Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949 9004232443, 9789004232440

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Gilded Voices

Ideas, History, and Modern China Edited by

Ban Wang, Stanford University Wang Hui, Tsinghua University Geremie Barmé, Australian National University

Volume 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/ihmc

Gilded Voices Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949

By

Qiliang He

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

Cover illustration: Yan Xueting, the director of the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling. Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data He, Qiliang, 1948– Gilded voices : economics, politics, and storytelling in the Yangzi delta since 1949 /   by Qiliang He.    p. cm. — (Ideas, history, and modern China v.5)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-90-04-23243-3 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23244-0 (e-book) 1. Storytelling—China—Yangtze River Delta—History—20th century. 2. Oral tradition— China—Yangtze River Delta—History—20th century. 3. Politics and culture—China—Yangtze River Delta—History—20th century. 4. Yangzte River Delta (China)—Economic conditions. 5. Yangzte River Delta (China)—Social conditions. 6. Yangzte River Delta (China)—Politics and govenrment. I. Title.   GR336.Y36H42 2012 398.209512—dc23 2012014204

ISSN 1875-9394 ISBN 978 90 04 23243 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 90 04 23244 0 (e-book) © Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For my parents He Yulin and Wang Zhonghua

Contents Acknowledgements  ....................................................................... List of Illustrations  .......................................................................

ix xi

Introduction  ..................................................................................

1

Chapter One  The Pingtan System  ........................................... 25 Chapter Two  Cutting the Tail: The Founding of the Shanghai Troupe in the Early 1950s  ....................................... 53 Chapter Three  Politics as Entertainment: Middle-Length Pingtan Stories in the 1950s and 1960s  .................................. 87 Chapter Four  Between the Association and the State: The Guangyu Incident in 1957  ............................................... 131 Chapter Five  Between Accommodation and Resistance: Pingtan Storytelling on the Eve of the Cultural Revolution  ............................................................................ 163 Chapter Six  Beyond Spiritual Pollution: The Odysseys of Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang  ...................................................... 191 Chapter Seven  Between Nostalgic and Critical: Political Pingtan Stories at the Turn of the New Millennium  ............. 227 Epilogue  Re-Patronizing Pingtan Storytelling  . ......................... 259 List of Interviewees  ...................................................................... 271 Bibliography  . ................................................................................ 273 Index  ............................................................................................. 291

Acknowledgements The present study, like all other academic works, results from collective efforts. I am heavily indebted to various individuals who not only made this study possible, but also trained me as a historian in the first place. It is my pleasure to thank them all here. I am eternally grateful to Professor Liping Wang, who recruited me from China into the University of Minnesota. Without her absolute confidence in my potential and meticulous guidance when I was a graduate student, I would still be a white-collar employee in the Bank of China. I appreciate Professor Ann Waltner’s unreserved and unending support to me during my years at the University of Minnesota and after my graduation. Professor Lary May not only introduced me to the field of popular culture, but also enhanced my awareness of the interrelationship between culture and ongoing political struggles. My conversations and cooperation with Professor Jason McGrath during my last year in Minnesota elicited my interest in culture and politics in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I express my gratitude to a number of scholars, whom I have not worked with. Mark Bender’s pioneering works about pingtan storytelling, to me, have been epoch-making. Bender’s book and articles enabled me to have a firmer grip on the pingtan art. My brief conversation with him in 2010 was encouraging and enlightening. Perry Link’s study about literature and folk arts in the PRC is particularly inspiring to me. His idea of “socialist literary system” offers me an analytical framework in this book. Jiang Jin’s research into popular culture in the twentieth century, especially that in Mao’s times, has lent me insights into the triangular relationship between the state, artists, and market. Works of Nan Enstad and George Lipsitz remind me of the significance of analyzing genres in the study of cultural history. Since the earliest stage of this study, I benefited from my communications with pingtan storytellers, writers, fans, and cadres. Here, I am deeply grateful to Su Yuyin, who provided me with information of his career as a pingtan storyteller as well as his personal life. To be honest, it was Su who ushered me into a new world of pingtan storytelling. I have also been highly impressed by Wu Zongxi’s good memory and profound understanding of the history of pingtan as a former Communist

x

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cadre and pingtan theorist. Both Su and Wu are my major informants. I also thank the following interviewees: Cai Kangyin, Chen Xi’an, Cheng Zuming, Fang Shuijin, Li Gang, Li Qingfu, Li Xin, Sang Jian, Shen Dongshan, Su Jia, Tang Lixing, Wang Boyin, Wang Zhonghua, Xia Zhenhua, Xu Qing, Yang Limin, Yang Zijiang, Zhang Shaozheng, Zhou Liang, Zhou Ping, and Zhou Zhenhua. Among them, Mr. Yang Zijiang, the protagonist of some chapters in this book, passed away in 2011. His death gave me a sense of urgency in completing this book. In a way, this work is devoted to all members of the pingtan world, most of whom are aging at present. Although Ge Yibin and Tao Chunmin did not receive my interviews, they have been extremely helpful in providing me with materials and information. I also thank Tan Guanhua, a graduate student at the East China Normal University (Huadong shifan daxue), who has been tirelessly working with me to gather scholarly works in Chinese over the years. Tan also shared with me ideas about cultural reform in the PRC era. Economically, this study benefits from the Research Opportunity Program of the University of South Carolina system and the Course Reallocation Award and TAPS grants from the University of South Carolina Upstate. Special thanks to Qin Higley and Katelyn Chin at Brill for their faith of my project and patience and guidance. The comments from the anonymous reviewer(s) both lent me encouragement and allowed me to think harder about pingtan storytelling and its relationship with the state and market. Lastly, I thank my family for their everlasting support. My parents, He Yulin and Wang Zhonghua, are both fans of Chinese theater and storytelling. Their hobbies wielded great influence on me since my childhood, which would eventually make me a cultural historian. My wife, Chen Wenyu, provides me with love and care. She has been my constant source of consolation, joy, and encouragement.

List of Illustrations Illustration 1: Playing a full-length pingtan story by Su Yuyin and Wang Boyin in 1994.  ........................................................ Illustration 2: Communist cadres including Chen Yun and Wu Zongxi  ................................................................................ Illustration 3: Zhu Xueqin and Guo Binqing were performing in the Xianle Story House.  ...................................................... Illustration 4: A booklet about lineups of pingtan performances in Shanghai and other cities (September and October 1954).  Illustration 5: Letter signed by nine pingtan artists vowing to quit telling classic stories on June 25, 1951.  ............................ Illustration 6: Founding of the Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe in 1951.  ......................................................... Illustration 7: Pingtan storytellers were performing for peasantlaborers in the Huai River valley in the winter of 1951.  ....... Illustration 8: Playing We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River  . ......... Illustration 9: Jiang Yuequan, Tang Gengliang, and Zhou Yunrui were performing Wang Xiaohe, a middle-length story about a Communist hero in 1940s Shanghai.  . ....................... Illustration 10: The badge for members of the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling, early and mid-1950s.  . ............................................................................... Illustration 11: Yan Xueting, the director of the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling.  . .............. Illustration 12: Storytellers were telling a story as a service for the train crew, early 1960s.  ...................................................... Illustration 13: “Cultivating Talents, Creating Stories, [and] Taking the Right Way” (churen, chushu, zou zhenglu), by Chen Yun.  . ............................................................................... Illustration 14: Su Yuyin and Chen Zhongying were performing Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in the late 1990s.  ...... Illustration 15: Zhou Ping was telling Wind and Rain in the Six Decades in the 2000s.  ................................................................. Illustration 16: Zhuanqiao Park Story House in Shanghai.  . ......

27 35 40 42 62 82 91 95 108 135 143 175 199 217 243 263

Introduction I have attempted to present and understand the thought of people who, though quite articulate in their own lifetimes, have been rendered historically inarticulate . . . Lawrence W. Levine1

Lawrence Levine’s comment on Afro-American folk singers and storytellers can also be said of pingtan storytellers, the protagonists of the present study. As a time-honored oral art with a history of two centuries, pingtan storytelling is “a synthetic performance medium that combines oral narration, dramatic dialogue, singing, and the music of stringed instruments” in telling stories in the Suzhou dialect.2 In the broadest sense, storytelling is a subgenre of theater.3 Since the Communist victory in 1949, varieties of “spoken and sung arts,”4 pingtan storytelling included, have been identified with quyi (literally, melody and art), which could variously be translated as “storytelling,” “ballad-singing and storytelling,” or “performed narrative arts.”5 In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), quyi and theater (xiju) are subsumed in a broader category of xiqu to facilitate supervision and management by the government. Therefore, all policies published by the PRC regime to reform theater in China could be readily applied to pingtan. In the past six decades, the time frame of this book, pingtan storytellers, like other quyi performers, told stories about swordsmen, officials, scholars and beauties in imperial times, trumpeted heroics of Communists in both the pre- and post-1949 eras, and imparted to millions of listeners themes of patriotism, filial piety, honesty, loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), anti-imperialism, and so forth. 1  Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), ix. 2   Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 3. 3   Elizabeth Wichmann, Listening to Theatre: The Aural Dimension of Beijing Opera (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), xiii. 4  Chen Yimin and Liu Junxiang, Chinese Quyi Acrobatics Puppetry and Shadow Theater (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999), 1. 5   Vibeke Børdahl, “Introduction,” in The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China, ed., Vibeke Børdahl (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 2.

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Jokes in their stories raised laughs, while sentimentalism and tragedies drew tears. In stark contrast to their eloquence on stage, nevertheless, pingtan storytellers were markedly inarticulate off stage. The two most influential and productive pingtan theorists/historians, Wu Zongxi (b. 1925) and Zhou Liang (b. 1926), are both former Communist cadres. Rarely have pingtan storytellers had their autobiographies written and published. When granted opportunities to speak in interviews and meetings, they as often as not internalized official ideologies and adopted government-sanctioned rhetoric for self-expression, wittingly or unwittingly. Therefore, the historian Tang Lixing (b. 1946) holds that what pingtan storytellers failed to realize was the fact that they were actually telling lies on and off stage.6 As the eldest son of Tang Gengliang (1921–2008), a prestigious storyteller, Tang Lixing recently assisted his father to author and publish an autobiography, arguably the only one by storytellers. Having grown up with his father’s story­ telling colleagues and accumulated source materials for his father’ book as a social historian, therefore, Tang Lixing has undoubtedly first-hand experiences of pingtan storytellers’ inability or reluctance to speak sincerely and boldly under political and economic pressures. Nonetheless, one may take the risk of oversimplifying the relationship between storytellers and political authorities if such silence is interpreted as pingtan storytellers’ hopeless impotence vis-à-vis the Communist state as if a misplaced gesture or a misspoken word on stage would lead to disastrous consequences. Throughout the PRC’s history, pingtan storytellers engaged in complex interactions with Communist political authorities to win political favor, seek employment security, maximize profits, and gain artistic autonomy. They were by no means defenseless prey to the omnipresent and omnipotent state. Rather, they scored some victories in the process. Their negotiating power stemmed, first of all, from pingtan storytelling’s immense popularity since the 1930s, particularly after the rise of radio broadcasting in Shanghai and its neighboring areas.7 By the late 1950s, a government report indicated that listeners in Shanghai, who enjoyed pingtan performances in performing venues or on broadcast  Tang Lixing 唐力行, interview with author, August 3, 2010.  Carlton Benson, “Manipulation of ‘Tanci’ in Radio Shanghai During the 1930s,” Republican China, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 1995, 117–146; Carlton Benson, “From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1996; Laura McDaniel, “ ‘Jumping the Dragon Gate’: Storytelling and the Creation of the Shanghai Identity,” Modern China 27, 4 (October), 484–507. 6 7



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over the radio, amounted to thirty thousand on a daily basis, making it second only to films.8 Communist cadres in the Yangzi Delta, who were fully aware of the CCP’s success in retraining and mobilizing folk artists in northwestern China in the 1940s, harbored the firm intention to make pingtan storytelling a tool of political edification immediately after the founding of the PRC. Hence, local cadres’ eagerness to enlist pingtan storytellers’ cooperation to educate the masses resulted in their willingness to compromise with the latter in various respects. Second, pingtan storytellers’ century-long collaboration with political elites enabled them to arrive at proper understandings of the changing political environments and take measures accordingly to protect their own interests. In the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), for example, pingtan storytellers succeeded in inserting Confucian moral and behavioral codes such as filial piety and loyalty to the Manchu regime in one of pingtan’s classic stories to please the governor of the Jiangsu Province.9 During the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), pingtan storytellers responded the call of the Nationalist Party (KMT) to sing ballads to promote the New Life Movement (Xin sheng­huo yundong).10 Therefore, pingtan artists initially saw nothing but a new round of collaboration between artists and the government when Communist cadres encouraged them to tell stories or sing ballads promoting patriotism, anti-feudalism, and anti-imperialism in the wake of Communist takeover. Very soon, some pingtan artists with political acumen sensed that the CCP’s ultimate but undeclared goal of its campaigns of disciplining storytellers and reforming their works might be an overhaul of this oral art. Out of fear of the government’s imminent imposition of a complete ban on pingtan storytelling, storytellers between 1951 and 1953 took preemptive actions to jettison all the classic stories, from which generations of pingtan performers had reaped enormous profits.

 8   Shanghai shi dang’an guan 上海档案馆, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei weisheng jiaoyu bu dang’an 中共上海市委卫生教育部档案 [Archives of department of health and education of Shanghai municipal committee of the CCP], A23-2-529, 128.  9   Fangcao 芳草, “Suzhou pingtan koujue 苏州评弹口诀 [Pithy formula of Suzhou pingtan storytelling],” Pingtan yishu 评弹艺术 [Art of pingtan storytelling], No. 1, 1982, 252. 10  Carlton Benson, “Manipulation of ‘Tanci’ in Radio Shanghai During the 1930s,” 136–138.

4

introduction The Issue of Domination and Resistance

Pingtan storytellers’ interdiction of their own classic pingtan stories, historically known as the movement of “Cutting the Tail [of feudalism]” (zhan weiba, roughly 1951–1953), was neither led nor explicitly endorsed by the new PRC regime. Meanwhile, however, Communist cadres exerted enormous pressure, through the audience and the media, to discourage storytellers from staging classic stories, as the second chapter will show. Hence, the movement, on the one hand, typified Chinese artists’ self-censorship, a means of thwarting political authorities’ further intervention and thereby minimizing political risks, when facing mounting political pressure. On the other hand, the contradiction between governments’ pronounced purpose of preserving China’s cultural heritage and protecting artists’ livelihood and Communist cadres’ undeclared agenda to abolish pingtan’s classic stories exemplified what James Scott calls “hidden transcript” by the dominant. The dominant’s hidden transcript, according to Scott, represents “the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed.”11 Storytellers’ commitment to altering their repertoire in a radical way was thus intended to seize the initiative for the survival of both this oral art and themselves. Meanwhile, storytellers created their own hidden transcript not only as a “critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant,”12 but also as a means of undermining the campaign of Cutting the Tail. By 1953, storytellers managed to resist, in devious ways, against the movement they themselves initiated and, consequently, local governments officially brought it to an end. Pingtan storytellers’ resistance to state domination, as exemplified by the movement of Cutting the Tail, in the past six decades have been largely overlooked by scholars, their listeners, and even themselves. In my interviews with a pingtan fan and a pingtan writer in the summer of 2010, they agreed with each other that it was oxymoronic to juxtapose “pingtan storytellers” with “resistance.”13 Likewise, Yang Zijiang (1926–2011), the storyteller, labeled all his fellow pingtan performers as “royalists” (baohuang dang), who willingly succumbed

11   James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xii. 12   Ibid. 13   Yang Limin 杨利民, interview with author, July 20, 2010; Xia Zhenhua 夏镇 华, interview with author, August 2, 2010.



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themselves to the despotic power of the Party.14 Their understanding of resistance, which denoted explicit political actions, however, was narrowly defined. Here, it is imperative that resistance be understood, first of all, not necessarily as political confrontations, but in “everyday forms,” to borrow the term from James Scott.15 Second, resistance is a complex process where resisters “may simultaneously support the structures of domination.”16 The simultaneous accommodation and resistance manifested themselves in pingtan artists’ self-censorship as well as their opposition and sabotage during the movement of Cutting the Tail. Third, neither dominators nor resisters are monolithic entities. The Party-state consisted of cadres whose outlooks of cultural reform in China were hardly consistent with policy-makers in the central government and with each other. Any Party policies had to be implemented and thus reworked by local cadres and, as James Gao has put it, “necessitated many local variations.”17 Meanwhile, storytellers differed along the lines of generations, political pursuits, and employment status. Some were co-opted to be state functionaries, while the majority of them maintained their self-employed status in most part of the PRC era. State, Artists, and Market: An Overview of Pingtan Storytelling in the PRC My recognition of the complexity of resistance enables my present research to divorce from oversimplified modes of state/artists, powerful/powerless, and domination/resistance. Evidently, political authorities’ power had its limitations and pingtan storytellers had some leverage, despite the former’s seeming heavy hands and the latter’s ostensible deference. Throughout Mao’s times, the CCP’s agenda of cultural reform, though fluctuating with the ever-changing economic conditions and political climates, could largely be summarized as “three changes,” namely, “change of the plays, change of people, and change

  Yang Zijiang 扬子江, interview with author, July 7, 2009.   James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), xvi. 16   Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4 (December 2004), 549. 17   James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949–1954 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 243. 14 15

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of system” (gaixi, gairen, gaizhi).18 In other words, Communist bureaucrats harbored the intention to carry through a comprehensive reform of the repertoire, personnel, and organizations in order to make Chinese artists “cultural workers” (wenhua gongzuozhe) and Chinese theater and quyi propaganda tools. The CCP’s agenda to reform pingtan storytelling, however, was consistently held back by governments’ lack of financial and personnel resources and derailed by storytellers’ noncooperation, vocal opposition, or purposeful sabotage. The interplay between pingtan artists and political authorities in the past six decades was by no means the one-sided domination by the Party-state, but more like a ping-pong game, in which story­tellers were able to score a lot of points to earn their livelihoods, secure and expand their market shares, and protect their reputations. In late 1951, the height of movement of Cutting the Tail, eighteen storytellers, under the auspices of the Shanghai municipal government, founded the state-owned Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe (Shanghai shi renmin pingtan gongzuo tuan). Though the establishment of the pingtan troupe has long been viewed as the state’s commitment to putting pingtan artists under centralist management, pingtan performers’ decision of being collectivized by the state was dictated no less by the government’s promise of offering financial security and assistance of artistic creation than by their succumbing to political pressure. Despite this, the vast majority of pingtan storytellers in the Yangzi Delta did not relish the opportunity to join the troupe and were, therefore, not on the state payroll throughout the 1950s essentially because local governments possessed no financial resource to subsidize and patronize all storytellers. In the opening decade of the PRC, hundreds, if not thousands, of self-employed pingtan performers counted exclusively on the market to reap profits and, consequently, were not under the obligation to propagate the CCP’s ideologies. To compete with the self-employed in the marketplaces, storytellers affiliated with state-run pingtan troupes developed novel singing and performing techniques and created new genres and repertoire to cater to not only existing listeners, but also the young-generation audience. In this sense, the clash between state-controlled performing enterprises and non-affiliated artists was as much a market competition as 18   Jiang Jin 姜进, “Duanlie yu yanxu: 1950 niandai Shanghai de wenhua gaizao 断裂与延续：1950 年代上海的文化改造 (Discontinuity and continuity: cultural reform in 1950s Shanghai),” Shehui kexue, No. 6, 2005, 96.



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a political conflict. Such a fight for market share eventually escalated into a violent incident between self-employed artists and those loyal to local Communist cadres in Suzhou in 1957, which lent governments in the Yangzi Delta an excuse to launch the Rectification Movement (Zhengfeng yundong) in 1958 to police, punish, and finally eliminate self-employed storytellers. In Shanghai, the movement allowed CCP bureaucrats to purge dissident storytellers and collectivize hundreds of pingtan performers in five newly established troupes in 1960. Yet, as Chapter Five will show, the state’s effort to patronize all pingtan storytellers proved largely futile, despite the creation of new troupes. First, all the five pingtan companies were “collectively owned” ( jiti suoyou zhi) so that the government did not inject money to cover all the cost, as in stateowned enterprises. Hence, storytellers continued to rely on the market to secure their livelihoods. Second, newly collectivized storytellers tended to accommodate the audience’s tastes and their stories and performing styles thus considerably deviated from political and cultural orthodoxy formulated by the Party bureaucracy. Oftentimes, bureaucrats were alarmed to find that storytellers’ descriptions of Communist heroes were sheer blasphemy, while comments and opinions passed in their stories were deemed as anti-governmental counter-propaganda. Therefore, they could by no means assume the role as the CCP’s propagandists. Third, the campaigns to establish pingtan troupes did not entirely crack down on storytellers’ self-employment. Maverick pingtan performers continued to eke out a living in the market on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). After ten years of turmoil in the Cultural Revolution, during which the vast majority of storytellers were either purged or stripped of their professional status, storytellers resumed their storytelling careers. Yet, once again, most of pingtan performers found that they could not land jobs in state-owned pingtan troupes and had to earn livelihoods in the market. Despite the reintroduction of the market economy and the relatively loosened control over cultural products in the reform era, nonetheless, the market was still not the only factor that dictated storytellers’ activities. In the 1980s and 1990s, political intervention not only continued to haunt pingtan performers, but also served a new function of assisting artists employed by state-run troupes to win market competition against their self-employed counterparts. Obviously, the market, with its varying natures in different historical stages, has played a significant role in empowering pingtan artists

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and disempowering political authorities. It is the key variable to complicate the long-held paradigm of state/artists and dominate/subordinate. Hence, the main pursuit of this book is to foreground the market’s role in the study of the development of pingtan storytelling in particular and China’s cultural reform in general. Yet, this is not a comprehensive history of pingtan storytelling since 1949. Instead, the present study focuses on some critical moments in the PRC history when the interplays of politics, market, and pingtan storytellers intensified. In such crucial historical junctures, CCP bureaucrats alternately felt dismayed to see their lofty dreams of effecting sweeping sociocultural changes hampered by the governments’ lack of financial capability or attempted to convert political capital into economic capital in favor of their patronized pingtan performers. While political supervision and intervention wielded enormous influence on the pingtan market, positively or negatively, the CCP’s cultural policies were also shaped by the market needs and curbed by economic feasibility. The present study about pingtan storytelling is, therefore, a case study that allows for a reexamination of cultural reform in the PRC era. Reexamining Cultural Reform in the PRC China’s cultural reform, both before and after the Cultural Revolution, as has been fruitfully studied by scholars of literature, theater, fine art, mass media, and so on, was fraught with contradiction, misunderstanding, and confusion. The case study of pingtan storytelling allows me to take a new look at the much-studied cultural transformations in the PRC times and challenge a number of deep-seated scholarly and commonsensical assumptions as follows: The CCP’s Success in Politicizing Chinese Culture: The Legacy of Yan’an Talks Both scholars and the conventional wisdom have viewed the Chinese culture under the CCP’s rule as, in Frederick Lau’s words, “the embodiment and manifestation of State ideology.”19 In other words, the development of Chinese culture followed Mao’s famous “Yan’an

19   Frederick Lau, “Forever Red: The Invention of Solo dizi Music in Post-1949,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol. 5 (1996), 126.



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Talks on Literature and Art” (Yan’an wenyi zuotan hui shang de jianghua, 1942), in which Mao explicitly pointed out that literature and art should serve political goals. Prior to 1949, Communist cadres, for example, had already succeeded in politicizing yangge and folk storytelling, both of which were highly popular in the CCP-occupied northwestern areas, to enlist local peasants’ support of the Party’s war efforts against the Japanese and the KMT.20 After the Liberation, the PRC regime actively called existing Chinese arts, media, and entertainment industry into service to build the “state propaganda”21 and manufactured rhetoric, signs, and visual images to create a new “political culture.”22 Between 1949 and 1979, for example, the Party managed to eradicate “most of the artistic styles and techniques of which it disapproved” to ensure that fine artists served the masses with their works.23 In this new political milieu, artists including painters and musicians were successfully co-opted to become functionaries, while their works were charged with the task of propagating Maoist ideologies.24 Given the low literacy rate across the country immediately after the CCP’s takeover of China, performing arts stood out as the most appreciated entertainment nationwide and therefore bore the brunt of the new government’s political intervention. A large number

20   David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda: The Yangge Movement in Yan’an,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, ed. Bonnie McDougall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 3–35; David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Changtai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller: Han Qixiang and the Chinese Communist Storytelling Campaign,” Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 4, October, 1993, 395–426; Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 21   Julian Chang, “The Mechanics of State Propaganda: The People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s,” in New Perspectives on State Socialism in China, eds., Timothy Cheek and Tony Saich (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 76–126. 22  Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 5. 23   Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994), 1. 24   Julia F. Andrews, “Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the AntiRightist Campaign,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 555–577; Frederick Lau, “Forever Red: The Invention of Solo dizi Music in Post-1949;” Andrew F. Jones, Life a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, New York: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992), 13; Zhang Lianhong 张练红, “Cong ‘xizi’ dao ‘wenyi gongzuozhe’—yiren gaizao de guojia tizhi hua 从“戏子”到“文 艺工作者”—艺人改造的国家体制化 [From “opera jokery” to “workers of literature and arts:” the state institutionalization in the reformation of artists], Zhongguo xueshu, No. 4, 2002, 158–186.

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of scholarly works have been devoted to the study of the Party’s initiatives in injecting Communist ideologies into the Chinese theatrical arts, restructuring performing troupes, and making theater part and parcel of institutional ideological apparatuses.25 Consequently, traditional theater irretrievably lost its repertoire and performing styles and could no longer restore its artistic value.26 By the same token, quyi artists including pingtan storytellers were also subject to governmental disciplining and cooptation.27 Without doubt, the CCP could not accomplish its goal of cultural reform without the consent and collaboration from artists and their associations or guilds. Artists’ initiatives and creativity were indeed the key to the CCP’s success in restructuring the society and altering culture. David Holm, for example, discovers “a certain level of

25   For example, John D. Mitchell ed., The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China (Boston: David R. Godine Publisher, 1973); Luke Kai-hsin Chin, “The Politics of Drama Reform in China After 1949: Elite Strategy of Resocialization,” Ph D Dissertation, New York University, 1980; Colin Mackerras , Chinese Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983); Constantine Tung, “Introduction: Tradition and Experience of the Drama of the People’s Republic of China,” in Drama in the People’s Republic of China, eds. Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 1–27; Elizabeth Wichmann, “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Beijing Opera Performance.” TDR, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1990, 146–178; Shi-Zheng Chen, “The Tradition, Reformation, and Innovation of Huaguxi: Hunan Flower Drum Opera,” The Drama Review, 39, 1 (T145), Spring 1995, 129–149; Harry H. Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China; Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Jonathan P. J. Stock, Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai (Oxford University Press, 2003); James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of, 231–237; Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009). 26  Tao-ching Hsü, The Chinese Conception of the Theatre (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985); Siyuan Liu, “Theatre Reform as Censorship: Censoring Traditional Theatre in China in the Early 1950s,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 61 Issue 3, 2009, 387–406. 27  Nancy Jane Hodes, “Strumming and Singing the ‘Three Smiles Romance:’ A Study of the Tanci Text,” Ph D Dissertation, Harvard University, 1991; Marja Kaikonen, “Quyi: Will It Survive?” in Vibeke Børdahl ed., The Eternal Storyteller, 62–68; Stephanie Webster-Cheng, “Composing, Revising, and Performing Suzhou Ballads: a Study of Political Control and Artistic Freedom in Tanci, 1949–1964,” PhD Dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 2008; Wang Di 王笛, “Guojia kongzhi yu shehui zhuyi yule de xingcheng: 1950 niandai qianqi dui Chengdu chaguan zhong de quyi yu quyi yiren de gaizao he chuli 国家控制与社会主义娱乐的形成：1950 年代前期对成都茶馆中的曲艺和曲艺艺人的改造和处理 [State control and formation of socialist entertainment: reform of performances and performers in early 1950s Chengdu]”, Zhongguo dangdai shi yanjiu, No. 1, 2009, 76–105.



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voluntary compliance” with which the Party system operated and, ultimately, it was those who were directed, namely artists, that made the final choices of artistic creation.28 The blind storyteller in northern Shaanxi, for instance, maintained his artistic autonomy, despite Communist cadres’ eagerness to make storytelling a tool of mobilizing local peasants in the mid-1940s.29 In the early 1950s, performers of huaguxi (Flower Drum Opera) in the Hunan Province actively worked with local political authorities to screen out feudalistic and superstitious elements in plays.30 Meanwhile, Shanghai-based cadres counted on the association for Huju (Shanghai drama) to oversee “the reform, re-education, and registration of performers.”31 Artists’ initiatives and autonomy notwithstanding, according to Chang-tai Hung, it was the CCP that exerted “its authority by setting in no uncertain terms of limits of artistic expression.”32 Even worse, collaborating with political authorities oftentimes proved a risky venture. Both Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz have demonstrated that cooperation with the CCP by xiangsheng33 performers and film stars only led to political purges.34 The government carried out its agendas of cultural reform not only by taking hard lines on cultural producers, but also through managing the audience. Elizabeth Perry finds that intellectuals and workers were segregated from each other in “places of recreation” in the 1950s and 1960s.35 Shaoguang Wang’s research demonstrates that people’s private time was regulated by the government in Mao’s times and, as a consequence, the state managed to “monopolize people’s spare time

 David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, 3.  Chang-tai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller,” 412. 30   Shi-Zheng Chen, “The Tradition, Reformation, and Innovation of Huaguxi,” 134. 31   Jonathan P. J. Stock, Huju, 163. 32  Chang-tai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller,” 420. 33   Xiangsheng 相声, literally meaning face and voice, is a comic monologue or dialogue popular mainly in northern China. 34   Perry Link, “The Crocodile Bird: Xiangsheng in the Early 1950s,” in Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, eds., Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 207–231; Paul G. Pickowicz, “Acting Like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Privatesector Filmmaking, 1949–52,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz eds., Dilemmas of Victory, 256–287. 35   Elizabeth J. Perry, “Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Popular Protest in Modern China,” Critical Asian Studies, 33:2 (2001), 179. 28 29

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by specifying the content of permissible leisure activities.”36 Wang’s inquiry into the distributions of private time in Maoist China provides a contrast to the relatively liberalized, depoliticized, and deregulated post-Mao era when leisure was outside the immediate control of the party-state and became privatized.37 Wang’s approach exemplifies a prevalent scholarly practice to highlight the antithesis between stringent government controls of culture in Mao’s times and a more diverse and tolerating China in the reform era, when the introduction of market effectively loosened the party-state’s regulating and disciplining of artists, journalists, and entertainers. Students of China’s mass media have been especially keen on dichotomizing the Maoist/postMaoist eras as politicization/deideologization, presumably because it was Chinese journalists who most acutely felt the state’s heavy hands between the 1950s and 1970s.38 The De-marketization of Chinese Culture in Mao’s China The commercialization and relative liberalization of Chinese mass media stemmed principally from the expansion and diversification of the cultural market and the Party’s reduction of subsidies in the age of Opening and Reform.39 The same socio-cultural logic has been applied

36   Shaoguang Wang, “The Politics of Private Time: Changing Leisure Patterns in Urban China,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, eds., Davis, Deborah et al. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 153–154. 37   Ibid., 156. 38   For example, Chin-chuan Lee, “Mass Media: Of China, about China,” in Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism, ed., Chin-chuan Lee (New York: The Guilford Press, 1990), 3–29; James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance (London: Routledge, 1991); Judy Polumbaum, “Outpaced by Events: Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning to Be a Journalist in Post-Cultural Revolution China,” Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, Vol. 48.2 (1991), 129–146; Chin-chuan Lee ed., China’s Media, Media’s China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Chin-chuan Lee ed., Power, Money, and Media: Communication Patterns and Bureaucratic Control in Cultural China (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000); Roya Akhavan-Majid, “Mass Media Reform in China: Toward a New Analytical Framework,” Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, Vol. 66.6 (2004), 553–565, to name just a few. 39   Zhou He, “Chinese Communist Party Press in a Tug-of War: A Political-Economy Analysis of the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily,” in Chin-chuan Lee ed., Power, Money, and Media, 145.



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to the study of marketization of the Chinese popular culture.40 To underscore the commercialization of Chinese culture in the reform age, Jason McGrath, for example, posits that the rise of cultural market “engenders new autonomies of popular culture,” whereas varying cultural forms, including films and novels, were dismissed as mere “vehicles for political propaganda” in Mao’s times.41 Serving the Party instead of the market, therefore, Chinese cultures in the first three decades of the PRC were “didactic rather than entertaining, production-oriented rather than consumption-oriented,” according to Xiao­ bing Tang.42 As market is not regarded as a problematic in analyzing cultural development and cultural products’ entertaining values are negated in Maoist China, scholars tend to treat cultural products and forms, such as dramas, as either the “political expression” of political publicists43 or political remonstrance.44 Scholars thus tend to adopt the approach that simply focuses on “the tensions between artists and the state.”45 It is no wonder that Colin Mackerras finds that all contributors of his Drama in the People’s Republic of China have focused exclusively on the Chinese drama’s relationship with politics.46 The scholarly assumption about the de-marketization of Chinese culture does not go without challenges. Ban Wang, for example, maintains that films made prior to the Cultural Revolution had “a strong entertainment appeal,” which had a “tremendous and indelible

40   For Example, Colin Mackerras, “Modernization and Contemporary Chinese Theatre: Commercialization and Professionalism,” in Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China, 181–212; Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak, “ ‘Reform’ at the Shanghai Jingju Company and Its Impact on Creative Authority and Repertory,” TDR, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter, 2000, 96–119; Richard C. Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: the New Politics of Culture (Lanham, Md.; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004). 41   Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 9–11. 42   Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 283. 43  Roger Howard, Contemporary Chinese Theatre (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 123. 44  Rudolf G. Wagner, The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 45  Richard C. Kraus, “China’s Artists between Plan and Market,” in Deborah Davis et al. eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, 190. 46  Colin Mackerras: “Conclusion,” in Constantine Tung and Colin Mackerras eds., Drama in the People’s Republic of China, 326–333.

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emotional impact on audiences.”47 Though entertainment like films was political by nature, as David Holm has cogently pointed out, even propaganda is interesting and revealing because “it is an attempt to manipulate and persuade.”48 As an interesting and appealing entertainment, Chinese dramas continued to captivate countless audiences as a hot cultural commodity in theaters, most of which, according to Bonnie McDougall and Kam Louie, were in private hands at least between 1952 and 1956.49 Even the nationalization of Chinese theaters, namely the marketplace of dramatists, afterwards did not automatically de-marketize Chinese dramas and quyi. Marja Kaikonen notes that quyi “remained commercial even in the midst of a dominating plan economy,” despite Maoists’ efforts to alter the condition. Kaikonen insists, however, such a commercialization of quyi was an artificial product of the state, who was responsible for both producing and paying for the consumers.50 At the best, it was a highly-regulated and centrally-controlled commercialization. The Party-State as the Lone Patron and Arbiter of Chinese Culture The Party-state’s willingness to spare no expenses to support the popular culture in Maoist times, Marja Kaikonen continues, stemmed from its desire of keeping Chinese culture “as ‘Chinese’ as possible.” Political authorities’ subsidy resulted in the demise of numerous cultural forms, including quyi, as living popular arts. Rather, they became “a cultural relic.”51 Kaikonen’s assertion about the government’s subsidization of the Chinese culture exemplifies a scholarly common sense that the Party-state, with its unprecedented political and economic prowess, had succeeded in financing and patronizing artists during the Maoist era.52 In the case of pingtan storytelling, Mark Bender likewise argues

47   Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 125. 48   David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda” 5. 49   Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 293. 50   Marja Kaikonen, “Quyi: Will It Survive?” 67. 51   Ibid., 62. 52   For example, Bonnie McDougall, “Writers and Performers, Their Works, and Their Audiences in the First Three Decades,” in Bonnie McDougall ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China,1949–1979, 189–191; Richard C. Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, ix; Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 184.



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that during the Maoist era, political authorities supplanted the market as the driving force of pingtan’s artistic innovation and creativity.53 More often than not, scholars’ emphasis on the CCP’s glaring success in patronizing the Chinese arts is strategically positioned to contrast the rigid Maoist culture with a much more diverse one after Mao’s death. Colin Mackerras, for example, contends that a large class of rural and urban performers no longer depended on state money, as they did in Mao’s times, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and thereby achieved professionalization.54 In a similar vein, Julia Andrews maintains that the Party bureaucracy assumed the role as the sole external arbiter of the Chinese art in Mao’s times, whereas, with the introduction of the cultural market after the Cultural Revolution, such a role was lost and China’s art became gradually more diverse.55 The CCP’s Effective Censorship While the state patronage was a means of the Party’s institutional control, censorship played an equally significant role for political authorities’ routine supervision of culture. Censoring dramas had long history since the late imperial times. On one hand, the theater and fiction were viewed as tools to “educate and cultivate” (  jiaohua) members of lower classes. On the other, “scripts and performances deemed subversive or indecent were heavily censored.”56 Though scholars have reached a consensus that the CCP was more interested in and capable of enforcing censorship, recent studies tend to differentiate censorship in Mao’s China from the “Soviet Union’s hyper-bureaucratized approach.”57 The CCP censors’ ultimate goal was not the ruthless crackdown of artists and their works, but to “create compliance and thereby to prevent forcible intervention.” Therefore, the censorship before the Cultural Revolution was, in Jerome Silbergeld’s words, a

  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 16–18.  Colin Mackerras, “Modernization and Contemporary Chinese Theatre,” 203. 55   Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979, 405. 56   Siyuan Liu, “Theatre Reform as Censorship,” 389. 57  Daniel C. Lynch, After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 29. 53 54

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kind of “do-it-yourself ” system.58 The “do-it-yourself ” censorship was in truth a self-censorship.59 In many occasions, the government created and made use of various bodies such as the Writers’ Association, the Artists’ Association, and Journalists’ Associations, to conduct the self-censorship.60 Characterized by a combination of “Party Principle” and self-censorship,61 the CCP’s censorship in particular and cultural policies in general were ambiguous and inconsistent, causing great confusion.62 Despite its inconsistency, the Party’s censorship succeeded in weeding out a large number of unwanted cultural works in Mao’s times. Siyuan Liu’s study of the reformation of Beijing Opera (  Jingju) in the 1950s, for example, indicates that the Party censorship had wrought considerable damage to the Chinese theatrical art and resulted in the loss of repertoire and “performance memory.”63 Similarly, Di Wang’s research about Chengdu government’s ban on a popular drumming dance in the early 1950s demonstrates the CCP’s determination to eliminate Chinese cultural forms with feudal legacies although Communist cadres adopted less radical approaches than they did during the Cultural Revolution.64 Rescuing Chinese Popular Culture from the State The long review of current literatures is a manifestation of both how productive the filed has been and how much weight of the state or politics has been put on when scholars study the transformations of China’s culture, especially that in Mao’s era. This book aims at grappling with the abovementioned assumptions by raising a number of questions: Did the CCP succeed in making cultural products in general and pingtan storytelling in particular tools of propaganda in

58   Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993), 5. 59   Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 35; Siyuan Liu, “Theatre Reform as Censorship,” 405. 60   Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008), 36. 61   Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China!, 35. 62   James Lull, China Turned On, 127. 63   Siyuan Liu, “Theatre Reform as Censorship,” 405. 64   Wang Di, “Guojia kongzhi yu shehui zhuyi yule de xingcheng,” 7–14.



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Mao’s times? In other words, did pingtan stories continue to serve, to a great extent, the function as an entertainment? To further explore the question, were pingtan storytelling’s functions as mass edification and as a popular entertainment mutually exclusive? Was the Partystate successful in disciplining, organizing, and patronizing all pingtan performers, especially in the first three decades of the PRC? Was it financially feasible to subsidize pingtan storytellers so as to make them cultural workers who preached the CCP’s political and social agendas? Given the politicization of Chinese culture prior to the 1980s, was market totally irrelevant? If not, how did the pingtan market affect the development of this oral art and shape the CCP’s cultural policies of pingtan storytelling? If the market, not just the governmental subsidies, continued to be storytellers’ source of revenue, to what extent did bureaucrats have control over contents of stories and storytellers’ performing techniques? In other words, was censorship in Maoist China efficient and effective in reining in Chinese culture, including pingtan storytelling? Ultimately, has the role of the Party-state been overemphasized, while that of the market is largely overlooked in the existing scholarship about cultural reform before the Cultural Revolution? To rescue the study of the popular culture from the Party-state in Maoist China is not an attempt to discount the role of political intervention in the development of China’s culture. Yet, as Jin Jiang’s study of Yue Opera (Yueju) has indicated, the impact of the Communist revolution on Chinese culture was “only of historical significance but [was] not historically significant.”65 The state was by no means the lone factor in the rise and fall of certain cultural products and forms. In the present study, I attempt to argue that the market was another key player, which not only dictated, in no small way, artists’ choice of repertoire and performing techniques in order to serve the audience’s preferences, but also (re)shaped governments’ cultural policies. The CCP’s decision-makers oftentimes had to take economic factors into account in their management of the Chinese culture. Hence, cultural reform in China has been as much a political task as an economic project. Indeed, market played an indispensable role in both cultural reform and urban economic restructuring in Maoist China. Hanchao

  Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 258.

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Lu’s research indicates that small stores in Shanghai, just like selfemployed storytellers, were not collectivized by the state, who found it unprofitable to “swallow” those businesses.66 Likewise, Jin Jiang argues elsewhere that the CCP, impeded by limited financial resource, failed to incorporate all artists and performers in Shanghai into the state apparatus on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.67 The Problem of Continuities The present study does not merely focus on pre-Cultural Revolution period, but cuts across the six decades of the PRC history. The state and market remained two valid problematics in the study of pingtan storytelling after ten years of hiatus, despite to a different degree. As has been shown above, scholars of literature, motion pictures, theater, and journalism of post-Maoist China tend to dichotomize a highlypoliticized and well-regulated culture in the 1950s and 1960s and a relatively liberalized and diversified one after Mao’s death. Such a contrast was perceived to result from the insertion of cultural market in the previously well-defined game between artists and the state. Given my contention that market had always been a factor in Mao’s times, another agenda of this book is to question the legitimacy of the dichotomy of Maoist/post-Maoist cultural transformations. Such a dichotomy hints at scholars’ tendency to highlight the discontinuity between Maoist times and the reform era in terms of social control and cultural management. While the recent scholarship has succeeded in investigating and recognizing the social and cultural continuity between the Republican and Communist eras in areas such as labor organization, social regulation, family values, and the management of popular culture,68 this book aims to add another dimension of continuity 66   Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 319–320. 67   Jiang Jin, “Duanlie yu yanxu.” 68   For example, William Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China: Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 24, 1990, 121–141; Michael Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to People (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Joseph Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 1995, 45–76; Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Mark Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and



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in modern Chinese history, one between the Maoist and post-Maoist epochs. I attempt to argue that the Cultural Revolution was by no means a watershed in the world of pingtan storytelling. On the contrary, the continuity between those two eras manifests itself in various respects such as the pingtan market, censorship, and political authorities’ supervision and intervention of this oral art both prior to and after the Cultural Revolution. Hence, cultural radicalism during the Cultural Revolution was not necessarily a logical outcome of cultural policies implemented during the 1950s and 1960s, but a deviation from the CCP’s flexible approaches throughout the PRC era. Therefore, I have no desire to explore pingtan’s fate during the Cultural Revolution, which disrupted the subtle balance between political authorities and artists in most part of the PRC era. My emphasis on the continuity between the pre-/post-Cultural Revolution times is not intended to downplay some new developments in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 2000s, for example, local governments’ accumulation of wealth because of decades-long marketization of economy enabled political authorities to finance and patronize the majority of, if not all, pingtan storytellers. This new development raises a novel question regarding the triangular relationship among political authorities, artists, and market. Contrary to an academic assumption that a liberalized and diversified economy in China would lead to the CCP’s loosening control over the culture, my research finds that political authorities were able to restore their roles as the patron and arbiter of Chinese art precisely because of the expansion of market economy in China and governments’ growing economic power. Chapter Design The selection of pingtan storytelling as the object of studying the interactions of political authorities, artists, and market in the PRC era stems from its unique characteristics as a quyi art. In the following

Labor Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: the Dynamics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz, Dilemmas of Victory.

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chapter, I will enumerate some important aspects of pingtan storytelling such as storytellers’ modes of organization and performance, Communist cadres, pingtan troupes and associations, marketplaces, narrating and performing skills, all of which had political implications. I attempt to demonstrate that pingtan storytelling has been inherently anti-collectivistic and censorship unfriendly so that it posed great difficulties to political authorities’ efforts to collectivize storytellers and reform this oral art. The second chapter chronicles the movement of Cutting the Tail and the establishment of the pingtan troupe in Shanghai in 1951. It is my intention to show that artists’ decisions to respond to calls of reforming their repertoire and join the state-owned performing enterprises were made not necessarily for ideological and political reasons, but because of their concerns of financial security. The third chapter focuses on the creation of middle-length pingtan stories (zhongpian pingtan), a new pingtan genre, in the 1950s. Stateemployed storytellers’ staging of middle-length stories served the dual goal of both entertaining the audience and preaching the CCP’s political and social agendas. In this chapter, I argue that local governments, rather than annihilating the pingtan market, aggressively created new genres to dominate the existent market and develop new ones to compete with self-employed storytellers. The market competitions between state-employed pingtan storytellers and their self-employed counterparts eventually escalated into an open conflict, the central theme of Chapter Four. In the spring of 1957, self-employed and government-backed storytellers plunged in a fist-swinging melee in Suzhou for the sake of controlling a performing venue. The violent incident in 1957, though previously interpreted as a clash between progressive pingtan artists and the ideologically backward self-employed, was a direct outcome of cut-throat competitions for monetary gains in the market. The incident resulted in local governments’ suppression of dissident storytellers in the late 1950s. As a consequence, the majority of self-employed storytellers were absorbed into a number of newly established pingtan troupes in Shanghai in 1960. The early 1960s witnessed a revived economy following the disastrous Great Leap Forward movement (1958–1960) and a somewhat loosened cultural control. Storytellers affiliated to newly established troupes, the protagonist of Chapter Five, continued to depend on the market to survive and thrive as local governments were unable to subsidize them. To amuse their listeners and to unleash their resentment at impoverished living conditions, those storytellers made full



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use of pingtan skills to manipulate plots and subplots and poke fun of the PRC’s economic failure in stories whose storylines were originally designed to glorify the CCP’s revolutions. Storytellers’ on- and offstage resistance testified to the CCP’s failure to transform storytellers into Socialist cultural workers. The final two chapters are set in the reform era. Chapter Six centers on two pingtan storytellers, Su Yuyin (b. 1929) and Yang Zijiang, both of whom told stories as self-employed performers in most of the PRC era. After the late 1970s, Su and Yang relied almost exclusively on the market to make a living. While their success in the market across the Yangzi Delta was spectacular, cadres from state-run pingtan troupes employed their political powers to accuse Su and Yang of cultural unorthodoxy and political incorrectness. Political authorities and their patronized artists thus resorted to political capital to win market competitions against self-employed performers. The seventh chapter illustrates the rise of political pingtan stories, namely, stories about political histories of the CCP and PRC, since the late 1990s. With the history of Party-state itself becoming a hot commodity in the market, storytellers in the past sixty years completed a full circle from the politicization of pingtan storytelling to political pingtan stories. A Note on Sources To achieve my goal of research, this study has drawn on varieties of printed, archival, and oral sources. Most Chinese books about pingtan’s history and theories were written by Zhou Liang and Wu Zongxi, the two ex-Communist cadres mentioned earlier. The 1980s might the most productive decade for writings about pingtan storytelling in that Pingtan yishu (Pingtan arts) was created and published on an irregular basis. Pingtan yishu, which receives sponsorship from local governments in the Yangzi Delta, features interviews with pingtan artists, essays written by storytellers, and reviews of pingtan stories, among other things. This journal does provide story-tellers with a locus where they could speak for themselves, though Communist cadres still take full control of it. Periodicals published and circulated by pingtan fans are valuable as they lend insights into the audience’s responses to pingtan performances in the 1990s and 2000s. Although books and periodicals have been published through varieties of channels, very few storytellers have their own works or memoirs published

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to inform readers of their lived experiences in the past six decades. Tang Gengliang’s The Dim Dream Recalled: My Pingtan Career (Biemeng yixi: wode pingtan shengya) might be the only book authored by a storyteller. However, what was noteworthy was the fact that Tang himself had been a storyteller-transformed CCP cadre since the 1950s. As storytellers were rendered inarticulate for most of the time, it was imperative to have storytellers’ voices heard especially because of their advanced ages. In his pioneering work about pingtan storytelling, Mark Bender has already presented numerous interviews with pingtan performers. In the past several years, I conducted interviews with storytellers, Communist cadres, pingtan fans, and pingtan writers, among others, in Shanghai and Jiangsu. My interviewees have provided me with information either complementary to or contrary to official publications. Storytellers have been silenced not only by political authorities, but also by time. For a whole generation of storytellers, who gained prominence at the turn of the 1950s and continued to be active in the 1980s or even 1990s, started to perish in the 2000s and failed to speak out prior to their death. Some of my interviewees passed away during the course of my research. Hence, it is a pressing task for this book to afford them an outlet to express themselves. Apart from publications and interviews, archives are of special importance. While official publications are rife with clichés that oftentimes concealed their writers’ real intentions, archival documents, which were produced and circulated with high confidentiality, usually pointedly addressed certain issues and concerns. Even though a lot of reports or meeting minutes were written and kept in order to serve political goals of policing or pacifying storytellers and therefore made inaccurate assessments about the pingtan market, the relationship between pingtan storytellers and cadres, storytellers’ livelihoods, and so forth, those documents are rich in information that is unavailable elsewhere. Compared with authors of official publications, who tended to focus on progressive artists, namely, state-employed ones, writers of archival documents usually pointed their fingers at the “(ideologically) backward” pingtan performers. Hence, archives are extremely valuable in the study of self-employed storytellers and low-profile pingtan performers. Moreover, as James Gao has found, archives allow scholars to understand not only political policies, but also the “policy-making process.”69 To further Gao’s discovery, I would add that archives lend 69

  James Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 8.



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researchers insights into how some specific policies were never publicized and carried out. In other words, archives, if carefully studied and properly interpreted, shed light on the CCP’s hidden script in various ways. Certainly, archives have their limitations. A grave problem of archival sources is the government’s purposeful concealment and suppression of files that political authorities perceive to be politically sensitive. As a rule, the Shanghai Municipal Archive (Shanghai shi dang’an guan) is responsible for declassifying documents of thirty years old. Yet, it is clear that documents produced during the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution are all missing. More significantly, archivists are entitled to re-classify and thereby close any previously opened documents as they see fit. Some archival sources that I discovered a few years ago and I am quoting in this book are no longer open to the public at present.

Chapter One

The Pingtan System Perry Link ushers in the analytical paradigm of the “socialist literary system” in his research into the Chinese literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The study of China’s socialist literary system allows Link to examine how writers, readers, editors, officials, and others “wrote, read, thought about, and argued over literary works.”1 My application of Link’s paradigm to this book stems from my belief that pingtan storytelling has always been a system, in which no single player takes on greater significance than others and no one could dominate or subdue others in any given time (maybe with the exception of the Cultural Revolution). In the pingtan system, all players—pingtan storytellers as well as their stories, mode of organizations, and performing skills, Communist bureaucrats whose visions of China’s cultural reform were mutually contradictory from time to time, organizations for pingtan artists, and pingtan’s marketplaces and their audience—engaged in constant negotiation and contestation to steer pingtan storytelling to a direction that no one had ever anticipated. The study of the pingtan system enables me to avoid oversimplified dichotomies of political authorities/artists, which emphasizes state’s domination over artists and appropriation of Chinese arts, and state/market, which presumes the Party-state’s efforts to politicize the culture succeeded in demarketizing pingtan storytelling in Mao’s era, while, conversely, its relaxed control over the society necessitated the revival of the pingtan market after the Cultural Revolution. Storytellers For hundreds of years, pingtan storytelling has been a highly individualistic performing art. A typical pingtan performing unit, or dang in

1  Perry Link, The Use of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11.

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pingtan’s terminology, consists of two performers, though one or even three storytellers are sometimes seen in performing contexts. Such an individualistic mode of performance and organization proved to be a double-edged sword for political authorities after the Liberation. On one hand, CCP bureaucrats envisioned that performing tours to remote and isolated rural areas entailed only a small number of highly mobile storytellers to fulfill the task of preaching the Party’s political agendas. In comparison, performances by theatrical troupes, which usually required scores of performers, musicians, and staff members, would inevitably incur much higher costs. In this sense, Shanghaibased cadres targeted pingtan storytelling for the same reason as their comrades in Hangzhou, who believed that it was easier to reform storytelling “to serve current political ends.”2 On the other hand, pingtan storytelling’s individualistic way of organization was detrimental to the Party’s endeavor to collectivize storytellers, which underpinned the CCP’s movement of reforming China’s theater and quyi. Selfemployment was the most lucrative way of organization as performers did not have to share profits with staff members, fellow storytellers, or political colleagues. Most storytellers maintained their self-employed or semi-self-employed professional status in most of the time in the PRC. Storytellers’ proclivity toward performing and garnering profits individually ran counter to the CCP’s target of reforming of China’s economy and society in Mao’s times, which put a premium on the collectivization of workforce and social lives. Even after a few state-run pingtan troupes were established in the Yangzi Delta since 1951, storytellers, state-employed and self-employed alike, publicly questioned the necessity of collectivizing storytellers in 1957 and 1962.3 From Communist cadres’ standpoint, the anti-collectivistic propensity of not just pingtan storytellers, but all quyi performers, was a hindrance of their metamorphosis from traditional artists to cultural workers to serve the masses. As a saying in early Maoist era vividly put it, cadres “preferred to lead a thousand troops and ten thousand horses rather than variegated vaudeville[-like quyi performers]” (Ningdai qiannjun wanma, budai shiyang zashua).4

  James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 233.   Zhou Liang 周良, “Suzhou pingtan shihua (ba) 苏州评弹史话（八） [A history of Suzhou pingtan storytelling, part eight], Pingtan yishu, No. 19, 1996, 148. 4   Cai Yuanli 蔡源莉, “Xin Zhongguo quyi gouchen: xiezai ‘wuwu’ zhishi fabiao 50 zhounian zhiji 新中国曲艺钩沉：写在“五五”指示发表 50 周年之际 [Probing into 2 3



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Illustration 1: Playing a full-length pingtan story by Su Yuyin (b. 1929) and Wang Boyin (b. 1923) in 1994. (Photo provided by Su Yuyin)

Though pingtan storytellers have usually been grouped with other story­ tellers, folklorists, xiangsheng performers, and even acrobats under the umbrella of quyi, the former distinguished themselves from any other quyi performers because of the profitability of their performances. Unlike teahouse-affiliated storytelling in cities like Chengdu,5 pingtan storytelling in the Yangzi Delta had long been a highly commercialized art independent of teahouses or entertainment centers. Thanks to the commercialization of pingtan storytelling since the 1930s in Shanghai and its adjacent areas, self-employed pingtan storytellers, particularly first-tier ones, enjoyed exceptionally high incomes in Republican China. Laura McDaniel’s article about pingtan storytellers’ dramatic change of social status between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s shows that the booming pingtan market in pre-1949 Shanghai allowed some pingtan stars to be harbingers of the city’s material

quyi in new China: on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the ‘5/5 Directive’],” Pingtan yishu, No. 28, 2001, 132. 5   Di Wang, The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 140–141.

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modernity.6 Self-employed pingtan storytellers continued to enjoy high revenues even after 1949, especially when the economy recovered and grew in the mid-1950s. Storytellers enrolled in state-run troupes in the 1950s and 1960s, by comparison, were compelled to accept substantial pay cuts both to demonstrate their will to follow the CCP’s lead and to alleviate the governments’ financial burden to collectivize them. Therefore, it was unlikely that Communist cadres were able to—as they had done to blind storytellers in the Northwest or economically disadvantaged folk musicians7—lend storytellers a sense of fanshen, a Chinese revolutionary rhetoric about impoverished peasants’ “standing up” and acquisition of means of subsistence and production after the Liberation.8 On the contrary, many a state-employed storyteller whined persistently that they were economically exploited by the governments. Given the inability of political authorities to promise a more affluent life, state-employed storytellers were bestowed upon political privileges as a means of boosting their morale. Storytellers such as Pan Boying (1903–1968), Tang Gengliang, and Zhu Huizhen (1921–1969) joined the CCP and became Communist cadres in the 1950s and 1960s. Though only a small fraction of storytellers relished the chance to acquire the Party membership, all state-employed pingtan artists, as understood by their self-employed counterparts, were absorbed into the state apparatus and therefore represented the state. Thus, storytellers were divided along the line of employment both in the 1950s and in the reform times. The self-employed tended to interpret their market competitions with state-employed storytellers as their conflict of interests with the state or the CCP, while state-run troupes tried to dominate the market by creating new pingtan genres, staging new stories (xinshu), or outright resorting to political measures. Meanwhile, clashes between state-employed or patronized storytellers and selfemployed pingtan artists could escalate into political movements or cultural campaigns in the late 1950s as well as in the mid-1980s.

  Laura McDaniel, “Jumping the Dragon Gate.”   Chang-tai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller” and Frederick Lau, “Forever Red.” 8   William Hinton, Fanshen; A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, Vintage Books, 1966), vii. 6 7



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Political Authorities: The State and Cadres While the self-employed viewed state-employed storytellers as the representative of the state, state-employed artists gained their firsthand experience with the state through their daily communications with Communist cadres in the troupes. Though storytellers-transformed cadres dominated the state-owned Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe in the early 1950s, they would soon be replaced by fulltime Communist cadres such as Wu Zongxi, who took office as the troupe’s director in 1954. The decision was made under the excuse that pingtan performers’ assumption of administrative positions would hamper their artistic development. Yet, Wu’s appointment revealed the Shanghai municipal government’s lingering suspicion about artists’ absolute fidelity to the Party. Julia Andrews’s study of a collaborative fine artist’s conflicts with local CCP bureaucrats in the 1950s likewise testifies to such a grave concern of the Party leadership.9 In a similar fashion, Chen Yun (1905–1995), the high-rank PRC leader before and after the Cultural Revolution and a pingtan fan, once differentiated two types of Communist cultural bureaucrats: artists or writers who joined the CCP and CCP members who happened to be assigned jobs to manage the culture. Chen was alerted to find that the former were never genuine Communists as their first and foremost identities remained artists throughout their lives.10 Obviously, Pan Boying, Tang Gengliang, and Zhu Huizhen all fell into the first category, while Wu Zongxi the second. Wu Zongxi As a graduate of the prestigious St. John’s University (Sheng Yuehan daxue), a Shanghai-based Anglican university, Wu Zongxi had been a fan of European literature, drama, and music, but not China’s performing arts, since his college years. Wu frankly admitted that had no interest in pingtan storytelling before he was assigned by the Shanghai

  Julia F. Andrews, “Traditional Painting in New China,” 562.  Ma Yingbo 马萤伯, “Chen Yun he wenyi gongzuo 陈云和文艺工作 [Chen Yun and the work of literature and arts],” in Chen Yun he tade shiye—Chen Yun shengping yu sixiang yantaohui wenji (shang) 陈云生平与思想研讨会文集（上） [Chen Yun and his cause—collected essays from the symposium of Chen Yun’s life and thoughts (volume one)], ed., Zhu Jiamu 朱佳木 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 946.  9 10

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municipal government to supervise and work with storytellers immediately after the Liberation. Wu officially joined the Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe in 1952 and became its director in 1954. His lack of interest in pingtan storytelling impelled him to request to be transferred to a Shanghai film studio twice in the 1950s, but in vain. Despite this, Wu eventually acknowledged that pingtan storytelling ennobled him, because he thereby built up unmatched reputation and, more significantly, gave full play of his passion and knowledge of modern literature and drama.11 The metamorphosis of Wu Zongxi, the Party’s earliest designated reformer of pingtan storytelling in Shanghai into a prolific writer and ardent defender of this oral art’s cultural heritage exemplifies James Gao’s contention that “the [CCP] transformers were also transformed” in the new political and cultural milieu.12 In his decades-long tenure in the pingtan troupe, he authored a number of pingtan ballads and stories, but his most widely recognized contribution was a large number of monographs and articles about pingtan’s narrative, singing, and performing skills, in which he attempted to elevate pingtan storytelling’s artistic status on a par with not only that of Chinese theaters but also that of literatures and arts worldwide. In this sense, Communist bureaucrats such as Wu Zongxi assumed the role as the “vanguard spokesmen,” to borrow the term from Mary Mazur,13 in order to perpetuate China’s traditional culture “in the name of the purity of art.”14 Just like his viewpoints of arts, such as his emphasis on dramatic conflicts and musicality of pingtan stories, had impact on the making of the artistic style of the troupe and the production of pingtan works, Wu Zongxi’s personal relationships with various storytellers dictated, in no small way, the ebb and flow of individual performers’ prestige and careers. Wu’s influence on the management and organization of the state-run pingtan troupe attested to Cao Tian Yu’s argument that the nature of cadres-masses relationship was “to a large extent

  Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, interview with author, June 3, 2009.   James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 261. 13   Mary G. Mazur, “The United Front Redefined for the Party-State: A Case Study of Transition and Legitimation,” in Timothy Cheek and Tony Saich eds., New Perspectives on State Socialism in China, 69. 14   Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Vol. 1: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 142. 11 12



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dependent upon the individual character of each cadre.”15 From the storytellers’ perspective, Wu Zongxi was all the CCP or the state was about. They were under the impression that Wu were able to singlehandedly carry out cultural policies from the central government, set or cut their salaries, dictate their livelihoods, arrange performances, screen out the unwanted repertoire, and suppress their self-employed counterparts. Storytellers’ wrath against Wu Zongxi typified the tension between workers and cadres in state-own enterprises Mao’s China as Elizabeth Perry has noted.16 To say that Wu Zongxi had been omnipotent in the world of pingtan storytelling is certainly an overstatement. However, as Gail Hershatter has argued, policies from the central government in the 1950s must be implemented “in widely varied environments, by local personnel who interpret, rework, emphasize, and deflect according to particular circumstances.”17 Hence, local cadres like Wu Zongxi, in pingtan artists’ eyes, embodied the Partystate, in spite of the fact that their outlooks of cultural transforms in China could be at odds with those of other CCP bureaucrats. Competing Views among CCP Bureaucrats Throughout the book, I will show how Wu Zongxi conflicted with other CCP bureaucrats regarding the management of storytellers and revising existing classic stories. In the early 1950s, when Wu worked as a staff member in charge of pingtan storytelling in the Shanghai Culture Bureau (Shanghai shi wenhua ju), he filed a report to the Ministry of Culture (Wenhua bu) of the central government calling for an interdiction on a number of classic pingtan stories. As the following chapter shows, his proposal was vetoed by both bureaucrats in Beijing and his superiors in Shanghai on the grounds that Wu pushed for an overly radical cultural policy that might hurt pingtan performers’ livelihoods. Interestingly enough, Wu’s radicalism was opposite to his counterparts in Sichuan. As Di Wang’s research indicates, local cadres were more concerned with performers’ survival, whereas high-rank

15   Cao Tian Yu, “Introduction,” in Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China eds., Cao Tian Yu, Zhong Xuping, and Liao Kebin (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 9. 16  Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai’s Strike Wave of 1957,” in Timothy Cheek and Tony Saich eds., New Perspectives on State Socialism in China, 245. 17  Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Summer 2002, 46.

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bureaucrats tended to impose hardline policies to ban popular culture in 1950s Chengdu.18 In the mid-1980s, as shown in the sixth chapter, Wu Zongxi and local cadres outside Shanghai disputed about whether to ban some commercially successful but artistically and politically questionable stories. In most occasions, differences and controversies among cultural bureaucrats resulted from the annoying uncertainty and inconsistency in the making and implementation of cultural policies. The CCP’s policy-making, according to Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, remained a “guerrilla-style” approach throughout the PRC times. Developed in perilous wartime environment, guerrilla policy style exempted decision makers from the constraints of political-legal institutions and abstract theories. As the approach made the policymaking a “continual process of improvisation and adjustment,” it generated difficulties and uncertainties for local bureaucrats.19 It was thus no wonder that Wu Zongxi was under the impression that the Party’s cultural policies were “alternately leftist and rightist” (huzuo huyou), oftentimes giving Wu confusing and contradictory directives. In 1964, for example, Wu actively responded to the call from the Ministry of Culture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Cao Xueqin (1724–1764), the author of The Dream of Red Chamber (Hong­ lou meng), to stage a story based on some chapters of Cao’s novel. Since January 1963, nonetheless, the Shanghai municipal government was launching a campaign of “Greatly Writing the Thirteen Years” (daxie shisan nian) in an attempt to populate theaters with dramas and stories exclusively set in the PRC era. Undoubtedly, Wu’s staging of a story adapted from The Dream of Red Chamber invited scathing criticism from the local government and the pingtan troupe was forced to quit performing the story within one short month.20 Interestingly enough, the Shanghai municipal government itself was condemned by the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee (Zhonggong zhongyang xuanchuan bu) for promoting an excessively radical

  Wang Di, “Guojia kongzhi yu shehui zhuyi yule de xingcheng,” 21–22.   Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, “Embracing Uncertainty: Guerrilla Policy Style and Adaptive Governance in China,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand: the Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China, eds., Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 7. 20   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 18 19



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agenda of “Greatly Writing the Thirteen Years.”21 CCP cadres’ highly contradictory outlooks of cultural reform in both Maoist and PostMaoist China testified to Joseph Esherick’s hypothesis that the Party did not act “as some unified, disciplined historical agent.”22 Bureaucratic Fragmentation Confusion and contradiction in devising and carrying out cultural policies stemmed from two factors. First, culture, for most of the time in the six decades of the PRC, was of lesser significance compared with economic development. Richard Kraus has posited that cultural reform in the reform age was merely an “afterthought,” while the Party leadership was preoccupied with the agendas of economic growth.23 Kraus’s discovery was, nevertheless, by no means unique to the post-Maoist era. Although a number of political campaigns were mounted in the name of culture in Mao’s China, as I have argued previously, cultural reform had frequently been conditioned and hindered by economic considerations. Financial feasibility and artists’ livelihoods more often than not outweighed political correctness. Second, the CCP’s management of culture was characterized by both administrative fragmentation and institutions with overlapping and indeterminate functions and duties. At the level of the central government, for example, Ministry of Culture and Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee were both in charge of devising and implementing cultural policies. At the local level, similarly, provincial and municipal culture bureaus and propaganda departments of local CCP committees worked together or competed with each other to interpret and carry out Party policies. Local cadres’ personalities and preferences reworked and even contravened policies devised by the central government. Moreover, professional associations functioned as a semi-official institution to manage artists and censor their works. Such administrative fragmentation was a manifestation of the “fragmented authoritarianism model” as proposed by Kenneth Lieberthal. According to Lieberthal, “authority below the very peak of the Chinese political system is fragmented

21   Wang Ankui and Yu Cong 王安葵、余从, Zhongguo dangdai xiqu shi 中国当代 戏曲史 [A history of contemporary Chinese theater] (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 2005), 294. 22   Joseph Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” 63. 23  Richard C. Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 28.

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and disjointed.”24 Though Lieberthal’s study is set in post-Mao China, political system, at the least in the realm of cultural management, was no less divided and fragmented prior to the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the six decades, structural divisiveness and bureaucratic fragmentation characterized cultural management, as my discussion of Wu Zongxi’s conflicts with other Communist bureaucrats has illustrated. Starting in the 1960s, the participation of Chen Yun, then the PRC’s vice chairman, in the reformation of pingtan storytelling further complicated the already decentralized the control of this oral art. Though his career after 1949 was tightly tied to the management of China’s national economy, Chen Yun was after all an avid pingtan fan and later a passionate reformer of pingtan storytelling. Having never assumed a position in either the Ministry of Culture or Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee, Chen’s status as a distinguished politician empowered him to challenge or even override, if necessary, decisions and directives made by cultural bureaucrats both in Beijing and locally in the Yangzi Delta in the 1960s as well as in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1984, he took the initiative to organize the “Leadership Work Committee for Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Pingtan” (  Jiang Zhe Hu Pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu), a transregional institution for the supervision of pingtan storytelling. Led directly under Chen Yun, the Committee transcended the jurisdiction of any local governments in the Yangzi Delta and eroded the latter’s authorities. In truth, the establishment of the Committee was by no means the first time a trans-regional institution was formed to monitor and discipline pingtan storytellers. In 1958, as the fourth chapter will show, a work team that consisted of cadres and police officers across the Yangzi Delta was organized in an attempt to eradicate pingtan storytellers’ self-employment in the name of the “Rectification Movement.” Admittedly, supra-regional institutions were the key to the success in efficiently controlling highly mobile pingtan storytellers. Yet, the existence of such institutions as the Committee weakened the power of well-entrenched provincial or municipal governments and caused great confusion for bureaucrats and artists alike.

