主页 The Teahouse Under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950–2000


年份: 2018
语言: english
页数: 330 / 326
ISBN 10: 1501715488
ISBN 13: 9781501715488
File: PDF, 13.38 MB
The Teahouse under Socialism

The Teahouse under

The Decline and Renewal of Public
Life in Chengdu, 1950–2000

Di Wang

Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London

This book has been published with the assistance of a research grant from
the University of Macau.
Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit
our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 2018 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wang, Di, 1956– author.
Title: The teahouse under socialism : the decline and renewal of public
life in Chengdu, 1950–2000 / Di Wang.
Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017040065 (print) | LCCN 2017040970 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501715549 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501715556 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781501715488 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501715495
(pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Chengdu (China)—Social life and customs—20th century. |
Tearooms—China—Chengdu—History—20th century. | Socialism
and culture—China—Chengdu—History—20th century. | Chengdu
(China)—Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: LCC DS797.77.C48 (ebook) | LCC DS797.77.C48 W355
2018 (print) | DDC 951/.38—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040065

For my family




Introduction: Urban Political Transitions under Socialism


Part I. The Decline of Public Life, 1950–1976


1. The Demise of the Chengdu Teahouse Guild and the Fall
of Small Business


2. State Control and the Rise of Socialist Entertainment


3. The Decline of Public Life under Mao’s Rule


Part II. The Return of Public Life, 1977–2000


4. The Resurgence of Teahouses in the Reform Era


5. Urban Residents and Migrant Workers in Public Life


6. The Power of Mahjong


Conclusion: The State, the Teahouse, and the Public Sphere


v iii

C o nte nts

Character List




Works Cited





Writing this book has been a long journey. My interest in the teahouses
of Chengdu started in the 1980s when I studied the society of the upper
Yangzi region, but it was a very hard task at the time because of a lack of
sources. In the 1990s, when I conducted research for my dissertation on
street culture in Chengdu, I discovered some good material and thought
that I might write a hundred-year history of Chengdu teahouses. However,
I decided to write two books on teahouses in Chengdu (divided by 1950)
after I found the massive records from the Chengdu Municipal Archives
in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As soon as the first book on teahouses
in the late Qing and Republican periods was completed in 2006, I started
to work on the current book. Unbelievably, the time has passed by so
quickly, and it has taken more than ten years, the longest time I have ever
spent on a book. Now, I feel so relieved to see that the book is going to
be published.
My thanks first go to Bill Rowe. The idea of studying teahouses
started during my graduate years at Johns Hopkins University under his


A c k now l e dgme nts

supervision; he was the first to read the first complete manuscript of this
book and gave me constructive comments. I owe special thanks to Karl
Gerth, who read the earlier version of the whole manuscript thoroughly
and offered the most comprehensive suggestions. I am also very grateful to Howard Goodman, who was my copy editor but did much more
than copyediting and helped me shape a better manuscript in many ways.
I would like to thank Madeleine Zelin and Richard Smith (as well as Bill)
for writing recommendation letters for my grant applications for this project. My gratitude goes to editor Emily Andrew at Cornell University Press
for her enthusiastic support of this project; she guided me through the
whole procedure, from revisions to final manuscript preparation. I would
like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for the press, who offered their
expert critiques and constructive suggestions for improving this book.
I thank the National Humanities Center (NHC) and the National
Endowment for the Humanities for providing residential fellowship during the 2006–2007 academic year, when I could concentrate my energy
and time on this project. The constant discussions with fellows of the
2006–2007 class at the NHC have inspired my thoughts. My thanks also
go to the University of Macau for supporting me with its generous Startup Research Grant at the last stage of this project. I received several grants
from Texas A&M University, including an International Research Travel
Assistance Grant (2007), a grant through the Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities (2007), and a Stipendiary Fellowship through
the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Confucius Institute (2009). This project also received research grants from the East Asian
Institute of the National University of Singapore (2010), L’École des hautes
études en sciences sociales (EHESS, 2011), and the Research Center for
Urban Culture at Shanghai Normal University (2012). I want to thank the
Chengdu Municipal Archives for allowing me to use its collection during
1997 and 2003. Without the access to massive archival material, it would
not be possible to complete this project. I also owe thanks to the Sterling C.
Evans Library at Texas A&M University for providing me its good
During the decade of working on this book, I presented papers based
on this project at Association for Asian Studies annual meetings and other
conferences and would like to thank the organizers, discussants, panelists, and audiences for their comments on my papers. I also gave talks at

Ac kno wled gmen ts


several institutions, including the National University of Singapore, the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Erlangen, Germany), the Free University (Berlin), L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, L’Université
Paris-Diderot, Nanjing University, Shanghai Normal University, Wuhan
University, Central China Normal University (Wuhan), Fudan University,
Peking University, and Remin University (Beijing). The questions and comments from audiences inspired my thoughts. Earlier versions of chapter 2
and chapter 6 have been published in the journals Frontiers of History in
China and International Journal of Asian Studies respectively. Some material in chapters 4 and 5 appeared in Quaderni storici. I thank the editors
and publishers for permission to reuse the materials here.
Many people provided their support in making connections or accompanying me on my fieldwork during 1997 to 2003. Especially, I would like
to thank Lai Jun, Wang Jing, Jiang Mengbi, Yang Tianhong, Hou Dechu,
and Li Xudong. My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their encouragement and spiritual support, which gave me strength to complete this
long journey. I dedicate this book to them.

The Teahouse under Socialism

Urban Political Transitions under Socialism

The last day of 1949 in Chengdu was cold and overcast, and in their usual
way residents sought warmth and camaraderie in hundreds of neighborhood teahouses. But December 31 also marked a turning point. News
about the war just beyond the city was trickling in, and newspaper headlines announced the destruction of Nationalist troops and a coming political
transition for Chengdu.1 Just a few days earlier, the air was filled with the
not-so-distant rumble of cannon and intense gunfire, but on December 27,
without firing a shot, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had marched
into Chengdu, preventing the street battles that residents dreaded. During
all this, life carried on, and teahouses not only remained open but were
packed with customers. Daily life was affected very little.2 Few patrons
would have noticed that on this last day of the year the new government
established a Committee for the Takeover of Culture and Education (Wenjiao jieguan weiyuanhui) under the PLA’s Military Control Commission in
Chengdu (Chengdu shi junshi guanzhi weiyuanhui), an act that would forever change not just teahouses but public life in general (see figure I.1).3


I n t r o duc ti on

Figure I.1 Stove to warm patrons in a teahouse in a Chengdu suburb,
September 2015. Author photo.

People eager to hear the latest about the war went to their neighborhood’s information hub. On December 31 the teahouse waiters would
have been attending to their usual duties—seating, clearing, and refreshing tea bowls—but today they were too busy to sweep peanut shells and

Ur b an P ol i ti c al Transi ti ons u n d er So cialis m


tobacco ash from the floor. Customers did not seem to mind; their sole
focus was the PLA’s presence in the city and the optimistic speculation
that the new Communist government would bring social and economic
stability. Large numbers in Chengdu were hopeful that a regime change
would end an era filled with civil war, rising prices, and the Nationalist dictatorship. The ordinary people cared little about complex political
ideologies but longed for stability and prosperity. In the eyes of many, a
regime change might not have been a bad thing.
As night fell, even more people squeezed into the teahouses, as the
day’s news was put aside in favor of scheduled storytelling. The storytellers quickly lured listeners into strange and fantastical worlds—Investiture
of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo
yanyi), and The Legend of Yue Fei (Shuo Yue).4 These roiling tales led
listeners into well-known historical and political narratives as well as into
ghost worlds, and it all overlapped with human society past and present,
providing temporary relief from recent difficulties. Many in the audience
went home once the storytelling ended at about 10 or 11 p.m., but hardcore teahouse-goers would have stayed much longer, bolstered by naps
taken earlier in the bamboo chairs.5 Also, late nights were when chefs,
apprentices, and workers from nearby shops and restaurants gathered in
the teahouses to relax with friends and unwind after their long shifts, and
to use the hot water to clean their faces and even their feet. The regulars
might not have noted the passing of another year before heading home.
After all, previous years had blended, one into another, and there was no
reason to believe the year ahead would be any different. The common folk
of Chengdu followed the generations that went before them, secure in the
knowledge that regardless of the world’s chaos, they could hold fast to
their meager livelihoods and their teahouses (see figure I.2).
But if some of the customers or workers paused to think about
teahouses, they might have recalled that like all of Chengdu, the teahouses
had already gone through some changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, even the city’s physical landscape had transformed
during this time.6 While the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century
and the occupation of Beijing by troops of the Eight Powers Alliance
had had little effect on Chengdu, which was shielded by high elevation
and mountainous borders, this protection was pierced with the regime
change brought by the 1911 Revolution. At that time, mutinous soldiers


I n t r o duc ti on

Figure I.2 Storyteller. From Fu Chongju 1910, 117.

burned and looted Chengdu’s commercial center, followed by the horrific
street battles of 1917 and 1932. Chengdu survived relatively unscathed
a few years later, when Japanese invading troops flooded eastern China.



Subsequently, from 1937 to 1949, Chengdu residents could easily frequent
teahouses, and they went about their everyday lives without interruption.
Long after midnight on the last day of 1949, waiters finally twisted the
knobs to turn off oil lamps or switched off electric lights, leaving their
teahouses dark and quiet, a brief respite in the daily cycle of operation.7
Teahouse workers went home to sleep under thermal quilts after another
exhausting day, and quite a few actually lived in the teahouses. This free
time was precious, a quick opportunity to rest or stretch sore muscles.
After just a few hours, they would make their way back to the commotion
of the teahouse, thankful for wages that kept them from starvation and
perhaps hoping to someday open their own place. As long as there were
teahouses, they would have their livelihoods.
While we cannot construct with any certainty the dreams and aspirations of average teahouse customers and workers, we can be sure that
most did not foresee the upheaval soon to come, when teahouses would
disappear along with the occupations that they provided. When workers awakened the following morning, January 1, 1950, they would have
opened the teahouse doors for business as usual, unaware that Chengdu
as well as all other Chinese cities had entered a profoundly different era,
one that made the functioning of teahouses and public life more subject
to state control.

