(Chinese Literature and Culture in the World) Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, Tsan-Huang Tsai (eds.) - Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution_ Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities-Palgrave Macmillan

Listening to China’s Cultural
Revolution
Chinese Literature and Culture in the World
Edited by Ban Wang
As China is becoming an important player on the world stage, Chinese literature is

poised to change and reshape the overlapping, shared cultural landscapes in the world.
This series publishes books that reconsider Chinese literature, culture, criticism, and
aesthetics in national and international contexts and render China’s classical heritage
and modern accomplishments as a significant part of world culture. By promoting
works that cut across the divide between modernity and tradition, this series will aim
to challenge the inequality and unevenness of the current world system and aspire to a
prospect of the global cultural community. Imbued with a desire for mutual relevance
and sympathy, the series strives to influence the dialogue regarding world culture.
Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University,
USA and the Yangtze River Chair Professor at East China Normal University, China.
He is currently the chair of Stanford’s Department of East Asian Languages and
Cultures. His publications include The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics
in Twentieth-Century China, Illuminations from the Past, and History and Memory.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period
(1949–1966)
By Krista Van Fleit Hang
Public Discourses of Contemporary China: The Narration of the Nation in Popular

Literatures, Film, and Television
By Yipeng Shen
Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture

By Ping Zhu
Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities

Edited By Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-Huang Tsai
Listening to China’s Cultural
Revolution
Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities
Edited by
Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-Huang Tsai
. LISTENING TO CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Selection and editorial content © Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and
Tsan-Huang Tsai 2016
Individual chapters © their respective contributors 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-47910-5
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Listening to China’s cultural revolution : music, politics, and cultural
continuities / [edited] by Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, Tsan-Huang Tsai.
pages cm. — (Chinese literature and culture in the world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Music—Political
aspects—China—History—20th century. 2. China—History—Cultural
Revolution, 1966–1976 I. Clark, Paul, 1949- II. Pang, Laikwan. III. Tsai,
Tsan-Huang, 1974–
ML3917.C6L57 2015
306.4⬘842095109046—dc23 2015018912
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library.
Cont en t s
List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I Temporality: Continuity and

Change in Cultural Revolution Music
1 A Diachronic Study of Jingju Yangbanxi Model
Peking Opera Music 11
Dai Jiafang, translated by Lau Sze Wing
2 From Confucianist Meditative Tool to Maoist Revolutionary
Weapon: The Seven-Stringed Zither (Qin) in the Cultural
Revolution 37
Tsan-Huang Tsai
3 Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the Production of the Hero
in the Amateur Performance of Yangbanxi 65
Laurence Coderre
4 Third World Internationalism: Films and Operas in
the Chinese Cultural Revolution 85
Ban Wang
5 Singing in the Dark: Film and Cultural Revolution
Musical Culture 107
Paul Clark
Part II Geography: Transplantation and

the Making of Regional Yangbanxi
6 Dialects as Untamable: How to Revolutionize
Cantonese Opera? 129
Laikwan Pang
vi CONTENTS
7 The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptation of The Legend of the

Red Lantern (Qizil Chiragh) during China’s Cultural
Revolution 147
Chuen-Fung Wong
8 The Dragon River Reaches the Borders: The Rehabilitation
of Ethnic Music in a Model Opera 167
Rowan Pease
Part III Lineages and Legacies: Cultural Revolution

Soundscapes beyond the Mao Era
9 Musical-Dramatic Experimentation in the Yangbanxi:
A Case for Precedence in The Great Wall 189
John Winzenburg
10 Sonic Imaginary after the Cultural Revolution 213
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
11 Just Beat It! Popular Legacies of Cultural Revolution
Music 239
Barbara Mittler
About the Authors 269

Index 273
I l l u s t rat ion s
Figures
9.1 The Great Wall, Act II, No. 17, “The Capture of Wan.” 195
9.2 Shajiabang, Scene 8, No. 2, Mm. 25–37. 201
10.1 End of Scene III in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy:
Percussion pattern, Saotou, in an orchestral texture
to express the heroic character’s courageous resolve. 228
10.2 Introduction of Aria: Percussion pattern, Maozitou, to
express the solemn scene and the pronouncement of
the wise Chief of General Staff. 229
10.3 Introduction of Aria: Percussion pattern, Maozitou,
for a more earnest and excited character, Yang Zirong. 230
10.4 Percussion consort as interlude before the finale in
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. 230
10.5 Tan Dun, The First Emperor, prologue, Mm. 19–27. 235
Tables
9.1 Musical and theatrical elements in The Great Wall. 196
9.2 Musical and theatrical elements in three Yangbanxi
works. 198
10.1 Instrumentation of the 1970 edition of Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy. 223
Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
This volume has emerged from an International Symposium on

Culture and Music in China’s Cultural Revolution, held at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in April 2013. Conceived and
convened by Laikwan Pang and Tsan-Huang Tsai, the symposium
was sponsored by the CUHK Department of Cultural and Religious
Studies. Additional support for the conference and this volume has
come from Chung Chi College, the CUHK 50th Anniversary fund, the
Faculty of Arts, United College, and the Universities Service Centre
for Chinese Studies. Chui-yu Cheung was a highly effective workshop
assistant. Research for the chapters of Tsai, Pang, Dai, Wong, Pease,
and Winzenburg were partly supported by three General Research
Fund (GRF) projects from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council:
The editors and the concerned authors are grateful for its generous
support.
The editors would like also to thank Xiaomei Chen and Helan
Yang for their conference papers, which could not be included in this
volume. Rachel Harris, ethnomusicologist at SOAS, University of
London, served as an insightful discussant at the symposium. Sessions
were chaired by Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shaoguang Wang, Siu Wah Yu,
Kaming Wu, and Denise Ho.
In preparing this volume the editors warmly thank their copy edi-
tor Susan Jarvis, and also Brigitte Shull and Ryan Jenkins at Palgrave
Macmillan for making the process so productive. Paul Clark would
like to thank Laikwan Pang and Tsan-Huang Tsai for the kind invi-
tation to join them in editing the volume and for their generosity
in insisting on alphabetical order in the listing of editors. Laikwan
Pang is grateful to all the student helpers who made the symposium
so smooth-running and welcoming. We, the editors, hope that this
collection will contribute to furthering academic studies of the com-
plexities of Cultural Revolution experiences. We extend our sincere
appreciation to all those who have made this book possible.
Introduction
After an academic conference in December 2010, Chen Fumin of the

Academy of Social Science, critic Meng Fanhua, and I drove back to
the city from a Beijing suburb. It was already midnight, and we were
lost, caught in the freeway heading nowhere. In the middle of finding
our way home, I was surprised to hear Chen and Meng suddenly sing
the famous arias from [the model opera] Shajiabang: “In the begin-
ning there were only seven or eight guns in our military unit just estab-
lished.” “Ai, this woman is not a simple one.” I was not surprised by
two old guys trying to act young, but rather by their extremely strong
“cultural memory”—so natural that these memories had become part of
their language and behavior.1
This incident was recorded by a young professor born in 1980, who

was perplexed by the robust “cultural remembrance” of his seniors
when compared to the complete nihilism of his generation in China,
which has no history and believes in nothing. Getting lost in a highway
system caught perpetually in the postindustrial infrastructural loops
and darkness, these two senior professors quickly resorted to their
common musical memories to form a common bond and provide an
emotional anchor. The author reflects that although the members of
this Cultural Revolution generation were deprived in their own ways,
their cultural and communal adherence is the envy of the younger
generation. We must admit that this sturdy cultural embeddedness
is foreign not only to the younger generation in China but also to
most people in Western liberal societies. This sense of assurance—
that there are people around them sharing the same aesthetic bonds
and cultural memories—cannot be replicated easily in today’s con-
sumer society.
We believe that the Cultural Revolution model performances, or
yangbanxi (which were mostly operas), as well as the entire musical
2 PAUL CLARK, LAIKWAN PANG, AND TSANHUANG TSAI
culture of the period form the backbone of the revolutionary culture

of the time, when everyone listened to the same music and sang the
same set of arias at political gatherings, in schools, and in their public
and private lives. While the official culture of the time had many senso-
rial and aesthetic dimensions, music was its central component. Today
we might look down on this type of revolutionary music as clichéd
and monotonous, but these works continue to be powerful in provid-
ing people with a sense of emotional anchorage in a rapidly chang-
ing world. This uplifting musical culture, stressing transcendence and
magnificence, clearly carries strong ideological messages and political
values. In this book, we strive to explain how the music was political,
and how politics can also become musical. More than most other cul-
tural forms, music is abstract in content, yet it can also send concrete
messages and have a concrete impact on people. If the musicians at the
time were given the task of translating politics into music, we are now
trying to do the reverse, and with full awareness that meanings could
be both lost and created in translations. As such, we are not here to
explain how music was used as a transparent tool to carry political mes-
sages, but to emphasize that there were necessarily mistranslations and
ambiguities. Through this analysis, we can further explore the mean-
ings of the Cultural Revolution, a historical project that was meant to
change the “soul” of the people, through drastic destructions and con-
structions. This book aims to illustrate both the musical and the politi-
cal meanings of this musical culture by exploring their interactions and
mutual translations before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.
While the music styles acceptable to the regime were limited, we
would be wrong to consider this musical culture as composed solely of
a few famous arias or operas. First, there were at least 11 model, new-
style Peking operas on different themes circulating at the time. There
were also ballet dramas highlighting popular songs (such as “The North
Wind Blows” in The White-Haired Girl). Symphonic works and a piano
recital were also included in the yangbanxi repertoire. New feature films
were produced in the early 1970s, and many of them featured new music
scores and interludes (see chapter 5 in this volume). Most importantly,
there were many more transplanted dramas produced by local opera
troupes based on the original stories of the yangbanxi Peking operas,
the musical styles of which were already hybrid (see chapters 6, 7, and
8). At the same time, many revolutionary songs were produced and
broadcast, along with yangbanxi music, by the loudspeakers put up in
the public spaces in almost every community. Classical music—Western
and Chinese—was not entirely suppressed. Some of them were trans-
formed into revolutionary forms and some were rescued for different
INTRODUCTION 3
purposes—such as for the sole appreciation of Chairman Mao himself

(see chapters 2 and 9). Music was central to the revolutionary culture
of the time, with the yangbanxi occupying a pivotal position while dif-
ferent kinds of music were also created or revived.
Although it was a time of forced homogenization, and most people
had limited access to music, overall they listened to a much wider range
of music than is often assumed. In terms of musical form, although
China’s unique national forms were emphasized, internationalism still
underlined the entire revolutionary culture, indirectly indicating a
relatively open mind-set to different cultural forms (see chapter 4).
In terms of social penetration, it was also a time when amateur per-
formances were encouraged, so that music no longer belonged solely
to professionals or to those who had the proper training. Music was
“democratized” to be accessible to the entire population, and every-
one could become revolutionary through music (see chapter 3). It
was also a long decade, and the musical culture changed substantially
during the period. In the early years, many revolutionary songs were
created by the Red Guards on their own; these would be replaced by
institutionalized music productions in the 1970s. The musical styles
of the yangbanxi also underwent a substantial transformation, which
is discussed in detail in some of the chapters included in this volume
(in chapters 1 and 10). This rich repertoire of music would continue
to impress the people, and the soundscapes of the Cultural Revolution
have never stopped being relevant ever since (see chapter 11). We do
not want to overstress the diversity of the musical culture, but we
should also not make a blanket characterization, or even condemna-
tion, of the music on the basis of a quick impression, because behind
it are actually many layers of history and culture.
As official records, personal recollections, and unpublished mate-
rials (such as program notes and recordings) become increasingly
accessible, new horizons are opening up for the study of this musical
culture. New materials are available for us to question the orthodox
view of the era as one of destruction and loss and to encourage new
perspectives in terms of understanding the creativity and experimenta-
tion that took place at that time. The work of China-based scholars
such as Yang Jian (1993), and works of scholars such as Paul Clark
(2008 and 2012) and Barbara Mittler (2013), among others, reflect
the emergence of new, more nuanced approaches and assessments of
the Cultural Revolution experience.2 There are now new possibili-
ties for us to understand how the musical experience of the Cultural
Revolution impacted Chinese identity and views of the world. Studies
of the visual dimensions of the Cultural Revolution tell us that the
period was a “colorful” era. By focusing on the yangbanxi and the

larger musical culture, this book analyzes the sonic dimension of the
Cultural Revolution, demonstrating that it was not only colorful but
also noisy. The focus on the Cultural Revolution’s revolutionary music
will help us to understand the connection between the inner and outer
worlds of individuals, and, in turn, how they related their own private
sensory experiences to their collective political lives. We believe that
there are specific routes of memories constructed via audio experi-
ences, and also unique ways for people to remember them and relate
to history. The music of this era formed subjects by suturing both the
musicians and listeners into the contemporary revolutionary spirit.
Unfortunately, discussion of the Cultural Revolution still requires
academic caution in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where
an extensive censorship and self-censorship mechanism is in place in
relation to the publication of Cultural Revolution studies. In the area
of the yangbanxi, there is no lack of mainland scholars researching
the era, but they often rely on online platforms or venues in Hong
Kong and Taiwan to publish their research.3 In the English-speaking
world, new scholarship is also continually being produced.4 But the
two strands of scholarship tend to be driven by different emphases:
the Chinese scholarship often stresses the importance of historical cor-
rection and accuracy, while the studies in English devote themselves
primarily to careful textual analysis of the more famous works, which
can be found and studied on celluloid, and there is a lack of scholarly
exchange and debate between the two. Unfortunately, there are still
relatively few works investigating the diversity and legacy of the musi-
cal culture of the era.5 We now have a historical opportunity to com-
bine the strengths of various approaches to explore the real historical
significance of this musical culture, which was actively constructed
by using Chinese folk songs, local operas, instrumental music, and
Western instrumental music. Referring to many individuals’ personal
experiences and memories, we also realize more fully that the musical
productions of the era were a part of people’s everyday life and had
lasting effects on their relationships with the world—as that night-
time song in a car on a lost road outside Beijing indicated.
The chapters in this volume challenge readers to not only pay atten-
tion to the music of this noisy political era but also to be alert to catch
any unexpected, discordant sounds in this highly political period.
Listening mindfully to the rich soundscape will lead us to the heart
of the Cultural Revolution and to an understanding of how “culture”
played an essential part in this era. The individual chapters investi-
gate, from a rich variety of perspectives, the tensions and interactions
INTRODUCTION 5
between politics and aesthetics, the center and the periphery, and
subjectivity and sensuality. This collection explores how the Cultural
Revolution was experienced by ordinary people and artists, as well as
by political leaders, and how the sensory was retranslated into political
actions—or, we should acknowledge, often into indifference. By listen-
ing mindfully, we resist ignoring and forgetting; by listening carefully,
we give the fleeting and lasting sounds the attention they deserve.
This collection brings together the most recent research in this
topic by specialists from different parts of the world. These scholars
come from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, cul-
tural studies, and literary studies, demonstrating the interdisciplinary
approach needed to engage in such a project. This ensemble shows
how interdisciplinary collaboration is needed in the study of Cultural
Revolution culture, and how historical depth has to be supported by
rigorous theoretical and contextual studies to understand the rich
meanings of this significant event in twentieth-century Chinese and
global history. The chapters in this book combine to demonstrate that
this vibrant subject has rich scholarly resonance for other studies and
academic concerns. We will also demonstrate that it is no longer suf-
ficient and desirable to study this important “political” event as simply
a product of political maneuvering. The exceptionality of the Cultural
Revolution is best approached from a diversity of cultural and social
perspectives to understand the occurrence of historical changes then
and since. Studies, like this one, of such a transformative historical era
help us to grasp that the so-called end-of-history epoch in which we
are caught is more constructed than natural. We need to rediscover
the links between our allegedly “peaceful” time and the revolutionary
era that marched to a different beat. History—especially that of the
Cultural Revolution—is still a living presence in China and beyond.
The Chapters
This book is divided into three parts encompassing the music’s ideol-
ogy, aesthetics and politics of dissemination, and its lasting impact
to the present day. We begin with the question of revolution and
explore why and how a new musical culture was constructed during
that particular time. In chapter 1, Dai Jiafang introduces us to the
development of the Peking opera yangbanxi music. Demonstrating
its musical development in three different stages, the chapter provides
sophisticated musical analysis based on the author’s very rich musical
knowledge of the Peking opera, which incorporated many types of
Chinese and Western music. It also explains how the music workers
strived for perfection. Tsan-Huang Tsai brings us to a different side

of the musical culture in chapter 2, illustrating the fate of the seven-
stringed zither as a traditional instrument in new, revolutionary times.
The chapter demonstrates how the gentle and tender zither quietly
survived the turbulent period celebrating loud and heroic music, and
how it ended up being one of the instruments in the ensemble that
created the favorite music of Mao in his last years of ill health.
The other three chapters in this part focus more directly on the
political meanings of the operas, illustrating that politics and music are
intimately connected. In chapter 3, Laurence Coderre shows how the
music of the Cultural Revolution was internalized by most Chinese.
She digs deep into the characterization of the villains in yangbanxi
to show us how, for many audience members at the time, they were
ironically the more attractive or engaging characters. She also dem-
onstrates how important opera characterization was to the overall
politics of the period. In chapter 4, Ban Wang offers an insightful
and meticulous analysis of On the Docks to demonstrate the range of
impact of the Cultural Revolution model operas. He shows the role of
the opera in the international relations of the PRC at that time, which
necessarily weaves back to the sensation and understanding of indi-
vidual audience members. This chapter reminds us how international-
ism was an important principle in the Cultural Revolution decade and
that this ideology could actually be staged theatrically and musically.
Cinema was one of the most important media to convey all kinds of
new music to the people, and in chapter 5, Paul Clark reminds us that
most of the population were introduced to the yangbanxi through
films. He shows how films helped people to sing and remember the
songs and demonstrates how the visual dimension of cinema rein-
forced the enduring power of the music.
The second part of the volume focuses on the transmission of the new
Peking opera yangbanxi repertoire to the huge population of China.
In order to introduce this highly selected and perfected repertoire to
such a vast country, the original theatrical form of the yangbanxi had
to be adapted and remediated in other forms. This part is devoted as
much to the musical forms as it is to the means of transmission and
distribution. The three chapters of part II complicate and challenge the
assumption that China’s musical culture was unified and singular. The
adaptation, or “transplantation,” of the yangbanxi was a central but
poorly studied cultural policy of the time. In chapter 6, Laikwan Pang
focuses on Cantonese opera, demonstrating the difficulties and efforts
of Cantonese opera workers to present the rigidly defined Peking-
opera yangbanxi in their own regional musical styles. Pang argues that
INTRODUCTION 7
the aural dimension—that is, the local dialect and the local musical
structure—was much more resilient to homogenization than the stage
dimensions. In chapter 7, Chuen-Fung Wong provides a close study
of the Uyghur adaptations of The Red Lantern in China’s northwest,
while in chapter 8, Rowan Pease brings us to a transplantation of Song
of the Dragon River by the Korean minority people in the northeast of
China. The two parallel studies demonstrate how a common policy led
to two completely different outcomes. While the Xinjiang Legend of
the Red Lantern is still considered a gem of the local musical tradition,
the Korean Song of the Dragon River is no longer remembered, and
many local people actually favored the original Peking opera over the
Korean adaptation. As a whole, these three case studies, focusing on
geographical areas at the margins of the country, combine to show the
diversity of China and explain how difficult it was for the yangbanxi
project to be “transplanted” across diverse communities.
Part III of the volume places Cultural Revolution music in its his-
torical continuum, demonstrating how the revolutionary music con-
tinues to matter in classical and popular music culture today. This
musical culture is rooted in bold experimentation and demonstrates
a strong life and propensity for creativity, despite radical changes in
China since the 1970s. In chapter 9, John Winzenburg traces the
musical experimentations long before the Cultural Revolution that
ultimately laid the ground for, and contributed to, yangbanxi musi-
cal innovation. The fusion of Western and Chinese music reflects the
aspirations of a people trying to conceive something entirely new, yet
the introduction of symphonic music to traditional Chinese operas
can be traced to different origins, both inside and outside China.
Providing musical analysis of this music, the other two chapters also
follow history and trace the afterlives of the music since the Cultural
Revolution. In chapter 10, Nancy Yunhwa Rao illustrates how this
music has influenced the classical music composition by internationally
renowned Chinese artists during the decades since. She shows that yang-
banxi music made a lasting impact on many Chinese musicians, however
much they wanted to reject the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in chap-
ter 11, Barbara Mittler analyzes how this revolutionary music continues
to inspire new popular music even today. Precisely because the music
was not simply a political tool, and as there was much to be enjoyed—
aesthetically and sensationally—these artistic products were carved into
the collective memory and taste at the popular level. The three chapters
in this part combine to place the revolutionary music in a historical con-
text, demonstrating that the Cultural Revolution musical culture was
not just a result of the directives of a few leaders. It was also more than
a simple replacement of elite music with mass music, as the elitist music
and the popular music intersected and interacted profoundly. The resul-
tant harmony and disharmony deserve more of our attention.
Notes
1. Yang Qingxiang 㜐⸮䤍, “Bashi hou, zenmeban?” 80⎶炻⾶ᷰ≆烎
(Post-1980 Generation: What Are We Going to Do with Them?)”
Jintian Ṳ⣑ (Today) 102 (Autumn 2013): 7.
2. See Yang Jian’s 㜐‍ pioneering Wenhua dageming zhong de dixia
wenxue 㔯⊾⣏朑␥ᷕ䘬⛘ᶳ㔯⬠ (Underground Literatures of the
Cultural Revolution) (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993); Paul
Clark The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Paul Clark, Youth Culture in
China: From Red Guards to Netizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), Chapter 2 (“Markng Out New Spaces: Red
Guards, Educated Youth, and Opening Up”); and Barbara Mittler,
A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012).
3. A notable set of recent publications in this regard are the two
volumes of chronicles put together by Li Song 㛶㜦, titled
“Yangbanxi” biannian shi “㟟㜧ㆷ” 䶐⸜⎚ (A Chronicle of
Model Opera of the Chinese Cultural Revolution) (Taipei: Xiuwei,
2011–2012). See also Dai Jiafang ㇜▱㜳, Zouxiang huimie: Yu
Huiyong de fuchenlu 崘⎹㭩䀕: ḶỂ␷䘬㴖㰱⻽ (Walking towards
Destruction: The Ups and Downs of Yu Huiyong) (Beijing:
Guangming ribao chubanshe, 1994); Liang Maochun 㠩努㗍,
“Rang yinyueshi yanjiu shenru xiaqu: Qiantan‘wenge’ yinyue yan-
jiu” (孑枛᷸⎚䞼䨞㶙ℍᶳ⍣烉㳭宰“㔯朑”枛᷸䞼䨞) (Let Music
History Go Deep: Preliminary Studies of “Cultural Revolution”
Music), Yinyue yishu 枛᷸刢㛗 (Music Arts), 4 of 2006: 19–27;
Wei Jun 櫷⅃, “Zhandi xinge: ‘Wenge’ yinyue de lishi zhuanbian ㇀
⛘㕘㫴烉“㔯朑”枛᷸䘬⌮⎚弔⎀ (New Songs from the Battlefield:
Historical Changes of “Cultural Revolution” Music), Huangzhong
湬摇 (Yellow Bell), 3 of 2009, 111–117.
4. See Rosemary Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of
Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–
1976) (Boston: Brill, 2010). There is also a special issue of The
Opera Quarterly 26(2–3) (2010) devoted to Chinese operas, with
four articles concerning the yangbanxi.
5. Paul Clark’s and Barbara Mittler’s are the only recent books in
English that include analyses of the musical culture of the time.
Both authors of these wide-ranging monographs contribute their
new research to our volume.
PA RT I
Temporality: Continuity and Change in

Cultural Revolution Music
C H A P T ER 1
A Diachronic Study of Jingju Yangbanxi

Model Peking Opera Music
Dai Jiafang
Translated by Lau Sze Wing
In the musics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution period of the twen-

tieth century, model Peking opera (jingju yangbanxi Ṕ∏㟟㜧ㆷ)
is undoubtedly the centre of interest—and with good reason. First,
model Peking opera is a prolific genre. Among the 19 officially recog-
nized model performances, 11—that is, over half—are Peking operas
(jingju Ṕ∏).1 Second, many musical innovations of model Peking
opera were highly effective, achieving satisfying results. Well received
by professionals, they have been adopted over and over again, even to
the present day, creating a lasting legacy. Thus, for decades, scholars
have diligently studied the music of model Peking opera. However,
most existing writing focuses on the musical materials only synchron-
ically and overlook the diachronic aspect—the process of artistic evo-
lution of the genre in such a short timespan of just over ten years. This
is the focus of this chapter.
Broadly speaking, model Peking opera was formed and developed
as follows. Well before the Cultural Revolution, in the summer of
1964, the Modern Peking Opera Festival was held in Beijing. Several
operas shown at the festival, namely, The Red Lantern presented
by the China Peking Opera Company, Shajiabang by the Beijing
Peking Opera Troupe, and Raid on the White Tiger Regiment by the
Shandong Peking Opera Troupe, were fairly mature in shape. Their
music received little revision after the occasion. Shortly before the
Cultural Revolution began, the Shanghai Peking Opera Company
made key revisions to two operas shown at the festival—Taking Tiger
12 DAI JIAFANG
Mountain by Strategy and On the Docks. Their vocal music (changq-

iang ⓙ僼) parts became largely fixed. In 1967, these five Peking
operas were enlisted in the first batch of model performances, the
“Eight Model Performances.” After 1968, the five model Peking
operas were adapted into movies. Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
successfully experimented with a score for a Chinese–Western mixed
orchestra. All subsequent model Peking operas took up the same
form of orchestration. In 1970 came a second batch of newly created
model performances, which included The Red Detachment of Women
and Fighting on the Plain by the China Peking Opera Company, Song
of the Dragon River and Boulder Bay by the Shanghai Peking Opera
Company, Azalea Mountain by the Beijing Peking Opera Troupe,
and Red Cloud Ridge by the Shandong Peking Opera Troupe.
The creation of model Peking opera music went through three
stages, each of which inherited certain creative techniques from the
previous period while developing its own distinctive artistic features.
The Early Stage of Model Peking Opera:

Artistic Features and Representative Works
T HE R ED L ANTERN and S HAJIABANG
Before the Cultural Revolution, what became the kinds of model
Peking operas were called modern Peking operas (jingju xiandaixi
Ṕ∏䍘ẋㆷ). They were modern in two aspects: first, the stories were
modern and revolutionary and the characters were revolutionists; and
second, to accustom audiences to the expressive requirements of mod-
ern themes and characters, the means of artistic expression—and the
musical form in particular—were expanded. This instilled the operas
with a modern flavor compared with traditional Peking operas.
Peking opera originated in the Hui and Han areas and came to its
present shape during the Daoguang emperor’s reign (1820–1850)
during the Qing dynasty. Thereafter, in just over a century, Peking
opera flourished and spread all over China, producing a vast num-
ber of repertoires and performers. Peking opera is now one of the
biggest Chinese theater genres, with its own musical conventions
and fairly high artistic standards. However, the music of traditional
Peking opera has numerous shortcomings in telling stories about
contemporary life and people. First, in the past century, Peking opera
master performers made advances in adapting melodic modes of sing-
ing (xuanfa changfa 㕳㱽ⓙ㱽) based on the types of roles in which
they specialized. With much skill, they developed many distinct
JINGJU YANGBANXI MODEL OPERA MUSIC 13
performance schools (liupai 㳩㳦). Yet, these musical modes only

contain stereotyped features of gender and role, and lack expressive
capacity for individual characters. Next, Peking opera has a rigid,
standardized formula of vocal music schema governing the transition
between arias and choice of metrical types. These imposed restraints
on musical creativity to a certain degree. Furthermore, the accompa-
nying ensemble music of Peking opera has the shortcoming of being
always high-pitched, loud, sharp in timbre, and rather monotonous
in mood. It accompanies singing well but is not adequate for asso-
ciation with stage settings, or establishing atmosphere, conveying
moods, and expressing feelings at a deeper level.
Due to the big gap between the conventional styles of Peking opera
music and the spirit of contemporary life, the music of model Peking
opera needed historic expansions and reforms based on the principle
of “following a formula but not restricted to the formula.” The few
mature works presented at the Modern Peking Opera Festival in 1964
were arranged for a Chinese–Western mixed orchestra, and brief revi-
sion of instrumental parts occurred later.2 The vocal music set in the
early 1970s did not differ much from the earlier, 1964 versions. Those
few works may be categorized as early-stage model Peking operas.
The most outstanding operas in that group are The Red Lantern and
Shajiabang, both of which received national acclaim in 1964.
In the music of early-stage model Peking operas, creativity is
mainly shown in the vocal music (changqiang ⓙ僼), as mentioned
above. Conventionally, Peking opera librettos are written based on
the vocal characteristics of some well-known performers of the par-
ticular opera—that is, “music before libretto.”3 In contrast, model
Peking opera followed the new convention of “libretto before music.”
The vocal music was written to serve the drama: it had to cater for
the new themes and convey a contemporary spirit. The emphasis
was on the embodiment of personal characters and the delivery of
drama. Instead of assigning one single personality to every character,
the music of each character changed in association with their differ-
ing mood and thinking. Those who participated in the vocal music
design of early model Peking operas were mostly Peking opera per-
formers and instrumentalists, who employed traditional Peking opera
school elements and techniques as the foundation and carefully built
up from there.
Yet, in determining performance school styles, whether or not a
certain style could match the character’s personality in the drama was
taken into careful consideration. For example, the bright, lively Xun
(Huisheng) style was assigned to Li Tiemei in The Red Lantern and
14 DAI JIAFANG
Sister A Qing in Shajiabang.4 For Diao Deyi in Shajiabang—a person

who is shadowy and cunning but pretends to be carefree—the forth-
right, eloquent Ma (Lianliang) style was utilized.5 In the same opera,
Guo Jianguang was given the Tan (Xinpei) style not only because
the performer at that time was a direct successor of the Tan (Xinpei)
school, but also because Tan (Xinpei)’s sonorous, ringing tone matches
with Guo Jianguang’s staunch and patient character.6 Li Yuhe’s music
in The Red Lantern carries some features of the Li style of the role’s
first performer, Li Shaochun.7 Nevertheless, compared with the old
way of “tailoring” the music according to the vocal school style of the
role’s most popular performer, the Li Yuhe vocal music design shows
a number of innovations.
In early model Peking operas, vocal music was written with utmost
care to portray characters’ personalities and their thinking through all
scenes so that the drama might be presented accurately. Techniques
used are discussed below.
The first technique, within the two fundamental modal sys-
tems of the lively, sonorous xipi 大䙖 and the subtle and expressive
erhuang Ḵ湬, metrical types (banshi 㜧⺷), and school styles, were
selected carefully according to the characters’ personalities and dra-
matic needs in every scene. For example, in the second scene of The
Red Lantern, when Li Yuhe and the messenger are parting, Li Yuhe
sings “No Difficulty can Daunt a Communist” (tianxiashi nanbu-
dao gongchandangyuan) in erhuang fast-three-eyes meter (kuaisanyan
⾓ᶱ䛤), which feels expressive but heavy. After receiving a dinner
invitation from the Japanese officer Hatoyama, he says goodbye to
Grandma Li and Tiemei in the aria “The Wine Fills Me with Courage
and Strength” (hunshen shi dan xiongjiujiu). To depict his righteous,
undaunted mentality in face of a deadly peril, and to highlight his
heartfelt, meaningful last words to Grandma Li and Tiemei, the music
is in the passionate, heroic xipi two-six meter (erliu Ḵℕ).
Music writers even constructed new metrical types to meet special
dramatic demands. For instance, in Raid on the White Tiger Regiment,
Yan Weicai’s “The Flowers of Chinese–Korean Friendship are Watered
with Blood” (ZhongChao youyi huaduo shi xianxue lai jiaoguan) and
Aunt Choi’s “A Colorful Rainbow Appears Over Anpyong Mountain”
(anpingshan shang caihong xian), when she sees the Chinese People’s
Voluntary Army, both contain North Korean musical features. They
are in xipi one-clap-two-eyes meter (yibaneryan ᶨ㜧Ḵ䛤), forged
after the three-four-dance meter, which suggests that the North
Koreans are good at singing and dancing, and shows the friendly rela-
tionship between Chinese and the Korean people and armies, painting
a touching picture of their jubilant meeting. In The Red Lantern, when

Li Yuhe affectionately bids farewell to Grandma Li on the execution
ground, he sings “The Party Teaches Me to Be a Strong Man of Iron”
(Dang jiao er zuo yige gangqiang tiehan). To adapt to the relatively
high speed of speech, erhuang two-six meter is used, created by put-
ting two-six meter, flowing-water meter (liushui 㳩㯜) and fast meter
(kuaiban ⾓㜧) of the xipi modal system into erhuang.
The language used in modern Peking opera is vernacular. Song lyrics
have diverse forms and are not limited to conventional seven-character
and ten-character lines. Following this, in the second design technique,
augmentation and diminution in vocal music in model Peking operas
are much more frequent than in traditional Peking operas. Only rarely
does a musical phrase fully conform to traditional codes. To articulate
characters’ expression in specific scenes, instrumental interludes pre-
pare and dramatize moods before leading to arias. Therefore, instru-
ments and voices work in collaboration to strengthen the characters’
delivery in the drama. For instance, in Scene 5 of The Red Lantern,
after listening to Grandma recounting their family history, Li Tiemei
sinks into deep reflection and sings “They are Shining Examples for Us
All” (zuoren yao zuo zheyang di ren). The music begins with a leisurely,
supple instrumental introduction in xipi dispersed meter (sanban
㔋㜧), filled with Peking-opera violin (jinghu Ṕ傉) vocabulary that
builds a contemplative atmosphere. The music then transports through
shaking meter (yaoban ㏯㜧). When Tiemei sings the line “Why daddy
and uncle were not afraid of taking risks” (weishenme diedie biaoshu
bupa dan fengxian), the last half of the clause enters the measured,
square-primary meter (yuanban ⍇㜧). After asking that deep, seri-
ous question from her heart, vocal augmentation is given to the word
“risks” (xian 昑) with a slow, long, winding melody, disclosing the
query in Tiemei’s heart that has remained unanswered. The interlude
that follows presents repetitive rhythms and two ascending, wobbling
melodies accompanied by a gradual increase in speed and volume,
depicting the rising thoughts in Tiemei’s mind. After sufficient time
comes a brief pause followed by Tiemei’s forceful outcry, “It was all for
saving China, saving the poor and defeating Japanese soldiers!” (weide
shi jiu Zhongguo, jiu qiongren, dabai guizibing). The answer has finally
dawned on her.
Besides designing personified vocal melodies and rhythmic figu-
rations, there is a third vocal music design technique in the model
operas. This captures the specific tones of the characters’ delivery in
different scenarios and settings through music, further developing
their personalities. Li Tiemei in The Red Lantern is a revolutionary
16 DAI JIAFANG
descendant. She is only 17 years old and brims with a lively, youth-
ful spirit. Her first appearance in the opera comes with the narra-
tive passage “They’re Men with Loyal, Crimson Hearts” (douyou yike
hongliang de xin) in traditional flowing-water meter, and not without
respective artistic treatment. The lyrics of the aria are at times square
and dense, while at other times they are loose and sparse. Because
of this arrangement of the lyrics and Tiemei’s unique disposition,
“although” (sui shuo shi 嘥宜㗗) of “although they were relatives they
did not acknowledge each other in the open” (sui shuo shi qinjuan
you bu xiangren) is repeated. There are also brief augmentation and
decorating notes on “subtle” (miao ⥁), “can” (neng 傥), and “guess”
(cai 䋄) of “I can guess part of the subtle secret behind this” (zheli
de aomiao wo yeneng cai chu jifen). Treatment of these meticulous
details in melody and rhythm actually causes a breakthrough from the
elementary form of xipi flowing-water meter. It makes the music flow
and sound fresh. It also sharply delineates the qualities shown by little
Tiemei during her first appearance in the opera—good at observation
and analysis, yet not very mature as she is young and lively.
It is particularly worth noting that the vocal music design of early
model Peking operas did not just emphasize the depiction of the good
characters’ personalities. The bad characters, likewise, received careful
artistic treatment. In Shajiabang, Hu Chuankui’s “Thinking of the
Past” (xiangdangchu), Diao Deyi’s “I Just Heard the Commander
Describing You” (shicai tingde siling jiang), and his “Granny Sha,
Don’t Take That to Heart” (Shalaotai xiudeyao xiangbukai) all pos-
sess strong personalities and tastes. In the scene of “A Battle of Wits”
(Douzhi) in Shajiabang, Sister A Qing, Hu Chuankui, and Diao Deyi
sing a trio. It adopts traditional beigong but at the same time breaks
from the beigong custom of using one metrical type throughout.8
Instead, it alternates between shaking meter and flowing-water meter.
Given that the trio “Red Flowers Need Green Leaves to Set Them
Off” (honghua hai xu lüye fu) can vividly depict Sister A Qing’s mind
game with her enemies in her pretense of relaxation while secretly
guarding against them, the strong backup by Hu Chuankui’s and
Diao Deyi’s singing is clearly indispensable.
In addition, the vocal music design of early model Peking operas
took into consideration the development of characters’ thinking
and personalities through the course of the story. The overall design
was thus multidimensional and multilayered, and the style consis-
tent, albeit with variety. All songs were carefully written with the
aim of shaping all characters accurately. This is especially evident in
The Red Lantern.
Li Yuhe, one of the three major figures in the opera, is a mature

undercover agent in the story. His arias throughout the opera were
mostly designed to indirectly sketch his strong revolutionary charac-
ter. His opening aria, “The Poor Man’s Child Shares the Household
Burden from an Early Age” (qiongren de haizi zao dangjia), reveals
his parent-like love for Tiemei, the young revolutionary. His duet
with the man who whets the knife, “Our People are Fuming with
Discontent” (you duoshao ku tongbao yuanshengzaidao), manifests the
care and empathy he feels for his countrymen who are suffering at the
hands of the Japanese, triggering his fighting spirit. “No Difficulty Can
Daunt a Communist” (tianxiashi nanbudao Gongchandangyuan),
which he sings when waving good bye to the messenger, shows his
love and care for his revolutionary comrades and his faith in final
victory. After receiving Hatoyama’s dinner invitation, he bids fare-
well to Grandma Li and Tiemei by singing “The Wine Fills Me with
Courage and Strength” (hunshen shi dan xiongjiujiu). The aria dis-
plays his intelligence and shows how he is not disturbed when con-
fronted by dangers, because of his fighting experience as well as his
passionate love for his family. He sings “Facing the Enemy Easily, as
Lofty as a Mountain” (songrong duidi weiran ru shan) at the din-
ner with Hatoyama. This shows his calmness, and sufficient mental
preparation for tackling the enemy’s conspiracy and the cruel battle
ahead. “My Courage Soars Sky High” (xiongxin zhuanzhi chong
yuntian), and “The Party Teaches Me to be a Strong Man of Iron”
(Dang jiao er zuo yige gangqiang tiehan), earlier sung to Grandma
Li—both of which he sings on the execution ground—present him
as a communist who, having survived cruel torture, looks forward
to the revolution’s future and firmly believes in its final victory. The
arias portray how he faces death with equanimity, righteousness, and
steely willpower. His last words to Grandma Li and Tiemei express
the deep connection they share, and his confidence that succeed-
ing revolutionaries will emerge. Painting the Communists indirectly,
all these arias create a vigorous image that is full of national hatred
toward the enemy but full of love for his family and the proletariat.
A courageous, intelligent Communist with steely willpower for the
revolution is brought alive on stage for the audience.
Compared with Li Yuhe, the overall arrangement of Tiemei’s
music focuses on her inner progress as she matures under cruel fight-
ing circumstances. Her first aria, “They’re Men with Loyal, Crimson
Hearts” (douyou yike hongliang de xin), depicts a young and clever
girl with a hint of childishness. After Grandma Li recounts the ori-
gin of the red lantern and their family history (in which the three
18 DAI JIAFANG
characters formed a family without blood ties), she sings the thought-
ful “They are Shining Examples for Us All” and the stirring, heroic
“Never Leaving the Field until Victory is Won” (da bu jin chail-
ang juebu xia zhanchang). When the question in her heart is finally
answered, she realizes the importance of the way of the revolution
and feels a strong commitment. When she sees Li Yuhe on the execu-
tion ground, she sings “Hoping Day and Night” (riye panwang) and
“Shining Gloriously Ahead for Evermore” (guanghui zhao er yong
xiangqian). These arias are filled with gratitude and passionate love
for Li Yuhe, the man who raised Tiemei, and reveal Tiemei’s resolu-
tion in following her adoptive father’s footsteps, assuming his revolu-
tionary commitment, and taking up the revolutionary mission. After
the Japanese kill Li Yuhe and Grandma Li, Hatoyama releases Tiemei
in a strategic, long-term plan to get major returns. Tiemei sings
“Biting my Hatred, Chewing My Rage” (chouhen ruxin yao faya),
in which the valiant xipi children’s-tunes meter (wawadiao ⦫⦫宫)
for the xiaosheng (young male) role is inserted to demonstrate how
Tiemei has become mentally mature and tough, putting hatred into
action, firmly determined to work for the revolution. Step by step,
those arias portray the logical development of Li Tiemei’s thinking
and personality.
The music of the major figures began to be organized into core
arias, primary arias and secondary arias in the music writing of
the early model Peking operas. The core arias express the compli-
cated, mixed feelings of characters at dramatic climaxes. They were
composed with the suite structure conventions borrowed from
traditional Peking opera, accommodating several metrical types
in an aria. With large capacity, clear dynamic contrast, and rich
layering, suite arias can comprehensively delineate the highs and
lows of various characters’ inner emotions, including the turning
points in their thinking. In other words, music writers substantially
employed all means to craft the mental dimension of characters in
the finest detail.
In the traditional vocal suite structure, rhythmic movement and
change of speed in the transition among metrical types constitute
the structure. Specified speed and rhythm are distinguishing features
of suite formulae. Possible formulae include: (1) going from slow
to fast speed and staying in one principle mode only; (2) beginning
with a lead-in meter (daoban ⮤㜧) and undulating-dragon meter
(huilong ⚆潁); (3) alternating between measured and dispersed
metrical types or between fast and slow speeds; (4) an integration of
the previous three types of arrangement; and (5) a principal mode of
a modal system and its inverse mode. In early model Peking operas,
all core arias in a suite structure use combinations of various metrical
types in the principal mode. Many begin with a lead-in meter and
undulating-dragon meter or alternate between measured metrical
types and dispersed metrical types, or between fast and slow speeds.
For primary and secondary arias that are medium and small in scale
there are usually only one or two metrical types, respectively. They,
nonetheless, have adopted the suite structure’s alternation between
measured and dispersed metrical types, or between fast and slow
speeds, to intensify expressiveness despite the limited variation in
metrical types.
The design of instrumental music in the early model Peking operas
also absorbed elements from traditional Peking opera and devel-
oped them. In model Peking operas, the traditional “Three Major
Instruments” are not solely used for the purpose of accompaniment.
Instrumental passages such as huqin fixed-melodies (qupai 㚚䇴)
and action-strings (xingxian 埴⻎) were composed for these instru-
ments.9 In Scene 6, “Music for Sister A Qing’s Nianbai Speech” of
Shajiabang, the enemy forbids fishing at the lake, so Sister A Qing
cannot reach the wounded warriors who are in hiding beside the
lake. The music mimics the consuming worries in Sister A Qing’s
heart. The melody and structure are idiosyncratic and innovative,
but accurately grasp the essence of huqin fixed-melodies’ vocabu-
lary to make a very charming ensemble piece for the “Three Major
Instruments.”
In summary, the creation of the music in the early model Peking
operas achieved success mainly through vocal music design. Different
from traditional Peking operas, the early model Peking operas are
modern dramas on contemporary themes. The first concern is the
thinking and personalities of the characters—especially the major
characters—and their development in the story. From elements as
small as vocal phrase structure and melodic decoration to such large
schemes as suite aria structures and the opera’s overall plan, music
writers worked with all materials available to strive for artistic per-
fection in crafting the characters. The tactic was to continue con-
ventions while introducing new developments. The music writers
tried to retain traditional Peking opera elements and made skillful
modifications when applying them in the new works. Therefore, the
arias of the early model Peking operas offer both familiarity and nov-
elty. They leap out of the conventional melodic frame but still con-
tain a profound Peking opera feel. Audiences and professionals alike
responded with overwhelming applause.
20 DAI JIAFANG
The Middle Stage of Model Peking Opera

Music: Artistic Features and Representative
Works, TAKING T IGER M OUNTAIN BY S TRATEG Y
and O N THE D OCKS
The most outstanding representatives of the middle-stage model
Peking operas, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and On the Docks,
first appeared in 1966 and underwent major revisions in 1968.
Compared with the early-stage model Peking operas, a lot of pro-
fessional composers were involved in writing the middle-stage model
Peking opera music as core contributors. The early-stage model Peking
opera music writers focused on vocal music design and embraced
changes to the legacy of traditional Peking opera. The music of the
middle-stage model Peking operas built on the accomplishment of
the early-stage model Peking operas and incorporated further inno-
vations. New possibilities regarding songs, instrumental writing, and
ways to empower the music with individual personality and the spirit
of the age were explored with obviously greater determination. Highly
notable new effects were attained.
New Breakthroughs in Vocal Music Design

The music design of the middle-stage model Peking operas continued
the early-stage experience of selecting appropriate opera school styles
to delineate the characters’ personalities and deliver the drama. In
addition, new techniques of music composition were applied.
To intensify tension and increase the levels of expression through
rhythm, meter, and speed, a new array of metrical types not avail-
able in traditional Peking opera were devised. In On the Docks, xipi
undulating-dragon meter in the central character. Fang Haizhen’s
“The Tempest Uplifts our Fighting Spirit” (baofengyu geng zhengtian
zhandou haoqing), xipi broad meter (kuanban ⭥㜧) in her “I have
carefully read the Communiqué from the Plenum” (xi du le quanhui
gongbao), and xipi row meter (paiban ㌺㜧) in Ma Hongliang’s “The
Great Leap Forward has Changed the Face of the Docks” (Dayuejin
ba matou di mianmao gai) are all metrical types that the music writ-
ers conceived in the xipi modal system. In Taking Tiger Mountain by
Strategy, erhuang two-six meter, coined in the early stage of model
Peking opera musical development, is used in Yang Zirong’s “I have
the Morning Sun in My Heart” (xiong you zhaoyang) and the duet
piece “Is This a Dream That I am Seeing, My Child?” (nandao shuo
yu haier xiangfeng zai mengjing) between Li Yongqi and Mother Li.
Newly created erhuang fast meter and inverse-erhuang chant meter

(yinban ⏇㜧) appear in Gao Zhiyang’s “Myriad Hardships and
Hazards” (qiannan wanxian ye nanbudao Gongchangdang ren) and
Fang Haizhen’s “Be Loyal to the People and the Communist Party”
(zhongyu renmin zhongyu Dang) in On the Docks. Besides making
brand-new metrical types, music writers also modified existing chil-
dren’s-tunes meter of xiaosheng (young male) roles to use in arias
that are normally sung by dan (female) or laosheng (old man) roles.
For instance, in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Chang Bao’s “We
Long for the Time When the Sun Shines Over These Mountains” (zhi
panzhe shenshan chu taiyang) is in inverse-erhuang children’s-tunes
meter and “My Resolve is to Fight on the Battlefield” (jianjue yaoqiu
shang zhanchang) in erhuang children’s-tunes meter. With its power-
ful, heroic vigor, children’s-tunes meter infuses the tender dan role
and the solemn laosheng role with a lively, exciting color, reinforcing
the characters’ bright, valiant images.
The middle-stage model Peking operas see greatest advancement in
the musical schema of suite arias. Suite arias in the early-stage model
Peking operas use metrical types in the principal mode almost exclu-
sively. In middle-stage model Peking operas, there is a mix. Some
large-suite arias only use the principal mode, while others use both
the principal and its inverse in one modal system. The latter scheme
could accommodate more layers of melodic and rhythmic variations,
allowing effective expression of complicated, ever-changing inner
emotions.
Putting the principal mode of a modal system and its inverse in
a suite structure is a unique modulation skill in Peking opera. The
lively, uplifting xipi may modulate to the milder, lingering inverse-
xipi by going down a fourth. The solemn, steady or subtle and
expressive erhuang also has an inverse version, inverse-erhuang,
which sounds more forceful. These inverse modes enrich the ges-
tures of their modal systems. In On the Docks, Ma Hongliang’s “The
Kindness of the Communist Party and Chairman Mao is Higher than
the Sky” (Gongchandang Maozhuxi en bi tian gao), followed by Han
Xiaoqiang’s “I Have Not Forgotten this Tragic History Filled with
Blood and Tears” (zhe banban xueleishi wo mei wangdiao), are suc-
cessful examples of suite aria using a modal system’s principal and
inverse modes.
Ma Hongliang opens the aria in erhuang slow meter (manban ㄊ㜧),
recalling the distressing scene of Xiaoqiang’s ill father carrying coals for
the sake of survival. Reaching “Dying Miserably Next to Piles of Coal”
(cansi zai meidui pang ゐ㬣⛐䄌➮㕩), the music enters the agonizing,
22 DAI JIAFANG
roaring erhuang dispersed meter. Immediately, it moves onto inverse-

erhuang primary meter on the word “hard” (nan 晦) in the line “My
hatred is hard, hard . . . to let go” (wo chouhen nan, nan . . . xiao ㆹṯ
【晦ˣ晦 . . . 㴰) that emphatically heightens the pain. When Han
Xiaoqiang picks up the song, the music modulates from inverse-er-
huang primary meter to the faster erhuang primary meter. The most
significant novelty in the suite aria structure in the middle-stage model
Peking operas is breaking from the conventional taboo against using
two modal systems (xipi and erhuang) in one aria. At that stage, two
modal systems began to appear in one aria as a suite. Since the accom-
panying jinghu violin is tuned differently for erhuang and xipi, con-
ventional suite arias contain successive metrical types in either of the
two modal systems, with very few exceptions. Under normal circum-
stances, xipi and erhuang could not both appear in one aria. However,
in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Yang Zirong’s aria “Welcome in
Spring to Change the World of Men” (yinglai chunse huan renjian) is
in erhuang in the first half and xipi in the second half. The first half of
the song tells of Yang Zirong’s lofty sentiments and his life dream, as
in the words “expressing my pride and telling my dream” (shu haoqing,
shu lixiang ㈺尒ね, 徘䎮゛). Erhuang rightly satisfies that mood. The
second half of the song speaks of Yang Zirong’s determination and
action, as in the words “showing my resolve, seeing my action” (biao
juexin, jian xingdong 堐⅛⽫, 奩埴≐). Xipi fast meter is quick, ring-
ing, and forceful. It fits perfectly the overwhelming temperament of
the words “drive on to the bandits’ den and turn it upside down” (dao
feichao ding jiao ta difu tianfan ㌋⋒ⶊ⭂⎓⬫⛘央⣑侣). Thus the
aria adopts these metrical types one after the other—erhuang lead-in
meter, erhuang undulating-dragon meter, erhuang primary meter,
erhuang dispersed meter, and xipi fast meter. The variety of metrical
types accompanied by change in the modal system delineates the char-
acter’s emotional progress and contrasts.
Therefore, while early-stage model Peking operas sketch the devel-
opment of characters’ thoughts and personalities through placing arias
of different affects throughout the course of the operas, the middle-
stage model Peking operas go further by marking the dramatic changes
in characters’ thinking and personalities within each suite aria.
Innovations in the Use of a Chinese–Western Mixed Orchestra

The main function of the traditional Peking opera orchestra is musical
accompaniment. The “Three Major Instruments,” jinghu, jingerhu,
and yueqin—collectively called the “Four Major Instruments” if
xiaosanxian (⮷ᶱ⻎) is added—accompany singing. Plucked-string,

bowed-string, and wind instruments such as suona (Ⓤ⏞) and sheng
(䫁) play fixed melodies in certain scenes (generically called “Civil
Scenes” wenchang). Percussion instruments are normally used to
coordinate actions and dances, and accompany the first appearance of
characters—particularly in fights (called “Martial Scenes” wuchang)
to enhance the dramatic mood. The percussion section consists of
another group of “Four Major Instruments”—bangu (㜧溻 clapper
drum), daluo (⣏擋 big gong), ba (摡 cymbals), and xiaoluo (⮷擋 small
gong), among which the bangu player takes the lead in the rhythm.
Compared with other Chinese theatrical genres, traditional Peking
opera has a very well compiled orchestration. However, all the accom-
panying instruments for civil scenes are high pitched and could sound
rather monotonous and cacophonous in tone and color. The practice
of playing percussion in martial scenes originated from performances
on outdoor stages. The percussion band can sound too explosive
in indoor performance settings. These shortcomings are not really
noticeable in traditional Peking opera music, yet when the function
of the orchestra in the opera needs to be extended further, traditional
orchestration cannot meet the expanded expressive needs.
With the spread of Western music in East Asia in the twentieth
century, some progressive Peking opera artists tried to introduce
Western musical instruments into the traditional Peking opera orches-
tra. These orchestration experiments were not unified in scale and
were not able to achieve a good balance in register, tone color, vol-
ume, temperament (pitch), and style. The difficulty of working out a
scientific, logical orchestration without weakening the Peking opera
flavor was no less than that of orchestrating for an irregular or totally
unconventional ensemble.
Creating a reasonable arrangement is the key to the success of the
Chinese–Western mixed orchestration in Taking Tiger Mountain by
Strategy, as I will explain shortly. To retain traditional Peking opera
musical characteristics, the conventional “Three Major Instruments”
and “Four Major Instruments” were kept in the orchestra. On top
of that, a whole set of percussive instruments, including xiaotangluo
(⮷➪擋), wuluo (⮷➪擋), gaoyindaluo (檀枛⣏擋 soprano daluo),
zhongyindaluo (ᷕ枛⣏擋 alto daluo), dashailuo (⣏䬃擋), yaba (⑹摡),
naoba (撁摡), and damaoba (⣏ⷥ摡) were added, with full exploration
of their functions and features. For the sake of balancing register and
dynamics, a number of Chinese instruments, including banhu (㜧傉),
pipa (䏝䏞), jianpan paisheng (擖䚀㌺䫁), qudi (㚚䫃), haidi (㴟䫃),
suona (Ⓤ⏸), and zhuguan (䪡䭉 bamboo flute), were added to give
24 DAI JIAFANG
support to the “Three Major Instruments” in depth, strength, bright-

ness, and tension. Western orchestral instruments, including the pic-
colo, flutes (two), oboe, clarinet, French horns (two), trumpets (two),
trombone, glockenspiel, timpani (two), cymbals, suspended cymbal,
first violins (four), second violins (three), violas (two), cello, and dou-
ble bass were added. The resulting orchestra preserves the unique
music accompaniment style of Peking opera with a strong Chinese
flavor. In comparison, the new orchestra is fuller in register (high,
middle, and low ranges) with balanced volumes between Chinese and
Western instruments. The timbre is rich and the dynamics wide. All
these conditions provide a rich palette of expressive possibilities.
The new orchestration also came with a change of performance
practice. The conductor replaced the bangu player as the leader of
the orchestra. To overcome the problem of the percussive “Four
Major Instruments” being too loud in indoor theaters, an organic
glass screen in the shape of an arch was put in front of the percussion
ensembles to lower their volume.
On musical texture, the following adaptations were taken up in
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy after repeated trials and tests:
● In the overall musical schema, a clear dominant-subdominant

relationship is required. The musical elements in order of
decreasing dominance are, thus, vocal singing, the “Three Major
Instruments,” Western strings, paisheng, woodwind, brass, tim-
pani, and big cymbals. Among all, vocal singing and the “Three
Major Instruments” are critical symbols of Peking opera art and
have to stand out throughout.
● The purpose of using Western music composition techniques is to
serve the indigenization of the music. In other words, melodies
have to sound Chinese, never “Western.” Harmonic progression
should not be avoided, but should be confined to the functional
harmony of the Western Classical and Romantic periods, which
is widely accepted by the Chinese people, with no emphasis on
colorful harmonic elaborations. The orchestra should not sound
too loud, too thick, or too heavy. Musical layers should be clearly
defined. A messy, disorderly texture must be avoided.10
Accompanying songs is the chief mission of the orchestra. Thus,

in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, songs stand out throughout
the opera. The orchestra never overshadows the singing. In nor-
mal circumstances, singing is accompanied by the “Three Major
Instruments” plus Western strings, appropriately brightened with
paisheng or some other woodwind instrument. Medium-sized inter-

ludes have the “Three Major Instruments,” plus strings, paisheng,
and woodwinds. Only in long interludes are brass, timpani, and/or
large cymbals sounded as embellishment. The rationale behind such
an arrangement is, again, to avoid the singing being drowned out by
the orchestra.
The multipart (instrumental/voice parts) sections of Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy generally follow the then fairly mature theory
of Chinese modal harmony. The application of Chinese modal har-
mony in the new orchestra generated some successful experiments
that established the following rules. Slow harmonic progression with
long, sustained notes does not fit well with Peking-opera rhythm;
such notes should therefore be used sparingly. Only when the melody
runs at an unsteady speed is broken chord figuration included, with
rhythmic support from the “Three Major Instruments.” Harmony
choice should rely on the story. Complicated, varied harmonies
should not be used for the positive characters, and the bass line of the
harmony has to be melodic. Some passages in Taking Tiger Mountain
by Strategy are highly impressive in terms of their close association
between harmony and orchestration. Chang Bao’s aria, “We long for
the Time When the Sun Shines Over These Mountains” (zhi pan-
zhe shenshan chu taiyang), is a good example. In the line “Daddy
escaped but Mom died when leaping across a ravine. Oh, Mother!”
(die taohui woniang que tiaojian shenwang. Niang A! 䇡徫⚆ㆹ⧀
⌜嶛㵏幓ṉˤ⧀⓲炰), the orchestra plays a multifunction chord on
the painful cry “Oh, Mother!” Strings play tremolo on the dominant
chord, while woodwinds and paisheng play the tonic chord. The jux-
taposition of those two chords creates an abrupt, bumpy acoustic
effect, reflecting the extreme misery Chang Bao feels about the sud-
den death of her mother.
In Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, the Chinese–Western
mixed orchestra is not just an accompaniment for singing. In the
overture, inter-act music, dances, and music written for certain dia-
logues, scenes, and actions, the orchestra serves as an important tool
to describe the settings, atmosphere, and inner emotions of charac-
ters. An example of this is the inter-scene music for Yang Zirong,
disguised as a bandit after receiving the new mission of infiltrating
the bandits, and galloping on the snowy Linhai plain. The music
begins with hasty rhythms in the percussion. The orchestra then
plays a subtheme that exhibits Yang Zirong’s wit and courage. The
subtheme is then developed through repeated eighth notes on the
same pitch that mimic the galloping as Yang Zirong rushes forward
26 DAI JIAFANG
boldly, all alone. After a series of ascending melodic sequences, the

middle- and high-register strings play a sustained long note with
tremolos and the low-register instruments play a descending melody
in units of three beats. The dramatic contrast between these two
groups of instruments produces a small climax in this inter-act musi-
cal passage. Then the climax comes to a sudden halt. The galloping
figuration changes from loud to soft, fading into the background.
The horn plays a grand, broad melody adapted from the aria phrase
(qichong xiaohan 㮼⅚暬㯱) in lead-in meter, which expresses Yang
Zirong’s forthright personality and his affection for his home coun-
try. At the same time, ascending and descending patterns in strings
depict snow and a storm. Together with the galloping figuration,
they accompany the horn melody, creating the air of the northern
forests. That further underscores Yang Zirong’s revolutionary pride
and bravery. After that, the galloping rhythm leads into a rushing
melody that continuously winds up and down and shifts between
loud and soft volumes. It sketches a picture of Yang Zirong riding
forward vigorously on the snowy plain. Finally, the rapid galloping
becomes a rhythmic preparation for Yang Zirong’s “free-meter sing-
ing with accompaniment in measured meter” in the high, resound-
ing erhuang lead-in meter.
The Chinese–Western mixed orchestral music in Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy has accomplished a great deal. It not only
solved the problem of the difficult mingling between Chinese and
Western musical instruments but also provided a novel, inspirational,
and demonstrative example of borrowing Western compositional ele-
ments, such as harmony and polyphony. For that reason, Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy’s Western orchestration, signified by “4, 3, 2,
1, 1” (meaning four first violins, three second violins, two violas, one
cello, and one double bass) was implemented in other model Peking
operas. In each opera, the number of individual instruments varies
according to the specific demands of the plot. Yet the basic arrange-
ment and principle of application generally follow those in Taking
Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
A First Attempt at Using Motto Themes to Depict

the Spirit of the Age and the Characters
Traditional Peking opera almost never reflects the period of the story
through its music. Middle-stage model Peking opera music incorpo-
rates melodies that are representative of the story’s time as so-called
motto themes in the operas. The use of Chinese–Western mixed
orchestration also opened up new possibilities for embodying the

spirit of the age.
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy was the first Peking opera to
experiment with this. Music writers used comparatively simple tactics:
combining the period of the War of Liberation (1946–1949) and the
plot of the People’s Liberation Army fighting the bandit squadron,
the melodies of two well-known army songs, “March of the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army” (Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun jinxingqu)
and “Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” (Sanda
jilu baxiang zhuyi), were woven into the overture and throughout the
opera. Later on, the composition of On the Docks’ overture assimi-
lated the main themes and thoughts of the whole opera. To depict the
dockworkers’ vital energy, striving, patriotic feelings, and international
mind-set, the overture music integrates two musical themes. One is
the tune of “L’internationale” as the group theme of the interna-
tionally minded dockworkers who are charged with providing foreign
aid. The other theme, composed in Peking opera melodic form, is a
labor theme describing the dockworkers working enthusiastically and
selflessly. These two themes are interlaced in the overture, creating a
majestic yet thrilling picture that uncovers the spirit of dockworkers
in the socialist era.
The desire to present the spirit of the age in middle-stage model
Peking operas was also apparent in the deliberate design of arias and
their accompanying music. In the 1966 revised version of Taking
Tiger Mountain by Strategy, the last vocal phrase and the postlude
of Yang Zirong’s “I Have the Morning Sun in My Heart” (xiong
you zhaoyang 傠㚱㛅旛) ingeniously follows the melodic fall distinc-
tive of erhuang, and smoothly leads into the tune of “The East is
Red” (Dongfang hong). This matches the beautiful scenery of sun-
rise on the Linhai plain. At the same time the music clearly empha-
sizes both the protagonist’s unquestionable loyalty to Mao Zedong,
his source of wisdom and strength. This effectively encapsulates the
theme of the story.
Middle-stage model Peking opera music writers also further
explored the use of music to present characters’ personalities. They
drew on Western opera’s use of personal themes and leading motifs.
Personified themes were written for specific characters in the model
Peking operas. Consideration was also given to the design of arias for
each character.
The use of personal themes in model Peking operas developed
as follows. In Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, “March of the
Liberation Army” is used as Yang Zirong’s theme and the tune of
28 DAI JIAFANG
“Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” as the

regimental Chief of Staff’s theme. These two themes are also musical
symbols of the heroes who are fighting the bandit squadron. The link
between these themes and characters is programmatic, by title not by
content, so the artistic skill seems relatively simplistic. Nevertheless,
the writers of the music in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy did
pay attention to the difference in image between Yang Zirong and
the Chief of Staff, a commander who is young but mature and far-
sighted. His music mainly follows the Gao (Qingkui) school style
for the laosheng (old man) role.11 It sounds steady, unadorned, and
persuasive. Rarely do fast meters occur. Yang Zirong, being a smart
and resourceful scout, has a rough and tough personality. His music
mainly consists of the laosheng style of the Yu (Shuyan) school and
Yan (Jupeng) school, and incorporates the xiaosheng (young male)
and the hualian (painted-face) styles.12 Yang’s music sounds strong,
exciting, and flowing. The speed and metrical types tend to be fast, so
that a bold, straightforward character is evident. Major characters thus
possess distinctive personalities in the overall music of Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy.
However, in On the Docks, model Peking opera music first saw con-
sciously composed personal themes in a real sense. Fang Haizhen,
the central character, is a proletarian heroine with a swift, decisive,
and daring personality. Her music adapted the Cheng (Yanqiu) school
style, blended with the descending melodic contour or melodic mode
of xiaosheng (young male) and robust elements of hualian (male
painted face) roles that produce a powerful vigor.13 More importantly,
a bright personal theme was composed for Fang Haizhen. It is fast
in tempo, strong in dynamics, and possesses a distinctive ascending
fourth melodic contour. This theme recurs throughout the opera in
aria preludes, interludes, and postludes with melodic and rhythmic
variations and is interwoven into Fang Haizhen’s arias. As a matter of
fact, the composition of personal themes in On the Docks was not yet
mature. For instance, in “I have carefully read the Communiqué from
the Plenum” (xi du le quanhui gongbao), the personal theme is tagged
onto every phrase in the song and presents a sequence in the direc-
tion of the vocal line (ascending or descending) at different pitch lev-
els. Such frequent appearances of the personal theme and modulation
sound rather tedious and over-embroidered. Yet, the fact that per-
sonal themes with individuals’ own sharp characteristics were no lon-
ger shared with other characters or used interchangeably was a historic
move designed to overcome the problem in traditional Peking opera
arias of having only role type categorization and lacking individuated
characters. Having personal themes with variations throughout the

opera is like using a needle to sew all the arias and instrumental pas-
sages that have relatively independent meanings together into one
organic entity. Thus the music of the opera has contrast, variations,
and development, yet at the same time is strictly unified. This greatly
enhanced the dramatic expressiveness of the opera music. For that
reason, the use of personal themes throughout the work was taken up
in the music of many subsequent model Peking operas, including the
revised versions of Shajiabang and The Red Lantern, and the almost
totally new creation of The Red Detachment of Women, Fighting on the
Plain, Azalea Mountain, and Boulder Bay.
Undoubtedly, personal and subject themes that reflect the spirit of
the time have the weakness of crude political identification and for-
mulism. However, music and opera arrangers did fundamentally write
the music in keeping with the operas’ content and characters. They
borrowed techniques from Western opera music, broke from certain
traditional Peking opera restraints, and successfully promoted major
reforms in Peking opera music. Simply by juxtaposing the flexible,
varied use of colorful personal themes and subject themes that reflect
the spirit of the age with the conventional use of fixed-melodies,
action-strings, xiaolazi (⮷㉱⫸ string connectives), and instrumental
interludes according to the fixed formula in Peking opera, it is pos-
sible to see the significance of such reforms.
The Late Stage of Model Peking Opera Music:

Artistic Features and the Representative
Works S ONG OF THE D RAGON R IVER and A ZALEA
M OUNTAIN
Six model Peking operas were released in the later period of the
Cultural Revolution ten-year era. Musically speaking, they mostly fol-
lowed the compositional experience of the middle-stage model Peking
operas. Yet Song of the Dragon River and Azalea Mountain present
several innovations and some striking achievements.
Arias and Personal Themes with a More Ref ined and Delicate Design
Song of the Dragon River and Azalea Mountain saw some new moves
in vocal music design. First, the composers rid the vocal music of all
traits of opera schools’ styles, which, as we have seen, were still pres-
ent in early- and middle-stage model Peking operas. All arias were
30 DAI JIAFANG
written according to the personalities of characters, their thoughts,

and actions in the opera. In Western music composition, modulation
is a crucial force to drive music forward. Song of the Dragon River and
Azalea Mountain inherited the modulation procedures of traditional
Peking opera, including chudiao (↢宫 modulating to a fourth below),
yangdiao (㈔宫 modulating to a fourth above), and the temporary
moving of gong (⭓) to a major second, above which is reserved for
dan (female) role’s xipi two-six meter and flowing-water meter. Like
On the Docks, Song of the Dragon River and Azalea Mountain drew
on the modulation skills of Western music composition, often con-
sciously including successive modulations to cause the music to flow
and increase its expressiveness. Their modulations are artistically much
more natural and suitable than those in On the Docks, as is evident in
the overture, inter-scene music, dance music, and instrumental pre-
ludes to arias in the newer operas. In Scene 4 of Azalea Mountain, for
example, the music for Mother Du bringing food and Lei Gang learn-
ing to read frequently alternates between G-gong (G⭓) and B-gong
(B⭓) through a third. Successive modulations were also widely
included in the arias. In Ke Xiang’s “The Proletariat” (wuchanzhe) in
Azalea Mountain, the music modulates all the way by ascending fifths
and ascending sixths, one after another, to move through four metrical
types. The closely packed modulations illustrate the fierce fight of the
protagonist against his or her enemy, pride, and fearlessness in the face
of death. In the erhuang suite aria of “Storm Clouds Gather” (luan
yun fei) in Azalea Mountain, in just one phrase in erhuang lead-in
meter, three punctuations (dou 徿) fall on three different gong-keys,
reflecting the complicated feelings of Ke Xiang. Similar modulations
occur also in the opening inverse-erhuang slow meter in the first half
of the first line of Jiang Shuiying’s “Fighting for One’s Whole Life to
Bring Freedom to the People” (wei renlei qiu jiefang) in Song of the
Dragon River. In both cases, after two modulations to a fifth above,
the gong-key reached at the end of the phrase makes a major second
interval with the original key. Such frequent gong-key modulations in
just one line are intimately related to the many thoughts and mixed
emotions in the protagonist’s mind.
Some new metrical types were also created. For example, in the
xipi modal system, Jiang Shuiying’s “People’s Thoughts are Changed,
the Appearance of the Earth is Changed” (ren huan sixiang di huan
zhuang) borrowed the technique of transiting from short, syllabic
phrases to long phrases from erhuang undulating-dragon meter to
make xipi undulating-dragon meter. Metrical types such as two-six
meter, flowing-water meter, and fast meter were borrowed from xipi
and put in erhuang. Examples include the inverse-erhuang two-six

meter in Jiang Shuiying’s arias “Fighting for One’s Whole Life to
Bring Freedom to the People” (wei renlei qiu jiefang) and “Let the
Red Flags of Revolution Fly Everywhere” (rang geming de hongqi
cha bian sifang), and Ke Xiang’s “The Taste of Bitterness is Hard to
Define” (huanglian kudan wei nan fen), as well as inverse-erhuang
medium meter in Ke Xiang’s “Home at Anyuan” (jia zhu Anyuan),
in Azalea Mountain. In Ke Xiang’s “The Proletariat” (wuchanzhe)
and Li Shijian’s “Green Bamboos on Azalea Mountain” (dujuanshan
qingzhu tu cui), xipi children’s-tunes meter infuses the tender dan
role and the solemn laosheng role with a lively, exciting color, reinforc-
ing the characters’ bright, valiant image. While the concept of metrical
type still prevails in the late-stage model Peking operas, its flexible,
diverse forms of use have moved it from a more or less fixed melodic
format to become a musical symbol that integrates rhythm, speed,
melodic mode, and gesture.
With regard to vocal phrase structure, plentiful conventional
phrase-modifying techniques were implemented, including augmen-
tation, diminution, capping the head of a phrase, inserting words
in the middle, tagging onto the tail, and compression with or with-
out curtailing lyrics. In the music, those techniques were applied in
large instrumental preludes and interludes with somewhat indepen-
dent expressive meanings, and in unison and choral singing passages,
which are foreign to traditional Peking opera. These flexible, various
skills, used in punctuation, line, and phrase structure, prominently
extended the dramatic gestures of Peking opera’s vocal system. The
writing of Peking opera music became de facto composition, unre-
servedly contributing to characters’ personalities and the dramatic
needs of the narrative.
In addition, the design of personal motifs did not solely consider
the features of characters and their corresponding musical possibili-
ties. Folk melodies from places in which the stories are set were assimi-
lated in a natural, skillful manner to give the personal motifs strong
local color. In comparison with being put in preludes and interludes
as in the middle-stage model Peking operas, the motto themes in late-
stage model Peking operas are more often incorporated into the vocal
music as organic parts of the arias and develop in accordance with
specific scenes and emotions of the characters. They became motto
themes in the full sense.
Jiang Shuiying, Longjiang (Dragon River) Production Brigades
Party Secretary in Ode to the Dragon River, is a rural female cadre. She
is tough and bold but also has her delicate and passionate sides. Her
32 DAI JIAFANG
personal theme contains elements of strength and inspiring willpower,

but at the same time it sounds tender and amiable by way of winding
steps around minor seconds in its melodic mode. Her music is based
on the subtle style of Southern water villages’ field songs. Across
scenes, the theme’s mode and tonality change according to the plot
and the role’s expressive requirements. Furthermore, the first half of
the theme, which contains repetitions of a note in an agitated rhyth-
mic figuration, eventually evolves into a variation of its own, while
the second half develops into a lively tune. They are distinguished
from each other and used independently throughout the opera. The
personal theme of Ke Xiang in Azalea Mountain sounds fresh, strong,
and handsome—exactly the stipulated musical characters for heroes.
Winding progression by steps in the lower register, on the other hand,
stresses Ke Xiang’s perseverance and composure. The motif carries
features of Xiang-Gan (Hunan and Jiangxi) regional music as well. Its
use throughout the opera is even more mature and sensible than the
placement of personal motifs in On the Docks and Ode to the Dragon
River. By comparison, the personal motifs in Azalea Mountain assume
a greater musical leading role through permeation throughout the
opera. All 11 arias of Ke Xiang open with her personal theme modi-
fied according to the meaning of the song. Personal themes and their
variations were placed in prominent positions in aria introductions
to clearly establish the characters’ appearance and prepare moods for
the songs, achieving a dual purpose. Ke Xiang’s personal motif, which
highlights her perseverance and composure, is particularly prominent
in terms of expression. It not only appears in all of her aria introduc-
tions, preludes, and inter-scene music, but also infuses all her arias and
interludes.
The Successful Attempt at Using Yunbai 枝䘥 (Heightened Speech) to

Endow Spoken Dialogue with Musicality in Azalea Mountain
Azalea Mountain is the first opera to completely and successfully
replace baihua (spoken colloquial speech) with yunbai (heightened
speech). The heightened speech in Azalea Mountain is, on one hand,
different from that of central Chinese accent used in traditional Peking
opera and thus easier for audiences to comprehend. On the other
hand, it inherited the strengths of rhyme, rhythm, and pitch contour
of traditional heightened speech. It bears the combined features of
varying lengths and density of notes, rhythmic movement, and con-
trast of high and low pitches as in a melody. Although heightened
speech is (strictly speaking) chanting, not singing, it sounds musical
and is a unique stylistic form that stands between singing and speak-
ing. With support from Peking opera percussion, it is well blended
with singing and instrumental passages to make an organic whole of
the opera’s musical structure. Besides, the texts of the heightened
speeches in Azalea Mountain are finely polished and highly poetic.
They fit the characters’ personalities and are full of the spirit of the
age. Heightened speech passages such as Ke Xiang’s statement of her
own miserable background—“I wandered in winds and rains. What
is my reward for working restlessly all these years? Nothing but my
iron-strong shoulders and arms” (fenglilai, yulizou, zhongnian lao-
lei hesuoyou? Zhishengde, tieda de jian cuzhuang de shou . . . 桶慴㜍炻
暐慴崘炻买⸜≛䳗ỽ㇨㚱烎⎒∑⼿炻摩ㇻ䘬偑儨䰿⢖䘬ㇳ . . . ),
and Mother Du’s “The vine grows against the cliff; the flocks fol-
low the head sheep” (qingteng kaozhe shanya zhang, yangqun zoulu
kan touyang 曺喌月䛨ⰙⲾ攧炻伲佌崘嶗䚳⣜伲)—were well written
for easy recitation and contain deep meaning. When matched with
the actions on stage, these textual passages display even greater musi-
cal potential. Flawlessly inlaid in the opera’s musical infrastructure,
heightened speech became an extremely appealing artistic technique
in Azalea Mountain.
Generally speaking, late-stage model Peking opera music, as exem-
plified by Ode to the Dragon River and Azalea Mountain, contin-
ued the profitable experience of the early- and middle-stage operas
and matured further in vocal music design, Chinese–Western mixed
orchestration, and the use of motto themes throughout the operas.
The late operas also took another step in borrowing Western opera
music-composition techniques and integrating numerous Chinese tra-
ditional musical elements as innovations, with plausible results.
In conclusion, the diachronic development of model Peking opera
music was a process of continuously drawing from the experience of
Western opera music composition for enrichment in music writing
and creativity. By borrowing Western compositional skills, arias and
personal motifs moved from the paradigm of conventional role-type
categorization to the paradigm of individual personification. Harmony
(modulations) and polyphony were introduced into both singing
and instrumental passages to dramatize the musical development.
Chinese–Western mixed orchestration tremendously strengthened
the gestural and expressive capability of the accompanying orchestra.
These big reforms resulted in significant breakthroughs from Peking
opera conventions. It is particularly worth noting that the creation of
model Peking opera music, nonetheless, inherited many traditional
Peking opera musical features, such as shaping according to melodic
34 DAI JIAFANG
mode, phrasing, and suite arias with interlinked metrical types.

