The Rise and Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’

[Randy W]

parts 1 and 2 of a three part series from the Sixth Tone

The Rise of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’
In the 1950s, workers’ cultural palaces were established in cities across the country to better mould the country’s new “leading class.” They had the side effect of democratizing culture.

The Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’
Beginning in the 1990s, the country’s working-class cultural spaces began to disappear, to be replaced by private, for-profit entities.

Photos showing indoor and outdoor activities at a workers’ cultural palace in Northeast China. Courtesy of Wang Hongzhe, re-edited by Ding Yining/Sixth Tone

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The social and economic status of China’s working class has fallen dramatically over the past 40 years, but there was a time when blue-collar proletarians were expected to lead the country’s revolution into the future, and vast spaces were built or set aside solely for their education, entertainment, and overall betterment. And the most iconic of these spaces was doubtless the workers’ cultural palace. By tracing their rise and fall over the past seven decades, we can observe some of the tremendous changes that have taken place in urban China in that time, and how they have reshaped the relationship between worker and society at large.

Unlike in the Soviet Union, the cultural palaces of the People’s Republic of China were mostly founded in repurposed landmarks, rather than new buildings. In 1950, the Imperial Ancestral Temple in Beijing’s Forbidden City was converted into the Working People’s Cultural Palace. That same year, in the nearby city of Tianjin, a stadium in the former Italian concession once owned and run by the Mussolini family was renovated into the Tianjin Workers’ Cultural Palace. It bears an inscription written by the city’s then-mayor, Huang Jing, exhorting workers “to work like soldiers and relax with culture.” In Shanghai, a hotel adjacent to the old racetrack in the city’s central business district was repurposed into what the city’s then-mayor referred to as “a school and paradise for workers.”

Repurposing preexisting structures was a practical decision, given the country’s weak economic foundations. But it also embodied an important concept in contemporary discourse: fanshen, a word that can mean to “turn over” or “reinvent.” By converting Confucian schoolhouses or bourgeois entertainment complexes into cultural venues for workers, socialist China was able to remake the social power relations and spatial attributes of its cities. In the space of just a few years, symbols of feudal and colonial power were transformed into “secular temples” of a worker-led nation.

The underlying goal here was the nationalization of workers’ leisure time. In 1950, the state-affiliated All-China Federation of Trade Unions declared that the main tasks of the country’s new workers’ cultural palaces and clubs were to disseminate political propaganda, spur on production, provide cultural and technical education, and to organize cultural and artistic activities for workers and their families in their downtime, in that order.

 . . .

Because the palaces had no commercial purpose and didn’t offer any consumer goods, they broke down some of the barriers to cultural consumption that had prevailed under capitalism, rendering culture accessible to workers who didn’t possess cultural capital, and restoring its status to that of a product of the people.

 . . .

Their legacy lives on, however, in the grassroots cultural and entertainment groups still ubiquitous in Chinese cities today. Whether square-dancing grannies or park-based opera enthusiasts, these groups represent continuations of a bygone collectivist cultural lifestyle — and, perhaps, alternative visions of a cultural industry once again freed from profit motives.

 

 

Edited March 10, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

An exterior view of a workers’ cultural palace in Northeast China, 2009. Courtesy of Wang Hongzhe
 

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Meanwhile, stripped of their funding, workers’ cultural palaces needed to find a new means of survival. Most were effectively privatized, as spaces once reserved for workers’ cultural activities were rented out to private business owners or converted into consumer venues such as arcades, ice rinks, billiards halls, or internet cafés.

Workers who were once free to enter and leave as they pleased now had to pay to use the facilities. Opera lovers who had been rehearsing in the same space for decades lost their rehearsal rooms to newly built nightclubs; libraries were converted into markets or cram schools.

Even those not demolished or renovated lost most of their collective character.

 . . .

With the demise of worker-dedicated cultural spaces in Chinese cities, the identity of the “worker” has become more unstable, and less visible. The concept of a “socialist working class” resonates less and less with the new generation of young workers; rather, they tend to identify with the more ambiguous term dagong ren, or “laborer.” And the preferred cultural space of dagong ren isn’t physical, but digital.

 

 

[Randy W]

 . . . and the third installment

The Digitization of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’
Workers have built new cultural spaces online, in poetry forums and on short-video apps, but the work they produce is rarely taken seriously.

A view of a so-called download shop. Courtesy of Wang Hongzhe

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The advent of cheap mobile phones, internet cafés, and other technologies have allowed them to make the best of their industrial surroundings, achieve a semblance of spiritual fulfillment, and even develop their own cultures.

 . . .

Cheap karaoke venues, internet cafés, nightclubs, and skating rinks allow workers to entertain themselves, maintain their social networks, and fulfill their spiritual and emotional needs, all at a good price. “Download shops,” for example, allow workers to download colossal collections of songs and films to their phone or computer for just a dozen yuan, far cheaper than the cost of even a single movie ticket.

 . . .

Today’s workers lack many of the benefits enjoyed by the socialist-era working class, whose members were mostly employed by state-owned enterprises and enjoyed stability, welfare programs, and access to state-supported recreation institutions like cultural palaces. But the new generation of migrant workers has clearly still created its own cultural spaces and forms of art. Only, these are rapidly changing shape, even as the workers themselves are pushed out of South China by the relocation of factories farther inland.

 

 

[Randy W]

China’s Factory Children and Their Splendid, Closed-Off Youth
A generation of Chinese people grew up on socialist-era compounds that formed their own little societies.

from the Sixth Tone

An exterior view of Factory 617’s cultural palace in Baotou, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Courtesy of Wang Wenchao

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For Pan and others from his generation, such factories were a unique environment to grow up in. Isolated from the outside world, they provided workers and their families with everything — schooling, health care, entertainment. But as China’s planned economy was dismantled, so were the factories. Pan’s “475” has sat abandoned for years.

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Most people in the group, including Pan, grew up in “Third Front” factories, enterprises with complicated histories. In the mid-1960s, feeling under threat from both the Soviet Union and the United States, the Chinese government decided to build a second complete national defense and heavy industry system by relocating factories and scientific research institutes to inland areas that enemies couldn’t easily invade.

This campaign divided the country into three areas from the outside in: the “First Front,” coastal and border regions likely to be the immediate war fronts, the “Third Front,” interior regions less likely to be affected by war, and the “Second Front,” the area in between. From 1964 to 1980, the state invested more than 205 billion yuan ($32 billion with today’s exchange rates) in the Third Front regions, almost as much as the country’s gross national product in 1970.

The more than one hundred factories and mines relocated to the Third Front area brought along over 200,000 workers and other personnel who migrated with their work units. Many had graduated from vocational colleges and universities and were among the country’s best-educated people.

The Third Front factories where they worked were remote and dispersed. To withstand enemy attacks, the factories were built close to or even inside of mountains and were divided into separate and dispersed departments. Cloaked in secrecy, there was limited communication between factories and the outside world. Each plant was distinguished by its own code number. Even the internal documents and work IDs of employees would only include these factory code numbers.

As they took root in these factories and mines, the new residents formed a unique culture. “Your factory was your home,” Pan says. His family, who lived in “475” for fifty years, called it “our factory.” His mother was a teacher at the factory’s elementary school, his father was a dispatcher in the production department, and his brother and sister-in-law, sister and brother-in-law, nieces and nephews were all born in the staff hospital. Until he went to college, Pan attended the factory school.