The Art of Cloning

Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution

Pang Laikwan

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784785208
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784785215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In the 1950s, a French journalist joked that the Chinese were "blue ants under the red flag," dressing identically and even moving in concert like robots. When the Cultural Revolution officially began, this uniformity seemed to extend to the mind. From the outside, China had become a monotonous world, a place of endless repetition and imitation, but a closer look reveals a range of cultural experiences, which also provided individuals with an obscure sense of freedom.

In The Art of Cloning, Pang Laikwan examines this period in Chinese history when ordinary citizens read widely, traveled extensively through the country, and engaged in a range of cultural and artistic activities. The freedom they experienced, argues Pang, differs from the freedom, under Western capitalism, to express individuality through a range of consumer products. But it was far from boring and was possessed of its own kind of diversity.

PART I

Arts, Politics, and Economics

CHAPTER 1

Maoist Aesthetics

The standard perception of the relationship between arts and politics in the Cultural Revolution is of art’s submissive nature to the fanatical political regime. Even Mao kept reminding his people how art could be employed for political purposes. For example, when criticizing the novel Liu Zhidan in 1962, Mao asserted:

Using novels against the party is a new invention. [For] anyone who wants to topple a government, the public opinion must be first prepared, and ideological works must be done. The revolutionaries do it this way, while the antirevolutionaries also do the same thing.¹

This quote is often mentioned to show how Mao saw art as a tool, making it available for all political interests to employ. But neither Mao nor most scholars ask further why and how “ideological works” are carried out by novels, and why the arts are so alluring to those with political intent.

I agree that the primary duty of Cultural Revolution propaganda was to espouse the official ideology, and the rest of this book is devoted to the contextualization of these works in order to understand how they interacted with the people. But I begin by discussing the Maoist aesthetic in order to present the relationship between arts and politics beyond a utilitarian model. Maoism, as many have argued, is deeply idealist.² Aesthetics played an important yet ambiguous role meandering between Marxist materialism and Maoist idealism, and the ardent Cultural Revolution further legitimized the aestheticization of not only politics but also society. Despite its sensorial engagement with the masses, Maoist art also commits itself to the pure form, opening itself to the consummation of beauty and the perfection of the abstract. The Cultural Revolution promised the Chinese people not only a better but also a more beautiful future. Here in this chapter we explore what is meant by beautiful in the Cultural Revolution.

Maoist Romanticism

The Cultural Revolution was a highly aestheticized period: not only were arts produced by professionals to be distributed to the masses, but the masses themselves also became artists. For example, more than 2,000 peasant painters were identified in Huxian, a rural city close to Xi’an with a population of half a million, and their works were featured not only around the country but also internationally.³ Before 1966, only a dozen amateur artists were recorded in the entire city of Yangquan in Shanxi province, a medium-sized industrial city with a population of 350,000. But during the Cultural Revolution, a 150-strong amateur artist group was formed, primarily consisting of coal miners, and their works were showcased not only in the city and the province but also in national art exhibitions.⁴ These might be exaggerated figures, but the regime’s clear efforts to promote amateur arts were obvious.

Of course, these artists were not allowed to paint anything they wanted. A revolutionary aesthetics had been developing in China from the late 1930s, when the CCP was forced to retreat to Yan’an to avoid direct confrontation with both the Republican government and the Japanese invaders. But the Cultural Revolution clearly represented its pinnacle. There were many aesthetic principles officiated during that decade, the most prominent of which was the rule of the “Three Prominences” (san tuchu), which stipulated that, “Among all characters the positive characters must stand out; among all positive characters the heroic characters must stand out; and among all heroic characters the major heroic characters must stand out.”⁵ Complementary to the “Three Prominences” were the aesthetic techniques of “Tall, Big, and Complete” (gao, da, and quan) and “Red, Bright, and Shining” (hong, guang, and liang), explicitly stating how the major heroic figures had to be presented. The “Sixteen Word” principles were also important: the enemy is far away while I am nearby; the enemy is in the shade while I am under the light; the enemy is small while I am big; the enemy is low while I am high (Di yuan wo jin, di an wo ming, di xiao wo da, di fu wo yang). These principles resulted in a rigid concept of composition, demanding the inflexible presentation of different types of figures. In terms of characterization, the principle of “Three Correct” (san duitou) was also applied to the making of yangbanxi; according to this, the use of all theatrical and musical elements had to match the characters’ thinking and emotions, personality, and sense of time. This principle stipulated that all aesthetic manipulations could only be carried out with the aim of supporting the characters. It is true that many of these official principles were introduced in 1969 and afterward, but these aesthetic structures had already been widely practiced among cultural workers before 1966, and were in fact classical techniques of Western arts widely known among those who had received basic art training.

