Resisting Spirits, by Maggie Greene
Transforming Tradition, by Siyuan Liu
Performing the Socialist State, by Xiaomei Chen
Reviewed by Letizia Fusini
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)
Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 260pp ISBN: 9780472074303 (hardcover)
Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 472pp. ISBN: 9780472132478 (hardcover); 9780472128723 (ebook)
Xiaomei Chen, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 384pp. ISBN: 9780231197762 (hardcover); 9780231552332 (ebook)
Nearly a decade ago, in Autumn 2016, I had the opportunity and the privilege to teach an undergraduate survey course on the history of Chinese theater, the only one of its kind in the UK back then. I was a freshly minted PhD graduate and that was my first teaching post. Aside from developing my lecturing skills, the main challenge was to find creative strategies to make the subject more accessible to students who were majoring in theater studies and knew almost nothing about Chinese culture and history. The task became even more daunting when, due to time constraints, I had to condense the history of the rise of modern drama (huaju 话剧) and the transformations of classical theater (xiqu 戏曲) throughout the late-Qing, Republican and early socialist epochs within the space of a couple of hours. Since I wanted to avoid information overload, I began to look for a unifying thread that could hthelp me connect these three periods and, in my research, I came across an excerpt from a text written by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 in 1904, where the future founder of the CCP eulogizes theater as the best “vehicle for social reform” (120), tracing the paternity of this idea to Confucius, who once said that “nothing is better than yue [乐, the performing arts lato sensu] at transforming social conventions” (118). These thoughts, written just before the dawn of the Republican period and yet rooted in the Confucian tradition, prefigured the Zeitgeist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, which, in turn, would be lauded by Mao Zedong in his essay “On New Democracy” as “having pioneered an unprecedentedly great and thoroughgoing cultural revolution” (361) whose only fault was that it failed to serve the interests of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Through these connections, I was able to visualize the (r)evolution of Chinese theater in the first half of the twentieth century as a tree growing out of Confucian roots and projecting its branches and foliage in a Marxist direction culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. My goal was to convey to my students the impression I had gotten vis-à-vis that short statement by Chen Duxiu about the power of theater to effect social change. The fact that in China, the attribution of a pedagogic and political function to theater is a traditional concept rather than a twentieth-century novelty, hence not an exclusive prerogative of the Communist period or of the Cultural Revolution, was the unifying thread I was looking for. What was initially a mere perception on my part, found confirmation in Richard Schechner’s foreword to the collection in which I originally found Chen Duxiu’s text, where he notes that “the roots of Mao’s attitude—that theater is an excellent educator and that rulers ought to use it as such—go deep in Chinese history. From an early date, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read” (x).
Schechner’s remark can open up an intellectual space for conceiving and understanding the transformations of Chinese theater(s) in the modern era as a holistic phenomenon that bridges different epochs. Quite recently, arguments that endorse and further develop this kind of perspective have been advanced, in a more extensive manner, by eminent scholars of Chinese drama and performance in three book-length studies published between 2019 and 2023. These are, by order of publication, Maggie Greene’s Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC (2019), Siyuan Liu’s Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s (2021), and Xiaomei Chen’s Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (2023).
Although they focus largely on the theater of the high socialist period (1949-1966), these studies ultimately regard the latter as coterminous with the drama reform of the Republican age, as foreshadowing the model operas of the Cultural Revolution period, and as extending its legacy into the post-Mao era (which they also touch on).
Before undertaking a comparative commentary of these books, I provide a brief summary and a preliminary evaluation of each, with a particular discussion of the extent to which their findings appear to converge, as well as highlighting the specificities of their critical approaches.
Greene’s monograph Resisting Spirits reconstructs the vicissitudes of ghost opera (鬼戏) during the high socialist period (1949-1966), and, more succinctly, in the early post-Mao era when literary ghosts started to reappear on Chinese stages following an almost two-decade ban (issued in 1963). More specifically, Greene examines the reception of three different adaptations of a Ming-dynasty canonical play titled Story of Red Plums whose original plot involves, among other things, the execution of a young concubine (Li Huiniang 李蕙娘) who returns to the earth post-mortem in ghostly form to avenge herself on the ruthless prime minister who had condemned her to death. Two of the dramatic texts under scrutiny in this study are Ma Jianling’s 马建翎 1953 Wandering West Lake (游西湖) and its 1958 revised version, while the third is Meng Chao’s 孟超 Li Huiniang 李蕙娘, which premiered in 1961 and, together with Wu Han’s 吴晗 Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (海瑞罢官) and Tian Han’s 田汉 Xie Yaohuan 谢瑶环, contributed to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the book’s final chapter is devoted to probing the afterlives of Li Huiniang at the dawn of the postsocialist age, particularly through analysis of an award-winning 1981 production starring Hu Zhifeng 胡芝风 and the related critical reviews. As Greene explains in the introduction, although ghosts and ghost plays are the titular subject matter of the book, they play an auxiliary role in her analysis, which is primarily aimed at opening up new views on how cultural workers reinterpreted and reused valuable material from China’s classical literary canon to suit the needs of a society that was transitioning into a new era as well as the demands of a ruling party that looked suspiciously at what it considered to be the relics of a feudal past. As a matter of fact, Greene selected ghost opera because it “had occupied an important role in the cultural and political discussions between 1949 and 1963” (12), thereby providing “a fascinating lens through which to view the high socialist period” (13). In other words, ghost opera and the intellectual discourse generated by its reuses as a form of new historical drama in the early years of the PRC is employed as a method to shed light on a particular area of drama reform which, however limited in scope, can provide further insights into broader cultural discussions concerning the distinction between superstition and mythology, and the relevance of ghostly characters to the promotion of class struggle among the laboring masses.
The volume makes an important contribution to questions of historical periodization as regards the PRC’s transition from a revolutionary to a post-revolutionary society. It effectively challenges the pre- and post-Great Leap Forward divide and debunks the myth of the Cultural Revolution as an isolated period in the history of the PRC. It also contributes, to a degree, to “depoliticizing” the received narrative of drama reform and cultural transformation in the high socialist period by telling what Greene defines as “the other side of the story”—that is, by laying bare the creative and aesthetic efforts of writers and critics in forging a new socialist literature that was meant to be not only ideologically correct, but also artistically satisfactory. She convincingly shows that cultural elites had a genuine interest in protecting the national literary heritage from being severely pruned, if not totally eradicated, which was not at all an easy task given that it entailed a constant negotiation among ever-shifting party policies, colleagues’ criticisms, collective concerns, and individual aspirations. Moreover, on account of the selected case studies, Greene’s book effectively foregrounds ghost opera as having played a major role not only in determining the direction of drama reform in the mid–twentieth century, but also, albeit indirectly, in contributing to the radicalization of the political atmosphere in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution.
Siyuan Liu’s volume Transforming Tradition is a monumental study tracing the origin and development of the CCP-led xiqu reform campaign during the high socialist period. As Liu’s thorough and impeccably researched analysis shows, this largely top-down reform process resulted, within a relatively short time span of seventeen years, in a radical alteration of the nature of classical Chinese theater’s dramaturgies and performance methods as well as in mutilating what he terms “xiqu’s entire ecosystem” (329). The book provides a comprehensive documentary history of this phenomenon, which Liu interprets through a multifarious theoretical framework combining concepts of historicism, gentrification, and colonial modernity with “additional influences from Marxist materialism and the Soviet Union” (18). Consisting of six ultra-dense thematic chapters, which examine the main initiatives aimed at purifying xiqu from its allegedly feudal, primitive, bourgeois, and even colonial elements and in a spirit (and language) that consistently echoed May Fourth intellectuals’ semi-iconoclastic critiques, the book identifies a thread of continuity between two ideologically divergent periods of China’s twentieth century, the Republican and the Communist eras. As a matter of fact, attempts at making xiqu, and particularly jingju (京剧), more “modern” and “realistic” in its content and stage design yet without sacrificing its distinctive and time-honored art had been tentatively implemented through the collaborative efforts of Mei Lanfang 梅兰芳 and Qi Rushan 齐如山 over two decades between the late 1910s and the early 1930s. Through meticulously reconstructing the dynamics of what was presented in 1951 as a project based on a “three-pronged approach” (改人, 改戏, 改制, i.e. reforming practitioners, repertoire, and organizational structure), Liu cogently shows that the CCP-affiliated reform leaders took over from where Mei and Qi had given up. Their strategy was partially informed by cultural and diplomatic aspirations reminiscent of those underlying the May Fourth intellectuals’ advocacy for a theatrical (r)evolution, which would later result in the emergence of spoken drama, and of those of the Mei-Qi duo who, in an attempt to refashion jingju as China’s national theatrical tradition par excellence, sought to accentuate its quintessential characteristics, especially its visual appeal, to help refashion China’s image in the West. Nevertheless, unlike Mei Lanfang who, as a fully trained jingju actor had become increasingly aware of the risks associated with modifying the fundamental principles of xiqu, their lack of technical and artistical expertise prevented them from predicting the negative effects of a reform that was de facto not only ideologically biased but also totally disconnected from the practical realities of xiqu.
