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Revolutions in the Superstructure: Approaches to Cultural “Popularization” in Mid-Twentieth Century China
Organizer: G. Andrew Stuckey, Kalamazoo College
Chair and Discussant: Yomi Braester, University of Washington
By the mid-twentieth century, China’s Communist Party faced a vexing problem: how could a political organization that claims to both represent and lead the Chinese people simultaneously speak about and for these people in a way that would be comprehensible to the largely uneducated masses? As previous scholarship has shown, the principal response to this problem was “popularization” (dazhonghua) or “massification” of the arts (wenyi), including opera, film, and literature.
This panel will explore not only the policies through which popularization was envisioned, but also popularization as a social and cultural process involving numerous incidences of cooperation, compromise, and conflict. Paper topics range from pre-1949 film and fiction to 1950s opera to a Cultural Revolution-era model drama and its afterlife.
Binding these inquiries together is the question of how popularized artistic forms “appealed to” and “influenced” mass audiences by virtue or their being embedded within large-scale structures (theoretical, institutional, and otherwise) of production and dissemination. Moreover, we will seek as a panel to answer related questions such as: how can the popularized arts be understood as solutions to social goals? how can we gauge the popularity of such art in the first place? how were tensions emerging from simultaneously “popular” and “political” artistic imperatives resolved? Addressing examples across a forty-year range, both the papers and ensuing discussion will attempt to set forward a new framework within which historical specificities of Communist Party cultural policy are brought into dialogue with the rise of politicized communities across the mid-twentieth century globe.
Tradition Transformed: National Forms in Zhao Shuli’s Early Fiction
G. Andrew Stuckey, Kalamazoo College
In the 1940s, communist literary policy urged the use of “national forms” (traditional and folk forms or styles) as a means of reaching and influencing the broad masses of the people. National forms, though, in communist usage were always (only) a means to an end, namely proselytizing the benefits of communism to the largely illiterate or semi-literate masses. Mao Zedong led the way on this front, most prominently with his 1942 Talks at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art. Of course, the danger that traditional forms would bring with them feudal ideologies always loomed and had to be met and countered by the efficacy of the democratic, or later revolutionary, content which was to be infused into the new literature.
This paper examines two of Zhao Shuli’s early stories, “Xiao Erhei jiehun” (Little Blacky Gets Married) and “Li Youcai banhua” (Rhymes of Li Youcai), in the context of the communist marriage of national form with revolutionary content. Zhao’s use of national forms reflects the double imperative of being at once accessible and entertaining to the widest range of people and of displaying the beneficence of the communist party. There is, though, a tension created by the opposite pulls of these two drives which we can see even in these two early stories, and which, by the Cultural Revolution led literary policy makers to abandon the call to use national forms altogether.
Celluloid Persuasion: Producing and Consuming Wartime Realities in North and Northeast China
Matthew D. Johnson, University of California, San Diego
Overshadowed by the wartime (1937-1949) film industries of Shanghai and Chongqing, Communist Party-led filmmaking efforts in north and northeast China have received little scholarly attention to-date. Nonetheless, the newsreels and features that did emerge from these overwhelmingly non-urban locations provide rare windows onto the ideologies, and institutional arrangements, through which Party representatives attempted to reshape a cultural medium with proven mass appeal.
This paper primarily focuses on news and documentary filmmaking as carried out by the Yan’an Film Corps, North China Film Corps, and Northeast Film Studio. Using memoirs, interviews, and evidence drawn from some of these rare films themselves (e.g. the Democratic Northeast series), I will address questions that seek to highlight wartime documentary’s relationship to its pre-1949 political and social environment: How should we understand interactions between filmmakers and the Communist Party? How were audiences identified and addressed through diegetic aspects (e.g. voiceover, editing) of documentary films themselves? How were such films presented, and what exchanges shaped their dissemination? In short, what political goals, professional standards, and “pre-cinematic” social realities shaped attempts to employ documentary film as a tool of mass mobilization during the 1930s and 1940s?
These questions are posed with several broader analytic goals in mind. Looking backward, they seek to connect Communist Party filmmaking with patterns of wartime filmmaking as a whole. Looking forward, they probe for clues that might illuminate the underpinnings of post-1949 state cinematic culture. Finally, they aim to stimulate further discussion concerning the relationship between mass culture and political regimes.
The Folk and the Avant-Garde in the Making of “Popular Propaganda” in Wartime China
Liang Luo, University of Michigan
The case of Zhao Shuli (1906-1970), the representative “peasant writer” of modern China, is worthy of critical examination in the context of a “popular propaganda.” Zhao Shuli’s early writings and cultural activities suggest that Zhao followed his own initiative to bridge the gap between the intellectual and the people before the “Yan’an Talk” was issued in 1942. Zhao’s case not only problematizes the absolute link between Mao’s “Yan’an Talk” and wartime intellectual choices, it also reminds one of the importance of restoring the personal in the examination of the political.
As Zhao Shuli’s contemporary, Tian Han (1898-1968)’s case further illustrates the ambiguities and “muddiness” in wartime intellectual choices. Tian Han’s cinematic sensibility and his exotic appropriation of “traditional” Chinese art forms such as Peking Opera and folk storytelling through a cinematic angle suggest a cultural orientation distinctively non-traditional, to the edge of avant-garde. Thus a fruitful examination of the cultural politics of modern China calls for a more carefully calibrated approach to the linkages between the personal and the political in discussing the relationship between the Communist Party and the modern intellectual, and between the intellectual and the people.
The Phantom of the Cultural Revolution Haunting China: As an indispensable piece of Chinese revolutionary repertoire, Red Detachment of Women (film 1961; ballet 1964) demonstrates both the merits and limits of Chinese cultural production during the first seventeen years of the PRC (1949-1966) as well as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Scholars have discovered how Red Detachment of Women performed ideology, e.g. its role in shaping Chinese collective memory about their revolutionary past. Since the mid-1990s, Red Detachment of Women has been a favorite topic in adapting and rewriting “red classics.” A nine episode TV drama Women Soldiers of Hainan Column (Qiongzong nübing, title changed to Red Detachment of Women in VCD/DVD distribution) appears to be a sequel of Red Detachment of Women. A twenty-one episode TV remake of Red Detachment of Women becomes a focal point as controversy around adapting “red classics” goes on in 2004. Meanwhile, two script writers of the TV series collaborate on and publish a novel of the same title.
This paper examines the TV adaptations and rewritings of Red Detachment of Women to show the legacy of “red classics” in the Chinese new cultural context. Following gender troubles which start in the film version, these adaptations switch the emphasis from soldiers in the original film and ballet to women. Thus the release of love and eroticism become a common practice in these remakes. Taking these adaptations as a form of afterlife, I argue that Red Detachment of Women has become a phantom of the Cultural Revolution, continuing to possess and haunt today’s China.