Xiaofei Kang’s Enchanted Revolution presents a mesmerizing new account of how Chinese religions, gender politics, and propaganda workers contributed to the Communist Revolution. Although earlier scholarship pointed to the quasi-religious qualities of Mao’s personality cult,Footnote ¹ Enchanted Revolution shows how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) simultaneously suppressed and co-opted religious traditions to engineer a new political culture and ritual order even before the founding of the People’s Republic. In particular, propaganda workers appropriated gendered tropes such as female ghosts to represent the sufferings of the peasant class, repackaged exorcism into class struggle, and cast the Communist Party as a cosmic force of light and justice to deliver the peasantry. In this sense, Kang argues that “religion was not just an adversary for the Party, it was also a model” (4). Specifically, Communist propaganda tapped into the gendered power of traditional religious culture to generate collective emotions and mobilize political actions.

The primary setting of the book is the revolutionary holy land of Yan’an in the 1940s, a pivotal era that laid the foundations for the next three decades of Maoist discourse and practice. Already well-known are the rectification movement (1942–1944), which established the mass line principle, and Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” which prescribed the Party’s cultural policies until the end of the Cultural Revolution. Kang’s study, however, focuses on an understudied mass campaign in 1944–45 against local shamans as embodiments of “superstition.” The key agents of this campaign included Party cadres, writers, artists, storytellers, medical doctors, and the targeted shamans themselves. These people, along with the texts and events they produced and the cultural institutions supporting and disseminating their work, constituted what Kang calls a “propaganda organism.” Instead of speaking with a monolithic voice, however, diverse propagandists had different motivations and used various rhetorical devices to engage in a “dialectical dance” with their rural audiences. Indeed, the anti-shaman campaign dovetailed with the Party’s other imperatives and had far-reaching political, cultural, spiritual, economic, and public health implications.

Methodologically, Enchanted Revolution presents a model of interdisciplinary scholarship and brings refreshing interventions to the historical, literary, religious, and gender studies of modern China. Combining textual studies with ethnographic fieldwork, it creatively mobilizes and critically interrogates a rich variety of sources, ranging from newspaper reports, Party documents, and works of literature and art to memoirs, oral histories, and participant observation. The cross-examination of these sources through the analytics of religion, gender, politics, economics, and aesthetics fosters a multifaceted understanding of a most formative decade in the Chinese Communist Revolution.

Enchanted Revolution comprises eight chapters divided into three parts. Part I, “The Campaigns” focuses on the “anti-superstition” mass campaigns in the revolutionary holy land of Yan’an in 1944 and 1945. Attacking mainly male shamans for abusing female patients/victims, the Party newspaper Liberation Daily cast the CCP as a new ritual master to save the lives of rural women from China’s “backward” traditions. Moving from rhetoric to methods, Chapter 3 discusses the public trials and mass meetings that elicited confessions from shamans and ostensibly rehabilitated them from “parasitic loafers” into productive, even “heroic” laborers. Yet since shaman healers were the most popular health resource for village folks, Chapter 4 chronicles how the CCP sought to replace them with the miracles of modern science by promoting model doctors and hygienic education, in part through exhibitions at temple fairs.

The three chapters of Part II, “Stories,” examine the representation of shamans, gender, and religion in Yan’an literature and performing arts. Chapter 5 chronicles the evolution of a “Red-Shoed Demoness” from a Liberation Daily news story to three stage performances that were part of the Yangge Movement and Storytelling Campaign. Parsing various narrative tropes and genres, this chapter argues that “the propaganda could not fight superstition without performing some superstition” (107). Chapter 6 studies an anti-superstition novel, Uncle Gao, which synthesized many anti-shaman news stories into the struggle between a peasant hero and a shaman villain. Its author, the native Cantonese writer Ouyang Shan, learned the local Shaanbei dialect and sought feedback from local villagers, such that the novel became a “must-read” assignment for all cadres at the county level and above in the late 1940s. Chapter 7 revisits the celebrated “peasant writer” Zhao Shuli’s classic 1943 short story “The Marriage of Young Blacky” against the religious culture and wartime imperatives in Southern Shanxi, with special focus on the literary representations of superstition as practiced by male and female parental figures.

