Introduction
This paper investigates pingtan storytellers’ explicit and taciturn resistance against domination by the local cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It challenges a long-held scholarly and commonsensical assumption about the Party-state's success in achieving hegemony over submissive artists in Mao times (1949–1976). I select pingtan storytelling as the subject of this study because of its popularity in the twentieth century. As a time-honoured folkloric art with a history of two centuries, pingtanFootnote 1 storytelling is ‘a synthetic performance medium that combines oral narration, dramatic dialogue, singing, and the music of stringed instruments’ in order to relate stories in the Suzhou dialect.Footnote 2 Since the 1930s, the commercialization of pingtan storytelling in Shanghai and its adjacent cities made it an enormously welcomed means of entertainment in the Yangzi Delta.Footnote 3 Its popularity did not wane with the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. By the late 1950s, the audience of pingtan storytelling amounted to approximately 30,000 per day, second only to the number of film-goers.Footnote 4 Its glaring market success, both before and after the Communist takeover of China, impelled local governments to appropriate the pingtan art into the Party's propaganda instrument by means of collectivizing performers and reforming the repertoire. As early as 1951, the Shanghai People's Pingtan Working Troupe (Shanghai shi renmin pingtan gongzuo tuan, hereafter the Shanghai Troupe) was founded and became one of the three earliest professional theatrical and folkloric performing enterprises fully funded and directly led by the Shanghai municipal government. Despite the establishment of the state-owned Shanghai Troupe, the vast majority of pingtan storytellers maintained their self-employed status throughout the 1950s. From 1958, local governments in the Yangzi Delta took concerted action to crack down on storytellers’ self-employment by purging dissident pingtan artists and forcing others to join newly founded troupes. In consequence, in March 1960, hundreds of hitherto self-employed storytellers were coerced into taking substantial pay cuts and were thereby absorbed into five troupes such as the Spark Pingtan Troupe (Xinghuo pingtan tuan, hereafter the Spark). Local governments thus succeeded in persuading or forcing storytellers to collaborate with the PRC regime to fulfil their political tasks of engaging in performing tours in the countryside, state-owned enterprises, military units, and schools, and thereby preaching the Party's social and political agendas.
Storytellers’ accommodation in the early 1960s appears to confirm scholars’ assumption that the CCP was able to transform artists and performers into collaborative ‘cultural workers’ (wenhua gongzuozhe) during Mao times. Recent research into the relationship between the PRC state and the artists, for example, indicates that the Party-state either provided artists with financial support and patronageFootnote 5 or forcibly co-opted them to be CCP functionaries.Footnote 6 Meanwhile, the Party succeeded in politicizing China's culture and making it the state apparatus of propaganda by regulating the audience's private timeFootnote 7 and eliminating the cultural market.Footnote 8 According to Mark Bender, in the case of pingtan storytelling, it was the political authorities, but not the market that served as the source of artistic innovation and creation.Footnote 9 The Party's supervision and intervention, however, inflicted irreparable damage to Chinese culture. As Marja Kaikonen summarizes, the Party-state's patronage made Chinese storytelling ‘a cultural relic’ rather than a living popular art and viable entertainment.Footnote 10
By emphasizing the CCP's capacity to transform artists as well as their work, scholars tend to ignore another important aspect of the relationship between artists and the Party-state, namely, the former's self-conscious resistance to the latter's domination. In the case of pingtan storytelling, the resistance of the storytellers against the CCP cadres was mounted in two ways: to limit Party control over the repertoire and to fight economic exploitation. Whilst cadres expected, and sometimes forced, storytellers to tell ‘new stories’ (xinshu), which were written after 1949 to highlight the CCP's achievements and Communists’ heroism, or to weed out elements of superstition, eroticism, and feudal moral codes from classic stories, storytellers nevertheless often violated those stipulations by distorting a storyline to demonstrate both their opposition to the intervention of their works by the political authorities and to cater to the audience's preferences. The relative artistic autonomy of the storytellers in the early 1960s resulted, in no small part, from the flexibility of pingtan performances. This ability and tendency to engage in improvised performances made pingtan storytelling a highly ‘censorship-unfriendly’ art that eluded the censors.Footnote 11
More importantly, the local government's inability to subsidize the above mentioned five troupes prompted the storytellers to stage their stories to please the listeners and thereby gain profits as the five troupes were organized under a ‘collective ownership’ (jiti suoyou zhi) without state funding. Pingtan troupes were able to reap profits to survive primarily because the cultural market continued to exist and to play a vital role in mediating the relationship between the state and the artists during Mao times.Footnote 12 Furthermore, the early 1960s, which witnessed the revival and development of the market and a loosened cultural management amid the ‘cultural thaw’,Footnote 13 provided pingtan artists with fertile soil for artistic autonomy and profit-making. Under these circumstances, storytellers of the five troupes, like performers in other collectively owned performing ensembles, relied heavily on the market to earn profits by providing the audience with a ‘market-oriented popular entertainment’,Footnote 14 though they also received fixed salaries from their respective troupes. After deducting the cost of salaries and benefits such as medical care and retirement pensions, the troupes held the remaining money in a ‘public accumulation fund’ (gongji jin). It was thus evident that first, local governments did not financially control the troupes and pingtan artists, who continued to select their repertoire and performing styles to serve their audiences. Second, as the troupes withheld a large portion of their revenue and paid their employers relatively meagre salaries, the tension gradually built up between cadres and storytellers, who firmly believed that they were being economically exploited. In the early 1960s, such simmering resentment was often vented in public during a performance and occasionally escalated into open conflict with the political authorities.
