Please Tune In: Broadcast Rally and the Dilemma of Socialist Sonic Governance

With the availability of radio sets and loudspeakers in urban China, the socialist state since the 1950s developed a new form of political mobilization on the air, the broadcast rally (guangbo dahui), with which a government organ would use the broadcast to address a large group of listeners. This paper investigates how radio technology gave rise to a new technique of mobilization as well as a new understanding of information. Unlike regular broadcasts, the broadcast rally was a highly choreographed and synchronized event, and who was ordered to listen mattered as much as who was scheduled to speak. As the broadcast rally soon ascended to a primary venue for disseminating information, it was integrated with extant mechanisms of state power to form a new information order that differentiated people and work units based on political status. During and after the event, moreover, the listeners (or their work unit) were also supposed to submit simultaneous reports on their immediate reactions to the rally and, later, feedback. New information technologies like radio not only constructed a new power hierarchy but also refashioned the socialist state’s perception of its subjects, with an ever-expanding volume of information being sent and received. The broadcast rally captured a dilemma that characterized much of Chinese socialism: on the one hand, the state deeply relied on a new modality of sonic governance that was facilitated by the circulation of information, and, on the other, it remained fundamentally suspicious and untrustful of those who would receive it.