Liu’s study, which relies on a rich array of textual and visual archival sources never previously referenced in anglophone research, illuminates a complex example of a politically driven, all-encompassing theater reform and its problematic legacy that affects present-day practice. It achieves this goal by documenting in-depth the theoretical basis and practical aspects of the reform process, giving equal attention to content and form as the true pillars of xiqu’s edifice, and devoting adequate space to exploring ways in which regional genres (difangxi 地方戏) were also targeted. Aside from making a substantial contribution to advancing the field of Chinese and theater studies, the volume also offers valuable insights into the landscape of global intercultural theater studies. Specifically, Liu develops Min Tian’s (2008) view of Chinese theater’s interculturation of Western theater in the twentieth century as a case of cultural displacement that entails both constructive and destructive effects on the tradition. “Displacement,” according to Tian, is the result of a process whereby “the Other is inevitably understood, interpreted, and placed in accordance with the aesthetic and artistic imperatives of the Self pertaining to its own tradition and its placement in the present, irrespective of the extent of the Self’s true knowledge of its Other” (Tian 2008: 6). In the case of Communist-era xiqu reform, as Liu insightfully shows, not only was the Other (i.e., Western realism, Marxian historical materialism, and the Stanislavsky’s system of psychological realism) displaced in an attempt to “gentrify” the indigenous tradition, but it was that very same tradition that was originally displaced, or misinterpreted. Quite fittingly, in defining the mid-century xiqu reform as a case of “gentrification,” Liu points out that, while the various targeted components of xiqu can be equaled to “displaced residents” of a “deteriorating area that needed salvation,” “it may be more accurate in many cases to describe the components as being decentered rather than displaced” (2). Liu’s meticulous analysis of how CCP reform policies weakened the centrality of the actor in the creative process of xiqu and in determining audience appeal, provides confirming evidence of and further elaborates on Min Tian’s earlier observations on the detrimental consequences of imposing a “naturalistic modernization” (173) on xiqu acting style through an ideological use of the Stanislavski system.
Moving on from xiqu to its “modern” counterpart, Xiaomei Chen’s monograph Performing the Socialist State is a two-part critical history of huaju from its beginnings in the late-Qing and Republican period to the twenty-first century. As its title suggests, the bulk of the book is devoted to the theater and film culture of the high socialist period and its impact on the post-Mao age. The Cultural Revolution period is not included in the discussion because the author has already dealt with it in a previous publication (Chen 2002) and because of the abundance of excellent scholarly studies on the topic. However, before delving into the minutiae of “Chinese Socialist Theater and its afterlife” through an intriguing selection of so far less-studied genres, plays, and topics, the author devotes the first three chapters that constitute Part I to reconstructing the lives and careers of the three individuals who are officially considered to be the founding fathers of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han (1898-1969), Hong Shen 洪深 (1984-1955), and Ouyang Yuqian 欧阳予倩 (1889-1962). Grouping these playwrights together as “a unique trio” (8) allows Chen to highlight the various ways in which they contributed to bringing theater closer to the people well before the Communist takeover, and how they continued to put their creativity and their individual initiative in the service of the socialist cause and for the betterment of Chinese society. By starting off with an examination of the three founding fathers’ respective achievements as eclectic representatives of the hybridized literary, theatrical, and cinematic culture of the early Republican age, Chen lays the foundation for the ensuing discussion in Part II, where she essentially argues that Chinese socialist theater was born from the leftist cultural tradition the three “partially” created (8). Furthermore, their works and those of other leading Republican-era playwrights are mentioned at various places in part II as well, in connection with analogous plays of the socialist and postsocialist periods, to show the extent to which the latter can be said to have perpetuated and further developed a set of pre-existing genres, styles, and thematic concerns born out of the experimental practices of the early decades of the twentieth century. Hence, although the book is primarily focused on emphasizing the legacies of three key figures of the huaju tradition, whose personal stories are used as “threads for discussion between various periods, histories, and ideologies,” the book is not as “limited” (12) as the author laments, for at least for two reasons. First, Chen manages to include an impressive range of other important twentieth-century playwrights and plays that constitute the history of huaju, hence interspersing the discussion with a wealth of comparative links. Second, she has further enriched it with an interdisciplinary perspective, first by opening each of the eight chapters with a classic red song—ranging from “The March of the Volunteers” to “The Internationale”—and then by discussing the interweaving relationship between mediascapes and soundscapes in the transition from a pre-revolutionary to a post-revolutionary China. The book’s final chapter, which examines the reception of “The Internationale” and its constant repurposing over the course of 100 years, not only shows the extent to which a single text can be adapted to express opposing ideologies or to critique the dominant discourse, but also provides further confirmation of the formidable power of the Confucian concept of yue in forging a collective spirit of adherence to the status quo and, at the same time, promoting new cultural impulses that seek to challenge that very status quo.
Chen’s volume has an impressive breadth and depth that the title and cover image do not adequately anticipate. Although a substantial part of the book is indeed about theater and film culture of the socialist age, the title and cover, which may be important from a marketing perspective, fail to capture what is arguably the heart of its narrative—namely, the consistent references to how Tian Han’s, Hong Shen’s, and Ouyang Yuqian’s artistic endeavours in the Republican era paved the way for the creation of a socialist performance culture that has not vanished despite the PRC’s transition to a capitalist economy and the advent of a consumerist society. This is all the more true given that, as the author asserts, one of the main goals of the book is to deconstruct the ways in which the image of the three pioneers of huaju has been distorted in post-Mao Chinese-language scholarship, where they are seen alternatively as perpetrators or as victims of the socialist regime. Among the many insights that can be gleaned from this study, the most noteworthy one in my opinion is the revelation that there exists a profound link between, on the one hand, the aesthetic liberalism and critical realism of the Republican age and, on the other, the commitment to ideological purity and political correctness of the high socialist period, an indissoluble binary that continues to inform contemporary Chinese theaters into the new millennium. As the chapter on Meng Bing’s 孟冰 soldier plays and history plays shows, huaju, in its contemporary incarnation, has not relinquished its original mission of creatively enacting a social criticism while still appealing to a mass audience. As in Meng’s specific case, the legacy of his three illustrious predecessors has been carried forward by expanding the socialist realist tradition as a means of exposing, in an ingenuously subversive yet aptly surreptitious way, the CCP’s inability to fulfil the promises of freedom, equality, and democracy that motivated, amongst other things, the rise of modern drama over a century earlier.
A major common denominator of these books is that they view the developmental trajectory of Chinese theater (both classical and modern) during the high socialist and, to a degree, postsocialist periods as largely a continuation of the reform projects advocated by intellectuals of the early Republican period that were predicated on a tradition/modernity divide. Throughout the twentieth century, whether it was about reforming xiqu or inventing and perfecting a new genre such as huaju, intellectuals, playwrights, and cultural workers had to navigate a complex and unstable social, cultural, and political environment that required them to balance the competing demands of artistic innovation and political correctness, with uneven results.
These studies employ different methodologies that help rethink the commonly accepted standards of periodization of China’s twentieth-century drama and performance culture.
Greene’s text-based analysis of how ghost plays were revised and discussed between the 1950s and the early 1960s is informed by the methodology of “surface reading,” which “accounts for what is in the texts without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation” (Best/Marcus 2009: 12). As opposed to “symptomatic reading,” which actively looks for a meaning that is not explicitly stated by the text or the author, surface reading does not wrest meaning out of a text and does not assume priority of subtext over text. By looking at the surface of the discourse on ghost opera and by interpreting ghostly characters as literary fantasies rather than as carriers of implicit political messages, Greene convincingly questions the claim that ghost play adaptations written in the early 1960s—like Meng Chao’s Li Huiniang—were meant primarily as vehicles for veiled criticism in regard to the catastrophic consequences of the Great Leap Forward. Although she does not deny that these plays may have also been created to express their authors’ political views, she is right in cautioning against the reductionism that may develop from such an interpretation, because it fails to acknowledge not only their literary quality, but also the fact that a large part of the debate was focused on tackling cultural and ideological issues that were unrelated to the economic policies of the time. Hence, this method allows Greene to situate the debate on ghost drama within a “longer literary time that connects the Mao era with a deeper cultural past” (16) and to disentangle it from the various political campaigns of the high socialist period.
Liu, too, views the reform of traditional theater in the Communist era as part of a much broader phenomenon that predates the Communist takeover and whose roots go back to the Self-strengthening Movement of the late-Qing period, which led to the systematic study of Western culture, opening the doors to a wealth of fresh ideas, styles, and critical approaches, including a new vision of history as a linear and teleological process. Nevertheless, his interpretation of the mid-century xiqu reform campaign as “a case of historicism” and “as part of the global modernity project” (18) is potentially problematic, not only because “historicism” is a highly elusive concept, but because the definition he relies on, which is drawn from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), connects historicism with European Enlightenment, a connection that is contradictory. The fact that xiqu was considered old and stagnant during the May Fourth era, and vulgar, formalist, and ideologically immature in the high socialist era, and therefore needed to “evolve” or, as Liu contends, to be “gentrified,” by following the example set by Western theater and by incorporating Western elements, can be better explained as a case of cultural Darwinism (paired up with historical materialism). Unlike the Enlightenment, which aspired to find “some eternal and universal Archimedean standpoint by which they could judge all specific societies, states and cultures” (Beiser 2011: 11), historicism argues against the existence of such universal values and aims to trace “the historical development of specific cultures rather than . . . the construction of a grand evolutionary account of the progress march of Culture” (Smith, “Historicism”). In my view, it would be more appropriate to replace (or integrate) the historicist frame with one based on cultural Darwinism, along the lines of the “adaptive comparative method” proposed by Sowon S. Park to study the Westernization of East Asian literatures in the modern era. Such a frame, which proposes to interpret Westernization as a means of gaining a competitive edge over the West rather than as a form of submission to colonial imperatives, would allow for a better understanding of the reasons why Republican-era and Communist-era discourses on the necessity of xiqu reform can be said to represent two faces of the same reality or, better still, two different stages of the same program of artistic development and cultural acquisition. When Hu Shi 胡適 stated that China lacked a sense of literary evolution and that Chinese theater could be reformed only by engaging with the most advanced forms of foreign drama, which would have to be examined through a comparative perspective and with the aim of injecting “some youthful blood from Western literature” (Hu Shi 1996: 116), he was not endorsing a colonial vision of literary evolution but was proposing that Chinese culture voluntarily adapt to Western standards in order to survive and thrive. As such, he was laying the foundation of Mao’s later advocacy for a new democratic culture that “opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation” (367), a formulation which, as Liu notes, set the tone of the debate guiding the 1950s xiqu reform campaign.
Although she does not explicitly acknowledge a specific theoretical and methodological framework for her analysis of the development of modern Chinese drama, Chen explains why she decided to adopt “a holistic view that bridges the Republican and PRC periods” (7) and a thematic approach in lieu of a strictly chronological one. Essentially, her goal is to offer a multifaceted and interdisciplinary critical history that is accessible to a nonspecialist readership and includes a range of authors, works, and practices. As she notes in the introduction, one of her main motivations for attempting what she calls “an almost impossible task” (7) is the realization, through her teaching and research, of the continuous relevance of early huaju works to contemporary times as attested by the many productions and rewritings of The Black Slave Cries Out to Heaven (黑奴吁天录), a rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that is one of the foundational pieces of Chinese spoken drama, through the socialist and postsocialist periods. It seems to me that the choice of case studies for part II is also instrumental in strengthening the effectiveness of Chen’s holistic perspective. In chapter 4, for example, she examines the rise of one-act satirical comedies (独木讽刺戏剧) of the mid-1950s as an example of “socialist critical realism” and views them as carrying forward the legacy of Yang Jiang’s 杨绛 and Chen Baichen’s 陈白尘 comedies of the Republican period, which exposed the hypocrisies and corruption of Chinese society under the Nationalist regime. Similarly, in chapter 5, which focuses on the representation of women characters in a series of red classic films and performances, she shows how these works are steeped in the tradition of early-twentieth century feminist theater inspired by Ibsen’s Nora and nurtured by burgeoning leftist ideologies, and how they were resurrected and refashioned in the postsocialist period in an effort to combine aestheticization with a renewed revolutionary spirit. The remaining chapters are organized, again, around a particular genre or theme that is examined across the socialist and postsocialist periods and are interspersed with references to the pre-1949 era history and performance culture.
Another aspect that emerges from a comparison of these three studies is that, despite the gradual tightening of the political and ideological climate over the course of the high socialist period, the debates on drama reform and the creation of new dramas went on undeterred, albeit in a cyclical, nonlinear manner, until the start of the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that artists and critics managed to find a space to exercise their freedom of expression despite party-imposed restrictions. They were perhaps aided by the fact that until the early 1960s there was considerable ambiguity as to the direction in which the CCP intended to steer cultural production and as to how to interpret Mao’s early recommendation “not to reject the legacy of the ancients” and later encouragement to criticize the wrongdoings of CCP officials. As Chen points out, the early 1950s saw the creation of several plays that cannot be categorized as fully “red” but that embody “all colors, red, gray, black, and every other spectrum in between” (153). On a similar note, Greene’s analysis shows that the debate on ghosts was multifarious and dynamic. It encompassed competing views, and, over the years, the focus shifted from discussing the suitability of supernatural literature and drama to determining how ghostly characters should be presented to audiences, whether as role models of class struggle or as symbols of feudal and bourgeois enemies. The CCP-led reform of xiqu, too, was implemented amid several rounds of debates and generated criticisms and negative reactions from artists, intellectuals, and audiences, though they did not manage to mitigate the disastrous effects of the top-down decisions taken by reform leaders and (often irresponsibly) enforced by local cadres. As a matter of fact, while the process had a fluctuating course as it shifted between radical and liberal phases (the latter occurred in 1957 and between 1960 and 1962), in general, it followed a unilateral trajectory that resulted in an excessive accentuation of the didactic and ideological function of theater and in a reduction of its most spectacular and ludic aspects.
Another aspect that links Greene’s and Liu’s studies concerns their shared findings on the paradoxical and ironic consequences of censorship and self-censorship processes aimed at bestowing a layer of ideological correctness on a canonical play’s content. Greene’s choice of case studies blatantly shows that an overzealous approach consisting in excessive plot excisions and modifications for the mere sake of achieving ideological purity could result in grossly distorting the nature of the text to a point verging on the absurd. As can be seen from Ma Jianling’s early attempt at producing a socialist-flavoured version of a pre-modern ghost play, his radical decision to eliminate the ghost to avoid fostering superstitious beliefs triggered a wave of severe criticism from various intellectuals who pointed out that in the original play the ghost was shown to stand up against injustice and feudal oppression and it was therefore imperative to keep it. Ironically, the old text, albeit anchored in pre-socialist culture, was deemed more ideologically sound than its modern-day version, which looked unreasonably mutilated. An analogous case is represented by the so-called badana (八大拿) plays, which formed part of the foundational repertoire of jingju wusheng (京剧武生) actors and were banned, like ghost drama, after 1963, after having been heavily abridged to expunge parts of the content that were considered reactionary and pernicious. The censoring of these plays’ contents, which entailed altering the plot and removing key scenes, resulted in an excessive simplification of the actors’ training practices, which, in turn, affected the artistic quality and believability of their performances. This is because xiqu is a totalizing kind of theater where content determines form and vice versa. As a matter of fact, the badana plays, which Liu intriguingly associates with Greek tragedy for their emphasis on portraying conflicts and dilemmas, attach great importance to the actors’ facial expressions and physical actions not as mere manifestations of skill but as a sophisticated means of conveying the characters’ nuanced psychologies. Similarly, as Liu rightfully notes, the ideological attack on xiqu’s distinctive theatricality, which was erroneously equated with “formalism,” involved the further curtailing of fundamental scenes, the flattening of key characters’ personalities, and even the elimination of a range of centuries-old conventional performance techniques and gestures, which were replaced with a realist and lifelike performance style based on Stanislavsky’s brand of psychological realism. These measures proved detrimental to the integrity and authenticity of xiqu because