H siao-t’i L i . Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China

In his seminal book Red Star over China, American journalist Edgar Snow drew attention to the importance of theater in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to inspire the populace to shift their allegiance: “When the Reds occupy new areas ... it is the Red Theatre which calms the fears of the people, gives them rudimentary ideas of the Red programme, dispenses great quantities of revolutionary ideas, and counter-propaganda, to win the people’s confidence. During the recent Shaanxi expedition, for example, hundreds of peasants heard about the Red players with the army, and flocked to see them, willing subjects for any propaganda dispensed in the pleasant form of drama” (quoted on 242). Earlier scholarship on the manifold uses to which opera had been put under the Chinese Communist Party during the anti-Japanese war and after the founding of the People’s Republic of China had argued that the extensive use...

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