The revival of Chinese pottery tradition from Yixing (I-hsing) after the Chinese Cultural Revolution raises a series of questions on cultural production, history, and cultural identity in post-Mao China. The study of Yixing pottery reveals China’s transformation from a mode of production dominated by communist ideology and planned economy to a new era marked by a type of hybrid ideological and economic system. This essay argues that Yixing pottery is a politicized artifact, in which the politics of value and the politics of identity arise from the commodification and ideological appropriation of revitalized traditions. Yixing pottery is culturally informed; socially practiced; politically charged; and commercially contaminated. The contemporary cultural significance of Yixing pottery reveals an irony: the destruction of traditional culture in Mao’s red China is redefined by the reconstruction of socialist culture in China’s rise as a new world power.
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