The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (32 page)

After September 1952, editors and publishers were required to register with the government and submit regular reports. Few classics of the country’s great literary heritage remained in print. The
Book of Odes
was the only one of the thirteen classics of literature that could be obtained, because it was deemed to contain popular chants of ancient times. A few poets, for instance Qu Yuan, who lived in the third century
bce
, also escaped destruction because they were said to have written ‘for the masses’. The central government, which won complete control over the press and publishing houses within a few years of liberation, supervised all such censorship.
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Instead readers received a dreary diet of Russian textbooks, translated by the thousand from the end of 1952 onwards, as well as the theoretical productions of the communist leaders, the works of Mao Zedong taking pride of place (severe restrictions on the use of gold were decreed in 1954, but among the exceptions, besides dental fillings, was the use of gilded foils on selected works of the Chairman). The bulk of published material, however, consisted of propaganda work, designed for every conceivable group and every conceivable subject. This included pocket-sized comic books churned out in their tens of millions for children, telling stories of class heroes, imperialist spies, war victories, production records and the building of a new socialist society. Writers working for the party produced a small number of approved works, but their output was minimal. Even those leftist writers who had flocked to the side of the communists – Lao She, Ding Ling, Mao Dun – were no longer in a position to produce the literature of protest that had made their fame before liberation. As one farsighted observer put it, ‘The failure of the hundreds of literary lights gathered in Beijing and Shanghai to produce a single work of distinction in the course of five years of communist rule may be an early indication not only that they misunderstood the nature of the communist cause they helped but also that they have been unable to adjust themselves to Mao’s rule.’
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But most of all, thanks to relentless campaigns of thought reform, people themselves were careful to select reading material that was politically correct. Nobody wanted to run the risk of being infected with bourgeois poison when dreaded struggle sessions were bound to follow. Maria Yen, a student at Peking University, wrote:

Translations of the modern Soviet novelists were safe, of course; we could buy the works of such popular writers as Fadeyev and Simonov. Older masters who had influenced a whole generation of Chinese writers – Turgenev and Dostoevsky and even translations of Gorki – were dismissed as obsolete. In Chinese literature it was all right to read the works of Zhao Shuli, Ding Ling’s
The Sun Shines over the Sungari River
and the so-called ‘collective productions’ of young writers, which were hailed as being rich in ‘party traits’. Virtually everything else, including books the Communists had previously praised as ‘progressive’, was suspect.