The issue of resistance and accommodation
Recent scholarship has focused on the contest between Chinese intellectuals and the Party-state prior to the Cultural Revolution.Footnote 15 Just as resistance beyond the sphere of Chinese intellectuals has received inadequate scholarly attention,Footnote 16 the pingtan storytellers’ challenge to state supervision and intervention has also been largely overlooked or trivialized by scholars, their listeners, and even themselves. During my interviews with a pingtan fan and a pingtan writer in the summer of 2010, they both agreed that it was oxymoronic to juxtapose ‘pingtan storytellers’ with ‘resistance’, when considering the activism of the pingtan artists in promoting the CCP's political and social agendas.Footnote 17 Likewise, Yang Zijiang (1926–2011), a storyteller previously hired by the Spark, labelled all his fellow pingtan performers as ‘royalists’ (baohuang dang), who easily succumbed to the despotic power of the Party.Footnote 18
All my interviewees’ denial of storytellers’ resistance and emphasis on their accommodation resulted from a narrowly-defined definition of resistance as mere dramatic political actions. Here, it is imperative that resistance be recognized, first of all, not necessarily as political confrontation, but as ‘everyday forms’, to borrow the term from James Scott.Footnote 19 In the early and mid-1960s, storytellers demonstrated their resistance by means of libelling the Communist cadres, frequently asking for sick-leave, refusing to conform to the dress code during performances, and threatening to withdraw from the troupes. Most seriously, they engaged in counter-propaganda on stage by distorting storylines and making incendiary comments, or simply by telling risqué jokes. The seemingly passive and apolitical on and off-stage resistance by the storytellers was, in James Scott's words, ‘[an] implicit disavowal of public and symbolic goals’.Footnote 20 In other words, they succeeded in undermining the Communist cadres’ agenda in trying to transform them into political propagandists.
Resistance is a complex process where resisters ‘may simultaneously support the structures of domination’.Footnote 21 As Michel Foucault has pointed out, power produces not only docility, but also the very thing which resists it. For example, as modern disciplinary techniques brought skilled workers together, they also created the possibility of workers going on strike.Footnote 22 In this sense, both collaboration and resistance result from power, for power can produce techniques for resistance.Footnote 23 Foucault's conceptualization between power and resistance, however, needs some modification in its application to the pingtan storytellers’ challenge to political authorities on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, the efforts of local government to politicize pingtan storytelling by creating new political stories did, ironically, provide pingtan performers with the weaponry to unleash their disillusionment with the reality. In other words, state domination created a means of resistance. On the other hand, pingtan storytellers’ techniques of resistance, such as humour and other improvised performances, gradually took shape in its long history, but were not a product of state domination after 1949.
Therefore, the Communist state's disciplinary power to organize storytellers did not bring about the latter's concerted actions against political authorities. The resistance of the storytellers remained largely uncoordinated. In contrast, the CCP's collectivization of storytellers facilitated a collaboration between the pingtan artists and the CCP to propagate government-sanctioned ideologies, as anticipated by the political authorities. Yet it was the same group of storytellers who, at times, appeared angry and insubordinate on-stage or in day-to-day communications with the Communist cadres. I argue that the seemingly self-contradictory moves to collaborate with and resist the political authorities were well-calculated to serve the same purpose, namely, to gain profits and increase income.
Pingtan storytelling
The capacity of pingtan storytellers both to negotiate with and to resist the state in the early and mid-1960s stemmed from their great popularity and unique performing and narrating skills, and because of this popularity, the CCP cadres depended on the storytellers to popularize the Party's social and political agendas by performing not only in commercial theatres, but also in schools, urban enterprises, and rural communities. Consequently, students, teachers, workers, and peasants, most of whom had rarely frequented commercial storytelling venues, became ardent pingtan listeners. Collaborative storytellers were required to tell newly written stories to trumpet the heroics of CCP members before and after 1949. Although the political authorities supposedly dictated the content of stage performances, the highly flexible performing and narrative techniques of the pingtan storytellers demeaned that control. For pingtan storytellers and listeners alike, a successful rendition of a story did not necessarily reside in its storyline or themes, but in the way it was played out. As Pen-yeh Tsao points out, the presentation, not the story per se, is crucial to captivate the audience.Footnote 24 The next section focusses on some of the narrating and performing skills of the storytellers, which enhanced the popularity of the stories, and also endowed the art with political implications.
