Market Success in a Planned Culture: Illegal Theatrical Performances in Post–Great Leap Forward China

After 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought to transform the production of popular culture from a market-based business into a section of the planned economy under the party-state. I term this new cultural system “planned culture,” as it followed the same practices as the planned economy system. But in practice, a strong planned culture was hard to maintain with scarce fiscal resources. It faced constant challenges from the cultural market in the Mao Zedong era, especially when the state temporarily retreated from the economic and cultural fields in the post–Great Leap Forward period. By depicting the different faces of unofficial culture, ranging from villages and suburban townships to big cities, this article argues that the state’s cultural reach in the Mao era was limited both by a lack of capacity and sometimes by preference, and that planned culture in the post–Great Leap Forward period was concentrated only in big cities, even after a decade of institutional expansion.