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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. ART BECOMES LIFE: THEATER AND THE POLITICS OF

REPRESSION IN SHANGHAI, 1927-1945

by

Adam D. Frank

submitted to the

Faculty of the School of International Service

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in

International Affairs

Chair: - Prof Robert Gregg

Prof. Ira Klein

Jean of the School of itemational Service a^gost h % Date

1996

The American University Washington, D.C. 20016

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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C o p y rig h t1996 by F rank, Adam Dean All rights reserved.

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by

ADAM D. FRANK

1996

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ART BECOMES LIFE: THEATER AND THE POLITICS OF

REPRESSION IN SHANGHAI, 1927-1945

BY

Adam D. Frank

ABSTRACT

Modern Chinese spoken drama did not emerge in China until the early 20th Century, but

by 1927 it had already become a feared propaganda weapon of the Communist Party and thus

became a target of censorship by Chiang Kaishek’s Guomindang, foreign imperialists and, later.

Japanese occupiers. This study argues that the leftists’ effective use of both modern and folk

theater forms played a key role in converting urban workers, intellectuals, and the rural peasantry

to the leftist cause. Further, the commandeering of theater for political ends was pan of a

centuries-old tradition of using the myths and icons of popular culture in rebellions against

delegitimized authority. Chiang Kaishek, unlike Mao, never accepted the importance of these

myths nor the importance of film and theater in transmitting them. The study combines

methodologies from history, anthropology, politics and literature to produce a work useful to each

of these disciplines.

ii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE

With few exceptions, I have used the pinyin method of romanization throughout the text.

Pinyin has largely replaced older methods in scholarly works and is the method used by the

majority of Chinese in romanizing Chinese words. Certain name spellings, e.g. Chiang Kaishek.

have acquired a life of their own, and in those cases I have retained the traditional romanization.

Discrepancies occur more frequently between text and notes. I have generally retained the

spellings of author names as they appear in the text of the cited work. Thus, for China’s most

famous playwright, you will find the spelling "Cao Yu” in the main text, but both "Ts’ao Yu”

and "Tsao Yu" in the notes and bibliography.

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

PREFACE...... iii

ABBREVIATIONS...... vi

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION...... 1

2. THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE LEFT-WING THEATER MOVEMENT...... 7

The Tradition of Censorship

May Fourth’s "Three Generations"

The Period of Formative Emulation in Drama, 1907-1927

3. THE EMERGENCE OF THE LEFT WING, 1927-1935...... 23

Shanghai: Still Life of the City

GMD and Foreign Cooperation Against the Left

Tian Han and the Organization of the Left-Wing Theater

The "Left Decade"

The Union of Theater and Film Workers

The New Life Movement

Workers and Peasants Theater in CCP Areas: Early Stages

4. THE ART OF PROPAGANDA: THE UNITED FRONT, 1936-1941 ...... 54

iv

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Galvanization of Shanghai's Left-Wing Theater Workers

Escape to the Solitary Island

5. SHANGHAI UNDERGROUND, 1941-1945......

Li Jianwu and the Underground Theater Movement

Shanghai in Yenan, 1942-1945

6. CONCLUSIONS ......

BIBLIOGRAPHY......

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CCP Chinese Communist Partv

GMD Guomindang

PSB Public Security Bureau

SMC Shanghai MuniciDal Council

SMP Shanghai Municipal Police

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION

At approximately 8:00 p.m. on the 29th of April, 1930, the Shanghai Art Drama Theater

dimmed the lights for that evening’s performance of All Quiet on the Western Front, the Chinese

stage adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel. Using a technique later made

famous by Bertolt Brecht, the theater had shown film clips of the First World War prior to the

performance and, during previous performances, had projected subtitles on a screen to comment

on the play.1

Suddenly and without warning, officers of the Guomindang-controlled Public Safety Bureau

stormed the theater, surrounding the performers with more than twenty officers, shutting down

the performance, and arresting theater workers.2 The League of Left-Wing Writers—founded

by China’s great twentieth-century writer Lu Xun, leftist playwrights Xia Yan and Tian Han, and

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) literary theorist Qu Qiubai-almost immediately issued a

proclamation decrying the raid and unjustifiable arrests:

■Xia Yan, "No One Could Forget the Year 1930: Before and After the Establishment of the Art Drama Society and the Drama League (Shei wangde yi jiu san ling nian—yishu ju shi yu ju meng chengli qianhou) in Historical Documents from Fifty Years of the Chinese Spoken Drama Movement, 1907-1957, Vol. 1 (Zhongguo huaju yundong wushi nian shiliao ji, 1907-1957, diyi ji), eds. Tian Han, et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1958), 152. Some scholars have argued that Brecht actually borrowed this technique from the Chinese.

2"Art Drama Society Resists Unjustifiable Raid and Closure, Declares Shanghai Masses Document" (Yishu jushi wei fankang wuli bei chaofeng, daibu gao shanghai minzhong shu) in Historical Documents from Fifty Years o f the Chinese Spoken Drama Movement, 1907-1957, eds. Tian Han, et al., 308-309.

1

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The League of Left-Wing Writers is the newly emerging cultural movement’s primary' wing.... We cannot bear this sort of oppression toward the Art Drama Society. We must safeguard the development of the newly emerging culture movement. We must call together a revolution of the masses, a common uprising. We especially urge that comrades of the hard-working, newly emerging cultural movement unite and resolutely resist the authorities devastating the culture movement. We advocate....freedom of speech, press and performance!3

Needless to say, such rhetoric did not endear the League of Left-Wing Writers to either the

Guomindang (GMD) or the official governing body of Shanghai’s International Settlements, the

Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC).

The censorship of this Western anti-war play, performed by Chinese actors in the Chinese

language for a Chinese audience, conveys the spirit of a time and place about which surprisingly

little has been written, either in English or in Chinese: the Golden Age of China’s early modem

spoken drama, or huaju *as it evolved in the Shanghai of the 1930s. Shanghai, a city that has

been called everything from the Whore of Asia to the Paris of the Orient, is sometimes also

remembered as a place where art and politics once met on the field of ideological battle. The

images that have filtered down to us over the decades of young intellectuals sipping coffee in

French cafes and plotting revolution contain very real seeds of truth and ultimately compel us to

ask, "Who were they? Where did they come from? What passions kept them going through

censorship, imprisonment, torture and exile?"

This study will attempt to show that the Chinese leftists’ effective use of both modem and

3"Proclamation of the League of Left-Wing Writers Opposing the Shut-down of the An Drama Society" (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng fandui chafeng yishu jushi xuanyan) in Historical Documents from Fifty Years o f the Chinese Spoken Drama Movement, 1907-1957, eds. Tian Han. et al., 307-308. Author’s translation.

‘John Y.H. Hu, T s’ao Yu (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972), 16. Hua (speech) and ju (drama) is a term coined by dramatist and screenwriter Tian Han in the early 1920s to differentiate the westem-style spoken drama from traditionally sung Chinese opera. Henceforth. I will use the terms huaju and "spoken drama" interchangeably.

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folk theater forms in the years of civil war and resistance to Japanese aggression between 1927

and 1945 played a key role in converting urban workers, intellectuals, and the rural peasantry

to the leftist cause. In contrast to past uses of theater as propaganda by rebellious populations,

the modern political theater movement in China was a natural response by Western-influenced

intellectuals to a combination of three distinctly twentieth-century social features: the ongoing

foreign industrial and cultural incursion that inspired the May Fourth movement; the anti-left

partnership in repression of the foreign-run SMC and Chiang Kaishek’s authoritarian, right-wing

GMD; and the occupation of Chinese territory by Japanese militarists.

At the same time, the modern political theater retained strong links to the past. Modern

spoken drama and screenwriting belonged to a centuries-old Chinese tradition of consciously

commandeering the myths and icons of popular culture for use as propaganda tools in rebellions

against delegitimized or not yet legitimized authority. While the myths and icons of old included

characters from popular Chinese vernacular literature and traditional opera, modern intellectuals

at first wove myths from the science and philosophy current at the time in Europe and America,

only to fall back on traditional symbols when they found themselves under greatest threat.

Thus, rebellion in China has traditionally worn both a political and a literary mask, and the

blossoming of the dramatic art that occurred at the peak of GMD censorship activities in the mid-

1930s has its precedent not only in Chinese history but in the histories of many regimes. In Nazi

Germany, Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical warnings of the consequences inherent in relinquishing

power to a self-proclaimed "master race” led to exile from his homeland. Apartheid South

Africa saw the plays of Athol Fugard weather several bannings as they rattled the unpleasant

skeletons of racism in the face of the white regime. In Communist Czechoslovakia, Vaclav

Havel’s satirical plays were banned and the future president imprisoned. When people awakened

to the knowledge of freedom are pushed to the wall, when such people can neither vote

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with the ballot card nor with their feet, they turn to myth and symbol, to the language of art and

literature to express their yearnings for liberation. Such was certainly the case of Shanghai's left-

wing theater community.

The following chapters will trace the evolution of the left-wing theater in Shanghai through

five distinct phases of Chinese modern spoken drama, each of which is closely linked to key

historical events. Chapter 2 will discuss the intellectual roots of the left-wing theater movement

and the preliminary phase of Formative Emulation, 1907-1927. Chapter 3 details phase two.

the Emergence of the Left Wing, 1927-1935, when the GMD and SMC combined forces to

repress leftist artistic activity. Chapter 4 examines the artistic and political transformations that

occurred in theater and film as a result of the GMD-CCP alliance during the third phase of the

United Front, 1936-1941. And Chapter 5 looks at the parallel development of the theater in

Japanese occupied Shanghai (phase four, Shanghai Underground, 1941-1945) and in the CCP-

held territories of North China (phase five, Shanghai in Yenan, 1942-1945).

Because all but the last of the five phases outlined above were, on the surface, characterized

by profound Western influences, they present the special challenge of understanding and

emphasizing their essential Chineseness. Historian Paul A. Cohen has written that "The supreme

problem for American students of Chinese history, particularly in its post-Westem impact phase,

has been one of ethnocentric distortion. "5 Cohen goes on to argue that the challenge for the

Western historian is to minimize this distortion and free ourselves "to see Chinese history in

new, less Western-centered ways."6 A decidedly ethnocentric view common to much of

twentieth-century historical writing on China is that Chinese culture remained virtually frozen for

5Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing in the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 1.

6Ibid.

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the last two thousand years. In contrast, the fundamental premise of the present study is that

Chinese culture has been anything but static and unchanging, and, further, that in periods of

extreme crisis, these changes were reflected in theater.

Both Chinese and Western theater historians have tended toward Western impact theories

of theater’s recent evolution and its relation to political events in China. While such an approach

is almost surely valid in looking at the direct borrowing of dramatic structure in this century, it

begins to break down when we look at the long-range historical evolution of Chinese drama and

nearly collapses when we look at the content of huaju. Chinese traditional opera consists of

many widely varying styles that have mutually influenced one another through the centuries. One

might argue that the yangge, a type of performance popular in North China that uses songs,

dances and folk plays, has less in common with Beijing-style opera than Beijing opera has with

modem Western theater.

Even more importantly, the common thread of using symbols in Chinese theater to comment

on political and social conditions runs from at least the Yuan Dynasty (1230-1368 A.D.) to the

present and is found in many forms of theater in China. Such a use of imagery and metaphorical

communication is very much a part of the Chinese language and finds a natural outlet in modem

spoken drama.

How, then, does the researcher differentiate between what is "Western" in modem spoken

drama and what is "Chinese"? From the angle of literary analysis. Western dramatic structures,

staging techniques and even costuming and make-up obviously dominate. From a political

viewpoint, much has already been written about Mao’s distinctly Chinese brand of Marxism, but

one could still persuasively argue that Marxism is an essentially Western construct. From an

anthropological position, the junction of huaju in society seems very much part of a long-standing

Chinese political, cultural and religious tradition of using theater for social commentary. To

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. resolve the dilemma, Paul Cohen ultimately reaches back to the multidisciplinary approach that

Marc Bloch argued for more than fifty years ago. The only way around the complexity of

modern scholarship in Bloch’s view was "to substitute, in place of the multiple skills of a single

man, the pooling of techniques, practiced by different scholars, but all tending to throw light

upon a specific subject."7 In other words, history is too big a subject to avoid a multi­

disciplinary approach in the modern world. Synthesizing perspectives produces a picture

somehow closer to "truth" than any one field can provide on its own.

The attempt here is to adopt a China-centered, multi-disciplinary approach by treating each

of the diverse viewpoints of history, international relations, theater, literature and anthropology

as essential to a clear view of the complex interaction between art and politics in a time of

revolutionary change. The goal is to create a piece of scholarship that is useful to each of these

disciplines.

7Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Peter Putnam, trans. (New York: Vintage Books. 1953), 68-69; quoted in Cohen, 185.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2

THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE LEFT-WING THEATER

MOVEMENT

Chapter 1 introduced the argument that the left-wing theater movement was one result of the

ongoing territorial and economic incursions by foreign powers that led to the anti-imperialist

intellectual movement usually categorized under the general rubric of "the May Fourth

Movement." Chapter 2 will not only discuss the late nineteenth-century origins of the May

Fourth Movement and the concurrent flowering of Western theater forms in China but also the

other side of the intellectual coin: the tradition of censorship and repression by ruling dynasties

in response to the rebellious questioning of authority.

While this study in no way attempts to produce a comprehensive history of censorship in

China, the effects and counter-effects of censorship are crucial to understanding the escalation

of conflict between Shanghai’s left wing theater community and both the right wing and foreign

authorities. The paternalistic system of social controls that both sides exercised to some extent

in their respective domains became the center of arguments over legitimate authority. Much of

this paternalism had conscious antecedents in the traditions of previous dynasties, antecedents

discussed in detail below.

The Tradition of Censorship

Politics and art have a unique and longstanding relationship in Chinese history, as does the

recognition of the power of popular culture by both authority figures and rebels. Censorship in

7

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China, so often misconstrued in our own time as a bi-product of Communist ideology, is

continuously traceable at least to the time of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan (Yuan Dynasty.

1260-1368 A.D.), but, according to historian Colin Mackerras, it was under the Manchus (Ching

Dynasty, 1644-1911 A.D.), the last non-Han people to rule the Middle Kingdom, that the art of

censorship reached its apex:

The Manchus imposed strict censorship on all forms of theater during the whole of their dynasty we may well agree with the modern scholar Wang Xiaochuan, who has collected all the edicts against novels and dramas of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods, that the Qing was substantially fiercer with regard to censorship than its predecessor, the Ming/

This censorship, however, was not restricted to overtly political works, nor works even

subtly critical of the dynasty. Classic vernacular novels such as The Water Margin (Shui hu

chuan) also fell victim to the censors, who found the work politically offensive because of its

"praise and support of rebels."’ Official Hu Ding, appealing successfully to the Qianlong

Emperor for censorship in 1754, wrote "[The Water Margin] regards....rebels as remarkable and

able people; those who revolt escape punishment, which is belittled."10 Hu goes on to

say, "Actors have adapted it into dramas and in the marketplace worthless people watch them....I.

your subject, beg you....to have the book blocks....destroyed and to forbid its performance on

the stage." Nevertheless, The Water Margin endured as underground literature.

The Water Margin reemerged as drama during China’s bloodiest rebellion. By the early

1850s, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) was in full swing, led by Hong Xiuquan, an

8Colin Mackerras, "The Drama of the Qing Dynasty" in Chinese Theater, eds. Mackerras and Elizabeth Wichman (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 111-112.

’Ibid., 111. The authorship of The Water Margin, also known as Outlaws o f the Marshes, is uncertain. The first known printed edition appeared in 1540. Written in the vernacular style of travelling storytellers of the 14th century, the novel follows the adventures of a band of colorful thieves, very similar to Robin Hood and his band of merry men, who rob from the rich, harass corrupt officials, give to the poor, and at all times remain loyal to the emperor.

I0Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unsuccessful candidate in the xiucai examinations, the county-level stage of the notoriously

difficult civil service exam system that might have brought honor to Hong’s family and his

village. But Hong failed the exams four times. After the third he became seriously ill and had

a vision that he was visited by a golden-bearded man who told him "Son of mine, you are filthy

after your descent on earth. Let me wash you in the river before you are permitted to see your

father."11

Hong came to believe that he was in fact the younger son of God and the brother of Jesus.

Hong’s charisma, combined with the social, economic and natural disasters that plagued China,

finally led to an open revolt. Hong and his followers sought to create a new kingdom of "Great

Peace," or Taiping. Just as the future sons and daughters of the May Fourth generation would

do, Hong’s armies sought to replace an increasingly corrupt and inept authority with a radically

different. Western-influenced society.

But the Taipings were not simply a Christian sect. Instead, their belief system incorporated

a wild mixture of folk religion, literary symbols, and biblical references.

According to Mackerras,

The Taipings were influenced by the ideas of the rebels in the The Water Margin , and it appears that their followers used theater performances to espouse the religious, egalitarian, anti-Manchu, and anti-Confucian aspects of their ideology, despite the formal ban.12

In other words, the Taipings were apparently conscious of the value in using popular culture as

a conduit for anti-Manchu propaganda.

"Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modem China, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 226-227.

“Colin Mackerras,"Qing Dynasty," 112. It should be noted that Hong himself banned most forms of drama after 1859 in a flurry of Puritanical censorship reminiscent of the aftermath of the English Civil War. Nevertheless, Mackerras offers some evidence that opera performances of well-known stories were important morale boosters in the Taiping ranks. See also Mackerras. "Theatre and the Taipings," in Modem China, an International Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1976), 473-501.

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It is this propaganda function of popular art that we see carried through in periods of major

crisis. The public transmission of popular, potent archetypes found in literature is repeated again

and again as each subsequent rebellion makes an honorable bow to those that came before, even

as the rebels sometimes reject parts of their own culture. The Boxers—an anti-Christian, anti-

foreign group of Shantung rebels who rose up in the final years of the 19th century-also

borrowed heavily from popular literature and traditional opera for their invulnerability rituals.

exercises that were meant to make their bodies impenetrable by arrows and bullets.13 Joseph

Esherick, in a book that is widely considered the definitive account of the Boxer Uprising, argues

repeatedly for the significance of popular icons found in such classic novels-turned-operas as The

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San guo yanyi) and Journey to the West (Xi youji):u

The importance of village opera for an understanding of Boxer origins can hardly be overstated....the gods by which the Boxers were possessed were all borrowed from these operas....When the young boxers were possessed by these gods, they acted out their battles for righteousness and honor just as surely as did the performers on the stage.15

In the 20th century, as we shall see, the rebels were possessed by modern icons such as Science.

Marx and Lenin. For the young intellectuals of the May Fourth generation, these were their

13The Boxer invulnerability rituals bear a striking similarity to the "ghost dance" rituals that became popular among the Olgala Sioux in the U.S. in the late 1880s. Ghost dancers also believed their rituals, which included wearing a special shirt, would protect them from the white soldiers’ bullets. In 1891, the Ghost Dancers were defeated in the last battle of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

I4Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 62. Compiled from prompt books and probably oral tradition by 14th century playwright Lo Kuanchung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is set in the turbulent Three Kingdoms period in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries. It is filled with tales of palace intrigue, rightful heirs to the throne and scheming usurpers. The book ends when the three states are unified into one empire. Journey to the West, also known as Monkey, was compiled as a novel in the 16th century by Wu Chengan. The story describes the travels of a Buddhist priest on his way from China to India in search of sacred texts. He is accompanied by a variety of unusual creatures, including a supernatural monkey and a pig-man.

15Ibid„ 64-65.

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gods.

May Fourth’s "Three Generations"

In discussion of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, it has become almost trite to

comment on the interplay of the May Fourth movement and the left-wing radicalism that period

spawned. Yet May Fourth remains a logical starting place for both looking backward to the roots

and looking forward to the growth of Chinese leftist theater, for it was the pre-World War I

Western intellectual-industrial encroachment on China and post-war betrayal of China that led to

the simultaneous adoption by Chinese youth of Western cultural traditions and rejection of

Western paternalism. The movement takes its name from the student protests that erupted in

Beijing immediately after the 1919 signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the subsequent

relinquishment of German-held Chinese territories to the Japanese. Among young intellectuals,

this act of imperialist derogation sparked a vital activism that had lain dormant for decades.

Or had it? If anything, the May Fourth Incident gave outward life to an activism that had

focused on the acquisition of knowledge at least since the rise of scholar and reformer Kang

Youwei (1858-1927). A child prodigy, Kang at an early age fell under the influence of Neo-

Confucian scholar Zhu Zuji, who emphasized "the uniting of scholarship and public affairs.”16

But, while Kang remained essentially a Neo-Confucian throughout his life,17 he soon went

further than most of his contemporaries, West or East, in escaping the intellectual prisons of his

time.

As historian Chow Tse-Tsung has pointed out, Kang is the symbolic father of the first

generation of May Fourth era thinkers. Kang’s revolutionary vision of the "Great Community"

I6Hsu, 362.

17As a philosopher, Kang was best known for his attempts to reinterpret the Confucian classics in terms of embracing change and social reform rather than idolizing tradition.

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would lay the basis for the second generation that included Lu Xun, scholar Hu Shi, and CCP

founder Chen Duxiu. In Kang’s view, great world confederations would "slowly draw together

under the pressures of a world parliament, which would attain unifying force through economic

sanctions, a patrolling navy, and a universal language designed by musicians and

philosophers.”18

For Kang, the influences were eclectic, all aimed at supporting his view that Confucianism

was properly seen as a reformist movement. "Kang completed a synthesis of these allegedly

Confucian ideas with ideas from the Buddhist tradition and from those parts of the Western

utopian literature that had been made available to him in Chinese translation."19 These works

included Etienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria, John Fryer’s Homely Words to Aid in Government,

and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Kang also read widely in modern science, politics

and philosophy, borrowing what he felt was most valuable for his own arguments.

By 1898 Kang had finally managed to access the young Emperor Guangxu through a series

of memorials calling for radical reforms, including discarding the old "eight-legged" civil service

examination based on classic Confucian texts.20 Following a series of audiences with Kang.

Guangxu launched the Hundred Days Reform, abolishing the eight-legged essay, establishing a

national university, turning temples into schools, and setting up programs to improve commerce

and agriculture.21

18Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1982), 67.

,9Ibid„ 65.

20The Chinese civil service examinations consisted of three levels: xiucai generally referred to local exams; juren referred to the provincial level; and jin sh i referred to the national level exams held in the nations capital.

2ISpence, "Heavenly Peace," 50.

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But Guangxu faced a powerful, politically adept foe in the Empress Dowager Cixi. who

managed a quiet palace coup that resulted in Guangxu’s confinement to an island on the palace

grounds. Kang Youwei and his allies were forced to flee the country.-

But from where did such intense resistance to change originate? The Empress Dowager

represented that part of the gentry (the degreed class) that realized its own obsolescence in the

modern world. For middle-aged and older degree-holders, implementation of new educational

methods would undercut their own hard-won positions as venerable caretakers of a traditional

system. Others believed that the old exam system effectively winnowed out the weak in character

from those best fit to serve, regardless of their practical skills. Even many scholars who believed

in reform for China argued that Kang’s went too far too soon. As a compromise with this latter

group of reform-minded conservatives, the Empress Dowager retained the new National

University in Beijing and abolished the old exam system in 1905.

It was in this confusing mixture of tradition and modernity that the second May Fourth

generation reached young adulthood, led by China’s great satirist, Lu Xun.

Lu Xun (1881-1936) was bom Zhou Shuren23 in Shaoxing in the Province of Zhejiang.

Though he came from a well-educated family of high social class, the imprisonment of his

grandfather when Lu was only thirteen and the death of his father three years later threw the

family into poverty. Nevertheless, Lu studied hard and managed to graduate from the School of

Railways and Mines in 1901, traveling to Japan soon after. There he attended medical school

for two years before dropping out to devote himself to literature.21

*Ibid., 51.

^Literary pseudonyms were quite common during this period. Many writers, theater and film artists had more than one in the course of their careers.

^Feng Xuefeng, "Lu Xun: His Life and Works" in Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. I. trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 12-13.

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After the 1911 revolution, Lu found himself appointed to the revolutionary government's

new Ministry of Education, where he remained until launching his full-time writing career in

April 1918 with the publication of his first short story,"Diary of a Madman," in New Youth

magazine. For Lu, this was the beginning of an intense and productive period of writing,

editing and teaching that would last until his death, and it was during this period that Lu

developed his distinct, biting satirical voice. For young intellectuals of the time, Lu symbolized

the synthesis of social consciousness and a kind of art that transcended ideology. Yet, despite

his value as a symbol of the left, Lu never became a member of the Chinese Communist

Party.15

The May Fourth movement was the result of this second generation’s willingness to break

out of the confines of Confucianism into a more direct, modern form of expression. Thus, Kang

Youwei’s utopian vision is replaced by Lu Xun’s sarcasm, well-illustrated in Lu Xun’s sharp-

edged criticism of a romantic contemporary’s propensity for "isms":

To write a good deal about yourself is expressionism. To write about others is realism. To write poems on a girl’s leg is romanticism. To ban poems on a girl’s leg is classicism. While:

A head drops down from the sky, An ox on the head stand high. Oh, my! At sea green thunderbolts fly!

is futurism.26

May Fourth, more than a mere event, was itself an historical framework for the thoughts

and feelings of the May Fourth generation. Lu Xun’s fighting spirit, sparked by the events of

May Fourth, later nearly died with the deaths of some of his own students during bloody student

“ Some debate continues about whether this was Lu’s choice or the Party’s choice.

26Spence, "Heavenly Peace," 254.

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protests that occurred on March 18, 1926. Suddenly, Lu’s biting satire is reduced to plaintive

sadness when he asks, "Besides, how could smiling, gentle Liu Hezhen have been slaughtered for

no reason in front of Government House?"27 Here, in the second generation’s tragic awakening,

lies the foundation for its politicization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a move that would lead

to the formation of the League of Left Wing Writers, the League of Left Wing Dramatists and

other leftist intellectual organizations.

But the seeds for those leftist associations had been sown much earlier. Chen Duxiu (1879-

1942)—a co-founder of the CCP in 192128—and others launched New Youth magazine in 1915.

In the words of Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, "It was dedicated to arousing the youth of the country to

destroy the stagnant old traditions and forge a new culture."19 Since the magazine’s founding.

Chen had supported the cause of women’s rights, and in 1918 he ran a complete vernacular

translation of Ibsen’s A Doll's House in the magazine.30

Like Lu, Chen received a solid classical education in his youth, but his personal intellectual

revolution occurred while studying in France from 1907-1910 and again from 1913-1916, when

he took charge of a work-study program for Chinese students and laborers.31 Chen’s work as

an editor and as a teacher at Beijing University ( Beida) won him "an enthusiastic following

among the educated youth"32 who were to comprise the third May Fourth generation. In Chen

we begin to see the early mixture of Marxism with other forms of socialism prevalent in Europe

“ Ibid., 235.

28Hsu, 517.

^ i d . . 497.

“Spence, "Heavenly Peace,” 161.

3IHsu, 496.

“Ibid.

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and the United States, a socialism that was largely a rejection of the essential "Chineseness" of

preceding nationalist reform movements.

Young intellectuals had grown impatient with any discussion of retaining the Manchu

Dynasty, even in the form of a constitutional monarchy, and the growing popularity of Karl

Marx’s writings in Europe soon filtered down to the Chinese through Japanese critical studies of

Marxism. Many first became exposed to Marxism through an 1899 Japanese work called Modern

Socialism, which argued that Marx used "profound scholarship and detailed research to discover

an economic base" and that socialism was "easily grasped" by workers. In embracing such

principles, the young elite in effect rejected its traditional "right” to rule the peasants and workers

(at least in theory).33 For the first time, the intellectual elite began to develop an idealism that

was both nationalist and truly modern in that it was not primarily based on reinterpretations of

Chinese ideas as Kang Youwei’s had been.

Likewise, in the emerging world of spoken drama, the influences of socialists or quasi­

socialist novelists and dramatists like Zola and Ibsen coincided with the early influences of Marx.

The dramatic forms had not yet changed, but the ideas, by the time the first Chinese socialist

party was formed in 1911, had already begun to infiltrate the world view of young students and

simply awaited interpreters to disseminate these ideas through popular culture.

The Period of Formative Emulation in Drama. 1907-1927

Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, young intellectuals used traditional theater

forms to express political viewpoints, but in the spoken play form, they found "a new sharp tool

for the direct expression of their political feelings."34 In the early years of the 20th century.

^Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modem China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 260.

^Colin Mackerras, "Qing Dynasty," 106-107.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. missionary secondary schools had introduced the works of Shakespeare. Moliere and others to

Chinese students. As these students matured and went on to university, they brought with them

a fascination for Westem-style drama that had never before existed in China. It was the February

1907 establishment of the Spring Willow ( Ouinliu) Society by a group of expatriate Chinese

students in Japan from which we can mark the beginning of the first phase of h u a j uAs pan

of an effon to raise funds for famine relief in northern Anhui and Jiangsu Provinces, Spring

Willow put on a one-act play called "The Tea Flower Woman" (Chahua nu), a translation of La

Dame Aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895).36 On June 1 and 2, Spring Willow

gave their first full-length performance. The Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven (Heim yutian lu).

adapted from a Chinese translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin. According

to Ouyang Yuqian, one of the more prolific left-wing playwrights and a founder of Spring

Willow, the Chinese legation in Tokyo opposed student participation, which gradually came to

a halt.37

Activities moved to China, and almost immediately a production of Black Slave , this time

by the Shanghai-based Spring Society (Chunyang shi) in 1907, became China’s first official

huaju. The drama of this early period soon acquired the name "civilized drama," most likely a

reference to the young intelligentsia’s embrace of new, ostensibly "superior" Western values in

the turbulent years leading up to the 1911 overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. Mackerras argues that

the civilized dramas may have played a small role in creating the social and political conditions

35Tian Han, "The Path and Prospects of Chinese Spoken Drama’s Artistic Development (Zhongguo huaju yishu fiazhan de jinglu he zhanwang) in Tian Han, et al., 3-4.

^Mackerras, "Qing Dynasty," 107.

^Ouyang Yuqian, "Recalling the Spring Willow Society" (Huiyi Chunliu) in Tian Han, et al., 22.

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that led to the overthrow of the Manchus.38 Regardless of their significance as revolutionary

propaganda, they laid the important ground work for later theater and film that would serve such

a function.

By 1918, more mature interpreters of the new Western influences began to emerge. Two

threads of socially conscious thought had appeared that would soon find their way into the plays

and screenplays of the emerging theater and film movement: the scientific pragmatism of

American philosopher and educator John Dewey and the already well-known theories of Karl

Marx. Both strands found early public exposure in Chen Duxiu’s New Youth magazine. The

first strand of socialism entered the world of popular culture through Hu Shi’s essays in the 1918

special Ibsen issue of New Youth. Hu Shi (1891-1962) had also received the traditional classical

education in his youth, but a scholarship to study in the U.S., where he received degrees at

Cornell and Columbia, led to a seven-year immersion in Western thought. Exposed to the

philosophies of Thomas Huxley and John Dewey—especially to Dewey’s theories of education—Hu

returned to a China ripe for social change. It was Hu who introduced baihua, or plain speech,

into literary writing.39 And it was in Chen’s 1918 special issue of New Youth that Hu wrote an

article called "Ibsenism” that advocated sound individualism as the direction in which China

should be moving.40

Historian C.Y. Hsu has argued these influences resulted in Hu’s complete rejection of

Confucianism:

Truth, according to the pragmatist, is changeable in proportion to its utility based on experimentation. Such an attitude, distinctly a product of an industrial capitalistic society, was diametrically opposed to the Confucian concept that truth is eternal and unchangeable.

-^Mackerras, "Qing Dynasty," 109.

^Hsu, 500.

40John Y.H. Hu, 16.

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On May 1, 1919, Chen published a special issue on Marxism. The university’s head

librarian, thirty-year-old Li Dazhao, served as the issue’s general editor/2 Li had shortly before

established an informal Marxist study group whose members included Mao Zedong, one of Li's

assistant librarians, and Qu Qiubai. Each in his own way, Mao and Qu would become two of

the most influential figures in developing a Marxist literary theory that would heavily influence

the theater movement—Qu through his early leadership of the League of Left-Wing Writers and

Mao through his writings and speeches at Yenan on the adoption of folk forms.

Somewhat auspiciously perhaps, John Dewey and his wife came to China for a two-year visit

from May 1919 to July 1921. During that period, with Hu Shi as his interpreter, Dewey toured

extensively and lectured to capacity crowds of students open to his messages of scientific

pragmatism. Dewey told audiences,

China could not be changed without a social transformation based upon a transformation of ideas. The [1911] political revolution was a failure, because it was external, formal, touching the mechanism of social action but not affecting conceptions of life, which really control society/3

Dewey’s emphasis on transformation of ideas to effect change are apparent in Hu Shi's

highly influential play, "The Greatest Event in Life" (Zhongsheng dashi), inspired by Ibsen’s A

Doll’s House. Published in New Youth in 1919, the play was largely responsible for building

Ibsen’s reputation in China "as a revolutionary realist playwright who advocated individualism.

41Hsu, 499.

42Spence, "Modem China," 306.

43John Dewey, "New Culture in China," Asia 21, No. 7 (July 1921): 581; quoted in Hsu. 506.

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women’s rights, social justice and iconoclasm."44

"The Greatest Event in Life" concerns the impending marriage of Tian Ya Mei to a long­

time friend, Mr. Chen. Mrs. Tian, Ya Mei’s mother, consults a blind fortune teller, who

informs her that the marriage would be a disaster. She regretfully tells Ya Mei that she cannot

marry Mr. Chen. Mr. Tian then enters the fray, objecting strongly to his wife’s persistent

reliance on superstition. He, on the other hand, refuses the marriage based on a 2,500-year-old

Tian clan tradition that says no Tian shall marry a Chen, since the two names were once

pronounced the same, implying they were once the same family. Thus, Mr. Tian may not be a

prisoner to superstition, but he is still a prisoner to tradition. In the end, Hu Shi implies that Ya

Mei has eloped with Mr. Chen. It is Chen’s note to Ya Mei that draws the generational dividing

line: "This matter concerns the two of us and no one else. You should make your own

decision. "45 The play marks the first time in Chinese drama that huaju was used to comment

on the conflict between the old China and the new.

The men and women who were the direct or indirect students of Lu, Chen and Hu became

the third generation of May Fourth intellectuals. And playwrights of this third generation such

as Tian Han, Cao Yu, Xia Yan and Li Jianwu—men whose lives and works we shall examine in

greater detail below—shared the distinction of being the first generation to learn outside the

traditional track of classical Chinese texts. Instead, they were exposed to what for all intents and

purposes was a traditional Western education, emphasizing social and physical sciences, language

study and even the performance of plays by Ibsen, Zola and Shakespeare.

““Constantine Tung, "T’ien Han and the Romantic Ibsen," Modem Drama 9, no. 4 (February 1967): 390.

45Hu Shi,"The Greatest Event in Life," (Zhongsheng dashi), trans. Edward M. Gunn in Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology, ed. Gunn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 8.

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The events of Spring 1919 shifted these young intellectuals away from a philosophy of

scientific gradualism toward social action. Just as the deaths of four students at Kent State

University during the height of U.S. involvement in Vietnam became a symbol for the American

government’s lost legitimacy, so did the deaths and arbitrary arrests of the May Fourth youth.

Even for those who did not participate directly in the marches and protests, a shared sense of

solidarity and of generational alienation found its expression in their work.46

The years between the beginning of the new republic and the White Terror that sent CCP

activity underground in 1927 saw a gradual maturing of huaju in both dramatic structure and

content. Playwright Tian Han (1898-1968) was especially prolific during this period and came

to symbolize the voice of the alienated young intellectuals who made up the bulk of the huaju

audience. At the same time, emerging troupes, especially at Shanghai Fudan University and

other schools, brought the new dramatists of Europe and the United States to the small but

dedicated huaju audiences/7 O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape saw its Chinese premier at Fudan’s Art

Drama Theater. Chekhov, Sardou, Zola, Shaw, O’Casey and Elmer Rice served as the indirect

teachers of playwrights such as Ouyang Yuqian and Tian Han, and because these teachers

(especially O’Neill) were themselves experimenting with new forms, the Chinese playwrights

were as likely to introduce expressionism or symbolism into a script as naturalism or realism.

It is especially important to emphasize here that the dominant philosophy of the left in 1927,

■“Perhaps an even closer parallel to the spirit of this time is found in the words of Thomas Jefferson, commenting on the American Revolution shortly before his death: "All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the power of truth, that the mass of mankind has not been bom with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." See Peter Calvert, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 30.

47Interview with Geng Bao Sheng, Director of Fudan University’s student theater, April 1995.

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reflected in art and literature, was not the subjugation of the individual contained in Marx but the

exaltation of the individual found in Nietzsche and Ibsen. As far back as 1907 and 1908.

influenced by the writings of both men, Lu Xun wrote essays that dealt with what he called the

"Mara" poets, a reference to the Buddhist god of destruction and rebellion and, for Lu Xun, an

apt name for the European writers who embodied the spirit of rebellious creativity.48 As Lu

wrote.

If we want to work out a policy for the present....we must examine the spirit, rely on the individual and exclude the mass. When the individual is exalted to develop his full capacity, the country will be strengthened and will arise.49

Thus, the intellectual atmosphere of 1927 Shanghai reflected the excitement of a new

intellectual revolution that embraced socialism-including elements of Marxism but emphasizing

individualism and the social pragmatism of John Dewey—as a necessary step for China’s renewal.

It was Chiang Kaishek’s reaction to the Marxist elements, especially the relinquishment of

property by the gentry inherent in Marxism, that would lead to repression of the theater

community and clearly draw the battle lines for much of the next decade.

^Spence, "Heavenly Peace," 102.

49Ibid.

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THE EMERGENCE OF THE LEFT WING, 1927-1935

One never asked why someone had come to Shanghai. It was assumed everybody had something to hide. -Lady Jellicoe30

While the huaju theater artists previous to 1927 had already aligned themselves with the left,

not until after Chiang Kaishek’s 1927 massacre of CCP members and workers sympathetic to the

CCP did the leftist playwrights seriously band together and adopt social realism with an anti-

GMD message as their preferred form. The second major argument outlined in Chapter I of this

study, that the anti-left partnership in repression of the foreign-run SMC and Chiang Kaishek’s

authoritarian, right-wing GMD led to a transformation of left-leaning theater workers into

hardcore leftists, is bourn out in the various organizational strategies outlined in this chapter that

the left adopted to survive, to strengthen its propaganda activities and to more closely align itself

with CCP policy.

By the early 1930s, these strategies had led to two polarized phenomena in Shanghai: the

creation of leftist intellectual organizations and the counter-creation of the neo-fascist New Life

Movement by right-wing military officers. Until the United Front in 1936, the two sides would

engage in a constant game of spy-versus-spy. But a number of factors, foremost among them the

unwitting protection offered by the foreign settlements, ultimately led to partial victory for the

50Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918-1939 (New York: Crown, 1990), 2.

23

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left in the propaganda wars of what became known as "the Left Decade."

Sb^ngbsi r Still Life of ths City

Shanghai’s foreign population and its labor-consuming industrial culture profoundly

influenced the left-wing theater artists. The dreams that American and European industrialists

brought with them of unbridled acquisition of wealth at the expense of the hapless Chinese were

outstripped only by the hopes for adventure, safe haven or escape from the law that a strange

brew of foreign workers, refugees and lost souls brought with them to Shanghai from a hundred

different lands. For the leftist playwrights, the story of the modern Chinese man or woman

trapped at the center of this whirling vortex of cultures often became the chief fodder for new

work.

A brief look at population figures begins to give a picture of the cacophony of foreign

images to which Chinese theater artists were exposed on a daily basis. Shanghai’s 1925 census

recorded 810,378 Chinese living in the International Settlement compared to 29,848 foreigners:

289,210 Chinese lived in the French Concession, compared to 7,790 foreigners; and the whole

city had a population of 2.5 million of which 14,000 were Japanese, 8,200 were British, 3,100

were American, and perhaps 14,000 were Russian (though only 4,000 were listed), largely White

Russian refugees from the 1917 Revolution.51 In the same year, Shanghai’s Municipal Council

failed to reserve a single seat for a Chinese. More club-like than democratic, the SMC adhered

to the principle of "one interest one vote." One particular councillor had 25 votes, and altogether

the Brits had 1,157, the Japanese 552, and the Americans 32S.52

5INichoIas R. Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 1991), 40.

aIbid„ 21.

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By 1932, the population had swelled to 3 million, including 70,000 foreigners.53 25.000

were White Russians, many of whom worked as taxi dancers, rickshaw pullers and even

concubines to wealthy Chinese.54 Here was a city that boasted a Japanese nightclub dancer

named Manuela,55 a city where entertainment establishments were run by powerful gangsters

named Big-Eared Tu and Pockmarked Huang,56 and which attracted a potpourri of foreign

communists that included Thomas Mann, Earl Browder (leader of the American Communist

Party), and the young Andre Malraux, who produced from his experiences the classic novel

Man’s Fate.51

Yet this was also a Shanghai where many young artists and intellectuals had for the first time

found freedom to think, to speak, and to fill their minds with the excitement of once forbidden

topics. For them, the new China—and Shanghai in particular-dripped with an intoxicatingly

greasy passion for life, tinged with a moral relativism that would become increasingly polarized

with successive acts of GMD and Japanese aggression. When the young intellectuals opened their

eyes, all around was death, corruption and filth, but when they closed them, visions of brighter

futures danced in their heads. Before 1927, this third May Fourth generation could not help but

hope that an act of good faith on their part would win over Chiang Kaishek and the right wing

of the GMD to the cause of socialist reform.

"Sergeant, 2.

MIbid„ 31-32

55Ibid„ 6.

"Ibid., 78.

"Ibid., 74.

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GMD and Foreign Cooperation against the Left

The transition from social drama to truly political drama in Shanghai emerged directly out

of the bloody purges of 1927. The tragedy began innocuously enough. As a victorious Chiang

Kaishek approached the outskirts of Shanghai in early 1927. the laborers and CCP cadres who

had kept the local warlord busy until Chiang’s arrival had every reason to believe that Chiang

was on their side. Stalin also apparently believed in Chiang’s good faith: The Soviet leader had

ordered the Shanghai workers to "bury their weapons" and avoid clashes with Chiang’s troops.5*

On March 22, 1927, Chiang entered the city unopposed.

Three weeks later, on April 12, Chiang ordered the beginning of the White Terror. GMD

troops, police and undercover agents shot suspected Communists on sight, disarmed workers and

eliminated labor unions.59 The long-expected official split in the GMD had finally come.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of CCP members and sympathizers fled to the International

Settlement and the French Concession during this time, despite recent repressive actions by the

SMC.

Previous to the GMD takeover of the city, the foreign areas had offered some semblance of

safety, if only because the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) and the Concessions police

maintained an ongoing rivalry with their Chinese counterparts. But the International Settlement

and French Concession officials already had a long history of anti-Communist feeling, and had

recently promulgated a number of anti-Communist regulations. The January 12, 1927 issue of

the North China Daily News, the largest English-language newspaper in the city, featured a ffont-

s'Hsu, 527. At this time the CCP represented the left wing of the GMD. Stalin hoped to mend the differences between the two sides, and Comintern representatives managed to convince Shanghai’s CCP-supporting workers to side with Chiang against the warlord who controlled Shanghai. For details see Conrad Brandt, Stalin's Failure in China (Cambridge, Mass., 1958).

^ s u , 528.

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page proclamation from the SMC that "prohibited political meetings, demonstrations, speeches

or political propaganda of any description within the settlement or upon municipal roads." It also

officially denounced those "preaching doctrines of force and class hatred.

Clearly, the foreign officials saw Chiang’s purge as an opportunity to rid the foreign

settlements of communist activity. After Chiang’s arrival, the rivalry slowly dissipated. The

GMD-run Public Security Bureau (PSB) and the SMP started cooperating when, after 1927. the

GMD began to fear Communists just as the International Settlement and Concessions police had

all along.61 The SMP offered a convincing argument for the team approach: 1931 statistics

showed that more than forty victims had been attacked by alleged "Communist death squads."

and at least thirty of them had been killed.62

For Shanghai’s theater community, the negative turn of events meant that just as their work

became more clearly politicized, opportunities for production diminished. Whereas foreign

settlement authorities had not closely watched theater activity before, they now began a program

of formal and informal censorship that would polarize and entrench leftist intellectuals. The

leftist response was increasingly sophisticated organization and co-production, the development

of anti-censorship strategies and a partial commitment to defer to CCP policy.

Tian Han and the Organization of the Left-Wing Theater

In this atmosphere of increasing repression, Tian Han and a disjointed community of left-

wing theater artists struggled to regroup.

“ "Shanghai Municipal Council Proclamation," North China Daily News, 12 January 1927. 1.

“ Frederic Wakeman, Jr, Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 135.

“Ibid., 137.

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Tian Han’s personal story is in many respects the story of the left-wing theater in

microcosm. Born into a gentry family in Hunan in 1898, Tian Han’s father died at an early age

and the family soon saw its fortune disappear. Nevertheless, Tian Han excelled in school, and.

after graduating from Changsha Normal School in 1916, he sailed to Japan, where his uncle was

supervisor of students from Hunan. At this time, he began to read Strindberg, Hauptmann.

Chekhov, Ibsen and Materlinck—all important figures in the creation of a realistic theater in the

West.63

During the early 1920s, Tian Han worked as a teacher at Shanghai University, then the

bastion of Chinese communism. Still, he shied away from politics, stating that "a writer should

compose poems, not propaganda. In this early period, Tian Han cultivated the image of the

romantic playwright, writing of "melancholy, aimless and self-pitying poets, artists, and

disillusioned, lonesome young ‘bohemians.’"65 He thus distinguished himself from the other

rising playwrights of the time such as Ouyang Yuqian, founder of the Spring Willow Society that

had produced some of the earliest huaju, and Hong Shen, the Western-trained dramatist and

director who had launched Fudan University’s experimental theater. Both these men were

already well-known for "deploring social inequities" in their work.66 Theater historian

Constantine Tung has written the following of the years just prior to Tian Han’s political

“Constantine Tung, "Lonely Search into the Unknown: T’ien Han’s Early Plays, 1920- 1930," Comparative Drama II, no. 1 (Spring, 1968): 41. Tung’s account of Tian Han’s early years contrasts noticeably with that of a People’s Republic of China theatre scholar, Fu Hu, who claims that the playwright was bom into a poor peasant family and only avoided the path of "aestheticism and decadence" (to where opposition to realism would have led him) because of the influence of Russian realistic literature. See Fu Hu, "Tian Han and His Immense Contribution to Modem Chinese Drama,” Chinese Literature, no. 10 (1979): 3-10.

•“Tung, "Lonely Search," 48.

“ Ibid.

“ Ibid., 53-54.

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transformation:

In 1925 and 1926, when many artists and writers went south to Canton to join the Guomindang revolution, Tian Han remained behind in Shanghai to found The Southland Society (Nan-Kuo She) with the sole purpose of promoting art, music, and literature. Finally, he confessed that he had no fixed ideas about China’s revolutionary movement, that he was suffering even more from his personal problems, and that he was resolved to continue to search inward for their solutions.*7

While Tung argues that the playwright by 1929 began to "show the deepening influence of

Ibsen and Strindberg,"68 one contemporary of Tian Han’s asserted that his plays were too

abstract for popular audiences and could be appreciated "only by European gentlemen and a small

circle of intellectuals."69 A later scholar of modern Chinese intellectual history, Poshek Fu.

went even further in commenting that all huaju at this time suffered from "overt didacticism and

platitudinous dialogue" that made it unwatchable for the proletariat it purported to concern itself

with.70 At the other extreme, Fu Hu has argued from a decidedly "party line" viewpoint that

Tian Han’s plays showed concern for the workers and peasants from the beginning.71

The truth most likely lies somewhere in between. We know that Tian Han worked closely

with theater artists, writers and other intellectuals who had already clearly established their left-

wing credentials, including the man who became the head of the CCP Cultural Committee in

Shanghai, Qu Qiubai. Tian Han may have held strong leftist views much earlier than 1930, but

something happened to change his opinion of the appropriate venue to express those views. Tian

^Ibid., 48. What Tung refers to as "the Southland Society" is henceforward translated as "the South Nation Society."

“Ibid., 50.

“ Fang Y, "Revolutionary Art Does Not Fear Terror," The International Theatre, No. 3 (1933), 17. Quoted in Yih-jian Tai, "The Contemporary Chinese Theatre and Soviet Influence 1919-1960" (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University, 1974), 56.

70Fu Poshek, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 71.

7IFu Hu, 6.

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Han’s work especially underwent a process of politicization after 1927. While the change may

have had more to do with his wife’s death or other personal troubles than with the White Terror.

Tian Han discarded his stories of young intellectual anti-heroes and, in both his screenplays and

plays, replaced them with stories geared toward moving audience members to active support of

the left. Perhaps he simply found himself so strongly associated with the left and so disgusted

with the failures of the right that he could no longer resist the social push toward mixing politics

with art.

But perhaps Tian Han’s shift to the left involved more than simply peer pressure. The

Shanghai cadres saw themselves as a "vanguard party" in the most Leninist sense of the term.

Whereas Marx and Engels clearly saw revolution as a spontaneous mass rising, Lenin argued for

the necessity of the vanguard.72 In support of this idea, Theta Skocpol wrote that great social

revolutions are "revolutions from above" led by elites in the name of the masses.73 To Tian

Han and the idealist leftists with whom he surrounded himself, the idea of the vanguard party

must have inspired images of The Water Margin's bandit heroes leading the people to rebellion.

But before the vanguard could lead the proletariat, they first had to successfully transfer the

allegiance of the wider elite, and it was this wider elite to whom they played.74

Whatever the explanation for his transformation, Tian Han, along with Xia Yan. was

^Peter Calvert, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 11.

^Ibid., 60.

74While Crane Brinton and other theorists of revolution concern themselves with "great revolutions," such as the English, French and Russian revolutions, a second school that includes Chalmers Johnson, Peter Calvert and James Davies argues that the dimensions of revolution also include alteration in the value structure of myths of a particular system, alteration in social structure, changes in political structures and alteration of the elite in social composition or membership. It is this last point with which we are concerned here. See A.S. Cohan, Theories of Revolution: An Introduction (New York: Halstead Press, 1975), 215.

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instrumental in formally radicalizing huaju in 1930 with the formation of the League of Left-

Wing Dramatists. As the introduction to this study emphasized, people pushed to the limits of

their survival will often turn to myth and symbol as their only weapons. The left-wing theater

workers, educated men steeped in the literary traditions of East and West, certainly would have

been aware of the long tradition in China of the artist commenting on society. By joining

together, they may have been conciously honoring that tradition.

The "Left Decade"

As early as 1929 independent drama groups had already made contact with one another, and

many theater workers had already become "left-leaning."75 At that time, these independent

groups banded together to take the unprecedented step of holding continuous, large-scale public

performances that included participation from the South Nation Society, the Xin You Drama

Society, the Fudan Drama Society, the Drama Assistance Society, and the Guangdong Drama

Research Institute.76

In the fall of 1929, under Xia Yan (1900-1995), members from the Creation Society and the

Sun Society came together to form the Shanghai Art Drama Theater. It became the first theater

directly under the Communist Party’s control. Its mission: Create a proletarian theater.77

Like Tian Han, Xia Yan’s upbringing and education foreshadowed his future leftist activism.

Bom Shen Duan Xian into a landowning family in Hangchow, Xia Yan traveled to Japan in 1919

to study electrical engineering. Returning to China in 1925, he became involved in the Northern

75Chao Ming Yi, "About the League of Left-Wing Theatre Workers." (Guanyu zuoyi xijujia lianmeng) in Collected Theatre Documents, vol. (Xiju I Luncong) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju juban shi, 1957) 183.

76Ibid„ 184.

^Tai, 57.

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Expedition against the warlord armies and during that period began to write seriously.78 It was

also during this time that Xia Yan turned to Marxism as a philosophy that would address his

strong sense of social injustice.

In January 1930,79 the Shanghai Art Drama Theater held its first performances: Upton

Sinclair’s The Second Story Man, Lu Marten’s The Miners, and Romain Rolland’s Game o f Love

and RevolutionCommenting on the exclusively foreign bill, Xia Yan said, "We had no

original script suitable to our purpose at the time. Secondly, because of the severe threat of the

‘white terror,’ it was much safer to produce foreign plays in the International Settlements in

Shanghai."8' By posing as amateur groups or by associating themselves with legitimate

organizations, many theater groups managed to stay clear of SMC censors.82

Three months later, the PSB shut down Shanghai Art Drama Theater’s production of All

Quiet on the Western Front, bringing an immediate response from the new League of Left Wing

Writers, the parent group of what would later become the League of Left-Wing Dramatists. The

ten years following 1927 were known as zuolian shinian, or the Left League Decade, and it was

in the atmosphere of highly ideological literary convictions that the League of Left Wing Writers

78Richard F. Chang and William L. MacDonald, "An Introduction to the Play" in Sya Yan, Under the Eaves of Shanghai: An Annotated Chinese Play, eds. Chang and MacDonald (New Haven: Far Eastern Publications, Yale University, 1973), v.

79Tai gives the year as 1931, but then later gives April 1930 as the date of the theatre’s demise. Newspaper accounts from April 1930 confirm the second date.

‘"Tai, 58.

8lXia Yan in Tian Han, et al., 148-149; quoted in and translated by Tai, 58.

CR. Tru, "In Spite of Terror and Repression-the Revolutionary Theatre in China," The International Theatre, No. 4 (1934), 28; quoted in Tai, 62.

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(henceforth, "the Left League") had come into being in March of 1930.® From its inception,

the Left League had been a quasi-official extension of the CCP Cultural Committee. Its

Manifesto had been drafted by Xia Yan, Feng Naichao and Li Zhuli, whom others believed had

actually been assigned by the CCP as "literary agents.

But following the GMD’s arrest and execution of five Left League members on February

7, 1931, it was Qu Qiubai who assumed control of the organization.*5 Qu Qiubai (1899-1935)

early in his intellectual life immersed himself in the study of Buddhism and Russian. But the

events of May 4, 1919 awakened in him a need to contribute to the improvement of Chinese

society.86 He began attending Li Dazhao’s Marxist study groups; however, these study groups

were not his only influence. When Bertrand Russell made his China tour in 1920, Qu became

especially enamored of the parallels with Buddhism Russell noted in his discussion of the world

of appearance and the nature of reality.87 By 1927, Qu had rejected romanticism and had

moved significantly toward what would become Mao’s camp within the CCP. Qu published

Mao’s report on the Hunan peasantry that persuasively argued the key role the peasantry would

need to play in a Chinese revolution. At the same time, Qu actively worked against Chen

Duxiu, a Party founder, whom he felt overemphasized the proletariat and underemphasized the

petty bourgeoisie and the peasant class.88

83 Wang Chi-wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936, Studies on East Asia Series (Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1991), 6.

“Tai, 43.

“ Wang, 110-111.

“ Spence, "Heavenly Peace," 170-171.

“ Ibid., 172-173.

®Ibid„ 247.

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It had been Qu’s adoption of Lenin’s concept of popular an that colored the Left League’s

activities and ultimately spilled over into subsequent dramatists’ and theater workers'

organizations, especially the Blueshirt drama groups. Lenin had argued that

An belongs to the people. It must penetrate with its roots into the very midst of the laboring masses. It must be intelligible to these masses and be loved by them. It must unite the feeling, thought, and will of these masses; it must elevate them.”

In only a few short years, Hu Shi’s brand of scientific pragmatism and Ibsen-like concentration

on subtle social issues like free love and marriage had been superseded by a raw and blatant call

for a "theater of the masses." Qu, along with Lu Xun, had decried the romanticism that still

dominated the works of many Left League members. On the other hand, it was Lu Xun who

argued most fiercely for the independence of the writer.

Lu became the Left League’s best-known member, but his relationship with the CCP

remained distant, and as an extension, so did his relationship with the position held by

Communist cadre Zhao Yang and others that the needs of the artist must remain subservient to

the needs of the Party.90 And, while the Left League continued until 1936, its polemical battle

only ended when the organization itself dissolved under Party orders to facilitate the formation

of the anti-Japanese United Front with the GMD. Even then Lu Xun’s faction battled with Zhao

Yang’s over the proper slogan to announce the United Front. Thus, the Left League both began

and ended in factional battles, lending credence to the argument that it was never seriously under

CCP control91.

While the Left League produced little significant work during the seven years of its

”Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 10; quoted in Tai, 51.

“Spence, "Heavenly Peace," 295.

9!Wang Chi-wong, 213.

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existence, censorship statistics suggest the GMD’s obsessive fear of Left League activities. 1931

figures showed a total of 228 literary works proscribed by the GMD censors and 149 in 1934.

From 1929 to 1936, the GMD proscribed a total of 672 titles.® And the Left League was not

the only organization the GMD feared. From its beginning, the Left League spawned a number

of offshoot organizations that gave members of the left-sympathizing artistic community a forum

for venting their patriotism. In the summer of 1930, Tian Han’s South Nation Society convened

an informal discussion forum. The thirteen groups attending this meeting decided to form a

Shanghai drama society league, using it as a springboard for their participation in the great

ideological battle that many artists and intellectuals believed was about to unfold. Consequently,

on August 1, 1930, they established the League of Left-Wing Drama Groups.93

Almost immediately, the GMD shut down the South Nation Society and restricted public

theater activity. As a result the League of Left-Wing Dramatists (henceforth, "the Dramatists

League"), which maintained a policy of individual membership rather than group membership,

came into being in 1931 .w The Dramatists League supported the production of both translations

of Western plays and new plays by the Shanghai intelligentsia. Following "September 18th."95

the first Blueshirt drama group began performing. Entirely organized by workers themselves,

the Blueshirts put on street theater (jietouju) in Shanghai’s East and West and proved the working

“Tai, 45.

“ Chao Ming Yi, 184.

“ Ibid, 184.

“ "September 18th" is the term used to refer to the Mukden Incident of September 18. 1931 in which the Japanese began their invasion of Manchuria. For the Shanghai literati, the date symbolized the weakness of the GMD in the face of foreign aggression and the need to organize Shanghai’s workers even more vigorously.

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class could create its own dramatic art.96 The Dramatist’s League presided over the Blueshirt

groups, along with active student and social drama groups. By June 1935, there were eight

workers’ theaters (including Blueshirts), one peasant theater, thirteen amateur groups, fifteen

university theaters, thirteen middle school theaters and two children’s theaters.97

While the Blueshirt and other worker-run theater groups probably had only minor impact

as worker-oriented propaganda, they served the important function of training grounds for future

CCP activists, especially in the case of women textile workers who produced plays through

Shanghai’s YWCAs. As Emily Honig recounts in Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai

Cotton Mills, 1919-1949,

Although the number of women who participated in YWCA programs was never more than a small fraction of the female work force, an overwhelming majority of women workers who became active in the labor movement and in the CCP after 1937 attribute their initial "political awakening" to the night schools run by the YWCA for women workers.98

The YWCA came to China in 1890, but by the end of the First World War, its emphasis

had shifted away from conversion and toward social welfare programs. By the late 1920s.

YWCA leaders such as Cora Deng and Maud Russell had become increasingly involved in the

militant labor movement and began genuine women workers’ programs in 1928. These programs

’‘Chao Ming Yi, 185. The origin of the Blueshirt troupes is in itself a story of the close links between the Shanghai and the Russian Soviet theater community. In 1923, the Russians set up a regular troupe for the performance of "living newspapers" in Moscow. They called this troupe the "Blueshirts". The Moscow Department of Culture laid down a standard performance format: the show began with a parade march-in followed by a lecture illustrated with short scenes, while a commentator linked the various scenes, summing up the political meaning at the end. See C.D. Innes, Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 23-24; quoted in David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 38.

’’Chao Ming Yi, 189. Because theatre groups were constantly disbanding and reforming under new names and new leadership, we can consider these numbers close approximations.

®Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986), 217.

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consisted of three-year courses of study that aimed to give each student both a minimal level of

literacy and a set of skills that would allow her to organize and fight for her own rights. After

the White Terror of 1927, the YWCA remained one of the few places where such work could

continue.” In its efforts to recruit workers for schools in every factory district in Shanghai, the

YWCA offered entertainment programs that included plays and movies. According to one

worker,"! went to the school because it looked like fun, not because I really wanted to learn to

read. They would sing and perform plays, so I thought it would be more fun than staying at

home."100

The YWCA very much saw theater as an essential device for raising awareness among

women laborers, many of whom were illiterate. Once each week, instead of regular class

sessions, students studied singing, storytelling and acting, "skills that would enable them to

become leaders in the labor movement."101 A description of one play in which these trained

workers performed on Labor Day of 1931 gives a picture of the creative social activism that the

YWCA encouraged. "The Gifts and the Givers," written and performed by club members,

depicts a student who receives many gifts on her birthday from friends and family. The girl

dreams that the workers who made the gifts come to her and tell her about the conditions under

which they worked to produce the gifts and how each worker contributed to the girl’s happiness.

They ask her to not only remember the gift givers but also the workers who produced them. In

” Ibid., 218.

100Ibid., 219-220.

101Ibid., 221. In an interesting sidelight, one YWCA teacher of such future leaders was the young stage and film actress Yunhe, who later became Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong. In 1933 Yunhe got a job teaching at a workers and peasants night school partially funded by the YWCA. In addition to teaching reading and writing, she sang traditional opera songs to her classes. For more on Jiang Qing’s film and theatre days, see Ross Terrill, The White-boned Demon: A Biography o f Madame Mao Zedong (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 48-112.

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the end, the Spirit of Labor Day enters with a worker, and the girl joins them in singing a Labor

Day song.102

Perhaps the more influential link between labor and theater in Shanghai came through Xia

Yan’s essays and screenplays. In the 1930s, Xia Yan began to personally investigate the plight

of Shanghai’s women cotton mill workers, collaborating with CCP members who worked in the

factories to sneak in and observe conditions first hand. Out of these efforts came the most

comprehensive report written on Shanghai’s contract labor system, "Contract Labor" (1936),

which soon became a popular pamphlet.103 Unlike most of his contemporaries, Xia Yan sought

to experience first hand what he wrote about. His early plays and later screenplays reflected a

level of personal understanding of workers’ and soldiers’ lives not found in the "high-brow"

works of Cao Yu, Ouyang Yuqian and Tian Han. Under the increasing pressures of both GMD

and SMC censorship, however, Xia Yan did share with his colleagues the pressure to turn to

screenwriting in order to eat.

The Union of Theater and Film Workers

In a sense, Shanghai mixed Hollywood and New York into one dynamic city. Theater artists

easily crossed the line to perform in the more widely seen medium of film. Public interest,

reflected in fan and gossip magazines, surged with rumors of shadowy liaisons between various

film and theater stars. Theater directors often sought well-known film actors to play lead roles

in order to boost ticket sales, and playwrights such as Xia Yan, Hong Shen, Tian Han and

Ouyang Yuqian became the core of left-wing film writing. While accomplished traditional opera

artists could expect to make a living from their work, huaju artists had to find other ways, and

I02"Women Workers Hold Joint Labor Day Celebrations," May 3, 1931 (YWCA National Board Archives, New York); quoted in Honig, 222.

I03Honig, 94-95.

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the thriving Shanghai film industry offered them an opportunity to expand left-wing propaganda

activities significantly as well as find an outlet for their creative energies, as long as they could

sneak past GMD and SMC censors.

By 1929, the GMD had already instituted film censorship rules. On January 1, 1930 the

GMD Ministry of the Interior issued three new regulations in conjunction with the establishment

of the Shanghai Special District Film Censorship Committee:

No film may be shown which is in violation of the political principles of the Guomindang or which might affect the prestige of the nation.

The Committee must refuse license to any film, or any part of film which may be disadvantageous to morality or to the public peace.

License will be refused to all pictures which might conduce to superstitious practices, or might encourage feudalism.10*

This followed on August 1, 1930 with a "Secret Order from the Nationalist government.

Character MI, Number 11," signed by the heads of "the Executive, Legislative, Judicial.

Examination, and Censorial Yuan," ordering that arrested Communists "should be immediately

dealt with, according to military law."105 Three weeks later the central government

promulgated an "Emergency Law for the Punishment of Crimes against the State," which stated

that persons guilty of inciting others to disturb the peace "by means of pictures, books, or

speeches of subversive propaganda against the state" were to be punished with death or life

imprisonment.106

I0*Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 60. This censorship activity only affected a small part of Shanghai’s film audience. Of approximately 400 films made by more than 50 Shanghai film producers between January 1928 and December 1931, about 250 were profitable and politically tame kung fu or mystery films. See Leyda, 61-62. In addition, 90% of the films shown in China during this period were American-made. See Leyda, 64.

I05Wakeman, 134.

I06Ibid„ 135.

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Nevertheless, the following year Luo Mingyou set up the Lianhua (United China) Film

Company, which would soon became the center of leftist film production.107 In fact, Luo had

close ties to the GMD and managed to keep the Left League’s film group from dominating the

studio until 1936.108 Luo’s money-making efforts resulted in Lianhua becoming not only a

well-known maker of left-wing films but also one of the biggest right-wing film companies.

Under less than ideal conditions, the left-wing film writers worked furtively if not altogether

secretly within the cavernous arms of Lianhua, which claimed four separate studios.

The left-wing playwrights gave high priority to their film work, even going so far as

developing the "Present Program of Action" adopted by the Dramatists League in September of

1931:

Members [of the League] must produce scripts for the film makers; join in the film production of the various companies; accumulate capital for our own film productions; organize a society for film research and bring together progressive actors and technicians to form a base for China’s left-wing film movement; and we must criticize and analyze the present state of the Chinese cinema....109

Clearly, even from its inception, the Dramatists League intended to expand its propaganda

activity through film. Up until this time, the playwrights had to contend with the frustration of

small audiences, generally restricted to well-educated intellectuals. The film audience in Shanghai

was far more inclusive. Ticket prices were cheap enough that workers could sometimes afford

them. And films could be dubbed into most of the major dialects found in Shanghai. No longer

would the theater community’s main aim be restricted to transferring the allegiance of a narrow

elite. Now they would focus even more of their efforts on the proletariat. What still

107Chris Berry, "Appendix 2" in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 204. Chinese film company names are as often as not given in their Chinese forms in the film literature. For the current study, I adopt this convention.

108Wakeman, 238-239.

109Leyda, 74.

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characterized the group’s efforts, however, was an almost complete lack of experience with the

peasantry who made up 90 percent of China’s population outside Shanghai.

Increasing tension between the Chinese and Japanese eventually provided a subject area that

all levels of society could relate to equally well. Despite a month-long resistance from the

Cantonese Nineteenth Route Army, the Japanese January 1932 bombing attack on Shanghai’s

Zhabei District and their subsequent victory meant both crisis and opportunity for the Shanghai

film industry. Bombing and burning destroyed much of the film industry’s property, putting

more than thirty companies out of production. Before the attack, Shanghai boasted thirty-nine

cinemas; sixteen of those were destroyed in the battle, most of which showed only Chinese

films.110

Under difficult financial circumstances, the studio owners needed better scripts to bring in

more audience. For these they turned to some of Shanghai’s most popular playwrights. In

February 1933, Xia Yan’s Wild Torrent premiered, and Tian Han provided two scenarios at once:

Three Modem Girls and Survival of the Nation.11' Wild Torrent, based on leftist writer Ding

Ling’s short novel, tells a story that combines "evil Japanese" elements with "evil landlord"

elements:

Against the background of the disastrous flood in the Yangtse Valley after the Japanese imperialists had invaded and occupied China’s three north-eastern provinces in 1931, the film shows how landlords use "refugee relief" as a pretext to extort money from the peasants and join hands with the local authorities to oppress them. The peasants rise in revolt and take the landlords’ timber to repair the dikes.112

The left-wing film team had already been pushing the envelope for some time. Beginning

in May 1932, they began to write overtly leftist film supplements for local newspapers, and in

110Ibid„ 72.

inIbid., 75.

•^Ibid-

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the summer. Film A rt appeared, the first Chinese journal of film theory and criticism. The GMD

banned it after only four weekly issues.113

The left-wing film team relied heavily on symbolism and metaphor to evade the censors, but

the GMD monitored them tightly. In 1933 the Moon is Clear Company produced Bad

Neighbors , in which two young scholars are cheated by both a bad neighbor to the East (Japan)

and one to the West (the U.S.). The film lasted for three days at the Carlton Theater before the

censors caught on.114

Tian Han’s Three Modem Girls is an excellent example of the combination of popular story

line and social commentary that the left-wing film team mastered during this period. In the film,

a young man becomes a popular film star in Shanghai. He joins the army and is wounded.

Naturally, his former fiancee from his home town turns up as one of his nurses, but she makes

it clear she is no longer interested in their marriage. Upon recovery, he returns to the studio,

but his first Southern sweetheart (not to be confused with the fiancee) who was married and could

not previously become his lover now is widowed and cannot act with him in his new film, so he

agrees to make a film with his second Southern sweetheart. She kills herself. He finds his

original fiancee, who introduces him to Shanghai’s troubles and contributes to his political

development. She goes on strike and loses her job, but our film star-cum-proletarian is now at

her side.115

The film was a box office smash. As a reward Lianhua gave Tian Han control of Yi Hua

Film Studio, which was now set to become the bastion of left-wing film making in Shanghai.

113Ibid„ 76.

,wIbid„ 77-78.

115Ibid„ 85.

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But on the morning of November 12th, thirty members of the GMD’s Blueshirt Society116

methodically destroyed the studio. The Blueshirt Society also established a film company of its

own, the Xinhua Company.117 The fact that Yi Hua had been the smallest of the three main

left-wing studios (Mingxing was the third) was apparently a conscious choice on the part of the

Blueshirt Society, which hoped to send a clear signal to Lianhua and Mingxing. The following

day, all Shanghai cinemas received a letter specifying "that films made by Tian Han [and others

named] that promote class struggle, pit poor against rich—such reactionary films may not be

shown. If they are shown, there will be violence and we cannot assure you that what happened

to Yi Hua Company will not happen to you."118 The Blueshirt Society’s violent tactics "went

hand-in-hand with the work of the GMD censors, who rejected eighty-three film scripts and

closed fourteen film studios between 1934 and 1935.

The PSB also arrested or attempted to arrest the most visible members of the left-wing film

team. Xia Yan, hearing of his impending arrest, managed to escape to Japan for a short time in

September 1934.120 In February 1935, Tian Han was arrested and was not released until the

fall.121 The actual destruction of film studios and arrests of key writers no doubt had some

freezing effect on the production of new left-wing films. But we can at least speculate that the

same forces that were already driving many GMD supporters in North and South China to call

11#Similar in name to the Blueshirt drama troupes but very different in ideology. The GMD Blueshirts took their cue from Hitler’s Brownshirts. The particular group that attacked Yi Hua studio called itself "the Society for the Eradication of Communists in the Film Industry.”

ll7Wakeman, 238-239.

1I8Leyda, 88.

ll9Wakeman, 238-239.

“ Leyda, 99.

mFu Hu, 3.

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for a united front against the Japanese were operating within the GMD machinery in Shanghai.

The fact that Xia Yan was alerted to his impending arrest and that Tian Han was jailed for a

relatively short time and escaped with his life at all offers at least some evidence for the presence

of allies within the GMD ranks. As long as the left-wing film team maintained such alliances

they could continue to produce.

Still, the left wing’s job grew even harder because the GMD leadership at this time projected

a popularly acceptable, perhaps even sincere rationale for its actions. Having just signed a peace

treaty with the Japanese, they were particularly concerned about provoking another incident

before they could rebuild and reorganize militarily. They therefore banned "all films about war

with a revolutionary character."122

Again, this action was part of a much larger, widespread censorship effort that further

galvanized the entire left-wing intellectual community. In February 1934, the GMD banned 149

books and seventy-six magazines in Chinese-controlled Shanghai. During that year there were

2,709 Public Security Bureau cases forbidding reactionary works, and more than twenty-five

bookstores were threatened with closure for selling the works of Lu Xun and other left-wing

writers. In June 1934, a law made it compulsory for publishers "to submit all manuscripts for

books and magazines to a special committee for inspection before they could be printed."123

The large number of banned works and closed bookstores attest to the high productive energy of

the intellectual community at this time.

The GMD censorship effort and the stormtrooper tactics of the Blueshirt Society were by

no means isolated or unrelated. They were integral parts of Chiang’s nationwide effort to

synthesize the modern idea of "the super man" with the traditions of Confucianism: the New Life

^Leyda, 88-89.

123Wakeman, 239.

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Movement.

The New Life Movement

The essentially fascist philosophy that lay behind Chiang’s New Life Movement contrasted

sharply with the calls for socialist democracy that theater artists and film makers pushed in their

plays and movies. While the two sides shared the same philosophical roots, the left had carried

on the May Fourth spirit in its rejection of Chinese tradition. Thus, in the leftist mind, huaju

was superior to traditional opera, and film held the attraction of integrating technology with a

screenwriting form very close to huaju. The right, on the other hand, attempted to synthesize

modem ideas such as citizenship, public health and Social Darwinism with traditional Confucian

values.

At the turn of the century, the common thread for what would become the left and the right

in Shanghai had been the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. In his 1873 work The Study of

Sociology, Spencer came up with an attractive, albeit fallacious twist to Charles Darwin’s theories

on species adaptation. He argued that "survival of the fittest" dominated both social and

biological evolution. Through Chinese translations of Thomas Huxley’s reinterpretation of

Spencer, Social Darwinism made its way into the libraries of reform-minded scholars. Like many

Western Social Darwinists, the Chinese tended to believe that evolutionary processes that took

thousands of years in the biological realm could be compressed into a decade or two in the social

realm. By 1911, Social Darwinism had been largely rejected as a social theory by Sun Yatsen

and other leading revolutionaries, who perceived it as "a barbaric form of learning."111 But

the idea of short-term physical, mental and social adaptability continued to attract such diverse

thinkers as Mao Zedong, who emphasized strengthening China through strengthening the body,

and Chiang, who thought more in terms of synthesizing the respective Chinese and Western

l24Spence, "Modem China," 302.

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concepts of the "super man." More readily available translations of George Bernard Shaw's work

after the 1911 Revolution brought debates about Social Darwinism and Supermen to the stage for

consumption by intellectual elites, and soon idea became fashionable among Chinese

industrialists.

By the early 1930s, Chiang had injected Social Darwinism into some of his own theories of

social change. He wrote that

....only those who readapt themselves to new conditions, day by day can live properly. When the life of a people is going through this process of readaptation, it has to remedy its own defects, and get rid of those elements which become useless. Then we call it new life.125

Chiang by this time had realized that force and intimidation alone could not control the workers

discontent forever. To legitimize his claims that GMD economic and social programs would

outshine those of the Communists, Chiang began to develop a new ideology that combined the

republican writings of Sun Yatsen with many of the reform methods of Western missionaries, and

perhaps most importantly to the Movement’s ultimate failure, with the traditional Confucianist

virtues of politeness, righteousness, integrity and self-respect with which Chiang hoped to create

"a new national consciousness and mass psychology."126

The New Life Movement never achieved a sufficiently serious status among the young

intelligentsia to rival the more aggressive and attractive CCP propaganda efforts. Though it did

apparently provide some sense of solidarity for a population beleaguered by Japanese militarism,

the New Life Movement had some fundamental drawbacks. Among them was an emphasis on

"clean” habits, including the elimination of such "antisocial or undisciplined acts as spitting.

“ Ibid., 415.

“ Ibid., 414.

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urinating, or smoking in public, casual sexual liaisons, and provocative clothing."127 In other

words, a generation of Chinese youth indoctrinated in the decadent pleasures of the West were

now being asked to tidy up their act. Few complied, even after being subjected to extensive

publicity efforts in the school system, the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. These efforts included

many of the same popular culture elements that the CCP used: lectures, pictures, pamphlets,

plays and movies. But Chiang failed to engage the intelligentsia sufficiently to create a right-

wing "Golden Age" in film and theater. While the New Life Movement dictated the length of

women’s hem lines,128 it ignored the fundamental economic inequities that similar CCP

programs on hygiene, morals and improved social habits emphasized. The YWCA play programs

addressed the same issues but did so in the context of empowering laborers to improve their

working conditions. The GMD shied away from any message that went beyond vague moral

platitudes.

Because of the weakness of right-wing propagandists in spreading the New Life message.

Chiang continued to support the more militant efforts of groups such as the Blueshirt Society,

started by early graduates of the Whampoa military academy, which Chiang had previously

headed. The Blueshirt Society adopted the more ascetic New Life values, while at the same time

advocating a Mussolini-influenced fascism and with Chiang’s tacit approval even pushed the

Generalissimo as someone who could and should rule China in the manner of Mussolini. By

1935, the Blueshirt Society had become very much the equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirts. Dai

Li, a graduate of Whampoa who became head of the GMD’s clandestine internal security

^Ibid., 415.

128Hem lines were required to fall a minimum of four inches below the knee, the slit in the traditional Chinese dress could rise only three inches above the knee, and a blouse worn with trousers had to fall three inches below the buttock line. See Spence, "Modem China," 416.

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network, was believed responsible for numerous political assassinations of opposition

leaders.129

For the theater and film community, the presence of the Blueshirts on the one hand

intimidated theater owners and studio heads and on the other steeled the resolve of writers.

directors and performers to continue producing anti-GMD and anti-Japanese works. As film

scholar Jay Leyda has written of this period,

Nineteen thirty-four was the last year of an open struggle between left and right in Shanghai's film studios, with the right using the weapons of authority and annihilation and the left defending its ideology and life with weapons of ingenuity and persistence.130

Leyda goes on to describe the results of this rivalry at Ming Xing Studio. The right-wingers

increased their production of "soft" stories, such as The Heart o f Beauty, Madame Mo and Enemy

o f Women and "even resubmitted scripts that the leftists had rejected." At the same time.

immediately after the Yi Hua Studio destruction, Xia Yan wrote his own "soft" script. The

Common Enemy. This is ostensibly the story of an all-suffering wife, a philandering husband and

a deceitful courtesan, but it actually contained subtle references to class solidarity and the anti-

Japanese struggle.131

The right responded. Wan Pilin, a Ming Xing screenwriter who also happened to be a

member of the GMD Central Propaganda Bureau, explained his own sense of obligation to write

rightist screenplays by commenting that "Some people think that Chinese villages are full of high

ideals and that peasants’ heads are stuffed with progressive notions-that’s all a dream....the left-

wing films that show village life aren’t true-they’re even laughable."132

“'’Spence, "Modern China," 417.

l30Leyda, 90-91.

l31Ibid.

l32Ibid. Originally appeared in Contemporary Cinema, November 1934.

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What Wan may not have known when he made this comment is that theater workers who

had fled to North China were already taking the preliminary steps to transfer those progressive

notions to the peasantry.

Workers and Peasants Theater in CCP Areas: Earlv Stages

The Shanghai theater community, up until 1934, had all but ignored the indigenous opera,

dance and storytelling forms of the country’s many ethnic minorities. The young intellectual

playwrights, even those who had experienced some degree of poverty in their own lives, lived

within an informal caste system that had survived thousands of years. When the May Fourth era

intellectuals rejected folk forms, they also marginalized an audience made up of the very people

they would most need to propagandize in order to win the revolution. But a combination of

academic work by scholars who operated outside the Shanghai cliques and the increasing

influence of Mao Zedong slowly began to shift attention to indigenous forms of drama, which

the Shanghai playwrights would themselves later adopt.

While CCP politics, under the direction of the Comintern in Moscow, became increasingly

entangled in intra-Party political squabbling, Mao Zedong and Zhu De formed their own power

base at the Hunan-Kiangsi border, where Mao had for some time been organizing peasants,

redistributing land to both rich and poor, creating Soviets and, with Zhu in command of the

army, carrying on a harassing guerilla warfare campaign against Chiang’s troops. Mao and Zhu

had in effect set up a separate party structure, though they continued to pay lip service to CCP

admonitions and orders. When Mao felt he had solidified support, he invited the Politburo

members to the First All-China Congress of the Soviets in Ruijin, Kiangsi Province, on

November 7, 1931. At this meeting, Mao secured a substantial victory by gaining widespread

party support for his activities. Still, the twenty-eight CCP Bolsheviks attending the conference

maintained their hold on the Politburo. Differences on land reform and guerilla activities versus

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traditional warfare drove a permanent wedge between the two groups.

Mao and his colleagues in the CCP could agree, however, on certain fine points in the

waging of psychological warfare. Even before the CCP and GMD had split, propaganda

techniques were an important part of a GMD officer’s training. Under the influence of Soviet

advisors in Moscow and in China, propaganda became a required area of study at the GMD’s

Whampoa Academy near Guanzhou.133 David Holm has succinctly described the CCP’s

underlying beliefs in traditional forms as propaganda tools:

The CCP was not just to agitate for revolutionary uprising, but also to make wider contact with the masses in the context of their everyday lives. In this effort, all pre-existing values and forms of China’s "old culture" as they existed in the minds and collective experience of Chinese people were or at least could be linked to the new political ideals and manipulated for the furtherance of revolutionary aims. The use of "old forms" of literature and art, then, was simply a particular manifestation of a much more general strategy in CCP political work.13*

By the early 1930s, folk artist drama troupes were attached to units of the Red Army. When

the Communists briefly held Changsha in July 1930, 400 young students joined up, many of

whom later took on an important role in expanding Shanghai huaju techniques in the Red Army.