Chinese–Western mixed orchestration and Western compositional
skills were adopted in a way that did not discernibly undermine the
essence of Peking opera. Such bold yet prudent innovations resulted
in model Peking opera music sounding remarkably Peking in style.
They are Peking operas in their own right and at the same time have
a brand new outlook that is different from traditional Peking opera.
Since many of those accomplished reforms of Peking opera music are
present in Azalea Mountain, that opera may be taken as the almost
perfect exemplar of all model Peking operas.
However, due to the meddling of Jiang Qing, the reform of model
Peking opera music also contained some obvious deficiencies. First,
traditional Peking opera has xipi and erhuang as its core modal sys-
tems, but it also includes melodies from some other modes, like chu-
iqiang (⏡僼), gaobozi (檀㊐⫸), sipingdiao (⚃⸛宫), and nanbangzi
(⋿㠮⫸). Many other excellent school styles also exist in traditional
Peking opera vocal music. However, due to Jiang Qing’s personal
preferences and her instruction that “we do not want any school but
the revolutionary school,” these modes, melodies, and styles were
rejected to varying degrees. The excellent traditions of Peking opera
were not entirely drawn on.
Second, arias of the main characters in model Peking opera are all
in suite metrical form. As model Peking opera music writers continued
previous traditions and developed new creative means, this newly for-
mulated standard somehow turned into a new constraint on further
creativity. Furthermore, because of the highlighting of heroes in arias,
vocal melodies were too often written in a high range. That not only
extinguished musical contrast but also created great difficulty in mak-
ing these model operas accessible for the average singer to perform.
Finally, model Peking opera has a fundamental flaw. The pursuit
of the standard protagonist’s image of being lofty (gao 檀), glorious
(da ⣏), and complete (quan ℐ) in all the model operas became
simply monolithic and repetitive. This resulted in limitations on the
music, even though the teams of musicians wracked their brains to
overcome such limits.
Acknowledgments
“The research presented in this chapter is funded by the Hong Kong
Research Grants Council under the General Research Fund project
“Musics during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: From Periphery to
Centre” (Project No.: 454710).
Notes
1. The 19 officially recognized model performances are The Red Lantern,
Shajiabang, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, On the Docks, Raid on
the White Tiger Regiment, The Red Detachment of Women, Fighting
on the Plain, Song of the Dragon River, Azalea Mountain, Boulder
Bay, and Red Cloud Ridge; included later were dance dramas The Red
Detachment of Women, The White Haired Girl, Sons and Daughters of
the Grassland, and Ode of Mount Yimeng; cantatas (then called sym-
phonic music) Shajiabang and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy; the
piano-accompanied song The Red Lantern; and the piano concert The
Yellow River.
2. Translator’s note (TN): The author assigns three works as early-stage
model Peking operas: The Red Lantern, Shajiabang, and Raid on the
White Tiger Regiment.
3. Conventional Peking opera music writing adopted “music before
libretto.” For example, the Mei School of Mei Lanfang has an ele-
gant, poised, and stately vocal style. Thus, his think tank mostly wrote
for him librettos with themes related to wealthy women, such as The
Lance of the Universe (Yuzhoufeng ⬯⭁撳), The Concubine Gets Drunk
(Guifei zuijiu 峝⤫愱惺), and The Conqueror Bids His Concubine
Farewell (Bawang bieji 曠䌳⇓⦔, a.k.a. Farewell, My Concubine).
4. TN: Xun Huisheng (1900–1968) was one of the “Four Famous Dan”
in the twentieth century. Dan (㖎) is a female role.
5. TN: Ma Lianliang (1901–1966) was enlisted in both the “Early Four
Famous Xusheng” and the “Late Four Famous Xusheng.” Xusheng (栣䓇,
literally “Bearded Man”) is another name for laosheng (侩䓇 old male role).
6. TN: Tan Xinpei (1847–1917) was also a master performer of
laosheng.
7. TN: Li Shaochun (1919–1975) was another master Peking opera
performer.
8. TN: Beigong is a monologue not overheard by the other characters on
stage.
9. TN: The “Three Major Instruments” of traditional Peking opera refer
to jinghu Ṕ傉, jingerhu ṔḴ傉, and yueqin 㚰䏜.
10. The phrase “messy, disorderly” in Gong Guotai’s original words is
“zaluanwuzhang” (㛪ḙ㖈䪈), as he mentioned in an interview with
the author on January 24, 1990.
11. TN: Gao Qingkui (1890–1942) was one of the “Early Four Famous
Xusheng.”
12. TN: Yu Shuyan (1890–1943) and Yan Jupeng (1890–1942) were two
other members of the “Early Four Famous Xusheng.”
13. TN: Cheng Yanqiu (1904–1958) was one of the “Four Famous
Dan.”
C H A P T ER 2
From Confucianist Meditative Tool to

Maoist Revolutionary Weapon: The
Seven-Stringed Zither ( Qin ) in the
Cultural Revolution
Tsan-Huang Tsai
In the existing literature on the Chinese seven-stringed zither qin 䏜,

historical approaches often stop short of exploring post-1966 devel-
opments, while ethnographic approaches routinely elaborate find-
ings from the 1980s onward. Consequently, the qin during China’s
Cultural Revolution remains under-researched. In his 1982 history of
the qin, Xu Jian 孠‍ (1923) only uses half a paragraph to describe
what happened during this period, stating thus:
Qin activities were very discontinuous in mainland China due to a

group of older qin players tragically dying in this huge wave of opposi-
tion and even the few who were fortunately still alive at the end of this
period were forced to give up their beloved instrument.1
Xu’s statement seems to make perfect sense, for a musical culture that
was highly celebrated by the elite class and strongly promoted by the
rulers in imperial China (regardless of their devotion to Confucianism,
Buddhism, or Daoism) would have become a central target for criti-
cism and attacks during the Cultural Revolution.
The limited number of academic publications about this period has
contributed to unidentifiable and confusing information being posted
on the Internet. For example, when responding to the question of
whether he could still play the qin during the Cultural Revolution,
38 TSANHUANG TSAI
Li Xiangting 㛶䤍暮 (1940), a retired professor from the Central

Conservatory of Music in Beijing, recalled:
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I spent six years without

playing the qin. I picked up the instrument again in 1973 because peo-
ple realized in the “Long River of Music History” (yinyue lishi changhe
枛᷸⌮⎚攧㱛) it’s necessary to have the qin.2
He did not elaborate further, but shifted the subject of conversation

to his use of the Vietnamese monochord dàn bâu to play Mao’s revo-
lutionary songs. In another account, when referring to the newly pro-
duced instruments, Li said:
Before the Cultural Revolution, some people produced new instru-

ments but overall they did not even meet the standard of stage props.
There have been more and more makers who have produced the qin
after the Cultural Revolution. Many makers in Beijing, four or five I
know personally, or even more.3
Although he did not provide a very clear explanation, Li’s first state-
ment confirms that he was unable to play the qin between 1966 and
1973, but that this situation did not last the entire decade. In con-
trast, the second statement directly avoids the period of the Cultural
Revolution but instead uses the decade as a reference point to describe
the situation before and after the Cultural Revolution.
After more than ten years of experience working with qin players,
the data that I have collected reveal a very different narrative from
the accepted one. This chapter devotes its attention to three main
areas. First, it looks at the research and musical activities related to the
qin between 1949 and 1966, a period that was particularly important
and which helps us make sense of the qin’s later involvement in the
Cultural Revolution. The chapter then reports, in the second section,
some private activities of qin players during the Cultural Revolution.
In the third section, the activities of two Cultural Revolution-era
committees will be examined: the Zither (qin, se, and zheng) Reform
Committee (Qin se zheng gaige xiaozu 䏜䐇䬅㓡朑⮷乬, hereafter the
Reform Committee) as well as the Audio-Visual Recording Committee
(Luyin luxiang zu ⻽枛⻽⁷乬, hereafter the Recording Committee).
Based on surviving data (such as program notes, concert recordings,
and the surviving instruments encountered during my field research)
and oral history, this chapter aims to provide a collective picture of
little-known qin practices during this period to further explore how
MEDITATIVE TOOL TO REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON 39
they fit into China’s Cultural Revolution and their impact on current
performance practice. In addition, the chapter supplies a missing part
of the literature about the musical activities of political leaders, and
describe how the qin players and makers involved in the committees
attempted to bridge political ideologies and appropriate modernity
in ways that went beyond the original, stated mission of instrument
modification.
The Golden Era: Post- Research and

Musical Activities of the Q IN
Despite the qin having a long association as a tool of self-cultivation
and meditation, with intellectuals and religious practitioners, such as
Buddhists, Confucianists, and Daoists, it enjoyed a rather special sta-
tus after the establishment of the People’s Republic. Both research on,
and musical activities of, the qin reached their highest peak in modern
history between 1949 and 1966, and the legacies of this era con-
tinue to affect contemporary practices of the qin. Apart from scholars
and musicians of the 1950s and 1960s, who left a large amount of
sources and documentation, the activities associated with the qin of
this period have also attracted a great deal of attention from Chinese
musicologists. Of most relevance to this chapter, however, regarding
the qin and its players under the new Communist regime, are the
three major processes of transformation that included changing its
target audience, downplaying players’ elite identity, and attempting
to build a canon.
First, the 1949–1966 period saw a move from playing the qin in
private to performing the qin to mass audiences. This marked a change
in target listeners and had significant implications for the instru-
ment. Personal diaries and concert programs reveal that prior to the
Cultural Revolution the government had already encouraged players
to perform publicly.4 In his diary, Zhang Ziqian ⻈⫸寎 (1899–1991)
reported countless public performances that he attended or gave in
the 1950s and 1960s—for example:5
20 Nov 1954: Went to [Shanghai] Cultural Square to hear the per-

formance of the Chinese Folk-Classical Music Tour Performing
Troupe . . . [A old qin piece called] “Pingsha” ⸛㱁 [performed] by the
qin and xiao 䭓 ensemble, but the qin was too soft. Amplifying setting
could have been better . . . In front of a large audience, the guqin must
at least be accompanied by a xiao and special attention has to be paid
to the amplifier. Otherwise, the impression given to people will be bad.
This is critical to the future of guqin and so should be cared for. The
audience today was about 50 to 60 people. Quite a large event.
16 April 1955: Went to the Sailors Club to perform in the evening. Still
the old thing “Meihua” 㠭剙. A scarce audience who were not good
listeners. No accomplishment at all.
20 Nov 1955: Yu De 塽⽟ and Wei Zhongle ⌓ẚ᷸ reported and per-
formed on [Shanghai] Cultural Square. Listeners numbered 10,000
something . . . The qin and xiao ensemble played “Pu’anzhou” 㘖⹝␺
in a way quite different from ours. The speed was very rushed. Sound
effect was also not very good.
These diary entries reveal that, due to performing the qin to mas-
sive audiences under the communist ideology, qin players increasingly
considered the scale of music—the volume, power, and dynamics of
the sounds and its reception—after observing the reaction of these
general listeners. Modern technology was also brought in to amplify
the sound that had hitherto been listened to and appreciated in inti-
mate settings by only knowledgeable listeners. Clearly, the elegant
orientations and subtle timbres that had been essential aspects of qin
music were no longer major concerns for this type of performance.
Rather, the symbolic presence of the ancient melodies and instru-
ments became important.
Second, players’ identity as an elite class was downplayed, and their
new occupational duty as members of the working class was empha-
sized. Apart from performing for mass audiences, qin players also
engaged in major politicized events or top-ranking performances—
especially players who carried a working-class identity or background.
For instance, consider the surviving concert programs of Yao Bingyan
⦂᷁䀶 (1921–1983), a player who was an accountant at the Shanghai
New Electronic Instrument Factory (Shanghai xinjian dianzi yiqi
chang ᶲ㴟㕘⺢䓝⫸Ẓ☐〉).6
As a member of the working classes, Yao appeared alongside four
other professional musicians playing Western styles of music or Western
instruments to represent Shanghai in the “Concert of the Soloists”
(Duchang duzou yinyue hui 䊔ⓙ䊔⣷枛᷸Ể), held in Beijing on
December 12, 1962.7 Yao’s performance of “Melody of Chu” (Chuge
㤂㫴) was the only traditional Chinese music presented that evening.
Interestingly, his work unit—the electronic instrument factory—was
listed together with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music as a perfor-
mance unit (yanchu danwei 㺼↢⋽ỵ): even though his playing had
nothing to do with his work, his performance still “belonged” to his
unit. In 1962 and 1963, as a “nonprofessional” musician, Yao was
unusually invited to perform at the annual Shanghai Spring Music
Festival (Shanghai zhi chun ᶲ㴟ᷳ㗍). The qin piece “Singing for
Chairman Mao and Singing for the Communist Party” (Gechang Mao
zhuxi gechang Gongchandang 㫴ⓙ㮃ᷣⷕ㫴ⓙℙṏℂ) performed by
Yao, which was an arranged version of the revolutionary song, can
also be found in the 1963 program.8
Third, the pre-Cultural Revolution period saw a remarkable invest-
ment in researching and developing the qin and promoting public
performances. As a result, it became necessary to build a canon for
performance repertoire. In Sixty Years of Study on the Qin, a 2011 ret-
rospective volume, the editor selects almost half the essays in the vol-
ume from this 17-year period.9 Among the articles selected from this
period, seven are by Zha Fuxi 㞍旄大 (1895–1978). Zha’s lifetime
achievement in reviving the qin in the 1950s and 1960s established
his name as the most important qin scholar and player for decades.
The outcome of a research project by a team led by him in 1956 is
particularly crucial. The main achievements of this project included
recordings (327 qin performances by 98 players at 23 different loca-
tions), objects (including 21 different types of qin handbooks, eight
editions of The Collection of Qin Studies (Qinxue congshu 䏜⬎᷃Ḏ)
and archaeological specimens), 61 photographs, and a survey and
directory about the qin culture of his generation (including valuable
information, for instance, that 14 percent of players were female and
that seven new pieces were—among 579 collected—composed).10
Even given that they received the full support of the central and
provincial governments, from a present-day perspective the outputs of
the team and its survey constitute a landmark activity in modern qin
history. The selections on the recorded performances, now called the
“eight old discs” (lao bazhang 侩ℓ⻈), are still very popular among
contemporary players and enthusiasts. The quality of music recorded
at this time set a high standard in terms of performance skills and
artistic styles, which were widely believed to be hard to achieve and
now regarded as classics and masterpieces of qin performance. The
30-volume Collection of Qin Handbooks, the most comprehensive and
important reference resource on qin music and theory, was based on
literary sources discovered by Zha’s team.11 These recordings and
handbooks have become the most significant sources and have been
treated as a canon by later qin players.
These three major transformations—of audiences, player identity,
and canon-formation—were part of the wider transformation of qin
music from a private cultural activity to a part of traditional music of
China in the public and political domain. Another associated devel-
opment that started during this period and continued long after was
the introduction of newly modified instruments alongside antique

ones. Experiments were attempted with newly invented strings (for
example, metal-nylon strings replacing silk strings).12 In 1958, Wu
Jinglüe ⏜㘗䔍(1907–1987), together with Gao Shuangqing 檀⍴⸮
and the Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Musical Instrument Factory
(Gongnongbing yueqi chang ⶍ⅄ℝ᷸☐〉), had already invented
a new model to create a louder volume and to stabilize the instru-
ments.13 Similarly, Guan Pinghu 䭉⸛㷾 (1897–1967) worked with
the People’s Musical Instrument Factory of Beijing (Beijingshi minzu
yueqi chang ⊿Ṕⶪ㮹㕷᷸☐〉) to create two prototypes.14 From the
illustrations of the prototypes, it seems another type of modification
was the method of tuning the strings.
Through a combination of performance and research, this 17-year
period after the founding of the People’s Republic anticipated the
upcoming development of the qin during the Cultural Revolution.
Indeed, it left a lasting impact on the post-Cultural Revolution revival
of the qin, including the period leading up to and since its 2003
UNESCO recognition as an Intangible Culture Heritage.15 This pre-
Cultural Revolution period, in my view, can be regarded as the golden
era of the qin in modern Chinese history.
Varied Experiences: Q IN Activities

during the Cultural Revolution
In contrast to all these achievements in the 1950s and early 1960s, qin
performance and research activities of this kind were subject to sus-
picion and censorship in the early period of the Cultural Revolution.
The social context and its long-standing association with elite cul-
ture placed the qin among the “Four Olds” (sijiu ⚃㖏)—old ideas,
culture, customs, and habits—which were targeted for destruction in
the first years of the Cultural Revolution. This was not only because
the instrument was associated with so-called feudalism and the aristo-
cratic, bureaucratic, and elite classes, but also because the instrument
itself, its repertoires, and associated ideologies meant that it was not
seen as an instrument for the general population, despite the work
of the 1950s and early 1960s. During my interviews, I realized that
for many senior players, recounting memories of their life during the
Cultural Revolution was often a painful experience, as their friends or
teachers were categorized as criminals and had even died as a result
of such persecution. It is indeed not hard to understand the reticence
of Xu Jian, or the somewhat ambiguous statements of Li Xiangting,
which were quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Although I have been told about players who were arrested, and
how great antique instruments or ancient handbooks were burned by
the Red Guards,16 we must not forget that the stories told by qin play-
ers very much depend on each individual, their circumstances, their
residential location, and most importantly their political background
and engagement. No single story could enable us to fully understand
how the qin and its players survived during these dramatic times. This
variety of players’ experiences should be considered when attempt-
ing to make sense of the qin and its practices during the Cultural
Revolution.
Not all stories told by qin players include suffering. For example,
rather than being prohibited from playing, it was “not the right mood
and atmosphere to play the qin as social movements went on and
on,” Wu Wenguang ⏜㔯⃱ (1946) stated. Mei Yueqiang 㠭㚘⻢
(1929–2004) claimed that although it was not easy to play the qin in
public contexts at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he did
manage to practice the instrument and to gather together with other
players for the so-called elegant gatherings (yaji 晭普). The Shanghai
qin player, Yao Gongbai ⦂℔䘥 (1948) also argues that, although he
did not have a qin with him when he was sent down like other young
people to live in Yunnan province, he did manage to memorize many
pieces of the qin repertoire as taught to him by his father during sev-
eral short trips back to Shanghai. As he recalled, “elegant gatherings”
were occasionally held in his Shanghai family home.17 Yao told me
that during the later period of the Cultural Revolution, his father Yao
Bingyan, Zhang Ziqian, and some other senior players often met to
play the instrument on the upper level of their Shanghai family home.
Generally, they would play the traditional repertoire they had memo-
rized without using notation. However, if there was any unfamiliar
person present, they would play music arranged from revolutionary
songs or model opera tunes.
These stories reveal clearly the wide range of player experiences,
and also that almost all of the most tragic events happened during
the first half of the Cultural Revolution’s ten years. Alongside these
individual stories about players and their private or hitherto unknown
activities, there were three young qin players who played an active role
in the “development” of the qin during the later period of the Cultural
Revolution. These three players along with other instrument makers,
musicians, and scholars were involved in the Reform Committee and
the Recording Committee set up by the State Council. In the follow-
ing section I examine the histories of these two Cultural Revolution
committees as musical and political projects. They not only provide
another angle on the qin during the Cultural Revolution but also fur-
ther assist us in interpreting the Party leadership’s thinking on the
issue of the place of traditional music in the new China.
The Reform Committee and the Recording

Committee: Musical or Political Projects?
The Reform Committee
The Reform Committee was set up in 1973 as part of a broader, cau-
tious revival of traditional music. According to Dai Jiafang’s unpub-
lished history of the Cultural Revolution, as well as my interviews with
musicians, the dramatic shift in 1972 from erasing traditional music as
part of the “Four Olds” to the renewal of interest in this music was due
to the improvement of relations between the United States and China
in the early 1970s. In response to President Richard M. Nixon’s visit
to China in February 1972, the China Arts Troupe (Zhongguo yishu
tuan ᷕ⚥刢㛗⚊) was established in early 1973 in preparation for a
goodwill tour to the United States. Along with a performance team,
the Long River of Music History project was also established under
the Culture Group of the State Council (Guowuyuan wenhua zu ⚥≉
昊㔯⊾乬) with the clear purpose of collecting, studying, and arrang-
ing traditional music repertoires to establish a suitable program for
the China Arts Troupe. This troupe would represent and promote the
image of a modern China to the outside world.18 In fact, the China
Arts Troupe did not visit the United States until 1978, and no qin
player could confirm their involvement as a troupe member. However,
the qin did feature in several overseas tours to Australia, New Zealand,
and Japan in 1974.19 There is no information about the impact of
these performances on foreign audiences or foreign relations; nev-
ertheless, this type of foreign performance tour and the preparations
for it undoubtedly stimulated the domestic developments and perfor-
mances of traditional qin music.
Subsequently, in 1973 the Reform Committee was formed with
the intention of improving and reforming traditional zithers. Its
members included the leader, zheng and se player Kang Mianzong
⹟亝⿣ (1939), qin players Gong Yi 潂ᶨ (1941),20 Li Xiangting,21
Wu Wenguang,22 and zheng player Hon See Wah (Xiang Sihua)
枭㕗厗(1940). Those from outside the capital were transferred from
other units to Beijing.23 For the qin players, such an opportunity was
relatively rare: these three musicians had nowhere to serve as qin play-
ers before the committee was formed. Nevertheless, their selection
was based on their enthusiasm for new qin compositions as well as

their recognized skills, which together represented a new generation
of players.
Although the main task of the committee was to implement the
musical ideas of Jiang Qing and Marshal Ye Jianying, a veteran Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) leader and ally of Mao, there is no strong
evidence that either Jiang or Ye were directly involved. According to
my interview with Hon, the musicians knew that Reform Committee
leader Kang Mianzong had a close personal connection with Ye, but
they were not sure whether Ye had any association with the commit-
tee. As stated in the preface of a 1975 concert program, the Reform
Committee was under the direct leadership of the Cultural Group,
but again no source suggests that Yu Huiyong ḶỂ㲛 (1925–1977),
a musicologist and deputy director of the group as well as model-
opera composer, was personally involved.24
The qin was selected to become the main instrument of concern to
the Reform Committee because to its association with the Long River
of Music History project. Its construction was commonly believed to
be insufficiently “scientific,” and it was considered unable to meet the
basic requirement of serving the general public due to its very low
sound volume, hence the need for reform. Furthermore, according
to the Cultural Revolution ideologies, far too much of the ancient
repertoire contained “unhealthy” content. It was therefore necessary
to select pieces carefully, or compose new ones.25 The new instrument
should be built to maximize the expressive power of these new “revo-
lutionary” works.
Remodeling or Improving the Instrument

To “serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers,” the qin had to be able
to create a louder sound and be performed in larger venues. For the
Reform Committee, modifying the qin into an accessible instrument
was essential—and indeed, several of their newly modified qin were
much bigger than normal in size and sound volume. The instrument
reformers commonly adopted manufacturing principles from Western
instruments, believing them to be the only way to advance “old” and
“poor” Chinese instruments and transform them into more progres-
sive models. The Reform Committee members, accordingly, paid
attention to the construction theories of violins or guitars, and hoped
that this approach would eventually improve the qin’s resonating
body and create its acoustic efficiency.26 Some of the new approaches
that were adopted included using softened wood, inserting a bass-bar
into the soundboard, and creating an additional wood board covering
the upper surface of the qin to function as a fingerboard (adapted

from the violin). The Reform Committee also experimented with new
ideas for the bridge, tuning pegs, and fine-tuner. Li described how
the three qin players on the committee would first discuss potential
solutions for improving the problems in a standard instrument. Using
his engineering background, Li would then draw a plan for a new qin
before handing it to instrument craftsmen, including the well-known
qin makers Sun Qingtang ⬁⸮➪ and Tian Shuangkun 䓘⍴✌.
According to my interviews, at least three new types of qin were
developed, including the “pinewood (bigger size) qin” (songmu (da)
qin 㜦㛐炷⣏炸䏜), the “additional fingerboard qin” (zhiban qin ㊯㜧䏜),
and the “electronic amplified qin” (diansheng kuoyin qin 䓝⢘㈑
枛䏜, an idea adopted from the electric guitar). The “pinewood qin”
that I saw is bigger (particularly in width), its pitch marks (hui ⼩)
are larger, and the bridge (yueshan ⱛⰙ) is higher than on a standard
instrument. Hoping to create the most effective resonance, the higher
bridge minimized contact with the surface of the qin, which serves as
the fingerboard with the function of a resonating body.27 Other modi-
fications can also be detected—for example, the strings were fixed
in the back of the lower bridge (longyin 潁漰), rather than tied with
two stands (yangzu 晩嵛), and the traditional tuning pegs (qinzhen
䏜张) had metal gears inserted to stabilize the strings during perfor-
mance and to ease the replacement of new strings.28 There appear to
be no surviving examples of the “additional fingerboard qin” and the
“electronic amplified qin,” but both Li Xiangting and Wu Wenguang
described their appearance and design to me. In addition, Li’s 1974
paper introduced the “electronic amplified qin” and the “mechanical
tuning system,” both produced by the committee during the Cultural
Revolution. Today, however, even Li and Wu believe these attempts
were failures, because the new timbre could not retain the quality and
characteristics of a qin.29
Composing and Rearranging the Music

These newly reformed instruments also required suitable new com-
positions, and it was essential that this music could convey revolu-
tionary messages and honor the great leader Mao. Although the new
compositions and rearranged works from existing revolutionary songs
occurred too in the 17-year golden era discussed previously, there are
two major differences between the pre-Cultural Revolution period
and the Cultural Revolution. First, in the Cultural Revolution it was
politically correct to perform new compositions and rearranged works
alongside a limited selection of traditional repertoires (see ensuing
discussion). Second, the stated purpose of the new qin compositions

or rearranged pieces in the 1950s and 1960s was serving the peasants,
workers, and soldiers, whereas this type of music during the Cultural
Revolution was mainly performed in political circles and for domes-
tic and international missions (discussed below). Whether composing
new repertoire or rearranging popular pieces from other solo instru-
ments and revolutionary songs, each of the three qin players composed
new pieces for their instrument. New works performed by players
of the zheng and se of the same committee were mostly arranged or
composed by professional composers, rather than by players of the
instruments themselves. However, as the performance techniques and
expressive characteristics of the qin were very different from those
of other Chinese instruments and unfamiliar to professional compos-
ers, qin players had no choice but to compose their own works.30
According to the concert programs and surviving notations that I
have gathered from players’ private collections, the newly composed
or arranged works included Li’s “Boat Song of the Three Gorges”
(Sanxia chuan’ge ᶱⲉ凡㫴)31; Gong’s “Red Sun Shining over the
Frontier” (Hongtaiyang zhao bianjiang 乊⣒旛䄏彡䔮)32 and “Taiwan
People Yearn to be Liberated” (Taiwan renmin pan jiefang ⎘㸦Ṣ㮹
䚤妋㓦)33; and Wu’s “Liuyang River” (Liuyang he 㳷旛㱛).34
The “Boat Song of the Three Gorges” was newly composed music,
and the two others —“Red Sun Shining over the Frontier” and “Taiwan
People Yearn to be Liberated”—were rearranged from existing works.
These three were also the most frequently performed of the new qin
pieces composed during this period. Generally speaking, according to
the notations and recordings, it is evident that these pieces were very
much influenced by more recently developed guzheng and pipa com-
positions of the 1950s and 1960s.35 The example of the “Boat Song
of the Three Gorges” clearly demonstrates how different performance
techniques, or musical elements and structures, were adopted to make
the qin music sound newer, more advanced, and more expressive than
the traditional repertoire.36
Selecting Repertoire and Modernizing Notation

Each player also had at least one representative piece chosen from
the traditional repertoire. Gong’s “Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang
Rivers” (Xiaoxiang shuiyun 㼂㸀㯜ḹ),37 Li’s “Guangling Melody”
(Guangling san ⸧昝㔋),38 and Wu’s “Plum Flower” (Meihua san-
nong 㠭剙ᶱ⺬)39 are examples of the few historical pieces that could
be played openly during the second half of the Cultural Revolution.40
Although the political situation may have relaxed in the early 1970s
compared with the last years of the 1960s, performing the old, tra-
ditional repertoire publicly was still highly sensitive. The music that
could be presented was carefully chosen, and the interpretation of
these pieces was highly propagandized. From the above titles, the
nationalist spirit of “Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers”—about
the current conflict and uncertain future of the nation; the revolution-
ary ideology of the “Guangling Melody”—about the assassination of
a tyrannical king; and the attitude of “Plum Flower”—about surviving
in a harsh environment—were all perfectly congruent with the ideo-
logical context of the Cultural Revolution.
A good background story for the pieces was not enough: the music
still needed to be reworked or reformed. Performances of the old
pieces had to be understood and appreciated by the general public:
as the length of traditional pieces were felt to try audiences’ patience,
shortened versions became the norm. Similar to their ideas about
instrument reforms, players believed Western staff notation to be a
more scientific method of preserving and representing Chinese music.
The “Guangling Melody” is a good example of these kinds of modi-
fication of the existing, historical repertoire. For instance, Gong Yi
cut some sections to reduce the overall structure for the version used
during the Cultural Revolution.41 According to The Handbook of
Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries (Quxian shenqi mipu 円ẁ䤆⣯
䦀寙), compiled during 1425,42 the piece consists of 45 sections in
total with six major parts, but Gong only included nine sections for
the Cultural Revolution version represented by the staff notation (a
later version that he published in 1999 was revised to have 11 sec-
tions). Furthermore, the reduction happened not only within the
overall structure but also within individual sections.43 This shortening
was expected to make the piece more appealing to mass audiences.
During my interview with Hon See Wah in July 2011, she showed
me a copy of the program notes of the Reform Committee. This was
a so-called internal report concert (neibu huibao yinyue hui ℭ悐Ể
㉍枛᷸Ể) in February 1975, intended to showcase the committee’s
achievements in front of the country’s political and cultural leaders.44
This is the only official concert of the committee that the musicians
could recall. According to the program, the committee did not limit its
performances to the three types of zither instruments (qin, se, and zheng)
that I had previously identified through my research, but also included a
new 25-pipe amplified mouth organ (ershiwu miao kuoyin sheng Ḵ⋩Ḽ
剿㈑枛䫁), a new four-stringed fiddle (sixian huqin ⚃⻎傉䏜), and also
a two-stringed and two-nut fiddle (shuang qianjin erhu ⍴⋫慹Ḵ傉).45
The music performed in the concert included pieces arranged from
revolutionary songs, selected traditional repertoires, newly composed

works, and newly arranged works from the revolutionary model operas.
Even pieces from traditional Peking opera were played. Although the
concert was clearly presented to showcase the outcomes of the Reform
Committee’s work in terms of newly produced pieces and modified
instruments, musical works performed by other non-zither reformed
instruments and vocal performances of revolutionary songs or model-
opera arias were all a prominent part of the program.
The work of the committee became clearer after Hon gave me
another version (dated December 1974) of the concert program,
along with an open-reel tape-recording of that particular concert.
The recording not only confirms the content and performers of the
1975 program but also provides us with an opportunity to experience
firsthand how these musicians tackled the “revolution” musically as
performers and audiences. If we compare the two different versions
of the program as well as the surviving recording, several interesting
issues arise:
● Chief Unit. Comparing these two versions, it becomes clear that

the concert was originally scheduled for December 1974, but
then postponed until January 1975. Possibly the 1974 concert
preview had not satisfied the censors or cultural authorities, but
we cannot be sure of the actual cause of the delay.46 However,
according to the preface page, it is clear that the chief unit to
which musicians reported was the Cultural Group led by Yu
Huiyong, rather than the political leaders in the central govern-
ment, such as Jiang Qing or Ye Jianying. Some texts had been
reworked (newly replaced words in brackets, my translation and
emphasis): “We are in the direct [loving] care of the central lead-
ing [responsible] comrades, and under the correct [direct] leader-
ship of the Cultural Group of the State Council.”47 Unlike the
later version, the earlier one suggested the central government
leadership oversaw the committee.
● Major Aim. These sources show that not all the instruments
used in this concert were newly remodeled (i.e., some traditional
instruments were included) and the music repertoire (whether
composed, or traditional and revolutionary, or conventional) was
selected to showcase the characteristics of the remodeled instru-
ments. There were two minor modifications on the preface page,
including the following (newly replaced words in brackets, my
translation and emphasis): “We in principle [mostly] used newly
manufactured remodeled instruments”48 and “for adapting
[and showing] the characteristics of remodeled instruments that

include the qin, se, zheng, and four-stringed fiddle.”49
● Musical Repertoire. Apart from rearranging the running order,
there were also some changes to the final program. For instance,
one of two pieces for female solo singing, the “Tea Drinking
Song” (Qingcha ge 実勞㫴), was replaced with a revolution-
ary piece entitled “The Red Sun over the Jinggangshan”
(Jinggangshan shang taiyang hong ḽⰿⰙᶲ⣒旛乊). The addi-
tional female soloist piece “Hatred in the Heart Must Sprout”
(Chouhen ruxin yao faya ṯ【ℍ⽫天⍹剥) was added. A com-
pletely new piece for zither ensemble named “Deep in the Night”
(Ye shenchen ⣄㶙㰱) was included and performed by Li, Kang,
and Hon. Strangely, the final piece, “The Ever Flowing Water
of the Red Flag Canal” (Hongqi qushui shuichangliu 乊㕿㷈㯜
㯜攧㳩), listed on the program as performed by Kang, was not
recorded on the open-reel tape.
● Individual Names. Other changes included deleting the names
of composers or replacing musicians. For instance, the 1974 ver-
sion mentioned the qin solo work “Taiwan People Yearn to be
Liberated,” which was rearranged from an erhu piece of the same
title composed by Wang Guotong 䌳⚥㼤. But in the 1975 ver-
sion, the composer’s name was removed. In another case, the per-
formers of a duet for two-stringed, two-peg fiddles, Guo Junming
㝄ὲ㖶 and Wang Shuren 䌳㞹ṩ, had been changed in the 1974
version to Wang Shuren and Zhang Hongren ⻈⬷ṩ.50
Although the program booklet did not include introductions to

individual pieces, their titles convey clear political messages intended
to celebrate the contributions of the CCP, its revolution, and the
people. As a former elite instrument, for the qin to become more
accessible to the general public, it needed to become closer to other
popular instruments, such as the guzheng, pipa, or erhu. Even if this
type of qin music has since almost disappeared, it was a very important
factor at the time for the qin to remain a part of Communist society.
The Recording Committee

These three qin players also took part in the Recording Committee,
although their roles and involvement were relatively minor in com-
parison with operatic singers. Established in September 1974, the
Recording Committee was officially named the State Council’s Audio-
Visual Recording Committee (Guowuyuan luyin luxiang zu ⚥≉昊⻽
枛⻽䚠乬). Its main task was publicly identified as being “to safeguard
Chinese music.” The sudden decision was made due to Mao’s cataract
problem in September 1974 (according to Dai Jiafang’s unpublished
paper).51 Jiang Qing, attempting to please Mao’s operatic and poetic
tastes, urgently gave three more tasks to the Cultural Group. The
Recording Committee was formed with the task of recording the fol-
lowing genres: classic poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties with
their corresponding melodies; traditional Peking opera arias imitated
on Chinese instruments; and traditional opera and narrative singing.
After Mao’s health improved, the committee was additionally tasked
with filming traditional opera and buying or borrowing foreign films
via Hong Kong.
Many musicologists, historians, lyricists, composers, musicians, and
operatic and narrative singers were transferred from other units to
work on these assigned tasks. Over the two years of its duration, more
than 80 members served on three subcommittees, dedicated respec-
tively to classic poetry, instrumental music, and operatic and narra-
tive singing.52 As many of the musicians who previously belonged to
the Reform Committee also had joint membership of the Recording
Committee, both committees seemed to have existed in parallel.
Apart from serving as members of the ensemble accompanying oper-
atic singers, the qin players were also assigned the duty of recording
Peking opera arias imitated by zithers. These recordings were selected
mainly for Mao to listen by himself.53 Li Xiangting and Wu Wenguang
recalled that the pieces performed by the qin included “Book of the
Qing Court” (Qinggong ce 㶭⭓ℴ), “Swapping the Son in the Law
Court” (Fachang huanzi 㱽⛢㌊⫸), “Pearl-veiled” (Zhulian zhai 䎈
ⷀ⮐), and “Yellow Gown” (Zhan huangpao 㕑湬堵).54
This traditional repertoire, the performance of which had been
prohibited for many years, came to life due to the personal tastes of
a single powerful man. Mao’s tastes (and failing eyesight) also had
great impacts on the development of traditional music genera—re-
constructing classic poetry with corresponding melodies; imitating
Peking opera arias using Chinese instruments; and preserving tradi-
tional opera and narrative singing. Despite many top ranking instru-
mentalists and singers continuing to perform these “constructed”
or “imitated” pieces to date, the qin players did not follow suit. To
imitate the Peking opera arias on the qin was totally new before the
Cultural Revolution; besides the contradictory musical aesthetics—
popular versus elite—to perform melodic progression smoothly on a
plucked instrument was almost impossible. These efforts were unable
to enhance the characteristics of the instrument.
Transforming the Confucianist Meditative

Tool into a Maoist Revolutionary Weapon
The Cultural Revolution was the largest and most radical project at a
national level in recent Chinese history, aiming to transform Chinese
musical and operatic culture to build a modern society. Including the
qin as part of the process was highly symbolic. The modifications to
the instrument and the development of its music may not have suc-
ceeded in these initial objectives, but the transformation of the qin
from an elite culture instrument to a professional performance art
instrument did have a long-lasting impact on its later development.
The reform of the qin’s construction during the Cultural Revolution
had little impact on its subsequent manufacture (apart, perhaps, from
closing off avenues of development), and the newly composed pieces
attract little interest among players today. Contemporary players still
use the standard qin and play the old repertoire without perpetu-
ating the changes that occurred during the Cultural Revolution.55
What, then, has been the lasting impact of the Reform and Recording
Committees on the qin, besides the painful stories of what happened
to its players? I consider that the impact does not arise from the reform
activities conducted by the committees, or the reformed instrument
and its new compositions. Rather, the committees’ significance relates
to the three members of the Cultural Revolution group of qin play-
ers. Compared with other musicians, these emerging, talented young
artists were recognized even during the time of China’s social and
political instability. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, these
three qin players returned to music conservatories and increased
the distinction between qin “scholarly traditions” and “institutional
traditions”—a distinction that was created in the 1950s—by bringing
the qin into the institutional curriculum. Players of both the “schol-
arly” and “institutional” traditions worked together in the 1950s,
but after the experience of the Cultural Revolution, the differences
between the two traditions created great tensions, which developed
into serious contemporary debates.56 The radical approaches that have
been continued by Gong, Li, and, to a lesser extent, Wu are believed
by other contemporary players to be tied to the legacy of the commit-
tees. All of them emphasize the importance of maintaining qin playing
and appreciation as a professional musical activity.
This professionalization of qin performance was irreversible, unlike
the newly modified instruments and compositional works that failed
to change the artistic preferences of the majority of players. Another
reason for the lack of success in perpetuating the Cultural Revolution
effort may be organizational. Although those musicians involved in

the committees seem to have been more fortunate than others during
the Cultural Revolution, we should not underestimate the pressures
of censorship and uncertainty that they had to face. Some musicians
recalled that when serving on the Reform Committee, they could
return to their homes in Beijing. However, while serving on the
Recording Committee, they were each provided with a private room
at the Xiyuan Hotel (Xiyuan bingguan 大剹⭦椮), in the city suburbs
near the Fragrant Hills, together with other instrumentalists, singers,
composers, scholars, and recording engineers. Their “professional”
lives and activities were very much disconnected from the public, as
they were brought together and their activities were kept quite secret.
As one of the qin players told me, they were given many tasks, but they
also enjoyed access to the best material and craftsmanship to reform
the instrument. Many interviews and conversations I had with these
committee members were difficult. Some former members deliberately
decided to block their memories of this era. Some have subsequently
come up with a particular or even alternative narrative. Even those who
were willing to share their stories often found that their recollections
of their engagement in this period remained rather vague or patchy.
Perhaps we can find some reasons for the mind-sets among musicians
working within the central political circles by considering the uncer-
tainties under which they worked—such as ambiguous objectives and
audiences, unclear organization, and uncertain leadership.
First, the committees had rather ambiguous objectives. Formally
their objectives were “to improve Chinese instruments” and “to safe-
guard Chinese music,” but every member of the committees knew
that pleasing Chairman Mao and his wife was their unspoken pri-
ority and essential goal. However, these two goals in themselves—
safeguarding and improving—could be said to contradict each other
when applied to the qin. It is not surprising that many so-called
achievements of the time would be regarded as unsuccessful today,
but these musicians had no choice about pursuing these conflicting
objectives. This ambiguity is illustrated by the two versions of the
internal concert programs quoted earlier. During my interviews, it
was not unusual to hear inaccurate information about the tasks of the
specific committee with which they were involved, or for the partici-
pating musicians to fail to recall events precisely. Although the 1975
concert was presented to demonstrate the outputs of the Reform
Committee, the impact of the Recording Committee, its mission,
and its political affiliation are evident in the selection and modifica-
tion of the concert program.57
Another source of the confusion of former committee members

about the details of their different tasks, periods, and contexts seems
partly to be the ambiguous organizational principles and responsibili-
ties of these committees. Many musicians were responsible to both
the Reform Committee and the Recording Committee, and/or the
newly formed China Arts Troupe, and undertook other occasion-
ally assigned tasks. Rather than performing music for the public,
members of both committees performed for the specific purposes of
serving the Party’s or the nation’s interests. They recorded and later
filmed their music exclusively for Mao Zedong (and later archiving it).
Occasionally they performed for foreign visitors or went on overseas
tours.58 During his visit to China in 1975, North Korean President
Kim Il Sung was entertained by a program that included pieces per-
formed by members of the committees. Qin players Wu and Gong
also joined goodwill visits overseas, including the tour stimulated
by Nixon’s first visit to China in 1972, as mentioned earlier.59 The
performance contexts for qin music, together with other Chinese
performing arts during the second half of the Cultural Revolution,
shifted from the general public to political circles and international
missions, in contrast to the “golden age” of the 1950s and the first
half of the 1960s. Whenever required, these players had to serve their
leaders and country. It is easy to understand why the copy of the con-
cert program of the Reform Committee seems to include tasks that
extend beyond the stated objectives of the committees, that is, zither
reform. With many concert performances offered to foreign visitors
with whom they had no association, these musicians mixed up the
background and the nature of these concerts in their memories. The
reactions of their own political leaders, however, form the main focus
of their memories.60
That said, further pressure was added by the fact that they were not
always clear which leaders were in charge. These committees were said
to have been directly taken care of by, and were responsible to, Jiang
Qing. In reality all her ideas seem to have been filtered through a chain
of command before being implemented. Apart from Kang Mianzhong
himself, committee members might not have known who was giving
the direct orders and who was responsible for their tasks. Musicians
and instrument makers were placed at the bottom of the chain, and
were contacted through musicologists and cultural and political lead-
ers. Hon recalled that, although they were told Ye Jianying oversaw
their committee, they never met him and everything was directed
through the head of the Reform Committee, Kang Mianzhong. In
turn, the committee was officially subordinate to the Cultural Group,
in charge of cultural activities nationwide. Clearly, these chains of com-

mand created further complications, which allowed each individual to
play his or her own games—even potentially dangerous ones—so long
as Chairman Mao and Jiang Qing were satisfied.
Final Remarks: Revolution = Innovation +

Experimentation?
This chapter, so far, may have given some sense of the range of expe-
riences of qin players and makers that I have gathered over the past
20 years as a student and researcher of Chinese music. There were
senior players who recall that the ideological associations of their
instrument made them targets of the Red Guards, who saw their
beloved instruments and scores destroyed. Some players gossiped
about threats and beatings, while others recalled mutual help and
support, or the return of instruments. Some musicians were deterred
from playing by the mood of the time, while still others continued
playing privately from time to time.
Some qin players like to share their stories about the Cultural
Revolution, as the period is an important reference point in their
life journey. Indeed, audiences—scholarly and otherwise—are often
excited to hear their stories. However, not all members of the Reform
Committee are necessarily willing or able to revisit these memories,
which makes this research and the collection of data difficult. It is
clear that there are many stories about the qin during the Cultural
Revolution, which remain to be told and documented.
This chapter has outlined two such stories, hitherto little known
because of the sensitivity of their work. The Reform Committee was
tasked with modernizing the various zithers in order to showcase
Chinese culture to overseas dignitaries and to expand the instrument’s
domestic audience. Its conflicting aims of safeguarding traditional
styles while creating new, revolutionary repertoire was ultimately felt
to offer unsatisfactory results. The second story, of the Recording
Committee, reveals how a revival of traditional forms was stimulated
by the very private and personal tastes of China’s paramount leader.
The work was left incomplete at the end of the Cultural Revolution,
and so its lasting impact is harder to judge.
If the task of making a Confucianist meditative tool into a Maoist
revolutionary weapon was not successful, in artistic terms, what does
the word revolution really mean with reference to the qin? While
browsing online, I found an amusing anecdote about the qin during
the Cultural Revolution that might provide an answer to the above

question:
In the Cultural Revolution, a group of guqin players were banished

to a “cowshed” (niupeng 䈃㢂). They had not had a chance to play
guqin for a long time. One day, the commune suddenly organized a
propaganda team. All the poor and lower-middle peasants trusted in
those people sent down for re-education, and assigned the guqin play-
ers to put on some performances. When the curtain on the stage rose,
the high-spirited announcer said, “The next item is a guqin solo, ‘The
Female Commune Member on the Grassland Misses Chairman Mao’
(Caoyuan nüsheyuan sinian Mao zhuxi 勱⍇⤛䣦␀⿅⾝㮃ᷣⷕ).” All
the audience was applauding. Undisguised, a guqin player then played
[the traditional] “The Grand Hujia” (Da hujia ⣏傉䫛).61 After that,
the performer prepared to play a piece from the pre-Cultural Revolution
repertoire, “A Dialogue between the Fisherman and the Woodcutter”
(Yuqiao wenda 㶼㧝斖䫼), which was introduced by the announcer as,
“The next item is Missing Our Savior in the Sweet and the Bitter Times
(Yiku sitian nian jiuxing ⽮劎⿅䓄⾝㓹㗇).” Subsequently, they pre-
pared and played [the traditional] Guangling Shan, which the announcer
introduced, saying “The next item is The Energetic Ironworkers (Datie
gongren you liliang ㇻ摩ⶍṢ㚱≃慷).” Later, they prepared to play
[the traditional] “Returning Home” (Guiqu laici ⻺⍣㜍彆), and the
announcer declared, “The next item is Educated Youth Going to the
Countryside will Make Achievements in the Wide World (Zhishi qingnian
xiaxiang qu, guangkuo tiandì you zuowei 䞍孮曺⸜ᶳḉ⍣ˣ⸧於⣑⛘
㚱ἄᷢ).” Afterwards, before “Wild Geese Alighting on the Sandbank”
(Pingsha luoyan ⸛㱁句晩), the announcer stated, “The next item is
Driving Ducks in the Commune Spring Plowing (Sheyuan chungeng
ganya mang 䣦␀㗍侽崞淕⾁).”62
The black humor here informs us about Cultural Revolution and post-
Cultural Revolution situations. Many instrumental pieces could be
renamed to hide their prerevolutionary identity, but at the same time
titles could also be changed to hide their revolutionary identity. For
example, the erhu piece “Taiwan People Yearn to be Liberated” and
its adaptation performed by the qin were later renamed “Nostalgia”
(Huai xiangqu ⾨ḉ㚚). This type of “rebranding” might also be
appropriate to sum up how qin players or makers dealt with the
changing Cultural Revolution circumstances and political censor-
ship, regardless of whether they gathered privately and quietly or were
organized by the government.
It is clear that the output of the Reform Committee, in terms of
modifying instruments, composing new pieces, or selecting traditional
repertoire, was neither very “innovative” nor “creative”: most inno-

vations could be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s. During the
Cultural Revolution, the qin and its players were obliged to fall in
line with other so-called traditional music genres of China. What
the Reform Committee members undertook during the Cultural
Revolution was part of the modernization process in play since the
late nineteenth century. Culturally or musically, perhaps the creative
and innovative experimentations during the Cultural Revolution were
not about making new instruments or composing new pieces, but
rather about learning to adapt to the political context and power of
the time. But at the end of the Cultural Revolution, it was clear this
type of innovation could not really improve the instrument and was
rejected by the majority of players. Instead, the instrument took on
a new symbolic role very different from other traditional musics of
China, as an instrument that is almost unchangeable.
After the Cultural Revolution, although interest in the inno-
vations and experimentations developed prior to and during the
Cultural Revolution more or less died out among qin players, we
can still see the Cultural Revolution’s great shadow cast over other
forms of Chinese performing arts. None of the improved instruments
or newly composed pieces for the qin seem important in the hearts
and minds of contemporary players. In contrast, even today, several
Chinese instrument genres are still undergoing the process of instru-
mental improvement and new music composition. Many new mod-
els of Chinese instruments have been experimented with, built, and
showcased at annual expositions.63 Countless new compositions for
Chinese instruments have been commissioned, rehearsed, and per-
formed. In contrast to the qin, all other Chinese instrumental tradi-
tions seem to carry forward the revolutionary legacies. Although they
will not say it, many musicians and composers still include some rep-
ertoire that they performed during the Cultural Revolution in their
musical performances.64
While reviewing modern Chinese history with specific reference to
the qin, we find that major reform efforts—including musical instru-
ments, new compositions, and qin notation—had already begun as
early as the 1950s. In fact, the reform activities that took place dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution partly recycled what had been done in
the 1950s and 1960s, and were to some extent a continuation of the
modernizing influences of Western cultures on Chinese traditional
performing arts, which had been occurring since the nineteenth
century. What had never been seen before, though, was the political
engagement and social movement—the two key factors that helped
speed up the dramatic modernization of the qin and forced a level of

radical change. More than was the case for any other instruments, the
work of the zither Reform Committee and its concerts were for top
political leaders and overseas missions, rather than serving the Cultural
Revolution’s mass audience of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The
professionalization and institutionalization that started in that era
continue to impact contemporary qin practices today. Regarding
the instrument itself and its repertory, the Cultural Revolution was a
rather meaningful era, as a milestone that marked the end of modern-
ization or Westernization. A new era of traditionalization has begun
in post-reform China, but that is another story.
Acknowledgments
This chapter is the output of a research project named “Musics during
the Chinese Cultural Revolution: From Periphery to Centre,” funded
by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under the General
Research Fund category (Project No.: 454710). Several earlier ver-
sions, both oral and written, were presented at various academic occa-
sions, including invited lectures and refereed conferences, and I am
thankful to those colleagues who raised insightful questions and criti-
cisms, or provided worthwhile comments during my presentations.
Notes
1. Jian Xu, A Brief History of the Qin (Qinshi chubian ġ䏜⎚⇅亾) (Beijing:
Renmin yinyue chubanshe, 1982), 194.
2. China Today (Jinri Zhongguo Ṳ㖍ᷕ⚥). http://www.chinatoday.
com.cn/ctchinese/second/2010-06/12/content_279177_2.htm.
(Unless specified elsewhere, the direct quotations from original
Chinese sources were translated by me.)
3. Shanxi University Culture Quality homepage (Shanxi daxue wenhua
suzhi wang Ⱉ大⣏⬎㔯⊾䳈峐仹ġ). http://www.sxu.edu.cn/zncs/
shuzhijidi/Readnews9.asp?Bigclassid=9&Bigclassname=%BB%B9%C
0%B4%BE%CD%BE%D5&Smallclassid=&Smallclassname=%D2%F4%
C0%D6&newsid=718&page=.
4. More precisely, the government mentioned here refers to various gov-
ernmental or party units (dangzheng danwei ġℂ㓧⋽ỵġ).
5. Zhang is a well-known Shanghai qin player who taught at the Shanghai
Conservatory of Music. His diary is an important source for under-
standing the modern history of the qin, but, sadly, the part written
during the Cultural Revolution is missing. Zhang often uses abbre-
viations when referring to names of qin repertories—for example,
“Pingsha” for “Pingsha Luoyan.” For more information, see Ziqian

Zhang, My Diary and the Qin (Caoman suoji 㑵从䎸存) (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 2005).
6. Other sources suggest that he worked at the No. 21 Factory of
Shanghai Radio (Yiyun zhai guqin guan 䦣ḹ㔳⎌䏜椮). http://m.
xici.net/d163272909.htm?ref=2&sort=update.
7. This concert was part of a two-week event held during December
10–24, 1962 in Beijing, where representative music and musicians
from other parts of China were gathered.
8. The practice of rearranging revolutionary songs for qin performance
was not unusual in the 1950s and early 1960s, but it was not politi-
cally enforced. The practice, however, enabled the instrument to sur-
vive during the Cultural Revolution.
9. Chen Lin, ed., Sixty Years of Study on the Qin (Qinxue yanjiu
liushi nian ġ䏜 ⬎䞼䨞ℕ⋩⸜) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe,
2011).
10. See Chen Lin’s paper, “Unprecedented or Distinguished? Interview
of Qin Zither Performers in 1956” (Kongqian yihuo juehou—1956
Nian guqin caifang 䨢⇵㈹ㆾ亅⎶—1956 ⸜⎌䏜慯孧), Musicology in
China 3 (2008): 43–51.
11. Research Institute of Music at the Chinese National Academy of Arts
(Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyuan yinyue yanjiusuo ᷕ⚳喅埻䞼䨞昊枛㦪䞼
䨞㇨) and Beijing Guqin Research Association (Beijing guqin yan-
jiuhui ⊿Ṕ⎌䏜䞼䨞㚫), eds., Collection of Qin Handbooks (Qinqu
jicheng 䏜㚚普ㆸ) (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 2010).
12. Strings with a steel core and wound with nylon.
13. Jinglüe Wu, “To Improve the Guqin (Guqin de gailiang ⎌䏜䘬㓡列),”
in Essays on the Improved Chinese Musical Instruments Vol. 1 (Minzu
yueqi gailiang wengji diyiji 㮹㕷᷸☐㓡列㔯普烉䫔ᶨ普), edited by
Chinese Music Research Institute at the Central Conservatory of
Music (Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan Zhongguo yinyue yanjiu suo ᷕ⣖
枛᷸⬎昊ᷕ⚥枛᷸䞼䨞㇨), 98–102 (Beijing: Yinyue chubanshe,
1961).
14. Pinghu Guan, “Improving the Guqin ( Gailiang guqin 㓡列⎌
䏜 ),” in Essays on the Improved Chinese Musical Instruments Vol.1
( Minzu yueqi gailiang wengji diyiji 㮹㕷᷸☐㓡列㔯普烉䫔ᶨ
普 ), edited by Chinese Music Research Institute at the Central
Conservatory of Music (Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan Zhongguo
yinyue yanjiu suo ᷕ⣖枛᷸⬎昊ᷕ⚥枛᷸䞼䨞㇨) (Beijing: Yinyue
chubanshe, 1961), 103–105.
15. “The Guqin and Its Music” was originally proclaimed in 2003 as
one of the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of
Humanity by UNESCO. A similar system was adopted and imple-
mented by the Ministry of Culture in China to safeguard this musical
practice and its representative transmitters since 2006.
16. One of the most traumatic stories that I came across was about Zha
Fuxi, whose outstanding achievements and legacies were described in
the previous section.
17. These stories were told directly by players themselves during my
interviews.
18. The Long River of Music History project was set up by Jiang Qing
㰇曺 (1914–1991) and other leading political figures, including Ye
Jianying ⎞⇹劙 (1897–1986), who was the vice chairman of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1973 and became the
defense minister in 1975.
19. Gong Yi joined the Shanghai Orchestra (Shanghai yuetuan ᶲ㴟᷸⚊)
to visit Australia and New Zealand, while Wu Wenguang took part in
the Army Friends Arts Troupe (Zhanyou wengongtuan ㇀⍳㔯ⶍ⚊) to
Japan. See Zhang Zhuo, “Qin qu “sanxia chuan ge” yanjiu” (䏜㚚˪
ᶱ ⲉ 凡㫴 ˫䞼䨞), Tianjin yinyue xueyuan xuebao 1 (2013): 76–83.
20. Gong used to work at the Shanghai Chinese Music Orchestra (Shanghai
minzu yuetuan ᶲ㴟㮹㕷᷸⚊) and as a part-time qin teacher of the
Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
21. Li was a teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music prior to his
retirement.
22. Wu is now a retired professor at the China Conservatory of Music, Beijing.
23. Before the committee was formed, Kang Mianzhong worked at the
China Opera and Dance-Drama Theater (Zhongguo geju wuji yuan
ᷕ⚥㫴∏准∏昊), while Hon See Wah worked at the Beijing Film
Orchestra (Beijing dianying yuetuan ⊿Ṕ䓝⼙᷸⚊). Prior to joining
the committee, Gong played double bass in the Shanghai Orchestra,
Li taught in the Central Conservatory and performed the dàn bâu
openly (Vietnam and China had a political and military alliance). He
started to learn the instrument after attending the concert given by
one of the Vietnamese art troupes. Wu played pipa to accompany the
model Peking opera in the Friends of Army Arts Troupe.
24. Yu Huiyong was the deputy director of the group in 1973 and the
minister of culture in 1975, when the newly reestablished ministry
replaced the group. On Ye, see note 18 above.
25. Some players and scholars of the 1950s and 1960s also shared a similar
view.
26. Several Chinese instruments adopted for the model opera had under-
gone similar reform, and Western instruments were used as the main
source of reference. The reform of Chinese instruments based on
Western models was not just a post-1949 phenomenon, but dates back
to experiments on erhu and pipa by Liu Tianhua ⇀⣑厗 (1895–1932)
in the early twentieth century.
27. Similar to the design for violin bridges, several holes were cut through
the lower part of a piece of solid wood that traditionally was attached
to the upper surface of the instrument.
28. The strings adopted were metal-nylon strings, which were believed to
have stronger expressive power and to be more stable in terms of tun-
ing. It was one of the committee’s tasks to improve the string quality.
29. Even the timbre of the “pinewood (bigger size) qin” sounds wrong,
according to several scholars who have heard the recording played
during my academic presentations (this is compared with their experi-
ences of antique or recently manufactured instruments). Li Xiangting,
“Qixianqin de kuoyin shebei ji jixie xianzhou” (ᶫ⻎䏜䘬㈑枛学⢯⍲
㛢㡘⻎弜), Yueqi keji jianxun 1 (1974): 5–7.
30. Although it may not be unique to this period, the close relationship
between a particular piece and an individual player became more
marked during this period. Players who performed the representative
pieces of others were treated as rare and unusual. For example, the
1974 recording of the “Boat Song of the Three Gorges” was per-
formed by Wu, but not by Li, who composed it.
31. First version was composed in 1974 and the revised version was in 1977.
32. A 1968 Chinese–Korean revolutionary song by Han Yuhao and Jin
Fenghao (see Pease’s chapter in this volume). The date of the qin ver-
sion is unknown.
33. Composition year unknown but the erhu version was composed in 1973.
34. Liuyang River was arranged in 1951 and the guzheng version was
arranged in 1973, but the qin version’s composition date is unknown.
Other works include “Grasslands Female Militia” (Caoyuan nümin-
bing 勱⍇⤛㮹ℝ), a 1950s revolutionary song that became very
popular during the Cultural Revolution and was rearranged for sev-
eral Chinese instruments, and “The Wish” (Xinyuan ⽫ョ), com-
posed by Su Xiaolian 剷㗻ⱂ and Lin Youren 㜿⍳ṩ. More titles
for newly composed qin pieces since the 1949 were included on
the website of Office of the Shanghai Local History (Shanghai shi
difangzhi bangongshi ᶲ㴟ⶪ⛘㕡⽿≆℔⭌), http://www.shtong.
gov.cn/node2/node2245/node72149/node72157/node72191/
node72220/userobject1ai78287.html. However, no information on
the year of these compositions is included.
35. These are both in Li’s 1995 and Wu’s 1974 unpublished recordings.
36. The changes to show newness included the following:
Techniques: Nontraditional fingering techniques were borrowed
directly from guzheng and pipa—for example, yaozhi ㏯㊯, lunzhi
弖㊯, and dasao ⣏㈓.
Time signature: From traditional freer and irregular meters toward
regular 4/4 beat.
Tempo: From steady increase in speed to sectional defined speeds,
including some extremely fast sections. Rhythm: Offbeat
accents were rarely used traditionally, and were now empha-
sized to produce a more vigorous, modern melody.
Harmony: Apart from traditional perfect fifth and eighth harmony,
major and minor third, as well as perfect fourth, were now used.
Dynamic: Traditional melodic dynamics were instructed by the

fingering techniques, which were now replaced by patterns of
melodic and structural climax. From smooth dynamic transi-
tion to distinguished dynamic contrast.
Structure: Adopting new A+B+A form instead of traditional sec-
tion/variation-based structure.
37. More background information for this piece can be obtained from
the homepage of John Thompson on the Guqin Silk String Zither,
http://www.silkqin.com/02qnpu/07sqmp/sq53xxsy.htm.
http://www.silkqin.com/02qnpu/07sqmp/sq02gls.htm.
http://www.silkqin.com/02qnpu/07sqmp/sq19mhsn.htm.
40. These pieces are still often performed and recorded by these players.
41. Yi Gong, The Performance Techniques of the Guqin (Guqin yanzou fa,
⎌䏜㺼⣷㱽) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999).
42. Quan Zhu, Quxian shenqi mipu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe,
1995 [1425]).
43. Although the 1999 published version was very similar to the Cultural
Revolution version, it is almost impossible to confirm whether Gong
still believes the shortened version is the most ideal, as he often per-
forms this version. Or perhaps he included this particular version here
in his publication for reasons of space.
44. According to Hon See Wah, not many major political or cultural lead-
ers attended this concert.
45. Among other newly modified instruments is the four-stringed high-
pitch fiddle (sixian jinghu ⚃⻎Ṕ傉). This instrument did not play
solo pieces, but it was used as the leading instrument to accompany
the revolutionary-modeled opera arias.
46. On the front page, the title of the concert had been changed from
Qinsezheng gaige xiaozu yijiuqisi nian nianzhong huibao 䏜䐇䬅㓡朑
⮷乬ᶨḅᶫ⚃⸜⸜买㯯㉍ (dated January 1975) to Qinsezheng gaige
xiaozu huibao yinyuehui 䏜䐇䬅㓡朑⮷乬㯯㉍枛᷸Ể (dated February
1975). In China, all official performances include several levels of cen-
sorships to meet both musical and political objectives.
47. The original text: ㆹẔ⛐ᷕ⣖栮⮤[峇峋]⎴⽿䚜㍍[Ṛ↯]ℛ⾨, ␴⚥
≉昊㔯⊾乬䘬㬋䠖[䚜㍍]栮⮤ᶳ.
48. The original text: ㆹẔ➢㛔ᶲ[⣏悥]䓐䘬㗗㕘孽⇞䘬㓡朑᷸☐.
49. The original text: ␴ᷢḮ循⸼[侫⮇]䏜䐇䬅⍲⚃⻎Ṕ傉䫱㓡朑᷸☐䘬
䈡䁡.
50. The composers for the piece “Grassland Patrol” (Caoyuan xunluo bing
勱⍇ⶉ忣ℝ)—Yuan Ye ⍇慶, Hu Tianquan 傉⣑㱱, Lin Wai Wah 㜿
ệ⋶, and Wu Rui ⏜䐆—had been reduced to include only Yuan Ye
and Hu Tianquan.
51. International Symposium on Culture and Music of China’s Cultural
Revolution, April 12–13, 2013 at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. See the conference webpage for more information, http://

www.cuhk.edu.hk/crs/crconference/home.html.
52. Luan Huili, “Tasks of the Audio-Visual Recording Committee During
the Later Years of the Cultural Revolution (Wenge houqi luyin luxi-
angzu gongzuo “㔯朑”⎶㛇“⻽枛⻽⁷乬”ⶍἄ)” (MA thesis, Central
Conservatory of Music, Beijing, 2011).
53. According to Li Xiangting, some of these recordings were broad-
cast after the Cultural Revolution on CCTV or radio in the late
1970s. Thirty to forty Chinese instrumentalists from the Recording
Committee used Chinese traditional instruments to perform famous
arias from traditional Peking opera, accompanied by a Peking opera
ensemble. When working to fulfill this particular task, musicians would
painstakingly transcribe the music from existing recordings of particu-
lar opera singers. Often they would seek advice from musicologists,
opera singers, or musicians, and imitated the specific singing styles on
their own instruments. Before making a formal recording, the musi-
cians would perform to the musicologists who were in charge, and
would make necessary musical and expressive adjustments. Recording
engineers would then record and edit repeatedly until they achieved
the best possible quality. Finally, the program notes would be edited.
After several proof readings, the recordings would be ready to be sent
to Chairman Mao.
54. They were asked to record, and did not actually perform in person for
Mao or other officials. These pieces were selected due to their stories
or Mao’s personal preferences. I have collected two sets of record-
ings containing: (1) the instrumental Peking opera arias performed
by guzheng (“Drumming to Curse Cao” (Jigu macao ↣溻横㚡) by
Kang Mianzhong), guanzi (“Iron Bow” (Tiegong yuan 摩⺻什) by
Guo xiang 悕⎹), pipa (“Matchmaker” (Hongniang 乊⧀) by Liu
Dehai ⇀⽟㴟), and dizi (“Yellow Gown” by Ceng Yongqing 㚦㯠
㶭); and (2) five arias performed by Hon See Wah, including “The
Return of Princess Wenji” (Wenji guihan 㔯⦔⻺㯱), “Condolences
at Wolong” (Wolong diaoxiao ⌏潁⎲⬅), “Caught and Freed at the
Lodge” (Zhuofang sudian ㋱㓦⭧⸿), “Firing Battles” (Lianying zhai
徆反⮐), and “The Abdication” (Xiaoyao jin 徵怍㳍).
55. The situation of the zheng is different from that of the qin. More
zheng players today prefer to use the newly reformed instrument while
enjoying the new compositions. Some zheng pieces composed during
the Cultural Revolution remain popular today.
56. Tsan-Huang Tsai, “‘Tradition,’ Internal Debates, and Future
Directions: The Concept of Tradition and Its Relation to Time in the
Practices of the Chinese Seven-Stringed Zither (Qin),” The Journal of
Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore 166 (2009): 97–124.
57. Some members of the committees were also later selected to join the
China Arts Troupe and other overseas performing missions.
58. From her personal recollection, Hon See Wah’s own engagements
during the period included the Chinese Export Commodities Fair,
Autumn 1973, in Guangzhou; Music and Dance Performance of the
International Festival in Celebrating the Labor Day, Concert Hall
of the Zhongshan Park, May 1, 1975; and a Performance of Music
and Dance in Honor of the visiting President of the Republic of the
Gambia and his wife, Beijing, 1975.
59. The programs included both old and new repertoire—for instance, Li
Xiangting’s composition the “Boat Song for the Three Gorges” was
selected and performed by Wu Wenguang in Japan in the mid-1970s.
60. Recalling a performance for the US President in 1975, Hon See Wah
replaced President Ford with President Nixon, whose visit to China
was in 1972. However, she clearly remembered that Jiang Qing stood
up to applaud and to congratulate her on the wonderful performance.
Hon also recalled that she was especially reminded to hold her head up
while her performance was being filmed for Chairman Mao’s personal
viewing. She remembers that the director told her Chairman Mao had
once asked who this girl was and why she always had her head down
during the performances.
61. Hujia was a reed flute played by northern nomads.
62. The Academic Forum of the Guqin Art Network (Guqin yishu wang xue-
shu luntan), http://www.guqinart.org/dv_rss.asp?s=xhtml&boardid=
17&id=914&page=1.
63. Such as the most high-profile event in the country: the Shanghai
International Musical Instrument Expo, http://www.musicchina-
expo.com/index.asp.
64. Just to name a few, xiami.com; Ceng Yongqing’s 2001 performance,
http://www.xiami.com/album/566923?spm=0.0.0.0.SgUWob ;
Hon See Wah’s 2003 performance, http://www.xiami.com/album
/105426?spm=a1z1s.6659509.6856557.13.iDkFHN; Min Huifen’s
斥よ剔 2011 performance, http://www.xiami.com/album/321686?
spm=a1z1s.6659509.6856557.7.W4ZayL; and Lian Bo’s 徆㲊 2007
performance (Weicheng qudiao xian youqing: zhuming zuoqujia lian
bo shici gequ xuan 㛒ㆸ㚚宫⃰㚱ね——叿⎵ἄ㚚⭞徆㲊孿孵㫴㚚徱).
C H A P T ER 3
Breaking Bad: Sabotaging the

Production of the Hero in the Amateur
Performance of Yangbanxi
Laurence Coderre
The heroes of the “model works” of the Cultural Revolution, the

yangbanxi, were well-nigh ubiquitous in the People’s Republic dur-
ing the 1966–1976 decade. They appeared in nearly every conceiv-
able form, from feature films to cigarette packaging to everyday
“real life.” This chapter examines what we might regard as a key
technology of this mass (re)production and remediation of revolu-
tionary models: amateur performance, as carried out in the context
of the yangbanxi popularization campaign (dali puji yangbanxi),
which officially began in July 1970. I consider the discursive atten-
tion given to the “proper” training of the amateur’s body, the
relevant “medium” for this particular technology, and the fantasy
of perfect correspondence between the molding of the body and
the molding of the person as a whole—between “appearance” and
“essence”—on which this (re)production process is predicated. In
quite possibly his most important act of sabotage, however, the fig-
ure of the yangbanxi villain reveals this fantasy for what it is: thriv-
ing on and creating doubt in a world of certainty, he forces us to
ask whether even the most revolutionary-seeming among us might
really be something else entirely.
66 LAURENCE CODERRE
(Re)producing the Hero

