THE ART
OF CLONING

THE ART
OF CLONING

Creative Production during China’s
Cultural Revolution

___________________________________________________

Laikwan Pang

First published by Verso 2017

© Laikwan Pang 2017

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-520-8

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-522-2 (US EBK)

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To my sons, Haven and Hayden

List of Figures

0.1:Vladimir Aleksandrovich Serov, The Winter Palace is Captured, oil on canvas, 1954.

1.1:The Great Army of Revolutionary Rebels of Jilin Lu Xun Academy of Art, Learning from Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers; Merging with Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers, propaganda poster, 1967, printed by Changchun Xinhua Printing Factory.

4.1:Chen Yanning, New Doctor in the Fishing Village, oil on canvas, 1974.

4.2:Jiang Huaqing, Up Hill and Down Dale by Shank’s Pony, propaganda poster, Shandong People’s Publishing House and People’s Art Publishing House, 1977.

4.3:Unit 54, 811 of the People’s Liberation Army, Jinan Military District, The Whole Garden Blossoms in the Colors of Spring, propaganda poster, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1977.

4.4:Wang Yujue, Village Doctor, Chinese ink on paper, 1963.

4.5:Tang Fushun, On Call At Sea, oil on canvas, 1974.

4.6:Cover page of People’s Pictorial, 1971, no. 11.

4.7:Huang Zhou, Back from a Medical Visit, Chinese ink on paper, 1973.

4.8:Tang Muli, Acupuncture Anesthesia Creating Miracle, oil on canvas, 1972.

6.1:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Pointe Arc Step Stage Pose.”

6.2:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown.”

6.3:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Full of Anger.”

6.4:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Accusation.”

6.5:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Changqing Leading the Way.”

6.6:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown,” (original paired dance).

6.7:Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, female dancers in the military units.

6.8:Jet-plane style.

6.9:Zhang Yuxian, The White-Haired Girl, porcelain, 1973, provided by Zhang Yuxian.

7.1:Lin Longhua, The More You Study, The Clearer Your Mind Will Be, propaganda poster, Liaoning Fine Art Publishing House, 1965.

8.1:Weng Rulan, A Crowd of Clowns, printed caricature, 1967.

8.2:Zhong Zengya, The New Work of an Old Professor, Chinese ink on paper, 1973.

Acknowledgments

I am most obliged to all those who have kindly accepted my invitations for interviews, which are very important to ground my analyses and open up my horizons. This book was also made possible by many who generously lent a helping hand with my research at different stages, including Joseph Li, Tang Ching-kin, Zhang Chuntian, Wei Ping, Wu Weimian, Teresa Chan, Nocus Yung, and Donald Yeung. Those distinguished PRC scholars who have provided me valuable information and research comments include Jin Dalu and Zhang Lianhong at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Cao Chunsheng at Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Xie Shaocong and Ching Mei-bo at Sun Yet-sen University. Independent ceramic scholar Ken Lo, Director Lou Tai Seng of Museu de Arte de Macau, Mr. Liang Yanlan of Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre, and Director Yang Peiming of Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center are all very kind to have shared their professional knowledge with me. Thanks from the bottom of my heart also to my cousin Guo Jianling for driving me from Nanchang to Jingdezhen, Stella Qu for bringing me to the Jianchuan Museum Cluster, and Yang Yang for connecting me to the National Ballet of China. Daisy Yuan, Irene Guo, and Edward Luper also pointed me in interesting research directions.

I thank Denise Ho, Harriet Evans, Chris Berry, Paul Clark, Ban Wang, Yiching Wu, Chris Connery, and Catherine Yeh for sharing with me their profound knowledge about the Cultural Revolution. I specifically want to thank Rebecca Karl for believing in my works, which I do not at times. Tony Bennett, Margaret Hillenbrand, Andrew Jones, Carlos Rojas, Zhang Chuntian, Qian Ying, and Li Jie have kindly invited me to their institutions to talk about my Cultural Revolution research. I thank them and all those who have generously shared their comments and knowledge at my talks. I am blessed by the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, whose rich collections and vibrant lunch talks witnessed and nurtured every single step of my research. I also thank Librarian He Jianye of C.V. Starr East Asian Library of UC Berkeley for introducing me to their rare collection. Hong Kong’s Research Grant Council (General Research Fund) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Direct Grant and South China Programme Research Grant) offered me generous financial support to conduct this research. I am most grateful to Audrea Lim at Verso for her excellent editorial comments, through which I have begun to understand the subtle differences between being pedantic and being erudite. Obviously I am still learning.

My sons Haven and Hayden let me in on their happy childhoods, which are completely different from my academic life, and the two parallel universes make each other more original, creative, and joyful. My husband KC continues to accept and ignore my incessant forgetfulness, sudden silence, and groundless anxiety with his composure toward the external world. My mother Ng Wing and my late father Pang Ho Ting gave me and my brother their most precious effort to nurture us into dignified and responsible human beings. Only in my family members do I see how I can be myself.

Shorter versions of Chapters 4 and 5 have been published in positions: asia critique (vol. 22, no. 4) and Listening to the Cultural Revolution: Translations between Music and Politics, ed. Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Chapters 2 and 7 are based on two of my previous essays, which appeared in Challenging (the) Humanities, edited by Tony Bennett (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013) and Visualizing China: Moving and Still Images in Historical Narratives, edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh (Leiden: Brill, 2012) respectively, although the chapters in this book are substantially different from the previous articles.

Introduction

If we compare today’s China with the country of fifty years ago, it is not difficult to reach the conclusion that Maoist China produced identical subjects. In the 1950s, the Chinese people were already described as “blue ants”: they all dressed the same, looked the same, and walked the same.¹ Entering the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which officially began in 1966, this uniformity seemed to extend from the look to the mind, and people thought and acted in ways that connected them with Mao and unified them. It could be seen as an immaculately monotonous world, one full of repetition and imitation. There were clearly people who were out of line with the mainstream, but the price was often too high, and the pressure too intense, for anyone to flaunt difference. Indeed, many displayed very little resistance against the call for uniformity.

From the outside, it is easy to conclude that this uniformity resulted from fanatical politics, an authoritarian government, and a compliant people with a submissive history. This book will explore all of these issues. However, a closer look reveals that this world of uniformity also offered a diversity of cultural experiences and an obscure sense of freedom. During the Cultural Revolution, ordinary Chinese citizens read many books, traveled to different parts of the country, and engaged in various kinds of cultural production. Their lives were not necessarily more deprived or boring than ours, which are diverse mainly because of different versions of pseudo-individualized cultural consumption. Other than the models of trauma and victimization, how can we account for the individuals who conceptualized themselves as autonomous, despite being highly conformist?

Let me begin with an example. Those who grew up during the Cultural Revolution are now in their late fifties or sixties, and among the more educated we find a common nostalgia for their Cultural Revolution reading experiences. Writers from Han Shaogong to Bei Dao, from Zhu Xueqin to Wei Guangqi, and from Wang Anyi to Zhi An all meticulously recount the books they read and how they read them.² Through an intimate description of their book lists, these intellectuals demonstrate the autonomy they were able to exercise in an age of extreme control. They also prove an insight into their intellectual independence, realized through their unique efforts to acquire knowledge without any institutionalized schooling. But behind the discrete accounts of epistemological pursuit, a common pattern of emotions can also be found among these stories, characterized by similar excitement and pleasure among the authors about reading, exchanging, and copying books. Recent research shows that a vigorous independent reading culture developed during the Cultural Revolution, and people were exposed to a wide variety of books circulating around. But there was also considerable overlap in the books the educated youth read, such as the so-called yellow-cover or grey-cover books published in the early 1960s for the party’s internal reference only. These banned books they read with such excitement were those already preselected by the party. In these personal tales, we can find a subtle dialectics of individuality and collectivity: on the one hand, below the surface of extreme uniformity there was enough space available for individuals to articulate their personalities; however, on closer inspection, these so-called individualities were not that distinguished from each other. Even these rebellious acts were conducted within a highly homogenous environment, and each person’s private experiences and independent actions were also shared widely among the same generation—these individuals are both unique and not so unique.

Instead of using the term “uniformity” here, we could characterize the dominant logic of subject formation during that time through the notion of “singularity,” taking advantage of the two opposite meanings that can be derived from that term. At the collective level, the entire Chinese people could be seen as a singular whole: they followed each other and contrasted themselves with the rest of the world as a people. Yet, individually, many Chinese people at the time truly believed they were independent and enlightened subjects, and that the Cultural Revolution offered—directly or indirectly—liberation and wisdom instead of subjugation, however disillusioned they might have become afterward. Terror and coercion were clearly present, but many people—particularly youth—were convinced that their conformity with the regime or with their peers was a manifestation of their freedom and enlightenment. The individuals became both the masters of history and replaceable parts. This extreme dichotomized pressure of subjectification and objectification exerted on the Maoist subject tore them asunder, although many people still found ways to lead ordinary lives. In the following chapters, with textual studies of different art forms, careful archival research, as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of major artists and the general people, I will examine how a wide range of subjects were formed through the tensions between personal liberation and collective identification, between revolution and survival, between models and copies. Here in this introduction, I first discuss the overall thesis of the book by exploring three key terms: subject formation, social mimesis, and propaganda. The chapter concludes with a general discussion of the approach and structure of the book.

Subject Formation

By “subject,” I do not mean the individual as such, but rather the ways in which individuals interact with the dominant ideology to acquire a sense of self. There is clearly a universal dimension to this subject formation, in its constituted status in relation to the dominant ideology, which was extremely strong during the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese people were clearly not one. I am concerned with the wide range of people trying to lead their lives in this difficult and exhilarating period. Let me start with a Red Guard.

At the end of his classic essay on subject formation, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” Louis Althusser lends hope to class struggle as the political force to transform an otherwise stagnant history. Contrary to the common reading of Althusser’s subject as passive in relation to ideology, his understanding of subject formation is actually twofold: it is true that subjects are passive, but he also reminds us that all ruling classes attain their ruling position through class struggle in the first place.³ So his essay ends with the hidden question of how to transform passive subjects into active revolutionary subjects. In the context of the Cultural Revolutionary, I can provide one example to supplement and complicate this Althusserian project.

In the diary of a Red Guard, we find the following entry:

March 6 [1967]:

I was planning to participate in the criticizing Duan Daming assembly in the afternoon. But I was late, and the meeting was already over. I entered the main hall alone. Being in Chongqing for five years, this was the first time I visited this place.

When I stepped into this grand palace-like hall, I was so emotional and couldn’t help myself feeling my passions kindled and my blood boiling. I thought of one picture: two soldiers smoking in a peaceful assembly hall after the Winter Palace was captured in the October Revolution. Because of the battle that had just happened, the magnificent hall was full of traces of gunfire, and the entire place was in a shambles. At that moment, did I also not enter a historical picture? Looking at the traces of the big-character posters and slogans on the wall, I asked myself, were these not gun marks of fierce battles?

I was so elated. I followed the steps and ran up. With the east wind blowing into the city, I wanted so much to sing heroically: “We have devoted ourselves to the glamorous revolution, so much happiness, and so many honors.”⁴

This is one of three diary entries chosen by the author Zhou Ziren, listed in his autobiography with the aim of showing how stupid he was in his salad days. Among the many pages of diary writing he had produced, he chose this particular entry—probably because he also found it revealing. Zhou is not an atypical Red Guard. A science major at Chongqing University, he was also interested in the arts and literature. An ambitious youngster with a “problematic” family background, Zhou quickly became an active member of a revolutionary group (zaofanpai), and he also edited a little newspaper that would soon become influential. Participating in revolutionary activities was clearly important for him to distance himself from the reactionary identity he had inherited from his family. This incident recorded in his diary demonstrates the active and imaginative dimension of this new identification process. Althusser reminds us that we are always already interpellated, but the subject also eagerly desires the ideology. Zhou had seen the painting before, and here he actively retrieved it from his memory to realize his strong desire to become a legitimate Maoist subject. This movement was characterized by a complex dynamic between the private and public selves of individuals. Zhou Ziren’s diary reveals how the subject formation of this Red Guard was aestheticized, historicized, and internationalized.

Let me clarify further. Associating the traces of slogans and posters with the traces of gunfire, Zhou indirectly demonstrates how the interpellation was defined by wendou. During the Cultural Revolution, there were two related but also opposite ways to stage class struggle: wendou (verbal battles) and wudou (fought battles). Wendou refers to the actions that took place at public gatherings, where political matters were debated, political criminals were criticized, and self-confessions were made. Most importantly, wendou was highly aestheticized, and cultural productions played a major role. Wudou usually took place outside the spotlight: class enemies were physically tortured, and antagonistic groups engaged in actual combat, which often resulted in serious injuries and deaths. Although wudou was prevalent and destroyed countless lives, wendou was constantly emphasized by the leaders, as wudou was considered to affect people’s skin and flesh only—unlike wendou, which touched people’s souls.⁵ Scholars like Yin Hongbiao argue that wendou was emphasized so much only as a pretext or remedy for the enormous amount of physical violence the Cultural Revolution directly elicited or legitimated.⁶ While I agree that the Cultural Revolution was full of physical violence, I still believe that artistic and literary activities were central to this historical event. They are ends in themselves, and this book is devoted to these wendou activities.

Although Zhou did not point out which painting he referred to, it was likely The Winter Palace Is Captured (1954) by Vladimir Aleksandrovich Serov (1910–68) (Figure 0.1). According to Toby Clark, this painting is typical Stalinist art, trying to tame the revolution into order:

It is a sombre scene with an air of order and harmony enhanced by the symmetrical composition and the laborious academic style. Ostensibly, the painting’s purpose is to venerate the Workers’ State by dignifying its moment of origin, though its effect is to reconstruct that moment as one of grim stasis, drained of rebellious energy.⁷

Figure 0.1: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Serov, The Winter Palace is Captured, oil on canvas, 1954.

Like the bulk of similar socialist realist paintings produced after the death of Stalin, in this painting we see soldiers, victors of the revolution, caught between battles, and the viewer is invited to speculate on the soldiers’ thoughts and reconsider the meanings of the revolution.⁸ So there are several layers of history involved: the original October Revolution, the 1954 socialist realist appropriation of the October Revolution, as well as Zhou Ziren’s reflection on this painting in 1967, in which he imagined an event in which he had played no part. Both the painting and Zhou’s account are full of traces of real battle and wendou, and these traces become imaginary connections between the present and the past. This painting effectively historicizes him in a grand narrative, so that what he did in Chongqing in the mid-1960s can be related directly to the October Revolution in Moscow fifty years previously. But Serov’s painting was meant to question the past. First, the October Revolution was both the foundation of and the biggest challenge to the Stalinist regime, whose meanings must be reexamined; second, now that Stalin had just died, the Soviet Union needed to find a new direction. In contrast, we can say that Zhou Ziren, connecting a quietude he experienced to the robust political gatherings he missed, identified directly with the revolutionary energies that were still ongoing. In a way, both Serov’s painting and Zhou’s memory of this painting were meant to reopen the meanings of the revolution, but Serov wanted to contain the revolutionary energies for state-building purposes, while Zhou desired to blast history open. Here we catch a glimpse of the differences between the 1960s’ People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the 1950s’ Soviet Union—while Serov focuses on the sense of control the two soldiers suggest, Zhou Ziren invests his desires and imaginary view of the actual battle in the traces on the walls. Zhou was agitated to take action instead of passively contemplating.

This diary entry also reveals the permanent Soviet marks left on this Chinese movement. Serov specialized in the kind of historical revolutionary paintings sponsored by the Stalinist regime. His most famous painting is V.I. Lenin Proclaims Soviet Rule (1947), which deliberately places Stalin behind Lenin in the historical “Second Meeting of the Soviets” in 1917—an event Stalin did not attend. With the aggressive support of the party, the painting won Serov the Stalin prize in 1947,⁹ and it became an iconic painting symbolizing the beginning of Soviet power. In 1957, when Beijing conducted a huge celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the USSR government presented the original 1947 painting to Mao as a gift, which has since been collected by the National Museum of China. (Some say the painting has mysteriously disappeared.) Thenceforth, Serov was seen as a master artist in the PRC, and his paintings were widely taught among Chinese students. Zhou probably saw The Winter Palace Is Captured a few years before writing, when such Stalinist artworks were models. Entering the Cultural Revolution, although all the Soviet models were denounced, and China was to construct its own, this nationalism was still effectively balanced by internationalism, unlike the current situation in the PRC, where nationalism is the only effective ideological force consolidating people’s identification with the state. We should notice that Serov was actually considered a conservative figure in the Soviet art establishment, and he fiercely defended positive, patriotic subject matter and traditional painting in the 1960s when socialist realism was open to the challenge of more creative and bolder aesthetic attempts.¹⁰ But when his painting was reappropriated by this Chinese Red Guard around the same time, his work became its most politically progressive and even destructive, giving the Chinese enthusiast an internationalist connection that justified his revolutionary fervor.

It was a time when the Chinese people were constantly reminded of the communist ideals that belonged to the whole world. This was particularly the case among the young Red Guards. As mainland scholar Xu Jilin, who was a Little Red Guard at the time, argues:

Mao claimed at that time that only after the liberation of all humankind can oneself be liberated. Therefore, the Red Guard generation tends to think big, from China to the world, and the issues and their thinking are always macro and all-encompassing. They all have the will and ambition to save the entire world.¹¹

Arif Dirlik also describes the Cultural Revolution as “an attempt on the part of Mao to move further along the path of revolution, past the point where immediate national goals had been achieved, toward the creation of a revolutionary culture.”¹² The Cultural Revolution could be understood as transcending narrow utilitarian missions of the nation to bring about the liberation of humankind. This diary entry written by an ordinary Red Guard intricately demonstrates how this young person desired to connect to a glorious history of world revolution. His personal interests—regaining class respect and embarking on a promising political career—are properly veiled by the universal meanings of the revolution. This elevation of the “I” to the most comprehensive level of the “we” explains Zhou’s elation. What is indirectly revealed in the writing is also the enormous anxiety attached to this subject. Individuals had to participate in collective movements to attain revolutionary status. Zhou had missed his chance, so he participated in it through his imagination, which made the experience even more powerful.

It was assumed that there was a continuous connection from the emancipation of the individual to that of the nation and the world, and as Dirlik argues, the radical nature of the Cultural Revolution does lend itself to this grand change in civilization, encompassing all levels of the individual and collective. However, the tensions between individuals and the collective were often much stronger than their connections, and the many levels and units of “self” were not easily reconciled. Theoretically, people are the same because they are all enlightened, and the combination of each of these autonomous subjects could march en masse to reach the new China. As such, the Cultural Revolution could be characterized as both totalitarian and not: while the unity of the revolution was supreme, the agency of each revolutionary individual was also emphasized; it was only demanded that the people’s autonomy could not result in a diversity that deterred the revolution.

We can say that Mao was always shifting between his equally strong beliefs in bottom-up liberation and top-down control, and the individual was inevitably caught in moral and political confusion, most clearly epitomized in the Cultural Revolution. It was a time when the Marxist slogan “doubt everything” (huaiyi yiqie) reigned supreme. The rebellious milieu gave individuals the courage to try new things, to trust their own impulses and not authority. But it was unclear how far this “everything” could go. As mainland scholar Qian Liqun reminds us, many Red Guards shouted aloud the slogan “revolution is not a crime” (geming wuzui) when they committed crimes, indirectly revealing the moral pressures and actual condemnations they shouldered.¹³ Maoist subjects were often caught up in insurmountable tensions, and were often highly constrained despite the promise that the opposite would be the case.

Social Mimesis

The slogan yiyuanhua (integration) was first raised in 1942 to demand the compliance of all regional units and departments to the order of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central in the name of war.¹⁴ Barbara Mittler uses this concept to demonstrate the Cultural Revolution arts as “univalent,” displaying an absolute monolithic quality that differentiates them from the arts created before and after this period.¹⁵ Throughout her book, Mittler emphasizes that the Cultural Revolution propaganda culture cannot be seen as homogenous, but she also highlights yiyuanhua as a logic demanding absolute conformity. She never properly explains the relations between the two opposite tendencies. I find Stuart Schram’s more nuanced interpretation more helpful, as he insists on translating the term yiyuanhua not as “to unify,” but as “to integrate,” because the notion is used as an appositive for combining division of labor with unified leadership. In Schram’s words, “the necessary division of labor between various organs can exist without posing a threat to the unity of the movement only on condition that the whole system be penetrated and controlled by a unifying force in the shape of the party.”¹⁶ If yiyuanhua is a main principle of Maoist governance, it implies both the integrity of the whole and the autonomy of the parts voluntarily submitting to a central spirit.

Although Schram is interested primarily in statecraft and institution, I think his reading of yiyuanhua provides us an insight to understand the Cultural Revolution propaganda culture: we should supplement the notion of subject formation with the process of social mimesis in order to understand the strong demand of social integration. To me, social mimesis does not refer to a smooth process in which everyone becomes alike peacefully; instead, it witnesses a difficult process of individuals being coerced into the political order and individuals longing for identification with others in the midst of fierce competition and antagonism. Particularly in the case of the Cultural Revolution, the more individuals were encouraged to trust their independent thinking, the more they needed identifiable friends and enemies to construct a scope of normative epistemology and morality. To become alike is a process much more difficult than we might assume.

The term “mimesis” might have a clear Greek origin, and might have developed as a concept in Western literary theory, but contemporary scholars elaborately demonstrate how mimesis should not be understood only as a Western representation theory: across different times and cultures, people have always mimicked each other to develop kinship. Anthropologists and postcolonial critics such as René Girard and Michael Taussig adopt the concept to explore why and how scapegoats are identified so that the rest of the members can liken themselves to others to form a stronger community; they also demonstrate how imitations are survival strategies for the people to motivate larger social changes.¹⁷ Feminists also found the term useful for exploring female subject formation.¹⁸ In general, mimesis is a process of social formation or social healing: it helps the people to develop bonding and submit to the dominant ideology. If Althusser’s theory of state ideological apparatus helps us to understand the privative dimension of subject formation, we also need to explore the group dynamics of the time to obtain a fuller picture.

The Cultural Revolution was a time when all group identities were challenged. Many scholars have already demonstrated how the debates around the bloodline theory (xuetong lun) showed the Red Guards’ identity anxiety. The more the children of the five red categories insisted that family background was the only legitimate index of class and refused to grant revolutionary status to others, the more it showed their anxieties of losing their elite status.¹⁹ These debates, as well as the rapid development and dissociation of political factions (paixi), both in the Party Central and the local regions, demonstrate how society was chaotic. Wang Chaotian, a Red Guard in Liaoning, recalls how, during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, he and his fellow Red Guards did not trust the Red Guard organization to which they belonged, largely because Mao did not show any faith in institutional structures—particularly those of the party—and the Red Guards felt free to follow or reject their organizations.²⁰ Yiching Wu and Yin Hongbiao also elaborately recount that, without coordinating authorities, Beijing Red Guards factions constantly formed and disbanded.²¹ The more society was unstable, the more people yearned to gather together and find refuge in collective lives, whose constant reformation made society even more volatile.

The masses were trusted with the duty of carrying out the revolution in Maoist China, seen most obviously in the concept of the mass line (qunzhong luxian). Developed as early as 1929, the mass line ended up being the single most important revolutionary principle of the party. The masses should transcend all institutions, and they owned all the creativity and initiations to propel history. During the Cultural Revolution, neither schools nor prisons were deemed effective means of education; the people should learn from each other. The existing school structures were quickly abolished in 1966. Students were released back into their communities to teach and learn from the people. Mao also believed that social deviants should be supervised and taught by the revolutionary masses, so there was a campaign to release criminals back to their communities for “popular indignation,” creating much violence and anxiety for both the ordinary people and the “criminals,” who went scot-free from the state apparatus but might face more random violence from the masses.²² Both the “reform through labor” (laogai) system and the “education through labor” (laojiao) system were challenged in the second half of the 1960s. It is true that the Cultural Revolution could be seen as a modernity project, with yangbanxi emphasizing precision and discipline (Chapters 3 and 5), and technological advancement promising to bring people better lives. But there were also subtle anti-modern elements, shown most obviously in the Maoist distrust of modern institutions and social stratification. Overall, we can describe the Cultural Revolution as a revolutionary laboratory, in which everybody was influencing and depending on everyone else to reach for the “Truth.” At the same time, a part of the same regime also demonstrated tremendous fear of such unstructured liberation, responding to the freedom it unleashed with strong modern disciplinary control.

People coalesced together in whatever ways they could, through their positive identification with Mao (Chapter 7), negative identifications with labeled enemies (Chapter 8), and whatever social institutions still operated (Chapter 4). An interesting tension was observed between those young people who actively participated in mainstream cultural and political events and those who chose to stay with a few trusted friends to read banned materials, discuss political philosophy, or produce alternative arts.²³ The independent thinking increasingly detectable in the late Cultural Revolution was also formed in secretive salons and through underground circulations.²⁴ Either in party-directed campaigns or self-formed communities, there was clearly a very strong mimetic structure in society from which very few people could run away.

There were contradictory effects of mimesis. On the one hand, mimesis implies failure of independent judgment. Because of one’s inability to interpret the world, the idealization of and competition with another person is resorted to for the subject to make sense of the world. In the end, “whoever has control over the internal medium—which has the power to guide wishes, fantasies, desires, and dreams, which is to say, to control extensive areas of the imagination—exercises power over the individual.”²⁵ On the other hand, imitation involves transformation, because mimesis includes both a cognitive and an active component: I see/hear, I learn, and I imitate. Mimesis always involves a final act of performance and actualization, a presentation of what has been mimetically indicated.²⁶ As such, the performative dimension of mimesis might sustain order, but it also makes change possible. As Taussig reminds us, mimesis produces not only conformity but also alterity, shown in the example of the “colonized” people reproducing the figurines of their “colonizers” in order to create distance from the latter instead of entirely forfeiting themselves.²⁷

The concept of mimesis is particularly important in this study because it is able to bring the cultural (the highly repetitive propaganda materials), the social (ways in which people interacted), and the political (submission and resistance) together in the Cultural Revolution context. While the Stalinist regime did try to shape and standardize works of socialist realism through institutional efforts such as the granting of the Stalin Prize, there was clearly no comparable cultural engineering in the entire Soviet bloc as rigid and all-encompassing as the yangbanxi (model performance pieces): a few works were so carefully crafted and delivered to become perfect, worthy to be sanctified as the only models for all thereafter cultural works to follow. Many people have described the yangbanxi as the only works to be watched by the people; this description is incorrect not only because there were many other non-yangbanxi cultural activities, but also because these works were meant to be models instead of individual products, which probably made them even more sacred. While there were plenty of public debates around the Stalin Prize and even contentions that the selection processes were flawed in the Soviet Union,²⁸ in China the artistic excellence and political correctness of yangbanxi could not be questioned in the slightest gesture. The models first had to be consecrated before the modeling processes could be legitimized.

I ask a core question in this book: By promoting copying, how much did Maoist society advocate conformity, and how much did alterity actually result from this? One of the most amazing aspects of this revolution was its diligent making of models that were accessible to everybody: models that everyone could aspire to emulate, but also many proliferating copies that constantly diversified and distorted these models. Instead of seeing Maoist society in a static form, I prefer to highlight its constant transformation, and mimesis is a theoretical concept that allows me to engage in this investigation.

Propaganda

Althusser believes that ideology is concretely represented in state ideological apparatuses, such as churches, schools, families, and the legal establishment, in which different rituals are performed to interpellate the subject. But in the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, most of these institutions were brought down, and the revolutionary masses were left on their own. While the small Party Central still controlled some propaganda, it was primarily the revolutionary masses who produced it. It was around 1968 and 1969 that the state apparatus started to resume its functions, and propaganda was institutionalized again. By Cultural Revolution propaganda, I refer not only to the official programs and activities but also those self-initiated by the people, and the two are intimately related.

In his highly influential book on propaganda, Jacques Ellul defines it as an inner control over the individual by a social force, so that “it deprives him of himself.”²⁹ He believes that, to be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision, so that the person can be manipulated. I hope to show in this book that Cultural Revolution propaganda clearly complicates this theory of manipulation: the making of the propaganda involved much contestation and negotiation, and the reception and reproduction of it created even more discrepancies from any central ideology.

The Cultural Revolution propaganda is probably most unique in its contradictory duties to both agitate and tame: it roused the people to revolt, but it also tried to mold them into docile people. In his book’s section devoted specifically to the PRC, Ellul argues that Maoist propaganda demonstrates a transition from “propaganda of agitation” to “propaganda of integration” at the moment when the PRC was established in 1949:

The integration of the revolutionary rebel into a prodigiously disciplined, organized, and regimented army, which goes hand in hand with his intellectual and moral indoctrination, prepares him to be taken into custody by integration propaganda after victory, and to be inserted into the new society without resistance or anarchical excursions.³⁰

Ellul is right to identify “propaganda of agitation” as active in nature, promoting a revolutionary course of action, but we cannot use the year 1949 to separate the PRC’s propaganda as subverting the status quo and then as sustaining it, as the two opposing forces continued to hold sway into the 1960s and 1970s. The Cultural Revolution embodies a most contradictory moment of state building: while the revolutionary spirit was to be rekindled in the fiercest way, propaganda was relied upon to unify the people. In its own contradictory way, this highly controlled propaganda was not a top-down mechanism, but we see how the people traveled around and struggled to learn and create propaganda, making it open-ended, not a cessation of all mental work.

Ellul also points out that while propaganda is addressed to a crowd, it must touch each individual in that crowd. The address must be personal, so that each member of the audience feels individualized, autonomized, and participatory.³¹ But this reading fails to acknowledge propaganda as culture, which also brings a collective into being. During the Cultural Revolution, propaganda was both demanded by the party and truly embraced by the people, and it brought people together instead of individuating them. For example, writing for public display in the form of big-character posters (dazibao) was strongly promoted during the Cultural Revolution as a form of propaganda. But this propaganda also became folk culture. Author Yu Hua describes the country then as the largest site of calligraphy exhibition,³² and famous classics scholar Ji Xianlin also saw the general calligraphy standard of the nation improve during the Cultural Revolution precisely because of these practices.³³ Big-character posters helped to popularize calligraphy and to a lesser degree, vice versa. The writing and the reading involved not only the delivery of political messages but also the sharing of aesthetic skills and judgment. This applies not only to big-character posters but to almost all forms of propaganda.

The strong performative dimension to this propaganda culture also helps us reconsider the idea of resistance in this cultural logic. It is through the repeated performances of sanctified works that the mainstream was reinforced, yet alternatives were also articulated. These two manifestations correspond with Judith Butler’s famous theory of gender performativity: “acts” are performed to stabilize identity, while the “performative” is meant to destabilize identity. Butler argues that since gender is primarily a construction, it needs to be acted out repeatedly to become naturalized. But the second dimension of the “performative” can reveal how gender is ideological. So Butler also dichotomizes ideological control and political resistance along with the political awareness of the agent that differentiates acts and the performative.³⁴ My study here does not emphasize the conscious resistance of political agency, as this kind of analysis simply does not apply to the Cultural Revolution. However, despite a lack of consciously active intervention for most of the Chinese people at that time, we can still conceptualize resistance on different levels. First, as I have mentioned, models and copies are never complementary, and the unbridgeable distance between them defines the power of culture. Second, this culture was designed to propel revolution, so there was always a dimension of confrontation in the propaganda, whether the fight was against the constraints of nature posed to productivity or against class enemies. Inevitably, residue of this destructive energy would go on a loose rein. Also, the aesthetic dimensions so much emphasized in the Cultural Revolution propaganda culture also perverted the political messages, which I will further discuss in Chapter 2. We should also be aware that propaganda carries not only affect but also concrete information, and people receive propaganda instrumentally, as knowledge to help them understand the world and navigate their lives. People read People’s Daily and big-character posters alike for the latest developments in the world and in their own communities. Propaganda is both arts and news, it moves and informs. With propaganda, people can judge. Judgment, as Kant explains, must always be understood as both individual and collective, in the sense that neither one can completely dominate the other.

This book simultaneously explores three levels of culture (wenhua) in the Chinese context: culture as propaganda, culture as arts, and culture as civilization. Chen Boda, the brains of Mao, announced in 1966 that most of the cultural revolutions in human history began with the arts, so the Chinese people should strive to build a revolutionary culture to make the larger revolution possible.³⁵ By “cultural revolutions,” Chen understood “culture” in the broadest sense, referring to the total sum of human activities and communication. But Chen Boda’s assertion also reminds us of the importance of arts and literature in making possible the transformation of the larger sense of culture. Most importantly, the concept of culture in China always contains the connotation of “influence,” as the term is composed of both wen (writing/culture) and hua (transformation). As wen is always associated with hua, wenhua is political. This subtle linkage between culture and power inherited in traditional Chinese thinking found its most radical manifestation in the Cultural Revolution, when culture was directly understood as politics. Propaganda in the context of the Cultural Revolution must be understood as a contested site where culture and politics were brought together.

To further understand the meanings of culture and arts in this cultural revolution, we can compare it with others—in fact, cultural revolution is not a foreign concept to many socialist regimes, and many of them initiated and proclaimed their own versions at different times. According to some historians, there were at least two cultural revolutions in the Soviet Union, one in 1928–31 and the other in the late 1950s. The Hungarian Communist Party suspended its previously strong control over people’s cultural life after the 1956 Uprising to make room for different arts activities, while Cuba and Albania also advanced massive political campaigns emphasizing culture in the 1960s. These were often called cultural revolutions too. These campaigns were carried out in different forms and on different scales, and they ended with different degrees of success, but none could match China’s in terms of intensity and degree of violence. Perhaps the greatest distinction is that all these socialist cultural revolutions were initiated from the top by party leaders who felt the need to strengthen existing socialist structures in different dimensions, but China’s was the only one that was sustained by active bottom-up support from the people.

The genesis of all these socialist cultural revolutions can be traced back to Lenin. Sheila Fitzpatrick first pointed out that a “cultural revolution” was advocated by Lenin in his 1923 article “On Cooperation,” which refers to the importance of an active citizenry.³⁶ Fitzpatrick demonstrates that the Leninist view of cultural revolution—unlike political revolution—“is neither sudden nor violent; it is a process of gradual ideological transformation in which cultural traditions and the Leninist principle of cultural continuity are respected.”³⁷ The active participation of the people in nation-building could be achieved only by raising the cultural standard of the people—specifically the peasantry; once this was achieved, the country could become entirely socialist.³⁸

It is generally understood that in the early 1920s Lenin advocated a new governance logic to shift the focus from politics in the narrow sense to culture as a most important part of communism-building.³⁹ Cultural revolution—assuming that the society is already socialist in its political structure—was meant to advance democratization of culture, equalization of cultural opportunity, a rapid rise of the education level of the population, and the formation of a new popular intelligentsia. The new Leninist formulation of culture was intended primarily to build instead of destroy, and it was gradual not abrupt.

Mao largely followed Lenin’s formulation of cultural governance in the early 1950s. Indeed, the notion of cultural revolution was used throughout the decade to express the new regime’s commitment to improving people’s cultural quality.⁴⁰ But by the time of the Anti-Rightists Campaign in 1956–1957, the notion of “culture” had become heavily politicized, and it no longer followed Lenin’s schema of political destruction first and cultural construction thereafter. The logic of political agitation dominated. From 1963, the government placed heavy demands on arts communities, giving them tasks such as houjin bogu (emphasizing the present against the past) and daxie shisannian (writing about the thirteen years, 1949–62). The Cultural Revolution began three years later, and propaganda became the materials invested with the most aggressive political will. The first thing the Maoist regime did was to destroy the existing arts establishment, and the Propaganda Department was one of the first departments closed down.⁴¹ But the idea—at least in 1966—was not for Mao to control culture directly; instead, its power should be channeled back to the people, allowing a new civilization to emerge.

As Rebecca Karl believes, a key component of the Cultural Revolution was precisely the inseparability of politics and culture.⁴² Clearly, this logic did not develop out of a cultural vacuum. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were already many deep reflections on culture in modern China. An iconoclastic rejection of the cultural past was latent in the very origins of China’s nationalism, and it was widely believed that a new culture needed to be built to facilitate China’s modernization. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution was as much about destruction as about construction, and it was believed that a new culture in the narrow sense could bring about a new culture in the broad sense. I believe that a close reading of the propaganda arts in the Cultural Revolution will lead us to the heart of both the new world that this revolution promised and the brutality it unleashed. Instead of presenting the propaganda arts as a reflection of contemporary society, I argue that it was precisely due to the tremendous power of arts and imagination in the revolution that its politics went to such an extreme.

About This Book: Approach and Structure

Before I explain the approach and structure of the book, I would like to introduce a brief historical outline of the Cultural Revolution for those readers who might need it. Most historians understand the Cultural Revolution as the result of internal power struggles within the CCP: by the mid-1960s, Mao could no longer put up with the existing party structure and wanted to initiate the Cultural Revolution to purge those party leaders, such as PRC’s President Liu Shaoqi and CCP’s General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, who had frowned on his political ambitions. In 1964, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and her allies such as Zhang Chunqiao began to initiate a series of cultural criticisms meant to implicate higher officials. The ongoing Four Clean-Up movement, led by Liu Shaoqi, who aimed to cleanse the nation’s politics, economy, organization, and ideology, was increasingly challenged by Mao as politically dubious. In May 1966, the Cultural Revolution officially commenced. Violence first began in schools and quickly spread to the street. At Tiananmen, Mao addressed more than 10 million Red Guards from around the country on eight occasions, and many of these youths would bring this Cultural Revolution back to their hometowns. As the army got involved, the people gained access to weapons, and China was submerged in numerous civil wars from 1967 to 1968.

In 1968, many young people were “sent down” to the countryside for reeducation. The Red Guards had been responsible for much of the social destruction, and this “reeducation” signaled that the original political goals had been achieved—or that they had failed. “May Seventh Cadre Schools” were also set up around the country to reeducate officials and intellectuals through hard labor. As the Soviet Union threatened war, Mao announced the success of the Cultural Revolution at the CCP’s Ninth National Congress in April 1969, after which he hoped to start working on the rebuilding of the party and the state apparatus. Schools of all levels began to operate again. The state resumed most of its functions in 1969, two years after the army, exercising even more violence, was called to take control of the civil wars around the entire nation, and Revolutionary Committees were finally established in most parts and levels of the nation, through which the military, party, and masses would govern jointly.⁴³ Meanwhile, most of the self-formed revolutionary groups were dismissed. But the Cultural Revolution continued despite the Chairman’s elaborate attempts to restore the state.

In 1971, when the news of the death of Lin Biao, the sole vice-chairman of the CCP, reached the population, people were shocked to find out the designated successor of Mao had always been a traitor. While many Chinese people were disillusioned, the Jiang Qing group also began to gather power and rule the country along with the aging Mao. It was generally understood that, from 1971, the idealism of the original 1966 spirit had largely dissipated. Replacing the communist ideals were authoritarian politics; replacing the vigorous development of autonomous arts by self-motivated artists were large-scale performances organized by the government, such as political concerts and poetry recitation performances. It was also in this year that Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to US President Richard Nixon, secretly visited Beijing and laid the groundwork for Nixon’s historical visit to China the following year.

Betrayed by Lin Biao and devastated by his own deteriorating health, Mao was concerned about his successor. In 1973, Deng Xiaoping was welcomed back from a Jiangxi labor camp to Beijing to be the state’s vice premier. Deng’s comeback in 1973 alerted many that Mao no longer trusted the Jiang Qing group. The Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius campaign in 1974 could be seen as the desperate response of Jiang Qing and her allies to consolidate their power. Those who participated in this mass movement were mostly halfhearted, however, and the authorities were increasingly discredited. Many ordinary people now became doubtful or contemptuous about political fanaticism. The Cultural Revolution became an event they watched from afar.

The official ending of the Cultural Revolution, as we all know, is 1976, but the exact point of termination was never clear. To many Chinese people who lived through the period, there was not a drastic rupture in the years from 1976 to 1978; it was a period of continuous confusion punctuated by a few major national events. The subsequent deaths of Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s most loyal and important supporter, and Mao himself were definitely crucial, but they were not anticipated to lead to the arrest of the Gang of Four, and the sudden downfall of Jiang Qing was a surprise to many core leaders. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976, which took the lives of more than 250,000 people, was more than just a natural disaster; many saw it as an omen of the fall of an empire.

If all recounted above is mostly accepted fact, many details of the events are still unclear because the Chinese government continues to consider the Cultural Revolution a taboo. Thankfully, studies of the Cultural Revolution are slowly gaining momentum again. In China, while research and publications on, and education about, the event are heavily circumscribed by the state’s consistent refusal to fund the research of aspiring scholars and by pervasive and opaque censorship pressure, people have still found ways to write this history, particularly via various online platforms.⁴⁴ Many new scholarly works are also published outside China. Overall, we can say that a common orientation of the current Cultural Revolution research in both China and the West is the emphasis on “history.” Even in the specific area of arts and literature, the objective to reconstruct history is very pronounced.⁴⁵ There are still many aspects of the history that we do not know, and the heavy censorship indirectly kindles the scholars’ moral obligation to write it. While clearly indebted to this scholarship, my work adopts a more unstable dialectical approach, which does not assert history as simply completed. Fredric Jameson famously writes, “for good or ill, the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously whether you think you can or not.”⁴⁶ This is due to the fact that, in a dialectical reasoning, everything is caught in history: there can neither be a totality of the here and now nor a clear sense of the closure of the past.

I want to keep this study dialectical in terms of both its concerned objects and its method. The Cultural Revolution was an extremely dialectical period, when different kinds of forces were swaying between opposite poles, and nothing stayed static. Any attempt to give one single interpretation of the event jeopardizes the dialectical nature of the event. But my “dialectical” approach refers not only to the dialectics of the Cultural Revolution; more importantly, I want to keep my studies from reaching stasis. As Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala remind us, changes could only be promoted by interpretation, not description, because interpretation keeps things open, and an interpretative stance also necessarily implies debates.⁴⁷ Jameson also criticizes that the philosophies of the dialectic are often undialectical, as they turn the dynamic of changes into definitions, stabilizing abstract forces of momentum by instrumental reasoning.⁴⁸ Of course, this book does not live up to Jameson’s impossible expectation, as no academic writing can completely avoid systematizing historical changes. But I do write with the awareness that the Cultural Revolution was full of radical and rapid changes along extreme opposites. In this book, I want to capture and interpret, if only partially, this dialectical spirit.

It is true that many people were killed and tortured, and many families destroyed; youths were exploited and ruined; loyalty and enthusiasm were ignited in order to be manipulated and punished. Anyone studying Mao’s thought cannot escape the ostensible facts of the brutality that he directly and indirectly summoned.⁴⁹ The massive killings and horrifying violence recorded by scholars might be selective, but the actual calamities cannot be excused, however noble the intentions behind them might have been. But focusing only on these calamities does not result in new perspectives when it comes to understanding history. For example, there is a strong epistemological desire to come up with an accurate figure for the death toll of the Cultural Revolution.⁵⁰ No matter how “scientific” these data collections are, the problems of focusing so much on these data lie not only in the issue of accuracy, but also in their ideological effects: transparent numbers seem to speak for themselves. The death toll also becomes an easy indicator of the degree of cruelty of the dictator involved, so that by counting how many died, the malice of Hitler can be compared with that of Stalin, and the intentions of Mao with those of Mussolini. There is no doubt that many people suffered and died, or that a great deal of anger and much sadness persist today. The CCP’s reluctance to face the Cultural Revolution also indirectly prompts researchers to describe people’s suffering as elaborately and accurately as possible. However, description attempts to reinstate the past as it actually happened; it makes claims to be indisputable and unchangeable. A factual description makes any reading beyond the dominant ethical condemnation difficult, and it also allows the critic to easily detach from the object of criticism.

In fact, not only the CCP’s critics but also the CCP itself chooses to take a “historicist” position in order to come to terms with this event so that the party can cast blanket condemnations, and disavow any link between then and now. The official government evaluation of the Cultural Revolution is this: “The Great Cultural Revolution … was not by any means a revolution nor a progressive movement. But it was an internal catastrophe mistakenly initiated by leaders and appropriated by antirevolutionary groups that brought serious mishaps to the party, the state, and the people.”⁵¹ The implied conclusion is that the Cultural Revolution was so brutal that it could only have been a historical exception, and that revolution is not an option anyone should consider today. The current research efforts to write a truthful, and bygone, Cultural Revolution history can be seen as complicit, however unintentionally, with this governing logic.

I have no intention of dichotomizing description and interpretation, as the two are more dependent on than independent from each other. My emphasis on the dialectical also does not imply any bias against the kinds of historical materials used. I too rely on existing data and personal memories, supplemented by careful contextual analysis as much as possible, to interpret this history. To be faithful to the dialectical environment that time and to continue the dialectical spirit in the present moment, this book strives to enliven the dialectics that both drove and betrayed the movement.

The next two chapters explore the political and economic meanings of the arts in the Cultural Revolution, and explain how this culture was able to weave people’s unsettled everyday lives together. Chapter 1 outlines the aesthetic principles all arts had to employ during the time, so that the arts became extremely predictable, against the radical ideological inconsistency found throughout the period. But it also demonstrates how an independent aesthetic drive was manifested beyond the instrumentalization of art. Chapter 2 deals with the general relationship between culture and economy during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time when the consumption of propaganda culture was fanatically promoted, in order to present a different reality from which the people could derive pleasure and meaning. The chapter focuses on one specific type of cultural production—literature—in order to discuss how the concepts of authorship and readership were conceptualized. It also provides a discussion of the Maoist superstructure as a way to conclude Part I.

Part II constitutes the main body of this study. The chapters are devoted to the relations between subject-formation and social mimesis. Chapter 3 presents an outline of the production and reception of the culture of models and copies, explaining how the models were made, and how they were presented and copied. Providing the historical background, this chapter also enables the discussions in the following chapters of the Cultural Revolution as both conservative and progressive. The following five chapters (Chapters 4–8) are devoted to actual case studies, chosen not only because they exemplify the culture of models and copies I examine, but also because they are characteristic of the time. While there was much continuity from the seventeen-year period (1949–66) through the Cultural Revolution, new developments and radical transformations could also be observed in the cases of the barefoot doctors, the yangbanxi project, the popularization of ballet, the Mao cult, and the blanket condemnation of intellectuals.

Chapter 4 offers an examination of a new model figure: the barefoot doctor. The representations of this figure demonstrate an example of practical governance of the time. The feminization of this model figure reveals the different ways in which people related to the revolution. Although the female protagonists on the model-theater stage were desexualized, these barefoot doctors were redomesticated in order to hold the family and community together.

The most interesting and powerful modeling and copying mechanisms remain in the making and the adaptation—the transplantation and remediation—of the yangbanxi, discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. The examination of Cantonese opera in Chapter 5 betrays the difficulties of the construction of national model operas for the entire country to follow. It was the sound—that is, music and dialect—that was most difficult to contain and homogenize. The construction of a new, unified revolutionary culture remained a remote dream. Chapter 6 looks at how the foreign classical art form of ballet was chosen as a propaganda vehicle for the yangbanxi project due to different needs. The most politically problematic element inherent in the art form is the erotic female body. This chapter demonstrates that the capturing of the dance movement in theatrical stills and porcelain statuettes both realized and devastated the concept of model that the Cultural Revolution strove to build.

The last two chapters investigate the deeper logic of this model culture. Chapter 7 explores Mao, the sublime beyond and above all models, and analyzes the convergences and divergences between Mao as image and Mao as leader of the revolution. We have taken for granted that their overlap is natural evidence of the Mao cult, but by introducing the concept of doxa, this chapter explores how Mao might only be a part of the people’s everyday life rubric, and how the supreme power that Mao allegedly assumed was highly fleeting. Chapter 8 focuses on the exact opposite object of representation: the intellectual, the most pronounced enemy of the revolution. It demonstrates how intellectuals were condemned to occupy ghostly positions—yet the ghost has always been extremely important in Chinese folk culture. The scapegoating of the intellectuals can also be seen as an important mechanism in the overall social mimesis process. Taking the two chapters together, we can see how the over-glorification of Mao is dialectic to the painstaking condemnation of the intellectuals, and that together these gave the ordinary people imaginary anchors to make sense of their own lives. The Conclusion provides my own reflections on the Cultural Revolution in relation to the present time.

Mao and the intellectuals were radically dichotomized during the Cultural Revolution, but reading their representations side by side now can help us to recognize their mutual affinity. They were images to be both consumed and read by the people. Studying the barefoot doctors featured on the propaganda posters and the female dancers in model ballets together betrays a wider range of allowable femininities than we might have assumed to have existed during the period. The audio and the visual in the same propaganda work might not necessarily converge, and there was an uneasy coexistence between the folk and revolutionary spirits. Countering the state’s active forgetting in the present era, we need to keep reading and writing the Cultural Revolution. It is the cultural realm that provides us with the largest possible space for such reading and writing, creating, and speculating.

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 of reason and objects. Instead, it was a chaotic political reality with which the Chinese people had to, but also found it hard to, align. As historians such as Shaoguang Wang, Elizabeth Perry, and Yiching Wu demonstrate, Mao never succeeded in controlling the Cultural Revolution he had unleashed, most vividly exemplified in the Shanghai January Revolution and the Wuhan Incident that took place in 1967, when workers took over the revolution and steered it away from central control.¹⁵ During the long decade of the Cultural Revolution, almost all stable institutions and authorities were subverted, and any balance achieved was quickly unsettled. Although informal networks persisted, continuing to facilitate favoritism and corruption, such relationships were never securely institutionalized. Most of the new power structures established after 1949 were destroyed by the drive for continual revolution. Education opportunities became more randomly distributed among the population, and classroom achievement was delinked from job prospects. There were no more institutionalized paths for upward mobility. Because of the discrediting of such “objective” indicators as academic results, the flows of power went in all directions, and individuals resorted to any means available to gain control and achieve upward mobility.

As some scholars have remarked, CCP governance was characterized by its adaptive responses to a wide range of historical conditions and challenges. “China’s long revolution gave rise to a ‘guerrilla-style policy-making’ approach that proved capable of generating an array of creative—proactive as well as evasive—tactics for managing sudden change and uncertainty.”¹⁶ This adaptive governance reached its peak and went over the top during the Cultural Revolution, and we can hardly identify a coherent policy that gives the Cultural Revolution an overall identity and raison d’être. The politics of the Cultural Revolution was characterized by constant ruptures of the dominant order, and the power was too fluid during the period to make out a clear order. Even the integrity of the state and the party was constantly challenged and jeopardized: there was nothing in the political realm that was consistent, reliable, or coherent. Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder demonstrate that it was extremely difficult for people to make similar political decisions in such rapidly changing, novel, and high-stakes situations, making society even more unstable.¹⁷

This might explain why the attempts at experimenting with a new aesthetics found in the republic’s first decade disappeared. It is a Marxist belief that artistic production is determined by the socioeconomic base, and that a new ruling class would inevitably engender a new art form. Like the Soviet Union in the 1920s, when new artistic theories were vigorously debated and experimented with, the 1950s also witnessed some interesting artistic experiments in the PRC. For example, with the approval of the government, Chinese master painters in the 1950s attempted to introduce traditional humanistic components to cultivate the Chinese version of socialist realism, which was never a direct copy of the Soviet model.¹⁸ New attempts were also carried out in music, such as the development of “pentatonic romanticism,” a musical style combining traditional Chinese five-tone scales with the Western harmonic structure. However, entering the 1960s, what had been experimented with in previous decade was quickly institutionalized and formalized to make the arts stable and expectable. Ironically, romanticism in Maoist society became a conservative force that glorified the human subject at the expense of art—this explains why realism was still much emphasized.

Order and Disorder

If modern European arts resort to the poetic and the artistic to reach beyond the world of order, Maoist arts were given the opposite mission of constructing an order. They were tasked to provide affective aesthetic anchorages in a highly disorienting political reality, and to construct a more coherent sphere of existence in contrast to the political chaos. The Maoist arts were intended to give the people a token of comfort, convincing them that a more transcendental structure stood behind everything. If the French Revolution was a catalyst in forging romanticism in Europe because of the people’s disillusionment with the Enlightenment, Maoist romanticism aimed to conjure up a quasi-reason, as imaginary, that justified all the chaos found in real life. We could say that it was due to the highly unstable political context that the arts of the Cultural Revolution were so powerful, as they helped to pull the diverse political energies together.

There is a surrealist dimension to the Maoist romanticism in that its aesthetics could transcend the material reality. In the original version of The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse liangzijun), for example, the party representative Hong Changqing was presented as weak and denigrated in his execution scene because he had been severely tortured. But Jiang Qing demanded that the team present him as strong and robust, giving him very powerful dance movements, like an eagle ready to fly up into the sky.¹⁹ In the final version of the model ballet, we find a surreal Hong Changqing facing his death, full of energy and courage, embodying an invincible Mao spirit that is necessarily bigger than any ordinary person. This arrangement would certainly turn off those Western viewers who valued La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928, dir. Carl-Theodor Dreyer) as a classic, but it was approved at the time as both “realist” and “romantic.” In this portrayal of Hong Changqing, we can say that the overall emotive intensity overruled common sense. But the invincible hero and the grand aesthetics were able to provide a disorienting society with an additional layer of reality in which the people could find refuge. If the period from 1964 to 1979 was an extremely volatile one for most Chinese people, the overall romantic aura displayed in the propaganda culture was much more stable and enduring.

However, no matter how much Maoist romanticism is supported by Maoist reasoning, such an intense dosage of imagination inevitably invites trespassing, encouraging the ordinary to explore the extraordinary. Severe tensions between order and disorder could be found in these arts. If Mao raised the notion of romanticism—however much it may have deviated from European romanticism—he not only believed in the power of imagination to envision something entirely new but also encouraged his people to chart the unfamiliar and the unexpected. After all, that was what the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were all about. In the Cultural Revolution, although the truly shocking and moving could not be articulated because they posed a direct challenge to the singular revolution, the romantic was realized through the facilitation of individuals feeling their deep connection with the people and history, and it was through this active engagement with the collective that the unbounded could be stirred up among the individuals. Compared with European romanticism, which provided new ways to imagine and connect with language and nature, the Maoist arts emphasized the transcendental unity of the people.

In his elaborate account of his Cultural Revolution experience, Chen Yinan, then a worker who participated actively in the political activities and faction battles in the city of Changsha, described the city in February and March of 1967 as the most exciting and dynamic place, because the rival groups took to the streets and promoted their political views.²⁰ Physical battles were not yet the norm, and propaganda was the main activity used to win support. At that time, the two rival groups were dominated by gaoshi, composed primarily of university students, and xiangjiang fenglei, mainly factory workers. The former group, with a high level of education, was more effective in writing big-character posters and giving speeches. Interestingly, while they had a natural advantage in these propaganda activities, and the gaoshi were then supported by the central party, the workers’ groups would dominate the street once night descended. At night, most workers would be out of the factories, and many could spend their leisure time together participating in political activities. According to Chen, the darkness empowered those who were sidelined by the elitist university students during the daytime. Some of the workers decorated propaganda cars, equipped with microphones and amplifiers; these cars toured around the city announcing political statements. Other workers would gather along the streets, sing their Mao songs, and lay down on the streets to stop the propaganda cars of the enemy groups from approaching their own cars. As Chen recalled:

Using my own flesh and blood to stop the advancement of their rumbling wheels, relying on my fearless determination to defend the voice of our revolutionary group, I really found a bit of “hero” aura on myself, and I also felt a tragic sense of greatness.²¹

In the daytime, the university students could capture people’s attention by showcasing their beautiful calligraphy and eye-catching drawings, but at night it was all about singing and shouting, the more primordial forms of expression and engagement. In such battles of vision and sound, the aesthetics produces a compelling empowerment, and it was these competitions of senses that fueled the momentum of the Revolution.

It is clear that art was used as a Maoist tool at that time, but also that this aesthetic power could slip out of control: people might be too appeased to engage in revolution, or become so agitated that they might begin to challenge the ultimate authority. Because of these contradictory assignments to ease and disturb, sometimes we can detect in the Cultural Revolution propaganda arts “self-reflexive” moments, showing just how confused these arts were. There is a scene in the 1974 novel Waves of the Jian River (Jianhelang) in which we find a newly rusticated youth, Liu Liu, who is given the responsibility of cooking for the peasants. But at one point he is so absorbed in the reading of the famous revolution novel Bright and Sunny Sky (Yanyangtian) that he burns the wowotou bread. The next day, he is again reading the same novel when cooking dinner, and he sees a wolf, which is later discovered to have been faked by a class enemy, coming for the food. Liu Liu picks up what happens to be the village’s only dumpy level and beats it hand over fist to make enough noise to frighten the wolf away. He succeeds, but ruins this important apparatus, and is criticized.

Liu Zhuhui, the leader of the rusticated youth and the novel’s protagonist, initiates a long and gentle conversation with Liu Liu, telling him that she had been obsessed with drawing when she was a child but later learned from her teacher that everyone has to be loyal to the party and follow its orders, and inevitably one needs to give up all personal interests and ambitions.²² Although Liu Zhuhui acknowledges that artistic activities should also be encouraged if they are helpful to the revolution, she points out that Liu Liu’s indulgence in literature must be condemned—as was Liu Zhuhui’s childhood devotion to drawing—because the arts could become an obsession and lead the new masters of the republic away from attending to the people wholeheartedly. This is obviously a complex meta-literary moment, in which a revolutionary novel tries to be critical of its kind. The author of the novel, Wang Lei, was himself a rusticated youth, and we can safely assume that the readers of this novel would also have included many rusticated youths. The way Liu Zhuhui condemns Liu Liu can be seen as a self-condemnation among the youth, presenting a paradoxical logic of a time when the arts and youth were entangled, empowered yet also victimized. If the propaganda culture—represented here by the novel Bright and Sunny Sky—only serves the function of political indoctrination, there is no reason to stop the youths from indulging in it. But since art also pacifies, diversifies, provides catharsis, and produces enjoyment, there are clearly residues in the arts that escape the dominant ideology, and it is these residues that propaganda fears the most.

Georg Lukács has reminded us that the Western novel tends to be driven by the completion of the life of the hero achieving epic unity at the end.²³ Cultural Revolution novels seem to display a different tendency—the ideology is unified but at the expense of the self-denial of the means, referring to both the art form and the heroes or heroines, so that neither the novel nor the main characters can comfortably provide a sense of completion. If European romanticism can be compared with Maoist romanticism, we find the latter so much keener than the former to pursue the primacy of thought to determine and condition the sensual dimension of arts. However, the underlying political intent could never completely control the sensorial and the imaginative. While it is true that Maoist artwork would never be allowed to venture into the plurality of language and aesthetics, romanticism is loaded with aspirations to reach abstract beauty and surpass the ordinary, so that the Maoist arts also have the potential to overcome the invested ideology.

The Drive of Aesthetics

In an essay arguing for the importance of culture in any revolution, Fredric Jameson suggests that China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was more a unique historical experience than a universal manifestation of “cultural revolution.” A major feature of the Chinese event that might not be found in other cultural revolutions, according to Jameson, was its generational conflicts. China’s Cultural Revolution was situated in a generational system inherited from the feudal past, and its youth displayed, through violence, a revolutionary dissatisfaction and impatience with the authority of their elders and the Confucian family system.²⁴

Jameson’s brief, and arguably reductionist, characterization of the Cultural Revolution resonates with my study here because his emphasis on generational conflicts implies structural aesthetic changes, as youths often differentiated themselves from the establishment through style. However, the Cultural Revolution did not display an aesthetics that was truly new and shocking. As Jameson argues on a different occasion, “Even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experiences, constructs made up of bits and pieces of the here and now.”²⁵ Precisely because radical alternatives are little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation, utopian narratives—so central to all revolutions—reflect only the limitations of our current imagination, indirectly disclosing what is not imaginable and not conceivable.²⁶ To Jameson, what is most political about these narratives is not the content but their reorganization of the present world.

Wiping out cultural traditions and condemning artistic freedom, the Cultural Revolution also initiated a cultural rejuvenation, with the aim of presenting a new look for the new world, but in the end this “new” style was not original at all. For example, in 1966 and 1967, when most publication houses ceased operation, the revolutionary masses practiced the freedom of press by putting together their own newspapers, pamphlets, and posters. Wood-block images became the dominant visual style. This was due largely to technical limitations, as the mimeograph was the most accessible form of printing, and fine visual reproductions were not possible. Yet this style also revealed a recycling of the 1930s and 40s Yan’an propaganda culture, giving the people a renewed sense of the revolution. In fact, it was not only the revolutionary masses who employed this style for its technical simplicity; when the publication houses resumed their duties, they also adopted the wood-block styles to demonstrate the new world order (Figure 1.1). The actual content of these works might be considered less important to the revolution than the effects of the new, yet recycled, look.

Figure 1.1: The Great Army of Revolutionary Rebels of Jilin Lu Xun Academy of Art, Learning from Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers; Merging with Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers, propaganda poster, 1967, printed by Changchun Xinhua Printing Factory.

Ted Huters suggests that the Chinese style and spirit that the Cultural Revolution claimed to have found and developed could be seen as the final embodiment of the “national essence,” a project that had proven so powerful yet elusive from the time of the late Qing.²⁷ In a very different context, Stuart Schram also reminds us of the importance of “style” in Maoist thought. He quotes Mao’s speech in March 1959: “There are some things which need not have any national style, such as trains, airplanes and big guns. Politics and art should have a national style.”²⁸ Here Mao not only demonstrated the importance of the Chinese way of doing things; he also pointed out the resemblance between politics and the arts in terms of their common search for style—emphasizing that a unique manner of presentation and organization was needed in both cases. Yiching Wu also reminds us that Mao took a specific approach to egalitarianism, which was concerned less with actual power distribution than with controlling the ways in which power was manifested and performed by the people. Mao seemed to have less interest in undoing the power hierarchy than in the ways people performed their power in public.²⁹

The Cultural Revolution was a time when new looks were both suppressed and encouraged. Fashion in general was prohibited, and the people knew very well how politically risky it could be if they appeared different.³⁰ But revolution was also all about a new look, and the reordering of appearance was the most powerful way to express a reordering of the ideological and material world. Although the social restraint of the time might have prevented the people from imagining radical difference, the revolutionaries tried to re-present and repackage the very limited vocabulary and ideas available during the time to justify their vision.

Almost all established artists, writers, and cultural policy-makers active in the seventeen-year period were criticized for spreading creative freedom and aestheticism, paving the way for a new cultural establishment that took artistic form and sensation even more seriously. The entire country went for a new propaganda culture hammer and tongs, and it was expected that this culture could launch a new history, with an open future unfolding in every moment, making possible what had previously seemed impossible. The quintessential revolutionary arts could be devoid of concrete revolutionary meanings, but the aesthetic drive helped to legitimize the revolutionary drive as inexhaustible. When discussing her first yangbanxi, The Red Lantern (Hongdengji), a World War II story featuring brave underground CCP members sacrificing themselves to protect a military secret, Jiang Qing was proud of the meticulous attention she had paid to the characters’ images, which were not entirely ideologically driven. She claimed:

The costume designer I employed used to make silk robes and modern suits for rich people. This was the first time he designed clothing for the poor, and he directly stitched patches on the front of the shirts. It was clear that he did not understand how laborers work. I told them that patches should be stitched on the elbows, knees, and collars, which are the areas most easily worn out. The shapes of the patches had to look good, and the use of color was also important to the image of the characters. Most laborers tended to wear poor clothing with gray and dark colors. However, I demanded that Tiemei [the female protagonist in The Red Lantern] wear a bright red Chinese-style shirt, as well as the mesmerizing hairpin I personally chose for her.³¹

Jiang’s reflection demonstrates her contradictory handling of the relationship between aesthetics and ideology. On the one hand, she criticized the designer for not being realistic because he did not design the costumes as they would appear in reality; on the other hand, she herself was also not a realist, as she gave her favorite character attractive clothing and hairpins that would not have belonged to a poor girl growing up under class oppression. As the first yangbanxi, The Red Lantern presented itself as the model for all revolutionary arts. It portrays no romantic relationships, and by featuring the little girl in a foster family, it depletes even blood relationships that might give rise to selfish considerations. The audience is invited to identify with Tiemei only through her revolutionary spirit. However, there is also an abstract sense of beauty conveyed by the piece—the “mesmerizing” hairpin would have nothing to do with her class status and the oppressions she experienced, but is rather an independent aesthetic detail that stands out from the ideology.

Jiang Qing was knowledgeable in many cultural forms, and she was also very specific about color. According to Xue Jinghua—the talented ballet dancer who played the lead role, Wu Qinghua, in the 1969 film version of The Red Detachment of Women—Jiang Qing was knowledgeable about technological issues and specific about the quality of film stock and processing to be used in the making of these films.³² Before production began, Jiang Qing invited the major creative members of the production team to watch a Hollywood film, and during the screening she drew people’s attention to the splendid green color the film was able to capture; according to her, it had not been seen in any Chinese productions. She reminded the crew to chulü (bring out the green), and the ability to capture the green colors well was then seen as an indicator of China’s cinematic achievement.³³

In a meeting with cultural workers in 1973, she criticized the use of color in the yangbanxi film On the Docks (Haigang), which tells the story of a group of Shanghai dockworkers discovering that there are class enemies adulterating fiberglass into the fine grains sent to Africa, with the aim of destroying China’s internationalist project. She exclaimed: “The scarf [of the character Gao Zhiyang] could be changed into beige—all you know is white. Now the anchor is red, and the sea water is blue. There is no mediating color in between, so that [the red and the blue] cannot be harmonized.”³⁴ She also spent much time in elaborating what she meant by “bringing out the green,” and she criticized the fact that, although The White-Haired Girl had taken her advice to emphasize the green color, the color was too prominent and lacked layers. It is true that in many visual propaganda materials—such as posters and yangbanxi—the color red assumes the ideological duty of contrasting right from wrong. Chris Berry also argues that in many of the Cultural Revolution yangbanxi films, the color red assumes a very strong connotative power, mostly associated with the party, but it also operates to “attract” and “affect.”³⁵ But this common didactic use of red is most subtly challenged by Jiang Qing’s rating of the new Chinese cinematic craft by the quality of its green colors, which are more difficult to present well than the red, and it was probably this technological difficulty that made Jiang Qing infatuated with green. This obsession with color might be one of the indicators demonstrating the autonomy of the aesthetic, even during such a fervently political period.

