Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Chapter One The Pingtan System -- Chapter Two Cutting the Tail: The Founding of the Shanghai Troupe in the Early 1950s -- Chapter Three Politics as Entertainment: Middle-Length Pingtan Stories in the 1950s and 1960s -- Chapter Four Between the Association and the State: The Guangyu Incident in 1957 -- Chapter Five Between Accommodation and Resistance: Pingtan Storytelling on the Eve of the Cultural Revolution -- Chapter Six Beyond Spiritual Pollution: The Odysseys of Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang -- Chapter Seven Between Nostalgic and Critical: Political Pingtan Stories at the Turn of the New Millennium -- Epilogue Re-Patronizing Pingtan Storytelling -- List of Interviewees -- Bibliography -- Index.

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In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949 , Qiliang He pieces together published, archival, and oral history sources to explore the role of the cultural market in mediating between the state and artists in the PRC era. By focusing on pingtan , a storytelling art using the Suzhou dialect, the book documents both the state’s efforts to police artists and their repertoire and storytellers’ collaboration with, as well as resistance to, state supervision and intervention. The book thereby challenges long-held scholarly assumptions about the Chinese Communist Party’s success in politicizing popular culture, patronizing artists, abolishing the cultural market, and enforcing rigid censorship in Mao’s times.