Staging Chinese Revolution

Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda

Xiaomei Chen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541619
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question.

Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

1

The Place of Chen Duxiu

Political Theater, Dramatic History, and the Question of Representation

The East is red, the sun has risen.

Mao Zedong has appeared in China.

He is devoted to the people’s welfare,

He-er-hai-yo,

He is the people’s great savior.

—“The East Is Red”¹

Chinese music and folkloric scholars have in recent years examined the rural origins of the popular song “The East Is Red.” It is seen first as a love song of Shaanxi province, then a popular tune during World War II, and finally as a eulogy before the founding of the PRC in praise of the wise leadership of Mao Zedong in Yan’an, which bathed the world with its brilliant morning sun in the east. Hu Feng 胡风, Lu Xun’s student and a socialist-leaning leader of the artists and writers from the KMT area during the war, noticed how the usual collective singing of “The Internationale” was replaced by “The East Is Red” at the opening ceremony of the First Congress of the Literary and Artistic Workers in Beijing in 1950. Mindful of the dominant power of the artistic leaders from Yan’an, Hu Feng enthusiastically embraced the glory and promise of the CCP in his own poetry, only to be persecuted four years later during the campaign against Hu Feng of 1954 (Mei 1998, 567–71). In the ensuing years with a dwindling freedom of expression, “The East Is Red” became the all-powerful ode in social gatherings and public performances, culminating in its de facto replacement of the national anthem during the Cultural Revolution. The 1965 performance of a revolutionary music-and-dance epic called The East Is Red not only expanded the popular song into a central stage production of socialist theater; it also popularized the negative image of Chen Duxiu, the cofounder of the CCP, as an erroneous leader in the early stage of the Chinese revolution in order to establish Mao Zedong as the wise leader who fought against revisionist predecessors such as Chen. The song “The East Is Red” continued to be played during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution to accompany Mao Zedong’s appearances at Tiananmen Square when he received thirty million Red Guards on twelve separate occasions. This chapter examines the intricate and paradoxical relationship between the theatrical performances of The East Is Red and the revised CCP party narrative history, together with several dramatic, cinematic, and television performances of Chen Duxiu as an enlightened, modern man in post-Mao China.

On May 27, 1942, Chen Duxiu, a penurious fifty-three-year-old man, was buried in a lonely mount in a small Sichuanese town. Chen had died of poisoning from the Chinese herbs with which—because he had no professional help or access to money—he had been trying to treat his illness. By his side was his third wife, twenty years his junior, who had been with him through his declining years. Judging from the small group of attending family members and friends who had donated the piece of land and coffin for the burial, few people would have been aware that this newly buried man was a cofounding father of the CCP and that, from 1921 to 1927, he had been the first general secretary, presiding over its first five party congresses. During this period, the CCP grew from a small circle of fifty-seven intellectuals and students at the First Party Congress, in 1921, to a number large enough to assume a major political role in modern Chinese history. At the time, it had become allied to the KMT in waging a nationwide war against the Japanese army. In 1949, the CCP defeated the KMT and established the PRC.

This burial of an old man seemed unimportant in 1942, during the national drama of Chinese resistance against the Japanese invaders. Chen looms large, however, when Chinese Communist revolutionary history is considered, both in public memory and in theatrical representations seeking to define political power, construct party authority, and connect a seemingly irrelevant past with the present in national and global contexts. Since the founding of the PRC, numerous party-history publications, textbooks, and cinematic, dramatic, and literary accounts have depicted Chen as a “rightist opportunist” (右倾机会主义者) active during the tragic “grand revolution” of 1927, in which the CCP submissively collaborated with the KMT. He was thus saddled with the blame for the failure of the Republican Revolution (国民革命), the CCP’s first major setback.

This chapter traces several revolutionary epic performances that explored Chen Duxiu life stories in plays, films, and television drama series from 1964 to 2001, along with the societal anxiety resulting from the various types of villains and heroes created as part of political culture. Highly melodramatic, the performances had stock characters, such as the villain posing a threat and the hero eliminating the threat. One might argue that socialist China was exploring the didactic, moralistic, and ideological roles of traditional opera, known for its array of types such as “loyal ministers and ardent men of worth” (忠臣烈士), “banished ministers and orphaned sons” (逐臣孤子), and dutiful men who “rebuke treachery and curse slander” (叱奸骂馋); they stand for “filiality and righteousness, incorruptibility, and integrity,” and express “grief and happiness at separation and reunion.”² Some of these figures are present in our eleven performance texts, as I will show presently, but the question is, how did revolutionary epic theater’s contemporary audiences stomach these echoes of bygone years’ didactic, moralistic theater? What were the cultural and ideological strategies that made them wildly popular, to the extent that some even became “national treasures of state art”?

