AUTEUR
Lisa RICHAUD-BERTHOUMIEU

ANNÉE
2026

ISBN

LIEU
London

EDITION
Routledge

LIEN
Lien vers l'ouvrage

Casual Assemblies: Afterlives of Maoist Performance Culture in Beijing’s Public Parks

ABSTRACT

Over the past 30 years, China's public parks have been turned into stages for amateur performances of socialist anthems by self-organized retirees who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976).

Challenging previous interpretations in terms of political expression or nostalgia, Casual Assemblies explores the seeming paradox of displaying political messages in the heart of the capital city while framing these gatherings as fun or self-entertainment – merely wan’r, in the language of parkgoers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, this book takes these claims to nonseriousness seriously. For at stake in these gatherings is the possibility of being nonliteral and reclaiming the sensuous pleasures of performing old tunes from “politics” (zhengzhi). This book theorizes casualness as a mode of engagement predicated upon the irrelevance of the correspondence between action and referential meaning. Through the making-casual of a cultural form once supposed to produce revolutionary commitment, parkgoers enact new experiences of being-in-public, togetherness, and shifting relationships to the Maoist past.

This book will be of value to readers with a keen interest in China, scholars and students in anthropology and Asian Studies, as well as travelers who have witnessed these phenomena firsthand.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

CRITICS' REVIEWS

"Lisa Richaud’s brilliant new book explores how retirees who lived through the Maoist period use urban public parks in China as an energized space in which to gather and sing old socialist anthems in a new spirit of casual and non-committal fun. Rooted in extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Richaud’s conceptually inventive and meticulously researched study reshapes our understanding of what it means to be and act political in contemporary China."

Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture, University of Oxford

"Casual Assemblies is an insightful, sophisticated work. Through a careful analysis of sustained fieldwork among the parks of Beijing, Richaud takes parkgoers’ claims about “having fun” seriously, challenging the common assumption that leisure activities in China are inherently political."

Paul Kendall, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Westminster

"Casual Assemblies offers a new understanding of performance of Maoist repertoires in Beijing parks as cultural forms detached from politics through their reappropriation on a ludic, casual mode. Imaginative and rigorous, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in public sociality after Mao or in the connections between fun and politics, in China and beyond."

Isabelle Thireau, Professor of Sociology at EHESS and Senior Researcher at CNRS

"Casual Assemblies is a thoughtful study of what it means for older urban Chinese residents to have fun through collective, public performances of Maoist and Socialist-era songs. The analysis eschews simplistic binaries and focuses instead on the complexities of wan'r (or having fun). Richaud illuminates how, for the generation of urban Chinese who lived through Maoist campaigns from the 1950s to the 1970s, the "surface" of public life and the personal joy of singing previously political songs becomes a meaningful shared space through which these individuals not only forge community but also make space for reflecting upon the vast changes they have experienced. " 

Jenny Chio, author of 'A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China'