This book identifies avant-garde performance as an important political force shaped by and shaping popular culture in modern China. Liang Luo proposes, in fact, that the popular avant-garde was the cultural force that called the Chinese nation into being in the early-to-mid-twentieth-century context and also reconfigured it at crucial moments in its history (p. 11). Realigning the term “avant-garde” with its historical roots to refer to art that aspired to political engagement with society, she reveals an “alternative Chinese theory of the avant-garde that challenges and interrogates works of art not solely on their intrinsic aesthetic merits but also on the grounds of their effectiveness” (p. 15). So as to illustrate this convergence of performance, politics, and popularity in modern China, Luo focuses on the work and activism of Tian Han (1898–1968), one of modern China's preeminent lyricists, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book is the first in-depth study in English that critically examines Tian Han's work and cultural legacy. A substantial and important contribution to the fields of modern Chinese literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China also significantly augments our understanding of the nature and intensity of global cross-fertilization that took place between Chinese cultural agents like Tian Han and the international avant-garde. By following the “interior arc” of Tian Han's imagination, Luo complicates the conventional view of communist Chinese cultural products as monolithic and instead positions Tian's works within a web of traditional Chinese, modernist, and cosmopolitan influences and networks of mutual interchange.

Throughout the five chapters of the book, Luo underscores the importance of two linked themes in Tian Han's work: “creating the new woman (chuangzao xin nüxing),” and “going to the people (dao minjian qu).” Illustrating in careful detail the centrality of powerful female images in Tian Han's work on stage, in print, and on screen, Luo traces Tian's personal and artistic trajectories in four crucial geographic sites of the avant-garde, which correspond to key historical-cultural moments.

In the first chapter, “The Lights of Tokyo,” Luo uses light as a central trope to describe Tian's enthusiasm for Hollywood melodramas; his intellectual encounters with Shakespeare, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and Tolstoy; and his portrayal of Christian imagery in the early play Lingguang (Spiritual light). Luo's analysis shows that it was amid the “illuminated physical and mental landscapes of Tokyo” that Tian engaged in a Faustian search for meaning and transcendence, creating the “female Faust” Meili and embracing a socially minded artistic outlook deeply infused with a sense of spiritual salvation.

The second chapter, entitled “The Night and Fire of Shanghai,” discusses the motifs of “night” and “fire” as symbolic markers in Tian's exploration of the dialectics between self and world, art and revolution, and the aesthetic and the proletariat (p. 61). Tian's ambivalence toward the city of Shanghai, which he sees as both a utopian and a dystopian landscape, becomes visible in Tian's development and performance of the transgressive and revolutionary archetypal female images of Salome and Carmen in response to the influence of Russian literature and Irma Duncan's “real dance for modern people” (p. 96).

Chapter 3, “Lovers and Heroes in the Wartime Hinterland,” reveals Tian's “intermedia experiments” and “genre transgressions” (p. 115) as he combines classical Chinese sources—such as Peking opera, spoken drama, and folk storytelling—with a strongly cinematic sensibility to create wartime propaganda. The resulting hybrid genre of opera film (xiqu dianying) rejuvenated Chinese opera, while the operatic mode in turn infiltrated the genre of film.

Chapter 4, “The International Avant-Garde and the Chinese National Anthem,” places Tian Han within a generation of international avant-gardists comprising Bertholt Brecht, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, and the African American singer, actor, athlete, and activist Paul Robeson, all of whom were born in 1898. Luo shows that the creation and propagation of the song “March of the Volunteers,” which was originally a song written by Tian Han for the 1935 Chinese feature film Fengyu ernü (Lovers in troubled times), demonstrates the existence of a robust exchange among the international avant-garde, China's commercial cultural industry, and communist politics at the time.

In chapter 5, “A White Snake in Beijing: Re-Creating Socialist Opera,” Luo reveals how Tian recasts the figure of Salome as White Snake in the 1950s opera Baishe zhuan (Tale of the white snake). Relating Tian Han's work on opera reforms in the PRC to Joris Ivens's transformation of the documentary film genre in East Germany, Luo elucidates the deep intellectual connection between Tian, Ivens, the composer Hanns Eisler, and Brecht, and identifies the White Snake female image as a locus of self-projection in a genre of “profound propaganda” (p. 207).

Throughout this theoretically informed study, Luo argues that Tian Han's avant-gardism is that of a “bohemian populist” whose work was energized by the utopianism he experienced in Tokyo and the deep concern for social justice he developed in Shanghai and the Chinese wartime hinterland.