I argue that these “morality plays” answered a persistent need for heroes and villains that could embody the values of the revolution and arouse sympathy for the suffering poor as well as the necessary ardor to sacrifice for the noble cause—qualities that the plays shared with their Western counterparts.³ Yet unlike the stock characters of some Western melodramas, the Chen Duxiu character embodied shifting, even oppositional, identities ranging from villain to hero that reflected drastically different national sentiments of the past half century. As the rest of this chapter will demonstrate, Chen was first portrayed as an archvillain in the PRC party narrative in the high Mao culture before 1966 and retained that role during the Cultural Revolution, which saw fit to extol Mao Zedong as the supreme hero. Although in early post-Mao China in the late 1970s and early 1980s, previous villains such as Liu Shaoqi, the former president of the PRC, was reclaimed as a hero, Chen remained a villain. The post-Mao regime would have rehabilitated Chen but for the fact that they needed a scapegoat against which to pit new heroes and could not attack Mao for the Cultural Revolution’s disasters and cruelties. Not until the 1990s economic takeoff, capitalization, and globalization did we witness Chen transformed into a complex, powerful figure brilliant and farsighted enough to rebel against foreign interference from the Soviet Union under Stalin’s dictatorship in the early course of Chinese revolution. This kind of discovery of a new hero could work in multiple ways. His spirit could continue to inspire the Chinese people to stay the course set by socialist China, striving for the equality, freedom, and prosperity that the early revolutionary leaders had envisioned. It could also fan a deeply rooted Chinese nationalism and encourage the belief that whatever had gone wrong in the party and nation’s history, it was all the foreigners’ fault, because the party could not be wrong, and, after all, “Aren’t we all Chinese?”⁴ By keeping CCP political figures at center stage, theatrical performance attested to its own relevance in contemporary China, where capitalism had replaced socialism, Communist idealism was passé, and foreigners were revered as successful entrepreneurs, in stark contrast to Chen’s anti-imperialist agenda in the early 1920s, with which he tried to inspire the Chinese people to pursue revolution.

Unlike other cultures where one can focus on historians’ identities in the making of historical narratives, this Chinese tale poses a particular challenge: in a socialist country where public performance was censored and tightly controlled by various levels of art officials, most of the statements of artists, critics, historians, and producers cited in the following came from state-run official presses, newspapers, and journals; artists and historians therefore could not always operate as individual subjects, in the manner typical of Western historiography. One cannot simply talk about individuals’ “historical identities” nor of “performed identities”⁵ in PRC culture, since theater critics and historians needed to adhere to the CCP ideology that had mandated these performances in the first place. As we shall see in the next section, the production of The East Is Red was created, directed, and promoted by high-ranking CCP state and even military leaders.

However, this difference in PRC performance culture does not necessarily mean that identity politics did not exist. A more fruitful approach would be to explore the complex relationship that came about between theater productions and national identities as an outgrowth of complex compromises—and even collaborations—between the ruling party and individual artists, critics, and historians and that, under the circumstances, resulted in some of the best artistic and cultural experiences in the PRC. For instance, in the case of The East Is Red, some artists, critics, and historians in the 1960s could have embraced, more readily than in subsequent years, the CCP’s socialist blueprint for “an equal and democratic China free from imperialist domination,” since the optimistic, nationalist sentiments associated with state ideology coincided with their sentiments. Indeed, many writers and artists had already either led or been affiliated with the left-wing literary and artistic circles before 1949 and had in fact helped bring about a “new China” through their artistic activities, as we see in the cases of Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian examined in the introduction. Many of them even constructed socialist theater before and after 1949. Among theater artists, one famous example is Lao She 老舍, who switched from fiction writing to play writing after the founding of the PRC, because he believed that theater was the most effective way to educate people and change society for the better (Dong and Hu et al. 2008, 41). Besides this accommodation with the status quo in the PRC’s early days, there was the intellectuals’ passionate desire to write, create, and perform, and their survival skills, which led them to find outlets for their creativity; the socialist state theater’s mass audiences had moreover provided artists with a huge stage such as they had never had before 1949, plus the status of professional writers and performers along with state-funded salaries, which meant they no longer had to eke out a threadbare existence, like some of the intellectuals under previous KMT rule.

With changes to carry out an economic reform in post-Mao China, some intellectuals were able to explore the open, albeit limited, space permitted them by the ruling ideology and to more freely express their individual subjectivities while still playing along with the status quo, or, as the case might be, genuinely welcome the new regime as another avenue for change. However, although judgments on some of the former revolutionary leaders were reversed in post-Mao official histories and subsequently in theater productions, Chen Duxiu had to wait until 1991, when the party histories’ zigzagging course finally led to his rehabilitation, as we shall see in the first positive depiction of Chen in the film titled The Be ginning of the World (开天辟地). This and subsequent productions relating to Ch...