Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture 9780231552332

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Performing the Socialist State

PERFORMING THE SOCIALIST STATE Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture

XIAOMEI CHEN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Wm. Theodore de Bary Fund in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup​.­columbia​.e­ du Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Chen, Xiaomei, 1954–­author. Title: Performing the socialist state : modern Chinese theater and film culture / Xiaomei Chen. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022642 (print) | LCCN 2022022643 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231197762 (hardback ; acid-­f ree paper) | ISBN 9780231552332 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater—­China—­History—­20th century. | Theater—­China—­History—­ 21st century. | Socialism and the arts—­China—­History—­20th century. | Socialism and the arts—­China—­History—­21st century. | Tian, Han, 1898–­1968—­Criticism and interpretation. | Hong, Shen, 1894–­1955—­Criticism and interpretation. | Ouyang, Yuqian, 1889–­1962—­ Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN2874 .C448 2023 (print) | LCC PN2874 (ebook) | DDC 791.051/0905—­dc23/eng/20220714 LC record available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2022022642 LC ebook record available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2022022643 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-­f ree paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: “Celebrating the People’s Republic of China’s National Day,” poster designed by Su Guojing, 1950, from the IISH collection, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Courtesy of https://chineseposters.net/posters/d29-685

For my students And for Miriam Siying Halperin

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

PART ONE: Theater Founding Fathers Liberal Aesthetics in the Republican Period

one Tian Han and His Legacy: Proletarian Modernism and “The Theater of Dramatists” 25 two Hong Shen and His Discontent: Canonicity Through Theory and Practice 65 three Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream: Cross-­Dressing, Drama Schools, and Theater Reforms 98

PART TWO: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Shifting “Classics” and Their Place in Cultural Transformation [ vii ]

Contents four Is Socialism Good? Satirical Comedy and the Gray Theater of the 1950s 143 five The Tales of the Wives: The Mao-­Era Metamorphosis of the “Red Classics” and Their Postsocialist Reinscriptions 173 six “The Song of the Geologists”: Remembering Scientists Onstage 202 seven Monumental Theater: Soldier Plays and History Plays 249 eight Singing “The Internationale”: One Hundred Years of Sonic Theater 268 Notes 289 Bibliography 329 Index 347

[ viii ]

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the generous institutional support this book has received over the decades, including an NEH summer stipend in 2002 and a Faculty Research Fellowship from American Council of Learned Societies in 2003. Since I joined its faculty in 2002, the University of California at Davis has granted me a New Faculty Research Grant in 2003, several Small Research Grants from 2004 to 2019, a Faculty Research Fellowship from Davis Humanities Institute in 2015, and a Publication Subvention Grant in 2022. I appreciate the university’s commitment to teaching and research in the humanities, the arts, and cultural studies. My research has provided innovative ideas and updated materials for my teaching, both on and off campus. I thank my colleagues and friends from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the East Asian Studies Program for their intellectual stimulation and friendship. I am extremely grateful to Michael Dylan Foster, professor and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Davis, whose excellent scholarship, exemplary leadership, and genuine friendship are inspirational. Michael represents the best that our profession has to offer in teaching, research, and service. Over the many years when this book was in the making, slowly, many colleagues kindly invited me to present some aspects of my research on their campuses or during the academic conferences they had organized. I am very grateful to Eric Hayot, Kirk A. Denton, Peng Hsiao-­yen, Isabelle Rabut, Judith T. Zeitlin, Xiaobing Tang, Chengzhou He, Eddy U, Robert J. Culp, Carlos Rojas, [ ix ]

Acknowledgments Andrea Bachner, Rosemary Roberts, Li Li, Kwok-­kan Tam, Barbara Mittler, Peidong Sun, and Lena Henningsen. I benefited greatly from their intellectual dialogues and from the questions and feedback from the audience. Among the numerous scholars and friends I am indebted to during the writing of this book, I am especially grateful to Gail E. Finney, Carol H. Hess, Mark H. Halperin, Kirk A. Denton, Barbara Mittler, and Xing Fan for answering many questions or reading parts of my drafts at different stages. The last three years of completing this book also coincided with an enjoyable time with Tarryn Li-­min Chun and Siyuan Liu, when we coedited Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021). I benefited greatly from their insights and friendship. At the same time, I was also inspired by the contributors of seven chapters in the book, Max  L. Bohnenkamp, Brian Demare, Maggie Greene, Liang Luo, Anne  Rebull, Christopher Tang, and Emily Wilcox, and especially their commitment to the study of Chinese socialist theaters. I am very grateful to Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director of Columbia University Press, for her wisdom and leadership in promoting ­Chinese studies publications and for her faith in this project from the beginning; to Christine Dunbar, editor at Columbia University Press, for her guidance, support, and patience, especially during the pandemic; to Christian Pizarro Winting, associate editor, for his tireless help with artwork approvals and publication details; and to Leslie Kriesel, production editing manager, for her understanding and assistance. Last but not least, I thank Gregory McNamee, copyeditor, for his timely communication, expert skills, and gracious help. I also appreciate Yang Pengxi’s help in enhancing the quality of some of the illustrations and Li Wei’s effort in contacting various performance institutions for permission to include some of them in this book. Several parts of this book’s material were developed, revised, and reframed from prior journal articles and collections of essays. A part of chapter 1 appeared in “Reflections on the Legacy of Tian Han: ‘Proletarian Modernism’ and Its Traditional Roots,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 155–­215. A small portion of chapter 2 appeared in “Mapping a ‘New’ Dramatic Canon: Rewriting the Legacy of Hong Shen,” in Modern China and the West, edited by Peng Hsiao-­yen and Isabelle Rabut (Leiden: Brill, 2014). A condensed section on six Taiping plays in chapter  3 first [x]

Acknowledgments appeared in “Six Taiping Rebellion Tragedies: Heroes, Traitors, and the Discourse of the Chinese Revolution,” in Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959–­2009, edited by Joseph Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). An early version of part of chapter  6 appeared in “ ‘Playing in the Dirt’: Plays about Geologists and the Memories of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist Era,” China Review: A Special Issue on the Memory of the Cultural Revolution, ed. Guobin Yang and Yue-­ming Bao, 5, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 65–­95. Part of chapter 7 appeared in “Breaking out of the ‘Main Melody’ : Meng Bing and his ‘Monumental Theatre,’ ” in Staging China: New Theatres in the Twentieth-­First Century, edited by Ruru Li (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). I thank Ruru Li for her permission to reprint a stage photo from this edited book. An early draft of chapter 8 was included in “Singing ‘The Internationale’: From the ‘Red Silk Road’ to the Red Classics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). I thank all the editors of these journals and edited books for their suggestions and help, and the three external reviewers for their expert opinions to improve this book. Finally, I want to thank my students who took my classes on Chinese film, fiction, and popular culture, especially those who attended my course Chinese 103: Modern Chinese Drama in English Translation. Their class discussions and term papers helped me appreciate even better the impact of teaching theater and film culture on their personal growth and intellectual development. A special thanks goes to those who participated in any of the three seasons of the UC Davis Chinese Student Drama Club, the experience of which has remained a high point of my teaching career. Dr. Megan Ammirati, my former PhD advisee and now a  much sought-­after China hand, directed two of these plays with talent, enthusiasm, and confidence. I will always remember our amateur performance of clapper ballad (快板) in the Maoist-­era style as we introduced our cast and thanked our audience. In that memorable but far too brief moment in the limelight, I fulfilled my old dream of acting, teaching, and researching at the same time. My students were right there with me. They are my inspiration. I dedicate this book to them.

[ xi ]

Performing the Socialist State

Introduction

ON MAY  30, 2017, in the small college town of Davis, California, twenty students from my Chinese 103 class, Modern Chinese Drama in English Translation, successfully performed Ouyang Yuqian’s 欧阳予倩 1922 spoken drama (话剧) After Returning Home (回家以后). After the stage lights dimmed, Megan Ammariti, my doctoral student at the time and the director of the play, chatted gleefully with her cast members about the possibility of producing another play in the winter quarter of 2018, when I would be teaching the course again. A few years earlier, reviewers of my Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama commented that the colloquial English translations would be appropriate for stage productions.1 I was grateful for the positive reception but skeptical about anyone’s interest in staging these remote Chinese plays in the English-­speaking world. As Megan explained in her director’s note, however, “Over the course of many years and numerous sections of Chinese 103, Professor Xiaomei Chen and I have been discussing the idea that spoken drama is best appreciated through performance: seeing and participating in live theater gives you a unique experience that reading words on a page cannot duplicate.” (“Spoken drama” refers to Western-­style plays with dialogues only, without the singing, dancing, and acrobatics that characterize traditional Chinese theater such as Peking opera and other regional opera forms.) Not only did we test our theory with students from the modern Chinese drama class, but our production of After Returning Home also [1]

Introduction might well have been the first time the play was performed in English. As Megan noted at the time, “Together we have come to new realizations about the characters, the visual designs, and the way the play speaks to issues we currently speak about at UC Davis.” These new realizations invite us, she added, to reflect on early spoken drama’s “relevance to contemporary Chinese society in the twenty-­first century, after the May Fourth call to science, democracy, and modernity has taken drastic turns between socialism and capitalism and anywhere in between and beyond.”2 Megan’s production of the play thus made a “great leap forward” from its translated English text to campus performance, adding something new to ponder on the pedagogy of teaching non-­Western culture and theater in general. Perhaps the plot of After Returning Home might provide a clue to the play’s relevance. An overseas student, Lu Zhiping 陆治平, the protagonist, belatedly falls in love with his Chinese wife from a traditional arranged marriage in an idyllic village in Hunan Province after his American lover during his study years at an American university forces him to choose between “his” two women. By the end of the play, Lu leaves his hometown, debating what he is going to do next, while his relatives believe that he will make the  right decision. Surprisingly, such a remote story, crafted as an early experiment in Western-­style dramatic form, resonated with some UC Davis students who also lived through cultural, generational, gender, and racial differences. To other students without a Chinese cultural or linguistic background, the play reveals a rich “slice of life” of a global, multifaceted culture that calls for mutual understanding, respect, and acceptance of each other, and even more so in the twenty-­first century, as expressed in some of my students’ term papers on experiencing Chinese theatrical forms through text and performance. Never before in my long teaching career did I feel such a close tie between teaching and research. Watching my students enjoy performing an early play, however—­a play that few Chinese directors nowadays would be interested in staging—­brought new perspectives to my scholarly writing. In searching for mentions of Ouyang Yuqian in the twenty-­first century, I was happy to find traces of remembrance of his role as a founder of modern and contemporary theater. Intriguingly, a play titled In Search of Spring Willow Society (寻找春柳社), which premiered in 2007, dramatizes the frustrated efforts of a group of drama students in Beijing trying to understand and restage The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven (黑奴吁天录) as part of the [2]

Introduction activities celebrating the centennial of spoken drama in 2007. These student characters onstage could not apprehend Ouyang Yuqian and his peers’ passion for a dramatic art without personal gain and commercial success, which had motivated them to pursue show business in the first place. The failure of these Chinese students in 2007 to connect with the vision of early theater pioneers, and my American students’ success in relating their experience to Ouyang’s After Returning Home, paradoxically celebrates the impact of spoken drama, its relevance beyond time and space, and the challenge of not forgetting its tradition in the semicapitalist society of contemporary China. Equally significant, drama critics attended a seminar to praise In Search of Spring Willow Society as having successfully carried out one hundred years of spoken drama’s realistic and critical tradition in thematic concerns with aesthetic achievements in blending the satirical power of comedy with the sublime appeal of tragedy.3 The UC Davis production of Ouyang’s play speaks to the importance of studying spoken drama in the increasingly connected and yet diverse world of the twenty-­first century. Recent comparative theater studies have illustrated both the potential and limitations of early Chinese theater history and practitioners such as Ouyang Yuqian. As the first English-­language monograph on the global reception of Stowe’s 1852 fiction, Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book, for example, elegantly examines the 150 years of performing Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the world stage; surprisingly, however, it skips East Asian and especially Chinese imaginative re-­creations of Stowe’s work such as The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven, which marked one of the beginnings of spoken drama, the main genre studied in this book. Whereas sharing similar local transformations of Stowe’s work in French, German, Romanian, Cuban, Brazilian, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts in colonialist, religious, economic, and socialist terms, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin masterfully narrates, the 1907 Chinese overseas student adaptation in Tokyo converted a Japanese-­European transplant into an aesthetic search for the beauty and power of modern theater, thereby initiating the dramatic career of Ouyang Yuqian. This impacted the development of modern drama, as the rest of this study will illustrate. The relevance of this early piece to contemporary times continued in 1959, in the first decade after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–­present), when Ouyang rewrote and directed The Hatred of Black [3]

Introduction Slaves (黑奴恨). Loosely based on the storyline of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the production was updated with an antiracist theme to protest the U.S. oppression of Black people during the civil rights movement while supporting anti-­imperialist and anticolonialist movements in Africa.4 As the president of the China Central Experimental Theater (中央实验话剧院), established in 1956 to explore new aesthetic approaches to socialist theater, Ouyang journeyed from Tokyo, where he first landed at the age of thirteen, to Shanghai and Beijing, where he acted in civilized dramas (文明戏) and Peking operas (京剧) as a female impersonator, and then to Guilin, where he pioneered the reform of gui opera (桂剧) during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937–­1945). He became a national leader of theater circle after the founding of the PRC. This transnational, cross-­gender border-­crossing through time and space provides another example of what Rossella Ferrari has insightfully termed “a dynamic confluence of transnational imaginations and mobile connections that have shaped the configuration of Sinophone performance cultures since the so-­called modern period as ‘inherently and perpetually inter-­culture.”5 Describing Tokyo in 1907, the year of Spring Willow’s premiere of The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven with “a hybrid of Chinese, Japanese, and European aesthetics,”6 Ferrari brilliantly reflects on the origins of modern Chinese drama and conceptualizes “the dynamics of intercultural performance networks in the East Asian Sinosphere . . . ​within an integrative system of continuities.”7 In addition to transnational and intercultural theater studies as new methodologies, we also need to continuously pay equal attention to the local production and consumption of knowledge, especially in this increasingly global and multicultural world. Recent Chinese scholarship illustrates how Stowe’s work has continued to reflect, at least partially, what is lacking in a changing time in contemporary China, as is evident in a study of an American film adaption of Stowe’s fiction that expresses the spirit of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (人权宣言), sensitive words seldom encouraged in political discourse.8 By the same token, others have explored Stowe’s protagonists’ “rational consciousness of freedom” (理性自 由意识) and its importance for making individual choices, a position that ran contrary to the advocate of collectivism in the mainstream domination of cultural discourse.9 From another angle, the hypocrisy of the “American dream” in Stowe’s characters, as illustrated in their tragic ends, point to its [4]

Introduction impossible realization, a potential reference to a “Chinese dream” promoted by Xi Jinping 习近平.10 Contrary to the conventional reception in seeing the novel as having led to the onset of the Civil War and ultimately resulting in the abolition of the slave system, Stowe’s fiction was interpreted as in essence having spread negative depictions of African Americans according to religious and racial differences.11 Translation studies favored Stowe’s work and scrutinized, for example, three classic translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in “translational eco-­environments,” as manifested in Lin Shu 林纾’s 1901 translation in the late Qing era, Huang Jizhong’s 黄继忠 1956 rendition in the PRC, and Wang Jiaxiang’s 王家湘 1998 version in the postsocialist period, each reflecting linguistic, cultural, and communicative aspects of the given period.12 Along a similar line of exploring indigenous traditions, Megan Ammariti’s essay on Ouyang Yuqian’s 1956 adaptation of The Hatred of Black Slaves demonstrates that Chinese performance that used black and white face to impersonate American characters is neither inherently progressive nor conservative, but the racial impersonation in Chinese theater “may reflect a corresponding interest in the self rather than the subject being portrayed”13 and should be better understood in relation to performing identities within Chinese theatrical traditions, despite its declared intention of supporting Afro-­Asian solidarity after the 1955 Bandung Conference.14 The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin manifests itself in college entry examination reference books and sample questions to test high school students’ interdisciplinary training in liberal education (素质教育), especially through accessing its significance in the history of translation and theater adaptation in the past century.15 This historical exegesis likewise matters not only in understanding texts and contexts but also in their relevance and impact on everyday life experience in the PRC, both in the socialist and postsocialist periods. A simplified excerpt from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was a favorite story in my third-­grade English class in 1963, which exposed me to racial oppression in the United States. During the ­Cultural Revolution (1966–­1976), after I worked for four years on an army-­ affiliated farm as a teenager in the Northeast Wilderness (北大荒), I took an oral examination for admission into the English Department of Beijing Institute of Foreign languages in 1973 as a worker-peasant-soldier student recruited at the grassroots level. The test was none other than reading aloud a paragraph in English from a simplified version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin! [5]

Introduction After I enrolled in the institute, my English skills were also enhanced by reading an unabridged version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, checked out from the institute’s library’s “rare collection” of a few politically correct books from the West, since most English-­language classics were banned as the “poisonous weeds” of the capitalist West during the later years of the Cultural Revolution. Such positive reading in socialist China found itself sometimes altered in the postsocialist period and resulted, additionally, in increasing research on Black feminism and its historical impact through the global circulation of Western feminist theories in literary and cultural studies. This book, however, is not about the travels of Stowe’s novel in China. Neither is it a personal account of complex culture in the Mao era. For many years I have wanted to write a survey history of modern drama from the beginning of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-­first century, which witnessed historical, cultural, and artistic changes during opposing regimes such as the Republican period (1911–­1949) under the leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party), the PRC period (1949–­present), and the postsocialist period since the late 1980s. In the past decades, however, landmark scholarly works in Chinese have enriched our understanding of modern and contemporary Chinese drama. Dong Jian and Hu Xingliang’s A Draft History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (2008) presents a comprehensive survey of the PRC theater from 1949 to 2000 with thematic threads and critical analysis of major texts and contexts. Fu Jin’s masterful A History of Chinese Theater in the 20th Century (2016–­2017) and his A History of Contemporary Dramatic Criticism (2019) exemplify the best Chinese-­ language scholarship. Fu’s works examine texts, concepts, and theater practices from the inception of the modern theater since the late nineteenth century in a wide variety of genres, among them spoken drama, kun opera (昆曲), Shaoxing opera (越剧), Henan opera (豫剧), Shanghai opera (沪剧), and numerous other local and traditional opera forms as well as folk opera (歌剧), ballet (芭蕾舞剧), and ethnic minority theaters (少数民族戏剧). The eight volumes of A History of Art in Modern Spoken Drama (with Tian Benxiang as the editor-­in-­chief) not only include directing, acting, and stage designs and other aspects of theater culture; they also present drama history, texts, and performance in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. How to incorporate and challenge these illuminating scholarly works in my book and render a multifaceted history in the English language in a  single volume accessible to general readers with critical rigor and an [6]

Introduction interdisciplinary scope while doing justice to the countless playwrights and theater practices, not to mention their life stories in the twists and turns of the political culture and ideological changes?16 Such an almost impossible task prompted me to attempt a holistic view that bridges the Republican and PRC periods, with a focus on various crucial moments and a  cluster of thematic concerns that represent trends, continuities, and discontinuities. Tracing the genre back to its beginnings, Performing the Socialist State is structured in two parts. Part I, “Theater Founding Fathers: Liberal Aesthetics in the Republican Period,” examines the pioneering achievements in the Republican period as exemplified in the artistic careers of three founders of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han 田汉, Hong Shen 洪深, and Ouyang Yu­qian. As part of Chinese intellectuals’ journeys to foreign countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, Tian Han (1916–­1922) and Ouyang Yuqian (1902–­1910) resided in Japan, where they fell in love with the artistic power and social relevance in Western drama in the tradition of Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and the like. Hong Shen traveled to the United States (1916–­1922), studied dramatic art at Harvard University, and interned in theaters in New York and Boston to gain hands-­on experience. In their subsequent careers in China, they all wrote dramatic, operatic, and film scripts, introduced Western techniques and styles, initiated a professional system of directing and modern theater management, and ultimately forged a mostly realist theater that became the foundation of the socialist stage in the PRC. At the same time, they led the efforts in experimenting with other artistic trends, such as modernism, romanticism, naturalism, and expressionism, to name a few. In their endeavors to make art relevant—­and indeed flourish—­in a time of national crisis and personal fulfillment, the three forerunners steered collective efforts through theatrical performances to mobilize the Chinese people in the War of Resistance, when theater flourished in a “golden period of development.” During the Civil War period (1945–­1949), as early pioneers in spoken drama scriptwriting, directing, education, and theater management, all three distinguished themselves in reforming traditional Chinese operas as well as in blazing a trail to establish film as a key entertainment genre, as the first part of this book will attest. In post-­Mao China, some Chinese-­language scholarship has viewed these founders as too political to be worthy of serious study and has attempted to [7]

Introduction rewrite literary history by rejecting the overtly ideological orientations of the Maoist period while emphasizing aesthetic criteria. Whereas some regard Tian and Hong as the initiators of a dogmatic propaganda theater, others deem them as victims of a totalitarian society. I question the predictable opinion that socialist China mostly suppressed artists and their creative energies, as seen in their unproductive years during the Maoist period (1949–­1976) in comparison with their creative careers during the Republican period (1911–­1949), claims that have cited Tian as a regrettable example together with other dramatists such as Cao Yu 曹禺, one of the most brilliant playwrights whose masterpieces were written before 1949. In this book, I examine how and why Tian and his cohorts visualized a socialist blueprint in the leftist cultural tradition of the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist theater through his writings from the first few decades of the twentieth century. I study them as partial creators of socialist culture rather than its mere victims. Recent English-­ language scholarship has explored Tian’s dramatic achievements in the Republican period, viewing his theater activities from the multifaceted perspectives of avant-­garde performance as well as “politics and popularity” in the context of the national and international theater movement in the early twentieth century, as seen in the excellent work of Liang Luo.17 Other scholars have examined Hong Shen’s creative life from 1919 to the 1940s, such as his 1919 staging of The Wedded Husband in Ohio to present traditional Chinese values to a hostile West, his adaptations of Western plays in Shanghai in the 1920s, and his books on drama and film pedagogies published between 1933 and 1943.18 In contrast, this book examines the legacies of Tian, Hong, and Ouyang together as a unique trio and connects the periods before, during, and after the socialist era. In other words, this study investigates their achievements and, equally important, their impact on theater culture in the PRC from the socialist to the postsocialist epochs. Chapter 1 starts with the making of the legacy of Tian as the lyric writer of “The March of the Volunteers” (义勇军进行曲), originally composed as a theme song for a wartime film against the Japanese invaders in the Republican period, but subsequently celebrated in the PRC period as the national anthem, as seen in numerous films, plays, operas, and television dramas in  the postsocialist period. Tian’s multiculturalism embodied often-­ contradictory heritages including American liberalism, Japanese socialism, [8]

Introduction proletarian modernism, Marxist aestheticism, and feminist equalitarianism, together with Ibsenesque drama, avant-­garde cinema, and Chinese traditional opera, to name only a few. In the context of this distinctive blend of various cultures from the East and the West, Tian led a core group of theater artists in search of a theater that could be at once artistically innovative and socially significant. Among his crowning achievements, Tian scripted a cluster of spoken dramas depicting the life struggle of theater artists, initiating what I have termed a “theater of dramatists” dedicated to their stories in pursuit of dramatic art. As the war in the 1930s shifted some public performances to the battlefields and the interior, theater practitioners in various genres transformed their trade into a national form of war mobilization, therefore paving the way for theater’s popularity in the PRC. Tian’s success in theater reforms from the 1920s to the mid-­ 1960s, nevertheless, partially brought about his death in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution; paradoxically, however, his death inspired further development of the “theater of dramatists” in the postsocialist period, one that explored artists’ experience in order to reject, at least partially, the radical policies of the Maoist era. The result was a series of performances that dramatized his own life, which I term the “theater of Tian Han,” as seen in spoken drama Hurricane (狂飙, 2006), the xiangju (xiang opera 湘剧) Grand Master Tian (田老大, 2010), the Peking opera Headmaster Tian Han (田汉 校长 2021),19 and the pingju (ping opera 评剧) An E 安娥 (2016).20 Most of these plays on Tian Han’s life were performed to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Here we witness a unique cultural practice of promoting theater through politics and conversely propagating politics through theater, which provides a perfect stage to commend theater artists, in many cases with ample state funding. From different angles, these productions staged a cyclical journey from the personal to the collective in Tian’s earlier career, with a final return from the collective to the personal, which celebrated the new “collective” to justify the postsocialist turn to capitalism. In the larger scheme of things, chapter 1 presents Tian’s exceptional career as an art leader whose persistence and predicament epitomize a familiar voyage through history on the part of countless artists and intellectuals of his generation. While chapter 1 narrates Tian’s story from the birth of spoken drama to its golden era in the 1930s and 1940s and its influence in the PRC, chapter 2 establishes Hong Shen’s achievements in pioneering the writing of theater [9]

Introduction history and theory from its onset. As the compiler of the first anthology of spoken drama in 1935, Hong was instrumental in its canon formation, which defined for later generations what a “classic” text looked like. Moreover, Hong initiated an investigation of theater as a performative and interdisciplinary field in a manner quite ahead of his time: he formulated a ­concept of “three creations of theater” (三度创作). Equally important to the “first creation of dramatic script” (一度创作), Hong argued, are the “second creation” (二度创作) of directing, stage design, and management, and a “third creation” (三度创作) that can be identified in the audience’s interpretation of a play. Furthermore, despite his reluctance to politicize theater, as seen in his slowly evolving leftist orientation during the war period, his success in searching for an aesthetic theater with a broad audience paved the way for the future development of socialist theater in the PRC. For example, his modernist depiction of a soldier’s life in his first expressionist play, titled Yama Zhao (赵阎王), and his well-­received “trilogy of peasant life” (农民三部曲) in the realist style, though criticized as not progressive enough by some leftist critics of the time, paradoxically laid the foundation for the worker, peasant, and soldier plays (工农兵戏剧) that became prominent genres in the PRC. Situating his story in the intersection of theater and politics, the second half of chapter  2 further reads Hong’s career as having reflected a theatricality in everyday life through analyzing his ­psychological identity, social role-­playing, and public spectacles as various  modes of self-­representation and public performance, which could enhance our awareness of dramatic behavior outside the usual realm of the theater stage. In a larger context of a cross-­fertilizations among the intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, I have also outlined Hong and his cohorts’ achievements in the fields of higher education: not only did Hong join Hu Shi 胡适 and Zhang Pengchun 张彭春 as among the “first” to script spoken drama in the Western style, but all three also shared mutual aspirations to use theater as a new and promising genre to articulate their visions of a modern China. Whereas Hu advocated a “Chinese Ibsenism” to popularize Western drama for a liberal individualism and was instrumental in solidifying Peking University as a world-­class institution with his educational theories, Zhang’s inspiring teaching, innovative directing, and diligent promotion of spoken drama for the student theater on the campus of ­Nankai School mentored and finally produced Cao Yu, one of the most [ 10 ]

Introduction important playwrights in modern China. Their paths would cross again in subsequent years as groundbreaking diplomats on the world stage. Hu, representing the KMT government, attended the 1945 San Francisco Conference, during which fifty-­one nations approved the charter that founded the United Nations. In 1946, in the same capacity, Zhang attended the first congress of the United Nations in London and made an outstanding contribution to the drafting process of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (联合国人权宣言) with his knowledge of Chinese civilization and traditional culture. Even though Hong served as a diplomat in the PRC a few years later for the opposing camp, all three cultural figures excelled in addressing students, educators, politicians, artists, and state leaders on the local and world stages, influencing the cultural and cross-­cultural life of China and the world with their command of English language, knowledge of the East and the West, and performance skills on and offstage. All these aspects illustrate that the depiction of Hong as foremost a “leftist dramatist” does not do justice to his rich legacy as a complex and multifaceted intellectual. Chapter 3 analyzes Ouyang Quqing’s career as the third founder of modern theater. Using a different strategy from the previous two chapters, I map out Ouyang’s career in ten-­year steps to offer a broader context of the industrial, business, and commercial landscape that affected development of the theater, as seen in Ouyang’s three attempts to connect his efforts in promoting theater performance, drama schools, and research institute with experimental operatic reforms.21 In particular, I trace Zhang Jian 张謇, a pioneering entrepreneur in modernizing the city of Nantong 南通, who established one of the first cotton mills in China together with hundreds of factories, farms, schools, banks, and other institutions. Less known in the recent repackaging of Zhang as a model businessman, however, are his efforts in financing Ouyang Yuqian’s endeavors to build an art school and modern theater, therefore supporting Ouyang’s vision in “saving the country with art” (艺术救国), which dovetailed and complemented Zhang’s achievements in “saving the country with industry” (实业救国). In the second part of chapter 3, I sketch a group of traveling artists during the war period who eulogized themselves as vital players in political theater as described in many plays, films, and local operas in the 1940s, culminating in the celebrated occasion of the First Southwest Drama Festival (西南剧展) in 1944. In the third part of this chapter, I focus on several [ 11 ]

Introduction classic plays in the golden period of spoken drama during the war period; I argue that a group of prominent playwrights associated with producing the “defense drama” (国防戏剧) in fact put new wine—­the theme of exposing traitors at a moment of national crisis—­into the old bottle of a historical event through which they expressed doubts about revolution in all its forms. Ouyang’s 1941 spoken drama, The Loyal King Li Xiucheng (忠王李秀成), for example, revealed the inner fighting within the revolutionary ranks of peasant leaders in the Taiping Rebellion (太平天国运动), while critiquing the chaos, destruction, and betrayal of their once lofty ideal. This deeper meaning of the play would surface above its previously perceived theme of criticizing the KMT and its so-­called nonresistance against Japanese aggression upon its initial success in the 1940s; it can be simultaneously interpreted, I argue, as having “foreshadowed” the failed mission of the CCP after it had won political power, as I illustrate in part in chapter 4. The complex legacy of Ouyang’s wartime drama is further enriched by a comparative analysis of five other history plays singularly focused on the Taiping Rebellion and written by illustrious playwrights such as Yang Hansheng 阳翰笙, Chen Baichen 陈白尘, and A Ying 阿英 from 1937 to 1941, at the peak of wartime drama. The subsequent inclusion of these plays in PRC drama anthologies throughout the Maoist and post-­Mao periods demonstrates theater’s potential to reveal different—­and often contradictory—­ receptions according to the changing landscapes of ideology, culture, and society throughout history. Narrating three theater founders’ stories as threads for discussion between various periods, histories, and ideologies does not suggest a less important role for other significant figures in constructing modern and contemporary theater as we know it. Despite the limited scope of this book, I have opted to weave, where I can, the achievements of other signature playwrights such as Cao Yu, Lao She 老舍, Xia Yan 夏衍, Yang Hansheng, Chen Baichen, A Ying, and many others into my analysis. This book also acknowledges countless writers, performers, designers, critics, censors, editors, teachers—­many nameless—­who have contributed to the making of dramatic history in all spectrums, politically and artistically, onstage and offstage. Part I provides an overview of the foundations and blueprints of three theater founders. In turn, part II, “Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife: Shifting ‘Classics’ and Their Place in Cultural Transformation,” reflects on how Tian, Hong, and Ouyang’s early careers from the 1920s on lay the [ 12 ]

Introduction foundation for the performance history of contemporary China after 1949. Fu Jin has best defined the paradoxical and even trapped position that represents Tian’s generation of artists right after 1949. Whereas some of  them felt liberated from the past KMT regime, at the same time, they were classified as the objects of the liberators’ ideological reforms, which aimed at remolding them into new cultural workers who served the ­interests of the party and of the people.22 Most specifically, elected as president of the China Theater Association (中国戏剧家协会主席) in 1952, Tian became a prominent leader in the canon formation of the socialist stage. Part II therefore contextualizes the early years of the PRC theater dynamics and Tian’s changing position from a self-­claimed “oppositional artist” (在野的艺术家) in the Republican period into a leader of “the mainstream artists” (主流艺术家), who navigated an even more difficult censorship in the often zigzagging course of ideological campaigns, acting the “right” part as a leader of the artistic circle to serve the interests of the state while  attempting to trailblaze new theater art for the broadest audience possible. To connect part I on theater founders with part II on theater practice in the Maoist and post-­Maoist periods, I begin each chapter with a brief survey of the themes, issues, and character types in the Republican period that continued to appear on the PRC stage. Arranged in chronological order to examine the critical terrain of PRC theater, chapter 4 starts with a popular song, “Socialism Is Good” (社会主义好), as a prelude to scrutinizing the “color scheme” of the 1950s theater and its controversy spoken dramas and their film adaptions from 1949 to 1958. Popularized in 1957 during the Anti-­ Rightist movement, “Socialism Is Good” inspired Tian Han to write a poem in 1958 in which he praised the singing of this song by an amateur performance team of disabled war veterans.23 Paradoxically, however, skepticism emerged in comedies, and especially satirical comedies (讽刺喜剧), which briefly flourished around 1955 and 1956 in response to the CCP’s call to criticize the unhealthy behavior of its officials. I argue that these works, though artistically satisfying, have been excluded from the “red classics” of the 1960s in the high socialist period partially because they represent a more innocent and heartfelt enthusiasm for the promising socialist blueprints envisioned by leftist artists before the PRC period. We also see a closer relationship between these works of the 1950s and the liberal literary movement of the 1920s and other aspects of Republican culture, such as [ 13 ]

Introduction “critical realist” literature and romantic drama and film, which were deemed by some as too unhealthy for the socialist stage. On the other hand, precisely because they can be perceived as less “revolutionary” (not “red”) and hence “gray” texts (between “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary”), these plays preserved sentiments about what the communist promise of a “free and democratic China” first meant to the Chinese people in the early 1950s. A discussion of what was later criticized as “middle characters” (中间人物), for example, can reveal people’s dreams before they disappeared from the socialist stage after the Anti-­Rightist movement of 1957, which suppressed oppositional voices against the CCP. Furthermore, I argue that it is indeed these depictions of “negative character” (反面人物) that expressed early seeds of resistance to the collective farming movements in the early 1950s, which were later cited as legitimate grounds for dissolving the practice in post-­Mao China. My goal is to uncover the multiplicities, complexities, and potentials of performance culture in early socialist China in its rudimentary form and its paradoxical nature through the reflection of everyday experience onstage. Through the process of viewing how performances interwove “red classics,” “gray texts,” and “black” (counterrevolutionary) messages, I emphasize the importance of studying propaganda performance culture and its liminal space between different “color” zones, and/or a combination of them to carve out a unique and ambiguous space, which is at once politically correct and intellectually challenging. On a different spectrum, I also trace the comedies of the 1950s back to their generic roots, briefly delineating the theory and practice of comedy in the Republican period; wherever I can, I integrate women’s theater, such as the outstanding achievement of Yang Jiang 杨绛, a founding mother of satirical comedy, which, according to Edward M. Gunn and Amy D. Dooling, reached a high level of artistry in the “comedy of manners” as an important part of realist theater in the Republican period. In my view, this also presented parallel themes in the later period, as seen in the “Rightist comedies” (右派喜剧) of the 1950s, as I discuss in chapter 4. Not coincidentally, my students from the UC Davis Chinese Drama Club successfully staged Yang Jiang’s wartime drama Forging the Truth (弄真成假, 1944) in spring 2018. A bitter satire on the clever tricks young lovers in 1940s Shanghai play to maneuver their relationships into marriages for materialist gains, such a seemingly remote comedy brought laughter to the young [ 14 ]

Introduction audiences on UC Davis campus and reflections on the play’s relevance to their contemporary life in America. This student production proved, in a  cross-­cultural context, Amy D. Dooling’s point that Yang’s Shanghai comedies in the 1940s “transcend the immediate historical circumstances” in contemporary China, where audiences are once again trading love for money.24 In the same vein, the same drama club’s 2019 production of Sha Yexin’s 沙叶新 If I Were for Real (假如我是真的, 1979), which caricatures the corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse of power during the late Maoist years, further resonated with even worse conditions in postsocialist society, when mocking those in power and lamenting the fate of the powerless became standard tropes on and off the internet. The impact of satirical comedy in the PRC stage—­however infrequent—­deserves our attention for its own historical significance. Whereas chapter  4 raises pertinent questions about theater’s place in fashioning China’s new identity as a socialist state in its first decade of the PRC’s founding, chapter 5 traces the tales of wives in making and remaking the red classics in the Mao era from the perspective of a feminist critique with “Chinese characteristics.” I demonstrate that the socialist state’s feminist theater reached its peak in the 1960s “red classic” performances and continued its transformation during the Cultural Revolution and in the post-­Mao period. Chapter 5 introduces the “cultural fever” of the high-­Mao period of the 1960s with “The Song of the Red Plum” (红梅赞), the theme song for the influential folk opera (歌剧) Sister Jiang (江姐), which premiered in 1964 and epitomizes the heroic spirit of a communist martyr. It remains one of the prevalent red songs from the Maoist period to the present day. To emphasize the historical context of such a phenomenon, chapter  5 begins with a brief connection with the history of women’s theater since the onset of spoken drama pioneered by Tian, Hong, and Ouyang in the Republican period, which had held up Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as a symbol for Chinese women’s liberation; the three founders, either separately or collaboratively, had written, directed, and performed early pieces of women’s theater.25 The rest of the chapter examines the transformations of the images of emancipated women in several “red classic” films and folk operas with relation to their family roles, their local communities, societal expectations, and their afterlives in postsocialist China. While heroic female characters conformed to the ideology of socialist realism, the spectacular scenes, compelling performers, and cultural fantasies captured some of the [ 15 ]

Introduction public. Through depictions of women, family, and desire, I outline the intricate relationships between erotic love, family structure, community experience, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment on the part of women characters. The dominant status of heroic and selfless women in the red classics during the 1960s ultimately resulted in their artistic and ideological makeovers into the “model theater” of the Cultural Revolution and their eventual return to postsocialist China in reconstructing the red classics. Cross-­genre adaptations of socialist feminist texts continued to entertain postsocialist audiences thanks to the fluctuating dynamics of China’s social, political, and economic transformations. With a focus on the cultural practice of performance art from Maoist to post-­Maoist society, chapter 5 complements recent studies such as The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics,” which investigates Great Changes in the Mountains (山乡巨变), Tracks in the Snow Forest (林海雪原), Red Crag (红岩), and The Golden Road (金光大道) in the Maoist period, and the adaptations of red classic works in picture books, cartoons, and television drama series in the postsocialist period. Chapter 5 also contributes to “a new critical framework and interpretative strategy within which to examine the profusion of official and unofficial cultural artifacts” associated with the CCP, as concisely articulated in Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution.26 Unlike these two exemplary studies, however, chapter 5 focuses on the aesthetic transformations in theatrical, cinematic, and television productions and the “gray texts” that aspired to be “red” in the authors’ intentions but were criticized as “not red enough” or even “black” precisely because their dramatic representations of the newly emerging “red” society reveal the latter’s inherited contradictions in claiming to serve the interests of the people while demanding the right of the state to control it. This book does not exclusively treat the theater culture of the Cultural Revolution, its traditional Chinese and Western artistic roots, and its impact after the death of Mao, which I already examined in my Acting the Right Part. Since then, exemplary studies have been published on the art of the Cultural Revolution, such as Rosemary A. Roberts’s Maoist Model Theatre (2010), Barbara Mittler’s A Continuous Revolution (2012), and Xing Fan’s Staging Revolution (2018). Chapter 6 thus picks up where previous books ends by focusing on the post–­Cultural Revolution period since 1976 and tackles the thorny issue of representing the scientists onstage, a topic not having been studied before.27 Whenever I can, I weave in the hegemony of the model [ 16 ]

Introduction theater into my analysis of the works before and after it to achieve a more holistic history of theater in the modern period. To better connect chapter 6 with the rest of the book, I briefly survey the early appearance of a few scientist characters in the Republican period, which was overpowered by the presence of other characters such as theater artists, writers, and other types of intellectuals. Xia Yan’s 1942 play The Fascist Bacillus (法西斯细菌) initially raised the issue of how scientific knowledge can save China—­or did those scientists in fact aid foreign powers to further victimize the Chinese people? That is a question more seriously pursued and represented onstage in the early PRC period in different manifestations. Illustrating how scientists have been portrayed onstage, chapter  6 begins with a popular melody, “The Song of the Geologists” (地质队员之歌), in order to map out the depictions of scientists onstage and their remembrance of the Cultural Revolution in the postsocialist period. This chapter focuses on three plays about geologists. The Young Generation (年青的一代) in the high Mao period depicted college graduates giving up their comfortable urban life in Shanghai to explore ore deposits in Qinghai Province in order to build up socialist industry, seemingly a realization of the failed dreams of Zhang Jian in real life (chapter  3) and Master Qin in Lao She’s Teahouse (chapter  4), both perceiving the power of modern industry and technology as a way of saving China. Geologists (地质师), which premiered in the postsocialist period, in contrast, reports what had happened to these geologists thirty years later after the chaotic Cultural Revolution ended: some held implicit regret, while others persevered; some were disabled but bathed in the new era’s celebration of them as great scientists. Ironically, Enjoy Hardship (享受艰难), staged in 1998, depicts their teenage children’s difficult journey in returning to Shanghai and trying to pass the entrance exam for a top school, which were especially challenging to students from remote provinces. Tracing the importance of scientists in the PRC and its effect on the postsocialist society as reflected in theater art, chapter  6 examines the phenomenon of the “rise of the red engineers” (following the insightful work of Joel Andreas) and explains how Maoist and post-­Maoist stagings of scientists and engineers help us understand not only the persuasive discourse of science, theater, and political power but also their utilitarian function in creating a new “class of Party technocrats” who received elite [ 17 ]

Introduction academic and political training in the 1950s and early 1960s and rose to political power in the 1990s as members of the Standing Committee of the Party.28 Prominent leaders include Wen Jiabao 温家宝, who graduated in 1967 with a postgraduate degree in geology from the Beijing Institute of Geology and served as premier of the State Council of the PRC from 2003 to 2013, and Hu Jintao 胡锦涛, formally trained as a hydraulic engineer in Tsinghai University, who succeeded Jiang Zemin 江泽民 in 2002 as the general secretary of the CCP until 2012 and served as the president of the PRC from 2003 to 2013. These were but two of the most influential leaders partially responsible for China’s economic takeoff in the postsocialist period. Not incidentally, Hu also led the student performance group of Tsinghai University and was chosen as a chorus member in the “revolutionary music and dance epic” The East Is Red (东方红), which premiered in 1965. Promoted as model students who were “both red and expert” (又红又专)—­and I would add “artistically talented” in Hu’s case—­during the Maoist period, these new party technocrats rule postsocialist China with the political capital of “high political consciousness,” the cultural capital of knowledge, and academic training. My discussion of the red classic theater, therefore, further explains how the discourse of “both red and expert” can be better understood in connection with theater’s mission to produce dramas that are “both red and classic/artistic.” The intricate interweaving tales of revolution, science, youth, power, and the state leader with performance art and its embodied practice cannot be simply dismissed as incidental phenomena or simplistic stage acts. Chapter 7 bridges 1990s theater with that of the twenty-­first century by investigating what I term “monumental theater” (里程碑戏剧), with a focus on the success story of a singular playwright who specializes in writing “soldier plays” (军旅戏剧) and “revolutionary history plays” (革命历史题材 剧). I argue that in postsocialist China, where culture and ideology have supposedly turned capitalist since the 1990s, Meng Bing’s 孟冰 “main melody plays” (主旋律戏剧) have gained popularity in the opposite direction: “turning socialist” in their thematic concerns and theatrical styles. The term “main melody plays” refers mostly to socialist realist plays, which advocate the core values of the CCP in keeping with its central goals. Against the usual impression of the main melody plays as tedious propaganda, the contemporary stage witnessed a “Meng Bing phenomenon” (孟冰现象) which culminated in a large-­scale drama festival in 2011 that [ 18 ]

Introduction staged fourteen of his plays, performed by thirteen prestigious theater troupes. Meng is at once politically correct, artistically innovating, and commercially successful. His “soldier plays” seemingly inherited a socialist realist tradition in praising the heroic deeds of the ordinary people with strong official backing and promotion. At a deeper level, however, his plays side with the still-­oppressed laboring people at the bottom of Chinese society, fifty years after their supposed “liberation” from the KMT regime. Meng’s dramas challenge the new rich in the “new era” and point to the impossibility of real change from a “feudalist” to a “socialist” period and from a “socialist” to a “postsocialist” society. The Meng Bing phenomenon provides much-­needed insight into the revolutionary stage in a nonrevolutionary time and its enduring public appeal to audiences with their private sentiments and concerns. By returning to and exploring new ground in experimenting with realist theater, Meng has also expanded the critical realist tradition that Tian, Hong, and Ouyang had pioneered in the Republican period but that had faded out to a large extent in the Maoist period, as I point out in chapter 4. Chapter 8 concludes this book with a diachronic study of the soundscape of singing “The Internationale” (国际歌) over the past one hundred years as a way of producing knowledge, creating new citizens, and blending artistic styles within and across genres and historical periods. Unlike the renowned song “The East Is Red,” which originated in a folkloric love song in Shaanxi in the 1930s and was later transformed into an all-­powerful eulogy of Mao, the sonic theater of the “The Internationale” found its origin in the West. Written in 1871 by Eugène Pottier and set to music by Pierre De Geyter in 1888, the song inspired members of socialist parties the world over in the early twentieth century, and especially during the Russian October Revolution of 1917, when it was used as a signature song of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union until 1944. Upon his return from the Soviet Union in  the  1920s, Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, the second CCP leader after Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, retranslated and popularized “The Internationale,” which became one of the most influential songs in contemporary China. Even though Qu  questioned the fundamental principles of the communist movement before his death at the hands of his enemies, numerous performance pieces  still portrayed him singing “The Internationale” on the execution ground, alternating between its Russian and Chinese lyrics, as his last act of loyalty. [ 19 ]

Introduction How did this foreign song become a heroic song accompanying the death of countless martyrs and virtually become a “party song” of the CCP without official designation as such? What was its appeal to the Maoist discourse as an effective tool in producing devoted citizens? How was it used in the PRC public ceremony, in novels, films, plays, and traditional operas, either as a theme song, background music, a stage line, or a visual image of the Paris Commune in propaganda posters? Key phrases in the lyrics, such as  “Arise, ye slaves afflicted by hunger and cold” (起来, 饥寒交迫的奴隶!), “Arise, ye oppressed people all over the world” (起来, 全世界受苦的人), and “Do not say that we have nothing (不要说我们一无所有), / We shall be the masters of the world! (我们要做天下的主人!)” have parallels with some of the central concepts of Maoist discourse on equality in class, gender, and race and its vision of emancipation for all mankind. An early Maoist film was even entitled Unite Together Towards Tomorrow (团结起来到明天), a concluding line from “The Internationale,” while casting pre-­PRC movie stars as new workers in socialist China. With equally powerful sonic effects, the same lyrics also inspired young participants during the 1989 Tiananmen student demonstrations against government corruption. Tracing the roots and practice of a sonic theater provides us with a new perspective in analyzing artists’ roles in creating, maintaining, and promoting the socialist state without seeing them necessarily as victims. In the twenty-­first century, “The Internationale” continues to be used on the Chinese stage to validate continuous rule of the CCP; at times, it implicitly challenges the CCP’s betrayal of its original blueprints. Meng Bing’s main melody play This Is the Final Struggle (这是最后的斗争) uses a key sentence from “The Internationale” as its title with a new meaning: in a postsocialist society riddled with corruption, scandal, greed, selfishness, and betrayals that have torn apart a family of three generations in twenty-­ first-­century China, it is up to the father figure, a decorated CCP war hero, to vow that he will still triumph in “the final struggle” in pursuit of communist idealism against all odds, in a tragic spirit that recalls Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet. Performed in 2011 by China’s National Theater (中国国家话剧院),29 This Is the Final Struggle won compliments from government officials for its anticorruption theme and steady communist faith, while at the same time garnering praise from audiences that applauded at the dramatic moments when satirical lines from the play exposed the very hypocrisy of communist glory. [ 20 ]

Introduction All in all, this book provides a much-­needed critical history of spoken drama from its birth to its latest incarnation in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Organized around a cluster of theoretical issues such as theater and nation/state, theater and gender politics, theater and film, theater and science, and theater and popular songs, it presents innovative perspectives by which to study Chinese drama as an essential part of world theater, comparative performance studies, multicultural studies, and the studies of modern Chinese literature, culture, history, and politics without negating personal and lived experience in everyday life.

[ 21 ]

ONE

Tian Han and His Legacy Proletarian Modernism and “The Theater of Dramatists”

Arise, 起来！ Ye who refuse to be slaves! 不愿做奴隶的人们！ With our very flesh and blood, 把我们的血肉, 筑成我们新的长城！ Let us build our new Great Wall! The peoples of China are in the most critical time, 中华民族到了最危险的时候， Everybody must roar his defiance. 每个人被迫着发出最后的吼声。 Arise! 起来！ Arise! 起来！ Arise! 起来！ Millions of hearts with one mind, 我们万众一心， Brave the enemy’s gunfire, March on! 冒着敌人的炮火，前进！ Brave the enemy’s gunfire, March on! 冒着敌人的炮火，前进！ March on! 前进！ March on! on! 前进！进！ —­“The March of the Volunteers”

ORIGINALLY COMPOSED BY Nie Er 聂耳 in 1935, with Tian Han’s lyrics, as the theme song of the film, The Sons and Daughters of the Stormy Times (风雨儿 女), “The March of the Volunteers” (义勇军进行曲) celebrates the soldiers who defended the nation even before Japan formally declared war on China. It quickly emerged as one of the most popular songs during the war. At the founding of the United Nations in 1945, delegates from all over the world [ 25 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers listened to the playing of “The March of the Volunteers” as a signature song of the Chinese nation against Japanese imperialism. According to popular lore, in 1949, when Liang Sicheng 梁思成 and others nominated the “March” to be the national anthem of the newly founded PRC, some expressed discomfort, saying that the line “the peoples of China are in the most critical time” would not work with the image of the PRC, which promised to usher in an era of tranquility after the wars were won against the Japanese invaders and the old regime of the KMT. Mao Zedong 毛泽东 and Zhou Enlai 周恩来, however, overruled them, believing that the original lyrics most accurately reflected recent history, which should be remembered in the present era of peace and prosperity.1 Such a recorded event in “real” life became a favorable scene to be staged in postsocialist performance pieces such as The Founding of a Republic (建国大业), a blockbuster film of 2009, and narrated in Road to Revival (复兴之路), an exhibition housed in the Chinese National Museum in Beijing, with displays of the original designs of the national flag and other treasures from the early PRC history.2 Both the film and the exhibition staged the story of how “The March” became “the provisional national anthem” (代国歌) as the result of collaborations of national leaders and art and theater trailblazers. Typical for the PRC exhibitions which often eclipses the problematic history of the Cultural Revolution, however, The Road to Revival did not narrate how, during the Cultural Revolution, numerous artists and intellectuals such as Tian Han were denounced as enemies of the people, and “The East Is Red” eclipsed “The March,” which was played without lyrics on some official occasions, such as Nixon’s visit to China. In 1982, “The March” was finally established as the official national anthem. This was done in part to celebrate Tian as a model patriotic intellectual, but the revival of Tian’s lyrics also communicated the popular sentiment that China had survived the Cultural Revolution. Like many of his contemporaries, Tian perished in a Maoist era that was supposed to create a society of equality, harmony, and justice. During the post-­Mao celebration of his life, the state and its media exploited his name to usher in a new era of reform; a Grand Theater of Tian Han (田汉大剧院), for example, bolstered the economic takeoff in Changsha, his hometown. The monumental theater functions as a public space for mass events and national celebrations, a tourist attraction, and an entertainment center that connects the local Hunan folk shows with the Moulin Rouge and Broadway musicals.3 [ 26 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy Exploring a commercial success with artistic experiments, the post-­Mao film industry pursued the story of Tian. In his 1999 film The Anthem (国歌), director Wu Ziniu 吴子牛 depicted the creation of the song, with a focus on Tian’s role as the founder of modern Chinese performance arts. Dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, Wu’s film was set in 1931, when Japan began its invasion of Northeast China. Tian led his drama troupe to support refugees from the region, who provided inspiration for his wartime plays. When war broke out in Shanghai on August  13, 1937, Tian and Nie Er followed a cameraman to the battlefield to shoot a documentary film, risking their lives to record Chinese bravery and Japanese cruelty. Realizing that films and songs now deemed more powerful weapons than theater, Tian and Nie began to write popular songs, many of which first appeared as theme songs for films. While they were on location shooting the film The Sons and Daughters of the Stormy Times, a Japanese bomber killed a student of Tian’s who had returned from overseas to join the war effort. Her heartbreaking death, along with suffering Chinese under the Japanese occupation, inspired Tian to write his lyrics for the “The March of the Volunteers.” Enraged by Tian’s imprisonment as a radical leftist, Nie composed music for Tian’s lyrics overnight and, with fellow artists, played the song on a riverboat outside the prison, allowing Tian to hear his words in musical form for the first time. Whereas other plots were mostly based on biographies of Tian and Nie, this scene breaks away from realist conventions to emphasize a romantic spirit, which is at once sublime and aestheticized, in keeping with Tian’s lifelong achievements in combining realist and romantic traditions. The film ends with a black screen with a small door in the middle, with Tian walking through it toward a small but bright spot in a dark, long tunnel. As a historical fact, the image refers to Tian’s release from the KMT prison; as a visual metaphor, it might be seen as forecasting the unpredictable journey of Tian’s life after 1949. The Anthem presents a typical story of Tian in the PRC—­a devoted leftist playwright whose wartime experience under the influence of the CCP brought about the golden days of his creativity in the 1930s and 1940s. The cinematic staging included war, violence, love, and death, yet such a stereotypical portrayal of Tian as a national icon could not do justice to  the unique path he had traveled as a multifaceted artist in history. Neither should Tian be readily reduced to a mere victim of Maoist China,  for which he helped to construct a revolutionary theater that [ 27 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers flourished in the PRC period with a lasting impact on postsocialist performance culture. A major twentieth-­century writer with a complex background and a controversial legacy, Tian left behind around sixty-­three modern spoken dramas, twenty-­seven traditional operas (including Peking-­, Hunan-­, and Henan-­style operas), two Western-­style operas (歌剧), twelve movie scripts, more than a thousand poems in both modern and classical styles, and a substantial body of literary criticism. He also translated plays by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Kikuchi Kan, and many others. Despite his extraordinary career across several genres, Tian’s place in literary history has been controversial. He was a pioneering artist in the development of modern spoken drama, from the “pluralist liberal period” (多元自由时期) in the 1920s and the leftist movement in the 1930s to the period of “seeking the spirit of nationalism and democracy” in the 1940s.4 Maoist critics rejected Tian’s Western modernist leanings, such as the “art-­ for-­art’s-­sake” creed in his early career, and they looked askance at his ­suspect social connections and personal history in the Republican period. Post-­Mao critics deemed his later work, with its apparent leftist tendencies, too political to warrant serious academic scholarship. Tian was extremely active in the early PRC period as a prestigious journal editor, drama critic, and organizer of a theater association and festivals, but his achievements have been glossed over because they were taken to be mostly reflections of the party’s control of literature and art. Moreover, Tian’s efforts in the proletarian cultural movement are acknowledged mostly as an example of someone who veered to the left in 1930 under the influence of the CCP. As this chapter illustrates, however, Tian published his views on “proletarian art” as early as 1920 and believed that proletarian art needed to be synthesized with Western feminist principles to benefit proletarian women in China and the rest of the world. Tian’s sensitivity to the complex issues of class, gender, and nation confirms his place as a unique interpreter of proletarian modernism in Chinese literary history. Tian’s story closely follows a pattern I have described with regard to the marginal position of modern Chinese drama, which was doomed by an approach to literature that drew an irreconcilable distinction between purely artistic practice and ideological activity.5 To buttress my argument, I look at the diverse foreign influences on Tian in his earlier career, before his Southern Drama Society period (南国社, 1924–1928) in the 1920s: that is, [ 28 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy the Russian, English, French, German, and American writers who mattered to him. A rich foundation in the work of these foreign figures helped form Tian’s identity as an independent artist with a strong sense of moral and social duty to his people. “Western, decadent, and bourgeois,” and especially “modernist,” were labels he applied to himself, and these influences turned out to lay a foundation for his aesthetic tastes and his cultural activities. Indeed, moving from the study of global trends toward that of socialist ideology and leftist literature, as he did in the early 1920s during his sojourn in Japan, Tian formed his multicultural and multi-­ideological identities as a proletarian modernist, combining his thought as a socialist internationalist and as a feminist nationalist, as reflected both in his critical writings and in his plays and operas. Simultaneously, he was fascinated by traditional Chinese operatic theater, with a view to using it to articulate the core of his leftist perspective and to perfect his dramatic writing skills. His artistic achievements proved crucial after the Anti-­Rightist movement of 1957, when his skills to adapt material from a variety of cultural sources allowed him to continue producing plays despite the strict censorship in a radical time. His two best works—­the Peking opera Xie Yaohuan (谢瑶环), written in 1961, and the spoken drama Guan Hanqing (关汉卿), scripted in 1958—­testify to the usefulness of such an aesthetic flexibility, which produced texts that speak with multiple voices, within the confines of a dominate cultural mandate of “using the past to server the present” (古为今用). Indeed, Tian could not have achieved his ultimate status as an aesthetic traditionalist in his opera reform without having traveled afar from the various spaces of the “West” and from the Chinese tradition, which he remained constantly inspired without losing his critical edge. In the larger scheme of things, Tian’s proletarian drama was partially shaped, somewhat ironically, by his encounter with modernism, which in turn provided a further impetus to continue to create an aesthetic theater in the forms of traditional opera and modern spoken drama.6

From Whitman’s Liberalism to Tian Han’s Global Proletarian Art Like many of his generation of Chinese intellectuals who sought new ideas from afar, Tian studied and lived in Japan (from 1916 to 1922); he was following in the footsteps of Lu Xun 鲁迅, who studied there from 1902 to [ 29 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers 1909.7 As the Japanese Sinologist Ito Toramaru contends, Lu Xun’s stay in Japan coincided with the adoption of new cultural identities among many Japanese intellectuals, who felt less threatened by Western colonization and more confident about Japan’s identity as a strong nation.8 As a result, they were interested in pursuing friendships with artists and writers from other countries so that together they might attain to a universal form of art that could transcend national and state boundaries. Ito ascribes Lu Xun’s famous abandonment of medicine for a career in literature as wanting to educate his compatriots after having seen apathetic Chinese watching a Chinese spy being executed by the Japanese military in a lantern slide show, not out of some desire to improve the negative characteristics of his fellow Chinese, as Lu Xun himself describes in his “Preface to Call to Arms” (《呐喊》自序), but to Lu Xun’s having benefited from Japanese intellectuals’ discovery of the “art-­for-­art’s-­sake” spirit (in the form of “universal art”) whereby they might transcend their national identity.9 Arriving in Japan about ten years later after Lu Xun, Tian seemed to ardently follow Lu Xun’s lead. He promoted another wave of cross-­cultural exchanges between China and Japan by encouraging a mutual search for the universal spirit of literature and art, exemplified at the time by Western models. In this sense, Tian can be seen as an active Occidentalist who fell in love with Western values at first sight, because they offered him what he felt was unavailable in his native culture. Rather than resist what might be called, in the postcolonial debate, the West’s “semicolonialist attempt to dominate the culture of the non-­West,” Tian, like many of his contemporaries, could not get enough of the West. He longed to turn what he had learned from it into a positive, powerful force against “evil societies,” which, he felt, could be found in both China and the West.10 In his first two years in Japan, Tian was drawn to the study of economics and politics. In March 1917, at age nineteen, he wrote his first essay, analyzing the Russian February Revolution of 1917 in terms of the increasing gap between rich and poor.11 Written in elegant semiclassical language and published in September  1917, Tian’s essay rendered a detailed economic analysis of Russian society, surveying the deep roots of injustice and inequality during the corrupt Romanov dynasty (1613–­1917) to the socio­ political consequences of Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861.12 An erudite essay with an easy flow between West and East, Tian’s work cites references ranging from Francis Bacon to Japanese news reports on the [ 30 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy possible causes of the February Revolution and the dire poverty of the peasants. Most significant, Tian balances quotations from ancient Chinese thinkers, such as Guanzi 管子 and Mozi 墨子, with his own comments on such Western theories and practices as socialism, and the population growth check proposed by the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus.13 Tian’s early efforts reflect an orientation that would characterize his entire career: he freely selected from Western thought and Chinese tradition in his pursuit of a proletarian theater most relevant to the common people. Tian’s encounter with Western thought led to the publication in 1919 of a lengthy essay on Russian literary history which covers literary trends in classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, and symbolism.14 Most significant, the essay provided Chinese readers with one of the first introductions to the Russian October Revolution, also in 1917. Li Dazhao 李大钊, cofounder of the CCP, was doing the same at this juncture, but Tian’s writing differs in that he treats fundamental ideas of “Russian Leninism, American liberalism and German socialist nationalism” as if they were similar political and intellectual programs.15 In 1921, Tian became the first to translate and publish the entire text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into vernacular Chinese; this was followed, in 1923, by his translation of Romeo and Juliet. The long list of foreign writers who influenced Tian’s literary thinking includes Marx, Lenin, Tolstoy, Goethe, Shelley, Hugo, Strindberg, Heinrich Heine, Hoffmann, Schiller, Ibsen, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Synge, Poe, Paul Verlaine, Baudelaire, Yeats, Turgenev, Gogol, and Stanislavski. Reading Tian in light of the critical debates in ­literary studies on postcolonialism, Orientalism, modernism, and feminist criticism shows him to be a confident intellectual, passionately pursuing his idealistic vision of literature and art. A search for an equal power relationship between the dominated East and the domineering West would have been irrelevant to Tian, whose purpose in conveying Western literatures and their humanitarian spirit to the Chinese people was to make them better able to build a modern, youthful China. So moved was Tian by Walt Whitman’s optimistic “Americanism” that he published a long essay in Youthful China (少年中国) in July  1919 to celebrate  his spirit of “democracy” on the occasion of Whitman’s hundredth birthday. In addition to Dong Jian’s point that Tian’s introduction of ­Whitman’s democratic aspiration came only four months after Chen Duxiu, another cofounder of the CCP, famously explained the Western concepts of [ 31 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers democracy and science in January 1919, we should emphasize an important aspect of Tian’s response to Whitman: Tian does not overlook the European colonialist practice against other nations and, by implication, the risk to China if it ignored the history of Western imperialism.16 Indeed, his essay begins with an overview of Western imperialist history in order to highlight the power of poetry to overcome that history. He cites the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, who claimed that the British could lose their “Indian Empire” but could never survive without Shakespeare: its ever-­growing struggle against British rule guaranteed that it was only a matter of time before the British would lose India, but 350  years after his death, Shakespeare still eclipsed, and would always eclipse, all other dramatists and did credit to England. Here is one of the earliest examples of Tian’s acknowledging the value of aesthetics above that of politics, a tension he and his cohorts had to navigate, adjust to, and compromise with in many years to come. Similarly, Tian maintained, Americans, as new colonialists competing with the old, would never be without Whitman, even when America was on the verge of losing one of its colonies, the Philippines. The present victory of America was not to be measured in its natural resources and material wealth. Rather, Tian believed, America’s short history was replete with “great and pure” historical figures whose spirit could benefit millions of people in the world. Those who delighted in the prospect of democratic idealism should therefore propose a toast to consecrate a democratic future! They cannot but “be grateful to America, to those admirable Americans it has brought forth, and the song of freedom they have composed.”17 At the end of his essay, Tian wondered whether Whitman’s “ship of democracy” would eventually sail to the other shore of East Asia.18 Reading him in hindsight, Tian could have provided an answer to our postcolonial debates by addressing the binary oppositions between the colonialist West and the oppressed East. Acknowledging an unequal power relationship between the West and East, as manifested in the West’s political and cultural domination of the East, Tian nevertheless separates  Shakespeare—­and by extension, writers of other Western artistic traditions—­f rom arbitrary association with colonialism, freeing him to support Western humanitarian, individualistic, and democratic values. That the British themselves claimed they could not survive without Shakespeare but could exist without India demonstrated that some British [ 32 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy writers had already rejected their own colonialism. This would not negate that teaching Shakespeare was once regarded as an important part of the British colonial mission in making better colonial subjects, but Tian’s focus on Thomas Carlyle demonstrates that it is possible to think about a universal-­nationalist literature outside the “box” of colonialism.19 The universal arts that appealed to peoples all over the world thus became for Tian effective means for vanquishing authoritarian regimes in the West and the East. In this way, Tian gave Chinese writers back the power of their voice and agency; to be more precise, for him nothing stood in the way of the Chinese borrowing from the Western canon. Furthermore, Tian resisted lumping together many diverse cultures and histories under the single rubric of the “West.” He teased out the crucial difference between the old British “West” and the new American democratic “West” (as illustrated in Whitman’s poetry), in terms of their contributions both to American politics (Whitman was bitterly against slavery) and to a balanced view of the relationship of art to political history. Tian’s writings demonstrate a thoughtful balance between his aesthetic interest in literary forms and a commitment to redressing social wrongs through art, whether they stemmed from Western or Chinese traditions. Whitman accorded with Tian’s vision of the artist as one whose great political acumen is equaled only by the emotional intensity of his work. Tian never gave up his Whitmanian role of a “prophetic poet,” as seen in his “prophetic drama,” in which he projected performers and dramatists as revolutionaries with acute artistic vision.20 It was his continuous desire to write “prophetic drama” in the PRC period, however, that partially resulted in his 1958 script The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir (十三陵水库畅想曲); driven by his new patriotic duty as a socialist artist, Tian projected in this play what a communist society looked like if China accomplished its goals in the campaign of the Great Leap Forward, a topic I will elaborate in chapter 4. To summarize, from his reading of Whitman, Tian drew a dynamic democratic spirit of Americanism combined with an anti-­imperialist, anticapitalistic disposition aimed at fostering a proletarian modernism, which would bring about a fulfilled life for peoples from all social classes, but especially for the poor and downtrodden. He believed in visionary artists who could best carry out such a mission in creating a new and modern China, a faith he subsequently kept before and during the early decades of socialist China. [ 33 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

Reframing “Modernisms” I have so far examined Tian’s interpretations of works growing out of the Russian and American revolutions, which laid the foundation for his “proletarian modernism.” From the start of his career, Tian associated the question of labor with the position of the poet. In “The Poet and the Question of Labor” published in 1920, he views the poet and the laborer as creating, in various periods of history, two equally essential modes of wealth: the spiritual and the material.21 Focusing on the British poet Edith Nesbit and her 1908 poetry collection Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism 1883–1908, he maintains that an ingenious poet should exalt the pleasure and the nobility of work and, above all, expose the oppression of laborers in a capitalist society. Moreover, a great poet should write not just about the life and emotions of manual laborers but also about that of poor intellectuals—­and women writers, for that matter—­who labor from dawn to dusk to feed their hungry babies. A mature and healthy civilization, Tian argued, should provide a “holy world” where soul and flesh coalesce and where intellectual workers such as journalists, painters, thinkers, and writers can be appreciated and rewarded. Tian’s early emphasis on the cultural elites—­and especially women writers—­partially explains his subsequent classic dramas and filmscripts featuring educated women as protagonists, either as awakened “new women” or as enlightened female leaders against injustice in family and society, or a combination of both. Tian’s mention of a close association between work, the poet, and women in “The Poet and the Question of Labor” grew into a major discussion in his ensuing essay on Christianity and feminism, “After Tasting the ‘Forbidden Fruit.’ ” In a careful reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the works of Ellen Key and other feminist pioneers, Tian portrays Eve as a feminist rebel against God’s edict that women be forbidden to acquire knowledge and power. Comparing Eve with Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House, Tian holds that Nora became Eve’s “daughter” once she left her husband in her revolt against a male-­dominated society. As a newly minted internationalist crusader for the proletarian class and for women, Tian believed that Chinese intellectuals were in a better position than their foreign peers to promote women’s liberation. Rather than engage in separate battles against capitalists and patriarchs, Chinese intellectuals could make common cause with the proletarian class and the female members therein to [ 34 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy bring about true equality between all social classes and between men and women. Already in 1920, Tian touched upon the essential issue of class politics in his version of feminist criticism and pioneered a women’s theater to address the issue of class oppression, which subsequently provided a blueprint for a socialist theater that explored women’s liberation to promote the liberation of the oppressed classes, as seen in numerous theater and film productions in the PRC period (chapter 5) and in its most radical form of the “revolutionary model theater” (革命样板戏) during the Cultural Revolution, when women leaders were portrayed as the most heroic.22 It is thus important to recall the women characters Tian created in his plays in the early 1920s, when he benefited from his balancing acts of feminist and proletarian perspectives. The Devil of the Piano (薛亚萝之鬼), written in 1922, depicts three music-­loving sisters and their awakening to the class differences between those who can afford a piano and those who sweat to produce the profits that enabled a rich family to purchase it.23 The feminist advocate Zhujun 竹君, the elder daughter of a capitalist, visits female workers in a textile factory, where she delivers lectures on promoting women’s right to vote, only to realize that her feminist politics does not interest women who labor in a suffocating and deafening environment with no opportunity for education or medical care. Zhujun therefore persuades her two sisters to return the piano their father purchased and give up their bourgeois lifestyle. By the end of the play, Zhujun plans to rent a room in the working-­class area and join women workers as “comrades” in their struggle to fight for the happiness of a “new rising social class”—­that of the proletariat.24 Although she may sound naïve, an idealist Zhujun at least illustrates Tian’s aspiration to integrate with the subalterns and to write on their behalf in his search for a popular theater. Whereas The Devil of the Piano depicts educated women who are aware of class differences, Tian’s two other plays of the same period focus on poor workers and peasants as victims of an unequal society. Before Lunch (午饭之 前), for example, presents another set of three sisters in a poverty-­stricken worker’s family.25 After the father dies “for the worthy cause of the proletariat,” the three sisters try to care for their ill mother with their meager wages from a textile factory. When the second sister dies in a protest for higher wages, the elder sister awakens to the hypocrisy of the Christian church. The play ends with the elder sister’s accusing God of having taken away their father, torn the sisters apart, and offered no help for their [ 35 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers mother’s illness. As the curtains close, the two surviving sisters dash out of the house for revenge, leaving behind a wailing mother, heartbroken by her daughters’ anguish. Although the characterizations in Before Lunch are one-­dimensional, Tian’s interests in class and gender politics began to mature with The Night the Tiger Was Caught (获虎之夜, 1922–­1923), one of his most representative plays of the period.26 Focusing on the May Fourth denunciation of arranged marriages, the play portrays a woman named Lian Gu 莲姑, from a well-­ to-­do family, who rejects her parents’ choice of husband from another wealthy family. On the night when a tiger is captured, however, the victim injured by the tiger turns out to be a Huang Dasha 黄大傻, a poor man passionately in love with Lian Gu. Thrust into the middle of a heated fight between the stubborn parents and a heartbroken Lian Gu, Huang commits suicide to end his misery. In this well-­structured play, the devoted lovers reach out for each other despite their class barrier. Dong Jian points to the play’s multifaceted aesthetic achievement: although no one can deny the class-­conflict theme, The Night the Tiger Was Caught also expresses the “poetic sadness” of Huang at the threshold between life and death that is typical of the “neoromantic,” or modernist, sentiments of Tian’s early Southern Drama Society period.27 I would stress further that Tian retained a poetic eloquence in his later plays, in both spoken drama and traditional operas; their singing passages and stage dialogues illustrated his erudition in classical poetry. No other dramatist in modern China has written as many—­and as well-­crafted—­poems as Tian did. It is in the context of Tian’s explorations of feminist ideas, we can situate his next essay, published in 1921 on the occasion of Charles Baudelaire’s hundredth birthday.28 Even though some Western and Japanese critics thought Baudelaire was morbid and decadent, his brand of modernism appealed to Tian because it revealed a new way of conceiving literature and art. Two years after discovering Whitman’s “commoner’s approach,” Tian was leaning toward an elitist style of literature after reading the works of Baudelaire, Poe, Paul Verlaine, and Oscar Wilde, and he began to view Western modernist writers in the light of a new vision of art that was true to the spirit of humanity. The art-­for-­art’s-­sake approach, which was indeed “a precious spirit of rebellion” brought to bear against the status quo, lay at the very center of Baudelaire’s symbolist poetry. Tian’s own sense of Baudelaire in 1921, as informed by Japanese scholarship, coincides with that of [ 36 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy Mary Anne Caws, who in 1994 wrote of Baudelaire that his “creative imagination tended toward the idea of art for art’s sake but whose politics often drew him the other way, toward the democratic art and life, against the sterility of the nonuseful. Even when he leaned toward the nonutility of art, he still was to believe that good art had always a moral” (italics from the original).29 Tian’s reception of Baudelaire pinpoints a quintessential feature of his own vision of theater that combined the best elements in artistic and democratic spirits, a theater that could be seen as neither purely “art for art’s sake” nor exclusively “art for life,” a debate Tian participated in the Republican period that remained central in the subsequent PRC discourse of drama criticism after 1949. Ironically, when Tian, in the 1930 “Our Self-­Criticism” (我们的自己批判)— in which he declared his intention to “turn left”—­criticized his “erroneous” borrowing of the West’s modernist decadent arts, he also turned his back on his reading of Baudelaire, which had emphasized the latter’s political orientation, especially its iconoclastic stance against tradition. Most significantly, Tian refuted his own plays of the early 1920s (when he paid attention to class and gender politics, as discussed earlier) by claiming that his premature attempt at combining art and social concern failed in the sentimental plays of his days of Southern Drama Society because the bourgeois influence had turned him away from depicting the common people.30 In the PRC period, Tian would repeatedly “confess” and criticize his modernist mistakes of the 1920s, especially during the Cultural Revolution. In all his dramatic writings, however, Tian coupled his mission to probe social injustice with a high artistic standard throughout his career. An examination of his proletarian modernism, therefore, must also examine his debt to the artistic vision of Oscar Wilde. For Tian, his adaptation of Wilde’s modernist play Salomé (莎乐美), which was successfully performed in Shanghai and Nanjing in 1929, was significant not only for its portrayal of a rebel but also for the fact that the rebel is a woman. In contrast to the “split personality” proposed by George Woodcock in his classic 1949 reading of Wilde’s Salomé character as symbolizing the paradoxes of paganism/ Christianity, aesthetic clown/creative critic, social rebel/social snob, and playboy/prophet,31 Tian nevertheless emphasizes Wilde’s rebellious spirit, so scandalous that Norbert Kohl believed that it spurred the aristocratic ruling class to ban the production of Salomé in London, citing its provocative message “against Christianity.”32 [ 37 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Fully aware of the elitist strain in Salomé, however, Tian attempted to disarm the predictable criticism that his staging an art-­for-­art’s-­sake play would elicit by declaring, in his announcement of Salome’s 1929 premiere in Shanghai, that his Southern Drama Society had taken seriously Tao Xingzhi’s 陶行知 advice to “go to the people” (到民间去). In the current theater season, therefore, he would dedicate his new play, Return to the South (南归), written in 1929, to Tao in honor of his work to promote drama education in rural China.33 Tian felt compelled to explain that he wanted very much to plant a “flower of evil” in the “bleak desert of Chinese theater” to wake up the sleeping art world.34 The red, lustful lips of Salomé suggested to him a powerful “red signal” (红色信号) that he associated with Salomé’s passion for personal fulfillment, symbolized by her triumphant holding of John’s decapitated head in her hands at the end of the play.35 There is nothing that is “anti-­epoch” (反时代) or “antimasses” (不大众) in this scene, Tian claimed; on the contrary, the Young Syrian’s love for Salomé, Salomé’s love for John, and John’s love for God represent a daring spirit of passion in defiance of death that “all the masses in love of freedom and equality” should imitate.36 This “red signal” witnessed numerous transformations in Tian’s depictions of rebellious and courageous women in his other plays, most noticeably, in his adaptation of Carmen (卡门) in 1930. Seen in this light, Tian’s own take on Wilde’s Salomé adds another dimension to what Helen Grace Zagona terms the history of “the diverse metamorphoses” in the legend of Salomé in the Western artistic traditions.37 As Zagona summarizes, whereas the Christian era at times depicted Salomé as an evil temptress, the Renaissance (e.g., Flemish, Italian, and German paintings) transformed this seductive dancer into “an ideal subject for depicting the beauty of the human form” with oriental allure in “dignified postures.”38 From Heine to Wilde, Zagona assures us, “art was all that she was: coldly beautiful, cruel, unrelenting, existing gratuitously, with no need for justification, with no purpose but to be admired.”39 Tian expressed similar depictions of the historical significance of Salomé, granting her, however, the urgent need to express the flowing individuality of Chinese artists as well as their desires to remain committed to their shared goal of “going to the people.”40 Thus, Tian’s Occidentalist writings helped him bridge the divides between the aesthetic and political orientations of art, between the female and the male perspectives, between the demands of the elite and the popular, between the modern and the traditional, and between East and West. In [ 38 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy this sense, he creatively used foreign others in the service of the artistic and political agenda that were pertinent to his own historical time. Retrospectively, in his theoretical writings and in his dramatic works, Tian laid the groundwork for the Maoist principle that literature and art should depict the life, deeds, and struggles of the proletariat, which point to the power and limitations of Tian’s legacy.

The Traditional Theater: A Foundation for Tian Han’s Proletarian Drama Before his interactions with foreign texts in the formation of his proletarian modernist theater, where did Tian Han stand in terms of his artistic experiments? Unlike some of his contemporaries who viewed traditional opera as iconoclastic symbol of old culture, Tian remained passionate for its artistic forms and spent the rest of his life reforming it, as seen in more than one hundred reviews, essays, prefaces, and memoirs related to various forms of Chinese opera that he published from 1928 to 1963. Tian’s early theoretical explorations into Western models and artistic experiments cannot be fully appreciated without mapping out his operatic reforms, which had laid the foundation for his borrowings of proletarian modernist drama from the West. Tian is one of the earliest to have merged traditional operatic form with the thematic concerns of his own historical time. As a devotee of shadow plays, puppet theater, and Hunan operas such as xiangju (湘剧) and huaguxi (花鼓戏), Tian grew up appreciating the diverse traditions of folk and local operas and was impressed by the popular performance of Hunan opera star Chen Shaoyi 陈绍益, known for the range, depth, and clarity of his singing voice. The impact of traditional theater was so profound that prior to his exposure to socialist and Marxist thought after he went to Japan in 1916 and before he wrote Violin and Rose (梵峨璘与薔薇) (his first spoken drama script) in 1920, Tian had already written two innovative operas, entitled A New Story of Educating Her Son (新教子, 1913) and A New Story of The Peach Blossom Fan (新桃花扇, 1915), which reflected his earliest critical positions on gender, class, and national identities. In fact, at the age of fifteen, Tian answered Liang Qichao’s 梁启超 call to write real-­life dramas based on historical events to advance the Republican [ 39 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers revolutionary cause in his first opera script, A New Story of Educating Her Son. Tian rewrote the old opera Sanniang Educating Her Son (三娘教子), which had been popular among illiterate rural women. In the original, a widowed Sanniang promises her late husband that she will raise her son to attain a prestigious social position. On learning that her son is refusing to take his studies seriously, she narrates her family story to motivate him to become a talented scholar. Tian switches the setting to the contemporary time of the Republican revolution and its struggle against the Qing court. In Tian’s plot, a widowed Sanniang tells her son his father’s courageous death in the revolutionary war to guide him to finish his father’s dream. The opera begins with Sanniang, performed as a young female lead role (正旦), singing an erhuang (二簧) tune. In the traditional opera style of “explaining to the audience one’s own name and background” (自报家门), she relates that she is heartbroken by the plight of China, saddled with “demoralized people,” a “weak government,” and “a sovereignty that is trampled by foreigners.”41 She recalls her late husband, who sacrificed his life in the revolutionary uprisings in Hanyang 汉阳. As Sanniang starts her daily routine of weaving, her son enters the stage in a designated role in traditional opera for a young scholar (小生). He recalls that his schoolteacher Master Chen has been encouraging him to study science in the hope that he will rescue “sorrowful” China from encroachment by foreign countries; the son sings, remembering his master’s lesson: “France demonstrated its greed for Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, England paraded its power by managing Tibet, and Russia attempted to take over Mongolia and Xinjiang.” The son takes leave of his playful years and prepares to avenge his country and live up to his parents’ expectations. Here we have a typical tale of an obedient son (孝子) whose loyalties to his parents are bound up with his duties to his country. Tian introduces a surrogate father figure into the play, an old servant of the household, who, following Sanniang’s directive, discloses to her son his late father’s wish. Speaking in the voice of an authoritative father figure, the old servant says that the old master worried about who would take over his unfulfilled duty upon his death before leaving for the battlefield two years before. In an aria, the old servant urges the young master to “act like your father” and to “exert all your efforts without hesitation” in order to fulfill his father’s high expectations. [ 40 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy Whereas the old servant foreshadows the attachment to a lower social group evident in The Night the Tiger Was Caught, Sanniang, in the disguise of a traditional widow, represents Tian’s earliest construction of a modern, enlightened woman who also appeared in his 1920s spoken dramas such as Before Lunch. Throughout his career, Tian continued to sharpen his skills in rewriting old operas for contemporary times during the Republican period as well as in the first two decades of the PRC period since 1949. Fifty years later in the mid-­1960s, Tian was persecuted as a destroyer of model theater; yet one cannot but detecting striking similarities between Sanniang with Grandma Li 李奶奶 in model Peking opera The Red Lantern (红灯记), the latter “in many ways emblematic” of the model operas promoted during the Cultural Revolution.42 Set in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, The Red Lantern portrays a Grandma Li, also a widowed storyteller of a family secret that bears a revolutionary heritage, and in her case, for a communist revolutionary cause. Upon the tragic death of her husband during a worker’s strike in 1927, Grandma Li had adopted as her son Li Yuhe 李玉和, her husband’s apprentice, and an infant girl as her granddaughter, Li Tiemei 李铁梅, whose parents had perished in the same worker’s strike. The comparison with Sanniang is especially striking in Grandma Li’s key aria, which lets Tiemei know the real family history following Li Yuhe’s arrest by the Japanese authorities: for the past seventeen years, Grandma Li has not told Tiemei the truth about her adoption for fear she was too young to accomplish her father’s wish. Now that her father might never be released from the Japanese prison, Grandma Li has no choice but state: “I’ve told you the truth, Tiemei, / Don’t cry, don’t be sad, be brave and strong, learn from your father’s / Revolutionary courage and lofty goals!”43 One difference between the two operas is that in Tian’s early opera, an unequal social relationship between master and servant is rectified by the gender hierarchy in a traditional society; these power relations account for the widowed mother in Tian’s opera granting authority to a male servant to legitimize the family will in a patriarchal society as a surrogate father. The loneliness of the widowed mother reinforces the late father’s sacrifice, the servant’s loyalty, and the son’s willingness to take his father’s place in society. This interweaving of the personal with the political is paralleled five decades later in The Red Lantern. By virtue of her seniority, the widowed [ 41 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Grandma Li remains the head of the traditional family structure. She is also equal to other members of the family in terms of class because the Li family consists of surviving members of three workers’ families. After understanding her adoptive father’s true identity, Tiemei’s gratitude intensifies, for she is now ready to “adopt” his revolutionary heritage. Her grief on losing her father now becomes keener than that of the son in Tian’s opera because, after they had lived together as parent and child for seventeen years, he has now been taken away from her forever. A striking difference between Tian’s opera and the model play, however, lies in gender ­politics, which dictated that the loyal son in Tian’s play transform into a “filial” daughter who is also faithful to the revolutionary heritage. Following this strand of thought, one might argue that artists in the Republican and socialist eras further explored the didactic and moralistic roles of opera with coherent aesthetics. Whereas A New Story of Educating Her Son presents an early comparable example with The Red Lantern in its use of the traditional family’s secrets, Tian’s opera A New Story of Peach Blossom Fan, written in 1915, points to an early theatrical use of contemporary settings to reflect the social events of its time. As the title suggests, A New Story of Peach Blossom Fan is a rewriting of Kong Shangren’s 孔尚任 Story of Peach Blossom Fan, a classic Southern style opera (传奇) of the Qing. Tian’s opera removes the tragic love story between Hou Fangyu 侯方域, a Ming loyalist, and Li Xiangjun 李香君, a famed courtesan faithful both to Hou and to the already perished Ming court. Set in 1915, Tian’s opera “called back from the grave” Kong Shangren and his friends to comment on the still backward, divided, and chaotic state of the new Republic. While revisiting Nanjing and reviewing their old dreams of a unified and strong China, they attend a drum-­singing performance (鼓词) by Liu Jingting 柳敬亭, a distinguished folksinger of the time. In his drum song, Liu describes how Europe and Japan compete for Chinese territories and accordingly proposes three remedies for constructing a modern and strong China: new schools to produce educated citizens, new factories to develop natural resources for a modern industry, and new weaponry to build up a military force.44 A New Story of Peach Blossom Fan thus explores a clever plot structure that incorporates a play within a play: in an inner play, Liu stages his own drama on the state of the republic in a performance watched simultaneously by his literati friends in the outer play. [ 42 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy What was unique about Tian’s early efforts to refashion traditional theater is that it happened a few years before Zhang Houzai’s 张厚载 defense of “the old opera” in the May Fourth debate. Literary historians are familiar with opera debate carried out in 1918 in the issues of New Youth (新青年). In these issues, “new literature” (新文学) advocates such as Chen Duxiu, Qian Xuantong 钱玄同, and Hu Shi attacked traditional opera for its themes, characterization, and style and argued for its elimination. Zhang Houzai, however, delineated three strengths in the old opera that cannot be easily replaced by its Western counterparts: its illusionary method of suggesting complex events, a most economical and practical style; its formulaic conventions in singing, speaking, acting, and acrobats (唱、念、做、打); and its close link to music and singing, which makes it more interesting than mere staged dialogue. We should preserve old opera, Zhang concludes, because it is the fruitful product of our history and arts.45 From a cross-­cultural perspective, Zhang’s view in 1918 was later “echoed”—­even using similar terms such as “suggestive” and “­illusionary”— by Bertolt Brecht after having watched Mei Lanfang’s performance in Moscow in 1935, a performance that inspired his theory of the “alienation effect” (间离效果). Tian Han’s reworking old opera in the 1910s, however, does not necessarily put him squarely in the same camp as Zhang, who resisted models of Western drama. Aspiring to become “China’s Ibsen,” Tian was among the first few to answer the call by Fu Sinian 傅斯年 to write scripts of our own spoken drama instead of merely translating and producing Western plays, and he succeeded in bridging the old opera with the new spoken drama by writing in both genres.46 Tian’s appreciation of traditional opera set him apart from other seminal literary figures, such as Lu Xun, who expressed a more critical view of old opera, as seen in his canonical 1922 story “Village Opera” (社戏). In this story apparently based on memory of a childhood visit to a local opera, the “I-­narrator” yawns in dismay and could not stand the thought of a woman’s “singing till dawn.”47 Years later, as an adult, the narrator gives opera another try and goes to see the famous actor Tan Xinpei 潭鑫培, only to be disappointed again; he leaves the theater before the show ends, enjoying the crisp Beijing air as if for “the first time,” never to think about Chinese opera again.48 What is even more problematic, the narrator recalls that a few days earlier he “happened to read a Japanese book” that put “into [ 43 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers words what had remained unformulated” in his mind; the book described Chinese opera as “so full of gongs and cymbals, shouting and leaping, that it makes the spectators’ heads swim and is quite unsuited for theater.”49 A foreigner’s casual yet powerful remarks validate the negative impression of Chinese opera, and by extension, help construct the narrator’s view of opera as part of his iconoclastic program against traditional society. I believe there is a logical connection between a “boring opera” with no end and a windowless and “indestructible” “iron house” that suffocates sleepers to “irrevocable death,” as Lu Xun powerfully expresses in his famous “Preface to Call to Arms” (《呐喊》自序).50 Neither is the link accidental between his bidding farewell to the old opera and his “call to arms” to break away from the “iron house” (his symbol of destructive Confucius tradition) so that he can raise “hope” in his literary writing “against pessimism” in order to “obey [his] general’s orders.”51 Lu Xun mocked traditional opera in his prose as well. In “On Photography” (论照相之类, 1924), for example, he criticizes the androgynous and cross-­dressing features of Mei Lanfang’s operatic performance: Why is the art of men acting as an elegant woman seen as “the most noble” and “most eternal” art in China? So Lu Xun asks implicitly.52 Anxious to see the emergence of a strong China, Lu Xun might not have considered a feminized man a fitting symbol for the nation.53 Furthermore, as Kirk A. Denton points out, “On Photography” can be seen as Lu Xun’s “allegory about the reception of mimesis in the Chinese cultural context.” As the most “realist” of Western art, when photography arrived in China, it was “defeated by the traditional aesthetic of Beijing opera and its gender mixing.” Lu Xun laments the “vat of black dye” that quickly stains foreign things when they arrive on Chinese soil.54 He sees Mei’s operatic art as expressing one of the chronic ills of the Chinese national character. The old opera, therefore, symbolized one of the strongholds of the Confucian tradition. Ironically, forty years later, the same metaphor of the old opera as a “stronghold” of the “old culture” once again surfaced as a main target of the Cultural Revolution, when Lu Xun was upheld as “the greatest standard-­ bearer leading the cultural revolution over thirty years ago” and Mao Zedong received sole credit for defining “the orientation for literature and art as service to the workers, peasants and soldiers” and posing the question of “weeding through the old to let the new emerge.”55 At the same time, Tian Han was persecuted as a member of the deadly “anti-­Party and [ 44 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy anti-­socialist leadership” associated with the Ministry of Culture to undermine “the reform of Peking opera,”56 an absurd accusation, but nevertheless one that underscored Tian’s role as president of the China Theater Association in the PRC period. In this way, Tian and his ilk were made to represent a “black line” of the bourgeoisie from the 1930s to the 1960s that sabotaged the proletarian cultural traditions that Lu Xun and Mao had pioneered, according to Zhou Enlai in a public speech in the Great Hall of the People on November 28, 1966.57 Indeed, the real beginning of the Cultural Revolution was not Yao Wenyuan’s 姚文元 attack in 1965 on the Beijing opera Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (海瑞罢官), which is the conventional wisdom, but rather the 1963 campaign against Meng Chao’s 孟超 Peking opera Li Huiniang (李惠娘) in May 1963 and the 1964 National Modern Peking Opera Festival, when Kang Sheng 康生 publicly criticized Tian Han’s opera Xie Yaohuan (谢瑶环) as “a poisonous weed against the Party and socialism.”58 Tian was attacked for “slandering the Party and its Chairman with his criticism of the Great Leap Forward,” and his critics “challenged him to name the villains attacked in the play,” as Rudolf  G. Wagner’s erudite study of Xie Yaohuan has pointed out.59 Ironically, the “brilliant victory over the bourgeois line of literature and art” was based on the very work of Tian in reforming opera four decades earlier even as it humiliated him. No single event can be blamed for Tian’s fate during the Cultural Revolution, but his difficult relationship with Lu Xun played a key role. Because of an unpleasant encounter with Tian at an October 1934 meeting where Tian accompanied three leaders of the leftist movement, Xia Yan, Zhou Yang 周扬, and Yang Hansheng, Lu Xun spoke of Tian as one of “the four fellows” (四条汉子) who had dared to challenge him.60 This derogatory term by Lu Xun, whom Mao praised as the exemplar of revolutionary literature in the Republican period, was enough to pin the label of “counterrevolutionary” on Tian, who died in custody while still wearing the “hat” of one of the “four fellows” in 1968, at the peak of the Cultural Revolution. Literary history has accounted for Lu Xun’s animosity toward Tian. Dong Jian traces Lu Xun’s displeasure to Tian’s dramatic adaptation of his novella The True Story of Ah Q (阿 Q 正传).61 If Dong was correct, it is ironic—­indeed tragic—­that it was out of a deep respect for Lu Xun that Tian adapted his The True Story of Ah Q into a successful spoken drama, which was performed in  Chongqing by Shanghai Amateur Drama Society (上海业余剧人协会), [ 45 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers starring Zhao Dan 赵丹, Qian Qianli 钱千里, and Bai Yang 白杨, and also by the National Drama School (国立戏剧专科学校), directed by Huang Zuolin 黄佐临, starring Shen Yang 沈扬 and Zhao Wenru 赵温如. Staged in 1938, they were among the first attempts to adapt Lu Xun’s fiction onstage. Drama critics commented on Huang’s quiet and humorous directing style and my father’s “abstract and stylist design (风格化手法).”62 Figure 1.1 preserves the original images of a playbill (upper left), a ticket (upper right, priced at 30 cents, 50 cents, and 1 yuan respectively), and a stage photo of the National Drama School production, a charity event to raise funds to pay for winter clothes in wartime. Dong Jian also cites Lu Xun’s criticism of Tian for staging theater performances in Nanjing after his release from a KMT prison; this he took as evidence that Tian was collaborating with the KMT government. “How come he has to perform in Nanjing?” Lu Xun ridiculed Tian as a restless and self-­ absorbed dramatist whose “showy” personality revealed the worst possible qualities of “xizi” (戏子, or theater performers).”63 Unlike Tian, who persistently pursued his theater dream, Lu Xun let politics define art; he therefore foreshadowed the PRC practice of censorship after 1949. Since Lu Xun died in 1936 and could not speak to his intentions, his works were always upheld as the most politically correct and artistically superior in the PRC, whereas Tian Han acted as both a “censor” (to make sure theater and films were politically correct and artistically sound) and the one to be “censored,” as seen in the public campaigns against his numerous plays, especially during the Cultural Revolution. All these reasons notwithstanding, there may be yet another aspect to this complex relationship that so far has escaped notice: Could Lu Xun’s dislike of Tian be understood through the satirical critique with which Lu Xun reviewed Mei Lanfang’s American tour in 1930? These performances, according to Lu Xun, had ended the “glory of Chinese national art,” instead of enhancing it, as overseas critics had claimed.64 Lu Xun mocked the uncanny skill with which Mei played female roles to gratify the Western gaze at Chinese femininity.65 Is it possible that Tian, a promoter of opera in its modern metamorphosis, evoked in Lu Xun similar deeply felt biases against traditional Chinese dramatists, especially in the persona of a xizi?66 Contrary to the May Fourth posture against traditional opera, Tian believed that traditional opera could—­and should—­be reformed to play a vital role in modernizing China. Unlike Lu Xun’s biases against Mei Lanfang, [ 46 ]

FIGURE 1.1 Tian Han, The True Story of Ah Q, adapted from Lu Xun’s novel of the same title. National Drama School, 1938. Director: Huang Zuolin; stage designer: Chen Yongjing. Source: From Li Naichen, Collected Materials of the Chinese National Drama School (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2013), 3:978.

