Sound and radio have become a flourishing new frontier in modern China studies. However, most recent books, dissertations and articles on audio broadcasting rely on written and printed sources such as state archives and memoirs. Lamenting the absence and inaccessibility of sound archives, historians have focused on media infrastructures and technopolitics, showing that sound studies is indeed possible without audio sources. Nevertheless, what are we missing by not listening to actual sounds? If audio recordings become available, what should we listen for?

This presentation will explore two types of audio(visual) sources for studying Chinese Socialist soundscapes. First, Professor Li will analyze retrospective representations of radios and loudspeakers during the Mao era in films made between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s: China Behind (1974), Maple (1980), Blue Kite (1992), Farewell My Concubine (1993), To Live (1994), In the Heat of the Sun (1995), Xiu Xiu, The Sent-Down Girl (1998), Platform (2000), Electric Shadows (2005), and Shanghai Dreams (2005). Professor Li proposes to treat such fictional films as media history, as they thematize the impact of mass media on ordinary people’s historical experiences. This will be followed by an introduction to a serendipitous collection of audio recordings of PRC radio between 1966 and 1971 – received and tape-recorded in Hong Kong by the American journalist Robert Elegant. After listening to short clips of central, local and ‘enemy’ radio, including readings of newspaper editorials, live broadcasting of mass rallies and parades, as well as contrarian voices and noises, there will be a discussion about what we hear and any unique insights that a sonic archive can give us beyond textual sources.

Jie Li is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, and Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Award and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. She co-edited the volume Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution and published various articles on film, media, museum, and sound studies. She was recently named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching.