Resisting Spirits resists the narrative of socialist cultural production as monolithic and uninspired and urges readers to consider the creativity and experimentation through which writers and artists navigated cultural and bureaucratic waters during the early 1950s and 1960s. This history of supernatural literature in the People's Republic of China (PRC) enables rigorous discussions about the relationship between mass politics and popular culture and the possibilities for artistic expression under high socialism.
Meng Chao and his ghost opera, among other case studies, are lenses for Maggie Greene to connect the pre-1949 and post-Mao cultural milieus with the high socialist period to reflect on how cultural workers made difficult, creative choices dealing with historical changes. Following Gail Hershatter, Greene proposes to read ghost plays “in a longer ‘literary time’ that connected the Mao era to the deeper cultural past” (p. 16) to counter sweeping narratives focusing on “campaign time.”Footnote 1 She takes seriously cultural producers’ passionate defense of classical culture and broad talents in recreating supernatural narratives under socialism.
Greene complements the pervasive practice of “symptomatic reading” in the study of socialist cultural productions by borrowing the concept of “just reading” or “surface reading.”Footnote 2 She insists on doing justice to her texts by paying attention to the “surface” of their discussions, that is, “what critics and artists openly and plainly said, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s” (p. 19). This approach not only balances the predominant reading of socialist culture from the dominant perspective of bureaucratic control but also opens up the high socialist period to linkages across time.
Greene tackles the differentiation between “mythology” and “superstition” by discussing early drama reform in the PRC in chapter 1. At the center of the chapter is a discussion of adaptations of the folktale “The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid” (Niulang zhinü), which reflects the malleability of socialist vocabulary and tensions even among the highest levels of producers and critics of “state-sponsored culture” (p. 25). This was manifested in a debate on Yang Shaoxuan's “unrestrained” adaptation of the folktale and Ai Qing's and Ma Shaobo's advocating a gentle touch on the classics.
This debate sets the tone for chapter 2, in which Greene uses Ma Jianling's “ghostless ghost opera” to continue engaging with the discourses of mythology and superstition in the PRC during the 1950s. The text in question is Ma's 1953 qinqiang adaptation of the Ming drama Story of Red Plums, in which Ma worked hard to rid the ghost Li Huiniang from the story to resist the spirit that “propagated superstition” (p. 48). Just as Yang's attempt at making folktales serve contemporary politics backfired, Ma's efforts at exorcising Li Huiniang's ghost-self from the play ran afoul of critics, who continued to argue for the “resisting spirit” (p. 75) of the original play, even after Ma attempted to restore Li's ghost in a 1958 revised version.
The Ma affair set the stage for Meng Chao's 1961 Kun opera Li Huiniang, which for Greene represents the zenith and nadir of the ghost play debate. Chapter 3 considers Meng's heroic ghost in Li Huiniang against the evil ghosts in Stories about Not Being Afraid of Ghosts, a collection of classical ghost stories published the same year. Consistent with reforming ghost plays with a gentle touch, Meng's opera was enthusiastically received, based on its political and artistic merits, as represented by Liao Mosha's “some ghosts are harmless” theory (yougui wuhai lun).
Meng's seeming success, however, abruptly ended in 1963, when the Ministry of Culture banned all ghost plays from the stage. Despite the ban, a robust debate on the future of drama and the fate of traditional culture in China played out between writers and artists struggling to defend the two poles of “some ghosts are harmless” and “no ghost is harmless” (p. 107). In chapter 4, Greene presents Jiang Qing as a key figure in engineering criticism of ghost plays and Liao's “some ghosts are harmless” theory. Greene further considers the 1963 debate a pivotal moment in transitioning from insisting on the resisting spirits of heroic ghosts to an emphasis on resisting the spirits and evil ghosts as well as the writers and artists who resurrected them.
These writers and artists and their works became “Ox Ghost-Snake Spirits and Poisonous Weeds,” as Greene details in chapter 5. Coinciding with the opening of the Festival of Peking Opera on Contemporary Themes in Beijing in early 1964, highly politicized and highly personal attacks started to be levied at Meng, rather than at his opera Li Huiniang. Even his early defender Liao penned a self-criticism in 1965 in which he attacked Meng's motives in resurrecting ghosts. However, it was senior drama critic and producer Liu Housheng's 1966 article branding Li Huiniang, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, and Xie Yaohuan as an “anti-party, anti-socialist thought community” (p. 139) that delivered the final blow to the three authors as well as their group of cultural liberals and political moderates of the early 1960s.
Greene brings the story of Meng's Li Huiniang into the post-Mao milieu in chapter 6 and considers the fate of artists, writers, and ghost literature more broadly between 1976 and the early 1980s. She finds a revival of Li Huiniang and other ghost plays onstage, although this revival was still unable to escape the need to offer greater, political lessons such as criticizing the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution. One notable exception is Hu Zhifeng's Li Huiniang from the Suzhou Peking Opera Troupe, which was widely praised for its artistic and commercial achievement. Greene then follows up with a sensitive analysis of how writers and artists took experimental steps to resurrect literary ghosts during the first decade and a half of the PRC with the goal of preserving Chinese literary and cultural traditions, despite the predominant interpretation of their using ghosts as “smokescreens” (p. 166) for ideological arguments.
By insisting on going beyond reading Chinese socialist cultural productions as literary “remonstrance” and taking seriously the surface of debates about ghost plays in published articles, purchased primary documents, and archival materials, Greene underscores “the dynamic, experimental nature of cultural production in the high socialist period” (p. 170). In the book's coda, Greene proposes “escapism” as a possible explanation for the continued popularity of fantastical stories across generations and cultures. I would add by reminding readers what Greene emphasizes throughout the book—that the beauty of the Chinese literary and cultural traditions in which the writers and artists grew up must have provided a most cherished route for such an escape. In that sense, I would have liked to see Greene take an even more serious look at the longer “literary time” in narrating the story of ghost operas in socialist China, with more discerning attention to how they fared during the late imperial and Republican eras, and how these eras have profoundly impacted the writers and artists at the center of this book.
Meticulously crafted and beautifully written, Resisting Spirits represents a most exciting new addition to the study of the cultural history of socialist China, its deep historical and cultural roots, and its great significance in informing our understanding of cultural productions in contemporary China.