Xuetou
Xuetou (sometimes xue), translated as humour or comic elements, is ‘words or acts by the storyteller to amuse or to excite laughter’.Footnote 25 Humour is not just used to spice up the stories, but constitutes an integral part of the stories. Just like the attempts by Communist censors to minimize humour in literatureFootnote 26 and xiangsheng, a comic monologue or dialogue popular in northern China, to ensure that listeners would not ‘be amused for the wrong reasons’,Footnote 27 political authorities in the Yangzi Delta have placed the ‘humour’ in pingtan storytelling under close scrutiny since 1949.Footnote 28 For radical leftist officials and writers, humour was a ‘soft sword’ (ruan daozi), with which counter-revolutionaries viciously attacked Socialist China.Footnote 29 Though politically moderate bureaucrats had a more tolerant and even appreciative attitude towards humour, they persisted in cautioning against unhealthy and seditious jokes.Footnote 30 The concerns of the communist cadres over humour were by no means unfounded. Wenwei Du calls humour in pingtan storytelling ‘social commentaries’, which, in a liberalized atmosphere, could become political weaponry.Footnote 31 In the highly disciplined society of the 1960s, however, humour was no less a weapon for storytellers by which to conduct counter-propaganda and voice their bitter disappointment at the economic hardship following the Great Leap Forward.Footnote 32
Chuancha
Chuancha is translated as ‘stuck-ins’ or ‘insertions’, which denote ‘humorous remarks and anecdotes inserted into the narrative or as part of the introductory patter before the actual storytelling begins’.Footnote 33 Though Mark Bender categorizes stuck-ins under humour, they can stand as an independent performing skill of pingtan storytelling because they comprise a wide variety of humorous remarks, news or rumours, commentaries of contemporary society and politics, anecdotes, and historical facts. Not every element of stuck-ins is intended to raise laughter from the audience. On most occasions, stuck-ins serves to contrast, confirm, or enrich the main plots.Footnote 34 Yet, on other occasions, stuck-ins can deviate from pingtan storylines to such an extent that they not only disrupt the narrative, but also adversely affect the central theme of the story.
Flexibility
Both humour and stuck-in are dependent on the capabilities of the storyteller to improvise, thus typifying the extraordinary flexibility of the pingtan storytellers. Storytelling flexibility stems from the lack of necessity to keep performances in line with written scripts, prior to the Communist takeover of China. Equipped with ‘promptbooks’ (jiaoben) rather than with scripts, pingtan storytellers took the liberty to add or subtract elements constantly and thereby manipulated the storylines. The non-existence of scripts in the world of pingtan storytelling prior to 1949 was caused by two factors. First, as Nancy Hodes posits, the process of transmission was ‘overwhelmingly an oral/aural from master to apprentice, with hardly any intervention of the written word’. Second, putting stories on paper ‘would be the height of folly’ for storytellers who depended on their oral artistry for a living.Footnote 35 Since the founding of the PRC, even though the political authorities demanded that classic stories and scripts for newly-created stories be written down, the recording of these stories has been unsuccessful. When Susan Blader compared her observation of Jin Shengbo's (b. 1930) stage performances with a book that transcribed the same story, for example, she found that the printed version did not include ‘paralinguistic features’ and thereby ‘entirely destroys the rhythm and tight, suspenseful structure’ of Jin's oral version. A disappointed Susan Blader concludes that ‘[o]ral narrative art is evanescent and perhaps it was never meant to be collected, preserved, fixed, or even studied as we all are assiduously doing’.Footnote 36
Accommodation: pingtan stories as propaganda
The flexibility of pingtan storytelling proved to be a double-edged sword to the political authorities. When storytellers were willing to cooperate with local governments, their flexible ways of performance and mobility were conducive to their undertaking the task of political indoctrination with their performances in schools or state-owned enterprises designated by Communist cadres. It was, however, not the PRC government's intention that performances in non-commercial venues should cause performing enterprises financial loss. The Ministry of Culture, for example, published a directive in 1953 requiring all performing enterprises in China to gain revenues in performances for rural communities, military units, and state-run enterprises.Footnote 37 To follow the instruction from the central government, Shen Dongshan (b. 1930), then hired by the Spark, set a range of prices for his performances: five yuan for primary schools, 20 yuan for middle schools, and 40 yuan for colleges. In early 1966, when he was invited to tell a story about Jiao Yulu (1922–1964), a deceased model CCP cadre, Shen charged enterprises in Shanghai 40 yuan for each performance. As he was accused of overpricing his performances, Shen retorted:
When I performed in the Shanghai Tools Factory (Shanghai gongju chang) for 2,900 listeners, [I] charged 40 yuan, [which meant that] each ticket was [priced] less than two fen. Would you say [the price] was high or not? Furthermore, [the Spark] is a professional performing ensemble receiving no financial support from the government. There are 49 performers [in the Spark] with 49 families [to feed]. We count [solely] on ourselves to earn revenues. I earn one hundred and twenty yuan [per month] and won't gain one extra fen [by charging 40 yuan for each performance].Footnote 38
Despite the accusation of surcharging listeners, the Spark benefitted enormously from the performances of the stories that were designed to promote Jiao Yulu's self-sacrifice and lofty Communist ideals. Su Yuyin (b. 1929), Shen Dongshan's colleague in the Spark, remembered that they were inundated with telephone calls from countless companies and factories all over the city soliciting performances of Jiao Yulu's stories. Considering Shen Dongshan was not able to single-handedly meet all the demands, the troupe quickly trained two more storytellers to tell the same stories in Shanghai.Footnote 39
Storytellers from the Spark also transplanted such special performances to other cities in the Yangzi Delta. Zhou Xiaoqiu (1921–2010), whose stories were deemed to lack popularity after he joined the Spark, once reported to the director upon his return to Shanghai that his performances drew an average 1,000 listeners per day in Changshu, Jiangsu Province. Such an abnormally high attendance amazed and confused his colleagues. Shortly afterwards, Zhou's fellow storytellers learned that he was assigned to tell stories in a primary school with student population of more than 1,000. In this manner, Zhou shared with teachers the responsibility of educating the children by telling the White-haired Girl (Baimao nü) whilst garnering profits for the Spark.Footnote 40 As he was given credits for cooperating with educators, the same Zhou Xiaoqiu would be under scathing attack from Communist cadres for his vulgar jokes and manipulation of plots when telling revolutionary stories in commercial venues.Footnote 41
Resistance: pingtan stories as counter-propaganda
The tension between storytellers and troupes
Storytellers like Zhou Xiaoqiu garnered profits in both non-commercial and commercial venues, such as teahouses and pingtan-only theatres, in the first half of the 1960s. Yet, whilst the troupe coffers were fattened, the storytellers, whose salaries were fixed, hardly benefitted from their own market success. A 1962 report revealed that public accumulation funds in the five recently established troupes grew exponentially. The Spark, for example, held more than 100,000 yuan.Footnote 42 Storytellers, however, never took pride in their rich troupes. Yang Zijiang once compared the Spark to a glass safe, meaning that storytellers were able to see the money inside, but were not entitled to it.Footnote 43 By 1962, storytellers felt increasingly disappointed by their relatively low salaries and without a raise in two years. A governmental report indicated that the majority of storytellers found it impossible to make both ends meet without the help of loans or by pawning their properties. In the Spark, 70 per cent of its storytellers had pawned some of their belongings. Performers showed the troupe's cadres pawn tickets in order to ask for extra subsidies. A performer's wife was seen to peddle vegetables outside a theatre and purposely to disclose her identity as the storyteller's spouse to boost the sale.Footnote 44 Yang Zijiang recalled that his family was deep in crisis as the 11 family members lived on 120 yuan, his monthly salary, whereas the minimal living cost in Shanghai in the 1960s was 12 yuan per person. Yang remembered that he had pawned whatever he was able to find in his home and, as a result, his house was as empty as a ‘football field’.Footnote 45
The complaints of Storytellers about low incomes were contagious. Performers from other troupes unleashed their frustration in various ways. The tension between rich troupes and poverty-stricken storytellers was not always handled in private meetings or conversations within the troupes, but was also brought into the open in their performances. A storyteller from the collectively owned Jiangnan Pingtan Troupe (Jiangnan pingtan tuan, hereafter the Jiangnan) once deliberately lowered his voice whilst telling a story. When listeners protested that they were unable to hear him, the storyteller dryly responded, ‘The money I am earning allows [me to tell the story as loudly as what listeners of] the front three rows can hear. If [listeners from] the fourth row can hear, they [should feel] lucky’. Other storytellers from the Jiangnan displayed their frustration on stage by refusing to purchase and wear the required costumes, electing instead to be clothed in shorts, T-shirts, and overshoes on stage. Listeners thus gave the Jiangnan, whose members were sloppily addressed, a nickname as the ‘beggars’ troupe’ (jiaohua tuan).Footnote 46 Troupers of the Spark adopted the same strategy to display their poverty in public. During a performance in 1962, for example, Yang Zijiang wore a casual short gown and explained to the amused audience that he had sold his long robe because of grinding poverty.Footnote 47 A government report noted that more and more storytellers from the Spark were dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and lined robes to perform in summertime.Footnote 48
When I asked Yang Zijiang to verify the accusation in the report, he commented that the improper dress was by no means his boldest action against the cadres. He was daring enough to pound the table to quarrel with the Spark's director.Footnote 49 Both Yang and Su Yuyin confirmed that most of their colleagues had contempt for the director.Footnote 50 A rumour circulated that the director, who had been an obscure storyteller throughout the 1950s, won favour with the CCP for his fraudulent declaration of his political accomplishments.Footnote 51 What upset Su Yuyin, Yang Zijiang, and many of their colleagues most was a strong feeling that the director's complicity with other Communist cadres to exploit the troupe economically. Chen Hesheng's salary in the Spark, for example, amounted to one-tenth of the monthly revenue he gained from the market. Performers from other troupes shared such an assertion and unanimously believed that their monthly incomes were equal to only a few days’ box office sales.Footnote 52 Wang Xiongfei (1922–1994), a Zhejiang-based storyteller, for example, griped to his friend on numerous occasions that he had already earned his salary of a whole year after only 19 days of performances. In other words, he had to submit all the revenues of the remaining 300 days to his affiliated troupe in Zhejiang.Footnote 53 As storytellers felt vastly underpaid, they chose not to perform, usually by feigning illness. Hence, requesting sick-leave, and extra subsidies on a regular basis became a passive, but effective, means of resistance by storytellers in the Spark.Footnote 54 In practice, the Spark sent inexperienced disciples to fill in for storytellers who were on temporary leave. On 15 May 1965, for example, a performance by the Spark featured only one experienced storyteller, whilst the other four bailed out and left their young disciples to fill in for them.Footnote 55
The resentment in the minds of storytellers erupted into a collective movement in the Yangzi Delta in 1962 when the raison d’être of organizing pingtan troupes was disputed. In Suzhou, for example, the director of the Suzhou Pingtan Troupe (Suzhou shi pingtan tuan) was lobbied, but in vain, to quit the troupe and restore the status of self-employment.Footnote 56 In Shanghai, a number of young storytellers asked to leave the state-sponsored Shanghai Troupe in order to organize their own performing ensembles to create more opportunities to perform and thereby receive higher incomes.Footnote 57 In the Spark, Yang Zijiang and some of his colleagues threatened to withdraw from the troupe unless they were awarded a pay increase.Footnote 58 Yang's loud cry did take effect, as he was approached by the government of the Yangpu District (Yangpu qu), with which the Spark was registered, to renegotiate his salary. In order to pacify the talented but defiant Yang, the cadres of the district government agreed to raise his total monthly income to 180 yuan. After accepting the offer and vowing to stay put, Yang Zijiang confessed to the district government that he had written to quit the Spark not because of his hostility towards the Party's policy of collectivizing storytellers but due to the abject poverty that his family had been suffering.Footnote 59
The 1962 movement was in reality part and parcel of a nationwide unrest among disgruntled dramatists and storytellers who sought to restore their self-employed status.Footnote 60 Yet the movement gained little momentum among pingtan performers. The vast majority of storytellers were easily pacified and continued to serve the Spark or other municipal troupes. For some storytellers like Yang Zijiang, they achieved their goal of a pay increase. As Yang Zijiang put it, it was crucial to ‘know which way the wind blows’ (shi shiwu) and to avoid direct confrontation with the political authorities.Footnote 61 With a consensus that they would score no points in political games with the CCP cadres, storytellers adeptly resorted to the stage as the outlet to unleash their growing disillusionment with the status quo, something they felt impotent to change. Despite their inability in the real world to improve their livelihoods and escape the suffocating efforts of the political authorities to discipline them, storytellers were trained to stitch their critical and humorous remarks seamlessly with plots or subplots of stories they narrated. In most cases, the audience approved these oblique but scathing criticisms of the contemporary political and economic situations with wide laughter. As Xiaomei Chen has argued, eruptions of applause and laughter in theatres was an indicator of the audience's approval or disapproval of certain political and social issues and thereby had special political implications in Socialist China.Footnote 62 Therefore, Communist cadres had every reason to accuse such storytelling of being not only culturally vulgar but also politically subversive. In the words of the author of a government report, storytellers ‘were engaging in counter-propaganda on stage, [where they] stood in the place of enemy's classes to disseminate anti-socialist thoughts’ by making ribald jokes and inserting politically questionable plots or subplots in both classic stories—those produced before 1949— and newly written ones.Footnote 63
Classic stories
From the outset, radical Communist cadres presumed that it was the classic stories that were fraught with morally depraved, ideologically backward, and politically subversive elements. Supported by a number of government reports about stage performances of classic stories in Shanghai in the early 1960s, such an assumption somehow legitimized and precipitated the Shanghai government's 1963 edict to ban the performance of classic theatrical plays and stories and encourage artists to ‘greatly write the thirteen years’ (daxie shisan nian). Writers of those reports pointed their finger at a number of storytellers, claiming that their disturbing ways of performing the already ‘bad stories’ (huai shu) poisoned the audiences. For example, when a female storyteller was telling Fate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao yinyuan), a story set in 1930s China, she inserted racy details about the villainous warlord's eagerness to kiss the heroine. Later, she went so far as to act out kissing on stage to amuse listeners. In a story about late Yuan (1271–1368) peasant warfare, the male performer spent a large portion of time in imparting knowledge about gambling to the audience.Footnote 64 Clearly, the narrative technique employed by the storyteller could be categorized as ‘stuck-in’, which helped the narrator to deviate from the storyline. Meanwhile, ‘humour’ (xuetou) was also inserted during other pingtan performances. For instance, when telling Pair of Pearl Phoenixes (Shuang zhufeng), a typical classic story about the romance of a scholar and a beauty, the storyteller added a sexual innuendo to describe a young lady's nap in a drowsy summer afternoon: The woman was said to be half-naked when lying on the bed. Yet, the storyteller joked that he was not telling a risqué story because a screen in the lady's house blocked the view of her body. Even storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe reportedly spiced up their stories with lurid anecdotes and bawdy jokes to entertain the listeners.Footnote 65
Facing a large number of classic stories that perpetuated feudal ideologies and bourgeois morals, the writer of the report concluded by asking how such stories and their storytellers could undertake the task of promoting Socialism and Communism among the audience. The report thus ended with a suggestion to stage more new stories about Communist revolution and to restrict the performance of the classic tales.Footnote 66
‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’
Performing new stories, nevertheless, did not warrant the spread of desired government-sanctioned ideologies. In these new stories, invariably featuring bitter struggles between Communist heroes or heroines and their enemies (Japanese invaders, Nationalist Party officers, secret agents from Taiwan or America, landlords, and a variety of counter-revolutionaries), the storytellers tended to manipulate their tales by spotlighting villains and accordingly downplaying the heroics of the protagonists. Storytellers highlighted villainous characters based on two considerations. First, there was more leeway in the characterization of villains because negative characters tended to ‘be based on the personal observations’ of artists.Footnote 67 Second, as Perry Link posits, ‘the villains were usually much more interesting—one might even say attractive—than’ heroes whom authors intended to eulogize.Footnote 68 In many cases, the audience was fascinated not by the political and military feats of the Communists, but by the enemies’ pursuit of luxurious lives and comical words, and awkward actions. In late 1964, Communist censors came to realize that the new stories which had been written to give wide publicity to the achievements of the CCP before and after 1949 were in fact being easily distorted to perpetuate feudal legacies and publicize bourgeois lifestyles. Communist cadres named such bad stories disguised in revolutionary cloaks as ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’ (hongpi baixin shu), which storytellers from the Spark frequently performed to ‘satirize, verbally attack, and denigrate’ (fengma chouhua) the Communist revolution in China.Footnote 69