The City, Modernity, and the Vitality of Teahouses
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan Province and one of the major cultural,
economic, and political centers in West China. It has a long history. During the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE), it was the capital of the
state of Shu. During the Tang dynasty, Chengdu was one of most prosperous cities in China. Much later, a transition occurred from late Ming
governance to that of the early Qing (roughly the 1620s to 1680s), during which Sichuan experienced more than a half century of war that devastated the economy in the region and damaged the cities. Yet in the early
Qing, the economy and culture were gradually restored. The Opium Wars
(1840–1842 and 1856–1860) had little economic impact on Chengdu,
although missionaries increased their activities there, and the city suffered
little damage during the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864). Chengdu had
one of the largest populations among the country’s inland cities in the


I n t r o duc ti on

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1900s to the 1920s
its population was from 340,000 to 350,000. By 1949, it had grown to
650,000. By 2000, its population reached six million.8
Like all other provincial capitals, Chengdu experienced almost all the
political, economic, social, and cultural transformations from the lateQing reforms to the Communist victory. During 1900 and 1910, Chengdu,
under the influence of the New Policies and self-government movement,
became a center and model of industrial, commercial, educational, and
social reforms in the upper Yangzi region. Local elites, supported by
state power, enthusiastically participated in reforms that expanded their
influence over ordinary people and built their social reputation. In 1911
many residents joined the Railroad Protection Movement, but in the
post-Republican revolution Chengdu fell into chaos. By 1935, the central
government barely controlled Chengdu; instead the city was in the hands
of five warlords who shared power under the system of defense districts
(fangqu zhi). The Nationalist government finally extended its power into
Sichuan during 1935 and 1937.9
The War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) brought Sichuan
and Chengdu onto the central stage of national politics. The Nationalist
government’s move to Chongqing (only 180 miles from Chengdu) had a
profound impact on Chengdu and also changed the relationship between
Sichuan and the central government. Many offices of the central government and other provincial governments, social and cultural organizations,
schools, and factories from East China arrived in Chengdu. A huge number of refugees flooded into the city, bringing new cultural elements with
them. Postwar Chengdu became a stage of political struggle between the
Guomindang and the Communists. On December 27, 1949, nearly three
months after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the People’s Liberation Army captured Chengdu.
During the early socialist period, Chengdu was gradually developed
into an industrial city, and its facilities and infrastructure were also gradually improved: streets were widened; there was new residential construction; sewage systems and bridges were built or improved. From 1964, the
central government launched a plan called Three Lines of Construction
(Sanxian jianshe) in preparation for future wars. This provided a new wave
of industrial development. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976),
the city fell into unrest and even a constant sort of violence in the early



stage of the movement, when many factories and schools were shut down,
and many young people and government employees were sent to the countryside. The Imperial City, a historic site dating to the Han dynasty, was
dismantled entirely.
The post-Mao reforms brought Chengdu rapid expansion and construction. From 1993 to 1998 the dredging of the Funan River that circles the city and the construction of parks with plantings along its banks
greatly improved the landscape, environment, and living conditions of the
city. In order to balance development between coast and hinterland, the
central government launched an ambitious plan called the Great Development of China’s West (Xibu dakaifa), which opened even more opportunities for Chengdu to play a broader role in the national economy. Sichuan
was usually one of the most populous of China’s provinces, but in 1997
its eastern part was separated and became administered by Chongqing at
the provincial level; as a result, Chengdu’s administrative region shrank.
Despite this setback, Chengdu, based on its central position in Sichuan
Province, subsequently built up its own momentum by knitting together
the economy of western Sichuan, thus providing a great opportunity for
its economic development.
With the advent of this kind of modernization, the pace of everyday life
has accelerated. As Ágnes Heller pointed out, “Any change in the rhythm
of life is bound to affect everyday life, but not everyone’s everyday life in
equal measure; and not every area of everyday life is affected to the same
degree.”10 Chengdu succumbed much less than other major Chinese cities to the fast-paced lifestyle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, like
many Chinese cities, Chengdu has experienced development processes and
pressures that are now commonplace in China and around the world. As
a result of China’s political, economic, and cultural transformation and
the impact of globalization, teahouses, teahouse culture, and the public
sphere have seen a shift in both the substance and style of the activities
and opportunities offered.11
By 2000, the city had changed dramatically. It teemed with places of
public leisure—coffeehouses, bars, Internet bars, karaoke clubs, ballroom
dance halls, cinemas, and other modern entertainment centers—as well
as luxury hotels and related facilities. Furthermore, almost every family had one or more color television sets and low-priced VCD and DVD
players that brought a huge variety of channels and entertainment genres


I n t r o duc ti on

(especially Hollywood). Entire families, in their own cars, were taking
drives out of town to scenic areas or to resorts and the like. Chengdu
residents had options for their leisure time, but, almost unbelievably,
this tsunami of options failed to drown the teahouse business; instead,
in Chengdu today, teahouses enjoy unprecedented popularity and success
and are found almost everywhere in the city. No one anticipated such a
strong resurgence, given the obstacles teahouses faced during almost every
political stage in the twentieth century.
During the War of Resistance, reformist elites and the government all
framed their constant attacks on teahouse culture in the larger context of
the war. They often compared the plight of soldiers fighting on the bloody
battlefields with people whiling away the hours at teahouses, turning leisure
pursuits into shameful activities. Lao Xiang, a local writer, defended the
habits of Chengdu residents, pointing out, “We do not cry out ‘Long live
teahouses,’ but we also disagree that teahouses should be forbidden. When a
better alternative emerges, teahouses may fade away. In the meantime, however, we have to go to teahouses to drink, rest, chat, do business, and meet
friends.”12 Lao believed that new types of public facilities might eventually
replace the teahouse, which was a token of an “old society” that would
be abandoned as society became more “progressive.” He of course could
not anticipate that more than half a century later, when society came to be
considered vastly more “progressive,” teahouses would flourish.13 Today,
old, small, and rustic teahouses prosper along with elegant and magnificent
ones, and they are shared by elderly retirees who smoke old-fashioned pipes
and fashionable youngsters with dyed hair and smart phones.
Chengdu in the past had more teahouses than other cities because of the
culture fostered by its geography and economy. Unlike in most regions in
China, the rural people of Sichuan, especially on the Chengdu Plain, lived
in relative isolation on their farmlands; this prevented the cultivation of
village or community life. They relied on rural markets more than did their
counterparts elsewhere, who had access to long-distance trade networks.
The rural workers of the Chengdu Plain marketed locally and then would
stop by a teahouse to socialize or take in entertainment. Some even bought
and sold in the teahouses.14 In addition, the narrow footpaths made the
use of transport animals rare; men using equipment such as carrying
poles, wheelbarrows, and sedan chairs were much more prevalent. Coolies
depended on teahouses as rest places. Poor water quality and limited fuel



Figure I.3 A teahouse in the open air. This photograph was taken by
Joseph Needham between 1943 and 1946. Photo reproduced courtesy of the
Needham Research Institute, Cambridge University.

made Chengdu further dependent on teahouses. Water carriers brought
river water from outside town to sell for drinking. Such transport would
have been difficult for many families, so it was common to purchase boiled
water directly from teahouses. Firewood, the major fuel in Chengdu, was
expensive; many ordinary families lit fires only to cook. They patronized
restaurants and teahouses in order to conserve firewood and bought their
hot water for washing from neighborhood teahouses (see figure I.3).
By the end of the twentieth century, drinking water, fuel, and transportation were plentiful and affordable, and people could drink tea
conveniently at home. So what has made teahouses endure? There are
many factors, but the most important is that teahouses always adapted
to changes in society and adjusted their business model in parallel with
cultural, political, and economic transformations. In particular, they have
been able to absorb new technology and new demands for pleasure. In the
first ten or fifteen years of the twentieth century, for example, even during the Qing dynasty at its endpoint, teahouses introduced movie shows
and record players to the public.15 In the 1980s, with the rise of videos,


I n t r oduc ti on

many teahouses added video screening equipment. To keep up with economic development and rising living standards, teahouses installed airconditioning and private box seats. Similarly, teahouses provided space
for mahjong. Even the older sort of personal services either survived intact
or came back in different forms. For instance, while the hot towel service
was gone, foot-soaking has been added. And fortune-telling, earwax picking, and shoe polishing continue today. Sometimes, people in the teahouse
feel that they have traveled to a previous era or are on a bridge linking the
past to the present.
Coffeehouses and bars have not replaced teahouses or stolen away
teahouse customers. Tea drinking is still the best fit for people with limited economic resources, especially the elderly. The main customer base in
the teahouse is the middle-aged and older. Young people who are attracted
to international trends go to modern Western-style coffeehouses or bars,
while others patronize the less-expensive and old-style ones.16 Coffeehouses and bars in contemporary Chinese cities are entirely Western, with
no reflection of Chinese custom, but teahouses are rooted in China’s past.
In a coffeehouse or a bar, patrons have no access to peddlers, fortunetellers, earwax pickers, or shoe polishers. The teahouse has always included
more of these aspects of the local society and economy than do the modern coffeehouse and bar. Its patrons can linger for hours or even all day,
for very little money, adding boiling water to their tea leaves rather than
having to buy another cup. In lower-level and street-corner teahouses,
people often strike up conversation, adding thus another dimension of
vitality to the teahouse environment.
Nearly all of Chengdu has been demolished and rebuilt during the
decades spanning the turn of the century. The old streets and neighborhoods in which teahouses were embedded are almost all gone, and the
city has been born anew, amid rapid population growth, booming urban
development, and the attendant traffic problems. Chengdu’s fate is similar
to that of almost all other ancient cities in China. Whereas each Chinese city in ancient times had its own charming, distinctive appearance
and folk culture, today this uniqueness is all but lost; cities are becoming alike in look and sensation. Therefore, the recovery and restoration
of the historical legacies of China’s cities form a significant mission for
social, cultural, and urban historians. Whether the teahouse will continue
to adapt to the challenges of radical social transformation, incorporate

Ur b a n P ol i ti c al Transi ti ons un d er So cialis m


today’s ubiquitous technological gadgets, manage globalization, and play
an important role in modern, urban lifestyles are questions that only time
will answer.

