Robert Culp (Bard College), Chang Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen)

This is the first session of the online lecture series "Practices of Reading in the People's Republic of China." It includes two talks, both concern the roles and situations of specific reader-groups that are targeted by early PRC's official publications. The first talk, given by Robert Culp, focuses on the young readers of the Youth League publications in Shanghai. Those readers gained authorial voices in the publications, and in the meantime served as a self-mobilizing collective subject under Maoism. The second talk is given by Chang Liu, which focuses on a short-lived official women’s magazine. By giving a gendered perspective on the reasons of the magazine’s failure, this talk tries to reveal the situations of the magazine’s target women readers at the time.