Communist cadres reached this conclusion after listening to nine full-length stories (one per month) staged by storytellers from the Spark between February and October 1964. The writer of a report dated 23 October 1964 classified ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’ into a number of categories. First, storytellers ‘pointed at the mulberry to revile the ash’ (zhisang mahuai) or, in other words, launched oblique attacks in their stories against Socialist China. In Merle Goldman's view, the strategy of ‘pointing at the mulberry to revile the ash’ was part of China's literary and political tradition and also employed by Chinese dissident intellectuals to criticize the regime in Mao times.Footnote 70 In Invisible Sentry (Anshao), adapted from a 1957 film about the Communist police's success in cracking down on a spy organization in the 1950s, the arrogant and sly Nationalist secret agent was arrested. Before he was ordered to confess, however, the captive made some special requests such as adequate food, a packet of cigarettes each day, and exemption from forced labour. The reporter was clearly offended by the storyteller's portrayal of the spy's haughtiness. Such requests, nonetheless, hinted at the storytellers’ longing for material abundance and political security. When an elderly storyteller told Red Crag (Hongyan), he illustrated a Communist traitor's mental struggle about whether to betray the CCP and his aspiration for material comfort. The storyteller rationalized the traitor's capitulation to the enemy in his lengthy monologue, in which the traitor made a comparison of lives under the rule of the Nationalist Party and the CCP. After joining the CCP, the traitor grumbled, he was haunted by anxiety and fear each and every day. Yet lives in Republican China (1911–1949) were so comfortable that he could live in a foreign-style mansion, drive cars, and dance in ballrooms.Footnote 71Red Crag, one of the most-read revolutionary novels before the Cultural Revolution, illustrated a group of incarcerated CCP members’ sustained struggles against the ruling Nationalist Party in a prison on the eve of the CCP's victory. The writer of the government report thus perceived that the storyteller's purposeful distortion of this classic revolutionary literary work was to vent his discontent with the CCP and articulate his nostalgia for the pre-1949 times.Footnote 72
The second category included stories that could ‘not tell friend from foe’ (diwo bufen). In other words, the audience was unable to determine whether the storytellers were praising the heroes or blaming their enemies during their performances, and, more seriously, it appeared that the storytellers even scoffed at the Chinese people. In a story about guerrilla warfare in northern China during the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945), for example, the storyteller explained that the post-war Japanese were bigger in stature than previously because they were children of Japanese military men who slept with Chinese women during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. The report found the theory outrageous as the performer light-heartedly made Japanese invaders’ atrocities and Chinese people's sufferings a topic of casual chat. In The Eternal Wave (Yongbu xiaoshi de dianbo), a story adapted from a 1958 film about underground fights between the CCP and the Japanese and the Nationalist Party in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, the protagonist, a CCP undercover agent, was always portrayed to be too slow-witted to be responsive to the wretchedly hostile environment. The storyteller joked that even his enemy could not bear the sight of such a ‘moron’ (shoutou).Footnote 73
The Eternal Wave also featured a wide spectrum of urban lives in pre-1949 Shanghai such as the secret society, ballroom dancing, and western-style food, all of which defined another category of stories under Communist censorship. Military Depot 51 (Di 51hao bingzhan), originally a 1961 film centering around the Communist undercover agents’ success in supplying the Communist base area with ammunitions in the early 1940s fell into the category. In the story, the protagonist, a Communist agent, managed to infiltrate a mafia organization in Shanghai. The storyteller thus rode the opportunity to furnish the audience with detailed information about the set-up of China's secret society and mafia jargon and to instil the audience with behavioural norms in colonial Shanghai. The last category of ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’ manipulated the plots to such a degree that accounts about revolutionaries paled in comparison with details about villains, which storytellers usually fleshed out in an animated way. For example, in Red Sun (Hongri), a story adapted from a war film (1963) with the same title, the storyteller spared no effort to clarify political cliques inside the Nationalist Party. In Wang Xiaohe, a story featuring a working class leader in the 1940s, the storyteller was obviously more interested in furnishing details about the Nationalist municipal government and gangsters in Shanghai in the 1940s. Each time, when the Communist protagonist Wang Xiaohe (1924–1948) showed up, the storyteller was about to finish the performance and therefore brushed lightly over Wang's heroics.Footnote 74
According to the author, the production of ‘Stories with Red skins and White Hearts’ resulted from storytellers’ dubious class backgrounds. The report asserted that some performers from the Spark had been Japanese collaborators during the Anti-Japanese War, ex-policemen, descendants of bourgeois families, concubines, gangsters, and drug addicts. In short, they could more or less be classified as the people's enemy, but would never become cultural workers serving Socialism without a complete transformation in character.Footnote 75 Much to the surprise of the Communist cadres, nevertheless, not only those who grew up in pre-1949 China and had yet to be re-educated oftentimes distorted storylines, but also the new breed of pingtan performers were inclined to stage ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’. From 14 February 1965, a pair of young storytellers told Invisible Sentry in a theatre located in the eastern suburb of Shanghai. Learning that the storytellers had obtained the story of Invisible Sentry, a typical ‘bad story’, from an elderly pingtan performer from the Spark, local cadres personally attended their performance, only to reconfirm that the story represented numerous aspects of urban bourgeois life that Communist cadres loathed to see. In an episode set in a ballroom in Hong Kong, for example, the storytellers hummed the tune of Jazz music and imparted knowledge about ballroom dancing to the audience. They excited the audience