No laughing matter: Learning to speak the “common language” in 1950s China

In 1955, the government of the People’s Republic of China launched a campaign to implement a standard spoken language called putonghua. As part of a broader agenda of language reform, the “common language” of New China was envisioned as the solution to the linguistic babel of dialects, many of them mutually unintelligible. On its surface, this configuration supports the Herderian model of one nation-one language. But to come to fruition and fulfil its role as a core component of the socialist vision of territoriality, the quest for linguistic uniformity must transcend the confines of nationality (minzu). In this framework, the masses—united by class interest and sustained by revolutionary fervour—would embrace monolingualism, with putonghua superseding all other forms of speech to achieve the dream of one (multi-ethnic) China speaking in one voice. This chapter explores the political project and social history of the campaign’s first three years, when the quest for speech uniformity was particularly fractured and contested. Using jokes, acts of refusal, and evidence of indifference as windows into popular attitudes, the analysis shows that the commitment of the people to the state’s linguistic imperatives was quite tenuous, undermined by the persistence of laughter.