A Revolution Domesticated

Based on newfound family letters, factory archives, oral history, and offiicial publications in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, this dissertation examines how urban Chinese families weathered the economic aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution by negotiating with the austerity measures, official ideology, and street-level bureaucracy. Such multivalent negotiations gave rise to "xiaokang", a “Confucianized” doctrine of depoliticized economic development, providing a durable basis for socialist China’s integration with the capitalist world order. A Shanghai-focused history of urban household economy and grassroots ideology in socialist China, this dissertation explains how urban families shaped modern China’s state-society dynamics and charted China’s unique transition away from Communism. Urban families’ experiences in late Maoist China were profoundly shaped by “revolutionary austerity”, characterized by ideological mobilization of urban families to bear the costs of Mao’s continuous revolution. By separating millions of teenagers from their families, the send-down youths movement (1968-1980) marked the austerity's apex. Instead of continuing the revolut