The ideal functioning of amateur performance as a technology of mass
(re)production is captured by Shi Ning’s short story, “Before and
After the Performance” (Yanchu qianhou), published in Liberation
Daily (Jiefang ribao) on April 14, 1974. Narrated by Sister Afang,
an amateur portrayer of Li Tiemei, the revolutionary successor in
The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji), the piece follows the development
of Honghua (literally, “red flower”) as she transitions from avid fan
to Li Tiemei performer to lead actress and head of her local propa-
ganda team. This evolution is established through flashbacks of the
first two meetings between Sister Afang and Honghua. Although
Sister Afang has been dispatched by her brigade commander to learn
from Honghua’s troupe in the story’s present, this is a reversal of
their original relationship. When the women first meet five years ear-
lier, it is Sister Afang who performs and Honghua who watches with
rapt attention. When the women meet again two years later, they are
both performing as part of a special evening of entertainment for an
important visitor. Calamity strikes when Sister Afang realizes that she
has misplaced her braid, an integral part of the Li Tiemei costume,
the loss of which threatens to derail the performance before it has
even begun. Without a second thought, Honghua cuts off her own
beloved braids––she has had them for eight years––affixing one to
Sister Afang’s head and thereby allowing the show to go on. The story
ends in the present, with Honghua portraying Jiang Shuiying, the
much-lauded heroine of Song of Dragon River (Longjiang song), on
an impromptu stage. The audience, which now includes Sister Afang,
is duly impressed, and everyone rushes to learn from Honghua upon
the completion of her performance.1
Honghua’s apparent linear trajectory from student to teacher is
combined here with a circularity typical of Cultural Revolution rheto-
ric, if not Maoist rhetoric in general, for even as Honghua is watch-
ing from the sidelines, it is she, not Sister Afang, who has the most
ardent revolutionary spirit. It is Honghua who consistently inspires
Sister Afang, not the other way around. Circularity does not imply
stagnation, however; there must still be progress. And this is precisely
where Honghua’s development from spectator to performer and her
increasingly revolutionary behavior become so crucial: in Honghua’s
evolution lies the promise of our own, insofar as the engine of her
development is the performance of Li Tiemei and other yangbanxi
heroines. Performance is rendered transformative, with the expec-
tation that one will, in a sense, “become” the hero one portrays,
BREAKING BAD 67
an attitude neatly summed up by Honghua’s grandfather, who is

rather unsurprised by his granddaughter’s donation of braids for
the glory of the yangbanxi. “Yes,” he says, “Chairman Mao’s pro-
pagandists (xuanchuanyuan) should act this way!”2 The underlying
logic behind this naturalized expectation is subsequently articulated
by an unnamed, discerning peasant onlooker in the story’s present,
who ventriloquizes and expands on a common slogan in the discourse
surrounding amateur performance: “Play a hero, study a hero, see it
in the actions” (yan yingxiong, xue yingxiong, jian xingdong).3 This
progression effectively explodes the notion of the stage as a delimited
space within which one can and should appropriate the behavior and
mannerisms of a hero or heroes. The goal is rather to mold oneself
into a hero in everyday life beyond the stage.
The official media outlets were only too happy to report on
instances in which the transformative promise of yangbanxi amateur
performance had apparently been borne out, thereby propagating a
new crop of models who traveled effectively between onstage and
offstage. The propaganda teams of Shanghai’s Number Four Benefit
the People Food Products Factory (Yimin shipin si chang) (hereafter,
Yimin Factory) were some of the most prominent of these models.
Articles describing their achievements quite commonly found their
way into the pages of Shanghai’s major daily, Wenhui bao, as well
as the national People’s Daily (Renmin ribao). When members of
Shanghai Normal University’s Chinese Department put together
a volume lauding amateur performances and performers in 1975,
Yimin Factory was given pride of place.4 The exploits of the perform-
ers in the collection were varied: increased production, better work
unit morale, successful reformation of problematic persons in the
work unit, creation and development of new works, and so on. In the
best tradition of yangbanxi heroes, these model amateurs were said
to overcome great difficulties to carry out their tasks, such as wad-
ing through frigid water and performing in challenging conditions.
Provincial newspapers likewise touted local exemplars of “real-life”
heroes forged through the amateur performance of yangbanxi. As
part of its commemoration of the 32nd anniversary of Mao’s Talks at
the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature (Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotan-
hui shang de jianghua), the May 23, 1974 issue of Sichuan Daily
(Sichuan ribao) included a number of articles pertaining to yang-
banxi, one of which focuses on the propaganda efforts under way
in Dengzhan Commune and the exploits of amateur performer Ma
Ziyuan, which include saving a small child from a burning building. A
bombastic account of her selflessness is significantly juxtaposed with
68 LAURENCE CODERRE
figures concerning the number of commune propaganda team mem-

bers who have joined the Party.5 The message is clear: the (proper)
performance of yangbanxi can propel individuals into the pantheon of
revolutionary figures, themselves worthy of reproduction—whether
firefighters or bureaucrats.
This focus on everyday, “real-life” heroes aids us, perhaps, in refin-
ing our understanding of what precisely is meant by “amateur.” In
general, of course, we tend to understand the “amateur” as one who
engages in a particular activity without remuneration—that is, in addi-
tion to their trade or employment, an understanding made explicit
in the Chinese term I have been translating as “amateur” here: yeyu,
literally “in addition to work.”6 But this conceptualization of the ama-
teur––hardworking machinist by day, opera performer by night––did
not always jibe with what was happening on the ground. The contin-
ued touring required of the Yimin Factory performers, for example,
left little time for work on the factory floor, meaning that these indi-
viduals may therefore be said to have essentially been living off their
art.7 It was also common for nominally amateur groups to include,
or be advised by, individuals who had been members of professional
troupes up until the Cultural Revolution. After all, professional song
and dance and opera troupes may have “disbanded” in great num-
bers after 1966, but in many cases they were simply reinvented in
more politically acceptable forms, including those of amateur status.
Educated, urban artists sent to the countryside were likewise recast as
talented, amateur peasants.8
The term “amateur” was therefore incredibly elastic during this
period, and this elasticity was fundamentally a function of its politi-
cal desirability. Whereas the professional operates on the basis of her
formal training, which leaves her uncomfortably close to bourgeois
priorities and hierarchies, the amateur succeeds by virtue of her ideo-
logical fervor.9 This is the political cachet of the amateur: her motives
are clearly borne out by her actions. Moreover, the amateur never
achieves mastery of her area of interest; she will forever be a student
of the masses and, it goes without saying, of Chairman Mao. This is
precisely Sister Afang’s position with regard to Honghua in “Before
and After the Performance.” As the latter moves from spectator
to performer to teacher, the former’s position as eternal student is
cemented. There is always more to learn; one can always be better.
Just as Mao called for a continuous revolution and the yangbanxi
were rendered more and more perfect with every round of revision,
amateur performers are forever perfecting their art––and through it,
BREAKING BAD 69
themselves. In a nutshell, this is the essence of the notion of perfor-

mance as transformation.10
The Logic of Remediation

As we have seen, this desired transformation requires, and produces,
the blurring of distinctions between onstage and offstage. In light
of this, and the importance of performance and performance studies
in contemporary thought, it is perhaps not surprising that the yang-
banxi and their position of prominence in everyday life during the
Cultural Revolution have been approached from the vantage point of
theatricality and performativity.11 As Teri Silvio suggests, however, the
“performance paradigm” tends to emphasize issues of identity/iden-
tification and the construction of a “self” in relation to, and as a prod-
uct of, a role or roles. Questions concerning the relationship between
person and object––or person and “thing,” for that matter––therefore
often fall by the wayside.12 Such questions seem particularly crucial to
any discussion of the yangbanxi, as the revolutionary heroes I have
been addressing appeared not just onstage but in nearly every imagin-
able medium. They could be seen on both small and big screens; their
likenesses found their way onto every surface, from mirrors to plates
to biscuit tins; their voices could be heard endlessly over loudspeaker
and radio. It is within this context that amateur performances of the
yangbanxi took place in the 1970s and, as a result, it is incumbent
upon us to ask how amateur bodies and embodied voices fit into this
environment of extreme intermediality and saturation. As an analytical
frame, performance alone does not seem to answer this question. This
is the logic of “remediation.”
As defined in the most restrictive sense put forth by Bolter and
Grusin, remediation is “the representation of one medium in
another.”13 Therefore, we might think of the yangbanxi films as reme-
diations of theater, or the Shajiabang symphony as a remediation of
the opera. One quickly finds, however, that the linear progression
from one medium to another implied in Bolter and Grusin’s most
basic definition of remediation is problematic in the context of the
yangbanxi, if not generally, as it becomes increasingly difficult to pin-
point the directionality of the remediatory process. Rather than rely
on this narrow understanding of remediation, then, I turn to Bolter
and Grusin’s own expansion of the concept, when they suggest that,
in a sense, “all mediation is remediation” because “[m]edia need each
other in order to function as media at all.”14 Ultimately, remediation
70 LAURENCE CODERRE
operates not as a series of vectors from one medium to another, but as

a system of media, perpetually defining themselves in relation to one
another and the production of the “real” as itself a form of (re)media-
tion. Thus, when considering the amateur performance of yangbanxi
through the lens of remediation, the most pertinent question is not
“what media are being remediated by amateur bodies in this particular
instance” so much as “how other media are being invoked in the con-
struction of amateur bodies as a medium in its own right.”
One of the key media in this regard is sculpture, invoked most
directly, perhaps, in the operatic practice of liangxiang, or “striking
a pose.” At their most emblematic, revolutionary heroes are com-
pletely motionless, temporarily transposed into the realm of statu-
ary, despite being physically onstage. But these theatrical moments
of stillness were also translated into actual sculptures—most notably,
for our purposes, in the form of porcelain statuettes. As it turns out,
the making of these statuettes, which first requires the sculpting or
“molding” of the clay and its subsequent vitrification in the kiln,15
is a rather apt metaphor for the idealized transformative process of
amateur performance in general: the body of the amateur performer
first assumes (or is made to assume) the form of the revolutionary
icon; then, through the act of performance––itself a substitute for
the flames of revolution––it undergoes a kind of transubstantiation,
becoming literally the stuff of heroes.
Indeed, this link between the performance of yangbanxi and sculp-
ture is rendered even stronger by the consistent use of the word suzao
when describing the process of crafting revolutionary heroes onstage.
As Ellen Judd makes clear, the prescriptive performance theory of the
Cultural Revolution was fully articulated in the mid-1970s, when the
notion of the so-called “three prominences” (san tuchu)––emphasis
on the positive characters over the negative, the heroic among the
positive, and the single most heroic among these––was combined with
the “basic task” (genben renwu) of socialist art: to suzao “proletarian
heroic types/images/characters (dianxing/xingxiang/renwu).”16 We
may well be tempted to simply translate suzao as “to create” here, as
Judd does, but the Chinese has a decidedly sculptural connotation to
it, as it can mean both to “mold” a substance—especially clay—into a
representative figure and, by extension, to portray a character in the
theater or craft a character in writing. The successful suzao of heroes
in the yangbanxi was said to be one of their most significant accom-
plishments: every tool at the creators’ disposal had been used in this
endeavor, and the importance of the continued optimal suzao of these
BREAKING BAD 71
same heroes became the central concern in discourse on amateur per-

formance. Amateurs had a responsibility to suzao these unquestion-
ably flawless characters as well as they could.
To the extent that amateurs were suzao-ing, or “molding” revolu-
tionary icons, the medium at their disposal was ultimately themselves:
their bodies, their voices, and ideally their entire beings. They were
aided in this process by a number of tools, not the least of which were
the endlessly repeated and definitive professional performances dis-
seminated over loudspeaker, radio, television, and finally film. The
People’s Daily editorial that marks the official beginning of the popu-
larization campaign on July 15, 1970 makes a point of noting the
usefulness of such representations, along with the written experiential
accounts of professionals.17 The proper reliance on these representa-
tions was further described in accounts of the difficult––but ultimately
always fruitful––learning process:
In order to promote the yangbanxi well, Ma Xiaode, a member of the

third brigade’s propaganda team, would spend his free time every day,
morning, noon, and night, sitting in front of the radio or broadcast
[loudspeaker], singing along word for word or, after watching a yang-
banxi film, practicing each individual movement. He often practiced
until his mouth and tongue were dry and his waist and legs ached.
Sometimes, he would practice late into the night, without any thought
of resting. After a period of this kind of diligent study and bitter
rehearsal, he was finally able to portray Yang Zirong, Guo Jianguang,
Li Yuhe, and other heroic characters quite well, after which he received
acclaim from the masses.18
While even the singing guides, at pains to describe the production

of sound “scientifically,” ultimately deferred to the aurally and visu-
ally instructive power of professional performances,19 this did not
stop the publishing houses from churning out all manner of perfor-
mance manuals, specifying—in minute detail—staging, properties,
set design, costumes, and gestures and dance steps––not to mention
the scripts, of course. Scores were also published in various formats,
the most common of which only include the vocal line of the main
arias; however, full scores and instrumental/percussion scores were
also available.
The emphasis on the amateur body within this discursive sphere
again points to a notion of performance as a transformative technol-
ogy, which is itself predicated on the assumed plasticity of bodies
and individuals. Ban Wang identifies this basic premise as critical to
72 LAURENCE CODERRE
the promulgation of repetitive revolutionary ritual.20 But, whereas

Wang describes “ritual” as a medium, I would argue that, from the
perspective of remediation, it is malleable individuals––who actively
mold themselves––who are the medium of note here. Like perfor-
mance, ritual is simply the mechanism through which this molding
is carried out or undermined. Moreover, the operating assumption
here is not just that the mind and body are both plastic, but rather
that the shaping of the latter will necessarily result in the perfectly
corresponding shaping of the former, that one can “endlessly reform
one’s worldview (shijieguan) as part of the performance process.”21
This is the logic of “thought reform through labor” (laogai), as it is
the logic of amateur performance of the yangbanxi: if the body (and
voice) are molded in the likeness of a revolutionary paragon, the rest
will follow.
The power attributed to the notion of performance as a technol-
ogy of transformation accounts for the discursive investment in the
standardization of that process, but only in part. We might better
understand the emphasis on the “proper” way to perform the yang-
banxi as indicative, on the one hand, of the precarious position of the
model performances’ staunchest supporters—Jiang Qing and what
would become the Gang of Four—and, on the other, a testament to
a sneaking suspicion that this much-vaunted technology was perhaps
not so effective after all. In keeping with the porcelain metaphor, we
might call this underlying unease the “fear of the misfire”—that is, the
concern that the transmutation effected in the kiln goes awry in some
way. In the context of amateur performance, the most problematic
of misfires are, in fact, not so much the imperfectly shaped repro-
ductions of the model heroes (e.g., amateurs singing out of tune) so
much as those cases in which vitrification is incomplete: clay and glaze
are not fused and transmuted into porcelain, and despite all hopes
and outward appearances, the amateur playing the hero remains just
that: an individual playing a hero, rather than becoming one. The dif-
ficulty here lies precisely in trying to tell the difference between the
two processes, in recognizing the misfire if and when it occurs—thus
the increasing attention paid to the standardization of performance
practice, staging, costuming, properties, and so on. For, despite the
unsettling notion of a disjuncture between the molding of the body
and the concomitant shaping of the individual as a whole, the former
still remains the preferred way to facilitate the latter. Faced with the
possibility of failure, the only recourse here, paradoxically, is to double
the efforts at molding the body “correctly,” since that can still be at
least partially controlled.
BREAKING BAD 73
But failures we know there were. In a duality that extended beyond

the stage and into daily life, appearances could often be deceiving:
Although nobody dared say so in public, among trusted schoolmates

or family frustration with the empty rhetoric and meaningless idealism
was frequently expressed. A certain tone in singing an aria from one
of the model operas, a certain flick of the head in exaggerated parody
of one of the central heroes, a clever rewording of a well-known verse
could provide an outlet for a largely unspoken but shared sense of the
ridiculous.22
In light of such behavior, it is no wonder that the cultural and political

authorities used every tool at their disposal to standardize such parodic
renditions and exaggerated head “flicks” into oblivion. That they did
not succeed in doing so should not be surprising: extreme standard-
ization––or what Alexei Yurchak calls “hypernormalization”23––has a
nasty way of producing new discursive spaces of the very kind it is
meant to eradicate.24 I would like to argue a slightly different point,
however, that the very gap between “playing” and “becoming,” which
proved so productive for unofficial and counter-discourses, was also
tied to, and embodied in, the oft-neglected figure of the yangbanxi
villain. It is precisely in occupying and exploiting this liminal space
that he does the most damage to the revolutionary enterprise.
The Saboteurs in Our Midst

Despite the fact that much, if not all, of the glory of the yangbanxi
is invariably directed at the heroes––and would-be heroes who play
them––the performances are not designed to be one-person shows.
Among the structural tools used to suzao the main heroic character of
each work is their juxtaposition with other characters, who are inevi-
tably dwarfed––sometimes literally––by the comparison. The starkest
contrast is, of course, provided by the figure of the class enemy:
The negative characters were invariably class enemies, for the most part
officers of the Japanese or Nationalist armies or spies. They were few in
number, as it was an essential feature of this theory that the positive and
heroic characters must predominate, but their presence was important
for both political and dramatic purposes. They were politically neces-
sary because class struggle was at the core of every proletarian drama
even if its main line of dramatic conflict lay in the realm of contra-
dictions among the people . . . The theory prescribed that the negative
characters be created with the primary purpose of revealing the virtues
74 LAURENCE CODERRE
of the hero(in)es, especially the main heroic character. The qualities of

the negative characters were of no other interest or purpose in prole-
tarian drama. In order to ensure strong dramatic conflict, the negative
characters should be formidably bad, but must not distract attention
from the heroic characters, to whom they must give way and whose
characterization they must serve to develop.25
In the terms of Maoist discourse, we might say that the villain primar-
ily served a dialectical purpose: he––the villain is consistently male–
–is the antithesis to the hero’s thesis; synthesis notably requires them
both. But the requisite villain had to be of a rather peculiar type:
despicable and cunning enough to put up a good fight, yet never so
much so that the triumph of good over evil could ever really be in
doubt.
This balance was difficult to achieve, but critical to the yangbanxi’s
propagandistic agenda, lest the works be consistently “misread.” It
was thus one of Jiang Qing’s chief concerns and criticisms of an early
version of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan)
when she addressed the conference on Peking operas on contem-
porary themes in Beijing in 1964. The villain of the piece, Vulture
(Cuoshandiao), overshadowed the hero, Yang Zirong, from the
work’s very inception, prompting a series of revisions in Shanghai
before the conference in the capital began. But Jiang Qing remained
dissatisfied with these changes, pointing out that Vulture’s scenes
were essentially untouched during this process, a fact Jiang attributes
to deference to the considerable talent of the man playing Vulture,
He Yonghua. To truly emphasize the heroic characters, He’s perfor-
mance had to be reigned in: Vulture had to become less remarkable
in his villainy.26
Jiang’s preoccupation with Vulture’s stature and his position
vis-à-vis Yang Zirong is perhaps best understood in the context of
the 1958 novel on which the opera was based, Qu Bo’s Tracks in
the Snowy Forest (Linhai xue yuan), and its subsequent film adapta-
tion, both of which appear to have caused some worrisome reac-
tions among readers and viewers. According to one Ding Lin of the
Beijing Number Two Experimental Primary School, children were
especially vulnerable to Vulture’s charms. Ding asserts that children
have a “strong propensity towards imitation” (qianglie de mofangx-
ing), such that they often reproduce teachers’ words and actions
as well as fictional characters’ traits in their games and lives.27 The
child emerges here as the malleable learner/viewer/listener par
excellence—the quintessential amateur performer, as it were. The
BREAKING BAD 75
playground is the child’s stage, as she reenacts what she has seen
and heard. But if this is the promise rooted in the figure of the
child, Ding Lin reports that in the case of Tracks in the Snowy Forest,
things have gone horribly wrong: instead of mimicking Yang Zirong
as they should, the school’s pupils are playing at being the bandits,
reproducing their idiosyncratic language and behavior.28 The rea-
son? The villains have too many strange tics, which both mask the
evildoers’ reactionary “essence” and attract the children’s attention.
By contrast, the heroes are bland and uninteresting. In short, the
villains are simply too cool—too much fun to play at. The result is
ultimately the overshadowing of the protagonist and the inversion
of the intended ideological message. This is the propagandist’s worst
nightmare, and though no amount of restructuring and revision
could ever completely foreclose this kind of unsanctioned reaction,
every attempt was made to restrict the villain’s role to essentially that
of a foil, a contrastive figure who would not attract any undue atten-
tion outside of his dealings with the hero.
This was somewhat of a departure from “traditional” opera—or,
at the very least, was pegged as such by Peking opera revolutionar-
ies. Gone were the villains one could love to hate; such sentiments
were too complex for the increasingly Manichean understanding of
the world promoted by official organs as of the mid-1960s. As one
can imagine, this made life difficult for actors who had made a name
for themselves playing exactly what was now to be avoided at all costs:
memorable, larger-than-life villains. For the famed Yuan Shihai, who
was perhaps best known for his portrayal of the historical villain Cao
Cao, learning how to act the villain in a modern opera was essentially
a new enterprise, one he finally “mastered” on his third attempt with
Captain Hatoyama (Jiushan, in Chinese) in The Red Lantern. Yuan
describes his ultimate breakthrough as follows:
I [eventually] understood that, when playing a negative character,

one should analyze the character’s reactionary essence (benzhi) from a
proletarian perspective; one must possess hatred for the negative char-
acter in order to depict (biaoxianchu) the negative character’s cruel
and ruthless reactionary essence. And, most importantly, one must
always remember that the purpose of depicting negative characters is to
heighten the establishment of the positive characters.
Hatoyama is a vicious, cruel character, who has treachery in his
heart but thinks himself beyond reproach. He dons a sincere, kind,
and worldly exterior (waibiao), but he cannot fully conceal his iras-
cible, empty, and weak nature (benxing). These factors add up to his
76 LAURENCE CODERRE
being the spitting image of a paper tiger. Thus, when I am playing this
character, in my heart (xin li) I have the following refrain: I must carve
(kehua) his “all bark, no bite” (selineiren) reactionary essence.29
Within the context of Yuan’s self-described epiphany, the acknowledg-

ment of Hatoyama’s second-tier status vis-à-vis the positive characters
comes off as a simple restatement of a categorical, official mantra. This
is particularly so because of the apparent difficulty with which Yuan
attempts to explain his creative process. Whereas the relationship
between positive and negative characters is provided without any hint
of equivocation, the rest of his account lacks such definition; here, he
ties himself into rhetorical knots.
At issue is the disjuncture between essence (benzhi) and outward
appearance (waibiao). As a character, Hatoyama is said to be defined
by a radical lack of correspondence between the two––which is itself,
paradoxically, also described as his essence. He acts one way, but really
is something else: he seems kindly but is vicious; he seems ferocious
but is weak. As it turns out, this duality is a trait commonly found in
yangbanxi villains; indeed, it is part of what makes them so nefarious.
Huang Shiren in The White-Haired Girl (Baimao nü) and Nan Batian
in The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun) purport to be
“good” Confucians despite their heinous crimes. The American impe-
rialists in Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi Baihutuan) say they
want peace on the Korean peninsula while planning their next attack.
The villains of the works set during the socialist period are arguably
even more two-faced. Huang Guozhong in Song of Dragon River and
Qian Shouwei in On the Docks (Haigang), for example, both reveal
themselves to be class enemies hidden in plain sight among the masses.
Faced with this kind of foe, for their part, the revolutionary heroines
and heroes further distinguish themselves by not falling victim to the
villains’ carefully crafted facades. While everyone else is fooled or even
led astray by the enemy in their midst, the heroine sees him and his
acts of sabotage for what they are: an instance of class struggle. The
inevitable unveiling of the villain in all his despicableness is one of the
hero’s chief tasks, and it is made possible by a kind of preternatural
discernment, carefully attuned to the underhanded tricks of the wolf
in sheep’s clothing.
This exceptional ability to see people for what they really are was
one of the many things the yangbanxi were supposed to model and
teach. This critical skill is described by one Tao Youzhi as “penetrating
appearance to see the essence” (touguo xianxiang kan benzhi), which
itself is predicated on distinguishing between “false appearances”
BREAKING BAD 77
(jiaxiang) and “true appearances” (zhenxiang). As ever, the key here

is the relationship between appearance and essence—when they cor-
respond and when they do not. Tao’s attempt at a characteristically
dialectical explanation is worth quoting at length:
[E]ssence and appearance are two different sides of the objective devel-
opmental process of things. Essence refers to a thing’s nature and inter-
nal relations, and appearance is a thing’s external form, which we can
perceive. Essence cannot be separated from appearance, and appear-
ance cannot be separated from essence. Essence must be reflected via
appearance; any appearance is the external manifestation (biaoxian) of
essence. From this perspective, essence and appearance are mutually
related and unified. However, essence and appearance are also distinct,
mutually contradictory, and mutually opposed. As essence is stored in
a thing’s interior, it is relatively stable, but as appearance is revealed on
a thing’s exterior, it is relatively changeable. That with which people
can directly make contact is a thing’s appearance. Moreover, appear-
ance may be categorized as true appearance and false appearance. The
former directly illustrates some aspect of the thing’s essence, while the
latter is the distorted and inverted manifestation of essence.30
Fang Haizhen, heroine of On the Docks and Tao Youzhi’s paradig-

matic example of what a discerning proletarian should be, is not
fooled by these momentary distortions and inversions of the villain
Qian Shouwei’s capitalist essence. Indeed, Tao goes so far as to sug-
gest that this ability to “penetrate appearance” is in fact part and par-
cel of Fang Haizhen’s proletarian “worldview” (shijieguan).31 Thus,
taking a revolutionary stand is equated here with what I would like
to call a Cultural Revolution “hermeneutics of suspicion”: although
there is a belief in, and a desire for, a direct correlation between what
a person “is” and what she “appears” to be, one must always be on
one’s guard, prepared for those instances in which “false appearances”
might rear their ugly heads.
There were, after all, an inordinate number of “class enemies” hid-
den in the very last place one would think to look during the Cultural
Revolution, including at the Great Helmsman’s right hand. It is most
fitting, then, that Tao Youzhi should end his 1974 essay with a dis-
cussion of Lin Biao, as someone who—like Qian Shouwei—hid his
treacherous inclinations but was ultimately found out by some per-
spicacious comrades. The average individual, in molding herself into
a Fang Haizhen––through amateur performance, perhaps—is called
upon to develop this perspicacity, this hermeneutics of suspicion, on
which she can draw to ferret out the Qian Shouweis and Lin Biaos in
78 LAURENCE CODERRE
her own everyday life. But this is easier said than done, for, as much
as the yangbanxi, and officially endorsed readings of them, try to per-
suade us that the shadowy world of the hidden class enemy and his
corollary, the undercover hero, might all be neatly squared away,32
the hermeneutics of suspicion they themselves promote would seem
to foreclose that possibility. Appearance and essence are continuously
wrenched apart by the simple act of interrogating their connection.
There does not seem to be any road back from that.
The implications of this hermeneutics of suspicion for the notion
of performance as a technology of transformation are therefore very
great indeed. It would seem to guarantee the “misfires” the process
is so keen to avoid by maintaining the gap between appearance and
essence consistent with “playing” the hero, as opposed to “becom-
ing” one. In truth, the disruptive power of the villain is even more
pronounced in this regard by virtue of the modifications to the per-
formance-cum-technology his portrayal requires. Whereas the mass
(re)production of heroes is an eminently desirable state of affairs,
the notion of (re)producing class enemies right alongside them is
considerably less so––though it may remain, as we shall see, a dialecti-
cal necessity. In the case of the villain, then, “misfires” are in fact the
goal—the transmutational process is to be intentionally sabotaged, as
it were. The actor Yuan Shihai’s discussion of how to play Hatoyama
(quoted at length above) is instructive here, insofar as he establishes
distance between his essence and that of the Japanese captain. Yuan
does not “mold” or suzao Hatoyama in the medium of his own body,
as amateurs are called upon to do when portraying heroic figures.
Rather, he renders harsh proletarian judgment on Hatoyama, even as
he plays him. This is not so much a case of performance as a straight-
forward technology of transformation as it is a “real-life” invocation
of the trope of the undercover revolutionary. If there were a patron
saint of villain-portrayers, it would be Yang Zirong, who manages to
remain every bit the ardent Communist even while donning his strik-
ing tiger skin sash as he enters the villain’s lair in disguise.
This means, of course, that a full, amateur staging of a yangbanxi
would ideally feature two conceptualizations of performance––as
“becoming,” in the case of the hero, and resolutely “not becom-
ing,” in the case of the villain––side by side. The need to discern
which was which was not hypothetical; this was a tension at the heart
of the discourse on amateur performance confronting individuals
on a daily basis. One fairly obvious way of ameliorating the situa-
tion was simply to push the villains offstage. Full stagings, and even
BREAKING BAD 79
staged excerpts, were more difficult to perform, requiring consider-

ably more resources than the presentation of a series of triumphant
arias, for example; they were, accordingly, the exception rather than
the rule. Villains appear to have been given decidedly limited stage
time beyond that, lacking any rip-roaring arias of their own. They
are likewise conspicuously absent from official accounts of amateur
performances; the figure of the villain is too unsettling to allow onto
the pages of People’s Daily and Wenhui bao. Better to whitewash him
out of existence.
Try as one might, however, the yangbanxi villain cannot be eradi-
cated, only displaced, for he remains a dialectical necessity: the heroes
cannot be heroic without adversaries to vanquish. Bumped unceremo-
niously off the amateur stage, we find these villains in the form of
the constantly invoked, nameless throng of “enemies” (diren), said to
oppose the popularization of the yangbanxi at every turn:
The enemies of the proletariat fear the revolutionary yangbanxi to

death and will hate them to their last . . . First, they went all out, besieg-
ing, cursing, disparaging, and sabotaging; they openly attacked, saying
the revolutionary yangbanxi were not good. Their frontal attack was
quickly decimated by the high level of political and artistic success of
the revolutionary yangbanxi. Later, they tried in vain to weaken the
great political educational power and artistic affective potential of the
yangbanxi. Some bad people went so far as to use the masses’ love of
the revolutionary yangbanxi to their advantage, upholding the banner
of “performing the revolutionary yangbanxi,” in order only to distort,
tamper with, and sabotage the revolutionary yangbanxi. This is a ten-
dency in the class struggle on the literary and artistic front that is wor-
thy of our serious attention.33
This 1969 Red Flag (Hongqi) editorial, reproduced in People’s Daily,

goes on to enumerate some of these attempts at sabotage, the most
spectacular of which involve intentionally “improper” stagings of
the works. Despite the nebulous nature of the rank-and-file “bad
elements” in society responsible for such performances as described
by the official press,34 their “crimes” are quite specific: men playing
women and vice versa; the reliance on feudal costumes and orna-
ments even when depicting revolutionaries; the reintroduction of
love interests excised from earlier versions; and the use of “make-up,
costumes, sets, properties, music, gestures, and choreography to
spread the base flavor of capitalism and feudalism, to distort the revo-
lutionary yangbanxi.”35 The perpetrators of these improper acts are
80 LAURENCE CODERRE
the most dangerous of class enemies. They do not attack head-on and
in plain sight; rather, they infiltrate and corrupt from within. They
perform the yangbanxi, but do so in such a way as to undermine
their status as proletarian models of the arts and mass-technology of
(heroic) (re)production. By meddling with precisely those aspects of
performance that the official discourse is so at pains to standardize,
the omnipresent class enemy has the wherewithal to throw the whole
system off-kilter.
It is, nonetheless, the case that the class enemy is also crucial
to that very same system. As unsavory as it would have seemed to
the cultural authorities at the time, the (re)production of villains
was just as important (if not more so) to the Cultural Revolution
enterprise as the (re)production of the heroic masses. The promo-
tion of the yangbanxi as the dominant repertoire of the period was
often carried out in the name of fighting back against the most
high-ranking public enemy at any given time. This was the case
when the works first rose to prominence in the years from 1967
to 1969, when former president Liu Shaoqi was the chief target.
The surge in writings about the yangbanxi of 1973 and 1974
also coincides neatly with the campaign to “Criticize Lin Biao,
Criticize Confucius,” as is the case with Tao Youzhi’s essay, dis-
cussed above. Finally, in 1976, as the Gang of Four began to attack
Deng Xiaoping, defending the yangbanxi was used (unsuccessfully,
it would seem) as a rallying point once again.36 These highly pub-
licized foes notwithstanding, however, just as the amateur perfor-
mance of the yangbanxi was meant to produce heroes en masse, it
had to produce enemies for them to defeat on a similarly large scale.
Like their brethren onstage, these enemies had to be adept at hid-
ing their true “essence,” and were necessarily revealed for what they
were by a new crop of heroes, fresh from the metaphorical kiln of
performance, well versed in the Cultural Revolution hermeneutics
of suspicion—until, that is, more enemies were “produced” out of
necessity, repeating the cycle ad infinitum. Such is the characteristi-
cally circular rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution.
However, as I have attempted to show in this chapter, the yang-
banxi villain is perhaps a better saboteur than we normally give him
credit for, undermining the (re)production of “real-life” heroes
through performance by casting doubt on the feasibility of a per-
fect correspondence between appearance and essence, body and
person. Perhaps––just perhaps––he succeeds in keeping the trans-
formative technology of amateur performance from coming full
circle.
BREAKING BAD 81
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of this volume, as well as all the participants
in the symposium from which it originated, for their kind words and
encouragement. Research for this chapter was undertaken with the
support of a Liu Graduate Research Fellowship from the University of
California, Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies.
Notes
1. Shi Ning, “Yanchu qianhou” (Before and After the Performance),
Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), April 14, 1974, 4.
2. My translation; ibid.
3. This slogan is sometimes shortened to only the first two terms of
the triptych––“play a hero, study a hero”––drawing on the notion
of “study” (xue) as itself a kind of embodiment, which has a very
long history, traceable all the way back to The Analects (Lunyu).
Interestingly enough, this abridged saying is also occasionally
inverted, becoming instead an adage about proper performance
practice: “study a hero to play a hero.” In this reversibility, we once
again find the circularity characteristic of Maoist discourse.
4. Yizhi changdao gongchanzhuyi: Gongnongbing puji geming yangbanxi
diaocha baogao (Singing All the Way to Communism: Investigative
Report on the Popularization of Yangbanxi by Workers, Peasants,
and Soldiers), edited by Shanghai shifan daxue Zhongwen xi gon-
gnongbing xueyuan diaocha xiaozu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin
chubanshe, 1975).
5. Chen Shenqing, “Yanzhe Mao Zhuxi de geming wenyi luxian shengli
qianjin-Ji Dengzhan gongshe ge dadui yeyu wenyi xuanchuandui
dali puji geming yangbanxi” (Victoriously Advance Chairman Mao’s
Revolutionary Line in Literature and Art—On the Energetically
Popularization of Yangbanxi by the Dengshan Commune Brigade
Amateur Propaganda Teams), Sichuan ribao (Sichuan Daily), May
23, 1974, 3.
6. For a discussion of amateur theater in China from 1949 to 1966, see
Colin Mackerras, Amateur Theatre in China, 1949–1966 (Canberra:
ANU Press, 1973).
7. See Ellen Judd, “China’s Amateur Drama: The Movement to
Popularize the Revolutionary Model Operas,” Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars 15(1) (1983): 26–35.
8. For many examples of this, see Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural
Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
9. These associations explain the push in 1972 and 1973, when Premier
Zhou Enlai was in a relative position of power vis-à-vis Jiang Qing’s
radical faction, for individuals to be both “red” and “expert” (you
hong you zhuan).
82 LAURENCE CODERRE
10. We should note that professionals could lay claim to “amateur” status
in this regard as well.
11. See, for example, Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political
Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 120–121; Ban Wang, The Sublime
Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 214.
12. Teri Silvio, “Animation: The New Performance?” Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 20(2) (2010): 422–438.
13. J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 45.
14. Ibid., 55.
15. Depending on the technique used, color is added under the glaze,
prior to the first and only firing, or over the glaze, after the first firing
but before the second.
16. As translated in Ellen Judd, “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the
Cultural Revolution,” in Drama in the People’s Republic of China,
edited by Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1987), 95.
17. “Zuohao puji geming yangbanxi de gongzuo” (Carry Out the Work
of Popularizing the Revolutionary Yangbanxi), Renmin ribao (People’s
Daily), July 15, 1970, 1.
18. My translation. Chen, “Yanzhe Mao Zhuxi de geming wenyi luxian
shengli qianjin-Ji Dengzhan gongshe ge dadui yeyu wenyi xuanchuan-
dui dali puji geming yangbanxi.”
19. See, for example, Xiao Congshu, Geming xiandai jingju xue chang
changshi jieshao (Introduction to the Fundamentals of Learning How
to Sing Revolutionary Modern Peking Opera) (Shanghai: Shanghai
renmin chubanshe, 1975), 54.
20. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 217.
21. My translation. “Zuohao puji geming yangbanxi de gongzuo.”
22. Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 259.
23. Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last
Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
24. Barbara Mittler also reminds us of the enduring polysemy of “pro-
paganda” of all sorts during the Cultural Revolution. See Barbara
Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution
Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).
25. Judd, “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution,”
100.
26. Jiang Qing, “Tan jingju geming—yijiuliusi nian qi yue zai jingju xian-
dai xi huanmo yanchu renyuan de zuotanhui shang de jianghua” (On
the Revolution in Peking Opera—Talks at the July 1964 Conference
on Peking Operas on Contemporary Themes), Renmin ribao (People’s
Daily), May 10, 1967, 1.
BREAKING BAD 83
27. Ding Lin, “Women de gongtong zeren” (Our Common Responsibility),

in Bi tan Lin hai xue yuan (On Tracks in the Snowy Forest) (Beijing:
Beijing chubanshe, 1961), 26.
28. Ibid., 26.
29. My translation. Yuan Shihai, “Tantan zhengque di duidai biaoyan
fanmian renwu” (On the Correct Approach to the Performance of
Negative Characters), Wenhui bao, October 4, 1965, 4.
30. My translation. Tao Youzhi, ““Yiyang” yu “bu yiyang”—tan xianxiang
he benzhi” (“Alike” and “Unalike”—On Appearance and Essence),
in Xue yangbanxi, tan bianzhengfa (Study the Yangbanxi, Discuss
Dialectics), edited by Gong Xueli (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chu-
banshe, 1974), 33–34.
31. Ibid., 35.
32. Judd, “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution,”
112.
33. My translation. Zhe Ping, “Xuexi geming yangbanxi, baowei gem-
ing yangbanxi” (Study the Revolutionary Model Works, Protect the
Revolutionary Model Works), Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), October
19, 1969, 2.
34. As I have argued elsewhere, the lack of specificity should not neces-
sarily be understood as a failure to deliver a particular propagandistic
message. On the contrary, in some cases, vagueness can, in and of
itself, be used as a rhetorical tool. In this instance, the “enemies” of
the yangbanxi are potentially so broadly construed as to be anyone
and everyone, which is precisely the point. See Laurence Coderre,
“Counterattack: (Re)contextualizing Propaganda,” Journal of Chinese
Cinemas 4(3) (2010): 211–227.
35. My translation. Zhe, “Xuexi geming yangbanxi, baowei geming
yangbanxi.”
36. The inaugural March issue of People’s Theater (Renmin xiju), for
example, includes a series of six articles, all written by professional
actors, Yuan Shihai among them. Over and over again, the authors
assert Deng Xiaoping’s opposition to the yangbanxi and all that they
represent. See “Jianjue huiji wenyijie youqing fan’an feng” (Resolutely
Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Wind to Reverse Correct
Verdicts in the World of Literature and Art), Renmin xiju (People’s
Theater) 1 (1976): 10–18.
C H A P T ER 4
Third World Internationalism:

Films and Operas in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution
Ban Wang
“Eight hundred million people watching eight shows” is a cruel joke

about the barrenness of culture during the Cultural Revolution. But
in recent years, scholars such as Paul Clark and Barbara Mittler, among
others, have demonstrated that there was life—and much of it quite
interesting and vibrant—in the proverbial cultural desert. In his book
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, Clark offers insights into cultural
innovations and professional perfectionism beyond the conventional
narratives of elite power games in high places. Listening attentively
beneath the loud noise of propaganda to the muffled music of artistic
experiment and innovation, Clark shows that an undercurrent of cul-
tural life was still going on, and creating a new aesthetics.1 Taking a
long view of China’s revolutionary history, Barbara Mittler, in her A
Continuous Revolution, decries the myth that the Cultural Revolution
is something radically new and disruptive.
Mittler offers an expert analysis of operatic, musical, and perfor-
mative innovations, and the popularization of performance arts. A
rich cosmopolitanism of culture becomes apparent in her analysis of
the adoption, translation, and appropriation of Western elements.
A musician herself, she shows precise musical mechanisms in such
works as the Yellow River Concerto and the ballet Red Detachment
of Women.2 What looks like propaganda contains a wide spectrum of
aesthetic design. Western musical motifs, melodies, and semantics are
86 BAN WANG
appropriated into the creation of the new concerto, and Western music
modes blend with the Chinese-style ballet movements of a peasant
girl. The combination of Western and Chinese resources explains why
Cultural Revolutionary propaganda was loved, and why its artistry
remained popular in the post-Cultural Revolution era. A continu-
ous view of culture extends back to the traditions before the Cultural
Revolution, but after it as well, and shows that, contrary to popular
belief, the Cultural Revolution is not a thing of the past but remains a
“continuous revolution.”3
In this chapter, I will consider the films of the Cultural Revolution
period in relation to modernization and Third World internationalism.
The Cultural Revolution continued the long-term debate and ideo-
logical difference within the Chinese Communist Party over China’s
developmental path. Should China be integrated with the global eco-
nomic system of capitalism, or should it pursue a sustainable path
balancing development with political unity, equality, community, and
the needs of the working people? Sustainability in socialism means
an all-round progress informed by the egalitarian ethos and relatively
equal distribution of income and resources among different sections
and classes, between cities and the countryside, and between differ-
ent sectors of the economy. The crux of this conflict is over economic
development versus social progress. While modern Chinese history
has been marked by a single-minded pursuit of wealth and power, this
“modernization” line frequently conflicted with alternative agendas
aimed at caring for the general welfare of citizens and working popu-
lation. In the runaway pursuit of economic growth in the Reform Era,
these conflicts resurfaced with a vengeance.
A look back at film images in the Cultural Revolution period is
helpful for understanding the nature of this conflict, as well as for
appreciating how much has been lost in forgetting the unfulfilled
goals. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, the issues about
development were articulated in a number of prominent films made in
1975. The films Spring Sprouts (Chunmiao 㗍剿), Breaking with Old
Ideas (Juelie ⅛塪), and The Pioneers (Chuangye ⇃᷂) have been seen
as ideological bombast, and these days few critics would bother to
pay attention to them. However, in the light of the controversy over
economic development versus social progress, these films, for all their
strident tones and dogmatic formula, engaged in an intense public
discourse that is absent in Chinese films of recent decades. Wang Hui
reminds us that the Cultural Revolution intensified the discursive bat-
tle about how people should participate in mass politics by becoming
masters of their own society, but, as the movement ran amok in acts of
THIRD WORLD INTERNATIONALISM 87
destructive violence, the party-state’s administrative and military con-

trol gradually shrank the space of discussion and mass participation.
The initial antibureaucratic, populist drive to open up multiple fronts
of discussion among spontaneous social organizations gave way to a
high politics of factional fighting as well as administrative retrench-
ment and policing. This shift constitutes what Wang calls the “depo-
liticization of politics,” which worked to contain and silence vibrant
political and critical energy in the initial moments of the movement.4
Produced at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the three films
cited above now seem to be the last gasp of argument in stridently
melodramatic and cinematic forms. Focusing on education reform—a
top priority on the agenda of the Cultural Revolution—Breaking
with Old Ideas comes through as a scathing critique of the top-heavy,
dogmatic, elitist educational system that had evolved over a decade.
Sheepishly aping the Soviet and Western models, the ivory tower
of higher education produces students who are obsessed with their
career advancement, material gain, and personal fame, completely
out of touch with the working population and without a sense of
social responsibility. Pitted against this “bourgeois” system are the
grassroots-leaning initiatives based on practical work and study, set
up and run by socially conscientious peasants and concerned leaders.
Through trial and error, the peasants build a labor university, which
is accessible to and welcomed by the rural population. Inspired by
the revolutionary tradition of integrating theory with practice, this
initiative represents a reform that strives to narrow the widening gap
between the cities and the countryside in an attempt to serve the
knowledge needs of the working people.
Spring Sprouts targeted the imbalanced and corrupt system of pub-
lic health service. The film depicts the public health system as the priv-
ileged enclave of bureaucrats and elites, where the doctors only care
for officials and city dwellers to the neglect of rural patients. The story
opens with an incident in which a careerist doctor neglects a child
in emergency and causes his avoidable death. It is important to note
here that, in today’s China, leaving patients, who are unable to pay, to
die on the hospital’s doorstep is becoming a phenomenon that barely
registers any outrage, and this makes the angry outcry of injustice in
the film all the more poignant. Angered by this incident, Chunmiao,
a peasant girl, dedicates herself to serving the medical needs of the vil-
lagers and strives to teach herself to become a barefoot doctor. Against
the obstructions from the egoistic, self-seeking doctors of the county
hospital, whose professional interest lies in managing the well-being
and longevity of high-ranking officials of the urban centers, and with
88 BAN WANG
the help of a new doctor as committed as her, Chunmiao eventually

completes her self-education and becomes a doctor of peasants. The
film’s narrative tension builds toward the showdown of two diametri-
cally opposed lines in health care and raises the pressing questions:
Medical progress for whom? Public health for what public?
The film The Pioneers addresses the theme of self-reliance in building
China’s oil industry. Besieged by the imperialist embargo and geopo-
litical agenda of containment, China’s oil industry looks to the cre-
ative potential of grassroots workers and peasants and mobilizes their
energy. Defying Western experts’ theory that China is lacking in oil
reserves, and resisting the oil embargo by imperialist constraints, the
oil workers—mostly peasants—learn from their mistakes and struggle
with obstacles in opening up China’s first full-scale oil field. A critique
of China’s dependency on foreign resources, the film asserts the alter-
native developmental concept of self-reliance in discovering and using
native resources. All the films include engaging songs that helped to
popularize their messages to Cultural Revolution audiences.
To reconsider these films is to revisit developmental issues in the
Cultural Revolution, and to see the current debate over China’s
integration into globalization in a new light. It will also rekindle the
controversy over whether China should passively get on track with
world capital or continue its unfinished efforts to preserve the socialist
agenda of autonomy, national sovereignty, and egalitarianism. Despite
the neoliberal gospel that “development is the hard logic,” the debate
has focused on the extent of privatization or public ownership of the
means of production, free market or state intervention, the protection
of workers, and the widening gap between city and countryside in
terms of economic development and social costs. These divergent sets
of questions can be traced back to the complex, multilayered experi-
ment and the checkered experience in socialist China from the early
1950s, through the Great Leap Forward, followed by the bureaucratic
restoration and the developmentalist agenda in the early 1960s. The
Maoist attempt to reinstate the equalitarian socialist vision against an
increasingly bureaucratic state underscored the Socialist Education
Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.5 The Cultural Revolution
revitalized the debate on these questions. Now, in the blind embrace
of the neoliberal model of development, scholars and critics tend
to forget that these problems are again breaking apart the fabric of
Chinese society, polarizing classes, and eroding communities. Instead
of disappearing consequent to China’s opening up to the worldwide
capitalist system, acute social and political problems have resurfaced
and been exacerbated in the past two decades. More recently, with the
much-vaunted “rise of China,” the phantom prospect of this commu-

nist-turned capitalist nation as a new superpower in Asia undercuts
the myth of endless economic growth and prosperity as the guarantee
for security and world peace. Domestically, these unresolved problems
intensify social, labor, and class divides and the rural crises—precisely
the earlier ills that the Chinese revolution set out to address.
In the following text, I will consider Chinese films during the
Cultural Revolution in the context of the Cold War and Third World
internationalism. I approach film as a source of history as well as a
forum for debating developmental issues. In entering the debate on
China’s future, Chinese films present a repository of images for all-
round social development. After highlighting the connections of the
Cultural Revolution with the student and civic rights movements in
the West, I will go on to illustrate the internationalist motifs and ideo-
logical alliance with the Third World.
The use of film as a medium for exploring international relations
and social development posits the possibility of emotional affinity and
understanding among different countries and peoples. How can we
articulate a global solidarity shared by the disadvantaged but widely
different nations and peoples in the world? How can one theorize a
shared discontent against economic inequality and political oppres-
sion? How can film envision a quest for alternative visions of devel-
opment that protects people, community, land, and nature from the
ravages of capital and neocolonial expansion?
Rather than treating films in isolation, apart from politics, I will
approach them as implicated in the conditions of Cold War geopol-
itics and ideology as well as anti-hegemonic and national indepen-
dence movements. In the intertwining of cinema and the Third World
movement, film participates in the rearticulation of visions for a new
society, community, and subjectivity. In his reflection on increasing
democratic sentiments around the world, Jacques Rancière brings the
democratic potential of populist aesthetic activity to the fore through
the concept of “distribution of the sensible.”6 Understood in the clas-
sical sense of cultural politics, the space of the sensible is an imagistic,
visual, and emotional remaking of the polis—a symbolic rewriting of
what is permissible, appropriate, and beautiful. By striving to make
a claim on, and by pushing back the boundaries of, the established
domain of the sensible, excluded and marginalized people expand
their power, assert their rights, and give form to their vision. Aesthetic
activity, then, is not simply political theater, rhetoric, or eye-catching
spectacle, but an inseparable part of social, populist movements for
oppressed peoples and subalterns.
90 BAN WANG
Speaking of worldwide democratic movements of the multitude,

Michael Hart and Antonio Negri have developed a similar political
aesthetics through the concept of the immaterial labor of biopolitics.
Immaterial labor refers to production of ideas, information, affects,
and social relations, which are not subordinate to the production of
commodities and profit. In the age of digital information and commu-
nication, rather than functioning as a mere ideological apparatus, the
incessant production of image, emotion, and ideas has the potential to
become dissociated from economic utility and administrative control.
Driven by a utopian vision to create change, the production of images
may become a force that is at once aesthetic, social, and political.7
Geopolitics, Social Movements,

and the Cultural Revolution
Despite its conventional images of isolation in the Cold War era,
China developed fluid and ambiguous relations with the world pow-
ers and had multiple connections with the outside world. Reaching
out to international allies was firmly on the policy agenda in the early
revolutionary era of war and during the Cultural Revolution. In the
early 1950s, the Korean War and the US policy toward Taiwan made
it impossible for China to reconnect with the United States, so the
country adopted the policy of “leaning to one side,” relying on the
support of the Soviet Union.8 While Russian financial aid, technical
personnel, and technology transfers helped China’s national economy,
the Soviet model of development was contested in the late 1950s, as
the Soviet regime revealed itself as following a statist capitalist mode
of development. The ideological as well as geopolitical confronta-
tions (the Soviets wanted to use China against the United States in
East Asia) led to a split in the early 1960s. In addition to its impe-
rialist demands, the “color change” of the Soviet regime also gave
warning signs to the Maoists that single-minded development at the
expense of social progress and equality would lead to the retrench-
ment of the bureaucratic elites and unequal division of labor and class,
undermining the socialist goal of equitable development. The rise of
a privileged stratum of the bureaucratic elite in the Soviet party-state
betrayed the revolutionary commitment to public interest and social
equality, and bred a new technocratic, development-obsessed class
bent on preserving its vested power and status. “Social imperialism”
and “capitalism without capitalists,” the familiar epithets before and
during the Cultural Revolution, were not wide off the mark for cap-
turing the changed nature of the Soviet party-state. This bureaucratic
state reproduced the inequality and oppression of the prerevolution-

ary era and broke the popular alliance of workers and peasants, the
constitutive social basis for the national control of accumulation. This
is also the essence of what was known as Soviet revisionism.9 In this
context, one can see that the phrase “capitalist roader”—destruc-
tive and abusive as it might have been in the heat of the Cultural
Revolution—served a critical function that was already at work in the
1950s criticism of the Soviet Union. “The capitalist road” here refers
less to the classical mode of production for profit and exploitative
capital–labor relations than to the new statist, elitist ruling class in the
postrevolutionary regimes. The concept meant the continuation of
the path along asymmetrical relations of colonization under the new
regime of worldwide capital sponsored by the metropolitan centers.
The local difference is that postindependence regimes were managed
by the local elites. During the Cultural Revolution, the invocation
of capitalist class could not refer to the actual existence of the profit-
seeking class, but pointed specifically to the emergent bureaucratic
class monopolizing knowledge and power. This “class” was produced
by the socialist system itself and within the Communist Party. Bent on
economic development and state power, the new top-heavy bureau-
cracy and technocratic elites undermined the foundation of socialist
legitimacy in the process.
The Cultural Revolution witnessed a moment of rupture in the Cold
War power structure between the Soviet Union and the United States.
As Third World decolonization and independence movements forged
ahead, a wave of interstate alliances and revolutionary movements was
unfolding in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the early 1970s, China
entered a new relation of tension with the Soviet Union and was mov-
ing toward a strategic tie with the United States. The tension with the
two superpowers and the alliance with the Third World intensified the
debate over domestic policy orientation and developmental agendas.
One question of the Cultural Revolution concerned “anti-revisionism
and its prevention” (fanxiu fangxiu ⍵ᾖ旚ᾖ), which was aimed at
Soviet revisionism. The other important slogan, “anti-imperialism and
anti-revisionism” (fandi fanxiu ⍵ⷅ⍵ᾖ), signaled the opposition to
US military actions in Southeast Asia. These slogans reflected the con-
flict in developmental strategy and represented a search for an alterna-
tive path—one that would avoid Soviet revisionism, on the one hand,
and keep the World Bank-sponsored “development of underdevelop-
ment” in the Third World at bay.
From an internal perspective that mostly focuses on the domestic
events, the Cultural Revolution is studied as civil strife, inner conflicts
92 BAN WANG
in high politics in the government and the Party, and the wholesale
overhauling of inherited values. Along with this interior view goes a
perception that China in this period was marked by geopolitical iso-
lation, an economic closed-door policy, and political repression. All
these are true, but they do not represent the whole story. Critics with
nostalgic feelings for the vibrant 1960s often point to the interna-
tionalist dimension of the Cultural Revolution, which contradicts the
closed-door image. China was not only making strategic overtures to
the United States to ward off the threat of Soviet expansionism but
also reaching out vigorously to Third World countries. The image of
an isolated China, however, may be traced to the geopolitical con-
text. Inner political and social tightening took place as a response
to the military threat, embargoes, and trade restrictions imposed by
the United States and the Soviet Union. But isolation went along
with opening up. While the Cultural Revolution was involved in the
dynamics of the Cold War conflict between two hegemonic powers,
its global vision also promoted deepening affinities with the revolu-
tionary movements and radical revolts in the Third World.
In relation to the global resurgence of guerrilla organizations in the
1960s, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe that the Chinese
Cultural Revolution is another inspiration alongside Cuba. Third
World revolutionaries welcomed the militancy and resurgent rhetoric
implied in the slogan “Bombard the headquarters.”10 This link between
the Cultural Revolution and guerrilla warfare may be far-fetched. But
the Cultural Revolution indeed served as a symbolic flash point for the
radical mobilization of national, populist insurgence against imperial-
ism and colonialism in Third World nations. In the United States, the
Chinese movement also resonated with the antiwar and the civil rights
movements initiated by students and minorities. Just as students and
workers in China sought to open up a space of debate in giving vent to
discontents against the bureaucratic apparatus, students and radicals
in the United States and Europe protested against the increasingly
centralized and repressive military-industrial complex. With regard to
the Third World and the revolution of the 1960s, Eric Hobsbawm
uses the term “cultural revolution” to describe the wave of rebellion
that swept across all three worlds—known at the time as the First,
Second, and Third Worlds—from 1968 to 1969. The emergent forces
of students, whose number could be counted in the millions, car-
ried out this rebellion. In street demonstrations and antiestablishment
activities, the student rebellions proved effective and powerful, as in
France in 1968 and in Italy in 1969. In the analysis of Hardt and
Negri, these activities shared the revolutionary spirit of the guerrilla
insurgents, and indeed sometimes became directly involved with the

agrarian uprisings of Third World independence movements.11
Despite its utopian dreams and antiestablishment drive, the revo-
lution in the Western metropolitan centers differed from that in the
peripheries of the Third World. The former was more cultural and
social than national-popular, stemming from social divisions rather
than any impulse to change the basic structure of state power. As
Hobsbawm rightly says, the student and youth rebellion was a depar-
ture from the classic revolutionary tradition of the French and Russian
revolutions. It further departed from the Chinese experience, despite
the apparent resemblance. It was cultural in “the utopian sense of
seeking a permanent reversal of values, a new and perfect society.”12
The difference between the two modes of revolution notwithstand-
ing, a global drive to protect vulnerable people and endangered com-
munities against the corrosive power of the market and the repressive
state was evidently a common, shared feature. This underlies an inter-
national merging of the revolutionary currents. The utopian affinity of
the Cultural Revolution with the student movements in the West con-
jured a radical reality into being, transforming utopia into action. For
the first time, students lived in a global world of mass media, global
air travel, and instant communications. The same inspiring books
appeared simultaneously in bookstores in Buenos Aires, Rome, New
York, and Hamburg. These books might include works by Herbert
Marcuse and Mao.13 Revolutionary tourists and politically awakened
students crossed oceans and continents to learn about Third World
experience. Chinese universities were the gathering places for overseas
students from the Third World. Beijing was hailed as the center of
world revolution.
Cultural exchange or communication allowed the vibrant anties-
tablishment protest of the Cultural Revolution to be exported to the
Third World, delivering utopian, anticapitalist, and anti-imperial mes-
sages that became quite influential in Parisian intellectual culture. In
recent decades, the major figures of this circle, with hangover from
the frenzied radical activity of those halcyon days, carried the critical
thrust into post-structuralism and deconstruction in graduate semi-
nars in Euro-American universities. Pointing to another global dimen-
sion of the Cultural Revolution, Calhoun and Wasserstrom attribute
the revolution to the upsurge of youthful adrenalin, and compare the
groundswell of Chinese youthful energy with that of the postwar baby
boomer generation in the West. Against the bourgeois constraints
imposed by the parent generation, as well as by the authoritarian-
ism of the postrevolutionary regime, the energetic, rebellious impulse
94 BAN WANG
surged in the Cultural Revolution and resurfaced later in the student

demonstration in Tiananmen Square in 1989.14
This radical fervor was more apparent than real, though. The global
student revolution did not make a substantive difference in terms of
social change. Hobsbawm cautions that the student revolt of the late
1960s was “the last hurrah of the old world revolution.”15 The working
class was no longer the primary agent, and the international movement
dedicated to the true revolution of the world had been disintegrating:
“After 1956 the USSR and the international movement under its lead-
ership lost their monopoly of the revolutionary appeal and of the theory
and ideology that unified it.” The international image of the Cultural
Revolution is “cultural,” without political teeth, a flexing of theory
without practice, a tinkering with symbols that later quickly merged
with show business. Marxism was seen as a school of thought rather
than a source of inspiration for social practice and action. Caricaturing
emergent new-left Marxism as “seminar oriented,” Hobsbawm con-
curs with the conservative philosopher Raymond Aron in seeing the
events of May 1968 in Paris as street theater or psychodrama.16
The Chinese Cultural Revolution needs to be distinguished from the
radical fervor that stemmed from within the metropolitan centers in the
West. Radical activities, antiwar movements, the New Left, and the civil
rights movement were no doubt struggles for a freer and more demo-
cratic society; however, they were waged within a civil order, without
challenging the fundamentals of the state and capitalism. They chal-
lenged the exploitive relation and made political gains through the legis-
lative framework. Their political victory may have softened the deepening
division, stratification, and inequality that are ceaselessly reproduced in
the expropriation of profit. Political activity and demonstrations may
mitigate the alienation of individuals from corporate and consumer cul-
ture and from the restrictions of the military-industrial complex, but the
challenges to capitalism and the state are reformist, theoretical, and cul-
tural. They were not thoroughgoing enough to be called revolution. As
Hobsbawm rightly notes, the radical movements of the 1960s were the
last hurrah of the classical revolution. It is no surprise that they ended up
as fodder for innocuous and sexy topics for graduate seminars in theories
of deconstruction, textual subversion, personal identity, or body perfor-
mance in the American academy for decades to come.
Obviously this loss of revolutionary potential is manifest in the
nostalgic cottage industry of the Cultural Revolution, and adds to
a libidinal image that belies the muted radical energy, obscuring the
unfinished structural problems in the capitalist world system. The aes-
thetic repackaging of the Cultural Revolution has proved to be an
erasure of its real systematic and social aspiration by what may be

called libertarian, libidinal radicalism—a social rebellion of youth in
the fashion of Woodstock and rock’n’roll. Critics dismissive of revo-
lution are inclined to see the Cultural Revolution, in the words of
Chinese filmmaker Jiang Wen, as a big pop concert and Mao as the
biggest rock star. They view the Chinese rock star Cui Jian as the most
significant inheritor of the “legacy” of the Revolution. The recent
commercialization of the movement transformed it into a stunning,
entertaining, and erotic spectacle, a carnival of sensuality and libidinal
abandon devoid of any practical political gravity. This erasure makes it
urgent to reinforce a distinction between a revolution strictly confined
to the cultural sphere and one devoted to real systemic change. While
it provoked radical, critical energy against the military-industrial com-
plex and the bureaucratic-capitalist alliance of North America and
Europe, the Cultural Revolution differs from the radical movement
in the centers on one important point: it is a revolution that, despite
all its failures and errors, continued to address the basic, long-term
problems in economic and social development in the aftermath of the
victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949. The Chinese revolution
strove to bring about a wholesale systemic change. It took a nation, a
new state, and a massive national population to wage the revolution,
and the aim was the constitution of a nation-state based on the alli-
ance of the majority of the people.
In this light, we need to modify Hobsbawm’s remark about the
global radical movements being the last hurrah of the classical French
or Russian revolution. The international connection of the Cultural
Revolution with the students in the West was only symbolic and ideo-
logical. It was associated with the discontents against alienation in the
metropolitan centers, which quickly became assimilated into the cul-
tural industry. The Chinese revolution, in general, and the Cultural
Revolution, in particular, were a part of independence and national
self-determination in Third World countries. The Cultural Revolution
became part of the global drive to resist capitalism and neocolonial eco-
nomic domination. As a response to the geopolitical containment and
trade embargo by the United States in East Asia, the Chinese revolution
and postrevolutionary projects were a huge attempt, beset by disasters
and failures, to find China’s own way of development—a third way
that did not repeat the Soviet model or remain entrapped in the condi-
tion of dependence on the world capitalist system. Thus, in its affinity
with the Third World in search of a third way, the Cultural Revolution
was a continuation of the Chinese revolution—in other words, it con-
tinued the antisystemic aspirations of the Chinese revolution.
96 BAN WANG
The question of socially oriented, egalitarian development is

a crucial theme in the Third World independent movement. The
Third World revolution not only sought to seize state power but also
engaged in exploring how to modernize and retain economic inde-
pendence and social harmony in the face of the worldwide expansion
of capitalism. The second half of the twentieth century saw the accel-
erated expansion of capital under the sponsorship of the neoliberal
global agenda. Contrary to its promise, development has not been
equally beneficial to all players and has enlarged the gap between
the Global North and South. Far from homogenizing societies and
making them identical to the capital–labor relation of the metropoli-
tan centers in the West, capital expansion fanned out on the basis of
an unequal global division of labor.17 Although newly independent
Third World nations are theoretically recognized as sovereign states,
most of them succumbed to the neocolonial condition of depen-
dence on the capitalist world system. Dependence means that these
nations are not in control of the accumulation process in the interest
of their own populations and social well-being but are subject to the
exigencies and demands of global capital. Samir Amin’s interpreta-
tion of imperialism and Maoism demonstrates that state control of
the economy and social alliances is crucial to national independence
on the peripheries. While state regulation is also important for capital
accumulation and for easing the tensions between capital and labor
in the metropolitan centers, it failed to materialize in Third World
nations. Amin’s example of the effective alliance between capital and
state in the center is the US New Deal and its social, democratic
agenda. Despite the myth of a self-regulating free market and private
capitalist ownership, in the postwar decades it was state-sponsored
policies like the New Deal, Keynesianism, and Fordism that helped
to achieve a measure of consensus and reconciliation between the
capitalist and the working class, and between the working class and
other social strata. In this social integration, the discontented and
oppressed sectors of the capitalist state felt comforted in their new-
found consumerism and materialism, and lost their vocation for
social change and for critiquing the inherent condition of inequality
and alienation.18
The material complacency of the middle class makes any revolution
unlikely in the metropolitan centers. Yet, in the weakest links of the
worldwide capital chains, the wretched of the earth on the peripheries
can still make revolutionary change and transform their society and
culture. This may be the key difference between the two broad visions
for change.
International Film as a Prism

for Third World Development
The Cultural Revolution witnessed an upsurge in China’s connec-
tions and solidarity with Third World nations. An ideology integral
to the Chinese revolution, internationalism asserts that peripheral
nations need to transcend nationalist and cultural parochialism, and
that the toiling masses of oppressed nations could connect and form
a worldwide “proletarian” class. Marked by emotional affinity and
ideological solidarity, this class consciousness motivated a concerted
effort to resist the hegemony of imperialism and colonialism. Recent
discussions of the Third World retain this ideological feature as a rally-
ing power in creating alliances and interconnections.19 Scholars have
questioned the effectiveness of this unifying ideology in the face of
divisive ethnic nationalism. Some have argued that China’s connec-
tion with the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s was primarily a
means to achieve its national interest. Isolated from the Soviet Union
and the United States, and pursuing a policy of self-reliance, China
sought allies in the Third World to “enhance its strategic position in
the world” and to build a good international image. This proved con-
ducive to its entry into the United Nations in 1971. Generous aid to
Third World countries, though puzzling to the observers, is explained
partially by identifying the military aid that served China’s security
interests in East Asia.20
Nevertheless, for all its pursuit of national interest, China’s prom-
ulgation of internationalist images cannot be underestimated. It is
through the aesthetic medium rather than rational analysis of interest
that the notion of Third World alliance proffers a focus of emotional
identification, and that an imagined community of the world’s work-
ing class of the Global South can be kept alive.
In its opening to the Third World, the Cultural Revolution pro-
vided a forum for Third World cinema. This cinema displayed images
of internationalist alliance and the common experience of decolo-
nizing countries. The scarcity of Chinese films during the Cultural
Revolution is often attributed to the highly censored social life and
ideological strictures. Yet, foreign films filled the gap. Imported films
from Albania, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Romania,
and Vietnam galvanized the attention of the viewing public. Their
imagery and narratives contributed to the formation of a mass culture
of entertainment, education, and mobilization. In the decades after
the Cultural Revolution, new film works often drew on this repertoire
of foreign images, creating major attractions in the nostalgic films,
98 BAN WANG
most remarkably in the film In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan
de rizi, 旛⃱䀧䁪䘬㖍⫸, 1994). In the following, I will address first
the internationalist vision and then the narratives regarding national
development in Chinese and foreign films.
The internationalism advocated by Third World films is distinct from
the transnational trends prevalent in contemporary “world cinema.”
It refers to cooperation, mutual help, cultural exchange, and solidar-
ity among developing nations struggling to achieve national sover-
eignty, control their domestic economies, and undertake social reforms.
Global in scope yet national in character, this form of internationalism
is defined as relations and affinities of the disadvantaged class cutting
across nations of the Global South. In historical practice, international-
ism was often associated with the earlier days of the Comintern and
the global agenda headed by the Soviet Union in maintaining a united
front. Chinese communists and socialists recognized themselves as an
integral part of this internationalist anti-systematic movement. In the
rhetoric of liberal globalization, however, international political relations
are obscured and replaced by a stylistic, individualistic, market-driven
cosmopolitanism—the hallmark of transnational cultural industry. This
cosmopolitanism celebrates the prerogatives of the globetrotting, jet-
setting, rich and famous, eliding the asymmetrical relations of repres-
sive hierarchy among national populations. Glamorous, imperial, and
profit-driven, it distrusts any attempt of a nation to exercise its sovereign
power over its economy, society, and culture. Rooted in consumerism
and hybrid lifestyle, and incompatible with international alliance, the
new-fangled cosmopolitanism hijacks the essence of internationalism as
a shared democratic aspiration for equality, livelihood, and community
among disadvantaged peoples around the world.
In this light, the film version of the Peking opera On the Docks
(Haigang 㴟㷗 1972) offers a sense of internationalism deeply anchored
in national sovereignty and self-reliance. The Shanghai dock as the cen-
ter of the film’s drama evokes a specific locus and time fraught with
memories of the colonial past and capital expansion. The dock’s bus-
tling scenes of loading and shipping teem with images and motifs of
international assistance and trade, with cargos bound for the vast conti-
nents in the Global North and South. The themes of internationalism,
class struggle, and self-reliance—familiar ingredients in the imaginary
repertoire of the Cultural Revolution—come to converge in a tightly
woven narrative. Evolving around the timely shipment of rice seeds to an
African country, the opera’s dramatic action begins to unfold as a former
member of the Chinese comprador class attempts to sabotage this aid
shipment. Previously an accountant serving colonialist trade firms ruled
by the foreign powers, Qian Shouwei, the saboteur, is a sleeper agent and
time bomb seeking to undermine China’s economy and international
alliances with the Third World. Significantly, the shipment of rice seeds
is to help a newly decolonized, independent African country to rebuild
its agriculture, as the country is delinking itself from dependence on
the World Bank and Western agro-businesses. Western economists and
experts declare that Third World economic independence would fail,
and impose the unequal rules of capital investment and development.
The political significance of this shipment is thus highlighted by the pur-
suit of national independence and economic self-reliance: the Chinese
workers on the dock are confronted with the urgent task of delivering
the rice seeds before the independence day of the African nation. The
mission symbolizes urgent internationalist assistance to the economic
development of the newly independent Third World nations.
In contrast with the aid to Africa, the other shipment, contain-
ing glass fiber, is headed toward a Scandinavian country of the First
World. Setting up the high-tech nature of glass fiber against the basic
foodstuff in the African shipment, the film portrays glass fiber as a dan-
gerous material. Elusive and overrefined, it may jeopardize the grain
if not handled properly—and indeed, it is by mixing glass fiber with
grains that Qian Shouwei, transport controller of the dock, attempts
to sabotage the African shipment. The difference between the two
shipments reveals the gap between the center of advanced technology
and the Third World peripheries as a place of primary material—a sign
of unequal development and the global division of labor. As a symbol
of the colonial past, Qian prefers the glass fiber shipment and tries to
undermine the African project, because the former will yield foreign
currency and profit, while the latter is moral, international support on
behalf of Third World self-reliance.
Qian tricks a naïve young dockworker, Han Xiaoqiang, into an
unwitting act of sabotage. However, as he becomes politically more
alert, Han is able to see through Qian’s plot. Still, Han’s suspicions
about the plot are not raised until he is given a chance to learn about
the colonial history of the Shanghai dock. To help Han with his
“mental problems,” the veteran workers take him to an exhibition
displaying records and memorabilia of the dock’s history. In the past,
the Japanese, Americans, and the Chinese compradors ruled the dock
together. The exhibition hall used to be the executive office of an
American transnational trade firm, and its inhabitant was a taipan
or trade executive. During the museum tour, it dawns on Han that
the historical alliance between transnational capitalism and the com-
pradors—the native representative of colonial capital—constitutes a
100 BAN WANG
regime of oppression and exploitation bent on exploiting and oppress-

ing the dock workers. With his past history in the role of comprador,
Qian comes across as an exemplary lackey to American and Japanese
colonial capital, having been rewarded numerous times for his loy-
alty and efficiency in extracting profits. By taking over the control of
the docks, the Chinese revolution changed the unequal, exploitive
relation between labor and capital, sidelined the capitalists, drove out
American colonialists, and abolished the comprador system. On their
way out, the American taipan predicted—in the typical fashion of
outgoing colonialists—that being coolies of a backward country, the
dock workers and indeed the Chinese people in general were simply
too stupid and unprofessional to manage the normal business of the
modern harbor, and that they would be unable to build a national,
independent economy and conduct international trade.
A rebuttal to this colonialist view of the ignorant coolies, the opera
displays vibrant scenes of workers’ self-management and efficient labor
in a complex dock with multiple international trade connections.
Meanwhile, Han Xiaoqiang’s change of mind leads to the uncover-
ing of Qian’s ongoing act of sabotage. And the change comes about
through the remembrance of the past. The invocation of the history of
unequal development and geopolitical conflict leads Han to question
his cosmopolitan dream about world travel. Han constantly intones a
sailor dream of “crossing the oceans and traveling around the world”
(piaoyang guohai, zhouyou shijie 梀㈔彯㴟, ␐㷠ᶾ䓴), and this high-
lights the fantasy of the world citizen in a global utopia of labor flow.
In a world of unequal development and power, this phantom renders
him close to the venture capitalist or entrepreneur of the metropolitan
center. Enjoying the privileges of capital, state protection, and military
security in territories of peripheral nations, and carrying a passport that
easily passes through the checkpoint, the cosmopolitan citizen is at the
vanguard of global capitalism. Who is Han Xiaoqiang, a Chinese dock
worker, to imagine that he too can do this?
That the cosmopolitan dream is untenable in a world fraught with
espionage and subversion between nation-states is evident as the film
traces Qian’s involvement in earlier subversive acts against the Chinese
army during the Korean War, and his later attempt to link up with
foreign agents in Taiwan, where the United States was increasing its
military buildup and implementing a policy of containment against
China. This episode of remembering the past tells a history of impe-
rialism and colonialism, and offers a context for the anxiety during
the Cultural Revolution about foreign trade, the closed-door policy,
and self-reliance. In the meantime, the narrative revolves around how
the dock workers manage the work process, deploy collective wisdom
and initiatives, and after overcoming the damages of Qian’s sabotage,
accomplish the task of the important shipment to Africa in a timely
and efficient manner.
T HE S EASON OF THE A PPLE H AR VEST as an

