Li Jie  (Harvard University) Noise Revolution: Radio Sounds of Cold War China  

WHEN: May 6th, 19.00 (s.t.) - 20.30 

WHERE: CATS AUDITORIUM 

Providing a sound track to a previously silent historiography, this lecture excavates a media history of the wireless and wired soundscape in Mao-era China. In 1949, China had only about one million radio sets, concentrated in urban “bourgeois” homes, but the Communist Party quickly expanded its listening public through a “radio reception network” and by the 1970s had constructed a wired broadcasting infrastructure with more than 100 million loudspeakers that revolutionized time and space, politics and everyday life. Drawing on archives, gazetteers, memoirs, and oral histories, this article examines the state-sponsored development of radio broadcasting as well as grassroots listening experiences and practices. I argue that radios and loudspeakers—rather than enthralling the nation with the party’s monotonous voice—contributed to the Chinese revolution in heterogeneous ways, from political communication to labor mobilization, from propaganda to surveillance, from enhancing the Mao cult to engendering violence and terror.

Who is Li Jie?  (see: https://ealc.fas.harvard.edu/people/jie-li)

Li Jie earned an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Harvard College and studied English literature at the University of Cambridge and German literature at the University of Heidelberg before returning to Harvard for a Ph.D. in modern Chinese literary and film studies. She was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Li teaches courses on East Asian Cinema and Chinese media cultures. As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014) excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition.  Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Her most recent book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023), is a cultural history of Chinese socialist film exhibition, reception, and audiences, including the media networks and environments, discourses, and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. Cinematic Guerrillas won the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award and the 2025 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.  It was also named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  She received the 2020 Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Harvard, which recognizes teachers for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates. In 2024, she was named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history, or art.