Public Life, Public Spaces, and Urban Society
under the Socialist State
Why are we looking at teahouses in socialist, that is, post-1949, Chengdu?
The teahouse may be considered a “small urban space,” following the
words of sociologist William H. Whyte in his discussion of such public
places as coffeehouses.17 It is natural, then, that the theory and history of
urbanism will be taken up here, since we are dealing with Chengdu as an
urban area with many smaller spaces, à la Whyte. I propose that we think
beyond simply “small urban spaces” and link the latter to concepts of
the public, society, and the state. How does the public (or publics) manifest itself (or themselves) in those small urban spaces? Teahouse life was
and is part, but not all, of public life in Chengdu, and was thus susceptible to transformations, along with the rest of the country. We shall see its
importance in everyday life and how an ancient cultural institution could
remain vital and even thrive despite unprecedented threats during a period
of rapid modernization. Post-Mao reforms provided a significant opportunity for the revival of public life, which enhanced the development of
the public sphere.
In this book, “the public” means people as they move about outside
their private spaces, engaging in livelihoods, commerce, information sharing, and entertainment—all of these giving substance to another aspect of
urban society, namely urban culture. The individuals who act in public,
in their public spaces, and the resultant life and culture that make up a
society, must all deal in numerous ways with the state. In this book I begin
to explore examples of the way in which certain policies of Early Socialism created historically game-changing impacts on society. The main
evidence of this was the large extent to which urban Chengdu and its
culture of public life became pressured and bent by the ruling Communist
state entity, which was quite concerned with the public. By looking back
at Chengdu and capturing the push and pull of various forces, we can
narrate changes in the situation of the urban teahouse (the small spaces)


I n t r oduc ti on

and the publics (smallest human units of society) who frequented them in
China’s new socialism (the state).
In the first half of the twentieth century, few other institutions in
Chengdu were more important in everyday life than teahouses, and no
other city in China had as many of them as Chengdu.18 By examining
the economic, social, political, and cultural changes that occurred in the
teahouses of Chengdu during the late Qing and Republican periods, we
obtain a thorough picture of everyday culture in its most basic unit of
public life. We find, as I did in my previous work, that the enduring local
culture and customs as represented by the Chengdu teahouse constantly
resisted relentless waves of Westernization, which imposed a uniformity of
modernist and then postmodern transformation, and which came in parallel with the state’s growing role in public life. In other words, two major
developments coexisted in the course of urban reform and modernization
in this period: the growing role of the state, and the concurrent decline of
the uniqueness of local culture and customs. Both of these developments
could be seen clearly in a major part of everyday culture—the teahouse.
The book at hand focuses on teahouses in Chengdu after the Communist victory. It deals with different issues and answers different questions
from those of the pre-Communist period because of, quite understandably, a new social and political environment. Today, Chengdu still has the
largest number of teahouses among all Chinese cities. In the second half
of the twentieth century, the role and importance of the teahouse changed,
and many more public spaces became available, as compared with the preceding eras and regimes. By the end of the twentieth century the teahouse
vied for patrons alongside outdoor places such as streets, squares, sidewalks, open markets, plazas, and parks, as well as such indoor places
as theaters, cinemas, galleries, museums, exhibitions, courtyards, arcades,
restaurants, and coffeehouses. However, like most popular public spaces,
the teahouse remains an enduring symbol of Chinese culture, having
already prevailed for centuries through political transformation, modernization, and globalization. Naturally, teahouse life was and is part, but
not all, of public life in Chengdu, and was thus susceptible to political
and social transformations, along with the rest of the country. We shall
see its importance in everyday life and how an ancient cultural institution
could remain vital and even thrive despite unprecedented threats to small
business per se during a period of rapid modernization. Post-Mao reforms



provided a significant opportunity for public life. It is a worthy subject for
historical scholarship. A robust understanding of the teahouse’s expansive social, cultural, and political roles can take us far in understanding
not just Chengdu, but the whole of Chinese urban society, as well as the
broader connection between the transformation of Chinese urban society
and the politics of the new socialist state.
To study and write about the world brought by the new state, I draw
on a general consensus in the field of historians and sociologists working on China by referring here to two major periods: Mao’s China
(1949–1976), which I frequently call Early Socialism, and the postMao Reform Era (1977–2000), or Late Socialism.19 My study is a type
of microhistory of Chengdu, and it concerns the processes, stories, and
degrees of change in the public life of that city, from the PLA’s takeover
and through the stormy political developments of Early Socialism—which
were massive and affected both urban and rural people, sometimes violently and tragically—ultimately arriving to the reforms of the post-Mao,
or Late Socialism, period.
By examining teahouses in Chengdu through the second half of the
twentieth century, this book will hold up for investigation several motivating questions: How did state power intervene in the operation of small
businesses? How could such a thing as “socialist entertainment” be established in a local society? What happened to the already established guilds?
How did the political movements change the teahouses and public life?
How did the teahouse revive and flourish under the post-Mao reforms
and the opening up of the economy? Through such questioning, we might
enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in Chengdu
under the Communist state with its needs.
Four major points run through the book as a type of contextual backdrop, and each point becomes an aspect of political developments that
greatly impacted lives in Chengdu, the old-style organizations there, and
the city’s economy. First of all, during the Mao era, the state achieved
tight control over society generally, and it was able to penetrate the very
core of society in order to control almost all its resources. The spaces usually available for social give-and-take and for the natural development of
social projects were sharply limited. Under the Communist regime, the
state attempted to control both the venues of public life and leisure and
their forms and content. Immediately after its political installation, the


I n t r oduc ti on

Communist administration in Chengdu carried out measures to manipulate everyday life and popular entertainment. Resistance after 1949 did
exist, as, in historical comparison, popular culture had resisted control
by elites and the state during the late Qing and Republican periods. But
post-1949 resistance was much subdued by the state’s often violent campaigns to root out so-called enemies, quell emergent protests, and impose
its own party-determined forms of expression, co-opting expressions and
actions by people in public spaces.20 Public life thus became weakened in
the face of the strongest state in Chinese history. We must recall that the
blunt harbinger of all this was the arrival in Chengdu in 1949 of a military unit that immediately looked toward a “takeover” of culture. Such
a military-ideological clamp on public life and people’s minds was a new
thing in Chinese history. As a result, many old forms of entertainment
and popular culture that did not manage to be recognized as “revolutionary” quickly vanished. Of course, although we perceive distinct conflicts
between this expanded state power and the society per se, in fact the reality was much more complex. The two should not be seen as occupying an
unvarying binary opposition: gray areas existed everywhere. Furthermore,
state policies were not always unalterable. With the intense flux of political movements, the state control of public space and everyday life was also
sometimes tight and sometimes loose.
Second, the post-Mao economic reforms, starting around 1977, were
a turning point in public life, because the Late Socialist state, caught up
in economic forces, had to weaken its control over people and lessen its
interventions in daily life. Socialist ideology over time has become less
important in the state’s planning. On the one hand, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government closely watch the crucial sectors such as mainstream media, education, and publications. On the other
hand, they have withdrawn direct control from many areas, including
small business operations, entertainment, and commercial culture. In parallel with economic and social developments, public life gradually became
increasingly freer as well. Everyday life was dominated by sweeping “open
market” economic reforms that were structured within a unique type of
socialist political system, and to a significant degree public life moved
away from state control. Public life after the post-Mao recovery differed
significantly from before. The emerging new sort of commercialization



had a great impact on teahouses and teahouse life, as well as political culture. And ultimately, as components of a long-established, ongoing local
culture, teahouses had to find ways to adjust to the massive wave of commercial globalization.
Third, there is no simple distinction between Mao’s rule (Early Socialism) and the reform era (Late Socialism). On the surface, we can see certain
continuities in the state’s policies that span the two eras. In fact, this phenomenon still affects all aspects of Chinese society. In their study of early
1950s China, Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz noted that during the
post-Mao Late Socialism, many people praised the 1950s, offering good
memories of that time: “It is no coincidence that post-Mao reform-era
publications promote positive memories of the early 1950s: the two periods share striking similarities. After the founding of the People’s Republic
in October 1949—and again in the late 1970s after Mao died—a massive
wave of rural migrants entered cities, private factories coexisted alongside
large state enterprises, nongovernmental and church groups operated next
to Communist Party-led organizations, and capitalists and other nonparty
figures supported the regime and played a role in shaping its policies.”21
I agree that there were such similarities, but throughout this book I also
emphasize a divergence: that the 1950s and the post-Mao era moved in
two different strategic directions. During Early Socialism, we can describe
a period of transition from the pre-1949 free market economy, with little
state engagement, to a centrally planned economy with a large factor of
state control. For example, although rural migrants could move to the city
for jobs, by then the powerful state could send out masses of urban residents to rural areas, and eventually a household registration system could
also prevent rural people from migrating to the cities (this is discussed
in more detail in chapters 1 and 2). With the reforms of Late Socialism,
however, the direction of the state, as instituted from the top, was the
opposite—going from the planned economy and tight state control to a
freer, market economy with less state control.
Fourth, the socialist state is still woven into social and cultural life and
still seeks to wield influence. Li Zhang studied migrant workers in the city
during the Late Socialism transition and noted that “the retreat of the
state” and “the triumph of the market and capitalism” might be incorrect
notions.22 Jing Wang argues similarly that in the years following 1989,