24   Kenneth G. Lieberthal, “Introduction,” in Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, eds., Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 8.



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Illustration 2: Communist cadres: Chen Yun (1905–1995, second from the left) and Wu Zongxi (b. 1925, second from the right) in 1983. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

Pingtan Organizations: Troupes and Associations Given pingtan storytellers’ immense mobility, one purpose of establishing state-run troupes was to immobilize them and thereby enhance manageability. The Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe, which was renamed as the Shanghai People’s Pingtan Troupe (Shanghai shi renmin pingtan tuan) in 1958 and the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe (Shanghai pingtan tuan) after the Cultural Revolution, was the only state-owned pingtan performing enterprise in China. As it was generally called “Shanghai tuan” in varying eras, I will use the “Shanghai Troupe” in this book despite its different names. Similarly, I will us the “Suzhou Troupe” to refer to the Suzhou Pingtan Troupe (Suzhou pingtan tuan, founded in 1952, previously known as the Pingtan Experimental and Working Troupe of Suzhou [Suzhou shi pingtan shiyan gongzuo tuan]). Both troupes were initially named as “working” or “experimental” in order to highlight the goal of local governments to

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set them as the role model for hundreds, if not thousands, of pingtan storytellers. What differentiated the two troupes were their ownerships. As employees of an enterprise owned and invested by the Shanghai municipal government, performers of the Shanghai Troupe enjoyed fixed salaries and other benefits between 1951 and the early 1980s. Since the Shanghai Troupe modeled itself after state-owned industrial enterprises, its administrative structure was, according to Morris Bian, bureaucratic by nature. In the Shanghai Troupe, not only cadres and staff members but also pingtan performers were assigned positions and given status based on the political hierarchy, like in other state-owned enterprises.25 It was no wonder that self-employed storytellers in the 1950s as well as 1980s regarded the Shanghai Troupe as a governmental institution or the representative of the state. Interestingly enough, the Suzhou Troupe, a collectively owned pingtan enterprise with limited, if any, state funding, was invariably juxtaposed with the Shanghai Troupe as the governmental agency presumably because its establishment in 1952 echoed the CCP’s call of collectivizing artists. Therefore, I use the term, “state-run,” to refer to both the Shanghai Troupe and Suzhou Troupe in the 1950s. In Shanghai, five collectively owned pingtan troupes were founded in 1960, signaling the last effort by political authorities to collectivize and patronize pingtan artists. With insufficient state subsidies, nonetheless, collectively owned troupes across the Yangzi Delta were compelled to seek profits while undertaking the political task of indoctrinating the masses. Though the Shanghai Troupe also performed such a dual function, collectively owned troupes in both Maoist and post-Maoist times were more sensitive to market needs and profit-driven. From local cadres’ perspective, as the fifth chapter will show, storytellers hired by collectively owned troupes tended to pander to the audience’s taste by distorting plots originally designed to boast of the CCP’s accomplishments and denigrating Communist heroes and heroines therein. Members that consisted of the five collectively owned pingtan troupes in 1960 had been self-employed pingtan performers throughout the 1950s, when they registered under the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling (Pingtan gaijin xiehui, hereafter, the Association). Founded in 1951, the Association played a vital role to

25

 Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China, 76.



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provide storytellers with performing permits, to make arrangements of performances, and to operate services to the sick, aging, and needy storytellers just like its predecessors in the late Qing and Republican eras. Shortly after the Communist takeover, local governments across the Yangzi Delta counted on the Association to recruit storytellers to participate in performances that preached the Party’s social and political agendas. After state-run troupes were established in the early 1950s, storytellers who joined the troupes usually minimized their activities in the Association. As storytellers employed by various troupes throughout the 1950s gained a new identity as “state cadres” (guojia ganbu), highlighting their bonds with the state, the self-employed were alternatively called “artists of the Association” (xiehui yiren) to confirm their affiliation with the Association. The boundary between state cadres and artists of the Association was fluid, as state-run troupes kept absorbing self-employed storytellers and quite a number of state-employed artists restored their self-employment status throughout the 1950s. For CCP cadres, state-employed artists were hailed as progressive storytellers, whereas artists of the Association were dismissed as political backward for their refusal to be collectivized. The rift between the two types of storytellers resulted not only from ideological reasons, but also from intense market competitions between them in the 1950s. The fourth chapter will show that their scramble for market exploded into a violent incident in 1957 in Suzhou. Political authorities rode on the opportunity of the incident to purge a number of insubordinate pingtan performers and gradually paralyze the Association. The early 1960s witnessed the ultimate triumph of political authorities over the Association, the offshoot of centuries-old autonomous guilds/associations for pingtan storytellers. The Association officially came to an end in 1962, when all storytellers were registered in the Association for Quyi Workers (Quyi gongzuozhe xiehui). Marketplaces and Audience Though the competitions between state-employed storytellers and artists of the Association had conventionally been interpreted as a clash between those supportive of and those resistant to the CCP’s noble cause of cultural reform in Maoist China, the pursuits of economic gains definitely carried more weight. Mutual hatred brewed among storytellers in the course of half a decade in the 1950s because, on the

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one hand, state-employed storytellers, who accepted substantial pay cuts and received fixed salaries to join the troupes, jealously found that their counterparts as often as not enjoyed far higher incomes. On the other hand, self-employed storytellers were outraged by the fact that state-run performing enterprises utilized their political privileges to dominate the market, particularly large-sized performing venues. In the Republican era, the 1950s, and the reform age, it was the “box-office revenue sharing option” (chaizhang zhi) that bestowed selfemployed storytellers with comfortable earnings. Under this system, storytellers were entitled to a specific percentage (fifth percent in most cases) of total box-office sales and were therefore eager to cater to the audience’s preferences. Renowned self-employed storytellers could thereby reap high profits if they were willing to perform in multiple venues each day in the 1950s. State-employed performers who received fixed salaries, by contrast, failed to benefit from the system, although state-run troupes dominated large-sized performing places both before and after the Cultural Revolution. In the world of pingtan storytelling, performing places are termed “story houses” (shuchang), which include open-air venues, teahouses, theaters, auditoriums, and any other indoor or outdoor locations fit for performances. While storytellers usually told stories in openair venues or vociferous teahouses before the commercialization of pingtan storytelling set in in the early twentieth century, an increasingly large number of pingtan-only theaters or auditoriums were constructed to accommodate hundreds of listeners in each performance since the 1930s. The Cangzhou Story House (Cangzhou shuchang), for example, was designed and built to install 430 seats in 1941, making it the biggest story house across the Yangzi Delta then.26 During the Anti-Japanese War (1937–1945), some ballrooms in both Shanghai and Suzhou were temporarily converted into story houses as their managements saw a declining market of dancing in the midst of the war.27 In the early 1950s, transforming ballrooms into story houses was no longer wartime expediency, but ballroom owners’ measure of survival, particularly because of local governments’ restraint upon

26   Shanghai shi wenhua yule changsuo zhi bianji bu 上海市文化娱乐场所志编 辑部, Shanghai wenhua yule changsuo zhi 上海文化娱乐场所志 [Records of venues of entertainment in Shanghai], n. p., 2000, 197. 27   Linghu yuan 令狐远, “Tingshu buji (xu)” 听书补记 (续) [Additional notes to listening to pingtan storytelling (part II)], Pingtan yishu, No. 14, 1994, 68.



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dancing. By 1954, when the Shanghai municipal government finally banned dancing, many a ballroom was renovated into story houses. Throughout Mao’s times, spacious and luxurious story houses were invariably ballroom-transformed ones, such as the Xizang Story House (Xizang shuchang), the Jingyuan Story House ( Jingyuan shuchang), the Xianle Story House (Xianle shuchang), and the Dahua Story House (Dahua shuchang).28 All of them were characterized by their enormous size (close to one thousand seats for each) and technologically advanced equipment. Su Yuyin recalled that ballrooms had long used US-made sound systems, such as RCA microphones, with which storytellers could have their sounds transmitted to back rows in sizable story houses. Therefore, it was ballroom-transformed story houses that made pingtan storytelling a mass consumed popular art. In this sense, political campaigns, such as the bans on dancing and Hollywood films, both dismissed as embodiments of the bourgeois lifestyle, were sometimes conducive to the further commercialization of pingtan storytelling in the PRC era. The emergence and domination of large story houses, nevertheless, did not wipe out smaller story houses. The coexistence of large story houses, teahouses, and auditoriums controlled by state-owned enterprises between the 1950s and 1980s both symbolized pingtan’s prosperity and complicated local governments’ management of pingtan performances. Take Shanghai as an example: while sizable commercial story houses were registered under the Shanghai Culture Bureau, teahouses were subordinate to Shanghai Municipal Food and Beverage Company (Shanghai shi yinshi gongsi) or its branches in various districts or counties until the 1980s. The fragmented management prevented cultural bureaucrats from taking concerted actions. As Chen Yun once complained in 1983, a whole range of institutions, such as labor unions, neighborhood committees, teahouses, supply and marketing cooperatives (gongxiao she), and privately owned enterprises were running story houses. As a result, local governments only focused on levying taxes without bothering to interfere with contents of stories.29

28   Shanghai shi wenhua Yule changsuo zhi bianji bu, Shanghai wenhua yule changsuo zhi, 199–202. 29   Chen Yun 陈云, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben) 陈云同志关于评弹谈话和通信 (增订本) [Comrade Chen Yun’s talks and letters regarding pingtan storytelling (revised and enlarged edition)] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997), 107.

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Illustration 3: Zhu Xueqin (1923–1994) and Guo Binqing (1920–1968) were performing in the Xianle Story House. Xianle was a typical large-sized, ballroom-transformed story house. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

Different story houses featured different stories so that their listeners differed along the line of age and family background. In Mao’s times, high-budget and high-profile stories, particularly middle-length pingtan stories performed by state-employed artists, were staged in large-sized ballroom-transformed story houses, while storytellers in smaller story houses such as teahouses usually performed low-budget full-length pingtan stories (changpian pingtan). Large story houses bore resemblance to first-class theaters and cinemas, where the audience paid higher prices for hours-long entertainment. By comparison, storytellers of full-length stories finished the storylines in weeks or months so that they required listeners to return to the same story houses over an extended period of time. Therefore, as I will show in the third chapter, large story houses before the Cultural Revolution attracted a whole spectrum of audience, but particularly young listeners who did not have the luxury of frequenting story houses on a regular basis but held strong purchasing power to seek entertainment.



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Considering high ticket prices and the numbers of listeners, performing in large-sized story houses was almost always lucrative. Hence, large story houses, along with newly created pingtan genres, succeeded in making pingtan storytelling a highly commercialized and mass consumed art in Mao’s era. Meanwhile, smaller teahouse-story houses served retirees who could afford to stay in story houses daily or nightly. Beginning in the 1990s when pingtan could no longer be a major entertainment in the Yangzi Delta, as Chapter Seven will show, the vast majority of story houses were built or renovated to serve the needs of the elderly. Therefore, story houses were usually located inside or near large communities to perform the social function of providing the aged with pastimes. To accommodate economically disadvantaged elderly listeners, such story houses always charged extremely low admission fees, if at all, and their financial loss was invariably compensated by the investments of local governments. In this sense, more and more storytellers received state subsidies by performing in story houses designed to serve the elderly. Hence, the time-honored box-office revenue sharing option could well be brought to an end by the 2010s. The new development of the relationship among state, story houses, and artists since the 1990s revealed that a booming economy and diversified society did not necessarily lead to the weakening of state patronage of popular arts. On the contrary, with its evergrowing economic power, the state became more capable of financing and patronizing artists. In both pre- and post-Cultural Revolution times, story houses marketed their performances through two channels: newspaper advertisements and booklets for lineups of pingtan performances. More often than not, only state-run pingtan troupes afforded to advertise their performances on major dailies or evenings in big cities. The booklets, which were published on a monthly basis, by comparison, provided more detailed information about the pingtan market. Therefore, both listeners and pingtan researchers and administrators kept close watch on the publications of such booklets. Chen Yun, for example, once asked two directors of the Shanghai Troupe to look for and send him the booklets in 1960.30

  Chen Yun, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben), 7.

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Illustration 4: A booklet about lineups of pingtan performances in Shanghai and other cities (September and October 1954). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s as well as at the present, such booklets have been published and distributed on a monthly basis. Advertisements were printed with such booklets.



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Genres For Communist cadres, lengths of stories carried strong political implications. As middle-length stories, created as late as 1952, allowed the audience to enjoy one complete story within one night, political authorities in Maoist times held a firm belief that they were fit for the new rhythm of the PRC when the laboring masses were preoccupied with daily works and were therefore unable to frequent story houses regularly. On the contrary, full-length stories served almost exclusively the leisured class, whose members did not have to or refused to participate in the socialist construction and thereby had the leisure time to go to story houses night in and night out. In other words, the audience of middle-length and full-length pingtan stories was differentiated by their classes. It was no wonder that at the height of leftist radicalism in the mid-1960s, political authorities in the Yangzi Delta demanded storytellers to quit full-length stories and stage only middle-length stories. Pingtan storytelling’s function of propagating the Party’s agendas could presumably best be played out by “opening ballads” (kaipian). Originally designed to be sung “at the beginning a storytelling session,” opening ballads served to “prepare both audience and performer for the lengthy storytelling session that follows each ballad.”31 Yet, since the 1930s, opening ballads became a singing art in their own right, especially with the rise of the radio culture in the Yangzi Delta. For pingtan listeners between the 1930s and the Mao’s era, opening ballads functioned as popular songs and thereby gained widespread popularity. Therefore, both the Republican government and the CCP were eager to make opening ballads a propaganda tool. The term “pingtan” is itself a compound word created by combining the terms pinghua (sometimes translated as straight storytelling) and tanci. Pinghua is a style of storytelling without music or musical instruments. Performed mostly by a single storyteller, pinghua stories usually relate tales of heroes and adventure such as the Romance of Three Kingdoms (Sanguo) and the Water Margin (Shuihu). Pinghua storytellers are trained and required to deliver a variety of speaking voices and roles in an “active, aggressive, ‘masculine,’ and, at times, even brutal” way.32 Pinghua is alternatively known as “big stories” (dashu),

 Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 2.  Ibid., 5.

31 32

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as opposed to “small stories” (xiaoshu) or tanci. In Mark Bender’s definition, tanci (literally, “plucking lyrics”) is “a synthetic performance medium that combines oral narration, dramatic dialogue, singing, and the music of stringed instruments in the telling of lengthy love stories.”33 Tanci storytellers use sanxian (three strings)-banjo and pipalute to accompany their singings. In short, the distinction between two subgenres of pingtan storytelling resides in the musical accompaniment (or the lack thereof ) and types of stories pinghua and tanci artists respectively tell, namely heroic stories for the former and romantic ones for the latter. The hallmark of many pinghua performances is the “lively, often humorous commentary.”34 Comments made in pinghua stories were not necessarily directly related to storylines, but sometimes on the contemporary society and politics to strike a chord among listeners. Under such circumstance, as I will show in the seventh chapter, storylines and comments in pinghua stories sometimes prove politically subversive. Political and ideological orientation of storylines was also used as a criterion to distinguish types of full-length pingtan stories in the 1950s and 1960s. Classic stories staged prior to 1949 were called “traditional stories” (chuantong shu), “old stories” (laoshu), or “category one stories” (yilei shu). During the movement of Cutting the Tail, storytellers hurriedly abandoned their classic stories and engaged in creating new stories or adapting dramas into pingtan stories. Though labeled as new stories in the early 1950s, the vast majority of such stories were still set in imperial China. They were thus called “category two stories” (erlei shu). Beginning in the mid and late 1950s, state-run troupes began writing or adapting films or novels into stories to publicize the CCP’s accomplishments in the twentieth century. Such new stories were trumpeted by Communist cadres as the achievement of pingtan’s reform in Mao’s epoch.35

 Ibid., 3.  Ibid., 6. 35   Zhou Liang 周良 enumerates 100 “category two stories” and 86 “new stories” staged in the 1950s and 1960s. See Zhou Liang 周良, Suzhou pinghua tanci shi 苏州评话 弹词史 [A history of Suzhou tanci and pinghua] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2008), 171–182. 33 34



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Pingtan Techniques For pingtan storytellers and listeners alike, a successful rendition of a story does not necessarily reside on its storylines or themes, but on the way it is played out. As Pen-yeh Tsao points out, the presentation, rather than the story, is crucial to captivate the audience.36 To interest and intrigue listeners, storytellers employed a wide variety of skills such as singing, narrating, music accompanying, and imitating, all of which have been investigated in scholarly works.37 In this section, I focus on a number of pingtan narrating and performing skills that both contributed to enhancing the popularity of stories and endowed the art with political implications. Xuetou – Humor Xuetou (sometimes xue), translated as humor or comic elements, is “words or acts by the storyteller to amuse or to excite laughter.”38 Humor is more than the spice, but constitutes an integral part of stories. As a saying has it, “humor is the treasure of storytelling” (xue nai shuzhong zhi bao),39 indicating humor’s supreme value in enticing pingtan listeners. In Mao’s era, Communist cadres took issue with humor in pingtan stories, which was parallel with the deadened satiric force in Socialist literature.40 The essence of humor is satire, but new stories were not supposed to poke fun at the CCP but rather to glorify its military and political accomplishments. Here, pingtan artists were bedeviled by the same problem that faced xiangsheng performers. The issue was, to borrow Perry Link’s question about xiangsheng, “how could a fundamentally satiric art begin to ‘praise’ things?”41 If satire was employed to discredit enemies of the new society, moreover, how could one “be

36  Pen-yeh Tsao, The Music of Su-chou T’an-tz’u: Elements of the Chinese Southern SingingNarrative (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1988), 10. 37   For example, Pen-yeh Tsao, The Music of Su-chou T’an-tz’u and Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo. 38   Wenwei Du, “Xuetou: Comic Elements as Social Commentary in Suzhou Pingtan Storytelling,” CHINOPERL Papers, No. 18 (1995), 33. 39  Ibid. 40   C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, Second Edition, 1971), 474. 41  Perry Link, “The Crocodile Bird,” 220.

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sure that nobody will be amused for the wrong reasons?”42 As a result, humor in pingtan storytelling was under the close scrutiny by political authorities since 1949.43 For radical leftist officials and writers, humor was a “soft sword” (ruan daozi), with which counterrevolutionaries viciously attacked the Socialist China.44 Without humor, however, pingtan would certainly be bland. To tackle the dilemma, Chen Yun once offered an eclectic solution to limit the dosage of humor. To paraphrase his words, without humor pingtan was not a complete art, but at the same time the excessive use of humor was not desirable.45 Though politically moderate bureaucrats took more tolerant and even appreciative attitudes toward humor, they persisted in cautioning against unhealthy and seditious humor.46 Communist cadres’ concerns over humor were by no means unfounded. Wenwei Du calls humor in pingtan as “social commentaries,” which, in loosened and liberalized political atmosphere, could become political weaponry.47 In the fifth chapter, nevertheless, I will show that pingtan storytellers employed humor as a means of counter-propaganda to voice their bitter disappointment at the economic hardship following the Great Leap Forward. Under this circumstance, numerous reports were filed in Shanghai in the early 1960s to admonish listeners and cadres against dirty or even subversive jokes. Such reports precipitated the movement of “Greatly Writing the Thirteen Years,” in which political authorities imposed more restrictions on stories and storytellers’ performing skills. Chuancha – Stuck-ins Chuancha is translated as “stuck-ins” or “insertions,” which denotes “humorous remarks and anecdotes inserted into the narrative or as part of the introductory patter before the actual storytelling begins.”48 Though Mark Bender categorizes stuck-ins under humor, the former

42  Perry Link, “The Genie and the Lamp: Revolutionary Xiangsheng,” in Bonnie McDougall ed., Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic China, 99. 43  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 50. 44   Fang Yun 方耘, Pingtan chuangzuo xuan 评弹创作选 [Selected works of pingtan storytelling] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1975), 9. 45   Chen Yun, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben), 51, 60. 46   Zuoxian 左弦, Zenyang xinshang pingtan 怎样欣赏评弹 [How to enjoy pingtan storytelling] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1957), 26. 47   Wenwei Du, “Xuetou,” 35. 48  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 50.



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stands as an independent performing skill of pingtan storytelling as it consists of a wide variety of humorous remarks, news or rumors, commentaries of contemporary society and politics, anecdotes, historical facts, and so forth. Not every element of stuck-ins is intended to elicit laughter among the audience. In most occasions, stuck-ins serve as a contrast to, confirmation of, or enrichment of main plots.49 Yet, in other occasions, elements of stuck-ins could considerably deviate from storylines of pingtan stories, which not only results in the disruption of narratives, but also causes adverse effects on central themes of stories. For example, a government report in 1964 showed that in a story whose storyline centered on the CCP-led guerrilla warfare against the Japanese, the storyteller left aside the main plot to talk at length about a landlord’s marriage with five wives without any criticism of polygamy. The reporter voiced his/her deep concern that all new stories whose storyline was designed to glorify the CCP’s past and present could be easily distorted into pro-feudal and pro-bourgeois ones, provided that such stuck-ins prevailed on stage.50 Longtang Shu – Elaboration Episodes Longtang shu, translated as “elaboration episodes,” consists of “minor subplots or less polished but entertaining digressions,” as opposed to “crisis episodes” (guanzi shu) in which the action unfolds rapidly and crises are resolved.51 Theoretically, elaboration episodes are devised and staged to support the development of crisis episodes. As full-length stories could be performed in months or even years prior to 1949, elaboration episodes were the key to storytellers’ endeavors to lengthen stories to gain profits consistently. Lacking dramatic conflicts as in crisis episodes, elaboration episodes are filled with vivid and facetious elements to keep listeners on the edge of their seats.52 For this purpose, pingtan artists are entitled to use elaboration episodes to address any topics, however distantly relevant to the main plot, as long as they can entertain the audience. For most listeners who are very familiar with

  Zuoxian, Zenyang xinshang pingtan, 23.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan 上海市档案馆, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an 上海市 文化局档案 [Archives of Shanghai Culture Bureau], B172–1–463–75,79. 51  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 88. 52   Zuoxian 左弦, Pingtan sanlun 评弹散论 [Scattered notes on pingtan storytelling] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1982), 103. 49 50

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the plots, elaboration episodes, whose elements are subject to occasional alterations in stage performances, supply genuinely innovative entertainment and thereby become the selling point. Hence, story­ tellers take the liberty to tell stories manipulatively by, for instance, lengthening elaboration episodes and shortening crisis episodes. As shown in the fifth chapter, Communist heroes’ heroics (crisis episodes) could give way to lengthy descriptions of activities of KMT agents and gangsters (elaboration episodes) in stories about underground Communist revolutionaries in pre-1949 Shanghai. Flexibility All skills I have enumerated entail storytellers’ capability of improvisation and thus typify pingtan storytelling’s extraordinary flexibility. As Mark Bender notes, the “flexible frame” of pingtan performance “allows for detailed excursions into the private reaches of the characters’ heart,” which contribute to evoke the audience’s feelings.53 Pingtan storytelling’s flexibility stemmed from storytellers’ lack of necessity to keep their performances in line with written scripts prior to the Communist takeover of China. Equipped with “promptbooks” (  jiaoben) rather than scripts, pingtan storytellers took the liberty to add or subtract elements and to manipulate plots and themes of stories. The non-existence of scripts in the world of pingtan storytelling prior to 1949 was due to 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.54 Even after political authorities intervened in to demand transcriptions of classic stories and scripts for newly-created stories since the founding of the PRC, the textualization of pingtan stories has been anything but successful. When Susan Blader compares her observation of Jin Shengbo’s (b. 1930) stage performances and a book that transcribes same story, she only finds that the printed version leaves out all “paralinguistic features” and thereby “entirely destroys the rhythm and tight, suspenseful structure” of Jin’s oral version. The disappointed Susan Blader comes  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 87.  Nancy Jane Hodes, “Strumming and Singing the ‘Three Smiles Romance,’ ” 259–260. 53 54



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to conclude 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.”55 Censorship Susan Blader’s frustration at researchers’ inability to transform pingtan stories into print has been shared by censors, who, as a rule, tend to review scripts as a means of examining literary, filmic, and theatrical works. Wu Zongxi, for example, once bemoaned that, unlike bureaucrats who were responsible for censoring novels and motion pictures—and who could, of course, read manuscripts and watch films beforehand—censors of pingtan had no control over storytellers’ scripts.56 In theory, the most effective way of overseeing pingtan performances is to plant cadres in story houses to listen to stories regularly. Yet, in practice, local governments across the Yangzi Delta are decidedly short of resources to do so considering the enormous number of story houses in major cities. Zhou Liang, who took office as a cadre of the Suzhou Culture Bureau (Suzhou shi wenhua ju) in the 1950s, admitted that he was frequently assigned the task of attending theatrical performances as a censor, but his superiors rarely asked him to listen to full-length stories in story houses to examine contents of such stories.57 Even when CCP officials-qua-censors showed up in story houses, storytellers had long been trained to grasp the skill of telling stories differently before different listeners. A widely circulated anecdote indicates that Ma Rufei, the pingtan master and founder of a pingtan guild in the late Qing, told his Pearl Pagoda (Zhenzhu ta) differently in the countryside, in towns and cities, and before 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.58

55   Susan Blader, “Oral Narrative and Its Transformation into Print: the Case of Bai Yutang,” in Vibeke Børdahl ed., The Eternal Storyteller, 172–178. 56   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, January 6, 2008. 57   Zhou Liang 周良, “Duanchang lu 短长录 [Records of short and long],” Pingtan yishu, No. 42, 2010, 27; interview with author, June 9, 2010. 58   Fangcao, “Suzhou pingtan koujue,” 252.

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Pingtan storytellers’ skillfulness in improvisation and the impossibility of transforming stage performances into texts, coupled with political authorities’ lack of manpower to supervise pingtan performances regularly, make pingtan storytelling a highly censorship unfriendly art in the past sixty years. To tackle the problem, cultural bureaucrats counted on listeners to keep watch on storytelling. In various critical moments of pingtan storytelling during the PRC times, listeners played indispensable roles in implementing the Party’s hidden transcripts. For example, some extremely radical listeners spared no effort to coerce storytellers into replacing classic stories with new stories at the height of the movement of Cutting the Tail, whereas the Party officials usually refrained themselves from explicitly requesting artists to quit classic stories. Even after the Cultural Revolution, “listeners’ appeals” were often cited to justify decisions to ban storytellers. The sixth chapter will show that Yang Zijiang was banished from pingtan storytelling on the grounds that a retired worker from a Shanghai-based bicycle factory sent a letter to the local government to lay bare Yang Zijiang’s venomous attack upon the Party in his stage performances.59 The same Yang Zijiang, however, won a reputation as a vocal and audacious critic of the CCP after his ten-year long exile in the 1980s. After he returned to stage in the early 1990s, as I will show in the sixth and seventh chapters, political authorities’ continued censorship of Yang Zijiang’s performances proved counterproductive. It only encouraged listeners across the Yangzi Delta to attend Yang’s storytelling, rather than scaring them away. Yang Zijiang’s experiences in the post-Mao years exemplified Geremie Barmé’s contention that “[g]overnment interdictions no longer necessarily marked the end of a career but, when properly managed, could often add to the public profile of a controversial artist.”60 *  *  *  * Throughout this chapter, I have discussed various aspects of the pingtan system and their economic and political implications in the PRC era. In short, pingtan’s individualistic mode of organization and performance both allowed performers to earn high incomes as the selfemployed and posed an obstacle to the Party’s efforts to collectivize

59 60

 Yang Zijiang 扬子江, interview with author, July 7, 2009.   Geremie Barmé, In the Red, xvii.



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storytellers, a core component of the CCP’s cultural reform. Furthermore, with its uniquely high flexibility, particularly the need for improvisations on stage, pingtan storytelling defied the censorship and political authorities’ appropriation, another key aspect of the PRC regime’s cultural agendas. The ineffectiveness of censoring pingtan storytelling resulted from both the targets of censorship, namely pingtan performers and their works, and the censors themselves. The CCP’s bureaucracy consisted of cadres with ill-defined boundaries of jurisdictions and oftentimes competing visions regarding how to transform China’s culture both in Maoist and post-Maoist eras. Therefore, the subject of censorship, namely the Party-state, as Gail Hershatter puts it, was not a fixed entity, but was always localized. After all, it was local cadres that implemented, interpreted, and even reworked Party policies at the local level. Therefore, the state meant differently for different people.61 In a similar vein, the present study shows that the Party-state was embodied by different individuals or groups. For the self-employed, the embodiment of the state was state-run troupes and their members; for state-employed storytellers, the state was Communist cadres in troupes; for cadres like Wu Zongxi, it was local governments, the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, and sometimes Chen Yun. Virtually all players, including Communist cadres of various levels, state-employed and self-employed artists, performers’ associations, pingtan performing enterprises of different natures, and the audience were at once the dominant and the subordinate. They all had certain negotiating power in different historical eras, but, meanwhile, had limitations of various sorts.

 Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory” 46.

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Cutting the Tail: The Founding of the Shanghai Troupe in the Early 1950s When the shattering peal of artillery north of the Soochow Creek (Suzhou he) was bringing Shanghai residents horror in late May 1949, pingtan storytellers in the relatively peaceful southern segment of the city continued their performances on stage or radio.1 Just three days following the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai on May 27, 1949, the government-run Shanghai People’s Radio (Shanghai renmin guangbo diantai) started to broadcast pingtan programs.2 Such a smooth transition notwithstanding, the violent regime change in China vastly unsettled and terrified storytellers, who had long enjoyed enormous fames and profits in the Yangzi Delta. Unlike Beijing Opera and Yue Opera, whose iconic figures such as Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) and Yuan Xuefen (1922–2011) had rich experiences in cooperating with the CCP and instantly ascended to be the PRC’s cultural elites,3 pingtan storytelling seemed to have won little favor from new political authorities. In a speech in November 1951, for example, a Communist cadre asserted that pingtan storytelling was an entertainment rife with “poisonous elements of feudalism” (fengjian dusu).4 All storytellers confronted a choice of actively collaborating with the CCP, keeping the status quo as self-employed storytellers, or leaving the country for Hong Kong or Taiwan to open up new markets. Meanwhile, Communist cadres pushed for a sweeping change of pingtan storytelling to fit the CCP’s agenda of cultural and societal reforms in China. Immediately after the CCP’s takeover of Shang-

1  Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, Biemeng yixi: wode pingtan shengya 别梦依稀 ：我的评弹 生涯 [The Dim Dream Recalled: My Pingtan Career] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 2008), 55. 2  Li Zhuomin 李卓敏, “Pingtan yu guangbo dianshi de bujie zhi yuan 评弹与 广播电视的不解之缘 [An indissoluble bond between pingtan storytelling and radio broadcasting and TV],” Pingtan yishu No. 23, 1998, 102. 3   Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 173. 4   Shanghai pingtan tuan 上海评弹团, Shanghai pingtan tuan wushi zhounian 上海评 弹团五十周年 [Fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Shanghai pingtan troupe] (n. p., 2001), 15.

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hai, therefore, political authorities proceeded to educate storytellers with Marxist conception of society and history. Meanwhile, some reform-minded listeners, though small in number, self-consciously joined the choir of reforming pingtan storytelling by urging storytellers to alter their performing styles and quit classic stories to exclusively tell new stories. Under enormous pressure from both Communist cadres and the audience, storytellers adopted a pre-emptive approach to impose bans on all classic stories in the early 1950s under the rubric of Cutting the Tail. The movement of Cutting the Tail, which has been assessed as storytellers’ self-censorship, exemplified local bureaucrats’ “hidden script.” Never officially backing the Cutting the Tail, Communist cadres adeptly intimidated storytellers and journalists and persuaded some listeners into taking part in the movement. To cadres’ disappointment, however, the movement failed to bring about a sweeping change to pingtan storytelling, but, on the contrary, caused a great deal of confusion and controversy. On the one hand, storytellers’ livelihoods were at stake as most of them were unable to create new, but commercially successful stories. On the other hand, interdicting classic stories was at odds with the central government’s general policy of tolerating theatrical and quyi repertoire for fear that artists’ livelihoods would have been jeopardized, had they been deprived of performing plays and stories they were familiar with. In this sense, the central government’s prioritization of artists’ livelihoods over political correctness was in conflict with local bureaucrats’ emphasis on fundamental cultural changes and reformation of artists. The reform of pingtan’s repertoire and storytellers in post-Liberation China thus started with utter fear, confusion, chaos, and misunderstanding. Initial Contacts In pessimistic storytellers’ opinions, the drastic regime change and the CCP’s victory in the late 1940s China foreboded the death of the time-honored pingtan art. Chen Xi’an (b. 1928), for example, was appalled to think that the CCP would ultimately forbid storytellers like him from telling stories to serve the “leisured class” (youxian jieji).5

5

  Chen Xi’an 陈希安, interview with author, July 23, 2009.



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Under this circumstance, most storytellers were concerned about their livelihoods if the new government banned all classic stories once and for all.6 Even though the CCP might not abolish storytelling altogether, the people, who must be busy working to build a new China, would no longer frequent story houses, as Tang Gengliang presumed. At any rate, storytellers were doomed to lose their jobs. Tang thus consulted with his fellow storyteller and close friend, Jiang Yuequan (1917–2001), and suggested that Jiang, who possessed a driver’s license then, purchase a used car in Suzhou and embark on a new career of trans-regional transportation in the Yangzi Delta.7 In order to adapt themselves to the new revolutionary age, some pingtan artists replaced their woolen long gowns with cotton ones to display their new, modest lifestyle.8 Tang Gengliang, for example, sought to organize a “Cotton Clothing Society” (Buyi hui) to dissuade his colleagues from leading luxurious lives.9 The CCP’s cadres who represented the Shanghai Military Control Committee (Shanghai shi junshi guanzhi weiyuanhui), nevertheless, appeared unexpectedly polite and respectful without showing any intention of getting rid of pingtan storytelling.10 In spite of this, most storytellers harbored suspicions against those cadres who wore military uniforms. Pan Boying was one of the few artists who were willing to keep in touch with Communist cadres on a daily basis in order to familiarize himself with the ruling party’s cultural policies. Within a couple of months after Shanghai was liberated, Pan managed to stage four stories about the ongoing Communist revolution and social transformations in China.11 Another notable storyteller who was on good terms with the new government was Liu Tianyun (1907–1965). Liu shuttled between story houses, in which he told stories about the newly enacted Marriage Law, and conference rooms where he attended political meetings as the representative of thousands of pingtan  6   Pan Boying 潘伯英, “Wo zenyang dangle ganbu 我怎样当了干部 [How did I become a cadre?],” Dazhong xiqu, Vol. 1, No. 4, June 10, 1951, 24.  7  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 53.  8  Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, “Shuoshu shengya (si) 说书生涯 (四) [My career as a story­teller, part four],” Pingtan yishu, No. 21, 1997, 153.  9   Tang Lixing 唐力行, Biemeng yixi: shuoshuren Tang Gengliang jinian wenji 别梦依稀: 说书人唐耿良纪念文集 [The dim dream recalled: essay collection in memory of Tang Gengliang, the storyteller] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2010), 7. 10  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 55. 11   Fanyi 凡一, “Pingtan gexinjia Pan Boying (xu) 评弹革新家潘伯英 (续) [Pan Boying, the pingtan reformer (part two)],” Pingtan yishu, No. 8, 1987, 173.

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storytellers.12 To show his commitment to following the lead of the CCP, Liu Tianyun started to air a new story on radio to publicize the Marriage Law as early as in December 1949.13 Elsewhere, more storytellers staged stories to respond to the CCP’s call for societal and cultural transformations in China in order to win the ruling party’s favor. The new political climate, for example, lured Fan Xuejun (1925–1995), previously known as the “Queen of Tanci” (tanci huanghou), out of retirement to participate in performances for charitable causes.14 As the new Marriage Law was intended to liberate Chinese women from familial burdens and social discriminations, it was understandable that female storytellers were particularly active in propagating the newly enacted law in story houses or on radio. Xu Xueyue (1917–2000), for example, led her two female disciples, Cheng Hongye (1924–?) and Chen Hongxia (1935–1989), to sing opening ballads to promote the Marriage Law in late 1950 or early 1951 prior to their experimenting with a four-act long new story about the rural life.15 Opening ballads, for its simple form and elegant music, turned out to be highly useful in the early stage of cooperation between the CCP and storytellers. Shortly after the establishment of the Shanghai People’s Radio, Jiang Yuequan was invited to sing thirty opening ballads of the White-haired Girl (Baimao nü), a story adapted from a widelyknown drama about a wicked landlord’s exploitation of peasants in northern China prior to the Communist victory.16 For years, Communist cadres encouraged local artists to stage the White-haired Girl, a story gradually developed by Communist writers, in all Communistoccupied regions.17 From Communist cadres’ perspective, therefore, Jiang Yuequan’s singing of opening ballads of the White-haired Girl

12   Xie Yujing 谢毓菁, “Liu Tianyun xiansheng shi zheyang jiaodao xuesheng de 刘天韵先生是这样教导学生的 [This is how Mr. Liu Tianyun instructs his disciples],” Dazhong xiqu, Vol. 1, No. 8, October 18, 1951, 29. 13   Xie Yujing 谢毓菁, “Tewu de zidan 特务的子弹 [The bullets from secret agents],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 133. 14   Shunzhong 顺中, “Tanci huanghou—Fan Xuejun 弹词皇后—范雪君 [Fan Xuejun, the queen of tanci],” Pingtan yishu, No. 12, 1991, 103. 15   Xu Xueyue 徐雪月, “Huiyi dangnian yanchu Luohan qian 回忆当年演出罗汉 钱 [Remembering the performance of Luohan Coin in the past], Pingtan yishu No. 24, 1999, 85–86. 16  Ni Pingqian 倪萍倩, “Pingtan yizhi bi—Chen Lingxi 评弹一支笔—陈灵犀 [Chen Lingxi, the pen of pingtan],” Pingtan yishu, No. 10, 1989, 143. 17   Xiaomei Chen, Playing the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 80.



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exemplified the CCP’s conviction to “revolutionizing” pingtan storytelling in a way, with which they were familiar and comfortable. From storytellers’ perspective, singing ballads to serve the governmental agenda of political indoctrination was by no means a new creation. In the 1930s, as Carlton Benson has shown, pingtan ballads had already been used to promote the KMT government’s New Life Movement.18 Writers who were able to adapt novels and dramas into pingtan stories or ballads found themselves extremely popular among pingtan storytellers. Chen Lingxi (1902–1983), formerly a journalist and writer for example, was the author of thirty ballads of the White-haired Girl for Jiang Yuequan and the Shanghai People’s Radio.19 Zhu Ezi (1910–1995), a longtime pingtan writer, both wrote full-length stories and revised and polished existent stories for renowned storytellers in the wake of the CCP’s takeover.20 Zhu Ezi kept writing and adapting stories for both self-employed artists and troupes until 1959.21 Facing soaring demands for new pingtan stories and songs, Chen and other writers organized the “Union for Writers of New Pingtan Storytelling” (Xin pingtan zuozhe lianhe hui). Apart from the thirty opening ballads, Jiang Yuequan also hired Chen to produce a full-length story, Lin Chong, based on one of China’s most read novels, Water Margin.22 Such new stories were particularly encouraged by CCP cadres as a means of reforming pingtan storytelling. Cao Hanchang (1911–2000) recalled that all storytellers who performed in Shanghai during the Chinese New Year of 1950 were required to tell new stories for seven consecutive days before old stories could be staged.23 Even though the government never explicitly stipulated the exclusive performance of new stories, some storytellers and even story house owners with political acumen attempted to please political authorities by replacing classic stories with new ones. Huang Yi’an (1913–1996), the very first storyteller

  Carlton Benson, “From Teahouse to Radio,” 134; 143.  Ni Pingqian, “Pingtan yizhi bi,” 143. 20   Zhu Ezi 朱恶紫, “He pingtan jieyuan liushi nian 和评弹结缘六十年 [Being attached to pingtan storytelling for sixty years],” Pingtan yishu, No. 14, 1993, 163. 21   Jin Guonan 金国男, “Zhu Ezi shengping 朱恶紫生平 [Zhu Ezi’s life],” Pingtan yishu, No. 37, 2007, 150. 22   Yuxiang 虞襄, “Pingtan yizhi bi—zhuihuai Chen Linxi xiansheng 评弹一支 笔—追怀陈灵犀先生 [The pen of pingtan storytelling: cherishing the memory of Mr. Chen Linxi],” Pingtan yishu, No. 29, 2001, 65. 23   Cao Hanchang 曹汉昌, “Shutan yanyun lu (xu) 书坛烟云录 (续) [The record of smoke and clouds in the world of pingtan storytelling, part two],” Pingtan yishu, No. 15, 1994, 138. 18 19

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to have authored and told full-length new stories immediately after the Liberation, remembered that it was the owner of the story house who approached him and demanded him to substitute a new story for his old one in the summer of 1949. Under the pressure from his employer, thus, Huang quickly wrote a story about the peasants’ warfare in late Ming (1368–1644). Despite a new and revolutionary theme, episodes about love affairs between courtesans and politicians continued to prevail in the story. Therefore, the audience enjoyed the story as its descriptions of romantic love bore resemblance to those in classic stories.24 Meanwhile, Huang Yi’an’s story was satisfactory to Communist cadres as it seamlessly transplanted stories or tales that had been popular in the CCP-controlled areas prior to 1949 to his own.25 The CCP’s agenda to reform pingtan storytelling was not limited merely to the occasional staging of new stories about the Communist revolution and contemporary social and cultural transformations. Making new artists was no less a pressing task than producing new stories. Across China, dramatists and quyi performers received retraining in classes organized by Communist cadres. By the end of 1950, over fifty thousand artists signed up for mandatory classes and seminars in seventeen provinces.26 In Beijing, for example, over one thousand dramatists attended such classes.27 In a similar fashion, storytellers were enrolled in seminars and workshops in the Yangzi Delta to familiarize them with the new government’s cultural policies and the history of the CCP and its revolution. For example, the Suzhou branch of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles (Zhongguo wenxue yishu jia lianhehui, or wenlian) offered storytellers in Suzhou a few classes as early as in late 1950.28 Between June and early September 1951, a similar workshop drew 250 participants. In the workshop, Communist cadres imparted Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art, among other things, to storytellers, who would go to the countryside to experiment with new stories after the

24  Huang Yi’an 黄异庵, “Wo de xie xinshu 我的写新书 [My writing of new stories],” Wenhui bao, October 22, 1950. 25   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 26   Fu Jin 傅谨, Xin Zhongguo xiju shi: 1949–2000 新中国戏剧史 [A history of drama in new China: 1949–2000] (Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002), 12. 27  Roger Howard, Contemporary Chinese Theatre, 63. 28   Qian Yingm 钱璎, “Huainian Cao lao 怀念曹老 [In memory of venerable Cao],” Pingtan yishu, No. 27, 2000, 75.



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workshop ended.29 In such classes, participants were required to take exams and tests. The higher the scores, the more progressive storytellers were assessed.30 Considering storytellers had to be temporarily released from duties of stage performances and thus gained no incomes, attending government-organized seminars and workshops was viewed as an indication of pingtan artists’ willingness to collaborate with the new regime and “pursuit of progressivism” (zhuiqiu jinbu). Cadres in Shanghai similarly urged storytellers to attend classes. Cao Hanchang remembered that the classes he took in late 1950 were taught on the campus of the Fudan University (Fudan daxue), where thousands of pingtan storytellers as well as dramatists engaged in discussions of reforming China’s existent theater and quyi.31 On August 1, 1951, the Shanghai municipal government once again held three seminars about theatrical reforms for pingtan storytellers and other artists.32 On both occasions, Wu Zongxi, who was working for the Department of Literature and Arts (Wenyi chu) of the Shanghai Military Control Committee, gave lectures and facilitated discussions.33 Su Yuyin, then a young storyteller, was under the impression that Wu had always represented the Shanghai Military Control Committee to contact and educate storytellers immediately after the Liberation. From time to time, Wu imparted to storytellers the knowledge of the evolvement from apes to human beings, namely, the Darwinist theory of evolution.34 According to Sigrid Schmalzer, teaching “from ape to human” was invariably the CCP’s first lesson of ideological indoctrination in the early 1950s.35 The story of evolving from apes and human beings allowed the CCP to popularize “materialism” to iron out idealism.36 After taking a number of classes, Cao Hanchang, however,

  Fanyi, “Pingtan gexinjia Pan Boying (zaixu),” 120.   Xia Zhenhua 华, interview with author, August 2, 2010. 31   Cao Hanchang, “Shutan yanyun lu (xu)”, 139. 32  Ding Jie 丁杰, “Wo yu pingtan 我与评弹 [Pingtan and I],” Pingtan yishu, No. 28, 2001, 173. 33   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 34   Su Yuyin 苏毓荫, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 35   Sigrid Schmalzer, “The Very First Lesson”: Teaching about Human Evolution in Early 1950s China,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul Pickowicz eds., Dilemmas of Victory, 233. 36  Ibid., 241. 29 30

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still felt perplexed about the CCP’s overall attitudes toward pingtan storytelling. Though he was quite sure that pingtan as an oral art would still be in great need in this new society, a question continued to puzzle him, namely what kind of stories the new regime would accept or at least tolerate.37 What was certain was that classic stories, from which generations of storytellers earned fames and wealth for centuries, started to receive negative assessments, if not scathing attacks, from Communist cadres. Cutting the Tail In the first two years following the CCP’s takeover of China, storytellers attempted to tell both classic stories and new stories in order to garner high profits and simultaneously please the new government. For example, in March 1951, Zhang Jianting (1909–1984) and his brother Zhang Jianguo (1923–2004), in various radio stations, told Painting of Ten Beauties (Shimei tu), a typical scholar-meeting-beauties story set in the Ming Dynasty, with which the Zhang brothers ascended to be first-rate storytellers in the 1940s, and The Red Lady (Hong niangzi ), a newly written story about late Ming peasants’ rebellions.38 For Communist cadres, however, such eclecticism was hardly satisfactory. In one meeting called by the Department of Literature and Art of the Shanghai Military Control Committee, one cadre proclaimed to “send Tang Bohu to the grave” (ba Tang Bohu songjin fenmu). If Three Smiles (Sanxiao), with the famous painter Tang Bohu (1470–1523) being the main character, was denounced to carry the feudal legacy, the frightened storytellers considered that all classic stories they kept telling for decades would sooner or later be banned by the new regime.39 Storytellers’ Self-Conscious Boycott of Classic Stories Storytellers swiftly translated fears and concerns about the imminent bans from the government into a pre-emptive action to stop telling

  Cao Hanchang, “Shutan yanyun lu (xu),” 139.   “Shanghai shi ge diantai xiqu jiemu shijian yilan biao 上海市各电台戏曲节目 时间一览表 [A schedule of theatric and quyi programs in various radios],” Dazhong xiqu, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 5, 1951, 30. 39  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 7. 37 38



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classic stories even without any official orders from political authorities. On June 25, 1951, nine pingtan artists including Tang Gengliang, Jiang Yuequan, and the Zhang brothers collectively issued a public letter to express their will to suspend all of their favorite classic stories such as Three Smiles, Pearl Pagoda, Jade Dragonfly (Yu qingting), Three Kingdoms, and Painting of Ten Beauties.40 In the next several months, the proposal brought forward by the nine storytellers escalated into a movement of pingtan artists’ self-censorship to avoid the CCP’s further intervention. On January 16, 1952, the Shanghai branch of the Association filed an inquiry to the Shanghai municipal government regarding a ban on about twenty stories.41 When the government gave no official reply, it took the initiative to declare banning five stories including the aforementioned Pearl Pagoda and Three Smiles on March 15, 1952.42 A fortnight later, the Suzhou branch of the Association announced to increase the number of banned stories to eleven.43 The two motions signified the culmination of the movement of Cutting the Tail, a movement that exerted profound impact on pingtan storytelling in the early 1950s. The Association thereafter tried, if not entirely successfully, to penalize its members for their continuing to tell classic stories. When Zhang Guoliang (b. 1929), for example, told the Three Kingdoms in Shanghai, he was charged for “selling drugs” (fanmai dupin) and was punished to be under the Association’s close surveillance for six months.44 The movement of Cutting the Tail, however, was by no means a campaign voluntarily initiated and participated in by pingtan performers. The pressure from the audience and the media, which had been agonizingly felt by all storytellers between 1950 and 1953, doomed the fate of classic stories. In the summer of 1951, for example, Tang Gengliang was notified that the Orient Radio (Dongfang diantai) of Shanghai was threatened by a letter signed by seventy listeners protesting Emperor

  Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-85, 3.   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-75, 37–38. 42   Zemin 泽民, “Pingtan xiehui jin kai huiyuan dahui, wei jinchang wubu jiushu wenti 评弹协会今开会员大会, 为禁唱五部旧书问题 [Pingtan association holds a meeting for members today for the issue of banning five classic stories],” Shanghai shutan, March 15, 1952. 43   Qian Ying 钱璎, “Lun jianguo chuqi de pingtan shumu jianshe 论建国以来的 评弹书目建设 [On the development of the pingtan repertoire in the early stage of the PRC],” Pingtan yishu, No. 27, 2000, 74. 44   “Pingtan gongzuo cunzai shenme wenti 评弹工作存在什么问题 [What are the problems in the work of pingtan storytelling],” Xin Suzhou bao, May 17, 1957. 40 41

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Illustration 5: Letter signed by nine pingtan artists vowing to quit telling classic stories on June 25, 1951. The letter triggered the movement of Cutting the Tail between 1951 and 1953. (Scanned copy from the Shanghai Municipal Archives)

Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan (Qianlong xia Jiangnan) by Shen Xiaomei (1905–1970) and thus had to withdraw the story on the grounds that it glorified emperors and nobilities and propagated feudal morals. As a privately owned radio station, the Orient Radio was concerned of the government’s suspension of its license with a charge of ideological backwardness. Thus, the radio station jettisoned Shen Xiaomei’s story without hesitation.45 In this fashion, ideologically radical listeners, albeit in a small number, played a disproportionally large role in monitoring performances in story houses and on air and coercively pushing for the staging of new stories. Their tireless intervention in 45

 Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 71.



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pingtan storytelling affected in no small ways the choice of stories by storytellers and owners of radio stations and story houses. Radical listeners usually sent readers’ letters to Dazhong xiqu (Mass Drama), a magazine edited by Wu Zongxi and his colleagues in the Department of Literature and Art, and Shanghai shutan (The Circle of Storytelling in Shanghai), a Shanghai-based privately owned newspaper. Wu Zongxi remembered that periodicals such as Shanghai shutan appeared extremely progressive despite, or because of, their private ownership. Its owner, with whom Wu Zongxi met regularly, was afraid, in the same way as the management of the Orient Radio, that the government might shut down the newspaper under the excuse of its apathy towards cultural reform in the new historical era. As a young cadre in charge of reforming theater and quyi, Wu Zongxi harshly criticized the newspaper for its insufficient support of new stories from time to time. The scared editors of Shanghai shutan therefore had to display their political progressiveness and cultural radicalism in the newspaper.46 Consequently, both periodicals became the main outlets where essays and readers’ letters were published to blame storytellers’ insistence on telling classic stories. On November 14, 1951, for example, two readers/ listeners urged a storyteller to make self-criticism because he not only continued to tell a classic story, Law Cases of Lord Peng (Penggong an), but also reminded the audience of Shanghai’s colonial past by calling the Nanjing Road (Nanjing lu) as “the Great Road of the Great Britain” (Daying da malu).47 Some listeners vowed to support new stories by launching the campaign of “not listening to old stories” (buting jiushu).48 Listeners pointed their fingers at not only storytellers, but also managements of story houses. On April 26, 1952, the Huizhong Story House (Huizhong shuchang) in downtown Shanghai was forced to make a public apology for its continuation of contracting storytellers

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 1, 2010.  Lu Ding’an and Gao Dapei 陆定安、高大培, “Zhu Yaoliang yinggai jiantao 朱耀良应该检讨 [Zhu Yaoliang must criticize himself],” Shanghai shutan, November 14, 1951. 48   Zhenghua 正华, “Xiangying ‘buting jiushu’ yundong 响应不听旧书运动 [In response to the movement of “not to listen to old stories”]. Shanghai shutan, December 26, 1951. 46 47

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to tell classic stories to pursue high revenues after listeners wrote to Dazhong xiqu to reprimand the story house.49 The Unsuccessful New Stories The deafening noise made by a small number of listeners inflicted incredible pressure upon storytellers and story house managements alike, but hid the fact that the vast majority of listeners prioritized classic stories over newly written ones despite the regime change. As a result, most new stories that were hailed by political authorities and self-righteous listeners gained little recognition in the market. Shen Dongshan (b. 1930) recalled that his Water Margin, the only classic story sanctioned by the CCP in the early 1950s, outcompeted all new stories told by famous storytellers in neighboring story houses around 1952 in spite of the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Since Water Margin narrated the story of peasants’ rebellions, the CCP had already adapted it into dramatic plays in the 1940s. For example, Communist dramatists in Yan’an had staged a Beijing Opera play, Driven Up the Liang Mountains (Bishang Liangshan), based on some episodes of Water Margin in the 1940s.50 Hence, it was the safest choice for many a storyteller to adapt this classic novel. Jiang Yuequan, for example, officially and openly acknowledged Han Shiliang (1897–1973), a pinghua storyteller specialized in Water Margin, as his master despite Jiang’s superstardom since the late 1940s.51 Apart from Water Margin, pingtan storytellers turned their attention to other classic novels and dramas that had won official acclaim from the CCP or works by the Party’s organ writers into performable stories. Such newly written stories that were usually adapted from novels and dramas have been called “category two stories.” Adapting Party-sanctioned works had two advantages. First, they were politically safe. Second, theatrical plays provided writers and storytellers with relatively sophisticated lyrics. Moreover, story­tellers were inclined to emulate performances of actors and actresses on stage 49   Zhang Haitang 张海棠, “Huizhong shuchang laihan: jiantao yanchang ‘jiushu’ de cuowu, duanjie qi jueyu ‘jiushu’ jueyuan 惠中书场来函: 检讨演唱“旧书的错误, 端节起决与“旧书”绝缘 [Letter from Huizong Story House: criticizing itself for the mistake of staging “old stories,” (and) being set to abandon “old stories” beginning from the duanwu festival], Shanghai shutan, April 26, 1952. 50  Hsiao-ti Li, “Opera, Society and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901–1937,” Ph D Dissertation, Harvard University, 1996, 368. 51   Shen Dongshan 沈东山, interview with author, June 28, 2010.



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and thereby “theatricalize” (xiju hua) pingtan storytelling.52 Category two stories were far from successful in most cases. Wu Zongxi was amazed to find that storytellers appeared like amateurs as soon as they told new stories.53 Li Bokang (1903–1978), a Shanghai-based storyteller, disappointedly discovered that the audience was reluctant to accept two of his new stories. As a result, he had to retell his favorite classic story in late 1952.54 Xue Xiaoqing (1901–1980), one of the most well-known storytellers in the 1930s and 1940s, tried to tell Hua Mulan, a story about a heroine’s military achievements and patriotism around the fifth century AD, instead of his favorite Pearl Pagoda. But Hua Mulan, in his daughter’s words, was “bland and tasteless” (pingdan wuwei).55 Even the renowned Jiang Yuequan felt dismayed by the fact that his recently developed new story drew only scores of listeners each day in Changshu in the early 1950s, even though the writer, Chen Lingxi, accompanied him during his performing tour and revised the story in accordance with the audience’s responses.56 The lack of artistic value and exciting episodes in new stories stemmed from the great urgency that artists felt so that they or professional writers worked out such stories in haste. Xue Xiaoqing, for example, had a writer author and read one chapter in daytime everyday and repeated the chapter to the audience at night.57 Xia Zhenhua (b. 1939), a middle school student and amateur writer in the early and mid-1950s, called the efforts to write for storytellers as “fire-fighting” (  jiuhuo) to underscore the urgency that every performer was facing. Since his friends had received too many requests for new stories in the early 1950s, he was also invited to participate in the movement of developing the new repertoire for pingtan storytellers. In summer breaks when

52   Zhou Liang 周良, Suzhou pingtan yishu chutan 苏州评弹艺术初探 [A preliminary exploration of the art of Suzhou pingtan storytelling] (Beijing: Zhongguo quyi chubanshe, 1998), 132–133. 53   Zuoxian 左弦, “Jianchi shuo xinshu he baocun chuantong shu de youxiu bufen 坚持说新书和保存传统书的优秀部分 [Insisting on telling new stories and preserving the essence of classic stories],” In Chen Yun tongzhi he pingtan yishu 陈云同志和评弹 艺术 [Comrade Chen Yun and pingtan art], eds. Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu 江浙沪评弹工作领导小组 (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 50. 54   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 9. 55   Xue Huijun 薛惠君, “Yi fuqin Xue Xiaoqing 忆父亲薛惠君 [In memory of my father, Xue Xiaoqing],” Pingtan yishu, No. 25, 1999, 32. 56   Chen Lingxi 陈灵犀, Xianbian shuangji 弦边双楫 [Dual oars beside strings] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1982), 12. 57   Xue Huijun, “Yi fuqin Xue Xiaoqing,” 32.

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he was out of school, Xia Zhenhua stayed with storytellers and wrote one chapter each day for their next-day performance. Most stories were adapted from dramatic plays, such as those of Beijing Opera. Xia Zhenhua remembered that a division of labor was usually agreed upon by him and storytellers, as he only made arrangements for music and singings and the latter prepared for the rest. Very soon, Xia became quite famous among pingtan storytellers who were all desperately hungry for stories, and, as a consequence, he assumed the role as an amateur pingtan playwright for the rest part of his life.58 Writers’ involvement resulted from the vast majority of storytellers’ insufficient education. As a contemporary observer noted, storytellers of older generations invariably transmitted stories orally to their disciples in the pingtan world as a practice. Therefore, most storytellers lacked necessary training in authoring their own stories.59 Nancy Hodes similarly finds that “an oral/aural process of transmission from master to apprentice” has long defied “any intervention of the written word” in the world of pingtan storytelling.60 Storytellers’ lack of capability to develop new stories was embarrassingly magnified in this new historical age. For Communist cadres, a more acute problem lay in storytellers’ deep-seated feudal ideologies, which distanced them from the day-to-day lives of workers and peasants. Hence, when representing the laboring masses on stage, storytellers were actually performing something that they were completely unfamiliar with.61 The invitation of professional writers might be helpful, but not realistic to all storytellers. After all, the fees charged by writers were prohibitively high so that only a very small number of storytellers could afford to hire writers. Wang Boyin (b. 1923) recalled that Jiang Yuequan, his master, paid gold bullions for the new story, Lin Chong.62 When Huang Jingfen (1924–1994), a female storyteller, defended her decision to continue to tell classic stories in late 1951, she claimed that the writer charged her exorbitantly to produce a new

  Xia Zhenhua, interview with author, August 2, 2010.   Chen Yunhao 陈允豪, “Mantan pingtan jie bianzuo xinshu wenti 漫谈评弹界 编作新书问题 [Casual comments on the development of new stories in the pingtan circle],” In Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, diyi ce, 1950–1964 苏州评弹文选, 第一册, 1950– 1964, ed., Zhou Liang 周良 (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1997), 4. 60   Nancy Hodes, “Strumming and Singing the ‘Three Smiles Romance,’ ” 259–260. 61   Chen Yunhao, “Mantan pingtan jie bianzuo xinshu wenti,” 4. 62   Wang Boyin 王伯荫, interview with author, July 26, 2009. 58 59



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story, which was certainly unaffordable.63 Even worse, some storytellers complained that new stories that they purchased at high prices were not always fit for stage performances.64 The Resumption of Telling Classic Stories The usually raw and tasteless but over-priced new stories dealt the vast majority of storytellers a heavy financial blow. Many of them refused, by using all kinds of excuses, to stage new stories long after the Association publicized its decisions to cut the tail in March 1952. The abovementioned Huang Jingfen, for example, put forth two reasons in November 1951 to justify her insistence on telling classic stories. Aside from high prices, Huang presumed that not a single new story was sophisticated enough for stage performance. Therefore, she had determined to postpone telling new stories for almost another year.65 Yan Xueting (1913–1983), a superstar storyteller and the chief of the Association, who had already declared to discard his famous classic story, Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai (Yang Naiwu yu Xiao Baicai) on September 19, 1951, broke his promise a week later. During a radio show on September 26, Yan announced that he would continue to tell Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai both on radio and in story houses because he was bonded by contracts. Predictably, Yan Xueting’s decision invited fierce criticisms from radical listeners.66 As the pressure of telling new stories piled up, artists and story houses alike tried not to directly challenge those radical listeners, but to make new stories akin to classic ones in terms of their styles and contents. Yan Xueting was cited by a governmental report dated December 20, 1952 to have copied music and texts about Suzhou’s landscape from a classic story to a new story without any modifications.67 Huang Yi’an confessed that his new story about late Ming peasants’ uprisings had quietly mutated into a story about romantic loves to cater to the audience. In

63   Jiesu 节苏, “Huang Jingfen butai chengshi 黄静芬不太老实 [Huang Jingfen lacks honesty],” Shagnhai shutan, December 5, 1951. 64  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 65. 65   Jingyu 金玉, “Huang Jingfen meiyou jinbu 黄静芬没有进步 [Huang Jingfen makes no progress],” Shanghai shutan, November 17, 1951. 66   “Weishenme shuole xinshu you gaishuo jiushu 为什么说了新书又改说旧书 [Why (did Yan Xueting) switch back to old stories after telling new ones?” Shanghai shutan, October 18, 1951, 20. 67   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 6.

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Huang’s words, he actually “surrendered to old stories” (xiang laoshu touxiang) by distorting the storyline of his new story.68 One storyteller later commented that what really mattered was the way in which story tellers narrated stories, but not what stories were. Even the highly valued White-haired Girl, the storyteller added, could be reworked to be a “bad story” (huaishu) on stage, as long as its performers injected wrong ideologies into it.69 For aged and economically disadvantaged storytellers, producing and performing new stories were well beyond their abilities. A report filed by the Association in 1952 revealed that there was a storyteller who could tell nothing but Jigong and the Association had to provide him with both financial aids and new stories.70 Tang Gengliang remembered that a certain Mr. Wang, who made a living as a perennial substitute in various story houses for artists on sick or casual leaves, always apologized to listeners for his inability to tell new stories before entertaining them with old ones in the early 1950s.71 Owners of story houses also attempted to mislead the political authorities and continue to stage classic stories. The Huizhong Story House, for example, advertised to stage White-haired Girl in May 1952, but secretly it contracted a storyteller to tell a classic story.72 By late 1952, a small number of storytellers decided to ignore the call of Cutting the Tail and picked up their classic stories to regain the market share. Among them, Yang Renlin’s (1906–1983) resumption of telling White Snake (Baishe zhuan), a romantic story between a female snake demon and a young male scholar in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), provoked a disturbance that led to a mutual hatred among storytellers. Yang Renlin, who had been famous for telling White Snake for decades before the 1950s, was originally appointed to head the group of “White Snake” in hopes that those who were specialized in telling White Snake would work together and manage to revise and improve the story to be a politically and ideologically acceptable one.73 68  Yuanshui 原水, “Li Chuangwang de zai chuxian 李闯王的再出现 [The reappearance of Li Chuangwang],” Shanghai shutan, September 6, 1950. 69   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 13. 70   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-75, 32. 71  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 414. 72   Feiguang 非广, “Huizhong shuchang de hunluan xianxiang 惠中书场的混乱现 象 [The disorder in the Huizhong story house],” Shanghai shutan, May 10, 1952. 73  Liaohua 辽譁, “Yang Renlin shijian buneng tuoyan, bixu chedi gao qingchu 杨仁麟事件不能拖延, 必须彻底搞清楚 [The (handling of the) Yang Renlin incident should not be delayed; (it) must be made clear thoroughly],” Shanghai shutan, October 25, 1952.



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Other storytellers were likewise organized to collectively rework classic stories such as Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai, Jade Dragonfly, Pearl Pagoda, and Romance of Three Kingdoms.74 Such a gathering of artists proved hardly fruitful as storytellers were not particularly enthusiastic over teamwork in revising stories. For example, group members blamed Yang Renlin’s disciple, Xu Lüxia (1917–1994), for his indifference to the rewriting of White Snake.75 More seriously, Yang Renlin brought the half-cooked revised edition of White Snake to Shanghai and publicly performed it in the fall of 1952. The outraged group members charged Yang for “taking people’s cause as a means of procuring private wealth” (renmin shiye kanzuo geren shengcai zhidao) and thus urged the hesitant Association to punish Yang Renlin immediately.76 Facing all the confusion and resentment, the Association felt totally lost and incapable of handling the situation. Therefore, it requested the Shanghai municipal government in late 1952 for solutions to pacify indignant storytellers and feed those who starved because their box-office earnings nose-dived when replacing classic stories with new ones. After months of investigations, a report was filed to reexamine the movement of Cutting the Tail on December 20, 1952. The governmental report discovered that only twenty percent of storytellers “self-consciously and willingly” (zijue ziyuan de) stopped telling classic stories, while the vast majority were hesitant primarily because of the lack of performable new stories. Ninety percent of story houses participated in the campaign of Cutting the Tail, but new stories drew the massive audience only in some large story houses. In smaller ones, new stories had, as a rule, proved unsuccessful. The author of the report voiced his/her concern that such a movement was disappointingly disorganized. As a consequence, many a storyteller lacked serviceable new stories as their means of subsistence. To rescue their declining business, a few storytellers had already quit new stories and retold classic stories or “reconnected the tail” ( jie weiba), as the report called it. The highly controversial Huang Yi’an, Yang Renlin, and Xu Lüxia were among the forerunners to have staged classic stories.77   Tang Lixing, Biemeng yixi, p. 8.   “Suzhou Baishe zu quanti tongzhi laixin, fandui Yang Renlin jie weiba 苏州白 蛇组全体同志来信, 反对杨仁麟接尾巴 [Letter from all comrades of “White Snake” group in Suzhou to oppose Yang Renlin’s reconnecting the tail],” Shanghai shutan, September 27, 1952. 76   Liaohua, “Yang Renlin shijian buneng tuoyan, bixu chedi gao qingchu.” 77   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 5–7. 74 75

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He Man (1919–1999), who worked with pingtan storytellers as a Communist cadre since the CCP’s takeover and then represented the Shanghai municipal government, put forth his comments in writing that it was not appropriate to indiscriminately negate classic stories. He thus recommended that a symposium be held to give artists opportunities to express their opinions.78 The recommended symposium was held in the morning of January 3, 1953 and storytellers who told classic and new stories were both invited. In the beginning, He Man encouraged all participants to speak out and reiterated that the government had never proposed interdictions on any stories in the past three years. He Man regretted that Communist cadres had shown no leadership in the movement of Cutting the Tail as their stance on banning or tolerating classic stories frequently wavered. Another cadre added that the government had never forced storytellers to initiate a movement like Cutting the Tail. It was the “pressure from the masses” (qunzhong yali) that compelled storytellers to quit telling classic stories. All participative storytellers including Li Bokang and Yan Xueting stressed that the PRC government had not explicitly declared to ban any stories. Meanwhile, a few participants complained that the media, especially Shanghai shutan, was hypercritical to newly staged stories and artists therefore lost their confidence in producing new works.79 Shanghai shutan’s radicalism and the entire movement of Cutting the Tail, however, ran counter to the PRC government’s principle of reforming China’s traditional culture in the wake of Liberation. Storytellers and cadres alike rightly claimed that the government never publicly and officially banned any classic stories. On the contrary, the Government Administration Council (Zhengwu yuan) of the PRC issued a directive on May 5, 1951 clearly stipulating that the central government opposed in principal enforcing bans on any theatrical plays and quyi stories. The directive expressly ruled that local governments were not entitled to seek injunctions against stage performances.80 This widely-known “The Directive on the Works of Dramatic Reform by the Government Administration Council” (Zhengwu yuan guanyu

  Ibid., 8.   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 9–13. 80   Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhua bu bangong ting 中华人民共和国文化 部办公厅, Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian ( yi) (1949–1959) 文化工作文件资料汇 编（一）(1949–1959) [Compilation of documents on cultural works (1) (1949–1959)], n. p., 1982, 176–177. 78 79



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xiqu gaige gongzuo de zhishi) or “5/5 Directive” (Wuwu zhishi) was published against the backdrop that Communist cadres’ hasty and massive bans in various provinces had seriously threatened artists’ livelihoods across the country.81 Even though the central government, since 1950, tried to dissuade local bureaucrats from clamping down on theater and quyi performances, such a policy was not necessarily well understood and effectively implemented in local areas. While cadres in the Yangzi Delta did not orchestrate the campaign of Cutting the Tail, they pressured the media, the audience, and artists in both official and unofficial ways, as I have mentioned. In addition, Wu Zongxi and his colleagues sought to enforce an outright interdiction on four pingtan stories, Jigong, Emperor Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan, Jade Dragonfly, and Dropped Golden Fan (Luo jinshan) for varied reasons in early October 1951. At this point, Wu Zongxi took office in the Shanghai Culture Bureau and was assigned to work in the Section of Theater and Quyi (Xiqu chu) despite his original intention to join the Section of Motion Picture (Dianying chu). Wu recalled that, unlike other governmental institutions, the Shanghai Culture Bureau was a new creation after the CCP’s victory. The KMT regime had never established a similar institution in Shanghai. Therefore, the earliest members of the Shanghai Culture Bureau were recruited through varieties of channels. Some had been the CCP’s secret agents like Wu Zongxi himself, while others were writers, dramatists, or journalists before 1949. Cadres differed from one another in terms of their personal experiences and visions of political and cultural reforms in post-Liberation China. As often as not, their viewpoints were incompatible with those of the Ministry of Culture in the central government as well as high-rank officials in Shanghai.82 The motion to impose ban on the four stories exemplified the conflicting opinions regarding how to treat China’s culture among Communist bureaucrats. The report immediately attracted criticisms in Shanghai.Yu Ling (1907–1997), who headed the Shanghai Culture Bureau then, commented that bans on stories were at odds with the central government’s guidelines of protecting China’s traditional culture and Wu’s report failed to present sufficient and clear evidence to justify such

  Cai Yuanli, “Xin Zhongguo quyi gouchen,” 134.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 19, 2009.

81 82

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bans. Therefore, the municipal government refused to relay the report to upper authorities. The proposed ban took no effect as the government soon found that the vast majority of storytellers had terminated to tell the four stories.83 Yu Ling’s objection to Wu Zongxi’s proposal resulted from his past experience of working with dramatists in Shanghai as an undercover Communist agent in the 1940s. By comparison, Wu Zongxi had mainly worked with young intellectuals to mobilize students throughout the 1940s and therefore was out of touch with performers prior to 1949. As Wu confided, he had been more interested in films rather than China’s theater and quyi. More than half a century later, Wu Zongxi came to think that he was too young and overly radical in the early 1950s. Therefore, his firm commitment to ridding the Chinese culture of feudal legacy impelled him to seek to eliminate some stories despite the central government’s baseline of avoiding bans on dramas and quyi stories.84 Even though the campaign of Cutting the Tail was initiated mainly by artists and not led by any Communist cadres, the central government frowned upon the movement soon after the decision to stop performing several stories was made public. When the Suzhou branch of the Association followed the footsteps of the Shanghai headquarters to ban eight stories including Jigong in late March 1952, Jia Caiyun (1918–?), a storyteller specialized in Jigong, wrote a letter directly to the Ministry of Culture in Beijing expressing her frustration about the interdiction of classic stories and presenting her opinions about revising Jigong. The two ministers, Shen Yanbing (1896–1981) and Zhou Yang (1908–1989), denounced local bureaucrats for their negligence of performers’ practical difficulties and failure to cooperate with artists in their written comments on Jia Caiyun’s letter. Shen Yanbing and Zhou Yang also urged the Jiangsu government to investigate the movement thoroughly and tackle the issue properly.85 Local bureaucrats in Shanghai and elsewhere accordingly made self-criticisms of not having given storytellers right instructions in the process and decided to lift bans on classic stories.86 In early 1953, the movement of Cutting the Tail was brought to an end because of both performers’ resistance and

  Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-75, 26–35.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 85   Cai Yuanli, “Xin Zhongguo quyi gouchen,” 134. 86   Qian Ying, “Lun jianguo chuqi de pingtan shumu jianshe,” 74; 98. 83 84



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the central government’s mounting concerns over artists’ livelihoods. In retrospect, the movement was never fully implemented among pingtan storytellers between 1951 and 1953. Some storytellers hesitated to stage new stories in mid and late 1952, when some others had already resumed telling classic stories. In this sense, classic stories, the hottest commodity in the market, did not really disappear in the Yangzi Delta in the early 1950s. However, new stories’ failure to gain market recognition and the sluggish economy in China lent storytellers a strong sense of insecurity. Many of them then considered joining the newly established Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe to enjoy fixed salaries and other benefits. Establishing Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe The Hong Kong Performing Tour The state-owned Shanghai Troupe was founded on November 20, 1951 by eighteen pingtan storytellers, among whom seven had actively sought to be collectivized by the government after their performing tour in Hong Kong in late 1949 and early 1950. The seven artists, including Tang Gengliang, Jiang Yuequan, Wang Boyin, the Zhang brothers, Zhou Yunrui (1921–1970), and Chen Xi’an, worked together as four dang (performing units) to dominate the Shanghai market before and after the CCP’ takeover of Shanghai.87 Though Tang Gengliang and his colleagues left an impression of their willingness to collaborate with the new regime soon after the Liberation, concerns mounted that the Communist government might abolish pingtan storytelling someday as the oral art was after all dismissed as having long served the leisured class, but not proletariats. When a former Shanghai ballroom owner invited the team of seven storytellers to perform in Hong Kong in the winter of 1949, they hesitated. The manager of the theater in Hong Kong promised to pay every dang ten ounces of gold and cover all board and lodging and transportation fees to lure them out of Shanghai. Performing in Hong Kong, the British colony, however, would be an indication of those well-esteemed artists’ betrayal of the new Communist regime.88 As Tang Gengliang and Jiang Yuequan were indisputably the core of   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 57.

87 88

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the group, it was up to them to make the final decision.89 Tang tried to keep their intention to head for Hong Kong confidential, but failed. The Department of Literature and Arts of the Shanghai Military Control Committee learned their itinerary soon and attempted to dissuade them from leaving Shanghai. Under this circumstance, Tang Gengliang was terrified by the fact that their membership of the Association might be suspended or revoked and they would lose the most important market of pingtan storytelling, namely, Shanghai. Fortunately, one major CCP cadre permitted storytellers to take the liberty to travel to Hong Kong. Tang and his company, bonded by the contract with the Hong Kong theater, saw the cadre’s tolerance as a green light of their performing tour.90 The Hong Kong performing tour of 1949 and 1950 was all but a success. Neither the theater nor the seven storytellers had anticipated the lack of a sizable audience of pingtan storytelling in Hong Kong, a largely Cantonese city. Shanghai immigrants to Hong Kong, the potential listeners, were mostly newcomers during the tumultuous years of the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) and had hardly set a foothold in this city. The attendance rate was between sixty and eighty percent. When the box-office sales were far from satisfactory, the seven artists failed to receive the promised payment. To survive in Hong Kong, the storytellers had to participate in private performances for a small number of wealthy and influential Shanghai immigrants such as Du Yuesheng (1888–1951). In Du’s house, their performances attracted a number of former KMT bureaucrats and social notables from Shanghai. Facing listeners of varieties of political and social backgrounds, Tang Gengliang and his colleagues did not dare to make any comments on post-Liberation China, lest their opinions should be distorted into anti-CCP remarks. Meanwhile, they were offered to permanently perform in Taiwan, but they crumbled upon careful consideration. The seven artists were convinced that only in the Yangzi Delta could their art be appreciated by millions of listeners because of pingtan storytelling’s use of the Suzhou dialect. In other words, they learned a lesson in this Hong Kong tour that their compromise and cooperation with the new regime was the key to their survival and success in their careers in the rest part of their lives.91   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 58–59. 91   Ibid., 62–64. 89 90



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The Road to the Collectivization Prior to their return to Shanghai, the seven storytellers notified the press of Shanghai their purchase of the public bonds in support of the PRC’s economic construction. As soon as they arrived in Shanghai after the three-month long stay in Hong Kong, Tang Gengliang suggested that his fellow performers cut their hair short to display the storytellers’ will to revolutionize themselves.92 Wu Zongxi recalled that Jiang Yuequan, Tang Gengliang, and others were thoroughly demoralized because of the debacle in Hong Kong. Under this circumstance, Tang Gengliang attempted to chart a new road for the seven story­ tellers by encouraging them to promote the CCP’s war effort in Korea and participate in workshops directed by Communist cadres in the Yangzi Delta in late 1950 and early 1951. Wu believed that the seven storytellers’ activism had been well calculated to please Communist authorities.93 Tang and his colleagues were lucky to avoid receiving criticisms as the government tried to show its open-mindedness. To repay the CCP’s generosity, as Wu Zongxi pointed out, Tang and his company spared no effort to convince Communist cadres of their willingness to follow the lead of the CCP. All the four dang hired professional writers to produce new stories in an attempt to replace gradually classic stories despite extremely high costs. In addition, the seven artists traveled to various cities and towns across the Yangzi Delta for charity performances and requested local cadres to give lectures about current political situations and the CCP’s cultural reform. By the end of 1951, they were hailed as the paragon of promoting new stories and the unpleasant experience in Hong Kong seemed to have evaporated.94 Frankly speaking, their collaboration with the CCP hardly diminished their status as stars of pingtan storytelling. The Zhang brothers, for example, continued to dominate radio broadcast in Shanghai by March 1951, when they told four hours on radio each day including two hours of Painting of Ten Beauties and two hours of a new story about late Ming peasants’ uprisings.95 For all the success the seven storytellers accomplished and their activism that Communist cadres seemed to appreciate, Tang Gengliang and

  Ibid., 63–64.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 94  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 66–67. 95   “Shanghai shi ge diantai xiqu jiemu shijian yilan biao,” 30. 92 93

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his company still felt somewhat insecure. On May 20, 1951, Chairman Mao Zedong personally initiated a campaign to clamp down on a recently released film, The Life of Wu Xun (Wu Xun zhuan). In his famous editorial titled “Ought to Emphasize the Discussion on The Life of Wu Xun” (Yingdang zhongshi dianying Wu Xun zhuan de taolun) in the People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), Mao charged the film for opposing the CCP’s social and cultural agendas by propagating anti-revolutionary reformism.96 The government-led attack on the film revealed the gap between dogmatic Maoists and Chinese artists in terms of how to understand social and political revolutions. From Mao’s perspective, filmmakers misconstrued Wu Xun, “an abject knave,” to be a proletarian hero.97 Tang Gengliang pondered in a panic that new pingtan stories were far from safe, given films like The Life of Wu Xun were under ferocious political attacks. Under this circumstance, Tang Gengliang and Jiang Yuequan analyzed that telling new stories was by no means the CCP’s ultimate goal of cultural reform. They concluded that the “way out” (chulu) for all storytellers was to join government-controlled and managed troupes and thereby receive fixed salaries. Immediately, the seven storytellers contacted Liu Tianyun, who had been famous for his collaboration with the CCP since 1949, and his disciple, Xie Yujing (1924–2011), to file a report collectively to the Shanghai municipal government requesting the establishment of a state-owned pingtan ensemble in Shanghai in mid 1951. As Tang Gengliang admitted, he and his colleagues drew inspiration from Li Shaochun (1919–1975), a Beijing Opera actor with national prestige.98 In the summer of 1950, Li Shaochun set an example for all Chinese artists to follow Communist cadres’ instructions and persuade members in his private troupe to join a newly founded state-run Beijing Opera enterprise.99 To impress the authorities, the nine storytellers once again headed for Suzhou to perform new stories and engage in studies of current politics on June 5, 1951.100 While storytellers for

  96   “Yingdang zhongshi dianying Wu Xun zhuan de taolun 应当重视电影《武训 传》的讨论 [Ought to emphasize the discussion on The Life of Wu Xun],” Renmin ribao, May 20, 1951.   97   C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 475.   98  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 67–69.   99  Wang Ankui and Yu Cong, Zhongguo dangdai xiqu shi, 111. 100   “Quyi dongtai 曲艺动态 [Latest developments of quyi],” Dazhong xiqu, Vol. 1, No. 4, June 10, 1951, 38.



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centuries were used to working and living individually, the nine storytellers experimented with a “collective life” ( jiti shenghuo) by living together in Suzhou to demonstrate their will to be collectivized. Two storytellers, Zhu Huizhen and her husband, Wu Jianqiu (1915–2005), happened to own a house in Suzhou and thus lent it to them as the dormitory.101 Prior to the nine storytellers’ performing and study tour in Suzhou, a Shanghai-based Communist cadre held a special banquet to express the Shanghai municipal government’s appreciation of their request of collectivization. The cadre confirmed that Yu Ling, the chief of the Shanghai Culture Bureau, was seriously interested in their requests, but asked them to enroll more storytellers in preparation for the establishment of a pingtan troupe. Despite their great efforts of promoting new stories in Suzhou in the summer of 1951, the nine storytellers kept waiting for the approval from the Shanghai municipal government.102 To highlight their loyalty to the CCP, Tang Gengliang drafted a letter on June 25, 1951 to reiterate the nine artists’ decision to quit telling classic stories and exclusively stage new stories. In the letter, Tang Gengliang expressed the nine storytellers’ willingness to take pay cuts to tell new stories by comparing their sacrifice of personal incomes with those who died for the country in Korea.103 The letter was signed by all the nine participants and sent to various newspapers and government bodies. In Tang Gengliang’s opinion, this open letter ended up leading to the movement of Cutting the Tail eight months later.104 Soon after Tang and his colleagues had their voices heard in the media with their open letter, they redoubled their efforts to push for the establishment of a state-run pingtan troupe. In early July 1951, another request was submitted to the Shanghai municipal government to restate the nine artists’ desire of being collectivized by the government only if their incomes could meet the minimal living standard. If their request were to be approved, they would “do whatever they are required to” (xuyao women zuo shenme, women jiu zuome).105 After their work and study in Suzhou, Tang Gengliang, Jiang Yuequan, Liu Tianyun, and others continued to conduct a performing tour in the

 Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 70.   Ibid., 69–70. 103   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-85, 3. 104  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 72. 105   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-85, 4–5. 101 102

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Yangzi Delta, during which they not only performed new stories, but also led a simple and semi-militarized life.106 The months-long effort made by Tang Gengliang and his colleagues finally bore fruit. On November 20, 1951, Shanghai Pingtan Working Troupe was established under the approval of the Shanghai municipal government. The same day witnessed the establishment of three stateowned performing ensembles, with Shanghai Beijing Opera Troupe (Shanghai jingju tuan) and the the Shanghai Acrobatics Troupe (Shanghai zaji tuan) being the other two. In hindsight, Wu Zongxi believed that the Chinese government actually modeled its management of performers after that in the Soviet Union and the decision of founding three troupes was meticulously made. The Shanghai Acrobatics Troupe was set up to entertain foreign visitors, while Beijing Opera was indisputably the leading theatrical art in China.107 As far as pingtan storytelling was concerned, the government acknowledged that pingtan artists “were providing people in Jiangnan with great education” ( jiyu Jiangnan diqu zhi renmin henda de jiaoyu zuoyong).108 In a similar fashion, Liu Housheng (b. 1921), who represented the Shanghai Culture Bureau, categorized acrobatics and pingtan storytelling as arts with high flexibility capable of serving the people in both urban and rural areas.109 Wu Zongxi, nevertheless, did not believe that the establishment of the pingtan troupe purely resulted from artists’ activism and their earnest requests. Instead, Wu Zongxi considered that the government had already harbored the intention to collectivize storytellers since Yu Ling, his superior in the Shanghai Culture Bureau was well aware of pingtan’s capacity of reaching average people in the Yangzi Delta.110 The government’s only concern was the right personnel to establish a state-run troupe. The publicity of the high-profile Tang Gengliang and his colleagues made them the best candidates.111 From pingtan artists’ perspective, however, teaming up with other story­tellers was not a new creation in the early 1950s. Fellowship among story­ tellers for the common purpose of garnering profits became prevalent as early as in the mid-1940s as a response to the audience’s preference

 Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 74.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 108   Shanghai dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-40, 7. 109   Shanghai pingtan tuan, Shanghai pingtan tuan wushi zhounian, 15. 110   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 4, 2009. 111   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 106 107



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of listening to varieties of stories, usually four or five, in one performance. Such a way of organizing and performing was called yuezuo (cross performances) in pingtan’s jargon.112 The seven artists including Jiang Yuequan and Tang Gengliang, who became the founders and backbone of the Shanghai Troupe, had frequently worked together for yuezuo before 1949. The nine storytellers including the seven yuezuo performers and Liu Tianyun and his disciple, however, would not be adequate to make a troupe. Wang Boyin remembered that it was Tang Gengliang and Liu Tianyun who were responsible for recruiting new members.113 On the eve of the founding of the Shanghai Troupe, nine more storytellers were admitted. In theory, storytellers’ eligibility to join the troupe resided in their supportiveness of the CCP’s political and cultural agendas and self-conscious pursuit of “progress” ( jinbu). That, however, was not always the case. For example, Zhu Huizhen and Wu Jianqiu, who lent their house in Suzhou to the nine artists as their dormitory, had long been close friends of Tang and his company. Both Han Shiliang and Zhang Hongsheng (1908–1990) had been co-workers with Tang Gengliang, Jiang Yuequan, and the Zhang bothers prior to 1949. As I have mentioned, Jiang officially acknowledged Han Shiliang as his master to learn stories of Water Margin immediately after the Liberation. Zhang Hongsheng assumed a role both as a pinghua star and a capable agent to control performing venues especially in Shanghai. Even though Jiang Yuequan and Zhang might not be able to maintain friendship, Zhang’s special relationship with story house owners and managers made him an indispensable candidate to join the newly established troupe.114 After the Shanghai Troupe was founded, Zhang Hongsheng continued his role to assign story houses for his colleagues in the troupe and help the Shanghai Troupe to win market competitions against the self-employed.115 In all fairness, Zhang Hongsheng did show his willingness to follow the CCP’s lead after 1949. For example, he published an essay to familiarize his fellow storytellers with the CCP’s theatrical reforms in September

  Zhou Liang, Suzhou pingtan yishu chutan, 156.   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009. 114   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 115   Li Qingfu 李庆福, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 112 113

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1950.116 Yao Yinmei (1906–1997) had been Jiang Yuequan’s friend for a while and worked with Jiang, Zhang Jianting, and Liu Tianyun in an anti-American propaganda play in October 1949. The female storyteller, Xu Xueyue, obtained her membership of the Shanghai Troupe because of her gender and indefatigable promotion of the new marriage law. She brought two of her disciples, Cheng Hongye and Chen Hongxia, to the troupe. Interestingly enough, Pan Boying, who had long been famous for his ardor for following the CCP’s lead, failed to gain the membership of the Shanghai Troupe. Wu Zongxi recalled that Tang Gengliang and Jiang Yuequan had maneuvered to force Pan Boying to leave Shanghai for Suzhou after their personal relationship deteriorated.117 Evidently, it was interpersonal relationship, not necessarily storytellers’ lofty ideal to reform China’s traditional culture, that impelled them to take pay cuts and join the state-owned performing ensemble. Tang Gengliang presumed that Jiang Yuequan’s prestige as a shrewd artist instilled confidence in some of his friends and former colleagues to be collectivized. Many were convinced that it must be an unmistakable option to join the state-owned troupe exactly because it was initiated by the wise Jiang.118 Yet the wise Jiang Yuequan, for all his fame as an outstanding pingtan artist and a smart person, only assumed the position as one of the vice directors of the newly established pingtan troupe. Liu Tianyun took office as the director as a reward of his longtime rapport with the CCP. Jiang’s eldest disciple, Wang Boyin, surmised that their infamous trip to Hong Kong in late 1950 and early 1951 continued to poison the relationship between the seven storytellers and the CCP and eventually led to his master’s loss of political status in the troupe.119 Though storytellers joined the troupe not necessarily for political reasons, they had to show their political consciousness to support the CCP’s cause of reforming the Chinese culture. In the very beginning of founding the state-owned pingtan troupe, such a support was embodied in their willingness to receive relatively low incomes. All the eighteen founding storytellers had the right to claim their salaries, but taking less money was not only encouraged, but also mandatory.

116   Zhang Hongsheng 张鸿声, “Xigai fangzhen yu renwu 戏改方针与任务 [The guidelines and tasks of theatrical reform],” Shanghai shutan, September 16, 1950. 117   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 118  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 79. 119   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.



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Under this circumstance, all of them were compelled to receive less than one-third of their revenues they could earn as self-employed story­tellers. Yao Yinmei, for example, had planned to claim a monthly salary of 180 yuan, but later reduced to 150 as he discovered that Tang Gengliang was willing to earn no more than 150 yuan.120 Contrary to most sources that sang high praise of storytellers’ willingness to reduce their revenues, Chen Xi’an, one of the eighteen storytellers, clearly felt the pressure from political authorities. Without accepting low salaries, Chen remembered, storytellers would not be admitted at all.121 Storytellers’ cooperation significantly lowered the government’s budget to collectivize storytellers, which attested to the PRC regime’s lack of financial capability to patronize Chinese artists across the country. Such massive pay cuts, however, dealt enormous financial blows to all the eighteen storytellers who had been used to earning several hundred and sometimes thousands of yuan per month. Liu Tianyun’s wife pawned a pair of gold earrings to cover family expenses.122 Quite a lot of storytellers sold their houses in preparation for their upcoming financial difficulties. Yao Yinmei sold his house in Suzhou to Jin Shengbo, a pinghua storyteller, at a price of 4,000 yuan and Zhang Hongsheng also sold his houses in Shanghai. Chen Xi’an asserted that Yao Yinmei’s loss was incredibly enormous as the house he sold would be valued at approximately ten million yuan in the 2000s. Chen Xi’an asked Jiang Yuequan to give him a grace period of six months during which he could maintain his status as a self-employed and earn enough money to repay his debt. His request was of course rejected.123 Such sacrifices, nevertheless, were as a matter of fact a well-calculated decision. Storytellers came to realize that, first of all, bans on classic stories were gradually enforced so that hundreds of storytellers would lose their means of subsistence and state-owned performing enterprises would certainly be the best shelter for them. Second, storytellers burned the candle at both ends in their prime ages and lacked financial security after their health began to fail. By contrast, the government had promised to provide them with medical care and retirement pensions. Wu Zongxi admitted that Communist cadres oftentimes cited examples of suicides of a pair of celebrated storytellers in the 1940s to paint  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 79.   Chen Xi’an, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 122  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 75. 123   Chen Xi’an, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 120 121

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Illustration 6: On November 20, 1951, eighteen pingtan storytellers founded the Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

a bleak picture of artists’ lack of security in the “old society” and to highlight the advantage of collectivizing storytellers.124 Third, if only new stories were permitted to be staged in the advent future, selfemployed storytellers would have to expend several thousand yuan for each new story. In the state-owned troupe, professional writers were also hired to exclusively work for storytellers to produce new stories.125 Cao Hanchang, who would later join a state-run pingtan troupe in Suzhou, shared the idea with Tang Gengliang the belief that storytellers’ livelihoods could be guaranteed only by means of cooperating with the new government.126 *  *  *  * The eighteen artists’ establishment of the Shanghai Pingtan Working Troupe was driven by both political and economic factors. Storytellers’   Wu Zongxi, interveiw with author, June 3, 2009.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 79. 126   Cao Hanchang 曹汉昌, “Shutan yanyun lu 书坛烟云录 [The record of smoke and clouds in the world of pingtan storytelling],” in Shutan koushu lishi 书坛口述历史 [Oral history of pingtan storytelling] ed., Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu bangongshi 江浙沪评弹工作领导小组办公室 (Suzhou: Guwuxuan chubanshe, 2006), 76. 124 125



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yearning for financial security and fear of losing the market in the Yangzi Delta decisively impelled them to collaborate with the new regime to collectivize themselves. Storytellers’ candidacy of joining the state-run Shanghai Troupe was not necessarily based on their willingness to cooperate with the CCP and their political consciousness. The two early CCP collaborators, Huang Yi’an and Pan Boying, for example, were both excluded from the Shanghai Troupe. On the contrary, it was interpersonal relationship among storytellers that enabled artists to enroll in this newly founded performing ensemble. In this sense, the mode of gathering storytellers in the early 1950s bore resemblance to that in the Republican era, when storytellers with good mutual relationship tended to bind together closely to gain profits in story houses. As a matter of fact, the core members of the Shanghai Troupe, namely, the seven artists who made the unsuccessful Hong Kong tour in 1951, began to perform together and gradually dominate story houses in Shanghai since the late 1940s. While the collectivization of pingtan artists was built upon storytellers’ fellowship in pre-1949 China, the new form of performing ensemble, the stateowned enterprise, was by no means of a new creation of the CCP after the Liberation.127 Therefore, it is safe to argue that the CCP’s cultural reform was launched on the basis of socio-cultural configurations originating in the Republican times. The establishment of the Shanghai Troupe was parallel and closely related to the campaign of Cutting the Tail, a political and cultural movement widely participated in and painfully felt by virtually all storytellers between 1951 and 1953. The decision of inhibiting staging classic stories was made by storytellers out of the fear that the government would sooner or later place official bans. Therefore, the movement of Cutting the Tail exemplified self-censorship in post-Liberation China. Jerome Silbergeld’s research into painters in the PRC finds “much of the task of artistic control has been placed in the hands of the artists themselves, in a kind of ‘do-it-yourself ’ system.”128 Yet, it was also clear that local cadres pushed for the movement of telling new stories by exerting high pressure on performers, the audience, story houses, and the media. The contrast between local cadres’ silence over the movement and their whole-hearted support behind the scene testified 127   For the origin of state-owned enterprises in China, see Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China. 128   Jerome Silbergeld, Contradictions, 5.

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to their “hidden script.” Local cadres’ resorting to the hidden script because of an understanding that their agenda of reforming pingtan storytelling was at odds with the tenet of the 5/5 Directive. The issuance of the 5/5 Directive stemmed from Communist cadres’ ill-advised bans on the theatrical and quyi repertoire nationwide, which caused artists’ financial difficulties. Hence, it was apparent that, from top CCP leaders’ perspective, livelihoods of performers and artists gained more weight than immediate reformation of China’s traditional culture. Here, the divergence among political authorities allows for a reexamination the system of censorship in the early PRC history. Kevin Latham posits that the Communist regime implemented a combination of the “Party principle” and a system of self-censorship to retain control over the production and distribution of media and culture.129 In the movement of Cutting the Tail, however, “Party principle” and the self-censorship were mutually contradictory, but not complementary. Differing opinions among policy makers, that is, the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, and practitioners, namely, local cadres and performers, illustrated the highly inconsistent and fragmented implementation of Party policies. Conflicting outlooks of the cultural reform between Communist cadres of different levels eventually brought the movement of Cutting the Tail to an end. Most storytellers continued to tell classic stories as self-employed storytellers after 1953. Only storytellers employed by the state-owned Shanghai Troupe adhered to new stories until the mid-1950s. The eighteen storytellers that founded the Shanghai Troupe, nonetheless, represented only a very tiny fraction of the population of pingtan performers across the Yangzi Delta. Outside this system, around 500 Shanghai-based self-employed pingtan storytellers depended solely on the market in the Yangzi Delta for a living.130 Outside the world of pingtan storytelling, the government similarly lacked financial resources to collectivize and patronize all performers. A survey in 1954 showed, for example, that Shanghai was home to 139 troupes and 7,300 actors and actresses of fourteen types of theater. Bureaucrats harbored no intention of collectivizing all artists for fear that such a vast number of performers and their families would impose

  Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle, 35.   Peng Benle 彭本乐, “Peiyang kua shiji yanyuan, zhongyao de shi tigao yanyuan suzhi 培养跨世纪演员, 重要的是提高演员素质 [To train trans-century performers, what is important is to enhance performers’ inner quality],” Pingtan yishu, No. 19, 1996, 118. 129 130



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an unbearable financial burden on the government. Hence, only a small number of performers could be incorporated into state-owned performing enterprises.131 Like other state-run performing enterprises, the Shanghai Troupe assumed the role of setting a role model for all self-employed storytellers by encouraging pingtan artists to produce and stage new stories and fulfill various political tasks. The very first political mission that awaited the state-employed storytellers was their participation in the campaign of fixing the Huai River (Huaihe), a river perennially inundating its neighboring provinces in history. In the third day of the establishment of the Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe, the eighteen storytellers, along with other artists and Communist cadres such as Wu Zongxi, headed for worksites in the Huai River valley to witness and experience the Socialist construction.

131   Shanghai dang’an guan 上海市档案馆, Shanghai shi renmin weiyuanhui wenyishi dang’an 上海市人民委员会文艺室档案 [Archives of the Office of Literature and Arts, Shanghai People’s Committee], B9-2-16, 2–8.

Chapter Three

Politics as Entertainment: Middle-length Pingtan Stories in the 1950s and 1960s On November 23, 1951, three days following the founding of the Shanghai Troupe, all the eighteen pingtan artists affiliated with the troupe and Chen Lingxi, the pingtan writer, headed for the worksite of the Fozi Ridge Reservoir (Fozi ling shuiku) of the Anhui Province to entertain peasant-laborers, engage in physical labor, and receive reeducation from the masses. Stephanie Webster-Cheng posits that eighteen artists’ work in the Huai River valley constituted a part and parcel of the CCP’s 1951 campaign of “Thought Reform” (sixiang gaizao) to transform intellectuals ideologically.1 Though the Thought Reform, as James Gao has pointed out, aimed at destroying intellectuals’ political confidence and moral integrity,2 the same political campaign allowed storytellers to undergo a metamorphosis from performers preaching feudal and capitalistic ideologies to state cadres who served the masses. When they finished their trip after three months, pingtan storytellers of the Shanghai Troupe collectively authored a three-hour long pingtan story, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River (Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao), and unintentionally created a new pingtan genre, middle-length stories. The success of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River in the market in the early 1950s encouraged the Shanghai Troupe to produce a large number of middle-length pingtan stories, many of which were highly popular in the Yangzi Delta during Mao’s era.3 This chapter seeks to explore the popularity of middlelength stories, a politically charged pingtan genre, prior to the Cultural

1  Stephanie Webster-Cheng, “Composing, Revising, and Performing Suzhou Ballads,” 124. 2   James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 152. 3   In 2001, when the Shanghai Troupe celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, it listed 61 middle-length stories staged between 1951 and 1966. Among them, 23 were adapted from full-length classic stories, while the other 38 were newly written stories. (See Shanghai pingtan tuan, Shanghai pingtan tuan wushi zhounian, 66–68.) It is difficult to estimate the number of middle-length stories written and performed by other pingtan troupes and self-employed storytellers.

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Revolution. I intend to explore political and economic implications of the creation and popularization of middle-length pingtan stories to serve the CCP’s agendas of composing new stories, revising classic stories, collectivizing and disciplining storytellers, and inculcating the massive audience. In the Huai River Valley The place in which eighteen storytellers stayed and worked until early 1952 was the Fozi Ridge Reservoir. According to Tang Gengliang, the reservoir was designed to support a power plant capable of generating electricity for a large city with millions of residents.4 The “Work team of fixing the Huai River” (zhihuai gongzuo dui), which all storytellers joined, was organized to answer the Shanghai government’s call that artists and performers should “experience real life [of peasants and workers]” (tiyan shenghuo) in this new historical stage. Therefore, participants of the work team were not limited to storytellers, but included dramatists and cartoonists. Communist cadres envisioned that many participants did not necessarily harbor the intention to make progress ideologically and politically, but aimed at either gathering materials for their future works, sightseeing, or accumulating political capital. Hence, they were particularly in need of Thought Reform.5 The leader of the work team, Yang Cunbin (1911–1989) was a drama director who had collaborated with the CCP during the Anti-Japanese War to stage patriotic plays in northern China. Situ Han (1923–1984), the vice leader and a CCP member, had long been a famous conductor in Shanghai. Another vice leader was Wu Zongxi, whose work experience with storytellers since 1949 had proved valuable in coordinating with pingtan artists.6 Prior to the journey to the Huai River, Wu was  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 89–90.   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Shanghai wenyi jie zhi Huai gongzuo dui zai sixiang gaizao zhong de shouhuo 上海文艺界治淮工作队在思想改造中的收获 [The gains in thought reform by work team of fixing the Huai River of Shanghai literature and art circle],” in Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, disan ce, Wu Zongxi juan 苏州评弹文选, 第三册, 吴宗锡卷 [Collected essays about Suzhou pingtan storytelling, vol. 3, the volume of Wu Zongxi], ed., Zhou Liang 周良 (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1997), 6. 6   Wang Yanling 王延龄, “Wangshi ruyan zai yanqian—ji yu Shanghai pingtan tuan tongqu zhihuai 往事如烟在眼前—记与上海评弹团同去治淮 [The past is like smoke, but comes clearly into view: notes to the participation in fixing the Huai River with the Shanghai pingtan troupe],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 47. 4 5



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engaging in the campaign of “transforming intellectuals” (zhishi fenzi gaizao) in Shanghai and had planned to go to Sichuan to supervise the campaign of land reform. As the Shanghai municipal government reformulated its work plans, however, he was assigned to lead the team to the Huai River.7 The leaders of the team put great emphasis on discipline as a gesture of making artists and writers new cultural workers in post-revolutionary China. Immediately after the team arrived in a city in Anhui, for example, Situ Han blew the whistle and all the team members formed up in line in an orderly fashion to head for their residential area.8 Virtually all storytellers have recognized how unforgettable the experience in the Huai River valley was. Hundreds of miles away from the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, storytellers were ushered into a totally new world in this remote and isolated mountainous area. Pingtan artists, who had been accustomed to an affluent lifestyle in the Yangzi Delta, witnessed unthinkable hardships and experienced dire shortage of daily necessities. Storytellers, for example, were compelled to abstain from drinking alcohol.9 Living with peasant-laborers in poorly-furnished work sheds, storytellers initially ate nothing but crisp cakes made of sorghum flour and carrots with hot pepper.10 Storytellers were occasionally required to take part in physical labor. Zhang Hongsheng, for example, later admitted during his performance of the third act of pingtan story, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, that he was once assigned to carry rice and cross a river during his stay in the worksite. Fighting against the force of nature gave storytellers new physical appearances. When workers from Shanghai came across Jiang Yuequan along the Huai River, they could hardly recognize the dark-complexioned pingtan star wrapped in a thick cotton-padded jacket.11 According to Wang Boyin, who was also a member of the work team, nonetheless, storytellers’ living conditions gradually bettered afterwards.12 Tang Gengliang remembered that team leaders later allowed artists to cook by themselves, considering they were not   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 81.  9  Ibid., 83. 10  Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, “Guanyu shumu de chuangzuo, gaibian he zhengli 关于书目的创造, 改编和整理 [On authoring, revising, and organizing stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 9, 1988, 12. 11   Wang Yanling, “Wangshi ruyan zai yanqian,” 49. 12   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.  7  8

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used to eating sorghum cakes. Their food consequently improved to such an extent that they could eat yam porridge, vegetable, and sometimes pork. In most cases, artists did not have to engage in physical labor, but were assigned tasks of entertaining and mobilizing laborers. Because of the language barrier, only plays and stories in Mandarin Chinese could be performed. Though the eighteen storytellers were steadfast in staying in the worksite for three months, some of their teammates quit and escaped to Shanghai as soon as they felt intimidated by the work and life in the Huai River valley.13 Storytellers’ living conditions, albeit adverse, were a marked improvement in comparison with those of peasant-laborers. Tang Gengliang observed that peasant-laborers worked extremely diligently, despite severe hardships. In order to heal their chapped heels because of longtime treading icy water and mud with bare feet, laborers used lards to moisten their wounds. Laborers’ salary was universally 0.3 yuan and three jin of grain per workday. On rainy days when construction work paused, peasant-laborers received no payments. Thus, they elected to give up food and lie down to sleep inside work sheds to save the rice for their families.14 Meanwhile, storytellers also witnessed heroism in laborers’ daily work. Jiang Yuequan believed that his three-month long stay in the Huai River area was an eye-opener, without which he would never have seen the grand scene of conquering a great river and constructing dams by millions of laborers. Half a century later, an image of heroism still struck Jiang: In order to install electricity lines in the rear mountain, every worker, who participated in the water conservancy construction, walked with a bamboo stick, carried an electric pole over the shoulder, and ran across the hill. What a “heroic spirit” (yingyong de qigai) it was!15

The ordeal and heroism that storytellers experienced and witnessed in the Huai River region became their indelible memory. Wang Boyin recalled that his fellow storytellers burst into tears in a summingup meeting after three long months in the Anhui Province.16 When Tang Gengliang and Liu Tianyun reported to Communist cadres in  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 86–87.  Tang Gengliang, “Guanyu shumu de chuangzuo, gaibian he zhengli,” 12. 15  Shanghai pingtan tuan 上海评弹团, Jiang Yuequan liupai changqiang ji 蒋月泉流派 唱腔集 [Compilation of Jiang Yuequan’s school of singing style] (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenyi chuban zongshe, Baijia chubanshe, 2006), 16. 16   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009. 13 14



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Illustration 7: Pingtan storytellers were performing for peasant-laborers in the Huai River valley in the winter of 1951. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

Shanghai after their return, storytellers were advised to stage a story for single-night performances.17 Very soon, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, a three-hour long pingtan story, was debuted in the Cangzhou Story House before it was also staged in other venues. We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River: Aesthetics of Politics The title of the story was named after Chairman Mao Zedong’s famous inscription, “We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River” in May 1951 to call for a campaign to tame this dangerous river. The story was a product of co-authorship of Chen Lingxi, Yao Yinmei, and Tang Gengliang, who gathered source materials and wrote its script together. They drew on both their lived experiences in the Huai River valley and reports in various periodicals to work out a three-hour long story to fulfill the requirement to perform for cadres and workers in political “evening parties” (wanhui). Writers without a doubt found inspirations

 Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 90.

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from films and theatrical plays to limit each performance within three hours and therefore authored a script with four sections.18 Unintentionally, the Shanghai Troupe succeeded in creating a new genre of pingtan storytelling, middle-length pingtan stories, whose performers were able to deliver a complete story to listeners within one afternoon or night. Considering the new genre’s closeness to the theater, I translate hui, or individual sections of middle-length pingtan stories, as acts. The first act of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River started with a conversation between Zhao Gaishan, a 23-year old progressive peasant in the Huoshan County of the Anhui Province, and his mother about the improvement of living conditions in the wake of land reform and Gai­ shan’s upcoming wedding with Wang Xiuying, a 19-year old rural girl. As the government called for peasants to take part in the campaign of fixing the Huai River, Gaishan, as a Communist Youth League (Gongqing tuan) member, signed up without hesitation in spite of his advent wedding, which was scheduled ten days later. Gaishan justified his decision to postpone the wedding by chanting, “Irrigation works can be constructed after River Huai was fixed up. [We can] expect every year of good harvest.” Therefore, Gaishan continued, “fixing the Huai [River] is also for our own sake.” Here, Gaishan made an unequivocal statement to prioritize the national community over his family. The storyteller, in the famous aria, “Zhao Gaishan Signs Up [for Fixing the Huai River]” (Zhao Gaishan baoming), attempted to instill into the audience the idea that the Chinese nation was an extended form of every individual’s family. In the political meeting, Gaishan’s mother bumped into Old Zhang (Lao Zhang), a local man in his fifties. To work in the Huai River valley, Zhang shaved off his beard to appear younger. The excited Zhang stated that people felt old prior to 1949, but “after Chairman Mao came, you are not old and I am not old, either. Not a single person is old.” In this manner, pre- and post-1949 eras were dichotomized in terms of not only poverty and affluence, but also old and young/new. Old Zhang’s assertion testified to a will to create “new men” in post-revolutionary China. Maurice Meisner has argued that Mao shared with Karl Marx in terms of the creation of “new men who would mold social and economic reality.”19 In a similar fashion, as Ban Wang posits, “Communist culture aims not just at   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.  Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 147. 18 19



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changing the old society; it also engages in fashioning the right kind of character, constructing revolutionary subjectivity, giving birth to the new man of the future.”20 Not surprisingly, Wu Zongxi’s final report of their trip to the Huai River also stressed the making of “new people” after storytellers underwent the Thought Reform. In the report dated July 12, 1952, Wu noted that the experience in the Huai River valley rejuvenated storytellers as they “bounced up and down [like children]” (bengbeng tiaotiao) in the worksite.21 In the second act, Gaishan and his company were assigned the task of earth excavation. The wintry cold, snow, and most importantly, frozen earth annoyingly slowed them down. To soften frozen earth, Gaishan proposed to cover the earth with sand at night to keep the soil warm. To his disappointment, his proposal aroused oppositions from virtually everyone including his close friend, Old Zhang. Gaishan thus decided to put into practice his idea alone at night. Meanwhile, Gaishan’s fellow laborer, Yang Guanglin, recoiled at the difficulties and planned to abscond. Coincidentally, Guanglin witnessed Gaishan’s experiment of softening frozen earth when he sneaked out of the work shed at night. Gaishan’s selflessness and unbendable perseverance struck Guanglin, who then decided to stay put. Act Two concluded with Gaishan’s success in solving the problem of digging frozen earth. The third act presented a working-class hero who set up a role model for Gaishan. Jiang Atu, an electrician from Shanghai, dived into the icy river and swam to the opposite bank to fetch a rope. With this rope, workers saved time to cross the river and ship a colossal electric generator before the river flooded again. Atu’s bravery and self-sacrifice, along with modern machinery brought by Shanghai workers, immensely impressed Gaishan, who admired workers as “big brothers” (lao dage). The meeting between Atu and Gaishan also symbolized the CCP-sponsored idea of the “workers-peasants union” (gongnong lianmeng). The third act, hence, illustrated the rural hero’s maturation and discovery of a new self after a superhero came forward to serve as a paragon for him. In Ban Wang’s words, it was “an intimate psychic process of growth and maturation” and “an acquisition of revolutionary identity,” which was essentially an aesthetic “process of sublimation.”22 Moreover, this   Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 123–124.   Wu Zongxi, “Shanghai wenyi jie zhi Huai gongzuo dui zai sixiang gaizao zhong de shouhuo,” 10. 22   Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 127. 20 21

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section was created to cater to the Shanghai audience as Atu represented the working class in Shanghai. After all, the story, which was set in the distant Anhui Province, was intended to entertain Shanghai listeners. It was thus no wonder that the story lavished the praise of workers and technology from Shanghai. With the coming of modern machines from Shanghai, the headquarters ruled that a tenth of laborers gave up their Chinese New Year vacation and stayed in the worksite. Gaishan hesitated for a short while as he had promised to get married during the break in his hometown. Jiang Yuequan gave a spirited rendition about Gaishan’s hesitation and eventual decision to postpone his wedding for the second time in his three-minute long aria, “Stay for the New Year” (Liu guonian). In the song, Gaishan felt ashamed by his wish to return home for the break when thinking of Atu’s risking of his life to ship the generator: I suddenly remember the electrician Jiang Atu. In order to complete the reservoir before the flood, He cast the word ‘life’ aside. If he can give his life for the project, Why do I have to leave for the marriage?23

Thus, Gaishan determined to stay in the construction site throughout the New Year vacation and put off his wedding for another time. Once again, the commitment to the national community gained more weight than his private family. To better illustrate Gaishan’s sacrifice of his private life for the construction of the country, Jiang Yuequan altered his usual way of singing. As Stephanie Webster-Cheng finds, while Jiang generally performed his tune between 68 and 72 beats per minute (BPM), he sang “Stay for the New Year” in a much faster pace, between 98 and 107 BPM.24 In retrospect, Jiang stated that he had assumed that Gaishan must be thrilled when facing the grand view of fixing the Huai River by millions of workers and peasant-laborers. Therefore, he could not continue to use his “Slow Jiang Tune” (man Jiang diao) whatsoever. In order to “keep pace with the rhythm of the era” (genshang shidai de jiepai), he was obliged to sing faster.25 Under this circumstance, the “Fast Jiang Tune” (kuai Jiang diao) was created.

23  Stephanie Webster-Cheng, “Composing, Revising, and Performing Suzhou Ballads,” 134. 24  Ibid., 135–136. 25  Shanghai pingtan tuan, Jiang Yuequan liupai changqiang ji, 16.



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Illustration 8:  Playing We Must Certainly Fix the Huai River, the middle-length pingtan story in the early 1950s, in a workers’ club in Shanghai. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

The Fast Jiang Tune, a new development of Jiang Yuequan’s singing style for the performance of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, would constitute an integral part of his “Jiang Tune” ( Jiang diao), one of the most popular pingtan singing styles. Jiang certainly was not the lone pingtan artist who came to realize the need to speed up singing in the new era. Xu Yunzhi (1901–1978), who had been a prominent pingtan star famous for his low-speed singing style since the 1930s, selfconsciously accelerated his singings after 1949.26 Aside from the creation of the Fast Jiang Tune, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River also allowed Zhu Huizhen to stand out and become a pingtan super star.27 Zhu Huizhen impressed the audience in Act Four where she played Gaishan’s fiancée, Xiuying. Xiuying paid a visit to Gaishan in the construction site as a member of “Sisters’ Consolation Team” ( Jiemei weiwen tuan). When narrating the couple’s encounter in the fourth act, storytellers avoided giving any sexual innuendo. Yet, Gaishan’s emotion and energy were by no means suppressed. He soon found an

  Zhou Liang, Suzhou pingtan yishu chutan, 18.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 91.

26 27

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outlet to transform his love of Xiuying and his family into his heroic action of saving a dam from collapsing. When chatting with Xiuying by the river, Gaishan spotted a rapidly widening crack on the dam. As the dam was on the brink of total destruction, Gaishan dived, right before his fiancée’s eyes, into the river and filled the crevice with his body. It was Atu, the Shanghai worker, who lent Gaishan the inspiration to sacrifice his body for the sake of the dam, as storytellers declared. With the help of other laborers, the dam was saved and consolidated. Gaishan’s rescue of the dam typified Communist literature’s success in “recycling of the individual’s libidinal energy for revolutionary purposes, in the constant displacing of the individual’s life and enjoyment into revolutionary experience.”28 Here, storytellers refashioned a story about heroes and beauties. This time, the fearless hero did not have to rescue the beauty herself, but the project with nationalistic significance, to win her heart. The protagonist’s passion was properly unleashed, while the CCP’s goal of building a new nation was fulfilled. In the end of the story, not only Gaishan was hailed to be a real hero, Xiuying was also lauded for her wise choice of the future husband. The traditional happy ending of “great reunion” (da tuanyuan) thus found a novel expression in this new pingtan story. The episode about Gaishan’s salvage of the dam was based on a news report in the Anhui Daily (Anhui ribao).29 Writers and performers in the Shanghai Troupe also drew from their lived experiences in the Huai River region to construct plots and subplots. Zhao Gaishan’s archetype was Ge Aishan, a peasant-labor who volunteered to stay in the work site during the New Year’s break.30 Writers based Jiang Atu’s diving into the river on what storytellers had witnessed: countless workers and peasant-laborers swimming in bitterly cold water to save the equipment from being washed away by the flood.31 Drawing archetypes from the real life legitimized critics’ labeling the story as a work of realism. Wu Zongxi commented that Gaishan was one of the progressive and patriotic “new figures” (xin renwu) who emerged in the   Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 124.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 90. 30   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao de chuangzuo jingguo《一定要 把淮河修好》的创作经过 [The process of making We certainly must fix the Huai river],” in Zhou Liang ed., Suhou pingtan wenxuan, disan ce, Wu Zongxi juan, 26. 31  Liu Tianyun 刘天韵, “Weida de laodong renmin he weida de Huaihe gongcheng 伟大的劳动人民和伟大的淮河工程 [The great laboring people and the great Huai River project],” Jiefang ribao, August 15, 1952. 28 29



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countryside since the land reform campaign was carried out across the country.32 The use of “type,” as in the case of Gaishan of the story, according to Marston Anderson, enables realist writers to transmit “general truths (i.e. ideology) and the encyclopedic portrayal of social reality.”33 To prevent their works from being “simply the fleshing-out of abstract ideological schemes,” as a consequence, authors of realist works privileged character over plot.34 For the audience, the use of typicality was by no means aesthetically and stylistically weird. As Bonnie McDougall and Kam Louie posit, “typical characters” were highly compatible with role stereotyping in traditional Chinese theater.35 The issue thus arose when authors created a hero to achieve typicality. Gaishan’s typicality as a “new man” under the new social and political system was attained as writers and performers assembled accomplishments and heroics from varied sources. Throughout the story, Gaishan was illustrated as a moral paragon to prioritize the national project over his private matters and an omnipotent hero who managed to conquer the nature by softening frozen earth and save the dam with his flesh and blood. In this sense, storytellers, albeit their assumption that they were propagating a collective identity of the laboring people in new China, were as a matter of fact reconfirming the heroism that the audience felt familiar with in classic stories about knights-errant (xia). In classic and popular fiction in China, xia possess both exceptional physical skills and high moral qualities. As Joe Huang observes, the concept of heroism in Socialist literature implicitly stressed “individuality and personal willpower.”36 Wu Zongxi did not fail to realize that the story somehow excessively dramatized Gaishan’s individual accomplishments without putting emphasis on the leading role of the ruling political party.37 Wu Zongxi’s critique of the story revealed an intrinsic paradox in China’s revolutionary novels

32   Zuoxian 左弦, “Yibu fanying zuixin zuimei de xianshi de zuopin—ping Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao 一部反映最新最美的现实的作品—评《一定要把淮河 修好》[A newest and most beautiful realist work that reflects the real life: a review of We certainly must fix the Huai river],” Wenhui bao, April 7, 1952. 33  Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 16. 34  Ibid., 199. 35   Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century, 291. 36   Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (New York: Pica Press, 1973), 321. 37   Zuoxian, “Yibu fanying zuixin zuimei de xianshi de zuopin.”

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and films in the Maoist era. On one hand, it was politically imperative to depict the people’s initiatives of conquering the nature and changing the society. On the other, the CCP essentially denied the agency to the people the Party claimed to have liberated.38 At any rate, the portrayal of Gaishan as a larger-than-life hero reconfirmed Perry Link’s discovery that xia-like heroes never really vanished in China’s Socialist literature and motion pictures even though the PRC government outright banned xia films and novels in Mao’s times. Such heroes continued to fascinate the audience in certain Party-sponsored anti-spy and war fiction.39 The heroism of Gaishan and Atu manifested itself in both their actions and their lofty Communist and nationalist ideals. Therefore, they were portrayed and accepted as xia in the new era in that their physical skills were “melded with” and “the same thing as” their “superior intellectual and moral qualities.”40 The glamour of Gaishan as a xia-like hero thus partially contributed to the story’s unheralded success in the market. Initially, writers and performers of the Shanghai Troupe intended to make the story a mere political report wrapping up their threemonth long experience in the Anhui Province. Therefore, they vastly underestimated the story’s popularity by assuming that the story could be staged no longer than one or two weeks.41 To their surprise, the Shanghai Troupe performed We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River in more than two hundred and fifty consecutive nights ever since its debut in April 1952. Wu Zongxi, who officially joined the Shanghai Troupe four months after the story’s debut, analyzed that seventy percent of listeners (over 260,000 in total ) were workers, who had never frequented story houses previously.42 In other words, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River enticed an enormous number of new listeners. With such a remarkable success, Communist cadres and organ writers hailed the creation a new type of pingtan storytelling that departed from the old one. Immediately after the story’s debut, an essay was published in the Xinmin Evening (Xinmin wanbao) pressing its readers for listening to We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River live in story houses.

  Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 190.  Perry Link, The Use of Literature, 228. 40  Ibid., 227. 41   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June, 3, 2009; Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009. 42   Wu Zongxi, “Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao de chuangzuo jingguo,” 27. 38 39



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The essayist asserted that the story’s success indicated the possibility of pingtan storytelling to represent “new people and new things” (xinren xinshi) with its adoption of new content and form. The new pingtan storytelling, the writer continued, had been totally exempt from old storytelling techniques such as xuetou and crisis episodes.43 To echo the essay, Wu Zongxi put forth further analysis about the story’s massive popularity. He viewed the form of middle-length pingtan stories as the deciding factor. Wu posited that classic stories, which lasted for months, if not years, to close the narrative, served exclusively the leisured class or “professional listeners” (zhiye tingke).44 By contrast, the laboring class, namely workers and peasants, were so busy that they expected storytellers to complete a story within one evening. The creation of three-hour long middle-length pingtan stories specifically served the needs of the “laboring people” (laodong renmin).45 The relative shortness of new pingtan stories allowed the Shanghai Troupe to create new stories constantly and renew its repertoire regularly. In this fashion, pingtan storytelling was capable of fulfilling the CCP’s requirements that literature and art could instantly reflect ongoing political events and struggles and inculcate state-sanctioned ideological doctrines.46 By 1954, We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River drew over 300,000 listeners in Shanghai, making it one of the most performed stories in the market. More recently, Wu Zongxi admitted that a tremendous portion of listeners was state-run factory workers or company employees whose work units paid their admission fees. They came to story houses to receive political reeducation especially after Zhou Yang, the vice minister of Culture, sang high praise of the story.47 Even in the 1950s, nonetheless, Wu never hid the fact that a great number of workers were in actuality not paid consumers, but were required by their superiors to sit in story houses. Despite this, such listeners still showed interests in

43  Sufeng 苏凤, “Xin pingtan de huashidai de youyi chuangzao: Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao 新评弹的划时代的又一创造:《一定要把淮河修好》[Another epoch-making and excellent creation of new pingtan storytelling: We certainly must fix the Huai river],” Xinmin wanbao, April 6, 1952. 44   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Pingtan shi zenyang zhengqu xin tingzhong de 评弹是 怎样争取新听众的 [How does pingtan storytelling acquire new listeners],” in Zhou Liang ed., Suhou pingtan wenxuan, disan ce, Wu Zongxi juan, 80–81. 45   Wu Zongxi, “Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao de chuangzuo jingguo,” 27–28. 46   Wu Zongxi, “Pingtan shi zenyang zhengqu xin tingzhong de,” 81. 47   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.

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the story. When returning to their work units, Wu found, workers and cadres continued to discuss the story in routine meetings.48 Political propaganda as it was, nevertheless, the story’s nature as an entertainment had never been overlooked by neither the Shanghai Troupe nor the audience. Indeed, writers and performers gradually reduced the dosage of highly politicized plots in the story. For example, in Act One when Gaishan tried to persuade his mother to uphold his decision to work in the Huai River valley and postpone his wedding, the earliest version of the aria included lines about the support of the CCP’s war effort in Korea. Such lines were entirely deleted by 1954.49 The third and fourth acts originally contained a subplot regarding the ongoing Campaign of Three Antis (1951) and Five Antis (1952).50 As the story was restaged in the mid 1950s, however, this subplot was completely taken out since the political campaigns had long been obsolete. New and more suspenseful elements, such as the risk that Atu took to fetch the rope, were accordingly added. Its writers were therefore congratulated on making the story as interesting and intriguing as some classic ones. To listeners, their embracing of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River stemmed from the story’s capacity to amuse them after they made a comparison between the story and tedious “political reports” (zhengzhi baogao). Wu reported that when the story was performed in a factory, workers told Communist cadres in their work units that We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River sounded far more “vivid and forceful” (shengdong youli) than political meetings.51 The Politics and Economics of Middle-Length Pingtan Stories We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River’s unanticipated success encouraged the Shanghai Troupe to produce increasingly more stories with a length of three hours and three or four acts. Such a new genre of pingtan storytelling was later officially named “middle-length pingtan stories.” The Shanghai Troupe, however, hesitated to use the name   Wu Zongxi, “Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao de chuangzuo jingguo,” 27.  Ibid. 50   Zuoxian, “Yibu fanying zuixin zuimei de xianshi de zuopin.” The campaigns of Three Antis and Five Antis were launched by the CCP to combat corruptions in Chinese cities in the early 1950s. While a large number of capitalists were punished during the movement, the CCP succeeded in consolidating its power. 51   Wu Zongxi, “Pingtan shi zenyang zhengqu xin tingzhong de,” 83. 48 49



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of “middle-length stories,” but preferred “new pingtan storytelling” (xin pingtan) at the outset instead. Wu Zongxi, for example, never labeled We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River as a middle-length story, but kept calling it a new pingtan story between 1951 and early 1953. He officially used the term, “middle-length story” as late as April 1953 in an essay to promote a newly written story about the Chinese navy.52 The term of “new pingtan” revealed the Shanghai Troupe’s ambition of not only creating a new pingtan genre, but also completely refashioning traditional storytelling. The new genre, as I have shown, has modeled itself after the theater and thereby departed itself from the conventional way of storytelling in that each performer is assigned one or more fixed roles in an act, whereas storytellers in full-length stories assume multiple roles throughout the whole stories. Moreover, participants of middle-length stories are required to strictly follow the scripts given to them, while those who tell stories in conventional ways possess nothing but outlines or, at the best, promptbooks of stories and therefore enjoyed full freedom of improvisation. Each act of the middle-length stories entails at least two and at most four storytellers. Therefore, a three-hour long performance can possibly get together a dozen storytellers. The edition of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River that I listen to, for example, featured twelve pingtan artists, Liu Tianyun, Xu Xueyue, Chen Xi’an, Chen Hongxia, Yao Yinmei, Zhang Jian­ ting, Yang Delin (b. 1928), Wu Zi’an (1919–2001), Jiang Yuequan, Zhang Hongsheng, Yang Zhenxiong (1920–1998), and Zhu Huizhen. Each artist followed the written script with lines and lyrics being prescribed. With the new form and content of pingtan storytelling, Communist cadres presumed that pingtan storytelling could better assume the role as the “light cavalry” (qing qibing) to reach remote and isolated areas and present shortened, but edifying pingtan programs to listeners in the countryside, factories, mines, and the military.53 As Mark Bender argues, the emergence of middle-length stories “helped create a new legitimacy for the pingtan storytelling arts.”54

  Zuoxian 左弦, “Pingtan Haishang yingxiong gei women de qifa 评弹《海上 英雄》给我们的启发 [The inspirations that the pingtan story Heroes at the ocean lends to us],” Wenhui bao, April 1, 1953. 53  Pan Boying 潘伯英, “Cong pingtan de yige xin xingshi dansheng tanqi 从评 弹的一个新形式诞生谈起 [Talking from the birth of a new pingtan form],” Xinhua ribao, May 17, 1962. 54  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 17. 52

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The instrumentality of middle-length stories as political propaganda was bolstered by their prominence in the market throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Following the footsteps of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, a number of middle-length stories enjoyed spectacular box-office success. Li Qingfu (b. 1933), once the vice director of the Shanghai Troupe, remembered that Wang Xiaohe (debuted in 1955) achieved sell-outs in three consecutive months and How Green the Reeds Are (Luwei qingqing) seven months.55 As soon as the Shanghai Troupe made the announcement of staging Qingwen, a middle-length story adapted from the Dream of Red Chamber in 1962, Wu Zongxi recalled, enthusiastic listeners lined up for tickets and the queue rounded a building block three times.56 Listeners were unanimously under the impression that it was hard to purchase tickets for middle-length stories in first-tier story houses. Cai Kangyin (b. 1950), a middle school student on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, felt that it was almost impossible to buy admission tickets at the door immediately prior to performances in the 1960s. Cai noted that box offices opened only twice a month and, in each time, tickets for the whole month would be quickly sold out.57 Listeners sometimes waited outside story houses in hopes that someone might resell their tickets shortly prior to the start of performances. Yet, many of my interviewees concluded that the chance of acquiring resold tickets was extremely slim.58 In this sense, tickets of middle-length pingtan stories were the hottest commodity in the market. To obtain tickets but avoid standing in long lines, Zhang Shaozeng (b. 1939) kept in touch with other pingtan fans in his work unit to urge the labor union to purchase “group tickets” for them. Zhang, a college graduate in the early 1950s, worked in the Yaohua Glass Company (Yaohua boli chang) in eastern Shanghai. Finding it inconvenient to cross the Huangpu River (Huangpu jiang) and travel to downtown to buy tickets, Zhang and his fellow pingtan fans invariably managed to obtain, with the help of the labor union of the company, scores of tickets for each time. In that case, it was certainly listeners such as Zhang, not the labor union or the company, who paid the price.59 Wu Zongxi

  Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 57   Cai Kangyin 蔡康寅, interview with author, July 26, 2010. 58   Zhang Shaozeng 章绍曾, interview with author, July 26, 2010; Su Jia 苏嘉, interview with author, September 27, 2010. 59   Zhang Shaozeng, interview with author, July 26, 2010. 55 56



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confirmed that the Shanghai Troupe frequently notified large-scale state-owned enterprises in advance of its upcoming pingtan performances to promote ticket sales. The Yaohua Glass Company definitely fell into the category of large state-run enterprises. Wu added that the Shanghai Troupe did not bother to check who paid for the tickets. As long as “letters of introduction” ( jieshao xin) were issued by work units and presented to the Shanghai Troupe together with payments, listeners were guaranteed to acquire tickets, which were usually unavailable elsewhere.60 Political Agenda: Maximizing the Audience Those who eventually obtained tickets and sat in story houses found that middle-length pingtan stories captivated a whole spectrum of audience members in terms of their ages and occupations.61 By contrast, smaller story houses that hosted full-length stories drew chiefly aged listeners. Cai Kangyin remembered that his grandfather, then over sixty in the early 1960s, was used to purchasing season tickets for full-length stories at discount prices. In story houses, his grandfather did not necessarily focus his attention on storytellers. As often as not, he sat at the back and chatted with his friends. For Cai, who had been accustomed to theater-like first-class story houses, the experiences of listening to full-length stories in smaller story houses were unspeakably unpleasant. Cai once immediately escaped from a teahouse where a full-length story was performed because he felt uncomfortable to sit among a large mass of white-haired listeners and the teahouse’s setup seemed a bit weird to him.62 Fang Shuijin (b. 1942), who started to frequent story houses in 1958, similarly found himself in an outlandish province when stepping into a teahouse-story house where full-length stories were staged. All other white-haired listeners cast their gazes on him since Fang was the lone young man in the building.63 Li Xin (b. 1946), also a middle school student in the late 1950s and early 1960s, recalled that she and her classmates could make some time only at night to go to story houses for middle-length stories, despite the

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010.   Cai Kangyin, interview with author, July 26, 2010; Su Jia, interview with author, September 27, 2010. 62   Cai Kangyin, interview with author, July 26, 2010. 63   Fang Shuijin 方水金, interview with author, July 23, 2010. 60 61

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fact that they needed to go to classes only half a day because of her school’s shortage of faculty members. Li and her classmates devoted all afternoons and most of the evenings to studying, but spent some nights every month in story houses to enjoy middle-length pingtan stories together.64 Testimonies by listeners indicate that middle-length stories’ capability to enthrall young ears and the light audience was by no means a delusion, but a well-grounded assertion, of Communist cadres. Most of my interviewees, all students or young employees in Mao’s era, complained about the lack of time so that middle-length stories supplied them with entertainment without spending excessive amount of time. As a matter of fact, the trend in pingtan storytelling to experiment with shortened stories with a fast pace had already started in the closing years of the Republican era. Quite a number of storytellers such as Zhang Jianting and Zhang Hongsheng gained popularity for their adoption of high-tempo approaches to tell classic stories.65 In the meantime, an increasingly large number of listeners found it hard to patronize story houses every single night, but elected to listen to pingtan stories only during weekends. They were nicknamed “pheasant listeners” (yeji tingke), meaning unprofessional or uncommitted listeners.66 Such a trend not only resumed, but also loomed large in the post-revolution era when accelerating and curtailing pingtan stories and attracting uncommitted listeners became central to the reformation of pingtan art. In this sense, middle-length stories, whose plots progress much more speedily than full-length ones,67 both fit the CCP’s agenda of transforming pingtan storytelling and met the demands for shorter and faster stories in the market. As a pingtan writer well puts it, the creation of middle-length pingtan stories was at once “the demand of the times” (shidai de yaoqiu) and performers’ proactive responses to

 Li Xin 李新, interview with author, August 2, 2010.   Wu Chenyu 吴琛瑜, Wan Qing yilai Suzhou pingtan yu Suzhou shehui: yi shuchang wei zhongxin de yanjiu 晚清以来苏州评弹与苏州社会: 以书场为中心的研究 [Suzhou pingtan and Suzhou society since the late Qing: a research centering on story houses] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2010), 200. 66  Ibid., 104. 67  Mark Bender has compared the beginnings of both full-length and middle-length stories and concludes that the foundation of plots in middle-length stories “is built quite rapidly in the first lines.” See Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 101. 64 65



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such a demand.68 As a consequence, the emergence of middle-length stories necessitated a further popularization of pingtan storytelling in big cities such as Shanghai. The new genre’s success in commanding a massive audience prompted Communist cadres to celebrate middle-length stories as a “simple and flexible” ( jiandan linghuo) form capable of “instantly reflecting the reality” (xunsu fanying xianshi) and thereby drawing the massive audience in varieties of sites such as “workshops” (chejian), “the edge of fields” (tiantou), “squares” (guangchang), and “recital halls” (dating).69 By contrast, full-length stories were under attacks from time to time as a form serving exclusively the leisured class. For Communist cadres, therefore, lengths of pingtan stories carried strong political implications. Non-laboring people, or the exploiting class, had the luxury to enjoy full-length stories on a nightly basis, whereas the new laboring masses listened to middle-length ones. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the dichotomy of full-length and middle-length pingtan stories was politicized to such a degree that high-rank Communist officials such as Wei Wenbo (1905–1987), the first secretary of CCP East China Bureau, enforced decrees to enjoin full-length stories all together. Pan Boying, a Suzhou-based storyteller transformed Communist cadre, openly cast doubt, but in vain, on such a radical policy.70 At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Pan was further criticized and tortured for his pro-full-length-story stance.71 Ironically enough, it was the same Pan Boying who, in order to celebrate the PRC’s first anniversary, experimented with four-act stories, which became the prototype of the Shanghai Troupe’s middle-length stories.72 Moreover, Pan personally wrote an essay in 1962 for a government-sponsored newspaper in Beijing to accentuate, to a national readership, storytellers’ ability to go deep among peasants, workers, and soldiers to serve the novel type of audience in the new society, the laboring masses, because of the flexibility of middle-length stories.73

68   Fangtian 方天, “Suzhou pingtan de zhongpian 苏州评弹的中篇 [Middle-length stories in Suzhou pingtan storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 29, 2001, 85. 69  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Zhonggong Shanghai shiwei weisheng jiaoyu bu dang’an, A23-3-5-29, 128. 70   Zhou Liang 周良, interview with author, June 9, 2010. 71   Fanyi, “Pingtan gexin jia Pan Boying (zaixu),” 130. 72   Zhou Liang, Suzhou pinghua tanci shi, 187. 73  Pan Boying, “Cong pingtan de yige xin xingshi dansheng tanqi.”

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Political Implication: Minimizing Flexibility Communist cadres’ celebration of the flexibility of middle-length stories notwithstanding, one of the hidden agendas of creating such a new genre was actually to minimize storytelling’s flexible ways of performing. In most cases, middle-length stories, especially those performed by storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe and the Suzhou Troupe, were staged in theater-like large story houses to generate greater revenues. However, spacious story houses irrevocably altered the relationship between storytellers and their listeners. In old-style teahouses, as an essayist posits, storytellers did not sit on high platforms or stages and are therefore closer to the audience. During the intermissions, storytellers were used to chatting casually with listeners nearby. By contrast, storytellers performing on colossal stages in sizable story houses only found themselves placed under spotlights and distant from listeners. The communications between storytellers and the audience were thereby blocked.74 Communist cadres viewed the diminishing interactions between artists and listeners not only as a political measure to discipline performers, but also an artistic creation. Wu Zongxi, for example, took pride in the Shanghai Troupe’s self-conscious abandonment of storytellers-audience communications as a defining characteristic of the troupe’s artistic style.75 Aside from performing venues, the written scripts middle-length stories contributed, to a great extent, to restrict the flexibility of pingtan storytelling. Wu Zongxi considered that Communist cadres like himself tended to infuse their ideas in scripts regarding characterization and developments of plots in the 1950s and 1960s.76 In this manner, storytellers had lost much control over the stories.77 The prepared scripts required storytellers to have some literacy, something many artists lacked. Zhang Jianting, for example, felt frustrated at his inability to understand the text when he was given the script of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River. As a result, he decided to attend literacy classes.78 In this sense, the creation of middle-length 74  Gu Lingsen 顾聆森, “Tantan chengshi shuchang de huigui 谈谈城市书场的 回归 [On the revival of urban story houses],” Pingtan yishu, No. 11, 1990, 113–115. 75   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Shanghai pingtan tuan de qunti fengge 上海评弹团的 群体风格 [The collective character of the Shanghai pingtan troupe],” Pingtan yishu, No. 21, 1997, 86. 76   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 6, 2009. 77   Xia Zhenhua, interview with the author, August 2, 2010. 78   Yuezi 月子, “Cong bijibu shang kan Zhang Jianting de jinbu 从笔记簿看张鉴 庭的进步 [Understanding Zhang Jianting’s progress from notebooks],” Xinmin wanbao, February 26, 1954.



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pingtan stories and their scripts functioned to transform storytellers by compelling them to receive education sponsored by the CCP. More significantly, as storytellers were generally assigned fixed roles in middle-length pingtan stories and loyal to scripts, improvisation became unnecessary and unattainable. Mark Bender notes that duo pingtan performances contained less improvised elements than those of solos and improvisation is particularly hard for “three or more.”79 With three or more storytellers sharing the stage in each act of middlelength stories, improvised performances became practically impossible. In order to get into their characters quickly given the conciseness of middle-length stories, storytellers directly embarked on bai (dialogues and monologues) and thus minimized biao (third-person speech) to keep plots developing.80 As an important pingtan technique of improvisation, as Mark Bender has shown, biao enables storytellers to make “digressions into other narrative territory.” Bender once observed a five-minute long digression with which the storyteller shifted from the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) to modern-day Nanjing Road in Shanghai.81 With such a capacity to connect the past with the present, biao allows storytellers to make comments on or, in many cases, outright criticize the reality. Therefore, the extensive use of biao as well as other pingtan techniques could be politically subversive. In other words, Communist cadres thereby took full control of what storytellers had to say on stage and the risk of storytellers’ making subversive and seditious remarks was minimal, if any, in the performances of middle-length stories. Xia Zhenhua, who was invited to write middle-length stories for both pingtan performing enterprises and self-employed storytellers in Suzhou prior to the Cultural Revolution, also confirmed the new pingtan genre’s inflexibility and therefore loss of the “essence” ( jinghua) of storytelling. By essence, Xia meant pingtan techniques of improvisation including xuetou and stuck-ins. While storytellers who told fulllength stories take the liberty to insert ad-lib elements, those engaging in performing middle-length ones had to adhere to scripts. As a consequence, middle-length stories, which are intended more to supply complete plots than to entertain the audience with various storytelling  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 102.  Linghu Yuan 令狐远, “Jiwang kailai—Suzhou pingtan duhou 继往开来—《苏州 评弹》读后 [Carry on the past and open a way for future: after reading Suzhou pingtan storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 29, 2001, 175. 81  Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 85. 79 80

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Illustration 9:  Jiang Yuequan (left, 1917–2001), Tang Gengliang (middle, 1921–2009), and Zhou Yunrui (right, 1921–1970) were performing Wang Xiaohe, a middle-length story about a Communist hero in 1940s Shanghai. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

skills, are less “chewy” (yaojiao), or in other words, significantly less rich in episodic and non-episodic elements, than their full-length counter­ parts.82 Despite his complaint, Xia authored a number of middle-length stories at storytellers’ request because of enormous market demands. Even self-employed storytellers sought to organize themselves to stage middle-length stories to pursue high profits. Collectivizing Storytellers The market success of middle-length pingtan stories both impressed and posed a threat to self-employed storytellers who had been used

82

  Xia Zhenhua, interview with author, August 2, 2010.



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to telling stories as solos or duos. By the mid-1950s, middle-length stories by the Shanghai Troupe and the Suzhou Troupe monopolized most large and well-equipped story houses. The success that state-run troupes achieved in the market was pertinent to the economic and political situations of the day. Wu Zongxi recalled that in the opening years of the 1950s when the recreation market was sluggish due to the Campaign of Three Antis and Five Antis, many reputed selfemployed storytellers made their minds to join the Shanghai Troupe. The Shanghai Troupe was able to maintain its competitiveness in the market exactly because of the popularity of middle-length stories.83 Other self-employed storytellers voluntarily worked together as pingtan groups to stage middle-length stories. Shen Dongshan, who joined a pingtan group in Suzhou, for example, performed the Tale of Chun Hyang (Chunxiang zhuan), a love story adapted from a folk story in imperial Korea, and Wang Baochuan, a story about a military man and his virtuous wife in ancient China, in two story houses in Shanghai in April and May 1955.84 Lack of professional writers to produce performable stories, Shen and his group members shortened their fulllength stories and adapted them into middle-length ones. Those who contributed their stories and rewrote them into scripts would receive additional payments. Prior to their performances of middle-length stories in Shanghai, however, Shen’s group usually made performing tours in other cities, most likely Hangzhou, to test the market.85 Even those who were not affiliated to any troupes or groups could take the liberty of organizing themselves to perform middle-length stories and thereby reap profits. In 1957, for example, Su Yuyin, then a self-employed storyteller, was approached to play Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong (Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong), a story based on a sensational elopement of a young lady and her male servant in 1920s Shanghai. Despite his complete ignorance of the story, he accepted the invitation. Eleven storytellers including Su staged Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in November and December 1957 in Shanghai under the banner of “joint performance of Shanghai pingtan artists” (Shanghai

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.   Pingtan jiemu biao, yijiu wuwu nian siyue nianer ri qi 评弹节目表, 一九五五年四月廿 二日起 [Lineups of pingtan storytelling, from April 22, 1955], n. p., 1955. 85  Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 25, 2010. 83 84

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shi pingtan yiren lianhe yanchu).86 The story proved to be a major success in the market and, as a result, the owner of the story house even considered having a neon sign installed in order to heighten its publicity. Su remembered that participatory storytellers were rated in each performance and payments were made based on such ratings, a system quite similar to those in some collectively owned troupes. Yet, this performing entity was loosely coordinated. Members performed individually in their respectively story houses whenever Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was not staged.87 The popularity of middle-length stories in the market convinced Wu Zongxi that the goal of establishing the state-owned Shanghai Troupe had been fulfilled. Wu explained that the troupe was initially named as Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe instead of a more straightforward Shanghai People’s Pingtan Troupe because of its nature as “an experiment to set a model” (shiyan shifan) for thousands of self-employed storytellers. However, Wu felt clueless at the outset about what model the Shanghai Troupe could provide for the self-employed and loosely organized pingtan groups. It was the success of middle-length pingtan stories, a genre unintentionally invented but later aggressively promoted by the Shanghai Troupe, that justified its role as the model of those who had not yet been collectivized.88 Furthermore, the Shanghai Troupe promised to supply the self-employed with newly authored stories to consolidate the troupe’s leading role in pingtan storytelling.89 By the mid and late 1950s, the Shanghai Troupe was indisputably in the leading position in the market of Shanghai as its middle-length stories consistently retained the lion share in high-profile and profitable story houses. The self-employed, in comparison, were gradually marginalized to such a degree that the vast majority of them had no option but to perform in small story houses and second tier cities. It is thus safe to argue that the state policy of collectivizing artists, namely state-employment’s triumph over self-employment, did not have to be enforced by

86   Shanghai shuchang jiemu, gongyuan yijiu wuqi nian shiyi yue nianer ri qi 上海书场节目, 公元一九五七年十一月廿二日起 [Lineups of stories in Shanghai story houses, from November 22, 1957], n. p., 1957. 87  Su Yuyin, interview with author, August 6, 2009. 88   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 89  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-487, 72.



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political intervention, but sometimes through the mechanism of market competitions. High Costs, High Profits, and High-End Market The market success of state-run troupes was principally scored in big cities where costs of performing middle-length pingtan stories could be covered by high box-office revenues. Entailing as many as a dozen storytellers for each performance, middle-length pingtan stories were without a doubt a high-cost product. Furthermore, extra costs were incurred to pay fees for writing scripts. Hence, as an essayist recently pointed out, only a tiny number of state-run troupes could afford to develop middle-length stories consistently.90 Middle-length stories could thus be understood as a peculiar cultural product under China’s new centralized economy after the CCP’s victory. In another analyst’s words, middle-length stories were germane to China’s “collective economy” ( jiti jingji).91 In small towns and cities where the numbers of pingtan listeners were significantly smaller, nevertheless, only fulllength stories proved profitable because low-cost pingtan solos or duos were able to draw the same group of listeners on a daily or nightly basis for a fortnight, a month, or longer. Staging middle-length stories, by contrast, were doomed to fail economically as the fan bases were not large enough to have story houses filled in an extended period of time.92 To capture the massive audience to cover the high personnel costs and achieve profitability, therefore, pingtan performing ensembles invariably focused on big cities, mostly Shanghai, considering their enormous population of listeners. As a common practice, all state-run troupes and pingtan groups resorted to middle-length stories to garner profits in their performing tours in Shanghai. Both the Suzhou Troupe and the Changshu Pingtan Troupe (Changshu pingtan tuan), for example, brought middle-length stories to Shanghai in their very first performing tours in the mid 1950s.93 The director of the

 Suwen 苏文, “Shuo zhongpian 说中篇 [On middle-length stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 42, 37. 91   Fangtian, “Suzhou pingtan de zhongpian,” 85–86. 92   Zhou Liang, Suzhou pingtan yishu chutan, 135. 93   Cao Hanchang, “Shutan Yanyun lu,” 79; Ye Linong 叶黎侬, Qinchuan yayun: Changshu pingtan yishu guan 琴川雅韵: 常熟评弹艺术馆 [Elegant rhythm from Qinchuan: pingtan art museum of Changshu] (Shanghai, Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2007), 50. 90

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Suzhou Troupe had no intention to conceal the purpose of staging middle-length stories in Shanghai: to generate higher incomes.94 Interestingly enough, those stories were rarely performed in their respective cities. Both run by the CCP notwithstanding, the Shanghai Troupe and the Suzhou Troupe competed with each other in the market for economic gains to such an extent that officials from the Shanghai and Suzhou had to mediate between them.95 The presumption that middle-length stories were lucrative in Shanghai was well-founded. In the 1960s, for example, solo or duo performances of full-length stories in Shanghai were usually priced at 0.15 or 0.2 yuan, while tickets for most middle-length stories were sold at a price of 0.2 or 0.25 yuan. Middle-length stories performed by the Shanghai Troupe could be priced at as high as 0.4 yuan.96 More importantly, almost all performances of high-budget middlelength stories were arranged in sizable story houses with a capacity of over five hundred seats. Virtually all such story houses were formerly dancing halls. Aside from commercial performing venues, performing ensembles cooperated with state-run enterprises for “block booking” (baochang) performances. The Suzhou Troupe, for example, staged Sun Fangzhi, the Model Shop Assistant (Mofan yingyeyuan Sun Fangzhi), a middle-length story about a contemporary saleswoman in northeastern China, during the troupe’s first performing tour in Shanghai in 1954. The CCP’s organ Jiefang Daily ( Jiefang ribao) expressly published an essay to call workers to listen to the story and learn from the heroine in the story.97 When the Suzhou Troupe staged Liu Lianfang, another story about a contemporary model worker, in Changzhou in southern Jiangsu, the Suzhou Troupe invited cadres of the factories for trial performances and tailored the stories upon listeners’ requests. Cadres of the factories had been concerned that such highly politicized stories might be extremely boring so that they locked the doors of story houses lest workers would sneak away during the performances. Yet, to their surprise, no listeners left story houses ahead

  Cao Hanchang, “Shutan Yanyun lu,” 79.  Ibid. 96   Fengyu 凤渔, “Shuchang piaojia 书场票价 [Ticket prices of story houses],” Pingtan yishu, No. 8, 1987, 184. 97   Xu Chuanming 徐传铭, “Jieshao xin zhongpian Mofan yingyeyuan Sun Fangzhi 介绍新中篇《模范营业员孙芳芝》[Introducing the new middle-length story, Sun Fangzhi, the model shop assistant],” Jiefang ribao, December 15, 1954. 94 95



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of time.98 In those performances, as a rule, listeners themselves did not have to pay for the tickets, but their employers did as a part of political missions to discipline and educate workers, farmers, and cadres. Such performances organized and paid for by employers typified an unwritten rule in Maoist China that “leisure activities should take the form of group action.”99 As state-owned enterprises and sometimes rural communes were required to intervene in workers’ and peasants’ private lives and to select the repertoire and hire artists on a regular basis, such performances differed from commercial ones in that the cultural producers (storytellers), consumers (workers, farmers, and cadres), products (designated stories), and prices were all well planned and highly regulated. In this sense, political authorities attempted to establish a new and predictable market following the logic of the planned economy. Therefore, performing for urban enterprises and rural communes was in reality the application of the rule of planned economy to the cultural realm. In other words, it was an alternative commercialization under planned economy. Marja Kaikonen once posits that quyi, including pingtan storytelling, “remained commercial even in the midst of a dominating plan economy. Although of course the whole thing was the other way round—it was not the consumers who paid but the producers!”100 Kaikonen certainly oversimplifies the production of quyi works by equating professional quyi artists with the CCP’s ideologues, whose performances were not intended to garner profits from their audience. Yet, she at least recognizes the nature quyi performances as commercial activities. In truth, the Shanghai Troupe was sometimes unequivocal about the troupe’s desire for economic gains in such performances. Between October and December 1955, for example, the Shanghai Troupe reportedly performed in various state-run enterprises, workers’ clubs, and rural communes for three months and eight days and drew 209, 883 listeners. In Gaoqiao area of Shanghai, performances by nineteen storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe sold over twenty-three thousand tickets (priced at 0.1 yuan) and brought in a net profit of more than 1,500 yuan in six days. The revenue proved no smaller than that in commercial performing venues. Wu Zong acknowledged that such   Cao Hanchang, “Shutan Yanyun lu,” 79.  Shaoguang Wang, “The Politics of Private time,” 153. 100  Marja Kaikonen, “Quyi: Will It Survive?” 67.   98   99

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performances, which had perfectly served dual goals of political propaganda and profit making, changed his viewpoints regarding how arts served the masses. Previously, he equated the performances for workers, peasants, and soldiers with free services. Then he came to recognize the potential of gaining revenues in fulfilling political tasks to entertain and educate the masses.101 Wu’s emphasis on the profitability of political stories was a response to the central government’s call that urged state-owned performing ensembles to receive fewer state subsidies and pay attention to money making in the early and mid1950s. In January 1953, the Ministry of Culture published a directive requiring state-run theatrical and quyi troupes to focus more on commercial performances in theaters instead of providing free service for factories, rural communities, and military units. Even performances for the latter, as the directive stressed, should sell tickets. The Ministry of Culture demanded all state-owned troupes to be economically self-sufficient and thereby alleviate the governments’ financial burden. As the directive emphatically pointed out, state-run troupes should be “managed as [commercial] enterprises” (qiye jingying), highlighting the expediency to achieve profitability.102 To answer the call from the central government, as Tang Gengliang reported, the Shanghai Troupe completed the process of “corporatization” (qiye hua) by January 1956.103 Performance Scheduling While performing for large-scale industrial enterprises, military units, and rural communes allowed state-run pingtan troupes to explore an alternative source of revenue, story houses in major cities were still a major marketplace for state-employed pingtan artists. Storytellers, especially Zhang Hongsheng in the Shanghai Troupe, retained certain control over many a story house. Zhang Hongsheng, who had assumed the position as the chief of the Department of Organization in the Association, maintained strong relationship with owners of story  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-163-50, 51–52. 102   Zhonghua Remin Gongheguo Wenhua bu bangong ting, Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian ( yi), 181–182. 103   “Tang Gengliang tongzhi laixin 唐耿良同志来信 [A letter from comrade Tang Gengliang], quyi gongzuo tongxun 曲艺工作通讯 [Newsletter of quyi work], ed. Zhongguo quyi yanjiu hui, No. 9, March 1956, 70. 101



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houses since the late 1940s. Even though Zhang and Jiang Yuequan, one of the principal founders of the Shanghai Troupe, did not keep good terms with each other, Zhang’s connections with story house owners and managers impelled Jiang and other storytellers to invite Zhang to be the founder of the troupe.104 In the early 1950s when he was a state-employed storyteller under the Shanghai Troupe, Zhang Hongsheng continued to assume a key role as an agent for story houses across the Yangzi Delta. Li Qingfu, then the vice director of the Shanghai Troupe, paid visits to Zhang’s house in Chinese New Year breaks only to find countless gifts such as hams piling up in his courtyard. Zhang obtained such gifts from the managements of story houses in hopes that Zhang could send quality storytellers, both from the Shanghai Troupe and self-employed, to their performing venues. Li Qingfu acknowledged that, for Communist cadres, it was extremely complicated to make arrangements for performing full-length stories, given their varying lengths from fifteen days to several months. Only people with special expertise such as Zhong Hongsheng could schedule performances of full-length stories to satisfy both story houses and storytellers. By comparison, middle-length stories, which could be finished within one single afternoon or night, required much less effort and expertise to lay down timetables of performances. In such a fashion, Communist cadres such as Wu Zongxi and Li Qingfu managed to deprive Zhang Hongsheng of his privilege of arranging performing venues and take his place in 1958 after middle-length stories gained prominence in the market.105 Li Qingfu thus gave a vivid description about how developing middle-length stories contributed to minimizing storytellers’ control of the market and securing Communist cadres’ positions in performing ensembles. Lin Chong: Market Success Built on Pre-1949 Stardom The political and economic utility of middle-length stories to collectivize and discipline storytellers, limit storytelling’s flexibility, and enable Communist cadres to take control of the market was made possible because of this new pingtan genre’s capability to appeal to a wider

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010.   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009.

104 105

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audience. Encouraged by We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River’s impressive market success, the Shanghai Troupe drew on not only contemporary fiction and news reports, but also classic pingtan repertoire or novels to produce middle-length stories. Lin Chong, which was debuted in May 1952 in Shanghai, was the Shanghai Troupe’s very first middlelength story adapted from ancient Chinese literary works.106 A story from Water Margin, Lin Chong was originally a full-length story written by Chen Lingxi under Jiang Yuequan’s request in 1950.107 The story gained recognition in the market in the early 1950s because the hero Lin Chong’s grievances and eventual rebellion in the closing years of the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) were both popular among the audience of classic Chinese novels and dramas and approved by the Communist political authorities. Li Shaochun, a Beijing-based Beijing Opera star, had already revised the story on the basis of the oldgeneration dramatists’ edition and staged it under the title of Wild Boar Forest (Yezhu lin) in 1948.108 Moreover, the same story had been one of the few CCP-sanctioned plays about imperial China in the 1940s, for it centered on the peasant revolution.109 Indeed, it was Li Shao­ chun’s edition that lent Chen Lingxi inspirations.110 With both popular support and governmental endorsement, Jiang and his partner kept staging the story between 1950 and 1951. After the founding of the Shanghai Troupe and eighteen artists’ trip to the Huai River valley, Chen proceeded to rewrite it into a middle-length story.111 Originally, Chen Lingxi worked out a twelve-act story, which divided Lin Chong into three separate but mutually related middle-length stories: Making Havoc in Wild Boar Forest (Danao Yezhu lin), Burning Horse-fodder Depot (Huoshao caoliao chang), and Open Fight against Wang Lun (Huobing

106  Mark Bender has a detailed analysis of Lin Chong in his work to demonstrate how classic fiction was adapted to fit pingtan’s narrative structure. Some part of the middle-length story is thus translated. See Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo, 105–111. 107   Zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong shangji 中篇评弹《林冲》上集 [Lin Chong, the middlelength pingtan story, part I] (Shanghai: Zhongguo changpian Shanghai gongsi, n. d.), 3–4. 108   Wang Ankui and Yu Cong, Zhongguo dangdai xiqu shi, 120–121. 109  Hsiao-t’i Li: “Opera, Society and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901–1937,” 368. 110  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 67–69; Xiashi 夏史, “Chongfeng taxue yi ying­ xiong 冲风踏雪一英雄 [A hero against the wind and treading on the snow], Shanghai xiju, No. 6, 2010, 47. 111   Zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong shangji, 3–4.



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Wang Lun).112 By mid 1954, only the first two were staged and were collectively named as Lin Chong. The first part of Lin Chong revolves around Lin Chong’s wrongful treatment by his superior, the malicious Gao Qiu. The conflict between the hero, a captain in the Imperial Guards and Gao resulted from Lin’s reluctance to join Gao’s political faction, but aggravated after Gao’s son fell in love with Lin Chong’s wife. Lin was sent to prison under the excuse that he planned to assassinate Gao Qiu and eventually sentenced to exile to the northern border area. Lin Chong’s virtuous wife flatly refused the proposal to divorce Lin, a hero in great adversity. In his way to the place of exile, the two escorting guards, who had received bribery from Gao Qiu’s son, tried to murder Lin Chong deep in the Wild Boar Forest. Fortunately, Lin’s sworn brother came to rescue, but Lin was unwilling to kill the two evil-minded guards and outright rebel against the government at this point. The second part relates how Lin Chong, who tried to lead a peaceful life in the north as a guardian of a horse-fodder depot, was eventually forced to join the rebels. Gao Qiu’s son continued to harass Lin Chong’ wife and forced a marriage with Mrs. Lin after Lin Chong left. Mrs. Lin pretended to consent, but secretly planned an assassination. Mrs. Lin’s father, also a captain in the Imperial Guards, fiercely denounced her daughter for her disloyalty to her husband. Mrs. Lin’s assassination later failed and she thus committed suicide. Gao Qiu’s son sent killers to the north in order to murder Lin. Learning the news about his wife’s death and his enemies’ plot, the saddened and outraged Lin resisted vigorously and managed to get rid of all the killers. Nowhere to go, the desperate Lin Chong had to join the insurgents in the Mount Liang (Liangshan). The Shanghai Troupe endeavored to make Lin Chong such a hero that was willing to submit meekly to maltreatment at the outset, but finally struck back mightily when facing an option of fighting it out or perishing. To highlight Lin Chong’s determination to resist, storytellers of the Shanghai Troupe adopted a new way of storytelling by extensively using gestures, postures, and even martial arts they learned from Beijing Opera plays. In the very last act of the second part of Lin Chong, for example, the storyteller who played Lin Chong put aside 112   Zuoxian 左弦, “Jieshao xin pingtan Huoshao caoliao chang 介绍新评弹《火烧 草料场》[Introducing the new pingtan story, Burning horse-fodder depot],” Wenhui bao, January 14, 1953.

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his musical instrument and used two empty hands to perform how Lin Chong snatched the sword from the killer. To Wu Zongxi, such a way of performing was a breakthrough in the pingtan art.113 Ironically, when self-employed storytellers similarly used martial-art-like actions on stage, they were criticized for inappropriately showing off “theatricalized actions” (xiju hua dongzuo).114 Yet to the Shanghai Troupe, the use of “theatricalized actions” served the purpose of underscoring the oppressed people’s stiff resistance against the “ruling class” (tongzhi jieji). Though the episode about Mrs. Lin’s attempted assassination of Gao Qiu’s son did not exist in the original fiction, Wu Zongxi believed, this episode was consistent with the leitmotiv of Water Margin.115 Such revisions and innovations exemplified the CCP’s agenda of reworking classic stories to put emphasis on the commoners’ victimization by and fight against the ruling class in the cruel feudal society.116 In 1960, the CCP’s top leaders such as Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) proposed a minor revision of a famous aria to further illustrate Lin Chong’s gritty resolution to fight back. Originally, “Lin Chong Treading on the Snow” (Lin Chong taxue), which was sung in the middle of the last act to showcase Lin Chong’s acute sense of desolation, consisted of eight lines. After a group of paramount leaders of the CCP listened to Liu Tianyun’s singing, Premier Zhou pointed out that its ending, “Cold and approaching the close of the year, [I] am at the end of the rope” (Tianhan suimu lutu qiong), sounded disappointingly depressing and Lin Chong’s heroism thereby diminished. Therefore, Zhou added two lines to end the aria: “When will the bloody feud be settled? Immediately wrath fills the hero’s chest.” (xuehai shenchou heri bao, dunshi yingxiong nu manxiong) to articulate the protagonist’s vow to revenge himself and his family.117 For pingtan fans, it was “Lin Chong Treading on the Snow” and many other arias sung by their favorite pingtan stars that sparked 113   Zuoxian 左弦, “Chongfeng taxue yi yingxiong—ting zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong xiaji 冲风踏雪一英雄—听中篇评弹《林冲》下集 [A hero against the wind and treading on the snow: after listening to Lin Chong [part II], the middle-length pingtan story],” Xinmin wanbao, May 11, 1954. 114  Lu Dingchang and Zhou Shiting 陆鼎昌、周式庭, “Xiang pingtan yiren tichu de xiao yijian 向评弹艺人提出的小意见 [Some minor opinions made to pingtan artists],” Xinmin wanbao, May 9, 1954. 115   Zuoxian, “Chongfeng taxue yi yingxiong.” 116  Stephanie Webster-Cheng, “Composing, Revising, and Performing Suzhou Ballads,” 92. 117   Xiashi, “Chongfeng taxue yi yingxiong,” 47.



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their interests. Aside from “Lin Chong Treading on the Snow,” the eight acts featured a number of highly popular arias, such as “Tavern” ( Jiudian) by Jiang Yuequan, “Farewell in Tears in the Roadside Pavilion” (Changting qibie) by Zhu Huizhen, and “Erroneously Chastising Zhenniang” (Wuze Zhenniang) and “Complaining of Injustice in the Tavern” ( Jiudian suyuan) by Zhang Jianting, all of which would be repeatedly sung in variously occasions in the next half a century and be recorded in the artists’ individual albums.118 He Zhanchun (b. 1922), former chief of Shanghai People’s Radio, recalled that many arias from Lin Chong, such as “Lin Chong Treading on the Snow” and “Erroneously Chastising Zhenniang,” were most frequently broadcast in the radio station.119 In truth, when the Shanghai Troupe unveiled the earliest edition of the story in early 1953, Wu Zongxi emphasized the artistic value of those arias as a new development of the traditional theater and boasted of “a huge amount of arias” (daduan changgong), rather than the story’s political relevance to the ongoing politics in China, as the troupe’s market tactic.120 In this sense, Wu’s strategy was similar to those used by commercials and reviews of dramas prior to 1949. Both cadres and pingtan artists have attributed the success of Lin Chong to Chen Lingxi, who designed all singings and lines. As a longtime journalist in Shanghai since the 1930s, Chen had been well-known for his familiarity with classic Chinese literature and theater and talents in writing pingtan works. After 1949, Chen was an active collaborator of the CCP and was hired by Shanghai Culture Bureau as a professional pingtan writer in early 1951.121 At the height of the movement of Cutting the Tail, Chen Lingxi was the coordinator between political authorities and storytellers and conducted investigations into the impact of the movement on pingtan performers’ livelihoods.122 After joining the Shanghai Troupe in November 1951, Chen wrote pingtan works exclusively for performers of the troupe. Staying   Zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong shangji, 4.  He Zhanchun 何占春, “Guangbo zhong de pingtan jiemu 广播中的评弹节目 [Pingtan programs in radio broadcasting], in Shanghai wenshi ziliao di 61 ji “xiqu zhuanji” xiqu jingying (shang) 上海文史资料第61辑 “戏曲传记” 戏曲菁英 (上) [Selected works of Shanghai cultural and historical records, No. 61, special collection of theater and quyi: elite artists in theater and quyi, part I] ed. Zhengxie Shanghai shiwei wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui 政协上海市委资料委员会 (Shanghai, Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1989), 306. 120   Zuoxian, “Jieshao xin pingtan Huoshao caoliao chang.” 121   Yuxiang, “Pingtan yizhi bi—zhuihuai Chen Lingxi xiansheng,” 66. 122  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-75, 35. 118 119

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with pingtan artists “three hundred and sixty-five days a year,” Chen felt that he immensely enhanced his understanding of the pingtan art and improved his writing skills in his tenure in the Shanghai Troupe.123 Chen not only wrote new opening ballads and middle- or full-length stories, but also orchestrated the Shanghai Troupe’s project of revising classic stories since 1953. With the cooperation with storytellers, Chen succeeded in reworking such stories as White Snake and Jade Dragonfly, which would become sensations in the market. In the opinion of Jiang Yuequan, Chen Lingxi’s longtime friend and colleague, Chen’s contributions were more than just revising those works, but re-creating new ones.124 What impressed artists most was Chen Lingxi’s adeptness in tailoring lyrics and lines to suit storytellers’ differing performing and singing styles. Such ability was of particular importance to bring into full play pingtan skills of storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe.125 The production of various popular arias in Lin Chong attested to Chen’s expertise in making arrangements of plots to boost numerous artists’ performances. To make Lin Chong a hot product in the market, the Shanghai Troupe mobilized the majority of its first-tier pingtan storytellers. The well-cast 1955 version, for example, starred Jiang Yuequan, Zhang Jianting, Liu Tianyun, Zhang Hongsheng, Yang Zhenxiong, Yao Yinmei, Zhou Yunrui, and Zhu Huizhen, all of whom had been enormously reputed storytellers since the 1940s, the times that Xia Zhenhua highly appreciated. Xia called the decade as “the Renaissance in China” (Zhongguo de wenyi fuxing) in that a great number of artists, not just pingtan storytellers, gained prominence then.126 The prosperity of pingtan in the 1940s continued to pay high dividends to the Shanghai Troupe in the 1950s and 1960s. It is thus safe to argue that the Shanghai Troupe built its market success in the two decades after its founding on the stardom developed prior to 1949. What was unique to the Shanghai Troupe was its ability to bring together a large number of stars to share stage to perform middle-length stories with regularity. Before the founding of the Shanghai Troupe, renowned pingtan performers could relish the chance to play together

  Chen Lingxi, Xianbian shuangji, 8.  Ibid., 2. 125   Yuxiang, “Pingtan yizhi bi—zhuihuai Chen Lingxi xiansheng,” 72. 126   Xia Zhenhua, interview with author, August 2, 2010. 123 124



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usually once a year, mostly several days before the Chinese New Year’s day in “storytelling gatherings” (huishu). In a sense, middle-length stories like Lin Chong supplied their audience the best entertainment by routinizing the carnival-like storytelling gatherings and thereby maximizing the star power. Chen Lingxi contributed to the Shanghai Troupe’s mission of entertaining the audience with his ingenious arrangements of roles so that every star could find a niche to showcase their acting and singing skills. Compared with the Beijing Opera version of the story, which highlighted only a few opera stars, Lin Chong’s performance time was relatively equally distributed among various renowned storytellers. Zhang Jianting, for example, played the role as Lin Chong’s fatherin-law, an unimportant role in the Beijing Opera version. Chen Lingxi elevated the role’s status in the story by writing two long arias, “Erroneously Chastising Zhenniang” and “Complaining of Injustice in the Tavern” to fully utilize Zhang’s talent of singing. Zhang’s arias, despite being new creations, found mention in Wu Zongxi’s essay dated January 14, 1953. The essay touted the two arias as the continuation of China’s classic culture and advertised them as the story’s major selling point.127 To justify the addition of episodes about Lin Chong’s wife and father-in-law, something non-existent in Beijing Opera and other plays, Wu Zongxi further explained that Mrs. Lin’s suicide and impassioned speeches and singings by Lin’s father-in-law aroused the audience’s anger against the ruling class in the feudal society.128 The essay thus served to both lend the story political significance and give widespread publicity to Zhang’s superb artistry. For Zhang Jianting, arias such as “Erroneously Chastising Zhenniang” and “Complaining of Injustice in the Tavern” reconfirmed his status as a pingtan superstar and constituted a vital part of his distinctive Zhang Tune (Zhang diao). In the 1950s and 1960s, Zhang Jianting, for all his evergrowing popularity, would make invaluable contributions in a number of highly popular middle-length pingtan stories, such as How Green the Reeds Are.

  Zuoxian, “Jieshao xin pingtan Huoshao caoliao chang.”   Zuoxian, “Chongfeng taxue yi yingxiong—ting zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong xiaji.” 127 128

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How Green the Reeds Are (debuted in 1964) was a revised version of The Siege of Mount Chong (Chongshan zhiwei), a middle-length story staged in 1959. Both stories centered on a group of Communist soldiers’ success in breaking the siege in the area of the Mount Chong (Chongshan), southern Jiangsu, in 1943. Over fifty Communist guerrillas hid deep in the reeds in the lake to avoid direct confrontations with the Japanese military force. While The Siege of Mount Chong related the story about how Communist fighters endured hardships and eventually managed to break the siege, How Green the Reeds Are highlighted the Communist guerrillas’ initiative to fight back and eliminate the Japanese army. Clearly, the revision was intended to alter the Communist fighters’ image from passive defenders to aggressive warriors actively seeking to annihilate the enemy and liberate the Chinese inhabitants in the area of the Mount Chong. Typical revolutionary stories that touted the CCP’s military accomplishments notwithstanding, the two stories impressed both reviewers and the audience not necessarily by anti-Japanese patriotism, but by their singing styles and performing techniques. One essay aiming at promoting The Siege of Mount Chong in March 1959, for example, stressed the significance of using pingtan skills such as narrating, music accompaniment, and singing to illustrate characters’ “traits of personality” (xingge tezheng) and “traits of mentality” (xinli tezheng).129 Though How Green the Reeds Are was staged at the height of “Greatly Writing the Thirteen Years” movement, which privileged literary and artistic works’ functions as political propaganda, it did not fail to assume its role as an entertainment to listeners with humorous remarks and popular arias, among other things. The first act started with the visit of Gu Chunlin, a Communist officer, to Old Lady Zhong (Zhong laotai) at night to discuss local peasants’ supports of Communist guerrillas. Unfortunately, a local leader, who had collaborated with the Japanese, broke in Old Lady Zhong’s house and found Chunlin. Chunlin gave the collaborator a stern lecture admonishing him not to be the enemy of the people. The conversation between the fearless and dignified Chunlin and the cowardly local leader was extremely facetious. The 129  Donggu 东谷, “Zhongpian pingtan Chongshan zhiwei de yanchu” 中篇评弹《冲 山之围》的演出 [The staging of The Siege of the Mount Chong, a middle-length pingtan story], Wenhui bao, March 15, 1959.



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Japanese collaborator, for example, awkwardly switched between two ways of addressing the Japanese army, the derogative “devil” (guizi) or the respectful “imperial army” (huangjun). His inability to address the Japanese invaders properly when interrogated by the Communist guerrilla fighter resulted in intense embarrassment and always elicited laughter in story houses. Indeed, it has been a longtime practice in middle-length stories to use villains’ awkwardness and misery to amuse the audience. The rapist landlord’s ignominious fleeing when facing his victim’s retaliation in the White-haired Girl (1958) and an arrogant KMT naval officer’s lack of swimming skills in Heroes at the Ocean (Haishang yingxiong, 1953), for example, both succeeded in enlivening the otherwise insipid political stories. Interestingly enough, pingtan reviewers in the early 1950s were highly critical of pingtan storytellers’ tendency of purposely displaying villains’ “ugly behaviors” (choutai) to galvanize listeners. Such depictions of villains, one reviewer stated, would by no means arouse the audience’s abhorrence of enemies.130 In his discussion of the middle-length story, Lin Chong, Wu Zongxi was similarly under the impression that storytellers were better at portraying villains than heroes, something the Shanghai Troupe should be watchful of.131 Ironically, the Japanese collaborator’s awkward remarks reinforced, rather than weakened, such a practice of providing listeners with amusement to keep them on the edge of their seats. When the collaborator and Gu Chunlin still stayed in Old Lady Zhong’s house, a squad of Japanese soldiers unexpectedly came to search for Communist combatants. To protect Chunlin, Old Lady Zhong confirmed Chunlin as her lone son, Meisheng, and the frightened collaborator did not dare to demur. Suspense soon built up with the return of the real Meisheng. Without hesitation, Old Lady Zhong claimed his son to be a Communist guerrilla and handed him over to the Japanese to save Chunlin. Here, the theme of prioritizing the national community over the familial one recurred, just like in We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River. Critics of the day hailed Old Lady Zhong’s sacrifice of her son as an example of privileging the “concrete class feeling” ( juti de jieji ganqing) over the “abstract mother-son love” (chouxiang de muzi zhiqing).132 The cancellation of blood relationship  Lu Dingchang and Zhou Shiting, “Xiang pingtan yiren tichu de xiao yijian.”   Zuoxian, “Jieshao xin pingtan Huoshao caoliao chang.” 132   Zhou Peisong and Shen Hongxin 周培松、沈鸿鑫, “Geming qingchang luwei qing—ting zhongpian pingtan Luwei Qingqing zhaji 革命情长芦苇青—听中篇 130 131

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as the foundation of families, as Xiaomei Chen finds, constituted the “seductive power” of revolutionary plays such as The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji).133 The third act started with Old Lady Zhong’s assistance of Chunlin to leave her house, despite the Japanese’ intensive surveillance prior to Communist guerrillas’ preparation of striking back. To deliver information to Commander Xue, the CCP’s paramount military leader in this region, Chunlin and his companion swam in the lake and breached the line of encirclement. To illustrate how adventurous their journey in the lake was, Zhu Xueqin (1923– 1994), the storyteller, sang approximately fourteen minutes with her unique high-pitch Qin Tune (Qin diao). With the accompaniment of Guo Binqing’s (1920–1968) pipa-lute, Zhu’s long aria about two Communist fighters’ breaking of the siege was widely appreciated by the audience and eventually acclaimed as the peak of the Qin Tune. Finally losing patience in dealing with tenacious Communist guerrilla soldiers and infuriated by Old Lady Zhong’s cooperation with the CCP, the Japanese decided to arrest Old Lady Zhong and use her as a bait to annihilate the Communist military force. The undaunted Old Lady Zhong ventured to remind Communist soldiers, who hid in the reeds, of the Japanese’s schemes and vehemently vituperated against the invaders and their collaborators under their watchful eyes. Zhang Jianting, who played the old lady, made full use of his sonorous voice to sing two famous arias, “Watching the Reeds” (Wang luwei) and “Scolding the Enemy” (Madi). For a better rendition of the aged female role, Zhang borrowed performing and singing methods of laodan (old female role) in Beijing Opera.134 Both arias would become important pieces of the Zhang Tune.135 In hindsight, the popularity of “Watching the Reeds” and “Scolding the Enemy,” along with many other Zhang’s arias and opening ballads, were compared with that of popular songs.136 Taking pingtan singings as popular music, however, 评弹《芦苇青青》札记 [Revolutionary love is profound and the reeds are green: notes on How Green the Reeds Are, a middle-length pingtan story],” Wenhui bao, September 1, 1965. 133   Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part, 134. 134  Duanmu Fu 端木复, “ ‘Pingtan zhichun’ jinian Zhang Jianting bainian dancheng “评弹之春” 纪念张鉴庭百年诞辰 [“The spring of pingtan” celebrates Zhang Jian­ ting’s one-hundredth anniversary],” Jiefang ribao, February 9, 2009. 135   Yu Bo 余波, “Tingshu zayi (san) 听书杂忆 (三) [Miscellaneous memories from listening to pingtan stories, part three],” Pingtan yishu, No. 41, 2009, 91. 136   “09 pingtan zhichun Zhang Jianting pingtan yishu yanchang hui 09评弹之春张 鉴庭评弹艺术演唱会 [The concert of Zhang Jianting’s pingtan art at the spring of pingtan, 2009], Dongfang dianshi tai, February 08, 2009, video clip.



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was nothing new in the twentieth-century China. As early as in 1930s, as Carlton Benson shows, opening ballads sung in story houses and broadcast in radios had already functioned as popular songs.137 To listeners during Mao’s times, Zhang Jianting was exceedingly successful in performing in middle-length pingtan stories, especially those about the Communist revolution. Zhang’s uniqueness resided in his vigorous renderings of singing and narrating, which was compatible to the high tempo of Communist revolution and construction. For Communist cadres, pingtan storytelling was disappointingly characterized by its softness. Ke Lan (1920–2006), a CCP organ writer and poet, for example, asserted that pingtan storytelling was deficient of solemn or passionate melodies and was therefore less masculine compared with its counterparts in northwestern China.138 Obviously, Ke’s cooperation with storytellers in CCP-controlled areas since the mid1940s entitled him to draw his conclusion.139 Thus, Zhang Jianting’s style was of particular significance in the new politico-cultural milieu. A reviewer estimates that Zhang probably participated in eighty or ninety percent of highly popular middle-length stories of the Shanghai Troupe and no one enjoyed greater popularity than he did.140 When asked why Zhang Jianting’s salary was set over four hundred yuan, which made him the highest paid storyteller in the troupe, Wu Zongxi replied that the salary system, albeit artificially devised in appearance, was actually somehow responsive to the market.141 In other words, Zhang’s salary did reflect his extraordinary popularity. Even in the late 1950s when Zhang was branded as a “rightist,” his popularity never waned. On the contrary, his political stigma aroused listeners’ curiosity and sympathy. Zhang thereby became even more popular than ever in the market. With the effort of the troupe’s writer, Chen Lingxi and its performers such as Zhang Jianting and Zhu Xueqin, How Green the Reeds Are was a record-breaking sensation in the market in the mid-1960s. Li

  Carlton Benson, “From Teahouse to Radio,” 142–143.   Ke Lan 柯蓝, “Cong xuexi dao changshi—he pingtan yiren hezuo Haishang yingxiong qianhou 从学习到尝试—和评弹艺人合作《海上英雄》前后 [From learning to trying: before and after my cooperation with pingtan artists to write Heroes at the Ocean],” in Quyi gongzuo tongxun, ed. Zhongguo quyi yanjiu hui, No. 4, November 1954, 2. 139   Chang-tai Hung, “Reeducating a Blind Storyteller,” 398. 140   Yu Bo, “Tingshu zayi (san),” 91–94. 141   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 137 138

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Qingfu remembered that the story was staged in seven consecutive months.142 Fang Shuijin, an ardent fan of Zhang Jianting, added that the Shanghai Troupe staged the story in three story houses simultaneously.143 Not every middle-length story, however, achieved market success. Some proved to be a total fiasco. Fang Shuijin once witnessed a middle-length story about skin-grafting technological breakthrough in China to draw only a dozen listeners.144 In many less successful middle-length stories, Zhang Jianting and other renowned storytellers played a role as rescuers. Their singings, usually designed to appear in the final acts, were able to provide the audience with genuine amusement and thereby overcome the dryness of stories at issue.145 *  *  *  * “Revolutionary mass culture,” according to Xiaobing Tang, was “didactic rather than entertaining, production-oriented rather than consumption-oriented.”146 Yet, throughout this chapter, I argue that politically charged middle-length pingtan stories were presented and accepted as entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s. While Communist cadres, writers, and performers put emphasis on the role of middlelength stories as a vehicle of messages of government-sponsored political and social reforms in China, the majority of listeners viewed them as pure entertainment. A great number of arias continue to entertain the audience to such an extent that even though the vast majority of middle-length stories have no longer been staged several decades afterwards, new breeds of storytellers keep singing them in various occasions at present. For example, in spite that The Siege of Mount Chong had been defunct in 1964 when it was replaced by How Green the Reeds, its “Risking Life to Wait for Kinsmen” (Maosi deng qinren), an aria originally sung by Zhang Jianting, remains one of the most important works of the Zhang Tune. The Shanghai Troupe’s capacity to offer entertainment in middle-length stories to millions of audience members in the Yangzi Delta in no small part resulted from the prestige of a number of pingtan superstars who survived the Chinese Civil War in

  Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009.   Fang Shuijin, interview with author, July 23, 2010. 144  Ibid. 145   Yu Bo 余波, “Tingshu zayi 听书杂忆 (Miscellaneous memories from listening to pingtan stories),” Pingtan yishu, No. 39, 2008, 218–219. 146   Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern, 283. 142 143



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the late 1940s. Therefore, the market success of middle-length stories was, to a great extent, built upon the commercialization of pingtan storytelling in the pre-1949 Yangzi Delta. Even stories with undisguised intentions to preach governments’ political agendas were accepted as entertainment. In my analysis of We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, I have demonstrated that stories about the CCP’s revolution as often as not provided the audience with aesthetic experiences of heroism. They interested and intrigued the audience by creating xia-like, larger-than-life heroes and heroines. Moreover, some stories such as We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River and Heroes at the Ocean were set in unfamiliar lands thousands of miles away from the Yangzi Delta and thereby addressed a tension between listeners’ relatively immobile and closed day-to-day lives and a collective aspiration of understanding the national community in Mao’s China. In Perry Link’s words, such works were used by the audience to learn “other parts of China.”147 After all, political propaganda, as scholars have cogently argued, should be as interesting as entertainment in that it was intended to “manipulate and persuade” the vast audience.148 In an interview, Li Qingfu provided a counter-example of political indoctrination in the 1960s when he led a team of storytellers to a local battalion to perform for soldiers. While most soldiers were recruited from other parts of China and failed to understand the Suzhou dialect, the performance was doomed to fail. High-rank officers had to lock the doors lest the bored soldiers might escape during the performance. Li Qingfu then swore not to return to the battalion as he believed that storytellers were in truth torturing, instead of entertaining, their listeners.149 The debacle testified to the significance of entertaining and artistic values in political propaganda. The relevance of middle-length pingtan stories to the CCP’s agendas of cultural and political reforms in China lay in not only the messages that those stories conveyed, but also the format. Contrary to Kevin Lantham’s argument that the CCP concentrated its attention to the change of texts of traditional operas rather than their forms and styles,150 the creation of middle-length pingtan attested to the importance of reforming forms and styles of Chinese arts in Mao’s times.  Perry Link, The Use of Literature, 301.  David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda,” 5. 149   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 150   Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle, 308. 147 148

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The length of middle-length stories carried both political and commercial implications. Their shortness precluded the extensive use of non-episodic and ad-lib elements such as xuetou and stuck-ins and thereby helped Communist cadres rid politically subversive elements of pingtan. The high tempo of middle-length stories was compatible with the fast rhythm in post-Liberation China and therefore appealed to a more massive audience. As Wu Zongxi proudly asserted, the target of making the Shanghai Troupe as the paragon of thousands of storytellers had been achieved because the Shanghai Troupe gradually monopolized the large-sized and lucrative story houses with the staging of some extremely popular middle-length stories.151 It is thus fair to argue that the CCP’s agendas of cultural reform were carried out not necessarily through administrative intervention or political campaigns, but occasionally by creating new genres, occupying existing market, and seeking new sources of revenue. In other words, staterun performing enterprises, such as the Shanghai Troupe, relied on the market mechanism to accomplish reformist missions by supplying the audience with amusements and aesthetic experiences and edging out their competitors, mostly the self-employed. Geremie Barmé has explored how Party ideology has been commodified to “compete effectively for the hearts and minds of consumers” in post-Maoist China. The market success of middle-length stories indicated that the commodification of state-sanctioned ideologies was by no means a new creation after the 1980s. Contributors of middle-length stories had already sought to transform official “slogans, icons, polices, and mode of language” into goods for sale.152 The use of middle-length stories by pingtan ensembles to attain political and cultural objectives, nevertheless, was not without limitations. First, the prosperity of pingtan storytelling in general and middlelength stories in particular was contingent upon a unique social and cultural setup in the wake of Communist takeover in China. Within two decades between the early 1950s and 1966 when American films and ballroom dancing, among many other forms of entertainment, were banned, pingtan storytelling faced much less intense competition than it would do since the 1980s, a topic I will address in the sixth chapter. Second, pingtan storytelling’s success in Mao’s times

151 152

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.   Geremie Barmé, In the Red, 115.



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was heavily reliant on its stardom prior to 1949 when pingtan storytelling had already been highly commercialized. As generations of pingtan stars gradually retired from their stage careers since the 1960s and 1970s, pingtan storytelling understandably lost its luster and fan base. Third and more relevant to state-run troupes’ political mission of popularizing the state’s policies to every corner of cities and the countryside, middle-length stories were a high-cost pingtan genre, designed for the vast urban market. Middle-length stories were profitable only in big cities such as Shanghai, but gained little market recognition in small towns, not to speak of the countryside. Hence, staging middlelength stories ironically ran counter to Communist cadres’ original intent to call into full play of storytellers’ mobility to preach the CCP’s political and social reforms in remote and isolated rural communities. In other words, middle-length stories failed to perform the function as “light cavalries” of political edification. Yet in cities like Shanghai, state-run pingtan troupes managed to outperform the self-employed and dominate the market with middle-length stories and other genres. The conflict between the aggressive state-run troupes and storytellers affiliated to the Association thus intensified in the late 1950s.

Chapter Four

Between the Association and the State: The Guangyu Incident in 1957 The success of middle-length stories did not contribute to the increase of state-employed pingtan performers’ revenues, for their salaries were fixed at the outset. However, the establishment of a few staterun pingtan troupes created a tension between state-employed and self-employed pingtan storytellers. The Shanghai Troupe was able to dominate large-sized story houses, but first-tier self-employed pingtan performers continued to enjoy high incomes in smaller performing venues. While state-employed pingtan stars felt disillusioned by the fact that the revenues of their self-employed counterparts were much higher than their fixed salaries, the self-employed, especially second-tier ones, harbored resentment against the monopoly of spacious story houses by state-run troupes. Since the self-employed could legally perform only by acquiring licenses from the Association, they understandably identified themselves with it. Hence, the conflicts of interest between state-employed and self-employed were interpreted as a clash between the Association and the Party-state and its agent, state-run troupes. The Association The Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling was founded in April 1951 both to demonstrate storytellers’ commitment to reforming the time-honored oral art and as a replacement of old pingtan guilds. The very first guild of pingtan storytellers, the Guangyu Public Society (Guangyu gongsuo) was believed to be established in the mid-1770s in Suzhou. For centuries, the Guangyu maintained its well-entrenched autonomy to challenge or negotiate with both Qing and Republican governments on storytellers’ behalf, recognize its members’ status as professional storytellers, granted permits of performance in Suzhou and adjacent places, and guarantee its

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members the care from cradle to grave.1 In 1912, it was renamed as the Guangyu Society (Guangyu she).2 In 1931, the Guangyu was given a new name as the Society for Storytelling Research of the Wu County (Wuxian shuoshu yanjiu she). In 1945, the Guangyu merged with the Puyu Society (Puyu she, established in 1935) and the Runyu Society (Runyu she, established in 1912), two smaller pingtan guilds, into the Pingtan Association of the Wu County (Wuxian pingtan xiehui).3 Soon after the CCP’s takeover of the Yangzi Delta, the Guangyu was reorganized into the Public Association of Pingtan Storytelling (Pingtan gonghui).4 On April 1, 1951, the Public Association of Pingtan Storytelling was once again restructured as the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling.5 Yan Xueting was elected as the director of the Association and continued to take office until 1962 when the Association became officially defunct.6 From storytellers’ perspective, numerous name changes in the twentieth century never altered the Association’s nature as an autonomous institution to protect them against state intervention. In reality, the Association bore resemblance to the time-honored Guangyu as an organizer and coordinator of thousands of storytellers. From the perspective of local governments, it was vital to recognize the Association’s autonomy in exchange for storytellers’ support immediately after the CCP’s victory. However, the Association’s rights to issue permits of performance for storytellers overlapped with those of local cultural bureaucrats. A clash between the Association and local governments was just a matter of time. Before the controversy between local governments and the Association surfaced, the Association assumed its indispensable role in granting licenses of performance and assigning performing venues for its members. In return, the members were responsible for paying a certain amount of membership fee to support the Association, which gained little, if any, subsidy from local governments. In 1959, such a membership fee amounted to twenty percent of a self-employed artist’s yearly

1  Yishui 易水, “Jiefang qian zhuanye pingtan zuzhi 解放前专业评弹组织 [ Professional pingtan organizations before liberation],” Pingtan yishu, No. 9, 1988, 216–217. 2   Zhou Liang, Suzhou pinghua tanci shi, 145. 3   Yishui, “Jiefang qian zhuanye pingtan zuzhi,” 217–218. 4   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-35, 33. 5   Yishui, “Jiefang qian zhuanye pingtan zuzhi,” 217. 6   Wan Ming 万鸣, Yan Xueting pingzhuan 严雪亭评传 [Critical biography of Yan Xueting] (Nanjing: Jiangshu wenyi chubanshe, 2002), 187.



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revenue.7 As a rule, not only non-members were prohibited from performing on stage, but any storytellers who worked with unregistered performers would face severe punishments from the Association.8 The Association collaborated with the PRC government by means of turning down applications for membership by those who were loathed by the government because of their previous anti-Communist stances, their class backgrounds, or just their personal behaviors. Wu Zongxi recalled that such people, who were dismissed as “dregs of the society” (shehui zhazi), became outcasts and lost their means of subsistence after 1949 so that they tried to embark on the career of storytelling to eke out a living. Many of them were former dance hostesses who were freshly out of their jobs as the Shanghai municipal government forcibly closed all ballrooms in the early 1950s.9 Quite a number of talented dance hostesses, however, managed to learn storytelling skills and made their careers as professional storytellers later.10 Apart from female dancers, Wu Zongxi particularly mentioned Yang Lelang (1911–?) and Zhu Shouzhu (1897–1972) as examples of “dregs of the society.”11 Zhu started to run and edit his newspapers in the 1920s and he earned his fame by publishing the Robin Hood (Luobin han), a Shanghai-based tabloid specialized in furnishing readers with news reports and comments on theater, on the eve of the CCP’s takeover of China. Yang Lelang happened to be a major writer for the Robin Hood and thereby became Zhu’s close friend. Yang was more widely known for his talk shows on radio in the late 1940s under the title of “Yang Lelang’s Empty Talks” ( Yang Lelang kongtan). Yang’s talk shows invariably achieved the highest ratings among all radio programs in Shanghai, as Shen Dongshan remembered. Their success in the capitalistic Shanghai invited the CCP’s suspicions and hatred. After the Liberation, the political pressure forced both Yang and Zhu to quit their careers as journalists, writers, or talk-show hosts. They therefore had to resort to pingtan storytelling after they acquired their memberships of the Association

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 11.   “Laihan zhaodeng 来函照登 [ Publishing an unabridged letter to the editor],” Xin Suzhou bao, June 23, 1957.  9   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 10   Li Qingfu, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 11   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.  7  8

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by officially acknowledging two famous pinghua storytellers as their masters.12 Compared with Yang Lelang’s and Zhu Shouzhu, Yang Zijiang’s transition to pingtan storytelling was excruciatingly unsmooth. Yang bitterly recalled that his applications for the membership of the Association were rejected for seven times in the early 1950s largely because of his family’s ties with KMT officials. Shortly after the Communist victory, Yang Zijiang suddenly found that he lost virtually everything that he once possessed and cherished. His parents, who previously owned bookstores in Shanghai, were arrested and all his properties including houses and automobiles were confiscated in 1953. Yang Zijiang tried to apply for a job as a truck driver in the China-Tibet border area, but his application was turned down on the grounds that the jobs were reserved for the working class members. Unable to land a job to feed his family, Yang attempted to become a professional pingtan storyteller since he was familiar with the Chinese history and folktales. Yang testified that he liked pingtan storytelling so much that he once stopped to listen to Yan Xueting’s Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai on radio on the street. He took tests held by the Association, but failed a number of times without any good reasons. Yang Zijiang later discovered that one staff member of the Association, who turned out to be an ex-employee in his father’s bookstores, still harbored resentment against him. It was such a personal grudge that led to the Association’s refusal to approve his application. Yang Zijiang’s wife, then a teacher in an elementary school, threatened to commit suicide along with her children because of grinding poverty after the unemployed Yang was continuously excluded from commercial pingtan performances. Concerned about the Yang family’s survival, the Association and the CCP cadres eventually granted Yang Zijiang the membership and the permit to tell pingtan stories.13 Yang Lelang, Zhu Shouzhu, and Yang Zijiang all encountered difficulties, albeit to different degrees, in starting their careers as pingtan storytellers both because the CCP harbored suspicions of their social and familial backgrounds and because the Association was reluctant to grant memberships to outsiders. In this sense, the government relied

12 13

  Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 25, 2010.   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009.



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Illustration 10: The badge for members of the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling, early and mid-1950s. ( The badge provided by Su Yuyin)

on artists’ guilds, something the CCP secretly vowed to eradicate, to fend off unwanted personnel and build cultural workers under the new political system. The Association, as a matter of fact, felt uncomfortable in admitting a large number of previously non-storytellers to intensify market competitions. Su Yuying confirmed that it was extremely hard for outsiders to join the Association. For those who had already registered in the Public Association of Pingtan Storytelling, by contrast, the procedure of their applications was a mere formality. Su did not even apply, as he recalled. On the contrary, he was approached by the Association to receive the membership presumably because his master, Jiang

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Yuequan, had been one of the most eminent storytellers of the day.14 Yet not every previously well-known storyteller was given a membership automatically after the Public Association of Pingtan Storytelling was reorganized to be the Association. Occasionally, the Association manipulated the procedure of issuing licenses of performance to weed out unwanted storytellers. Fan Xuejun, sobriquet as the “Queen of Tanci” for example, tried to make a comeback to the stage by applying for membership immediately after the Liberation. Despite her activism in participating in charity performances to echo the CCP’s political calls, the Association decided to delay issuing her the permit probably because most pingtan storytellers had felt dismayed by Fan’s untraditional way of telling stories. Fan ended up no restoring her professional status.15 Once admitted into the Association, storytellers enjoyed the exclusive rights to perform in various story houses in the Yangzi Delta. For example, during the Chinese New Year of 1950, Su Yuyin carried a letter issued by the Association to perform in a small island in the Lake Tai ( Taihu). The letter specified the number of performances in each day (two), ticket price (0.1 yuan), and the percentage that Su was entitled to earn.16 Throughout the 1950s, storytellers affiliated to the Association oftentimes exchanged information about available storytelling venues, which could very likely become their next employers. Su Yuyin remembered that his colleagues, as a rule, wrote to notify him shortly before their performance run expired and recommend that Su apply for the next run. As long as Su presented the letter from the Association, his application would easily be approved. In big cities such as Shanghai and Suzhou, storytellers registered in the Association gathered in designated teahouses in the mornings to exchange information and learn performing skills from senior artists.17 Though the Association continued to take care of thousands of storytellers, the honeymoon between the Association and local governments in Shanghai and Jiangsu ended soon after three state-run pingtan troupes were established in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Changshu in the 1950s. Gradually, Communist cadres, who devoted all their time and energy to developing state-run troupes, showed little interest in cooperating with the Association. By the mid-1950s, the   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009.   Shunzhong, “Tanci huanghou—Fan Xuejun,” 103. 16   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 5, 2009. 17   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 14 15



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­ eadquarters of the Association in Shanghai suffered from a shortage h of hands, after its only staff member was transferred to a new post in the Shanghai Culture Bureau. However, the government had no intention to allow the Association to fill the position. Yan Xueting, the director of the Association since its inception, thus complained in 1957 that the Association was in a “state of paralysis” (tanhuan zhuangtai) because of the governments’ cold shoulder. Its members had only two things to do every single day: performing and drinking tea, whereas the Shanghai Culture Bureau did not bother to pay any attention to storytellers’ day-to-day life.18 The Association versus Troupes The laissez-faire approach adopted by local governments sometimes benefited self-employed storytellers registered under the Association as they took the liberty to pursue profits in the market. Storytellers, for example, voluntarily collectivized themselves occasionally for the sake of moneymaking especially in times of economic recessions. Shortly following the establishment of the Shanghai Troupe, nine pingtan groups (zu) were organized in Shanghai to absorb over one hundred storytellers.19 Some were also created in Suzhou. Such groups were so loosely organized and managed that their members could join or quit them as they wished. Members worked together from time to time to stage middle-length stories to draw the audience and garner profits as the preceding chapter has indicated. Other than that, storytellers maintained their independence by telling full-length stories in their respective performing venues. Some of the groups disbanded as soon as they lost the majority of their members. Shen Dongshan remembered that he joined “Suzhou Experimental Group of Pingtan Storytelling” (Suzhou shi pingtan shiyan zu), a Suzhou-based pingtan performing entity, in the early 1950s. In 1955, virtually every group member but Sheng and his performing partner joined the state-run Suzhou Troupe. As a result, the duo had to rejoin Group

18  Yan Xueting 严雪亭, “Pingtan xiehui chuyu tanhuan zhuangtai 评弹协会 处于瘫痪状态 [ Pingtan association is in a state of paralysis],” Xinmin bao wankan, May 17, 1957. 19   Wan Ming, Yan Xueting pingzhuan, 223; Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-390, 42.

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Nine of Shanghai thereafter.20 Also in 1955, six members Group Five agreed to settle down in Changshu and thereby founded the state-run Changshu Pingtan Troupe.21 The emergence of state-run pingtan troupes and nine groups in Shanghai and Suzhou in 1951 and 1952 was a direct outcome of economic hardship in the Yangzi Delta. Wu Zongxi believed that most storytellers resorted to the government for help during the Campaign of Three Antis (1951) and Five Antis (1952) when a large number of capitalists were purged and the national economy was thereby slowed down. Besides the worsening economic situation, the call for Cutting the Tail considerably reduced storytellers’ profits prior to 1953. Under this circumstance, receiving governmental subsidies was highly appealing to all storytellers who were suffering from low economic gains. Thus, Group One officially requested to follow the footsteps of the Shanghai Troupe to receive financial aid from the Shanghai municipal government in January 1952. The report emphatically pointed out that new full-length stories would draw fewer listeners and storytellers were definitely in need of monetary support provided the audience rate was lower than eighty percent.22 The request was not approved, evidently because the government lacked the financial capability to fund one more pingtan troupe in Shanghai. Starting in 1953 when the economy recovered and improved and self-employed storytellers resumed telling classic stories on stage, however, state-run troupes in Shanghai and Suzhou found them in an uphill battle against performers registered under the Association. While the Shanghai Troupe was short of hands to create and stage popular middle-length stories consistently, its staging of new full-length stories was far from a success. In 1953, Tang Gengliang was depressed by the fact that the attendance rate in the story house that contracted the Shanghai Troupe paled in comparison with that of the neighboring story house where self-employed storytellers were telling classic stories.23 Apart from the different repertoire, as Tang’s colleague in the troupe, Wang Boyin, believed, the self-employed were able to take up a sizable market share because performers of the Shanghai

  Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010.  Ye Linong, Qinchuan yayun, 21. 22   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-171, 28. 23  Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, “Shuoshu shengya (qi) 说书生涯（七） [ My career as a storyteller (seven)],” Pingtan yishu, No. 24, 1999, 154. 20 21



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Troupe temporarily discontinued its performances on a regularly basis. Aside from their three-month long absence in the late 1951 and early 1952 when members of the troupe stayed in the Huai River valley, they frequently engaged in some non-productive activities such as “political study” (zhengzhi xuexi). Under this circumstance, self-employed actors and actresses, especially the first-rate ones, capitalized on the Shanghai Troupe’s absence to make a fortune to such a degree that quite a number of celebrated storytellers purchased houses as investments.24 Non-troupe members were capable of garnering high revenues also because of their diligence. Managers of story houses usually competed with each other to contract prestigious storytellers who accumulated enormous wealth by performing in five or six story houses per day.25 In 1957, Jiang Yuequan pointed out that first-class storytellers could earn approximately one thousand yuan per month, three times more than Jiang’s monthly salary, as long as they performed in only four story houses daily.26 By contrast, storytellers employed by the state-run troupes usually performed twice a day.27 Story houses thus had to hire the self-employed to fill the vacancy. Even second-tier storytellers benefited vastly from the booming pingtan market in the Yangzi Delta. Shen Dongshan contrasted his revenue with salaries earned by members of the Suzhou Troupe in the mid-1950s: Most of my colleagues [in the group] joined the Suzhou Troupe in 1955. Gong Lisheng and I were the only two [who refused to join the troupe]. My father had died of cancer and I borrowed over twenty thousand [ yuan to cover the cost of medical care]. I needed to earn more money to pay off the debt. . . . I was [ later] asked to join the Group Nine. . . . When Group Nine performed in Suzhou, my friends in the Suzhou Troupe approached me and asked whether I was able to earn 5 yuan a day. I did not respond. In reality, in the Suzhou Troupe, a male storyteller earned 1.1 yuan, while his female partner 0.9 yuan [a day]. A couple thus earned only 60 yuan a month. [As to me], I earned 45 yuan a day. [ I ] couldn’t tell them the fact. [Otherwise,] they would feel disgruntled.28

  Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B-172-4-875, 24. 26   Jiang Yuequan 蒋月泉, “Kan yikan pingtan jie cunzai de wenti 看一看评弹界 存在的问题 [ Take a look at the issues in the circle of pingtan storytelling],” Xinmin bao, May 11, 1957. 27   Wan Ming, Yan Xueting pingzhuan, 222. 28   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010. 24 25

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As a matter of fact, the incomes of Storytellers in the Suzhou Troupe had improved markedly in the mid-1950s. In the early 1950s shortly after the troupe was established, the eleven founding members discovered that their new stories failed to win the audience’s recognition and the troupe was thus incapable of paying wages.29 Though he might have overstated his incomes, Shen was doubtlessly right to assume that members of the Suzhou Troupe would have been painfully demoralized had they learned the wide disparity in terms of incomes. Self-employed storytellers’ high incomes stemmed in no small part from the governments’ adjustments of policies and regulations in favor of self-employed artists in the mid-1950s. In May 1956 when the central government was concerned about the financial hardship that thousands of dramatists, dancers, singers, acrobats, and quyi performers were suffering across the country, a directive was published to exempt stage performances from “entertainment tax” (yule shui) in the following two years. The government expected that performing enterprises and self-employed artists could benefit from the new policy by raising their incomes by up to 27%.30 The central government’s acrossthe-board policy certainly failed to take pingtan storytellers’ economic situation of the day into consideration. The already rich self-employed benefited from the tax exemption most, whereas it did not affect artists employed by state-run troupes as they received fixed salaries. In January 1957, the Shanghai municipal government implemented a new policy to unify box-office revenue sharing option for pingtan story­tellers to answer the call from the central government to improve performers’ livelihoods. Prior to 1957, storytellers hired by state-run troupes and registered in one of nine groups could legally gain 42% and 40% of the box-office revenues respectively, while self-employed performers were entitled only 37.5%. The government then decided to impose a unified system by stipulating a 40% box-office sharing option to all performers regardless of their employment ­status.31 Such new measures without a doubt lent self-employed story­tellers a new leverage to pursue profits. Both the economic recovery and adjustments of policies by the governments hardly affected incomes of storytellers affiliated with state  Cao Hanchang, “Shutan yanyun lu,” 75–76.   Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhua bu bangong ting, Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian ( yi) (1949–1959), 393–394. 31   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-857, 1. 29 30



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run troupes. In 1953, all storytellers in the Shanghai Troupe expected a substantial pay increase as Communist cadres had earlier promised to recalculate their salaries. Yet, artists were eventually disappointed to learn that the highest salary was around two hundred yuan. Wu Zongxi admitted that he had no full control of pay raise as the CCP’s policymakers usually opposed exorbitantly high payrolls in state-run enterprises. When college professors earned only three hundred yuan, it was unlikely that pingtan storytellers could receive considerably bigger paychecks.32 To pacify resentful storytellers in pingtan troupes, Communist cadres had recourse to both political and economic means. For example, Wu constantly reminded storytellers of their experiences in the Huai River valley where peasant-workers, who participated in the construction of dams, earned merely 0.3 yuan and 3 jin of rice per day.33 In 1953, a movement under the rubric of “Democratic Reform” (minzhu gaige) was launched inside the Shanghai Troupe. Wu Zongxi considered that such movements originated in the CCP’s military force during the Anti-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. As a rule, soldiers were encouraged to criticize their superiors and vice versa in order to retain high morale. After the CCP’s takeover of China, such a military practice was transplanted to state-owned enterprises including the Shanghai Troupe.34 The movement was launched against the backdrop that the enormous gap of incomes between state-employed storytellers and the self-employed was demoralizing the former. Such a gap, coupled with other interpersonal conflicts, prompted two reputed storytellers to quit the Shanghai Troupe and restore their status as the self-employed.35 Yan Xueting, nicknamed the “Emperor of Pingtan Storytelling” ( pingtan huangdi) and the director of the Association, for example, had temporarily withdrawn from the Shanghai Troupe in early 1953.36 One of the eighteen founders of the Shanghai Troupe, Xie Yujing, also left the troupe and restored his self-employed status in the same year.37 Therefore, the government sent several cadres, including Li Qingfu, to lead the movement and let both performers and the staff

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.  Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 85. 34   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 1, 2010. 35   Tang Gengliang, “Shuoshu shengya (qi),” 155. 36   Wan Ming, Yan Xueting pingzhuan, 223. 37   Liu Zongying 刘宗英, “Tanci mingjia Xie Yujing 弹词名家谢毓菁” ( Xie Yujing, the tanci master), Kunshan wenshi 昆山文史, No. 9, 1990, 124. 32 33

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to criticize each other.38 Meanwhile, Li Qingfu carefully reviewed the archives regarding the trip to Hong Kong by Jiang Yuequan, Tang Gengliang, and their colleagues in 1950 and 1951 before he drew the conclusion that the tour was non-political and purely intended to make a fortune.39 The movement ended with a pay increase for every storyteller in the troupe. Tang Gengliang and his colleagues had their monthly salaries increased by 30 or 50 yuan.40 Some storytellers such as Zhang Jianting and Yan Xueting had their monthly salaries increased to over 400 yuan. Wu Zongxi mentioned that performers’ salaries were not arbitrarily stipulated, but were tied to their box-office sales. Without doubt, both Zhang and Yan had long been superstars in the market.41 Wang Boyin also remembered that his salary was raised from 120 to 130 yuan.42 After the movement, the troupe officially filed a report to the Shanghai municipal government to justify its request to raise performers’ salaries by emphatically complaining that some self-employed storytellers earned seven to ten times as much as those affiliated with the troupe.43 The Democratic Reform in 1953 failed to appease resentful members of the Shanghai Troupe once and for all. On the eve of the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957 when members of the Shanghai Troupe were encouraged to speak out and criticize the management, the issue of incomes was once again brought up. Jiang Yuequan found that first-rate storytellers could easily earn several times more than he did if they performed for only four story houses daily. In addition, Jiang demanded that storytellers keep the rights to choose workmates, stories, and even story houses.44 Some more critical storytellers even claimed that it was storytellers who fed the non-productive cadres and administrative staff. To weather the wave of criticism, the Shanghai Troupe attempted to implement more flexible measures to allow artists to contract story houses. It was expected that storytellers could keep their shares of ticket sales and were only entitled to pay the

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 1, 2010.   Li Qingfu, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 40   Tang Gengliang, “Shuoshu shengya (qi),” 155. 41   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 42   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009. 43   Shanghai shi dang’an guan 上海市档案馆, Shanghai shi renmin zhengfu wenhua jiaoyu weiyuanhui dang’an 上海市人民政府文化教育委员会档案 [Archives of the Committee of Culture and Education, Shanghai People’s Government], B34-2-207, 2–4. 44   Jiang Yuequan, “Kan yikan pingtan jie cunzai de wenti.” 38 39



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Illustration 11:  Yan Xueting (1913–1983), hailed as the “Emperor of Pingtan Storytelling” prior to 1949, served as the chief of the Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling after 1951. The background was the copy of Chairman Mao’s famous inscription about cultural reform, “Let a hundred flowers blossom; weed through the old to bring forth the new” (Baihua qifang, tuichen chuxin) in May 1956. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

troupe management fees. Such a measure bore striking resemblance to the one that would be adopted in most pingtan troupes in the early 1980s. The reform aborted, nevertheless, soon after the Anti-Rightist Movement set in later in 1957 and the old system of distribution and organization remained intact. Criticisms unleashed by Jiang Yuequan and his colleagues, however, did bear some fruits. Once again, the Shanghai Troupe decided to increase storytellers’ incomes by paying them “dress allowances” (fuzhuang fei). Wang Boyin was satisfied to find that his monthly salary rose to 170 yuan with the addition of the clothing fee by 1957.45 With the pay increase, however, storytellers in state-run troupes still earned significantly less than their   Wang Boyin, interview with author, July 26, 2009.

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self-employed counterparts by 1957. More storytellers, not necessarily famous ones, withdrew from the Shanghai Troupe. Ling Wenjun (1915–1974), for example, requested to temporarily leave the Shanghai Troupe under the excuse of gathering funds to repay his debts. Yet, he never returned.46 Even young and inexperienced performers quit state-run troupes for economic reasons. Cheng Liqiu (1940–1969) joined the Shanghai Troupe as a disciple at the age of 16, but, as her family advised her to gain more profits outside the Shanghai Troupe, she elected to withdraw from the troupe around 1957, a fateful year that affected virtually all pingtan storytellers.47 The Guangyu Story House Incident, 1957 The Intensified Conflicts between the Association and State-Run Troupes The eventful year of 1957 witnessed the intensification of conflicts between the Association—or, more precisely, storytellers under the Association—and state-run troupes in Shanghai and Suzhou chiefly for the sake of economic gains. While storytellers hired by the troupes in Shanghai and Suzhou felt jealous of high incomes earned by first-rate self-employed performers, second-tier storytellers registered under the Association were dismayed to find that state-run troupes monopolized most of the large-sized story houses in big cities. Between late September and late October in 1954, for example, almost every ­spacious and therefore profitable story house in downtown Shanghai such as Xizang Story House, Xianle Story House, and Cangzhou Story House contracted performers from the two state-run troupes of Shanghai and Suzhou. The self-employed were thereby marginalized and had to perform in smaller theaters or teahouses.48 Moreover, storytellers of state-run troupes monopolized performances on radio.49 Under this circumstance, however, top self-employed storytellers could still lead comfortable lives by working in multiple story houses each day. Yet for numerous aged and unpopular storytellers, their livelihoods were at stake because of both state-run troupes, leasing decent   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 48   1954 nian 9 yue 27 ri qi shuchang zhenrong biao 1954年9月27日起书场阵容表 [ Lineups of story houses starting from September 27, 1954], n. p., 1954. 49   Cai Kangyin, interview with author, July 26, 2010. 46 47



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performing venues and the ever-growing number of storytellers as pingtan storytelling had become an increasingly lucrative business in the mid-1950s. Even though a consensus was reached between storytellers and local governments since the early 1950s that the Association exercised the authority to grant performers its membership, local governments never explicitly relinquished their rights to issue permits of performance. By law, local governmental institutions such as culture bureaus in Shanghai and Suzhou could perform the same function. In other words, the Association was never the sole institution that was entitled to authorize performances, contrary to its members’ long-held assumption. Yan Xueting’s overt complaint in 1957 that the Association was never taken seriously by the local governments hinted on the occasional overriding of the Association’s authority by political authorities.50 Meanwhile, the ongoing movement of collectivizing privately owned enterprises resulted in the dwindling number of story houses. In reality, the entire number of seats slightly increased in the mid-1950s after story houses variously merged or expanded.51 Such a new development undoubtedly attenuated third-rate storytellers’ chances of stage performances. It was thus no wonder that Jin Shiying and Wang Ruyun, two aged storytellers, made a loud appeal to the government asking for more outlets for performances in a meeting in Suzhou in May 1957.52 What infuriated self-employed storytellers most was the inability of state-run troupes to fill performing venues with enough star storytellers after contracts with story houses were placed. In a meeting dated May 15, 1957, state-run troupes, which were perceived to have signed contracts with a wide range of story houses, despite their lack of the personnel to execute the contracts, became the target of the resentful participants. Moreover, storytellers in state-run troupes were blamed for their arrogance. Once joining state-run troupes, storytellers were automatically honored as state cadres and progressive artists. By contrast, those who stayed away from state-run troupes were dismissed as

  Yan Xueting, “Pingtan xiehui chuyu tanhuan zhuangtai.”   For example, Shanghai had 96 story houses with 13,895 seats in 1950, but 61 story houses with 16,318 seats by 1955 (see Zhou Liang 周良, Suzhou pingtan shigao 苏州评弹史稿 [A draft history of Suzhou pingtan storytelling] [Suzhou: Guwuxuan chubasnshe, 2002], 218). 52   “Pingtan gongzuo cunzai shenme wenti.” 50 51

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backward performers discriminated against by Communist officials.53 Even worse, those who quit state-run troupes were deemed as politically suspicious.54 Yang Zhenxin’s (1921–1965) withdrawal from the Suzhou Troupe, for example, was condemned as “an act of sabotaging revolutionary causes” ( pohuai geming shiye). Therefore, a clear line of demarcation had been drawn between artists affiliated with state-run troupes and those registered in the Association. Though sharing the identity as pingtan storytellers, the two groups were disturbed by miscommunications or sometimes outright hostility. Storytellers employed in state-run troupes were sometimes warned by Communist cadres of distancing them from their biological siblings, who happened to be self-employed artists. As state-run troupes were criticized for obstructing storytellers’ unity, the necessity of organizing, financing, and managing pingtan ensembles by governments was called into question. Jia Caiyun, among others, vowed that she could singlehandedly achieve the accomplishments that the state-run troupes were boasting of such as writing new stories and performing for state-owned enterprises.55 Huang Yi’an, who quit the Suzhou Troupe in the mid-1950s, bitterly joked that joining state-run troupes was like plunging into “an abyss of ten thousand zhang” (wanzhang shenyuan), after which storytellers had to “break off ties with kins” (duanqin duanqi).56 The Incident Huang Yi’an was the key figure in the Guangyu Story House Incident (Guangyu shuchang shijian) in June 1957, in which the disputes between government-patronized storytellers and those under the Association eventually evolved into a violent action. The incident took place on June 2, 1957. In the evening, a number of members of the Association attempted to stop Gong Huasheng (b. 1939) and Pan Liyun (b. 1939) from telling Jade Dragonfly in the Guangyu Story House (Guangyu shuchang) in Suzhou on the grounds that neither Gong nor Pan was registered members of the Association.57 The dispute   Ibid.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 55   “Pingtan gongzuo cunzai shenme wenti.” 56   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 48; Wu Zongxi, interview author, July 31, 2010. A zhang is approximately three meters. 57   “Guangyu shuchang fasheng le shenme shi 光裕书场发生了什么事 [ What happened in the Guangyu story house],” Xin Suzhou bao, June 12, 1957. 53 54



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regarding the two ­storytellers’ ­eligibility to stage pingtan stories had troubled the Association as soon as they signed a contract with the Guangyu Story House, a performing venue invested and managed by the Association. Understandably the story house had been named as such as a reminiscence of the defunct Guangyu Society, the guild that had furnished countless storytellers with protection and guarded against governmental intervention. Therefore, the Guangyu Story House was of symbolic significance as a base area of the Association and its members. It was thus no wonder that its occupancy by non-members exacerbated most members of the Association. Earlier, Gong and Pan had bypassed the Association and acquired the license from the Suzhou Culture Bureau. To avoid further disputes and pacify indignant members of the Association, a storyteller offered to switch story houses with Gong and Pan, but the proposal was turned down. Since it was widely believed that Gong was the foster son of Pan ­Boying, a storyteller-transformed CCP bureaucrat, the aggressiveness of Gong and Pan, for storytellers, was easily interpreted as the government’s encroachment on the Association’s authority.58 On May 27, an ad hoc committee of the Association in Suzhou convened to temporarily authorize Gong and Pan to perform for one month between May 29 (the first day of the fifth month in the lunar calendar) and June 27. Further discussions about non-members’ qualifications of performing in the Guangyu Story House would resume after Gong and Pan completed their contract. However, a number of members continued to protest furiously, despite the committee’s resolution and, consequently, a compromise was thereby reached that only Gong, but not Pan, was allowed to perform solo on stage considering his father’s membership of the Association.59 The dispute eventually escalated into violent actions in the evening of June 2 when Gong Huasheng insisted on telling the story with Pan Liyun on stage to fulfill the terms of the contract. Angered by Gong’s provocative actions, hostile storytellers threatened to “drag [Gong] down [from the stage]” (tuo xialai) during the performance, according to staff members of the Guangyu Story House. Anticipating conflicts and disruptions, Gong resorted to not only the Suzhou Culture   “Laihan zhaodeng.”   “Guanyu Guangyu shuchang shijian de diaocha baogao 关于光裕书场事件的 调查报告 [An investigation report regarding the Guangyu story house incident],” Xin Suzhou bao, June 26, 1957. 58 59

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Bureau, but also the local police office, for help.60 Prior to the performance, nine plainclothes police officers entered the story house.61 The presence of policemen convinced many a storyteller that the government had set a snare for noncompliant members of the Association. Other than policemen, Gong also invited his relatives and neighbors to attend the performance as witnesses if necessary. At around 7:30 when Pan Liyun stepped up to the stage, she was stopped for a number of times by a female storyteller, who was heard to be yelling “[if ] there’s food to eat, everyone shares” [yao chifan, dajia chi].” Clearly, the female storyteller felt that her job had been snatched by non-members. At about 8 o’clock when Gong and Pan were tuning their musical instruments and ready for stage performance, Gong quarreled with Xi Yunxia, another storyteller of the Association. Xi then mounted the stage and seized Pan’s pipa-lute. The story house was thereafter in great chaos and confusion. Wu Shouquan, who identified himself as a worker and an average pingtan listener, but was believed to be a plainclothes policeman by storytellers, stepped up and held Xi, while other listeners, whom storytellers likewise assumed to be policemen, took hold of Xi from behind. In the process, Xi was injured, but could not recall who had beaten him up although he dimly felt tens of men used violence against him. More storytellers came forward to help Xi and resulted in a fist-swinging melee. Storytellers strongly suspected that it was the policemen who were involved in the fighting. Then, some police officers showed the public their identities, but unconvincingly denied that they had expected the disorder and used violence. After storytellers and listeners who had been involved in the melee were sent to a local police station, over seventy members of the Association gathered outside and raised an outcry in protest at the police’s resort to force until midnight.62 The incident led to a lengthy investigation orchestrated by the Suzhou municipal government. The investigative committee, which consisted of members of People’s Political Consultative Conference of Suzhou (Suzhou shi zhengxie), the Association, Suzhou Bureau of Public   Ibid.   “Fujian: Guanyu Guangyu shuchang shijian diaocha baogao de buchong shuo­ming 附件：关于光裕书场事件调查的补充说明 [Appendix: supplements to the investigation report regarding the Guangyu story house incident],” Xin Suzhou bao, June 26, 1957. 62   “Guanyu Guangyu shuchang shijian de diaocha baogao,” Xin Suzhou bao, June 26, 1957. 60 61



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Security (Suzhou shi gong’an ju), the Suzhou Culture Bureau, two “democratic parties” (minzhu dangpai), and the New Suzhou Daily ( Xin Suzhou bao). Between June 5 and 16, the committee held five meetings with twenty-one pingtan storytellers, sixteen listeners, and eleven employees of the Guangyu Story House. In addition, the committee interviewed two vendors and one doctor for further information. Yan Xueting and Huang Yi’an were appointed to represent the Association, but Huang refused for some undisclosed reasons.63 Wu Shouquan, who held Xi Yunxia from behind in the evening of June 2, for example, not only received interviews, but also sent a letter to the New Suzhou Daily, the CCP’s organ in Suzhou, to reiterate his motivation of stopping Xi and confirm that the police did not use violence. What upset Huang Yi’an and his fellow artists was a report published in the New Suzhou Daily on June 12, 1957, in which the reporter gainsaid the police’s use of force to assault storytellers. Huang unleashed his resentment and questioned the report’s accuracy and objectivity by pointing out that the reporter could not even tell Xi’s gender as the report consistently used “she” to refer to the male storyteller. Furthermore, the reporter failed to mention that he himself was a member of the investigative committee. Accordingly, Huang implied that such an investigation would by no means be impartial and therefore called for Suzhou’s vice mayor to step in to resolve the dispute.64 Elsewhere, Huang approached the said vice mayor and stated “the [Suzhou] Culture Bureau colluded with the [Suzhou] Bureau of Public Security to beat up storyteller Xi Yunxia.”65 After all, the Association was a trans-regional organization for storytellers across the Yangzi Delta. Therefore, Huang traveled to Shanghai to publicize details about the Guangyu Story House Incident and made a call for unity among storytellers against the government’s aggression. Wu Zongxi lately analyzed that Pan Boying was actually Huang’s chief target in Suzhou and personal feuds between Pan and other storytellers might have contributed to the escalation of the Incident into a dramatic confrontation between pingtan artists and the local government.66 If Pan personified the government in Suzhou, it was the state-run Shanghai Troupe that symbolized the ever-expanding state power that hurt storytellers’ autonomy. Hence,   Ibid.   “Laihan zhaodeng.” 65   “Guangyu shuchang fasheng le shenme shi.” 66   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 63 64

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Huang tried to persuade Yan Xueting, the director of the Association to side with him. Huang wrote to Yan and Zhang Hongsheng, both of whom were highly reputed, but unable to win favor in the Shanghai Troupe, urging them to withdraw from the Shanghai Troupe. Huang also pressured Yan not to collaborate with the government as Yan was appointed as the member of the investigative committee.67 Meanwhile, Huang dispatched a group of angry storytellers to stop Yan from performing on stage to force Yan to clarify his stance.68 The confused and indecisive Yan vowed to safeguard the Association by stating that he would quit the troupe only if Communist cadres forced him not to lead the Association.”69 Moreover, Huang urged storytellers to donate their one-day revenues to support his actions and encouraged them to appeal to the central government in Beijing.70 Huang Yi’an and his company soon found that they were fighting an unwinnable war, particularly in the context of the Anti-Rightist Movement beginning in mid-May 1957. Articles condemning Huang Yi’an were juxtaposed with those attacking soon-to-be Rightists for their criticisms of the ruling party earlier in 1957. Huang was charged for arousing anti-government sentiment among storytellers and pitting the Association against state-run troupes. In the rest part of 1957, Huang was frequently denounced in public in front of a story house in ­Shanghai.71 The charges against Huang became graver as time passed by. Jiang Yuequan surmised that Huang had carefully planned the incident. Tang Gengliang went a step further to accuse Huang of harboring the intention to “overthrow the Party leadership” (tuifan dang de lingdao).72 Throughout July 1957, letters and essays contributed by

67   “Huang Yi’an you jihua you mudi de yinmou baolu: qitu dakua pingtan tuan gaoluan pingtan xiehui 黄异庵有计划有目的的阴谋暴露：企图打垮评弹团搞乱评 弹协会 [ Huang Yi’an’s calculated and purposeful scheme has been exposed: [ he] attempts to bring down the troupes and mess up the pingtan association],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 5, 1957. 68   “Suzhou pingtan jie shengtao Huang Yi’an 苏州评弹界声讨黄异庵 [ Pingtan circle in Suzhou denounces Huang Yi’an],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 16, 1957. 69   “Jielu Huang Yi’an yinmou huodong 揭露黄异庵阴谋活动 [Exposing Huang Yi’an’s conspiracies],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 9, 1957. 70   “Suzhou pingtan jie shengtao Huang Yi’an,” Xin Suzhou bao, July 16, 1957; “Shanghai pingtan xiehui huiyuan fennu jiefa Huang Yi’an yinmou huodong 上海 市评弹协会会员愤怒揭发黄异庵阴谋活动 [ Members of the pingtan association in Shanghai angrily expose Huang Yi’an’s conspiracies],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 5, 1957. 71   Xia Zhenhua, interview with author, August 2, 2010. 72   “Shi Huang Yi’an dianhuo Shandong qunzhong 是黄异庵点火煽动群众 [ It is Huang Yi’an who sets the fire and incites the masses],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 3, 1957.



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self-righteous reporters, writers, and readers inundated the New Suzhou Daily to censure Huang Yi’an and his company. At this point, Huang was portrayed not only as an anti-government activist, but also a morally decadent man who had deserted his wife and son.73 Even Huang’s closest friends and followers, who had been involved in the Guangyu Story House Incident, were compelled to speak out to blame Huang and swear publicly to draw a line with him.74 Such immense pressure finally subdued the embattled Huang, who had to make public confessions about his crimes including organizing a clique, planning and provoking the Guangyu Story House Incident, and, more seriously, “mounting well-calculated and frenzied attack against the Party” (you jihua de xiang dang changkuang jingong) in late August 1957.75 Without a doubt, the Guangyu Story House Incident was the culmination of pingtan storytellers’ resistance against local governments’ overriding of the Association’s authority of granting membership and assigning performing venues. Such an authority gained tacit recognition from political authorities in exchange for storytellers’ allegiance to the new regime immediately after the CCP’s takeover of China. The establishment of state-run troupes gradually convinced self-employed storytellers that the state was hurting their interests as performers from those troupes received subsidies from local governments, enjoyed high political status, and used political capital to monopolize large-sized story houses. Even though first-rate pingtan artists usually enjoyed better incomes than their counterparts in state-run troupes, the vast majority of storytellers with lower reputation had slim chances to perform in decent performing venues. To improve their livelihoods, self-employed storytellers wished that the Association, just like its predecessors in the Qing and Republican eras to struggle for their rights and benefits. Self-employed storytellers’ violence in the Incident and the antagonism throughout the investigation, however, backfired and gave the CCP and its organ newspapers every reason to question the Association’s legitimacy in leading and reforming storytellers. The New Suzhou Daily, for example, took advantage of the coverage of the Incident to   “Benshi pingtan yiren juxing zuotan hui, menglie fanji Huang Yi’an fanghuo yinmou 本市评弹艺人座谈会, 猛烈反击黄异庵放火阴谋 [ Pingtan storytellers of our city hold seminars, vehemently counter Huang Yi’an’s machination of setting fire],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 6, 1957. 74   “Suzhou pingtan jie shengtao Huang.” 75   “Huang Yi’an kaishi ditou renzui 黄异庵开始低头认罪 [ Huang Yi’an starts to bow his head and plead guilty],” Xin Suzhou bao, August 24, 1957. 73

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showcase storytellers’ varieties of ill behaviors.76 Meanwhile, the same newspaper cast doubt on the legal grounds, on which the Association was able to issue licenses of performance to storytellers. The essay, published in the form of a reader’s letter, raised the question about whether the Association could override the government’s authorities to grant artists permits of employment.77 Such a letter articulated the state’s hidden agenda to expand its scope of jurisdiction at the cost of the Association. From self-employed storytellers’ perspective, Huang Yi’an, who had been elected as the director of the Association’s Suzhou office earlier in 1957, was expected by many to defend the interests of the selfemployed and guard the Association’s time-honored autonomy against the Party-state’s encroachment. More often than not, such conflicts between local governments or state-run troupes and self-employed storytellers were intertwined with personal feuds among pingtan performers and Communist cadres. In the case of the Guangyu Story House Incident, Wu Zongxi held that it was Pan Boying’s overly strong personality that invited storytellers’ resentment in the first place.78 If Pan embodied the CCP’s regime and its political intervention into storytelling’s artistic and financial autonomy for storytellers, Huang was singled out as one of the black sheep in the Association that incited the animosity between the self-employed and the Party-state. Huang’s effort failed and he was politically purged. Before he was eventually exiled to the remote and underdeveloped Qinghai Province, Huang witnessed a storm of harsh criticisms and vicious mockery in Shanghai and Suzhou. In a newspaper essay, for example, the author nicknamed Huang as “Huang, the Blue Sky” (Huang Qingtian). Since “Blue Sky” was historically used to refer to incorruptible officials in China such as Bao Zheng (999–1062), who were bold enough to go against the will of the ruling class and restore justice for the grassroots, Huang was

  Lu Shiyi 陆士一, “Fazhan pingtan yishu, bixu jiuzheng waifeng 发展评弹艺 术, 必须纠正歪风 [ To develop the pingtan art, bad trends must be rectified],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 2, 1957. 77   “Pingtan xiehui neng jiazai zhengfu zhishang ma? 评弹协会能架在政府之 上吗？ [Can the pingtan association place itself above the government?],” Xin Suzhou bao, June 28, 1957. 78   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 76



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sarcastically called as such to illustrate his willingness and ability to organize disgruntled storytellers to combat local political authorities.79 Huang, The Blue Sky Huang, the Blue Sky, a four-act long middle-length pingtan story written and performed by the Shanghai Troupe in 1958, was intended to lay bare Huang Yi’an’s schemes to undermine unity among storytellers by viciously attacking state-run troupes.80 In the story, Huang was portrayed as an opportunist who had joined the Suzhou Troupe when classic stories were banned in the early 1950s, but quit the troupe soon after the ban was lifted and self-employed storytellers were thus able to garner enormous profits in the market. Unwilling to admit that he and his like had regained their identities as the self-employed purely for the sake of money, Huang launched virulent attacks against state-run troupes to encourage more storytellers to withdraw from and thereby destroy those performing enterprises. For this purpose, Huang sought to create an atmosphere of utter irreconcilability between staterun troupes and self-employed storytellers, who registered under the Association.81 Since Huang was not personally involved in the violent incident in the Guangyu Story House on June 2, 1957, the middlelength story skipped it and started with Huang’s seditious speech in a routine morning tea party in Shanghai calling for storytellers’ collective actions against local governments.82 The second act highlighted Huang’s conspiracy with members of the China Democratic League (Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng, CDL), one of China’s eight “democratic parties.”83 Throughout the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, the CDL had been fiercely denounced for its anti-CCP stance with many of its members being purged. In this manner, the story lent the audience an impression that the Incident had constituted an integral part of the CDL’s counter-revolutionary agenda. In the story, Huang tried to enroll a renowned senior storyteller into the CDL and ask him to serve as a witness of the Incident in spite that the latter was   Li Zao 李枣, “Chuochuan ‘Huang qingtian’ de mimi 戳穿“黄青天”的秘密 [Debunk the secrets of Huang, the Blue Sky],” Xin Suzhou bao, July 11, 1957. 80   Shanghai shi renmin pingtan tuan 上海市人民评弹团, Huang “Qingtian” 黄“青 天” [ Huang, the blue sky] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1958), I. 81   Ibid., 1–2. 82   Ibid., 2–21. 83   Ibid., 22–30. 79

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not present in the story house when the Incident was under way.84 In Act Three, anti- and pro-government storytellers confronted with each other to seek the truth about the Incident.85 The last act closed the whole story with Huang’s scheme being debunked. The key to Huang’s failure was the misled aged storyteller’s eventual realization of Huang’s dishonesty.86 The writing and staging of Huang, the Blue Sky, as Wu Zongxi confirmed, typified middle-length stories’ instrumentality in representing contemporary political situations. Artistically speaking, Wu continued, this story was quite successful in that its writers and performers were without a doubt familiar with storytellers’ lives. Yang Zhenxiong, Huang Yi’an’s disciple, was assigned to perform Huang in the last two acts both because of his familiarity with Huang in day-to-day life and as a means of dispelling the doubts that Yang might be implicated in this political incident. At any rate, Wu assumed that the story was never an authentic representation of the incident, but artistic fabrication was inevitable. For example, the aged storyteller who was recommended to join the CDL was fictitious.87 Other than exposing Huang Yi’an’s deceitfulness and denigrating the CDL, writers reworked the story in many other ways. For example, the story totally ignored the animosity between self-employed storytellers and Pan Boying, which partially contributed to the escalation of clashes among pingtan performers into a violent incident. Ironically, the Shanghai Troupe expressly invited Pan to participate in writing the story.88 Such a purposeful omission helped define the Incident as a carefully planned and well organized anti-CCP campaign orchestrated by Rightists instead of a mere private feud. To aggravate the charge against Huang, the prefacer of the published version of the middle-length story, Wu Zongxi, asserted that the Incident had been a concerted effort made by both Huang and some Rightists in the Shanghai Troupe.89 Furthermore, the story was set mostly in Shanghai to serve the Shanghai audience in various occasions. For example, the story was staged in the Xizang Story House for one month starting

  Ibid., 31–38.   Ibid., 38–59. 86   Ibid., 59–72. 87   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 88   Shanghai shi renmin pingtan tuan, Huang “Qingtian,” I. 89   Ibid., I–II. 84 85



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from April 19, 1958.90 The targeted audience was not only general pingtan listeners, but also pingtan storytellers, many of whom had been active participants of the Guangyu Story House Incident. When listening to the story, Hou Jiuxia, for example, was seen to shiver of utter rage and terror when storytellers on stage performed Hou’s fiery anti-governmental speech. Hou was openly blamed during a meeting immediately after the pingtan performance.91 The meeting was held as a part of a months-long campaign in 1958 to discipline self-employed storytellers under the rubric of “rectification” (zhengfeng). The Rectification Movement in 1958 The Rectification Movement that self-employed pingtan storytellers went through in the Yangzi Delta was part and parcel of a nationwide movement to discipline performers and artists who had not been incorporated into state-run performing enterprises. The notice issued by the Ministry of Culture on April 2, 1958 estimated that approximately 150,000 theatrical or quyi performers engaged in stage performances across the country. The decision was made in the context of the AntiRightist Movement one year earlier when state-run troupes had some of their members purged as Rightists and oppositional voices were thereby silenced. Performers employed by state-run performing enterprises had long been lauded as progressive, while the self-employed were dismissed as politically backward. However, it was the former that bore the brunt of the Anti-Rightist Movement, whereas the latter was largely unaffected during the sweeping political movement in 1957, with the exception of Huang Yi’an and his followers. In reality, self-employed artists had been consistently exempt from political campaigns for almost one decade, but benefited from the social stability and economic growth throughout the 1950s. In this sense, the 1958 Rectification Movement could be understood as a make-up political campaign targeting those poorly disciplined and loosely organized selfemployed performers, even though the notice overtly disavowed the

90   Shanghai pingtan jiemu 3 上海评弹节目3 [Shanghai pingtan programs 3], n. p., 1958. 91   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 24, 2010.

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connectedness between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Rectification Movement.92 The Guangyu Story House Incident gave local governments in the Yangzi Delta every reason to police thousands of maverick selfemployed storytellers, especially because many of them gained excessively high incomes, which kept demoralizing state-run troupes over the years. Therefore, the central government’s call for rectifying ­performers arrived in the right time for local bureaucrats. On February 14, 1958, almost two months earlier than the publication of official directive by the central government, a meeting had already been held in Shanghai to discuss how to cope with self-employed storytellers. The minute of the meeting showed that the Rectification Movement would last from February to April, 1958 in Shanghai, while it would not start until May 1958 in Suzhou. Before anything else, pingtan artists would be divided into two groups, namely, the Shanghai-based and the Suzhou-based, during the Chinese New Year of 1958 regardless of pingtan storytellers’ high mobility.93 Such “localization” and immobilization of storytellers allowed for an easier management of pingtan performers for Communist cadres such as Li Qingfu, then the vice director of the Shanghai Troupe. During the movement, Li was in charge of organizing, reeducating, and punishing storytellers. Very recently, Li Qingfu still felt the necessity of launching the Rectification Movement, first of all, on the grounds that pingtan storytellers consisted of people of highly heterogeneous backgrounds, such as dancing hostesses. Therefore, it was imperative to eliminate “impure” elements among storytellers. Second, quite a large number of storytellers were dismissed as morally decadent by indulging themselves in gambling and sexual promiscuity, among other things. Third, probably most importantly, their high incomes consistently destabilized state-run troupes in the 1950s.94 Li’s assessment obtained confirmation in a 1960 governmental report, in which the author complained that self-employed storytellers, especially those of Group Eight and Group Nine, “politically and artistically” (zhengzhi shang, yishu shang) competed with state-run troupes by means of offering “weird tunes and odd tones”

92   Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhua bu bangong ting, Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian ( yi) (1949–1959), 232–235. 93   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-926, 5–6. 94   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009.



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(guaiqiang guaidiao), “outlandish dress and exotic costume” (qizhuang yifu), and stories promoting feudalistic superstition on stage.95 Considering the Association was a trans-regional organization with its members from Shanghai, Suzhou, and many other places in the Yangzi Delta, Li Qingfu assembled a team of around thirty members who came from governmental institutions in different areas such as the Bureau of Tax and the Bureau of Public Security in both Suzhou and Shanghai. As far as Li could recall, approximately 1,700 storytellers, not including those employed by state-run troupes, forcibly participated in the Rectification Movement in both Shanghai and Suzhou. Participative artists were required to produce “big-character posters” (dazi bao) to expose evils of other storytellers in the early stage.96 Su Yuyin, who remained a self-employed storyteller throughout the 1950s, remembered that cadres including Li gave lectures about the CCP’s cultural reform and the movement itself before every storyteller was asked to write big-character posters. The more one storyteller wrote, the more s/he appeared active and progressive. Gong Lisheng (1928– 2002), later the director of a collectively owned pingtan troupe in the 1960s, swore to write over ten thousand big-character posters and thereby won Communist cadres’ favor. Storytellers did not have to write such posters based on facts. Instead, they could take the liberty to make up stories or distort facts to libel their fellow storytellers. Su, for example, once read a post in which the author claimed that Zhang Hongsheng, a pinghua star in the Shanghai Troupe, was a highway robber in the past. Besides generating big-character posters, storytellers convened in meeting rooms on a daily basis to engage in political studies. Hence, they were kept away from story houses and stage performances.97 Li Qingfu, nevertheless, insisted that stage performances not be suspended during the movement. Storytellers, many of whom had garnered enormous profits by performing in more than four story houses each day, were permitted to tell stories in only one story house at night. In the daytime, all performances were cancelled, as artists were divided into twenty groups to receive Party cadres’ reeducation.98 With all such seminars, meetings, and political studies, storytellers might feel that the Rectification Movement was similar to ­Communist   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 48–49.   Ibid. 97   Su Yuyin, interview with author, August 6, 2009. 98   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 95 96

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cadres’ management of pingtan storytelling immediately after the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai. Su Yuyin, for example, was totally ignorant of the government’s intentions of launching such a large-scale ­movement.99 As the movement proceeded, nevertheless, storytellers came to feel the state’s heavy hand and realize that they were on the verge of being punished, stripped of their performing careers, or collectivized. At this point, Li Qingfu became the most feared person among storytellers. The commonest punishment was the reform-through-labor (laogai). As far as Li could remember, over seventy were sentenced reform-through-labor in remote provinces such as Qinghai, Xinjiang, or Gansu.100 Many other were penalized in different ways. Gu Hongbo (1911–1990) was sentenced one year in prison presumably because of his assistance for Huang Yi’an during the Guangyu Story House Incident. Yang Lelang, the abovementioned talk show host prior to 1949 and pingtan storyteller after Liberation, was arrested and charged as a “counter-revolutionary” once again at the height of the movement following his first arrest in 1956. Yang would not be released until after the Cultural Revolution, while Gu Hongbo returned and continued his career as a storyteller in 1960.101 Despite his insistence on the correctness and necessity of launching the movement, Li admitted, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, that there must have been a great deal of mistakes. Charges were made essentially based on big-character posters and secret reports filed by audience members. Not every politically questionable storyteller was eventually purged. Zhou Xiaoqiu (1924–2010), for example, confessed during the movement that he once joined a KMT organ to serve as a secret agent in the Zhejiang Province. Yet, Zhou swore that he only chatted with local farmers to glean information for the KMT, but never committed crimes against the CCP and the people. He succeeded in convincing Communist cadres and was pardoned.102 Some storytellers were judged as counter-revolutionaries solely because of their complaints and jokes during stage performances. Xu Lüxia, for example, publicly expressed his disdain for Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969), the Soviet Union’s military and political leader, when he visited China in 1957. According to listeners and   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009.   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 101   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010. 102   Su Yuyin, interview with author, June 28, 2010.   99 100



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staff of the story house, Xu once said, “foreign tramps have come again” (waiguo biesan you laile), when Voroshilov arrived in Shanghai. Xu was thus purged and forced to labor in Qinghai.103 While a few of them received punishments for political reasons, the majority were sent to labor camps merely for their personal behaviors and life styles. Jia Caiyun, who vocally opposed the movement of Cutting the Tail in the early 1950s, had long been loathed by Communist cadres for her “corrupt and degenerate” (fuhua duoluo) lifestyle and was thus branded as a Rightist this time.104 A young and arrogant female storyteller, whom Communist cadres disliked and tried to teach a lesson by putting her in jail for a few hours, was taken to the local police station in Shanghai in the morning. As promised, a cadre should have brought her back to the study group in the afternoon, but unfortunately, the police station changed its schedule and transferred its detainees to northern Jiangsu earlier than expected. As a result, the said female storyteller forcibly stayed in a labor camp in rural Jiangsu for an extended period of time.105 Apart from political campaigns, local governments implemented new policies or revised old ones to limit self-employed storytellers’ capability of garnering high profits on the grounds that large incomes had been the source of all kinds of vices for some storytellers who “disengaged from politics, became alienated from reality, and divorced from the masses” (tuoli zhengzhi, tuoli shiji, tuoli qunzhong). Communist cadres thereby imputed storytellers’ luxurious lives and the decline of arts to undeservingly high revenues. Therefore, a meeting dated February 14, 1958 ruled that no one was entitled to earn more than five hundred yuan per month. To achieve this goal, the Shanghai Culture Bureau adjusted the box-office sharing option down to 30% and 35% as opposed to 40%, which had been stipulated in January 1957. Moreover, 1958 happened to be the year when the nationwide entertainment tax exemption expired. Under this circumstance, the meeting confirmed the reinstitution of the entertainment tax in all story houses. The paradox for Communist cadres, however, lay

  Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009.   Zhou Wei 周巍, Jiyi yu xingbie: wanqing yilai Jiangnan nü tanci yanjiu 技艺与性 别：晚清以来江南女弹词研究 [Skills and gender: a study of female tanci performers in Jiangnan since the late Qing] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2010), 229–230. 105   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010. 103 104

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in the fact that quite a large number of story houses were privately owned or under joint state-private ownership. Decreasing storytellers’ incomes would automatically raise the revenues of private owners, or using the CCP’s term, capitalists. To avoid fattening capitalists, the meeting further ruled that all extra revenues gained by story houses should be reserved as the “public accumulation fund” (gongji jin) that owners had no rights to expend. To immobilize those highly mobile storytellers, CCP cadres emphasized that anyone who performed in story houses was required to present not only licenses of performance, but also certificates of permanent household registry (changzhu hukou) in Shanghai.106 Meanwhile, storytellers also had their performing time cut as the government required them to go to the countryside and “experience lives [of peasants]” in villages for two months without pay every year beginning in 1958.107 Considering that taking disciples had conventionally been one of senior storytellers’ sources of revenue, the government imposed a new rule that newly adopted disciples ought to be young men and women with junior high school education and instruction fees were limited to 100 or 200 yuan.108 In this manner, the Rectification Movement and the newly enacted policies succeeded in pacifying disgruntled storytelling stars inside state-run troupes. Wu Zongxi felt relieved that storytellers in the Shanghai Troupe no longer complained about their incomes as soon as the movement deprived self-employed storytellers of high profits.109 With all the efforts that the Shanghai Culture Bureau had made to organize and discipline storytellers, Communist cadres’ ultimate goal was to collectivize the remainder of storytellers after hundreds had been purged and thus ostracized from the community of storytelling. Li Qingfu considered establishing pingtan troupes as the final stage of the Rectification Movement.110 Yet, it took another two years to achieve the goal of collectivizing the vast majority of storytellers. Between 1958 and 1959, an experiment was carried out to organize hithertofore self-employed storytellers in ten “teams” (dui) first and, then, five troupes. In teams, storytellers continued to share box-office revenues with story houses just like before. On March 2, 1960, five

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-926, 6–8.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 11. 108   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-4-926, 22–23. 109   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, June 3, 2009. 110   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 106 107



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collectively owned pingtan troupes were finally established under the management of five administrative districts in Shanghai. Shanghai’s municipal government proudly declared its success in reforming and collectivizing 201 storytellers, who would thereafter enjoy fixed salaries and other benefits.111 In reality, the Rectification Movement resulted in an enormous loss of storytellers. If Li Qingfu’s memory did not mislead him, there were over 1,700 self-employed storytellers in the beginning of the movement.112 By 1960, nonetheless, only 201 were able to resume their storytelling careers legally in Shanghai by joining one of the following troupes: the Long March (Changzheng), Pioneer ( Xianfeng), Spark ( Xinghuo), Jiangnan, and Sky Riding (Lingxiao). *  *  *  * The Guangyu Story House Incident was an epitome of social commotions across the country in 1957. Just like workers all over China who went on strike to fight for their economic security,113 self-employed pingtan storytellers struggled mightily against local political authorities to gain bigger market share. From self-employed storytellers’ perspective, state-run troupes and their employees represented the state. As market competition intensified in the mid and late 1950s, those employed in state-run troupes became the easy target for low-rank storytellers, who were convinced that state-run troupes were utilizing their political power to seize the majority of decent story houses. From Communist cadres’ perspective, high incomes that first-rate self-employed storytellers could receive from the market posed a grave threat to state-run troupes as its members’ relatively low salaries delegitimized the CCP’s effort of collectivizing of storytellers. The conflicts, which were driven by economic factors in essence, finally surfaced in 1957. While storytellers inside state-run troupes publicly expressed their disillusionment at their low incomes compared with their self-employed counterparts, the self-employed inveighed against state-run troupes’ hegemonism of monopolizing large-sized story houses. Hundreds, if not thousands, of unorganized and non-collectivized storytellers rallied around the Association to negotiate with and resist against the state power, as their predecessors did in Qing and Republican eras.

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 45–52.   Li Qingfu, interview with author, July 23, 2009. 113   Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai’s Strike Wave of 1957,” 239. 111 112

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The Guangyu Story House Incident signified the culmination of such a clash. Huang Yi’an and his company ended up losing the hardfought battle against local Communist cadres such as Pan Boying. Huang was condemned and purged as a political foe, who intended to sabotage the socialist cause. Nevertheless, most Communist cadres and storytellers were, wittingly or unwittingly, oblivious of the fact that the clash stemmed from competitions for economic gains among storytellers. Local governments in Shanghai and Suzhou capitalized on the Incident to not only comb out defiant pingtan artists, but also stabilize state-run troupes because revenues were all lowered across the pingtan world. The forcible reduction of incomes proved to be one of the major achievements of the Rectification Movement in 1958 that followed the Incident. In the name of enhancing storytellers’ political consciousness, the movement succeeded in limiting storytellers’ capability of earning high incomes. As soon as Shanghai-based Communist cadres managed to collectivize the remaining storytellers by establishing five collectively owned troupes in Shanghai in 1960, members of state-run troupes stopped bearing grudge for economic reasons. CCP cadres might expect the decade of the 1960s to be totally exempt from conflicts between storytellers and political authorities as cadres took full control over pingtan troupes since the Rectification Movement. To their frustration, however, storytellers in the first half of the 1960s continued to unleash their disappointment at the reality and fight for their rights on- and off-stage. Their weaponry was no doubt pingtan skills with which storytellers could manipulate plots and subplots of revolutionary pingtan stories.

Chapter Five

Between Accommodation and Resistance: Pingtan Storytelling ON THE EVE OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION The first spring of the nineteen sixties; the spring breeze sweeps the city of Shanghai; Good news about technological revolutions is circulating everywhere; It is the Maoist Thought that arms our minds; It is the brilliant rays of the General Line that lighten our eyes; It is the clarion of the Great Leap Forward that stimulates our soaring drive. (From “The First Spring of the Nineteen Sixties” [ Liushi niandai diyi chun], an opening ballad composed by Chen Lingxi and sung by Xu Lixian)

The zeitgeist of the Great Leap Forward movement found expression in the opening ballad, “The First Spring of the Nineteen Sixties.” The ballad signaled that its singer, Xu Lixian (1928–1984), whose style had previously been characterized as weak, tender, and melancholy,1 developed high-spirited and strong approaches of singing to resonate with the speed in the building of Socialism.2 With its lively and somehow unsmooth rhythm,3 this ballad struck a chord among hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of listeners to anticipate a vibrant age that would drive China to a Communist society, the ultimate destination for all human beings. Fifty years later, Li Xin and Wang Zhonghua (b. 1945) could still remember how they drew encouragement from the opening ballad in the early 1960s when both were middle school students.4 “The First Spring of the Nineteen Sixties,” however, 1   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, Pingtan wenhua cidian 评弹文化辞典 [A dictionary of pingtan culture] (Shanghai: Hanyu da cidian chubanshe, 1996), 134. 2   Yubo, “Tingshu zayi,” 220. 3   Its composer, Chen Lingxi, admitted that he occasionally ignored whether musical tones of words fell in with the established pattern when composing The First Spring of the Nineteen Sixties. See Chen Lingxi, Xianbian shuangji, 21. 4   Li Xin, interview with author, August 2, 2010; Wang Zhonghua 王忠华, interview with author, July 20, 2009.

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failed to presage the realization of Communism in China as promised by Chairman Mao and expected by a large portion of the populace. The economic debacle following the Great Leap Forward movement, however, led to not only widespread disillusionment with the CCP’s regime, but also the government’s loosening its control of the society and culture. In this period of “cultural thaw,”5 the most significant event in pingtan storytelling in Shanghai was no doubt the founding of five collectively owned troupes in the wake of the Rectification Movement. The Establishment of Collectively Owned Pingtan Troupes in Shanghai Prior to the official establishment of the five collectively owned pingtan performing enterprises in Shanghai, storytellers were required to report to Communist cadres their expected salaries after joining the troupes. Witnessing a large number of storytellers punished for varieties of reasons, political or not, the terrified storytellers were temporarily willing to exchange monetary gains with political favor and personal security. As has been shown in the case of founding the Shanghai Troupe, voluntarily taking low salary was a gauge of a storyteller’s political consciousness. Under this circumstance, storytellers who survived the Rectification Movement usually asked for monthly salaries considerably lower than the average incomes they were able to earn as the self-employed in the late 1950s. Su Yuyin decided to take 85 yuan, but Communist cadres raised his salary by 5 yuan. Therefore, Su’s fixed salary was 90 yuan after he became the member of the Spark, which amounted to only one-tenth of his income per month then.6 In the troupe, the highest pay for a tanci storyteller was no more than 108 yuan.7 Yang Zijiang calculated that he had five children and his wife’s parents to feed. Therefore, he applied for a monthly salary of 130 yuan, which made him the highest-paid storyteller in the Spark.8 5   I borrow the term of “cultural thaw” from Paul Pickowicz, who investigates the new development of China’s film industry in the early and mid 1960s. See Paul Pickowicz, “The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s,” in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed., Chris Berry (Ithaca, New York: China-Japan Program, Cornell University, 1985), 97. 6   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 7   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 8   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009.



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­ ommunist cadres were convinced that the storytellers’ voluntary lowC ering of their incomes stemmed from their “revolutionary enthusiasm” (geming reqing).9 Another factor that led storytellers to consent to substantial pay cuts was Communist cadres’ promise to renegotiate and thereby raise storytellers’ salaries six months later.10 To highlight political authorities’ commitment to revolutionizing pingtan storytelling and transforming previously self-employed storytellers into artists serving Socialism, the five troupes were given such names as “Long March” or “Pioneer” to forge a direct link between pingtan and the Party’s ongoing revolutionary cause. The namesake of the Spark organization, or “Xinghuo,” was a Chinese idiom: “A single spark can start a prairie fire” (xingxing zhihuo keyi liaoyuan), a metaphor that Chairman Mao invoked in 1930 to illustrate how an initially weak revolutionary force would finally prevail in China. To sustain the pingtan reform and efficiently manage storytellers, Communist cadres handpicked some progressive storytellers to be directors of each troupe. The Spark’s director, Gong Lisheng, had been Shen Dongshan’s performing partner since the early 1950s. Gong was believed to have been relatively unsuccessful in the market before Shen joined him and lent him a few stories. Both of them refused to join the Suzhou Troupe in the mid-1950s under the excuse of Shen’s father’s death.11 When the second chance of being collectivized by the state arrived after the Rectification Movement, Gong left cadres and his fellow storytellers an impression that he was actively “in pursuit of progress” (zhuiqiu jinbu). Both Su Yuyin and Shen recalled that when storytellers were assigned to write and post big-character posters in the early stage of the Rectification Movement, Gong openly swore to produce more than ten thousand posters overnight, by means of which he stood out among his colleagues and won the CCP’s favor.12 With collaborative storytellers such as Gong Lisheng in charge, the five troupes succeeded in collectivizing hundreds of storytellers in Shanghai. A report filed in 1961 to the Shanghai municipal government boasted that ninety percent of storytellers had been collectivized

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 64.   Ibid. 11   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010. 12   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007; Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010.  9 10

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since the Rectification Movement.13 While the government accused the self-employed of pursuing high revenues,14 ironically, the newly established troupes were required to reap profits by themselves. Neither municipal nor district governments provided them with financial subsidies. By nature, the Spark and other four troupes were under collective ownership, meaning that their storytellers earned profits in the market and received fixed salaries from their respective troupes. After deducting the cost of salaries and benefits such as medical care costs and retirement pensions, the troupes retained the remainder of the money in the name of “public accumulation fund.” Since revenues of the troupes rested entirely upon numbers of listeners of stage performances, cadres of five troupes sometimes made phone calls to story houses to double check box-office sales of specific days, lest storytellers would hold some portions of monetary gains for private use.15 In her study of Yue Opera, Jin Jiang similarly finds that collectively owned Yue Opera troupes were responsible for providing the audience with “market-oriented popular entertainment.”16 Such a system was not a new creation. Rather, many performing enterprises including the Suzhou Troupe were likewise under collective ownership throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but they had long been recognized as staterun troupes, nothing unlike the Shanghai Troupe in many aspects. In order to highlight the government’s commitment to treating both state-owned Shanghai Troupe, five collectively owned troupes, and other state-run troupes from Jiangsu and Zhejiang equally, the Shanghai Culture Bureau adjusted the box-office revenue sharing option and ruled that all troupes were entitled fifty percent of the revenues in all commercial story houses, while the percentage for troupes was as high as seventy for troupes in such performing venues as workers’ clubs and community cultural centers in June 1960. Considering such a sharing option might hurt the profitability of story houses, the government lowered the percentages for troupes to forty and sixty respectively a few months later.17 Anyhow, storytellers employed in the Shanghai Troupe and in five collectively owned troupes were, in

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-390, 42.   Ibid. 15   Su Yuyin, interview with author, June 28, 2010. 16   Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 183–184. 17   Shanghai shi dang’an guan 上海市档案馆, Shanghai shi zong gonghui dang’an 上海 市总工会档案 [Archives of Shanghai Federation of Labor Unions], C1-2-3774, 4. 13 14



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theory, ­financially and politically equal. In the early 1960s, the CCP government in Shanghai had full confidence in the capacity of five troupes to garner profits without governmental investments because of a booming market of storytelling in the first half of the 1960s when many restrictions imposed on this oral art were lifted. The Thaw in the Early 1960s Admittedly, the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing nationwide famine devastated China’s economy and, understandably, fatally weakened the state’s capability to finance and patronize artists across the country. In 1959, the Ministry of Culture reinstituted the policy to encourage dramatists and quyi performers to stage both classic and new plays or stories as an antidote to the CCP’s prioritization of newly created repertoire but ignoring the audience’s preferences during the early stage of the Great Leap Forward movement.18 The implementation of this new policy clearly resulted from the grave budgetary problems of local governments amid China’s economic crisis. Therefore, it is vital to understand that the CCP’s loosening its control over China’s popular culture in the early 1960s was not merely due to the Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) administration’s relatively open and mild policies, but also due to the economic expediency. By 1963, the Ministry of Culture, which aimed at a substantial budget cut, sought to transform the vast majority of the existing 2,842 state-owned troupes across the country into collectively owned performing enterprises and thereby terminate state funding.19 Under this circumstance, China’s cultural and entertainment industry became more market-oriented to cater to the audience’s tastes and somehow depoliticized compared with the 1950s. Paul Pickowicz’s inquiry into the film industry in the early 1960s China shows noticeable changes in styles and themes of Chinese motion pictures. In this period, as Pickowicz observes, political authorities relaxed the control of the motion picture industry and

  Zhou Liang, Suzhou pingtan shigao, 189.   Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhua bu bangong ting 中华人民共和国文化 部办公厅ed. Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian (er) (1960–1966) 文化工作文件资 料汇编（二） [Compilation of documents on cultural works (2) (1960–1966)], n. p., 1982, 314–315. 18 19

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filmmakers were given more artistic freedom.20 In a similar fashion, pingtan artists, both hired by state-run troupes and self-employed, sought to amuse and intrigue their listeners by either referring back to pre-1949 pingtan repertoire or elicit a nostalgia of the past to articulate their disillusionment at the present on the audience’s behalf. The new political and cultural climate in the opening years of the 1960s thus furnished storytellers and the audience alike with the opportunities of self-expression in the midst of China’s economic fiasco. In 1960, vigilant Communist cadres in Shanghai had already discovered signs of political incorrectness in stories told not necessarily by backward self-employed storytellers, but by those employed by state-run troupes. A report filed in August 1960 pointed a finger at a state-run pingtan team from Zhenjiang in the Jiangsu Province for their popularizing feudal ideologies and decadent lifestyles. Their Killing Ma in Jinling ( Jinling sha Ma) was criticized for its animated descriptions of activities in brothels in late Qing times, while both Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai and Four Graduates of the Imperial Examination (Si Jinshi) imparted to the audience Confucian “propriety, righteousness, honesty, and a sense of shame” (li yi lian chi). Therefore, the author of the report urged local cultural bureaucrats to listen to pingtan stories in story houses more frequently and pay close attention to stories that would be staged in Shanghai.21 The suggestion seemed to take no effect at all. In the several years to follow, more classic stories and opening ballads were publicly staged, no matter how ideologically backward and politically incorrect they seemed to be. Such a movement was conventionally called “searching the bottom of chests [to seek traditional stories or ballads]” (fan xiangdi) as a counteraction of Cutting the Tail in the early 1951.22 “Searching the bottom of chests” also constituted part and parcel of a nationwide movement to collect and revise traditional plays and stories in 1961, as required by the Ministry of Culture.23 It has been universally believed that “searching the bottom of chests” commenced in 1961, a year many storytellers, cadres, and pingtan fans remember as a vibrant, if somewhat chaotic, year of artists’ re-establishment of pingtan as a pure

  Paul Pickowicz, “The Limits of Cultural Thaw,” 97.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 49–52. 22   Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 122. 23   Zhonghua renmin gongheguo wenhua bu bangong ting ed., Wenhua gongzuo wenjian ziliao huibian (er) (1960–1966), 256. 20 21



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entertainment, or in other words, in depoliticizing this oral art. What they did not explicitly acknowledge was the fact that the de-politicization of pingtan storytelling, which disavowed Communist cadres’ decade-long effort to imbue pingtan works with Communist ideologies, was political by nature. 1961 When looking back to 1961 and 1962, a listener recalled that all troupes actively engaged in “joint performances” (huiyan) or performances of “selected scenes” (zhezi xi) not only in their regular performing time (afternoons and evenings), but also in Sunday mornings. Their activism resulted in both conserving and displaying pingtan’s tradition and drawing a wide spectrum of listeners of the day for more monetary gains. The prosperity of the pingtan market was, in the listener’s words, “a contrast to as well as an outgrowth of ” (xiangfan xiangcheng) the contemporary economic woe.24 The listener’s comment attested to the economic factor behind the storytellers’ endeavor to restore pingtan’s tradition. Such an effort led to the reduction of performances of new stories, particularly the less popular full-length ones. As a matter of fact, various pingtan troupes had already started to revise and stage classic stories such as Jade Dragonfly and Three Smiles as early as in the mid-1950s in the name of inheriting to and carrying forward China’s artistic tradition. If classic stories (despite the fact that they had been cleaned up) were nothing new to listeners, the singing of some longlost opening ballads supplied to the audience refreshing experiences of entertainment. The most unforgettable joint performances of opening ballads took place in the summer of 1961 at the Culture Square ( Wenhua guangchang) of Shanghai. Facing thousands of fervent listeners, storytellers from both the Shanghai Troupe and the newly established Long March sang opening ballads which had been of great popularity in the 1940s but were suppressed after 1949 for their lack of political significance. The joint performance featured a large number of pingtan superstars. Jiang Yunxian’s (b. 1933) “Miscellaneous Opening Ballad” (Shijin kaipian) amalgamated varieties of pingtan tunes in one ballad.

  Yu Bo, “Tingshu zayi (san),” 95.

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Interestingly enough, Jiang was publicly criticized for singing “Miscellaneous Opening Ballad” in 1958.25 As late as in 1960, singing ballads with various tunes was dismissed as an evil tendency among pingtan storytellers who improperly hunted for personal fame and monetary gains.26 After Zhang Jianting sang “Just in Personal Crisis” ( Bao luonan), in which he imitated cries of peddlers in different dialects, he had to sing an extra ballad about a lazy man’s dream of making a fortune at the audience’s behest. Jiang Yuequan’s “Admonishing Wife under the Lamp” ( Dengxia quanqi) warned women of not cheating on their husbands. Zhu Xueqin’s “whiskers” (Luosai hu) informed listeners of the fact that all beauties in Chinese history loved men with whiskers. Both Xue Xiaoqing’s “Mantis’ Wedding” ( Tanglang zuoqin) and Yan Xueting’s “Zhu Zhishan Talks Big” (Zhu Zhishan shuo dahua) were filled with nothing but facetious descriptions and comments. The performance lasted over three hours and the audience was vastly amused and fully satisfied. In retrospect, a listener saw such performances as an eruption of an unstoppable force by storytellers to react to the over-politicization of pingtan art in the 1950s.27 The de-politicization of pingtan storytelling in the early 1960s therefore carried strong political implications. By early 1963, a survey conducted by the Shanghai Culture Bureau showed that 344 stories were staged in Shanghai in the first quarter of 1963. Among the 344 stories, 155 were about “scholars and beauties” (caizi jiaren), “knights-errant” (wuxia), “ghosts and demons” (guiguai), “[those] trumpeting bourgeois ideologies” (xuanyang zichan jieji sixiang), “[those] beautifying imperial ruling class” (meihua diwang tongzhi jieji de), and “superstition” (mixin de). The rest were historical stories (73), law cases and detective stories in imperial China (55), mythology (5), and others (46). Only ten stories concerned the CCP’s revolutionary accomplishments prior to 1949.28 What was more worrisome was storytellers’ retelling stories with “absurd and bizarre” (huangdan liqi) plots and their proneness to the use of “erotic and vulgar” (huangse xialiu) xuetou to pander to the audience.29 Wu Zongxi was then 25   Yubo 余波, “Tingshu zayi 听书杂忆 [ Miscellaneous memories about storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 39, 2008, 207. 26   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-358, 51. 27   Yu Bo, “Tingshu zayi (san),” 95–97. 28   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 5–6. 29   Wenzi 文子, “Jiaqiang shehui zeren gan—Shanghai pingtan tuan bufen yanyuan xuexi taolun Chen Yun tongzhi yijian 加强社会责任感—上海评弹团部分演员学习 讨论陈云同志意见 [ Enhancing a sense of social responsibility: some performers of



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convinced that storytellers’ use of cheap jokes and staging erotic stories was intended to hide their deficiency of pingtan art. Wu called stories that were highly entertaining but short of political and artistic value as “relaxing items” (qingsong jiemu). Meanwhile, a theory that all traditional stories were perfect so that they should be kept intact on stage prevailed to justify the uncritical restoration of classic stories.30 Chen Yun, the PRC’s vice chairman prior to 1966, who happened to stay in Shanghai in 1961, personally attended a number of pingtan performances in story houses both as a Communist cadre and a pingtan fan. Worried about the tendency to indiscriminately preserve classic stories and to cater to the audience by ignoring pingtan’s instrumentality in political indoctrination, Chen handwrote his comments under the title “Opinions on Handling Xuetou, Relaxing Items, and Traditional [ Pingtan] Repertoire at Present” ( Muqian guanyu xuetou, qingsong jiemu, chuantong shuhui de chuli de yijian) on July 25, 1961.31 Chen thereby reminded storytellers of pingtan’s dual role as an entertainment and as a political tool to reform China’s culture and society. He specifically addressed the issue of xuetou, which he believed to be an indispensable element of pingtan storytelling. Yet, according to Chen, the dosage of xuetou should be limited. The excessive use of xuetou would certainly distract the audience and disrupt a pingtan story’s narrative completeness.32 Shen Xiaomei Chen Yun’s reaction to the (over)use of xuetou and the revival of classic stories did not signal political authorities’ decision to tighten the control over storytellers and to de-commercialize pingtan storytelling immediately, but reconfirmed a forceful wave of pingtan’s commercialization in the early 1960s. In this period, probably no one benefited from the changing social and cultural environment more than Shen Xiaomei, who joined the Long March in 1960. The second chapter has shown that Shen’s two stories, Emperor Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan

the Shanghai pingtan troupe study comrade Chen Yun’s comments],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 31. 30   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Jiaqiang shehui zeren gan 加强社会责任感 [ Enhancing a sense of social responsibility],” in Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu ed., Chen Yun tongzhi he pingtan yishu, 63. 31   Ibid., 64. 32   Chen Yun, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben), 51; 60.

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and Jigong, were so controversial in the early 1950s that the radio station had to terminate broadcasting Shen’s story under enormous pressure from radical listeners. In a sense, the event was a trigger of the movement of Cutting the Tail. Throughout the 1950s, Shen was prohibited from telling those two stories even though a large number of classic stories were staged after substantial revisions starting in the mid-1950s. The cultural thaw in the early 1960s afforded Shen an opportunity to resume telling Emperor Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan and Jigong in the Yangzi Delta and to regain his fame as an outstanding pinghua artist. In 1962, when the Long March was performing in Beijing, Shen relished the chance to tell some portions of Jigong and won applause from the Beijing audience.33 Among the audience, there were cadres from the Ministry of Culture, who showed extraordinary interest in Shen’s stories. As soon as Shen and his colleagues of the Long March finished their Beijing performing tour and arrived in Shanghai, the Ministry of Culture sent a special airplane to bring Shen back to Beijing again. At request of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Culture such as Zhou Yang and Xia Yan (1900–1995), Shen repeated the stories that he had told just a few days earlier.34 In fact, cadres in the Ministry of Culture viewed Shen and his stories as a sample, with which they could test the CCP’s bottom line of tolerating such ideologically backward but commercially successful stories or plays. Very soon, an article regarding Shen’s two stories were published in one of the Party-sponsored newspapers, Guangming Daily (Guangming ribao). While Jigong gained acknowledgement as it portrayed an undisciplined Buddhist priest’s supernatural power to fight the ruling class in favor of the low-class people, Emperor Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan was ideologically questionable to such an extent that the open-minded article writer felt difficult to revise it into a politically correct story. Set in the high Qing times, the story gave a detailed account of Emperor Qianlong’s struggles against local tyrants and corrupted bureaucrats in southeastern China. In the process, a number of swordsmen offered the emperor assistance and showed their absolute loyalty to the Qing court. The gravest problem of the story lay in Shen’s attempt to depict Emperor Qianlong as a xia-like hero. As such, Shen could easily invite criticism that the story was intended to glorify feudal rules and   Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 122.   Zhang Shaobo 张少伯, “Shutan si Jigong 书坛四济公 [Four Jigong’s in storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 11, 1990, 145. 33 34



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­ erpetuate feudal ideologies. Such an innate weakness notwithstandp ing, the story, according to the author, still ought to be tolerated as an entertainment to amuse ­listeners.35 In the Shanghai market, however, the two stories were banned until the Ministry of Culture vocally supported Shen. After learning of the decision by the Ministry of Culture, Shi Ximin (1912–1987), who was then in charge of the Department of Propaganda of the CCP’s Shanghai branch, personally interrogated Wu Zongxi regarding the interdiction of Shen’s stories. The confused Wu did not know how to reply. Certainly he was not supposed to be responsible for banning the two stories alone, as he was merely the director of the Shanghai Troupe and hardly exercised any direct control over storytellers outside his own performing ensemble.36 Shen Xiaomei’s career culminated in July 1962 when he was selected along with other eleven storytellers from both the Shanghai Troupe and the Long March to perform in Hong Kong.37 The Hong Kong performing tour served the political and economic functions to improve the relationship between the PRC government and businessmen in that British colony, especially those who escaped from Shanghai before and after the Communist victory in 1949.38 Wu Zongxi felt that the Shanghai Troupe’s performances in Beijing between 1961 and 1962 might have drawn interest from Hong Kong visitors, who then lobbied to the Ministry of Culture to approve a performing tour in Hong Kong. Though Wu was given the exclusive right to select storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe, cadres of the Ministry of Culture intervened in and proposed that two performers from the Long March be added. In Wu’s opinion, Shen’s special performances in Beijing must be the decisive factor. Moreover, the Ministry of Culture might attempt to show its fairness to newly established troupes and avoid criticisms about the government’s favoritism to the Shanghai Troupe. At any rate, Shen and a female storyteller from the Long March temporarily joined the Shanghai Troupe for this performing tour in Hong Kong, where he staged selected episodes of Jigong.39 35   Duqiao 渡桥, “Yetan pingtan 也谈评弹 [Also on pingtan storytelling],” Guangming ribao, June 16, 1962. 36   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010. 37   Tang Gengliang, Biemeng yixi, 115. 38   “Shanghai pingtan tuan gongzuo zongjie (zhaiyao) 上海评弹团工作总结 (摘要) [A summary of the work of the Shanghai pingtan troupe (excerpt)], in Pingtan zhanbao, October, 1967, 28. 39   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010.

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Shen Xiaomei’s performance in Hong Kong of selected episodes from Jigong, once a highly controversial pingtan story, signified China’s new political leaders’ temporary jettisoning of cultural radicalism and depoliticization of entertainment in the early 1960s. The Ministry of Culture’s decision to invite storytellers from the Long March exemplified the government’s impartial attitude towards state-run or collectively owned troupes. Shanghai-based collectively owned pingtan troupes, albeit their inability to secure funding from the Shanghai municipal government, were competitive in the market. Though the Shanghai Troupe continued to monopolize spacious and well-equipped first-tier story houses, troupes like the Spark never felt the shortage of performing venues presumably because of the dismissal of a large number of storytellers during the Rectification Movement. In the Spark, the Business Section (yewu zu) took the responsibility to contact story houses or enterprises and assigned outlets of performances for approximately forty dang of storytellers.40 Aside from commercial story houses, storytellers in the Spark cooperated with schools and state-owned enterprises for special performances to generate more revenues. Shen Dongshan set a range of prices for his performances in primary schools (5 yuan), middle schools (20 yuan), and colleges (40 yuan). For most of the time, he did not have to display his pingtan skills, but just told stories about revolutionary wars. In 1966, when he was invited to tell stories about Jiao Yulu (1922–1964), a deceased model Communist cadre, to propagate Jiao’s dedication to leading local farmers in Shandong, Shen charged enterprises in Shanghai 40 yuan for each time (100 minutes). 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 120 yuan [ per month] and won’t gain one extra cent [by charging 40 yuan for each performance].41

40 41

  Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 20, 2007.   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, July 24, 2010.



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Illustration 12:  Storytellers were telling a story as a service for the train crew, early 1960s. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

Despite the accusation of overpricing, the Spark benefited enormously from the performances of the stories that were designed to promote self-sacrifice and lofty Communist ideals, especially because the Shanghai Troupe appeared lethargic in the campaign of eulogizing Jiao Yulu.42 Su Yuyin remembered that the troupe was inundated with phone calls from countless companies and factories all over the city soliciting performances of Jiao Yulu’s stories. Considering Shen was not able to single-handedly meet all demands, the troupe quickly trained two more storytellers to tell such stories in various places in Shanghai.43 Occasionally, storytellers from the Spark transplanted such special performances to other cities in the Yangzi Delta. Zhou Xiaoqiu, whose stories were deemed to lack popularity after he joined the Spark, once raised eyebrows among his colleagues by reporting to the director of the troupe that his performances drew at average one thousand listeners per day in Changshu, Jiangsu Province upon his return to

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 31, 2010.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, June 28, 2010.

42 43

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­ hanghai. Shortly afterwards, Zhou’s fellow storytellers learned that S he was assigned to tell stories in a primary school with a population of students over one thousand. In this manner, Zhou shared with teachers the responsibility of educating the children by telling the White-haired Girl while garnering profits for the Spark.44 For most of the time, however, storytellers of the Spark were assigned to conduct commercial performances in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In the market outside Shanghai, Su Yuyin found that he and his partner faced competitions not merely with storytellers affiliated to other troupes, but also with the self-employed, who failed or were unwilling to be recruited by any troupe and who had no legal license to perform. In one of the interviews, Su Yuyin gave a vivid description about such storytellers: We called them feixiong. Fei, meaning “no,” referred to the fact that they had no legal permit, but it could also mean “fly” as they constantly flew all around [the Yangzi Delta seeking performing opportunities]. Xiong meant “brothers.” . . . On one occasion in Taicang [in Jiangsu province], I came across a feixiong who was telling [the story] of Lord Bao (Baogong). My partner, who was a member of the Communist Youth League, suspected that the storyteller might not have a license. After I paid a visit [to the storyteller], I told my partner that I had checked his permit. I was such a tenderhearted person [that I sympathized with feixiong]. Had I told the truth, my partner would have filed a report [with the authorities reporting the storyteller]. . . . Usually, both feixiong and story house owners would be criticized [by political authorities], but not fined. [ That was why] story house bosses did not really care [whether storytellers possessed licenses]. . . . It was not hard to identify feixiong. They sometimes bribed me with a full pack of cigarettes for fear that I might disclose their identity.45

Feixiong were excluded from the performances for state-run enterprises and had to perform in commercial venues, usually in marginal areas. In reality, while feixiong were illegal storytellers, there still existed legal self-employed pingtan performers in the early 1960s. On August 21, 1962, when the Shanghai municipal government readjusted the boxoffice revenue sharing option, it was stipulated that the self-employed were entitled to receive 30% of the total revenues.46 Though the government manipulated the policy to preclude the self-employed from acquiring high incomes, it was doubtless that self-employed storytellers   Ibid.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 20, 2007. 46   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai zong gonghui dang’an, C1-2-3774, 4. 44 45



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did not totally vanish despite the Rectification Movement and the ensuing establishment of five pingtan troupes. With the novel configuration of pingtan performing ensembles, market, and storytellers in the early 1960s, all the five collectively owned troupes proved to be financially successful. In July 1962, a report revealed that public accumulation funds in the five newly established troupes grew exponentially: the Long March held over seventy thousand yuan, the Pioneer over eighty thousand, the Sky Riding over fifty thousand, the Jiangnan over seventy thousand, and the Spark more than one hundred thousand.47 Storytellers, however, hardly took pride in their richer 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 get it.48 By 1962, storytellers felt increasingly disappointed by their relatively low salaries without a raise in two years. Communist cadres ascribed storytellers’ simmering resentment to China’s economic difficulties in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, inflation, and, more significantly, storytellers’ enormous incomes prior to their participation in those troupes.49 Yet, the report also confirmed that the majority of storytellers found it impossible to make both ends meet without loaning money or pawning their properties. In the Spark, seventy percent of its storytellers had pawned some of their belongings. Performers showed the troupe’s cadres pawn tickets as a means of asking for extra subsidies. A performer’s wife was seen to peddle vegetable outside a story house and purposely disclosed her identity as the storyteller’ spouse to promote the sales.50 In my interview with Yang Zijiang, I showed him a government document that refuted Yang Zijang’s claim about his family’s financial ­difficulties.51 Yang Zijiang and his wife quickly responded that their family was deep in crisis as the eleven family members lived on 120 yuan, his salary, each month, whereas the minimal living cost in the 1960s Shanghai was 12 yuan per person. Yang recalled that he had pawned whatever he was able to find in his home and, as a result, his house was as empty as a “soccer field.”52 Storytellers’ complaints about low   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 60.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 49   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 61. 50   Ibid., 58–59. 51   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 11; Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 52   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 47 48

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incomes were contagious. Performers from other troupes unleashed their frustration in various ways. Tensions between affluent troupes and poverty-stricken storytellers were not always handled in meetings or conversations inside troupes, but were brought into open in performances. A storyteller from the Jiangnan once deliberately lowered his voice when telling a story. When listeners complained about their inability to hear him, the storyteller dryly responded, “The salary I am earning allows [me to tell stories as loudly as] what listeners of the front three rows can hear. If listeners of the fourth row can hear, they [should feel] lucky.” Other storytellers from the Jiangnan publicly protested on stage by refusing to order and wear costumes, but electing to be clothed in shorts, T-shirts, and overshoes on stage. Listeners thus gave the Jiangnan, whose members were sloppily addressed, the nickname as “beggars’ troupe” ( jiaohua tuan).53 Troupers of the Spark adopted the same strategy to display their poverty to the public when telling stories. During a performance in 1962, for example, Yang Zijiang wore a casual short gown and explained to the audience that he had sold his long robe because of grinding poverty.54 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.55 Very recently, Su Yuyin still felt amused by his colleagues’ protests by means of wearing casual dress on stage and whining about their low incomes in an interview in 2009. Without costume fees to purchase appropriate clothes, Su remembered Pan Wenyin (b. 1929) wore a relatively thick lined robe but turned on the electric fan on stage to keep the temperature low. Unfortunately, his partner caught cold as a consequence. Yang Zijiang, meanwhile, wore shorts to tell stories.56 Yang Zijiang added that improper dress was just a minor of way of protest. He was daring enough to pound the table to quarrel with the Spark’s director.57 Yang and many of his colleagues had a strong feeling of being exploited after joining the Spark. Chen Hesheng’s salary in the Spark, for example, was one-tenth of the total revenue he earned in the market. Performers from other troupes shared such an assertion and unanimously believed that their

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 59–61.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 11. 55   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 61. 56   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 57   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 53 54



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monthly salaries were equal to only a few days’ box-office revenues.58 Wang Xiongfei (1922–1994), a Zhejiang-based pinghua storyteller, for example, griped to his friend on numerous occasions that he had already earned his salary of a whole year after his first nineteen days of performances. In other words, he had to submit all the revenues in the rest three hundred days to his affiliated troupe in Zhejiang.59 Storytellers bore a grudge against troupes not merely for the uneven distribution of wealth inside troupes. Personal feuds contributed to the intensification of conflicts between cadres and performers. Both Yang Zijiang and Su Yuyin dismissed the director of the Spark, Gong ­Lisheng, as the CCP’s loyal collaborator to lay a heavy hand upon them and their fellow storytellers. Su noted that only one Youth League member endeared himself/herself to Gong. The rest of storytellers never showed the slightest respect to him.60 A passive, but effective, means of resistance often used by storytellers in the Spark was requests of sick leaves and extra subsidies on a regular basis.61 As a practice, the Spark sent inexperienced disciples to temporarily replace storytellers on leave. On May 15, 1965, for example, a performance of the Spark featured only one experienced storyteller, Pan Wenyin. The other four who scheduled to tell stories bailed out of the performance and let their young disciples to fill in for them.62 The simmering resentment in storytellers’ minds erupted into a collective movement in 1962 when the raison d’être of organizing pingtan troupes was disputed. According to Zhou Liang, the 1962 movement was the second wave of de-collectivization in the pingtan world.63 Certainly, the first one referred to the Guangyu Story House Incident in 1957. The 1962 movement was much less violent and dramatic compared with the incident of 1957. In Suzhou, for example, the director of the Suzhou Troupe was lobbied, but in vain, to quit the troupe in the early 1960s.64 In Shanghai, a number of young storytellers requested to leave the state-sponsored Shanghai Troupe and organize their own performing ensembles to both enjoy more opportunities of performances and   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 64.   Gu Xidong 顾锡东, “Tingshu jiuhua lu (xia) 听书旧话（下） [Old remark on listening pingtan stories (Part II ])],” Pingtan yishu, No. 31, 2002, 199. 60   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 61   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 61. 62   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-928, 45. 63   Zhou Liang, “Suzhou pingtan shihua (ba),” 148. 64   Qian Ying, “Huainian Caolao,” 76. 58 59

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seek higher profits.65 In the Spark, Yang Zijiang and some of his colleagues threatened to withdraw from the troupe and become the selfemployed provided they would fail to receive a pay increase.66 Yang’s loud cry did take effect, as he was approached by the government of the Yangpu District, in which the Spark registered, to renegotiate his income. Cadres of the Yangpu government agreed to pay Yang extra, which would raise his total monthly income to 180 yuan, to pacify the talented but defiant Yang. Yang later wrote a letter to the district government and confessed that he had requested to quit the Spark not because of his hostility against the Party’s policy of collectivizing storytellers but as a result of abject poverty his family was experiencing. Yang thus accepted the offer and stayed in the troupe.67 Yang’s colleague, Fang Yufeng, was more resolute and militant as he quit the Spark twice during the movement.68 The Right to Laugh The 1962 movement was in reality a piece and parcel of a more widespread unrest among a large number of dramatists and storytellers who sought to restore their self-employment.69 Yet, the movement gained little momentum in pingtan storytelling. The vast majority of storytellers were easily pacified and continued to serve the Spark or other troupes. For some storytellers like Yang Zijiang, they achieved their goals of pay increase. For more storytellers, nevertheless, the memory of the CCP’s persecution of a large number of their fellow storytellers in the 1958 Rectification Movement remained excruciatingly fresh. As Yang Zijiang put it, it was crucial to “know which way the wind blows” (shi shiwu) and avoid direct confrontation with political ­authorities.70 With the 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   Jiang Jin, “Duanlie yu yanxue,” 102.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 11. 67   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 68   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-534, 66; Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 69   Jiang Jin, “Duanlie yu yanxu,” 102. 70   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 65 66



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inability in the real world to improve their lives and escape suffocating efforts by political authorities to discipline them, storytellers were trained to stitch their critical and humorous remarks seamlessly with plots or subplots of stories they were narrating. On stage, storytellers were able to put their discontent in circulation among listeners by fleshing out xuetou and improvised comments or manipulating plots and subplots of stories. In most cases, the audience approved storytellers’ oblique but scathing criticisms of the contemporary political and economic situations with a wide laughter. 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 “engaged in counter-propaganda on stage, [where they] stood in the place of enemy’s classes to disseminate anti-Socialist thoughts” by telling politically questionable stories, both classic and new ones, and dishing out ribald humors.71 Classic Stories At the outset, radical Communist cadres presumed that it was 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 government edict to expel classic theatrical plays and stories from stage once and forever and “greatly write the thirteen years” by Ke Qingshi (1902–1965), the General Secretary of CCP’s Shanghai branch. Evidently, the authors of such reports not only personally attended performances, but also carefully took notes in story houses. Writers pointed their fingers at a number of storytellers whose disgusting ways of performing the already “bad stories” severely poisoned the audience. For example, when Jiang Yunxian was telling Fate in Tears and Laughter ( Tixiao yinyuan), a story set in 1920s and 1930s China, she wove racy details about how anxious the villainous warlord was to kiss the heroine into the plot. Jiang went so far to act kissing on stage to amuse listeners. In a pinghua story about late Yuan (1271–1368) peasant warfare, the performer spent a considerable portion

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 13.

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of time in imparting knowledge about gambling to the audience. Some listeners reported that the same storyteller informed the audience of Premier Zhou Enlai’s confession of his mistakes in launching the AntiRightist Movement. In a performance of 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 when describing a young lady’s nap in an afternoon in summertime: The woman was said to be half-naked when lying on the bed. Yet the storyteller shamelessly defended 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 sometimes spiced up their stories with lurid anecdotes and bawdy jokes to entertain listeners. Zhang Hongsheng, for example, once addressed the issue of fetus education in a story. Zhang joked that a husband should be restrained from clapping his pregnant wife on the belly to hurt the baby’s brain. Otherwise, the mentally-­challenged baby would grow up and become a counter­revolutionary. The writer of the government report further discovered that some storytellers were completely intoxicated on stage and thus made irresponsible remarks in their performances. The writer concluded his/her report by asking how such stories and their storytellers could undertake the task of promoting Socialism and Communism among the audience. The report ended with a suggestion to stage more new stories and strictly limit classic stories.72 “Stories with Red Skins and White Hearts” The proposal of staging more new stories corresponded with Ke Qingshi’s edict to greatly write the thirteen years between 1949 and 1962. Ke compared classic stories to cutworms, which quietly bit off cotton roots in the fields. Classic stories, in Ke’s view, sabotaged the Socialist culture in the same manner.73 Performing new stories, nevertheless, did not warrant the spread of the desired government-sanctioned ideologies. In new stories that invariably featured bitter struggles between Communist heroes and their enemies ( Japanese invaders, KMT officers,   Ibid., 20.   Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, “Nanwang youqing—jinian Jiang Yuequan xiansheng 难忘友情—纪念蒋月泉先生 [ Unforgettable friendship: in memory of Mr. Jiang Yuequan], Pingtan yishu, No. 31, 2002, 209. 72 73



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secret agents from Taiwan or the US, landlords, and other counterrevolutionaries in the urban and rural areas), storytellers took the liberty to manipulate storylines by putting emphasis on villains and accordingly downplaying protagonists’ heroics. Storytellers highlighted villains 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.74 Second, as Perry Link observes, “the villains were usually much more interesting—one might even say attractive—than” heroes that authors intended to eulogize.75 In many cases, the audience was fascinated not by Communists’ political and military accomplishments, but by enemies’ pursuit of luxurious lives and comical words and behaviors. In late 1964, Communist censors came to realize that new stories that were written to give wide publicity the CCP’s accomplishments before and after 1949 could easily be distorted to be bad stories perpetuating the feudal cultural legacy and promoting 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.76 Communist cadres reached the conclusion after their nine-month long effort of listening to nine out of twenty-eight full-length stories told by storytellers from the Spark in various story houses between February and October 1964. The writer of a report dated October 23, 1964 classified “stories with red skins and white hearts” into four categories. In the first category, storytellers “pointed to the mulberry to revile the locust tree” (zhisang mahuai) or, in other words, launched oblique attacks in their stories against Socialist China. In Invisible Sentry (Anshao), adapted from a 1957 film about the Communist police’s success in eradicating a KMT spy organization in the 1950s, the CCP interrogator was portrayed like a county magistrate in imperial China. What upset the writer most was the arrogant and sly KMT secret agent in the story. After the spy was arrested and forced to confess, he conditionally consented, but made a number of special requests. He demanded sufficient food, a pack of cigarette each day, and exemption from forced labor. Such requests, as a matter fact, did reveal pingtan   Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China, xiv.   Perry Link, The Use of Literature, 229. 76   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghais shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-463, 76. 74 75

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artists’ longing for material abundance and political security. When Zhu Qinxiang (1899–?), an elderly storyteller, told Red Crag (Hongyan), he described a Communist traitor’s struggle about whether to betray the CCP and his aspiration for material comfort. Zhu rationalized the traitor’s surrender to the KMT in his lengthy monologue, in which he made a comparison of lives under the leadership of the KMT and the CCP. After joining the CCP, the traitor grumbled that he was haunted by anxiety and fear each and every day. Yet lives under the KMT’s leadership were so comfortable that he could live in a foreignstyle mansion, drive cars, and dance in ballrooms.77 Red Crag (by Luo Guangbin [1924–1967] and Yang Yiyan [ b. 1925]), one of the two most read revolutionary novels,78 illustrated a group of incarcerated CCP secret agents’ sustained struggles against the KMT in a prison in southwestern China on the eve of the CCP’s victory. The writer of the government report thus perceived such a monologue as the storyteller’s purposeful distortion of this classic revolutionary fiction to vent his discontent with the CCP and articulate his nostalgia for the KMT’s rule.79 The second category included stories that could “not tell friend from foe” (diwo bufen). In other words, the audience was not under the impression that storytellers were praising the heroes and blaming their enemies on stage. More seriously, storytellers scoffed at the Chinese people and lost their “national integrity” (minzu qijie). In a story about guerrilla warfare in northern China during the Anti-Japanese War, for example, the storyteller explained that the Japanese were then bigger in stature than previously because they were children of Japanese men who slept with Chinese women during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. The report found the theory outrageous as it made Japanese invaders’ atrocities and Chinese people’s sufferings a topic of casual chats. In Wang Xiaohe, a scab was afraid that his collaboration with factory owners might arouse his fellow workers’ indignation. The storyteller joked that the scab would have to swim to survive if over two thousand workers all pissed on him. To the author of this report, the comparison of the working-class solidarity to urination was outright blasphemy. The stories classified   Ibid.   The other one was the Song of Youth 青春之歌 [Qingchun zhige], by Yang Mo 杨沫 (1914–1995). 79   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-463, 76. 77 78



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in the third category misrepresented the image of the CCP members. In The Eternal Wave ( Yongbu xiaoshi de dianbo), a story adapted from a 1958 film about underground fights between the CCP and both the Japanese and the KMT in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, the protagonist, a CCP undercover agent, always appeared too slow-witted to be responsive to the wretchedly hostile environment. The storyteller joked that even the KMT’s spy could not bear the sight of such a “moron” (shoutou).80 The Eternal Wave also featured a wide spectrum of bourgeois lives in pre-1949 Shanghai such as ballroom dancing and western-style food, which defined all stories in the third category. Military Depot 51 (Di 51hao bingzhan), originally a 1961 film centering around the Communist undercover agents’ success in shipping military supplies to the Communist base area in the early 1940s, and Fighting at the Enemy’s Heart (Zhandou zai diren xinzang li), a story adapted from a 1960 novel about Communist secret agents in 1940s Shanghai, fell into the category. Storytellers of The Eternal Wave not only gave full accounts about high living in Shanghai, but also tried to evoke the audience’s curiosity about the private life of a pair of Communist hero and heroine. In the story, they disguised as a married couple, but maintained their comradeship before they really got married in the second half. When discussing the narrowness of their bedroom, the storyteller grinned mischievously and asked, with a sexual innuendo, how the male and female Communists could sleep in the lone bed at night. In Military Depot 51, the protagonist, a Communist agent, succeeded in infiltrating into a mafia organization in Shanghai. The storyteller thus detailed the set-up of China’s secret society and mafia’s jargons and thereby instilled the audience with feudal moral norms. The last category of “stories with red skins and white hearts” manipulated plots to such a degree that accounts regarding revolutionaries paled in comparison with details about villains, whom 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 KMT. In Wang Xiaohe, the storyteller was obviously more interested in giving details about the KMT’s municipal government and gangsters in Shanghai in the 1940s. Each time, when the Communist protagonist, Wang Xiaohe (1924–1948),

  Ibid., 76–78.

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showed up, the storyteller was about to finish the chapter and therefore brushed lightly over Wang’s heroics.81 The production of “stories with red skins and white hearts” resulted from storytellers’ dubious class backgrounds, according to the author. The report asserted that storytellers from the Spark had variously been spies of Wang Jingwei’s (1883–1944) puppet regime during the Anti-Japanese War, ex-policemen, descendants of bourgeois families, concubines, gangsters, and drug addicts. In short, they could more or less be categorized as the people’s enemy, but would never become cultural workers serving the society without a thorough transformation in the new era.82 To Communist cadres’ surprise, nevertheless, not only storytellers who grew up in pre-1949 China and had yet to be reeducated oftentimes distorted storylines, the new breed of pingtan performers were also inclined to stage “stories with red skins and white hearts.” Starting from February 14, 1965, as a government report showed, a pair of young storytellers Zhong Shaoxiang and Sheng Shao­ yun told Invisible Sentry in a story house located in the eastern suburb of Shanghai. Learning that the storytellers 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 to the audience knowledge about ballroom dancing. They excited the audience by reminding them of long-forbidden dances such as 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 Zhong and Sheng performed Invisible Sentry rather than another new story, The Red Lantern, later one of the “model plays” (yangban xi) about undercover Communists’ struggles against the Japanese in the 1930s Manchuria, chiefly because the former commanded a much larger audience. When Invisible Sentry was staged, the number of listeners of each performance was between 200 and 300, as opposed to twenty or thirty for The Red Lantern. Here, it was evident that storytellers continued to put emphasis on ­attendances as late as

81 82

  Ibid., 78–79.   Ibid., 80.



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in 1965. To Communist cadres’ astonishment, both Zhong and Sheng were slightly over twenty, but had spent a great deal of time in gathering information about lives in colonial Hong Kong and Shanghai. They not only rejected the CCP’s ideological indoctrination, but also felt fascinated by and actively popularized the “old decadent lifestyles” ( jiude fuxiu shenghuo).83 *  *  *  * Virtually all the stories that radical Communist cadres took issue with in the early and mid 1960s were adapted from films (Military Depot 51, The Eternal Wave, The Red Lantern, Red Sun, and Invisible Sentry), and fiction (Fighting at the Enemy’s Heart and Red Crag), which had already enjoyed massive popularity across the country. Featuring suspenseful plots, military actions, and heroism and showcasing a panorama of urban modernity in Shanghai and Hong Kong, those stories continued to captivate the audience after their adaptation into pingtan stories. One major barrier to rework those motion pictures, dramas, and fiction and make them performable pingtan stories was their inadequate contents. A report filed in 1965 indicated that storytellers tended to weave a considerable quantity of non-episodic information into stories for their month-long (26 days) performances.84 Storytellers rode the opportunities of enriching and lengthening 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 more effort to represent ballroom dancing or western-style restaurants than to eulogize Communist heroes. In all fairness, storytellers’ failure to fulfill the task of propagating the CCP’s accomplishments did not necessarily stem from their hostility to the CCP and reluctance to portray Communist protagonists, with whom storytellers felt entirely unfamiliar. In most cases, they were more comfortable in representing the urban milieu of pre-1949 Shanghai, in which they lived and worked for decades. Zhou Xiaoqiu, for example, learned pingtan storytelling in Shanghai from his master, Zhao Jiaqiu (1898–1977) since the 1940s. In the 1930s, Zhao had already gained the reputation as a pingtan artist skillful at representing Shanghai’s urban society. Zhou

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-928, 13–14.   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-928, 46.

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was thus long immersed with the social culture in pre-1949 Shanghai.85 It was thus no wonder that Communist censors were offended to find that a female Communist undercover agent behaved like a roguish woman in Zhou’s stories.86 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.87 In the context of China in the 1960s, the competition of two narratives regarding pre1949 Shanghai carried new political ramifications, for a retrospect to the city’s splendor prior to the CCP’s takeover lent a contrast to the blandness of culture and the shortage of daily necessities following the Great Leap Forward. For example, after the aforementioned pair of young storytellers addressed various types of dancing in Invisible Sentry, a listener, who once had a mania for dancing, confessed “[ I feel like dancing as if I had] an itching in the feet when listening [to the story about dancing halls in Hong Kong].”88 In another performance, the audience was highly intrigued when a storyteller described how delicious fresh-water crabs (dazha xie) tasted.89 In many a story, villains betrayed the CCP out of their desire for affluence. Their unashamed needs for food, housing, and wealth indeed struck a chord among listeners who had suffered from a nationwide shortage of supply over the years. As a result, Communist cadres were alerted to find that villains were more interesting or attractive than Communist heroes and heroines, as Perry Link has commented. In Link’s inquiry into spy novels and films in pre-Cultural Revolution China, the villains usually fascinated 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

85   Yang Xuelin 杨学林, “Churen, chushu caineng baocun he fazhan pingtan yihsu—tan Xiao Dangui zhisi de chuangzuo, yanchu 出人、出书才能保存和发展评 弹艺术—谈《筱丹桂之死》的创作、演出 [ Pingtan art can be preserved only by cultivating talents and creating (new) stories: on the production and performance of the Death of Xiao Dangui],” Pingtan yishu, No. 27, 2000, 17. 86   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-928, 45. 87   Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007), 216. 88   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-5-928, 13. 89   Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-432, 10.



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unfathomable.”90 In other words, villains’ peculiar attractiveness attested to the audience’s yearning for escaping from the status quo in an impoverished and tedious society. Pingtan storytellers’ transformation of 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 exemplified artists’ resistance to state domination in Mao’s China. Pingtan storytellers’ resistance in the early 1960s was parallel to Shanghai workers’ strikes in the mid-1950s in that resisters in both cases fought chiefly for monetary gains.91 Yet, such resistance has been largely ignored and trivialized because, first of all, storytellers tended to employ “everyday forms” of resistance, to borrow James Scott’s term.92 Second, their resistance was intertwined with their accommodation, namely, their cooperation with the CCP to engage in ideological indoctrination in varieties of institutions such as enterprises, schools, and rural communes. Throughout the chapter, I have presented Yang Zijiang, for example, as a vocal resister, but what I did not mention is that Yang gained wide recognition in the 1960s for his writing of Guerrillas on the Railroad ( Tiedao youji dui) and Lei Feng, two stories about the CCP’s heroes.93 However, resistance and collaboration were just two sides of the same coin. Both served storytellers’ clearly-defined purpose, namely, to improve their economic conditions. Therefore, storytellers harbored no intention to and were unable to change the power relation between the Party-state and themselves, especially because of the bitter lesson they learned during and after the Guangyu Story House Incident. Nevertheless, their on- and off-stage struggles were by no means politically irrelevant. On the contrary, their resistance was symptomatic of the PRC regime’s inability to transform artists and entertainers ideologically into cultural workers in Socialism. Jin Jiang similarly finds that the CCP hardly integrated China’s entertainments into its cultural management system, nor could it completely remold the Chinese social culture by the mid-1960s.94 Pingtan storytelling’s flexible way of performing took on great political significance as it defied state’s supervision and intervention. Such

  Perry Link, The Use of Literature, 229.   Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai’s Strike Wave of 1957,” 239. 92   James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvi. 93   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, January 6, 2008. 94   Jiang Jin, “Duanlie yu yanxu,” 102. 90 91

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flexibility was immanent in pingtan skills, with which pingtan story­ tellers fascinated their listeners for generations. Most culturally vulgar and politically subversive elements populated in the government reports that leveled criticism at storytellers from the Spark or other troupes could be categorized “stuck-ins.” Therefore, censors were unable to take full control of stage performances by means of reviewing scripts in advance. It was thus understandable that the author of the report about the Spark in October 1964 proposed a rigid way of performing that required storytellers’ verbatim renditions of story scripts.95 At the height of the Cultural Revolution, radical bureaucrats further ruled to eliminate all xuetou and stuck-ins, among other things, to curb the dangerous flexibility inherent in pingtan storytelling.96 The surging radicalism during the Cultural Revolution bulldozed not merely pingtan’s performing techniques, but also its organizations and performers. The vast majority of pingtan troupes disbanded with their storytellers being either released or purged. As a consequence, pingtan storytelling would not revive until the late 1970s.

95 96

  Shanghai shi dang’an guan, Shanghai shi wenhua ju dang’an, B172-1-463, 82.   Zuoxian, Pingtan sanlun, 293.

Chapter Six

Beyond Spiritual Pollution: The Odysseys of Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang A few years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, commercial pingtan performances reappeared in the market. The audience felt ecstatic about their reunion with pingtan storytelling after a long decade. The honeymoon between the audience and pingtan artists lasted only two or three years. In the early 1980s, pingtan storytelling, like other theatrical and quyi arts, however, could hardly withstand the aggression of new forms of media and entertainment such as TV broadcasting and imported films. Under this circumstance, Beijing Opera troupes across China, for example, were encouraged to become more economically independent.1 In a similar fashion, the slump of the pingtan market prompted most pingtan troupes to restructure their employment and distribution systems, through which performing ensembles were able to temporarily hire and share profits with self-employed storytellers. In order to cater to the audience, storytellers developed new stories such as those about knights-errant and sensational events in pre-1949 Shanghai. This chapter focuses on two storytellers, Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang, who achieved market success with their newly written stories in the early 1980s. My choice of Su and Yang was by no means random. Both Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang failed to restore their status of professional storytellers following the Cultural Revolution. Unable to receive governmental subsidies, therefore, they had to rely on the market to reap profits. Their stories, Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong and Emperor Kangxi (Kangxi huangdi) respectively, both commanded a large audience before cultural bureaucrats managed to impose bans on them in the early and mid-1980s. Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong related a story about an elopement of a young lady from a wealthy family and her servant and displayed the kaleidoscopic social life in Republican Shanghai.

1   Elizabeth Wichmann, “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Beijing Opera Performance,” 149.

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As the fourth chapter has shown, stories about pre-Liberation Shanghai had already enthralled the pingtan audience because such stories presented a striking contrast between the impoverished China in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the affluent Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s. Aged listeners in the 1980s, nonetheless, cherished stories about Republican Shanghai for a differing reason: the nostalgia for their childhood in this city. In Emperor Kangxi, Yang Zijiang portrayed Emperor Kangxi (R. 1661–1722) as an enlightened ruler, who received assistance from various swordsmen to clean out corrupted officials and domineering nobilities in the government. Yang Zijiang was able to captivate listeners not merely because of the storylines, but also thanks to his incisive comments on the politics and society of the PRC. Such comments undoubtedly invited suspicions that Yang Zijiang used storytelling to launch attacks on the government, a déjà-vu of what he had already done in the 1960s. Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang, who were both temporarily expelled from pingtan storytelling, insisted that their stories raise cultural bureaucrats’ concerns not because they were deemed to lack artistic value, but because their success posed grave threats to state-run troupes, especially the Shanghai Troupe. In other words, state-run pingtan enterprises used their political capital to win market competitions against self-employed storytellers. The battle between stateemployed and self-employed pingtan artists once again unfolded in the times when China became increasingly commercialized, but the pingtan market had considerably shrunk. Pingtan Storytelling in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution inflicted a crushing blow on pingtan storytelling. Virtually all prestigious storytellers in the Shanghai Troupe were purged, while the vast majority of pingtan artists in the five Shanghaibased collectively owned troupes lost their professional status. Jiang Yunxian from the Long March, for example, was initially sent down to the countryside for twenty-two months and was later assigned a job in a confectionary plant in 1972.2 Yang Zijiang and Su Yuyin, the two

2   Cai Yiping 蔡一平, “Jiang Yunxian yu Tixiao yinyuan 蒋云仙与《啼笑姻缘》   [ Jiang Yunxian and Fate in Tears and Laughter],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 189.



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protagonists in this chapter, were transferred to a grocery store and a scrap recycling company respectively as the Spark, like many other performing troupes across the country, disbanded during the Cultural Revolution. Outside Shanghai, pingtan troupes similarly suffered from the depletion of personnel. The Wuxi Quyi Troupe ( Wuxi quyi tuan), for example, managed to keep only eleven performers after losing fifty. In the greater Suzhou area, only one out of eight pingtan troupes outlasted the Cultural Revolution. Accordingly, only one story house survived as more than twenty were shut down.3 When the Cultural Revolution ended in the late 1970s, pingtan ­storytelling instantly regained its new life. Tired of “model plays” during the ten years of turmoil between 1966 and 1976, post-Cultural Revolution listeners were delighted by the revival of traditional theater and storytelling. The three years between 1977 and 1980 were remembered as the honeymoon period for pingtan performers and the audience. Listeners welcomed whatever stories they were offered.4 New pingtan troupes were founded in Shanghai and many other places in the Yangzi Delta, and a large number of former pingtan artists restored their status as professional storytellers.5 Jiang Yunxian, for example, joined the newly established New Long March Pingtan Troupe ( Xin changzheng pingtan tuan) in 1979.6 Even under this circumstance, nevertheless, storytellers could hardly regain pingtan’s popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, according to a contemporary observer.7 The happy time between storytellers and their audience lasted only three short years. In the Chinese New Year break of 1979, pingtan performers were stunned to find that the market was extremely sluggish.8 Pingtan’s decline was deemed inevitable thanks to competitions from new types of media and entertainment such as Hollywood films and

3   Zhou Liang 周良, “Suzhou pingtan de lishi 苏州评弹的历史 [A history of Suzhou pingtan], Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 226. 4   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 20, 2007. 5   Zhou Liang, “Suzhou pingtan shihua (ba),” 145. 6   Cai Yiping, “Jiang Yunxian yu Tixiao yinyuan,” 189. 7  Fu Jun 傅骏, “Zou zhenglu, zou xinlu, zou kuanlu 走正路, 走新路, 走宽路 [ Take the right way, take the new way, (and) take the broad way],” Pingtan yishu, No. 3, 198, 30. 8   Qiu Xiaopeng and Yu Xiaoting 邱肖鹏、郁小庭, “Nuli gaohao xin changpian 努力搞好新长篇 [Endeavor to improve new full-length stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 253.

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TV plays.9 In 1980, pessimism pervaded as some storytellers, upset by the ever-dwindling pingtan market, made an assertion of pingtan’s imminent extinction.10 Though pingtan storytelling did not perish as predicted, the number of listeners continued to plummet throughout the 1980s. It was estimated that pingtan listeners in the Yangzi Delta amounted to thirty million per year immediately following the Cultural Revolution. Yet, by 1987, the number dropped to around twenty million. Meanwhile, the number of performers accordingly dipped by one third within one decade.11 The Shanghai Troupe’s frequent performing tours in Hong Kong in the 1980s were also viewed to be motivated by a desire of gaining profits outside the Yangzi Delta.12 One of the deciding factors behind pingtan’s decline was the dearth of marketable new stories. In 1983, for example, a critic wrote to express his dismay at the paucity of quality stories and innovation of performing styles. In his words, contents of stories were “trite” (chenfu), while storytellers’ performing skills seemed “crude” (cucao).13 One writer from the Suzhou Troupe complained that newly written full-length stories had disappointed the audience to such an extent that neither story houses, nor listeners or storytellers were willing to accept them.14 More contemporary observers were convinced that the centuries-old pingtan art had been outmoded in the 1980s.15 Shen Zu’an (b. 1929), a renowned playwright from Zhejiang, pointed out that listeners were on a quest for new and high-quality pingtan products after they resumed listening to pingtan stories in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, old styles and repertoire would no

 9   Wang Pei 汪培, “Pingtan yishu duanxiang 评弹艺术断想 [ Thoughts on the art of pingtan storytelling], Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 20. 10   Zhou Liang, “Suzhou pingtan shihua (ba) ,” 145. 11   Zhou Liang 周良, “Zhongdian fuchi pingtan 重点扶持评弹 [Give special support to pingtan storytelling],” in Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, disi ce, Zhou Liang juan 苏州评 弹文选，第四册，周良卷, ed., Zhou Liang 周良 (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1997) 84. 12  Ye Yi 叶毅, Tingshu suibi 听书随笔 [Random essays about listening to pingtan stories], n. p., 2009, 96. 13  Gu Xidong 顾锡东, “Kaishu diyi hui 开书第一回 [Starting the first chapter of stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 8. 14   Qiu Xiaopeng 邱肖鹏, “Jiulong kou chuangzuo yanchu qianhou 《九龙口》创 作演出前后 [ The process of producing and staging Jiulong kou],” Pingtan yishu, No. 7, 1987, 77. 15   Liu Housheng 刘厚生, “Jidian xiwang 几点希望 [A few wishes],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 9; Shen Zu’an 沈祖安, “Nan ye bunan 难也不难 [ Difficult, or not],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 239.



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longer appeal to a massive audience.16 Hence, it was widely recognized that new stories were in urgent need since listeners had been weary of classic ones.17 New breeds of storytellers’ lack of new stories or creativity gave Wu Junyu (1931–2008), a pinghua storyteller of the Shanghai Troupe, every reason to question the legitimacy of the existing systems of employment and distribution. Wu compared state-patronized artists, who were destined to perish in market competitions, to greenhouse plants, which would not survive storms in the wild.18 Wild Stories As storytellers could no longer count on classic stories to galvanize the post-Cultural Revolution audience, some of them turned their attention to the transplantation of knight-errant novels (wuxia xiaoshuo) and romantic fiction (yanqing xiaoshuo) published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In retrospect, storytellers’ recourse to those two genres stemmed from pingtan storytelling’s longstanding tradition of telling both romantic and heroic stories. To be more specific, most tanci stories featured romantic loves between scholars and beauties in the imperial era, while most pinghua stories centered on accomplishments of swordsmen or military leaders. Fiction published in Hong Kong and Taiwan could thus be seamlessly transplanted to pingtan storytelling.19 Yet in the socio-political milieu of the early 1980s, such stories failed to win favor of political and cultural authorities. On the contrary, they were derogatively labeled as “wild stories” (yeshu), namely, stories that obtained no approval from bureaucrats. To be more specific, wild stories included three genres, knight-errant stories, romantic stories, and stories with anti-governmental implications. Knight-errant stories were blamed for their emphasis on violence and preposterous plots.20

  Shen Zu’an, “Nan ye bunan,” 239.  Ren’an 忍庵, “Pingtan shumu yizhi guankui 评弹书目移植管窥 [A limited view on the transplantation of the pingtan repertoire],” Pingtan yishu, No. 7, 1987, 157. 18   “Huigu san sishi niandai Suzhou pingtan lishi 回顾三四十年代苏州评弹历史 ( Looking back to the history of Suzhou pingtan storytelling in the 1930s and 1940s),” Pingtan yishu, No. 6, 1986, 252. 19   Wenyan 闻炎, “Wenhua huanjing yu pingtan de fazhan 文化环境与评弹的发展 [Cultural milieu and the development of pingtan storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 20, 1996, 75. 20  Xiaogu 肖古, “Shuangye hongyu eryue hua—Shanghai pingtan tuan saer zhounian qingzhu hui sanji 霜叶红于二月花-上海评弹团卅二周年庆祝会散记 [ Frost-bitten leaves look redder than early spring flowers—random notes on the 16 17

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When highlighting the omnipotence of martial arts, moreover, knighterrant stories were anti-modern in that heroes were mystified to be able to overcome modern weaponry with their blood and flesh. More seriously, storytellers of such stories perpetuated feudal morals such as unconditional loyalty to the throne and guilds.21 Romantic fiction, which highlighted universal sentiments and emotions, especially loves between sexes, was dismissed for their overemphasis on “expressing the selves” (biaoxian ziwo) and their ignorance of the principal of the Socialist literature and arts that prioritized class over human nature. A critic further politicized pingtan stories that enshrined “passions of the selves” (ziwo zhi qing) by claiming that such stories were the manifestation of the ongoing Spiritual Pollution ( jingshen wuran) in the early 1980s.22 What was more politically incorrect were stories told by ­storytellers who intended to vent their resentment against China’s society and political system on stage.23 Wu Zongxi admitted that disgruntled listeners showed enormous interest in stories that overtly or covertly criticized the CCP, which confirmed the pervasion of “bourgeois liberalization” in China.24 To the disappointment of Wu Zongxi and his fellow CCP bureaucrats, wild stories, which were dismissed to be artistically unpolished and politically subversive, achieved great market success and contributed to attracting young listeners in the early and mid-1980s.25 Zhou Liang estimated that among two hundred newly staged stories in the 1980s, most were about knights-errant, pre-1949 Shanghai, and power struggles inside imperial governments.26 Between January and

c­ elebration of the 32nd anniversary of the Shanghai pingtan troupe],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 44. 21  Xi Wuchang 奚五昌, “  ‘Wuxia shu’ xiaoyi “武侠书”小议 [Small talk about “knight-errant stories”],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 179. 22   Miu Yihang 缪依杭, “Wuqing weibi zhen haojie—you Yiwang qingshen yinqi de sisuo 无情未必真豪杰：由《一往情深》引起的思索 [Real hero may not necessarily be unfeeling: thoughts from Long Lasting and Profound Love],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 99. 23   Wang Boyin 王伯荫, “Wode xinyuan 我的心愿 [ My wishes],” in Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu bangongshi ed., Chen Yun tongzhi he pingtan yishu, 94. 24   Zuoxian 左弦, “ ‘Churen, chushu, zou zhenglu’ 出人，出书，走正路 (“Cultivating talents, creating stories, and taking the right way”),” in Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu bangongshi ed., Chen Yun tongzhi he pingtan yishu, 57. 25   Zhou Yufeng 周玉峰, “Dui Suzhou pinghua xianzhuang de fansi 对苏州评话 现状的反思 [Reflections on the current situation of Suzhou pinghua storytelling],” Pingtan yishu, No. 11, 1990, 53. 26   Zhou Liang 周良, “Suzhou pingtan shihua ( jiu) 苏州评弹史话（九） [ History of Suzhou pingtan, part nine],” Pigntan yishu, No. 20, 1996, 120.



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July 1982, for example, over seven hundred stories were staged in more than one hundred story houses in Shanghai. Only one was a newly written patriotic story about China’s national women’s volleyball team, while the vast majority of stories could be categorized as wild stories.27 From July 1982 and June 1983, Tang Gengliang remembered, sixty percent of stories staged in Shanghai featured chivalrous heroes/heroines and incorruptible officials in ancient China as their protagonists. Meanwhile, stories about the Communist revolution nearly vanished in the market.28 For Communist cadres in the Yangzi Delta, the rampancy of wild stories lent them a feeling of déjà-vu about the year of 1961, when the CCP slackened control over artists including pingtan storytellers. As a result, as Wu Zongxi summarized, numerous vulgar stories with bawdy jokes, all of which had been previously banned or suppressed, rapidly dominated the pingtan market. To counter this trend in the early 1960s, Wu and many other CCP cadres requested Chen Yun to intervene in. After carefully studying the market, Chen Yun published a directive that urged storytellers to privilege pingtan art over monetary gains.29 Two decades later, Chen Yun was again invited to orchestrate a counteroffensive against the rampant wild stories. The Anti-Wild Stories Crusade Chen Yun’s knowledge about pingtan’s predicaments in the early 1980s generally came from minutes of a few meetings and his conversations with local CCP cadres and performers. During a private talk with Wu Zongxi on April 5, 1981, Chen wrote down the famous directive: “Cultivating Talents, Creating Stories, [and] Taking the Right Way” (churen, chushu, zou zhenglu). Chen understood that pingtan storytelling was facing numerous problems such as the outflow of talents, budget cuts, and the shrinking market. Yet, Chen believed that the most pressing task was to preserve the pingtan art.30 Chen Yun

  Wang Pei, “Pingtan yishu duanxiang,” 22.  Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, “Renzhong daoyuan, jiaobu xu zouzheng 任重道远, 脚步须走正 [ The burden is heavy and the road is long; Take the right steps], in Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu bangongshi ed., Chen Yun tongzhi he pingtan yishu, 95. 29   Wu Zongxi, “Jiaqiang shehui zeren gan,” 63. 30   Zhou Liang 周良, Chen Yun he Suzhou pingtan jie jiaowang shilu 陈云和苏州评弹界 交往实录 [ The chronicle of Chen Yun’s communications with the circle of Suzhou pingtan] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2000), 82. 27 28

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even proposed an increase of state funding to the Shanghai Troupe to prevent state-employed storytellers from telling overly commercialized stories and therefore discarding pingtan’s artistic tradition.31 In addition to government sponsorship, the Shanghai Troupe resorted to the political force to avoid the impacts of the market. In 1983, Chen Yun wrote a letter to urge local governments of the Yangzi Delta to coordinate with each other to tighten the control of story houses.32 Local cadres interpreted instructions in the letter as the weaponry of combatting bourgeois liberalization and exorcising Spiritual Pollution in pingtan storytelling in spite that Chen Yun had never explicitly established a connection between wild stories and the ongoing political movement of eradicating Spiritual Pollution. The letter, as a consequence, resulted in a meeting of five hundred participants in the Qingpu County of Shanghai, Chen’s hometown, in November 1983. In the meeting, organizers of the meeting leveled harsh criticisms at wild stories and their storytellers. It was also agreed in the meeting that wild stories would be outright banned.33 The movement of banning wild stories constituted part and parcel of the Campaign of Eradicating Spiritual Pollution (Qingchu jingshen wuran yundong) in the Yangzi Delta. The campaign, which aimed at countering the ongoing trend of preaching capitalist democracy, casting doubt on the legitimacy of Socialism, and blindly adoring foreign influences, briefly lasted between fall 1983 and February 1984. In retrospect, the central government and local bureaucrats had inconsistent visions for the goals of the movement: while political leaders in Beijing mainly focused on Spiritual Pollution in politics and ideologies, local cadres tended to extend the campaign to cultural and economic realms.34 In pingtan storytelling, Communist cadres reinterpreted it as a movement of battling artistic unorthodoxy, as exemplified by the meeting in Qingpu. Chen Yun, who had been famous for his tolerance to storytellers, was uncharacteristically supportive of the meeting and its decision to put a heavy hand on storytelling. Three decades later, Wu Zongxi regretfully admitted that Chen Yun was   Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡, “Chen Yun tongzhi dui dangqian pingtan gongzuo de yixie yijian 陈云同志对当前评弹工作的一些意见 [Some opinions about the current pingtan work by comrade Chen Yun],” Wenyi yanjiu, No. 5, 1981, 4. 32   Chen Yun, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben), 107. 33  Yang Xuelin, “Churen, chushu caineng baocun he fazhan pingtan yihsu,” 17. 34   Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 120–127. 31



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Illustration 13:  “Cultivating Talents, Creating Stories, [and] Taking the Right Way” (churen, chushu, zou zhenglu), by Chen Yun. (Photo provided by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe)

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actually misled by local cadres such as Wu himself into believing that wild stories were so rampant that they started to jeopardize the pingtan art he loved with a passion. As a consequence, Chen approved the movement of eliminating wild stories.35 Despite his vow to crusade against the unorthodox way of storytelling, Chen Yun emphasized that the government was well-intentioned and harbored no intention to intimidate artists.36 Employment and Distribution Systems in the Post-Mao Era To tighten the control over storytellers, managers of story houses were discouraged from contracting storytellers telling wild stories. A staff member of a Shanghai story house reported in 1985 that his colleagues always reminded storytellers of correcting their performing styles and purifying contents of stories. Some pressure was brought to storytellers through the audience.37 Not all story houses, however, were similarly committed to battling wild stories. As the economic reform entailed state-run story houses to take full responsibility of their financial losses and gains, the vast majority of story houses and pingtan troupes shared the concern of profitability. In other words, the reformative agenda that story houses and pingtan troupes pushed through was economic by nature, despite a resounding call for cultural orthodoxy and political correctness in the ongoing movement of annihilating wild stories. The economic missions of cultural producers exemplified a practice in the 1980s to equate the cultural reform with the economic reform: the former to mean nothing but, in Richard Kraus’s terms, “balancing the book[s].”38 To balance the books and break the Maoist egalitarian payment system, reforms were carried out to alter the employment and distribution systems among around forty pingtan troupes (excluding the Shanghai Troupe) in the Yangzi Delta starting in 1979 and 1980. The Suzhou Troupe, for example, cut the number of its registered performers from 91 to 60, but increased total yearly performances by

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 4, 2009.   Chen Yun, Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben), 118. 37   Liang Zhuqi 梁竹岐, “Wei kaichuang pingtan xin jumian, shuchang yingzuo naxie gongzuo? 为开创评弹新局面书场应做哪些工作？ [ To create a new situation for pingtan storytelling, what should story houses do?],” Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985, 250. 38  Richard Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China, 20. 35 36



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67% between 1978 and 1982.39 Furthermore, the “contract system” (chengbao zhi), which had been introduced in industrial enterprises nationwide, was ushered in to encourage storytellers to increase the numbers of their performances. The contract system was implemented in two phases. First, storytellers’ income was tied to the numbers of their yearly performances. Second, storytellers’ incomes were tied to box-office sales. Pingtan artists were usually entitled to 75 to 95 percent of the revenues, with the remainder going to the troupes.40 On one hand, the contract system as such enabled storytellers affiliated with the state- or collectively owned troupes to become semiself-employed performers. On the other hand, the system allowed nonaffiliated storytellers such as Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang to resume their storytelling career by registering with pingtan troupes without receiving fixed salaries. Performers under the contract system took the liberty to select the repertoire, which was somewhat out of political cadres’ control, but subject to market demands. With both storytellers and story houses focusing on revenues to survive, cultural bureaucrats’ cry for pingtan’s artistic orthodoxy and political correctness only became unheeded advice. Under this circumstance, a CCP cadre summarized that pingtan in the early 1980s was characterized by “three disorganizeds and one rampant” (sanluan yiduo), namely, disorganized ( performing) units (duiwu luan), disorganized repertoire (shumu luan), a disorganized system (zhidu luan), and rampant wild stories.41 The so-called three disorganizeds revealed the increasing diversification of pingtan performers and venues, which greatly complicated cadres’ control. Hence, the newly implemented employment and distribution systems in the post-Mao era opened new opportunities for former storytellers like Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang to continue their storytelling career and gain profits. Meanwhile, however, they kept feeling the pressure from CCP bureaucrats throughout the 1980s for artistic, economic, and political reasons. Artistically, their stories were blamed for deviating from principles of the pingtan art, while, economically, they successfully competed with the Shanghai Troupe for the audience

39   Zhou Liang 周良, “Dangqian pingtan gaige zhong de jige wenti 当前评弹改革 中的几个问题 [A few problems in the current pingtan reform],” in Zhou Liang ed., Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, disi ce, Zhou Liang juan, 41. 40   Zhou Liang, “Suzhou pingtan shihua (ba),” 149. 41   Wang Pei, “Pingtan yishu duanxiang,” 21.

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with their highly popular stories such as Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong and Emperor Kangxi. Su Yuyin Su Yuyin never gained recognition as a top-notch pingtan storyteller even though his master, Jiang Yuequan, was one of pingtan’s most celebrated artists and an active supporter of the CCP. As soon as he became Jiang’s disciple in the late 1940s, Su quit his job in a machine shop in Shanghai and learned Jade Dragonfly, his master’s favorite classic story.42 In the early 1950s, Su Yuyin failed to take the chance to join the state-run Shanghai Troupe, in spite of the fact that his master was one of its eighteen founding artists. He remained a selfemployed storyteller until 1960 when he joined the Spark. As soon as Cultural Revolution broke out, the Spark disbanded and Su was sent to a scrap recycling company where he worked until his retirement in the late 1980s. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, Su managed to perform pingtan by temporarily affiliating himself with numerous pingtan troupes. Throughout his career, Su Yuyin was most widely known for authoring and staging Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, a typical “Shanghai story” (Shanghai shu), a pingtan genre that features various aspects of urban life in pre-1949 Shanghai including secret societies, crime, prostitution, and sexual scandals. Uncritically embracing and appreciatively representing Shanghai’s colonial past, or “old Shanghai” (lao Shanghai), Shanghai stories understandably were viewed as politically incorrect before the 1990s. Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong The illicit love affair between Huang Huiru, a young lady, and her family’s servant, Lu Genrong, was the subject of gossip in the late 1920s and early 1930s not merely in Shanghai but throughout the whole Yangzi Delta. As reported in newspapers in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, Huang Huiru, the daughter of a wealthy family in   Qin Lailai 秦来来, “Du Shiniang qianxian bai mingshi 《杜十娘》牵线拜名师 [Du Shiniang facilitating (Su Yuyin) to be apprenticed to a famous master],” Xinmin wanbao, May 2, 2007. 42



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Shanghai, was initially engaged to a young man from an influential family. After the proposed marriage did not materialize, the heartbroken Huang fell in love with Lu Genrong. In August 1928, the pregnant Huang and her sweetheart escaped to Suzhou, but were soon captured by the Suzhou police. In a lawsuit that lasted two years, the Huang family sued Lu for abducting their daughter and stealing jewelry; Lu was eventually found not guilty in 1930. In the process, Huang broke with her family and fearlessly but in vain defended her lover. The Huang-Lu elopement elicited enormous public interest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Aside from news coverage, the story was adapted to three films in 1929 and, moreover, was staged in almost all theaters in Shanghai and neighboring cities.43 The story’s popularity also lent inspirations to pingtan storytellers of the day. As far as I can discover, two versions of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong pingtan storytelling emerged in the 1930s. One was the sixteen opening ballads published in 1935 in a Shanghai evening paper. Written in a sort of concise language blending vernacular and classic Chinese, the sixteen opening ballads sketched the elopement with an emphasis on Huang Huiru’s regret over losing her virginity to the lowly Lu.44 Another version was authored and performed by Zhao Jiaqiu. In the 1930s, Zhao had already earned fame as a pingtan master adept in representing Shanghai’s day-to-day life. In 1933 he was voted to be the most popular storyteller in Shanghai.45 Since complete textual or acoustic records of Zhao’s story are not extant, we can only take a brief look at his version by reading two published excerpts. By and large, Zhao condemned the Huang-Lu affair as an irredeemably shameless scandal, which could only be brought to an end by Huang’s suicide.46 The denunciation of the elopement in both versions thus evidenced pingtan’s conservatism in the 1930s that opposed romantic love without parental consent.

43  For more detail for the illicit affair and its representations in the media of the day, please refer to Qiliang He, “News about Killing, News that Killed: Media Culture and Identities in the 1920s China,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2006. 44   “Huang Huiru kaipian shiliu pian 黄慧如开篇十六篇 [Sixteen opening ballads of Huang Huiru],” Pingtan yishu, No. 12, 1991, 66–73. 45   Carlton Benson, “From Teahouse to Radio,” 237. 46   Zhao Jiaqiu 赵稼秋, Qiusheng ji 秋声集 [Collection of autumn sounds] (Shanghai: Xinsheng she, 1935), 46–47.

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Su Yuyin’s Career in the Maoist Era Su Yuyin’s full-length story of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was presumably not derived from that of Zhao Jiaqiu because, as he admitted, his story was in reality an extended version of a middle-length story.47 As an advertising booklet indicates, the middle-length story of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was once staged in November 1957 in the Smart Story House (Shimao shuchang) of Shanghai. The Smart Story House, previously known as the Smart Ballroom, was a typical privately owned ballroom transformed into a storytelling venue following the Shanghai government’s interdiction on ballroom dancing. The whole story, divided in four acts, “Falling in Love” (Dingqing), “Elopement” (Siben), “Arrest” (Beibu), and “Judicial Sentence” ( Xuanpan), required eleven storytellers to share stage. Su Yuyin and his wife were responsible for the third and first act, respectively.48 Su recalled that the eleven storytellers were then all young and inexperienced. Unable to secure a position in a state-owned pingtan troupe in Shanghai or elsewhere, Su had to team up with fellow storytellers to eke out a living.49 After 1958, Su Yuyin’s performing unit of eleven storytellers disbanded despite the glaring market success of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong presumably because of storytellers’ time conflicts. At this point, Su was entertaining the idea of expanding the three-hour long middle-length story of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong into a typical fifteen-day full-length one partly because there were too many performances of Jade Dragonfly, the story he regarded as best, in the market. In my interview with him in the summer 2007, Su Yuyin described how he took great pains in creating the longer version of the story. A conversation with one of his friends gave him inspiration. His friend considered that every story had its own character (xingge). Some were instructive, his friend opined, while others were amusing. The character of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong ought to be relaxing and humorous.50 As a consequence, Su kept enriching the story by adding anecdotes and folksongs of old Shanghai to the story over the next several decades.51 Su Yuyin’s project of rewriting and performing the full-length story of Huang Huiru   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007.   Shanghai shuchang jiemu, gongyuan yijiu wuqi nian shiyi yue nianer ri qi, n. p., 1957. 49   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007. 50   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007; Su Yuyin 苏毓荫, “Tingke de weikou 听客的胃口 [ Listeners’ appetites],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 11–12. 51   Su Yuyin, “Tingke de weikou,” 12. 47 48



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and Lu Genrong was disrupted in 1960, because he joined the Spark, where he received a fixed monthly salary of 90 yuan.52 Su’s joining the troupe proved counterproductive to his longtime project, Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, principally because of his lack of motivation. He thereafter no long worried about incomes, for the troupe’s staff usually arranged performances for him. In the early and mid-1960s, Su Yuyin and his partners were dispatched to both commercial story houses and performing venues designated by state-run enterprises. Under this circumstance, Su Yuyin recalled, he definitely had no incentive to create any new stories.53 Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in the 1980s The Spark disbanded as soon as the Cultural Revolution broke out. Su Yuyin, as noted earlier, was reassigned to a job as a worker in a scrap recycling company in the Yangpu District of Shanghai. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Su was unable to restore his professional status as a full-time pingtan artist. The contract system and the new, relatively flexible personnel management introduced in the late 1970s, however, enabled Su Yuyin to re-embark on his storytelling career. Despite his affiliation with the factory, he managed to sign contracts with numerous pingtan troupes, some in Shanghai and others elsewhere, in the first half of the 1980s. Su Yuyin, hired as a “specially invited” (teyue) performer, kept 80 percent of the revenues, while the troupes he performed with received the remaining 20 percent. The hiring pingtan troupes sent Su’s factory official letters asking to “borrow” him temporarily (usually for a year), while the latter suspended Su’s pay, but kept his position for him.54 Su Yuyin’s staple was Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, a commercially successful story despite its stigmatization as a wild story. Wild stories were dismissed as lacking cohesiveness or central themes as they were pieced together from multitudinous loosely related stories or anecdotes.55 To counter this charge, Su defensively commented that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong had a clear theme about marital freedom and universal equality, and was

  Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 54  Ibid. 55   Linghu Yuan 令狐远, “Tingshu buji (san) 听书随笔 (三) [Additional notes on storytelling, part 3],” Pingtan yishu No. 15, 1994, 145. 52 53

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therefore of great social significance. In the context of the 1980s when news about overly luxurious weddings abounded across the country, the love story between a high-class woman and her male servant served as a counter-example to marriages for the sake of money.56 Su Yuyin’s assertion was by no means baseless, as, for example, a 1989 news report indicated that the cost for weddings doubled between 1986 and 1989.57 To justify his goal of highlighting love, not wealth, as the ultimate purpose of the union between the sexes, Su Yuyin substantially revised the story. For example, Huang Huiru was not betrothed to a man of a similar age, as reported in newspapers in the 1920s. In Su’s version, Huang’s elder brother tried to marry her as a concubine to a man in his fifties. In this fashion, Su considered himself a social critic because such a revision was intended to criticize the early 1980s’ trend of loveless unions between young women and middle-aged men. Su recalled that, after the Cultural Revolution, many aged men, who had been politically purged and therefore lost their spouses, suddenly acquired wealth as a result of the government’s largesse. The unions between men with advanced age and young women invited widespread controversies regarding whether their marriages were based merely on economic considerations. Another noticeable modification was the status of Huang’s mother, who, in Su Yuyin’s story, was a concubine.58 Such a portrayal of her as a victim of polygamy and patriarchy in the traditional Chinese society allowed Su to glorify his story as “anti-feudalistic,” which greatly departed from the two conservative versions in the 1930s.59 What is worth mentioning here is that the story I have listened to is the version that the Shanghai Cable TV (Shanghai youxian dianshi tai) recorded in 1998. Considering pingtan storytellers’ propensity to add and subtract certain elements in their stage performances, it is safe to assume that what Su Yuyin actually narrated on stage in the 1980s was certainly not identical to what I heard. In effect, Su’s story consisted of only ten long chapters (two hours per chapter) as late as in 1981, whereas the current version includes 32 short chapters (one hour

  Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 20, 2007.   “Jiehun feiyong liangnian fanfan 结婚费用两年翻番 [ Wedding cost doubled in the past two years],” Xinmin wanbao, March 12, 1989. 58   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 20, 2007. 59  Ibid. 56 57



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per chapter).60 In the several decades between the 1950s and 1990s, Su Yuyin kept fleshing out the story by inserting a vast amount of xuetou, stuck-ins, and elaboration episodes. Despite Su Yuyin’s emphasis on the story’s promotion of marital autonomy and anti-feudalism, therefore, what really fascinated the audience was the suspense of the “master-loves-servant” theme and the myriad anecdotes and jokes.61 According to a commentator in the 1990s, the greatest contribution of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was the story’s lively depiction of society in Republican Shanghai.62 In the early and mid-1980s, however, the same details caused Su Yuyin a great deal of trouble. Su recalled that he affiliated himself with at least two pingtan troupes in the early 1980s to perform Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong. Sometime before 1981, Su became a specially invited storyteller of the Jiangyin Pingtan Troupe ( Jiangyin pingtan tuan) in the Jiangsu Province. Later, he signed a contract with the Jinshan Pingtan Troupe ( Jinshan pingtan tuan) in a distant suburb of Shanghai. Su’s itinerant storytelling in the Yangzi Delta was sometimes a distressing experience. In his own words, Su was frustrated to such an extent by the political interference with his storytelling that he “vomited blood” (tuxie).63 Su Yuyin felt that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong received unfair treatment at the hands of the Shanghai Culture Bureau and other Shanghai political and cultural authorities in the 1980s because it was labeled as a wild or even poisonous story. Su’s ex-colleague in the Spark, Shen Dongshan, later confirmed that he learned in the mid-1980s that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong had officially been blacklisted as a wild story during the aforesaid meeting in ­Qingpu.64 Not a single Shanghai story house dared to contract with Su. Su Yuyin’s performances outside Shanghai were also under constant surveillance and suffered from harassment for both ideological and economic reasons. In October 1981, for example, Su Yuyin unfolded his fifteen-day performance in Huzhou, Zhejiang. In the downtown area, there were three venues for pingtan performances. The most prestigious artist by far was Yu Hongxian (b. 1939) of the Shanghai Troupe.  Ibid.  Ibid., Su Yuyin, “Tingke de weikou,” 12. 62   Shen Shanzeng 沈善增, “Su Yuyin he Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong 苏毓荫和《黄 慧如与陆根荣》 [Su Yuyin and Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong,” Pingtan yishu, No. 12, 1991, 60–62. 63   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007. 64   Shen Dongshan, interview with author, June 28, 2010. 60 61

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Yu has been remembered as the artist who helped pingtan, a local art, attain national fame because of her singing of Chairman Mao’s poems before and during the Cultural Revolution. Yu, fresh from a tour in Hong Kong, initially galvanized pingtan fans in Huzhou. In comparison, Su Yuyin was relatively unknown to local listeners. In Su Yuyin’s debut in the evening of October 1, 1981, the story house that contracted with him sold only 40 tickets, whereas Yu Hongxian packed the auditorium with over 500 listeners. The audience’s enthusiasm for Yu, nevertheless, rapidly waned since her classic story was too familiar to listeners’ ears. In the next two weeks, Su Yuyin nightly performed before around a hundred listeners, while more and more pingtan fans asked to have their tickets for Yu Hongxian’s performance refunded. Yu ended her storytelling in Huzhou after ten days, five days earlier than scheduled.65 The plummet in Yu Hongxian’s popularity worried the Shanghai Troupe and cultural bureaucrats in Shanghai. A cadre of the Shanghai Culture Bureau called his counterpart in Huzhou asking that Su’s performance be discontinued on the grounds that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong contained stories about such poisonous things as prostitution and crime in pre-1949 Shanghai. Indeed, Huzhou’s cultural officials had also been concerned that Su’s story might “spread poison” (fangdu) among the audience. After cadres of the Huzhou Culture Bureau (Huzhou wenhua ju) attended Su Yuyin’s debut, however, they found the story ideologically and culturally harmless. On the contrary, they even praised the aspects of the story which preached marital freedom for their promotion of China’s new Marriage Law. To respond to the Shanghai Culture Bureau, bureaucrats in Huzhou summoned a dozen pingtan fans to a symposium to discuss Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong. Soon afterward, the manager of the story house, a certain Comrade Shen, took the minutes of the meeting and traveled to Shanghai to defend the story and explain Huzhou’s decision to let Su’s performances continue. In my interview with him, Su recounted the drama of Comrade Shen’s visit to Shanghai: I asked Shen not to quarrel with the Shanghai [bureaucrats, before he headed for Shanghai]. Shen was confident in himself [and stated] “I’m now over fifty and a CCP member. We are all CCP members. So, we will only appeal to reason ( jiang daoli).” . . . After he returned from Shanghai,

65

  Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007.



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Shen said that he and the Shanghai cadres [clashed to such an extent that they] pounded the table. The Shanghai bureaucrats ordered him to stop my performance, but Comrade Shen retorted, “What entitles you to demand that?”66

In retrospect, Su Yuyin understood that the Shanghai cultural bureaucrats’ opposition to Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was not necessarily driven by ideological reasons alone. Rather, market competition and profit were decisive factors. In early 1981, prior to the Huzhou performance, Su Yuyin had won another face-to-face competition in Hangzhou against artists of the Shanghai Troupe, who told the classic story, Three Smiles. On that occasion, the stunned director from the Shanghai Troupe personally came to listen to Su Yuyin’s storytelling and then jumped to the conclusion that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was a “bad story” that advocated the “theory of class conciliation” ( jieji tiaohe lun). The infuriated Su retorted “Even Mao Zedong never talked about class conciliation” (Mao Zedong dou bu shuo jieji tiaohe lun). Su Yuyin thus came to believe that all stories that commanded a large audience and were lucrative would be categorized as bad or wild stories as long as they were not performed by storytellers of the Shanghai Troupe.67 In Su Yuyin’s opinion, the Shanghai Troupe was not very responsive to the market at all. Heavily reliant on government subsidies, the troupe was not particularly interested in implementing the contract system and, as a result, most members of the troupe still had fixed salaries in the early 1980s.68 Zhou Zhenhua, vice director of the Shanghai Troupe at present, recalled that the troupe refused to apply a contract system prior to the mid-1980s. By 1986, the Shanghai municipal government covered the deficit that the Shanghai Troupe had on a yearly basis, and, as a consequence, storytellers were unmotivated to engage in performing tours in the first half of the 1980s.69 Such an outdated system made it possible for the Shanghai Troupe’s artists to continue to perform classic stories whose market was dwindling. Cultural bureaucrats in Shanghai including cadres of the Shanghai Troupe, however, continued to sing high praise of the troupe’s insistence on preserving traditional culture and combating vulgar market-oriented stories. Wu Zongxi, for example, boasted that  Ibid.  Ibid. 68  Ibid. 69   Zhou Zhenhua 周震华, interview with author, July 31, 2009. 66 67

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the Shanghai Troupe kept its eyes only on art and never stooped to “low taste” (diji quwei).70 Until recently, Wu took pride in the fact that the Shanghai Troupe never “sold pingtan for money.”71 Wu Zongxi, according to Su Yuyin, was the very CCP cadre responsible for banning Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong. In the early 1980s, Su tried a few times to stage his story in Shanghai, but in vain as no story house dared to enter a contract with him.72 As a matter of fact, controlling storytelling venues, most of which were state-owned and within the reach of the Shanghai Culture Bureau, had been a chief means of censorship in Shanghai. Wu Zongxi admitted that, as late as the 1990s, Shanghai’s cultural bureaucrats succeeded in blackballing the unwelcomed storyteller Yang Zijiang by dissuading all of Shanghai story houses from signing contracts with him. However, Wu Zongxi bemoaned that, unlike their counterparts who were responsible for censoring novels and motion pictures—and who could, of course, read manuscripts and watch films beforehand—censors of pingtan had no control over storytellers’ scripts. Therefore, Wu Zongxi explicitly denied that there was any censorship of pingtan in the 1980s.73 Wu Zongxi’s assertion about the nonexistence of censorship ought to be understood not as a fact, but as a result of a bureaucrat’s frustration with the unattainable goal of enforcing effective censorship over unwanted pingtan stories. In fact, Wu’s claim was at odds with Su Yuyin’s personal experience. Wherever Su performed, local bureaucrats would receive admonitions that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was a poisonous story.74 Local bureaucrats, nevertheless, tended to ignore calls from Shanghai to ban the story, as had happened in Huzhou. Such unsuccessful censorship resulted from both the Shanghai government’s lack of jurisdiction in neighboring provinces and local bureaucrats’ prioritization of profits over political correctness. Aside from performing outside Shanghai, Su figured out another way of circumventing censorship in Shanghai. In January 1983, for example, he succeeded in staging his story in the Jiading County, Shanghai. To outwit censors, the story house distributed flyers announcing that Su would tell the classic story, Jade Dragonfly, but in actuality the story turned out to be Huang

  Zuoxian, “Shanghai pingtan tuan de qunti fengge,” 86.   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, January 6, 2008. 72   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 73   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, January 6, 2008. 74   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007. 70 71



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Huiru and Lu Genrong.75 Apparently, censorship was not evenly enforced in Shanghai, with distant suburbs always being less tightly controlled or even totally ignored. Nonetheless, Shanghai’s bureaucrats finally managed to expel Su Yuyin from the world of pingtan, if only temporarily. In 1984, Su had a contract to perform for the Jinshan Pingtan Troupe, which was under the jurisdiction of Shanghai’s bureaucrats. Succumbing to enormous political pressure, the Jinshan Pingtan Troupe eventually decided to terminate Su’ contract. The shocked Su was delivered a document issued by the Shanghai Culture Bureau charging him with “earning illegal revenues and [telling] low-taste and obscene [stories] on stage” (huode feifa shouru, taishang diji xialiu). The document further threatened that the government would soon pursue an investigation of Su Yuyin’s possible economic crimes. Such an accusation did not even convince the director of the Jinshan Pingtan Troupe, who commented that it was unimaginable that his fellow CCP members would go so far as to use a government document to libel a storyteller. The despaired Su Yuyin had to cancel all scheduled performing tours and returned to the factory. Su Yuyin was able to resume his storytelling career after his retirement in 1986, but somehow illegally since he could gain no performing permits.76 The New Life of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in the 1990s The Shanghai Troupe’s hostility did not necessarily come from its cadres. Some storytellers also voiced their opposition to Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong and its storyteller, Su Yuyin. Yao Yinmei, one of the eighteen founders of the Shanghai Troupe, for example, had an essay published to accuse Su’s story of showcasing adultery and other criminal activities in the name of promoting marital freedom.77 Yao assumed his authority as a specialist of pingtan stories about Republican China for his longtime fame of telling Fate in Tears and Laughter, a story set in the 1920s. In all fairness, both stories of Fate in Tears and Laughter and Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong centered on young couples’ unfulfilled loves because of the victimization of evil powers such as warlords, stubborn   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 2, 2007.  Ibid. 77  Yao Yinmei 姚荫梅, “Shuoshu shi gaotai jiaoyu 说书是高台教育 [Storytelling is an education on high stages],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 5. 75 76

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parents, and conservative officials. Both stories furnished listeners with panoramic views of China’s urban society in the 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, Yao’s charge was hardly fair to Su Yuyin. Moreover, while Su’s story was intended to combat money-oriented marriages, the Shanghai Troupe was trumpeting True Sentiments and False Emotions (Zhenqing jiayi), a middle-length story written and staged, in much the same way, to correct a social malaise that valued wealth as the youth’s sole standard of choosing marriage partners.78 In this sense, Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was fiercely attacked only because it was not a product of the Shanghai Troupe and its market success was perceived as a threat to storytellers employed by the Shanghai Troupe. Yao Yinmei’s criticism of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, which was published in 1991, did not signal cultural bureaucrats’ renewed effort to suppress Su Yuyin and his story. On the contrary, Yao’s essay was printed in a magazine in conjunction with a dozen articles in 1991 that gave Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong and other Shanghai stories their long overdue credits. The essayists that participated in the discussion of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong ranged from pingtan storytellers (including Su Yuyin himself ), pingtan listeners, professional writers, to the CCP’s cultural bureaucrats. Most of them appreciated Su’s perseverance to enrich the story despite his mistreatments by political authorities and ability to provide the audience with intriguing details of the society in 1920s and 1930s China. Shen Shanzeng (b. 1950), a Shanghaibased novelist and reportage writer for example, was fascinated by Su’s depictions of the daily life half a century before. Shen particularly mentioned such tiny but interesting details as food in restaurants in the 1920s Shanghai.79 One pingtan storyteller, who subscribed to Su Yuyin’s claim that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was intended to promote marital freedom, laid emphasis on anti-feudalism as the story’s central theme.80 Another pingtan storyteller added that the story was written to oppose the overemphasis on familial backgrounds in marriages and to strive for free-choice marriages.81 A pingtan aficionado grouped 78  Xu Mengdan 徐檬丹, “Woxie Zhenqing jiayi 我写《真情假意》 [ My writing of True Sentiments and False Emotions],” Pingtan yishu, No. 2, 1983, 205–206. 79   Shen Shanzeng, “Su Yuyin he Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong,” 60. 80   Wang Rusun 王如荪, “Tingshu suigan 听书随笔 [Random thoughts of listening stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 12. 81   Zhang Shaobo 张少伯, “Ting Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong de ganxiang 听《黄慧 如与陆根荣》的感想 [Some thoughts after listening to Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong], Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 8.



