Audible Socialism

In Audible Socialism, Yu Wang reveals how radio became the central infrastructure through which Maoist China reshaped the nation's political culture and social relations.

Between 1940 and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party erected over 2,300 radio stations, produced 76 million radio sets, and installed 100 million loudspeakers nationwide. Wang argues that this expansive network functioned not merely to transmit socialist messages but materially embodied socialism itself.

Wang shows that the era's auditory technologies, though mostly low cost and improvisational, shaped the dynamics of expertise, gender, and subjectivity in ways that transformed how socialism in China was understood and practiced. Reassembled Soviet transmitters favoring the pitch of women's voices, for instance, gave the revolution its "natural tone," while factory loudspeakers turned workers' ears into sites of industrial productivity. Yet Wang also uncovers the ambiguities in this system of auditory governance, where listeners tuned into "enemy" radio and diverse actors reinterpreted state authority for their own ends.

Deeply researched and informative, Audible Socialism offers a new framework for understanding how modern states instrumentalize and rule through the human senses.