Chinese folk arts, which had been celebrated by the CCP since the Yan’an period, also played guiding roles. The propaganda arts needed to navigate the cultural density the revolution was to confront, and many Maoist arts were developed from the extant folk and mass culture. There is a sense of liveliness found in many propaganda arts, corresponding to a mood of renao, with scenes full of activity, music, and color, and people bustling and busy. For the narrative arts, the story is often full of drama yet easy to follow, sentimental with a happy ending. The Maoist arts were both driven by a historical sublime elevated above people’s everyday reality and committed to a communicative effectiveness to reach the Chinese masses. This explains the heavy reliance on folk operas and folk imaginations, to be discussed further in Chapters 5 and 8. At the same time, the techniques of Western classical narrative arts ensure unity, so that in yangbanxi we find linear structure and consistent character traits replacing the general episodic structure and the emphasis on character types usually found in traditional Chinese literature and drama.

Needless to say, Soviet aesthetics were also extremely visible. Muscular bodies, metallic will, utopian light, glory of the people—these are all clear signs of socialist realism, the art form sanctified by the Stalinist regime in 1934 to present the favorable features of society and inspire people’s identification with the party. Socialist realism was introduced to China in the 1930s by left-wing intellectuals such as Zhou Yang, and the CCP further consolidated it into the Chinese situation, crystallized in Mao’s 1942 Talks.⁶ Entering the 1950s, Soviet culture was warmly embraced by the newly liberated China, and socialist realism became its official aesthetic principle. The regime also welcomed trusted and benign attempts to implement the foreign doctrine with Chinese characteristics, breathing new life into socialist realism.

However, by the end of the 1950s, it was increasingly clear that the copying could not be taken for granted. First, the Sino-Soviet diplomatic relationship deteriorated quickly, and the Chinese were determined to unburden themsleves from the Soviet influences to develop their own national form. Secondly, the Chinese deviated from the Soviet Union’s experiences in many substantial ways. As many scholars have reminded us, socialist realism developed in the Soviet Union with its own cultural background, such as the deep-rooted Russian religious faith and the many avant-garde experiments flourishing in the beginning of the twentieth century, which allowed the arts to be conceptualized almost spiritually as something that could facilitate redemption and shape life. As Boris Groys demonstrates, the 1920s Soviet avant-garde artists believed that their acts of murdering God gave them a demiurgic, magical power over the world, which allowed them to will a new world into order.⁷ The socialist realism developed thereafter could be seen as both a rejection of the avant-garde’s destructive project and a reappropriation of the mythic power of art. Irina Gutkin also contends that socialist realism was developed in the Soviet Union based on the interaction between two projects: while the Bolsheviks provided the timetable and master plan for revolutionary transformation, the artists gave visions of the future reality and new man.⁸ The Maoists inherited neither the immanence of a religious faith nor an avant-garde artistic legacy to merge life and art. By 1958, it was clear that the Chinese people needed something slightly different to be wielded into the Maoist ideological framework.

Although socialist realism was no longer promoted in the late 1950s, much of its doctrine remained official and obligatory. Art was meant not only to embellish or glorify power but also to master the materials of life and organize them into forms that in turn prescribed the new society. In the Cultural Revolution, we see the development of new conventions for realistic but ideology-soaked portrayals. For example, when presenting the models of laborer, peasantry, and soldier together in a propaganda poster, the laborer and the soldier were almost always male, while the peasantry would be female, creating gender stereotypes that were both politically correct and culturally acceptable.

In a way, combining foreign and local aesthetics to develop a new national style is nothing new; similar attempts are found in projects of “cultural modernity” in other times and spaces. What is characteristic to Maoist arts is the operation of a unified revolutionary will to coordinate different cultural traditions and memories. The period also saw, in the domain of opera, the replacement of the traditional creative collective, composed of musicians and performers, with individual directors to supervise works—leading to the rise of artist-politician composers such as Yu Huiyong.⁹ These individual directors and composers were carefully selected—more politically than professionally—to ensure the maintenance of underlying ideological control.

I term this aesthetic structure—which is both subordinated to ideology and also devoted to its perfection—“Maoist romanticism.” In 1958, to replace socialist realism, whose Soviet implication was too strong, Mao Zedong and Zhou Yang advocated a new slogan—the “Synthesis of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism”—as the leading principle guiding China’s proletarian arts and literature. “Revolutionary realism” was stressed to emphasize its connection with socialist realism, while “revolutionary romanticism” truly characterized its new departure.