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Tian, on the eve of Mei’s tour to the Soviet Union, offered Marxist-­inspired criticism of Mei’s operatic art in the context of debates on the opera. Tian argues that socialist realism had inspired dramatists to become active participants in constructing a socialist Soviet Union.67 Mei’s invitation reflected the Soviets’ interest in imbibing the “Oriental arts” for developing “the international art of the proletariat.”68 Tian hoped that Mei would learn from the proletarian theater of the Soviet Union how to reform Peking opera into a vehicle properly reflective of its times.69 By integrating his views of Chinese, Japanese, and Soviet art, Tian in fact recaptured the spirit of “proletarian modernism” in pursuit of an “international proletarian art” that he had formulated in his Japan years. In his essay on Mei, Tian links the development of proletarian art with opera reform, which he pursued for the rest of his life. I have so far delineated a legacy of Tian that have sprung from a three-­ pronged approach: proletarian literary movements, modernist aesthetics, and traditional Chinese opera and their implications for the subsequent theater history. I believe that there might be a logical connection between a seemingly accidental set of “fours”: (1) the May “Fourth” debate on the old opera; (2) Lu Xun’s accusation of Tian as being one of the “four fellows”; (3) Mao Zedong’s call to eliminate the “four olds” (四旧) of feudalist and bourgeois culture; (4) Tian’s persecution at the hands of the “Gang of the Four” (四人帮); and (5) the early post-­Mao “four modernizations” (四个现代化) which in hindsight still fell short of the May Fourth call for science and democracy almost sixty years earlier. Different from Lu Xun and Mao’s distrust of old opera, Tian refashioned it as “modern” and “proletarian” while challenging some aspects of the May Fourth discourse, characterized by its binary views of the “traditional” versus the “modern,” “China” versus “the West.” In spite the crucial differences between the Republican and the PRC cultures, the most extreme form of Maoist art and literature had its deepest roots in the Republican period and ultimately in traditional drama. Accordingly, I have presented a complex and coherent story of an important writer and traced the historical contingencies and continuities of ­dramatic history in the Republican, Maoist, and post-­Mao periods. I also suggest that the Western modernist traditions, when considered in Chinese historical and cultural contexts, have indeed become intricate—­and almost unrecognizable—­elements of the rich theater art represented by the operas and spoken dramas of Tian. [ 48 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy

Scripting Performance: From “Theater of Dramatists” to “Theater of Tian Han” As a prolific writer with a diverse intellectual background, Tian Han was at his best scripting life stories of artists and especially theater artists, embodying in them his own sorrow, frustration, and aspirations. As a visionary leader in the art circle, he combined artistic, national, and international politics in his portrayal of struggling artists from his early writings in the 1920s until the end of his career, as seen in his 1958 play Guan Hanqing. Tian’s characters protested poverty and oppression, lived through especially by talented women artists, whose gender and class identities blend perfectly in their search for an aesthetic culture. Moreover, as a self-­claimed “oppositional artist” (在野的戏剧家) who networked with fellow artists to fashion his most productive period during the Southern Drama Society movement (1924–­30), Tian wrote plays for his drama society to perform, partially in pursuit of his theater dream, and partially to try out a commercial success to fund his art school and its seasonal productions, which in turn trained drama specialists, expanded his repertoire, and established theater practice to impact the war period and in the PRC. Written before but performed at the peak of the Southern Drama Society movement, for example, Tian’s Violin and Rose, written in 1920, expressed his concerns for starving artists, with the violin as a metaphor for art and the rose as one for romantic love. In this play, Liu Cui 柳翠, a talented folksinger, forgoes her own needs in order to send her lover to Paris, the world center of Western music, so that he will be able to “perform at the grand ceremony celebrating the founding of a young China.” She told her lover that as “poor workers and depressed youth are reaching out for the comfort of your music,” “New Cultural soldiers and anti–­old society warriors are longing for your encouragement.”70 Intriguingly, three decades later, Tian himself turned out to be this successful lyric writer who, on October  1, 1949, in Tiananmen Square, witnessed his “The March of the Volunteers” solemnly played as the provisional national anthem during the founding ceremony of the PRC. The larger point here is that Tian melded his own sentiments and experience into much of the mood of his dramatic characters. While dreaming of a future for his generation of artists onstage, Tian prophesied his own success offstage. [ 49 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Nevertheless, Tian’s nationalist sentiments and his demarcating of the old and new society, as represented by the characters of Violin and Rose, mark him less as a leftist writer than as a May Fourth writer who looked toward an imagined West as an ideal “other” from which to draw cultural rejuvenation. Note, for instance, Liu Cui’s remark that her lover’s failures as an overseas student in “Dongyang” (东洋, Eastern Oceans, referring to Japan) did not mean he could not go to “Xiyang” (西洋, Western Oceans, referring to Europe and America), where so many other artists had fulfilled their dreams.71 In “an artistic country” like France, though he could not enroll in a music school right away, he might find work in a factory, listen to “the laboring sounds of the workers,” and be moved to compose “new music.”72 To the best of my knowledge, this play was one of the first few to stage dramatic interactions between audience and performers in the form of “plays within plays” in spoken drama. The first act, for instance, is set in front of a stage in the New World entertainment center in the early summer of 1920. Before the performance starts, a worker steps out from the audience to present Liu Cui with a bouquet of wildflowers. He tells her that she has brought happiness to his mother, who sees in her the beauty of her own daughter, whom she has lost to illness. “If only she were alive, I would have given up anything to let her perform so that others could also appreciate her talents,” the mother laments.73 In the larger context, this line can be interpreted as declaring a celebrated performer to be a reputable profession in a traditional society that deemed dramatists as one of the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. Among the audience members, a Mr. Li, an art patron, goes backstage to congratulate Liu on her performance and overhears her telling her lover that she has decided to marry a rich man so that she can support his trip to Paris. To teach the young couple a lesson about the importance of pursuing love, Li first takes Liu as his fourth concubine and then, after Liu realizes she has made a mistake, Li, his wife, and the other concubines put their resources together to send both Liu and her lover to Paris. This undertaking gives Li his purpose in life: to seek out and support talented young people who hold out the promise of forging a better future for his suffering country. In his idealistic ending of the play, however, Tian implicitly admits that an artistic dream cannot be realized without a wealthy patron and his women, who sympathized with financially strained artists; potential gender issues (Li versus the women, who must obey his patriarchal order) and [ 50 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy class conflicts (sympathy for the oppressed even among rich patrons) played their parts and complemented each other in Tian’s construction of a play about an artist’s life. Whereas Violin and Rose foregrounds struggling performers, Tian’s masterpiece, A Night at a Café (咖啡店之一夜, 1922), portrays lonely individuals looking for comfort and companionship with theatrical events in the background. The café serves as a microcosm of the “larger sphere of society,” where drifters suffer from loneliness and alienation but might discover “travel companions.”74 On the plot level, there are at least three dramatic conflicts. The first involves Bai Qiuying 白秋英, a waitress, who has run away from the country to escape an arranged marriage while trying to find Mr. Li, her lover of many years. To her sorrow, she sees Li walk into the café on the arm of Miss Chen, a rich city girl, to whom he is now engaged. Instead of begging for his love, Bai throws his money and love letters into the fire. Bai is then comforted by Mr. Lin, the protagonist of the second conflict. Lin has been arduously trying to make his own way in life, but he is tormented by his father who tries to force him into an arranged marriage for his own financial gain. As a college student of art and literature with a romantic temperament, Lin cannot decide if he should “live in a world of eternity or of temporality,” a “world of spirit or of flesh.”75 Bai, in turn, offers solace to Lin, because, though an “ordinary woman without any knowledge of literature and painting,” she understands his quest for love and a spiritual life. The third conflict involves a blind Russian poet whom the college students occasionally invite to the café. Forced into exile by numerous reactionary governments, this traveler to such remote lands as Burma, India, and Japan recites poignant poetry and plays music that evokes love in his young audience. “The life of a blind poet in exile with a guitar, drifting in foreign land” is itself a “mournful song” and a “beautiful poem,” Bai and her customer remark.76 Lin and Bai are deeply touched by the poet’s longing for his homeland and lament the “sorrows of artists” and “difficulties of one’s life journey.”77 In a broader context, this play expresses the romantic spirit of solitary artists and their harsh environments. For Bai and Lin, the café became “a home away from home” in an indifferent society and functions as a metropolitan “boardinghouse” where like-­minded artists gathered as brothers and sisters after having roamed from city to city and country to country looking for ways to bring their dreams to fruition. As Lu Minzhi best put it [ 51 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers in the context of Tian’s experience in Japan: “Not only café a gathering place, but also an imagined utopia for worshipping Western literatures; not only it is a space to reveal private sentiments but also a cultural saloon of public sphere.”78 The dramatic world of the café, where old lovers part and new friends meet, contrasts with the performance space of theater, where people act to protect their own interests. Right before Mr.  Li and Miss Chen enter the café, Bai remarks that it is now close to eleven o’clock, when she would expect more costumers to be streaming in from the theater behind the café.79 On entering the café, Miss Chen comments that she enjoyed the show so much that she left early, wanting to avoid feeling disappointed at seeing “the end of a good show.” Clearly, Tian’s play flows from the social space of the café to the performance space of the theater, and a night at a café becomes part sketch of theatergoers and part commentary on the theatricality of life. Whereas the café attracts lonely youths coming together like brothers and sisters, the theater serves as a link between theatrical events on and offstage. Tian’s most accomplished rendering of an artist’s life is to be found in The Death of a Famous Actor (名优之死, 1927), another by-­product of Tian’s accomplishment as president of Shanghai Art College. Performed during the Fish and Dragon Art Festival (艺术鱼龙会) in the winter of 1927, the play draws on “The Heroic Death,” a prose poem by Baudelaire that had fascinated Tian since his student days in Japan.80 According to Tian, the poem depicts a master actor who is arrested by the king for taking part in a conspiracy against him. The night before his execution, the king asks him out of curiosity to perform one final time. Astounded and a little frightened by the actor’s perfect performance, the vicious king provokes an audience member to insult him. This remark humiliates the actor, and he drops dead, much to the relief of the king, who thereby deems his own power to have remained intact. The play was also partially based on a non-­Western source, the true story of a Chinese Peking opera actor’s tragic death in a society hostile to performers. It was said that on tour in Shanghai, the once famous actor failed to sell out performances even after adding, despite his poor health, some well-­k nown crowd-­pleasing skits. After the first skit, he supposedly peeked out from the side of the stage and, seeing the half-­empty audience, breathed his last while seated on his costume trunk. So familiar was Tian [ 52 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy with the struggles of artists that he directed The Death of a Famous Actor without a written script.81 Still, the most immediate influence on the production of the play was Gu Menghe 顾梦鹤, whose brilliant acting brought the performance to life in its premiere. A successful actor in both Peking opera and in spoken drama, Gu inspired Tian to stage a play in order to showcase Gu’s talents in both genres.82 Tian indeed constructed a play within a play—­that is, an inner play in which the Peking opera star fills his traditional dramatic role onstage, and an outer play in which his real-­life struggle to survive is revealed in a spoken drama style. In the subsequent performances of The Death of a Famous Actor, this demanding role was also assumed by Hong Shen, the subject of chapter 2. Hong’s background in traditional Chinese opera, his formal American education in theater art, his “perfect personality,” and his discontent at the obstacles standing in the way of promoting drama made him the ideal choice to play’s protagonist Master Liu.83 The Death of a Famous Actor thus provided artists a stage for demonstrating their talents and a forum for venting their dissatisfaction, both crystallized in Master Liu. At the play’s outset, Master Liu is upset with his apprentice Liu Fengxian 刘风仙, because, since becoming a star, she no longer bothers practicing her art. She has lapsed into a materialistic lifestyle, going out with Master Yang, a rich man who passes his time seeking out beautiful women backstage. Crestfallen at seeing the shattering of his dream of training “talented and loyal apprentices,” Master Liu collapses onstage in reaction to some people in the audience who have been provoked by Master Yang into heckling him. He leaves behind a grief-­stricken Liu Fengxian, now painfully aware that she would give anything to bring back the dear master by whom she was raised and transformed from orphan to star. Despite the play’s somber ending, Tian projects optimism onto one of the other characters, Mr.  He, a progressive friend of Master Liu, who assures Liu that this world will have to change for the better and opera singers will have a new life, one in which they can sing to their hearts’ content onstage and do what they like offstage.84 Mr. He also expresses Tian’s own bitterness at the unjust treatment of performers in the Republican period: “Why does the life of a famous actor of a generation have to end with such a tragic death!”85 It was therefore no wonder that The Death of a Famous Actor remained a classic on the PRC stage, as evident by its three successful productions by Beijing People’s Art Theater (北京人民艺术剧院) in 1957, 1979, and 2018.86 [ 53 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers This plea for a better life for artists would be echoed in the PRC in theater performances and films on artists’ lives. The 1965 film Stage Sisters (舞 台姐妹) follows Tian’s The Death of a Famous Actor: it portrays two Shaoxing opera (越剧) actresses: progressive Zhu Chunhua 竺春花, who helps Xing Yuehong 刑月红, her “stage sister,” combat the evil forces of the old society that had corrupted her.87 Xing is reminiscent of Liu Fengxian in The Death of a Famous Actor: Xing marries her boss/agent and abandons her acting career, which she can resume only after 1949, when a new China provides performers better opportunity. Tian’s The Death of a Famous Actor thus provided a model for character types, plots, and themes for a series of later theater works dealing with artists’ onstage and offstage lives. Ironically, in 1956, Tian wrote two essays as a public appeal to save opera performers, who still suffered from huger, poor health, low wages, and crowded housing conditions in the new China.88 Tian would pay a heavy price during the Cultural Revolution, suffering in real life “the death of a famous actor/script writer.” The Death of a Famous Actor was one of the earliest plays in modern Chinese drama to directly represent a theater space onstage. Both act 1 (which sets up the dramatic conflict) and act 3 (which ends with Master Liu’s death and Liu Fengxian’s awakening) are set in the backstage area of the theater. Backstage is the perfect “meta-­drama” setting: it reveals the preparations involved in going onstage (e.g., makeup and costume dressing), and allows actors to comment on the performance that is taking place onstage. Act 2 is set in the house of Master Liu, an extension of the “backstage.” Here Master Liu leads the daily training of his apprentices, with newly famous Liu Fengxian refusing to cooperate and Liu Yunxian 刘芸仙, the “younger sister,” urging Fengxian not to disappoint their master. In contrast to Feng­ xian, Yunxian indicates that Master Liu’s dramatic art will have a successor, similar to Zhu Chunhua of Stage Sisters, who rejected a corrupt lifestyle as well. Both works make prominent use of theater space, a hallmark that historians have taken as evidence of Tian’s familiarity with theater artists and what he learned from his own remarkable playwriting career. Tian’s leadership extends beyond his scripting a generation of artists and should include his lifelong endeavor to collaborate with numerous artists in interdisciplinary activities to promote art education and pursue an independent art movement, to partially fend off KMT censorship. Long before the founding of the PRC, however, Tian had already self-­censored his own works and labeled them “bourgeois” because they failed to answer the [ 54 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy needs of the common people as he had described them in his essay “Our Self-­Criticism,” his declaration that he intended to “turn left.” His self-­ censorship was to a large extent driven by his eagerness to respond to audiences’ wish for drama to become a vehicle for social reform. Although a victim of his own legacy, Tian helped formulate a leftist tradition that would later evolve into the rigid Maoist policy on art and literature. Tian’s situation demonstrates that all societies—­(semi)capitalist and (pre)communist, (post)socialist, and (pro)democratic—­have their own forms of censorship; the intelligentsia as a whole frequently collaborate with the government, especially in the sense that they censor their own works. This process of self-­censorship can best be assessed by looking at “Our Self-­Criticism,” which Tian scholars have cited as containing the essential historical data for understanding the Southern Drama Society movement and its social environment, its accomplishments, and its limitations. In this essay, Tian adopted a unique narrative strategy: he “set the record straight” by delineating the literary influences, authorial intention, and cultural and historical background of his dramatic activities and artistic network, while simultaneously critiquing his “erroneous” past, a past that had not measured up to the requirements of proletarian art, to which he had become committed by 1930. “Our Self-­Criticism” fulfilled the “dual” task of writing a hitherto unavailable theater history and critiquing it from the leftist point of view, therefore reaching out to readers and audiences at a time when a cultural trend was turning away from “art for art’s sake” and moved more and more toward “art for life” in both local and global contexts. More than anyone else, Tian set the tone for subsequent PRC dramatic criticism, which combined official censorship with self-­censorship in the form of self-­ criticism, albeit in many instances, extracted through psychological and political pressure. Most important, with “Our Self-­Criticism” he left a legacy of literary societies, artistic networks, early drama history, and independent art education at a dynamic point in history when foreign influences, ideological shifts, and critical paradigms were stirring both in art and in society. Discussing the formation of literary societies, Tian traced his fascination with the idea of tuanti (团体), or groups, which can be partially traced to his attraction to the nineteenth-­century Russian Narodniks, a group of populist agrarian socialists who viewed the peasants and the intelligentsia as  the only valid revolutionary forces. Inspired by the spirit of this [ 55 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers “courageous revolutionary tuanti,” with ringleaders like Tchaikevsky, Krivenko, Michailovsky, and Kololenko, in “Our Self-­Criticism” Tian explains the intentions behind his first, and as yet unfinished, film, Go to the People (到民间去).89 In his filmscript, Tian depicts a group of Chinese college students welcoming a Russian revolutionary poet, played by Boris ­Pilnyak, who listens to the Chinese students’ views on future social changes; some prefer socialism, but others believe in “going to the people.” The Russian poet encourages them to pursue their own dreams; “whoever realizes your dream of reforming China first,” the Russian poet declares, will win the love of this beautiful waitress.”90 After narrating the story of the film, Tian then refers to a reception for Boris Pilnyak in Japan and to Leon Trotsky’s critique of him. Trotsky called Pilnyak a “fellow traveler” (同路人) in relation to revolutionary literature and a “realist” who, though he did not dislike revolutionary Russia, failed to eulogize it publicly as an ideal society. Tian claimed that two groups, “fellow travelers” and “proletarian writers,” split the contemporary Russian literary scene in two. “Fellow travelers” could be further divided into “leftist fellow travelers,” who realistically depict both the negative and the positive sides of the revolution, and the “rightist fellow travelers,” who adopted a passive and pessimistic view of the revolution.91 Although I do not mean to suggest that Tian was among the first to use the words “fellow traveler,” I am struck by his constant use of these designations in 1930; “fellow travelers” was to become a  much-­used term in Maoist discourse to describe unreformed Chinese intelligentsia not worthy of being called proletarian writers. Tian’s self-­ criticism, nevertheless, could not reduce the historic significance of his own contributions to the theater world. As Luo Liang has succinctly pointed out, Tian’s lifelong obsession with two key themes, that of “creating the new woman” and “going to the people,” expressed his fundamental “desire to engage with social problems,” which “made possible a conversation among gender, performance, and politics.”92 Despite his self-­criticism, Tian gives ample space in “Our Self-­Criticism” to recording his lifelong interest in networking with artists, which led in part to his promotion of independent art education with which to train a new generation of artists. To fully articulate his dedication, he advanced a theoretical argument for establishing private schools (私学) as a means of  educating proletarian youth who could neither afford nor qualify for public education. He stressed the urgent need to start private art education [ 56 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy for disadvantaged youth, who, although they lacked money, did not “lack talent” and could “share the weal and woe of the historical times and possess the vision and knowledge to become pioneers of a new era.93 In December  1927, Tian organized a series of dramatic performances during a weeklong Fish and Dragon Art Festival that marked the first public performances under the name of Southern Drama Society. “Dragon” refers to illustrious performers who could attract audiences, and “fish” stood for the fortunate students given the opportunity of studying dramatic art while performing with “dragons.” Besides Tian’s five scripts, the festival put on two of the most celebrated modern plays of the Republican period, The Death of a Famous Actor and Pan Jinlian 潘金莲. Adapted from the prominent fourteenth-­century novel Water Margin (水浒传), Ouyang Yuqian’s Pan Jinlian reversed the patriarchal verdict that the eponymous heroine was an adulterous murderer and transformed her into a courageous rebel devoted to the pursuit of happiness (in a spirit similar to that of Salomé) with an outstanding cast that included Ouyang cross-­dressing as Pan Jinlian and Zhou Xinfang 周信芳 as Wu Song 武松. As a result, the unique production combined the quick pace of spoken drama’s plot development in the Aristotelian tradition with traditional theater’s lyric beauty and body movement, stemming from the singing passages of Peking opera. Pan Jinlian best showcased Tian’s belief that both spoken drama and Chinese opera should be nurtured in pursuit of a new and dynamic theater. Although not always followed by dramatic performances like the Fish and Dragon Art Festival, informal forums (座谈会) often celebrated artists’ birthdays or their career anniversaries, such as the gathering of celebrities in Shanghai to honor Tian’s fiftieth birthday and his thirty-­year career in the drama. In March 1947, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 described Tian as “a pioneer not only of drama but also of the entire cultural circle.”94 After 1949, as the president of the China Theater Association, Tian continued to preside over many forums, a more common practice in the PRC mostly organized as official associations to carry out the CCP’s policies on literature and art. Paradoxically, the more elaborate his artistic networks became, the more quickly he abandoned his earlier pursuit of an independent art movement, a fundamental principle of the Southern Drama Society. Some of these forums led to critical moments in the development of Chinese theater. For example, in the National Forum on Artistic Works (全国文艺工作座谈会) held in June 1961 in Beijing, Premier Zhou Enlai and Zhou Yang, deputy minister [ 57 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers of the Ministry of Propaganda, disparaged the ultraleftist initiatives that suppressed artists’ freedom during the Anti-­Rightist campaign. In the same spirit, Tian defended historical drama, citing its rich potential for social relevance in contemporary China, as opposed to the ultraleftist view that traditional operas (传统戏) would be replaced with modern, contemporary plays (现代戏). Art forums, previously used as informal gatherings of fellow artists for social networking in the Republican period, had, since the 1950s, developed into historic meetings that directed the present and future orientation of art and literature. Among important events was the National Forum on the Scriptwriting of Modern Spoken Drama, Opera, and Children’s Plays (全国话剧 歌剧儿童剧创作座谈会), held in March 1962 in Guangzhou. At this forum, Zhou Enlai once again supported the creative work of intellectuals, whom he urged people to trust as they would any labor group. Vice Premier Chen Yi 陈毅 further argued that Chinese intellectuals should not be regarded as bourgeois intellectuals, the label that was used to repudiate them. Following the state leaders’ legitimization, Tian went further in rejecting the leftist tendencies of drama criticism, encouraging playwrights to write not only modern but also historical plays, which, when done correctly, could also represent the spirit of contemporary times. Tian endorsed the demand of socialist art for vivid, heroic characters as protagonists of plays, but not to the exclusion of ordinary people, or even negative characters like Zeng Guofan 曾国藩. Indeed, Tian excelled in his own history plays such as Princess Wencheng (文成公主).95 Even though Tian wrote Princess Wencheng upon Premier Zhou Enlai’s urging to promote ethnic unity after the Tibetan rebellion of 1959, therefore deemed as “meeting the need for urgent propaganda” (应景之作), his poetic language, deep motions, and well-­structured dramatic conflicts in portraying the peacemaking marriage of Princess Wencheng to Song­ tsan Gambo 松赞干布 against all odds during the Tang dynasty were further enriched by the spectacular and artistic production of the China Youth Art Theater (中国青年艺术剧院), which produced more than three hundred shows.96 Celebrating “the wise founders of two kingdoms such as Tang Taizong 唐太宗 and Songtsan Gambo,” the production presented “extravagant and majestic” staging of an enduring legend through creative directing, acting, stage, lighting, and costume designs with the collective support of talented artists in other theaters. Artistic creation therefore offset, softened, and explored the potentials in propagandist theater.97 [ 58 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy Tian’s argument for a “walking with two legs policy” (两条腿走路) to promote both premodern and modern stories in traditional theater, and his own success in rewriting traditional stories for stage performance in the early 1960s, made him a prime target of the radical leftist leaders who opposed questionable drama serving the interests of feudalist, capitalist, and revisionist art (封、资、修). Mao sided with their judgment that drama was a stronghold of counterrevolutionary art, and this partly led to his determination to initiate the Cultural Revolution, a move that effectively invalidated Tian’s career as a promoter of drama. Ironically validated, however, was Tian’s longtime belief in the intricate relationship between drama and real-­life experience and in drama’s capacity to be integral to social change. As leader of his drama circle and defender of traditional theater, Tian was subjected to public humiliations during numerous “struggle sessions”—­proceedings quite opposite to the forums over which he had so often presided. The artistic networking Tian had so ingeniously mastered now became one of his most “heinous” crimes during the Cultural Revolution as he was criticized for his “complicated social relations” before 1949. The most impactful forum occurred in February 1966, when Jiang Qing 江青 presided over a meeting on literature and art in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It was reported that after having watched dozens of films, operas, and plays with four generals, Jiang delineated a “black line of literature and art” since 1949, which was supposedly dominated by “an ­anti-­party and anti-­socialist dictatorship” against Mao Zedong’s thoughts. Revised several times by Mao and then released as an official document of the CCP Central Committee on April 10, 1966, this “Summary of the Seminar on the Literature and Art in the PLA (部队文艺工作座谈会纪要) instantaneously established Jiang as a key leader and virtually promoted the Cultural Revolution. The report falsely cited Lin Biao 林彪 as having invited Jiang to preside over the forum, which legitimized Jiang’s role because Lin was in charge of the PLA, whereas Jiang had no official affiliation with the army nor any authority to call a forum within it. Postsocialist history argued that Mao revised and expanded the content of this report multiple times and added Lin Biao as having entrusted Jiang to hold this seminar in order to legitimize the launching of the Cultural Revolution. This unique event enabled Mao to bypass the approval of the leaders of the Political Bureau and repudiated the achievements of the proletarian arts since the leftist literary movement in the 1930s.98 Ironically, Mao, by default, had [ 59 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers unintentionally rejected the achievements that resulted from carrying out his own policies since the speech on literature and art he had delivered in Yan’an in 1942, also known as a landmark forum (延安文艺座谈会) that had dominated the production and reception of literature and art in the first seventeen years of the PRC’s history from 1949 to 1966, which Jiang now accused as a period characterized by a “black line” of bourgeois and revisionist arts. Even more ironically, when Jiang was a starving young actress, Tian Han invited her to stay with his family to tide her over a difficult time, in the same way as his characters in Violin and Rose did; such generous ­networking backfired tragically when Jiang replaced Tian as a key leader in the theater circle and, with one broad stroke, wiped out the entire progressive history since the May Fourth movement, in a forum format that Tian promoted. In 1979, the post-­Mao regime duly recognized Tian’s epoch-­making career. The event was another forum with a grand national memorial meeting chaired by Mao Dun 茅盾, who praised Tian’s landmark contributions to the development of drama when he was the president of the Shanghai Art College, as well as the performance of The Death of a Famous Actor, which “pioneered a new path for our nation’s theater movement.”99 Ironically, almost forty years before, Tian had self-­censored these events for expressing the “insincere attitude toward life” of romantic artists whose “class nature” could be seen when analyzed in the context of “that particular environment.”100 Although he used less radical rhetoric than the Red Guards, in his remarks Tian had already started “capping” himself as bourgeois long before the ultraleftists denounced him as “counterrevolutionary” during the Cultural Revolution. Mao Dun’s rehabilitation speech therefore reversed not only the Cultural Revolution’s verdict on Tian but also Tian’s judgment of himself in 1930. Thus, Tian can be seen as both a producer and a victim of his historical times; equally important, however, were his personal life and professional network, which dictated much of his life’s trajectory. Although critics contended that it was the triumph of Communist Party ideology that won Tian over in 1930, when he finally “turned left” after several years’ hesitation, there were other important factors. By that time, some of his best students and actors had deserted his “art for art’s sake” orientation and left his Southern Drama Society to join other leftist theater groups. A political shift toward the left seemed to be his only option if he wanted to maintain [ 60 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy his artistic networks and give his organization a chance to survive fierce competition from other theater groups. At the core of his career, dramatic production and theater survival had always been the chief considerations in his political orientation. His passionate extramarital affair with An E 安娥, a staunch underground member of the CCP, also drew him closer to the communist alliance. In 2000, Beijing hosted the premiere of Hurricane (狂飙) to critical acclaim, a biographical play about Tian Han written by Tian Qinxin 田沁鑫, one of the most important directors in the twenty-­first century.”101 As a contemporary reincarnation of Tian’s “theater of dramatists,” the play initiated “theater of Tian Han” in staging the struggle and sorrow of Tian and his fellow dramatists, with multimedia images of his five major plays. Hurricane, for example, presents Tian’s Guan Hanqing, which, not coincidentally, depicts a thirteenth-­century visionary playwright who, like Tian, had dramatized the life stories of a playwright and an actress in search of a popular theater to promote social justice. Each of the five plays restaged in Hurricane embodies a structure of plays within a play, with inner plays staged by his students and outer plays portraying how Tian and his loved ones reflect on his life and career. Hurricane portrayed his passion for theater as well as sorrow and regret at having “engineered” his own tragedy through his tireless efforts in theater activities. Additionally, with innovative interactions between Tian, his mother, and his four wives, each exploring his complex selves, Hurricane echoed Tian’s own search for an experimental theater in his early career. One scene, for instance, involves Tian, his first wife, Yu, and third wife, Lin. Each watches the unfolding of Tian’s early play Longing for Home (乡愁), written in 1922, in which the “real-­life,” younger version of Tian and Yu act out an episode from the play. In this episode, Yu accuses Tian of selfishly pursuing his artistic career at the expense of her health and happiness. Walking out of the area where he has been observing the play, Tian apologizes to Yu for not having seen to her needs in the past few years.102 The foregoing sorrowful scene is transformed into an uplifting view of the photographs of eight women playwrights, lit up one by one to celebrate their innovative plays, such as Bai Wei’s 白薇 Linli (琳丽),103 Yuan Changying’s 袁昌英 Southeast Flies the Peacock (孔雀东南飞),104 Pu Shunqing’s 濮舜卿 The Plaything of the Goddess of Love (爱神的玩偶) and Paradise on Earth (人间的乐园), Lu Xiaoman’s 陆小曼 Bian Kungang (卞昆冈), Xiao Hong’s 萧红 In Memory of [ 61 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Mr.  Lu Xun (纪念鲁迅先生), Yang Jiang’s 杨绛 As You Like It (称心如意) and Windswept Blossoms (风絮); Ding Ling’s 丁玲 Kiln Workers (窑工) and Reunion (重逢); and An E’s The Story of the Golden Scales of a Fish (金鳞记). After this scene, as eight male students of Tian move backstage the eight lightboxes containing the women playwrights’ photographs, Tian murmurs something to himself about the fragility of women’s bodies and how easily their quick wit and brilliance are reduced to nothingness with the passage of time. Tian then speaks to his mother about his boyhood and his quest as an adult for a fresh and magnificent life; and to Weizhong, his third wife, about their passionate love at first and the failure of their marriage.105 A significant portion of the play is then devoted to highlighting Tian’s conversations with his students regarding his determination to be in touch with reality and the masses; his aspirations in developing an independent art movement; and his major plays and films, with their dates and titles flashed onto movable screens. At this moment, An E appears as the “red Salomé” Tian had depicted in his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a personification of the type of woman Tian had failed to find throughout the years. An E best united the “redness” of the CCP’s ideology with the unrestrained passion of Wilde’s character. She encourages Tian to finally accept and devote himself to socialist idealism.106 Unfortunately, however, An E, Tian’s true love in real  life, became almost an allusion to the political force beyond Tian’s ­control—­as a passionate revolutionary just returned from the Soviet Union, she helped turn Tian’s intuitive search for an aesthetic theater into a radical political act. A subsequent scene of Tian being taken to the KMT prison in 1935 for producing leftist dramas and Tian’s mother welcoming him home afterward is contrasted with the next scene’s representation of a different sort of prison, taken from Tian’s drama Guan Hanqing. Tian plays Guan Hanqing and An E plays Zhu Lianxiu, the actress punished for having performed in Guan Hanqing’s play, as they reenact the magnificent prison reunion scene, in which they read and sing the song written by Guan to give voice to their shared destiny and love: I studied thousands of volumes of the classics; I wrote more than fifty plays. And all these years the nation has been crushed, People have suffered untold misery everywhere. [ 62 ]

Tian Han and His Legacy We saw, and we fought, Till Dou Er sped us to our deaths. . . . ​ Years divide us, but our hearts are one. Unwedded, we shall lie in the same grave. Behold! When the fields again Are red with azalea blossoms, How two butterflies, you and I, Will flutter in the breeze, loving each other, Never to part!107

This well-­k nown passage, along with the play Hurricane, celebrates not only the love and the career of Tian but also the dedication of his mother and four wives, his actors and actresses, and his artistic network. The play concludes with Tian’s national anthem to illustrate his pivotal position in modern China. This biographical play reached a high artistic standard of “theater of dramatists,” a subgenre begun by Tian’s Violin and Rose and matured in his The Death of a Famous Actor. In fact, a “theater of Tian Han” witnessed the 2020 National Day premiere of a folk opera titled Tian Han premiered by the Shanghai Opera House (上海歌剧院), which blended Chinese operatic music with that of the Western opera. The opening act, for example, explored Hunan opera’s (湘 剧) tunes to highlight their impact on his childhood. Stylistic attributes of Shanghai-­style Peking opera (海派京剧), Suzhou professional storytelling (苏州评弹), and Soviet “red songs” also showcased a resilient and metropolitan Shanghai culture that “accepts all rivers and streams.”108 Drama critics published articles in theater journals to praise an ingenious use of the space: as figure  1.2 illustrates, the innovative stage design featured two-­ story steel structures at both sides of the proscenium arch as additional spaces for acting and singing, whereas a desk and a chair at the center stage presented a symbolic traditional Chinese operatic space for more flexible acting and singing. A movable screen at the rear stage displayed visual images for historical background and dramatic effects.109 With highly professional passages from classic Western operas intersected with Chinese folk music motifs, and with a focus on Tian Han’s early life and his first and last wife (An E) who inspired him with love, arts, and especially music, the opera skillfully combined Tian’s pursuits for aesthetic perfection in all theater genres and his sentiments and idealism during the [ 63 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

FIGURE 1.2 Sheng Heyu, Tian Han. Shanghai Opera House, 2020. Composer: Wu Yuebei; director: Zhang Manjun; stage designer: Xiu Yan. Source: From Wei Zhi and Zu Zhongren, “From Young Dramatist to Revolutionary Playwright,” Opera 10 (2020): 4–­12.

war period, as seen in the roaring finale that featured his “Anthem.” The production embodied a fitting tribute to his prolific career, his artistic network, and the realist, modernist, romantic, and liberal traditions he had pioneered through its rise and fall and trials and triumphs. The celebration of Tian Han’s life has become a fixture of cultural life  in  contemporary China, where special forums to commemorate his 100th birthday in 1998 and 120th birthday in 2018 (田汉诞辰纪念会) offered perfect opportunities to restage his plays and plays about him. Tian’s story on stage has also become a favored “show business” vehicle to commend the anniversaries of the birth of the Party, the army, and the PRC, in a way difficult to find in another country’s theater history. Perhaps in this context, then, Tian Han has finally become “China’s Ibsen,” his aspiration as a young man, and has realized his theater dream even beyond his own imagination.

[ 64 ]

TWO

Hong Shen and His Discontent Canonicity Through Theory and Practice

We fight along the Yellow River, 我们战黄河, 我们战淮河! We fight along the Huai River! 微山湖水今又生洪波. The Weishan Lake roars in waves again. 不能战者不能守, Those who cannot fight, cannot defend, 只有抗战到底没有和! There is no truce until the war is over! Our enemies will not claim a speedy conquest? 敌人速战不决奈我何? We have vast expanses of land and multitudes 我们地广人又多; of people; 父亲也不顾鬓毛皤, Fathers ignore their age, 弟弟战死还有哥. 嘿! Brothers follow their siblings. Hey! The military joins with the populace, and 军民合作,官兵合作, officials with soldiers. 全国成一个. Our country unites as one. Final victory belongs to us, to us, to us! Charge! 最后胜利一定属于我! 属于我! 属于我! 杀呀! —­“Song of the Waves”

UNLIKE HIS “THE March of the Volunteers,” which subsequently became the national anthem, Tian Han’s “Song of the Waves” (洪波曲) has rarely been mentioned in the cultural history of contemporary China.1 Likewise, Zhang Shu 张曙, the song’s composer, was less well known than Nie Er, who arranged the music of “The March of the Volunteers.” A faithful and gifted [ 65 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers student of Tian, Zhang had followed Tian to Wuhan in 1938 and organized mass singing activities for war mobilization under the leadership of Guo Moruo, the head of the Third Office of the Political Department of the KMT Government in alliance with the CCP in their united front in the War of  Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Leading dramatists such as Tian  and Hong Shen, among others, worked with Guo’s department to ­promote wartime propaganda theater, a topic that I will return to later in this chapter. Tian wrote the lyrics for “Song of the Waves” upon hearing the news of the first victory of the KMT army in the Battle of Tai’erzhuang (台儿庄大捷) in 1938, which demythologized the supposedly invincible Japanese army and greatly raised the morale of the Chinese people. Equally inspired by this military triumph, Zhang adapted the marching song format from the Western tradition and conducted the song’s first chorus performance in April 1938, which quickly helped popularize the song throughout the country.2 The song’s patriotic spirit in defense of the nation became so emblematic of the times that Guo Moruo even used the title of this song for his autobiography, which depicted his experience as a cultural bureaucrat in Wuhan in 1938.3 In 1940, An E wrote the script and Ren Guang 任光 the musical scores of a five-­act folk opera (歌剧), also titled Song of the Waves, which portrayed the heroic deeds of the KMT troops and civilians in winning the Battle of Tai’erzhuang, therefore making history of folk opera as the first to combine Western music with indigenous Chinese elements, and the only opera that depicts a single military battle at that time.4 Seen in this light, the 2020 folk opera Tian Han, as seen in figure 1.2, celebrated not only Tian Han’s artistic journey with An E but also the national folk opera tradition (民族歌剧) that Tian and An helped create in the Republican period. In post-­Mao China, when the KMT troops received more credit as the main force in the frontal defense of the country, a 1986 film entitled The Blood-­Stained Battle of Tai’erzhuang (血战台儿庄), produced by Guangxi Film Studio, played an important role in the history of the relationship between Taiwan and the Mainland. Much against the CCP’s narratives during wartime, this film portrayed Chiang Kai-­shek as a courageous leader who bravely presided over a memorial ceremony to pay tribute to a fallen division commander under the fierce bombing by the Japanese air force, an episode based on recorded film documentaries. Reportedly touched by the [ 66 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent portrayal of his father as a positive character for the first time in the PRC performing arts, Chiang Ching-­kuo 蒋经国, then the president of Taiwan, interpreted the film’s message as the CCP’s eventual recognition of the KMT’s war achievements. Not long after seeing the film, Chiang Ching-­kuo reportedly invited key leaders to view the film and subsequently endorsed the first wave of KMT veterans returning to the mainland to visit their relatives in 1987—­almost four decades after they had retreated to Taiwan—­ thereby opening the door for personal communications and trade between Taiwan and the Mainland.5 Thanks to its sensitive nature, the film went through seventeen revisions and several rounds of censorship at various administrative levels, where artists negotiated ideological and aesthetic boundaries; it also involved the participation of a foreign authority: Joris Ivens 尤里斯·伊文思, a Dutch documentary filmmaker who happened to travel to China in 1986. Ivens heard about the making of this film and joined a discussion session on the revision of the script with excitement. He explained to the crew how, forty-­eight years earlier in 1938, he had traveled to China from the Spanish war front in order to record the Chinese resistance against the Japanese during World War II; his 1939 documentary entitled The 400 Million (四万万人 民) preserved dramatic shots of the Battle of Tai’erzhuang.6 The visual images and touching stories in Ivens’s documentary authenticated the history of the battle—­unfamiliar to many Mainland Chinese at the time—­and were subsequently incorporated into scenes of The Blood-­Stained Battle of Tai’erzhaung.7 Critics praised the dramatically powerful finale of the Chinese film: a four-­minute-­long shot of “seemingly a great wall of blood and flesh” consisting of piles upon piles of corpses of Japanese and Chinese soldiers, with the resounding music of the prelude of “The March of the Volunteers”; these audial and visual effect aroused a sense of tragedy and grandeur that eventually overpowered the celebratory mood of victory, a shocking ending that went against the mainstream optimistic trend without dramatizing tragedy of war. Fallen soldiers from both sides were portrayed as equal victims of a brutal and unjustifiable war against the Chinese people. Ivens’s input as a foreign expert who had supported China’s war effort partially helped the film pass the strenuous censorship for its groundbreaking portrayal of a KMT-­led victory. Despite its absence in the Chinese collective memory, nevertheless, “Song of the Waves” surfaced thirty years later in a thirty-­part television [ 67 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers drama series entitled Zhou Enlai in Chongqing (周恩來在重庆), broadcast in 2008 to celebrate the convening of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress. Dramatizing Zhou’s eight-­year leadership (1938–­1946) to collaborate with the KMT in their war efforts to defeat the Japanese invaders, episode 8 showcased Zhou’s friendship with dramatists: Zhou invited Hong Shen, Tian Han, and Guo Moruo to dinner, during which Hong expressed his frustration: he and his fellow artists had once sung the “Song of the Waves” during their retreat from Wuhan before it fell into the Japanese hands, and they performed under extremely difficult conditions in the hinterland without seeing any noticeable progress in winning the war. Another scene of this episode focused on Zhou’s grief upon hearing the tragic news of Hong Shen’s attempted suicide on February  5, 1941, and Zhou’s regret at not being able to take care artists who had sacrificed so much.8 The PRC drama history has blamed the KMT’s military ambush of the CCP-­led New Fourth Army in southern Anhui, known as the “Wannan Incident” (皖南事变), and the KMT’s failure to support “starving artists” as key factors that triggered Hong’s suicide attempt. By the same token, this episode also followed a standard PRC narrative: Zhou quickly lent support—­ morally and financially—­to Hong, who reportedly drew strength from Zhou’s caring spirit.9 Countering this conventional wisdom, however, Hong Qian 洪钤, Hong’s daughter, defended her father against contemporary critics’ “overdramatization” (戏说) and “distortion” (丑化) of her father’s legacy. Hong Qian claimed that a former close friend of her father informed her in the 1980s that her father’s suicide attempt in 1941 was triggered by his profound disappointment in the CCP, which had made a list of the leftist artists and writers to evacuate from Chongqing in anticipation of possible KMT persecutions after the Wannan Incident.10 In spite of his leadership in left-­wing drama activities, Hong Shen was unjustifiably left off the list, at which time he realized, “They do not trust me!” He found himself at an impasse, thus sinking into despair. Hong Qian described her father’s lifelong desire to be a scholar or a professor, not a politician, and his dying wish that he would rather see his two daughters become second-­rate scientists or technicians than first-­rate writers. By 1945, at the onset of civil war between the KMT and CCP, China had evolved into a nation that “left no independent space [ 68 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent for cultural figures to pursue their own values and dreams.”11 Along the same lines, Hong Shen stated in 1945 that in his earlier years he pursued a theater career because he did not want to be a bureaucrat; later on, however, he reluctantly became one in order to carry out his dramatic activities (因为做戏, 才来做官). Hong was referring to his position as the section chief in charge of wartime drama and art activities upon Guo Moruo and Tian Han’s urging in 1937, expressing his “great dismay about bureaucracy and political corruption” and “ambivalence with regard to his seven years of work as a cultural bureaucrat.”12 In spite of his daughter’s defense, the legacy of Hong has been characterized as having initiated a “utilitarian concept of theater” (功利主义的戏剧 思想), which dominated the PRC stage and eventually led to the ultraleftist model theater of the Cultural Revolution.13 Others have objected that labeling Hong as the original contributor to “a dramatic criticism characterized by a vulgar sociology” (庸俗社会学的戏剧批评) is unfair without treating Hong’s theory and practice in their entirety and in the context of the historical circumstances. Distortion of Hong’s concept of theater, therefore, will result in a misunderstanding and rejection of the realist tradition.14 Both sides, in my view, fail to note that Hong’s rich and multifaceted thoughts on theater practice defy easy classification in terms of either “isms” or “schools” and cannot be simply catalogued as either politically or artistically oriented. In assessing Hong as a founder of spoken drama, I emphasize his complex identities as expressing various modes of self-­representation: his family’s deep involvement with the early history of the KMT and his father’s tragic execution as a scapegoat in the KMT politics had probably cautioned him against taking part in political affairs. In his lifelong pursuit of a popular theater, Hong nevertheless became gradually drawn to the left-­wing dramatists and their admired theater productions, a dilemma that necessitated multiple role-­playing in complex circumstances. In fact, Hong’s legacy can be better acknowledged as having illustrated a performative process, in which he formed his various and shifting subject positions in response to his understanding of the prevailing trends; in his scripts, Hong also allowed his dramatic characters to behave in socially acceptable ways while exploring their multiple voices in response to the prevailing ideology, a point I will return to later in this chapter. [ 69 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

Mapping a “New” Dramatic Canon Known as one of the three founders, Hong has received less attention than Tian Han in English-­language scholarship, perhaps partly due to Hong’s hybrid career as a scriptwriter, a director, a critic, and a theater entrepreneur.15 As Luo Liang has pointed out, Hong adopted “a conscious strategy” of “intermediality” in his writing of essays, performance manuals, theories of drama and film, director experience, and other pedagogical works in order “to maximize the social impact of his various artistic enterprises.”16 His death from lung cancer in 1955 also led to a shorter career and less direct impact on PRC theater than that of Tian, who scripted spoken drama and revised traditional operas from 1949 to 1964.17 Moreover, Tian’s tragic death during the Cultural Revolution generated interest in his life stories in the postsocialist period, which brought about a “theater of Tian Han,” as I discussed earlier. In contrast, Hong has rarely appeared in the performance pieces of the new era. I read Hong’s life and career as stories of theatricality in the broader sense of the word; by “theatricality,” I refer to Thomas Postlewait and Tracy D. Davis’s understanding of it as “a mode of representation or a style of behavior characterized by historic actions, manners, and devices, and hence a practice” and as “an interpretative model for describing psychological identity, social ceremonies, communal festivities, and public spectacles, and hence a theatrical concept.”18 These elements can be found in the pivotal moments of Hong’s career, which directly or indirectly changed the course of dramatic history. Regarding Hong’s place in history, theater histories recorded a crucial moment: In April 1928, three founders of spoken drama met in a Shanghai restaurant to bid farewell to Ouyang Yuqian, who was traveling to Guangdong. In their discussion about the state of modern theater, Hong suggested using the word huaju (话剧, spoken drama) to replace older terms such as xinju (新剧, new drama), wenmingxi (文明戏, civilized drama), aimeiju (爱美剧, amateur theater), and feizhiye de xiju (非职业的戏剧, nonprofessional or ­noncommercial theater).19 Tian and Ouyang agreed, and huaju became the name of this increasingly popular genre (hereafter I replace “spoken drama” with huaju). The incident illustrates their collaborative efforts in developing huaju and Hong’s insight in emphasizing hua (spoken dialogue) as an essential [ 70 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent feature borrowed from the traditions of Ibsen and Shakespeare while at the same time marking a critical difference from the practitioners of “new drama” or “civilized drama.” In February 1929, Hong completed his essay “From New Drama to Huaju,” in which he defined huaju as being composed by dialogues exchanged between characters, which imitated life and communicated directly with the audience for the enjoyment of ordinary people (平民的戏剧). A good play could subtly teach people about their instincts and sentiments; mere slogans, by contrast, would not be effective, Hong stressed. Huaju included “isms” (主义) for a better understanding of “the way of the world” (人情世故), philosophies of life, and critiques of behaviors.20 Here, Hong’s reference to “isms” focuses on lessons in everyday life, not the “ism” that Hu Shi mentioned in his often-­quoted “fewer isms and more questions” (多研究些问题, 少谈些主义), which challenged Li Dazhao’s advice for young people to first resolve the issues of “isms” as part of his effort to spread Bolshevik ideology.21 Hong’s dramatic theory, therefore, should not be simplistically confined to either Li’s Marxist approach or Hu’s liberal approach. Seen in historical hindsight, however, Hong’s take on huaju can be perceived as closer to Hu Shi’s idea of evolutionary and pragmatic reform than to Li Dazhao’s intellectual dogmatism or as situated between the two approaches with an open space of its own. Furthermore, Hong’s naming of a new genre expressed his understanding of American theater that shaped much of his multifaceted identity as a Chinese dramatist in search of an aesthetic theater free from political constraints, although he was only partially successful, because of the unique cultural, social, and local circumstances of his times. In this regard, Hong is different from Tian Han. Unlike Tian, who read about Western modernist drama while studying in Japan from 1916 to 1922, Hong directly benefited from being one of the first Chinese overseas graduate students to study theater in America in 1919, after three years of studying ceramics at Ohio State University beginning in 1916.22 In George Pierce Baker’s drama class at Harvard University, known as “Workshop 47,” Hong went through the same rigorous training that produced Eugene O’Neill, George Abbott, and Maurine Dallas Watkins. During his years in America from 1916 to 1922, Hong wrote English-­language plays about Chinese people that involved arranged marriage, such as The Wedded Husband (为之有室),23 or their experience in World War I, such as Rainbow (虹); published articles on Chinese operas for Western readers; and worked in theaters in Boston and New York [ 71 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers to familiarize himself with theater management, which included advertising, ticket sales, accounting, ushering, and cloakroom service.24 A passionate love affair with an American woman who shared his zest for theater further affected Hong’s Western experience. The racial discrimination he experienced as a Chinese living in America, in company with a blond American woman, however, also resulted in Hong’s realistic understanding of a Western society with its own broken dreams.25 Hong thus formed a more realistic view of America than that of the early Tian, who embraced American liberalism from afar. Unlike Tian, who scripted an opera as his first play, Hong is known for his early dramatic play Yama Zhao, published in 1922, in imitation of the expressionist style of Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill. Influenced by O’Neill’s episodic structures, “stream of consciousness,” and psychological drama, Hong depicted the title protagonist as a military defector who hallucinated about talking to various characters in his past life while escaping from his captors. Hong’s innovative directing and the passionate acting of the protagonist, however, resulted in a lukewarm reception; his audiences in Shanghai found his experimental theater too foreign for their taste. Hong won over his audience two years later, in 1924, with his successful adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, which he titled The Young Mistress’s Fan (少奶奶的扇子), transposing the English comedy into the milieu of upper-­class Shanghai; the play established him as an authority in scripting, directing, and managing Western-­style theater. As Siyuan Liu has succinctly pointed out, Hong’s The Young Mistress’s Fan greatly contributed to his founding-­father status for “his sinicized adaptations and productions of modern Western plays that transcended the decade’s aimeiju (amateur theater) movement’s didactic naturalism,” “thus providing the necessary training ground for future huaju practitioners.”26 From a comparative angle, Weihong Bao further situated Hong “at the crossroads of the transnational circulation and production of knowledge involving multiple cultural and political forces” in order to emphasize “the relationship between human and technology, as well as between media and environment.”27 Expanding existing scholarship, I emphasize other factors in order to do justice to the rich and complex legacy of Hong. Most important, Hong expressed a different psychological identity from his peers and did not fully embrace left-­leaning agendas until his later years. Indeed, Hong resisted “turning left” partly because of the trauma he had suffered from [ 72 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent the execution of his father, Hong Shuzu 洪述祖, an official working in Yuan Shikai’s 袁世凱 government who was implicated as a scapegoat in the 1919 assassination of Song Jiaoren 宋教仁, when Yuan deemed Song as a threat to his political ambitions. It is important to note that in 1919, during the Russian October Revolution, which inspired many young intellectuals, Hong Shen, alone in America, was heartbroken when he read his father’s will; he vowed never to get involved with politics and switched his major to theater as his salvation in a dangerous life.28 In his later years, however, he could not decline the KMT’s invitation to become its party member, thanks to his father’s prior association. His suicide, therefore, could be more fully understood in the context of this dilemma, when he felt trapped in the KMT’s persecution for his leftist theater activities and the CCP’s distrust. Indeed, modern drama histories credit three founding fathers as having pioneered and promoted the social function of theater, with the task of transforming Chinese audiences into modern and enlightened citizens. Reacting against such a political reading, scholars in the post-­Mao period naturally criticized the strict censorship that had controlled literary production and singled out “class struggle” as a favored theme at the expense of artistic innovations, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Hong’s rural trilogy (农村三部曲), written in the 1930s, has continuously been interpreted as having portrayed poverty-­ stricken rural China where poor  peasants confronted rich landlords’ exploitation in the Republican period.29 Such a political reading—­in part thanks to Hong’s own writing of drama history—­runs contrary to the internal contradictions embodied in Hong’s plays. Either emphasized as an indispensable theme that had created “great” theater in the Maoist period or blamed as the reason why brilliant playwrights had failed to produce “masterpieces” after 1949, class struggle has been singled out as the key dramatic conflict, for better or worse. However, Chinese dramatists have successfully “put new wine into an old bottle” (旧瓶装新酒); they repackaged Western dramatic concepts, such as irreconcilable dramatic conflicts, into the new concept of the opposing forces of “class struggle,” thereby blending Marxism with Western dramaturgy. In doing so, they bridged socialist proletarian spirit with capitalist bourgeois art, the East with the West, the modern with the traditional, and ideological function with aesthetic pursuits. [ 73 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers In fact, Hong’s multifaceted theater bypass easy classification either in terms of “isms” or “schools.” The first play in Hong’s rural trilogy, Wukui Bridge (五奎桥), for example, depicts a dramatic conflict between two powerful forces—­rich gentry and poor peasants—­that defy reconciliation. This is similar to the spirit of the Greek tragedy Antigone, in which Antigone’s tenacious efforts to give her brother, Polyneices, a proper burial cannot be resolved with the equally persuasive will of Creon, the king of the land, who does not want to honor a man he regards as a traitor. By the same token, in Wukui Bridge, poor villagers are determined to demolish a bridge to clear the way for a boat carrying a Western-­made pump that will provide desperately needed water for their rice fields during a severe drought. They are met with the equally stubborn obstruction of Mr.  Zhou, a rich man whose ancestors had built the bridge to protect the “precious land with geomantic elements” and the local community. Here, Hong niftily combined his pursuit of an aesthetic theater with his newly discovered concept of “class struggle” in structuring dramatic conflicts in a “well-­made play.” This provided a fertile ground for the PRC theater history to cite the play as one of the earliest examples of peasant play written in the Republican period. On the one hand, however, one could also take seriously Mr. Zhou’s critique of “Western things” as detrimental to the preservation of the traditional way of life; if the Western-­made machine can do all the work for us, Mr. Zhou argues, young folks would have nothing better to do in their spare time except gambling and playing cards.30 Hong’s interest in structuring dramatic conflicts between various characters played an equally significant role as his so-­called class consciousness. This at least partially explains why some of Hong’s best plays can be interpreted as reflecting class struggle between the rich and the poor, even though Hong once used Wukui Bridge as an example to illustrate his writing process: only after painstaking four revisions was he able to consider Wukui Bridge artistically satisfying.31 Looking into Hong’s life trajectory through a psychological lens, it is interesting to note that Wukui Bridge is the real name of his ancestral burial ground where his father’s remains were laid to rest after his execution, according to his wish.32 In 1955, during his declining year battling lung cancer, Hong felt sad while paying his last respect to Wukui Bridge; his family lot on “precious land with geomantic elements,” now leveled for construction, still held a special place in his heart.33 Seen in this light, it [ 74 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent was possible that the dramatic conflict between Mr. Zhou, who fights hard to protect his family land against the local community’s intrusion, expressed to some extent a deeply felt divide in Hong’s own subconsciousness in guarding his family’s legacy against the demand of his times to ally himself with the common people. Hong, therefore, put in the “old bottle” of a Western well-­made play a variety of new wine, providing a unique blending of multiple voices open to different interpretations, either in terms of Marxist theory of class struggle, or Western dramaturge, or a combination of the two and of other ­factors such as family and educational background. Hong’s overarching interest in structuring irreconcilable dramatic conflicts prompted some left-­wing critics to attack the last play in his trilogy, entitled Qinglong Pond (青龙潭), for its confused depiction of Sha Xiaoda 沙小大, a young peasant who insists on building a new road by cutting down cherry trees—­the source of the villagers’ livelihood—­in a year of severe drought. After the drought gets worse, older peasants in the village finally give in to Sha’s idea of building a road in exchange for a foreign-­made pump to bring water to the distressed fields. The pump, however, comes too late to save the crops; worse still, Sha now frenziedly throws himself into the praying-­for-­rain rituals, against which he had originally fought. As figure 2.1 demonstrates, the National Drama School’s 1936 production faithfully followed the realist style of Hong Shen’s script in acting, stage, costume, and lighting designs, a dominate tradition both in the Republican and in the PRC period especially regarding peasant plays. Hong’s insights into the peasants’ ignorance, superstition, and selfishness prompted left-­wing critics to point to Hong’s “narrow-­minded realism” that kept him at a distance from the peasants without a real understanding of them.34 From the point of view of scriptwriting, however, one could emphasize Hong’s skill in structuring a rapidly developing dramatic crisis, which sees the essence of drama through “the art of crisis” in “­destiny or circumstance” in “clearly furthering the ultimate event,” as explained by William Archer, an early twentieth-­century Western theater critic, according to Marvin Carlson’s classic interpretation of European theatrical traditions.35 Hong’s interest in uncompromising conflicts within individuals, and with his peers and his environment, defies a one-­ dimensional theme of class struggle, while leaving room for those to pursue this line of political reading. His supposedly failed attempt in critical [ 75 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

FIGURE 2.1 Hong Shen, Qinglong Pond. National Drama School, 1936. Director and stage designer: Ma Yanxiang. Source: From Li Naichen, Collected Materials of the Chinese National Drama School (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2013), 3:932.

realist theater, nevertheless, in part points to the rich potential of multiple meanings beyond a particular school or approach. Furthermore, the enduring theme expressed in Qinglong Pond can be ­recognized almost a half-­century later in a 1984 film titled Yellow Earth (黄土地), directed by Chen Kaige 陈凯歌, a trailblazer of the “fifth-­ generation” film directors in post-­Mao China. Paralleling Qinglong Pond’s plot of Sha Xiaoda’s failed attempt to save his village’s harvest in a drought-­ ridden year, Yellow Earth conveys an equally tragic sense of disappointment at the communist attempt to save poverty-­stricken peasants: it concludes with an identical “praying-­for-­rain ritual,” in which local peasants piously express their faith in a heavenly force controlling their destiny. Before this finale, Gu Qing 顾青, a cultural worker among the communist-­led troops, collects local tunes among the poor peasants in his effort to create revolutionary songs to support the war effort. In this process, he promises Cui­ qiao 翠巧, a fifteen-­year-­old girl, that he will return a year later to take her [ 76 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent to a CCP-­liberated area to pursue a new life after he had obtained approval from his army unit. Upon Gu’s final return, however, Cuiqiao has already drowned in the Yellow River while struggling to cross it to reach the CCP-­ liberated area the night before she was to be forced into an arranged marriage. When Gu walks toward the fervent crowd piously engaged in their annual ritual of praying for rain, Hanhan 憨憨, Cuiqiao’s younger brother, is the only one rushing toward Gu against the pushing crowd. Whereas Hanhan’s embracing Gu indicates a sense of hope, the scene highlights the stubborn power of a traditional society, which, if anything, was gaining momentum despite the communist advance to eliminate it. Most important, Gu’s inability to save Cuiqiao pointed to the futility in bringing any change to a society rooted in thousands of years of history. It is sadder still to reflect on Hong’s lifelong effort in creating a modern theater to address social problems and his ambiguities in its realization, as seen in his contractionary characterization of Sha Xiaoda and the ironic confirmation of Hong’s own broken dreams several decades later. With historical hindsight, this could perhaps help us explain Hong’s self-­ mockery of his plays as the results of “hard labor which cannot please anybody”: his left-­leaning plays were considered as not “progressive” enough for the socialist-­leaning critics, nor were they politically correct for the KMT-­affiliated critics who were displeased with his “leftist alliance.” In fact, Hong’s navigation between oppositional ideologies and between art and politics found its way into his survey of wartime drama from 1937 to 1947.36 Characterizing the war period as a golden age in the development of huaju, Hong recorded numerous troupes traveling to the war fronts and interior areas and documented their popular performances and innovations in scripting, acting, stage design, makeup, and music. Subsequent PRC histories referred to Hong’s account in describing wartime theater as an extended stage for performing artists, together with Tian Han’s portrayal in his poem: “Four hundred million actors and actresses (演员四亿人) / Ten thousand li of war front (战线一万里) / The world is the audience (全球作观 众) / Watch our magnificent play (看我大戏剧).”37 While emphasizing theater’s unique opportunity in time of war, however, Hong paid equal attention to the aesthetic values of theater, especially mining the rich potential in traditional Chinese operas. Acknowledging the war period as a perfect opportunity to modernize, Hong illustrated how [ 77 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers the artists in the Guangdong opera (粤剧), the Peking opera (平剧), and the Hubei opera (楚剧) revised the old tales of patriot to rally the masses against foreign invaders. In an essay published in 1945, Hong even argued for the useful function of “ghost plays” (鬼戏), which had often been targeted as having represented the worst elements of backward traditional culture; Hong explained that Shakespeare employed a ghost character in Hamlet and featured his dead father as an artistic device in aiding the distressed protagonist.38 Hong’s effort to rescue ghost plays from extinction would have led to possible persecution in the Maoist period if he had lived beyond 1955; the ensuing radical campaign against ghost plays even before the start of the Cultural Revolution damaged Tian Han’s career, and Hong’s membership in the KMT before 1949 would have landed him in an even worse situation than that of Tian if Hong had lived through the radical Maoist years. Hong’s effort at rescuing ghost plays preceded the debate of ghost plays such as Li Huiniang, a kun opera (昆剧) that premiered in 1962 to critical acclaim, only to be attacked four years later as an “anti-­CCP” play and deemed “potentially dangerous” since it could be construed as emphasizing a backward stance against “scientific, rational thinking.”39 Hong’s 1940s presocialist defense of ghost plays, therefore, illustrates a close connection between a traditional genre and its potentials in contemporary exploration. In addition to moving beyond the usual divides between modern and traditional, and huaju and old opera, Hong’s survey of wartime drama also bridged the oppositional camps between the KMT/CCP. In the aforementioned 1948 essay on wartime drama, he praised the local opera that successfully staged the heroic sacrifice of KMT military commanders, thus celebrating the major role of KMT troops in the defense of the nation. He paid equal attention to the “rice sprout song” (秧歌) movement in the CCP-­ occupied Yan’an, at once affirming its ideological appeal for rural people and its entertainment value in the popular culture at the grassroots level with love stories being inserted in representations of “the collective life of the army.”40 Hong’s emphasis on this folkloric dance that “served the soldiers (为兵) and the peasants (为农)” preceded the PRC theater that focused on “workers, peasants, and soldiers” (工农兵戏剧); Hong thus pointed out the potential of Yan’an performance as a model even before the founding of the PRC. Seen in this light, his multiple voices opened a relatively balanced view of art and politics even at a time of national crisis. [ 78 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent

The Place of Hong Shen’s “First History” in Later Histories I have so far examined how Hong’s life and career were more complex than a leftist playwright and argued for the need to study his legend as primarily a dramatist in search of an aesthetic theater at all costs. Ironically, the approach to reading Hong’s life as a playwright rooted in the politics of his times was initiated by Hong himself. As professor of English and theater in various universities in China, such as Fudan University, Jinan University, Shandong University, and Qingdao University, Hong wrote numerous essays and drama reviews. In contrast to Tian, who was at times criticized for sloppy scholarship, Hong’s introduction to the drama volume of the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, published in 1935, is a pioneering work that shaped subsequent histories of drama.41 As one of the ten volumes under the chief editorship of Zhao Jiabi 赵家壁 on the first ten years of “China’s new literary movement” from 1917 to 1927, Hong’s edited drama volume established the first canon of spoken drama from eighteen playwrights, many of which have been reprinted in subsequent compendia and anthologies. Hong therefore initiated the writing of the history of huaju with his first introduction to the field, which has been often cited in later histories. Hong’s introduction to his drama volume has at least two major differences from other introductions in the same series. First, his introduction is extremely long, at 123 pages, in comparison with Zhu Ziqing’s 朱自清 introduction to poetry of sixteen pages, Mao Dun’s, Lu Xun’s, and Zheng Boqi’s 郑伯奇 prefaces to fiction at forty, eighteen, and forty pages, respectively; and Zhou Zuoren’s and Yu Dafu’s 郁达夫 prefaces to prose of eighteen and twenty-­three pages, respectively.42 Most important, Hong’s introduction offered a systematic reading of huaju in the context of its critical debates, its relationship to Chinese and Western traditions, and its balanced task of “popularizing and advancing the art of theater” (普及与提高), which Mao Zedong subsequently addressed in his “Talk at Yan’an Forum of Literature and Art” in 1942 and became a guiding principle of socialism in the PRC. More inclusive than Mao’s criteria for literature and art, however, Hong argued for a place in history for Hu Shi’s concept of theater as a tool “in spreading ideas” (传播思想), “organizing society” (组织社会), and “improving life experience” (改善人生). Hong defended Hu’s advocacy for individualism in such statements as, “Striving for individual freedom is the same as [ 79 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers striving for the freedom of one’s country,” which was to be subsequently criticized as bourgeois individualism in Maoist China.43 Hong also paid equal attention to the aesthetic orientation of huaju and its ideological functions, a balanced view that disappeared in Mao’s Yan’an talk and the PRC literary theories thereafter. Post-­Mao and postsocialist theater histories have finally redeemed Hu’s pioneering role in advocating individualism in the early stage of huaju, thus returning to Hong’s original assessment of Hu. Additionally, Hong’s introduction started with a lengthy history of the May Fourth movement in its historical contexts. Hong’s delineation of China’s domestic politics from the late Qing to the betrayal of China in the Treaty of Versailles by the imperialist powers is strikingly similar to the subsequent historical narratives of the CCP, which singled out the opium wars as the beginning of China’s semicolonialist period. Five pages into his introduction, Hong had barely begun his lengthy discussion of China’s corruption as the key reason that “new cultural movements” were looking for national salvation, with extended quotations from Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and others. It was not until twelve pages later that Hong began to discuss Liang Qichao’s exile in Japan, his call to write fiction and drama in the vernacular language, and his contemporaries’ efforts in reforming traditional opera.44 Why did Hong start his introduction with a heavily historical and ideological perspective? Existing scholarship in the PRC argued that Hong drafted his introduction by “exerting himself to apply Marxist theory of literature and art” to “scientifically explain the development of the first ten years of Chinese huaju” with “a rather materialistic view of history.”45 This assessment validated a popular view of Hong turning left after 1930 when he joined the Chinese League of Left-­Wing Writers. It fits perfectly with the official PRC view of literary history, which has interpreted the leftist trend as the highest achievement of the Republican period. A closer examination of Hong’s artistic networks, however, reveals that Hong’s persistent search for a modern stage was an equally important factor in his alliance with new drama troupes and with artists of either CCP or KMT affiliations. Before he “turned left,” Hong had already been impressed by Tian Han’s Southern Drama Society, which popularized huaju in cities at the ebb of its movement, and his establishment of an art institution and drama festivals to forge a social network of artists. The warm reception of [ 80 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent Tian’s plays allowed Hong to “realize that the kind of drama he had searched for in the past could indeed be found in the theater of Tian,” since his plays appealed not just to urban elites but also to students and common people, who warmly responded to the performances of the Southern Drama Society.46 His subsequent act of joining the leftist theater after 1930 was, to a large extent, a result of being drawn to Tian’s social networks and drama achievements, which were more appealing than his lonely search for a dynamic theater. At the time when Hong was “most dispirited,” he discovered the Southern Drama Society, joined the movement in Shanghai, and then became a member.47 Hong was also eager to connect with the best artists with mutual respect: when Tian tried to persuade Hong to join the Left-­ Wing League in 1930, he first introduced Hong to A Ying, a renowned playwright and film critic Hong had long wished to meet. While Hong “protested” that he was indeed a member of the KMT, A Ying, an underground member of the CCP, reassured him that the Left-­Wing League transcended party boundaries and was an organization of progressive writers, which Hong could identify with. Only when Tian mentioned that Xia Yan, a playwright, and critic Hong appreciated, had already joined the league did Hong finally agree to follow suit, without knowing that Xia, too, was a key underground leader of the CCP art circle. Hong’s cautious stance between opposing political camps made him a less likely candidate to write an openly Marxist critique of the history of drama. His introduction expressed his view of modern drama as a performative and interdisciplinary art, which could not be meaningfully talked about without having explored historical, cultural, and political contexts. The same can be said of poetry, fiction, prose, and other genres. Drama, nevertheless, depends on direct interaction with audiences, who decide what kind of drama will survive. If no one buys a ticket, a show cannot go on. Moreover, as a playwright, director, actor, critic, theorist, and educator all in one, Hong seemed to have been unable to write a history of drama until he explored drama’s other function and impact. This is not to discount certain elements of his introduction as being partially influenced by a Marxist view of history, but I consider it a result of Hong’s encounter with a convenient cultural framework in outlining drama history, which coincided with his multidisciplinary view of theater rather than merely being dominated by a Marxist approach. [ 81 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers The popularity of a Marxist view of literary history in the early twentieth century, however, could explain Hong’s own effort in reinterpreting plays written before his American education. In his essay, originally written in 1928, Hong quoted a line from his A Tragedy of the Poor (贫民惨剧), written in 1916: “Dad! Everyone in the world are equal human beings, but why do some ride in the cart while others pull the cart with hard labor?” Recalling his writing these lines thirteen years earlier as a student, Hong now, in retrospect, wondered what Lenin was writing about at the same time in a small room in Switzerland in exile.48 Having now been exposed to a Marxist approach, Hong injected into his early plays a class-­struggle theme, which in 1916 he was unable to articulate. Subsequent theater history includes repeated examples of dramatists’ reinterpreting their own plays only after others had already injected political readings into them, as seen in the best-­k nown case of Cao Yu, who first rejected critics’ labeling his masterpiece Thunderstorm (雷雨) as a leftist play concerning worker’s oppression, only to embrace this description years later once he realized that its social and political significance made the play popular.49 Indeed, Hong’s introduction was ahead of its time in other aspects. In the first place, well versed in both Chinese opera (xiqu 戏曲; hereafter I will use xiqu in place of “Chinese opera”) and huaju, Hong discussed the cross-­ genre practice of traditional xiqu, reformed xiqu, new drama, civilized drama, and huaju as an integrated history. First, while covering all these subgenres, Hong included both the history of “drama,” which usually refers to dramatic texts, and the history of “theater,” which involves all aspects of performance that transform a dramatic text to a stage production. In Chinese terms, Hong covered “the first creation,” referring to scriptwriting; “the second creation,” referring to directing, stage and costume design, lighting, and stage management; and “the third creation,” referring to audience reception and their re-­creation of the meanings of a play offstage. Subsequent histories tend to focus more on the first creation of dramatic texts, and to a lesser degree, on the second creation, or performance aspect, while shortchanging the third creation, in audience response, or reception studies. Hong nevertheless delineated the importance of audiences in his introduction, for example, in narrating Chen Dabei’s 陈大悲 “three requirements to his audiences,” announced in 1923: Chen asked his audiences to be responsible in creating a new theater by first holding applause until the [ 82 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent end of each act; second, not talking in loud voices that might drown the dialogue onstage; and third, sending your feedback about performances.50 Second, Hong explored dramatic texts, performances, theater troupes, drama journals, artistic networks, and drama schools, without losing sight of commercial/financial issues to sustain theater. For instance, Hong analyzed Chen Dabei’s theory of promoting an “amateur theater” in the 1920s to free theater from its search for profits. Whereas Chen’s theory “suits the remedy to the case” (对症下药) at a time when commercialism had eroded theater, Hong believed that this approach was impractical since no matter how “amateur,” or anticommercial, a theater wanted to be, it would still require financial resources to produce a show and to provide a living wage for its members. Without money, it would be difficult to organize a troupe, let alone sustain it in the long run. “Amateur theater,” therefore, could not become a free art without being somehow controlled by the subsidies of the  capitalists.51 Hong’s view seems especially pertinent eighty years later in postsocialist China, where, once removed from complete state subsidies during the socialist period (when theater professionals were state employees with salaries and benefits), some theater troupes had no choice but to succumb to commercial culture to survive. As a public art that involves live audiences, theater can never become a free agent in ideological, financial, or artistic terms. Drama histories in postsocialist China, therefore, have not substantially surpassed Hong’s introduction in conceptual frameworks. From another spectrum, drama history always allied itself with institutional history. Dong Naibin and others, for example, delineated how since its beginning the writing of Chinese literary history developed in tandem with the establishment of university curricula in modern China. Teaching literary history became more accepted in the 1910s and 1920s since the Ministry of Education of the Republican government perceived in the teaching of literary history an effective narrative of the origin and heritage of the nation to promote patriotic sentiments. This trend continued in the PRC period, when many universities made literary history a mandatory course, whereas classes on other genres mostly remained as selective courses.52 Drama appeared only when it supported the general scheme of literary history, or it fell through the cracks of university curricula and shifted to specialized drama schools. When taught as a course, the syllabus [ 83 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers covered mostly master playwrights such as Cao Yu, Xia Yan, and Guo Moruo, all known for the literary qualities of their dramatic texts. By the same token, general literary histories also dismissed in works on drama history as seen in Huang Xiuji’s A History of Composing Histories of Chinese New Literature, which skipped Xu Muyun’s 徐慕云 History of Chinese Drama, published in 1938. Indeed, Xu’s history remained obscure even to critics of his time since it was published in the middle of the war, when very few people cared about drama scholarship. Xu’s history also suffered from its introduction, written by Chu Minyi 褚民誼, who later became a Japanese collaborator when he served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Wang Jing­ wei’s 汪精卫 government in 1940, and as a result, was executed as an “archcollaborator” in 1946. Xu’s monograph was actually the earliest book-­ length study of huaju in the true sense of the word, because it included both xiqu and huaju. Unlike Hong Shen’s introduction, Xu’s history covered almost no literary texts but concentrated extensively on performing arts such as singing, dancing, acting, costume, makeup, and so on. The publication and reception of Xu’s drama history nevertheless did not fit into the grand narrative of the wartime period as the “golden age of Chinese drama” thanks to its relationship between war mobilization and mass audience. Seen from this perspective, wartime circumstances also suppressed rather than promoted the development of drama studies.

A Legend Beyond “History” and “Theater”? Are there new ways of writing and teaching modern drama? Could we write a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history that would do justice to its richness? Drama historians tend to record Hong as being the “first” to emphasize the scope of his interdisciplinary accomplishments: straddling the theater and film industries, for example, he was the first to write a filmscript, entitled The Lady of Shentu (申屠氏) in 1925. Previously, the film industry followed the convention in “civilized drama” of improvisation with plot outlines, known as scenario play (幕表戏). Hong wrote the first sound motion picture in China, entitled Red Rose Singer (歌女红 牡丹), released in Shanghai in 1931. He also wrote the first radio play in Shanghai in 1936, a new media that reached a broader audience beyond theater.53 [ 84 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent Calling Hong’s works “the first,” however, might introduce more confusion or “miscounts” into history. Contrary to the usual view that Hu Shi’s The Main Event in Life (终身大事), published in 1919, was the first huaju script, Pan Keming has pointed out that Hong Shen’s earliest plays, such as A Pear Seller (卖梨人, 1915) and A Tragedy of the Poor (1916), were in fact among the first modern scripts.54 Song Baozhen states in her History of Modern Chinese Drama that, on the contrary, the one-­act play titled Awakening (醒) by Zhang Pengchun (P. C. Chang) appeared three years earlier than Hu Shi’s The Main Event in Life. Zhang’s Awakening was first written in December 1915, when he was studying at Columbia University, and the play was published and staged in 1916 by the Nankai New Theater (南开新剧团), with Zhou Enlai impersonating the lead role of the sister of Gentleman Feng 冯君. Directed by Zhang himself, the play was staged in both English and Chinese.55 An in-­depth study of Zhang’s entire career in the context of cross-­ cultural experiences and their influence on the initial development of huaju in a global milieu, however, points to two plays earlier than Awakening. One, his three-­act play The Intruder (闯入者), was first published in English in installments from September  1915 to January  1916.56 His three-­act play Invader (入侵者) was written in New York in February 1915, and his Man in Gray (灰衣人) first appeared in March  1915.57 Similar to Hu Shi’s The Main Event in Life, all three plays of Zhang’s were written in English when Zhang was studying theater in New York. In fact, Hu recorded in his diary in February 1915 after his first meeting with Zhang, when both were studying at Columbia University, that he was pleased to see that Zhang had already written some scripts including The Intruder, which was well structured, with references to contemporary affairs. Hu noted that Zhang was ahead of him (先我为之); even though Hu had read many Western plays, he was not yet ready to script any of his own.58 Rather than attempt to figure out who was the first, then, it is perhaps more important to note that in the 1910s, brilliant overseas students such as Hu and Zhang happened upon each other and formed a budding social network with mutual aspirations to develop theater as a new and promising genre to articulate their visions of a modern China. Most intriguingly, in addition to Hu’s contributions in introducing Ibsen into China and Zhang’s inspiring teaching, innovative directing, and diligent promotion of  huaju, their paths would cross again in later years in their pioneering achievements in China’s higher education: whereas Hu was instrumental in [ 85 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers solidifying Peking University as a world-­class institution with his visionary spirit and educational theories, Zhang put Nankai University and Tsinghua University on the map as among the most prestigious college campuses in China. Zhang, since returning from the United States in 1922 after defending his PhD dissertation and in his capacity as a newly appointed professor at Nankai University, wrote scripts, directed, managed, and promoted the Nankai New Theater for his students, thereby training a generation of theater professionals. Most important, Zhang kindled the magnificent career of Cao Yu, a remarkable feat that prompted Fu Jin to claim that this alone could be considered one of the most important contributions of the Nankai student theater activities to the development of huaju.59 Cao later recalled his great admiration of Zhang, his loving and respected mentor, who tapped into his full potential and inspired him to throw himself into a theater career, which became an essential part of his life.60 As known to many, Cao’s masterpieces, such as Thunderstorm Sunrise (日出), Wilderness (原野), and Peking Man (北京人), eventually ushered in a golden age of huaju and finally realized the dream of his teacher’s generation in fashioning a Chinese national theater with local stories while expanding the traditions of Western modernism, realism, naturalism, and expressionism as well as traditional Chinese theater. It was in Zhang’s course on “Modern Drama,” initiated into the Nankai curriculum in 1926, however, that Cao first studied Ibsen and other Western and Chinese masters.61 In 1927, as a student member of the Nankai drama group, Cao cross-­dressed in the dramatic role of the female tenant in Ding Xilin’s 丁西林 Oppression (压迫); with Zhang as the director, Cao also participated in the production of Chen Dabei’s The Patriot Thief (爱国贼) .62 In 1927, Zhang directed Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (国民公敌); this title later was changed to A Strident Doctor (刚愎的医生) to avoid the local authority’s censorship, with Cao cross-­dressing as the daughter of the ­protagonist. In 1928, Zhang’s directing of A Doll’s House, starring Cao Yu as Nora, likewise made theater history.63 It preceded the more famous 1935 production of the same title starring Lan Ping 蓝苹 (later known as Jiang Qing) playing the  lead role of Nora. Lan Ping’s performance reportedly reached such a high artistic level that Zhang still remembered it vividly many years thereafter.64 [ 86 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent In addition to advancing higher education, both Hu Shi and Zhang Pengchun were groundbreaking diplomats on the world stage. Hu, after his release as China’s ambassador to the United States, was chosen by the KMT government as one of the eleven delegates to attend the 1945 San Francisco Conference, during which fifty-­one nations endorsed the charter to establish the United Nations. In 1946, as Chinese representative, Zhang attended the first congress of the United Nations in London upon completing his tenure as minister (公使) to Chile. As Sun Pinghua has summarized, Zhang, in his capacity as deputy chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (联合国人权委员会), made an outstanding contribution to the drafting process of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”: “He defined the nature of the declaration accurately, successfully integrated Confucianism into the declaration . . . ​and expounded China’s views on human rights to the world. These contributions were marked down in history, and his contributions were also the contributions of Chinese civilization, national intelligence, and traditional culture.”65 Hong, even though he devoted his career mostly to theater activities and education, became a diplomat after 1949, following in the footsteps of Hu  and Zhang. Hong devoted his time and energy to cultural exchanges mostly with socialist countries then in alliance with China during the Cold War. Suffice it to point out that with personal charisma and a knowledge of the West, all three towering figures—­Hu, Zhang, and Hong—­excelled in addressing students, educators, politicians, and state leaders on the local and world stages, influencing the cultural and cross-­cultural life of China and the world. Despite their drifting apart in opposing regimes after 1949, as Hong worked for the communist regime in the PRC and Hu and Zhang once represented the KMT government, their dramatic careers enhanced their diplomatic roles and doubled the cultural capital therein as intellectual elites. One such example resides in Zhang’s advice to Mei Lanfang on the latter’s choices of relatively more accessible Peking opera pieces for American audiences to understand during his trip to the United States in 1930.66 Hong belonged to the first generation of overseas students who went against the trendy pursuit of degrees in science and technology and chose to study theater as an academic subject in the United States, thereby receiving formal training in various schools of Western theaters as a performance [ 87 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers practice, and as a vehicle for social change. Indeed, it was not until the return of theater specialists such as Xiong Foxi 熊佛西, Yu Shangyuan 余上沅, Hong Shen, and others that huaju was taken seriously as an artistic genre and began to form its own special qualities. According to Xu Muyun and Fu Jin, therefore, the year 1925 witnessed a crucial event in the homecoming of Zhao Taimou 赵太侔 and Yu Shangyuan, who returned to Beiping (Beijing) upon their graduation from American universities with theater degrees.67 Xiong Foxi, who also studied theater at Columbia University and received a master’s degree, had already met Zhao and Yu earlier in New York, where they shared a grand dream of devoting the rest of their lives to developing “a national theater of China” (中华国剧).68 Zhao’s and Yu’s return from the West led to the founding of the Theater Faculty of Beijing Art School (国立北平艺术专科学校) and the initiation of a “national theater movement” (国剧运动), in which Zhang Pengchun also participated. Xiong chaired its theater department and that of Peking University, and he recruited and trained talented students who later became actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, theater critics, and historians. From 1932 he developed peasant theater (农民戏剧) in rural Hebei Province where peasants were invited to create their own plays in an open space, “an incredible achievement that urban dwellers at that time could not have even imagined, therefore comparable to the innovations of the avant-­garde theater.”69 Unlike the earlier generation’s superficial rejection of traditional xiqu as an obstacle to modernization, as expressed by Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, and others, Yu and Zhao defended the aesthetic values of xiqu characterized by its respectable features such as “formula” (程式), “expressionism” (写意), and “suggestiveness” (虚拟) and its actor-­centered performance practice and abstract staging. This old-­style Chinese theater can therefore be combined with Western modernist and realist schools to form a “national theater” with Chinese materials for Chinese audiences.70 Xia Xiaohong explained the complex and interwoven debates on such terms as xiqu, “drama” (戏剧), “national theater” (国剧), “old style theater” (旧剧), and “new drama” (新剧). Xia points out that it is precisely in the concept of a national theater, “located at the interstices of Chinese old-­style theater’s expressionism and European theater’s realism, that we find what Yu Shangyuan and his colleagues described as ‘the perfect theater of which we all dreamed, from antiquity to the present.’ ”71 Hong Shen’s return from the [ 88 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent United States was part of this key moment of theater transformation, when he joined his peers in putting into practice their Western academic training in creating a genuinely Chinese theater.72 Examining his legend as a multigenre scriptwriter, theorist, manager, political activist, wartime troupe organizer, university professor, administrator, and journal editor in the intellectual milieu of his environment will help emphasize the interdisciplinary—­or perhaps even antidisciplinary—­ implications of performance culture, broadly defined. Equally important, one could examine the presence of theatrical or performative elements in other activities and discuss Hong’s talents in playing the “right” part in everyday life that changed drama history. In 1923, for example, Pu Boying 蒲伯英 and Chen Dabei attempted, without success, to promote “amateur” theater by using dramatic scripts for the first time in order to eliminate improvisatory scenario play. They invited Hong, a newly minted expert in theater from America, to join their Shanghai Stage Society (上海戏剧协社) to modernize all aspects in theater production, such as stage design, lighting, makeup, and management. Acting as a Western-­style director for the first time in Chinese history, Hong demanded punctual arrival of all actors and repeatedly rehearsed with each actor—­no matter how famous he was—­to correct movements, gestures, and line delivery until he got it right; Hong aimed at adopting a natural and realist style at a time when theater was still dominated by actors. Hong met the most stubborn resistance, however, when he attempted to introduce actresses to play female roles, thanks to the ancient cross-­ dressing tradition, in which male performers (男旦) played female roles because women were discouraged from appearing on public stage; even “civilized drama” in the 1910s and 1920s inherited this practice despite various efforts at reforming traditional theater. To overcome this obstacle, Hong turned himself into an actor: he schemed the staging of Hu Shi’s The Main Event in Life—­in which young actresses played female roles—­as the first play in the program, and A Shrewd Woman (泼妇)—­in which seasoned male actors played female roles—­as the last play after intermission, with the pretense that well-­established male actors appearing in the last play would surely bring out more applause from the audiences at the curtain call. Surprisingly, the audience responded enthusiastically to the fresh and true-­to-­ life acting by young actresses in the first play but were turned off by the unnatural manners of the cross-­dressing actors in the second play, now set in [ 89 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers sharp contrast with the first.73 Hong transformed the audience as part of his “directing crew” to educate the cast about the urgent need for theater reform, therefore effectively ending an outdated practice while establishing himself as the new authority in modern theater. With regard to this episode in drama history, Megan Ammirati has provided a useful comparative perspective: whereas Hong’s “gender-­appropriate” casting is usually stressed for “the end of female impersonation,” the narratives of Restoration England and Japanese actress performance in the twentieth century “focus on the beginning of actresses’ rise to professionalization.” It is therefore important to bear in mind that “China’s difficulty with celebrating gender-­appropriate casting could also be due to its rich history with fluid gender performance” such as “male impersonation by female actors” as a “dominant performance practice.”74 Hong brought about a turning point in modern history: drama and gender studies scholars have credited Hu’s The Main Event in Life as the quintessential play of “Nora walking out of her patriarchal home” in imitation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Hu’s introduction of “Ibsenism” in 1919 as a significant event in women’s liberation during the May Fourth movement.75 I would further argue that Hong visualized Hu’s vision of women’s equality in a modern production that doubled the dramatic effect of Hu’s script: whereas Hu challenged a patriarchal tradition which had trapped women in real life in an arranged marriage, Hong’s stage production created a performance space for women to act for themselves and to speak in their own voices; true to Hu’s realist style, Hong created modern stage in directing, casting, acting, and stage management in with the same passion of Zhang Pengchun and others. Whereas 1923 marked a year in which Hong changed theater history in gender politics, 1930 stood out as a time when Hong acted the “right” part on the national and international stage, when he protested Harold Lloyd’s 1929 film Welcome Danger (不怕死) upon its release in the Grand Theater in Shanghai (大光明戏院). Deeply offended by its humiliating portrayal of “ugly” Chinese such as drug dealers and gamblers in a crime-­ridden Chinatown in San Francisco, Hong walked onto the stage, on February 22, right before the start of the film, delivered an impassioned speech against the film’s distortion of Chinese people, and called on the audiences to boycott the imperialist and racist film. His subsequent arrest by the police, and his colleagues’ demand for his release led to more drama in the public, when [ 90 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent leaders and activists in art, theater, film, education, government offices, and other mass organizations demanded banning the film.76 In a second act of performance in a court hearing, Hong found a perfect stage where he did not need to worry about pleasing his audiences because many shared his nationalist sentiment.77 Hong’s resounding success further clarified for him that his ambition of becoming a Chinese Ibsen could only be realized by responding to the needs of the people. Hong took part in the formation of the China Leftist Drama Troupe Alliance (中国左翼剧团联盟), together with the collaboration of more than fifty theater professionals in seven troupes in their joint effort to promote theater productions in a much-­ changed landscape of national salvation. If protesting a foreign movie landed Hong in a political theater, he played the role of a protagonist on an even larger stage during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. In 1942, for example, Hong gave one of his best theatrical performances in real life after the play he directed, Farewell, Hong Kong (再会吧,香港!), had been censored by the KMT authorities in Guilin. Hong still proceeded with the first act and captivated his audience with a spectacular stage design and an excellent cast. As the curtain rose for the second act, however, Hong walked onto the stage to inform the audience that they could not continue the show, thanks to the censors.78 Why couldn’t they stage a play against the Japanese aggressors? Hong asked his audience. Instantly, he rescripted real-­life experience into an existing play. Farewell, Hong Kong now embodied a new structure of a play within a play, with Farewell, Hong Kong as the inner play and his improvised speech against censorship as the outer play. The outer play interrupted the inner play while at the same time enriching the theatrical atmosphere. With an impressive figure as a famous actor, Hong improvised an “outer play” that featured himself as the protagonist and the KMT authorities as the antagonist, thus bringing to the foreground the implicit anti-­authority theme against the Nationalist government, which had originally been hidden in the inner play’s anti-­Japanese imperialist plot. Onstage, Hong thanked the audience for their support and offered ticket refunds. He broke into tears and rushed backstage to embrace his acting crew, crying together in their arms. The agitated audience did not want their money; instead, they rallied around him and hoped for another opportunity to see his production. Hong’s outer play against censorship therefore tactfully created what William Sauter terms “a theatrical event” [ 91 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers that emphasizes “the performer’s actions and the spectator’s reactions” as a “way of describing what performers and spectators do together in the making of ‘the theatrical event.’ ”79 Examining theatrical events both onstage and offstage, therefore, demonstrates the need to study them as interactive events and as an important approach in understanding theater’s search for an audience and for its own place in history, as exemplified by Hong. Hong’s own productions of theatrical events, as described earlier, took a dramatic turn in 1949, after the founding of the PRC. Whereas his pioneering effort at scripting realist plays for a popular audience paved the way for the socialist theater in the Maoist period—­as the following chapters will attest—­ironically, his illustrious accomplishments in the Republican period led him to an engaged but shortened career in the new China. Thanks to his excellent English, charming personality, and broad social network, upon Premier Zhou Enlai’s recommendation, he was appointed the deputy director of the Bureau of Foreign Cultural Relations under the Ministry of Culture and was elected vice president of the China Theater Association; these responsibilities left him without much opportunity to script and direct plays that he loved so much, therefore ironically concluding his theater career at a time when dramatists was promised a greater freedom in a new and democratic China, a topic I explore in chapter 4. Around his hectic schedule as a busy diplomat, Hong managed to direct two notable plays for the China Youth Art Theater. The first was A Cherished Dream of Forty Years (四十年的愿望), which premiered in 1953 and depicted the successful completion in 1952 of the Chengdu-­Chongqing Railroad (成渝 铁路) through challenging terrain in mountainous regions. The play celebrated an industrial miracle unimaginable in the several decades since the end of the Qing dynasty. With close to one hundred performances in Beijing and other cities, the play was chosen as one of the best new socialist dramas to accompany the third delegation to visit the battlefields in North Korea during the Korean War. Hong was reportedly so excited about this tour that he offered to play a minor character but was too busy to do so, thanks to his demanding schedule as the deputy leader of the delegation.80 In his spare time and during vacations, Hong directed a second play for the same theater, Xia Yan’s The Fascist Bacillus, first performed in Chongqing in 1942 when Hong codirected with Ying Yunwei 应云卫 to critical acclaim. [ 92 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent Hong explained his intention with this play: confronted with the problem of very few quality plays produced since 1949, he wanted to “revive the exemplary works since the May Fourth period,” a strategic move, in my view, to restage canonical plays in the critical realist tradition (批判现实主 义) before 1949 and reclaim them as an integral part of a “realist theater” in a new style now termed “socialist realism” (see chapter 4). Hong perceived an opportunity to carry forward the theater achievements of the Republican period or to put “old wine into a new bottle” that should work both for the PRC agenda of celebrating a new China, which had promised to provide a free stage for patriotic artists, and for fulfilling his own vision of a modern theater with aesthetic style and social impact. Hong listed three reasons to restage The Fascist Bacillus: first, the play combined an ideologically appropriate theme of depicting intellectuals’ consciousness in serving social justice against a blind faith in a “pure science” in a well-­scripted drama with artistic appeal. Second, the U.S.-­backed Korea War called for “our sacred mission in eliminating the Fascist bacillus,” which was spreading once again in the world. Third, some of the intellectuals who had lived in the “old society” in the Republican period still harbored erroneous beliefs in “science conquering all” (科学至上) and a tendency to “deviate from political engagement” (脱离政治), as seen in the lead character of The Fascist Bacillus; these intellectuals needed to raise their political consciousness in socialist society (see chapter  6 for more discussion of The Fascist Bacillus). 81 Hong’s tentative effort to cross the politically opposed boundaries between Republican and PRC cultures resembled his earlier attempt to cautiously navigate the KMT and CCP divides in his wartime theater practice, as examined previously, therefore leaving behind an exemplary work of the May Fourth period on the PRC stage, and sadly, his long creative work before his death in 1955. Figure 2.2 illustrates the realistic style that imitated the characters’ life in Japan in costume, makeup, and stage designs that Hong was known for, which yielded an impressive production by the China Youth Art Theater. Hong’s 1954 essay, moreover, left a record for theater historians of his endeavor in preserving the original interpretation of his 1942 production of the play in the context of World War II while at the same time arguing for its legitimate place on the PRC stage to meet the changing tastes of the audiences.82 A minor character of a worker, Hong explained as an example, [ 93 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

FIGURE 2.2 Xia Yan, The Fascist Bacillus. China Youth Art Theater, 1954. Director: Hong Shen; stage designers: Zhang Zhengyu, Liu Junmin, and others. Source: From Yu Lin, ed., The China Youth Art Theater (n.p., n.d.), 8.

was toned down from his original image as “one from the underworld” (江湖形象), so that audiences would more likely to accept him as a member of the proletarian class, now the “masters of the socialist state.” By the same token, a mistress from a wealthy family in the original script was revised from a heartless flirt into a patriot who donated to the war effort [ 94 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent against Japanese aggressors while retaining her Westernized lifestyle grown out of her Hong Kong background.83 Hong’s 1954 production was therefore “an initial experiment” to “sort through” and “inherit” all the revolutionary traditions in order to “further develop and enrich theater practice for our country and people.”84 For the same act of restaging classics from the Republican period, Tian Han subsequently was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution as the “forerunner of a black line of bourgeois literature and art” (资产阶级文艺黑线的祖师爷); both Hong and Ouyang Yuqian fortunately escaped such a tragic fate owing, unfortunately, to their “timely” deaths before the Cultural Revolution. Written one year before his death in 1955, this essay was one of the very few Hong produced after 1949. In his lifelong effort to write theater history, as exemplified in his 1935 introduction to the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, and his 1948 “Chinese Theater Movement and Education” discussed earlier, Hong documented his footsteps in the PRC theater and what he believed was a peaceful transformation. He treaded guardedly in  the zigzagging course of political campaigns after 1949, such as the national “movement to reform the ideological outlook” (思想改造运动) while still cherishing a hope that he could still pursue his theater dream in a new state. *

*

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Sixty years after Hong’s death, what has happened to his legacy? From the perspective of the aesthetic development of theater in the twentieth century, Hong’s pioneering endeavors at experimenting with modernist theater, as seen in his Yama Zhao, eventually bore fruit in the 1980s when post-­ Mao dramatists continued his legacy in search of an aesthetically pleasing and politically liberating theater, as exemplified in Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian’s 高行健 modernist plays such as Bus Stop (车站) and A Wildman (野人).85 Liu Jinyun’s 刘锦云 Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (狗儿爷涅盘), however, more closely resembles Hong’s Yama Zhao. Similar to Hong’s sociological concerns of the warlord period and its psychological effects on soldiers drafted from among dirt-­poor peasants, Liu’s panoramic view of the collective agricultural movement and its tragic impact on the peasant’s life explained the land-­ obsessed mentality of Uncle Doggie, who is elated to own his own land right after the founding of the PRC only to lose it to the collective movement. Uncle Doggie’s depression, anxiety, and paranoia lead him to live [ 95 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers alone in the mountains in his own world of illusions and fear; like Yama Zhao, Uncle Doggie relies heavily on monologues with himself and others in his dream world. Analogous to Hong’s portrayal of Yama Zhao, Liu also explored the stream of consciousness technique in depicting Uncle Doggie’s survival in an “oppressive pseudo-­world” and as “a simple Chinese man of plain stock with a sense of justice and correct human relations,” according to Marián Gálik’s depiction of Zhao.86 The stunning staging of Liu’s Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana by the Beijing People’s Art Theater in 1986 proved to be a landmark event in theater history for Lin Zhaohua’s 林兆华 “second creation” in directing and staging, with talented stage design and management, essential aspects of theater that Hong had demanded for serious study in his 1935 introduction. Before the socialist period, Hong—­following Zhang Pengchun’s pioneering efforts during his tenure at Nankai School—­was instrumental in establishing a professional directing system against the early 1920s and actor-­centered practice such as improvisations. Lin’s achievements in the second creation further developed his predecessor Jiao Juyin’s 焦菊隐 legendary directing of Lao She’s The Dragon Beard Ditch (龙须沟) and Teahouse (茶馆), to be discussed in the following chapter on the theater of the 1950s. In more recent years, scholars such as Rossella Ferrari, in her insightful study Pop Goes the Avant-­Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China, have examined Meng Jinghui’s 孟京辉 experimental theater, his contradictory relationships with Western counterparts, his mainstream popularity, and his success in merging the popular with the avant-­garde on the contemporary stage. As Claire Conceison has rightly pointed out, Ferrari’s study, as fundamentally “a study of Meng in the framework of the avant-­ garde in China,” “positions him as an important catalyst—­a force shaping, promoting, and redefining the avant-­garde as both an aesthetic trajectory and a market commodity.”87 Conceison’s own expert translations of Meng’s representative plays have further enriched our understanding of Chinese theater, which found a road less traveled, and yet much admired, from Hong’s Yama Zhao to its most recent manifestations.88 Taking Hong’s Yama Zhao and Cao Yu’s Wilderness as early examples of expressionist combined with realist techniques, Yuwen Hsiung further explored six expressionist playwrights from the early 1980s to the 1990s—­Gao Xingjian, Lin Zhaohua, Huang Zuolin 黄佐临, Xu Xiaozhong 徐晓钟, Meng Jinghui, and Stan Lai 赖声 川—­a nd their discursive practice as seen in their works.89 [ 96 ]

Hong Shen and His Discontent As for the modernization of Peking opera ( jingju) in lockstep with the development of huaju, Xing Fan’s excellent Staging Revolution explored what it was to be modern, Chinese, and revolutionary in the model Peking operas perfected during the radical years of the Cultural Revolution, contextualizing this old style theater “at the intersection of history, artistry, and aesthetics” and emphasizing “constant artistic experimentations to accommodate the modern stories and characters” within the “framework and the eventual formation of a new sense of beauty” in jingju.90 Hong and his peers would have been pleased to see how contemporary scholarship on Chinese theater by Western and Chinese scholars has finally come together in moving beyond binary opposites between traditional and modern, China and the West, theory and practice, and politics and aesthetics, as explored in Hong’s pioneering first introduction to a history of huaju.

[ 97 ]

THREE

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Cross-­Dressing, Drama Schools, and Theater Reforms

Army flags flutter, 战旗在飘荡, 号角声声悲壮。 Bugle blowing triumphant. From the central plains to the Hunan rivers, 从中原到三湘, 敌人还肆着疯狂。 Enemies madly advance. Though victory in sight, 胜利虽已经在望, 当今的困难, Hard times of today, 等待我们这一代担当。 Wait for our generation to bring an end. Arise, 起来, 中华的知识儿女， Sons and daughters of Chinese intellectuals, Let’s mobilize all the forces, 快动员一切力量, 走向反攻的战场。 March to the battlefield for a new offense. We are pioneers of the masses, 我们是大众的先驱, We are bridges between the army and the people. 我们是军民的桥梁。 We are diligent sowers of seeds, 我们是辛勤的播种者, 要把这文化的种子, We sow the seeds of culture, 带到每一条战线， To every war front, To every village. 每一座村庄。 Listen, our motherland calls upon us, 听吧，祖国在呼唤, 让我们再出发，再歌唱, Let us start our journey again and sing, 直到祖国的原野, Till the vast land of our country 洋溢着自由的光芒。 Fills with the brilliant sunlight of freedom. —­“Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin” [ 98 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream IN 1944, TIAN HAN wrote “Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin” (桂林文化界抗敌工作队队员之歌) to commemorate the departure of theater performers at the conclusion of the First Southwest Drama Festival, which, presided over by him, Ouyang Yuqian, and others, showcased twenty-­ odd productions of huaju performed in the city of Guilin.1 This song exemplifies theater artists’ self-­identity as traveling “cultural workers” to the battlefields against Japanese aggression, as “pioneers of the masses,” and as “bridges between the army and people.” In contrast to his earlier lyric, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!” in the national anthem, Tian Han’s new line of “arise, sons and daughters of Chinese intellectuals” in this song placed the “cultural workers” above the enslaved masses in order to enlighten them. Understandably, this drama festival has often been cited a landmark event during which theater artists mobilized the masses for the war effort while creating a golden period of drama. In the writings of Ouyang Yuqian, Tian Han, and Hong Shen, and especially in the literary histories partially based on their self-­narratives, “cultural workers” in the Republican period and “new cultural workers” in the PRC appeared as collective and self-­ identifiers to graft individuals into history. It is important to note, ­however, that Ouyang, before he breathed his last in 1962, dictated his will: “Who am I? I am an active participant in the drama movement” (戏剧运动的积极 分子). All his endeavors, as an actor, scriptwriter, director, educator, and researcher, in huaju, folk opera 歌剧, local operas, and dance dramas, are “for this purpose only and he had never retreated from this position.”2 His last will expressed his urgent desire to “leave behind a definitive conclusion on the coffin lid” (为自己盖棺定论) with regard to his self-­identity, probably to fence off future simplistic glorifications of his official labels such as an excellent member of the CCP, vice president of the China Theater Association, president of the China Dancers Association, president of the Central Academy of Drama (中央戏剧学院), president of China Central Experimental Theater, and the list goes on, enumerated during his memorial in 1962.3 Forty-­seven years later, in 2009, during a national conference to commemorate Ouyang’s 120th  birthday, celebrated figures once again lauded his patriotic spirit in “shouldering the sacred mission” in creating history and “reflecting the voice and will of the people.”4 Ouyang’s last words also echoed his earlier statement in his often-­cited essay titled “Since I Began [ 99 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Acting” (自我演戏以来), written in 1932: “I am only an actor (伶人), an ordinary (平淡的) actor.” In this autobiographical writing, Ouyang preserved his  personal journey and theater conventions involving numerous key players in traditional theaters, modern drama, and film. As Song Baozhen has pointed out, his witness accounts throughout his entire career, his reflections on theater practice, and his “epoch-making drama criticism” (史诗性戏剧批评) have not been surpassed by any of the contemporary dramatic research.5

An Overview of Ouyang’s Career Exploring his last words as a key by which to unlock his life story, this chapter starts with an overview of Ouyang’s career in a historic century, an overview that proceeds in ten-­year increments, beginning in 1911, when Ouyang returned from Japan to embark on his professional career; then moving on to 1921, at the end of his experiments with the Nantong Acting School (南通伶工学社), where he combined Western arts with Chinese xiqu in training new actors; 1931, when he concluded his leadership of Guangdong Drama Institute (广东戏剧研究所), where he had built a theater, trained actors, scripted plays, published theater journals, and promoted drama criticism; 1941, when his influential history drama The Loyal King Li Xiucheng was performed to resounding success during the war period; 1951, when he led and participated in the Rectification Campaign in the art circle; and finally 1961, which witnessed the successful productions of his two representative plays. With this approach, rather than see Ouyang’s career as a downhill spiral toward politicization, propaganda, and victimization, I emphasize his creative energies in turning crisis into opportunities in pursuit of a transnational theater aesthetics across temporal and spatial boundaries.

1911: Before and After the Spring Willow Society In 1911, Ouyang returned to Hunan Province to embark on his professional career upon completing three years of performing with Spring Willow Society in Japan (1907–­1910), therefore embarking on his early post-­Japan [ 100 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream years (1911 to 1919) during which he established himself as the most illuminous Peking opera actor in the South impersonating female roles while pioneering huaju practice and productions in Shanghai and in Hunan Province. The epoch-­making year of 1911, when the Republic of China was founded after the overthrowal of the Qing court, signified a fascinating beginning for Ouyang, from Tokyo to Shanghai—­before and after Spring Willow Society. Born in 1889, and nine years older than Tian Han, Ouyang studied in Japan at age thirteen in 1902, a decade earlier than Tian’s arrival in 1916 at age eighteen. During his six years in Japan, Tian enjoyed a public sphere in Tokyo where leftist and rightist, political and materialist, decadent and revolutionary tendencies coexisted; Tian’s journey from Tokyo to Shanghai, an equally modern metropolis in East Asia, carried with him cultural and artistic imprints of Tokyo, thus pointing to an alternative approach to understanding his generation of writers as mostly the May Fourth generation.6 From 1912 to 1916, Hong Shen was still a student active in campus drama at the Qinghua School (清华学校) in Beijing, where he drafted outlines for scenario plays for his peers to improvise dialogues in order to win a drama competition prize.7 Hong arrived in Columbus, Ohio, in 1916, fourteen years later than Ouyang’s arrival in Japan in 1902, and he returned to Shanghai in 1922 after having studied theater at Harvard University and practiced his trade in New York and Boston. In contrast, even though sharing similar journeys between Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, or New York, Ouyang’s tenure in Japan contains interrelated, though distinct, dimensions. Ouyang brought to Japan his lifelong dream of impersonating female roles in Peking opera, which he had harbored since the age of ten, when he felt a surge of emotions both “fun and sad” upon watching a fascinating performance of a young female role (花旦).8 He grew up watching operas and acting his own child show for friends and relatives and staged his first xiqu performance in Tokyo in 1909. His accomplished Shanghai period included more than a decade of impersonating female roles, cultivating stardom equal to that of Mei Lanfang, as seen in the then popular phrase “Ouyang in the south and Mei in the north” (南欧北梅). Unlike the usual practice of xiqu actors starting their years of training as apprentices to master performers, as seen in Mei’s case, Ouyang taught himself through watching and imitating star performers. His acting skills [ 101 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers also derived from real-­life experience: in playing the role of an old lady, he drew inspirations from “three model women,” his maternal and fraternal grandmothers and his aunt, each of whom possessed the unique personalities for his dramatic character.9 His theory and practice of acting therefore predated the PRC slogan “art came from life but is superior to life” (源于生 活，高于生活). Ouyang’s cross-­dressing for female roles is unique among theater founders and early practitioners. Yet his passion for performing Peking opera equaled his attraction to what Siyuan Liu termed “a hybrid theater” in Japan, which included shinpa (新派), shigeki (新剧), and civilized drama (文明 戏), during his Tokyo years. While challenging the enshrining of the June 1907 premiere of The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven in Tokyo as “modern Chinese theater’s curtain-­raising act,”10 Liu argued for the play’s equal significance as “a harbinger of wenmingxi’s ideological and performative hybridities in its mixture of nationalist message and entertainment values in addition to unabashed borrowing of Chinese, Japanese, and Western performance conventions.”11 It was in this cross-­cultural and multigenre production that Ouyang debuted his acting career, playing the role of Little George as well as impersonating a female dancer, and participated in combining Western drama style, Japanese shinpa theater, and Chinese operatic use of a fluid space, in which characters move freely without the rigid structure of individual acts. This practice of singing and dancing, which, according to Siyuan Liu, “would become a major part of wenmingxi’s hybrid identity as well as its major liability in the eyes of huaju purists,” 12 paradoxically sowed the seeds of Ouyang’s forthcoming career in pioneering multigenre theaters, in which he excelled in reformed Peking opera, wenmingxi, huaju, film, and the gui opera of Guangxi Province, as well as training theater professionals in all areas. Throughout his career since he left Tokyo in 1910, Ouyang succeeded in the sinicization of Western theaters through performance practice. His persistent efforts in constructing a synthetic theater resulted in his successful modernization of xiqu through learning from Western theater practice. Indeed, very few in his generation so well integrated the dichotomies between the West and the Chinese, the Japanese and the Chinese, the traditional and the modern, the expressive and symbolic art of xiqu and the realist, modernist, and romantic art of huaju, through his multiple talents in acting, scripting, directing, stage management, and dramatic criticism and education. [ 102 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Equally important is the fact that our knowledge of early history was largely based on Ouyang’s own accounts, which historians often cite in their writings on the beginnings of modern theater. According to his memoir, for example, some Japanese critics praised The Black Slave as a better production than the professional performances of their own countrymen. Even though the play was adapted from the 1901 Chinese translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this amateur student show was indeed the first complete written script in Chinese created for stage production and hence in a “purely huaju format,” with separate acts and dialogue only.13 According to Ouyang, it was also the first professionally directed play (by a well-­k nown Japanese shinpa star), thus departing from the existing practice of impromptu acting. Third, it was professionally managed in terms of advertising, costumes, playbill, and ticket sales. Via the influence of Japanese shinpa, Ouyang and his peers were exposed to the European romantic style while “moving closer to the old theater of traditional Chinese xiqu” as seen in certain aspects from the rehearsal to the performance of The Black Slave.14 After his return to Shanghai in 1912, Ouyang played a key role in transplanting the Spring Willow style to Shanghai, where the Spring Willow Theater (春柳剧场) staged more than eighty wenmingxi from 1912 to 1921 and contributed to the greatest period of flourishing of wenmingxi.15 Ouyang’s early career presents a contrasting view to Hong Shen’s negative critique of wenmingxi as having “failed” around 1917 and 1918 in his “Introduction,” the first history of modern Chinese drama discussed in chapter 1.16 On the contrary, thanks to his persistent effort as the only surviving Spring Willow member, Ouyang thrived in his career during this period precisely because wenmingxi has been characterized in drama history as a transitional theater that is “neither Chinese nor Western” (不中 不西), “both Chinese and Western” (亦中亦西), “neither new nor old” (不新 不旧), and “both new and old” (亦新亦旧).17 He was a transcendental figure who broke all barriers while at the same time stitching diverse performance styles together to create his own personal style.18

1921: Art, Capitalism, and Commercialism 1921 has frequently been glorified as the founding year of the CCP, an earthshaking event that changed the course of modern China, together with [ 103 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers 1919, when the May Fourth movement supposedly paved the way for ushering modernity and rejuvenation. The three years from 1919 to 1921 are recounted in cultural history as an epoch-­making era. No studies, however, have assessed these three years as having expressed a “faded dream” in the context of theater history. In 1919, Ouyang had given up his lucrative career in Shanghai as a popular Peking opera star after having successfully produced a series of Dream of the Red Chamber plays (红楼戏) in order to accept Zhang Jian’s invitation to preside over Nantong Acting school while supervising the construction of the Gengsu Theater (更俗剧场). “Gengsu” means “changing the old practice,” which expressed Ouyang’s dream of “training actors with knowledge” while he “thoroughly reformed er’huang opera” (二 黄戏).19 In the sad year of 1921, however, a despondent Ouyang had no choice but to return to Shanghai after his disillusioned experiments with the acting school. Contextualizing the founding of this school in the early 1920s, it is important to recall the historic role of Zhang Jian, labeled by President Xi Jinping in 2020 as “a pioneer and a model for Chinese private entrepreneurs.” Visiting the first private museum in modern China, which Zhang built, Xi pointed to the significant role of private business alongside government-­run companies. From 1899 to the mid-­1920s, Zhang prospered in building factories, a cotton mill, a shipping company, and an agricultural enterprise, and more. Celebrated as the most forward-­looking in the 1920s, Nantong, Zhang’s hometown, benefited from his foresights in investing his profits from local industries into social welfare and public institutions: Zhang financed more than three hundred facilities, including banks, museums, nursing homes, orphanages, hospitals, and libraries. Equally influential were his accomplishments in inaugurating one of the first teacher’s colleges in China as part of his endeavors in developing Nantong’s modern educational system, which featured around 240 elementary schools and several universities, including the earlier components of what later transformed into Fudan University and Nanjing University. Through twenty years of hard work and prophetic vision, Zhang transplanted almost all areas of Western education into Nantong in the fields of general education (普通教育), teacher’s education (师范教育), professional education (职业 教育), general education (通俗教育), and special education (特殊教育), such as the school for deaf people (聋哑学校) in China.20 [ 104 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Honored as a talented “gentry businessman” (士绅商人), Zhang played an irreplaceable role of go-­between who navigated between the sometimes conflicting interests of the government-­affiliated business and private enterprises while serving as their spokesperson in his dual identities.21 Winning the title “Number One Scholar in the Country” (状元) at age forty-­ two after twenty years of endless study marked him as a reluctant cultural elite who thrived in an autocratic system with a vision of “saving the country with industry” (工业救国) and “saving the country with education” (教育救国). Zhang’s story of “Zhuangyuan diving into the business world” confirmed that the emerging entrepreneurs could not be merely dismissed as greedy, selfish, and materialistic: they are indeed courageous pioneers unsurpassed by people from other walks of life.22 The tales of Zhang, however, seldom mentioned his artistic endeavors; our discussion of Ouyang thus recovers a lesser-­k nown episode that connects theater with business, or another alternative approach of “saving the country with arts” (艺术救国). Attracted to Zhang’s financial resources and a shared passion for operatic art, Ouyang moved his family to Nantong and traveled to Japan to investigate the most updated theater designs and equipment for building the Gengsu Theater. Most significantly, Ouyang envisioned his first modern acting school as a training ground for a new generation of well-­rounded actors, one that combined traditional theater training with a modern curriculum that included English, history, Chinese, geography, math, gymnastics, music, and dance to cultivate students’ overall qualities in art and culture. Such a rigorous formal training inevitably alienated his colleagues who advocated a quick turnaround of new actors to produce new shows for ticket sales to support the school. Their emphasis on commercial theater clashed with Ouyang’s elite art training. Zhang Jian’s dwindling financial support as he experienced factory bankruptcies also added insult to injury and resulted in Ouyang’s failure to sustain a modern school; Ouyang subsequently acknowledged that perhaps it was a bit impractical for him to insist on bringing a Western symphony orchestra into his curriculum in an attempt to incorporate Western opera into xiqu.23 Theater artists nevertheless remembered Zhang Jian’s “theatrical” life one hundred years later, as seen in a xi opera (锡剧), Great Master (大先生), that depicted Zhang’s early success in turning a wetland into a cotton field to establish his first textile factory while changing poverty-­stricken [ 105 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers peasants’ life for the better. His courage and wisdom in modernizing the country remained an inspiration in contemporary China.24 Performing in the local xi opera of Jiangsu Province, Great Master honored at once a model capitalist, a regional theatrical tradition, and, implicitly, Ouyang’s lifelong efforts in opera reform on the local and national level and its latest artistic achievements. Ouyang left his engrained mark in the history of theater institutions in his Nantong years when he trained approximately ninety actors, produced more than forty shows of Peking opera, Kun opera, and huaju. His invitations to luminous opera stars such as Mei Lanfang, Yang Xiaolou 杨小楼, Cheng Yanqiu 程砚秋, and Gai Jiaotian 盖叫天 to perform in the Gengsu Theater were preludes to Tian Han’s Fish and Dragon performances during his Southern Drama Society period, when stars and students mingled in school activities and dramatic productions, as discussed in chapter  1. Ouyang’s ten-­day grand performance with Mei in January 1920 in Nantong likewise became a watershed event that showcased two most brilliant Peking opera stars on one stage.

1931: Beyond the Guangdong Drama Institute Ten years later, the year 1931 brought about another defeat in Ouyang’s theater dream. Despite his belief that he had “accomplished nothing” during his Nantong years,25 Ouyang continued his efforts in pursuing his dual quest for art creation and financial stability once again in 1929, this time encouraged by what seemed to be a stable financial support from a local government. He moved to Guangzhou upon accepting the invitation of the provincial government of Guangdong to establish the Guangdong Theater Research Institute (广东戏剧研究所), which included an acting school, a small theater for teaching and research, and a large theater for public performance. Additionally, Ouyang organized an acting department, which included both xiqu and huaju, a music school with a Western orchestra, and a teacher’s training program. Meanwhile, he presided over the publication of a major journal, titled Theater (戏剧) which brought out twelve volumes with 110 issues.26 During his three years in Guangdong, Ouyang coached numerous artists in theater, film, and music; scripted and translated about thirty plays; and wrote several important theoretical essays on the theater.27 [ 106 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Throughout the war years, Ouyang continued to advance his theater dream with his gui opera reform, which peaked in 1939, when he was invited by the local authorities in the city of Guilin to preside over the Gui Opera Experimental Theater (桂剧实验剧团) and a gui opera training school. During his two sojourns in Guilin, which totaled seven years, Ouyang achieved artistic success in adapting his own Peking opera scripts of The Peach Blossom Fan (桃花扇) and Liang Hongyu (梁红玉) into gui operas through combining techniques from Peking opera, huaju, and other regional xiqu. In fact, during his Guilin years, Ouyang experimented with what was subsequently termed as “transforming plays, performers, and system” (改戏，改人，改制), which, according to Fu Jin, happened after 1949 in the PRC.28 Ouyang’s endeavors in introducing directing system, stage designs, and traditional repertoire reform finally metamorphosed gui opera from an insignificant local practice into one of the “ten big xiqu genres.”29 His gui opera reform in fact predated ping opera reform (平剧改革) in Yan’an, which Mao Zedong celebrated as an epoch-­making theater reform never witnessed in history. Drama historians have argued that the CCP’s decision to established Yan’an Ping Opera Research Institute (延安平剧研究院) in 1942 and Mao’s inscription of “bringing forth the new from the old” (推陈出新) in commending the institute’s founding marked the beginning of xiqu reform. By his own practice and theory, however, Ouyang had already succeeded in “making the foreign serve China” (洋为中用) and “making the ancient serve the present” (古为今用), which Mao subsequently proposed in 1964 in response to a student from the Central Music Academy (中央音乐学院) who complained about her college’s predominant teaching of Western music at the expense of Chinese folk and revolutionary music.30 In the larger scheme of things, moreover, Ouyang’s deep roots in Guilin played a key role in converting Guilin during the war period into the “Cultural City of Guilin,” where cultural figures collaborated in a flourishing performance scene during the war years.31

1951: The Rectification Campaign I will skip over the year 1941 until the end of this chapter to examine more comprehensively the 1940s as a complex and transitional period to the PRC. Suffice it to note that thanks to his prestige of a prominent leader [ 107 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers during the war period, Ouyang was appointed as the director of the Organization Committee of the Chinese Xiqu Improvement Bureau (中华全国戏曲改 进会筹委会) in 1951, three years after the founding of the PRC. Elected as the first president of China Dancer Association in 1953, he scripted and directed the first dance drama of the PRC, titled Peace Dove (和平鸽), which combined Western ballet and Chinese folk dance to reflect a nationalistic theme against U.S. imperialists during the Korean War.32 Transforming the classic choreography of the elegant Odette in Swan Lake into a courageous peace-­ loving dove rescued by Shanghai workers from the bullies of a U.S. imperialist, who now replaced Von Rothbart, the evil sorcerer in the original ballet, Peace Dove became a signature piece that paved the way for the creation of model revolutionary ballets such as The White-­Haired Girl (白毛女) and The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军) during the Cultural Revolution. Ouyang’s persistent pursuit of his theater dream in the Republican period could partially explain why, upon the founding of the PRC, he embraced his new positions as president of the Central Academy of Drama in 1950 and as president of the China Central Experimental Theater in 1956. With the new socialist state’s financial backing for theater as a national art, Ouyang probably perceived in the two new institutions a rejuvenation of his Nantong dream, in which the Nantong Acting School was supposed to work in tandem with the Gengsu Theater, each playing a complementary role in actor training and onstage experiments without worrying about any financial payoff. Seen in this context, one could understand better his tireless efforts in running these two institutions until the very end of his life, especially if one recalls his early lament in the failure of the Spring Willow endeavors: “How can we succeed if we try to pursue art but worry about money at the same time?” “At that time, our perception of art was too shallow.”33 Pursuing his theater dream under a different regime, nevertheless, calls for compromise and strategy, which would explain why, in the same year of 1951, Ouyang spoke at a mobilization meeting to initiate a rectification movement in the circle of art in Beijing, a campaign aimed at criticizing anti–­Communist Party artists and intellectuals, together with Zhou Yang, Lao She, and Ding Ling.34 Conventional wisdom would describe his speech as merely a reluctant act for his own survival or as an example of the suppression of artists’ creative energies. I would argue that the PRC’s financial support for theater organizations—­at least seen in 1951, when many artists [ 108 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream still believed in the CCP’s promise of a better life—­offered Ouyang and his peers a reason to embrace a new socialist theater. Additionally, new socialist theater’s mission to serve the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers provided new possibilities for a past practice never lasted, as seen in Chen Dabei’s five-­year experiment in promoting peasant theater in Ding County 定县, Heibei Province, in order to achieve “the popularization of theater” (戏剧大众化).35 To Ouyang and his peers, the new PRC theater mandate seemed to offer an idealistic solution for a previous dilemma: whereas theater’s impact on the people provided the broadest audience possible, theater artists could count on the benefit of a stable government support with regular salaries without fearing the pitfall of commercialism and the fate of starving artists.

1961: The Hatred of Black Slaves and The Peach Blossom Fan In 1961, when the China Central Experimental Theater formally rehearsed a nine-­act huaju titled The Hatred of Black Slaves, Ouyang’s declining health prevented him from directing the play, but he wrote elaborate notes on the past and present of his beloved The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven, from which The Hatred of Black Slaves was adapted.36 A participant in its original 1907 production, Ouyang had spent ten days while in a hospital bed writing his new script in 1957, revising George into a revolutionary figure with “organizational skills” who “dared to act” and to “sacrifice himself for others.” Black people’s anti-­imperialist and anticolonialist struggle continued in Africa, which prompted Ouyang to keep original plot points that worked with this contemporary theme while deleting others that did not.37 His original reading of the 1907 play as a protest against racism in America now blended perfectly with Maoist Cold War sentiment against the capitalist West. The play’s restaging was also planned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the inception of huaju in light of what then seemed the promising early years of the PRC, during which Ouyang was able to overcome liberalism (自由主义) in order to devote himself to the socialist cause.38 Leaders of the dramatic circles such as Tian Han, Cao Yu, and Jin Shan 金山 praised the production as “true-­to-­life, touching, and exciting,” especially the impressive acting style of Tom and the meticulously directed scene that focused on his family (figure 3.1),39 together with its competent stage and [ 109 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers

FIGURE 3.1 Ouyang Yuqian, The Hatred of Black Slaves. China Central Experimental Theater, 1961. Director: Sun Weishi; stage designers: Qi Mudong and Cheng Xun. Source: From Wang Zhengchun and Xian Jihua, eds., China Central Experimental Theater (n.p., 1996), 34.

lighting designs accompanied by the recurring music of “Ol’ Man River” (老人河) from the 1927 American musical Show Boat; the song’s comparing the indifferent flowing of the Mississippi River to the never-­ending sufferings of Black people helped complete the director’s pursuit of total artistic effects with lyrical emotions.40 Such creative adaptation of the 1907 The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven, however, had likewise occurred in the revolutionary war period for its political relevance to the Chinese society. During the Red Army period (1927–­1937), The Black Slave was revised as Peasant Slaves (农奴) by an amateur [ 110 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream soldiers’ group to promote class struggle against rich landowners.41 As a celebration of the First Congress of the Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers convened in Ruijin 瑞金 in 1931, Peasant Slaves explored the original play’s antislavery theme to stimulate a Red Theater movement (红色戏剧) led by early founders of the Red Army theater such as Li Bozhao 李伯钊. Li received her communist education in the Soviet Union with a passion for performing arts, inspired by Ouyang’s early theater achievements; now appointed as vice president of the Central Academy of Drama, Li and Ouyang jointly led this first-­rate college, which produced countless theater and film artists throughout the PRC period. Their team benefited from the brilliant career of Sun Weishi 孙維世, whose directing of The Hatred of Black Slaves blended Chinese xiqu with the Stanislavski system of acting, in which she was trained in Moscow during World War II. A newly established professional theater beyond the war period provided fertile ground to experiment with new forms of arts that could best combine the Soviet socialist with the American antislavery tale to denounce American imperialism. The year 1961 also witnessed the second production of Ouyang’s huaju The Peach Blossom Fan after its first show in 1957. These two PRC performances to a large extent perfected Ouyang’s 1946 huaju version by the same title, which is regarded as one of the highest achievements of his career and of the 1940s theater in general.42 Ouyang’s huaju was adapted from a Southern-­style opera completed by early Qing dynasty playwright Kong Shangren 孔尚任 in 1699. Based mostly on real historical figures after exhaustive reading of historical documents, Kong reflected in his opera his own explanation of “the reasons for the collapse of the Southern Ming court in Nanking in 1645”43 through the dramatization of a tragic love story between a famous courtesan, Li Xiangjun 李香君, and a student scholar, Hou Fangyu 侯方域.44 Both Li and Hou remained loyal to the defeated Ming court and to their passionate love: after Hou’s imprisonment and Li’s being beaten upon her refusal to be sent to the inner court to please the lust of the emperor, both became religious acolytes upon hearing a Daoist master’s teaching not to cling to their romantic yeaning in a world in chaos. As Judith  T. Zeitlin points out, Kong “simultaneously bridged and maintained the gap separating past and present that gives historic drama its suggestiveness and power.”45 As a remaking of this tradition, Ouyang’s 1946 adaptation addressed a new contemporary crisis in a national crisis “authenticated” by its historical precedence. While inheriting Kong’s exposing of the corruption of the Ming [ 111 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers officials and lovers’ separation, Ouyang changed the tragic ending into a more powerful one: Hou capitulated to corrupt officials and switched his  loyalty to the new political order of the Qing court, which caused Li to die of heartbreak, thereby expanding Kong’s employment of “the emotions entailed by separation and union, to depict feelings about rise and fall” of one’s country (借离合之情, 写兴亡之感).46 Ouyang’s huaju version of The Peach Blossom Fan was therefore noted in the PRC period as superior to that of Kong’s for his mastery of historical materials and a deeper understanding of contemporary reality.47 Similar to his other reform plays, ­Ouyang put the new wine of a patriotic theme against traitors into the old bottle of a tragic love story, enriching huaju repertoire through transforming a traditional xiqu script with a lasting impact on the socialist stage. ­Figure 3.2 illustrates actors’ impressive training in and graceful adaptation of xiqu conventions such as gestures and body language blended into huaju performance. Examining the legacy of Ouyang, Chen Ke once asked: How did Ouyang transcend dramatic traditions from the East and the West, excel in both

FIGURE 3.2 Ouyang Yuqian, The Peach Blossom Fan. China Central Experimental Theater, 1957. Director: Ouyang Yuqian; stage designer: Li Chang. Source: From Wang Zhengchun and Xuan Jihua, eds., China Central Experimental Theater (n.p., 1996), 29. [ 112 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream xiqu and huaju, and combine theater theory and practice unsurpassed in history? Chen pointed out that from the beginning of his career, Ouyang only wanted to be a “barely competent actor.” To illustrate this point, Chen examined Ouyang’s most accomplished feast in adapting nine xiqu plays from the classical fiction The Dream of the Red Chamber. With the sole purpose of filling the house, Ouyang “scripted” his plays as he was performing them, streamlined the novel’s sprawling episodes into individual acts with more concentrated conflicts, and provided minor characters with more plots, therefore reforming the opera’s old practice of lead actors dominating the stage. By dramatizing innovative and popular episodes according to the taste of the audiences, Ouyang explored the best Chinese xiqu style to stage the most classic fiction.48 By the same token, The Peach Blossom Fan shared similar legacy in transforming ancient texts into contemporary theater successes, therefore keeping its appeals from 1937, when he first adapted The Peach Blossom Fan into a Peking opera after Japan’s occupation of Shanghai, out of his grief and indignation; due to the needs of the time, he only borrowed a few key plots from Kong’s original text “without attempting to be faithful to it.”49 After three days of rehearsal, this Peking opera was enthusiastically received by audiences but was forced to close after only two performances.50 His adaptation of a gui opera by the same title was equally popular in Guilin in the 1940s and has been acknowledged as an integral part of the booming theater scene under the leadership of Tian Han and himself. The restaging of the huaju version in 1961 celebrated the prior history of this play. It also paradoxically concluded his career: in 1962, three thousand VIPs, from state leaders to cultural elites, attended his funeral; in 2020, the Central Academy of Drama restaged The Peach Blossom Fan to commemorate his 130th birthday and to celebrate his brilliant career as well as his dedicated leadership as its first president.

1941 and Beyond: War, Theater, and Revolution As a founder of huaju, Ouyang wrote or revised more than forty huajus, directed fifty of them, scripted or adapted fifty some xiqu pieces, and wrote or directed thirteen films. Drama historians considered his 1941 huaju The Loyal King Li Xiucheng as his best of the war period.51 [ 113 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Before diving into the play, I will contextualize it in the most flourishing theater period in the unoccupied areas of Chongqing and Guilin from 1938 to 1945. From October to May of each year, when Chongqing, a hilly city surrounded by rivers, was shrouded by heavy mist and hence sheltered from Japanese air raids, a yearly event called the Misty Season Drama Festival (雾季公演) provided wartime drama its best opportunity to thrive, as seen in 1944, which alone witnessed 118 drama performances by different drama troupes. Among the best-­k nown pieces are Cao Yu’s Metamorphosis (蜕变, 1940) and Peking Man (北京人, 1940) and Guo Moruo’s history play Qu Yuan (屈原, 1942), which depicted the title hero (about 340–­278 bce) as a tragic poet whose patriotic spirit in fighting against the status quo made the drama a success with audiences. Hong Shen’s best wartime script, Air Force General (飞将军), and his outstanding directing of Xia Yan’s Sai Jinhua (赛金花, 1935) became highlights of “defense drama” (国防戏剧). Sai Jinhua dramatized the story of a famous Qing dynasty courtesan who won over Western men and persuaded them to lessen their demands on China at a time of national crisis. Some PRC drama historians pointed out the play’s allusion to the KMT government’s “nonresistance” policy toward the Japanese as reminiscent of the corrupt and cowardly Chinese officials’ “kowtowing to Western powers” in the Qing dynasty made the play a hit in Shanghai, with a record twenty-­t wo full-­house performances. 52 Its immediate banning by the KMT government and the subsequent public uproar against the ban (known as the “incident of Sai Jinhua”) seemed only to have confirmed the genius of the playwright, whose historical allusions between a strong-­w illed courtesan and a weak KMT government were not lost on either political camp. Directed by Hong Shen and starring brilliant actors and actresses such as Jin Shan 金山 and Wang Ying 王莹, the play “shocked the dramatic circle of Shanghai” and has been studied as a superb example of defense drama.53 Ideologically opposed to the standard PRC reception history, Taiwan scholars cited the triggering event that resulted in the banning of the play: the audience was outraged at the scene in which German Field Marshal Alfred Count von Waldersee, then the head of an eight-­nation relief force to suppress the Boxers, was playing with Sai Jinhua’s silk-­embroidered tiny shoes; some in the audience could not control their anger and started booing when high-­ranking Manchu officials kowtowed to the foreigners, at [ 114 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream which point Zhang Daofan 张道藩 shouted, “stop acting right now!”54 Whether it was an audience-­induced or Zhang-­initiated incident, historians on both side of the Taiwan Straits confirmed the sensitive nature of the play and its reference to real-­life experience outside the theater. The aesthetic achievements of theater complemented the social impacts of the defense drama under the leadership of Hong Shen, Tian Han, and Ouyang Yuqian. Qiu Kunliang, a Taiwanese scholar, however, has challenged this “golden era” narrative for its focus on either a left-­wing or nationalist perspective with an emphasis on wartime theater. Qiu argued that this approach could not sufficiently explain cultural activities in the Japanese-­ occupied areas and under Wang Jingwei’s pro-­Japanese regime in Nanjing, where theater professionals negotiated their political positions, developed commercial theater companies, and collaborated with the government to promote performances. For example, the production of Roar China! (怒吼吧, 中国!) in 1933 has often been cited as an anti-­Japanese play that aroused the Chinese audience against Japan’s aggression, but the same play was revised and staged in the Japanese-­occupied areas to emphasize the plot of a British captain and American merchants’ bullying Chinese boatmen. The 1943 production of Roar China! by the Nanjing Dramatic Art Society (南京剧艺社) clearly declared its intention: “our friendly countries such as Japan and Italy have already terminated the unequal treaties with China, but Britain and America still discriminated against us.” It is clear that this production functioned as “a propaganda play” in order to promote the Japanese agenda of “the Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere” (大东亚共荣圈), especially after the Pacific War broke out in 1941, when Wang Jingwei’s pro-­Japan government declared war on Britain and America.55 Chen Dabei, known for his leadership role in promoting “amateur theater,” participated in this production sponsored by the “Nanjing collaborative regime of Wang Jingwei.” In the same anti-­Britain/America and pro-­Japan atmosphere, Roar China! was also staged in Beiping (Beijing) by the China Dramatic Art Society (中华 剧艺社) in 1943, with a cast member from the Manchuria Film Studio sponsored by the Japanese and from several theater troupes of Beiping. In the year 1942 alone, theater professionals with various backgrounds and intentions produced around eighty performances in Shanghai, with some theater artists traveling between the Wang regime–­controlled areas and the Chiang Kai-­shek/KMT–­controlled areas.56 Qiu’s scholarship presented a forgotten picture of the hybrid nature of theater activities: one work could be [ 115 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers remade for opposing political camps and for various functions such as artists’ desire to promote theater at all costs.57 Less known in the 1940s history was a series of films and plays that eulogized theater performers themselves, as seen in Tian Han’s “Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin,” cited at the beginning of this chapter. In his 1948 film Spring Cannot Be Shut Out (关不住的春光), Ouyang Yuqian elaborated the tales of cultural workers during the war period, thereby continuing Tian’s “theater of dramatists,” as I discussed in chapter  1. In contrast to the reference of Hong Shen and other dramatists singing “Song of the Waves” while retreating from Shanghai in the television drama about Zhou Enlai, as mentioned in chapter 2, Ouyang’s Spring Cannot Be Shut Out depicts what happened to those who left the performing troupe during their retreat from Guilin to Chongqing after the Japanese occupation. In Ouyang’s film, Mei Chunli 梅春丽 meets Wu Jingzhi 吴警之, who cares for her during the difficult walk to Chongqing in the Guilin retreat. After they marry in Shanghai, Mei becomes disenchanted with his upper-­class lifestyle, refuses to use her singing talents to climb the social ladder, and finally escapes from his “prisonlike” home to return to her performing group. As was typical of the progressive movies of the 1940s, urban areas such as Chongqing and Shanghai are depicted as places of corruption inhabited by parasites, whereas a rural farm becomes a symbolic utopia to which Mei returns; she regains her own identity as a cultural worker and returns to her troupe, performing new operas for the local peasants. Mei’s story indeed parallels the real-­life experience of Wang Renmei 王人美, a popular movie star who played the role of Mei, and projected into her character her own experience in having traveled from Japan-­occupied Hong Kong to Guilin in 1940 as a war refugee. Whereas Ouyang’s film on performers depicts a female cultural worker’s lonely and alienated life away from her troupe, Shi Dongshan’s 史东山 1947 film Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon (八千里路云和月), narrates the story of a performance team and their sacrifice for the war cause. The film begins with Jiang Lingyu 江玲玉, a college graduate listening to the radio broadcast of popular patriotic songs such as “March of the Volunteers” and “Song of the Graduate” (毕业歌),58 both with Tian Han’s lyrics; inspired by their stirring music, Jiang runs away from her aunt’s comfortable home in the city to join a performance team for war mobilization. She falls in love with Gao Libin 高礼彬, a musician and the team’s leader, as they travel between [ 116 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream dangerous war zones to perform for the masses and soldiers. The film concludes with a pregnant Jiang fainting on a street in Shanghai, indicating the plight of starving performers even after Japan’s surrender in 1945 and, implicitly, their disappointment with the KMT regime. This typical leftist cinematic view of the corruption and incompetence of the KMT allowed the film to be canonized as a progressive film after 1949. The star power of Bai Yang 白杨 and Tao Jin 陶金, who played the roles of Jiang and Gao, respectively, established their reputation as charismatic performers in the Republican period, which paved the way for their crowning success in PRC cinema, as I will briefly examine in chapter 4. Shi’s film adopted a documentary style, which faithfully recorded his own experience as a cultural worker traveling with one of the twelve National Salvation Drama Troupes (抗日救亡演剧队), which were organized in 1938 to perform in different parts of China. One of their most frequently staged plays included Putting Down Your Whip (放下你的鞭子), which depicts a starving teenage girl too weak to finish performing a skit on the street and therefore being whipped by her distressed, tearful father, both fleeing from Japanese-­occupied territory. The lines from the actors to incite responses from the audience, and the fact that this play was performed in the open space, marked it as an important event in the tradition of “street theater” (街头剧) in modern China.59 At the same time, Shi’s Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon also featured an ingenious plot structure that includes a play within a play: the “inner play” showcased how the team members staged Putting Down Your Whip, with the dramatic characters Jiang playing the daughter and Gao playing the father. At the end of their performance, however, Jiang and Gao could not conclude the play as it was previously scripted. Originally, a cast member “planted” in the audience was supposed to shout out his forgiveness of the father upon realizing that it was the fault of the Japanese aggressors, whose occupation of the Northeast drove the poor performers away from their homeland. To the surprise of the cast, however, the audience kept berating the father character until the actor (played by Gao) pulled off his fake beard, revealing that he was not real and this was only a play, to the laughter of the audience and cast members alike. In this “outer play” in which Jiang and Gao acted out their respective roles in Putting Down Your Whip, Shi’s film became one of the last few dedicated to the life stories of theater artists in the Republican period and in the Maoist period, with [ 117 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers their outstanding achievements twice-­revealed—­as seen in the double performances of both Jiang and Gao acting out their dramatic roles in Putting Down Your Whip, and their personal sufferings and sacrifice in the war front as portrayed in Shi’s film. In addition to representing how drama troupes made a difference in real life, the film vividly recorded theater history by depicting how huaju was introduced to the masses during a national crisis, and how it was accepted even by those ordinary people without a modern education and across the ideological and political divide. Most intriguingly, the film represented the  team’s performing for the KMT troops who had won the Battle of Tai’erzhuang (see chapter 2), in a scene in which an actor led the soldiers in singing a popular wartime song entitled “The March Song of the Sword” (大 刀进行曲), known as the song of the Twenty-­Ninth Army of the KMT. In the middle of the performance, a KMT army commander praised the performers for their bravery in completing the show even though the Japanese invaders were closing in. “Our government will surely foster your talents, the sowers of the cultural seeds, and we will not disappoint you,” the KMT official assured the performers, using the same phrase, “sowers of the cultural seeds,” that Tian Han used in his “Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin.” Seen in historical hindsight, however, this episode reflected and acknowledged the KMT’s patronage and protection of the performers during their difficult journey, and it could be retrospectively interpreted as a sharp contrast to their fate in the new society of the PRC, which accused the KMT of oppressing artists and promised them a better life in a socialist China. In the larger context of rewriting war history in twenty-­first-­century China, Shi’s film faithfully presented the KMT troops’ courageously fighting against Japanese invaders in the main battlefields, presenting a contrasting view in the Maoist discourse which criticized KMT’s “nonresistant policies” (不抵抗政策) while claiming the CCP as the sole leader in winning the war. Postsocialist scholarships on war history and a few performance pieces have to some extent corrected this. In depicting “a Chinese people’s war against Japanese aggressors,” some historians have now given fair weight to both “the frontal battles” fought by the KMT (正面抗日战场) and the “interior battles” (敌后战场) waged by the CCP, both of which “had paved the way for the strategies of a protracted war against the invaders and for its eventual victory.”60 Seen in this light, Shi’s film staged not merely [ 118 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream theater artists’ war contributions but also their positive interactions with the “frontal” troops and their commanders who aided them in critical moments. In a paradoxical fashion, dramatists in the twenty-­first century continued to eulogize dramatists of the past in search of a new stage to display their talents. Most amazingly, in 2008, theater luminaries from Beijing and Shanghai gathered on a national stage to celebrate the epoch-­making centennial of huaju in a “symphonic play of poetry” (交响诗剧) titled Cry to Heaven (吁天), directed by the eminent Yu Rongjun 喻荣军. First performed in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing with a fluid structure of six chapters, this play traveled through time and space in search of a history of huaju while utilizing other performing arts such as dance, singing, poetry recitation, symphonic music, and multimedia devices, a true tribute to what Ouyang had once dreamed during his Nantong, Guangzhou, and Guilin years.61 A cast of thirty-­some well-­k nown actors and actresses from three generations collaborated in restaging episodes from both the 1907 Spring Willow Society’s The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven and Ouyang’s 1961 The Hatred of Black Slaves. In between these excerpts, dramatic characters of the ten foremost theater artists reflected on the history of modern theater as they see it. They include not only master playwrights such as Tian Han, Hong Shen, Ouyang Yuqian, Guo Mouro, Xia Yan, and Cao Yu but also Li Shutong 李叔同, a founder of the Spring Willow Society; Lao She, the author of Teahouse, the most celebrated text in the PRC period; Jiao Juyin 焦菊隐, the director of Teahouse; and Huang Zuolin, the director and theorist who combined traditions of the East and West. The very acting of their pasts by an outstanding cast, who, in real life, were students and beneficiaries of their predecessors’ careers, enriched the play’s complexity as a dialogue with the historical past and a contemplation of contemporary theater and society. One critic even argued that Yu’s new adaptation “can be read as a metaphorical call for freedom of speech.”62 If this production revealed the central place of the original play in the history of modern drama, another play titled In Search of the Spring Willow Society (寻找春柳社) in contrast, pointed to the crisis of postsocialist theater, thus revealing uncertainty, ambiguity, and confusion about drama history and its key players. The play presented a group of students in contemporary Beijing attempting to rehearse the original 1907 play The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven only to realize the impossibility of staging it in the [ 119 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers twenty-­first century. Even though it was part of their efforts to participate in the celebratory events in honor of the centennial of huaju, these college students could not understand why and how their forerunners, who were also amateur students like themselves, staged the play in Tokyo a hundred years ago. They invited three directors to help to no avail. They could not understand the first director of the older generation, who stuck to the realist tradition and believed in “truthfulness” as “the soul of drama”; he left the rehearsal site in utter despair over the loss of the spirit of the Spring Willow Society. The second director of the younger, avant-­garde generation counseled the students to “play with drama” (玩儿戏剧), since the soul of drama is no more than “temperament and interest” (情趣), a contemporary concept of theater that could not help students to connect with the original script. The third director confused the students even more with her eloquent speech and full confidence in believing that drama was all about “taste” or “flavor” (品味). Despite their repeated efforts, the students could not act out the dramatic roles of Li Shutong and Ouyang Yuqian, except to poke fun at their impersonation of female roles, which now seemed exotic and comical; neither could they apprehend why audiences in the past century went to the theater in the first place. Ironically, both “truthfulness” as “the soul of drama” and “temperament and interest” constituted an essential part of Ouyang’s own theoretical writing on the nature of theater. Despite its intended goal of commemorating a monumental work, this fourth attempt to restage The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven indeed revised it into a theater of the absurd, which dismantled its original meanings—­ artistically and ideologically—­to lament the impossibility of carrying out its legacy. The rather shallow acting out of the dramatic role of Ouyang onstage ironically pointed to the latecomer’s inability to play out his rich experience in theater, as recounted in his memoirs of his part in Spring Willow Society, especially regarding his cross-­dressing in playing Western women characters. Ouyang chronicled his fourth appearance onstage when he played the female title role of Floria Tosca in Victorien Sardou’s French play La Tosca (杜思克), which premiered in Paris in 1887 and was later adapted into Puccini’s renowned opera.63 Even though Ouyang stressed his passion for acting for fun and entertainment, he also noted the play’s inevitable impact on the early members of the United League (同盟会), which was founded by Sun Yat-­sen in 1905 to overthrow the Qing imperial court and establish the republic. Working through a Japanese translation of the [ 120 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream play penned by Taguchi Kikutei 田口掬汀 and titled Hot-­Blood: A Tragedy (Higeki Nekketsu 悲剧热血), Ouyang and his peers titled their adaptation Hot Tears (热泪) for their attraction to this European melodrama of a love triangle.64 They also drew inspiration from the artistic achievements of shinpa theater reform while exploring the Chinese tradition of impersonating a female role to express the nationalist spirit: rebellious and courageous. In the role of Floria Tosca, a celebrated opera singer, Ouyang carved out another space in “theater of dramatists,” who are willing to sacrifice and die for their lovers, as seen in Mario Cavaradossi in this play by Sardou, an artist and Bonapartist sympathizer, against the brutality and oppression of Baron Scarpia, the ruthless police commissioner in Rome.

“Taiping Rebellion” Tragedies and the Discourse of Revolution Let us return to Ouyang’s 1941 huaju The Loyal King Li Xiucheng, a history play depicting the declining years of the Taiping Rebellion. The play revealed the infighting among Taiping peasant leaders, which, according to PRC drama history, alluded to the KMT’s corruption and especially its slaughtering of CCP soldiers in the Wannan Incident (see chapter 2). The play was interpreted as having called upon the Chinese people to unite in their fight against Japanese invaders, and not against each other. Ouyang directed his own play in its premiere in Guilin with resounding success: it was performed continuously for fourteen days, with twenty-­three shows altogether, and a total of thirty thousand people attending in a small city with a population of only sixty to seventy thousand at that time.65 Following conventional PRC drama history, Ouyang claimed in 1959 that back in the 1940s the play was censored by the KMT regime in Guilin, which imposed thirty changes and fifty cuts in the play.66 Against this reading, below the surface theme of Ouyang’s The Loyal King Li Xiucheng as a leftist play against KMT rule there is a deeper structure: the play can be interpreted as having revealed Chinese intellectuals’ critiques against chaos, suspicion, jealousy, and betrayal in the course of revolutionary changes; the tragic flaws, infightings, and inevitable defeats of the Taiping peasant leaders, in the larger context of modern and contemporary China, could be seen—­with historical hindsight—­as having “foreshadowed” similar occurrences in the CCP revolution, especially after it had won [ 121 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers political power and its right to rule in 1949, which uncannily might not have been intended by the playwright. Seen in this light, one might appreciate the legacy of Ouyang as having sown seeds for reinterpretation decades after the appearance of his works, when postsocialist reality could help one draw out the more complex message of his plays. Contextualizing Ouyang’s portrayal of the problematic Taiping leaders in the larger history of modern theater, I examine six historical plays that exclusively depict the Taiping Rebellion, and that have never been studied together either in Chinese or in English. Astonishingly, from 1937 to 1942, four major playwrights from different parts of China concentrated their efforts in creating six Taiping plays in a matter of five years (1937 to 1941) during the traumatic war years against Japanese aggressors. The six plays are Chen Baichen’s 陈白尘 1937 play Jintian Village (金田村,) which depicts the golden years of the Taiping Rebellion; Yang Hansheng’s 1941 play The Spring and Autumn of the Divine Kingdom (天国春秋), which dramatizes the middle years of the Taipings, when power struggles weakened its reign; Chen Baichen’s 1942 play The Dadu River (大渡河), which presents Shi Dakai’s 石达 开 career after the internal murders among the Taiping leaders forced him to pursue his own Taiping vision; Yang Hansheng’s 1937 play The Death of Li Xiucheng (李秀成之死) and Ouyang Yuqian’s 1941 play The Loyal King Li Xiucheng, both of which portrayed Li Xiucheng as the most loyal of kings but doomed to failure because of the incompetence of his chief leader, Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全, and his corrupt relatives; and A Ying’s 阿英 1942 play Hong  Xuanjiao (洪宣娇), which illuminates the eponymous leader’s disillusionment with the very revolution she helped to stage. The account of her jealousy, which resulted in murder, and her subsequent regrets reveal a culture’s reflecting on its own biases against women, especially women leaders in a peasant uprising. I am intrigued by this fascination with the Taiping and the high-­quality productions of these plays, three of which appear in three separate PRC drama anthologies as representatives of a “golden period” of wartime plays.67 The drama histories from the PRC have claimed that the KMT government censored left-­wing dramatists and forced them to retreat into the writing of history plays, which indirectly attacked the KMT’s pacifying policy toward the Japanese in their depiction of the heroic spirits of the Taiping uprising. Indeed, the six plays reveal a paradox: the chronological events in the plays conform with the established historical accounts, as [ 122 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream recorded in Phillip A. Kuhn’s chapter, “The Taiping Rebellion,” in the Cambridge History of China and in numerous other works of Chinese scholarship.68 The six plays therefore seem, at first sight, to have adhered to the fundamental purpose of history plays of delineating history as “accurately” as possible while re-­creating the dramatic events to relate to contemporary wartime reality. However, when it comes to the political exploitations of the Taipings, they turn out to be the most “creative,” incoherent, and contradictory parts of the plays, deviating from the “historical authenticity” of past events. Thus, going beyond the teleological view of drama history, this section of the chapter examines the six plays as potentially challenging the very nature of revolutions—­be they peasant uprising, KMT republican revolution, or CCP socialist revolution—­and their utopian vision, brutal betrayal, and traumatic disillusionment. The marriage of revolution, war, and theater finds its most illustrious example in the stage representations of the historic Taiping Rebellion. Lasting from 1851 to 1864, it has been viewed as a heroic peasant revolution whose semisocialist, utopian vision was to divide land equally among peasants, in response to the Qing dynasty’s repression and foreign aggression that followed Chinese defeat in the Opium Wars (1839–­1842). Politicians and dramatists alike have explored the myth of the Taiping Rebellion in constructing a nationalist narrative that could promote other revolutions both within and outside China. As political lore would have it, for instance, Karl Marx was the first to hail the triumphant Taiping troops in 1853 as the beginning of a “brand-­new” China in the Orient. According to one Chinese historian’s account, on the eve of great social upheaval, Marx declared that the most ancient empire in the world might soon greet reactionaries fleeing European revolutionary movements with these astonishing words on the Great Wall: “The Chinese Republic—­liberty, equality, and fraternity.”69 However, less than ten years later, in 1862, Marx was reported as so disgusted by the violence of the rebellion that he denounced the Taiping Rebellion, declaring that it had merely “changed dynasties without implementing real social reform.”70 Similarly, Sun Yat-­sen anticipated Mao Zedong in exploring the history of the Taiping Rebellion and calculating how it would fit into his Republican agenda of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty. Once describing himself as  “Hong Xiuquan the second,” Sun called on his fellow revolutionaries to  learn from this “patriotic hero,” known as “the heavenly king” of the [ 123 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers Taipings. Echoing Marx’s divided view, Sun Yat-­sen likewise criticized the Taiping leaders for their lack of knowledge of democracy. Even if it had succeeded, the “Heavenly Kingdom” would have amounted to no more than “another feudalist monarchy,” claimed Sun, while advancing his own “Three People’s Principles” (三民主义) of nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood as the elements of a superior blueprint.71 Both Marx and Sun deployed the Taiping legend as dramatic props to play out conflicting dramatic roles while forming their own political theaters in either the Chinese or the European context. Influenced by their national and international father figures, both the KMT and the CCP continued to explore the political drama of the Taiping events. Whereas the KMT applauded the Taiping leaders as heroes of the “nationalist revolution,” the CCP extolled them as champions of the peasant uprising and designated itself as their sole successor in the unfinished mission of championing the interests of the poor peasants. One significant episode of this political theater was illustrated in the sculptured relief on the Monument of the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Dedicated in 1949 and completed in 1958 to commemorate 30 million revolutionary martyrs dating back to 1840, the monument includes eight reliefs of “major ­episodes” in chronological order: the Opium Wars, the Jintian Uprising of Taiping, the May Fourth movement, and the guerrilla warfare in the Japanese-­occupied areas, to name a few. In Tiananmen Square on September 30, 1949, after Zhou Enlai had led three thousand delegates of the First Conference of Chinese Political Consultation to break ground for the monument, Mao Zedong read aloud the inscription for it, which was subsequently carved in Zhou Enlai’s calligraphy. The memory of the fearless Taiping Rebellion was promoted as part of Chinese revolutionary history to millions of Chinese during their frequent visits to the monument that quickly became a popular educational, ceremonial, and tourist attraction. While selections of the reliefs by Liu Kaiqu 刘开渠 and other oil paintings of the Jintian Uprising made their way into the Museum of Revolutionary History, the history of Chinese new art, children’s picture books, and theatrical productions of the PRC period continued to mine the narrative of this rebellion. The most stirring representations of the uprising, however, emerged in Chen Qitong’s 陈其通 huaju Ten Thousand Rivers and Mountains, which depicts the Long March of 1934–­1935. The first script of 1953 starts with a narrator’s voice celebrating the “Taiping Revolution” as an [ 124 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream important event of “the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people,” which was “suppressed by the ruling class and imperialists.”72 The Chinese people succeeded only after Chairman Mao had established one of the first rural Soviet bases to serve as a staging area for the armed struggle against the KMT in 1927. Although evocation of the Taipings in the prologue disappeared from the second revision, one key episode—­that of the Red Amy’s triumph in crossing the impassible Dadu River—­remained in all the subsequent versions up to the Cultural Revolution period. In this act, a commander wins over a local boatman by claiming that the Red Army would not repeat the fate of Shi Dakai, who perished with his Taiping soldiers while crossing the river because they were fighting Japanese imperialists and the KMT reactionaries under the wise leadership of the CCP.73 This episode illustrates the lasting appeal of the Taiping leaders, who were left mostly untouched during the Cultural Revolution, at a time when many revolutionary leaders were branded as “traitors,” “conspirators,” and “capitalist roaders,” the “hidden enemies” in socialist China. Gradually, however, in the postsocialist period the Taiping movement was increasingly condemned as a “feudalist dynasty” and “a defeated utopian experiment” characterized by corruption and inequality.”74 Seen in this light, it is apparent that the Taiping Rebellion has repeatedly functioned as a “stage prop” in constructing political theater outside the performance space itself. Contextualized in the political history of twentieth-­century China, as briefly sketched earlier, it is easier to understand why the six historical plays in question yield key insights into the internal power struggle among revolutionary leaders, which was characterized by chaos and murder. Although Western imperialists’ suppression of the Taiping Rebellion onstage invited connecting them, in real life in the 1930s and 1940s, to the Japanese invasion of China, the enemies inside the revolutionary movement were perceived to be more dangerous than foreigners. The prophetic power of this wisdom ironically proved “right” against the fate of the four playwrights twenty years later during the Cultural Revolution, when they were persecuted as “counterrevolutionaries” in the very revolutionary society they had helped bring about. One might explain away their persecutions by having recourse to the post-­Mao and post–­Cultural Revolution (after 1976, that is) interpretations along the official lines, which habitually assailed the radicals known as the “Gang of Four” for the chaos and tragedies, since they were, precisely, “the enemies inside the revolutionary movement.” [ 125 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers This argument, however, glosses over the philosophical impact and paradoxical nature of these fascinating plays. Their problematic vision of the revolution underscores theater’s potentials for being read as “predicting,” even before the CCP won political power, the failure of such revolution. The first play, Jintian Village, by Chen Baichen, staged in 1937, depicts the success of the Jintian Uprising of 1851, the official beginnings of the Taipings, when Taiping leaders cooperated in trying to overthrow Manchu rule. At this early stage, however, the Taiping movement suffered the loss of Feng Yunshan 冯云山, known as the Southern King 南王, whose integrity had held the Taiping leaders together. It also lost its most courageous leader, Xiao Chaogui 肖朝贵, the Western King 西王, on the battlefield. Jintian Village ends with the other leaders’ pledge to avenge Feng and Xiao, a promise delivered especially to Hong Xuanjiao 洪宣娇, Xiao’s grief-­stricken widow, herself a prominent woman leader in the Taiping movement. In spite of adhering to the well-­k nown chronology of the historical events, Chen’s play portrays Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全, the Heavenly King 天王, as a weak and impotent figurehead and in so doing casts doubt on the characterization of this rebellion as one of the greatest revolutions. Philip  A. Kuhn’s classic narrative comments on the social message contained in Hong’s writings and his belief that “men are, in some ultimate sense, equal before God,”75 but at the outset of Chen’s play, a group of paupers, gamblers, and drunkards mocked Hong Xiuquan for his claim that Jesus Christ had received him as his “Heavenly Brother” and empowered him to eliminate all the evil spirits, especially those Manchus and rich people lording it over the poor Chinese.76 The dramatic character Hong reveals his mandate from heaven only upon recovering, after forty days, from a serious illness brought on by failing the civil examinations he took to become a court official. The humiliation arouses hatred in him for the Confucian classics, which he orders to be burned to ashes. Most significantly, Hong appears in the play to be exercising undeserved power handed to him by Feng Yunshan, the talented organizer who had mobilized the local peasants and residents in Guangxi Province, who in turn embraced Hong as their leader. When Feng was imprisoned, however, Hong rejected his subordinates’ call to rescue him. Chen’s Taiping play thus focused on frail leadership, faithlessness, and betrayal, even at an early, presumably successful stage of the movement. [ 126 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream The second play, Yang Hansheng’s The Spring and Autumn of the Divine Kingdom (hitherto referred to as The Spring and Autumn), performed in 1941, dramatizes the middle years of the Taiping Rebellion around 1856, when fierce struggles among Taiping leaders were weakening their hold on power. In this play, Hong Xiuquan, alarmed that Yang Xiuqing 洪秀清, the Eastern King, has attempted to usurp his authority, orders Wei Changhui 韦昌辉, the Northern King 北王, to murder him. In response to the public outcry against his brutality, Hong Xiuquan then orders the murder of Wei, whereupon Shi Dakai, the Assistant King 辅王, flees for his life from the capital city. Contemporary critics and later memoirs, commenting on the performances in 1941, remarked on the tremendous applause that erupted when Hong Xuanjiao spoke the following line: “We should not be obsessed with slaughtering our own brothers when our kingdom is facing its fiercest enemies from the outside.” The audiences took this line as referring to the KMT’s conflict with the CCP at a time in the war when both should have joined forces to fight the Japanese.77 While not rejecting an interpretation like this, influenced by the exigencies of wartime, I believe that the play’s additional appeal also resides in its focus on the very brutality and bloodbath within the revolutionary regime, which challenged justification for any revolution, however noble its initial intentions. The third play, Chen Baichen’s The Dadu River, performed in 1942, further dramatized the internal chaos and the mutual distrust between the Eastern King (东王), Yang Xiuqing, and the Northern King, Wei Changhui, as well as the bloody murders, but from Shi Dakai’s perspective. Concluding with Shi’s single-­handed military campaigns after he had broken away from Hong Xiuquan, Chen’s play offers a unique reflection on the role of the scholarly elites—­both their dreams and their failures—­in the Taiping movement. A former Confucian scholar with a literary bent who had donated his property and fortune to help the Taipings devise their idealist blueprints for social justice, Shi became increasingly outraged by the brutal treatment of the intellectuals. He challenged Yang Xiuqing, who justified the atrocious slaughter of scholars and intellectuals by attacking their “pursuit of personal fame” through a civil examination system that launched their official careers in “facilitating the Manchu court’s 300 years of ruling the Han Chinese”; without such betrayals and collaborations, the Taiping movement would have more easily eliminated the Manchu rulers, Yang argued [ 127 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers against Shi.78 The negative light in which this portrayal casts Yang contrasts with the more balanced view of Yang as a leader with “administrative brilliance and instinct for power centralization,” without which “the Taiping movement would never have achieved as much as it did,” as well as a “faithless schemer.”79 Paralleling his portrayal of Yang as coming from the poorest rural background and harboring anti-­intellectual sentiments, Chen drew an equally derogative portrait of Wei Changhui, a former Confucian scholar from a “new rich” family background. Equipped with a polished and sophisticated manner, Wei hides his true feelings about Yang, waiting for the right moment to murder him and his family and eventually slaughtering Shi Dakai’s family. As both defense and critique of intellectual types, moreover, Chen Baichen created Han Baoying 韩宝英, Shi’s female student and elitist soulmate, who appreciates his poetry and music; however, Shi suppresses his desire to marry Han for fear of being lumped in with the other kings, like Yang and Wei, and being accused of lusting after women while prohibiting married soldier couples from sleeping together. Subsequently married to another weak, but intellectual, man, Han eventually commits suicide to persuade Shi to escape the siege of the Qing troops and lead future Taiping campaigns. Beautiful, intelligent, and devoted, Han represents Chen’s ideal and idealistic intellectual, the sort best suited to take the helm of the Taiping movement with its inherent weaknesses. This dramatic conflict between peasant and cultural elite foreshadows subsequent plays in the PRC in which class struggle became an increasingly central theme aimed at celebrating the subalterns, as well as the dramatic reversal of fate during the Cultural Revolution when all four previously mentioned playwrights were persecuted for being bourgeois intellectuals who had failed to portray the proletariat onstage. The fourth and fifth plays, The Death of Li Xiucheng and The Loyal King Li Xiucheng, depict the last three years of the Taiping movement, from 1863 to 1866, culminating with Li Xiucheng’s 李秀成 heroic defense of Nanjing under siege by the Qing army. Celebrated as the self-­sacrificing “loyal king” by the broad masses longing for strong leader, Li stands up against Hong Xiuquan’s corrupt relatives, who spend their days slandering him and lining their pockets with the loot they stole from impoverished peasants. Most remarkably, Li refuses to follow the example of Shi Dakai—­who has severed all connection with the corrupt regime to attain his Taiping goals [ 128 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream on his own—­choosing instead to offer himself up for the integrity of the Taiping cause, despite the advice of his own followers that he save his troops for a future comeback. Reluctantly forsaking his military strategy of winning victories elsewhere to lure the enemies away from Nanjing, Li rushes back to Nanjing upon Hong’s repeated requests, knowing well that it is already too late to break the siege. His perseverance, integrity, and faith in the Taiping cause in the face of widespread corruption and disillusionment so toughen his last ten thousand soldiers’ hearts that, after being captured, they prefer to set themselves afire and burn to death rather than surrender to the enemy. Clearly, according to the playwrights of these two plays, the suppressive Qing regime and the Western imperialist powers were no less vicious enemies than the traitors and spies within the Taiping central power structure who “tore down the stage of our great drama.”80 Figure 3.3 illustrates the outstanding production of The Death of Li Xiucheng by the China Youth Art Theater in 1963, in a climactic scene when Li Xiucheng (starring Du Peng 杜澎) confronts a foreign imperialist (starring Shao Hua 邵华), both renowned actors in the socialist period. The brilliant

FIGURE 3.3 Yang Hansheng, The Death of Li Xiucheng. China Youth Art Theater, 1963. Directors: Jin Shan and Zhang Yisheng; stage designers: Zhang Zhengyu, Lu Yangchun, Liu Junmin, and others. Source: From Zhang Jianzhong, ed., A Half-­Century of Progress on the Stage: China Youth Art Theater, 1949–­1999 (Beijing: Beijing dahai wenhua jiaoliu, 1999), 51. [ 129 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers codirectors who had played key roles in wartime theater—­which had witnessed the play’s stunning premiere in 1940 (directed by Hong Shen with a record seventy performances—­restaged this PRC show, which blended a dramatization of a heroic peasant leader with a socialist task of exploring the past in service of contemporary revolutionary themes. Its combined artistic achievements thus overpowered the shortfalls of a political drama, therefore, connecting the aesthetic heritage of the Republican period with that of the PRC. This insistent antitraitor theme, however, turned out to be highly ironic, considering that in the PRC period Chen Baichen was excited to be invited by Shanghai Haiyan Studio to write a film script on the Taiping movement to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Jintian Uprising. After having completed a detailed script outline with chronology, costume designs, leaders’ legends, and even calendar comparisons between the Manchu and the Taiping governments based on elaborate research, he was told that the film production could not proceed since Li Xiucheng was now viewed as a traitor.81 The reason had to do with the then current discussion of the original version of Li’s “self-­narration” (李秀成自述)—­written in his last few days in prison—­which had triggered an accusation that Li flattered the Qing court and criticized Hong’s incompetent leadership in hopes of sparing his own life. More than three hundred articles on Li’s career and his “self-­narration” were published in the thirty years after the founding of the PRC in 1949, the majority of them appearing between 1964 and 1965, after Qi Benyu’s 戚本禹 initial attack on Li as a traitor.82 The emphasis on the treacherous nature of a peasant leader unfortunately led to the denunciation of Qu Qiubai, the second key leader of the CCP after Chen Duxiu’s ouster in 1927.83 Even though he was celebrated as a martyr who died heroically on the KMT’s execution ground in 1937, Qu had written a similar “Superfluous Word” (多余的话) questioning the value of his revolutionary career as CCP leader amid the complex politics within the CCP top leadership, thereby recalling the manner in which Li Xiucheng had blamed Hong Xiuquan for his weak leadership (see chapter 8). The dual attacks against two “heroes turned traitors,” who lived in two different historical periods and with diverse ideologies, set the tragic tone for the Cultural Revolution, when countless seasoned PRC leaders and intellectuals, including Yang Hansheng and Chen Baichen, were persecuted as traitors. Yang was termed “an enemy of the people” for having written The [ 130 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Death of Li Xiucheng, supposedly at the bidding of the KMT government, which wanted to celebrate its defense of Nanjing in 1937 at the beginning of the war against Japanese invaders. Another “crime” was even more absurd: upon getting out of the KMT prison in 1935, Yang refused to join the KMT as a condition of his release. Since his identity as a CCP member was concealed from the KMT, he covered himself by saying, “I do not want to associate myself with any political parties. I will not join the KMT, nor the CCP.” “Not  willing to join the CCP,” therefore, became a piece of incriminating evidence with which to assail his loyalty to the CCP, despite his spotless history as a CCP veteran—­he had joined the CCP as early as 1925 and participated in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927.84 Most intriguingly, his imprisonment by the KMT came about in the first place because of two traitors, who had held high-­ranking positions as heads of the CCP Central Bureau of  Shanghai. This heartbreaking personal experience could have intensified Yang’s resentment of the traitor, which worked its way into his two Taiping plays. With this perspective, the ending of Yang’s The Death of Li Xiucheng seems at once tragic and ironic. Before his execution, Li Xiucheng pours three cups of wine on the ground as ablations for eulogizing three groups: first, the “brave souls of the Taiping kings” who inspire us with the “victory of the Jintian Uprising to rescue the poor from the bitter sea and to drive away the Qing rulers and foreign invaders” and “build our own nation and state”; second, more than one million Taiping soldiers whose “hot blood” spread over sixteen provinces, brought down by enemies’ bullets, severe weather, starvation, and endless suffering and “whose heroic, sacrificing spirit will forever live in our hearts”; and finally, his last ten thousand soldiers in captivity who refused to surrender. In tone and vocabulary, Li’s poetic soliloquy resembles Mao’s dedication to the Monument of People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Squire commemorating the numerous Chinese martyrs who had given their lives for several Chinese revolutions in the last hundred years, starting with the Taiping revolution. Most ironically, however, during the Cultural Revolution, Yang’s passionate lyrics depicting Li as a national hero became the most damning evidence of his own sympathy for a traitor. Paradoxically, however, it was Yang’s sustained role as a leader of the leftist dramatic movement during the KMT reign, and his creative energies, that helped construct much of the Maoist discourse and the socialist art that he himself had pioneered. [ 131 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers If Yang’s play illustrates the importance of a traitor discourse, the sixth play, Hong Xuanjiao by A Ying, with its glorified portrait of a woman leader of the Taipings, offers a fascinating look at the complex relationships between history play and women’s theater. Unlike the other five plays, which were exclusively premiered in “the areas unoccupied by the Japanese,” A Ying’s play debuted in the partially Japanese-­occupied Shanghai of 1941. In contrast to Yang Hansheng’s The Spring and Autumn, which demonized Hong Xuanjiao as a jealous woman, A Ying’s play shows a courageous, thoughtful woman commander striving to prevent the slaughter of other leaders. Divided in four acts, A Ying’s play presents four crucial years in the Taiping movement with the woman leader at center stage doing her utmost to win a harsh war and to prevent tragedy from erupting within the Taiping movement. Set in 1851, act 1 begins with the Taiping leaders welcoming a triumphant Hong Xuanjiao. The commander of “the detachment of women” (娘子军) though still in her twenties, she has just captured Daozhou (道州) in Hunan Province, an enemy stronghold that male leaders in earlier attempts had failed to seize. Finding herself in the middle of power struggles already emerging between leaders from the diverse backgrounds of poor peasants, rich landlords, and scholars, Xuanjiao focuses her attention instead on the official writings of the Taiping history, for these are to be preserved in “the archives of the new country’s history” (国史馆) for future generations; she argues that the writers should record the responsibilities for defeats as well as victories, such as Yang Xiuqing’s failure to send his troops to rescue Xiao Chaogui and Feng Yunshan, who subsequently died in their campaigns to conquer Changsha and Quanzhou, respectively.85 In having a heroine pay close attention to how history is constructed, this scene invites comparison with the PRC and its subsequent obsession with writing and rewriting the official histories to glorify certain leaders such as Mao Zedong while demonizing others. Finally, act 4, set in 1864, dramatizes the months-­long siege of Nanjing, with a frightened, morbid Hong Xiuquan rejecting others’ persistent pleas that they give up Nanjing and retreat to Jiangxi and Wuhan to wait for the opportune time to renew their campaign. Xuanjiao attempts, in vain, to steer the Taiping movement away from its final undoing, only to witness the tragic suicide of Hong Xiuquan. Xuanjiao similarly fights to the bitter end with Li Xiucheng, then loses her sanity after his capture, and the play [ 132 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream concludes with her prophetic line: “Let us remember the blood-­stained history of the fourteen-­year Taiping Kingdom so that our nation will have some hope of rejuvenation.”86 In his characterization of Xuanjiao as a female protagonist, A Ying—­a leader of the leftist dramatic movement—­ paved the way for constructing a socialist feminist tradition. That tradition would peak on the PRC stage, which upgraded women characters to embodiments of revolutionary idealism in the cause of the working poor and the Chinese nation. While limning a woman leader, however, A Ying, like his fellow playwrights, revealed his suspicious view of the revolution, its peasant leaders, and women’s predicament. I hope the preceding brief account will help us understand two perspectives regarding political theater both within and outside the theater space. First, I argue that these four playwrights expressed a dark view of the Taiping Rebellion, using their ingenious dramatization of Taiping leaders to expose their hypocrisy and ignorance. Jintian Village, for example, depicts a hallucinating, weak Hong Xiuquan who, when challenged by other leaders’ differing opinions, announces that his political decisions have been reached by his transforming himself into the “heavenly father” (天王). “Who am I?” he would ask his fellow leaders.87 Realizing that Hong has entered a trance to become the “heavenly father” himself, fellow leaders piously accept his “arbitrary and absolutist political style.”88 When Xuanjiao complains to Feng Yunshan about Hong Xiuquan’s role-­playing, Feng Yunshan convinces her to tolerate Hong’s acting for the sake of the overall victory of the Taipings.89 Both Feng and Xuanjiao thus become Hong Xiuquan’s reluctant audience, accepting his demoralizing political performance and even joining forces with him to convince lower-­rank followers that he indeed speaks as God himself. An even better student of Hong Xiuquan, however, turns out to be Yang Xiuqing. In Hong Xuanjiao, for example, as his power struggle with Hong heats up, Yang himself enters a trance in the role of “heavenly father” to inflict beatings on Hong Xiuquan, whose subsequent despair almost drives him to suicide.90 In The Spring and Autumn, Yang Xiuqing enters another trance to force Hong Xuanjiao to confess her jealousy of his female companion. Xuanjiao feels compelled to go along, as if she believed that God inhabited Yang’s body, despite her disgust with Yang.91 This unequal gender relationship further intersects with issues of class and educational ­background when Taiping leaders with scholarly backgrounds find this [ 133 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers theatrical religious rite at “strategic moments” “distasteful to China’s elite.”92 By dramatizing the theatricality of political life, these playwrights demystified the “heroic” myth of the Taiping leaders. They accidentally anticipated, however, a post-­Mao reevaluation of Hong Xiuquan that saw him as an ignorant and powerless leader, the first to look toward the West for inspiration but to find there, instead of democracy and science, a pseudo-­religious cult.93 Astonishingly, the playwrights in our inquiry disclosed their doubts and critiques of Taiping leaders seventy years earlier than their post-­Mao counterparts. My second perspective focuses on the dramatists’ rescripting of “outer plays” long after their historic premieres as another layer of political performance in the 1970s and 1980s. There is, as an example, Yang Hansheng, who when released from prison after nine years’ imprisonment, from 1966 to 1975, actively participated in the national drama of the “anti–­Gang of Four campaign.”94 During the Fourth National Conference of Literature and Art Workers, in 1979, Yang read aloud a long but incomplete list of 170 names of the writers, dramatists, and artists who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and led a one-­minute silent mourning for their premature, tragic deaths.95 Many of those who did not survive the Cultural Revolution were Yang’s close associates—­many film and theater stars. In fact, after his rehabilitation (平反) in 1979, Yang focused on submitting materials to win rehabilitation for Tian Han and wrote four essays to commemorate his extraordinary career. Tian Han died in 1968 while in custody as the result of persecution. Eulogizing Tian as a revolutionary poet and scriptwriter for progressive film and drama, and a talented leader and organizer of literary and dramatic institutions,96 Yang poured into his eulogy the same passion, grief, and lyrical flair with which his dramatic character Li Xiucheng had memorialized his Taiping kings and soldiers at the end of The Death of Li Xiucheng. The death of a peasant uprising leader was thus intricately connected with the death of a famous actor, memorialized by the survival of another dramatist. In the last fifteen years of life until his death in 1993, Yang continued to publish memoirs and autobiographies to set the record straight for his circle of friends in the art community, seemingly drawing on the same spirit that inspired Hong Xuanjiao’s commitment to preserve the history of the Taipings in A Ying’s play. Among Yang’s writings, one can detect a post-­Mao rescripting of the dramatic history of his two Taiping plays, in light of the [ 134 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream new agenda against the Gang of Four. To clear his name as a KMT suspect, Yang “drafted” an “outer play” in his memoirs with the following four acts. Act 1: Yang claimed in 1984 that he wrote The Death of Li Xiucheng in 1937 to celebrate the heroic spirit of the title hero battling Zeng Guofan 曾国藩 and Li Hongzhang’s 李鸿章 army, and in order to expose the KMT’s suppression of the CCP forces.97 Thanks to its contemporary relevance, the play was even staged successfully in the Japanese-­occupied areas and in Yan’an. The KMT officials became so apprehensive about the play that they buried alive Li Ying, the lead actor who had played the role of Li Xiucheng, and imprisoned many cast members; in defiance, the cast sang the play’s theme song to voice their determination never to surrender. Ironically, these actors belonged to a “Loyal Theater” (忠诚话剧团) sponsored by the KMT itself.98 Act 2: Yang Hansheng wrote The Spring and Autumn after the Wannan Incident in September 1941, in which KMT troops attacked the CCP’s New Fourth Route Army. The intent was to point up the way the KMT murdered the Chinese people instead of fighting the Japanese, recalling a similar mission displacement when Taiping leaders were preoccupied with internal strife instead of defeating the Qing troops.99 Act 3: During the Cultural Revolution, radicals attacked Yang’s The Spring and Autumn for having created a tyrant in Hong Xiuquan, which was taken as an indirect reference to Mao Zedong. Yang was further accused of being a close follower of Zhou Enlai, the target of the Gang of Four in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. In effect, Zhou’s directives had inspired Yang to write his two Taiping plays as a critique against the KMT during the war period. Furthermore, in 1935 Lu Xun labeled Yang one of the questionable “four fellows,” together with Zhou Yang, Xia Yan, and Tian Han. Opposing Lu Xun was an additional charge against Yang and three other “fellows,” since Lu Xun was held up by Mao Zedong as the great “standard bearer of the Cultural Revolution” in the Republican period, targeting traditional society and the KMT’s cultural oppression, and hence one of the few correct leaders in the fields of literature and art at this juncture. Act 4: After the Cultural Revolution, the performance of The Spring and Autumn became at once a political ritual to rehabilitate the playwright and a rediscovery of the new historical significance of wartime drama. Critics reviewed the production of Yang’s play by the experimental workshop of the Central Academy of Drama in 1983 as “having astonishing similarities [ 135 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers between the past and the present” with “dramatic conflicts between the loyal and traitorous leaders, unity and division, candor and conspiracy”—­ official phrases then reserved exclusively for depicting the crimes of the Gang of the Four. This timely, contemporary relevance to socialist China, critics believed, “might have surpassed the original intention and imagination of the playwright four years ago.”100 This production fulfilled a wish of Jin Shan, who had played the role of Li Xiucheng in 1937 to resounding notices. Released from prison in 1975, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, Jin Shan died of a stroke in 1982 and could not see through his project of building a theater for the Central Drama Academy and staging The Spring and Autumn.101 In his public mourning for Jin Shan and his numerous memorial essays for other dramatists, Yang Hansheng continued to script acts of political theater celebrating the post-­Mao regime and his and other artists’ “new liberations,” declaring wartime plays to be superior to the radical “revolutionary model theater” promoted by the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. Despite this claim, Yang’s two Taiping plays bear some surprising resemblances to Cultural Revolution–­era model Peking operas such as Azalea Mountain (杜鹃山), which was said by some critics to have defeated the revisionist, feudalist, and capitalist policy on literature and art advanced by Yang and his like. Promoted during the Cultural Revolution, five to eighteen “revolutionary model theatrical pieces” dominated Chinese stage to portray heroic characters during the war period and workers, peasants, and soldiers in the socialist period. Developed as a relatively later piece of the model theater, Azalea Mountain shared with its peers the exploration of a mother figure as the ultimate role model to inspire the younger generations as seen in The Red Lantern (see chapter 1).102 Whereas Azalea Mountain presents a Mother Du instructing her “grandson” to enlist in the CCP-­led peasant troops to avenge his father, The Death of Li Xiucheng has a Mother Liu encouraging her grandson to join Li Xiucheng’s army to defend Nanjing, even though she has already lost her son and daughter-­in-­law to the T ­ aiping cause. Indeed, Yang’s play features even more progressive revolutionary masses than those in Azalea Mountain, which still need the CCP’s reeducation to become effective soldiers. Yang’s Taiping soldiers act with elevated political consciousness from beginning to end. Wartime dramas, therefore, foreshadowed model theater’s fundamental characteristics thirty years later, despite Yang’s assertion that Gang of Four–­era literature and art [ 136 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream (四人帮文艺) had effectively destroyed the “glorious” tradition of modern Chinese drama since its beginnings. The fascination with the Taiping plays transformed, in the twenty-­first century, into highlighting unstable and problematic leaders in the wu opera (婺剧) Dreams Dashed at the Wu River (梦断婺江), which premiered in 2004.103 In the opera, Li Shixian 李世贤, known as the Attendant King (侍王), must, in response to Hong Xiuquan’s command, abandon his stronghold of Jinhua in Zhijiang Province and race with his seventy-­thousand-­strong army to the defense of Nanjing, but to no avail. In contrast to the popular support and selfless sacrifices of the peasants evident in earlier Taiping plays, the opera opens with the evocation of a luminous “Palace of the Attendant King” (侍王府), which the local peasants have been painting with ferocious effort, fearing that any delay in completing it could bring dire punishment down on them at the hands of Li Shixian’s soldiers. The opera then details Li’s brutal plan to execute leaders of the famished peasants who have rebelled against Li’s demand for even more grain with which to replenish army supplies, in disregard of the devastating natural disasters the peasants have suffered and their heavy taxation by the Qing court. As opposed to Mother Liu in The Death of Li Xiucheng, who sends both her son and grandson to join the Taipings, a destitute mother of a veteran Taiping soldier cannot convince Li Shixian to spare the life of her only son, subsequently executed for having deserted the army to care for her. The peasants’ rebellion and execution scenes in this wu opera could remind contemporary audiences of the countless rural riots and their silent suppression in postsocialist China, where the increasing gap between rich and poor and the corruption of local and central officials were posing pressing challenges to the stability of the society. The indirect reference of Li’s problematic legend to current reality could have become more powerful in view of the popular tourist attraction in Jinhua city of the “Palace of the Attendant King,” a “national architectural site” protected since 1988 as “the biggest and the best-­preserved of the Taiping kings’ dwellings,” with the largest number of wall paintings and sculptures preserved inside the palace.104 The reversion of the Taiping leader from indispensable savior of the poor to their luxury-­loving oppressor paralleled a similar image of the corrupt CCP, which has historically claimed support of the poor as its mandate to rule and its prerogative to liberate. Most deadly of all to behold would have been the brutality of the Taiping leader in this wu opera, [ 137 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers depicted as perhaps more fatal than that of the Manchu rulers and Western imperialists, who were presented as the arch enemies of the poor in earlier Taiping plays. This anticorruption thematic concern devolves into a heart-­wrenching love story, ending with the humiliating defeat of the Taipings as symbolized by the deaths of Li Shixian 李世贤 and his lover Liu Yanqing 柳彦卿. Unlike Hong Xuanjiao, whose love story was enmeshed in complex relationships with various leaders, the main plot of the opera focuses on the tragic encounter between Li and Liu. Liu had originally broken into Li’s palace to protest his totalitarian order to burn Confucian classics and to persecute scholars, among whom was her lover, now imprisoned by Li. However, attracted to Li’s bravery and the Taiping dream of eliminating the Manchus and other foreign aggressors, Liu falls in love and becomes Li’s counsel, helping him to make the right decisions, especially regarding his treatment of the people. Even though this love story taps into the traditional narrative archetype of “a loyal and faithful woman saving a trapped hero” (义女救英雄), the reversal of roles entailed in a female protagonist enlightening a bewildered and confused Taiping leader reminds one of the feminist take A Ying comes up with in his play on Hong Xuanjiao. Unlike the wartime plays, however, this wu opera implicitly questions the very reality of a communist-­turned-­capitalist China and its connection with the Taipings: Both started as peasant-­based revolutions but failed to become the people’s pledged protector. Hence, we get Liu Yanqing’s sharp criticism of the Taiping leader: “The Taiping army rebelled for the benefit of the people, but why on earth would people rise up against the Taipings?”105 The line—­singled out as having “displayed a profound sense of history” and expressing the playwright’s “critical awareness of the need to warn of a repetition of the past tragedy” (醒世意识)—­was used to advertise this wu opera on Central China Television, where it was broadcast to a national audience.106 More than half a century later, our Taiping play retains its original function of exploring history to comment on contemporary reality, except for the fact that the widespread dissolution of the Chinese revolution in the twenty-­first century is no longer confined to the reader’s imaginings but has indeed become manifest in the everyday reality of ordinary people’s lives and in their disillusions of the communist revolution. To bring our story to a full circle, five years later in 2009, a gui opera, Ouyang Yuqian, debuted to commemorate the 120th  birthday of Ouyang [ 138 ]

Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream Yuqian to critical acclaim in Guilin. The opera adds to the flourishing genre of “theater of dramatists” initiated by Tian Han and updated by those theater artists who discovered in three theater founders’ own lives continuous inspirations for creating new theater. Persuaded by Guilin cultural officials to script this gui opera after their own failed attempts in the past decade, the playwright Liu Guicheng 刘桂成 understood gui artists’ “special attachment” (情结) to Ouyang, who had reformed and recreated gui opera during the war period.107 Focusing on Ouyang’s unique personality and emotion as  a “scholar, an artist, and a fighter for democracy,” the opera dramatized Ouyang’s training of gui actors and actresses and his collaborations with Tian Han, Xia Yan, Zhang Shu, Li Kenong 李克农, Ma Junwu 马君武, and ­others to promote theater and war mobilization, with equal passion and ingenuity.108 Members of democratic parties such as the Jiusan Society (九三学社) appreciated the gui opera’s portrayal of the collaborations between the CCP and those parties in the traumatic 1940s, a unforgettable period when Ouyang’s search for “democracy, freedom, and truth” expressed its own faith and function.109 Drama specialists likewise commended the opera’s representation of Ouyang’s “noble personality and elegant demeanor” through music, singing, poetry, and dance.110 Wang Meng 王猛, the stage designer of the opera, recalled that thirty years had passed since the gui opera Picking up the Jade Bracelet (拾玉镯) captured national headlines with its 1952 classic production (adapted into a film in 1953) and was honored by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai; after decades of “sleeping years” without good scripts to perform since the 1950s, the new gui production Ouyang Yuqian, which staged the master artist’s achievements in reforming gui opera in the 1930s and 1940s, has once again revived gui opera, therefore completing “a perfect circle” from life to stage and from stage to life.111 The unique scene of Ouyang’s training actors and actresses seventy years ago onstage reflected at once past inspiration and the present generation’s talents in a challenging commercial time. My critical approach has partially followed the lead of Marvin Carlson, who advises us to consider “what sort of performance was involved in the process of writing about performance” so as to present “more or less internally coherent mappings of the fluid territory of performance.”112 This chapter reveals the multiple, fluid, and complex meanings of plays both on and offstage, between dramatists and their audiences, and between the past and [ 139 ]

Part I: Theater Founding Fathers present; it also challenges “continuous traditions,” “coherent structures,” and “stable identities” in order to examine the concepts of “identity,” “revolution,” and “culture” as “constructed, relational, and in constant flux,” and as borders where “meaning is continually being created and negotiated.”113 Moving beyond Western theories of performance study, however, I stress that Chinese performance study must take into consideration its own historical, cultural, ideological conditions and contradictions, as well as Western theories that inspired our performance study in the first place. From the artistic journey of Ouyang Yuqian in the early twentieth century to the popular gui opera on Ouyang’s own life in the twenty-­first century, I have emphasized the significant acts of theater performers who created and recreated their dramatic role as “cultural workers” while redefining socialist and postsocialist art movements and their complex place in history.

[ 140 ]

FOUR

Is Socialism Good? Satirical Comedy and the Gray Theater of the 1950s

Socialism is good, socialism is good! In a socialist country people enjoy high social status, Reactionaries, struck down, Imperialists run away with their tails tucked. People of the entire nation unite, Take part in a new wave of socialist construction, A new wave of socialist construction.

社会主义好，社会主义好!

社会主义国家人民地位高, 反动派, 被打倒,

帝国主义夹着尾巴逃跑了。 全国人民大团结, 掀起了社会主义建设高潮， 建设高潮。

—­“Socialism Is Good”

WRITTEN IN 1957, the song “Socialism Is Good” (社会主义好) became one of the most popular songs in the high Mao period when the laboring people celebrated their high status as masters of a socialist country and prided themselves on having driven out the “imperialists” who had “run away with their tails tucked.”1 The song’s impression on Tian Han can be seen in his 1958 poem, which eulogized a group of disabled veterans for singing “Socialism Is Good” in their amateur performance: You are the good sons and daughters of the motherland, The Party’s good soldiers! Sing, work, strive, and perform, Encourage the people of the entire country [ 143 ]

你们是祖国的好儿女, 党的好战士!

唱吧，干吧，表演吧,

给全国人民更多的鼓励.2

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife In fact, the song expressed an optimistic sentiment seen earlier on October 1, 1949, during a performance in a Nanjing theater. Upon hearing the news of the founding of the PRC, Tong Zhiling 童芷苓, a Peking opera star, removed his fake beard on stage in order to shout out celebratory slogans along with the exhilarated audience, with applause and cheering lasting for more than ten minutes, an exciting scene he had never seen before in his acting career.3 After that day, dramatists and performers took part in holiday celebrations and street parades, some in costume and makeup, and experienced pride in having become citizens in a new society that was no longer, supposedly, prejudiced against them. Walking alongside the ordinary people in street parades helped them tangibly enjoy their “high status,” as the song “Socialism Is Good” later expressed, equal to that of the masses. At the same time, they were expected to transform themselves into deserving new artists to serve the interest of the people. The career path of the theater founders in the early years of the PRC reflected this dilemma. Not surprisingly, Tian was soon appointed chief of the Opera Improvement Bureau (戏曲改进局) and was elected president of the China Theater Association and vice chairman of the All-­China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.4 Now entrusted as a national leader of literature and arts, Tian devoted his energy in leading a new round of theater reform in the socialist period, which would have continued, in theory, his earlier efforts in the Republican period to modernize theater, but in reality the earthshaking task of remaking old theater performers into “new art workers” (新文艺工作者) paradoxically meant rejecting much of the achievements of the “old” theater reform before 1949. Theater histories record Tian’s leadership in following the government’s mandate in transferring private theater troupes into state-­owned institutions, banning numerous “ghost plays” in the traditional operas no longer suitable for reflecting contemporary life experience, and guiding fresh productions in praise of “new people and new events” (新人新事). In his correspondence with old friends, however, Tian reminisced about his theater life before 1949 and his fellow artists’ tremendous feats. During a visit to Lugou Bridge with his wife, An E, in 1957, Tian penned a poem titled “Eulogy of the Lugou Bridge” (歌卢 沟桥), in which he exalted the artistic accomplishments of the late actor Liu Baoluo 刘保罗, who played a dramatic role in Tian’s play Lugou Bridge (卢沟桥), which debuted in Nanjing in 1937.5 In the same poem, Tian also paid tribute to the dynamic Hong Shen, who directed the play to critical acclaim. [ 144 ]

Is Socialism Good? Tian’s public management of theater reform in the present society and his private nostalgia crystallized a tension between developing an effective theater and preserving it as a forum for self-­expression and social criticism, which artists had practiced before 1949. Such a tug-­of-­war characterized much of the dramatic history of the early 1950s, creating, as a by-­ product, a rather complex phenomenon with rich voices and multiple positions not to be repeated in the subsequent years after 1957 and in the 1960s, when theater activities became increasingly restricted in subject matter, thematic concern, and artistic style. To better appreciate facets of the fascinating theater of the 1950s and its disjoints, it might be helpful to recall the controversial reception of Voices in History: Solemn Promises Made Half a Century Ago, published in 1999.6 In historical hindsight, the widespread response to and the ensuing banning of that popular book highlighted disruptors of hopes and dreams in the early 1950s. The book’s prohibition seemed bizarre because it was a collection of newspaper editorials and articles written by Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and progressive intellectuals and democratic party leaders from 1941 to 1946 to advocate a “new democratic revolution” (新民主主义革命). Distributed at the peak of the so-­called totalitarian regime of the KMT, these writings boiled down to countless promises that, once in power, the CCP would lead the Chinese people in building a new democratic China with human rights, free speech, and the election of national leaders by popular vote.7 These promises were targeted at the KMT, which was perceived as having failed to guarantee those rights. Because of these promises, many people gave their lives to the communist cause during the war period. Ironically, many of these promises were subsequently erased in Mao’s works, republished in the 1950s and 1960s by the Committee for Compiling Mao Zedong’s Works. The book holds a mirror to the broken vows to the people before the CCP had won political power and their erasure in PRC history. This chapter situates itself in the dynamics of the earlier promises and broken dreams as a thread to digest several plays of the early 1950s as representative of this period. I characterize them as having embodied and combined at least three major types: “faith plays,” which dramatize people’s sacrifices to win the communist revolution; “dream plays,” which express what people imagine as a better future according to the CCP’s promises; and “cautionary tales,” which warn about fading dreams and emerging bureaucracy and corruption. I emphasize how these layers of [ 145 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife different messages intercept and interweave into the fabric of the early 1950s theater and how promises and dreams quickly turned into satirical mocking of them despite a strict censorship. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Wang Shaoyan’s 王少燕 rare satirical comedies, for example, were still inspired by his faith in the CCP as a clean and democratic party that could be improved with constructive arts. In deliberating these overlapping themes, I also blend in a discussion of “red classics.” Rosemary Roberts and Li Li characterized two themes of red classic novels from 1949 to 1976 as including “historical tales of the exploits of the Communist heroes of the revolutionary war, and tales of the struggle to transform Chinese society through the socialist reform of agriculture and industry.”8 Investigating Hao Ran’s 浩然 peasant fictions as a principal genre, Richard King demonstrated how “four decades from the 1940s to 1980” is “the age of a grand narrative of progress, of the Communist Party leading the Chinese people along the road to a prouder, more modern, and materialistic better future” as exemplified in Hao Ran’s red classic novels.9 Describing “red legacies,” more broadly, as evoking “at once utopian ideals and traumatic catastrophes,” Jie Li argues that “red legacies pose critical questions for the continuity and transformation of Chinese identity from the socialist to postsocialist eras. At stake is not only how the present remembers the past but also how the past might shape the present.”10 Nicolai Volland best summarized the historical dynamics of Chinese socialist literature as having been celebrated in the 1950s, rewritten in the early 1960s, “vilified during the Cultural Revolution, revived briefly in the post-­ Mao era, forgotten during the 1980s, dug up during a nostalgic 1990s,” and “exploited by crass commercialism in the twenty-­first century.”11 I investigate a few cases of the 1950s performance to add to the mix of what Volland calls “the Chinese literary universe” for a more comprehensive dive into this fascinating period so that dramatic productions and receptions are also included in the ongoing debates.

Faith Plays in the Rear Window of History Together with fiction, poems, and films, early 1950s called for numerous productions of “faith plays” that reflected martyrs’ sacrifices for a promised future in the canon formation of early socialist era. For example, the [ 146 ]

Is Socialism Good? 1950 drama Growing Up on the Battlefield (战斗里成长) dramatized how a rural family was torn apart before 1949 and how a father and son reunited on the battlefield as members of the revolutionary army to liberate all the oppressed peoples. Ironically, this “red classic” play’s promise for a better China was satirized, in 1992, in a post-­Mao film titled Blue Kite (蓝风筝), in which Zhu Ying 朱英, an actress in an army theater in the 1960s, rehearses her dramatic role as the mother in Growing Up on the Battlefield who bids a painful farewell to her husband, asking for his promise that he will return to take vengeance on the bullying landlord. Thirteen years pass before she finally rejoins her family. The appearance of Growing Up on the Battlefield in the film Blue Kite is ironic: theater performers such as Zhu Ying could only rehearse the promises of a better life on stage, but in real life she had no freedom to decline to be a dance partner with top CCP leaders. The tragic plot of Zhu’s captivity further pointed to the predicament of theater professionals, and their precarious status in the PRC. Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮 壮, the director of the film, and son of Yu Lan 于蓝, a movie star, and Tian Fang 田方, a famed film director, grew up with his parents’ hopes and disillusions and their increasingly perilous position in the PRC, even though they were the movers and shakers of red classic theater and films. Postsocialist films such as Blue Kite can thus be read against early “faith plays” to reflect on the discrepancy between the CCP’s promises before 1949 for a democratic China and its subsequent betrayal. As history changed tides, the “red classic” Growing Up on the Battlefield metamorphosized into a film of dystopia in post-­Mao society. This case further illustrates the importance of studying the red classics and their impact on postsocialist society, since “they provided opportunities for creative juxtapositions of critiques against and parody, mockery, or satire of the myths and icons of the Communist Party.”12 Sharing a similar theme of portraying the CCP-­led revolutions, Ten Thousand Rivers and Mountains can be seen as another faith play to dramatize the Red Army’s sacrifices during the Long March. Its complex process of multiple revisions, however, must be analyzed to reveal the changing meanings of what “faith” signifies as time went on. As a Red Army veteran, Chen Qitong first drafted a reportage play (活报剧) in 1937, which was expanded into a full-­fledged work in 1938. The play’s 1954 premiere led to three more major revisions in 1955, 1956, and 1979; further, the play was twice adapted into film in the 1950s and in the 1970s. Each revision reflected the [ 147 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife zigzagging ideological trajectories in contemporary China and the demand that theater reflect them. The play was attacked as “antisocialist” during the Cultural Revolution for its alleged support for erroneous policies during the Long March. In response, its 1976 revised version during the last year of the Cultural Revolution added Mao’s leadership that led the Long March to victory by inserting into the dialogue about the Zunyi meeting (遵义会议) in 1935, during which Mao’s leadership was supposedly secured. Nevertheless, some audiences responded warmly to this 1976 version because it evoked the heroic deeds of veteran leaders persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Not surprisingly, this production was once again criticized as part of Deng Xiaoping’s 邓小平 attempts to reverse the Maoist course of eliminating revisionist art during the Cultural Revolution, an accusation made to justify Deng’s ousting from power following the April Fifth movement (四五运动) of 1976.13 By the same token, post–­Cultural Revolution history cited the play’s November 1976 reappearance on stage (right after the downfall of the Gang of the Four in October) as the first piece of art to “thaw the icy period of the Cultural Revolution,” which had eradicated revolutionary art of the socialist period.14 The play therefore continuously provided new interpretations to remain “politically correct,” even though what was “correct” in one movement often proved to be “incorrect” in the next. Nonetheless, the faith in “only socialism can save China” remained intact at its core message. Seen in this light, scrutinizing the fluid, changing, and contradictory nature of socialist theater will yield insight into a complex history, as illustrated in Yang Lianfen’s astute study of the long revision process of Wang Lin’s 王林 novel Hinterland (腹地). First published in 1949 with limited circulation, Hinterland was based on Wang’s personal experience as a CCP guerrilla fighter in the 1940s against Japanese invaders but was soon criticized for producing a flawed protagonist who was too aloof and solitary to be a revolutionary hero. In the following decades, Wang considered rewriting the novel as the central task of his life. He died in 1984, and his novel was finally published in 1985 to little attention. As Yang points out, “the tragedy of Hinterland lies in that its first edition fell out of step with Mao’s Yan’an Talks, and its second edition followed the Yan’an Talks too closely at a time when China was already under Deng’s policy of Reform and Opening Up.”15 Most relevant to this chapter, the final version reduced six chapters of the most intriguing materials on the free village and county election to only [ 148 ]

Is Socialism Good? one chapter, deleting the true-­to-­life experience of the local peasant in the 1940s who were most attracted to a new democratic life the CCP then promised as part of the United Front strategy; deleted also was the lively village theatrical troupe and its hilarious improvisations that entertained the audience and even teased “stubborn seniors” who did not participate in election activities.16 Here faith in a democratic society—­enacted through theater—­was authentically preserved as it was practiced in real life in the  1940s, only to be abandoned when dreaming about it was no longer politically correct. Wang Lin’s perseverance in revising his novel, nevertheless, paradoxically revealed his faith in art as reflecting revolutionary experience, which had to be revised from what was “authentic” as he had experienced into what was “typical” according to historical “truth” of the revolution.

Democratic Elections and One’s Own Theaters If Wang Lin’s fiction was not published until he had deleted the part about free elections in the 1940s, Lao She’s 1957 Teahouse was initially inspired by the first constitution of the PRC.17 Teahouse was based on his earlier draft of a play to celebrate that event. According to an eyewitness account, Xu Chongde 许崇德 was invited as a university teacher to join an expert committee to draft the first constitution of the PRC, which was released in 1953 for public comment and received more than one million feedbacks for its revision. Xu and his colleagues went to rural areas to carry out democratic elections (民主普选). At that time, many women did not even have their own names except being addressed as “Elder Aunt of the Lis” (李家大嫂) or “Elder Sister of the Wangs” (王家大妹), for example. Xu’s team created names for them, such as Li Suzhen 李素珍 and Wang Yamei 王亚美, to help them register to vote. In the same year, “constitution” (宪法) even became a popular name for many newborn babies.18 The complex legacy of the “democratic election” is investigated in Zhang Jishun’s fascinating study of Shanghai: whereas the movement motivated workers to claim their status as “masters of the new society” (主人翁) as seen in the ritualized events such as wearing one’s best attire to cast a vote, there were also some 110 suicides in 1954 in certain neighborhoods (里弄). Some former KMT affiliates, rich landlords, and religious believers before 1949 were confused and scared when their [ 149 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife past lives were scrutinized in the process of qualifying for voting rights.19 The result of this election at once promoted the masses’ identifying with the new regime’s call to participate in the political process and demoted the social status of those previously unaffiliated with or opposed to the CCP. As part of this process, Lao She was himself elected as the people’s representative of Beijing municipal and participated in the First National People’s Congress, where he applauded the passing of the final version of the constitution with an enthusiastic crowd.20 In 1957, Lao She wrote a play to implicitly celebrate the constitution, one that focused on the three Qin brothers (秦氏三兄弟) over fifty years of their lives from 1898 to 1948.21 Cao Yu, Jiao Juyin, Ouyang Shanzun 欧阳山尊, and Zhao Qiyang 赵起扬, leaders of the Beijing People’s Art Theater, regarded the script as an “occasional play” (应景戏) but were drawn to the second scene in act 1 in a teahouse with vivid characters. Jiao Juyin suggested that Lao She expand this one scene into a full-­length play. Lao She readily agreed and finished Teahouse in three months.22 Retaining the original space, Teahouse includes three acts, each depicting three declining regimes, as seen in act 1, set after the failed reform movement of 1898, act 2, during the warlord period in 1918, and act 3, under KMT rule in 1947. With more than seventy true-­to-­life characters moving through their lives from their twenties to seventies in a single setting of a teahouse, Lao She portrayed the past as a tragic time without a clear future. With unsurpassed familiarity with the lives of ordinary people in old Beijing, Lao She was in his element sketching a historic period he knew the best while hinting at a better time to come in a new China to beckon. In more than sixty years of performance history, the Beijing People’s Art Theater was the only troupe that could have successfully produced Teahouse thanks to its unique local Beijing style, which Teahouse helped establish.23 In this regard, the second creation played an equally significant role as the first creation of the script. With Teahouse and a several other plays before, such as Dragon Beard Ditch, Jiao Juyin developed his own school of directing (导演学派), which best combined Chinese operatic conventions with the Stanislavski system and suggestive theater with realist theater.24 He succeeded in turning Lao She’s “gold mine” script into “historical changes as heavy as the Mountain Tai.”25 In addition to his critical suggestion of focusing the play on a teahouse only, Jiao also added some twenty customers.26 Most ingeniously, he added a Bible seller who walks among the diverse [ 150 ]

Is Socialism Good? customers; each time he approaches one of them, the level of the background noise decreases, therefore inviting the audience to follow the Bible seller to observe people from all walks of life.27 As part of this “director’s comprehensive staging plan” (导演总体戏剧构思), Jiao also cast certain actors to play their dual roles of both father and son to provide links to the otherwise scattered plots. Ying Ruocheng 英若诚, for example, first played Pock-­Mark Liu Senior 刘麻子, in act 1, as a professional pimp who sells a poverty-­stricken girl to an eunuch; his ruthlessness worsens in act 2, when he sells a woman to two deserters to share as their wife, only to be matched, in act 3, by his son Pock-­Mark Liu Junior 小刘麻子, who plans to organize all the prostitutes, jeep girls, and hostesses into a cartel while converting the teahouse into a KMT intelligence center. More important, Jiao changed Lao She’s original ending into a more dramatic scene. The three protagonists—­ Wang Lifa 王利发, the owner of the teahouse; Master Chang 常四爷, a former Manchu bannerman; and Master Qin 秦仲义, a bankrupt industrialist—­ circle around the stage to spread paper money at their imagined funerals, affectingly hinting at the burials of three eras, according to a standard interpretation in theater history.28 It is therefore important to note that both Lao She’s script and Jiao Juyin’s directing style played an equally significant part in making Teahouse a classic, red or not; superb directing, acting, and staging entertained the audiences while enriching the script. In terms of stage design, Weijie Song rightly points out that in the classic  1958 production, the design teams “famously arranged and displayed eight tables total in act 1 and reduce the number to five in acts 2 and 3.”29 These material objects depict onstage “social and political transformation in the everyday scenes of a shrinking and malfunctioned public space.”30 Furthermore, Song’s thoughtful investigation into the special form and the constructions of the teahouse in a series of productions of Teahouse, ranging from its 1958 premiere, 1982 film adaptation, 1999 avant-­garde version, and 2010 television drama, further illustrates “the political dimensions of entertainment, education, and edification” while staging “a subtle and complex critique of the pre-­Mao social morass and political violence.”31 ­Figure 4.1, a draft sketch of the stage design for the 1958 premiere production, illustrates at once the designer’s talent as artist and the director’s blueprint of characters function in the space. Among the five versions of Teahouse productions, identified by directors—­Jiao Juyin and Xia Chun (焦菊隐,夏淳版) in 1958; Lin Zhaohua (林兆华版) in 1999; Wang Chong (王翀版) [ 151 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife

FIGURE 4.1 Stage design draft for Lao She’s Teahouse, Beijing People’s Art Theater, 1958. Directors: Jiao Juyin and Xia Chun; stage designer: Wang Wenchong. Source: From Fu Jin, A History of Drama in New China: 1949–­2000 (Changsha: Human meishu chubanshe, 2009), 68.

in 2017; Li Liuyi (李六乙版) in Sichuan dialect, also in 2017; and Meng Jinghui (孟京辉版) in 2018—­the 1958 version is still considered the classic that other  versions cannot surpass, even though Lao She’s masterful script ­provided the later versions endless imaginative space to re-­create other “classics.”32 The stage design sketch of figure 4.1 demonstrates the magnificent set of the 1958 version inside the teahouse with unique period costumes and decorations. Seen in this light, Teahouse expresses the initial hope for a “red culture,” which partially explains its appeal in postsocialist China through inducing nostalgic sentiments and critical reflections on the paradoxes of Maoist culture. Yet Teahouse is an odd case: it was considered a classic, which represents the highest artistic achievement in the first seventeen years of the PRC and hence is included in Selected Chinese Plays Over Fifty Years from 1949 to 1999 and subsequent anthologies, together with Growing Up on the Battlefield and Ten Thousand Rivers and Mountains, to name a few.33 Teahouse, [ 152 ]

Is Socialism Good? however, is not a red classic in the conventional sense because it did not portray the heroic revolutionary war experience, its leaders and martyrs, or the heroic deeds of workers, peasants, and soldiers in socialist construction. The production and reception histories of Teahouse pose questions about the time-­honored dichotomy between form and content. Can they be considered equals in our understanding of PRC theater? Can a classic play with artistic achievement not be red but still be appreciated as equally significant in its political implications, and, conversely, can a red classic play such as Growing Up on the Battlefield be studied for its artistic creation, or the lack of it, together with its red content? One cannot really speak of red classic in the conventional sense of the word. Perhaps it is in this “gray text” of the early 1950s, however, that we can find a relative equilibrium between red culture and artistic merits, in which compromises could be made between political theme and aesthetic style. By using terms such as “red,” “gray,” and “black” text, I do not mean to suggest that they are isolated or self-­contained categories. I emphasize instead their multiple, overlapping, or even oppositional voices. Indeed, early 1950s plays sometimes embody all colors, red, gray, black, and every other spectrum in between, as seen in Lao She’s 1950 play Fang Zhenzhu (方珍珠). The play dramatizes a Master Fang 方老板, who returns to Shanghai in 1945 after years of drifting around the interior areas during the war as a starving drum song singer (鼓书艺人). He finds his dream of having his own theater at a peaceful time, however, destroyed by local bullies, KMT censors, and a licentious general who harasses his adopted daughter, Fang Zhenzhu, a budding performer at the peak of her career. Upon liberation in 1949, Master Fang dismisses rumors that the CCP will persecute theater artists and, following the calling for a new society, takes an active part in transforming his folk art to serve the interests of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The play ends happily with Master Fang’s finally realizing his dream of establishing his own theater (戏园子), where he can stage his own shows without having to worry about KMT agents’ blackmail and censorship. At the end of the play, he sings “a new lyric for a peaceful society” that accentuates his pride as a new cultural worker equal to everyone else in a new society, which treats theater artists as free human beings. Like Teahouse, in Fang Zhenzhu, Lao She focused mostly on life before 1949, and especially that of folk theater artists from his own social networks, therefore enriching the repertoire of Tian Han’s “theater of dramatists.” In [ 153 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife contrast to Teahouse, which ends in 1948, the last part of Fang Zhenzhu briefly stages the budding new society after 1949, and, by default, sets forth how Master Fang and his friends accepted the CCP’s ideological campaign on class theory in political meetings and the theater’s call to serve a new society. Fang Zhenzhu faithfully records everyday experience at a time when performers were excited to open their own theaters and fulfill their dreams of being free and independent artists. The premiere of the play in 1950—­ only one year after liberation—­is significant because it preserved the authentic dream of running one’s own theater. As subsequent history has shown, their dreams were very quickly shattered in the period of “theater reform” (戏改), when individual theaters were taken over as government-­ sponsored organizations and productions were subject to even more strenuous censorship than that of the previous regime, as Siyuan Liu insightfully recounts.34 Rereading Fang Zhenzhu helps us restore the initial dream of the theater artists right after 1949 and their transition from managing their own productions to collaborating with the new state. I argue that unlike in the red classics’ peak period of the 1960s (chapter 5), these early dramas represent a more innocent and heartfelt enthusiasm for the promised socialist blueprints as expressed in the writings of the CCP leaders in the 1940s, which had not been erased on stage until after the Anti-­Rightist movement of 1957. They can be perceived as “gray texts” in political orientations but “classic” for their aesthetic qualities with sentiments on what revolutionary promises meant to them in the early 1950s. In depicting the early life and dreams, Fang Zhenzhu displays the artistic traditions of folk performance arts (曲艺) indigenous to the local culture of Beijing. In its premiere by the China Youth Art Theater, huaju star Lu Xi 路曦 performed drum songs in order to portray a talented Fang Zhenzhu. Most significantly, a film adaptation of Fang Zhenzhu released in 1952 further preserved Beijing folk culture before liberation in its casting of Xiao Wang Yurong 小王玉蓉, a dan (旦) actress in Peking opera, as Fang Zhenzhu, combining the art of Peking opera with drum song singing.35 Tao Jin, a movie star in the 1940s, played a perfect Master Fang, exploring his fame and skills in cinema with broad appeal. Additionally, Fang Zhenzhu tapped into star “crosstalk” (相声) performers such as Hou Baolin 侯宝林, who played the dramatic character Bai Erli 白二 立, Master Fang’s competitor before 1949 and collaborator afterward. As [ 154 ]

Is Socialism Good? fellow performers, Bai and Fang shared a past of being bullied in the old society as well as an aspiration to have their own theaters. Unlike Fang, who was ready to promote folk art to serve the new China, Bai fell asleep during a political meeting, more honestly reflecting the mentality of some artists not drawn to the PRC’s ideological campaign. Most significantly, the film preserves two entertaining crosstalk skits by Hou Baolin, in the dramatic character of Bai, for later generations to learn about Beijing folk theater before it was tainted by subsequent theater reform. There are also the more original skits by Hou Baolin, a popular “crosstalk” performer before and during the PRC period. Hou’s performance in Fang Zhenzhu preceded his own starring in the 1956 crosstalk film (相声电影) Wandering in the Zoo, Waking from a Dream (游园惊梦) which “daringly stretched artistic boundaries and elicited multilayered and intermedial laughter” between comedy film and crosstalk under Mao.36 It was Hou’s so-­called lowbrow performance in Fang Zhenzhu, however, that best preserved the preliberation art. The rich artistic forms of folk performance have carved out a special space for Fang Zhenzhu in theater and film history. After a brief “honeymoon” period in the early PRC, workers, peasants, and soldiers replaced performers and artists on stage. Worse still, when theater artists appeared onstage again in 1958, after the Anti-­Rightist movement in 1957, they became “negative characters.” In a five-­act play titled A Portrait of One Hundred Rightist Clowns (右派百丑图), for example, a movie actor, a professor, a journal editor, and a lawyer, all members of democratic parties, plot to mobilize the masses against the CCP’s rule so that they can become “movie stars” and “presidents of their own film studios.”37 It was here that the original dream of Master Fang to own his theater emerged as evidence of their grievance against socialist China. Their subsequent persecution ironically fulfilled the KMT agent’s prediction in Fang Zhenzhu that performers would not fare well under communist rule, a prediction Master Fang had quickly dismissed but that turned out to be true in subsequent history, as reflected in A Portrait of One Hundred Rightist Clowns. In contrast to Fang Zhenzhu, which tells us more accurately about the initial hopes of artists, Portrait ironically portrays the price they paid for the realization of such dreams. In the theater scene of 1958, what did Tian Han achieve as a theater leader? Navigating the precarious year, Tian indeed wrote his “best” play, Guan Hanqing, and his “worst” play, The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir, in the same year, according to theater historians. Often anthologized, Guan [ 155 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Hanqing can be seen as a classic play for artistic merits, but not as “red,” since its protagonist of a Yuan dynasty playwright has nothing to do with “the new people and events in socialist construction.” In fact, Tian wrote Guan Hanqing to bypass socialist reality and return to a topic at which he excelled: dramatists who devoted their lives to social justice, and therefore best lived in the bygone eras. Yet, in scripting an ancient playwright outraged by oppression, Tian created a historical figure to serve the interest of the common people in socialist time, thereby carrying out—­in spirit—­ the same realist tradition that defined “red classic” plays. In the story of Guan, who does not succumb to imprisonment, death sentence, or exile, Tian reflected his own experience as a leftist playwright imprisoned by the KMT. It is therefore no wonder that Xia Yan depicted Tian as “a contemporary Guan Hanqing and the soul of contemporary theater.”38 Tian’s expression of dramatists’ inner strength with pride, honor, and a rebellious spirit inevitably exposed him to persecution during the Cultural Revolution thanks to a censorship system he helped foster.39 The play nevertheless created a gray area for multiple interpretations, either red or black or somewhere in between, while carving out a creative space under the circumstances. In contrast, Tian’s The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir staged the rapid construction of the reservoir participated by state leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1958 to reflect the immediate reality in socialist China. Tian scripted it in eight days, with artists in the China Youth Theater rehearsing each act as it was drafted. The huge cast included administrative staff, chiefs, stage design team, exemplifying the mass participation of the Great Leap Forward movement then in full sway. This very “red” play for having represented “typical characters in typical situations” (典型环境 中的典型人物)—­the mantra of Maoist art—­in a timely fashion can hardly be justified as “classic” despite the very best efforts thrown into the production by the talented directors, stage designers, and actors, whose artistic credentials were much admired in theatrical circles. As one critic said, the production created a seemingly real-­life scene to simulate 100,000 people laboring on the construction site; the stage design team ingeniously created a rotating stage to connect the otherwise scattered scenes, with a warm reception from the audience.40 Figure  4.2 demonstrates a fairytale scene 13, set in the future time of 1978, twenty years after the completion of the reservoir, its background [ 156 ]

Is Socialism Good?

FIGURE 4.2 Tian Han, The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir. China Youth Art Theater, 1958. Director: Jin Shan; stage designers: Zhang Zhengyu and Mao Jingang. Source: From the Xiaomei Chen family collection.

dotted with nuclear-­powered yachts, concert halls, literary research institutes, national art academies, and even a drama school in a rural area outside of Beijing, all dreams of Tian Han and his fellow dramatists before and right after the founding of the PRC.41 In this imagined communist landscape, a schoolteacher (center) nostalgically explains to her students how the reservoir was built twenty years earlier, in 1958. She interacts with former colleagues who had also participated in the building of the reservoir: a musician continues to play his guitar to celebrate the past glory, a geologist and a biologist now lead an Interplanetary Navigation Institute (星际航空学院), and a Red Army–­era writer has magically recovered from lung cancer through a scientific breakthrough combining Western and Chinese medicine. In historical hindsight, this magnificent communist society has proved elusive even now regarding the “liberation of Taiwan” and China’s becoming the number-­one economic power in the world, surpassing [ 157 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Britain and the United States, exemplified by China’s launching of tourist spacecraft to the moon, as predicted in Tian Han’s script. It is ironic that the scene’s celebration of the Eighteenth National Congress of the CCP, in real history, was not convened in 1978 but in 2012, which called for a firm march on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics toward building a moderately prosperous society (建设小康社会). By 1978, China had barely emerged from the chaotic Cultural Revolution, which witnessed the death of Tian Han, tragically paralleling to the fate of his character in his Death of a Famous Actor (chapter 1). My mother, who played the role of the teacher in figure 4.2, told me years later that this production had remained one of her most cherished memories; as a proud member of a theater collective, she enjoyed working with literally everyone in the theater in a single production: administrative staff, chiefs, and stage design team workers were all part of more than a hundred crewmembers, exemplifying the enthusiastic mass participation of the Great Leap Forward movement then in full sway in real life. The Rhapsody therefore points to the value of examining the red theater of the 1950s, especially in terms of what knowledge it constructed and how this “knowledge” inspired artists in their vision of a utopian China. Tian Han’s prophetic play expressed a fanatical version of the dreams promised to the people by the CCP in theatrical form and artists’ faith in realizing them. Guan Hanqing and The Rhapsody best illustrate Tian’s two lifelong passions: his tenacious portrayal of dramatists committed to a critical mission against the status quo, as seen in the former, and his romantic mode of a socialist imagery, as seen in the latter. They demonstrated intellectuals’ liabilities and assets in the formation of socialist knowledge. The plays also highlight the tensions between artistic pursuit and social function and the challenges they have produced in performance history, which has been debated, interpreted, and anthologized along these lines. Fatefully, as one critic put in another way, the two plays diametrically expressed a “real Tian Han,” a passionate dramatist who returned to his selfhood in his heroic portrayal of Guan Hanqing, in contrast to what he described as a “bogus Tian Han” who, in The Rhapsody, gave up his power as a social critic in his negative depiction of a novelist who stands in the way of the laboring people’s construction of a new society in 1958.42 However, if one takes seriously the second creation of a unique theater production and the third creation of the audience’s warm reception of The Rhapsody, one can indeed recover a missing episode of performance history in the Maoist era. [ 158 ]

Is Socialism Good?

One-­Act Plays, Satirical Comedies, and Rightist Plays What happened to some of the hopeful artists, theater professionals, and intellectuals in the mid-­1950s, when their initial dreams of a democratic new society quickly waned as political campaigns began to transform them into compromising socialist citizens? What happened to their increasingly challenging role in representing a collective vision and their own identity as effective actors to help realize such vision? Partly in response to the CCP’s call to popularize mass theater at the grassroots level for the purpose of educational entertainment, some theater professionals and amateurs alike began to write one-­act plays (独幕剧), which can be rehearsed and produced more quickly than full-­fledged plays. In fact, the wave of one-­act plays in the 1950s has been retrospectively regarded in the twenty-­first century as one of the three golden periods of one-­act plays, the first being the 1920s, when The Main Event in Life by Hu Shi pioneered huaju; one-­act plays reached their maturity with Tian Han’s classic The Night the Tiger Was Caught. The second wave appeared in the 1940s when Ding Xilin and Yang Jiang’s comedies and Chen Baichen’s satirical plays demonstrated the highest achievements of one-­act plays.43 Most important, the third wave in the 1950s benefited from state-­run theater institutions such as the professional journal titled Scripts (剧本), which, after 1953, organized award competitions for one-­act plays and received a total of 667 submissions in 1953, 684 in 1954, and 1,140 in 1955. The journal recommended outstanding pieces to the public and even provided stage designs to help amateur theaters produce them. Promoting the one-­act play was singled out as the best achievement of Scripts as an academic journal in the 1950s.44 The most accomplished pieces in the context of this chapter are the “one-­act satirical comedies” (独幕讽刺喜剧), which exposed the “dark aspects of a new society” for the purpose of improving it. Their comical satire of CCP bureaucracy, nepotism, privilege, arrogance, and hypocrisy were faithful reflections of the emerging social problems and were in part the result of artists’ answering the CCP’s call for constructive criticism to improve the party’s work style. A critical edge ensured the plays’ popularity among audiences, but it also precluded them from being accepted in the canon of red classics owing to their failure to eulogize the bright aspects of socialist China. Indeed, their subversive messages against the wrongdoings [ 159 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife of party officials could easily mark them as rightist plays with black messages, especially during the Anti-­Rightist movement of 1957, which persecuted many intellectuals who dared to criticize the CCP. I argue that studying these well-­made “gray plays” can help us better understand what has been erased in theater history until the twenty-­first century and recover the underlying subcultures and their buried dreams. Gray texts should be taken seriously, therefore, as having contributed to the historical understanding of the very formation of red classics and as counterexamples of works that, although not entirely red, were intended as such (to improve and purify socialist society in accordance with its original blueprints), but they were received as gray or black in keeping with censorship and a restrictive institutional system. There were at least three influences on the rise of this genre in the mid-­ 1950s. First, in response to criticism against CCP officials’ unpopular work style, Mao’s promotion of “let one hundred flowers blossom and one hundred schools of thought contend” (百家齐放, 百家争鸣) provided a more relaxed atmosphere for artistic and academic pursuits. Consequently, during the second expanded board meeting of the China Writers Association, convened in 1956, some writers advocated “intervention in life” (干预生活) in order to expose conflicts in contemporary life; as masters of the new society, they should criticize the remaining “backward” elements in order to promote socialist cause. Because these writers were passionate about their mission, they believed that “socialist critical realism” (社会主义批判现 实主义) could become an effective weapon in carrying out the ideals put forth in Mao’s Yan’an talk on literature and art. They did not realize that they were treading on dangerous territory, since their approach was soon criticized as antiparty and antisocialist in the subsequent Anti-­Rightist movement precisely because they had attempted to act as masters of the new society in their newly defined role of the people’s artists. Examining their failed endeavor in producing red classics helps us understand what could have been included in the red classic canon as well as the attendant shortfalls of the ideological and political culture of that specific time in history. Related to the first, the second influence came at a critical juncture in  Sino-­Soviet relations in the mid-­1950s, amid the changing dynamics of  the international socialist movements. Around the time when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism, some Soviet writers began to voice their [ 160 ]

Is Socialism Good? critiques against negative aspects of their society. Galina Evgeniyevna Nikolayeva’s 尼古拉耶娃 1954 novel The Director of the MTS and the Chief Agricultural Expert (Povest’ o direktore MTS i glavnom agronome 拖拉机站站长和总农 艺师), for example, was translated into Chinese and published in Translations (译文) in 1955.45 Nikolayeva depicts a female protagonist, Nastya, who fights against bureaucratic behavior by Soviet officials, thereby expressing her own desire to actively participate in the socialist construction. Along the same lines, Valentin Vladimirovich Ovechkin’s 奥维奇金 District Routine (Rajonnye budni 区里的日常生活), a collection of five sketches (特写) of rural Soviet life, portrayed a deputy party secretary who challenges his boss, the first party secretary, and urges him to change his bureaucratic conduct. Ovechkin’s subsequent visit to China and Liu Baiyu’s 刘白羽 introduction of him at a meeting convened by the China Writers Association in 1956 further promoted Soviet writers’ daring spirit among Chinese writers. This resulted in the devastating persecution of two promising young writers as rightists due to their popular publications, namely, Wang Meng’s 王蒙 Newcomer in the Department of Organization (组织部新来的年青人) and Liu Binyan’s 刘宾雁 On the Bridge Construction Site (在桥梁工地上), both published in 1956.46 The third influence can be traced back to the early twentieth century, which witnessed the rise of comedy as a new artistic genre for its social, cultural, and humanistic functions. Zhang Jian documented key moments in its development and regarded Wang Guowei 王国维 as the first critic to speculate on an initial theory of comedy. Against the traditional Chinese concept of comedy, which projected a “harmony between heaven and humans” (天人合一) and, hence, a “happy ending in reunion in comedy” (大团圆喜剧结局), Wang linked suffering to the aesthetics of comedy (痛苦说) in order to “open the eyes of the audience to the painful life experience they all must confront.”47 “Pinning his hope on humor for creating his idealist comedies,” Wang aimed at “irreconcilable emotional conflicts and noble catharsis” in search for “truth in life.”48 Lu Xun further critiqued traditional comedy’s happy ending and its “zombie optimism” (僵尸的乐观), calling for a new concept of comedy as an important part of his agenda to transform Chinese national characteristics. As early as 1919, he argued that satire could attack social illness and direct society toward a better future.49 Lu Xun’s famous definition that “tragedy destroys valuable things for people to watch” (悲剧将人生的有价值 的东西毁灭给人看) while “comedy tears apart valueless things for people to [ 161 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife watch” (喜剧将那无价值的撕破给人看) proved influential in the formation of modern comedy.50 Chen Dabei developed satirical comedy that ridiculed the hypocrisy of society, whereas Xiong Foxi accentuated comedy’s potential to “amuse audiences” (趣味性), so that pleasure can be linked to the instructional functions of theater. Likewise, Ouyang Yuqian argued for the concept of comic laugher as an expression of the “delights of life,” which include human existence, happiness, and an optimistic spirit.51 Contextualized in the social milieu of the petty-­minded urbanites of the 1940s, Yang Jiang’s 1942 play, As You Desire (称心如意) depicts the female protagonist’s comic encounters with her relatives, who are supposed to help her upon her arrival in Shanghai after her parents’ death. One by one, however, they reject her. The play’s family intrigue portrays “young people on the fringe of the bourgeois society of Shanghai, looking for a place in it.”52 Yang’s humor also transcended “the immediate historical circumstances” of their creation in wartime Shanghai, unexpectedly resonating with audiences in post-­Mao society, some of whom were once again trading love for money, as Amy D. Dooling commented on Yang’s comedy Forging the Truth.53 If Yang’s comedies left no question that Republican-­period society was “corrupt,”54 it seems ironic that satirical plays on a hypocritical society again found their way on the early 1950s socialist stage. Blending the tradition of Bernard Shaw’s comedy of ideas with his own commitment to improve society, Wang Shaoyan published Unofficial Stories of a Director (主任 外传) in 1957, which included four one-­act satirical comedies mostly focused on a negative character Director Chen, to critical acclaim.55 Wang’s first comedy in this series, Rotten Grapes (葡萄烂了), appealed to audiences with its sharp satire against rising bureaucracy and incompetence in the new society.56 Managing department stores without any marketing skills, Chen overbought grapes without being able to sell them in time. Out of frustration, he calls a meeting to reduce losses but must discuss first how to call fewer meetings, a comic scene, and a friendly satire of a key feature of PRC culture, which thrives on meetings. Despite desperate efforts such as asking all his employees to sell grapes on the street as even more rotten grapes pile up, the play ends with him receiving yet another pressing phone call informing him that more grapes are arriving to his warehouse. Wang’s subsequent plays repeated his ingenious ending with a rapid fall of the curtain for its most dramatic effects. Compact and well-­structured, with sharp, timely, and humorous dramatic conflicts, the play was an immediate [ 162 ]

Is Socialism Good? sensation after its premiere by the China Youth Art Theater, followed by productions of several professional and amateur theater troupes all over the country. State leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai praised the play after attending a performance, and Wang was accepted as a member of the China Theater Association after winning an award for this play.57 Wang’s second comedy, A Patient with Free Coverage (公费病人), staged by the China Youth Art Theater and other troupes in 1956, moved from caricaturing inefficiency and bureaucracy to hypocrisy and deception of the CCP officials, as seen in the same Director Chen. Even though the text did not specify that the same Director Chen appeared in Wang’s previous play, savvy audience members who had already watched Rotten Grapes might fill in the blanks and imagine that the same Chen, exhausted from the debacle of the grapes, is now taking advantage of the privileged medical coverage given to officials; after staying in a hospital for almost a year free of charge for expensive medicine that he does not need, Chen refuses to leave. Worse than in the first play, Chen is now shameless in arguing with the doctor that he is sick; he also schemes to get his roommate discharged so that he can enjoy a single room by himself. In contrast, his roommate, a model worker from a steel factory, can’t wait to return to work, much against his doctor’s advice that he receive more treatment. Wang’s satire explores the deeper problem of the socialist system: “gongfei,” or free care at the public expense, produced more “bingren,” or patients, who are morally ill but with healthy bodies.58 Most intriguingly, thanks to this play’s dubious nature, the China Youth Art Theater, despite having the courage to stage this play, decades later left it out in its records of performance history. I was fortunate to discover a stage photo of A Patient with Free Coverage in a private family album celebrating the acting career of a theater couple, An Guotao 安国涛 and Wu Fengyuan 吴风媛, who acted as the doctor and the nurse in the China Youth Art Theater production of 1956. Ironically, even in this family collection, the playwright’s name was not mentioned.59 I wonder if Wang Shaoyan’s subsequent status as a rightist discouraged theater to acknowledge him as the scriptwriter—­or was his five-­year stint (1949–­1954) at the theater as its scriptwriter too “brief” for his name to be registered? His plays were never listed in the theater’s rather complete list of all its productions since its inception, as seen in its two commemorative publications. In my family archive, however, I discovered two lists of plays performed by the China [ 163 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Youth Art Theater from 1949 to 1979, drafted in the early 1990s by my parents separately according to their memory and the materials they consulted; they both listed A Patient with Free Coverage (figure  4.3) as having been produced in 1956. Again, a private record filled in a gap in the official record of the theater.60 As the most outspoken critic of Party bureaucracy, Wang returned to the satirical comedies in the Republican period such as The Issues of “Face” (面子 问题).61 Written by Lao She in 1942, the play centers on a group of petty-­ minded officials affiliated with the KMT who see “face” or “reputation” as the most important thing. After being fired from his official post, the main character harasses his doctor, in a way similar to Director Chen, to provide a method of suicide that will not cause him to “lose face.” Erasing the different years during which the two plays were written, one cannot easily tell if the satires on corruption and hierocracy aim at different regimes.

FIGURE 4.3 Wang Shaoyan, A Patient with Free Coverage. China Youth Art Theater, 1956. Director: Zheng Tianjian. Source: Courtesy of Wu Fengyuan. [ 164 ]

Is Socialism Good? Further probing into what happens inside the family life, away from public scrutiny, Wang’s third play, Loving Son and Daughter (男女情长), portrays Director Chen as a heartless son; he quarrels with his sister, a lower-­ rank official, about their mother’s moving into town from the countryside. While each at first fights for their mother to stay with their family to take over household duties, upon her arrival, each pushes the mother to the other’s house when she appears too sick to be of use. When mother decides to leave her callous children and mentions a check of 1,000 yuan, both siblings beg their mother to stay with their respective families. Disgusted by her selfish children, the mother leaves, planning to donate her savings to the agricultural production cooperatives in her home village. Her “politically correct” support for the collective movement dovetails with her wish that her grandchildren be brought up as filial offspring to take care of their parents. Again, the play ends in a grotesque situation when both siblings rush to chase their mother, with one stuck in the door and the other asking, “Why on earth are you in such a hurry?” with a quick curtain fall.62 Whereas Yang Jiang’s As You Desire ends in a happy scene when an uncle finally invites the protagonist into his house, Wang’s parody concludes bitterly when the mother walks out. Unlike Nora’s leaving her husband in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the mother’s departure reverses May Fourth comedies such as The Main Event in Life, in which a daughter walks out her parents’ house in pursuit of individualism. Wang’s bitter attack on Director Chen also went further than Chen Baichen’s 1939 satirical play titled Men and Women in Wild Times (乱世男女), which “satirizes the hypocrisy of various bourgeois and petit-­bourgeois characters who pay lip service” to the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and to “social welfare, and women’s liberation.”63 Wang’s play reveals that CCP officials violate the very ethics they preach in socialist China, no different from the officials of the KMT regime. Wang’s fourth play, Beautiful Spring (春光明媚), depicts Director Chen’s almost absurd behavior. During a spring outing to a park where his employees are supposed to enjoy collective leisure time away from the office, Chen carries out his ideological education instead. He questions a dating couple if their choice of each other is politically correct and if dancing together while holding hands is a legitimate entertainment without exerting an unhealthy influence on the masses in the park. He urges the young man, a model worker who exceeds his quota every day, to raise his political consciousness despite his technological skills and criticizes the young woman [ 165 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife for wearing a flower-­pattern shirt instead of the usual blue uniform.64 While intensely focused on his effort to educate his employees, he accidentally falls into a river; so does his little daughter, who he is supposed to be looking after. The curtain falls when people poke fun at them wearing each other’s pants dripping with water. Wang reaches his highest artistic achievement in his last play written in 1957, titled Wall (墙). Concisely structured, the play has only two characters: the Bureau Chief (局长), who builds a wall to separate his office from the rest of his colleagues for noise control; he argues with the Director (主任), who forewarns him of the consequences of distancing himself from the masses. The spirited dialogues between them—­either for or against the wall—­poke fun at political slogans in CCP discourse that apply to the masses but not to those in power. A permanent wall built with bricks and cement would be so steady, the Bureau Chief argues, that it would provide security and privacy until communist society is realized.65 Ironically, the wall prevents his own little daughter from getting into his office on a rainy night, and he is “imprisoned” within the wall, unable to reach his assistant when he needs help. When he accidentally locks himself in, no one can hear his screams for help because of the thick wall; he waves desperately through his window at the only person who passes by, who turns out to be a hearing-­impaired man who walks right in front of him without hearing him. The play ends with Wang’s unique dramatic style: the curtain quickly draws to a close right after the Chief Executive uses an ink bottle to try to break the impenetrable wall, with the Director reminding him of his earlier warnings.66 This play was ahead of its time, moving close to the theater of the absurd, yet its seemingly irrational and illogical actions in “a meaningless universe,” as seen in Samuel Beckett’s plays, were paradoxically strategized to ridicule the collapse of the moral standards as the result of Wang’s faith in the CCP’s promises and in his mission in providing meanings in order to realize them.67 Seen in this light, even though Wall was not included in Wang’s Unofficial Stories of a Director, it is intriguing to note that the Director, possibly implying Director Chen, has a higher moral standard than his boss, the Bureau Chief, therefore indicating how power corrupts even more at a higher level. Realizing that the Anti-­Rightist movement was gaining momentum in 1957 and his play could be easily distorted as attacking the CCP, Wang twice tried to withdraw his manuscript after its acceptance by a journal. The editor reassured him that the play was politically correct and that there was [ 166 ]

Is Socialism Good? nothing to worry about. Sure enough, upon its publication, Wall was publicly condemned as a typical counterrevolutionary work. Reading the play many decades later, I am struck by Wang’s profound insight into the dire consequences of an increasingly unequal society, his courage in exposing it, his artistic craft in witty and concise dialogues, but most intriguing of all, his blind trust in the CCP’s ability to self-­correct its problems and his naivety in believing that such a play would sharpen his skill as a comedy writer without a political demise that resulted in his persecution as a rightist and exile from Beijing to work in rural Hebei for twenty-­two years. Zhang Jian was therefore correct in pointing out that whereas political satirical comedy (政治讽刺喜剧) reached its most brilliant stage in the 1940s, as represented by Chen Baichen’s classic Promotion Scheme (升官图),68 thanks to its political power, such a genre had to suffer fatal defeat in a “people’s society,” as the zigzagging course of the development of comedy from 1949 to 1976 demonstrates.69 I argue that Wang inherited the classic art of Chen to expose the hypocrisy and tyranny of the society without realizing that his sincere desires to change the new society for the better inevitably produced a “black text” against the Party’s authority. Wang, however, was not alone in believing the dual functions of high art and its social impact. Li Chao 李超 won similar praise upon the publication of a one-­act satirical comedy titled Busy Meetings (开会忙) in 1955. A dozen party officials—­f rom a party secretary to a director, deputy director, and bureau chief—­walk in and out of the setting, a conference room, debating whether it is necessary to call a meeting. Should one be blamed for being absent from the meeting? Can one attend a meeting while taking care of his small child on the side? Is the meeting democratic enough to hear everyone’s opinions? After too much ado about nothing, the play ends with one official criticizing his colleague for his bureaucratic work style, whereas another feels disappointed and even depressed by the fact that there would no more meetings to discuss the necessity of calling meetings. If Wang and Li’s plays represent a rare flourishing yet brief period of satirical comedies in the Maoist period for their sharp political interventions, Yue Ye’s 岳野’s 1956 play Joys and Sorrows (同甘共苦) was denounced as  counterrevolutionary for its romantic plot plus a warning of CCP official’s questionable behaviors. Unlike Wang and Li’s plays, which present CCP officials as antagonists, Yue’s play centers on a protagonist Meng Shijing 孟时荆, a high-­ranking CCP official, and the single event of the [ 167 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife “homecoming” of Liu Fangwen 刘芳纹, Meng’s ex-­wife, who brings their son to visit his father. The drama unfolds when Meng realizes that he is more attracted to his ex-­wife from an arranged marriage in the countryside—­ whom he had already divorced on the grounds that she was “ignorant, backward, and unlovely”—­than Hua Yun 华云, his educated wife, whom he married out of “free love” after having shared a “similar experience” during the revolutionary war period. In hindsight, Joys and Sorrows ironically raised a similar issue already addressed three decades earlier in Ouyang Yuqian’s comedy After Returning Home, which dramatizes the conflicting emotions of Lu Zhiping, torn between his newly acquired Chinese American “wife,” an educated Westernized woman, and his virtuous Chinese wife, gained through an arranged marriage. By the end of the play, Lu appears to be more attracted to his homebound, loyal, and understanding Chinese wife than to his “shrew woman” from the West. As discussed in chapter 3, the play questions the negative influence of Western education while trying to come to terms with traditional Chinese values in the 1920s. In this regard, Ouyang’s play risks losing the feminist gain of May Fourth theater, as seen, for example, in Tian Han’s The Night the Tiger Was Caught. The image of once trapped women in patriarchal homes in Tian’s play was replaced by that of a content daughter-­in-­law in Ouyang’s play, who patiently waits for her estranged husband to return, never desiring to leave home herself. Ouyang’s challenge of the May Fourth iconoclastic agenda against patriarchal traditions ironically found a new expression in this 1950s socialist play, except this time, the patriarch is a high-­ranking CCP official, not the lower-­rank Director Chen in Wang’s plays. Liu Fangwen in Joys and Sorrows resembles Wu Zifang in Ouyang Yuqian’s Homecoming in her image as a virtuous and sacrificing wife from the countryside. However, the differences between the two female protagonists cannot be more striking: Liu is now dramatized as a new woman who has transformed herself from the victim of an arranged marriage in the “old society” into an educated and dynamic leader in the collective farming movement in her home village. Most important, she seems to have perfectly combined the virtue and devotion of a traditional woman with an active public role as a revolutionary woman, thus becoming a more charming lady for Meng than his nagging, and therefore “unlovable,” wife. Figure 4.4 illustrates a dramatic moment in this relationship when three key characters interact in a realist setting of the 1950s. [ 168 ]

Is Socialism Good? In a way that would have classified the play as a red classic, Liu Fangwen in Joys and Sorrows testified to the importance of the CCP agenda of women’s liberation. The embodiment of Liu as an emancipated woman, however, paradoxically critiques the characterization of Meng, the very image of the CCP official, whose changing taste in women disqualifies him as an exemplary leader, one who is expected to be faithful to his wife who accompanied him through the arduous war time years. Yet, as shown in the most ingenious part of the plot, Meng’s dramatic action fits the very profile of a good party official: his position as the deputy director of the Department of Agriculture in a provincial committee of the CCP makes it natural for him to feel drawn to Liu, whose enthusiasm for bringing changes to her home village and for reporting on the challenges of organizing local peasants into collective farming opens his eyes to the reality of life in rural areas

FIGURE 4.4 Meng Shijing between his rural ex-­wife (left) and urban wife (right), in Yue Ye, Joys and Sorrows. China Central Experimental Theater, 1957. Director: Sun Weishi; stage designer: Liu Lu. Source: From Wang Zhengchun and Xuan Jihua, eds., China Central Experimental Theater (n.p., 1996), 27. [ 169 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife and provides him with new visions for his own leadership role in carrying out the party’s agricultural policies. The plot would have classified Yue’s play as a “red classic,” one that reflected the heroic deeds of the collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s. The bonds of common interest in rural life that bring them closer than ever before—­a theme that would have been acceptable in normal cases without complex romantic relationships—­ nevertheless did not prevent Joys and Sorrows from being criticized as a black “rightist play” for its “attack on the party and its officials” despite—­or perhaps because of—­ popular productions by several theater groups throughout the country. On one level, however, such a campaign against this play did not really miss the target: Liu’s final leaving of Meng’s home, after having rejected his proposal for remarriage, does not simply repeat other acts of home-­leaving on the part of new women characters on earlier Chinese stages, as seen in numerous Nora-­like plays in the tradition of Ibsen; she rejects, first and foremost, a party official of high rank who is supposed to lead the battle for women’s liberation rather than confine them once again in patriarchal homes. On another level, nevertheless, Liu in essence remains an old Wu character, in After Returning Home, dressed in the new clothes of socialist state feminist, speaking its new jargon, but playing a comparable traditional role of supporter of her man and his leadership in the collective farming moment, except he is now her ex, implicitly exposing the futile efforts of communist revolution that had incited women to sacrifice for their own liberation, gendered and otherwise, and yet had left them behind in their pursuit of women’s own dream of happiness. Meng was also criticized as a “middle character” (中间人物) or “unhealthy” character who was neither progressive enough to be a protagonist nor backward enough to be an antagonist. Worse still, as a CCP leader, Meng should have represented his real-­life counterparts to inspire awe and ­admiration as a perfect role model in socialist China, not as a man confused in his private life. Yet, it is in this gray character with conflicting desires for his two women that we witness the real appeal of the play, a love triangle in a patriarchal home unchanged even in a new socialist society. Yue Ye was thus disparaged for decades for having written this one play, a black text with an antiparty and antisocialist message. In early post-­Mao China of the early 1980s, Yue’s play conversely was anthologized as one of the classic plays written in the Maoist period representing a typical example of a [ 170 ]

Is Socialism Good? “fourth kind of play” (第四种戏剧), which courageously transgressed, in the early 1950s, the much-­promoted categories of three types of plays on workers, peasants, and soldiers. In the postsocialist era, which subverts ­literary criteria of the Maoist period, it has nonetheless remained one of the classics for its combination of love story, social criticism, and aesthetic taste.70 The irony of reversing theater history is further expressed in the changing fate of “middle characters.” In Yue’s fourth type of drama, Liu Fangwen was intended as a protagonist, or “positive character” (正面人物), in pursuing dreams of collective farming. Peasant plays of the 1950s, at the same time, often staged antagonists who refused to give up their land. These antagonists in rural plays who went against the collective movement in fact expressed more genuine desires of many peasants and their faint voice of opposition against the radical policies in the 1950s. For this very reason, they have, not surprisingly, metamorphosed into protagonists in post-­Mao China, as seen in Liu Jinyun’s 1986 play titled Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, which covers historical events from 1949 to the 1980s. In this experimental play, Uncle Doggie becomes a lonely and tragic King Lear character, stubbornly resisting the collective farming movement in the 1950s and 1960s by tilling his own piece of land, day in and day out, without being affected by the political events occurring in his village. Uncle Doggie at once embodies a positive character in defiance against the collective mandate, a negative character precisely for the same reason if seen from the Maoist perspective, and a middle character who refuses to be clearly defined. “Peasant plays,” a pillar of Maoist theater, rewrote the history of the countryside after 1949 with a sarcastic critique against the very red message of the first seventeen years of socialist China, thereby obtaining status as a classic text with artistic achievements that rejects color definition but satisfied both audiences and critics.71 The theater journey from Lao She’s Fang Zhenzhu to Liu Jinyun’s Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana illustrates contradictions, inconsistencies, and clues to the construction and deconstruction of red classics. This chapter explores gray texts and black messages as having revealed multifaceted positions to ­challenge or subvert the red classics or to restore what had been erased in history. From Wang Shaoyan and Yue Ye’s persecutions after the Anti-­ Rightist movement to Lao She’s suicide during the Cultural Revolution, we  appreciate theater artists’ early dreams, persistent hopes, tireless [ 171 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife endeavors, and intelligent collaborations in charting out the socialist imaginary. From artists’ dreams of owning their own theaters to satirical comedies against rising social ills and inequality and artistic explorations despite censorship, we also clearly see the continuities between the cultures of the Republic and the PRC and their inherited core values and challenges to preserve them.

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FIVE

The Tales of the Wives The Mao-­Era Metamorphosis of the “Red Classics” and Their Postsocialist Reinscriptions

Atop the red crag the red plum blooms 红岩上红梅开 A thousand li of ice and frost under her feet 千里冰霜脚下踩 Fearing not bitter cold in the depth of winter 三九严寒何所惧 A single bright red heart to open toward the sun 一片丹心向阳开 Red plum flowers blossom 红梅花儿开 Each petal releasing brilliant colors 朵朵放光彩 Her head high, furiously releasing a myriad petals 昂首怒放花万朵 Fragrance extending beyond the cloudy heavens 香飘云天外 Awaking the hundred flowers and they open together 唤醒百花齐开放 To herald a new spring with a triumphant song 高歌欢庆新春来 —­“The Song of Red Plum”

WRITTEN IN 1964 by Yan Su 阎肃, an eminent songwriter, and his colleagues as a theme song for a folk opera (歌剧) titled Sister Jiang (江姐), “The Song of the Red Plum” (红梅赞) has remained one of the most popular red songs from the Maoist period up to the present day. First performed in 1964 in Beijing by the Air Force Political Department Performance Troupe (空军政治部文工团), Sister Jiang made history in folk opera with a successful run of 286 shows from 1964 to 1965, with subsequent reruns attended by three generations of the CCP leaders, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin 江泽民, the only work to claim such an honor. Xi Jinping, the PRC president since 2013, married Peng Liyuan 彭丽媛, whose singing career peaked after performing the [ 173 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife theme songs of the eponymous heroine, Sister Jiang, among other red songs. In 2006, China Central Televison (CCTV) broadcast a documentary on the creation of the opera: in 1962, Liu Yalou 刘亚楼, the commander in chief of the Air Force, encouraged the cast to “exert all their efforts in creating a classic opera.” Liu studied in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1945, loved operas especially Carmen, and knew passages from several Western operas by heart. For Liu, the Red Army, both in the Soviet Union and in China, and the red songs forged in their histories were an integral part of his memories. Liu rejected an earlier song, which sounded “too masculine” for a female role, and instead approved “The Song of the Red Plum” as a theme song appearing at least three times in the critical moments of the opera: it introduces Sister Jiang’s first appearance onstage; it expresses her sorrow upon seeing the head of her husband hung up on the county gate by the KMT; and it accompanies her bracing for execution at the end. Perfected by five generations of actresses who played the title role, this song became one of the most remembered red songs in the Maoist and post-­Maoist periods.1 Socialist state feminism, as seen in Sister Jiang and other red classic performances to be examined here, inherited the pioneering tradition of the feminist theater under the influence of Western feminism and a global socialist movement since the 1910s (as explained in chapter 1). In the 1920s, Bai Wei, an admirer of Tian Han, from whom she had first learned about Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, developed a Chinese style of women’s theater with her 1928 play Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda (打出幽灵塔), in which a brave, Nora-­ like concubine breaks out of her prisonlike house in search for freedom and happiness.2 Her story, however, is only a subplot to foil a more tragic story in which a loving mother and a courageous daughter wage a fierce yet unsuccessful battle against a patriarchal society symbolized either by domineering and lustful domestic fathers or by new-­nationalist fathers already corrupted by a revolution that aimed to eliminate Confucian values. The death of the daughter in her mother’s arms at the conclusion of Bai’s play epitomizes the sheer difficulty, if not the impossibility, of breaking out of a patriarchal family. As women characters appeared more prominently in drama scripts, the establishment of women playing women became a double-­edged sword against the patriarchal tradition. In the production of A Doll’s House by the Shanghai Amateur Actors Association (上海业余戏人学会) in 1935, Lan Ping, later known as Jiang Qing, successfully blended her own rebellious and [ 174 ]

The Tales of the Wives individualistic personality into the dramatic character Nora; she also benefited from Zhang Min’s 章泯 teaching of the Stanislavski method, which required her to put her own emotions into her character.3 Her brilliant debut as a free-­spirited Nora in Shanghai became both a “blessing,” when Mao Zedong felt attracted to her as a beautiful actress in Yan’an, and as a “curse,” when, after the death of Mao, she was scapegoated as a radical leader of the Cultural Revolution.4 Women and theater therefore are closely connected in the making of theater and political histories from the Republican to the socialist and postsocialist period. In the “liberated areas” occupied by the CCP, especially in Yan’an, dramatists experimented with a “national form” that drew inspiration from the life experiences of the masses and from the indigenous folk theater, as seen in the best-­k nown folk opera, The White-­Haired Girl, which was inspired by communist ideology.5 The first seventeen years of the PRC drama situated the fate of woman in the larger context of “socialist revolution and construction,” which provided women with a perfect stage for public performance. Huaishu Village (槐树庄), which premiered in 1959, for instance, featured a Mother Guo 郭大娘, an “earth mother” transformed into a new revolutionary matriarch. The loss of her only son to the war effort merely reinforces her tenacious effort to take the lead in the numerous political events occurring in the countryside: the land-­reform movement to distribute land among poor peasants, the campaign to support the War of Resisting the United States and Aiding Korea, the collective farming movements, and the Great Leap Forward. A single woman’s saga, therefore, became a miniature history of the early PRC onstage.

Red Classic One: “Party Membership Dues” I have so far briefly provided a few moments in the history of women’s theater since the onset of huaju as a general context for examining women characters from literary adaptations to theatrical performances in the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter focuses on the transformation of women’s images in four red classic films and other performances in relation to their local communities, family roles, societal expectations, and afterlives in postsocialist China. While heroic female characters in these works conformed to  the ideology of socialist realism, the spectacular scenes, compelling [ 175 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife performers, and cultural fantasies fascinated the public. Through depictions of women and desire, I outline the intricate relationships between erotic love, collective experience, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment in cross-­genre adaptations of socialist texts that continued to entertain postsocialist audiences thanks to China’s social, political, and economic transformations. At first sight, these texts seem to be additional proof of Chinese official feminism, which portrayed liberated women as having been subjected to the ideology of individual sacrifice for the socialist cause with their free consent. I interpret them, however, as having paradoxically inherited the romantic love stories contested by external forces of resistance in the traditional literature and popular culture, thus revealing some of their subjectivities of being “women” in their own personal and historical circumstances. Foregrounding the love aspect of red classics does not necessarily negate the significance of Maoist feminism; it complicates its process of adapting elements from traditional cultural roots and helps recover aspects of social, emotional, and artistic appeals so far neglected in the official interpretations of the red classics. As I will demonstrate later, the works under discussion were first produced in the 1950s and early 1960s, at the peak of the red classic period, to express Maoist socialist idealism. During the Cultural Revolution, many were criticized or banned, whereas others were resurrected due to their potential to refashion the ultraleftist views of the CCP history and their representations in theater and film. In the postsocialist period, however, they emerged again as either an “aesthetic” remake in a globalized China that prioritized “art” over ideology or as pop icons to promote singing stars  and increase financial gains through ticket sales while not losing their appeal for a Maoist nostalgia still attractive to audiences. I argue that although the selfless spirit of sacrifice still appeals to the contemporary audience partially because of its disappearance in real life, the so-­called red classic performances have also remained essential for the ruling ideology’s claim to “remain true to our original aspiration and keep our mission firmly in mind” (牢记初心，不忘使命), as best formulated by Xi Jinping, in order to consolidate CCP’s power over the discontented citizens. The first case is Wang Yuanjian’s 王愿坚 short story “Party Membership Dues” (党费), published in 1954, the year I was born. I grew up with this transformative story about a simple and splendid woman from a poor rural background giving up all she had for the cause of the communist [ 176 ]

The Tales of the Wives revolution. Through this and similar stories as textbooks, I acquired reading and writing skills in the Chinese language in addition to the moral strength to aspire to become a heroic woman. I was also mesmerized by Tian Han’s 田华 beautiful female protagonist in a film adaptation called The Daughter of the Party (党的女儿), released in 1958 at the peak of the socialist period. Cited as one of the best examples of carrying out the principles of Mao Zedong’s “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art,” Wang’s short story presents the main theme of the life and struggle of the masses and the Red Army against Nationalist enemies during the 1930s. It has a simple storyline: after her husband joined the Long March in April 1934, Huang Xin 黄新, a underground party member, helps Comrade Cheng 程同志, a scout for “a tiny force left behind to continue behind-­the-­lines struggle,” escape from KMT arrest by drawing the enemy’s attention to herself and is arrested.6 The story ends with a grief-­stricken Cheng delivering Huang’s five-­year-­old girl to CCP guerillas in the mountains, together with her silver dollars and preserved vegetables as her party membership dues. Cheng expressed his admiration for Huang: “How can anyone measure the value of a party member’s affection for his party? How indeed can anyone count a party member’s devotion and sacrifice?”7 Selected for an elementary school textbook, Wang’s story inspired not merely a generation of readers in their loyalties to the party but also the practice of submitting monthly party membership dues right after receiving one’s salary in the PRC. It is reported that Zhu De 朱德, known as a cofounder of the Red Army with Mao, left his offspring with no inheritance and submitted his savings of 20,000 yuan as his last party membership dues; the check has since been on display in the Revolutionary History Museum in Beijing to educate later generations about the importance of party membership dues and the legacy of state leaders.8 Conventional reception of this story emphasized Huang’s sacrifice for the party without references to her unwavering love for her husband, who expected her sacrifice in his honor. The two silver dollars are as much about her devotion to the guerrillas’ cause as the token of love left behind by her husband. Beneath the plot of a woman’s sacrifice, therefore, lies what Chen Sihe termed “a latent structure beneath the manifest mainstream discourse” (民间隐形结构) in a contemporary literary work.9 This latent structure, in “Party Membership Dues,” could be seen as a simple love story and [ 177 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife a couple’s desire to share their fate in extremely arduous circumstances. It also reflected real experience in the early 1930s, when poor peasants had no choice but to bid farewell to the Red Army, which had “liberated them” but also left them behind to face slaughter by the KMT. Comrade Cheng, the first-­person narrator, noticed the drastic change in the local community upon entering the village: in sharp contrast to the lively days filled with “meetings, classes, drums and gongs, shows and songs all over the place after a day’s work” when the Red Army was around, now “everything had changed: there was a dead silence everywhere,” without any lights.10 Such a bleak depiction of the Soviet Area (苏区) did not fully reflect the bloody local history after the Red Army’s retreat. Decades later, postsocialist party histories detailed the cruelties of the revolutionary war and the tremendous suffering of the poor peasants. In his authoritative book on the Long March, Wang Shuzeng documents that among the young men who joined the Red Army from Ruijin, the departure point for the Long March, 18,000 died during the perilous journey; among the 50,000 new recruits from Xingguo County 兴国县, 28,000 became “martyrs of the Red Army.” The Eighth Regiment of the Chinese Workers and Peasant Red Army (中国工 农红军第八军团) consisted entirely of new recruits right before the Long March; the regiment perished within sixty days after its formation. From 1934 to 1937, after the Red Army retreated from the Soviet Area, the KMT and their affiliates slaughtered 800,000 family members and supporters of the Red Army.11 Wang asks why the poor peasants supported the Red Army. Before the Red Army’s arrival, 80 percent of the population was dirt-­poor and owned only 20 percent of the land. Once promised that they would be able to harvest on their own land and be granted dignity and justice, and after they learned new phrases such as “proletarian revolution,” they developed a collective awareness of “making an effort for the public good” (为公家的事出力) and sacrificed themselves at an “amazingly high price.”12 A far cry from reflecting this harsh reality, “Party Membership Dues” nonetheless depicted a devastated community which needs to reconnect with each other. As a starving guerrilla fighter hiding in the mountains without supplies, Cheng “grew desperate and helpless” because he “could not endure [his] isolation from the masses.”13 The official interpretation of  the story invariably underlines peasants’ support for the CCP’s cause in  the revolutionary war. Without denying its obvious presence, one can also detect the image of a lonely traveler coming in search for a family. [ 178 ]

The Tales of the Wives Introducing Huang Xin, first as “a housewife in her mid-­t wenties,” and then as “a Party member since 1931,” Cheng was drawn to her feminine “soft humming” of a familiar song, “Seeing My Love Off to Join the Red Army,” and “her kind, calm eyes,” “alert and full of energy.”14 Sharing a past in a local community prompts Huang to protect him in the same way that her husband would have been protected by other women. Most important, mutual support between neighbors and villagers is at once revolutionary comradeship and communal attachment, which were increasingly cemented in times of adversity; the story therefore functions as a red classic that expresses communist idealism as well as a traditional text that promotes local culture and ritual.

Red Classic Two: The Daughter of the Party Unlike the events that happened within “a couple of weeks” in “Party Membership Dues,” the 1958 film The Daughter of the Party provides a prehistory and history of these events that justify sacrifices of the peasants for the communist cause, while elaborating on the romantic aspect of the story. In contrast to the absent husband in the short story, Wang Jian 王坚, a Red Army official, appears at the beginning of the film to attend a concert right after the founding of the PRC. Drawn to the beautiful folksongs from Xingguo County, his hometown, Wang is mesmerized by the actress on stage, who looks like Li Yumei 李玉梅, his loving wife, whom he has not seen for twenty years. In a long flashback, which constitutes the main part of the film, he recalls how he bid farewell to Yumei in 1934, telling her that the Red Army would return soon, and encouraged her to persevere in underground work. “Forever remember that you are a glorious member of the party,” he says to his wife, who fulfills his wish to the end of her life. In comparison to “The Party Membership Dues,” cinematic techniques such as the long shots of the peaceful village and the closeup of loving gaze between them in a tender farewell underline Yumei’s desire to be faithful to her husband and to the party at the same time. With his guilt that the Red Army never returned as promised, Wang talks to the actress, who turns out to be Xiaoniu’r 小妞儿, the little girl he had left behind. With another flashback, Xiaoniu’r narrates how, only a few days after the Red Army had left, the “white dogs” arrested eight CCP [ 179 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife members. At the execution ground, the village party secretary took the bullet aimed at Yumei, and, before breathing his last, urged her to report to his boss, Ma Jiahui 马家辉, the party secretary of the district, that a traitor has handed over a list of all the members of the underground network. To Yumei’s surprise and indignation, Ma, who had introduced her into the party organization, turned out to be the very traitor who caused all the damage. With the help of Ma’s guilt-­ridden wife, Yumei escaped to continue her search for the CCP guerrillas in the mountains. A typical Maoist reading would emphasize the menace of a traitor, who must be identified immediately and eliminated to prevent further damage. On the level of latent structure of local culture in terms of women’s experience, however, Yumei’s confusion and suffering, caused by the traitor, foreground her loneliness and vulnerability without her husband when contested by a malicious force. At a time of crisis, Yumei longs to be with Wang. She dreams about the morning sun shining through the forest, where Wang emerges with his Red Army troops, only to be confronted by Ma Jiahui: Ma stands next to her husband, rejects her claim that he is a traitor, and therefore raises doubts about Yumei’s innocence. Yumei’s desire to expose the traitor originates as  much from her loyalty to the party as from her passion in protecting her husband and her own honor. In the name of a revolutionary couple, a traditional love tale that overcomes obstacles transforms smoothly into a revolutionary remaking of a feminist story. Furthermore, following the traditional ethics of “bringing peace to the dead after a proper burial” (入土为安), Yumei leads her villagers in risking their lives to bury the eight corpses hanging in the trees in bitter wind against the KMT’s order not to do so; this plot shares a universal theme with Sophocles’s Antigone, in which the title heroine defies the orders of King Creon and buries the body of her deceased brother, Polyneices, to follow the laws of man against the laws of nature. With another shift to 1950s China, Wang hands back the red party membership card, with the two silver dollars, to Xiaoniu’r: “Your mother was an excellent daughter of the party! How many comrades like her have died for our happiness today!” Beneath this official message, however, the love theme again surfaces: Wang’s request that his daughter remember her mother becomes the ultimate payoff for Yumei, who is now glorified at once as the object of male desire and his loving memory, the ideal mother for her daughter, and the heroic woman for the party. [ 180 ]

The Tales of the Wives Despite its huge success, The Daughter of the Party was attacked during the Cultural Revolution as one of the four hundred “poisonous-­weeds movies” (毒草电影) produced between 1949 and 1966, and for having depicted a bloody and devastating life in the Jiangxi Soviet Area, advocating “a philosophy to live at all costs” (活命哲学), as evidenced in the lines spoken by Ma. By allowing the traitor to survive the massacre, the film paved the way “for the theoretical base for the betraying acts of Liu Shaoqi’s traitor’s clique.”15 This sweeping critique, absurd as it was, ironically pinpointed the cruel circumstances Yumei endured, which was a realistic account of the bloodstained tragedy after the Red Army’s retreat. In the historical context of the politics of the Cultural Revolution, the attack on numerous films aimed at eliminating the potential damaging effects beneath the mainstream narratives of The Daughter of the Party to promote the radical genre of the “model theater,” with victorious protagonists without sadness, setback, and slaughter. Denunciating these red classical pieces elevated model theater’s heroines as true proletarian without any traits of feudalist and bourgeois sentiments.

Red Classic Three: The Shining Red Star Despite the film’s predicament during the Cultural Revolution, the storyline of Wang’s “Party Membership Dues,” however, was given a second chance in a 1974 film entitled The Shining Red Star (闪闪的红星), adapted from a popular novel by Li Xintian 李心田. Published in 1972, during the Cultural Revolution, as a children’s book, Li’s novel was also adapted from “Party Membership Dues” and sold a record several million copies at the time when few works of fiction were able to pass the most rigorous censorship imposed in this period.16 The film, however, followed a major change in Li’s fiction in terms of gender politics: it created a ten-­year-­old boy, Pan Dongzi 潘冬子, to replace Xiaoniu’r. The design of a boy allows the protagonist to grow up as a male soldier, joins his father in the Red Army, and finally avenges his mother. Ironically, a socialist feminist story in Wang’s original piece had to be subverted in gender identity to reflect a latent patriarchal society in real life: mother now remains nameless and is known to others as “Dongzi’s mother” 冬子妈. The significance of women characters, however, is paradoxically preserved: Dongzi follows his mother’s heroic spirit to [ 181 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife honor his parents’ memories, therefore, expressing the quintessential lyric, “the party as dear as my mother” (我把党来比母亲), in the 1960s popular song titled “Sing a Song for the Party” (唱支山歌给党听).17 As a rare case of a celebrated film during the Cultural Revolution, The Shining Red Star reversed the sad, sentimental, and dark atmosphere by setting the story in 1931, three years earlier than The Daughter of the Party. This “prehistory” before the Red Army’s retreat from the Soviet Area explains the local peasants’ benefits from and support for the communist movement: Red Army soldiers rescue Dongzi and his mother from being killed by Hu Hansan 胡汉三, the vicious landlord; drive away Hu and other local despots; divide the land among the poor; and establish elementary schools for the children and a local government run by the peasants’ representatives. All the promises made by the CCP are now realized, which explains the sacrifices of Huang Xin and Yumei in the two earlier works. In 1934, when the Red Army retreats from Jiangxi, Dongzi’s father gives him a red star. While luring the enemies away from surrounding the local CCP supporters, Dongzi’s mother is burned to death in her hut, which Dongzi witnesses in tears from afar. At the end of the film, Dongzi kills Hu and reunites with his father in 1938, when the latter returns to lead local guerrillas to battle against the Japanese invaders after the formation of the united front between the CCP and the KMT. This Cultural Revolution–­era adaptation created a formidable father figure who saves his son and leads his troops to victory, in sharp contrast to mother’s lonely execution in The Daughter of the Party without the protection of the “liberator.” What is most significant, The Shining Red Star portrays a more romantic picture of the local peasants’ sacrifice, which, in real historical accounts, did not witness the return of the Red Army. Figure 5.1 illustrates the heroic return of the father who admits Dongzi into the CCP troops at the happy ending of the film. This family reunion reinforced the official line of the Cultural Revolution to continue class struggle in defense of Mao’s “correct line” through a voiceover of the adult Dongzi, who learned, many years later, that the Red Army’s embarking on the Long March and his separation from his father were direct results of “the erroneous leftist-­opportunist line of the CCP leaders, who excluded Mao from the party’s central leadership, thus causing the loss of the Central Soviet Area, which had been previously established by Mao.”18 The return of Hu, which symbolized a “capitalist restoration” by the class [ 182 ]

The Tales of the Wives

FIGURE 5.1 Pan Dongzi joins the CCP troops upon his father’s return. Still from the film The Shining Red Star. August First Film Studio, 1974. Director: Li Ang.

enemy, testified to the heavy price of an “erroneous party line.” At one point in the film, a local leader delivers to Dongzi’s mother the news of Mao’s return to the leadership position in the Zunyi meeting in January 1935. It was during her mission to spread this news to firm up local villagers’ faith in the Red Army’s return that mother gives up her life to protect the villagers. This extremely unlikely plot links the fate of Dongzi to the most recent party victory against the Lin Biao anti-­CCP clique in 1972, which allegedly continued the two-­line struggles in 1935, when Wang Ming’s 王明 leftist opportunist line was defeated. This fabricated storyline with no base in history was essential for the film to be promoted as a victory of the Cultural Revolution’s new art. Equally important are carefully executed aesthetic details that express appropriate political message in the creation of this new red classic after numerous old red classics were struck down. Artistic achievements in music and cinematography played an important role in the film’s success, [ 183 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife especially when compared with only a few films made during the same period such as A Golden Road (金光大道), with similar politically correct themes but without much artistic appeal.19 Fu Gengchen 傅庚辰, the composer of The Shining Red Star, recalled that he had already completed the general music scores for the film with seven songs until he read the newly added song “The Red Azalea” (映山红) in the third revised script. Fu was so touched by its lyrical beauty that that he decided to abandon his previous songs to focus on this new one.20 “The Red Azalea” first appears in a feminine solo after Dongzi’s mother told him that his father would return when the red azalea blossoms to express her longing for her husband. When spring arrives with red azalea blossoming all over the hills, Dongzi runs out of the village to greet his father, only to find himself disappointed again. The same song appears again at the scene of her execution in lieu of “The Internationale,” the usual choice for similar occasions in numerous PRC performances. In the twenty-­first century, the cinematographers recalled their creative process in a famous scene known as “a small bamboo raft floating in a river” (小小竹排江中流). They originally planned to take just one shot, since the filmscript has only a single sentence; upon arriving at the location in Jiangxi, they were so stunned by the beauty of the landscape that they ultimately produced a long episode. In the most lyrical form, the scene describes Dongzi and his mentor traveling on a gushing river with green hills along its banks and a souring eagle in the sky to symbolize his will to follow his father’s footstep against all obstacles, accompanied by a solo, “The Red Star Inspired Me to Join the Battle” (红星照我去战斗).21 Whereas its singer, Li Shuangjiang 李双江, became a “pop star” during the Cultural Revolution, starting with this song, the richly encoded visual and audial feast mesmerized many spectators with romance and adventure at a time when it was a rare occurrence, myself included. The acting was also outstanding, as seen in the performance of child star Zhu Xinyun 祝新运, who played Dongzi and became a national celebrity with Jiang Qing posing with him in the People’s Daily while receiving foreign guests. Hu Hansan, the vicious landlord, became a popular nickname for an unpopular person in everyday life; his line “a thief inside one’s house is the most difficult to detect” (家贼难防啊) became a trendy joke. I remember watching the film again and again, both in cinema with my classmates at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages in school-­organized [ 184 ]

The Tales of the Wives events and on the small black-­and-­white television screen at home, enchanted by the beautiful sceneries and the magic power of movies seldom seen during the Cultural Revolution. In hindsight, a high aesthetic style with all the technical advantages of the film media with appropriate insert of key political jargon terms ensured its success as a new red classic despite its striking similarities with the core narrative of the “old red classics” produced before and criticized during the Cultural Revolution. Three decades later in 2007, Maoist nostalgia, socialist legacy promotion, and commercial incentives brought about the release of the twenty-­three-­ part television drama series of The Shining Red Star, directed by Zhu Xinyun, who played Dongzi in 1974. The television drama introduced traditional cultural aspects to neutralize the original message of the revolutionary legacy. They portray Dongzi’s father as a loyal son and Dongzi’s mother as a loyal daughter-­in-­law who sells her silver bracelet to pay for her mother-­ in-­law’s medical expenses.22 Furthermore, unlike his adultlike persona, required by the Cultural Revolution’s theory of perfect characters in the film version, Dongzi engages in boyhood tricks with his two friends, such as beating the landlord’s vicious dog to death after having lured it into a trap with a pig bone.23 The television series also added Ximei 细妹, a childhood sweetheart (青梅竹马) whose father also departed for the Long March; she perished in the dangerous mission of delivering intelligence to the guerrilla troops. The television drama recovered the traitor story originally in the 1958 movie The Daughter of the Party but renamed him as Pock-­Mark Luo 罗麻子. Unlike his predecessor, Ma Jiahui, Pock-­Mark Luo has complicated motivations, weaknesses, and poor skills in dealing with human relationships and is therefore a more sympathetic character. Dongzi’s story continued to inspire contemporary artists as exemplified in a 1999 dance drama of The Shining Red Star, first performed by the Shanghai Song and Dance Theater (上海歌舞剧院). Celebrated as a brilliant piece of a “new Shanghai school of dance,” this show experimented with the concept, convention, and structure of the genre in portraying the emotions of Dongzi without the use of language or political discourse. Structuring the dance around the more universal conflicts between the good and the evil and between old and new force, director Zhao Ming 赵明 fashioned five female dancers in red dress to evoke different layers of the meanings of the red star; they sometimes dance with Dongzi to help express his internal world or his interactions with his environment. The red star became a key [ 185 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife dance element (舞蹈元素) to represent the revolutionary spirit with aesthetic taste.24 In this dance drama, performing art ultimately produced a real “red classic” with form and content in harmony, many decades after the birth of the red classic in its original form.

The Sympathetic Traitor and His Stage Heroines From the socialist to the postsocialist periods, major adaptations of The Daughter of the Party continued to transform the art of each respective genre while adapting to the changed tastes of the audiences. A 1958 huai opera (淮 剧, originated from Anhui Province), preserved the dramatic conflict between Li Yumei and the traitor Ma Jiahui,25 whereas in 1991, a production of the same genre was commended for its successful second creation of directing, acting, and staging, but it was also criticized for a lack of breakthrough in revising its original storyline.26 Among numerous adaptations, the huangmei opera (黄梅戏, popular in Hubei and Anhui provinces) stood out with its beginning scene that directly staged Yumei’s execution with her heartbroken farewell to her daughter, accompanied by female choral singing (伴唱) to heighten the tragic effect of death and separation. The poster of this 2018 production in figure 5.2 illustrates the makeup, costume design, and acting style of this local opera, in which negative characters such as Ma Jiahui (first left in front role) and the KMT executioner (upper right) were portrayed in a humane and even handsome manner without conventional unattractive caricature. It also features Yang Jun 杨俊, known as one of the “five golden flowers” (五朵金花) among Huangmei opera performers; Yang’s singing and acting as the female protagonist showcases one of the best artistic achievements of this regional opera. The success of the huangmei opera in the twenty-­first century and other numerous adaptations can be traced back to the folk opera (歌剧) that premiered in 1991, the most influential piece thanks to its humanization of Ma Jiahui. After the massacre of the CCP members, his wife becomes insane, madly cutting into pieces his bloodstained white shirt, for she, too, was once a “glorious” member of the CCP. Ma begs for his wife’s forgiveness: “Don’t you understand that I did this so that you can survive?” When Tian Yumei 田玉梅 confronts Ma for having betrayed his pledge to the party, Ma argues, “I’ve done more for the party than you ever did—­I gave you party [ 186 ]

The Tales of the Wives

FIGURE 5.2 Poster of the Huangmei opera The Daughter of the Party. Hubei Province Opera Art Theater and others, 2018. Adapted from the folk opera by Song Xiteng. Director: Deng Desen; composer: Xu Zhiyuan; stage designer: Tian Shaopeng. Source: Courtesy of Hubei Province Opera Art Theater.

lessons and taught you the Red Army songs. I was doing the right thing then and I am not doing the wrong thing now. Let others judge who is right and who is wrong.”27 When Ma’s wife tries to protect Yumei by aiming Ma’s pistol at him, Ma once again reminds her wife of his deep love and is thereby transformed from a heartless coward into a complex human being, torn between love for his wife and for his party. Ma, however, must remain a dangerous enemy within the revolutionary ranks so that the contemporary opera can work for the postsocialist campaign to validate the legacy of the CCP. It ends with an execution scene, but Yumei is given two choices: either reveal the whereabouts of the guerrillas or be slaughtered with a knife along with her daughter, “one piece of flesh at a time.” The ensuing singing passages justify a mother’s sacrifice of her daughter while exploring the full power of operatic music: “My dear child, mom has let you down. / Mom has never provided you with a carefree childhood.” “My only belonging is that red flag in my heart.”28 An older Xiaoniu’r than her counterpart in the film version replies: “Mom, I’ve [ 187 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife grown up and I understand: “A little lamb kneels in front of its mom” (羊羔 羔吃奶跪望着妈). “A little bird opens her mouth waiting for its mom in the nest (小鸟张嘴盼妈早回家). “A little girl can never live without my loving mom” (女儿离不开我的好妈妈).29 Drawing Xiaoniu’r closer to her bosom in tears and sorrow, Yumei asks her to raise her head and look afar: In the moonlight a group of children happily walk toward school In the spring breeze, our village has taken a new look I will sing in heaven I will sleep under the earth When the flowers blossom all over the divine land tomorrow Don’t forget to wake me up In the heavenly sky I will smile at the ten thousand spring colors in my home village

星光里一群小伙伴 正欢欢喜喜进校园 春光里家乡换新颜 我在天边唱 我在土里眠 待来日花开满神州 莫忘喊醒我 九天之上 笑看这万里春色满家园30

This passage has become a popular song, with numerous performances by Peng Liyuan, whose career reached its peak with her creation of Tian Yumei in this folk opera (歌剧). Peng was the wife of Xi Jinping, then the possible designated future general secretary of the CCP after Hu Jintao’s retirement. As the son of Xi Zhongxun 习仲勋, a former high-­ranking party official, Xi was attracted to her simplicity and purity, and she was smitten by his honesty and down-­to-­earth style.31 The perfect blending of an outstanding singer on national stage with a top performer in political life further promoted Peng’s image as “the daughter of the party” onstage and her role as the good wife of Xi offstage. Several songs in Peng’s repertoire are often performed in concerts and mass celebratory events, widely popularized through television broadcasts. One is “Farewell to the Red Army beneath Fenghuang Ridge” (凤凰岭下送红军), a theme song from the 1958 opera film (戏曲电影) Hong Xia (红霞), adapted directly from a folk opera with the same title set in the Jiangxi Soviet Area in 1934, like The Daughter of the Party. Hong Xia, the title heroine, bids farewell to her fiancé, Zhao Zhiguang 赵志光, who is joining the Red Army for the Long March. The “white dogs” come back and threaten to slaughter the entire village. Under such a threat, Hong agrees to lead the “white dogs” to [ 188 ]

The Tales of the Wives the Red Army’s route, to the shock of the villagers, who assume she is a traitor. Instead of leading the enemies to a dead end as she had planned, however, Hong mistakenly guides them to the real road on which the Red Army just traveled. At this point, Zhao is arrested while trying to burn down the bridge to cut the enemy off from pursuing the Red Army. Zhao, too, believes that Hong has switched to the enemy’s side. Hong faces three difficult tasks: to lead the enemies back to the dead-­end cliff at Fenghuang Ridge, to rescue Zhao, and to make sure she is not mistaken as a defector. In the end, she flirts with the KMT official until he is drunk, in front of Zhao, who is locked up in the next room and painfully witnesses Hong’s “betrayal”—­both of his love and of the revolution. Hong eventually protects her honor by killing the guard, sets Zhao free, and urges him to deliver a message to the Red Army to wipe out the enemies at Fenghuang Ridge. Hong dies as the chorus song arises: A glorious name A heroic woman In the stormy years of the past You gave up your life to protect the Red Army You used wisdom to bury the enemy Your fresh blood reddens the sky Your glory shines through the mountains

光辉的名子 英雄的姑娘 在暴风雨的年代 你用生命掩擭了红军 你用智慧把敌人埋葬 你的鲜血染红了天边 你的光辉照耀了山岗32

As the first opera film produced in the early days of the PRC, this movie adaptation spread its theme in songs subsequently performed in schools, factories, and amateur theatrical events. The new kunqu opera version (新昆曲), Hong Xia, performed by the Northern Kunqu Opera Troupe (北昆 剧团), was said to have saved the Northern kunqu genre by combining artistic features of huaju and new folk opera (新歌剧), in the same fashion as the Fifteen Strings of Coins (十五贯) had saved the Southern kunqu opera (南昆 剧种).33 Despite their success with audiences, some literary critics argued as early as 1960 that some of the songs in Hong Xia lacked revolutionary heroic spirit, unlike countless martyrs who embraced their death without bourgeois sentiments such as a desire to live.34 During the Cultural Revolution, Hong Xia was denounced as having promoted “philosophy to live at all costs” (活命哲学) “using the scheme of a woman’s beauty to trick the enemy” (施美人计), and “fake betrayal” (假投降) to produce excuses for other [ 189 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife traitors such as Liu Shaoqi, the elected president of the PRC persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution. Hong Xia’s lines “In the frozen winter I am longing for the sunshine (天寒地冻盼日出), / At the moment of death I still want to live” (人到死时仍想活) were singled out as an utterance of the traitor’s thought.35 Hong Xia’s artistic achievements nevertheless were recognized in the twenty-­first century, when critics traced Hong Xia as the initiator of “final aria before execution” (绝唱唱段). Hong’s aria combined the soliloquy of traditional opera with folksong motifs to articulate her faith in the revolution, her nostalgia for a happy life, and her defiance of death.36 Subsequent celebrated operas further developed this praxis of “final aria before execution” as performed by their protagonists: Sister Jiang’s “People from Five Continents Celebrate Together” (五洲人民齐欢笑) in Sister Jiang and Tian Yumei’s “Ten Thousand Spring Colors in My Home Village” (万里春 色满家园) in The Daughter of the Party. Over the past decades, these arias were performed in numerous celebrations of the birth of the nation, the party, and the army. The second set of Peng Liyuan’s popular songs came from the folk opera Sister Jiang, based on the red classic novel Red Crag (红岩). In addition to Liu Yalou’s leadership in its creation, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Luo Ruiqing 罗瑞卿, chief of the general staff of the PLA, also helped revise the lyrics of a song, “Sewing the Red Flag” (绣红旗), that Peng subsequently perfected in her solo performance. Luo had acted on stage in the Red Army theater movement in Jiangxi Soviet area, and according to the legend, even played the dramatic role of Chiang Kai-­shek 蒋介石, who was captured by the character of Lin Biao, played by Lin Biao himself in a play entitled The Snow on Lushan (庐山雪).37 Luo wanted to make sure that this opera truthfully reflected the revolutionary spirit of his comrades who did not live to see the founding of the socialist China. Ironically, Luo was himself accused of being a “traitor” and a “counterrevolutionary” and was among the first to be stricken down even before the official start of the Cultural Revolution.38 To reverse the verdicts of all those persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, Sister Jiang was restaged in 1978 in early post-­Mao China and fortunately preserved the second generation of Sister Jiang performance in an opera film version. Fitting as if a glove with the new campaign against the Gang of Four, the newly labeled traitors denounced by the post-­Mao regime, the 1978 opera film focused on Sister Jiang’s betrayal by Fu Zhigao 甫志高 [ 190 ]

The Tales of the Wives and her execution right before the liberation of Chongqing in 1949. In both the folk opera and the opera film versions (戏曲艺术片), Sister Jiang blames the deaths of the martyrs on the betrayal of Fu, a spineless intellectual who joined the revolution for the gains he would have obtained with the pending victory of the revolution.39 By contrast, Jiang and her comrades-­in-­ arms sew a red flag with five stars in prison, after having heard of such a design for the national flag that Mao had raised in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949. Jiang wants her friends to hand this flag over to the party upon the liberation of Changqing. “On that day when the red flags finally flutter all over China, please do not easily forget these storming years” (别把这战斗的岁月轻忘掉), Sister Jiang sings in “Sewing the Red Flag” (绣红旗). According to a 2006 CCTV documentary, in the original lyric, it was worded “please do not forget these storming years entirely” (全忘掉). A Red Army veteran had suggested this change in 1965 to remind the later generations how easy it would have been to forget the sacrifices of the martyrs. The CCTV documentary on the history of performing Sister Jiang by five generations of artists (五代《江姐》) and the real-­life story of Sister Jiang could remind some contemporary audiences that countless corrupt officials of the CCP have indeed forgotten their predecessors’ sacrifices.40 Figure 5.3 shows the 1978 film adaptation from the second-­generation performance of the opera, which can be appreciated as a transitional piece from its more realist style of 1964 premiere to the more glamorous images of Sister Jiang in the subsequent three more generations of productions in postsocialist era. With a different voice, however, some postsocialist audiences attempted to redeem Fu Zhigao as a realist, a true-­to-­life intellectual, whose arrest by the KMT is caused mostly by his love for his wife. According to the novel Red Crag, from which the folk opera and the opera film was adapted, Xu Yunfeng 许云峰, Fu’s boss from the CCP underground network, advised Fu not to go home that night, since a KMT spy had already penetrated the bookstore Fu had opened as a potential meeting place for underground work. Fu questions Xu’s authority and takes a chance to go home to see his wife for the last time and make sure she will be taken care of after Fu’s transfer. With fresh flowers and her favorite Sichuan spicy beef in his hands, however, Fu is arrested at the doorway of his apartment; he turns into a traitor overnight, which leads to the arrest of Xu, Sister Jiang, and others. To redeem Fu from an individualistic perspective beyond the era of Mao, however, one [ 191 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife

FIGURE 5.3 “Sewing the Red Flag.” Still from the film Sister Jiang, adapted from the folk opera of the same title. Shanghai Film Studio, 1978. Composer: Yan Su. Codirectors: Huang Zumo and Fan Lai.

commentator wrote that she was brought up with the idea that one should loath Fu as a traitor but had grown to admire him, since he puts his love for his wife first at a critical moment. He chooses love over revolution because she needs him more than revolution needs him. The commentator appreciates Fu as a devoted husband, a heroic man who protects women.41 Another writes: “After all, didn’t Shen Zui 沈醉 (Yan Zui 严醉 in Red Crag), the KMT police chief in real life, eventually become a respected member of the Political Consultation Congress in the PRC (政协委员) despite his evil acts of having executed numerous CCP members? No one should therefore take Fu too seriously as a traitor: he was a good husband, pure and simple; he loved literature and arts, and he knew how to take care of his wife.”42 Reading this comment, one might wonder if the villainous character Shen Yangzhai 沈养斋, the KMT police chief interrogating Sister Jiang in the opera film, has a valid point when he attempts to persuade her: [ 192 ]

The Tales of the Wives I have a family, wife, children, and parents I have also been through a lot, drifting in this lonely world Heart to heart I am also sad Cannot but feel sympathetic to the lonesome past

我也有妻室儿女、父母家庭 我也曾历经沧桑，几经漂零 将心比心也悲痛 能不为你凄凉身世报同情

Shen further appeals: “who would understand you, miss you and forever keep you in their heart after you had sacrificed your youth?” (你这里空把青 春来葬送，又有谁知你，思念你、把你铭刻在心中). For your own sake, you should think twice about your situation.43 After all, aren’t human emotions, romantic love, happiness, and peace universally shared values for all mankind? Our country is facing difficult times, and our society is not perfect. We can negotiate and reform. Why resort to bloody warfare and follow the dated Marxist theory of class struggle that resulted in broken families and senseless deaths?44 To fully bring out the humanity in Shen to the extent allowed by the censors, one critic has argued in 2018 that the actor playing the role of Shen could explore more deeply “the simplest and sincere emotions,” which “had touched and moved audiences” in a recent production; the music and acting of Shen therefore became “a bright spot” (亮点) through his gentle and soft (温婉) singing against the conventional portrayal of a heartless negative character.45 While writing this chapter, I viewed the 1978 opera film version again, in which Shen was portrayed as a one-­dimensional, cold-­ blooded villain per the usual practice of performances in early post-­Mao China; even though the body language and singing tones of the 2018 performance seem more gentle and humanistic, the lyric cited earlier still made me wonder: If Sister Jiang were to come back today from heaven and witness “the restoration of capitalism in China,” would she have agreed with Shen’s point about the futility of the communist revolution? Would she have understood a little better Fu’s instinct to protect his wife at the expense of the party’s principles? Here, how the same lyric is performed matters; even more so, historical distance from the Maoist to the postsocialist culture matters. Content dictates form, whereas, and paradoxically, form also redefines content. Historical “facts” were the foundations that helped spread the fame of both the opera Sister Jiang and the original novel Red Crag, published in 1961, arguably one of the most celebrated red classics in the Maoist era. In [ 193 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife an informative study, Li Li describes the creation process of this foundational myth of the CCP involving multiple authors, editors, and critics and as the result of “accumulation of multiple literary, communal, and political interests over more than a decade.”46 I add here my own recollection of the novel’s personal impact on me as a third grader in elementary school in Beijing: in 1964, I was so inspired by Red Crag that I could not decide which of my two favorite plots to write about for a composition assignment of “afterthought” (读后感作文). In the end, I wrote both, one on the underground journal March Forward Newsletter (挺进报): in the darkest days of the KMT rounding up of the CCP, Cheng Gang 成岗 (real name 陈然) printed two dozen issues of the newsletter at night from June  1947 to April  1948 to spread news of the CCP’s victory against the KMT.47 He admired his partner, Liu Siyang 刘思扬, who also risked his life listening to the news from Yan’an on shortwave radio and transcribed them in beautiful handwriting, then passed them to Cheng Gang to print. They did not know each other but finally met in prison, both betrayed by Fu Zhigao. My composition ended with Cheng’s execution and Liu’s death during a prison break on the eve of Chongqing’s liberation.48 From this story, I learned about friendship and compassion, which can be best expressed and appreciated under the most difficult circumstances without even knowing each other’s names. I wrote my second afterthought on the story of Sister Jiang: on her way to join her husband in northern Sichuan to lead peasant guerrilla troops, Jiang buries herself deep inside her grief upon seeing his bloody head, chopped off by the KMT and displayed at the city gate; instead of feeling sorry for herself, she turns pain and anguish into strength with her illustrious line, “Orphans and widows will still carry on the cause of revolution” (剩下孤儿寡母一样闹革命). My sister, who lost her husband during the 1976 Tangshan earthquake (see chapter 6), repeated the same line of Jiang in her own diary to express her will to persevere with her late husband’s unfinished mission. In both compositions, I rearranged the plots in the voices of the protagonists as first-­person narrative with internal monologues to the extent a third grader could manage. In hindsight, my own rewriting (from a literary point of view) of the already rewritten stories (from an ideological standpoint) illustrated the impact of the red legacy that instilled into a child’s mind the correlation between living a revolutionary life and  writing a revolutionary story. Incidentally, my writing was based on reading both the original long novel—­which was a bit of a challenge for [ 194 ]

The Tales of the Wives a third grader, though the almost detective-­like plots and a few love episodes kept me going—­and a “picture storybook” (小人书) adapted from it. I could spend a few cents to rent a copy from a street vendor, a favorite pastime on my way home from school, during the “golden age” of this genre in the 1950s and early 1960s, which Rosemary A. Roberts has insightfully studied.49 In the context of this chapter, I want to further examine the novel’s data selection with regard to the bleak history of traitors. Contemporary historians have pointed out that from 1948 to 1949 in the city of Chongqing, almost all the key underground CCP leaders were rounded up by the KMT and defected to it. Among twelve traitors, half occupied high-­ranking positions, such as Liu Guoding 刘国定, the underground party secretary of Chongqing; Ran Yizhi 冉益智, the deputy party secretary of Chongqing; and Tu Xiaowen 涂孝文 and Luo Anding 罗安鼎, the district party secretary and the deputy district party secretary of the worker’s movement ( 地工委书记), who were also district party secretaries of the upper (上川东) and lower (下川东) regions of Sichuan.50 According to The True Story of Red Crag (红岩纪实), the heroic character Xu Yunfeng 许云峰 in Red Crag was in fact created as “the district party secretary of worker’s movement” on purpose to cover up the desolate reality by which several of his bosses in real life sold out their comrades. By the same token, Fu Zhigao was believed to be based on a combination of five top-­ranking traitors, including Liu Guoding, Ran Yizhi, and Tu Xiaowen, except in the novel Fu was demoted several levels down the chain of command as a district CCP committee member, a position even lower than that of Sister Jiang.51 In this way, the novel ostensibly retained its red classic narrative by distorting history despite of its claim to faithfully reflect revolutionary past. To further remake history as more splendid than it was lived through, the fiction created a Li Jingyuan 李敬原, a fearless and loving member of the Special Committee of Eastern Siyuan Region (川东特委书记), who delivered the directives for Xu Yunfeng and his associates, before and after Xu’s arrest, to minimize the KMT’s sabotage brought about by Fu Zhigao.52 With this revision of history, Red Crag could appear as an upbeat and optimistic work to boost the appeal of the CCP. It is therefore no wonder that the authors had been advised to eliminate an “overly depressive mood” in the first few drafts of the novel in order to depict the heroic spirit of the CCP members in the KMT prison.53 [ 195 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife While demoting high-­ranking traitors in real history to lower-­ranking officials, Red Crag also follows a typical ideological line of class determinism: Liu Siyang, born into a rich family, feel compelled to prove his loyalty to the party through a protracted transformation from a bourgeois intellectual into a true CCP martyr. In this regard, coauthors Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan once confessed that they were not “thorough” in depicting Liu’s character in the third draft: he did not start as an idealist hero but grew into one through his extraneous efforts to better himself with a higher standard than that required of others from a working-­class background.54 When distrusted by his comrades thanks to his family background, Liu blames himself for not having made himself a more determined CCP member to withstand the test of the people.55 The subsequent PRC history would have ironically proved that Yang’s enemy’s warning in prison would eventually come true: the Communist Party stresses class struggle. As a rich man’s son, you will be a target of the CCP to purify its ranks or be kicked out after its victory.56 Ironically, both Luo and Yang themselves were born into similar family backgrounds and had to be extremely harsh about Liu’s need to perfect himself. In fact, Luo was so cautious of his own background that he transplanted his own heroic deed of sewing a five-­starred red flag in prison to celebrate the founding of the PRC into the character of Sister Jiang in order to highlight her superior leadership role instead.57 Despite his efforts to “demote” his own place in history, nevertheless, the fact that his elder brother was a well-­k nown KMT army commander had always been a “black mark” in his archive since liberation; it became worse during the Cultural Revolution’s hunt for traitors, both those still hidden within the party, such as Liu Shaoqi, and those who defected from the KMT to the CCP before 1949. According to some historians, after having declined Jiang Qing’s request to adapt Red Crag into a modern revolutionary model opera and transform Sister Yang’s character into one closer to Jiang Qing’s own image, Luo was presumably accused by Jiang as a traitor based on his family relationship, and that was why he could survive the KMT imprisonment.58 Even though such typical post-­Mao “history” almost always blamed Jiang for countless persecutions of innocent writers and artists, it is indeed a paradoxically twisted story: in real history, upon Luo’s arrest, his fellow prisoners did not trust him until Jiang Zhuyun 江竹筠 (the historical figure who inspired the creation of Sister Jiang in Red Crag) reassured the others [ 196 ]

The Tales of the Wives that he could be trusted as a real comrade. A similar plot in the fictional Red Crag occurs when Sister Jiang confirmed Liu Siyang’s trustworthiness to eliminate his cellmates’ distrust. During the Cultural Revolution, however, neither the creations of Sister Jiang nor Liu Siyang could have protected Luo from Jiang Qing’s accusation. Not surprisingly, Luo allegedly committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution, and Yang was in exile from 1968 to 1972, a period much longer than his imprisonment by the KMT.59 The role of traitors continued to transform in the postsocialist remaking of the red classics in the beginning of the twenty-­first century, as manifested in a television drama series Sister Jiang, which aired in 2010. In order to put new wine into an old bottle, the television series replaced Fu Zhigao with Wang Bingren 王秉仁, who introduces Sister Jiang into the CCP organization, trains her as an excellent colleague, but “betrays” his CCP comrades while acting as a double agent between the CCP and the KMT, providing more dramatic suspense in a detective story to appeal to the younger audience. Wang finally dedicates himself to the CCP cause upon Sister Jiang’s persuasion and dies as a martyr, presenting himself as a more complex character than the “black-­or-­white” Fu.60 Certain aspects of Wang’s character indeed can be found in historical traitors: Tu Xiaowen, for example, caved in because of his love for his wife, but on the way to the execution ground, he joined others in singing “The Internationale,” albeit at a lower volume.61 To further depart from the red classic fiction and other performance pieces, the television drama also more faithfully reflected the real-­ life story of Sister Jiang with a love triangle between her husband and his first wife, who raised her son after her execution by the KMT. All these changes avoid the Maoist texts of “black or white” characters without a gray area in between.62

Peng Liyuan: Nationalist Feminist Icon As I discussed earlier, the postsocialist rewritings of a Maoist red classic witnessed a new phase of development in the twenty-­first century when artists attempted to recast red classic opera by first preserving the original revolutionary spirit; second, embodying new messages to remind people never to forget the CCP’s original promise for a better society against [ 197 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife corruption and oppression; and third, appeasing the new taste of the audiences for artistic experience. In this trend of aestheticization of the red classics, a new history of folk opera has not incidentally paralleled the stories on the rise of Peng Liyuan from a popular singer to the most glamorous First Lady. Peng Liyuan, known for her brilliant third-­generation performance of Xi’er 喜儿 in the folk opera The White-­Haired Girl in 1978 and the title protagonist of Sister Jiang in 1991, became a bridge, a symbol, and an icon that connect socialist and postsocialist official cultures, celebrating the poor, the female, and the red-­colored proletarian ideal, which the narratives of Peng interweaved, expanded, and promoted. The legacy of Peng, therefore, constructed a newer “new cultural worker,” as opposed to the “new cultural workers” that Lao She’s Fang Zhenzhu initiated on stage in 1951. At the same time, it combined what is “newer” with what is the “oldest” in traditional ethics into a global Chinese nationalist idol, as seen in at least four layers of discourse. First, the stories of Peng celebrated her as a success story possible in post-­Mao China only after 1976. It was in Maoist China that her parents were discriminated against as rich landowners before 1949, and her grandfather committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution after brutal persecution. Despite her politically incorrect background, which would pose a challenge to a successful career in the Maoist period, Peng debuted in her role of Xi’er, and she was praised for having understood her character’s true feelings as a poor peasant girl who fights against a vicious landowner. Peng’s performance legitimized the early post-­Mao regime as a new liberator from the bitter Maoist era, which had supposedly “liberated” Xi’er in the first place from the oppression of the KMT before 1949. Peng’s double stories of liberation illustrated in the debut of Xi’er paved the way for her theatrical success, which was at once artistically and politically significant for herself and for the nation. Second, thanks to her disadvantaged background, she grew up among the rural poor with a talented mother, a singer, a xiqu performer, a key player in a country drama troupe. Accompanying her mother to perform in rural villages since she was six years old, Peng drew strength from the simple and kindhearted grassroots audiences; her love for them poured out from the gushing feelings expressed in her popular singing of the song “My Fellow Countrymen” (我的父老乡亲):63 [ 198 ]

The Tales of the Wives I was born in a small mountain village That is where my fellow countrymen live They called me by my nickname they express much intimacy, love, and happiness

我生在一个小山村 那里有我的父老乡亲 一声声 喊我乳名 多少亲昵 多少疼爱 多少开心

She vowed never to forget her roots no matter how far she has traveled; she remembers how “Their millet nourished me” (小米饭 把我养育). “They taught me how to become a good person in rain and wind” (风雨中 教我做 人). She reminds us: “A tall tree of one thousand feet will never forget its roots” (树高千尺 也忘不了根).64 Her mother’s artistic impact integrated with the inspiration of the nurturing poor to provide a perfect postsocialist call never to forget the ordinary people with high aesthetic style. Third, even though she started her career as a successful amateur cultural and art worker (业余文艺工作者), her rise to stardom benefited directly from decades of academic training, which bloomed in the early post-­Mao years after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. In part to celebrate post-­ Mao regime, academic essays emphasized the fact that Peng was the first to receive a master’s degree in national vocal music (民族声乐) from the Central Music Academy (中央音乐学院), when China transitioned from a socialist to a semicapitalist mode of production both in the economic and cultural fields. Yet, Peng resisted a commercial career with lucrative income and persevered in performing for the PLA soldiers and ordinary people. Again, a perfect combination of Maoist core values of serving the workers, peasants, and soldiers and a role model of professional training with artistic talent who rejected commercial temptations in the post-­Mao era. Her signature song of 2002, “Rivers and Mountains” (江山), was popular for reminding the CCP of its promise to devote itself to the ordinary people’s happiness, especially “after it had won political power; one should always bear in mind people’s bitterness and delight” (打天下坐江山/一心为了老百姓 的苦乐酸甜). “The grassroot masses are the great earth and the heavenly sky” (老百姓是地 老百姓是天). “They are the forever concerns of the Communist Party” (老百姓是共产党永远的挂念).65 Her acclaimed singing of passages from the folk opera Sister Jiang and other red classics entertained the populace in concerts, music videos, and television programs such as the Spring Festival Galas, celebrating at once her beauty, her passion, her feminized steel will, her acting, and her singing style while commemorating the birthdays of the party, the nation, and the army to validate CCP’s legacy as [ 199 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife the leader of a continuous socialist revolution with capitalist characteristics. Figure  5.4 illustrates a typical music video that showcases Peng Liyuan’s solo performance of popular red songs, easily searchable on the internet from the 1990s to the present day. Fourth, Peng was also praised as a perfect traditional wife and mother who won the love of Xi Jinping. Upon their first meeting in 1986, the media reported, Xi, then, the deputy mayor of Xiamen, Fujian Province, did not ask how much she made as a popular singer but praised her 1982 debut song in the Spring Festival Gala, “In the Field of Hope” (在希望的田野上). Peng was impressed by his pure heart and simple lifestyle; Xi later revealed that forty minutes into their first date, he already decided that Peng would be his wife.66 As well, right before Xi became the number one leader of the PRC, Peng quit her performance career but became an even more brilliant global icon as a fashion trendsetter, a model to promote made-­in-­China outfits, a goodwill ambassador to display the “soft power” that interweaved the fabrics of the nation, the female, the communist ideal, and the artistically talented and effective propagandist.67 Throughout this chapter, I have indicated the sharply contrasting role of Jiang Qing. She was never officially declared as the first lady; her expertise

FIGURE 5.4 Music video of Sister Jiang’s aria “I Give up My Youth for Communism,” starring Peng Liyuan. Still from a CCTV program. [ 200 ]

The Tales of the Wives as an actress before liberation worked against her participating in political life until right before the Cultural Revolution. Peng Liyuan, on the other hand, rose to greater feminist power upon becoming the first lady in postsocialist China, with the cultural and symbolic capitals acquired through condemning the vicious Jiang Qing, both in her growing-­up stories and in her performance career. Ironically, Peng had to quit her singing career in order to better “perform” on the national and international stage after she became the first lady. Her prominent place on and then disappearance from the theater stage illustrated the power and limitation of a performing woman, which repeated the story of Jiang Qing.68 One wonders: What has women’s image really gained through the century-­long theater history of performing heroines? This study of women characters on and offstage helps us understand the complex influences of the traditional and popular cultures in the Maoist literature and arts, and their continuingly changing dynamics in the post-­Mao nostalgia for socialist experience. As the result of the conspiracies—­and most important, collaborations—­between the commercial, the popular, the academic, and the global cultures, the representations of women’s culture have once again secured an important place in contemporary China with a double-­edged sword: on the one hand, they still work well with the official culture to rally people’s support. On the other hand, they can point to the potential disappearance of the socialist heroines on contemporary stage in support of an age-­old male-­dominant, semicapitalist society, as seen in the case of Peng Liyuan. It is when they are situated within these specific and ideological circumstances, nevertheless, that the representations of women—­in the arts and in real life—­will help us understand better what it means to be a socialist and postsocialist woman. In this way, performance culture can indeed connect the past with the present, the individual with the colletive, and the socialist imagining with the postsocialist predicament.

