Revolution Domesticated

During the Mao era, Chinese urban families were subjected to decades of austerity in the name of continuous revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, they bore the economic costs of political campaigns aimed at transforming daily life. Under Deng Xiaoping, however, a new vision took hold: a stable, moderately well-off family, strikingly reminiscent of Confucian ideals that only a few years before had been consigned to the prerevolutionary past.

Drawing on Mao-era family letters, grassroots archives, and oral history, this book shows how revolutionary austerity transformed urban families and shaped China’s transition to a new economic order. Yanjie Huang pinpoints the unintended consequences of Maoist policies, arguing that urbanites turned inward to the domestic sphere of the family in order to weather the compulsory sacrifices of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Sweeping visions of collective social transformation helped foster tightly knit, inward-looking nuclear families focused on rearing a single child. Tracing how Shanghai families found survival strategies for economic hardships, Huang argues that the interaction between the urban household and grassroots ideology contributed to the post-Mao turn to developmentalism. From a groundbreaking bottom-up perspective that weaves together economic, political, and social history, Revolution Domesticated provides a new understanding—rooted in everyday life—of the origins of China’s epochal post-Mao transformations.