Romanticism was clearly not a new term in modern Chinese arts and literature, but it was extremely influential in the 1920s among the May Fourth generation, soon to be overwhelmed by the 1930s left-wing cultural movements which condemned romanticism as self-indulgent and bourgeois. Many have already pointed out the connection between Mao and the May Fourth generation, which I do not need to repeat here. But we must be aware that it was Mao himself who re-sanctified the political correctness of romanticism to become a kind of political idealism, which encouraged the people to imagine and to transcend. Whereas the May Fourth romanticism was condemned by the 1930s leftists as individualist and sentimental, the revolutionary romanticism reinstated in the 1950s and 1960s was celebrated as collectivist and as enhancing nation-building. In the 1930s, romanticism was condemned as anti-enlightenment; two decades later, romanticism and enlightenment were no longer dichotomized but considered mutually nurturing. Romanticism was then understood as an art form that celebrates the subjective potential of human beings.

This discursive change clearly hinged on historical conditions. In 1958, the term “romanticism” was strategic because it could raise people’s spirits, encourage them to engage in larger-than-life cultural and social production, and convince them to commit themselves to the impossible Great Leap Forward campaign. The new doctrine was supported by the following conviction: “Only this kind of art and literature can perfectly reflect the reality of leaping forward, and encourage the people to march toward newer and grander aims.”¹⁰ Although the word “reflect” was employed, it is clear that this new art form was meant to promote rather than to reflect, because the realization of this “reality” remained in the future tense. The strong doses of romanticism found in the arts produced during the Great Leap Forward and later Cultural Revolution clearly distinguish themselves from the official Soviet arts.¹¹

This Maoist romanticism can be contrasted with European romanticism—they are clearly different, but they also share comparable drives, particularly in their common endorsement of imagination. Paul de Man discusses the role imagination plays in European romantic poetry, arguing that the themes of nature and natural objects employed so frequently in these poems often evolved under a dialectic relationship with human consciousness.¹² Different romanticist poets dealt with this dialectics between nature and culture in different ways. A most interesting tendency is the further problematization of culture into yet another new set of polarities on the basis of the tensions between thought and language. As such, many poets struggled around the triangular relationship between human thoughts, human language, and things, and they pondered on the mediating and productive roles played by language. Can language portray things? Can language reflect thinking? De Man uses William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” to explain the struggles of the poet to deal with this triangular structure: through his attempts at writing about nature, Wordsworth is able to portray “a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world.”¹³ It is important to note that this independent consciousness was not thought itself, because it could not be influenced by any human intent; rather, it was made possible entirely by poetic language. Language and things formed an alternative aesthetic bonding that subverted the domination of thoughts.

De Man’s interpretation of Wordsworth is clearly a part of his deconstruction project, and therefore debatable among experts; however, many would agree that this indulgence in the formalistic dimensions of language to challenge the rationality taken for granted in the Enlightenment is a common drive found among many European romantic poets and artists. In contrast, neither did the Chinese romanticists problematize human thought, nor were they interested in the formalistic power of language. The Chinese romanticists tended to celebrate the human mind, which could be employed to engage with or even change material reality. They also took language for granted: party slogans, for example, were treated in the most unambiguous ways to directly instruct the people. It was demanded that major Mao quotations be put to music to facilitate infiltration. But many of these statements were long and tonally and rhythmically uninteresting, giving the composers a very hard time. Many people also did not find the singing easy or necessarily enjoyable, but it was a duty to sing these awkward songs. It was a highly aestheticized society, but the logic of aestheticization was not explored, and the mediating roles of arts and literature remained imperceptible.

In fact, a strong awareness of the disjuncture between the artistic form and human thought characterizes not only European romanticism but also almost all other modern artistic and literary movements in the West. Even for realist novels and arts, the exaltation of the form and the affect—which cannot be named or appropriated by meanings—is prominent.¹⁴ This two-century-long conjoint aesthetic project for naming the unnamable can be understood as a common attempt by many artists to come to terms with a modern society ruled by rationality and driven by consumption. Divergences notwithstanding, many artistic movements in the West since the eighteenth century have overlapped in their common exploration of the layers of meanings below a world of order and reason, and they also show shared interests and questions in the countless and nameless things appearing in the new bourgeois society, and in the unfolding senses that are never able to be wrangled into order.

In contrast, the sociopolitical background in which the Cultural Revolution arts arose was not the new modern bourgeois life full...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Arts, Politics, and Economics
• Part II: A Culture of Models and Copies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Chinese Glossary
• Index