Over the past 30 years, China's public parks have been turned into stages for amateur performances of socialist anthems by self-organized retirees who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976). Challenging previous interpretations in terms of political expression or nostalgia, Casual Assemblies explores the seeming paradox of displaying political messages in the heart of the capital city while framing these gatherings as fun or self-entertainment – merely wan’r, in the language of parkgoers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, this book takes these claims to nonseriousness seriously. For at stake in these gatherings is the possibility of being nonliteral and reclaiming the sensuous pleasures of performing old tunes from “politics” (zhengzhi). This book theorizes casualness as a mode of engagement predicated upon the irrelevance of the correspondence between action and referential meaning. Through the making-casual of a cultural form once supposed to produce revolutionary commitment, parkgoers enact new experiences of being-in-public, togetherness, and shifting relationships to the Maoist past. This book will be of value to readers with a keen interest in China, scholars and students in anthropology and Asian Studies, as well as travelers who have witnessed these phenomena firsthand. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license. Date: 3 Nov 2026 Time: 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM (HKT) / 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM (CET) Speaker: Prof. Lisa Richaud (Anthropology), KU Leuven Moderator: Prof. Joseph Li (Public Humanities Programme), The Chinese University of Hong Kong Speaker's Bio: Lisa Richaud is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at KU Leuven. Her publications include Casual Assemblies (Routledge, 2026) as well as “The Political Work of Negative Affects: A View from Post-Reform China”, a guest edited special section of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in urban China, her writings has explored the sociality of public spaces, affective experiences of urban life among rural migrants, as well as different ways in which "ordinary" citizens have engaged with propagandistic forms and discourses - from playful, homonymic appropriations of slogans in online expression to casual re-enactments of revolutionary songs. Particularly interested in investigating the subtle forms of agency and world-building dimensions inherent to detachment, she is currently developing a new research project on the refusal of work and the forms of post-resignation lives, and how the state responds to such "willful" experiences of rest beyond moral condemnation or repression. Enquiries: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk