INTRODUCTION
A Revolution in Culture
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was the biggest non-wartime, concentrated social upheaval in world history. Conventionally dated from 1966 to 1976, the event saw a nation of 800 million people apparently respond to the whims of one man. Mao Zedong called on Chinese, particularly the young, to renew his revolution in order that China might avoid the perils of revisionism and complacency he observed in the Soviet Union. Only through perpetual efforts could the achievements of his Chinese Communist Party be secured for future generations. But the Cultural Revolution ended shortly after the death of its instigator. China since 1978 has been transformed by economic policies that are the antithesis of Mao’s. Economic reform and opening up, rather than Mao’s “continuous revolution,” have made China stronger and increasingly influential in the modern world.
In 2006, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution and the thirtieth of its end, a major new history of these events was published in the United States. In Mao’s Last Revolution, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals argue: ‘To understand the “why” of China today, one has to understand the “what” of the Cultural Revolution.’1 In almost 700 pages, they chronicle with magisterial insight events behind this vast political and social upheaval. Using a range of materials, including publications of that decade and memoirs and other records published since, MacFarquhar and Schoenhals offer forensic analysis of the factional politics at the highest levels that propelled the majority of Chinese to be caught up in Mao’s last great gesture. Most of the narrative focuses on the very top of Chinese politics, on the leadership compound in Zhongnanhai, beside the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing.
Missing from this important study is the cultural dimension of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed MacFarquhar and Schoenhals never explain directly why Mao’s movement was labelled this way. They merely suggest that Mao saw that continuing his revolution required a cultural transformation, not just a political commitment. Cultural production and consumption hardly appear in the volume at all. The occasional reference to a Peking opera, film, or ballet is always in the context of top-level political disputation.2 Rarely do these two authors venture beyond Communist Party politics to touch on what these years meant for the ordinary citizen, obliged to perform ritual loyalty to a Beijing leadership that kept dropping people.
This present work has three purposes: to offer a history of culture during the Cultural Revolution; to provide more insight into life beyond the political or social elites during these years; and to place this decade more firmly into its twentieth-century Chinese context. A focus on culture can offer more for these latter two aims than a concentration on life at the highest echelons of politics.
A comprehensive cultural history of the Cultural Revolution has not been attempted before. Studies in Chinese and Western languages of opera, literature, art, and music have offered considerable insight into these particular activities between 1966 and 1976, although most frequently in the broader context of post-1949 or twentieth-century developments. The usual approach is to regard these ten years as a period of limited and distorted activity. Many Chinese, when asked about culture in these years, will suggest only half facetiously that there was no culture. The old joke: ‘Eight-hundred million people watching eight shows’ (Bayi ren kan ba ge xi) is frequently cited as adequately summing up culture during this decade. The following pages, drawing upon contemporary materials, recollections, and scholarly studies produced in the thirty years since Mao’s death, and taking an approach that attempts to respect the professionalism and skills of many of the artists involved, will try to show how misleading that old joke is. The madness of Maoist politics can explain the stupidity and emptiness of much of cultural practice in these years. We will see how political leaders constantly worried about their control of cultural production and consumption. But there was more going on, with more lasting impacts, than a concentration on the political dimension can begin to grasp.
An approach that brings together a wide range of cultural practices, from opera and dance to writing, reading, fine arts, and even architecture, shows the interconnectedness of cultural production and consumption in these years. A model Peking opera hero had a life beyond the opera theatre, in posters, newly created folk dance, story-telling, comic books, and even on everyday household utensils. This repetitive presence illustrates the ambition of the cultural authorities to invent a new mass culture. The ubiquity of such heroes also alerts us to audience responses to these new cultural products. As we shall see, two responses are evident: an internalization of such heroics and the rhetoric surrounding it, or a counter-discourse of underground satire or elaboration of such heroics in more satisfyingly emotional and personal terms.
Coverage of everyday life in the Cultural Revolution has tended in recent decades to be the domain of the memoirist. Books in the vein of Wild Swans have dominated the market in Western languages, competing to present tales of suffering, persecution, and determined survival.3 Western readers cannot help but be moved by these stories, though few such readers are able to assess the interests behind many of these tellers of family tales. Most of these memoirs have been the work of Chinese whose positions of relative social and political influence were challenged by Red Guards, Mao’s youthful shock-troops in his last revolution. The writing and publication of these memoirs have often been part of a re-assertion of social status and what the authors see as political propriety, even if unacknowledged by the writers.
An account of cultural practice in the Cultural Revolution offers another way to understand what life was like for most Chinese in these ten years. The production of operas, dances, films, and fine art can take us beyond political elites to encounter a range of specialists trying to survive in challenging circumstances. Cultural consumption, in the world of Chinese audiences, can provide a glimpse into the kinds of entertainment and worldviews of ordinary Chinese subjected to much more than eight ‘model performances’. Culture can help round out our picture of the Cultural Revolution, for it was at its heart.
Understanding audience responses to cultural production during the Cultural Revolution presents a challenge. Published discussion of officially approved works makes heroic assumptions about mass audience appreciation of the efforts of proper-thinking artists and their managers. Richard Kraus, in his excellent The Party and the Arty, alerts us to the possibilities of autonomy for audiences.4 From his focus on the commercial commodification of art and literature since the 1980s, he argues that audiences and readers were able to establish their own relationships with works of art and literature. The following chapters share this view of Chinese audiences, applying it even to a period when the Party was making its strongest claims to control the consumption as well as the production of culture. The evidence for this audience autonomy is largely anecdotal, based on my own observations as a resident of Beijing in the last two years of the Cultural Revolution. Even published accounts, however, sometimes contain implications about actual audience responses to works. Fulmination against backwards local opera troupes presenting “black” shows, for example, indicate that some artists saw an unfulfilled demand for old-style works. Generally, the more shrill the rhetoric in praise of a new work, the more uncertain were the cultural authorities that audiences would respond in the appropriate ways. A third source of information about audiences lies in the ways in which Chinese responded after 1978 in a new cultural marketplace. I would argue that we can read responses, expectations, and interests from the 1980s, discussed by Kraus, back into the 1960s and 1970s, despite very different political circumstances. Indeed, the commercial commodification of culture that has characterized Chinese artistic life in the last quarter-century was made possible by the ideological commodification of culture in the Cultural Revolution. Constant and repeated re-working of model works in those ten years included what we might now identify as cross-genre product tie-ins. A hero of a model opera would appear in posters, songs, comic books, even on pencil cases and enamel mugs. This commodification made the rise of the cultural marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s seem less of a break with the past than has generally been assumed.
An approach through culture offers a potentially productive way to understand the power of the Cultural Revolution experience, its nature, and its repercussions. Stills from the filmed versions of the ‘model performance’ operas and ballets are part of the collective visual memory of the era for Chinese and for others who take an interest in the period. A study of cultural activities during these years can help our understanding of the Cultural Revolution in two ways that counter the usual interpretations of the period. First, the innovation and experimentation in the field of culture in these ten years contrasts with the orthodox emphasis on destruction and failure. Second, a cultural perspective can encourage a greater sense of the continuities between the period before and after the Cultural Revolution. Instead of simply a period of madness, the Cultural Revolution was also a time of considerable creative energy, official and unofficial, that built on earlier developments and made possible a reorientation in Chinese cultural discourse since the 1980s.
The third, general aim of this study is to show how the Cultural Revolution is best understood in its broader twentieth-century context. Those who play up the artistic excesses and limitations of these years and memoirists intent on righting wrongs both tend to emphasize the disconnection between the Cultural Revolution and the periods before and since. The madness of Mao’s last revolution indeed showed the bankruptcy of his politics and made easier the task of making changes after his passing, as MacFarquhar and Schoenhals show.
Instead of being seen as an aberration, these years are better approached in the context of certain tendencies in Chinese cultural and social developments in the twentieth century. Cultural practice between 1966 and 1976 had deep roots in the Chinese experience not simply after 1949 but since China’s nineteenth-century encounter with Western power and culture. A profound ambiguity pervaded Chinese responses to the new political and cultural environment created by the interruption of Chinese paramountcy in East Asia, with the rise of Western countries joined by Japan. An urge to make China again wealthy and strong was entwined with an uncertainty about the value of the Chinese cultural inheritance. By the last decades of imperial rule, social reformers, inspired in part by apparent Japanese success in facing these dilemmas of modernization, had begun to produce new ideas, media, and even institutions to strengthen the nation.5 The Qing dynasty made a belated run in introducing new-style education and other ideas, but it was too late and imperial China came to an end in 1911.
In the second decade of the century, as Chinese power-holders tried to work out effective political structures for the new republic, Chinese intellectuals were engaged with new ideas about the way forward. The ambivalence towards the Chinese cultural heritage continued, though the complete rejection of the past was a major theme of the May Fourth movement. On 4 May 1919 students and other nationalists had demonstrated in cities across China against post–World War Ⅰ concessions the warlord government was offering to Japan. The date of the demonstrations gave a name to the current efforts to make China ‘wealthy and strong’. The more radical May Fourthers called for the complete abandonment of Chinese values, personified for many by Confucianism, and their replacement by foreign morality and ways of organizing society. From among the exponents of radical change came the men involved with founding the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. A Western ideology, Marxism, in its Leninist iteration, would provide a way forward for stagnant Chinese society.
The May Fourth era in the first half of the twentieth century was a period of literary and artistic innovation. A new literature, written in a new-style language that resembled everyday speech, had a strong commitment to social reform, which even more popular writing also espoused. A reformist urge was also behind efforts to modernize Chinese musical theatre, with opera artists attempting to match the newly introduced spoken drama in contemporary relevance. Film, particularly in Shanghai, China’s most modern city, was largely in the hands of socially progressive artists who saw the mass audience potential of the medium to effect change.
Just as war with Japan in 1895 had been a catalyst for dynastic reform and ultimate collapse, so war with Japan from the 1930s until 1945 also had huge repercussions. The Nationalist (Guomindang) regime that had brought a degree of national unity after 1928 was revealed as weak and corrupt during the years of the Pacific War. Meanwhile the Communist Party in its wartime headquarters in Yan’an was able to experiment with new ways of mobilizing rural populations for nationalist resistance to invasion and for the transformation of social power in the countryside and towns. Leninist ideas on mobilization were combined with Chinese notions (whether imagined or real) of collectivist cooperation. Mao Zedong and party ideologues produced writings laying down policy for the return to the cities.
These policies included recasting traditional ideas about the social functions of literature and art to enlighten, uplift, and unite popular understanding of the world. In this field, as in others, imported concepts were combined with local traditions to produce a new hybrid to serve China’s (and the Communist Party’s) own purposes. Westernized writers and artists from such places as Beijing and Shanghai were obliged to explore ways to use popular or folk cultural traditions for new, revolutionary purposes. Such policies were put into effect, first in Yan’an and the Communist base areas, then across the nation after 1949.
The delineation of eras according to key events (for example, the 1911 fall of the Qing dynasty, the 1937 Japanese invasion of China proper, and the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949) has been the norm in thinking and writing about China in the twentieth century. A cultural perspective, however, calls into question the importance of these dates. The kinds of changes in literary style typical of the May Fourth writers publishing in New Youth after 1915 had origins in the new-style novels on modern subjects that emerged in the 1890s and before the fall of the dynasty. More important for art and literature in mid-century was not the Japanese occupation of much of China but the enunciation of policies on cultural practice by Mao in Yan’an in the spring of 1942. Bonnie McDougall and Kam Louie, in their comprehensive 1997 overview of Chinese writing in the twentieth century, outline a more useful periodization that acknowledges deeper changes than simply the political. They suggest three major periods: 1900–1937 ‘Towards a New Culture’, 1938–1965 ‘Return to Tradition’, and 1966–1989 ‘The Reassertion of Modernity’.6 As the titles of each period indicate, the 1949 political divide shrinks from significance and Mao’s efforts to connect with popular and elite Chinese traditions take centre stage. Xiaobing Tang, writing in 2000, offers a similar backward glance at the preceding century, identifying the coherence and totality of its literature and art.7
An unprecedented step in not using the standard ten-year periodization of the Cultural Revolution appeared in 2005 in a 600-page chronology of dance in China since 1949. Mao Hui and the rest of the editorial team make their breaks in 1965 and, remarkably for a Chinese publication, in 1975. For a Chinese book the step is so bold that the editors chose not to explain their decision. But the content of the chronology reinforces the view that change in this area of cultural practice was not dependent upon political chronologies.8 The following chapters will illustrate three broad phases into which cultural activities and politics during the ten years after 1966 can be divided. An initial period (1966–1968) was typified by urban social unrest, Red Guard activism, and a cultish focus on Mao. The second period can be identified with the People’s Liberation Army, which helped restore order in 1969 and lost its commander-in-chief in 1971 when Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen successor, fell from power (and from the skies over Mongolia, while fleeing after an alleged attempt on Mao’s life). During this second phase, millions of ex–Red Guards and other young people were ‘sent down’ to the countryside. From the early 1970s, a degree of routinism returned to Chinese cultural and even political life. Cultural activities, including the publication of literary journals, new feature films, and a broadening of performing and literary genres, saw a marked expansion.
The following pages will show how in the realms of cultural production and consumption the activities in the ten years after 1966 drew upon efforts since even before Yan’an days to combine Western and Chinese traditions and elements in new cultural practice. It is no coincidence that the eight so-called model performances of the Cultural Revolution consisted of modernized musical theatre with deep roots in Chinese popular culture, two ballets which reworked a Western classical genre, and a symphonic music piece based on one of the modern-style operas. I will try to show how the whole range of cultural activity in 1966–1976 continued, deepened, or distorted the modern inheritance of cultural responses to China’s changing global condition. Making China’s culture modern, I argue, was as much an obsession of artists and leaders in the Cultural Revolution as it had been for their counterparts during the previous eighty and more years.
In examining cultural continuities in the twentieth century, Miriam Hansen’s concept of ‘vernacular modernism’ has particular relevance. Hansen’s writings on American and other films have been applied by Zhang Zhen to Chinese film culture from its beginnings in ‘shadow plays’ in the 1890s until the 1930s.9 Zhang makes clear the popular (or vernacular) responses to the modern that film-going reflected and enhanced among urban Chinese, especially in Shanghai. ‘Vernacular modernism’ offers an alternative, or counter, discourse to the elitist ambitions of political and social leaders. Neither Hansen nor Zhang have applied this concept to post-1949 Chinese cultural history. The Cultural Revolution experiment can be seen in the light of their writings as a doomed attempt to combine the vernacular and the elitist in a modern project. Mao and his supporters could be no more successful than social and political leaders had been in the first half of the century in directing popular cultural discourse.
The popular initiative in making Cultural Revolution culture their own, as outlined in the following chapters, fits well with the experience of vernacular modernism before 1937. These tensions between elitist and educated ambition and popular response and resistance underline the following chapters. They alert us to the issue of three realms of audience and artist: the truly popular, the educated, and a middle field in which learned writers borrowed from and contributed to the elaboration of what were essentially vernacular forms. As Patrick Hanan and others have shown in popular fiction and theatre before the twentieth century, elite writers could enjoy and even produce works that revealed strong roots in vernacular, popular traditions.10 These three kinds of audiences differ from the readership topography suggested by Bonnie McDougall in her stimulating essay collection, Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences.11 Intent on demolishing the fiction of a unitary audience for Chinese fiction from the 1950s to the 1980s, McDougall identifies four broad groups. The primary readership consists of educated young people. A secondary audience is made up of literary intellectuals and cultural bureaucrats, who are joined by two additional audiences outside China (Sinologists and Overseas Chinese, and general readers). An examination of audiences for literature, performing arts, and fine arts during the Cultural Revolution confirms the importance of the first two audiences outlined by McDougall. During these ten years, the secondary audience was at its most powerful and ambitious in seeking to shape cultural practice. They sought, with some success it would seem, to expand the primary audience to include people from a wider range of educational and generational backgrounds. Cultural Revolution art and literature attempted to embrace and promote the popular, the educated, and the modern.
Instead of being a sidetrack on China’s road to modern wealth and influence, the Cultural Revolution is best understood as firmly part of the process. The powerful themes of the Cultural Revolution, including mass mobilization and the renewed push to combine Western and Chinese elements in a new-style mass culture, fit well with the previous decades’ obsessions. Suffering subjected on some Chinese between 1966 and 1976 should not obscure these long-term continuities with the preceding and following decades. Instead of being perceived simply as a period of destruction or as an arena of factional political conflict, the Cultural Revolution can be seen also as an era of modern innovation and efforts at real change in China’s cultural inheritance. Failed or half-hearted attempts to update cultural forms stuck in conventions for artists and audiences gave way to an all-out shift to modern subject matter, forms, and values. The ultimate failure of these efforts or rejection of their absurd politics does not detract from the astonishing innovation and commitment they represented. The participants in these upheavals went on to grasp the op- portunities provided with economic changes after the 1970s. The ambition of Cultural Revolution culture continued to reverberate even in the art and writing in the 1980s onwards that seemed to reject utterly Maoist culture.
The first chapter starts with the origins of Cultural Revolution innovation in the modernized Peking opera. It will show how these new operas were the product of decades of experimentation by a range of modern specialists working with performers. Chapter Two examines the ways in which these new operas and ballets became models for a new mass culture, including the so-called transplanting of the operas into other regional musical theatres. Films are the focus of Chapter Three , for it was in film that the models and their innovation became most familiar to Chinese audiences. Chapter Four discusses the expansion of official and unofficial cultural production in the 1970s, including attempts to popularize and modernize dance, music, other stage works, fine arts, and architecture. Writing and reading are examined in Chapter Five , in which the reaction of audiences, artists, and some politicians against excessive political interference is also discussed. The conclusion suggests some of the ways in which Cultural Revolution modernity enabled the further experimentation of the 1980s and after.
CHAPTER 1
Modelling a New Culture
On the night of 28 August 1977, Yu Huiyong, the former Minister of Culture, was rushed to hospital. Earlier that day, after more than ten months’ detention at the State Council’s No. 4 Guesthouse, he had written a last testament and then drunk a bottle of sulphuric acid, used as lavatory disinfectant. For three days Yu lay in agony, conscious for most of the time while the acid ate away at his throat and stomach, until he died on the last day of August. It was a terrible end for one of the artists most responsible for the key cultural artefacts of the Cultural Revolution.
Yu Huiyong had been involved in the creation of several of the model operas and other works of the new culture of the 1966–1976 repertoire. Born in 1925, Yu had joined a Communist performance troupe as a teenager during the War of Resistance. Assigned after 1949 to work at Shanghai’s music conservatory, he helped transform the institution from a somewhat Western-oriented, middle-class school into a training ground for a musical corps for Mao’s China. By the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Yu Huiyong headed the theory department at the Shanghai Conservatory. He had also become head of the Drama Reform and Creative Group, directing Chinese opera modernization in the city. By the early 1970s Yu had become Minister of Culture in Beijing. It was a long way from a peasant background in Shandong province.1
Opera modernization, which Yu Huiyong helped lead, was at the heart of the cultural innovation of the Cultural Revolution. Five of the eight ‘model performances’ that were initially presented as touchstones of artistic creativity were modernized Peking operas devised by people like Yu. An examination of the origins of modernized Chinese opera reveals that the cultural developments of 1966–1976 began before 1949. These model works grew out of the efforts of a wide range of artists, professionals, and specialists that had begun even before 1949. This chapter will trace the modernizing of opera before the mid-1960s before outlining the central place of culture in the start of the Cultural Revolution. The innovations of the five model operas are our central concerns.