But Jiang Qing also showed her great anxiety regarding arts that were not under her direct control. In a 1969 “Important Speech of the Central Leader,” delivered to all cultural workers in the nation, Jiang Qing announced:

After watching the television news on April 14, I was not able to sleep. Before reporting the Ninth National Congress the station broadcasted a cultural program. It did not deliver Mao Zedong Thought, but it was flooded with black materials of the capitalist class. It utilized capitalist methods, and used folk songs to convey yellow (pornographic) tunes. The dancers swing their bodies, and I am most angry to see them wearing military uniforms as well as all kinds of minority costumes to do such kinds of movements. This kind of propaganda is rotten to the core. No art to the dances, they are simply obscene.³⁶

It is hard to imagine this kind of “capitalist” and “obscene” material broadcast on CCTV in April 1969, at a time when Mao was announcing the success of the Cultural Revolution. But this statement shows what Jiang Qing chose to see. It vividly demonstrates how anxious she was about any cultural performances introduced to the nation that had not been under her direct scrutiny. She was so concerned and restless probably because she knew very well that power over the arts could slip out of her control all too easily. It was a time when all the revolutionaries considered themselves producers of a new culture—something that had never happened before, and probably no one, including Jiang herself, was completely sure about the absolute differentiation between the pornographic and the revolutionary. Pleasures, anxieties, and imaginations were all very strong, making the arts of this revolution highly emotionally charged.

The Sensorial

This aesthetics blends fiction and reality. We can say that the entire Cultural Revolution propaganda culture was primarily a project to rework reality, to make it aesthetically and politically unambiguous. For example, the big-character posters served the function of both proof and sentence. Once written down and posted, words became facts, and these acts of writing destroyed the lives of many.³⁷ At the same time, representations also beautified reality. While it was hard to change the material conditions, cultural workers were given the enormous political duty of transforming reality at the level of representation. Hao Ran, the author of The Golden Road, a novel I will discuss further, describes his writing skills of the time accordingly:

When I was conceptualizing my novels, I always took a completely opposite view of those things I experienced in reality. For example, if I saw a worker being lazy, negative, and selfish, I would conceptualize an ideal image of a character with hardworking, positive, and selfless attributes.³⁸

As a cultural worker committed to the party and its policies, Hao Ran understood that he had to present a world that was not only better than, but also the opposite of, actual materialist reality in order to fulfill his political duty of creating art “based in life yet higher than life.” For most ordinary students, even their diary was meant to be propaganda, to be read by all and graded by teachers.³⁹

The competition of fictions and reality, or different “realities,” is in fact a central feature of socialist realism. Not just Maoist China but many socialist regimes kept telling the people that material reality should not be trusted, and that the propaganda culture presented a more truthful political reality than unmediated everyday reality could. Evgeny Dobrenko explains that socialist realism was originally a “commodity” produced by the Soviet Union, destined first for the “market” of world revolution and later for its own population to sustain its legitimacy, as the disaster-ridden Soviet economy had to be buried under another layer of reality produced by socialist realism.⁴⁰ Precisely because the actual economy was so depressing, the state had to create a different world to conceal human misfortune. If Stalinist propaganda culture was meant to decorate and cover up the existing reality, the Cultural Revolution displayed a slightly different dynamic. Philip Huang argues that there was an extreme disjunction between representational reality and objective reality in the Cultural Revolution.⁴¹ I would instead argue that the two layers of reality were interpenetrated so intensely that it became difficult to tell the difference.

A most important element that allows this overlap between aesthetics and ideology is the sensorial. If we follow Jacques Lacan to see the world in the two realms of the Symbolic and the Real, the sensorial, however unmediated, still belongs to the Symbolic and cannot provide us a window into the Real. But the proximity of the sensorial to the Real can be easily manipulated, often by aesthetic efforts, to steer the subject’s orientation to the world. I think the Cultural Revolution worked painstakingly to aestheticize the sensorial for direct use by the ideological. At the same time, the aesthetic reordering of reality also created a new set of sensations which facilitated the invisible superimposition between reality and ideology.

Let me first present one widespread practice to demonstrate this: yikusitian (remember the bitter and think of the sweet). History is obviously one of the most useful tools for a regime to justify its legitimacy, and for a people to unify against internal or external threats. As shown in Chinese history, every new dynastic turn implies a new historical reinterpretation, and the CCP was no exception. But it went so far to ensure only one rigid sensational form of history, the interpretation of which could be implanted in people’s mass psychology: the past can only be bitter, while the present can only be sweet.

I would say that yikusitian was not just one among many cultural tools the regime used to shape the people, but was essential for the ideological machine to leap between representations and realities. First, it was believed that once elders were invited to talk about their bitter life under GMD governance, the young people would then be reminded of how they were blessed by the communist revolution and the party’s leadership. In a published yikusitian story meant to be a model for the genre, the narrator, after lamenting his own enormous hardship as a factory laborer during the GMD days and glorifying the bright future of the current generation of factory apprentices, ends his confession with one final line: “Today’s happiness is bestowed by the Party.”⁴² This line, addressed particularly to the younger generation, also ends this collection of yikusitian stories published in 1964. A totalistic historical view was quickly established.

In a similar sleight of hand, it is also believed that yikusitian prompted the people to confess their own mistakes, facilitating not only their metamorphosis into the new socialists but also the regime’s total surveillance and control. It is most obviously shown in the “two remembering and three investigations” (liangyi sancha) campaign: the former is remembering class bitterness and race bitterness, while the latter refers to investigating thinking, work, and attitude. In a 1970 instruction book that teaches local cadres how to launch this campaign, cadres are commanded to spend much effort in the two yiku activities before they can acquire any real results in the three investigations.⁴³ In order to make sure the masses are properly agitated, the instruction book also advises that the two yiku components last five days, while the three investigations can be conducted within four days. Specific yiku activities have to be launched: eating yiku meal, singing yiku songs, and watching yiku films, with the environment decorated in yiku ways.⁴⁴ All the senses were coordinated to reproduce a reality. These were considered the most effective ways to prompt the people to engage in confessions. The original insurmountable distance between the private worlds of the individuals and the regime desiring for public control could then be bridged.

Overall, this relatively simpleminded pedagogy relied heavily on ritualistic and sensational elements to deliver the messages. Specific songs, such as “Remembering the Bygone Bitterness” (Xiangqi wangri ku) and “Never to Forget Class Bitterness” (Buwang jieji ku”) would be sung, and slogans such as “Don’t forget class bitterness, remember the hatred of blood and tears” (buwang jieji ku, laoji xuelei chou) and “Don’t forget the Communist Party after turning over, don’t forget Chairman Mao when blessed with happiness” (fanshen buwang Gongchandang, xingfu buwang Mao zhuxi) were designed to be raised at certain climactic moments. In many cases, specific “bitter meals” were also served. The concept of “bitterness” was therefore presented through the narrator’s rational persuasion, the aesthetic experiences of songs and words, as well as the direct sensual impact of taste, to bring out a collective understanding of the historical progression from the bitter past to the sweet present.

We can say that the yikusitian ritual is very effective as a pedagogical tool because it utilizes the rational and the sensational. However, the subjective easily escapes the collective conditioning, and the underlying ideology such as Maoism does not always succeed in incorporating all the sensorial feelings. For example, Wang Xiaoming recounts that some of the yikusitian “speakers” were not very expressive, boring the audience and embarrassing the host; however, some speakers were too eloquent. He remembers how an elderly peasant, in front of an assembly of students, recounted in a very detailed way how a woman was raped by some bandits; this amounted to a form of sex education in this age of extreme asceticism. Some of the students’ faces turned red, or they made faces to each other, and many just felt angry.⁴⁵ The history of suffering meant to legitimize the current regime became a form of perverted pleasure, and the bitter meal—which all students detested—was there to ensure the correct manner of interpretation, sometimes to little avail.

The sensations of yikusitian were not only manifested in rituals but they also became rhetoric implanted into different propaganda works. We can explore how the teleology of yikusitian is manifested in The Golden Road (Jinguang dadao), the most popular official novel during the Cultural Revolution. Although the bulk of the novel describes the lives of the peasants from 1949 to contemporary times, it includes a long prelude to introduce readers to the childhood and youth of the novel’s protagonist, Gao Daquan, from 1932 to 1949. There we find that his poor family led an anguished life under the oppression of the landlords and class enemies, leaving Daquan with no option but to flee his family and hometown to survive. Following the yikusitian structure, the long prelude serves to remind readers of the legitimacies of the 1949 revolution and, indirectly, of the 1966 Cultural Revolution.

But the novel also describes a threshold between the bitter past and the sweet present. This threshold remains the most ambiguous and aestheticized moment of the entire novel. At the end of the Prelude, in the express train he took to return to Fangcaodi, his newfound home, on October 1, 1949, Gao Daquan watched a cadre give a solemn speech to the passengers:

In the midst of the ardent handclaps, the old revolutionary cadre began his speech. Although there was a long distance between them, and Gao was not able to see the cadre’s face, the cadre’s voice was steel-hitting, so exorbitant and sonorous, trembling the chords of people’s hearts … On the speedy train, immersed in the wave-like handclaps and cheering, Gao Daquan was lost in a wondrous deep thought he had never experienced.⁴⁶

Through the voices of the cadre and the masses, which cannot be visualized, the protagonist is caught in this trance-like reflection—as are the readers. We must notice that although his speech is presented here, the actual words are less powerful than the direct impact of the cadre’s steely voice. Resonating with the masses’ cheering and clapping, this pure voice directs the protagonist to his own inner being, which could now be superimposed with the express train plunging toward an open future. Leaving the capitalist past behind, what is gained is an abstract sense of aesthetic sublime. But this appropriation also demonstrates how ideology might always be operating as a void. The aesthetic drive presented in this episode could not be seen as a tool to carry a given ideology, because the aesthetic is most powerful when the voice is devoid of all content—although this also indirectly reinforces the ideological. Through the empty voice, the subject is interpellated into a political teleology that seemingly goes in a natural direction along the course of China’s socialist modernization. More accurately, the content is both absent and present: it is always already there, but it also does not matter.

Yikusitian is not only a ritual, but an epistemology and aesthetics, instructing the people how the past had to be “sensed,” and how the present could be “felt.” The new revolutionary aesthetic pedagogy was also motivated and legitimized by the yikusitian concept. After several years of anarchy, the state decided to consolidate a new aesthetic common sense based on a selection of what was invented and practiced, so that some dimension of collective experiences could be institutionalized. In a 1969 issue of the influential Shanghai revolutionary newspaper Wenyi zhanbao (Literary and Arts Combat News), a secondary school teacher shared experiences of offering new revolutionary literary and arts course for Year 2 students:

We read Chairman Mao’s writing The Analysis of Different Classes in Chinese Society. We took this writing as our ideological weapon.

We learned the brutal faces of the exploiting class. We listened to the album of revolutionary ballet opera The White-Haired Girl, and we learned how to sing some songs such as “Prelude,” “Cry My Dad,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

We practiced our calligraphy and learned how to draw cartoons. We also learned how to write revolutionary criticism on public boards. All these were useful when we visited factories and villages [for political agitation activities].

We went to factories and invited elderly workers to talk about history in general, and particularly their family histories and the criminal histories of the capitalists exploiting the workers. We went down to villages to interview poor and lower–middle class peasants about the histories of their villages, families, and communities and how the landlords exploited them.

We analyzed the interviews and began to write the three “histories.” We also invited those who were more motivated to write songs, plays, and small-scale scripts for all kinds of cultural activities.

We organized the different classes to engage in the yikusitian activities. Small conclusion: We wrote reports on The Analysis of Different Classes in Chinese Society with our own experiences and reflections.⁴⁷

Although extremely politicized, this curriculum describes a rather impressive arts education, which takes an integrative approach to situate different forms of arts and art-making under the yikusitian politics. In terms of the diversity of artistic forms, the curriculum includes music, calligraphy, drawing, writing, and even interviewing. But the visual, the audio, the literary, and the performative were not just fragmented into unrelated blocks, as the entire curriculum was structured along a coherent political project of yikusitian, legitimated by Maoist theories, supported by field visits, and concluded with the students’ own reflections—which presumably would bring the students back to the Maoist theories learned in the beginning of the course. It is a practice-based arts curriculum, and the individual activities are oriented toward their “usefulness” to society, so that calligraphy was not practiced for self-cultivation but for writing big-character posters in political agitation. While the autonomy of arts was strictly prohibited, this curriculum was able to integrate different art forms in the common cause of class struggle.

But in the curriculum we can also interpret a relationship between arts and ideology in the opposite direction: that class struggle became an excuse for the arts to express themselves. We might see an art teacher trying her best to teach art in a politicized environment, with her students taking great pleasure in writing calligraphy, drawing cartoons, and singing revolutionary songs without much concern for content. It is difficult to differentiate ideology from art in these activities, as pleasure is always highly slippery and resists control. If yikusitian demanded the learner reorder and repackage history to make it useful for the dominant ideology, the students’ interests in the arts were also promoted.

Reality and Fiction

The ideological, aesthetic, and sensorial interacted in complex and fluid ways. We can say that under Maoist romanticism, it was very difficult for the people to face reality. Let us examine another example, the CCP’s reception of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo, Cina (1974). In 1972, the world-renowned left-wing Italian filmmaker was invited by the Maoist government to make a film that could introduce to the world “correct” images of modern China. But when the finished product was shown to selected CCP leaders before its public screening, the Chinese hosts frowned at what they watched, and from the ambiguous images he produced they saw the good wishes and friendship they had offered this Italian “comrade” completely trashed. Clark reminds us that the criticism of the film was an indirect attack by cultural insurgents on Zhou Enlai and others associated with the expansion of foreign contacts.⁴⁸ As such, the propaganda machine began to operate, and the film was given a huge wave of nationwide critical attention, although it was not shown in the country until 2004.

A 1974 People’s Daily editorial column set the national tone. It provides a long and careful textual analysis of the film, and it argues that Antonioni deliberately chose to shoot negative scenes that damaged the image of China and intentionally avoided presenting the country’s “correct” reality:

In the entire film, we do not see a new factory machine, a new tractor, a decent school, an operating construction site, nor a harvest scene … And those things which [Antonioni] believed could defame China and the Chinese people are presented elaborately in wide-angles, close-ups, and extreme long shots.⁴⁹

In another review, published in the Beijing-based Guangming Daily, the Chinese critic proclaimed:

We have been in Shanghai many times, and we see how this city, which was originally part-colonial and part-semicolonial and unevenly developed before the Liberation, has become an industrial base of our country, with many grand factories and tidy workers’ residential areas newly built. Antonioni saw them but refused to recognize them. With secret intentions Antonioni chose to shoot only crude factories, isolated machines, and those worn-out buildings left from the old society.⁵⁰

A large part of the Guangming Daily review was identical with the People’s Daily editorial, to the extent that we do not know whether the reviewers had seen the film at all, as almost no people in China had actually watched it. It probably did not matter, since the most important message to be delivered in this review was the critic’s observed “reality” of Shanghai that reflected the progressiveness of the socialist era instead of Antonioni’s evil images.

The effective engineering of such a wide national campaign against a film that had never been seen demonstrates how powerful the cultural apparatus was, and how little freedom was left to the people. If the Cultural Revolution was initiated with many enlightenment promises, by the early 1970s the idealism was almost entirely exhausted. It is of more concern to me here that this campaign demonstrates how criticism could be divorced from both the actual text and the claimed reality, while it was increasingly difficult to distinguish text from reality. From this campaign, we realize that representations were never understood as naive reflections of reality during the Cultural Revolution, but different people could produce different views of the same reality. The People’s Daily commentary did accuse a scene of being staged, but the main body of the criticism did not—or dared not—counteract Antonioni by charging him with fabricating the footage, and there was no dispute that the documentary images presented were indexical to Shanghai’s city view and the people’s everyday lives. The whole campaign against Chung Kuo, Cina was not directed at Antonioni’s “constructions”; the filmmaker was attacked for the “realities” he chose to record: he deliberately depicted a backward reality of China against the blissful and progressive reality that his host wanted him to present and the world to consume. As demonstrated in the Guangming Daily commentary, the Chinese critic tried to present his views of Shanghai against Antonioni’s. They could both be “real,” but one was more “correct.” It was around this “correctness” that the battle was waged, and exactly what the “reality” entailed was less important than it might seem.

In this propaganda culture, “fiction” and “reality” were equally important and equally legitimate. Dobrenko argues that for socialist realism, representations could be enacted as a semiautonomous reality to compete with or cover up people’s actual everyday life. In this case of the Chinese reception of Chung Kuo, Cina, a reverse—although entirely complementary—mechanism was applied: when the cultural representation was not the desirable one in the eyes of the ruling regime, the social reality was called upon to interject. But this reality was also a highly selective one, with no ambition to stand for the true reality. In a way, Antonioni was motivated by his ambition to capture a relatively “real” China devoid of ideological control; however, to the Chinese regime, Antonioni’s project was ideological through and through.

This struggle defies not only the Platonic hierarchy between reality and fiction but also the Marxist privilege of the material world composed of real human labor over the nonmaterial world composed of image. Considering the fact that Chung Kuo, Cina was heavily invested with the PRC’s newfound concern of portraying a better international image in the early 1970s, the case was probably even more problematic to many Marxist critics because the regime’s hospitality provided for the making of the film in 1972, and its later violent defamation of it in 1974 concerned nothing but national image. As a dear international friend of socialist China, Antonioni was trusted with all the assistance and hospitality he needed to make this film possible, because the film was perceived as another piece of socialist propaganda. The CCP leaders were caught off guard, almost piece of naively, when they realized that the film was made with a completely different agenda, meant to pluralize meanings instead of projecting a coherent and positive image of Maoist China. The only response the regime was able to articulate was a complete disavowal, and then to enact another criticism campaign against the failed propaganda to turn it into negative propaganda.

It is almost a truism that arts and politics are connected. The question is how they interact, how they support each other or bring each other into crisis. Jacques Rancière argues that although they rest on independent realms, arts and politics both involve the “distribution of the sensible.” While politics distributes power, places, humans, and things in hierarchy, the arts can reveal such concealed distributions and intervene in them.⁵¹ Therefore, the most important function, or powerful attribute, of the arts is to disrupt politics. This ability is conferred by art’s autonomy against the controlling politics always trying to contain it.⁵² In a way, we need to reverse Rancière’s theory to understand the relationship between arts and politics in the Cultural Revolution; while Rancière emphasizes the pluralizing effects of arts in contrast to the monopolizing tendency of politics,⁵³ the Cultural Revolution arts tend to express the opposite, presenting a stable enough screen for the people to engage with their highly disorientating world. But it does not make the Cultural Revolution works lesser arts, because they still connect to the people in powerful ways, most vividly demonstrated by the painstaking efforts of the regime to produce them, appropriate them, and interpret them time and again. The ways that arts allure the manipulation of power indirectly show the unbridgeable distance between them. From the perspective of the individual, art is also not a private sphere; instead, it allows the individual to make sense of the world and other people. These “subjective” components are essential for ideologies to work.⁵⁴ It is this distance and mutual attraction, however subtle in the Cultural Revolution arts, that propels my study here.

CHAPTER 2

Production and
Circulation of Literature
under the Revolutionary
Cultural Economy

Examining the aesthetics of Cultural Revolution propaganda works is important to reestablish the inherent link between aesthetics and propaganda, but this approach also runs the risk of detaching the works from the masses and dislocating the authors from their communities. There was clearly a sublime revolutionary ideological spirit that steered the works, but we must recognize that these arts were also mundane cultural items circulating among the folks as objects of appreciation and entertainment. This chapter supplements the previous chapter’s discussion of their aesthetics by exploring their economics, not in terms of the profits the works made but their production, circulation, and reception among the people. In other words, this chapter aims to study the cultural economy of the Cultural Revolution. Unsurprisingly, propaganda was never treated as a commodity by Maoist economists. It is the political value embodied in the propaganda that supposedly defined its worth. To many people, propaganda could only be “evaluated” according to its degree of loyalty to and manifestation of the ruling ideology, which is repeatedly inscribed in each of these works to allow the ideology to persist and flourish. But I believe that their values were also established, and changed, through the interactions they made with the people. Although these works were not meant to be economic items, it is important to study them accordingly to reveal precisely how the political can never completely suppress economics, and how value can only be understood in relative terms. Here in this chapter, I want to study the intricate tensions between propaganda as items circulated in society and propaganda as vehicles of absolute political values.

Maoist Cultural Economy

Let me begin with an example. When the Korean pop song “Gangnam Style” hit China a few years ago, some elderly Chinese spoke up and accused, half-jokingly, that the horse-riding dance featured in the music video was a knockoff of a popular song and dance performance from the Cultural Revolution: When the Red Guards on the Grassland See Chairman Mao (Caoyuan shang de Hongweibing jiandao liao Maozhuxi). The piece portrayed the elation of a group of Mongolian Red Guards arriving at Tian’anmen Square and seeing the Chairman, and it was performed by youth all over China for propaganda purposes. The topic has attracted much follow-up discussion on the internet, where we find former Red Guards expressing their nostalgia for their convivial experiences around the performances. But very few mention its political messages. We can extract two sets of values embodied in this Cultural Revolution propaganda: the ideological message of Mao as the only source of happiness of all Red Guards, versus the festivity of the masses learning and performing the piece among themselves. If the dominant value of the work resided in Mao’s power forty years ago, the latent value of fellowship surfaces over time, and most of the elderly Red Guards now choose to identify the happy singing and dancing featured in the text with their own communal experiences, drawing a veil over the Chairman who was their only true love.

The Cultural Revolution constructs a society that is both radically vertical and radically horizontal: while Mao, and the small leadership operated under his name, dictated how people should think and behave, peer influences were also very powerful in determining the meanings of life. Because institutionalized career paths could no longer be planned easily, personal hobbies were quickly adopted and deepened into aptitudes and talents to define one’s worth, and peer groups were formed to share knowledge, cultivate common interests, and form communal bonding during these volatile times. Together the vertical and horizontal forces, both very strong, held the field of culture together.

This can be contrasted with Pierre Bourdieu’s model, which is most widely used to study cultural economy in different parts of the world. Some China studies scholars find Bourdieu’s model helpful for understanding the relationship between culture and class in Maoist China.¹ But while Bourdieu’s idea of cultural and political capital might offer us new insights to understand the 1950s’ PRC society, what makes Bourdieu’s theory inapplicable to the Cultural Revolution resides in both the very strong Maoist mandates, which invested fixed ideological values in each product, as well as the equally strong peer relationships that emphasized integration instead of differentiation. It is true that Bourdieu’s sociology is also built primarily on the horizontal model, in which society is composed of people’s changing activities in their relations with each other. But Bourdieu’s horizontal model demonstrates society as an open structure composed of constantly renewing processes, while the human interactions encouraged during the Cultural Revolution were meant to facilitate social integration not social mobility. The liberal capitalist society that informs Bourdieu’s theory clearly privileges individuals as conscious and autonomous agents who struggle to advance their interests. In Maoist China, however, the concept of the individual was largely suppressed, so that individuals were discouraged from taking initiatives to set up social networks based on their personal calculations, but they were equal members of a revolutionary community. Different conceptions of the individual directly impact the way cultural work is “valued.”

Considering autonomous agents as the foundation of society, Bourdieu conceptualizes the value of cultural works on two levels. On the one hand, the producers are agents who gain in prestige and market power through the impact of their works, and their own position-taking relative to other agents within the art and literary fields. On the other hand, consumers develop their class status through their cultural taste and cultural knowledge—their cultural capital—of a specific range of artworks.² Bourdieu is clearly interested less in the intrinsic value of the works than in them as carriers of cultural capital, which embodies the need of society to differentiate people into classes. In contrast, the absolute Maoist values invested in each Cultural Revolution propaganda work were meant to guarantee the equality of the people, and people were encouraged to produce and receive cultural items in similar ways that avoided the formation of class society through the cultural production and consumption that Bourdieu describes (and takes for granted). It was assumed during the Cultural Revolution that culture did not differentiate but connected individuals—the singular culture conditioned the singular people.

Producers and consumers in Bourdieu’s world can secure aspects of personal welfare, such as material wealth, or fame, or a sense of freedom through culture. In contrast, because cultural capital was not a valid concept in the Cultural Revolution, individuals were not encouraged to believe that they could accumulate personal benefits through the production or consumption of cultural products. It was stated in a 1966 Ministry of Culture report that most authors, artists, and scientists were already full-time employees of government institutions and received a basic monthly salary, so their publications need not bring them additional financial rewards. Furthermore, ordinary citizens should be encouraged to publish but should not be rewarded financially because they had full-time jobs. Remuneration was to be given only to those few freelance authors and translators who still needed financial support.³ If liberal democratic societies rely largely on monetary rewards to encourage production or innovation, Maoist society emphasized honor and respect. But ultimately, such honor and respect did not rest with the individual; they belonged to the entire society: this differs from the Bourdieu system most fundamentally. The Maoist society was idealized as a fully integrated and coherent one, so that everyone was an exchangeable nut or bolt, valuable but replaceable. While Bourdieu’s cultural economy is based on the exchangeability of cultural works, the Maoist was based more on the exchangeability of the authors, whose productions were all, theoretically, unified by the revolutionary spirit incarnated. The driving force behind the production and circulation of cultural products was not to be the self-interest of such agents, who had to be either anonymous and submerged in a collective work unit or representatives of an equal society. I do not think that cultural capital can ever be totally suppressed in any society, and there were still professional artists and other cultural producers who wanted to maintain their fame and degree of influence during the Cultural Revolution. But these personal intentions were concealed as much as possible in a time when the collective overwhelmed the individual.

But what I really want to emphasize here is that with the universal ideological messages invested in each work, and without the calculating agents conscious of their accumulation of cultural capital, a cultural economy still existed in the Cultural Revolution. Cultural products were still produced, sold, and circulated, and there were active agents conducting these transactions and activities. The inapplicability of Bourdieu’s model of cultural economy to China’s Cultural Revolution lies not in the complete absence of agents or concepts of capital but in the way that authorship and readership could only be manifested as public functions. Cultural works were produced and exchanged not for individual agents’ positioning and movements in a given field but in the name of the advancement of the Maoist collective, which could be achieved, as many Maoists believed, through a vigorous culture of incessant production, circulation, and reception. But this cultural economy submitted personal freedom to political necessity. As shown in Yin Hongbiao’s research, among all the schools of thought—legitimate or alternative—developed among the youth during the Cultural Revolution, none advocated private property; they all endorsed the socialist conviction of public ownership as the realization of social equality. Even liberalist thoughts emerging in the mid-1970s did not mention private property; instead, they focused on the convergence of socialism and liberalism.⁴ We must admit that this was a cultural economy that emphasized collective authorship, public access, and political effects, making it drastically different from the one we are familiar with.

Control over Literature and Publishing

With the aim of social integration, this culture was put together by painstaking forces to oppress the desires of people to express their unique selves. Considering the nature of artistic production, this was clearly not an easy task. Let me focus on literature and publishing to further explore how this cultural economy worked.

The official Cultural Revolution literary scene can roughly be separated into two periods: before and after 1969. In the first period, with the incessant class struggles taking place in all publishing units, a large part of the publishing industry was effectively shut down. There were still literary and publication activities taking place, but they featured only two authors: Mao himself and the revolutionary masses as a singular collective. First, the entire official printing capacity was devoted to Mao’s writings. The dilapidated Ministry of Culture issued a notice to the nation in June of 1966:

We categorically refrain from publishing those new books that should not be published or do not have to be published. We also do not publish new issues of existing books at the moment. All paper and resources must be utilized for the publication of Mao’s works.⁵

There were also concerted political efforts to keep the price of Maoist works low in order to make them available to as many people as possible. For example, it was decided that the retail price of the Selected Writings of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong xuanji) was lowered from 3.25 RMB to 2.00 RMB in 1966, implying a state subsidization of 43 million RMB.⁶ No tax and logistic fees could be charged to any product related to Mao’s works.⁷

In May 1967, a special unit was put together by the central party: the Office of the Publication of Chairman Mao’s Writings (Mao Zhuxi zhuzuo chuban bangongshi).⁸ The unit was a small but powerful temporary organization composed of thirteen officers, who were prohibited from engaging in any political activities or identifying with any political alliances, and the unit could demand the compliance of all related units in the nation. When most of the printing units in Beijing and Shanghai were controlled by the revolutionary masses and could not continue production, by December 1967, the office succeeded in publishing 80 million copies of the four-volume Selected Writings of Mao Zedong. The aim in 1968 was that every educated citizen and every household in the countryside would be given a set of “five precious gifts”: a set of Selected Writings of Mao Zedong, a book of Quotations of Mao Zedong (Maozhuxi yulu), one of Mao’s monographs, Poetry of Chairman Mao (Mao zhuxi shici), and a Mao photo collection. All the national resources, from paper to logistics, were arranged to achieve this goal.⁹

Between 1966 and 1968, the state devoted its entire publication capacity to establish Mao as the single author, and we can say that this cultural economy was heavily state-funded and was not self-sustainable economically. But these writings were also circulated and reproduced in ways that facilitated new social and economic relations. First, the revolutionary masses also wrote as Mao’s pupils or his embodiment. Outside the state apparatus, there were many publications put together by the people themselves, ranging from small pamphlets to periodicals. The revolutionaries utilized the existing facilities that remained idle in schools, publication houses, and newspaper studios, and they could apply for funding from the various work or education units to purchase paper and ink. There were many different versions of Long Live Mao Zedong Thought (Mao Zedong sixiang wansui) published among the revolutionary masses, meant to include also those Mao writings and speeches not published in the official publications.¹⁰ Because of the heavy editorial labor involved, these works embodied the authorship of both Mao and the revolutionary masses. In 1967, the self-publication of “little newspapers” also reached its peak, with many different titles put together by all kinds of organizations under self-developing circulation channels. Some of them were distributed free of charge, and some were sold at a price that could keep production running. There were also private marketplaces emerging in many cities for the sale and exchange of these newspapers. Individuals actually made profits from these activities, which outraged, for example, the Shanghai government. On September 22, 1967, the Shanghai revolutionary committee issued “The Notice to Ban All Illegal Publication and Hawking of Propaganda Materials,” announcing that all those involved had to be prosecuted.¹¹ Even those propaganda materials meant to condemn capitalism easily turned into commodities themselves, although the profits, if any, would mostly be invested back to the publication instead of being reaped personally, exceptions notwithstanding.

Second, many spontaneous literary creations were also generated—whether or not they were recorded. As mentioned in the Introduction, wendou (verbal battles) was core to the revolutionary logic of the Cultural Revolution, and it was often characterized by the extensive and diligent quotations from Mao’s writings that preceded and legitimized all political activities. Of course, Mao’s writings were interpreted and appropriated in all kinds of ways, to the extent that they became empty signifiers; two enemy groups fighting against each other could claim the same Mao quotation as their justification. But the people also created their own slogans and big-character posters, the communicative effectiveness of which rested largely on the literary craft of the writers. Many workers and peasants were empowered by these exercises, and they found themselves respected and elevated through the exercise of their literary skills. Most of them were not published and involved no profit or cost, but they were tightly woven within a cultural economy. Most of the materials used were not original, but appropriated—sometimes after careful deliberation and sometimes spontaneously—to give them new meanings. Authors were simultaneously readers, and they were connected through their identification with the revolutionary spirit, which inspired them to be receptive and creative. Heavily circulating among peers, the power of these works might have been even more generative than the printed ones.

In 1969, the national publication industry gradually restarted. According to established sources, there were eighty-seven publishers in China immediately before the Cultural Revolution, but most of them stopped production in the years 1967 to 1969. Official presses resumed operation gradually; there were already fifty-two presses in 1971.¹² Like the situations of all other cultural enterprises, the publishing industry was first reinvigorated by the popularization of yangbanxi in the late 1960s. It is estimated that more than 31 million volumes of various kinds of readers of six yangbanxi were published in Beijing between 1970 and 1972.¹³ The publication costs of these readers were generally high, because many of them featured color photographs; however, they were sold at an affordable price, with a huge state subsidy. The cost of a yangbanxi reader was more than 70 cents per book, but they could be priced as low as 25 cents, in order to make them affordable to more people.¹⁴

Quickly, other literary genres were also published. Poetry collections were one of the most popular forms of leisure reading in the early 1970s. Some records indicate that more than 390 such books were published by official channels from 1972 to 1975;¹⁵ others estimate the number to be around 360.¹⁶ The poems were written primarily by factory workers, peasants, and soldiers, who were now the so-called new masters of the country, thanks to the Cultural Revolution. But the productions of these poems were heavily supervised by the party. Xiaojinzhuang, for example, was handpicked by Jiang Qing to be the national model poetry village. The peasant poetry of Xiaojinzhuang featured lines such as “Heaven looks small when compared to the Party’s kindness; Mother’s care and intimacy cannot measure up to the Party’s love.”¹⁷ But the named author of the poem, Wang Xinmin, stood not for himself but rather for a collective. These poems all had to follow yet another model of “Three-in-One”: the leaders provided the themes, the masses contributed their experiences, and the professionals supplied their skills. In the end, it was often the named authors—the chosen workers, peasants, and soldiers who had little training in writing poetry—who had the least to do with the poems. Recent research shows that most of the elderly ladies who participated in the poetry competition gatherings in Xiaojinzhuang were actually illiterate, and the poems they recited were written either by their literate family members or by professional editors sent from the city.¹⁸ The responsible units would then collect and publish these poems, distributing them freely or at a very low price within the community.

There were also many newly written novels published during the period 1971–76: some research documents 126 novels,¹⁹ or 187 by other counts.²⁰ The lives of workers, peasants, soldiers, and rusticated youth were the central subjects of many of these novels, either because they were supposedly the new masters of the republic, or because the authors and the main readers of these novels would identify with their experiences. Novel production was as collectively driven as that of poetry, but the political standard was primarily guarded by the editors of the presses, who received clear political messages from the party and supervised the authors—who were often young, since most established writers had already been purged. Zhang Kangkang, for example, recounted that when the Shanghai People’s Press accepted her manuscript Demarcation Line (Fenjiexian, 1975), the press invited her, at the age of twenty-five, to go to Shanghai to rewrite the novel. She spent five months working on the revision in an office provided by the press, with the active participation of two senior editors. One of the most obvious problems, as she recounted it, was the handling of the “Three Prominences” principle (the three-tier organization principle featuring the hierarchical order of major heroic characters, heroic characters, and positive characters). This principle was of the utmost importance to the Shanghai press at that time. She had to reconceptualize the entire novel, and particularly the characterizations, according to the advice of the editors.²¹

Generally speaking, when cultural production was regularized in the 1970s, authorship in the official cultural economy could be separated into two categories. Most authors were now named, but they were usually amateurs—such as Zhang Kangkang and other young writers—who had to be carefully guided by party cadres. There were also newly reinstated writers, who were “forgiven” and given the opportunity to serve the party. Almost all of them took the duties gratefully and considered them the grace of the party, as being able to publish with their own names was a most dignified way to assume their own humanity. The experiences of Liu Dajie, a professor of Fudan University and a widely respected literary historian, could be seen as an example. Although he was also purged during the first few years of the Cultural Revolution, he was reinstated in the early 1970s. He was then asked to rewrite his very influential History of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxue fazhan shi) to fit the 2,000 years of Chinese literary history into a struggle between Confucianism and Legalism, with the aim, obviously, to support the political ideology of the time. Liu fulfilled his task loyally, but awaiting him was another wave of massive attacks, which came right after the Cultural Revolution; he passed away in 1977.²²

Translation also took place, but it was restricted primarily to the areas of science and technology, and almost no new foreign literature was introduced to China during the time.²³ In contrast, many collectively or anonymously authored materials sponsored by the party appeared. A few very powerful “writing groups” were formed, organized by the party to deliver its messages to the people. The members were arranged into different departments responsible for areas of history, literary criticism, Marxist-Leninist theories, diplomatic relationships, and so on, also serving the same role as a contemporary think tank.²⁴ An infamous example was the very influential Shanghai City Revolutionary Committee Writing Unit, which was headed by Yao Wenyuan and composed of many scholars and writers of the Jiang Qing clique. The unit was established in July 1971 and ceased operation in October 1976. Within this five-year period, it produced 800 pieces of criticism and many novels.²⁵ All these pieces were motivated by specific political purposes, such as striking down a particular class enemy, initiating mass movements, or popularizing new policies. For example, the short story Early Spring Morning (Chuchun de zaochen) features a story taking place in the spring of 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was at its peak. Instead of attacking the class enemies and kicking over the traces, the worker leader Guo Zikun decides to go to the masses and to educate the old worker Qin Changbao. Guo explains to the young Red Guard Xiaolan that the Cultural Revolution was wielded not to destroy production, but to build the solidarity of the 95 percent of the good Chinese people.²⁶ This 1973 novella was clearly written with the purpose of restoring national order and promoting productivity, although this national policy would soon be challenged all over again.

With the full support of the state apparatus, distribution of approved works took many forms. Since the Xinhua Agency maintained national distribution, approved works could reach the entire country easily. An estimated 10 million copies of The Golden Road were published and distributed; the book is still considered the most widely read Chinese novel published since 1949. According to their copyright pages, the initial print run of Zhang Kangkang’s Demarcation Line was 600,000, while the first printing of Wang Lei’s Waves of the Jian River (Jianhelang, 1974) was 400,000. Both works were written by first-time authors and were part of the Shanghai People’s Press’s “Up the Mountain Down the Countryside Intellectual Youth Creative Writing Series.” A little-known work today, Waves of the Jian River was reprinted in 1975 and again in 1976, and it is estimated that a total of 1.41 million copies of the novel were published.²⁷ These novels were generally not inexpensive, but still affordable—they sold for less than 1 RMB per copy, which could be used to purchase 1.2 catty (about 600 grams) of pork in Shanghai in 1976.²⁸ Many people still bought them, though, because leisure materials were very limited and people craved literature. Although many books published during the Cultural Revolution were never sold, remaining in storage,²⁹ many did reach the market and were heavily circulated, read by educated citizens all over the country. In fact, some novels were able to reach even the illiterate. For example, right after its publication, the entire Demarcation Line was read to the masses on Shanghai Radio.³⁰ The Golden Road and other novels written by Hao Ran were made into films, comics, and plays.

The Power of Circulation

What I have demonstrated here is precisely the logic of singularity: on the one hand, the Maoist cultural apparatus was an extremely potent force regulating culture; on the other hand, individual authors also seemed to be able to express themselves, even within a propaganda context. This applies to both periods, although in different ways. In the first period, the revolutionary masses were authorized to rebel, although the rebellion was always subjected to the sublime authority. In the second period, control was exercised in a much more “traditional” way, but new writers were given a lot of encouragement and many chances to publish. My interests in this cultural economy reside not in the ways capital was carried and produced; rather, I want to explore how intersubjectivity was established.

If the official writing culture was actually more encouraging and encompassing than a hackneyed stereotype of propaganda allows us to imagine, it was, however, still one implemented by fierce control. Between the unifying Maoist forces and the pluralizing cultural economy, tensions abounded. Let us focus on poetry, which is usually interpreted as an individualist artwork par excellence. My question is how authors established relationships with readers, and how readers related to each other through these pieces. First and foremost, millions of poems written by the Red Guards appeared in the aforementioned “little newspapers” that blossomed around the country between 1966 and 1968.³¹ These poems were not commissioned by the state but were mostly the self-expressions of the writers, giving the pronoun “I” a very prominent position; however, the pronoun was meant to emphasize identification with Mao or with the revolutionary spirit. We can say that the authors of these revolutionary poems were reciprocal, as they so actively copied each other’s ideas and styles to render their poems very similar to each other.

After 1968, when the Red Guards were dispatched to the countryside, many of these rusticated youths continued to write poetry. The poems they produced could no longer be naive, but they were often caught between, on the one hand, struggling to be loyal to the original revolutionary spirit and, one the other hand, being discontented with politics and making a subtle outcry of desperation and grievance in the face of a bleak reality. I quote two extreme examples:

(I)

The countryside needs me,

I need the countryside even more.

For the enterprise of Communism

I want to stay here, devote my whole life

to realize class ideals.

In this land of Shaanbei, I want to

embrace ten, and twenty

combative springs to come.³²

(II)

As spider webs mercilessly seal off my stove top

As smoldering cinders sigh over the sorrows of poverty

I’m still stubbornly spreading out the hopeless cinders

And writing with finely powdered snow: believe in the future

As my purple grapes dissolve into late-autumn tears

As my flower leans upon another’s breast

I still stubbornly reach for a frozen, withered vine

And write upon the desolate ground: believe in the future

…

Regardless of how other people treat our rotting flesh

The grief of losing one’s way and the pain of failure

With either their moving tears, deep sympathy

Or their contemptuous sneers and caustic scorn

I firmly believe in the backbone of our humanity

It will give us warm, objective, and fair judgment

On the numerous searches, deviations, failures, and successes

Yes, I anxiously await their pronouncement.³³

The first example is an excerpt from a long poem titled “Song of Idealism” (Lixiang zhige), collectively authored by a group that called itself “Worker and Peasant Students of the 1973 Class, Department of Chinese, Peking University.” The second set of lines comes from a famous poem by Guo Lusheng, also known as Shi Zhi, titled “Believe in the Future” (Xiangxin weilai), written in 1968. Both poems were created by rusticated youths, yet they express two very different authorial “I”s. Not only was “Song of Idealism” collectively created, but the position of the “I” in the poem has been forfeited; the “I” could be articulated only because this “I” was ready to be submerged in both the agricultural collective and the national collective—the ideal future of humankind. The specificity of this “I” no longer matters, because the exchangeable is not just each of the rusticated youths but also everything within communism: the values of my life depend on how it can be exchanged to benefit communism in general. This long poem was nationally broadcast, accompanied by specially arranged music, by the Central People’s Broadcast Radio in 1975 and subsequently published in the People’s Daily.

In contrast, “Believe in the Future,” an extremely rare “alternative” poem circulated among the youth, was signed by an individual author and presented a stubbornly personal vision and voice. Its popularity among the rusticated youth quickly attracted condemnation from Jiang Qing herself. Guo’s poems would later lead to his adverse treatment in the military, which contributed in part to the mental illness he developed in the early 1970s.³⁴ Here the “I” is a very specific one, which cannot be exchanged with anyone else or anything: I believe in the future because that future is mine. But we should also notice that as the poem proceeds, the collective us surfaces to take over the stubborn me, when “our humanity” is featured to illustrate a collective experience of searches, deviations, failures, and successes. Even for this very unique poem, which is often featured to testify to the underground culture of the time, the author was not able to articulate an independent self completely deprived of a “we.” We see the staging of the tensions between the “me” trying to express myself and the “me” constituting and being constituted by the collective, that is, the political.

Painstakingly suppressing individual authorship, this ideological structure inevitably also called attention to the very thing it tried to subdue. The subtle tensions between “I” and “we” demonstrated in both poems, although manifested in different ways, witnessed the intersubjectivity inherent in all cultural productions at that time. We can read the “we” as a manifestation of a writerly collective, and it also shows the irreducible position of the readers being conceptualized as “us.” Let us examine a relevant example. The single legitimate poet in Maoist society was, of course, Mao himself, and various versions of his poetry collections were sold in the millions in China. Allegedly 2.1 billion single sheets of Mao’s slogans and poetry were printed as posters during the Cultural Revolution,³⁵ but there were only about thirty poems by Mao officially published in the 1964 version of Poetry of Chairman Mao, which was far too few to satisfy the eager and huge readership. A volume of unpublished poems by Chairman Mao, containing a further twenty-four of his poems, was discovered in China in 1966; overnight, it came to be considered the most precious gift from Mao to his people, who not only read and recited the poems but organized workshops to study them together.³⁶ By some estimates, there were more than ten versions of the manuscript circulating in Peking University alone; they quickly reached all universities and cultural institutions around the country in the form of handwritten manuscripts or mimeograph copies. In the beginning, people had no doubts about the authenticity of these works, the romantic writing style of which was very much akin to that of Mao. It was quickly discovered that these poems were not written by Mao but by an intellectual youth, Chen Mingyuan, who wrote more than ten of them but was unaware of how his works came to be considered Mao’s. Chen was a protégé of the famous poet Guo Moruo, whose poetic style was known to be comparable with Mao’s. This might explain why Chen’s poems could be taken as Mao’s, and his entrapment could also be read as a part of a larger political struggle against Guo.³⁷ How it happened has not been revealed, but we do know that Chen was quickly captured and sentenced as an antirevolutionary.

The story did not end there. These poems continued to circulate underground, and gained many sincere admirers among readers all over the country, even after their counterfeit status was discovered. According to Lu Ding, a writer at the time, the rusticated youths were particularly fond of them, probably because the real author was someone with whom they could actually identify.³⁸ But most importantly, the sense of inauthenticity and arbitrariness suggested by these poems lent an ironic footnote to the youths’ own fates. These faked Mao poems echoed the changing status of the rusticated youths themselves, in that the poems’ fall from official to unofficial status in the national cultural economy corresponded with the decline of the youths’ own political usefulness to the regime. In this case, there was a hidden continuity between the official and unofficial cultural economies, and they related to each other not through the conscious positioning or strategies of agents but through the arbitrary designation of the all-powerful regime with which the authors identified in the first place. In the end, Mao, as the revolution itself, was still the only sublime author. All individual selves had to identify with and be endorsed by this singular and imaginary subject position in order to be recognized.

But this case study also shows how propaganda broke down. As shown in the generic Maoist style of Chen Mingyuan’s poems, he was conscious not to call attention to his unique poetic self but followed the narrowly accepted model. But when his poems were condemned as “faked,” his own authorship was immediately unveiled, condemned, and aggrandized. This also led to the poems’ circulation and popularization among rusticated youths, and the expressive self quickly multiplied. Most ironically, during those years, everyone modeled poetry after Mao’s, and many poems produced could be considered Mao knockoffs. The system collapsed when the tacit copying, as public secret, was disclosed, which also immediately displayed the systematic differentiation between writing-like-Mao and writing-as-Mao. This awareness also facilitated the readers to rediscover their connection with their peers, and thereby their own existence independent from the political system.

It was a time when society was assumed unified through individuals’ voluntary submission to Maoism, so that Mao’s vertical doctrine supposedly matched people’s horizontal fellowship. Because authorship and readership imbricated each other, all cultural works combined and represented a collective voice of the time. But as shown in Chen’s case, it was precisely at the moment when the overlap between the vertical and the horizontal power failed, the system collapsed. When Chen, originally following the Mao model closely, was suddenly identified as a deviate author, intersubjective bonding was formed among peers bypassing Mao, demonstrating how the vertical and the horizontal could never overlap perfectly. Like the elderly Red Guards I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, who now choose to remember their fellowship instead of their devotion to Mao, Chen’s case shows that if conditions allowed, people could quickly circumvent order and hierarchy to facilitate more equal societal relations—this is the democratic hope of human beings.

The Value of Maoist Propaganda

Marx’s theory of commodities was clearly developed according to the specificities of capitalist society, and he emphasizes how the use value of a commodity must be emptied out before the commodity can become exchangeable and profitable. In a capitalist society, because the emphasis is placed so much on exchange, the commodity is almost an empty vehicle, not to be used so much as circulated in order to generate more capital. But it still has to have a use value to qualify its status as a commodity. Fredric Jameson explains the dynamic:

In order to have an exchange value, the commodity must possess a use value, but one whose content is absolutely indifferent. Only the existence of use value as such is required, so that the content of the latter functions rather like an empty sign.³⁹

Here, Jameson provides a rather concise picture of how capitalism works via the three different kinds of values that Marx theorizes: it is the generation of surplus value that drives the abstraction of use value into exchange value. Core to the Marxist theory of value is the criticism of this logic of surplus value, causing exchange value to preside over use value, making all values relative. This is what Marxist scholars mean by the devaluation of all values.

Although never elaborated by Marx, we tend to assume the opposite for an ideal communist economy, in which the use value matters the most—the worker would determine what to produce by considering the product’s use value to the worker, or the worker collective, and thus the whole society. People still exchange goods in most socialist societies, as they did in Maoist China. Even at the height of the Great Leap Forward, Mao reminded his comrades that commodities should continue to be produced and exchanged. But this economy was not profit-driven; instead, its aims were to diversify production to meet people’s always changing needs.⁴⁰ Simply put, commodities are produced, exchanged, and consumed in both capitalist and socialist societies alike. But the exchange of commodities in the former is meant to produce surplus value, while in the latter it does not need to fulfill such a function. Instead, commodities are exchanged in a socialist economy to facilitate the plurality of human existence.⁴¹ A modern liberal-capitalist society dissolves the values of all things into relationships between its members to set up their social status. In contrast, a communist society should redeem each of the members’ intrinsic values, not through the exchange of commodities or their labor-power, but through their labor directly.

While Marx never provides an elaborate analysis of communist economy, he also does not discuss cultural products as commodities, probably because capital did not massively penetrate into cultural production during his lifetime. Also, cultural products cannot be “used up,” so the idea of “use value” is very problematic for cultural products. The classical Marxist theory of value beomes a very weak analytic tool for us to understand socialist cultural economy. In socialist society, use value cannot be easily applied to a cultural product because it cannot be used as such; exchange value and surplus value also do not fit because such products in socialist societies are not meant for profit. We must admit that Marxism is always much more powerful as a critique of capitalist society than as an analytic tool to understand socialism. In fact, the Cultural Revolution cultural economy could call our attention to a fundamental problematic in the Marxist model: Marxism seems to assume a somewhat direct relation between commodity value and social relation. In a capitalist society, when the exchange value of a commodity is detached from its use value to become relative, social relations are also destabilized and utilized for capital growth. But in the case of the Cultural Revolution, destabilizing social relations could be politically productive. As I have demonstrated above, the value of a Cultural Revolution cultural commodity resided in its ability to both carry the vertical revolutionary demand and facilitate horizontal community formation. The two sets of values were not always in tandem; sometimes they pointed in two different directions, causing tensions. Maoist propaganda is therefore loaded with the ability to challenge its own ideological messages through its circulation among the people. In other words, to make the value of a propaganda piece relative to another through its circulation in society, the highly suppressed social plurality could be reestablished. If Marx was critical of the naturalization of social relations in capitalist society resulting from the fetishization of commodities’ exchange values, the Cultural Revolution demonstrates a different scenario in which exchange could make a totalitarian society grow disarrayed.

The meanings of change in Maoist society could be further explored on more macro level. Maoist society was never determined by ideology alone, but culture, politics, and economics interacted and conditioned each other intensely. This characteristic helps us reexamine the supposedly rigid relationship between a deterministic economic base and a determined immaterial superstructure that classical Marxist theory advances. It has been pointed out that the leading position given by dogmatic Marxism to materialist reality as the only domain in which historical changes can be initiated makes all other elements in the superstructure dependent and “inferior.” To answer this criticism, many Marxist theorists—particularly those interested in culture—have demonstrated that Marx and Engels never treated the relationship between them so deterministically.⁴² But this economic determinism was most severely challenged in actual political practices. Both early Stalinism and Maoism deviated from Marxism ostensibly in their privileging of humans’ ability to change economic conditions.

Mao makes it clear that “relations of production” must be transformed before “productive force” can be altered and improved—which is another way of saying that the transformation of the superstructure precedes that of the economic base.⁴³ Mao further states that the capitalist class did not develop its states after the Industrial Revolution but before it; it altered the superstructure first and then developed its state apparatus.⁴⁴ He argues that actual changes of production could only be the result of a series of transformations in politics and culture already achieved in the superstructure. This is a historical progression opposite to the one prescribed in Soviet orthodoxy. While Mao’s most important aim is to emphasize the supreme role of politics in statecraft, culture also matters a great deal. Mao particularly stresses the essential role played by propaganda in preparing the revolution. Political opinions must be presented culturally to be effectively communicated, to the extent that these opinions can be conceptualized in cultural terms.

Although Mao deviated from the USSR political doctrines, the introduction of socialist realism into China was clearly a catalyst to facilitate his ideas. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, socialist realism is predicated on the assumption that art can change life, so that art can be used directly to engineer social reality. It is true that China does not have the religious tradition, as in the Soviet Union, that allows the arts to assume the quasi-religious function of human redemption. But the Confucian legacy of “words conveying Truth” (wenyi zaidao) lingered and was reinvigorated under Maoism, and art was trusted as an all-encompassing moral guide. Propaganda arts were tasked with carrying many sets of values, moral and political, to establish a new and unsegregated society.

For example, production and consumption were often dichotomized in Cultural Revolution literature and films, so that the importance of production was blown up, while people’s desire for consumption was repressed.⁴⁵ We can hardly see any acts of buying in the propaganda works of the time, but people were constantly engaged in, and enjoyed, production. This dichotomized handling of consumption and production merged with the discourse against individualism, and abundant examples can be found in the propaganda culture to condemn people’s selfish thoughts as the source of all evil. In the yangbanxi On the Docks, the character Han Xiaoqiang detests his assigned job as a loading worker. He dreams of being a sailor traveling around the world. What is wrong with Han Xiaoqiang sticking with his life goal? The story soon reveals that his laments distract him from concentrating on his work, allowing class enemies to adulterate fiberglass into the grains sent to Africa. Han’s personal ambition becomes the source of all corruption and system breakdown in On the Docks, and he must be brutally deprived of this “selfish” wish to realize the Maoist ideal of Third World Internationalism. In the scene “Attending the Party to Fight Hatoyama” in The Red Detachment of Women, the Japanese officer Hatoyama lures the protagonist Li Yuhe to join his camp by convincing Li that the highest moral principle all people should adopt is “for me and for myself.” As the embodiment of evil, Hatoyama clearly delivers this line to suggest that “selfishness” is the highest principle of imperialism and capitalism, and therefore the most corrupt form of thinking.

However, development must be glorified, and the revolution was wielded under the promise of national wealth. Maoism no less than capitalism is driven by the teleological discourse of development. If the yangbanxi pieces are more strictly about the presentation of Maoist ideology, many films and novels produced at that time focus on agricultural and industrial productions. Productivity is often the ultimate purpose of the story, and development becomes itself the end instead of a means to Maoism. Many of the propaganda pieces were driven by the Maoist imagination of a perfect future with boundless material supply and enjoyment. Maoists knew very well if immediate personal economic interests could not be relied on to set the agenda, the accumulation of national wealth that would ultimately benefit every single individual still propelled the revolution. The Maoist utopia is as ideologically driven as economically based. But most importantly, it needed to be morally justified at a time when morality was more difficult to decide upon and articulate.

Caught between the condemnation of capitalism and the celebration of development, the propaganda culture walked a thin line when it came to depicting economic activities. While those collectivist economic activities that contributed to national development were glorified, too many discussions of people’s materialist lives could promote their awareness of their material lack. As such, these celebrations were often supported by much more fierce efforts in condemning corrupt activities driven by individual interests, which were all identified as capitalist. Development and economism were dichotomized as collectivist against the selfish. Upon closer examination, we might be surprised to realize just how many Cultural Revolution propaganda arts were actually about economic activities, although they were tagged with strong moral judgment, which was employed most relentlessly to condemn everything the regime resisted and to solve all the unsolvable political contestations.

We can definitely describe the propaganda as a tool at the service of the political regime. But in the end, the Maoist also believes in something higher than politics. An interesting case in point that demonstrates this socialism of Mao is the depiction of water—particularly that in the agricultural setting. Water can be used to represent, on the one hand, the rare natural resources desired and competed for by the people and, on the other hand, the tyranny of nature, which in turn symbolizes the sublime moral force. As such, water promotes greed, yet it is also called upon to punish such greed. Demonstrated by the Dazhai model, nothing is more precious than water in an agricultural society, and in many novels and films we find farmers developing their personal calculations regarding the use of water and irrigation for their own benefit. But, at the same time, natural disasters are also frequently employed to destroy or cleanse people’s economism, and water—as river floods or rainstorms—is one of the most frequently used metaphors in this regard.⁴⁶ A flood could be understood as the transcendental force that destroys the old world and brings about a new society. Many films and novels construct their narratives around floods, and we find that directors and authors made great efforts to portray floods in the most spectacular and impressive ways, representing the epitome of the aesthetics in these narrative works. A flood could also be seen as an aestheticized course of history, as its strength and power aggressively overcame anything.⁴⁷ But, at the same time, humans can also subdue water. There are so many Cultural Revolution heroes constructed around their abilities to control floods or develop new water sources for agricultural uses. One of the most self-glorified achievements of the CCP was precisely its water management, made possible both by modern technology and the party’s ability in mobilizing the people.

Water belongs to the realms of economy, morality, and politics, yet each of these domains interacts with the others to define the meanings of water. Water is the natural resource essential for the national economy to grow, but it also promotes greed, which must be punished morally and controlled politically, whose ultimate objective, however, is precisely economic development. The almost spiritual will of the water operates side by side with the party’s ability to control water, both of which at the end are somehow conditioned by the desire for economic growth. But water also resides outside any political control, and it wills in its own violent way. Neither economic determinism nor political determinism alone drove these complex representations of water, but Maoism operates in a highly interlocked and sometimes self-conflicted cosmology.

It is clear that Mao forfeited economic determination to set loose the revolutionary will, but Mao’s ultimate faith in the human consciousness also prevented politics from becoming completely autonomized. The Maoist cosmology is both materialist and idealist. It has an implicit psychological dimension, which conditions both subject formation and social formation. In contrast, classical Marxism does not believe that history can be altered by human intentions alone. In a way, there is an internal limit set within classical Marxism to condition how far “human will” can go. As Étienne Balibar argues, Marx understood politics not as an autonomous realm, but rather as necessarily embedded in specific historical conditions, largely because of his refusal to privilege politics. Therefore, the classical Marxist base-superstructure order should be understood not as a fetishization of the economy but as the prevention of the autonomization of politics.⁴⁸ If we follow Balibar’s argument, Marx might regard the Maoist deviation from classical Marxism as a serious error. But we can also say that Maoism does not privilege politics as such. It tries to communicate with and control a much larger cosmology in which culture, politics, and economy interact intensely. This Maoist regime is also aware of the tensions between the richness of humanity and its desire to control everything: the former both realizes and resists the latter.

The traditional Marxist superstructure-base relation is clearly insufficient for us to understand Maoism. I think it is more appropriate to describe Maoism through its emphasis on the interactions of all things. There are two contested features in this Maoist cosmology: the belief in boundless human power, physical and mental, as well as the belief in the whole world, wherein human beings are only a part. As we know, Mao was influenced as much by Marx and Lenin as by Confucian classics and Daoist folk culture, and he was always trying to synthesize the many different thoughts he had a grasp on into his theories of contradiction and practice. As I have mentioned on another occasion, Mao’s emphasis on the mutual conditioning of practice and knowledge demonstrates his dislike for any “grand narrative,” and he frequently reminds us that no “theories” can really explain history. But Mao is also a keen thinker, so his theory of dialectics could be seen as the abstract structure incorporating his always changing and expanding thoughts.⁴⁹ He does not mind contradictions, and in fact welcomes them as active constituents of his philosophy, allowing him to conceptualize his political philosophy as an ever-transforming intellectual construction that is also always oriented to solving actual practical problems. Maoist society is characterized by impulses to bring all the contradictions together, to achieve equality and social union. For example, Sigrid Schmalzer points out that one of the most cited documents in the PRC’s official science discourse was in fact Mao’s 1942 Yan’an talks on literature and art.⁵⁰ Although Mao did not mention science at all in the talks, artists and scientists alike learned from them the importance of a two-way flow of knowledge: intellectuals disseminate cultural and scientific knowledge to the masses, and the masses contribute their own experiences to enrich the institutional knowledge production of the former. The idea that everyone is under the enlightenment and supervision of someone else, and that scientists and artists always understand each other made this society a highly intertwined one.

This also brings us back to the question of value. A major characteristic of modern society is its relativization of value: values are no longer transcendental units to guide people’s actions and decisions. Absolute universal values are no longer trusted, so that it is becoming difficult to define and differentiate good and bad. The rise of capitalism has been seen as a major cause of this dissolution of standards into relationships. We could describe the function of Maoist propaganda as affixing transcendental values back to society, so that the people could lead their lives based on permanent political and moral guidelines, the relativization of values being a sin both economically and morally. Depleted of market factors and reinvestigated with true Maoist values, the Cultural Revolution propaganda could embody the propriety of the new world order. However, the interconnection of myriad things inherent in the Maoist cosmology also prevented the easy establishment of any straightforward moral and political principles. If in a capitalist society the exchange value of a cultural commodity depends on the ways it reflects the consumer’s identity, the exchange value of a work of Maoist propaganda was based on its relevance to the interconnectedness of all things, and therefore the application of Maoism, always in its making, to all realms of human life. Under this cosmology a cultural work was useful to the regime in its degree of effectiveness as a governance tool, but due to the interconnected nature of the Maoist structure, any one-directional control from politics to culture was also impossible. Value cannot be fixed, even in a Maoist society.

PART II

A Culture of Models
and Copies

CHAPTER 3

Art and the Culture of
Models and Copies

The main body of this book is devoted to the social mimesis made up of different cultural mechanisms of modeling and copying in the Cultural Revolution. Models—referring both to individual figures and model cultural pieces—led the transformation of the ordinary people to match the regime’s expectations through their diligent copying. But in reality mimesis can never be easily controlled, as clearly demonstrated in the Cultural Revolution. In terms of the subjects conjured up, they were caught between autonomy and total submission, embedded in dense networks of power and intersubjectivity. In terms of the mediating cultural products, they were extremely monotonous and not so: although only limited kinds of models were erected, there were many different ways of copying. The act of copying, which proliferates and diversifies, necessarily diffuses the authenticity of the model. People and representations became entangled in the process: a few individuals were chosen as models, some made the models, more copied them, yet the copies would also become models to be copied by others. Almost all the Chinese people were caught up in the continuity of making and copying during this confusing period.

This chapter serves as an overview of the logic of this cultural mechanism, and of the specific means of production and reception involved. A closer examination of particular cases of this propaganda culture in the following chapters will help us to explore the actual experiences of the people running or caught up in this culture. This chapter is separated into two main parts, one on models and the other on copies. They must be studied together because the models are constructed in order to be copied, while the copies should, to different degrees, be loyal to the models. But more importantly, studying them side by side reveals how the heavy-handed control of the regime would inevitably meet the proliferation effects of culture, and propaganda, as long as it relies on cultural transmission, always exceeds the register of the dominant political power. As such, I also use slightly different approaches to understand models and copies: the first part on models is devoted to the investigation of the regime and its ideology, thus a more analytic approach; the second part emphasizes the actual praxis among the masses, and refers to different examples to discuss how people actually appropriated and enjoyed the propaganda. I want to show how propaganda was both a carefully deliberated means to control the people and a range of everyday practices among the people that would necessarily evade that control.

Erecting the Models

I characterize the Cultural Revolution model culture by two different but related conceptions of “model”: mofan, the distinguished individuals or projects whose greatness merits imitation, and yangban, which are fictitiously constructed and represented as embodiments of perfection. Propaganda is utilized to broadcast the good deeds of the mofan figures, and so its role is secondary. But the yangbanxi project was the entirety of the second logic, as propaganda not only promoted but constructed the imaginary yangban heroic figures in representations. Let us examine mofan first.

In classical Chinese, mofan originally means the mould that produces utensils. Gradually the term acquires the meanings of rules and teaching, particularly in relation to artistic production: mofan is the artistic principle for people to learn how to draw, and mofan could also be understood as the act of mimesis. The etymology of the term displays a classic development from artifact production to artistic production. It also took on teaching implications, so that mofan refers to both abstract principles and actual persons as teachers. Mofan becomes the models and exemplification to teach moral goods and guarantee social cohesion. As Børge Bakken demonstrates, individuals are “produced” in this exemplary society by being commanded to be in line with standards of exemplarity. Imitation is the conceptual heart of social order, so that education is as much a way to rule as a way to teach.¹ Other scholars also demonstrate how education in contemporary post-Mao China still relies heavily on related concepts.² But we must say that Maoist China took this strategy in a radical direction. According to Donald Munro, in the year 1959 alone, some 3 million “advanced producers” and more than 300,000 “advanced units” were selected in China as models.³ It was always a clear governance principle of the CCP to identify model figures and model work units for all kinds of pedagogical and publicity purposes.

This culture of models can be dated back to the party’s formative period. Some scholars argue that institutionalized celebration of model figures was initiated in the first Model Laborers Meeting, which took place in Yan’an in 1943.⁴ But newspaper reports in 1941 reveal that model workers were already identified to receive both media attention and material rewards.⁵ Most notably, Wu Manyou, a peasant who was able to produce a good harvest in the poor soil of Yan’an, was identified and featured as a model peasant in April 1942 in the party newspaper Liberation Daily.⁶ Five months later, the story of Zhao Zhankui was also featured in the same newspaper, portraying him as a devoted steel worker toiling in front of a high-temperature furnace without any protection for more than ten hours every day.⁷ Both reports invited the people to learn from the model figures of their perseverance and self-sacrificing attitudes.

I agree with Munro that the CCP practice of model emulation is congenial to traditional Chinese philosophy—particularly Confucianism, which teaches people to strive to be a model in order to influence others. The model assumes the role as educator, and respect comes from being imitated.⁸ Yinghong Cheng also acknowledges the influences of traditional Chinese moral emulation theories on the communist conceptualization of the Chinese “new man.”⁹ Mao’s tremendously influential “Three Old Essays” (laosanpian) could also be understood as essays of this genre: erecting models who demonstrate high ethical conduct so that all can model after them. While Confucianism emphasizes worldly practices more than Buddhism and Daoism, all three main schools of Chinese thinking advocate a wise self who practices moral wisdom, and this wise self would naturally become the teacher of the people. Two processes are involved in this emulation theory: setting up the model and encouraging everyone else to transform themselves according to the models. But the two processes also become one, as the model is only a catalyst, and ideally all would ultimately become exemplary.

Therefore, this emulation theory is deeply internalized, as everyone is encouraged to investigate oneself and internalize the model. Historian Gao Hua demonstrates that Yan’an’s rectification program made use of the Confucian philosophy of internalization to demand and invite the cadres to probe deeply into their thinking, transforming the traditional Chinese philosophy of self-cultivation into a confession discourse that would prove essential to the CCP’s subsequent governance.¹⁰ But what Gao Hua does not mention is the imitative nature of this supposedly private confession discourse, so that all the personal confessions were very much alike, and it became almost a genre of fictive writing based on existing models. In other words, there are two dimensions of mimesis, in content and in form, involved in this culture of confession: while everyone needed to measure up against an abstract moral ideal, the confession style also became highly repetitive.

