Music and radio in Maoist China (1949-19769

Abstract

During Mao Zedong's twenty-seven years of leadership, radio became one of the main means of conveying the ideology and policies of the Chinese Communist Party, given the size of the territory and the literacy level of the population. The centralized structure of the radio system and the adopted transmission systems - monitoring system and transmission receiver system - combined with the resulting collective listening practice, allowed the CCP greater control and manipulation of the information conveyed. Music and radio music programs, produced according to the maxim “serving the people”, served as a complement to information programs, allowing, more or less consciously (through the structure of the programs themselves, the activities of the listening groups or passive individual listening) a better assimilation of what was transmitted.