Social Relations of Amateur Practice: The Socialist Vision for Culture in Hunan’s Agricultural Production Cooperatives, 1953–1958

This article interrogates the development of amateur cultural practice in the agricultural production cooperativization movement of the People’s Republic of China from approximately 1953 until early 1958. It focuses on evidence from Hunan province, where cultural authorities aspired to establish, for each agricultural cooperative, clubs for amateur activity, amateur theater troupes, and reading rooms. Rural organizers envisioned this proliferation of amateur activity unfolding on a grand scale through the cooperativization process. This article analyzes cooperative plans, reports, and cultural projects to argue that its organizers fostered amateur practice as a means for transforming social relations. In doing so, they pursued a vision of socialism as the creative reconstruction of everyday life, refusing narrowly extractivist imperatives for rural reform.