Socialist Industrial Design in Mao Era China and After

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Historiography on the People's Republic of China before 1978 has so far had little to say about the history of industrial design and its role in state-society relations and everyday life. This reflects popular beliefs about socialist material culture during the first three decades of Chinese Communist Party rule. When asked today, many people inside and outside of China will often respond that the Mao Era was shaped by poverty and material scarcity. This suggests that socialist modernisation - of the kind witnessed during the 1950s and 1960s under European socialist regimes - was of little consequence to the lives of most ordinary citizens. Industrial design, however, mattered even during times of material scarcity and austerity; particularly if we define the term broadly to include not only officially accredited design departments and factory work but also local practices of recycling and reworking existing materials according to industrial design blueprints. Seen in this way, industrial design becomes an important site to examine the connections between China's politics, technology, materials, and the material cultures that surrounded people in their everyday public and private lives. The project revisits industrial design during the Mao Era and the early Reform Era, from the 1950s into the 1980s. Based on new records from international archives, Party-internal publications, newspaper and periodicals, diaries, photography, technical manuals, memoirs, oral history interviews, and - wherever possible - surviving objects from the era, it brings PRC industrial design and materials into the wider history of post-war design and material culture. Much has been written about "post-Mao" industrial design, yet this project argues that many of the designs, materials, and manufacturing processes developed during the first three decades of CCP rule, then under Chairman Mao, were used to realise the post-Mao reforms. The history of socialist industrial design is central to understanding material culture and industrial design in China today. The project approaches industrial design from two perspectives: objects and the materials used to produce them. Moving beyond selected and famous socialist consumer products (wristwatch, bicycle, TV, etc), the project looks at vernacular objects of daily use, including chairs, tables, desks, wardrobes, cupboards, sofas, sheets, bedding, crockery, and thermoses. It focuses on four central types of raw and engineered materials: wood, metal, bamboo, and plastics. This approach to PRC industrial design links the social history of these objects and their everyday uses to their contexts of production, circulation, and the broader discussions of raw material provisions, material sciences, mechanisation, materiality, and talk about new aesthetics for a "New China". The project emphasises the role played by a diverse set of individuals and groups who created designs in art institutes, design offices, but also in the workshops of factories often located in the new urban centres of socialist China away from Beijing and Shanghai. It combines this with an exploration of the work of people in government institutions, such as the offices of the Ministry of Light Industry or the Ministry of Forestry, who were in charge of state planning and party-state supervision of object production. It also explores un-institutionalised adaptations and manufacture of industrial blueprints, black market activities, and the connection between material shortages, provisions, and austerity designs.The project will allow the PI to write a new monograph on PRC industrial design history. Several international workshops will lead to the creation of a new online resource - "The Mao Era in Objects" and to a co-edited publication on Mao Era material culture. The project will further promote dialogue between university academics and museum curators through collaboration with the new Hong Kong Museum M+.