Fabio Lanza

In the years between 1958 and 1962, the Urban Commune movement was promoted as a radical effort to change the daily lives of Chinese city residents, including their relationship to work, eating, care of the self, and of the family. It was especially aimed at completely altering the conditions of women (urban “housewives”).

By looking at both the theoretical discussions and the experimental practices of collectivization in Beijing, this paper shows that while the movement failed, it nonetheless brought to the fore some of the crucial tensions that marred the search for socialist living: between welfare and development, between labor and liberation, and between production and social reproduction.