Audience, Applause, and Countertheater: Border Crossing in "Social Problem" Plays in Post-Mao China

In the present postcolonial age, when the Eurocentric literary tradition is being challenged in the West, Chinese literature, as a specific kind of Third-World literature, is becoming increasingly well known. Yet significant studies of Chinese literature, especially in the modern period, have been generally confined to fiction and, to a much lesser degree, lyric poetry, both of which have received substantial translation and discussion. The recent heightened interest in Chinese film that the global movie industry has witnessed has turned the Western gaze to the seemingly most marketable Chinese art form. What remains least known in the West—or the least likely object of “colonization” in terms of the transfer of knowledge and power across East-West boundaries—are modern Chinese plays and their political role in Chinese intellectual life. ¹

To address this situation, I intend to argue that unlike other literary genres, which are usually confined to the private sphere, theater operates in a public sphere that has frequently beheld Chinese intellectuals crossing the border between the official ideology and the open, albeit limited, space permitted to them by that ideology. The border-crossing activities inherent in literary cross-cultural studies of the Orient and the Occident or of traditional and modern canonicity are easily imagined, but in studies of modern Chinese drama appears a peculiar kind of border crossing, characterized by an intricate play of power, stemming from the marginalized discourse against the dominant ideology.

Modern Chinese drama, known in Chinese as huaju, or “spoken drama” (as opposed to the traditional operatic theater), grew out of the Western Ibsenesque tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century. An increasingly important genre in modern China, huaju performed an entirely new role after the death of Mao. In sharp contrast to the lean drama years of the Cultural Revolution, when “eight hundred million Chinese people watched only eight model plays,” ² the staging of many successful huaju from 1978 to 1979 gave rise to the view of the period as a Chinese dramatic renaissance. Around 1976, the year of Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, a number of what were then known as “social problem plays” began to appear, an apparent development of the abundant “real-life” political dramas that had preceded them. These plays, coming as they did at the end of the Cultural Revolution, immediately attracted large audiences avid for the opportunity to choose among and enjoy a larger variety of plays. According to one report, in 1979 alone as many as sixty-two huaju were presented across the country to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Of these, seventeen dramatized the nationwide campaign against the Gang of Four, and sixteen rehearsed the “glorious” lives of “proletarian revolutionary leaders” such as the late Premier Zhou Enlai, the late President Zhu De, and many others who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. ³ Not surprisingly, when in 1982 drama critics began to notice the theater losing audiences to the cinema and television, they looked back nostalgically to this “golden time,” when theater alone served as a public forum for directly addressing pressing social issues.

This brief flowering of live theater and its subsequent decline has been much reflected upon in China. In 1987, ten years after this theatrical surge, Liu Xiaobo, a young critic then in his twenties, shocked the Chinese dramatic world by claiming that the post-Cultural-Revolutionary Chinese theater had not produced any “real” drama. Even in the so-called early post-Mao “renaissance” period, he argued, theater was employed exclusively as a political vehicle for reevaluating history. For example, in rejecting the experience of the Cultural Revolution, the so-called popular “anti-Gang-of-Four plays” eulogized the values of the 1950s. When, however, the Anti-Rightist Movement of the 1950s was repudiated as an appalling product of a radical Maoist ideology, and thus an unsuitable subject for drama, it was necessary to look further back into the war period when the Communist Party seemed closer to the people...