But we should not understand the Maoist practice as a direct manifestation of the traditional pedagogical philosophy. Firstly, this CCP policy of identifying model citizens and featuring them as objects of imitation was also clearly in keeping with Soviet practices. David Brandenberger demonstrates that in the late 1920s there was a discursive change in the Soviet Union propaganda machine, which steered away from featuring class to instead featuring individuals as the motor of social change. The portrayal of individual heroes was first considered by the party to be a bourgeois convention incompatible with the tenets of historical materials. But the creative intelligentsia—particularly Gorky and his brigades—raised their concerns about the ideological establishment’s failure to promote a popular sense of Soviet identity. They began to turn ordinary workers, soldiers, and cadres into heroes, and the popularization of these role models created the make-believe environment in which each of the new socialist citizens could become a national hero.¹¹

A most important development was probably the so-called Stakhanovite movement, represented by the official celebration of the worker Aleksei Stakhanov and other workers crowned as “Stakhanovites” in the first “All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites.” All Soviet workers were asked to follow Stakhanov’s attempts to try new methods of production, so that worker productivity could be increased nationally.¹² Stakhanov was then featured in History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course, a propagandist textbook on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was first published in Russian in 1938, and translated into Chinese quickly afterward; it became a standard textbook for the Yan’an regime to learn and promote Marxism.¹³ Wu Manyou and Zhao Zhanku were put together as the Chinese versions of Stakhanov.

Secondly, we must realize that processes of teaching and learning were key to internationalism and Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution.” Socialism could not take place in one country only—different communist parties had to align, guide, and inspire each other, while the assumption of the Soviet Union as the master teacher was always silently implied. All socialist countries should learn from the valuable experiences and lessons of the Soviet Union, ensuring solidarity and mutual support. Peter Kenez also reminds us of the importance of the nature of Marxism in the formation of the propaganda state in the Soviet Union, because the socialists believed that they alone possessed the “true knowledge” and the instrument to analyze the process of history: “The task of the revolutionaries, therefore, was not to search for knowledge, for that was already achieved. Their duty was instead to bring the fruits of Marxist analysis to the proletariat.”¹⁴ Richard Lowenthal further illustrates that while the Soviet Communists were always conscious that their experiences would become models for other socialist countries, the Chinese communists struggled with their Soviet teachers and also conceived the PRC as the model for other underdeveloped countries to guide their own national liberation movements.¹⁵ The idea of the model was core to the spread of communism around the world in the twentieth century.

Most importantly, Confucianism and Maoism diverge in the latter’s ultimate emphasis on action. By tapping into our internal moral aptitude, and turning each individual into a better person, Confucianism believes that society will become kinder if each individual is moral. In contrast, active social changes motivate Maoism, and any personal cultivation discourse is only a means to a remote end: to engage in revolution. The Confucian notion of worldly participation, particularly after the enormous influences and challenges from Buddhism beginning in the Tang Dynasty, was infused with a certain degree of pessimism, acknowledging the limitations of the individual in the face of uncontrollable history. But the Maoist subject is much more willful, ready to change history against all odds. Only by emptying out all the existing evil within them can a person begin to face up against society and history. It is the subsequent actions of the Maoist subjects, capable of changing and leading history as a people, that are decidedly new to Chinese thought.

But we must also acknowledge that the CCP’s practice of emulation displays an exquisite tension between individuality and collectivity, which is also a core ideological knot of Maoism as a political theory. Mao trusted neither intellectuals nor most party leaders, and he asked the people to teach themselves to avoid empowering the privileged class. But the autonomy of the masses was also not truly believed in, as all individuals are corruptible. Mao’s loyal cadres or followers living in each community became the direct link between the Leader and the people, and most of the model figures belong to this category. In order to keep his cadres free from corruption, Mao decreed that the holders of power must not be separated from the masses, who would exercise a moral control over their leaders.¹⁶ Basically, we can say that Maoist statecraft is built on a disjointed chain of trust and distrust: the bureaucracy should not be trusted, but neither should the masses be set entirely free. Intermediate figures were identified to embody the true Maoist decree, who, however, might also be weak-willed. Mofan figures were always identified and publicized since Yan’an, but Maoism condemned any attempt to privilege these model figures to become a higher class differentiated from the people, in contrast to the general Confucian practices. Mofan individuals were erected only temporarily, not for others to look upon, but for them to actively transform themselves accordingly. This ultimate distrust of individuals made the mofan figures highly contested.

The Cultural Revolution regime continued to actively identify mofan work units and mofan figures. From an organizational perspective, the presentation of successful institutions was instructive to improve national productivity and political correctness, and there were many such model work units during the Cultural Revolution. The most famous ones were the Dazhai production brigade, as the nation’s agricultural model, and the Daqing oilfield, as the nation’s industrial model. Six factories were identified as model factories¹⁷ and the Nineteenth Foodstuff Shop (Shijiu liangdian) in Xi’an was the model shop. In the area of arts, Huxian and Yangquan were identified as model villages of rural arts, while Xiaojinzhuang was the model city of poetry. There are many emotional stories attached to these work units, emphasizing how the impossible became possible, and how the members served each other or outsiders selflessly. For example, the Nineteenth Foodstuff Shop attracted national attention because it was claimed that the shopkeepers made every possible effort to serve their customers, from locating as wide a variety of foodstuff as possible in that time of material scarcity to delivering the heavy loads by hand to individual customers, and even cooking noodles for needy people. These services were all delivered free of charge.¹⁸

These model work units were presented as collectives, following the collectivist ideologies of communism. However, central to the Maoist propaganda were not the collectives but individuals as model figures. Within the model units, major leaders, such as Chen Yonggui of Dazhai and Wang Jinxi of Daqing, were always praised for their heroic deeds and altruistic devotion to the masses. Outside these units, model workers were also identified and honored. The most famous example was clearly Lei Feng, a twenty-two-year-old soldier who died in 1962. Although he had already been identified as a model worker in 1957, his nationwide fame was constructed after his death, with an enormous propaganda campaign operating to celebrate his faithfulness to Mao in line with Cultural Revolution rhetoric. Other famous model figures of the time include Jiao Yulu, a county cadre who died working too hard in agricultural production to help his folks survive the Great Famine, and Ouyang Hai, a soldier who sacrificed himself to push a carriage off a railway track. They both died right before the Cultural Revolution and were chosen to receive major propaganda attention. These recently dead figures were chosen to be immortalized as historical models to legitimize the revolution. It was individuals as heroes, not the nameless masses, that defined the underlying logic of the entire propaganda machine. The individual selves of the mofan heroes were effaced to be emphasized, and their eternal fame was also established through their self-sacrifice.

In order to avoid falling into the trap of individualism, the actual selection process tried to uphold the mass line as the Maoist major guiding political principle. The real-life mofan individuals were clearly not developed bottom-up in a Habermasian process of deliberation based on the equal and impartial participation of all citizens. However, nor did they testify to a centralized authoritarian regime. Rather, mofan figures were first identified by people within their own communities before being targeted by the party. In an article published in the party mouthpiece, Red Flag, in 1967, the importance of mofan figures in the Cultural Revolution was reasserted, and the article reiterated that these model figures had to be chosen among the people by the people: “There are three strengths and three functions of model figures: they function as the head of the people, the backbone of the people, and the bridge among the people.”¹⁹ In order to lead the people, the model figures had to come from the same community, making sure the correct ideologies were communicated effectively to the members. It would be too simplistic to condemn the model figures as puppets and the rest as duped, because theoretically both the “persuader” and the “persuaded” belonged to the same community, and productive dialectic between the selected individuals and the masses could be maintained.

Obviously, these selection criteria did not always function well. To the regime, the mofan figures were also prone to abuse the power assigned to them. Entering the Cultural Revolution, most of the previously identified mofan figures were purged. For example, Shi Chuanxiang was a model toilet cleaner whose devotion to his job received the attention of the party in the late 1950s, and his self-narration was published in booklet form by the Workers Publishing House, with 1.8 million copies issued in 1965.²⁰ But one year later, Shi was identified by Jiang Qing as a class enemy, and his major crime was shaking hands with Liu Shaoqi.²¹ If many model figures identified in the seventeen-year period were criticized in the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards—who presented themselves as the most faithful and noble embodiment of the revolutionary spirit—were also not dependable. They beleaguered and overwhelmed both the people and the party, and the regime quickly recognized that the models it needed for the Cultural Revolution might be of a radically different type. The yangbanxi project could be dated back to 1964 or even earlier.²² But the yangbanxi pieces were not sanctified as the only models for the nation until 1967, coinciding with the time the Red Guards plundered the nation to such an extent they could no longer be trusted. Yangbanxi and the Red Guards appeared around the same time, but they developed out of different logics and discourses. As the complete loyalty of the yangbanxi figures was clearly deemed to be more useful a model than any real person, their fates went in opposite directions after 1967.

The term yangban, unlike mofan, is a very modern word, and it was first used to refer to models of industrial products. The term contains a clear implication of design, involving multiple dimensions of consideration to construct a “useful” product. Each yangban is described with precise measurement for industrial reproduction. The first time the term gained a wide usage in the PRC political discourse could be dated back to 1963, when the National Agricultural Science Committee (Quanguo nongye kexue gongzuohui) advanced the idea of the yangban field, a set of scientific agricultural strategies designed for high-yield output that could be adopted nationally. “Yangban field” immediately became a buzz word in communes and work units all over the country. The term became completely politicized a year later. To support the ongoing Four Clean-Up Movement, CCP Central Committee issued three reports in 1964 (together called “duoquan yangban” [models of power seizure]), that showed the actual experiences of local cadres and the masses unmasking and punishing their corrupted leaders. Jiang Qing decided to use this scientific-turned-political term to describe her pioneering cultural project, probably with the aim to emphasize the implications of both pedagogy and precision that had been attached to the term. Quickly the term yangban was widely adopted, used not only in yangbanxi but also in other cultural realms to describe the model works created by the party for people’s copying such as yangban songs and yangban clothing.

When the cultural enterprises began to operate again in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were not any rigid demands that only yangbanxi could be performed. But there was a tremendous amount to anxiety circulating. Unavoidably, the few approved stories and characters would be reproduced again and again to become a kind of national obsession, not only in the theater but in all cultural forms. In 1970, among the 393 newly published books under the category of arts and literature, 245 were related to yangbanxi, ranging from scripts, to music scores, to photo collections.²³ While the few yangbanxi flooded the county, they also served as prototypes for the reestablishing cultural enterprises. Paul Clark reminds us that many kinds of Red Guard performances, in the form of spoken dramas, singing, and even tableaux poses, were invented by the youths themselves and proliferated in all public spaces; however, by 1968 these amateur and spontaneous acts were replaced by a narrower range of performances delivered by professional troupes.²⁴ This not only indicated the expiration of the Red Guards, but by 1968 culture had to be completely controlled by the party.²⁵

We can say that this shift from real-life mofan to fictitious yangban demonstrates how the regime found fiction more reliable than reality, in line with the Maoist romanticism mentioned in Chapter 1. A 1969 article published in Red Flag rebuked those individuals who proclaimed themselves to be the inspiration for the various yangbanxi characters, and the article described them as shameless and fishing for political capital for themselves.²⁶ These people were criticized not only because they bypassed the official apparatus for vanity’s sake but also because yangbanxi were not meant to resurrect those model figures that originated in the masses. Instead, yangbanxi heroes were deemed the ultimate heroes—far greater than any ordinary person could aspire to become. If the earlier emphasis of the mofan culture on locating models among the people in social reality had been based on a political trust in the people, the yangbanxi culture seemed to betray this, and the fictive heroes were completely malleable to the ideologies invested.

For example, after several years of political suppression, writer Hao Ran received his first official assignment to write a biographical novel of a local cadre, Wang Guofu, who died in early August 1969. In January 1970, Wang was featured in the People’s Daily and other national newspapers and periodicals as a Cultural Revolution mofan cadre, who worked so hard that his production brigade was able to bring constant harvests. Around the same time, Hao Ran was also invited by newspaper the Guangming Daily to write a novel to glorify his exemplary deeds. But in April of 1971, when the novel, then titled Wang Guofu, was finished halfway, the People’s Daily published an article denouncing any novel based on a real-life story, and the project had to stop right there. Hao Ran was very frustrated, but he quickly “fictionalized” the story, taking out all the hints that might refer to reality, and rewrote the novel into The Golden Road.²⁷ The regime found Gao Daquan, supposedly a completely fictionalized character, much more reliable and safe than the mofan figure Wang Guofu, although he was already dead.

Let us look at some of these yangban figures. Many of them carried official duties, such as cadres (Hong Changqing in The Red Detachment of Women), soldiers (Yan Weicai in Attack on the White Tiger Regiment), and sometimes secret party agents (Li Yuhe in The Red Lantern). These heroes are almost always representatives of the party, and are therefore morally constrained. There are also historical characters such as Li Zicheng, who was promoted in a pre–Cultural Revolution novel and received rare protection during the Cultural Revolution only because the hero led a peasant revolution that could be seen as a proof to support Maoist historiography. The actions of the heroes are motivated by the principle of “serving the people,” while they are always ready to follow the instructions of their trusted superiors. Those who are not officers but other model types—such as workers, peasants, or rusticated youths—were characterized particularly by their physical strength and collective identity (Gao Daquan in The Golden Road). The physical prowess of the main women or children characters was often emphasized to legitimize their heroic status despite their gender, such as Jiang Shuiying in Ode of the Dragon River (Longjiang song), or age, such as Pan Dongzi in the film Sparkling Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing). They provide labor for the collective, and through labor show their dedication to the people—always ready to sacrifice their own interests.

These yangban figures were extremely unreal and therefore demanded a lot of aesthetic manipulation to elicit people’s identification. With the stipulation of Maoist aesthetic principles such as the “Three Prominences,” these figures were always placed in the middle of the dramatic tension, and all major contradictions and actions had to begin and end with them so that they would not lose any attention from the audience.²⁸ In the original version of the opera On the Docks, the heroine, Fang Haizhen, was not at the center of all the action. But after a series of revisions, both the two major lines of dramatic tension were placed on her: it was her discovery that the cargo sent abroad was problematic, and she also personally investigated and corrected the ideological deviation of the problem character, Han Xiaoqiang. In the case of Azalea Mountain, the main heroine, Ke Xiang, was at the center of the drama even before she appeared: the enemies had already caught her and were going to execute her, while the party fought to rescue her. Needless to say, Fang Haizhen and Ke Xiang were also given the most beautiful music and most spectacular stage designs to make them the center of attention all the time. Famous writer Wang Zengqi, also a main producer of Shajiabang, comments that no matter how much Jiang Qing demanded the yangbanxi companies erect the “number one characters,” such as Guo Jianguang in Shajiabang and Hong Changqing in Red Detachment of Women, it was always the “number two characters,” A Qingsao and Wu Qinghua in these two cases, who gained audiences’ attention, because they still had a little bit of personality, while the “number one characters” were completely shallow.²⁹

As I have said, real-life heroes and heroines continued to be identified in the Cultural Revolution, as there was a strong urge to revitalize the public’s loyalty to the party, and these figures could be flagged as evidence of the congruity between the leader and the popular will. Identifying individuals who were completely in alliance with the party was particularly important for the new “Three-in-One” revolutionary committee policy, which included representatives of the revolutionary masses to all levels of governing bodies. Obviously, the people’s representatives were not always mofan figures, but the mofan logic was important to convince the people on the ground of the party’s new authority. However, the mofan figures established during the Cultural Revolution were increasingly faked. Barbara Mittler reminds us of the reports of heroic stories flooding the current news media: these individuals were all resolute, fearless, and invincible, empowered by Mao Zedong Thought.³⁰ These actual people became increasingly similar to the yangban heroes. Real-life models and constructed heroes supposedly belonged to two different categories: while heroes did impossible things, model figures could be found in everyday life. But Maoist romanticism merged fact with fiction, making the Cultural Revolution highly surreal.

Acts of Copying

The elaborate model culture constructed during the Cultural Revolution was meant to create links between the ruling regime and the people, and to turn the people into ideal revolutionary subjects in the eyes of the regime. The formation of the revolutionary subject could be understood according to this formula: the party created the models based on the people, the people consumed them, and in turn both copied them and became the copies. It was the people’s active and voluntary reproduction of the copies, rather than the direct coercion of the party, that supposedly defined Maoist propaganda culture. The network of copying built up in the Cultural Revolution propaganda culture was complex; regional and temporal differences were huge. For example, Chen Pingyuan, currently Peking University professor of Chinese literature, recalls comparing his own experiences with those of other rusticated youths who were assigned to the northern part of the country. The cultural activities organized by his units were far fewer, largely because the winter in northern China was so long that the rusticated youths there could have an extensive winter break from farm work.³¹ But we can still detect a general structure and mechanism, which facilitated and supervised such ceaseless copying.

As we know, the famous May 16 Notification of 1966 announced the dismissal of the Propaganda Department and demanded revolutionary groups all over the country take over the leadership of cultural enterprises. The entire national culture became dysfunctional, and the infamous Cultural Revolution Small Group took over all propaganda works. While Jiang Qing had been supervising the making of yangbanxi since 1964, the first four yangbanxi companies of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra, First Beijing Peking Opera Company, China Peking Opera Company, and Ballet Dance Company were officially established in November of 1966. They were under the direct administration of the military, and became the central production houses for the new revolutionary culture. Political struggles were incessant in these yangbanxi companies, but in general they were still relatively protected in order to produce the model pieces demanded by Jiang Qing for the entire country.³²

These yangbanxi companies were staffed with the best artists and performers available, yet the masses were always invited to engage in the production process. Each of the yangbanxi pieces was created out of a painstaking process involving countless discussion sessions between not only key creative figures but also ordinary people and political leaders. People of different backgrounds were invited to watch the different versions of the yangbanxi, followed by long and active discussion sections: scenes and lines not understood and appreciated by the masses had to go. By carefully soliciting viewpoints as widely as possible, Jiang Qing and her coterie aimed to coin a new artistic language of revolution out of a mass consciousness. As the party needed propaganda arts to create the communist myth for the entire people, these works had to be carefully calculated to match the tastes and please the mentality of the crowd. The most important political part resided always in the reception: the people were encouraged to embody these figures by singing and performing them.

According to the research of Yawen Ludden, a number of artists remarked in interviews that the few national yangbanxi companies provided a relatively peaceful environment for the pursuit of their creative endeavors.³³ Ludden might be right to characterize Yu Huiyong, the director of the Ministry of Culture in the early 1970s, as a devoted artist-official who aspired to protect the yangbanxi productions from too much political meddling. This privilege was enjoyed not just by the few top-tiered production units, but by almost all cultural institutions in the nation, because not only the making but also the perpetuation of a new culture in the vast country was considered extremely important to the Cultural Revolution. In an age of extreme egalitarianism, it was an unspoken national policy that cultural workers could enjoy higher social status and more privileges than other people. As such, the continuous chain of performance subjects refers not only to the top professional performers in the yangbanxi companies, but also to many intermediate professional and semiprofessional performers, all the way to the general masses as complete amateurs.

While the small number of theatrical companies, film studios, and individual artists could be trusted to produce model theatrical works, they were also given the honorable tasks of teaching others how to produce and perform these approved texts as perfectly as possible. One task of the highly esteemed and protected yangbanxi companies was to go to different parts of the country to lecture and demonstrate, yet more often major regional groups would travel to Beijing or Shanghai to watch the official performances and participate in the tutorials set up by the yangbanxi companies. These regional troupes would go back to their regions and further teach the lower-level regional troupes. Selected performers and musicians might also be sent to the two cities to study. An actor in the Shenyang Revolutionary Yangbanxi School recounted that the usual practice involved two actors being sent to Beijing and Shanghai to learn how to perform one specific role. When they came back, the two would be delivered directly from the train station to the studios, where a whole group of local performers would be waiting, so that the “messengers” could explain thoroughly what they had just learned as freshly as possible.³⁴

At that time, in addition to the professional troupes, there were also Mao Zedong Thought Arts and Literature Propaganda Teams, often called xiaofendui, which were set up in many work units and communes. They were put together locally by their own members to provide the people with propaganda performances. This type of propaganda team is often confused with two other kinds invented during the Cultural Revolution: Workers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams and Soldiers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams. They were set up by the Party Central around 1967, and sent to different units to maintain social order and to control the Red Guards. These propaganda teams embodied Mao’s mandate and violence, and they were authorized to exercise the people’s dictatorship on anyone opposing them.³⁵ The arts and literature propaganda team was something altogether different, and it was not an invention of the Cultural Revolution but could be found in the Republican period. These were originally units in the military to provide entertainment to soldiers, but during the Cultural Revolution many commune and work units began to develop their own propaganda teams.

While endless copying was encouraged and distortions resulted within the hierarchy of cultural enterprises, the ordinary people were also encouraged to perform yangbanxi on their own, with the help of performance manuals churned out by publishing houses in the early 1970s.³⁶ Offering a close study of this amateur performance culture, Laurence Coderre explains the ideological weight given to the “amateur,” who could be saved from the bourgeois implications attached to the “professionals” while being dedicated to performing the new spirit of the time. These performances also matched the Maoist theory of “thought reform through labor,” so that these performances could be understood as a technology of transformation, with everyone in the country learning to be more perfect in this permanent revolution.³⁷

Due to the nonprofessional and highly diffusive nature of this “emulation” culture, the transformations went many directions, and the people enjoyed the performing for many reasons and effects, from personal leisure to collective fellowship, from self-realization to aesthetic cultivation. Yang Baozhi, a graduate of the Central Conservatory of Music and a rightist-classified, recalls that in the spring of 1967, when many cultural groups in Chongqing—where he lived—were caught up in political struggles and ceased production for almost a year, some professional cultural workers decided to perform Shajiabang on their own. But they were not able to find the full musical score, which was still considered a national secret at that time. So Yang was asked to write out the score by listening to the recording. He took two months to finish the task, and a full performance of Shajiabang was staged with the score he put together.³⁸ This act also allowed him, a rightist, to gain longed-for respect from the community. But it does not mean he was readily converted into a Maoist revolutionary. He would continue to be identified as a rightist and condemned as a class enemy in the years to come. Yang admits that he still enjoyed these propaganda works because:

The opposing propaganda teams both claimed that they were spreading Mao Zedong Thought, but the contents of their Mao Zedong Thought clearly differed. Still, many youths interested in arts and literatures actively participated in these propaganda teams, hoping to satisfy one’s desires to perform and make art. Also, different sections of the Army supported different factions, and the rich meals served to thank the propaganda teams after their performances were hard to find in those days of material scarcity. Those “supporting the left” meals were extraordinary enjoyment for the team members. Needless to say, these teams provided excellent opportunities for the art and literature youths to find lovers and develop romance.³⁹

Propaganda teams were meant to be the direct mouthpiece of the party. Historian Wu Di reveals in a personal interview that when he was working in a factory in Inner Mongolia, he refused an invitation from a previous school friend, now working in the same factory, to join the propaganda team because he dismissed these activities as naive and gullible. He preferred to read on his own instead.⁴⁰ But many young people were still attracted to participating in these teams. As Yang Baozhi recalls, his fellow young team members did not seem to care too much about the content of the pieces and their political missions, but they enjoyed staying in the teams for various personal reasons.⁴¹ Members were often more privileged in terms of both social status and material rewards, and rusticated youths were particularly keen to join these units, as they could escape hard labor. The propaganda team members were often half-workers (ban tuochan): they received full salaries, but could leave their work when there were performances scheduled.

Accounts of Cultural Revolution youth were full of similar fond memories of their propaganda activities: Ziyun recalls that there were about twenty members in the propaganda team to which he was assigned, and all were rusticated youths with musical and dancing talent.⁴² Liu Ping also recollects how, when she was fifteen years old, she learned to play The White-Haired Girl in the mountainous area in Guizhou, where no one—including herself—had any idea of what ballet was, and she could only study yangbanxi films very closely. As she recounts:

Young people would learn to play the musical instruments or sing or dance whenever they had the chance. Within a short time, large numbers of art talents sprang up … There would be a string band or brass band or orchestra in each of the propaganda teams.⁴³

Most of the teams were organized by local communities and work units to provide their members with propaganda and entertainment, but some were also initiated by individuals, particularly in the early phase of the Cultural Revolution. In October 1966, Hu Fayun was still a secondary school student, and he was enthralled by the liberating atmosphere at the time. As a music lover, he decided to organize his own propaganda team, named “Red Lu Xun Academy of Arts.”⁴⁴ He and his friend started to recruit members, borrowed instruments, booked a space, and even successfully applied for a grant from the city office. Within two months, a thirty-member propaganda team, composed almost entirely of secondary school students, was set up, and the teenagers began to live together in two of the borrowed classrooms of a deserted primary school. Like many other similar attempts, they were also quickly disbanded after three months of operation due to the rapidly changing local politics. But in its short lifespan, this self-formed arts and literature propaganda team received numerous invitations, and the members were proud to tour around factories, schools, and institutions of different political backgrounds.

Other than the sense of satisfaction created out of such self-initiative exercises, these propaganda teams also pleased the members by allowing certain creative freedom, often out of contingent needs. Liu Jialing, then a secondary school student, remembers how overjoyed he was at being admitted to his school’s propaganda team. He was originally recruited for his skills in playing stringed instruments, but when there was a lack of singers, he was also asked to go on the stage to perform. His favorite piece was The Red Lantern, but he knew only how to sing and not how to perform. He remembered how he and his fellow schoolmates playfully invented the gestures for specific lines, and his peasant audience seemed to enjoy them very much.⁴⁵ We can imagine how these amateur performances were unfaithful to the original yangbanxi, but it was the actual practices among the masses that enlivened the pieces. As Liu exclaims, “Although there was only a very limited range of plays, songs, and musical programs allowed to be performed repeatedly, the extent of the people’s participation was without parallel in history.”⁴⁶

Not only did the arts and literature propaganda teams present yangbanxi; they also created their own propaganda works. Most of these pieces might not have had the honor of being the “model,” nationally presented or broadcast, but they were created, performed, and watched by the communities, with special meanings in communal lives. Upper-level institutions also organized performance competitions, inviting subordinate work units to send their teams to participate in these conventions, giving the members not only a chance to perform their works to a wider audience but also the challenge of excelling aesthetically.⁴⁷

Local performers also found ways to locate and appropriate the “models” in their own ways. A most interesting case might be the adaption of Lenin’s films in local operas. In the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, almost all films, imported or domestic, were considered reactionary and banned from screening. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, in November 1967, the party approved two Lenin films, Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), to be screened again. This amounted to a public announcement of their acceptable status, which inevitably invited appropriations. Historian Zhang Xiaoliang argued that segments of the films had been appropriated by at least three different local drama groups—Chuan Opera, Ping Opera, and Henan Opera of Qu—and these appropriations quite freely combined local and foreign elements. Since they were local adaptations, strong carnivalist dimensions were retained, and both the performers and the audiences enjoyed the revolutionary messages being mocked in subtle or obvious ways. In a Chuan Opera adaptation of the film, Lenin sang to his wife that he would remind the army to be careful of the nude statues in the Winter Palace, as they were precious gifts of the Tsar to the proletariat. In a Ping Opera, Lenin actually sang: “Rev, revolution is progressing so greatly; Im, imperialism is all frightened. Me, folaji, ji, jimier, yiliqi … my mom, how come Russians have such long names?”⁴⁸ Obviously, all these lines were meant to amuse the audience, and these creative and entertaining ways of appropriating the models were not entirely inconceivable in the Cultural Revolution.

Other than yangbanxi, Cultural Revolution propaganda is composed of a wide range of cultural forms. From photography to literature, from plastic arts to visual arts, they all display strong mimetic impulses. For example, the two volumes of Meishu cankao ziliao baotou xuanji (Selections of Art References and Newspaper Designs), published in 1971 and 1972 by the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, were widely distributed and very important in standardizing the revolutionary drawings. Particularly in the second volume, clear instructions for drawing revolutionary figures were included, amounting to a popularization and standardization of basic drawing knowledge to the entire population.⁴⁹ Other than printed matter, all local towns and villages needed to put up and constantly renew large propaganda billboards, and a large number of half-trained or self-trained painters were recruited for these jobs. Professor Cui Xiaodong, now a renowned painter teaching at the Central Academy of Arts, recounts that in the early 1970s, when he had just graduated from secondary school and started working in a furniture factory, he was responsible for putting up the unit’s Great Criticism Billboard (Dapipan zhuanlan), which was a public display every unit was required to issue every month. Other than slogans and notices and criticisms, these billboards also featured huge propaganda paintings. He would be given some samples, and he would then enlarge them and put them on the billboards. Cui found this basic art training very important for his later career.⁵⁰

These active copying exercises provided much room for the copying subject to reflect on these materials. Xu Bing, an acclaimed contemporary Chinese artist, recounts how his close observation of the Cultural Revolution propaganda arts was important to his self-training when his parents were condemned as black components, that is, class enemies, in society:

Writings, characters, calligraphy, they all have very strong political and social meanings. In the editorial and columns of the People’s Daily, there are fixed regulations of what kinds of fonts can be used to present the sayings of specific kinds of people, such as important speeches of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, or words from negative characters. Observing them I came to understand a deeper meaning of Chinese words.⁵¹

The mastery of an art often begins with copying, and it is only through copying that the underlying rules and patterns can be revealed, and the new discovered. Copying is always the foundation of different art trainings. But the acts of copying exercised by the Chinese people went far beyond the confines of the arts. Ordinary people reproduced all sorts of materials they got hold of, from People’s Daily commentaries to notations of revolutionary songs, from official internal memorandums not meant to be circulated in public to underground novels and poems. At a time when the people were asked to base their self-transformation on limited models, and there was so little entertainment, acts of copying were both national duty and pastime. While copying might have been encouraged by the regime, these acts also realized the agency of the copying ones and facilitated appropriation. I have seen a beautiful handwritten notebook containing an underground novel. As shown on the cover page, it was a gift from the one who copied the book to another person. The copied product could easily become a token of love because it embodied the labor, and therefore identity, of the one who copied the whole book word by word. Precisely because of the strong mediation of the copying agent, a truly “conservative” culture cannot be sustained by mechanisms of copying, as deviation is the necessary by-product of any copying process.

Transformation versus Solidification

Before I move on to examine more closely some specific examples, here I must clarify that this culture of copying also underwent a historical transformation within the decade. As I have mentioned, the Cultural Revolution could be separated roughly into two periods: the first three years corresponded to a period of semi-anarchy, after which the state largely resumed its functions. Corresponding to this political history, we also find the copying culture in the first phase more spontaneous and voluntary, while it became highly controlled in the second phase, a time when the yangban culture also became dominant. Acts of copying were prevalent in both periods, but the former stage could be understood as displaying a productive social mimesis whose drive was to establish a new culture, while the second part aimed to solidify the status quo.

Let me offer two examples to demonstrate the change. The Cultural Revolution was initiated, among other things, by criticism against the newspaper column Three-Family Village Post (Sanjiacun zhaji), cowritten by Wu Han, Deng Tuo, and Liao Mosha.⁵² In an internal memorandum of the Office of the Youth League Committee of the Instrumentation Department in Shanghai, written on May 16, 1966, workers described how important the criticism against Three-Family Village was:

The vast number of the youth members responded vehemently and swiftly to this class struggle in the ideological sphere. They rushed to read the newspaper, voluntarily picked up their pens, and wrote many criticism essays … Peng Guangchang, a Youth League Committee member of the Dahua Instrument Factory, announced: “The fire of war has spread to us the youth. I operate the machine with one hand, and pick up a pen with another, and will start firing at the Three-Family Village.”⁵³

This report revealed how the milieu of “autonomy” overwhelmed the young people during this initial phase, and it was believed that cultural criticism was a cogent means of self-empowerment. The young workers were clearly proud of the new intellectual duties conferred upon them. This report also emphasized the military nature of cultural criticism: “We, the revolutionary youths, should listen to Chairman Mao, and use his ideas to combat those enemies who have pens in their hands, such as Deng Tuo, in order to defend Mao Zedong Thought.”⁵⁴ One could easily condemn these young workers as being manipulated, but to the young workers, choosing Chairman Mao over the other elites was entirely their own rational decision. They were encouraged by Mao to pick up the pens not originally given to them to fight against those who already had pens. Their pens represented power.

However, this culture of criticism was always repetitive, and individuals all turned to the official opinions to articulate their own. The first essays to appear in party mouthpieces directed against the Three-Family Village were published on May 8 and 10, 1966,⁵⁵ and this report, dated May 16, testified to widespread follow-up criticisms taking place among the people. As the report continues:

The Youth League of Pujiang Electronic Instrument Factory has organized two criticism meetings in three days, and the youth have produced more than thirty critical essays, posted widely through broadcast, on blackboard newspapers, and wall newspapers … Our Youth League has also organized five combat groups, further leading our youths to fire at the black company of the Three-Family Village.⁵⁶

This report was actually subtitled “Robust Reactions, Speedy Actions.” A sense of urgency was clearly suggested in this report, both reflecting and further promoting swift answers to new pleas.⁵⁷ Although these largely spontaneous responses were not organized by the Party Central, and the self-formed associations and spontaneous activities mushroomed overnight in China’s major cities, these criticisms were all modeled closely after official pieces, so that the Three-Family Village Post was criticized in almost identical ways everywhere. As the famous “May 16 Notification” was published on the same day as this community circulation within a factory, we can see that the Cultural Revolution was an explosive event that happened simultaneously in many parts and sectors of the country. But this swift response was largely a result of swift copying.

However, we could still say that the period 1966 to 1968 was not so much controlled by the party; rather, it was the young people who voluntarily resorted to the Maoist authority to articulate their individuality. As Zhang Shaocheng, a young painter at that time, recounts, the young people were always in a rush, and they ensured that all the propaganda materials they made could be produced and published as soon as possible, so that they could respond to the constantly changing political reality.⁵⁸ As these revolutionary activities had to follow the official position very closely, there was little time for people to reflect. It was probably this mood of urgency that encouraged the youngsters to sacrifice quality for speed, making not only their content but also their aesthetics very uniform: rough, hurried, disorderly, but self-justifying and attention-seeking.

In contrast, entering 1969, when the state resumed its power, the yangbanxi culture became supreme, and the social mimesis based on voluntary identification was no longer possible. The regime began to realize that allowing the people to model themselves after each other could facilitate solidarity and be extremely dangerous, and it hurried to collect such power for its own use. A symbolic case in point was the national criticism campaign directed against the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, as well as all Chinese actors, actresses, and theater artists who were influenced by him. In the famous speech on art practices that Jiang Qing delivered to the military in February 1966, Stanislavsky was already being identified as one of the key Russian cultural theorists who provided intellectual resources to those 1930s cultural critics who wrongly took capitalist enemies as their masters.⁵⁹ At that time, Stanislavsky was only a part of a huge Soviet reactionary culture that needed to be purged. However, Stanislavsky gained the spotlight again in 1969, when the yangbanxi project reached its ideological height. There we find Stanislavsky being accused of promoting his capitalist class values through his “system” of acting. Among all the reactionary values he upheld and disseminated, his promotion of individualism in theatrical arts, in terms of his emphasis on the idiosyncrasy of each actor and each character, was most criminalized.⁶⁰ These criticisms effectively stopped any attempts to present and represent “individuals” in China’s performance arts. Although Stanislavsky’s theories only concerned theater, they were interpreted socially and politically. His emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual against the common connections of the people was condemned as antisocialist.

While copying was emphasized in both the first and the second periods of the Cultural Revolution, the periods differed in the former’s encouragement of voluntarism against the latter’s strict demands on standardization. The agency of the individual workers was realized in their reiteration of the official views in 1966, but the individual as a concept was completely repressed in 1969. We can say that in both periods, true knowledge was embodied in Maoism, so the real difference was whether the masses were trusted to reach Maoism on their own, or whether they had to follow very rigid guidelines. While the first period seemed to be more liberal, we must also realize that it was in this period that violence was most rampant. Beijing’s Red Guards went to different parts of the vast country to perform Cultural Revolution rituals and languages, which were quickly copied by local audiences and spread around; with or without anyone instructing them to spread the practices, they would re-perform the revolutionary rituals for their own people. Copying does not always mean docility; in this case, society was blasted open by copycat violence.

CHAPTER 4

Barefoot Doctors
and Femininity

It is clear that the logics of yangban heroes and mofan figures were increasingly difficult to differentiate, and it was the mutual support of the two discourses that motivated the propaganda culture of the Cultural Revolution. This chapter focuses on a figure type, the barefoot doctor (chijiao yisheng), that was given both duties, and I would like to explore how the barefoot doctor was at the same time a mofan citizen and a yangban hero.

With the new developments on all social fronts, the Cultural Revolution boasted its breeding of a number of “new things” (xinsheng shiwu), including some of the things we have mentioned: Revolutionary Committees, the new education curriculum, Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, and May Seventh Cadre Schools. They combined to demonstrate that the Cultural Revolution heralded a brand new era. Among the new institutions and new practices, there were also new role types, or old ones attracting new propaganda attention, such as the Red Guards (those high school or university students self-defined, or qualified by revolutionary groups, as loyal followers of Mao Zedong and his thoughts), the Little Red Guards (those not old enough to be qualified as Red Guards but avowed to be faithful to Mao), Iron Girls (young women willing to do the hardest labor for the community), rusticated youths (young urban students sent to the countryside for reeducation), and barefoot doctors (medical practitioners with little professional training serving their own rural communities). Like all other real-life mofan figures, the barefoot doctor was both a common person coming from the masses and a representative of the regime. But they were also not the typical mofan figures whose identities were often publicized. Instead, most of the barefoot doctors we found in the mass media were nameless, defined by their professional duties instead of their extraordinary individual achievements. Their collective identity is due to the actual social functions they needed to fulfill, and it is their specific social role that motivates my investigation. Or, we can say that all mofan figures were representatives of institutions, and these individuals were promoted because new institutions, or new relations in old institutions, were fostered. The barefoot doctor could be seen as a most successful mofan figure type in this regard. However, as the Cultural Revolution continued its course, a radical politicization would separate her from the local institutions to which she originally belonged.

Representations of the Barefoot Doctor

Many memoirs demonstrate the power of the official propaganda posters on their authors, to the extent that they could bear much imposed hardship and imagine blessings.¹ The barefoot doctor was widely found in the cultural representations of the time, particularly propaganda posters. These posters were the most accessible form of culture for many people, as the price of each poster rarely exceeded 0.2 RMB, making them affordable to many households. In reality, many of the barefoot doctors were actually male, but those represented in propaganda arts were primarily women, and these posters were very popular as home decorations. The youth and beauty of these young doctors seemed to capture the attention and feeling of identification of many people.

Zhu Yong describes his deep affection for the barefoot doctor depicted in Chen Yanning’s New Doctor in the Fishing Village (Figure 4.1), which was displayed on the wall of his family home for many years in the 1970s:

As the one who resists illness, she has a healthy body corresponding well to her identity. Seeing through her loose Cantonese fisherman outfits, I can feel the power of her inside body and the elasticity of her skin.²

Figure 4.1: Chen Yanning, New Doctor in the Fishing Village, oil on canvas, 1974.

The following statement appeared on a recent Chinese blog:

There is a very private reason that explains my interest in these propaganda posters, as they were the only works of art I could access during my childhood. I did not know there was a Mona Lisa; the love in my dream was the barefoot doctor in these propaganda posters.³

These beautiful barefoot doctors became one of the most accessible feminine images for the youth at a time when sexual differences were carefully contained, when a large number of women entered traditionally male occupations, and when women were presented in cultural propaganda as being just as strong and willful as men.

These propaganda posters are usually brightly colored, and the color is used either on the body of the barefoot doctor as clothing or around her in the background. These figures stand in stark contrast to the images of female workers in the 1950s, the modern and professional identity of whom was emphasized through white garments or white aprons.⁴ While New Doctor in the Fishing Village is rather unique in depicting fishing life, and was first drawn as an oil painting and only later made into a propaganda poster, the barefoot doctor found in other more generic posters is often surrounded by blossoming flowers, which might be the traditional medicine she just picked from the mountains (Figure 4.2), or intended to indicate that she is a part of the natural countryside setting that nurtures this new socialist model.

Figure 4.2: Jiang Huaqing, Up Hill and Down Dale by Shank’s Pony, propaganda poster, Shandong People’s Publishing House and People’s Art Publishing House, 1977.

In spite of their name, the barefoot doctors are seldom shown with bare feet (New Doctor in the Fishing Village remains an exception). They always carry a medicine box—which is the only official symbol indicating their barefoot doctor identity—even when they are performing agricultural labor. The barefoot doctor might be featured centrally as the main character celebrating this role model, but often they are portrayed submerged into the community, glorifying the new collective life in the countryside (Figure 4.3). Although barefoot doctors are also depicted with broad shoulders and a darker skin color, corresponding to the aesthetics of the time, they are always smiling and never frustrated, and are deprived of any sentiments of class struggle.

Figure 4.3: Unit 54, 811 of the People’s Liberation Army, Jinan Military District, The Whole Garden Blossoms in the Colors of Spring, propaganda poster, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1977.

Traditional femininity was clearly condemned as politically regressive during the Cultural Revolution. One of the most prominent female models of the Cultural Revolution was the “Iron Girl,” who was commended for the hard labor she assumed, which exceeded the physical capacity of many women, and whose characteristic femininity was emptied out.⁵ While the barefoot doctor was also involved in nontraditional occupational roles for women, unlike the “Iron Girl” she was characteristically feminine. But the barefoot doctors were not meant to be outstanding and—unlike the yangbanxi heroines whose singing style, hairstyles, clothing, and manners were so prominent that they naturally attracted admiration and imitation—these figures did not offer such invitations. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Red Flag identified three characteristics of a mofan figure: the head, the backbone, and the bridge of the people. The barefoot doctor exhibits only the last two. They were needed in all communities, and they remained low-key because they did not represent the ideals of the revolution. As shown in these posters, their roles were operational rather than archetypal.

These visual representations demonstrate that the barefoot doctor did not advocate struggles typical of the spirit of the Cultural Revolution but was more a caretaker of the village—one who brought peace, comfort, and community coherence. The barefoot doctor in these posters is characterized by a degree of naiveté and purity and is sincerely embraced by the village as a family member. We do not see clenching fists, frowning faces, or piercing stares; rather, she soothes the soul and builds community through her sincere attention and affection. On the posters, she is often seen to be engaging with the community and is seldom a lone heroine wrestling her way to an idealized future. Although the barefoot doctor was invested with the lofty political ideal of universal equality, in most of these propaganda posters she is not a political figure but instead a neighborhood girl who is neither assertive nor threatening.

These barefoot doctor images might seem shallow, but they embody a complex representational politics. As a mass icon during the Cultural Revolution, the barefoot doctor was assigned different duties, maintained by and operated through her femininity. While most of the existing scholarship on the visual medical culture focuses on the visualization of the ill body, the massive scale of the visual propaganda of the barefoot doctor is a rare case that visualizes the body of the doctor, who in turn embodies the medical discourse. Behind her naiveté, this model figure was invested with a radical medical policy that demanded the mobilization of the masses.

The Barefoot Doctor as an Institution

A propaganda slogan that first appeared during the Great Leap Forward and was widely circulated during the Cultural Revolution stated, “Eliminate the Three Big Gaps” (xiaomie san da chabie). The three gaps were those between urban and rural areas (chengxiang chabie), between workers and farmers (gongnong chabie), and between mental and manual labor (naoti chabie).⁶ All three gaps were related to the barefoot doctor, whose profession embodied the convergence of mental and manual labor, and whose actual accomplishments were seen as able to bridge the other two gaps. This “Eliminate the Three Big Gaps” slogan not only described social reality indirectly—revealing that Chinese society was still thick with disparities of all sorts; it also legitimized mass-mobilization projects, in the sense that much had to be changed and pushed through before an egalitarian society cleansed of these inequalities and oppressions could come into being. The new medical policy must be understood within this larger egalitarian state ideology.

Although the Cultural Revolution was not officially announced until May 1966, a series of policy changes had already been introduced in 1964 and 1965. Most relevant to the barefoot doctor is the so-called June 26th Directive. On June 26, 1965, Mao had a discussion with medical officers, and he expressed his anger that 85 percent of China’s population lived in the countryside, while the works of the Health Department served mostly the urban population, and a large amount of the national health budget was spent in advanced medical experiments and technologies.⁷ Reportedly, he ordered a policy reform to shift China’s medical focus to the rural population. Mao’s official statement, the June 26th Directive, to be promoted around the country, was one simple and direct line: “to place the emphasis of medical and health policy on the villages” (ba yiliao weisheng gongzuo de zhongdian fang dao nongcun qu).⁸

In fact, the June 26th Directive did not initiate anything new. Mao had always been critical of the urban-rural disparity, and the PRC’s medical policy thus far had taken the rural situation seriously. A cooperative medical system had already taken shape in villages in the mid-1950s, with health-care stations formed locally and financed by villagers as well as the communes or agricultural cooperatives.⁹ A three-tier village medical structure had also begun to take shape in the 1950s, and the three levels of village medical services corresponded to hospitals on the county level, health institutes (weisheng suo) at the commune level, and health stations (weisheng shi) at the village level. While county hospitals and commune health institutes were staffed with professional medical officers, the state could not afford to provide the local level of village health stations, which numbered in the millions, with professional doctors. For that reason, educated villagers were selected for short-term medical training to qualify as medical workers (weisheng yuan), who could provide basic and preventive medical care to their fellow villagers. Such training had been arranged since the 1950s, and the June 26th Directive only reiterated and reinforced an existing policy that might not have been implemented so successfully. Most importantly, it asserted Mao’s resolute commitment to bringing universal basic health care to the countryside.

Entering the Cultural Revolution period, the barefoot doctor became the most important symbol of this medical policy. If the barefoot doctor was a mofan figure, aspired for by the whole nation, these individuals were by no means perfect professionals but simply rough and ready enough to take up basic assignments. Most importantly, it was not individuals but local communities that were expected to initiate the self-transformation. The barefoot doctors were a collection of widespread and locally based practitioners, and their practices differed significantly around the country. Mao claimed that the medical profession did not need years of education and training; rather, it was the experiences acquired through actual practice that made good doctors. In accord with Mao’s teachings, local communities would select young people and train them as paramedics for village health stations. Those chosen were often the children of doctors, local high school graduates, or rusticated youth.¹⁰ They would be sent to medical institutions in adjacent counties for several months, or sometimes only weeks or days, to receive short-term training. Alternatively, medical teams from county hospitals were dispatched to villages to attend to patients and teach selected young villagers simple medical skills at the same time. The primary tasks of these unofficial doctors were to lower the infant mortality rate and prevent the spread of contagious diseases.

However, the government did not put these people on the payroll. Individual barefoot doctors might have received a very small stipend from their work units, and they received gifts from patients from time to time, but they continued to work in the fields and received regular salaries from their own work units, so the government could be spared the burden of remunerating such a huge team of medical workers. With the minimum investment from the state, these lesser-trained village doctors allegedly benefited more than 500 million rural people. By 1975, there were 1.5 million village doctors in China.¹¹

Just as the state could not afford to fund the staffing of the rapidly expanding health sector with professional doctors and nurses, it was also too poor to fund the large amount of medicine and equipment required for the numerous village health stations around the country, and traditional Chinese medicine was called upon to fill the gap. Other than some basic Western medicine, the barefoot doctors—as is often recounted—also prescribed herbal medicine available in the mountains close by (which they often collected themselves) and provided treatments such as acupuncture, cupping therapy, and massage with simple tools. This kind of medical service required minimal investment and was generally safe after so many generations of practice. Chinese medicine played a prominent role in the health policy of socialist China due not only to budgetary limitations but also because of people’s habits and values.¹² But it is also clear that many of the barefoot doctors were very young, with very little training, so not all of them had access to extensive traditional Chinese knowledge and techniques. At the very least they could provide psychological comfort. Embedded within the patients’ own social circle, the barefoot doctors could facilitate a kind of emotional support network, consisting of the patient’s family members, relatives, and indeed the entire village. As mainland scholar Yang Nianqun documents, the barefoot doctors were often embraced by villagers as family members. In the patient’s home, the doctor would talk about domestic routines and everyday life matters when attending the patient, and the family members would also be glad to serve the doctor a bowl of hot noodles with a fresh egg.¹³

Barefoot doctors as communal explorers also served as the bridge between traditional Chinese and modern Western medicines. It was a time when many peasants still refused to go to hospital, preferring to stay home for the most crucial life events, such as births and deaths. Childbirth in particular was considered a private matter, which might bring bad luck to those who witnessed it.¹⁴ In the research conducted by Joshua Goldstein and Gail Hershatter, the midwife occupied a unique discursive position in the new Republic in the 1950s, which advocated a new governance of care to be distinguished from the ruthless Republican government and feudal Chinese culture.¹⁵ The barefoot doctor was a Cultural Revolution update of the modern midwife, already widely promoted in the 1950s: not only did the new barefoot doctors assume more medical duties than delivering babies, but the barefoot doctor also acted as a bridge to bring the people to modern medicine. As Xiaoping Fang argues:

Barefoot doctors played significant roles as participants, promoters, and guides during the process of institutionalizing villagers’ medical encounters with doctors into the hierarchical medical system. As a result, villagers started to move beyond their home villages to access new medical services in modern medical settings, mainly county hospitals.¹⁶

Mao’s rural medical reform was widely lauded as successful. Gail Henderson claims that, by the end of the 1970s, “China transformed its health profile and emerged as one of the few developing nations with a list of major causes of death that closely resembled those of the industrialized countries.”¹⁷ This health care was one of the most important means by which the Maoist government was able to establish its legitimacy with China’s vast population.

However successful the barefoot doctors were in reducing medical costs and providing timely treatment to the rural people, they disappeared with the emergence of China’s post-socialist economy. In the late 1970s, when the collective economy in the rural areas gradually gave way to a private economy that commended hardworking individual peasants, the income of the barefoot doctor—which had generally been slightly higher than that of ordinary peasants during the Cultural Revolution—was far too low to consider for those farmers who could sell their products in the markets. The cooperative medical system also collapsed and was replaced by a user-pays system. Once again, medicine became a profession, and the title “Doctor” could not be claimed without a long period of professional training. In 1985, the term “barefoot doctor” was officially aborted by the Ministry of Medicine.¹⁸

As the research of Volker Scheid shows, many established physicians of the time are now highly critical of the Cultural Revolution, due largely to their own negative experiences.¹⁹ In contrast, many patients were grateful for the barefoot doctors and the availability of medical services, and their respect for these doctors was often higher than that given to official cadres, as Li Yanhong argues.²⁰ Despite the low professional quality of these barefoot doctors, and the numerous cases of mistreatment by them—many instances of which were fatal—there has been a recent nostalgic trend in China that glorifies the barefoot doctor as the icon of egalitarianism.

To some older Chinese people, the Cultural Revolution was a time when a fair society was not just an empty slogan but one that was actually practiced. They miss their communist past, in which basic medical care—no matter how basic it may have been—was available to everyone, in contrast to the present capitalist system, which sacrifices the health of millions of poor people in China. Most importantly, the PRC rural healthcare policy was both practical and adaptive, allowing different regions to modify the policy according to their own needs. As Shaoguang Wang demonstrates, the PRC history of rural health care provides some detailed insights into the state’s rational operation and its ability to fine-tune policy by reacting to newly emerging problems in a timely fashion.

Even during the most radical period of the Cultural Revolution … the Chinese government never imposed a single model of the [cooperative medical system] nationwide. Instead, the cooperative medical scheme varied significantly by brigade, commune, county, and region.²¹

This also made the barefoot doctor such an effective model, because it could be copied widely and proliferated with many variations. The government did not need to standardize the role rigidly; communes and work units could produce their own versions of barefoot doctor based on their unique situations. The copying process was flexible, practicable, and productive enough to facilitate social mimesis among the people. More specifically, the barefoot doctor was less a role than an institution. Chunjuan Nancy Wei describes the barefoot doctor campaign as a typical and successful “second-best” institution, able to solve China’s rural health issues in practical ways.²² This concept of the “second-best” can help us understand social mimesis from a different perspective, in contrast to the “best” institution, celebrated as those standardized organizations permeated with watertight bureaucracy, and designed to produce the “best” products. Being “second best,” the most important function of the barefoot doctor is as much her ability to solve specific social problems as her flexibility and adaptability.

The Representation of Medical Femininity

There is no available data about the exact gender distribution of the barefoot doctors, but we do know that female doctors were specifically recruited to take care of female patients and serve as midwives,²³ indirectly showing either the scarcity of female doctors or the high demands for them at that time. Female characters were printed not only on propaganda posters but also on the cover of the official barefoot doctor manual, demonstrating a clear gender disposition in this new role type. Compared with other popular figures, such as Chairman Mao, as well as the archetypes of the model worker, peasant, and soldier, the barefoot doctor was not portrayed so frequently in Cultural Revolution propaganda arts and was not a product of major political struggles that demanded aggressive promotion until the mid-1970s. Yet the people loved these posters as home decorations.

Harriet Evans uses a propaganda poster of the time to show that the domestic space of Maoist China still belonged predominantly to women, as the only male portrayed stands outside the domestic threshold.²⁴ This analysis accords with Kay Ann Johnson’s observation that women’s responsibility for housework and child care was never challenged during the Cultural Revolution.²⁵ Richard King, through his analysis and translation of the story of Li Shuangshuang, also reminds us that the Maoist ideal of femininity incorporates both domestic responsibilities and communal leadership, reflecting the woman as deserving of the love and respect of both her husband and her people.²⁶ Even for Maoist China, socialist progress could not risk any challenges to traditional family structure, so women had to assume all previous duties well. The popularity of the barefoot doctor posters further demonstrates the melding of domesticity and femininity, even during this era of radical idealism.

Other than the poster, which was utilized to transmit uncomplicated and socially acceptable images to the population, we can also find the barefoot doctors represented in other cultural forms. This is how a newspaper report in 1968 depicted the barefoot doctor:

Let’s talk about Zhang Daxin of Dongbin brigade. With a tall and robust figure, she is clearly a girl who has labored in the village for many years. Zhang Daxin only had two and a half years of education, and she is the least educated one among the commune’s “barefoot doctors.” But she shoulders the heavy responsibilities of taking care of the health of the entire brigade. On a cold and snowy day of the deep winter of 1967, a poor peasant of the Dongbin Number One brigade had to be sent to the hospital. The hospital is more than ten miles away from the brigade, and the patient could not walk such a long distance. The only available transportation was the little boat through the river, which however was already frozen. Zhang Daxin solemnly announced: “Let’s go, and ice cannot block our way! We will break the ice and row the boat, and we must bring the patient to the hospital.”

…

Last year, on a day in the early summer, she was called from the wheat field to deliver a baby. It was a dystocia, and the woman had already lost consciousness. Daxin tried everything, and the baby was finally born. But its entire body was black and it was not breathing. She gave the baby a shot, to no avail. She then tried acupuncture, which also showed no effect. She opened its mouth and saw a mouthful of blood, which she immediately cleared, but it still could not breathe. She then started to breathe air into its mouth … After forty-five minutes [of CPR], the baby finally gained its breath, as well as its body color. It began its first cry. What a loud and resonating song of praise to the “barefoot doctor”!²⁷

I have quoted this description at length to demonstrate how this new model of the barefoot doctor was actually portrayed in the official culture a bit more willfully than in the propaganda posters discussed earlier. Zhang Daxin is not just a general family doctor; she has assumed a wide range of health duties for the villagers, from sending a patient to the hospital to delivering babies at home. She travels around in the most severe weather conditions, demanding strength and a masculine body, but she is also the village’s midwife—a position not to be occupied by a man. Unlike the professional doctors, who are legitimized and protected by their medical gowns and a clinical environment, she needs to go into family homes and heal the patients with her will, care, and charm, instead of through expensive medicine and modern tools. Zhang Daxin is both a doctor and a nurse, and she must be a trusted insider in the village. She is able to provide the health care that is congruent with existing village life and values.

There were other types of visual representation that also depicted the barefoot doctor, from which we can see a wider spectrum of femininity. Here we find some very traditional renditions. The village doctor had been a subject of the fine arts prior to the June 26th Directive of 1965, and in Wang Yujue’s 1963 painting Village Doctor (Figure 4.4), we can already detect the domestic aspects of this character type.

Figure 4.4: Wang Yujue, Village Doctor, Chinese ink on paper, 1963.

Wang Yujue produced Village Doctor when she was still studying at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and was sent to the countryside for reeducation. There, she was moved by the devotion of a young village doctor, who was also a rusticated youth two years her senior. She decided to turn this figure into the subject of her graduation thesis.²⁸ The female identities of the painter and the subject made this painting representative of the new “female painting” of the time. In the dim light, the doctor is absorbed in her delicate chores, completely devoid of any social connections, and her red lips and fragile profile suggest a traditional Chinese beauty. In this pre–Cultural Revolution picture, the female doctor is invested with a femininity that has subtle sexual connotations. Even entering the Cultural Revolution period, sexuality was not entirely depleted from the barefoot doctor. As discussed earlier, the barefoot doctor’s bare feet are brought to attention in Chen Yanning’s New Doctor in the Fishing Village, and the female sexuality that occupied Zhu Yong’s youthful desire was partly carried across through her feet. Unintentionally, the name “barefoot doctor” invites the people to pay attention to the doctor’s feet, indirectly confronting China’s long history of bound feet, and such heavy sexual connotations might explain most propaganda painters’ avoidance of calling attention to the feet at all.

In some other visual arts, we can sense a certain freedom associated with the barefoot doctor, in which she travels on boats (Figure 4.5), or is in a minority with a higher sense of mobility (Figure 4.6). This is most clearly evidenced in Huang Zhou’s Chinese brushstroke paintings, where we find the female barefoot doctor radiating will and an adventurousness, unconfined within a domestic environment (Figures 4.7). Huang Zhou, most famous for his sketches of Chinese ethnic minority people and their everyday lives, was among the first artists to be purged in the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He was denied the right to paint during the entire Cultural Revolution, except for a brief period between 1972 and 1974. Huang continued to depict lives of ethnic minorities during this period and right after the Cultural Revolution, and the female barefoot doctor was one of the liberated/liberating figures chosen by the brutally treated painter to express himself in an ambiguous way: she is cheerful, yet independent and in control. The barefoot doctor was a flexible enough archetype to allow painters of the time to explore different kinds of femininity, and humanity.

Figure 4.5: Tang Fushun, On Call At Sea, oil on canvas, 1974.

Figure 4.6: Cover page of People’s Pictorial, 1971, no. 11.

Figure 4.7: Huang Zhou, Back from a Medical Visit, Chinese ink on paper, 1973.

The Cultural Revolution was a time when all kinds of professionalism were condemned, as it was decreed that labor should not be classified and segregated in terms of hierarchy. A rare artistic representation of the medical profession during the period is Tang Muli’s Acupuncture Anesthesia Creating Miracle (Zhenma chuang qiji) (1972), which was commissioned by the health service to demonstrate the use of acupuncture as an anesthetic in surgery (Figure 4.8).²⁹

Figure 4.8: Tang Muli, Acupuncture Anesthesia Creating Miracle, oil on canvas, 1972.

Although this is not a representation of the barefoot doctor, the picture highlights the female nurse’s acupuncture skills (see her smiling face without the surgical mask, communicating directly with the patient), while the faceless (and presumably male) doctor’s actual surgery was rendered as background, suggesting contrived relations between femininity, traditional knowledge, and modernity in Cultural Revolution medicine discourse. Considering that all the other medical staff, including the nurses, wear masks, the beautiful face of the acupuncturist is almost like a simulacrum hiding the modern, and fearsome, medical labor from the patient. The modernization of the Chinese traditional practices and the sinicization of modernity could complement each other because they were carried out by the gentle and careful young woman. Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo, Cina also showcases a childbirth scene, with acupuncture anesthesia applied by female nurses to characterize China’s Cultural Revolution. This scene could be seen as an official representation of the new medical discourse; it was clearly arranged by the government to represent China to the world.

At that time, there was an ideological debate in the field of science between professional science and mass science, with the argument put forward that scientific knowledge should be produced and consumed by the people instead of only by professional scientists. Many amateur scientists therefore engaged in scientific discussions in the public sphere.³⁰ The barefoot doctor clearly supported this new scientific discourse. In 1970, among the 298 books published in the category of “science and technology,” 66 were about Chinese medicine, and many were published as manuals for barefoot doctors.³¹ Scientists were also supposedly blessed by this medical discourse, giving them a new chance to merge with the masses. There was supposed to be a successful—albeit tension-ridden—convergence between tradition and modernity, the people and technology, and the barefoot doctor was designed to settle these contradictions.

The barefoot doctor was a representative of modern medicine, yet she was also deeply ingrained in the Chinese agricultural world. It is generally understood that science fiction is the most important utopian genre in modern Western culture because it promotes people’s visions of the endless and boundless developments of a technological future. But in Maoist China—like many developing countries—most modern utopian visions took the form of actual material enjoyment, often presented in an agricultural setting. A very symbolic CCP utopian moment can be located in the lyrics of Nanniwan (South Mud Bay), a song produced by the Lu Xun Academy in 1943 to celebrate the success of an agricultural campaign in Yan’an.³² This song was chosen to be featured in a climactic scene in the 1964 The East Is Red performance, identifying Yan’an as a Maoist utopia. Almost every PRC citizen can still sing this line today: “South Mud Bay, what a good place. Such a good place, with such a good view. Fields full of crops; hills covered with sheep and cattle.”³³ Maoist utopianism was such an effective propaganda tool partly because so many people found resonances of their folk culture in the sensations of pleasure presented.

But we also have to acknowledge the components of industrialization and technical development in the Maoist utopia. I agree with Jiwei Ci that utopianism was first introduced into China through Marxism, and after 1949 it became a possible project, culminating in the Cultural Revolution.³⁴ No matter how rurally based the Maoist utopia was, it could not rid itself of the industrial development so widely emphasized in Marxist and Leninist imaginations. “Development” was still the ultimate promise of the Cultural Revolution. However, the Maoist imagining of machines was not a reproduction of the Soviet one. The Maoist utopia was built around a specific structuring of the agricultural and the industrial that was uniquely China’s.

As Tina Mai Chen reminds us, this Maoist imagination was characterized by a human-machine continuum, glorifying not the machine as such but the assemblage of human bodies with instruments or gadgets; the machines were considered an extension of the body to realize a qualitative transformation.³⁵ Compared with the Soviet propaganda culture, the Maoist ideology indeed emphasized people much more than it did machines, and there was a relative lack of representation devoted to the beauty of the machine on its own—in contrast to the abundant constructivist arts found in the Soviet Union.³⁶ It is true that there were films, novels, and propaganda arts devoted to the depiction of factory lives, but constructivist aesthetics were never institutionalized by the PRC state. In those few propaganda posters that actually celebrated factory life, it was often not the machines that received the prime attention but the people around them. Among all yangbanxi, On the Docks might be the one most clearly devoted to the glorification of industrial development and machines, but the main drama still resides in the tensions between the good and the bad, the selfless and the selfish, in humanity. It was never the machines, but rather the model workers and Mao, who were fetishized in the Cultural Revolution.

As many critics note, without much foreign investment available, Chinese industrial development relied heavily on the exploitation of the agricultural population, channeling the surplus of the countryside toward the development of urban centers. But some other scholars also remind us that the notable agricultural development of the time was made possible by related industrial inputs such as steel, tractors, fertilizers, and small power stations, some of which were imported from cities while others were produced within the villages.³⁷ Generally speaking, it is difficult to dichotomize China’s economy during the period into urban versus rural, and the way the barefoot doctor represented a convergence between the agricultural and the industrial, between the traditional and the modern, was clearly exemplary. This ideal model figure was both practical in terms of solving real social problems and ideological in justifying the revolution.

The Barefoot Doctor Caught in Class Struggle

Because the barefoot doctors had to carry out actual policy duties, they could not be so politicized to become symbols of rebellion. But something changed in the mid-1970s, and we need to contextualize this discursive change historically. These paramedics were not called “barefoot doctors” until 1968, when the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Post published a series of articles praising the work of the village doctors working in the suburban Shanghai area.³⁸ They were called barefoot doctors because they worked barefoot in the rice fields and were often summoned directly from the field to see a patient. One of the Wenhui Post articles was soon republished in the Red Flag and the People’s Daily, and the term “barefoot doctor” immediately prevailed over the official term “medical worker,” spreading nationwide. Although the description of “barefoot” applies only to the southern part of the country, where rice is grown in flooded fields, it was this universalization of a particular phenomenon that conjured up a national imagination.

Wenhui Post was the mouthpiece of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee at that time, directly controlled by Zhang Chunqiao, the de facto party leader of the city. This news reportage was issued to identify and transform a local phenomenon into a national political tool. But at the same time, raising the barefoot doctor to a propaganda role also demonstrated the current Shanghai government’s commitment to bringing order to the city, as the barefoot doctor suggests reconciliation and care. In late 1966 and early 1967, Shanghai witnessed one of the most radical power seizures by the people, and the revolutionary worker groups wanted to build the new Shanghai government based on the model of the Paris Commune. Zhang Chunqiao, representing the Party Central, came down from Beijing to Shanghai to negotiate and acceded to the request of the revolutionary leader Wang Hongwen to form the Shanghai Commune. But in a few months the commune would be replaced by the Revolutionary Committee, demonstrating Beijing’s control once again. As I have mentioned, the 1967 national policy of the setting up of the Revolutionary Committee based on the “Three-in-One” principle was the first gesture of Mao demanding order be resumed. While Shanghai witnessed fierce bottom-up revolution, it was also one of the first places in the country to implement the new national policy of order restoration. The national propaganda of the role of the barefoot doctor could be seen as a part of this. As Andrew G. Walder has demonstrated, while the 1967 “Shanghai January Revolution” was lauded as the success of the workers’ commune against the state, the event also demonstrated the party’s need to control resources and its general desire for order.³⁹

Most of the barefoot doctor representations analyzed so far were produced after 1968, and they all had a built-in distance from actual class struggles and revolution. It was also around the time when the idealism of the original 1966 spirit began to dissipate. Many ordinary people were increasingly doubtful or contemptuous about political fanaticism. It is true that, following the promotion of Wenhui Post in 1968, the term “barefoot doctor” was heavily promoted around the country and would forever be tinged with political connotations, but flagging this role also demonstrated a governance desire to advocate healing—however indirectly—at a time when many parts of the country were submerged in bloody factional battles.

