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  • Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era ed. by Xiaomei Chen et al.
  • Jen-Hao Walter Hsu
RETHINKING CHINESE SOCIALIST THEATERS OF REFORM: PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AND DEBATE IN THE MAO ERA. Edited by Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. 320.

The history of Chinese performing arts during the socialist era is usually narrated as a process where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s power gradually takes full control of the production mechanism and dictates the rules of playwriting and performance-making. Indeed, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, one of the editors, sets the stage for this edited collection with a thorough and detailed overview of a history of the CCP's ongoing instrumentalization of the theatre as reactions against the changing political tides. In her account, the CCP leaders deployed arts hoping to awaken class consciousness among the proletariat for revolution. These early propagandist attempts eventually culminated with Chairman Mao's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" in May 1942, which later "set forth an artistic mandate that would shape cultural production for the next three decades" (9). This top-down model pretty much becomes the point of departure for scholars to delve into the field of Chinese socialist-cultural studies; this model reflects the reality that Chinese socialist-cultural reforms are part and parcel of the larger political projects to rebuild the national body and reinvent the socialist self.

Truly, the nine chapters here can help the readers to come up with a holistic view of how the production, distribution, and reception of the performing arts specifically change over time in relation to a series of political movements mobilized by Mao. The chapters in the collection are roughly arranged in the chronological order of the CCP's political evolution. The volume starts with Max L. Bohnenkamp revisiting the making of The White-Haired Girl during the Yan'an period. "Mao's Talks" inspired the new yangge (a traditional Chinese northwestern folk dance celebrating harvest) and new music-drama movement in search of a new national theatrical form. The White-Haired Girl was created as a response to this impetus. Bohnenkamp reveals to us that this search was nonetheless a cross-cultural process in which China sought to reinvent itself through a dialectical relationship with the West: "one may become a new social and political subject by striving to overcome, in art and performance, both the 'other' and the 'self'" (55). Siyuan Liu, Liang Luo, Emily Wilcox, Christopher Tang, and Tarryn Li-Min Chun all echo Bohnenkamp's discussion of socialist self-remaking through the performing arts. Liu and Luo bring us to the early 1950s, when the People's Republic of China (PRC) was just founded and xiqu (traditional Chinese opera) reform was put on the political agenda. Liu, using Pingju Liu Qiao'er (Sister Liu) and huocixi (The Empress Dowager) as case studies, demonstrates that the PRC's early xiqu reform eliminated the improvisational nature of pre-modern xiqu, especially to get rid of the illicit and vulgar content and uplift the low social status of the traveling players by training them as state-sponsored cultural workers. The function of xiqu was therefore transformed "from entertainment to ideological propagation" (70). Luo tells us another story of xiqu reform during the same time period, but from a different perspective. She focuses on the leading elitist reform figure, Tian Han, and his theatrical experimentation with The Legend of the White Snake. In her discussion, Tian Han's intervention to theatre reform, albeit a response to the state's demand, is not merely a subservient following of the Yan'an model. His reforms instead are a genuine creative impulse that "originated from a desire to reconnect contemporary realities and political aspirations with traditional forms and folk practices" (156). Wilcox and Tang bring us to the late 1950s and early '60s, when China was going through the controversial Great Leap Forward and breaking away from Russia. These new political conditions required new strategies for China's cultural self-remaking. Wilcox describes and analyzes the making of Dagger Society in...

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