How Culture Was Planned: Shanghai’s Troupe-Relocation Project in the 1950s

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines Shanghai’s troupe-relocation project in the second half of the 1950s. I argue that this project, by its nature, represented the way of resource allocation in a “planned culture” system, in which the state sought to replace the market and dominate the allocation of cultural resources. Popular culture hence was to be transformed from a market-based business into a section of the “planned culture” system under the Party-state. In the “planned culture” system, Shanghai’s troupe-relocation project, on the one hand, was aiming at providing cultural facilities for the inland industrial cities under construction and state welfare for the working class; on the other hand, it was beneficial for balancing the supply and demand in the local theatre market. Since yueju (yue opera), a local theatrical genre performed in the Shaoxing dialect, played a significant role in the troupe-relocation project, this article focuses on the stories of two yueju troupes, Xinxin and Chunguang. Migrating from Shanghai to northwestern industrial cities during the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), their considerations and reactions to political mobilization, their lives in new environments, and their destiny in the post-Mao era reflected the connection between the “planned culture” and planned economy, as well as the interplay between state planning and the cultural market. Their stories expose the inherent flaws of the “planned culture” system: First, it was undeniable that the economic cost of the “planned culture” was enormous. Second, administrative orders made resource allocation inefficient and inflexible .