Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China

2. Operatic Revolutions: Tradition, Memory, and Women in Model Theater

Operatic Revolutions tradition, memory, and women in model theater Over three decades have passed since the heyday of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Memories of some of the main players of model theater, though, remain strong. Qian Haoliang, who played Li Yuhe in the revolutionary model Peking opera The Red Lantern, hoped very much that audiences from the 1960s and 1970s would have forgotten his association with Jiang Qing, and his performance and promotion of model theater. He wished to erase from the memory of his audience the fact that Jiang Qing changed his name from Qian Haoliang to Hao Liang in 1968, as “qian” in Chinese might suggest “money,” or “bourgeois materialist pursuit.” Thanks to his star status in the model theater, he even became a representative of the Ninth Chinese Communist Party Congress in April 1969 and the vice minister of the Ministry of Culture in 1975.1 After the trial of the 74 | a c t i n g t h e r i g h t par t Gang of Four, the post-Maoist regime detained him for a five-and-halfyear investigation as having been a key player in Cultural Revolutionary politics. His biggest wish was to “live the remainder of his life in peace,” according to one journalist from the Beijing Youth Daily who visited him on March 6, 1993.2 When he appeared on stage to portray characters from the traditional repertoire, however, audiences urged him to perform “Poor Children Learn to Work at an Early Age” (Qiongren de haizi zao dang jia), from The Red Lantern, before letting him exit. The fascination with model theater persisted in Beijing universities. In March 1996, 613 students reportedly showed up during the first session of a new course entitled “Peking Opera Art,” an amazing number considering the fact that Peking opera and modern drama had been declining for years.3 After viewing excerpts from The Red Lantern and two other traditional operas on video, many students stated that they had already become “lovers” of Peking opera. They expressed their gratitude to their teachers who opened to them a new world of art and showed up at classes early to be sure of finding a seat in the overcrowded classrooms. After learning the dramatic art, some even performed for campus entertainment a skit from Shajiabang, another model Peking opera.4 In an era of modern consumer culture, traditional operatic art, along with a tinge of revolutionary idealism as expressed in model theater, still retained its appeal in contemporary China. This phenomenon has led me to inquire into the cultural and ideological dynamics of Cultural Revolutionary theater, which shaped—and was shaped by—the political contingencies of China in the 1960s and 1970s. As a powerful cultural memory, model theater reveals much about the way a people and a nation envisioned the self, imagined the other, and, in turn, as a result of coming to an understanding of the other, reconstructed the self. To some extent, the study of model theater evokes Edgerly Firchow ’s point, expressed in The Death of the German Cousin, that “literature does not only mirror national stereotypes; it shapes them, changes them, and makes them respectable.”5 And indeed, in many different ways, model theater did not simply reflect the cultural and ideological dynamics of the period that gave rise to it; it significantly contributed to the ways in which China imagined itself in the public arena of national and international drama. Accordingly, in this study I am chiefly concerned with elucidating the “theatricality” of political life in contemporary China as a basis for understanding modern Chinese theater; for a remarkable feature of contemporary China’s cultural scene is the extent to which theater is political and politics is theatrical. One quick way to recognize the latter point o p e r a t i c r e v o l u t i o n s | 75 is to recognize contemporary life as a stage on which is enacted an ongoing political drama that has all the actors scrambling to perform the “right” parts in order to ensure their political survival. To illustrate this cultural phenomenon, I analyze the model theater promoted during the Cultural Revolution as a theatrical means of evoking the Maoist memory of a past revolution and, with its re-creation on stage, as a means to continue the revolution in post-1949 China. I also take...