This was in 1951, before censorship tightened up.
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Still, truly voracious readers managed to survive, often on private collections kept away from prying eyes. Kang Zhengguo, then still a young boy in the ancient capital of Xi’an, had a rebellious streak and was sent to live with his grandparents. The old house, with its whitewashed walls, hardwood floor and delightful jumble of old furnishings, was a treasure trove of all sorts of books, stuffed away in dusty piles in the attic. Kang devoured everything he could get his hands on, from Buddhist sutras and swashbuckling novels to old newspaper clippings pressed between the pages of an oversized edition of
The Thirteen Annotated Classics
. The collection would survive until the advent of the Red Guards in 1966.
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The beat of folk drums and the chant of revolutionary song displaced classical music. Records of Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Mozart and other foreign composers seen as bourgeois were quietly put away. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an talks on literature and art, the entire staff of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing decided in 1952 to debate how best to apply the Chairman’s theories to their work, and concluded that musicians must be ‘in harmony with concrete reality’. The same year the president of the Shanghai Conservatory – one of the most renowned in Asia before 1949, and a leader in modern music – wrote to the
Liberation Daily
to attack blind worshippers of Western music who thought that ‘music need not have ideological content’.
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Jazz was so much in demand before liberation that Shanghai was considered the music capital of Asia. Budding players from all over the world, as well as experienced musicians from the United States, performed in the many venues for popular music right up to 1949, but within weeks after the fall of Shanghai nightclubs were boarded up or converted into factories. The regime banned jazz outright, decrying it as degenerate, decadent and bourgeois. Even more in demand, in the decades before liberation, were female singers who incorporated Hollywood songs, jazz orchestration and local folk music into popular tunes. Music by stars such as Zhou Xuan was widely broadcast over the radio and played on the gramophone, only to be denounced as pornographic after 1949. The destruction went further: the great majority of the 80,000 records produced in the era before communism were deposited in a state archive where they deteriorated beyond repair.
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Soon ears became attuned to the new music introduced by Soviet cultural delegations. Radios started broadcasting such tunes as ‘The Favours of the Communist Party are Too Many to be Told’, ‘Hymn to Chairman Mao’, ‘Song of the New Woman’ and ‘Brother and Sister Plough the Wasteland’. Singing became popular. Unlike solos, which were intolerable expressions of bourgeois individuality, group singing was safe. And it helped spread propaganda, with songs composed for every type of activity. Farmers sang of land reform, workers of labour rights. ‘Soldiers sing while marching or when they stop to rest. Schoolchildren sing a great part of their day. Prisoners sing four hours a day. In all the indoctrination courses for the candidates for government positions, singing takes up three to four hours daily.’ Students gathered in parks on special occasions, singing a strident ‘Song of the New Peasant’ or its equivalent to the accompaniment of drums and gongs. Girls in choirs belted out such catchy tunes as ‘Ten Women Praise their Husbands’. The singing was taught with the same demanding discipline as everything else, with the result that it was often very impressive. Some may not have sung from the heart, but everybody knew the words, as they echoed through city streets and mountain valleys. Children were soon seen singing on their way home, swinging an arm to beat the cadence.
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Loudspeakers helped. They seemed to be everywhere, placed at street corners and railway stations, in dormitories, canteens and all major institutions. They often blasted the same tune, as people assembled in the morning for their fifteen minutes of calisthenics. They broke up the day, alternating between political speeches and revolutionary songs as people had their lunch break or made their way back home at the end of their shift. They played more songs in the evening. So widespread and intrusive were loudspeakers that regulations curbing their use after midnight had to be introduced in Beijing, with little effect.
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With new songs came new plays, welcomed at least initially by many viewers. Young people in particular did not always care for old-style Chinese opera with its classical plots and extravagant costumes. Maria Yen, like many other students who supported the revolution, rushed to see
The White-Haired Girl
. When the curtain went up she saw the interior of an ordinary farmer’s hut, with realistic, rough furniture, a dab of snow against the papered window. ‘And no lords and ladies with falsetto voices minced out on the stage; instead we found a simple peasant, bent with work and with age, speaking to his young daughter.’ The old father was forced to surrender his daughter into the hands of his rapacious creditor, but was so heartbroken that he hanged himself. ‘Some of us were close to tears as we watched the landlord and his hired bully pull the girl away from the father’s body to carry her back to the landlord’s household. All over the audience we could feel the indignation rise as we watched the girl being beaten and abused like a slave by the haughty women of the household.’ The plot was simple. The daughter becomes pregnant, and the landlord promises marriage, but sells her to a brothel instead. She escapes and hides in a cave with her baby for two years, her hair growing long and white. The communists liberate the village from the Japanese, and the young girl is finally reunited with one of the guerrilla fighters, a childhood friend she always loved. The landlord stands trial as the peasants shout their verdict: the death penalty. It was a gripping story. The dialogue, singing and acting flowed naturally, creating a spectacle that touched the emotions of many who watched it. The audience burst out in applause as the villainous landlord was dragged off for execution and the curtain came down.
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The
White-Haired Girl
was produced as an opera, as a film and also as a ballet. It was performed by professional theatre societies, travelling drama groups, military acting troupes and amateur actors organised in factories, offices, schools, universities and youth clubs. Other plays, for instance Cao Yu’s
Thunderstorm
, were endorsed, all following the precise rules and regulations of the Drama Reform Committee, set up by the Ministry of Culture in July 1950. And conversely, anything that smacked even remotely of bourgeois individualism was proscribed. A few foreign playwrights managed to survive – largely thanks to the fact that they were allowed in the Soviet Union. In the case of Shakespeare, for instance, two leading critics from Moscow had concluded that the English bard had exposed the evils of the capitalist system, which paved the way for a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
by a theatre school in Beijing in 1956 – something so exceptional in the People’s Republic that it warranted a full review in the
Illustrated London News
.
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Theatre was propaganda, and it spread even further thanks to short, simple and very topical plays. Like the rice-sprout songs performed by the dance troupes of the People’s Liberation Army, military actors helped propagate the message by mounting popular plays almost anywhere, in squares, gardens, parks and other public spaces where pedestrians could be corralled to watch and applaud. The plays always addressed the latest government campaign in simple terms easily comprehensible to illiterate farmers, but they became rather predictable. There was always a scene of a soldier placing his foot on the protruding belly of an enemy lying on the ground with legs in the air, whether he was an evil landlord, undercover spy or imperialist exploiter.
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Shanghai had been second only to Hollywood in terms of the film industry. But much of it was destroyed in the Second World War, and whatever vestiges remained the new regime swept away. The most popular genres had happily mixed pulp fiction, swashbuckling adventure and comedy with avant-garde techniques to create a celluloid language which was popular all over China. Classical-costume, knight-errant, martial-arts and magic-spirit films attracted even larger audiences, capturing not only millions in China, but many more abroad, since South-east Asia was their biggest market. Hollywood itself was popular. When the communists marched into Shanghai, the Cathay was advertising
I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now
, a musical film in Technicolor featuring June Haver. None of this was exclusive to the great cities along the coast, since already in the 1930s cinema had penetrated deep into the hinterland. Even in Kunming, a medium-sized city in the subtropical south, half a million people went to see the 166 films shown in 1935.
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A campaign against foreign cinema followed within months of liberation. Foreign films were deemed reactionary and decadent, and were ousted by Russian ones – for instance
Lenin in October
,
The Virgin Land
and
The Great Citizens
. Within a year or so hundreds of employees were working at several dubbing centres. Some of the films were well done and inspiring, especially those made before the war (for example
The Battleship Potemkin
), but many were dull, even in the eyes of leftist students. So few people wanted to see them that they were never profitable. In Beijing prices had to be cut several times to attract a crowd. Still the masses stayed away, until the authorities granted the theatre operators permission to show foreign pictures from outside the Soviet Union for five days a month. But the contrast between a full house for reactionary films and the rows of empty seats on days when healthy productions were shown was an embarrassment. A prompt ban resolved the issue. The Korean War brought an end to Hollywood everywhere in the country. In cinema, as in other art forms, the tremendous burst of creativity that was supposed inevitably to follow revolution, as artists were freed from the fetters of feudalism and imperialism, never materialised.
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Like every other social group, religious leaders were lured into the embrace of the party by promises of freedom. They were quickly disabused. The pretence of religious freedom was upheld for a year or two after liberation, but the leadership were secretly determined to extirpate all rival belief systems. In February 1951, Hu Qiaomu, who headed the propaganda department, upheld the Soviet attack on the church as an example for emulation. But as he spoke to his underlings, he warned that it would take time to ferret out all diehard believers.
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