But a radicalization of the barefoot doctor took place in 1975. It was a time when Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping—representing the pragmatic and rehabilitated side of the party—were trying to regain control of the state, but were fiercely opposed by the Jiang Qing group, who continued to stress the need for continual struggle inside the party.⁴⁰ The Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius campaign was launched in 1974 as a response from the Jiang Qing group, and the sudden politicization of the barefoot doctor in 1975 was a part of this. There were no dramatic films featuring the barefoot doctor as a prominent character before 1975, and among the more than one hundred novels published during the Cultural Revolution, only three (as far as I know) feature barefoot doctors as protagonists, demonstrating that this role was not often conceptualized as a yangban.⁴¹ However, the barefoot doctor as a yangban was strongly felt in the propaganda culture in 1975, when two related feature films were screened: Chunmiao and Hongyu (The New Doctor), both made that year.⁴²

Here I specifically focus on Chunmiao, as it portrays a female barefoot doctor committed to political struggle. She inherits the aforementioned border-crossing femininity, but she also devotes herself to universal class struggles, affording no moral ambiguities. The barefoot doctor shown in the posters as a docile, amiable, and connecting figure is challenged in this film, the revolutionary narrative of which could not afford to leave much of the aforementioned social healing and reconciliation perpetuated. Chunmiao was clearly a political vehicle for the Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius movement.⁴³

Released to coincide with the National Day period of 1975, Chunmiao was invested with a clear political agenda of provoking struggle within the party. The film, directed by the veteran filmmaker Xie Jin (codirected with Yan Bili and Liang Tingduo), tells the story of how a young village girl, Chunmiao (performed by Li Xiuming), becomes a barefoot doctor and initiates a class struggle against senior medical officers. Under the auspice of Mao’s June 26th Directive, Chunmiao is selected by her fellow villagers to learn medicine in the commune’s health institute, but she is looked down upon by her assigned mentor, Doctor Qian, who was a member of the oppressing class before the revolution and now refuses to teach her any useful medical skills. She has to struggle to learn as much as she can on her own, with the help of sympathetic nurses and a young male doctor.

Chunmiao finally decides to quit her studies and return to the village to become a self-taught “barefoot doctor.” Aroused by the high spirits of the Cultural Revolution, she marches back to the health institute, trying to experiment with a new and affordable medicine that can cure the back pain of her fellow villager, Uncle Shuichang, while engaging in class struggles with Director Du and Doctor Qian at the health institute. Seeing his position and privilege jeopardized, Qian attempts to murder Uncle Shuichang in order to ruin Chunmiao’s experiment. They fail, and Chunmiao succeeds in devising a new medicine by using herself as a guinea pig.

Other than a few assignments involving recording the yangbanxi pieces in celluloid, Chunmiao was the first new feature film to be directed by Xie Jin during the Cultural Revolution—his previous film had been the 1965 classic Wutai jiemei (Stage Sisters). Xie Jin is lauded as one of the greatest filmmakers in the PRC, but Chunmaio has been the stigma staining Xie’s career. The film is seldom mentioned in the studies of Xie Jin, and it is usually not included in the director’s oeuvre, as a result of either censorship or self-censorship. Chunmiao’s strong political message was viewed as Xie’s service to the Gang of Four. The film has not been made publicly available because of its strong association with the Cultural Revolution. The copies now available online or for purchase on DVD are all illegal.

The film Chunmiao was initiated and promoted by the Shanghai government and can be seen as a development of the larger project of politicizing the barefoot doctor movement.⁴⁴ The barefoot doctor spoke neither for the 1965 medical reform nor the 1968 Wenhui Post propaganda campaign, but it was clearly targeted for the 1975 national politics. In January 1975, at the First Meeting of the Fourth National People’s Congress, Zhou Enlai re-advocated the “Four Modernizations” in the areas of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology that he first advanced in 1959,⁴⁵ suggesting the need to take leave of the Cultural Revolution mentality to embark on a new road of pragmatic development. In the same speech, Zhou continued to praise the barefoot doctor—which, however, was identified as an accomplishment of the Cultural Revolution, suggesting also the datedness of this role. As shown in Chunmiao, the Jiang Qing group, which had a strong foothold in Shanghai, repoliticized the role to prove that the Cultural Revolution had not ended.⁴⁶

If the barefoot doctor was originally conceptualized as a figure who could bridge the gap between the urban areas and the countryside, as well as the gap between mental and manual labor, the character of Chunmiao in this 1975 film clearly represents the peasant-proletarians refusing to reconcile different class and social conditions. As a work glorifying village communal life, Chunmiao was shot in Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, a place famous for its beautiful scenery, characteristic of Southern China. The film also began to emphasize the beauty of this place: the verdure of the spring fields spreads out to meet the clear blue skies, with blossoming flowers sprouting along flows of translucent streams. Against this luxuriant background, we see young women in bright shirts—among them Chunmiao, who resembles the welcoming young ladies we see in posters. Like many propaganda posters, there is a clear idealization of rural life in the film, and Jiang Qing’s heavy involvement in the film also coincided with her glorifications of village life for the advancement of her own leftist politics.⁴⁷ Unlike the doctors in the posters, this film character is determinedly committed to class struggle, and her pleasant smiles shown at the beginning of the film are gradually replaced by solemn expressions, indicating her pledge of loyalty to Mao’s revolution. Advocating class struggle, Chunmiao becomes a typical political figure of the Cultural Revolution.

Let us examine more closely the (dis)connection between Chunmiao and the barefoot doctor model shown on propaganda posters. The film is keen on showing Chunmiao’s hands in order to highlight the different kinds of labor she is capable of performing. Facing Du and Qian’s condescending comment that her hands are for hoes rather than for acupuncture needles, Chunmiao is determined to demonstrate her ability to provide both tough agricultural labor and fine medical labor. However, the film also highlights the more traditional type of female labor performed by Chunmiao. Doctor Qian refuses to convey any medical knowledge to Chunmiao and assigns her only household chores, which she then performs with dedication. While Qian is condemned for confining Chunmiao to lowly women’s chores, she is also indirectly glorified for her ability and willingness to engage in traditional feminine work. Immediately after she is informed that she has been selected to study medicine for the village, the film cuts from the open ground where her hands are shaken by the villagers to a close-up of her hands in her own home, where she is stitching a belt for Uncle Shuichang to alleviate his back pain. Her delicate hands, capable of fine embroidery, remind the viewers of the traditional female image in Wang Yujue’s Village Doctor.

However, in order to emphasize that the barefoot doctor is also a political subject, this female identity belonging to the domestic space must be exposed to the public, as suggested in a scene where Du visits Chunmiao at the village health station and orders her to close it down. There we see a sequence of sophisticated camera work and editing that connects the indoor space with the outdoors. Du intends to persuade Chunmiao in private to close down the health station, but we see Chunmiao and the gathering villagers outside constantly trying to open up the window and the door, while Du keeps closing it to shut out those trying to intrude into the private space. The scene emphasizes how important it is for Chunmiao to break out into the open space from the indoors, signifying both the domestic confinement suggested earlier and the secrecy connected to Du’s political self-interest, and therefore class oppression.

In this film, Chunmiao is bestowed with a heavier political burden than the barefoot doctor was originally given. Her role cannot be confined to the household; instead, as a political figure, she has to plunge into the public space and lead the people. This is suggested by another montage arrangement. In the home of the village head, Chunmiao is applying acupuncture to Uncle Shuichang. When Chunmiao is informed that all the medical boxes of the barefoot doctors in the commune have been seized by Du, she cannot hide her despair and starts crying. But the film immediately cuts from her tears to, first, tides of ocean waves and, second, a patch of open ground where villagers gather for political activities. These two scenes announce the advent of the Cultural Revolution, and the cozy home space where Chunmiao, the barefoot doctor, cures people has to be superseded by the “natural” historical development in which Chunmiao, the proletariat leader, wages revolution.

As shown in the film, as well as in political reality, medicine became a battlefield on which right and wrong, healing and killing, directly contended with each other in ideological terms. The Cultural Revolution saw the rise of new medical methods, which were invested with political meanings. A case in point was the then popular “chicken blood therapy,” a medical treatment of injecting chicken blood directly into the patient, which allegedly could cure many different kinds of illness. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, the scientifically baseless therapy was justified by the political ideology of social progression, and the mortalities that resulted were seen as sacrifices necessary for the advancement of science and revolution.⁴⁸ Correspondingly, in the film both Uncle Shuichang and Chunmiao see the healing process in ideological terms, and they are both ready to risk their health to unseat the counterrevolutionaries. The seemingly politically neutral medical governance was at the same time a field of intense contestation. Associated with a particular political faction instead of a general national policy, the barefoot doctor could no longer remain politically neutral; instead, she was pushed to the front line to wave a flag for the doomed Cultural Revolution.

The Model as a Site of Contestation

At first, the barefoot doctor was meant to be a metaphor to reconcile antagonisms, and she could be understood as a depoliticlzed mofan figure par excellence. But this model was always invested with a strong class consciousness, and the radical politics invested in Chunmiao may not be that surprising a historical development. In The German Ideology, Marx attributed the main cause of alienation to the fundamental split between manual and mental labor: “Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears.”⁴⁹ Marx was critical of a certain form of labor—mental labor—which associated itself with consciousness, presiding over and oppressing other forms of non-mental labor. In other words, the split between mental and manual labor gave rise to, or was symptomatic of, the labor division and labor exploitation that characterized the root of the evil of capitalist society.

This Marxist awareness found its way into Mao Zedong’s thinking in the late 1930s, and it would continue to have an impact on PRC governance. In his 1938 lectures, “On Dialectical Materialism,” Mao took up Marx’s ideas and explained the struggle between idealism and materialism, between mental and manual labor, in class terms:

Intellectual labour then becomes the exclusive privilege of the ruling class, while manual labour becomes the fate of the oppressed classes … To eliminate the distinction between manual labour and intellectual labour is one of the preconditions for eliminating idealist philosophy.⁵⁰

To replace the existing intellectuals as a privileged class, China needed a new people who would engage in both intellectual and mental labor, and the barefoot doctor embodied this vision most convincingly.

If the barefoot doctor had remained a highly flexible institution allowing local communities to match it on their own, we might have seen more structural change of society. But since this institutional concept was quickly politicized and fetishized to become a yangban figure for narrowly defined political duties, the original social program was quickly emptied out. Compared with the barefoot doctors portrayed in propaganda posters, who celebrate a good policy, Chunmiao the film character is clearly combative and willful; she is intended to provoke confrontation while those in the posters are intended to promote consensus. The most exceptional attribute of Chunmiao as a barefoot doctor is her direct participation in devising new medicine in the health institute. An important policy motive in institutionalizing barefoot doctors was to keep them in the village to provide primary health care to the villagers, so that the limited number of professional medical officers could focus on the more serious medical problems. But the film Chunmiao deliberately brings the two professional levels into conflict, ending with a fierce struggle between Chunmiao at the health station level and Du at the health institute level (as well as the unseen Minister Liang at the hospital level). The complementary three-tier national medical infrastructure devised to deal with the practical issues of China’s health-care situation becomes the film’s stage on which to conduct intraparty political struggles.⁵¹

The barefoot doctors in the posters are already empowered—and therefore protected—by medicine. The medicine box was the most prominent sign of the barefoot doctor, together with the associated medical policy, and it was carried with pride. But the film moves one step backward and highlights the power associated with medicine, thus stressing the struggles between classes regarding who holds this power. While the villagers give Chunmiao the medical box, Du takes it back; while the villagers put up the health station on their own, Du orders it to be closed down. The barefoot doctor, together with the villagers she represents, needs to fight for the right to medication, while the posters simply take it for granted. Chunmiao might be much more politically astute than those barefoot doctors featured in propaganda posters, but she also distrusts all existing institutions and desires to unseat all in power, destroying instead of healing society.

The posters celebrate the barefoot doctor and rural health care as a policy product that has already been given, but the film asserts that the people must rise up and fight for their rights to medication, echoing the overall Cultural Revolution mission to build a radical democracy that had already proven disastrous. Being the political vehicle of the extreme leftists, Chunmiao most directly reveals the class struggles that originally fueled the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution calls into question all normative power and discourses, and the film stresses that medicine is never a politically neutral arena. The domestic affiliation of the barefoot doctor thus becomes a hindrance to this political awakening, and Chunmiao’s communal identity needs to be reengineered before she can go out to the public to lead political actions. The Maoist discourse of emulation is trapped here in the classical reform-revolution tension: should individuals be gradually modeled into new institutions, or should selected individuals be promoted to revolutionary leaders who lead the masses to blast society open?

Along with the tensions created between effective governance and class struggles, between order and revolution, another theoretical implication of this study is the uncomfortable position occupied by gender in politics. The barefoot doctor simultaneously embodies two kinds of femininity—the traditional domestic version and the modern professional version—which resolves an ongoing feminist debate that had existed since the beginning of the new Republic. Kimberley Ens Manning discusses a feminist debate in 1950s China about the tensions between female physical particularities and universal equality, as different feminist groups stood for contrasting positions on emphasizing or completely ignoring the physical differences of the two sexes.⁵² During the Great Leap Forward, women’s liberation was emphasized even more, but the tensions also became more pronounced.⁵³ The barefoot doctor can be seen as the new Cultural Revolution role that incorporated and updated these debates; she was now given the “doctor” title not only to take care of childbirth but also to assume a wide range of medical duties professionally, and she synthesized both feminine particularities and gender equality in a way that was meant to both modernize and revolutionize the nation.

As a figure designed to provide medical services communally and domestically, the barefoot doctor is idealized as a pure young woman who can be trusted with people’s health. During a time when female workers were extensively introduced to heavy industry and labor-intensive work,⁵⁴ when the female Red Guards had to resort to extreme violence to prove their liberation from gender confines,⁵⁵ the feminine care and charm seen in the propaganda posters of the barefoot doctors revealed a different logic of depoliticization. The female gender of the barefoot doctor allows her access to the domestic space, therefore protecting her from the public/political realm. Femininity is a shelter, sparing her from larger class politics to concentrate on fulfilling the domestic/national chores, so this type of femininity is clearly needed for any governmentality of the modern state—socialist or not. But the film Chunmiao tries to call back the revolutionary engendering process. The film first celebrates Chunmiao’s domestic ability, but very soon it painstakingly pulls Chunmiao from the house to a public, open space, reaffirming the Cultural Revolution’s desexualized politics that had silently been sidelined as the Cultural Revolution dragged on. Chunmiao could be seen as one of the last efforts to resurrect a gender politics that was already doomed.

It is now a truism to say that gender identity is not natural but acquired, that it is not stable but positional—partially and temporally fixed by social and political forces. It is also clear that the mainstream female gender constructed during the Cultural Revolution was a political manipulation, and that femininity was used for selected political purposes. But we also tend to take “politics” for granted and assume a linear relation between ideology and subjectivity—the latter conditioned by the former. The ways in which the barefoot doctor was represented demonstrate a more complicated tension between femininity and politics. This history shows that she is conditioned by the sway of politics, but it also reveals how easily the political meanings invested in her could be altered and undone. While the politics of the Cultural Revolution were never stable, femininity maintains a certain inertia that always lures yet obscures those interested parties who want to appropriate it. It is true that femininity continues to be written and rewritten, but the ways in which it never ceases to be a point of attraction reveals its enigmatic, and extra-political, dimension.

The discursive flexibility of femininity is able to reveal the complexity and ambiguities of the appropriating forces. Tani Barlow argues that Chinese feminism in socialist China was a matter largely of mobilization policy and the invention of cultural conventions.⁵⁶ But these newly invented conventions had to be compatible with the existing social context enough for people to adopt. We might say that the original barefoot doctor passed the test exceptionally, and she was flexible and attractive enough as a viable model. At the same time, her ability to travel inside and outside of the home was congruent with her status of being both a part and not a part of the people, and a certain slipperiness attracted and resisted all political appropriation. The Chunmiao efforts of turning this flexible mofan into a rigid and unrealistic yangban eradicated most of the vigor this new institution originally contained.

CHAPTER 5

Opera and Transplantation
between Cultures

In 2008, many Chinese citizens were angry at the inclusion of yangbanxi Peking Opera arias in the new secondary school music studies curriculum in ten selected regions, with the Ministry of Education’s decision criticized for reintroducing Maoist brainwashing. But many also immediately came to the rescue of yangbanxi by demonstrating how artistically excellent these pieces were, giving rise to considerable debate both online and offline. After fifty years of active forgetting, yangbanxi still gets under people’s skin and creates controversy—partly because the project was so violently homogenizing, but also because the pieces were simply too ingrained in the minds of a generation. Fudan University professor Ge Jianxiong recalls:

Our generation is way too familiar with yangbanxi. Being a secondary school teacher and student counselor (a Red Guard Regimen Counselor it was called), I particularly cannot forget. It is because not only did I need to be like the “revolutionary masses” who had to watch, listen, and sing, I also had to organize, instruct, and even coerce students to watch, listen, and sing. When the yangbanxi films were shown, our entire school canceled classes and marched to the movie theater singing the arias together …

In my experience, although we did try to learn and sing these revolutionary arias so fanatically and faithfully, most of the people sung or roared them in mechanical ways, displaying no exquisiteness of the Peking Opera arts.¹

This account reveals how the yangbanxi pieces were deep-seated in the people’s minds after years of watching, listening, and singing—with singing perhaps representing the ultimate goal. The People’s Daily published a commentary in 1970 to reassert the utmost importance of all citizens learning yangbanxi, and it raised the slogan, “Learn to sing yangbanxi, and learn to be a revolutionary” (xuechang yangbanxi, xuezuo gemingren).² The slogan strongly suggests the intimate relation between singing and being. Not only were the masses made to watch and listen to these theatrical pieces, but they also sang and impersonated the yangban characters. The core of the yangbanxi project was precisely such impersonation. The yangbanxi project can be seen as a most radical one to construct identity and subjectivity through culture and performance.

But a more practical issue arose in this master plan, which was the diverging capability of the many Chinese citizens to enjoy and perform these pieces. Despite being the ultimate embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, these yangbanxi pieces were culturally specific, and people’s appreciation and learning of them did not operate in a cultural vacuum. China is a huge country with a vast, culturally diverse population, but the Cultural Revolution was a highly homogenous political program promoting a social ideal that all Chinese people were expected to seek to achieve. As such, the tensions between center and margins were strong during the entire period, although they were not easily detectable. As Richard Kraus reminds us, the propaganda culture deliberately suppressed regional tensions because the regime wished to offer a unified image of the country and the people.³

In this chapter, I focus not on the actual yangbanxi pieces but on the revolutionary regional operas. I explore both the original regional operas aspired to be models and those adapted from yangbanxi. This comparison allows us to fathom the impossible task of unification given to the model culture in this vast country of enormous regional differences. We tend to view the Chinese masses as docile; they were discouraged from deviating from the dominant ideology to show any cultural or political individuality. But even the Cultural Revolution regime at the time did not see its people in this way, and it was clear to the leaders that the new propaganda culture had to come to terms with the differences structured in the population. If the yangbanxi was designed to unify the people, there was a clear logical confusion between prescription and description, means and ends. Was the yangbanxi an honest reflection of the already unified national culture, or was it a tool to achieve the objective of unification? The Jiang Qing regime seemed to advertise both, but there is an ostensible temporal gap between yangbanxi and the social reality. Obviously, reflection could only be partial, or mythical, for the pedagogy to make sense.

The policy of transplanting the revolutionary yangbanxi into regional operas (yizhi geming yangbanxi), officially announced in 1967, could be seen as a public recognition that the unified culture was not achieved yet. It can be seen as a rational arm of a coercive cultural program: although yangbanxi were required to be produced and watched all over the country, the cultural specificities of different regions were also recognized. The regime was aware that any national cultural unification attempts had to come to terms with regional differences, and the universal revolutionary spirit must be rendered in specific cultural forms to reach the many people of such a huge nation. However, there were intricate tensions between the official revolutionary models and their regional adaptations: the Jiang Qing regime made sure the latter were completely faithful to the former—which was also clearly understood to be impossible, or there would have been no transplantation project in the first place.

The transplantation project was therefore caught between fidelity to yangbanxi and its affinity with the local opera tradition, and the appropriation process necessarily betrayed unique aesthetic manipulations and impasses. Generally speaking, the visual arrangements of the local operas could be adapted to yangbanxi’s rigid standards, but the aural aspects were more difficult to control, although it was supposedly the singing that most directly facilitated the modeling effects. This is particularly complicated for the voice. Examining films across cultures, Michel Chion explores how often voice is connected to motherhood and one’s cultural origins, and how often a woman’s voice can invite protagonists to reconnect to their hidden secret desire and longing; compared with images, the voice can be deeply internal yet ubiquitous.⁴ I will not engage in a psychoanalytic reading of yangbanxi, but the deep connection between the audio and the cultural as manifested in the Cultural Revolution transplantation project supports Roland Barthes’ argument that the voice has a grain, particularly in the case of “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”⁵ It is this materiality I try to unearth in this chapter that might most fundamentally challenge the yangbanxi logic.

Caught between yangbanxi as means and as end, the transplantation project tolerated the local “sound” under the premise that the project was transitional, with the ultimate goal of forfeiting itself to attain a unified national culture. Judged in this way, the regional music and local dialects might be seen as residues that were doomed to be phased out; however, as elements that could signify the regional culture, voice and music were also the most resilient cultural elements in the face of the official models, complicating the core logic of performance in yangbanxi, and revealing the inherent tensions between models and copies.

Thanks to the transplantation project, many regional revolutionary operas were produced during the Cultural Revolution, but these works are no longer remembered and discussed, like a wound whose only fate was to heal and be forgotten. Most of these regional revolutionary operas did not enjoy preservation on celluloid or vinyl, so critics and audiences have not been able to go back to them to examine their texts and recreate their legacy.⁶ Very few young performers and musicians today could stage these works in the way that they were originally performed. If an ideological mission of the Cultural Revolution was to ultimately unify the national culture through yangbanxi, our collective obliviousness to the many peripheral cultural activities also taking place at that time runs the risk of endorsing the homogenizing objective of the Cultural Revolution, and ignoring the fact that this revolutionary culture was indeed more pluralizing than it had wanted to be.

Here I confine my efforts to Cantonese Opera, partly because of the uniqueness of its politics and form, bringing into sharp focus some common conditions of all regional arts at that time. Cantonese Opera enjoys a rich artistic tradition and a huge audience base, which are culturally and physically far removed from the original Beijing- and Shanghai-centered yangbanxi projects. By the mid-1960s, many Cantonese people still did not speak Mandarin, the national dialect of Putonghua, and the southern region—blessed with a thriving Cantonese popular culture—maintained its cultural specificities.

The Fears for Regionalism

Considering the huge aesthetic and political experiments involved in transplanting yangbanxi into Cantonese Opera, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to this topic.⁷ The only exception is the 1984 article written by Bell Yung, who demonstrates how Cantonese Opera lost its distinctive characteristics in order to accommodate the tunes, beats, and linguistic tones of the original Peking Opera music and lyrics. He also laments that the transplantation project risked sacrificing the great diversity of regional opera genres in China to meet political and theoretical demands.

Yung’s careful analysis and pertinent criticism are valid. However, the Peking Opera hegemony did not slay the regional operas; instead, the Cultural Revolution was probably the last period when traditional operas enjoyed dominant popularity among the masses, in the Guangdong area and elsewhere. Although traditional plays were in vogue right after the Cultural Revolution, this enthusiasm subsided quickly in the early 1980s, to be replaced by Westernized popular culture imported from Hong Kong, Japan, and the rest of the world. As actress Lu Qiuping recalls, shortly after the Cultural Revolution ended, the revolutionary Cantonese Opera Li Shuangshuang, featuring her in the lead role, was shown in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, which had a seating capacity of 5,000 people, for more than a month—with a full house every night.⁸ There was also a vigorous fan culture in place, in which arias were popular tunes, and the stars—male and female—were seen as objects of desire. Ni Huiying—featured as the female lead in many revolutionary pieces, including the Cantonese Opera version of The Red Detachment of Women—received fan mail every day, and she was always greeted by screaming fans when she left the theater after performances.⁹ According to some estimates, there were seventy-nine cultural working groups and fifty-five opera groups operating in Guangdong province in 1975.¹⁰ Although these numbers represent a substantial drop from those before the Cultural Revolution, it is evident that many opera activities still took place. Overall, we might be critical of the ideology of transplantation, but the popularity of these works among the people needs further exploration.

We can separate the development of Cantonese Opera during the Cultural Revolution into two different phases. The first phase corresponds with the period from 1964 to 1967, represented by the production and the banning of Storm in the Countryside, a new revolutionary Cantonese Opera created by local artists. The second phase includes the years after 1968, when Cantonese Opera productions—like those in many other regional theaters—were quickly resumed and promoted by the government to stage the transplanted yangbanxi. I think the two phases deserve equal attention, because the two combine to offer us a window to understand the difficulty of centralization and standardization in the Cultural Revolution.

Storm in the Countryside is based on a 1962 novel by Wu Youheng, titled Shanxiang fengyun lu. Set in the midst of the civil war, a CCP female military company commander, Liu Qin, saves a girl named Chunhua from jumping down a cascade to kill herself. Liu therefore has the chance to learn of Chunhua’s misery as a slave girl who was raped by Tailless Snake (Zhanweishe), a militia commander of Taoyuan Walled Village. The village was controlled by three local rich families and protected by their own private militia. Among the three families, the most important person is Devil King (Fanguiwang), who is basically the ruler of the village. Meanwhile, the CCP has also decided to send Liu Qin to the Taoyuan Walled Village as an undercover agent to agitate the villagers to collaborate with the party for a pending insurrection against the landlords. She poses as a secondary school teacher and earns the trust of Devil King and his daughter; she then collaborates with the poor tenants, such as Chunhua’s father, to spread revolutionary messages within the village. In the end, she succeeds in helping the CCP to attack and take hold of the village during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

The regional charms of the novel won it much affection and popularity in the Guangdong area, and it was first adapted into a spoken drama and later a Cantonese Opera. Very quickly, the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre featured it at the politically significant Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention, which took place in Guangzhou from July 1 to August 15, 1965. Storm in the Countryside could be seen as a locally initiated model revolutionary piece that developed side by side with the official works in Beijing and Shanghai, sanctioned not until 1966 and 1967.¹¹

When traditional plays were no longer allowed to be performed, the Cantonese Opera cultural workers did their best to create a new revolutionary piece that could perhaps serve as the model for subsequent attempts, and at least sail through the political turmoil to prevent Cantonese Opera from complete collapse. It was a collective creation, featuring the most prominent performers and musicians of the time. The original cast was invited to present the piece in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen—and, according to some internal memoranda, the tours were very successful and received compliments from party leaders and fellow performers alike.¹² Many key party leaders and cultural celebrities attended at least one of the performances during the tours.¹³ It was common practice for leaders to participate in cultural activities, but the enormous attention given to this regional piece also demonstrated that it was politically important.

Wu Youheng, the author of the original novel, was a native Cantonese. He was accused of spreading regionalism during the Anti-Rightists Campaign and was demoted to become a factory worker. The novel was written during this period, but it continued to emanate a strong local Guangdong flavor, as did its opera adaptation. In fact, the regional identification is acknowledged in the story almost as a meta-theme. The heroine Liu Qin is assigned to the walled village by the party because she had lived in the village when she was young, and so she could convince the other villagers that she had come back to be a secondary school teacher out of devotion to her hometown. When Liu Qin follows the party fighters to the mountain area in Southern Guangdong in the first scene, she cries, “Oh, my long-departed homeland, I am back again.” In the climatic event, the Mid-Autumn Festival, Devil King’s daughter intends to showcase the most elaborate local rituals to the people. All the people in the region are welcome to participate, therefore offering the best opportunity for the CCP unit to attack. Embracing the local identity in this way is strategic for addressing the audience, which was mostly Cantonese. During the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre’s tour of Beijing and Shanghai, those who were most enthusiastic about the piece also seemed to be Guangdong natives.¹⁴ If Storm in the Countryside could be seen as a model piece, its mode of identification was based largely on the local people’s identification with the Guangdong regional identity, facilitated not only by the story and the characters, but also the regional opera form itself. Unsurprisingly, Storm in the Countryside was condemned as reflecting regionalism, and was therefore forbidden to be shown in 1967.

Due to its economic strength, cultural and linguistic uniqueness, and physical distance from the central administration, Guangdong province has always exercised a certain degree of autonomy beyond state control since the imperialist era, and this continues to the present day. Regionalism was considered a major impediment to the republic’s political unification since the 1950s, and the tensions between Guangdong and the central government were inevitably revealed in the governance of Cantonese culture. The Guangzhou government seemed to be able to resist the Cultural Revolution up to the end of 1966, but upon the demotion and imprisonment of major officials such as Tao Zhu and Zhao Ziyang, Guangzhou quickly fell into chaos. Among the many rebel groups mushrooming at that time, the Guangzhou Headquarters of Workers Defending Mao Zedong’s Thought was the biggest worker organization, claiming to represent 150,000 workers in the region. Around the same time, Guangzhou’s two major newspapers, the Guangzhou Daily and the Southern Daily, were taken over by revolutionary groups, as were other cultural institutions such as the Pearl River Film Studio. Guangzhou became a battlefield, witnessing some of the bloodiest clique fighting in the country. A major target of criticism was regionalism; Tao Zhu, the first party secretary of the Department of Central Southern Region, was scapegoated as the common enemy of nearly every political group. He was also accused as the sponsor of the Cantonese Opera.¹⁵

It was at the height of this regionalism purge that Storm in the Countryside was banned. Jiang Qing did not seem to like this opera the first time—and indeed the last time—she watched it in Shanghai, in February 1966. In the discussion session, she repeatedly said that she did not understand Cantonese and found the piece very difficult to follow. She also discouraged filming of the opera, a project that was already on the Pearl River Film Studio’s agenda. She urged the attending artists to send her requests to Tao Zhu to investigate the historical accuracy of the story.¹⁶ Two messages were clearly delivered: she did not enjoy the piece because it was a Cantonese product, and Tao Zhu, the highest official of the region, was directly responsible. Jiang Qing’s personal cultural taste and her political concerns converged in the fate of a theatrical work.

In fact, it was not unreasonable or impulsive for Jiang Qing to associate Storm in the Countryside with regionalism, because this Cantonese Opera was created with the full understanding that its success was important to the survival of the regional art in the upcoming political storm, the first effects of which were already being felt.¹⁷ Most importantly, it was the decision of the creative collective that the new revolutionary Cantonese Opera should continue to emphasize its original formal characteristics. In an internal report, Lin Yu, the director of Storm in the Countryside and the deputy head of Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre, emphasized that the piece had been created to be faithful to Cantonese Opera. Cantonese Opera circles had been experimenting with creating new revolutionary pieces, but they were all criticized by audiences as betraying the integrity of the local art. He claimed:

When we create new scripts or adapt existing pieces, if we do not emphasize the characteristics of the regional forms, and do not follow the principle of ‘I am my own lord, and I walk my own road’ [yiwo weizhu, zou ziji de lu], the project will then fail for sure.¹⁸

The enormous success of Storm in the Countryside among native Cantonese audiences proved Lin Yu right. The piece has a particularly important political meaning in its aspiration to be its own model, bypassing the revolutionary Peking Opera aesthetic hegemony. The final resolution to ban this piece demonstrates that the Cultural Revolution regime decided not to accept any cultural attempts that deliberately showed regional deviations from the national models.

The script for Storm in the Countryside was elegantly written in vernacular Cantonese, poised between literary refinement and the rural people’s everyday life experiences. The lyricist Yang Zijing, with the active participation of Wu Youheng, combined both traditional literati prose and Cantonese spoken language to present a contemporary story with a classical flavor. The piece also featured almost all the Cantonese opera stars available, making it a historical event. The set design highlighted Guangdong local scenery: there were local banyan trees behind He Feng’s house, and the interior design of the landlord’s house was also unique to the Guangdong area. But the most crucial efforts were directed at the musical arrangement. First, all Western instruments were taken away, and traditional Cantonese musical arrangement was emphasized. Second, the entire piece featured traditional banghuang tunes, deliberately avoiding the fixed xiaoqu tunes, which could be associated with contemporary times. Banghuang songs were the only ones sung on the Cantonese Opera stage in the late nineteenth century, and there were thirty of them. But other song types were gradually introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they were grouped under the umbrella of xiaoqu, whose repertoire is more diverse and its origins more varied: some of them are traditional folk songs, while some are more recent, Western-influenced popular songs developed in the urban areas; some derive from other genres of traditional Chinese music, and some are folk songs of other regions. In the 1930s and 1940s, xiaoqu was highly popular in Cantonese Opera, and some trendy performances featured only xiaoqu.¹⁹ But banghuang was reintroduced in the 1950s to purge the pre-Liberation commercialism, and in Storm in the Countryside, xiaoqu was deliberately avoided in order to connect to a tradition that the artists found not only more authentic but also more politically correct. Composer Tan Jian admitted that his musical arrangement was meant to convey a rich Cantonese Opera musical feeling.²⁰ It was the musical arrangement, more than anything else, that defined its faithfulness to the opera tradition as well as, mistakenly, the political authority.

If Storm in the Countryside was designed as propaganda, its huge success was attributed largely to its musical arrangement, which moved the audience. In the fourth scene, when Liu Qin is introduced to the family of Devil King, his top guard, Tailless Snake, interrogates her to see whether she has any hidden agenda. It includes a short one-minute section of beigong (singing in soliloquy), in which the two dialoguing characters withdraw into their own subjective spaces and sing to themselves, creating a private moment for them to think aloud and for the audience to understand the psychology and calculation of the two characters. The audiences’ hearts beat with the worries that Tailless Snake will identify Liu Qin’s flaws, as well as with relief and excitement at seeing the heroine’s confidence and wisdom outwit her enemy. This scene is an important suturing moment—when the characters sing to themselves, they also sing to the audience, therefore inviting the audience to identify with them directly. Each character sings five lines intercepting each other, with a traditional Cantonese Opera melodic ensemble meandering between. The first four verses were meant to give the audience a sense of excitement and expectation, while the last slowed down the pace and concluded the confrontation.²¹ The verses were written in a sophisticated parallel structure, in which Liu Qin’s lines always overpower Tailless Snake’s preceding lines, in terms of both meaning and music. Although the lines are written in elegant Chinese, they are sung in colloquial Cantonese, giving the viewers a sense of classicism as well as a local identification. For the pronoun ta (he/she) instead of singing “ta” (the Cantonese pronunciation of ta), the performer sings “kui,” which is the colloquial form of the third-person pronoun. In the third and fourth lines, instead of singing “hong-ta” (seeing her), the singers use the Cantonese colloquial “tai-kui.” In the transplantation project thereafter, colloquial Cantonese was no longer allowed to be sung in the arias. Most interestingly, much of the dramatic energy of the piece is built upon Liu Qin’s role-playing and her ability to deceive. This soliloquy section is developed precisely around themes of performance, pretension, and seeing through: Tailless Snake keeps suspecting that the gentle teacher in front of him is a spy, while Liu Qin reminds herself to be careful with this old fox. Many in the audience clearly enjoyed this identity game, indirectly complicating any simpleminded logic of power and authenticity.

The piece’s highlighting of femininity also distinguishes it from yangbanxi pieces. Its theme remotely echoes Hua Mulan in a reverse way: the legendary daughter Hua Mulan dresses as a son to take her father’s place in the army, while the female soldier Liu Qin poses, ironically, as a civilian, also in order to enter deep into the battlefield. In the first and the fourth scenes, when Liu Qin discovers the landowners’ oppression of the poor people, she uses a masculine voice to sing a few lines to show her anger, which is not conventional in Cantonese Opera. But most of the other scenes feature the exquisite singing and passion of Liu instead of her actions and fighting. In the sixth scene, she sings a six-minute aria titled “Liu Qin Expressing Herself” (Liu Qin shuhuai). She sings alone in her bedroom, yearning to take up her military uniform to resume her soldier’s identity. However, it is also in this scene that her female identity, in terms of singing, posture, and overall aura, is at its most prominent and attractive. Director Lin Yu acknowledged that the creative team gave Liu Qin a generous amount of singing lines precisely because they knew the audience would love it, and these songs would also emphasize the piece’s Cantonese Opera identity.²² The official condemnation of the piece in 1967 sealed the fate of this attempt, and the Cantonese Opera was to give up most of its regional features in order to demonstrate its fidelity to yangbanxi. Sadly, the excellent attempt by Cantonese Opera to create its own revolutionary model while maintaining its cultural specificty failed to invite any follow-up.

Transplantation: Visual versus Aural

Designed as a model piece, Storm in the Countryside was not allowed to become one, and Liu Qin was never a yangban heroine. Although it made use of the best strategies available to produce new modern revolutionary pieces, the only obvious problem with this piece was its regional identity, which refers not so much to its cultural flavor but to the fact that it was put together by local groups, rather than being centrally organized. So when the piece was purged, so was the entire Cantonese establishment. All the opera troupes were disbanded in 1967 and 1968. Many performers, producers, and musicians were condemned as “cow ghosts and snake gods,” and sent to the countryside for reeducation,²³ while others were forced to change their professions. They were not allowed to engage in opera activities of any form, including practicing on their own, and they were forced to terminate their stage lives and suffer hard labor and humiliation.²⁴ But the hiatus lasted for only a year, after which the power of yangbanxi swayed all of China.

The Jiang Qing regime was clear from the beginning that the few yangbanxi pieces performed by major groups in Beijing and Shanghai had too limited a repertoire to reach all parts of the vast country of China.²⁵ Two major efforts were in place to allow the chosen works to infiltrate the entire nation: remediation and transplantation. First, the theatrical works were adapted by the resumed cultural industries into comic books, films, records, and television, making them available to different audiences. The originals were captured to different degrees of faithfulness, owing to each medium’s own specificity—documentation by television was the least mediated, whereas comics were probably the most mediated. Second, the form-specific performances—be they modern Peking Opera, ballets, or symphonies—were “transplanted” to different regional opera forms. As the Cultural Revolution continued its course in the 1970s, the original Zhejiang yue regional opera Half Basket of Peanuts (Banlan huasheng) and the original Hebei bangzi regional opera Spring Swallow of the Snowy Mountain (Xueling chunyan) were also named yangbanxi, showing how the Jiang Qing regime began to relax its control of artistic forms, so that less centralized productions might also be appoved as models. But they were still produced under the auspices of the transplantation project and had to be modeled after the first yangbanxi, if only in spirit, unlike Storm in the Countryside, which was produced outside the Beijing- and Shanghai-based yangbanxi purview.

Two articles published in the People’s Daily in 1971 called for the large-scale popularization of yangbanxi pieces through their use in other genres,²⁶ but such activities had already begun much earlier. For example, On the Docks was transplanted into the Qiong Opera (the form based on Hainan Island) and presented in the Outdoor Theatre of the Haikou City Harbor Affairs Office in late 1968.²⁷ The Hebei bangzi transplantation of The Red Lantern was nationally broadcast by CCTV in 1969.²⁸ In fact, the aforementioned Department of the Central Southern Region, headed by Tao Zhu, had invited the Chinese Peking Opera Theatre to present the newly developed Red Lantern in Guangzhou as early as 1965, in order to teach the participating representatives from various Cantonese Opera groups how to adapt it into Cantonese Opera.²⁹ The first transplantation attempts took place around the time Storm in the Countryside was created. In Guangzhou, two sets of parallel attempts were made between 1964 and 1966, but by 1967 it was clear that only the model pieces directly supervised by Jiang Qing could be the gold standard.

Institutionalized opera activities began in Guangzhou again in 1968, which experimented with, first, the making of new short revolutionary pieces meant to be skits for different propaganda purposes, and, second, the transplantation of yangbanxi. Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre was given the task of transplanting Shajiabang, while Guangzhou City Cantonese Opera Company worked on Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihu shan), both Peking Opera yangbanxi.³⁰ The condemned artists were quickly called back to take charge of the two transplantation projects. A total of 108 opera professionals were assembled to produce Shajiabang, and many were solicited directly from their political retraining schools. Stars were included in a full company with set designers, musicians, lighting operators, and stage assistants. New performers and musicians were also quickly trained and recruited, and they worked side by side with the established artists, whose original seniority and fame were still largely respected. The hierarchical system of the opera circles persisted despite the rupture that had been introduced by the revolution in the previous two years. Shajiabang was also made into a color film by the Pearl River Film Studio in 1974, meaning that this Cantonese Opera version was already approved as a “second-degree” model to be disseminated further.

There was a rigid concept of the model in the transplantation project, in stark contrast to the flexibility demonstrated in traditional opera culture. It was demanded by the party that when performing yangbanxi all troupes had to stay faithful to the original—down to lines, steps, beams of stage light, and even mended patches in a character’s clothing.³¹ Also, while all yangbanxi pieces had their own adaptation histories, all previous versions that preceded the ultimate model had to be eliminated entirely. The Cantonese Opera versions of Shajiabang, The White-Haired Girl, The Red Detachment of Women, and Azalea Mountain had all been performed before the Cultural Revolution, but they were suppressed immediately after the transplanted pieces were created.

In fact, many of the original yangbanxi pieces featured unique cultural flavors: Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy featured the winter scenery of northeast China, On the Docks highlighted its Shanghai location, The Red Detachment of Women featured the local culture of Hainan, and Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qi xi Baihutuan) took place outside China, featuring the exotic costumes and dances of Korea. These stories were not created by Jiang Qing or her coterie specifically for the yangbanxi project, but were chosen, for diverse reasons, from a huge existing corpus of revolutionary works that had been developed in different forms and areas before and after 1949. Inevitably, they were tinged with regional flavors of different kinds. When they were designated as yangbanxi, no clear efforts were directed at eliminating these regional identities, but they were often further emphasized. For example, the directors, choreographers, dancers, and set designers for The Red Detachment of Women were sent to Hainan to study the dances, costumes, and scenery of the Li people.³² Such arrangements reinforced the authenticity of the works, gave tonality to the performances, and emphasized China’s own rich cultural traditions. In his studies of socialist cinema, Paul Clark reminds us that, in Maoist China, “Paradoxically, one of the most effective ways to make films with ‘Chinese’ style was to go to the most ‘foreign’ cultural areas in the nation.”³³ Being understood as integral parts of the nation, minority cultures were the most accessible groups for cultural workers to use in order to find and express China’s national style.

But the real problem resides with the sound. While audiences tended to welcome exotic images, their audio habits were generally much more stubborn. For yangbanxi, the basic Peking Opera musical system remained unchallenged by the setting of the story. An opposite effect was shown in the transplanted pieces. Although the arias were sung in Cantonese, the overall musical arrangements and performance followed the Peking Opera original very closely, resulting in an awkward musical arrangement that belonged neither to Peking Opera nor Cantonese Opera. Unlike Storm in the Countryside, the Cantonese version of Shajiabang is remembered by many artists and viewers as an unpleasant piece, and the performance was unable to engage local audiences very effectively. The problems lay primarily in the aural dimension. In the words of director Guo Hui, who directed a few transplanted projects during the Cultural Revolution for the Guangzhou City Cantonese Opera Company, local audiences often described these works as “pleasing to the eyes but hard on the ears” (haokan bu haoting).³⁴

As Guo Hui reveals, there were strict instructions from the designated yangbanxi companies that local troupes had to follow, regardless of whether they were enacting the original versions or creating new, transplanted versions. It was relatively easy to come to terms with the visual arrangements, because the settings, costumes, and props could all be ordered from the original companies in Beijing and Shanghai. There were elaborate guidebooks published by the original companies to aid regional companies in staging the works exactly the way they should be.

A major role for Guo as a director was to follow these standards as closely as possible. For example, a change of scene usually took five to ten minutes in traditional Cantonese Opera performance, but in standard yangbanxi a shorter time of only one or two minutes was allowed for such a transition. So she had to train the workers to change the sets quickly and precisely. In fact, Cantonese Opera had always welcomed modern visual refinement and had been receptive to change. Guangzhou was one of the first Chinese cities to be exposed to Western culture and ideas, breeding not only revolutionary thoughts and innovative initiatives but also an insatiable desire for modernity, so the Cantonese Opera stage was often filled with street fashions and spectacular stage settings. The set design of Cantonese Opera was also much more complex than that of traditional Peking Opera. Naturally, the elaborate visual design of the original model work was quickly accepted by Cantonese Opera artists and fans.

Sporadic slogans could also be assimilated. Sacred phrases such as “Chairman Mao” or “Long Live the Communist Party” had to be delivered in Mandarin to show the Cantonese people’s great respect for the Chairman and his party.³⁵ This arrangement might show the inferiority of Cantonese to Mandarin, but Cantonese Opera has always been open to “foreign” elements, and we do not need to overemphasize its victimization. In the Republican era, saxophones, violins, banjos, and guitars were used profusely on Cantonese Opera stages.³⁶ Overall, Cantonese Opera has always been proud of its inclusiveness, welcoming distant topics, novel visual designs, Western musical instruments, and even foreign words. What held these diversities together, however, were the tunes, although the tunes were also constantly expanding and transforming.

Chuen-Fung Wong demonstrates in his meticulous studies of the Uyghur version of The Red Lantern (The Legend of the Red Lantern) that Uyghur musical elements were introduced to the transplanted piece systematically, and its production came as a long-awaited opportunity for fellow artists and musicians to safeguard the Uyghur national performing arts after years of active destruction.³⁷ But such cultural freedom and aesthetic confidence were not allowed in the Cantonese transplantation, probably because the Uyghurs as an ethnic minority enjoyed a relatively larger degree of cultural freedom than was allowed in the Han regional cultures, and the success of the Uyghur The Red Lantern remains an exception. Rowen Pease gives us an opposite example of the “failure” of the transplantation of Song of the Dragon River (Longjiang song) to local operas of the Korean minority in northeast China, as the local people did not like it and in fact preferred the original Peking Opera.³⁸ We can only say that transplantation operas that could match the artistic vigor of either the yangbanxi original or the local operas were rare to find.

In a 1974 report published in the People’s Daily, traditional Cantonese Opera was officially criticized as “lewd music” (mimi zhiyin),³⁹ and the demands for Cantonese Opera to give up its skittish and giddy voices to match the heroic atmosphere of the new era were raised throughout the entire Cultural Revolution period. Not only regional operas but also dialects were placed in hierarchical order, with Mandarin on top of all others. But in the vast countryside, many people still did not understand Mandarin, which drastically reduced the efficacy of the central propaganda.⁴⁰ It is clear that the transplantation project was designed to solve this governance problem, by bringing the yangbanxi to those who preferred their regional languages. In the case of the Cantonese Shajiabang, the transplanted piece followed the Peking Opera original very strictly, and there were no deviations from the original lyrics and dialogue. Because the linguistic tones of Mandarin and Cantonese differ too much, and the two systems of music are not entirely compatible, it is basically impossible to retain the original lyrics without twisting the local tunes substantially, or the other way around—in both cases, displeasure inevitably results.⁴¹ Keeping the original text of Peking Opera intact was considered the principal political task in the transplantation project, which inevitably forced the adaptation to lose Cantonese Opera’s distinctive characteristics, jarring the ear of the connoisseur.

Huang Zhuangmou recalls that when he arranged the music of the Cantonese Opera version of On the Docks, there was one line that was very tricky to handle. In the second scene, when the retired worker Ma Hongliang comes back to visit the harbor, he is amazed by the new machines available to do the hard work, and he sings: “The big crane, so incredible. It picks up a ton of steel so effortlessly.” In adapting the line into the Cantonese Opera version, Huang was not allowed to alter the wording, nor could he change the basic rhythm. He also needed to follow the melody as much as possible. But when the word da-diao-che (“crane”) is sung in Cantonese with a similar melody, the middle part of the word, “diao,” now sounds so similar to “fuck”—which, of course, could not be allowed. So Huang had to find a different but similar enough tune to present the line, while tweaking the pitch and length of the note.⁴² Cantonese is a very rich tonal language with six (some say seven or nine) phonetic tones, meaning that any slight change of the tone can change the meanings of the word drastically. This makes writing lyrics for Cantonese songs very difficult—the tone of the word and the tune of the melody have to match precisely. The word da in Mandarin is at a much higher pitch than in Cantonese. In order to make the Cantonese “da” comprehensible, Huang had to lower its pitch in the melody in the Cantonese Opera version. Once the tone of “da” is corrected, the sound of the syllable “diao” also stabilizes. He also slightly lightened the transitional tone between “diao” and “che” to avoid the tone-twisting sound of “diao” to become the foul word. Although Huang was able to keep the sound of “diao” from going astray, the new version broke down the rhythmic pattern of the original line, blunting the originally buoyant beat that aptly describes Ma’s excitement at seeing the incredible big crane. This is all very technical, but such issues were numerous and difficult to resolve in the act of transplantation. In addition to reducing the dramatic effects, the music unfortunately also became less pleasing to the ears of the Cantonese Opera audience.

Although Western instruments had been in general use on the Cantonese Opera stage, it was popular musical forms—such as Broadway theater, Hollywood scores, and jazz—that were in vogue in pre-1949 Cantonese Operas. As I have mentioned, all these had to go when new revolutionary operas were designed, but what was systematically introduced to yangbanxi was Western classical music (the saxophone was not allowed to be used in Cantonese Opera during the Cultural Revolution), and many experiments had been conducted to develop a new type of revolutionary classicism. It was claimed that Western orchestral instruments were particularly important to Cantonese Opera because they could assist the low sound and weak timbre of some traditional instruments, and also correct the feminine tendencies of Cantonese Opera.⁴³ The traditional musical notation gongchi was no longer used, replaced completely by numbered musical notation—wherein all musical notes are described in numbers, which makes reading and teaching much easier but sacrifices some of the musical complexity. The most elaborate performance was to be accompanied by a small full-scale orchestra with an ensemble of more than thirty members, with both Chinese and Western instruments.⁴⁴

According to Kuang Bin, who was a toujia (the musician who plays the lead instrument and acts as the leader of the musical team) in the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre during the Cultural Revolution, he had to learn anew how to collaborate with the conductor of the orchestra to synchronize the two musical systems when presenting the transplanted pieces. Generally speaking, toujia continued to lead the Chinese ensembles during the performance sections, and the conductor took up the leading role during the overture and other musical interludes. But a clear break between the Chinese musical section and the Western musical section was not always to be found, and the two ensembles sometimes had to play together. As such, toujia had to pay close attention to the performers’ singing and movements while also working with the orchestra.⁴⁵

Liang Runtian, who was a zhangban, responsible for the rhythm of the music during the performance, also recounts that the traditional Chinese musicians had to work closely not only with the Western ensemble but also with the director and the singing arrangers (changqiang sheji) in many rehearsals and discussion sections, which had never before occurred in the history of Cantonese Opera.⁴⁶ Actress Zheng Peiying recounts how difficult it was for singers to cope with the new music, as the traditional ensemble always gave clear musical cues to the singers about when to start singing, but in the yangbanxi performances the singer could no longer rely on the flexibility of the ensemble.⁴⁷ As interactions between the singers and the musicians were always encouraged in traditional Chinese operas, improvisation was not only tolerated but often characterized the highest aesthetic enjoyment for both the performers and the connoisseurs. However, with the introduction of Western symphonic music to traditional banghuang tunes, the music had to be planned very carefully beforehand, drastically reducing performative freedom. But such precision allowed the pieces to be written down faithfully, and therefore reenacted by the people, which was a prime political goal of the yangbanxi project.

Many of my interviewees praise the Cantonese Opera Azalea Mountain (Dujuan shan, 1974) for being a very sophisticated work in the transplantation project, as the artists and musicians were tasked with meeting very high musical demands.⁴⁸ In fact, there was a clear plan to turn this Cantonese Opera into a film by the Pearl River Film Studio in 1976,⁴⁹ although the political environment altered so rapidly that year that the project was never realized. Based on the available recording, I suspect that the piece could not have been attractive to ordinary Cantonese Opera fans, because it was characterized by very prominent Western classical music. The music was arranged in a very elaborate and sophisticated manner, featuring exquisite collaboration between the Chinese ensemble and the Western ensemble. Kuang Bin characterizes the piece as the most difficult one, in terms of technique, on which he had worked and said the music was so fast that it defied all his training and practice in Cantonese Opera.⁵⁰

In Azalea Mountain, the musicians played the Chinese instruments as if they were Western instruments, but traditional Cantonese Opera tunes were still used, and the overall matching between the Chinese and Western music had to be precise.⁵¹ Compared with the original Peking Opera, the Western orchestration was even more highlighted in the Cantonese copy—as shown, for example, in Ke Xiang’s famous “I lived in Anyuan” (“Jiazhu Anyuan”) aria in the third scene. The aria is one of the few in the entire yangbanxi oeuvre to feature feminine singing and soft music, but the Cantonese Opera uses a heavy symphonic arrangement to accompany the strong voice, probably because the female character had to prove her ability to repudiate her femininity. Generally speaking, traditional Cantonese operatic music’s emphasis on the virtuosity of the lead performers was completely abandoned; instead, it followed the logic of modern Western music, emphasizing precision.

Such indulgence in aesthetic complexity and precision could be seen as a mark of the time. In the experimentation taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, producers struggled to present original lyrics in comprehensible forms that still pleased Cantonese ears; however, after a few trials the artists seem to have realized that the lyrics—or the political messages—no longer mattered; instead, they focused on developing a new kind of music that had never been heard before. I should note that the Cantonese Opera version of Azalea Mountain was put together during a time when most people were disillusioned about national politics, and some had also begun to raise questions about the correctness of Cultural Revolution politics thus far. Guangzhou was the location of some of the bloodiest civil fighting in the late 1960s, and several years later it was also one of the first places in China where alternative thoughts were publicly displayed. A symbolic event took place in November 1974, when three young people—Li Zhengtian, Chen Yiyang, and Wang Xizhe—under the pseudonym of Li Yizhe, posted a one-hundred-meter-long big-character poster in Guangzhou’s Zhongshan Fifth Road, not far from the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre.⁵² The poster raised questions related to socialist democracy and legality, and it challenged those in office perpetuating their monopoly of power and distributing interests among their family members. Selected passages of the poster were quickly circulated around the entire country.

The Cantonese Opera Azalea Mountain was created around the same time in the same place, and its indirect response to the emerging demand for political changes was, unsurprisingly, a kind of aesthetic indulgence. Given its elaborate musical arrangement, the lyrics were necessarily sidelined, and all the Maoist ideas they originally contained were cast in an ambiguous position. As the recording of Azalea Mountain shows, if the Cultural Revolution had not ended immediately afterward, and if all the musical experiments carried out thus far were not so abruptly and thoroughly abandoned, we might have retained a very unique kind of operatic performance that is not Cantonese Opera, Peking Opera, or Western opera. But we can also say that this kind of alienating music could be produced only at the withering end of a utopian movement, the doom of which was already inscribed in the music.

The Cultural Workers

This book aims to illustrate how social mimesis could be a multidimensional mechanism involving not only individual changes but also institutional transformations and cultural fissures. If I have characterized the medical institution, which featured the barefoot doctor as its embodiment, as a rather successful social reform project because it could be easily copied by local communities, we might consider opera transplantation a rather unsuccessful social mimesis project because unlike the original yangbanxi very few people actually sang the songs. However, while the masses did not sing the transplanted pieces, the opera singers did—and there were plenty of them. They were probably the most significant subjects of emulation in the case of opera transplantation because they personified the ideology.

After 1949, a vigorous institutionalization process was put in place in regional operas to offer the performers and musicians professional status. The Chinese Xiqu Institute was set up in 1951 to implement a new pedagogical and epistemological system for all major types of regional operas. Cultural workers’ unions were also established around the country, including the Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Workers Association, channeling messages from the party directly to the practitioners. We also saw the development of the director system, which was launched to guarantee some kind of general control, both aesthetically and politically, over all regional operas.⁵³ Strategic units were established, such as the Experimental Troupes in Guangdong Province Cantonese Opera Company, to experiment with innovative works.⁵⁴

But in terms of business structure, theatrical groups were never completely nationalized, and there were parallel structures of government-owned groups (guoying) and non-government-owned groups (minying).⁵⁵ Private groups were always key players in the overall theatrical scene during the seventeen-year period, and they did not entirely disappear even during the Cultural Revolution. The most important policy intervention involved the salary system: in 1958, the government endorsed a pay scale of sixteen salary points for all performance groups, from 42 RMB to 360 RMB,⁵⁶ which not only prevented too great an income disparity among the cultural workers but also effectively organized them into a system that could be controlled by the state. Under this system, key performers still received higher salaries, followed by musicians and stage workers; however, generally speaking, subsidiary performers, set designers, and other stage workers were given social status and salaries comparable to those of the stars.

To understand the newly conferred “professional” status to opera workers in the PRC, we can compare the Guangzhou situation with Hong Kong’s, as Cantonese Opera developed vigorously in both places in the 1950s and 1960s. To the revolutionary regime, an original sin of Cantonese Opera was its cultural affinity with colonial Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the Chinese diaspora. Some critics argue that Cantonese Opera was the regional opera most condemned by the socialist critical apparatus precisely due to its outside links.⁵⁷ But it also had to be promoted due to its effectiveness as propaganda in overseas Chinese communities.⁵⁸ In Hong Kong, Cantonese Opera’s active collaboration with cinema and popular culture at large followed and reinforced the opera’s audacity and valiance. At the same time, a large part of the traditional corpus was kept and brought to life in the city. This commercially driven environment aligns with the mainland Cantonese Opera culture before Liberation, and the training for regional opera in the modern city also resembled the traditional practice of the master-pupil relationship.

With the support of mass media such as film, records, and tabloid newspapers, the star system thrived. According to the film director Li Tie, veteran female sheng (male-personification) performer Ren Jianhui commanded 17,000 Hong Kong dollars (around 3,400 US dollars at the time) per film in the 1960s.⁵⁹ Ren made forty-one films in 1960 alone! In contrast, Luo Jiabao, also a first-class Cantonese Opera performer in Guangzhou and a returnee from Hong Kong, recounted that the highest monthly salary he had received in the 1950s and early 1960s was about 1,000 RMB (around 400 US dollars at the time). Obviously, personal income of the two systems cannot be compared in simple numeric terms, and what Luo earned was a very high salary by PRC standards. We can only say that had he stayed in Hong Kong, he could have enjoyed a very comfortable material life; but being an admired cultural worker in socialist China also brought him great social respect unknown to the capitalist system. In Hong Kong, the female singers—including those sheng performers performing masculine roles—were often more eminent than their male counterparts, and romance stories featuring beautiful couples also tended to be more popular among audiences, who were also largely female. Across the border, particular efforts were directed toward strengthening the voice and the actions of the actresses, highlighting the masculine dimensions of the female protagonists. Such heroism was disdained by Hong Kong Cantonese Opera fans, who tended to prefer traditional romantic stories and the accompanying intricate performances.⁶⁰

While Hong Kong connoisseurs and artists often dismiss mainland Cantonese Operas as too loud, unreserved, and inauthentic, those on the mainland side consider the Hong Kong operas unprofessional and sometimes sloppy. As He Mengliang, who was admitted into a state-operated Cantonese Opera school in the late 1950s, proudly recalls, the kind of education he received under the auspices of the new socialist state was systematic, organic, and comprehensive. Not only was he offered a thorough training in Cantonese Opera; he was also given a methodical education in appreciating and performing Peking Opera and other regional operas, so that he had been able to cultivate a broad vision and sensibility of Chinese opera arts since his youth.⁶¹ Now teaching Cantonese Opera in Hong Kong, He laments that the kind of institutionalized education he received under the socialist system could not be found in the colonial city, whose Cantonese Opera business was always market driven. This attitude is shared among many mainland Cantonese Opera artists who spent their formative years in China during the Cultural Revolution. Although mainland artists and audiences discarded the modern revolutionary pieces almost overnight once the Cultural Revolution ended, many still consider the socialist experimentation pertinent to some forms of operatic modernization of which they are proud.

I do not want to exaggerate their differences, as Cantonese Opera in Hong Kong and in Guangzhou is more connected than disconnected, and viewers and artists in each place do find works from the other side attractive. But I also sense a subtle mutual disdain, with each tradition proclaiming its arts to be more authentic than those of the other: the Hong Kong opera culture is proud of its connection with “tradition,” whereas mainland artists and viewers consider their arts more “serious,” and the term yanjin (“strict” or “rigorous”) frequently came up in my interviews. To those mainland cultural workers who were baptized by the Cultural Revolution, their works’ authenticity rests with the artists’ firm devotion to aesthetics in a more abstract sense. From an institutional perspective, yangbanxi could be seen as an attempt to discipline Chinese culture and the people, who had been assumed as disorganized and intractable. Inevitably we also observe the reverse: the more the yangbanxi project declared itself to be firmly in the saddle, the more odds it faced from the people in its implementation.

Many Hong Kong Cantonese Opera artists are pleased with their traditional training, which has not been corrupted by the hegemony of Peking Opera and socialist governance. Most mainland artists, however, treasure their vigorous institutionalized training, which is allegedly more modern than that of their Hong Kong counterparts, and their ability to integrate with other regional traditions and Western music allows them to face new challenges and keep the arts alive in the rapidly changing modern world. They tend to see tradition less rigidly, as there was more than one model available for them to learn from—contrasting the stereotypical view that the yangbanxi tradition made the artists narrow-minded. As Ouyang Yuqian remarked well before the Cultural Revolution, Cantonese Opera is an extremely adaptable form, and its malleability is beyond the imagination of outsiders.⁶² Cantonese Opera was always adaptable to change, and it is this affinity for change that partly forms its tradition. Instead of reading the Cultural Revolution as the destruction of the traditional arts, it could be understood as another historical opportunity for Cantonese Opera to rejuvenate itself through absorption and assimilation, although the result was less than pleasing to most.

In my interviews, many musicians and performers recall how they spent seven days a week practicing, rehearsing, and discussing their operas during the Cultural Revolution; they were completely devoted to the arts, and all they thought about was perfecting them. These were not individual cases; the overall social milieu encouraged them to develop a sense of pride. Both Ni Huiying and Lu Haichao remembered the 9 RMB “nutritional supplement” they were given in addition to their regular monthly salary of 45 RMB because they needed the extra nutrition to perform acrobatic movements onstage. Although they were interviewed separately, both described the nutritional supplement in the same way—with shining and smiling eyes, they used their fingers to draw in the air an object the size of a shoebox, the size of the 9 RMB block of chocolate they received every month. Lu Haichao admitted that sometimes his mother would sell it in the market for 8 RMB, whereas Ni Huiying recounted that she ate all the chocolate, with utmost pride and happiness, as the chocolate was a marker of her social status and professionalism. The authenticity of their arts may be embodied more truthfully in this block of chocolate the performers brought back home every month than in the final products they put together.

To return to the ideas of performance and embodiment introduced at the beginning of the chapter, these young performers might have been the most direct products of the Maoist subject-formation by performing the models. Those in the new generation of cultural workers were protected and treasured by the new regime, as they were asked to replace the earlier generation of artists and intellectuals and to move history forward. But, most importantly, they underwent vigorous training in order to adopt the revolutionary aesthetics as their own. As Michael Dutton reminds us, Chinese revolutionary subjects were conjured up primarily by appeals to the senses through shared culture, history, and memory; this is distinctly different from the stress on rationality and constructivism in Western modernity.⁶³ It was the rigorous training the performers went through that most effectively shaped their subjectivities.

The performance culture was so important to the Cultural Revolution because the revolutionary spirit needed to be continuously performed. The person who performed this spirit would always be caught between being themselves and being a tool of the spirit.⁶⁴ The Maoist performers tried to demonstrate their truthful and spontaneous outburst of personal affection and emotion, but at the same time they had to be at one with the dominant spirit. This is not unique to the Cultural Revolution; in all propaganda culture, we observe how performers had to trust and distrust their own spontaneous feelings in order to achieve the self-contradictory stage in which performers were required to demonstrate both their autonomy and their discipline. This can only be done through incessant and repetitive training—both in terms of technique and ideology.

Individuals identified with Mao, and revolution, both truthfully and mechanically: these performers were the “singular” Maoist subject par excellence. On the one hand, they were given material support and were fed idealistic aesthetics that convinced them they were truly liberated. On the other, they were constantly reminded of their status as mere vehicles of the revolution. Once the revolution ended, their arts lost all meaning. In reality, many of the more famous performers tried their best to leave mainland China immediately after the Cultural Revolution. There is no attempt here to romanticize their works and their subjectivities; they were simply real people.

CHAPTER 6

Ballet across Genres
and Forms

It is true that the yangban models were powerful and well protected; however, as they were meant to be copied, they were necessarily exposed to the risks of being transformed. It is also problematic to consider them inert objects waiting to be appropriated and transformed because these models also exerted an enormous power on the copying subjects. Mimesis can be extremely complex as there is no end to the process, and the involved reality and representation mutually condition each other and undergo constant transformation. In the chain of the yangban copying, there were many intermediate agents, such as the Cantonese opera singers just discussed, who resisted the simple categories of subject and object, because they both copied and were copied, and they could be considered both the performing subject in control of the copying process and the product being molded by ideology.

Given this background of constant power-transfer, this chapter explores questions related to mastery. Two opposite questions can be asked: Could the model exert power over all its copies? Could the Maoist subjects ultimately transcend Maoism to master themselves? Paradoxically, history seems to have provided negative answers to both questions. Here I want to sort out the dynamics and trace the seeds of liberation, if any. Precisely because Maoism worked to remain all-powerful to the Maoist subjects, the model had to somehow resist appropriation by the copying subject to maintain its “aura.” But Maoism also believed in human creativity and encouraged the people to surpass any existing boundaries to carve out a brand new world. If the Cultural Revolution was able to produce a new revolutionary subject, this subject was radically different from that produced under capitalism, whose prime ideological structure is possessive individualism—one becomes a subject by possessing objects. Instead, the Cultural Revolution made it difficult to clearly differentiate subject and object. We need a more complex model to understand the contrived and multiple subject-object relationships formed during the era of the Cultural Revolution, which would also help us understand why the Maoist subject could be understood as “singular” instead of “collective.”

This chapter focuses on ballet, because this model culture was, of all the yangbanxi forms, probably the one most resistant to cultural appropriation yet most congenial to gender fetishism. Ballet was an unlikely candidate for the Chinese model culture project, as it was still an alienating art form to most Chinese people by the mid-1960s. Unlike Peking Opera, whose connoisseur culture was already ingrained in many parts of China, most Chinese people had never seen a ballet. But ballet turned out to be a most representative cultural form of yangbanxi.

