The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance by Tuo Wang (review)

As an effort in understanding how social control worked through staging people’s bodies in everyday lives during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Tuo Wang’s The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance offers a thought-provoking study of the pervasive revolutionary rhetoric, spectacles, presentations, mass gatherings, and rituals from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on traditions from cultural anthropology, performance studies, acting theory, linguistics, and literary criticism, Wang reveals the importance of performance in shaping, communicating, and fundamentally controlling the Chinese masses. What Wang calls “the overacting phenomenon” means the internal mechanism that mobilized Chinese people’s revolutionary acts and contributed to their eagerness to keep performing ideal Maoist subjects during the ten-year chaos. Beyond the dominant model in previous studies that frequently consider the mechanism of Maoist social control as something from the visible power of authorities, this book takes a bottom-up direction from which ordinary people’s performance of power and self-discipline is made explicit.

In the first chapter, a set of revolutionary ritual performances that were created during the Cultural Revolution become the main focus of Wang’s discussion. These ritual performance included morning request/evening report (早請示、晚匯報 zaoqingshi, wanhuibao), loyalty dance (忠字舞 zhongziwu), Mao’s quotation exchange, the display of Mao’s images in every household, and reporting daily activities in front of Mao’s picture. More crucially, Wang sets out to explain how the shaping of political idols and political subjects went hand in hand with the insertion of Maoist ethics and values into the daily life by pointing out the power of the crowd. As Wang addresses, the boundary between the actors and the spectators was so blurry that every participant could simultaneously be an actor and an audience. But Mao was the only theme of the performances in any case. Such political rituals were performed by individuals for others to see and functioned as a mean of social control under which the masses were largely self-disciplinary.

The second chapter examines ditto how the revolutionary language as a highly performative discourse engaged with the construction of political reality in people’s everyday lives. Wang traces the content, form, production, reception, and identity, educational, and sociopolitical functions of what Wang regards as “magic charm,” the big character poster (大字報 dazibao) as a genre (p. 41).

Both chapter 3 and chapter 4 focus on the key role that the “modeling” played in promoting the possibility of ordinary people being transformed into the heroic revolutionary subjects. While chapter 3 examines how model plays contributed to creating and defeating an imaginary enemy, the “class enemies” as the opposite of the perfect revolutionary, the following chapter sheds light on the construction of revolutionary heroes in real life through role-playing rather than actual being. Wang defines overacting as a central concept to understand the core of Maoist mass performance. As Wang argues, overacting, which means the way of acting in an effort to “compensate for the existential gap between performer and character with more action,” shut down any space for spectators’ imaginations and interpretations (p. 97). Wang further points out the paradox between the fundamentally performative nature of overacting and the necessity for Maoist performers not to appear to be acting.

In chapter 5, Wang clearly defines and takes a critical look at the public struggle meeting (批鬥會 pidouhui), which refers to “a type of theatrical political congregation, during which the person or people to be struggled against are verbally castigated or physically tormented by the politically empowered” in front of a crowd of witnesses (p. 104). In emphasizing the revolutionary theatricality, Wang regards the public struggle meeting as one of the many ways in which the masses lived out the revolutionary “scripts.” Based on the earlier discussion of model plays as the vital ideological apparatus of the authorities, Wang goes further to argue that public struggle meeting can be understood as “the logical endpoint of the experience of model theater” (p...