Imaginary Double of Chinese Development
Due to the stricture of censorship during the Cultural Revolution,
domestic film production seemed lackluster, and films from North
Korea, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union regaled the
audience with exotic cinematic spectacle and entertaining narratives.
With the model performances (yangbanxi 㟟㜧ㆷ) becoming more
formulaic, films from Third World countries supplied much-needed
melodramatic excitement, real-life experience, and viewing satisfac-
tion. This situation was well captured by a popular saying of the time
that Chinese films were all but news and journalism (xinwen jianbao
㕘斣䬨㉍), Vietnamese films were filled with fighter jets and cannons
(feiji dapao梆㛢⣏䁖), and Korean films were filled with laughter and
tears (youku youxiao⍰⒕⍰䪹). The saying captured a point about the
attraction of North Korean films, which were entertaining and were
well received by the Chinese audience. Although North Korean films
provided melodramatic relief and appealing images, it was their treat-
ment of rural development that made them internationally relevant as
China’s imaginary counterpart.
North Korean rural films offered an image of self-made and self-
reliant development as a way to modernity and presented Chinese
viewers with a “significant other”: visions of integrated communal and
economic life that China should be pursuing. They were concerned
with themes of rural reconstruction, self-management, political subjec-
tivity, and respect for nature and land in the new socialist countryside.
Dubbed in Chinese, the films delineate details of the everyday family
life and the moral fabrics of rural communities—details that were read-
ily recognized and appreciated by the Chinese audience. Characterized
by vivacious melodrama and everyday aesthetics, North Korean films
delivered much-needed relief and popular entertainment
It is important to note that rural development is a running theme
in the Peking opera On the Docks—an urban film. The focus on the
shipment of rice seeds to an African nation as a gesture of interna-
tional support is premised on the development of a self-reliant rural
economy. The opera’s urban backdrop, the Shanghai harbor, for all its
signs of modernity and technology, is linked to rural reconstruction.
102 BAN WANG
In contrast, current studies of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan culture favor

the glamorous lifestyle of the gleaming metropolis. But while boast-
ing a stylistically hybrid consumer lifestyle, the capitalist metropolis
tended to re-create the patriarchal hierarchy of status and relations of
oppression. At the very heart of the modern colonial, “civilized” city
was regression toward inhumanity and barbarism. A familiar Weberian
and Marxist perspective pictures urban capitalist modernity not as
historical advancement and inclusiveness, but as the “prehistorical”
stage before the real history emerges from it. Shifting the locale of
modernity to rural areas, Third World films make a different claim on
modernity—a rural modernity. In reconstructing community and self-
reliant economy, rural transformations in developing countries turned
rural areas, the proverbial backwater of the premodern life, into a van-
guard in modern development.
Concerns of rural development also informed and fostered a highly
regarded film genre in Chinese cinema under the rubric of “the film
of the socialist countryside.” Before the Cultural Revolution, the para-
digmatic case may be the 1959 film The Young People of Our Village
(Women cunli de nianqing ren ㆹẔ㛹慴䘬⸜弣Ṣ) as well as its sequel,
made in 1963. In this melodrama celebrating the enterprising spirit of
the youth in a Chinese village, young people make efforts to increase
production, improve their material life, introduce technology, and com-
bat traditional mental habits, all the while producing a new culture that
enhances the communal fabric. Both films feature catchy songs that
audiences found engaging. In general, China’s rural films sought to
bridge the gap between the city and the countryside—one of the most
pressing questions in China’s economic plans after 1949—and expressed
a socialist vision that sought to mitigate the harsh expropriation of rural
resources for urban-centered industrialization and modernization.
This utopian goal was once again on the agenda during the Cultural
Revolution. An integral part of social transformation in rural com-
munes, the policy of self-reliance was well implemented by the Dazhai
Brigade in Shanxi province. Daizhai started out as an exemplar of the
self-reliant rural community but was later manipulated and politicized
by the radicals and ideologues. Whatever one might say against the pro-
pagandist nature of models such as Dazhai, it is instructive to consider
the visual presentation of rural development as a wishful image.
Korean films were not treated as foreign films; thanks to the
exquisitely worked dubbing and the portrayal of a traditional rural
lifestyle similar to that of northern China, they became an integral
part of the new socialist culture in the countryside. A look at the
widely circulated film The Season of the Apple Harvest (Zhai pingguo
de shihou 㐀务㝄䘬㖞῁) provides further illustration. The film

describes the way a production team in a hilly North Korean area
harvests and manages an overabundant crop of apples. The harvest
of apples, though symbolizing the wisdom of the Party leadership
in the national economy, points to the actual fast economic develop-
ment of North Korea in the postwar period up to the late 1960s. The
visuals of rural landscapes exude a warm feeling of confidence, com-
munity, cooperation, abundance, and self-sufficiency. Opening shots
of the rural scenes at dawn, of the fields in bright sunshine, and many
close-ups of beautiful crops of apples impress a sense of tenderness
toward nature, the land, and the people. Rather than a preindustrial,
idyllic image of nature and peasantry, the opening scene evokes an
image of the modern village that is being made and articulated—not
a revival of tradition but a political and economic act.
Some may question the truth of the film’s depiction of rural pros-
perity. Due to the Cold War and the current East Asian geopolitics,
few social scientists and historians have the patience to inquire into the
noticeable achievements of North Korea in economy, social life, and
people’s welfare after two decades in the aftermath of the Korean War.21
The accomplishments were the fruits of a combination of factors: self-
reliance, international aid from the Soviet Union and China, and the
national resolve to avoid developmental pitfalls of the Soviet Union and
dependency on global capital. By the accounts of certain American soci-
ologists, in the 1950s and into the 1960s, North Korea was well ahead
of many socialist countries, and certainly ahead of South Korea, in many
aspects of economic and social development until the 1970s.
In The Season of the Apple Harvest, the huge harvest of apples pres-
ents a challenge to the farmers: they will have to sell apples or preserve
them for future use. To sell apples, they need to make contracts with
the distribution centers in town; to preserve they will have to learn
new technology and build a facility. Although both methods have the
potential to meet the needs of a national population rather than mak-
ing a profit, selling large amounts to the distribution centers is the
easier way out, and more prone to competition, market mechanisms,
and corruption. This difference in distribution also leads to a diver-
gence between a bureaucratic management style, embodied by the
team leader, and the flexible, democratic self-management by young
people in the village. While the team leader scrambles day after day
to beat the competitors to get contracts, the educated young villagers
seek to use modern technology to make apple preserves. As the nar-
rative unfolds, economic decision-making is gradually shifting from
the “market-savvy” team leader to the hands of the young villagers.
104 BAN WANG
Pooling their ideas and organizational talent, the young people—

mostly young women—learn advanced technology and make connec-
tions with the industry in the city to carry out their projects.
The narrative progresses as the team leader gradually delegates
more responsibility and authority to the innovative young people.
The result is a dynamic picture of self-reliance and self-governance
in a diffuse network of responsibility and participation. Remarkably,
most active members of the production unit are female workers, who
challenge and modify the “feudal” patriarchal leadership of the team
leader. On the other narrative track, the main plot evolves around
how actively each member of the village community participates in the
production process with a commitment that is not simply economic
but simultaneously political, cultural, and ideological. Economic pro-
duction is continuous with the formation and maintenance of the
community and culture. This narrative thread raises the question of
political consciousness embodied by varying degrees of participation
in day-to-day collective affairs.
Participation, or lack thereof, underlies the tension between active
members and the withdrawal of one female character, melodramati-
cally illustrated by the episodes involving the relationship between
two sisters. The younger sister, Zhen Yu (Whether this is a Korean
or Chinese name seems irrelevant—a sign of the merging of identities
in internationalism?), is a positive example of what a member of the
rural community can do when she draws on local resources, rallies
group support, participates fully in production and community, and
adopts new technology. Pretty, smart, sharp, educated, enterprising,
and ready to admit her errors, she is the polar opposite of her elder
sister. The elder sister Shun Yu used to be a dedicated worker but is
now looking forward to a life of comfort in marriage. Her fiancé is an
engineer in the city, so she is eager to leave the countryside behind
for modern amenities and consumer culture in the city. She is losing
her political consciousness and neglecting her responsibility for the
rural community. The divergent paths of the two sisters point fur-
ther to the difference between the individual pursuit of personal well-
being and the collective effort to achieve the common good. This, of
course, is also a familiar pattern in the Chinese films dealing with rural
development.
Pursuing a “bourgeois” lifestyle of consumption, and moving away
from her proper role as an active member of the rural community, the
elder sister attends the youth meetings less often, until she withdraws
from the day-to-day duty of her work team and the production pro-
cess. All she cares about now is preparing to be a model housewife.
Her carelessness at work leads to a near-disaster when a storm strikes,

and would have ruined the apples left lying unprotected outdoors if
not for the timely rescue by her more conscientious peers.
As in most socialist narratives threaded with a plotline of ideologi-
cal transformation, thought-reform functions as a catalyst for ideo-
logical turnabout in the film narrative. As in the film On the Docks,
recalling the past and appreciating the sweetness of the present in this
Korean film bring the older sister back to a much-needed political
consciousness. The past suffering of her family, told through the story
by her father, enables her to realize how important it is to participate
in collective efforts. Together with other members of the community,
she begins to understand the value of maintaining a self-chosen way
of life. Like others, she appreciates again the value of her role as a
member of the community. She is part of the community that tries
to block the external colonial and imperialist forces from sabotaging
the socialist gains of ordinary people in independently managing their
work and life.
At a time when the neoliberal myth of development prevails and
conceals unequal relations and gaps between nations, rereading the
films On the Docks and The Season of the Apple Harvest raises once
again the questions around alternative development that takes seri-
ously the values of community, the egalitarian spirit, political par-
ticipation, and, above all, the effort to forge a popular, democratic
culture. These questions were not only the continuous themes of
the Chinese revolution but also were significant issues of contesta-
tion in the Cultural Revolution and afterward. They are part of
the trial and error of a new culture that projects a different path of
life, work, and social relations—a path resistant to the expansion of
global capital.
Notes
1. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural
Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center,
2012), 64–78.
3. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 3–32.
4. Wang Hui, “Depoliticized Politics: From East to West,” New Left 41
(2006): 31.
5. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Maurice Meisner, Mao’s
China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New
York: Free Press, 1999). Also see Cao Tianyue, ed., Modernization,
106 BAN WANG
Globalization and China’s Path of Development (Xiandaihua, quan-

qiuhua yu Zhongguo daolu) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban-
she, 2003).
6. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum,
2004), 12–13.
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 66.
8. For an excellent discussion of China’s nationalism and foreign policy,
see Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy,” The
China Review 1(1) (2001): 1–27.
9. Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed
Books, 1989), 130. Also see Shaoguang Wang, “The Structural
Sources of the Cultural Revolution,” in The Chinese Cultural
Revolution Reconsidered, edited by Kam-yee Law (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 241–258.
10. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 76.
11. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–
1911 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 444–447.
12. Ibid., 446.
13. Ibid. For a recent collection of essays about how Mao’s red book of
quotations was disseminated and studied by political activists around
the world, see Alex Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
14. Craig Calhoun and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “The Cultural Revolution
and the Democracy Movement of 1989: Complexity in Historical
Connections,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered,
241–246.
15. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 446.
16. Ibid., 445, 447, 448.
17. Amin, Delinking, 127.
18. Amin argues that the loss of the revolutionary vocation through the
welfare state and Fordism makes revolution impossible in the West.
See Amin, Delinking, 12. Giovanni Arrighi makes a similar point in
his monumental The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994),
320–321.
19. Vicky Randall, “Using and Abusing the Concept of the Third World:
Geopolitics and the Comparative Political Study of Development and
Underdevelopment,” Third World Quarterly 25(1) (2004): 43.
20. Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy,” 11–12.
21. For a reliable source of information and history, see Aidan Foster-
Carter, “North Korea: Development and Self-Reliance: A Critical
Appraisal,” in Korea: North and South: The Deepening Crisis, edited
by Gavan McCormack and Mark Selden (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1978), 115–149.
C H A P T ER 5
Singing in the Dark: Film and Cultural

Revolution Musical Culture
Paul Clark
Music and film remain central in Cultural Revolution memories to

this day. This chapter will attempt to show the importance of films
in the musical and everyday life of that decade (1966–1976). It will
argue that without films as a medium of promulgating, populariz-
ing, and elaborating the music of the Cultural Revolution, musical
memories of those years would probably be much less significant.
I will also show how films were a core part of the creation of the
model Peking operas that dominated musical life in that era. When
new feature films appeared from the studios from 1973 their songs
were vital to the impact and popularity of the new works. The
chapter will first outline how films assumed these vital functions in
popular musical life in the 17 years before the start of the Cultural
Revolution and then examine the various ways in which films served
music after 1966—including those that may not be obvious. Music
and film in the Cultural Revolution offer a case study in intertex-
tuality, in which songs or musical themes developed in a film and a
particular context are repeated and become elaborated in new styles
in later films, on radio and loudspeaker, in classrooms and work-
places, in performances, and in quiet resistance. In short, the musical
soundtracks of the Cultural Revolution decade owed an enormous
debt to films. The success of the various kinds of music was in large
part due to films.
108 PAUL CLARK
Music and Films before the

Cultural Revolution
From the release of the first Shanghai-made sound films, Chinese
audiences expected music, particularly songs, in their Chinese films.
The link between films and music in China was not new in 1949. For
half a century, film viewing had involved music. Before the widespread
use of sound by the late 1930s, musical accompaniment on a range of
instruments—piano, erhu, accordion, violin, or percussion—was a fea-
ture of some screenings of foreign and Chinese-made movies.1 With
the advent of sound came the incorporation of songs into Shanghai-
made features. The most famous singer, Zhou Xuan (1918–1957),
made her first film in 1935 and became a star with films like Street
Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937). Zhou’s rise was indicative of the realiza-
tion by left-wing filmmakers (and their more conservative counter-
parts) that songs could enhance a film’s appeal to audiences and its
ability to convey messages to viewers.2 A single song sung by a beggar
in the second part of The Spring River Flows East (Yi jiang chunshui
xiang dong liu, 1948) summed up the main message of the four-plus-
hour epic. The lyrics in subtitles on screen strengthened the song’s
impact. Songs could also be listened to without watching the film in
which they appeared. Radio and live performance took awareness of
the film and its themes to other audiences. Even the reproduction of
lyrics and scores in newspapers and magazines served the filmmakers’
interests. These functions of film songs and their lives beyond the
cinema all featured prominently in the Cultural Revolution, but these
were not invented then.
From 1949, songs became an important means of conveying politi-
cal and social messages for the new communist regime. Films were
a central means of promulgating these songs. The use of songs had
roots in Christian missionary efforts from the nineteenth century to
use music to popularize their religion and deepen devotion. In new-
style schools run by the state or non-Christian groups in the twenti-
eth century, massed singing was a means to encourage collectivism,
discipline, and diversity in learning. The attempted mobilization of
Chinese urban and rural society after 1949 drew upon this tradition
of group singing. The songs promoted included a new kind of musical
item, revolutionary songs (geming gequ), with roots in wartime Yan’an
and in the ranks of the communist armies before 1949. Feature film
songs tended to be of a different nature from geming gequ, as they
usually had a narrative function in the feature film story. Their film
context often encouraged a less militant tune and lyrics than their
SINGING IN THE DARK 109
revolutionary counterparts. Geming gequ tended to be more “politi-

cal” than songs embedded in the new feature films emerging from the
state-owned studios after 1949. Both kinds of songs, however, were
sung in schools and work units as a means of mass mobilization in
support of the communist revolution.
The Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s 1958 lunge toward
accelerated industrialization through mass effort, saw unprecedented
intensification of collective mobilization for most Chinese citizens.
The efforts extended to the cultural realm, with mass writing of
poetry, accelerated production of films (from script writing through
to release), and further campaigns to popularize geming gequ.3 Songs
were an essential part of promoting collective commitment and push-
ing greater endeavors.
As the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward became apparent, with
increasing shortages of food and the emergence of famine, songs took
on renewed importance as morale boosters. Given the circumstances,
emphasis on the kinds of tuneful, catchy songs from films was perhaps
more appropriate than on the more directly political nature of geming
gequ. Typical of the film songs were the solo song and two choruses
from the hugely popular 1959 feature The Young People of Our Village
(Women cunli de nianqingren) from the Changchun Film Studio. All
the songs, like geming gequ, referred directly to socialism and the col-
lective, but the film context softened or sugar coated the politics of
the lyrics. The film story made oblique suggestions of sexual attrac-
tion between several of the young men and women on screen, who
were giving their all to the building of an irrigation canal for their
village-based commune. Catchy tunes could also accommodate this
romantic element without undermining the political messages. This
was a lesson also apparent in the Cultural Revolution, when new fea-
ture films appeared from the studios after 1973.
Restoring the standing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
regime in the countryside after the post-Great Leap Forward fam-
ine was the purpose of the Socialist Education Movement, which got
under way in 1963. Urban performers, teachers, young graduates, and
others fanned out to the countryside to organize activities that were
designed to strengthen farmers’ commitment to socialist construc-
tion. Music played an important role in this effort to remobilize the
countryside. Experiments in modernizing traditional performing arts
(drum songs, clapper songs, local opera) characterized this period.
Film screens began to reflect these efforts in 1964–1965 on the
eve of the Cultural Revolution. Regular feature film production was
supplemented, and then largely replaced, by a high number of what
110 PAUL CLARK
were essentially concert films. These titles included such gems as Every
Flower Faces the Sun (Duoduo hong hua xiang taiyang, a compilation
of ethnic minority songs and dances from a 1964 concert in Beijing
made at the Changchun Film Studio in 1965), The New Worker at
the Coal Depot (Meidian xin gongren, a modern musical directed by
Dong Kena at her Beijing Film Studio in 1965), and Three Little Red
Flowers (San duo xiao hong hua, three Zhuang minority operas (caidi-
aoxi) filmed at the Beijing Film Studio in the same year).4 These films
recorded performances of new-style works, such as modern subjects
and short local operas, and documented newly approved songs and
other performances from concerts in Beijing and Shanghai in par-
ticular. Film again served the function of taking these local shows to
a potentially much wider audience in an era when television viewing
was still a novel experience in Chinese cities. This kind of adapta-
tion and modernization of local musical theater was how the Cultural
Revolution model operas were being created at the same time as these
smaller-scale efforts at using film to popularize new kinds of tradi-
tional music.
One kind of film song that was not necessarily traditional deserves
special mention. Foreign films had always been a major part of
Chinese film viewing, a situation that did not change substantially
after 1949, although the origins of the imported works certainly did.
Feature films from the Soviet Union replaced Hollywood works in
the early 1950s. As mass audiences grew in the 1950s, a major pro-
portion of viewers were relatively new to the film-viewing experi-
ence and required guidance. The transition for audiences who had
been Hollywood fans may have been difficult; but for all viewers, the
new films from China’s socialist brother nations required some get-
ting used to. The songs in films from the Moscow and other studios
helped to endear the new-style films to old- and new-style filmgoers.
Russian composers and lyricists put as much effort into their film
songs as their Chinese studio counterparts did. Unlike the dialogue
in foreign films, which was dubbed in Chinese, foreign film songs
were left in the original language and subtitled in Chinese. For many
viewers, this was an added attraction, as hearing the foreign language
in the songs enhanced the exotic appeal of many films. Strictly speak-
ing, “Moscow Nights” (Mosike jiaoqu zhi ye, lit. Moscow Suburban
Nights) was not a film song, but after its Soviet appearance in 1956
it soon became as popular in China as it was in the Soviet Union.
Well-crafted Chinese lyrics helped to attract Chinese fans. Such pop-
ularity of film songs and other songs served the political purpose
of consolidating Sino-Soviet friendship and also helped to make the

foreign films appealing in China, so that attending them was not
considered just a duty to be done in organized work groups or school
groups. The popularity of Indian films among Chinese film viewers
and radio listeners should not be overlooked in this context. Tuneful
interludes, often with dancing, made films and film songs from the
subcontinent a fond memory for many Chinese.5
The foreign film songs also served as models for songs in Chinese
feature films. By the mid-1950s, many Chinese movies incorporated
a standard two songs—frequently, each would be of a different style,
with one somber or romantic and the other joyful, for example.
Films set in exotic locations, particularly among ethnic minorities,
lent themselves to songs, reflecting a majority, Han Chinese view
about “happy, smiling natives.” Five Golden Flowers (Wuduo jin-
hua, Changchun Film Studio, 1959, color), for example, used its
Bai minority setting in the southwest to essay a number of themes—
including romantic love and music—not usually seen in Han majority
settings. This immensely popular film features singing (and danc-
ing) from the very first shot, as various minority peoples gather at a
county fair. A more somber story, though equally exotic and tuneful,
was Visitor on Ice Mountain (Bingshan shang de laike, Changchun
Film Studio, 1963, black and white), a tale of international spying
across the northwestern border. The Turkic tunes that feature in this
film were long remembered by Chinese filmgoers.6 Xie Jin’s 1961
hit film, The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun, Tianma
Film Studio), also had an exotic setting in subtropical Hainan island.
The appeal of the work to voters who named it their favorite in the
first One Hundred Flowers readers’ poll conducted by Popular Film
(Dazhong dianying) lay in a number of elements, including the story
of a feisty young woman’s transformation into a disciplined fighter.
But the music in the film—particularly two songs, one of which is
actually sung twice by the women’s detachment—was a major part of
its success and had a lasting impact.
This kind of feature film music was not heard (and seen) in isola-
tion. Opera adaptations were a relatively minor activity in Chinese
film production before 1949, as most opera fans preferred live per-
formances. From 1949 onward, however, opera films were a major
part of film production, as filmmakers were encouraged creatively to
record newly modernized versions of traditional-style operas. These
covered a range of regional opera traditions and brought them to a
much wider, national audience. Theater and performance in China
112 PAUL CLARK
had almost always been musical. The opera films became an important
means of promoting the process of political correction and updating
of traditional stories, as well as allowing audiences and opera profes-
sionals access to efforts at modernizing the music and singing styles of
the various opera genres. Opera films from the 17 years before 1966
helped prepare the ground for the use of film in consolidating the
model status of the Cultural Revolution yangbanxi (model perfor-
mance) operas in the first half of the 1970s.7
The important role played by feature films after 1949 in intro-
ducing Chinese audiences to symphonic, or Western, instrumental
music should not be overlooked. Most Chinese learned to under-
stand the conventions of Western orchestral music through going
to the movies. They would not have been exposed to symphonic
music without its association with feature films. Western symphonic
music was a language different from Chinese musical traditions, and
it had to be learned. The visual clues that films offered helped view-
ers to learn the associations of particular rhythms and instruments
with particular moods or feelings. Films were crucial to that learn-
ing process. I would argue that one reason for the popularity of
the two main Cultural Revolution model ballets was precisely that
audiences were familiar with the language of symphonic music used
in the works, even if the dancing seemed highly exotic. Music had,
of course, been used in films from the Shanghai and other studios
before 1949, but the greater resources available to the state-owned
studios of the People’s Republic meant that more attention was given
to incorporating music into the new-style feature films between the
opening credits and closing shots at the end. From the first products
of the Northeast Film Studio, built on the core of the Japanese-run
Manchukuo studio in Changchun, there are credits for the studio’s
orchestra (in this case, Dongying yuedui). Composers, and soon con-
ductors, also appeared in film credits. Several of the first films from
the state-run Beijing and Shanghai film studios list their wind and
string orchestra song troupe (e.g., Beiying guanxian yuedui geyong
dui or its hechangdui).8
Songs did not appear by any means in all feature films made after
1949, but it is notable that some of the most well received and well
remembered films of the 1950s and early 1960s included catchy
or emotional songs as part of the narrative. These films included
Daughter of the Party (Dang de nüer, Changchun Film Studio, 1958),
the comedy Better and Better (Jinshangtianhua, Beijing Film Studio,
1962), and Part Two of The Young People of Our Village (Women cunli
de ninqiangren, xuji, Changchun Film Studio, 1963).9
Film and the Cultural Revolution

Model Performances
Films had three major roles in the emergence of the model perfor-
mances that were at the core of Cultural Revolution cultural life. Films
provided the source material for several of these model work, which
incorporated cinematic effects in their staging design. Films were also
essential in the promulgation of the model performances. Without
film, the model works could not have existed.
The opera The Red Lantern, for example, was based on a pub-
lished screenplay titled The Revolution Has Successors (Geming ziyou
houlairen), which was never made into a feature film. The Harbon
City Peking Opera Company saw potential in the nonmusical film
script published by the Changchun Film Studio. Later, a Shanghai
opera company took on the opera, which was then handed also to a
Beijing-based company, where opera experts and other experts were
enlisted to enhance the work. Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy was
similarly drawn from a film original, in this case an adaptation of a
part of Qu Bo’s 1958 novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xue
yuan) made at the army’s August First film studio in 1960. The two
Cultural Revolution model ballets were directly inspired by highly
popular films from the 1950s, the “rice sprouts musical” (yangge ju)
The White-haired Girl and Xie Jin’s 1961 hit The Red Detachment of
Women. Even the songs of the latter were reworked directly in the
model ballet version.
Films played an important role in the creative development of
the original yangbanxi operas, in which film directors, designers,
and other professionals were invited by opera companies to assist
in the creative process. The driving concern was to try to make the
experience of watching live performances of the new-style Peking
opera with modern subject-matter close to that of watching mov-
ies. The creators of the new-style operas tried to replicate on stage
something akin to the effects of close-ups, zooms, and editing cuts.
This reflected the fact that, after 1949, the number of filmgoers
began to exceed of the number of people attending Chinese opera.
The modern-subject operas were particularly hard-pressed to attract
viewers to their strange novelty. Making the experience of the new
stage works seem familiar to cinemagoers was a way to break through
to the mass audience that traditional-style opera had once enjoyed.
When Tiger Mountain was being revised by a Shanghai opera com-
pany before being named as a model, Ying Yunei, a director at the
Shanghai Film Studio, was brought to remodel the performance and
114 PAUL CLARK
lead rehearsals. Likewise, The Red Lantern benefited from film spe-
cialists’ input in stage direction, lighting, and design. As the girl Li
Tiemei learns from her grandmother that she and her father are not
blood relatives of the old woman but that they are all an adopted
family, the drama is enhanced by techniques of lighting and stage
blocking designed to echo the effects of close-ups and zooms on the
cinema screen.10
The role of film in helping to promulgate the original eight
“model performances” (yangbanxi) can be exaggerated in retro-
spect. The five modernized Peking operas, two ballet dramas, and a
symphonic suite based on one of the operas appeared on film, several
years after they had been declared models, for a new kind of cultural
production in May 1967.11 But work began soon afterward on put-
ting these central works in celluloid. The task was so important that
it took some time to ensure the screen versions were as perfect as
possible. Eventually, the first of the operas, Taking Tiger Mountain
by Strategy ( Beijing Film Studio), was released for National Day
(October 1) in 1970. All aspects of the film versions of the model
operas were of the highest professionalism available to the filmmak-
ers, including the singing and musical accompaniment. In this way,
the films, released over the following three years served a musical
purpose in offering to amateur and professional opera troupes, per-
forming these works since the mid-1960s, a visual version of what
had usually been only available on gramophone records and in radio
broadcasts.12
The two ballet dramas in the original eight yangbanxi were remark-
ably foreign works for Chinese audiences, unlike their Peking opera
counterparts (although modernized opera also took some getting used
to for many viewers). Part of the ballets’ foreignness was their near-
complete reliance on Western-style symphonic music, though with the
addition of some Chinese instruments and the use of song, including
voicing the thoughts of the central protagonists. For many ballet goers
this kind of music was relatively familiar from watching feature films.
The film versions of The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi-
jun, Beijing Film Studio, 1971) and The White-Haired Girl (Baimao
nü, Shanghai Film Studio, 1972) both enjoyed the same degree of
attention to perfection as the model opera films had endured during
their production.13 Like their opera cousins, these films took the, by
now familiar, symphonic music of the ballets to professional and ama-
teur musicians in visual as well as aural form. Audiences, who might
earlier have endured less-than-perfect versions of the musical scores,
could also now hear the real thing.
It is the filmed versions of the yangbanxi operas and ballets that

have endured in popular memories of the Cultural Revolution
years. Upon release and for several years afterward, color stills from
these films featured on the walls of dormitories and homes across
the nation. The effort to organize mass attendance at the films also
helped secure their place in collective memory. This is despite the
suggestion that, at least initially, prints of the model performance
films were limited in number and carefully monitored on distribu-
tion, apparently to avoid damage that might spoil the viewing expe-
rience of such important works.14
Films of other new-style operas and other musical performances
played an important part in bringing musical experimentation to
wider audiences in the mid-1970s. The film of Azalea Mountain
(Dujuan shan, Beijing Film Studio, 1974), one of the second tranche
of model operas, shows how films influenced the creation of the new-
style works and their celluloid versions. The central heroine, Ke Xiang,
an underground communist leader, is being led to her execution by
Guomindang police. She pauses dramatically and, in close-up, checks
the top fastening of her dazzlingly white jacket. She then uses her
hand to pat the hair on one side of her head in place. The opera’s
musical score incorporates Western instruments in playing several
bars of the socialist anthem The Internationale. Many Chinese view-
ers would immediately recall the scene in the 1965 feature film Red
Crag (Liehuo zhong yongsheng, Beijing Film Studio), in which Yu Lan,
playing a communist revolutionary, prepares for her imminent exe-
cution by Guomindang soldiers in the 1940s. She pats her hair and
nobly steps forth with her similarly condemned comrade, played by
Zhao Dan, as The Internationale begins to rise to a crescendo on the
soundtrack.15
Films were also a means to promote further evolution of the mod-
ernized Peking operas that had dominated the original eight yang-
banxi. A good example is the film version of Boulder Bay (Panshiwan,
Shanghai Film Studio, 1976), codirected by Xie Jin and Liang Tingduo.
There were several unusual elements in the stage opera, to which the
directors added more when they put it on celluloid. The central hero,
a people’s militia leader in a southeast coastal fishing village, is mar-
ried and spends some stage time joking with his wife, who looks after
their baby. This central hero, a family man, is in complete contrast to
the leading characters in almost all the other modern-subject Peking
operas, though the heroine of the second-tranche yangbanxi Song of
the Dragon River (Longjiang song) has a husband. Filming Boulder
Bay was an opportunity to further elaborate the stage effects of a fight
116 PAUL CLARK
under water against Taiwan-based spies, though it did not sit well
with the naturalistic possibilities of film. Xie and Liang, in fact, inter-
cut shots from real locations with the sound-stage performances to
enhance a sense of naturalism in the midst of opera song and move-
ment. The result was an innovative but unfamiliar mix in presenting
one of the last of the Cultural Revolution operas.16 Film was also an
important means to encourage the so-called transplanting (yizhi) of
the modernized Peking opera into other, regional musical traditions,
including Sichuan opera (Chuanju), flower-drum opera (Huaguxi)
from Anhui, and Cantonese opera (Yueju). These transplanted mod-
ernized works even included the unexpected Uyghur-language musi-
cal (Weiwueryu geju) into which the model The Red Lantern had been
turned and filmed in 1975 at the army’s August First studio, a studio
not renowned for its musical film output.17
Film versions of other musical performances in the early 1970s
brought a new dimension to music previously available live to a small
minority, or only heard on radio or records. A symphonic piece, the
Shajiabang Symphony, was part of the original eight yangbanxi. This
was a new kind of performance, which combined symphonic music,
augmented with Chinese string, wind, and percussion instruments,
with Peking opera singers performing versions of the arias from the
model opera Shajiabang. It was the least commonly performed of the
original eight model works and was released on film in early 1973.
It was part of a stage documentary, which also included piano-ac-
companied concert versions of arias from the model opera The Red
Lantern (Hongdeng ji) and a performance of the piano concerto The
Yellow River, based on the 1939 eponymous cantata (Gangqin ban-
chang “Hongdeng ji,” gangqin xiazouqu “Huanghe,” geming jiaoxi-
ang yinyue ‘Shajiabang’). The full color filming of these performances
potentially brought them to a wider audience that might enjoy the
new versions.18
Among other filmed performances was the somewhat more innova-
tive Long March Choral Suite (Changzheng zuge). Written by the com-
poser-conductor Tang Jiang in 1964, this suite was first performed
publicly in 1975. Tang and his fellow composers (it was presented as a
collective work, as was common in the Cultural Revolution era) incor-
porated local musical styles in the work, including ethnic minority har-
monies from regions through which the Communist Party’s legendary
Long March passed in the mid-1930s.19 Again, a film version brought
this work and the highly professional performance to more listeners.
In an age before widespread access to television sets, musical films
included compilations of performances. One such was the mundanely
titled Song and Dance (Gewu) released in 1973 and made at the Pearl
River Film Studio in Guangzhou. In these films, the items put on cel-
luloid for a national audience included several praise songs of that era,
which had been written and refined through regional performance
concert conventions that served in these years to weed out or confirm
the political and audience acceptability of new works. Making this film
was also an opportunity for some of the staff of the Guangzhou studio
to get back to professional practice after years of disruption and lim-
ited production of newsreel and similar TV-style works.20 The concert
film We are All Sunflowers (Women dou shi xiangyanghua, 1975) was a
similar case. It showcased songs and dances propagandizing the policy
of sending educated youth to the countryside. But it was also a means
of reviving production that had ceased in the early 1960s at the Emei
Film Studio in Sichuan.21 An even later example is Bai hua zhengyan
(A Hundred Flowers Contend in Beauty, Beijing Film Studio, 1976),
which even included excerpts from three of the all too familiar original
eight yangbanxi (as if in defense of these classics at this stage in the
Cultural Revolution), along with a range of musical performances by
the Central Art Troupe (Zhongyang yishutuan). The latter included
a piano solo (Shimian maifu, Ambushed on All Sides) along with
recent compositions of modified, classical-style Chinese music and
solo songs in praise of the Party. Including the yangbanxi excerpts
could also serve as a “cover” for the more innovative musical items.22
The ever-familiar “three battles” (san zhan) films made before the
Cultural Revolution, which were in continuous and widespread circu-
lation after 1966, naturally featured songs. Fighting North and South
(Nanzheng beizhan, 1952) had a theme song used at the start and
end of the work. From 1962, Mine Warfare (Dilei zhan) included a
song at 18 minutes into the film, sung by a chorus. Tunnel Warfare
(Didao zhan, completed in December 1965) included a song at 12
minutes and in the closing scene, sung by soloist Deng Yuhua.23 The
ubiquity of 16-mm prints of these three films meant that they were
a frequent reminder of the musical legacy of the 17 years before the
Cultural Revolution.
Music in the New Feature Films after 

When nonmusical feature films started to emerge from the studios
again in 1973, the cinema screen resumed its former role in promul-
gating popular songs. Some of the early films in the new era were
remakes of classic films from the 17 years before 1966. By 1973, as
Cultural Revolution political fervor was replaced by a dull normalcy in
118 PAUL CLARK
daily life (although strident propaganda remained typical in the print

media), remakes in color, and often in wide-screen format, appeared
in cinemas. They were intended to dazzle audiences with the new ver-
sion of often all too familiar pre-1966 films. The standard two songs
reappear, with slightly adjusted lyrics, in the reshot Green Pine Ridge
(Qingsong ling, remade in 1973 with almost exactly the same cast
and crew; original black-and-white version, 1965), Scouting Across the
Yangzi (Dujiang zhencha ji, 1974; original, 1954), and Fighting North
and South (Nanzheng beizhan, 1974, original 1952).24 Completely
new feature films perhaps had more attraction for audiences, who were
eager to see new things on screen. The two songs in the children’s
film Sparkling Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing, August First Film
Studio, 1974) were an excellent example of the quality of songwriting
in the era and the impact that film songs had on the general popula-
tion. The songs, a determined song of anticipation of revolutionary
victory and a happy march of the soldiers in the child hero’s fantasy,
were both hugely appealing to Chinese listeners, especially as the two
songs were repeatedly played on radio and by broadcasting stations on
communes, in trains, and at other venues in 1974–1975. Students and
workers learned how to sing the songs, which were performed wide-
ly.25 The association with the cherubic hero and the martyrdom of his
mother in the original film added to the songs’ popular impact. The
styles of the music and even the lyrics of the songs in these new feature
films were not noticeably different from their equivalents in films from
the earlier 17 years. What was new was the musical talent devoted to
the creation of the new songs and the means to promulgate them
widely in work units, in communes, and elsewhere. Loudspeakers and
radios were more numerous by the 1970s.
For titles released in the years 1974–1976, the standard catalogue
of feature films consistently lists the names of the singing soloists
on the soundtrack. This had not been the practice in the 1950s and
1960s, when singers from musical troupes usually contributed anony-
mously to the songs in some features. In this revival of feature-film
production in the last few years of the Cultural Revolution decade,
songs in films became an expectation for audiences. In my experience,
many viewers would leave the cinema with a sense of disappointment
if the feature had lacked these musical interludes or accelerations of
the narrative. Many viewers also remarked on the attractiveness of the
songs as a way of assessing new titles. As in earlier decades, a catchy
song helped popularize a film, even if the singing of it was something
spontaneous among friends, rather than organized in classroom, dor-
mitory, or work unit.26 In her study of cinematic soundtracks edited
for broadcasting on radio and loudspeakers, Nicole Huang illustrates

another way in which films could extend their presence beyond cin-
emas and other places where they were screened.27
Another kind of film music featured in Chinese lives in the first half
of the 1970s. Foreign films had never vanished from China’s screens
after 1949, and did not do so even during the Cultural Revolution
decade. When widespread screening of foreign films resumed in
1970, three nations’ works predominated: North Korea, Albania, and
Vietnam. Korean films seem to have had the most appeal, assisted in
part by the regular use of songs in the tales of sacrifice, struggle, and
adulation for Kim Il-sung. The work with the biggest impact was The
Flower Seller (Mai hua guniang), released in Beijing in September
1972. Queues stretched around the block in Dongdan and elsewhere,
attracted by the relative novelty of a wide screen and color film,
though the musical score was also part of the appeal. Upon rerelease
in the city in June 1973 the film achieved box office record for a for-
eign film shown in Beijing. More than 600,000 tickets were sold or
distributed to work units.28 As with locally made films, the songs from
many Korean and other foreign features were played on radio and
through other channels.
Film songs—especially those from foreign features—had other
roles in Cultural Revolution musical culture. Singing a song or whis-
tling a tune from a favorite pre-1966 movie that had been banned
could bring trouble in an era of great caution and attempted control
over ordinary lives. But this did not stop many Chinese from indulg-
ing in nostalgia for more liberal times or remembered pleasures. Such
indulgence generally required a space where the consequences were
less likely to be grave for the bold singers. The memoirs of youth
who had been sent down to the countryside, published post-Cultural
Revolution, are full of instances of clandestine singing. The songs
were often those from foreign or Chinese films in circulation before
1966. Not infrequently, the remembered choral occasions were under
the cover of darkness in dormitories, or outdoors in fields or forests
away from adult supervision. The spirit of such occasions ranged from
sadness or loneliness in rural exile far from urban homes and families
to solidarity and determination to survive often harsh conditions and
discipline, particularly in the case of military-style construction corps
in the northeast or southwest. Quietly singing “Moscow Nights” or
some other song, now officially banned along with the films that they
had appeared in, can also be seen as an effort at resistance on the part
of the sent-down youth. Chinese film audiences since 1949 had always
made their own interpretations or uses of films, no matter what the
120 PAUL CLARK
makers of the films or the cultural leadership wanted them to under-

stand from their viewings. The singing of film songs in these unofficial
or “underground” contexts during the Cultural Revolution decade
was simply a continuation of this unofficial practice by audiences.29
Film songs from before 1966 also provided raw material for the
creativity of educated youth, and even for new official purposes. Feng
Zhicheng, a high school student in 1969, heard a loudspeaker truck
in the streets of his Chengdu neighborhood encouraging youth to
enlist in the movement down to the villages. To the theme tune of the
1964 film Heroic Sons and Daughters (Yingxiong ernü, Changchun
Film Studio), which was occasionally shown after 1966, new lyrics
were added: “Leaving their dear friends, educated youth (zhiqing,
short for zhishi qingnian) must go to far away places/Re-educated
by poor and lower-middle peasants/Shake up the world and tem-
per our red hearts.”30 The heroics of the original film about young
Chinese fighting in the Korean War, which had moved young audi-
ences in cinemas, were recycled by association through use of the
film tune to promote the new policy for youthful mobilization. In
unofficial contexts, young people could take well-known film songs
and change the familiar lyrics to something closer to their concerns,
often humorous and with local references. Yan Xiaoli, a sent-down
youth from Chengdu, recalled how she and four classmates found a
quiet glade in the Yunnan mountains and spontaneously burst into
singing, including the American “Oh, Susanna,” the 1938 romantic
Soviet song “Katyusha,” and that old favorite, “Moscow Nights.”31
This sent-down youth’s use of songs from films was an indication of
the influence that these songs had enjoyed throughout the period
before 1966. Their recycling of the tunes with new lyrics could draw
upon a shared affection for the originals and the films that the songs
had enlivened.
Legacy
Despite considerable, striking changes in Chinese life and politics after
the death of Mao, the arrest of the Gang of Four, and introduction
in late 1978 of the “reform and opening up” policy, the connections
between musical culture and film, outlined above, for the preceding
40 years did not change dramatically until the 1990s. The expectation
of two songs per film continued into the late 1970s and 1980s. An
influential example is the film Little Flower (Xiao hua, Beijing Film
Studio, 1979), a vehicle for the then girlish charms of Liu Xiaoqing
and Chen Chong. The story of siblings separated as babies and

reunited in the 1940s civil war, the film featured the dulcet tones of
Li Guyi, who established a career as a star of film songs. She had first
been credited as a film song soloist on Great Wall on the Southern Seas
(Nanhai changcheng, August First Film Studio), made in the last year
of the Cultural Revolution decade, and in 1977 she featured on the
soundtrack of an agricultural commune story, A Long Journey (Wan li
zhengtu, Beijing Film Studio).32 Singers such as Li Guyi, trained dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution, formed the backbone of a new cohort
of entertainers who featured on China’s rapidly expanding number
of television screens. They were the mainland’s answer to Taiwan’s
Deng Lijun (Teresa Teng), who became a huge star in China with
her sentimental love songs. The careers of the mainland’s new film-
developed singers show that, by the 1980s, television had begun to
take over the role in musical culture that feature films had held dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution and before. But films served to reinforce
the impact of television shows like the Spring Festival galas on CCTV
and in bringing singers to public attention. The rise of cassette tape
recorder and radio ownership in the 1980s, along with expanding
television ownership and multiplying channels, transformed popular
musical culture in China.
Films continued to include songs throughout the 1980s, even
with the rise of a new generation of filmmakers who ostensibly turned
Chinese film on its head. The first major film of the fifth generation,
The Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, Guangxi Film Studio, 1984), included
a theme song sung by the female protagonist to express her suppressed
emotions, as well as a folk song reworked with new Communist Party
lyrics sung by the central character and the peasant girl’s little broth-
er.33 Although composer Zhao Jiping based his songs on Shaanxi folk
styles, in keeping with the ambitions of the director to better reflect
the reality of late 1930s peasant life, the inclusion of these two songs
was a familiar element for Chinese audiences. Part of the consider-
able popular appeal of the film that can be said to have marked the
end of the Fifth Generation as a distinctive, new cohort of filmmakers
also involved the use of songs. Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong
gaoliang, Xi’an Film Studio, 1987) was one of the last notable films
that included songs as a major element reflecting the themes of the film.
Certainly the young men in northern China in the summer of 1988,
whom I heard readily bursting into a lusty “Little sister, go forward
boldly” (Meimei, ni da dan de wang qian zou), enjoyed the musical
soundtrack of Zhang’s hit. So-called main melody films (zhuxuanlü
122 PAUL CLARK
dianying),—the name denoted their propaganda importance rather

than being a reference to their musical elements—which became an
important part of the effort to promote orthodoxy in the 1990s and
later, also included theme songs to convey the films’ messages and
enhance their impact on audiences. The tradition that had been estab-
lished in the 1950s and reinforced in the Cultural Revolution decade
continued into the new century.
Another legacy of the music promoted on cinema screens during
the Cultural Revolution arose as a response to the somewhat inflated,
bombastic nature of a lot of the Western-style symphonic work of that
decade, as elaborated in Nancy Rao’s chapter in this volume. The soaring
melodies and repetitive bravura of the Yellow River Concerto (Huanghe
gangqin xiezouqu) were typical of this straining effort to move audi-
ences unfamiliar with symphonic conventions and apparently requiring
insistent guidance to appreciate this kind of music. In a movement seen
in the fine arts and other cultural productions after 1976, some com-
posers responded by taking the opposite tack. Tan Dun’s avant-garde
use of basins of water to be splashed and other quiet, unorthodox sound
makers in his compositions was a rejection of the Cultural Revolution
heritage of pompous Western orchestral music.
Conclusion
Among several older generations of Chinese citizens, memories of the
Cultural Revolution era often include aural memories, particularly of
music of those years. Much of that music was committed to cellu-
loid and shown on screens across the nation—whether in cinemas, on
threshing grounds, or in work unit canteens. Films played a major part
in securing the musical memories of those years, be they arias from the
model operas, tunes from the model ballets, praise songs for Chairman
Mao, or songs from hit feature films like Sparkling Red Star.
A broader point should close this overview: the importance of plac-
ing the Cultural Revolution decade in the context of China’s twenti-
eth-century cultural history. The above discussion has tried to show
that many of the features of Cultural Revolution musical culture were
a continuation of trends established decades earlier. Likewise, the
decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution saw a perpetuation
of features from that era and, of course, a reaction against some of
those elements. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a strong
conviction in the power of music and film to persuade, encourage,
and uplift characterized cultural life in China.
Notes
1. Much work remains to be done in this area. Jubin Hu, Projecting a
Nation: Chinese National Cinema before 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2003), does not touch on this subject. Recent
Chinese-language research on film exhibition has tended to ignore
the actual film-viewing experience of audiences—see, for example,
Liu Xiaolei, Zhongguo zaoqi Huwai diqu dianyingye de xingcheng
(The Early Chinese Film Industry Outside of Shanghai) (Beijing:
Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2009).
2. For a study of the mixed, indigenous and Western nature of
Chinese film music in the 1930s, see Yeh Yue-yu, “Historiography
and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s,” Cinema
Journal 41(3) (2002): 78–97.
3 . In 1958 and 1959, film studios produced 180 films, which
compared with 171 films made in the 1949–1957 period by
the state-run studios: Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and
Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 80. For a pioneering study of revolutionary songs, see
Isabel K. F. Wong, “ Geming Gequ : Songs for the Education of
the Masses,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts
in the People’s Republic of China 1949–1979 , edited by Bonnie
S. McDougall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1984), 112–143.
4. Details on these three films can be found in Zhongguo dianying
ziliaoguan and Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyuan dianying yanjiusuo,
eds, Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu (1949–1979) (Catalogue of
Chinese art films, 1949–1979) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe,
1981), 871–872, 875–876 and 885–886, respectively.
5. A provincial distribution company’s listing of Indian films shown
between 1949 and the 1970s lists eight feature films, the first
four released in late 1955. Three of the eight titles were also
distributed in 16-mm format, allowing for wider access than
just in cinemas. All eight films were banned in 1962, the year of
border skirmishes between the two countries. See Hunan sheng
dianying faxing fangying gongsi (Hunan provincial film distri-
bution and projection company), Yingpian (changpian jiemu)
pianming paicibiao (Films (feature-length) title list), Changsha,
1978, 126.
6. For an early discussion of the appeal of these minority settings, see
Paul Clark, “Ethnic Minorities in Chinese Films: Cinema and the
Exotic,” East-West Film Journal 1(2) (1987): 15–31.
7. See the issue of The Opera Quarterly 26 (2–3) (2010), edited by
Paola Iovene and Judith T. Zeitlin, devoted to Chinese opera on film
from, before, and during the Cultural Revolution.
124 PAUL CLARK
8. The production listings from 1950 for the privately owned film com-
panies in Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu include credits for “music”
(yinyue, rather than composition zuoqu), but no credits for orchestra
groups: see 48–57 (six titles, including Wu Xun zhuan).
9. See, respectively, Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 750–751, 703–704,
and 313–314.
10. For more on the creation of these model operas, see Paul Clark,
The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 26–56.
11. On the promulgation of the original yangbanxi see Clark, Chinese
Cultural Revolution, 56–62.
12. On the filming of the five opera yangbanxi, see Clark, Chinese Cultural
Revolution, 123–129.
13. Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, 129. On the evolution of the
original ballets, see 159–168. Filmed versions were also made of two
later Cultural Revolution ballets, Caoyuan ernü (Sons and Daughters of
the Grassland, 1975) and Yimeng song (Ode to the Yimeng Mountains,
1975).
14. The Hunan film distribution company’s list of film titles, with the
number of copies, cited in note 5 above, seems to indicate that only 13
each of the 35-mm prints of the yangbanxi films were in nationwide
release in 1970–1972: 24–25.
15. These observations on audiences’ responses to these and other films are
drawn from my experience of filmgoing in Beijing during 1974–1976
and since, and from discussions with Chinese filmmakers of several gen-
erations since 1980.
16. For production details, see Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu,
1090–1091. For an interview with the codirector Liang, see “Fang
“Panshiwan” de daoyan Liang Tingduo” (Interview with Liang
Tingduo, Director of Boulder Bay), in Wutai yu yinmu zhi jian:
xiqu dianying de huigu yu jiangshu (Between Stage and Screen:
Retrospective and Tales of Opera Films), edited by Zhao Jingbo and
Ran Changjian (Beijing: Zhongguo wenyi chubanshe, 2007), 69–79.
17. August First had been a coproducer, with the Beijing and central
Newsreel studios, of The East is Red (Dong fang hong) in 1965. For
production details of the Uyghur-language film, see Zhongguo yishu
yingpian bianmu, 1029. See the chapter in this volume by Chuen-
Fung Wong for more on the Uyghur musical genre.
18. Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 970–971.
19. I remember attending a live performance in early 1976 and being
struck by the unusual and dramatic part singing. The 1976 film,
made at the army’s August First film studio, was called Hongjun bu
pa yuanzheng nan: Changzheng zuge (The Red Army Fears Not the
Difficulties of a Lengthy Journey: Long March Choral Suite).
20. For production details, see Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 980–
981. The studio completed only the Cantonese opera version of
Shajiabang in 1974, and in 1975 came its first nonmusical feature film
since 1966.
21. Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 1034–1035. Emei’s most recent
feature film (a Sichuan opera) had been released in 1962, one of just
a handful from the studio between its establishment in 1958 and
1966.
22. Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 1058.
23. See Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu, 94–96, 727–728, and 914–915,
respectively.
24. For details of the originals and remakes, see Zhongguo yishu yingpian
bianmu, 864–865, 976 (Pine); 138–139, 994–995 (Scouting); 94–96,
992–993 (North).
25. These points are based on my observations as a student in Beijing at
the time of the film’s release in October 1974 and in the following
two years.
26. In early 1976, my Chinese and foreign classmates in Peking University’s
History Department attempted to learn the difficult tunes of the song
versions of two newly released poems by Mao Zedong. The numer-
ical-notation scores of these lieder-style songs had been published
widely in the newspapers for groups like ours to learn to sing and per-
form. They were a challenge for even the most accomplished amateur
singer.
27. Nicole Huang, “Listening to Films: Politics of the Auditory in 1970s
China,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7(3) (2013): 187–206.
28. Tian Jingqing, Beijing dianying ye shiji, 1949–1990 (Achievements of
the Beijing Film Industry, 1949–1990) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying
chubanshe, 1999), 157–158. The ticket numbers meant that one in
six or seven urban Beijingers watched the film. Nicole Huang notes
that this film was also heard as an edited soundtrack on radio: Huang,
“Listening to Films,” 199–200.
29. I observed a similar, somewhat ironic use of The Internationale by
student protestors in Tiananmen Square in May–June 1989.
30. Feng Zhicheng, “Zhiqing geyao” (Educated Youth Ballads), in
Zhiqing dang’an, 1962–79: Zhishi qingnian shangshan xiaxiang
jishi (Educated Youth Archive, 1962–79: Records of Educated
Youth Going Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages),
edited by Yang Zhiyun et al. (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe,
1992), 360.
31. Yan Xiaoli, “Ganjiawan jishi” (Records of Ganjiawan), in Yang
Zhiyun, Zhiqing dang’an, 387–388.
32. For details of these two films, see Zhongguo yishu yingpian bianmu,
1101–1102 and 1131–1132.
126 PAUL CLARK
33. The central narrative of the film features a communist soldier arriv-
ing in the district to collect folk songs to turn into revolutionary and
patriotic ditties in the midst of the war with Japan. For more on The
Yellow Earth and its significance, see Paul Clark, Reinventing China:
A Generation and Its Films (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
2005), 82–89.
PA RT I I
Geography: Transplantation and the

Making of Regional Yangbanxi
C H A P T ER 6
Dialects as Untamable: How to

Revolutionize Cantonese Opera?
Laikwan Pang
While yangbanxi pieces were meant to forge a new revolutionary subjec-

tivity among the people, a practical issue inevitably arose, which was the
different capabilities of the many Chinese citizens to enjoy and reenact
these pieces. Despite being the ultimate embodiment of the revolution-
ary spirit, these yangbanxi pieces were culturally specific, and people’s
appreciation and learning of these pieces did not operate in a cultural
vacuum. China is a huge country with a vast, culturally diverse popula-
tion, but the Cultural Revolution was a highly homogenous political
program that promoted a social ideal for all Chinese people to achieve.
As such, the tensions between the center and the margin were always
strong during this period, although they were not easily detectable. The
regime aimed to offer a unified image of the country and its people, and
the propaganda culture deliberately suppressed regional tensions. As
Richard Kraus asserts, “Maoist central control over culture enabled the
center to portray a nation of greater unity than was in fact warranted.
The Cultural Revolution superficially homogenized ethnic, economic,
and even gender differences.”1 What remains less explored in the exist-
ing Cultural Revolution literature is the dialectics between the core and
the periphery, and between the model and the copies, which helped
make the Cultural Revolution such a unique historical event.
In this chapter, I focus not only on the actual yangbanxi but their
transplanted versions, because I believe it is the latter that represented
the ultimate spirit and paradox of the yangbanxi project, which was
designed to be models to be culturally appropriated, creating an
130 LAIKWAN PANG
irreducible distance between the original and the copies. The policy of
transplanting the revolutionary yangbanxi into regional operas (yizhi
geming yangbanxi 䦣㢵朑␥㟟㜧ㆷ), officially announced in 1967,
should not be understood as entirely coercive: although yangbanxi
were required to be produced and watched all over the country, the
cultural specificities of different regions were also recognized. The
regime was aware that any national cultural unification attempts had
to come to terms with regional differences, and the universal revolu-
tionary spirit must be rendered in specific cultural forms to reach the
many people of this huge nation.
As such, the transplantation project was caught between fidelity to
the yangbanxi and affinity with the local opera tradition. Accordingly,
the appropriation process necessarily betrayed unique aesthetic manip-
ulations and impasse. Generally speaking, the visual arrangements of
the local operas could easily be adapted to the yangbanxi’s strict stan-
dards, but the aural aspects—including both dialect and music—were
more difficult to “tame.” The transplantation project tolerated the
local “sound” under the premise that the very project was meant to
be transitional, with the ultimate goal of forfeiting itself to attain a
unified national culture. But, precisely due to its transitional status,
the transplantation project reveals the core political mechanism of the
Cultural Revolution’s cultural program, which features a complicated
infiltration and diffusion process. Judged in this way, the regional
music and local dialects might be seen as residues that were doomed
to be phased out. Being elements that could signify the regional cul-
ture, voice and music were also the most resilient cultural elements in
the face of the official models.
In this chapter, I confine my efforts to Cantonese opera, partly
because of my own cultural background and partly because of the
uniqueness of its politics and form, which also exemplify some com-
mon conditions of all regional arts at that time. Cantonese opera enjoys
a rich artistic tradition and a huge audience base, which are culturally
and physically very far away from the original Beijing- and Shanghai-
centered yangbanxi project. By the mid-1960s, many Cantonese
people still did not speak the national language, Putonghua, and the
southern region—blessed with a thriving Cantonese popular culture—
continued to maintain its cultural specificities. In light of this clear
distance between the political centers and Guangdong, I would like
to explore how Cantonese opera artists responded, first, to the model
put forward by the original yangbanxi pieces, and, second, to the cul-
tural tradition of the Cantonese opera art as its own model. Although
the Cultural Revolution celebrated innovation and radical rupture
DIALECTS AS UNTAMABLE 131
from tradition, regional operas continued to be relied upon precisely

because of their historical affinity with the local people. There were
intricate tensions between the official revolutionary models and their
regional adaptations: the Jiang Qing regime made sure the latter was
completely faithful to the former, which was also clearly understood
to be impossible; otherwise there would have been no transplantation
project in the first place.
The Fears for Regionalism

Considering the enormous aesthetic and political experiments involved
in transplanting yangbanxi into Cantonese opera, it is surprising that
Bell Yung’s chapter on Shajiabang 㱁⭞㴄 is the only serious academic
effort, in any language, that explores the adaptation process in musi-
cal terms.2 Focusing on Shajiabang, he demonstrates how Cantonese
opera lost its distinctive characteristics to accommodate the tunes,
beats, and linguistic tones of the original Peking opera music and lyr-
ics. Yung laments that the Cantonese opera version lost its musical
identity by staying faithful to the model, and the transplantation proj-
ect also risked sacrificing the great diversity of regional opera genres
in China to fulfill political and theoretical demands.
Yung’s careful analysis and pertinent criticism should be well-taken.
However, although the Cultural Revolution represented a pinnacle of
the politicization of the arts, it was probably the last period when tra-
ditional operas enjoyed dominant popularity among the population; it
was followed by a brief period of enthusiasm for traditional plays, which
subsided quickly in the early 1980s. We can separate the development
of Cantonese opera during the Cultural Revolution into two different
phases. The first corresponds to the period from 1964 to 1968, rep-
resented by Storm in the Countryside, a new revolutionary Cantonese
opera created by local artists to respond to the times. The piece failed to
please the Jiang Qing regime and was banned entirely in 1967. These
years witnessed the most spontaneous and uncontrolled period of the
Cultural Revolution, and the revolution was driven primarily by the
people themselves. In the case of Cantonese opera, a blackout period
resulted from this extreme politicization: all the opera troupes were dis-
banded in the years 1967 and 1968, and no operas were staged.
The second phase concerns the years after 1968, when Cantonese
opera productions, like those in many other regional theaters, were
quickly resumed and promoted by the government as important propa-
ganda tools. Institutionalized opera activities began after the setting up of
Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Revolution Committee (⸧ⶆ䱌∏⚊朑␥
132 LAIKWAN PANG
Ể␀Ể) on September 28, 1968, which experimented with the making

of new short revolutionary pieces and the transplantation of yangbanxi.
The First Military Company of Guangzhou Cantonese Opera and the
Second Military Company of Guangzhou Cantonese Opera were set up
in 1969 and 1970, respectively.3 Quickly, the two state-owned troupes,
Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater and Guangzhou City Cantonese
Opera Company, also resumed operations. The provincial company was
given the task to transplant Shajiabang, and the city company worked on
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan 㘢⍾⦩嗶Ⱉ).4
Storm in the Countryside (Shanxiang fengyun Ⱉḉ桶ḹ) is the
most important piece of work of the first stage. It could be seen
as the most successful Cultural Revolution Cantonese opera, as it
is the only revolutionary piece still played; however, it could also
be seen as a failure, because it was created for—but denounced
by—the Cultural Revolution. Storm in the Countryside is based on
a 1962 novel by Wu Youheng ⏜㚱⿺ titled Shanxiang fengyun lu
Ⱉḉ桶ḹ⻽,5 and it was adapted by Guangdong Cantonese Opera
Theater in 1965. Wu was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) army
commander in the 1940s, and he assumed high government posts
in Guangdong in the 1950s. Being accused of spreading regional-
ism, he was demoted to become a factory worker in the 1957 Anti-
Rightist Campaign. The novel was written during the period he was
demoted. Interestingly, the novel continued to emanate a strong
local Guangdong flavor, which also subsequently led to its condem-
nation. It tells a story that took place in 1947. In the midst of the
civil war, a CCP female military company commander, Liu Qin ⇀
䏜, saved a girl named Chunhua 㗍剙 from jumping down a cas-
cade and killing herself. Liu therefore had the chance to learn of
Chunhua’s misery as a slave girl who was raped by Zhanweishe 㕑⯦
噯 (Tailless snake), a militia commander of Taoyuan Walled Village
㟫⚕⟉. The village is controlled by three local rich families and pro-
tected by their own private militia. Among the three families, the
most important person is Fanguaiwang 䔒櫤䌳 (Devil King), who is
basically the ruler of the village. Meanwhile, the CCP also decided
to send Liu Qin to the village undercover to agitate the villagers to
collaborate with the Party for a pending insurrection against the
landlords. She posed as a secondary school teacher and earned the
trust of Fanguaiwang and his daughter; she then collaborated with
the poor tenants, such as Chunhua’s father, He Feng ỽ⣱, to spread
revolutionary messages within the village. In the end, she succeeded
in helping the CCP to attack and take hold of the village during the
Mid-Autumn Festival.
When traditional plays could no longer be performed, the

Cantonese opera cultural workers did their best to create a new
revolutionary piece that could, perhaps, serve as a model for subse-
quent attempts and sail through the political turmoil at least for the
moment to keep Cantonese opera from complete collapse. It was a
collective creation, featuring the most prominent performers of the
time. The original cast was invited to present the piece in Beijing,
Shanghai, and Shenzhen—according to some internal memoranda,
the tours were very successful and received compliments from
party leaders and fellow performers alike.6 According to the offi-
cial records, almost all the key party leaders and cultural celebrities
attended at least one of the performances during the tours, and the
enormous attention given to this regional piece also demonstrated
that it was politically important.
Regional identification is acknowledged in the story almost as a
meta-theme. Liu Qin is assigned to the walled village by the Party
because she had lived in the village when she was young, and so she
could convince the other villagers that she had come back to be a sec-
ondary school teacher out of her devotion to her hometown. When Liu
Qin leads the party fighters to enter the walled village, she cries, “Oh,
my long-departed homeland, I am back again.” Fanguaiwang’s daugh-
ter intended the climatic event, the Mid-Autumn Festival, to showcase
the most elaborate local rituals to the people. All the folk in the region
were welcome to participate, therefore offering the best opportunity
for the CCP unit to attack it. This embracing of the local identity
is strategic to engage the identification of the audience. During the
Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater’s tour of Beijing and Shanghai,
those who were most enthusiastic about the piece also seemed to be
Guangdong natives.7 Unsurprisingly, Storm in the Countryside was
condemned as reflecting regionalism, and banned in 1967.
Due to its economic strength, cultural and linguistic uniqueness,
and physical distance from the central administration, Guangdong
province has always exercised a certain degree of autonomy beyond
state control, from the imperialist era to the present. During the
Cultural Revolution, however, regionalism was considered a major
impediment to the nation’s continued revolution, and the tensions
between Guangdong and the central government were inevitably
revealed in the governance of Cantonese culture. It was at this height
of purging regionalism that Storm in the Countryside was banned.
Although we do not know the real reasons behind the 1967 ban,
Jiang Qing did not seem to like this opera the first time, or the last
time, she watched it. After Storm in the Countryside was first staged
134 LAIKWAN PANG
in Shanghai in February 1966, when Jiang Qing and other Shanghai

leaders were invited to participate in a discussion session, she repeat-
edly said she did not understand Cantonese and found the piece very
difficult to follow. She also discouraged filming of the opera, which
was already planned by the Pearl River Film Studio. She also urged the
team to investigate the historical accuracy of the story.8
In fact, it was not unreasonable or impulsive for Jiang Qing to associ-
ate Storm in the Countryside with regionalism, because this Cantonese
opera was created with the full understanding that its success was impor-
tant to the continual survival of the regional art in the upcoming political
storm, the first strikes of which were already being felt. Most importantly,
it was the decision of the creative collective that the new revolutionary
Cantonese opera should continue to emphasize its original formal charac-
teristics. In an internal report after the successful appearance of the piece
in the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention, Lin
Yu 㜿㤉, the director of Storm in the Countryside and the deputy head of
the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater, demonstrated that the piece
was created to be faithful to Cantonese opera. Cantonese opera circles
had been experimenting with creating new revolutionary pieces, but the
new works were all criticized by audiences as “adding songs to spoken
drama” (huaju jia chang 宅∏≈ⓙ). He claimed, “When we create new
scripts or adapt existing pieces, if we do not emphasize the characteristics
of the regional forms, and do not follow the principle of ‘I am my own
lord, and I walk my own road’ (yiwo weizhu, zou ziji de lu ẍㆹᷢᷣ, 崘冒
⶙䘬嶗), the project will then fail for sure.”9 The notable success of Storm
in the Countryside with native Cantonese audiences proved Lin Yu right.
As such, the piece has particularly important political meaning in its aspi-
ration to be its own model, bypassing the aesthetic hegemony forged by
the new regime. Had the piece not been banned, cultural production in
the Cultural Revolution might have been very different. Precisely due to
its aspirations, Storm in the Countryside must inevitably meet its demise.
There are many meticulous arrangements that demonstrate the
piece’s firm commitment to traditional Cantonese culture. The set
design highlighted Guangdong local scenery: there were banyan trees
behind He Feng’s house,10 and the interior designs of the landlord’s
house were also unique to the Guangdong area.11 But the most cru-
cial efforts were directed at the musical arrangement. First, all Western
instruments were removed, and traditional Cantonese musical arrange-
ment was emphasized. Second, the entire piece featured traditional
banghuang 㠮湬 tunes, deliberately avoiding the fixed xiaoqu ⮷㚚
tunes, which could be associated with contemporary times. Although
there were new arrangements of these traditional tunes, composer
Tan Jian 寕‍ admitted that the ultimate aim was to convey a rich
Cantonese opera musical feeling.12 Banghuang songs were the only
ones sung on the Cantonese opera stage in the late nineteenth cen-
tury; there were only 30 of them, and they were used in all plays. But
other song types were introduced in the beginning of the twentieth
century, and they were grouped under the umbrella of xiaoqu, whose
repertoire is more diverse and origins more varied: some of them
are traditional folk songs; some are more recent, Western-influenced
popular songs developed in the urban areas; some derive from other
genres of traditional Chinese music; and some are folk songs from
other regions.13 In the 1930s and 1940s, xiaoqu was highly popu-
lar in Cantonese opera, and some trendy performances featured only
xiaoqu.14 But banghuang was reintroduced in the 1950s to purge the
pre-Liberation commercialism. In Storm in the Countryside, all xiaoqu
were deliberately avoided to connect to a tradition that the artists
found not just more authentic but more politically correct.
Let us examine the piece more closely to understand the impor-
tance of sound in it. In the fourth scene, when Liu Qin is introduced
to the family of Fanguaiwang, his top guard, Zhanweishe, interro-
gates her to see whether she has any hidden agenda. It includes a
short one-minute section of beigong 側ὃ, in which the two dialogu-
ing characters revert briefly to their own subjective spaces and sing to
themselves, creating a private moment for them to think aloud and
also for the audience to understand the psychology and calculation
of the two characters. This scene is an important suturing moment—
when the characters sing to themselves, they also sing to the audience,
therefore inviting the audience to identify with the characters directly.
Each sings five lines (four in the jianzi furong 㷃⫿剁呱 tune and
one in the gunhua 㺂剙 tune), intercepting with each other, with a
traditional melodic ensemble of erhu, pipa, and yueqin meandering
between.15 The sets of lines were written in a sophisticated parallel
structure, in which Liu Qin’s lines always overpower the preceding
lines of Zhanweishe, in terms of both meanings and music:
Jianzi furong: 16
Z: Don’t mistake an eagle for a phoenix. 卓㈲Ⱉ渘擁⻻↌↘
LQ: Under the human skin he is still a poisonous snake. ㉓䛨Ṣ䙖ṵ
㗗㭺坺
Z: See, her sword-shape eyebrows contain untamed spirit. 䚳⤡⇹䚱
⏓慶㮼
LQ: See, his thief’s eyes shine with viciousness. 䚳Ṿ峤䛤曚↞⃱
Z: I need to carefully examine her trail. ㆹ天⮇䚳⤡埴啷
LQ: I need to counter him with cautions. ㆹ天⮷⽫␴Ṿ弫慷
136 LAIKWAN PANG
Z: No one can hide the truth from my eyes. 宩ḇ晦䜺ㆹᶨ⍴䛤

LQ: He has suffered the sound of two firings of my shotgun. Ṿ㚦栮
㔁彯ㆹ᷌⢘㝒
Gunhua:
Z: I have to test this girl in the hall. 天孽㍊征➪ᶲ⥹⧀
LQ: I have to deal with this general whom I have defeated. ᶼ⮡Ẁ征
ㇳᶳ峍⮮
Although the lines are written in elegant Chinese, they are sung in col-
loquial Cantonese, giving the viewers a sense of classicism as well as a
local identification. For the third-person pronoun ta Ṿ/⤡, instead of
singing “ta” (the Cantonese pronunciation of ta) the performers sings
“kui” Ἂ, which is the colloquial form of the pronoun. In the third and
fourth lines, instead of singing “hong-ta” 䚳Ṿ (See [him]) the singers
use the Cantonese colloquial “tai-kui” 䛯Ἂ. In the transplantation proj-
ect thereafter, colloquial Cantonese was no longer allowed to be sung in
the arias. Most interestingly, the first seven stanzas of the jianzi furong
tune are mostly about vision, about looking through the performance
and pretension of the opponent, but the last line ends with sound—her
two gunshots that defeated Zhanweishe before, and that also marks Liu
Qin’s future victory over Fanguaiwang. Much of the dramatic energy of
the piece is built upon Liu Qin’s role-playing and her ability to deceive.
So performance is a central theme of this piece—intentionally or not.
We can read these lyrics as illustrative of this central theme and, mutatis
mutandis, as metaphorical regarding the deceptiveness of the visual. As
such, the aural is much more important and authentic than the visu-
al—an echo of the producers’ announcement that it is the music and
the dialect that embody the true identity of Cantonese opera. While all
the visual arrangements could be set up and seen through, it is the effect
of the sound that is most determining and truthful.
The opera’s highlighting of femininity also distinguishes it from
yangbanxi operas. Its theme remotely echoes Hua Mulan in a reverse
way, as female soldier Liu Qin poses as a civilian to, ironically, enter
deep into the battlefield. In the first and the fourth scenes, when Liu
Qin discovers the landowners’ oppression of the poor people, she uses
a masculine voice to sing a few lines to show her anger, which is not
conventional in Cantonese opera. But very quickly she shifts back to
her feminine voice, and most of the other scenes feature the exqui-
site singing and passion of Liu instead of her actions and fighting. In
the sixth scene, she sings a six-minute aria titled “Liu Qin shuhuai”
⇀䏜㈺⾨ (Liu Qin expressing herself). She sings alone in her bed-
room, yearning to take up her military uniform to resume her soldier
identity. However, it is also in this scene that her female identity, in

terms of singing, postures, and overall aura, is most prominent and
attractive. Director Lin Yu acknowledged that the creative team gen-
erously gave Liu Qin a lot to sing precisely because they knew the
audience would love it, and these songs would also emphasize the
piece’s Cantonese opera identity.17 The official condemnation of the
piece in 1967 sealed the fate of this attempt, and the Cantonese opera
was to give up most of its regional features to demonstrate its fidelity
to yangbanxi. Sadly, these impressive attempts by Cantonese opera
to create its own revolutionary model while maintaining its cultural
specificities were to have no follow-up.
Transplantation: Visual versus Aural

After the purging of almost all existing culture, the yangbanxi project was
to demonstrate what a new revolutionary culture should be like, but the
Jiang Qing regime was also clear from the beginning that these standard
pieces performed by major groups in Beijing and Shanghai were too lim-
ited a repertoire to reach the vast country effectively.18 Two major sets
of efforts were in place to allow the chosen works to spread throughout
the entire nation: remediation and transplantation. First, the theatrical
works were adapted by reproducible media into various formats—comic
books, film, records, and television—to make them available to different
audiences. These mass media captured the originals to different degrees
of faithfulness, owing to each medium’s own specificity: documentation
by television was the least mediated, whereas comics were probably the
most. Second, the form-specific performances—be they modern Peking
opera, ballets, or symphonies—were “transplanted,” using Jiang Qing’s
own term, to different regional opera forms.
There was a rigid concept of the model in the transplantation proj-
ect, in stark contrast to the flexibility and mutual indebtedness dem-
onstrated in the traditional opera culture. The Party demanded that
when performing yangbanxi, all troupes had to stay faithful to the
original, down to lines, steps, beams of stage light, and even mended
patches in a character’s clothing.19 While all yangbanxi operas had
their own adaptation histories, all the previous versions that preceded
the ultimate, fixed, and approved model had to be eliminated entirely.
This was not unique to Shajiabang, as other Cantonese opera versions
of the yangbanxi, such as White-Haired Girl, The Red Detachment
of Women, and Azalea Mountain, had all been performed before the
Cultural Revolution, but they were suppressed immediately after the
official, transplanted versions were created.
138 LAIKWAN PANG
The new version of the Cantonese opera Shajiabang was first

staged in 1969. Cantonese opera was given the honorable task of
transplanting yangbanxi in 1968, and previously condemned art-
ists were quickly called back to take charge of two transplantation
projects. One hundred and eight opera professionals were assembled
to produce Shajiabang, and many were solicited directly from their
political retraining schools. Famous performers, such as Hongxiannü,
were included in a full company with set designers, musicians, lighting
operators, and stage assistants. New performers and musicians were
also trained and recruited in a speedy fashion. They worked side by
side with the established artists, whose original seniority and fame
were still largely respected. The hierarchical system of the opera circles
persisted despite the rupture introduced by the revolution in the pre-
vious two years. Shajiabang was also made into a color film by the
Pearl River Film Studio in 1974, meaning that this Cantonese opera
version was already an approved model to be further disseminated.
Although the arias were sung in Cantonese, the overall musical
arrangements and performance followed the Peking opera original
closely, resulting in an awkward musical arrangement that belonged
neither to Peking opera nor to Cantonese opera. Unlike Storm in the
Countryside, the Cantonese version of Shajiabang is remembered by
many artists and viewers as an unpleasant piece, and the performance
was not able to engage local audiences very effectively. To be more pre-
cise, the problem rested primarily on the aural dimension. In the words
of director Guo Wei 悕ㄏ, who directed a few transplanted projects
during the Cultural Revolution for the Guangzhou City Cantonese
Opera Company, local audiences often described these works as “nice
to watch but hard to listen to” (haokan bu haoting ⤥䚳ᶵ⤥⏔).20
As Guo Wei reveals, there were strict instructions from the desig-
nated yangbanxi companies that local troupes had to follow, regardless
of whether they were performing the original versions or creating new
transplanted versions. The visual arrangements were relatively easy to
come to terms with, because the settings, costumes, and props could all
be ordered from the original companies in Beijing and Shanghai. There
were elaborate guidebooks published by the original companies to aid
regional companies in staging the works in exactly the way they should
be—the core idea of a model. A major role for Guo as a director was to
follow these standards as closely as possible. For example, a change of
scene usually took five to ten minutes in a traditional Cantonese opera
performance, but in standard yangbanxi only one or two minutes were
allowed for such a transition. In fact, Cantonese opera had always wel-
comed modern visual enrichments and refinement. Guangzhou was
one of the first Chinese cities to be exposed to Western culture and

ideas, breeding not only revolutionary thinking and innovation but
also an insatiable desire for modernity, so the Cantonese opera stage
was often filled with street fashions and spectacular stage settings.21
The set design of the Cantonese opera was also much more complex
than that of traditional Peking opera.22 Therefore, the elaborate visual
design of the original model work was quickly accepted by Cantonese
opera artists and fans with little resistance.
But it was much more difficult to handle the musical aspects. In
the case of Shajiabang, the transplanted version strictly followed the
Peking opera original, and there were no deviations from the original
lyrics and dialogue. Because the linguistic tones of the Beijing dialect
and Cantonese differ too much from each other, and the two systems
of music are also not entirely compatible, it was virtually impossible to
retain the original lyrics without twisting the local tunes substantially,
or the other way around—in both cases, displeasure would result.23
Keeping the original text of Peking opera intact was considered the
principal political task in the transplantation project, which inevitably
forced the adaptation to lose Cantonese opera’s distinctive character-
istics, jarring the ear of the connoisseur.
Composer Huang Zhuangmou 湬䉞害 recalls that when he came to
arrange the music of the Cantonese opera transplant of On the Docks,
there was one line that was very tricky to handle. In the second scene,
when the retired laborer Ma Hongliang comes back to visit the water-
front, he is amazed by the new machines available to do the hard work,
and he sings to the tune of xipi peiban 大䙖㌺㜧: “Dadiaoche, zhen
lihai, cheng dun de gangtie, ta qingqing di yizhuo jiu qilai” ⣏⎲弎, 䛇
⌱⭛, ㆸ⏐䘬摊摩, Ṿ弣弣⛘ᶨ㈻⯙崟㜍 (The big crane, so incredible.
It picks up a ton of steel so effortlessly). In adapting the line into the
Cantonese opera version, Huang was not allowed to alter the wording,
nor could he change the basic rhythm. The word dadiaoche (“crane”)
was originally sung in “3 2 1 2 3,” but when the line was sung in
Cantonese in a similar tone, “diao” might be understood as an obscene
word meaning to copulate—which, of course, could not be allowed.
So Huang had to find a different but similar enough tune to present
the line, and he lowered the pitch for the word da (⣏) from “mi” to
the lower “la,” and also slightly lengthened its duration.24 The word
da in Putonghua is at a much higher pitch than in Cantonese, and the
lowered pitch in the Cantonese opera version is inevitable. Interestingly,
once the tone of “da” is corrected, the sound of the syllable “diao”
also stabilizes. Furthermore, by slightly lightening the transitional tone
between “diao” and “che,” the tone twisting sound of ⯴ (diao) is also
140 LAIKWAN PANG
avoided.25 Although Huang was able to keep the sound of “diao” from
going astray, the new version broke down the rhythmic pattern of the
original line, blunting the originally buoyant beat that aptly describes
Ma’s excitement at seeing the incredibly big crane. In addition to reduc-
ing the dramatic effects, the music, unfortunately, also became less pleas-
ing to the ears of the Cantonese opera audience.
Cantonese opera has always been proud of its inclusiveness, wel-
coming distant topics, novel visual designs, Western musical instru-
ments, and even foreign words. What holds these diversities together,
however, is the set of tunes. Because Cantonese has a very rich tonal
system, the linguistic tunes and the musical tunes must comple-
ment each other well to make the words comprehensible. Although
the musical tunes were also constantly expanding and transforming,
these changes were made compatible with the linguistic system of the
Cantonese language.26 The intimate relationship between local dialect
and operatic music was particularly important after the 1920s when
foreign cultural influences grew considerably. In the Republican era,
not only were saxophones, violins, banjos, and guitars used profusely
on Cantonese opera stages27 but also were lines and arias with English
terms such as “sorry” and “bye-bye.”28 These terms were incorpo-
rated into the opera because they were already part of the Cantonese
vernacular, and could be heard in everyday life. This tacit respect
for the local audience’s everyday life was radically destroyed by the
Cultural Revolution transplantation project. When important phrases
such as “Chairman Mao” or “Long Live the Communist Party” were
presented on stage, they even had to be delivered in Putonghua to
show the Cantonese people’s greatest respect for the chairman and his
party.29 This arrangement also indirectly acknowledges the inferiority
of Cantonese to Putonghua, as well as the inferiority of Cantonese
opera to Peking opera. This is in sharp contrast with the cultural and
aesthetic confidence shown in Storm in the Countryside.
The introduction of the symphonic music to regional operas most
vividly demonstrates the aesthetic experimentations that the Cultural
Revolution introduced to its cultural propaganda. As mentioned,
Western instruments had been in general use on the Cantonese opera
stage, but they were introduced along with popular musical forms,
such as Broadway theater, Hollywood scores, and popular jazz. But
it was Western classical music, not its popular forms (the saxophone
was not allowed to be used during the Cultural Revolution), that was
systematically introduced through the yangbanxi, and many experi-
ments had been conducted to develop a new type of revolutionary clas-
sicism based on the elite music of both the Chinese and the Western
traditions. It was claimed that Western orchestral instruments were

particularly important to Cantonese opera because they could assist
the low sound and weak timbre of some traditional instruments and
also correct the feminine tendencies of Cantonese opera.30 The tra-
ditional musical notation gongche ⶍ⯢ was no longer used and was
replaced completely by numbered musical notation. A conductor pre-
sided over a small full-scale orchestra to form an ensemble of over 30
members, with both Chinese and Western instruments accompanying
the performances.31
Kuang Bin was a toujia ⣜㝞 (the musician who plays the
lead instrument and acts as the leader of the musical team) in
the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater during the Cultural
Revolution. He had to learn all over again how to collaborate with
the conductor of the orchestra to synchronize the two musical sys-
tems when presenting the transplanted pieces. Generally speaking,
toujia continued to lead the Chinese ensembles during the perfor-
mance sections, and the conductor took up the leading role during
the overture or other musical interludes. But a clear-cut distinction
between the Chinese musical section and the Western musical sec-
tion could not always be found, and the two ensembles sometimes
had to play together. As such, toujia had to pay close attention to
the performers’ singing and movements, on the one hand, and work
with the orchestra, on the other.32 Liang Runtian 㠩㵎㶣, who was a
zhangban ㌴㜧 (the one responsible for the rhythm of music during
the performance), also recounts that the traditional Chinese musi-
cians had to work closely not only with the Western ensemble but
also the director and the singing arrangers (changqiang sheji ⓙ僼
学孉) in many rehearsals and discussion sections, which had never
before occurred in the history of Cantonese opera.33 Actress Zheng
Peiying 恹➡劙 recounts how difficult it was for singers to cope with
the new music, as the traditional ensemble always gave clear musical
cues to the singers when to start singing, but in the yangbanxi per-
formances the singer could no longer rely on the flexibility of the
ensemble.34 There had traditionally always been good interaction
between the singers and the musicians during the performance, to
the extent that improvisation on both sides was not only tolerated
but often characterized the highest aesthetic enjoyment for both
the performers and the connoisseurs. However, with the introduc-
tion of Western symphonic music to traditional banghuang tunes,
the music had to be very carefully planned beforehand, drastically
reducing performative freedom. But such precision allowed the
pieces to be written down faithfully, and therefore reenacted exactly
142 LAIKWAN PANG
by performers, which was a prime political goal of the yangbanxi

project to begin with.
Many of my interviewees praise the Cantonese opera Azalea
Mountain (Dujuan shan 㜄淫Ⱉ) (1974) for being a highly sophis-
ticated work in the transplantation project, largely because the art-
ists and musicians were tasked with meeting high musical demands.
In fact, there was a clear plan to turn the Cantonese opera into a
film by the Pearl River Film Studio in 1976, although the political
environment altered so rapidly that year that the project was never
realized.35 Based on the available recording, the piece might not have
been particularly attractive to ordinary Cantonese opera fans, because
it was characterized by very prominent Western classical music, and
the music was arranged in a very elaborate and sophisticated man-
ner featuring exquisite collaboration between the Chinese ensemble
and the Western ensemble, and the singers had to follow the music
precisely. Kuang Bin characterizes the piece as the most difficult one
he has worked on, and the music was so fast as to defy all his training
and practice in Cantonese opera.36 In Azalea Mountain, the musicians
played the Chinese instruments as if they were Western instruments,
but traditional Cantonese opera tunes were still used, and the overall
matching between the Chinese and the Western music had to be pre-
cise. Compared with the original Peking opera, the Western orches-
tration was even more highlighted in the Cantonese transplanted
version—as shown, for example, in Ke Xiang’s famous “I Lived in
Anyuan” (“Jiazhu Anyuan” ⭞ỷ⬱㸸) aria in the third scene. The aria
is one of the few in the entire yangbanxi oeuvre that featured feminine
singing and soft music, but the singing and music became firm again
in the Cantonese opera, probably because the female singer/character
had to prove her ability to repudiate her femininity. Generally speak-
ing, traditional Cantonese opera music’s emphasis on the control of
the lead performers was completely abandoned; instead, it followed
the logic of modern Western music, which emphasizes precision.
In those transplantation experimentations taking place in the late
1960s and early 1970s, producers struggled to present the original
lyrics in a comprehensible form that still pleased Cantonese ears; how-
ever, after a few trials, the artists seem to have realized that the lyrics,
or the political messages, no longer mattered; instead, they focused
on developing a new kind of music that had never been heard before.
Note that the Cantonese opera version of Azalea Mountain was put
together during a time when most people were disillusioned about
national politics, and some also began to question the validity of the
Cultural Revolution project itself. Guangzhou was where some of the
bloodiest civil fighting took place in the late 1960s, and several years
later it was also one of the first places in China where alternative politi-
cal ideology was publicly displayed. A most symbolic event took place
in November 1974, when three young people—Li Zhengtian 㛶㬋
⣑, Chen Yiyang 旰ᶨ旛, and Wang Xizhe 䌳ⶴ⒚—under the pseud-
onym of Li Yizhe 㛶ᶨ⒚, posted a hundred-meter-long big-charac-
ter poster in Guangzhou’s Zhongshan Fifth Road, not far from the
Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater.37 The poster raised questions
related to socialist democracy and legality, and select passages were
quickly circulated around the entire country. The Cantonese opera
Azalea Mountain was created around the same time in the same place,
and its indirect response to the emerging demand for political change
was, unsurprisingly, a kind of aesthetic indulgence. Given its elabo-
rate musical arrangement, the lyrics were necessarily sidelined, and all
the Maoist ideas they originally contained were cast in an ambiguous
position. As the recording of Azalea Mountain shows, if the Cultural
Revolution had not ended immediately afterward, and if all the musi-
cal experiments done thus far were not so abruptly and thoroughly
abandoned, we might have now been able to enjoy a unique kind of
operatic performance that is not Cantonese opera, Peking opera, or
Western opera. But we can also say that this kind of unusual music
could be produced only at the withering end of a utopia movement,
whose doom was already inscribed in the music.
Acknowledgments
The research presented in this chapter is funded by the Hong Kong
Research Grants Council under the General Research Fund project
“The Adaptation of Model Plays: Aesthetics and Politics in China’s
Cultural Revolution” (Project No.: 448313).
Notes
1. Richard Curt Kraus, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 57.
2. Bell Yung, “Model Opera as Model: From Shajiabang to Sagabong,”
in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s
Republic of China, 1949–1979, edited by Bonnie S. MacDougall
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 144–164.
3. Guangzhou yueju tuan tuanzhi bianji weiyuanhui ⸧ⶆ䱌∏⚊⚊⽿亾
弹⥼␀Ể (Editorial committee of Records of Guangzhou Cantonese
Opera Company), ed., Guangzhou yueju tuan tuanzhi ⸧ⶆ䱌∏⚊⚊⽿
(Records of Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Company) (Guangzhou:
Guangzhou yueyi fazhan zhongxin, 2002), 9.
144 LAIKWAN PANG
4. Zhongguo xiquzhi Guangdong juan, 57.