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­ ingtan stories into three categories, “beneficial but not harmful” (youyi p wuhai), “harmful without benefits” (youhai wuyi), and “neither beneficial nor harmful” (wuyi wuhai). He implied that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong fell to the third category as it was structurally and ideologically flawed, but did no harm to listeners as an entertainment.82 As most contributors appreciated or at least sympathized with Su Yuyin, the backlash against staging Shanghai stories was relatively minor. Apart from Yao Yinmei’s essay, Yin Dequan, an editor of the Suzhou TV (Suzhou dianshi tai), similarly voiced his opposition. In his view, Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong deviated from pingtan tradition and catered to the audience with low tastes. Meanwhile, he, like pingtan theorists in Mao’s era, continued to enshrine stories about the CCP’s revolution as the new development of pingtan storytelling.83 A dramatist similarly contended that stories set in pre-1949 Shanghai had long existed as an indispensable part of pingtan storytelling. He redefined Shanghai stories as those featuring Communist undercover agents’ heroism in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai such as Wang Xiaohe and The Eternal Wave. In comparison, commercially successful stories including Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong were disruptive to the pingtan art.84 The last contributor raised an issue regarding how to remember and interpret Republican Shanghai in the age of open and reform. In Mao’s time, Shanghai’s self-presentation as the intermediary of the China and West and the forerunner of globalization was almost entirely suppressed.85 However, the memory about Shanghai’s colonial modernity in the Republican era never really evaporated, but revived after the 1980s. The audience’s preference of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong over Wang Xiaohe indicated a shift of the grand narrative of pre-liberation Shanghai from the CCP’s version that glorified Shanghai as a city with a revolutionary heritage to a popular nostalgia for its cosmopolitanism and material modernity. As has been shown in

82   Zhou Kemin 周克敏, “Youhai wuyi he youyi wuhai 有害无益和有益无害 [ Harmful without benefits and neither beneficial nor harmful],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 9–10. 83  Yin Dequan 殷德泉, “Tingzhong suopan 听众所盼 [ The audience’s expectations],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 63. 84   Zhou Jikang 周继康, “Ruhe shuohao jiu Shanghai ticai de shumu 如何说好上 海题材的书目 [ How to better tell stories about old Shanghai],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 8. 85  Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 182.

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the preceding chapter, memories about bourgeois life styles in preliberation Shanghai had already captivated the audience as early as in the 1960s. With China opening its door to the external world and the market being further loosened up following the Cultural Revolution, more and more storytellers engaged in commodifying such nostalgia on stage. The proliferation of Shanghai stories such as Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was by no means simultaneous, but was parallel to the government’s embracing of the memories of old Shanghai in the early 1990s when the city was “bathed in nostalgia.”86 Shanghai images and texts were marketed, as exemplified by the “Eileen Chang fever,” starting in the 1990s just like at the turn of the twentieth century. Alexander Des Forges analyzes that the government-sanctioned nostalgia functioned as a response to China’s growing involvement in globalization. By appreciating Shanghai’s modernity in the 1930s, the government and the media endorsed “a particular approach to global capitalism and its commercial culture.”87 Under this circumstance, in the official rhetoric and popular imaginary, “what was materially beneficial for Shanghai” had to be “ethically good and historically right.”88 It was thus not a surprise that Fan Boqun (b. 1931), China’s pioneering researcher of popular culture, sang high praise of Shanghai stories when he participated in the abovementioned discussion of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in 1991. In Fan’s opinion, stories about old Shanghai were produced and staged in the right time because of the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Shanghai city. Storytellers could thus join the choir of publishers and writers to help the Shanghai audience take a firmer grip on Shanghai’s past.89 Despite recognition and appreciation from Su Yuyin’s fellow storytellers, scholars, and writers and a relatively relaxed political environment in the early 1990s, the story’s road to Shanghai was still twisted and winding. Although Su Yuyin could no longer remember the exact year when he was allowed to perform in a story house in Shanghai, he recalled that it took some effort to outwit Communist bureaucrats and eventually acquire the performing permit in Shanghai. It was  Hanchao Lu, “Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China,” Pacific Affairs, Volume 75, No. 2, Summer 2002, 185. 87  Ibid., 182. 88   Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 216. 89   Fan Boqun 范伯群, “Manyi jiu Shanghai ticai de shumu he xiaoshuo 漫议旧 上海题材的书目和小说 [ Informal discussion of pingtan stories and fiction about old Shanghai],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 15. 86



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sometime in the early 1990s when the Dahua Story House signed a contract with Su and his partner. The manager of the Dahua Story House had attended one of Su Yuyin’s performances in Huzhou in 1981 as a member of the work team organized by the Shanghai Culture Bureau. Rather than blaming Su for telling poisonous stories, the manager was enormously impressed by Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong. Therefore, he did not hesitate to contract Su at this point. Initially, the application for Su Yuyin’s performance was delivered to the Quyi Section (Quyi chu) of the Shanghai Culture Bureau, but the story house received no response at all. Evidently, Shanghai cultural bureaucrats’ hostility against Su Yuyin lingered. The manager of the Dahua Story House then re-filed the application to the Theater Section ( Xiju chu). The confused cadres of the Theater Section wondered aloud whether the story house had mailed the application forms to a wrong address. At any rate, the Theater Section eventually granted Su Yuyin the approval after the story house submitted a supplementary report. Prior to the permit’s arrival, however, the manager posted advertisement outside the story house and Su had already started to perform. The popularity of the story in the Dahua Story House prompted Li Qingfu to attend the performances.90 Su Yuyin’s success in getting access to the Shanghai market resulted from the unclear jurisdictions of political institutions of the PRC government. The CCP’s censorship was thus fatally weakened because of the government’s fragmented and ill-coordinated administration. Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong gained further publicity in the late 1990s with its TV broadcasting. In 1998, Su Yuyin’s partner, Chen Zhong­ ying (b. 1967) suggested that she be willing to contribute two thousand yuan to bribe cadres of Shanghai television stations to earn a chance to have Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong videotaped and aired. Su considered that his partner was a strong-willed lady whose aspiration for a successful pingtan career impelled her to push for staging Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong on TV.91 Su Yuyin, however, was clueless about how to contact and convince personnel of TV stations. Luckily, Cheng Zuming (b. 1935), the editor of pingtan programs in the Shanghai Cable TV, approached Su Yuyin and suggested that the story be videotaped immediately.92 Cheng Zuming remembered that he and his wife had   Su Yuyin, interview with author, August 6, 2009.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 92  Ibid. 90 91

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frequented the Xiangyin Story House ( Xiangyin shuyuan), a story house affiliated to the Shanghai Troupe, to listen to Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong every Saturday in 1998. Although Cheng felt that the story could by no means represent the pingtan art, he still appreciated Su Yuyin’s performing skills. In Cheng’s opinion, it was Su Yuyin’s solid training under his master Jiang Yuequan that enabled Su to deliver the audience outstanding performances on stage. Cheng Zuming, who became an editor of the Theater Channel (xiqu pingdao) of the Shanghai Cable TV in 1994, was dismayed by the fact that his TV station lacked pingtan programs, especially full-length stories. Cheng occasionally had to borrow playable videotapes from his colleagues of the Suzhou TV. Cheng Zuming understood that the Theater Channel served a broad audience, not just professional pingtan artists and aficionados. Even though Su Yuyin’s story was artistically flawed, it was able to capture a large number of TV viewers who had minimal knowledge about the pingtan art.93 Under this circumstance, Cheng told Su and Chen that he had reported to his superior and the Shanghai Cable TV agreed to record ten chapters first to test market. In extremely hot and humid summer days in 1998, Su Yuyin and Chen Zhongying worked in a studio of the Shanghai Cable TV with a group of specially invited listeners. To keep the studio absolutely quiet, all the five floor air conditioners had to be turned off. Everyone including performers and cameramen suffered from intolerable high temperature. After five days of work, the first ten chapters of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong were officially aired in the TV station.94 In August 1998, when Su and Chen were on a performing tour outside Shanghai, Su Yuyin received an urgent phone call requesting him to return to Shanghai and have the rest of the twenty-two chapters recorded. The Shanghai Cable TV collected a large number of highly positive feedbacks from TV viewers and decided to resume the broadcasting, even though there were ill-willed attacks from anonymous listeners. The Shanghai Cable TV’s broadcast of the story thus gave Su Yuyin wide publicity as Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong enjoyed one of the highest audience ratings among pingtan programs in the following several years.95 In the next decade, the story was repeatedly televised by various TV stations in Shanghai. For example, Huang   Cheng Zuming 程祖铭, interview with author, February 7, 2011.   Su Yuyin, interview with author, May 7, 2007. 95  Ibid. 93 94



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Illustration 14:  Su Yuyin and Chen Zhongying (b. 1967) were performing Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in the late 1990s. (Photo provided by Su Yuyin)

Huiru and Lu Genrong was broadcast in the Shanghai TV (Shanghai dianshi tai) in October 2005, only one year after it showed up in the same TV station.96 Su Yuyin remembered that the story was aired for four times in total. The highest rating reached 2.4%, as opposed to under 0.1% for a lot of full-length pingtan stories on TV.97 Though Cheng Zuming failed to remember the exact ratings of the story, he was under the impression that Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong was from time to time among the top twenty TV programs, including more popular TV plays, news reports, and films, in terms of their ratings. More than once, Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong had to be rebroadcast when other full-length stories suffered from dismal ratings.98 Su Yuyin’s successful rendition of the story of Huang-Lu elopement enabled him to assume the authority as an insider of the illicit affair in particular and Republican Shanghai in general. In January 2007, when the Shanghai 96  Xu Xiaobo 徐晓波, “Dianshi shuyuan jiemu bianpai bu kexue 《电视书苑》节目 编排不科学 [ Programs of the Garden of Stories on TV are not scientifically scheduled],” http://bbs.sh-pingtan.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=2555, Accessed on February 3, 2011. 97   Su Yuyin, interview with author, January 7, 2008. 98   Cheng Zuming, interview with author, February 7, 2011.

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TV produced a documentary about the elopement of Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, Su Yuyin, along with historians and Lu Genrong’s daughter, was invited to tell the story and put forth his analysis of the case before millions of TV viewers.99 Finally, the popularity of Su Yuyin and Chen Zhongying prompted the Yin Dequan, who was in charge of making and broadcasting pingtan storytelling in the Suzhou TV, to invite Su and Chen to videotape Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong in Suzhou in 2007, despite Yin’s uncompromising stance to oppose the story in 1991.100 Yang Zijiang While Su Yuyin eventually gained recognition and respect in the 1990s and 2000s, his ex-colleague in the Spark, Yang Zijiang, ­struggled mightily against political authorities throughout the three decades between the 1980s and 2000s. Su Yuyin remembered that Yang ­Zijiang was popular as early as in the 1960s principally because of his exceptional ability to produce and stage new stories.101 In the early the 1980s, Yang Zijiang’s stories, primarily Emperor Kangxi, continued to command a vast audience in spite of his failure to have his professional status reinstated after the Cultural Revolution. Yet shortly after he resumed his storytelling career in the early 1980s, he was severely chastised for seditious comments against the government in his stories and eventually lost, for the second time, his legal status as a storyteller until the early 1990s. Yang Zijiang’s proneness to blaming the CCP, Wu Zongxi surmised, presumably stemmed from the maltreatment he received during the Cultural Revolution.102 Wu Zongxi’s speculation was partially correct, for Yang Zijiang’s sufferings in the PRC started in the early 1950s. As I have shown in the third chapter, Yang’s parents were arrested and all his properties confiscated shortly after the CCP’s takeover of China. Yang Zijiang’s embarkation on the career of   99   “Youguai, haishi siben? 诱拐还是私奔？ [Abduction or elopement?],” Shanghai dianshi tai, January 20, 2007. 100  Yin Dequan 殷德泉, “Suzhou dianshi shuchang luzhi Su Chen dang Zhupu yinyuan 苏州电视书场录制苏陈档《主仆姻缘》 [Suzhou TV Story House ­videotaping Marriage of Master and Servant by Su and Chen],” http://www.pingtan.com.cn/000006/ T061205SZ.htm, Accessed February 3, 2011. 101   Su Yuyin, interview with author, August 6, 2009. 102   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 19, 2009.



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storytelling resulted from his unemployment following the disaster in his family. Since Yang has never received systematic training of storytelling, according to Su Yuyin, his performing style differed from those of most storytellers in that he used mostly narration without resorting to gestures and postures to dramatize stories.103 In the 1960s, Yang Zijiang joined the Spark with Su Yuyin, Shen Dongshan, and scores of other storytellers. As an employee of the Spark, Yang Zijiang oftentimes conflicted with the director for his outspokenness and became the target of political authorities, for he tended to criticize the government, directly or indirectly, in his stories, as I have shown in the fifth chapter. Meanwhile, however, his ability to write new stories such as Lei Feng and Guerillas on the Railroad allowed him to enjoy special privileges in the Spark especially in the mid-1960s when all classic stories were banned by the Shanghai municipal government. Su Yuyin, who was impressed by Yang’s story about Commissioner Lin Zexu’s (1785–1850) suppression of opium trade on the eve of the Opium War (1839–1842), also confirmed Yang Zijiang’s outstanding ability to make arrangements of plots. His appreciation of Yang’s ability notwithstanding, Su Yuyin believed that Yang Zijiang was quite an unpopular person in the Spark probably for his arrogance. During the Cultural Revolution, therefore, Yang Zijiang’s unpopularity led to his radical colleagues’ bitter hostility against him. Yang was physically tortured and branded as a counterrevolutionary before he was sent down to a grocery store.104 The Ban on Yang Zijiang in the 1980s Soon after the Cultural Revolution, Yang Zijang, just like Su Yuyin did, resumed his storytelling career even though his stigma of counterrevolutionary had not been removed yet. Considering that he, as a counterrevolutionary, would not be accepted by any troupes, Yang decided to capitalize on the contract system by registering and sharing profits with the Zhenjiang Quyi Troupe (Zhenjiang quyi tuan).105 In December 1980, Yang Zijiang told Thirteen Emperors in the Qing Dynasty (Qinggong shisan chao) in the Xizang Story House, a spacious story house with 990 seats. The story gained popularity to such an extent   Su Yuyin, interview with author, August 6, 2009.  Ibid. 105   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 103 104

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that Yang Zijiang had to raise the ticket price by 0.05 yuan. While the majority of storytellers sold their tickets at the price of 0.15 yuan, the admission fee of Yang’s story amounted to 0.2 yuan. In Yang’s opinion, the spectacular success of his story posed a major threat to his counterparts in the Shanghai Troupe as most storytellers affiliated to the Shanghai Troupe lost competitions against him.106 Under this circumstance, cadres and performers from the Shanghai Troupe such as Wu Zongxi, Jiang Yuequan, and Tang Gengliang attended Yang Zijiang’s performances without giving an advance notice. Yang considered that their unexpected visits violated a longstanding unwritten rule among pingtan storytellers, which prohibited professional storytellers from attending their colleagues’ performances without prior consents. Yang Zijiang was under the impression that cadres and storytellers from the Shanghai Troupe, who invariably wore masks to conceal their identities in the story house, behaved secretively in order to gather evidence against Yang. The outraged Yang Zijiang blasted the CCP’s cadres by pointing out that he was not “vending illegal salt” (fan siyan), but just telling a story.107 Yang Zijiang, however, was not entitled to determine his own fate. In May 1981, all chiefs of Culture Bureaus and directors of pingtan troupes in Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang convened in Dongshan of Suzhou to find fault with jokes and comments used in Yang’s stories and make a motion to banish Yang from the world of pingtan storytelling indefinitely. What frustrated Yang Zijiang most was bureaucrats’ rejection of his appeal in the meeting. In reality, Yang was not even allowed to attend the meeting. In Yang’s words, the meeting in Dongshan was a “trial by default” (quexi shengpan), in which his storytelling career was sentenced to death.108 From cultural bureaucrats’ perspective, Yang Zijiang jeopardized his career because “vituperation” (ma) abounded in his storytelling, which epitomized the prevalent bourgeois liberalization.109 More recently, Wu Zongxi acknowledged that it was not just cadres from the Shanghai Culture Bureau or the Shanghai Troupe, but the Propaganda Department of the CCP committee in

106   Yang Zijiang, 扬子江 “Gao quanti pingtan tongren shu 告全体评弹同仁书 [A letter to all pingtan colleagues],” http://hk.netsh.com/bbs/875/html/tree_34526920 .html, Accessed November 5, 2009. 107   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 108   Yang Zijiang, “Gao quanti pingtan tongren shu.” 109   Zuoxian, “  ‘Churen, chushu, zou zhenglu,’  ” 57.



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Shanghai, that made the decision of expelling Yang Zijiang.110 Initially, as Yang remembered, Communist cadres did not outright impose bans on his storytelling, but encouraged other storytellers to level charges against him. Wu Junyu, who had been famous for his boldness in criticizing the government and the society and was consequently purged as a “Rightist” in 1957 in the Shanghai Troupe, accused Yang of anti-CCP remarks by commenting “whoever would like to vilify the Communist Party go and listen to Yang Zijiang[’s storytelling]” (yao ma gongchandang, quting Yang Zijiang).111 The last straw turned out to be a letter from a retired worker of a bicycle factory, in which the writer denounced Yang Zijiang for anti-CCP remarks in his stories. Nevertheless, Yang Zijiang firmly believed that it was political authorities who made the worker write such a letter.112 Under high pressure from the provincial government, the Zhenjiang Quyi Troupe had to revoke its contract with Yang Zijiang. Within a decade since 1981, Yang Zijiang’s storytelling career was again interrupted.113 In the process, Yang filed, but in vain, applications to regain the performing license for a few times. Wu Zongxi recalled that Yang once proposed donating all ticket sales to a fund for repairing the Great Wall in exchange for the performing license. Yet, the application was once more turned down.114 Hence, within a decade since 1981, Yang had to stay at home especially after his retirement from the grocery store. Yet, Yang Zijiang believed that he accomplished two goals during his lengthy exile. First, he babysat his grandson. Second, he devoted himself to creating or improving four new stories about Communist politicians, which would enable him to gain prominence after 1990, as the following chapter will demonstrate.115 Yang Zijiang’s Lawsuit against the Suzhou Troupe Starting in the early 1990s, Yang Zijiang was allowed to tell stories in southern Jiangsu, presumably because of his rapport with the Suzhou Troupe for a decade. Yang Zijiang took pride in his contribution to

  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 19, 2009.   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 112   Yang Zijiang, “Gao quanti pingtan tongren shu.” 113   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 114   Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 19, 2009. 115   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 110 111

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training three renowned storytellers for the Suzhou Troupe. All the three gained prominence in the market by telling Yang’s Emperor Kangxi, a story based on Thirteen Emperors in Qing Dynasties (Qinggong shisan chao). Yang ­Zijiang also earned a fame because of Emperor Kangxi both before and after his banishment from pingtan storytelling. Li Gang (b. 1968), a Suzhou-based pinghua storyteller and TV talk show host, recently hailed Emperor Kangxi as a masterpiece and the peak of Yang Zijiang’s ­storytelling career.116 Wang Chiliang (b. 1965), who freshly graduated from a pingtan academy and joined the Suzhou Troupe in the early 1990s, lived with Yang Zijiang to learn Emperor Kangxi. Given that Yang had instructed Wang Chiliang’s master previously, as Yang ­Zijiang remembered, Wang willingly called Yang as “grandpa” (adie). In 1995, before Wang Chiliang competed for a national title of storytelling, Yang Zijiang spent three full days in rehearsing an episode from Emperor Kangxi with Wang. Yang specifically asked Wang to conclude the story with a line: “After five hundred years, another sage emerged in the world, that is, Deng Xiaoping” ( Wubai nian youchu yi shengren, Deng Xiaoping). Yang Zijiang believed that such a complimentary remark about China’s supreme leader would help his grand student stand out and win the contest. Wang Chiliang lived up to Yang’s expectation by winning the first prize.117 While Wang Chiliang as well as the Suzhou Troupe acquired prestige and profits because of the story Yang authored, Yang Zijiang disappointedly felt that he had never been given enough credits. As more storytellers told Emperor Kangxi and some even profited from publishing audio-visual products of the story, Yang Zijiang’s dissatisfaction gradually grew. The Suzhou TV’s broadcasting of Emperor Kangxi by a storyteller of the Suzhou Troupe in early 2004 triggered the resentful Yang Zijiang to file a lawsuit against the Suzhou Troupe to claim his copy right of the story in May 2004.118 A group of young lawyers willingly worked for Yang Zijiang and waived his attorney fees in order to gain more publicity for their law firm.119 During the court hearing on May 24, the plaintiff stated that the storytellers employed by

  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010.   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 118  Feng Ying 冯莹, “Kouchuan xinshou yinchu banquan zhizheng 口传心授引 出版权之争 [( The practice of ) passing down by mouth and giving by heart led to disputes over copyright],” Renmin fayuan bao, September 8, 2006. 119   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 116 117



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the Suzhou Troupe staged Emperor Kangxi for numerous times, had the story broadcast, and produced compact disks for sale without the authorization of Yang Zijiang, the story’s author. Therefore, Yang sought an injunction to stop the Suzhou Troupe’s encroachment of his right of authorship and requested an open and official apology as well as fifty thousand yuan as compensation from the defendant. Hence, Yang Zijiang was hailed as the first pingtan storyteller who defended his intellectual property rights through legal avenues. All quyi performers in the Yangzi Delta, not just pingtan storytellers, thus riveted their attentions to the case.120 Most Yang Zijiang’s ex-colleagues and friends, including Su Yuyin, nevertheless, did not fancy his chance of winning the lawsuit since Yang had always been in the disadvantageous position vis-à-vis political authorities for decades.121 The defendant, the Suzhou Troupe, retorted that it had been a time-honored tradition in pingtan storytelling that apprentices learned from masters to obtain stories. The defendant described pingtan storytellers’ transmission of stories as “passed down by mouth and given by heart” (kouchuan xindi), with which authorizations in writing were unnecessary as long as master-apprentice relationship was built and recognized. Furthermore, all performers who learned from Yang Zijiang had already paid their apprentice fees (150 yuan each). If the modern-day idea of copyright were applied to pingtan storytelling, the Suzhou Troupe continued, this traditional oral art would have certainly died out provided the master-apprentice relationship collapsed.122 Moreover, the Suzhou Troupe argued that Yang Zijiang was by no means the author of Emperor Kangxi since the story was in actuality derived from a well-known folk story. After rounds of heated debates between the defendant and the plaintiff, the court decided to mediate. The chief of the law court admitted that the court initially attempted to categorize the story as an “oral work” (koushu zuopin), but later recognized it as a legitimate quyi work, whose intellectual

 Feng Ying, “Kouchuan xinshou yinchu banquan zhizheng.”   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 122   Li Xiaowei and Wang Ren 李小伟、王刃, “Banquan zhizheng, pingtan yiren Yang Zijiang su Suzhou pingtan tuan zhuzuo quan jiufen an” 版权之争，评弹艺人 扬子江与苏州评弹团著作权纠纷案 [Controversy of copyright: the case of pingtan storyteller Yang Zijiang’s suing Suzhou pingtan troupe over copyright], http://www .chinalawedu.com/news/21604/5900/63/2006/9/xi7121146101129600211644-0 .htm, Accessed Febuary 17, 2010. 120 121

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property rights were protected by law.123 Eventually, an agreement was reached and the Suzhou Troupe was willing to hand over all prize money that Emperor Kangxi had won and pay extra twenty thousand yuan as the compensation for Yang Zijiang.124 When looking back on the lawsuit, Yang Zijiang provided a new perspective of the relationship between market and politics by summarizing his storytelling career in the 1980s and 1990s: On the one hand, his storytelling was outlawed by means of political intervention; on the other hand, Communist bureaucrats sent young storytellers to learn stories from Yang Zijiang because of their awareness that Yang’s stories and storytelling styles warranted market success.125 *  *  *  * After the Cultural Revolution, both Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang gained prominence in the market thanks to the newly instituted contract system in most performing enterprises in the Yangzi Delta. The contract system, which originated in the economic reform in cities and the countryside alike, was evidently a transplantation of economic policies to the cultural reform following the Cultural Revolution. As I have shown in the third chapter, political and cultural authorities had applied the rule of planned economy to culture in the 1950s and 1960s when state-run troupes provided their targeted audience (workers, farmers, or soldiers) with designated stories in performances organized by state-run enterprises or institutions. Hence, it is safe to argue that political authorities in both Maoist and post-Maoist eras aimed to apply economic measures, the planned economy and the contract system respectively, to cultural reform. My study of the CCP’s policies of managing pingtan storytelling thus reveals the continuity before and after the Cultural Revolution in the realm of cultural reform. The continuity of the two historical times also manifested itself in the resurgent conflicts between self-employed and state-affiliated storytellers. In both times, the jousts for the pingtan market were masked in the political and cultural rhetoric. In 1958, as the chapter four has illustrated, selfemployed storytellers, who reaped enormous profits from the market, were charged for perpetuating feudal and bourgeoisie ideologies in their classic stories and were therefore forced to be collectivized after  Feng Ying, “Kouchuan xinshou yinchu banquan zhizheng.”   Su Yuyin, interview with author, July 2, 2009. 125   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 123 124



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the Rectification Movement. In the 1980s, in a similar fashion, storytellers such as Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang, who had oftentimes outdueled their counterparts from state-run troupes in market competitions, were accused of telling wild stories, spreading Spiritual Pollution, and propagating the bourgeois liberalization. The Campaign of Eradicating Spiritual Pollution marked the culmination of the CCP’s decades-long effort to battle bourgeois liberation and tighten its control over the society and the culture. Students of the campaign have focused their attention to the Chinese supreme leaders’ initiation of launching the crusade against Spiritual Pollution in an attempt to denounce political dissidents and fend off political and ideological influences from the West.126 Yet, as Merle Goldman posits, various groups including Party cadres in local areas took the opportunities brought about by the campaign to attack their rivals.127 The expulsion of Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang exemplified the economic use of this political campaign in the local level. In other words, cultural bureaucrats used their political and cultural capital in the movement to vanquish their competitors and scramble for profits from the market. The movement against wild stories, furthermore, also illustrated the increasing diversification and fragmentation of the CCP’s rule. CCP members in different areas of the Yangzi Delta clashed with each other regarding who was entitled to judge Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong. The ban on Su Yuyin and his full-length story was limited only to Shanghai and did take effect in the neighboring provinces, attesting to the fact that the poor coordination among various regions further complicated and weakened the CCP’s censorship over popular culture, especially inherently censorship-unfriendly pingtan storytelling. The weakened censorship over pingtan storytelling eventually allowed storytellers like Yang Zijiang to resume his storytelling career since the early 1990s. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Yang Zijiang gradually quit performing Emperor Kangxi, but turned his attention to a number of stories about political leaders and events in the past six decades. Yang Zijiang’s alteration of topics corresponded with the audience’s shift of tastes from the 1980s to the mid-1990s and beyond. Shanghai stories such as Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong were able to capture listeners’ 126   Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China, 120–127; Charles Alber, Embracing the Lie: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in the People’s Republic of China ( Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004), 235–251. 127   Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China, 123.

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imagination about Shanghai in the Republican era, the times when most listeners in the 1980s were born and raised up. More than one decade later, the new breeds of listeners who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s wished storytellers to help them revisit Mao’s China, a contrast to an ever-commercialized and globalized China at the turn of the twenty-first century. Under this circumstance, Yang Zijiang continued to score remarkable market success. His stories, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping (Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping), which I will discuss in some detail in the following chapter, were deliberately designed to elicit aged listeners’ memories about their childhood and youth when Mao’s China was characterized by both egalitarianism and social and political unrests.

Chapter Seven

Between Nostalgic and Critical: Political Pingtan Stories at the Turn of the New Millennium This chapter examines the rise of political pingtan stories, namely, full-length stories about the history of the PRC or CCP. Initiated by Yang Zijiang, political stories usually focus on Communist leaders’ privacy as well as great political events and incidents such as the Cultural Revolution and the June 4th Incident (1989), which governmentsanctioned editions of history failed to explain fully and clearly. Political pingtan stories met the tastes of the new breeds of listeners, who grew up in Mao’s times and retired in the late 1990s and 2000s. Stories about the early years of the PRC fascinated listeners as storytellers succeeded in eliciting memories of the elderly about their childhood and youth. As full-length stories required each listener to return to the same story house on a daily basis, an unintended outcome of the popularity of political pingtan stories at the turn of the new millennium was the transformation of story houses into a public space for retirees’ socialization. When China was rapidly aging in the past two decades, it became a pressing issue for local governments to take good care of the elderly. In many parts of the Yangzi Delta, under this circumstance, storytelling became one of the government-funded means of entertainment to serve retirees. Therefore, starting from the late 1990s through the 2000s, a large number of story houses were either renovated or constructed to allow aged listeners to enjoy pingtan storytelling, including political pingtan stories. Although plots of political stories were at odds with official histories of the CCP and PRC and some of the storytellers’ comments occasionally could easily be interpreted as social criticisms of the prevalent political corruptions and moral decadence, CCP officials were usually tolerant, compared with cadres’ hard lines against Yang Zijiang and Su Yuyin in the 1980s. The tolerance resulted from, first of all, a more liberal society in the late 1990s and 2000s. Second and presumably more importantly, the desire to keep the elderly in story houses completely outweighed political correctness.

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The storytellers featured in this chapter are Yang Zijiang, Li Gang, and Zhou Ping (b. 1964), all of whom were pinghua storytellers. It is not my intention to downplay the popularity of tanci in the new millennium. Tanci performers were able to garner high profits by not only staging full-length stories in story houses, but also engaging in singing shows in varieties of venues such as TV broadcasting and tourist sites. A top tanci performer was entitled to earn as much as ten thousand yuan per month by merely singing opening ballads in private parties, restaurants, and TV shows.1 Though there were also tanci storytellers who told political stories, it was pinghua storytellers who achieved greatest success in staging and developing such a new genre of pingtan stories. As shown in the first chapter, pinghua, as the musicless subgenre of pingtan storytelling, requires storytellers to use xuetou and incisive comments to interest listeners. In the history of pingtan storytelling, pinghua stories were almost exclusively those about politicians, militarists, and swordsmen. In other words, pinghua has long been a “masculine” subgenre of pingtan storytelling. Hence, it was no wonder that a large number of pinghua storytellers made their career by telling political pingtan stories in the last two decades. The box-office success of political stories both allowed pingtan storytelling to assume a new social function as a means of community service for retirees and boosted the pingtan market, which had been in decline since the 1980s. The Decline and Revival of Pingtan Storytelling in Post-Mao China The decline of pingtan storytelling started as early as in the spring of 1979, when storytellers were pained to find that their box-office sales plummeted.2 Throughout the 1980s, the influx of novel technologies and new entertainments such as TV broadcasting and foreign films took a heavy toll on pingtan storytelling.3 From the late 1990s on, however, pingtan storytelling unexpectedly managed to bounce back and restore its role as an important entertainment, if almost exclusively for elders. Peng Benle (b. 1938), who was once trained as a pingtan   Zhou Zhenhua, interview with author, December 23, 2011.   Qiu Xiaopeng and Yu Xiaoting, “Nuli gaohao xin changpian,” 253. 3  Wang Pei, “Pingtan yishu duanxiang,” 20. 1 2



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performer and scriptwriter, but has devoted himself to studying pingtan’s impact on the modern-day urban society, noted in 2000 that Shanghai alone had over eighty story houses, whereas the same city boasted only one hundred story houses in the 1950s, arguably the golden time of pingtan storytelling.4 Meanwhile, story houses in Suzhou grew quickly in a similar fashion. Between 1995 and 2000, the number soared from 20 to 45.5 In the new millennium, the main concern in the world of pingtan was no longer the lack of listeners, but the shortage of quality storytellers. During the 1980s and 1990s when pingtan storytelling hit nadir, a large number of storytellers quit their career as pingtan artists and switched to other businesses for livelihoods. Li Gang recalled that most pinghua storytellers across the Yangzi Delta felt it difficult to win contracts for stage performances since 1988 and he chose to be a businessman in 1993. In the 2001, when Li Gang restored his career as a pinghua storyteller, he only found that story houses strove to hire storytellers.6 Peng Benle estimated that the eighty story houses in Shanghai had to share around sixty dang of storytellers.7 Meanwhile, storytellers had access to alternative arenas, such as TV broadcasting and radio stations, to tell stories and gain extra income. A survey conducted in the late 1990s indicated, for example, the number of listeners who enjoyed pingtan art on a regularly basis might reach ten thousand each day.8 As late as in 2009, pingtan storytellers reportedly put on over 29,000 performances and attracted 3.6 million listeners in Shanghai, which indicated that pingtan storytelling remained one of the major means of entertainment in this city.9

4  Peng Benle 彭本乐, “Shanghai de shuchang, tingzhong he pingtan yanyuan 上海 的书场, 听众和评弹演员 [Story houses, the audience, and pingtan performers in Shanghai],” Pingtan yishu, No. 27, 2000, 143–147. 5  Gao Fumin 高福民, “Rang Suzhou pingtan genshang shidai de fazhan 让苏州 评弹跟上时代的发展 [Let Suzhou pingtan keep pace with the development of the times],” Pingtan yishu, No. 27, 2000, 7. 6  Li Gang, interview with author, June, 25, 2010. 7  Peng Benle, “Shanghai de shuchang, tingzhong he pingtan yanyuan,” 153. 8  Ibid., 154. 9   Chu Jingwei 储静伟 “Tairi pingtan shuchang binlin guanzhang, lao tingzhong jishu shi lingdao zhonghuo zhengfu zhengjiu” 泰日评弹书场濒临关张 老听众疾书 市领导终获政府拯救 [The Tairi pingtan story house was on the verge of being out of business; old listeners wrote to leaders in the municipal government and the government eventually came to rescue], Dongfang zaobao, August 31, 2011.

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Pingtan Storytelling and China’s Aging Society The resurgence of pingtan storytelling in the late 1990s was a direct outcome of China’s rapidly aging society. Robert Stowe England posits that China is aging rapidly because of the one-child policy. In 2000, people aged over 65 constituted 7% of the whole population and the percentage will rise to 25 to 30 by 2040.10 As early as in the 1980s, signs started to appear that pingtan would become an entertainment exclusively for the elderly. Wu Zongxi recalled that some story houses in the 1980s began to cancel night performances to cut costs because the elderly usually chose to stay at home at night.11 A survey published in the early 1990s indicated that, among 40 listeners in a story house, 14 were over 70, 17 between 60 and 70, and 6 between 40 and 60. The average age was 61.26.12 In 2007, a writer found that story houses in Suzhou were open to listeners only in the daytime to serve the needs of older listeners. Instead of blaming story houses for neglecting the young clientele, the writer appreciated storytellers’ fulfillment of their “social functions” (shehui gongneng), namely, providing the elders with sites where they could kill time.13 Without storytelling, Peng Benle posited, “a sense of isolation, alienation, and inferiority” (gudu gan, shiluo gan he zibei gan) would have grown to such a degree that retirees might conflict with their families and even the society. Peng’s conclusion was drawn from his observation of retired inhabitants in a town of the Baoshan District of Shanghai, where the only two story houses were initially out of business. As the elderly had nowhere to listen to pingtan stories, they elected to play mahjong as both amusement and gambling. Discords between the elderly and their families surfaced and intensified before the township government decided to reopen a story house to alleviate the hostility inside families.14 Retirees, however, heartedly embraced storytelling not necessarily because they had been long-time pingtan fans. Many of them, on the contrary, had rarely listened to pingtan stories and frequented story 10  Robert Stowe England, Aging China: The Demographic Challenge to China’s Economic Prospects (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2005), xi. 11  Wu Zongxi, interview with author, January 6, 2008. 12  Peng Benle, 彭本乐 “Lun Shanghai shuchang wenhua de fazhan he tigao 论上 海书场的发展和提高 [On the development and improvement of culture in story houses of Shanghai],” Pingtan yishu, No. 14, 1993, 113. 13  Gu Duhuang 顾笃璜, “Xiaoyi pingtan 小议评弹 [Some minor comments on pingtan storytelling].” Pingtan yishu, No. 37, 2007, 24. 14  Peng Benle, “Shanghai de shuchang, tingzhong he pingtan yanyuan,” 152.



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houses prior to retirement. In Peng Benle’s words, they were “new aged listeners” (laonian xin tingke).15 New aged listeners sat in story houses not for the sole purpose of listening to stories, but in order to hang with their fellow listeners in the same story houses on a daily basis. The emergence of new listeners should be understood against the backdrop that danwei (workplace units) no longer provided their retired employees with civil sociability and the elderly had to seek socialization in private ways in reform China.16 As a CCP cadre has lately pointed out, pingtan storytelling differentiated itself from theaters and motion pictures in that full-length pingtan stories were invariably performed in an installment in fifteen days or longer and were thereby able to attract the same listeners daily.17 Peng also noted that there were listeners who kept frequenting specific story houses for years or even decades.18 Peng called such extremely loyal clients as “banker listeners” (zuozhuang tingke), who understandably became leaders among their fellow listeners.19 Intimate social groups thus came into being among listeners, who got together regularly in story houses and had similar tastes and interests in pingtan storytelling. Story houses thereby provided members of such social groups with a public arena where they shared information and viewpoints about more than just pingtan stories, but personal incomes, commodity prices, social news, and political issues.20 Prior to a pingtan performance that I attended in the Yalu Story House (Yalu shuchang) in Shanghai on June 25, 2011, for example, aged listeners, who obviously lived in the same neighborhood and therefore knew each other, were engaging in an animated discussion about the imminent moving and relocating of their houses. The indignant listeners pointed their fingers at the local

15  Peng Benle 彭本乐, “21 shiji pingtan qianjing zhanwang 21世纪评弹前景展望 [Pingtan’s prospect in the 21st century],” Pingtan yishu, No. 26, 2000, 86. 16   Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-Cultivation in China’s Capital,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 20, Issue 3, 313. 17  Wang Zhenghao 王正浩, “Jianlun shuchang yanchu de jingying he guanli 简论 书场演出的经营和管理 [Briefly on the management and administration of performances in story houses],” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991, 40. 18  Peng Benle, “Shanghai de shuchang, tingzhong he pingtan yanyuan,” 151. 19  Peng Benle, “Lun Shanghai shuchang wenhua de fazhan he tigao,” 116. 20  Peng Benle 彭本乐, “Lun Shanghai shuchang wenhua de fazhan he tigao 论 上海书场文化的发展和提高 [On the development and improvement of culture in story houses of Shanghai],” in Zhou Liang 周良 ed., Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, dier ce, 1979–1994 苏州评弹文选, 第二卷, 1979–1994, 270.

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government, who, according to them, tried to “kick old Shanghainese out [of Shanghai]” (ba lao Shanghai gan chuqu). In rural areas, listeners also exchanged information about agricultural technologies and markets of farm produce.21 Usually, it was the “banker listeners” who dominated such discussions because of their seniority and rich experiences in both story houses and the society. Listeners might further relay the information and viewpoints they acquired from story houses to the wider public in the society.22 To accommodate listeners’ needs, story houses usually made special arrangements. The Tianlin Story House (Tianlin shuyuan) in western Shanghai where Zhou Ping told a political story in June 2011, for example, installed small cases under seats to allow listeners to store their teacups and other personal belongings. In a similar fashion, a story house in the Songjiang District that I visited on May 9, 2009 permitted listeners to keep their cups on tables so that most listeners could have fixed seats. Despite the new function of story houses as a locus for listeners’ socialization, they resumed their role as the provider of pingtan stories. Yet classic stories that pingtan storytellers kept telling in decades, if not centuries, were no longer highly sought after. Peng Benle analyzed that the new aged listeners at the turn of the twenty-first century were inexperienced listeners and showed no interest in pingtan’s performing skills but prioritized intricate and intriguing plots.23 In the past two decades, it was political stories that fascinated the listeners most. An onsite survey conducted on January 5 2010, for example, indicated that among 50 listeners in a story house in the Changning District of Shanghai, 47 were not desirous of any classic pingtan stories, while 40 were eager to listen to stories about political history of the Cultural Revolution or the reform era, namely political stories.24 Political pingtan stories have certainly reinvigorated pingtan market and enabled a number of formerly obscure pingtan performers to make their careers. Such stories were lauded for their capacity to reflect the real life and thereby captivate the audience.25 Even though some political stories had glaring weakness such as narrative incompleteness,

 Ibid.  Peng Benle, “Lun Shanghai shuchang wenhua de fazhan he tigao,” 116. 23  Peng Benle, “21 shiji pingtan qianjing zhanwang,” 86. 24   Sang Jian 桑健, interview with author, January 6, 2010. 25   Quri 曲日, “Yao renzhen zhuahao changpian shumu jianshe 要认真抓好长篇 书目建设 [(We) need to seriously improve the building of full-length stories],” Pingtan yishu, No. 26, 2000, 6. 21 22



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they galvanized the audience in many cities of the Yangzi Delta. Peng Benle once personally attended a pingtan performance about Lin Biao’s (1907–1971) attempted coup d’état in the early 1970s, only to find that the story lacked a central theme and structural coherence. For all its deficiency, however, the story commanded a large audience.26 Li Gang made a similar observation shortly before he resumed his storytelling career in 2001. Li initially wondered why such an incomplete and incoherent story could ever enthrall a large number of listeners. Eventually, he realized that the coup d’état itself was attractive enough.27 For aged listeners, political events in PRC constituted a major part of their lived experiences and had become their indelible memories. Listeners’ zest for political pingtan stories in the new millennium, according to a pingtan artist, was comparable to the 1980s when audience members, who spent their childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, were fascinated by stories about pre-liberation Shanghai. Sensational news in pre-1949 and political events in early PRC eras similarly evoked generations of listeners’ nostalgia for their childhood and youth. What was unique to listeners of the 2000s was their mixed feeling about the past. As the pingtan storyteller pointed out, many listeners have been victims of China’s political upheavals between the 1950s and 1970s, either sent down to the countryside as teenagers or purged as political foes of the CCP.28 Between Market and Censorship Despite a great success on the market, political pingtan stories have proved a risky and sometimes illegal venture throughout the past three decades. In the early and mid-1980s, as Chapter Six has shown, cultural bureaucrats already placed the blame on storytellers who made comments on contemporary politics in their stories. Despite storytellers’ claim that they were in effect preaching the CCP’s political

26  Peng Benle 彭本乐, “Pingtan yanyuan xu bu xiezuo ke 评弹演员需补写作课 [Pingtan storytellers need to make up the writing lessons],” Pingtan yishu, No. 33, 2004, 182. 27  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 28   Chen Yanyan 陈燕燕, “Dui dangqian pinghua de chongxin renshi 对当前评话 的重新认识 [A new understanding of modern-day pinghua],” http://www.pingtan .com.cn/000009/Y091020SZ.htm, November 5, 2009.

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policies and glorifying the CCP’s history,29 topics such as the Cultural Revolution and June 4th Incident remained political taboos in China.30 This rang especially true to the June 4th Incident, which, in John Gittings’s words, had been “the most neuralgic spot” in the new millennium.31 Therefore, anyone who touched upon such sensitive themes was punishable by political authorities. Pingtan storytellers might be the only artists in China to address such political topics seriously. As Li Gang once stated in his stage performance, he had lost sleep the night before he told the story about the June 4th Incident, for he was the only performer across the country to be bold enough to not only relate those tabooed stories, but also make his own analyses and comments on it.32 Storytellers’ audacity resulted from their proneness to commenting on current social and political situations, which constitutes pingtan’s basic skills to vivify stories and intrigue the audience. The character of “ping” in the word of pingtan, for some pingtan students, exactly stood for “commenting.” While average storytellers can only recite stories, making comments or “ping” in storytelling is a highly creative work as it requires artists’ improvisational performances.33 Storyteller Yang Zijiang once took great pride in his ability and eligibility to comment on historical events and figures in his stage performance. In his words, “I [am entitled to] make comments on accomplishments and faults in one thousand years” (qianqiu gongguo wo lai ping).34 As stated in previous chapters, pingtan storytelling’s flexible ways of performance enabled storytellers to avoid censorship. In the context of the twenty-first century, as Wu Zongxi pointed out, political and cultural authorities were neither able to nor willing to “control”

 Wan Zunian 万祖年, “Shijian qizi jiaohui yao shigan 实践七字教诲要实干 [(I) should do solid work to practice the seven-character instructions],” Pingtan yishu, No. 28, 2001, 22. 30  Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, “Introduction: The Transformation of the Relationship between Chinese Intellectuals and the State,” in Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market, eds., Edward Gu and Merle Goldman (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 11. 31   John Gittings, The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. 32  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, 改革风云 [Wind and cloud of the reform], chapter 15, March 8, 2007. 33   Zhu Zhongyi 朱钟益 and Zhou Kemin 周克敏, “‘Ping’ zi zhouyi “评” 字诌议 [Casual comments on the character of ‘ping’],” Pingtan yishu, No. 35, 2005, 141. 34   Yang Zijiang, Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping 刘少奇和邓小平 [Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping], chapter 23, April 12, 1998. 29



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(guan) pingtan storytelling.35 The inability of governments to control storytelling resulted, in part, from government officials’ more liberal attitudes toward performing arts. Li Gang considered that most Communist bureaucrats had become much more open-minded and tolerant at present. The CCP commanded the confidence that the PRC regime would never be overthrown by mere storytelling so that political authorities would rarely keep close watch on storytellers in the 2000s.36 In the relatively liberal environment, profit-minded managers of story houses wholeheartedly welcomed storytellers’ more active role in stage performances and encouraged them to cater to the audience’ needs. Under this circumstance, some artists, whose performing careers were cut short for varieties reasons, returned to stage starting in the mid-1990s. The highly controversial Yang Zijiang was one of the returnees. Yang Zijiang Since 1993, Yang Zijiang staged four political stories about four Communist leaders, Pan Hannian (1906–1977), Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). The creation of four full-length stories reestablished Yang Zijiang’s prestige of as a productive writer of pingtan stories after ten years of absence from the pingtan world.37 His stories instantly proved commercially successful. Yang’s success, for contemporary observers, resided in his unique style of “interspersing narration with comments” (bianxu bianping) and his emphasis on stories about contemporary events, with which listeners were highly familiar.38 Controversial as Yang’s stories were, one essayist considered, his stories afforded listeners opportunities to understand political events and issues that they had been previously uninformed about but were eager to know. Such stories allowed Yang to captivate not only the elderly but also the young and middle-aged clientele.39 In my interview with him in 2009, Yang felt particularly proud of the capacity of his stories to enthrall young white-collars, who were

 Wu Zongxi, interview with author, July 19, 2009.  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 37   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 38  Wenyan, “Wenhua huanjing yu pingtan de fazhan,” 76. 39  Gu Duhuang, “Xiaoyi pingtan,” 24. 35 36

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anxious to know the evolvement of the Chinese society. As to middleaged and elderly listeners, they also failed to comprehend the early history of the PRC. Forcefully making his point that “a nation that does not understand the history has no future” (yige bu liaojie lishi de minzu shi meiyou qiantu de), Yang proclaimed himself as an intellectual and historian to wake up ignorant listeners. Being a university graduate, Yang distinguished himself from other storytellers because of not only his education background, but also his outspokenness to “tell the truth” (shuo zhenhua). While political authorities prohibited the masses from talking about politics and understanding history to promote Obscurantism, his conscience as an intellectual impelled him to enlighten the audience. For Yang, all audience members had the constitutional right to know what the government was doing and to understand who had been “angling for fame and compliments” (guming diaoyu) as opposed to those who had been really serving the people.40 In one of his stage performances, Yang boasted that his story­ telling was not a traditional pingtan art, but zawen.41 Zawen, or irony as translated by Rubie Watson, has provided Chinese writers of the twentieth century with rich vocabulary for cultural and political subversion.42 To justify his claim to be a historian-storyteller, Yang had extensively read publications produced in mainland China, especially those published by the Central Party Literature Publisher (Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe), but nothing from Hong Kong. Yang’s exclusive use of official documents and publications and purposeful neglecting sources from abroad both empowered him to assume an authoritative position to address and explain the PRC’s history and helped him defy any charges of making up stories to libel the CCP and its leaders.43 Not every Communist cadre took offense at Yang Zijiang’s verbal attacks on the CCP in his storytelling. Zhou Zhenhua, the vice director of the Shanghai Troupe and a CCP member, for example, recognized Yang’s self-styled identity as an intellectual who imparted the audience with information and knowledge. In Zhou’s opinion, most storytellers had received little education, while Yang might be the lone college

  Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009.   Yang Zijiang, Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping, chapter 26, April 13, 1998. 42  Rubie S. Watson, “Making Secret Histories: Memory and Mourning in Post-Mao China,” in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, ed., Rubie S. Watson, (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1994), 70. 43   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 40 41



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graduate. Well-educated storytellers like Yang were in great need because only they could author and perform stories that held cultural values and contained rich information to intrigue and inspire the audience.44 Information, messages, and viewpoints that Yang attempted to deliver to listeners in his storytelling included political leaders’ privacy, the comparison of Maoist and Dengist eras, government dishonesty, corruption, family issues, and so forth. Here, I take the month-long Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, which Yang told in April 1998 in Wuxi, as an example to illustrate Yang’s ability to strike a chord among the audience. The story, according to Yang Zijiang, was the end product of five rough drafts that he authored in the past three decades.45 Covering a historical period between the Great Leap Forward and the opening years of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiao­ ping gave detailed accounts about political activities by a pantheon of Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Peng Dehuai. The story especially focused on a series of events, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Lushan Conference (Lushan huiyi, 1959), the economic debacle in the late 1950s, Peng Dehuai’s persecution, Liu Shaoqi’s ascendance to state chairmanship, and the eventual conflicts between Liu and Mao, all of which had led to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. When recounting those political events, Yang Zijiang refreshed the audience’s memory about China in the 1950s and 1960s from time to time in an attempt to offer a contrast between the impoverished and turbulent Mao’s era with the affluent post-Mao China. In Yang’s words, “the era in his story was the most torturous times” in the Chinese history.46 Yang attempted to paint a picture of China in the 1950s and 1960s as a nation plagued by economic underdevelopment, inadequate supplies of daily necessities, and widespread famines.47 Yang attributed China’s economic failure, first of all, to the egalitarian labor and distribution system. In the opening chapter, for example, Yang reminded aged listeners of their fixed salaries thirty years ago, namely 36 yuan, an amount that remained unchanged for decades.48 Thirty-six yuan symbolized

  Zhou Zhenhua, interview with author, July 31, 2009.   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 46   Yang Zijiang, Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping, chapter 48, April 24, 1998. 47  Ibid., chapter 3, April 2, 1998; chapter 15, April 8, 1998; chapter 20, April 10, 1998; chapter 30, April 15, 1998. 48  Ibid., chapter 1, April 1, 1998. 44 45

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the CCP’s extremely inflexible distribution system under which any competitions were suffocated and laborers thus lacked motivations.49 China’s underdevelopment prior to Mao’s death also resulted from the government’s flagrant disrespect to intellectuals as he summarized that it was intellectuals who endured the gravest hardships.50 Since Deng Xiaoping’s reform has brought most of the irrational social and economic policies to an end and revived China’s economy, Yang greeted Deng as the “greatest statesman” in China.51 Despite his largely negative assessment of Mao’s times, Yang Zijiang still cherished the memory of the first two decades of the PRC when the government was clean and Communist cadres were incorruptible. Yang recalled that the CCP’s supreme leaders such as Mao were all frugal and upright. In the early 1960s, for example, the chief executive of the Yangpu District of Shanghai commuted to his office by bicycle daily.52 In the 1990s, however, even township chiefs afforded to drive luxury cars such as Lincoln, which was priced at $300,000.53 In Chapter 38, Yang related the story about Marshal Chen Yi (1901–1972), the mayor of Shanghai in the early 1950s, who rejected his father-in-law’s request to land a job in Shanghai. This episode was brought up as a stark contrast to the modern-day Communist cadres’ abusing of their political power for personal gains. Such greedy cadres, Yang added, had an inordinate desire for houses not only for their father-in-laws, but also for their grandchildren.54 Other than endemic corruption, Yang Zijiang presented more examples about a myriad of political issues and social evils in post-Mao China such as the pollution of the Soochow Creek,55 dysfunctional legal system,56 the soaring tuition fees,57 drug abuse,58 state-owned enterprises’ financial irresponsibility,59 and the crumbling health care system.60 When addressing the issue that the state could no longer

 Ibid.,  Ibid., 51  Ibid., 52  Ibid., 53  Ibid., 54  Ibid., 55  Ibid., 56  Ibid., 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid., 59  Ibid., 60  Ibid., 49 50

chapter chapter chapter chapter chapter chapter chapter chapter

12, April 6, 1998; chapter 37, April 19, 1998. 19, April 10, 1998. 1, April 1, 1998. 3, April 2, 1998. 39, April, 20, 1998. 38, April 19, 1998. 9, April 5, 1998. 12, April 6, 1998.

chapter 42, April 21, 1998. chapter 45, April 23, 1998. chapter 30, April 15, 1998.



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afford to provide most of the populace with medical insurance and, consequently, retirees could not receive reimbursement for their medical expenses, Yang lambasted wild extravagances committed by local governments that resulted in the exhaustion of the national wealth.61 Yang’s criticisms of contemporary China and the CCP culminated in his allusion that China was in need of a democratic political system. In Chapter 37, for example, Yang rhetorically asked his listeners whether the Chinese people could criticize their political leaders, whereas the Americans were about to impeach President Bill Clinton.62 Elsewhere, Yang explicitly stated that the people should be in possession of political rights and taxpayers ought to enjoy the freedom of speech. If not, as Yang Zijiang put it, it meant that the people had not yet been in control of the political power.63 Just like in the 1980s, Yang Zijiang’s outspokenness continued to offend political authorities, who sought to ban his storytelling in the 1990s and 2000s, and even some listeners, who wrote anonymous letters to report Yang’s distortion of historical facts and denigration of the CCP’s leaders. Albeit the political pressure, the aging Yang was able to resume his storytelling career in the past two decades primarily because of the huge demand of his stories in the market. The triumphant Yang asserted that it was the market, not the Communist cadres, who “had the final say” (shuole suan) on what could be staged at present.64 Yang’s assertion was not unfounded. Storytellers and listeners alike were under the impression that Yang Zijiang deliberately increased the dosage of blaming Communist cadres in his storytelling after 1995 and 1996 because of the market demands.65 Yang’s marketing strategy confirmed Geremie Barmé’s findings that government interdictions could be utilized to “add to the public profile of a controversial artist” in post-Mao China and political dissidence became marketable commodities.66 Yang Zijiang’s business acumen manifested itself also in his willingness to adjust the contents of his stories in the mid-1990s, when, according to Li Gang, Yang turned his attention to the history of the PRC. Between the 1980s and the mid-1990s,  Ibid., chapter 32, April 16, 1998.  Ibid., chapter 37, April 19, 1998. 63  Ibid., chapter 36, April 18, 1998. 64   Yang Zijiang, interview with author, July 7, 2009. 65  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 66  Geremie Barmé, In the Red, xvii; “Soft Porn, Packaged Dissent, and Nationalism: Notes on Chinese Culture in the 1990s,” Current History, 93 (1994), 272. 61 62

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Yang Zijiang’s only story about the twentieth-century China was Pan Hannian, which examined China’s modern history through the lens of various Communists’ vicissitude of life. When political stories gradually gained momentum in the market, Yang’s stories starting in the late 1990s focused more on the CCP’s supreme leaders, with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping being the prime example.67 Li Gang and “Li Gang Pinghua” Compared with Yang Zijiang, the new breeds of pingtan storytellers who made their careers in telling political pingtan stories in the 2000s were much less outspoken and critical. However, they kept eliciting aged listeners’ collective memories about the first four decades of the PRC and putting emphasis on sensitive issues such as unemployment and government corruptions. Here, I take Li Gang, who has earned great fame and wealth for his two political stories, Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution (Wenge fengyun) and Wind and Clouds of the Reform (Gaige fengyun), as an example. The selection of Li and his stories is due to his market success. Li’s stories, according to himself and some newspaper reports, were most commercially successful in pingtan storytelling in the 2000s.68 In various occasions, Li broke records of attendance rates in story houses in the 2000s. For example, in August 2006, Li Gang’s Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution attracted 236 listeners on average in a Suzhou story house, which was designed to accommodate merely 160 audience members.69 In an interview with him in 2010, Li Gang kept reminding me of his box-office success across the Yangzi Delta. The manager of the Meiqi Story House (Meiqi shuchang) of Shanghai, for example, implored Li to perform in her story house several times as all preceding storytellers of Meiqi had failed to impress the audience.70 When he eventually told Wind and Clouds of the Reform in March 2007 in the Meiqi Story House, Shanghai listeners from near and afar packed the story house. From time to time,

 Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010.  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, chapter 7, March 4, 2007. 69   “Pingtan ‘Guo Degang’ weihe nan huojiang 评弹 “郭德纲” 为何难获奖 [Why is it difficult for “Guo Degang” of pingtan storytelling to win awards?],” Jiangnan shibao, November 3, 2006. 70  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 67 68



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Li had to apologize to those who were sitting uncomfortably in “added seats” ( jiazuo) as the staff admitted more listeners than Meiqi could accommodate. Some listeners were even assigned seats where they could only listen to Li Gang, but not see his performance.71 Li Gang Li Gang’s success stemmed from both his systematic training as a pinghua performer and his careful deliberation on pingtan’s future. Li Gang felt particularly grateful to his pingtan masters and mentors who made him both a competent storyteller and an upright person. Unfortunately, however, pingtan hit nadir when Li Gang started his storytelling career in the late 1980s. In 1993, Li Gang made his minds to change his profession and go into business. As a less-than-successful businessman in the following eight years, Li once again decided to reembark on the career of storytelling. The meticulous Li Gang did not rush back to stage, but conducted thorough investigations about the audience’s responses to storytelling. Li quickly discovered that stories about the PRC’s political history such as Lin Biao’s political intrigues during the 1960s and 1970s and power struggles in Beijing in the early 1990s were turning the tide in the midst of pingtan’s decline. When polished and enriched, Li pondered, such stories could win a remarkable market success and bring about a dramatic change to pingtan storytelling as a whole. Li explained that all superstars in past generations had earned their reputations because of their self-conscious innovations of the pingtan art. The creation of political pingtan stories was a breakthrough at the turn of the twenty-first century when listeners felt weary of classic stories. Thus, Li delved into publications about the Chinese history in the past six decades in much the same way as Yang Zijiang did. Yet, Li did not limit himself to books and articles published in mainland China, but referred to those from overseas, particularly Hong Kong.72 After his eight years of absence from stage, the well-prepared Li Gang made his official comeback in an ill-maintained story house in Zhangjiagang, a small city in southern Jiangsu, on the New Year’s Day

71  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, chapter 19, March 10, 2007; chapter 23, March 12, 2007. 72  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010.

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of 2002. The story house, though spacious (with 400 seats), had been unappealing to both storytellers and listeners because of its outdated and unrepaired facilities. As a consequence, its highest attendance rate was over ninety audience members prior to Li Gang’s arrival. Li considered the story house to be his best place to test market because of its distance to big cities such as Shanghai and Suzhou. Had he received unfavorable market reaction in Zhangjiagang, Li believed that his unsuccessful experiment with new political stories would have been easily glossed over by listeners and story house staff in large markets. To promote Li Gang’s new story, the owner of the story house took the liberty to give the story a sensationalized title, “A Romantic History of Jiang Qing” ( Jiang Qing yanshi) in hopes that Madam Mao’s privacy could draw the curious audience. The strategy took effect, even though Li Gang’s story contained little, if any, lurid information about Jiang Qing (1914–1991) as the title had promised. On January 1, 2002, the story house sold 135 tickets. The number doubled in the second day. Facing soaring demands for tickets, Li reminded the owner of loaning more chairs and tea sets to serve the growing number of listeners. Li proved right once again when the story house sold out its tickets in the third day and more seats had to be added in the fourth day. The owner of this insufficiently equipped story house borrowed chairs and benches from restaurants nearby and used bowls to serve tea to the clientele when cups were in short supply. The success of Li Gang’s debut in Zhangjiagang jumpstarted his career as a pinghua storyteller. Very soon, various story houses in the Yangzi Delta competed to extend their offers to Li, who only found his schedule filled up year after year between 2002 and 2007. Over the five years, Li Gang gradually developed and perfected two full-length stories, Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution (for 45-day performances) and Wind and Clouds of the Reform (for 15-day performances).73 Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution covered a historical period between the Anti-Rightist Movement and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. It highlighted some great political events, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement, the purge of Peng Dehuai, Mao’s anti-Liu Shaoqi schemes, the rise of Red Guards, and many other political dramas during the Cultural Revolution. As its sequel, Wind and Clouds of the Reform started from the death of Mao in 1976. Li Gang meticulously

73

 Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010.



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Illustration 15:  Zhou Ping (b. 1964) was telling Wind and Rain in the Six Decades, a political pingtan story, in Suzhou on March 5, 2011. (Photo provided by Zhou Ping)

picked key incidents and events, including the power struggle between Deng Xiaoping and Hua Guofeng (1921–2008), Hu Yaobang’s (1915–1989) odyssey to rehabilitate reputations of the political purged in the late 1970s, college students’ protests in 1987 and 1989, the June 4th Incident in 1989, Jiang Zemin’s (b. 1926) rise to power in the 1990s, and the NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999, to entertain the audience. What merits mentioning is that Zhou Ping’s Wind and Rain in the Six Decades (Fengyu liushi nian), to which I listened in story houses for several times, was derived from Li Gang’s two full-length stories. Both storytellers placed emphasis more on stories about the Cultural Revolution than on the reform era not only because the former was regarded as a historical period rife with social and political dramas, but also because the Cultural Revolution constituted the audience’s lived experiences in their youth. Born at the height of the Cultural Revolution, nevertheless, Li Gang was barely a witness of the decade of turmoil between 1966 and 1976. Therefore, he acknowledged that he was actually ineligible to tell such stories to listeners who had lived through the six decades of the

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PRC.74 From time to time, Li solicited source materials and anecdotes from listeners to enrich and revise his stories. Occasionally, Li felt that information provided by listeners was in mutual conflict, but he still vastly benefited from his communications with the audience.75 During his performance on September 22, 2007, for example, Li expressed his gratitude to listeners who had reminded him that the Wu Garden (Wujia huayuan) of Beijing was Wu Sangui’s (1612–1678) private residence in the early Qing Dynasty.76 On another occasion on March 6, 2007, a listener pointed out a factual error about Hua Guofeng’s state chairmanship in the story. Li thus publicly corrected his mistake and declared that Hua never officially assumed the position as the Chairman of the PRC since Mao had already abolished such a position.77 Some listeners were in reality participants or witnesses of certain historical events. A listener, as Li Gang recalled, was once a member of Unit 8341 (8341 budui), Mao’s guard unit, and supplied Li with first-hand information about the CCP’s top leadership.78 Such performer-listeners interactions were made possible because of the customary practice in pingtan performance that allowed storytellers to take a fifteen-minute break in the middle. Listeners were thus able to chat with storytellers or each other during the intermissions. During the break in Zhou Ping’s performance on June 21, 2011, in a similar fashion, I witnessed an aged male listener who approached Zhou. The listener tried to convince Zhou, who had stated in the first half of his performance that keeping silence was the best way of survival during the Cultural Revolution, that shutting up in political campaigns did not guarantee personal safety. Their relatively low age and willingness to cooperation with listeners by no means disqualified Li Gang and Zhou Ping from telling stories about the PRC’s political history. More than once, Li boasted of his endeavors to conduct interviews and researches all over China, which empowered him to be a conveyor of information and knowledge of the past. His conscientious and careful preparations stemmed from his conviction that storytellers who related stories about PRC history

74  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun 文革风云 [Wind and clouds of the Cultural Revolution], chapter 1, September 17, 2007. 75  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, chapter, 29, March 15, 2007. 76  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun, chapter 12, September 22, 2007. 77  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, chapter, 12, March 6, 2007. 78  Li Gang interview with author, June 25, 2010.



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could not fabricate plots at will as they did when telling classic stories, but had to be loyal to the facts since recklessly concocted stories would never fool listeners, who were all witnesses of such a history.79 More significantly, with his collaboration with listeners, Li in reality co-authored his stories with his clients. Such co-authorship allowed Li to take a position as an orchestrator to elicit the aged listeners’ collective memories of the second half of the twentieth century in that Li did not speak to his audience as Yang Zijiang did, but spoke for them. What differentiated Li from Yang was the latter’s proneness to assuming an authoritative position in his storytelling to tell his listeners the PRC’s past from his own perspective. Yang was able to wield such an authority because of his seniority and lived experience, something that Li lacked. Differences in age, generation, experience, and employment set Li Gang and Yang Zijiang apart in the contents and styles of their storytelling, though both profited from narrating political stories. Himself a victim of the CCP’s political campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, Yang argued with urgency that the young generation should remember the history and use the history as a criticism of both the PRC’s past and the present-day society. Li Gang, by contrast, wished his elderly listeners not to take his stories too seriously. In Li’s own words, his stories were merely “casual chats in teahouses.”80 Li further explained that casual chats in teahouses were by no means orthodox history of the CCP, but no more than “popular legends” (minjian chuanshuo).81 Such differing attitudes also resulted from their different employment status. Li, as a storyteller hired and managed by the Suzhou Troupe between 2005 and 2007, was lack of the liberty that self-employed Yang enjoyed to mount attacks on the CCP’s regime. In the beginning of every year, Li Gang recalled, the Suzhou Troupe urged all storytellers to sign an agreement stating that performers should “shoulder their own responsibilities of stories” (wenze zifu).82 Because of the pressure from the troupe, Li sometimes even encouraged his audience to forget some elements of his stories immediately after they exited the story houses because, as he hinted, disclosing and circulating declassified

 Li  Li 81  Li 82  Li 79 80

Gang, Gang, Gang, Gang,

Wenge fengyun, chapter 24, September 24, 2007. Wenge fengyun, chapter 9, September 21, 2007. Gaige fengyun, chapter 2, March 1, 2007. interview with author, June 25, 2010.