they ultimately resulted in disconnecting form from content and, by depriving the actors of their ability to strike a balance between prescribed manners and personal inventiveness, made the art of xiqu degenerate into something artificial and incapable of achieving genuine characterization. The fact that the adoption of Stanislavsky’s realism failed to enhance xiqu actors’ impersonation skills and instead caused them to feel impeded and unnatural confirms Huang Zuolin’s insightful remark that the attempt to create a fourth wall, “an illusion of real life on stage . . . imposes limitations, restricting us by the framework of the stage and thereby seriously hampering creativity” (Huang 1999: 156). Min Tian, too, points out that although, and contrary to what Brecht assumed, xiqu actors do identify with the role, their way of combining “the ‘inner technique’ of introspection with the outgoing technique of representation,” as Huang Zuolin (1999: 157) put it, is not consistent with the principles of Stanislavsky’s realism because the latter does not aim for “beauty and refinement” (171). As Li Yu 李渔, an illustrious writer and drama theorist of the early Qing period stated in his monumental work Casual Notes on a Leisurely Mood (闲情偶寄, 1671), “there is a difference between manners in real life and those on the stage” (Li Yu 1999: 87).
On the whole, by foregrounding the continuities in the development of Chinese theater across distinct periods of modernity (Republican, socialist, and postsocialist) and by considering the impact of Communist-era theater reforms on contemporary performance culture (even if succinctly), these three studies variously testify to the complexities and contradictions of the relationship between art and politics and between tradition and innovation. Moreover, they give evidence of the extent to which censorship practices can or cannot sanction a definitive break with the past. Considering the first two aspects, Chen’s final chapters, especially the one on Meng Bing and the one on sonic theater, demonstrate that contemporary Chinese artists continue to be driven by the same ideals that motivated the founding fathers of huaju, while also seeking new avenues and strategies to express their vision and produce works that satisfy the authorities as well as audiences. As for ghost plays, as Greene illustrates in her final chapter, they never disappeared from the Chinese stages despite several attempts at casting them in a bad light that culminated in the 1963 ban. As the title of her book suggests, not only have these supernatural figures consistently embodied a spirit of resistance to evil and oppression, they are also part of an undying legacy that, although crippled during the high socialist period, has managed to regain its original status in the postsocialist era and is now associated more with the world of phantasy and entertainment than with the pedagogical function imposed on it between 1949 and 1962. The same, however, cannot be said for xiqu more generally. In the concluding chapter of his book, Liu offers a detailed analysis of a 1959 jingju production of The Battle of Red Cliff (赤壁之战) and of the ensuing debate as a means of assessing the results of the reform campaigns, given that in that year the CCP had announced the completed nationalization of private xiqu companies. The fact that this production was generally found disappointing due to the adoption of a historical materialist perspective that encumbered the pace of the story, weakened characterization, and destroyed entertainment, testifies to the failure of this reform process, which, as Liu repeatedly points out, was guided by ignorance of the true essence of xiqu and a wilful bias against its supposed primitiveness. Liu’s concluding remarks extend to xiqu’s contemporary ecosystem, which he dismally but realistically defines as “the legacy of a seventeen-year tradition” (331) that managed to radically (and perhaps definitively) steer the course of an ancient art form. Finally, and contrary to received wisdom, these three books forcefully show the highly experimental and prolific nature of the theater activities of the high socialist period, which gave rise to equally prolific critical debates. Taken together, they paint a dynamic history made of lights and shadows, in which the past and the present mirror each other in (often) surprising ways.
Letizia Fusini
SOAS University of London
Works Cited
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Best, Steven and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, 1 (2009): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chen, Duxiu. “On Theater.” In Faye Chunfang Fei, ed./tr., Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, 117-120.
Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
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