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

3. Family, Village, Nation/State, and the Third World: The Imagined Communities in Model Theater

During the past two decades, modern Chinese literary studies have usually dismissed the need for any scholarly research on the revolutionary model theater. The era of model theater appears as a blank period devoid of any literary value, and Cultural Revolutionary literature—if mentioned at all—pales when compared to that of the great periods of the pre– Cultural Revolutionary and post–Cultural Revolutionary periods, presumably so rich in cultural heritage. The post-Maoist regime made this dismissal of the Cultural Revolutionary period an integral part of its four modernizations program, which was accompanied by a literary and artistic renaissance inspired partially by Western models. In the West, cultural studies affected academia because they differed Family, Village, Nation/State, and the Third World the imagined communities in model theater 124 | a c t i n g t h e r i g h t par t from older forms of literary criticism, which considered political implications as only peripherally relevant to the admiration of culture. In early post-Maoist China, men of letters adopted a reverse course—that is, they gave an edge to “new criticism” (to the detriment of older forms) in their attempt to marginalize a politically oriented model theater.1 The Chinese should not be faulted for failing to follow the Western model in this regard, since, as I have pointed out elsewhere, they only turned to Western discourse to supply what they deemed lacking in a given situation at a particular moment in Chinese history. Their use of Western formalistic approaches to literary criticism can be understood as a conscious effort to debunk the Maoist ideology, which branded the notion of the aesthetic a Western idea—and hence bourgeois and reactionary. They did not realize that the proponents of certain Western discourses would have found the study of the political implications of model theater significant. The recent trends in what Simon During calls “cultural populism,” for instance, serve to deepen the disenchantment with the traditional split between the popular and the elite discourses. Seen in this light, the study of model theater is worthwhile because it can be used to examine a culture of differences that prevailed in a society organized by diverse fields through which various discursive practices were inherited.2 This theater existed as part of a cultural dynamics within a large ensemble of domination that deeply affected a nation and the everyday life of its people.3 Only a few scholars have attempted to redeem the study of model theater in China.4 In his polemic 1989 essay “The Literary Spirit of the Cultural Revolution: The Triumph of Popular Idealism,” Mu Gong situated the rise and fall of the model theater in the larger historical contexts of what he termed the irreconcilable differences between the elitist intellectuals and the masses. He argued that it was the Chinese intellectuals who tended to marginalize the history of the Cultural Revolution. They all (almost without exception) divided the literary history of the People’s Republic of China into three periods: (1) 1949 to 1966: the seventeen years, which inherited the great tradition of the May Fourth literature; (2) 1966 to 1976: the disastrous ten years of the Cultural Revolution; and (3) 1977 to the present: the new era of post-Maoist literature that is intrinsically endowed with literary and aesthetic value. In writing literary history in this manner, Mu Gong claimed, the Chinese intellectuals were actually rewriting their own political history. At the same time that they deplored their personal suffering during the Cultural Revolution, they only wrote about the history they chose to remember. fam i l y, v i l l a g e , n a t i o n / s ta t e , a n d t h e t h i r d w o r l d | 125 They often forgot that after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, it was the Chinese intellectuals themselves who had borrowed heavily from Western elitist ideas such as romanticism, utopianism, individualism, and liberalism , thereby alienating themselves from the Chinese masses. Thus, Mu Gong believed, the literary achievements of the May Fourth movement had always been looked upon with special favor in Chinese history because it represented the point in time when Chinese intellectuals first renounced the masses by importing and implementing Western concepts. According to Mu, only Mao Zedong among notable Chinese intellectuals in the May Fourth period perceived over time the...