Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda

Staging Chinese Revolution

Staging Chinese Revolution

Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda

Xiaomei Chen

Columbia University Press

New York

The publication has been partially supported by a Publication Subvention Grant of University of California at Davis.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chen, Xiaomei, 1954– author.

Title: Staging Chinese Revolution : theater, film, and the afterlives of propaganda / Xiaomei Chen.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042459 (print) | LCCN 2016002640 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231166386 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541619 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: China—History—1949—Historiography. | Theater—Political aspects—China—History—20th century. | Heads of state—China—Biography. | Biography—Political aspects. | China—Politics and government—1949—Biography.

Classification: LCC DS777.549 .C47 2016 (print) | LCC DS777.549 (ebook) | DDC 951.05072—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042459

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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COVER IMAGE: Song and Dance Morning Light.

From The Road to Revival. Courtesy of Li Ge

COVER DESIGN: Mary Ann Smith

To my daughter, Miriam Siying Halperin,

and her generation of readers,

who might want to read about Chinese performance arts

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Propaganda Performance, History, and Landscape

1. The Place of Chen Duxiu

Political Theater, Dramatic History, and the Question of Representation

2. The Return of Mao Zedong

A People’s Hero and a New Legacy in Postsocialist Performance

3. The Stage of Deng Xiaoping

The Incorrigible Capitalist Roader

4. The Myth of the Red Classics

Three Revolutionary Music-and-Dance Epics and Their Peaceful Restorations

Epilogue

Where Are the Founding Mothers?

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

For a book twelve years in the making, I am indebted to many teachers, friends, relatives, colleagues, and others in my life who assisted me through this long process.

My parents were my first teachers. My father, Chen Yongjing, studied and taught stage design in the National Drama School from the 1930s to the 1940s in Jiang’an, Sichuan province, together with Cao Yu and Huang Zuolin, and worked as the leader of the stage and costume design team in the former China Youth Art Theater beginning in 1949. My mother, Ji Shuping, played Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1956 and starred, in the last two plays of her acting career, in Brecht’s Life of Galileo in 1979 and Jules Vallès’s La commune de Paris in 1983. An unknown drama in Western theater history, Vallès’s play inspired Chinese performers and audiences in early post-Mao China with its depiction of the struggles and sufferings of the people of Paris and their heroic deeds in establishing the Paris Commune. It was one of my earliest introductions to staging socialist-inspired revolution on a world stage, in a remote time and place from its point of origin. Unfortunately, the China Youth Art Theater was abolished at the high tides of economic reform, with only two dozen former employees still living in its old compound in Beijing. I think often of my childhood years growing up among them. We were one big family bound together by an important theater that had staged many of the red classic plays in the first seventeen years in the existence of the PRC. I am grateful to my sister, Chen Feibi, my brother, Chen Ji, and my sister-in-law, Liu Hongjun, who took care of my parents in Beijing and attended numerous funerals as children of our theater to bid farewell at the time of death of ailing members. This book is my tribute to their fabulous lives and outstanding careers.

My aspiring teachers at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (now known as the Beijing Foreign Studies University) taught me the enjoyment of learning English as a second language. A recent WeChat group has connected me to former teachers and schoolmates and reminds me every day of the value of our golden years as worker-peasant-soldier college students (1973–1977): we deeply appreciated our roots in the bottom of society and the indispensable lessons learned from the ordinary people with whom we lived. Upon entering college, I had the good fortune of bringing with me treasured memories from the northeastern wilderness in Heilongjiang province, where I farmed with my teenage friends from middle school from 1969 to 1971 and practiced writing as a local reporter from 1971 to 1973. Xu Xianguo, Guo Qingchen, and Cui Guoxiang taught me how to be a caring and honest newspaperwoman and rekindled my love for writing, which was first instilled in me by my fourth-grade teacher, Yao Weizhen, at Beijing Jingshan School in 1964. Like many children of my generation, teacher Yao’s two years of teaching us how to read and write in Chinese turned out to be the only formal school training on the subject I ever had, which ended in 1966 at the commencement of the Cultural Revolution. Through WeChat, I am in daily contact with my Jingshan classmates, who remind me often of our formative years when serving the people and putting their interests first was the fashionable trend in behavior. My English teacher, Wu Jin, and my math teacher, Liu Shenrong, now in their eighties, still join us in reunion events. As loving teachers, they influenced the way I devote myself to my students, from the early years at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute to my current position at the University of California, Davis.

I am indebted to Professor Edward Geary, who invited me to stay with his family during my first two weeks at Brigham Young University in the fall of 1981 and guided me through my master’s degree in the English Department. Within one week upon arriving at BYU, he convinced me that I could teach freshman composition to American students and praised my teachers back in China for having trained English speakers behind the iron curtain. From the late Professor Clifford C. Flanigan I learned his passion for Western medieval theater and for inspiring his students as the first priority in his job description as a university professor. To Professor Marvin Carlson I owe my formal training in Western theater and theory, gained in the five superb classes I took from him and through his never-ending support for his students three decades after having taught them in the first place. I am indebted to Professors Eugene Ouyang and Sumie Jones, who taught me how to teach and write about East-West comparative literature and find our own voices in a multi faceted academic world. My training as a doctoral student in comparative literature at Indiana University prepared me for a rewarding career and stimulated in me an enthusiasm for teaching and research.

The seeds of this book were sowed during my wonderful years at Ohio State University (1989–2002), where I benefited from so many friends and colleagues. I am grateful to Kirk A. Denton for his friendship, never-failing support, and the formative years we spent together in good and trying times. Patricia Sieber, Judy Andrews, and Kuiyi Shen have always been there for me, to cheer me on and encourage me to take on new challenges. Lindsay Jones and Sabra Webber were always supportive and understanding. Friends and colleagues Julie Watson, Margret Chan, Shelley Quinn, Timothy Wong, Mark Bender, Galal Walker, and many others also made my years at Ohio State University unforgettable.

The writing of this book commenced in 2003, when I started teaching at UC Davis. I am grateful to my three department chairs, Robert Borgen, Chia-ning Chang, and Michelle Yeh, for their unwavering support and to the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies for a subvention grant for this book. My colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures are the best one could have; similar to my team at Ohio State, they supported me as family and friends. I thank my students, especially those enrolled in my courses on modern Chinese drama, modern Chinese fiction, and on Chinese film, for their shared ideas and passion for learning. This book was written for them as well.

Over the years, there have been outstanding scholars whose works have inspired me, and I am thankful for their support: Kirk A. Denton, Barbara Mittler, David Der-wei Wang, Ban Wang, Wendy Larson, Edward Gunn, Michelle Yeh, Sheldon Lu, Yingjin Zhang, Christopher Lupke, Ying Hu Ruru Li, Alexia Huang, Claire Conceison, Weihong Bao, Xiaobing Tang, Chengzhou He, Xinmin Liu, Jie Li, Weijie Song, Beverly Bossler, and Thomas E. Postlewait, among many others. I am grateful to Gail Finney for her friendship, for reading a draft of my introduction, and for her valuable suggestions. I thank Yuming He for her feedback on my introduction and Chengzhi Chu for his timely help with PowerPoint, sometimes right before my conference presentations. I am grateful to Xuefeng Feng for introducing my works to Chinese-language readers and Pengxin Yang for his technical support for the illustrations. Last but not least, I am profoundly grateful to Mark R. Halperin for being there for me for many years with tremendous patience, understanding, and support in many different and essential ways. Mark has read many pages of the draft of this book with his historian’s insights.

A special thanks must go to Jennifer Crewe, president and director of Columbia University Press, for guiding me through the publication of this book, for her professionalism, efficiency, and wisdom in supporting scholarly works on Chinese literature and especially on theater and performance culture. I am indebted to Jonathan Fiedler, editorial assistant at Columbia University Press, Leslie Kriesel, assistant managing editor at Columbia University Press, and Mike Ashby, copy editor, for their timely communication, expert skills, and gracious help. I am grateful to the four anonymous external reviewers, whose advice helped me improve this book. I own all the copyrights to any errors it contains.

Some of the ideas in this book were presented at conferences at Harvard University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Nanjing University, Beijing Normal University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Rutgers University, Purdue University, Hamilton College, and the Catholic University of Portugal. I thank colleagues from these institutions for their invitations and conference participants and audiences for their feedback.

An earlier version of chapter 2 titled Fifty Years of Staging a Founding Father was published in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). A small portion of chapter 3 titled The Cinematic Deng Xiaoping was published in China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Matthew D. Johnson et al. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). A part of chapter 5 was published as The Road to Revival in China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions, edited by Ban Wang and Jie Lu (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012). I thank the University of Iowa Press, Bloomsbury, and Lexington Books for their permission to reprint these materials. I am grateful to Meng Bing, Dong Wei, and the Drama Troupe attached to the Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army for providing stage photos for Meng Bing’s plays, to Li Ge for his permission to print his photographs of The Road to Revival, to Feng Shuangbai for contacting Li Ge on my behalf, and to Yao Yuan and the Theater Troupe Attached to the Political Department of the Nanjing Military Region for allowing me to use images of Women on the Long March.

Introduction

Propaganda Performance, History, and Landscape

This book is about propaganda theater performance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the mid-1980s into the twenty-first century. I argue that in a postsocialist state with capitalist characteristics such as the PRC, propaganda can no longer be simply dismissed as a monolithic, top-down, and meaningless practice characterized solely by censorship and suppression of freedom of expression in a totalitarian regime. Instead, propaganda can be studied as a complex, dialogic, and dialectical process in which multiple voices and opposing views collide, negotiate, and compromise in forming what looks like a mainstream ideology—and indeed functions as such—to legitimize the powerful state and its right to rule. At the same time, propaganda also insinuates itself in the form of commercial culture, star culture, youth culture, and the cyber sphere to give popular appeal. Most important, propaganda is, to a large extent, deeply lodged in personal memories and the nostalgia for a bygone past among vast numbers of individuals. The term capitalist characteristics, therefore, applies not only to China’s market economy but also to the spheres of ideological superstructure that orient cultural practice.

Recent Western scholarship has yielded insights into propaganda studies as a new field in examining culture, society, history, literature, and every day life practice. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo, for example, have presented thirteen propositions about propaganda culture that include a wide range of topics, such as biblical texts’ warnings against spreading false messages about God; the Catholic Church’s dedicated institutions to maintain its religious authority in the seventeenth century; Brazilian and North American slavery propaganda and its antislavery challenges; American Cold War brainwashing for democracy; and American public diplomacy as a global campaign. Auerbach and Castronovo emphasize propaganda as a cultural practice that concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs. It therefore has tremendous relevance for art history, history, theology, communications, education, media studies, public relations, literary analysis, rhetoric, cultural theory, and political science (Auerbach and Castronovo 2013, 2). Unfortunately, their study does not pay close attention to performance studies and dramatic culture, and the majority of the essays on case studies in non-Western or non-European cultures limit themselves to the so-called catastrophic events and dark history from the Soviet Union of the Stalin era and China in the wake of the massacre of pro-democracy forces at Tiananmen Square (2). The Cold War mentality to focus on the totalitarian regimes of the former socialist bloc points to a critical need to study other neglected areas of propaganda culture that construct everyday experience and reveal its complexity and function.

My book focuses on propaganda theater performance in contemporary China as a complex and intriguing social habitus by combining two seemingly uninteresting and—as some might argue—boring or unpopular genres: historical narratives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), called dangshi yanjiu (党史研究), and numerous propaganda performances in theater, film, and television drama, supposedly based on party-history research. However, I argue that the CCP historical narrative and its related, multifaceted fields in some instances reinvented itself by creating a niche in the publishing world through the marketing of political biographies, leaders’ memoirs, and war stories in the reform era. The popularity of Maomao’s memoir, titled My Father Deng Xiaoping (我的父亲邓小平), for example, created an almost perfect blending of a postsocialist official agenda to legitimize CCP rule and of the public interest in Deng’s private life, including his first love, his children’s upbringing, and his family’s endurance through difficult times. More specifically, this daughter’s memoir records a single, short sentence once uttered by Deng about his first wife: She was a rare beauty; this mushroomed into highly imagined, fictional details of a short-lived but passionate love story in a number of films and television dramas, which I examine in chapter 3. This episode crystallizes the transformative power from official party history—which in and of itself is fictional and constantly in flux—to propaganda performance, which explores the changing interpretations of history and the alluring tales of revolutionary leaders to create romance, detective, suspense, and war stories that overlap with some of the features of Hollywood blockbusters, despite their obvious differences. A political biography based on the themes and time lines of the CCP history narrative, in this way, could become a best seller in the book market for its appeal as a private biography. Such leaders’ biographies could even join company with those in the United States on the life stories of John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln; Western political biographies, however, have not ended up generating as many performance pieces as have their Chinese counterparts. This book explores the complex intersection between the emergence of political biography, the rewriting of CCP history, and related performances and treats them as a fluid, complex, and rich cultural practice.

Propaganda performance can also be studied as antipropaganda that reveals contradictions, inconsistencies, and deconstructive clues with which to question the conventional wisdom that propaganda purports to advance. I dove into the archives of CCP party history, personal memoirs of eyewitnesses of and participants in war events, and Internet essays as bases for studying various performances that depict Deng Xiaoping as a great military leader in the late 1920s, as so constructed from the mid-1980s into the twenty-first century. A careful reading of these diverse genres reveals gaps and gray areas in the official account of Deng’s early life and yields clues to viewing Deng as a deserter rather than a heroic leader during the difficult wartime in Jiangxi province. Most significantly, certain performance genres explored visual power such as collage to bypass, erase, or avoid the inglorious fact that Deng was in fact absent in the 1929 Baise Uprising (百色起义), which he was credited for having led to success, whereas other performances followed certain party-history narratives to explain away Deng’s leaving the scene as following the orders of the CCP Central Committee. Deng’s practical wisdom to protect himself at the time of crisis can be perceived as a key factor in understanding his subsequent career in the zigzagging course of the country and the party, as seen in the equally zigzagging course of the rewriting of the CCP’s history and the performance culture that accompanied it. Reading these performance pieces against memoirs and biographies can help us understand the conflation of the man and the representations of his life through various media.

My study takes seriously the important genre of CCP history writing, which conventional wisdom has often dismissed as unworthy of scholarly pursuit. Recent social science scholars such as Elizabeth J. Perry have produced insightful explorations of the CCP history narrative and its changing dynamics in the formation of new cultural identities. Perry investigates the century-long history of Anyuan 安源, a small mining town in Jiangxi province where the three CCP leaders—Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇, and Li Lisan 李立三—successfully led workers’ strikes in the 1920s. The purges of Liu and Li during the Cultural Revolution changed the official narratives of their respective roles in the history of Anyuan and related narratives of the history of the workers’ movement but not the respect for them on the part of local survivors. Perry treats the transformation of the Anyuan legacy as a local site to investigate the role of cultural positioning, or the strategic deployment of a range of symbolic resources . . . for purposes of political persuasion and the afterlife of Anyuan history and its power of cultural patronage appropriating and reinterpreting that complex heritage (Perry 2012, 4, 13). From these perspectives, scholars can pay serious attention to the particular people who undertake it and to their skills as messengers in generating new commitments and identities (5). With her in-depth mining of one revolutionary site over a century of history, Perry facilitates a more complex understanding of the enduring appeal of the Maoist revolutionary past, the tremendous sacrifices and dedication of millions of people, and the continuing attraction of revolutionary personalities as part of an interwoven and ambiguous fabric of events and memories, one deeply invested with cultural and political significance (14). Most relevant to my study of propaganda performance is Perry’s insight into the importance of recognizing the participation of the people who passionately embraced revolutionary idealism and actively contributed to the making of local, national, and revolutionary history rather than being seen as having merely been repressed by revolutionary doctrines. My study reflects on theater artists’ faith, hope, and dreams inspired by the Chinese Communist Revolution and their active role in constructing and participating in socialist and postsocialist theater culture.

In the field of modern Chinese propaganda studies, Rudolf G. Wagner was among the pioneering Western scholars to take political theater seriously, as seen in his exemplary study of the artists’ use of dark allusions from 1958 to 1963 in scripting contemporary Chinese historical drama, the ultimate genre to which a writer will have recourse at a time of crisis (Wagner 1990, 245).¹ His approach of focusing on the fringe rather than on the center in the political situation, ideological debate, economic policies, and theoretical discourse has enriched our understanding of the contemporary theater and political history of the period.²

With her profound knowledge of culture, art, and music, Barbara Mittler’s recent award-winning book set a new standard for examining the significance of mass creation, participation, and reception of the Cultural Revolutionary propaganda art, its prehistory in traditional culture, and its afterlife in contemporary China. She draws our attention to the aesthetic experience at its base and probes into its functions, both for the artist and for the audience (Mittler 2012, 28). As Ban Wang has cogently pointed out, by asking what did people do to propaganda instead of what propaganda did to people, Mittler takes a long view of Chinese revolutionary history and shows how a growing body of cosmopolitan artists grew up to become the products and inheritors of an enduring Cultural Revolutionary legacy; the propaganda culture of the Cultural Revolution, therefore, is not a thing of the past but remains a ‘continuous revolution’ with a vibrant creative and interpretive energy at work and a distinctive national style (B. Wang 2013, 183). Similarly, Ban Wang, in his own groundbreaking study on the sublime figure of history, published more than a decade earlier, had also convincingly explained the aesthetic experience in socialist China, describing a whole generation of Chinese artists as enthusiastic participants in revolutionary movement and crediting their creative energy for artistic expression (B. Wang 1997, 209–10). My study of plays featuring revolutionary leaders takes seriously the traditional Chinese concept of literature carrying the way (文以载道) and demonstrates how Maoist propaganda art and culture inherited the ideological function in the Confucian and May Fourth practices in developing their complex aesthetic expressions. In particular, I draw attention to the roots of these plays in traditional dramatic literature, which, in the words of Stephen West, was heavily didactic and served the double purpose of education and entertainment (West 1986, 21).

Perry’s work has also enriched these earlier scholarly works in social history on the origin of the Chinese revolution and its leaders’ roles in manipulating multiple forces. Steven Averill’s study, for example, focuses on a similar local perspective to challenge the conventional wisdom that Mao’s early success in the Jinggangshan Base Area (井冈山革命根据地) in Jiangxi province in the 1920s resulted from his heroic qualities and his stance against the urban-based Communist Central Committee. Exploring the local events that occurred before and after Mao’s presence in Jinggangshan and their significance in the early stage of revolutionary base building, Averill focuses on the historical patterns of local strongman rule, clientelist politics, lineage conflict and ethnic struggle within which the party had to compete for power (Averill 2006, 3). Both Perry’s and Averill’s studies have critically engaged the changing and contradictory CCP history narratives as vital historical, cultural, and ideological contexts and examined their formative power in the construction of knowledge.³

My study further investigates the transformation from local social history and its national reimagining to theatrical performances in contemporary China, in which numerous works either have Jinggangshan in their titles or embed the Jinggangshan story as a critical episode in dramatizing early revolutionary history. In contemporary China, this remaking and packaging of key revolutionary sites provides, on the one hand, accessible and feel-good drama to collaborate with the ruling ideology to promote a harmonious society in a free-market setting; at the same time, however, it offers multiple sites of cultural interventions with which some theater performers have explored the symbolic capitals of the revolutionary past to critique the not-so-revolutionary present. Chapter 2, for example, traces Mao’s frequent recollections of his golden years in Jinggangshan, Yan’an, and other key locales of the revolutionary past onstage to remind audiences offstage not to forget the ordinary poor people and their sacrifices for the revolution after the revolution is won. Seen in this light, propaganda can also be studied as memory, but not individual memory usually claimed as such but propaganda memory in the name of history, meticulously selected and constructed to institutionalize a collective memory of bloody wars, heartfelt sacrifices, and harsh everyday life in a past revolutionary time in order to legitimize the postsocialist regime and its political agenda in a nonrevolutionary time.⁴ For example, the repeated appearances in several plays of Mao as a dramatic character punishing some high-ranking officials for abusing their power in the 1940s and early 1950s can be perceived as a reincarnated Mao returning from heaven to contemporary China to lecture and condemn corrupt officials. Mao is therefore selectively remembered by his creators as an eloquent character in order to critique a contemporary society rotten to the core from the top down while at the same time being promoted by censors as part of the official anticorruption campaign to legitimize the CCP’s right to rule. A passionate Mao who cares about the sufferings of the poor and listens to their complaints, as so displayed onstage, is perfect propaganda performance. At the same time, however, these propaganda performances could remind one of the postsocialist regime’s betrayal of Mao’s original call of serving the people, therefore highlighting contemporary leaders’ inability to answer Mao’s critiques. Prosperity for whom? can evoke Mao’s earlier question, Whom do we serve? and thereby points to the nature of contemporary society as socialist in name only. In this regard, Geremie Barmé’s insightful remark on the complex skin of the so-called nonmainstream or underculture as a pallelel or even parasite culture from the 1970s to the 1990s could also explain a multifaceted tradition of postsocialist performance depicting revolutionary leaders, which has developed within the orbit of an avowedly socialist state whose gravitational pull is often all too irresistible and has itself undergone an extraordinary transformation (Barmé 1999, xiv–xv).

Propaganda performance, however, does not always validate Mao and his cohorts; it also questions Deng and his successors. Its multilayered and dialogic imagining of the past can also be seen as possibly challenging Mao and the very Communist system he had established and consolidated. For example, I demonstrate that the tremendous amount of scholarship in Chinese, based on the newly declassified archives in the former USSR since its collapse in 1989, facilitated the rewriting of Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 not only as a remarkable cofounder of the CCP in 1921 but also, and, more important, as a visionary leader who had predicted, as early as 1942, the grim future of the CCP: if the party won, it could turn China into a Stalinist state that purged its own leaders. It was not Stalin who created a totalitarian regime, Chen argues; it was the Soviet system without democracy that had given rise to Stalinism (Chen Duxiu 1993a). The newly constructed founding history of the CCP and the performance pieces on Chen and on the founding myths of the nation in the past three decades, therefore, can partially be perceived as having questioned the fundamental principle of the proletarian dictatorship that has validated the Maoist, Dengist, and post-Dengist regimes. These deconstructive seeds could grow well precisely because both party-history narratives and propaganda performances are institutionalized by a powerful state—one with ample financial and ideological resources. The establishment could celebrate at once Mao’s political victory in founding a socialist state and Deng’s reform achievements in creating an economic superpower thanks to their courageous resistance against foreign influences—either Western colonialists who had bullied China before 1949 or the Soviet socialist imperialists since the 1960s. So it is narrated and staged in history and performance.

A Global Socialist Stage: The Communist Manifesto with Chinese Characteristics

A critical study of the numerous performances, in the past half century, of the founding stories of the CCP contributes significantly to Martin Puchner’s remarkable approach in investigating the intricate, complex relationship between political and aesthetic manifestos first inspired by Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto.⁵ Tracing the geographical spread of the Manifesto from its first publication to the 1960s as a poetry of the future revolution, Puchner demonstrates that the Manifesto had evolved into a literary genre through which Western, European, and some non-Western modernist artists have articulated their desires and hopes, maneuvers and strategies of modernity in making history and fashioning the future (Puchner 2006, 2). Puchner maintains that the study of the Manifesto in the past two centuries in world literature must also include a history of socialism in order to understand how social theory, political acts, and poetic expression are all woven together into a creative practice. Puchner contends that the history of successive manifestos is thus also a history of the futures these manifestos sought to predict, prefigure, and realize (3). My study of numerous performance pieces on the Chinese revolution and its founding fathers illustrates, to the extent relevant to the central issues of this book, how the Manifesto and the Marxist approach to world revolution have defined the Chinese revolutionary course, construct its discourse, predict its utopian outcome, and prefigure new revolutionary movements while inspiring their oppositional messages that have at the same time challenged and subverted some of their core values.

A groundbreaking work notwithstanding, Puchner’s study cites the rather odd case of Hu Shi 胡适 and his 1917 Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature (文学改良刍议) as the lone example of a Chinese writer borrowing from political and art manifestos while advocating for a vernacular literature against traditional Chinese genres.⁶ A well-known liberal steeped in the Western political system and philosophical thought, Hu was known as an opponent of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao 李大钊, his two colleagues on the faculty of Peking University and cofounders of the CCP in 1921. Both Chen and Li were instrumental in publishing the second chapter of the Chinese translation of the Manifesto in the Weekly Review (每周评论) in its section featuring world classics in 1919. The editorial preface to this piece introduced the Manifesto as the most important work of Marx and Engels for advocating class struggle and unity among all workers to achieve proletarian dictatorship (Ren Jianshu 1999, 193–94). After Chen’s arrest by the authorities for his Communist activities and Li’s self-exile into the countryside to avoid prosecution, Hu Shi took over the Weekly Review and published special issues on John Dewey’s theory of pragmatism (实验主义). As Dewey’s faithful student and translator, Hu published his own landmark essay in July 1919 titled More Issues and Less Isms! (多研究些问题, 少谈些主义!), which made a case for solving the pressing social issues such as rickshaw men’s starvation and limitation of the president’s rights in the new constitution instead of indulging oneself in loud and empty talk on various isms. Upon Chen’s release from prison, Chen and Li engaged with Hu in what historians later termed the first debate between Marxist and anti-Marxist advocates among Chinese intellectuals, a brief but fruitful deliberation that eventually introduced Marxism to Chinese readers and the general populace (196). As I discuss in chapter 1, on the politics of representations of Chen Duxiu in contemporary China, a television drama called The Sun Rises in the East (日出东方) dramatizes Hu’s effort in lobbying for Chen’s release from prison in spite of their different political views.⁷ This postsocialist performance of certain CCP founding fathers’ early careers and their close associates corrected the one-dimensional practice in the Maoist period of eulogizing Li Dazhao and Mao as pioneers of the Chinese revolution while denigrating Hu as an opponent of their endeavors, as seen in the anti–Hu Shi campaign in the mid-1950s (Larson 1991, 110–12).⁸ In a film script published in 1961 titled The Story of Lu Xun (鲁迅传), Hu is depicted as an antagonist partially upon Ba Jin’s 巴金 suggestion that certain historical figures, such as dead people and negative characters like Hu Shi, should retain their real names, whereas other, minor characters could have fictional names.⁹ In postsocialist China, Hu has been restored to a large extent as an enlightenment leader of the May Fourth Movement, a steady advocate for individualism, freedom, and democracy, which ran contrary to the violent approach of proletarian revolution through class war, as expressed in the Manifesto.

Seen in this light, my study of the lasting impact of the Manifesto in the political and artistic culture of contemporary China fills a gap in Puchner’s innovative mapping of the global transformations of the Manifesto since the late nineteenth century. Canonized as a central text, the Manifesto has been repeatedly explored to substantiate the necessity for the Chinese revolution as an essential part of global socialist movements in order to legitimize the CCP’s mission of rescuing the Chinese people from their sufferings from class oppression before 1949. In the Maoist years of the 1960s and 1970s, invoking the spirit of the Manifesto further defended the CCP as the shining leader of Third World countries in their regional struggles against old-fashioned Western imperialism and neocolonialism as well as against a new brand of Soviet socialist imperialism and revisionism, which had allegedly betrayed the original intent of the Manifesto, according to the views of Maoist ideology at that time.¹⁰ During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the works of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Lu Xun remained among the small number of allowable texts to be read by the Chinese public to promote a continued socialist revolution, Marx’s motto that the proletariats would not emancipate themselves until after they had emancipated all mankind (无产阶级只有解放全人类, 才能最后解放自己) was even inserted into a key episode in a revolutionary modern ballet called The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军): Wu Qinghua 吴清华, the female protagonist, was magically transformed into a proletarian soldier during the war period of the 1930s, only after she had been informed of the revolutionary truth expressed in this motto (Mittler 2012, 70–72; X. Chen 2002, 86–88; Roberts 2010). Whereas The Red Detachment of Women and other revolutionary model theater (革命样板戏) pieces of the Cultural Revolution exemplify what Puchner calls poetry of the revolution—a genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires,¹¹ the political and artistic explorations of the Manifesto in projecting a future revolution, however, did not limit themselves merely to the events in the 1990s, a period that, according to Puchner, witnessed the changing discourse of the Manifesto, when the new form and the new content have to produce one another, if they want to truly shape and make the future (Puchner 2006, 46). In the contemporary Chinese scene, the new form and new content coexist and mutually depend on each other in creating new and contradictory meanings in the Manifesto, which inspired conversions to Communism; they also produced countless literary, artistic, and theatrical works and affected everyday life experience. The numerous remakings of the model theater of the Cultural Revolution in television series and stage performances half a century later in contemporary China indicate the lasting impact of the Manifesto and its Chinese characteristics.

In fact, since the birth of the CCP in 1921, the Manifesto has continually been reinvented to justify the changing dynamics of political and artistic culture. A 1999 documentary film released on television (电视文献纪录片) titled The Communist Manifesto (共产党宣言) delineated such historical transgressions from the Maoist socialist doctrines to the Dengist postsocialist agenda. As part of the nationwide endeavor to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, this documentary traced the translations and circulation of the Manifesto the world over and especially in China, where many martyrs memorized a few sentences from the Manifesto in KMT (Kuomintang, established by Sun Yat-sen and later led by Chiang Kai-shek) prisons before walking heroically toward the execution ground while fearlessly singing The Internationale (国际歌), a poetic expression of the proletarian spirit of the Manifesto. Supposedly based on several years’ collaborative research by numerous scholars, the documentary presented numerous images of different versions of the Manifesto, such as the first Soviet translation, the first Chinese translation, by Chen Wangdao 陈望道, the six different translations since then until 1949, the hand-printed copy circulated in the Jiangxi revolutionary base in the 1930s, and the ongoing research on the Manifesto in other countries.¹²

This lineal development of a central text smoothed out the obvious contradictions between a Maoist and Dengist approach to Chinese socialism. Mao’s urge to unite working men of all countries—famously popularized as the mission of the Manifesto—blended seamlessly with Deng’s vision of liberating the force of production to reclaim China’s long-delayed prosperity through a free-market economy, despite the obvious conflicts between capitalist and socialist ideologies. The enduring power of the Manifesto thus legitimized a socialism with Chinese characteristics in its advance toward capitalism, which, according to Marx and Engels, was based on private property of the bourgeoisie and therefore should be abolished for its exploitation of the many by the few (Marx and Engels 2000, 256). As I describe in chapter 3, the filmic representation of Deng’s early life in France captures this very ironic course of action: whereas inspired by the socialist labor movement in France, the young Deng joined the CCP because he experienced firsthand oppression and exploitation in a Western capitalist society; he did not, however, read the Manifesto until after he became a committed Communist, and neither did he realize then that the victory of the Chinese revolution two decades later would not necessarily bring about a better livelihood for the Chinese people in material terms in the Maoist socialist period. Subsequent representations of Deng as an architect in chief of economic reform often referred to his frequent reading of the Manifesto and The ABC of Communism, by Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, as a decisive moment in his Communist conversion in France in 1920.¹³ Several essays published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto’s publication further characterized Deng’s theories as the greatest development in Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought for the successful application of their founding principles to concrete, contemporary Chinese reality. In a paradoxical twist, the real great leader Deng, these essays claimed, has finally led China to prosperity in the twenty-first century, ultimately proving the eternal truth of the Manifesto and its lofty Communist idealism.¹⁴ In spite of their conflicting theories and practices, Marx and Engels were right, Chairman Mao was right, and Comrade Deng Xiaoping was even more right. Puchner’s depiction of the "tension between updating The Communist Manifesto and preserving its original force" after Marx’s death, therefore, manifests itself in a markedly different fashion in the Chinese context: after Mao’s death, cultural officials and performing artists collaborated on and transformed, without seemingly obvious tensions, the Maoist socialist reading of the Manifesto into a postsocialist revisionist imagining. After Deng’s death, his theory and practice of the economic reform of capitalism have been enthroned as the latest expression of the spirit of the Manifesto; most ironically, his capitalist approach with Chinese characteristics proves to be the most effective socialist blueprint for a prosperous economic power.

My study of the staging of the Chinese revolution and its leaders investigates the artists’ continual efforts to find a theater space in order to make their revolutionary art relevant in a contemporary time—a time so remote from the original intentions of the Manifesto that had inspired many of them to join the Communist Revolution in the first place. As I discuss in chapter 4, for example, in the transitional period toward a market economy in early post-Mao China, some theater artists struggled with the emerging commercial culture in their attempts to produce a revolutionary music-and-dance epic, The Song of the Chinese Revolution (中国革命之歌). In the difficult process of brainstorming a new script that could appeal to the changing tastes of contemporary audiences, the director acted out a scene in which a young Mao Zedong travels a long distance in a blizzard in order to obtain a copy of the Chinese translation of the Manifesto. The director told his colleagues that this was how hard it was for the early leaders to seek revolutionary truth and so should be the spirit to guide them through the creative process of this new revolutionary epic in a nonrevolutionary time.

