丁香园AV

Presented by 丁香园AV David Lam Centre and Department of History

Please note that this talk will be in Mandarin.

Revolution in the Lilong and Its Legacy: Revisiting Shanghai Neighborhood Committees in the Mao Zedong Era

From April 1 to May 31, 2022, Shanghai underwent a 61-day period of citywide COVID-19 lockdown measures. In that moment, the long-lost Neighborhood Committees suddenly became omnipresent. The sudden reappearance of the Neighborhood Committees sparked a series of historical questions: Is the Neighborhood Committee that has resurfaced the same one I grew up knowing? Why did many residents feel its absence over the past two or three decades? Did it fade away or become integrated into institutional norms? What drove the Neighborhood Committees to assert themselves at this juncture? Was it the ongoing impact of the CCP’s revolutionary mobilization, a resurgence of the “campaign-style governance of the Mao Zedong era, or a unique circumstance? These questions all point to the enduring significance of grassroots governance experiences in early People’s Republic of China. The spring and summer of 2022 in Shanghai allow for a re-examination of Shanghai Neighborhood Committees of the Mao era from a broader perspective, not only across the 1949 divide but also challenging the presumed historical rupture of 1979, in order to explore the shifts and consistencies in the CCP’s urban grassroots governance.

Speaker Bio

Jishun Zhang 张济顺 is a 2024–25 Visiting Scholar at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus of the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities of East China Normal University. She studies the history of modern China, with a focus on Shanghai’s history. Her research focuses on grassroots social governance and cultural transformation in the Mao era. Professor Zhang’s books include Chinese Intellectuals’ Views on America, 1943-1953 (Fudan University Press, 1999), and A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s (Social Sciences Academic Press, 2015). Zhang is a graduate of Beijing Normal University and Fudan University, where she received her PhD.