Ballet in China

Although ballets were shown and taught among the elite in China in the early twentieth century, they were not performed and watched by the general Chinese people until the 1950s, when the PRC government promoted ballet to reflect its friendship with the Soviet Union. The young Chinese republic was to learn everything from the Soviet Union, including its dances. China’s first original ballet performance was allegedly Heping ge (The Dove of Peace), staged in 1950. But the official birth year of ballet in China is widely held to have been 1954, when the Soviet ballet expert O.A. Yealina was invited by the Chinese government to hold a series of training seminars for local ballet teachers in Beijing. It took another four years for the first national production of Swan Lake to be presented in 1958, and the Central Ballet Ensemble (now known as National Ballet of China) was established in 1959, in Beijing. The Russian ballet experts first invited to station in the Ensemble, such as Pyotr Gusev, became the first generation of ballet dancers, teachers, and choreographers in the PRC. But, under the deteriorating diplomatic relationships between the two countries, all the Russian experts left China a year later, leaving the Chinese ballet dancers and choreographers on their own.

The ballets taught by the Russian teachers to their Chinese pupils in the 1950s were romantic works stressing lyricism, softness, and grace, and the first ballets staged in China were classical pieces like Swan Lake and Giselle, not the new revolutionary ballets such as The Red Poppy, The Flames of Paris, and Spartacus. According to the recollection of Li Chengxiang, the director of the Central Ballet Ensemble in the 1980s, what they learned from the Russian experts was more a systematic approach to ballet as an organic art form than ballet as a political form.¹ Zhao Ruheng, who would later star in The Red Detachment of Women, also recalled the tough technical training demanded by the Soviet experts, and it was the artistic skills that the young dancer remembered, rather than the ideologies.² In 1960, when Sino-Soviet relations turned sour, the classical ballets taught by the Soviet experts became yet another piece of evidence of Soviet revisionism, so that ballet also lost the privileged status it had been given in the 1950s. The following three years were a depressing period for Chinese ballet—until 1963, when there was a call for the creation of revolutionary ballets.

Meanwhile, Japanese choreographers and dancers Shimizu Masao and Matsuyama Mikiko, who were moved by the 1951 Chinese film The White-Haired Girl (Baimaonü) which they had watched in Japan, decided to adapt it into a ballet form, and they were the first to employ ballet to present a Chinese revolutionary story. With the Chinese government completely uninformed, The White-Haired Girl was staged as a ballet by the Matsuyama Ballet Company in Tokyo in 1955.³ Three years later, the Japanese company was invited by the PRC government to stage this production in China, which was the first time Chinese viewers had seen a ballet version of this household story. Watching their homegrown story presented in this extremely foreign form was a revelation to audience members in Beijing, Chongqing, Wuhan, and Shanghai who were fortunate enough to get a ticket.⁴ In Shanghai alone, more than 10,000 viewers attended the ballet; among them was Hu Rongrong, who later presented her own version of The White-Haired Girl in 1962, before the yangbanxi project took shape. Although seldom officially acknowledged, this Japanese production was the root of Chinese revolutionary ballet.

Premier Zhou Enlai was the first central leader to demand a revolutionary reform of the ballet, but with reservations: while he encouraged the ballet to try something new, he also asserted that the nationalization of ballet would take many generations of effort.⁵ But in December 1963, Jiang Qing decided to lead the ballet reform, and she instructed the ballet companies in Shanghai and in Beijing to start working on The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl. According to her nurse, the two movies Jiang Qing adored the most were The Red Shoes (1948, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) and La Red (or Rossana) (1953, directed by Emilio Fernández).⁶ The Red Shoes depicts the struggles of the young and talented ballerina Victoria Page between love and arts: either she gives up her career and marries her lover, or she devotes her entire life to ballet. Jiang Qing, according to her nurse, identified strongly with this ballerina. In January 1964, Liu Shaoqi, then PRC’s chairman and soon to become the country’s first enemy, also advocated the use of ballet to present Chinese stories. The Matsuyama ballet company was then invited to present its White-Haired Girl again in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in 1964, attended by Mao and almost all major party leaders.

Among the first yangbanxi pieces canonized in 1966 and 1967 were The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl, usually called the “Red Piece” and the “White Piece.” Later, in 1974, Ode to Yimeng (Yimeng Song) and Sons and Daughters of the Grasslands (Caoyuan ernü) were also given the honor of being models, but their cultural and political influences could not match those of the two earlier pieces, largely because the Cultural Revolution ended soon afterward. One of the most significant cultural achievements of the Cultural Revolution was the familiarization of the Chinese masses with ballet, and all four ballets were turned into feature films. But this effective infiltration was also made possible by the already familiar narratives chosen to be delivered by this foreign dance form. All four ballets featured stories, characters, and music that were already very familiar to the people.

In the case of The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women, the stories had been particularly well known due to the popular feature films of the same names made in 1951 and 1962 respectively. The White-Haired Girl was originally a folk story circulated in the northeast region in the 1930s and 1940s: villagers noted the frequent appearance of a white-haired female ghost who stole the food villagers offered to the gods housed in a temple. The story was first made into a short yangge dance in 1943, and was adapted into a new opera by the Lu Xun Academy for the CCP’s seventh annual meeting in 1945. It tells the story of a young woman named Xi’er, who hides on a mountain to escape the tyranny of her master; her hair turns white after several years of solitude, and eventually her lover comes back with the communist troops to rescue her. They punish the landowners and liberate the people. A film was made in 1951, and with its success and the wide popularity of its music, such as the famous interlude “North Wind Blows” (Beifengchui), the character and the story of the white-haired girl became the stuff of household legends. Quickly, the tale was adapted into many cultural forms and regional operas, and became a staple of the official revolutionary pieces in the seventeen-year period, including a famous Peking opera directed by A Jia in 1957. It was first adapted by the Shanghai Dance School into a short solo ballet piece in 1962 by its vice president, Hu Rongrong, and a short thirty-minute piece was then created and presented in 1964. The full-length version was subsequently made into a yangbanxi in 1967.

The media history of The Red Detachment of Women was relatively simpler, as the ballet’s origin was a popular film made in 1961 by director Xie Jin, whose story was based on a script named Heroines of the Hainan Island (Qiongdao yingxiong hua), published in 1959. The playwright, Liang Xin, consulted military history and turned a real historical event—the establishment of a CCP female detachment on Hainan Island in 1931—into a drama about an exploited maid escaping the tyranny of her landlord master to find a new life in the CCP female detachment.⁷ In 1964, the story based on the film was made into a ballet by the Central Ballet Ensemble under direct supervision of the party, and the Fourth Troupe of China’s Peking Opera Company later also worked on its Peking Opera version, which was also included on the model list in 1972.

The other two younger revolutionary ballets were also based on existing stories. In terms of highlighting femininity and sexuality, Ode to Yimeng is most provocative, as it retells an allegedly real story of Yingsao giving her own milk to save an injured communist soldier during the Civil War. The idea of a male soldier drinking the milk of a young mother is sexually provocative enough, although the soldier does not suck her breast directly but rather a bottle that contains the milk she has produced. The story was selected as a model piece because it allegedly demonstrated the close bonds between the army and the people—or what was then often called “the relationship between fish and water” (yushuiqing). The folk identity of Sons and Daughters of the Grasslands was even more prominent. It was adapted from an animation film based on a Mongolian folk story, and the ballet features a brother and sister looking for their sheep, which have been released by the class enemies. They are lost in the open fields, and the entire community goes out to save them. The narrative line of this piece is probably the weakest among all yangbanxi, but the simple story and exotic setting made it a natural candidate for dance adaptation.

Foreign Form and Familiar Sexuality

No matter how familiar the stories were, the dance form was still decidedly foreign, and the Cultural Revolution ballet has a uniquely hybrid nature. Although major efforts were devoted to sinicizing ballets by introducing Chinese dance steps,⁸ and strong musical arrangements were introduced to anchor people’s “correct” emotional identification with the positive and negative characters,⁹ the foreignness of the dance form was by no means diluted. A case in point is the famous “Arc step pointe stage pose” (jiaojian gongjian bu liangxiang) of Wu Qinghua in The Red Detachment of Women, in which the Chinese martial arts “arc step” was presented en pointe, featuring the grandiose image of the heroine to the audience when she had just escaped the tyranny’s estate (Figure 6.1). This pose was entirely new to both dancing traditions.

Figure 6.1: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Pointe Arc Step Stage Pose.”

The sections of Swan Lake featured in the 1939 Soviet film Lenin in 1918 provided the first experience of seeing ballet for most Chinese people—as well as seeing bare female legs so publicly displayed—and these few minutes were the entirety of ballet reception of most Chinese people by the mid-1960s. Internationally renowned dancer Yin Mei recalls first watching the clips of The White-Haired Girl in the documentary film The Red Sun Lightens Up the Ballet Stage (Hong taiyang zhaoliang liao balei wutai, 1967) when she was nine years old. She immediately fell in love with the dance, and she began to teach herself by following the images she watched on films. She asked her father to buy her a pair of ballet shoes, and he asked his Shanghai friend to find them.¹⁰ The dance form was as foreign to the Chinese people as Chinese ballerinas were to Westerners then. Beryl Grey, then the top ballet dancer in the United Kingdom, who was invited to China to perform and give lessons, wrote when she first watched a Chinese ballet in Beijing in 1964, “Although it seemed curious at first to see Oriental faces in such a typically European ballet as Swan Lake, their performance was so convincing that I soon found it perfectly acceptable.”¹¹ Chinese and ballet just did not seem to go together in the mid-1960s.

Yet it did. First, ballet had been seen as the representation of the superior Soviet—and indeed the entire Western—culture in the 1950s. Sinicizing ballet had strong political implications for the Maoists in the mid-1960s. It was in 1963, when the PRC was becoming more internationally isolated, that official attention was first given to the sinicization of ballet, probably because the possession of this finest form of European culture would mark the progressiveness of the PRC’s cultural revolution. But more importantly, there was the actual diplomatic need to export China’s revolutionary culture to the West, entertaining foreign guests and promoting international collaboration. Peking Opera could almost only be performed by Chinese performers and musicians, but ballet dancers of different cultural backgrounds could participate in these Chinese revolutionary ballets, meaning that they could be exported, restaged, and collaborated on. The Red Detachment of Women was quickly spotted by the Albanian communist government, which maintained a close diplomatic relationship with China in the 1960s, and the piece was adapted and staged by its own ballet troupes in Tirana in 1965. When Jiang Zuhui, a major playwright of the Central Ballet Ensemble, was given the task by the government of going to Tirana to help the Albanian dancers to perform the piece, she first frowned at the assignment because of the great cultural distance between the two countries. But she changed her mind immediately once she arrived in the country, seeing that so many of the dancers were Soviet trained, and the chief director of the dance company was actually Jiang’s own schoolmate in the Soviet Union.¹² Zhou Enlai was invited to watch the Albanian version of the ballet when he visited the country in 1966 as PRC’s premier. Dancers from the two countries later collaborated and staged The Red Detachment of Women in Beijing, in October 1967.¹³ Richard Nixon also watched this ballet during his 1972 historical visit—although, like most Western viewers who watched it for the first time, the US president regarded it as total propaganda.¹⁴

Ballet was used as a diplomatic tool for the CCP to popularize China’s Cultural Revolution internationally because the intended audience could supposedly be introduced to the Chinese ideologies through an art with which they were familiar. In fact, the impression of yangbanxi in the West is still primarily made up of the two major ballet pieces. But the same ballets created the exact opposite effect among domestic audiences. Although the stories, the music, and the look were homegrown, the way they were embodied in the ballet form was completely alien. Very few critics in China were able to explain the formal aspects of the dance form, and the general population also had little desire to know about the aesthetics of the dance—unlike the way they connected with the model Peking Operas, as most of the singing styles of the latter were inherited, and the viewers could quickly link the new stars with the old. But in the case of ballet, with the stories already so familiar and the knowledge of the new form so sparse, the audience was directly impacted by the dancing bodies, bypassing the mediation of criticism.

Like many other dance forms, ballet is sexually provocative. Modern ballet is a particularly feminine form, with the narrative built around the dancer, showcasing her body and its power. It calls attention to the dancer’s long feet and her pelvic strength, highlighting particularly her inner thighs—which is extremely foreign to the Chinese dance tradition. The male ballet dancer is often meant only to be her partner, to support her for more elaborate movements. Because of her reproductive role, a woman can open her legs wider than a man, and ballet places particular emphasis on this ability, calling attention not only to the female body but also indirectly to the woman’s sexual prowess. In fact, before ballet was “modernized” in the twentieth century, the dance form had been a very sexual performance in many parts of Europe. Ballet dancers were usually considered indecent, and some of them made their living as the concubines of important men.

Needless to say, the sexual and sensual aspects of the ballet had to be evaded in these revolutionary pieces. While The Red Detachment of Women was more easily endorsed as Maoist because of its military dimension, the traditional femininity presented in The White-Haired Girl is prominent. Despite working on The White-Haired Girl since 1966, Jiang Qing was never happy with it. After Jiang had spent a few years incessantly rewriting and restaging, the Cultural Revolution ended before she was satisfied with any of the revisions. The sparkle of romance between Xi’er and Dachun remained, and Xi’er is probably the most feminized woman protagonist among all the model pieces.¹⁵

Since the ballet focuses on the female dancers, there is an inherent conflict between the dance form and the Cultural Revolution’s celebration of masculinity and militarism. Rosemary Roberts elaborates that there were many new arrangements in The Red Detachment of Women to subvert the gender conventions in classical ballet.¹⁶ It is the female dancer, rather than the male one, who pairs with and supports the lead female dancer, and bodily contact between the hero and the heroine is deliberately minimized. Generally speaking, the female dancers in the revolutionary piece were designed to convey strength and tension in both their movements and their poses. The original 1961 film version of The Red Detachment of Women focuses on the female character Wu Qionghua, but when it was adapted into a ballet, not only was her name changed to a gender-neutral one—Wu Qinghua—but far more attention was given to the CCP commander, Hong Changqing, to make him the real central figure, therefore allowing him to enjoy the highest choreographic attention according to the “Three Prominences” and “Sixteen Word” principles. On stage, there is a subtle tension between Hong Changqing and Wu Qinghua as to who is the central “hero” in The Red Detachment of Women, and in reality the character playing Hong, Liu Qingtang, was much more powerful than the female dancers in the Central Ballet Ensemble. He was a close ally of Jiang Qing and ended up being promoted to the state’s deputy minister of culture in 1974.

Despite all these efforts to masculinize the dance, the female bodies continued to enjoy most of the attention of Chinese audiences. People aspired to become Fang Haizhen in On the Docks by singing like her, but who could dance like Wu Qinghua in The Red Detachment of Women? Because of the inherent difficulties of ordinary Chinese citizens performing the ballets, who also lacked the knowledge to appreciate the aesthetics of the dance form, the fetishization of the female dancing bodies seems to have been a readily available pleasure for ordinary Chinese citizens, promoting the possessive objectification of the female body.

However, both the theatrical body and the filmic body were constantly on the move, making it difficult to fetishize them. There is a built-in distance between the ballerina and the audience in a theatrical setting, and the meanings of the female characters were rigidly fixed in the revolutionary narrative. We can say that the female dancers were properly protected in the theater and in films, but there were other “tie-in” products that made fetishization of the female body easier. Below, I study the theatrical stills, which were indexical and two-dimensional, and porcelain portraitures, which could be rendered more abstract and were three-dimensional representations. They were two related yet very different tie-in products arresting the dancing bodies into still portraits. In these appropriation attempts, the fleeting body of the dancer was frozen into a form that could be consumed by the new Cultural Revolution subject. Since relatively fewer photographic and ceramic representations of Ode to Yimeng and Sons and Daughters of the Grasslands are available, the following focuses primarily on the first two ballets.

The Photographic

Photography was always used for propaganda in Maoist China, but not in the form of the documentary photomontage that was considered a significant weapon of Soviet propaganda. Despite artistic repackaging, it was the documentary nature of photography that was deemed political in photomontage. However, with Maoist romanticism reigning high in socialist China, photography was invested with a strong theatrical impulse. In people’s everyday snapshots, we find subjects posed theatrically instead of looking directly at the camera, assuming a kind of heroic romanticism and self-objectification. Photography, which was practiced in China as a performance since the late Qing,¹⁷ found a new performative life in this revolution, where fiction and reality converged. As the photographer Jin Yongquan recounts, in the mid-1950s the practice of touching up photographs for the media already existed, and debates around related professional ethics gradually subsided to make way for a general practice allowing performance and artificiality to be accepted in photojournalism.¹⁸ As China entered the Cultural Revolution, the theatrical was taken very much for granted, and this hyperbole of the performative could be seen as an indirect comment on the real, which could act and be acted upon. If people’s everyday reality was so thoroughly politicized, the political was also playful, artificial, and illusory.

The single most important genre of photography during the Cultural Revolution was probably yangbanxi stills, which were tools to popularize yangbanxi. While very few people could afford to watch the theatrical productions of the ballets, most came to know about the dance through films and stills. But, compared with both the original theater and the moving pictures, the image of the stand-alone photograph was taken out of its narrative form. These stills often captured the most spectacular moments, and the condensed theatricality was frozen in an eternal moment that could be possessed. As I show below, some images relied more on the original narrative for their signification, while others did not; the latter were fetishized more easily.

In addition to the filmic adaptation and opera transplantation, it was also decided to publish a larger number of readers, propaganda posters, scripts, musical scores, and lyrics related to yangbanxi, which, as mentioned, contributed to the regeneration of the publishing industry. Other than reportage photography and the portraiture of leaders and selected model figures, the making of theatrical stills dominated the official photographic art, although very few photographers were given the honor of carrying out these duties.¹⁹ It is recorded that, in Shanghai alone, in the three-year period 1969–71, a total of 130 million single sheets of yangbanxi photographic stills and posters were published.²⁰ In his 1996 novella My University (Wo de daxue), author Liang Xiaosheng describes the many calendar cards that were published by different work units in the early 1970s, which often featured images of yangbanxi. He deliberately describes how The White-Haired Girl cards were carefully placed under glass-covered desktops for the person who occupied the desk to enjoy.²¹ Premier Zhou Enlai once criticized the official The Red Detachment of Women reader for containing too many color photos, and said too many copies were published, which was a burden to the state’s finances. Zhou instructed that Peking Opera yangbanxi readers that could teach people how to sing the arias should be published in a larger quantity, but very few people could learn the dancing by reading the counterpart ballet readers, so there was no need to produce so many of them.²² What Zhou did not, or failed to, recognize was that the visual consumption of these photos created a kind of pleasure on which the state could not keep a tight rein.

Most of these photographs were not shot during the actual theatrical performances but were taken in film studios when the films were made. Those fortunate enough to be selected as official photographers of these model performances, such as Shi Shaohua, Zhang Yaxin, Meng Qingbiao, and Chen Juanmei, had to stay for the entire filming process to catch the best moments. A major difficulty they encountered was the shutter sound, which could disturb the live sound recording. The solution was to build a soundproof box covering the camera.²³ These photographers were provided with the best imported Swedish Hasselblad cameras—allegedly there were only a few in the entire country—and the most expensive Kodak color film, which might explain the stunning quality of these stills even to contemporary eyes. Since most of the scenes and performances could not be restaged, at the film shooting location photographers made great efforts to use different photography techniques to capture the heroism and monumentalism the stills were to convey.²⁴

At least two photographers—Shi Shaohua and Zhang Yaxin—were assigned to The Red Detachment of Women. Shi was then the head of Xinhua News Agency’s Photography Unit, while Zhang was a younger photographer with a good political background. Most of the stills circulating were actually taken by Zhang. A variety of theatrical stills were produced, including those featuring the heroic figure Hong Changqing and the evil character Nan Ba Tian. Heroes and heroines leaping off the ground, hovering over intimidated class enemies, were also favorite compositions of these photographs, as the “Three Prominences” principle could be applied, while the excitement of the dance form could also be highlighted. But, in general, the most widely distributed and prominent stills were those featuring female dancers—either individually or in groups.

Among the many theatrical stills captured in The Red Detachment of Women, one stood out and became a classic. It features the famous movement of Qinghua performing “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown.” (Daoti zijin guan) (Figure 6.2). The photograph was published independently as posters and stand-alone print sheets, and was widely reprinted in many publications. A former rusticated youth writes in his blog about “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown”:

Figure 6.2: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown.”

Once that action was captured in still photography, it was widely distributed and became so popular, and it appeared on not only posters but also many different fine publications widely circulated both nationally and internationally. That action was so famous not only due to its beautiful image and the high skills of the dancer, but at that time when people knew nothing about ballet, they could project all kinds of bewilderment and imagination onto the image. Something like the classic dialogues in today’s Zhao Benshan’s short sketch, this phrase “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” actually became a vogue phrase at that time.²⁵

This account clearly demonstrates how the image was consumed independently from the narrative, and how the foreignness of the form actually facilitated people’s imaginations. The author then recalls that a fellow rusticated youth called a special dish he made by this name, demonstrating how well known both the name and the image were. It was also the favorite image featured in posters or advertisements of restaged or tie-in products of the ballet from that point on. In 2010, the image was highlighted again to be reprinted as a stamp, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the National Ballet of China.

The “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” step could be understood as an innovation combining movements from two traditions. First, it resembles the grand battement derrière of ballet, which features the dancer flapping her leg as high as possible behind her while keeping the rest of her body still. As such, the dancer, unlike in the new Chinese innovation, does not need to jump off the ground. The yangbanxi step is also indebted to a traditional Chinese opera dance movement, when the performer needed to kick back a “flower spear” thrown to her by raising a leg backward, but in opera the back leg is curved, and the performer also does not need to jump off the ground. It is in The Red Detachment of Women that this Chinese opera movement is merged into the ballet form, highlighting the dancer’s jumping skill as well as the stretching legs and toes that are also distinctly ballet-inspired. The original opera step requires the back-kicked leg to reach the crown the performer wears, but the dancer chose to stretch her leg as much as she could to make it look straight and long, complying with ballet aesthetics.²⁶ This photo was so influential partly because of the incredible body power and suppleness of the dancer, Xue Jinghua, and partly because of the body curve that was so sensational yet abstract. In a personal interview, Xue explained that this was also her favorite photograph. While many dancers tried to imitate this movement, she believed no one had really matched her own version. She also felt that it was this photo that had made her truly famous throughout China.²⁷

Why did this still become the iconic image of not only this ballet but the entire yangbanxi? We can compare it to other stills of the same piece, which are also widely distributed. For example, there is a still for the scene “Full of Anger” (Manqiang chouhen), which features Qinghua chained in Nan Ba Tian’s dungeon (Figure 6.3). Here we find that, despite her chain, Qinghua shows her strong willpower not to yield. In another still, we observe the moment Qinghua finally finds the military unit after a long journey of hardship in the scene “Accusation” (kongsu), and this is the critical redemption moment when her life changes course (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.3: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Full of Anger.”

Figure 6.4: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Accusation.”

With a weeping face and comforting flag, this photo has a strong narrative power, and viewers can easily identify, via the heroine, with the revolutionary discourse: the CCP would provide all the Chinese people with a new life. Another famous still shows Changqing leading Qinghua, showing the way to find the military unit; it is often called “Changqing Leading the Way” (Changqing zhilu) (Figure 6.5). This is probably the most romantic moment in the entire ballet, although this encounter was meant only to set up the “class” affinity of the two protagonists. All these three pictures are tightly connected to the storyline, and they are all very expressive and emotive. The figure “Changqing Leading the Way” clearly promotes romantic identification, while audiences come to pity her suffering in “Accusation.” There was a masochistic dimension in “Full of Anger,” although the tortured body was shown only briefly.

Figure 6.5: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Changqing Leading the Way.”

While “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” was clearly the most influential image among all the theatrical stills of this ballet, the female body featured in it was also the most abstract. In contrast to the clear emotion of Qinghua recorded in other photos, the sensation expressed in this still seems much more ambiguous. Qinghua in the red dress presents this step two times. It first appears when she wakes up from exhaustion after escaping from Nan Ban Tian. Seeing Changqing, a stranger, trying to save her, she struggles to escape with this step. It is seen again in another double dance, featuring Qinghua and another female fighter entering Nan Ba Tian’s estate secretly to prepare for an attack. When Qinghua first sees Nan Ba Tian, she is angry and wants to run to him, yet is stopped by her female partner in order to wait for a better opportunity (Figure 6.6).

Figure 6.6: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown,” (original paired dance).

The step is first presented to show her struggles to escape from the hero, while the second scene features same-sex dance. In these two scenes, the other dancers, coincidentally, both represent the party, while Qinghua performs the very challenging step in order to show her initial struggles to run away from the party’s kind help and disciplinary demand. But in the still, neither Changqing nor the female fellow soldier is shown. Evading the original dynamics between the two dancers, which externalize the psychological struggles of Qinghua between her strong personal revenge impulse and her submission to party discipline,²⁸ this photo now features an abstract red triangle composed of a determined but also soft female body. It is difficult to extract any concrete political meanings from this still, although there might still be the lingering attraction of the audience of the rebellious female agent.

Both Meng Yue and Bai Di have convincingly shown us how sexuality is depleted from the two ballet pieces in order to construct the empty notion of class invested in the female image.²⁹ Bai Di goes so far as to argue that the two ballet pieces are in fact feminist texts, because they destroy the sexual pleasure associated with the presentation of female as object, and class struggle is a shelter that facilitates women’s flight from their designated home and hearth. This interpretation matches the overall ideological environment of the time, but the sexual connotations of the female characters can never be done away with. Realizing how widely “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” decorated peasant homes and student dormitory rooms, Paul Clark observes that ballet model plays were read pornographically:

Despite the best efforts of the Cultural Revolution adapters of the two ballets, sex was not entirely removed from the picture. Audiences’ own assumptions or unsanctioned thoughts about what might happen, in another dance world perhaps, between Xi’er and Wang Dachun or between Qinghua and her instructor, could never be stamped out.³⁰

Between Bai Di’s and Clark’s opposite readings, one must wonder how the people meandered between ideological demands and their own personal desires when consuming these propaganda materials.

It is true that many still remember the female characters in The Red Detachment of Women as sexy, with attention paid particularly to their legs. Qinghua in the “Red Piece” is dressed primarily in two sets of costumes, symbolizing her different political and psychological conditions. She wears red, silky traditional dresses both before she is admitted to the military and when she goes back to attack Na Ba Tian, and she wears military outfits in the unit. The two looks are “sexy” in their own ways, but it was primarily in the military outfits that the dancers were voyeuristically gazed upon. In the military, all female soldier characters wear shorts and puttees, which is a long narrow piece of cloth wound tightly and spirally round the leg to the ankle, showing leg skin between the shorts and puttee (Figure 6.7). This look was invented for this ballet, corresponding to the actual military summer outfit of some divisions of the People’s Liberation Army at the time. But this look is also erotic. As the famous mainland writer Wang Shuo admits:

The most erotic performance during the revolutionary times was definitely The Red Detachment of Women. The female fighters all wear tight short pants showing half of their bare legs, and they carry their guns and hover from one side of the theater to another side one after another, with their two legs stretching into a straight line. They could by no means convince me that they are at war, but they are a group of beautiful women with beautiful legs showing us what the human body is. I have to admit, I always see ballet as erotic performance.³¹

Figure 6.7: Theater still, Red Detachment of Women, female dancers in the military units.

It is hard to say how many viewers were like Wang Shuo, and related to the dance sexually, but we do know that the association between sex and theater and film in the Cultural Revolution was to be found in many later cultural representations, most famously in Jiang Wen’s two nostalgic films, In the Heat of the Sun (1994) and The Sun also Rises (2007). An individual artist also recalls in the documentary Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works (directed by Tan Ying Yuan, 2005) that his first sexual feelings were indeed aroused by the dancing women wearing skin-tight military shorts in The Red Detachment of Women. There is clearly a mixture of cultural memory and cultural reconstruction that mediates our impression that sex was a main subtext of yangbanxi ballets.

I have no intention of denying the sexual connotations of the ballet, as people can read sex from pretty much anything, and it was a time when such desires were particularly prominent. In fact, during the Cultural Revolution, the army attire connoted not only militarism and masculinity, but sometimes also their opposites. It was recounted that some women cut their military outfits to tight-fit their figures, with specific focus on lowering the collar and narrowing the waist in order to highlight their attractive bodies.³² But specifically for this “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” still, Qinghua is featured in loose red dress instead of a military uniform. The ballet might invite audiences’ sexual fantasies, but this particular still should not be understood only in terms of sexual gratification. In addition to the fetishization of femininity, the photo also demonstrates an abstract beauty of a woman striving for power and freedom. There is a strong sense of aesthetic perfection, as well as body discipline, clothed in the silky, red, traditional outfit, offering a dynamics of suppleness and determination, passivity and activity. In many discussions of gender appropriation, the criticism of the objectification of the female sex is often directed against the all-powerful and conquering male subject, polarizing the passive female object against an active male subject trying to control and possess her. Here I would delay this reading in order to explore the more dynamic subject formation elicited in this image, made possible by the specific context of the time.

A strong cultural mark of ballet is the extreme body discipline demanded of female dancers. Professional ballet dancers have to demonstrate a high level of coordination and mental acuity, which can only be achieved through years of hard training and self-discipline. The demands placed on the Chinese female dancers of the revolutionary ballets were even higher, as they had to engage in many leaps and highly demanding physical movements to show the revolutionary spirit they embodied. Worse, unlike their Western counterparts—who performed ballets in a more protected manner—the Chinese dancers during the Cultural Revolution had to perform for the masses. There were only two major ballet companies in China during the Cultural Revolution, and dancers were deployed to stage performances all over China. Top ballerina Zhao Ruheng laments that she was forced to end her ballet career much earlier than usual because of the many performances she had to endure during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution.³³

Corresponding to the powerful model culture, there was a strong body politics at work during the Cultural Revolution, so all citizens had to assume a similar set of gestures, clothing, and ways of speaking. It was the fit body of the laborer that was glorified, and all the heroes and heroines featured in the propaganda culture were physically strong, agile, and robust, emphasizing their big hands, broad shoulders, and physical fitness. The Cultural Revolution involved a huge campaign of bodily reengineering. There were many rituals invented, such as “loyal dancing,” and many political gatherings also featured the torturing of class enemies as a major attraction.³⁴ The idea was to construct a new Chinese body in the first case and reform an old Chinese body in the second. In the famous “jet plane style” (penqishi), the class enemy was pressed to give a ninety-degree bow to the audience, with arms and feet straight, and he or she had to maintain this posture for hours on a stage until the gathering ended (figure 6.8).

Figure 6.8: Jet-plane style.

Almost all these political acts were treated as performances, and the calculation of affective presentation and sensuous identification was essential. A former Red Guard, Li Bin, recalls, “I would never act alone, and we always conducted revolutionary acts in a group. All in all, I cannot do it without gaining attention. I need others to see, like staging a show.”³⁵ Staging and presenting were the political act’s main purposes, and without the audience and address the action itself became meaningless. Another important set of meanings resided in the effect on those being penalized. The demands for body twisting and difficult balancing could also be found in many other torturous performances, such as standing and sometimes bowing on a stack of chairs—not entirely unlike the acrobatic actions found in the yangbanxi ballets. Xie Yinlin, then a student at Tsinghua University, recalls the ways in which she was tortured when she was captured by an opposing Red Guards group:

They pushed me to the wall, forced me to press my body toward the wall. My head, my back, and my ankles all had to touch the wall. And then they asked me to squat down, with my back and ankles still pressed to the wall. This is an impossible movement. When I tried to squat down like this, I lost my balance quickly, and I fell. But they forced me to do it again and again … That was repeated hundreds of times, and I was so exhausted I could not even stand up again.³⁶

This is as much a bodily torment as military or dancing training. The Cultural Revolution could be seen as a nationwide project of body torturing and body engineering, and these rituals were highly performative and mimetic. Torturing methods were invented and quickly copied around the country, and people in different parts of China were particularly keen on knowing and practicing the new presentations from Shanghai and Beijing, so that the way a few Red Guards in Beijing released their leather belts to beat up class enemies was quickly adopted nationwide, to the extent that the wearing of a wide leather belt became a fashion among the youth.³⁷

Li Qian, a former Red Guard, recounts his resolute belief in the Maoist exaltation of human willpower (rending shengtian), thus his inventive responses to hunger during his imprisonment:

It was the summer of 1969. In the midst of hunger suffering I suddenly wanted to combat hunger, and I conducted a spiritual challenge to materiality. I started to train my body flexibility under that kind of hungry conditions. I kicked and split my legs, bending over and over, in ways that were almost life-risking. Until I completely ran out of energy, I asked my young cellmates to help stretch my legs as much as possible while I was lying down … I told myself silently: I had to persist, and I had to use my spirit to win materially. After a few days, my body became a bit suppler, but little red spots, which were neither painful nor itchy, also appeared all over my body … Later I realized that they were signs of broken capillaries.³⁸

We should pay attention to his equation between “spirit” and “body” in this life-risking project—the youngster tested his willpower by torturing his own body, almost like the Nazi body aesthetics. But it is also interesting to observe that Li Qian did not choose to train his body power, instead focusing on flexibility. This is due largely, I believe, to his actual malnutrition, but I also believe a certain yangbanxi aesthetics developed from ballet, and the traditional opera performance was also in play, so that he would come up with the idea of stretching his legs and bending over to prove his spiritual power. This was the Maoist spirit, whose power was most violently or imaginatively carried out by the human body.

While the most prominent ideology of the Cultural Revolution was probably the enormous power of the human will, the female body often became the most invested embodiment of this will, demonstrated by invincible heroines fighting against natural disaster and material limitations. Ballet seemed to strike a congruous chord with the overall cultural milieu in terms of body discipline. The years of professional training required for the ballet might have prevented most Chinese people from performing it, but the hidden desire for body torture and body perfection implicit in the Cultural Revolution discourse offered an alternative pleasure for people in consuming ballets, indirectly revealed in these popular images.

There were many different ways in which individuals related to the photograph “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown.” The sexual connotations might have been there, but we should not ignore the modeling effects by overemphasizing the pornographic reading. As demonstrated, the model was an extremely important political concept during the Cultural Revolution, and these pictures were models par excellence, capturing the most “perfect” body as politically sublime. This body could be understood as the objectified other that gratifies the all-powerful self, but it could also be understood as an ideal self to be achieved—a yearning for the promise of the revolution. One reading featured fetishization and the other narcissism: the two directions did not necessarily cancel each other out but rather allowed the subject to be formed in multiple ways. The abstract form of ballet seemed to be particularly effective in facilitating this multi-leveled identification network, both resisting and reinforcing the politicization of the dance form.

The Porcelain

Sculpture and theater could be seen as two of the most ideologically symbolic art forms when it came to constructing models. There was an interesting convergence between the two art forms in the Cultural Revolution. For example, the famous Rent Collection Courtyard sculptural series, one of the most important works of plastic arts in PRC’s history, was designed as a piece of theater, to ensure a certain emotional journey of the visitors along the scenes they watched in sequence. Denise Ho and Jie Li discovered that the clay artists did not create the statues based on their imaginations but rather invited both ordinary people and local opera performers to pose for them.³⁹ They even went to the local Buddhist and Daoist temples to learn how the ghosts, deities, and arhats were depicted. In other words, this exhibition was based not only on traditional clay arts but also opera arts and local religious imagery, pertaining not only to the socialist worldview but also the feudal one.

One major formal innovation introduced to the revolutionary ballet was the Chinese operatic liangxiang, referring to the act of major characters striking a pose after they walked on stage (see Figure 6.1, above). This act in traditional Chinese theater is meant to attract the attention of the audience to the featured performer, connecting the person on stage and those in the auditorium for the upcoming virtuoso performance. In a modern setting, this act of liangxiang could be the perfect moment for photographic stills. In yangbanxi ballet, liangxiang was not just mechanically added to the dances but was organically welded into the performance. We can see careful choreography featuring tabloid frozen poses alongside dynamic dance steps.

The relations between action and portrait were of enormous importance to the choreography of The Red Detachment of Women. The official interpretation states:

In the tension between motion and stillness, the revolutionary ballets put much emphasis on posture. The piece designed many still stage portraits for Hong Changqing and Wu Qinghua. Through the many exquisite statues constructed on stage, different facets of the sublime spiritual dimension of the heroes and heroines are presented.⁴⁰

This introduction of still stage portraits to a dance can be understood in relation to the modeling effect: turning a living character into a motionless statue and fixing certain fleeting qualities into eternity was a significant aspect of the propaganda culture. Other than photography, ceramic reproduction of these yangbanxi figures could also serve this function. As Laurence Coderre reminds us, the notion of suzao (molding), which derives from ceramic arts, was a very important concept in Cultural Revolution propaganda culture, the aim of which was precisely to mold individuals.⁴¹

The most important figurative art in China is clearly porcelain. However, porcelain studios and factories were prominent targets of the campaign against the “Four Old Things” (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, as the art was viewed as feudal and elitist. In Jingdezhen, which had been the “porcelain capital” of China since the Song dynasty, all activity came to a halt in 1966. Not only were all figurines featuring traditional beauties and religious figures condemned and destroyed, but even decorative utensils such as vases and teapots were considered decadent. At the same time, all foreign trading activities were banned, and the internationally famous Jingdezhen Porcelain Factory, which had relied heavily on exports, had to shift its market to local products.⁴² A major collective project carried out by the Jingdezhen artists was to create the biggest porcelain Mao statue ever made, with a height of 2.5 meters.⁴³ This project was meant to display the loyalty of the artists and the factory to Mao and the revolution, but this attempt was conducted against the nature of porcelain, a fragile material that does not favor large size. With many failed attempts and many creative solutions tried, the project took more than two years of collective effort to realize, and the statue was exhibited in Jinggangshan in 1968.

However, such a political project did not generate funds to support the continued survival of the factory, which had to keep producing commodities to pay its salaries and support families. Artists began to create different porcelain Mao statues for sale, and they also realized that animal figures were not considered reactionary, so animals comprised a major genre of Cultural Revolution porcelain arts. In addition to Mao figurines, new model figures of workers, peasants, and soldiers were also created. But none of them sold well, largely because the domestic demand was very weak, and people had no spare money to buy porcelain to decorate their homes.⁴⁴ Although it was demanded that factories should operate to their full production capacities, it was a depressing period for this factory, whose products by nature fell behind the pace of the revolution.

Shiwan, another major national porcelain production site in Guangdong Province, was slightly more fortunate in being able to sail through the political movement. While Jingdezhen suffered much from class struggle activities and the halt of exports, the Shiwan Ceramic Arts Factory maintained its production relatively smoothly, partly because its market had always been domestically based.⁴⁵ According to Liu Zemian, a Shiwan ceramic master who had been in the trade since the 1950s, the factory also engaged mostly in the production of Mao statues in the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. These ranged from smaller statues—around 15 to 20 centimeters tall and priced below 1 RMB—to larger ones priced up to 10 RMB. The small statues sold well due to the newfound needs and desires of many families to pay their daily respects to Mao.

When the policy of promoting yangbanxi reached both ceramic factories, artists began to make figurines modeled after famous theatrical characters. Unlike the Mao statues that many families were willing to purchase, there was not a large market for these yangbanxi figures. Some Western critics assert that a typical gift for a newlywed couple during the Cultural Revolution was a color ceramic statue of the Xi’er-Dachuan pair.⁴⁶ Many current dealers of Cultural Revolution porcelain (wenge ci) also claim that revolutionary porcelain home decorations were a sign of the time. Such accounts are clearly exaggerated. As Liu Yuanchang, who was a young Jingdezhen artist at the time, recalls, most peasants and workers, barely on the breadline, found no reason to spend the little money they had on these decorative commodities. He also remembers that the major buyers of their porcelain products were actually the few hotels still operating in China, not the ordinary people. Ceramic arts professor Cao Chunsheng explains that most of the Cultural Revolution porcelains now in the market were faked, as there were only very few made, and even fewer would be retained.⁴⁷ Due to the low demand and the full operation of the factory, the craftsmen were able to focus their time and energy on a small number of commodities, so Cultural Revolution porcelains were often very fine in quality. The mass-produced products that are more coarse are usually not products of the Cultural Revolution.

Due to its rarity, Cultural Revolution porcelain is now fetishized as a symbol off the time, as shown by the large number of knockoffs produced, and the huge sales activity taking place online and in auction rooms. Ironically, while its decorative function made porcelain unfit for revolutionary times, this commodity status facilitated its transition into the post-Maoist period with ease. Cultural Revolution porcelain has been quickly reappropriated to embody the current nostalgia for the everyday life of the past. This fad is based on a contemporary consumerist desire that did not exist at the time. This is particularly complicated in my case study, as both the material (ceramic) and the content (the ballerina) connote a femininity readily available for objectification and collection.

Zhang Yuxian, now a porcelain master in Jingdezhen and then a porcelain disciple in the factory, recalls that he had very little to do at that time and could devote much time to making perfect figures.⁴⁸ In an interview, he revealed that one figure of which he was very proud was a white-haired Xi’er from the ballet The White-Haired Girl (Figure 6.9). This porcelain figure is depicted in an arabesque position en pointe, and we can find very delicate facial expressions and hair details that show her strong emotions. The fragility and elegance of porcelain seem to match the equally delicate ballet dance. Zhang recalls that this figure was not an order from his seniors; he created it for his own amusement. He was dumbfounded after watching his first ballet show, particularly attracted by the beauty and gracefulness of the ballerina who happened to pass by his seat when she came down from the stage to greet the audience after the show. As a junior worker in a downtrodden porcelain factory, he could spend his spare time—which was considerable—molding this figure to perfection. The most delicate part was the en pointe, as such a small touching point made the model very unstable, meaning it could easily collapse during the firing process.

Figure 6.9: Zhang Yuxian, The White-Haired Girl, porcelain, 1973, provided by Zhang Yuxian.

Compared with the 2.5-meter Mao portrait figure painstakingly made by the Jingdezhen Porcelain Factory, this figurine is actually a much more “adequate” porcelain art. It is true that this Xi’er figure is distinctly emotional and theatrical compared with the traditional figures the factory once produced, and we also see a pair of disproportionately big and strong hands that might contradict her delicate face, but we can still observe a certain sense of fragility and serenity in the figure that is inherent in the material. Because porcelain is so brittle, it must be treated mindfully and protectively, making it an art form that is by nature resistant to monumentality and grandeur. The history of porcelain is one of craftiness, and experimentation was directed primarily at subtle details: refining the clay to give rise to more shapes, enriching the pigments to give more colors to the products, advancing the artists’ painting and molding skills for finer shapes, and creating more possible forms for utensils and figures. None of these acts could readily be appropriated by the revolutionary discourse. In this Xi’er figure, we see special artistic attention given to the ballet shoes and elongated legs, and there is a sense of feminine gracefulness that cannot easily be found in other Cultural Revolution cultural products. Ballet seems to have enlivened this ceramic art form, as there is a certain aesthetic congruity between ballet and porcelain: both are not easily induced by or reducible to the masculine revolutionary discourse.

Liu Zemian in Shiwan also recalled the loyal devotion he gave to yangbanxi figures. One figure of which he was very proud was also a ballerina—this time a female soldier from The Red Detachment of Women. But, unlike Zhang Yuxian, whose production of Xi’er was motivated by a private experience, Liu’s production was a part of a collective project. He recounts how much he and his young colleagues were devoted to their jobs, and how, with the practice of collective authorship, they often worked together to make a collection of related figures—not unlike the much bigger clay figures found in the famous Rent Collection Courtyard.

The porcelain workers were particularly fond of producing scenes of yangbanxi pieces, which could be combined to show the entire narrative. These works were not created to be bought but were meant to be toured around adjacent areas for exhibition. However, the craftsmen seldom had the chance to watch the actual performances, since they were rare. Liu Zemian and his colleagues created The Red Detachment of Women figures by watching the film and studying the photographic reprints, so that the porcelain figure was a third degree of appropriation. When presented in a set, these smaller figurines—each around 10 to 20 centimeters—shared the same political function of the 2.5-meter-high porcelain Mao statue created in Jingdezhen, as they were all meant to display the revolutionary spirit of the time. They were made not to be possessed, but rather to teach and be admired. When I asked Liu Zemian, now in his seventies, whether he associated any sexual or romantic fantasy with the ballerinas, he seemed to be amused and laughed. He said most of his peers were morally pure and dedicated to their jobs during those times, and he really treasures those years of simple naiveté as a foundation to continue his artistic life. We could interpret this innocence as a repression, but I have no reason to doubt his sincere identification with his work, particularly if he was convinced that these figures were given the sacred mission of conveying the revolutionary spirit to the masses.

Porcelain captures the female yangbanxi dancer in a form that readily invites male objectification. Here she does not move, but is small and smooth, inviting the owner’s appreciation and fondling. The plasticity of the captured movement also coincides with people’s infantile desire to see inanimate objects coming alive. But during the Cultural Revolution, most people could not afford to purchase them, and these figures were meant to be exhibited and appreciated from afar. Although the porcelain representation facilitated the objectification of “her,” the material conditions of the time disallowed any easy possession of these objects, denying the seer any simple ways to become the owner and consolidate “his” subject position. This can be compared with the nineteenth-century Paris of Walter Benjamin, where people were mesmerized by the commodities they saw in shop windows. To Benjamin, the commodity-on-display has a mythical power to glorify progress.⁴⁹ It was a time when most Parisians could not afford to buy these commodities, and precisely due to this unaffordability—yet with the products within reach—the lure of possession was carved into the nature of these objects. In contrast, Cultural Revolution porcelain was not meant to be a commodity, so the cult dimension was even stronger. If the Cultural Revolution objects also embody a promise of progress, they signify not only material abundance and industrial advancement but also an ultimate emancipation—which was even more abstract, and consequently more alluring.

Between Subject and Object

It is true that we should not idealize the people at that time as morally pure and deprived of all human desires, but we must recognize that their political and economic conditions were drastically different from our own. Without the mechanism to facilitate the desire of possession, the subject position formed on the part of the appreciating audience could not comfortably appropriate the female yangban figure as a vulnerable object. Zhang Yuxian’s making of his Xi’er might have been inspired by sexual attraction, and he transformed his beloved image into an object. But this possession was a privileged one, and the pleasure of private possession was not available to many people, who therefore understood “objects” slightly differently from how we do in a capitalist-liberalist environment. If there is really a set of universal human natures, the social structure and conditions help express and repress these natures selectively.

Both the “Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown” photo and The White-Haired Girl porcelain are portraitures of yangbanxi ballerinas, but the main formal differences between them as propaganda products lie in the former’s two-dimensional flatness, which is deprived of the actual physical volume and weight that define the materiality of the latter. Meanwhile, the fragility of porcelain makes it hard to handle, in contrast to the easy reproduction and low prices of photographic printing. Predictably, it was the wide circulation of the theatrical stills among the masses that promoted the ballet, while the porcelain portraitures remained special objects, affordable only for the very few. The two tie-in products betray the different dimensions of Cultural Revolution yangbanxi fetishism, and together remind us that individuals were not completely passive, waiting to be molded by the revolutionary discourse, but they also related to the official models in different ways. No subjects could be formed without a certain room for freedom already built in, and particularly in modern times one has to be convinced of a feeling of voluntary choice and decision to be effectively interpellated into an ideology. The ways these “subjects” related to “objects” were important in facilitating their subject formation.

This voluntary dimension of subject formation also found a unique ramification in the collection culture then. The Cultural Revolution was a period of scarcity. The concept of commodity in a world of material abundance could not be applied there, as basically all objects were possessed to be used immediately. But, clandestinely, a culture of collection also developed among the people, and the burgeoning Cultural Revolution commodity market existing in today’s PRC is not only a result of the current market economy: people at that time had already started collecting. As rich families tried all they could to get rid of their feudal or bourgeois collections, which could cost their lives in 1966, quickly many common people began to collect the newly available revolutionary objects, from little newspapers to Mao batches, from Red Guard armbands to all kinds of stamps and tickets. An extreme example is Fan Jianchuan, who is the owner of the gigantic Jianchuan Museum Cluster in Anren, Sichuan.⁵⁰ He admits that his hobby of collecting began in 1966 when he was nine years old, when he collected his first Mao batch and propaganda pamphlet. They became the sacred roots of the millions of his collection displayed in his museum complex.⁵¹

While Fan is clearly an exceptional character, many people did develop a habit of, and interest in, collecting revolutionary objects of the time, in whatever ways they could afford. We could consider object collection a universal human desire, but in the context of the Cultural Revolution these revolutionary objects could be seen as embodying the official ideology, and the act of collection could be read as a means for people to come to terms with the revolution. As collectables, these objects traversed the boundaries of the sacred and the secular, observing the tensions between the subject who owned them and the ideology which made them powerful. Although the term “master” (zhuren) was a master trope in the Cultural Revolution, and the people were always reminded that they were now masters, there were always other masters behind each master, as the chain of subjectification never ends.

CHAPTER 7

Mao as Doxa

This chapter and Chapter 8 focus on two very prominent models that were neither mofan nor yangban, as they were not meant to be modeled from. But there were still incessant copying efforts to proliferate them, making them highly visible in society. We could call them sublime figures that define right and wrong, weaving the ideological quilt together. While both mofan and yangban embodied Maoist ideology and encouraged the people to imitate them for the acquisition of the revolutionary spirit, there were models that the revolutionary masses could not become; rather, they stood beyond the ordinary people, to be loved and to be hated. They became rituals, repeatedly performed to guide subject formation. If the previous three chapters explore how the construction of the new Maoist subject was central to the political project of the Cultural Revolution, this chapter and the following one demonstrate that subject formation happened anyway, whether or not it aligned with the official mandate. I am interested in analyzing how ritualistic treatments of the Leader and the enemies helped the revolution forge and challenge political unity.

In this chapter, I first focus on Mao. Although Barbara Mittler emphasizes repeatedly in her book on Cultural Revolution propaganda culture that audiences were participatory instead of simply indoctrinated, a main thesis of her study is precisely the domination of Mao over all facets of the people’s cultural life, so that the overwhelming presence and proliferation of MaoMusic, MaoArt, MaoSpeak (using her words) contributed to the univalent culture, “chaining” the reader and audience to think and believe only one thing, to various degrees of success in different cases.¹ I agree with her general observation, but we still have to work out a way to comprehend the contradiction between participation and indoctrination. Here I would like to further investigate the relationship between Mao and his people with the notion of doxa, which can more subtly demonstrate how the people interacted with Mao in their everyday lives, problematizing both notions of submission and autonomy.

As I have mentioned in Chapter 2, those who claimed Mao’s persona and wrote in his name, such as Chen Mingyuan, were severely punished, but the regime encouraged the people to write in Maoist style and to draw Mao—in both cases the distance between Mao and the people was kept intact, and such imitations were also ways to show loyalty, receive blessings, and be enlightened. Official Mao portraits were produced by a few painters still accepted by the state, like Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Zhenshi, and Wang Guodong, while literally millions of amateur painters also copied Mao’s portraits—mostly for all kinds of propaganda activities, and sometimes as a leisure pastime, along with the drawing of traditional bamboo and mountains. Reproduction went wild. According to Robert Benewick’s estimates, between 2.5 and 5 billion Mao badges were produced in China, representing more than 20,000 designs made of twenty-seven different kinds of material.² It has been claimed that during the period 1966–70, some 4.1 billion Mao portraits of varying types were published in the country.³ More than 900 million copies of the propaganda poster featuring Liu Chunhua’s painting Chairman Mao to Anyuan—a painting that was meant to rewrite the party history of the 1922 Anyuan Labor Movement—were produced in a country with a population of 700 million.⁴

While the traditional emulation theory does not apply to Mao because there was only one Mao and no one could be him, I would like to show that Mao and his works were so extensively scrutinized and anatomized that he was also inevitably turned into cliché. His images were so widely seen and copied that they directly contribute to our general understanding of the Cultural Revolution as an age of brainwashing. But the power of appropriation remains in the masses, in a similar way to how the porcelain artist shaped his favorite ballet character. In other words, Mao was both the sublime model and all the hackneyed copies, showing how society was dominated by both a vertical Maoist mandate and a horizontal social mimesis. This chapter works to come to terms with the contradiction of these activities as both manifestations of a cult conditioning people’s ignorant submission and part of the dominant social formation that fashioned common sense and predictability in an age of extreme instability. Extending this set of contradictions, I would also like to ask whether, if the people had to identify with Mao faithfully, should they also have appropriated Mao’s revolutionary spirit, which would ultimately lead them to challenge the authority of Mao? If people identified with Mao to topple the existing structure, to what degree should Mao himself, as the ultimate holder of power, also be overthrown? Mao empowered the people not only to become the same but also to be different—to depend on others but also to be independent. Although many see Mao’s omnipresence as evidence of a homogeneous society, the Cultural Revolution was also a period ridden by contradictions between order and disorder.

Mao as Cult

By way of introduction, let me begin with the Mao cult, which has been most commonly used as a concept to understand the relationship between Mao and the people. Daniel Leese has meticulously documented that the Mao cult could be traced back to the Yan’an period—particularly during the Rectification Campaign of 1942–3, which officiated “Mao Zedong Thought.”⁵ Both the 1942 Rectification Campaign and the Anti-Japanese War were important factors contributing to the rapid rise of the cult, as people needed unifying images and a singular discourse to fight internal and external enemies. After Liberation, the Mao cult was legitimized further. If traditional superstition had to go, the idolization of the Chairman could replace it. In a 1970 interview, Mao candidly acknowledged the existence of a Mao cult in China, and associated his personality cult with an ancient emperor-worshiping tradition.⁶ According to Maurice Meisner, this suggests that Mao was well aware of the social origins of his own cult—conscious that the cult flourished because China was still basically a peasant land dominated by old rural traditions.⁷

But the Mao cult had undergone much transformation during these three decades. A first turning pointing was Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, in which the Stalinist cult was criticized and condemned as the source of many political problems developed in the Soviet Union. The speech prompted Mao and the CCP to review all policies that might lead to the cult of personality. To prevent China from running into the sorry state of affairs seen in the Soviet Union, Mao and his comrades took many measures to prevent the rise of personal worship in communist China.⁸ Most symbolically, the People’s Daily published an editorial on April 5, 1956, entitled “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” defining the personality cult as a “rotten, poisonous remnant” of the exploiting classes, a habitual leftover of patriarchal traditions like emperor or tsar worship that had to be rooted out through continuous socialist education.⁹ But the Mao cult was readopted in the Great Leap Forward to articulate a uniquely Chinese path to communism, so that by cherishing Mao the Chinese were to discard the Soviet model and to sketch out their own path to communism. On June 17, 1963, the People’s Daily reprinted the letter of the CCP to the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) to rebuke the latter’s suggestion for the peaceful coexistence of the socialist and capitalist worlds, which was seen as a betrayal of world communism. Mao became the only legitimate leader of the third world. By 1966, the cult was no longer a governance tool of a new regime, or a result of Mao’s own aggrandized self-image.¹⁰ Instead, it was heavily intertwined with a ferocious revolution, in which the revolutionary community could not be realized without each individual member worshipping Mao as the common object of desire. The Red Guards displayed particularly strong emotions and loyalty to Mao. They studied Mao’s writing, participated in pilgrimages to Beijing to see him in person, and engaged in ritualistic activities around objects related to him, such as the mangos presented by the Pakistani government to Mao. The ordinary people also needed to pay ritualistic respect to the Mao portrait every morning and every night.

Many historians read the Cultural Revolution as the result of Mao’s political insecurity and ambitions. Rebecca Karl reminds us that his self-initiated exile from power in the early 1960s contributed directly to the exponential growth of the Mao cult.¹¹ Tuo Wang also believes that the many Maoist rituals and cult activities developed in the Cultural Revolution were meant to facilitate the direct communication between the people and Mao.¹² But the Cultural Revolution Mao cult was clearly not something Mao directly engineered. Jiang Qing’s role is considered substantial. She launched the “Three Loyalties Four Infinities” political campaign in 1967, which asked the people to be loyal to Chairman Mao, loyal to his thinking, and loyal to his proletarian revolution; people were also to devote their infinite admiration, passion, belief, and faithfulness to Mao—his thinking as well as his revolution. Lin Biao institutionalized the Mao cult in the army. Even Zhou Enlai was accused of pulling strings behind the scenes, as he deliberately overstressed the dominant role Mao played in consolidating the CCP and in winning the wars that led to the establishment of the PRC in the 1964 epic performance The East Is Red (Dongfang hong), which Zhou directly supervised. The East Is Red, allegedly modeled after North Korean revolutionary music drama, is a theatrical performance featuring songs and dances that reenacts the history of the CCP and proves the moral legitimacy of the PRC. Its task of merging history and theatrical performance is also widely considered the prototype of the yangbanxi project to come.

It is true that the Mao cult manifested many vested interests, but it was not on the original agenda of the Cultural Revolution regime. After a year of anarchy, the regime was desperate for control, and the Mao cult seemed to be the only effective means for the ruling regime to unite a country submerged in countless civil wars. According to Leese, the origin of the ritualistic worship of Mao that gained widespread currency in China could be traced back to Mao’s special PLA Unit 8314 being dispatched to the Beijing General Knitting Mill to unite two contending mass organizations in 1967. This Central Guard unit took the approach of propagating Mao Zedong Thought to both factions, encouraging them to study Mao and pay respect to Mao in a military fashion. As the approach soon proved successful to stop faction fighting, the CCP Central Committee decided to endorse such ritualistic practices nationwide, with the hope of imposing order on a chaotic country. But this decision only aggrandized the Mao cult, which was already spiraling out of control. Many of the loyalty rituals and representations had been grassroots inventions to demonstrate people’s love and faithfulness; ironically, once they were officially endorsed, the CCP failed to control them, resulting in cult anarchy.¹³ It was only when the state resumed most of its power in the early 1970s that this cult was gradually contained. In 1971, a main policy associated with the campaign against Chen Boda was precisely the suppression of the Mao cult. It is recorded that at the 1971 Guangzhou Trade Fair, the associate director of the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, Qiao Guanhua, walked through every corner of the exhibition site to take down or tune down all posters, facades, and quotations of Chairman Mao to give the correct “image” of China to the world.¹⁴ The unstructured and impulsive identification of the people with Mao became history, and the Mao cult of the 1970s was mediated by the state and many interested parties.

This history shows that the Mao cult was never unified and consistent, but there were many discursive and nondiscursive forces at play. This is the case for Mao Zedong Thought too. A common difficulty when studying Mao and his ideas relates to the many internal contradictions found within his own thinking. One is almost always able to find something from Mao’s corpus to support one’s ideas, yet the exact opposite is also likely to be present if one makes enough effort. Perhaps Mao himself was thoroughly dialectical, always willing to think about the world from many different perspectives, refusing to allow his own thought to become static. Or maybe he was just not a very consistent person. Also, Maoism is not the thought of one person, since Mao’s speeches and writings were often influenced or penned by his colleagues, such as Ai Siqi, Li Da, Chen Boda, Zhou Yang, Hu Qiaomu, and Zhang Chunqiao. For this reason, Mao is more of a textual site than a single and coherent philosopher.

Mao was not always manifested in the form of a cult in the vast land of China, even during the Cultural Revolution; indeed, there were people who did not show him any respect. Clare Harris demonstrates that when the Tibetans were stripped of their religious imagery and forced to display posters of Chairman Mao in their homes and workplaces during the Cultural Revolution, they slept with their feet facing them, showing their disgust at his images by consciously inverting a traditional practice in which images of particular deities are touched with the head in a gesture of respect.¹⁵ This might be an extreme case, but it reminds us that many people did not see Mao as a deity, but rather as a human being, or even a political myth. In turn, painstaking efforts were made to constantly conceal the fact that Mao was only a construction.

Mao as Doxa

Focusing too much on Mao as cult risks overemphasizing the people’s submissiveness, failing to see how, to many people, their “sociality” around Mao was more important than Mao himself. Or, there is always intense interlacing between the spiritual and the material, the subjective and the intersubjective, in these cult events, and we need to find ways to unravel the entwining. We can use the concept of doxa as one theoretical tool to make sense of the relationship between Mao and the people.¹⁶ Doxa is a Greek term used by Aristotle to describe people’s common opinions, general beliefs, and typical expectations that form the basis of their sense of community and communication. Recently, Pierre Bourdieu used this term to demonstrate that every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness, so that the people can be given a sense of limits beyond which they cannot go. According to Bourdieu, doxa is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident.”¹⁷ From Aristotle to Bourdieu, doxa is usually understood as common sense, in contrast to people’s imagination of the ideal on the one hand and their individual creativity on the other. It describes the confines within which humans interact with each other, and it defines people’s conscious and semi-conscious calculations in a secular society.

If we can read the Mao cult along the concept of doxa, we might be able to understand how the worship was also a part of social formation. Let me go back to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The big-character poster, a form of handwritten poster mounted in public areas as a means of political communication, was not a new invention of the Cultural Revolution but had already been widely used during the 1957 Anti-Rightists Movement. But the reinvigoration of the use of these posters as a means to display mass class struggle and radical democracy was driven by a series of spontaneous events that took place in Beijing in May 1966, showing how quickly society formed a consensus of the presentation of the revolution. Nie Yuanzi, a party cadre working in Peking University’s Philosophy Department, wrote and posted her big-character poster on campus on May 25 with some of her colleagues, criticizing the leaders of the university. Nie recounted that her poster was meant as a response to the May 16 Notification—the party’s official announcement of the Cultural Revolution, containing her own personal grievances and resentments.¹⁸ A few days later, some secondary-school students also used big-character posters to pledge their loyalty to Mao. Mao subsequently published his own in early August, and announced a direct relationship between himself and the people. This poster became a major symbol of the ongoing Mao cult. These dramatic acts reinforced each other to make this propaganda practice epidemic. The initiation of the Cultural Revolution was neither a wire pulled by the Leader nor a consensus people reached on their own. Instead, it involved a series of radical decisions made by different players, which were also somehow loosely orchestrated by a central locus of power. The notion of the Mao cult does not have the analytic power to explore what the sudden popularity of this propaganda meant in the initiation of the revolution, although Mao clearly played a key role.

Instead of seeing Mao as cult, we could read Mao as doxa, in the sense that loving Mao was in the air and part of people’s everyday life; there was no alternative. It is true that revolution could be understood as a logic opposite to doxa. However, doxa does not disappear in a revolution. Let us examine another event that took place at around the same time: a personal appearance by Mao. In the summer of 1966, the seventy-three-year-old Chairman decided to swim across the Yangzi River again. Watched by many admiring people, he took one hour and five minutes to swim the open and turbulent river. It is generally understood that this widely publicized and glorified act was Mao’s personal political showcase, giving him an opportunity to display his naked but still healthy body in front of the entire nation and his political enemies, with the aim of showing off the political ability and power he still possessed. As this act demonstrated, Mao was highly sensitive to his own body image, and he also displayed a strong narcissism despite his advanced age. Immediately after this event, the famous article, “We Need a Helmsman to Steer through the Sea,” was published in the People’s Daily, agitating the people to rebel against all capitalist authority by following the Helmsman.¹⁹

We can comprehend this event by emphasizing how Mao used his body to attract people’s sensual attention. But we must also admit that, to most ordinary eyes, this seventy-year-old male body was not attractive at all. I believe that the fetishization of this body was a part of the doxa. There were two bodies of Mao being featured in this media event: Mao’s immortal body as the incarnation of the permanent revolution, and Mao’s mortal body, which was clearly senescent. Probably to the amazement of many contemporary eyes, which clearly see an aged mortal body, the Chinese people chose to see only the immortal body. It was through the people’s complicit but active interpretation that Mao was able to collapse the entire revolution onto his body, allowing his flesh to become the avatar of all the wildest revolutionary activities through the propagation of his image. This was due not only to the relative absence of ageism in Confucian culture but also to an underlying culture of seeing and political doxa conditioning the significations of Mao’s image—a doxa well prepared in the previous decades. In other words, it was common sense at that time to see Mao as the agile and strong political leader. Seeing him otherwise was beyond what the doxa permitted and was too dangerous. Freely applying the popular culture concept of textual poaching to speculate on the free interpretation of the people against the dominant coding can be risky, because it ignores the intense working of the doxa in any society. The doxa is constructed by social intersubjectivity, which allows us to gain a different perspective to understand the model: the direct influences of the model on the followers might be less important than the ways the followers interact around the model.

Ernst Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, explains the political theology behind the European medieval kingship, in which the King is the perpetual actualization of all royal potencies. He demonstrates that the King never dies, and is free from the imbecility of infancy and the defects of old age because he is conceptualized with two bodies: his natural body and the body politic. There were many attempts in medieval Europe to come to terms with the King’s two bodies, and Christian theology played an important role in linking the King to Christ in order to help the people understand how the King was more than an ordinary human being.²⁰ Based on Kantorowicz’s classic book, Eric Santner further demonstrates that entering the modern age it is the Emperor’s second body, that is, his body politic, that was gradually transformed into the master trope that allowed for different manners of secular entities—including, above all, the state and its various offices and institutions—to form the modern sovereignty.²¹ The “fleshy excess” discharged by royal authority persists into modern Europe, and the royal remains are channeled into the advent of popular sovereignty, generating novel pressures and excitations on every citizen as individual bearer of sovereign power.²² Santner’s analysis diverts our attention from the King himself to the social institutions developed around him as a concept, and reminds us that along the track of modernization, the royal remains in the new bearer of sovereignty: the people.

Although Santner finds new ways of exploring the self-empowerment of the European people entering modern society, and his analysis of the French Revolution is fascinating, his analysis remains relatively linear and hierarchical. He suggests that the people still needed to rely on the superior position of the king, who secreted a “sublime flesh,” to make sense of the new symbolic order and their own newfound power. I do not want to counter his specifically European analysis here, but I do want to show that in late-imperial China, there seems to be more direct links between the court and the people, giving the latter more room to develop their own power structure. There, Confucianism played an important role in constructing the link between the immortality of the Emperor and the lineage of the Confucian families, integrating local society with the state. As David Faure demonstrates, starting in the Ming dynasty, the local people came to identify with the state by following the ways the emperor practiced ancestral rituals, so that by institutionalizing their own lineage, the common people also connected their lineage with officialdom. The centrality of ancestral sacrifice popularized by neo-Confucian state theory became the linchpin connecting state authority and local communities during late imperial China, because the people were convinced that by practicing the ancestral rituals the Emperor was also performing, they and the court could form a common sociopolitical structure, and their sons could be accepted into the ruling elite.²³ In this late-imperial Confucian society, through the institutionalization of family rituals, the state distributed part of the power to local clans, with the ultimate aim of organizing social order and guaranteeing local political stability. In a way, we could say that the Confucian rituals that both the Imperial family and the common people needed to perform brought the court and the people on more equal par than in medieval Europe.

