The Manipulation of Tanci in Radio Shanghai During the 1930s

The Manipulation of Tanci in Radio Shanghai During the 1930s* by Carlton Benson INTRODUCTION In Republican China, intellectuals, political activists, and entrepreneurs who wished to mobilize new types of behavior faced an identical problem. How was it. possible to reach the .general populace and influence its behavior with their messages? One method was the employment of traditional forms of popular culture as media through which to communicate new ideas. The attempts made by intellectuals and party activists to promote political action with popular culture have been well documented. The parallel efforts made by entrepreneurs to mobilize new patterns of consumption have also begun to attract the attention of scholars. 1 My goal is to illustrate how entrepreneurs in Shanghai during the 1930s combined a traditional storytelling genre with radio, and thereby developed a powerful new way to penetrate local society during the Nanjing Decade. I will also consider their· messages, and argue that entrepreneurs employed the two media to promote new forms of economic and political behavior that were mutually antagonistic. By storytelling I refer to tanei, a performance genre with certain traditional features. It presented love stories performed by one or two men who combined narrative, acting, and musical skills. They told their stories in daily installments that often began with an opening song, or kaipian, and continued with a narrative that was laced with jokes and arias. A single performer relied on the three-stringed banjo to accompany his songs; if a second performer joined him, he played the pipa. Tanei originated in Suzhou and employed the native dialect, * I want to thank Professor Wen-hsin Yeh, Susan Glosser, and Chris Reed for commenting on an earlier version of my paper. I also want to thank the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China for funding my research. but Shanghai was the storyteller's mecca by 1930, and there its conventions were broken. Shanghai had a kaleidoscopic effect on the genre. A male community recreated the traditional storytelling experience in teahouses , for example, where neighborhood men could sit around tables and drink tea while they listened to live performers ..But meanwhile, storytelling also flourished in hybrid form on the radio. When a clever group of entrepreneurs adopted this medium to advertise their merchandise in the early 1930s, they quickly made an important discovery. By broadcasting a familiar storytelling genre they could increase the appeal of a penetrating new technology, attract an unprecedented audience that included women, and begin to affect its spending habits. Consequently they paid storytellers salaries that were previously unimaginable to perform at the city's radio stations. They also placed receiving sets in their stores and played tanei to attract shoppers. The disembodied voices of performers were wafted into the city's streets, and filled its public spaces. To understand the golden age of storytelling that began with commercial radio, I will frrst sketch the history of broadcasting in Shanghai. There, unlike in many cities, early radio was largely controlled by merchants and flooded with entertainment. 2 Then I focus on the entrepreneurs who employed radio to create a new community that I will call radio Shanghai. Composed of men and women who produced and listened to radio in private or public places, radio Shanghai transcended gender, class, and native-place lines. It also introduced many elements of traditional popular culture onto the air waves. These included tanei, but radio Shanghai repackaged the genre to satisfy the needs of a new community. For example, the opening song was divorced from the narrative, and flourished as an independent means of expression. The efforts of two advertising agents to channel new messages through the opening song, or kaipian, is my paper's subsequent focus. Advertising agents, who played an important mediating role in radio Shanghai, manipulated the kaipian to peddle competing visions of modem life for their clients. On behalf of retailers, they promoted a consumer society composed of indulgent shoppers-one in which women played an important public role. And on behalf of the Guomindang (GMD), they simultaneously promoted the New Life Movement 118 and proclaimed a spartan society composed of patriotic citizens-one in which women renounced consumption in the national interest.·The GMD clearly gained...