Performing After Hours: Workers’ Cultural Production at the Margins of Factory Labor in Socialist China

This paper focuses on workers’ after-hours (yeyu) cultural production at the margins of productive factory labor in socialist China. After-hours recreational activities referred to a set of cultural practices in the socialist industrial workplace quite different from contemporary invocations of “amateur” art. Workers’ drama and performance were highly structured activities conducted in the time and space of their work unit and thus distinct from both production time on the shopfloor and private time at home. Through archival documents from Shanghai, this paper delves into the rise of workers’ after-hours drama and performance activities in 1958, when such recreational activities received heightened attention and underwent state reorganization. Why were workers’ cultural activities—not necessarily conducive to productive labor—granted increased legitimacy during the Great Leap Forward, a period usually associated with a collective mania for production? How did factory workers experience drama and performance activities led by the active members of their workplace, when factory production was taking up more and more of their waking time? What exactly were workers’ after-hours cultural practices in socialist China, when they were at once distinct from professional drama and performance and not inferior? Drawing on performance scripts and investigation reports from state factories in Great Leap Forward Shanghai, this paper examines how after-hours cultural production at the margins of factory labor placed the value of drama and performance in the sensorium of workers’ everyday life and created new possibilities of sociality in the collective workplace.