At the same time, Li Bazhao had individually made her way from the Soviet Union, where she

had studied Soviet dance and drama. She would later hold important positions in the CCP

cultural apparatus in Yenan and North China base areas.135

In early 1932, a Workers’ and Peasants’ Drama Troupe began operating, and in early 1933.

the Gorky School of Drama and a subsidiary Blueshirt Drama Troupe were set up to train drama

cadres and actors. Li Bazhao headed both. Upon graduation, the school deployed students to the

local level and in the ranks to initiate drama activities, organize troupes, and establish new

133Holm, 18.

13Tbid., 20.

I35Ibid„ 22-23.

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clubhouses. "They formed the backbone elements in a large number of professional and amateur

drama troupes."136

Zhao Pinsan, a participant in the movement, described a living newspaper ( huabao)

performed by the Blueshirt Troupe under Li’s direction:

Each person wore a blue shirt, and a triangular bib which was red on the inside and white on the outside. When coming on stage, no other items of costume were necessary: if the red was on the outside, the actor represented a revolutionary character, while the white represented a reactionary character. The content of performances was simple and clear, and people could also represent machines, or a horse and cart, or other such objects, and by forming human chains in various ways with various kinds of movement could portray all sorts of things symbolically.137

The significance of these living newspapers cannot be overemphasized. Here was a new

form of theater that was widely seen by a generally illiterate or barely literate population of

soldiers and peasants. By telling a group of peasants in Kiangsi about events in Beijing or in

Shanghai, the CCP cultural leaders hoped to cultivate a sense of the peasants’ place in the larger

China and hence a sense of nationalism. The Blueshirt troupes were often the only source of

information about the outside world. They soon began to believe that peasants would respond

even better to their efforts if they incorporated elements of more localized folk drama into

productions.

The arrival of Qu Qiubai, despite a brief purge of Mao and his supporters, speeded the

process of returning to old forms. In January 1934, Mao Zedong, struggling to prevent the

complete cut off of the Red Army by 700,000 GMD troops, had lost substantial control of the

136Ibid„ 24.

I37Zhao Pinsan, "Remembrances of Spoken Drama Work in the Central Revolutionary Base Area," (Guanyu zhongyang geming genju de huaju gongzuo de huiyi) in Tian Han, et al., 188; quoted in Holm, 25. Holm’s translation. In the U.S. during this same period and through the 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project under Hallie Flanagan performed living newspapers as part of FDR’s New Deal. Parallel to the Chinese, many of the American techniques originated in Russian socialist theater.

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Communist movement at the Second All-China Soviet Congress. The twenty-eight Bolsheviks

allowed Mao to retain the chairmanship of the Central Executive Committee, but the Bolsheviks

intended to reduce Mao to a figurehead.138 In February 1934, Qu Qiubai arrived in Ruijin to

assume the post of Minister of Education in the Soviet People’s Government and simultaneously

to become Director of the Art Bureau, both with the perhaps grudging approval of the

Bolsheviks. He immediately pronounced that huaju must be reformed to make it more accessible

to people and that new lyrics could be set to old folk melodies. Meanwhile, by July 1934, Po

Ku in Ruijin and Wang Ming in Moscow obtained Comintern permission to place Mao on

probation and bar him from party meetings. Mao was placed under house arrest until the Long

March began in October.139

But theater activity was to take a momentary back seat to the problem of the CCP’s very

survival. Ignoring Mao’s proven guerilla strategy, the Revolutionary Military Council under Li

De had ordered the Red Army to break through the GMD Fifth Campaign’s encirclement. On

October 15, 1934, the Long March began with 85,000 soldiers and 15,000 government and party

officials. Qu Qiubai and other "Maoists" unacceptable to the twenty-eight Bolsheviks were left

behind to defend the base.140 On a return trip from Yenan to Shanghai in June of 1935, GMD

troops arrested Qu and executed him by firing squad.141 The Gorky School of Drama had

already disbanded in August 1934 in the heat of Chiang’s campaign. It’s more than 1.000

students were eventually to organize into 60 drama squads.143

I38Hsu, 558-559.

139Ibid., 559.

,40Ibid.

141Spence, "Heavenly Peace," 293.

I43Holm, 24-25.

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By the time the remnants of the Red Army reached Yenan in December 1936, it had been

reduced to 8,000 men. Po Ku and Li De could not maintain power in the face of such a

devastating loss, and, with Zhou Enlai’s and Zhu De’s help, Mao Zedong became the most

powerful man in the CCP. As such, he would begin to exercise his theories of utilizing existing

folk forms in art and literature to win the hearts and minds of the masses. Thus, the left-wing

theater artists who joined Mao in the north began to diverge in their emphasis from the left­

wingers in Shanghai, though each group continued to communicate with and influence the other.

The overall left-wing activity in Shanghai had become almost completely isolated from the

CCP, but the theater artists who made up the Dramatists League continued to seep into Yenan

in the following years, and the plays they wrote there and in other safe havens in China continued

to make their way back to Shanghai. While the Shanghai left still concentrated its major efforts

on the proletariat, it also began to influence the wider folk culture movement in the Communist

base areas. But other events were to usher in the true Golden Age of both theater and film:

Increasing Japanese aggression and the GMD-CCP United Front against it.

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THE ART OF PROPAGANDA: THE UNITED FRONT, 1936-1941

The previous chapters have primarily focused on leftist conflicts with the GMD and SMC.

Chapter 4 will concentrate on the argument that Japan’s territorial expansion into China and

eventual occupation of Chinese Shanghai in particular drove the left-wing artistic community into

the "good versus evil" world of resistance theater that would later facilitate propaganda activities

with peasants and workers in North China and eventually give the CCP an edge in its propaganda

war against the GMD.

By December of 1936, Japanese expansionism in the north had driven the CCP leadership

in Yenan and several GMD generals in the north and south into a series of secret consultations.

In November of the previous year, the Japanese had reseated the last Qing Dynasty emperor. Pu

Yi, as emperor of Manchukuo143 and placed eastern Hebei Province under an "East Hebei

Anti-Communist and Self-Government Council that gave them decisive control of the area."144

While the CCP called for a united CCP-GMD front, the GMD generals, led by Young Marshall

Zhang Xueliang, attempted to persuade Chiang to make fighting the Japanese his priority. On

December 12, 1936, in the famous "Xian Incident," the Young Marshall arrested Chiang during

u3Japan had occupied Manchuria following the 1931 Mukden Incident. In 1932. it established Manchukuo, placing the Manchu Pu Yi on the throne in an attempt to support its argument that Manchuria had been returned to its native people. The following year the League of Nations accepted the Lytton Report, which found Japan had acted in violation of international law. Subsequently, Japan withdrew from the League, further isolating itself and moving one step closer to war with the Western powers.

““Spence, "Modern China," 420.

54

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a visit to the GMD’s Xian headquarters. After two weeks of negotiation and with the CCP’s

Zhou Enlai mediating, Chiang finally agreed to include the Communists in a new United Front

effort against the Japanese.115

In theater and literature, the United Front period was marked by a unification of the

seriously divided left-wing intellectual community. The League of Left-Wing Writers disbanded

in the Spring of 1936,116 and, despite increasing GMD pressure to minimize their attacks, the

left wing turned its attention almost exclusively to anti-Japanese efforts. After the beginning of

the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, ensconced in the relative safety of the foreign concessions, these

artists, writers, directors and editors soon found that the foreign-dominated Shanghai Municipal

Council (SMC) was just as afraid of the Japanese as the GMD, and the SMC censored left-wing

activities accordingly.

Under attack from all sides, Xia Yan, Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian and other dramatists used

symbolism, double meanings, and even alternate scripts to evade censorship.117 Consequently,

their creativity stretched to its limits, the leftists produced some of their finest work. This was

the period during which Cao Yu, often characterized as China’s greatest playwright, produced

his best work.

The heavy-handed, propagandists drama that had characterized the years 1927-1935 would

in the following six years be replaced by works much richer in character, plot development and

structure and much subtler in delivery of the pro-left, anti-Japanese message. In particular, Cao

I15As part of the deal Young Marshall Zhang returned with Chiang to the Nationalist government capitol in Nanjing and served the next 54 years in GMD captivity in China and Taiwan.

llsSpence, "Heavenly Peace," 295.

117Fu Poshek, 91.

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Yu’s Thunderstorm (1936), Xia Yan’s Under Shanghai’s Eves (1937), and Chen Paichen’s Men

and Women in Wild Times rivaled in quality much of the left-wing work coming out of the United

States and Europe during the same period. While anti-GMD barbs continued to find their way

into works of this period, the GMD-CCP United Front focused most writers’ energy on anti-

Japanese messages. At the same time, before the Japanese completely overran the Chinese sector

of Shanghai in 1937, the GMD and SMC continued to do everything in their power to hold the

Japanese at bay by banning anti-Japanese references in plays and screenplays. After 1937. the

"Solitary Island" of the foreign-held concessions became a nest for left-wing intellectuals, but the

SMC worked even more vigorously to contain the anti-Japanese propaganda.

The Galvanization of Shanghai’s Left-Wing Theater Workers

When the CCP Central Committee ordered the dissolution of the Left League in the spring

of 1936, it was already a seriously divided organization. In the atmosphere of United Front

politics that the CCP was trying to push, the factional squabbling inside the Left League between

men such as Zhao Yang, who advocated "National Salvation" literature, and Lu Xun, who

generally supported a United Front policy but feared that it would smother the revolutionary

spirit, made it increasingly difficult for the Party to offer its support.148 Lu Xun, hurt that he

was not consulted about the future of the organization, was said to be ambivalent about its

disintegration.149 Dying of tuberculosis, he surely must have hoped to see a united China in

his lifetime but probably never believed it would happen. He died on October 19, 1936.

While the Dramatists League continued, its efforts in theater and film shifted largely toward

anti-Japanese messages. However, under the circumstances of an increasingly heavy Japanese

148Spence,"Heavenly Peace," 295.

149Wang, 182.

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presence in Shanghai’s daily municipal affairs, both the GMD censors in the Chinese city and the

SMC censors in the International Settlements cracked down with even greater vigor. A survey

of the Shanghai theater scene in August of 1936 by Yao Xinnong in T’ien Hsia Monthly. an

English-language humanities journal, provides an example of the kind of pressure the theater

community faced. Yao reported a trend toward plays about national defense with titles such as

Autumn Sun, A Home in the Northeast and "Smuggling," bespeaking the fact that "the Chinese

dramatists have awakened to the value of the stage as a medium for propaganda..."150 At the

same time, the Shanghai audience had expanded from students and intellectuals to middle-class

"salary men". Yao estimated that one-third of the Shanghai Travelling Dramatic Group’s (the

Travellers) revenues in a visit to Shanghai during the previous April and May came from the

middle class, who also began to participate more regularly in production. The Art Society

established the Shanghai Ant, a theater group "formed by employees of banks, business firms.

municipal and government offices, postal, customs, and railway administrations, etc." 151 Yao

also describes worker theaters which may have been YWCA-sponsored or at least performed in

very similar fashion to the YWCA drama groups:

In Shanghai, so far as we know, there are at least six workers’ dramatic clubs, formed largely by wage-earners in cotton mills, tobacco and textile factories, etc. Most of these workers attend night schools, where they pick up drama as a sideline study. Only one of the six workers’ dramatic clubs, it is interesting to notice, is composed wholly of men; the other five are all formed by women. Performances are generally given in the evenings, lasting from two to three hours on an impoverished stage, before an audience which averages from four to five hundred persons. They are invariably produced on a small scale, since they are intended only for the performers’ fellow-workers, and their family folk; and, after all. the workers cannot afford to go beyond their means.

At the beginning of their dramatic movement, the worker-players were trained and directed by intellectuals, usually their night school teachers. At present, though most plays are still staged under the direction of their scholar-guides, competent directors have risen from their

150Yao Xinnong,"Drama Chronicle," T ’ien Hsia 3 (August 1936): 46-47.

1MIbid., 47.

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own ranks. As a rule, after each performance they hold a conference, at which they discuss freely the merits and shortcomings of the play and players, and suggest themes for new plays to be written.152

Yao goes on to comment that these workers had little interest in Western plays or in "high brow

Chinese plays." Their work included titles such as "Homeless Mothers and Daughters" and "A

Worker’s Home."153

By 1936, then, two distinct lines of theater had developed. On one track, the intellectual

left continued to produce plays primarily geared to shift the allegiance of Shanghai’s educated and

wealthy elites. On the second track, the workers who made up the elusive "proletariat" spoke

to each other through plays on the everyday topics that concerned them, including labor rights,

hygiene and literacy. But it was on the first group’s efforts in both film and theater that the PSB

and the SMP seemed to have focused their main censorship efforts.

In April of 1936, the Travellers played 19 days at the Carlton Theater. The Travellers had

premiered Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm the previous year and had already been banned three times

in Peiping because of the play’s central focus on an incestuous love affair. They were closely

watched by the Shanghai authorities, but seemed to have escaped a shutdown.15* On June 21,

the SMC forced the Experimental Little Theater to halt its production of three plays—"Corner of

a Metropolis," "Autumn Sun" and "Smuggling"-only ten minutes into the performance of the

first play.155 Two days later, when the Shanghai Ant was about to start its own evening of one-

acts-"SmuggIing,” "Poison" and "Bugle"-the management apologetically informed them that

152Ibid„ 46-47.

153Ibid., 47.

I5*Ibid., 48.

155"Weekly Experimental Little Theatre Yesterday Morning Forced to Stop Performance," Shen Bao, 22 June 1936, 11. See also Yao, 50.

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they would have to immediately vacate the premises by order of the SMC.136 The common

thread in these two cases of censorship was "Smuggling," a play about an unspecified group of

smugglers in northeast China who wreaked havoc on the local community. The SMC correctly

interpreted these smugglers to be Japanese imperialists. As it generally did, the SMC attempted

to cut off anti-Japanese propaganda before the Japanese themselves had a chance to detea it.

Rather than put a brake on the blossoming huaju movement in Shanghai, the bannings

seemed to compel Shanghai theater artists to create even more theaters. In May, the Union of

Dramatic Groups formed; other new groups included the Lion’s Roar, the Fourth Decade and the

Thousand Generation. And a new theater building, the Twentieth Century, planned to house a

new professional drama group.157

The film industry suffered a reverse fate: almost complete destruaion at the hands of the

GMD and the SMC. By the end of 1935, the GMD had already shut down ten studios, leaving

only two operational. Diantong’s closing the following year marked the end of Shanghai's short­

lived Golden Age of cinema, a period during which home-grown films had substantially replaced

superficial criticism of the Nationalists with "deeper treatments, more seriously developed

charaaers, new methods and forms, all evolved through the necessity to evade censorship and

the total repression that was always threatened, but never quite achieved, by the

Guomindang. "158

The left-wing intellectual group meanwhile continued to produce translations of well-known

I56"Ant’s Three Public Performances Banned Yesterday," Shen Bao, 24 June 1936, 10. See also Yao, 50.

157Yao,"Drama Chronicle," 51.

l58Leyda, 92.

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Western plays, including productions of A Doll’s House,™ Gogol’s The Inspector General.

and an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment,™ but much of the novelty of these

plays had already worn thin for Chinese audiences. Perhaps the combination of audiences hungry

for huaju with which they could identify and the appearance of a playwright who not only

understood the intelligentsia’s attraction to things Western but also its imprisonment in things

Chinese resulted in the first real "hit" of Chinese spoken drama: Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm. Partly

because of its highly controversial subject matter-the effects of an unwitting incestuous

relationship on two families—and partly because of its comparatively high level of writing, the

play generated huge audiences. More than any other play of the pre-Liberation era. it came to

symbolize "high brow” theater at its best.

Cao Yu was born Wan Jiabao in 1910 to a well-to-do family in Tianjin. Very much a child

of the "third generation" May Fourthers, Cao received the best education and huaju training of

the time. As a member of the prestigious Nankai Middle School’s dramatic club from 1926-

1930, Cao performed in Ibsen’s An Enemy o f the People amongst other plays and helped translate

Galsworthy’s Strife. In 1935 he received his B.A. in English from National Qinghua University

in Peking.161 It was in his final year at Qinghua that Cao Yu wrote Thunderstorm, his first

play.

The story of a rich mine owner’s family members and their secretive, intimate relationships

ls*The previous year Jiang Qing (later Mao’s wife), who had changed her name again to Lan Ping, played Nora in a production of A D oll’s House at the Golden City Theatre. The play was a huge hit, running for the unheard of period of two months, and one critic wrote that "1935 was the Year of Nora." In her later incarnation during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing persecuted many of the Shanghai actors and drama critics who disapproved of her performance. See Terrill, 64-69.

I60Yao,"Drama Chronicle," 45.

161 John Y.H. Hu, 21.

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with a servant family. Thunderstorm in many ways reminds us of a cross between Chekhov's

Uncle Vanya and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night in its treatment of the decay of the

gentry class combined with biting, tragic conflicts within the family. In Thunderstorm, however.

the conflict is played out in a peculiarly un-Chinese plot element: through an unintentional

incestuous relationship that ultimately leads to destruction.1®2 Here, Cao Yu also borrows from

the Greeks. Like Oedipus and his family, the members of the Chou and Lu families are the

victims of isolated acts of passion perpetrated in the past that have come back to haunt them. If

we are searching in Cao Yu for shades of Marxism or "worker’s" theater, we find that the

playwright uses a much broader palette here that rejects simple categorization. As Cao Yu

himself wrote of his first play,

I was not clearly aware that I wanted to rectify, satirize, or attack anything. Near the end of the writing however, there seemed to be an emotional surge pushing me forward, and I was releasing and transforming my suppressed anger into bitter denunciation of the Chinese family and society. But in the beginning, when I began to form a vague image of Thunderstorm, what interested me was a couple of episodes, a few characters, as well as a

l62The plot of Thunderstorm in brief: 19-year-old Lu Shifeng and her step-father. Lu Kuai, are employed as servants in the House of Chou. Lu Shiping is the wife of Lu Kuai and the mother of Shi Feng. She has never visited the Chou home since her family began working there. The Chou family consists of the Master, Chou Puyuan; Chou Ping, his son by his first "wife": and Chou Chung, his son by his much younger second wife, Chou Fanyi. Chou Ping and Chou Fanyi, close in age, have had an affair. But Chou Ping regrets it, and, at the same time has fallen in love with Shifeng, the servant girl. Chou Fanyi intends to fire Shifeng and Lu Kuai and asks Lu Shiping to come to the Chou home so she can discuss the ostensible reasons: Younger son Chou Chung wants to marry Shi Feng. When Lu arrives at the home, she remembers she has seen this furniture many years before; then suddenly she realizes that old Master Chou is the same Chou who had forsaken her after she had bourn two sons, the second of whom died soon after birth. She reveals herself to Master Chou, who believed she had committed suicide thirty years earlier. Lu Shiping vows to leave, never to allow her family to return to this house. Unfortunately, Lu Shifeng and her half-brother. Chou Ping, have been lovers for many months and are ready to run off and get married. Despite Lu Shiping’s best efforts to hide the truth from her children, the secret is unwittingly revealed, buckets of blood flow, and huaju finally comes of age. In the best tradition of Sophocles, Lu Shiping is the real tragic figure in this play: a woman for whom a flawed choice of lover many years before has come full circle to haunt her.

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complex and aboriginal sentiment.1®

Until its final scene attempts to break Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar record for most deaths

in the last ten minutes of a tragedy, Thunderstorm realistically portrays class conflict in Chinese

society as it is played out through the passions of its characters. Rather than creating an

intellectual exercise in dogma, Cao Yu cuts to the bone of Chinese hypocrisy. In this respect,

his talent might have rivaled Lu Xun’s had he shadowed and highlighted it with just a tinge of

humor. But his plays remain largely humorless.

Upon graduation, Cao Yu taught at Tianjin Normal College for Women, then was appointed

principal of the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Nanjing. He wrote Sunrise (Rechu) in

1935 and The Wilderness (Yuanye) in 1936, completing a loose trilogy. In 1937, while teaching

at National Qinghua University, war broke out with Japan, and the National Academy of

Dramatic Arts moved to Chongqing. During this period, Cao finished Metamorphosis (Tuibian)

(1940), Peking Man (Beijing ren) (1940), and The Bridge (Qiao) (1945), and completed two

adaptations: Family (Jia) (1941), from Ba Jin’s novel, and Just Thinking (Zhengzai xiang)

(1940), based on The Red Velvet Goat by Mexican playwright Josephina Niggli. He also

translated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.™

During the civil war and occupation period, Cao somewhat mysteriously managed to stay

aloof from the CCP left-wing literary movement, though his own statements in post-Liberation

interviews seem to indicate that he always sympathized with the left.1® More objective critics

l®John Y.H. Hu, 21.