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the state also actively participated in consumer and commercial culture.
She tries to explain “how culture [was] reconstructed in the 1990s as the
site where capital—both political and economic capital—can be accumulated.” She finds that in what is termed “the postsocialist state,” government has taken a different strategy for maintaining influence, namely, by
playing an active role in culture. It has “rejuvenated its capacity, via the
market, to affect the agenda of popular culture, especially at the discursive
level.” Therefore, “the state’s rediscovery of culture as a site where new
ruling technologies can be deployed and converted simultaneously into
economic capital constitutes one of its most innovative strategies of statecraft since the founding of the People’s Republic.”23
I would argue slightly differently. The state has merely found a new
and more subtle way to influence culture and entertainment in the postMao era—top-down homogeneity. Although there is no question that the
new consumer culture is more plentiful and laden with choices than ever
before, it reflects little that is local, and instead has become homogenized.
Thus, a national, even centralized, culture has strengthened. Of course,
such a national culture may be driven by modernization and commercialization as well as by the state. For example, the nationally driven policy
surrounding urban development encouraged the unifying of culture and
further weakened the ability of local architecture and well-established patterns of urban activity and spaces to survive.
In sum, we have considered both the Chengdu teahouse, a longestablished institution, and the Chinese state as phenomena that developed
distinct shapes over the half century in question. The teahouses per se—
their buildings, sites, manner of operation—were not altered at first, so
much as culturally supervised and politically controlled, and consequently
they withered. The new Communist state too had its distinct shapes over
those fifty years, especially going from Early to Late Socialism. At this
point, it will aid in the overall argument, and in sustaining my four major
points, mentioned just above, if we consider briefly some previous scholarly approaches to the idea of public spaces and their interaction with the
political needs and impacts of the state. The two phenomena created an
urban confluence of the public and the political in which we can see both
the state’s hand and the citizenry’s means of resisting that hand, while
continuing their lives and lifestyles (see figure I.4).



Figure I.4 A teahouse where middle-class people gathered. This photograph
was taken by Joseph Needham between 1943 and 1946. Photo reproduced
courtesy of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge University.

The Public and the Political: Urban Culture under Socialism
In premodern China, there always existed a concept of “public” (gong);
it touched on motives and actions partly official and partly familial and
domestic. In this book, “public” is often used in a sense that connects it with
“public space.” In late-imperial China, people often discussed “the public” (gongzhong) in connection with voluntary organizations and “public opinion” (gongzhong yulun), something discussed by Mary Rankin
and William Rowe.24 During the period of the 1911 Revolution, the rampant warlordism and emergence of the Nationalist government, the public
played an important role in shaping national and local politics and political culture. At this time, “public” could have several meanings, such as
media, intellectuals, an amassed body of a local population, various associations, and so on. Often, such “publics” were separated from the government and officials. After 1949, the “public” became a sensitive term,
since the state and the party dominated politics, the economy, and culture,


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and continually changed and grew or shrank in its force, in parallel with
Mao’s radical ideologies and policies. Until the Cultural Revolution, “the
public” did not exist and was replaced by “the masses” (qunzhong), sometimes being “revolutionary masses” (geming qunzhong)—a term with a
negative opposite, namely “counterrevolutionaries” (fangeming). In a
certain sense, in communist discourse, “the masses” were those people
who diligently followed the CCP and its government and actively participated in required political movements. Although “revolutionary masses”
had a life in public places, it was hardly voluntary but was sponsored or
organized by the state and the party. There were only official and private
realms, no actual “public” between those two endpoints. This changed
in the post-Mao era. After some relaxation of state controls on many
fronts, people acquired relatively more freedom in political and public
life. With this opening and “ideological emancipation” (sixiang jiefang),
people had more opportunities to participate in national and local politics
and to form public opinions. “The public” came back from its formerly
deflated profile and started to play a role in China’s political life and political culture.
There was not a discourse recognized as something like “public life”
in the field of Chinese history, even though people did have goings-on in
public spaces.25 In contrast, there has been an important literature about
public life and public spaces in the West. Those studies seem to follow one
of two approaches—the narrow and the wide. The narrow view, it seems,
has focused on people’s need to find the spaces that are outside of home,
close friends, family, and private service. It sees different groups and types,
coming into contact in, and clashing over, public rituals and public venues.26 The wider approach uses an analytical viewpoint from sociological
and communications theory, and in some contexts views both people and
the state as occupying the realm of the public together.27
In this book, I will remain more or less persuaded by the narrow
approach. I favor Richard Sennett’s notion of public life as occurring outside of family and close friends, as stated above.28 Regarding the wider
approach and what one might call the mixing of the political into the public space, I hope to show that especially in the case of post-1949 China,
the people and the state tended to stake out different directions and were
to some extent, but not diametrically or in a binary sense, oppositional.
Overall my concept of public life has the following traits: (1) it is human



activity in places that people share—in some sense among random people who do not constitute a kin or friendship group; (2) in such a place,
people do not have expectations of privacy; (3) their activities can be conducted for social, leisure, or economic reasons; and (4) activities of public
life can be affected by specific political situations as well as the overall
political culture of the state. In this study, the focus of public life is mainly
on everyday habits of association that are relatively voluntary and free.
That is, they are not manipulated by the needs of the state and its ruling
party, although it will be instructive, further along, to reflect on certain
state-sponsored activities or other propaganda-driven events held in public places, using the public as actors.
Yunxiang Yan notes that “a significant change in public life during
the post-Mao era has been the disappearance of frequent mass rallies,
voluntary work, collective parties, and other forms of ‘organized sociality’ in which the state (through its agents) played the central role. In its
place are new forms of private gatherings in public venues.” Under Mao,
public life took the form of a highly controlled, “organized sociality” that
emphasized the “centrality of the state, the official ideology, and the submission of individuals to an officially endorsed collectivity.”29 Although
I do not think there was any “voluntary work” under Mao’s rule (any
activity under a “voluntary” flag was sponsored or organized by the party
or the government), Yan was right in observing the transformation of
public life in the post-Mao era from collective to individual. While some
have argued that we might do well to look at party-led public events during Early Socialism as a new and transformed sort of public life in public
spaces, I would prefer to emphasize the presence or lack of such essential
qualities as voluntarism and vocal expression. Under Mao, these latter
qualities were suppressed so that controlled propaganda flow and a controlled public ruled out voluntary, vocal public activities.30 After Mao,
“the new sociality celebrates individuality and private desires in unofficial
social and spatial contexts.” The center of public life and socialization
shifted “from large state-controlled public spaces (such as city squares,
auditoriums, and workers’ clubs) to smaller, commercialized arenas.”31
Recently, we have had studies of dance halls, bowling alleys, and parks,
all of which provide such public space. However, in Chengdu, it was the
teahouse that provided not just a space, but services to meet the everyday
needs of people from all walks of life. Services must be seen as part of the


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urban culture, and they added relatively more richness to public experiences in these ubiquitous public spaces.
It is clear that public spaces, as typified so well by the Chengdu teahouse,
meshed during this period with political forces—at certain times and in
circumscribed ways. My overall research on the teahouses of Chengdu has
also taken up the way in which they were impacted by the new political
culture; this has helped to show how the CCP’s agenda transformed public
space and public life. Once again, there is a broad and a narrow approach
in this literature; and again I will favor, at least in this discussion, the narrower approach.32 Based on the perspective found in the work of Lynn
Hunt, I want to delimit this political culture: for our purposes it means
the socialist or Communist Party’s political culture. Hunt focused her
examination of political culture on specifically that which developed, and
evolved and changed, within the long process called the French Revolution.33 Similarly, we must recognize that the Chinese Communist revolution professed and practiced a culture that changed and revealed new
forms over successive political periods. In the following study, without
losing site of where we are in this evolution in political culture, we can
examine the effect of the wider aspects upon the narrower—through the
lens of the teahouse. We can begin to explore how the new Soviet-style
state employed political power to manipulate all aspects of Chinese society, how political power determined people’s daily lives and cultural lives,
and how socialist politics and in some sense its progressivist and modernist culture penetrated the broad public life. As with the French Revolution,
we are dealing with a radical, ideologically potent period of time. We will
see to what extent the Communist revolution and other political movements affected the relationships among people and between the individual
and the state. A great many current studies of political culture in China
focus on the wide arenas of national politics, policy making, state ideologies, and elite activities, but here we enter the lowest level of politics and
culture in order to see the two interact at the most basic unit of society.
Urban culture might be considered a part of the political culture, and
Chengdu gives us much on which to build or correlate, in regard to theoretic and historical studies. I see several approaches as having developed
in studies of post-1949 Chinese cities. The first was a macro-political
approach, coming mostly from political scientists and sociologists. Its
deals mostly with government policies and little with quotidian human
activities. There were in fact few studies of post-1949 Chinese cities before