Entering the twentieth century, the Maoist rituals could be seen as alternative forms of the Confucian rituals. Acts like “Asking instructions from Mao in the morning and reporting the day’s events to Mao in the evening” (zao qingshi wan huibao) were clearly modified from the daily Confucian-Daoist rituals paid to the ancestors. These rituals might demonstrate how Mao was considered to be the people’s common ancestor, but they were also symbolic links between the political center and the people. For hundreds of years the people performed rituals not so much to be subjected to power but to obtain power. Rituals are always meant to differentiate insiders from outsiders, and this demarcation is always power-inducive. Simply speaking, through the performance of rituals, the people could align closer to power.

Combining Santner’s and Faure’s models together, we can more pertinently understand how Mao might be less a cult figure than a political symbol whose meanings were constructed and elaborated by the people, however passively. While modernity entails the transference of political power from the king to the people, Mao in China became the nodal point of this transformation process, presented as both the king and the people. Or more accurately, Mao, embodying the second body of the king, became the site for the people to empower themselves. Mao set himself as a model not for his subjects to become him but rather for them to know how to interact with each other to construct a new society. Santner’s analysis reminds us that modern political life in the West is actively constructed and informed by its residual past, and the modern people empower, or confuse, themselves by borrowing the second body of the King whose first body is long dead. Through the elaborate Maoist rituals the people performed, they also came to learn how to be the new bearer of sovereignty, yet subject to its control. If Santner is too optimistic about the modern European people’s common will, Maoist China showed that the people could be very submissive to the new sovereignty with which they identified.

When all the traditional lineage rituals were banned during Maoist times, new rituals were established—this time centering on Mao as the people’s common father. Since he was the founding father of the new socialist China, all the new rituals were directed to him, collapsing the familial father and the dynastic father into one person. Mao’s own charisma and the fact that he actually came from a peasant family also helped to weave this imaginary identification. But more important than Mao as the new ancestral subject for everyone to identify with was Mao as a common political symbol that gave order to society, so that brotherhood and sisterhood could be established, and a sense of doxa could perpetuate—particularly at a time when political unrest was everywhere. In other words, as a mediator, Mao’s effects were as much spiritual as political and social, as Mao legitimized the new socialist institutions, and he also defined and set the limits of the doxa, within which people could feel free to lead their lives.²⁴

On October 12, 1966, the People’s Daily published two letters from some Chinese soldiers at the front, who expressed their sincere desire to obtain a few Mao badges, as there was only one badge available to an entire unit and the soldiers had to take turns wearing it. Many readers were moved upon reading the article, and sent the soldiers their own badges. Enclosing a Mao badge in his letter, a youngster wrote to the newspaper’s editor on October 16 that he was just so fortunate to own a badge that day and had worn it for three hours. Although extremely unwilling, he attached his only badge in this letter, and hoped that the editor could direct it to the soldiers.²⁵ We can interpret this incident as a reflection of people’s blind worship of Mao—Mao as cult. But we can also pay attention to the interactions among the people: through the Mao badge, this young person was able to connect to the soldiers miles away. Such strong emotional bonding of imaginary brotherhood was a very effective means for the people to make sense of the revolution and their relation to it. Again, we might not read this fanaticism as a manifestation of doxa in a Bourdieu sense, but the revolutionary fellowship formed around this Mao badge might inspire us to see how vertical worship facilitated horizontal comradeship, and to reinvestigate the role Mao played in forging the “common.”

Quite simply, Mao had to be everywhere. Contrary to the Byzantine iconoclasts, who condemned the making of any divine images as disrespectful to the represented religious figures, Mao followers had no problems seeing their divine leader’s images visually represented in the most all-pervasive manner.²⁶ Reading this extremism from a different perspective, the “correct” presence of Mao was the most effective way to protect the people from random political criticism. Mao was as visible as invisible.

Carrying a Mao badge on one’s clothing, erecting a Mao statue in a public space, or displaying a Mao portrait in the home were all performative means for the people to express their infinite loyalty to Mao. But they were also ways to show their identification with the political doxa and develop a sense of security. These acts were further performed in propaganda posters, in which Mao’s portraits hung on the walls of conference rooms, witnessing and approving people’s collective study, or in the homes of workers, endorsing the happiness bestowed by the new China (Figure 7.1). Two possible readings could be derived here. On the one hand, these pictures might demonstrate how Mao was able to enter the domestic space and observe the most private activities of the people. On the other hand, the Mao portraits were only displayed as a response to a social doxa, so that people could be a part of the mainstream, which in turn protected them. Mao could be treated more as an artificial construction than an active observer or intruder. People worshipped Mao, but they were also aware that it was the people around them who gave Mao these meanings.

Figure 7.1: Lin Longhua, The More You Study, The Clearer Your Mind Will Be, propaganda poster, Liaoning Fine Art Publishing House, 1965.

If the youngster sharing his only Mao badge with distant soldiers was an effective way to gain him an entry ticket to the revolution, more people began to submit to the Mao ritual and the Mao image only to be immersed in the homogenous whole. A vivid example can be found in the reminiscence of Ke Guoqing, a member of a propaganda art team of Fudan University, active from 1966 to 1970, named “Red Painting Brush” (hong huabi). He recalled that there was a late evening when the team was mobilized to draw the latest propaganda notice in the train station and the People’s Square. An elderly member, by miswriting one character, changed the meaning of the line from “Long Live Chairman Mao” to “Die Chairman Mao.”²⁷ Ke recounted that upon recognizing the grave mistake everyone was first stupefied and then afraid, because they were aware of the fierce violence directed against any unintentional disrespect to Mao’s images and his words at the time, and feared this could happen to this man. Quickly, the team redrew the slogan carefully during the night, making sure no one outside the team was aware of it. This small incident of mutual protection demonstrates vividly how the people feared their fellows much more than they feared Mao in this Maoist doxa, as the source of anxiety came not from Mao but rather from the people. There was nothing sacred about Mao in this case, but the political use of his images and his ideas defined social norms and limits.

Being consecrated icons, Mao images had to be “truthful” embodiments of the all-powerful Chairman. But it was also clear to everybody that this holiness was a human construction. From 1950, it was stipulated that all copying and reproduction of Mao images had to be based on those images published by the People’s Publication House and People’s Fine Arts Publishing House.²⁸ As such, people were trained to acquire Chairman Mao’s images based on a few officially approved models reproduced meticulously. Entering the Cultural Revolution, rules became law. The second regulation of the infamous 1967 “Six Regulations of Public Safety” (gong’an liutiao) clearly stipulated that any attack or defamation of Mao and his intimate comrade, Lin Biao, was considered an act of antirevolution.²⁹ Consequently, we see many efforts among the people accusing each other of being disrespectful to Mao images. Both the production of correct Mao images and the punishment of incorrect images were legitimized by the highest political echelon, but they also became general rules of society for the common people to follow and to ground their own everyday lives.

Da Zheng reminds us that the freedom of writing enjoyed by the people in producing their propaganda posters was illusory, as only Mao could adopt calligraphy artistically by indulging in cursive script, while most of the Chinese people had to use the regular script.³⁰ The cursive style requires special training not only in writing but also in reading, and more obviously distinguishes the aesthetic identity of the calligrapher—Chairman Mao was the only legitimate “author” of China. However, what Zheng does not point out is the way Mao’s characters were often individually cut away from his original passages to be regrouped into new tablets or slogans for all kinds of use: each character is Mao’s own handwriting, but the phrase as a whole is not. Many institution inscriptions claiming to be Mao’s were produced precisely in this way, with copying at its most ambiguous. Paying respect to his calligraphy in this way, Mao’s writing is also completely destroyed.

What I want to suggest here is a shift of perspective—in a society where Mao was so visible, maybe he mattered the least. Only when we direct our attention away from Mao to the people around him might we find his true meanings in this society. René Girard has developed a theory of desire based on mimesis, demonstrating how human beings influence and compete with each other by desiring the same object. Girard demonstrates that many nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels display a structure of desire between the hero and a mediator: the hero often finds the mediator to be a person with superior achievement, and the hero begins to desire the same object of desire as the mediator in order to compete with or become the mediator. Although the novels are often about how the individual hero desires and pursues that object, the actual meanings of the object are of little regard, as the object is only a means for the hero to imitate the mediator.³¹ To Girard, humans do not know what to desire; individuals imitate the desires of others to define themselves.

In Maoist society, in which individuals imitated each other to honor Mao, we see not only brotherhood and sisterhood established but also much competition. Individuals tried to excel others in owning Mao, and they found ways to condemn their competitors. It was recorded that Zhang Zhenshi was beaten up harshly during the Cultural Revolution simply because the Mao portraits he produced often faced slightly to the left, so that only one of Mao’s ears was shown—critics considered this arrangement a subtle criticism of Mao.³² Shi Lu was also harshly condemned for his remarkable 1959 painting Zhuanzhan Shanbei (Changing the Battlefield to the North of Shaanxi Province), which was criticized for putting Mao in front of a cliff, where he had no way to go forward.³³ Social mimesis is composed not only of people affiliating with each other, but also of their incessant competition and conflict, as similarities and differences are always dialectic to each other. I will discuss this further in the next chapter.

Here I would also like to emphasize that although doxa could be understood as a form of social mimesis, it could also be understood as an undercurrent of any social engineering process. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, doxa was developed by, on the one hand, people copying each other to love Mao and, on the other hand, people trying to avoid this Maoist revolution. Doxa is where the everyday life is formed: conformity might be commanded in a military form of living, but people’s everyday life necessarily resists such requests. People lead their lives based on habits, which have clear communal dimensions but are also always idiosyncratic. There are all kinds of resources in the realm of doxa so that human individuality can be observed and protected. If Mao was a most obvious and safe component weaving people’s everyday lives together, the “common” also resisted control and unfolded in its own ways.

Mao as Monument

There is clearly a conservative side of doxa. As Bourdieu reminds us, doxa helps petrify social boundaries and resist change, therefore necessarily constructing social inertia. It tends to privilege the dominant and take the current structure of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. The doxa demonstrates the field of the agents’ dispositions, which are taken for granted, and helps social formation.³⁴ Therefore, being a leader of a revolution, once Mao is caught up in a doxa, his revolutionary power is doomed to be submerged into the ebbs and flows of the people’s everyday life. Bourdieu does remind us that doxa is “open to symbolic hijacking, forced as it is to entrust itself to a spokesperson, the exclusive agent of the ontological leap presupposed by the move from praxis to logos.”³⁵ Doxa is prone to being appropriated and controlled by power. The Mao doxa seems to demonstrate the reverse, but complementary, tendency: the clear and strong ideology was absorbed into people’s everyday life and stasis, so that by holding onto Mao the people no longer needed to think, toil, or spin but lived simply and practically. This could be very anti-Maoist.

Aware of these subtle tensions, Mao was probably the only one in the whole country who openly disapproved of the Mao cult. To be more accurate, he wavered between endorsing and denouncing his image-building. Mao might have stood behind the Mao cult to sustain his own power and policy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution; however, as the revolution progressed, evidence to the contrary was also found, as the Chairman was aware of the hidden ideological intricacy embedded in such political fanaticism. While Kantorowicz depicts the European emperors as passively conditioned by the dominant political theology, Mao seemed to be more sensitive and assertive in defining his own power. As he said to his cadres in 1967:

The [political] core is recognized by the masses through actual struggles in reality, not a position one can just occupy. The one who believes that oneself is at the core is the most stupid person.³⁶

It is therefore not surprising to see Mao’s repulsion at the extreme aggrandizement of his image among the people, which he rightly predicted would only lead to his inevitable downfall.

But there was only so much he could do. For example, the erection of a Mao statue at the Tsinghua University campus, on May 4, 1967, attracted many imitations, leading to intense competition involving the building of ever-bigger and grander Mao statues all over China in 1967 and 1968.³⁷ After reading a report about the many huge Mao statues being put up everywhere in 1967, Mao ordered the situation to be corrected. Next to the report, he handwrote this message to his direct subordinates:

Lin Biao, [Zhou] Enlai, and all comrades of the Cultural Revolution Small Group: This type of affairs wastes both human and financial resources, producing no benefits but harm. If not effectively deterred, these activities will lead to a trend of flamboyance and vainglory. Please discuss this issue in the Extended Meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, and put them off by issuing proper orders. July 5, 1967.³⁸

The central government took immediate action, issuing a directive on July 13 to order that all Mao statues be centrally planned, and stating that these public monuments could not be constructed unless at the right time and in the right place, to be approved by the central government. Interestingly, the new policy was not effective at all, and huge public statues of Mao continued to be constructed everywhere. On September 13, 1967, the central government issued another document, titled “The Chinese Communist Party’s Serious and Thorough Implementation of the ‘July 13’ Directive,”³⁹ but its effects were also minimal. As Jin Dalu records, despite repeated demands from the Party Central and the city revolutionary committee to stop related activities, Shanghai’s revolutionary masses remained obsessed with the making of Mao statues all over the city. Competing revolutionary groups condemned opponents’ projects and asserted that only their own were politically correct.⁴⁰

On December 17, 1967, Mao again raised his solemn objection against the pervasive monumentalization of his own figure. After reading a report about his statue being constructed to celebrate the construction of the Shaoshan railway, he wrote next to the report:

1. The idea of “absolute authority” is wrong. There is never an absolute authority. All authority is relative, and no objects can stand apart from other objects relative to them. 2. Such elaborate construction [of my statues] is also wrong. Authority and prestige can only be established naturally through struggles and practices, not … put together artificially. This kind of authority will for sure collapse. 3. No celebration of leaders’ birthdays.⁴¹

At the age of seventy-four, Mao was still politically astute, acknowledging that power could only be constructed through political struggle, which was also the underlying motive for launching the Cultural Revolution. Between the swimming narcissist and the world-wise political theorist, we see a Mao trying hard to sail through the turbulent sea of power while maintaining the extreme self-confidence and determination necessary to rule this chaotic country.

In November 1967, a central government circular was issued stating that no one could reprint any unpublished photo of the Chairman without going through the central government’s censorship and approval process.⁴² In June 1969, the central government issued another circular, which explicitly forbade formalistic worship of the Chairman as well as the unauthorized printing of his image or works, and for the first time it also officially disapproved of the further building of statues and the manufacturing of badges.⁴³ How much these policies were initiated by Mao we do not know, but it is clear that the party was becoming uneasy, either of the threat of the Mao cult to the shaky establishment, or of its reflection of the people’s resistance to be further mobilized. I think it is the latter that more accurately describes the social reality of the time. The Mao cult had already become the doxa, actively constructed and needed by the masses for a sense of comfort and predictability.

Han Shaogong recalls a culture of exchange developed during the Cultural Revolution:

Mao badges were extremely popular at one time, and new designs were widely pursued immediately after they were released. One big porcelain badge could be exchanged with five or six small aluminum badges. One alloy-steel bowl-size badge can be traded for three or four porcelain or bamboo badges. But after a while, the badge heat subsided, and boys began to be interested in military items. As a result, an 80-percent new army hat was worth more than ten badges, and one needed two or three stamp books to buy a four-pocket military uniform. A while after, Shanghai-made Huili sneakers became the fashion, particularly those in white color, which could be traded in for a transistor radio plus a pair of military pants, or one double-sided ping-pong bat with a few machine gun bullets.⁴⁴

Here, Han recounts the development of black market fashion trends during the Cultural Revolution, when schools were closed or lessons reduced, and youths were put on the street to reinvent their everyday lives. In fact, in 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was spreading fiercely across the country, dozens of market sites were found in Shanghai where people gathered to exchange and trade Mao badges, and there was illegal mass production of Mao badges for profit.⁴⁵ It is within this folk culture that we see the greatest distance between Mao the leader and Mao the image. When the exaltation of Mao’s image became a trend—when it was the popular culture instead of the political realm that controlled the circulation of these iconic objects—their cult value dissolved into exchange value, and the political meanings of the images were forgotten, easily replaced by ideologies of the popular, embedded in trendy items such as fashion (sneakers) and militarism (machine gun bullets). Back in 1966, the Cultural Revolution was first initiated in the army.⁴⁶ But the wide circulation of military items quickly found among the folks also testified to the tensions and dynamics between doxa and revolution.

When the ideological value of the Mao image vanished, Mao could only passively watch his images floating and submerged in history. We know that Mao’s eyesight deteriorated quickly in the 1970s, and by 1975 he was almost blind. It might have been a blessing for him not to see his images becoming commodities. The “marketization” of Mao badges demonstrates how much the Mao doxa was not sacred but rather secular, and how easily the fervent Maoist passion could be displaced by a pair of trendy sneakers. The tangential yet tangible links set up between personality cult, militarism, and consumerism indirectly revealed the indeterminate demarcation between politics and antipolitics.⁴⁷

Being so profusely copied by his people, Mao exposed himself to the most meticulous scrutiny and extensive appropriation, therefore necessarily risking his own self-control. At the same time, the identification of the people with Mao was both voluntary and compulsory, in the sense that while they loved their Greatest Leader sincerely, there was no other choice but to love him. Both Mao and the people forfeited part of their identity and individuality for the sake of the other. The identification between the people and Mao was more complicated than a schema of indoctrination and stupefaction. The Chairman did not entirely control power; rather, power passed through Mao, who submitted to and exercised it.

In a personal letter he wrote to Jiang Qing in 1966, Mao commented that, as an onlooker (he was not in Beijing at the time), he felt quite uneasy observing the rapid development of the Mao cult. It was clear to him that he was being used by others for political purposes, but for the moment he could only follow the flow and be a part of it:

I am confident, yet not. When I was young, I told others that I believe I can live to two hundred years old, and I can swim for 3,000 li. I was very assertive. However, I am also not confident in myself, always believing that the monkey, which is me, can become the king only because there are no tigers in the mountain … The higher one is blown up, the heavier one will fall down. I am ready to become pieces.⁴⁸

According to this letter, there is a clear gap between Mao the real person (as the writer of this letter) and Mao the cult figure. Although the letter seems to show Mao’s reluctant willingness to play along with a plan instituted by someone else, he is also discerning in recognizing the larger historical wave in which he is only a player. Mao was not the tiger: not only would he lose control, but by embracing the tidal wave, the monkey would ultimately be swallowed up.

Mao might have wanted to be a wayward monkey rumbling his way in the jungle, but in reality this mischief-maker would be frozen into the many monuments built around the country, fated to be overlooked. Using Mao as an example, we can also reinvestigate what monumentalism might mean along with the concept of doxa. Although the monument is necessarily dialectic to the mundane, as the monument is set up with the aim of contrasting with the ordinary life of the masses, its power will be exhausted, dooming it to become a part of the mundane all over again. Despite being overwhelmed at the beginning, the masses would ultimately accept the monument as a part of their everyday life. Or, the monument is always constructed with an aim to become a part of the doxa. In order to become a monument, its sublime effect was destined to fade away, to merge into the ebbs and flows of the collective—ultimately, there is nothing as invisible as a monument. Commenting on Germany’s recent obsession with monuments and memorials, Andreas Huyssen argues that “the more monuments there are, the more the past becomes invisible, the easier it is to forget: redemption, thus, through forgetting.”⁴⁹ Standing among the masses, the monument would acquire a familiarizing effect, forcing the people who passed it every day to ignore its existence.

Thus the model as monument is always caught in the passage of time: while it is primarily meant to sustain the past into an eternal future, it also projects a future in which the present becomes the past, the outdated. Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the idea of a ruined monument tends to have great appeal in popular culture, such as in Hollywood disaster movies, as the monument always contains the irony of being both powerful and powerless.⁵⁰ There is a very complicated past-present-future relationship set up in monuments: in the case of the Mao figure, although he was a present power, he was monumentalized with a hidden presumption that he would become the past in the future, when he would become either irrelevant, or be politicized again for a completely different purpose. In both cases, the Cultural Revolution was destined to become obsolete.

Since the Cultural Revolution was meant to be a revolution, its deviant arrangements and aberrant happenings were considered normative. Things that may have been unconventional, and sometimes unacceptable, during other historical moments were embraced and encouraged to qualify the revolutionary aura. The term “cultural revolution” was constantly emphasized in the propaganda culture to remind the people that they were caught in a special and transitional period, indirectly also predicting that life would return to normal in due course. It was a time when standard values could be cast aside momentarily, only to prepare a future where some of these values would be restored, better practiced and realized. Revolution could only be a historical threshold, so that monumentalizing the revolution was an oxymoron.

In fact, such a dialectics between inertness and transformation is core to Maoism itself. As Badiou reminds us, no single political party can fully legitimize itself as the representative of the people, and it must resort to the endorsement of an external force—particularly personal genius—as the incarnation of the doubtful representative capacity of the party.⁵¹ The case of Mao is most representative and enigmatic in this regard, as he incarnates both the party and the force to revolt against the party. Existing studies of Mao tend to consider him as a locus of power, in the sense that he is where power begins and ends. But, as he himself acknowledges, he is also a power-effect, and part of a network in which power circulates. The Cultural Revolution was an event that involved coming face to face with power in order to destroy the entire system and power distribution so that the people might rebuild it inside out and upside down. But there were also many ways for order to take root again, reenacting a sense of continuity and commonsense for the people to get by. Mao as an image was caught exactly in between—he was both the symbol for destruction and a doxa for people to muddle through. Like Ban Wang, I believe that many people loved Mao out of their deep feeling of gratitude.⁵² But we should not overemphasize the people’s revolutionary will by ignoring their equally strong, if not stronger, desire to lead an ordinary life day by day, knowing neither glory nor defeat, but simply grounded loosely and perfunctorily in something they can hold fast to and eke out a living from.

CHAPTER 8

Intellectuals as Ghosts

If the Cultural Revolution was initially driven by the mutual empowerment between the people and Mao, this coalition proved to be extremely destructive, as the masses—with the eternal blessings of their leader—were authorized to do almost everything, resulting in the liquidation of all social structures and institutional orders. Wang Xiyan, a condemned author who was locked in a cowshed amid demands that he be reeducated by the people, recalls how he and his fellow imprisoned intellectuals were violently handled by a retired soldier. There was one line from this tyrannical master that Wang remembered very well:

Do you see what is in front of my chest? This is a golden badge of the Great Leader. Do you see what is on my arm? This is the red armband the Great Leader wore on the top of Tian’anmen. However much my infinite loyalty to the Great Leader is, however much my infinite power over you, cow ghost and snake god!¹

One of the most symbolic manifestations of the Cultural Revolution was the reversal of the existing pedagogical structure, allowing the masses to educate the intellectuals. With infinite love, Mao taught the people directly; by way of a most ironic twist, the people re-taught the intellectuals with infinite hate. However, we must realize that the Maoist intellectuals were not entirely unprepared, and they probably knew better than most that the ideal Maoist society was one without them. Did they voluntarily submit themselves to this position? Probably not. But as the custodians of the regime, most Maoist intellectuals had taken part in and struggled with the discourses leading up to their victimization during the Cultural Revolution. They were not entirely passive, and this chapter aims to investigate this history. This investigation is not meant to shift the moral burden from the Maoist regime to the intellectuals themselves, criticizing how they dug their own graves. My concern is still largely structural, and I want to explore how this scapegoating relates to the social mimesis we have been discussing. I will explore the intellectuals as a force of negative mimesis by focusing on two concepts: sacrifice and ghost.

Intellectuals as Sacrifice

Mimesis produces not only identity but also differences, and cultivates not only bonding but also hatred. One prominent feature of the Cultural Revolution is the extreme hatred shown to the assigned enemies. Other than condemning Maoism as innately evil, we can attribute this hatred to at least two social mechanisms. First, in a society that puts such stress on mimesis and social integration, the people would inevitably feel a strong competition among themselves. Sigmund Freud argues that when many people are in proximity to one another, such as neighbors and siblings, they develop “narcissism of small differences” to construct self-identity and justify competition. He points out that between those people who are otherwise alike, minor differences are often identified and overstated, becoming a source of hostility and sometimes violence.² Those people who are closest are often the fiercest enemies. In the Cultural Revolution, when all the people were asked to model themselves after the same Maoist ideals, individuals and groups struggled to look for people of difference as enemies. Not allowed to amplify the uniqueness of oneself in a society where individualism was strictly prohibited, efforts were focused on the location of the slightest differences in others as threats to society. Those identified as objects for criticism did not only include class enemies such as the capitalists and rightists; painstaking efforts were also spent on detecting and exaggerating the least visible heterogeneities among the people. It is this compelled desire to spot the slightest deviations that explains some of the most tragic facets of the Cultural Revolution.

Secondly, a society demanding such unity often requires sacrifices to conjure up the tight bonding. Mimesis and sacrifice are twins: on the one hand, sacrifice allows for mimesis to be possible; on the other hand, mimesis is also the coping mechanism in the aftermath of a process of sacrifice.³ Many cultural theorists have demonstrated how sacrifice is essential for communities to organize social relations. Freud argues that the totem animal could be understood as a substitute for the controlling father, who must be killed to reestablish the bonds of the brothers, and the dead father also becomes stronger than the living one had been, while the competing brothers reconcile through the death of the ultimate subject of authority and object of desire.⁴ Georges Bataille reminds us that human lives are full of excesses, which must find ways to be expelled. This is what he calls “general economy,” which, in contrast to our common understanding of the economic sphere as one of production, is the realm of excess, a realm where the useful is destroyed.⁵ Different cultures invent different rituals to identify sacrificial victims—animals, slaves, children, or even princes—as representatives of the excesses, and the violence exerted on the victims becomes a way to release the excessive energy, which is supposedly able to bring the concerned society back to peace and order.

Clearly, there were many class enemies in the Cultural Revolution to be victimized, including not only Mao’s political competitors but also the pre-Liberation landlords and capitalists, as well as their children. Officially, there were “five black categories”—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements (rascals), and rightists. They were declared to have been the representative class enemies since 1949, and stripped of all lands and privileges in the various campaigns. But they continued to be identified as communists and victimized in almost all political movements that followed. Gradually, four more groups also entered the official class enemy list: traitors, spies, capitalists, and intellectuals.

Among the nine groups of class enemies, intellectuals were listed as the last one—thus its other name “stinking number nine” (chou laojiu), indicating their utter “uselessness.” In fact, all intellectuals were caught in an ambiguous position between being useful and being useless. In his theory of general economy, Bataille argues that the victim chosen must be considered worth sacrificing, and this valuable object is destined for violent consumption in order to stage the social expulsion of the useful wealth.⁶ In the case of Maoist intellectuals, they were chosen as sacrificial victims probably also because they were useful to a society which was clearly under construction. But, ironically, their “reeducation” by the masses was also most spectacularly displayed in all political gatherings to demonstrate how the masses were now masters of society, and how the intellectuals were transformed from being useful to conspicuously useless. If the intellectuals were objects of sacrifice for the realization of the Cultural Revolution, it was not their lives that were sacrificed but their social status. The usefulness of the intellectuals to society might have been stripped, but they gained new values as the social alterity. It was through the sacrificial rituals of the intellectuals that the unity of the masses was achieved; but the “ghostly” presence of the intellectuals also helped maintain the dialectics—good versus bad, light versus dark—needed for any enlightenment to make sense of itself. Therefore, as sacrifices, the most unique and useful feature of these intellectuals was their “negativity.”

“Intellectual” is clearly a modern concept in the Chinese context, and the category includes many types, ranging from writers, artists, educators, and scientists to bureaucrats. Probably due to lingering Confucian influences and nationalist sentiments, there is also a heavy dimension of publicness and social responsibility inherent in the identity, from the late Qing to the present. Almost every educated citizen who utilized their advanced knowledge to influence the people could be seen as an intellectual. In Maoist China, there were also differences between party members and non-party members, giving the intellectuals an additional layer of social differentiation.

To Shaoguang Wang, the basic social and political contradiction developing in the 1950s and early 1960s that led to the Cultural Revolution was the one between the political elite (hong, or red) and functional elite (zhuan, or professional).⁷ After 1949, when the young ruling state demanded a wide range of support, these two groups of people became the new privileged class, justifying their elitist status based on two different and competing principles: their political reliability for the state to achieve socialist equality in the first case; and their overall usefulness to the state to achieve greater national development and productivity in the second. To Wang, the socialist ideals of equality and the promotion of modern industrial development were conflicting principles, and the Cultural Revolution can be seen as the open battle between these two principles and the two groups of elites. However, the Maoist cultural elite, which is the concern of this chapter, could not be comfortably cast into either the “red” or the “professional” group. During the seventeen-year period, their political capital was not based on their political trustworthiness—on the contrary, they were usually of problematic family backgrounds, and the state was not always confident with them, which resulted in the Anti-Rightists campaign. Cultural elites were not valued by the state on the basis of their actual functional use to industrial or economic development; instead, it was their cultural knowledge and communicative ability that were deemed useful—although only vaguely—for governance purposes.

We can further understand the specificities of this group of intellectuals by referring to Antonio Gramsci’s differentiation of “organic intellectuals” and “traditional intellectuals.”⁸ Organic intellectuals—such as industrial technicians, policy-makers, lawyers, and all kinds of professional experts—are created by the dominant class to gain the consent and support of the people. Traditional intellectuals—such as teachers and priests—perform their pedagogical duties generation after generation, holding on to their unchanging social role as a kind of moral anchor. They also put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group. To Gramsci, the two types of intellectuals are opposites because the first group is created by every new dominant class to support its position, and its historical position rises and falls with the dominant class, while the second group represents a historical continuity that is uninterrupted even by the most radical changes in political and social forms. But the dominant social group calls for the support of both these two intellectual types: the dominant group must receive the direct support of the organic intellectuals, and it also needs to legitimize itself by “ideologically” conquering the traditional intellectuals.

If Gramsci’s organic intellectuals are comparable to the functional zhuan (professional) elite in the PRC, we cannot assume the compatibility of the other pair, as the political hong (red) elite is loyal only to the current political establishment, while Gramsci’s understanding of the traditional intellectuals is based on their faithfulness to their own moral and political ideals, which supposedly cannot be altered by any external coercion. The intellectual history I describe here concerns precisely how some Chinese cultural elites tried yet failed to be both “traditional” and “red.” They had supported and legitimated this regime, and they were conscious of their intellectual identity, which was somehow inimical to the regime to which they pledged loyalty. Or, there is a structural tension between the two identities: by “traditional” the intellectuals should maintain a critical and moral distance from power; yet by “red” they must show their “usefulness” to power. Trying to be both, these intellectuals could not but meet their demise.

Although the seventeen-year period witnessed many state-directed projects against intellectuals, the blanket condemnation against all intellectuals—particularly those who had always served the party—observed during the Cultural Revolution was largely unexpected. During the seventeen-year period, professional cultural workers were given decent remuneration and relatively comfortable working environments to encourage them to concentrate on their work.⁹ We also begin to see a merging of social roles: many cultural workers also became political leaders, and the space available for those intellectuals who wanted to preserve a careful distance from the state was shrinking rapidly. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 might have alerted the CCP of the political unreliability of intellectuals, and Mao responded by wavering between an ideological maneuver, the Hundred Flowers Movement, and direct suppression, the Anti-Rightists Campaign.¹⁰ But the Anti-Rightists Campaign was targeted at those individuals who failed to show complete loyalty; intellectuals as a class were still largely protected, particularly cultural workers. As Boris Groys reminds us, socialist realism was both a cultural project and a political project, whose correspondence could be achieved by the overlap of roles between creators of arts and creators of social reality. In the Stalinist era, many writers, artists, and filmmakers were afforded access to privileged party circles and encouraged to participate directly in the Stalinist power apparatus. It was hoped that the artists could gain an insight into the process through which reality was molded by the party leadership, which they could reflect in their works.¹¹ We could see a similar situation in 1950s China, where the cultural elite rubbed shoulders with the political elite. But the major difference between the two national situations resided in the rather clear separation of the party and cultural circles in the case of the Soviet Union, while many of the CCP leaders were already amateur artists or art-lovers. In fact, entering the Cultural Revolution, some of the most powerful leaders were writers or art critics by profession. Under fluctuating policies, censorship and self-censorship in the PRC were generally intense during this seventeen-year period, yet the roles and social privileges of the artists and writers were not challenged, and they came to form a privileged sector that enjoyed a degree of freedom, respect, and authority not readily available to most ordinary citizens. This explains the particular hostility shown in the Cultural Revolution to three types of famous cultural workers—famous writers, famous performers, and famous professors—as well as those who received three types of high income—high salary, high author remuneration, and large bonuses—a group generally known as sanming sangao.

Existing scholarship tends to emphasize only the victimization and, therefore, passiveness of the intellectuals. But since they were valued by the regime in the previous seventeen years to build the new state, they inevitably contributed to their own predicaments. According to the logic of Maoist romanticism, culture not only produces symbols, but it also defines material existence, and social relations are as much reflections of cultural representations as the other way around. This logic can be deeply destructive to the autonomy of cultural workers, but it also allows them to intervene within politics. Trying to master the dynamics, most Maoist intellectuals in the end failed to harness the power. There was a particular history that turned intellectuals from being understood as constructive to society to condemned as destructive, and this intellectual history is revealed by the literary and political trope of the ghost. The ghost representations were originally produced and protected by cultural workers in the seventeen-year period who would then be labeled and criticized as such in the Cultural Revolution.

Representations of Ghosts

Before the Cultural Revolution, the “rightist” label was applied to criminalize selected intellectuals. However, from 1966 on, being an intellectual was already a natural sin. Now intellectuals were given a new name—“cow ghosts and snake gods” (niugui sheshen)—and they embodied all evil and hatred in the Cultural Revolution era. The term, invested with such heavy political value in the Cultural Revolution era, was originally Buddhist: in Buddhist stories, the cow ghost carries out punishments in hell, while the snake god is responsible for protecting the holy scripture in heaven. As they belonged to two different realms, the two spirits were not mentioned together until the Tang poet Li He was described by his contemporary in this way: “A mouth-opening whale and a jumping sea turtle; a cow ghost and a snake god; they cannot be compared to the absurdity and imaginativeness of [Li He’s] poems.” The term “cow ghost and snake god” had already been a commonly used idiom before Mao’s time; but it was Mao—a fan of Li He—who made it a household saying.

Mao began to use the term frequently in the late 1950s. But what made the term really legendary was the editorial published in the People’s Daily on June 1, 1966, which was titled “Sweeping away all cow ghosts and snake gods” (Hengsao yiqie niugui sheshen), announcing the initiation of the Cultural Revolution.¹² The editorial urged the people to use Maoism as their weapon to sweep away those cow ghosts and snake gods—referring primarily to intellectuals who had dominated the nation’s ideological and cultural fronts—so that the people could smash the spiritual shackles they had carried for so many years thanks to the exploitation class. According to this editorial, the Cultural Revolution was launched primarily on the ideological and cultural fronts, with the aim of sweeping intellectuals away in the same way that people sweep away evil spirits at every year’s end—although more violently if necessary. All of a sudden intellectuals became ghosts. It is true that the term “cow ghosts and snake gods” could be used to describe all kinds of class enemies. But more often than not, the term was used specifically for intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution.

If we go back in history, we might find two major meanings of the ghost in the eyes of the CCP: the ghost as a part of folk culture, and the ghost as an allegory for political enemy. In both cases cultural workers played an important role. Folk religions were considered a major obstacle to land reform in the Jiangxi-Fujian-Guangdong “Central Soviet” region in the late 1920s and early 1930s.¹³ But after their forced retreat from the Central Soviet area, the CCP realized that it was important to develop a more encompassing attitude to superstition in the Yan’an area, as the newly arrived CCP struggled to gain the trust of the locals.¹⁴ Ghost representations became respected as a part of the folk culture and were incorporated into cultural productions. Anti-superstition dramas were continually made,¹⁵ but efforts were also made to produce new cultural products that resonated with folk beliefs while propagating a new socialist worldview. For example, among the new yangge plays there were works adapted from traditional ghost stories. In addition to creating new cultural pieces for the people in the region, the Peking Opera troupe of the Lu Xun Academy also staged traditional operas, including ghost plays, in part to develop cultural workers’ skills in Peking Opera, and in part to ease the nostalgia of the sojourned CCP members, including Mao himself.¹⁶ In the CCP’s rural governance, there was always an implicit assumption of the affinity between the people and ghost representations. Producing new ghost plays which were politically correct enough, cultural workers became the bridge between the people and the party.

Upon its stormy victory in 1949, the new socialist regime tried to be both: while respecting the rural population as its supporter and guardian, the CCP also followed the practices of the GMD government by clinging to the principles of a modern and secular state, striving to establish a modern China free of “religious contamination.” In the cultural realm, we find the contradictory handling of superstitions manifested on two different fronts. In cinema, the representative modern mass media form, the supernatural was censored en masse.¹⁷ In contrast, ghosts in the theater were viewed in a more benign light. Whereas cinema was considered a state ideological apparatus serving strong educational functions, obscure elements in regional operas were tolerated as leisure activities and folk customs. Also, with the consent of the new regime, there was an intellectual engagement, promoted by prominent cultural leaders such as Tian Han, trying to preserve those traditional theatrical pieces with supernatural elements in the socialist era.¹⁸ In 1950, there was already vigorous debate on mythology and superstition, and sympathetic intellectuals argued that the mythic elements that so richly informed traditional Chinese operas should be retained in the new era, and only those that led people to superstitions should be abandoned.¹⁹ Of course, it was never clear how the two categories could be differentiated, but after this debate there was largely a consensus that mythology should be protected—at least in theater.

While the ghost resided comfortably in the realm of representation in the first eight years of the republic’s history, a discursive change happened in 1957. The ghost became a common trope in Mao’s political speeches in the turbulent period of 1957–61, punctuated by the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Anti-Rightists Campaign, the Great Famine, and the PRC’s severing of its diplomatic relationship with the Soviet Union. The ghost—real or fictional—was tirelessly used by Mao as a political allegory to refer to constantly changing enemies with different degrees of tolerance.

Mao first used the term “cow ghosts and snake gods” to show his approval of ghost operas. In January 1957, he decreed that there should be no ban on plays featuring cow ghosts and snake gods; audiences should be given the chance to watch them so that they could criticize and finally abandon them.²⁰ Three months later, Mao repeated his idea, but this time he further connected the cow ghosts and snake gods with malicious people in society:

There are many cow ghosts and snake gods in society, and it is not surprising that they also appear in scripts. Not all Chinese people believe in ghosts, and there is nothing to fear about such performances. Many young people do not know what cow ghosts and snake gods are, so they should watch some of these pieces for educational purposes.²¹

Here, the ghosts referred to both real class enemies and theatrical representations, and Mao took the liberty of jumping freely between reality and fiction, assuming their inherent relationship without any explanation. Ironically, this confusing logic seemed to make him a more charismatic speaker and leader, as both talks were not on culture specifically, but rather on overall socialist governance, and Mao’s ability to bring in many fresh elements certainly appealed to his listeners.

In May of that year, the Ministry of Culture announced that all previous bans on traditional plays had been lifted, and the so-called superstitious works could be performed nationwide, despite the fact that these plays had always been performed widely. This lift, it was claimed, was a result of the rising political consciousness of the people and performers, who were now wise enough to tell toxins from nutrients.²² Most importantly, these works belonged to the folk culture and tended to have strong moralistic elements, emphasizing the ultimate penalty given to bad people, and were usually effective political allegories. The term “cow ghosts and snake gods” was often used along with the term “emperors and generals” (diwang jiangxiang): although plays of both categories were reactionary residues of traditional culture, in the Hundred Flowers Movement the former tended to receive milder criticism than the latter, which were written for the oppressing class.²³

But it was also around this time that intellectuals were transformed from the custodians of ghosts to the ghosts themselves. Ghosts were bad social elements that could be watched and enjoyed at the beginning of 1957, but entering the Anti-Rightists Campaign they became selected intellectuals to be condemned most violently. From July 1957, individual intellectuals began to be described as “cow ghosts and snake gods” in the People’s Daily.²⁴ The benign components of the term detected in the January and March speeches of Mao faded away, and the term directly referred to the rightists, who were ghosts always ready to attack socialism.²⁵

But calling intellectuals ghosts lasted only for a brief time, and quickly ghosts became something else in the official culture. In 1959, Mao ordered the Institute of Literary Studies in the Chinese Academy of Science to collect stories featuring the heroic deeds of traditional Chinese heroes fighting ghosts as allegories to agitate contemporary Chinese people’s fighting against Western imperialism and Soviet revisionism.²⁶ The collection, entitled Bupa gui de gushi (Stories of Not Fearing Ghosts), was published in 1961,²⁷ allegedly with the direct endorsement of Mao. A compilation of premodern short stories, the book demonstrates that the Chinese people were not fearful of supernatural spirits, and that they made every effort to subdue them. Most of these traditional stories in fact affirm the existence of ghosts, and the collection is meant to celebrate the power of humans over ghosts. In one such story, we find a female ghost trying to threaten Cao Zhu, a Qing dynasty official who just happens to stay overnight in a haunted house:²⁸

She suddenly loosens her hair and sticks out her tongue, appears as dying from strangulation. But Cao Zhu is not threatened, and smilingly he says, “The hair is a bit too fluffy, and the tongue is a bit too long. But there is nothing to fear.” The ghost then picks up her head and puts it on the desk. Cao laughs and says, “I do not fear those with heads; let alone those without!” The ghost runs out of tricks, and she disappears.²⁹

Although in 1957 intellectuals were ghosts who had to be condemned, in this 1961 publication, Cao Zhu, as an intellectual-official, was applauded, because he showed the strength and the will of the people against ghosts. As He Qifang, another famous writer and then head of the institute, wrote in the introduction, these ghost stories are presented allegorically, to encourage the people to fight against the current ghosts, who are “imperialism found in the world, reactionary forces of different countries, and those anti-China forces of revisionism.”³⁰ Allegedly, Mao wanted to use this book as propaganda to encourage the Chinese people to stand against their enemies, although in a few years’ time the ghosts would be referred to as internal enemies all over again.

Here we observe two sets of developments. On the one hand, there was a lineage of intellectuals whose identification with the people was superimposed on that of the ghost representations, ranging from Ji Yun who wrote the Cao Zhu story to He Qifang who collected it, from Tian Han who preserved the ghost theaters to Mao Zedong who safeguarded the folk arts. On the other hand, Mao himself also used the ghost allegorically, always ready to invest the term with his will to subdue the changing enemies he had in mind at that particular time. Obviously, Mao was not the first to use ghosts allegorically; there is a long history of zhiguai novels in traditional China, which feature demons, spirits, and the extraordinary. They were very popular because many readers were fascinated by the ghostly, but the authors also tended to invest social or historical commentary in such stories.³¹ There was a long literary history to support Mao’s free use of the ghost as allegory. In both cases, intellectuals assumed significant roles in protecting, creating, and coding ghost representations.

These two manifestations, ghost as folk culture and ghost as political allegory, came to a direct confrontation in the national purge of Li Huiniang in 1963. Ghost plays sailed through the rough Anti-Rightists Campaign, but the Ministry of Culture banned all ghost plays after the Li Huiniang incident.³² The event also reconnected cow ghosts and snake gods to intellectuals. Some critics trace the real beginning of the Cultural Revolution to this purge because it signals the rise of Jiang Qing’s regime and its determined efforts to crush and humiliate the dominant intellectual culture.³³

In 1959, cultural workers were encouraged to engage in the revision of traditional operas, to prove that the Hundred Flowers Movement spirit had not been stamped out. Responding to this policy, historian Meng Chao created a new kunqu opera named Li Huiniang, based on the famous Ming dynasty play Tale of the Red Plum (Hongmei ji). The piece was very popular, and was staged more than 200 times.³⁴ But this popularity also caused its demise four years later. The play has a long history of evolution, which I will not elaborate on here.³⁵ To simplify the story, we can say it involves three main figures: the corrupted prime minister Jia Sidao, his concubine Li Huiniang, and the royal school student Pei Junqing. Jia is outraged to learn that Li and Pei have fallen in love. He succeeds in killing his concubine, who comes back to the human world to save her lover, and takes revenge on Jia Sidao.

The traditional Ming story on which this play was based does not feature Li Huiniang, who is only a minor character. But Huiniang the female ghost persona became more and more important in the numerous adaptations thereafter, and the story morphed into a popular ghost play. New atheist versions of the play were created, showing, for example, how Huiniang escapes by faking her death, therefore eliminating the ghost elements altogether.³⁶ But Meng Chao decided to retain and even emphasize the play’s under-worldly dimension by adding a new act, “Phantom Regrets” (Youhen), and elaborating the act “Ghost Debate” (Guibian)—both of which are meant to emphasize the ghostly heroism of Li Huiniang. As such, the new kunqu play highlights Huiniang’s agency, which is both tragic and courageous.

Although the ghost elements are extremely prominent in Meng Chao’s version, viewers and commentators did not consider the play superstitious when it premiered in Beijing in 1961. Flurries of positive reviews penned by critics and officials celebrated the play as a story praising feminine strength, human will, and the struggle for social righteousness.³⁷ Other critics pointed out Meng’s efforts in downplaying the romance elements and emphasizing the class affinity between Huiniang and Pei.³⁸ The ghost was clearly understood as an allegory with political meanings.

In 1963, a critical piece against Li Huiniang was published in a major Shanghai newspaper;³⁹ the piece was allegedly initiated by Jiang Qing herself.⁴⁰ The long article gives a detailed textual and historical analysis of the play, and accuses both the play and the positive reviews of the play of treating humanism as universal and nonmaterialist. The author argues that Li Huiniang is only a tragic and feeble character, and her struggles—conditioned by feudal society—are so weak that they do not deserve popular celebration today. The underlying political motivation of the criticism to launch purges of Meng Chao and his allies was quickly identified, as waves of writings similar in tone followed. The fate of the opera was sealed in 1964 when it was classified as a “big poisonous weed against the Party and Socialism,” and the target was no longer the piece but rather its author, Meng Chao.⁴¹ Soon afterward, another nationwide movement aimed at purging Wu Han’s Hairui Dismissed from Office was flagged,⁴² and the cumulative effect of the national criticisms of these two pieces was to legitimize the call for a cultural revolution.

From the 1950 debate on mythology and superstition, to Mao’s 1957 talk on cow ghosts and snake gods, to the 1961 anthology of stories about not fearing ghosts, discussions had always been directed to the reception of ghost representations, and was not about the political identities of the writers themselves. But a clear discursive change can be identified with the Li Huiniang incident, in which the ghosts created were directly linked to their creators. People were not sure whether the real target of this campaign was the female ghost Li Huiniang or the author Meng Chao, because they were considered as one now.⁴³ By 1963, anyone who created cultural works containing non-secular entities, regardless of the work’s intentions or reception, was to be condemned, and the celebration of human will against evil, as shown in the 1961 collection of ghost stories, was no longer considered a legitimate objective. The ghosts created in arts and literature could no longer be read figuratively; instead, they directly promoted superstition. Those who created them were ghosts too, who should be locked up and prevented from haunting the world. All the distance between an author and the works one creates that makes art possible was taken away, conflating the political identity of the writer and the subject matter.

The Negativity of Intellectuals

In the famous 1963 “Instruction on Literature and Arts,” delivered around the same time as the Li Huiniang event, Mao stated that true socialist reform had yet to take place in many cultural arenas, and many government departments were still ruled by so-called dead people:

Problems abound in all forms of art such as the opera, ballads, music and fine arts, dance, the cinema, poetry, and literature, and the people involved are numerous; in many departments very little has been achieved so far in socialist transformation. The “dead” still dominate in many departments. What has been achieved in the cinema, new poetry, folk songs, the fine arts, and the novel should not be underestimated, but there, too, quite a few problems exist. As for such departments as the opera, the problems are even more serious. The social and economic base has changed, but the arts as part of the superstructure, which serves this base, still remains a serious problem. Hence we should proceed with investigation and study and attend to this matter in earnest.⁴⁴

The most important point made in this speech concerned Mao’s conviction that the “dead” were dominating the many government departments. But Mao used the cultural departments as scapegoats to generalize a national problem, since they could actually produce the “dead.” Both the cultural workers and the cultural officers were now ghosts. The ghost as a metaphor for a dejected and rejected entity—an entity that also haunts—somehow managed to fit very well with the social position of intellectuals in this new society. Intellectuals wrote ghost stories, were condemned as ghosts, and had to live like ghosts.

Another feature of the ghost is that it never dies, which justifies all the efforts, however violent, to bust them. Robert Jay Lifton also observes the frequent references to demons in Maoist China, explaining that the attention called to the incarnations of evil that never die out actually reflected a general fear of the Maoists of the death of the revolution. He argues that the intellectual liberalization in 1961 and 1962 had introduced to China antirevolutionary ideas of “humanism” from Russian and Eastern European intellectual circles, and Maoists feared that these ideas would direct the people away from the revolution.⁴⁵ Lifton argues that it was such “humanism,” transcending class origins and class struggles, that the Maoists feared the most. Instead of calling these ideas humanist, the Maoists condemned them as expressions of the ghosts. But the irony is that ghosts will never die, and so they will never be completely eradicated. This also indirectly demonstrates how the revolution could never end and was therefore immortal.

Ji Xianlin, professor and head of the Department of Eastern Languages at Peking University and a well-known writer and translator at the time, recalls that intellectuals like him could not take main roads during the Cultural Revolution because they would become the targets of punches and thrown stones:

We chose the isolated little alleys at the corners. During the decade-long havoc, there were many more of these little alleys than there are today at Peking University. These alleys could be found behind the shabby old buildings, beside the ditches. They were full of garbage, human excrement, and weeds, and it smelled so bad that the entire sky was covered with foul odor. Absolutely no one would come to these places in regular times, but they became my haven.⁴⁶

Many intellectuals remember the Cultural Revolution as a time of segregation: they were either physically imprisoned or psychologically denounced by the people around them, and lived in a hellish environment akin to a parallel universe. As Ji Xianlin admits, the intellectuals even came to enjoy this spectral existence, being left to hell, protected from the disturbance of the human world. However, what they feared the most was the times when they were dragged back to the masses to perform as ghosts. In other words, they never truly died, and were therefore never disconnected from the masses. It is this “negative” connection that defines the intellectuals’ value to the revolution.

This personal account describes one such event, in which the author witnessed how Zhou Yang performed his prescribed role at a political gathering:

No matter how much the crowd went wild, how great the people’s bravado, or how unforgiving they were, [Zhou Yang] was always able to respond in ways that were both effortless and watertight. No matter what he was asked, he always responded, “I am against Chairman Mao.” He seemed to be suggesting, “You are most interested in wrongful and evil assault? OK, I will give you what you desire the most.” Immediately [after his response] the hall would fill with deafening slogans such as “I defend to my death …” or “Down …,” and the sadistic crowd was happy. Zhou was also able take a breath from the endless questioning. Everybody was content.⁴⁷

Obviously Zhou had attended many of these rituals, and knew his role to play. His performances were repetitive, and the audience responses were also expected. While Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice could help us understand how the ritualistic purge of intellectuals can be meant to settle unsettleable social conflicts, the Chinese situation is also unique. As I have mentioned, Bataille argues that the sacrificial objects are already themselves valuable ones to society, yet the sacrifices are empowered in obscure ways: originally profane objects, through the sacrificing rituals, become sacred, because in such rituals, the victim is the only one to leave the real order entirely to become divine.⁴⁸ But traditional China does not have an equivalent concept of the sacred, and the Maoist rituals were not staged to expel the luxury. The Cultural Revolution victims were not given the respect and elegance that human sacrifices might receive as Bataille describes, but they were most humiliated, by the yin-yang hairstyle and the high hats, for example. They were not meant to be killed and given up to the divine, but their lives had to be maintained in the most farcical ways to convince the masses that they were enlightened.

Bataille is not only interested in sacrifice as excesses to be expelled, but he also found sacrifice a unique object for the people to experience death. The act of sacrificing pertains to violence and the perverse, through which the audience transgresses the boundaries of the profane world to reach the realm he calls “sovereignty,” the area in which individuals can escape the realm of work and utilitarianism to indulge in useless expenditures and various forms of eroticization and intoxication. Although the sacrificial victim does not need to be actually killed, the idea of death needs to be carried across.⁴⁹ But in the Cultural Revolution, the ghosts kept coming back to the world of the profane, and did not truly enter the realm of the sacred to actualize the kind of erotic effusions that Bataille theorizes. This might be due to the fact that in China we can find neither a concept similar to Bataille’s “sovereignty” nor a realm completely separate from the human world. The intellectuals might be disgraced in the most humiliating ways, but they were not meant to be “sacrificed” as such—they were tortured not to be killed, and suicides were strictly prohibited as a form of resistance to the proletarian dictatorship. Instead, they were cast in a threshold between life and death. They were continually pulled back into light from their dark hell to be smashed all over again, and their constant reappearances drove the revolution.

In Daoist China, life and afterlife, the human world and the underworld, were never clearly severed, but the dead continued to live with the people in different ways. The souls of the dead, through proper rituals, would reside in ancestral tablets, providing blessings and protection to their offspring, who gave them daily offerings. There were also souls who failed to settle and wandered in the human world, and festivals and rituals were performed to placate such beings. The sometimes peaceful, sometimes dangerous coexistence between the living and the dead allowed the two to develop all kinds of relations. As I have mentioned, the ghost has a strong affinity with the living in Chinese culture, and the ghost is also often allegorical in nature, meant as a vehicle for the people to comment on contemporary human affairs. In the seventeen-year period, intellectuals showed so much affinity with ghosts partly because they assumed the duty to protect cultural heritages, partly also because they wanted to maintain the allegorical power of the ghosts. But in the Li Huiniang incident the political establishment decided to grasp the cultural power directly; intellectuals were transformed from the producers of the allegories to the allegories themselves. This total condemnation of the spiritual world could also be seen as a proof of the enlightenment, except that the ghosts were preserved.

The enlightenment is less a state than a process that always needs a dialectic other to operate. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, the class enemy was not condemned simply to disappear but must come back to justify the ongoing enlightenment. The Cultural Revolution is a period full of ghosts, referring to not only the living ghosts such as the intellectuals but also the recently dead, many of whom were those “accidentally” killed in the class struggles. They did not enter the divine; since they were mostly wrathful, they lingered and haunted the human world. The cries of their vengeance were heard through the night, and it was clear to the sleepless people that these haunting ghosts remained at large because they were mistreated. All the purgation rituals and these ghost stories could be seen as the other side of the Cultural Revolution enlightenment, and they continued to perform the suppressed tradition. The ghost cannot “die’’ being the antagonistic other necessary to wield the imaginary social unity.

We can also see in this theater of the excess a showcase of the superabundance of revolutionary energy. The hyperbole of the performative showed the overflow of cultural-political excesses, and the Cultural Revolution stage featured and expelled them at the same time. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the dominant economy of the Cultural Revolution was not one of the material; the people were thrown into a world of endless propaganda, comparable to Bataille’s idea of general economy. Material existence was still intensely experienced, but the people were encouraged to relate to the world via all kinds of fictions and performances, shown most clearly in the neighborhood stages presenting not only yangbanxi but also never-ending theatrical political gatherings.

Around the whole country, intellectuals were required to sing the humiliating “Howling Song of Cow Ghosts and Snake Gods” (niugui sheshen haoge). In front of the people, howling like an animal, wailing like a ghost, they sang: “I am a cow ghost and snake god, and I am a cow ghost and snake god. I am guilty, I am guilty. I am guilty to the people, and please exercise your dictatorship on me.”⁵⁰ Although never officially published, this song, with variations, was sung all over the country. The figure of the ghost also found an affinity with the burgeoning caricature culture developing at the time. The condemnations against the intellectuals tended to be very repetitive and cliché, and their characterizations were often formulaic and lacking individuality. As such, the pictorial cartoon was very effective as a propaganda tool to condemn them. A very important pictorial work that shook the upper political echelons was the caricature titled A Crowd of Clowns (Qunchoutu) (Figure 8.1). Echoing the traditional pictorial representation of the folk story of “Zhong Kui marrying off his sister’’ (Zhong Kui jia mei) in which the ghosts follow Zhong’s order to carry the bride to the husband’s house in procession, this Cultural Revolution cartoon was first published in the Beijing “little newspaper” East is Red (Dongfang hong) on February 22, 1967, allegedly produced by a student of the Central Arts Academy. It was published at a time when many of the featured “crowns” had not yet been completely stripped of power, and its wide circulation caused great anxiety among many senior party leaders.⁵¹ This comic quickly attracted many follow-ups, and quite a few different versions of One Hundred Clowns (Baichoutu) were produced. As shown in these representations, the cow ghosts and snake gods discourse was both political and cultural, and it was difficult to differentiate fiction from reality.

Figure 8.1: Weng Rulan, A Crowd of Clowns, printed caricature, 1967.

We could characterize the Cultural Revolution as a period of extreme phantasmagoria. The Four Big Oppressive Landlords—Liu Wencai, Huang Shiren, Nan Ba Tian, and Zhou Bapi—were tirelessly referred to as symbols of class enemies.⁵² However, among them three were actually fictional characters, demonstrating how much the Cultural Revolution encouraged the merging of reality and fiction. The situation became even more confusing when people like Chen Qiang, the famous actor playing both Huang Shiren in the film The White-Haired Girl and Nan Ba Tian in the film Red Detachment of Women, entered the list of the condemned.⁵³ It was no longer easy to differentiate the actor from the characters he played.

In the political gatherings, both those on the stage and those on the floor were well aware of the performative dimension of the presentation, and everyone had a role to play. Outside the publicly performed rituals, the revolutionary theatricality overflowed and ran wild. With the rituals continually performed, these ghosts never reached the realm of the sacred; as such the audience also did not confront the radical alterity the sacrificial ritual could have made accessible. Instead, most of the audience became bystanders participating in the rituals halfheartedly as the performances repeated.

The Reincarnation

As the Cultural Revolution progressed, intellectuals were gradually solicited for help again. In 1969, the state began to show friendly gestures to those intellectuals who were willing to submit themselves totally to the masses.⁵⁴ A symbolic event was Zhou Enlai’s 1972 high profile reception of Yang Chen-Ning, the 1957 Nobel laureate in physics. The professor was a clear taboo in the late 1960s, but we began to see such figures in the official culture, such as the professor erected for the 1973 National Lianhuan Painting and Chinese Painting Exhibition. Zhong Zengya depicted a professor (as the title suggests) beside the dim lamp light, recording his analysis of some Chinese herbal medicine probably just picked up in the nearby mountain in his Chinese ink brush painting, The New Work of an Old Professor (Lao jiaoshou xin zhuzuo) (Figure 8.2). We can read this professor image as an “update” of the barefoot doctor archetype discussed in Chapter 4, at a time when the intellectual, in his most humble way, was again found useful by the state. There were also many late Cultural Revolution works, such as the 1974 film The Pioneers (Chuangye), in which engineers and geologists are featured as patriotic and useful for modernization, although they are also ideologically weak and need to learn from their worker colleagues to follow Maoism.⁵⁵

Figure 8.2: Zhong Zengya, The New Work of an Old Professor, Chinese ink on paper, 1973.

Some humanity scholars and cultural elites were also safeguarded: it was in the 1974 “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” campaign that they finally became “useful” again. To launch a criticism of Lin Biao and Confucius simultaneously, the Maoists ordered the Chinese people to reread the Confucian texts, via the mediation of top philosophers, to infiltrate a “correct” reading. Selected “reformed” philosophers were called upon to assist this campaign. Under pen names such as the Liang Xiao Writing Group, with the pun of liangxiao (two universities, meaning Tsinghua University and Peking University), many of these writings were actually written by major Confucian philosophers, such as Feng Youlan. From short slogan-type writing to serious book-length scholarship, many criticisms were produced to condemn Confucius’s writings.⁵⁶ Here we observe a regime that was seemingly, in its full-blown confidence, able to control all meanings produced. However, as intellectuals were summoned again to engage in scientific research and in “teaching” the masses, it was also proven that no modern government could do away with intellectuals.

The reemergence of the intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution also helps us to engage with Derrida’s discussion of the specter status of Marxism, which has been seen as a desirable anti-foundational purview to develop new leftist politics in today’s neoliberalist world. Derrida demonstrates that the collapse of communism as dogma in the late 1980s finally gave us the chance to relearn certain lessons of Marx, which come to light only when Marxism becomes spectral, when it can be understood as possibility instead of metaphysics.⁵⁷ In the case of these Chinese intellectuals, it was probably only when they were displaced from their dominant position to the subdued position—only when they became ghosts—that they could regain the assigned duties of being Marxist intellectuals, to discuss history, rupture, and restructuration.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. We did not see any serious reexamination of the dominant ideology from this group of Marxist scholars. Instead, most still held on to the ideology of social realism, if not socialist realism, as the main purpose of their existence. At the 1977 National Conference for Literary Workers—the first of its kind after the Cultural Revolution—many reinstated writers took to the stage and angrily protested the calamity inflicted on them and those whose lives were taken during the Cultural Revolution. Zhou Yang burst into tears after his passionate speech; Cao Yu almost collapsed onstage and needed to be helped out of the venue before the conference ended.⁵⁸ Before a huge audience composed primarily of writers, Xia Yan asked this desperate question: “Why is [the Gang of Four] so hostile to the writing of reality? I don’t understand.”⁵⁹ The overarching question of this conference seems to have been this: “Why are we, the writers, bearers of the suffering of the Cultural Revolution?” Xia Yan tried to answer his own question: they were feared because they were the embodiment of reality. To him, or the entire generation of Maoist intellectuals, representing reality is still their most important historical task. As both a writer and a scapegoat Xia Yan himself witnessed how extensively and tragically ideology can operate. After ten years of ghostly existence, this experience did not help him gain a more profound understanding of the relationship between ideology and writing, between the state and the intellectual. Needless to say, the new generation of intellectuals, thanks to the marketization of the cultural realm, is further discouraged to explore the troubled relationship between culture and politics.

Maybe we have placed too much confidence in Marxism as specters; maybe Marxism really cannot redeem humanity, neither can intellectuals. Ann Anagnost has argued that while socialist realism is in practice a mode of censorship that closes down any attempts in art and literature to represent reality directly, among the ordinary people there are the tactics of everyday life not to escape but to further engage with such representational politics in and after the Cultural Revolution. The people would play the role assigned to them consciously and exaggeratedly to produce a “bogus reality,” as shown in a 1979 case of an individual impersonating the son of a powerful official and receiving all kinds of gifts and privileges beyond his imagination. These “mimetic” acts become a means of play, so that the regime of “truth” is made to reveal its own fictive and self-referential nature.⁶⁰ Compared to the ordinary people, the writer should be better equipped to perform this mimetic power, yet most of them fail, or choose not, to engage with the potentiality of mimesis. If reality could really be transparent, there would be no ideology and no oppression. Ideology needs fiction to operate, so does its resistance. In contemporary China, when intellectuals are increasingly distanced from politics, probably only ordinary people can rekindle the dynamics between culture and politics in their ordinary lives. If Derrida fails to truly negate Marxism by holding onto its specters, we might start considering negating the intellectuals as the defenders of our polity and humanity.

Conclusion

Forty years have passed since the dismal termination of the Cultural Revolution that had lasted too long, and there are currently two strong views about its lingering meanings in contemporary China: first, we need to rekindle its communist spirit to combat the capitalism that reigns China; and second, China is still suffering from the devastation of the moral upheaval it introduced. While sympathetic to both these views, I concur with the ordinary majority in seeing little connection between the Cultural Revolution and China’s current reality. From a macro-institutional perspective, China is neither condemned by the havoc created fifty years ago, nor could it be salvaged by any mass mobilization waving communism as its myth. The enormous volume of state power the PRC has gained and the equally enormous amount of social problems it directly or indirectly created are consequences less of the Maoist revolution than of the neoliberal global conditions that reward a politically stable country that can supply a huge amount of cheap labor unendingly while being willing to shove away into the drawer—however temporarily—most concerns for labor conditions, environmental protections, and internal social inequality. Some of the conditions discussed previously are important factors in shaping the development of post-socialist China, such as the presence of a strong central government able to coordinate the vast land and population confidently and effectively, and the presence of a largely secular people (who do not have much religious burden) to engage in market activities aggressively. But these proto-capitalist conditions would exist with or without the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy of the late 1970s might be a rectification of the Cultural Revolution, but too many things have happened afterward that combine to steer the direction of the development of this giant country.

If we shift our attention to the ordinary Chinese people, most of them are also not interested in linking their present lives to past events. Many Chinese people are generally satisfied with their lives, and they see no need to reconstruct and indulge in a history of political fanaticism, naiveté, and sinfulness to confound the development and nationalist pride many people are enjoying at present. If the past frustrates and embarrasses the present, why should we reintroduce shame and hesitation to a time of peace and prosperity? If Deng Xiaoping introduced a radical ideological break to China after the Cultural Revolution to correct the historical mistakes, why should we force a continuous causal relation between the past and the present that has already been severed? The deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai ended not only two individual lives but also an epoch of socialism. People might be nostalgic for a highly selective memory, but overall very few would want to go back to relive or correct the past. I believe that history has little power for present-day China.

If the Cultural Revolution has anything to do with the ascending road of “China Rise,” it might have impacted the people with a magical disenchantment that distanced them both from history and from politics. Instead, the bourgeois mentality is switched on, and the people fall back on their own private resources to secure present gain and future stability. This has provided a smooth path for capitalism to find its way to this post-socialist country. The Cultural Revolution legacy the Chinese people have inherited is neither a belief in the future nor a disbelief in heroes (lines of famous Cultural Revolution poems by Shi Zhi and Bei Dao), but a cynicism to any claims of the common good and any pursuits that could transcend people’s private interests to benefit the public. More accurately, the people are caught in a perpetual present. The past is gone, while the future could only be a continuation of the present. This inability and avoidance to face the past and the future also condemn the present to be a depoliticized one. Politics is understood as trickery, a power game for unscrupulous people to use every expedient to get what they want. Those few ambitious individuals trying to advance the public interest through political participation are careful to locate the subtle grey areas to make small changes. However, most people try to rescue their individuality in the realms of economy and consumption.