164Ibid., 22-23.

lteUwe Krauter, "In the Limelight Again: Introducing China’s Leading Dramatist Cao Yu," Chinese Literature, no. 11 (November 1980): 39. In this interview, Cao Yu told Krauter,"I opposed the Kuomintang government in Nanjing...They were arresting anyone who was progressive. Some thought I was a Party member."

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have accused him of being little more than a pseudo-leftist literatus.166 But an accurate critical

assessment is not really necessary to appreciate the fear Cao Yu’s work instilled in the censors:

His plays were popular, the most popular huaju China has known before or since, and the GMD

saw his work as unquestionably left-leaning. Whatsmore, Cao Yu’s characters are prisoners to

a traditional value system that ends up destroying them for their sins. The irony of the GMD's

reaction to the play lies in the unambiguous message that Cao Yu delivers: never does he deny

the gravity of the incestuous crime the characters have committed, however unwittingly. One

could argue that, even as his more sympathetic characters cry out with leftist, pro-labor

sentiments, Cao Yu was himself pushing a pro-New Life Movement message that reaffirmed

traditional values. After all, those who sinned in Thunderstorm paid in blood.

But the thugs who enforced censorship regulations for the GMD were no literati. According

to Tao Jin, who played Zhou Ping in the 1935 Beijing premier of Thunderstorm,

The Guomindang said our play was harmful, that a story about a son in love with his stepmother couldn’t have a good influence and that a young master in love with his maidservant was equally bad. The play was considered pernicious. After a week the police came and arrested the eight main actors and actresses, including myself. We were handcuffed, shackled and tortured. They made us kneel and beat us. They wanted us to admit we were Communists.167

166C.T. Hsia, A History of Modem Chinese fiction, 1917-1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 318; quoted in Christopher C. Rand, "Introduction" in Ts’ao Yu, The Wilderness, translated by Rand and Joseph S.M. Lau (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1980), xxxiii-iv. Hsia comments that Cao’s plays,"....capitalize on the stock bourgeois responses to certain decadent and corrupt aspects of Chinese society and vaunt a superficial leftist point of view, of which only the most rigorous Marxist critic could disapprove. A serious artist in his own conceit, Ts’ao Yu complained in his postscript to Sunrise that, much as he was attracted to Chekhov, in the absence of a more mature audience he could not experiment in the Chekhovian manner. His plays supply contrary evidence, however: that bad taste is inherent in his manifest inability to represent life in mature and unpretentious terms. Ts’ao Yu solemnly invokes fate, heredity, jungle law, and the class struggle to illuminate and ennoble the melodramatic action of his plays, but syncretism only underscores his lack of a personal tragic vision."

167Krauter, 34.

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Compare Tao Jin’s description of the GMD’s interpretation of Thunderstorm with Qing Dynasty

censor Hu Ding’s criticism of The Water Margin because of its "praise and support of rebels."

Assuming the translation is reasonably accurate, Tao Jin’s use of terms such as "couldn’t have

a good influence" and "pernicious" indicate in the GMD rule a continuation of the ruler-subject

relationship. No shift had occurred to a leader-citizen relationship. Just as the Qing and all other

dynasties before them had clearly understood their place in the Confucian hierarchy, so did

Chiang Kaishek and the GMD. The "masses" needed to be protected from manipulation by

purveyors of decadence. It is no accident that the censorship of Thunderstorm in Beijing and.

later, in Shanghai occurred at the peak of Chiang’s New Life Movement, an attempt to graft

long-held traditional beliefs of what it meant to be Chinese onto a confused, relativistic world.

If Thunderstorm creates an almost operatic vision of a decaying gentry, Xia Yan’s Under

Shanghai Eaves paints the much more intimate and believable picture of the city’s petit-

bourgeoisie and their daily trials. The story revolves around the relationships between three

families, a half-crazed old man and an prostitute who share a small, two-story dwelling. The

pivotal event in the play is the return of Kuang Fu, an ex-political prisoner, after a ten year

absence. Kuang’s best friend, Lin Chicheng and Kuang’s wife, Yang Caiyu, had long ago given

up on him and some years before began to live together as husband and wife. The three care for

each other deeply and are forced to make a difficult choice.

For perhaps the first time, audiences watched characters with whom they could genuinely

identify. Lin is a factory foreman who abhors his own willingness to kowtow to his bosses.

Another tenant, Huang Jiamei, is a university graduate who cannot find a job. And Huang’s

father is a peasant fanner who has come to Shanghai for the first time to see his new baby

grandson. Each of the dozen or so characters seem to represent someone that the typical urban

Shanghainese would meet almost daily in his or her own neighborhood. More than any other

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Chinese playwright, Xia Yan resembles his American contemporary, Clifford Odets. Like Odets,

he usually manages to humanize the occasional rifts of leftist propaganda that flow from the

mouths of his characters. Li, the drunken old man, is an example. When he is drinking, Li

sings traditional opera songs: "The sun is sinking, the moon is rising, it is twilight....When I

gaze on the lovely child, I can hold back no longer, the tears fall like pearls from my eyes."16*

But as Kuang-making a reference to the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932-explains to his old

friend Caiyu, "He [Li] had an only son, who joined the army during the January 28 Campaign

against the Japanese and was killed....He insists that his son is alive, and is a general."169

Combined with the traditional opera verse, such a quiet, powerful reference surely must have

brought lumps to the throats of audience members, as well as raised the blood pressure of GMD

censors.

Again like Odets, Xia Yan’s characters can decry poor labor conditions while balancing on

the thin line between art and propaganda. The cynical, even crotchety Lin declares early in the

play,"They don’t care whether you live or die; they can always get another workhorse!"170 But

with few exceptions, Xia Yan’s workers are complex people. When Lin believes that his "wife."

Yang Tsaiyu will reunite with Huang, he quits his job in what is essentially an act of economic

suicide:

LIN: Plant manager isn’t a job for a human being at all. The ones over you treat you like an ox, and to the ones under you you’re a dog. From morning to night, nobody, top or bottom, will give you the time of day. But now I don’t have to take the rap for anybody: I don’t have to be treated like a dog by anybody....

CAIYU: Don’t get too excited now, Chicheng—

168Hsia Yen, Under Shanghai Eaves, trans. George Hayden in Gunn, "Chinese Drama," 109.

l69Ibid.

170Ibid., 87.

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LIN: But first of all, you’ve got to be happy for me, that I got out of that kind of life!

CAIYU: Then from now on you—

LIN: From now on. Hm.m

Five years earlier, before the United Front, Lin’s act might have been one of heroism. Now.

in the more ambiguous world of 1937, where the right wing was both friend and enemy. Lin’s

words are underscored with a shadow of sadness.

But unlike their predecessors in the Qing and Ming Dynasties, playwrights such as Cao Yu

and Xia Yan used not only content to rebel but form as well. In The Wilderness, Cao Yu

borrows heavily from O’Neill’s more expressionist works. The mixture of symbolism and

realism found in Cao Yu’s work is meant to shock the audience into viewing its own world

through modern eyes and to therefore reject Chiang Kaishek’s paternalist brand of fascism. In

other words, the response of modern playwrights to archaic paternalism was a distinctly modern

response that bred even more intense paternalism. No doubt Chiang really did see an erosion of

values in all leftist ideologies, and though he paid considerable lip-service to proclaiming his own

Christianity, his full embrace of the wonders of modem science and his acceptance of a market

economy, he must at times have seen the CCP as the Qing saw the Taipings: dangerously

charismatic crackpots who had adopted a single thread of Western thought and blown it

horrifyingly out of proportion.

Escape to the Solitary Island

The power that the left-wing playwrights of this period were able to bring to their work

added greatly to the creation of a new political-cultural mythology among both urban elites and

workers. In the amalgamated, confused image of Chinese society that was Shanghai, average

171Ibid.

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Chinese sought recognizable images of themselves on the stage, in literature and even in the

advertisements found in the daily newspaper. In part, the propaganda wars, whether they were

anti-Japanese, anti-CCP or anti-KMT, fought to identify the images that the people most wanted

to see, whether true or not.

As Chalmers Johnson has argued.

Myth draws from doctrines that are independently respected in society and reinterprets such doctrines so that they will tend to mobilize popular imagination in support of a national govemment-a government that in all probability is already supported on the basis of interest.172

In other words, propaganda from all sides sought to win over people searching for both an

individual and a national identity. For Shanghai’s left, the irony came in that the more tightly

they were painted into a corner in terms of what, when and where they could perform, the more

they were forced to draw on the traditions of Chinese folk literature, opera and music and.

consequently, the more successfully they were able to instill audiences from villages and cities

across China with a sense of their common Chineseness.

It was the next phase of Japanese aggression that pushed the left in this direction. What

many consider the first battle of World War II began on the night of July 7, 1937 shortly after

10:30 p.m not far from the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing when a Japanese officer ordered

an attack on Chinese forces to retaliate against the unconfirmed capture of a Japanese soldier.

By mid-November, the Japanese had broken through Chinese defenses in Shanghai and

completely occupied the city. A quarter million Chinese had died in the defense of Shanghai,

and 40,000 Japanese had died in its capture.

The occupation of Shanghai scattered the left-wing intelligentsia in several directions. Those

172Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937-1945 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962). 27.

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who had some chance of making a living outside of Shanghai through family or connections left

the city, while others, such as the well-respected scholar of French literature Li Jianwu, could

ask no one to care for their families and could seek work nowhere else. For the latter group, the

International Settlement and the French Concession became known as "the Solitary Island." a

refuge for the thousands who fled the Japanese-controlled sections of the city. Because it came

so soon after official CCP pledges in September 1937 to "abolish the policy of sabotage and

Sovietization which aims at the overthrow of the GMD government,"173 the occupation meant

for theater workers a resurgence of the anti-Japanese theater that had begun only a few years

before. At the same time, foreign censorship increased dramatically in the atmosphere of terror

that permeated the as yet unoccupied foreign areas. By 1938, SMC censors personally observed

performances to check for anti-Japanese references. Not even the smallest reference was

tolerated "under penalty of expulsion of the group in question from the foreign settlements."1-1

But the direct attack on the stronghold of the intelligentsia had re-galvanized the leftist

theater community. During the Chinese military resistance in Shanghai from August to

November 1937, huaju had suddenly increased in popularity. Yu Ling led the Shanghai

Association of the Theatrical Circle for National Salvation (Shanghai xiju jie jiuwcuig xiehui),

founded in the French Concession in August. The Association sponsored "resistance plays"

(ikangzhan ju), usually simple street dramas unadorned with complex plot structures, stereotyped

and calling for armed resistance. Such "nationalistic" theater became extremely popular. Yu also

organized thirteen drama troupes with twenty members each to perform in hospitals and refugee

centers. Soon, the Shanghai Ant and the Banking and Finance Employees’ Club followed suit.

173Hsu, 588.

I74Fu Poshek, 79.

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concentrating on street theater. In late October, the Association sent eleven troupes inland.175

In December 1937, ensconced in the Solitary Island, senior CCP Cultural Committee

members Yu Ling and A Ying started the Blue Bird Dramatic Society (Qingniao jushe), made

up mainly of members of the Association who had not fled to the interior. The theater disbanded

in January 1938 because of internal squabbling and bomb threats. Yu Ling then spearheaded the

founding of the Shanghai Arts Theater (Shanghai yishu juyuan), which put on one benefit

performance for refugee children at the Lyceum Theater. While rehearsing for a second show.

Li Jianwu’s Sahuang shijia (an adaptation of William Clyde Fitch’s Truth), the French Municipal

Government shut them down for security reasons. The ever-persistent Yu then founded Shanghai

Dramatic Arts Society (Shanghai juyishe).176

With the founding of Shanghai Dramatic Arts Society, the Solitary Island theater artists had

made an almost complete metamorphosis from ambiguous artists to propagandists of good versus

evil. While they still attempted to produce plays that went beyond propaganda, poor box office

receipts pushed them further and further toward traditional themes and, by the beginning of 1939.

toward historical stories that already had a symbolic value for Shanghai audiences.177

Frank Wells’ commentary, appearing in a May 1938 "Drama Chronicle" in T ’ien Hsia

Monthly, is indicative of contemporary criticism that saw the anti-Japanese resistance as spawning

a renaissance in cinema and theater. Theater artists, rather than abandoning their profession for

more direct resistance work, saw in the theater an essential tool to fire the spirits of both the

urban and rural populations who continued to resist. Supported by famous Shanghai movie stars,

directors, actors and playwrights, one roving group of child actors performed "patriotic" plays

17SIbid„ 74.

176Ibid., 77.

l77Ibid„ 87.

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with such immortal titles as "Arrest the Traitors" and "Aid Our Mobile Units."17*

Another example was the formation in Hankou of the "China National Anti-Japan War-Aid

Dramatists Association," led by Chang Daofan, former GMD Vice-Minister of Education and the

Interior. Chang wrote several plays himself, including Our Old Home about the loss of

Manchuria. Other members of this association included Hong Shen and Tian Han.179 Tien

Hsia three months later featured the complete text of Yao Xinnong’s one-act play "When the

Girls Come Back," in which the girls in fact do not come back because they have apparently been

captured or killed by marauding Japanese.180

The significance of this theater that lay outside of Shanghai, away from the sandwich effect

of the Japanese and the SMC, lies not only in its immediate gravitation toward anti-Japanese

content but also in the continued production of works for the stage by Shanghai playwrights who

then managed to smuggle their works into Shanghai. Thus, Solitary Island playwrights sent their

work to the interior, while exiled playwrights got their work to Shanghai.181 This unplanned

arrangement served the dual purpose of giving the Solitary Island playwrights an uncensored

outlet for their own resistance drama while giving the exiled playwrights a way to support their

comrades who felt the heaviest censorship pressure.

Liang Yan’s comment in Tien Hsia Monthly's February 1939 "Drama Chronicle" shows

how far the war had moved the intellectual left’s view of the theater from the first appearance

of Cao Yu in mid-decade to where it now stood: "True, the theater has become an instrument

I78Frank B. Wells,"Drama Chronicle," Tien Hsia Monthly 6 (May 1938): 477.

I79Ibid., 479.

I80Yao Hsin Nung, "When the Girls Come Back," T’ien Hsia Monthly 7 (August 1938): 94-120.

181Fu Poshek, n84, 195.

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for propaganda; but in time of war, what else can we expect from the Chinese stage? What the

theater has to offer is only a part of the greater drama-the war itself. The two cannot be

separated."182 Liang’s update also mentions that drama had "invaded" Sichuan Province ever

since the move of the wartime capital to Chongqing. Under Xiong Fuxi, the Nationalist

government established Sichuan Provincial College of Dramatic Arts in Chengdu. The Purpose

of the three-year training was to prepare people for "national reconstruction and resistance."183

40,000 school children participated in a play called "Children’s World" written by Xiong to

celebrate national Children’s Day. And under Cao Yu, the National Academy of Dramatic An

moved from Nanjing to Chongqing.181

The fact that Chinese intellectuals in Chongqing used "art" to fight the resistance war, while

millions of other Chinese gave their lives did not escape the criticism of those who carried on the

biting satirical tradition of Lu Xun. In a time when pointing a satirical finger at even the most

hypocritical "resistance" theater might be misconstrued as unpatriotic, Chen Paichen produced

a remarkable piece of absurdist drama called Men and Women in Wild Times (Luanshi nan nu).

The play begins two weeks before the city of Nanjing will be abandoned to advancing Japanese.

The opening scene takes place in a second-class train carriage onto which rich and poor

desperately try to crowd, entering through windows and from all sides. A member of the

Resistance, Chin Fan, sleeps in the luggage rack above. Madame Bureau Chief carries her

Westem-style toilet aboard. Throughout the first act, we are exposed to the myriad faces of

hypocrisy that claims legitimacy in the name of "saving the nation!" Passengers try to top each

other with the terrors they have seen in the war, as in this tall tale told by Miao Yiou, "a

182Liang Yan,"Drama Chronicle," Tien Hsia Monthly 8 (February 1939): 180.

183Ibid., 177-178.

lfWIbid., 178-179.

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translator":

MIAO: Talk about coincidences. I have an even bigger coincidence for you! I was at the Sung-chiang train station when the siren started. There was this refugee who uiun’i have enough for his train fare and was hanging around on the platform. When the bombs fell he was so scared that he fainted. But by the time he woke up then—wow—what do you know! There, wrapped in his arms, was this leg blown off a woman! It was all covered with blood, but it was still neatly dressed in a silk stocking. And there were over five hundred dollars in bills stuck inside the stocking! So the refugee took that money right away and made his getaway inland! That’s what you call a "War of Resistance Windfall"!183

Later, Miao and Wu Qiuping, an editor, drink themselves into a stupor while justifying their

actions as a form of patriotism:

MIAO: [Drinking] But that doesn’t mean this bottle is being wasted on us! One may say that we here are all pillars in the work of the Resistance! And as much strength as this wine gives us, so it gives that much strength to the War of Resistance!

WU: [With deep emotion] How right you are! Think of this red wine not as the fruit of the vine, but as the blood of the Japs! We must gorge ourselves on the blood of the Japs!186

The third act of Men and Women in Wild Times takes place two years later in a plush hotel

in the wartime capitol of Chongqing. The same contemptible characters argue over petty

rivalries, and, toward the end of the play, find themselves giving the first reading to a new play

which they plan to perform as a benefit for a Resistance War fund. The script that has been

given to them concerns a group of wealthy people escaping Nanjing on a train. By the third act.

the characters in the benefit play-who include a translator, an editor, and a woman who carries

her toilet with her-are dancing the nights away in a posh hotel in Chongqing.

Chen’s device of the play within a play is reminiscent of Italian playwright Luigi

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, with which Chen may have been familiar.

And, in the spirit of other absurdists, Chen is cruelly cynical toward characters who indulge

185Ch’en Pai-ch’en, Men and Women in Wild Times (Luanshi nan nu), trans. Edward M. Gunn in Gunn, "Chinese Drama," 139.

‘“Ibid., 141.

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themselves in self-congratulatory artistic endeavors while less sophisticated members of society

die in battlefield trenches. Yet Chen’s message apparently went unheard. As theater scholar and

Chen translator Edward Gunn commented, "The fact that so many self-appointed guardians of

patriotism in the arts during the war were appalled at Chen’s satires could only have gratified

him, since the exposure of sham is central to his work."187

Despite internal dissent over political correctness, for those stranded in the Solitary Island

this flurry of activity strengthened their own work and, more importantly, their resolve to

continue resistance no matter how far they were pushed to the precipice of a violent Japanese

response. Shanghai Dramatic Art Society managed to secure a contract from March to June 1939

at the Xinguang Theater, a dilapidated movie house on the Rue de Ningbo. A performance of Li

Jianwu’s 1934 play This is Only Springtime (Zhe buguo shi chuntian) and Yu Ling’s Woman

(Nuzi) were complete box office failures.188 In August of 1939, Yu Ling rented a dance hall

on Avenue Edward VII in the International Settlement for six months, calling it the Xuangong

Theater. There he staged Li’s This is Only Springtime once again and his own Night Shanghai

[Ye Shanghai). Despite the group’s persistence, the seven plays staged between August and

November were all box office failures, managing only twenty to thirty percent seating

capacity.189

But in November the Shanghai Dramatic Art Society’s luck changed. A Ying’s experimental

production of Ouyang Yuqian’s period piece Blood Flower (Bixue Hua) filled the Xuangong for

over 35 days. Aside from the fact that it stole its public name from a popular Beijing Opera,

Sorrow o f the Late Ming (Mingmo yiheri), it was also a simple, moral tale that used a "skillful

187Gunn, "Chinese Drama," xiv.

188Fu Poshek, 87-88.

189Ibid„ 89-90.

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juxtaposition of historical metaphor and modem sensibility."1® Blood Flower is the story of

Sun Kexian and his courtesan mistress, Ge Nenniang, who maintain active resistance to an

"enemy". Their actions contrast with those of a traitorous Chinese couple and a second, passive

couple who choose withdrawal from society as a means of maintaining loyalty to the dynasty.

