<i>The Teahouse under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950–2000</i>. By Di Wang (New York, Cornell University Press, 2018) 330 pp. $95.00 cloth $29.95 paper

Documenting the changes to public life in Chengdu since the communist takeover on the eve of 1950, Wang regales readers with a feast of vivid details about the social dynamics within the teahouse in relation to state power among diverse actors, from owners and staff to patrons, entertainers, fortune tellers, and earwax pickers. Complementing his earlier work, The Teahouse: Small Businesses, Everyday Culture, and the Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (Stanford, 2008), the current book continues to treat the teahouse as a microcosm of urban society not only to delineate the decline and renewal of public life under socialism but also to compare it with the pre-communist era to reveal the persistent elitist views of teahouse culture and the unceasing state efforts to reform it throughout the twentieth century.Wang’s research about Chengdu draws from new Maoist-era archives and his own ethnographical observations and interviews in the reform era to contextualize everyday life within the larger political economy. In an age of rapid urbanization, when cities are becoming more alike in look and sensation, Wang adopts the mission of a social, cultural, and urban historian to recover and restore the historical legacies of a medium-sized inland city that bore a resemblance to many other major cities in China. In the process, he significantly expands and enriches the field of urban history beyond the well-studied largest municipalities such as Shanghai and Beijing.This book is divided chronologically into two parts—early socialism (1950–1976) and late socialism (1977–2000). Each part contains three chapters that tackle similar aspects of the teahouse during those two eras in a parallel structure. Chapters 1 and 4 focus on the teahouse as a small business suffering drastic decline in the time of nationalization and collectivization (1950–1976) but reviving and flourishing since the onset of the period of economic reform (1977–2000). Chapters 2 and 5 examine the teahouse as a cultural space where public entertainment was redefined and politicized as a propaganda machine in Maoist China only to come back strong during the late socialist era with traditional, even vulgar, art forms. Chapters 3 and 6 look at the teahouse as a social space where public life unfolded. Wang convincingly argues that the state’s agenda of transforming consumers into producers in early socialism dramatically reduced the number of teahouses and patrons. By the 1960s, guests were serving themselves to demonstrate socialist equality between customers and waiters in the few remaining teahouses owned by the collective. Yet by the reform era, the distinctive ambiance of low-end street-corner teahouses and high-end balconies had become a prominent marker signaling social status and wealth at a time when the word class had disappeared from the political lexicon.Although the temporal structure of the book seemingly dichotomizes the early and late socialist periods, Wang clearly demonstrates the historical trajectory by connecting the dots across the twentieth century. For example, the teahouse guild, which emerged in 1929 to protect the interests of business owners, albeit with limited resources under the growing state control before 1949, re-appeared as a tool for policy implementation in 1950 before finally vanishing in 1956 when the state claimed to have released small businesses “from the control of feudal guilds” (37). However, without the guild’s control of the number of teahouses and the price of tea to prevent serious competition in the trade, easy entry and uncontrolled competition in late socialism made it harder for small businesses to survive.Wang defines public life literally, treating the teahouse as the physical place where urban life outside people’s private spaces occurred (11). This space, which was predominantly a man’s world before 1950, became gender-neutral in the reform era, as women have actively participated in every aspect of teahouse life ever since. As Wang reveals, under the state’s watch (though its power to penetrate society varied over time), the “public sphere” as a discursive site of public power vis-à-vis the state rarely applies to twentieth-century Chengdu.Written in plain language, this book is easily accessible to nonprofessionals interested in Chinese urban culture. Meticulously researched, it also offers new material and insights to scholars in modern Chinese history, urban studies, cultural anthropology, and the sociology of leisure.

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