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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Soviet Influences on State Consumerism

  • Karl Gerth, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    Unending Capitalism
    Published online:
    08 May 2020
    Print publication:
    14 May 2020, pp 73-100

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 examines the implications of how, in the opening years of the PRC, the CCP officially sanctioned all things Soviet—material, cultural, and ideological. In doing so, the CCP sponsored expansion of consumerism through popularizing Soviet styles. The developing Chinese version of state consumerism thus buttressed the socialist rhetoric that the CCP promoted through imported cultural products such as Soviet films, art, novels, and political ideology, which explicitly called for rejecting capitalism and bourgeois values. But Mao and other Chinese leaders became increasingly disenchanted with Soviet-style policies and economics; and their domestic audience both noticed the implicit endorsement of consumerism behind the socialistic veneer of Soviet fashions and products, and criticized it. The eventual rejection and self-aware turn of the CCP in the 1960s away from the Soviet “restoration of capitalism,” as the CCP labeled Soviet policies, was not enough to counter the growing inequalities associated with industrial capitalism and consumerism.