the 1980s.34 Then the field began to explore urban people and their needs,
habits, and lifestyles. Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish did much
to open this up. Their Urban Life in Contemporary China dealt with a
vast array—politics, the economy, security, infrastructure, marriage and
family structure, the status of women, urban organizations, crime and
social control, political control, religions, social values, and personal relationships.35 A few years later, Whyte wrote the chapter “Urban Life in the
People’s Republic” for volume 15 of the Cambridge History of China; it
addressed urban life historically from 1949 to 1980. From Whyte’s work
we understand how people responded to the Communists’ takeover of
cities, the party’s Soviet model of urban development, the relationship
between the urban elite and ordinary people, urban organizations, and
the chaotic impact on urban life of political movements such as the Great
Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.36 So far his overall work
remains the most comprehensive analysis.
In the second approach, studies of modern urban China began to take
a historical view, focusing more on personal and individual experiences
under the Communist regime through studies (mostly after 2000) based
on empirical and archival data. These new and often reliable sources have
increasingly enhanced our understanding of the People’s Republic of China
and its cities. Research topics have focused heavily on the transition from
Communist leadership during the warfare leading up to 1950 to urban management later on, as well as how this transition happened and what was its
mechanism. Moreover, since so many studies concentrate on Shanghai, historians of urban China face a challenge regarding the picture of Chinese cities taken as an aggregated whole. The recent and perhaps more important
of the English-language historical approaches is Dilemmas of Victory: The
Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, edited by Jeremy Brown and
Paul G. Pickowicz.37 The editors recognize that “documents from municipal archives have led to much more detailed accounts of the Communist
takeover of city institutions and the reordering of urban society.”38 Like
these Western historians of China, Chinese historians in mainland China
also started their studies of the CCP’s socialist urban agenda generally after
2000. Despite various restrictions of a political nature, in the past decade
some important works have emerged that deserve our attention; in particular, there has been notable progress in the discovery and development of
new materials and topics, although most of them are on political history,
and few of them study cities other than Shanghai.39


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The newest contribution to this approach of the history of Communist China is Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of
High Socialism, edited by Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, which
includes three articles dealing with cities: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai.
As the editors point out, the past scholarship has been “mainly top-down
and state-focused,” but this edited volume focuses on “individual people
in villages, factories, neighborhoods, counties, and ethnic minority regions
from the bottom up, and in everyday contexts.” This book has also found
that state and society are “impossible to clearly distinguish” from each
other. During the Mao era, politics could be seen everywhere and penetrated everyday life. Therefore, to study public life, we must consider the
factors of politics; as Brown and Johnson point out, “Looking at everyday
life does not mean ignoring the role of the state.”40 In fact, the relations
of state and society have become a main focus in studying the history of
socialist China, and also the emphasis of my study of public life. From this
book, we will find that almost all major changes in public life during Early
Socialism resulted from the government and state policies.
Finally, the most recent studies of cities and urban life in post-Mao
China are those by anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists. Besides demography, they examine the transformation from the
planned economy to the market economy and, of more recent interest,
from the ideology of socialist idealism to real problems of disparity, urban
woes, and lifestyles. These studies pay attention to workers, government
employees, intellectuals, and women. Concerning the latter, we now have
explorations of women’s experiences at work and home, as well as of
how women responded to economic and gender inequality, the workermanagement relationship, political participation, the public’s response to
changes, employment opportunities for women, and the status of women
in urban and rural migrant families.41 Another important topic of this
approach has been the prominent changes of Late Socialism (the reform
period) that have to do with the rise in itinerant people and the demolition
and reconstruction of cities.42
In studying China’s recent urban culture, although we have been discussing concepts, we must nonetheless keep in mind several specifics that
impacted society in the cities. First, the Communist regime during Early
Socialism established a machine of control sufficient to reach even the
lowest level—that is, the street level—of urban society in which random



activities occur in the spaces of public life. Second, after the post-Mao
reforms, a large “floating population” greatly escaped the state’s control
of urban society. Third, since the late twentieth century, China has undergone both an urban and commercial revolution that has changed urban
public life. Fourth, academic writing about post-1949 China went through
changes. Work conducted in the 1970s and 1980s generally offered a
national perspective on political systems, policies, control, and management. With the turn of this century, however, the focus shifted to urban life
and problems in specific cities, with an emphasis on human experiences.
All these trends point to the form and plan of my book. Because my
study is one of microhistory, it tends to combine the historical (including
all the new archival material) and the socio-anthropological approaches
just mentioned. I rely on both archival material and fieldwork in an effort
to build up my interpretation of the changes in an inland city that in some
sense are relatively typical of any Chinese city. Built on a foundation of
those earlier studies, my method shifts away just a bit, to go in new directions. The first of these shifts has to do with China’s enormous social and
cultural transformation after 1949. In the past, studies of modern Chinese
history regarded the Republic and the People’s Republic as two separate
eras. Of course they were right, because the two regimes have obvious differences in political systems, governance, economic and cultural policies,
and so forth. However, some recent works on PRC history have found a
continuity in the CCP regime’s emergence from the Nationalist government; they have also pointed out that CCP and Guomindang policies were
not so essentially different as we thought before.
For example, in her 1995 article on everyday life of bank employees in Shanghai and the emergence of the danwei system, Wen-hsin Yeh
pointed out that by the time the Communists took over Shanghai in 1949,
“a significant portion of Shanghai’s middle-class urbanites had already been
socialized by decades of comparable communal experience.” Therefore,
the Communist victory in 1949 was “not experienced as a raw confrontation between bourgeois individualism and peasant socialism.” Instead,
Yeh believes that “the very corporate capitalism that the Communists proceeded not so much to dismantle as to reconstitute had prepared middleclass urbanites’ transition to socialism.”43 In 2013, the Harvard-Yenching
Institute held a workshop, “Rethinking the 1949 Divide: Dialogue between
Political Science and History”; the participants were historians from the


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United States and China.44 The topics of the papers included economic
policies, the railroad, the rise of socialist entertainment (my own paper),
attacking Yiguandao (a popular religious organization), drafting the 1954
constitution, comparisons of the 1911 revolution and the 1949 revolution, American universities in Shanghai, social welfare, mass movements,
and so on. Almost all the participants of the workshop agreed, although
to different extents, that the Guomindang and the CCP had many connections in the form of ideology, governance, and economic policy.
The present book seeks to strengthen the terms of the debate about
continuity and discontinuity after 1949 chiefly by going more deeply into
the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond and by using bottom-up data
that knit together individual lives and the state—all of this related to one
major inland city and its basic units of public space. I fully recognize the
changes and continuities in public life, and the important interplay of the
two. Yet my relatively concrete evidence helps to determine more precisely
what changed and what remained unchanged in public spaces, public life,
and urban culture in Chengdu. By examining public life well past 1949, my
study reveals how the Communist revolution and subsequently its enormous, top-down political campaigns affected relationships among ordinary
people, the CCP, and the state. I describe public life and political culture
during periods of unprecedented historical upheaval, covering the upheavals of Early Socialism, through the radical Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, to the post-Mao reforms of Late Socialism. Finally, my
shift of focus has to do with the everyday importance of the teahouse: it has
always been the hub of neighborhood communication and social interaction, thus the perfect venue that the politically powerful sought to influence.
The teahouse, as a microcosm of society, provides an ideal window for
observing social, cultural, and political transformations. To fully understand a city like Chengdu requires that we enter it from the “bottom”
in order to examine the basic units of urban social life. My interest is
in how Communist political culture was enforced in these public spaces,
and how the resulting changes affected public life generally. In short,
I will argue that everyday life in China did undergo a truly fundamental
change after 1949, perhaps this being the “rupture” that the one side of
the debate refers to, and may be thought of as the roiling surface of a
swift river. Although we understand its overall magnitude, we know little
about the specific, aggregated details, especially concerning life on the bottom rungs of urban society. The latter aspect represents the continuity of



sand, pebbles, and quieter undercurrents that adhere and change only very
slowly as individual units, over the river’s long course.

Evaluation and Use of Sources
New sources available for the study of post-1949 China present new challenges. In 1969, Michel Oksenberg listed five major primary sources for
studying PRC history and culture: mainland publications, such as books,
journals, and newspapers; interviews of former residents of the PRC;
accounts by people who visited China; fictional works; and Chinese documents and other materials. He did not mention mainland archives because
at the time scholars did not have access to them. He acknowledged that
assessing these works presented challenges, for example, “what perspectives are commandeered by each source.” Today, we are in a much better
position than scholars in the 1950s and 1960s. We have access to archival
materials despite some limitations. However, the sources are uneven. For
example, archives related to the 1950s and 1960s are available, but those
for the 1970s and after become rare. Therefore, as Oksenberg pointed
out, “the study of China must be undertaken in the face of strong discontinuities in the sources.”45
Although for the events of the 1950s and early 1960s I depend primarily on archival materials, still we find few records on our subject—the
teahouse in general—because during the 1960s and 1970s the number of
teahouses decreased dramatically, and they became less important. Yet
some Chengdu teahouses survived, and these give us broad clues about
teahouse life and even details from a variety of writings that are not usually found in archives—personal records, diaries, and memoirs. However,
generally the data about teahouses in 1950s Chengdu usefully reveal
aspects of the transition from Nationalist to Communist governance that
impacted teahouse life and business operations. They touch on the means
of state control, employment, and wages, and the reasons for and results
of the teahouses’ decline. The Cultural Revolution, a time when teahouses
reached their nadir, has left little documentation for us, and the situation
was made even worse by the fact that the “national press for this period
was less informative, more propagandistic.”46
I have generally relied on post-1949 materials held by the Chengdu
Municipal Archives; these are listed at the beginning of the endnotes, along


