Joyful singing in parks: encounters, appropriations, and contradictions in the dynamic of state governance in urban China

Abstract

Older citizens engaging in casual choral singing in public parks — a form of “social nonmovement” — can serve as a locus to show how cultural and spatial strategies of state governance become entangled, not without friction, in a Chinese city. Marginalized by the new urban economy, the choral singing participants appropriate an older socialist form of state-orchestrated public culture — which has shaped their bodily habitus during the earlier stages of their lives — for fun and socialization. In turn, the central government appropriates this leisure form of choral singing to re-animate Party public culture as a means to secure political legitimacy and promote a harmonious society. Such state-orchestrated public culture, with its implicit spatial order, justifies mass gatherings in public spaces and legitimizes the choral participants’ claim of