The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics

Chapter Four. The International Avant-Garde and the Chinese National Anthem

145 chapter four The International Avant-Garde and the Chinese National Anthem Alexander Portnoy, who grew up in Newark, New Jersey during World War II, remembers in vivid detail a song he learned in grade school. Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple. . . . “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“We will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”1 Portnoy is the “lust-ridden, mother addicted young Jewish bachelor” in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the novel that made its author a major celebrity in American literature. The fictive young man appears to have paid serious attention to the revolutionary message of both the music and the lyrics. At the same time, it is hard to ignore the fact that this seems to have something to do with his own private construal of “A-rise! A-RISE!” as sanctioning his youthful obsession with masturbation. Portnoy referred to the song as “the marching song of the victorious Red Army,” which his teachers referred to as the “Chinese National Anthem” during World War II. The music teachers in New Jersey were neither alone nor original in their mistake. A Dutch filmmaker on location in China in 1938,2 as well as a Chinese music educator in its wartime capital, Chongqing, did the same.3 What was, in fact, a popular film song entitled “March of the Volunteers” would indeed go on to be designated the provisional national anthem of the new Communist regime—but only a full decade later, in 1949. 146 The Avant-garde and the popular in modern china “Yiyongjun jinxingqu” (March of the Volunteers), regarded by a host of international artists and activists as the Chinese national anthem long before its ascendance to that official status, offers a case study in the democratic energies and the experimental natures of both the revolutionary avant-garde and popular nationalism. The constant reenactment of the song during wartime by a great number of people in China, and around the world, is testimony to the complexity and dynamics of national politics as embodied experience in an international setting. The song would eventually—most likely due to its popularity—be designated the provisional national anthem at the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, but it would only be written into the Chinese Constitution as the official national anthem more than half a century later, in 2004.4 The transformation of a popular film song into the Communist national anthem suggests the confluence of several distinct determinants: the emergence of the Shanghai commercial film industry and the creation of new sound reproduction technology by US-trained engineers, the legacy of the avant-garde and the role of the Communist Party, the alignment of mass culture and military volunteers , and the convergence of an internationalist imagination and Chinese nationalism. Scholars of the interwar European avant-garde have argued for its shaping influence in the creation of new cultural institutions and meanings.5 This chapter taps into the expressive energy of the interwar and wartime avant-garde in the context of modern China. Furthermore, in accordance with Craig Calhoun’s attempt to rescue nationalism from history “as a conceptual framework, a discursive formation, a rhetoric, a structure of loyalties and sentiments,” which not only takes shape within history but also informs history,6 I emphasize the democratic impulse within popular nationalism that fuels the process of constructing a national identity. One cannot ignore war, famine, and other disastrous outcomes brought on by nationalism, but, as Calhoun contends, what also matters is “the cultural productivity that goes into nationalism—the symphonies and tangos, films and poetry.” Most important, the idea of the nation makes possible the imagination of a collective actor—“We the people,” a performative construct that simultaneously calls “the people” into existence and exerts on them a strong claim to cohesion and collective action.7 The decades between the two world wars constituted a similarly formative and dynamic moment in the mutual formation of the international avant-garde and modern Chinese nationalism. The International Avant-Garde and the Chinese National Anthem 147...