Abstract
Because of the residual Cold War divide between the liberal West and authoritarian East, few scholars take theatre dramatizing the historical experience of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seriously. Refusing to treat the genre as mere propaganda, Xiaomei Chen investigates theatre and drama portraying communist leaders. Continuing her earlier work, Acting the Right Part, this book, Staging Chinese Revolution, offers a masterful and analytical account of China’s propaganda theatre performance in the last three decades.
The author claims that ‘propaganda’ is a mode of communication that is essential to every society. Previously a mouthpiece of the CCP, propaganda has an active afterlife: it shapes everyday beliefs, popular sentiments, and imagination. It is an ongoing conversation where multiple voices and opposing views collide, negotiate and compromise. Official propaganda may seep into and feed on cultural industry, star culture, entertainment, and social media, making fuzzy lines between the official and popular, politics and pleasure.
Propaganda with a human face sheds light on China’s transition from the party’s top–down sponsorship to more pluralistic, horizontal gestures and innovations, getting more on track with culture markets in the West. The book delineates a gallery of top CCP leaders in a series of drama and theatre performances and offers revisionist readings and refreshing images. Instead of stern and mythical figures, these leaders are shown to be mortals with feet of clay: individual human beings fraught with contradictory feelings and caught up in romance, intrigues, and failings. On the other hand, the revisionist readings also rediscover some leaders, such as the CCP’s founding father Chen Duxiu, whose vital role in revolutionary history has been suppressed by the cultic valorization of Mao Zedong.
Party propaganda may be ideological, but it may also be soul-searching and critical. Propaganda may legitimate party rule and shore up reigning ideology and political imperatives, fanning, for instance, nationalism against foreign aggression and Western hegemony. It also invokes the good old days to critique the bad new ones. It recalls the idealistic past, redolent with robust revolutionary elan, so as to expose the party’s decrepitude and atrophy. By evoking the authentic ethos of youthful leaders and the state’s duty as the guardian of the people’s interests, dramatic performances tell the inconvenient truth of the party’s betrayal of its own principles.
The author excels in tracking the mutation of theatre genres over time. A drama about a figure such as Mao or Deng Xiaoping is placed within a genealogy of a series of plays from the 1950s to the 21st century. Few scholars can accomplish this feat better than Xiaomei Chen, who commands at her fingertips all prior works leading up to the play under discussion. Her family background in theatre and personal experience as a youthful performer makes her account engaging and compelling – a testament to her commitment and passion.
The dramatic trajectory illuminates how a leader has been figured and reconfigured over time. Take Chen Duxiu in the first chapter. Although he was the head of the CCP at its birth, films and dramas up until the post-Mao era had cast him as a negative persona, because he gave way to both Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin and was thus responsible for the CCP’s first setback in 1927. In the context of globalization and capitalist modernity, however, Chen Duxiu emerges as a figure of resistance against foreign and Soviet influence, and a champion of the humanist values of equality, freedom, and prosperity. Similarly, the construction of Mao goes with reigning sentiments and ideologies at different phases of the Chinese revolution. Mao began as a successful leader adept at mobilizing the peasants, but he became anxious about his authority in the wake of the CCP becoming a ruling party bent on consolidating its power. Entering the city and enjoying privileges, the party lost touch with the people. Numerous plays depict critical voices from the grass roots, coupled with Mao’s continuing warning against party bureaucracy. Some dramas show Mao’s own lapses into the prerogatives and inequality he condemned. In more recent dramas, Mao becomes humanized and individualized in his family and love relations.
Overall, Staging Chinese Revolution is a well-written and eloquent work. It has made an important contribution to our understanding of theatre and performance in socialist and post-socialist China.