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with the abbreviations used to identify them. In the late 1990s, I found
these archival materials scattered in the files deposited by the Chengdu
Police Force, the Guilds in All Professions, the Bureau of Industry and
Commerce, the Registry of Commercial Administrations, the Association of Industry and Commerce, the Chamber of Commerce, the Second
Bureau of Commerce, the United Front Section of the Municipal Party
Committee, and the Bureau of Culture. They had not been used previously
by researchers. During the 1990s, archives in China were much more open
than later, so I was able to access not only those related to the 1950s, but
also the early 1960s, although the quantity and quality were not as good
as in the earlier years.
In addition, I use newspapers, miscellaneous written sources, and
my own field investigations. Examples of the newspaper sources are the
Chengdu ribao (Chengdu daily) and the Renmin ribao (People’s daily). Both
were official newspapers of the Communist Party and the government, but
the former was at the city level, while the latter was at the national level.
There are rare mentions of teahouses, usually for propaganda purposes, but
which are nonetheless useful. It should be mentioned that from the 1950s
to the 1970s, local newspapers reported little on teahouses, in sharp contrast to the plentiful and colorful coverage previously, during the Republican period. Beginning in 1949 the newspapers fell under the control of
the government and thus became a political propaganda tool of the party.
Although teahouses were still permitted, they were regarded as “backward” and were rarely included in “positive publicity,” an attitude that we
notice in the comments and urgings set forth in the newspapers. Moreover,
the Communist government strongly promoted the notion of building a
modern, industrial city that eschewed leisure lifestyles and consumption.
Therefore people reduced significantly their patronage of teahouses.
My book’s sources on Late Socialism present both advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is the lack of archival files; for example,
even simple facts such as the precise number of teahouses in this period
cannot be answered. In China’s current political environment, recent
issues are more difficult to research using archival sources, because the
pertinent archives are either classified or unavailable to the public. As to
advantages, because the teahouses underwent revival during the reforms
of Late Socialism, and because of the relatively freer media, local newspapers increased their attention to issues and activities concerning teahouses.



One further note: Under socialism, our relevant sources (whether archival or print media) became structured to benefit the prevailing political
movements and ideologies. The preservation and distribution of information via newspapers, especially in Mao’s China, was the domain of political propaganda, making the authenticity of their reportage questionable
in some instances and to varying degrees. The CCP and the government
tightly controlled the dissemination of information from the 1950s to the
1970s, making the use of any materials from this era fraught with difficulties. Therefore, we must analyze the background of the news and place it
into its larger political context. Sometimes I treat this information not so
much as facts but as indicators of how and why the report was presented
in a particular way, merely in order to sift out the truth from between
the lines.
Journalism changed after the beginning of the reforms. The CCP and
its government still controlled the media, but the emergence of non-party
newspapers brought a bit more freedom, as long as media did not report
on sensitive political topics. This meant that they could generally report
accurately on issues in everyday life, including leisure activities. As a result,
newspapers reported with increasing frequency on teahouses and public life, providing valuable details. Of course, these reports shared some
similarities with writing in the Republican era; they often presented an
elite perspective that was critical of teahouses and public life and biased
against popular entertainment. Therefore, we should be skeptical about
using them: they are simply a source to understand a more or less official
view of popular culture.
In addition to archives and journalistic media, the second part of
the book relies on fieldwork. I have been able to perform fieldwork in
teahouses for several years and have witnessed dramatic changes to the
city’s landscape, culture, and everyday life. I have observed all types of
teahouses, from multilevel balconied places to small street-corner establishments, and I have talked with a variety of people, from patrons and
owners to staff and associated workers—waiters, fortune-tellers, shoe polishers, and earwax pickers. When I investigated a teahouse, I did not pass
around a questionnaire, take notes, or record conversations, preferring
instead unstructured chats; the topic or questions were not prepared but
followed the momentary flow. After fieldwork each day, I wrote in my
journal what I heard and saw.


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What I heard and saw was not selective according to some imposed
format: I was able to collect stories of (at some basic level) actual events
and information more easily from a casual conversation than from a formal survey. It helped that in an old-style street-corner teahouse, patrons
do not have much sense, or right, of privacy. On the other hand, I could
not gain sources systematically on certain subjects, and the information
I received was sometimes random. Also, I have tried to retain the original
flavor of my notes in their first state. I hope that this helped to preserve
whatever was spontaneous in them. Although I performed field investigation like an anthropologist, I nonetheless treated what I encountered
from a historical point of view—that is, not attempting to establish, or
interpret, a person’s habits or patterns in particular ways, but to answer
historical questions relative to how economic and political changes transformed public life. I have seen that within a mere decade, the old city has
virtually vanished before our eyes, subsumed (physically, at least) by the
new. The distinctive charm and folk culture of each city in ancient China
have been all but obliterated as cities have become increasingly uniform.
Therefore, to recover and restructure the history of China’s cities is a significant mission for social, cultural, and urban historians.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, this book has six chapters
and is divided into two parts, of three chapters each. The first part, “The
Decline of Public Life, 1950–1976,” focuses mainly on state control of the
teahouse business and popular entertainment and the subsequent transformations they experienced. Chapter 1 explores the fate of local trade
organizations in the early 1950s. By examining the transformation and
demise of the existing, older Teahouse Guild in Chengdu, we see how
the state could manipulate such organizations to achieve control of small
businesses. Once the socialist agenda was put into motion and the state
used the organizations to gain total control over all aspects of business, it
greatly diminished, and nearly destroyed, their functioning as open public
spaces. This process by the new Communist state was just one part of a
comprehensive elimination of social activities and groups that were seen
as threatening because they existed outside the scope of state power. Thus
we see how the state’s gradual expansion corresponded with the broader
society’s decline. The fate of the Teahouse Guild after 1949 was a reflection of the attempted elimination of an urbane and culture-filled “society”
overall and the attendant public sphere. In the city, all organizations at



all levels, from streets to danwei, became parts of the state administration and under the control of a new type of officialdom. From the 1950s
to the 1970s, no freely formed or evolved social organizations existed
in China; any that did were in name only. During the early and middle
1950s, the CCP launched a collectivization movement through which
most privately owned teahouses in Chengdu were forcibly brought under
collective ownership.
Chapter 2 describes state control over cultural life, which occurred as
soon as the People’s Liberation Army entered Chengdu. This would over
time transform the major teahouse theaters and the performance troupes
associated with them. The goal was to usurp old-fashioned performances
with “socialist entertainment.” The chapter examines a survey of folk performers that the local government undertook in the mid-1950s so as to
control and reduce the number of performers and thus weaken all forms
of popular entertainment. Through this old-style public arena, the new
government disseminated political propaganda, and the teahouse became
a political stage for a newly created political culture. Initially, longestablished and revolutionary forms of entertainment coexisted, but
as time went on the former was increasingly attacked, controlled, and
reformed, until socialist entertainment dominated.
The core of chapter 3 deals with the microcosm of the teahouse; it
describes people’s daily lives in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s
under the Communist government, including to what extent people
conducted what I refer to as public lives, and to what extent politics
and political movements interfered with that. It was the lowest point
for teahouses and public life in Chengdu. The relevant places became
politically sensitive, and patrons, workers, and those associated therewith might fear grave repercussions from even the most innocent conversation. However, teahouse life in some ways carried on outside the
scope of government control. People continued to gossip and spread
“rumors,” just as they had for centuries. The teahouse seems to have
provided a relief from everyday problems, and could remind people of
former ways of life.
The second part of the book, “The Return of Public Life, 1977–2000,”
discusses the process by which teahouses in Chengdu moved from near
obliteration to unprecedented development in the reform period and the
opening up of a market economy. The development of private business fostered a revival of teahouses, which in turn deepened public life. Chapter 4


I n t r oduc ti on

shows that at the end of the Cultural Revolution teahouses did not suffer
total destruction, as had the city’s walls and many popular spaces, as well
as forms of folk entertainment. Teahouses were indeed dormant, but not
dead; they recovered immediately once conditions were politically favorable, as seen in the renewed popularity of street-corner teahouses and the
emergence of the high-end tea balconies. Beginning in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, teahouses reemerged on virtually every corner in the city and
today thrive as never before.
Chapter 5 focuses on the various types of teahouse patrons and those
who made a living in and were associated with the teahouse, especially
migrant workers. With the post-Mao reforms and weakening of state control, teahouses could exist in a relatively more open social environment,
serving all levels and all kinds of customers across the social spectrum,
regardless of outward status, class, gender, and age; in particular they
became the domain of the retired and elderly. Furthermore, as local markets strengthened and management practices improved, people once again
began to earn a living in teahouses.
By examining mahjong—a mere game but the most popular activity in
the teahouse—chapter 6 brings out conflicts among neighbors, examines
the role of the residential committee in the neighborhood, and observes the
responses of the municipal government and official media concerning the
city’s image. Mahjong brings us face to face with changes in daily life and
popular culture at the turn of the current century, as daily life moves away
from Communist control and “socialist morality.” It also serves my argument that these changes reflect a much broader political, economic, social,
and cultural transformation in which conflicts between individual rights
and the collective interests have become prominent.
The conclusion weaves together the broader themes of cultural continuity and discontinuity, of conflicts between national and local cultures,
and public life and public sphere. Teahouses, a thoroughly old-fashioned
Chinese phenomenon, had never before experienced vicissitudes like those
in the second half of the twentieth century. But the fact that they survived
and then flourished, aiding urban public life in the process, underscores
the vitality of local culture and the rise of the public sphere.