Part III, “The Magnum Opus,” is devoted to the 1945 opera The White-Haired Girl, the exemplary work arising out of Mao’s Yan’an Talks and arguably the most enduring and influential revolutionary classic for the past eight decades. Earlier scholars had already examined The White-Haired Girl’s transformations from folktale to opera to film to ballet, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Especially salient was Meng Yue’s argument that the later versions suppressed the protagonist’s sexuality to promote class struggle.Footnote ² Xiaofei Kang’s chapter, however, traces the opera’s origins back to Yan’an’s anti-shaman campaign and highlights propaganda workers’ invocation of traditional religious tropes to build a new faith in Mao. Apart from connecting the revolutionary classic to religious tales and traditions (such as the ancient legend of a transcendental “Hairy Maiden” who lived in a mountain cave), Kang astutely points out how the opera and the 1950 film muted the female deity and took away Xi’er’s potential agency to seek revenge, instead introducing the male savior Dachun, who represents the cosmic yang force of the Communist Party.

Propaganda is constructed to manipulate and is notoriously unreliable—so how might scholars handle such materials in a critical and rigorous manner, so that they yield glimmers of truth? Enchanted Revolution features comparative and intertextual close-readings of various propaganda genres, not only reconstructing what really happened but also unpacking what the rhetoric accomplishes. Kang’s detection of subtle discrepancies between the Rashomon-like narratives of the same events also leads to significant insights. Chapters 2 and 3, for example, analyze three types of narratives from the newspaper Liberation Daily: a front-page editorial penned by the Party leader Lu Dingyi, news stories about a shaman’s trial and his “scams” by a Party journalist, and the oral transcript of another shaman’s first-person narrative. While editorials, news stories, and confessions appeared in parallel layout to corroborate each other and establish the Party’s epistemic authority, Kang compellingly teases out hidden tensions and competing voices. Whereas the journalist’s quasi-ethnographic account dismisses the “heat and noise” of ritual practices, the shaman’s confession reproduces energetic and poetic incantations that exude pride, expertise, and masculine vigor. Casting further doubt on the seemingly objective journalistic account, the final section of Kang’s analysis points out the campaign rhetoric’s omission of female shamans and its emasculation of male shamans to highlight the “CCP’s intention to take control of rural women’s reproductive bodies to ensure population growth and labor supply in the Border Region” (42). Along similar lines, as shown in chapter 3, the Party-state sought to integrate male shamans—as remnant “parasitic” members of rural society—into the larger labor force through public trials and mass confessions, which took the form of succinct community pacts and pledges apparently coauthored by reformed shamans and Party agents. In these ways, Enchanted Revolution presents a master class in reading against the grain and between the lines.

Although the anti-shaman campaign lasted but two years and took place only in and around Yan’an, this book holds broader implications for studying Maoist China and beyond. Most convincingly, the Conclusion argues that the campaign’s organizational mechanisms—including mass meetings, public trials, struggle sessions, and confessional rituals—were eventually deployed at the national level against a variety of enemies. The White-Haired Girl, too, has remained influential throughout the PRC: its narrative became the archetype for two 1960s films about China’s ethnic borderlands, whereas the story’s return to the stage in the new millennium stimulated much public discussion. Still awaiting further study are broader questions of how religion, gender, and politics continued to intersect in the seven decades of the PRC since 1945 and in areas beyond Shaanbei, as well as how the case of China compares with other communist countries. With greater focus on the production of propaganda, Enchanted Revolution could further encourage studies of propaganda’s dissemination, reception, and interactions with local religiosities over the decades. Indeed, an earlier iteration of Kang’s chapter on The White-Haired Girl inspired me to develop an argument about Maoist cinema’s revolutionary spirit mediumship for my book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China. With admiration and gratitude, I close my review and call on all students and scholars of modern China to read this tightly focused, meticulously researched, and impeccably argued book.