particular subject-object relation.”Footnote 1 Yet, so far, the study of things (including, though not necessarily restricted to, the premises of “thing theory”) has had limited traction in scholarship on the history of the People's Republic of China. Laurence Coderre's remarkable book Newborn Socialist Things demonstrates powerfully that things mattered, especially in socialist China. Exploring the materiality of the late Cultural Revolution, in discourse and beyond, the book shows how thinking “with and through things” can tell us something about this particular historical moment in Maoist ideology and practice, and about the longue durée of modern Chinese history.
Socialist China had its own theory of things, anchored in the concept of the “newborn thing,” or, as it was later called, the “newborn socialist thing.” Echoing Bill Brown's thing theory, Coderre explains that we should understand China's newborn things as constellations of “human and nonhuman actors,” of ideas, objects, bodies, institutions, social formations, and so on. By constituting “the officially recognized future in the present” (p. 111), newborn things struggled against the “old things” of China's past, a past that constantly lingered in the present in material form. The “newness of the newborn things” was thus a “measure of progress” of the socialist project at large (p. 8). Newborn things were (re)mediated in the media environment of the Cultural Revolution, which included “LPs, radio broadcasts, films, lantern slides, newspapers, magazines, comic books, posters, paper cuts, porcelain figurines, wallets, product packaging, ornamented mirrors, household appliances, and human bodies” (p. 14). The commodity form, heavily contested in socialist theory and practice, both facilitated and obstructed the way newborn socialist things came into being and worked.
The book examines such newborn things, the commodity form, and processes of mediation in six chapters, each focused on a different case study. Chapter 1 asks how sound was conceptualized and how the sounding of the Cultural Revolution made specific kinds of acoustic spaces. It shows how sound mediated and made national territory, using new technologies to reorganize “local temporalities” (p. 38). Connecting the work of broadcasters and salespeople, as “fellow travellers. . . . crisscrossing the same developmentalist terrain” (p. 56), chapter 2 explores how socialist retail was reconceptualized as a “civilising process.” Coderre traces how and why “access to and acquisition of consumer goods continued to function as a benchmark of historical progress in the PRC, even as the mechanisms that facilitated development in this area raised significant questions about the overarching socialist project” (p. 65).
Chapter 3 moves from socialist salespeople to window displays and model retail work, showing how productivist displays emphasized labor and production over consumption, thus “rendering it politically acceptable” (p. 90)—or at least trying to do so, for the tensions and contradictions remained. The case of porcelain products from Jingdezhen reveals this shift toward an aesthetic of production, one focused on questions of how (materials, processes, tools), by whom, and where objects were made in order to render “production per se visible and consumable” (p. 103).
In chapter 4, the newborn socialist things are commodities themselves, and some of the books, primers, and stories written and published to help the wider public understand the intricacies of the political economy theory, demystify the socialist commodity, and thus combat (so the hope) capitalist commodity fetish. At the same time, people, too, could become newborn socialist things, as chapter 5 discusses. Amateur performance—for example, yangbanxi—turned the body into a medium and gave people an opportunity to “mold” themselves “into a hero in everyday life” (p. 144); the promise, Coderre writes, was that “heroes could be mass (re)produced” (p. 146). Yet, “appearance” and “essence” did not necessarily align, and anxiety about distinguishing “hidden class enemies from honest revolutionary heroes” loomed large (p. 161).
The final chapter turns to mirrors, one of the ubiquitous mass-produced items of the Cultural Revolution. These mirrors, Coderre argues, operated “as objects that should be used in order to verify, study and correct that which is revealed in its depths” (p. 180). In other words, they encouraged and enabled constant self-scrutiny, in service of the self-improvement demanded in Maoist discourse since before 1949. Here, mirrors mediated and remediated, the self-becoming both subject and object.
Newborn Socialist Things is one of only few studies to take seriously the “late Cultural Revolution” as a central historical moment. Coderre helps rescue this period from being merely the tail end of the Mao era, the conceptual afterthought of Maoism, or, conversely, the moment before the reform era or the seedlings of something thoroughly new and “un-Maoist.” Instead, the book uses the late 1960s and early 1970s to connect and think broadly across the whole history of the People's Republic of China. As Coderre illustrates, the (hi)stories of things often defy political periodizations, or at last complicate them substantially. The book also opens up new ways of thinking about the Cultural Revolution as a moment that provides rich insight into “the formation of an avowedly socialist field of political economy, its theories, contradictions, and material manifestations” (p. 11). Coderre compels us to take problems of political economy, revolutionary theory, and revolutionary practice seriously and to see the political-economic and cultural as interlinked. The book thus makes a convincing case for why we must engage with the solutions different people proposed at the time, even if and precisely because in many cases they did not solve the problems encountered.
It is extremely difficult to do this book justice in a short review. Newborn Socialist Things is a tour de force: fascinating, inspiring, and challenging. It is a must-read for anyone interested in socialist (and postsocialist) China, its material culture, and its materiality. I also strongly recommend it to anyone inclined to think that material culture and materiality mattered comparatively little during this period. This book will forcefully dispel any such notion. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and I know I will return to it repeatedly in the coming years, to reread, reconsider, and be inspired once more. That is what the best books should do, and Coderre has accomplished this exceptional feat.