Part I

The Decline of Public
Life, 1950–1976

From 1949 to 1976, nearly three decades under Mao’s rule, the Chinese
people experienced intense unrest: small businesses and people’s everyday lives were negatively affected by political storms. For some, the military victory of the Communist insurgency in 1949 augured prosperity
and a happier life; but the reality was very different. Although during the
“New Democracy” of the early 1950s the government carried out relatively moderate policies in the cities, the CCP constantly launched radical political movements, one after another, as reflected in the names of
the subperiods of Early Socialism, as often seen in modern historical studies. These were labeled New Democracy, 1949–1952; the Three Antis and
the Five Antis, 1951–1952; Collectivization, 1954; Socialist Transformation, 1956; Anti-rightist, 1957; the Great Leap Forward, 1958; the Great
Famine, 1959–1961; Socialist Education, 1964; and the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976.
During the Three Antis and Five Antis Campaigns, owners of small
businesses became targets of party harassment. Then, from 1952 to 1954,


Pa r t I

during collectivization, the government forced many private businesses
into collective or state ownership. Furthermore, the Great Leap Forward
and commune movements in 1958 pressed heavily on rural and urban
populations. For example, in places or moments not concerned with harvests, government staff, factory workers, and peasants all had to participate in mass iron-making, which ultimately contributed very little to the
economy. Moreover, the Great Leap Forward must be associated with a
long train of ill effects resulting from the cult worship of Mao, bureaucratic fecklessness, and overall political chaos that resulted in the Great
Famine of 1959 to 1961. Further summary of these vast disruptions is
not needed at this point, only to say that once China entered into, or created, this unfortunate political situation, public life became discouraged
and public spaces shrank: “revolutionary culture” dominated cultural life.
The stories given in the next three chapters show the immediate causes of
the decline in Chengdu’s teahouse businesses, popular entertainments, and
public life. The discussion examines the great diminution of the Teahouse
Guild and teahouse operations. These chapters show clearly that as state
control reached its highest point, public life concomitantly fell to its lowest. None of this should imply a permanent disappearance. Teahouses and
public life barely held on after the Cultural Revolution, to await a different future in the era of post-Mao reforms.


The Demise of the Chengdu
Teahouse Guild and the Fall
of Small Business

During its first thirty years, the CCP monopolized not only political power
but economic resources, a phenomenon that began as soon as it took over
governance of the nation. In Chengdu, one of the new government’s first
targets for manipulation was the guilds. The long-established Teahouse
Guild dominated the city’s teahouse business in the first half of the twentieth century, but it quickly disappeared after 1950. In exploring the fate
of old economic organizations in one city under Communist rule, we can
understand in a fundamental way how the broad political changes altered
economic life in all of China. There have been some excellent studies of
Chinese guilds, but most have concentrated on the late-imperial period.
A few studies of guilds focus on the Republican era, but those concerning
post-1949, especially publications in English, are almost absent.1 Scholarship on the economic history of the early People’s Republic of China
has assumed a national perspective, and less attention has been paid to
small business and social and economic organizations at the local level.2
Joseph C. H. Chai has collected and reprinted important works published


C h apte r 1

in various journals regarding economic changes and development in China
in The Economic Development of Modern China. The second volume,
Socialist Modernization, 1949–78, includes thirty-nine articles whose topics range from the land revolution, collectivization, industry, finance, and
communization to agriculture, international trade, and economic policies.
But none focuses on the transformation of old-style mercantile and trade
This chapter deals with the Teahouse Guild in Chengdu; but it also
considers the reorganization, transformation, and decline of Chinese
guilds generally and describes state control of professional organizations
from a microhistorical perspective. I discuss four major issues: First, how
the long-established guild was transformed and how it was replaced by
the Preparations Committee for the (New) Teahouse Guild in Chengdu
(Chengdu shi chashe ye tongye gonghui choubei weiyuanhui, hereafter
referred to as “New Teahouse Guild”). Second, the chapter analyzes the
nature and organizational structure of the New Teahouse Guild. Third,
it explores the roles of the New Teahouse Guild in social and economic
life and how it was transformed into an organization that solely carried
out government policies. Finally, there is discussion of the impact of the
Three Antis and Five Antis Campaigns (1951–1952), in which the former
targeted corruption, waste, and bureaucratism, and the latter bribery,
tax evasion, cheating on workmanship and materials, theft of state properties, and stealing of state economic information. By following these
developments, we can better understand the attitude and policies of the
CCP and its new government toward old-style economic organizations
during Early Socialism. At first the government used these organizations
to control various professions, but it soon forced them off the historical
stage. The chapter argues that the decline and final death of the guilds
resulted directly from the state’s rising strength and restriction of social

The Chengdu Teahouse Guild in the Republican Era
In late-imperial and Republican China, guilds played a significant role in
urban economic life and society, but a Chengdu guild for teahouses was
established only later, in the 1930s, and all Chengdu teahouse proprietors

De mi se of the Che ngdu Teah o u s e Gu ild


were required to join. This guild went back to 1929, when the Nationalist government issued laws regarding chambers of commerce and guilds
(tongye gonghui) and ordered their reorganization. Consequently, the
Chengdu municipal government required merchants of all professions to
set up guilds. By April 1931, eighty-two Chengdu guilds had been established, including the Teahouse Guild, all having completed the transformation from bang (i.e., a group that conducts the same trade) to guild
(gonghui). A new Chamber of Commerce was established, and in 1936
the Teahouse Guild (Chashe ye tongye gonghui) was restructured and registered with the government. This pre-1949 Teahouse Guild was much
less autonomous than its predecessors: the government was increasingly
manipulating such organizations.4
In the Republican era, especially the late period of the Guomindang
(GMD, or Nationalist Party) government, guilds steadily increased their
dependence on state power. During the War of Resistance (1937–1945),
the Teahouse Guild was gradually transformed from an autonomous
organization into a state-controlled one. However, to a certain extent it
still represented the interests of the teahouse profession and resisted the
increasing controls; it performed conventional guild functions such as
making professional regulations, unifying prices, registering businesses,
restricting new teahouses, and mediating conflicts among the members.
At the same time it played a role in the communications between teahouse
proprietors and local government. Thus, as observed through its organizational structure, leadership, membership, functions, and activities, the
Teahouse Guild before 1949, under the GMD government, could still protect its members’ interests and help resist government control.5
During the GMD regime, Chengdu’s Teahouse Guild often cooperated
with the Nationalist government concerning certain local affairs, but it
never stopped resisting when the interests of the profession were threatened or damaged. Although in most of the cases the government was
always the winner, the guild was sometimes able to force the government
to withdraw its policies. For instance, in August 1940, when the government imposed a new tax, the guild resisted by organizing members not to
recognize the tax and to plan a market strike if any member was arrested.
Facing a threat of a market strike, the government had to postpone the
new tax.6 This example tells us that the guild could become either a bridge
between the teahouse profession and the government or an agency that


C h apte r 1

could challenge state power. Teahouses could create a loud voice and force
the government to consider the needs of a whole profession. The guild
often had conflicts with the government regarding prices and taxes, but
it had to retain a good relationship because it often depended on local
authorities to regulate the overall teahouse trade.7 Although guilds under
the Nationalist government were increasingly controlled by state power
in comparison with the guilds of the late-imperial period, they were still
able to fight back if the interests of the profession were jeopardized.

Transformation of the Guild under Party Administration
On January 8, 1950, twelve days after the People’s Liberation Army
entered Chengdu, the Military Control Commission (Junguan hui) called
the heads of the Chamber of Commerce and all guilds for a meeting at
which military authorities explained the CCP’s “economic principles of
the New Democracy” and its “policy to protect national industries and
commerce.”8 The following day, the commission, the municipal government, and the Workers’ Union of Chengdu had what they termed an
informal discussion (zuotanhui), calling for increasing production in
order to spur the economy. Then, the commission took over all properties of the Nationalist government, their “bureaucratic capital” ( guanliao ziben), and that of war criminals, while changing some enterprises to
state-owned or “public-private partnerships” ( gongsi heying).9 Although
teahouses, like all other professions, were put under the new government’s supervision, their business operations were not influenced much
by the government at this time.
The reorganization of the Teahouse Guild was part of the state’s effort
to change old-style economic organizations into tools of control over all
professions. In August 1949, even before the Communists’ victory, the
Central Committee of the CCP issued “Instructions for Organizing the
Association of Industry and Commerce,” which ordered that all old chambers of commerce be transformed into the Association of Industry and
Commerce (Gongshanglian). In March 1950, the Department for Work in
a United Front (Tongzhan bu) pointed out that the Gongshanglian is “an
important organization for promoting the united front work” in privateowned industries and commerce, and the CCP, and government, could use



it to “unite and educate” businessmen in order to implement government
policies and laws. This meant that a transformation within the guilds
would be under Gongshanglian supervision. In the process of establishing the Gongshanglian, in many other places guilds were already being
reformed. For instance, from the second half of 1949, more than 150 guilds
in Beijing were reformed, and by the end of 1952, 132 preparation committees for all kinds of guilds were established there.10
In Chengdu, there were several levels of administration for controlling teahouses. The highest was the Bureau of Industry and Commerce
(Gongshang ju), and the lowest was the New Teahouse Guild; the Preparations Committee of the Gongshanglian (Gongshanglian chouweihui),
established in April 1950, was located in the middle. The Gongshanglian
took responsibility for “carrying out government policies” and for “uniting
and educating” all businessmen and leading them toward reform. Based
on government instructions, the Gongshanglian worked to transform professional organizations in April 1950; and by the end of December the
process was completed. The result of such transformation was the following: 151 old guilds plus 24 other occupations that did not have guilds
were placed into 81 preparation committees for new guilds. The government claimed that such a move released small business “from the control
of feudal guilds.” In May 1953, they were again restructured into fifty-six
“committees for professional trade groups” (tongye gonghui weiyuanhui),
and the teahouse profession was combined with hotel businesses, thus
becoming known as the “Committee for the Chengdu Hotel and Teahouse
Professions of the Gongshanglian” (Chengdu shi gongshangye lianhe hui
lüzhan chashe ye tongye weiyuanhui). During the Socialist Transformation
Movement from 1953 to 1956 the latter was renamed the Committee of
Service Professions of the Gongshanglian in Chengdu. Thus, the demise of
the New Teahouse Guild occurred over several years, perhaps somewhat
imperceptibly, beginning with the above renamings and restructuring of
numerous guilds in 1950, and coming to completion between 1953 and
1956.11 This suppression of guilds went hand in hand with the government
policy that restricted the development of the teahouse business and reduced
spaces for public life. The gradual decline in the number of teahouses and
their overall business slump was a logical and unavoidable result.
The CCP’s overall national policy to reduce the influence of guilds was
created in order to keep social organizations from challenging the state’s