With the benefit of hindsight, we observe that depoliticization was not a historical product of the Cultural Revolution but developed side by side with the utmost political frenzy during the time. In a society that placed so much emphasis on mimesis and conformity, people were both politicized and depoliticized; as the people were always paying attention to each other to identify differences, individuals had to try very carefully not to express political views that might attract adverse attention. The more the people were required to be alike, the more they were anxious of being identified as different, and the more they needed to protect themselves. As the Cultural Revolution dragged on, depoliticization became more prominent, and the models were increasingly entrenched in people’s doxa because following them was safe. Not only public values but also independent political judgment was discouraged, and the people became more and more timid about engaging with politics out of genuine concern. Poet Bei Dao recounts a conversation he had with his fellow construction workers. It was 1971, he was twenty-two years old, and the news of Lin Biao’s death had just been announced to the construction workers before lunch:

The specter of Vice-Leader Lin Biao led our lunch conversations, and everybody discussed the news and speculated on his possible escape routes. I began to talk. Starting with isolated phrases I spouted eloquent speeches, and my words poured out like a flood. I talked about the paradox of revolution and power, and I raised the Marxist concept of “Doubt Everything” as well as the spiritual future of our generation … Not until An Zhisheng poked me with his shoulders did I see the anxieties in people’s eyes. They started to leave, and quickly the place became empty. Only me and An Zhisheng were left behind.¹

This recollection vividly describes the blurry and subtle line between friends and foes, between politicization and depoliticization, between past and future, in this stressful society. Conversation topics could easily slide from casual chats to dangerous political taboos, and the people seemed to have a clear sense of what could be said, and what not, with the scope of the former much smaller than the latter. The two youths were quickly identified as a can of worms that could bring troubles to the community—probably in ways not too unlike the situation of Lin Biao. Bei Dao was very fortunate that his deviance was not reported; many similar cases were. Intense politicization also brought intense depoliticization, and it is not easy to differentiate the acts of identifying enemies from those of protecting oneself. Depoliticization as a structural consequence of the Cultural Revolution might have been Mao’s biggest blind spot.

We can say that the Cultural Revolution was initiated by an aspiration to engage with politics and engage with the future. The “failure” of the Cultural Revolution meant the failure of the two. Obviously, there was something fundamentally wrong about the Cultural Revolution. Under Maoist governance, while each individual was trusted as unique and significant, on the collective level the people had to be one. The Cultural Revolution demanded individuals to voluntarily identify with Maoism, with the fantasy that people’s autonomy could be controlled. As this book has demonstrated, this contradictory call for individuals to be both singular and unified tore them asunder. The alleged overlap between individuals and the collective did not rekindle people’s generous concerns for each other, and the self was never able to pursue a truly political project that honored individuals’ complex relationships with others. Instead, people were locked up in their own immediate subjectivism, easily objectified by power. In this society, where similarities and differences were so radically dichotomized, the Cultural Revolution was also a world where sympathy and genuine mutual respect could not be engendered. Sympathy and respect are possible under two conditions. First, it is the recognition of difference rather than sameness that cultivates a yearning in us to engage fully with an other who does not think and act the same ways as we do. Second, this difference cannot be absolute but is situational: it is when the other is recognized as different from us—not fundamentally but under a combination of circumstances at a given moment—that we can connect to that other. This kind of situational and nonpurposive difference was not allowed to exist during the Cultural Revolution. Because difference was understood in absolute terms, the people were not encouraged to give sympathetic responses to each other. Obviously, many still did—but outside the official purview.

Worse, the power structure was opaque and unstable, so the people were as agitated as they were confused. The Cultural Revolution was initiated to achieve radical equality in society, and the revolutionary masses responded to this call by unseating the leaders by force. But quickly they would realize that the highly hierarchical power structure between the leader, party, and the masses was never challenged, and in such chaotic milieu the power hierarchy was reproduced almost in a random way in a society where no institutions or normative values were secure. The principle of equality was not realized in a form of mutual respect and social collaboration; instead, the people competed to become “revolutionary,” struggling to meet a “benchmark” that was never really clear. Therefore, the new revolutionary subjects, meant to be the ultimate end of the Cultural Revolution, could never rise to a place in which they could define the revolution and direct its course. On the bright side, this Maoist subject avoided the egoism and constructed confidence of the Western metaphysical subject, whose wishes to control are unbounded. However, this subject could never develop to a stage that would outgrow the revolution, and therefore was always estranged by an ideology larger than they were. If the model culture was a key part of Mao’s Cultural Revolution from its inception, the revolutionary subject could never escape the control of the model, and therefore could never be free. After the Cultural Revolution, the people rediscovered their deprived freedom in an entrepreneurial and individualist society. The political emancipation promised by the Cultural Revolution proved to be fake, and economic liberalism quickly fulfilled that ideological vacuum.

For these reasons, the Cultural Revolution was doomed from the beginning. How could the Cultural Revolution produce revolutionary agents who were extremely conformist? How could they display true compassion with their fellows who could only be either identical to or opposite from them? Or we can characterize the Cultural Revolution as a radical modernity project, aspired to tame the unruly Chinese culture that was doomed to fail. I can only say that if our neoliberal popular culture selling quasi-individuality is making us standardized and thoughtless, its exact opposite—the Maoist propaganda culture—is also not an option for the cultivation of enlightened, responsible, and caring citizens. Any intention to glorify and romanticize Maoism as a viable alternative to capitalism is delusional, although the Cultural Revolution was clearly driven by such an aim.

I began this research with the hope to locate the seeds of liberation inherent in this revolution. Against my best wishes I see mostly betrayal: all such promises were summoned only to be suppressed and manipulated. The two most fundamental components of the Cultural Revolution were clearly culture and revolution, but the Maoists put the two in hierarchical structure: culture (wendou) was promoted, along with violence (wudou), only as a means to achieve revolution as an end. Culture and violence became mutually replaceable, and they were both tools for power to rule and perpetuate, which also discharged the oppositional relation of the two. But history shows that neither violence nor culture should be understood as means. While any use of physical violence should be submitted to the most austere critical scrutiny, culture must be protected from any utilitarian logic. Culture is by nature a process, pointing to an open future through the unsettling course of diversification. But the inherent association between culture and plurality was deliberately stamped out in the Cultural Revolution, which also prevented the people from imagining an open future. In a similar way, the “China dream” promoted by the current Xi Jinping government is only a most blatantly unimaginative endorsement of the present. At the same time, the notion of revolution is also one of the most suppressed and mocked ideas in contemporary mainstream Chinese society. If the Cultural Revolution was a failure, we should not lose hope regarding the imaginative dimension of revolution in general, without which we could neither see our estrangement nor find ways to overcome it.

It is precisely because the promises the Cultural Revolution failed to deliver that we should not forget about the Cultural Revolution, against the active forgetting the PRC government has implanted in the country for forty years. Interestingly, there is currently a new wave of Cultural Revolution discussions developing among the older folks. Most of the revolutionary youths are now past their prime, also outwitting the political “wisdom” they have developed after the Cultural Revolution. Living in and out of synchrony with China as a nation, they witnessed Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy and the subsequent embrace of capitalism and globalization that led China to become a major world power. At the moment, while the Cultural Revolution is still an area of taboo in the PRC official culture, some retired people have begun to revisit their youth. As mentioned in the Introduction, particularly during the past few years, with the rise of the internet as an alternative public space, the Cultural Revolution has increasingly been recounted through memoirs and repentance writings. Many official archives are still sealed by the government, in stark contrast to the carnival of some older people—each of whom has something to say. In the name of rescuing memory, these sincere writings and voices might still be in the minority, and they tend to be trivial, subjective, and contradictory. But they keep the Cultural Revolution alive in society, showing that people are still constantly asking what it means—to them and to China. In 2013 and 2014, there were also Red Guard leaders, such as Song Binbin and Chen Xiaolu, who openly repented and apologized to the Cultural Revolution victims for their crimes, together with a recently published book collecting thirty-seven such repentances.² Many former Red Guards, now in their autumn years, are getting together to talk about their past, and some have also taken action and started to publish online.

It might still be too early to evaluate the historical meaning of this surge of repentances, which earned the compliments of PRC mainstream media in 2014 but quickly lost attention. We do not know exactly what the official attitude is—it might still be wavering. These personal reflections might be sincere, or they might only be the result of the personal calculations of the ones who repent, but a combination of them powerfully contrasts with, and effectively demythologizes, the new round of Mao heat partly engineered by the Xi government. The desire for repentance and transcendence witnessed in these writings distantly echoes the individuals’ love of Mao and the CCP when these remorseful souls were youths, as in both historical periods the concerned subjects wished to forfeit, or actualize, themselves for the sake of the larger society. The major difference between the two stages probably resides in their relation with Maoism: they were demanded to be conducive to the higher ideal fifty years ago; today, most of them believe they have been relieved of this burden.

Most importantly, they are the only living and still active generation in China who had actual experiences of the revolution, and their experiences and reflections might productively be contrasted with this era when “superstability” is sought at all costs. As mentioned in the Introduction, it is problematic to fetishize these personal memories as historical truths. But if we can understand them as a multitude of subjective narrations motivated by all kinds of personal intentions, these confessions and accounts might re-enchant the paradox of their subject formation, and reconnect the past and the present. These “talkative” subjects also stand in stark contrast to the incompetence and unwillingness of the government to extract any meanings from the Cultural Revolution. In the PRC, the Cultural Revolution has almost become an oral history. It is clearly unrealistic to expect the current leaders—many of them former Red Guards—to reflect on the calamity and understand the revolution more profoundly, but let us hope that the seeds of liberation originally contained in, but highly repressed by, the Cultural Revolution may yet sprout new lives in a new environment fertile with memory and curiosity. Their memories and words could help build a public realm of pluralistic opinions and narratives to resist the totalitarian impulses of both the Cultural Revolution and the current PRC. I hope that by critically reflecting on the Cultural Revolution, we will not forget the courage to imagine, a faith in politics, and the will to change. Our continual revisit of the Cultural Revolution—however partial—should point us to a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between revolutionary thinking and the cultivation of more egalitarian political communities, in which relations between the self and others can be expressed with more diversity and respect, less angst and insecurity.

Notes

Introduction

1Guillain, Robert, The Blue Ants: 600 Million Chinese under the Red Flag, London: Secker & Warburg, 1957, 3–8.

2Han Shaogong, “Manchang de jiaqi” (The Long Vacation), in Qishi niandai, edited by Bei Dao and Li Tuo, 562–84, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008; Bei Dao, Chengmen kai (Opening the City Gates), Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2010, 97–104; Zhu Xueqin, Sixiang shi shang de shizong zhe (Those Who Disappeared from Intellectual History), Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1999, 171–83; Wei Guangqi and Ding Dong, “Meiyou kongbai: Wenge shiqi de dushu shenghuo” (No Blankness: Reading Experiences during the Cultural Revolution) Huaren Wenhua Shijie 9, 1997; Wang Anyi, Wang Anyi dushu biji (Wang Anyi Reading Notes), Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 2007, 6–7; Zhi An, “‘Wenge’ dushu yu Zhongguo 60 nian” (“Cultural Revolution” Reading and Sixty Years of China), Tengxun xinwen wang, last modified September 28, 2009, accessed March 5, 2015, news.qq.com. Although Bei Dao mostly recounts his childhood reading experiences before the Cultural Revolution, the rhetoric and content of his account are very similar to the others’. Yin Hongbiao also discusses the reading culture then in his Shizongzhe de zuji: Wenhua dageming qijian de qingnian sichao (Footprints of the Missing: Thoughts of the Youth during the Cultural Revolution), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2009, 218–33.

3Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 85–126, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, 124–6.

4Zhou Ziren, Yige hongweibing xiaobao zhubian de wenge jiyi (The Cultural Revolution Memories of a Chief Editor of a Little Red Guard Newspaper), Taipei: Xinrui wenchuang, 2012, 89.

5Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), “Yao wendou, buyao wudou” (We Want wendou, not wudou), Renmin ribao. This editorial was published on September 5, 1966, but the notion of wendou was most widely promoted during 1968 and 1969, when the country was beset with countless regional civil wars.

6See Yin Hongbiao, “Wenhua dageming zhong de wudou” (The wudou in the Cultural Revolution), in Women dou jingli guo de rizi (Those Days We Have Experienced), edited by Ji Xianlin, 292–8, Beijing: Shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2001.

7Clark, Toby, Art and Propaganda: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997, 95.

8Bown, Matthew Cullerne, Socialist Realist Painting, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998, 332, 336.

9Johnson, Oliver, “The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?” Slavic Review 70: 4, Winter 2011, 819–43, 831.

10Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 306–7, 402.

11Xu Jilin, “Women zheyidai zhishi fenzi” (We as a Generation of Intellectuals), Nanfang dushi bao (Southern Metropolitan Daily), November 12, 2013.

12Dirlik, Arif, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, 130.

13Qian Liqun, Mao Zedong shidai he hou Mao Zedong shidai (1949–2009) ling yizhong lishi shuxie (Maoist and Post-Maoist Time [1949–2009]: Another Type of Historical Writing), vol. 2, Taipei: Linking Books, 2012, 30.

14Zhonggong Zhongyang Zhengzhiju, “Zhonggong Zhongyang guanyu tongyi kangri genjudi dang de lingdao ji tiaozheng ge zuzhi jian guanxi de jueding.” (On the Unification of Party Leadership in the Anti-Japanese Bases, and Adjusting the Relations between Various Organizations), in vol. 8 of Mao Zedong ji (Collection of Mao Zedong), 155–64, Hong Kong: Jingdai shiliao gongying she, 1975.

15Mittler, Barbara, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013, 30–2, 126–7, 333–4.

16Schram, Stuart, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 89.

17See Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965; and Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge, 1993.

18Luce Irigaray, for example, reminds us that the patriarchy imposes the same fear and envy of the boy to the girl. When the girl is asked to imitate the boy, phallocentrism is perpetuated. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, 11–129.

19Bloodline theory was a major debate driving the development of the Red Guard movement in the period 1966–7, causing antagonisms among young revolutionaries with different political family backgrounds. The legendary Yu Luoke was sentenced to death because he criticized the Red Guard movement for disallowing individuals to decide who they wanted to be, regardless of their family background.

20Wang Chaotian, Wo shi yige “hongweibing” (I Am a “Red Guard”), Taipei: Zhongguo dalu wenti yanjiusuo, 1976, 14–15.

21Wu, Yiching, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015, 53–94; Yin Hongbiao, Shizongzhe de zuji, 5–124.

22Dutton, Michael, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to “The People”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 278–80. See also how Ding Xueliang describes the ways the released criminals formed gangs among themselves and continued to harass local communities, and the Red Guards did not know how to deal with them. Geming yu fangeming zhuiyi: cong wenge dao Chongqing moshi (Recounting Revolution and Antirevolution), Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2013, 181–8.

23Both poet Bei Dao and historian Wu Di reveal how the propaganda culture was not attractive to them. They preferred reading and writing on their own or with their peers. Author’s interview with Bei Dao, October 9, 2013, Hong Kong; author’s interview with Wu Di, November 5, 2013, Hong Kong.

24See Wang, Aihe, “Wuming: An Underground Art Group during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 3: 2, 2009, 183–99, and Yin Hongbiao, Shizongzhe de zuji.

25Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 238.

26Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, 5.

27Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 1–18.

28Johnson, “The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist.”

29Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, 87.

30Ellul, Propaganda, 79.

31Ellul, Propaganda, 6–9.

32Yu Hua, Shige cihui li de Zhongguo (China in Ten Words), Taipei: Ryefield, 2011, 28.

33Ji Xianlin, Niupeng zayi (Disarrayed Thoughts in the Cowshed), Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1999, 40–1.

34Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990, 175–80.

35Chen Boda et al., “Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, Xie Tangzhong, Wu De zai wenyijie dahui shang de jianghua” (Speeches by Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Zhou Enlai, Xie Tangzhong, Wu De delivered at the Great Assembly of Arts Circle), in Song Yongyi ed., Zhongguo Wenhua dageming wenku guangpan (The Archive of Chinese Cultural Revolution in Compact Disc), Hong Kong: Universities Service Centre for China Studies of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.

36Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “On Cooperation” in vol. 33 of Collected Works, 467–75, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965. Originally published in Pravda, May 26–7, 1923.

37Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–32,” Journal of Contemporary History 9: 1, January 1974, 33–52, 33.

38However, Fitzpatrick has recently admitted that this “cultural revolution” paradigm was actually her invention in the 1970s. Lenin had used the term, but in a sense that was slightly different from the one she proposed. She used the term as an analogy to the Chinese Cultural Revolution that had attracted so much Western attention then. But she insists that an event of this nature had taken place, and she picked up the Chinese terminology to demonstrate a comparable transformative cultural project. See Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Russian Review 58: 2, April 1999, 202–9.

39Khestanov, Rouslan, “The Role of Culture in Early Soviet Models of Governance,” Studies of East European Thought 66, June 2014, 123–38.

40See Wang Weifu and Wang Zhi, “1956–1976: jishu geming yu wenhua geming sixiang de yangyi guiji” (1956–1976: The Mutual Repression and Manifestation of the Technological Revolution and the Cultural Revolution), Xinhua wenzhai 307: 7, 2004, 53–5

41The Ministry of Culture was not closed then; it was simply not functioning. It was ordered shut down finally on June 22, 1970, and its tasks were taken over by a “Culture Unit” newly established under the direct control of the State Department. The efforts this time were more to reinstate the role of the state in controlling culture than the other way around.

42Karl, Rebecca E., “Culture, Revolution, and the Times of History: Mao and 20th-Century China,” The China Quarterly 187, September 2006, 693–9.

43There were many different versions of the “Three-in-One” principle circulating in the Cultural Revolution, such as the soldier-peasant-soldier coalescence, the cooperation of workers, cadres, and technicians in the factory, as well as the close collaboration of the older generation, the middle-age generation, and the younger generation in all organizations.

44There are digital journals—although these are circulated within confined communities—devoted to the “memory rescue” of the Cultural Revolution, such as Zuotian (Yesterday) and Jiyi (Memory). Zuotian was published in January 2012 edited by He Shu, while Jiyi was first published in September 2008 by Wu Di. Difang wenge (Local Cultural Revolution) is a public website based in Canada specifically for the collection and publication of happenings around the country during the Cultural Revolution. There are also a few other popular websites in mainland China welcoming submissions related to the Cultural Revolution, such as Renmin yu shehui (Humanities and Society), Guanchazhe (Observer), and Gongshi wang. Overall, the PRC government is still relatively lenient with regard to the publication of Cultural Revolution memoirs online, although we do not know when this policy might shift.

45Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 2; Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 384.

46Jameson, The Modernist Papers, London: Verso, 2007, ix.

47See Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 11–26.

48Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 50.

49See, for example, Su, Yang, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Goldstein, Melvyn C., Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundrup, On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009; and Yang Haiying, Meiyou mubei de caoyuan: Mengguren yu Wenge datusha (The Grassland without Tombstones: Mongolians and the Cultural Revolution Great Massacre), translated by Liu Yingbo and Liu Yanzi, Xinbei, Taiwan: Baqi wenhua, 2014.

50A widely quoted figure allegedly came from a statement made by Ye Jianying, then chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, in a Central Party meeting on December 13, 1978, in which he claimed that the death toll of the Cultural Revolution was 20 million. R. J. Rummel estimated that about 7,731,000 people had died from causes directly related to the Cultural Revolution. A more recent estimate by Jin Zhong is 3.42 million. Focusing on rural China only, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals argue that between 750,000 and 1.5 million were murdered there. The latest estimation, by Andrew Walder, is 1.1 to 1.6 million deaths.’’ See Ye Jianying, “Zai Zhongyang gongzuo huiyi bimuhui shang de jianghua (yijiu qiba nian shier yue shisan ri)” (The Speech Made in the Closing Meeting of the Central Working Conference [December 13, 1978]), Ai sixiang wang, last modified December 14, 2008, accessed March 5, 2015, aisixiang.com; Rummel, R. J., China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991, 263; Jin Zhong, “Zuixin ban wenge siwang renshu,” (The Latest Version of the Death Toll of the Cultural Revolution), Open Magazine 310, October 2012, 48–50; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, 262; Andrew G. Walder, ‘‘Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966–1971,’’ Social Science History 38, nos. 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 513–39.

51Zhonggong Zhongyang dangshi yanjiushi (Research Center of the History of the Central Chinese Communist Party), Zhongguo gongchandang lishi, er juan, 1949–1978 (History of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2 [1949–1978]), Beijing: Research Center of the History of the Central Chinese Communist Party, 2011, 752.

1. Maoist Aesthetics

1Mao Zedong, “Zai bajie shizhong quanhui shang de jianghua” (Speech Delivered in the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee), in vol. 45 of Mao Zedong quanji (Complete Collection of Mao Zedong), edited by Zhang Dijie, 224–32, Hong Kong: Rundong chubanshe, 2013.

2Wendy Larson explains how Mao repeatedly employed concepts like mind and spirit to advance his politics. Larson, Wendy, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in the Twentieth Century, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, 90–5.

3See Duan Jingli, Hu Xian nongmin hua chenfulu (The Ebbs and Flows of Hu Xian Peasant Paintings), Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2005.

4See Yangquan gong ren ye yu mei shu bian chuang zu (Yangquan Workers Amateur Artistic Production Group), ed. Yangquan gongren meishu dazibao, bihua xuan (Collection of Yangquan Workers Artistic Big-Character Posters and Murals), Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1976.

5The idea of “Three Prominences” was first advocated by Yu Huiyong in his article “Rang wenyijie yongyuan chengwei xuanchuan Mao Zedong sixiang de zhendi” (Allowing the Cultural Sphere to Become the Propaganda Field for Mao Zedong Thinking Forever), published in the newspaper Wenhuibao on May 23, 1968. The idea was soon incorporated as an official regulation that all artists must follow.

6Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and the Arts” in Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present, edited and translated by Faye Chunfang Fei, 129–41, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

7Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, translated by Charles Rougle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, 64–5.

8Gutkin, Irina, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, 12–21.

9For the contribution of Yu Huiyong to yangbanxi, see Dai Jiafang, Zouxiang huimie: “Wenge” wenhuabuzhang Yu Huiyong de fuchenlu (Walking towards Destruction: The Ups and Downs of Yu Huiyong, Minister of Culture during the Cultural Revolution), Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe, 1994, 280–91.

10Wenyi bao (Art and Literature Post), “Xianqi wenyi chaungzuo de gaochao! Jianshe Gongchan zhuyi de wenyi!” (Begin the High Tide of Cultural Production! Making Communist Art and Literature!), Wenyi bao 19, 1958.

11Dobrenko argues that romanticism always occupied a subtle position in socialist realism. See Dobrenko, Evgeny, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, translated by Jesse M. Savage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, 57–66.

12De Man, Paul, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1–18, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

13Ibid., 16.

14Jameson, Fredric, The Antinomies of Realism, London: Verso, 2013, 46.

15Wang, Failure of Charisma: The Chinese Cultural Revolution in Wuhan, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Perry and Li, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Revolution, Boulder: Westview, 1997; Li Xun, Da bengkui: Shanghai gongren zaofanpai xingwang shi (The Great Collapse: The History of Shanghai’s Labor Dissident Movement), Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1996; and Wu, Yiching, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, 95–189.

16Heilmann, Sebastian, and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, 1–29, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011, 7.

17Dong and Walder, “Factions in a Bureaucratic Setting: The Origins of Cultural Revolution Conflict in Nanjing,” The China Journal 65, January 2011, 1–25, 5.

18Lin, Xiaoping, “Challenging the Canon: Socialist Realism in Traditional Chinese Painting Revisited,” Third Text 21: 1, January 2007, 41–53.

19Fang Yun, Geming yangbanxi xuexi zhaji (Notes of Learning Revolutionary Model Performances), Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1974, 36.

20Chen Yinan, Qingchun wuhen: Yige zaofan pai gongren de shinian wenge (Youth without Traces: The Ten-Year Cultural Revolution of a Revolutionary Worker), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2006, 115–21.

21Ibid., 120.

22Wang Lei, Jianhelang (Waves of the Jian River), Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1974, 379–99.

23Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel: A Historical-Philosphical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, 129.

24Jameson, Fredric, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso, 2009, 273.

25Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, xiii; see also Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, 289.

26Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 413.

27Huters, Ted, “Between Praxis and Essence,” in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, edited by Arif Darlik and Maurice Meisner, 316–337, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989, 335.

28Schram, Stuart, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 135.

29Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins, 36.

30See Sun Peidong, Shishang yu zhengzhi: Guangdong minzhong richang zhuozhuang shishang (1966–1976) (Fashion and Politics: The Everyday Clothing and Fashions of Guandong People [1966–1976]), Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 2013, 142–57.

31Jiang Qing, Jiang Qing zizhuan (Autobiography of Jiang Qing), edited by Chang Xiaoshi, Hong Kong: Beiyunhe chubanshe, 2012, 328.

32Author’s interview with Xue Jinghua, August 9, 2011, Hong Kong.

33Ibid.

34Jiang Qing, “Zhongyang shouzhang jiejian dianying, xiju, yinyue gongzuozhe zuotanhui jianghua” (Central Leaders’ Meeting with Film, Drama, and Music Workers), Wuyouzhixiang, accessed December 14, 2011, wyzxsx.com.

35Berry, Chris, “Every Colour Red? Colour in the Films of the Cultural Revolution Model Stage Works,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 3, 2012, 240–4.

36Quoted in Liang Maochun, “Rang yinyueshi yanjiu shenru xiaqu: qiantan ‘wenge’ yinyue yanjiu,” (Let Music History Go Deep: A Preliminary Studies of “Cultural Revolution” Music), Yinyue yishu 4, 2006, 20–1.

37Wang, Tuo, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014, 9–20.

38Li Hui, Li Hui wenji (Collected Works of Li Hui), vol. 1, Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1998, 295.

39Fan Shitao, “Wenge riji: Guifan, chengfa he richang jilu” (Diary Writing in the Cultural Revolution: Discipline, Punishment, and Everyday Recording), Zuotian (Yesterday) 1, January 2012, no page number.

40Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, 8–9.

41Huang, Philip C. C., “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 21: 1, January 1995, 105–43, 111, 132.

42Xue Qinsheng, “‘Xiaogui’ zaofan” (The Rebellions of the “Little Ghosts”), in Yikusitian hua dangnian (Talking about the Past through yikusitian), edited by Qunzhong chubanshe, 103–111, Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1964, 111.

43Yancheng zhuanqu geweihui (Revolutionary Committee of Yancheng Special Region), “Xuexiban dier jieduan jinxing ‘liangyi sancha’ jiaoyu jihua chugao” (The Second Phase of the Study Class, Launching the “Two Remembering and Three Investigations” Scheme, First Draft), 5.

44Ibid., 4.

45Wang Xiaoming, “‘Yikusitian’ zongshengxiang” (Many Manifestations of “yikusitian”), Minjian lishi dang’an ku (The Folk History Project of Universities Service Centre of China Studies), accesssed October 4, 2014, mjlsh.usc.cuhk.edu.hk.

46Hao Ran, Jinguang dadao (The Golden Road), Beijing: Renming wenxue chubanshe, 1972, 48.

47Nanhuixian Bayi Zhongxue yi jiaoshi (A teacher of August First Secondary School in Nanhuixian), “Women kaishe geming wenyike de changshi” (Our Attempts to Implement Revolutionary Arts and Literature Courses), Wenyi zhanbao (Arts and Literature Combat Daily), February 9, 1969, 4.

48Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 234–5.

49Remin ribao pinlunyuan, “Edu de yongxin beilie de shoufa—piping Andongni’aoni paishe de tiwei Zhongguo de fanhua yingpian” (Evil Intention, Despicable Means: Criticizing Antonioni’s Anti-China Film Chung Kuo, Cina), Renmin ribao, January 30, 1974.

50Zhong Kewen, “Chuochuan fanhua xiaochou de beilie jiliang” (Laying Bare the Despicable Tricks of an Anti-China Clown), Guangming Ribao, February 7, 1974.

51Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006, 12–19.

52Rancière, Jacques, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 44.

53See comments of Bosteels, Bruno, The Actuality of Communism, London: Verso, 2011, 129–69.

54Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 85–126, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, 111.

2. Production and Circulation of Literature under the Revolutionary Cultural Economy

1Andreas, Joel, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, 9.

2The two approaches are illustrated in Bourdieu’s two main works, The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge, 1986, respectively.

3Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Wenhuabu (PRC Ministry of Culture), “Wenhuabu dangwei guanyu jinyibu jiandi baokan tushu gaochou de qingshi baogao” (Report from the Party Committee of the Ministry of Culture Regarding Further Reductions in Remunerations for Newspaper, Journal, and Book Publications), in Zhongguo banquanshi yanjiu wenxian (Collected Documents for the Research of China’s Copyright History), edited by Zhou Lin and Li Mingshan, 331, Beijing: Zhongguo fangzheng chubanshe, 1999.

4Yin Hongbiao, Shizongzhe de zuji: Wenhua dageming qijian de qingnian sichao (Footprints of the Missing: Thoughts of the Youth during the Cultural Revolution), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2009, 548–50.

5Fang Houshu, “Mao Zedong zhuzuo chuban jishi (1949–1982 nian)” (Account of Mao’s Publication, 1949–1982), Chuban shiliao (Publication History) 1, 2001, 70–86, 78.

6Liu Guo and Shi Feng ed. Xin Zhongguo chuban wushinian jishi, (Record of Fifty Years of Publishing in New China), Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1999, 99–100.

7Ibid., 101–2.

8Fang Houshu, “Mao Zedong zhuzuo chuban jishi,” 84.

9Fang Houshu, “‘Wenge’ shinian Mao Zedong zhuzuo” (Recounting the Publication of Mao Zedong Writings and Mao Zedong portraits during the Ten Years of “Cultural Revolution”), in Qinli XinZhongguo chuban liushinian (Personal Experiences of Sixty Years of Publication in New China), edited by Song Yingli and Liu Xiaomin, 247–82, Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2009, 256–71.

10Li Xiaohang, “Wenge shiqi qunzhong zuzhi bianyin de Mao Zedong sixiang wansui kaolüe” (A Study of the Long Live Mao Zedong Thoughts Published by the Revolutionary Masses during the Cultural Revolution Period), Dangshi ziliao yanjiu, April 2002.

11“Guanyu jinzhi feifa yinshua, shetan maimai xuanchuanpin de tonggao.” See Jin Dalu, Feichang yu Zhengchang: Shanghai “wenge” shiqi de shehui shenghuo (Regularities and Irregularities: Social Life in Shanghai’s “Cultural Revolution” Period), 2 vols., Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2011, vol. 2, 246.

12Song Yuanfang ed. Zhongguo chuban shiliao (xiandai bufen) shangce (Historical Data of Publication in China, Vol. 3 [Modern Section] Part 1), Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe; Wuhan: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001, 252.

13Fang Houshu, Zhongguo chuban shihua xinbian (New Edition of Chinese Publication History), Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2010, 351; see also Mo Weiming and He Qiong, “‘Wenhua dageming’ shiqi de ‘yangbanxi’ tushu chubanwu” (The Printed Materials of “Model Theatrical Works” during the “Cultural Revolution”), Dangshi wenyuan (Literary Circles of CPC History) 5, 2007, 4–8.

14Ibid., 350.

15Yang Suqiu, “‘Wenge wenxue’ yu ‘Xinshiqi wenxue’ de guanlian yanjiu” (The Relation between the Literary Works Produced during the Cultural Revolution and Those Produced during the New Period), PhD diss., Soochow University, 2010, 69.

16Wang Jiaping, Wenhua da geming shiqi shige yanjiu (Poetry of the Cultural Revolution), Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2004, 180.

17“Tian bi dang en tian yi xiao, Dang bi niang qin dang geng qin.” Yidui fuduizhang Wang Xinmin (Vice Leader of the First Unit Wang Xinmin), “Qinren laidao zanmen cun” (Family Members Coming to Our Village), in Xiaojinzhuang shige xuan (Collected Poetry of Xiaojinzhuang), edited by Tianjin renmin chubanshe. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1974, 16.

18Wang Jiaping, Wenhua da geming shiqi shige yanjiu, 186–8.

19Yang, Lan, Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1998, 5.

20Xiao Min, “Wenge xiaoshuo de shenyu huayu gongneng” (The Function of Cultural Revolution Novels in Mythmaking), Wenxue qianyuan 2, 2008, 189–97.

21Zhang Kangkang, Dahuang binghe (The Iced River of Dahuang), Jilin: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1998, 266.

22Wu Zhongjie, Haishang xueren (Shanghai intellectuals), Gulin: Guangxi shifandaxue chubanshe, 2005, 12–16.

23See He Weike, “‘Wenhua dageming’ shiqi waiguo zhuzuo fanyi chuban qingkuang gaishu” (Translation and Publication of Foreign Works during the “Cultural Revolution”), Yiyuan xintan 1, 2009, 439–48, 442–5.

24Ding Dong, “‘Wenge’ xiezuozu xingshuai lu” (The Ups and Downs of Cultural Revolution Writing Groups), Wenshi bolan 10, 2005, 4–11.

25Yang Suqiu, “‘Wenge wenxue’ yu ‘Xinshiqi wenxue’ de guanlian yanjiu,” 56.

26The short story can be found in Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, ed., Xuqu: “Nuli fanying wenhua dageming de douzheng shenghuo” zhengwen xuan (Prelude: “Deligently Reflecting the Life of Struggles during the Cultural Revolution” Essays Collection), Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanse, 1975.

27Guoji wenhua chubanshe, “Jibu xiangqian de beiying” (The Back Shadow of the One Walking Swiftly Ahead), last modified October 8, 2009, Yi shang hui you. Shangyou quan, accessed June 25, 2012, club.china.alibaba.com.

28Jin Dalu, Feichang yu zhengchang, vol. 2, 125.

29Fang Houshu, Zhongguo chuban shihua xinbian, 344.

30Zhao Guochun, “Zhang Kangkang de diyibu changpian xiaoshuo Fenjiexian” (Demarcation Line, the First Novel by Zhang Kangkang), Zhejiang zhiqingwang luntan, accessed June 25, 2012, zjzq.com.cn.

31See the elaborate studies of Wang Jiaping, Hongweibing shige yanjiu (Research on Red Guard Poetry), Taipei: Wunan tushu, 2002.

32Wang Lijian, Huimou qingchun: Zhongguo zhiqing wenxue (Looking Back at Youth: The Literature of Chinese Intellectual Youths), Taipei: Airiti Press, 2008, 67–8. My translation.

33Collected in Shi Zhi, “Nine Poems,” translated by Jonathan Stalling, Chinese Literatuere Today 1: 2, Winter 2011, 13–19, 13.

34Wang Lijian, Huimou qingchun, 83.

35Fang Houshu, Zhongguo chuban shihua xinbian, 344.

36Lu Ding, Hongdong quanguo de weizao Mao zhuxi shici yuan’an (The Unjust Case of Counterfeit Mao Poems That Shocked the Whole Country), Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1986, 7.

37Chen Mingyuan, Wangnian jiao: Wo yu Guo Moruo, Tian Han de jiaowang (Friendship despite Age Difference: My Relationship with Guo Moruo and Tian Han), Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1999, 55.

38Lu Ding, Hongdong quanguo de weizao Mao zhuxi shici yuan’an, 78–9.

39Jameson, Fredric, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, London: Verso, 2011, 37.

40Mao, Du shehui zhuyi zhengzhi jingji xue pizhu he tanhua (Comments and Discussions Related to the Reading of Socialist Political Economy), Beijing: Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guoshi xuehui, 1998, first published in 1958, 38.

41This is the theory, but in practice the Maoist state was clearly maneuvering the value transfer from agricultural products to industrial products, so that “profits” could be invested back into industrial development.

42See Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 75–82; Eagleton, Terry, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011, 119–20.

43Mao, “Reading Notes on the Soviet Union’s ‘Political Economics,’” in Miscellany of Mao Tse-Tung Thought (1949–1969) Part II, Springfield, Virginia: Joint Publications Research Service, 1974, 259; see also Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics, trans. Moss Roberts, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977, 51. Mao did not pen the reading notes, but these notes were recorded from his colleagues who were summoned to read the Soviet text Political Economy: A Textbook together with him in 1959 and 1960. It was later published as “Du Zhengzhi jingji xue jiaokeshu biji.” The English translations of the notes can first be found in the Miscellany of Mao Tse-Tung Thought published in 1974. It was later retranslated and included in A Critique of Soviet Economics.

44Mao, A Critique of Soviet Economics, 66.

45For an elaborate analysis of the suppression of consumption in Maoist China, see Wang Ning, Cong kuxingzhe shehui dao xiaofeizhe shehui (From Ascetic Society to Consumer Society), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2009, 42–127.

46Those Cultural Revolution novels displaying such depictions include Chang Zheng’s Zhongliu dizhu (The Mainstay), Shijia zhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1974; Chen Dabin’s Benteng de Dongliuhe (The Surging Dongliu River), Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1975; Cheng Xianzhang’s Zhangtianhe (Zhangtian River), Guangzhou: Guangdong remin chubanshe, 1976; Liu Huaizhang’s Jiliu (Turbulent Current), Shijia zhuang: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1975; and Zhang Jun’s Qin long tu (Capturing the Dragon), Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1974, as well as Zhang Kangkang’s Dahuang binghe.

47See Pang, Laikwan, “Colour and Utopia: The Filmic Portrayal of Harvest in Late Cultural Revolution Narrative Films,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 3, 2012, 263–82.

48See Balibar, Etienne, Politics and the Other Scene, translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2002, 8–13.

49Pang, Laikwan, “Mao’s Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future,” Rethinking Marxism 28: 1, 2016, 108–23.

50Schmalzer, Sigrid, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, 56.

3. Art and the Culture of Models and Copies

1Bakken, Børge, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

2Kipnis, Andrew B., Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; Kuan, Teresa, Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

3Munro, Donald J., The Concept of Man in Contemporary China, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977, 147.

4Sun Yun, “Zhonggong yingmo biaozhang zhidu de zhaoshi ji yanbian” (The Development of the Chinese Community Party’s Honoring System for Heroes and Models), Dang de wenxian 3, 2012, 71.

5Xin Zhonghua bao (Yan’an) (New China Daily (Yan’an)), “Guanyu yingjie Wuyi shengchan da jingsai de gexiang banfa” (Different Ways to Welcome the Great May First Production Competition), March 23, 1941.

6Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), “Mofan nongcun laodong yingxiong Wu Manyou” (Model Peasant Labor Hero Wu Manyou), Jiefang ribao, April 30, 1942.

7Jiefang ribao, “Xiang mofan gongren Zhao Zhankui xuexi” (Learning from model worker Zhao Zhankui), Jiefang ribao, September 11, 1942.

8Munro, The Concept of Man in Contemporary China, 135–8.

9Cheng, Yinghong, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009, 48–9.

10Gao Hua, Hong Taiyang shi zenyang shengqi de: Yan’an zhengfeng yundong de lailongqumai (How Did the Sun Rise over Yan’an? A History of the Rectification Movement), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000, 436.

11Brandenberger, David, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011, 67–81.

12See Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 66–98.

13Liangong (bu) Zhongyang teshe weiyuanhui, ed. Liangong (bu) dangshi jianming jiaocheng (History of the All-Union Communist Party [Bolsheviks]: Short Course), Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1975, 372.

14Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 5.

15Lowenthal, Richard, Model or Ally? The Communist Powers and the Developing Countries, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, 285.

16Schwartz, Benjamin I., “A Personal View of Some Thoughts of Mao Tse-Tung,” in China and Other Matters, edited by Benjamin I. Schwartz, 187–207, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

17Leese, Daniel, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 200.

18Meng Xi’an, “Huoxue huoyong Laosanpian, quanxin quanyi wei renmin - Ji Xi’an Shi Shijiu liangdian wei gongnong bing fuwu de xianjin shiji” (Learning and Practicing Mao’s Three Old Speeches, with All Their Hearts to the People: Recording the Progressive Works of Xi’an’s Number 19 Foodstuff Shop), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), September 7, 1970.

19Li Ping, “Laodong mofan yao zhan zai wuchan jieji wenhua dageming de qianlie” (Labor Models Must Stand in Front of the Proletariat Cultural Fevolution), Hongqi (Red Flag) 188: 2, 1967, 44–5.

20Shi Chuanxiang, Rang Wuchan jieji geming jingshen daidai xiangchuan (Let Our Proletarian Class Consciousness Pass from Generation to Generation), Beijing: Gongren chubanshe, 1965.

21See Zhao Feng, Zhongzi xia de yinying (The Shadows under Loyalty), Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993, 8–9.

22Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 16.

23Liu Gao and Shi Feng, ed. Xin Zhongguo chuban wushinian jishi (Record of Fifty Years of Publishing in New China), Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1999, 128.

24Clark, Paul, Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 15–20.

25See Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, “Jiang Qing Zhang Chunqiao Yao Wenyuan jiejian wenhuazu chengyuan shi de jianghua” (Speech Made by Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan When They Met Members of the Culture Unit), Zhongwen Makesi Zhuyi Wenku, accessed February 28, 2014, marxists.org.

26Shanghai jingju tuan Zhiqu Weihu shan juzu (The Shanghai Peking Opera Company production unit of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy), “Nuli suzao wuchan jieji yingxiong renwu de guanghui xingxiang” (Working Hard to Develop the Bright Heroic Image of Proletarian Hero Figures: Some Reflections in the Development of the Heroic Image of Yang Zirong), Hongqi (Red Flag) 218: 11, 1969, 62–71.

27Liang Qiuchuan, Cengjing de Yanyangtian: Wo de Fuqin Haoran (Those Sunny Days: Hao Ran, My Father), Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 2014, 135–45.

28Fang Yun, Geming yangbanxi xuexi zhaji (Notes of Learning Revolutionary Model Performances), Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1974, 52–7.

29Wang Zengqi, Renjian youxi (Dramas in the World), Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 2014, 204.

30Mittler, Barbara, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013, 223–7.

31Author’s interview with Chen Pingyuan, October 3, 2013, Hong Kong.

32For that turbulent history of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra, see Zhou Guangzhen, Fenghuang yong: Zhong yang yue tuan shi 1956–1996 (History of Central Philharmonic Orchestra, 1956–1996), Beijing: Joint Publishing, 2013, 183–241.

33Ludden, Yawen, “Making Politics Serve Music: Yu Huiyong, Composer and Minister of Culture,” TDR: The Drama Review 56: 2, 2012, 152–68.

34Liu Jialing, Jiyi xianhong (Bright Red Memory), Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2002, 34–5.

35See Xu Youyu, Moran huishou (Looking Back Suddenly), Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1999, 173–82.

36See Xiaomei Chen’s account of how excited she was learning yangbanxi as a child. Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002, 34–43.

37Coderre, Laurence, “Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the Hero in the Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi,” in Listening to the Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics and Cultural Continuities, edited by Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, 65–83, Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

38Yang Baozhi, “Yige ‘youpai’ canjia zaofanpai xuanchuandui de jingyan” (The Experience of a “Rightist” Participating in Revolutionary Propaganda Team), Zuotian (Yesterday) 27, December 30, 2013, 1–26, 3–4.

39Ibid., 6.

40Author’s interview with Wu Di, November 5, 2013, Hong Kong.

41See also Clark, Paul, Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 31.

42Ziyun, Kuayue wenge de rensheng suiyue (Those Years of My Life Crossing over the Cultural Revolution), Taipei: Xinrui wenku, 2011, 152–8.

43Liu, Ping, My Chinese Dream: From Red Guard to CEO, San Francisco: China Books, 2012, 124.

44Hu Fayun, “Hong Luyi” (Red Lu Xun Academy of Arts), in 1966: Women nayidai de huiyi (1966: Memories of Our Generation), edited by Xu Youyu, 205–30, Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1988, 211–29.

45Liu Jialing, Jiyi xianhong, 152–3.

46Ibid., 157.

47Clark, Youth Culture in China, 32.

48Zhang Xiaoliang, “Liening chuan chaoxue fenmo dengchang” (Lenin Wearing Traditional Chinese Boots and Makeup to Appear on State—A Theatrical “Rare Flower” Appeared Temporarily in the Cultural Revolution), Zuotian (Yesterday) 53, June 2015, 1–8.

49Renmin meishu chubanshe (People’s Fine Arts Publishing House), ed., Meishu cankao ziliao baotou xuanji (Selections of Art References and Newspaper Designs), 2 vols., Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1971, 1972, vol. 2, 48–61.

50Author’s interview with Cui Xiaodong, August 23, 2010, Beijing.

51Wei Tie, “Xu Bing: Ziyou shi ziji gei de” (Xu Bing: Freedom Can Only Be Given by Oneself), in Wendao: Shier zhong zhuizhu mengxiang de rensheng (Asking the Way: Twelve Ways of Life in Pursuit of Dreams), edited by Jia Zhangke and Zhao Jin, 96–113, Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2011.

52The column was published in the party journal Qianxian (Frontline) from 1961 to 1964. The column featured short essays about a wide range of topics catering to intellectual tastes. In May 1966, a series of articles was published criticizing the Three-Family Village essays as antiparty and anti-socialist. The biggest crime the authors committed was supposedly their alignment with the feudal past, and those essays glorifying traditional wisdom were condemned as propaganda to prepare for an uprising against the proletarian dictatorship. This campaign was understood as the follow-up to the criticism against Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Hai Rui baguan), initiated first by Yao Wenyuan’s essay, “Ping xinbian lishiju Hai Rui baguang” (Criticizing the New Historic Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office), Wenhui bao (Wenhui Daily), November 10, 1965. See Wu Han, Wu Han Wenji (Collections of Wu Han), Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1988, vol. 4, 467; Leese, Mao Cult, 123–4.

53Yibiao ju tuanwei bangongshi (Office of the Youth League Committee of the Instrumentation Department), “Shehui zhuyi Wenhua dageming zhong tuan zuzhi he qingnian de dongtai” (Actions of Party Organizations and Youths in the Socialist Cultural Revolution: Robust Reactions, Speedy Actions), May 16, 1966, Shanghai Municipal Archive, B103-3-720, 1.

54Ibid., 3.

55Gao Ju, “Xiang fandang fanshehuizhuyi de heixian kaihuo” (Firing the Anti-Party Anti-Socialism Black Line), Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), May 8, 1966; He Ming (Guan Feng), “Caliang yanjing, bianbie zhenjia” (Open Your Eyes and See the Truth), Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), May 8, 1966; Yao Wenyuan, “Ping ‘Sanjiacun’” Yanshan yehua Sanjiacun zhaji de fandong benzhi (Comments on the Reactionary Essence in ‘Yanshan yehua’ and ‘Sanjiacun zhaji’), Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1966.

56Yibiao ju tuanwei bangongshi, “Shehui zhuyi Wenhua dageming zhong tuan zuzhi he qingnian de dongtai,” 1–2.

57Down south in Guangzhou, people also quickly pointed their fingers at their own intellectuals, and Qin Mu, the writer of Cantonese origin, was first identified in early June by the mass media as Guangdong’s own representative intellectual class enemy. Hai Feng, Guangzhou diqu wenge licheng shu lüe (An Account of the Cultural Revolution in the Canton Area), Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1971, 16–18.

58Author’s interview with Zhang Shaocheng, February 6, 2015, Guangzhou.

59Jiang Qing, “Lin Biao tongzhi weituo Jiang Qing tongzhi zhaokai de budui wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui jiyao” (Report of Comrade Jiang Qing’s Speech for the Military Arts Workshop Summoned by Comrade Lin Biao), in Jiang Qing tongzhi jianghua xuan bian (Selected Speeches by Comrade Jiang Qing), 1–17, Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1968, 9.

60Shanghai geming dapipan xiezuo xiaozu (Shanghai Revolutionary Great Criticism Writing Unit), “Ping Sitannisilafusiji ‘tixi’” (Criticism of the ‘System’ of Stanislavsky), Hongqi (Red Flag), 213/214, June/July 1969, 36–46.

4. Barefoot Doctors and Femininity

1See Chen, Xiaomei, “Growing up with Posters in the Maoist Era,” in Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 101–22, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 105–6; Min, Anchee, “The Girl in the Poster,” in Chinese Propaganda Posters: From the Collection of Michael Wolf, edited by Anchee Min, Stefan Landsberger, Duo Duo, and Michael Wolf, 3–9, Koln: Taschen, 2003.

2Zhu Yong, Fan Yuedu (Anti-Reading), Taipei: Joint Literature, 2008, 235.

3Wang Pei, “Zai xuanchuan hua zhong kan dong Zhongguo” (Understanding China through Propaganda Posters), Xinwen banzhoubao (Half Weekly News) 4, September 26, 2009, reprinted in Baibanbao, accessed May 15, 2013, baibanbao.net.

4See Chen, Tina Mai, “Proletarian White and Working Bodies in Mao’s China,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11: 2, Fall 2003, 361–93.

5See Honig, Emily, “Iron Girls Revisited: Gender and the Politics of Work in the Cultural Revolution, 1966–76,” in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China, edited by Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson, 97–110, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; Jin, Yihong, “Rethinking the ‘Iron Girls,’: Gender and Labour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Gender & History 18: 3, November 2006, 613–34.

6See Bonnin, Michel, The Lost Generation: The Rustification of Chinese Youth, 1968–1980, translated by Krystyna Horko, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2013, 13–18.

7Pang Xianzhi et. al. ed. Mao Zedong nian pu (Chronology of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976), 6 vols., Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2013, vol. 5, 505–6.

8Mao Zedong, “Guanyu yiliao weisheng gongzuo de zhongdian wenti” (Key Issues Related to Health Care), in vol. 11 of Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (The Manuscripts of Mao Zedong since the Country Was Established), edited by Zhonggong zhongyang wenxue yanjiushi (CCP Central Archive Research Centre), 387, Beijing: Junshi kexue chubanshe, 2010.

9See Zhou Haisha and Guo Yan, “Woguo chuji weisheng baojian tixi xingcheng de lishi he chenggong yinsu fenxi” (An Analysis of the History and Success of Our Nation’s Primary Health Care), Zhongguo chuji weisheng baojian (Chinese Primary Health Care) 23: 1, 2009, 2–4.

10For an oral history of a rusticated youth being chosen as a barefoot doctor, see Liu Xiaomeng, Zhongguo zhiqing koushu shi, 268–305.

11Cao Pu, “Renmin gongshe shiqi de nongcun hezuo yiliao zhidu” (Oral History of Rusticated Youths in China), Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004, 78–83.

12See Scheid, Volker, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 67–81.

13Yang Nianqun, Zaizao “bingren”—Zhongxiyi chongtu xia de kongjian zhengzhi (1832–1985) (Remaking “Patient”—The Spatial Politics of the Conflicts between Chinese and Western Medicine [1832–1985]), Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 2006, 392–4.

14See Hershatter, Gail, “Birthing Stories: Rural Midwives in 1950s China,” in Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, edited by Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz, 337–58, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Although this essay describes the situation in the 1950s, we can safely assume that many traditional values continued well until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

15Goldstein, Joshua S., “Scissors, Surveys, and Psycho-Prophylactics,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1: 2, 1998, 153–84; Hershatter, “Birthing Stories.”

16Fang, Xiaoping, Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2012, 149.

17Henderson, Gail, “Issues in the Modernization of Medicine in China,” in Science and Technology in Post-Mao China, edited by Denis Fred Simon and Merle Goldman, 199–222, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989, 203.

18Renmin ribao, “Buzai shiyong ‘chijiao yisheng’ mingcheng, gonggu fazhan xiangcun yisheng duiwu” (Aborting the Title “Barefoot Doctor,” Fortifying the Development of Rural Doctors), Renmin ribao, January 25, 1985.

19Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China, 79–81.

20See Li Yanhong, “Chijiao yisheng yingshiersheng” (Barefoot Doctor Born with the Time), Dangzheng luntan—ganbu wenzhai (Party and Government Forum, Cadre’s Digest) 4, 1999, 40–1.

21Wang, “The Evolution of China’s Rural Health Care Financing,” Modern China 35: 4, 2009, 370–404, 381.

22Wei, Chunjuan Nancy, “Barefoot Doctors: The Legacy of Chaiman Mao’s Healthcare,” in Mr. Science and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution: Science and Technology in Modern China, edited by Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock, 251–280, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013, 274.

23Wang Sheng, “Chijiao yisheng qunti de shehui rentong ji yuanyin fenxi—yi Hebei sheng Shenze xian wei gean” (An Analysis of the Social Recognition of the Barefoot Doctor Collective—A Case Study of Shenze County, Hebei Province), Zhonggong dangshi yanjiu (Journal of Chinese Communist Party History Studies) 1, 2001, 109–15, 114.

24Evans, Harriet, “‘Comrade Sisters’: Gendered Bodies and Spaces,” in Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 63–78, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. See also her more recent chapter, “Ambiguities of Address: Cultural Revolution Posters and Their Post-Mao Appeal,” in Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution, edited by Li Jie, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, forthcoming, in which she further demonstrates how women were pulled back into their domestic place as the Cultural Revolution moved on.

25Johnson, Kay Ann, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

26King, Richard, ed., Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010.

27Wenhui bao (Wenhui Post), “Mao zhuxi wei pinxiazhong nong peiyang de hao yisheng—ji Jiangzhen renmin gongshe de ‘chijiao yisheng’” (The Good Doctor Nurtured by Chairman Mao for the Poor Peasants—A Record of the “Barefoot Doctor” of Jiangzhen’s People’s Commune), Wenhui bao, September 14, 1968.

28Wang Yujue, “Jifa, yijing yu biaoxian” (Techniques, Mood, and Expressions), Artxun.com, last modified February 17, 2011, accessed November 12, 2014, news.artxun.com.

29For a more elaborated analysis of the picture, see Andrews, Julia F., Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 357–8.

30See Schmalzer, Sigrid, “Labor Created Humanity: Cultural Revolution Science on Its Own Terms,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, 185–210, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

31Zhang Hongwei, “Xueni ji hongzhua, taiting liu lühen—Xin Zhongguo liushinian chuban dashi ji” (The Footprints Left by Goose in the Snow, Leaving Traces in the Courtyard Full of Moss—Chronicles of Major Publishing Events in New China), Bianji zhiyou (Editor’s Friend) 9, 2009, 137–76, 167.

32Yan’an in 1939 was isolated by both the GMD and the Japanese army. Mao Zedong advanced a “Great Production Campaign,” and agitated the people and the army to cultivate land for self-survival. South Mire Bay was one of the places that was cultivated and that became agriculturally productive.

33Lyrics by He Jingzhi; melody by Ma Ke.

34Ci, Jiwei, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, 146.

35Chen, Tina Mai, “The Human-Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese Theoretical Physics, and Chinese Revolutionary Theory,” Cultural Critique 80, Winter 2012, 151–81.

36For a comparison of the two representational cultures, see Dutton, Michael, “Fragments of the Political, or How We Dispose of Wonder,” Social Texts 110, Spring 2012, 109–41.

37Guo Yiyao (Y. Y. Kueh), Buke wangji Mao Zedong: Yiwei Xianggang jingji xuejia de linglei kanfa (Mao Zedong Cannot Be Forgotten: Alternative Views of a Hong Kong Economist), Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2010, 171–80.

38See note 27; also Wenhui bao (Wenhui Daily), “Cong ‘chijiao yisheng’ de chengzhang kan yixue jiaoyu geming de fangxiang” (Viewing the Direction of the Medical Education Revolution through the Case of the “Barefoot Doctor”), Wenhui bao, September 14, 1968. The second article featured “barefoot doctors” of Jiangzhen Commune of Chuansha County, located in the countryside of Shanghai.

39Walder, Andrew G., Chang Ch‘un-ch‘iao and Shanghai’s January Revolution, Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1978.

40Exactly what was happening behind the closed doors of Zhongnanhai in the period 1974–76 was still mostly unknown to the public, largely because of the restriction on information by the current government to the public. But most scholars characterize the politics of the time as a struggle between two factions: the veteran cadres and officials who looked to Premier Zhou Enlai to bring order to the country and the young group of radicals whom the Cultural Revolution had catapulted into the upper ranks of the party hierarchy. See Meisner, Maurice, Mao Zedong, Cambridge: Polity, 2007, 190.

41They are Ji Yanhua’s Yanminghu pan (Aside the Yanming Lake) (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe,1973), Mu Fu’s Fengyu Xinghua cun (Wind and Rain of Xinghua Village) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1974), and Yang Xiao’s Hongyu (Red Rain) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973).

42Also made in 1975, The New Doctor was directed by Cui Wei and adapted from the novel of the same name written by Yang Xiao. The barefoot doctor featured in The New Doctor was not a woman but a youngster, the sixteen-year-old Hongyu, and the film celebrates youthfulness and sees youth as the backbone of the republic. Unlike Chunmiao, which stresses inner-party struggle, the people’s enemy portrayed in Red Rain was a more traditional class enemy, who ran an herb shop before Liberation. Generally speaking, The New Doctor was as ideologically bipolar as Chunmiao, and the committed protagonist also could not afford to bear any political ambiguities.

43For details of the Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius movement, see, for example, MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, 366–73.

44Zhai Jiannong, Hongse wangshi: 1966–1976 nian de zhongguo dianying (Red Past: Chinese Cinema in 1966–1976), Beijing: Taihai chubanshe, 2001, 449–56.

45Zhou Enlai, “Report on the Work of the Government,” delivered in the Fourth National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China on April 18, 1959, Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1959

46But according to Jane Duckett, the cooperative medical system was not officially associated with the Cultural Revolution until 1981, when the medical system was abandoned by the Ministry of Health. See Duckett, “Challenging the Economic Reform Paradigm: Policy and Politics in the Early 1980s Collapse of the Rural Cooperative Medical System,” The China Quarterly 205 (2011), 80–95.

47See Brown, Jeremy, “Staging Xiaojinzhuang: The City in the Countryside, 1974–1976,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder, 153–84, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

48Hai Bazi, “Fengmi yishi de ‘jixue liaofa,’” (Fashionable Chicken Blood Therapy), Dang’an chunqiu (Memories and Archives) 12, 2009, 24–8.

49Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach, New York: Prometheus Books, 1998, 50.

50Mao Zedong, “Bianzheng weiwu lun” (Dialectical Materialism), in vol. 5 of Mao Zedong ji bujuan (Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung), edited by Takeuchi Minoru, 187–280, Tokyo: Sososha, 1984 (first published in 1946), 190.

51One defining feature of Mao’s thought, in contrast to classic Marxism, is his replacement of class struggle with contradictions among the people as the “principal contradiction” in Chinese society after the socialist transformation of 1955–56. During the Cultural Revolution, the “principal contradiction” was placed within the party, and Mao believed that the people’s chief enemies were actually within the Communist Party. See Schram, Stuart, The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 122–5, 171–7.

52Manning, Kimberley Ens, “Making a Great Leap Forward? The Politics of Women’s Liberation in Maoist China,” Gender and History 18: 3, 2006, 574–93; Manning, “The Gendered Politics of Woman-Work: Rethinking Radicalism in the Great Leap Forward,” Modern China 32: 3, 2006, 349–84.

53Manning, “Embodied Activisms: The Case of the Mu Guiying Brigade,” China Quarterly 204, December 2010, 850–69.

54See Jin Yihong, “‘Tie guniang’ zai sikao—zhongguo wenhua da geming shiqi de shehui xingbie yu laodong” (Rethinking “Iron Girl”—The Social Gender and Labor during China’s Cultural Revolution), Shehuixue yanjiu (Sociology Research), 1, 2006, 169–93.

55See Honig, “Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, 255–68, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

56Barlow, Tani, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 247.

5. Opera and Transplantation between Cultures

1Ge Jianxiong, “Yangbanxi tiejin de shi shenme shenghuo” (What Kind of Everyday Life yangbanxi Is Closest To), Nanfang dushi bao (Southern Metropolitan Daily), February 24, 2008.

2Renmin ribao, “Zuohao puji geming yangbanxi de gongzuo” (We Need to Do the yangbanxi Popularization Job Well), Renmin ribao, July 15, 1970.

3Kraus, Richard Curt, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 57.

4Chion, Michel, The Voice in Cinema, translated by Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 61–2, 109–22.

5Barthes, Roland, The Responsibilities of Form: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 270.

6Other than the Cantonese Opera version of Shajiabang, there was only one regional adaptation that received the honor of being adapted for the cinema: the Uyghur opera The Red Lantern, which was made into a color film by August First Film Studio in 1975.

7Yung, Bell, “Model Opera as Model: From Shajiabang to Sagabong,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, edited by Bonnie S. MacDougall, 144–64, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

8Author’s interview with Lu Qiuping, August 7, 2011, Guangzhou. According to information provided by the Memorial Hall, its original capacity was more than 5,000 seats. In 1975, the number of seats was reduced to 4,729, and in 1998 it was reduced to 3,838 (email correspondence, March 23, 2012). I have not been able to find documents that show exactly when the piece was staged and for how long it ran.

9Author’s interview with Ni Huiying, July 18, 2012, Guangzhou.

10Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan bianji weiyuan hui (Editorial Board of Records of Chinese Opera, Guangdong Volume), ed., Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan (Records of Chinese Opera, Guangdong Volume), vol. 1, Hong Kong: Jiaoliu chubanshe, 1987, 65. See also Lai Bojiang, Guangdong xiqu jianshi (A Brief History of Guangdong Opera), Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2001, 369.

11Existing records of this piece include a 1965 audio recording, a 1978 videotape, which was supposedly very close to the 1965 version, and a 1979 film version made by the Pearl River Film Studio, which however differs much from the 1965 version.

12In the Guangdong Provincial Archives, I was able to find a set of internal documents issued by the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater and the Guangdong Ministry of Culture that report on the tours of Storm in the Countryside in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen in 1965 and 1966: “Shanxiang fengyun yanchu tuan dao jing huibao yanchu qingkuang huibao” (Record of the Performances of Storm in the Countryside in Beijing); “Jiang Qing tongzhi kan Shanxiang fengyun hou tichu de yijian” (Comments by Comrade Jiang Qing after Watching Storm in the Countryside); “Shanghai shi lingdao tongzhi dui Shanxiang fengyun yiju tichu de yijian” (Views of Shanghai Leaders on Storm in the Countryside); “Hu Qiaomu tongzhi dui Shanxiang fengyun de yijian” (Comments by Comrade Hu Qiaomu on Storm in the Countryside); “Shanghai xijujia xiehui zhaokai Shanxiang fengyun zuotanhui” (Shanghai Dramatists Association Workshop on Storm in the Countryside); and “Shanxiang fengyun zai Shenzhen yanchu qingkuang jianbao” (Records of Workshop of Storm in the Countryside in Shenzhen). They are grouped together into sets of documents, nos. 312-1-70-69-90, and 307-1-370-73-130, 307-1-370-73-130(1), 307-1-370-73-130(2), 307-1-370-73-130(3), and they have been given continuous page numbers by the Archives, from 69 to 130. Hereafter I will refer to this set of documents as “Tours of Storm in the Countryside.”

13According to the official records, those who attended include Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Li Fuchun, Lu Dingyi, Peng Zhen, Bo Yibo, Ye Jianying, Hu Qiaomu, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Zhou Yang, Lin Mohan, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, and Tian Han.

14“Tours of Storm in the Countryside,” 79, 84, 113.

15Guangdong Xinhua yinshuachang weiyuanhui (Committee of Guangdong Xinhua Publication House), ed., Chedi zalan Guangdong Yueju de wenyi heixian: shiqi nian lai Yueju zhanxian shang de jieji douzheng, (Destroy the Black Line of Arts in Guangdong Cantonese Opera Completely: The Class Struggles on the Battle Line of Cantonese Opera in the Past Seventeen Years), 2 vols., publication place unknown, 1968, vol. 1, 1, 9.

16“Tours of Storm in the Countryside,” 101.

17See He Qixian and Fan De, “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui ziliao, He Qixiang, Fan De tongzhi de fayan” (Statements by Comrades He Qixian and Fan De in the Exchange Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-70-50-5; Guangdong sheng canjia Zhongnan huiyan jumu xuanba yanchu bangongshi, ed., “Dui Yueju Shanxiang fengyun de yijian” (Opinions on the Cantonese Opera Storm of the Countryside), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-64-90-100.

18Lin Yu, “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui Lin Yu tongzhi de fayan—Tan daoyan yueju Shanxiang fengyun de tihui” (Statements by comrade Lin Yu in the exchange workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention—My directing experience of Storm in the Countryside), Guangdong Provincial Archive, no. 312-1-70-50-55.

19Liang Peijin, Yueju yanjiu tonglun (Discussions of Cantonese Opera Research), Hong Kong: Longmen shudian, 1982, 179–80.

20Tan Jian, “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui ziliao, Tan Jian tongzhi de fayan” (Statements by Comrade Tan Jian in the Exchange Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-70-59-62.

21The first four verses were delivered with the tune jianzi furong, a lighter and faster member of the furong tunes, while the last verse is sung in gunhua, a version of ziyouban (free tune).

22Lin Yu, “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui Lin Yu tongzhi de fayan—tan daoyan yueju Shanxiang fengyun de tihui” (Statements by Comrade Lin Yu in the Exchange Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention—My Directing Experience of Storm in the Countryside), Guangdong Provincial Archive, no. 312-1-70-50-55.

23All the cultural establishments in Guangdong province sent their cultural workers to Yingde for reeducation, while those working in institutions in Guangzhou City went to Ershatou. Each camp housed tens of thousands of cultural workers.

24Most of the memoirs written by famous performers and producers, or their biographies, set during the Cultural Revolution focus on the relatively short period of 1967–69. See, for example, Hong Xiannü, Hongdou yingcai (The Heroic Color of Red Beans), Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1998, 129–33; Luo Pinchao and Feng Xiaolong ed., Luo Pinchao wutai yishu qishisan nian (Seventy-Three Years of Luo Pinchao’s Theater Arts), Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1998, 121–30; and Wang Zongyou and Chen Moren ed., Yueju biaoyan yishujia Lang Junyu (Cantonese Opera Performer Lang Junyu), Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003.

25Renmin ribao, “Ba geming yangbanxi tuixiang quanguo qu” (Promote Revolutionary Model Plays throughout the Country), Renmin ribao, June 18, 1967.

26Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 75.

27Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan, 58.

28Zhen Guangjun, “Wenge qijian Jiang Qing yu Hebei bangzi” (Jiang Qing and Hebei bangzi Opera during the Cultural Revolution), Dushu wenzhai (Reading Digest) 1, 2011, 40–2, 42.

29Guangdong Sheng Wenhua Ting (Guangdong Province Ministry of Culture), “Huibao wosheng gedi xuexi jingju Hongdengji qingkuang” (Report on the Study of The Red Lantern in Various Regions of the Province), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 307-1-344-179-185.

30Guangzhou yueju tuan tuanzhi bianji weiyuan hui (Editorial Committee of Records of Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Company), ed., Guangzhou yueju tuan tuanzhi (Records of Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Company), Guangzhou: Guangzhou yueyi fazhan zhongxin, 2002, 9; Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Zhongguo xi qu zhi: Guangdong juan, 57.

31Zhe Ping, “Xuexi geming yangbanxi, baowei geming yangbanxi” (Studying the Revolutionary Model Plays, Protecting the Revolutionary Model Plays), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), October 19, 1969.

32Author’s interview with Xue Qinghua, August 9, 2011, Hong Kong.

33Clark, Paul, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 101.

34Author’s interview with Guo Hui, July 18, 2012, Guangzhou.