[ 201 ]

SIX

“The Song of the Geologists” Remembering Scientists Onstage

The valley breeze caresses our 是那山谷的风, 吹动了我们的红旗, red team flag, 是那狂暴的雨, 洗刷了我们的帐篷。 fierce storm cleans our tents. Our passion overpowers hunger 我们有火焰般的热情, 战胜了一切疲劳和寒冷。 and cold. Pack on our back, we climb mountains upon mountains, 背起了我们的行装，攀上了层层的山峰, Full of hope, in search for rich 我们满怀无限的希望, 为祖国寻找出富饶的矿藏。 resources for motherland. Stars in the sky light up our path. 是那天上的星，为我们点燃了明灯。 Birds from the forest forecast the 是那林中的鸟, 向我们报告了黎明。 arrival of the dawn. Our passionate spirit overpowers 我们有火焰般的热情，战胜了一切疲劳和 寒冷。 hunger and wind. —­“The Song of the Geologists”

AROUND 1952, HAVING “delved into life” (深入生活) in order to create popular socialist arts, Xiao He 晓河, the composer, was touched by the passion and tenacity of a group of geologists he encountered. Their inspiration brought about a charming melody, “The Song of the Geologists” (地质队员 之歌),1 which has been treasured by three generations of geologists.2 The popularity of the song during the radical Cultural Revolution in 1973 [ 202 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” testified its enduring appeal at the time when numerous songs created prior to 1966 were denunciated as “unhealthy” or “counterrevolutionary.”3 It is interesting that among various kinds of scientists in socialist China, geologists received the most attention in theatrical productions, songs, and film ­representations from the 1950s to the 1990s. “The Song of the Geologists” has remained one of the very few songs written specifically for scientists in general and was therefore best remembered as their red song (红歌), an intriguing phenomenon that I will examine later in this chapter. The popularity of this song reflected the PRC’s early endeavors to promote science and technology in the Cold War era when China was isolated from the Western industrial world. The founding of the Chinese Academy of Science (中国科学院) in 1949 and the appointment of Guo Moruo, a renowned poet, playwright, historian, and archeologist, as president of both the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (中国文联) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院) demonstrated the central government’s recognition of a strategic leadership role that would bridge literary, cultural, scientific, and technological fields in contemporary China. Zhou Enlai’s speech at the 1956 National Conference on the Issue of the Intellectuals (全国知识分子问题会议) declared, to the relief of numerous intellectuals, that they had already become integrated into the social class of the proletarian workers; Zhou described the decisive role of scientific research in developing national defense and in all aspects of economic and cultural life.4 In the first three chapters of this book, I examined important plays dramatizing the life stories of intellectuals and their creative roles in constructing national, local, and individual identities through personal and communal experience in the context of modernity, war, and personal trauma. Chapter 4, on 1950s theater, further delineated the transformation of artists, writers, and their collaborations with—­or sometimes implicit resistance to—­such ideological conversion. Moving to women’s representations onstage from the 1960s to the postsocialist era, chapter 5 investigated artists’ participation and limitation in self-­expression and social intervention in their writing of women’s experiences. As a logical development, this chapter discusses the representations of scientists, broadly defined, as either complementary to or different from other social groups in changing historical conditions. In some cases, creations of scientists as dramatic characters blended or neutralized elements of diverse or even opposing [ 203 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife ideologies, thereby providing distinctive clues for a better understanding of a complex society at large and its aesthetic experience. A study of scientists onstage can also help us appreciate how the interpretation of science and technology in theater represents a culture’s self-­image and its insights into other cultures, either from collective or individual perspectives, both on and offstage.

Early Prototypes of Scientists on the Republican Stage Scientists had rarely been staged from the onset of modern Chinese theater to the end of the Republican period. Hong Shen’s first anthology of huaju originally published in 1927, for example, canonized eighteen plays from the first decade of huaju, generally termed the May Fourth period. Embodying familiar themes of the period such as family melodrama, romantic love, and social ills, most of these eighteen plays, in historical hindsight, can be seen as having pioneered subsequent dramatic subgenres, such as the history play 历史剧 as seen in Guo Moruo’s Zhuo Wenjun (卓文君), the soldier’s play in Hong Shen’s Yama Zhao, the peasant’s play in Tian Han’s The Night the Tiger Was Caught, and the worker’s play in Hu Yepin’s 胡也频 The Family of a Bricklayer (瓦匠之家). Both Guo’s and Tian’s plays, moreover, can also be characterized as early versions of women’s plays (妇女题材剧). In Hong’s anthology, Cheng Fangwu’s 成仿吾 one-­act play Welcome Party (欢迎会), however, was an exception in which the protagonist by the name of Dr. Zhang Keqin 张克勤 was featured as an engineer by training. For the sole reason of not having obtained his doctoral degree from a foreign university, Zhang finds himself rejected by the brother and father of Liu Jingming 刘景明, the object of his love. Worse still, the play centers around the Liu family’s preparing a welcome party for the homecoming of a newly minted PhD, Wang Yongfang 王永芳, who, according to Zhang, had seduced Liu’s sister thirteen years earlier in order to gain financial support from Liu’s family for his expenses while studying abroad. Frustrated by the family’s rejection, Zhang relays to Liu’s brother that his father’s wealth, which had sponsored his study abroad as well as that of his sister’s fiancée, Dr.  Wang, had in fact been immorally accumulated through his father’s treacherous betrayal of China by collaborating with foreign imperialists. Zhang’s revelation of a family secret—­a dramatic device commonly used in [ 204 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” Greek tragedies and Ibsenesque plays—­incites Liu’s brother to rebel against his father. The play concludes with Liu’s father being left alone onstage, wondering when the welcome party would begin, if at all, after his children had already left the house in search of their own destinies. Furthermore, Zhang in Welcome Party tenderly encourages Liu to pursue her own dream of studying music or painting in Germany or France against her family’s demand for her to go to the United States, where, they believe, Liu might more easily find a rich husband since more fashionable young men had recently begun to study science and technology. Cheng Fangwu’s perception of Europe as a romantic destination for art-­aspiring students and the United States as a materialist-­oriented destination (拜金主义) targeted the American educational system as well as domestic issues such as social justice. In this context, Cheng’s play can also be perceived as at least partially an autobiographical work based on his own experience in combining foreign scientific training, romantic literary writing, and a committed communist career. In the 1910s, for instance, he enrolled as a student of military science at the Tokyo Imperial University; in the early 1920s, he became a “new literature writer” (新文学作家) affiliated with the Creation Society (创造社) and its circle of young scholars including Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu 郁达夫; a few years later, he translated The Communist Manifesto (共产党宣言) directly from German into Chinese before he joined the CCP in Paris in 1928.5 Most legendarily, he participated in the Long March as the only professor, and he served as president of the Shanbei Public Academy (陕北公学), the first university established by the Red Army in the communist-­occupied areas, to be followed by his celebrated career as the first president of Renmin University of China upon its founding in 1949. Characterized as a “modern educator, writer, and translation expert,” Cheng followed a trajectory from an early science student to a literary figure, career revolutionary, and finally educator, which provides insight into the intricate dynamics among ­science, culture, literature, and revolution.6 A slightly different character in the scientific fields can be found in Cao Yu’s Metamorphosis, which premiered in 1939 in Chongqing. Typical of other plays of this period, it is set during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression but focuses on a Dr.  Ding 丁大夫, who devotes her scientific knowledge to saving wounded soldiers and, after disillusionment in her idealistic mission of saving the world, finally accepts the wisdom of [ 205 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Inspector Liang Gongyang 梁公仰, who effectively reorganizes the hospital to meet wartime demands. Theater critics credited the playwright’s optimistic spirit, patriotic passion, and conscience as reasons for the play’s powerful appeal. Cao’s own familiarity with the life stories and career paths of intellectuals with scientific backgrounds, I would add, also facilitated his creation of impressive characters in addition to his masterful skills in constructing dramatic suspense, dialogue, and climax. Forty years later, in 1978, Dr. Ding was interpreted as a “model character among patriotic, progressive intellectuals and science workers (科学工作者) with a sense of justice in the new democratic revolutionary period.” Such a reading expressed a typical sentiment in the early post-­Mao period, when theater artists during the Republican period began to feel the urgent need to rewrite dramatic history in order to restore to glory important playwrights such as Cao, whose works had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution.7 In the same historical period, other critics attempted to return Cao to his so-­called original intent of portraying patriotic medical scientists, doctors, and staff working together in a “democratic environment” without having to rely on an individual leader as demanded by leftist critics.8 The next noticeable characterization of a scientist, broadly defined, appeared in 1941 in Cao Yu’s play Peking Man. Yuan Rengan 袁任敢, an anthropologist, recounts the tale of Peking Man as a primitive creature, “free, happy, not restrained by civilization, nor shackled by unfaithful morality, and closely bound up with nature.”9 Though minor characters, yet with powerful symbolism, both the spontaneous and cheerful anthropologist and his alter ego, the Peking Man, contrast sharply with the decaying atmosphere of the Zeng’s oppressive household, inhabited by Zeng Hao 曾浩, a pathetic patriarch who finds nothing better to do except wait for his death by compulsively painting his coffin over and over; his son, Zeng Wenqing 曾文清, who fares no better in his parasitic life; and his manipulative wife, who manages the household with a tyrannical personality. Most tragically, two innocent women were trapped in this prisonlike house. The first is Sufang 榡方, deeply but hopelessly in love with Wenqing and quietly putting up with his wife’s bickering and verbal abuse over the years. She finally gathers the courage to leave the house only after her hope of Wenqing’s ever becoming a “real man” vanishes. The second is Ruizhen 瑞贞, the daughter-­in-­law of Wenqing, who has no choice but to divorce her husband from an arranged marriage, whom she does not love. In the finale, when [ 206 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” Sufang and Ruizhen are unable to open the bolted door to walk out of the patriarchal house, the Peking Man guides them outside and, symbolically, to a new life. Here, a social scientist’s appearance onstage and the subject of his study, the Peking Man, provide an alternative approach to understanding human conditions, the history of society, and a long and problematic civilization, as most critics agreed in the 1940s upon the premiere of the play. The real connection to a scientific theme, however, resides in Cao Yu’s use of a 1927 anthropological find around Zhoukoudian (周口店) of the fossil remains of extinct members of the human lineage dating from about 770,000 to 230,000 years ago. As Hu Feng 胡风 pointed out, Cao’s play portrayed the anthropologist and the Peking Man as symbolic “dream carriers” (托梦的人) who “appear as ghosts” in the dreams of Sufang and Ruizhen to encourage them to embark on new lives, thereby leaving behind those “superfluous men” (多余的人) in the rest of the depressing Zeng family, who are “useless and even harmful to society.”10 The most significant dramatization of scientists’ lives can be found in Xia’s The Fascist Bacillus, performed to critical acclaim in Chongqing in 1942 by the China Dramatic Art Society, with Hong Shen as director. Raising the issue of the interweaving of science and politics in China, the play presents dramatic conflicts among a group of scientists and their friends traveling through the war-­ridden areas of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guilin, and Chongqing only to realize that their much-­devoted scientific endeavors cannot cure China’s illness; the urgent fight against Japanese imperialists is indeed much more important than scientific experiments. Yu Shifu 俞实夫, for example, received his medical degree in Japan, married a Japanese wife, and worked in a Japanese research institute in Shanghai in an effort to invent a vaccine against typhus. Contrary to his belief that his scientific inquiries will benefit not just China but also the future of mankind, Yu becomes disillusioned upon learning that Japanese invaders contaminated the drinking water in Manchuria with typhus bacteria as they waged biological warfare against innocent Chinese. Influenced by the world-­renowned bacteriologist Hans Zinsser, who believed that the fascist bacillus is the worst kind of bacteria, Yu finally realizes that there is no such a thing as a pure science that is beyond politics and war, a point of view that was “a major tenet of the communist credo as articulated in opposition to the scientism of leading May Fourth intellectuals such as Hu Shi.”11 [ 207 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife In historical hindsight, The Fascist Bacillus set the tone for the subsequent PRC representations of scientists in the high socialist period, providing an essential link between the theater of the Republican period and the socialist period despite the usual claim that they are radically different. The play’s historical and contemporary significance as one of the best wartime dramas in the Republican period nonetheless justified its subsequent performance in 1954 by the China Youth Art Theater in its efforts to revive and celebrate classics written in the first fifty years of huaju. Directed by Hong Shen and with a playbill preface by Xia Yan, The Fascist Bacillus was warmly received and became one of the very few plays on scientists staged either in the Republican period or in the Maoist period between 1949 to 1976. The politicization of scientists onstage occasionally appeared in the early period of the PRC. One example is the nautical engineers in the 1963 play Second Spring (第二个春天), which reveals different and contrasting perspectives in constructing images of scientists on the socialist stage. Continuing with Xia’s trope of “the consciousness of the intellectuals” being interrogated by the politics of World War II, Second Spring contextualizes a Cold War mentality in the global confrontations between the capitalist and the socialist in its characterization of a foreign expert. As a former Royal Navy Academy schoolmate of one of the Chinese scientists, a foreign female expert works herself into the Chinese scientists’ circle and offers her expertise in building a top-­secret submarine, only to be exposed as having attempted to steal advanced technology from China. By the end of the play, Chinese scientists not only reveal her espionage, but, more important, they also succeed in convincing her collaborator from a Latin American country to return home to fight side by side with the proletariat rather than work for a Western imperialist agency. A play about scientists, therefore, fit perfectly into the Maoist blueprint of China as the sole leader of the third world countries in its struggle against global capitalism and revisionism, especially the perceived domination of the two superpowers in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union. These foreigners, however, are minor characters designed to frame a national and international context that celebrated a Chinese-­imagined “third-­world country alliance” against Western imperialist countries during the Cold War era. Liu Zhiyin 刘之茵, the female lead, indeed represents a feminine ideal in socialist China, who is at once a brilliant military scientist who led the construction of the submarine to completion and a [ 208 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” talented musician whose playing of a violin at the beginning and end of the play indicates Liu’s having admirably achieved the combined dreams of Liu Cui, Tian Han’s character who could only dream about studying music in Europe (see chapter 1), and of Xia Yan’s Yu Shifu, whose success in his scientific experiments turned out to have unintentionally assisted the enemies’ atrocity of murdering the Chinese people. Socialist China during the high Mao period, therefore, was dramatized onstage as a utopian state where past dreams could be fulfilled when personal aspirations and collective aspirations were finally combined. As typical of the plays from 1949 to 1966, politically correct scientists—­if they did appear—­are often paired with conservative ones to emphasize “an ideological conflict between the progressive” and the “conservative” (先进与保守的斗争). Liu Zhiyin therefore has to convince her father, the head of the research institute, to proceed with her experiment in launching a test model of the submarine; once it meets with failure, a chief engineer not only misguidedly brings a foreign agency into the project for lack of confidence in his Chinese colleagues’ ability but also abandons the submarine when it catches on fire. It is Feng Tao 冯涛, a navy colonel, who risks his life in boarding the burning submarine in an effort to steer it to safety. The play ends with Liu inviting Feng to stay at her house while recuperating from his wounds, a hint at a budding romance between a talented man and a beautiful woman. The rare appearance of scientists on the Maoist stage suggests the questionable but useful status of Chinese intellectuals, scientists, and engineers in socialist China during the Maoist period and especially during the Cultural Revolution. They were expected to ideologically reform themselves before being fully accepted as productive members of society, unlike the workers, peasants, and soldiers who made up most PRC protagonists. The film adaptation of Second Spring in 1975 illustrates the play’s importance in further promoting Mao’s principle of “independence and self-­reliance (独立 自主，自力更生),” which was pushed to the extreme during the Cultural Revolution.12 In post-­Mao China, stories of scientists as persecuted “others” during the Cultural Revolution gained traction and even became a favorite subject, as seen in portrayals of nuclear scientists in the 1980 play Atom and Love (原子与爱情), hydraulic engineers in the 1993 play The Yellow River Flows Into the Sea (黄河入海流), and glaciologists in the 1994 play The Light of the South Pole (极光). Revolutionary music and dance epics such as the 1985 production of The Song of the Chinese Revolution (中国革命之歌) and the 2009 show [ 209 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife of The Road to Revival (复兴之路) even devoted separate scenes to nuclear scientists, hailing them as dedicated martyrs and forefathers of “two atom bombs and one satellite” (两弹一星), who launched China into the position of a strong modern nation without rival. Despite their elevated status in post-­Mao China as valuable human resources for economic growth, their representation still falls short in comparison to the numerous historical plays, family plays, avant-­garde theater, and other genres in Maoist and post-­Maoist theater.

Stories of Soldiers and Red Geologists in The Young Generation Before examining a group of plays on geologists, the topic of this chapter, let us consider what theater was doing in the 1990s, when China’s long-­ awaited transformation from socialism to modernity brought not only wealth and a higher living standard but also unfairness, inequality, and corruption. The theater of the 1990s affords us a view of the dramatists’ reflections on the social, economic, and cultural changes wrought by economic developments. Questions arise: Did they ally themselves with some of the cultural elites to embrace the new populist consumerism? Or did they themselves adopt a more humanistic approach to depicting urban and rural life in contemporary China? To what extent did theater of the 1990s express a longing to return to the values and spirit of the 1950s and early 1960s? Did the theater of the 1990s remember the Cultural Revolution differently from the way theater in the late 1970s and the early 1980s did? What kind of nostalgia did the theater of the 1990s exhibit? What kind of history did it stage, and to what end? An examination of two distinctive theater stories of the early 1960s will help address these questions; it should also demonstrate the directions and collective values to which postsocialist plays returned in the 1990s. The conventional view is that Maoist theater at its height, from 1949 to 1966, produced scarcely any noteworthy plays, owing to the plays’ heavy ideological and political freight. However, I believe the 1963 play Soldiers Under Neon Light (霓虹灯下的哨兵), by Shen Ximeng 沈西蒙, Mo Yan 漠雁, and Lü Xingchen 呂兴臣, has an important place in the history of modern Chinese drama.13 Anthologized as one of the best dramas in the PRC period, Soldiers Under Neon Light succeeded in representing the historical contexts, cultural [ 210 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” specificities, and the dreams and ideals of individuals in a utopian socialist state at its most ambitious and imaginative point. In terms of artistic achievements, the play’s second creation of directing and acting by numerous troupes across the country illustrated a balance between inheriting the best performing techniques of the earlier period while to some extent meeting the horizon of expectations of the audience in the heyday of socialist China. Set in newly liberated Shanghai, the play depicts a People’s Liberation Army unit recently assigned to the challenging job of defending Shanghai against the subversions of KMT agent and against the more intangible, bourgeois influence allegedly associated with Shanghai’s commercial culture and semicolonialist history. The play dramatizes humiliating experiences inflicted by foreign aggression and domination in Shanghai. For instance, the father of Tong A’nan 童阿男, a new recruit of the PLA unit, was beaten to death on Nanjing Road before 1949 when “British pirates, Eastern-­foreign (Japanese) devils, and American Yankees lusted for and raped ­Chinese women, burned down residential houses and murdered innocent people.”14 The play interweaves details of semicolonialist history with a focus on the suffering of the working class in Shanghai, the city that lays claim to being the birthplace of the CCP and the locus where the working class partially originated. Soldiers Under Neon Light testifies to Shanghai’s urban history in the same vein as does Joseph  W. Esherick, who portrays it as an industrial city that shares the features of other modern urban centers, such as treaty ports, capital cities, interior cities, tourist cities, railway cities, and frontier cities. Thus the play’s centering on Shanghai displays what Esherick describes as “an intricate dialectical relationship between modernity and national identity,” a “certain tension between what Clifford Geertz calls the ‘search for identity,’ which looks back to history and the past, and the forward-­looking ‘demand for progress.’ ”15 Concentrating on the downtown commercial center around Nanjing Road, the play’s storyline crystallizes the “liberating and disorienting” changes of modernity, “bringing both empowerment and anxiety.”16 These ambivalences were further complicated by the predisposition of the CCP to view Western-­influenced, or “capitalist,” modernity (as perceived in the image of “old Shanghai”) as being detrimental to its Maoist ideals of social equality between rich and poor on the one hand and the Maoist promise of a socialist “modern” life, or a better society for all urban and rural laborers on the other hand. The [ 211 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife mindset of the Nanjing Road soldiers, who are mostly of rural origin, reflects these ambivalences and anxieties. As they engage in the effort to create a new, socialist Shanghai, the soldiers remain determined to hold on to their rural roots and revolutionary identity. Bearing in mind Mao’s exhortation that liberation is but the first step of our new “long march” in socialist China, Lu Hua 路华, the political instructor of the unit, warns his soldiers that Shanghai is not a “nest” for enjoying material comfort but rather a “battlefield” that affords no victory over the enemies’ camp.17 At the same time, patrolling Nanjing Road provides the soldiers their first glimpse of urban life’s pleasures, including flower girls, concerts, park entertainments, and commercial culture under neon lights. This exposure leads Chen Xi 陈喜, a platoon leader, to throw away a pair of old socks heavily patched by his country wife with homemade cloth. Isn’t a better material life what we struggled so hard in the past to achieve? So wonders Chen, who now fancies the pleasures of city life. In this state of mind, he neglects Chunni 春妮, his wife from the country, who now seems to him too rustic to appreciate the advantages of urban living. A key moment in the play has to do with Chen reading Chunni’s heartbreaking letter, in which she lovingly recalls seeing him off to the battlefield only three days after their wedding and her delight each time she learns of his heroic deeds in the War of Liberation. Who could have anticipated that “with the revolution barely won,” he would already have “thrown away the time-­honored revolutionary tradition?” He did not “lay down his life because of the enemy’s bullet but fell down on Nanjing Road” because of bourgeois influence.18 Read aloud from backstage, Chunni’s poetic words became one of the most celebrated monologues in the history of PRC drama, to be used sometimes as the standard audition piece for winning admission to drama schools. More telling, however, in the context of the play, is Chen’s turnabout, with the help of Lu Hua, his political instructor, and his passionate wife. This reversal crystallizes the point when the drive for collective identity and memories of the past triumph over the desire for a more felicitous personal life. Figure 6.1 shows the reunion between Chunni (second left) with Chen Xi (first right) in Shanghai; the stage design represented skyscrapers indicating old capitalist world before 1949, intersected with a neon light advertising The White-­Haired Girl, symbol of a new culture and life having taken over the “paradise of adventures” (冒险家的乐园), a “nickname” of old Shanghai. [ 212 ]

“The Song of the Geologists”

FIGURE 6.1 Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Soldiers Under Neon Light. China Youth Art Theater, 1963. Director: Deng Zhiyi; stage designers: Chen Yongjing and Mao Jingang. Source: From Yu Lin, ed., The China Youth Art Theater (n.d., n.p.), 39.

The depiction of Shanghai in terms of the binary opposites of the Western/modern/past and Chinese/socialist/present are also represented by another relationship in the play, this time a triangle: Lin Yuanyuan 林媛媛 and her cousin Luo Kewen 罗克文, who wants to take her abroad to America for the sake of furthering her music education, and Tong A’nan 童阿男, a [ 213 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife former schoolmate and now a fresh PLA recruit, to whom she is also attracted. By the end of the play, Lin has come to her senses, brought there by the failed KMT sabotage that accidentally wounds her cousin, whose life is saved by Tong. She begs the political instructor Lu to help her leave Shanghai, and her bourgeois family, so that she can till the land in the countryside alongside other laborers. However, Lu helps her to understand that her musical gifts can also serve the interests of ordinary people. “Your singing talents can support the struggle against the enemies and inspire people in their efforts to construct a new Shanghai and a new China,” Lu convinces Lin.19 At the final curtain, when Chen and Tong are departing for the Korean War, Lin expresses her hope that she will encounter Tong at the battlefield front line, where she expects to be sent as a volunteer singing in a military performance troupe.20 At the dawn of the PRC, Lin and her generation were attracted to the possibilities of a revolutionary career, and leaving Shanghai symbolized for them the will to break away from their bourgeois families in order to be accepted by the common people as one of them. In this respect—­that is, on ideological grounds—­the play depicts the city as inferior to the country. But at the same time that the soldiers are taught to retain the class awareness that they are peasants, they are also asked to transform the urban area into a socialist space, the eventual consequence of which would be to abolish the social, cultural, and economic discrepancies between city and country. To ensure that rural class consciousness does not break down because of the lure of materialism, the play warns its audiences that after the War of Liberation has been won, the contest between the pull of revolutionary/rural and counterrevolutionary/urban influence will continue in socialist society and, even more so, in our own minds; the peril is that Western ways could peacefully turn our soldiers into bourgeois citizens and ultimately reverse the course of our revolutionary history. In Soldiers Under Neon Light, therefore, we witness on the Chinese stage one of the earliest instances of the “never forget the class struggle” slogan, which was intended to “continue the proletarian revolution on the cultural and ideological fronts,” and which was one of the key concepts of Mao’s theory of the Cultural Revolution. This manner of directly appealing to audiences vouchsafed for a modern Chinese drama such as Soldiers Under Neon Light the role of helpmate in shaping the ideology of the Cultural Revolution; it contrasts with the characterization of the modern Chinese drama as a [ 214 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” victim of the Cultural Revolution, as commonly observed in post–­Cultural Revolution discourse, which had repeatedly referred to the public denunciation of numerous dramas produced before the Cultural Revolution as “poisonous weeds.” Soldiers Under Neon Light could not have performed the foregoing important function single-­handedly. First performed in 1963 to depict contemporary life in Shanghai, The Young Generation (年青的一代) could be read in the context of our discussion as a sequel to Soldiers Under Neon Light both in theme and character “development.” The traits of the much-­tempered platoon leader Chen Xi and his senior commander Lu Hua in Soldiers Under Neon Light are now transplanted into Lin Jian 林坚, a veteran revolutionary who, like Chen, participated in the CCP’s effort to liberate Shanghai, fought in the Korean War against the U.S. imperialists, and now serves as the president of a factory in Shanghai. Always conscious of his origins, Lin Jian, as his name suggests in the appearance of the Chinese characters, has the “resolve” to hold onto his revolutionary heritage. He maintains a simple lifestyle, lives in the “workers’ village,” and we see him repairing a wooden pail himself. Most important in terms of continuing to play a constructive role in the new society, where the members of the working class have now become the “masters,” he trusts that his children will follow his example and reject the privileges and comfort usually granted senior officials of the CCP hierarchy. Thus Xiaobing Tang correctly remarks in his insightful study of The Young Generation that “the staging of the nation in the form of theatrical spectacle was a purposeful enterprise and a phenomenal success.”21 Such success could not have been achieved without a father figure like Lin Jian, who is at once the patriarch of the family and of the state as symbolized in his high-­ranking official status. Lin Jian is gratified by his daughter Lin Lan 林岚, freshly graduated from high school. Younger than Lin Yuanyuan of Soldiers Under Neon Light but equally gifted in the performing arts, Lin Lan decides not to pursue an acting career in a film academy, despite the encouragement of a teacher who thinks highly of her potential. She furthermore insists on settling down in the Jinggang Mountains in Jiangxi Province, an impoverished revolutionary relic from the civil war period, where she intends to draw on her education to help convert a barren land into a prosperous socialist village. Leaving Shanghai, for Lin Lan, takes on a much more natural and urgent character than it did for Lin Yuanyuan, since the former was educated in a [ 215 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife socialist China where she learned to appreciate and view the common ­people as role models. So Lin Lan, in theory, does not require a painful ­ideological “makeover,” as did Lin Yuanyuan, who had grown up in the “old society” before 1949 under the KMT and was exposed to Western, especially American, influence. Reading in the context of the dramatic texts in the Republican period examined earlier in this chapter, Lin Lan’s ready rejection of a potential acting career in a socialist society ironically pushed further away the unfulfilled dreams of Dr. Zhang Keqin in Cheng Fangwu’s Welcome Party; Zhang’s fascination with Europe as an artists’ dream land was now replaced by a socialist utopia that privileged peasants over performers, who were once again viewed as inferior to other professions in a new society. Lin Lan’s urge to leave Shanghai contrasts sharply with her brother’s life plan. We meet the brother, Lin Yusheng 林育生, at the outset of the play, when he has just returned to Shanghai after having been posted to a remote, barren area of Qinghai Province, where he was assigned by the state to work as a geologist upon graduating from college. It does not take long for Lin Yusheng in The Young Generation to remind one of Lin Yuan­ yuan’s cousin Luo Kewen in Soldiers Under Neon Light, who longed for a life of ease with ample occasions for listening to music and other pleasant pastimes, away from the concerns of the Chinese revolution. Lin Yusheng’s dream is more modest: now that his doctor has allegedly provided a medical certificate stating that his legs could not endure Qinghai’s harsh climate, Yusheng has a legitimate prospect of finding a job in Shanghai; the only question that remains for him is whether his fiancée, Xia Qianru 夏倩如, will find a research position in Shanghai upon her graduation. Shanghai is the ideal place for such work. Among other advantages, it boasts the most up-­to-­date research facilities and illustrious, much sought-­after experts to mentor someone in the field of geological research.22 Yusheng has an ecstatic vision of the life he and his future wife could enjoy, working by day and appreciating music, fiction, poetry, movies, and friends in the evenings and on the weekends.23 However, the influence of classmates who have already volunteered to work in Tibet and other remote areas leads Qianru to wonder whether she is too attached to Yusheng—­and to Shanghai—­to come to a decision on her own. She feels guilty for forsaking her courageous classmates in their difficult yet thrilling adventures; she experiences this doubt especially strongly when they gather joyfully and sing “The Song of the Geologists.” [ 216 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” Complicating the relationship of these two is Xiao Jiye 萧继业, a former classmate and colleague of Lin Yusheng’s, who has also returned to Shanghai from Qinghai on a business trip. He eventually exposes Lin Yusheng’s account of the medical certificate for the fabrication that it is, and he persuades Xia Qianru to follow her fervent wish to work in a remote area, thereby arousing Lin’s jealousy. Central to the debate among the various characters is what Xiaobing Tang calls “the contrasting perceptions of happiness.”24 Lin Jian and Xiao Jiye believe that “happiness” is intimately related to “hard work and struggle,” without which happiness cannot exist. Lin Yusheng, on the other hand, takes “a good life” for granted: more than ten years after liberation, he wants to know why on earth members of the younger generation should have to return to the harsh conditions they lived under in the mountain areas during the war period. Doesn’t everybody work hard for a better life? he asks.25 Lin Yusheng’s question, which seems valid to us today, once more reflects the contradictory nature of Maoist ideology, whose promise of a better life in the new society did not prevent it, when the time came, from continuing to demand sacrifices from the haves for the sake of the have-­nots. Maoist ideology, as reflected in Xiao Jiye’s loyal observance, gestures toward both “modernization” in the Chinese socialist context and a paradoxical rejection of it under the pretext that it is tainted by Western influence. Seeing Lin Yusheng caught in this dilemma, Lin Jian feels bound to reveal to him his revolutionary background and family history. It appears that Lin Yusheng is Lin Jian’s adopted son, his biological parents having been executed by the KMT twenty-­four years before. On the third day after his birth and the day before her execution, his mother left behind a will that, for lack of any other medium, she wrote in her own blood. In this last communication, she asked Yusheng to remember always that although his parents lived “in the darkest age of all times,” they strove all their lives to “bring about a bright future.” And at the end of their life’s journey, they wished to pass on to their son their “ideals, hope, and the sense of an unfinished mission” to “build a communist heaven” for all the poor peoples in the world. “Never stop or backslide; otherwise, you are stopping just short of ­betraying our revolutionary cause.”26 Upon learning of his proletarian past, Yusheng breaks into tears, overcome with longing for the mother he has never seen, and regretting how far he has strayed from her express wishes. This biological mother/son bonding and ideological class identification mean that [ 217 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Lin Yusheng has more in common with Soldiers Under Neon Light characters Chen Xi and Lu Hua and their rural and revolutionary roots than with Shanghai urbanites Luo Kewen and Lin Yuanyuan and their artistic talents and bourgeois tastes. Yusheng finally heeds Lin Jian’s warning against the “imperialists and reactionaries who have pinned their hopes and their counterrevolutionary dreams of [capitalist] restoration on this younger generation.” When the political stance finally becomes the “personal,” family history, the young man is ready to defend the new nation his parents had fought for “with their own blood.”27 Thus, despite obvious differences between the two plays, The Young Generation echoes the call of Soldiers Under Neon Light to sustain the revolution to guarantee that a socialist country will not “change color.” Both plays paved the way for the ideological landscape of the Cultural Revolution, contrary to the conventional belief that pre–­Cultural Revolution theater was radically different from the theater of the Cultural Revolution period. The Cultural Revolution could not have been launched so smoothly without the theater of the foregoing period and the work that came out of other fields of literature and art. Many close links can also be recognized between The Young Generation and The Red Lantern, one of the most popular “revolutionary modern operas” promoted during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. Both works use the device of “telling revolutionary family stories” to accomplish a dramatic reversal of plot and character development and to ensure the survival and passing on of intact revolutionary memories from the old people to the young generations. Growing up in adoptive families, both Li Tiemei of The Red Lantern and Lin Yusheng remain ignorant of their real identity until this knowledge became essential to guaranteeing that they would take up and carry on the revolutionary lifework of their respective families, whether biological or adoptive. When Tiemei appears onstage, she is already a member of the working-­class poor (and the knowledge she gains later of her family background merely reinforces her proletarian identity). By contrast, Lin Yusheng evolves from a carefree youth with bourgeois tastes who is absorbed in gratifying his personal interests into a deserving inheritor of his biological parents’ revolutionary heritage, a heritage he commits himself to perpetuating in a new society with different historical circumstances. As Xiaobing Tang writes: “This communal family also embodies an unmistakable utopian effort to create a personal revolutionary society.”28 [ 218 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” The playwright is able to suggest a historical link and a collective identity by associating the past of Yusheng’s family with that of another family, namely the family of his former colleague Xiao Jiye and his grandmother. As did Grandma Li in The Red Lantern, Jiye’s grandmother 肖奶奶 weathered many years of “bitter winds and harsh rain,” the most difficult time being 1936, when the KMT released her after three years’ imprisonment. At that point she had just learned that her only surviving son—­Xiao Jiye’s father—­ had died during a workers’ strike. Jobless, without relatives, and without any way to reconnect with the CCP underground for their support, Grandma Xiao raised Jiye—­then only five months old—­by herself. She consoled herself with the ardent hope that her grandchild’s generation would never live like “horse and cow,” to slave for the rich.29 Her sorrow on learning that Jiye’s right leg might need to be amputated after a work accident in Qinghai, and Jiye’s insistence on going back to Qinghai whatever the outcome of his injury, acts as a foil for Yusheng and his exploitation of his condition to avoid returning to Qinghai. By the end of the play, Yusheng’s consistently dedicated sister, Lin Lan—­joined by Yusheng’s fiancée, Qianru, Yusheng himself, and other high school and college graduates—­bids farewell to Shanghai and to her assembled teachers and schoolmates, promising them that she and her friends will disperse themselves among the local people like seeds spreading on the earth, to take root, blossom, and bear fruit and thus create a beautiful future.30 This “collective” ending presages the allegorical finale of The Red Lantern, when Li Tiemei, after having lost her adoptive father and grandmother, joins her new revolutionary family, the CCP guerrillas, to repulse the Japanese invaders. In this respect, too, The Young Generation was the precursor for The Red Lantern’s much-­celebrated theme of fostering proletarian successors by means of collective memory, rather than being an entirely different kind of play, as was conventionally believed.

New Stories of Geologists in the 1990s It is natural to wonder how this 1963 story, with its happy ending, stood up to real life and to theatrical representation. What happened to Xiao Jiye, Lin Yusheng, and Xia Qianru, the three geologists in The Young Generation who settled in a remote area of China? What became of their aspirations, [ 219 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife both as to professional and personal life? Was Jiye able to persevere despite his physical condition? Did Yusheng begin to regret his second departure from Shanghai? How did Qianru end up feeling—­as a scientist and as a woman—­about working in a faraway, isolated region of the country? Would she miss Shanghai at all? Did Lin Lan regret her decision to go down to the countryside? Unfortunately, the theater of the period following the Cultural Revolution—­that is, the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s—­addressed merely the last question. Several plays from that time period, including Sha Yexin’s 沙叶新 If I Were for Real (假如我是真的) and Li Longyun’s 李龙云 (There Is a Small Courtyard) (有这样一个小院) and Small Well Lane (小井胡同), follow the fortunes of urban middle school and high school graduates who left for the countryside in large numbers during the Cultural Revolution, became unhappy with their lives, and then met with disappointment and frustration in their tenacious efforts to transfer back to their home cities. Based on these plays, one can infer Lin Lan’s fate in the Jinggang Mountains and her possibly frustrating attempts to transfer back to Shanghai, as had happened to countless sent-­down youth after the Cultural Revolution. Even if she did succeed in returning home, she might have been one of the tens of thousands of educated youth in the 1990s who found themselves “down-­ posted” (下岗), or unemployed, in postsocialist China. Interestingly, no play from the late 1970s or the entire decade of the 1980s depicts the life of geologists. Not until 1997, when Yang Limin’s 杨利民 play Geologists (地质师) was first performed by the Daqing City Theater (大庆 市话剧团) to critical acclaim, were theatergoers reminded of this profession’s much overlooked contributions to the realization of the socialist vision.31 Geologists could also be read as a possible “sequel” to the seemingly unfinished story of The Younger Generation. If, as argued earlier, The Young Generation takes up the story of Soldiers Under Neon Light when it depicts the successors to Chen Xi and Lu Hua in early postliberation Shanghai meeting the new challenge of educating youth about their revolutionary past in the 1960s, might it not be said that Geologists examines the “afterlife” of this revolutionary legacy and its impact on the lives of the young scientists in the next three decades. Although reading intertextually might not be the purview of drama, it does appear that modern Chinese theater has undertaken the unique role of providing alternative history and family saga on the public stage. [ 220 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” Geologists includes four acts, set in 1961, 1964, 1977, and 1994, representing respectively the high Maoist culture of the 1960s, early post-­Maoist life after 1976, and the Deng Xiaoping reform period in the 1990s, which was characterized by rapid modernization and globalization. Geologists cleverly glosses over the most “disastrous” period of the Cultural Revolution as it attempts to track the spiritual roots and moral burdens of this young generation by asking: Where did they come from? What inspired them? What frustrated them? How did they become who they were? What were their dreams and regrets? What changes did their reflections on life and society in the 1960s undergo by the end of the play in the 1990s? These are questions that invite meditation on the values, pitfalls, and sorrows of idealism, socialism, utopianism, postsocialism, capitalism, modernism, and globalization in contemporary Chinese life. Unlike the Shanghai plays Soldiers Under Neon Light and The Young Generation, Geologists is set in Beijing, the political, cultural, and ideological center of the PRC. The play’s single setting—­an old scientist’s home close to the Beijing Railway Station in the heart of the nation’s capital—­features a magnificent clock on top of the station’s building that is seen through a window in the back of the apartment of the scientist’s fourth-­floor apartment.32 The sitting room’s focal point is a large black-­and-­white photograph of an aged geologist standing in the desert by the side of a camel. This, we learn, is the deceased father who never returned from the desert, to which he traveled to determine whether there might be oil resources in 1959.33 His daughter, Lu Jing 芦敬, who has resolutely decided to carry on her father’s unfinished work, is graduating from Beijing Petroleum Institute with a major in petroleum prospecting. Figure  6.2 illustrates a realist setting with the photograph of Lu’s father and the Beijing Railway station through the window of Lu’s apartment. Lu Jing does not hesitate to leave her home city, as did Xia Qianru in The Young Generation; rather, she acts like a female Xiao Jiye, impatient to leave Beijing to work in the wilderness of the Northeast, where a new oil deposit has been discovered. She is therefore acutely disappointed on being assigned instead to join the faculty of her alma mater, where, because of her excellent academic achievements, she will train future geologists. Act 1 concludes with Lu Jing’s farewell party for her classmates as together they sing “The Song of the Geologists” to their hearts’ content, with as much [ 221 ]

FIGURE 6.2 Yang Limin, Geologists. Director: Xu Lixia. Source: From “Huaju Geologist Stage Photos,” Dramatists 4 (2020): 153.

“The Song of the Geologists” enthusiasm as the characters in The Young Generation displayed when they sang it under similar circumstances. But from that point the two plays diverge, since in Geologists the acts that follow take us from 1964 to 1994, three decades of hard times that starkly contrast the reality of the geologists’ lives with their youthful hopes and expectations. It is Lu Jing’s classmates themselves who relate what has been happening to them as they periodically visit her in her Beijing apartment to commemorate the past, navigate the present, and hope for the future. Her former classmates’ accounts allow Lu Jing to experience vicariously all that they have gone through in the wilderness, so that she can share their agony and their anxieties. She also participates in the lives of others by virtue of her relationship to the two men between whom she is torn, and their experiences naturally affect her happiness, or lack of it. In The Young Generation, the story of Xia Qianru’s seemingly divided affections for Lin Yusheng and Xiao Jiye is never developed, as opposed to the story of Lu Jing’s feelings for the two men in her life, which drives much of the plot and character development of Geologists. In following this theme to its conclusion, the playwright leaves the audience with much to contemplate in regard to the consequences of unrequited love, societal duties, and the authority of the state. Lu Jing’s first love is Luo Ming 洛明, who is known as “camel,” a nickname bestowed on him because of his way of immersing himself in his work without showing off his brilliance; like a camel, he shoulders a heavy load in endless journeys toward his destiny without complain.34 He reminds Lu Jing of her father, especially the persevering spirit her father demonstrated in pursuing his career under inordinately arduous circumstances. Luo Ming’s story recalls that of Xiao Jiye in The Young Generation: he is similarly intent on leaving for the wilderness, because it is the place where he expects to be able to do the most to advance his geological career. “We petroleum geologists are lucky to have a chance to work on a first-­rate, world-­class oilfield—­it’s a dream come true for several generations of geologists,” he says to Lu Jing.35 But Luo Ming pays a heavier price than does Jiye to realize his ambition. His health progressively deteriorates as the play unfolds, until he can no longer walk unaided at one point of the play. Again, Luo Ming’s story could easily function as a sequel to the brief account of Jiye’s life. The Young Generation ends at the beginning of Jiye’s career, when he is a young, vibrant idealist, whereas Geologists covers a time span of thirty years, an ample interval for audiences to witness, in the [ 223 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife mirror story of Luo Ming, what Jiye’s idealistic goals might very well have cost him. The question arises, however, as to whether Jiye would have been able to summon the kind of strength Luo Ming draws on to survive. The narratives by other characters in Geologists contribute other, objective perspectives on Luo Ming’s heroic exploits, thereby dispensing with any necessity to rely on the subjective feelings of the protagonist and granting both narrator onstage and audiences offstage equal opportunities to comment on the events without requiring the protagonist to act them out. Both Jiye and Luo Ming belong to the innocent, altruistic generation of the 1960s, but Luo Ming differs from Jiye in his steadfast pursuit of Lu Jing. Whereas Jiye denies Yusheng’s accusation that he is attracted to Qianru, Luo Ming is quite open about his feelings for Lu Jing upon his return in 1964 to Beijing (act 2). He tells his competitor, Luo Dasheng 罗大生, that the latter has not won Lu Jing’s love, despite his tenacious effort to court her, but he warns him that he will not surrender his right to fight for her: “It is in our human nature to pursue happiness—­I am willing to sacrifice my life for my love,” Luo Ming says.36 When night falls, however, Luo Ming leaves Lu Jing without saying good-­bye, having realized that he is destined to live and work in the wilderness and not wanting Lu Jing to have to contend with the hardships he has known and will continue to face. Perhaps this is what he meant when he spoke of his willingness to “sacrifice” his “life for” his “love”—­that is, his lover’s happiness is more important to him than possessing her. Many years later, during the Cultural Revolution, he marries a local technician who rescued him from harm when they worked together in earlier days; yet still he longs for Lu Jing, his ideal, unattainable love. Perhaps Jiye’s romance might have met the same fate, had he ever made room in his wholehearted dedication to his country to pursue it. Strictly speaking, it is Yusheng, who displays some of the heroically romantic characteristics attributed to Luo Ming, although his attachment to Qianru was criticized for comprising too great a part of his pursuit of personal happiness, at the expense of the time he had left to pay attention to collective values. Nevertheless, Luo Ming—­a stronger, more rounded character than either Yusheng or Jiye—­ combines in his makeup an avidity for pursuing the collective ideal as well as personal fulfillment in a love relationship. That his devotion to a dual goal meets with such unhappy results implies that it cannot be achieved. It also by implication questions the rationality and humanity of any ideology that demands such a broad and profoundly [ 224 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” painful sacrifice. From the perspective of the present, we can understand that this play of the 1990s was the product of a generation that had fully experienced the consequences of its idealism and had begun to have doubts about what was being demanded of it. To explore these two plays from another angle, one notes an intriguing contrast between Luo Dasheng of the 1990s Geologists and Lin Yusheng of the 1960s The Young Generation. Like Yusheng in Shanghai, Dashing in Beijing wants to gratify both his personal and professional aspirations. He would like to lead a comfortable life in Beijing, marry Lu Jing, and ideally live with her in the old geologists’ home near Beijing Railway Station. Unlike Yusheng, however, Dasheng first volunteers to go to the northeastern wilderness with Luo Ming, but he is promoted and transferred back to Beijing three years later because of a scientific breakthrough that had in fact resulted from Luo Ming’s work. Luo Ming’s politically questionable family background causes him to be sent further away to an even more desolate area to work, from which he has even less hope than before of ever being reunited with Lu Jing. Over the years, Luo Ming holds on to the numerous letters he has written to Lu Jing, and he also keeps undisclosed in his heart his almost unbearable longing for her. He is aware that his life and career belong to the distant, great depths of the earth in remote regions of the country since one cannot find oil deposits in prosperous cities. Referring to Dasheng’s good fortune in being able to reside in Beijing, where he will be able to give Lu Jing the care she deserves, Luo Ming confesses during a 1964 visit, “Only Dasheng can make you happy; I cannot.” Having been transferred without recourse to faking a medical document, Dasheng is a “luckier” Yusheng; his “honorable discharge” simultaneously promotes his career and helps his prospect of winning Lu Jing’s hand, if not her heart. However, both Dasheng (大生, which means “grand life”) and Yusheng (育生, which means “nurturing life”) belong to the city. They are passionate about its rich culture, colorful lights, magnificent architecture, and the likelihood it presents for living a comfortable life, the kind of life they wish to provide their spouses and offspring. Luo Ming (明, which means “tomorrow) and Jiye (继业, which means “carrying out outstanding achievement”), on the other hand, must choose fealty to their revolutionary heritage and the abnegations of careers that follow from this choice over personal happiness. Luo Ming’s is the familiar, difficult, well-­k nown choice of the title hero in Ethel Lillian Voynich’s 1897 novel The Gadfly [ 225 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife (牛氓), in which the protagonist, Arthur 亚瑟, suppresses his profound love for Gemma 琼玛, his beloved, in favor of his idealistic career in winning Italy’s independence from Austria’s domination.37 The Gadfly was a popular novel in Maoist China from the 1950s to the 1960s for its theme of sacrificing romantic love for one’s commitment to fight for national independence. A film adaptation from the Soviet Union also enhanced the novel’s appeal of “love plus revolution.” I and many others in Maoist China admired and imitated Gemma and Sister Jiang (in Red Crag, chapter 5), despite their cultural, ideological, and historical differences. What, then, about the chosen ones in these plays? How did men’s fate affect the portrayal of the women? Granted that Xia Qianru in The Young Generation is not given the central role that Lu Jing has in Geologists, so that we learn much less about her internal conflicts regarding her relationship with her fiancée. Moreover, there is no telling how she would fare in remote Qinghai Province throughout the years, nor whether she would survive the  harsh conditions there and also manage marriage to Yusheng under these conditions. Nevertheless, Qianru, on the face of it, makes more of a gesture than does Lu Jing toward social equality for women, although she does it in a rather hesitant way. After all, she does demonstrate the courage to leave Shanghai along with her male peers for a rough, unpredictable career in the hinterland. Lu Jing, by comparison, seems rather weak and indecisive for her generation; she could have insisted on joining Luo Ming and the others on their long voyage to the wilderness if she had really wanted to. In addition, the history of the period provides many examples of husbands and wives commuting to separate jobs—­another option that Lu Jing passed up. Instead, she allows geography to determine who will be her life partner. Evidently, she enjoys living comfortably in Beijing, content in the realization that her house is not the center of action but rather a “waystation” where her friends can rest and rejuvenate themselves in the course of their exhausting journeys. Clearly, the Beijing couple lucks out by garnering the best of both worlds. They discuss their idealism as members of the self-­denying generation but do not experience much inconvenience in the process. Their regret over lost dreams cannot be accorded the same weight as the real sacrifice of their peers. While Lu Jing reveres her father’s aspirations, she lacks Luo Ming’s willpower to realize them. She is a city girl at heart, who fancies the romantic setting of the countryside but lacks the energy and determination [ 226 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” to break out of the city to venture into the remote world. Like Ibsen’s Nora, instead of leaving home, she waits in vain for the right Torvald to put together a nest for her. In fact, Lu Jing calls to mind the women depicted by the May Fourth writers in the early Republican period who struggled to leave the home of their parents or their husbands’ homes. She occupies her father’s old residence for thirty years, treasuring his memories and photographs, and then she invites her husband to live with her in the same place after their marriage. Despite being portrayed as naïve and one-­dimensional, Lin Lan and Qianru of The Young Generation at least embody the fearless, selfless spirit of Maoist women, who valued collective ideals more than they did their own happiness. Nor can Lu Jing claim the sort of bravery that certain post-­Mao women required when they chose to stay home after rejecting the Maoist state feminist program that, under the guise of granting women full equality with men, imposed on women the double burden of an overwhelming load of duties to society and a similarly daunting number of duties for maintaining the home. In short, Lu Jing is a complex—­and more true-­to-­life—­woman who has the dreams of gender equality that the May Fourth movement instilled, the aspirations for a nation/state that the PRC contributed, the desire for material comfort that the post-­Mao period supported, and the frustration in having failed to draw on and promote all these objectives that the post-­ Deng era witnessed. She summarizes in herself the conflicts and concerns of women’s lives in the twentieth century. The new challenge for Lu Jing—­ and for Qianru as well—­resides in the tension between her willingness to settle in a desolate place, where poverty, wilderness, and extreme climate are constants, and her desire to seek fulfillment in love and a career. In dealing with such challenges, the influence of the patriarchal structure looms large, as manifested by Luo Ming and Dasheng’s overprotectiveness toward Lu Jing. Why would both men feel it incumbent upon them to take care of Lu Ling and to judge what would be best for her? Are we no further along in this department than we were with the bewildered May Fourth male characters who guided their women’s lives and careers (if they had any) by way of the dictates of their own self-­image and patriarchal interests? After considering these issues, I must suggest an alternate reading of the play that seems to have anticipated these questions. For those who want to imagine what would have happened to Lu Jing had she linked her fate to [ 227 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife that of the person she truly loves, the play presents two more female characters: Tie Ying (铁英, which means “iron hero”), Luo Ming’s wife, and Qu Dan 曲丹, Lu Jing’s college friend, who marries Liu Ren 刘仁 (from the same graduating class) in the Northeast oilfield. As their life stories unfold, one wonders whether Lu Jing would have become another Tie Ying, taking in Luo Ming at his time of great need, nurturing him back to health, and continuing to play the role of full-­time nurse to him for the next twenty years. Would Lu Jing have had the courage and stamina to endure such hardship? Or would Lu’s life have looked more like Qu Dan’s life? Qu Dan forfeited her own career as a promising geologist to tend to her husband, who had lost both feet to frostbite in the 1960s in a temperature experiment that made it possible to successfully transport petroleum from the oilfield to the outside world.38 Given the unfortunate developments in her friends’ lives, perhaps Lu Jing was the luckiest of the three in being allowed to pursue a college teacher’s career in Beijing and not being required to relinquish much of what constitutes gratification in one’s life for the sake of her husband. Yet matters are never simple, it seems, for her husband’s career did not go far, so she had nobody or nothing to sacrifice for, even if she had wanted to. Unsuccessful but forever striving, Dasheng possibly touches us more than does the eventually illustrious Luo Ming, since, while as talented as Luo Ming, he must cope with more familiar difficulties, such as endless problems of state bureaucracy, administrative work, and his troubling sense of guilt at being the fortunate one who can reside in Beijing and marry Luo Jing. Always mindful that he does not inspire his wife’s most profound feelings, Dasheng has the sort of nagging insecurities that turn him into a “hero of one of us,” or someone with a more believable, true-­to-­life character than some of his more “noble” peers. In the end, nobody among the three couples in the play—­Lu Jing/Luo Dasheng, Tie Ying/Luo Ming, and Qu Dan/Liu Ren—­can be described as happy and fulfilled in the true sense of the words. The women might be able to derive some satisfaction from being able to tell themselves that their sacrifices were vital to their husbands’ welfare, but the sacrifices did not ensure success: one man still could not come up with any achievement to boast of and the two others became either disabled or seriously ill in the remote oilfields. Given this plot, one might argue that no matter how much women characters work to achieve both their professional and personal goals, in the last instance women continue to represent the “moon,” or the [ 228 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” passive, domestic other who merely reflects the light of the “sun,” which stands for the more socially acknowledged male contribution to society. However, at the same time, the play does give voice to the pain, sorrow, and suffering caused by a society that demands the unachievable from both men and women, making it equally impossible for them to leave or to stay. Neither the rural nor the urban arena offers the geologists a choice that is complete in itself. It appears that only love can survive this insoluble dilemma, as proven by Luo Ming’s lasting love for Lu Jing, Tie Ying’s self-­ effacing love for Luo Ming, Dasheng’s unconditional love for Lu Jing, and Qu Dan’s magnanimous love for Liu Ren. Ultimately, these anguished love stories overpower the underlying theme of idealism that challenges, complicates, and glorifies love. Earlier plays of the late 1970s and 1980s tended to foreground the Cultural Revolution, implicating it as the root cause of all problems and hardships. Geologists does not take this approach. Act 3 of the play, which is set in 1977, provides a convenient frame for the main characters to quickly report what happened to them during the interval of the Cultural Revolution, which had taken place since their 1964 gathering in act 2. The conversation between Lu Jing and Dasheng reveals that Dasheng, in his own words “saw through everything”—­including his foiled dream of becoming a great geologist—­during the “ten years of the great disaster.” He laments accomplishing so little of what he had hoped to do, a standard complaint of many people who felt that the Cultural Revolution had wasted their time and energy. But in Dasheng’s case the Cultural Revolution is surely not the sole culprit, since he wrestles with his unrealized career ambition from the beginning to the end of the play. After a quick accounting of the “maddening” period of the Cultural Revolution, the play focuses again on Beijing, now bathed in “celebratory festivities” to “witness the people’s victory” against “the Gang of Four”; Beijing still remains “the happiest city” in the world.”39 The experience of the Cultural Revolution has been narrated in dry terminology, using such official terms as “the people’s victory” to end it, but the more vivid language associated with the pains, sacrifices, and regrets of the geologists continues to evoke their lives, both in Beijing and in the wilderness, without noticeable interruption, contrary to the typical accusation lodged by people that the Cultural Revolution had “interrupted all normal life.” When, for instance, Liu Ren appears after a decade’s absence equipped with [ 229 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife artificial feet, it is an image that merely evokes the similar story that the audience had been told in act 2, and that refers to a time before the Cultural Revolution. As in act 2, Liu Ren remains nostalgic for Beijing, and, disabled or not, he is eager to walk through the city and search out its new wonders.40 As before, he envies Lu Jing her good fortune in being a Beijing resident, which again positions him to strike a sharp contrast with Xiao Jiye in The Young Generation. Jiye conceives of Shanghai as a city of comfort that can minister only to one’s needs for personal happiness. To Liu Ren this is no disadvantage; for him, every square foot of Beijing has its old charm and significance: “Tiananmen Square, Beihai Park, the Summer Palace, and our alma mater.”41 Beijing is also the city where a friendship between two former rivals is cemented by an act of compassion. On hearing from Liu Ren that Luo Ming’s health has been dangerously compromised by twelve harsh years of work in the remote oilfields, Dasheng immediately summons Luo Ming to Beijing and helps him gain admission to an excellent hospital, where he will be treated by the best doctors in the capital. The persistent love demonstrated for the “new” Beijing (the capital of the PRC) and for the “old” Beijing (i.e., its traditions, college life, and material comforts) on the one hand confirms the post-­Mao official discourse heralding a “new birth” after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and thus investing the play with the necessary political correctness; on the other hand, it foregrounds the anguish and long-­lived nostalgia of those who are no longer able to make Beijing their home—­by a decision, however, that they had made before the Cultural Revolution. After a lights-­out onstage indicating the passage of seven days, Luo Ming returns to Lu Jing’s house, once again to stare at the photo of her father; he is at loss for words as he sees, for the first time, the life that his former competitor enjoys with Lu Jing. Meanwhile Dasheng wonders how differently each of their lives would have turned out if back in 1964 it had been Luo Ming rather than he who was transferred from the Northeast to Beijing. “People tend to forget things easily. In the years to come, who would have believed what we had to overcome there. . . . ​Nobody would believe what we went through.” Heartbroken, Luo Ming simply wants to sit among his friends, saying nothing. But suddenly he utters a great wail, and his entire body shakes. If anything is clear at this moment it is that the characters’ responses are only glancingly related to the experience of the Cultural Revolution; their pain and sorrow have deepened as they aged and moved [ 230 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” through many of life’s rites of passage and acquired hard-­won self-­ knowledge. They are intent on preserving the memories of their youthful sacrifices and dedication without regard to what happened during the Cultural Revolution, which in any case was a relatively short-­lived event in the panorama of history. Seventeen years have elapsed when act 4 begins. It is 1994, and Beijing is now a city of disco music, freshly painted walls, outsize television screens, leather sofas, and a high-­rise-­dominated skyline, all of them imprints of China’s rapid advances in modernization and globalization. Lin Lan, Luo Dasheng and Lu Jing’s eighteen-­year-­old daughter, is preparing for her rigorous college entrance exam. There is little doubt that hers will be an entirely different major from the one that her parents chose, for her generation has an entirely different set of values and aspirations. In the past seventeen years, her parents have heard nary a word from Luo Ming, but one day there he is, on a national television program entitled Oriental Horizons that interviews celebrities and stars. Now a world-­class geologist, Luo Ming has written twenty-­four scholarly books, and his scientific experiments have garnered him forty-­eight awards, including two from a world petroleum organization. Still exhibiting the selfless spirit that animated his generation, he credits his achievements to all the geologists with whom he studied and worked and who shared his dreams. Responding to the interviewer’s observation that he is too “orthodox,” he confesses that he was “educated and fostered by the People’s Republic,” and that part of him will “never change.”42 His friend’s success excites Dasheng, but it also revives his regrets that he never finished the academic book that he had started in the 1960s. To finally confront Lu Jing with what he sees as her unhappiness in their marriage, Dasheng tells her that the influential report he delivered in 1964 on oil explorations was mostly written by Luo Ming, who should therefore have been the one to win a transfer from the Northeast to Beijing. In a loving and forgiving manner, Lu Jing confesses, in turn, that she has waited thirty years for Luo’s confession: “From this moment on, I am really falling in love with you.”43 Here Geologists evokes the early post-­Mao theme that investigates loveless marriages that had come about for political, ideological, and geographical reasons, but they could be redeemed by honesty, mutual understanding, and forgiveness. Yet in contrast to the message of certain early post-­Mao love stories, the roots of Luo Ming and Lu Jing’s unhappiness could not be entirely attributed to the start [ 231 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife of the Cultural Revolution, which witnessed their sorrows but did not initiate them. Two days later in a rainy afternoon, as sad saxophone music plays “Homecoming” in the background, Luo Ming appears at the Beijing couple’s doorstep. In the past seventeen years he has often visited Beijing, and each time he looked from afar toward Lu Jing’s apartment by the railway station, trying to image what Lu was doing at that moment. He misses the autumn rainy days in Beijing that remind him of his carefree college days. To Lu Jing, he reveals that he is tied to his wife, Tie Ying, primarily by gratitude for her protective sheltering of him during the Cultural Revolution. He is also grateful for Dasheng’s help seventeen years ago; it was critical in enabling him to walk again. But when Lu Jing congratulates him on his extraordinary achievements, Luo retorts bitterly: “To whom do I talk about all these? My wife or my son? . . . ​Perhaps any insignificant achievement is made possible through time. . . . ​[in tears] I have only the two of you [for true friends].”44 His titles of president or board member of numerous research associations aside, Luo Ming has come to believe that in his inner being he is simply a geologist who belongs to the earth’s “deep strata,” and that he is destined to walk forever toward that “heavy world” without the benefits and rewards of worldly wishes and desires.45 Another lights-­out signals that it is two days later, when the three couples from the same 1964 graduating class gather for the third time in Lu Jing’s home. In the meanwhile, Liu Ren has had a near-­fatal stroke and is now in a wheelchair, with his wife, Qu Dan, intent on spending the limited time they have left together to show him “the beautiful landscape of his motherland.” Anxious to finish the shopping she has been assigned by her friends in the oilfield, Tie Ying gives vent to her annoyance at their greed for Beijing commodities. She points out that their “oil city” of two million people now (compared to when they first set foot in the wilderness) has almost everything, including high-­rise buildings, dance halls, bars, and highways. To everyone’s surprise, Dasheng then announces that he has accepted a job that will take him to an oilfield in Xinjiang Autonomous Region; it is as if, three decades later, he still feels the need to compensate for his failure to stay in the wilderness with his former classmates. The play thus concludes with Dasheng finally incarnating Lu Jing’s father, who had disappeared in the Xinjiang desert many years ago, and simultaneously replacing his idealist counterpart, Luo Ming, now too feeble to work in the [ 232 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” fields. To initiate his adventure, Dasheng has ironically picked the time when China’s modernization and globalization efforts were at their peak, when its petroleum industry faced the stiffest competition it had ever known in the world economy, and when many of his own generation of scientists and workers, who had built up the industry, were retiring or unemployed. His surprising declaration is followed by the solemn striking of the gigantic clock of the Beijing Railway Station, a familiar sound that has not changed in the past thirty years, and at first by dead silence from his friends. “We will be parted again,” Lu Jing then says, “and God knows when we will be together again?” Echoing what they did in their get-­together thirty years ago, they end by singing their favorite, “The Song of the Geologists.” This time around, however, they succumb to tears, but when one person cannot complete the lyric, the other takes over, amid the dimming of the stage lights. This dramatic conclusion of the play retains at once the idealist dreams of the geologists and their disillusionment with Maoist ideology, thus playing a perfect game in passing censorship in the postsocialist regime, as seen in its repeated warmly received performances. The realities evolving from 1990s global capitalism, as depicted by the end of Geologists, is foreshadowed in Lin Jian’s warning against a “capitalist restoration” in The Young Generation, or in Mao’s warning that “a peaceful transformation” from a socialist China to a capitalist China had to be prevented and only with the certainty that the ideological battle between the proletariat and the bourgeois had been successfully waged—­a warning that was used to justify the launching of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, the three couples’ tireless efforts to realize the national dream of a strong China to counter Western influence far surpass Lin Jian’s expectations of Lin Yusheng when he exhorted him to commit himself to a life of sacrifice in order to attain a similar goal. Or, as alluded to before, we might say that Geologists presents dramatic characters who reenact onstage the subsequent lives of Yusheng, Jiye, and Qianru from The Young Generation, involving them in the circumstances most favorable to highlighting their sorrows and achievements within the appropriate historical contexts. The playwright may not have attempted to explain why things happened as they did, but he did convey the depth of the protagonists’ despair while also extolling their unselfish spirit, abiding love, and enduring idealism. The play’s most trenchant, even though implicit, ideological criticism of the status quo is communicated by way of both the “glorification” and mockery [ 233 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife of Beijing and what it stands for. At Beijing’s center is its railway station, toward which the youngsters go for inspiration, comfort, and rejuvenation. But before long they are drawn back to the periphery and the desolate places where nothing like Beijing exists. If we characterize the earlier play as “farewell Shanghai” and the latter one as a “journey into Beijing,” we note that both plays evoke the powerful emotions of nostalgia, compassion, frustration, and forgiveness of an entire generation of Chinese scientists who sacrificed largely without too much regret, and who dreamed a dream from which they never wanted to wake up. A subtext might be discerned here: the longing for some sort of spiritual wealth such as they had possessed under Maoist idealism, before it was marred by their experience of the Cultural Revolution; this longing and the life events associated with it became the memories that they clung to. Thus, the Cultural Revolution was perceived as an integral part of their youthful experience of Maoist China, and as such it was not to be forgotten nor spoken of in dismissive, negative terms without acknowledging or understanding its historical complexities. These views of the playwright may be interpreted as a discourse meant to counter the discourse inspired by the dominant modes of globalization, which have flourished at the expense of the local—­that is, Chinese—­ interests and experience.46

Returning to Shanghai in Search of a Hero Is it logical to ask what happens, then, to the next generation of these geologists? How do they relate to their parents’ generation and their lives, dreams, and sacrifices? Geologists briefly mentions Lu Jing and Luo Dasheng’s daughter, who wants nothing to do with her parents’ old values and careers. Nor does the play elaborate on what Luo Ming and Tie Ying’s son looks like in the “oil city.” It is left to another play, Enjoy Hardships (享受艰难), written by Ouyang Yibing 欧阳逸冰, which premiered in 1998, to pick up where Geologists left off with the protagonist, Han Huigu 韩惠姑, the teenage son of a petroleum geologist couple who left Shanghai in the 1960s to work in the distant Ningxia Autonomous Region. Growing up on the “frontier” listening to his mother’s nostalgic songs about Shanghai, its beautiful Huangpu River, and the grand, resounding sound of the gigantic clock on top of the Customs Building, Han Huigu has cherished since childhood the dream of [ 234 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” returning to Shanghai to enroll in the same middle school where his mother once studied. Family lore has it that his mother was the president of the student association of that well-­k nown middle school, the music director of its woodwind band, and the young person selected as the “model student” of the entire city of Shanghai.47 Huigu’s mother could easily have evolved into another Xia Qianru from The Young Generation, because of her love for Shanghai and its rich culture; or she could just as easily have turned into another Qu Dan, who renounces living in the city to pursue the national vision of building up the petroleum industry. Indeed, Huigu would have even been seen as the “real” son of Tie Ying and Luo Ming who would want their son to have all the opportunities they had missed in the major city. However, Huigu’s mother dies while attempting to rescue other workers in an oil well accident. The same accident inflicts a severe leg injury on Huigu’s father, so that he must thereafter be confined to a wheelchair (an image that evokes Xiao Jiye, Liu Ren, and Luo Ming, all of whom suffer disabling leg injuries). When Han Huigu appears in Shanghai alone at the door of Li Mingyang 李明扬, Enjoy Hardships echoes the theme in Geologists of the lasting bond between former college friends, but with a different twist. Li is eager to proffer Huigu his help in starting a new life in Shanghai, partially to express his gratitude to Huigu’s father Han Muchun 韩慕春 for taking his place in Ningxia Autonomous Region upon college graduation, at the time when Li’s father was critically ill and needed his care in Shanghai. Li knows that the fortunes of the Li’s and the Han’s could easily have been reversed if Huigu’s father had not stepped up to relieve him. As the play unfolds, Li’s daughter becomes a strong advocate of Huigu’s cause to enroll in his mother’s alma mater, even at the moment when Huigu has almost lost faith in his own dream. A striking point of contrast, also, is how hard Huigu must work to pass the demanding middle-­school entry examination in 1990s Shanghai; it is clearly shown to be so much more rigorous than the comparable exam in 1960s Shanghai, when Lin Lan in The Young Generation passed up her chance to take in order to work in the countryside as an ordinary peasant. Indeed, it appears that on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a group of middle-­ school students felt so oppressed by the inhumanely rigorous exam that they wrote to Mao Zedong to protest the system, thereby triggering some of the initial events of the Cultural Revolution. One of the worst [ 235 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife manifestations of Mao’s warnings about the risks surrounding the “peaceful transformation” from a socialist to a capitalist society is to be found in Enjoy Hardships, in which only the fittest and the “brightest” youth are offered better opportunities, at the expense of other children, especially those who are socially, culturally, and economically disadvantaged. Furthermore, 1990s Shanghai as depicted in Enjoy Hardships encapsulates a highly competitive capitalist society, the kind in which Li’s wife works for a foreign company that will dock her a month’s pay if she is a mere minute late for work.48 At one point, Li is detained by the authorities when it is discovered that his assistant stole 10 million yuan from his private company. Now Huigu’s father seizes the opportunity to help Li out: He draws on the patent income of his scientific experiments to pledge a large amount of money that will guarantee payment of Li’s debt in the event the stolen money is not returned. In crises, friendship and family count, of course, but it is even more crucial, apparently, to have money at one’s disposal, a reality that is quite different from the one that obtained in the socialist era, when money was deemed insignificant in terms of its impact on social influence and personal happiness. Nevertheless, despite the dominant role of money in Enjoy Hardships, the play still exhibits the vestiges of the Maoist dilemma of striving for a modern society by means of socialist idealism, as in the previous two plays about the 1950s and 1960s generation such as Soldiers Under Neon Light and The Young Generation. Han Huigu seeks to claim his “birthright” to a Shanghai school in order to increase his chances of an auspicious future away from the “frontier,” yet at almost every dramatic turn, the play glorifies the old heroes and heroines of the 1960s, holding them up as the most precious family treasure, to be used as models to inspire and urge on the young protagonists. In act 4, for instance, Huigu rents an attic in Shanghai where he will study for the entrance exam, and his ability to do this serves as a vivid reminder of what his father—­and his counterparts Luo Ming and Liu Ren—­have lost in their single-­minded devotion to collective interests. However, Huigu’s wish to go back to Ningxia to care for his father illustrates the fact that the younger generation is equally prepared to take up their parents’ destiny and “enjoy hardships,” just as Lin Yusheng’s biological and adoptive parents expected him to do. The paradoxical title of the play, which calls upon the younger generation to “enjoy hardships,” expresses [ 236 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” the past and present generations’ determination to go forward with their “old-­fashioned” dreams, despite their profound sense of hopelessness. The pathos of what has been lost is clear to many, yet the hope persists that the next generation will learn from the aspirations and mistakes of those who came before and will fare better. After all, Huigu is still searching for heroes in the course of the play, and he finds them right in his own family and among the family friends of his parents, all of whom cheer him on. Finally, one must note that although Enjoy Hardships has a time span of several decades, at no point does it invoke any memories of the Cultural Revolution, thus inviting ambiguous readings of what the Cultural Revolution did mean to the two generations represented in the play. Is it possible that what is left out yields more important matter to think on than what is presented? Or had the experience of the Cultural Revolution become entirely irrelevant to contemporary life in the 1990s? Or, again, was the Cultural Revolution associated with such idealistic bygone times that it became painfully complicated to represent the dire consequences of that idealism? Apparently, no one wants to experience the Cultural Revolution again, either personally or collectively. Yet is it not possible that the goal of the Cultural Revolution—­a perpetual socialist revolution (with continued progress in achieving equality) so as to repel any return of a capitalist society—­ still matters? This question seems pertinent today, especially for many of those who are now unemployed, uninsured, and unprotected from the “law of the jungle.” I argue that, to some extent, it is the increasingly ruthless capitalist free market alone that keeps the idea or memory of the socialist “dream of equality” alive. The Cultural Revolution seems destined to be given an afterlife that claimed to hold onto its original vision in radical democracy, mass participation, and the people’s right to rebel against state bureaucracy. The nostalgia for the Maoist era—­as evidenced in repeated performances of songs and model theatrical works from the Cultural Revolution—­gives us a different message about the memory of the Cultural Revolution from the messages provided by the mainstream ideology at home and popular writers abroad. As capitalism, Westernization, and globalization increasingly shape Chinese society and class formation, Mao’s theory of the Chinese revolution as an integral part of the world revolution and his efforts to prevent the restoration of a capitalist society should present a sobering note in our reflections on the past century’s history. [ 237 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife

The Socialist Icon of Geologists in the National Imagination Finally, I will address the issue of why geologists were chosen for dramatization, rather than other kinds of scientists? While sharing the same social and ideological status as their peers in other fields, geologists enjoyed a more intriguing profile in Maoist China. The familiar story of the founding of a “new China” features Li Siguang 李四光, a patriotic geologist who journeyed through England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hong Kong to return to Beijing in 1950, bringing invaluable ore and mineral samples and exploration equipment from the West to serve the motherland. He was immediately appointed director of the Research Institute of Geology and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.49 The first five-­year plan (1953–1957) designated the development of “heavy industry” (重工业) as a priority. Its 156 key industrial projects included many metallurgical projects and energy resources projects, all of which needed the rapid and solid training of geologists in the shortest period possible. “One group after the other, geologists ‘eat in  the wind and sleep in the dew’ (风餐露宿), climb mountains and wade through rivers (跋山涉水), arduously and tirelessly prospecting ‘underground treasure’ (勘探地下宝藏); no doubt they deserve the honorable nickname of the ‘trailblazers of national construction’ (国家建设的尖兵),” recounts A Brief History of the People’s Republic of China. 50 Hailed also as the “scouts of socialist construction” in publications of the 1950s and early 1960s, geologists enjoyed an important role in the national imagination for their pioneering work to discover natural resources for producing steel, coal and oil, the lifelines of heavy industry in order to compete with the imperialist West in the Cold War era. The national call to launch “a great advance toward modern science and technology” (向现代科学技术大进军) further promoted the Chinese determination to “change the backwardness of the economic, scientific, and cultural realms of China in order to catch up, in the next several decades, with the most advanced standards of the world.”51 The summons to march toward “Great Nature” (向大自然进军) moved geologists one step closer to the heroic, hardworking image of the “new” peasants, who labored in the open fields, battled challenging terrain, and endured countless difficulties in conquering nature. Geologists were respected venturing into the remote, barren frontiers, traveling long distances in the [ 238 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” mountainous areas, which required unusual physical strength and extraordinary health, thus setting them apart from scientists who worked in much greater comfort in laboratories and research facilities. Most important, a good geologist resembled Mao’s expectations for “model students” to achieve “three excellences” (三好学生) as reflected in such slogans as “good academic achievement, good health, and good work ethics” (学习好, 身体好, 工作好). Han Huigu’s mother in Enjoy Hardships, therefore, must have been a citywide “three-­excellent student” in a Shanghai middle school to prepare herself for the life of a geologist. Geologists best combined patriotic dedication, socialist consciousness, scientific knowledge, traditional ethics, team spirit, perfect health, and physical strength, making them icons of the new socialist man and woman, and hence as close an ideological equal to the workers, peasants, and soldiers as any scientist could ever get. They can also be more easily classified as “reformed intellectuals” on par with other laboring people. Such an equal emphasis on the mind, spirit, and body helps us understand why in all three plays discussed herein, the most celebrated geologists, such as Xiao Jiye in The Young Generation, Luo Ming in Geologists, and Han Muchun in Enjoy Hardships, all have leg problems. Not being able to walk in the field leaves them in great torment, and losing their health becomes tantamount to losing the most important part of their identity. The worsening of their health, in chronological order from Xiao Jiye’s recovery of a leg surgery to Luo Ming’s struggle from paralysis to walking with crutches, and finally to Han Muchun’s appearing in a wheelchair onstage, expresses the heavier price to pay as one pursues idealistic dreams in increasingly difficult local and global environments from the 1960s to the 1990s. On the one hand, the “disabled” bodies in the last two plays of the 1990s highlight the unreachable noble goals of “three excellences” of the high Mao period, and the inevitable destructive power of modernization and industrialization, which result in the alienation of the human beings in the West and in post-­Mao China. On the other hand, the “disabled bodies” also call upon the Chinese people never to forget the spiritual heritage of an idealist age, in which sacrifice and dedication were indeed valued high above material gains and personal happiness. My interview with Yang Limin, the author of Geologists, testifies that the play faithfully recorded his own interactions with fifteen geologists who had spent considerable time in the Daqing oilfield. Having moved to Daqing [ 239 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife at seventeen with his father to work at odd jobs and married a geologist himself, Yang knew his subjects intimately. He became a personal friend of Wang Qimin 王启民, the real-­life inspiration for the dramatic character Luo Ming in Geologists, and was deeply touched by his dedication to Daqing despite declining health. Yang was determined to stage his life on theater long before Wang became a national hero.52 Indeed, Wang Qimin was promoted in the post-­Mao official media as the scientist counterpart of the well-­k nown Daqing model worker Wang Jinxi 王进喜, who was credited with leading Daqing workers to construct one of the most productive oilfields in China. In fact, Mao Zedong’s call for the “Chinese industries to learn from Daqing” (工业学大庆) brought about a popular movie, Pioneers (创业), a rare success during the Cultural Revolution when few dramas, movies, and other kinds of performative works were officially produced. In this movie, in keeping with the spirit of the radical 1970s, Zhou Tingshan 周梃杉, inspired by the real-­life story of Wang Jinxi, must fulfill the difficult task of “reforming” geologist-­in-­chief Zhang, the “bourgeois intellectual,” who underestimates the potential of the oil deposits and the talent and will-­power of his workers despite his patriotism and desire to serve his motherland. Interestingly, the heroic portrayal of Luo Ming, Liu Ren, and other geologists in Yang Limin’s play rectified this distorted history by depicting their sacrifice as central to the construction of Daqing, and by extension, all oilfields in China. Geologists from all over the country naturally responded to Geologists with enthusiasm upon its performance by Daqing City Theater for the special occasion to celebrate the National Conference on Petroleum Industry held in Daqing in 1998.53 Many geologists told Yang Limin that they cried frequently upon hearing the repeated singing of “Song of Geologists,” which had sustained them many years earlier. They were extremely grateful to the playwright for having recorded an entire generation’s aspirations, dreams, sacrifices, and life journeys in a way no other genre or writer had been able to achieve. Some even commented, as I did, that they, too, regarded Geologists as a sequence to The Young Generation of the 1960s, which had also inspired their own aspirations of living the life of Xiao Jiye and become “good sons and daughters wishing to devote themselves to work in the four corners of the world” (好儿女志在四方).54 In front of the geologists who served both as the inspirations for creating Geologists and as its most appreciative audience, Yang felt rewarded for his career that saw him write [ 240 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” sixteen plays about the oilfields, including three of his most celebrated plays such as Black Stone (黑色的石头), Geologists, and The Great Wilderness (大荒野). Labeled as one of the best main melody plays in contemporary China,55 Geologists won several national prizes such as Cao Yu Drama Prize (曹禺戏剧奖) and Grand Wenhua Prize (文华大奖) for its artistic achievement. Critics claimed that Yang Limin revived the socialist-­realistic tradition of Chinese drama based on his own passion and experience in living in the “rich, black soil” of Daqing that nurtured a generation of geologists and his art.56 A successful run of 168 performances in the lean years of contemporary Chinese theater production earned 1.5 million yuan during a “continuing crisis of modern drama” with decreasing audiences and state financial backing.57 Although in terms of national visibility, Ouyang Yibing’s Enjoy Hardships fell short of Geologists, as a children’s play, Enjoy Hardships found a warm reception among its intended audience, especially teenagers. Disturbed by the increasing teenage suicide rate, Ouyang wanted to emphasize that youngsters should not fear life’s difficulties. Asked why he chose a geologist’s son, Ouyang replied, Xiaomei, you are a few years younger than me and perhaps do not remember as well as I do. In my formative years as a teenager and as a college student, we heard so many enthusiastic lectures given by geologists working in the most remote and difficult part of China. They inspired us to foster a fearless spirit in overcoming hardships in life and giving their best to the country and to the people. In 1959, the news of our discovery of Daqing oilfield, and the end of the helpless age of relying on foreign oil, was as sensational as that of the subsequent successful explosion of our first atomic bomb, both real boosters of our patriotic feelings, national pride, and desires to give it all to our motherland. When you heard so many lectures given by Daqing people, you could not but want to write about them since they represent the noblest and most respected people who persevered in difficult circumstances.58

Through the spirit of “enjoying hardships” as reflected in the life stories of the father and son, Ouyang wanted to tell his young audience, that “hardships are the treasures of one’s life whereas setbacks are turning points in one’s striking for a higher goal”—­lines in the play that the audience often responded to during the play’s performance. [ 241 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife In response to my reading of Enjoy Hardships as a sequel to Geologists, Ouyang Yibing confessed that he had never thought about them in this way, but that it made perfect sense, since his play appeared a bit later than Geologists and focused on the second generation. That two playwrights simultaneously wrote about the same generation of geologists without consulting each other illustrated a common respect among contemporary artists and writers for this particular group of scientists. In addition, he was also moved by some of the disabled audience members who came up to him in wheelchairs after the play’s performance, thanking him for having written a play for them, since Han Muchun, the father, appears in a wheelchair onstage. They interpreted this as celebrating the strong will of disabled people in overcoming obstacles inconceivable to others. Regarding the settings of Shanghai and Ningxia in the play, Ouyang Yibing dedicated the play to the people of Shanghai, which in the Mao era was designated to send its residents to Ningxia. From the 1950s movement to “build up the frontier” (支边), to the 1960s and 1970s movement to send down urban youth to the countryside (上山下乡), and to the tremendous scientific, technological, and managerial support since the early days of the People’s Republic to the present day, college graduates such as Han Huigu’s parents left their home city. After its successful premiere in Shanghai, Ouyang revised the play to the setting of Beijing for subsequent Beijing performances and concluded the play with a more open ending pertaining to the fate of the protagonists in order to highlight the vicissitudes of life. Regarding my reading of the play’s skipping over the entire period of the Cultural Revolution as a way to present the intellectuals’ emotional and spiritual journey in the entire PRC period in a more coherent fashion, Ouyang believed that time was still not yet right to understand what had happened during the Cultural Revolution, let alone to represent it in the most profound and penetrating manner as one perceived in some of the Soviet masterpieces on World War II. Before we barely had enough time to ponder over our experience of the Cultural Revolution, we rushed into a new age of “capital accumulation” in contemporary China. Decades after the Cultural Revolution, we still need more historical perspective before gaining real knowledge and penetrating insights.59 What is clear in my interviews with both Ouyang Yibing and Yang Limin, it seems, is that their memories of growing up with the legends of geologists and of living among them and sharing their songs and sorrows since the 1950s overpowered any other [ 242 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” memories; indeed, they motivated the very creations of these unique plays depicting the country’s best and brightest. Their memories of the past and perceptions of the present therefore bestowed us with valuable insights into the heritage of Maoist China and the diverse and complex lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Cultural Revolution.

