The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses: Cultural Work in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward

Abstract

In the early 1960s, as part of a suite of policies intended to rectify the failures of the Great Leap Forward, the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Culture launched new cultural policies that inaugurated a relatively liberal period for the arts in the People’s Republic of China. This article explores how these new policies reconceptualized the relationship between art and politics to emphasize the importance of providing audiences with experiences of enjoyment, relaxation, and aesthetic pleasure, as well as how state-run media reporting on the newly opened Museum of Chinese Art and its inaugural exhibition embodied the aspirations of these new policies by describing and imagining visitors indulging in the beauty of the museum and the artworks on display. By examining the brief expansion of what it meant for art to serve socialism in the early 1960s, this article reveals that cultural officials experimented with multiple configurations of the relationship between art and politics during the Mao Zedong era.