Sun, after a failed attempt at armed resistance, is executed, and Ge condemns the collaborator.

Cai Ruheng, then commits suicide rather than compromise her fidelity. In the final moments of

the play, the remaining characters discover that Nanjing’s occupation will soon end because the

militia is approaching.191

Poshek Fu’s description of the reaction to Blood Flower offers a microcosm of political

theater and its impact during the resistance period:

Under Japanese pressure, the Shanghai Municipal Police demanded changes, and A Ying consequently made eight revisions. But in performance, the company continued to use the original version. When the censors made surprise visits to the theater, the performers simply switched to the revised script. The censors were also plied with cigarettes and cakes, both expensive items, to keep them from watching the play too closely. And on one occasion, a group of young uniformed Japanese appeared in the auditorium and took all the front seats. The company refused to cancel the show as the theater owners suggested, however, and the performance became even more intense with these "Manchus" sitting in front. The audience went wild, and soon afterward the play was banned.192

What "high brow" drama could not achieve for ten years - the transference of the elite's

loyalty — the Japanese occupation achieved, to a large degree, almost immediately. If success

at the box office is our measure, Shanghai's audiences, when offered the choice between the new.

hopeful myth of United Front-style nationalism or anti-GMD propaganda, decidedly chose

nationalism. The CCP’s victory in Shanghai during this period was to sway audience members

toward its own brand of that nationalism. The GMD as yet had no parallel theater activity in

lwIbid„ 90.

I9lIbid„ 90-91.

I92Ibid„ 91.

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Shanghai. For resistance propaganda, the GMD seems to have deferred to the CCP or simply

left the theater community alone under the assumption that the foreign censors would keep it

under control.

By 1940, left-wing theater workers had shifted almost completely to an emphasis on

entertainment first and message second. This change came about for two main reasons. First,

the refugee-swelled population of the International Settlements translated to a scarcity of jobs,

especially for well-educated intellectuals not used to heavy labor. To remain in the theater, they

had to give the audience what it wanted. Second, by mid-1940, A Ying and Wu Yonggang

received CCP instructions to establish the New Arts society (Xinyi she) to divert the Japanese and

foreign area censors’ attention from the Shanghai Dramatic Art Society. The New Arts Society

concentrated on entertainment while Shanghai Dramatic Art Society focused on propaganda in

the thin guise of historical drama.1”

About fifty percent of the 27 plays it staged between 1940 and 1941 were historical. Wu

Zuguang’s Song of Uprightness (Zhengqi ge) and Yang Hansheng’s The Death o fLi Xiucheng (Li

Xiucheng zhi si), for example, were both originally written in unoccupied China and sold out for

over a month in Shanghai. This historical huaju focused on themes well-known to traditional

opera audiences, such as "heroic loyalty and self-sacrifice, varying only in matters of stress—some

opting for loyal minsters, some for chaste widows, and some for both."w In response to these

successes, the GMD finally started its own troupe after failing to buy off the Shanghai Dramatic

Art Society. The new troupe, called the Heavenly Wind Company ( Tianfeng juchang), was led

by playwright Yao Ke and director Fei Mu. Like its main rival, the Heavenly Wind Company

’”Ibid„ 92.

'*Ibid.

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also concentrated on historical plays.195

In 1941 the theater community, which had managed to pull a considerable number of coups

against the censors, came under intense heat. In March, Yu Ling and Ba Ren fled to Hong Kong

because of increasing Japanese persecution.196 In November 1941, Cao Yu’s Metamorphosis.

written in the interior and directed by British-trained Huang Zuolin, ran for a month to full

houses at the Shanghai Professional Company (Shanghai zhiye jutuan). When the hero declared

at the end of the play,"China, China, you should be strong!" the audience shouted patriotic

slogans. The SMC, under Japanese pressure, swiftly banned the play.197

One month later, on December 8, 1941, the Japanese occupied the International Settlements.

195Qing Song, "This Month" (Zhe yiyue). Theatre Arts (Juchang yishu) no. 10 (August 1939); quoted in Fu Poshek, n98, 196.

196Fu Poshek, 96.

I97Ibid.

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SHANGHAI UNDERGROUND, 1941-1945

When a state is occupied by an aggressive, powerful enemy, the need for myth as a

preserver of culture is never greater. Just as in occupied France during the same period,

occupied Shanghai experienced a distillation of traditional symbols, so that words, music, even

color in a piece of theater might have meaning for the average Shanghainese that would escape

the eye of the Japanese censor. Resistance references at times became so subtle as to be almost

invisible, but, borrowing an image from Emily Dickinson, audiences hungry for hope found

"internal difference where the meanings are."

But the price Shanghai theater artists paid to communicate those meanings was often

intolerable. When the Japanese Imperial Army occupied the foreign sectors of Shanghai in 1941.

it shut down all theaters and foreign newspapers and compiled lists of theater company

members.1* Yet another layer of underground theater workers fled at this time, leaving only

those few who had no choice but to stay or had been ordered to stay by the GMD or CCP. Li

Jianwu and Huang Zuolin were among the former group, but it was Li who would come to

symbolize what was best in the people of occupied Shanghai during the five years of Japanese

terror.

lwIbid., 96.

77

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Li Jianwu and the Underground Theater Movement

Li Jianwu (1906-1982) was born in Yuncheng County in Shanxi Province, the son of a

military leader responsible for the liberation of Yuncheng during the 1911 Revolution. When Li

was 13, his father was assassinated. Nevertheless, Li became an exceptionally fine student,

publishing widely even before entering Qinghua University in 1925. He studied on scholarship

in Paris for three years, returning to China in 1933 to marry You Shufen. In 1935 he went to

Shanghai to teach French literature at Jinan University.1W

Throughout the 1930s, though Li wrote a number of left-leaning works, he maintained the

position that the artist must remain independent of political pressures or ideologies, that his

primary duty was to tell the truth as he saw it through his scholarly and creative writing. Li

wrote his first staged play, This is Only Spring, in 1934. The story centers on a police chiefs

wife who releases a rebel from the South, her former lover, because she has become repelled by

materialism. But this solidly leftist theme was not enough to gain the respect of Li’s more

activist colleagues, one of whom described him during this pre-war period as a "bystander" who

"sits in his study, and at times turns to look at Flaubert on the left and at others looks at Zola and

George Sand on the right. n2a)

Several factors came together in early 1942 to change Li’s perspective and to create the most

intense period of huaju production that Shanghai had ever seen, and as a result, provided a means

for Shanghai’s playwrights and screenwriters to eke out a meager living. Soon after the

occupation the Japanese banned all English and American films, which limited theaters to

showing old films, Japanese films or newsreels.201 At the same time, Shanghai’s

,99Ibid„ 69-70.

200Ibid., 72.

201 Ibid., 97.

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manufacturing sector, suddenly cut off from Western markets, shifted much of its investment

capital to entertainment. An added, possibly patriotic factor was the Japanese take over and

centralization of the film industry in Shanghai. Many theater owners were simply unwilling to

work with Japanese officials, turning instead to live theater and sometimes even organizing their

own drama companies.202

According to Poshek Fu, writing on Li Jianwu’s Shanghai during this time.

Between 1942 and 1945, there were at different times over 30 full-time companies. 16 theaters, and a total of over 500 people involved in the dramatic professions. And while the average attendance rate was about 40 percent of seating capacity, the most popular plays, Qin Shouou’s Qiuhaitang (Begonia), in 1942, and Fusheng liuji (A Drifting Life), directed by Huang Zuolin in 1943, ran to full houses for over five and four months respectively.203

Li later declared that during this period he had jumped down from his "ivory tower" and that the

gentry no longer accepted him as one of their own.204 Still, he tried to inject moral-political

messages into his plays after 1942. But audiences primarily seeking entertainment to help them

block out their dismal situation seldom caught the subtle messages of Li’s hurriedly written

scripts.205

In 1944, Li drew suspicion to himself with the production of Youth (Qingchun), staged by

the New Arts Theater Group (Xinyi jutuan). Youth tells the story of Xier, a young farm laborer

who wishes to marry Xiang, the village headman’s daughter. Instead, Xiang’s father marries her

“ Gu Zhongyi,"The Shanghai Dramatic Movement in the Last Ten Years" (Shinian lai de Shanghai huaju yundong) in The Chinese Drama Movement and Education in the Last Ten Years o f the Resistance War (Kangzhan shinian lai Zhongguo de xiju yundong yu jiaoyu), ed. Hong Shen (Shanghai, 1948), 163-167; quoted in Fu Poshek, 98.

^Ling Ke, Random Notes on Theater (Juchang ouji) (Tianjin, 1983), 24; see also Hong Luo, The Age of the Solitary Island (Gudao shidai), (Shanghai, 1947), 89; quoted in Fu Poshek, 98.

^ L i Jianwu, "A Letter to a Friend" (Yu youren shu), Shanghai Culture (Shanghai wenhua) no. 6 (July 1946): 28-29; quoted in Fu Poshek, 100.

^ F u Poshek, 101.

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off to a rich eleven-year-old boy. Xier returns and urges Xiang to run away with him:

XIER: ....there’s a change of rule coming, and everything will change along with it...

XIANG: Dear Xier, I can’t last out till that day comes.

XIER: Yes, you can, and it won’t be long either....356

The couple’s second elopement is discovered, leading to Xiang’s divorce. Her father demands

her suicide, but Xier manages, with his mother’s help, to get Xiang away from her father and

the couple walks off into the sunset to the strains of music from the countryside and the gentle

admonitions of Xier’s old mother, which, according to Poshek Fu. is "an obvious symbol of the

national Resistance in the interior, whose unyielding struggle will precipitate the collapse of the

Occupation."207 Fu may be stretching believability in arguing that Youth is a resistance drama

posing as a moral comedy, but the very setting of the play-an almost idealized rural China

wherein lay China’s only hope of expelling the invader—and the fact that the young lovers are

freedom seekers would have inspired hope for many audience members. And hope was

something the Japanese censors could not tolerate.

Li knew the chance he was taking. Up to then the theater world had only narrowly escaped

the fate of the film industry. The Japanese secret police-the Kempeitai—kept a watchful eye on

theater activities, and many theater artists had been arrested or had simply disappeared.208 On

April 19, 1945 at two o’clock in the morning, the Kempeitai finally arrested Li. For twenty days

20

^F u Poshek, 103.

3*Ibid., 104.

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he was interrogated and tortured.209 Just when he thought he was about to be killed, Li claims

to have said, "Tell my children that I have been a good man. Papa has died in bitterness, tell my

children to behave better."210 Soon after, a friend ransomed Li, and his torturers released him.

Two weeks later, after his interrogator forced Li to meet him in a coffee shop for a chat about

Li’s relationship to Tian Han—and forced Li to pay for both coffees—Li and his family managed

to escape Shanghai and safely made their way to the interior.211

The strange irony of Li’s heroism under torture, as well as the heroism of many other left-

wing intellectuals in occupied Shanghai, is that they suffered not only for the CCP but for the

GMD as well. They represented a far more real "United Front" than did the party stalwarts in

Chongqing and Yenan. This same generation of literati-tumed-warriors would come to believe

that out of their sacrifice would be bom a new, united China where "patriotism" meant rising

above the conflicts that had already weakened the nation to the point of total disintegration. No

one felt more disappointment at the post-1945 breakout of civil war than those who fought the

propaganda wars of the Shanghai resistance.

Li Jianwu and other left-wing theater artists who remained failed to see that their’s truly was

a solitary island. If the purpose of huaju from 1927 on had been to convert the elite, the exercise

had been taken as far as it could go by 1941. After the occupation of the International

Settlements, the gentry largely escaped, and those who remained were either already converted

209Ibid., 105. Fu Poshek goes on in the same passage to reconstruct the torture from three of Li’s personal essays, noting that the interrogator was Hagiwara Daikyoku, a notorious ex-monk: "Ice-cold water was poured into his mouth and nostrils continuously until the water come [sic] back out mixed with blood. Then the process started again. At times torturers would even sit or stand on his bloated belly in order to increase the pain. Throughout the torture, with the help of a Chinese interpreter, Hagiwara asked him question after question."

210Ibid., 106.

2nIbid., 108.

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by Japanese atrocities to a true United Front, were hopeless collaborationists, or like the couple

in Ouyang Yuqian’s Blood Flower, had simply disappeared into the shadows of Shanghai's

narrow alley ways to wait the war out.

The real CCP conversion effort had now moved to the loess caves of Yenan.212

Shanghai in Yenan. 1942-1945

As we have already seen, the CCP seemed generally to encounter more success in securing

the allegiance of theater workers and theater audiences than did the GMD. Through conscious

programs of political warfare that included leftist theater and film work, the CCP appealed to the

elite’s sense of nationalism and patriotism, especially in the face of Japanese aggression. The

question, then, becomes how successful was the CCP propaganda effort? As David Holm has

noted in his study of the use of folk drama as propaganda in North China, assessment of audience

response is difficult to gauge even in our own society, especially when we rely on sketchy

records and sketchier memories of long ago performances.

What we can determine, however, is that the CCP leadership and the urban intellectuals who

fled to the North considered indigenous folk forms important and effective means of

communicating Marxist values. The yangge movement is the most significant example of Mao's

emphasis on "putting new wine in old bottles,"213 especially following the theoretical guidelines

published as the 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature. Here Mao defined the

agitational role of the army and masses together, formulating a theory of mass, social art that was

simple, tightly organized and direct. Most importantly, he clearly communicated his theory of

a mass-led revolution:

2l2Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition, defines "loess" as "a fine­ grained, yellowish-brown, extremely fertile loam deposited by the wind."

213Holm, 115.

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We must popularize what is needed and can be readily accepted by the workers, peasants and soldiers themselves. Consequently the duty of learning from the workers, peasants and soldiers precedes the task of educating them. This is even more true of elevation... .(We must not) raise the workers, peasants and soldiers to the level of the feudal class, the bourgeoisie or the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia but...along their own line of ascent, along the line of ascent of the proletariat... In the arts, we must have the [old] Chinese operas and yangge [folk dance with songs] as well as modern drama.:u

Yangge is the term used for songs, dances and folk plays performed in China from the Lunar

New Year in mid-winter until the Lantern Festival in autumn. Scholars had given it attention as

early as 1926 when the American Baptist Church sponsored the "Experimental District" project

at Dingxian, a county roughly 150 kilometers south of Beijing, run by the Chinese Society for

the Advancement of Popular Education (also known as the Mass Education Society). This group

of activist social scientists devoted themselves to eliminating illiteracy and carrying out the "Four

Educations"—culture, livelihood, hygiene and citizenship—and combatting the "Four Maladies"-

ignorance, poverty, weakness and selfishness.215

From their work, sociologists Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen produced a 1933 report called

A Selection o f Dingxian Yangge Plays (Dingxian yangge xuan), containing 48 plays. This report

described in detail the traditional yangge performance:

Most villages want to have one yangge performance in the first month. Apart from this. yangge can be performed again at various temple fairs and holidays to contribute to the festivities. A single performance normally lasts for four days at a stretch and three days at least; some carry on for ten days...No matter who is performing, all costs are paid by the village and allocated evenly between households according to the amount of land held. Those who cannot pay in ready cash may substitute rice, flour, or other foodstuffs Those among them who are good at singing band together and form a Yangge Society [Yangge hui], commonly called a Righteous and Harmonious Society [Yihe hui].216

2uRoger Howard, "People’s Theatre in China Since 1907," Theatre Quarterly I, no. 4 (October-December 1971): 72-73.

215Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen, A Selection of Dingxian Yangge Plays (Dingxian yangge xuan) (n.p., Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui, 1933), 1; quoted in Holm, 118.

2I6Ibid., 120.

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Holm makes the important connection between the yihe ("righteous and harmonious" or "united

in righteousness") of the yangge and the yihe of the Boxers United in Righteousness ( Yihe quan).

This same region of south-central Hebei was a center of Boxer activity. And as Holm points out.

There is at least some evidence of a connection between yangge and the secret societies. Heroes from popular novels, who also appeared on stage as characters in opera, figured prominently in the hodgepodge pantheon of the Boxers, and their religious practices included yihe boxing. More tellingly, local legends and songs link a local figure called Blacksmith Wang, the "Yangge King," with the Boxer leadership. Wang figures in stories about a pitched battle that took place between the Boxers and allied forces outside the city gate of Dingxian in 1900.217

So once again we find a link between popular culture and rebellion, though in the case of the

yangge that the CCP encountered, the situation is somewhat reversed. Here, the theater activity

is in part a holdover from a rebellion that occurred forty years before. In the interim, the yangge

maintained its rebel content only in myth, in the local legends and songs of Hebei villages, and

in the name the players had adopted for their form. CCP propagandists keyed into a tradition

they were surely aware of, for they would have known of the Taiping’s adaptation of popular

opera to deliver their message, and they would have known that the Boxers also used the popular

pantheon of gods and characters from the classic vernacular literature to inspire their followers.

While the yangge appeared to rely more on archetypes—the farmer, the bawdy maiden, etc.-it

was an obvious choice with rich possibilities for propagandists looking for a way into the popular

mind of the peasantry and working population. In the same sense, the huaju had already taken

over that function in Shanghai during the occupation by adopting old forms that would likely

move audiences desperately trying to hold on to their sense of "Chineseness." And it was this

acknowledgement of the value and power of traditional, truly Chinese forms that brought the

exiled Shanghai theater community into action in North China.

Under the direction of Ouyang Yuqian in 1940-1941, the Lu Xun Arts Institute concentrated

217Holm, 120-121.

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at first on improving the quality of Chinese huaju and in producing foreign plays. As a result,

the Party intervened and decreed that the main responsibility for drama workers was to focus on

mass activities in army units and at the local level.218 The theater workers at this time began

to pay more serious attention to folk music and dance and especially to the techniques of yangge.

Zhou Yang, who had spent much of the early 1930s as head of the Left League, feuding with Lu

Xun, in 1943 took on the leadership of the Luyi Propaganda Troupe (JLuyi xuanchuandui), which

had its yangge trial run that same year. Zhou continued to push the idea of the mass-line in the

arts, writing and speaking continuously about using the lives of the masses as the foundation for

creative work.219

The Luyi Troupe became well-known among cadres and peasants alike, partly because of

its innovative experimentation with synthesizing huaju and yangge forms and partly because of

its star-studded ensemble, which included urban huaju and movie actors Wang Dahua. Li Lilian

and Xu Xu.220 The drawback to enthusiastic participation from urban theater artists was the

prejudice against old forms they brought with them. While they found no fault with the

incestuous relationship of Cao Yu’s characters in Thunderstorm, they rejected as the worst kind

of vulgarism the overt sexuality found in traditional yangge.

Thus began a campaign to increase the political content of the yangge and decrease negative

images. Relationships between lovers were replaced by sister-brother relationships. Soldiers,

peasants and workers appeared with greater frequency, and the theater workers developed

stylized, dance-like choreography for these new characters. Most importantly, the new yangge

218Constantine Tung, "Introduction: Tradition and the Experience of the Drama of the People’s Republic of China," in Drama in the People’s Republic of China, eds. Colin Mackerras and Tung (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 2.

219Holm, 237.

220Ibid., 218-219.

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virtually eliminated negative imagery of any kind: even Japanese imperialists and traitorous

Chinese were eliminated from the scripts. For the Cultural Committee cadres, "negative"

included any clownish characters as well. In effect, the new yangge became increasingly

lightweight when compared with the traditional works, and ribald comedy was eliminated as "a

threat to the New Democratic social order."21 As Holm comments,"Traditional yangge, with

its outrageous posturing and buffoonery, was by its very nature a denial of all forms of

authority."— While neither Holm nor other writers on the Yangge Movement indicate that

the CCP took the sort of heavy-handed approach toward the folk theater that the GMD had taken

toward huaju, the paternalistic parallels are clearly defined, and the CCP adopted the May Fourth

tradition of iconoclasm by eliminating "low" values and images but then replaced them with new

icons, the "high" values of Maoism and nationalism.

At the Spring Festival of 1944, the yangge appears to have caught fire. The movement had

been officially endorsed on March 22 of the previous year at a meeting of the CCP Cultural

Committee, which had assigned Zhou Yang and others to implement drama activities in all the

base areas. They encouraged workers, peasants and soldiers to form their own yangge troupes

and to write their own material.23 For the remainder of 1943 and the beginning of 1944.

hundreds of troupes did form, though production activities were often divided along class lines

21Ibid., 238. The CCP debate on the relative value or decadence of quwei, a term that includes both clownishness and sexuality, is notably similar to the monks’ debate on whether or not Jesus ever laughed in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. When William of Baskerville, the hero of this 14th Century murder mystery, argues that even as St. Lawrence underwent a hideous torture on the executioner’s gridiron, he "knew how to laugh and say ridiculous things, even if it was to humiliate his enemies." The old blind monk Jorge replies, "Which proves that laughter is something very close to death and to the corruption of the body."

