Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China by Hsiao-t’i Li (review)

Hsiao-t’i Li’s Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China explores his long-abiding interest in opera as a vehicle for enlightenment and indoctrination in twentieth-century China. Li’s monograph, building upon his prior Chinese-language scholarship on the didactic uses of opera by late Qing reformist elites, traces this history from the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1960s. Li examines two models of opera: a market-oriented model centered on the Xin wutai (新舞台 New Stage) in Shanghai and an elite-sponsored one associated with the Yisushe (易俗社 Society to Transform Customs) in Xi’an. The commercial model comes to be eclipsed by escalating demands for art to hew to politics from the 1930s through the 1960s, while the paternalistic one—mobilized with increasing effectiveness by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—survives into the 1980s. If that observation is not entirely unexpected, more illuminating is Li’s insight that the producers of Beijing opera in Shanghai and the playwright-managers of Qin Tunes in Xi’an were equally committed to a kind of civilizing mission.

Li’s tale of opera in two cities begins in chapter 1 with a synthesis of the standard Chinese opera history in sinophone scholarship. Chapter 2 narrates the conflicted attitudes toward opera among early twentieth-century intellectuals, especially the New Culture radicals. Many of them embraced opera as a medium for disseminating reform, even as they rejected the existing performance repertoire. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to Shanghai’s New Stage, categorizing the operas and enumerating the staging innovations introduced under the management of the reform-minded Xia brothers, Xia Yuerun (夏月潤 1878–1931) and Xia Yueshan (夏月珊 1868–1924). The New Stage packaged modern concepts in novelty and entertainment. Chapter 5 shifts to the 1912 founding of the Yisushe, charting the endeavors of local elites who spearheaded reformed Qin Tunes in Xi’an and its hinterland. The Yisushe, by seeding new ideas into conventional storylines, became more effective at mobilizing folk opera for social reform than the New Culture intellectuals. The final chapter sketches the spread of both prototypes of opera reform across China, even as war and politics narrowed the range of content.

Li’s lens on the politics of opera is a welcome addition to the historical literature on modern China. The chapter on Qin Tunes makes a singular contribution to the anglophone scholarship (especially given that opera in Shanghai has garnered much wider attention). Taken together, the Shanghai and Xi’an case studies reveal that the CCP’s use of opera as propaganda was more heir to the conservative, paternalistic model than to the progressive, commercial one. But Li wants the parts to tell us something about the whole, thereby offering a comprehensive narrative of opera and politics in modern China. Ultimately, his case-study approach and the incommensurability of his pre- and post-1949 sources do not fully capture the complexity of modern Chinese opera across space or time.

Li’s tale of two cities is structured by implicit contrasts: Shanghai versus Xi’an; coastal versus interior; progressive versus conservative; commercial orientation versus Confucian paternalism. Commercialism and paternalism, however, were not the only two modes of opera reform. Beijing, for instance, featured an actor-driven model of reform. The Zhengyue yuhuahui (正樂育化會 Association for Education and Transformation [End Page E-20] through the Rectification of Music), founded shortly before the Yisushe and launched by opera star Tian Jiyun (田際雲 1865–1925), also sought to reform opera by, among other initiatives, shielding actors from sex work and cleaning up bawdy scripts. Indeed, it was one of Tian’s new plays that made a sensation at the New Stage in 1910 (136). As the work of Joshua Goldstein has shown, actors, operas, and styles circulated from city to city, especially along the Beijing–Tianjin–Shanghai circuit.¹ A focus on intersecting networks rather than contrasting nodes might have done more to capture the social...