Personal Journeys in the National Context As a coda to this chapter, it is interesting to reflect on an early draft first written more than a decade ago for a conference presentation, where I spotlighted the intriguing fact that Wen Jiabao 温家宝, then premier of the State Council from 2003 to 2013, graduated from the Beijing Institute of Geology (北京地质学院) with a graduate degree in structural geology in 1968. After receiving his degree, he worked as a geologist in Jiuquan 酒泉 in  Gansu Province for fourteen years, so he probably would have been aware of the play The Young Generation and perhaps even seen its popular movie adaptation. Similar to Xiao Jiye and Luo Ming, he might have held dear the poetic lyric and inspirational music of “The Song of the Geologists.” In the same sacrificing spirit seen in Xiao and Luo, who encountered dangers during their fieldwork onstage, Wen once barely survived a flood by holding onto the neck of a yak after his tent had already been washed away three times.60 Wen, unlike his dramatic counterparts, had worked his way up from a local team to become the vice minister of Geology and Mineral Resources (地质矿产部) before he was promoted to powerful positions in the CCP’s Central Committee and above. One wonders what dramatic role he would have played in moving up the social ladder and, more particularly related to this chapter, how he would have reflected on his experience as the technician and political instructor of the Geomechanics Survey Term under the Gansu Provincial Geological Bureau (甘肃省地质局地质力学队) and head of its political section from 1968 to 1978, a period that paralleled Luo Ming’s stage story. Wen’s career track obviously demonstrated that he was endorsed as both “red and expert” (又红又专) with a high level of “political consciousness” and scientific expertise. How did he balance such seemingly opposing demands and a family life without having to compromise his love life and perhaps the happiness of his woman, as seen in the [ 243 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife emotional turmoil surrounding Luo Ming? Most important, the fact that a national leader’s life journey coincides with that of our protagonists illustrates the significance socialist China attached to the profession, therefore pointing to the relevance of staging socialist scientists to many pressing issues in contemporary China and its unfolding political drama. In historical hindsight, Wen belongs to a new “class of Party technocrats,” as termed by Joel Andreas in his insightful book Rise of the Red Engineers, who “received academic and political training at elite technical universities in the 1950s and early 1960,” but some rose to political power in the 1990s, with a large majority of the members of the Standing Committee of the Party formerly trained as engineers. “China today is ruled by Red engineers,” Andreas argues, and rightly so; they “resemble the officials who staffed the upper levels of the state machinery in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe prior to 1989,” including such dominant figures as Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev.61 Furthermore, Andreas points out the difference between the socialist theory of Henri Saint-­Simon, who championed “a talented and enlightened group of industrial leaders, scientists, and engineers” to govern society, and the Marxist vision, which rejected Saint-­Simon’s hierarchical nature of privileging the educated elite in its attempt to eliminate all class distinctions.62 Favoring the proletariat as “the revolutionary vanguard,” Marxists and Marxist practitioners in socialist movements mobilized the poorest class for an egalitarian agenda and eventually “a new hierarchy based on political and cultural power emerged, with a class of party technocrats on top.”63 The crucial departure of the Chinese experience from that of the Marxist and Soviet models resides in the fact that the CCP systematically criticized intellectuals since the founding of the PRC and especially during the Cultural Revolution. By so doing, the CCP under Mao explored the “class power” (i.e., “political capital”) of the proletariat to suppress even more intensely the intellectuals with “knowledge and academic credentials” (i.e., cultural capital) while using other groups of radical intellectuals to envision and carry out an extreme Maoist ideology.64 Paradoxically, the intellectuals’ “persecution” stories during the Cultural Revolution, narrated on and offstage, legitimized them in their rapid rise to state power in post-­Mao society. In the Maoist period, dual demands for young generation to be both “red and expert,” for example, were predicated on the overriding principle of “politics in command” (政治挂帅), which was surprisingly forced back into [ 244 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” political and cultural life, forty years after the death of Mao in 1976, under Xi Jinping. Since taking over as CCP general secretary in 2012, Xi has urged Party members to “embrace the spirit of Mao and make ideology the priority” in order to restore “authoritarian control over all aspects of life.”65 The post-­Mao regime under Deng Xiaoping’s rule attacked “politics in command” as an ultraleft Maoist calamity and ridiculed its extreme slogans, such as “we would rather have weeds growing in the fields to preserve socialism, but not seedlings sprouting in the fields to engender capitalism” (宁要社会主义的草, 不要资本主义的苗). After four decades of economic reform with Chinese socialist characteristics, the Xi regime now seems compelled to rein in “unhealthy” Western ideology for the sake of upholding Maoist and socialist core values. Shantou University, for example, was originally sponsored by a Hong Kong billionaire and recognized as a flagship institution in producing world-­class graduates in the new era of reform. In 2018, however, it was criticized by a provincial inspection term as being “weak” in ideological work and “inefficient” in fencing off the penetration of illegal religious organizations on campus. Therefore, the university must carry out the Party’s mandate to raise the “four consciousnesses” (四个意识), that is, “consciousness of the need to maintain political integrity” (政治意识), to “think in ‘big picture’ terms” (大局意识), to “uphold the leadership core” (核 心意识), and to “keep in alignment” (看齐意识).66 This last-­ditch effort to enforce Maoist ideology ironically proves true the remark that “the reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert,” as articulated by Yan Lianke 阎连科, a novelist in contemporary China controversial for his satirical, surreal, absurdist, and mythorealist portrayal of  indifferent officials and sleeping citizens with shallow materialistic mindsets.67 To complete this coda in the spirit of connecting the past with the present, I cannot help but insert a personal story. Around the time of the ­staging of The Young Generation and the first act of Geologists in the early 1960s, my sister Chen Feibi 陈非比 was enrolled as a college student in the Department of Geophysics (地球物理系地壳物理专业) at the University of Science and Technology of China (中国科学技术大学) in the newly established specialization in seismology (地震学). Throughout my growing-­up years, I had often heard my sister’s melancholy story of how hard it had been for her to forgo her passionate desire to study performance art and how she had reluctantly signed up as a science major on her college application. Like many [ 245 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife high school graduates in 1960, she felt compelled to answer the Party’s call to “conquer the highest peaks of scientific and technological mountains” (攀登科学技术的高峰). In her diary entries, she recorded many times her “ideological struggle” (思想斗争) in trying to become a scientist—­with no real interest in the subject and at the expense of her longing to sing and dance onstage. Over the years, she worked tirelessly with rescue teams in disaster areas after the Xingtai 邢台 earthquake in 1966 and the Haicheng 海城 earthquake in 1975, gradually strengthening her fortitude in the process and excelling in her seismologist career, only to lose her husband, Jia Yunnian 贾云年, on July 28, 1976, in the historic Tangshan earthquake (唐山大地震), which claimed more than 240,000 lives, with one million people crushed under the rubble of the industrial city. The Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Wall, erected in 1989, is engraved with the names of Jia and his five teammates, tragically symbolizing their failed attempts over the previous four years to produce a near-­term forecast of the earthquake, after they had already predicted a possible 7.0 earthquake to occur in northern Hebei Province. Where, exactly, in Hebei, and at what time would it hit? Jia spent four months doing fieldwork, taking six trips to difficult parts of Hebei and nearby regions to collect data in a race to predict the time, location, and magnitude of an impending earthquake with sufficient precision so that a warning could be issued. Tragically, Jia and his teammates arrived at Tangshan three days before the earthquake struck and perished on the very land they had tried so hard to protect. My sister’s well-­received autobiography A Tragic Journey, written thirty years after her husband’s death, expressed her deep gratitude to the nameless rescue workers who, under extremely difficult circumstances such as aftershocks, storms, and layers of debris, dug out Jia’s glasses, two notebooks detailing his last seven months of work, and his watch, frozen at the exact minute and second when the earthquake struck. Looking at these objects thirty years later, my sister imagined his last moment: he must have felt a tremendous sense of guilt and regret that he did not beat the devil at its own game. He did not have enough time to defeat the “enemy of the people” and prevent his people and country from suffering from this natural disaster. My sister also recorded how in her most heartbroken days immediately after the earthquake, she and her team in Hebei worked day [ 246 ]

“The Song of the Geologists” and night to monitor seismological events, trying to collect timely data to prevent such a disaster from striking again. My sister’s autobiography records real-­life experiences complementary to the stage stories of Xiao Jiye and Luo Ming: unlike Lin Yusheng and Xia Qianru in The Young Generation, who debated whether they should stay in Shanghai to work in a research institute or to venture into the desert of Qinghai Province, my sister and brother-­in-­law, upon their graduation, did not hesitate to sign up for a newly formed seismological team in Yunnan Province. On October  1, National Day, of 1964, nine members among the first class of forty-­one seismologists produced since the founding of the PRC bid farewell to Beijing in Tiananmen Square, vowing to the party and the motherland their determination to contribute to the pioneering works of the Seismological Research Bureau in Yunnan Province, the outpost furthest from Beijing. Originally assigned to the Beijing Geophysics Research Institute—­a position Yusheng in The Young Generation would have loved to accept and similar to Lu Jing’s teaching and research position in Beijing in Geologists—­Jia insisted on devoting his talents to the most difficult and remote part of China. Similar to scenes from The Young Generation and Geologists, my sister, my brother-­in-­law, and their classmates recited poems and sang red songs at their graduation commencement, expressing their excitement for a new life as a scientists, their will to become “a cog in the revolutionary machine that never rusts” (做一颗永不生锈的革命的螺丝钉), so that they could utilize their “limited life” to serve the interest of the people without bounds (把有限的生命投入到无限的为人民服务之中去).68 Their performance at the commencement resembles a scene in the film version of The Young Generation in which Xia Qianru joins a chorus onstage expressing their desire to go to remote areas where they are needed most. My sister and brother-­in-­law also graduated in the same year, 1964, when the three geologists, Lu Jing, Luo Dasheng, and Luo Ming, graduated from the Beijing Petroleum Institute in Geologists. During and beyond college, my sister, with her talent in solo singing and dance, and my brother-­in-­law, a versatile musician who played the erhu (二胡) and flute, organized countless amateur performance events in Beijing, Yunnan, Hebei, Liaoning, and other places where they conducted research and carried out fieldwork, combining their theatrical talents with their ­scientific pursuits; this resonates with the story of Lin Lan in The [ 247 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Young Generation, who forgoes her audition opportunity to enroll in a film academy in order to work in a remote and poverty-­stricken rural area. My sister, in contrast, was able to connect her role as a professional science worker (专业科学工作者) to that of an amateur art worker (业余文艺工作者) while serving the country and the ordinary people in multiple compacities. After her retirement, she led a choral group of retirees composed of former scientists, artists, teachers, and other intellectuals. They sang red songs for anyone who cared to listen and who had shared a similar past dream of building a socialist state with their own hands. In the final analysis, the real-­life stories of my sister and the death of my brother-­in-­law might prove to be more dramatic and more tragic than those staged in the geologist plays; the intricate interweaving tales of science, revolution, youth, and socialist state with that of the performance art and their embodied cultural politics, delineated in this chapter, cannot be overestimated. Neither should they be dismissed as incidental tales, trivial episodes of individual life, or simplistic stage acts.

[ 248 ]

SEVEN

Monumental Theater Soldier Plays and History Plays

I am a soldier I came from the people Defeated the Japanese bandits Wiped out the KMT troops I am a soldier Love my country and people Revolutionary war has tempered me I stand more determinedly than ever before Hold tight my weapon With eyes wide open Whoever wants to start a war I will fight him to death without mercy

我是一个兵 来自老百姓 打倒了日本侵略者 消灭蒋匪军 我是一个兵 爱国爱人民 革命战争考验了我 立场更坚定 嘿嘿枪杆握得紧 眼睛看得清 谁敢发动战争 坚决打他不留情

—­“I Am a Soldier”

AROUND 1950, AT the outbreak of the Korean War, song writer Lu Yuan 陆 原 and composer Yue Lun 岳仑 were troubled by the fact that their military unit did not have a popular song for soldiers still fighting to complete the War of Liberation on the battlefields in southern China.1 Both art workers and soldiers in the military, Lu and Yue wrote “I Am a Soldier” (我是一个兵) in half a day. The song depicts the dramatic transformation from a peasant to a soldier for the sake of winning a nationalist war against common enemies.2 The song became a rallying song that inspired the army, and it has [ 249 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife remained popular in postsocialist China, especially for its message of coming “from the ordinary people” and loving “my country and my people.” Not only was the song designated as one of the core songs that all soldiers should learn to sing well, but it also reportedly inspired heroic deeds: a dying soldier sang the song before breathing his last in 1952, toward the end of the Korean War; in 1995 another soldier survived seven major surgeries after a training accident and credited the song as his main source of strength in recovery.3 Citing “I Am a Soldier” as a point of departure to indicate the power of art and its connection to the grassroots, this chapter investigates Meng Bing 孟冰 and his most representative military-­theme plays (军旅戏剧), which depict model soldiers and veterans on the postsocialist stage whose stories exemplify the heroic spirit of the military while at the same time challenging the very values that trapped them in the reform era. In the twenty-­first century in postsocialist China, where “going capitalist” has continued to become the cultural norm, Meng Bing’s huaju have gained popularity in the opposite direction: “going socialist” in their thematic concerns, theatrical styles, and ideological critiques of a capitalist reality. Usually considered a lackluster propaganda promoted by the CCP, Meng’s main melody plays indeed created a “Meng Bing Phenomenon” (孟冰 现象), which designated 2009 as the “Year of Meng Bing.” A drama festival in 2011 staged twelve of his plays in twelve cities.4 Several seminars explored his achievements in having overcome a “crisis in huaju” (话剧危 机),5 including one in 2016 that celebrated five of his plays that were translated and published in Japanese in a series of anthologies of modern Chinese drama.6 Meng’s plays also made theater history by having received all the available drama awards in 2010. He is at once politically correct, artistically innovative, and commercially successful.7 The “Meng Bing phenomenon” illustrated the lasting appeal in a realist theater pioneered by the May Fourth playwrights in the tradition of Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian and perfected in the high Mao era on the socialist stage. A study of the Meng Bing phenomenon provides a much-­ needed perspective in understanding the lively revolutionary stage in a nonrevolutionary time and its enduring ability to present a critical vision of contemporary reality in the age of state censorship. As president of the Drama Troupe Attached to the Political Department of the PLA, Meng continued to expand the socialist realist tradition to depict heroic soldiers, [ 250 ]

Monumental Theater thus excelling in his role as the leader of an army theater company with official backing.8 Financed by a state budget in the interest of national defense, his “soldiers” from rural China testify to the suffering of the peasants in the twenty-­first century and their children’s sacrifice serving in desolate military outposts. Meng’s soldier plays extend, on one level, the army performance tradition since the Red Army period of the 1930s in lofty idealistic praise of “red soldiers.” At a deeper level, however, Meng’s plays express his “reflective thinking” on social problems; he allied himself with the still oppressed people at the bottom of Chinese society fifty years after they supposedly became the “masters of socialist China.” Meng’s plays fundamentally challenge “the new rich” in “the new era” and point to the impossibility of change from “feudalist” to Maoist China and, most recently, from a “socialist” to a “postsocialist” period.

The “Meng Bing Phenomenon” and Monumental Theater The Ballad of Yellow Earth (黄土谣) is a case in point. Set in the 1980s in era of economic reforms, the play depicts Song Laoqiu 宋老秋, a party secretary in a remote village in Shanxi Province who, on his deathbed, makes his three sons promise to pay back a 180,000 yuan debt that resulted from his failed attempt to start a brick factory in his efforts to lead his fellow villagers to a better life. He refuses to expire until his eldest son, Song Jianjun 宋建军, pledges to pay back the entire amount against his two brothers’ reservations. As an honorable soldier who recently left military service to return to his rural roots, Jianjun benefited from his education in the army and pledges to carry out his soldier’s spirit in helping his poverty-­stricken village. Based on a real-­life story, this play, at first glance, can be seen as a typical play about “good people and good deeds” (好人好事) with a familiar theme of personal sacrifice for the interests of the people and the country: the protagonist could have declared “bankruptcy” and been freed of the villagers’ debt, but he did not want “the state to suffer loss.” The play is therefore promoted as a perfect main melody theme: Song and his eldest son, Jianjun, have carried out the founding principle of the CCP, which serves the fundamental interests of the masses, as the playwright himself has cleverly claimed.9 In the larger scheme of things, Meng ingeniously unveils, at the same time, how the CCP has indeed broken its promise of a better China, [ 251 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife especially where the Chinese peasants are concerned. They are still dirt-­ poor, four decades after liberation, and are still struggling with a harsh reality in contemporary China, where corrupt officials have sold out to vested interests. In act 2, for example, Song Jianguo 宋建国, the second son who ventures into the business world in Shenzhen, expresses his frustration in dealing with party officials who have enriched themselves through bribery and embezzlement and who gambled away several million yuan of the “people’s money” in Macao casinos in a single night.10 Jianguo thus believes that his elder brother is “foolish” in planning to pay back their father’s debt: Who knows where the money will end up, perhaps squandered again by the crooked officials? Who cares about a dying old party secretary in a poor village by the Yellow River, who worries to the end about his villagers?11 Most important, he mocks his brother’s attempt to learn from the spirit of Lei Feng 雷锋, a PLA model soldier whom Mao called on the nation to emulate in 1963 in order to become “a screw that never rusts” in the grand machine of the revolution.12 Beneath the surface theme of “learning from Lei Feng,” therefore, the play points to the absence of a  Lei Feng spirit in postsocialist China, where corrupt officials talk the talk but do not walk the walk, and critiques the absence of the core values of the Maoist period and the absurdity of celebrating them in a semicapitalist China. From this perspective, Meng’s play almost reaches a point of being absurd in its modernist mockery of the “truth” in socialist and postsocialist China. Meng’s Ballad of Yellow Earth was based on a true story of sixty-­ two-­year-­old Song Xianqin 宋先钦, a “real-­life” Lei Feng figure in Hunan Province, who had labored for ten years in order to pay back a debt of 300,000 yuan to his fellow villagers, even at the expense of his youngest son’s death from exhaustion.13 After having interviewed Song, however, Meng decided against a “reportage play” in the socialist realist tradition. Instead, he invented an absurd death scene for the father, prolonging his death throughout the play until the promise is kept. With a setting that consists only of the three meager caves belonging to the Song family, the play reminds its audiences of the dire poverty in rural China. As the curtain falls, when the family members finally carry his coffin out of the cave, a revolving stage turns the family dwelling into a village scene where everyone—­old and young, man and woman—­joins the Songs in the funeral procession. The absurdist plot best expresses Meng’s intention: “An ordinary [ 252 ]

Monumental Theater peasant ‘shocks the heaven and the earth’ with his sincerity and honesty. What a sharp contrast to those corrupt party officials who abuse their power for self-­interest and family wealth!”14 Some of Meng’s audiences were also moved to tears: a graduate student in sociology from Tsinghua University wrote to Meng that he was so touched by an ordinary peasant’s “manly spirit” that he sat in the theater long after the play was over, not knowing what to think of his own life. An older member of the audience could not believe that the play was based on the life experience of a CCP member; he felt deeply guilty and ashamed of his own inability to do the same as Old Song.15 Taken as a whole, it is possible to interpret Meng’s dramatic world as having questioned the very nature of debt: Does Old Song owe a debt to his fellow villagers, or does the CCP owe a debt to Song, his family, and the villagers? Likewise, Old Song has faithfully led his villagers in following the CCP’s cause from the War of Liberation to Land Reform, the People’s Commune movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and finally the “new era” of economic reforms. Unfortunately, however, precisely at the moment when Deng Xiaoping’s post-­Mao regime exclaimed “Let some people get rich first” in the 1980s, changing the lives of countless peasants for the better, Old Song, in following Deng’s call, makes a fatal mistake in a business investment and leads his village to bankruptcy. Despite his lifelong sacrifice, Old Song obliges his offspring to pay back “his” debt. Even though the traditional ethics of “a son paying back his father’s debt” (父债子还) would partially work for the logic of the plot, one still wonders what had caused Old Song’s heavy debt in the first place. It is here that a main melody play can simultaneously drive home its counterpoint against the mainstream ideology: a socialist system has trapped peasants deeper in poverty rather than liberating them from it. Indeed, the CCP can be seen as the “ultra-­debtor” to its people, to those “creditors” who have never seen any returns from their “investment” from the 1920s to the 1970s, when they persevered in the thorny years of preliberation war efforts and of the postliberation collectivization movement. The “bankrupt” countryside, especially in the regions that had sacrificed the most for the CCP cause—­as seen in the geographical settings of The Ballad of Yellow Earth—­has even forfeited its “creditor’s rights,” as revealed in Old Song’s debt passed on to his children, in Old Qin’s inability to ask for monetary compensation for his father’s death, and, worse still, in the lack [ 253 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife of awareness that he even deserves payback. Their blind faith in continuing to “learn from Lei Feng” in a morally depleted contemporary China renders the play even more tragic in tone—­hence, critical realist theater at its best.

Recovering Archives of Life In the historical context of contemporary theater since 1949, The Ballad of Yellow Earth connects the genre of peasant plays with soldiers’ life in the Maoist period, but the honorable Old Song’s slow and agonizing death interrogates the history behind it with its debts to the laboring people. Significantly, Meng’s Archives of Life (生命档案) has filled a gap in restoring respect for the ordinary soldiers and has paid back, if only in a small and symbolic fashion, the debt the state owed to its people, therefore bringing up to date the genre of soldier plays popular in the socialist theater of the high Mao period, but with an ironic twist and a critical edge against it. The avant-­garde staging of the “main melody” play Archives of Life, which premiered in 2009, does not seem extraordinary at first sight: a proscenium stage with a backdrop screen displaying computer-­generated images or scenes. In between the backdrop and the front stage, a raked, sloping platform connects the front stage with the back screen while serving as a separate space of dramatic action when called for. As the curtain rises, sharply dressed contemporaries—­in army uniforms, hospital gowns, and business-­ casual attire—­pace anxiously, waiting for the latest news on Liu Yiquan 刘 义权, who is being operated on for late-­stage cancer. The worried crowd at times freezes into a group sculpture onstage, conveying their sorrow and frustration, while watching nurses and doctors rushing through the center stage in their last efforts to save Liu’s life, as if they were observing the passing of history right in front of them. Amid the rising sound of music, an exhausted Liu is wheeled out on a hospital bed, surrounded by his family and friends. In a presentational style of performance similar to the self-­introduction technique used in Peking opera, his wife and coworkers directly address the audience in their asides, in which they narrate their relationship to the dying Liu and their admiration for his ordinary but heroic life. At the same time, in a Brechtian style of distancing the audience from the dramatic action and inviting them to become detached observers of social issues, Liu’s boss summarizes [ 254 ]

Monumental Theater his life story: “Old Liu, an archivist in the military, has lived a very simple life, in front of a desk, on a chair, with a magnifying glass and a pair of white gloves” in a contemporary society where seeking wealth has become the goal for many people.16 When the dramatic action freezes around Liu (in a group sculpture reminiscent of an oil painting, with cold tones of green, yellow, and blue), this anti-­illusionistic technique reminds the spectators that they are watching an enactment of reality instead of reality itself, as the character Liu, on a hospital bed, now speaks aloud his thoughts on the fundamental theme of this play: “Life and death all occur in a split second. Until now, I was too busy to think about the end of my journey. The time has now come. Everyone’s life ends with a few pieces of paper, hurriedly stuffed into his archive, which records the final judgment history has passed onto his life. What conclusion would they draw about my life? What have I done up to this point?” Despite a blended performance style drawn from traditional opera, Brecht, and modernist techniques, Archives of Life remains one of the most astonishing realist plays in the tradition of Ibsen, Shaw, Tian Han, and Hong Shen in terms of its close connection to social issues of contemporary society. At the end of his life, for example, the character Liu raises a piercing question that everyone in the PRC faces: What would be included in his own “archive,” or “personal record,” known as dang’an (档案), which administrators in every work unit in the PRC are responsible for putting together? Together with a resident registration system (户籍管理制度), the archive system enables the Chinese government to control its citizens: in a sealed envelope inaccessible to the individual concerned, one’s supervisor—­with his sole authority, judgment, and sometimes even imagination—­records an individual’s work performance and attitude toward the CCP and suggests whether he or she can be trusted with important duties according to the official rules of “proper” behavior. Until recent years in postsocialist China, a dang’an not only followed an individual for life but also exerted a lasting impact on job assignments, promotions, and, ultimately, the final appraisal of his or her life contributions to and hence standing in society. A second copy of the dang’an is locked up in the local branch of the Public Security Bureau as a permanent record. During political campaigns such as the Anti-­Rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution, the verdict of “rightist” or “counterrevolutionary” was usually stuffed into one’s dang’an envelope; when these actions were declared to be Mao’s mistakes and those [ 255 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife cases were rehabilitated in later decades, the old verdict was replaced with a new one. This official seal of one’s record is almost a symbolic act of “a final assessment made after the lid is placed on a person’s coffin” (盖棺论定). That is the reason why Liu, before he breathes his last, wonders what will be in his own dang’an, which will become the legend of his life. The staging of Liu’s dedication to his work earns Archives of Life the designation of “a model worker’s play” (英模戏剧) and therefore predetermines a glowing appraisal of Liu’s life in his own dang’an. However, the complex messages in the unfolding events of Liu’s achievements challenge the fundamental issues underlying the dang’an system, its authoritarian and arbitrary nature, and the related question of how to honor numerous, nameless war heroes who have never had a dang’an of their own and, hence, who have been deprived of their rightful place in national memory. The play focuses on Liu’s selfless efforts to reconstruct missing pieces in the revolutionary war history, which in and of itself is an ironic comment on the inhuman and “forgetful” state. As an army officer in charge of military archives for the PLA, Liu recovers archival materials for soldiers who died in the Red Army period (1927–­37), in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937–­45), and in the War of Liberation (1945–­49), many of them without official records as to when, where, and how they perished. In his forty-­one years of selfless service, Liu has established or cleaned up more than 830,000 archives and restored the dignity and respect for ordinary soldiers and commanders who had either been missing in action or wrongly accused of acts of treason or desertion, for lack of records to prove otherwise. In the subsequent flashback scenes, for example, Liu recalls his shock upon discovering an old army register that recorded only the names of new recruits: two died in the battlefield two days after they had joined the CCP army; a Dumb Zhang 哑巴张—­unable to speak, and real name unknown—­ died in the war without leaving any clue as to which village he was recruited from. In tears and with a deep sense of guilt, Liu imagines himself talking to these forgotten soldiers: Who are you waiting for all these years? You are waiting for me to dig into the dust of history, so that you did not die in vain, or disappear in ashes and smoke? I will be your guardian angel and protect those deserted boxes of archives that preserved clues to your life story! I will bring you back to history and prove that you have indeed lived a much happier and longer-­lasting life than our contemporaries! [ 256 ]

Monumental Theater It is for his contemporaries that Liu works, so that people living in the twenty-­first century would also remember those ordinary men and not just celebrate the glories of the founding fathers of the CCP, as seen in numerous blockbuster movies and television drama series. It is for Liu’s contemporaries that Meng and his colleagues wrote this play, so that the family members of these nameless heroes—­who still live in the poverty-­stricken countryside in the twenty-­first century—­are never forgotten. To this end, this play dramatizes Liu’s repeated encounters with a character named Old Qin 老秦. They first meet in the early 1980s, in Qin’s home village in northern Shaanxi Province, where the local people had paid a heavy price for supporting the CCP during the war period. Liu wins over Qin’s trust because they share a similar passion: as head of his village’s archives, Old Qin single-­ handedly guards a few “revolutionary history relics,” such as an original slogan written by a Red Army soldier and a “road pass permit” passed between CCP underground liaisons during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. The KMT soldiers murdered Old Qin’s grandfather after he refused to hand over these “relics.” Upon learning that Liu wants to take these relics to the Revolutionary History Museum in Beijing, Old Qin painfully parts with his “priceless treasures” and rallies his villagers to bid farewell to their “ancestors,” whose only tangible forms of existence are embodied in these relics. He also invites the sons and grandsons of the deceased to kneel to their “forefathers,” as a traditional funeral would have demanded. A village fanfare follows, with the lion dance and drum beating to “send their ancestors home” to the national archives in the capital city, where their memories, hopefully, can be better preserved. In subsequent scenes, Old Qin repeatedly looks for Liu in Beijing, once in front of the newly erected, impressive Archival Museum of the PLA, a national monument to honor veterans and the army. The magnificent building, however, remains “indifferent” to Old Qin’s deceased father: his name could not even be inscribed on a monument of revolutionary martyrs in his hometown for lack of evidence that he had died heroically on the battlefield. A decade later, and by the play’s end, Liu finally succeeds in matching the nickname of Qin’s father with his registered name in the army archives, which he had changed to upon joining the army. Liu delivers this news to Old Qin before his death and is greatly relieved that he has finally brought closure to this case before his own death. [ 257 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife Liu’s effort to recover history sometimes involves an entire PLA army; for example, he tracks down a former KMT clerk who was coerced into falsifying a local newspaper report in 1932 on the so-­called surrender of the last group of soldiers from the Thirteenth Red Army (红十三军) to the KMT authorities. Upon recovering the true story of their heroic death thanks to the “confession” of this former KMT associate, Liu, in his imagination and enacted onstage, “welcomes the long-­forgotten soldiers back to history.” He beckons scores of young, exhausted soldiers, one by one, out from the backstage screen onto the raked stage. They walk, firmly but tragically, down to the central stage and then “exit into history” again in smoke from the battlefield. This tragic scene ends with a frozen group sculpture in which Liu carries an exhausted female soldier on his back while holding the hand of a wounded comrade, followed by other soldiers from the last surviving group of the Thirteenth Red Army who are now finally being “taken home” by Liu and his assistant; the former KMT clerk looks on, relieved that he has finally helped these soldiers regain their innocence and dignity. This montage of spectacular images, acted out in three gradually elevated stage areas with magnificent stagecraft and sound effects, represents one of the best realist plays in contemporary China, in addition to its borrowings of Brechtian and xiqu techniques, especially in the officially sponsored genre known as “main melody theater,” which praises the revolutionary heritage of communist soldiers. True to the spirit of socialist realist theater promoted since the beginning of Maoist China in 1949, Archives of Life was in fact inspired by the real-­life story of Liu Yiquan, who won the admiration of performing artists from the Drama Troupe Attached to the Political Department of the PLA. On October  11, 2009, upon hearing Liu’s speech in the Great Hall of the People, Meng Bing, the “master scriptwriter of military plays” and Gong Xiaodong 宫晓东, a seasoned director, were moved to tears and vowed to tell “the story of this ordinary man with extraordinary emotions and theatrical fanfare.”17 A frequent collaborator with Meng, Gong excels in “the second creation of performance,” which turns scripts into stage productions, and vowed to take this play to new level of artistic experience. As soon as the cast was chosen, they visited Liu in the hospital to get to know him as a real-­life hero in order to experience the inner life of their roles in the play, in the spirit of the Stanislavski method, which emphasizes psychological realism and emotional authenticity. The actor assigned to [ 258 ]

Monumental Theater play the role of Old Qin, for example, sang a folksong from northern Shaanxi for Liu to express his heartfelt gratitude, since the actor was himself the offspring of a revolutionary martyr, whose official confirmation as such was delivered to the family only decades after the father’s death. Thus, the actor well understands the sorrow and frustration of Old Qin, the character he acts in the production. The actresses who play the roles of Liu’s wife and his assistant practiced their lines so hard during the day that they found themselves talking to Liu, the real-­life hero, in their dreams at night. With twelve revisions of the script, four hundred rehearsal hours, and fifteen versions of performances for official censors in between, the sensational premiere of Archives of Life won universal praise from the leaders of the party, the state, the army, and, most important of all, audiences and critics. Widely recognized as one of the most brilliant main melody plays in recent years, it also won several top prizes in the drama circle and, as a result, brought more financial support from the state government for the theater troupe to stage other main melody plays. It was no doubt a winner both politically and commercially, at once popular with the official culture and with the some alienated audiences who love to support anything but the official. Most astonishingly, this theatrical representation of Liu’s work has, in turn, inspired more archival workers to fulfill Liu’s unfinished task in real life: in 2010, the Archival Museum of the PLA dispatched a group of researchers to southern Zhejiang Province in search of traces of the Thirteenth Red Amy and recovered 360 “revolutionary relics,” including oral histories, written documents, county records, photos, newspapers, and manuscripts. They also met veterans, some now a hundred years old, and collected touching stories of “a Thirteenth Red Army lost in history”: as one of the fourteen Red Armies officially organized by the central committee of the CCP from the late 1920s to early 1930s, the Thirteenth Red Army fought more than one hundred battles and captured seven county sites in southern Zhejiang Province from 1930 to 1932, with six thousand troops at its peak. It was wiped out by the KMT in 1932, the only unit in the armies to have suffered a total defeat, and it disappeared from the administrative regionalization system of the Red Army (红军编制), with hardly any surviving records. Meng’s Archives of Life illustrates his success not just as an army scriptwriter famed for his “propaganda plays,” but also as a pioneer in what I [ 259 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife term a “revolutionary/commercial avant-­garde style” to lure young audiences to the theater with his own artistic pursuits, which ingeniously blend dramatic scenes of the rural with the cosmopolitan, socialist with capitalist, and past with present. Clothed as a main melody play to promote a revolutionary spirit, Archives of Life hollows it out, punches holes in its very logic, and stresses its futility and absurdity. Did the martyrs die in vain? What would they say if they were to witness the extreme corruption, deception, and unlawful exploitations of national resources and of ordinary people in postsocialist China? In line with this argument, one drama critic quoted the following stage line by Archivist Liu to confirm “a theme of searching for human dignity”: “If a country becomes indifferent to its martyrs, it will see no sacrifice for its destiny in the future.”18 The play thus calls for respect for the nameless people and demands that we never bury them again in the relentless course of history. At its core, the play represents the best achievements of soldier’s play in the past century, written by a playwright who is himself a proud soldier, a general in rank, a president of a military drama troupe, and, in 2015, thanks to his outstanding plays, was elected vice president of the China Theater Association in the footsteps of Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian.

In Search of Li Dazhao Seen in this larger context, one can better appreciate the theme of “death and debt” in Meng’s plays, which calls for a stage design with images of tombstones, monuments, and bloody battlefields, as I have examined in Archives of Life, and permeates the stage of The Ballad of Yellow Earth, which begins with a dying man and ends with his funeral. Both plays share a persistent search for the missing pieces in history in order to raise questions and, hopefully, find a closure for their contemporary audiences. This running theme expresses a theatrical mood or the emotional dimension of a play in dramatic action. Meng displays his “death and debt” theme even in his so-­called revolutionary leader’s play (革命领袖题材剧), a crown jewel of his main melody theater. In Search of Li Dazhao (寻找李大钊), which premiered in 2005, for example, opens with five oversize tombstones and inscribed with Li Dazhao’s name and photo image. A scaffold is then wheeled onto the central [ 260 ]

Monumental Theater stage, with Li Dazhao, the cofounder of the CCP in 1921, standing on it, ready to be executed by a northern warlord in 1927, a reenacted historical fact as it was recorded in textbooks, official histories, and performance pieces of various genres. What is shockingly different in this enactment, however, is the stage set dominated by a single set of gallows, which Li Dazhao moves around, on, or in front of, in his imagined interactions across time and space, with his family, his student followers, and his comrades, throughout the course of the play. Figure  7.1 shows a Li Dazhao on the ­gallows talking to his inner self, played by another actor, about his past and present. Despite episodic scenes in subsequent flashbacks that show the unfolding of Li’s extraordinary career, the gruesome image of the gallows looms large throughout the play. In scene 1, for example, upon the announcement of the execution, two hangmen lower the rope to tie it around Li’s neck and kick away the metal board beyond Li’s feet, and the stage lights suddenly go out according to the stage directions. This execution repeats itself in scene

FIGURE 7.1 Meng Bing, In Search of Li Dazhao. Hebei Drama Troupe, 2011. Directors: Gong Xiaodong and Xiao Tao; stage designer: Huang Ping’an. Source: From Ruru Li, ed., Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 90. Photographer: Yang Shaoduo. [ 261 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife 2, when Li bids farewell to his teacher before the latter’s execution for his anti–­Qing dynasty activities, enacted also onstage right before Li’s eyes. Since the entire play is a flashback of Li’s life story, the end of the play goes back to the beginning, when the frozen action of execution continues, and Li therefore gets executed “again” on the gallows. Furthermore, Li’s execution is witnessed by a woman member of the CCP, the last one to be executed on a list of nineteen martyrs. She reports to the audience that Li’s execution lasts twenty-­eight minutes, with the rope tied to his head moving up and down three times before breathing his last, and the entire process of executing nineteen martyrs lasting two hours and twenty minutes, a gruesome fact based on historical record and presented on an absurdist stage depicting an oversize execution ground.19 To construct this huge stage set, stylized as a “story within a monument” (纪念碑里的故事), one hundred people worked day and night for a month, using five tons of steel to create an expansive stage of six hundred square feet, attracting many people passing by the troupe’s construction site and wanting to see what the play was all about. The most intriguing part of this play, however, resides in its structure of a play within a play, with the inner play depicting Li’s life story and the outer play showing how a director rehearses the inner play with his cast. Exploring a Brechtian “alienation effect,” the unfolding of the inner play is often interrupted by the director, who criticizes his cast members for lacking a basic understanding of revolutionary history. He interrupts, for example, the rehearsal of a scene dramatizing the first meeting of the CCP in 1921, where all the founding members passionately sing together “The Internationale,” the de facto party song of the CCP at the time. At this point in the rehearsal, the director feels extremely frustrated because she must teach her cast how to sing “The Internationale,” since they can only sing contemporary pop songs. A Brechtian interruption thus punctuates the loss of communist appeal only ninety years after the Party’s founding and potentially prompts the audiences to reflect on the failure of its mission and the senseless loss of people’s lives. The director’s frustration in producing a revolutionary drama in a nonrevolutionary time reveals the artists’ exhaustion in pursuing an aesthetic form of realist drama. Imposed onto this play within a play, there is a third “play,” so to speak: in the middle of rehearsing In Search of Li Dazhao, the director is drafted, in exchange for a lucrative paycheck, into directing a television drama [ 262 ]

Monumental Theater entitled Chiefs of Anti-­Corruption Bureau (反贪局长); the actors who play the roles of Li Dazhao and Mao Zedong are also drafted, also for a large salary, to play the roles of two bureau chiefs—­Chief Zhou and his deputy chief—­ whose job is to expose and discipline corrupt CCP officials in contemporary China. Pressed by a tight schedule when the two plays compete for time and space, they also intercept and challenge each other’s storyline and its legitimacy. In the process of rehearsing the dramatic roles of Li and Mao, and of their “successors” in contemporary television drama, the two actors finally understand and appreciate the original “spiritual wealth” of Li and Mao, and thus able to fulfill the director’s plans for conveying the meanings of both plays. In a sense, one can interpret the historical figures of Li and Mao as having “shaped” the actions of anticorruption officials in contemporary China, injecting into them the lost revolutionary ideal and reminding them of their obligation and debt to the Chinese people. That is why, at the end of the play, after the woman martyr narrates the horrific details of the execution in the inner play on the life of Li Dazhao, the director interrupts the rehearsal of this play and decides to change the ending of the television drama: Bureau Chief Zhou should not resign in order to avoid retribution as the result of his determination to discipline corrupt officials, which is scripted in the current version of the play. “He should act as a real leader, in the image of Li Dazhao,” the director now declares. The play on Li Dazhao therefore ends with a monologue delivered by the actor playing the roles of both Li and Bureau Chief Zhou, with “each of their souls joined in one body.”20 He decides to submit the list of corrupt officials to the top authority at the risk of his own safety. “I am willing to give up my life for my motherland because I love her deeply and want to protect her honor.” The dual dramatic characters of Li and Bureau Chief Zhou are now merged in the body of the same actor, who then walks up to the gallows, followed by the director. When the curtain falls and rises again, the director walks to the front stage, breaking into tears; her entire cast—­the woman martyr, old CCP members, and other actors and actresses—­emerges from the back of the gallows and exit from the side stage. The director throws her script to the ground, sitting on the edge of the front stage, wailing, with her back to the audience. As the multimedia backscreen rolls out the names of the nineteen martyrs, the curtain finally closes with the “tomb forest” of martyrs restored to its original place from the opening scene.21 History [ 263 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife now completes a full and vicious cycle: With the martyrs disappearing into their stone tombs, did their cherished dreams also perish in history? Was their dream finally smashed as Bureau Chief Zhou—­a new and solitary martyr—­walks up to the gallows in defense of an unrealizable dream in postrevolutionary China? Was the director crying for the impossibility of staging a play while keeping its contradictory messages straight, or was she mourning the senseless deaths of these great people and the history behind that mock at them? In the process of displaying revolutionary martyrs—­ the old and the new—­the play indeed deconstructs the very logic of the communist revolution from the inside out and dramatizes the futility of revolution or the absence of any centrality of meaning in the universe, in the spirit of a modernist theater tradition that originated in the West. The double image of Li and Zhou upholds Li’s heroic and noble spirit but also challenges its worth, visualizing the absurdity of debt and death symbolized by the repeated executions on the gallows. As an aside, it is also interesting to note that the original male director in the script was cast as a woman director in the stage production, therefore opening the possibility of allowing a female theater artist to reframe the master narrative of the male founding father onstage.

Soul of the Republic and Its Endless Search Meng Bing’s “monumental theater,” however, did not stop at interrogating the visions of the CCP itself. His 2005 play entitled Soul of the Republic (辛亥魂) delves further into history to explore the “real” meaning of the Republican Revolution of 1911. On the one hand, Soul of the Republic seems no different from a well-­received dramatic television series, Walking Toward the Republic (走向共和, 2003), which dramatizes the painful process of overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing the Republic of China (ROC) under the legendary leadership of Dr.  Sun Yat-­sen. As seen in similar performances of Sun, his premature death in 1925 enabled the PRC to celebrate him as the “forerunner of democratic revolution,” therefore legitimizing itself as his successor. On this account, Soul of the Republic is yet another main melody play to honor revolutionary leaders and martyrs prior to the communist revolution. [ 264 ]

Monumental Theater On the other hand, the play can be interpreted as Meng’s additional attempt to trace the original “debtor,” who had constructed a nationalist dream of China’s revival and mobilized innocent people to sacrifice themselves for it. To this end, the stage is set with a group of large bookcases in a library, where a contemporary female college student looks for research materials for her thesis on the history of the Republican Revolution; when she loses her way in the confusing records, Sun walks out from history to address her questions, as the bookcases open to reveal various scenes of battlefield, prison, and execution ground. Among these scenes of “death and debt,” the female student interrogates Sun and the martyrs who die for his vision of a democratic China. She challenges, for example, Sun’s call for a violent revolution rather than a peaceful means of evolution: “Why couldn’t China follow the British and Japanese parliamentary system with a monarchical figurehead to amuse and attract foreign tourists?” she asks.22 By the same token, she questions the wife of Huang Xing 黄兴, Sun’s commander-­i n-­chief in the unsuccessful Wuchang Uprising of 1911, the key battle that established the ROC: “Why did you marry a defeated commander, for sympathy or love, or for a showy act of a beautiful lady marrying a handsome hero?” Huang’s wife is puzzled why, only ninety-­five years after the hard-­won revolution, a history student would fail to comprehend their will to sacrifice for a free republic: “Why would anyone marry for a ‘showy act’? Doesn’t youth in contemporary China believe in true love?” Huang’s wife asked in bewilderment.23 If the female student fails to understand love for a martyr, she finds it harder to believe that Zou Rong 邹容 —­who drafted Revolutionary Army (革命 军), a passionate appeal for a new republic, at age eighteen, and died in a Qing prison when he was twenty-­one—­had in fact turned himself in to the authorities in order to “use his own blood to water the tree of freedom” and his “own corpse to pave the way for the Republic.”24 Sun, who, together with the female student, witnesses the torture of Zou in his prison, explains to her that Zou’s Revolutionary Army went through twenty editions and sold more than a million copies and became the bestseller of the time. Zou’s “throwing himself into prison,” Dr.  Sun remarks, “is meant to convey to your generation that it is easier to read or interpret history than master the true spirit behind it.”25 [ 265 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife The same message is also delivered in Lin Juemin’s 林觉民 will, written to his beloved wife before his execution in 1911: “On the very account of my love for you, I now wish to sacrifice my life to give a chance for everyone who loves each other. . . . ​Because of this, I dare to give up myself and go before you. In grief, you will understand my heart. . . . ​Sacrificing our happiness will ensure happiness for all people.”26 Upon hearing from the female student’s response that she cannot stop crying about his death, Lin realizes that she is not his wife, who would not cry after reading his advice not to do so.27 The most moving death scene, moreover, depicts Chen Tianhua’s 陈天华 suicide in Japan in the bitter winter of 1905. Again narrated by Sun, Chen’s death was a protest not against the corrupt Qing court or foreign imperialists but against the loss of morality and aspirations among many of the eight thousand Chinese students studying in Japan. As Chen walks toward the ocean, his final destination, the contemporary college student protests, “Are you escaping from a harsh reality? Are you taking your life too lightly?”28 By the same token, she challenges Qiu Jin 秋瑾—­the first woman martyr to die for the revolution in modern Chinese history—­and her identity as a woman, a mother, and a wife. As she asks Qiu Jin what she really wants from her life, the only response she receives is the brutal sound of execution from the backstage when Qiu’s head is being chopped off, as specified in the stage direction.29 By the end of the play, when all the martyrs gather around Sun to celebrate the success of the founding of the Republic, and the female student addresses him as the premier, the president, and the grand marshal, Sun credits himself only as a citizen of the ROC and, most important, asserts, “Revolution has not yet succeeded, and our comrades should continue to strive!” Sun’s words, taken from his will, are followed by Mao’s voiceover from backstage, which announces the founding of the PRC in 1949. The official mainstream message is, on one hand, loud and clear: the founding of the PRC has finally fulfilled Sun’s dream of establishing a modern, democratic, and free China. Underneath this main melody theme, however, drawing on the difficult lives of contemporary Chinese peasants as seen in Meng’s other plays, one could possibly question the idealist China dream, based on nationalism, utopianism, and the empty promise of a better life. Once again, Meng manages to construct a revolutionary narrative on a grand scale of theatrical innovations while effectively emptying out its core values. Most significantly, Meng’s deconstructive reading [ 266 ]

Monumental Theater of the Republican revolution has subverted the logic of Mao’s communist revolution, which has always been glorified as the foundation and continuation of the first. They all misled the Chinese people and indebted them without providing them with real happiness. In conclusion, Meng’s “monumental theater” displays a visual culture’s amazing ability to combine contradictory narratives and provoke “illogical” conclusions for the audience. As a scriptwriter working in the most confining ideological environment such as a PLA drama troupe, Meng has excelled at playing the official game—­he thrived in it rather than being disgusted by it and giving up on it. He shone in the limelight of the postsocialist stage, popularized and sustained main melody plays, and established them as part of the canon in contemporary China. Without Meng there would have been no successful main melody theater to speak of. With Meng, however, main melody drama has been transformed partially into a subversive genre that challenges the very concepts of the main melody and its misleading and authoritarian nature, if audiences choose to interpret it this way. Our story of Meng illustrates once again the enduring appeal of theater and its potential force in connecting audiences with their everyday life experience, and vice versa. Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, three founders of huaju, would have smiled in heaven and embraced Meng as their most worthy successor, who has brilliantly fulfilled their wish in combining the best of Western dramaturgy from all schools and styles with Chinese artistic, social, and cultural experience.

[ 267 ]

EIGHT

Singing “The Internationale” One Hundred Years of Sonic Theater

Arise, ye slaves afflicted by hunger and cold, Arise, ye oppressed people all over the world! The blood which fills my chest has boiled over, Make one last war for Truth! The old world, It shall be destroyed like fallen petals and splashed water, Arise, ye slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing, We shall be the masters of the world! This is the final struggle, Unite together towards tomorrow, The “Internationale” Shall certainly be realized!

起来，饥寒交迫的奴隶！ 起来，全世界受苦的人！ 满腔的热血已经沸腾， 要为真理而斗争！ 旧世界 打个落花流水， 奴隶们起来，起来！ 不要说我们一无所有， 我们要做天下的主人！ 这是最后的斗争， 团结起来到明天， 英特纳雄耐尔 就一定要实现！

—­“The Internationale”

INTRODUCED AT THE beginning of the twentieth century, “The Internationale” (国际歌) has faithfully accompanied the development of performance arts in a manner unparalleled in world theater and music history from the twentieth to the twenty-­first centuries.1 The song appeared frequently in theater and films in the PRC, either as a theme song or background [ 268 ]

Singing “The Internationale” music, and in the postsocialist period. For example, Meng Bing’s 2011 play This Is the Final Struggle evoked the well-known sentence in the last stanza of the song. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Meng’s main melody plays implicitly decried the corruption of the party in a morally bankrupt society in the twenty-­first century. This Is the Final Struggle, however, can be read as even depicting the impossibility of realizing the ultimate dream of “The Internationale,” thus expressing, to some extent, a sense of despair that a nation, or even a family, can ever “unite together towards tomorrow” in carrying out “the final struggle” to reach the utopian society of communism.2 Set on a New Year’s Eve at a family dinner, This Is the Final Struggle portrays a heartbroken CCP official with his disintegrating family: his elder son tries to persuade his younger son not to flee to a foreign country with illegally acquired wealth, while at the same time his grandson waits for an opportunity to expose his uncle for his own selfish interests. Described as a well-­made play with tension, suspense, and witty dialogues to criticize social ills and injustice, it could not find an appropriate ending, literally or figuratively, leaving it open to the audience to imagine whether the younger son will listen to his brother’s advice to give up his criminal plan or whether a newly reformed human being can survive in a society that cannot protect honest citizens. The play ends with two songs: a popular Maoist children’s song titled “We Are the Successors of Communists” (我们是共产主义的接 班人) accompanied the younger son’s phone call to his father from the airport, indicating his sense of guilt, while the last stanza of “The Internationale” rose as background music as the father await for his son’s return.3 The evocation of the “final struggle” waged against the old world of capitalism, however, paradoxically expressed its improbability or a veteran’s stubborn illusion. In 2017, a huaju plainly titled The Internationale (国际歌) traced the leader of the worker’s movement in 1920s Shanghai in his efforts to recast the original faith (初心) of the young communists who gave their all to the revolution; it was hoped, the playwright wrote, that ninety years later today’s audiences would remember that “The Internationale” would resonate again as long as inequality and a longing for freedom exist.4 Taking these two performances as my point of departure, I examine the preoccupation of Chinese intellectuals, writers, and artists with the power of voice and sound. I explore soundscape in an interdisciplinary approach that links visual, sonic/aural, musical, and performative texts as sites of  cultural memory and the construction of knowledge and historical [ 269 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife narratives. I investigate how the fixed lyric in one formidable song transformed and multiplied into diverse or oppositional messages when performed in different genres and historical contexts. At the same time, I tie up loose ends of this book by focusing on the reception of a single song over a century and its prominent role in cultural and art politics. For instance, how did “The Internationale” evolve from its French and Soviet roots into a Chinese nationalist song of promise, change, and progress? How did it become a rallying song to mobilize the Chinese masses and convert them to the CCP cause? Why did it preserve its popularity in a way that other classic red songs did not in the zigzagging historical transitions from the high Maoist period to the heyday of the Cultural Revolution, to the early reform era, and finally to postsocialist disillusionment? I argue that despite the song’s historical involvement in the construction of revolutionary discourse, such as leaders’ tales, war stories, socialist constructions, and postsocialist remaking of party history, “The Internationale” has retained its function as a song of memory and of counterculture for manipulating the very revolutionary beliefs it had helped promote in the first place. It bridged the official and the anti-­official soundscape while providing other shades of colors in between. Most important, as a site of sonic construction of knowledge and power, “The Internationale” embodies and manifests complex and paradoxical impulses, which can at once legitimize and/or challenge the status quo and its authoritarian system. In the changing landscape of contemporary Chinese cultural performance, “The Internationale” has captured immense emotional power, promoting a nation’s political alignment with the communist movement before and after the founding of the PRC in Maoist socialist culture. It has also expressed Maoist nostalgia in the postsocialist period, and by remapping mediascapes and soundscapes, it has at once intensified and/or harmonized the contradictions at a time when socialist and capitalist values interact in producing a unique culture that does not fit into the usual binary claims of either camp.

Sonic “Origins,” Power, and Song Stories Sonic imagination has occupied a central position both in the CCP’s founding fathers’ own autobiographical writings as well as in biographies and [ 270 ]

Singing “The Internationale” Party histories written by others. Among them, Qu Qiubai, the second leader of the CCP after Chen Duxiu, presents intriguing stories. In his own words, it was the power of “The Internationale” that first formed his socialist identity before he had read books written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The profound impact of sonic power lured him into the pursuit of socialist theories and to a large extent changed his life trajectory from a literary figure to a leader of an emerging political party. In November 1920, during his fifty-­day stay in Harbin on his way to visit the Soviet Union as a newspaper reporter dispatched by the Morning News (晨报) in Beijing and New Current Affairs (时事新报) in Shanghai, Qu heard “The Internationale” for the first time, sung passionately by a large crowd in Russian at the Harbin Labor Party’s celebration of the third anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union. At the age of twenty-­one, he was deeply affected by its solemn melody. “It was the first time I heard ‘The Internationale,’ and since then, I have enjoyed hearing it numerous times again in the Soviet Union everywhere and all the time.”5 During his sojourn in the Soviet Union, “The Internationale” touched him again in his subsequent visits to workers’ gatherings and socialist and communist congresses. As occurred with many of Qu’s contemporaries, the sonic imagination of “The Internationale” helped construct a global socialist citizen to liberate the world’s proletariat. It was amid the roaring chorus of “The Internationale,” for example, that Qu attended the First Congress of the Far East Communist and Revolutionary Parties in St.  Petersburg in February  2, 1922, where “the laboring people of Petrograd” and their comrades from faraway countries shouted “long live the Soviets” to deafening applause in the magnificent imperial palace of the former regime, “shaking the great wall of an ancient kingdom with a history of four thousand years.”6 Similarly, on June 22, 1921, Qu was impressed by the music of “The Internationale,” which spontaneously arose upon the declaration of the opening of the Third Congress of the Comintern in Moscow.7 Even though after the ceremony he succumbed to tuberculosis, which he had contracted when he was in China, Qu wrote his Spiritual Journey to the Red Capital (赤都心史), a classic work of “red reportage” and the first of its kind in Chinese literary history, and left behind a lasting image of Lenin speaking to the audience on July 6, 1921, his silhouette reflected on the wall against red banners.8 Qu reported this exhilarating scene of Lenin speaking to the proletariat in fluent German, the Party’s lingua franca, with the earnest and dramatic air of a “true” [ 271 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife proletarian leader. Together with his description of the audial power of “The Internationale,” Qu preserved in his writing a quintessential visual image of Russia’s October Revolution, which was later captured in paintings, films, and performances, and has influenced different generations of Chinese audiences. Based largely on his own words, biographers and historians have credited Qu as the first Chinese journalist to report on the Russian October revolution.9 They describe him as one of the earliest and most spirited “red ambassadors” who first traveled on the “red silk road” through Manchuria and Siberia between mid-­October 1920, when he left Beijing, to January 25, 1921, when he arrived in Moscow.10 When Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao cofounded the CCP in 1921, as a result of having studied the Soviet revolution from translated writings and imported ideas, Qu had already witnessed the Soviet revolutionary life firsthand and published reports on the postrevolutionary society, with its promises and problems. Having reported these events before or around the time of the founding of the CCP, Qu became not only a pioneer in introducing Leninism to the Chinese people but also the first teacher to instruct the first group of Chinese students dispatched by the CCP to study in the Soviet Union, and his students included many future leaders and writers, such as Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi 任弼時, Luo Yinong 罗亦农, Jiang Guangci 蒋光慈, and Peng Shuzhi 彭述之.11 Interestingly, the stories of Qu being one of the CCP’s “founding fathers” have often returned to his sonic experience. Although details varied, historical narrative and performance works highlighted Qu’s role in translating the lyrics of “The Internationale” in 1923. A 2001 television drama series captures this sonic moment: The Sun Rises from the East (日出东方) dramatized Qu’s visit to Mao Zedong’s residence in Guangzhou, where Qu tells Mao about his plan to publish his new translation of “The Internationale.” With Cai Hesen 蔡和森, Qu recites his newly rendered lyrics with poetic zest.12 In response to Cai’s question, Qu explains that he did not directly translate the word guoji (国际), “Internationale,” into Chinese but instead transliterated it as ying-­te-­nai-­xiong-­nai-­er (英-­特-­纳-­雄-­耐-­尔) because it matched the six beats of the music and could also be understood by people speaking different languages (异语同声). Even though this scene with Cai might be fictional, it was based on the historical record on Qu’s explanation to create corresponding music rhythms (同声相应) to popularize “The Internationale.”13 Qu emphasized a linkage of sounds to what Sterne calls [ 272 ]

Singing “The Internationale” one’s “cultural moments and the crises and the problems of their time,”14 and, I would add, to the cross-­cultural transformative effects of sonic power. In the television drama, upon hearing that Qu had first heard the song in a workers’ gathering in Manchuria for a celebration of the founding of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong suggests in the television drama that the song be taught to “our workers, peasants, and all the revolutionaries.” While Qu is teaching Mao and Cai to sing the song, a montage appears with scenes from the Soviet movie Lenin in October (列宁在十月), in which Russian workers storm the Winter Palace in 1917 amid the roaring music of “The Internationale,” familiar images to many Chinese audiences who had lived through the Maoist period. Music historians cited countless events during which “The Internationale” played an inspirational role. Quoting Lenin’s saying that no matter where he was, a worker with political consciousness will always find his comrades with the familiar tune of “The Internationale,” Su Jin best summarized its romantic and realist lyric allures to inspire the working poor to “smash the private ownership of capitalist system,” as expressed in the lyric, “It shall be destroyed like fallen petals and splashed water.” Whereas in 1924, coal miners in Anyuan 安源 sang “The Internationale” to commemorate their strikes two years earlier, in 1926 in Guangzhou, around ten thousand people concluded their rally observing the fifty-­fifth anniversary of the Paris Commune in the pouring rain. During the 1927 Nanchang Uprising, Autumn Harvest Uprising and Guangzhou Uprising, soldiers never failed to sing “The Internationale” either marching to victory or at the crushing moment of defeat.15 After Li Dazhao’s execution by a Northern warlord in 1927, seven hundred mourners attended his funeral in Beijing and once again sang “The Internationale.” In the Soviet areas, Red Army performers blended the lyrics of “The Internationale” into a traditional opera text in its portrayal of a Luo Wei 罗伟, who, in real life as well as on stage, explained the CCP’s mission to liberate “oppressed people all over the world” before his execution.16 During the most arduous journey of the Long March as well as during Yan’an years, soldiers copied “The Internationale” in their notebooks, taught it to the masses wherever they were stationed, and sang it at mass rallies and performances. During the New Year’s Eve celebration of 1938, when someone sitting in the audience asked Mao to sing a song, Mao turned around to conduct a collective singing of “The Internationale,” which left a deep impression on the audience.17 [ 273 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife To insert a personal experience in this context, in fourth grade, I wrote a composition titled “Whenever I Sing ‘The Internationale,’ ” which enumerated inspirational thoughts that raced through my mind upon singing the song as I visualized martyrs’ sacrifices, Long March exertions, murders at the execution ground, and my vow to complete their unfinished mission when I joined the Young Pioneers. Ironically, after September 13, 1971, when Lin Biao—­Mao’s chosen successor in 1968—­was reported to have died when his plane crashed as he was on his way to defect to the Soviet Union and the entire country was under a military alert against potential Soviet invasion, the Central People’s Radio Station was told to repeatedly broadcast “The Internationale” and “Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention” (三大纪律八项注意) in an attempt to maintain order and stability after this shocking event.18 By then, having lived in the Northeast Wilderness for three years, these once enthusing songs since childhood seemed to have lost their appeal for me. I finally became disillusioned with Mao’s vision of the Cultural Revolution, as did many in my generation. “The Internationale,” as Barbara Mittler has rightly pointed out, instead of pointing to a “correct vision of the future,” might open to “a plurality of possible futures, of roads not taken.”19

“Foreign” Songs, Chinese “Red Classics,” and Their Soundscape While the founding nation’s stories intersect with “The Internationale,” the dawning years of the PRC cultural industry endeavored to promote its rallying power. How did this foreign song become popularized as a virtual CCP  party song which produced devoted citizens across international boundaries and historical periods? I argue that some of the key lyrics, such as “Arise, ye oppressed people all over the world!”; “Do not say that we have nothing,  / We shall be the masters of the world!”; and “This is the final struggle, / Unite together towards tomorrow,” best explain the central concepts of the Maoist discourse of equality and emancipation of all mankind. Soviet films played an outsize role in popularizing “The Internationale” in the early years of the PRC. In her study of Shanghai, Zhang Jishun investigated the prominence of Soviet films in 1950, when cultural authorities required that Soviet films had to consist of 20 to 25 percent of the entire [ 274 ]

Singing “The Internationale” movie schedule in order to expand the audience base for “progressive films” against the competition of Hollywood films popular at the time.20 At least three films on Lenin—­each featuring “The Internationale” at key moments—­were released in China between 1950 and 1952. The construction of the Maoist discourse in early PRC films thus partially drew its inspiration from Soviet cinema, which was combined with the May Fourth new music and leftist mass composition, benefiting from what Andrew F. Jones calls “the hierarchized ‘music historical field’ of the Republican period.”21 It was not until the mid-­1950s that “The Internationale” began to appear more frequently in execution scenes in domestic films, reaching its peak appearance in 1960s film, in the background music of the model theater, and in mass singing sessions of revolutionary songs. Produced in 1936 by the Moscow Film Studio and dubbed in Chinese in 1950 by China’s Northeast Film Studio, Lenin in October dramatizes Lenin’s secret arrival in Saint Petersburg following his 1917 winter exile in Finland, with well-­structured episodes such as his convincing his fellow leaders to stage a military uprising to seize political power against Trotsky’s argument for delaying such action and his sleeping on the floor of his bodyguard’s apartment the night before the onset of the October Revolution and final victory. The movie features “The Internationale” twice: in a “martyr scene” when a driver kills a policeman who is on his way to capture Lenin, and in a “celebration scene” when Lenin declares the eventual realization of a “mass revolution” in the victory rally at the conclusion of the movie.22 Whereas the first appearance of the song explains the support base for the revolution at the grassroots level, the second one accentuates the utopian dream of the proletarian dictatorship. I recall totally enjoying this victory scene, with stirring crowds and rousing song and music, when I watched this film several times on an army farm in the Northeast Wilderness from 1969 to 1973, when only a few communist films from the Soviet Union, Albania, North Korea, and North Vietnam replaced Chinese films banned during the Cultural Revolution. Following the same realist style, the second film, Lenin in 1918 (列宁在一九 一八), produced by Moscow Film Studio in 1939 and released in China in 1951, depicts the dramatic events in the year after the October Revolution and Lenin’s determination to defend the first socialist state against imperialist forces and the White Army.23 “The Internationale” emerges at the [ 275 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife electrifying moment when Lenin enters a factory to mobilize the cheering  crowd against the reactionaries’ rebellion; the soundtrack of “The Internationale” stops after Lenin is shot by a woman would-­be assassin, signifying a traumatic event during the Soviet revolution. Together with the audio and visual effect of “The Internationale,” Lenin’s call to the workers during his speech, “preserving a political regime is more difficult than winning it,” became a well-­k nown slogan in the 1960s China to echo Mao’s call to “never forget class struggle,” especially during the Cultural Revolution, when films on Lenin remained among the few not banned for public viewing, foreign and domestic alike. The music of “The Internationale” in Lenin in 1918 around the assassination scene now took on a new significance, suggesting that the hidden agents of the bourgeoisie were the most dangerous enemies of the people. That is why, in the subsequent scene, Lenin convinced Maxim Gorky never to show mercy to class enemies: “We were too soft in the past; the bullets of the intellectuals are still lodged in my body.” That warning justified persecutions of the “bourgeois intellectuals” before and during the Cultural Revolution. Less popular than the two preceding films, The Unforgettable 1919 (难忘的 一九一九), produced in 1952 and dubbed by the Northeast Film Studio in 1952, dramatizes the Soviet Red Army’s 1919 defeat of the White Army in the Battle of Petrograd against British, American, and French forces, with the dominant presence of Stalin, a manifestation of the cult of his personality.24 Despite this departure from its precursors, The Unforgettable 1919 similarly concludes with the rising music of “The Internationale” at a mass rally, as a stirring crowd cheering “Long Live Stalin!” The prominence of “The Internationale” in these Soviet films, however, did not transplant itself immediately into the making of a new cinema in the beginning years of the PRC. Among the Chinese films released in 1950, at least three martyr movies could have used “The Internationale” in their execution scenes, but they resorted to the popular music of the Republican period. Zhao Yiman (赵一曼), for instance, depicts the heroic story of the title heroine, a CCP woman commander in the Northeast Allied Force against the Japanese Invaders (东北抗日联军), and her eventual capture and torture in an enemy prison. Before her execution, Zhao calmly puts on her best attire, combs her hair, and bravely shouts “Long live the CCP!” This execution scene closely resembles the familiar act of [ 276 ]

Singing “The Internationale” Sister Jiang in the well-­k nown 1965 film Living Forever in Burning Flames (在 烈火中永生), adapted from the novel Red Crag, discussed in Chapter  5.25 While Zhao is accompanied by the music of the film’s theme song, characterized by mixed tones of leftist and popular music before 1949, however, Sister Jiang, in contrast, marches to the execution ground to the rising music of “The Internationale,” arm-­in-­a rm with her comrade. Thanks to the more radical policies in the 1960s, the exploration of the “new music” of the May Fourth period and of the Chinese folkloric tradition present in early 1950s films was gradually replaced by the more “purely” communist “Internationale.” Zhao Yiman was not alone in drawing from Republican period music. In Shangrao Prison (上饶集中营), also released in 1950–­1951, the multiple execution scenes utilized chorus singing popularized in Yan’an and elsewhere during the war period, featuring leftist musical tunes pioneered by Nie Er and Xian Xinghai 冼星海 and accompanied by piano, violin, cello, and other Western symphonic instruments for heroic and tragic affects. Steel-­Made Soldiers (钢铁战士), also released in the same years, shares features with Shangrao Prison: its lengthy storyline in a prison setting with repeated torture did not call for “The Internationale” despite its popularity in real life during the same historical period. The poster for Shangrao Prison in figure 8.1 preserves the rather rustic painting style in the early 1950s right after liberation, which did not portray the CCP members as handsome, heroic, and grander than real-­life figures, as seen in later years. The prominence of “The Internationale,” however, can be found in the title of another film released in 1950, titled Unite Together Towards Tomorrow (团结起來到明天), a key line from the song’s lyric. Starring Bai Yang dressed in a textile worker’s uniform as a representative of the oppressed proletariat, the film dramatizes a workers’ strike against the KMT government in 1948 to protect their factory on the eve of Shanghai’s liberation. The movie concludes with a victory rally featuring a theme song expressing the workers’ will: “Unite together towards tomorrow / Our glorious struggle, brave and determined (我们光荣斗爭 勇敢坚強) / Not afraid of countless difficulties (千难万苦不怕阻挡) / Only the CCP can bring us the glory of victory” (有了共产党才有胜利的荣光).” Both the visual power of the movie stars of the Republican era and the popular songs of the early 1950s—­such as “The Sky Is Bright in the Liberated Areas” (解放区的天是晴朗的天) and the PLA song [ 277 ]

FIGURE 8.1 Film poster of Shangrao Prison. Shanghai Film Studio, 1951. Scriptwriter: Feng Xuefeng; directors: Sha Meng and Zhang Ke; stage designers: Han Shangyi and Zhu Dexiong.

Singing “The Internationale” “Our Troops March Toward the Sun” (我们的队伍向太阳)—­in fact illustrate the creative process of a Chinese assimilation of the spirit of “The Internationale” with a shared vision of a communist future. One of the earliest uses of the “The Internationale” may be found in the 1956 film Mother (母亲), which dramatized the story of a migrant worker from the poverty-­stricken countryside to Shanghai, only to lose her husband to the foreigners’ cruel exploitation of steelworkers; she devotes the rest of her life to underground work for the CCP under dangerous conditions while raising three children to become dedicated communists. At the low ebb of the revolution, Mother witnesses the brutal arrest of Lao Deng 老邓, the underground leader of the worker’s movement, who fearlessly walks out of his prison cell singing “The Internationale” on his way to the execution ground. This direct use of “The Internationale,” however, did not preclude the movie from incorporating popular songs of the Republican period, as seen in the variations of the theme song “How Can I Not Miss Her” (叫我如何不 想她), originally written by Zhao Yuanren 赵元任, as background music throughout different moments in the movie. Zhao belonged to the soundscape of what Andrew Jones described “the luminaries of May 4th era literature and culture,” who were also “active in promoting new music,” and shared the mission of “the nation-­building enterprise.”26 In addition, Zhao’s song accompanied the love scene between the mother’s elder son and her future daughter-­in-­law, both underground CCP members, who discuss their secret work while rowing a boat at Beihai Park in Beijing. Exploring “How Can I Not Miss Her” was both historically accurate because of its popularity in Beijing at the time of the film’s setting, and thematically appropriate for a budding romantic love cemented in a common faith. The star power of the Republican period, as seen in the captivating performances by Zhang Ruifang 张瑞芳 and Jin Yan 金焰, also injected the movie with a trans­ historical and transideological appeal. Following a similar story of a courageous mother, the 1960 film A Revolutionary Family (革命家庭) portrays Zhou Lian 周莲, an illiterate woman in an  arranged marriage, who finds in her husband a loving and patient ­mentor who teaches her how to read as well as “the revolutionary truth.”27 A  tireless CCP organizer of the peasant and workers’ movements in 1927, her husband dies of fatigue and illness, but Zhou takes over his underground work while raising three children. In a moving scene, she enjoys listening to [ 279 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife her son’s story of having witnessed “a brand-­new life” in the Soviet Union, where workers no longer suffer from oppression and exploitation. Shortly thereafter, on his way to the Jiangxi Red Army area, he is captured and tortured by the KMT. He heroically embraces death, singing “The Internationale” as he steps out of his prison cell, soon joined by a chorus of all the prisoners and witnessed by his mother in a nearby cell. Blending a traditional scene of “sorrowful partings and joyful reunions” (悲欢离合) with the CCP’s call for sacrifice, Zhou becomes even more determined to fight for the common cause for all the proletariat, which now includes avenging her own son. In A Revolutionary Family, the singing of “The Internationale” unites two generations of revolutionaries as the mother’s and son’s farewell further cements their biological relationship with class solidarity. A new revolutionary family also ironically “confirms” the value of an arranged marriage of the traditional culture, which had “gifted” Zhou with a benevolent husband who appreciated her for who she was. This sort of possible “patriarchal” reading, however, could be countered by the real-­life story of Yu Lan 于藍, who played the role of Zhou. In the 1930s, at age seventeen, Yu walked for fifty days to reach Yan’an, where she trained at the Lu Xun Art Academy and debuted in her protagonist role as another revolutionary mother in the 1951 film Red Flag Over Green Hill (翠岗红旗). Her spectacular performance of Zhou in A Revolutionary Family won her best actress award in the second Moscow International Film Festival.28 In contrast to her dramatic character Zhou in an arranged marriage, Yu Lan’s falling in love with Tian Fang 田方 in Yan’an, their shared limelight in pioneering a new cinema in the early PRC years, and their happy marriage testified to the enduring “truth” of “The Internationale,” as its second stanza proclaims: “There has never been any savior of the world (从來就沒有什么救世主), / Nor deities, nor emperors on which to depend (也不靠神仙皇帝). / To create Mankind’s happiness (要创 造人类的幸福), / We must entirely depend on ourselves / (全靠我們自己)!” “The Internationale” became increasingly prominent in mid-­1960s cinema, particularly in “red classics” film such as The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军) and Living Forever in Burning Flames. As Barbara Mittler observes, during the Cultural Revolution “The Internationale” appeared in most of the model works at their execution scenes, such as Hong Changqing’s burning to death in The Red Detachment of Women and On the Dock (海港), when [ 280 ]

Singing “The Internationale” “The Internationale” became “an important leitmotif” to highlight the spirit of internationalism in support of the oppressed peoples of the world.29 In the most radical claim by the official media during the Cultural Revolution, “The Internationale” was even cited as the only revolutionary song since the birth of the Paris Commune of 1871; according to this claim, all the works produced in the hundred years from “The Internationale” to the model theater were nothing but expressions of feudalist, capitalist, and revisionist arts and should therefore be eliminated.30 “The Internationale” was therefore explored in the sweeping ideological campaign against literary and artistic achievements of the May Fourth period and the first seventeen years of the PRC in order to carry out “the great proletarian cultural revolution.” If Roderick MacFarquhar is correct in concluding that perhaps part of Mao’s motive in initiating the Cultural Revolution was to “galvanize the country” after “routine replace[d] voluntarism” and “responsibility clog[ged] idealism,”31 “The Internationale” was explored once again to rally the masses toward achieving that rebirth of a Chinese revolution. In early post-­Mao China, when new plays, operas, and films criticized the drastic policy of literature and art during the Cultural Revolution, however, “The Internationale” again gained popularity in staging CCP leaders, as seen in several performance pieces on Zhou Enlai’s dying days, when he sang “The Internationale” with his wife to express his communist resolve despite being attacked as a “contemporary Confucius” by the Gang of Four. Lesser-­k nown events such as the Guangzhou Uprising were also staged in early post-­Mao China, as seen in a huaju titled Guangzhou Thunder (广州惊雷). Unlike the troops in the Nanchang Uprising, which quickly retreated from the city to preserve its forces, the participants in the drama occupy key spots in Guangzhou, such as the telegraph station, the police department, and the central bank. They defend their posts against the gunshots of the imperialist forces of America, Britain, Japan, and France after three days of fierce combat on the city streets, in the spirit of the Paris Commune of 1871. In one dramatic scene, Zhou Wenyong 周文雍, a leader of the uprising, declares to his ex-­lover that contrary to her obsession with bourgeoisie Western music, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, it was “The Internationale,” the “militant song of the starving slaves, which would be heard all over the world to inspire the proletariats to realize communism.”32 In real history, upon the defeat of Guangzhou Uprising, Zhou was imprisoned; he [ 281 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife had one request before his execution, to have a picture taken with Chen Tiejun 陈铁军, who had pretended to be his wife as a cover for their underground activities. They had fallen in love but were too busy for romance. On the execution ground, they finally declare their love, sing the “Internationale,” and perform their own wedding in front of their enemies. A 1980 film, A Wedding at the Execution Ground (刑场上的婚礼) presents this real-­life story, which was adapted into a Guangdong opera (粤剧), a dance drama (舞剧), and a Peking opera, all featuring the leitmotif of “The Internationale.” At its face value, the essence of economic reform in the new era since the 1980s explored the goal of prosperity to justify a restoration to “old world” of capitalism, which “The Internationale” promised to smash. Ironically, however, the song still occupied a central position in deifying Deng Xiaoping in numerous performances, which Mao would have called “revisionist poisonous weeds” engineered by agents of the “number-­one capitalist roader within the Party” (党内头号走资派), as Mao had branded Deng in 1976. Throughout the decades following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc, “The Internationale” has maintained its sonic power in transforming China into a capitalist economy with “socialist characteristics.” This occurred in the song’s permanent positioning as a concluding piece in two revolutionary music and dance epics, The Song of the Chinese Revolution (1984) and The Road to Revival (2009).33 In both epics, “The Internationale” “harmonized” (和谐了) contradictory ideologies in two different eras, speaking at once to the Maoist socialist blueprint in liberating the slaves, the Dengist march toward modernization and prosperity as “the final struggle, / unite together towards tomorrow” (which in fact was a march backward toward capitalism), and the post-­Deng leaders’ pursuit of the “Chinese dream” (which navigated between and even bridged Maoist socialism and Dengist capitalism) so that the Chinese people will truly become “the masters of the world!”

Emotional Power, Political Mobilization, and Countercultural Rally Performances of “The Internationale,” both in everyday life and in cinematic and theatrical and representations, functioned as a protest song of [ 282 ]

Singing “The Internationale” the communist movement against the KMT rule before 1949 as well as a rallying song in the socialist and postsocialist eras to legitimize the CCP regime. The impact of “The Internationale” has also become an integral part of Chinese dramatic history, which can be traced back to the “red theater movement” of the early revolutionary military base areas in Jiangxi Province. As recorded in his Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow was impressed by the Red Army amateur performances of drama skits and a harvest dance to the local peasants, with leaders such as Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and Liu Bocheng 刘伯承 sitting among the cadets, workers, and villagers on the ground in the open fields in Bao’an 保安 in 1936. At the end of a three-­hour-­ long variety show, an all-­children chorus concluded the evening with singing “The Internationale,” while the young women dancers stood erect with their “fists upraised as the song ended.”34 This sonic culture in a local community was further developed with the institutional practice of providing a Red Army unit with a performance team, which became an essential part in the process of politicization of soldiers from the 1930s through contemporary times. A twenty-­first century representation of this practice appeared in a huaju titled Music from Heaven (天籟), which depicts a Red Army performance team carrying a gramophone through numerous and fierce battles during the Long March. In a  central scene of the play, a young soldier loses her life protecting the instrument that was a gift from the Soviet Red Army and treasured as one of the most precious “weapons” in fulfilling their mission in mobilizing the army units. In another scene, a woman team leader played “The Internationale” from a record she had brought back from the Soviet Union to educate her coleader to understand that their task as a “cultural army” was as critical as that of any unit engaged in combat. At the end of the scene, fellow team members joined her in singing “The Internationale” while a revolving stage displayed them in a group sculpture as they performed their skits. According to the reviews, Music from Heaven successfully premiered in 2007, presented by the Soldiers Theater Attached to the Political Department of Guangzhou Military Region (广州军区政治部战士话剧团). This reportage play in fact dramatized the history of this particular army theater: it was first organized as a propaganda team of the Fourth Red Amy (红四军) in 1928 in Jinggangshan, where high-­ranking commanders such as Nie Rongzhen 聂荣臻, Luo Ronghuan 罗荣桓, and Luo Ruiqing occasionally served as directors, scriptwriters, or actors.35 It was later renamed the Soldiers Theater [ 283 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife and accompanied the Red Army troops through the Long March, as portrayed in Music from Heaven. The celebration of “The Internationale” in the play as a unifying song created a theatrical monument that eulogized the contributions of the army performers in the revolutionary past. Despite the seminal role of “The Internationale” in maintaining the hegemony of CCP ideology, its symbolic power could also rally a countercultural movement to challenge the official culture. The story of the song, therefore, would not be complete without mentioning its subversive role in the 1989 Tiananmen student demonstration by way of example. The Cui Jian 崔健 phenomenon is a case in point. During the early years of the reform era, Cui’s rock and roll song “I Have Nothing” (一无所有) captured a young generation who shared his feeling of possessing nothing in a society rapidly moving away from its socialist past. Having grown up in the Maoist period with an inspiring message such as “don’t say that we have nothing / we will become the masters of the world” from the “The Internationale,” many from Cui’s generation felt disillusioned by communist idealism after the Cultural Revolution as many found themselves owning nothing in a world in pursuit of material wealth. Originally written as a love song for his girlfriend, Cui’s confessional song simultaneously expressed a deep sense of loss and has thus been interpreted as an allegory against the status quo. Cui’s electrifying performance of the song in Tiananmen Square became a central event in the 1989 student demonstration against the government’s corruption and refusal of political reform. Ironically, “I Have Nothing” expanded the rebellious spirit of “The Internationale,” which gained a new power among the younger generation. As Yang Fan recalled, “The Internationale” reminded him and his fellow students of their responsibilities and inspired them to “stand up to the highest authority in China”: “I was ready to die for the great cause,” he said, and when the song “superseded all sound on the square,” he “grew up and became a man.”36 In one of the most memorable moments during the government crackdown of the demonstrations on June  4, 1989, the last group of students reluctantly retreated from Tiananmen Square at gunpoint while singing “The Internationale.” Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 recalled how the students’ command post repeatedly broadcast the oath, “Heads may be chopped off, blood may flow, but democratic liberty may not be lost.” To Liu and his ­fellow demonstrators, the “sad strains of the official song of the Chinese Communist Party, the ‘Internationale,’ ” “the heavy atmosphere of martyrdom,” and [ 284 ]

Singing “The Internationale” “the spirit of sacrifice blended together perfectly.”37 From a slightly different perspective, Andrew Jones also pointed out the political use of rock music in student demonstration “as a means for affective empowerment, cultural critique, and as a conduit for explicitly political protest.”38 Cui’s song was understood as “an ironic response to the Chinese lyric of the “Internationale,” when “masters of a new socialist China” in the Maoist discourse were paradoxically transformed into images of rebellious slaves against the Dengist regime in their persistent search for individualism, freedom, and democracy, the original blueprints of the May Fourth movement of 1919.39 The history of singing “The Internationale” now has ­completed a full and vicious cycle: When the students retreated from Tiananmen Square and their tragedy gradually disappeared from the national consciousness, did their cherished dreams also perish in history? Did their aspiration of becoming the masters of their own destiny deconstruct the very logic of the Communist revolution from the inside out and dramatize its futility? Much has happened in the years since the government’s repression of the 1989 student demonstrations. China’s emergence as the second greatest economic power in the world still calls for the collective singing of “The Internationale,” as seen in the commercial success of the 2007 Beijing concert “Shocking” (震撼) featuring Liao Changyong 廖昌永, Mo Hualun 莫华伦, and Liu Huan 刘欢, three acclaimed singers. Despite their brilliant singing of classic and popular songs from the Chinese and foreign repertoires, they did not truly stir the emotions of many audiences until they sang “The Internationale”—­first in French and then in Chinese—­at their second ­curtain call, when the audiences finally joined them in a singalong, a moment that perfectly explored collective memory and commercial appeal with their aesthetic talents.40 Political song has a rich history in performance culture, and its relevance to everyday life and cultural convention, with all its contradictions and inconsistencies, is profound. I began this chapter with the story of Qu Qiubai, and I return to the multiple voices embodied in the theatrical performance of Qu’s life, which reflected the spirit of “The Internationale” as well as rejections of its partial visions. Scripted by Hong Xiu 红袖 and produced in 2006, Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), an operatic drama (戏曲话剧), was praised for its “extremely simple stage style” (极简主义的舞台风格), characterized by a bare stage, monologues with private thoughts, and a “cold portrayal” of a [ 285 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife lonely soul trapped in a tragic time.41 In a successful attempt to combine the theatrical conventions of huaju with Peking opera, Qu Qiubai illustrates the power of sound, which, in the words of Jacques Attali, “reflects the manufacture of society” and “prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.”42 Centered on the emotional power of Qu’s “Superfluous Words” (多余的話) written in a KMT prison in 1935, the operatic drama probed his “traitorous” thoughts against Chinese communist history, which had resulted in a mass criticism of Qu before and during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Qu was gradually restored to his original status as an important early leader of the CCP, and his “Superfluous Words” has been deciphered as an insightful treatment of the international socialist movement, which had questioned the problematic nature of its early leadership. It is therefore no wonder that years later this operatic drama focuses on the last days before Qu’s death, when he puts down his mask as a former CCP leader and uses paragraphs from his “Superfluous Words” in speaking to his mother, two wives, and his prospective lover, Ding Ling, about his private feelings. Qu regretted having led the career of an “actor” in the political theater of the CCP power struggle, when he was entrusted with presiding over the CCP’s Politburo at a time of crisis in 1927, after the KMT had openly turned against the party. In this process of criticizing the CCP while denying his role as a true believer, however, the sonic background of “The Internationale” throughout the performance underscores the fact that Qu did die heroically while singing it, as numerous communist martyrs did before their executions. To borrow from Jonathan Sterne’s discussion of sound studies, we see in this instance how sonic practice “redescrib[es] what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world”: Qu should be reinscribed by his communist culture as a heroic leader as, in the final analysis, his sonic expression overpowered his “confessional” words and his actions spoke louder than his writing.43 By the same token, the 2011 film Seal of Love (秋之白华) also explores a sonic imagination to reflect on Qu’s creative and critical capacities as a writer, translator, and literary critic, especially in the context of his friendship with Lu Xun and his leadership of the leftist literary movement in the 1930s. Even though the film focuses on the romantic love between Qu and his second wife, Yang Zhihua 杨之华, the motifs of “The Internationale” still emerge at critical moments; the film highlights Qu’s quiet despair when he [ 286 ]

Singing “The Internationale” was captured and imprisoned by the KMT after having been “abandoned” by Red Army troops upon their retreat from Jiangxi to embark on the Long March. Both the operatic drama and the film restore Qu to his identity as a passionate lover, a literary giant, and a committed socialist, even though he questioned the very fundamentals of the communist ideology and the exhausting internal strife within the CCP central leadership that had persecuted him both as a “leftist opportunist” and a “rightist opportunist” at different moments of crisis in early CCP history. Most significantly, both the operatic drama and the film dramatize his execution, at which he courageously sang “The Internationale” in Russian and in Chinese on his way to the execution ground, reportedly touching many onlookers with his “unflinching” faith in his last political act. In a dramatic and paradoxical fashion, “The Internationale” harmonized Qu’s opposing desires: his questioning of his own experience as a communist leader did not preclude his faith expressed in the song, which strived for the happiness of all the suffering people. In theatrical representations of Qu’s life journey, “The Internationale” enabled him to express his multiple voices and multifaceted selves as a modern intellectual in search of a utopian state for the oppressed and the poor and a May Fourth literary figure attempting to free himself from the dilemma of “isms.” Whereas the emotional power of his “Superfluous Words” expressed his putatively traitorous critique of communist doctrine, for example, the sonic power of his singing “The Internationale” paradoxically confirmed his identity as an international socialist, whose commitment to the liberation of “all the slaves of the world”—­a key phrase in “The Internationale”—­ultimately protected his reputation against future attacks as a “traitor.”44 Both in real life and in artistic representations, Qu’s singing of “The Internationale” transcended rigid ideological boundaries and permitted intellectuals to underscore their own humanity and dignity, while also praising the revolutionary masses as masters of their own fate. In Qu’s case, singing “The Internationale” expressed his complex life, which was deeply affected by his early experience of listening to the masses singing the song, his later life when he taught it to others, and lack of regret for his deeds when led to his execution. The song also “expanded” the legacy of Qu and the paradoxical stories centering on his close relationship to it. Propaganda performance in contemporary China, as partly accompanied through a century-­long history of singing “The Internationale,” has [ 287 ]

Part II: Chinese Socialist Theater and Its Afterlife not always been forced upon writers, actors, and artists through strict censorship and political suppression. Let me caution against the conventional wisdom that socialist China suppressed artists and their creative energies, as seen in their unproductive years during the Maoist period. On the contrary, Chinese intellectuals and performance artists had to become even more ingenious and original in a highly censored society to find an allowable and ambiguous space so that they could still produce classic shows and films that have lasted beyond a particular time in history, as we have seen in Jiao Juyin’s second creation of Lao She’s Teahouse and Meng Bing’s remaking of main melody plays with artistic vision, dramatic talent, the wisdom to interact with audiences, and a flexible strategy to adapt to changing ideological and political mandates. The music-­making history of “The Internationale” likewise explains and expands the power of representation on the part of artists in all genres who often took the lead in visualizing and participating in the formation of contemporary canons. Without their pioneering achievements and skills to adapt and reimagine, we would not have witnessed the long history of performing “The Internationale,” the socialist state, and the rich, complex, and diverse life experiences onstage and offstage over the past century.

[ 288 ]

Notes

Introduction 1. See Siyuan Liu, “Book Review: An Authoritative Anthology of Modern Chinese ­ rg​/­28927​/­fuse​-b ­ ook​-­review​-­an​ Drama,” Art Fuse, April 18, 2011, https://­artsfuse​.o -­authoritative​-­anthology​-­of​-m ­ odern​-­chinese​-­drama​/­; Xing Fan, “Review of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama,” Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 1 (2016): 221–­23. 2. In Megan Ammariti’s director’s note. 3. For the positive reception of this play, see Bai Ying 白瀛, “Xunzhao Chunliu She: Naoshi zhong de ququ” 《寻找春柳社》闹市中的蛐蛐 (A cricket in a noisy market: On In Search of Spring Willow Society), http://­web​.­zhongxi​.­cn​/­z xxwdt​/­ycxw​/­4675​ .­html. 4. Sun Weishi 孙维世, “Huiyi Ouyang Yuqian Tongzhi chuangzuo Heinu hen” 回忆 欧阳予倩同志创作《黑奴恨》(Recalling Comrade Ouyang Yuqian’s creation of The Hatred of Black Slaves), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao 欧阳玉倩研究资 料 (Research materials for Ouyang Yuqian studies) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1962), 466–­70. 5. Rossella Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres: Intercultural Performance Networks in East Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 1–­2. 6. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, 1. 7. Ferrari, Transnational Chinese Theatres, 2–­3. 8. See Luo Fei 罗菲, “Lun Tangmu Shushu de Xiaowu zhong de ‘Renquan Xuanyan’” 论《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中的“人权宣言” (On the Declaration of Human Rights in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Movie Literature 电影文学 14 (2018): 148–­50. 9. Lü Jiayu and Xu Tianqin 吕家钰, 徐天琴, “Tangmu Shushu de Xiaowu zhong de ziyou yishi yu lixing yishi fenxi”《汤姆叔叔的小屋》中自由意志与理性意志分析 (An [ 289 ]

Introduction analysis of freedom consciousness and rational choice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Literature Education 文学教育(上) 1, no. 8 (2018): 56–­59. 10. Zhang Yi 张忆, “Xiao muwu li de ‘Meiguo meng’ ” 小木屋里的“美国梦” (An “American Dream” in a little wood cabin), Ability and Wisdom 才智 32 (2015): 228–­30. 11. Ma Xinran 马欣然, “Tangmu Shushu de Xiaowu dui Meiguo zhongzu guanxi de jiegou yu jiangou”《汤姆叔叔的小屋》对美国种族关系的解构与建构 (Deconstruction and construction of racial relations in America in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Masterpieces and Master Writers 名家名作 8 (2021): 132–­33. 12. Wan Guanghui 万光辉, “Fanyi shiying xuanze lun shijiao xia de Tangmu Shushu de Xiaowu de sange zhong yiben de duibi yanjiu” 翻译适应选择论视角下《汤姆叔 叔的小屋》的三个中译本的对比研究 (A comparative study of three Chinese versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the perspective of translation as adaptation and selection), MA thesis, Ocean University of China 海洋大学, 2011. 13. Megan Ammirati, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China: Ouyang Yuqian’s Regret of a Black Slave and the Tactics of Impersonating Race, Gender, and Class,” Asian Theatre Journal 36, no. 1 (2019): 3. 14. Ammirati, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China,” 6. 15. Jin Fei 金飞, “Tangmu Shushu de Xiaowu bati de sikao yu qishi 《汤姆叔叔的小屋》 八题的思考与启示 (Reflections and revelations on the eight questions on Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Teaching Reference for Middle School History 中学历史教学参考 13 (2019): 30–­33. 16. For informative introductions to modern and contemporary Chinese theater, see Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times: From 1840 to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), The Performing Arts in Contemporary China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), and Chinese Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983). For a valuable guide to selective Chinese plays from 1900 to 1949 with plot summaries and analysis, see Bernd Eberstein, A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900–­1949, vol. 4, The Drama (Leiden: Brill, 1990). For a subgenre study of women’s culture in yue opera, see Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-­ Century Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). For an excellent study of gender and nationalism in traditional operas, see Daphne P. Lei, Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 17. Liang Luo, The Avant-­Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the ­Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 16. 18. See Weihong Bao, “The Art of Control: Hong Shen, Behavioral Psychology, and the Technics of Social Effects” (249–­27), and Siyuan Liu, “Hong Shen and Adaptation of Western Plays in Modern Chinese Theater” (106–­71), both in Siyuan Liu and Xiaomei Chen, eds., Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016). 19. Xiang opera Old Master Tian premiered on January 10, 2021, in Kunming. See https://­w ww​.1­ 63​.c­ om​/d ­ y​/a­ rticle​/G ­ 00FEL6S0514R9NO​.h ­ tml. Headmaster Tian Han premiered on June 22, 2021, in Beijing. See http://­w ww​.­g uocuijingju​.­com​/­news​ [ 290 ]

Introduction /­html​/­​?­34780​.­html. Both were anniversary performances to celebrate the centennial of the CCP’s founding. 20. The ping opera An E was performed by the Number One Ping Opera Troupe of Shijiazhuang City 石家庄市评剧一团 in 2016 to celebrate the CCP’s founding and ­ tml​/­2017​- ­01​/1­ 3​ the victory of the Long March, https://­epaper​.g­ mw​.c­ n​/­g mrb​/h /­nw​.D ­ 110000gmrb​_ 2­ 0170113​_1­ -​ 1­ 2​.h ­ tm. 21. My “ten-­year step” strategy was inspired by the international lecture series  titled “Living the Socialist Modern: The Chinese Communist Party at 100,” organized by Barbara Mittler, Peidong Sun, and Lena Henningsen in 2021. I presented a draft outline of this chapter on Ouyang Yuqian following the conference format and found it beneficial in presenting a larger historical framework. I am grateful to the feedback of the audience, especially my correspondence with Jie Li, Wen-­hsin Yeh, and Barbara Mittler. 22. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, xia 二十世纪中国戏剧史 (下) (A history of Chinese theater in the twentieth century), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2017), 2:6. 23. Tian Han 田汉, “Zeng Sichuan Sheng Geming Canfei Junren Jiaoyang Yuan Keyu Yanchu Dui” 赠四川省革命残废军人教养院课余演出队 (To the amateur performance team of the Disabled Revolutionary Veterans Care Center in Sichuan), in Tian Han quanji 田汉全集 (Complete works of Tian Han), 20 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 12:189–­91. 24. Amy D. Dooling, “Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies; Or, The Serious Business of Marriage,” in China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters, ed. Christopher Rea (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015), 14. 25. For transformations of Nora’s theme into women’s pursuit of independence in the works of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Ding Ling, see Shuei-­May Chang, Casting off the Shackles of Family (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Kwok-­kan Tam, Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation (Singapore: Springer Verlag, 2019); Chengzhou He, Henrik Ibsen and Modern Chinese Drama (Oslo: Fagbokforlaget, 2004); and Xiaomei Chen, “Introduction,” in Columbia Anthology of Modern ­Chinese Drama, ed. Xiaomei Chen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 1–­30. For Jiang Qing’s performance of the role of Nora in the Republican Period, see Natascha Vittinghoff, “Jiang Qing and Nora: Drama and Politics in the Republican Period,” in Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, ed. Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowski (Münster: Lit, 2005), 208–­41. 26. Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds., Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2016), 4. 27. For studies on model theater, see Kirk A. Denton, “Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,” in Drama in the People’s Republic of China, ed. Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras, 119–­36 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987); Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2012); Elizabeth Wichmann, Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991); Rosemary A. Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–­1976) (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-­Huang Tsai, [ 291 ]

Introduction eds., Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Xing Fan, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018). 28. Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1. 29. “Douzheng qiang ying baichang sanban ‘laoyezi’ qiju Guohua Juchang”《斗争》将 迎百场 三版 “老爷子”齐聚国话剧场 (This Is the Final Struggle will celebrate its one hundredth performance with the return to the China National Theater of three actors who had played the role of the father), http://­ent​.­sina​.­com​.­cn​/­j​/­2011​-­10​ -­11​/1­ 5003438281​.s­ html.

