Revolutionary Bedsheets: Industrial Design and the Material Properties of Maoist China

Abstract

The growing scholarship on consumption has offered provocative new ways of using consumer goods as a lens to understand social relations, political subjectivity, and economic institutions in Mao’s China. However, the prevailing social-centered paradigm often views consumer goods as an abstract category rather than as materials with differing qualities. The literature has rarely considered the properties of materials, such as weight and durability, in connection with the nature of the Maoist system. By looking at materials in their own right, this article focuses on the material properties of a consumer product prominent in the Mao era and afterward: the Minguang brand of floral-patterned bedsheets, affectionately known as China’s “national bedsheet.” My research reveals that as a material embodiment of key differences between the Maoist system and other political-economic systems, the Minguang bedsheet’s material form was the result of understudied yet defining characteristics of the Maoist system, such as economic autarky, socialist realist industrial design, opposition to planned obsolescence, and an obsession with cotton fibers.