5. Wu Youheng ⏜㚱⿺, Shanxiang fengyun lu Ⱉḉ桶ḹ⻽ (Record of
the Storm in the Countryside) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chu-
banshe, 1962).
6. In the Guangdong Provincial Archives, I was able to find a set of internal
documents issued by the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theater and the
Guangdong Ministry of Culture that report on the tours of Storm in
the Countryside in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen in 1965 and 1966:
“Shanxiang fengyun yanchu tuan dao Jing huibao yanchu qingkuang
huibao” ˪ġġⰙḉ桶ḹġġ˫ġ㺼↢⚊⇘Ṕ㯯㉍㺼↢ね⅝Ể㉍ (Record of the
Performances of Storm in the Countryside in Beijing); “Jiang Qing tong-
zhi kan Shanxiang fengyun hou tichu de yijian” 㰇 ġ 曺⎴⽿䚳ġ˪ġⰙḉ桶
ḹġ˫ġ⎶㍸↢䘬シ奩 (Comments by Comrade Jiang Qing after Watching
Storm in the Countryside); “Shanghai shi lingdao tongzhi dui Shanxiang
fengyun yiju tichu de yijian” ᶲ㴟ⶪ栮⮤⎴⽿⮡ġ˪ġⰙḉ桶ḹġ˫ġᶨ∏㍸↢
䘬シ奩 (Views of Shanghai Leaders on Storm in the Countryside); “Hu
Qiaomu tongzhi dui Shanxiang fengyun de yijian” 傉᷼㛐⎴⽿⮡ġ˪Ⱉ ġ
ḉ桶ḹġ˫ġ䘬シ奩 (Comments by Comrade Hu Qiaomu on Storm in
the Countryside); “Shanghai xiujujia xiehui zhaokai Shanxiang fengyun
zuotanhui” ᶲ㴟ㆷ∏⭞⋷Ể⎔⺨ġ˪ġⰙḉ桶ḹġ˫ġ⹏宰Ể (Shanghai
Dramatists Association Workshop on Storm in the Countryside); and
“Shanxiang fengyun zai Shenzhen yanchu qingkuang jianbao”˪ġġⰙḉ
桶ḹġ˫ġ⛐㶙⛛㺼↢ね⅝䬨㉍ (Records of Workshop of Storm in the
Countryside in Shenzhen). They are grouped together into sets of docu-
ments: nos. 312-1-70-69-90, and 307-1-370-73-130, 307-1-370-73-
130(1), 307-1-370-73-130(2), 307-1-370-73-130(3), and they have
been given continuous page numbers by the Archives: from 69 to 130.
Hereafter, I will refer to this set of documents as “The Beijing, Shanghai,
and Shenzhen Tours of Storm in the Countryside in 1965 and 1966.”
7. “The Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen Tours of Storm in the
Countryside in 1965 and 1966,” 79, 84, 113.
8. Ibid., 101.
9. “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui
ziliao, Lin Yu tongzhi de fayan” ᷕ⋿⋢ㆷ∏奪㐑㺼↢⣏Ể乷樴Ṍ㳩
⹏宰Ể峬㕁, 㜿㤮⎴⽿䘬⍹妨 (Statements by Comrade Lin Yu in the
Exchange Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical
Performances Convention), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-
1-70-50-55.
10. “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui
ziliao, He Qixiang, Fan De tongzhi de fayan” ᷕ⋿⋢ㆷ∏奪㐑㺼↢
⣏Ể乷樴Ṍ㳩⹏宰Ể峬㕁, ỽ⏗佼, 劫⽟⎴⽿䘬⍹妨 (Statements by
Comrades He Qixian and Fan De in the Exchange Workshop after
the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances Convention),
Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-70-50-55.
11. Guangdong sheng canjia Zhongnan huiyan jumu xianba yanchu ban-
gongshi ⸧᷄䚩⍪≈ᷕ⋿Ể㺼∏䚖徱㉼㺼↢≆℔⭌, ed., “Dui Yueju
Shangxiang fengyun de yijian” ⮡䱌∏ġ˪ġⰙḉ桶ḹġ˫ġ䘬シ奩 (Opinions

on the Cantonese Opera Storm of the Countryside), Guangdong
Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-64-90-100.
12. “Zhongnanqu xiju guanmo yanchu dahui jingyan jiaoliu zuotanhui ziliao,
Tan Jian tongzhi de fayan” ᷕ⋿⋢ㆷ∏奪㐑㺼↢⣏Ể乷樴Ṍ㳩⹏宰Ể峬
㕁, 寕‍⎴⽿䘬⍹妨 (Statements by Comrade Tan Jian in the Exchange
Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical Performances
Convention), Guangdong Provincial Archives, no. 312-1-70-59-62.
13. Bell Yung, Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 129.
14. Liang Peijin 㠩㱃擎, Yueju yanjiu tonglun 䱌∏䟷䨞忂孢 (Discussions
of Cantonese Opera research) (Hong Kong: Longmen shudian,
1982), 179–180.
15. Jianzi furong is a lighter and faster version of the furong tunes,
therefore giving the audience a sense of excitement and expectation.
Gunhua is a version of ziyouban 冒䓙䇰 (free tune), usually used in
the end of an aria to introduce a new mood. In this case the gunhua
concludes the confrontation of the two characters.
16. Z refers to Zhanweishe, and LQ refers to Liu Qin.
17. “Zhongnan qu xiju guangmo dahui jingyan jiuliu zuotanhui Lin Yu
tongzhi de fayan—tan taoyan yueju Shanxiang fengyun de tihui” ᷕ
⋿⋢ㆷ∏奪㐑㺼↢⣏Ể乷樴Ṍ㳩⹏宰Ể㜿㤉⎴⽿䘬⍹妨 —— 宰⮤
㺼䱌∏ġ˪ġⰙḉ桶ḹġ˫ġ䘬ỻỂ (Statements by Comrade Lin Yu in the
Exchange Workshop after the Central Southern Region Theatrical
Performances Convention—My Directing Experience of Storm in the
Countryside), Guangdong Provincial Archive, 312-1-70-50-55.
18. Editorial, “Ba geming yangbanxi tuixiang quanguo qu” ㈲朑␥㟟㜧
ㆷ㍐⎹ℐ⚥⍣ (Promote Revolutionary Model Plays throughout the
Country), Renmin ribao Ṣ㮹㖍㉍, June 18, 1967.
19. Zhe Ping ⒚⸛, “Xuexi geming yangbanxi, baowei geming yangbanxi”
⬎Ḉ朑␥㟟㜧ㆷ炻ᾅ⌓朑␥㟟㜧ㆷ (Studying the Revolutionary
Model Plays, Protecting the Revolutionary Model Plays), Renmin
ribao Ṣ㮹㖍㉍, October 19, 1969.
20. Interview with Guo Wei, July 18, 2012, Guangzhou.
21. The most elaborate record of the historical developments of Cantonese
opera is the eight-volume Zhongguo xiquzhi: Guangdong juan pub-
lished in 1987 (see note 10). More recent studies can be found in
“Zhongguo xiquzhi (Guangdong juan)” bianji weiyuanhui˪ᷕ⚥
ㆷ㚚⽿ (⸧᷄⌟)˫亾弹Ể␀Ể, ed., Zhongguo xiquzhi (Guangdong
juan) ᷕ⚥ㆷ㚚⽿ (⸧᷄⌟) (Records of Chinese Operas (Guangdong
volume)) (Beijing: Zhongguo ISBN zhongxin, 1993), as well as the
two collections of Yueju yanjiu wenxuan 䱌∏䞼䨞㔯徱 (Collected
Essays on Cantonese Opera), edited by Xie Binchou 寊⼔䬡 and
Chen Chaoping 旰崭⸛ (Hong Kong: Gongyuan chubanshe, 2008).
22. Yung, Cantonese Opera, 12.
146 LAIKWAN PANG
23. See Yung, “Model Opera as Model,” for an elaborate analysis.

24. Interview with Huang Zhuangmou, October 30, 2010, Guangzhou.
25. ⎲ is third-tone diu, marked as diu3 ĩ旜⍣⢘Īį ⯴ is second tone,
marked as diu2 (旜ᶲ⢘). The “tonal value” of ⎲ is 44, which is rela-
tively flat, whereas ⯴ is 213, with a twist in tone. I am very grateful
for the advice of Wong Nim-yan and Sam Chan on this point.
26. For a historical study of the development of the Cantonese opera tunes
and singing style, see Huang Jingming 湬攄㖶 et al., “Shitan yueju
chanqiang yinyue de xingcheng he yanbian” 孽宰䱌∏ⓙ僼枛⬎䘬⼊
ㆸ␴㺼⎀ (An Attempt to Study the Formation and Transformation of
Cantonese Opera Singing System) in Yueju yanjiu wenxuan 2 (2008):
123–150.
27. Liang Puijin, Yueju yanjiu tonglun 䱌∏䞼䨞忂孢 (General Studies of
Cantonese Opera) (Hong Kong: Longmen shudian, 1982), 180.
28. Yu Simu ἁ⿅䈏, “Yueju wenhua jiangzuo” 䱌∏㔯⊾孚⹏ (Workshop on
Cantonese Opera Culture). http://www.ningfung.org.hk/19/20d.htm.
29. Interview with Guo Wei.
30. See the article authored under the name of New China Agency
reporter, “Yueju de xinsheng: Ji Guangdong yuejutuan xuexi yizhi
geming yangbanxi Shajiabang,” 䱌∏䘬㕘䓇—存⸧᷄䱌∏⚊⬎Ḉ䦣
㢵朑␥㟟㜧ㆷ㱁⭞㴄 (New Life for Cantonese Opera—Guangdong
Cantonese Opera Company Learning How to Transplant Shajiabang),
Dagongbao ⣏℔仹, May 18, 1974; reprinted in Difangxi yizhi
geming yangbanxi hao, diyiji ⛘㕡ㆷ䦣㢵朑␥㟟㜧ㆷ⤥, 䫔ᶨ弹
(Regional Transplantation of Revolutionary Model Plays is Good,
Vol. 1) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1975), 71–76.
31. This applied, of course, only to the major performances taking place
in major theaters in Guangzhou; the scale of the traveling ensemble in
the countryside was cut down substantially.
32. Interview with Kuang Bin, March 7, 2012, Guangzhou.
33. Interview with Liang Runtian, February 3, 2012, Hong Kong. There
were also unique dimensions of Cantonese opera that were retained.
For example, whereas in Peking opera the male falsetto was largely
replaced because it was not considered “realistic,” the Cantonese
opera was less influenced because most male singers sing in modal
voices—that is, pinghou ⸛┱.
34. Interview with Zheng Peiying, March 8, 2012, Guangzhou.
35. Guangdong Provincial Ministry of Culture, “Guanyu peishe yueju
Dujuanshan wenti de pishi” ℛḶ㉵㏬䱌∏ġ˪ġ㜄淫Ⱉġ˫ġ斖桀䘬㈡䣢
(Regarding the Filming of Azalea Mountain), February 5, 1976.
Guangdong Provincial Archives, 214-A1-3-8-82.
36. Interview with Kuang Bin.
37. Li Yizhe 㛶ᶨ⒚, Guanyu shehuizhuyi minzhu yu fazhi ℛḶ䣦Ểᷣᷱ
㮹ᷣᶶ㱽⇞ (Concerning Socialist Democracy and Legality) (Hong
Kong: Heshang dasan chubanshe, 1976).
C H A P T ER 7
The West is Red: Uyghur Adaptation

of The Legend of the Red Lantern
( Qizil Chiragh ) during China’s
Cultural Revolution
Chuen-Fung Wong
The production of the Uyghur version of The Red Lantern (Qizil chi-
ragh; Chinese: Hongdeng ji) in the 1970s marked a crucial moment
in the history of the musical involvement of minority nationalities
during China’s “Great Cultural Revolution” (medeniyet zor inqilabi,
1966–76) in at least two important senses. First, the opera was played
and sung entirely in the Uyghur language, with musical materials
drawn extensively from traditional Uyghur music, and was accompa-
nied by a mixed orchestra of Uyghur and European musical instru-
ments. This represents a carefully controlled experiment for model
Chinese (Peking) operas to be “transplanted” (özleshtürüp ishlengen;
Chinese: yizhi) into minority languages and operatic genres to fur-
ther the dissemination of “revolutionary messages” and to advance
the principles and practices of socialist realism in minority performing
arts. Second, to minority musicians involved in the project—many of
whom had lately been labeled jin-sheytan (demon, Satan) and suf-
fered different extents of abuses during the most violent phase of the
Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s—the production of the opera
came as a long-awaited opportunity to safeguard their national per-
forming arts. This was achieved via means that were often modernist
and reformist. In this chapter, I suggest that it is important not to
148 CHUENFUNG WONG
approach minority performing arts during the Cultural Revolution

as disruption—as mere erratic outcomes of misguided cultural poli-
cies, as is often claimed in official and conventional accounts,1 or
as undesirably politicized works that are void of creative integrity
and aesthetic values. Rather, I seek to understand how the Uyghur
adaptation of the model opera The Red Lantern perpetuated both
the post-1949 policy to integrate the Uyghur and their homeland
into the new Chinese nation as well as a subaltern sense of cultural
modernity that characterized much of Uyghur musical creativity in
twentieth-century China.
I shall first contextualize the adaptation against varying degrees of
realizing the principle of “socialist in content, national in form” in
minority performing arts since the 1950s, and its renewed applica-
tion during the widespread transplanting of model operas for both
Han Chinese and minority theatrical idioms in the 1970s.2 For
minority musicians and many in their audiences, a liberal realization
of such principle remained one of the very few outlets for uphold-
ing traditional music and culture during the most repressive era
under Chinese domination. One extremely well-known song from
the opera, “Uluq niyet, yüksek irademni qilalmaysen qamal” (“My
spirit storms the heavens,” scene 8, no. 3), will then be examined to
scrutinize the negotiation of stylistic preferences. The comparative
analysis suggests that Qizil Chiragh is more than a mere adaptation
of the original Chinese opera. The stylistic incompatibility between
traditional Chinese and Uyghur theatrical genres provided a creative
ground for the production of one of the most powerful works in the
history of modern minority music in China.
Uyghur Music and the Cultural Revolution

The Stalinist notion of “socialist in content, national in form,” explic-
itly embraced by Mao in his famous “Talk with Music Workers” in
1956, received different degrees of realization in Xinjiang during
the early years of the communist takeover. Both the Chinese state
and minority nationalists seemed to be skeptical about the idea of
employing minority languages and musical materials in the produc-
tion of large-scale dramatic works for the state’s political propaganda.
The production of the Uyghur drama Küresh Yoli (The course of the
battle; Chinese: Zhandou de licheng) in 1959 for the celebration of
the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic repre-
sents one example. The story was written by the prolific author and
THE WEST IS RED 149
playwright Seypidin Ezizi (1915–2003), an Uyghur who became the

first chair of the Autonomous Region in 1955 (and later, in 1968, of its
Revolutionary Committee). The drama is about the Ili Rebellion from
1944 to 1949 during the Second East Turkestan Republic (known in
official Chinese history as “Üch Wilayet Inqilabi,” or “Three-District
Revolution”) and the “new life” after the “Liberation” in 1949.
Similar to other explicitly politicized “Uyghur dramas” produced in
the 1950s, Küresh Yoli was staged entirely in putunghua, with music—
written by the Orientalist Chinese folklorist-songwriter Wang Luobin
(1915–1996)—that barely resembled traditional Uyghur music.3 The
reluctance to adapt minority languages and traditional music to the
most high profile of these staged productions was perhaps not unre-
lated to the widespread accusation of “local nationalism” during the
anti-Rightist Campaign from about 1957 to 1959.4
The production of Xelq Kommunisi Yaxshi (The People’s
Commune is good) in 1965,5 the tenth anniversary of the founding of
the Autonomous Region, marked a departure from such skepticism.
Premiered by the state-sponsored Xinjiang Singing-and-Dancing
Troupe in Urumqi in October, approximately one year before the
commencement of the Cultural Revolution, Xelq Kommunisi Yaxshi
was described as a “new large-scale song and dance muqam” (Chinese:
xin mukamu da gewu) because of its extensive use of melodic and
rhythmic elements from Oshshaq Muqam, one of twelve classical
suites from the revered On Ikki Muqam tradition. A double-seated
symphonized ensemble was experimentally adopted, with settings for
solo, duet, and chorus; it also employed techniques of variation and
transposition,6 devices that are considered “a great success for experi-
menting with polyphonization for muqam music.”7 Local experts
of traditional Uyghur performing arts, including such well-known
musicians as muqam master Zikri Elpetta (1915–1986), soloist of
the tembur plucked lute Hüsenjan Jami (1930–2011), folk vocalist
Ghiyasidin Barat (1937–2003), and composer Iskender Seypulla (b.
1937), were among the major musicians recruited for the project.
The well-known Uyghur poets Téyipjan Éliyop (1930–1989) and
Abdukérim Hoja were responsible for the lyrics. The foreword of
the concert program, published in 1965, states explicitly that Xelq
Kommunisi Yaxshi is a “new muqam” that is socialist in content but
ethnic/national in form. More than a few oral and written sources
suggest that Seypidin Ezizi had been substantially involved in the pro-
duction of this “new muqam,” and his involvement served to safe-
guard the Uyghur muqam against the increasing marginalization of
minority performing arts in the “new China.”8 Seypidin was indeed

a key figure in securing national support for the documentation and
protection of the Uyghur muqam in the 1950s and early 1960s, an
achievement few minority cadres had accomplished. He reportedly
reprimanded his colleagues in the Xinjiang Cultural Bureau in 1965
for ignoring his request to “put the twelve muqams on stage.”9 The
pivotal role of high-ranking minority cadres in mediating between the
Chinese state’s cultural integration and minority national expression
continued into the Cultural Revolution.
The early stage of the Cultural Revolution, spanning the years from
its commencement in late 1966—marked in Xinjiang by the arrival of
some 400 Red Guards (qizil qoghdighuchilar) in Urumqi in mid-Sep-
tember10—until around 1969, has been characterized as a time when
there was “virtual cessation of Uyghur culture.”11 Ethnic minorities
were the “key targets of the movement,” and attacks on the “Four
Olds” (old customs, ideas, culture, and habits) were “more portentous
for the ethnic minorities than . . . for the Han,” because it was decided
that ethnic minorities “no longer required ‘special’ treatment, while
the policy of ‘national regional autonomy’ was condemned as cre-
ating independent regions and encouraging separatism.”12 Multiple
sources confirm that mosques were turned into warehouses and pig
barns, while Uyghur people and other Muslims were forced to raise
pigs.13 Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife and a major player of the Cultural
Revolution, reportedly regarded minorities as “‘foreign invaders and
aliens’ with ‘outlandish’ songs and dances.”14 The classical Uyghur
muqam was branded a “poisonous weed” and a remnant of the “old
society.” Lyrics of folk songs were considered pornographic, musical
instruments were burnt, and musicians were persecuted. Rehearsals
and performing activities of major performing groups came to a halt
one after another, and a large number of musicians were sent to remote
villages during the late 1960s for reeducation.
Numerous oral accounts describe that public performance of tra-
ditional music was condemned and prohibited during the early years
of the Cultural Revolution. A Uyghur musicologist remembers that
every time he sang folk songs and accompanied himself on the two-
string plucked lute dutar, he would close the door and make sure no
one was around. When he heard approaching footsteps, he would
immediately switch to lyrics that praised Chairman Mao and the
Cultural Revolution.15 A senior tembur performer remembers that
the Red Guards—composed of both Uyghur and Han Chinese—
would come to weddings and other ceremonies and stay for the first
part of the event, during which he and other musicians would play
THE WEST IS RED 151
standard “revolutionary tunes” such as “Sailing the Seas Depends on

the Helmsman” (Dahai hangxing kao duoshou); and when the Red
Guards left, they would switch to traditional melodies to entertain
the guests.16 The playing of instrumental pieces was also problem-
atic; another Uyghur instrumentalist recalls that on one occasion the
performance of “Ejem,” an Ili/Ghulja-style Uyghur traditional piece,
was condemned “anti-revolutionary.”17 One senior Uyghur elemen-
tary school teacher remembers witnessing, in Ghulja, how one of her
acquaintances was seized by the Red Guards after playing “Méning
Rawabim,” a modern Uyghur piece played on the plucked lute rawap
that was composed in the early 1960s.18
Héytem Hüseyin (b. 1944), the Uyghur actor who played the
heroic railroad switchman Li Yüxé (Chinese: Li Yühe), the leading male
role, in the Uyghur version of The Red Lantern, recalls often hearing
a group of well-known Uyghur musicians, including vocalist Pasha
Isha, instrumentalist Hüsenjan Jami, composers Qurban Ibrahim and
Iskender Seypulla, vocalist Ghiyasidin Barat, and choreographer Haji
Rahman (1932–1982), being forced to sing “The Song of Monsters
and Demons” (a.k.a “Howling Song”), a notorious tune assigned for
performance by alleged “reactionary academic authorities” and “cap-
italist-roaders” during “struggle sessions” as part of public humilia-
tions across China. One version of the song, as he remembers it, is
quoted below. The song was translated into Uyghur by playwright
Memet Tatliq, then the vice chair of Xinjiang’s Culture Bureau, who
had recently been branded a member of the “Black Gang.” Héytem
recalls witnessing these musicians being forced to strain their voices
singing the song in both Uyghur and Chinese until the Red Guards
allowed them to stop.19
Men bir jin—Sheytanmen; I’m a monster and demon;
Men bolsam xelqning düshmini. I’m enemy of the people.
Gunahkarmen; gunahkarmen; gunahkarmen; I’m a sinner; I’m a sinner; I’m a sinner.
Xelq méni dessep yanjisun! I should be trampled and smashed by

the people.
Ebjiqimini chiqarsun! Pull the tattered me out!20
The bloodiest phase of the Cultural Revolution, from its onset to

around late 1968, subsided soon after Xinjiang’s new “Revolutionary
Committee” was formed and Wang Enmao (1913–2001), the First
Party Secretary of Xinjiang who had been at the center of chaotic

factional clashes and armed conflicts, came under an official cloud.
Wang’s influence declined and he eventually left Xinjiang.21 As else-
where in China, significant numbers of literary and performing
activities resumed during the relatively peaceful period from around
mid-1972, when the dictum of “national in form, socialist in content”
was gradually reinstated in Xinjiang.22 All these changes set the stage
for the production of the Uyghur version of The Legend of the Red
Lantern.
Qizil Chiragh
Chinese-language model operas were performed in Xinjiang soon
after they had been created, beginning with the production of the
Peking opera The Red Lantern in September 1965 by the Peking
Opera Troupe of the state’s Xinjiang Production and Construction
Corps. Another model Peking opera, Shajiabang, received its first
performance in Xinjiang in 1968, and it was followed by a number of
local productions. This opera was also produced as a Uyghur-language
musical later in the 1970s. A series of articles published in Renmin
ribao (People’s Daily), the major organ of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP), from mid-July of 1970 to early 1971 demanded that
performing troupes around the country, professional and amateur
alike, learn the model operas from published scripts and filmed perfor-
mances. Although model operas should be performed in their exact
original shape, these articles maintained that local troupes should
produce these operas according to their own “local conditions” by
performing shorter or partial versions, and avoid waste extravagance
by employing fewer personnel, props, and costumes.23 It was unclear
whether this signaled the beginning of a policy change for the adapta-
tion of model operas in local genres and languages. A good number
of articles published in Renmin ribao in 1971 described the trans-
planting activities from Peking opera into a range of regional opera
forms across the nation as a “revolution.” Xinjiang ribao (Xinjiang
Daily) published the entire scripts of The Red Lantern in May and
Shajiabang in June 1970. A few months later, in October, a filmed
performance of the model Peking opera The Red Lantern was shown
on the Xinjiang Experimental Television Station (Xinjiang shiyan
dianshitai). Other model plays, such as On the Docks (Haigang) and
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan) were subse-
quently staged in various parts of the autonomous region.24
THE WEST IS RED 153
A few sources suggest that the apparent switch back to the

“national in form, socialist in content” policy in the early 1970s was
not an exclusively top-down decision mandated by the state cultural
authorities. For instance, the Kazakh production of The Legend of the
Red Lantern in the Kazakh language in late 1970—which was pos-
sibly the first attempt to perform the model opera in a minority lan-
guage in Xinjiang—was an outcome of the “strong wish” of some
Kazakh herders of the Long March Commune (Changzheng gongshe)
in Burchin (Chinese: Buerjin), located in the Altay region of northern
Xinjiang.25 They had watched the recently screened Peking opera and
wanted to use the Kazakh language to sing it. The commune’s “pro-
paganda team” (xuanchuan dui) then started to transplant the entire
opera into the Kazakh language in April 1971, and they had their first
performance in May 1971.26
Similarly, Héytem Hüseyin, who had graduated from the Central
Conservatory of Drama (Zhongyang xiju xueyuan) in Beijing in 1965,
and been assigned a job immediately to the First Xinjiang Drama Troupe
(Xinjiang huaju yi tuan) in Urumqi, recounts that as early as the first
half of 1971, the troupe resumed routine rehearsals (after a few years
of interruption). The piece with which they initially experimented was
“Inqilawiy aile tarixini ghezep bilen sözlesh” (Recounting the revo-
lutionary family history with pain) from The Red Lantern (Scene 5,
no. 9). It was sung in the Uyghur language. The desire to perform
the opera in Uyghur, according to Héytem, came largely from mem-
bers of the troupe, who considered the adaptation an opportunity to
resume the performance of Uyghur drama. Candidates for adaptation
included The Red Lantern, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and
the model ballet The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun).
Héytem recalls that members of the troupe considered it too chal-
lenging to learn a ballet, while the acrobatic components of Taking
Tiger Mountain by Strategy would also be technically demanding. The
Legend of the Red Lantern was presented as a manageable option.27
This is consistent with the common view that the performance of
model operas in minority languages and music since the early 1970s
served as a musical consolation—or, as Clark nicely puts, “a welcome
relief from a steady diet of Han, Peking-opera inspired, or orthodox
exhortatory modern songs that were the usual fare in public perfor-
mance in the Chinese heartland.”28
During the final years of the Cultural Revolution, the transplanting
of model operas became a policy endorsed and aggressively propa-
gated by the central government in Beijing.29 Revolutionary model
operas in adapted forms were considered an important “weapon” to

“unite the thoughts of people of all ethnicities” for socialist revolu-
tion.30 Héytem remembers that the entire fifth scene of Qizil Chiragh
first appeared as a session in an evening show in Urumqi. The troupe
then traveled to Chöchek (Chinese: Tacheng) and a few other towns
in northern Xinjiang, where their performances of the scene were
extremely well received. The troupe then requested permission to
“transplant” the entire opera into Uyghur. The approval came soon
afterward, and the opera was premiered in May 1972 in Urumqi and
was subsequently staged throughout Xinjiang. Almost the same group
of local musicians involved in the production of People’s Commune
is Good (Xelq kommunisi yaxshi), the “new muqam,” in 1965 were
recruited again in this model opera adaptation project.31 What fol-
lowed was a series of touring performances in Xinjiang and no fewer
than five major revisions of both the lyrics and music during the next
two to three years, leading to multiple performances in Beijing in
early 1975 for an event titled “Joint Performances of Culture and
Arts of Minority Nationalities” (Shaoshu minzu wenyi huiyan), includ-
ing one reportedly attended by Jiang Qing at the Capital Theater
(Shoudu juchang). Troupe members stayed in Beijing over the next
eight months or so for the filming of the Uyghur model opera, which,
in color and with Chinese subtitles, was eventually screened nationally
in September 1975.32
The score of the opera appeared in a somewhat finalized form as the
“basic melodic line” score (Qizil Chiraq: Asasliq Ahang Notiliri) in
1976. This single-line cipher (numbered) notation, with the Uyghur
libretto printed in the recently adopted Latin alphabet with Chinese
translation, was based on a performance in May 1975. In this version,
the opera has eleven scenes and is preceded by a brief instrumen-
tal overture. Each scene is a musically inclusive suite that contains
between four and eleven pieces. Sixteen of these pieces were selected
from the color film made in late 1975—which has slight differences
from the published notation—and soon released on an album of two
LP discs in early 1976, and subsequently, in the late 1990s, as two cas-
sette tapes. The musical analysis discussed here is based on these four
audiovisual and printed items, except where noted otherwise.
Modeling on the Model

Adapting model plays for minority musical idioms presents a qualita-
tively different task from doing it for other Chinese operatic genres for
at least two technical reasons. First, most minority musical-theatrical
THE WEST IS RED 155
genres are stylistically incompatible with Chinese operas. Second,

there is simply no comparable theatrical form in traditional perfor-
mances of Uyghur and other minorities. The project thus presented a
unique challenge to minority musicians, given that a central require-
ment in the adaptation of the Cultural Revolution model perfor-
mances (Chinese: yangbanxi) is that all elements of the performance,
ranging from costumes, props, and stage settings to storyline, lyrics,
and dramatic details, should be reproduced with utmost precision,
despite the use of local language and musical procedures to engage
local audiences. The translation of the lyrics, melodic contour, and
musical structure should closely resemble those of the original Peking
opera. Quite a number of sources indicate that the compositional pro-
cess involved negotiations over several revisions from 1972 until the
finalized version, which was published as single-line cipher notation in
1976. Initial versions of the opera contained large numbers of exten-
sive percussion passages as well as melodic and rhythmic styles taken
directly from Peking opera. Héytem Hüseyin and Ablimit Sadiq, the
two actors who alternated in the central role of Li Yüxé, recalled in
1975 that they had initially rehearsed two excerpts from two model
Peking operas—the third scene, “Shenshan wei ku” (Sorrow in deep
mountain), of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and the fifth scene,
“Tongshuo geming jiashi” (Recounting the revolutionary family his-
tory with pain), from The Red Lantern—using the Uyghur language
to sing in Peking opera style without accompaniment at small rehears-
als. They repeatedly watched the film and learned Peking opera sing-
ing and acting from members of the regional Peking opera troupe in
Urumqi.33 Yet, because these Peking opera passages were soon consid-
ered incompatible with the overall style and Uyghur musicians found
them difficult to imitate, they were later eliminated.34 The eventual
solution was to employ traditional Uyghur music borrowed from folk
songs and the classical muqam, performed by a mixed orchestra of
Uyghur and European musical instruments.
However, direct quotations from classical muqam songs, as seen
in earlier versions of the Uyghur opera, were considered inadequate,
because they failed to “express the personalities of the roles.” An arti-
cle, identified as written collectively by the troupe, maintains that even
the best of muqam songs can only “reflect the thoughts and emotions
of the working people of a specific time and place, which are still
way behind the lofty spiritual realm of the proletarian heroic roles.”
Because of that, “raw musical materials” should be “reformed and rec-
reated according to the need of portraying the characters of the heroic
roles.”35 Memet Zunun, one of the translators of the opera, identified
two “mistaken tendencies” the troupe had “struggled against” dur-

ing the adaptation. The first was the request to have “strong muqam
style,” which, he maintained, had interfered with the reform and the
renewing of the Twelve Muqam traditions during the transplanting.
The second error was the “excuse” of “safeguarding the specific char-
acteristics of Peking opera and opposing the use of traditional classical
folk music of the Uyghur for the transplanting.”36
The composers and translators of the lyrics thus found themselves
involved in a project with three primary missions. The first was to
reproduce a modern Peking opera, which had already been a “model”
in many different senses,37 in Uyghur with corresponding musical
expressions borrowed from traditional Uyghur music with consider-
able exactitude. The second mission was to continue the post-1949
modernist project of “reforming” the centuries-old tradition of
Uyghur muqam and other musical genres (with the “new muqam,”
People’s Commune is Good in 1965 being the most immediate prede-
cessor). The third, and perhaps the most important, mission for many
Uyghur musicians and audiences was to revitalize the Uyghur musi-
cal and theatrical traditions after years of official suspension since the
beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
In this section, I take a closer look at the musical process of the
transplanting of The Red Lantern by focusing on a major section of
the opera “My spirit storms the heavens” (Uyghur: Uluq niyet, yüksek
irademni qilalmaysen qamal; Chinese: Xiongxin zhuanzhi chong yun-
tian), from scene 8 “The struggle at the execution ground” (Uyghur:
Jaza meydanidiki küresh; Chinese: Xingchang douzheng), a solo sec-
tion sung entirely by the leading male role Li Yüxé (same number
in both Uyghur and Chinese versions, which were made structurally
identical). This scene takes place on the execution field before Li Yüxé
and his adoptive mother, Granny Li, are executed by the Japanese mil-
itary police chief Hatoyama. This transplanted section in the Uyghur
opera was praised in at least one propaganda article as having “strong
characteristics of the era, with rich senses of life, high level of fighting
spirit, and distinct ethnic colors, which expresses the lofty aspiration
of the revolutionists . . . and is a section with complete musical images
and masterly, rich musical expressivity.”38
One important difference between the Chinese and Uyghur ver-
sions involves the use of melodic and modal materials. In the original
Peking opera, this section appears like a mini suite, consisting of six
stanzas that advance through a number of metrical-rhythmic types
from the opening slow, unmetered melismatic introduction to the
final fast, single-beat syllabic song. The entire suite is sung in erhuang,
THE WEST IS RED 157
one of the two categories of commonly used modal scales in Peking

opera.39 Comparable concepts of modal scales and metrical variation
can certainly be found in traditional Uyghur music: Uyghur modal
scales are loosely connected to muqam suites, each of which, theo-
retically, explores a distinctive mode and its transformation through a
number of rhythmic-metrical types.40 Somewhat surprisingly, such a
process was abandoned in the adaptation. Instead, the songs for each
of the three major roles were composed using modal and melodic ele-
ments taken from one of the three muqam suites used in this opera:
melodies and modal materials of Li Yüxé (Yuhe) are derived from
Mushawrek Muqam; Li Tyéméy’s (Tiemei) from Raq Muqam; and Li
Momay’s (Nainai/Granny) from Chebbiyat Muqam. Such a unifying
effect was desired because each “heroic figure” needed a “fundamen-
tal musical character that is reiterated and developed” throughout the
opera.41 The original erhuang mode was thus used here—in a section
sung entirely by Li Yüxé—in the mode of Mushawrek Muqam (which
sounds somewhat similar to the Aeolian mode).
The assumed similarity between the Chinese and Uyghur versions
is immediately clear from the opening prelude of the section, which
starts in both versions with four ascending notes in roughly the same
key played assertively by the brass. In the Uyghur version, the melody
then moves into a somewhat bi-tonal ambience between the tonic and
the dominant—a common compositional device in modern Uyghur
composition—before the brisk, fast phrases played on the plucked lute
rawap in the high register, imitating the orchestral strings in the Peking
opera. Interestingly enough, in the Peking opera, the instrumental
prelude, played predominantly by Western orchestral instruments in
one single mode, slows down toward the entrance of the voice for the
trio of traditional Chinese fiddles and lutes to emerge—an idiomatic
device found in most model Peking operas—whereas in the Uyghur
version, what prepares the entrance of the voice after the fast rawap-
led prelude is an orchestral section that is primarily Western.
The first stanza of the Peking opera is in the metrical type of daoban
(the “lead-in” meter), used for a slow introductory line that features
unmetered and melismatic singing, which finds its counterpart in the
opening muqadimme section of a muqam suite. These similarities have
encouraged a view that point to the semblance between the opening
song of Qizil Chiragh (“Gündipaylar böridek huwlashti chiqsam tür-
midin”) and the muqadimme overture in Mushawrek Muqam.42 Yet,
a closer look into the music reveals that the connection between the
two exists only in theory at best. First, the Mushawrek mode used in
most of Li Yüxé’s songs in the opera appears like an Aeolian model
on G, a considerable simplification of the original muqam—which is

composed of two successive tetrachords built on G with both second
steps of the tetrachords as microtonal passing notes and somewhat
unstable; none of these tonal nuances exists in the adaptation (except
used in a rather unconventional way at a later point, which will be
discussed later). Second, the singing here starts in a high register—an
attempt to imitate the emphatic opening of daoban lines in Peking
opera—where the muqadimme section of a muqam is an unmetered
improvisatory piece that introduces and develops the muqam’s modal
scale through a somewhat arch-shaped melodic contour that starts and
ends in relatively low registers. What further surprised its audience in
this opening line is the cadential point on the final word, “türmidin”
(from the prison), which is sung by a Western mixed four-part cho-
rus moving from F major back to the G minor-like tonic—a musical
device rarely used in such a prominent number sung by a leading char-
acter in model Peking operas, let alone Uyghur traditional music.
The instrumental passage that follows further exemplifies the nego-
tiating processes between Peking opera and Uyghur musical tradi-
tions. The elaborate percussion session—idiomatic in Peking opera to
accompany stage actions—is now replaced by an interlude led again by
the rawap. Such replacement is common throughout the entire opera,
where instrumental interludes led by the rawap and the ghéjek spike
fiddle—both aggressively reformed instruments since the moderniza-
tion project in the 1950s and 1960s, and hence often described as
“representative” instruments—pervade and sometimes play melodic
inserts and countermelodies for the singing, becoming in some sense
a secondary voice. The replacement is explained as an insufficiency in
traditional Uyghur music:
Uyghur percussion music [instruments], such as the dap [framed

drum], the naghra [paired steel drums], and stone [tash] are good at
expressing happy emotions, but when it comes to reinforcing the plot
and expressing the characters, they are significantly limited.43
The second part of the interlude, a lyrical orchestral melody in the

Peking opera, is replaced by a two-part chorus singing, somewhat
contrapuntally, the vowel “a” in a similar melodic contour. Taken
together, these changes make the Uyghur opera appear less like a sim-
ulation of the model Peking opera and more a distinct, new musical
entity.
Every subsequent stanza in the Peking opera is matched with a
loosely corresponding metrical-rhythmic pattern in the Uyghur
THE WEST IS RED 159
version of the opera. For example, the second stanza—marked “hui-

long” (undulating dragon), a metrical type that compliments the open-
ing unmetered “daoban”—is adapted to a duple section (“Boldi bend
koyza-kishenge”), sung syllabically in a medium tempo articulated by a
slightly syncopated rhythmic pattern , which
remotely resembles some of the duple songs in muqam suites. This
pattern returns toward the end of the third stanza (“Oghri Jiu Shen”),
which, originally a moderately slow duple song in “yuanban” (original
meter) in the Peking opera, is now sung in the Uyghur version against
a seven-beat meter articulated by the pattern ,
a “Uyghur rhythm” that supposedly mimics the Sufi sama dance and
is loosely reminiscent of the rhythmic mode used in the “Ikkinchi
Dastan” and “Ikkinchi Meshrep” songs in a muqam suite. The fourth
song, originally in slow quadruple meter (mansan), is now sung lyri-
cally by a female chorus and soon joined by a mixed chorus (“Barche
güller échilip”). The return to “yuanban” in the fifth song (“Partiyege
ishledim”) is similarly accompanied by the seven-beat pattern sung by
a solo male voice in a walking tempo. Finally, the last song, which is
a “duoban,” a fast, single-beat metrical-rhythmic pattern often used
to end such a mini suite in traditional Chinese opera, is sung here
in a correspondingly fast tempo in duple meter (“Axtur mexpiy höj-
jetni”), with the fermata in the last line also reproduced on the syllable
“dest,” suggesting the final declaratory line of a muqam suite as often
seen in staged performances. The outcome is a creative sequence of
metrical-rhythmic patterns that resemble extremely selectively those
in Peking opera and Uyghur muqam, while also remaining a creation
on its own.
The tonal design discussed in this section demonstrates some of the
most creative efforts in the adaptation. I will focus on two instances
here. First, the two-measure instrumental fill to the second stanza
(“Boldi bend”) introduced two microtonal pitches on the second step
of the scale, namely, A-flat and A half-flat, clearly attempting to imi-
tate the Mushawrek mode. The lyrics here correspondingly describe
how the feet and hands of Li Yüxé are chained by the Japanese guards.
The modified second step in the scale continue into the first part of
the third stanza, and the contrast between the two is the most pro-
nounced—in one instance, both notes in one single measure—when
Li Yüxé sings “Qiynidi barche usul bilen jazalap köp uzaq” (tortured
and punished extensively with every method) with an emotional
intensity that is literally reproduced in the melody. Listened to as a
whole, this section functions essentially as a C minor, or the dominant
tonal area of G minor, to which the melody returns in the next line
(which describes Li Yüxe’s bravery facing such torture). The micro-

tonal inflection is nicely framed in the modulation procedure to rein-
force the dramatic action.
The second example involves the tunes of orthodox “revolution-
ary songs” that are frequently quoted in model operas and need to be
reproduced intact. Two songs are quoted in this section of the Peking
opera: “The Dadao March” (Dadao jinxingqu), which symbolizes vic-
tory over Japanese invasion, and “The East is Red” (Dongfang hong),
the de facto Chinese national anthem during the Cultural Revolution
and a song that symbolizes Chairman Mao Zedong and the com-
munist revolution. Similar to the Peking opera, the first phrases of
both songs are quoted during the third stanza (“Oghri Jiu Shen”) in
the Uyghur version. Here it appears after the modulation back to G
minor (conceptualized also as Bb major), after which an instrumen-
tal passage brings the tonality to F major, the dominant area of G
minor’s relative major, in which the melody of “The Dadao March”
appears in the brass. The melody then modulates back to Bb major
in duple (“Qarisam”), using the previous duple rhythmic pattern
, a change from the preceding seven-beat
pattern as if to prepare for the entrance of
the melody of “The East is Red,” which is now quoted, with the
rawap and the ghéjek carrying the melodic line, in Bb major and in
duple.44 Overall, the tonality of this section moves from G minor
in the prelude, the first stanza, and the first interlude, through a C
minor passage with microtonal inflections in the second stanza and
the beginning of the third stanza, followed by a modulation, notably,
to the major tonalities of F and Bb for the quotations of two revo-
lutionary songs, and finally returning to G minor for the rest of the
section—a modulation procedure clearly borrowed from European
classical opera. Considering that in the original Peking opera the
entire section stays in one single mode—the erhuang mode on B
(often conceptualized as an E major starting on the fifth step), except
when “The East is Red” is quoted in A major—the Uyghur adapta-
tion offers a remarkably fresh interpretation of this climactic section
by incorporating tonal and metrical procedures drawn from vastly dif-
ferent influences. It is also arguably more progressive and modernist
than the original Peking opera.
Conclusion
Qizil Chiragh is more than a transplant of the Cultural Revolution
model Peking opera The Red Lantern. Héytem said about the opera
THE WEST IS RED 161
toward the end of one of our interviews: “It’d be a real Uyghur

opera had we employed Uyghur expressions, costumes, and stage
setting, and had the story not taken place in the northeast but in
Xinjiang.” In many important ways, this statement captures the often
complicated sentiments and ambivalences toward the opera among
Uyghur musicians and audiences. The brief analysis above tries to
understand the Uyghur adaptation of The Red Lantern during the
latter phase of the Cultural Revolution as a creative endeavor that
transcends the constraints inherited in adapting a Chinese/Peking
opera and the assumed stylistic borrowing from Uyghur muqam.
In the first place, the project represents a continuation of a number
of practices installed in minority performing arts since the Chinese
takeover in 1949. At the forefront is the notion of musical sound as
a realization of socialist realism, which calls for the use of performing
arts to reflect the “new life” under communist rule. This required
the transformation of traditional expressive means into a new set
of sensibilities for the portrayal of modern characters and emotions
and the narrating of linear historical happenings. Such transforma-
tion was already in place with the aggressive musical modernization
projects that had been occurring since the early 1950s, as manifested
in the modification of musical instruments and performing prac-
tices as well as the introduction of new ensemble settings, compo-
sitional devices, and musical aesthetics. The new narrative capacity
was established through a wide range of new vocal and instrumental
compositions in the 1950s and 1960s and a set of musical lexicons
cultivated for its expression.45 This included, as seen in the excerpts
examined earlier, the stereotyped and somewhat simplified melodic
modes and rhythmic-metrical cycles, which barely resemble muqam
melodies but rather the repertoire of modern instrumental composi-
tions, which are either inspired or adapted from traditional tunes.
This has also included the new sonic attributes put on the two lead-
ing melodic instruments in the opera, the rawap plucked lute and
the ghéjek spike fiddle, the most aggressively “reformed” Uyghur
instruments that have attained virtuosic status and also carried the
most number of modernist pieces and solo passages. Qizil Chiragh
is both a continuation of this new style and contributed to its ongo-
ing redefinition. Equally important, its rhythmic and melodic pro-
cedures are drawn from a wide variety of stylistic sources, ranging
from Chinese and European operas to premodern Uyghur genres
and post-1950s compositions, which speak to a self-assured indi-
genization that has characterized much of modern minority perfor-
mance in the twentieth century.46
Acknowledgments
Research for this essay was partly funded by the Hong Kong Research
Grants Council under a research project named Musics During the
Chinese Cultural Revolution: From Periphery to Centre (Project No.:
454710).
Notes
1. Zhu Peimin, Ershi shiji Xinjiang shi yanjiu (Research on Twentieth-
century Xinjiang History) (Urumqi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe,
2000), 308–325.
2. A pioneer work on the transplanting of model operas is Bell Yung’s
study on Cantonese opera Sagabong, transplanted from the Peking opera
Shajiabang. See Bell Yung, “Model Opera as Model: From Shajiabang
to Sagabong,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the
People’s Republic of China, 1949–79, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 144–164.
3. Wang Mei, “Ershi shiji xiaban ye Xinjiang diqu geju chuangyan ji qi
yinyue gailun” (A General Discussion of the Performance of Opera
and Its Music in the Xinjiang Region during the Second Half of the
Twentieth Century) (PhD dissertation, Central Conservatory of Music,
Beijing, 2010), 49–71. The drama was later made into a Uyghur opera
sung in the Uyghur language after the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
4. Michael Clarke, Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia: A History
(New York: Routledge, 2011), 54–58; quoting Donald McMillen,
Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang, 1949–1977
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 92–94.
5. The work also appeared under at least two other titles, as Xelq
Gongshesi Yaxshi (People’s Commune is Good) and Yashisun Xelq
Gongshesi (Long Live People’s Commune).
6. Tian Liantao, “Cong Weiwu’er shier mukamu de sange banben kan
Xinjiang de minzu yinyue jipu zhengli gongzuo” (Three Versions of
Twelve Muqam and the Transcription of Ethnic Music in Xinjiang),
Renmin yinyue 6 (2002): 32–35.
7. See Zhou Ji, Mukamu (Muqam) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chuban-
she, 2005), 215–216. The change was consistent with the Uyghur pro-
grams at the two major performance showcases in 1964. In the first of
these, the “Showcase for Modern Dramas” (Xiandai xiju guanmo hui-
yan) in June/July, two Uyghur-language propaganda dramas were played;
in the second, the “Showcase for the Amateur Arts and Cultures of the
Minorities” (Shaoshu minzu qunzhong yeyu wenyi guanmo) in November/
December, various Uyghur plucked lutes, such as the rawap and the
dutar, were reportedly employed to accompany the singing of revolu-
tionary songs (“Xinjiang juxing xiandai xiju guanmo huiyan,” 1964) (A
combined performance of modern dramas was held in Xinjiang).
THE WEST IS RED 163
8. Xiong Kunjing, “Weihu weizu youxiu chuangtong: Sayfuding Aizezi

yu Shi’er Mukamu” (Protecting the Fine Uyghur Tradition: Seypidin
Ezizi and Twelve Muqam), Bainian chao, 2006.
9. Ibid.
10. June Teufel Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and
National Integration in the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 214.
11. Michael Friederich, “Uyghur Literary Representations of Xinjiang
Realities,” in Situating the Uyghur between China and Central Asia,
edited by Ildikó Bellér-Hann et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 102.
12. Clarke, Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia, 66.
13. See James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 274–275; and Wang Lixiong,
Wo de Xiyu, ni de Dongtu (My Western Region, Your East Turkestan)
(Taipei: Lotus, 2007).
14. James Millward and Nabijan Tursun, “Political History and Strategies
of Control,” in Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, edited by S.
Frederick Starr (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 97.
15. Interview, June 8, 2005.
16. Ibid.
17. Interview, June 17, 2005.
18. Interview, March 18, 2013.
19. Interview, March 2013; see also Héytem Hüseyin, Hijran mung-
liri (The Sorrow of Separation) (Qeshqer: Qeshqer Uyghur neshri-
yati, 2007), 225–232; and Héytem Hüseyin, Libie qing (Feelings
of Separation) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2011),
141–145.
20. This version of the lyrics is taken from Héytem Hüseyin, Hijran
mungliri, 228. The translation is mine. Monsters and demons were a
standard Cultural Revolution characterization of the contents of the
now condemned old-style Chinese operas.
21. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, provides a helpful overview of major
political episodes in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, 265–
276. McMillen’s Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang,
1949–1977 remains one of the most resourceful studies of the topic
in the English language. See also Dreyer’s China’s Forty Millions,
205–259 for another oft-cited analysis of the Cultural Revolution in
minority regions.
22. See Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions, 245.
23. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), July 15, 1970; August 16, 1970;
January 16, 1971.
24. Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Xinjiang juan, bianji weiyuanhui, ed., Zhongguo
xiqu zhi: Xinjiang juan (Chronicle of Chinese Operatic Music:
Xinjiang), (Beijing: China ISBN Center, 1995), 29–67.
yinyue gailun,” 73–75.
26. See also “Xinjiang gezu renmin re’ai yanbanxi,” Renmin ribao, May
1972.
27. Interview with Héytem Hüseyin, March 2013.
28. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76. See also Memetchnun,
“Geming yangbanxi zai Tianshan nanbei kaihua jieguo: Tan Weiwu’er
geju Hongdeng Ji de yizhi” (Revolutionary Model Operas Blossomed
and Bore Fruit Over South and North of the Tianshan Mountains: On
the Transplanting of Uyghur Opera The Red Lantern), in Difang xi
yizhi geming yangbanxi hao (The Adaptation of Revolutionary Model
Operas for Local Operas is Good) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban-
she, 1975), 48–55; Zhou Ji, Mukamu, 71–72; various interviews.
29. Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 76–77.
30. Héytem Hüseyin and Ablimit Sadiq, “Yan geming xi; zuo geming
ren” (Play Revolutionary Opera; Become Revolutionaries), in Difang
xi yizhi geming yangbanxi hao (The Adaptation of Revolutionary
Model Operas for Local Operas is Good) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe, 1975), 62–63.
31. The Chinese musicologist Zhou Ji (1943–2008) was also on the team
as a composer. He wrote about his involvements in Zhou Ji, Mukamu,
71–74; and Zhou Ji, Zhou Jianguo, and Wu Shoupeng, “Xinjiang
geju shilue” (A Brief History of Opera in Xinjiang), Xinjiang yishu
xueyuan xuebao 3(1) (2005): 38–48.
32. Héytem Hüseyin, “‘Qizil Chiragh’ chaqnighan yillar” (The Shining
Years of Red Lantern), Part 2, Shinjang Sen’iti 2 (2005), 26–38;
Héytem Hüseyin, Libie qing, 46–79; Wang Mei, “Weiwu’er yu gejü
Hongdeng ji de chuangyan ji qi yinyue chuangzuo” (The Performance
and Musical Composition of Uyghur Opera The Red Lantern), Yinyue
yanjiu 6 (2010): 78–88; Zhongguo xiqu zhi, 676–677; interviews with
Héytem Hüseyin, March and June 2013.
33. Héytem Hüseyin and Ablimit Sadiq, “Yan geming xi; zuo geming
ren,” 56–63; various interviews.
yinyue gailun”; Xinjiang Weiwu’er Zizhiqu Gejutuan yizhi geming
yangbanxi Hongdengji juzu, 42. (“Tianshan nanbei hongdeng shan-
yao” [The red light is shining all over the Tianshan Mountain] People’s
Daily [Renmin ribao] May 29, 1975).
35. Xinjiang Weiwu’er Zizhiqu Gejutuan yizhi geming yangbanxi
Hongdengji juzu, 41.
36. Memet Zunun, “Geming yangbanxi zai Tianshan nanbei kaihua
jieguo, 52. However, the incompatibility between the two styles also
required the retention of several dramatic attributes of the original
Peking opera. For example, Peking opera-style singing is imitated
when Li Yüxé scolds at Wang Lienjü, because “there is no such expres-
sion of anger in muqam (Xinjiang Weiwu’er Zizhiqu Gejutuan yizhi
geming yangbanxi Hongdengji juzu 1975, 42).
THE WEST IS RED 165
37. Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 73–74.

38. Mu Jing and Qi Guodong, “Wenyi geming de youyi fengshuo cheng-
guo: Ping Weiwu’er geju yingpian Hongdeng Ji” (Another Rich
Outcome of Literary Revolution: Review of the Uyghur Operatic
Film Red Lantern), Renmin ribao, December 10, 1975.
39. The erhuang mode is similar to the Mixolydian mode and is often
used, as Mittler notes, for “reflective and reminiscing moments.”
See Barbara Mittler, “‘Eight Stage Works for 800 Million People’:
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Music—A View from
Revolutionary Opera,” The Opera Quarterly 26(2–3) (2010): 385.
The other commonly used modal category is xipi, which resembles
the Aeolian mode.
40. See Rachel Harris, The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central
Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 81–86;
Nathan Light, Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in
Xinjiang (Berlin: Lit Verlag 2008), 200–206.
Hongdengji juzu, 40–41.
yinyue gailun,” 79–80.
Hongdengji juzu, 43–44.
44. In contrast, again, this melody is carried by the strings section of the
Western orchestra in the original Peking opera.
45. See Chuen-Fung Wong, “Reinventing the Central Asian Rawap in
Modern China: Musical Stereotypes, Minority Modernity, and Uyghur
Instrumental Music,” Asian Music 43(1) (2012): 34–63.
46. Elsewhere, I have argued that it is important also to look at promi-
nent minority musicians—pop music superstars and concert virtuosi
alike—as musical individuals whose power stems from their capacity
to project and sustain a voice that is figured as authentic and cultur-
ally convincing. See Chuen-Fung Wong, “Singing Muqam in Uyghur
Pop: Minority Modernity and Popular Music in Northwest China,”
Popular Music and Society 36(1) (2013): 98–118. This is a role also
assumed by Héytem and a few other prominent Uyghur vocalists and
instrumentalist during the Cultural Revolution—a topic that is beyond
the scope of this chapter.
C H A P T ER 8
The Dragon River Reaches the

Borders: The Rehabilitation of Ethnic
Music in a Model Opera
Rowan Pease
This chapter examines the “transplantation” (yizhi 䦣㢵; Korean yishik)

of the model opera Song of the Dragon River (Longjiang song 潁㰇
株, 1971), as it was adapted for the Korean minority population in
northeast China. This was part of a wide push to popularize (puji 㘖⍲;
Korean: pogŭp) the revolutionary model works (yangbanxi 㟟㜧ㆷ;
Korean: ponbogi kŭk)1 throughout China, initially through radio, films,
books, newspapers, and artefacts, and later through regional and ethnic
musico-dramatic forms.2 From 1972, cultural organs all over China set
about transplanting the model works, including all the troupes work-
ing in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin Province.
Ryonggangsong, as it was pronounced in Korean, was a Korean
sung drama (changju ⓙ㌖; Korean: ch’anggŭk) created and performed
between 1972 and 1976 by the Yanbian Prefectural Song-and-Dance
Troupe as part of this policy of transplanting the model works.3 It
was one of several model works adapted to suit the tastes of the eth-
nic Korean population living in northeast China, while preserving
its revolutionary and model core intact. Ryonggangsong was by far
the most ambitious of these transplanted model works and indeed
remains the most ambitious musical drama mounted by institutional
musicians in Yanbian. This ambition was not only in scale but also
in attempting to fuse three very different musical genres: Southern
Korean4 sung narrative drama, Chinese opera, and Western opera. In
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basics of structure, staging, gesture, and movement, these forms share

little common ground. In terms of musical languages alone, the three
are strikingly different: the guttural voice of p’ansori and ch’anggŭk,
supported by a single drum; the highly melismatic melodic lines of
Jingju (Beijing opera), which are followed by a small instrumental
ensemble and punctuated by raucous percussion; and the huge bel
canto arias of romantic opera, supported by Western orchestral har-
monies. This unlikely fusion was driven by political imperatives that
seemed to overturn all the rules of the earlier, more destructive years
of the Cultural Revolution and, as I will show, placed a great deal of
stress on the artists involved.
Mao praise songs such as “The Red Sun Shines on the Border” (Hong
taiyang zhao bianjiang 乊⣒旛䄏彡䔮 Korean: Pulgŭn hae pyŏn’gangŭl
pich’une), from the earlier period of the Cultural Revolution, remain
a staple of red nostalgia tapes and the annual Spring Festival Concert
(Chunjie wanhui 㗍刪㘂Ể) on CCTV. Ryonggangsong, on the other
hand, is now practically unknown. It is not mentioned in a recent 700-
page history of the troupe that produced it, or even in its composer’s
autobiography.5 Despite its flaws, Ryonggangsong was an ambitious and
influential step in the development of the local professional music style. It
was the outcome of a sustained and collective effort to produce a music
that was popular and modern, distinct from the Westernized music of
North and South Koreas, as well as from the music of Han China.
Other scholars have analyzed the artistic ideologies of the Cultural
Revolution, the factional struggles among cultural leaders, and the
histories and aesthetics of the model dramas.6 I focus on this single
Cultural Revolution model drama in order to examine the impact of
these ideologies far from the political and cultural center of China,
in an area that may have been considered marginal to Beijing’s inter-
est. I will first outline the particular historical and political context of
Koreans in northeast China during the Cultural Revolution before
describing earlier attempts to localize or modernize Korean sung
drama in the region. I will briefly outline how, as elsewhere in China,
most professional musical institutions closed for several years between
1969 and 1971, and musicians went to labor and learn among the
people.7 Moving on to the period after the death of Lin Biao, the
next section will describe the implementation of the puji dissemina-
tion policy within Yanbian. It will detail how Song of the Dragon River
was adapted as a ch’anggŭk over three years, how it underwent a series
of experimental performances (guanmo 奪㐑 or shiyan yanchu 孽樴
㺼↢) for cultural leaders at the prefectural, provincial, and national
levels, and how it was finally toured before local mass audiences. The
THE DRAGON RIVER REACHES THE BORDERS 169
following section will explore those aspects of Korean music that were
deemed suitable to convey revolutionary ideas, and those aspects of
the Chinese opera music that were considered indispensable. Finally,
the chapter will reflect on the opera’s impact at the time and beyond.
Despite the very limited number of performances and its disappear-
ance from official histories,8 the groundwork it laid in being Korean
and ideological can be heard in local music today.
This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in the period 2010–
2013, during which I spoke to many participants involved in the
drama: singers, players, audience members, advisers, conductors, and
cultural leaders. I also read contemporary reports and looked at draft
scores and the archives of the Yanbian Prefectural Song-and-Dance
Troupe. Hŏ Wŏnsik 孠⃫㢵, the composer of Ryonggangsong, died
several years ago, but his widow, Pang Yŏnsuk 㕡䅽⍼, assisted me
with recollections, in particular by finding a tape recording taken from
a broadcast of the opera. Despite rich resources, this research is prob-
lematic: being highly politicized—and involving divas—participants’
memories are often in conflict, and both original sources and current
sources are incomplete or biased.
Chinese–Korean Culture before and during

China’s Cultural Revolution
In 1964, Yanbian, an autonomous prefecture in northeast China, was
home to about half of China’s 1.3 million ethnic Koreans.9 Their pop-
ulation (623,136) was roughly equal to that of the Han Chinese.10
As Yanbian was an autonomous prefecture, Koreans were guaranteed
a degree of self-government and support for their national culture,
but—as in other autonomous areas—the degree of real autonomy
was contested, and varied according to central policy. The Cultural
Revolution is now viewed as a period when there was very little local
autonomy and no support for local culture: “‘To respect or even men-
tion nationality characteristics is to make a revisionist and capitula-
tionist mistake,’ was a typical slogan of the new era.”11
The aims of the Cultural Revolution in Yanbian were different
from those in the central parts of China. Due to its particular history
of migration and occupation, there were few local class enemies12—
the capitalist roaders and revisionists who were attacked elsewhere.
They differed, too, from other minority populations: the northeast
was relatively modernized and industrialized, and Japanese coloniz-
ers had eradicated much Korean traditional culture in the first half
of the twentieth century. China’s particular concern in Yanbian was
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its proximity to North Korea and the divided loyalties of the Chinese
Korean population. Many people crossed the border freely during the
1950s and early 1960s; they also listened to North Korean radio and
read North Korean books. Several professional musicians had trained
at the conservatory in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and
in 1959 North Korean teachers had been recruited to the local art
school. When struggle sessions started in the summer of 1966, it was
to North Korea that victims fled, including leading musicians. North
Korea had allied itself to the Soviet Union, and hence was an enemy
revisionist state: Kim Il Sung was denounced by Red Guards as a “fat
revisionist” and “Korea’s Khrushchev.”13 It was only in 1970 that
relations warmed again between the two nations.
It is difficult to determine what happened locally during the cha-
otic early years of the Cultural Revolution, in part because the news-
papers printed only national news.14 Central directives from Beijing
in September 1966 called for stability in the strategically important
border areas such as Yanbian, where security was to take precedence
over revolutionary disorder,15 but these directives seem to have been
ineffective. Those I interviewed, who were high school students at
the time and are now in their sixties, recalled abandoning their educa-
tion for demonstrations and factional fighting. Singing and dancing
were an indispensable part of their activities; each group had its propa-
ganda workers who would lead singing during demonstrations: “You
had to sing whether or not you wanted to. To not sing was counter-
revolutionary” (Buyuanyi chang ye dei chang. Buchang shi fangeming
ᶵョシⓙḇ⼿ⓙˤ ᶵⓙ㗗⍵朑␥). They sang songs that were used
throughout the county: “The East is Red Dongfanghong ᷄㕡乊,”
“Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman, Dahai kangxing kao
duoshou ⣏㴟凒埴月凝ㇳ,” the settings of Mao quotations (Yulu ge
宕⻽㫴), and so on, which all had Korean translations.16 The profes-
sional music institutions were disbanded, and many of their members
joined production brigades. Those who stayed behind were busy with
struggle meetings.17 From March 1967, the military took control of
the Party and government of Yanbian.18 In the summer of 1968, a
revolutionary committee was established to govern the prefecture, and
policy became clearer.19 The former prefectural leader, Chu Tŏkhae (a
supporter of the now disgraced Deng Xiaoping), was attacked and
accused of trying to establish an independent kingdom. The accusa-
tions against Chu included his support for indigenous Korean cul-
ture—both traditional and modern.
As part of the campaign against Chu, in July 1969, newspapers
denounced Yanbian cultural workers for promoting Chu’s so-called
black lines of ethnic splittism and “ethnic blood lineage theory”

