Revolution in the ear: Mao era noise and the making of meaning

Abstract

What is the experience of noise? What does it ask of us? What traces does it leave? At first listen, the Mao era PRC seems in harmony with an understanding of noise as inherently revolutionary or destructive. Whether we think of noise as opposed to signal, to music, to social norms, or in terms of volume, the Mao years offer endless examples. However, this case, in which a regime both purveyed radical change and established order, calls for a reexamination of the relationship between noise and revolution. In this article, we explore the role of noise, of novel and errant sonic events, not for the revolutionary regime, but for those who heard and lived the Chinese revolution. Drawing on personal testimonies from letters, literary sources, and particularly from memoir, we explore noise as a prompt for renewed examination of the social and sensory world. We consider how it prompted individuals to make sense of the period both at the time, and as memory and history. Examining these assorted ‘earwitness’ accounts, we show that noise and signal, like revolution and order, defy binary categorization in the Mao years. We argue that while noise was indeed disruptive, it also provoked active responses to make sense and create order. The dissonant, the loud, and the cacophonic were afforded value and in turn offered structure. Noise further had the capacity to create, as well as erode, social bonds. Finally, we argue that in affective understandings of rock music lie clues for interpreting both the experience and memory of Mao era noise, and through these, the Mao era as lived and remembered.

Keywords:

• Noise
• memory
• mao era experience
• rock

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Mark Czeller, Evelyn Shih, Julia Keblinska, and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback on this article. Thank you also to the members of the Resonators, who have provided endless insight and inspiration. Finally, a special thanks to the Universities Service Centre for China Studies, CUHK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 One resource we made particular use of for this article was the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Folk History Archive (民间历史). This project of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at CUHK, which ended in 2022, collected personal testimonies, memoirs, and biographies, and made them available online, with the consent of the original authors.

2 We worked with a range of terms that conveyed a parallel to the English “noise”, including 噪音, 雜音, 雜聲, 吵鬧. We note that, as with English terms such as “clamor,” “din,” “thrum,” etc., such terms overlap in both the source signal they describe and in responses to these sounds.

3 The Tuning of the World was originally published in 1977. In this paper we quote from the 1994 republication of Schafer’s work (the version also referenced in Marie Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.

4 Some positive affectivities of noise are briefly discussed by Schafer in The Tuning of the World, to be clear. In one short section, which draws inspiration from the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Schafer contrasts noise with silence, in terms of the sacred and the profane. Though the modern world is “noise-riddled,” in Schafer’s view, noise could also be “sacred” and a sign of prosperity in certain situations and locations (Schafer 1994, 51, 52).

5 Along with mosquitoes, rodents and flies.

6 The significant reduction in the sparrow population meant that crops were left “vulnerable to insects” and an ecological imbalance ensued, which led to China experiencing “the greatest human-created famine in history” (Shapiro 2001, 104).

7 As Judith Shapiro has written, the “official discourse” concerning Mao era campaigns pertaining to the natural environments was “[Filled] with references to a ‘war against nature.’Nature was to be ‘conquered.’ Wheat was to be sown by ‘shock attack.’ ‘Shock troops’ reclaimed the grasslands. ‘Victories’ were won against flood and drought. Insects, rodents, and sparrows were ‘wiped out’” (Shapiro 2001, 96).

8 A topic covered in Lovell (2021).

9 For a discussion of Warburg’s work, see Ernst (1986, 270-1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dayton Lekner

Dayton Lekner researches, translates, and writes histories of the Chinese 20^th Century. His research has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, and 20^th Century China. His monograph Flower. Power: The Writing of a Maoist Campaign, 1951–59 is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. His translations have appeared on the website, Reading the China Dream, in Voices from the Chinese Century (Columbia, 2019), and in the journal Contemporary Chinese Thought. He is editor of the online journal Revisiting the Revolution that translates influential Sinophone research on 20^th century Chinese history.

Joseph Lovell

Joseph Lovell researches 20^th century Chinese history, sound studies, and media studies. He recently completed his PhD with a dissertation on the Mao era soundscape, which examines how sound technologies reshaped the state and society relationship in the early PRC. His work has been published in the edited volume Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific: Music, Media, and Technology, and the journal Annali di Ca’Foscari. Serie Orientale. He is now in the early stages of an environmental humanities project concerning climate advocacy in the Chinese cultural context.