1. Tian Han and His Legacy 1. Tian Han 田汉, “Guanyu ‘Yiyongjun jinxingqu’ ” 关于《义勇军进行曲》(On “March of the Volunteer Army”), in Tian Han quanji 田汉全集 (Complete works of Tian Han), 20 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 18:138. 2. For the exhibition of modern history in the National Museum of China, see Kirk A. Denton, Exhibiting the Past (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 1–­2. 3. See the description of Grand Theater of Tian Han at its website, https://­baike​ .­baidu​.­com​/i­ tem​/田 ­ 汉大剧院. 4. Tian Han, Tian Han zhuan ji 田汉专集 (Special collection on Tian Han), 2 vols., ed. Shanghai Xiju Xueyuan Xiju Wenxuexi 上海戏剧学院戏剧文学系 (Dramatic Literature Department of Shanghai Academy of Theater) (Shanghai: Shanghai Xiju Xueyuan Xiju Wenxuexi, 1980), 2:2–­3. 5. See Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 18–­31. 6. I thank Kirk A. Denton for helping me clarify this point. 7. For scholarship on Tian Han in the Chinese language, see Dong Jian, “Nanguo She” 南国社 (Southern Drama Society), in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue shetuan liupai 中国现代文学社团流派 (Literary societies and schools in modern Chinese literature), ed. Jia Zhifang 贾植芳 et al. (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu, 1989), 2:939–­78, and Tian Han zhuan 田汉传 (A biography of Tian Han) (Beijing: Shiyue wenyi, 1996); Zou Ping 邹平, Tian Han 田汉 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu, 1999); and Zhang Yaojie, Ying ju zhi wang Tian Han 影剧之王田汉 (Tian Han: The king of film and drama) (Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu), 2003. 8. For a detailed account, see Ito Toramaru 小谷一郎 and Liu Ping 刘平, Tian Han zai Riben 田汉在日本 (Tian Han in Japan) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1997). 9. Rey Chow has described the slide show incident as the beginning of “the discourse of technologized visuality” and of “a new kind of discourse in the postcolonial third world” in Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 4–­5. Lydia H. Liu viewed it as the “staging of the spectacle of horror” in a “convoluted relationship between a spectacle and its several relays of audiences as well as the voice that recounts the story”; see Translingual Practice: Literature, [ 292 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy National Culture, and Translated Modernity—­China, 1909–­1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 71. 10. For a study of “Occidentalism” in this context, see the introduction to Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-­Discourse in Post-­Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–­26. 11. See Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 80. 12. Tian Han, “Eguo jinci zhi geming yu pinfu wenti 俄国今次之革命与贫富问题 (The current Russian revolution and the question of rich and poor), in Tian Han quanji, 18:254–­64. 13. Tian Han, “Eguo jinci zhi geming yu pinfu wenti,” 261. 14. Tian Han, “Eluosi wenxue sichao zhi yipie” 俄罗斯文学思潮之一瞥 (A survey of Russian literary thought), in Tian Han quanji, 14:1–­78. 15. Zhang Yaojie, Ying ju zhi wang Tian Han, 25. 16. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 106–­7. 17. Tian Han, “Pinmin shiren Huiteman de bainian ji” 平民诗人惠特曼的百年祭 (Celebrating the hundredth birthday of the people’s poet Walt Whitman), in Tian Han quanji, 14:292–­93. 18. Tian Han, “Pinmin shiren Huiteman de bainian ji,” 302. 19. I thank Eric Hayot for pointing this out. 20. Tian Han, “Pinmin shiren Huiteman de bainian ji,” 298–­99. 21. Tian Han, “Shiren yu laogong wenti” 诗人与劳工问题 (The poet and the question of labor), in Tian Han quanji, 14:79–­123. 22. For Tian Han’s “After Tasting the ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ ” see Tian Han, “Chi le ‘zhiguo’ yihou de hua” 吃了“智果”以后的话, in Tian Han quanji, 14:191–­238. For more discussion on women characters in the model theater of the Cultural Revolution, see Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Rosemary A. Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–­1976) (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2012); and Xing Fan, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018). 23. The year of Tian Han’s play is when the script was written, not its premiere. The same applies to his other plays. 24. Tian Han, Xueyaluo zhi gui 薛亚萝之鬼 (The devil of the piano), in Tian Han quanji, 1:140–­41. 25. Tian Han, Wufan zhiqian 午饭之前 (Before lunch), in Tian Han quanji, 1:143–­62. 26. For the English translation of The Night the Tiger Was Caught by Jonathan Noble, see Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, ed. Xiaomei Chen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 97–­114. An earlier translation by Randy Barbara Kaplan was published in Asian Theatre Journal 2, no. 1 (1994): 1–­34. 27. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 208–­9. 28. Tian Han, “Emo shiren Potuolei’er de bainian ji” 恶魔诗人波陀雷儿的百年祭 (Celebrating the hundredth birthday of Baudelaire, a satanic poet), in Tian Han quanji, 14:312–­36. [ 293 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy 29. Mary Anne Caws, “Charles Baudelaire,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 75. 30. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan” 我们的自己批判 (Our self-­criticism), in Tian Han quanji, 15:185. 31. Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde, The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4, 6. 32. Kohl, Oscar Wilde, 4, 6. 33. Tian Han, “Yishu yu yishu jia de taidu” 艺术与艺术家的态度 (Art and the artist’s attitude), in Tian Han quanji, 15:20–­21. 34. Tian Han, “Di yi ci jiechu ‘piping jia’ de Liang Shiqiu Xiansheng” 第一次接触“批 评家”的梁实秋先生 (First encounter with Mr. Liang Shiqiu as a “critic”), in Tian Han quanji, 15:63. 35. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 174–­75. 36. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 175. 37. Helen Grace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art’s Sake (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 21. 38. Zagona, The Legend of Salome, 21. 39. Zagona, The Legend of Salome, 22. 40. For the impact of Oscar Wilde’s philosophy expressed in Salomé and the development of Chinese Salomés such as Pan Jinlian 潘金莲 and Wu Zetian 武则天, see Jing Jiang, “Chinese Salomés on the Chinese Stage,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23, no. 2 (2011): 175–­209. 41. Tian Han, Xin jiao zi 新教子 (New story of educating her son), in Tian Han quanji, 7:3. 42. Tarryn Lin-­min Chun, “Sent-­Down Plays: Yangbanxi Stagecraft, Practical Aesthetics and Popularization During the Cultural Revolution,” in Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debates in the Maoist Period, ed. Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Chun, and Siyuan Liu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 244. For the artistic achievements of the model operas in acting, stage, and lighting design, see Fan, Staging Revolution. 43. Weng Ouhong 翁偶虹 and A Jia 阿甲, The Red Lantern 红灯记, trans. Brenda ­Austin and John  B. Weinstein, in Chen, Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, 535. 44. Tian Han, Xin Taohua shan 新桃花扇 (New story of The Peach Blossom Fan), in Tian Han quanji, 7:16. 45. For his core argument, see Zhang Houzai 张厚载, “ ‘Lianpu’—­‘da bazi’ ” “脸谱”—​ “打靶子” (Face painting—­stunts), New Youth 新青年 5, no. 4 (1918): 429–­31, and “Wo de Zhongguo jiuju guan” 我的中国旧剧观 (My views of old Chinese opera), 343–­48. 46. Fu Sinian 傅斯年, “Xiju gailiang ge mian guan” 戏剧改良各面观 (Various perspectives on theater reform), New Youth 新青年 5, no. 4 (1918): 322–­41, and “Zai lun xiju gailiang” 再论戏剧改良 (Again on theater reform), 4:349–­60. 47. Lu Xun 鲁迅, “Village Opera” 社戏, in The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 146. 48. Lu Xun, “Village Opera,” 140. [ 294 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy 49. Lu Xun, “Village Opera,” 140. 50. Lu Xun, “Preface to Call to Arms,” 《呐喊》自序, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, in The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, ix–­x. 51. Lu Xun, “Preface to Call to Arms,” ix–­x. 52. Lu Xun, “On Photography,” trans. Kirk A. Denton, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–­1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 203. 53. For a discussion of Lu Xun’s comment on Mei Lanfang’s androgyny and cross-­ dressing in female roles, see Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, ed. Xiaomei Chen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‛i Press, 2003), 44–­46. For Mei’s place in the world, see Min Tian, Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-­ Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced (New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); for Mei’s contribution to the remaking of Peking opera, see Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-­creation of Peking Opera, 1870–­1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 54. Kirk A. Denton, “Introduction,” in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 118. 55. Anon., “China’s Great Revolutionary Army of Literature and Art Advances Victoriously in the Direction Indicated by Chairman Mao: Literature and Art Workers Hold Rally in Peking for Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Chinese Literature 2 (1967): 5. 56. Anon., “China’s Great Revolutionary Army of Literature,” 9. 57. Anon., “China’s Great Revolutionary Army of Literature,” 12–­13. 58. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 850. For an informative study of Li Huiniang and ghost plays, see Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 59. Rudolf G. Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 137. 60. Lu Xun, “Da Xu Maoyong guanyu kangri tongyi zhanxian wenti” 答徐懋庸关于 抗日统一战线问题 (Response to Xu Maoyong on the issue of the united front in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression), in Lu Xun quanji, 6:541. 61. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 400. 62. Yin Ye 殷野, “Yi wu Chongqing huaju wutaide liangtai A Q Zhengzhuan 忆雾重庆 话剧舞台的两台《阿 Q 正传》(Remembering two productions of The True Story of Ah Q in misty Chongqing), People’s Theater 人民戏剧 3 (1982): 33–­34. 63. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 480. For the problematic relationship between Lu Xun and Tian Han (e.g., the debate over “defense literature” and over Hu Feng), see Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan, 399–­408, 479–­83; Liu Ping, Xiju hun, 363–­81; and Zhang Yaojie, Ying ju zhi wang Tian Han, 284–­301. Zhang Yaojie’s biography points to the most negative, and even hypocritical, aspects of Tian Han and upholds Lu Xun as the sharp and fair critic who could not tolerate Tian; see Zhang Yaojie, Ying ju zhi wang Tian Han, 300–­302. 64. Chen Mingshu 陈鸣树, “Shenmei de rentong yu yiqu” 审美的认同与异曲 (Similarities and differences in aesthetic standards), Dramatic Art 戏剧艺术 2 (1986): 32. 65. For a discussion of Lu Xun’s distrust of gender-­crossing behaviors in performance art in the context of his general contribution to women/gender issues, [ 295 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy see Eileen Cheng, “Gendered Spectacles: Lu Xun on Gazing at Women and Other Pleasures,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 25–­27. 66. Lu Xun was not against all dramatists; he promoted “Western” plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, and others. He surveyed new drama 新剧 in Tianjin in 1912 and approved its social function in 1922. See Cao Gukai 曹古恺, “Lu Xun yu Zhongguo huaju” 鲁迅与中国话剧 (Lu Xun and Chinese spoken drama), Drama Research 戏剧研究 3 (1981): 82–­99. For his view of traditional Chinese opera, see Qiu Zhensheng 邱振声, “Lu Xun yu xiju” 鲁迅与戏剧 (Lu Xun and drama), Guangxi Daily 广西日报, September 15, 1981. 67. Tian Han, “Sulian weishenme yaoqing Mei Lanfang qu yanxi?” 苏联为什么邀请 梅兰芳去演戏? (Why did the Soviet Union invite Mei Lanfang to perform?), in Tian Han quanji, 17:31. 68. Tian Han, “Sulian weishenme yaoqing Mei Lanfang qu yanxi?,” 32. 69. Tian Han, “Sulian weishenme yaoqing Mei Lanfang qu yanxi?,” 39. 70. Tian Han, Fan’elin yu qiangwei 梵峨璘与蔷薇 (Piano and rose), in Tian Han quanji, 1:30. 71. Tian Han, Fan’elin yu qiangwei, 28. 72. Tian Han, Fan’elin yu qiangwei, 29–­30. 73. Tian Han, Fan’elin yu qiangwei, 13. 74. Tian Han, Kafeidian zhi yiye 咖啡店之一夜 (A night at a café), in Tian Han quanji, 1:109. 75. Tian Han, Kafeidian zhi yiye, 109. 76. Tian Han, Kafeidian zhi yiye, 106. 77. Tian Han, Kafeidian zhi yiye, 127. Tian Han borrowed this stage line and the experience of Eroshenko, the blind Russian poet, from a letter written by Li Chuli 李初梨. See Tian Han’s 1921 essay, “Qiangwei zhi lu” 蔷薇之路 (The road of the roses), in Tian Han quanji, 20:262. 78. Lu Minzhi 盧敏芝, Tian Han yu Dazheng Dongjing 《田汉与大正东京: 公共空间的文 化体验与新女性的形构》 (Tian Han and Tokyo: Cultural experience in the public sphere and the construction of new women in Taisho Japan) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2020), 9. 79. Tian Han, Kafeidian zhi yiye, 115. 80. Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem is titled “Une mort heroique” and can be found in The Parisian Prowler: Le spleen de Paris, petits poèmes en prose, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 81. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 119. 82. Tian Han, “Tian Han xiqu ji di si ji zixu” 《田汉戏曲集》第四集自序 (Preface to the fourth volume of Selected Plays of Tian Han), in Tian Han quanji, 16:326. For the premiere of The Death of a Famous Actor at the first Fish and Dragon Art Festival, see Zhang Xianghua 张向华, Tian Han nianpu 田汉年谱 (A chronology of Tian Han) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1992), 98. 83. Tian Han, “Guangyu Mingyou zhi si” 关于《名优之死》 (About The Death of a Famous Actor), in Tian Han quanji, 16:374. 84. Tian Han, Mingyou zhi si 名优之死 (The death of a famous actor), in Tian Han quanji, 1:352. 85. Tian Han, Mingyou zhi si, 356–­57. [ 296 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy 86. Quoted from “Zheshi Tian Han ‘jiang mei jinxing huimie’ de beiju” 这是田汉“将 美进行毁灭”的悲剧 (This is a tragedy in which Tian Han destroyed beauty), https://­w ww​.­sohu​.­com​/­a/​ ­283592051​_ ­827253. 87. Written by Lin Gu 林古, Xu Jin 徐进, and Xie Jin 谢晋, Stage Sisters was produced by Shanghai Tianma Film Studio 上海天马电影制片 in 1964–­1965. The filmscript can be found in Luo Yijun  罗艺军, ed., Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi: 1949–­ 1966, dianying ji, xia 中国新文学大系 1949–­1966 电影集 (下) (Consortium of modern Chinese literature: 1949–­1966, film vol.  2) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 1991), 571–­612. 88. Tian Han, “Bixu qieshi guanxin bing gaishan yiren de shenghuo” 必须切实关心并 改善艺人的生活 (We must be concerned and improve the living conditions of theater artists in earnest), in Tian Han quanji, 17:234–­40; Tian Han, “Wei yanyuan de qingchun qingming” 为演员的青春请命 (A plea on behalf of actors and actresses for the prime time of their artistic careers), in Tian Han quanji, 16:71–­73. 89. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 91. 90. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 92. A Night at a Café showcased what I have termed “Tian Han’s café revolutionaries.” The romantic space of the café allows student artists to imagine themselves as social reformers without serious commitments to “isms.” When Tian dismissed it as bourgeois sentiment, he also negated his own view of seeing art as an independent form of social change. For Tian Han’s relationship with Boris Pilnyak, see Luo, The Avant-­Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 84–­87. 91. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 99. 92. Luo, The Avant-­Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 17. 93. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 137. 94. Zou Ping 邹平, Tian Han 田汉 (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu, 1999), 227. 95. Tian Han’s Princess Wencheng premiered with the China Youth Art Theater in 1960; it was directed by Jin Shan 金山 and stage designed by Zhang Zhengyu 张 正宇 and my father Chen Yongjing 陈永倞. 96. Interview with Bai Fengxi 白峰溪, who played the role of Princess Wencheng in the B cast. 97. In Yu Lin 余林, “Ta ceng gengyun guo zhepian tudi—­huiyi Tian Han zai Qingyi” 他曾耕耘过这片土地—­回忆田汉在青艺 (He once ploughed through this land: Remembering Tian Han’s creative works at the China Youth Art Theater). In Yu Lin, Huaju shengcun kongjian silü 话剧生存空间思虑 (Reflections on the existing space for huaju) (Beijing: Minzu, 2007), 245–­46. 98. For the original text, see Anon., “Lin Biao Tongzhi weituo Jiang Qing Tongzhi zhaokai de budui wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui jiyao 林彪同志委托江青同志召开的部队文艺工 作座谈会纪要 (A summary of the Seminar on the Literature and Art in the PLA presided over by Comrade Jiang Qing on behalf of Comrade Lin Biao) (Beijing: Renmin, 1967). For an informative history of this forum and especially the fact that Lin Biao did not play any role, see Chen Zhao 陈昭, “ ‘Budui wenyi zuotanhui jiyao’ poxi” 部队文艺座谈会《纪要》剖析 (An analysis of “Summary of the Seminar on Literature and Art in the PLA”), http://­www​.­cnd​.­org​/­CR​/­ZK10​/­cr585​ .­gb.html. [ 297 ]

1. Tian Han and His Legacy 99. Mao Dun 茅盾, “Mao Dun Tongzhi zhi daoci” 茅盾同志致悼词 (A memorial speech by Comrade Mao Dun), in Tian Han zhuanji 田汉专集, 1:6–­7. 100. Tian Han, “Women de ziji pipan,” 123. 101. Tian Qinxin is a female director known for combining avant-­garde, suggestive 写意, and realist styles. For a study of staging this play in comparison with her  later “youth edition,” see Zhang Yingge 张郢格, “Tian Qinxin: Kuangbiao ­shiliu  nian—­ping qingchunban huaju Kuangbiao 田沁鑫: 狂飙十六年—­评青春版 话剧《狂飙》(Tian Qinxin: Sixteen years of Hurricane—­O n the youth edition of Hurricane), Contemporary Theater 当代戏剧 6 (2017): 28–­30. For the reception of its premiere, see “Huaju Kuangbiao shoulun piaofang chaoguo qishi wan yuan” 话剧《狂飙》首轮票房超过70万元 (The first season of ticket sales for the spoken drama H ­ urricane has yielded 700,000 yuan), http://­ent​.­sina​.­com​.­cn​/h ­ ​/­46046​.­html. 102. I am grateful to Tian Qinxin 田沁鑫 for providing me with a stage director’s script for Hurricane. Citations are quoted from this version. 103. For English-­language scholarship on Bai Wei and Yuan Changying, see Haiping Yan, “Other Life: Bai Wei, Yuan Changying, and Social Dramas in the 1930s,” in Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–­1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), 100–­134. 104. For an English translation of Southeast Flies the Peacock, see Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson, Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 209–­52. 105. From Tian Qinxin’s director’s script, 24–­30. 106. From Tian Qinxin’s director’s script, 46–­48. 107. This passage appears in Tian Qinxin’s director’s script, 52–­53. Translation quoted from Chen, Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, 434–­35. 108. Huang Qizhe 黄启哲, “Minzu geju Tian Han guoqing shouyan” 民族歌剧《田汉》国 庆首演 (The folk opera Tian Han premiered on National Day), http://­wenhui​ .­whb​.­cn​/z­ huzhan​/x ­ inwen​/­20201001​/3­ 73463​.­html. Huang Qizhi noted that the opera Tian Han was produced by a group of award-­winning artists such as scriptwriter Sheng Heyu 盛和煜, director Zhang Manjun 张曼君, composer Wu Yuebei 吴粤北, and stage designer Xiu Yan 修岩. 109. Wei Zhi 为之 and Zu Zhongren 祖忠人, “Cong xiju qingnian dao geming juzuo jia” 从戏剧青年到革命剧作家 (From young dramatist to revolutionary playwright), Opera 歌剧 10 (2020): 4–­12.

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent 1. Chinese text quoted in Hongbo qu in Tian Han, Tian Han quanji 田汉全集 (Complete works of Tian Han), 20 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 11:233. 2. Dong Jian, Tian Han zhuan 田汉传 (A biography of Tian Han) (Beijing: Shiyue wenyi, 1996), 538–­39, 552. 3. The original title of Guo Moruo’s 1948 autobiography was Memoir of the War Years Against Japanese Aggression 抗战回忆录. After revision, it was republished in [ 298 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent installments with a new title, The Song of the Waves 洪波曲, in People’s Literature 人民文学 from July to December 1958. 4. See Sheng Ying 盛英, “An E nianu” 安娥年谱 (Chronology of An E), New Literary Historical Record 新文学史料 3 (2006): 193–­94. The script of the opera can be found in An E, An E wenji 安娥文集 (Selected works of An E) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 2008). 5. See Zheng Xuefu 郑学富, “Dianying Xuezhan Tai’erzhuang jiaqi liang’an goutong de qiaoliang” 电影《血战台儿庄》架起两岸沟通的桥梁 (Film The Blood-­Stained Battle of Tai’erzhuang built a bridge of communication across the Taiwan Straits), Wind and Rain of Zhongshan 钟山风雨 5 (2017): 43–­45. 6. Meng Weijun 孟伟君, “Dianying Xuezhan Tai’erzhuang de muhou gushi” 电影《血 战台儿庄》的幕后故事 (The inside story of the film The Blood-Stained Battle of Tai’erzhuang), Party Life 党的生活 (黑龙江) 8 (2015): 52–­54. 7. See Li Hailiu 李海流, “Jilu dianying zhi fu yong jingtou jilu kangzhan Zhongguo” 纪录电影之父用镜头记录抗战中国 (Father of documentary film recording China’s war battles), Red Crag Spring and Autumn 红岩春秋 6 (2014): 35–­38. 8. Ming Ren 明人, “Hong Shen zisha zhi xiangqing” 洪深自杀之详情 (Details of Hong Shen’s suicide), 369 Pictorial 三六九画报 3 (1941): 80. 9. Chen Meiying 陳美英 and Song Baozhen 宋宝珍, Hong Shen zhuan 洪深传 (A biography of Hong Shen) (Beijing: Wenhua, 1996), 287–­92. 10. Hong Qian 洪钤 also claimed that contrary to the reports that Hong’s suicide was driven by financial crisis; Hong’s wife Hong Changzhen 洪常真 revealed in 1982 that “the real pressure was political.” See Hong Qian, “Ku wei rensheng bu zi ai—­xie zai fuqin Hong Shen qushi wu shi wu zhounian zhi ji” 苦味人生不自 哀—­写在父亲洪深去世五十五周年之际 (A bitter life without sorrow: On the fifty-­ fifth anniversary of my father Hong Shen’s death), https://­w ww​.­jintian​.­net​ /­today​/?­ ­​ action​-­viewnews​-­itemid​-­27749. 11. Hong Qian, “Ku wei rensheng bu zi ai.” 12. Weihong Bao, “The Art of Control: Hong Shen, Behavioral Psychology, and the Technics of Social Effects,” in Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China, ed. Siyuan Liu and Xiaomei Chen (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 249–­50. 13. Song Baozhen, Hong Shen: “Wei rensheng” de shehui xianshi xing xiju piping, xia 洪 深:“为人生”的社会现实型戏剧戏剧批评 (下) (Hong Shen: The “for-­life” approach of social-­realist dramatic criticism, part 2), 2004, http://­w ww​.­xiju​.­net​/­view​_­con​ .­asp​?i­ d​=­105. 14. Gu Jin 古今, “Ping Hong Shen: ‘Wei rensheng’ de shehui xianshi xing xiju piping, xia” 评《洪深: “为人生”的社会现实型戏剧批评（下）》(A review of “Hong Shen: ‘For-­life’ approach of social-­realist dramatic criticism, part 2”), Dramatic Art 戏剧艺术 1 (2011): 51. 15. For English publications on Hong Shen, see Chih Wu, “The Collected Works of Hung Shen,” Chinese Literature 9 (1963): 110–­14; David Y. Chen, “Two Chinese Adaptations of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,” Modern Drama 9, no. 4 (1966): 431–­ 39; Walter J. Meserve and Ruth  I. Meserve, “Hung Shen: Chinese Dramatist Trained in America,” Theatre Journal 31, no. 1 (March 1979): 25–­34; Carolyn T. Brown, “Creative Imitation: Hung Shen’s Cultural Translation of Eugene [ 299 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent O’Neill’s ‘The Emperor Jones,’ ” Comparative Literature Studies 22, no.  1 (1985): 147–­55; Marián Gálik, “Hung Shen’s Chao—­The King of Hell: The Interliterary Relations with O’Neill and Baker,” in Milestones in Sino-­Western Literary Confrontation (1898–­1979), ed. Marián Gálik (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 123–­34; and Liu and Chen, Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China. For English language scholarship on Tian Han, see Jarmila Haringova, “The Development of Tian Han’s Dramatic Writing During the Years 1920–­1937,” in Studies in Modern ­Chinese Literature, ed. Jaroslav Prusek (Berlin: Akademie-­ Verlag, 1964), 131–­57; Constantine Tung, “T’ien Han and Romantic Ibsen,” Modern Drama 9, no. 4 (1967): 389–­95, and “Lonely Search into the Unknown: T’ien Han’s Early Plays, 1920–­1930,” Comparative Drama 2 (Spring 1968): 44–­54; Randy Kaplan, “Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han,” Modern Chinese Literature 4, nos. 1–­2 (1988): 87–­98; Lily Hsiao Hung Lee, “Local Colour in Two of T’ien Han’s Early Works,” The Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 15–­16 (1983–­84): 102–­16; Bonnie  S. McDougall, “The Search for Synthesis: T’ien Han and Mao Tun in 1920,” in Search for Identity: Modern Literature and the Creative Arts in Asia, ed. A. R. Davis (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1974), 225–­54; Rudolf G. Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Liang Luo, The Avant-­Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 16. Liang Luo, “Reading Hong Shen Intermedially,” in Liu and Chen, Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China, 209. 17. Tian’s last play was his adaptation of Liang Xin’s 梁信 film The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军) into Peking opera in 1964, which is artistically unsatisfactory, with heavy dialogues, minimal arias, and less poetic appeals. The script can be found in Tian Han quanji, 9:491–­557. 18. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 19. Dong Limin 董丽敏, Hong Shen 洪深 (Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu, 1999), 86. 20. Hong Shen, “Cong Zhongguo de xinxi shuodao huaju—­xu Ma Yanxiang zhu Xiju Gailun” 从中国的新戏说到话剧—­序马彦祥著《戏剧概论》(From China’s new drama to spoken drama: A preface to Ma Yanxiang’s On Drama), in Hong Shen yanjiu zhuanji 洪深研究专集 (A collection of Hong Shen studies), ed. Sun Qingwen 孙青 纹 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, 1986), 133–­45. 21. For a study of the development of an “Age of -­Isms” in Chinese writings to ­create stereotypes and utopian future, see Ivo Spira, A Conceptual History of Chinese -­Isms: The Modernization of Ideological Discourse, 1895–­1925 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010). 22. Hong Shen, “Xiju de rensheng” 戏剧的人生 (A life of drama), in Hong Shen wenji 洪深文集 (Selected works of Hong Shen) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1957), 1:478–­84. 23. For an English translation, see Hong Shen, The Wedded Husband (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2014). The play was produced by Man He under the direction of Steven Siyuan Liu and performed by the Ohio State University theater department in 2013. 24. Hong Shen, “Xiju de rensheng,” 482–­87. [ 300 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent 25. Chen Meiying and Song Baozhen, Hong Shen zhuan, 51–­70. See Hong Shen’s own account, in “Xiju de rensheng,” 487–­88. 26. Siyuan Liu, “Hong Shen and Adaptation of Western Plays in Modern Chinese Theater,” in Liu and Chen, Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China, 107. 27. Weihong Bao, “The Art of Control,” 253–­54. 28. Hong Qian, Zhongguo huaju dianying yundong xianqu Hong Shen 中国话剧电影运动 先驱洪深 (Hong Shen: A pioneer of Chinese spoken drama and the cinematic movement) (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun keji gufen youxian gongsi, 2011), 56. 29. Jiao Shangzhi 焦尚志, Zhongguo huaju yishu shi 中国话剧艺术史 (A history of Chinese spoken drama), vol. 3, ed. Tian Banxiang 田本相 (Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang jiaoyu, 2016), 338. 30. Hong Shen, Wukui Qiao 五奎桥 (Wukui Bridge), in Hong Shen wenji, 1: 221–­22. 31. Hong Shen, “Xiju de rensheng,” 480. 32. Hong Qian, Zhongguo huaju dianying yundong xianqu Hong Shen, 59. 33. Hong Qian, Zhongguo huaju dianying yundong xianqu Hong Shen, 291. 34. Chen Meiying and Song Baozhen, Hong Shen zhuan, 146. 35. Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 309. 36. Hong Shen, “Kangzhan shinian lai Zhongguo de xiju yundong yu jiaoyu” 抗战 十年来中国的戏剧运动与教育 (The Chinese theater movement and education during the ten-­year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression), in Hong Shen wenji 4: 121–­261. 37. Huang Huilin 黄会林, Zhongguo xiandai huaju wenxue shilue 中国现代话剧文学史略 (A concise literary history of modern Chinese spoken drama) (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu, 1990), 206. 38. Hong Shen, “Ai Hongmei” 哀《红梅》(Mourning Red Plum), in Hong Shen wenji 4:309–­10. 39. Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2019), 3. 40. Hong Shen, “Kangzhan shinian lai Zhongguo de xiju yundong yu jiaoyu,” 190–­93. 41. Hong Shen, Daoyan 导言 (Introduction), in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, xiju ji 中国新 文学大系, 戏剧集 (Compendium of modern Chinese literature, drama), ed. Hong Shen (Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935), 1–­99. 42. This page number comparison is based on Cai Yuanpei et al., Zhongguo xin wenxue daxin daolun ji 中国新文学大系导论集 (A collection of prefaces to the Compendium of modern Chinese literature) (Shanghai: Liangyou, 1940). 43. Hong Shen, Daoyan, 20. 44. Hong Shen, Daoyan, 12–­15. 45. Chen Meiying 陳美英, Hong Shen nianpu 洪深年譜 (A chronology of Hong Shen) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1993), 62. 46. Chen Meiying and Song Baozhen, Hong Shen zhuan, 105. 47. Tian Han, “Nanguo Huaju Gu di er ci gongyian yuanyuan jieshao” 南国话剧股第 二次公演演员介绍 (Cast introduction to the second season huaju production of the Southern Drama Society), in Tian Han quanji, 15:31–­32. [ 301 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent 48. Hong Shen, “Shuyu yige shidai de xiju” 属于一个时代的戏剧 (Drama that belongs to an era), in Hong Shen wenji, 1:453. 49. See Cao Yu, Lei Yu xu《雷雨》序 (Preface to Thunderstorm) (Shanghai: Wenhua shenghuo, 1936). Cao wrote to a Japanese director in 1935 about his intention in writing a poetic play without addressing social issues; this explained why Cao scripted a prologue and epilogue that bring his audiences to a remote past with a “distance of appreciation.” The absence of prologue and epilogue has enhanced its “realistic significance” while modifying the colorful aesthetic flavor of the play. See Jiao Shangzhi, Zhongguo xiandai xiju meixue sixiang fazhan shi, 291–­92. For an example of Cao’s subsequent reinterpreting of his play in the PRC period, see the “Preface” to the English translation of Thunderstorm: “As a matter of fact, Thunderstorm is a drama taken from life as it was. Those bitter dark days are gone forever and the play remains only for its historical realism. Every time I recall this, a wave of gladness lifts my heart because my fondest dream at the time when I wrote Thunderstorm is realized today.” Cao Yu, “Preface,” in Cao Yu, Thunderstorm, trans. Wang Tso-­liang and A. C. Barnes (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), and “Leiyu de xiezuo” 雷雨》的写作 (The writing of Thunderstorm), in Cao Yu lun chuangzuo 曹禺论创作 (Cao Yu on dramatic writing) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenji, 1986), 3–­5. 50. Hong Shen, Daoyan, 30–­31. 51. Hong Shen, Daoyan, 32–­33. 52. Dong Naibin 董乃斌, Chen Bohai 陈伯海, and Liu Yangzhong 刘扬忠, eds., Zhongguo wenxue shixue shi 中国文学史学史 (History of the historiography of Chinese literary history) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin, 2003), 78–­82. 53. Sun Qingwen 孙青纹, ed., “Zan Hong Shen zai yishu shang de shouchuang jingshen 赞洪深在艺术上的首创精神 (In praise of Hong Shen’s creative spirit in the arts), in Hong Shen yanjiu zhuanji 洪深研究专集 (A collection of Hong Shen studies) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, 1986), 137–­38. 54. Pan Keming 潘克明, “Qianyan” 前言 (Preface), in Hong Shen daibiao zuo 洪深代 表作 (Best plays of Hong Shen), ed. Pan Keming (Zhengzhou: Huanghe wenyi, 1986), 1. 55. Song Baozhen, Zhongguo huaju shi 中国话剧史 (The history of modern Chinese drama) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2013), 49. 56. Hu Shi translated The Intruder as Wairu 外辱. The play was published in the English journal titled The Nankai Quarterly 南开季刊, issues 1 and 2 (September 1915 to January 1916). See Cui Guoliang 崔国良 and Cui Hong 崔红 et al., eds., Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu 张彭春论教育与戏剧艺术 (Zhang Pengchun on education and dramatic art) (Tianjin: Nankai Daxue, 2003), 333. 57. The Man in Gray originally appeared in English in Overseas Youth in America 留美 青年, published by the American Association of Chinese Christian Students in North America 北美中国学生基督教协会 in March 1915. For a Chinese translation, see Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 372–­76. 58. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 619–­20. 59. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang 二十世纪中国戏剧史 (上) (A history of Chinese theater in the twentieth century), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2016), 1:94. [ 302 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent 60. Tian Benxiang 田本相 and A Ying 阿鹰, Cao Yu nianpu 曹禺年谱 (A chronology of Cao Yu’s life), ed. Beijing Renyi Xiju Bowuguan 北京人艺戏剧博物馆 (Theater Museum of the Beijing People’s Art Theater) (Beijing: Beijing Renyi Xiju Bowuguan, 2010), 25–­26. 61. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 659. 62. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 663; Tian Benxiang and A Ying, Cao Yu nianpu, 29. 63. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 663–­65 and 671–­72. Tian Benxiang and A Ying, Cao Yu nianpu, 29. 64. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang, 1:281. For a study of Zhang Pengchun, see Huang Dianqi 黄殿祺, ed. Huaju zai beifang dianjiren zhi yi Zhang Pengchun 话剧 在北方奠基人之一张彭春 (Zhang Pengchun: One of the founders of huaju in northern China) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1995). 65. Sun Pinghua, “Pengchun Chang’s Contributions to the Drafting of the UDHR,” Journal of Civil & Legal Sciences, 5:5 (2016): 1. 66. Cui Guoliang and Cui Hong, Zhang Pengchun lun jiaoyu yu xiju yishu, 679–­81. 67. Xu Muyun 徐慕云, Zhongguo xiju shi 中国戏剧史 (A history of Chinese drama) (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1938), 134. 68. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang, 1:270. 69. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang, 1:270. 70. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang, 1: 277. 71. Xiaohong Xia, “The Construction of the Modern Chinese Concept of Xiju (‘Drama’),” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, ed. Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 65. 72. For Yu Shangyuan’s achievements in “national theater movement,” see Siyuan Liu 刘思远, “Guoju yundong de xiju shixue yanjiu—­yi Yu Shangyuan de 1922–­ 1926 nian de xiju huodong wei zhongxin” 国剧运动的戏剧史学研究—­以余上沅的 1922–­1926年的戏剧活动为中心 (A historiographical study of the national theater movement: centering on Yu Shangyuan’s theatrical activities in 1922–­1926), Journal of Nanjing University 南京大学学报 2 (2016): 119–­27. 73. Hong Shen, “Wo de dagu shiqi yijing guo le ma?” 我的打鼓时期已经过了吗? (Have I passed the prime time of my theater career?), in Hong Shen wenji, 4:534. 74. Megan Ammirati, “Hong Shen and the ‘Natural Death’ of Female Impersonation: Rethinking the History of Gender-­Appropriate Performance in Huaju,” in Liu and Chen, Hong Shen and the Modern Mediasphere in Republic Era China, 174–­75. 75. For a classic study of early Chinese feminist characters, see Meng Yue 孟悦 and Dai Jinhua 戴锦华, Fuchu lishi dibiao 浮出历史地表 (Emerging from the surface of history) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, 1989). 76. Dong Limin 董丽敏, Hong Shen 洪深, 100–­106 (Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu, 1999). 77. Dong Limin, Hong Shen, 105. 78. Gao Yu 高宇, “Hong Shen—­jutan shang de hei xuanfeng” 洪深—­剧坛上的“黑旋风” (Hong Shen: The “black whirlwind” in the dramatic circle), Portrait Magazine 人物杂志 2 (1948): 20. 79. Davis and Postlewait, Theatricality, 23. 80. Chen Meiying and Song Baozhen, Hong Shen zhuan, 378. [ 303 ]

2. Hong Shen and His Discontent 81. Hong Shen, “Daoyan Faxisi Xijun zi wen lu ji” 导演《法西斯细菌》自问录记 (A record of self-­directed questions with regard to my directing of The Fascist Bacillus), in Hong Shen wenji, 4:338–­39. 82. Hong Shen, “Daoyan Faxisi xijun zi wen lu ji,” 341. 83. Hong Shen, “Daoyan Faxisi xijun zi wen lu ji,” 342. 84. Hong Shen, “Daoyan Faxisi xijun zi wen lu ji,” 343. 85. For English-­language studies of Gao Xingjian, see Kwok-­kan Tam, Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2002), and Todd J. Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For a study of the experimental theater, see Rossella Ferrari, Pop Goes the Avant-­Garde Experimental Theater in Contemporary China (London: Seagull Books, 2012). 86. Gálik, “Hung Shen’s Chao,” 129. 87. Claire Conceison, Review of Pop Goes the Avant-­Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China by Rossella Ferrari (Columbus, OH: MCLC Resource Center, 2016). 88. For Claire Conceison’s introduction and translations of Meng Jinghui’s works, see Meng Jinghui’s I Love XXX and Other Plays (London: Seagull Books, 2017). 89. See Yuwen Hsiung, Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 2013). 90. Xing Fan, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera During the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018), 8.

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 1. For the Chinese text of “Song of War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin,” see Tian Han, “Guilin wenhuajie kangdi gongzuodui duiyuan zhi ge” 桂林文化界抗敌工作 队队员之歌, in Tian Han quanji 田汉全集 (Complete works of Tian Han), 20 vols. (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 11:398–­99. 2. Su Guanxin 苏关鑫, “Ouyang Yuqian zhuanlue” 欧阳玉倩传略 (A brief biography of Ouyang Yuqian), in Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao (Research materials for Ouyang Yuqian studies) 欧阳玉倩研究资料, ed. Su Guanxin (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1992), 11. 3. Anon., “Woguo zhuming yishujia, xijujia, jiaoyujia Ouyang Yuqian Tongzhi shishi,” 我国著名艺术家，戏剧家，教育家欧阳予倩同志逝世 (Ouyang Yuqian, famous artist, dramatist, and educator, has passed away), Theater Gazette 戏剧报 10 (1962): 31–­33. 4. Li Mu 李牧, “Xu” 序 (Preface), in Ouyang Yuqian yibai ershi zhounian danchen jinian 欧阳予倩120周年诞辰纪念, ed. Zhongguo Xijujia Xiehui Lilun Yanjiushi 中国戏剧家 协会理论研究室 (Theory Research Office of the China Theater Association) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2010), 2. 5. Song Baozhen 宋宝珍, “Ouyang Quqian: Shishixing xiju piping de chuangli yu fazhan” 欧阳玉倩: 史诗性戏剧批评的创立与发展 (Ouyang Yuqian: The creation and development of epic theater criticism), in Ouyang Yuqian yibai ershi zhounian danchen jinian, 205–­20. [ 304 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 6. Lu Minzhi 盧敏芝, Tian Han yu Dazheng Dongjing: Gonggong kongjian de wenhua tiyan yu xin nüxing de xinggou 田汉与大正东京: 公共空间的文化体验与新女性的形构 (Tian Han and Tokyo: The cultural experience in the public sphere and the construction of new women in Taisho Japan) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2020), 11–­15. 7. Hong Shen, “Xiju de rensheng” 戏剧的人生 (A life of drama), in Hong Shen wenji 洪深文集(Selected works of Hong Shen), 4 vols. (Beijing: Hongguo xiju, 1957), 1:474–­78. 8. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai” 自我演戏以来 (Since I began acting), in Ouyang Yuqian quanji 欧阳玉倩全集 (Complete works of Ouyang Yuqian), 6 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1990), 6:2. 9. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 44. 10. Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-­Modern China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 48. Based on Ouyang Yuqian’s memoir “Huiyi Chunliu” 回忆 春柳 (Remembering Spring Willow Society), theater history usually regards 1907, the year The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven premiered in Tokyo, as the beginning of huaju. The Spring Willow Society’s earlier premiere of Camille 茶花女 in February 1907, however, was also seen as the beginning, even though others disagreed since it was not a complete production. Huang Aihua pointed out mistakes in Ouyang Yuqian’s memoir based on her original research of local Japanese newspapers. See Huang Aihua 黄爱华, Zhongguo zaoqi huaju yu Riben 中国早期话剧与日本 (Early Chinese spoken drama and Japan) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2001), 40–­69. For the history of the Spring Willow Society’s premiere of  Camille, see Zhong Xinzhi 鍾欣志 and Cai Zhuqing 蔡祝青, “Bainian huigu: Chunliu She Chahuanü xinkao” 百年回顾: 春柳社《茶花女》新考 (Looking back one hundred years: New research on the Spring Willow Society’s premiere of Camille), Taipei Theater Journal 戏剧学刊 8 (2008): 257–­81. They examined local newsletters and playbills published by Chinese overseas students and clarified  Ouyang’s mistaken memory and some of Huang’s misinformation about the location, the size of the theater, and audience reception with valuable photographs. 11. Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-­Modern China, 49. 12. Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-­Modern China, 49. 13. Ouyang Yuqian, “Huiyi Chunliu” 回忆春柳 (Remembering Spring Willow Society), in Ouyang Yuqian quanji, 6:150, 152. 14. Chen Ke 陈珂, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi: Ouyang Yuqian pingzhuan 舞古今长袖 演中外剧诗 欧阳予倩评传 (Dance with long sleeves ancient and present, perform drama and poetry Chinese and foreign: A critical biography of Ouyang Yuqian) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2012), 9–­11. 15. Chen, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi, 20. 16. Hong Shen, Daoyan 导言 (Introduction), in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi, xiju ji 中国新 文学大系, 戏剧集 (Compendium of modern Chinese literature, drama), ed. Hong Shen (Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935), 15. 17. Tian Benxiang 田本相, “Dai xulun” 代绪论 (In place of a preface), in Zhongguo huaju yishushi 中国话剧艺术史 (A history of art in Chinese spoken drama), 9 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang jiaoyu, 2016), 1:6. [ 305 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 18. Wang Yong’en 王永恩, “Jianli xiju biaoyan de xin fanshi—­lun Ouyang Yuqian dui xiju xingshi mei de zhuiqiu” 建立戏剧表现的新范式—­论欧阳予倩对戏剧形式美的 追求 (The formation of a new model for dramatic expression: On Ouyang Yuqian’s search for a formalistic aesthetics in theater), Drama 戏剧 3 (2019): 46–­57. 19. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 86. 20. See Zhou Jun 周隽 and Zhou Xinguo 周新国, “Zhongguo minying qiyejia de xianxian yu kaimo” 中国民营企业家的先贤与楷模 (A pioneer and role model for Chinese private entrepreneurs), Office Administration 秘书工作 12 (2021): 53–­55. See also “Shiyejia Zhang Jian jianjie” 实业家张謇简介 (A brief introduction to Zhang Jian), http://­lishi​.­zhuixue​.­net​/­qingchao​/­29354​.­html. 21. See Wu Xiaobo 吴晓波, “Tan Zhang Jian: yige hen weida de shibai de yingxiong” 谈张謇: 一个很伟大的失败的英雄 (Zhang Jian: A very great but defeated hero), https://­f inance​. ­sina​. ­c om​. c­ n​/­china​/­g ncj​/­2 020​-­11​-­16​/­d oc​-i­ iznezxs2040403​ .­shtml. 22. Wu Xiaobo, “On Zhang Jian.” 23. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 102, note 1. 24. See Zhu Xiaojuan 朱晓娟 and Gu Haitao 顾海涛, “Xiju Da Xiansheng: Ouge kaihuang xingken de weida xianqu” 锡剧《大先生》: 讴歌开荒兴垦的伟大先驱 (Xi opera Great Master: Celebrating a great pioneer in wetland reclamation), Cultural Monthly 文化月刊 12 (2021): 70–­71. 25. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 85. 26. Su Guanxin 苏关鑫, Ouyang Yuqian nianbiao 欧阳玉倩年表 (A chronology of Ouyang Yuqian’s life), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 29. 27. Chen Ke, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi, 134–­35. 28. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, xia 二十世纪中国戏剧史 (下) (A history of Chinese theater in the twentieth century), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2017), 2:8. 29. Chen Ke, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi, 180–­81. 30. Sun Guolin 孙国林, “Mao Zedong ‘gu wei jin yong, yang wei zhong yong’ pishi de lai long qu mai” 毛泽东 “古为今用，洋为中用” 批示的来龙去脉 (The origin of Mao Zedong’s directive of “making the foreign serve China” and “making the ancient serve the present”), https://­www​.k­ unlunce​.c­ om​/j­czc​/m ­ zdsx​/2­ 018​-0­ 3​ -­20​/1­ 23851​.h ­ tml. 31. See Huang Shizhi 黄世智, “Zhongguo xiju chuantong zai Guilin wenhua cheng” 中国戏剧传统在桂林文化城 (Chinese theater tradition in the cultural city of Guilin), Art Exploration 文艺探索 23 (2009): 5–­9. 32. For an informative study of the history of PRC dance culture and dance drama in national and global context, see Emily Wilcox, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 33. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 51. 34. Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian nianbiao, 56. 35. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, shang, 285–­86. 36. Chen Ke, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi, 211. 37. Ouyang Yuqian, “Heinu hen houji” 《黑奴恨》后记 (Postscript to The Hatred of Black Slaves), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 449. [ 306 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 38. Ouyang Yuqian, “Wo yao wei shixian weida de gongchanzhuyi lixiang gong­ xian yiqie 我要为实现伟大的共产主义理想贡献一切 (I want to give it all for the realization of the great communist idealism), in Ouyang Yuqian quanji 6:417–­18. 39. Anon., “Dui zhongzu qishi de kongsu—­Zhongguo Juxie Yiweihui zuotan Heinu Hen”对种族歧视的控诉—­中国剧协艺委会座谈《黑奴恨》(Condemnation of racial discrimination: A seminar on The Hatred of Black Slaves held by the Art Committee of the China Theater Association), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 449. 40. Anon., “Dui zhongzu qishi de kongsu,” 458. 41. Chen Baichen 陈白尘 and Dong Jian 董健, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao 中国现代戏 剧史稿) (A draft history of modern Chinese drama) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989), 653. 42. Chen Baichen and Dong Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao, 140. 43. Wilt L. Idema, “Traditional Dramatic Literature,” in Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 833. 44. For a survey of traditional Chinese drama, see Idema, “Traditional Dramatic Literature,” esp. 826–­35 on chuanqi plays. 45. Judith T. Zeitlin, “Introduction,” in The Peach Blossom Fan, trans. Chen Shih-­ hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch (New York: NYRB Classics, 2015), xi. 46. Translation from C. H. Wang, “The Double Plot of T’ao-­hua shan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 1 (January–­March 1990): 9. 47. Huang Qingquan 黄清泉, “Cong lishi de zhenshi dao yishu de zhenshi—tan Taohua Shan zhong Hou Fangyu de xingxiang” 从历史的真实到艺术的真实—­谈《桃花 扇》中侯方域的形象 (From historical reality to artistic realist representation: On the characterization of Hou Fangyu in The Peach Blossom Fan), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 444–­45. 48. Chen Ke, Wu gu jin chang xiu yan zhong wai ju shi, 48–­50. 49. Ouyang Yuqian, “Taohua Shan xuyan”《桃花扇》序言 (Preface to The Peach Blossom Fan), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 171. 50. Ouyang Yuqian, “Taohua Shan xuyan,” 171. 51. Su Guanxin, “Ouyang Yuqian zhu yi xi nian mulu” 欧阳予倩著译系年目录 (A chronology of Ouyang Yuqian’s works and translations), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 491. 52. Chen Baichen and Dong Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao, 303. 53. Wang Weiguo 王卫国, Song Baozhen 宋宝珍, and Zhang Yaojie 张耀杰, Zhongguo huaju shi 中国话剧史 (History of modern Chinese spoken drama) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1998), 63. 54. Ruo Wu 吴若 and Jia Yidi 贾亦棣, Zhongguo huaju shi 中国话剧史 (History of modern Chinese spoken drama) (Taipei: Xingzhengyuan Wenhua Jianshe Weiyuan­ hui, 1985), 126. 55. Qiu Kunliang 邱坤良, “Funi yu kangdi: Wang Jingwei zhengquan de xiju jie” 附 逆与抗敌: 汪精卫政权的戏剧界 (Betrayal and resistance to the enemy: The drama field under Wang Jingwei’s regime), Drama Research 戏剧研究 1 (2005): 131. 56. Qiu Kunliang, “Funi yu kangdi,” 119. [ 307 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 57. Qiu Kunliang’s article cited works on thriving theater performances in Japanese-­ occupied areas, such as Peking opera star tours in Manchuria and in Nanjing. See Qiu Kunliang, “Funi yu kangdi,” 120–­35. 58. Tian Han wrote the lyrics of “Song of the Graduate” as the theme song for the film The Plunder of Peaches and Plums (桃李劫), directed by and starring Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之 and Chen Bo’er 陈波儿 and produced in 1934 by the Diantong Film Company 电通影片公司. 59. For an informative essay on the history and practice of street theater of the same period, see Xiaobing Tang, “Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art,” Cross-­Currents 18 (2016): 21–­50. 60. He Li 何理, Zhongguo renmin kangri zhanzheng shi 中国人民抗日战争史 (A history of the Chinese people’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 2005), 2. 61. “Huaju jiaoxiang jushi Yutian Renmin Dahuitang jiqing shangyan” 话剧交响剧诗 《吁天》人民大会堂激情上演 (A symphonic play of poetry titled Cry to Heaven passionately performed in the Great Hall of the People), https://­zhidao​.­baidu​.­com​ /­question​/6­ 1594478​.­html. 62. Shiao-­ling Yu, “ ‘Cry to Heaven’: A Play to Celebrate One Hundred Years of ­Chinese Spoken Drama by Nick Rongjun Yu,” Asian Theatre Journal 26, no.  1 (2009): 9. 63. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 16. 64. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zi wo yanxi yilai,” 18. 65. Chen Baichen and Dong Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao, 138–­40. 66. Ouyang Yuqian, “Ouyang Yuqian xuanji qianyan” 《欧阳玉倩选集》前言 (Preface to Selected Works of Ouyang Yuqian), in Su Guanxin, Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 184. 67. For a typical narrative of “the golden period,” see Chen Baichen and Dong Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao, 432. 68. Philip A. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 10:264–317. 69. Shi Shi 史式, “Rang Taiping Tianguo huifu benlai mianmu” 让太平天国恢复本来 面目 (Let Taiping Heavenly Kingdom return to its own historical status), http://­ www​.­aisixiang​.c­ om​/­data​/3­ 3951​.h ­ tml. 70. Shi Shi, “Rang Taiping Tianguo huifu benlai mianmu,” 8. 71. Shi Shi, “Rang Taiping Tianguo huifu benlai mianmu,” 3. 72. Chen Qitong 陈其通, Wan shui qian shan 万水千山 (Ten thousand rivers and mountains), in Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan 中国话剧五十年剧作选 (An anthology of Chinese spoken drama in fifty years), 8 vols., ed. Li Moran 李默然 et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2001), 1:314. 73. Chen Qitong, Wan shui qian shan, 298. 74. Lei Yi 雷颐, “ ‘Tianguo’: Yichang fubai de wutuobang shiyan” “天国”:一场腐败的 乌托邦试验 (Heavenly Kingdom: An experiment in corrupt utopia), Literature and History 文史天地 10 (2017): 16–­17. 75. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” 277. [ 308 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 76. “The Han Chinese” refers to the majority ethnic group, whose emperor was overthrown by the Manchus, an ethnic group from northeastern China that then established the Qing dynasty (1644–­1911). 77. Zhang Daming 張大明 and Pan Guangwu 潘光武, Yang Hansheng pingzhuan 阳翰 笙评传 (A critical biography of Yang Hansheng) (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1998), 157. 78. Chen Baichen, Dadu He 大渡河 (The Dadu River), in Chen Baichen, Chen Baichen wenji 陈白尘文集 (Literary works of Chen Baichen), 8 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenji, 1997), 3:499. 79. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” 294. 80. Yang Hansheng 阳翰笙, Li Xiucheng zhi si 李秀成之死 (The death of Li Xiucheng), in Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi xubian 中国新文学大系续编 (A sequence to Compendium of New Chinese Literature), 10 vols. (Hong Kong: Xianggang Wenxue Yanjiu­ she, 1968), 9:543. 81. Chen Hong 陈虹, Ziyou sui han xin—­Chen Baichen zhuanji 自有岁寒心: 陈白尘传记 (Indomitable integrity: A biography of Chen Baichen) (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin, 2000), 206–­7. 82. In Jiang Tao 姜涛, “Chongdu Li Xiucheng Zishu” 重读《李秀成自述》(Rereading Li Xiucheng’s Self-­Narration), https://­chenboda​.­pixnet​.­net​/­blog​/­post​/­257027936. Qi Benyu argued that he was not encouraged by Mao nor Jiang Qing to write his essay on Li Xiucheng, as other historians claimed, but the rise of Soviet revisionism at the time prompted him to study the issue of traitors; some connected his essay with the subsequent movement to eliminate traitors, but he could not have foreseen it at the time of writing. Qi Benyu, Qi Benyu huiyilu 戚本禹回忆录 (A memoir of Qi Benyu) (Hong Kong: Zhongguo wenge lishi, 2016), 283. 83. Jiang Tao, “Chongdu Li Xiucheng Zishu,” 1. 84. Zhang Daming and Pan Guangwu, Yang Hansheng pingzhuan, 252–­53. 85. A Ying 阿英, Hong Xuanjiao 洪宣娇, in A Ying ju zuo xuan 阿英剧作选 (Selected plays of A Ying) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1980), 413–­15. 86. A Ying, Hong Xuanjiao, 461–­62. 87. Chen Baichen 陈白尘, Jintian Cun 金田村 (Jintian Village), in Chen Baichen wen ji 陈 白尘文集 (Literary works of Chen Baichen), 8 vols. (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi, 1997), 2:320. 88. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” 277. 89. Chen Baichen, Jintian Cun, 333. 90. A Ying, Hong Xuanjiao, 429. 91. Yang Hansheng, Tianguo chunqiu 天国春秋 (The spring and autumn of a divine kingdom), in Zhongguo kangri zhanzheng shiqi da houfang wenxue shuxi 中国抗日战 争时期大后方文学书系 (Selected literary works from the great interior during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, drama), 3 vols., ed. Cao Yu (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1989), 2:750–­52. 92. Kuhn, “The Taiping Rebellion,” 277. 93. Sheng Xunchang 盛巽昌, Taiping Tianguo wenhua daguan 太平天国文化大观 (A cultural survey of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) (Nanning: Guangxi renmin, 2000), 17–­19. 94. Zhang Daming and Pan Guangwu, Yang Hansheng pingzhuan, 248–­51. [ 309 ]

3. Ouyang Yuqian and His Theater Dream 95. Zhang Daming and Pan Guangwu, Yang Hansheng pingzhuan, 258. 96. Zhang Daming and Pan Guangwu, Yang Hansheng pingzhuan, 256–­57. 97. Yang Hansheng, “Yang Hansheng xuanji huaju juben ji zixu” 《阳翰笙选集》话剧 剧本集自序 (Preface to the drama volume of Selected Works of Yang Hansheng), in Yang Hansheng yanjiu ziliao 阳翰笙研究资料 (Research materials for Yang Hansheng studies), ed. Pan Guangwu 潘光武 (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan Wenxue Yanjiusuo, 1992), 304. 98. Yang Hansheng, “Yang Hansheng xuanji huaju jubenji zixu,” 304–­5. 99. Yang Hansheng, “Yang Hansheng xuanji huaju juben ji zixu,” 306. 100. Wang Zhiqiu 王志秋, “Lun Tianguo Chunqiu” 论天国春秋 (On The Spring and Autumn of the Divine Kingdom), in Pan Guangwu, Yang Hansheng yanjiu ziliao, 527. 101. Xian Jihua 洗济华 and Zhao Yunsheng 赵云声, Huaju huangdi Jin Shan zhuan 话剧 皇帝金山传 (A biography of Jin Shan, the emperor of spoken drama) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 1987), 310. 102. For a study of gender politics in Azalea Mountain and its impact on postsocialist society, see Nicole Huang, “Azalea Mountain and Later Mao Culture,” The Opera Quarterly 26, nos. 2–­3 (2010): 402–­25. 103. Wu opera is a regional genre popular around Jinhua city 金华 and its surrounding areas in Zhejiang Province. 104. See Li Qian 李倩, “Qiannian fudi: Taiping Tianguo Shiwang Fu de qianshi jin­ sheng” 千年府地：太平天国侍王府的前世今生 (The palace of a thousand years: The past and present of the Palace of the Attendant King), https://­z j​.­z jol​.­com​ .­cn​/­news​/­1199297​.­html. 105. Jiang Chaogao 姜朝皋, Meng duan Wujiang 梦断婺江 (Dreams dashed at the Wu River), Drama Script 剧本 3 (2005): 67. The opera was first performed by the Wu Opera Troupe of Zhejiang Province 浙江婺剧团 in 2004. 106. Central China Television, “Difang xi zhichuang” 地方戏之窗 (Featuring local operas), aired on November  14, 2004, http://­w ww​.­cctv​.­com​/­program​/­d fxzc​ /­20061114​/1­ 02709​.­shtml. 107. See Liu Guicheng 刘桂成, “Dute gexing dashi fengcai guiju Ouyang Yuqian chuangzhuo gantan” 独特个性 大师风采 桂剧《欧阳予倩》创作感谈 (Unique personalities and master style: Afterthought on writing the gui opera Ouyang Yuqian), Drama Script 剧本 2 (2010): 67–­68. 108. Liu Guicheng, “Dute gexing dashi fengcai guiju Ouyang Yuqian chuangzhuo gantan.” 109. See Tan Long 覃珑, Wei Zheng 韦征, and Lai Huiyun 赖慧云, “Guan guiju Ouyang Yuqian yougan 观桂剧《欧阳予倩》有感 (Afterthought on watching the gui opera Ouyang Yuqian), in Ouyang Yuqian yibai ershi zhounian danchen jinian 欧阳予倩120 周年诞辰纪念 (Commemorating the 120th  birthday of Ouyang Yuqian), ed. Zhongguo Xijujia Xiehui Lilun Yanjiushi 中国戏剧家协会理论研究室 (Theory Research Office of China Theater Association) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2009), 169–­72. The article revealed that one thousand people were in the audience of the opera’s premiere, and many were invited as members or VIPs from the democratic parties. 110. “Ouyang Yuqian, rang guiju suxing” 《欧阳予倩》, 让桂剧苏醒 (Ouyang Yuqian: Gui opera revived), https://­w ww​.d ­ dgx​.­cn​/­show​/­1799​.­html. [ 310 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? 111. “Ouyang Yuqian, rang guiju suxing.” 112. Marvin Carlson, Performance (London: Routledge, 1996), 187–­88. 113. Carlson, Performance, 188.

4. Is Socialism Good? 1. Composed by Xi Yang 希扬, with lyrics by Li Huanzhi 李焕之, the song was performed again in 2011 during a concert to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the PRC’s founding, as well as many times thereafter. See Meng Hong 孟红, “Gequ ‘Shehui zhuyi hao’ wenshi shimo” 歌曲《社会主义好》问世始末 (The birth story of “Socialism Is Good”), Literary Circle of CCP History 党史文苑 10 (2020): 47–­49. 2. Tian Han, “Zeng Sichuan Sheng Geming Canfei Junren Jiaoyang Yuan Keyu Yanchu Dui” 赠四川省革命残废军人教养院课余演出队 (To the Amateur Performance Team of the Revolutionary Disabled Soldiers Care Center in Sichuan), in Tian Han quanji (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 12:191. 3. Fu Jin, Ershishiji Zhongguo xiju shi, xia 二十世纪中国戏剧史 (下) (A history of Chinese theater in the twentieth century), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2017), 2:2. 4. Yu Cong 余从 and Wang Ankui 王安葵, eds., Zhongguo dangdai xiqu shi 中国当代戏 曲史 (A history of contemporary Chinese opera) (Beijing: Xueyuan, 2005), 10. 5. For Tian Han’s account on Liu Baoluo, who died during a dress rehearsal of a wartime play when an actor accidentally killed him with a loaded gun, see Tian Han, “Guanyu Liu Baoluo” 关于刘保罗 (About Liu Baoluo), in Tian Han quanji, 20:570–­71. 6. Xiao Shu 笑蜀, ed., Xinhua Ribao, Jiefang Ribao shelun xuan: Lishi de xiansheng—­bange shiji qian de zhuangyan chengnuo 新华日报, 解放日报社论选: 历史的先声─半个世纪 前的庄严承诺 (Selected editorials of New China Daily and Liberation Daily: Voice of history—­solemn promises made half a century ago) (Shantou: Shantou Daxue, 1999). 7. For CCP’s policy on the “new democratic China” and its long-­term effect on ­literary work, see Lianfen Yang, “The ‘Red Classic’ That Never Was,” in The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, ed. Rosemary Roberts and Li Li (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press 2018), 7–­8. 8. Roberts and Li, The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics, ix. 9. Richard King, Milestones on a Golden Road (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 3. 10. Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds., Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2016), 2. 11. Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitism: The Literary Universe, 1945–­1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 6. 12. Roberts and Li, The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics, 3. 13. The April Fifth movement was triggered by a protest against the government  suppression of public mourning of Zhou Enlai. It was declared a [ 311 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? counterrevolutionary riot but was rehabilitated as a revolutionary mass movement against the Gang of Four in 1978. For theater productions reflecting this movement, see Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 197–­215. See Wang Chenyang 王晨阳, “Xin shiji yilai ‘Siwu’ yundong yanjiu zongshu” 新世纪以来“四五”运动研究综述 (Research summary of the April Fifth movement in the 21st century), Party History Overview 2 党史博采 (下) 7 (2021): 36–­37, 61. See also Zong Fuxian 宗福先, “Yu wu sheng hu sishi nian” 《于无声处》 四十年 (Forty years after the premiere of In the Land of Silence), Shanghai Literature 上海文学 7 (2018): 85–­98. Zong’s essay confirms my point in Acting the Right Part that his play partially led to the official rehabilitation of the April Fifth movement. Zhong recalled that Chen Yun 陈云 mentioned the play as popular support for rehabilitation during a CCP Central Committee Working Conference (中央工作会议), 93. 14. Gao 高皋, Hou Wenge shi 后文革史 (A history of the post–­Cultural Revolution era) (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1993), 26. 15. Yang Lianfen, “The Red Classic That Never Was: Wang Lin’s Hinterland,” in Roberts and Li, The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics, 12. 16. Yang Lianfen, “The Red Classic That Never Was,” 13. 17. Zhang Fan 张帆 and Wang Su 王甦, “Chengqing youguan huaju Chaguan shi ruhe dansheng de e chuan” 澄清有关话剧《茶馆》是如何诞生的讹传 (Clarifying the inaccurate accounts of the origins of Teahouse), Literature Gazette 文艺报, July 9, 2017. See also Tang Ying 唐莹, “Changuan wenxueben yanbian yanjiu《茶馆》文 学本演变研究 (A study of the evolution of Teahouse’s script), One Hundred Schools of Prose (Theory) 散文百家 (理论), 11 (2021): 25. 18. See “1954 nian xin Zhongguo diyi bu xianfa” 1954 年新中国第一部宪法 (The 1954 first constitution of new China), https://­news​.­ifeng​.­com​/­special​/­60nianjiaguo​ /­60biaozhirenwu​/­renwuziliao​/­200908​/­0812​_­7766​_­1299044​.­shtml. 19. Zhang Jishun 张济顺, Yuanqu de dushi: 1950 niandai de Shanghai 远去的都市: 1950年 代的上海 (A city displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wen­ xian, 2015), 118. 20. Ke Ying 克莹 and Li Ying 李颖, eds., Lao She de huaju yishu 老舍的话剧艺术 (The dramatic art of Lao She) (Beijing: Wenhu yishu, 1982), 73–­74. 21. Zhang Fan and Wang Su, “Chengqing youguan huaju Chaguan shi ruhe dan­ sheng de e chuan.” 22. Zhang Fan and Wang Su, “Chengqing youguan huaju Chaguan shi ruhe dan­ sheng de e chuan.” 23. One exception was Li Liuyi’s adaptation of Teahouse in Sichuan dialect in 2007. See Megan Ammariti, “Spoken Drama in the Twenty-­First Century: Li Liuyi’s Sichuan-­dialect Adaptation of Teahouse,” https://­u.​­osu​.­edu​/­mclc​/­online​-­series​ /­a mmirati/. 24. Liu Liexiong 刘烈雄, “Jiao Juyin—­chuangjian zhongguo daoyan xuepai de xiju dashi” 焦菊隐—­创建中国导演学派的戏剧大师 (Jiao Juxin: A theater master who established the Chinese directing school), in Zhongguo shi da xiju daoyan dashi 中 国十大戏剧导演大师 (Ten Chinese master directors), ed. Liu Liexiong (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 2005), 8–­11. [ 312 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? 25. Hu Zhiyi 胡志毅 and Zhou Jingbo 周靖波, Zhongguo huaju yishu shi 中国话剧艺术史 (A history of art in modern spoken drama), ed. Tian Benxiang 田本相 (Nanjing: Jiangsu fenghuang jiaoyu, 2016), 5:177–­78. 26. Hu Zhiyi and Zhou Jingbo, Zhongguo huaju yishu shi, 178. 27. Liu Liexiong, “Jiao Juyin,” 15. 28. Ke Ying and Li Ying, Lao She de huaju yishu, 394. 29. Weijie Song, Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 73. 30. Song, Mapping Modern Beijing, 75. 31. Song, Mapping Modern Beijing, 70. 32. In “Chaguan jin wuban, zhe bu zhi de shensi ma?” 《茶馆》仅五版，这不值得深 思吗？(Only five versions of Teahouse: Should this invite our critical reflection?)” http://­epaper​.b ­ jnews​.c­ om​.­cn​/h ­ tml​/2­ 019​-1­ 1​/­21​/­content​_­771724​.­htm. The article summarized Lao She’s daughter, Shu Ji’s 舒济, evaluations of all five productions regarding changes in directing, stage design, and acting style throughout the sixty-­one years since its premiere in 1958. 33. See Li Moran 李默然 et al., eds., Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan 中国话剧五 十年剧作选 (An anthology of Chinese spoken drama in fifty years), 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2001), vols. 1 and 2. 34. For an excellent study of theater reform from the 1950s to early 1960s, see Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021). 35. The film Fang Zhenzhu, directed by Xu Changlin 徐昌霖, was produced by the Daguangming Film Studio 大光明影业公司 in 1952. It preserves realistic street scenes and storylines mostly faithful to the historical past. 36. Lu Xiaoning, “Intermedial Laughter: Hou Baolin and Xiangsheng Dianying in Mid-­ 1950s China,” in Maoist Laughter, ed. Ping Zhu, Zuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), 88. I cite the English translation of the film, Wandering in the Zoo, Waking from a Dream, from Lu, “Intermedial Laughter,” 73. Lu explains that the title satirized a man breaking rules while visiting a zoo in Beijing, playing on a pun on “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” in a classic drama, 81. 37. For the script of this play, see Yang Huasheng 杨华生 et al., Youpai baichou tu 右 派百丑图 (A portrait of one hundred rightist clowns) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, 1958). A playbill of this play with character list be found at http://­blog​.­sina​ .­com​.­cn​/­s​/­blog​_ ­593bbc120100hfp2​.­html. 38. Xia Yan 夏衍, Lan xun jiu meng lu 懒寻旧梦录 (Lazily searching for old dreams) (Beijing: Sanlian, 1985), 167. 39. Rudolf G. Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 74–­76. 40. Fang Chu 方楚, “Tan huaju Shisanling shuiku changxiang qu” 谈话剧《十三陵水库畅 想曲》(On the spoken drama The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir), Theater Gazette 戏剧报 13 (1958): 35. 41. Tian Han, Shisanling Shuiku changxiang qu 十三陵水库畅想曲 (The Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir), in Tian Han quanji, 6:310. The stage set of this production did not include these items listed in Tian Han’s script; see figure 4.2. [ 313 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? 42. Guo Yuqiong 郭玉琼, “Zhishi fengzi ziwo lixiang de gaoyang yu shiluo—­Tian Han 1958 nian changzhuo zhong zhishi fengzi xingxiang bijiao” 知识分子自我理想的 高扬与失落—­田汉1958年创作中知识分子形象比较 (The rise and fall of intellectuals’ idealistic self: Comparing the images of intellectuals in Tian Han’s 1958 plays), Dramatic Literature 戏剧文学, 11 2007): 62. 43. Hu Decai 胡德才, “Lun 1950 niandai dumu huaju chuangzuo chao” 论1950年代独 幕话剧创作潮 (On the creative wave of one-­act plays in the 1950s), Journal of Hainan Normal University 海南师范学院学报, 4 (2005): 34. 44. Hu Decai, “Lun 1950 niandai dumu huaju chuangzuo chao,” 31. 45. I thank Zhen Zhang for the reference of the Russian titles. For more discussion on this topic, see Douwe Wessel Fokkema, Literary Doctrine in China and Soviet Influence, 1956–­1960 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 73 and 100. 46. For a succinct account of Liu Binyan’s career, see Leo Ou-­fan Lee, “Introduction,” in Liu Binyan, People or Monster, ed. Perry Link (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), ix–­x vii. For a better understanding of powerful intellectuals in the 1950s and their transformation in the post-­Mao years, see Liu Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, trans. Zhu Hong (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). 47. Zhang Jian, 张健, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun 中国现代喜剧史论 (A critical history of modern Chinese comedy) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 2006), 14. 48. Zhang Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun, 14. 49. Zhang Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun, 18. 50. Zhang Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun, 17–­19. 51. Zhang Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun, 20–­21. 52. Edward M. Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937– 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 231. 53. Amy D. Dooling, “Yang Jiang’s Wartime Comedies; Or, The Serious Business of Marriage,” in China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters, ed. Christopher Rea (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2015), 14. 54. Gunn, Unwelcome Muse, 238. 55. Wang Shaoyan’s book Unofficial Stories of a Director was first published in 1957 by the New Art Publisher 新文艺出版社, the year that launched the Anti-­Rightist movement, during which Wang’s collection of satirical plays became an immediate target of the CCP. My citations of all the plays by Wang Shaoyan are from their reprints in Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju 王少燕与讽刺喜剧 (Wang Shaoyan and satirical comedy), ed. Wang Yilong 王益龙, Wang Yiling 王益玲, and Wang Yipeng 王益鹏 (Beijing: Zuojia, 2017). 56. Written in 1955, Rotten Grapes was first published as a book in 1956 by the Writer’s Publishing House 作家出版社, which included a stage photo of the performance by the Wuhan People’s Art Theater 武汉人民艺术剧院, a rare find since Wang wrote five one-­act satirical comedies in two years (1955–­1957) that were quickly performed and then criticized, so that few records were preserved. 57. Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 89. For a study of Wang Shaoyan’s satirical comedies in the context of other satirical plays, such as He Qiu 何求’s The Arrival of New Bureau Chief (新局长到来之前, first performed in 1956 by the China Youth Art Theater), Lao She’s Look West at Chang’an (西望长安, also first performed in 1956 by the China Youth Art Theater), [ 314 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? and critical debates on the genre, see Xu Yaqian 徐亚茜, “ ‘Shiqi nian’ fengci xiju de jieshou yanjiu” “十七年”讽刺喜剧的接受研究 (A study of the reception of satirical comedies during the “seventeen years”), MA thesis, Yangzhou University 扬州大学, 2015. 58. Textual analysis of A Patient with Free Coverage was based on the reprint of the play in Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 210–­30. 59. I thank Wu Fengyuan 吴风媛 for a copy of her book Qu shu liu hen—­Fengyuan yu Guotao xiju rensheng 氍毹留痕—­凤媛与国涛戏剧人生 (Leaving marks on stage: Fengyuan and Guotao’s theatrical life) (Beijing: Renmin meishu, 2016), 59, and her permission to reprint figure 4.3. In my interview with him, Wang Shao­ yan’s son Wang Yipeng 王益鹏 confirmed that this was the first time his family had seen a stage photo of Wang Shaoyan’s plays, since his scripting career was very brief and was followed by twenty-­t wo years of exile. 60. See Yu Lin 余林, et al., eds., Zhongguo Qingnian Yishu Juyuan 中国青年艺术剧院 (The China Youth Art Theater), for the first publication to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the China Youth Art Theater. The second publication, titled Bange shiji de wutai licheng—­Zhongguo Qinnian Yishu Juyuan, 1949–­1999 半个世纪的舞台历程—­中国青年艺术剧院, 1949–­1999 (A half-­century of progress on the stage: China Youth Art Theatre), ed. Zhang Jianzhong 张健钟 (n.p., n.d.). 61. Lao She’s Mianzi wenti 面子问题 (The issues of “face”) can be found in Lao She xuanji 老舍选集 (Selected works of Lao She), 5 vols. (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 1986), 1–­87. 62. In Nan nü qing chang 男女情长 (Loving son and daughter), in Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 243. 63. Edward M. Gunn, “Chen Baichen, Luanshi nan nü” 乱世男女 (Men and women in wild times, 1939), in A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900–­1949, 4 vols., ed. Bernd Eberstein (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 4:79. 64. In Chunguang mingmei 春光明媚 (Beautiful spring), in Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 166–­70. 65. In Qiang 墙 (Wall), in Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 249. Wall was first published in the July issue of Red Crag (红岩) in 1957. As soon as the play was published, the journal had no choice but to publish several essays attacking the play as antiparty. Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 87. 66. Wang Yilong, Wang Yiling, and Wang Yipeng, Wang Shaoyan yu fengci xiju, 255. 67. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 43. 68. See John B. Weinstein, “Ding Xilin and Chen Baichen: Building a Modern Theater Through Comedy,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 92–­130. 69. Zhang Jian, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shilun, 207. 70. Hua Ren 华仁, ed., Sange juben ershinian zhenglun 三个剧本 二十年争论 (Three plays and their debates over twenty years) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989), reprints Joys and Sorrows and two other “fourth kind of plays” and critical reviews surrounding its controversy. It also includes a report of a seminar held in 1981, which praised Yue Ye’s play as having dared to focus on love, marriage, and personal [ 315 ]

4. Is Socialism Good? emotions, subjects still not handled well even at the time of the seminar. See 400–­401. 71. Drama critics praised Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana for its mature and successful depiction of Chinese peasants. For an English translation, see Jin Yun 锦云, Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, trans. Ying Ruocheng 殷若成 (Beijing: China Translation & Publishing Corp., 1991).

5. The Tales of the Wives 1. See Jin Zhong 金中, “Geju Jiang Jie wenshi qianhou” 歌剧《江姐》问世前后 (A birth story of the folk opera Sister Jiang), Fujian Party History Monthly 福建党史月刊 7 (2010): 13–­15. 2. See Amy D. Dooling, “Desire and Disease: Bai Wei and the Literary Left of the 1930s,” in Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature, ed. Charles Laughlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 51–­60. For Bai Wei and feminism, see Jianmei Liu, “Feminizing Politics: Reading Bai Wei and Lu Yin,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 5, no.  2 (2002): 55–­80. For an English translation of Bai Wei’s play by Paul B. Foster, see Xiaomei Chen, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 95–­157. 3. Kwok-­kan Tam, ed., Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 40–­41. 4. For plays on Jiang Qing and other wives of Mao, see Xiaomei Chen, ed., Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 18–­28, and Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 288–­95. For a revisionist study of Jiang as an artist and a woman apart from politicization of her as a negative woman, see Mei Li Inouye, “Performing Jiang Qing (1914–­ 1991),” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2020. For research on Jiang both on political and artistic ground, see Gu Yizhong, “The Myth of Voluntary Death,” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2017. 5. For an informative study of the Western origins and Chinese theoretical debates on The White-­Haired Girl, see Max  L. Bohnenkamp, “Neither Western Opera, Nor Old Chinese Theater,” in Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Rethinking Performance Practice and Debates in the Maoist Period, ed. Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Chun, and Siyuan Liu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 34–­60. 6. Wang Yuan-­chien (Wang Yuanjian) 王愿坚, “Party Membership Dues,” trans. George Cheng, in Literature in the People’s Republic of China, ed. Kai-­yu Hsu and Ting Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 141. 7. Wang Yuan-­chien, “Party Membership Dues,” 148. 8. See Deng Xuefeng 邓雪峰 and Kan Yanhua 阚延华, “You Zhu De zuihou yibi dangfei yinfa de sikao” 由朱德最后一笔党费引发的思考 (Thoughts on Zhu De’s last party membership dues), Party History Overview (Theory) 党史博采 (理论) 10 (2011): 14. [ 316 ]

5. The Tales of the Wives 9. Chen Sihe 陈思和, ed., Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi jiaocheng 中国当代文学史教程 (A textbook of contemporary Chinese literary history) (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue, 1999), 13. 10. Wang Yuan-­chien, “Party Membership Dues,” 142. 11. Wang Shuzeng 王树增, Changzheng 长征 (The Long March) (Beijing: Beijing renmin, 2006), 62. For an authoritative account of the unheard difficulties during the Long March, see esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 12. Wang Shuzeng, Changzheng, 62. 13. Wang Yuan-­chien, “Party Membership Dues,” 142. 14. Wang Yuan-­chien, “Party Membership Dues,” 142–­44. 15. See “Wenge qijian bei dingwei ducao ji you yanzhong cuowu yingpian sibai bu” 文革期间被定为毒草及有严重错误影片四百部 (400 poisonous-­weed films and films with serious errors attacked during the Cultural Revolution), https://­w ww​ .­douban​.­com​/­doulist​/­121091040​/­​?­s,douban​.­com​/­doulist​/­121091040​/­​?­start​=­25​ &­sort​=­seq​&­playable​= ­0​&­su. For an eyewitness account of Jiang Qing’s intrusion into the fields of literature, theater, and film as Mao’s wife, with absolute power, see Chen Pixian 陈丕显, Chen Pixian huiyi lu 陈丕显回忆录 (A memoir by Chen Pixian) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1994), 1–­54. 16. See Wang Qiangen 王泉根, “Li Xintian yu Shanshan de Hongxing” 李心田与《闪闪 的红星》(Li Xintian and The Shining Red Star), Literature Gazette 文艺报, July 22, 2019. 17. Lyrics by Jiao Ping 焦萍 and music by Jian Er 践耳. For the creation story, see Li Jianhua 李建华, “Changzhe shange gei dang ting” 唱支山歌给党听 (Singing a mountainous song for the Party), Little Musician 琴童 6 (2021): 16–­17. 18. Quoted from the film The Shining Red Star, directed by Li Ang 李昂 and produced by the August First Film Studio 八一电影制片厂 in 1974. 19. Released in 1975, A Golden Road was collectively adapted by Hao Ran’s novel of the same title, directed by Lin Nong 林农 and Sun Yu 孙羽 and produced by Changchun Film Studio 长春电影制片厂, 1975. 20. In Wang Yu 王煜, “Bainian fanghua, hongse langman” 百年芳华，红色浪漫 (Fragrance from hundred years of red romance), Xinmin Weekly 新民周刊11 (2021), 8–­12. 21. Yuan Chengliang 袁成亮, “Hongse jingdian Shanshan de Hongxing dansheng ji” 红色经典《闪闪的红星》诞生记 (The birth story of the red classic The Shining Red Star), Party History Overview 党史纵览 11 (2007): 53–­55. For a clip of the bamboo raft scene and accompanying song, see https://­3g​.­163​.­com​/v­ ​/­video​/­VQUVN2L9U​ .­html. 22. The storyline of the father was originally in Li Xintian’s 1972 story. 23. The film director and scriptwriters deleted childlike behavior in the original story and raised Dongzi’s status as a perfect character, known as “tall, big, and perfect” 高、大、全, in order to pass the censors during the Cultural Revolution. See Yuan Chengliang, “Hongse jingdian Shanshan de Hongxing dansheng ji.” 24. See Deng Yingxuan 邓颖璇, “Shanghai Gewu Tuan geming lishi ticai wuju chuangzuo yanjiu” 上海歌舞团革命历史题材舞剧创作研究 (A study of revolutionary historical dance drama performed by Shanghai Song and Dance Theater), MA thesis, Nanjing Art Academy 南京艺术学院, 2020, 13. [ 317 ]

5. The Tales of the Wives 25. See Zuo Ming 左明, “Huaiju Dangde nü’er” 淮剧《党的女儿》(Huaiju The Daughter of the Party), Theater Gazette 戏剧报 9 (1958): 24–­25. 26. Can Ruo 灿若, “Dang de nü’er de de he shi” 《党的女儿》的得和失 (The pros and cons of The Daughter of the Party), Shanghai Drama 上海戏剧 5 (1991): 35. 27. Yan Su 阎肃, Wang Jian 王俭, He Dongjiu 何东久, and Wang Shou 王受 Dang de nü’er 党的女儿 (The daughter of the party), Drama Script 剧本5 (1992): 4–­17, 3, 13. 28. Yan Su et al., Dang de nü’er, 17. 29. Yan Su et al., Dang de nü’er, 13. 30. Yan Su et al., Dang de nü’er, 13. 31. In “Xi Jinping Peng Liyuan de aiqing gushi” 习近平彭丽媛的爱情故事 (The love story between Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan), https://­w ww​.­roselove​.­com​/­huayu​ /­45728​.h ­ tml. 32. Lyrics from the film adapted from the opera; filmscript by Shi Han 石汉, directed by Feng Yifu 冯一夫, Hua Chun 华纯, and Li Yuwu 李育五, and produced by the Shanghai Film Studio 上海电影制片厂 in 1958. 33. Zhu Anping 朱安平, “Hong Xia shi zhi xiang shou”《红霞》矢志相守 (Hong Xia ­forever together), Party History Overview (Historical Record) 党史博采（纪实) 6 (2016): 58. 34. Zhang Chengwan 張程万, “Zhe shou ge quefa geming yingxiong zhuyi jingshen” 这首歌缺乏革命英雄主义精神 (This song is insufficient in revolutionary heroic spirit), People’s Music 人民音乐 10 (1960): 20. 35. Zhu Anping, “Hong Xia shi zhi xiang shou.” 36. Xie Xiaodi 谢晓娣, “Minzu geju juechang changduan xiangguan wenti yanjiu” 民族歌剧绝唱唱段相关问题研究 (A study of the final aria and related issues in national folk operas), National Music 民族音乐 1 (2018): 4–­6. 37. In Mu Lai 木兰, Kaiguo shi daqiang zhi mi 开国十大将之谜 (The riddles of ten senior generals who founded the PRC) (Beijing: Zhongguo dang’an, 1995), 366–­68. 38. Mu Lai, Kaiguo shi daqiang zhi mi, 396–­401. 39. Both folk opera and the opera film of Sister Jiang followed the same explanation of Fu Zhigao’s questionable intension to join the CCP. See Luo Guangbin 罗广斌 and Yang Yiyan 杨益言, Hongyan 红岩 (Red crag) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian, 1997), 139–­40. 40. For a summary of five generations of Sister Jiang’s performances, and especially the style and reception of the fifth generation, see Liu Xia 刘霞, “Di wu dai Jiang Jie de yanchang tedian yu jiaose fenxi” 第五代《江姐》的演唱特点与角色分析 (An analysis of singing style and character creation in the fifth-­generation production of Sister Jiang), MA thesis, Shanxi Normal College 山西师范学院, 2016. 41. In Aili Dongguo Xiansheng 东郭先生, “Mianhuai Fu Zhigao” 缅怀甫志高 (Cherishing the memory of Fu Zhigao), http://­w ww​.­360doc​.­com​/­content​/­10​/­1025​/­12​ /­100814​_­63816015​.s­ html. 42. “Fu Zhigao shi ge hao laogong” 甫志高是个好老公 (Fu Zhigao is a good husband), http://­w ww​.­douban​.­com​/­note​/­120500782/. 43. Cited from Wang Kai 汪凯, “Guanyu Jiang Jie Shen Yangzhai de biaoyan tanxi” 关于《江姐》沈养斋的表演探析 (On the acting style of Shen Yangzhai in Sister Jiang), Bright Moon Fashion 明月风尚 14 (2018): 306. Wang’s quotations are the same as they appear in 1978 film version scripted by Yan Su 阎肃 and directed by Huang Zumo 黄祖模 and Fan Lai 范莱. [ 318 ]

5. The Tales of the Wives 44. This is a summary of Shen Yangzhai’s stage lines from the 1978 film version, both in dialogue and singing passages. Later productions in the twenty-­first century preserved this key passage but acting style changed over time. 45. Wang Kai, “Guanyu Jiang Jie Shen Yangzhai de biaoyan fenxi,” 306. 46. Li Li, “How to Tell a Story of Imprisonment: Ideology, Truth, and Melodramatic Body in the Making of Red Crag,” in The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, ed. Rosemary A. Roberts and Li Li (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018), 57. 47. For a museum in Chongqing built on the original site of the newspaper and the historical figures Red Crag was based on, see “Tingjin Bao Jiuzhi Chenlieguan jianzheng Chen Ran de geming sueyue” 《挺进报》旧址陈列馆见证陈然的革命岁月 (The Museum of the March Forward Newsletter witnesses the revolutionary years of Chen Ran), http://­w ww​.­cq​.­xinhuanet​.­com​/­2021​-­06​/­07​/c­ ​_­1127536191​.­htm. 48. Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hongyan, 92, 388, 598, 641–­42. 49. Rosemary A. Roberts, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Rediscovering Heroes of the ‘Red Classics’ in Lianhuanhua of the Reform Era,” in Roberts and Li, The Making and Remaking of China’s Red Classics, 115–­35. 50. Zhang Jun 张均, “Hongyan zhong de pantu xingxiang Fu Zhigao yuanxing kao” 《红岩》中的叛徒形象甫志高原型考 (Research on the historical figures Fu Zhigao’s character was based on), Modern Chinese Literature Studies 中国现代文学研究丛刊 10 (2016): 89. 51. Zhang Jun, “Hongyan zhong de pantu xingxiang Fu Zhigao yuanxing kao,” 89. 52. Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hongyan, 144. 53. Wang Weiling 王维玲, Hua shuo Hongyan 话说《红岩》(On Red Crag) (Beijing: Huashan wenyi, 2000), 28–­29. 54. Wang Weiling, Hua shuo Hongyan, 84. 55. Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hongyan, 433. 56. Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hongyan, 212. 57. Wang Weiling, Hua shuo Hongyan, 122. 58. Wang Weiling, Hua shuo Hongyan, 168–­70. 59. Wang Weiling, Hua shuo Hongyan, 171. 60. In “Jiang Jie zengjia pantu xi” 《江姐》增加叛徒戏 (Sister Jiang added more stories on traitors), http://­y ule​.s­ ohu​.c­ om​/2­ 0100730​/n ­ 273877288​.s­ html. 61. Zhang Jun 张均, “Hongyan zhong de pantu xingxiang Fu Zhigao yuanxing kao,” 91. 62. See “Jiang Jie ganqing xi yinqi zhengyi” 《江姐》情感戏引起争议 (A love triangle story in the television drama Sister Jiang triggered debate), http://­ent​.­sina​.­com​ .­cn​/x ­ /​ 2­ 010​- 0­ 8​- 0­ 7​/0­ 1493043288​.s­ html. 63. Zhang Junguo 张俊国, “Xiantan geren fengge de xingcheng yinsu” 浅谈个人风格 的形成因素 (On the formation of individual style), Popular Literature and Art 大众 文艺 2 (2014): 269. 64. The lyrics of “Wo de fulao xiongdi” 我的父老兄弟 (My fellow countrymen) by Shi Shunyi 石顺义, composed by Wang Xiren 王锡仁, can be found at https://­geci​ .­d777​.c­ om​/d ­ TMbcKb8B. 65. “Chuanwan na xie nian xi shu Peng Liyuan” 春晚那些年细数彭丽媛 (Yearly account of Peng Liyuan style in her performance at Spring Festival Gala throughout the [ 319 ]

5. The Tales of the Wives years), https://­baike​.­baidu​.­com​/­reference​/2­ 946619​/­c3557gzKHERlAfPI3clNWW uXqaCtasiBFKrS0P1HUe5Cj35BYKCoQP​-­T XqMBb40XwYLE3​-­N0bFJnkEpvLt7hi h5Lr1BNI6i0hQUgltKwm8Yf. 66. “Chuanwan na xie nian xi shu Peng Liyuan.” 67. For media reports of Peng Liyuan’s charisma, fashion, grace, and talent as the first lady of the world stage, see Zhou Hang 周航, “Zhongguo zhengzhi renwu baodao de xin bianhua” 中国政治人物报道的新变化 (New changes in media reports of Chinese political figures), Journal of Communication 新闻传播 1 (2014): 54–­55. 68. For changing representations of Jiang Qing on television drama and film, see Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution, 290–­95.

6. “The Song of the Geologists” 1. “The Song of the Geologists” 地质队员之歌 was composed by Xiao He 晓河, with lyrics by Tong Zhixian 佟志贤. It has another title, “The Song of Prospecting Team” 勘探队员之歌. I use the former, since that was the Chinese title used in the three plays of geologists discussed in this chapter. 2. In Yang Zhen 杨振, “Xinhuo xiangchuan: Sandai dizhi ren de xiangguo meng” 薪火相传 三代地质人的强国梦 (Three generations of geologists continued the dream of a strong nation), https://­w ww​.­cgs​.­gov​.­cn​/­ddztt​/c­ gs100​/­z hengwen​ /­201611​/­t20161121​_­417242​.­html. 3. “The Song of the Geologists” was collected in Zhandi xin ge 战地新歌 (New songs of the battlefield), ed. Guowuyuan wenhuazu geming gequ zhengji xiaozu 国务 院文化组革命歌曲征集小组 (Collecting team of revolutionary songs at the ­c ultural group of the State Council), 2 vols. (Beijing: Renmin, 1973). For an informative study on the impact of New Songs of the Battlefield during and after the Cultural Revolution, see Lei X. Ouyang, Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022). 4. “Quanguo Zhishi Fengzi Wenti Huiyi xianqi xiang kexue jinjun rechao” 全国知 识分子问题会议 掀起向科学进军热潮 (The convenience of the National Conference on the Issue of Intellectuals resulted in a wave of marching toward science), https://­w ww​.­edu​.­cn​/­ke​_­yan​_y­ u​_ ­fa​_ z­ han​/s­ pecial​_­topic​/­60rd​/m ­ eeting​/­200909​ /­t20090907​_4­ 05500​.s­ html. 5. The contemporary Chinese theater’s dramatization of the impact of The Communist Manifesto was a recurring theme in constructing revolutionary history and collective memory both on and offstage. See Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 7–­13, 82–­83, 175–­76. 6. Liu Lian 刘炼, “Cheng Fangwu: Yige canjia guo Changzheng de daxue jiaoshou” 成仿吾: 一个参加过长征的大学教授 (Cheng Fangwu: A university professor who participated in the Long March), http://­w ww​.­g mw​.­cn​/­content​/2­ 004​- ­05​/­17​ /­content​_ 2­ 8744​.­htm. 7. Shen Weide 沈蔚德, “Huiyi Tuibian de shouci yanchu” 回忆《蜕变》的首次演出 (Remembering the premiere of Metamorphosis), in Cao Yu yanjiu ziliao 曹禺研究 [ 320 ]

6. “The Song of the Geologists” 资料，下 (A collection of research materials on Cao Yu), ed. Tian Benxiang 田本相 and Hu Shuhe 胡叔和, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1991), 2:1014. 8. Lu Baotai 陆葆泰, “Lixiang de guangmang fazi keguan xianshi shenghuo zhongjian” 理想的光芒发自客观现实生活中间 (The shining light of idealism came

from an objective world of reality), in Tian Benxiang and Hu Shuhe, Cao Yu yanjiu ziliao, 2:1020. 9. Bernd Eberstein, “Cao Yu: Peking Man,” in A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900–­1949, vol. 4 (The Drama), ed. Bernd Eberstein (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 68. 10. Hu Feng 胡风, “Lun Cao Yu de Beijing Ren” 论曹禺的《北京人》(On Cao Yu’s Peking Man), in Tian Benxiang and Hu Shuhe, Cao Yu yanjiu ziliao, 2:1046. The “superfluous man” is a character type in nineteenth-­century Russian literature, one who is usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-­educated, and informed by idealism and good will but incapable of effective action, as seen in the works of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov. 11. Borjörn Lodén, “Xia Yan: The Fascist Bacillus,” in Eberstein, A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 264. 12. The huaju Second Spring was scripted by Liu Chuan 刘川. It premiered in 1962 and was performed by several theater troupes in Shenyang, Tianjin, and Shanghai. The film Second Spring was directed by Sang Hu 桑弧 and Wang Xiuwen 王秀文 and produced by Shanghai Film Studio in 1975. The reappearance of famous movie stars such as Yu Yang 于洋 before the Cultural Revolution, the sleek design of a submarine, and its masterful cinematic representation on the surging waves of the ocean resulted in a popular reception during the Cultural Revolution despite the addition of radical slogans. 13. Soldiers Under Neon Light was written by Shen Ximeng 沈西蒙, Mo Yan 漠雁, and Lü Xingchen 吕兴臣 and was first performed by the Frontline Theater of the Nanjing Military Region of the PLA 南京军区前线话剧团 in 1962 and was staged by several theater troupes in different parts of the country; the text was published in Drama Script 剧本 2 (1963): 2–­41. 14. Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Nihongdeng xia de shaobing 霓虹灯下的 哨兵 (Soldiers under neon light), in Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan 中国话 剧五十年剧作选 (An anthology of Chinese spoken drama in fifty years), 8 vols., ed. Li Moran 李默然 et al. (Beijing: Zhonguo xiju, 2000), 3:324–­25. 15. Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–­1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 1. Esherick cites Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 258. 16. Esherick, Remaking the Chinese City, 1. 17. Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Nihongdeng xia de shaobing, 329. 18. Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Nihongdeng xia de shaobing, 330–­31. 19. Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Nihongdeng xia de shaobing, 346. 20. Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, and Lü Xingchen, Nihongdeng xia de shaobing, 353–­54. 21. Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 166. 22. Chen Yun 陈耘, Nianqing de yidai 年青的一代 (The young generation), in Li Moran et al., Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan, 3:384. Citations of The Young Generation are from this text. An English translation by Constantine Tung and Kevin A. [ 321 ]

6. “The Song of the Geologists” O’Connor can be found in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, ed. Xiaomei Chen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 461–­518. 23. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 369. 24. Tang, Chinese Modern, 176. 25. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 400. 26. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 415–­16. 27. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 416. 28. Tang, Chinese Modern, 190. 29. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 400. 30. Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai, 432–­33. 31. According to my interview with Yang Limin, Geologists was first performed by the Daqing City Theater in 1997; citations of this play are from Yang’s Dizhishi 地质师 (Geologists), in Li Moran et al., Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan, 8:91–­159. 32. Yang Limin got his inspiration for the setting of Geologists, next to Beijing Train Station, from a college graduate of 1958, who remarked that from the original housing units for the employees of the former Ministry of Geology, one could see the station and its grand clock. This fact was cited as an example of Yang Limin’s “delving into life” 深入生活 for a better understanding of the geologists. Yang revised the play ten times to perfect its structure and characterizations. See Liu Yuqin 刘玉琴 and Du Yingzi 杜英姿, “Heitudi shang bujuan de geren” 黑土地上不倦的歌人 (A tireless singer on the black earth), People’s Daily 人民 日报, July 22, 2000. 33. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 98. 34. My interview with Yang Limin, September 10, 2004. 35. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 127–­28. 36. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 128. 37. Ethel Lillian Voynich, The Gadfly (New York: Henry Holt, 1897). 38. According to my interview with Yang Limin, Liu Ren’s story was based on a real-­ life story in the early years of the construction of the Daqing oilfield. 39. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 135. 40. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 137. 41. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 138. 42. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 148. 43. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 151. 44. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 155. 45. Yang Limin, Dizhishi, 155. 46. In my interviews with them, Yang Limin and Ouyang Yibing both agreed with my assessment that their plays were in large part responding to a global economy, and the storylines expressed their wish to bring back the idealist spirit of the Maoist generation. 47. Ouyang Yibing’s Enjoy Hardships premiered in 1998 in Shanghai, performed by the Children’s Art Theater of China Charity Foundation 中国福利会儿童艺术剧 院, and was collected in Li Moran et al., Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan. 48. Ouyang Yibing 欧阳逸冰, Xiangshuo jiannan 享受艰难 (Enjoy hardships), in Li Moran et al., Zhongguo huaju wushi nian ju zuo xuan, 8:463. [ 322 ]

6. “The Song of the Geologists” 49. Liao Gailong 廖盖隆 and Zhuang Puming 庄浦明, eds., Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo biannian shi 中华人民共和国编年史 (A chronicle of the People’s Republic of China) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, 2001), 22. According to this chronicle, the Chinese government established the Beijing Institute of Geology in 1952 as part of a comprehensive effort to develop national industries. Many universities established or expanded their geology departments to meet increasing demand. In the early years of the PRC, seventeen teachers affiliated with the Department of Geology of Northwest University in Shaanxi Province trained thousands of petroleum geologists, who subsequently became pioneers in establishing major oilfields in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the northeastern provinces, the ­central plain, and along the southeast coast and other parts of China. According to one statistic in the 1980s, thirteen geologists-­in-­chief and eight directors of the fifteen Provincial Geological Bureaus in China were indeed graduates of the Department of Geology at Northwest University, with three academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Technology. 50. Pang Song 庞松 and Chen Shu 陈述, Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo jianshi 中华人民 共和国简史 (A brief history of the People’s Republic of China) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1999), 114. 51. Liao Gailong and Zhuang Puming, Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo biannian shi, 140. 52. Interview with Yang Limin, September 10, 2004. 53. Interview with Yang Limin, September 10, 2004. 54. Interview with Yang Limin, September 10, 2004. 55. An English translation of Black Stone by Timothy C. Wang can be found in Reading the Right Text: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, ed. Xiaomei Chen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 223–­81; for an analysis of this play in the context of proletarian theater, see 28–­36. For an essay on the main melody movement in theater, see Claire Conceison, “The Main Melody Campaign in Chinese Spoken Drama,” Asian Theatre Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 190–­212. Conceison notes: “Metaphorical in usage, the term ‘main melody’ refers to the part of a musical composition which is the primary theme of the piece and yet exists among other elements in harmony. The analogy implies that Chinese society consists of a cacophony of voices, but the loudest and clearest of these should be the CCP and socialism, just as a piece of music has many components but the most prevalent should be the main melody,” 191. See also Ruru Li, Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55–­60. 56. Liu Yuqin and Du Yingzi, “Heitudi shang bujuan de geren.” 57. Interview with Yang Limin, September 10, 2004. 58. Interview with Ouyang Yibing, September 17, 2004. 59. Interview with Ouyang Yibing, September 17, 2004. 60. See Zhang Lei 张蕾, “Lingdao ren zui ying dong qiongren: Wen Jiabao hui muxiao” 领导人最应懂穷人 温家宝回母校 (Leaders should best understand the poor: Wen Jiabao returns to his alma mater), Decision-­Making Exploration 决策探索 2 (2012), http://­news​.­ifeng​.­com​/­history​/­zhongguoxiandaishi​/­detail​_ ­2013​_­03​/­11​ /­22956706​_­0​.­shtml​?­​_­f rom​_ ­ralated. 61. Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1. [ 323 ]

6. “The Song of the Geologists” 62. Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers, 2. 63. Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers, 2. 64. Words in quotation marks are from J. Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers. 65. “Xi Jinping’s Politics in Command: China’s Leader Wants Absolute Control Over Information,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2016. 66. Qi Zhifeng 齐之丰, “ ‘Zhengzhi guashuai’ zaidu chengwei Zhongguo gaoxiao gui nie” “政治挂帅”再度成为中国高校圭臬 (“Politics in command” once again became a criterion for evaluating Chinese universities), https://­w ww​.­voachinese​.­com​ /­a ​/­C hinese​- ­C ommunist​- ­P arty​- ­i deological​- ­c ontrol​- ­o f​- ­h igher​- ­l earning​ -­institutions​-­20170329​/­3786934​.­html. 67. See Jiayang Fan, “Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China,” New York Times, October 15, 2018. 68. Chen Feibi 陈非比, Beizhuang de licheng 悲壮的历程 (A tragic journey) (Beijing: Dizhen, 2006), 22–­23.