by reminding them of long-forbidden dances such the waltz and rumba. In another episode, the female spy from Hong Kong tried to seduce a Communist police officer by wearing a translucent silk gown. Communist cadres later learned that the two young storytellers performed Invisible Sentry rather than another new story, The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji), the future ‘model play’ (yangban xi), chiefly because the former commanded a much larger audience. When Invisible Sentry was staged, the number of listeners attending each performance was between 200 and 300, as opposed to 20 or 30 for The Red Lantern. Here, it was evident that in the 1960s the choice of repertoire was greatly dictated by attendance rates. To the astonishment of the Communist cadres, both storytellers were slightly over 20 years of age and had received their education in the PRC era, but they were still more willing to spend a great deal of time in preparing for their performances by gathering information about the lavish lifestyles of colonial Hong Kong and pre-1949 Shanghai. In this way, they not only rejected the CCP's ideological indoctrination but also actively popularized the ‘old decadent lifestyles’ (jiude fuxiu shenghuo).Footnote 76
The pair of young storytellers chose to perform Invisible Sentry rather than The Red Lantern because the audience heartily embraced the entertaining but often subversive elements contained in the political stories. In all ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’, the accomplishments of Communist heroes and heroines were significantly downplayed by the storytellers. The audience thus shared with the storytellers a desire for an affluent lifestyle in the context of widespread famine in the wake of the Great Leap Forward movement. The aspiration for a plentiful supply of food, housing, entertainment, and even multiple wives was articulated to reject a puritanical lifestyle as preached by the Communist state. In a similar vein, when ignoring or denigrating Communist heroes and heroines and highlighting their foes in the stories, both pingtan performers and their listeners refused to subscribe to the official version of modern Chinese history which trumpeted the CCP's accomplishments in exterminating ‘Chinese people's enemies’, such as the Japanese, the Nationalist Party, and American Imperialists. Moreover, the storytellers provided the audience with an alternative to social reality, and also a different type of entertainment. As theatres and cinemas had been filled with works where Communist protagonists were invariably the foci, villains stole the spotlight in the pingtan performances. Villainous figures were able to strike a chord with their listeners essentially because it represented an expression of the latter's desires and aspirations for a better lifestyle. Hence, compared with Chinese dissident intellectuals who sought a separation of artistic activity from Party control,Footnote 77 storytellers forged a firmer connection with their audience by showcasing the grinding poverty in the present and articulating nostalgia for the gracious living in the past.
The difficulty of censorship
Virtually all stories that radical Communist cadres took issue with in the early and mid-1960s were not originally written by storytellers but were adapted from films (Military Depot 51, The Eternal Wave, The Red Lantern, Red Sun, and Invisible Sentry) or fiction (Red Crag). Featuring suspenseful plots or military actions and showcasing a panorama of urban modernity in Shanghai and Hong Kong, those stories had already commanded a large audience in their original form and continued to capture the imagination of listeners after their adaptation into pingtan stories. One major barrier to reworking the motion pictures and novels into performable pingtan stories was their inadequate content. A report filed in 1965 indicated that storytellers tended to weave a large quantity of non-episodic information into stories for their month-long (26 days) performances.Footnote 78 Hence, storytellers took the advantage and enriched and lengthened their stories by adding whatever they felt familiar with, mostly urban lives in pre-Liberation Shanghai. Therefore, as Communist cadres noted, storytellers put in far greater effort to represent ballroom dancing, western-style restaurants, and gangster feuds as stuck-ins than to eulogize Communist heroes and heroines. In all fairness, the failure of storytellers to fulfil the task of propagating the CCP's accomplishments did not always stem from their hostility to the CCP and reluctance to portray Communist protagonists. In many cases, they had an innate instinct to represent the urban milieu of pre-1949 Shanghai, in which they had lived and worked for decades. It was thus no wonder that Communist censors were offended to find that female Communist undercover agents often behaved like roguish women in capitalist Shanghai in those stories.Footnote 79
Storytellers’ narration of Shanghai's past, which appreciatively highlighted the city's material modernity, in Communist cadres’ minds, posed a challenge to the CCP's master narrative that pit socialism against capitalism and stressed ‘obligatory denunciations against the evils of capitalism or colonialism’ in Shanghai.Footnote 80 In the context of China in the 1960s, the competition between two narratives of pre-Liberation Shanghai carried a specific political implication, for a retrospective view of the city's splendour prior to the Communist takeover was in stark contrast to the actual blandness of culture and the shortage of daily necessities of the day. For example, after the aforementioned pair of young storytellers addressed various types of dancing in Invisible Sentry, a listener, once an aficionado of dancing, confessed ‘[I feel like dancing as if I had] an itching in the feet when listening [to the story about dancing rooms in Hong Kong]’.Footnote 81 In another performance, the audience was reportedly intrigued by a storyteller's description of the tastiness of fresh-water crabs (dazha xie).Footnote 82 As a result, the Communist cadres were alerted to the fact that the pingtan villains were more interesting or attractive than the Communist heroes and heroines, as Perry Link has commented. In Link's enquiry into spy novels and films in pre-Cultural Revolution China, the villains usually enthralled the audience with their ‘two-way radios, underground munitions factories, soundproof chambers, and other evil equipment that made them seem very stylish technically as well as mysteriously unfathomable’.Footnote 83 In other words the peculiar attractiveness of the villainous characters attested to the yearnings of the audience to escape the status quo of an impoverished and tedious society.
