Temporal Politics and the Collectivization of Young People’s Leisure Time in Early Maoist Beijing

Following the takeover of Beijing in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party started to provide public cultural goods for youth by organizing collective leisure activities, mostly on weekends and holidays. From 1953, the authorities took a more interventionist approach when they held collective leisure activities more often on an everyday basis after the Party realized that leisure was a field for Communist education. Although the Party expected youth to live in a planned and regular way, discontent sprang up in 1956 when young people found they could not master their leisure time because there were too many mandatory activities, and many work units forced people to attend organized leisure activities collectively. The Party, as a result, decided to ‘let people plan their time freely’ by reducing unnecessary meetings in leisure time, allowing voluntary participation of leisure activities, and letting Party committees make overall leisure arrangements in local work units. Instead of challenging the legitimacy of political intervention in their leisure time, young people got accustomed to a new pace of life favoured by the regime: doing the right things at the right time, in the right place.