-Ib id ., 239.

^Ibid., 240-241.

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with urban intellectuals producing scripts and the workers, peasants and soldiers performing and

tending to technical tasks.

A November 7, 1943 document, "Resolution of the Party Central Propaganda Department

on the Implementation of Party Policy for Literature and Art," called for Party-wide distribution

and study of Mao’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature. The document gave drama

top priority:

Spoken drama and song opera [geju\—a form of art that blends theater, literature, music, dance, and even visual art in a single furnace, and includes all sorts of old and new forms and local forms—with content reflecting the people’s feelings and resolution, in forms that are easy to perform and easy to understand, have already proved to be a powerful weapon in mobilizing and educating the masses to persevere in the Resistance War and develop production. They should be developed across the board in every locality and in every military unit.224

The commitment outlined in this document came to fruition at the 1944 festival.

An estimated 2,000 out of approximately 12,000 CCP personnel in the region participated

in yangge productions during the festival,225 and these groups reached large audiences. Yangge

troupes of South District Propaganda Troupe performed ten times in the city and countryside to

a total of 6,100 people; the Northwest Party School Yangge Troupe performed thirteen times to

17,000 people; and the College of Administration Troupe performed fifteen times to a total of

10.000.226 Noticeably absent from these plays were the themes of the resistance war or class

struggle. Zhou Yang, in an article on the 1944 festival, reported that of fifty-six plays he

inspected, twenty-six dealt with the production movement, including labor exchange, labor

heroes, reform of "layabouts" and agricultural production by military units and factories;

^Ibid., 248-249.

^Gunther Stein, The Challenge of Red China (London, 1945), 70; quoted in Holm. 253.

^Holm, 255.

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seventeen dealt with army-people relations; ten with self-defence and rooting out traitors; two

with struggle behind enemy lines; and one with reduction of interest and rent.227 Particularly

notable is the absence of anti-GMD themes, since border clashes between CCP and GMD troops

had increased dramatically by the spring of 1944.

While it is difficult to measure actual "success" in CCP indoctrination work, the continued

efforts of CCP propaganda cadres in pushing the yangge and minimizing the huaju as a

propaganda tool, along with the apparent popularity of yangge not only in rural Hebei but in

urban Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai as well, seems to point to the skill with which the CCP

had learned to deliver its message. Certainly the GMD had no equivalent movement, and in

GMD-controlled areas yangge was referred to as the "dance of revolution" by both sides.22*

In rural areas where illiterate peasants and soldiers lived without access to radio or

newspapers, existing in conditions that had changed little in a thousand years, Mao saw need to

draw peasants into a "continuous communications structure," and to develop corresponding

organizational forms.229 Drama-and yangge in particular—became the chief transmitter of not

only what the CCP considered proper values but also of basic national or international news and

important changes in government policy. New directives could get from Party headquarters to

remote areas of the interior in twenty days.230 The GMD had no comparable network of

writers and communication systems in its own territory, nor even in the urban areas it still held.

While we should be careful not to exaggerate the overall effect of yangge on the outcome

^Ibid., 269-270.

^Ibid., 321.

229William H. Friedland with Amy Barton, Bruce Dancis, Michael Rotkin and Michael Spiro, Revolutionary Theory (Totawa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun & Coj. Publishers, Inc., 1982), 121.

230Holm, 319.

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of either the Resistance War or the Civil War, in the realm of political warfare, it gave the CCP

a clear advantage that did seem to effectively defeat the GMD’s New Life Movement-style

paternalism. Even if the CCP leadership in reality maintained a similar paternalism, it

successfully convinced the peasant and soldier populations that what Mark Selden has called "the

Yenan Way"231 gave them a kind of limited democratic choice they would never find under the

corrupt GMD. As Holm has observed, both the GMD and CCP were essentially statists,232 but

the CCP discovered that a sort of pallid political correctness toward the masses, while it may not

have inculcated strong communist values, at least raised soldier loyalty a notch and gave the

peasants a generally better impression of CCP policy and CCP troops than they ever had of the

GMD.

In the end, the transference of myths and icons seems to have been a one-way affair.

Amongst the urban elites, even those who participated in the Yangge Movement in North China,

the attraction of folk forms was apparently a passing one, for they largely rejected it at war’s end

and returned to what they considered the only "valid" theater for a modern society: huaju.

231 "The Yenan Way" refers to Selden’s interpretation of CCP-style democratization in North China during the Japanese resistance. Selden argues that Mao consistently emphasized the necessity for Party cadres to return to "the mass line." The cadres would still serve as a kind of vanguard, but their decisions would come not only from theory but also from frequent and substantial consultation with peasants and workers. See Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995).

^Holm, 338.

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CONCLUSIONS

This study has attempted to show that the modern political theater movement in China was

a natural response by Western-influenced intellectuals to a combination of three major social

features: the ongoing foreign industrial and cultural incursion that inspired the May Fourth

movement; the anti-left partnership in repression of the Shanghai Municipal Council and the

Guomindang; and the unrelenting pressures of Japanese military conquest in North and East

China. At the same time, modern spoken drama and screenwriting belonged to a centuries-old

Chinese tradition of consciously commandeering the myths and icons of popular culture for use

as propaganda tools in rebellions against delegitimized or not yet legitimized authority.

Ultimately, in their attempts to secure the allegiences of urban intellectuals and rural workers and

peasants, the left-wing theater artists of Shanghai fell back on traditional symbols presented in

the new form of spoken drama and new symbols in the guise of folk drama.

As Peter Calvert wrote in Revolution and Counter-Revolution,

Ideas are central to the notion of revolution, first because all political life is structured in terms of ideas, second because revolution, an essentially-contested concept, is a label attached to events or sequences of events which mean different things to different people, and third because the very concept of change, the yardstick which people use to dertermine whether or not a revolution has occurred, is itself culturally determined...The recognition of the power of ideas is, of course, foremost among the reasons why revolution is alternatively admired and feared.233

In the Shanghai of the 1930s, it was this very power of ideas that Chiang Kaishek and the

^Calvert, 77.

90

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men of the Shanghai Muncipal Council most feared. The European members of the SMC would

have had plenty of examples from their own history to draw upon: Lutheranism, the Tudor

Revolution in England and the Corpemican Revolution in science are but a few.23* And Chiang

Kaishek would have had the long history of rebellion in China to draw on, including the Taiping

Rebellion and the Boxer Uprising.

With the New Life Movement, Chiang attempted to deflate the spreading communist myth

and at the same time revitalize fundamentalist values in a population adrift in the confusion of

imperialist aggression, destruction of inland markets, natural disaster and an invasion of Western

technology and intellectual models. In the midst of such turmoil, the GMD leadership found

allies in the International Settlements. What neither Chiang Kaishek nor the leaders of the

Shanghai Municipal Council nor, later, the Japanese occupation leaders ever understood fully was

that the spirit of change unleashed during the Guangxu Emperor’s One Hundred Days Reform

had endured through the attempts of the Empress Dowager to rein them in, through the failed

visions of the 1911 Revolution, through the long period of warlord division and chaos of the

1920s, and through the GMD’s White Terror campaign against the left.

Moreover, the Chinese people held on to the spirit of the GMD as it had been created by

the Republic’s founding father, Sun Yatsen, even as Chiang Kaishek attempted to dismantle the

essence of the party after Sun’s death. Somehow, Sun’s Three People’s Principles—nationalism,

democracy and socialism—had been so modified by the time of the 1927 White Terror campaign

against the Communists that they really existed only as hopes in the popular mind. In a sense,

the whole left-wing theater movement-perhaps the whole success of the Communist revolution-

rested on the GMD’s inability to truly accept these concepts as the central operating principles

of government and on the left’s ability to keep them alive through art and literature.

^Cohan, 15.

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If Tian Han and the socially conscious artists whom he represented were apolitical or at least

open to limited cooperation with the GMD government before 1927, the barrage of censorship

that came along with the White Terror inevitably pushed them increasingly to the left. In the

same vein, the Blueshirt Theater Movement of the workers and peasants and the social theater

that grew out of YWCA education activities found their inspiration in the atmosphere of foreign

and Chinese government corruption, labor exploitation, racial and cultural prejudice, censorship

and organized crime activity that gave Shanghai its deservedly seedy reputation. The GMD of

Sun Yatsen had promised democracy and a rise in the general standard of living. While in urban

areas and in many rural areas these reforms were partially achieved, their very incompleteness

unleashed high expectations among urban intellectuals and peasants alike. Theater and film

simply gave voice to those expectations, magnified them and disseminated them even more widely

among the urban population. The repression of theater and film thus fueled Communist

successes.

We may argue that Shanghai’s left-wing intelligentsia never fully achieved its goal of

securing the loyalty of the wealthy, educated gentry who kept Shanghai’s industry well-oiled and

running smoothly. Though huaju and Chinese-made cinema had its following, traditional opera

and foreign films remained far more popular and reached a far wider audience in Shanghai, an

audience that often included the very "proletariat" that Shanghai intellectuals convinced

themselves they were leading.

But in looking at the overall success of the CCP’s use of theater in its propaganda war

against the GMD, the Communists do seem to have scored a clear if not complete victory. This

victory came about for at least two reasons. First, because the United Front gave Mao breathing

room in CCP-held territory to concentrate theater work on peasants and soldiers, virtually

unopposed by GMD counter-propaganda efforts, he was able to cultivate the image of a CCP

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leadership that remained first and foremost concerned with the expulsion of the Japanese and the

recovery of Chinese territory from imperial powers. While Mao appears to have planned for the

inevitable civil war just as vigorously as Chiang Kaishek, he played the United Front role to the

hilt, and, especially through the Yangge Movement, concentrated the attention of the peasants and

soldiers on agriculture, industry and beating the Japanese.

Second, the post-1941 Japanese occupation revitalized Shanghai’s huaju and created an

heroic image of the left-wing intelligentsia that it had never before achieved either in its overtly

anti-GMD phase (pre-1936) or in its United Front incarnation, when theater and film writers

spent much of their time zigzagging subtle messages between GMD and SMC censors. For the

Chinese audiences, the resistance drama of A Ying and Li Jianwu held clear, though still subtle

messages of nationalism and liberation. These were the same audiences who had missed or

ignored the left-wing’s point a few years before. Now, when the choice between left and right

had degenerated into the choice between "good" and "evil", the messages came through loud and

clear. Even though the GMD also sponsored underground theater work during this period, it was

the left with whom Shanghai’s audiences equated messages of resistance. For it was the left

which understood the power of myth contained in the historical dramas, traditionally performed

as opera, that they now presented in the new form of huaju. Just as Qu Qiubai, Zhou Yang and

Mao himself saw the transforming power of the myths and archetypes contained in the traditional

folk drama of North China, so did the remaining Shanghai artists recognize the power of myth

in traditional opera and the relative ease with which they could transfer those mythic symbols to

huaju in order to truly popularize it as a form of entertainment.

Notably, neither the left-wing theater artists who remained in Shanghai nor those who

escaped ever fully discarded their beliefs that huaju somehow improved on traditional opera or

on less "sophisticated" folk forms. For the Shanghai intellectuals, folk arts were there to be

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mined for content not for their hoary, traditional forms, which were to be discarded and replaced

with forms that lay outside Chinese culture. In the May Fourth tradition, they largely rejected

Chinese culture because it was Chinese.

Theater and film are gauges by which we can measure the success or failure of political

propaganda efforts. To modify Frederico Garcia Lorca’s comment about the power of theater

to mirror social truths, theater also creates social values. The audience member, moved by a

play or a movie, leaves the focused world of the theater and sees his or her own world differently

as the result of the experience. If that transformation is merely emotional, perhaps the effect will

fade with a cold beer, a cigarette or a good night’s sleep. But if the effect is also intellectual,

if that is, the art has caused a shift in the audience member’s intellectual or moral framework,

and if the play is one to which this person can mentally return again and again for reassessment,

perhaps then the effect is a more lasting one.

The introduction to this study put forth the argument that the Chinese tradition of using

theater to shift such intellectual frameworks is a long one. Successive dynasties—down through

the present Communist Dynasty—have attempted to maintain their equilibrium in times of shaky

legitimacy by controlling art, literature, drama and other means of free expression. But wherein

lies the danger of such work? A Chinese political scientist once told an audience of Americans

that "Chinese people do not see themselves as citizens. They see themselves as subjects."135

Whether we call it Nationalism or Communism or Boxerism, the awakening in the individual of

an awareness that out there, somewhere, is a common enemy, that the individual is part of a

greater body beyond the village or county or nation-state, this awakening presents the gravest

danger to power.

At some level, the authors of The Water Margin understood this, as did the Taiping rebels

^Anonymous. Panel discussion on Chinese and Western perceptions, April 1994.

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and the Boxers who adapted the icons of popular literature to inspire a rebellious change in

outlook amongst the peasants they encountered. Mao Zedong’s genius lay in his understanding

of how his own movement fit into the historical tradition of rebellion in China. In contrast to

founders of the CCP like Chen Duxiu, Mao understood that a distinctly European philosophy

such as Marxism could not simply be grafted on to Chinese culture without regard for long-held

traditions and beliefs. Chiang Kaishek, like Chen Duxiu, focused his efforts on the the urban

industrialists and the big landowners, never accepted the idea that peasants could have a fully

human consciousness, and never believed the peasant conciousness, if carefully cultivated, could

become a powerful, unified revolutionary force.

The Communist movement not only accepted the necessity of borrowing from history by

pitting art against authority, but realized it also had to create a fundamentally new pattern.

Unlike the Taiping or the Boxers or the countless other rebel leaders who had risen and fallen

in North China under the Qing Dynasty, Mao believed that he could replace the basic, traditional

structure of governance with something truly modem. Like Chiang, Mao never believed

constitutional monarchy could work for modem China. Yet in the end, each man became a kind

of modem monarch. Neither could really escape the fundamentally paternalistic Confucianism

that has, up to the present, eclipsed all other political principles in China. Simply put, in a

system that is still fundamentally a Confucian hierarchy of emperor over subject, it is the

government’s duty to control the people, not to be controlled by them.

If the lesson that Shanghai’s left-wing theater community bequeathed to China is forgotten

for the present, the very few, very old members of that community who still remember the

footlights and the youthful enthusiasm of rebellion, can rest assured that their legacy, too, is now

part of a long tradition of political theater in China. It is a tradition that inevitably rises again.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1965.

Berry, Chris, ed. Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1991.

Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft, Peter Putnam, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1953.

Brandt, Conrad. Stalin’s Failure in China. Cambridge, Mass.: 1958.

Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy o f Revolution, revised and expanded edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

Calvert, Peter. Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1990.

Clifford, Nicholas R. Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 1991.

Cohan, A.S. Theories of Revolution: An Introduction. New York: Halstead Press, John Wiley & Sons, 1975.

Cohen, Paul A. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing in the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Collected Theatre Documents, vol. (Xiju I Luncong). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju juban shi, 1957.

Esherick, Joseph W. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Friedland, William H. with Amy Barton, Bruce Dancis, Michael Rotkin and Michael Spiro. Revolutionary Theory. Totawa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun & Coj. Publishers, Inc., 1982.

Fu Poshek. Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Gunn, Edward, ed. Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

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Holm, David. Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Hong Luo, The Age of the Solitary Island (Gudao shidai). Shanghai, 1947.

Hong Shen, ed. The Chinese Drama Movement and Education in the Last Ten Years of the Resistance War (Kangzhan shinian lai Zhongguo de xiju yundong yu jiaoyu). Shanghai. 1948.

Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Hsia, C.T. A History of Modem Chinese fiction, 1917-1957. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

Hsu, Immanuel C.Y. The Rise o f Modem China, 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995.

Hu, John Y.H. T s’ao Yu. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972.

Innes, C.D. Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Johnson, Chalmers A. Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1937-1945. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1962.

Ke Ling. Random Notes on Theater (Juchang ouji). Tianjin, 1983.

Leyda, Jay. Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China. Boston: MIT Press, 1972.

Li Jinghan and Zhang Shiwen. A Selection ofDingxian Yangge Plays (Dingxian yangge xuan). N.P., Zhonghua pingmin jiaoyu cujinhui, 1933, 1-.

Lu Xun, Selected Works, vol. I, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956.

Mackerras, Colin and Constantine Tung, eds. Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Mackerras, Colin and Elizabeth Wichman, eds. Chinese Theater. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983.

Seagrave, Sterling. The Soong Dynasty. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Selden, Mark. China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited. London: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.

Sergeant, Harriet. Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures 1918-1939. New York: Crown,

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1990.

Spence, Jonathan. The Gate o f Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895- 198G. New York: Penguin, 1982.

. The Search for Modem China. New York: W.W. Norton 1990.

Stein, Gunther Stein. The Challenge of Red China. London: Whittlesey House, 1945.

Swayze, Harold. Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Terrill, Ross. The White-boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao Zedong. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984.

Tian Han, et al. Historical Documents from Fifty Years of the Chinese Spoken Drama Movement, 1907-1957, Vol. I (Zhongguo huaju yundong wushi nian shiliao ji, 1907- 1957, diyi ji). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1958.

Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. Policing Shanghai 1927-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Wang Chi-wong. Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930-1936, Studies on East Asia Series. Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1991.

Articles in Newspapers and Periodicals

"Ant’s Three Public Performances Banned Yesterday." Shen Bao, 24 June 1936, 10.

Dewey, John. "New Culture in China." Asia 21, No. 7 (July 1921): 581-586.

Fang Y, "Revolutionary Art Does Not Fear Terror," The Imemational Theatre, No. 3 (1933): 56-.

Fu Hu. "Tian Han and His Immense Contribution to Modem Chinese Drama." Chinese Literature, no. 10 (1979): 3-10.

Howard, Roger. "People’s Theatre in China Since 1907." Theatre Quarterly I, no. 4 (October-December 1971): 67 -75.

Krauter, Krauter. "In the Limelight Again: Introducing China’s Leading Dramatist Cao Yu.” Chinese Literature, no. 11 (November 1980): 29-52.

Li Jianwu. "A Letter to a Friend" (Yu youren shu). Shanghai Culture (Shanghai wenhua) no. 6 (July 1946): 28-29.

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Liang Yan. "Drama Chronicle." T ’ien Hsia Monthly 8 (February 1939): 177-180.

Mackerras, Colin. "Theatre and the Taipings" Modem China, an International Quarterly 2, no. 4 (October 1976): 473-501.

Qing Song. "This Month" (Zhe yiyue). Theatre Arts (Juchang yishu) no. 10 (August 1939).

"Shanghai Municipal Council Proclamation." North China Daily News, 12 January 1927. 1.

Tru, R. "In Spite of Terror and Repression—the Revolutionary Theatre in China." The International Theatre, No. 4 (1934): 59-.

Tung, Constantine. "Lonely Search into the Unknown: T’ien Han’s Early Plays, 1920- 1930." Comparative Drama II, no. 1 (Spring, 1968): 44-54.

. "T’ien Han and the Romantic Ibsen." Modem Drama 9, no. 4 (February 1967): 389- 395.

"Weekly Experimental Little Theatre Yesterday Morning Forced to Stop Performance." Shen Bao, 22 June 1936, 11.

Wells, Frank B. "Drama Chronicle." T’ien Hsia Monthly 6 (May 1938): 466-477.

Yao Hsin Nung. "Drama Chronicle." T ’ien Hsia 3 (August 1936): 45-52.

Plavs

Sya Yan. Under the Eaves of Shanghai: An Annotated Chinese Play, eds. Richard F. Chang and William L. MacDonald. New Haven: Far Eastern Publications, Yale University. 1973.

Tsao Yu. Thunder and Rain (Lei yu), trans. Yao Hsin-nung. T’ien Hsia Monthly (October 1936 - February 1937).

Ts’ao Yu. The Wilderness. Translated by Christopher Rand and Joseph S.M. Lau. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1980.

Yao Hsin-nung. "When the Girls Come Back." T’ien Hsia Monthly 7 (August 1938): 94- 120.

Unpublished and Archival Materials

Tai Yih-jian. "The Contemporary Chinese Theatre and Soviet Influence 1919-1960." Ph. D. diss., Southern Illinois University, 1974.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Women Workers Hold Joint Labor Day Celebrations." New York: YWCA National Board Archives, 3 May 1931.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.