35Author’s interview with Guo Wei, July 18, 2012, Guangzhou.

36Liang Puijin, Yueju yanjiu tonglun, 180.

37Wong, Chuen-Fung, “The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptation of The Legend of the Red Lantern (Qizil Chiragh) during China’s Cultural Revolution,” in Listening to the Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics and Cultural Continuities, edited by Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, 147–165, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

38Pease, Rowan, “The Dragon River Reaches the Borders: The Rehabilitation of Ethnic Music in Model Opera,” in Clark, Pang, and Tsai, Listening to the Cultural Revolution, 167–186.

39Xinhuashe jizhe (New China News Agency Reporter), “Yueju de xinsheng—Ji guangdong sheng yuejutuan xuexi yizhi geming yangbanxi Shajiabang” (Rebirth of Cantonese Opera—A Record of the Transplantation of Shajiabang by Guangdong Province Cantonese Opera), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), May 21, 1974.

40See Huang, Philip C. C., “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution: Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 21: 1, January 1995, 105–43, 134.

41See Yung, “Model Opera as Model,” for an elaborate analysis.

42Author’s interview with Huang Zhuangmou, October 30, 2010, Guangzhou.

43Xinhuashe jizhe, “Yueju de xinsheng.”

44This applied, of course, only to the major performances taking place in major theaters in Guangzhou; the scale of the traveling ensemble in the countryside was cut down substantially.

45Author’s interview with Kuang Bin, March 7, 2012, Guangzhou.

46Author’s interview with Liang Runtian, February 3, 2012, Hong Kong. There were also unique dimensions of Cantonese Opera that were kept. For example, whereas in Peking Opera the male falsetto was largely replaced in yangbanxi because it was not considered “realistic,” the Cantonese Opera was less influenced because most male singers sing in modal voices—that is, pinghou.

47Author’s interview with Zheng Peiying, March 8, 2012, Guangzhou.

48The audio recording of Azalea Mountain that I refer to is a recording of a live performance stored in the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre. A television version of Azalea Mountain was made by CCTV in Beijing in 1975, but no one has been able to locate a copy.

49Guangdong Sheng Wenhua Ting (Guangdong Province Ministry of Culture), “Guanyu paishe yueju Dujuanshan wenti de pishi” (Regarding the Movie Shooting of The Azalea Mountain), Guangdong Provincial Archives, 214-A1-3-8-82.

50Author’s interview with Kuang Bin.

51For an elaborate analysis of the musical style of the original Peking Opera Azalea Mountain, see Zhuang Yongping, “Xiandai jingju Dujuanshan yinyue fenxi” (An Analysis of the Music of Modern Jingju Dujuanshan), Yuefu xinsheng 29: 3, 2011, 80–9.

52Li Yizhe, Guanyu shehui zhuyi minzhu yu fazhi (Concerning Socialist Democracy and Legality), Hong Kong: Heshang dasan chubanshe, 1976.

53See Evans, Megan, “The Emerging Role of the Director in Chinese Xiqu,” Asian Theatre Journal 24: 2, Fall 2007, 470–504; see also Liang Peijin, Guangzhou yueju fazhan 1949–1965 (Development of Cantonese Opera in Guangzhou from 1949 to 1965), Hong Kong: Feichangpin chuban jituan, 2008, 152–7, 214.

54Liang Peijin, Guangzhou yueju fazhan, 109.

55In 1957, there was actually a suggestion raised by Shanghai’s Department of Ministry to turn all public groups back into private ones in order to enliven the overall creative environment and market sensibility of the theatre. See Zhang Lianhong, Lilian jinghun: Xin Zhongguo xiqu gaizao kaolun (Becoming Spirits: A Study of the xiqu Reform in New China), Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013, 386–7.

56Liang Peijin, Guangzhou yueju fazhan, 101.

57Fu Jin, Xin Zhongguo xiju shi: 1949–2000 (A History of Chinese Drama: 1949–2000), Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002, 38–9.

58Guo Bingzhen, “Guangdong xiqu gaige sanshi nian” (Thirty Years of Cantonese Opera Reform), in vol. 2 of Yueju yanjiu wenxuan (Collected Essays on Cantonese Opera), edited by Xie Binchou and Chen Chaoping, 423–52, Guangzhou: Guangzhou shi wenyi chuangzuo yanjiusuo, 2008, 447.

59Kuai bao (Fast Daily), “Dangnian pianchou wanqi, zaoshi quanzhong fupo: Li Tie xisu Renjie congqian” (Commanding $17,000 per Film, She Is a Rich Woman in the Circle: Li Tie Gives a Detailed Account of Sister Ren), Kuai bao, December 1, 1989.

60Zhao Cong, Zhongguo dalu de xiqu gaige (The Opera Reform in Mainland China), Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1969, 11.

61Author’s interview with He Mengliang, September 7, 2011, Hong Kong.

62Ouyang Yuqian, Zhongguo xiqu yanjiu ziliao chuji (First Compilation of Chinese Regional Opera Research), Beijing: Yishu chubanshe, 1956, 134–6.

63Dutton, Michael, “Fragments of the Political, or How We Dispose of Wonder,” Social Texts 110, Spring 2012, 109–41.

64See Crespi, John A., Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2009, 142–67.

6. Ballet across Genres and Forms

1Liu Yuhua, Zhongguo balei suxie (Sketches of Chinese Ballet), Hong Kong: Lewen shudian, 1997, 15–17.

2Huang Aihe, “Zhao Ruheng: Xin Zhongguo diyidai baleiwu yanyuan wangshi” (Zhao Ruheng: The Stories of China’s First-Generation Ballet Dancer), Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan (Chinese News Weekly), last modified July 27, 2011, accessed September 27, 2012, history.gmw.cn.

3Shimizu, Songshan baleiwu Baimaonü—Ri Zhong youhao zhi qiao (The White-Haired Girl of the Matsuyama Ballet: The Bridge of Sino-Japanese Friendship), Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1985, 28–9.

4Ibid., 60–4; 67–75.

5Zhong Zhaoyun, “Lin Mohan yu Zhou Enlai de wangshi zuiyi (xia)” (Recounting the History of Lin Mohan and Zhou Enlai [Part II]), Dangshi bocai (jishi) (Party History [Documentary]) 2, 2009, 28–32, 29; Li Song, “Yangbanxi” biannianshi pian (A Chronicle of Model Opera of Chinese Cultural Revolution), 2 vols., Taipei: Showwe, 2011, 2012, vol. 1, 78.

6Wang Fan, “Ma Xiaoxian nüshi tan Jiang Qing” (Madame Ma Xiaoxian Talks about Jiang Qing), Lishi xuejia chazuo (Teahouse for Historians) 3, January 2006, 105–13, 107.

7There are still debates regarding exactly who first created the piece. See Luo Changqing, “‘Hongse niangzi jun’ chuangzuo lunzheng jiqi fansi” (The Debates Related to the Making of The Red Detachment of Women and Its Reflections), Changjiang shifan xueyuan xuebao (Journal of Yangtze Normal University) 25: 1, January 2009, 118–24.

8See Paul Clark’s more elaborate discussions of what kind of efforts were introduced to gauge the attention of the Chinese viewers: Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 159–62, 165–6.

9Mittler, Barbara, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013, 71–2.

10Author’s interview with Yin Mei, May 14, 2012, Hong Kong.

11Grey, Beryl, Through the Bamboo Curtain, St James’s Place, London: Collins, 1965, 28.

12Yuan Chengliang, “Jiang Zuhui de balei qing (san)” (Jiang Zuhui’s Passion for the Ballet [Part III]), Xiaoshuo yuedu wang, last modified March 23, 2012, accessed September 9, 2012, readnovel.com.

13Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), “Zhong A liangguo wenyi gongzuo zhe lianhe yanchu, Zhongguo geming xiandai baleiwuju Hongseniangzi jun” (The Coproduction of China and Albania, the Chinese Revolutionary Model Ballet The Red Detachment of Woman), Renmin ribao, October 17, 1967.

14Haldeman, H. R., The Haldeman Diaries, New York: Berkley, 1995, 417.

15For a more elaborate discussion of Jiang’s involvement in The White-Haired Girl at different stages, see Sun Wenlang, “Jiang Qing chashou baleiwuju ‘Baimaonü’” (Jiang Qing’s Intrusion in the Ballet Theater The White-Haired Girl), Dangshi tiandi 4, 2006, 38–41.

16Roberts, Rosemary, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Boston: Brill, 2010, 125–34.

17Pang, Laikwan, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007, 69–101.

18See Jin Yongquan, Hongqi zhaoxiangguan: 1956–1959 nian Zhongguo sheying zhengbian (Red Flag Studio: Debates on China’s Photography 1956–1959), Beijing: Jincheng chubanshe, 2009, 51–8, 109–35.

19See Chen Shen and Xu Xijing, eds, Zhongguo sheying yishushi (A History of Chinese Photography), Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2011, 540–57.

20Mo Weiming and He Qiong, “‘Wenhua dageming’ shiqi de ‘yangbanxi’ tushu chubanwu” (The Printed Materials of “Model Theatrical Works” during the “Cultural Revolution”), Dangshi wenyuan (Literary Circles of CPC History), 5, 2007, 4–8, 8.

21Liang Xiaosheng, Liang Xiaosheng zuopin zixuanji (Self-Selections of Liang Xiaosheng), Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 1996, 61–2.

22Liu Gao, Shi Feng, ed. Xin Zhongguo chuban wushinian jishi (Record of Fifty Years of Publishing in New China), Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1999, 122–3, 129.

23Zhang Yaxin, Yangbanxi juzhao: Zhang Yaxin sheying zuopin (Stills of Model Theatrical Works: Zhang Yaxin’s Photographic Works), Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2009, 5.

24Xu Xijing, “Jiduan zhengzhi de yishu xuanshi—‘Geming yangbanxi’ juzhao zhong quanli yizhi de shijue biaoda” (The Art Expressions of Extreme Politic: The Visual Representation of the Will of Power in Yangbanxi’s Stills), Fujian shifan daxue xuebao 3, 2008, 95–103.

25Jia peng zhi yue, “Daoti zijin guan” (Kicking Back to the Purplish Golden Crown), last modified November 17, 2008, accessed July 10, 2013, junqing0008.blog.163.com.

26Zhongyang dianshitai “chongfang” lanmuzu (“Chongfang” unit of CCTV), “Xiaoshi de hongwuxie” (The Disappeared Red Dance Shoes), Guangming wang, 2010, accessed June 6, 2013, big5.gmw.cn.

27Author’s interview with Xue Qinghua, August 9, 2011, Hong Kong.

28Zhang Yaxin, Yangbanxi juzhao, 194.

29Bai Di, “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, edited by Richard King, 188–202, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010; Meng Yue, “Female Image and National Myth,” in Gender Politics in Modern China, Writing and Feminism, edited by Tani E. Barlow, 118–36, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

30Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 166.

31Wang Shuo, Kan shangqu hen mei (It Looks Very Beautiful), Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1999, 262–3.

32Jin Dalu, Feichang yu zhengchang: Shanghai “wenge” shiqi de shehui shenghuo (Regularities and Irregularities: Social Life in Shanghai’s “Cultural Revolution” Period), 2 vols., Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2011, vol. 1, 221.

33Collett-White, Mike, “Zhuanfang Zhao Ruheng: buneng moque wenge dui baleiwu de gongxian” (Interviewing Zhao Ruheng: We Cannot Wipe Away the Cultural Revolution’s Contributions to Chinese Ballets), Reuters, accessed July 26, 2013, cn.reuters.com.

34For an introduction to the various political rituals, see Lu, Xing, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004, 127–42.

35Li Bin, “Yi ge “gouzaizi” de miwang” (The Confusions of a “Rascal”), in Women chanhui, edited by Wang Keming and Song Xiaoming, 238–9.

36Xie Yinlin, “Wenge heilao 92 tian” (Ninety-Two Days in Cultural Revolution Black Prison), Zuotian (Yesterday) 13, January 2013, 8.

37See Honig, Emily, “Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, 255–68, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

38Li Qian, Mishi yu qiusuo: Yige zhongxuesheng de wenge jishi, (Lost and Search: The Cultural Revolution Record of a Secondary School Student), New York: Kejie chubanshe, 2008, 349.

39Ho, Denise Y., and Jie Li, “From Landlord Manor to Red Memorabilia: Reincarnations of a Chinese Museum Town,” Modern China 42: 1, 2016, 3–37.

40Shan Hua, “Wei wuchan jieji de yingxiong renwu suxiang—Xuexi geming xiandai wuju Hongse niangzi jun yunyong wudao suzao yingxiong xingxiang de tihui” (Portraying the Proletarian Hero Figures—Lessons from Designing Heroic Images through Dances in the Revolutionary Modern Drama Red Detachment of Woman), in Zan geming yangbanxi wudao sheji (Complimenting the Dance Design of Model Theatrical Works), edited by Our Society, 17–25, Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1974, 19.

41Coderre, “Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the Hero in the Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi.”

42Changshi ziliao hui bian bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Diaosuci chang changshi ziliao huibian (Collected Materials of the History of the Porcelain Factory), Internal Material, 40.

43Ibid., 55–9.

44Author’s interview with Liu Yuanchang, May 21, 2013, Jingdezhen.

45Author’s interview with Liu Zemian, August 19, 2013, Shiwan.

46Edison, Victoria, and James Edison, Cultural Revolution: Posters & Memorabilia, Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2005, 109.

47Author’s interview with Cao Chunsheng, May 21, 2013, Jingdezhen.

48Author’s interview with Zhang Yuxian, May 21, 2013, Jingdezhen.

49See Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, 90.

50Fan’s museum cluster is clearly magnificent, not only in terms of its sheer size and architecture but also because of its strong and sometimes conflicting ideologies.

51Author’s interview with Fan Jianchuan, September 11, 2014, Anren, Sichuan. See also Fan Jianchuan and Li Jinxi, Daguan nu, 108–9.

7. Mao as Doxa

1Mittler, Barbara, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013, 30–2, 126–7, 333–4.

2Benewick, Robert, “Icons of Power: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution,” in Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, 123–37, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 131.

3Cai Liyuan, “Xuanchuan yishu de jiduan yihua—‘Wenhua da geming’ shiqi de xuanchuanhua” (The Extremism of Propaganda Art—The Propaganda Paintings during the Cultural Revolution), Sichou zhilu (The Silk Road) 2, 2009, 82.

4This painting was part of the political campaign against Liu Shaoqi, whose leadership of the Anyuan Labor Movement was documented in a 1961 oil painting titled Liu Shaoqi yu Anyuan gongren (Liu Shaoqi and Anyuan Workers), painted by Hou Yimin. For more about Hou’s painting, see Hung, Chang-Tai, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2011, 145–6; for Liu’s painting, see Andrews, Julia F., Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994, 338–42.

5Leese, Daniel, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 8.

6Snow, Edgar, The Long Revolution, New York: Random House, 1972, 18–19, 169–70.

7Meisner, Maurice, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed., New York: Free Press, 1999, 387.

8Leese, Mao Cult, 27–46.

9Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), “Guanyu wuchan jieji zhuanzheng xia de lishi jingyan” (Historical Experiences Regarding the Dictatorship of the Proletariat), Renmin ribao, April 5, 1956.

10Mao had compared himself to the greatest heroes in Chinese history. See his poem “Qinyuanchun—xue”; for English translation, see Mao Zedong, “Snow,” in Reverberations: A New Translation of Complete Poems of Mao Tse-tung translated by Nancy Lin, 41–2. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1980. Originally a poem written in 1936.

11Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 116.

12Wang, Tuo, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014, 9–20.

13Leese, Mao Cult, 169, 196–205.

14Zhang Shaocheng, “‘Wenge’ shiqi de Guangzhou meishu huodong” (The Artistic Activities of Guangzhou during the “Cultural Revolution”), Yangcheng wanbao (Guangzhou Evening News), October, 26, 2013.

15Harris, Clare, “The Photograph Reincarnate: The Dynamics of Tibetan Relationships with Photographs,” in Photographs Objects Histories, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, 132–47, London: Routledge, 2004, 138–9.

16I am inspired by Zhou Qun and Yao Xinrong’s essay, “Xinjiu Mao Zedong chongbai” (Mao Cult Old and New), Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-First Century) 12, 1993, 37–43.

17Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 164.

18Nie Yuanzi, Wenge “wuda lingxiu”: Nie Yuanzi huiyilu (“Five Great Leaders” of the Cultural Revolution: Memories of Nie Yuanzi), Hong Kong: Shidai guoji chuban, 2005, 109–21.

19Renmin ribao, “Dahai hangxing kao duoshou” (We Need a Helmsman to Steer through the Sea), Renmin ribao, August 15, 1966.

20Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, 42–86.

21Santner, Eric L., The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 39.

22Ibid., 26.

23Faure, David, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, 9–10.

24As Paul Clark argues, when an artist was unsure of the political climate, Mao as a model might provide a safety net. See Clark, Paul, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 204.

25Xu Qiumei and Wu Jijing, “‘Wenhua dageming’ shiqi de Mao Zedong xiangzhang” (Mao Zedong’s Badges during the “Cultural Revolution” Period), Dangshi zonglan (Party History Overview) 9, 2008, 51–4, 52.

26Mao Zedong Zhuyi hongweibing Shanghai zong geming weiyuanhui xuanchuanbu (Shanghai’s Maoist Red Guards Revolutionary Committee Propaganda Department), and Shanghai meishujie geming zaofanpai pihaixian lianluozhan (Shanghai’s Art revolutionary Rebels Black-Line Criticism Contact Station), ed., Chedi zalan meishujie zibenzhuyi fupi de xuangaoshu (Declaration of the Complete Dismantling of the Resurrection of Capitalism in the Field of the Arts), Shanghai: publisher unknown, 1967.

27He miswrote “Jingzhu Mao Zhuxi wanshou wujiang” as “Jingzhu Mao Zhuxi wushou wanjiang.” See Jin Dalu and Chen Lei, “Guanyu Fudan ‘honghuabi’” (Regarding “Red Painting Brush” of Fudan University), Dongfang Zaobao (Dongfang Daily), September 16, 2013, accessed December 6, 2014, dfdaily.com.

28Xinwen chuban zongshu (State Press and Publication Administration), “Yinzhi Maozhuxi xiang yingzhuyi shixiang” (Issues Related to the Publication of Chairman Mao’s Image), April 25, 1951.

29Zhonggong zhongyang, “Zhonggong zhongyang, Guowuyuan Guanyu zai Wuchan jieji Wenhua Dageming zhong jiaqiang gong’an gongzuo de ruogan guiding” (Some Regulations from CCP Central and State Council Related to the Implementation of Public Safety Works during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), January 13, 1967 (Zhongfa 67, 19), in Song Yongyi, ed., Zhongguo Wenhua dageming wenku guangpan, (The Archive of Chinese Cultural Revolution in Compact Disc), Hong Kong: Universities Service Centre for China Studies of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.

30Zheng, Da, “Chinese Calligraphy and the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Popular Culture 28: 2, Fall 1994, 185–201.

31Girard, René, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, translated by Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, 1–52.

32Zhu Yu, “Wei Mao Zedong huaxiang de huajiamen” (Mao Portrait Painters), Qiaoyuan (Qiao Garden) 2, 1999, 22–3.

33San Mu, “‘Wenge’ zhong de ‘shengxiang’ meishu yundong he guangchang shang de ‘hongse bopu’” (The Art Movement of “Sacred Figure” during the Cultural Revolution and the “Red Pop Art” in the Square), Shehui kexue luntan (Forum of Social Sciences) 6, 2004, 72–83.

34Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 165–6.

35Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, 185.

36Hubei Ribao (Hubei Daily) editorial, “Mao zhuxi shicha Huabei, Zhongnan he Huadong diqu de zhongyao zhishi” (Important Instructions by Chairman Mao When He Visited the Huabei, Zhongnan, and Huadong Areas), Publication place unknown, 1967, 3.

37Yang Haocheng, Mao Zedong tuxiang yanjiu (Mao Iconology), Taipei: Shidai guoji chubanshe, 2009, 175–7.

38The report Mao read was “Quanguo gedi qunzhong zhengzai jiji suzao Maozhuxi juxiang.” Mao’s handwritten commentary next to the report is reprinted in Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (Research Center of CCP Central Archive), ed., Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (The Manuscripts of Mao Zedong since the Country Was Established), Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996, 368–9.

39Zhonggong zhongyang (CCP Central), “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu renzhen guanche zhixing Zhongyang ‘qi.yisan’ zhishi de tongzhi” (Comments on Stopping Construction of Mao Zedong Sculptures and Others), in vol. 12 of Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, edited by Zhonggong zhongyang wenxue yanjiushi, 368–9.

40Jin Dalu, Feichang yu Zhengchang: Shanghai “wenge” shiqi de shehui shenghuo (Regularities and Irregularities: Social Life in Shanghai’s “Cultural Revolution” Period), 2 vols., Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2011, vol. 2, 200–15.

41Reprinted in Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi ed., Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, vol. 12, 455–6.

42Zhonggong zhongyang, “Zhonggong zhongyang, zhongyang wenge guanyu yanjin sizi fanyin wei fabiao guo de Maozhuxi zhaopian de tongzhi” (Notice of the Chinese Communist Central Committee and Central Revolutionary Group Prohibiting the Reproduction of Chairman Mao’s Unpublished Photographs), November 27, 1967 (Zhongfa 67, 357), in Song Yongyi, ed., Zhongguo Wenhua dageming wenku guangpan.

43Zhonggong zhongyang, “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu xuanchuan Mao zhuxi xingxiang ying zhuyi de jige wenti de tongzhi” (Notice of Some Issues Concerning the Propaganda of the Image of Chairman Mao), June 12, 1969 (gaiyao), in Song Yongyi, ed., Zhongguo Wenhua dageming wenku guangpan.

44Han Shaogong, “Manchang de jiaqi” (The Long Vacation), in Qishi niandai, edited by Bei Dao and Li Tuo, 562–84, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008, 568–9.

45Jin Dalu, Feichang yu Zhengchang, vol. 2, 176–83.

46In a letter Mao wrote on May 7, 1966 (commonly known as the May 7 Instruction), Lin Biao was instructed to turn the PLA into a big school, in which politics, defense, and agriculture were all taught. The army also ran its own factories, and officers were sent to the people to agitate the class struggle. Mao, “Wuqi zhishi—Zhi Lin Biao” (May 7 Instruction—To Lin Biao), in Zhongguo jin dai ming jia zhu zuo xuan cui: Mao Zedong juan (Selections of Famous Authors in Modern China: Mao Zedong Volume), edited by Jiang Yihua, 589–92, Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1994.

47Mao objects remain collectable today. See Schrift, Melissa, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: The Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001; Barmé, Geremie, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996; Dutton, “From Culture Industry to Mao Industry: A Greek Tragedy,” boundary 2 32: 2, 2005, 151–67.

48Mao Zedong, “Gei Jiang Qing de yi feng xin” (A Letter to Jiang Qing), July 8, 1966, in vol. 12 of Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao, 71–75, 72.

49Huyssen, Andreas, “Monumental Seduction,” New German Critique 69, Fall 1996, 181–204, 184.

50Johnson, Barbara, Persons and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 35.

51Badiou, Alain, The Communist Hypothesis, London: Verso, 2010, 149–55.

52See Wang, Ban, “Human Rights, Revolutionary Legacy, and Politics in China,” boundary 2, 38: 1, 2011, 135–63, 153–5.

8. Intellectuals as Ghosts

1Wang Xiyan, Fenxin zhugu de rizi: wenge huiyilu (Those Heart-Burning and Bone-Cooking Days: Memoir of the Cultural Revolution), Hong Kong: Kunlun zhizuo gongshi, 1991, 113.

2Although Freud has mentioned this concept a few times, he never theorizes it thoroughly. For a comprehensive elucidation of Freud’s articulation and the idea’s wide resonances, see Blok, Anton, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences,” European Journal of Society Theory 1: 1, 1998, 33–56.

3See Chow, Rey, “Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay),” Representations 94: 1, Spring 2006, 131–49.

4Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, translated by James Strachey, London: Routledge & Paul, 1950, 132–43.

5Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, New York: Zone Books, 1991, vol. 1, 27–61.

6Ibid., 59.

7Wang, Shaoguang, “The Structural Sources of the Cultural Revolution,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, edited by Kam-yee Law, 58–91, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

8Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Elec Book, 1999, 134–9.

9Hao Fuqiang, “‘Shiqi nian’ wenyi gaochou zhidu yanjiu” (Writers’ and Artists’ Fees during “the Seventeen Years”), Jianghai xuekan (Jianghai Academic Journal) 19: 4, 2006, 200–5.

10See Goldman, Merle, “Mao’s Obsession with the Political Role of Literature and the Intellectuals,” in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, from the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, 39–58, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1989, 46; Schwartz, Benjamin I., “Thoughts on the Late Mao,” : Between Total Redemption and Utter Frustration,” in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, from the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward, edited by MacFarquhar, Wu, and Cheek, 34–5, 35.

11Groys, Boris, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, translated by Charles Rougle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, 52.

12Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), “Hengsao yiqie niugui sheshen” (Sweeping Away All Cow Ghosts and Snake Gods), Renmin ribao, June 1, 1966.

13Zhu Shan, “Tudi geming shiqi Jiangxisuqu de fanmixin yundong” (Anti-Superstition Campaigns in Soviet Jiangxi during the Land Reform Era), Kexueyu wushenlun (Science and Atheism) 1, 2006, 34–5.

14Lieberthal, Kenneth, Governing China: From Revolution through Reform, 2nd ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 48–52.

15Wang Yuxia, “Zhongyang suqu wenhua xintoushi” (New Dissection of the Culture of the Central Soviet Area), Dangshi yanjiu yu jiaoxue (Research and Teaching of Party History) 6, 1998, 63–7.

16For a personal account, see Ren Jun, Wo zhe jiushinian, 1920–2010: Yiduan geming jiating de siren jiyi (My Ninety Years, 1920–2010: Personal Memories of a Revolutionary Family), Beijing: Huawen chubanshe, 2010, 167.

17Pang, Laikwan, “The State against Ghosts: A Genealogy of China’s Film Censorship Policy,” Screen 52: 4, Winter 2011, 461–76.

18Pang, Laikwan, “Tian Han’s Historical Dramas in the Great Leap Forward Period: History, State, and Authorship,” in Oxford Handbook of Chinese Literature, edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner, New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

19See, for example, Ma Shaobo, “Mixin yu shenhua de benzhi qubie” (The Essential Differences between Superstition and Myth), in Ma Shaobo, Xiqu gaige sanlun (On Xiqu Reform), 29–33, Beijing: Yishu chubanshe, 1956.

20Mao Zedong, “Zai shengshi zizhiqu dangwei shuji huiyi shang de jianghua” (Talks during the Meeting with Party Secretaries of Provinces, Cities, and Autonomous Regions), in vol. 5 of Mao Zedong xuanji (Selected Writings of Mao Zedong), 330–62, Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1977, 349.

21Mao Zedong, “Tong wenyijie daibiao de tanhua” (Discussion with Representatives of Cultural Fields), in vol. 7 of Mao Zedong wenji (Collected Literary Works by Mao Zedong), edited by Zhonggong Zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (CCP Central Archive Research Centre), 249–59, Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1999, 257–8.

22He Haisheng, “Wenhua bu fachu tongling jinyan jumu yilü kaifang” (The Ministry of Culture’s Announcement Allowing All Banned Plays to Be Performed Again), Juben (Play Monthly) 6, 1957, 63.

23Chen Jin, Mao Zedong yu wenyi chuantong (Mao Zedong and Artistic Traditions), Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1992, 256–7.

24Wang Yi, “Mao Zedong de ‘dagui zhanlüe’” (Mao Zedong’s “Ghost Fighting Strategies”), Yanhuang chunqiu 5, 1999, 15–19.

25It was not the first time intellectuals were called ghosts in Chinese history; in the Yuan dynasty a dramaturge Zhong Sicheng put together a book titled A Record of Ghosts (Lu gui bu), which recorded the biographical details and works of his fellow dramaturges in the Yuan dynasty. See Zhong Sicheng, Xinjiao Lu gui bu zheng xu bian (New Edition of the First and Second Volumes of A Record of Ghosts), Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 1996.

26Chen Jin, “Zai ‘bupa gui’ de beihou: Mao Zedong zhidao bianxuan Bupa gui de gushi de qianqian houhou” (Behind “Not Fearing Ghosts”: Before and After Mao’s Direction to Compile Stories of Not Fearing Ghosts), Dang de wenxian (Party Documents) 6, 1993, 3.

27Zhongguo kexue yuan wenxue yan jiu suo (Institute of Literary Studies in the Chinese Academy of Science), ed., Bupa gui de gushi (Stories of Not Fearing Ghosts), Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1961.

28The original story was first published in the Qing dynasty, in Ji Yun, Yue Wei Cao Tang biji (The Collection of Notes of Yue Wei Cao Tang), Guangzhou: Caizhengsi, 1835.

29Ji Yun, “Cao Zhu xuyan” (The Empty Words of Cao Zhu), in Zhongguo kexue yuan wenxue yan jiu suo, ed., Bupa gui de gushi, 64–5.

30He Qifang, “Xu” (Introduction), in Zhongguo kexue yuan wenxue yan jiu suo, ed., Bupa gui de gushi, 1–11.

31See Xie Mingxun, Liuchao zhiguai xiaoshuo yanjiu shulun: huigu yu lunshi (Studies of Six Dynasty’s zhiguai Novels: Reflections and Discussions), Taipei: Liren shuju, 2011.

32Wenhuabu (Ministry of Culture), “Guanyu tingyan ‘guixi’ de qingshi baogao” (Requesting the Suspension of the Performances of “Ghost Plays”), Xinhua wang (Xinhua News), accessed July 16, 2009, news.xinhuanet.com.

33See Chen Jun, Jingdu kunqu wangshi (History of Kunqu in the Capital), Taipei: Showwe, 2010, 263.

34Zhang Lianhong, Lilian jinghun.

35Ibid., 139–71.

36See the 1953 qinqiang opera Visit to the West Lake (You Xihu) created by Ma Jianling.

37Liao Mosha, then director of the Beijing City Propaganda Department, under the pen name Fanxing, wrote the article “Yougui wuhai lun” (No Harm from Ghosts), Beijing Wanbao (Beijing Evening News), August 31, 1961, in support of the play.

38Zhang Zhen, “Kan Kunqu xinfan Li Huiniang” (Watching a New kunqu Version of Li Huiniang), Xiju bao (Opera) 5, 1961, 47–9; Li Qingyun, “Tantan Li Huiniang de ‘tigao’” (Discussion of the “Elevation” of Li Huiniang), Xiju bao (Opera) issue number unavailable, May 1962, 47–50.

39Liang Bihui (Yu Minghuang), “‘Yougui wuhai’ lun” (On “No Harm from Ghosts”), Wenhui bao (Wenhui Daily), May 6–7, 1963.

40Ye Yonglie, “Sirenbang” xingwang: “Wenguan” yao duo Hua Guofeng de quan (The Rise and Fall of the “Gang of Four”: “Literati Officers” Take Power from Hua Guofeng), Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 2009, 503–8.

41Qi Xiangqun, “Chongping Meng Chao xin bian Li Huiniang” (Reevaluating Meng Chao’s New Adaptation of Li Huiniang), Xiju bao (Opera) 103, January 1965, 2–8.

42See note 52 of Chapter 3.

43Meng Chao was a very senior CCP member who joined the party in 1926. He was one of the founders of the League of Leftist Writers in 1929. After 1949, he became a key figure in the national publication industry, supervising the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, Theatre Publishing House, and People’s Literature Publishing House.

44Mao Zedong, “Instruction on 12 December 1963” in Five Documents on Literature and Art, 10–11, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967 (italics added).

45Lifton, Robert Jay, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, 19–27.

46Ji Xianlin, Niupeng zayi (Disarrayed Thoughts in the Cowshed), Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1999, 93.

47Li Pingjin, “Qingchun zhige de zaoyu” (The Occurrences of Song of Youth), Xinwen chuban jiaoliu (News Publication Exchange) 2, 2000, 16–7.

48Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, 49–51.

49Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, New York: Zone Books, 1991, 43–61.

50Dai Jiafang, “Dongluan zhong de xuanxiao—1966–1969 nian jian hongweibing yundong zhong de yinyue” (Musical Turmoil: Music of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution—1966–1969), Zhongguo yinyuexue (Musicology in China) 1, 2005, 80–118, 98.

51Among the thirty-nine condemned people, nine were famous intellectual writers, while the rest were all major party leaders—those on sedans are Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Interestingly, it was the nine intellectuals who took the lead, preceded by Lu Dingyi, the head of the Propaganda Department, and therefore the head of these cultural workers. They were the three protagonists of the Three-Family Village Post—Wu Han, Deng Tou, and Liao Mosha—the “Four Fellows”—Xia Yan, Zhou Yang, Tian Han, and Yang Hansheng—and we also find Lin Mohan and Qi Yanming among them.

52Among the four, only Liu Wencai is a real figure. He was a warlord in the Republican period but was made “famous” primarily by the sculptural series Rent Collection Courtyard, whose negative depiction of Liu is now largely questioned. Huang Shiren and Nan Ba Tian are the evil landlords featured in The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women. Zhou Bapi is another exploitative landlord presented in the novel Gao Yubao.

53Qin Jimin, “‘Na Ba Tian’ Chen Qiang ‘wenge’ lijie ji” (The Torture “Na Ba Tian” Chen Qiang Experienced in the “Cultural Revolution”), Wenshi chunqiu 4, 1994, 15–20.

54See Renmin huabao (People’s Pictorial), “Pinxia zhongnong huanying zheyang de zhishi fenzi” (Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants Welcome This Kind of Intellectuals), Renmin huabao 1, 1969, 12–13.

55We can say that the biggest discrepancy between scientific workers and cultural workers resides in the former’s usefulness to industrial and technological developments, so that they were relied on selectively throughout the Cultural Revolution. But Cong Cao also argues that the damage of the Cultural Revolution to Chinese science was much more severe than in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany because of China’s shorter history and weaker institutionalization in modern science. Cao, “Science Imperiled: Intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution,” in Mr. Science and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution: Science and Technology in Modern China, edited by Chunjuan Nancy Wei and Darryl E. Brock, 119–42, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013, 135–6.

56Many of these essays were collected in a Renmin chubanshe (People’s Publishing House), ed, “Pi Lin Pi Kong wenzhang huibian” (Collected Essays of the Anti-Lin Biao Anti-Confucian Movement), Beijing: Beijing Renmin chubanshe, 1974.

57Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.

58The meeting was organized by Zhang Guangnian, chief editor of the magazine Renmin wenxue (People’s Literature), and took place in Beijing from December 20–30, 1977.

59Zhang Shouren, “Yanshan ye hua bei pi qianhou—Wo de shinian jingli” (Before and After the Criticism of Yanshan yehua—My Ten Years), in Wo men dou jing li guo de ri zi (Dates We Have All Gone Through), edited by Ji Xianlin, Niu Han, and Deng Jiuping, 135–51, Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2001, 149.

60Anagnost, Ann, National Past-Times National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, 45–74.

Conclusion

1Bei Dao, “Duan Zhang” (Fragmented Chapter), in Qishi niandai, edited by Bei Dao and Li Tuo, 20–38, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008, 23.

2Wang Keming and Song Xiaoming, eds, Women chanhui (Our Regrets), Beijing: China Citic Press, 2014.

Chinese Glossary

Baimaonü Images

Baichoutu Images

ban tuochan Images

banghuang Images

Banlanhuasheng Images

“Beifengchui” Images

beigong Images

Bupa gui de gushi Images

buwangjiejiku, laojixueleichou Images, Images

Cao Zhu Images

Caoyuanernü Images

changqiangsheji Images

Changqing zhilu Images

chengxiang chabie Images

chijiao yisheng Images

choulaojiu Images

Chuchun de zaochen Images

chulü Images

Chunmiao Images

Daotizijin guan Images

Dapipan zhuanlan Images

Daxie shisannian Images

dazibao Images

diao Images

Diwang jiangxiang Images

Diyike Images

Dongfanghong Images

dongyuan Images

Dujuan shan Images

Ershatou Images

Fangcaodi Images

Fenjiexian Images

gaoshi Images

geming weiyuanhui Images

geming wuzui Images

gong’an liutiao Images

gongchi Images

gongnong chabie Images

“Guibian” Images

gunhua Images

guoying Images

Hai Rui baguan Images

haokan buhaoting Images

Hengsao yiqie niugui sheshen Images

Hepingge Images

honghuabi Images

Hongmeiji Images

Hongyu Images

houjin bogu Images

huaiyi yiqie Images

huaju jiachang Images

jianzi furong Images

jiaojian gongjianbu liangxiang Images

“Jiazhu Anyuan” Images

Jinguang dadao Images

“kongsu” Images

Kunqu Images

laogai Images

laojiao Images

Lao jiaoshou xinzhuzuo Images

Laosanpian Images

Li Yizhe Images

Liang Xiao Images

liangxiang Images

liangxiao Images

liangyi sancha Images

Lixiangzhige Images

Longjiang song Images

“Manqiang chouhen” Images

Meishu cankao ziliao baotou xuanji Images

mimi zhiyin Images

minying Images

mofan Images

Nanniwan Images

naoti chabie Images

niugui sheshen Images

paixi Images

penqishi Images

pinghou Images

Qi xi Baihutuan Images

“Qinyuanchun—xue” Images

Qunchoutu Images

qunzhong luxian Images

renao Images

rending shengtian Images

san duitou Images

san tuchu Images

sanming sangao Images

Shanxiang fengyun lu Images

sheng Images

shizai renwei Images

suzao Images

Shijiu liangdian Images

“Sanjiacun zhaji” Images

toujia Images

weisheng shi/suo/yuan Images

wendou Images

wenhua Images

wudou Images

Wutai jiemei Images

Xiangjiang fenglei Images

“Xiangqi wangri ku” Images

Xiangxin weilai Images

xiaofendui Images

xiaomie san da chabie Images

xiaoqu Images

xinsheng shiwu Images

xipi paiban Images

xuechang yangbanxi, xuezuo gemingren Images, Images

xuetonglun Images

yangban Images

yanjin Images

Yanyangtian Images

yikusitian Images

Yimeng Song Images

yiwoweizhu, zouziji de lu Images, Images

yiyuanhua Images

yizhi geming yangbanxi Images

Yizhi xiuhuaxie Images

You Xihu Images

Youhen Images

yushuiqing Images

zaofanpai Images

zhangban Images

Zhenma chuangqiji Images

zhiguai Images

Zhiqu Weihu shan Images

zhongjianrenwu Images

Zhuanzhan Shanbei Images

ziyouban Images

Index

Acupuncture, Anesthesia Creating Miracle, 122–3

Ai Siqi, 199

Althusser, Louis, 3–5, 10, 13–14

Anti-Japanese War, 196

Anti-Rightists Campaign, 18, 200, 220, 221, 224, 225–6

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 53, 53–5, 123

Anyuan Labor Movement, 195

appropriation, 63

power of masses, 195

Aristotle, 200

art as tool, 29

Attack on the White Tiger Regiment, 92

authorship as public function, 61

Azalea Mountain, 93

filming of, 154–6

musical arrangements, 154–5

transplantation, 149, 154–6

Bakken, Børge, 85

Balibur, Étienne, 78

ballet, 24, 162–93

Arc step pointe stage pose, 167

body discipline, 181–4

development in China, 163–7

diplomatic role, 168, 169

efforts to masculinize, 171

gender fetishization, 163, 167–71, 185

nationalization, 165

resistance to cultural appropriation, 163

revolutionary form, 164–5

sexual element, 169–70, 179–81

Sinicization of, 168

Soviet influence, 163–4, 167

transplantation, 147

unfamiliarity to Chinese people, 165, 167

see also photographic stills; porcelain portraitures

Ballet Dance Company, 95

Ban Wang, 215

banned books, 2

barefoot doctors, 24, 25, 107–35, 156

acupuncture, 122–3

class struggle, 125–31

as effective model, 116

femininity and, 111–12, 117–25, 133–5

fetishization, 132

freedom of, 121–2

gender distribution, 117–18

as institution, 112–17

links to bound feet, 121

medicine box, 13

mofan citizen, 107

origin of term, 125–6

posters, 108–10, 118, 132

radicalization, 126–7

representations of, 108–12, 118, 119–20

representative of modern medicine, 123

as midwife, 115

role of traditional Chinese medicine, 114–15

role of, 114–15, 119

selection, 114

as support network, 115

working conditions, 114

yangban hero, 107

see also Chunmiao

Barlow, Tani, 134

Barthes, Roland, 138–9

Bataille, Georges, 218, 231–2

Bei Dao, 2, 240, 241

“Believe in the Future,” 69–70

Benjamin, Walter, 191

Berry, Chris, 45

big-character posters, 15, 16, 39, 52, 155, 200

billboards, 101

Great Criticism Billboard, 101

bloodline theory, 11

body reengineering, 182

Bourdieu, Pierre, 59–61, 200, 209

horizontal model of cultural economy, 59–61

Brandenberger, David, 86

Bright and Sunny Sky, 40

Butler, Judith, 15

calligraphy, 15, 207–8

Cantonese Opera, 139, 144

affinity with Hong Kong and Macau, 157–9

banghuang tunes, 144–5

criticisms of, 151

development during Cultural Revolution, 140–2

gongchi, 153

musical issues, 153–4

problems with translation from Mandarin, 149–50, 152–3

role of musicians, 153–4

toujia, 153

traditional musical arrangement, 144

use of Western instruments, 153

xiaoqu, 145

Cao Yu, 237

Cao Zhu, 226–7

CCP

governance, 26

Ninth National Congress, 19

Central Ballet Ensemble, 166, 169

Central Philharmonic Orchestra, 95

Chairman Mao to Anyuan, 195

Changing the Battlefield to the North of Shaanxi Province, 208

Chen Boda, 16, 198, 199

Chen Juanmei, 173

Chen Pingyuan, 95

Chen Qiang, 235

Chen Xiaolu, 244

Chen Yanning, 108–9

Chen Yinan, 38–9

Chen Yiyang, 155

Chen Yonggui, 89

Chen-Fung Wong, 151

Chen, Tina Mai, 124

Cheng Mingyuan, 71–2, 195

China Peking Opera Company, 95

China Rise, 240

Chinese Xiqu Institute, 156

Chion, Michel, 138

Chuan Opera, 100

Chung Kuo, 123

Chung Kuo, Cina, campaign against, 53–5

Chunjuan Nancy Wei, 117

Chunmiao, 127–31, 132–3, 134, 135

involvement of Jiang Qing, 128–9

see also barefoot doctors

Clark, Paul, 91, 149, 179

Clark, Toby, 5

class enemies, 182

categories, 218

jet plane style torture, 182

political acts as performance, 183

torture, 183, 231–2

class struggle, 5

see also intellectuals; wendou; wudou

Coderre, Lawrence, 97, 186

collectable revolutionary objects, 193

black market, 212

culture of exchange, 212

see also Mao badges; Mao statues; porcelain portraitures

Confucianism

divergence from Maoism, 87

ritual links to Maoist cult, 203–4

worldly participation, 87–8

Confucius, condemnation of, 237

copying

acts of, 94–102

emulation culture, 97, 195

historical transformation, 102–6

network, 94–5, 162

promotion of, 13, 83–107

role in traditional culture and training, 102

“cow ghosts and snake gods,” 147, 222–6, 233–4

“Howling Song of Cow Ghosts and Snake Gods,” 233–4

see also ghosts; intellectuals

Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius campaign, 20, 126–7, 236

Crowd of Clowns, A, 234

Cui Xiaodong, 101

cultural elites, 220

see also intellectuals

Cultural Revolution, 1, 8

anti-modern elements, 12

brutality, 22

contradiction of, 14

dialectical approach, 22–3

memoirs, 244–6

as modernity project, 11–12

official start, 19

politics, 36

propaganda culture, 9, 29

relationship between culture and economy, 23

revisionist view, 22–3, 244–5

role of arts, 9–10, 18, 23, 29, see also yangbanxi

role of Jiang Qing, 197–8

studies of, 20–1

taboo in contemporary China, 20–1

totalitarian nature, 9

unity, 9

Cultural Revolution Small Group, 95

cultural workers, 156–61

“nutritional supplement,” 159–60

professional status, 157

salary system, 157

star system, 157–8

culture as arts, 16

see also wenhua

culture as civilization, 16

see also wenhua

culture as propaganda, 16

see also wenhua

Da Zheng, 107

Daoism, 232–3

see also ghosts

Daqing oilfield, 87

daxie shisannian (writing about the thirteen years), 18

Dazhai model, 77

production brigade, 88

dazibao, see big-character posters

de Man, Paul, 34–5

Demarcation Line, 67

Deng Tuo, 103

Deng Xiaoping, 19, 20, 126, 239, 240, 244

depoliticization, 240–1

Derrida, Jacques, 237–8

Dirlik, Arif, 8

diversity of experience, 1

Dobrenko, Evgeny, 47

Dong Guoqiang, 36

“doubt everything,” 9

Dove of Peace, 163

doxa, 194, 200

fetishization of body, 201

form of social mimesis, 208

Mao as, 199–209

see also Mao cult

Dreyer, Carl-Theodor, 38

Duan Daming, 4

duoquan yangban (models of power seizure), 91

Dutton, Michael, 160

Early Spring Morning, 66–7

East is Red, The, 124

education, 11

new curriculum, 107

through labor, 11

“Eliminate the Three Big Gaps,” 112–13

Ellul, Jacques, 14–15

“emperors and generals,” 225

Evans, Harriet, 118

family structure, 118

Fan Jianchuan, 193

Jianchuan Museum Cluster, 93

fashion

prohibition, 43

revolutionary look, 43

Faure, David, 203–4

femininity, 107, 111–12, 133

female gender construction, 134–5

in medicine, 117–25

see also barefoot doctors, porcelain portraiture

films

focus on agriculture and industry, 76–7

see also yangbanxi

First Beijing Peking Opera Company, 95

Flames of Paris, The, 164

folk arts

guiding role in Cultural Revolution, 31

Four Big Oppressive Landlords, 235

Four Clean-Up movement, 19, 91

Four Modernizations, 128

Four Old Things, 186

Freud, Sigmund, 217, 218

“Gangnam Style,” 58

Gao Hua, 86

gaoshi, 39

Ge Jianxiong, 136–7

gender performativity, 15

German Ideology, The, 131

ghosts

in Chinese folk culture, 24, 223

intellectuals represented as, 222–9

ghost plays, 223–4

as political allegory, 224–5

see also “cow ghosts and snake gods”; Daoism; intellectuals

Girard, René, 10, 208

Giselle, 164

Golden Road, The, 46, 50–1, 92, 93

Gorky, Maxim, 86

Gramsci, Antonio, 220

Great Famine, 224

Great Leap Forward, 38, 73, 112, 197

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, see Cultural Revolution

grey-cover books, 2

Grey, Beryl, 167

Groys, Boris, 32, 221

Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre, 144

Guangdong Province Cantonese Opera Company, Experimental Troupes, 156

Guangming Daily, 53

Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Workers Association, 156

Guangzhou Daily, 143

Guo Hui, 150

Guo Lusheng, 69–70

Guo Moruo, 71

Gusev, Pyotr, 163

Habermas, Jürgen, 90

Hairui Dismissed from Office, 228

Half Basket of Peanuts, 147

Han Shaogong, 2

Hao Ran, 46–7, 67, 92

Harris, Clare, 199

He Mengliang, 158

He Qifang, 226–7

health care, see medical system

Henan Opera of Qu, 100

Henderson, Gail, 116

Heroines of the Hainan Island, 166

History of Chinese Literature, 66

Ho, Denise, 185

Hong Changqing, 37–8

Hongyu (The New Doctor), 127

houjin bogu (emphasize the present against the past), 18

Hu Fayan, 99

Hu Qiaomu, 199

Hu Rongrong, 164

Huang Shiren, 235

Huang Zhou, 122

Huang Zhuangmou, 152

humanism, 230

Hundred Flowers Movement, 221, 224, 225

Hungarian uprising of 1956, 17, 221

Huters, Ted, 43

In the Heat of the Sun, 180

Instruction on Literature and Arts, 229

intellectuals, 216–38

condemnation, 24, 221

death of, 233

as ghosts, 24, 222–9, 230, 232–3

hostility to famous intellectuals, 222

hostility to sanming sangao (high earnings), 222

humiliation, 233–4

independence, 2, 12

negativity, 229–35

organic, 220

reincarnation of, 235–8

rightist label, 222

sacrifice of, 217–22

stinking number nine class enemies, 218

torture, 231–2

traditional, 220

see also Anti-Rightists Campaign; class enemies; “cow ghosts and snake gods”; ghosts

Iron Girls, 107, 111

Jameson, Fredric, 21, 41, 73

Ji Xianlin, 15, 230–1

Ji Yun, 227

Jiang Qing, 19, 37–8, 44, 66, 90, 93, 95, 136, 143–4, 149, 170, 228

control over artistic forms, 147

downfall, 20

group, 20, 126–7, 128

“Important Speech of the Central Leader,” 45–6, 105

role in Cultural Revolution, 197–8

views on colour, 44–5

Jiang Wen, 180

Jiang Zuhui, 169

Jiao Yulu, 89

Jie Li, 185

Jin Yongquan, 172

Jingdezhen Porcelain Factory, 186

huge Mao statue, 186–7, 189

Jiwei Ci, 124

Johnson, Kay Ann, 118

July 13 directive, 210–11

June 26th Directive, 113–14, 119

Kant, Immanuel, 16

Kantorowicz, Ernst, 202, 209–10

Karl, Rebecca, 18, 197

Ke Guoqing, 206–7

Kenez, Peter, 87

Khrushchev, Nikita, 196–7

King, Richard, 118

Kissinger, Henry, 20

Kuang Bin, 153

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 38

Lacan, Jacques, 47

Leese, Daniel, 196, 198

Lei Feng, 89

Lenin in 1918, 100, 167

Lenin in October, 100

Lenin, Vladimir, 6, 17–18

Li Da, 199

Li He, 222–3

Li Huiniang

purging of, 227–9, 233

Li Qian, 183–4

Li Shuangshuang, 118

Li Shuangshuang (film), 140

Li Tie, 157

Li Xiuming, 127

Li Yanhong, 116

Li Yizhe, see Wang Xizhe

Li Zhengian, 155

Li Zicheng, 93

Liang Runtian, 153–4

Liang Tingduo, 127

Liang Xiao Writing Group, 236–7

Liang Xin, 166

liangxiang (striking a pose), 185–6

Liao Mosha, 103

Lifton, Robert Jay, 230

Lin Biao, 198

death, 20, 241

Lin Yu, 144

literature

appropriation, 63

authors, 65–6

circulation, 57, 67–72

control over, 61–7

criticism, 66

novels, 65

political role, 66–7

production, 57–80

spontaneous creations, 63

translation, 66

see also Mao’s writings; poetry; writing groups

little newspapers, 63, 68, 234

Little Red Guards, 107

Liu Dajie, 66

Liu Jialing, 99

Liu Qingtang, 170–1

Liu Shaoqi, 19

Liu Wencai, 235

Liu Zhidan, 29

Long Live Mao Zedong Thoughts, 63

Lowenthal, Richard, 87

Lu Ding, 71

Lu Haichao, 159–60

Lu Qiuping, 140

Lu Xun Academy, 123–4, 165, 223

Lu Zemian, 190–1

Ludden, Yawen, 96

Lukács, Georg, 40–1

Luo Jiabao, 157

Manning, Kimberley Ens, 133

Mao badges, 205, 206–7

marketization of, 212–13

see also collectable revolutionary objects

Mao cult, 24, 196–9

in army, 198

Mao as doxa, 194, 199–209

Mao as image, 24, 207, 215

Mao as revolutionary leader, 24

Mao’s view of, 209–10, 213–14

MaoArt, 194

MaoMusic, 194

MaoSpeak, 194

omnipresence of Mao, 196

readoption in Great Leap Forward, 197

suppression, 198

vested interests, 198

see also doxa, Mao badges, Mao portraits, Mao statues

Mao portraits, 195, 205–6

Chairman Mao to Anyuan, 195

propaganda posters, 195

reproduction, 195

Mao songs, 39

Mao statues, 186–7, 209–15

Mao Zedong, 1, 7, 19, 33, 58, 85, 227

1942 Talks, 32

conflicting beliefs, 9

death, 20, 240

identification with, 12

swim across Yangzi River, 201–3, 211

use of ghosts as political allegory, 224–6

Mao Zedong Thought, 94, 196, 198, 199

Propaganda Teams, see propaganda teams

rituals, 198

Mao Zedong Thought Arts and Literature Propaganda Teams, 97

see also propaganda teams

Mao’s writings, 62–3

fake Mao poems, 71–2

poetry, 62, 70–1

Maoism

idealistic nature, 29

Maoist aesthetics, 29, 41–6

Maoist cultural economy, 58–61

Maoist propaganda, see propaganda

Maoist romanticism, 30–41, 171, 222

order and disorder, 37–41

surrealist dimension, 37

Maoist thought

importance of style, 43

Marx, Karl, 73, 78, 131, 237

theory of commodities, 72–80

Masao, Shimizu, 164

mass line, 11

Matsuyama Ballet Company, 164

May 16 Notification, 95, 104, 200

May Fourth

generation, 33

romanticism, 33

May Seventh Cadre Schools, 19

medical system

role of traditional Chinese medicine, 114–15

structure, 113, 132

training, 113–14

see also barefoot doctors

Meng Chao, 227–9

Meng Qingbiao, 173

Mikiko, Matsuyama, 164

mimesis, see social mimesis

Mittler, Barbara, 19, 94, 194

model culture, 85

model as site of contestation, 131–5

model citizens, 85–6

model factories, 88–9

model figures, 24, 83, 85, 89

model performance works, see yangbanxi

model work units, 89

see also Nineteenth Foodstuff Shop; Dawing oilfield; Dazhai model

Model Laborers Meeting, 85

model works, 84, 96

local appropriation, 100

see also yangbanxi, mofan

mofan, 84–5, 88, 107

shift to yangban, 92

work units, 88; figures, 88, 89–90

see also yangban, yangbanxi

Munro, Donald, 85

Mussolini, Benito, 22

My University, 172

Nanniwan, 123–4

narcissism of small differences, 217

National Agricultural Science Committee, 91

National Conference for Literary Workers (1977), 237

New Doctor in the Fishing Village, 109–10, 120

new things (xinsheng shiwu), 107

New Work of an Old Professor, The, 235

newspapers, 42

see also little newspapers

Ni Huiying, 140, 159–60

Nineteenth Foodstuff Shop, 87–8

Nixon, Richard, 20, 169

nostalgia about Cultural Revolution, 2, 244–6

“Notice to Ban All Illegal Publication and Hawking of Propaganda Materials,” 63

novels of Cultural Revolution, 39–41

objectification, 3

October Revolution, 6

Ode of the Dragon River, 93

Ode to Yimeng (Yimeng Song), 165, 166

Office of the Publication of Chairman Mao’s Writings, 62

“On Dialectical Materialism,” 131

On the Docks, 76, 83, 124

Qiong Opera transplantation, 148, 149, 152

“On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” 197

Open Door policy, 239, 244

opera, 136–61

cultural specificity, 137

disbanding of troupes, 147

regional transplantation of, 138, 140–56

revolutionary regional, 137

see also Cantonese opera; Peking Opera; yangbanxi

orchestral symphonies: transplantation, 147

Ouyang Hai, 89

Ouyang Yuqian, 159

pamphlets, 42

Pearl River Film Studio, 143, 148

Pease, Rowen, 151

peer groups, influence of, 58–9

Peking Opera, 136, 146

see also yangbanxi

Peking Opera Company, 166

People’s Daily, 16, 53–4, 125, 137, 148, 151, 204–5

People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 207

People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 19

People’s Publication House, 207

permanent revolution concept, 87

Perry, Elizabeth, 35

photographic stills, 171–85

consumption of, 173

touching up, 172

use on posters, 172

yangbanzi stills, 172

Ping Opera, 100

Pioneers, The (Chuangye), 236

poetry, 64

national model poetry village, 64–5

rusticated youths, 68–9

Poetry of Chairman Mao, 62, 70

porcelain portraitures, 171, 185–91, 192

fetishization, 188, 190–1

yangbanxi characters, 187–8, 190

Xi’er-Dachuan pair, 187

contemporary market for, 188

buyers, 188

see also collectable revolutionary objects; Jingdezhen Porcelain Factory; liangxiang (striking a pose); Mao statues; Shiwan Ceramic Arts Factory

posters, 42

barefoot doctors, 108–10, 118, 132

Mao’s slogans and poetry, 70

see also big-character posters

propaganda, 3, 13–18

of agitation, 14

billboards, 101

in Cultural Revolution context, 16–17

diverse cultural forms, 101

performative dimension, 15

production and circulation, 57–80

published matter, 101

symbolic role of water, 77–8

value of, 72–80

see also posters

Propaganda Department, 18

dismissal, 95

propaganda teams, 98–9, 107

half-workers (ban tuochan), 98

organization, 99

publishing

commitment to Mao’s writings, 62–3

control over, 61–7

first period of Cultural Revolution, 61–2

resumption of industry, 64

see also little newspapers

Qian Liqun, 9

Qiao Guanhua, 198–9

Qiong Opera, 148

Quotations of Mao Zedong, 62

Raid on the White Tiger Regiment transplantation, 149

Rancière, Jacques, 55

readership as public function, 61

reading culture, independent, 2

reality vs. fiction, 52–6

Red Detachment of Women, The, 37–8, 44, 76, 92, 94, 140

in Albania, 168–9

ballet, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170

film, 235

Kicking Backward to the Purplish Gold Crown, 174–8, 181, 184, 192

photographic stills, 173, 174

porcelain portraitures, 190–1

pornographic reading of, 179–81

relationship of action and portrait, 186

transplantation of opera, 149

Red Flag, 90, 125

Red Guards, 4, 11, 19, 105, 107, 183–4

appearance of, 90–1

despatch to countryside, 19, 68–9

female, 133–4

loyalty to Mao, 197

poetry, 68–9

repentance of, 244–5

Red Lantern, The, 44, 93, 100

Hebei bangzi transplantation, 148

Uyghur version, 151

Red Lu Xun Academy of Arts propaganda team, 99

“Red Painting Brush,” 206–7

“Red Piece,” see The Red Detachment of Women

Red Poppy, 164

Red Shoes, The, 165

Red Sun Lightens Up the Ballet Stage, The, 167

“Red, Bright and Shining,” 30

reeducation, 19

reform through labor, 11

Ren Jianhui, 157

Rent Collection Courtyard sculpture series, 185

revolutionary arts, 43

see also yangbanxi

Revolutionary Committees, 107

revolutionary culture

construction of, 24

Roberts, Rosemary, 170

romanticism, 33–5

pentatonic, 37

see also Maoist romanticism

Russian Revolution, 6

rusticated youths, 68–9, 98, 107

Santner, Eric, 202–4

Scheid, Volker, 116

Schmalzer, Sigrid, 79

Schram, Stuart, 9–10, 43

Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 62

Selected Writings of Mao Zedong, 62

Selections of Art References and Newspaper Designs, 101

sending down to countryside, 19

sensorial, 46–52

Serov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, 5–7

seventeen years period, 222

Shajiabang, 93, 94, 97–8

transplantation, 148, 149, 152

Shanghai City Revolutionary Committee Writing Unit, 66

Shanghai January Revolution, 36, 126

Shaoguang Wang, 35, 117, 219

Shenyang Revolutionary Yangbanxi School, 96

Shi Shaohua, 173

Shi Zhi, 240, see also Guo Lusheng

Shiwan Ceramic Arts Factory, 187

singularity of experience, 2–3

Six Regulations of Public Safety, 207

“Sixteen Word” principles, 30–1, 170

social deviants, 11

social mimesis, 3, 9–13, 23, 83–107, 156, 162, 194, 208, 217, 218, 238

contradictory effects 12

horizontal, 195–6

origin of term, 10

transformation and, 12

socialist realism, 31, 32, 221

as commodity, 47

Soldiers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, 97

see also propaganda teams

Song Binbin, 244

“Song of Idealism,” 69–70

Song of the Dragon River

Korean transplantation, 151

Sons and Daughters of the Grasslands, 165, 166–7

Southern Daily, 143

Soviet aesthetics, 31–2, 32

Soviet Union

experts, 163–4

influence on ballet, 163–4

models, 6–7

severing of relationship with China, 163–4, 224

Sparkling Red Star, 93

Spartacus, 164

Spring Swallow of the Snowy Mountain, 147

Stage Sisters, 128

Stakhanov, Aleksei, 86–7

Stakhanovite movement, 86–7

Stalin, Joseph, 6

Stalin Prize, 13

Stalinist propaganda culture, 47

Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 105

star system, see cultural workers

Storm in the Countryside, 141–6, 147, 148

banning of, 143–4, 146

Cantonese Opera identity, 146

femininity in, 146

musical arrangement, 145

subject formation, 2, 3–9, 23, 191–3, 194

production of citizens, 85

subjectification, 3

Sun Also Rises, The, 180

suzao (moulding), 186

Swan Lake, 163, 164, 167

“Synthesis of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism” slogan, 33

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy

transplantation, 148

Tale of the Red Plum, 227

“Tall, Big, and Complete,” 30

Tan Jian, 145

Tan Ying Yuan, 181

Tang Muli, 122–3

Tangshan earthquake, 20

Tao Zhu, 143

Taussig, Michael, 10, 12

“Three Correct,” 31

“Three in One” revolutionary committee policy, 93, 126

“Three Loyalties Four Infinities” campaign, 197–8

“Three Old Essays,” 85

“Three Prominences,” 30, 65, 170, 173

Three-Family Village Post column, 103–4

Tian Han, 224

transplantation project, 138–9, 141, 147–56

concept of model, 148–9

assimilation of slogans, 150–1

see also opera

Trotsky, Leon, 87

Tuo Wang, 197

“two remembering and three investigations,” 48

uniformity, 1, 2

utopianism, 124

value, 79–80

Vattimo, Gianni, 21

victimization models, 1

Village Doctor, 119–20, 129

Walder, Andrew G., 36, 126

Wang Anyi, 2

Wang Chaotian, 11

Wang Guodong, 195

Wang Guofu, 92

see also The Golden Road

Wang Jinxi, 89

Wang Lei, 39–40, 67

Wang Shuo, 180

Wang Xiaoming, 49

Wang Xinmin, 65

Wang Xiyen, 216

Wang Xizhe, 155

Wang Yujue, 119–20

water

symbolic role in Maoist propaganda, 77–8

Waves of the Jian River, 39–40, 67

Wei Guangqi, 2

wendou (verbal battles), 5, 6, 63, 243

Weng Zengqi, 93

wenhua, 16

Wenhui Post, 125–6

Wenyi zhanbo, 51

When the Red Guards on the Grassland See Chairman Mao, 58

“White Piece,” see The White-Haired Girl

White-Haired Girl, The, 45

ballet, 164, 165–6, 170

film, 235

photographic stills, 172–3

porcelain portraitures, 188–9, 192

transplantation, 149

Winter Palace is Captured, The, 7

wood-block prints, 42

“words conveying Truth,” 75

Wordsworth, William, 34–5

Worker and Peasant Students of the 1973 Class, Department of Chinese, Peking University, 69–70

Workers Defending Mao Zedong’s Thought, 143

Workers Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, 97

see also propaganda teams

Workers Publishing House, 90

writing groups, 66

Wu Di, 98

Wu Han, 103, 228

Wu Manyou, 85, 87

Wu Qinghua, 44, 94, 167, 170, 171, 175, 178

Wu Youheng, 141–2, 144

wudou, 5, 243

Wuhan Incident, 36

Xi Jinping, 244, 245

Xia Yan, 237–8

xiangjiang fenglei, 39

xiaofendui, see Mao Zedong Thought Arts and Literature Propaganda Teams

Xiaojinzhuang

as national model poetry village, 64–5, 89

Xiaoping Fang, 115–16

Xie Jin, 127, 128, 166

Xie Yinlin, 183

Xinhua News Agency, 67

Photography Unit, 173

Xu Bing, 101–2

Xu Jilin, 8

Xue Jinghua, 175

Yan Bili, 127

Yan’an, 30, 31

propaganda culture, 42

Rectification Campaign, 86, 196

Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works, 180–1

Yang Baozhi, 97–8

Yang Chen-Ning, 235

yangban, 84, 91–4, 107, 162

clothing, 91

figures, 92–3

songs, 91

see also yangbanxi

yangbanxi, 11, 13, 64, 84, 91

aesthetic principles, 23, 184

amateur performances, 97, 100

companies, 95

contemporary controversy, 136–7

different versions, 95

disconnect from reality, 138

heroes, 92

heroines, 111

involvement of masses, 95–6, 97

local appropriation, 100

opera arias, 136

popularization, 148

production and circulation, 57–80

project, 90–1

reception, 57

regional transplantation of, 138, 140–56

regional troupes, 96

remediation, 24

supremacy of, 104–5

training in production, 96

transplantation, 24, 138, 141

see also ballet; opera; photographic stills; porcelain portraiture

yangge plays, 223

Yao Wenyuan, 66

Yealina, O.A., 163

yellow-cover books, 2

Yiching Wu, 11, 35–6, 43

yikusitian (remember the bitter and think of the sweet), 48–52

aesthetics, 51

bitter meals, 49

ritual, 49

yiku activities, 49–50

yiku songs, 49

Yin Hongbiao, 5, 11

Yin Mei, 167

Yinghong Cheng, 85

yiyuanhua (integration), 9–10

Yu Hua, 15

Yuang, Bell, 140

Zabala, Santiago, 21

Zhang Chunqiao, 19, 125–6, 199

Zhang Daxin, 118–19

Zhang Kangkang, 65, 66, 67

Zhang Shaocheng, 104

Zhang Shenshi, 195

Zhang Xiaoliang, 100

Zhang Yaxin, 173

Zhang Yuxian, 188–9

Zhang Zhenshi, 208

Zhao Benshan, 174

Zhao Ruheng, 164, 182

Zhao Shankui, 85

Zhao Zhanku, 87

Zhao Ziyang, 143

Zhi An, 2

Zhong Zengya, 235

Zhou Bapi, 235

Zhou Enlai, 126, 128, 164–5, 169, 173, 198, 235

death, 20, 240

Zhou Lingzhao, 1895

Zhou Yang, 31, 199, 231, 237

Zhou Ziren, 4–9

Zhu Xueqin, 2

Zhu Yong, 108–9, 120

Zue Jinghua, 44–5