C h apte r 1

power. The central government pointed out that, despite the guilds’ long
history in handling relationships within professions, in the past they were
controlled by a small group of people and, as the government claimed,
were used to suppress middle and small businessmen. Therefore, they
were not to be banned but to be transformed completely.12 Although it
was true that in earlier times middle and small businessmen were sometimes suppressed, the issue was largely exaggerated. However, the CCP
fully recognized an antistate threat, because guilds had resisted the GMD
Under socialism, Chengdu now began the effort to gain control of
small businesses such as teahouses, but change was not immediate. In
fact, the Communist Party’s control and transformation of teahouses
were undertaken gradually, beginning with a registration requirement.
In June 1950, the government demanded that street vendors register the
stalls that lined the streets. Of a total of 7,136 vendor applications, the
government approved only 2,481 for long-term business operations and
1,681 for short-term operations, and denied 2,974. After the process was
completed, all street vendors had to carry a government-issued license
and were allowed to sell their items only in the markets assigned to them;
they were prohibited from setting up stalls on heavily traveled streets or
All shops were required to sign contracts, which are preserved in the
Chengdu Municipal Archives. One example is the guarantee signed by the
Broad View Tea Balcony (Daguan chalou) in February 1951: “I am Su
Bingcheng who operates the Broad View Tea Balcony at 24 North Three
Bridges Street [Sanqiao bei jie] and I have obeyed all regulations issued
by the government. I confirm that all information in the registration is
true. If there are any violations or inaccuracies, I am willing to bear all
responsibility.” Each teahouse had to have two guarantors, usually business owners (see figure 1.1).14
The Chengdu municipal government, working with the departments
of industry and commerce, public security, taxation, health, and culture,
manipulated every aspect of the teahouse trade and imposed various fines.
There were price controls, prohibitions on peddlers, and penalties for
“lawless” behavior by patrons; restrictions regarding placement of tables
and chairs on sidewalks, management of waiters and waitresses, and
performances; bans on gambling and trading gold; and rules on sanitary

Figure 1.1 Guarantee signed by Broad View Tea Balcony. From Chengdu
shi zhengfu gongshang dang’an (CSZGD) 40–65–13.


C h apte r 1

conditions and inspections for hygiene.15 While similar measures had been
in place during the Republican era, implementation by the Communist
government was much more forceful and effective. During the mid-1950s,
while implementing public-private partnerships, the local government carried out a “balanced budget policy.”16 Despite these efforts, however, and
because of the state’s encroaching control and the associated dramatic
change in the political and economic environment, teahouses faced a very
difficult situation. Indeed, the decline of the teahouse was predictable.

Reorganization of the Teahouse Guild in 1950
After Chengdu’s government was taken over by the PLA, the old Teahouse
Guild continued to handle the teahouse profession’s affairs for eight or
nine months. This changed beginning in September 1950, when the Gongshanglian informed all directors, supervising directors, and heads of groups
of the Teahouse Guild with membership records to participate in another
of their “informal meetings” in order to “exchange ideas for reforming
the guild.” A few days later, an assembly was held and attended by 408
teahouse keepers. They were divided into five groups to “select candidates
for the preparatory committee.” Twenty-five members were chosen, and a
director and associate director were also selected.17
On October 20, 1950, a meeting was held to announce the establishment of the New Teahouse Guild, at which representatives from government offices gave speeches. The Gongshanglian first reported the process
by which the New Teahouse Guild was established; then the director of
the guild announced the new mission: “To understand government policies and to carry out all government laws and decrees.” Not a single word
was spoken about protection of professional interests—the most basic
function of the pre-1949 guild. Then, Liao Wenchang, former president
of the guild, congratulated the establishment of the New Teahouse Guild
and apologized for “not serving the teahouses well.”18 This was a hapless
apology. In fact, even though the GMD had enforced control over guilds
during the War of Resistance, the older Teahouse Guild had still been
able to organize teahouses and to fight for their interests.19 Probably, Liao
hoped that the New Teahouse Guild under the new government might
actually serve the profession; he surely could not have anticipated the



guild’s disappearing just a few years later into a vast bureaucratic blend of
trade-group committees.
The representative of the Bureau of Industry and Commerce emphasized three points in the October meeting. First, he said that the committee
was formed of members who were examined by the bureau carefully, and
he accused the old guild of being controlled by a small group. He wanted
the new leadership to unite all people in the profession and to pass government policies and laws for all members and receive members’ inquiries
to the government. Second, he pointed out that members in the old guild
did not take care of affairs and hoped that all members now would support the New Teahouse Guild. This statement was obviously not accurate: I have noted, above, the old guild’s organizing strength. Third, the
most important goal of the New Teahouse Guild was to organize and
train members and to inculcate “a better understanding of politics” (tigao
zhengzhi renshi).20
The representative of the Shop Workers’ Guild (Dianyuan gonghui)
made a speech in which he criticized some teahouse keepers for selling
their businesses and firing employees. Actually, such actions resulted from
the movement to “clean up bandits and oppose local despots; and reduce
rent and return deposits” (qingfei fanba, jianzu tuiya). Some Chengdu
teahouses were owned by absentee landlords, who used security deposits on leases as their own capital to open a teahouse business. Now that
they were under pressure from the government to return some part of that
money, they had to close their teahouses and get cash out of them. But the
representative was calling it an “illegal action” (bufa huodong) when shop
owners closed without government approval. He wished members of the
guild would work together during this difficult time and observe the principle of “benefiting both proprietors and employees” (laozi liangli).21 In fact,
the owners who shut their businesses had no other options, as rural actions
were becoming increasingly violent, especially when the Land Revolution
swept in like a storm. They had to do whatever was necessary for survival,
so they logically abandoned their teahouse businesses for cash.
It is interesting that the same representative acknowledged the economic
crisis that confronted small businesses: “Under the GMD reactionary
regime, industry and commerce and teahouse businesses were very prosperous. But, after liberation, all businesses have become very depressed.”
The reasons, he explained, were changes of lifestyle: for example, the way


C h apte r 1

silks, satins, woolens, and cosmetic goods were no longer popular, to the
extent that 60 percent of such goods were unsold. “In the past, bureaucratic capital and landlords manipulated markets” and “they basically
engaged in speculative businesses,” he said. Therefore, he defined prosperity in the past as “false prosperity” (xujia fanrong). This assessment
is hardly convincing. Until 1950, commerce in Chengdu was dominated
by small businesses, and there is no evidence to indicate monopolization
and manipulation of markets by so-called “bureaucratic capital and landlords.” Actually, any regime change whatsoever would have shaken markets, and any new regime has to devote time to stabilizing society and
the economy.
Consumption of certain consumer goods, as listed above, was indeed
influenced by political changes, because most purchasers were upperand middle-class people. When the Communist revolution was unfolding, even though it had not touched them directly, rich people would
reduce their consumption of leisure goods. Therefore, such merchandise
no longer sold well. Furthermore, the government wanted to transform
Chengdu from a “city of consumption” (xiaofei chengshi) to a “city
of production” (shengchan chengshi).22 In such a transformation, one
should not be surprised that government policies emphasized industry
but overlooked commerce. Furthermore, in the language of revolutionary
discourse, the word “consumption” was quite negative, and the policy to
make Chengdu into a city of production turned into a long and arduous
process. Only with the reforms after 1979, and after recognition of the
multiple functions of cities, did the government start to encourage consumption. The teahouse, as a typical consumption profession, inevitably
faced a crisis of survival during the political and economic environment
of the 1950s (see figure 1.2).
The same representative had more to say. He talked about relations
between owners and laborers, pointing out that “today is a new society,” so relations between owners and laborers were different from in the
past. According to the representative, all disputes between owners and
workers occurred because “proprietors had bad habits fostered in the
old society.” He asked the members of the New Teahouse Guild to have
a discussion with their workers if a dispute occurred, and he criticized
some teahouse owners for laying off workers, accusing them of “passing around a rumor” that the government would demolish the teahouse



Figure 1.2 Crowded teahouse in a Chengdu suburb,
September 2015. Author photo.

profession. What happened to the teahouse businesses later proved the
so-called “rumor” to have been not all that groundless. This showed a
sense of crisis in the profession—a lack of confidence toward the regime’s
policies concerning small businesses.23
During the same meeting, a police representative talked about security. He complained that the regulations issued by the police two months
previously had actually not been carried out, and he hoped that under
the New Teahouse Guild everyone would take responsibility for security,
paying special attention to bandit and secret society activities and reporting them to the police without worries over “personal considerations”
(qingmian).24 Why did he mention “personal cons