Performing the Socialist State offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, it identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role and artistic achievements of performance across eras.
Xiaomei Chen focuses on the long and remarkable careers of three founders of modern Chinese theater and film, Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. They introduced Western plays and theories, adapted traditional Chinese operas, and helped develop a tradition of leftist theater in the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist canon. Chen investigates how their visions for a free, democratic China fared in the initial years after the founding of the People's Republic, briefly thriving only to founder as artists had to adapt to the Communist Party's demand to produce ideologically correct works. Bridging the "red classics" of the 1960s and the postsocialist period, she considers the transformations of the depictions of women, peasants, soldiers, scientists, and revolutionary history in films, plays, and operas and examines how the market economy, star culture, social networks, and state sponsorship affected dramatic productions.
Countering the view that state interference stifles artistic imagination, Chen argues that theater professionals have negotiated with ruling ideologies to create works that are politically acceptable yet aesthetically ingenious. Emphasizing the dynamism of Chinese performance cultures, Performing the Socialist State has implications spanning global theater, comparative literature, political and social histories, and Chinese cultural studies.
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Xiaomei Chen is Distinguished Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia, 2016); Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (2002); and Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (second and expanded edition, 2002), as well as editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (Columbia, 2010; abridged edition, 2014), among other publications. Chen is also coeditor of Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era (2021), which received the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.