Chapter 5 reinterprets the CCP’s policies toward retail and distribution to show how the party’s control over retailing not only fulfilled the socialist ideological goal of eliminating a class of people who profited through trade rather than labor (private merchants) but also helped the state better control consumption. Despite the state’s efforts, the definition and practices of “socialist commerce” changed in response to the current economic and political contingencies—particularly the need to accumulate faster. While the CCP attempted to find ways to improve distribution and consumption and adopted and aborted socialistic experiments, it never abandoned its overriding goal of using the country’s limited resources to rapidly industrialize. The state wanted socialistic experiments related to retailing and distribution to maximize control over labor and eliminate the siphoning of profits from the state, rather than to “build socialism” and create an ideal socialist marketplace.

The Introduction introduces the primary questions of the book: what are the implications of the spread of consumerism in the Mao era, 1949–76? The argument is simple: consumerism is a correlate of capitalism. Both depended on each other to expand. The implication: the spread of both define the political economy of the PRC not as “socialist,” as is commonly assumed, but rather as capitalism. As the book demonstrates, the Mao era was a specific variety of capitalism called “state capitalist” because the state attempted to channel and suppress consumerism and consumption generally to facilitate rapid industrialization. The chapter justifies labeling these state attempts to control consumerism with a coined term, state consumerism. The rest of the Introduction explains the specific use of these three key terms: consumerism, capitalism, and socialism. Finally, the chapter suggests how the rest of the book attempts to demonstrate why this reinterpretation of “Communist China” as developing a form of capitalism helps readers understand the history of the era and new and better ways.

Chapter 4 examines the evolution of three forms of economic propaganda—advertisements, posters, and films—to reveal the move toward greater state consumerism, and reveals the ways the CCP navigated the central contradiction between its socialist rhetoric and its capitalist policies. While the Soviet Union provided ideological cover for the CCP’s embrace of consumerism, the party also used public discourse surrounding consumerism to promote restraint. These forms of discourse all attempted to subordinate people’s material desires under a propaganda blitz of messages proclaiming the importance of hard work and frugal living. The CCP’s brand of consumerism thus attempted to castigate individual material desires as bourgeois and celebrate social consumption in its stead. The CCP’s social consumption celebrated collective achievements that benefited the entire nation, such as expanding production of goods and infrastructure like nuclear weapons, bridges, collective dining and childcare, and health care. The CCP used their growing propaganda apparatus to promote consumerism even as it attempted to shape—and at times even suppress—consumerism’s self-expanding, compulsory nature.