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Paper short abstract

Music education centred on socialist revolutionary songs in a Chinese school in postwar Yokohama shaped diasporic youth identities. Through collective and performative singing, Maoist repertoires fostered political belonging and communal ties among second and third generation Chinese in Japan.

Paper long abstract

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, ideological divisions emerged within the Chinese diaspora in Japan between supporters of the PRC (Mainland-oriented groups) and supporters of the Republic of China (Taiwan-oriented groups). These tensions culminated in the 1952 schism of the Chinese School in Yokohama. In the aftermath of this split, the Mainland-oriented Chinese school introduced music education programmes centred on songs that praised socialist New China, such as ‘Labour Is the Most Honourable’ (Laodong Zui Guangrong), which were widely used in the PRC to inculcate socialist values among youth. With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, this musical repertoire shifted further toward explicit veneration of Mao Zedong and Maoist ideology. For example, ‘Songs of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong’, which were melodic settings of passages from the Quotations of Chairman Mao, became central to music education and extracurricular singing activities. These songs mirrored those employed in mainland China as tools for ideological education, indicating a transnational circulation of revolutionary musical practices. Drawing on school newsletters and interviews with graduates of the mainland-oriented Chinese school in Yokohama, this paper examines how ‘New China’ songs functioned within music education and collective musical activities, and how they shaped the identities of Chinese youth living in Japan. Particular attention is paid to the school choir, whose members participated in Japan’s communist singing movement (utagoe undō), forming musical solidarities that initially transcended nationality and ethnicity. However, during the Cultural Revolution, the choir increasingly distanced themselves from Japanese communist movements and became more deeply aligned with the glorification of the Maoist regime. By focusing on second- and third-generation overseas Chinese, this study argues that singing practices associated with a distant ‘homeland’ played a crucial role in community formation and identity negotiation. The paper argues how music served as an educational tool, an ideological medium, and a means of articulating belonging within the complex sociopolitical context of postwar Japan.