Di Wang. The Teahouse under Socialism

Over the course of several scholarly monographs, Di Wang has chronicled the political culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chengdu, the capital of China’s inland Sichuan Province. His various microhistories of this city—a major metropolis for over two thousand years, but the subject of significantly less scholarly study than coastal entrepots like Shanghai or national capitals such as Beijing—provide thought-provoking case studies of the interplay between national trends and local culture. In The Teahouse under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950–2000, the award-winning sequel to his highly acclaimed The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (2008), Wang convincingly contends that, in Chengdu, the teahouse is a place (albeit not the only place) where public life in its various forms—economic, social, cultural, and political—happens (11). A study of Chengdu’s teahouses thus can reveal much about the China’s turbulent twentieth century. In this volume, Wang traces the near disappearance and ultimate revival of Chengdu’s teahouses under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, which he divides into a period of “early socialism” (the Maoist era, 1949–1976) and “late socialism” (the reform era of Deng Xiaoping and his successors, 1977 on) (13). This decline and resurgence tracks the dramatic increase, then noticeable decline, in state power over everyday life. Wang provides a formula for understanding these changes: the rise of state control correlated directly with the decline of “public life” during early socialism (32); the opposite pattern would occur under late socialism (120).

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