The ability of the Pingtan storyteller in practice to transform stories that were originally designed to glorify the CCP's military and political achievements into an instrument to unleash, wittingly or unwittingly, their frustration and disillusionment in the 1960s, compounded the view of the Communist cadres that pingtan storytelling displayed a dangerous flexibility. Such flexibility was immanent in the skills of the pingtan storytellers, by which they were able to draw their listeners for generations. This extraordinary flexibility, therefore, prevented the censors from taking full control of the ad-lib stage performances by means of reviewing the scripts in advance. As an ex-Communist cadre recently commented, unlike cultural bureaucrats who could read manuscripts and watch films beforehand, the censors of the pingtan stories had no control over the scripts.Footnote 84 The most efficient way for cadres to supervise the storytelling was to attend performances personally. Yet, as a Suzhou-based cadre confirmed, he and his colleagues were generally deployed in the supervision of dramatic performances, and were rarely assigned to sit in the storytelling theatres simply because the Suzhou Culture Bureau (Suzhou shi wenhua ju) was short of hands in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 85 Even when CCP officials-qua-censors showed up in performing venues, storytellers had long been trained to grasp the skill of telling stories differently before different listeners. A widely circulated anecdote moots that Ma Rufei, the pingtan master and founder of a pingtan guild in the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), prepared a number of versions of his Pearl Pagoda (Zhenzhu ta), a romantic story between a scholar and a beauty, for performances before different audiences such as peasants, townsmen, or Confucian scholars. When telling the story for Ding Richang (1823–1882), the Provincial Governor of Jiangsu in the 1860s and 1870s, Ma deliberately underscored Confucian morals such as loyalty and filial piety.Footnote 86
The skill of the storytellers to improvise and the difficulties in transforming stage performances into texts, along with the lack of civic manpower to regularly supervise pingtan performances, made the art highly censorship-unfriendly. It was thus understandable that the author of the report about the Spark in October 1964 proposed enforcing an extremely rigid way of performing, which required storytellers’ verbatim renditions of story scripts.Footnote 87 At the height of the Cultural Revolution, radical Maoists further ruled to eliminate all humour and stuck-ins to curb the flexibility inherent in pingtan storytelling.Footnote 88
Conclusion
Political authorities’ ineptitude in censoring pingtan storytelling in Mao times resulted from both the pingtan's unique flexibility as well as the failure of local government in its willingness to deploy enough officers to supervise performances on a nightly basis. For some observers, the efficacy of Party-state censorship was overrated in the first place. T. A. Hsia, for example, notes that readers in a totalitarian society could accept government-sanctioned readings ‘for reasons of his own which may be entirely different from the official ones’.Footnote 89 ‘Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts’ were singled out by the Communist cadres precisely because the audience embraced them for the wrong reason. The very existence and popularity of such stories attested to the CCP's failure to transform storytellers into cultural workers under Socialism after a decade-long effort of disciplining and collectivizing pingtan performers. By the same token, the endeavour to politicize pingtan stories resulted in storytellers’ appropriation of them into the outlets to unleash their resentment towards the PRC's economic woes. The use of ribald jokes and lurid details by storytellers as a means to counter the CCP's master narrative bore resemblance to shunkouliu (slippery jingles), a specific type of popular satirical saying that reflected ‘genuine popular ideas, values, and attitudes’ in the reform age.Footnote 90 Though the study of shunkouliu indicates that satirical criticisms of the government and society would have been systematically suppressed in Mao times, the pingtan storytellers developed viable ways to mock and disavow Party-sponsored ideologies.
The resistance of the pingtan storytellers to political domination in the early 1960s was in parallel with the strikes of the Shanghai workers in the mid-1950s in that resisters in both cases acted chiefly for monetary gain.Footnote 91 Yet, one may be under the impression that pingtan storytellers were more inclined to employ everyday forms of resistance and therefore lacked the intensity and seriousness compared with the 1950s working class, especially as storytellers had been both resisters and collaborators of the CCP's political domination. Throughout this paper, I have presented Yang Zijiang, for example, as a vocal resister, but what I did not mention is the fact that Yang gained wide recognition in the 1960s for writing Guerrillas on the Railroad (Tiedao youji dui) and Lei Feng, two stories about the heroics of Communist protagonist.Footnote 92 Thanks to his popularity and ability to author stories to eulogize Communist heroes, he was invited to conduct a special performance for Chen Yun (1905–1995), China's vice chairman in the early 1960s.Footnote 93 As I have shown, however, resistance and collaboration were just two sides of the same coin. Both served a clearly-defined purpose, namely, to improve the economic conditions of the pingtan storytellers. Therefore, they had no intention to change, and realistically were unable to change, the power relation between the Party-state and themselves. Nevertheless, their on and off stage struggles were by no means politically irrelevant. On the contrary, the resistance of the pingtan storytellers was symptomatic of the inability of the government of the PRC to fulfil its promise to transform artists and entertainers ideologically in the Mao era. Jin Jiang similarly finds that the CCP hardly integrated China's entertainment into its system of cultural management, nor could it completely remould the Chinese social culture by the mid-1960s.Footnote 94 Only during the Cultural Revolution, presumably, could the CCP manage to police artists and performers and exercise full control of the production and consumption of Chinese culture.
