Enjoy or Resist? Audience Reception of Revolutionary Model Operas in Communist China

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Art and Politics

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes often step into the cultural production process in order to turn art work into a vehicle for political propaganda. The audience reception is indispensable to fully grasp the relationship between authoritarian regime and cultural production. As Hall (1973) has argued that the encoding and decoding process are relatively autonomous to each other, that is to say, the encoded ideological messages in the cultural products not necessarily being decoded by the audiences in a pre-defined way. To what extent the audiences receiving and internalizing the regime’s intention and how they making meaning out of these cultural products are therefore subject to closer examination.
Although substantial literature exists on the audience reception of cultural products and the influence of media on audience, most assume a background of democracy and developed market system. Few scholars directly address the audience reception of the art work as well as the embedded ideological messages in authoritarian regimes. This research will fill this gap and draw on the case of Chinese Revolutionary Model Operas widely spread during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). I focus both on the social and political contexts on a macro level and the audience’s meaning-making process on a micro level in order to elaborate the mechanism of audience reception of art work in an authoritarian regime.

Author

• Hexuan Zhang, University of Virginia