(minzu xuetonglun 㮹㕷埨亇孢 Korean: minjok hyŏlt’ongnon). 20
Ethnic blood lineage theory was said to be used by the exploiting
classes to promote Korean culture and unity, and thereby to ignore
class struggle. The musical culture that was being attacked in the
“ethnic blood lineage theory” struggle sessions was precisely the cul-
ture that had been promoted during the earlier “Hundred Flowers”
movement in 1956.
During that earlier movement, cultural workers sought out tradi-
tional performers and singers to “let the past serve the present, and
foreign things serve China.”21 All professional performers and com-
posers had to learn to play or sing traditional Korean music and to
draw upon it in their own cultural work.22 Few of them had previously
been exposed to much traditional music, being educated in colonial
schools or conservatories and more accustomed to Western music.
Their resulting work was often closer to that of “new folk song”
(Korean: shin minyo) composers in colonial Korea in the 1930s, and
to the work of musicians in neighboring North Korea, rather than
rural folk music. It was Westernized folk music, using pentatonic mel-
odies, three-four rhythms, and light romantic accompaniment. Now,
under the Cultural Revolution, to sound North Korean was to sound
revisionist. To use such music to praise Mao or propagate communism
would sully Mao’s image.23
Despite the predominance of this largely urbanized form of new
folk music, more traditional Korean vocal forms had survived up until
1966 at the Yanbian School of Art and in professional troupes. These
forms were performed and taught by traditionally trained singers
who had migrated to China from southern Korean before 1945: they
included classical sung poetry, such as kasa and sijo,24 as well as the
sung narrative form p’ansori and its staged offspring, ch’anggŭk. In
p’ansori, a single performer acts all the roles, including that of the nar-
rator, with only a fan, handkerchief, and bamboo screen as props, sup-
ported by a drummer. The performer’s voice has a remarkable power
and range, often very husky, and switches rapidly between speech,
heightened speech, and song. Ch’anggŭk is a musical theater form that
had developed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Korea.
It uses the same musical style as p’ansori, but divides roles between
multiple performers and adds stage props and movement. P’ansori
was not widely performed in Yanji, but there was a New Changgŭk
Experimental Troupe Yanji shi xin changju shiyan jutuan⺞⎱ⶪ㕘
ⓙ∏孽樴∏⚊ (active 1960–1962). This troupe not only performed
staged versions of traditional dramas (such as Shimch’ŏngjŏn and
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Ch’unhyangjŏn) but also experimented with new revolutionary sto-

ries, such as the sung dramas Red Sisters (Pulgŭn chamae) in 1961
and Happiness (Haengbok) in 1962. These preserved the original
musical style of ch’anggŭk while adding revolutionary content, such
as promoting land reform or interethnic harmony.25 Red Sisters was
actually an early example of “transplantation,” having been adapted
from a revolutionary pingju26 play. Neither the traditional nor the
new ch’anggŭk performances had been considered particularly suc-
cessful, and the troupe was disbanded after only a couple of years.
Such music had its roots in the southern part of the Korean penin-
sula, and the Koreans in Yanbian—particularly in Yanji town—were
from the northern provinces of Korea where the singing style of the
south was less popular. One singer said to me, “Yanbian people don’t
know this Chŏlla province way of singing . . . they said I had broken my
voice, they didn’t like it.”27
During the Cultural Revolution, traditional music was reviled as
belonging to the “Four Olds (sijiu ⚃㖏),” and its performers were
labeled demon spirits (Korean: chapkwisin) and shunned.28 Cultural
workers were criticized for seeking them out.29 The earlier modern-
izations were likewise unacceptable. An editorial in the Yanbian Daily
in 1969 denounced the new ch’anggŭk, Red Sisters, as one of three
“poisonous weeds” of blood lineage theory culture.30
Disseminating and Transplanting

the Model Works in Yanbian
The former Red Guards told me they enjoyed singing the Mao quo-
tations and Mao praise songs during the earlier years of the Cultural
Revolution, but the paucity of published musical materials between
1967 and 1969 suggests that the musical diet was limited. New nation-
ally approved songs were occasionally published in the newspaper,31 cir-
culated in mimeographed pamphlets, or posted on notice boards. There
was a gap of nine years between publication of Vol. 3 of the Revolutionary
Song Collection (Korean: Hyŏngmyŏng kagokchip) in 1964 and Vol. 4
in May 1973, although in between there were “internal” volumes of
Revolutionary Literature and Art (Geming wenyi). The only songs pub-
lished were musical settings of the words of Chairman Mao—initially in
Chinese in 1966, and then in 1967 in a Korean version, Mo Chusŏk ŏrok
kayo 1, published by the Jilin Cultural Office and printed in Yanbian.
This had an initial print run of 300,000, five times greater than any
previous songbook. A translated collection of praise songs, “Long live
Chairman Mao” (Mo Chusŏk manse), was published in March 1969.
This diet was relieved during the early 1970s when, as elsewhere
in China, the model opera films were released. With each new film,
the papers would devote pages of coverage. The sounds of yangbanxi
became very familiar, and indeed popular, particularly among younger
Koreans. From 1970, yangbanxi study groups were set up throughout
the region. In September 1970, the Second Forum of Amateur Art
Troupes in Yanbian was instructed to strengthen the troupes’ work
of spreading the model works still further.32 At the Song-and-Dance
Troupe, The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji 乊䀗存) was regularly per-
formed with piano, along with the ballet White Haired Girl (Baimao
nü䘥㮃⤛), and the Shajiabang 㱁⭞㴄ġSymphony.33 Besides films, the
cultural work teams and local opera troupes performed model opera
excerpts all around the area, carrying their instruments, stage equip-
ment, food, and bedding from village to village.34
In 1972, when the drive to transplant model operas started in Yanbian,
the idea of creating revolutionary ch’anggŭk was revisited. This was quite
a brave move, conductor An Kungmin ⬱⚥㓷 told me, given the earlier
attacks on Korean musical drama. However, the Cultural Revolution
had entered a second stage, with a relaxing of the policies against ethnic
culture, and a more varied, localized musical diet. Furthermore, in late
1970 North Korea had come back into the Chinese diplomatic fold, and
cultural exchanges had resumed, including in Yanbian.35 The Yangsando
Art Troupe came to perform,36 North Korean films were regularly
shown in Yanbian as elsewhere in China,37 and Chinese composers were
even urged to learn from the sentimental songs that accompanied those
films.38 It was under these circumstances that the model opera Song of
the Dragon River was adapted as a Korean sung drama, ch’anggŭk.
The purpose of the national policy of transplanting model works
into familiar local styles was to ensure the wider and deeper penetra-
tion of revolutionary culture, and to a certain extent to enrich the cul-
tural diet (the “blossoming of a hundred flowers”).39 Most Koreans
in Yanbian told me that they found the sounds of Jingju far too high
and the singing too nasal for their taste—apart from the lyrics being
incomprehensible. The policy of localization should have addressed
these problems. However, as described above, the operas were already
becoming familiar throughout the prefecture and were popular with
young people. Some cultural workers, according to the magazine
Yŏnbyŏn munye (Yanbian Literature and Art), questioned the need to
transplant operas, but were convinced that there were some rural areas
that had yet to be penetrated by the revolutionary operas.40
Every county and township troupe in Yanbian was assigned the task
of transplanting the works. From August 27 to September 3, 1974, one
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amateur and ten professional troupes performed the results of transplan-

tation at a festival in Yanji City, watched by leaders of the Prefectural
Committee, the Prefectural Revolutionary Committee, and the Bureau
of Culture.41 The show included a Korean-language version of the
play Azalea Mountain (Dujuanshan 㜄淫Ⱉ) by the prefectural the-
ater company; The Red Lantern, performed using Korean folk song, by
the Tumen City Cultural Work Troupe; three transplanted versions of
Song of the Dragon River as a female chorus song accompanied by zith-
ers (kayagŭm pyŏnch’ang) by the Yanji County Cultural Work Troupe;
Korean-language operatic excerpts by the Wangqing County Cultural
Work Team, and the sung drama examined in this chapter.
Work on the Korean sung drama Ryonggangsong had started in
June 1973, when the prefectural government political department
formed a “small transplanting team” to oversee the political aspect of
the work of creating a Korean Song of the Dragon River. They chose
Dragon River because it reflected contemporary agricultural con-
cerns rather than historical battles that might be irrelevant to Korean
audiences. Furthermore, it did not involve acrobatics or martial arts,
which would have been impossible for the Song-and-Dance Troupe,
besides being uncharacteristic.42
Song of the Dragon River is a story of proletarian class solidarity
and sacrifice. Its lead figure, female Party secretary Jiang Shuiying
(in Korean, Kang Suyŏng), persuades brigade leaders to agree to
flood their land to irrigate the drought-stricken lands of neighboring
communes, urging them to overcome their local loyalty to serve the
greater good. Jiang Shuiying is shown several times to embody a spirit
of selfless heroism; as a result, an obstructive class enemy is defeated,
and the opera ends with a bumper harvest.43
As a yangbanxi, Song of the Dragon River had already undergone
a seven-year process from regional play to nationally approved opera,
closely supervised by Jiang Qing. It was fixed in November 1971
when Premier Zhou Enlai gave the final artistic tweak (the actress’s
dynamic range was too great).44 Mao was filmed attending the show
the following year, giving the ultimate validation. Once fixed, Song
of the Dragon River, like all model works, was filmed so that it could
be seen by people all over the country. To mark the first public per-
formance on March 7, the Chinese-language Yanbian Daily and its
Korean equivalent, Yŏnbyŏn Ilbo, printed the entire script of Dragon
River in Chinese and Korean along with photographs.45 Soon after-
ward, it was published in Korean and Chinese booklets.46 This was
followed a few days later with reviews by local factory workers, peas-
ants, and even cultural workers.47 There was a flurry of similar reports
in September 1972 when the film version was first shown.48
Musical Style 
Paul Clark writes that “the cult of the amateur gave way to the recruit-
ment of professionals” in the process of perfecting the Song of the Dragon
River, 50 and the same is apparently true of the Korean transplant. In
June 1973, a team of ten professionally trained creative workers, includ-
ing four Chinese–Korean composers, were assigned the job of collec-
tively transplanting the music of the opera as a ch’anggŭk. Despite there
being four names on early draft scores, in reality there was only one
composer—Hŏ Wonsik (a graduate of the Shenyang Conservatory)—
and three advisers, two of whom, Ri Hwanghun 㛶湬⊃ and Chŏng
Chungap 恹ὲ䓚, were specialists in Korean traditional music, since
Hŏ knew little of this, having been teaching in Shenyang Conservatory
when the “study Korean music” program was implemented.51
Only the music and language were to be changed. Korean cos-
tumes were used for the minor peasant roles (just as they wore local
clothes in the original), but otherwise the stage props, gestures, and
stage directions of the actors had been firmly fixed by the central
authorities, and not one blink was to be changed. Such gestures were
derived from Jingju and were entirely alien to Korean sung drama;
furthermore, there was no Jingju percussion to support such gestures
in ch’anggŭk.
In September 1973, a larger creative team52 held talks at which its
members identified musical issues such as the problem of song modes,
structure, orchestration, vocal technique, percussion, and “basic fla-
vour.” As a result of these talks, a series of decisions about the music
of the transplanted Ryonggangsong were made. These are listed below
in italics, with further elaboration arising from my conversations with
participants at the meeting and my own analysis of the score:
● The melodies were to be based on southern Korean folk song (namdo

minyo). Because of its links to traditional epic singing p’ansori,
this folk song style was suited to narrative music, but was not as
tragic as p’ansori itself. I suggest that it was also chosen because
it was distant from the sounds of North Korean music and the
popular kyŏnggi folk song style that prevailed there.
● The voice was to be much higher and more resonant than traditional
“raspy” Korean singing. This was in keeping with the positive and
heroic image of the lead characters. Singers were required to fuse
the natural Korean “chest” voice with the falsetto of bel canto.
For this reason, the principal soprano of the Song-and-Dance
Troupe, Pang Ch’osŏn 㕡⇅┬, was replaced after the first trial
performances by singers trained in the Korean vocal style. To my
176 ROWAN PEASE
ears, the high range, stamina, and strength of the heroine’s voice
is one of the most striking aspects of the opera. It seems some-
what at odds with the appeal to local tastes, since the high pitch
of Jingju was said to make it unpopular with Koreans.
● Vocal ornamentation was to be borrowed from Jingju and Western
opera, as well as Korean music. A principal singer demonstrated for
me that this took the form of some virtuosic melisma from Jingju,
the rapid audible vibrato of bel canto singing, and some grace
notes from Korean folk singing. Wider vibrato and glottal articu-
lations, heard in classical Korean genres, were to be avoided.
● The rhythmic structure was to be derived from Korean metrical pat-
terns (ch’angdan). The score reveals that the composer used 20
of these, including well-known compound patterns such as chin-
yangjo, chungmori, chajŭn chungmori, chung chungmori, chajin
mori, and kŭtkori; some in simple rhythm, which more closely
matched revolutionary martial music: andang, hwimori; and the
5/8 otmori. Helpfully, these were already associated with emo-
tional moods, characters, and dramatic effects. These patterns are
to me the most audible markers of Koreanness in the opera.
● Aria structures were derived from revolutionary Jingju and
Western arias. Analysis of key arias reveals this structure: a free
rhythm introduction, a section exploring the characters’ feelings,
a transitional middle section, and a final section in the new mood
(in revolutionary operas, nearly always resolute). This pattern of
transformation is a key aesthetic of Cultural Revolution works
and is repeated continually through the opera within individual
arias as well as at the overall level.
● The orchestra mixed Korean and Western orchestral instru-
ments. The first draft of the score shows the two-stringed fiddle
haegŭm, the twelve-stringed zither kayagŭm, and Korean per-
cussion alongside Western wind, brass, and string sections. In
later drafts, the Korean flute chŏttae replaces the Western flutes,
the shawm chang saenap replaces the oboe, and an accordion is
added. Thus the orchestra became more closely associated with
both folk music (the Korean shawm and flute) and revolutionary
music (the accordion).
● Percussion. Percussion plays a key role in Jingju, punctuating the
action and creating moods. It was decided that this could not be
incorporated into the Korean drama. Instead, the score reveals
that the orchestral texture combines the heterophonic style of
Jingju, where stringed instruments follow the vocal line, and the
homophonic style of romantic Western opera and film music, in
which a melody is accompanied by chordal harmony. Hŏ was an
expert in the Western romantic style of ballet music, suitable for

setting moods and expressing emotion.
● Other structural techniques were the use of leitmotifs to signify
certain characters and moods, fanfares, and the insertion of revo-
lutionary songs. For instance, when listening to the opera, one
hears that the character of Kang Suyŏng is always introduced
with the distinctive melodic pattern from the original yangbanxi.
A quote from the song “The East is Red” symbolizes the inspira-
tion of Mao. The last chorus of the opera is a revolutionary song,
“Kongjǒk sasang kotti p’iyǒ malli hyanggi pomne (The flowers
of communist thinking are blooming, spreading their fragrance
everywhere).”
The heroine, as in all model operas, was the crux of the drama—the
most prominent of the three prominences—and so her arias had to
faithfully capture the spirit of the yangbanxi. The composer had more
freedom with other commune members, peasants, and soldiers—as
long as they were depicted respectfully. He avoided the sorts of well-
loved dances and songs that characterize later “ethnic” shows. As for
the class enemies, they were inevitably depicted musically through tra-
ditional Korean music. But since such characters were downplayed in
model operas, there was little music of that type. You can hear some
for the character of Hwang Kukjung 湬⚥⾈, an intransigent landlord.
Some Korean nongak percussion was inserted into the score at the
point where there is Chinese percussion and acrobatics to depict the
struggles with the flood in the original yangbanxi, but this is absent
in my recording. An Kungmin told me, with regard to another con-
cert at this time, that the traditional Korean nongak ribbon dance
was considered too ethnic, indeed as “doubting socialism.”53 Another
explanation is that this scene was omitted or curtailed because acro-
batic dancing was uncharacteristic and difficult for the troupe, as sug-
gested during the original selection meeting. It is even possible that
the scene was included but the sound would have been too poor for
radio broadcast.
The Composition and Approval Process

Once these decisions were made, Party Secretary Kang’s core arias were
the first to be composed. Within six months, in November 1973, the
core section of the first act was given its first trial performance for cultural
workers in Yanji: “With all one’s body strive for the liberation of all man-
kind (Ŏryŏun immurŭl matda).” The next sections, to follow a year later,
were even more critical scenes for the soprano heroine, “Gazing at Beijing
178 ROWAN PEASE
increases my strength” (Pukkyŏng sŏng para poni onmome himi sonne) and
“Let the red flag of revolution be planted everywhere” (Hyŏngmyŏng
ŭi pulgŭn kibal sabange huinarrige harira). These were performed at a
specialist cultural workers’ meeting as a taster in September and then in
October 1974 at a so-called report performance for provincial and pre-
fectural political leaders in a rural village (Xinfeng, Changbai township).
At this performance, the opinions of political leaders and more ordinary
viewers were sought. The reports focus on whether the performances
effectively reflected class struggle and the campaign to criticize Lin Biao
and Confucius, rather than audience appreciation of the music.54 In
December 1974, in Changchun, capital of Jilin province, the eighth sec-
tion, “Struggle at the Sluice Gate,” was performed for cultural leaders
at a provincial cultural research gathering, alongside works transplanted
into 17 different local genres, such as errenzhuan55 and Hebei bangzi
(wooden clapper) opera.56 One musician’s opinions took precedence at
that meeting: those of Kim Pongho, composer of the nationally approved
Korean songs “Yanbian People Love Chairman Mao” and “The Red Sun
Shines on the Borders,” and now a vice director of the provincial Culture
Bureau. A report summarizing the festival of Jilin-transplanted yangbanxi
praises the new fruits of studying Yan’an talks and criticizing Lin Biao
and Confucius, but it again remains frustratingly silent on the artistic
impact of the opera.57 I spoke to Kim, but he could not recall suggesting
any changes to the music—the focus was on the text, direction, and act-
ing. “Struggle at the Sluice Gate” was performed for nine nights at the
Workers’ Cultural Palace in Changchun and broadcast on Changchun
Television on the evening of December 23.58 The Jilin Daily reported an
excited response from Korean audiences:
Your use of the art forms that Koreans love to appreciate to transplant
revolutionary model opera exemplifies the loving care of the Party
and Chairman Mao for us. We want to learn from the heroine Jiang
Shuiying, live in the villages to open our eyes, better embrace revolu-
tion, increase production, bravely and quickly transform, make greater
contributions to the revolution.59
In March 1975, the Song-and-Dance Troupe took the third and

eighth sections to Beijing for a trial festival of transplanted operas.60
Frustratingly, although their attendance and performance are noted in
newspaper reports of the festival, Ryonggangsong is not singled out for
further mention. The principal singer recalls that she had to do several
encores. It received approval from the national cultural authorities in
charge of yangbanxi transplanting, as the core arias were recorded and
published by China Record Company.
The successive drafts of the opera reveal few changes to the music,
besides the alteration of instrumentation and the omission of the per-
cussion section mentioned above. Pang Yŏnsuk told me that her hus-
band planned the work mentally before writing it. Most of the changes
seem to have been practical—the extension or shortening of certain
passages to better fit stage movements were worked out by the com-
poser with the director. In particular, the core arias changed very lit-
tle, indicating that the music was considered to capture the heroine’s
prominent characteristics accurately. On October 4, 1975, the full
orchestral score was completed and each player copied their own part.
In November 1975, the themes of the opera were internally published
by the Yanbian Song-and-Dance Troupe as an “experimental ch’anggŭk
transplant” using cipher notation, complete with a Mao quotation and
explanations of the Korean rhythms. Newspapers report a series of
performances that December in Yanji City and Helong township, but
there are no reviews and no further advertisements. Instead, news of
Zhou Enlai’s death in January dominated the newspapers.
Remembering and Assessing R YONGGANGSONG

Ch’ŏn Hwaja ℐ剙⫸,61 the singer chosen to perform the role of the
heroine Kang Suyǒng for the Beijing performance and recording, was
generally well favored by the Cultural Revolution. She had been the
only student of Korean classical song, sijo, at the Yanbian School of
Arts, and disliked the strict discipline of rote memorization of these
extremely slow and subtly ornamented poems. With few regrets at the
time, she burnt all her own notations. (Within two years, her teacher
was dead.) Having publicly repudiated the classic repertoire, she
became a successful performer of revolutionary song. Not only did she
have the right power and range but also had a father who had been an
anti-Japanese fighter, so her class background was excellent. When she
was sent down, along with all students, to the countryside, she tells me
the peasants insisted she stand at the side of the fields singing for them
while they labored. In the early 1970s, now that a more traditional
Korean sound was required, Ch’ŏn presented the perfect Kang and
could not have been more proud to take on the role. The direction,
she recalled, was incredibly detailed and rigid—not surprisingly, since it
had been set by the very top leadership. She describes the feedback she
got from audiences as being overwhelmingly favorable: “My voice was
sweet, was so high and bright.” Kim Sŏnok 慹┬䌱, who gave all the
local performances, relished the chance to sing an operatic role, and
especially a revolutionary icon. Like Ch’ŏn, she had trained in ethnic
180 ROWAN PEASE
vocal music but had opted to transfer to bel canto, so the opera again
played to her strengths. Hwang Sangnyong 湬䚠潁, who played the
counterrevolutionary class enemy Hwang Kukjung, positively disliked
the opera, and told me that everyone else did too!
The Annals of Yanbian Korean Prefecture music theater count
over 50 performances of the opera, including 17 in Beijing, as well
as Changchun and Jilin, and Yanbian, but we know these were often
only performances of excerpts. Looking through contemporary news-
papers, I could find few reviews of the performances: People’s Daily
(Renmin ribao) had reported the Beijing performances of transplanted
works, including several versions of Song of the Dragon River, but did
not mention the Korean performance.62 The Jilin Daily reports of
the Changchun shows merely mention the presence of the Korean
troupes, among others, as displaying the rich fruits of the Criticize
Lin Biao and Confucius campaign. The Yŏnbyŏn ilbo (Yanbian Daily
Korean edition) has just two advertisements for performances in Yanji
town and in Longshui village.63 I met one woman, Kim Rongsok, who
attended a Yanji performance. Bussed in with her unit, the Tractor
Workshop, she said it was a “political duty” to attend the show at the
Workers’ Cultural Palace. Besides, she was very fond of the model
opera films. Standard history books describe the delight and relief
of the Korean people at hearing the model operas set in their own
musical language, but this does not seem to be borne out by Kim’s
evidence. She and her friends were not enthralled:
The original model opera was better. Because . . . the original . . . the per-
formers . . . for whatever reason the Chinese was better . . . we all felt like
that. The Chinese was more interesting. It was just the . . . Chinese . . . the
Korean translation . . . we already were very familiar with the contents,
how can I say it, it wasn’t polished, that kind of feeling. The standard
of the performers in the film was better than in the Korean version. It
wasn’t the music . . . it was the performance, the Chinese was performed
well. (interview, Yanji city, April 2011)
But Kim Rongsok did not express her opinion at the time, except
to her friends: “We couldn’t say it in a loud voice, ‘the performance
troupe such and such,’ we couldn’t say it say it freely.”
The lead participants of the performance suggest that it failed
because its time was over—just a few days after its local premiere,
Premier Zhou Enlai died, and in the following months Mao died and
the Cultural Revolution was over, its cultural products shelved. Kim
Pongho, the leader among Cultural Revolution musicians, echoed this
ideological shift when he told me 35 years later that the opera failed
because “they forgot to serve the people. Art should serve the people,
but this was written to serve politics.”64 Yet, many people still sing
arias from the original Song of the Dragon River. The conductor of
Ryonggangsong, An Kungmin, suggested to me that the two styles—
Korean ch’anggŭk and model opera—just could not mesh. One was
introverted and lent itself better to tragedy and sentiment; the other
was relentlessly martial and optimistic. Perhaps our original audience
member was also right in saying that they took it to the wrong places:
they performed it for leaders, fellow cultural workers, and eventually
urban workers, but they forgot Mao’s directive about going deeply
into the countryside. She said to me:
The Korean one was never widespread, like the model operas, to every
town, village, county. This was about the countryside—an agricultural
story—reflecting village life. This should have been shown in villages,
in communes or townships. If they’d performed it in the people’s com-
munes, that way lots of peasants would have seen it. But it didn’t spread
to those places. (Interview, Yanji City April 2011)
But her criticism conflicts with the memories of others. Pang Yŏnsuk
told me that she heard it in Xicheng in Helong county, and that “the
listeners liked it—it was about village life.”
One of the two Kang Suyŏng actors, Kim Sŏnok, recalls perform-
ing the transplanted opera in village squares, with peasants squatting
around. The other, Ch’ŏn, says that the cast and orchestra were too
large and required the kind of stage that could only be found in town-
ships. That seems plausible, but Kim likely performed key arias accom-
panied by accordion in village tours.
The composer Hŏ was clearly not satisfied with the work: he omit-
ted Ryonggangsong from his collected works65 and his biography,
despite having spent more than three years working on it. He and the
Song-and-Dance Troupe never attempted another ch’anggŭk again.
Conclusion
Cultural Revolution scholars such as Barbara Mittler and Paul Clark
have urged researchers not to take at face value assertions that the
Cultural Revolution was a period of no creativity, and an aber-
ration within twentieth-century Chinese cultural development.
Ryonggangsong certainly bears this out. It is the most ambitious of
many pieces written during a brief period of concentrated cultural
“transplanting” in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.
It drew upon the experiences of composers and writers in the late
182 ROWAN PEASE
1950s and early 1960s to update Korean sung drama to serve modern
audiences. It fed into the later works of composers (including Hŏ)
of operas and ballets in the 1980s, and in the post-reform era. The
use of Korean rhythmic patterns and instruments, and the Korean
chest voice raised to the operatic soprano range, is still a feature of
such music. While the attempt to incorporate elements of Jingju into
Korean music was not repeated after the Cultural Revolution, the use
of modern Chinese music and Western music to update Korean music
to reflect “the spirit of the age” and ideological movements continues
to preoccupy state musicians working in Yanbian. In 1989, more than
a decade after Ryonggangsong, the Yanbian Song-and-Dance Troupe
produced an opera, Arirang, created by many members of the same
team. Arirang is celebrated as Hŏ’s, his fellow composers’, and the
troupe’s finest achievement to date.66 It surely built on their expe-
rience, including the weaknesses of Ryonggangsong, but the earlier
work is not acknowledged in the troupe’s history.
The Song of the Dragon River had been closely associated with Jiang
Qing, so it quickly became politically unacceptable. Unlike the origi-
nal model work, its Korean incarnation had never been extensively
“spread”: it had not saturated the media and entered local memory. It
was therefore never likely to outlive the revolutionary movement that
gave birth to it.
Acknowledgments
This chapter is a direct finding of a research project named “Musics
during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: From Periphery to Centre,”
funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under the General
Research Fund category (Project No.: 454710).
Notes
1. Fixed in Beijing in May 1967, some predated the Cultural Revolution.
An editorial titled “Geming wenyi de youxiu yangban (Excellent Models
of Revolutionary Arts)” announced them in the Yanbian edition of the
Xinhuashe dianxun, May 31, 1967. See also June 17, 1967.
2. Paul Clark refers to two People’s Daily articles in early 1971 announc-
ing this policy. See Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75.
3. Many articles promoted this policy following the distribution of
the Red Detachment of Women ballet film. See, for instance, “Dali
puji geming yangbanxi (Strongly Spread the Revolutionary Model
Operas),” a three-page spread on July 17, 1970; an article titled “Puji
yangbanxi, hanwei yangbanxi (Spread the Model Operas, Defend the

Model Operas)” by the Revolutionary Jingju Study Group, Yanbian
ribao (Yanbian Daily, Chinese edition, hereafter YBRB) August 13,
1970; “Hyŏngmyŏngjŏk ponbogigŭkŭl himssŏ bokŭp haja (Strive to
Spread the Revolutionary Model Works),” Yŏnbyŏn ilbo (Yanbian
Daily, Korean edition, hereafter YBIB), September 1, 1970.
4. P’ansori and ch’anggŭk have histories that predate the 1945 divi-
sion of Korea. I use the term “southern Korea” here to indicate that
these forms originated and developed in the south of the peninsula,
although they were widespread by the mid-twentieth century.
5. Kim Tŏkkyun and Kim Tŭkch’ŏng, Chosŏn minjok ŭmakka sajŏn
(Dictionary of Korean Musicians) (Yanji: Yŏnbyŏn taehak ch’ulp’ansa,
1998), 429.
6. Barbara Mittler, Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997); Barbara Mittler, “‘Eight Stage
Works for 800 Million People’: The Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in Music—A View from Revolutionary Opera,” The
Opera Quarterly 26 (2010); Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution;
Dai Jiafang, Yangbanxi de fengfeng yuyu: Jiang Qing, yangbanxi ji
neimu (The Trials and Hardships of the Model Performances: Jiang
Qing, the Model Performances and the Inside Story) (Beijing:
Zhishi chubanshe, 1995); Arnold Perris, “Music as Propaganda: Art
at the Command of Doctrine in the People’s Republic of China,”
Ethnomusicology 27(1) (1983): 1–28; Richard King, Art in Turmoil:
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976 (Los Angeles, CA:
UBC Press, 2010).
7. Zhongguo Chaoxianzu yinyue wenhuashi editorial group, Zhongguo
Chaoxianzu yinyue wenhuashi (History of Chinese–Korean Musical
Culture) (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2010), 226.
8. Compare, for instance, the audience figure of 330,000 for just two
months of model work performances in Beijing, cited in Mittler,
“Eight Stage Works”: 378.
9. National Bureau of Statistics, 1964 census data. http://www.stats.
gov.cn/english/Statisticaldata/CensusData.
10. Enze Han, Contestation and Adaptation: The Politics of National
Identity in China (Oxford University Press, 2013), 68. By the time
of the Third Population Census in 1982, the Han population had
increased by a further 430,000, making them the majority population.
This is in part due to the policy of “filling the borders by migration.”
11. Bernard Vincent Olivier, The Implementation of China’s Nationality
Policy in the Northeastern Provinces (San Francisco: Mellen Research
University Press, 1993), 151.
12. Many Koreans had been forced to migrate to Manchuria to work
on Japanese-owned land or in Japanese-owned factories. Those
184 ROWAN PEASE
unsympathetic to the communist government chose to return to South

Korea at the end of the war. For the history of the Chinese–Korean
population in the years after 1945, see Olivier, The Implementation of
China’s Nationality Policy.
13. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 223.
14. From March 1967 to July 1968, the Yŏnbyŏn ilbo was replaced by the
nationally compiled Sinhwasa chŏnmun.
15. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution.
16. Interview with a former conservative faction (baohuang pai) member,
Yanji, March 16, 2012.
17. Rowan Pease, “Yanbian Songs: Musical Expressions of Identity
amongst Chinese Koreans” (PhD thesis, University of London, 2001),
158–159.
18. Olivier, The Implementation of China’s Nationality Policy, 148.
19. Ibid., 96.
20. YBRB, July 19 and 26, 1969; YBIB, July 29, 1969.
21. This Maoist slogan first appeared in 1956. See Mittler, Dangerous
Tunes, 271, 285–301.
22. Pease, Yanbian Songs, 131–132.
23. Interview with Kim Pongho, April 2010. Officials closely examined
his two Mao praise songs “Yanbian renmin re’ai Mao Zhuxi” (Yanbian
People Love Chairman Mao) and “Hong t’aiyang zhao bianjiang”
(The Red Sun Shines on the Border) for such contamination before
approving them for national dissemination.
24. These poetic forms were associated with traditional literati elites and
their courtesans. They are set to slow fixed melodies, and are heav-
ily ornamented. See Hae-kyung Um, “Classical Music: Vocal,” in
Music of Korea, edited by Byong Won Lee and Yong-Shik Lee (Seoul:
KTPAC, 2007), 39–46.
25. Kim Ch’anghŭi, “Chungguk Chosŏnjok p’ansori yesul paljŏn taehan
koch’al” (Outline of the Development of Chinese Korean p’ansori),
Yishu diantang (Palace of Arts) 78 (2010): 16.
26. A northeastern Chinese opera form. The title of the Chinese play was
Hong yimei 乊⦐⥡į
27. Interview with Ri Kŭmdŏk, Yanji city, July 3, 1999.
28. Kim Munja, the most accomplished traditional vocalist, died in Yanji
hospital in July 1967 of undefined causes. I was told that “nobody
would care for her” as she was a class enemy. See Pease, Yanbian
Songs, 165.
29. “Chedi zalan minzu wenhua xuetonglun: Ping laoyiren zuotanhui”
(Thoroughly Pulverize Ethnic Culture Blood Lineage Theory: A
Criticism of the Old Artist Talks), YBRB, July 26, 1969.
30. Ch’oe Sundŏk, “Ŭmaksa” (Music History), in Yesulsa (History of
Art), edited by Pukkyŏng taehak Chosŏn munhwa yŏn’guso (Seoul
taehak ch’ulp’anbu, 1994), 184.
31. I could find none in newspapers of 1967 or 1968, and no news of

any cultural activities locally, apart from a picture of women danc-
ing with drums at the establishment of the revolutionary commit-
tee. There were just six songs published in Yanbian ribao in 1969,
all locally composed by workers. Two were Mao praise songs, three
were settings of Mao quotations and a directive, and one a slogan
song, “Dadao Suxiu, dadao xinshahuang (Destroy Soviet Revisionism,
Destroy the New Tsar),” January 4, February 24 and 25, March 12,
and April 19, 1969.
32. “Changyi shu” (Proposal), YBRB, September 18, 1970.
33. YBRB, Zhongguo Chaoxianzu yinyue wenhuashi, 229.
34. Interview, Huang Yusuk, Helong, March 2013.
35. Newspapers reported a North Korean provincial delegation visiting
Changchun in September 1970, for which local musicians performed
(interview with An Kungmin, July 1999). Later, on September 26,
1972, YBRB reported performances of the Ryanggang Province Art
Troupe in Yanji, and carried a review by Kim Pongho.
36. YBRB, September 26, 1972.
37. YBRB, July 16, 1971.
38. YBRB, April 25, 1972; September 26, 1972.
in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts: In the People’s
Republic of China, edited by Bonnie MacDougall and Paul Clark
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 144–196; Clark, Chinese
Cultural Revolution.
40. Yŏnbyŏn munye 1972, 4.
41. YBRB, September 7, 1974.
42. In fact, there is one scene of acrobatic dancing in the original opera,
which I discuss later.
43. For a detailed description of the 1964 play and the yangbanxi, see
Rosemary A. Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender
and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Leiden:
Brill, 2010).
44. Dai, Yangbanxi, 195–196.
45. YBRB, March 8, 1972.
46. Ryonggangsong (Song of the Dragon River). (Yŏngil: Yŏnbyŏn inmin
ch’ulpansa, 1972).
47. For instance, “Wuchan jieji xianjinfenzi de guanghui xingxiang” (A
Radiant Image of Proletarian Progressives) by Commune member Jia
Changlu, YBRB, March 26. See also March 3, 7, and 18, 1972.
48. See, for example, YBRB and YBIB, September 19, 1972.
49. Interview with team members, and with Kim Ch’anghŭi, a singer in
the performance and a scholar of ch’anggŭk, Yanji, March 28, 2013.
50. Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, 64.
51. The other advisor, Kim Sŏngmin 慹⢘㮹, was a vocal director at the
Song-and-Dance Troupe as well as a singer and composer. He later
186 ROWAN PEASE
published articles on changdan and so may have had some input on

this aspect, but it was the other two researchers whom Hŏ’s widow
recalled helping at this time.
52. Kim 2010. In addition to the musicians already mentioned, those
present included Kim Songmin慹⢘㮹, Ko Chasong 檀⫸㗇, Ch’oe
Sammyŏng Ⲽᶱ㖶, Kim Chin 慹暯, Kim Changhǔi 慹㖴佚, Ch’oe
Suman, and Kim Yŏngha 慹≯㱛.
53. Pease, Yanbian Songs, 172.
54. No author, Mo Chusŏk ŭi hyŏngmyŏng munye rosŏn ttara kyesok
munye hyŏngmyŏng ŭl chal haja: Chŏn chu chŏnŏp munye ganch’e
hoeyŏn tae hoe chongyŏl (Continue to Follow Chairman Mao’s
Artistic Road and Implement Artistic Revolution: Summary of the
Prefectural Concourse of Professional Artistic Groups), Yŏnbyŏn
munye 11 (1974): 4–8.
55. A northeastern Chinese quyi form performed by two people.
56. Jilin ribao, December 15, 1974.
57. “Wosheng wenyi diaoyan shengli mu” (The Successful Closing of the
Provincial Arts Research Assembly), Jilin ribao, December 30, 1974.
58. “Struggle at the Sluice-gate (Zhashang fengyun)” was performed
nightly during December 16–24, 1974, in the Workers’ Palace of
Arts, Changchun, and then for a further seven nights at the hall of the
Province Hotel (Sheng bingguan litang) Jilin ribao, December 15,
22, and 30, 1974.
59. Jilin ribao, January 29, 1975.
60. Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, lists three such conventions, 77,
84, 107.
61. Interviews with Ch’ŏn, July 1999, April 2011, April 2013.
62. Renmin Ribao, March 19, 1975.
63. YBRB, December 1975.
64. Interview, Beijing, April 2011.
65. Hŏ Wŏnsik, Kot p’inŭn uri sallim: Hŏ Wŏnsik chakkokjip (Blossoming
Lives: Collected Works of Hŏ Wŏnsik) (Yanji: Yanbian renmin chu-
banshe, 1982).
66. This tragic opera, based on a traditional Korean love story, won the
highest prize (youxiu jumu jiang) at a National Opera Trial Show
(Quanguo geju quanmo dahui) in Zhuzhou in November 1990. See
Zhongguo Chaoxianzu yinyue wenhuashi, 291.
PA RT I I I
Lineages and Legacies: Cultural

Revolution Soundscapes beyond
the Mao Era
C H A P T ER 9
Musical-Dramatic Experimentation in
the Yangbanxi : A Case for Precedence
in The Great Wall
John Winzenburg
The yangbanxi “model dramas” were intended by their creators

and supporters to revolutionize China’s musical-dramatic genres.
Peking opera was central to that effort because it was deemed to
be the most nationally symbolic and important genre in staging
class struggle on the literary-artistic front.1 However, as we now
consider this period in retrospect, we see how generic meaning
changes over time, where the experimentation of the yangbanxi is
part of a larger trajectory beyond Peking opera alone. The inclusion
of ballets Baimao Nü (White-Haired Girl) and Hongse Niangzijun
(Red Detachment of Women) and the “Revolutionary Symphonic
Music” Shajiabang among the main eight works is only one indica-
tion of how the yangbanxi associated with Jiang Qing were novel
in their specific blending of elements from Chinese and Western
opera, dance, and music. Paul Clark points out how “cultural devel-
opments of 1966–1976 began before 1949,” and that experimenta-
tion of the yangbanxi had precedents in works that appeared before
the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).2 In
the decades since the Cultural Revolution, Chinese performing
arts have continued the path of experimentation, though diverse
and divergent from the yangbanxi paradigm, even if Peking Opera
itself no longer resonates as China’s national-cultural symbol to the
degree it did before 1976.
190 JOHN WINZENBURG
This chapter discusses how experimental approaches in The Great

Wall (entitled Meng Jiang Nü in Chinese) by Shanghai-based,
Russian–Jewish composer Aaron Avshalomov and his Chinese col-
leagues preceded yangbanxi efforts in important ways. The music-
drama gained great attention in China for its numerous high-profile
performances in 1945–1946. However, it was ignored by the PRC
establishment after 1949, which instead valorized the operatic prede-
cessor to Baimao Nü created in Yan’an in the mid-1940s. The Great
Wall has only recently gained recognition for its important contribu-
tion to modern Chinese music-drama.3 But if, as Richard Kraus con-
tends, the importance of China’s theatrical reform became epitomized
in the yangbanxi,4 I would further argue that the experimental pro-
cesses at play in the yangbanxi find their precedent in The Great Wall
at a critical intersection of politics, genre, and national culture. The
cross-generic experimentation seen in these and other works must
therefore be viewed against a more significant backdrop of Chinese
cultural transformation.
Precedence in my discussion refers to a synthetic cultural framework
that, in time, forms an expansive political-generic trajectory related to
musical-theatrical reform. “Trajectory” here does not imply a prede-
termined linear or temporal path in terms of direct influence only.
Rather, it suggests a discursive reform process that is partly causal and
partly intertextual. Michael Klein observes that “any crossing of texts
is an instance of intertextuality, while within the potentially unlimited
range of a particular intertext, any form of agency in which an author
borrows from or alludes to another text is a more narrow instance
of intertextuality called influence.”5 Klein follows Mikhail Bakhtin’s
recognition of agency in the creation of literary genres, such as the
novel, amid the wider sociohistorical environment.6 The Great Wall
took shape at a pivotal historical moment in semicolonial Shanghai
and contributed to the later yangbanxi as a direct and indirect prec-
edent. My discussion of precedence here sees both agency (influence)
and intertextuality at play in the realm of music-drama via the con-
struction of a politicized hybrid genre, as seen in the Avshalomov and
yangbanxi works.
Designating the linkage between these works as “politicized” is
vital. Politicized hybrid genres do not merely deal with the political
act of audience reception,7 but are virtually driven by political envi-
ronments of crisis, struggle, and power relationships. This chapter
describes a historical linkage in the ideological and generic restruc-
turing of Chinese musical drama via the pursuit of political-aesthetic
goals: namely, the eclectic mixture of Chinese and Western generic
MUSICALDRAMATIC EXPERIMENTATION 191
features, within the guise of artistic modernity, that have simultane-

ously promoted China’s national strengthening and various ideologi-
cally encoded subject positions over the past century. The eight core
yangbanxi share key aesthetic and ideological frameworks with The
Great Wall, even if the generic specifics differ. Together, they reveal
that, while Avshalomov and his Chinese colleagues may not have had
a direct influence on the yangbanxi creators, they were not isolated
historically. I suggest that the relationship instead forms a political-ge-
neric trajectory, reflecting the historical forces that have been present
in China over the past century, and continue with new works today.8
In my discussion, I first compare the mixed Chinese–Western,
musical-dramatic generic features used in The Great Wall with the
yangbanxi works Baimao Nü and Shajiabang. Here, I consider two
pervasive forces that are common to The Great Wall and all of the eight
main yangbanxi: the main “menu” of musical-theatrical features from
which artistic creators selected—nonuniformly—in producing large-
scale works; and the emergence of symphonicization as a structural
aesthetic feature. Second, I address the political factors of party ideol-
ogy, factionalism, and nationalism that drove these generic-aesthetic
formulations of different generations, as I explore how Avshalomov’s
work may link to the yangbanxi creators. I thereby position The Great
Wall as one significant urban precedent to the yangbanxi within a
political genre of symphonicized modern Chinese musical dramas.
Experimentation in T HE G REAT WALL :

Cultural and Generic Blending
The Great Wall was a music-drama in six acts and a prologue—over
two hours in length—that adapted the Chinese myth of Meng Jiang
Nü, who sacrifices herself at the Great Wall in front of Emperor Qin
Shihuang to avenge the cruel death of her husband, Wan Xiliang. The
production was performed by a very large cast from the Zhongguo
Gewujushe (Chinese Ballet and Musical Drama Association), which
was secretly backed by the communist underground, and the Shanghai
Municipal Orchestra. Apart from Avshalomov and foreign orchestral
members, it was fully financed, produced, and performed by Chinese
participants, with Cao Xueqing playing Meng Jiang Nü, Cheng
Shaoyu as Emperor Qin Shihuang, and Qiu Yucheng as Wan Xiliang.
Its first short run in Shanghai, from November 25 to December 2,
1945, attracted sudden widespread attention among Chinese and
non-Chinese alike in local cultural and political circles.9 By March
1946, it was revived in isolated performances, before receiving longer
192 JOHN WINZENBURG
runs in Nanjing and Shanghai later that year. In all, it was performed
approximately 30 times in front of noteworthy artistic and political
figures of the day, including top Kuomintang and American military
figures and foreign dignitaries. Plans to take the production to the
United States were abandoned as China’s civil war intensified, and
Avshalomov left China in 1947.
Avshalomov wrote The Great Wall while confined in Japanese-
occupied Shanghai during the latter years of World War II.10 He
had grown up on the Russian–Chinese border viewing and listening
to Peking opera, and he spent many years researching Chinese folk
music before writing a number of symphonic and staged works that
blended Chinese and Western forms.11 His works were performed by
the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra from the early 1930s. During his
17 years in Shanghai, he formed important close relationships with
Shen Zhibai, Wei Zhongle, Mei Lanfang, Tian Han, Guo Muoro,
Xian Xinghai, Nie Er, Jiang Chunfang, and Zhou Xinfang. Although
he was not Chinese himself, he shared their dedication to modern-
izing Chinese music and theater, and The Great Wall was his most
elaborate effort in this respect.
Joshua Goldstein has described Chinese efforts at Peking opera
reform from the late Qing dynasty to the Republican period just pre-
ceding the Japanese occupation.12 Avshalomov’s compositions were
part of the continuing reform debate. He was regarded by his Chinese
colleagues, critics, and audiences with admiration for providing bold
and stimulating experiments, even if his efforts were accepted or
rejected in varying degrees.13 However, the composer was careful not
to classify The Great Wall as a “modern Peking Opera,” instead sub-
titling it as a “Chinese Music Drama” (yinyue gewuju). Avshalomov
was fully aware of the distinctions, and his intention was not to reform
Peking opera, but rather to replace it with a new synthetic theatrical
form that coincided with his experiments in creating new Chinese
music. His nontheatrical symphonic works were equally groundbreak-
ing, and he approached the musical-dramatic experiment as part of his
overall effort to write modern Chinese artistic works.
A closer look at the main features of The Great Wall reveals
expansive generic interplay. Dramatically, the plot was adapted from
Chinese myth, and it was performed in spoken and sung Mandarin.
The manner of spoken text delivery was both realistic and declaimed,
in the manner of Chinese opera. The sung text, however, included
only one “aria”—the folk tune Meng Jiang Nü, used in place of a
Chinese opera aria. Instead, the Chinese chorus is given the primary
singing role in every act, but representing highly varied dramatic
roles, including market sellers, forest trees, ghostly spirits, Tartar sol-
diers, and the mass of laborers building the Great Wall. The scenery
was elaborate and lighting used extreme effects to depict the terror
of Meng Jiang’s journey through the forest at night. The costumes
were actually obtained secondhand from Chinese opera troupes, but
makeup did not follow Peking opera conventions. Dance—both in
Chinese and Western forms—was given great importance, while styl-
ized gestures and poses from Chinese opera were included. In certain
scenes, the dramatic action proceeds via accompanied pantomime.
According to the composer, these dramatic features are all musically
driven, even when music is not heard.14 This is because the work was
conceived first and foremost as a symphonic-dramatic work. At times,
musical breaks occur for unaccompanied dialogue, while at others the
dramatic action, mood, and emotions of the characters are depicted in
the orchestral score. The large Western orchestra is utilized in the com-
bined manner of incidental music, melodrama (where spoken dialogue
occurs over descriptive music), and film music. Avshalomov had been
one of the first composers to mix Chinese and Western instruments on
the concert stage, but he does not use Chinese melodic instruments
here. Instead, he only adds a few Chinese percussion instruments
within the orchestral battery. However, the Western instruments are
used at points to mimic Chinese instrumental idioms. As Avshalomov
explains, the melodic-harmonic scheme is derived mainly from the
Chinese pentatonic scale, employing stylized Chinese motives, on the
one hand, and highly dissonant non-Chinese motives, on the other.15
In this way, the musical language differs greatly from what Barbara
Mittler has called “pentatonic Romanticism.”16 Instead, Avshalomov
adapts pentatonicism to an eclectic mixture of late-Romantic, impres-
sionist, and early modernist styles to depict changes in the dramatic
action and emotion from moment to moment.
A recording of The Great Wall is unfortunately not available in its
full orchestral version.17 The publicly available orchestral score, piano
reduction, synopsis, and acting script are all in English versions, with
only partial inclusion of the original Chinese dialogue (in Romanized
script) or Russian translation. Equally important is the lack of detailed
indications and photographs available regarding stage blocking,
dance, and pantomime gestures.18 However, the expansive orches-
tral score—over 300 pages, all handwritten by the composer—and
relatively limited dialogue appearing in the script reveal how music,
dialogue, and gesture intertwined in the staged performance, with
symphonic music at the forefront. One passage of a scene from Act
2 exemplifies the rapidly shifting musical styles and dramatic effects
194 JOHN WINZENBURG
found throughout. In this scene, Meng Jiang and her beloved Wan
Xiliang have just been given permission to marry, even though Wan is
fleeing from the Emperor’s soldiers. The wedding attendants appear
for the ceremony, carrying wedding robes and other items as a few
musicians play the wedding music, in which a characteristic Chinese
folk tune is heavily embellished by the large orchestra.
The ceremony is scarcely over, however, when clamoring voices
are heard outside. Hoarse cries of the Emperor’s soldiers call out:
“Open the door! We will have the bridegroom Wan Xiliang living or
dead!” Meng Jiang’s father hides Wan in the next room just as the
soldiers enter.
The head soldier interrogates the father, saying, “By order of our great
Shi Huangdi! Where is Wan Xiliang? He must be found at once!” To
this the terrified father stutters and replies: “I . . . I don’t know.” “Don’t
know?” barks the soldier, “Then we will search the house ourselves!”
The soldiers proceed to search the house, and they soon return,
bringing Wan out in chains. Meng Jiang is mortified, and desperately
tries to pull him from the soldiers’ grasp. Wan says to her, “Meng
Jiang, my bride, marry another man who could make you happy.” But
Meng Jiang refuses to let go, saying, “No, I am your wife. Even death
cannot part us now.” She bursts into tears as the soldier pushes her
aside and issues his command to his comrades: “To the wall with him!”
The curtain falls as the stage freezes in a tableau (see figure 9.1).
From this brief introduction, we begin to ascertain the wider aes-
thetic objectives that Avshalomov and his colleagues pursued in The
Great Wall, namely:
● Creating an experimental music-drama that is monumental in

terms of length, generic variety, historical significance, and per-
forming forces
● Setting a familiar/accessible Chinese plot in the national spoken
language
● Subjectively maintaining elements of Chinese opera
● Eclectically blending dramatic, dance, and musical genres in
which Chinese–Western, and traditional–modern interaction
produces new artistic languages
● Scoring the orchestra as the central musical medium for dramati-
zation, resulting in the symphonicization of the modern Chinese
music-drama.
Table 9.1 highlights some of the main musical and theatrical elements
at play in The Great Wall in pursuit of these objectives. (The highlighted
Figure 9.1 The Great Wall, Act II, No. 17, “The Capture of Wan.”
All rights reserved by the Estate of Aaron Avshalomov (BMI). Reprinted by
permission of the American Composers Alliance, Inc., exclusive publisher;
http://www.composers.com.
areas in bold text will inform the following discussion of the yangbanxi.)
These elements were selected from a “menu” of generic options that
were available to Avshalomov involving plot, text, and singing; scenery
and lighting, costumes and makeup, dance and stage gestures, musical
dramatization, and instrumentation; and core musical features of tex-
ture, melody, and harmony. The specific combination was the product
of artistic intent rather than one prescribed by convention.
196 JOHN WINZENBURG
Table 9.1 Musical and theatrical elements in The Great Wall.
Plot, text, & Mandarin, from Chinese myth—“Heroic tragedy-triumph”

characterization – Distinction between positive-negative characters
– Expanded choral characterization
Spoken text Mixture of spoken and declaimed Chinese
Solo singing 1 “aria”—Chinese folk tune (Meng Jiang Nü)
Choral singing Western antiphonal/canon/polyphonic—Expanded role
Scenery & lighting Modern/Western theater
Costumes & makeup Chinese operatic costumes; non-Peking Opera makeup
Dance Stylized Chinese operatic poses with Chinese folk dance and
Western choreography
Gestures Mixes Chinese operatic gestures with Western pantomime
Musical dramatization Symphonic—composed music drives all dramatic aspects
– Programmatic–mood music: incidental, melodrama,
film music
Instrumentation Full Western symphony orchestra; includes Chinese
percussion
– Sometimes “mimicking” Chinese instruments
– Continuous accompaniment
– Frequent breaks for text delivery
Musical texture Western homophony/polyphony; counterpoint
Melodic materials Composed, Chinese motif-based, 1 folk tune
Harmony Western late Romantic & early modernist
– Heavily chromatic and dissonant
– Pentatonic/modal foundation
Experimentation and Reincarnation

in Three YANGBANXI Works
These initial conclusions serve as a platform for addressing dominant
aesthetic objectives that took shape three decades later during the
Cultural Revolution. A comparison of Avshalomov’s approach to those
used in three representative yangbanxi works reveals important simi-
larities. Table 9.2 analyzes the same “menu” of dramatic, musical, and
dance elements from table 9.1 that are found in the “Revolutionary
Modern Ballet” Baimao Nü and both opera and symphonic versions
of Shajiabang.19 I have chosen these works because they encompass
the three main genres represented in the core eight yangbanxi works,
and they adequately represent the main (though by no means all) fea-
tures present for purposes of comparison.
The specific yangbanxi elements demonstrate parallels to The Great
Wall in both their variety (non-highlighted areas) and commonality
(highlighted areas). The areas highlighted in italicized text indicate

consistencies among the three works that differ from The Great Wall.
The areas highlighted in bold text indicate similarities among the three
works and to The Great Wall. Those in italicized text demonstrate how
the yangbanxi took up modern historical plots and characters, focused
on solo singing (even in a dance drama),20 and included mixtures of
Chinese and Western instruments as an intrinsic scoring element.
The larger collection of non-highlighted elements, however, under-
scores an even greater lack of uniformity among all works under consid-
eration in terms of spoken text, choral singing, dance and gesticulation,
and other fundamental musical and dramatic features. This subjective
variation from a common set of choices constitutes an important
shared attribute with the earlier Avshalomov work. This is because the
basis for selection is directly related to balancing Chinese–Western and
traditional–modern cultural markers in the pursuit of musical-theatrical
novelty based on the subject position of the artistic creators. In other
words, from one standpoint, the yangbanxi and Avshalomov works
would form part of the century-long trajectory of Chinese musical-
dramatic reform precisely because they show a high degree of individ-
ual subjectivity in their negotiation of elements from a common menu.
Since this menu incorporates a significant presence of both operatic
and nonoperatic genres,21 I would contend that, even though Peking
opera had been central to the question of dramatic reform, ultimately
the yangbanxi as a whole were concerned with wider generic-aesthetic
possibilities. Avshalomov displayed foresight in this respect.22
Equally significant are features that bind the works from the different
eras. I have highlighted in bold text the elements that are common to
the three yangbanxi examples and The Great Wall. For example, all of
them used Mandarin texts and depicted some form of heroic triumph as
a form of overcoming historical oppression. Musically, the anhemitonic
pentatonic scale is featured, albeit to varying degrees, as a prominent
national-sonic marker, tying the newer genre to traditional forms.
Of all the common features, I find the emergence of symphoni-
cization to be the most significant because of its role in achieving
monumentality and depicting heroism. Monumentality in this case
refers to the projection of power via imaginary, sonic, and (in the
case of the “Revolutionary Symphonic Music” version of Shajiabang,
where the orchestra itself is center stage) visual effects. The Western
symphony orchestra, whether alone or in combination with Chinese
instruments, served this function in the yangbanxi in all three ways
(described below) with larger numbers and contrasting instrumen-
tation to the older theatrical forms. In terms of dramatization, it
Table 9.2 Musical and theatrical elements in three Yangbanxi works.
“Revolutionary Modern “Revolutionary Modern “Revolutionary

Peking Opera” Ballet” Symphonic Music”
Menu of Elements Shajiabang Bai Mao Nü Shajiabang
Plot, text, & – Mandarin – Mandarin – Mandarin

characterization – Modern historical plot/tale – Modern historical plot/tale – Modern historical plot/tale
– “Heroic triumph” – “Heroic triumph” – Added choral text
– Three prominences – Three prominences – “Heroic triumph”
Spoken text – Spoken Chinese – None – Spoken Chinese
Solo singing – Arias/duet/cycles/trios – Arias/duet/songs/ – Arias/duet/solo-choral
– Peking/Chinese opera style recitative – Peking/Chinese opera style
– Folk-bel canto style
Choral singing – None – Expanded role – Expanded role
– One unison male passage – Bel canto/folk bel canto – Bel canto/folk bel canto
– Homophony/unison – Multipart Peking Opera/bel canto
– Antiphonal – Homophonic/unison/
– Martial/Greek/ 2-part
Western operatic – Antiphonal
– Homophonic/unison
– Martial/Greek/
Western operatic
Scenery & lighting – Modern/Western theater – Modern/Western theater – None/concertized
Costumes & – Modern/realism – Modern/realism – None/concertized
makeup – Non-Peking Opera makeup – Non-Peking Opera makeup
Dance & – No dance – Ballet – None
acrobatics – Stylized operatic poses – Chinese opera stylization
– Acrobatics (limited)
Gestures – Stylized/modified operatic – Mixed – Concertized
opera-pantomime
Musical – Symphonic—operatic – Symphonic – Symphonic–operatic/cantata
dramatization – Programmatic—mood – Programmatic—mood – Programmatic—mood
– Literal/accompanimental – Thematic transformation – Composed Chinese & Western opera with symphonic
– Composed Chinese & – Composed/ interpolations
Western opera based folk-tune-based
– Incidental
Instrumentation – Chinese chamber – Full orchestra (Western) – Full orchestra (Western)
orchestra(20) – Chinese solo instruments – Chinese instruments (accompany arias with Western
– Peking – Chinese percussion instruments)
Opera consort (19) – Some mixed Chinese–Western orchestra passages
– Full orchestra (Chinese– – Chinese percussion
Western—2 types) (15)
– Chinese percussion (3)
Musical texture – Heterophony/ – Homophony/ – Homophony/polyphony
homophony polyphony – Choral heterophony
– Counterpoint – Counterpoint
Melodic materials – Chinese/Peking Operatic – Folk/folk-based – Chinese/Peking operatic
– Composed – Composed – Composed
– Chinese motivic
Harmony – Pentatonic/diatonic/triadic – Pentatonic/diatonic – Pentatonic/diatonic/triadic
– Nonfunctional/little (Pentatonic Romanticism) – Some pentatonic Romanticism (in interpolated
functional – Coloristic chromaticism sections)
– Functional/early Romantic – Some functional
200 JOHN WINZENBURG
expanded the timbral possibilities for programmatically depicting wide

ranges of moods, emotions, events, and scenic portraits—especially
via the prominence of militaristic brass.
An excerpt from Scene 8 of the “revolutionary modern Peking
opera” Shajiabang demonstrates how symphonicization extends
beyond an accompanimental or ornamental role, becoming a struc-
tural element, a mood provider, and a dramatic respondent to the vocal
line. In one three-minute segment from the end of the Scene 8 inter-
lude, four different sets of instruments—used systematically through-
out the opera—musically prepare for the climactic surprise attack
by Communist soldiers on the enemy-held village.23 The segment
begins in measure 3724 with a mixed orchestra of Chinese–Western
instruments (instrumental set type 1) playing a six-bar diminuendo
with tremolo strings to set the hushed nighttime landscape, and the
Peking opera percussion section plays alone (set type 2, m. 43) as two
People’s Liberation Army scouts appear surreptitiously. The scouts
perform a dance to the accompaniment of a small Chinese chamber
orchestra (set type 3, m. 48) with a Western cello and double bass,
which depicts their hidden reconnaissance work, before the larger
mixed orchestra re-enters at m. 1 of the next section, “Feibing qixi
Shajiabang” (Flying Soldier Raid on Shajiabang). Its militaristic brass
signals the arrival of hero Guo Jianguang. He sings one passage in the
style of accompanied recitative (m. 10), describing the serendipitous
nocturnal setting, followed by a transitional section (m. 13), first with
the large orchestra and then with the opera percussion alone as the
other soldiers enter (m. 25) in formation. Guo’s next aria entrance
(m. 31), announcing the favorable conditions for attack on the sleep-
ing village, is accompanied by the four sidajian (main accompanimen-
tal instruments—here the jinghu and jing erhu fiddles and the plucked
strings yueqin and xiao sanxian) that form one variation of the con-
sort used to accompany Peking opera (set type 4). They are supported
by triads in the orchestral strings, and the vocal line is punctuated by
sudden, short tutti responses from the orchestra25 (see figure 9.2).
Symphonicization, as shown here, is not merely a matter of scoring
for a large Western ensemble. In Shajiabang and the larger scheme of
yangbanxi, the Western orchestral principle serves as framework for
(1) expanding the Chinese consort into larger ensembles, (2) group-
ing Chinese and Western instruments together, either as ensemble
members or as solo instruments, (3) adding textures and harmony
to vocal-instrumental lines, (4) providing descriptive, instrumental
“characterization,” and (5) becoming an inherent part of the musical-
dramatic structure via overtures, interludes, phrasal punctuation, and
Figure 9.2 Shajiabang, Scene 8, No. 2, Mm. 25–37.
codas. I would thus suggest that symphonicization is one generic pil-

lar of the eight main yangbanxi, even if it is realized in different ways
and to varying degrees.
As mentioned above, Avshalomov’s work did not include melodic
Chinese instruments in The Great Wall—though they did appear on
stage in certain scenes. However, he was one of the first to combine
Chinese and Western instruments on the concert stage in his Piano
202 JOHN WINZENBURG
Concerto in G in 1936 and in a suite for erhu and orchestra in 1941.

This was before the main reforms in Chinese instrumental construction
took place in the mid-twentieth century, and concert reviews suggest
that projection and nonstandardized intonation were perceived as the
main challenges on the orchestral stage at that time.26 Avshalomov’s
overall concept of symphonicization preceded the yangbanxi in this
respect. Revisiting the list of five main aesthetic objectives from The
Great Wall above, then, we find significant overlap with the yang-
banxi in terms of (1) experimentation and monumentality, (2) plot
and language, (3) subjective use of Chinese operatic elements, (4)
eclectic blending of genres, and (5) symphonicization of the modern
Chinese music-drama.
Nationalism, Ideology, and Factionalism

in T HE G REAT WALL and YANGBANXI
If the aesthetic objectives of works from these different eras aligned in
key ways, there were also similarities in political factors. Hon-lun Yang
has highlighted the complex relationship between aesthetic decisions and
sociopolitical factors during the Cultural Revolution, reminding us how,
in many ways, “culture was merely used as a pretext for political strug-
gle and social change.”27 Consideration of the respective performance
backgrounds shows how generic similarities and differences between The
Great Wall and yangbanxi further translate into the modern Chinese
musical drama as a “political genre.” I do not argue that Avshalomov
himself composed The Great Wall as a pretext for political struggle.
However, most aspects of the conception, production, content, and
performance context of The Great Wall and the yangbanxi were highly
politicized in terms of nationalism, ideology, and factionalism.
Despite sometimes extreme ideological and aesthetic polarities, the
creators of these works from different political factions and eras pur-
sued a common goal: national strengthening via Chinese representation
with the adopted support of Western forms. These creators presumed a
high degree of tension and negotiation of Chinese–Western traditions
because nationalism had to be both internally and externally represented
due to historical circumstances. Internally, political goals were met by
establishing familiarity with domestic listeners and viewers through
Chinese generic references. Externally, works needed to portray a China
that was strong, accessible, and even exotic. A projection of strength
to the outside world immediately reflected itself onto the national self-
esteem, which was also useful for domestic political positioning. The
depiction of “new strength” in the face of autocratic or colonial adversity
was a major impetus for both The Great Wall and yangbanxi creators.
Thus they opted for expansive scales of production, including larger
orchestras, choruses, lighting/scenic effects, and generic interplay. The
Mandarin Chinese texts used in all the original works fortified plots that
mainly involved themes of national-historic significance.
They also promoted class consciousness. We are familiar with the
professed ideology of the yangbanxi to valorize the proletariat, erad-
icate feudalism and bourgeois capitalism, and reject traditions that
were based on superstitions, myths, and religions. They sought the
elimination of old operatic roles relating to, in Jiang Qing’s words,
“emperors, princes, generals, ministers, scholars, and beauties.”28
Their supporters also claimed to promote art for the masses. Backed
by Shanghai’s underground Communist Party, The Great Wall shared
many of these ideals. But some features did not fully conform to the
ideological principles of the yangbanxi. Rather, it seemed to strad-
dle the line between themes that were deemed “revolutionary” and
“counter-revolutionary revisionist” as professed by Jiang Qing and
yangbanxi proponents during the Cultural Revolution.
The Meng Jiang Nü plot was selected during China’s Republican
era as an allegorical attack on the Kuomingtang (KMT). The pro-
duction—under threat of surveillance and harassment by KMT secret
police before its premiere29—did not have the leeway to openly depict
KMT corruption, oppression, and ineptitude in the manner witnessed
after 1949. Nonetheless, its ancient mythological origin may have dis-
qualified it from use as a “model work” of the 1960s. In the yangbanxi,
Jiang Qing instead stressed “operas on revolutionary contemporary
themes which reflect real life in the . . . years since the founding of the
Chinese People’s Republic and which create images of contemporary
revolutionary heroes on our operatic stage,” even if “historical operas
portraying the life and struggles of the people before our Party came
into being” were also deemed necessary.30 The Great Wall was class
conscious and anti-feudal, but it did not so clearly distinguish positive
and negative characters, which was a requirement of the yangbanxi.
For example, it portrayed Emperor Qin Shihuang as cruel and driven
by spirits who visited him in dreams, but it also cast Meng Jiang as a
privileged beauty who turns to courage and cunning only when her
newlywed groom is taken away in chains. She then braves the per-
ilous journey to the Great Wall to find her husband, Wan Xiliang,
encountering an endless forest of “ghosts, goblins, and all kinds of
evil spirits” along the way.31 Then her epic struggle is condensed into
a series of scenes from Act III, Scene 2 and dramatized by means of
dancing, pantomime, and programmatic music. This is enhanced by
204 JOHN WINZENBURG
phantasmagoric scenery, costuming, and lighting effects. In the pro-

cess, she is transformed into a cunning, hardened heroine, prepared
to sacrifice herself for the sake of her husband’s soul—an allegorical
reference to the soul of the nation.
Meng Jiang’s courageous characterization is not without later par-
allel. Hon-lun Yang has written of the “new womanhood” embodied
in the female protagonists of the yangbanxi. Indeed, Chinese audi-
ences witnessed a similar journey and transformation in the character
of Xi-er from the ballet Baomao Nü. In a series of segments from
Scene 4 of the ballet, Xi-er braves a perilous sojourn alone in the
mountains, battling wild creatures, wind, and snow. Her successful
struggle to survive virtually turns her hair white. But whereas Meng
Jiang’s arrival at the Great Wall ends in tragedy and martyrdom—the
music-drama was written during the Japanese occupation and before
China’s Civil War—Xi-er’s transformation heralds her return to a “lib-
erated” village and the satisfaction of seeing her former persecutors
executed. The creators of Baimao Nü had the hindsight of victory on
their side, and their protagonists could highlight the triumph of the
Communist Party.
In The Great Wall, Avshalomov and his backers were trying to pro-
mote modernism in the vein of “high art,” even as they espoused a
thinly veiled political narrative. Act 5 shows a gruesome montage: con-
scripted laborers are whipped and starved as they build the Great Wall,
minor revolts are crushed mercilessly, and Wan Xiliang is entombed
alive. Ultimately, Meng Jiang sacrifices herself at the Great Wall after
deceiving the love-struck Emperor so that her husband can receive a
proper burial. Heroism by martyrdom was not the ultimate ideological
pillar of the yangbanxi, which instead insisted on tangible, if not brutal,
victory. But professions of loyalty to Chairman Mao in climactic arias,
such as those by Guo Jianguang (Scene 5–2) and Sister Aqing as else-
where (Scene 6–3) in Shajiabang, got equated to theistic statements of
faith. In comparison, where The Great Wall may have offended Cultural
Revolutionaries in its superstitious references, it compensated with
ancient historical realism. Mao Zedong and his cultural aides had often
discarded ancient historical themes to distance themselves from the ide-
ological trappings that were associated with older forms. The Great Wall
actually embraced the ancient to counter those trappings by exposing
their source. By criticizing the ruthlessness of Emperor Qin Shihuang,
it indirectly struck at those in Republican China who adopted the same
tyrannical tendencies. The yangbanxi not only demonized the defeated
KMT, Japanese, and feudalistic enemies more directly, but also made
demonization a political-generic pillar in each of their plots.
As essays in On the Revolution of Peking Opera demonstrate, the

most zealous tirades could be used to justify subjective generic prefer-
ences and to gain partisan advantage against rival factions within the
Communist Party. In one translated, reprinted editorial, the author
lauds Comrade Jiang Qing while attacking those who “worked closely
with the top counter-revolutionary revisionists in the former Peking
Municipal Party Committee and Zhou Yang, Qi Yanming, Xia Yan,
Lin Mohan, Tian Han, Zhang Geng and company to use old Peking
opera to serve a counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism.”32
Apart from the convenience of using ideological jargon to vilify
personal enemies, Jiang and her supporters castigated those who
acknowledged any form of educational value in old operas, regard-
less of degree, as “capitalist roaders.” This editorial went so far as
to employ metaphors of embattlement to frame their assault, stating,
“we do want to capture the stronghold, to attack this most stubborn
‘fortress’ in theatrical art and to capture for the proletariat this most
closely guarded position of the bourgeois reactionary forces.”33
Two decades before this editorial, The Great Wall experienced two
types of factionalism that were related to Cultural Revolution rivalries.
First, it was caught in interparty factionalism, as civil strife and early
Cold War positioning quickly followed Japan’s defeat. Impresario
Jiang Chunfang had, in 1939, been assigned by the underground
Communist Party committee “to contact, help and support Aaron
Avshalomov in every way.”34 Together, according to Li Hexie, they
established the Chinese Ballet and Musical Drama Association that
produced The Great Wall. However, the production was coopted
by the same KMT that it had intended to criticize shortly after its
premiere, partly due to US intervention. US Lieutenant-General A.
C. Wedemeyer was posted in Shanghai immediately after World War
II. He attended one of the early Great Wall performances and was
reportedly so impressed that he asked the producers to formulate a
plan for a US tour. Wedemeyer took the plan with him on a visit to
Chongqing and presented it to Chiang Kai-shek, who immediately
passed it on to his wife, Soong Mei-Ling (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek), to
assume sponsorship.35
At the same time, Mei-Ling’s sister Soong Ching-Ling (Mme. Sun
Yat-sen), an opponent of her brother-in-law, also sponsored The Great
Wall in a pair of March 1946 performances for the benefit of her China
Welfare Fund. This created a dilemma for Avshalomov. The American
representatives were hoping in 1946 to forge a rapprochement between
Communists and Nationalists. At the same time, they planned to gar-
ner greater support for the KMT in the United States. It appears that
206 JOHN WINZENBURG
Avshalomov was being groomed for a role as cultural ambassador. If

he was to represent modern Chinese culture there (which a number
of Chinese objected to), he would need to declare Chinese citizenship
under KMT auspices.36 Under such circumstances, it is unclear how
Avshalomov and Great Wall producers planned to tour the United
States with KMT sponsorship, even as they maintained their original
ties to the underground Communist Party. However, the composer
felt himself increasingly caught between contending KMT, CCP, and
US expectations.37 Ultimately, Communist gains in the countryside
forced cancellation of the US tour, and pressure from KMT generals
grew on Avshalomov. He perceived himself to be in such danger that
he left China for the United States permanently in October 1947.
The Great Wall was summarily forgotten until the “rehabilitation” of
some of its Chinese proponents, such as Jiang Chunfang, following
the Cultural Revolution.
Details of Avshalomov’s Communist Party connections remain
opaque. Publicly available materials from the composer himself suggest
that he was primarily interested in developing a new form of Chinese
music-theater and surviving the uncertain political landscape as he
created professional opportunities for himself. Jiang Chunfang later
recalled, however, that while writing The Great Wall, “Avshalomov
wanted to slip out of Japanese-occupied Shanghai to the resistance
base of the Communist-led New Fourth Army in northern Jiangsu
province to compose and perform there. But because of stepped-up
enemy mopping-up campaigns he was unable to do so.”38
Further research is also necessary to determine the exact nature
of the relationship between the Chinese Ballet and Musical Drama
Association and the Communist Party. Yan’an was far from Shanghai,
and the post-1949 immortalization of the opera Baimao Nü (White-
Haired Girl), which was written in Yan’an and performed there just
months before The Great Wall premiere in 1945, gives some indica-
tion of the political distance between Shanghai-based and Shaanxi-
based party organs. The Yan’an opera was also experimental and
served as a predecessor to a 1950 film version and the later yangbanxi
ballet version. It has received numerous performances and had vari-
ous scores published in the PRC. In contrast, as Jiang Chunfang later
complained, The Great Wall was ignored by official PRC organs until
it staged a series of Avshalomov commemorative concerts in the mid-
1980s, including a number of scenes from the music-drama.39
However, there is evidence that The Great Wall was indirectly
related to inner-party (CCP) factionalism that occurred after 1949.
Before he left China, Avshalomov had come under KMT pressure
in part because of the public support The Great Wall received from
suspected opponents of the KMT. On the eve of the November
1945 premiere, over 30 well-known Chinese commentators of art
and literature wrote a collective review in a leading local newspaper
promoting the work. Shown below is a translation of the endorse-
ment, which illuminates some of the ideological underpinnings of the
Chinese artists who worked in proximity to The Great Wall.40 In the
third and fourth paragraphs, they address the allegory and oppres-
sive social conditions taken up by the work. The second paragraph
legitimizes the aesthetic and generic choices made in the production,
and the first paragraph acknowledges Avshalomov’s own fragile posi-
tion and provides vital defense against potential criticism of his non-
Chinese ethnicity.
Shanghai Cultural Community Endorses The Great Wall

“Meng Jiang Nü Cries in Search of her Husband at the Great Wall,”
“Men Jiang Nü’s Cry Brings Down the Great Wall,” and “Wan
Xiliang Builds the Great Wall” are all traditional Chinese family folk-
tales. Especially widespread is a tune called “Meng Jiang Nü Shieryue
Huaming” [Meng Jiang Nü’s December Nickname]. This folktale and
folktune have now been used by Mr. Avshalomov to create a six-act,
ten-scene music drama. Although Mr. Avshalomov is a Westerner, he is
an expert on Chinese music. He has researched Chinese music for over
thirty years and has composed dozens of Chinese symphonic works,
concertos, sonatas, operas, and pantomime dance dramas. He has
created a distinctive style of Chinese music based on Chinese melodies,
and we can say that his list of Chinese dance dramas, Chinese operas,
and Chinese music dramas have all made an important contribution to
Chinese music and theatre.
If theatre is a comprehensive art, then it can be said that music drama
is comprehensive theatre. The music drama The Great Wall [Men Jiang
Nü] is a blend of opera, dance drama, and modern [spoken] drama. As
a result, its performance is even more exacting than any single theatri-
cal type: It requires a symphony orchestra, a dance troupe, stage actors,
and a chorus of singers. For this reason, its [production] expenses are
enormous. However, this massive production is now finally being pre-
sented to public audiences.
The music of The Great Wall utilizes vivid colors to paint images of
civil disturbances, soldier brutality, Meng Jiang’s nightmarish struggle,
and the harsh cruelty against conscripted laborers building the wall.
They also depict the roughness of soldiers dancing wildly, the serenity
of Meng Jiang combing her hair, the beauty of the secluded garden, the
poetic romance of an unexpected encounter with a stranger, and the joy
of a wedding celebration.
208 JOHN WINZENBURG
This production captures the small tragedy that occurs within a

great event – the tragedy of a newlywed couple reveals the bitter expe-
rience of government forced labor that was carried out in constructing
the Great Wall.
The Great Wall is an important event in the development of music
and theatre. It is a great achievement both in terms of musical composi-
tion and performing arts, and it is a production that should be strongly
recommended to audiences.
Li Songing, Wu Renzhi, Li Zhihua, Xu Huaisha, Cui Wanqiu, Jiang
Tianzuo, Mao Yu, Ying Weimin, Zhu Manhua, Fei Mu, Gu Zhongyi,
Ke Ling, Luo Shiwen, Man Tao, Zhang Ke, Mei Lanfang, Yu Ling,
Xia Yan, Huang Jiayin, Zhou Xinfang, Zuo Lin, Fu Lei, Zhou Xuliang,
Shen Zhibai, Ping Zhongzu, Lan Lan, Wu Mei, Bai Li, Shi Tuo, Tang
(Sao), Yao Ke, Li Jianwu, Wei Zhongle
Many of the signatories were appointed to important positions in

the PRC cultural establishment after 1949. Continuous political cam-
paigns from the 1950s could not necessarily shield them from persecu-
tion within the CCP, however. As cited in the Hongqi editorial above,
Xia Yan (appearing as Hsia Yen in the official PRC translation of the
editorial) was listed as “top counter-revolutionary revisionist” by yang-
banxi supporters in the mid-1960s. Paul Clark also describes how Xia
and “Shanghai Legacy” film writers such as Ke Ling were persecuted in
the run-up to the Cultural Revolution.41 Colin Mackerras documents
how Zhou Xinfang and the family of deceased Mei Lanfang suffered
due to Cultural Revolution factionalism relating to operatic reform.42
Huang Zuolin’s presence suggests an even more direct connection to
the yangbanxi. Paul Clark acknowledges Huang’s part in transforming
Baomao Nü into a full-length dance-drama.43
Precedence in Politicized Hybrid Genres

The objective of listing these examples is not to thoroughly establish
The Great Wall as a direct predecessor to the yangbanxi in the man-
ner that the Yan’an Baimao Nü was, or to suggest that its supporters
from 1945 fell into factional camps in the 1960s. Rather, they (1)
begin to establish a web of relationships extending to interparty and
inner-party factionalism among individuals involved in the works
from both eras; (2) highlight the fact that all works discussed here
were directly tied to their immediate political environments to an
unusually high degree; (3) demonstrate a continuity of key politi-
cal-aesthetic concerns gripping generations of Chinese from before
and after the establishment of the PRC; and (4) establish Aaron
Avshalomov as an important agent linking vital moments in China’s
modern musical-theatrical development, via both a potentially direct

influence and a wider spectrum of intertextual relationships. For this
reason, I regard The Great Wall as an important precedent to the
yangbanxi within the “politicized hybrid genre” of modern Chinese
music-drama. I designate the genre as politicized because of the
heightened political crisis that engulfed China at this point in his-
tory, and because of the ways in which factional, national, and inter-
national politics directly affected the production and reception of
works from both eras.
I have discussed how cross-cultural and cross-generic blending reflects
politically motivated aesthetic processes in China’s experimentation of
new musical and dramatic forms. Despite the centrality of Peking opera
as a national symbol within China’s theatrical development, that genre
alone does not completely represent the scale of reform that China has
experienced over the past century. The yangbanxi included nonoperatic
works and numerous non-Peking opera elements across its repertoire to
a degree that exceeds a merely ornamental role. I have shown how the
subjective selection from a similar menu of ingredients ties The Great
Wall with the Cultural Revolution works, and I have identified sym-
phonicization as a key ingredient linking all the works. I have further
argued that ideology and factionalism, even if not identical, have his-
torically linked the works from different eras.
When politics, genre, and national culture intersect across textual
boundaries, they shed a multitude of dialogic threads that connect
them via agency, influence, or socio-ideological consciousness, as
observed by Bakhtin. The “politicized hybrid genre” discussed here is
a conscious creation of an era marked by national crisis.
Acknowledgments
This chapter is a direct finding of a research project named “Genre,
Hybridization, and National Signifiers in Chinese–Western Fusion
Concertos,” funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council
under the General Research Fund category (Project No.: 248013).
Notes
1. Editorial, “Hail the Great Victory in the Revolution of Peking Opera,” in
Hongqi (Red Flag) 6 (1967), reprinted in Jiang Qing, On the Revolution
of Peking Opera (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1968), 8.
2. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. I limit my discussion to
Avshalomov’s work in relation to the eight main yangbanxi works in
210 JOHN WINZENBURG
this chapter to provide a close analysis within the narrative of influence

and intertextuality. Many of the conclusions drawn here apply to other
works from the Cultural Revolution as well.
3. See John Winzenburg, “Aaron Avshalomov and New Chinese Music
in Shanghai, 1931–1947,” Twentieth-Century China 37(1) (2012):
50–72.
4. Richard Curt Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China (New York: Oxford
5. Michael Leslie Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 11–12.
6. Bakhtin describes agency in terms of “dialogic threads, woven by socio-
ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot
fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.” See M. M. Bakhtin,
“Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited
by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1981), 276. The original essay was writ-
ten in 1935. For further discussion, see John Winzenburg, “Heteroglossia
and Traditional Vocal Genres in Chinese–Western Fusion Concertos,”
Perspectives of New Music 51(2) (2013): 101–140.
7. See Sarah Weiss, “Permeable Boundaries: Hybridity, Music, and the
Reception of Robert Wilson’s ‘I La Galigo,’” Ethnomusicology 52(2)
(2008): 203–238.
8. Ibid. Weiss discusses one example found in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor.
9. The performance history of The Great Wall is derived from numerous
advertisements, notices, reviews, and news stories in periodicals from
late 1945 to late 1946. The most extensive coverage is found in the
Chinese-language dailies Da gong bao, Shijie chenbao, and Wenhui bao,
as well as the English-language North-China Daily News.
10. Avshalomov’s Chinese name was transliterated as “Along Afuxialuomufu.”
11. See Winzenburg, “Aaron Avshalomov.”
12. Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation
of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2007).
13. Numerous reviews appeared from late 1945 to late 1946, especially
in the Chinese-language press, discussing the relative merits of The
Great Wall in relation to theatrical reform. Opinions were highly var-
ied, often according to political, aesthetic, and ethnic biases. See, for
example, Tian Han, “Yige gudai funüde beiju—ping Meng Jiang Nü”
(An ancient Woman’s Tragedy—A Review of The Great Wall), Zuojia
zazhi, Inaugural Issue (n.d.): 34–35.
14. Aaron Avshalomov, The Great Wall by Aaron Avshalomov: Acting
Script (New York: American Composers Alliance, 1944), 2.
15. Ibid.
16. See Barbara Mittler, Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music
in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997).
17. The Great Wall received incomplete concert performances at Columbia