7. Monumental Theater 1. For the creation story of the song, see Shi Jie 史介, “Gequ ‘Wo shi gige bing’ de dansheng 歌曲《我是一个兵》的诞生 (The birth story of “I Am a Soldier”), Music from Hometown 乡音 7 (2019): 47–­48. 2. See Zhao Min 赵敏, “‘Wo shi gige bing’ dansheng ji” 《我是一个兵》诞生记 (The birth story of “I Am a Soldier”), Party Organization 党建 8 (2012): 40–­41. 3. “Bei cheng wei ‘zhongxing zhadan’ de yishou ge” 被称为“重磅炸弹”的一首歌 (A song regarded as powerful as a heavy bomb), Young Men and Young Women 少男少女 7 (2021): 26–­27. 4. See Wang Gongyuan 王功远 and Gu Haihui 谷海慧, “Junlü huaju yu zhuxuanlü yishu xianzhuang—­Meng Bing fangtan lu” 军旅话剧与主旋律艺术现状—­孟冰访谈 录 (The current status of military-­themed plays and main-­melody art: Interview with Meng Bing), Journal of the Yunnan Academy of Art 云南艺术学院学报 4 (2015): 33–­39. 5. See for example, a seminar on Meng Bing’s plays in Wu Dandan 武丹丹, “Meng Bing xiju zuopin yantaohui zai Jing zhaokai” 孟冰戏剧作品研讨会在京 召开 (A seminar held in Beijing on Meng Bing’s plays), Drama Script 剧本 12 (2011): 22. 6. Quoted from Jia Yi 佳一, “Renwen ban Zhongguo Xiandai Xiqu Ji / Meng Bing Zuopin Ji zuotanhui zai Jing juxing” 日文版《中国现代戏曲集/孟冰作品集》座谈会在京 举行 (Seminar held in Beijing on the Japanese translation of A Collection of Meng Bing’s Plays in a series of modern Chinese dramas), Chinese Theater 中国戏剧 3 (2016): 73. 7. For an informative discussion on Meng Bing’s major plays, including directors and actors’ reflections on how they performed his plays, see Hu Linghong 胡凌 虹, “Zhuxuanlü de xianshi huhuan yu fansi liliang: Zongzheng Huajutuan lai Hu zhanyan zhi qidi” 主旋律的现实呼唤与反思力量—­总政话剧团来沪展演之启迪 (Main melody play’s call to reflect reality and its power: Thoughts on the [ 324 ]

7. Monumental Theater Shanghai tour of the Drama Troupe Attached to the Political Department of the PLA), Shanghai Wave 上海采风 7 (2011): 4–­14. 8. For a summary of Meng Bing’s career and his achievements, see Weng Min 王 敏, “Xianshi zhuyi xiju de shouwang yu kaituo—­tan Meng Bing de xilie juzuo” 现实主义戏剧的守望与开拓—­谈孟冰的系列剧作 (Persevering and exploring realist theater: On Meng Bing’s drama series), The Academic Journal of the PLA Art Academy 解放军艺术学院学报 2 (2012): 36–­38. 9. Meng Bing 孟冰, “Guanyu huaju Huangtu Yao de shuoming” 关于话剧《黄土谣》的说 明 (My explanation of huaju The Ballad of Yellow Earth), in Meng Bing juzuo xuan 孟冰 剧作选 (Selected plays of Meng Bing), 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2011), 2:61. 10. Meng Bing, Huangtu Yao 黄土谣 (The Ballad of Yellow Earth), in Meng Bing juzuo xuan, 2:13–55, 45. 11. Meng Bing, Huangtu Yao, 45. 12. Lei Feng was a soldier in the PLA. After his death in 1962, Mao Zedong issued a nationwide call to “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng,” praising him as a new model for the PLA in peacetime, which resulted in songs, plays, films, and other art media to popularize his story. 13. Liu Ping, Zhuiqiu xinling zhi guang 追求心灵之光 (In search of the light of the soul) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2011), 1. 14. Liu Ping, Zhuiqiu xinling zhi guang, 72. 15. Liu Ping, Zhuiqiu xinling zhi guang, 74. 16. All the quotations from the play were transcribed from a DVD recording of the production provided by Meng Bing. The DVD was produced by the Drama Troupe Attached to the Political Department of the PLA. The play was written in 2009 by Meng Bing, Wang Hong 王宏, and Xiao Li 肖力; for the script, see Meng Bing, Wang Hong, and Xiao Li, Shengming dang’an 生命档案, in Meng Bing juzuo xuan, 4:290–­333. 17. Wang Menghuan 王梦欢 and Liu Xuan 刘璇, “Yong xin yinchang de yingxiong songge” 用心吟唱的英雄颂歌 (A hero’s song composed with one’s soul), PLA Newspaper 解放军报, January 17, 2010. 18. Huang Weijun 黄维钧, “Zhuisu shengming de zunyan—­Shengming dang’an guan­ hou” 追溯生命的尊严—《 ­ 生命档案》观后 (Searching for the dignity of life: Afterthoughts on watching Archives of Life), Chinese Drama 中国戏剧5 (2010): 26. 19. Meng Bing, Xunzhao Li Dazhao 寻找李大钊 (In search of Li Dazhao), in Meng Bing juzuo xuan, 3:285. 20. Meng Bing, Xunzhao Li Dazhao, 286. 21. Meng Bing, Xunzhao Li Dazhao, 287. 22. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun 辛亥魂 (Soul of the republic), in Meng Bing juzuo xuan, 3:114. 23. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 112. 24. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 133. 25. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 134. 26. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 137. 27. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 138. 28. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 130. 29. Meng Bing, Xinghan hun, 126. [ 325 ]

8. Singing “The Internationale”

8. Singing “The Internationale” 1. Translation in Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2012), 112–­27. 2. This is my own reading based on textual analysis and has not been confirmed with the author. 3. Wang Gongyuan 王功远 and Gu Haihui 谷海慧, “Hou ji bo fa: Meng Bing xin shiji junlü huaju changzuo shuping” 厚积薄发: 孟冰新世纪军旅话剧创作述评 (Profound accumulation gradually expressed: A critical review of Meng Bing’s military-­ theme plays in the new century), New Century Theater 新世纪剧坛 6 (2015): 25. 4. See Tang Dong 唐栋, “Lishi bing bu yaoyuan: Huaju Guoji Ge chuangzuo tan” 历 史并不遥远: 话剧《国际歌》创作谈 (History is not far away: On writing huaju The Internationale), Drama Script 剧本3 (2018): 37–­38. 5. Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, “Xin Eguo youji” 新俄国游記 (A travel report from new Russia), in Qu Qiubai duoyu ren xinshi 瞿秋白多余人新史 (A new history of a superfluous man), ed. Qiu Sang 丘桑 (Beijing: Dongfang, 1998), 117. 6. Wang Guanquan 王观泉, Yige ren he yige shidai 一个人和一个时代 (A man and his era) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, 1989), 244. 7. Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, Chidu xin shi 赤都心史 (Spiritual journey to the red capital), in Duoyu ren xinshi, 191. 8. Qu Qiubai, Chidu xin shi, 194. 9. Wang Guanquan, Yige ren he yige shidai, 206–­8. 10. Zhou Yongxiang 周永祥, Qu Qiubai nianpu 瞿秋白年譜 (A chronology of Qu Qiubai) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin, 1983), 19. 11. Wang Tiexian 王铁仙 and Liu Fuqin 刘福勤, eds., Qu Qiubai zhuan 瞿秋白传 (A biography of Qu Qiubai) (Beijing: Beijing renmin wenxue, 2011), 94. 12. Here is a case of a typical media misrepresentation of the history of translating “The Internationale.” The translation used in this television series, as well as in several other films and dramas, was not written by Qu Qiubai; it was revised by other writers and finalized in the early 1950s as the “official” version. 13. Su Jin 束锦, “Xin minzhu zhuyi geming shiqi gongchang dang ren dui ‘Guoji Ge’ de chuanchang jiqi chansheng de xiaoyong” 新民主主义革命时期共产党人对《国 际歌》的传唱及其产生的效用 (The impact of communists’ spreading “The Internationale” in the new democratic revolutionary period), Jiangsu Social Science 江苏社会科学 2 (2018): 171. 14. Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3. 15. Su Jin, “Xin minzhu zhuyi geming shiqi gongchang dang ren dui ‘Guoji Ge’ de quanchang jiqi chansheng de xiaoyong,” 171–­74. 16. Su Jin, “Xin minzhu zhuyi geming shiqi gongchang dang ren dui ‘Guoji Ge’ de quanchang jiqi chansheng de xiaoyong,” 174–­75. 17. Su Jin, “Xin minzhu zhuyi geming shiqi gongchang dang ren dui ‘Guoji Ge’ de quanchang jiqi chansheng de xiaoyong,” 176. [ 326 ]

8. Singing “The Internationale” 18. As Barbara Mittler notes, this “Red Army Song” was “based on disciplinary points made by Mao in 1928” to remind the army to help the people without abusing their power. It was also one of the four most popular songs during the Cultural Revolution, together with “The East Is Red,” “The Internationale,” and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman” (大海航行靠舵手); they were remembered as “sounds of the Cultural Revolution.” Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 69, 112. 19. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 114. 20. Zhang Jishun 张济顺, Yuanqu de dushi 远去的都市：五十年代的上海 (A city displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian, 2015), 272. 21. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 16. 22. According to Patricia Wilson, in 1939, Zhou Enlai brought back a film projector and some Soviet films such as Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918 to Yan’an from the Soviet Union; he taught others how to operate the projector. See Patricia Wilson, “The Founding of the Northeast Studio,” in Chinese Film: The State of the Art in the People’s Republic, ed. George Stephen Semsel (New York: Praeger, 1987), 15–­33. 23. Lenin in 1918 was directed by Mikhail Romm, with Boris Shchukin playing the role of Vladimir Lenin, produced in 1939 and translated by the Shanghai Film Studio attached to the Central Film Bureau. 24. Starring Mikheil Gelovani as Joseph Stalin and Pavel Molchanov as Vladimir Lenin, and directed by Mikheil Chiaureli, The Unforgettable 1919 was produced by Mosfilm Studio in 1952 and was much less popular in China than the other two films on Lenin. 25. Living Forever in Burning Flames was produced by the Beijing Film Studio in 1965 and directed by Shui Hua 水华, with Xia Yan, Luo Guangbin 罗广斌, and Yang Yiyan 杨益言 as scriptwriters, with a unique all-­star cast numbering Zhao Dan 赵丹, Yu Lan 于蓝, and Zhang Ping 张平. 26. Jones, Yellow Music, 35. 27. A Revolutionary Family was directed by Shui Hua and produced by Beijing Film Studio in 1961. 28. Red Flag Over Green Hills was directed by Zhang Junxiang 张骏祥 and produced by Shanghai Film Studio in 1951. 29. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 112–­13. 30. Chen Baichen 陈白尘 and Dong Jian 董健, Zhongguo xiandai xiju shigao 中国现代戏 剧史稿) (A draft history of modern Chinese drama) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989), 3. 31. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–­1966, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3:469. 32. Tan Yiyuan 潭仪元 and Xu Hongsheng 许宏盛, Guangzhou jinglei 广州惊雷 (Thunder in Guangzhou). In Guangdong huaju xuan 广东话剧选 (Selected plays from Guangdong), ed. Zhongguo Xijujia Xiehui Guangzhou Fenhui 中国戏剧家协会广 州分会 (Guangzhou branch of the China Theater Association) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin, 1981), 326. 33. For more information and analysis of these epics, see chapter 3 of Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). [ 327 ]

8. Singing “The Internationale” 34. Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), cited in Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, ed. Jan Cohen-­Cruz (London: Routledge, 1998), 29. Cohen-­Cruz was “astonished that actors were so integrated into the major events of the times” and noted Snow’s depiction of the “vitality of these theatre contingents in the 1930s and 1940s,” 26. 35. Anon., “Guangzhou Junqu Zhengzhibu Zhanshi Wengongtuan 广州军区政治部战 士文工团 (Soldiers Theater Attached to the Political Department of Guangzhou Military Region), http://­baike​.­baidu​.c­ om​/­view​/2­ 259284​.­htm. 36. Quoted from Joanna T. Pecore, Ken Schweitzer, and Yang Fan, “Telling the Story with Music: ‘The Internationale’ at Tiananmen Square,” Education About Asia 4, no. 1 (1999): 30–­36. 37. Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, “That Holy Word, Revolution,” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, 2nd ed., ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1992), 316. 38. Andrew F. Jones, “The Politics of Popular Music,” in Wasserstrom and Perry, Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, 155. 39. Jones, “The Politics of Popular Music,” 157. 40. In “Liu Huan and Mo Hualun bipin laoqu xinchang ‘Guoji ge’ zhong jiqing xiemu” 刘欢莫华伦比拼老曲新唱《国际歌》中激情谢幕 (Liu Huan and Mo Hualun competed with each other in singing anew old song “The Internationale” at curtain call), http://­ent​.s­ ina​.c­ om​.c­ n​/­y​/2­ 007​- 0­ 7​- ­04​/0­ 0301623900​.s­ html. A video can be found at https://­w ww​.b ­ ilibili​.c­ om​/­video​/B ­ V1Zb411L7Ki/. 41. See Liang Pan 梁盼, “ ‘Dubai’ de Qiubai—­Guan wutai ju Qu Qiubai” 独白”的秋白—­观 舞台剧瞿秋白 (Qiubai through “monologues”: Watching the play Qu Qiubai), https://­wenyi​.­g mw​.­cn​/2­ 019​-1­ 0​/2­ 1​/­content​_ ­33250425​.­htm. 42. Jacques Attali, “Noise: The Political Economy of Music,” in Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, 30. 43. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 2. 44. I use quotation marks here to indicate that Qu was indeed charged as a traitor before and during the Cultural Revolution. Even then, his singing of “The Internationale” at the execution ground helped soften his image as a traitor.

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Index

A Ying (playwright and theorist), 12, 81, 122, 132–­33, 134, 138 Abbott, George, 71 adaptations: of Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven, 4, 109, 110–­11, 119; for film, 4, 13, 139, 147, 151, 154, 177, 186–­97, 209, 226, 243, 276; and opera, 107, 112, 113, 186–­87, 282; by Ouyang Yuqian, 57, 107, 109, 111–­12, 113, 121; of red classics, 16, 82, 176, 181, 182, 186; of Teahouse, 151–­52, 312n23; on television, 16, 188; by Tian Han, 29, 37–­38, 45–­47; of Western texts, 3–­5, 8, 37, 38, 62, 72, 103, 120 aesthetics vs. politics, 7–­8, 9, 80, 297n90; and comedy, 167; and Hong Shen, 10, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 93, 97, 115; and Lu Xun, 30; in Maoist period, 288; and Meng Bing, 19, 250, 266, 288; and red classics, 153, 176; and Tian Han, 28, 32, 36–­37, 38, 46, 55, 58, 60, 158 African Americans, 4, 5, 109, 290n11, 307n39 After Returning Home (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 1–­2, 3, 168, 170

“After Tasting the ‘Forbidden Fruit’” (essay; Tian Han), 34 agriculture, socialist reform of, 14, 146, 165, 168, 170, 171, 175, 253. See also peasants Air Force General (huaju; Hong Shen; wartime theater), 114 Air Force Political Department Performance Troupe, 173 Albanian films, 275 All-­China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, 144 amateur theater (aimeiju), 70, 72, 89, 103, 115, 159, 163; vs. commercial, 83; groups for, 45, 174; and music, 13, 189, 247; soldiers’, 110–­11, 283 Ammariti, Megan, 1, 2, 5, 90 An E (ping opera; Liu Xinghui), 9 An E (Tian Han’s wife, song writer, and playwright), 61, 62, 63, 66, 144 An Guotao (actor), 163 Andreas, Joel (red engineers), 17, 244 Anthem, The (film; Wu Ziniu, dir.), 27 Antigone (Greek drama; Sophocles), 74, 180

[ 347 ]

index Anti-­Rightist movement (1957), 14, 154, 160; and artists, 58, 155, 160, 171; and personal archives, 255; and Tian Han, 13, 29; and Wang Shaoyan, 166–­67 April Fifth movement (1976), 148, 311n13 Archer, William, 75 archives, personal (dang’an), 255–­56 Archives of Life (huaju; Meng Bing; soldier play), 254–­60; staging of, 254, 258 Arrival of New Bureau Chief (satirical comedy; He Qiu), 314n57 artistic forums, 57–­58 artists, performing: and Anti-­Rightist Movement, 58, 155, 160, 171; and CCP, 153, 159, 205; as characters, 9, 17, 49–­50, 116, 117, 155; and Cultural Revolution, 134, 171–­72; in film, 116; oppositional, 49; in PRC, 9, 92, 108–­9, 117, 118, 147, 216, 288; in Republican period, 13, 17, 117; and Tian Han, 49–­50, 51–­52, 54; in USSR, 160–­61; as victims of socialist state, 8, 20, 27, 55, 60, 100, 214–­15. See also censorship; cultural workers; dramatists, theater of; particular individuals As You Desire (comedy; Yang Jiang), 62, 162, 165 Atom and Love (huaju; Li Weixin and others; scientist play), 209 Attali, Jacques, 286 audiences: American, 87; and censorship, 91–­92; disabled in, 242; and drama vs. theater, 82–­83; and Hong Shen, 10, 71, 73, 81, 82, 90–­91; in Maoist period, 93–­94, 211; and Meng Bing, 253, 254, 262, 263, 267; and Ouyang Yuqian, 109; and Peng Liyuan, 198; and red classics, 176, 186; and Rhapsody, 158; at Sai Jinhua, 114–­15; and Soldiers Under Neon Light, 214; and street theater, 117; teenage, 241; and Tian Han, 13, 50, 52, 53, 55; wartime, 84; and women actors, 89–­90

Autumn Harvest Uprising, 273 Awakening (huaju; Zhang Pengchun), 85 Azalea Mountain (model theater; Peking opera), 136 Bai Wei (woman playwright), 61, 174 Bai Yang (actress), 46, 117, 277 Baker, George Pierce, 71, 300n15 Ballad of Yellow Earth (huaju; Meng Bing; soldier and peasant play), 251–­54, 260 Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism (Nesbit), 34 ballet, 6, 108. See also dance dramas Bandung Conference (1955), 5 Bao Weihong, 72, 290n18 Baudelaire, Charles, 31, 36–­37, 52 Beautiful Spring (satirical comedy; Wang Shaoyan), 165–­66 Beckett, Samuel, 166 Before Lunch (huaju; Tian Han), 35–­36, 41 Beijing Art School, 88 Beijing People’s Art Theater, 53, 96, 150–­52 Bian Kungang (huaju; Lu Xiaoman), 61 Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven (huaju), 2–­3, 102, 103, 305n10; adaptations of, 4, 109, 110–­11, 119; contemporary production of, 119–­20 Black Stone (huaju; Yang Limin; worker play), 241 Blood-­Stained Battle of Tai’erzhuang (film; Yang Guangyuan and Qu Junjie, dir.), 66–­67 Blue Kite (film; Tian Zhuangzhuang, dir.), 147 Boxer Rebellion, 114 Breaking Out of Ghost Pagoda (huaju; Bai Wei), 174 Brecht, Bertolt, 43, 254, 255, 258, 262 Brezhnev, Leonid, 244 Brief History of the People’s Republic of China, 238 Britain, 90; colonialism of, 40, 115; and India, 32–­33

[ 348 ]

index Bus Stop (huaju; Gao Xingjian), 95 Busy Meetings (satirical comedy; Li Chao), 167 Cai Hesen (early CCP leader and martyr), 272, 273 Cambridge History of China, 123 Camille (huaju; Spring Willow Society production), 305n10 Cao Yu, 8, 10–­11, 12, 84, 109, 119; and Sunrise, 86; and Teahouse, 150; works by, 82, 86, 96, 114, 205–­7, 302n49 capitalism: and Enjoy Hardships, 237; Mao on, 233, 236; in postsocialist China, 200, 233, 236, 250; in Soldiers Under Neon Light, 212; and “The Internationale,” 269, 270, 273, 281, 282 Carlson, Marvin, 75, 139 Carlyle, Thomas, 32, 33 Carmen (Western opera), 38, 174 cartoons, 16 Caws, Mary Anne, 37 CCTV (Central China Television), 138, 174, 191, 200 censorship: and Archives of Life, 259; in Cultural Revolution, 176, 275, 276; in early PRC, 8, 145, 154, 172; of films, 67, 275, 276; and Ibsen, 86; by KMT, 91–­92, 121, 122, 135, 153; and main melody plays, 250; and originality, 73, 288; in postsocialist period, 233; and red classics, 154, 160, 181, 193; and satirical comedies, 146, 159, 162–­67; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 121, 122; and Tian Han, 13, 29, 46, 54–­55, 60, 156; of Western works, 6 Central Academy of Drama, 108, 113, 135, 136 Central Experimental Theater, 4, 99, 108, 109, 110, 112, 169 Central Music Academy, 199 characters, fictional: artists as, 9, 17, 49–­50, 116, 117, 155; black, white, and gray, 170, 197; intellectuals as, 17; Mao Zedong as, 263, 266; middle, 14,

170, 171; negative, 14, 155, 186, 193; peasants and workers as, 209; scientists as, 202–­48; socialist, 58. See also women characters Chekhov, Anton, 31, 321n10 Chen Baichen (playwright and drama historian), 12, 122, 127, 128, 130, 159, 165, 167 Chen Dabei (playwright and theorist), 82–­83, 86, 89, 109, 115, 162 Chen Duxiu (CCP co-­founder), 19, 31, 43, 80, 130, 271, 272 Chen Feibi (seismologist), 194, 245–­48 Chen Kaige (film director), 76 Chen Ke (drama historian), 112–­13 Chen Qitong (playwright), 124–­25, 147 Chen Shaoyi (Hunan opera actor), 39 Chen Tianhua (anti-­Qing revolutionary), 266 Chen Tiejun (CCP martyr), 282 Chen Xiaomei, personal experiences of, 1–­2, 5–­6, 194–­95, 245–­47, 274, 275 Chen Yi (CCP leader), 58 Chen Yongjing (stage designer), 213, 297n95 Chen Yun (playwright), 312n13 Cheng Fangwu (CCP leader, author and educator), 204–­5, 216 Cheng Gang (character in Red Crag), 194 Cheng Xun (stage designer), 110f Cheng Yanqiu (Peking opera actor), 106 Cherished Dream of Forty Years (huaju; Hong Shen, dir.), 92 Chiang Ching-­kuo, 67 Chiang Kai-­shek, 66–­67, 115 Chiefs of Anti-­Corruption Bureau (TV drama; play within a play), 262–­63 China, People’s Republic of (PRC): corruption in, 15, 20, 137, 145, 210, 252–­53, 260, 284; early years of, 8, 48, 143–­72, 208, 216, 276–­77, 279, 280; economy of, 11, 18, 157, 238–­43, 245, 253, 285, 323n49; first constitution of, 149, 150; founding of, 266; and Republican period, 48, 144, 172, 208, 216, 279; and Taiwan, 66–­67. See also

[ 349 ]

index China, People’s Republic of (PRC) (continued) Cultural Revolution; Maoist period; post-­Mao period; postsocialist period China Dancer Association, 108 China Dramatic Art Society, 115, 207 China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, 203 China Leftist Drama Troupe Alliance, 91 China Theater Association, 13, 45, 57, 92, 99, 144, 163, 260 China Writers Association, 160, 161 China Youth Art Theater: and comedy, 163–­64; and Hong Shen, 92, 93; productions by, 58, 129, 154, 156, 157, 208, 213 China’s National Theater, 20 Chinese Academy of Science, 203 Chinese Communist Party (CCP): and artistic forums, 57; and artists, 153, 159, 205; bureaucracy of, 159, 163, 164; and colonialism, 80; and comedies, 150, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167; corruption in, 137, 145, 164, 191, 263, 269; and democracy, 31–­32, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150; founding of, 103, 270–­73; and geologists, 215, 219, 243; and Hong Shen, 72–­73, 77, 78, 80–­81, 93; and intellectuals, 87, 158, 159; internal power struggles of, 182–­83; and KMT, 66–­68, 72–­73, 78, 93, 118–­19, 145, 155, 182; membership dues to, 177; and Meng Bing, 250, 261, 262, 269; and Ouyang Yuqian, 108–­9, 139; and Peng Liyuan, 197, 199; and personal archives, 255–­56; promises of, 14, 145–­46, 147, 149, 154, 158, 166, 178, 182, 197, 199, 211–­12, 217, 251–­52, 266; and Qu Qiubai, 286, 287; and red classics, 154, 169, 176, 178, 182, 186; and “rice sprout song” movement, 78; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 12, 121, 123–­27, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137; technocrats in, 17–­18, 244; and “The Internationale,” 20, 270–­74, 279, 283, 284; and Tian Han, 9, 27, 28, 60, 61;

and traitors, 180, 187, 195, 196; in United Front, 66–­68, 149, 182; and women, 62, 169 “Chinese Theater Movement and Education” (essay; Hong Shen), 95 Chinese Xiqu Improvement Bureau, 108 Chow, Rey, 292n9 Christianity, 34, 35–­36, 37, 38, 126, 150–­51 Chu Minyi (Foreign Minister of Wang Jingwei government), 84 Civil War period (China; 1945–­1949), 7, 68, 215 civilized drama (wenmingxi), 4, 70, 71, 82, 89, 102, 103 class status: and CCP, 211, 215; and intellectuals, 58, 203, 214, 217–­18, 244; Tian Han on, 34–­35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50–­51 class struggle, 111, 196, 237; and Hong Shen, 73–­74, 75, 82; in red classics, 182, 193; and scientists, 214, 217–­18; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 128; and “The Internationale,” 276, 280 Cold War, 87, 109, 203, 208, 238 colonialism, Western, 80, 115; and Tian Han, 30–­33, 40, 42 comedies: and CCP, 150, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167; and faith plays, 146–­49; as one-­act plays, 159–­72; satirical, 13, 14–­15, 143–­72; theory of, 161–­62 Comintern, 271 commercialism, 83, 146, 185, 199, 201; and Meng Bing, 250, 259, 260; and Ouyang Yuqian, 105, 108–­9 Communist Manifesto, 205, 320n5 Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, 79, 95 Conceison, Claire, 96 Confucianism, 44, 87, 126, 138, 174 Continuous Revolution, A (Mittler), 16, 274, 280, 291n27, 293n22, 326n1, 327n18 Creation Society, 205 crosstalk performances, 154–­55 Cry to Heaven (huaju; Nick Rongjun Yu; theater of dramatists), 119

[ 350 ]

index Cui Jian (singer), 284–­85 Cultural Revolution (1966–­1976): and artists, 134, 171–­72; banned films in, 275, 276; disillusionment with, 270, 274, 284; and Enjoy Hardships, 237, 242; and entrance exams, 17, 235; and faith plays, 148; and Geologists, 220, 221, 224, 229–­35, 242–­43; and Hong Shen, 73; intellectuals in, 209, 220, 224, 243, 244; and Jiang Qing, 175; and main melody plays, 253; and Mao Zedong, 274, 281; and Peng Liyuan, 198; and personal archives, 255; and Pioneers, 240; popular songs in, 26, 327n18; and red classics, 146, 176, 181, 182, 183, 185, 189–­90; and scientists, 17, 202–­3, 206, 229, 230–­31, 232, 234; sent-­down youth in, 220, 242; and Shining Red Star, 181–­86, 317n18; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 125, 128, 130–­31, 135; and “The Internationale,” 270, 276, 280–­81; and theater in 1990s, 210, 214–­15, 218; and Tian Han, 9, 35, 37, 41, 44–­45, 46, 54, 59, 60, 70, 78, 95, 156, 158; and traditional literature, 44–­45; and traitors, 125, 189–­90, 196, 197, 328n44; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 5–­6; and women, 15, 35. See also model theater, revolutionary cultural workers, 76, 98–­99, 140; new, 13, 99, 153, 198; and Peng Liyuan, 198, 199; traveling, 11, 77, 99, 115, 117, 308n57; in wartime, 116–­20 culture, popular, 78, 176, 201. See also popular theater; songs, popular Dadu River (Taiping Rebellion play; Chen Baichen), 122, 127 dance dramas, 18, 108, 185–­86, 209–­10, 282 Daqing City Theater, 220, 240, 322n31 Daqing oilfield, 239–­41 Daughter of the Party (film; Lin Nong, dir.), 177, 179–­81, 182, 185; adaptations of (huai opera, huangmei opera, and folk opera),

186–­97; love story in, 179, 180. See also “Party Membership Dues”; Shining Red Star, The Davis, Tracy D., 70 De Geyter, Pierre, 19 Death of a Famous Actor (huaju; Tian Han; theater of dramatists), 52–­54, 57, 60, 63, 158 Death of Li Xiucheng (Taiping Rebellion play; Yang Hansheng), 122, 128, 129–­31, 134, 135, 136, 137 defense drama (wartime theater), 12, 114–­15 Deng Desen (director), 187f Deng Xiaoping, 148, 173, 245, 282; economic reforms of, 220, 253; and Tiananmen demonstrations, 285 Deng Zhiyi (director), 213f Denton, Kirk A., 44, 291n27, 292n2, 292n6 Devil of the Piano (huaju; Tian Han), 35 Ding Ling (woman writer), 62, 108, 286, 291n25 Ding Xilin (playwright), 86, 159 Director of the MTS and the Chief Agricultural Expert, The (Soviet novel; Nikolayeva), 161 District Routine (Soviet sketches; Ovechkin), 161 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 15, 34, 86, 90, 165, 174 Dong Jian (theater historian), 6, 31, 36, 45, 46 Dong Naibin (critic), 83 Dooling, Amy D., 14, 15, 316n2 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 31 Draft History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Dong Jian and Hu Xingliang), 6 Dragon Beard Ditch (huaju; Lao She), 96, 150 drama: civilized (wenmingxi), 4, 70, 71, 82, 89, 102, 103; dance, 18, 108, 185–­86, 209–­10, 282; defense, 12, 114–­15; historical, 18, 114, 121–­38, 204; histories of, 79–­84; Japanese, 102, 103; new (xinju), 70, 71, 82, 88; prophetic, 33, 158; vs. theater, 82–­83; wartime, 77, 78, 84, 115, 116, 122, 135. See also huaju (spoken drama)

[ 351 ]

index drama criticism, 6, 28, 37, 55, 58, 69, 100, 102 Dream of the Red Chamber plays, 104, 113 dream plays, 145 Dreams Dashed at the Wu River (Wu opera; Jiang Chaogao), 137–­38 Du Peng (actor), 129 East Is Red, The (music and dance epic), 18 “East Is Red, The” (song), 19, 26, 327n18 education, 85–­86, 87, 104; and Ouyang Yuqian, 102, 105, 106–­7, 108; and Tian Han, 54, 56–­57; in US vs. Europe, 205; in USSR, 111 Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon (film; Shi Dongshan, dir.), 116–­19 Emperor Jones (play; O’Neill), 72 Enemy of the People (huaju; Ibsen), 86 Engels, Friedrich, 271 English language, 11, 92, 105; plays written in, 71, 85; and Tian Han, 28–­29, 70; translations into, 1–­2, 96; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 3, 5–­6 Enjoy Hardships (huaju; Ouyang Yibing), 17, 234–­37, 239, 241, 242; entrance exams in, 235–­36 Eroshenko, Vasili, 296n77 Esherick, Joseph W., 211 ethnic minority theaters, 6 “Eulogy of the Lugou Bridge” (poem; Tian Han), 144 experimental theater, 4, 96, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 169 expressionism, 7, 10, 72, 86, 88, 96 faith plays, 145, 146–­49 Family of a Bricklayer, The (huaju; Hu Yepin), 204 Fan Lai (director), 192f, 318n43 Fang Zhenzhu (huaju; Lao She), 153–­54, 171, 198, 313n35 Farewell, Hong Kong (huaju; Hong Shen, dir.), 91

“Farewell to the Red Army beneath Fenghuang Ridge” (song; Hong Xia), 188 Fascist Bacillus, The (huaju; Xia Yan), 17, 92–­95, 207–­8 February Revolution (Russia; 1917), 30–­31 female impersonators, 57, 85, 86, 121; and Hong Shen, 89–­90; Lu Xun on, 44, 46; Ouyang Yuqian as, 4, 101–­2, 120 feminism: black, 6; with “Chinese characteristics,” 15; egalitarian, 9; and Jiang Qing vs. Peng Liyuan, 201; Maoist, 176; and red classics, 176, 181; socialist, 133, 174; and Tian Han, 28, 34–­35, 36, 38; Western, 6, 174. See also women Feng Xuefeng (writer, critic, director), 278f Feng Yifu (director), 318n32 Feng Yunshan (Taiping Rebellion leader), 126, 132, 133 Ferrari, Rossella, 4, 96, 304nn85–­87 festivals, 11, 18, 57, 99, 106, 114 Fifteen Strings of Coins (Southern kunqu opera), 189 film, 7, 21; adaptations for, 4, 13, 139, 147, 151, 154, 177, 186–­97, 209, 226, 243, 276; Albanian, 275; banned, 67, 275, 276; and faith plays, 147; improvisation in, 84; North Korean, 275; and Ouyang Yuqian, 102, 113; and politics, 16; and red classics, 147, 176, 280–­81; Shanghai in, 277; Soviet, 242, 273, 274–­76, 327n22; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 130; and “The Internationale,” 20, 274–­77, 280; on theatrical artists, 116; theme songs from, 8, 25, 27, 188, 268, 276, 277, 279, 308n58; and Tian Han, 27, 28, 177, 179–­81, 182, 185, 308n58. See also particular titles First Congress of the Far East Communist and Revolutionary Parties (St. Petersburg; 1922), 271

[ 352 ]

index First Southwest Drama Festival (1944), 11, 99 Fish and Dragon Art Festival, 57, 106 folk performance arts, 26, 107, 277; and red classics, 153–­54. See also opera, folk folksongs, 42, 49, 78, 190, 259 Forging the Truth (comedy; Yang Jiang), 14 Founding of a Republic, The (film; Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, dir.), 26 Four Olds (Cultural Revolution), 48 400 Million, The (documentary film; Joris Ivens), 67 Fourth Red Army, 283 France, 28, 49, 50 “From New Drama to Huaju” (essay; Hong Shen), 71 Fu Gengchen (composer), 184 Fu Jin (theater scholar), 6, 13, 86, 88, 107 Fu Sinian (historian and writer), 43 Gadfly, The (Voynich), 225–­26 Gai Jiaotian (Peking opera actor), 106 Gálik, Marián, 96 Gang of Four, 134, 148, 190, 229, 281; and April Fifth movement, 312n13; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 125, 135, 136 Gao Xingjian (playwright), 95, 96 Geertz, Clifford, 211 Gengsu Theater (Nantong), 104, 105, 106, 108 geologists, 202–­48; and economy, 238–­43, 323n49; in Enjoy Hardships, 234–­37; personal stories of, 243–­48; song of, 17, 202–­3, 216, 221–­22, 233, 240, 243; in The Young Generation, 219–­34 Geologists (scientist play; Yang Limin), 17, 219–­34, 235, 239–­41, 245, 247 Germany, 28, 31 ghost plays, 78, 144 Go to the People (film; Tian Han), 56 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 31 Gogol, Nikolai, 31

Golden Road (film; Lin Nong and Sun Yu, dir.), 16, 184, 317n19 Gong Xiaodong (director), 258, 261 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 244 Gorky, Maxim, 276 Grand Master Tian (xiang opera; Qian Yue; theater of dramatists), 9 Grand Theater of Tian Han (Changsha), 26 Great Changes in the Mountains (red classic novel; Zhou Libo), 16 Great Leap Forward, 33, 45, 156, 158, 175, 253 Great Master (xi opera), 105–­6 Great Wilderness (huaju; Yang Limin), 241 “Greater East Asia Co-­Prosperity Sphere,” 115 Growing Up on the Battlefield (huaju; Hu Ke; soldier play), 147, 152, 153 Gu Menghe (Peking opera actor), 53 Guan Hanqing (huaju; Tian Han; theater of dramatists), 29, 49, 61, 62–­63, 155–­56, 158 Guangdong Drama Institute (Theater Research Institute), 100, 106–­7 Guangzhou Thunder (huaju; revolutionary history play), 281 Guangzhou Uprising, 273, 281 Guanzi, 31 Gui Opera Experimental Theater, 107 Gunn, Edward M., 14 Guo Moruo, 57, 66, 68, 69, 84, 203, 205, 298n3; celebration of, 119; history plays by, 114, 204 Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Peking opera; Wu Han), 45 Han Shangyi (stage designer), 278f Hao Ran (novelist), 146, 317n19 Hatred of Black Slaves, The (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 3–­4, 5, 109–­11, 119 He Qiu (playwright), 314n57 Headmaster Tian Han (Peking opera; Hu Mingshuai; theater of dramatists), 9, 291n19

[ 353 ]

index Heine, Heinrich, 31, 38 “Heroic Death, The” (poem; Baudelaire), 52 Hinterland (novel; Wang Lin), 148–­49 History of Art in Modern Spoken Drama (ed. Tian Benxiang), 6 History of Chinese Drama (Xu Muyun), 84 History of Chinese Theater in the 20th Century (Fu Jin), 6 History of Composing Histories of Chinese New Literature (Huang Xiuji), 84 History of Contemporary Dramatic Criticism (Fu Jin), 6 History of Modern Chinese Drama (Song Baozhen), 85 history plays, 18, 114, 204; on Taiping Rebellion, 121–­38 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 31 Hong Changzhen (Hong Shen’s wife), 299n10 Hong Qian (Hong Shen’s daughter), 68, 299n10 Hong Shen (playwright, director, and historian), 7–­10, 65–­97; as actor, 53; adaptations by, 72; and aesthetics vs. politics, 10, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 93, 97, 115; attempted suicide of, 68, 73; and audiences, 10, 71, 73, 81, 82, 90–­91; and CCP, 68, 72–­73, 77, 78, 80–­81, 93; celebration of, 119; and class struggle, 73–­74, 75, 82; as diplomat, 87; early career of, 12–­13, 15; on huaju, 70; and KMT, 77, 78, 80–­81; leftist leaning of, 10, 72–­73, 80–­81; and Meng Bing, 19, 250, 260, 267; and opera, 71, 77–­78, 82; realism of, 10, 69, 75, 76, 89, 90, 92, 93, 255; rural trilogy of, 73, 74, 75; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 130; on theater, 9–­10, 69, 103; theater histories of, 9–­10, 79–­84, 99; and Tian Han, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80–­81, 144; in US, 7, 71–­73, 87–­89, 101; in War of Resistance, 68–­69, 114, 116;

and Western theater, 72, 87–­89; works by, 10, 71, 72, 74–­76, 82, 84, 85, 90–­91, 95, 96, 204; and Xia Yan, 81, 92–­93, 207, 208 Hong Shuzu (Hong Shen’s father), 73 Hong Xia (opera film; Feng Yifu, Hua Chun, and Li Yuwu, dir.; red classic), 188–­90 Hong Xiu (woman playwright), 285–­86 Hong Xiuquan (Taiping Rebellion leader), 122, 123, 126–­30, 132, 133, 135, 137 Hong Xuanjiao (Taiping Rebellion play; A Ying), 122, 132–­33, 134, 138 Hong Xuanjiao (Taiping Rebellion woman leader), 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 138 Hot Tears (play; Taguchi Kikutei), 121 Hot-­Blood: A Tragedy (play; Higeki Nekketsu), 121 Hou Baolin (crosstalk performer), 154–­55 “How Can I Not Miss Her” (song; Zhao Yuanren), 279 Hsiung, Yuwen, 96 Hu Feng (writer, poet, theorist), 207 Hu Jintao (former PRC president), 18, 188 Hu Shi (literary scholar and philosopher), 10, 43, 85–­87, 207; as diplomat, 87; and Hong Shen, 71, 80; and KMT, 11, 87; on literary history, 79–­80; works by, 85, 89, 90, 159, 165 Hu Xingliang (drama scholar), 6 Hu Yepin (leftist writer), 204 Hua Chun (director), 318n32 Huaishu Village (huaju; Hu Ke; peasant play), 175 huaju (spoken drama), 1–­21; anthologies of, 10, 12, 79, 122, 152, 170, 204, 210, 250; first canon of, 10, 13, 70–­78, 79, 204; first works of, 10, 39, 80, 85; performance of, 1–­2, 10; red, black, or gray, 13–­14, 16, 153, 154, 156, 160, 170, 171; term for, 70 Huang Aihua (drama scholar), 305n10

[ 354 ]

index Huang Jizhong (translator), 5 Huang Ping’an (stage designer), 261f Huang Xiuji (literary historian), 84 Huang Zhumo (director), 318n43 Huang Zuolin (director and theorist), 46, 47, 96, 119 Hugo, Victor, 31 Hurricane (huaju; Tian Qinxin; theater of dramatists), 9, 61, 63 hybrid theater, 102, 115 “I Am a Soldier” (song; Lu Yuan and Yue Lun), 249–­50 “I Have Nothing” (song; Cui Jian), 284–­85 Ibsen, Henrik, 7, 86, 170, 205, 227, 255; and Hong Shen, 71, 91; and Hu Shi, 85; and Tian Han, 31, 34, 43, 64, 174. See also Doll’s House, A Ibsenism, Chinese, 9, 10, 90 idealism, socialist, 176, 179, 237, 239, 322n46; in postsocialist period, 233–­34, 236; vs. romanticism, 226, 229 If I Were for Real (satirical play; Sha Yexin), 15, 220 improvisation, 84, 89, 96, 101, 103, 149 In Memory of Mr. Lu Xun (huaju; Xiao Hong), 61–­62 In Search of Li Dazhao (revolutionary history play; Meng Bing), 260–­64; staging of, 260–­61, 262 In Search of Spring Willow Society (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 2, 3, 119–­20 India vs. Shakespeare, 32, 33 inner and outer plays, 42, 53, 61, 91, 117, 134–­35, 262–­63 intellectuals: and aesthetics vs. ideology, 93; and Anti-­Rightist movement, 155, 160; and CCP, 87, 158, 159; as characters, 17; class status of, 58, 203, 214, 217–­18, 244; and Cultural Revolution, 209, 220, 224, 243, 244; as cultural workers, 99; and democracy, 145, 206; and education, 10–­11; as fellow travelers, 56;

Japanese, 30; in Maoist period, 203, 209, 219–­34, 242–­43, 244; in postsocialist period, 219–­34; reformed, 239; in Republican vs. post-­Mao periods, 206; sent-­down, 220, 242; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 121, 127, 128, 133–­34; and “The Internationale,” 269, 276, 287; Tian Han on, 34–­35. See also geologists; scientists Internationale, The (huaju; Tang Dong), 269 “Internationale, The” (song), 19–­20, 184, 197, 268–­88; and CCP, 20, 270–­74, 279, 283, 284; Chinese lyrics for, 19, 272; in film, 20, 274–­77, 280; lyrics of, 268, 270, 272, 274; and Meng Bing, 20, 262, 268–­69; as protest song, 282–­83; and Qu Qiubai, 19, 271–­73, 286–­87, 326n12; and Tiananmen demonstrations, 20, 284–­85 Intruder (huaju; Zhang Pengchun), 85 Invader (huaju; Zhang Pengchun), 85 Issues of “Face” (huaju; Lao She), 164 Italy, 115 Ito Toramaru, 30 Ivens, Joris (Dutch documentary filmmaker), 67 Japan: actresses in, 90; Chinese intellectuals in, 7, 29–­30, 80, 205, 266; and main melody plays, 250; occupation of China by, 12, 115, 132, 308n57; Ouyang Yuqian in, 7, 100–­103, 105; and Tian Han, 29–­30, 39, 43, 48, 52, 71; types of drama in, 102–­3. See also War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression Jia Yunnian (seismologist), 246–­48 Jian Er (song writer), 317n17 Jiang Guangci (leftist fiction writer), 272 Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife), 59–­60, 174–­75, 184, 309n82; in Doll’s House, 86; and Lin Biao, 297n98; and Peng Liyuan, 200–­201; and traitors, 196, 197

[ 355 ]

index Jiang Zemin (former PRC president), 18, 173 Jiang Zhuyun (CCP martyr; Red Crag; Sister Jiang), 196 Jiangxi Soviet Area, 178, 181, 190, 280, 283, 287; Red Army retreat from, 182, 188–­89 Jiao Juyin (huaju director), 96, 119, 150–­51, 152, 288 Jiao Ping (song writer), 317n17 Jin Shan (actor and director), 109, 114, 129, 136, 157, 297n95 Jin Yan (actor), 279 Jintian Uprising (1851), 124, 126, 130, 131 Jintian Village (Taiping Rebellion play; Chen Baichen), 122, 126, 133 Jiusan Society, 139 Jones, Andrew F., 275, 279, 285 Joys and Sorrows (huaju; Yue Ye), 167–­70 Kang Sheng (CCP leader), 45 Key, Ellen, 34 Khrushchev, Nikita, 160 Kikuchi Kan (Japanese author), 28 Kiln Workers (huaju; Ding Ling), 62 King, Richard, 146 Kohl, Norbert, 37 Kong Shangren (Qing dynasty dramatist), 42, 111–­12 Korean War, 92, 93, 108, 175, 214, 215, 250 Korolenko, Vladimir, 56 Krivenko, Sergey, 56 Kuhn, Phillip A., 123, 126 Kuomintang (KMT; Nationalist Party), 6, 13, 219, 259, 277; and CCP, 66–­68, 72–­73, 78, 93, 118–­19, 145, 155, 182; censorship by, 91–­92, 121, 122, 135, 153; and comedy, 164, 165; corruption of, 117, 121, 164; and Hong Shen, 77, 78, 80–­81; and Hu Shi, 11, 87; in Maoist period, 149, 155, 198; and Qu Qiubai, 286, 287; and red classics, 174, 177, 178,

179–­80; and Soldiers Under Neon Light, 211, 214; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 135; and Teahouse, 149, 150–­51; and “The Internationale,” 283; and Tian Han, 27, 54, 156; and traitors, 195, 196; in United Front, 66–­68, 149, 182; in War of Resistance, 12, 114, 115, 118, 125, 257; and The Young Generation, 216, 217. See also Republican period La Tosca (play; Sardou), 120–­21 Lady of Shentu (filmscript; Hong Shen), 84 Lady Windermere’s Fan (play; Wilde), 72 Lai, Stan (playwright), 96 Lan Ping. See Jiang Qing Lao She (playwright), 12, 17, 108, 288; celebration of, 119; works by, 96, 150, 153–­54, 164, 171, 198, 313n35, 314n57. See also Teahouse League of Left-­Wing Writers, 80, 81 Lei Feng (model soldier), spirit of, 252–­53, 254 Lei Yu xu (Preface to Thunderstorm; Cao Yu), 302n49 Lenin, Vladimir, 31, 82, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276 Lenin in 1918 (Soviet film), 275–­76, 327n22 Lenin in October (Soviet film), 273, 275, 327n22 Li Ang (scholar), 317n18 Li Bozhao (woman playwright; huaju), 111 Li Chang (stage designer), 112f Li Chao (playwright), 167 Li Chuli (theorist of revolutionary literature), 296n77 Li Dazhao (CCP co-­founder), 31, 71, 272, 273 Li Hongzhang (politician and diplomat of late Qing dynasty), 135 Li Huanzhi (song writer), 311n1 Li Huiniang (Peking opera; Meng Chao), 45, 78

[ 356 ]

index Li, Jie, 146 Li Kenong (PLA general), 139 Li Li, 146, 194 Li Liuyi (director), 152, 312n23 Li Longyun (playwright), 220 Li Shixian (Taiping Rebellion leader), 137, 138 Li Shuangjiang (singer), 184 Li Shutong (actor, artist, and Buddhist monk), 119, 120 Li Siguang (geologist), 238 Li Xintian (novelist), 181 Li Xiucheng (Taiping Rebellion leader), 128–­32, 134, 136, 309n82 Li Ying (actor), 135 Li Yuwu (director), 318n32 Liang Hongyu (Peking opera; Ouyang Yuqian), 107 Liang Qichao (scholar and reformist), 39, 80 Liang Sicheng (architect and historian), 26 Liang Xin (film scriptwriter), 300n17 Liao Changyong (singer), 285 liberalism, 71, 109; American, 8, 31, 72 Light of the South Pole (huaju; Li Guoxiu), 209 Lin Biao (PRC marshal), 59, 183, 190, 274, 283, 297n98 Lin Juemin (late Qing revolutionary martyr), 266 Lin Nong (film director), 317n19 Lin Shu (translator), 5 Lin Zhaohua (huaju director), 96, 151 Linli (huaju; Bai Wei), 61 literary history, 8, 28, 79–­84 Liu, Lydia H., 292n9 Liu, Steven Siyuan, 72, 102, 154, 300n23 Liu Baiyu (writer), 161 Liu Baoluo (actor), 144, 311n5 Liu Binyan (writer), 161 Liu Bocheng (PRC marshal), 283 Liu Chuan (playwright), 208–­9, 321n12 Liu Guicheng (gui opera; Ouyang Yuqian), 139

Liu Guoding (traitor in The True Story of Red Crag), 195 Liu Huan (singer), 285 Liu Jingting (opera; character in A New Story of Peach Blossom Fan), 42 Liu Jinyun (Jin Yun; huaju playwright), 95–­96, 171, 316n71 Liu Junmin (stage designer), 94f, 129f Liu Kaiqu (artist), 124 Liu Lu (stage designer), 169f Liu Shaoqi (former PRC president), 163, 190, 196, 272 Liu Siyang (character in Red Crag), 194, 196 Liu Xiaobo (critic), 284 Liu Yalou (PLA general), 174, 190 Liu Yiquan (character in Archives of Life), 258–­59 Living Forever in Burning Flames (film; Shui Hua, dir.; Red Crag), 276–­77, 280, 327n25 Lloyd, Harold, 90 Long March (1934–­1935), 124, 148, 205, 283, 287; and red classics, 147, 177, 178, 182, 185, 188; and “The Internationale,” 273 Longing for Home (huaju; Tian Han), 61–­62 Look West at Chang’an (huaju; Lao She), 314n57 Loving Son and Daughter (satirical comedy; Wang Shaoyan), 165 Loyal King Li Xiucheng (Taiping Rebellion play; Ouyang Yuqian), 12, 100, 113, 121, 122, 128 Lu Minzhi (scholar), 51–­52 Lu Xi (actress), 154 Lu Xiaoman (woman playwright), 61 Lü Xingchen (playwright), 210, 213, 321n13 Lu Xun, 29–­30, 79, 161–­62, 286; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 135; and Tian Han, 43–­44, 45, 46, 48, 295n63 Lu Yangchun (stage designer), 129f Lu Yuan (song writer), 249–­50

[ 357 ]

index Lugou Bridge (huaju; Tian Han; wartime theater), 144 Luo Anding (traitor in The True Story of Red Crag), 195 Luo Guangbin (fiction writer; Red Crag), 196, 327n25 Luo, Liang, 8, 56, 70 Luo Ronghuan (PRC marshal), 283 Luo Ruiqing (PLA general), 190, 283 Luo Wei (CCP martyr), 273 Luo Yinong (early CCP leader and martyr), 272 Ma Junwu (scientist and educator), 139 Ma Yanxiang (drama theorist and director), 76 Macau, 6 MacFarquhar, Roderick, 281 Main Event in Life (huaju; Hu Shi), 85, 89, 90, 159, 165 main melody plays, 18–­19, 241, 249–­67, 288, 323n55; and “The Internationale,” 268–­69. See also Meng Bing Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics,” The, 16 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 31 Man He, 300n23 Man in Gray (huaju; Zhang Pengchun), 85 Mao Dun (fiction writer and cultural leader), 60, 79 Mao Jingang (stage designer), 157f, 213f Mao Zedong, 48, 173, 267, 309n82; on capitalism, 233, 236; and Cultural Revolution, 274, 281; on Daqing, 240; and entrance exams, 235–­36; as fictional character, 263, 266; and Jiang Qing, 175; on Lei Feng, 252; on literature and art, 39, 44, 45, 59–­60, 79, 80, 148, 156, 160, 177; and “March of the Volunteers,” 26; and Monument of the People’s Heroes, 124, 131; and opera, 107, 139; in red classics, 182, 183; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 123, 132, 135; and

“The Internationale,” 272, 273, 282, 283; in war against KMT, 125, 148; works of, 145 Maoism, 56, 217–­18, 245; disillusionment with, 233; and “The Internationale,” 20, 274–­75 Maoist Model Theatre (Roberts), 16 Maoist period (1949–­1976), 13, 193; aesthetics vs. politics in, 288; artists in, 8, 9, 117; audiences in, 93–­94, 211; comedy in, 167; idealism of, 176, 322n46; intellectuals in, 203, 208, 209, 219–­34, 242–­43, 244; nostalgia for, 152, 176, 185, 201, 210, 237, 270; and “The Internationale,” 270; women in, 201, 227–­29 March Forward Newsletter (CCP underground publication), 194 “March of the Volunteers, The,” (song; Nie Er and Tian Han), 25–­26, 63–­64, 65, 67, 116; as national anthem, 8, 26, 49, 63 “March Song of the Sword, The,” 118 Marx, Karl, 31, 123, 271 Marxism, 9, 71, 73, 80, 81, 193, 244 May Fourth period (1919–­1921): and comedy, 165; and Cultural Revolution, 60; and Hong Shen, 80, 93; and huaju, 2, 204; and main melody plays, 250; music of, 275, 277, 279; and opera, 43, 46; and Ouyang Yuqian, 101, 104; and scientists, 207; and Taiping rebellion plays, 124; and “The Internationale,” 275, 281, 287; and Tian Han, 36, 48, 50; and Tiananmen demonstrations, 285; and women, 90, 168, 227 Mei Lanfang (Peking opera actor), 43, 44, 46, 48, 87, 101, 106 Men and Women in Wild Times (huaju; Chen Baichen), 165 Meng Bing, 18–­19, 249–­67; and aesthetics vs. politics, 19, 250, 266, 288; and audiences, 253, 254, 262, 263, 267, 288; and commercialism,

[ 358 ]

index 250, 259, 260; and Ouyang Yuqian, 19, 250, 260, 267; in Republican period, 19, 264–­67; and “The Internationale,” 20, 262, 269; and Tian Han, 19, 250, 260, 267 Meng Chao (Peking opera playwright), 45 Meng Jinghui (huaju playwright), 96, 152 Metamorphosis (huaju; Cao Yu), 114, 205–­6 Milton, John, 34 Ming dynasty, 111–­12 Misty Season Drama Festival (Chongqing; wartime theater), 114 Mittler, Barbara, 16, 274, 280 Mo Hualun (singer), 285 Mo Yan (fiction writer), 210, 213, 321n13 model theater, revolutionary, 16–­17, 35, 69, 237; ballet, 108, 175, 198, 212, 280–­81; opera, 41–­42, 97, 136, 196, 218–­19; and red classics, 181; and Taiping rebellion plays, 136; and “The Internationale,” 275, 281; worker’s plays, 256. See also worker, peasant, and soldier plays modernism, 7, 86, 95, 255, 264; proletarian, 9, 28, 29, 33, 34–­39, 48; of Tian Han, 28, 29, 33, 34–­39, 48; Western, 48 modernization: and disabilities, 239; economic, 11, 48, 104–­6, 221, 231, 233, 282; and opera, 46, 77, 88, 97, 102; of theater production, 89, 144; and Westernization, 217. See also Zhang Jian Monument of the People’s Heroes (Tiananmen Square, Beijing), 124 monumental theater, 18–­19, 249–­67. See also Meng Bing Mother (film; Ling Zifeng, dir.), 279 Mozi, 31 Music from Heaven (huaju; Fu Yongfan, dir.; soldier play), 283–­84 “My Fellow Countrymen” (song), 198–­99

Nanchang Uprising (1927), 131, 273, 281 Nanjing Dramatic Art Society, 115 Nanjing University, 104 Nankai New Theater, 85, 86 Nankai University, 86, 96 Nantong Acting School, 100, 104, 105, 108, 119 Narodniks, 55 National Drama School, 46, 47, 75 National Forum on Artistic Works (Beijing; 1961), 57–­58 National Forum on the Scriptwriting of Modern Spoken Drama, Opera, and Children’s Plays (Guangzhou; 1962), 58 national identity, 30, 39, 211 National Salvation Drama Troupes, 117 national theater, 8, 86, 88 nationalism, 91, 102, 108, 211; and female impersonators, 121; and geologists, 241; Meng Bing on, 265, 266; and Taiping Rebellion, 123 naturalism, 7, 86, 89 Nesbit, Edith, 34 New Fourth Army (PLA), 68 New Story of Educating Her Son (opera; Tian Han), 39–­41, 42 New Story of The Peach Blossom Fan, A (opera; Tian Han), 39, 42 New Youth (journal), 43 “Newcomer in the Department of Organization” (short story; Wang Meng), 161 Nie Er (composer), 25, 27, 65, 277 Nie Rongzhen (PRC marshal), 283 Night at a Café, A (huaju; Tian Han), 51–­52, 297n90 Night the Tiger Was Caught, The (huaju; Tian Han), 36, 41, 159, 168, 204 Nikolayeva, Galina Evgeniyevna (Soviet writer), 161 Nixon, Richard, 26 North Korea, 275 North Vietnam, 275 Northern Kunqu Opera Troupe, 189

[ 359 ]

index October Revolution (Russia; 1917), 19, 31, 73, 272 “On Photography” (essay; Lu Xun), 44 On the Bridge Construction Site (reportage fiction; Liu Binyan), 161 On the Dock (model Peking opera), 281 one-­act plays, 36, 85–­89, 159–­60, 162, 167. See also Wang Shaoyan O’Neill, Eugene, 71 opera, folk (geju), 6, 99, 190; new, 66, 189; and Peng Liyuan, 198, 199; red classic, 15, 173–­74, 175, 186, 187, 188, 190–­92; and Tian Han, 63, 66, 298n108 opera, model, 41–­42, 97, 136, 196, 218–­19 opera, traditional Chinese (xiqu): and adaptations, 107, 112, 113, 186–­87, 282; and Archives of Life, 255; Guangdong (yueju), 78, 282; gui, 4, 102, 107, 138–­40; and Hong Shen, 71, 77–­78, 82; and huaju, 1, 43, 57, 78, 82, 189, 286; huangmei, 186, 187; kun, 6, 106, 189; local, 6, 11, 39, 43, 78, 99, 186; Lu Xun on, 43–­44; and Mao Zedong, 107, 139; and modernization, 46, 77, 88, 97, 102; and Nantong Acting School, 104; and Ouyang Yuqian, 11, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 138–­40; and Peach Blossom Fan, 112; Peking, 4, 9, 28, 29, 48, 78, 87, 97, 101, 102, 104, 106, 136, 144, 154, 254, 282, 286, 300n17, 308n57; vs. photography, 44; ping, 9, 291n20; reform of, 11, 80, 82, 106, 107; Shaoxing, 6, 54; Southern-­style, 111; and “The Internationale,” 273; and Tian Han, 28, 29, 36, 39–­48, 54, 58; xiang, 9, 39 opera, Western-­style, 28, 63–­64, 174 Opera Improvement Bureau, 144 Opium Wars (1839–­1842), 123, 124 Oppression (huaju; Ding Xilin), 86 “Our Self-­Criticism” (essay; Tian Han), 37, 55, 56 “Our Troops March Toward the Sun” (song), 279

Ouyang Shanzun (huaju director; Ouyang Yuqian’s son), 150 Ouyang Yibing (playwright), 234–­37, 241, 322n46 Ouyang Yuqian (gui opera; Liu Guicheng), 138–­40 Ouyang Yuqian (playwright, director, and actor), 1–­5, 8, 95, 98–­140; adaptations by, 57, 107, 109, 111–­12, 113, 121; and CCP, 108–­9, 139; celebration of, 119; on comedy, 162; early career of, 12–­13, 15; and education, 102, 105, 106–­7, 108; as female impersonator, 4, 101–­2, 120; and huaju, 70, 101, 102, 106; hybridity of, 103; in Japan, 7, 100–­103, 105; and Meng Bing, 19, 250, 260, 267; in Nantong, 103–­6; and opera, 11, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 138–­40; and Rectification Campaign, 107–­9; in Shanghai, 101, 103, 113; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 121, 122; and Tian Han, 101, 109, 113, 139; in War of Resistance, 4, 113–­21; and Western theater, 100, 105, 106 Ovechkin, Valentin Vladimirovich, 161 Palace of the Attendant King (Jinhua city), 137 Pan Jinlian (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 57 Pan Keming (drama historian), 85 Paradise on Earth (huaju; Pu Shunqing), 61 Pardise Lost, Paradise Regained (Milton), 34 Paris Commune (1871), 20, 273, 281 “Party Membership Dues” (short story; Wang Yuanjian), 176–­79, 181 Patient with Free Coverage (satirical comedy; Wang Shaoyan), 163–­64 Patriot Thief (huaju; Chen Dabei), 86 Peace Dove (dance drama; Ouyang Yuqian), 108 Peach Blossom Fan (opera; Kong Shangren), 111, 113

[ 360 ]

index Peach Blossom Fan, The (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 107, 111–­13 Peach Blossom Fan, The (Kun opera; Kong Shangren), 107 Pear Seller, A (huaju; Hong Shen), 85 Peasant Slaves (huaju; Li Bozhao), 110–­11 peasants, 214, 216, 239, 252; as characters, 209; fiction of, 146; theater of, 88, 109. See also worker, peasant, and soldier plays Peking Man (huaju; Cao Yu), 86, 114, 206–­7 Peking University, 86 Peng Liyuan (singer; Xi Jinping’s wife), 173–­74, 188, 190, 197–­201 Peng Shuzhi (early CCP leader and Trotskyist), 272 performance, 11, 82, 89; of huaju, 1–­2, 10; study of, 139–­40 Philippines, 32 photography, 44 Picking up the Jade Bracelet (gui opera), 139 picture storybooks, 195 Pilnyak, Boris (Russian poet), 56 Pioneers (film; Yu Yanfu, dir.), 240 PLA (People’s Liberation Army), 59–­60, 68; Archival Museum of, 257, 259; drama troupes of, 250, 260, 267. See also Red Army Plaything of the Goddess of Love, The (huaju; Pu Shunqing), 61 Poe, Edgar Allen, 31, 36 “Poet and the Question of Labor, The” (essay; Tian Han), 34 Pop Goes the Avant-­Garde: Experimental Theater in Contemporary China (Ferrari), 96 popular theater, 35, 202, 259; and avant-­garde, 8, 9, 96; vs. elite, 38, 69, 78, 92 Portrait of One Hundred Rightist Clowns, A (satirical comedy), 155 Postlewait, Thomas, 70 post-­Mao period (1976–­): aesthetics vs. politics in, 7–­8; comedy in, 162;

disabled in, 239; economic reforms in, 48, 253; faith plays in, 146, 148; geologists in, 206, 209–­10, 221, 227, 230, 240; Hong Shen in, 80, 95; intellectuals in, 206, 244; Jiang Qing in, 196; KMT in, 66–­67; love stories in, 227–­32; Peng Liyuan in, 198–­99; red classics in, 146, 147, 170–­71; and Republican period, 48, 206; reversal of verdicts in, 190–­91; scientists as characters in, 16–­18, 209–­10; Taiping Rebellion plays in, 12, 125, 134–­35, 136; “The Internationale” in, 270, 281–­82; Tian Han in, 26, 60, 64; women in, 227–­29 postsocialist period (late 1980s on): 1990s in, 210, 214–­15, 218, 219–­34; capitalism in, 200, 233, 236, 250; censorship in, 233; commercial vs. amateur theater in, 83; corruption in, 210, 252, 253, 260; Hong Shen in, 80; intellectuals in, 219–­34; main melody plays in, 19, 250–­67; and Peng Liyuan, 197; red classics in, 176, 178, 193; In Search of the Spring Willow Society in, 119–­20; Sister Jiang in, 191–­93; socialist idealism in, 233–­34, 236; Taiping Rebellion plays in, 122, 125, 137; Teahouse in, 152–­53; “The Internationale” in, 270, 283; Tian Han in, 9, 28; traitors in, 187, 197; women characters in, 201; women in, 6, 227–­29 Pottier, Eugène, 19 “Preface to Call to Arms” (essay; Lu Xun), 30, 44 Princess Wencheng (history play; Tian Han), 58 Pu Boying (playwright and theater reformist), 89 Pu Shunqing (woman playwright), 61 Puccini, Giacomo, 120 puppet theater, 39 Putting Down Your Whip (huaju; wartime theater), 117–­18

[ 361 ]

index Qi Benyu (CCP theorist), 130, 309n82 Qi Mudong (stage designer), 110f Qian Qianli (director and actor), 46 Qing dynasty, 112, 114, 120, 309n76; fall of, 101, 264; and Taiping Rebellion, 123, 126–­29, 135, 138 Qinghua School (Beijing), 101 Qinglong Pond (huaju; Hong Shen; peasant play), 75–­76 Qiu Jin (martyr, feminist and writer), 266 Qiu Kunliang (Taiwanese scholar), 115 Qu Qiubai (early CCP leader), 130, 285–­87, 328n44; and “The Internationale,” 19, 271–­73, 286–­87, 326n12 Qu Qiubai (operatic drama; Hong Xiu), 285–­87 Qu Yuan (history play; Guo Moruo), 114 Quan Xuantong (linguist and writer), 43 radio, 84, 116, 194, 274 Rainbow (huaju; Hong Shen), 71 Ran Yizhi (traitor in The True Story of Red Crag), 195 realism: and Archives of Life, 255, 258; and Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven, 120; and Cao Yu, 302n49; critical, 93, 160, 253; and expressionism, 96; of Hong Shen, 10, 69, 75, 76, 89, 90, 92, 93, 255; and main melody plays, 18–­19, 250; of Meng Bing, 252, 253, 262; and national theater, 86, 88; and red classics, 156; and romanticism, 27; socialist, 15–­16, 18–­19, 48, 93, 160, 175, 241, 250, 252, 258; and Teahouse, 150; and “The Internationale,” 273; and Tian Han, 27, 31, 48, 64, 255; in USSR, 48, 275; and women, 15–­16, 175 Rectification Campaign (1951), 100, 107–­9 Red Army, 182, 205, 251; Fourth, 283; performance units in, 283–­84; and red classics, 174, 177, 178, 179, 183;

and “The Internationale,” 273; Thirteenth, 258, 259. See also PLA Red Army period (1927–­1937), 110, 125, 147, 256 “Red Army Song,” 327n18 “Red Azalea, The,” (song), 184 red classics: adaptations of, 16, 82, 176, 181, 182, 186; and aesthetics vs. politics, 153, 176; and CCP, 154, 169, 176, 178, 182, 186; and censorship, 154, 160, 181, 193; and Cultural Revolution, 146, 176, 181, 182, 183, 185, 189–­90; and film, 147, 176, 280–­81; and folk opera, 15, 173–­74, 175, 186, 187, 191, 192; vs. gray or black texts, 154, 171; and KMT, 174, 177, 178, 179–­80; and Long March, 147, 177, 178, 182, 185, 188; love stories in, 176, 179, 180, 191–­92; and one-­act plays, 159; in post-­Mao period, 146, 147, 170–­71; in postsocialist period, 176, 178, 193; and Teahouse, 152–­53; and television, 16, 185, 188; and “The Internationale,” 280–­81; and Tian Han, 155–­56; traitors in, 180, 181, 185, 186–­97; and women, 169, 170, 173–­201 Red Crag (red classic novel; Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan), 16, 190–­94, 195–­97, 226, 276 Red Detachment of Women (film; Xie Jin, dir.), 300n17 Red Detachment of Women (model ballet), 108, 280–­81 Red Flag Over Green Hill (film; Zhang Junxiang, dir.), 280 Red Lantern (model Peking opera), 41–­42, 136, 218–­19 Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution, 16 Red Rose Singer (film; Hong Shen), 84 “Red Star Inspired Me to Join the Battle” (song; Fu Gengchen), 184 Red Star Over China (Snow), 283 Red Theater movement, 111, 158, 283

[ 362 ]

index Ren Bishi (CCP leader), 272 Ren Guang (composer), 66 reportage plays, 147, 252, 283 Republican period (1911–­1949), 6–­8, 13–­14, 25–­140; class struggle in, 73; comedy in, 162, 164; corruption in, 69, 80, 117, 121, 162, 164; and Cultural Revolution, 95; vs. early PRC, 48, 144, 172, 208, 216, 279; and Hong Shen, 93; leftist trend in, 80; and Meng Bing, 19, 264–­67; music of, 276, 277, 279; and post-­Mao period, 48, 206; scientists as characters in, 17, 204–­10; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 130; and “The Internationale,” 275; theater artists in, 13, 17, 117; traitors in, 12, 204–­5; women in, 204, 227. See also May Fourth period; Red Army period; War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression Republican Revolution (1911), 264–­67 Return to the South (huaju; Tian Han), 38 Reunion (huaju; Ding Ling), 62 Revolutionary Army (Zou Rong), 265 Revolutionary Family (film; Shui Hua, dir.), 279–­80 Revolutionary History Museum (Beijing), 257 revolutionary leader’s plays, 260 Rhapsody of Shisanling Reservoir, The (huaju; Tian Han), 33, 155, 156–­58 “rice sprout song” movement, 78 Rise of the Red Engineers (Andreas), 244 “Rivers and Mountains” (song), 199 Road to Revival, The (exhibition; Chinese National Museum; Beijing), 26 Road to Revival, The (music and dance epic), 210, 282 Roar China! (huaju), 115 Roberts, Rosemary A., 16, 146, 195 romanticism, 7, 27, 31, 226, 229, 273 Rotten Grapes (satirical play; Wang Shaoyan), 162–­63

Russia: February Revolution in, 30–­31; literary societies in, 55–­56; October Revolution in, 19, 31, 73, 272; and Tian Han, 28, 30–­31, 34. See also Soviet Union Sai Jinhua (defense drama; Xia Yan), 114 “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman” (song), 327n18 Saint-­Simon, Henri, 244 Salomé (play; Wilde), 37–­38, 57, 62 Sang Hu (film director), 321n12 Sanniang Educating Her Son (opera), 40–­41 Sardou, Victorien, 120–­21 Sauter, William, 91 scenario plays, 84, 89, 101 Schiller, Friedrich, 31 scientists: in 1960s vs. 1990s, 219–­34; as amateur art workers, 247–­48; as characters, 203–­4; disabled, 239; personal stories of, 243–­48; and politics, 207, 208, 209; red and expert, 243, 244 Scripts (journal), 159 Seal of Love (film; Huo Jianqi, dir.), 286, 287 Second Spring (film; Sang Hu and Wang Xiuwen, dir.), 209, 321n12 Second Spring (huaju; Liu Chuan), 208–­9, 321n12 Selected Chinese Plays Over Fifty Years, 152 “Sewing the Red Flag” (song; Yan Su; Sister Jiang), 190, 191, 192 Sha Meng (director), 278f Sha Yexin (playwright), 15, 220 shadow plays, 39 Shakespeare, William, 7, 20, 28, 31–­32, 71 Shanghai: in films, 277; Ouyang Yuqian in, 101, 103, 113; plays set in, 211–­15, 219, 220, 221, 225, 230, 234–­37, 242; socialist period elections in, 149; in War of Resistance, 114, 115, 116, 132 Shanghai Amateur Actors Association, 174

[ 363 ]

index Shanghai Amateur Drama Society, 45 Shanghai Art College, 52, 60 Shanghai Song and Dance Theater, 185 Shanghai Stage Society, 89 Shangrao Prison (film; Feng Xuefeng), 277, 278f Shantou University, 245 Shao Hua (actor), 129 Shaw, George Bernard, 162, 255 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 31 Shen Ximeng (playwright), 210, 213, 321n13 Shen Yang (actor), 46 Shi Dakai (Taiping Rebellion leader), 122, 127–­29 Shi Dongshan (film director), 116–­17 Shi Han (film scriptwriter), 318n32 shigeki drama (Japan), 102 Shining Red Star, The (dance drama; Zhao Ming, dir.), 185–­86 Shining Red Star, The (film; Li Ang and Li Jun, dir.), 181–­86, 317n18 Shining Red Star, The (TV series; Li Hui, dir.), 185 shinpa drama (Japan), 102, 103, 121 “Shocking” (concert; 2007), 285 Show Boat (musical), 110 Shrewd Woman, A (huaju; Ouyang Yuqian), 89 Shui Hua (film director), 327n25 “Since I Began Acting” (essay; Ouyang Yuqian), 99–­100 “Sing a Song for the Party” (song; Yao Xiaozhou), 182 Sister Jiang (folk opera; Yan Su), 15, 173–­74; arias from, 190; Chen Xiaomei’s recollections of, 194–­95; documentary on, 174; film version of, 190–­91; and Peng Liyuan, 198, 199. See also Living Forever in Burning Flames; Red Crag Sister Jiang (TV drama series; Tan Li and Peng Qiyu), 197 “Sky Is Bright in the Liberated Areas, The” (song), 278

slavery, 3–­5 Small Well Lane (huaju; Li Longyun), 220 Snow, Edgar, 283 Snow on Lushan (huaju; Red Army theater), 190 “Socialism Is Good” (song), 13, 143–­44 soldiers, 209. See also worker, peasant, and soldier plays Soldiers Theater, 283–­84 Soldiers Under Neon Light (huaju; Shen Ximeng, Mo Yan, Lü Xingchen), 210–­15, 216, 218, 220, 221, 236 Song, Weijie, 151 Song Baozhen, 69, 85, 100 Song Jiaoren (a founder of the KMT), 73 “Song of Red Plum, The” (Sister Jiang theme song; Yan Su), 15, 173–­74 Song of the Chinese Revolution, The (music and dance epic), 209–­10, 282 “Song of the Geologists, The” (Xiao He), 17, 202–­3, 216, 221–­22, 233, 240, 243 “Song of the Graduate” (Tian Han), 116 “Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin” (Tian Han), 98–­99, 116, 118 Song of the Waves (autobiography; Guo Moruo), 298n3 Song of the Waves (folk opera; An E and Ren Guang), 66 “Song of the Waves” (song; Tian Han and Zhang Shu), 65–­68, 116 Song Xiteng (opera scriptwriter), 187f songs, popular, 21, 173, 249–­50; in Cultural Revolution, 26, 327n18; from films, 8, 25, 27, 118, 182, 188, 268, 276, 277, 278, 308n58; and folksongs, 42, 49, 190, 259; and Peng Liyuan, 190, 200; and Tian Han, 8, 13, 27, 65–­68, 98–­99, 116, 118, 143–­44. See also “East Is Red, The”; “I Am a Soldier”; “Internationale, The”; “March of the Volunteers”;

[ 364 ]

index “Socialism Is Good”; “Song of Red Plum”; “Song of the Geologists”; “Song of the War-­Front Cultural Workers in Guilin”; “Song of the Waves” sonic theater, 269–­70, 284–­85 Sons and Daughters of the Stormy Times (film; Tian Han and Xia Yan), 25, 27 Soul of the Republic (huaju; Meng Bing), 264–­67 Southeast Flies the Peacock (huaju; Yuan Changying), 61 Southern Drama Society, 57, 60; and Hong Shen, 80–­81; and Tian Han, 28, 36, 37, 38, 49, 55, 106 Soviet Union (USSR): artists in, 160–­61; drama education in, 111; in films, 280; films from, 226, 242, 273, 274–­76, 327n22; realism in, 48, 275; and red classics, 63, 174; scientists in, 208, 244; and “The Internationale,” 271, 273, 274–­75, 282 Spiritual Journey to the Red Capital (Qu Qiubai), 271 spoken drama. See huaju Spring and Autumn of the Divine Kingdom (Taiping Rebellion play; Yang Hansheng), 122, 127, 132, 133, 135, 136 Spring Cannot Be Shut Out (film; Ouyang Yuqian), 116 Spring Willow Society, 100–­103, 108, 119, 120, 305n10 Stage Sisters (film; Xie Jin, dir.), 54 Staging Revolution (Xing Fan), 16, 97 Stalinism, 160 Stanislavski method, 31, 111, 150, 175, 258 Steel-­Made Soldiers (film; Cheng Yin, dir.), 277 Sterne, Jonathan, 272–­73, 286 Story of Peach Blossom Fan, A (traditional opera; Kong Shangren), 42 Story of the Golden Scales of a Fish, The (An E), 62

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 3, 4–­5 street theater, 117 Strident Doctor, A (huaju; adapted from Ibsen’s Enemy of the People), 86 Strindberg, August, 31 “Summary of the Seminar on the Literature and Art in the PLA, A” (1966), 59–­60 Sun Pinghua, 87 Sun Rises from the East, The (TV drama series; Wang Jin and Ma Runsheng, dir.), 272–­73 Sun Weishi (woman huaju director), 110, 111, 169 Sun Yat-­sen, 120, 123–­24, 264–­65 Sun Yu (film director), 317n19 Sunrise (huaju; Cao Yu), 86 “Superfluous Words” (Qu Qiubai), 286, 287 Synge, John Millington, 31 Taguchi Kikutei, 121 Tai’erzhuang, Battle of (1938), 66, 118 Taiping Rebellion (1851–­1864), 12; history plays on, 121–­38 Taiwan, 6, 66–­67, 114–­15, 157; Republic of China in, 101 Tan Xinpei (opera actor), 43 Tang, Xiaobing, 217, 218 Tangshan earthquake (1976), 246 Tao Jin (actor), 117, 154 Tao Xingzhi (educator and reformer), 38 Tchaikevsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 56 Teahouse (huaju; Lao She), 17, 96, 119, 149–­53, 288; versions of, 151–­52, 312n23 technocrats, 17–­18, 244; red and expert, 18 television, 138, 200; adaptations on, 16, 188; documentaries on, 174, 191; dramas for, 67–­68; and red, black and gray drama, 16; and red classics, 16, 185, 188; and Teahouse, 151; on War of Resistance, 116

[ 365 ]

index Ten Thousand Rivers and Mountains (huaju; Chen Qitong), 124–­25, 152; revisions of, 147–­48 Theater (journal), 106 theater of dramatists, 9–­10, 61–­64, 116–­21, 139, 153; and Tian Han, 49–­63; in wartime, 116–­20. See also An E (ping opera); Death of a Famous Actor; Fang Zhenzhu; Grand Master Tian (xiang opera); Guan Hanqing; Headmaster Tian Han (Peking opera); Hurricane; Ouyang Yuqian (gui opera); Spring Cannot Be Shut Out; Stage Sisters; Tian Han (folk opera); Violin and Rose There Is a Small Courtyard (huaju; Li Longyun), 220 Thirteenth Red Army, 258, 259 This Is the Final Struggle (huaju; Meng Bing), 20, 269 Three People’s Principles, 124 Thunderstorm (huaju; Cao Yu), 82, 302n49 Tian Benxiang (drama scholar), 6 Tian Fang (actor and director), 147, 280 Tian Han (folk opera), 63–­64, 66 Tian Han (playwright and critic), 7, 8–­9, 25–­6 4; adaptations by, 29, 37–­38, 45–­47; and aesthetics vs. politics, 28, 32, 36–­37, 38, 46, 55, 58, 60, 158; and artists, 49–­50, 51–­52, 54; and audiences, 13, 50, 52, 53, 55; and CCP, 9, 27, 28, 60, 61; celebration of, 119; and censorship, 13, 29, 46, 54–­55, 60, 156; on class status, 34–­35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50–­51; and Cultural Revolution, 9, 26, 35, 37, 41, 44–­45, 46, 54, 59, 60, 70, 78, 95, 156, 158; death of, 70, 134; early career of, 12–­13, 15; in early PRC, 144–­45, 155–­56; and education, 54, 56–­57; on fellow travelers, 56; and feminism, 28, 34–­35, 36; and film, 27, 28, 177, 179–­81, 182, 185, 308n58; foreign influences on, 28–­33, 34–­39, 43, 50,

55, 64, 174; and Guo Moruo, 66; and Hong Shen, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 80–­81, 144; in KMT prison, 27, 46, 62; “left turn” of, 60, 62; and Lu Xun, 43–­44, 45, 46, 48, 295n63; and Meng Bing, 19, 250, 260, 267; modernism of, 28, 29, 33, 34–­39, 48; network of, 60–­61, 80–­81; and opera, 28, 29, 36, 39–­48, 54, 58; “Our Self-­Criticism” by, 37, 55, 56; and Ouyang Yuqian, 101, 109, 113, 115, 139; poetry by, 28, 32, 34, 36, 77, 143–­44; and popular songs, 8, 13, 27, 65–­66, 98–­99, 116, 118, 143–­44; and realism, 27, 31, 48, 64, 255; and Southern Drama Society, 28, 36, 37, 38, 49, 55, 106; theater of, 9, 63, 70; and theater of dramatists, 49–­63, 139, 153; translations by, 28, 31; and women, 34–­35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50–­51, 56; works by, 28, 34, 35–­36, 41, 61–­62, 144. See also Death of a Famous Actor; Guan Hanqing; “March of the Volunteers”; Night the Tiger Was Caught, The; Violin and Rose Tian Qinxin (woman director), 298n101. See also Hurricane Tian Shaopeng (stage designer), 187f Tian Zhuangzhuang (film director), 147 Tiananmen demonstrations (1989), 20, 284–­85 Tibet, 58 Tolstoy, Leo, 31 Tong Zhiling (Peking opera actor), 144 Tong Zhixian (song writer), 320n1 Tracks in the Snow Forest (red classic novel; Qu Bo), 16 Tragedy of the Poor, A (huaju; Hong Shen), 82, 85 Tragic Journey, A (Chen Feibi; seismologist), 246–­47 traitors: and CCP, 180, 187, 195, 196; and Cultural Revolution, 125, 189–­90, 196, 197, 328n44; and Ouyang Yuqian’s plays, 112, 129;

[ 366 ]

index and Qi Benyu, 309n82; and Qu Qiubai, 286, 287, 328n44; in red classics, 180, 181, 185, 186–­97; in Republican period, 12, 204–­5; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 125, 129–­32, 136 translations: of Communist Manifesto, 205; into English, 1–­2, 96; Japanese, 120; of “The Internationale,” 19, 272; by Tian Han, 28, 31; of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 5, 103 Translations (journal), 161 Trotsky, Leon, 56, 275 True Story of Ah Q, The (Lu Xun), 45–­47, 295n62 True Story of Red Crag, The (history), 195 Tsinghua University, 86 Tu Xiaowen (traitor; in The True Story of Red Crag), 195, 197 Turgenev, Ivan, 31, 321n10 Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (peasant play; Liu Jin Yun), 95–­96, 171 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 3–­5, 103 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Transnational history of America’s Most Mutable Book, 3 Unforgettable 1919, The (Soviet film), 276, 327n24 Unite Together Towards Tomorrow (film; Zhao Ming, dir.), 20, 277 United League (Tongmenghui), 120 United Nations (UN), 11, 25–­26, 87 United States (US): Civil War in, 5; education in, 50, 53, 88, 205, 213; Hong Shen in, 7, 53, 71–­72, 82, 87–­89, 101; and Hu Shi, 87; imperialism of, 111, 115, 211, 281; influence of, 29, 31–­32, 216; liberalism in, 8, 31, 72; Mei Lanfang in, 46, 87; racism in, 4, 5, 109, 110; and scientists, 208; slavery in, 3–­5; and Tian Han, 28, 31–­34. See also After Returning Home Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 4, 11, 87

Unofficial Stories of a Director (satirical comedy; Wang Shaoyan), 162–­63, 166, 314n55 Verlaine, Paul, 31, 36 “Village Opera” (short story; Lu Xun), 43–­44 Violin and Rose (huaju; Tian Han), 39, 49, 50–­51, 60, 63, 209 Voices in History: Solemn Promises Made Half a Century Ago, 145 Volland, Nicolai, 146 Voynich, Ethel Lillian, 225–­26 Wagner, Rudolf G., 45 Walking Toward the Republic (TV drama series; Zhang Li, dir.), 264 Wall (satirical comedy; Wang Shaoyan), 166–­67 Wandering in the Zoo, Waking from a Dream (crosstalk film; Shi Lan, dir.), 155 Wang Chong (huaju director), 151 Wang Guowei (historian, scholar, and poet), 161 Wang Hong (playwright), 325n16 Wang Jiaxiang (scholar and translator), 5 Wang Jingwei (left-­wing leader of the KMT), 84, 115 Wang Jinxi (model worker), 240 Wang Lin (fiction writer), 148, 149 Wang Meng (writer and former Minister of Culture), 139, 161 Wang Ming (early CCP leader), 183 Wang Qimin (geologist), 240 Wang Renmei (actress), 116 Wang Shaoyan (playwright), 146, 162–­67, 171 Wang Shuzeng (historian of the Long March), 178 Wang Xiuwen (film director), 321n12 Wang Ying (actress), 114 Wang Yipeng (artist; Wang Shaoyan’s son), 315n59 Wannan Incident (1941), 68, 121, 135

[ 367 ]

index War of Liberation (1945–­49), 212, 214, 249, 253, 256 War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1947–­1945): CCP-­K MT United Front in, 66–­68, 149, 182; and comedy, 165; Hong Shen in, 68–­69, 91, 114, 116; huaju in, 7, 11–­12, 99, 113–­21; KMT in, 12, 114, 115, 118, 125, 257; and “March of the Volunteers,” 25, 27, 67, 116; Ouyang Yuqian in, 4, 113–­21; plays about, 41, 94–­95, 175, 182, 205–­6, 256; Shanghai in, 114, 115, 116, 132; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 121, 122, 125, 127, 131; traveling artists in, 11, 77, 99, 115, 116–­17, 308n57 Water Margin (traditional fiction; Shi Nai’an), 57 Watkins, Maurine Dallas, 71 “We Are the Successors of Communists” (song), 269 Wedded Husband, The (huaju; Hong Shen), 8, 71 Wedding at the Execution Ground, A (film; Erji Guangbudao and Cai Yuanyuan, dir.), 282 Wei Changhui (Taiping Rebellion leader), 127, 128 Welcome Danger (film), 90–­91 Welcome Party (huaju; Cheng Fangwu), 204–­5, 216 Wen Jiabao (former PRC State Premier), 18, 243–­44 Western imperialism, 208, 215, 281; and Taiping Rebellion, 125, 129, 138; of US, 111, 115, 211, 281 Western influence: and comedies, 168; and Maoism, 107, 233, 237, 245; and music, 66, 277, 281; and performance study, 140; in Soldiers Under Neon Light, 211–­13, 214; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 134; on Tian Han, 28–­39, 43, 48, 50, 52, 55, 64, 174; and universal art, 30, 33, 44; in The Young Generation, 216, 217

Western literature, 31–­32, 33, 36–­37, 43, 52, 79 Western theater, 20, 71, 102, 162, 296n66; and class struggle, 73, 75; and Hong Shen, 72, 74, 87–­88; and Meng Bing, 264, 267; and national theater, 88–­89; and Ouyang Yuqian, 100, 105, 106; techniques of, 7, 255; and Tian Han, 28, 31–­32. See also Brecht, Bertolt; Ibsen, Henrik White-­Haired Girl, The (model ballet/folk opera), 108, 175, 198, 212 Whitman, Walt, 31–­32, 33, 36 Wilde, Oscar, 36, 37–­38, 62, 72 Wilderness (huaju; Cao Yu), 86, 96 Wildman (huaju; Gao Xingjian), 95 Windswept Blossoms (huaju; Yang Jiang), 62 women: as actors, 89–­90; in arranged marriages, 280; and CCP, 62, 169; and Cultural Revolution, 15, 35; and democratic elections, 149; as directors, 264; and Hong Shen, 72; and land reform, 175; in Maoist period, 201, 227–­29; as martyrs, 266; in May Fourth period, 90, 168, 227; as playwrights, 61–­62; in post-­Mao period, 227–­29; in postsocialist period, 6, 201, 227–­29; and realism, 15–­16, 175; and red classics, 15–­16, 169, 170, 173–­201; in Republican period, 204, 227; and Taiping Rebellion plays, 122, 132, 133; and Tian Han, 34–­35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50–­51, 56. See also female impersonators; feminism women characters, 133, 170, 174, 175, 201, 203; in 1960s vs. 1990s, 219–­34; in comedies, 168; and Ouyang Yuqian, 101–­2; and red classics, 181–­82; and Tian Han, 35, 39–­41. See also Doll’s House, A women’s theater, 14, 15, 35, 132, 173–­201, 204 Woodcock, George, 37

[ 368 ]

index worker, peasant, and soldier plays, 18, 19, 171, 204; and collective agriculture, 95–­96; and Hong Shen, 10, 75, 78; and Meng Bing, 250–­51, 254 workers, 34–­35, 209, 211, 215, 239 Wu Fengyuan (actress), 163 Wu Yuebei (opera composer), 64f, 298n108 Wu Ziniu (film director), 27 Wuchang Uprising (1911), 265 Wukui Bridge (huaju; Hong Shen; peasant play), 74–­75 Xi Jinping, 5, 104, 173, 176, 188, 200, 245 Xi Yang (composer), 311n1 Xi Zhongxun (CCP leader; Xi Jinping’s father), 188 Xia Chun (huaju director), 151, 152 Xia Yan (playwright and film scriptwriter), 12, 84, 156, 209, 327n25; celebration of, 119; and Hong Shen, 81, 92–­93, 114, 207, 208; and Lu Xun, 45, 135; and Ouyang Yuqian, 139. See also Fascist Bacillus, The Xian Xinghai (composer), 277 Xiao Chaogui (Taiping Rebellion leader), 126, 132 Xiao He (song writer), 202–­3, 320n1 Xiao Hong (woman writer), 61 Xiao Li (playwright), 325n16 Xiao Tao (director), 261f Xiao Wang Yurong (Peking opera actress), 154 Xie Yaohuan (Peking opera; Tian Han), 29, 45 Xing Fan, 16, 97 Xiong Foxi (playwright, director, and peasant drama creator), 88, 162 Xiu Yan (stage designer), 64f, 298n108 Xu Changlin (film director), 313n35 Xu Lixia (director), 222f Xu Muyun (drama historian), 84, 88 Xu Xiaozhong (huaju director), 96

Yama Zhao (huaju; Hong Shen), 10, 72, 95, 96, 204 Yan Lianke (fiction writer), 245 Yan Su (songwriter), 173, 318n43 Yan’an, 78, 175, 273, 277 Yan’an Ping Opera Research Institute, 107 Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art (Mao Zedong), 79, 80, 148, 160, 177 Yang Hansheng (playwright), 12, 45, 122, 127, 130–­32, 134–­35, 136 Yang Jiang (woman playwright), 14, 15, 62, 159, 162, 165 Yang Jun (huangmei opera actress), 187f Yang Lianfen (scholar), 148 Yang Limin (playwright), 239–­41, 322n32, 322n46 Yang Xiaolou (Peking opera actor), 106 Yang Xiuqing (Taiping Rebellion leader), 127–­28, 132, 133 Yang Yiyan (fiction writer), 196–­97, 327n25 Yang Zhihua (Qu Qiubai’s wife), 286 Yao Wenyuan (writer and critic), 45 Yeats, William Butler, 31 Yellow Earth (film; Chen Kaige, dir.), 76–­77 Yellow River Flows Into the Sea (huaju; scientist play), 209 Ying Ruocheng (actor and translator), 151 Ying Yunwei (director), 92 Young Generation, The (huaju; Chen Yun; scientist play), 215–­19, 239, 240, 245, 247–­48; and Enjoy Hardships, 235, 236; film adaptation of, 243; and Geologists, 219–­34 Young Mistress’s Fan (adaptation; Hong Shen), 72 Youthful China (journal), 31 Yu Dafu (writer), 79, 205 Yu Lan (actress), 147, 280, 327n25 Yu Rongjun (director), 119

[ 369 ]

index Yu Shangyuan (drama theorist, educator, and playwright), 88, 303n72 Yu Yang (actor), 321n12 Yuan Changying (woman playwright; women’s theater), 61 Yuan Shikai (first official president of the Republic of China), 73 Yue Lun (song writer), 249–­50 Yue Ye (playwright; fourth kind of plays), 167–­68, 170–­71, 315n70 Zagona, Helen Grace, 38 Zeitlin, Judith T., 111 Zeng Guofan (statesman and military leader of the late Qing), 58, 135 Zhang Daofan (founder of National Drama School; KMT cultural leader), 115 Zhang Houzai (critic), 43 Zhang Jian (entrepreneur), 11, 17, 103–­6, 161, 167 Zhang Jishun (scholar), 149, 274 Zhang Ke (director), 278f Zhang Manjun (folk opera director), 64, 298n108 Zhang Min (director), 175 Zhang Pengchun (P. C. Chang; playwright, director, and diplomat), 10, 11, 85–­88, 90, 96 Zhang Ping (actor), 327n25 Zhang Ruifang (actress), 279 Zhang Shu (composer), 65–­66, 139 Zhang Yisheng (actor and director), 129 Zhang Zhengyu (stage designer), 94f, 129f, 157f, 297n95 Zhao Dan (actor), 46, 327n25

Zhao Jiabi (editor and scholar), 79 Zhao Ming (director), 185 Zhao Qiyang (head of Beijing People’s Art Theater), 150 Zhao Taimou (educator), 88 Zhao Wenru (actress), 46 Zhao Yiman (film; Sha Meng, dir.), 276–­77 Zhao Yuanren (linguist and composer), 279 Zheng Boqi (film scriptwriter and theorist), 79 Zheng Tianjian (director), 164 Zhou Enlai, 45, 116, 135, 145, 156, 203; and April Fifth movement, 311n13; and artistic forums, 57, 58; and comedy, 163; and dramatists, 68, 92; as female impersonator, 85; and film, 327n22; and Monument of the People’s Heroes, 124; and opera, 139; and red songs, 26, 281 Zhou Enlai in Chongqing (TV drama series; Dong Yachun, dir.), 68 Zhou Wenyong (CCP martyr), 281–­82 Zhou Xinfang (Peking opera actor), 57 Zhou Yang (critic and theorist), 45, 57–­58, 108, 135 Zhou Zuoren (writer and scholar), 79 Zhoukoudian, 207 Zhu De (CCP leader), 177 Zhu Xinyun (actor), 184, 185 Zhu Ziqing (writer), 79 Zhuo Wenjun (huaju; Guo Moruo), 204 Zinsser, Hans, 207 Zou Rong (martyr of the anti-­Manchu movement), 265 Zunyi meeting (1935), 183

[ 370 ]