A decade later, when capitalism had become increasingly dominant in many facets of Chinese society, theater artists appealed to some discontented audiences by dramatizing the early promise the CCP made to its people before 1949, an implicit contrast to its broken status in the twenty-first century. Set in 1948 on the eve of the founding of the PRC, a 2009 play titled Mao Zedong’s Reveries at Xibaipo (毛泽东在西柏坡的遐想) staged the dramatic character Mao reflecting on his transformation from a young scholar to a national leader thanks to his belief in Marxism and Leninism. Talking to his twenty-first-century audiences, who resent the corruption of the CCP and the social unrest in capitalist China, a poetic Mao declares anew the promise he made before 1949: after China is liberated, all the poor peasants who sacrificed their lives to support the CCP during the war period will be able to enjoy their favorite dishes.

Amid Mao’s reveries, the most famous line from The Communist Manifesto appears on the back screen of the stage in the image of the first German edition and the first Chinese translation: A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. Against this background, key episodes in the international communist movements are presented: Lenin defends his new economic policy that saved the young Soviet Union; Mao rejects Stalin’s proposal of dividing China by the Yangtze River and letting the defeated KMT nationalist government share half of China’s territory on the eve of the CCP’s winning the civil war. Mao’s deviations from the forefathers of the Communist movements illustrate his pioneering role in discovering an alternative path to the Chinese revolution against Soviet doctrines while producing a new fetish of the Manifesto, which ironically questions the very applicability of its utopian vision in contemporary time.

In a nutshell, this book examines the theatrical life of leaders of the Chinese Communist Revolution and their theatrical representations as cultural heroes or fearful traitors through a sample of numerous performance pieces, including modern spoken dramas (话剧), traditional operas (戏曲), films, television plays, and documentaries. I argue that visionary revolutionary leaders and creative theater and film artists share a dialectical and paradoxical relationship in staging revisionist histories of modern China, both on and off the theater stage and the silver screen. In the larger scheme of things, this study investigates the problematic relationships of self, subject, agent, state building, and national others in contemporary China’s production and reception of performance culture. It treats Chinese theater as an extended form of political theater that engages critical issues of memory, commemoration, and contested party-history narratives. The examination of the revolution’s political theater and its representations onstage within the four walls of theater space helps us reflect on wide-ranging and vital questions regarding cultural performance and the rethinking of the postcolonial paradigm in the depiction of China during the post–Cold War and postsocialist era. Performance-culture studies can offer effective ways of understanding the theatrical nature of everyday life, both in the formation of political culture and in the shaping of the Chinese people’s personal experiences. We will miss an important piece of history, I argue, if we do not understand the dramatic culture of modern China and the performance history that demonstrates the complex past and present.

Chen Duxiu: The First Generation of CCP Leaders in Performance Culture

Chinese Communist Party history has frequently mentioned five generations of leaders, with Mao as the first, Deng as the second, Jiang Zemin 江泽民 as the third, Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 as the fourth, and Xi Jinping 习近平 as the fifth, describing the latter four as supposedly carrying out or further developing Mao’s socialist legacy. My study of contemporary performance history revises this conventional wisdom by structuring around three generations of leaders, emphasizing Chen Duxiu’s dramatic role as the first generation who had inspired and educated Mao and his colleagues in their pursuit of socialist vision. Delineating the complex trajectories of the performance history of Mao as the second generation in chapter 2 and Deng as the third in chapter 3 provides a more nuanced understanding of the history of theatrical representations of the first thirty years of the Mao period and the second three decades of the Deng period since the founding of the PRC in a larger context. To this end, chapter 1 examines the performance history of Chen Duxiu, who served as the first general secretary of the CCP from 1921 to 1927, in its critical years. Similar to other key intellectual leaders of the second decade of the twentieth century, Chen argued early on in his career that theater should function as a grand university to educate all people under heaven, whereas opera actors and dramatists must take upon themselves the role of great university teachers (Chen Duxiu 1993b, 4). Chen voiced his view of a new theater in 1904, before he had converted to Marxist and socialist thought, therefore heralding the operatic and literary revolution yet to come amid the early waves of the May Fourth Movement.¹⁵ Little did he know that he was to become, first, an archvillain in the socialist period in the process of celebrating Mao as the supreme leader and, second and conversely, a superhero against Stalinism and the Soviet interference in the Chinese revolution, as so presented in various performance pieces in the reform era from the mid-1980s on. Chapter 1, therefore, examines revolutionary epic performances in drama, film, and television series from 1964 to 2001