University in 1956, and Beijing and Shanghai in 1985. Thus far, I have
only located a reference by Aaron to a recording of excerpts made at
Columbia. See Jacob and Aaron Avshalomov, Avshalomovs’ Winding
Way: Composers Out of China—A Chronicle (New York: Xlibris, 2001),
372. Recordings have not been found via correspondence with Aaron’s
son Jacob or in collections at the American Composers Alliance in
New York, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Edwin
A. Fleisher Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the New
York Public Library of Performing Arts, the Shanghai Conservatory,
or the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
18. The Chinese-language media coverage from 1945 to 1946 includes
considerable descriptive detail regarding lighting, scenery, staging,
gestures, and music.
19. The ballet version of Baimao Nü was written in 1964 and premiered
in 1965 (previous film and opera versions exist). The opera Shajiabang
was written in 1963 under a different title and revised in 1963–1964,
and the symphonic version was adapted in 1965. Table 9.2 is based
on: (1) Beijing Peking Opera Troupe, Revolutionary Modern Peking
Opera: Shajiabang Full Score (May 1970 Performance Version) (Beijing:
Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1973); (2) Shanghai Dance School,
Revolutionary Modern Ballet: Baimao Nü Full Score (Shanghai:
Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1972); and (3) Central Philharmonic
Orchestra, Revolutionary Symphonic Music: Shajiabang Full Score
(Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe, 1976).
20. The yangbanxi ballet Hongse Niangzijun (Red Detachment of
Women) does not include singing as a main feature.
21. This is at least true in relation to the limited body of officially sanc-
tioned Cultural Revolution works.
22. Although The Great Wall did not include Chinese melodic instru-
ments, a number of those instruments appeared on stage during the
work.
23. The four instrumental set types are based on my own analysis, and are
ordered here according to their appearance in the scene for descriptive
purposes only.
24. Hereafter, “measure” is referred to as “m.”
25. The following musical reduction is drawn from Beijing Peking Opera
Troupe, Revolutionary Modern Peking Opera Shajiabang, 260.
26. See, for example, Marcato, “The Municipal Orchestra,” The North-
China Daily News, January 20, 1936, 15. See also G. M., “American
Music at Lyceum Theatre,” The North-China Daily News, February
25, 1941, 4.
27. Hon-lun Yang, “Gendering ‘1968’: Womanhood in Model Works
of the People’s Republic of China and Movie Musicals of Hong
Kong,” in Music and Protest in 1968, edited by Barley Norton and
212 JOHN WINZENBURG
Beate Kutschke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),

225–226.
28. Jiang Qing, “On the Revolution of Peking Opera,” in Jiang Qing,
On the Revolution of Peking Opera (Beijing: Foreign Language Press,
1968), 2.
29. No author, “Jiang xie Meng Jiang Nü hu Mei de Zhongguo Gejuwushe”
(The Chinese Ballet and Music Drama Association that will Take The
Great Wall to the US), Shijie chenbao, March 24, 1946, 4.
30. See Jiang Qing, “On the Revolution of Peking Opera,” 3.
31. Aaron Avshalomov, “The Great Wall by Aaron Avshalomov Acting
Script,” 15.
32. “Hail the Great Victory,” 10.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Li Hexie, “Jacob Avshalomov and Chinese Music,” in China
Reconstructs 33(1) (1984): 39. Jiang Chunfang would become the
general editor of the Greater Chinese Encyclopedia after 1949.
35. No author, “Meng Jiang Nü hu Mei gongyan” (The Great Wall to
Perform on US Tour), Shijie chenbao, March 18, 1946, 4.
36. Ibid.
37. Jacob and Aaron Avshalomov, Avshalomovs’ Winding Way, 259.
38. Li Hexie, “Jacob Avshalomov and Chinese Music,” 39. Aaron’s son
Jacob corroborates that Aaron considered going to the base. But
he contends that Aaron had in the back of his mind to move to the
United States, and that he vacillated between KMT and CCP support
“according to whichever seemed at the moment more likely to allow
him to do his own composing.” Jacob Avshalomov, private electronic-
mail message to John Winzenburg, September 2, 2009.
39. Dai Penghai, “Heyi wei sizhe” (How to Comfort the Dead), in Jiang
Chunfang: Wenhua lingmiao bozhongren (Jiang Chunfang: A Sower of
Cultural Seedlings) (Shanghai: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1990),
33–38. Here, Dai states that, according to Jiang Chunfang, The Great
Wall was undertaken as a mission by the Shanghai underground Party,
and Jiang himself took part in the writing, casting, rehearsing, and
performing of the work under the alias He Yiqing.
40. The endorsement originally appeared in Chinese. See “Shanghai
wenhua jie tuijian Meng Jiang Nü” (Shanghai Cultural Community
Endorses The Great Wall), Shidai ribao, November 25, 1945, 2. The
endorsement also appeared as “Tuijian Meng Jiang Nü” in Da gong bao
on November 25, 1945. English translation by John Winzenburg.
41. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 114.
42. Colin Mackerras, The Performing Arts in Contemporary China
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 56.
43. Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 162.
C H A P T ER 10
Sonic Imaginary after the

Cultural Revolution
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Metropolitan Opera House

The 2006 world premiere of the opera The First Emperor was one
week away, but the collective spirit of the team was deteriorating.
Composed by Tan Dun, The First Emperor was a monumental affair,
and it was the first time the Metropolitan Opera at New York had
commissioned a composer of Chinese descent. The pressure was high
in the rehearsal room, so a break was called. Tian Hao-Jiang, a world-
renowned opera singer, was caught in the tension of differing artistic
visions among members of the production team, as well as endless
revisions. During the break, he sat down at the piano, seeking solace.
The tune that came to his fingers was “The East is Red,” the omni-
present anthem from the era of Cultural Revolution. Soon his Chinese
colleagues gathered around him. Tian recalled later:
Zhang Yimou, normally so dour, singing and raising his fist to the
sky in a gesture familiar to anyone who had been alive during the
Cultural Revolution . . . For the full twenty minutes we sang and sang
and sang, one revolutionary song after another, plus set pieces with
characteristic poses from the model operas we’d been required to
attend during the Cultural Revolution. Wang Chaoge danced on,
Zhang Yimou leaped about and gestured, and as I added my own
voice, I felt a rush of mixed feelings. The Cultural Revolution had
been such a difficult time . . . And here, more than thirty-five years
later, in a rehearsal room at the Metropolitan Opera in New York
214 NANCY YUNHWA RAO
City, were three survivors of that horrific decade, singing those songs
of oppression, yet suffused with the warmth of bittersweet nostal-
gia. We were back in our youth, the youth in our hearts, feeling
a camaraderie that lifted our transient worldly cares. I felt such a
loving kinship with my Chinese colleagues. We had come through
that terrible time, yet in spite of it, or perhaps because of it, we had
discovered our artistic identities.1
Each of the world-famous Chinese talent brought together for this

premiere—singers, directors, librettist, set designer, choreographer,
and musicians—had his or her own compelling stories of blazing
paths from the countryside to this legendary stage of the quintessen-
tial European art form.2 Whatever their personal stories, however, on
the eve of the premiere came this outburst—a return to revolutionary
songs, music, gestures, and poses from yangbanxi.3 The remarkable
scene is indicative of not just the Cultural Revolution’s influence on
music and theater, but also the bodily impulse beneath the conscious
mind that bound this generation to the poses, dances, and sonic imag-
eries of the yangbanxi.
The scene at the rehearsal speaks directly to the feverous phenom-
enon that Ban Wang analyzed with great nuance in his book The
Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century
China.4 Through their performing bodies, singer Tian and his Chinese
colleagues resorted to a collective memory of the revolutionary aes-
thetics that transcended the bounds of the surroundings, elevating to a
spirit of “limitlessness and boundlessness” so revered in that era. Their
morale was strengthened by the magnitude and dynamics evoked by
their singing bodies.5
The Cultural Revolution, Wang reminds us, “cannot simply be seen
as a sequence of socio-political events engineered by a handful of poli-
cymakers in Maoist China.”6 The point is particularly poignant for the
yangbanxi. It is common to consider the yangbanxi as the product of
the state. The well-accepted image of a bureaucratic production, with
Jiang Qing as the lead, engaged in the bolting together of melodies,
verses, and instrumentation according to the “Three Prominences”
(santuchu) rubric has led to a common notion about its mechanical
production. Such a perspective on the yangbanxi stems from a kind
of “structuralism”—privileging the political productive apparatus—and
“instrumentalism”—concentrating on the reformers’ interest in shap-
ing the opera as a tool of political ideology. In such a framework, there
is little space left for the human beings who inhabited the “structure”
of the yangbanxi —from the music-making that generated the musical
compositions and their performances to the consumption that involved
SONIC IMAGINARY AFTER THE REVOLUTION 215
people from all fabric of the society. They were considered passive receiv-
ers and laborers of the dominant culture and were thus given far less
attention. Yet it was through the daily activities and persistent efforts
of various people that the yangbanxi became the musical, cultural, and
social practices of the era. The various types of people and musicians
who created, produced, reproduced, and emulated the works, and who
grew up breathing the sonority and images of yangbanxi like air, were
not just puppets of this machinery, or just impassive spectators.7 There
is also no point-to-point correlation between the authoritative control
of the production process and the control of the musical content and
meaning of the music. The yearning for musical and dramatic expres-
sions in which one can fully identify comes to rest on the agency of
individuals. In fact, the focus on propaganda and authoritative control
through the prism of political ideology tells little of other kinds of sto-
ries about experiencing and making the yangbanxi. For example, how
were the yangbanxi incorporated by people into their own creativity,
music-making, and daily activities? What was the massive transforming
process in which the yangbanxi organized the social/cultural/musical
practices? What was the unique brand of performativity evoked by the
yangbanxi? In what ways did the formation of the musical landscape
result from earnest endeavors and diligent practices to create and pro-
duce the yangbanxi? As “sound,” what constituted the distinctive char-
acteristics of its sonic imaginary? What music semantics and tropes from
this body of work became influential in the music today? What were
the procedures of manipulation in the creative and musical process that
conformed to its doctrine only to evade it?
These questions pertain to the way in which the yangbanxi left
their marks on the national sonic memory and imagery, and how they
structured individuals, groups, or societies’ relationships with musical
practices and other performing arts during the Cultural Revolution.
Comprehending the context for such daily practices and creative out-
lets is crucial for any exploration of the great breadth of ideas, dra-
matic concerns, music language, gestures, and aesthetics expressed in
the oeuvre by composers such as Tan Dun, who came of age during
the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, this extraordinary group of compos-
ers—the class of 1978—has risen to prominence on the international
stage over the past two decades: Chen Yi, Bright Sheng, Zhou Long,
and Tan Dun in America; Chen Qigang in France; Chen Xiaoyong
in Germany; and Guo Wenjing, Qu Xiaosong, and Ye Xiaogang in
China. As a sign of acknowledgment of their artistic accomplish-
ments, their music scores are published by the most prominent music
publishers in Europe and the United States, including G. Schirmer
(United States), Boosey and Hawkes (United States), Theodore

Presser (United States), Ricordi (Italy), Sikorski (Germany), Oxford
(U.K.), and Gerard Billaudot Editeur (France). Despite the recogni-
tion of their talent and craft, few scholars have examined critically the
significance of the yangbanxi in their music practice, from aesthet-
ics, sonority, and stylistic characteristics, to cultural practices and even
visceral connections—such as the scene in the rehearsal room of the
Metropolitan Opera House. The influence of the yangbanxi on con-
temporary composers is profound, and far beyond the scope of this
chapter. As a preliminary study, the chapter will lay down the frame-
work by first considering the yangbanxi as part of a multitude of musi-
cal and cultural practices in society, rather than state-sanctioned work,
then it will address issues of genres and hybridity in the yangbanxi—in
particular, how they are reflected in the instrumentations of different
yangbanxi. The rest of the chapter will focus more specifically on the
use of Chinese percussion in the yangbanxi, the theoretical discourse
surrounding this form, and its different usages as a means of expres-
sion. Finally, we will connect back to works by the composers of the
Class of 1978 in which similar gestures are used in a variety of ways.
By gaining a fuller understanding of both the daily practice of yang-
banxi, and the social, cultural, and musical context of the sonority of
music hybridity, as well as the creative impulse that lies at the core of
contemporary musical work, the chapter offers a window for under-
standing the sonority of the post-Cultural Revolution era.
“I Needed Art So Much!” 

Although it was certainly not the strategy of yangbanxi production
to attend to the interests and tastes of multiple constituencies of the
audience, the music was inevitably heard from varying personal per-
spectives. For a large part of the masses, against the backdrop of the
“cultural desert” and limited musical expression marked by an acutely
political-sensitive society and oppressive atmosphere, the yangbanxi
stood out, as did many of the form’s aesthetic values.9
As is well known, the yangbanxi embodied in sound the social uto-
pia and the aesthetics of the sublime essential to the movement. As
Ban Wang notes:
The cultural character of the Revolution points to the eminently aes-

thetic dimension of political life during those tumultuous years. The
aesthetic . . . does not pertain simply to the arts or literature or even
aesthetic theories, but embraces human pleasure and pain, enthusiasm
and despair.
Signs of lyrical revolutionary enthusiasm were everywhere: feelings

of euphoria burst forth, passions ran high, ambitions soared, a tidal
wave of energy and creativity was unleashed. 10
One important vehicle through which the aesthetics of “lyrical revo-

lutionary enthusiasm” were articulated was the embodied musical
experience evoked by the yangbanxi. The embodied musical experi-
ence is a type of internal mimetic participation in response to music,
including the muscular responses to the tension, timbre, register,
and texture in music, the (sub)vocal imitation of the sound, and
the physical—if internal—mimicry of symbolic gestures.11 Through
stylized repetitions of its music, bodily gestures, and movements,
the aesthetics of the lyrical revolutionary enthusiasm was thus “insti-
tuted” and deeply felt. As one musician noted:
My generation likes the model works; they are our youth. Yes, there are
people who dislike them too, but really we do like them. Indeed, when
I was young, eighteen or so, I needed art so much, we all did. And then
there were just the model works as our food, and we actually thought
they were quite great.12
In yangbanxi, music, lyrics, and images enable audiences and listen-

ers to experience feelings of devotion, sacrifice, and loyalty, as well
as mood and atmosphere, through various musical rhetorical pro-
cesses. Music, embodied experience, and performativity constituted
an important part of the rhetorical process. The music narrative struc-
tures, sonic content, genres, styles, gestures, and modes of delivery
formed important tropes, symbols, and referents that became familiar
and widely circulated. As such, the yangbanxi brought together dis-
parate audiences and listeners through live performances as well as
loudspeakers, radio, and film.
It was, however, through the significant “everydayness” that the
aesthetics of the yangbanxi achieved the greatest potential. While they
were not often conceptualized as such, the yangbanxi constituted a
significant everyday cultural practice for many. In particular, the prom-
inence of the yangbanxi during the Cultural Revolution was cemented
by means of participatory cultural practices: through their vivacious
production, reproduction, and adaptation in everyday life, and through
their telling and retelling. The modes of their everydayness varied
greatly from villages to cities, and from music professionals to ama-
teurs, yet they similarly pointed to the power of daily engagement.
The following two examples reflect vividly the everyday cultural and
musical practices surrounding the yangbanxi during the early 1970s.
In his reminiscence, Gao Mobo recalled how new cultural practices

resulted from producing the yangbanxi in a dialect of Jiangxi prov-
ince—the transplantation of the yangbanxi. Recounting the excite-
ment of this new cultural practice and its effect, he wrote:
For the first time, the peasants used the language of their own and
the tunes familiar to them to perform on stage. It was exhilarating for
them. And they all diligently studied the scripts, resulting in a general
rise of literacy and reading capability . . .
The cultural life also fostered and set the precedent for freedom of
romance. Before the Cultural Revolution, all marriages in Gao Village
were arranged rigidly by middlemen. Then the transplantation of the
yangbanxi fostered a far more lively and fluid interaction in the neigh-
borhood. Two couples successfully got married, and distinctions of
social classes, pedigrees, and kin were marred as a result of their mar-
riage. The principal role Ahqing Sao [from Shajiabang] was played by
a girl from an affluent family in Gao Village. But rather than being
condemned for her prestigious background, she performed brilliantly
in that role and was very popular, becoming a shining example that
young people aspire to. The same energy was brought to many remote
villages. Gao Village even built a basketball court, organizing tourna-
ment among villages.13
In these villages, the practice of the yangbanxi created a new sense of

community and social engagement, giving rise to a unique space for
both romance and creative endeavor. The resulting new ritual and the
unprecedented public discourse kept the production and reproduc-
tion of yangbanxi afloat. And the significance of the cultural practice
was such that the proletarian heroine from Shajiabang did not even
need to be proletarian. The significance of the performance to the vil-
lage glossed over the blemished, imperfect background.
A different buzzing scene in Beijing was recounted by Bao Kun.
In the years 1971–1976, power struggles grew fierce among political
figures in the top leadership of China, yet at the lower stratum, factory
laborers found ways to entertain themselves, eagerly engaging in cul-
tural activities. Performing yangbanxi became a fad. A majority of fac-
tories formed their own troupes and were well equipped with essential
musical instruments—the larger ones even had more standard Western
instruments. Most factories reduced their production lines by half, or
even halted production temporarily, to carry out intense rehearsals. Such
endeavors were beyond reproach in the political climate. Emulating
professional troupes associated with the yangbanxi, the factory ama-
teur troupes worked hard so they would be invited to perform at vari-
ous assemblies.14 Given such an incentive, workers’ cultural activity was
broadened to include the learning of instruments, Beijing opera singing,

dancing, and so on. Friendships and social groups were formed among
amateurs who endeavored to emulate the state-sanctioned professional
performing troupes. Meanwhile, various musical instruments enjoyed
a new vogue—everything from popular accordions and violins to wind
instruments (including oboe, clarinet, and trumpet), and even guitars,
the quintessential bourgeois instrument much condemned earlier in the
Cultural Revolution. Ardent music lovers exchanged music scores of
violin exercises, from Jacques Mazas to Niccolò Paganini. Music enthu-
siasts gathered to practice by the Tongzi River of the Forbidden City
every evening; the cultural life reached various corners of Beijing parks
suitable for instrumental practices. Beijing was then full of people who
were learning instruments. 15 Many hoped their diligent musical pursuit
would eventually change their fate, allowing them to one day score a
plum post with army troupes or performing groups. As the state sup-
ported opera and symphony troupes both nationally and locally, musi-
cians commanded the respect to which many youngsters aspired.16 This
reminiscence portrays a generation’s devotion to engage as deeply as
possible with the music of the yangbanxi.
These are only two examples of numerous social and cultural prac-
tices surrounding the yangbanxi during the Cultural Revolution.
Many similar stories show the genre’s daily significance and relevance.
With different modes and approaches of adaptations, the yangbanxi
were transformed into an outlet for youthful energy, creativity, and
leisure activities. In one village, the troupe could be just the accordion
and several wind instruments; in another, it may be another combina-
tion. Though varying in scope, scale, professionalism, and so on, these
everyday practices—particularly the relevant musical practices—made
the yangbanxi lively in a physical sense, and their sonority was central
to daily life. Through repeated practicing, performing, and reinvent-
ing, the imprint of the yangbanxi’s sonority was left on street corners,
factory floors, school stages in villages, park pavilions in urban areas,
and, most importantly, the collective psyche.
Considering the ways and contexts that the yangbanxi were repro-
duced, listened to, and emulated, and the different ways in which
they structured cultural and social practices, is crucial to an explo-
ration of the genre’s music legacy. Certainly the yangbanxi did not
exist in people’s lives in forms separate from their performance and
sound. Considering their “usage” brings to light the various dispersed
and tactical forms of the usage and the makeshift creativity of groups
and individuals. Through these cultural practices, the yangbanxi
transformed communities and individuals. Through their “doing,”
through their embracing of the challenge of creating and performing,

the music constituted the sonic imaginary of the era.
Genre, Hybrid, Musical Taste

The yangbanxi comprised many musical genres and traditions—dif-
ferent Chinese opera genres, regional folk music, revolutionary and
popular songs, and Western orchestral music—and involved instru-
ments of both the Chinese and Western traditions. While in some situ-
ations the merging of genres could fashion a crossover, highlighting
and maintaining the identity of each, this was not the strategy for the
yangbanxi. The production teams working on the yangbanxi endeav-
ored to blend the genres in ways that effected a seamless integration.
The ideal amalgamation was pursued with great rigor (albeit guided
in large part by ideology), and was derived from diligent research,
cautious adaptations, numerous experiments, endless revisions, and
repeated scrutiny. Many different musical traditions and genres were
coalesced into a hybrid whole and followed in a fundamental way the
aesthetic of Chinese opera. While European instruments were used
in the yangbanxi, the timbre was blended in the hybrid such that
the homologous music-identity relationship lost its tenancy. Similar
phenomena can be found in various repertoires of other cultures—for
example, American popular music. While hard rock was forged out of
the blues, its listeners do not actively engage with the “blackness” of
the blues genre while listening to hard rock.17
Indeed, the timbre of European orchestra instruments, as part
of the yangbanxi tradition, acquired meaning and functionality for
people who grew up listening to it in that particular context. Artist
Chen Danqing gave a poignant example. He recalled an extraordinary
experience in 1978 when he heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 for
the first time on the radio, directed by China’s most eminent conduc-
tor, Li Delun. Having been intimately familiar with the pleasurable
sound of European instruments as accompaniment for the yangbanxi
opera Shajiabang (though vaguely aware of the records of Western
classical music circulating underground), Chen was shocked to hear
them in Beethoven’s symphony. They sounded to him strangely like
themselves, in their own language! It made such an impression that
he noted it as a singular memorable experience of that year.18 In other
words, learning the identity of these instruments away and separate
from the yangbanxi challenged his established connection to their
functionality and associative sound. Chen was referring to the timbre
of several wind instruments (horn, clarinet, trombone, tuba) and cello
and double bass.
Composer Tan Dun, too, recounts often an anecdote of his attend-

ing the first post-Cultural Revolution college entrance exam in 1977.
For two years prior, he had been a violinist for a regional opera troupe
in Hunan, for which he occasionally composed as well. He brought
along a violin to audition for the composition program of the Central
Conservatory of Music. When asked by the examiners to play Mozart
or Beethoven, he responded that he knew nothing of either: instead,
he proceeded to fiddle away music from some 500 folk songs that
he knew.19 A colorful story characteristic of a polemical personality,
his anecdote nonetheless pointed to the challenged and homologous
“cultural identity” of the violin during the Cultural Revolution. To
people whose sound world was shaped by the yangbanxi, and whose
musical taste was molded by them, the homologous music-identity
relationship of each tradition might become obscured by the distinc-
tive “sound” of the hybrid. Both examples show the functionality of
instruments as defined by their role in executing the aesthetics sur-
rounding the yangbanxi and their derivatives. For this generation,
therefore, the violin represented not the “canon” of the Western
European tradition, but the omnipresent yangbanxi and other forms
of music-making they inspired. In this particular hybrid, the yangbanxi
provided the everyday musical sonority for millions. As a model, the
hybrid was emulated endlessly by other musical stage works created
during this time, as well as regularly heard from loudspeakers and in
films. The sonority of the hybrid, or its simulacrum, thus established
the basis of musical taste.
In a 1984 study of the transplantation of Shajiabang to Cantonese
opera, Bell Yung astutely brought attention to the issue of musical
taste:
[Model operas] have undeniably influenced the musical taste both of

musicians and, more importantly, of the masses in the period since the
Cultural Revolution. Musical and theatrical experiments first tried in
the model operas have their offspring today in many genres of Chinese
music and drama and such experimentation will, undoubtedly, continue
for many years to come.20
While often only musicians and political figures are thought to be of

relevance to the “musical taste” of the yangbanxi—they were, after
all, the arbiters—Yung shifts the perspective to the audience, and calls
our attention to the formation of the taste for the millions, as well as
its consequences. The impact of the sonority surrounding the yang-
banxi, their interpretation and adaptation, played out richly in the
musical imagination of the mass audience. The yangbanxi achieved
unprecedented success in its experimentation of the cultural synthesis

of music, its sonority growing in significance through multiple prac-
tices. The productions were replicated with the help of detailed offi-
cial manuals of instructions; the styles were emulated in many other
theatrical and musical works that followed similar principles. While
cultural synthesis in music had begun in China before the start of the
twentieth century and went through many changes of focus, in the
yangbanxi’s pursuit of a perfect amalgamation, many earlier experi-
ments and separate initiatives were combined, revised, and canonized
in terms of semantic units, performance practices, and structural/
compositional norms.21 The sonority resulting from this unique artis-
tic endeavor of cultural synthesis, compounded by its omnipresence
and repetitive production, marked the yangbanxi’s musical legacy.
Their mode of cultural synthesis was thus key to the musical taste they
inspired.
The Orchestra
Since the yangbanxi in fact emerged from a long process of change,
and evolved gradually in the genre of Chinese opera before the genre
achieved its refined synthesis, the history of experiments and revisions
on some of these works could be dated back to the 1950s.22 The role
of the resulting orchestra grew significantly larger with the inclusion
of overtures, expressive interludes, leitmotifs, operatic gestures, func-
tional harmony, motivic connections, and techniques of melodic and
harmonic development. 23
The orchestra of the yangbanxi was itself a highly integrated
ensemble. Rather than simply an addition of Chinese instruments
to a European standard orchestra, or vice versa, it was inflected and
balanced to achieve particular desired effects. Two factors contrib-
uted significantly to its sonic characteristics: the innovative use of the
instruments in a true cross-cultural situation and the fine-tuned bal-
ance in the instrumentation.24 Consider, for example, the orchestra
for Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. Table 10.1 summarizes the
instrumentation page of the 1970 edition of the full score.
Rather than having Chinese instrumentalists separated from the rest
of the orchestra, several musicians playing Western instruments are
expected to double up on their counterparts in Chinese instruments:
the two-string bowing instrument banhu would be played by a violin-
ist; the qudi by a flautist; the double reed instruments haidi and suona
by an oboist; and the shudi by a clarinet player. This instrumentation
page corroborates reports that performers of Western instruments
Table 10.1 The instrumentation page of the 1970 edition of the full score of Taking
Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
Category Instruments Performers
Three Leading Jinghu Ṕ傉 high-pitched two-stringed fiddle for opera

Chinese Instruments Jing erhu ṔḴ傉ġtwo-stringed fiddle for opera
Yueqin 㚰䏜ġplucked lute with a wooden body

Other Chinese Banhu 㜧傉ġtwo-stringed fiddle with a coconut (played by
resonator one Violin I)
Pitched Instruments Pipa 䏝䏞 pear-shaped fretted lute with 5 strings
Jingpan 擖䚀㌺䫁 free reed mouth organ
paisheng
Qudi 㚚䫃ġtransverse bamboo flute (played by
Principal Flute)
Haidi 㴟䫃 smaller-size suona (played by Oboe)
Suona Ⓤ⏸ double-reed wind instrument with (played by Oboe)
a metal bell
Zhuguan 䪡䭉 bamboo double-reed wind instrument (played by
Clarinet)
Woodwind Piccolo 䞕䫃 (played by
Second Flute)
Flute (2) 攧䫃
Oboe ⍴䯏䭉
Clarinet in A ⋽䯏䭉炷A 宫炸
Brass Horn in F (2) ⚮⎟炷F 宫炸
Trumpet in Bb (2) ⮷⎟炷Bb 宫炸
Trombone 攧⎟
Western Percussion Vibrafuno 撅㜧摇䏜
Timpani (2) ⭂枛溻

Chinese Percussion Dabo ⣏懠 large cymbals
Diaobo ⎲懠 suspended cymbals
Ban 㜧 wood clapper
Gu 溻 drum
Xiaotang gu ⮷➪溻 medium-pitched barrel drum
Wuluo 㬎擋 war flat gong
Gaoyin daluo 檀枛⣏擋 high-pitched large flat gong
Zhongyin daluo ᷕ枛⣏擋 medium-pitched large flat gong
Diyin daluo I, II Ỷ枛⣏擋 low-pitched large flat gong
Xiaoluo I, II ⮷擋flat gong with rising pitch when struck
Dashai luo I, II ⣏䬃擋 special low-pitched large flat gong
Xiaobo ⮷懠 small cymbals
Changbo ⓙ懠 singing cymbals
Naobo I, II 掫懠 medium cymbals
Damaobo ⣏ⷥ懠 large cymbals
String Violin I (4) 䫔ᶨ⮷㍸䏜
Violin II (3) 䫔Ḵ⮷㍸䏜
Viola (2) ᷕ㍸䏜
Cello (1) ⣏㍸䏜
Double bass (1) Ỷ枛㍸䏜
were required to learn their counterparts in the Chinese tradition to

gain a better handle on the feel, color, and inflection of the traditional
Chinese instruments.25 The requirement was set by Yu Huiyong, a well-
regarded scholar in the Chinese folk music tradition prior to becom-
ing a powerful figure in coordinating the specialists working on the
yangbanxi. This training aimed to immerse Western-trained musicians
in the aesthetics of Beijing opera so that they would gain a better feel
for Beijing opera style, its phrase punctuations, placement of strong
and weak notes, and sense of rhythm and motion. In addition, numer-
ous doctrines and principles were generated for the composition team.
In terms of the adoption of Western compositional techniques, the
principle was set clearly to avoid (1) a “Western” style of melody, (2)
heaviness in instrumentation, (3) unusual harmonic progression, and
(4) chaotic or unordered instrumental lines.26 Furthermore, another
principle (4–3–2–1–1) was devised to keep in balance the number of
Western string instruments in the orchestra (first violin—four; second
violin—three; viola—two; cello—one; double bass—one).
These principles were part of the diligent effort to keep the bal-
ance of instrumentation in the orchestra to gain a particular timbre.
The instrumentation of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy is rep-
resentative. It comprises traditional Beijing opera accompaniment
(three melodic instruments, such as the sandajian ᶱ⣏ẞ, and a five-
member percussion consort), additional Chinese instruments (seven
instruments, of which five are doubled by Western instrument play-
ers), and a Western chamber orchestra of eleven strings (4–3–2–1–1),
nine winds (two flute/piccolo, one clarinet, one oboe, two horns, two
trumpets, one trombone), as well as timpani and miscellaneous other
percussion instruments. It was mandated that emphasis should be
given to sandajian: jinghu, jing’erhu, and yueqin. Although Chinese
instruments were fewer in number, clearly they were the lead, to which
the Western instruments played a supplementary role.
Many variations exist among different works in yangbanxi in terms
of orchestration. For example, The Red Lantern includes two additional
instruments of the huqin family and one additional plucked instrument,
while a harp is added to Azalea Mountain. In contrast, Shajiabang
used primarily Chinese instruments as the main instruments, adding
only horn, clarinet, trombone, and tuba to the wind instruments, and
cello and double bass to strengthen the lower voices in the strings.
Most yangbanxi orchestras were based on a fairly similar makeup of
instrumentation. The 4–3–2–1–1 principle and instruction to empha-
size sandajian ensured that the timbre of the orchestra would not be
overpowered by the sonority of Western string instruments. Although
Chinese instrumentalists only constitute a third of this 30-member

orchestra, the emphasis given to sandajian and the penetrating sound
of the opera percussion consort ensure their prominent sonority.
As such, a notable musical aesthetic of cultural synthesis was derived
from the fully integrated orchestra of the yangbanxi. And, for listeners,
the mixed ensemble concretized a unique sonority of orchestral color,
mode of delivery, and style of performance. It carries an eclectic mixture
of music rhetoric and sonic elements, though a mixture steered, anchored,
and shaped to achieve certain aesthetic goals—for example, the juxtaposi-
tion of pipa, viola, and clarinet to create the sound of a horse galloping;
the tuneful inflection of jihu joined by the Western string section; and
the characteristic punctuation of Chinese percussion consort that often
preceded orchestral tutti (the playing of the whole orchestra).
ba-datai cang–cai–cang–cai
(Percussion Pattern)
One of the most notable characteristics in the overall sonority of the
yangbanxi orchestra came from the persistent use of a Chinese opera
percussion consort. It was used in all the yangbanxi—from the revolu-
tionary opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, to the revolutionary
ballet The White-haired Girl and the symphonic version of Shajiabang.
Its ubiquitous presence ensured that the yangbanxi’s mode of articula-
tion and dramatization was always linked to the prominent sonority of
Beijing opera percussion amid the mix of Chinese and Western melodic
instruments. The percussion is said to be the soul of the music.
In the Beijing opera tradition, the percussion consort is highly
versatile. Its music comprises an existing set of idiomatic rhythmic
patterns, luogu dianzi. The percussion consort is regularly used to
punctuate and highlight speeches, support dramatic movements,
emulate emotive responses, reflect the mood and inner state of charac-
ters, distinguish character types, and introduce and accompany arias.
Sonically, the percussion consort is the soul of Beijing opera and the
backbone of the musical drama. With its persistent presence in the
yangbanxi, the percussion consort continued to be the soul of the
musical narrative, and thus came to play an important role in its sig-
nification process. In fact, through various enhancements, its role was
expanded in the yangbanxi.
Traditionally, the opera percussion consort includes four players;
however, five were typically required in yangbanxi. Traditionally,
each of the four groups—gu-ban (drum and clapper), daluo (large
gong), xiaoluo (small gong), and naoba (cymbal)—employs mostly
one, and only occasionally two, instruments. The yangbanxi, how-

ever, make use of a larger assortment of variety in each group to
enhance the overall range of expressivity. With seven daluo of vari-
ous sizes and thickness and five naobo of varied types, the percus-
sion consort had much richer color and more sonic possibilities. The
percussion consort is given a stronger identity than in the traditional
Chinese opera. At the same time, the presence of the opera percus-
sion consort was also conceptualized differently from the use of per-
cussion in a regular Western symphony orchestra. It takes a leading
role in structuring the drama. As such, in the yangbanxi the percus-
sion consort plays a dual role: as a part of the orchestral instruments
and, more importantly, as the soul of the musical drama and musical
narrative.
Integrating Western and Chinese traditions in the yangbanxi had
an important consequence for the latter’s discourse: what used to be
an oral tradition was now recorded in written form and scored as part
of the composition. In the yangbanxi, practices traditionally transmit-
ted in person by one generation of musicians to the next—traditions
that included nuanced details of inflection, ornamentation, melismatic
passage-work, and timbre—were transliterated into Western notation.
It was achieved both with the help of systematic and theoretical study
of the oral tradition, and through the painstaking compositional pro-
cess to refine the yangbanxi. The adoption of the Beijing opera per-
cussion consort is no exception.
The first comprehensive study of the music for Beijing opera per-
cussion accompaniment, Jingju Dajiyue Huibian Ṕ∏ㇻ↣᷸㯯亾,
was published in 1958.27 The 360-page document provided a meticu-
lous study of over 100 pre-existing rhythmic patterns of percussion
music, known as luogu dianzi 擋溻䁡⫸. This study transliterated
these rhythmic patterns from oral tradition into two types of nota-
tion: (1) luogu jing 擋溻乷, that is, character notation using Chinese
words that identify combinations of instruments, modes of articula-
tion, and timbres; and (2) Western music notation, stratifying the
four groups of instruments on separate staves. All the percussion pat-
terns are divided into five separate categories according to their usage.
Each notated percussion pattern is accompanied by explanation of its
idiomatic usage, character, dramatic context, and so on. The com-
prehensive study included a wide range of patterns, from the most
common and simple to the obscure and complex. It also created new
symbols for performance practices that had no corresponding concept
in Western notation. Also included were discussions of the difficulty
of exacting the oral tradition in Western notation, and suggestions
of various approaches to use to incorporate them in new works. This

research represents not only a compilation of luogu dianzi, but also,
more importantly, a theoretical understanding and discussion of their
sonority. By representing them in Western notation, such a study
introduced luogu dianzi to the music lexicon available to wider musi-
cal circles.
The scoring for the opera percussion consort in the yangbanxi
reflected the deep influence of such theoretical study. Music for the
percussion consort was written in Western musical notation, supple-
mented by the inclusion of luogu jing in Chinese characters. The
effect of these music gestures was closely controlled by the composi-
tion team, resulting in nuanced expression. Figure 10.1 reproduces
a page of interlude from the end of the third scene in Taking Tiger
Mountain by Strategy, showing the use of a percussion pattern, sao-
tou ㈓⣜, in an orchestral texture to express the heroic character’s
courageous resolve.
The traditional pattern is expanded with changes in the second half
to suit the spirit better. Figure 10.2 produces the introduction of aria
that incorporated a grave version of the percussion pattern, maozitou
ⷥ⫸⣜, to express the solemn scene and the pronouncement of the
sage character, the Chief of General Staff (⍪害攧). Figure 10.3 shows
a similar percussion used to introduce another aria, but this time for a
more earnest and excited character, Yang Zirong 㜐⫸匋.28
The percussion consort is also used as an interlude. Figure 10.4
shows the first of six pages of interlude using only percussion consort.
Such scoring for percussion consort in yangbanxi not only gave the
percussion music a more prominent role than in traditional Chinese
opera, but also refined the detail of each usage and crystallized in
written form a greater range of nuanced, different variety. In addition,
the theorizing and transliteration made this complex oral tradition
accessible and comprehensible to performers of Western instruments,
formalizing its significance, and thereby introducing it to the formal
musical language of contemporary Chinese music.
In practice, the use of the percussion consort in the orchestra for-
malized its place in musical practice and sonic memory. As composer
Chen Yi once noted, her familiarity with luogu jing was essential for
her role as concert master of the regional Guangzhou yangbanxi
orchestra; without it, she would have been unable to provide proper
cues.29 Having grown up learning violin in a family with an avid inter-
est in Western classical music, her years of playing with the mixed
orchestra at the Guangzhou yangbanxi opera troupe deeply affected
her musical thinking.
Figure 10.1 End of Scene III in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Percussion pattern, Saotou, in an
orchestral texture to express the heroic character’s courageous resolve. The passage shown here in piano
reduction is played by the full orchestral tutti, as well as sandajian, pipa and jianpan paisheng.
Figure 10.2 Introduction of Aria: Percussion pattern, Maozitou, to express the solemn scene and the pro-
nouncement of the wise Chief of General Staff.
Figure 10.3 Introduction of Aria: Percussion pattern, Maozitou, for a more earnest and excited character, Yang Zirong.
Figure 10.4 Percussion consort as interlude before the finale in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
The Power of the Sonic Imaginary

Bell Yung concluded his study on the particular yangbanxi Shajiabang
with a general observation. Noting that extensive research in Chinese
music theory—analyses of musical sound rather than philosophy—
emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of the pressure to create
model operas, he observed:
An important consequence of the theorizing was that musicians’ con-

cepts of music and of their compositional procedure began to change.
These changes will surely have deep significance for the future of
Chinese music.30
When these words were published, barely seven years had passed
after the close of the Cultural Revolution, and Yung could not have
anticipated the incredible energy, creativity, and accomplishment of
the so-called Class of 1978 composers and how their work would
have such a prominent presence in the international music scene
of the twenty-first century. His observation has proved to be very
much on target.
Alex Ross of The New Yorker calls contemporary Chinese composers
Tan Dun and his cohort “children of the Cultural Revolution,” as they
were the first post-Cultural Revolution class to enter college in 1978,
graduating in 1982.31 They are, to be sure, children of the yangbanxi.
The circumstances of their upbringing greatly differed, and the musical
practices through which they participated in the reproduction of the
yangbanxi also varied. Yet, there is no doubt that the everydayness of
the yangbanxi affected them deeply, and the associated cultural and
social practices constituted their youth. Chen Yi notes, “[It was] not
only the only shows to go to, but everybody learned to sing or play or
perform! [At our troupe] we would have to make self-criticism after
a performance if we made a mistake. We enjoyed every perfect per-
formance every night as a performer. Technically it’s refined, in high
quality. The music is fantastic.”32 Their musical tastes were shaped by
the yangbanxi, their musical imagination grew from them, and their
connection to their sonority was profound and deep. The musical
language of the yangbanxi’s hybrid nature became part of their sonic
imagination. And in different creative ways, they have renewed the
music language through which they find their own distinctive style.
Meanwhile, these composers might not always be fully cognizant
of the sonority and impulse that drove their creative instinct. In the
post-Cultural Revolution era, those in the new generation were not
interested in embracing the older tradition of the yangbanxi. Rather,
they responded to changes in the political-cultural landscape with

various experimentations and with a resolute turning away from the
canonic works. Their endeavor gained an additional boost from lec-
tures on twentieth-century music and composition classes held by
British composer Alexander Goher, who, according to Wu Zuqiang,
who facilitated the cultural exchange, compressed a year-long course
into six weeks. Following Goher’s visit, the Class of 1978 took their
experiment to another level of novelty, eager to break from what their
teacher Wu Zuqiang calls “the already stabilized tradition.”33
While Tan Dun shocked his teachers by using tone cluster, glis-
sandi, and harmonics in his 1979 orchestral work, Li Sao 䥣橂, Guo
Wenjing employed even more continuous glissandi on timpani, strings,
clarinet and trombone, as well as polytonality, in his 1983 work for
two pianos and orchestra, Suspended Ancient Coffins on the Cliffs in
Sichuan ⶅⲾご吔. These endeavors demonstrated that the composers
were, as one of their teachers, Li Xi’an, astutely observed, “tenacious
about expressing their own personalities in music—something rare
before and during the Cultural Revolution.”34 Commenting on Zhou
Long’s 1983 work, Valley Stream 䨢察㳩㯜, ethnomusicologist Qiao
Jianzhong noted also that “Zhou Long has dealt a deathblow to the
established formulas of Chinese music of the last thirty years.”35 In the
eyes of Communist Party music bureaucrats like Lü Ji, these compos-
ers had abandoned the national music represented by the yangbanxi.
Looking back at his earlier career, Tan Dun noted, “I spent nine years
in Beijing . . . At the time, my understanding of modern concepts and
artistic trends was to abolish them all and innovate!”36
It would seem that in pursuing styles suited for expressing their
unique musical creativity and imagination, the Class of 1978 com-
posers left behind the music canon of the yangbanxi. Yet, they might
not really have done so. If they abandoned the narrative style, politi-
cal content, functional harmony, and structural norms of the yang-
banxi, they did not move too far from the music’s semantic units,
performance practices, and aesthetics. In particular, their modes of
cultural synthesis were paradoxically shaped by the music canon of
the decade they sought to leave behind. Their modern musical lan-
guage and sonic imaginary have been fully caught in the historical
experience.
Indeed, many salient features of the yangbanxi cultural synthesis
remain significant to contemporary Chinese composers, whose sonic
imaginary was well steeped in the synthesis. Instrumentation is one
of them. As in the yangbanxi, their use of Chinese instruments—
especially percussion—adds a remarkable timbre, sense of motion,
rhythm, and energy. Their treatment of the timbre and articulations

of Western instruments also involves extremely creative bending and
sculpting of the sonority to resonate with and embody the feel of
Chinese instruments or vocal styles. The ubiquitous Chinese opera
percussion instruments betray the greatest affinity between their work
and the yangbanxi. In many ways, the use of luogu dianzi represents
one of the most traditional, yet most innovative, aspects of the works
of contemporary Chinese composers.
Though different in individual approaches, contemporary Chinese
composers’ use of Beijing opera percussion constitutes expressive
content, provides rhythmic structure, and shapes musical tempo-
rality. On one hand, the new music conjures up traditional percus-
sion classics, and, on the other, it redefines, reshapes, and expands
the tradition, and in many instances provides new meaning for it.
In this respect, their approach never seems to have veered too far
from the yangbanxi. In Tan Dun’s Li Sao, the penetrating sound of
luogu dianzi, with the fast strokes on danpi gu (the leading drum of
the percussion consort) alluding to jijifeng, provides an introduc-
tion that leads into the full orchestral texture of the opening. The
luogu gesture continued to provide punctuation in the 26-minute
composition. In Suspended Ancient Coffins, Guo Wenjing includes
a percussion consort comprising percussion from his native Sichuan
opera. (He was a member of the song and dance troupe in the city
of Chongqing during the Cultural Revolution.) The instruments—-
chuan tanggu, chuanluo, maluo, and chuangba—correspond to the
four-member group in the percussion consorts of Beijing opera. The
work is filled with majestic orchestral gestures, yet close to the end
there emerges a dialogue between the two pianos and the Chinese
percussion consort in a thinner texture, referencing luogu dianzi in
an innovatively allusive way. A contrast to Guo Wenjing’s allusiveness
is provided by Chen Yi’s direct use of the music semantics. At the
close of her second symphony in a fabric of light orchestral sonor-
ity, Chen Yi uses the pattern chongtou ⅚⣜, played by the distinc-
tive xiaoluo and bright ringing resonance of nabo in syncopation, to
evoke a stately character heading off on a grave mission. The distinc-
tive music gesture with brassy timbre suggests not only the ambience
of the poised character but also the graceful pace. It should be noted
that the work commemorates her father.37
The appearances of Chinese percussion in the work of compos-
ers from the Class of 1978 shares many of the same characteristics
as the use of the percussion consort in the yangbanxi: rather than
simply an instrumental part providing musical texture and color, per-

cussion is a shaping force of the musical narrative, or at times is used
independently of the melodic instruments. Whether appearing in full
or in partial forms, the Chinese percussion consort contributed sig-
nificantly to the sculpting of dramatic moments—even if only to pro-
vide emphases to phrase endings. Indeed, perhaps the most influential
aspect of cultural synthesis in the yangbanxi is the sense of sonority
and rhythm derived from the unprecedented significance accorded
to Chinese percussion, and percussive sound effects in general. This
sonority and dramatic force are significant at many different levels,
from pure sonic characteristics, to dramatic gesture, powerful narra-
tion, theatrical momentum, and so on.
The use of the percussion consort as an instrumental interlude
in the yangbanxi has even left its mark on contemporary opera. In
his 2006 opera, The First Emperor, Tan Dun took this aesthetic to a
new level of signification. The impressive opening scene was power-
ful in this respect. Characteristic of his usual bold vision, Tan Dun
transformed the iconic classical institution of the Metropolitan Opera
House, which typically performed the nineteenth-century romantic
operas, through his use of percussion. With the unified vocal roar of
the large chorus and a row of drummers on stage, Tan Dun created a
feast of percussive sound (see figure 10.5).
This was accomplished through a precisely orchestrated sequence
of vocalization, deliberately audible breathing, slapping sounds,
uniform body movements, temporal punctuations, and deliberate
motions of the drummers. Following this percussive sonority was the
masterful presence of a Beijing opera actor singing in Chinese, whose
monologue was punctuated by the luogu dianzi; however, it was per-
formed not by the usual timbre of percussion consort, but rather by
the singer’s own oral rendition of them in luogu jing. The colossal
presentation of the full percussion ensemble/consort as a prologue
to a grand opera would seem rather peculiar in the European opera
tradition, but it could find many precedents in the yangbanxi. Here,
Tan Dun replicates the strong reliance on the percussion ensemble
in the yangbanxi tradition yet creates it anew in musical language
that recalls the American Experimentalist tradition. The opening of
The First Emperor forcefully claimed its audience as its community,
and summoned their presence to the post-Cultural Revolution sonic
imaginary. Considered in this light, perhaps the scene in the Met’s
rehearsal room where Chinese singers and production team members
broke into singing and performing the yangbanxi and revolutionary
songs so fervently was not a musical coincidence. Through the familiar
Figure 10.5 Tan Dun, The First Emperor, prologue, Mm. 19–27.
gestures, vocalization, bodily movements, and performative acts of

the yangbanxi, they geared up for the grand opera with a unique aes-
thetics and sonic imaginary.
Notes
1. Hao-Jiang Tian, Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to
the Met (New York: John Wiley, 2008).
2. The production team included Zhang Yimou (director), Fan Yue (set
designer), Wang Chaoge (codirector), Dou Dou Huang (choreogra-
pher), Ha Jin (librettist), as well as many musicians and dancers.
3. The gestures and poses are inseparable from the music. Barbara Mittler
notes that “During the Cultural Revolution, a distinct pose of rever-
ence would have always been prevalent in presentations of ‘The East
is Red.’” Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of
Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012), 109.
4. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-
Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
5. Ibid., 199.
6. Ibid., 194.
7. For the making of the first five operas, see Paul Clark, The Chinese
Cultural Revolution: A History (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 26–43.
8. Barbara Mittler, “Popular Propaganda? Art and Culture in
Revolutionary China,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 152(4) (2008): 482.
9. Aside from the yangbanxi, a large number of revolutionary musical
works were also officially allowed. Much of them were collected in five
volumes of New Songs of the Battlefield, published from 1972 to 1976
during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. See Lei Ouyang
Bryant, “Music, Memory, and Nostalgia: Collective Memories of
Cultural Revolution Songs in Contemporary China,” The China
Review 5(2) (2005): 151–175.
10. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 195.
11. Arnie Cox, “The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical
Meaning,” Musicae Scientiae 5(2) (2001): 195–209.
12. Barbara Mittler, “Popular Propaganda?”: 482.
13. Mobo Gao 檀満㲊, “Start on a Journey: Memories of a Child from
Rural China” (⏗䦳烉ᶨ᷒⅄㛹⬑⫸ℛḶᶫ⋩⸜ẋ䘬存⽮), in The
Seventies (ᶫ⋩⸜ẋ), edited by Bei Dao ⊿ⱃ and Li Tuo 㛶旨 (Hong
Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008), 86–87.
14. Laurence Coderre discusses the same phenomenon with Yimin Factory
performers and sheds light on the incredible elastic term, “amateur,”
during this period. See Coderre, chapter 3, this volume.
15. Bao Kun 氵㖮, “Leap Before the Dawn” (湶㖶⇵䘬帵≐), in The
Seventies (ᶫ⋩⸜ẋ), 187–188. Chen Yi, interview by the author,
Houston, March 14, 2015.
16. Xueping Zhong, “Between Lixiang and Childhood Dreams,” in Some
of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, edited by Xueping
Zhong, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
17. For the concept of homology in music identity, see Georgina Born,
“Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural
Identities,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation,
and Appropriation in Music, edited by Georgina Born and David
Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000),
31–47. In fact, even the blues grew out of black–white interaction,
from which the intermix became coded African-American.
18. Chen Danqing 旰ᷡ曺, “Lucky I was Young Then: Recollection of
the 1970s” (⸠ḷ⸜弣Ļġ⚆゛崟ᶫ⋩⸜ẋ), in The Seventies (ᶫ⋩⸜ẋ),
62–63.
19. Deborah Solomon, “Composing a Life,” New York Times, December
3, 2006.
in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s
Republic of China, 1949–1979, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 163.
21. See Ching-Chih Liu, A Critical History of New Music in China (Hong
Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010); Sheila Melvin and Jingdon
Cai, Rhapsody in Red: How Classical Music Became Chinese (New
York: Algora, 2004).
22. See 㛶㜦 Song Li, (“㟟㜧ㆷ” 亾⸜⎚. ⇵䭯, 1963–1966 ⸜) (A
Chronicle of Model Operas of the Chinese Cultural Revolution) (Taibei
Shi: Xiu wei zi xun ke ji gu fen you xian gong si, 2011–2012). See also
Clark, The Cultural Revolution, 26–54, and Dai Jiafang, chapter 1,
this volume.
23. In her recent article, Yawen Ludden credits Yu Huiyong, culture
minister during the Cultural Revolution and an expert on Chinese
traditional music, for initiating the use of Western instruments and
techniques such as leitmotif in model operas. While Yu’s significant
involvement with the compositional processes made him a key figure
in the crafting of model opera into the musical canon of the hybrid
we know today, it seems misleading to take the innovation as the cre-
ative vision of one person. See Yawen Ludden, “Making Politics Serve
Music: Yu Huiyong, Composer and Minister of Culture,” TDR: The
Drama Review 56(2) (2012): 152–168.
24. Dai Jiafang discusses the formation of the integrated orchestra in great
detail. See Dai, chapter 1, this volume.
25. Yang Jian 㣲‍, “The Birth and Artistic Accomplishment of the Second
Group of Yangbanxi,” (䫔Ḵ㈡㟟㜧ㆷ䘬ṏ䓇⍲刢㛗ㆸ⯙), Drama 3
(2000) (ㆷ∏˫2000 ⸜ 3 㛇), n.p..
26. Jun Chi ⅃樘, An Introduction to the Experience of Creating Modern
Chinese Opera (䍘ẋṔ∏枛᷸⇃ἄ乷樴ṳ乵) (Beijing: Central
Conservatory, 1996), 90.
27. Zhang Yuci et al., eds., ⻈⫿ヰġˣġ⏜㗍䣤ġˣġỽᷢġį Ⰸ㤂㛸亾叿, Jingju
Dajiyue Huibian (Ṕ∏ㇻ↣᷸㯯亾) (Beijing: Renmin yinyue chuban-
she, 1958).
28. Ibid., 91.
29. Private conversation with Chen Yi, February 2007.
30. Yung, “Model Opera as Model”: 164.
31. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (New York: Picador, 2008), 518.
32. Email correspondence with Chen Yi, July 15, 2015.
33. Interview with Wu Zuqiang, Beijing, December 8, 2004. Wu was the
Dean at the Central Conservatory of Music during the period when
the 1978 class studied there.
34. Quoted in Melvin and Cai, Rhapsody in Red, 327.
35. Ibid.
36. Interview with Tan Dun “Face to Face with Celebrity,” Phoenix TV.
http://phtv.ifeng.com/program/mrmdm/hudong.
37. A fuller discussion of this work can be found in Nancy Yunhwa
Rao, “The Tradition of Luogu Dianzi (Percussion Classics) and Its
Signification in Contemporary Music,” Contemporary Music Review
5(6) (2007): 511–527.
C H A P T ER 11
Just Beat It! Popular Legacies

of Cultural Revolution Music
Barbara Mittler
Year 2003: A Chinese taxi driver is being asked whether he likes to

sing. “Oh yes,” he does, and he especially likes to sing to himself when
he is alone in his car. And has he heard of the model works (㟟㜧ㆷ
yangbanxi)? Does he like to sing them, too? “Of course,” he has, and
“of course,” he likes them, too, and in particular the one tune that he
then proceeds to “teach” his clients: a song from one of the model
works from the Cultural Revolution, the ballet The Red Detachment
of Women. His clients, a group of youngsters in their twenties join in:
they, too, as it turns out, know the tune quite well. Indeed, as they
get out of the taxi a little later, they immediately begin a street break-
dance, attracting many other youngsters to come and join them, and
to dance to the sounds of The Red Detachment of Women. The scene
ends in a “mass choreography” of synchronized dancers, Michael
Jackson-style.
This is a scene from a 2005 Dutch documentary entitled Yang Ban
Xi (Model Works).1 The film deals with the afterlife of the Cultural
Revolution in music by following the paths of former yangbanxi per-
formers and stage celebrities into the 2000s. As it follows the prep-
aration for a new performance of the Red Detachment of Women,
featuring the two original female lead dancers, now in their late fifties,
dancing with a much younger ballet troupe at their side, the documen-
tary suggests that the soundscapes of the Cultural Revolution have
never stopped being relevant in the almost 30 years since it officially
ended. Evidently, history, and especially the history of the Cultural
240 BARBARA MITTLER
Revolution, is still a living presence in China, indeed, it is a part of

people’s everyday life.
Well known is the enormous success of the “Red Sun Songs,” revo-
lutionary songs praising Mao (the “sun” who is “bringing happiness
to the people of China,” as expressed in the most important of these,
“The East is Red” Dongfang hong ᷄㕡乊). “Red Sun Songs” began
flooding the Chinese music market around the centenary of Mao’s
birthday in 1993: millions of tapes and CDs in pop, rap, jazz, and rock
versions of the old songs were being published almost daily. Within a
few months in 1991, more than one million copies were sold, which
increased to 14 million by 1993, to 72 million by 2006, and to 80 mil-
lion by 2008.2 This interest has not yet subsided, quite the reverse
being true. Ever new versions continue to appear: Zhao Dadi’s 崝⣏
⛘ (1965–) recent fascinating remake of “The East is Red,” mixing
elements from Chinese folk song, with playing of the suona (Ⓤ⏸, a
Chinese reed-instrument), Chinese gongs, Hammond organ, and pop
strings is just one striking example.3 It throws an interesting light on
different regimes of popular music here united in perfect harmony:
revolutionary music, which was popular (at least initially) by political
fiat, as “music for the masses” (through the song’s lyrics and allusions
to the original melodies), popular music inspired in part by musical
styles from outside of China—which has a long tradition going back
to the 1910s and 1920s (with Hammond organ and pop strings)—
and finally, some of China’s own popular traditions (with mountain
song styles in the vocals, gongs, and suona).
There is a vibrant business of remediating Cultural Revolution pro-
paganda music in a continuum that ranges from popular entertain-
ment4 to high art.5 Images, texts, and sounds from the musico-dramatic
experience that was the Cultural Revolution reappear in many different
guises, as postmodern political propaganda, on the one hand—during
the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis, for example,
where heroes from the model works were made to advocate adequate
“hygienic behavior” in new political comic strips6—or as commercial
advertising, on the other. One such advertisement produced in Hong
Kong for Linux 2000 software, a rather peculiar 19-second short clip,
is a typical example of how musico-dramatic gestures from the Maoist
period have become part of a performative spectacle that draws on
cultural memories and convictions grown through the experience of
the Cultural Revolution and thus persuades, but also serves to enter-
tain, the postmodern age: it mixes generic gestures from Cultural
Revolution model opera, Mao quotation songs, and loyalty dances.7
Before a stereotypical, stylized background of mountains and trees,
LEGACIES OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION MUSIC 241
a small detachment of men and women in army attire march wav-

ing a red flag. They begin with a rhythmic recitation of two Cultural
Revolution slogans: “There is nothing wrong with revolution. To
rebel is justified” 朑␥㖈伒, 忈⍵㚱䎮.8 Then, they continue to sing
to a melody modeled after the idiosyncratic wavelike tunes and march-
ing rhythms and styles of Cultural Revolution music.
Naturally, the Linux computing revolution advertised here is quite
unlike Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but the rhetoric, visual, aural, as
well as textual, in which this revolution is captured is quintessen-
tially and generically that taken from the repertoire of dramatic music
from the Cultural Revolution. While it is not an exact citation, the
advertisement makes clear references to the styles and genres of the
time, which are obviously telling and remembered, in spite of the
fact that they are here presented in a manner considerably condensed
and essentialized. The youngsters who carry computer equipment on
their shoulders promise in their song—echoing the rhetoric of many
Cultural Revolution slogans—“We are out to develop technology,
diligently creating new things, propagating our culture and making
the masses happy.” 䥹㈨⍹⯽, ≒≃⇃㕘; 㔯⊾Ỉ㑕, 忈䤷⣏ế. The
performance then ends in a typical “frozen pose” (liangxiang) that
Cultural Revolution performances inherited from Chinese operatic
practice, with each of the performers holding up—to the same final
beat—a Chinese Linux 2000 box in a victorious performative gesture
that is quite worthy of Cultural Revolution drama (except that the
little red book and Mao portrait as props are now missing).
In this last chapter of the book, which has thus far presented much of
the breadth and depth, and the timely and regional variations, of musi-
cal practice and experience during and after the Cultural Revolution, I
offer a few closing reflections on the steady and sustained social lives of
soundscapes from the Cultural Revolution; and I also discuss their fate,
as part of the propaganda and popular cultures before, during, and after
that era. It will be my contention that the popular (and) propaganda
sounds associated with the Cultural Revolution were enjoyed as well as
endured, liked as well as disliked, even during the Cultural Revolution.
It is this fact, the impact—conscious as well as subconscious—so to
speak, of the Cultural Revolution as a resounding musical experience
that plays a crucial role in producing so many and such a great diver-
sity of contemporary retakes of this music, popular and otherwise, and
thus explains its proliferation (and marketability) to the present day.
I begin with a discussion of a few prominent examples of recently
remediated Cultural Revolution sounds, and then turn to the expe-
rience of these sounds during the time of the Cultural Revolution
242 BARBARA MITTLER
itself, reflecting on my findings from oral histories of the Cultural

Revolution before this background of remediation. In explaining what
remains a very intricate relationship—between popular culture, on the
one hand, and propaganda, on the other—and in trying to explain
why this should be so, I draw upon and echo some of the contribu-
tions in this volume and my own earlier study.9
Setting the Stage: Remediating Cultural

Revolution Soundscapes
A recent Chinese retake of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit “Beat It”
appears as part of a growing series of what one article calls “icono-
clastic ‘mash-ups’”10 on Youku or TuDou.com (Chinese counterparts
to Youtube).11 The series uses vintage footage from the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) Choir and PLA band performing the Long
March Suite (攧⼩乬㫴) during the Cultural Revolution. The Long
March Suite is a symphonic and choral suite, with poetry by Red Army
general Xiao Hua 倾⋶ (1916–1985), based on a composition first
created in 1965. It was revised and then filmed in the final months
of the Cultural Revolution, in February 1976, and recently reedited
in 1992.12 The Long March Suite continues the hybrid traditions
established in the model works from the Cultural Revolution, which
included a number of symphonic and instrumental works based on
model operas (e.g., the Shajiabang Symphony, based on the model
opera Shajiabang, or the piano-accompanied concert version of arias
from the model opera The Red Lantern), all of which had been filmed
in 1973, together with another symphonic model work, the Yellow
River Piano Concerto. Not least because of these filmed versions,
these works were well known to everyone who had lived through the
Cultural Revolution—and even later generations, as these pieces have
now become “classics”13 and have not stopped being performed regu-
larly since the late 1970s, a fact we will return to later.
The Long March Suite highlights both operatic bel canto and Chinese
folk styles of singing, and features poetic recitation and an orchestral
tableau that includes Chinese instruments within a symphonic setup. It
integrates both the orchestra (which is part of the staged performance,
which has all musicians playing by heart, so that no music stands can
hinder them from “participating” in the action) and the choir, as pro-
tagonists in the action, clapping and moving with the contents of the
story told. The performance takes place in front of a film screen that
provides shifting and moving background images illustrating the iconic
moments of the Long March and, finally, the arrival in Yan’an.
Referring back, visually, to this Cultural Revolution performance by

citing from the filmed footage, the images are, in these mash-ups, cou-
pled with a radically new soundtrack: well-known songs from a global
selection from the pop, rock, and rap music repertoire.14 Next to “Beat
It,” which became particularly popular, with millions of viewers,15
Queen’s “We Will Rock You,”16 Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” “Bad
Romance,” and “Telephone,”17 Nightwish’s “She Is My Sin,”18 Justin
Bieber’s “Baby,”19 KPop band Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry Sorry,”20
and the Wonder Girls’ “Nobody,” as well as Gong Linna’s “Tan’te ⽸
⽹ (Apprehension)”21 and K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” (the official theme
song of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa),22 have all been
produced as “Red Army” 乊⅃ cover versions using images from the
Long March Suite. There seems to be no end to this trend.23
In the original Long March Suite, music takes precedence, it is the
instruments, the singers, and the choir that are foregrounded, even
while the action is played out and visualized dramatically on the screen
above the musicians. The filmic images form a visual set and back-
ground to the musical foreground, which tells the story of the Long
March. This foregrounding of music and sound is evident in the vari-
ous Red Army remakes, too. In “Beat It,” for example, the synchro-
nization between movements in the instruments, the back-and-forth
between singer and choir, and the Jackson soundtrack is very well
done; the E-guitar solo that we hear introduced in sync with an erhu-
solo passage (“Red Army Beat It,” 2:50) and the drum and cymbal
beats at the beginning, as well as the running “cello-percussion” pas-
sages, are extremely effectively executed. In rhythmic cuts—shot-re-
verse-shot (which echo original practice, see LMS 21:00)24—between
choir, orchestra, soloist, and conductor, and between different instru-
mental groups (the horns are dominant, “Beat It” 0:24), the dialogic
quality of the Jackson song is underlined.
Yet, in all of the covers, the respective popular song is projected
onto an only slightly varying, but clearly very limited, selection of
images from the Long March Suite, which is constantly recut for this
purpose. The many and radically different sonic remakes of a limited
collection of visual materials, well-known and thus perfectly “read-
able” in their original signification by contemporary audiences, both
empties and reifies the generic images with concrete meaning. The
fact that most of the covers have been elaborately produced and syn-
chronized with great inspiration and care—trying to even match the
movement of the lips with the words of the respective songs (some
more, some less successfully)25—increases this somewhat paradoxical
effect even more. The identical images—of a gong or drums playing,
244 BARBARA MITTLER
an erhu soloing, the choir and a female and a male soloist singing and
responding—may be accompanied by words and a soundscape that
is totally contradictory and antipathetic. The same (overdetermined
through propagandistic repetition) faces and movements of soloists,
instrumentalists, choir, and conductor come to stand for and symbol-
ize many different characters and a myriad of actions and sentiments
voiced in the cover texts and derived from the images associated with
them: from the yearning or disillusioned lover in the Justin Bieber
and Lady Gaga covers to the gang fighter in the new version of “Beat
It,” everyone pours out his heart to the same set of images. While the
continuing remediation of the same visual repertoire with ever differ-
ent soundtracks and texts highlights the stylized and somewhat hyper-
bolic condensation of dramatic and musical gestures in the Cultural
Revolution work, it may also appear to remove (and thus empty and
clear) all fixed connotations. To what extent, then, while tune and text
of the songs are retained as in the original, is the message of both the
cover song and of the Cultural Revolution visual background “lost
in translation”? And to what extent can it be seen reverberating, nev-
ertheless, in the remediation, thus adding new dimensions of signifi-
cance to existing memories or ideas?
“Beat It” is one of Jackson’s first songs that made him into the
star of synchronized mass break-dance choreography—so it is aptly
used on yangbanxi tunes in the Dutch documentary mentioned ear-
lier. Jackson’s dance and song originally describes how he stops a knife
fight between two gang leaders. In the song and the video accompa-
nying it, Jackson appears as the good guy who breaks up the fight.
He finally launches into a dance routine. Gang members too join him
in the dance, which unifies all, “enemies” included, and thus every-
one, by the end, is evidently agreeing (at least for the moment)—in
perfectly synchronized movements—that violence is not the solution
to their problems. It does not really matter, after all, who is right or
wrong, they have to stick together. “Let’s beat it” is addressed to
themselves in a way: let’s forget about fighting!26
The primary message of the Long March Suite, onto which Michael
Jackson’s text and music is projected in the Chinese “Beat It” parody,
is, of course, slightly different. The Long March Suite speaks of the
Long March (October 1934–October 1935), a military feat under-
taken by the Red Army and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to
evade the deadly pursuit by the Nationalist Army. Several pockets of
the Red Army escaped from the Nationalist forces in a circling retreat
and reportedly traversed over 6,000 miles in about a year’s time. The
route passed through some of the most difficult terrain of western
China: wild rivers, snowy mountains, and desolate plains. The journey
left nine out of ten of those who originally departed Jiangxi either
dead or abandoned on the way. The bitter struggles of the Long
March have been eulogized repeatedly as one of the most significant
and heroic episodes in the history of the CCP. It was also the event
that would seal Mao’s personal prestige as one of the new leaders of
the Party. In the Long March Suite, accordingly, Mao’s position in the
fight is key. Indeed, the image of the singer that is used in the refrain
“Just beat it” in the Cultural Revolution original appears in a song on
Mao’s superior military ability, his way of “using his soldiers in godly
fashion” 㮃ᷣⷕ䓐ℝ䛇⤪䤆 (Long March Suite LMS 22:32 ff.). The
uplifting words appeal to the masses (with Jackson’s text, “Just beat
it!”), make them follow and accept his lead, in a synchronized uni-
sono choir—if not dancing—and next, in the images projected behind
the Long March Suite, well-known to the Chinese audience, they go
off and cross the Luding bridge, a seemingly impossible feat, as it is
broken in so many spots and suspended high above the roaring river
waters. Yet, they manage to cross, and do so successfully because they
are able to support each other, to stick together.
The most important message in the Long March Suite, then, is not
one about fighting the Nationalists, but, not unlike the message in
“Beat It,” about standing together and supporting each other, some-
thing that is expressed here not in synchronized dance movements
as in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” (of which the audience watching
the mash-up is, of course, aware), but in the synchronized hand and
body movements to be seen both in orchestra and choir throughout
the piece (e.g., for Luding Bridge, LMS 25:46–26:41). These ges-
tures have, most likely, inscribed themselves into the visual memory
of those who lived through the Cultural Revolution and reverberate,
therefore, on seeing and hearing the Jackson cover.
This example may indicate that these Red Army covers are not just
entertainment; and indeed, it underlines the sociopolitical relevance
of the musico-dramatic repertoire from the Cultural Revolution and
its message even today. As Ban Wang argues in this volume, instead
of disappearing, serious social and political problems have resurfaced
with China’s opening to global capitalism. Some of them are, para-
doxically, precisely those problems that the Cultural Revolution and
its ideology had hoped to address and relieve, by preaching solidarity
and unity for all: standing by each other, supporting each other self-
lessly, and fighting for a common cause was its ideological message.
Why choose Jackson’s song, then, and what does its superimposi-
tion on the Chinese propaganda work mean? One of the reasons why
the Jackson cover may be so particularly successful today is precisely
that China’s current unresolved problems—intensifying social, labor,
246 BARBARA MITTLER
and class divides and the rural crisis—evoke memories of the old ide-
ologies, especially as they are mixed with and superscribed, as well
as echoed, by the message of the Michael Jackson song. Following
Wang, I would argue that the use of these Cultural Revolution images
that evoke particular texts and sounds, enhanced with new sounds
and texts that amplify their meaning, are a force that may not only be
aesthetic but is social and political as well.
This is true for all of the covers, but particularly for the Jackson
cover: Jackson is well known and extremely popular in China.27
Chinese articles call him the “God” of popular music and the “king”
or “emperor” of the “song” or the “entertainment world.”28 When
he died in 2009, his death was “grieved all over the world“—but
especially in China.29 When his clothes collection was auctioned off
in 2011, this took place in China.30 While Jackson had never set foot
on Chinese soil and had never given a concert in China, he had, as
one article states, become an important symbol and part of China’s
cultural repertoire since the 1980s.31
His music, and more importantly, what is considered the philoso-
phy behind his music, has greatly influenced the pop music scene in
China. He is hailed as someone who has been able to produce “sounds
of nature.”32 Accordingly, his contribution to the world of popular
music is not just to music but to the idea of music as a liberating world
language,33 and thus, a contribution, too, to the world of politics and
people’s understanding of each other. That is what he stands for,
symbolically, in China: freedom, peace, and consideration.34 The fact
that “Beat It,” regularly described in Chinese writings as Jackson’s
“first great hit,”35 is superscribed so successfully upon a Chinese pro-
paganda work such as the Long March Suite is not all that surprising
then. It appears a perfect fit. The success of the superimposed message
points to the fact that China, in spite of its recent policies of building
a “harmonious society” (internally) and instituting a “peaceful rise”
(internationally), has not yet been able to attain its ideal.
A political dimension is also not lost in some of the other covers in
the Red Army mash-up series—of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga among
them. Their daring juxtaposition of Cultural Revolution visuality and
rock soundscapes resonates because the openly erotic and provocative
imagery accompanying the original songs is quite familiar to Chinese
audiences, and thus it enhances the Cultural Revolution visuals fore-
grounded in the cover. Hearing the sounds and seeing the Cultural
Revolution visuals, Chinese audiences will actually ponder over both
sets of images, overlapping and echoing as well as contradicting and
challenging each other.
Because of the acceptance and widespread knowledge of the global

pop and rock repertoire, it would not make any sense at all, indeed
it would be impossible, for current Chinese propagandists to try and
eradicate these visuals from people’s minds. One netizen who uploads
the “Beat It” version on Youtube comments jokingly: “The People’s
Republic of China decided that the original Beat It video clip was not
fit for the Chinese people and asked the Office of Censorship to cre-
ate its own version of the clip, while keeping the original song. This is
what resulted.” (Uploaded on July 9, 2010).36
These particular covers are evidently appealing to some audi-
ences, as they correspond to a not uncommon view of the Cultural
Revolution—held by influential figures such as Chinese filmmaker
Jiang Wen or artist Zhu Wei, for example—as representing a libidi-
nal, libertarian radicalism. They consider the Cultural Revolution as a
social rebellion of youth in the fashion of Woodstock and Rock’n’Roll,
a “huge pop concert” with Mao as its biggest rock star.37 The success
of recent commercializations of Cultural Revolution culture, which
have transported and magnified this interpretation of it as a stunning,
entertaining, and even erotic spectacle—a carnival of sensuality—
seems to point to the popularity of this view; and the successful super-
imposition of Lady Gaga’s erotic and Justin Bieber’s defiant sounds
all fit this bill very well.
In her chapter in this volume, Laurence Coderre illustrates the
physical immediacy and bodily impulses associated with Cultural
Revolution propaganda works, which were binding several genera-
tions to engage with particular poses, gestures, dances, and sounds.
The corporeal and sensual effect of these memories is hard to forego
even when the original is superscribed in sound in these remediations.
This is even more true as the rock and pop covers discussed here
can also be seen in a continuum with the kinds of remediations tak-
ing place during the Cultural Revolution itself, when a Beijing opera
would move into another local operatic form (undergoing significant
and sometimes counterintuitive transformations, as some of the essays
in this volume have illustrated), or into a comic strip and film, or into
an oil painting or a popular print or poster. Resetting the soundtrack
of Cultural Revolution music is a radical move, to be sure, but one
that in the end only constitutes an extension of these earlier, again
often embodied and thus very subjectively experienced, revisions
and remediations of these same propaganda pieces, which are, there-
fore, not forgotten easily and which have, even during the Cultural
Revolution itself, often imposed (or opened up) multiple angles of
perception for them.38
248 BARBARA MITTLER
When Justin Bieber, Michael Jackson, or Lady Gaga become the

soundtrack for a feast of Cultural Revolution visuals, the old propa-
ganda visuals as well as the original pop visuals are important (appear-
ing before an internal eye, so to speak) in the immediate experience
of the cover. But is this, in turn, the case also with the original music
from the Cultural Revolution? As it is covered completely and boister-
ously, does the aural memory of the propaganda piece still play a role
in the sensual appeal of these remediations?
In other words, in seeing and hearing one of the Red Army cover
songs, is the original Cultural Revolution sound going along with the
images shown in the covers always already remembered? Is it no lon-
ger (or not only) Jackson or the gang leader he embodies whom the
audience is hearing, or is it indeed the brigade leader from the Long
March whom they are actually seeing in the cover, even though medi-
ated through the Jackson sound? And what does this particular “ste-
reo effect” mean? How ironic or iconoclastic (or cool?) does the use
of erhus and cellos sounding as electric guitars and metallic percussion
appear to a Chinese audience who knows the original so well?
Musicians are able to hear the difference between violins played in
a symphonic piece from the Cultural Revolution and in a Beethoven
symphony, as Rao shows in her contribution. Others too have attrib-
uted a particular “revolutionary” sound to classical instruments in
propaganda pieces from the Cultural Revolution (see Pang). Part
of the reason for this effect may be the hybrid or synthetic qual-
ity of these sounds, which, as Nancy Rao argues forcefully, became
part of the new generations’ sonic imagination. For this generation,
then, it appears to be a natural to be hearing and seeing two or more
soundtracks at the same time: and even though the cover appears to
be drowning the alternative soundtrack and aural dimension of the
piece, this hybrid awareness opens up new dimensions of meaning,
both to the original sound of the propaganda piece as well as to the
cover that had hitherto not been visible and audible. To what extent,
then, does the imposition of “popular sound” on the “revolutionary
sound” change the nature of these “popular sounds” as well, just as
the nature of “classical sounds” had once been changed by having
them enter a “revolutionary” composition?
Paul Clark, in his contribution to this volume, points to the fact
that memories of the Cultural Revolution era have a significant aural
dimension to them. He mentions the daily exposure to propaganda
music and sounds, experienced in the form of films shown all over
the country—in cinemas, on threshing grounds, or in work unit
canteens—or else, blaring through the ubiquitous loudspeakers. One
would assume, therefore, that this revolutionary musical memory—

reinforced by overdetermined learning through embodiment and the
constant and reiterated appreciation experience of this music during
the Cultural Revolution—left its imprint. Even if openly “silenced” by
the noisy sounds of Jackson’s, Bieber’s, or Gaga’s rock in the covers—
this soundtrack, while hushed, would presumably be quite resilient
and powerfully resounding.
During the Cultural Revolution, blasting from public loudspeak-
ers day after day, this revolutionary sound was a permanent, every-
day experience, but does that mean it continues as a subconscious
soundtrack that cannot be eliminated while seeing and hearing
these covers today? Could one even argue that the original Cultural
Revolution soundtrack, subdued and drowned by new sounds from
the popular music repertoire precisely by not being there, becomes
perhaps even more resonant in people’s minds? And what would
that mean? Does a cover like the Red Army “Beat It” thus produce
a new type of multivocal musical experience that carries the audi-
ence back even more forcefully, perhaps, to those times when they
embodied and performed and constantly heard these sounds? What
does this tell us about the relationship between popular culture and
propaganda?
These noisy but silent or sonically denatured remediations of the
Cultural Revolution soundscape reveal as much about history in the
present as they do about the past (i.e., the Cultural Revolution). The
continuous and ongoing remediations of the Cultural Revolution
musico-dramatic soundscape are obvious testimony to the fact that
this soundscape has not been and perhaps can never be forgotten.
Musical productions of the Cultural Revolution era continue to be
part of people’s everyday life and have lasting effects on their rela-
tionships with the world. Indeed, they, the “revolutionary” and
“modern” models for art during the Cultural Revolution, have, para-
doxically enough, become “classics,” as Winzenberg points out in his
chapter: what is seen as “revolutionary” in one era can quickly fade
into “classicism” in another. History, and especially the history of the
Cultural Revolution, is still a living presence in China. To understand
concretely what this means for the polyphonic sound experience of
the present and how this was, in fact, engendered by a particular
experience of the past, I will now take one step back and begin with
the basic question of what it was that characterized the soundscape
of the Cultural Revolution—caught between propaganda and popu-
lar culture—and thus engendered the particular social life of sounds
from this period in its aftermath.
250 BARBARA MITTLER
“Sounds amidst the Fury”? Living

the Cultural Revolution Soundscape
This book has given ample evidence for what has been argued in recent
studies on Cultural Revolution culture: that the notion that Cultural
Revolution culture produced nothing but “eight model works” is his-
torically inaccurate.39 The Cultural Revolution was accompanied by
music. There were “sounds amidst the fury,” including “foreign clas-
sical” and “Chinese traditional” sounds, while music, just like all other
artistic production, was subject to extreme political regimentation: only
certain correct colors, forms, and sounds were officially acceptable. Yet,
it turns out that there was a substantive difference between what was
officially endorsed and what was actually available. People remember
the Cultural Revolution soundscape in many different, often contradic-
tory, ways. In the following discussion, I would like to point to some of
these contradictory memories to offer a reflection on the social lives of
the Cultural Revolution soundscapes as seen manifested in some of the
remediations discussed so far. I contend that understanding the aural
experience that was the Cultural Revolution may help us explain its
social lives and continuing vibrant repercussions in the present.
The oral histories cited here go back to a series of in-depth inter-
views I conducted in Beijing and Shanghai in the early 2000s with
representatives from many different class and generational back-
grounds—from a young taxi driver to an elderly musician, from a
middle-aged journalist to a housekeeper and a museum curator.40 My
interviewees were randomly chosen from a group mostly involved in
education, art, or media today. Half of them came from working-
class, rural, or what would be considered “capitalist” backgrounds,
the other half came from intellectual families, members of which had
been criticized severely and declared Rightists, even counterrevolu-
tionaries before and during the Cultural Revolution. About half of
them had experienced being sent down to the countryside or working
in factories. All were asked the same set of questions about their per-
sonal memories of cultural life during the Cultural Revolution, includ-
ing questions about watching or performing the model works and
others.41 Their takes on the soundscape of the Cultural Revolution
will be scrutinized in the following pages in an attempt to trace and
make visible the extremely multifaceted and complicated nature of
the Cultural Revolution as (cultural) experience. These memories are
indeed “visions of the collectively experienced past.” They constitute
reconstructions by those who have lived through it. Naturally, they
cannot be taken as “an objective chronology of the past,”42 but they
are also valuable indications about its importance to the present and
enable us to understand why people reacted to Cultural Revolution
artistic production the way they did (and continue to do today).43
One artist, born in 1954, mentioned that he regularly played the
Butterfly (Lovers) Violin Concerto 㠩Ⱉỗ冯䤅劙⎘ Liang Shanbo
yu Zhu Yingtai during the Cultural Revolution. The concerto,
composed in 1959 by Chen Gang 旰⇂ (1935–) and He Zhanhao
ỽ⌈尒 (1933–), is based on local operatic tunes situated in a structure
of functional harmony. The piece was officially condemned during the
Cultural Revolution because it told a dynastic story based on romantic,
unfulfilled individual love, not love for the Party and the Communist
cause. For some, therefore, its “reappearance” after the Cultural
Revolution marked the coming of a changing order. One interviewee
remembers the piece being played again on the radio in 1976: “So
then I thought: society is changing!” (Housewife, 1950s–).
At the same time, however, clandestine listening and playing was
evidently practiced throughout the ten years that are now considered
the “Cultural Revolution.” Some urban youth even organized their
own music sessions with “loot” from second-hand stores: “We were
able to buy all kinds of things, old records as well . . . The family and
the neighbors, everybody would come to listen . . . It was the first time
for me to listen to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.” (Intellectual, 1958–)
Others, fed up with listening to, and singing, revolutionary songs,
organized their own “underground concerts” with Western music:
“We would have these ‘concerts’ in the homes of those children whose
parents had ‘disappeared’ . . . In the 1980s, when I heard Beethoven
again, I was quite surprised; I just could not quite remember why I
knew this music so well” (Writer, 1958–).
The varieties of music available were quite impressive: there were
those who listened to the Beatles during the Cultural Revolution and
others who played Mozart string quartets, and almost every (sent-
down) youth would carry his or her collection of 200 Famous Foreign
Songs ⢾⚥⎵㫴Ḵ䘦椾 Waiguo minge erbaishou with them. Musical
life (and cultural life more generally) then, during the Cultural
Revolution, was quite diverse, both in the cities and in the country-
side, and contained a mixture of Chinese and foreign sounds.
One historian (born in 1949) who had grown up in the country-
side, the child of illiterate peasants, mentioned the regular visit of a
storyteller:
Because China is so big, it was not possible to actually control every-

thing and know exactly what was going on. You could perform all kinds
252 BARBARA MITTLER
of things, and nobody would know it. Often there were blind men as
storytellers. The whole activity was organized by the village; they gave
him a place to stay and eat, etc. Nobody interfered. Tradition had not
been broken off.
Another former sent-down youth, a renowned ethnomusicologist,

remembers practicing the violin on his own during his time in the
countryside, playing just about anything he wanted, since nobody
knew what he was playing. But he also remembers learning about
rural folk culture:
I learned a lot about folk songs 㮹㫴 min’ge, for example. Really,

through the Cultural Revolution, the musical world of each one of us
has broadened . . . China is so big, and there are so many differences in
musical style. Folk music 㮹斜枛᷸ minjian yinyue has only really been
understood since then. (Ethnomusicologist, 1940–)
This impression is echoed by another former sent-down youth, who

remembers the Shanxi countryside as a very musical place:
There was a lot of music performed in the countryside—local operas

