Urban Workers’ Leisure Culture and the ‘Public Sphere’: A Study of the Transformation of the Workers’ Cultural Palace in Reform-Era China

Abstract

This article looks into urban Chinese working-class leisure culture through a case study of the transformed Workers’ Cultural Palace in Zhengzhou in Henan province. Making timely and engaging contribution to the discussion on changing working-class subjectivities in post-Mao China, the author investigates Zhengzhou workers’ cultural and communicative activities, including songs, dramas and political discussions in an urban space. The case study provides hints of a re-politicized space which constitutes a public sphere, attended by the working class, of free discussion on class inequalities and related issues. In the emergent public sphere inhabited by urban workers, class consciousness is nurtured as distinct from the Chinese middle class. The findings point to contested public spheres in China’s increasingly class-divided society and the return of class politics at the bottom rungs, taking issue with seemingly conventional wisdom purporting to declare the end of class in practical Chinese politics and scholarly Chinese studies.