ABSTRACT
Before offering some final reflections on the topic at hand, I should briefly evoke what this book has downplayed: the fragility of the sense of perpetual repetition that may have arisen from my descriptions. While I have deliberately described the scenes in public parks as a recurring, long-lasting feature of social life in the capital city (and elsewhere in the People’s Republic), Casual Assemblies may serve as a reminder of the uncertainty surrounding the future of these afterlives of Maoist performance culture and modes of sociality. During a follow-up visit to Beijing in 2017, I found out that sound-level regulations, whose implementation in Jingshan and Beihai Parks had only started toward the end of my fieldwork in 2013–2014, had had an obvious impact on the gatherings, many of which were nowhere to be found. If parkgoers might have chosen to relocate to other parks (something which I was not able to find out during this short trip), it remained that these sound-related constraints had created a sense of emptiness in the public spaces at the heart of the capital. Implemented in the name of environmental concerns, did these regulations have reasons other than those stated? It is difficult to connect these recent rules with any deliberate attempt on the part of municipal authorities to disrupt the routines of those who congregate in the former imperial domains. In Jingshan, the regulars of the Passion Square Choir had managed to preserve their “license to sing,” as I called it in Chapter 1, relying on their ties to the park’s administrative staff. One condition for being able to do so, however, was to give up the possibility of sound amplification. Regardless of the nature of the authorities’ motivations, this limitation of sonic presence remains a way of reordering the sensible, further regulating the conduct of those who, in the case of the Passion Square singers, had tacitly been showcased as a model singing group in official media.