⛘㕡ㆷ difangxi as well as folk songs. In the early years of the Cultural
Revolution, people did not sing the folk songs so openly because of
their content: love and sex. These kinds of things were not supposed
to be there. So they would just create new words for a song and make
it into a revolutionary song. It is too bad that I did not record these
songs. The Shanxi folksong is a very old form. And I would never have
known anything about these songs had I not been there, so really,
not only did we teach the peasants, the peasants also taught us a lot.
(Intellectual, 1955–)
These examples illustrate that official attempts to delimit precisely

the choice of cultural resources available during the Cultural Revolution
were not entirely successful. Officially, in the years between 1965 and
1971, traditional themes and techniques in opera, literature, comics,
and painting as well as foreign, “capitalist,” or “revisionist” art works
were no longer readily available (that is, for sale, on the radio, or on the
public loudspeakers and in officially sanctioned public performances).
This situation changed, however, quite drastically, with the beginning
of Ping-Pong Diplomacy in the early 1970s and after Richard Nixon’s
1972 visit to China. Foreign orchestras were now allowed to travel to
China again, and many artists specializing in traditional painting styles
and in traditional instruments such as the guqin (of which Tsai’s essay
tells a fascinating story), who were condemned in the early years of

the Cultural Revolution, were asked to come back from the country-
side and create the so-called hotel art 㕭椮刢㛗 lüguan yishu, and old-
style music as well, so as to impress foreign guests with the exquisite
qualities of traditional Chinese culture.44
What we can conclude from this record of oral history, which echoes
the arguments presented in this book, is that although there were
harsh restrictions on the propagated official soundscapes through-
out the Cultural Revolution, manifold local and private soundscapes
continued to exist both in urban settings and in the countryside.
These stand as a significant and hybrid backdrop to the experience
of Cultural Revolution propaganda sounds. Both clandestine and
propaganda sounds had an important impact on the making of aural
experiences: they served to introduce a great variety of both popular
and high art forms to those who had never been exposed to them
before. Through the model works, for example, and their local varia-
tions, urban youth learned about Chinese opera. Being sent to the
countryside, they were confronted with local folk musics. Peasants, on
the other hand, through films and performances by sent-down youth,
learned about foreign popular songs as much as they did about ballet
and symphonic music.45
The soundscapes of the Cultural Revolution thus opened up new
avenues of experience for those living in the countryside, on one hand,
and in the cities, on the other. They also gave the people, both in the
countryside and in the cities, regular opportunities to take part in large-
scale cultural performances, both actively or as audiences—providing
more opportunities than ever before (or after) to experience music in
very immediate fashion.46 Thus, the propaganda sounds, in conjunction
with nonofficial sources of sound that continued to circulate, were able
to enrich the everyday cultural experience of the average Chinese.
The musical experience of the Cultural Revolution, both through
the official channels and through the unofficial, clandestine practices,
was thus ear-opening and educational. Evidently, it was entertaining
too, as some would point out:
During the Cultural Revolution, we would sing some of these popular

songs, the Long March Suite 攧⼩乬㫴, for example, and some of the
model works, too. I liked them a lot. Of course, there was nothing else,
and they may even be rather crude artistically, but I liked them, neverthe-
less, especially Azalea Mountain 㜄淫Ⱉ Dujuanshan and Red Lantern.
In fact, I liked the operas best. And even now, there are still quite a lot
of people who like the model works! (China Historian, 1949–)
254 BARBARA MITTLER
One of the reasons for these very positive responses was the fact that
almost everyone was involved in creating and thus embodying this
cultural experience, reenacting the model works (or the Long March
Suite, which would become the object of so many covers) or singing
revolutionary songs and performing loyalty dances, as both Nancy
Rao and Laurence Coderre point out in their chapters. Many would
remember being told: “Why don’t you study a little bit of Beijing
Opera.” And many did: “I can still sing some of the arias. My son
often calls on me to sing them” (Intellectual, 1958–).
In thus creating a “democratic” or “massified” experience through
embodied performance, so that a “hard-working machinist by day”
could well be an “opera performer by night,” as Laurence Coderre
shows, and despite the repressive lid of ideological constraints, the
Cultural Revolution thus allowed for a vibrant, creative, and inter-
pretative energy to be brought to life through a vast range of artis-
tic enactments: it gave a social life to sound in ways and manners
unknown before (and after).
Although some embarrassment is evident in statements on enjoy-
ing the propaganda art and music from the Cultural Revolution among
contemporaries, it is also clear that consumers of Cultural Revolution
propaganda apparently derived considerable pleasure even from a text
whose ideological message they did not necessarily accept. The divide
between control and freedom, then, was not as sharply defined as it
might at first appear. The idea that propaganda’s reception has only two
alternatives—manipulative top-down control and an individual’s subver-
sive initiatives to bend it to their own purposes—misses the mobilized,
inspirational, playful, and populist character of a long tradition of pro-
paganda in China. Nancy Rao points to the fact that a rigid binary that
affirms the Chinese saying, “There is policy above, and agency below”
ᶲ㚱㓧䫾, ᶳ㚱⮡䫾, is not sufficient to explain the workings of Cultural
Revolution culture. Indeed, a large portion of the cultural experience of
the Cultural Revolution, generally, was in fact based on self-organized,
self-initiated grassroots activity. People and artists were on productive
and receiving ends of cultural processes. Cultural Revolution culture—
inclusive of its music—was thus always already popular culture.
I have shown elsewhere that what people make of propaganda is
just as unpredictable as what they make of any other artistic “text,”
in spite of all the overdetermination worked into propaganda by the
ideologues.47 The public will neither appreciate propaganda art’s
aesthetic qualities nor criticize them (but maybe they will do both);
also, they will neither notice its political content nor ignore it (or
they may even do both). This ambiguity and openness in its recep-
tion also explain some of the after-effects of Cultural Revolution
propaganda art, the acceptance of ironic, cynical, or even iconoclastic

takes on it, which are not something new in postmodern remakes and
are integral to the Cultural Revolution experience as well. Cultural
Revolution joke collections, for example, attest to this as do reports
of singing with a certain (inadequate) tone, or with a particular flick
of the head in exaggerated parody, using a clever rewording of a well-
known verse, thus providing an outlet for a shared sense of the comic
and ridiculous.48 This sense is echoed in the “iconoclastic ‘mash-up’”
cover versions discussed earlier, with their exaggerated cuts, provoca-
tive instrumental juxtapositions, and waxen figures.
These carnevalistic readings of the Cultural Revolution soundscape
have now come to be appreciated not just by those who have nostal-
gic memories of performing (and thus having fun with) it and (dis-)
believing it during their youth, but also by a younger generation who
never went through and experienced the Cultural Revolution at all.
Evidently, one reason for the enormous success of the Red Army cov-
ers probably lies hidden in the jouissance it continues to provide, both
to those who have memories of their performance and those merely
imagining them. One interviewee formulates:
My generation likes the model works, they are our youth . . . Indeed,
when I was young, eighteen or so, I needed art so much, we all did.
And then, there were just the model works as our food, and we actually
thought they were quite great. Jiang Qing used really good perform-
ers, writers, artists, and musicians. Of course, this was propaganda for
Mao’s thoughts, but it was also simply good art. (Musician, 1942–)
Another interviewee would judge differently but still come up with a

similar conclusion about enjoyment of Cultural Revolution soundscapes:
“Of course, there was nothing else, and they may even be rather crude
artistically, but I liked them, nevertheless” (China Historian, 1949–). A
third informant would say that his son (from the break-dancing genera-
tion in Yang Ban Xi) demanded that he sing from the model works
for him from time to time (Intellectual, 1958–), while a fourth is more
skeptical about the model work’s appeal to a younger generation:
The model works now still have an audience, but it is all people like us.
It has nothing to do with their artistic value, it is really only nostalgia.
Very few actually consider them art; most who go to see them do so for
different reasons. It is a phenomenon similar to the nostalgia restau-
rants of sent-down youth 䞍曺梸⌭ zhiqing canting. The younger gen-
eration will find this very strange. They will not like the model works.
(China Historian, 1957–)
256 BARBARA MITTLER
The subjective pleasure that some of these contemporaries expe-

rienced and continue to experience watching the model works, in
addition to the particular aural and visual memories of the works
themselves may be derived from sources that have nothing to do with
their original message or artistic quality.49 One artist, documented in
the 2005 Dutch documentary Yang Ban Xi, remembers how much
he liked to watch the model ballet Red Detachment of Women, not
for its political content but because the women were wearing short
shorts and he thought this very sexy. Another of the model ballets,
Sons and Daughters of the Grasslands 勱⍇⃧⤛ Caoyuan ernü, features
a dance in which one can even see under the girls’ skirts—of interest
to some, to be sure.50 There are those who would deny such read-
ings, or who would argue, “of course they are sexy, but in the type
of context in which we were brought up then, we would never think
of that” (Playwright, 1956–).51 There are others who would point to
these to support their view of a “sensual” Cultural Revolution (and
this may well be the reason why Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are not
just accepted but greatly appreciated as covers, as discussed earlier).
And indeed, these features also explain why—quite in opposition to
the predictions made by the China historian quoted earlier—the gen-
eration born after the Cultural Revolution, in a kind of “Art Retro”
Movement, also finds some of the art and culture of the Cultural
Revolution fascinating, why they flock to Cultural Revolution nos-
talgia restaurants, why they buy collections of the model works and
Red Sun CDs with remakes of revolutionary songs in praise of Mao
and sing them in karaoke bars, why they visit Cultural Revolution flea
markets, and why they accept Cultural Revolution art as “classic.”
When it comes to Cultural Revolution propaganda and the social
life of its sounds, the concept of pleasure as well as ideas about forceful
seduction and brainwashing manipulation all have important explana-
tory power. There is a constant renegotiation of the meaning of pro-
paganda. Some people continue to engage with it, even today, but
for very distinctive reasons—some want to relieve themselves of its
trauma and others want to relive its fun—the openly political Michael
Jackson covers and the steamily sensual Lady Gaga covers of the Long
March Suite offer evidence for all of these emotions.
In addition, the makers of Cultural Revolution propaganda art were
quite familiar with the rules of how to make art popular. They under-
stood that the medium was not the message, but that the medium in
fact “changes the number and variety of messages and the character
of the audiences.”52 Accordingly, to draw in as much audience as pos-
sible, the message would be packaged in as many media as possible,
ranging, in terms of soundscapes, from revolutionary operas to ballet

to symphonic music. As Fiske puts it: “A popular text, to be popular
must have points of relevance to a variety of readers in a variety of
social contexts.”53 In order best to address itself to the crowd and be
effective, explains Jacques Ellul in a similar vein, popular art (and pro-
paganda) “must touch each individual in that crowd . . . it must give
the impression of being personal, for we must never forget that the
mass is composed of individuals.”54 By creating a propaganda art that
advocated the same message in a myriad of different cultural regis-
ters, genres, and forms,55 the Chinese state, in its attempt to thwart
the creation of popular art from below, produced precisely such art
from above, and—judging from hindsight—did so rather success-
fully. One interviewee who had been a schoolboy during the Cultural
Revolution describes the propaganda art of the Cultural Revolution
as popular culture:
Things that are popular (㳩埴 liuxing) must really be rather low art,
because they are for a lot of people . . . and this is what Jiang Qing wanted:
she really did not want high art in that elitist sense. And therefore, the
model works served the same function as pop songs (㳩埴㫴㚚 liuxing
gequ) do today. (Photographer, 1960–)
Seeing the model works this way makes it easier to understand why
they are so effortlessly “cover-able” with almost any piece from the
record of global pop—their social lives were pop all along.
Indeed, the state’s claims for Chinese propaganda art during the
Cultural Revolution were twofold: it aspired to be popular art and high
art at the same time. In his Yan’an Talks, Mao rages against a “crude
poster and slogan style,” arguing that art’s artistic value is dependent
on how well it “serves the people” (ᷢṢ㮹㚵≉ wei renmin fuwu).56
By nature of this ideology, the more popular the art work, the higher
its artistic achievement. State engagement in entertainment culture
during the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to establish a monop-
oly on popular culture. As in Huxley’s Brave New World, in the art of
the Cultural Revolution “there are no masterpieces, for masterpieces
appeal only to a limited audience.”57 The propagandist, by contrast,
has to reach as many people as possible. And accordingly, each of the
main heroes in the model works is closer to Superman or Zorro than
to Hamlet or Oedipus—or to put it in musical terms: closer to Lady
Gaga than to Cecilia Bartoli. Only if compared with popular and mass
culture, rather than elite art and culture, does Cultural Revolution
propaganda art and music begin to make sense.
258 BARBARA MITTLER
Popular culture tends to be “excessive,” its brush strokes “crude,”

and its colors “striking.” Its overabundance calls on those who reject
and despise popular culture to say that it is “vulgar,” “melodramatic,”
“superficial,” “sensational,” and “transparent.”58 All of these descrip-
tions fit the art of the Cultural Revolution, the official and the unof-
ficial (including folk styles and foreign styles), and its remediating
covers as well. The broad consumption and, at the same time, broad
condescension toward a cultural product is usually evidence for its
popularity.59 Accordingly, the rhetoric of the “deficient character” of
cultural products from the Cultural Revolution is identical to the cri-
tique high culture habitually offers of popular culture.60 But (elevated
and elevating) popular culture is exactly what Cultural Revolution
culture has aspired to be.61
According to Jacques Ellul, propaganda can only be effective when
it is applied over a long period of time.62 Taking the Mao cult as one
example, which finds its reflections in the Cultural Revolution sound-
scape—with the hymn to Mao “The East is Red” played and var-
ied incessantly—we can see a continuity of more than half a century.
At least since the 1935 Zunyi Conference during the Long March,
which was so well remembered in the Long March Suite, for example,
Mao had become the main leader of the Chinese revolution. Symbolic
affirmation of this fact is given repeatedly and on various platforms
and media. In music this happens, for example, with the adoption in
1942 of the folk song turned revolutionary song, “The East is Red.”
According to Jacques Ellul:
Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacities for atten-

tion or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance. This trait of
continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and
turns. It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be
so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yester-
day . . . Actually it is only an indication of the grip it exerts, of the reality
of its effects. We must not think that a man ceases to follow the line
when there is a sharp turn. He continues to follow it because he is
caught up in the system.63
These observations are directly relevant with regard to the reme-

diations in recent times of Maoist music from the Cultural Revolution
era—in the form of Red Sun Songs or the mash-up covers discussed
earlier. No particular message, but a special feeling, is associated with
this music and Mao who remains, ultimately, the most prominent and
long-lived symbol of all Cultural Revolution propaganda art: “It is no
longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual
cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to lead to a

choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an
opinion, but to arouse an active and mythical belief.”64
Model works or revolutionary songs, all of them in praise of Mao,
which have grown, been consolidated over time, and are in a process
of continuous refinement and revision, represent and serve the basic
culturally dependent needs of a particular time. They are not just what
they appear to be but are much more: they are, in fact, symbolizations.
As shared formulations, or “propagemes,” they are attempts to express
specific (and changing with time) emotional, cognitive, and mental
needs.65 The repetitive use of the propageme creates a feeling of trust,
a framework that makes Chinese society stick together.66 Invocations
of this Maoist soundscape thus provide a “moral economy” for assess-
ing and understanding the present. This, again, can be seen as the rea-
son for remediations of this culture being so successful and explains the
“sociability” of these sounds, so to speak. In the case of the Michael
Jackson cover of the Long March Suite, we have seen how the cover
text can actually reinforce such a message. Many recall the days under
Mao as “a time of employment security, clean government, and relative
social equality,” even though they have “equally vivid critical reminis-
cences of cadre tyranny, grinding poverty, violence, and fear inflicted
by political campaigns.”67 Regardless, they will stick to their hero and
the music associated with him—and will easily accept the superscrip-
tion of a new hero such as Michael Jackson upon it.
What is pertinent is that the new Cultural Revolution propaganda
cult that has been blooming since the late 1980s and prominently
includes the soundscapes from the Cultural Revolution is not just a
grassroots popular movement; it is more or less openly supported by
the Chinese government as well. Cultural Revolution sounds are thus
recognized (and remembered) for all their worth by different com-
municators and audiences within Chinese society: as semantic markers
and mediators for things that may indeed have little to do with each
other—a social “kit,” so to speak.68
Leaving the Stage: Rethinking the Social

Lives of Cultural Revolution Sounds
This book on the musical field in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
is testimony to the fact that the Cultural Revolution is much more
than a significant political event or an exceptional period in Chinese
history. While the music officially approved during the Cultural
Revolution may be criticized as clichéd and monotonous, this and
260 BARBARA MITTLER
other “sounds amidst the fury” evidently continue to be powerful

in providing people with a sense of emotional anchorage in a rapidly
changing world. The remediations of Cultural Revolution music we
see today—“Beat It” and the other Red Army mash-ups, Linux adver-
tisements, or the Zhao Dadi retake of “The East is Red,” mentioned
at the beginning of this essay, all of which constituting a few examples
among many—make it possible to offer new views and interpretations
of the Cultural Revolution and the importance and social lives of its
various soundscapes. By reading Cultural Revolution music as a music
of politics and a politics of music, illustrating its variety during the
times of the Cultural Revolution itself, and demonstrating its impact
to the present day, this book has argued that while the sound worlds
of those who lived through the Cultural Revolution were shaped by
the official Cultural Revolution music—especially the yangbanxi and
revolutionary songs—there was more to the experience of the Cultural
Revolution in sound. The book has illustrated that the musical reper-
toires prevalent in the Cultural Revolution ranged from local operas
to symphonic concertos and from Beethoven to music for the guqin,
some of which were enjoyed clandestinely. Official propaganda art was
thus unofficially countered and contextualized.
This book engages with this legacy of underground and alternative
as well as semi-alternative/semi-official cultures, some of which were
created only to be hidden for some time from public view, but never,
necessarily, successfully. The book studies examples from the wealth
of official propaganda music, which did not become a model in the
end (the Long March Suite and the transplanted model works being
prevalent examples) but was music nevertheless, performed, read,
and practiced throughout the Cultural Revolution locally as well as
nationally. Only by highlighting these often overlooked works, as well
as the underground popular arts created at the local and grassroots
levels, can we begin to capture the complexity that characterized cul-
tural life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Only then is it pos-
sible to understand the strong competition that Cultural Revolution
propaganda was faced with and why—in spite of everything else that
happened during those years—it has been able to remain popular even
decades later.
Oral history and published memoirs have been key in this attempt
to rewrite the history of sound during the Cultural Revolution.
Cultural Revolution soundscapes allowed for individual agency and
pluralistic reception even as they served as an instrument for main-
taining power and control; and thus, the experience of the Cultural
Revolution soundscape meant many different things in different places
to different people, and sometimes even to the same person. Oral

history and memoirs make visible the resulting contradictions in the
Cultural Revolution experience, revealing “dissonances” among peo-
ple’s different recollections of the past and presenting “fragmented
memories.”69 Oral history and memoirs thus enable us to reconstruct
a history full of fissures and disjunctures, which helped to illustrate the
immense complexity of this cultural experience (and its memory work)
at hand. This book is another attempt to tap the richness and to high-
light the individual experience of the Maoist soundscape during the
Cultural Revolution, which differed substantially depending on the
class background of a particular participant, his or her geographical
situatedness, educational background, closeness to high revolutionary
personnel, and many other factors. However, it was determined for
all by the mechanisms of the continuous revolution that continues to
inform the present today.
In this chapter, I offered a few closing reflections on the social lives
of soundscapes from the Cultural Revolution era and their fate as part
of the propaganda and popular cultures before, during, and after this
time. I have argued that the experience of the Cultural Revolution
itself is key to producing a great diversity of contemporary retakes to
the present day and have tried to explain the contiguity between pop-
ular culture, on one hand, and propaganda, on the other. In answer-
ing the question of why and how Cultural Revolution soundscapes
continue to resonate in contemporary Chinese popular culture—as
the Red Army mash-ups illustrate so aptly—I contend that the pro-
liferation and popularity of Cultural Revolution sounds during the
Cultural Revolution itself and in its aftermath—bringing together
different forms of popular as well as elite culture—can be explained,
first, because propaganda music was the most prevalent but by no
means the exclusive fare one could see or hear during the Cultural
Revolution. Propaganda music appeared as a dominant and constantly
repeated element in a spectrum that was officially restricted but unof-
ficially open.
All of this has been highlighted throughout this book: it has illus-
trated the intricacies and varieties of the Cultural Revolution sound-
scape and has uncovered many unexpected and counterintuitive sounds
to be heard during the Cultural Revolution—in transplanted model
works, for example, even if they turned out to be rather more difficult
to produce than envisaged. They brought to life, again, sounds that
had temporarily been silenced and overwritten by those of the revo-
lutionary model works, but which evidently had never been forgotten
(Pang’s and Wong’s chapters).
262 BARBARA MITTLER
Something similar must be said of the pop and film songs from
afar and from forbidden movies, which were officially silenced but
unofficially available (Clark’s chapter). The chapters in this volume
thus illustrate some of the real enthusiasm for the (officially unaccept-
able) traditional forms of opera (Coderre’s chapter) and guqin playing
(Tsai’s chapter). They highlight the Cultural Revolution soundscape’s
depth as well as its breadth of reach and touch.
The second important point that explains the popularity of Cultural
Revolution music and its ability to get covered so successfully in the
soundscapes of global rock and pop today is the fact that the propa-
ganda soundscapes from the Cultural Revolution were determined by
the rules of popular culture. They made use of some of the most popular
art forms, in addition to selecting genres from the high arts such as ballet
and symphonic music, which were then popularized. By adhering to the
protocols and rhetorics of popular culture and by featuring an inherent
hybridity, the Cultural Revolution soundscape is quite easily fitted into
other kinds of global popular culture (as in the Red Army series).
Third, the propaganda music of the Cultural Revolution was not
an invention of the Cultural Revolution itself. Instead, it made use
of long-established predecessors that had been circulating for many
decades. There was continuity, then, in the production of the Cultural
Revolution soundscape. The most popular anthem during the Cultural
Revolution, the song in praise of Mao, “The East is Red,” dates back
to the 1940s (and, indeed, in the form of the folk song on which it is
based, to an even earlier time).70 Almost all of the model works and the
Long March Suite, too, can be traced back to earlier versions—films,
novels, plays, dances, and operas predating the Cultural Revolution.71
Cultural Revolution sounds were always already remediated and refer
back to a long history of “pre-propaganda,”72 and this, too, contrib-
uted to their success during and after the Cultural Revolution. The
musical “propagemes”73 that characterize the Cultural Revolution
had already become so deeply rooted in cultural memory long before
1966 that it would not have been easy to eradicate them even then,
much less during the Cultural Revolution.
All of these observations can be used to explain better the impact
and popularity of the Red Army cover pop and rock songs and other
postmodern remediations of the Cultural Revolution soundscapes dis-
cussed in this chapter. Not only are they not complete deviations from
the “sounds amidst the fury” but also they are just one further twist
in the constant and continuous remediations taking place during and
since that dramatic era.
Notes
1. Yang Ban Xi–The Eight Model Works, directed by Yuen Yan-Ting,
Rotterdam: Scarabee Films, 2005. All sources for this chapter that
are available only on the Internet have been entered in DACHS, the
Digital Archive of Chinese Studies http://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.
de/sinologie/digital_resources/dachs/ housed at the Institute of
Chinese Studies, Heidelberg, and can be accessed conveniently there
(a password can be obtained from the DACHS team).
2. Geremie R Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 186; Gregory Lee, “‘The East
Is Red’ Goes Pop: Commodification, Hybridity and Nationalism in
Chinese Popular Song and Its Televisual Performance,” Popular Music
14(1) (1995): 95–110, 99; Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution.
Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press Asia Center Series, 2012), chapter 2. For audio exam-
ples, cf. the database accompanying this book, e.g., http://projects.
zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/, ill. 2.5 a–d.
3. This is available as mus 2.5 in the database to A Continuous Revolution,
http://projects.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/.
4. See http://projects.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/,
vid. 0.1, which consists of a typical video made of a wedding perfor-
mance of “Cultural Revolution style” theatrical skits.
5. http://projects.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/, ill. 0.2
is an example of contemporary art that plays with one of the propa-
ganda images of Hong Changqing (the hero in Red Detachment of
Women) as reconfigured in a sensual setting (and wrongly renamed
Yang Zirong, the hero of another model opera).
6. The comic strip, which is made up of images from propaganda posters
and model work posters from the Cultural Revolution, can be accessed
at http://projects.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/, ill.
0.1.
7. See http://projects.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/continuousrevolution/,
vid. 4.3. Thanks to my former student, Dr. Nora Frisch, for drawing
my attention to this advertisement.
8. Mao is said to have written this on his first big-character poster in
response to the Red Guards in the summer of 1966. It consequently
recurs in a whole series of articles in People’s Daily (Ṣ㮹㖍㉍ġ) Renmin
ribao.
9. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution.
10. See Zhang Shuo ⻈撸, “Michael Jackson’s Influence on Chinese
popular music” 彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲⮡ᷕ⚥㳩埴枛᷸䘬⼙⑵, Youth Writers
曺⸜㔯⬎⭞ Qingnian wenxuejia (4) (2011): 125–127.
11. For TuDou versions of “Beat it,” see e.g., http://www.tudou.com/
programs/view/Xf4Ta-b1luc/.
264 BARBARA MITTLER
12. For a full version of the 1976 version of the Long March Suite (LMS),
see http://v.pps.tv/play_353SY3.html.
13. For a discussion of this paradoxical “classicism,” see Winzenberg in
this volume.
14. Cf. for example, Jay Chou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_
xP9kfVfRcE; Huo Yuanjia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
aXAKTBv4Cpo; and Gangnam Style: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v= blXxyr9LjWg.
15. See Zhang Shuo, “Michael Jackson’s influence.” A TuDou search
for “Beat It” gives 7 hits for the so-called 乊⅃“Red Army” ver-
sion of the song. See http://www.soku.com/t/nisearch/Beat%20
It?f=1&kb=05120000yv200__Beat%20It. For statistics of the
Red Army covers, see also http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/
red-army-orchestra-%E7%BA%A2%E5%86%9B%E7%89%88.
16. For “We Will Rock You,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
XGJiiOLekxY.
17. For “Poker Face,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4h-
5mFEdIg; for “Bad Romance,” see https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v= uKsEtn1jcjY.
18. See Nightwish, “She Is My Sin,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
DaLonhBqzfc.
19. For Justin Bieber, “Baby,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
E5Fvtn95r L4&index=4&list=PL_ohFtHgG13GEVZs-UsDK9n 5d66b
88uZZ.
20. For “Sorry Sorry Sorry,” see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
0cByiHdD3KI&index=3&list=PL_ohFtHgG13GEVZs-UsDK9n
5d66b88uZZ.
21. For the Red Army version of Gong Linna’s “Apprehension,” see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRHqqct7VQ.
22. For “Wavin’ Flag,” see http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/red-
army-orchestra-%E7%BA%A2%E5%86%9B%E7%89%88.
23. See Zhang Shuo, “Michael Jackson’s Influence.” Many of these
songs are replayed in the Youtube report, “China’s Red Army Sings
Michael Jackson?! China Uncensored,” https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=UrsNuG8jXjI.
24. References are to the full version of the 1976 version of the Long
March Suite (LMS): http://v.pps.tv/play_353SY3.html, archived, as
are all other covers in DACHS.
25. The quality of this particular synchronization is immediately obvi-
ous when compared with the cover of a Bruno Mars song, “Just the
Way You Are,” created by a netizen with the name pew2007. Here,
the cuts and connections are not nearly as perfectly and as musi-
cally done as in the Chinese covers: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Jz2sxDSYhTg.
26. 倾摩 Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael Jackson” 宩㗗彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲, ARTS

CRITICISM (9) (2009): 7.
27. There is a myriad of articles dealing with the art and music of
Michael Jackson, in a number of rather diverse types of jour-
nals, for example, ⢷ᾅ⻢ Xiao Baoqiang, “To Fight over Michael
Jackson’s Heritage Is a Long and Protracted War” 彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳
徲忿ṏḱ⣢⿸㗗㊩ᷭ㇀, Popular Finance Advisor ⣏ế䎮峊栦斖
Dazhong licao guwen 2009 (8); “Never Say Good-bye—Michael
Jackson” 㯠ᶵ宜ℵ奩——彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲, Spring Season’s Health
曺㗍㛇‍⹟ Qingchunqi jiankang (15) (2010); 㛶唁⏃ Li Huijun,
“If You Are Thinking of Plastic Surgery, Don’t Study Michael
Jackson” ゛㔜⭡,⇓⬎彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲, Family Science-New Health
⭞⹕䥹⬎·㕘‍⹟ Jiating kexue—xin jiankang (8) (2009); 寊⚕ Xie
Yuan, “Michael Jackson: His Posthumous ‘Powers’” 彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳
徲:幓⎶ᷳ ≧, Chinese Market ᷕ⚥ⶪ⛢ Zhongguo Shichang (42)
(2009); 㖞㗻㘜 Shi Xiaoqing, “Michael Jackson—Genius and
Tragedy, a Shuddering Life” 彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲—⣑ㇵᶶず∏䘬桌㞿Ṣ
䓇, Nanbeiqiao ⋿⊿㠍 (5) (2011); ả㔯⏗ Ren Wenqi, “Popular
Music and Modernity—A Criticism of Chinese Pop Music” 㳩埴枛
᷸ᶶ䍘ẋ⿏—ᷕ⚥㳩埴枛᷸㈡⇌, Bulletin of the Hebei Science and
Technology Normal University 㱛⊿䥹㈨ⶰ劫⬎昊⬎㉍ 4(1) (2005);
Lauren Waterman (Yangqiao Wanke’er) 㰌㠍彰⃳⮼, “Jackson’s
Influence in Fashion Is Immortal” 㜘⃳徲䘬㖞⯂⼙⑵≃“ᶵ㛥,”
English Saloon 劙宕㱁潁 Yingyu shalong (9) (2010); ⼸㴟䅽 Xu
Haiyan and 䚃䀶 Sheng Yan, “Michael Jackson: That Is How It Is:
Exhibiting a Plain and Great Michael Jackson”˪彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲:⯙
㗗征㟟˫:⯽䍘乗䱡侴ệ⣏䘬彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲, Film Literature 䓝⼙
㔯⬎ Dianying wenxue (3) (2010); 倾摩 Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael
Jackson” 宩㗗彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲: 7.
28. Cf. Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael Jackson? ”; 㜿⅚ Lin Chong, “Michael
Jackson—Humanity’s Last God of Entertainment” 彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳
徲:Ṣ䰣㚨⎶ᶨ᷒⧙᷸ᷳ䤆, Chinese Economic Weekly ᷕ⚥乷㳶␐↲
Zhongguo jingji zhoukan (26) (2009); 䌳㖶桶 Wang Mingfeng, “A
Brief Anaylsis of ‘The King of Pop Music’—Michael Jackson’s Way
to Success” 㳭㜸“㳩埴枛᷸ᷳ䌳”彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲䘬ㆸ≇ᷳ忻, Beauty
and Its Time 伶ᶶ㖞ẋ Mei yu shidai (9) (2009); see also “Sounds
of Nature from the Dead—Michael Jackson” 必⍣䘬⣑䯩ᷳ枛——彰
⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲, Songs from the Campus 㟉⚕㫴⢘ Xiaoyuan gesheng (8)
(2009); Zfreet Cheung, “Heavenly King and Monopoly—The Reason
behind Michael Jackson’s Monopoly” ⣑䌳ᶶᶻ⇑—彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲䘬
ᶻ⇑㓭, Chinese Invention and Monopoly ᷕ⚥⍹㖶ᶶᶻ⇑ Zhongguo
faming yu zhuanli (8) (2009).
29. Cf. ⎬⚥㫴徟つ⾝彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲 “Fans from All Over the World
Grieve Michael Jackson,” News Samadhi 㕘斣ᶱ㗏 Xinwen sanmei (7)
266 BARBARA MITTLER
(2009). Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael Jackson?” also stresses his global
success and appeal.
30. Cf. Chinese World ⋶Ṣᶾ䓴 Huaren Shijie 2011.11.
31. See Zhang Shuo, “Michael Jackson’s Influence,” 127.
32. “Sounds of Nature from the Dead—Michael Jackson” 必⍣䘬⣑䯩ᷳ
枛—彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲 Songs from the Campus 㟉⚕㫴⢘ Xiaoyuan gesh-
eng 2009 (8); 㛶曺 Li Qing, “Critiques of Michael Jackson in American
Journals.“ 伶⚥㛪⽿㚱ℛ彰⃳⮼·㜘⃳徲䘬㉍忻䁡孬 Publishing References
↢䇰⍪侫 Chuban cankao (21) (2009).
33. See Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael Jackson?”
34. See Zhang Shuo, “Michael Jackson’s Influence,” 125–127. Cf. also
Xiao Tie, “Who is Michael Jackson?” 5–10.
35. See Film Literature 䓝⼙㔯⬎ġDianying wenxue 3 (2010).
36. See “Beat It,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDz8jtMrm9s;
and “Communist Sings Beat It,” https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=-C6zd0UCHcQ.
37. Jiang’s position appears quite clearly in one of his films, In the Heat
of the Sun 旛⃱䀧䁪䘬㖍⫸ of 1994. For a discussion of Zhu’s image,
which superscribes Mao with Cui Jian, see Mittler, A Continuous
Revolution, 284–285.
38. For the play with memories of earlier forms of Cultural Revolution
propaganda pieces, see Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 82–83.
39. See, for example, Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution. A
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Mittler, A
Continuous Revolution. Eight model works were available in 1966;
during the rest of the Cultural Revolution, another ten works were
added to the set. See the discussion of this stubborn misconception in
chapter 1 of Mittler, A Continuous Revolution.
40. A complete list of the interviewees, their occupations, ages, and fam-
ily backgrounds is given in Appendix A to Mittler, A Continuous
Revolution. Interviewees preferred to remain anonymous.
41. A complete list of interview questions is included in Mittler, A
Continuous Revolution, Appendix B.
42. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, “Introduction: Memory, Power,
and Culture,” Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and
Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China, edited by Lee Ching
Kwan and Yang Guobin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
1–20, 3.
43. See Karl H. Hörning, “Kultur und soziale Praxis: Wege zu einer ‘real-
istischen’ Kulturanalyse,” Kultur Medien Macht: Cultural Studies und
Medienanalyse, edited by Andreas Hepp and Rainer Winter (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 31–46, esp. 32.
44. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, chapter 5.
45. See some of the testimonies from interviews quoted in Mittler, A
Continuous Revolution, chapter 1.
46. For examples of photographs of cinematic performances, see DACHS

2009 Cinema Performances in the Countryside. See also the reports
especially in Du Honglin 㜄淧㜿, Broken Souls Awakening from Their
Dreams: Reports by Sent-Down Youths from Times of Trouble 櫪㕕㡎
愺—ᷕ⚥䞍ねᶲⰙᶳḉ桶ḹ乒⭆ (Ningbo: Ningbo, 1996), chapter 3.
47. Barbara Mittler, “Popular Propaganda? Art and Culture in Revolutionary
China,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152(4) (2008):
466–489; and Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, Introduction.
48. Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 259.
49. Thymian Bussemer, Propaganda und Populärkultur: Konstruierte
Erlebniswelten im Nationalsozialismus (Wiesbaden: Deutscher
Universitätsverlag, 2000), 69.
50. For a discussion of sexual elements in the model works and other
model art during the Cultural Revolution, see Mittler, Continuous
Revolution, chapters 1 and 6. See also Xiaomei Chen, Acting the
Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary
China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 37, 116; Kim
Suk-Young, Revolutionizing the Family: A Comparative Study on the
Filmed Propaganda Performances of the People’s Republic of China and
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 1966—1976 (PhD Diss.,
Northwestern University, 2005), 253; and Rosemary Roberts, Maoist
Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Leiden: Brill, 2010). A rather mis-
taken view in this regard is voiced in Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang, “From
Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer
Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China,” in Spaces of Their
Own. Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, edited by
Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999). She takes prescribed asexuality at face value.
51. One artist Couple (he, 1954–; she, 1959–) was quite adamant about this
sexual reading being unacceptable. He: “Nobody would be thinking
that way.” She: “No, really, nobody would have such thoughts . . . The
people and their thoughts at the time were very healthy ‍⹟ jiank-
ang, nobody would think of sex, they were all thinking of the story.”
52. Terence H. Qualter, Opinion Control in the Democracies (London:
The Macmillan Press, 1985), 196.
53. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman,
1989), 141.
54. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New
York: Knopf, 1965), 7–8.
55. See Bussemer, Propaganda und Populärkultur, 78.
56. Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art, a
Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, translated and edited
by Bonnie McDougall (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1980),
cf. also Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics
268 BARBARA MITTLER
in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1997), 210; Bussemer, Propaganda und Populärkultur, 96.
57. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper &
Row, 1965), 43
58. John Fiske, “Populäre Texte, Sprache und Alltagskultur,” in Kultur
Medien Macht: Cultural Studies und Medienanalyse, edited by Andreas
Hepp and Rainer Winter (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 74.
59. Fiske, “Populäre Texte,” 67
60. Ibid., 76.
61. Ibid.; Alex S. Edelstein, Total Propaganda: From Mass Culture to
Popular Culture (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997); Nancy Snow,
Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World 3rd ed. (New
York: Seven Stories, 2010).
62. Ellul, Propaganda, 18.
63. Ibid.
65. Rainer Gries, “Zur Ästhetik und Architektur von Propagemen:
Überlegungen zu einer Propagandageschichte als Kulturgeschichte,”
in Kultur der Propaganda, edited by Rainer Gries and Wolfgang
Schmale (Bochum: Winkler, 2005), 9–35, 32.
66. Gries, “Zur Ästhetik und Architektur von Propagemen,” 31–32.
67. Lee and Yang, “Introduction: Memory, Power, and Culture,” 7–8.
68. Gries, “Zur Ästhetik und Architektur von Propagemen,” 22.
69. Lee and Yang, “Introduction: Memory, Power, and Culture,” 5.
70. See DACHS 2009, Dongfang Hong, Red Is the East, original
words.
71. For example, the song from the model ballet The Red Detachment
of Women, which started this chapter, had been popular from its first
appearance in the 1961 feature film of the same title.
73. See Gries, “Zur Ästhetik und Architektur von Propagemen.”
Abo u t t he Au t hor s
Paul Clark is Professor of Chinese in the School of Cultures, Languages,

and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His latest
book, Youth Culture in China: From Red Guards to Netizens (Cambridge
UP, 2012), focuses on 1968, 1988, and 2008. His The Chinese Cultural
Revolution: A History (Cambridge, 2008) marked an effort to insert
consideration of culture into the study of the Cultural Revolution.
Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films (Chinese UP, 2005) is
a study of the Fifth-Generation filmmakers who grew up during the
Cultural Revolution. His Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949
(Cambridge, 1987) helped pioneer the international, academic study of
Chinese films. Clark’s first book was in Maori history. He studied at the
University of Auckland, Peking University, and Harvard University. His
current book project is a study of leisure in Beijing since 1949.
Laurence Coderre is a postdoctoral fellow in the study of China at
the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese
Studies. She received a PhD in Modern Chinese Literature from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 2015. She is currently revising
a book manuscript on remediation and socialist commodity produc-
tion in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Her recent articles have
appeared in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Journal of
Chinese Cinemas. Additional research interests include socialist real-
ism, postsocialism, and disability studies.
Dai Jiafang is Professor and Head of Institute of Musicology at Central
Conservatory of Music. He is one of China’s leading researchers on
the Cultural Revolution era, particularly its musical culture. Professor
Dai is the author of Going to Ruin: Biography of Minister of Culture Yu
Hui Yong in Cultural Revolution (in Chinese, 1994), The Brief History
of Chinese Music (in Chinese, 1993), The Ups and Downs of Yangbanxi:
Jiang Qing, Yangbanxi and Inside Story (in Chinese, 1995).
Lau Sze Wing graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong
with an MPhil and a BA in Music. Her master dissertation discusses can-
torate, the vocation of cantor/song leader in religious services, in the
only Reform Jewish congregation in Hong Kong. In addition to doing
270 ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ethnomusicology studies, she has great passion for music education and
keyboard music performance. Lau holds the Licentiate Diploma in organ
recital awarded by Trinity College, London. She is currently doing a post-
graduate diploma program in music education at the Chinese University
of Hong Kong.
Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at the Institute
of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg and is Director of the
Cluster of Excellence at the University of Heidelberg entitled “Asia
and Europe in a Global Context.” Mittler has published monographs
on Chinese avant-garde music, Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese
Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China since
1949 (Harrassowitz 1997) and the early Chinese press, A Newspaper for
China? Power, Identity and Change in China’s News-Media, 1872–1912
(Harvard UP, Asia Center Series, 2004). Her third book-length study
on cultural and artistic production during the Cultural Revolution,
which approaches this complex period making use of methods from
cultural studies and oral history, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense
of Cultural Revolution Culture, was published in Harvard University
Press’s Asia Center Series in 2012. She is currently completing a manu-
script on gender tropes and new women (and men) in women’s jour-
nals from China’s long twentieth century.
Laikwan Pang teaches in the Department of Cultural and Religious
Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author
of Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema
Movement, 1932–37 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), Cultural Control
and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (Routledge,
2006), The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (University of
Hawaii Press, 2007), and Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative
Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (Duke UP, 2012).
Rowan Pease is editorial manager of The China Quarterly. She com-
pleted her PhD, on songs of the ethnic Koreans living in northeast
China, in 2001, and she has since published several book chapters
on Chinese–Korean music and the Korean pop wave in China. Her
research is based on extensive fieldwork in China, particularly in the
Korean autonomous areas of the northeast. She is coeditor, with
Rachel Harris and Shzr Ee Tan, of Gender in China Music (University
of Rochester Press, 2013) and of Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds
and Cultures, with Rachel Harris (Routledge, 2015).
Nancy Yunhwa Rao has a degree in Music Performance from National
Taiwan Normal University (BA) and degrees in Music Theory from the
University of Michigan (MM and PhD). Her research interests include
ABOUT THE AUTHORS 271
the music of Ruth Crawford, Henry Cowell, and Elliott Carter; Chinese
opera, Chinese contemporary compositions, early Chinese American
music, and theories and analyses of cultural fusion in music. Her essay
“Ruth Crawford’s Imprint on Contemporary Composition” won the
Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music
in 2009 for its outstanding contribution to scholarship in American
music. Rao served as chair of the Diversity Committee for the Society
for Music Theory and organized special sessions that integrated non-
Western musical perspectives. One such session was “Cultures Eliding,
Cultures Colliding: Postcolonialism, Globalism, and the Analysis
of Music” at its 2002 annual meeting. Rao is active at the Society
for Music Theory and Society for American Music. She is Associate
Professor in Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Tsan-Huang Tsai is a senior lecturer at Australian National University.
Having studied ethnomusicology (MMus) at Sheffield and anthropol-
ogy (MPhil and DPhil) at Oxford, he taught three years at Nanhua
University in Taiwan and six years at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. His research covers a wide range of disciplines, including ethno-
musicology, organology, anthropology, and Chinese/Taiwanese stud-
ies. He is the author of an upcoming monograph, one edited book,
and more than 20 articles published in both Chinese and English lan-
guages examining the Chinese seven-stringed zither, Buddhist music,
music and politics of Taiwan, and theoretical/methodological issues of
organology. His scholarly awards include, a postdoctoral research fel-
lowship (Australian Center on China in the World), an affiliated fellow-
ship (International Institute for Asian Studies), an endeavor fellowship
(Australian Government), a visiting fellowship (ANU’s Humanities
Research Center), a PhD fellowship (Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation),
and the Gribbon award (American Musical Instrumental Society).
Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies and the
Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford
University. He is also the Yangtze River Chair Professor at East China
Normal University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure
of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth –Century China (Stanford
UP, 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford UP, 2004), and
History and Memory (in Chinese, Oxford UP, 2004). He edited Words
and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Brill,
2010), and coedited Trauma and Cinema (Hong Kong UP, 2004),
The Image of China in the American Classroom (Nanjing UP, 2005),
China and New Left Visions (Lexington, 2012), and Debating Socialist
Legacy in China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He was a research fellow
with the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000 and with
272 ABOUT THE AUTHORS
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2007. He has taught

at Beijing Foreign Studies University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard,
Rutgers, Seoul National University, and E. China Normal University.
Working with Russell Berman of Stanford, he coedited the issue of Telos
(summer 2010) China: Critical Theory, Market Society, and Culture
and co-taught the National Endowment for the Humanities summer
seminar “Shanghai and Berlin: Urban Modernism” in 2010 and 2011.
John Winzenburg is an associate professor of music at Hong Kong
Baptist University, where he conducts the Cantoría Hong Kong and the
HKBU Choir. He also appears regularly with the Hong Kong New Music
Ensemble. Winzenburg’s research focuses on Chinese–Western “fusion
concertos,” musical experimentation by Aaron Avshalomov in pre-1949
Shanghai, and new Chinese choral music, and his current research is funded
by the General Research Fund (GRF) of the Hong Kong Research Grants
Council. His international publications include articles in Asian Music
(2014), Perspectives of New Music (2013), CHIME (2013), Twentieth-
Century China (2012), and The Journal of the Central Conservatory of
Music (2011–2012), as well as chapters in books by Palgrave Macmillan
(2015) and University of Michigan Press (2015). Winzenburg is also the
compiler and editor of the Edition Peters anthology Half Moon Rising:
Choral Music from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan
(2015). The Cantoría successfully presented a Weekend Concert “New
Choral Sounds of China and the World” at the Concert Hall, National
Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing on 10 June, 2012.
Chuen-Fung Wong is presently Associate Professor of Music at Hong
Kong Baptist University, where he teaches courses in world music,
ethnomusicology, and Chinese music. His primary research concerns
Uyghur music in northwest China and addresses issues of musical
modernity and minority nationalism. He is recipient of a National
Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 2009 and the Rulan
Chao Pian Prize for the best Chinese music publication in 2013. He
currently serves as President of the Association for Chinese Music
Research (2014–2017).
Index
amateur performance Better and Better, 112

encouragement of, 3, 67–8 Bieber, Justin, 243, 246, 248,
Yimin Factory, 67, 68 249, 256
Amin, Samir, 96 “Boat Song of the Three
An Kungmin, 181 Gorges,” 47
Arirang, 182 Bolter, Jay David, 69
Aron, Raymond, 94 Bombard the Headquarters, 92
Audio-Visual Recording Committee, Boulder Bay, 12, 29
38, 43, 44, 50–1, 52, 53, 54 Breaking with Old Ideas, 86–7
see also seven-stringed zither Bright Shen, 215
Avshalomov, Aaron, 190, 191, 192, Butterfly (Lovers) Violin
194, 201, 204, 205–7 Concerto, 251
see also The Great Wall
Azalea Mountain, 12, 29, 253 Calhoun, Craig, 93
adaptations of, 137 Cantonese Opera
Cantonese opera version, 142–3 adapting yangbanxi to, 6–7, 116,
development as model opera, 129–43
29–34 dialect issues, 140, 142
Korean minority version, 174 inclusiveness, 140
film of, 115 phases of revolutionary
orchestration, 224 development, 131–2
response of artists, 130
Baimao Nü. See The White symphonic music, 140–1
Haired Girl Cao Xueqing, 191
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 190 capitalist roader, 91
ballet CCTV, 121
role of Western instrumental Central Art Troupe, 117
music, 112 Central Conservatory of
yangbanxi works, 114 Drama, 153
Ban Wang, 71–2, 213, 216 Changchun Film Studio, 109,
banghuang songs, 135 111, 113
Bao Kun, 218 Chen Chong, 121
Barat, Ghiyasidin, 149, 151 Chen Danqing, 220
Beijing Film Studio, 110, 116 Chen Fumin, 1
Beijing Peking Opera Troupe, Chen Gang, 251
11, 12 Chen Yi, 215, 227, 231, 233
274 INDEX
Chen Yiyang, 143 Dai Jiafang, 51

Cheng Shaoyu, 191 Daughter of the Party, 112
Chiang Kai-shek, 205 Deng Lijun, 121
China Arts Troupe, 44 Deng Xiaoping, 80
China Peking Opera Company, 11, 12 Ding Lin, 74–5
China Record Company, 178
China Welfare Fund, 205 “The East is Red,” 27, 160, 170,
Chinese Ballet and Musical Drama 177, 213, 240, 258
Association, 191, 205, 206 Eight Model Performances, 12, 114
Ch’ŏn Hwaja, 179 Éliyop Téyipjan, 149
Chŏng Chungap, 175 Ellul, Jacques, 258
Chu Tŏkhae, 170–1 Elpetta, Zikri, 149
Chunfang, Jiang, 205 Every Flower Faces the Sun, 110
Clark, Paul, 85, 175, 181, 208 Ezizi, Seypidin, 149–50
class enemies, 77–8, 80
Class of 1978, 215, 216, 231, 232 Feng Zhicheng, 120
classical music Fighting North and South, 117, 118
Cantonese opera, 140–1 Fighting on the Plain, 12, 29
role in yangbanxi, 2–3, 7, 19, film music
189–209 concert films, 109–10
“Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang legacy, 120–2
Rivers,” 48 post-1973 feature films, 117–20
Cold War, 89, 90, 91 pre-revolution, 108–12
Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius revolutionary musical culture,
campaign, 80, 180 107–22
cultural adherence, 1 role of Western instrumental
cultural remembrance, 1 music, 112
Cultural Revolution, 88 vehicle for propaganda, 108–9
aesthetic repackaging, 94–5 films
censorship of discussion, 4–5 foreign, 110–11, 119
clandestine listening, 251 model works, 2, 6, 12, 107, 113–17
collective aesthetic memory, 214 North Korean, 101
continuing presence, 239–40 opera films, 111–12
geopolitics, 90–6 role in cultural revolution,
global dimension, 93–4 85–105
influence on post-revolutionary Russian, 110–11
sonic imagery, 213–36 Third World internationalism, 85,
meanings of, 2 97–101
musical experience, 3 see also film music; On the Docks
musical soundscape, 250–9 The First Emperor, 213, 234–5
new propaganda cult, 259 First Military Company of
sonic dimension, 4 Guangzhou Opera, 132
see also Third World First Xinjiang Drama Troupe, 153
internationalism Five Golden Flowers, 111
Culture Group of the State Council, Flower Seller, The, 119
44, 54 Four Olds, 42, 44, 172
INDEX 275
Gang of Four, 72, 80 Hoja, Abdukérim, 149

Gao Mobo, 218 homogenization of culture, 3
Gao Shuangqing, 42 Hon See Wah, 44, 48–9
geming gequ. See revolutionary songs Hongse Niangzijun. See Red
Goher, Alexander, 232 Detachment of Women
Goldstein, Joshua, 192 Hon-lun Yang, 202
Gong Linna, 243 Huang Zhuangmou, 139
Gong Yi, 44, 52 Huang Zuolin, 208
Great Leap Forward, 88, 109 Hundred Flowers Contend in
The Great Wall, 189–209 Beauty, A, 117
class consciousness, 203 Hüseyin, Héytem, 151, 153,
comparison with yangbanxi, 191, 154, 160
196–202, 208–9 Hwang Sangnyong, 180
cultural and generic blending,
191–6 Ibrahim, Qurban, 151
factionalism, 205–8 In the Heat of the Sun, 98
main features, 192–3, 194–6 instrumental music
nationalism in, 202–5 Four Major Instruments, 22–3
use of Western orchestra, 193–4 mixed orchestra, 22–6, 33–4,
Great Wall on the Southern Seas, 121 147, 220–2, 222–5
Green Pine Ridge, 118 percussion, 23, 225–30, 233–4
group singing, 108, 119–20, 172–3 role of violin, 221–2
Grusin, Richard, 69 Three Major Instruments, 22–4
Guan Pinghu, 42 see also classical music; seven-
Guangdong Cantonese Opera stringed zither
Theater, 132, 134, 141, 143 instrumentalism, 213
“Guangling Melody,” 48 “Internationale,” 115
Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Isha, Pasha, 151
Revolution Committee,
131–2 Jackson, Michael, 242, 243–6,
Guangzhou City Cantonese Opera 248, 249, 259
Company, 132 Jami, Hüsenjan, 149, 151
guerilla organizations, 92 Jiang Chunfang, 192
Guo Junming, 50 Jiang Qing, 34, 45, 49, 51, 53, 54,
Guo Muoro, 192 55, 72, 74, 131, 133–4, 137,
Guo Wei, 138 150, 174, 182, 203, 214
Guo Wenjing, 215, 232, 233 Jiang Wen, 95, 247
jingju yanganxi. See Peking opera
Hart, Michael, 90, 92–3
He Yonghua, 74 Kang, Party Secretary, 177–9
He Zhanhao, 251 Kang Mianzong, 44, 45, 49, 50, 54
heroes in yangbanxi, 6, 65–80 Kim Il Sung, 54
real-life heroes, 67–8 Kim Pongho, 180–1
Heroic Sons and Daughters, 120 Kim Rongsok, 180
Hŏ Wŏnsik, 169, 175 Kim Sŏnok, 179–80, 181
Hobsbawm, Eric, 92–3, 94, 95 Klein, Michael, 190
276 INDEX
K’naan, 243 Lü Ji, 232

Korean minority
adaptation of Song of the Dragon Ma Ziyuan, 67
River, 167 Mackerras, Colin, 208
ch’anggŭk sung drama, 167, 168, Mao Zedong, 3, 6, 53, 54, 55, 93,
171–2, 175 109, 148, 150, 172, 180,
Chinese-Korean culture, 169–72 245, 257
Cultural Revolution aims, 169–70 as rock star, 95, 245
productions of yangbanxi, 167, Marcuse, Herbert, 93
172–82 Mei Lanfang, 192
yangbanxi study groups, 173 Mei Yueqiang, 43
Korean War, 90 Meng Fanhua, 1
Kraus, Richard, 129, 190 Meng Jiang Nü. See The Great Wall
Kuang Bin, 141 Mine Warfare, 117
Kungmin, An, 177 Mittler, Barbara, 3, 85–6, 181
Kuomintang, 205 model performances. See yangbanxi
Küresh Yoli, 148–9 Modern Peking Opera Festival, 11, 13
“Moscow Nights,” 110–11, 119–20
Lady Gaga, 243, 244, 246, 248, music
249, 256, 257 impact of cultural revolution, 7,
leaning to one side, 90 213–36
Legend of the Red Lantern. See The remediating propaganda music,
Red Lantern 239–62
Li Delun, 220 see also classical music; film music;
Li Guyi, 121 group singing; instrumental
Li Sao, 232, 233 music; orchestral music;
Li Shaochun, 14 revolutionary songs
Li Xi’an, 232
Li Xiangting, 38, 42, 44, 46, 50, 51, 52 Negri, Antonio, 90, 92–3
Li Yizhe, 143 New Ch’anggŭk Experimental
Li Yuhe, 14 Troupe, 171–2
Li Zhengtian, 143 New Worker at the Coal Depot, The, 110
Liang Runtian, 141 Nie Er, 192
Liang Tingduo, 115–16 Nightwish, 243
Lin Biao, 77–8, 168 Nixon, Richard M., 43, 252
Lin Yu, 134, 137 North Korea, films from, 101–5
Linux 2000 advertisement, 240–1, Northeast Film Studio, 112
260
Little Flower, 120–1 On the Docks, 6, 20–9, 30, 32
Liu Shaoqi, 80 Cantonese Opera version, 139
Liu Xiaoqing, 120 film version, 98–101, 105
Long March, 116, 258 at Modern Peking Opera
Long March Suite, 116, 242–9, 253, Festival, 12
254, 258, 259, 262 role in international relations, 6
Long River of Music History Uyghur version of, 152
project, 44, 45 villain in, 76, 77
INDEX 277
One Hundred Flowers movement, Qu Xiaosong, 215

111 Queen, 243
opening up of China, 120
opera troupes, 2 Rahman, Haji, 151
Oshshaq Muqam, 149 Raid on the White Tiger Regiment,
11, 14
Pang Yŏnsuk, 181 at Modern Peking Opera Festival,
Pearl River Film Studio, 116, 134, 11
138 North Korean musical features
Peking opera, 11–34 villain in, 76
arias, 29–34 Rancière, Jacques, 89
artistic features, 12–13 Red Cloud Ridge, 12
development of characters’ Red Crag, 115
thinking, 16–18 Red Detachment of Women, The, 12,
development of model operas, 29, 85, 189, 191, 256
11–12 adaptations of, 137
early stage of development, 12–19 film of, 111, 113, 114
instrumental music design, 19, Uyghur version of, 153
22–6 (see also classical music; villain in, 76
instrumental music) Red Guards, 3, 43, 55, 172
late stage of development, 29–34 in Xinjiang, 150, 151
Li style, 14 Red Lantern, The, 56, 242, 253
Ma (Lianliang) style, 14 development as model opera,
middle stage of development, 12–19, 29
20–9 film of, 113, 114, 116
motto themes, 26–9, 31 Kazakh version, 153
new metric types, 30–1 Korean minority version, 173,
orchestra, 22–6, 222–5 174
Sun (Huisheng) style, 13–14 at Modern Peking Opera Festival,
vernacular language, 15 11
vocal design, 14, 19, 20–2 orchestration, 224
yunbai (heightened speech), Uyghur production of Qizil
32–3 Chiragh, 7, 116, 147,
People’s Musical Instrument 152–61
Factory of Beijing, 42 villain in, 75–6
performance as technology of Red Sorghum, 121
transformation, 72 Red Sun Songs, 240, 256, 258
Ping Pong Diplomacy, 252 reform policy, 120
Pioneers, The, 86–7, 88 remediation of Cultural Revolution
precedence, 190 music, 69–73, 239–49
Red Army cover versions of songs,
Qiao Jianzhong, 232 243, 245, 248
qin. See seven-stringed zither Revolution has Successors, 113
Qiu Yucheng, 191 revolutionary songs, 3, 108–9
Qizil Chiragh. See The Red Lantern campaigns to popularize, 109
Qu Bo, 74, 113 Ri Hwanghun, 175
278 INDEX
rise of China, 89 Shanghai Film Studio, 113

Ryonggangson. See Song of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, 191
Dragon River Shanghai Peking Opera Company,
11, 12
“Sailing the Seas Depends on the Shen Zhibai, 192
Helmsman,” 170 Shi Ning, 66
Scouting Across the Yangzi, 118 Sichuan Opera
Season of the Apple Harvest, The, adapting yangbanxi to, 116
101–5 Silvio, Teri, 69
Second Forum of Amateur Art social imperialism, 90
Troupes (Yanbian), 173 Socialist Education Campaign, 88, 109
Second Military Company of Song and Dance, 117
Guangzhou Opera, 132 Song of the Dragon River, 12, 66, 115
seven-stringed zither (qin), 6, 37–58 development as model opera,
during Cultural Revolution, 42–4 29–34
golden era, 39–42 Korean minority production of
identity of players, 40 Ryonggangson, 167–82
as Maoist revolutionary weapon, villain in, 76
52–5 Sons and Daughters of the
modification, 42, 45–6 Grasslands, 256
new compositions, 46–7 Soong Ching-Ling, 205
overseas tours, 44 Soong Mei-Ling, 205
professionalization, 52–3 Soviet Union, 90
revolutionary performance Sino-Soviet friendship, 111
contexts, 54 Sparkling Red Star, 118, 122
revolutionary repertoire, 47–8 Spring Festival galas, 121
transformation of music, 41–2 The Spring River Flows East, 108
Seypulla, Iskender, 149, 151 Spring Sprouts, 86, 87–8
Shajiabang, 1, 131, 192, 242 Storm in the Countryside, 131,
adaptations of, 137 132–7, 138, 140
Cantonese Opera version, ban on, 133–4
138–9, 220 success with Cantonese audiences,
comparison with The Great 134–5
Wall, 196–202 Street Angel, 108
development as model opera, structuralism, 213
12–19, 29 Sun Qingtang, 46
at Modern Peking Opera Super Junior, 243
Festival, 11 Suspended Ancient Coffins on the
orchestration, 224, 225 Cliffs in Sichuan, 232, 233
see also Shajiabang Symphony
Shajiabang Symphony, 116, 192, Taiwan, US policy towards, 90
242 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,
comparison with The Great Wall, 11–12, 20–9, 74, 222–4
196–202 film of, 12, 113
Shandong Peking Opera Troupe, at Modern Peking Opera Festival, 11
11, 12 percussion, 225, 227–30
INDEX 279
revision of, 113–14 Wang Guotong, 50

Uyghur version of, 152, 153, 155 Wang Hui, 86–7
“Talk with Music Workers,” 148 Wang Shuren, 50
Tan Dun, 215, 221, 231, 232, 233, Wang Xizhe, 143
234 Wangqing County Cultural Work
Tang Jiang, 116 Troupe, 174
Tao Youzhi, 75–6, 77, 80 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, 93
Tatliq, Memet, 151 We are All Sunflowers, 117
Teng, Teresa. See Den Lijun Wedemeyer, Lieutenant-General A.
Third World internationalism, C., 205
85–96 Wei Zhongle, 40, 192
film as reflection of, 97 The White Haired Girl, 2, 189, 190,
“Three battles” films, 117 191, 192, 205
Three Little Red Flowers, 110 adaptations of, 137
Three Prominences, 213 comparison with The Great Wall,
Tian Han, 192 196–202
Tian Hao-Jiang, 213, 214 film of, 113, 114
Tian Shuangkun, 46 Korean minority version, 173
Tiananmen Square incident, 94 percussion, 225
Tracks in the Snowy Forest, 74–5, 113 villain in, 76
traditional instruments, 37–58 Workers, Peasants and Soldiers
transplantation of yangbanxi, 2, Musical Instrument
129–43 Factory, 42
faithfulness to original, 137 Wu Jinglüe, 42
fears for regionalism, 131–7 Wu Wenguang, 43, 44, 51, 52
rigid model for, 137 Wu Youheng, 132
visual versus aural adaptation, Wu Zuqiang, 232
137–43
Tunnel Warfare, 117 Xelq Kommunisi Yaxshi, 149
Xian Xinghai, 192
Uyghur music Xiang Sihua. See Hon See Wah
adaptation of The Red Lantern, 148 Xianjiang Revolutionary
Cultural Revolution, 148–54 Committee, 151
mixed orchestra, 147 Xiao Hua, 242
muqam songs, 149–50, 154–6 Xie Jin, 113, 115–16
problems with adaptation, 154–61 Xinjiang Cultural Bureau, 150
productions of yangbanxi, 7, 116, Xu Jian, 37, 42
147–62
Yan Weicai, 14
Valley Stream, 232 Yan’an, 108
villains in yangbanxi, 6, 65 Yan’an Talks, 257
as saboteurs, 73–80 Yanbian Prefectural Song-and-Dance
Visitor on Ice Mountain, 111 Troupe, 169, 173, 178, 182
Yanbian School of Arts, 171, 179
Wang Chaoge, 213 Yang Ban Xi (Model Works), 239,
Wang Enmao, 151–2 255, 256
280 INDEX
Yang Jian, 3 opera; transplanted dramas;

Yangbanxi Uyghur music; villains in
backbone of revolutionary yangbanxi
culture, 1–2 Yanji County Cultural Work
body of works, 2–3, 11 Troupe, 174
development of, 5, 11–34 Yao Bingyan, 40–1, 43
embodied experience, 217 Yao Gongbai, 43
everyday cultural practices, Ye Jianying, 45, 49, 54
217–18 Yellow Earth, The, 121
films of model works, 2, 6, 12, Yellow River Concerto, 85, 116, 122
107–22 Ying Yunei, 113–14
impact on contemporary The Young People of Our Village,
composers, 216, 231–6 102, 109, 112
impact on national sonic memory, Yu De, 40
215, 231–6 Yu Lan, 115
musical-dramatic experimentation, Yuan Shihai, 75–6, 78
189–209 Yung, Bell, 221, 231
original stories, 2 Yurchak, Alexei, 73
percussion pattern, 225–30
performativity, 217 Zha Fuxi, 41
popularization campaign, 65 Zhang Yimou, 121, 213
post-revolution influence, 213–36, Zhang Ziqian, 39–40, 43
239–62 Zhao Dadi, 240, 260
quest for perfection, 5–6 Zhao Jiping, 121
regionalization and Zheng Peiying, 141
transplantation of, 127–82, Zhou Enlai, 174, 180
153, 154–60 Zhou Long, 215, 232
sculpture metaphor, 69–72 Zhou Xinfang, 192, 208
sense of community, 218–20 Zhou Xuan, 108
social practice of an era, 213–14 Zhu Wei, 247
use of percussion, 216 Zither Reform Committee, 38,
see also Cantonese Opera; classical 43, 44–50, 52, 53, 54, 55,
music; Cultural Revolution; 56–7, 58
Eight Model Performances; altered program notes, 48–50, 53
heroes in yangbanxi; see also seven-stringed zither
instrumental music; Peking Zunun, Memet, 155–6

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Listening to China’s Cultural

Edited by Ban Wang

As China is becoming an important player on the world stage, Chinese literature is

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Public Discourses of Contemporary China: The Narration of the Nation in Popular

Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Culture

Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities

List of Illustrations vii

Part I Temporality: Continuity and

Part II Geography: Transplantation and

7 The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptation of The Legend of the

Part III Lineages and Legacies: Cultural Revolution

About the Authors 269

This volume has emerged from an International Symposium on

Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-Huang Tsai

After an academic conference in December 2010, Chen Fumin of the

This incident was recorded by a young professor born in 1980, who

culture of the period form the backbone of the revolutionary culture

purposes—such as for the sole appreciation of Chairman Mao himself

period was a “colorful” era. By focusing on the yangbanxi and the

strived for perfection. Tsan-Huang Tsai brings us to a different side

Temporality: Continuity and Change in

A Diachronic Study of Jingju Yangbanxi

In the musics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution period of the twen-

Mountain by Strategy and On the Docks. Their vocal music (changq-

The Early Stage of Model Peking Opera:

performance schools (liupai 㳩㳦). Yet, these musical modes only

Sister A Qing in Shajiabang.4 For Diao Deyi in Shajiabang—a person

a touching picture of their jubilant meeting. In The Red Lantern, when

Li Yuhe, one of the three major figures in the opera, is a mature

The Middle Stage of Model Peking Opera

New Breakthroughs in Vocal Music Design

Newly created erhuang fast meter and inverse-erhuang chant meter

roaring erhuang dispersed meter. Immediately, it moves onto inverse-

Innovations in the Use of a Chinese–Western Mixed Orchestra

xiaosanxian (⮷ᶱ⻎) is added—accompany singing. Plucked-string,

support to the “Three Major Instruments” in depth, strength, bright-

● In the overall musical schema, a clear dominant-subdominant

Accompanying songs is the chief mission of the orchestra. Thus,

paisheng or some other woodwind instrument. Medium-sized inter-

boldly, all alone. After a series of ascending melodic sequences, the

A First Attempt at Using Motto Themes to Depict

orchestration also opened up new possibilities for embodying the

“Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” as the

characters. Having personal themes with variations throughout the

The Late Stage of Model Peking Opera Music:

written according to the personalities of characters, their thoughts,

and put in erhuang. Examples include the inverse-erhuang two-six

personal theme contains elements of strength and inspiring willpower,

The Successful Attempt at Using Yunbai 枝䘥 (Heightened Speech) to

mode, phrasing, and suite arias with interlinked metrical types.

From Confucianist Meditative Tool to

In the existing literature on the Chinese seven-stringed zither qin 䏜,

Qin activities were very discontinuous in mainland China due to a

Li Xiangting 㛶䤍暮 (1940), a retired professor from the Central

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, I spent six years without

He did not elaborate further, but shifted the subject of conversation

Before the Cultural Revolution, some people produced new instru-

The Golden Era: Post- Research and

20 Nov 1954: Went to [Shanghai] Cultural Square to hear the per-

the introduction of newly modified instruments alongside antique

Varied Experiences: Q IN Activities

The Reform Committee and the Recording

was based on their enthusiasm for new qin compositions as well as