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and unpublished information would be politically risky to him as well as listeners.83 Beyond Nostalgic and Critical Memories Indeed, Li Gang contradicted himself by declaring that he had taken great pains in gathering reliable sources and claiming that his stories were nothing other than casual chats in teahouses. Li was facing a paradox between the needs to attract listeners by demonstrating the credibility his stories and the necessity to avoid violating the CCP’s taboos. Quite a lot of listeners believed that Li Gang’s stories were based on concrete facts. One ninety-year old retired cadre, for example, commented in 2006 that listening to Li’s stories was just like taking classes of the CCP’s history.84 However, only by dismissing his stories as hearsay could he convince political authorities that he harbored no intention to challenge the official narratives of China’s revolutionary past and the present. Li Gang thereby carefully maneuvered between market preferences and political correctness by eliciting aged listeners’ collective memories about the PRC history. The creation of such memories should be understood in the context of the turn of the twenty-first century. As an offshoot and a new development of the “Mao fever” starting in the early 1990s, they functioned “to contain and dissolve the anxiety of everyday life” and “to translate collective concerns into consumer desires,” as Xiaobing Tang posits.85 The formation of collective memories, according to Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, was not innocent in post-Maoist China. Memories about China’s revolutionary past fostered both critiques of and consent and compromise with the present.86 In the times when the Chinese were fascinated by economic miracles, but discontented with social inequality and injustice in

 Ibid., chapter 14, March 7, 2007.  Ni Xiaoying 倪晓英, “Li Gang: Wenge fengyun yinbao pinghua re 李刚:《文革 风云》引爆评话热 [Li Gang: Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution Sparks pinghua craze], Suzhou ribao, September 1, 2006. 85   Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, 283. 86   Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, “Introduction: Memory, Power, and Culture,” in Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China, eds., Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2007), 10. 83 84



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the past two decades, the popular attitudes toward Mao’s China have been ambivalent, as researches about workers in Northeastern China87 and retirees in Beijing88 have indicated. Such ambivalence manifested itself in a blending of “nostalgic memories” such as security of livelihood and employment and economic and political equality and “critical memories” such as violence, fear and cadre tyranny.89 It was thus no wonder that such a mixed feeling about the past and a sense of bewilderment about the present could find resonance among pingtan listeners in the Yangzi Delta. Pingtan listeners’ confusion about the present and past were a direct outgrowth of their failure to reconcile the official historical narrative about the CCP and the PRC and their lived experiences. The government-sponsored master narratives of the PRC’s past political events such as the Cultural Revolution were highly mutable as they shifted frequently in line with contemporary political realities.90 To aged listeners, the mainstay of pingtan’s audience in the past two decades, the official edition of the history was fragmented and sometimes inaccurate, which resulted from the constant shifts of the CCP’s grand narrative. Throughout the early PRC history, the Party was capable of transforming people into nonpersons,91 but the boundary between the people and their otherness (political foes, nonpersons, or monsters) was extremely fluid and mutable.92 The Chinese people, victims or victimizers of various political campaigns alike, experienced rollercoaster in their lives. It was thus a vexing question for participants and witnesses of the early history of the PRC to locate their positions in relation to others and to the regime and make a meaningful connection between the present and the confusing past. Memories, therefore, played a role as a “countercritique” and complement to modern historical discourse

87   Ching Kwan Lee, “What Was Socialism to Chinese Workers? Collective Memories and Labor Politics in an Age of Reform,” in Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, 141–165. 88   Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing,” 303–327. 89   Ching Kwan Lee, “What Was Socialism to Chinese Workers? Collective Memories and Labor Politics in an Age of Reform,” 144–156. 90  Lowell Dittmer, “Rethinking China’s Cultural Revolution amid Reform,” in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, ed. Woei Lien Chong (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 5. 91  Rubie S. Watson, “Making Secret Histories,” 83. 92   Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing,” 319.

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imposed by political authorities.93 As both storytellers and their listeners found it hard to obtain a complete picture about the past of the nation as well as their own, they invoked memories to negate, contest, and supplement the government-sponsored historical narrative. Li Gang’s Pinghua Stories Political pingtan stories, as my analysis of Yang Zijiang’s storytelling has demonstrated, played a counteractive role to the state’s effort to obliterate unapproved memories in reminding listeners of the PRC’s crucial moments that were highly relevant to their lived experiences. Similar to Yang Zijiang’s story, both Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution and Wind and Clouds of the Reform were intended to remind the audience of the political history between the 1950s and the 2000s and highlighted a dilemma between nostalgic and critical memories of the PRC’s past. Even though Li Gang took the same approach as that of Yang Zijiang to paint a picture of Mao’s China as a society of simplicity, egalitarianism, and integrity, but always plagued by material shortage and political violence, he addressed the contrast between the past and present in a more light-hearted and humorous way. When discussing the evolution of dogmatic Maoism into commercialism in China on September 23, 2007, Li quoted a well-known TV commercial for a nutrition product. He observed that the outworn slogan “Never forget class struggle” (qianwan buyao wangji jieji douzheng) had been erased and replaced by a new one, “No new year’s presents are received other than ‘brain platinum’  ” ( jinnian guonian bu shouli, shouli zhishou Nao baijin) in public spaces.94 In a similar fashion, he described the gradual diminishing of health care in China and doctors’ irresponsibility three days later by demonstrating the change of slogans in hospitals. In the 1960s, Li recalled that the slogan hung in every hospital was “Heal the wounded and rescue the dying, practice revolutionary humanism” ( jiusi fushang, shixing geming de rendao zhuyi), while in the 2000s, the slogan became “Pay the fee before [you] see the doctor” (xian fuqian, hou kanbing).95 Li’s storytelling was immediately paused by a shower of applause and laughter by the elders as medical 93   Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 4–5. 94  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun, chapter 13, September 23, 2007. 95  Ibid., chapter 20, September 26, 2007.



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care had long been their main concern. In post-Maoist China where channels to express political viewpoints were unavailable, as Xiaomei Chen has argued, eruptions of applause in theaters was an indicator of the audience’s approval or disapproval of certain political and social issues and thereby carried special political implications.96 On June 21, 2011, when Zhou Ping repeated the same episode and joke in his storytelling, the audience likewise greeted him with laughter and bravo. Retirees’ disillusionment with the disservice of China’s medical system and a growing sense of insecurity found concrete expression in performers’ humorous and vivid depictions. Li Gang’s overt criticisms of medical personnel and institutions as such exemplified the capacity of his stories to resonate with the audience’s confusion, concerns, and fear in an increasingly commercialized and globalized Chinese society. Li directly addressed social and cultural issues that were specific to the opening decade of the twenty-first century such as excessive speculations in real estate, inflation, and the intrusion of multi-national capitalism. Li Gang illustrated the aggressiveness of foreign enterprises and international capital by singing a song adapted from a widely circulated revolutionary song, “No Communist Party, No New China” (Meiyou Gongchan dang jiu meiyou xin Zhongguo). While the original song put emphasis on the CCP’s success in forcing “imperialism to escape with the tail between its legs” (diguo zhuyi jiazhe weiba taopao liao), Li changed it to “imperialism has returned with a suitcase under its arm” (diguo zhuyi jiazhe pibao huilai liao). As the audience was bursting out laughter and applause, Li further explained that he did not mean to offend anyone, but just repeated what a laid-off worker had sung.97 Li Gang’s disclaimer served the purpose of avoiding potential political interference. In order to highlight the nature of his stories as an unofficial history of the PRC or casual chat, Li tended to invoke supernatural and superstitious elements in his account of great political events and explications of political leaders’ fates. When telling the story about Tao Zhu’s (1908–1966) reassignment to a new position from Guangdong to Beijing in 1966, for example, Li brought up an anecdote that a mysterious fortuneteller in Guangzhou came across Tao and predicted that Tao would prosper only in the south

  Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part, 183.  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun, chapter 17, September 25, 2007.

96 97

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and would perish in Beijing. Such a prediction proved accurate as Tao died three years after he took office in the central government.98 Another fortunetelling helped Li Gang to explain why the Chinese ambassador managed to escape the NATO’s bombardment on May 8, 1999 during the Kosovo War (1996–1999). Li once again affirmed the accuracy of such fortunetelling in spite that he dismissed the episode as a mere rumor.99 Other storytellers who told political stories employed the same strategy. On June 25, 2011, Xu Changqing (b. 1963), in his story about the power struggle between Chairman Mao and Lin Biao, gave a detailed account about the appearance of a mysterious serpent in a Shanghai villa where Mao Zedong stayed for a night in 1971. The creature was related to Mao in part because Mao’s had been born in the year of snake. Xu then stressed that he was not talking nonsense, for there were a lot of supernatural phenomena that modern science could not fully explain. Compared with the story of a serpent, Li Gang related an equally, if not more, uncanny story about another great leader of the PRC, Hu Yaobang, the former General Secretary of the CCP. Hu’s mother, according to Li, did not give birth to Hu until her thirteenth month of pregnancy. Prior to delivery, his mother dreamed of a boy in red who smiled at her and jumped down from the sky. The awakened mother then gave birth to Hu. A fortuneteller later paid a visit to Hu’s household and predicted that Hu, still a baby, would be “either wealthy or noble” (feifu jigui) in the future.100 Such a story was produced partially because Hu Yaobang, whose death triggered the students’ protest in 1989, was a highly sensitive topic. After students’ protest evolved into the notorious June 4th (Tianan’men) Incident, the topic about Hu Yaobang remained a political taboo in China for over a decade. Li Gang noted that he could nowhere find information about Hu’s activities before 1986 and official biography of Hu authored and published by the CCP ended abruptly in 1966. Even essays in memory of Hu written by his daughter were characterized by great vagueness.101 Yet for the audience, such stories about political leaders did not sound overly outlandish, as a large quantity of classic pingtan stories, like ancient Chinese novels or even orthodox historical records, had frequently featured supernatural  Ibid., chapter 22, September 27, 2007.  Li Gang, Gaige fengyun, chapter 29, March 15, 2007. 100  Ibid., chapter 7, March 4, 2007. 101  Ibid.   98   99



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origins of emperors or peasants uprising leaders to illustrate the historical inevitability of their success. Stories like Hu’s birth therefore fell easily on the ready ears of elderly listeners or classic fiction readers, many of whom had been immersed in pingtan stories or novels about imperial China for decades. As a matter of fact, Li used the parallel between dynastic China and the PRC in many other aspects to furnish listeners with the cognitive framework to make sense of the recent political history and the contemporary society. Li, for example, compared shengzhang (provincial governors) of the PRC with xunfu of the Ming and Qing dynasties and referred Prime Minister Zhu Rongji (b. 1928) as zaixiang or xiang instead of zongli.102 The reception and approval of Li Gang’s parallel of China in imperial times and at present allowed the audience to face and ease a tension between their lived experiences and the historical narrative fleshed out by the PRC. The government-sanctioned narrative dismissed the Cultural Revolution as an aberration in the CCP’s history and precluded any discussions about the June 4th Incident. While the government placed an emphasis on forgetting, for listeners who lived through the past several decades, such political events and incidents constituted their indelible memories. In their youth, those listeners were either victims, victimizers, or both of numerous political campaigns. From time to time, Li requested in his storytelling listeners to confirm their status as Rightists during the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957103 and the persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.104 Occasionally, listeners were willing to disclose their historical stigmas as Rightists to Li in their chats during intermissions.105 When relating stories about Red Guards’ activism and radicalism in the late 1960s, however, Li was also convinced that some attendants of his performances must have participated in Red Guards’ pilgrimage to Beijing to pay tribute to Chairman Mao in 1966. To please ex-Red Guards, Li tried not to be critical of radical youth’s violence in the late 1960s,

102  Ibid., chapter 20, March 10, 2007. Xunfu 巡抚 was a term used during the Ming and Qing times to refer to a governor of a province, which was equivalent to shangzhang 省长 in twentieth-century China. In the same fashion, xiang 相, zaixiang 宰相, and zongli 总理 can all be translated as the prime minister, though the latter is used only in the twentieth century. 103  Ibid., chapter 4, March 2, 2007. 104  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun, chapter 18, September 25, 2007. 105  Ibid., chapter 4, September 18, 2007.

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but gave their credits for sincerity and honesty.106 Li Gang’s version was in marked contrast with some historical accounts about violence, vandalism, and robbery committed by Red Guards.107 Hence, storytellers like Li attempted not to polarize their listeners, but to lend them insights into how to understand the PRC’s political history as well as and listeners’ roles in those turbulent decades. Here, likening the PRC to Chinese dynasties served a special goal to situate the Communist regime in China’s long history. Given an impression that political coups and power struggles in the PRC was just a déjà-vu of those in previous dynasties, listeners came up with an alternative narrative of history. While the CCP had constantly preached the notion that China entered into a new historical stage with the establishment of the Socialist system and the PRC was therefore a break with China’s feudal past, the audience of political stories was led to believe that the history repeated itself for another time in the past six decades. Listeners, ex-victims and ex-victimizers alike, were assured of an identity as innocent and powerless people who managed to survive political struggles among “emperors, princes, generals, and ministers” (diwang jiangxiang), in much the same way as heroes and heroines of classic pingtan stories did. As Li stated on September 28, 2007, no matter how complex the Cultural Revolution was and how diverse people’s political convictions were, listeners of his performance had been all innocent, sincere, and faultless.108 In other words, the elderly, with whom the government furnished a fragmented narrative of their past and who were further marginalized in the age of globalization, were bestowed upon a new identity, with which they were able to complete a picture about their past, present, and future. In his storytelling, Li Gang succeeded in resolving the dilemma between critical memories and nostalgic memories to galvanize the aged listeners and enabled the socially and economically marginalized elderly to come up with a collective identity in the 2000s. On the one hand, critical memories about political instability and economic predicaments reassured listeners of the peaceful and prosperous

 Ibid., chapter 26, September 29, 2007.  For more detail, see, Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi 高皋、严家其, Wenhua da geming shinian shi 文化大革命十年史 [The history of the decade of the Great Cultural Revolution] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1986), 79–91. 108  Li Gang, Wenge fengyun, chapter 24, September 28, 2007. 106 107



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reality. On the other hand, nostalgic memories functioned as potent weaponry of social criticism for both Li Gang and his audience. The game of criticizing the reality and blaming political authorities, nonetheless, was played within a certain limit. As Li Gang put it, he was unwilling to “hit the [CCP’s] bottom-line” (peng dixian), as Yang Zijiang sometimes did. Li rhetorically asked whether it would be possible that the CCP would implement a multiparty system or appoint him to be “chairman of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference” (zhengxie zhuxi), provided he lashed the ruling party into anger with his incendiary comments in the storytelling. Therefore, he remained extremely cautious not to offend political authorities. On some occasions, his story houses were raided by local cadres in charge of arts and culture. Those cadres usually received anonymous reports about Li Gang’s anti-CCP or anti-government remarks in his storytelling. Li believed that most reports were filed not by listeners, but by his competitors. Fortunately, Li’s performances were never banned thanks to a relatively relaxed political atmosphere in China in the 2000s.109 Li Gang’s remarkable market success as well as his consciousness of political correctness boosted his career in the 2000s. When he returned to stage in 2002, Li Gang acquired the permit of performance with his registration of the Wuxi Pingtan Troupe (Wuxi pingtan tuan) and later he transferred to the Zhangjiagang Pingtan Troupe (Zhangjiagang pingtan tuan). As a rule, the two troupes did not pay Li Gang salaries since Li was never their official employee. Rather, Li submitted a certain percentage of his revenues in exchange for the permits, a system I have discussed in the preceding chapter. In 2005, the Suzhou Troupe, which was in desperate need of a competent pinghua storyteller, recruited Li as a full-time employee. Two years later, Li was depressed to find that the Suzhou Troupe failed to fulfill a lot of promises it had made when hiring him. The Suzhou Municipal Bureau of Radio, Film and Television (Suzhou guangbo dianshi ju) thus lured the disgruntled Li Gang out of the Suzhou Troupe to join the Suzhou TV to host “Li Gang Pinghua.” “Li Gang Pinghua,” a new talk show using the Suzhou dialect and tailored for Li Gang, was designed to comment on current political events and social issues.110

 Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010.  Ibid.

109 110

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“Li Gang Pinghua” Li Gang started to be on the payroll of the Suzhou TV in August 2007, but he had to finish his last run of stage performance in Shanghai in September 2007. In the interview, Li Gang appreciated the Suzhou TV for its recognition of his value and granting him the first-class salary. Li explained that local TV stations such as the Suzhou TV could never compete with their counterparts from Beijing or Shanghai with Mandarin Chinese programs for lack of funds and talents. To gain grounds in ratings in Suzhou, the Suzhou TV laid emphasis on “programs in dialects” (fangyan jiemu) to grip the attention of TV viewers.111 “Li Gang Pinghua,” which would soon stand out to be the Suzhou TV’s top ranked program in dialect, was officially aired on December 5, 2007. In this 30-minute long program at 21:30 every night, Li Gang usually began with “[We] meet again; let’s chat together” (you pengtou le wa; yidao lai cheche). By dismissing his talk shows as nothing but casual chats, Li Gang adopted the same strategy of telling political stories, namely, to trivialize the political implications of his stories and talk shows alike. Despite his rhetoric of casual chatting, “Li Gang Pinghua” has been characterized by its incisive comments on politics and society in Suzhou and beyond. As a reporter pointed out in 2008, news broadcasting was usually scheduled between 18:00 and 20:00. Put in the time slot between 21:30 and 22:00, “Li Gang Pinghua” was clearly intended to make comments on news that viewers may have already known about. “Commenting” thus became the key to the talk show. By critically commenting on the social evils, Li Gang shouldered the responsibility of “pleading for justice on people’s behalf ” (weimin qingming). Li Gang’s ability to make witty and sometimes scathing remarks, according to the reporter, stemmed from his experience as a storyteller.112 Even though some fault-finding viewers occasionally voiced their discontent with his use of storytelling techniques in talk shows, Li Gang firmly believed that the adoption of such skills were necessary.113 For example, Li Gang described the news about the mafia’s assault of a young film director as “four swords fluttering up  Ibid.   Jiyi 季屹, “ ‘Li Gang Pinghua’ mianli cangzhen Suzhou hua “李刚评话”: 绵里 藏针苏州话 [“Li Gang Pinghua:” the Suzhou dialect [is like] a needle hidden in silk floss],” Suzhou guangbo dianshi bao, October 10, 2008. 113  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 111 112



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and down” (siba dao shangxia fanfei), an expression widely used in classic stories about swordsmen.114 On January 17, 2010, when introducing to his audience Xiaogang Village (Xiaogang cun) of the Anhui Province, Li Gang virtually repeated the fifth and sixth chapters of Wind and Clouds of the Reform, as the said village has long been viewed as the origin of China’s rural reform in the late 1970s.115 For Li Gang, the experience of storytelling not only lent him performing skills and information about the Chinese history and society, but also allowed him to develop and retain a masculine “aura field” (qichang) that empowered him to combat social evils.116 As has been discussed previously, pinghua, whose stories invariably center on China’s military and political history and swordsmen’s heroics, has long been a “masculine” subgenre of pingtan storytelling as opposed to tanci, which focuses more on romantic loves and family issues. By “aura field,” Li Gang thus evidently meant his courage to speak his mind to fight for general public’s interests. Indeed, most issues that the viewing public was concerned of were well articulated in Li Gang’s pinghua stories between 2002 and 2007. Such issues ranged from the skyrocketing real estate price, bureaucratic irresponsibility, corruptions, uneven distribution of wealth, monopoly of market by state-owned enterprises, to the dysfunctional healthcare system in China. In various times, Li Gang pointed his finger at real estate speculation and bureaucratic corruptions, two interrelated issues. For example, when analyzing the collapse of a residential building in Shanghai on August 19, 2009, Li unequivocally pointed out that local CCP cadres must have received bribery to contract unqualified construction companies. Li further reminded viewers of “collusion of bureaucrats and businessmen” (guanshang goujie) to push up housing prices.117 In a similar fashion, Li Gang continued to address the issue of medical care or the lack thereof, something the elderly pingtan listeners have been most upset about. On May 25, 2010, Li Gang blamed the Guangzhou Drug Administration (Guangzhou yaojian ju) for its unwillingness to interfere with the abnormal rise of medicine prices in Guangzhou.118 Six months later, Li cited a survey and reported to the

  “Li Gang Pinghua 李刚评话 [Li Gang’s pinghua]” June 20, 2010.   “Li Gang Pinghua,” January 17, 2010. 116  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 117   “Li Gang Pinghua,” August 19, 2009. 118  Ibid., May 25, 2010. 114 115

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audience a harsh reality about the increased medical expenses: the cost of chemotherapy for gastric cancer has increased 150 times in the past two decades. Li thus called for some adjustments of policies to alleviate patients’ financial burdens.119 Li Gang, however, again acknowledged that he could not singlehandedly alter the reality despite his critical comments in “Li Gang Pinghua.” Nonetheless, he felt encouraged that his audience was now under the impression that someone like Li Gang was sincerely speaking for them.120 As often as not, speaking for the people meant to offend political authorities and interest groups. Yet, Li believed that CCP cadres were far more tolerant and open-minded than previously. They would never outright crack down upon “Li Gang Pinghua,” though occasionally directors of the Suzhou TV could receive complaints about factual errors in programs and Li Gang’s lack of thorough and objective investigations. As the number one Suzhou-dialect program of the Suzhou TV, nevertheless, cadres of the TV station were usually unwilling to intervene in as they understood that the audience’s embracing of “Li Gang Pinghua” exactly stemmed from its incisive comments on social inequality and injustice. Without a doubt, it was the audience ratings that gained more weight in the Suzhou TV’s choice of topics. The rising ratings of “Li Gang Pinghua” led to the increased amount of commercials in this talk show. Li estimated that commercials amounted to eight minutes and fifteen seconds in 2010, while other 30-minute long programs, as a rule, carried only five minutes of commercials. In 2009, the advertising revenue of “Li Gang Ping­hua” was over eighty million yuan. The year of 2010 was expected to witness another surge of income by 14.3%, or, over one hundred million yuan.121 *  *  *  * Recent research indicates that economic development and social stability served as the CCP’s legitimacy since the 1990s.122 China’s pursuit of economic development and embracing of globalization, however,  Ibid., November 5, 2010.  Li Gang, interview with author, June 25, 2010. 121  Ibid. 122  André Laliberté and Marc Lanteigne, “The Issue of Challenges to the Legitimacy of CCP Rule,” in The Chinese Party-State in the 21st Century, eds., André Laliberté and Marc Lanteigne (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 8. 119 120



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psychologically unsettled the socially and economically marginalized such as the elderly. Retirees’ confusion over the present was exacerbated by the CCP’s incomplete historical narration, which precluded them from conjuring up a cognitive map to see through the past and the present. The state-sanctioned historical narrative about the six decades of the PRC was highly fragmented as the government continued to keep silence on certain political events and issues. It was political pingtan stories and story houses that provided them with a means by which the aged listeners were able to come up with a complete picture about the history of the PRC and their past lives. Storytellers and listeners made an effort to complement and challenge such a narrative by eliciting collective memories about the PRC’s past. In order to make a fuller explanation about the aforementioned tabooed political events and justify their own actions therein, storytellers and listeners rationalized the PRC’s political history in an irrational way. Namely, the PRC was interpreted as a continuation of the longue durée of China’s imperial history. Communist leaders were constantly compared with emperors and officials in imperial China whose power to rule, or Mandate of Heaven, was bestowed upon by supernatural forces. As such, retirees were assured that no political campaigns that they either participated in or suffered from were abnormal in the Chinese history. Rather, they were merely innocent and ill-informed people who happened to have been involved in and eventually survived political power struggles, which had happened repeatedly in the Chinese history, classic novels, and pingtan stories. Story houses, therefore, afforded the aged listeners a public space where political viewpoints were articulated, varieties of real-life information was exchanged, and listeners’ collective identities were expressed. Storytellers oftentimes reminded the audience of the privilege to discuss politics inside story houses, but requested listeners to be forgetful after they returned home. It was clear, therefore, that both listeners and storytellers viewed story houses as their exclusive province for political discussions and debates. Such a public space went beyond story houses. Storytellers sometimes contradicted themselves by urging listeners to relay the information and ideas they gleaned in story houses to their families and friends. More significant, such stories have been electronically preserved and circulated with the rise of the internet in China. In reality, I acquired all stories by Yang Zijiang and Li Gang from the internet. As a consequence, such a public space was

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extended to a larger audience in the society of the Yangzi Delta with the technological advancement. The creation and popularity of “Li Gang Pinghua” further extended such a public space to a wider audience. Li Gang adroitly transplanted both performing skills and topics from his storytelling to this 30-minute long talk show. Both story house managers and the Suzhou TV were driven by economic gains to tolerate or even encourage Li Gang to address politically sensitive topics in public. Listeners in story houses and TV viewers alike have shown enormous interest in Li’s stories and comments as Li Gang was viewed as a public figure who spoke on their behalf and fought for their interests. Rampant corruptions, real estate speculation, and the lack of health care, among other things, topped the list of concerns of both pingtan listeners and the TV audience. Thus, Li Gang’s storytelling as well as “Li Gang Pinghua” allowed them to express their societal and political viewpoints and thereby participate in political discussions, something unattainable elsewhere in present-day China. Political discussions notwithstanding, Li Gang and his listeners/ viewers never intended to sway decision-making of the governments or challenge political authorities. Storytellers attempted to de-politicize political stories and talk shows by dismissing the information they provided as nothing more than casual chats in teahouses. The reluctance to challenge political authorities outright by Li Gang and his fellow storytellers, however, indicated the limitation of such new public spaces. Namely, they were impotent to effect major political changes in China. Though Li Gang criticized the society and political authorities from time to time, his articulated criticisms of the society merely exemplified a “political but non-confrontational forms of life,” which has been prevalent among the elderly in urban China.123

123

  Judith Farguhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Biopolitical Beijing,” 309–310.

Epilogue

Re-patronizing Pingtan Storytelling Story Houses in the Low-Price Age The popularity of pingtan storytelling, particularly political pingtan stories, among the elderly since the late 1990s prompted local governments to recognize the significance of pingtan story houses as a stabilizer of local communities. As Feng Xu posits, communities or shequ in China replaced neighborhood committees and workplace units to be “participatory civil societal” organizations under the Party’s leadership since the 1990s. Considering the indispensable role of communities in stabilizing the society and thereby legitimizing the CCP’s rule,1 professional pingtan performing enterprises were highly supportive of the call of community service for seniors. Zhou Zhenhua, vice director of the Shanghai Troupe, confirmed in 2009 that the troupe signed contracts with the government of the Songjiang District of Shanghai to send storytellers to numerous story houses registered in this district and deliver best stories to pingtan fans.2 Under this circumstance, both public and private investments were ushered in to build or renovate story houses in various cities and towns of the Yangzi Delta. Usually under the management of “senior citizens’ homes” (  jinglao yuan), “recreation centers for seniors” (laonian huodong zhongxin), or “associations for seniors” (laonian xiehui), story houses sold tickets at prices as low as one or two yuan per ticket.3 Luojing Story House (Luojing shuchang) in the Baoshan District of northern Shanghai, for example, was affiliated with township-level “center for cultural activities” (wenhua huodong zhongxin) fully funded by the local township government in 2005. The Luojing Township Government (Luojing zhen zhengfu) invested nearly one million yuan to renovate a cinema into a story

1   Feng Xu, “New Modes of Urban Governance: Building Community/Shequ in post-danwei China,” in Laliberté, André and Marc Lanteigne eds., The Chinese PartyState in the 21st Century, 23. 2   Zhou Zhenhua, interview with author, July 31, 2009. 3   Peng Benle, “Shanghai de shuchang, tingzhong he pingtan yanyuan,” 148–149.

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house with 150 seats to serve aged listeners within the confine of the town. Despite its high cost, the story house charged its listeners a surprisingly low admission fee: one yuan per performance.4 Provided a full-length story was told in fourteen installments (two weeks), it would take a listener fourteen yuan to enjoy the complete story. Therefore, it was economically unfeasible to charge retirees higher admission fees. Storytellers were surely aware of incredibly low prices set by all story houses. Yang Zijiang once joked in his storytelling that three yuan, the admission fee for his performance each day in 1998, was the price of a bowl of wonton in Wuxi, Jiangsu.5 As a matter of fact, ticket prices of pingtan storytelling have not been raised since the 1990s despite the inflation in China, especially in the 2000s. Xu Qing, the manager of the Tianlin Story House in western Shanghai, a story house affiliated with the government-funded and operated Tianlin Center of Community Services and Activities (Tianlin shequ fuwu huodong zhongxin), commented that the ticket price of the story house remained to be 4 yuan (3.2 yuan for long term listeners) since its inception in 2002. She added that retirees certainly could not afford to pay a higher price.6 Most story houses faced the similar issue of pricing tickets. In Wuxi, the local government, considering that a film ticket was priced at 50 yuan, officially permitted story houses to charge listeners as much as 20 yuan in 2010. Given the elderly’s purchasing power, nevertheless, story houses still sold each ticket for 3 yuan. Meanwhile, one manager emphasized that only by charging each listener 10 yuan, could the story house avoid deficit.7 The low-price policy implemented by virtually all story houses gradually inflicted financial burden on all managing staff. Toward the end of the 2000s, it was unlikely that story houses could count on boxoffice sales to survive. A report released in August 2011 gave readers a glimpse into a Shanghai-based story house’s predicament. Tairi 4   Zhou baiyi and Cheng Yi 周柏伊、程怡, “Luojing zhen zhengfu maidan fuzhi pingtan yishu, ‘yiyuan shuchang’ xiying lao ximi 罗泾镇政府买单扶植评弹艺术, “一 元书场”吸引老戏迷 [(The Luojing township government pays to support the pingtan art, [and] “one-yuan story house” attracts old drama fans)],” Xinmin wanbao, March 11, 2011. 5   Yang Zijiang, Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping, chapter 16, April 8, 1997. 6   Xu Qing 徐青, interview with author, June 21, 2011. 7   Lin Jiejie 林洁洁, “Shu matou chongkai lao shumi pengchang, sanyuan chashui fei nengting liangchang dashu 书码头重开老书迷捧场 三元茶水费能听两场大书 [Storytelling venue reopened (to attract) old storytelling fans to patronize; three yuan is worth two storytelling performances],” Jiangnan wanbao, March 9, 2011.



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Story House (Tairi shuchang), a pingtan performing venue in southern suburban Shanghai, was on the verge of being closed for financial reasons. Its manager complained to the reporter that he could only sell tickets at a price of three yuan to about one hundred listeners daily, while a relatively renowned storyteller usually asked for a payment of three hundred yuan per day. Thus, the box-office revenues could by no means cover other costs. Since he became the manager in 2002, he and his wife were the only employees of the story house. Recently, his wife quit the story house considering the low income and he became the sole person who worked for it.8 Suzhou-based story houses did not fare any better. A survey conducted in Suzhou in April 2006 similarly revealed financial and operative difficulties that Suzhou-based story houses faced in the first half of the 2000s. The Xuguan Story House (Xuguan shuchang), which was situated in a town about seven miles away from downtown Suzhou, for example, was run by a couple who personally owned the building for the story house. According to the owners, the story house had 150 seats and kept a seventy percent attendance rate over the years. As the statement of income and expenditure provided by the owners shows, the story house’s revenue amounted to 32,740 yuan, while it paid storytellers 16,657 yuan in the fiscal year between August 2000 and July 2001. Approximately, the story house held 156 performances (with about 105 listeners per performance) and paid every performing unit 107 yuan per performance at average. In the fiscal year between July 2004 and August 2005 (sic), the story house slightly raised ticket price to 2.5 yuan and considerably increased numbers of performance. Therefore, its annual income reached 56,814 yuan, but its payments to storytellers soared to 30,178 yuan in the meantime. Clearly, within five years, the owners gave storytellers pay increases by about 40 percent. The owners also had to cover the cost around 12,960 yuan per year for utilities, administrative fees, and wages of staff. The couple was able to earn a profit between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan a year since 2000 because, first of all, the story house engaged in other commercial activities. It sold breakfast and rented out spaces for chess and card games. Second, the owners were able to devise other means of garnering profits to make up for the cost. Third and more importantly, the owners did not have to pay rents

8   Chu Jingwei, “Tairi pingtan shuchang binlin guanzhang, lao tingzhong jishu shi lingdao zhonghuo zhengfu zhengjiu.”

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for the building since they owned it and they did not hire full-time employees, for they themselves worked as ushers, ticket sellers, and waitpersons.9 Governmental Subsidies In a sense, the Xuguan Story House was not a typical story house in the Yangzi Delta as its owners did not to have to pay rents and salaries, as most story house managers did. The rampant real estate speculation and uncontrolled inflation in the mid and late 2000s dealt a heavy blow to all story houses financially. Xu Qing put forth her dilemma in my interview with her in June 2011. On one hand, she stated that storytellers asked for higher incomes in the 2010s than in the early 2000s. Yet, Xu did not think storytellers’ requests for more money was unreasonable considering the escalating living cost in the Yangzi Delta. In reality, pingtan storytellers charged far less than singers and film stars. While a young and inexperienced singer would ask for 500 yuan for a 10-minute performance, Xu continued, the Tianlin Story House she managed paid storytellers 200 yuan for a two-hour storytelling performance each day. On the other hand, story houses, the Tianlin Story House included, did not dare to raise ticket prices to cover the cost for fear that higher admission fees, albeit still considerably lower than prices of film tickets, would scare away the elderly. Hence, the only way to balance the books was to seek government funding. The Tianlin Story House, much the same as the abovementioned Luojing Story House, was affiliated with a government-subsidized and operated community center. It was built inside the Tianlin Center for Community Services and Activities. In order to keep the admission fee low, as informed by Xu Qing, the local governments had to provide at least 150 thousand yuan annually. In actuality, the cost for the operation of the story house was just a tiny fraction of the subsidy package annually granted by local governments to support the community center, which featured a cinema, an exhibition center, an audio-video room, a library, and a ballroom, among other things. The vast majority of the facilities were free of

9   “Pingtan shuchang guode hai haoma? 评弹书场过得还好吗？ [Do pingtan story houses fare well?],” Suzhou ribao, May 21, 2006.



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Illustration 16: Zhuanqiao Park Story House (Zhuanqiao gongyuan shuchang), in the southern suburb of Shanghai, was opened to public in March 2011. Invested by the township government, it is affiliated to an entertainment complex to serve local residents, especially the elderly. The story house allows listeners to leave their teacups on the tables. (Photo provided by Zhou Ping)

charge for about ninety thousand residents in the area, especially those above sixty (around ten thousand). Though the operation cost could be partially covered by rents received by leasing some space to a bank and other companies, local governments were undoubtedly the major subsidizer. Xu Qing estimated that both district and community governments paid the center approximately eight or nine million yuan per year.10 The case of the Tianlin Story House exemplified a widespread practice of local governments to fund story houses. The Luojing Township Government, for example, annually bestowed 100 thousand yuan upon Luojing Story House in the name of “supporting pingtan art.”11

  Xu Qing, interview with author, June 21, 2011.   Zhou baiyi and Cheng Yi, “Luojing zhen zhengfu maidan fuzhi pingtan yishu, ‘yiyuan shuchang’ xiying lao ximi.” 10 11

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Listeners were certainly aware of investments and subsidies from local governments. While enjoying low-price performances, some express their worry about their inability to pay higher admission fees once governments withdrew financial supports.12 When news about the financial difficulties of the abovementioned Tairi Story House was disclosed, listeners did not hesitate to write to the township government requesting subsidies.13 At least in the late 2000s and the opening years of the 2010s, governments across the Yangzi Delta were firmly committed to lending story houses supports, financially and administratively. In 2006, for example, the Suzhou municipal government sought to lay out a budgetary plan to fund thirty-seven story houses in the Greater Suzhou area. It was estimated that each story house was given an annual allowance of 25,000 yuan, in which 15,000 was intended to subsidize performers, 7,000 for maintenance and renovation, and 3,000 for other activities.14 By the end of the 2000s and the early 2010s, as has been shown in the case of the Tianlin Story House and the Luojing Story House, the subsidies invariably exceeded 100,000 yuan and local governments thereby entirely took over performing venues, both government-operated and privately owned. With the pingtan storytelling’s new social function to serve the elderly and governments’ assumption of full financial and administrative control over story houses, the role of state-run pingtan troupes loomed larger than before as not only providers of pingtan performances, but also mediators between (semi-)self-employed storytellers and story houses. State-run troupes were able to play the role as a middleperson because managing staff of story houses, most of whom were government functionaries, had absolute trust in the credibility and ability of state-operated troupes to coordinate with self-employed storytellers. Xu Qing noted that she always asked the Shanghai Troupe to find storytellers for the Tianlin Story House as she was concerned that some poorly disciplined self-employed storytellers’ occasional breach of contracts and therefore failure to serve the aged listeners.15 Upon requests from various story houses in Shanghai, the Shanghai Troupe either

12   Lin Jiejie, “Shu matou chongkai lao shumi pengchang, sanyuan chashui fei nengting liangchang dashu.” 13   Chu Jingwei, “Tairi pingtan shuchang binlin guanzhang, lao tingzhong jishu shi lingdao zhonghuo zhengfu zhengjiu.” 14   “Pingtan shuchang guode hai haoma?” 15   Xu Qing, interview with author, June 21, 2011.



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contacted the self-employed and storytellers from other troupes or directly sent storytellers employed by the Shanghai Troupe. In reality, the Shanghai Troupe played a significant role in serving communitybased story houses in Shanghai in the past decade. Zhou Zhenhua, the vice director of the Shanghai Troupe, for example, stated in my interview with him in July 2009 that the Shanghai Troupe had entered into a contract with the Songjiang District government to send storytellers to story houses located in this district on a regular basis to support existing or newly built story houses.16 Toward an Age of Free Pingtan Storytelling? Many story houses in Songjiang that Zhou Zhenhua had mentioned were newly constructed venues to serve local communities. The one I paid a visit to in May 2009 was built inside a neighborhood open to aged listeners free of charge. Zhou Ping, the storyteller performing for the story house in early May, told of his income in a community story house in my interview with him in 2009: He was guaranteed to receive two hundred yuan daily regardless of the numbers of listeners.17 During my visit on May 9, 2009, I was told that virtually all residents of the neighborhood were previously farmers in this area before its urbanization. After local residents sold their lands to real estate developers and the local government, they settled down in some nearby neighborhoods. The specific story house was built to serve exclusively the elderly therein. It was the local government as well as residents’ committees who hired and paid storytellers including Zhou Ping. In the late 2000s, most such free story houses were situated in suburban Shanghai. Yet, things changed quietly in more recent years when some story houses in downtown Shanghai also started to exempt listeners of admission fees. Eventually in the summer of 2011, a rumor circulated that the government would soon rule that all story houses in Shanghai be free to listeners. In other words, story houses would count exclusively on governmental subsidies with box-office sales becoming non-existent. The rumor instantly sparked controversies across the Yangzi Delta. Many pingtan fans believed that the new rule was not totally absurd,

  Zhou Zhenhua, interview with author, July 31, 2009.   Zhou Ping, interview with author, August 6, 2009.

16 17

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epilogue

for the thrust of the proposal was to allow residents, not necessarily the aged, to get access to facilities of community centers, in which most story houses had been built. Take the Tianlin Story House as an example. If the library, the exhibition hall, and the audio-video room had all been free to local residents, on what grounds should listeners be charged four yuan to sit in the story house under the same roof ? Xu Qing, the center’s manager, replied to my inquiry by squarely expressing her opposition against the proposal. She firmly believed that free performances would cause unnecessary confusion and chaos and disrupt aged listeners’ lives. She cited an example of a story house in the Southwestern Cultural Center (Xi’nan wenhua zhongxin) in the same district as the Tianlin Story House. The center’s policy of allowing the nearby residents to take tickets free of charge resulted in unexpected consequences. On the one hand, those who acquired tickets did not have the motivation to go to the story house on a daily basis like paid listeners in other venues. Thus, storytellers were discouraged to perform in a relatively empty performing place. On the other hand, those who lived slightly distant from the center, but were eager to enjoy the performances, usually failed to obtain free tickets on time. Therefore, they would be denied access to the story house. Based on her observation of the operation in the Southwestern Cultural Center, Xu Qing suggested that admission fees, no matter how insignificant they were, were still in need as a threshold to fend off unmotivated listeners.18 Xu Qing’s point of view later found resonance in a newspaper article dated July 21, 2011. The article was written from listeners’ perspective to voice their opposition to free storytelling for the same reasons as Xu Qing had put forth and to assure policymakers of listeners’ willingness to pay a small amount of money for performances.19 Both the author of the article and Xu Qing felt uncomfortable with half-empty story houses. It was easy to understand that storytellers would be highly encouraged with a roomful of listeners. Yet, why did story house staff care the attendance rates after all, given the fact that it was local governments that footed all bills? Xu Qing gave me a definite answer that the attendance rates did matter, but not for financial reasons. Since pingtan storytelling assumed the new role as the elderly’s   Xu Qing, interview with author, June 21, 2011.  Zhang Shirong 张世荣, “Lao tingke tan mianfei shuchang 老听客谈免费书场 [Old listeners on story houses for free (admission fees)],” Shanghai laonian bao, July 21, 2011. 18 19



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post-retirement entertainment with story houses becoming their public space for pastime and socialization, it was vital to understand that governments were committed to keeping retirees inside story houses on a daily basis and preventing them from engaging in any activities, such as gambling, which might hurt familial and societal harmony. Hence, in the new century, keeping high attendance rates in pingtan storytelling was no longer an indicator of pingtan storytellers’ commercial success, but a political task and social responsibility to take care of the aged and maintain a “harmonious society.”20 As a consequence, Communist cadres and story house staff continued to urge storytellers to stage stories that were able to draw aged listeners including political stories, in spite that box-office sales constituted only a small portion of the revenues to operate and maintain story houses. Governments of all levels in the Yangzi Delta commanded the confidence to cover all the costs doubtlessly because of China’s economic development and governments’ enhanced ability to accumulate unprecedentedly vast wealth. Governments, Market, and Artists: The Triangular Relationship Reconsidered The indispensable role of local governments in investing in and subsidizing story houses attested to their newfound financial capacity to patronize the pingtan art in the 2000s. Apart from the need to serve the elderly and thereby maintain societal harmony, the mission to preserve traditional cultures also prompted governments in the Yangzi Delta to patronize pingtan storytelling. In this sense, Joseph Levenson’s observation forty years ago that the CCP’s vowed to perpetuate China’s traditional art in the name of artistic purity continued to ring true,21 despite the incredible transformations of the country’s socio-political conditions and the CCP itself in the second half of the twentieth century. Compared with those in the early stage of the PRC, however, governments in the new millennium mustered greater economic power and, contrary to some scholarly researches and the commonsensical assumption, were thereby more capable of patronizing and disciplining artists and their works. My study of pingtan storytelling in

  Xu Qing, interview with author, June 21, 2011.   Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Vol. 1, 142.

20 21

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the 2000s thus allows for a reconsideration of the triangular relationship of governments, artists, and market. In his research into the Chinese literature and motion pictures in the 1990s, Jason McGrath dichotomizes China’s popular culture in Maoist and post-Maoist eras as state heteronomy and relative autonomy. By heteronomy, McGrath means “under the Maoist social organization all the various sphere of politics, society, economics, and culture were theoretically, and in most cases actually, subsumed under the total project of revolution; hence, for example, the oft-critiqued instrumentalization of art, through which films and novels became vehicles for political propaganda.” Starting from the 1990s, by contrast, artists managed to achieve “various types of autonomy,” which were “generated by the market-driven differentiation of society and culture.”22 McGrath’s emphasis on the 1900s as the line of demarcation stems from his conviction that effects of the market had yet to wield impact on cultural production through the 1980s. It was during the 1990s that the “Socialist literary system” as proposed by Perry Link came to an end and writers and filmmakers began to enjoy certain autonomy primarily because of the expansion of the market.23 McGrath draws a line in the 1990s as he is not convinced of the domination of market in the 1980s. He further notes, market reforms in China did not result in “the privatization of entire industries,” but a dual system of “public-private arrangements,” particularly in the sector of cultural production.24 Jason McGrath’s analysis, though focusing on the reform times, lends insight into the nature of China’s cultural production in the past six decades. Throughout the book, I have documented the complex, sometimes dramatic or even violent, interactions between PRC governments and pingtan artists. It has never been a linear history about the CCP’s political domination and patronage of the culture during Mao’s times, as has been presumed by scholars. Though Communist cadres of various levels tried to collectivize storytellers, subsidize performing enterprises, and take full control over the repertoire and performances, the governments lacked financial capability and manpower to achieve such goals of cultural reform. Therefore, as I have emphasized, the cultural market and storytellers’ self-employment continued   Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 9–10.   Ibid., 3. 24   Ibid., 4. 22 23



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to exist and, from time to time, counteract political authorities’ efforts to transform pingtan storytelling into a propaganda instrument. In other occasions, political propaganda took the form as entertainment to compete for market share to win the hearts and minds of the populace. Meanwhile, political authorities, hampered by limited financial resources, had to not only tolerate but also count on the cultural market to feed thousands of storytellers. The juxtaposition of politicalized and market-oriented pingtan storytelling and the coexistence of stateand self-employed storytellers prior to the Cultural Revolution allow for a reevaluation of Jason McGrath’s observation of China’s cultural reform in the reform era. The case study of pingtan storytelling in the 1950s and 1960s thus demonstrates that “public-private arrangements” held true not only after the Cultural Revolution, but also during Mao’s times, although storytellers were more politically repressed in the first three decades of the PRC. The 2000s witnessed the seizure of unprecedented financial power by the governments to resume the mission that their counterparts in Mao’s times tried, but not entirely successfully, to accomplish, namely, to fund storytellers and subsidize pingtan storytelling. In a similar vein, Jin Jiang has noted that dramatists, such as performers of Beijing Opera and Yue Opera, depended heavily on governmental funding to survive in the past two decades.25 What was unique to pingtan storytelling was political authorities’ patronizing storytellers, state-employed and self-employed alike, via their investments in and subsidization of story houses in the name of serving retirees and preserving China’s traditional arts in the new millennium. It was not an exaggeration, therefore, to argue that political authorities, for the first time in the history of the PRC, were capable of fully subsidizing pingtan storytelling and funding pingtan performers. The Cultural Revolution might be an exception. Yet, governments between 1966 and 1976 did not resort to economic means, but political means, to enlist storytellers’ cooperation. The ability of local governments to invest millions of yuan in each community center and inject hundreds of thousands of yuan annually into the story house therein resulted from, without a doubt, China’s economic miracle driven by the expansion of market economy since the early 1980s. The case study of the (re)patronization of pingtan storytelling by local governments therefore helps raise a

  Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men, 200.

25

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theoretical issue regarding whether the rise of market economy would lead to the CCP’s loosened control of, or de-politicization of, culture. My observation indicates just the opposite. Economic development did not necessarily weaken, but actually strengthened, the capacity of local governments to supervise and intervene in the culture in 2000s China. In the case of pingtan storytelling, stories in the past two decades appeared to be less politicized and more audience-oriented only because they did not explicitly serve the agenda to promote dogmatic Marxism and the Socialist cause as some stories did in Mao’s age. Nevertheless, pingtan storytelling in the 2000s was still political in that it was complicit with political authorities to fulfill the goals of keeping the elderly within neighborhoods and thereby build a harmonious society. Under this circumstance, CCP cadres, who commanded full control over the marketplaces, namely story houses, continued to put emphasis on attendance rates, not in order to garner profits, but for the sake of social management. The triangular relationship between governments, market, and artists, as has been discussed throughout the whole book, exemplifies a continuity between Mao’s and post-Mao’s China in the realm of cultural reform and management. Governments and artists have been constantly playing a ping-pong game with the cultural market being the arena, with the exception of the Cultural Revolution. Selfemployed artists were able to score a lot of points in the 1950s and 1960s, while storytellers depended heavily on state subsidies to survive at the height of China’s liberalized market economy in the 2000s. Hence, no one could totally dominate the other side throughout the six decades. The story of pingtan storytelling in particular and China’s cultural reform in general will still be the one between market force and political intervention.

List of Interviewees

Name

Sex

Birth Date

Occupation

Place

Cai Kangyin 蔡康寅

M

1950

Pingtan fan

Hong Kong

Chen Xi’an 陈希安 Cheng Zuming 程祖铭

M

1928

Storyteller

Shanghai

M

1935

Los Angeles, CA

2/7/2011*

Fang Shuijin 方水金 Li Gang 李刚

M

1942

Pingtan fan and TV programming staff Pingtan fan

Shanghai

7/23/2010

M

1968

Suzhou

6/25/2010

Li Qingfu 李庆福

M

1933

Storyteller and TV talk show host CCP cadre

Shanghai

6/3/2009

Li Xin 李新 Sang Jian 桑健 Shen Dongshan 沈东山

F

1946

Pingtan fan

Shanghai

7/23/2009 8/2/2010

M

Pingtan fan

Shanghai

1/6/2010*

M

1930

Storyteller

Shanghai

6/28/2010

Su Yuyin 苏毓荫

M

1929

Storyteller

Shanghai

7/24/2010 5/2/2007

Su Jia 苏嘉 Tang Lixing 唐力行

M

Pingtan fan

M

1946

Wang Boyin 王伯荫 Wang Zhonghua 王忠华

M

1923

Toronto, Canada Son of a pingtan Shanghai storyteller and historian Storyteller Shanghai

F

1945

Pingtan fan

Shanghai

Time 7/26/2010* 9/1/2010* 7/23/2009

5/7/2007 5/20/2007 1/7/2008 7/2/2009 7/5/2009 8/6/2009 6/28/2010 7/24/2010 9/27/2010* 8/3/2010 7/26/2009 7/20/2009

272

list of interviewees

Table (cont.) Name

Sex

Birth Date

Occupation

Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡

M

1925

Ex- CCP cadre and pingtan theorist

Shanghai

1/8/2008

Script writer

Shanghai

6/3/2009 7/4/2009 7/19/2009 7/1/2010 7/31/2010 8/2/2010

manager of a story house Pingtan fan

Shanghai

6/21/2011

Shanghai

7/20/2010

Storyteller

Suzhou

7/7/2009

M

1926– 2011 1939

Pingtan fan

Shanghai

7/26/2010

M

1926

Suzhou

6/9/2010

M

1964

Ex-CCP cadre and pingtan historian Storyteller

Shanghai

8/6/2009

CCP cadre (vice director of the Shanghai Troupe)

Shanghai

7/31/2009

Shanghai

12/23/2011

Xia Zhenhua 夏镇华 Xu Qing 徐青 Yang Limin 杨利民 Yang Zijiang 扬子江 Zhang Shaozheng 章绍曾 Zhou Liang 周良 Zhou Ping 周平 Zhou Zhenhua 周震华

M

1939

F M M

M

* Interviews conducted through phones or internet phones.

Place

Time

Bibliography

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Middle-length Stories Yiding yaoba Huai he xiuhao 一定要把淮河修好 [We certainly must fix the Huai river]. 1953. Audio Clip. Luwei qingqing 芦苇青青 [How green the reeds are]. 1965. Audio Clip. Zhongpian pingtan Lin Chong 中篇评弹《林冲》[Lin Chong, the middle-length pingtan story]. Shanghai: Zhongguo changpian Shanghai gongsi, n. d. CD. Full-length Stories Yang Zijiang 扬子江. Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping 刘少奇和邓小平 [Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping]. April 1–April 30, 1998. Audio Clip. Su Yuyin and Chen Zhongying 苏毓荫、陈忠英. Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong 黄慧如与陆根荣 [Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong]. Shanghai youxian dianshi tai 上海有线电视台 [Shanghai Cable TV]. 1998. Video Clip. Li Gang 李刚. Gaige fengyun 改革风云 [Wind and clouds of the reform]. March 1–March 15, 2007. Audio Clip. ——  Wenge fengyun 文革风云 [Wind and clouds of the Cultural Revolution]. September 1–September 30, 2007. Audio Clip. TV Shows Youguai, haishi siben? 诱拐还是私奔? [Abduction or elopement?]. Shanghai dianshi tai 上海电视台 [Shanghai TV]. January 20, 2007. Video Clip. “09 pingtan zhichun Zhang Jianting pingtan yishu yanchang hui 09评弹之春张鉴庭 评弹艺术演唱会[The concert of Zhang Jianting’s pingtan art at the spring of pingtan 2009].” Shanghai Dongfang dianshi tai 上海东方电视台 [Shanghai Orient TV]. February 08, 2009. Video Clip. “Li Gang pinghua 李刚评话 [Li Gang’s pinghua].” Suzhou dianshi tai 苏州电视台 [Suzhou TV]. 2009–2010. Video Clip. Works in Chinese 1954 nian 9 yue 27 ri qi shuchang zhenrong biao 1954年9月27日起书场阵容表 [Lineups of story houses starting from September 27, 1954]. n. p. 1954. “Benshi pingtan yiren juxing zuotan hui, menglie fanji Huang Yi’an fanghuo yinmou” 本市评弹艺人举行座谈会, 猛烈反击黄异庵放火阴谋 [Pingtan storytellers of our city hold seminars, vehemently counter Huang Yi’an’s machination of setting fire]. Xin Suzhou bao, July 6, 1957. Cai Yiping 蔡一平, “Jiang Yunxian yu Tixiao yinyuan” 蒋云仙与《啼笑姻缘》[ Jiang Yunxian and Fate in Tears and Laughter]. Pingtan yishu, No. 4, 1985. 184–189. Cai Yuanli 蔡源莉. “Xin Zhongguo quyi gouchen: xiezai ‘wuwu’ zhishi fabiao 50 zhounian zhiji” 新中国曲艺钩沉: 写在 “五五” 指示发表50周年之际 [Probing into quyi in new China: on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the “5/5 Directive”]. Pingtan yishu, No. 28, 2001. 127–144. Cao Hanchang 曹汉昌. “Shutan yanyun lu (xu)” 书坛烟云录 (续) [The record of smoke and clouds in the world of pingtan storytelling, part two]. Pingtan yishu, No. 15, 1994. 138–142. ——  “Shutan yanyun lu” 书坛烟云录 [The record of smoke and clouds in the world of pingtan storytelling]. In Jiangzhehu pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu bangongshi ed., Shutan koushu lishi. 38–82.



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Chen Lingxi 陈灵犀. Xianbian shuangji 弦边双楫 [Dual oars beside strings]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1982. Chen Yanyan 陈燕燕. “Dui dangqian pinghua de chongxin renshi” 对当前评话的重 新认识 [A new understanding of modern-day pinghua]. http://www.pingtan.com .cn/000009/Y091020SZ.htm, Accessed on November 5, 2009. Chen Yun 陈云. Chen Yun tongzhi guanyu pingtan de tanhua he tongxin (zengding ben) 陈云同志关于评弹的谈话和通信 (增订本) [Comrade Chen Yun’s talks and letters regarding pingtan storytelling (revised and enlarged edition)]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1997. Chen Yunhao 陈允豪 “Mantan pingtan jie bianzuo xinshu wenti” 漫谈评弹界编 作新书问题 [Casual comments on the development of new stories in the pingtan circle]. In Zhou Liang ed. Suzhou pingtan wenxuan, diyi ce, 1950–1964. 4–6. Chu Jingwei 储静伟. “Tairi pingtan shuchang binlin guanzhang, lao tingzhong jishu shi lingdao zhonghuo zhengfu zhengjiu” 泰日评弹书场濒临关张 老听众疾书市 领导终获政府拯救 [The Tairi pingtan story house was on the verge of being out of business; old listeners wrote to leaders in the municipal government and the government eventually came to rescue]. Dongfang zaobao, August 31, 2011. Ding Jie丁杰. “Wo yu pingtan 我与评弹 [Pingtan and I].” Pingtan yishu, No. 28, 2001. 170–174. Donggu 东谷. “Zhongpian pingtan Chongshan zhiwei de yanchu 中篇评弹《冲山 之围》的演出 [The staging of The Siege of the Mount Chong, a middle-length pingtan story].” Wenhui bao, March 15, 1959. Duanmu Fu 端木复. “ ‘Pingtan zhichun’ jinian Zhang Jianting bainian dancheng ‘评弹之春’ 纪念张鉴庭百年诞辰 [“The spring of pingtan” celebrates Zhang Jianting’s one-hundredth anniversary].” Jiefang ribao, February 9, 2009. Duqiao 渡桥. “Yetan pingtan” 也谈评弹 (Also on pingtan storytelling). Guangming ribao, June 16, 1962. Fan Boqun 范伯群. “Manyi jiu Shanghai ticai de shumu he xiaoshuo 漫议旧上海 题材的书目和小说 [Informal discussion of pingtan stories and fiction about old Shanghai].” Pingtan yishu, No. 13, 1991. 13–27. Fang Yun 方耘. Pingtan chuangzuo xuan 评弹创作选 [Selected works of pingtan storytelling]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1975. Fangcao 芳草. “Suzhou pingtan koujue 苏州评弹口诀 (Pithy formula of Suzhou pingtan storytelling).” Pingtan yishu, No. 1, 1982. 242–259. Fangtian 方天. “Suzhou pingtan de zhongpian 苏州评弹的中篇 [Middle-length stories in Suzhou pingtan storytelling].” Pingtan yishu, No. 29, 2001. 85–86. Fanyi 凡一. “Pingtan gexinjia Pan Boying (xu) 评弹革新家潘伯英 (续) [Pan Boying, the pingtan reformer (part two)].” Pingtan yishu No. 8, 1987. 170–176. ——  “Pingtan gexinjia Pan Boying (zaixu) 评弹革新家潘伯英 (再续) [Pan Boying, the pingtan reformer (part three)].” Pingtan yishu, No. 11, 1990. 120–132. Feiguang 非广. “Huizhong shuchang de hunluan xianxiang 惠中书场的混乱现象 [The disorder in the Huizhong story house].” Shanghai shutan, May 10, 1952. Feng Ying 冯莹. “Kouchuan xinshou yinchu banquan zhizheng 口传心授引出的 版权之争 [(The practice of ) passing down by mouth and giving by heart led to disputes over copyright].” Renmin fayuan bao, September 8, 2006. Fengyu 凤渔. “Shuchang piaojia 书场票价 [Ticket prices of story houses].” Pingtan yishu, No. 8, 1987. Fu Jin 傅谨. Xin Zhongguo xiju shi: 1949–2000 新中国戏剧史: 1949–2000 [A history of drama in new China: 1949–2000]. Changsha: Hunan meishu chubanshe, 2002. Fu Jun 傅骏, “Zou zhenglu, zou xinlu, zou kuanlu 走正路, 走新路, 走宽路 [Take the right way, take the new way, (and) take the broad way].” Pingtan yishu, No. 3, 1984. 29–32. “Fujian: guanyu Guangyu shuchang shijian diaocha baogao de buchong shuoming” 附件: 关于光裕书场事件调查报告的补充说明 [Appendix: supplements to the

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Index

5/5 Directive, the (Wuwu zhishi 五五指示), 70, 84 “Admonishing Wife under the Lamp” (Dengxia quanqi 灯下劝妻), 170 Aesthetic, 91, 93, 97, 127, 128 Anderson, Marston, 97 Andrews, Julia, 15, 29 Anhui Daily (Anhui ribao 安徽日报), 96 Anti-Japanese War, the, 38, 88, 141, 184, 186 Anti-Rightist Movement, the archives of, 23 before or after, 142, 143 China Democratic League and, 155 Huang Yi’an and, 150 in pingtan stories, 182, 237, 242, 251 the Rectification Movement and, 156 Artists of the Association (xiehui yiren 协会艺人), 37; also see Self-employed Association, the during the Guangyu Story House Incident, 144–153, 157, 161 end of, 37, 132 founding of, 36, 131, 132 and governments, 132, 137 membership of, 74, 114, 131, 133–136 and state-employed artists, 141 stories banned by, 61, 67, 68, 69 storytellers affiliated with, 37, 129, 137, 138 the Suzhou branch of, 72 Zhang Hongsheng and, 114 Association for Quyi Workers, the (Quyi gongzuozhe xiehui 曲艺工作者 协会), 37 Association for Reforming and Improving Pingtan Storytelling, the (Pingtan gaijin xiehui 评弹改进协会), 36, 131, 132, 135, 143; also see the Association Bad story (huaishu 坏书), 68, 186, 209 Bai 白 (dialogues and monologues), 107 Ballroom (dancing), 38–40, 128, 133, 185–187, 204, 262

Barmé, Geremie, 50, 128, 239 Beats per minute [BPM], 94 Beijing Opera (  Jingju 京剧), plays of, 64, 66, 117, 121 reformation of, 16 roles in, 124 stars of, 53, 76, 116 troupes of, 78, 191, 269 Bender, Mark interviews done by, 22 Lin Chong, 116n106 on middle-length pingtan stories, 101, 104n67 on pingtan and politics, 14 pingtan terms and theories, 44, 46, 48, 107 Benson, Carlton, 57, 125 Bian, Morris, 36 Biao 表 (third-person speech), 107 Big story (dashu 大书), 43; also see Pinghua Big-character poster (dazi bao 大字报), 157, 158, 165 Blader, Susan, 48, 49 Bourgeois liberalization, 196, 198, 220, 225 Box-office revenue sharing option (chaizhang zhi 拆帐制), 38, 41, 140, 159, 166, 176 Cai Kangyin 蔡康寅, 102, 103 Campaign of Eradicating Spiritual Pollution (Qingchu jingshen wuran yundong 清除精神污染运动), 198, 225; also see Spiritual Pollution Cangzhou Story House (Cangzhou shuchang 沧州书场), 38, 91, 144 Cao Hanchang 曹汉昌, 57, 59, 82 Category one stories (yilei shu 一类书), 44; also see classic story Category two stories (erlei shu 二类书), 44, 64, 65; also see new story CCP (Chinese Communist Party) accomplishments of, 36, 44, 122, 127, 170, 183, 187, 189 bureaucrats and cadres, 7, 8, 22, 26, 29, 31, 33, 37, 49, 58, 74, 134,

292

index

141, 147, 160, 162, 196, 197, 201, 208, 210–212, 231, 255, 256, 270 censorship by, 15, 16, 61, 215, 226 criticisms of, 50, 74, 196, 219, 220, 221, 236, 239 and cultural reform and policies of, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 17–19, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33, 36, 51, 53, 55–57, 75, 76, 79, 87, 88, 93, 99, 104, 118, 157, 161, 167, 172, 180, 197, 225, 233, 245, 270 history of, 21, 47, 58, 227, 245, 246, 251 loyalty to, 1, 77 master narrative of history by, 188, 213, 247, 257 membership of, 28 secret agents of, 184 and storytellers, 56, 80, 83, 179 Censorship, 15 do-it-yourself, 16; also see self-censorship inefficient, 20, 49, 51, 84, 210, 211, 225, 234 in Mao’s China, 15, 17 and market, 19 in Post-Mao China, 50, 210 Central Party Literature Publisher, the (Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe 中央文献出版社), 236 Changshu Pingtan Troupe, the (Changshu pingtan tuan 常熟评弹团), 111, 138 Chen Hesheng 陈鹤声, 178 Chen Hongxia 陈红霞, 56, 80, 101 Chen Lingxi 陈灵犀 and Jiang Yuequan, 57, 65, 116, 120 and middle-length stories, 87, 91, 116, 119, 121, 125 and opening ballads, 57, 163, 163n3 Chen Xi’an 陈希安, 54, 73, 81, 101 Chen Yi 陈毅, 238 Chen Yun 陈云 and cultural bureaucrats, 29, 35, 51 and pingtan reform 34, 39, 41, 171, 197–200 and pingtan techniques, 46 and the Shanghai Troupe, 198 Chen Zhongying 陈忠英, 215–218 Cheng Hongye 程红叶, 56, 80 Cheng Liqiu 程丽秋, 144 Cheng Zuming 程祖铭, 215–217 China Democratic League, the (CDL, Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng 中国民 主同盟), 153, 154

China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the (Zhongguo wenxue yishu jia lianhehui 中国文学艺术家联合会 or Wenlian 文联), 58 Chinese Civil War, the, 74, 126, 141 Chuancha 穿插, 46; also see Stuck-ins Classic story bans on, 3, 4, 44, 50, 54, 55, 81, 83, 153, 182, 219 decline of, 195, 208, 209, 232, 241 definition of, 44 during the movement of Cutting the Tail, 60–70, 72, 73, 75, 77 form of, 99 ideological backwardness in, 181, 182, 224 about knights-errant or swordsmen, 97, 255 and middle-length stories, 87n3 and new stories, 58 and political authorities, 3 revision of, 31, 88, 118, 120, 169 revival of, 84, 138, 159, 168, 169 171, 172 romantic love in, 182 scripts of, 48 styles of telling, 104 told by self-employed storytellers, 138 Collective life ( jiti shenghuo 集体生活) 77 Collectively owned (jiti suoyou zhi 集体所有制), 7 director of, 157 distribution system of, 110 founding of troupes, 161, 162, 164 and market, 36, 177 and state-owned pingtan troupes, 174 storytellers of 192, 201 the Suzhou Troupe, 36 Yue Opera troupes and other performing enterprises, 166, 167 Collectivize (collectivization) de-collectivization, 179 failure to be, 20, 37, 84, 110 of privately owned enterprises, 145 by the state, 6, 7, 18, 20, 26, 28, 36, 73, 77, 78, 81–84, 88, 115, 158, 160–162, 165, 180 of storytellers, 7, 80 by storytellers themselves, 137 Communist Youth League, the (Gongqing tuan 共青团), 92 “Complaining of Injustice in the tavern” (  Jiudian suyuan 酒店诉冤), 119, 121



index

Contract system (Chengbao zhi 承包制), 201, 205, 209, 219, 224 Cotton Clothing Society (Buyi hui 布衣会), 55 Counter-propaganda, 7, 46, 181 Cultivating Talents, Creating Stories, [and] Taking the Right Way (churen, chushu, zou zhenglu 出人，出书， 走正路), 197, 199 Cultural reform apathy toward, 63 and collectivization, 51 goals or agendas of, 10, 11, 75, 76, 128, 157 and market or economic factors, 8, 17, 200, 225 outlooks of, 5, 25, 33, 71, 84, 268 in reform times, 33, 37, 224, 268–270 scholarship about, 17 Cultural Revolution, the after, 15, 18, 25, 158, 191, 195, 206, 214, 219, 224 archives of, 23 before, 7, 13, 17, 18, 34 in pingtan stories, 227, 232, 234, 242, 243, 247 radicalism during, 16, 19, 105, 190, 192, 219, 220, 244 as a watershed, 19 Cultural thaw, 164, 164n5, 172 Cultural worker (wenhua gongzuozhe 文化工作者), 6, 17, 21, 26, 89, 135, 186, 189 Cutting the Tail, the movement of (zhan weiba 斩尾巴), 4, 20, 44, 50, 53, 70–73, 77, 138, 172 Chen Linxi and, 119 classic stories and, 54, 61 the culmination of, 61 opposition to, 5, 68, 159, 168 the reexamination of, 69 as self-censorship, 54, 83, 84 and the Shanghai Troupe, 83 Dahua Story House (Dahua shuchang 大华书场), 39, 215 Dang 档 (performing unit), 25, 73, 75, 174, 229 Danwei 单位 (units), 231 Darwinist theory of evolution, 59 Dazhong xiqu 大众戏曲 (Mass Drama), 63, 64 Democratic parties (minzhu dangpai 民主党派), 149, 153

293

Democratic Reform, the (minzhu gaige 民主改革), 141, 142 Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, 222, 235, 237, 238, 243 Department of Literature and Arts (Wenyi chu 文艺处), 59, 60, 62, 74 Directive on the Works of Dramatic Reform by the Government Administration Council (Zhengwu yuan guanyu xiqu gaige gongzuo de zhishi 政务院关于戏曲改革工作的 指示), 70; also see the 5/5 Directive Dim Dream Recalled: My Pingtan Career (Biemeng yixi: wode pingtan shengya 别梦依稀：我的评弹生涯), 22 Ding Richang 丁日昌, 49 Dream of Red Chamber, the (Honglou meng 红楼梦), 32, 102 Driven Up the Liang Mountains (Bishang Liangshan 逼上梁山), 64 Dropped Golden Fan (Luo jinshan 落金扇), 71 Du, Wenwei, 46 Du Yuesheng 杜月笙, 74 Emperor Kangxi (Kangxi huangdi 康熙皇帝), 191, 192, 202, 218, 226 copyright of, 222–225 the popularity of, 191, 202, 219 “Emperor of Pingtan Storytelling” (pingtan huangdi 评弹皇帝), 141, 143; also see Yan Xueting Emperor Qianlong, 172 Emperor Qianlong’s Tours in Jiangnan (Qianlong xia Jiangnan 乾隆下江南), 61–62, 71, 171, 172 Entertainment tax (yule shui 娱乐税), 140, 159 “Erroneously Chastising Zhenniang” (Wuze Zhenniang 误责贞娘), 119, 121 Esherick, Joseph, 33 Eternal Wave, The (Yongbu xiaoshi de dianbo 永不消失的电波), 185, 187, 213 Evening party (wanhui 晚会), 91 Experience real life [of peasants and workers] (tiyan shenghuo 体验生活), 88 Fan Boqun 范伯群, 214 Fan Xuejun 范雪君, 56, 136; also see Queen of Tanci Fang Shuijin 方水金, 103, 126 Fang Yufen 方玉峰, 180

294

index

Fanshen 翻身 (Standing up), 28 “Farewell in Tears in the Roadside Pavilion” (Changting qibie 长亭泣别) 119 Fast Jiang Tune (kuai Jiang diao 快蒋调), 94, 95; also see Jiang Tune Fate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao yinyuan 啼笑姻缘), 181, 211 Feixiong 非（飞）兄, 176 Fighting at the Enemy’s Heart (Zhandou zai diren xinzang li 战斗在敌人心脏里), 185, 187 “First Spring of the Nineteen Sixties”, The (Liushi niandai diyi chun 六十年代第一春), 163 Five Antis, the Campaign of, 100, 100n50, 109, 138 Four Graduates of the Imperial Examination (Si Jinshi 四进士), 168 Fozi Ridge Reservoir, the (Fozi ling shuiku 佛子岭水库), 87, 88 Fudan University (Fudan daxue 复旦大学), 59 Full-length pingtan story (changpian pingtan 长篇评弹) censorship against, 49, 183 decline of, 138 and the leisured class, 43, 105 length of, 47 low-budget, 40, 111 middle-length stories and, 87n3, 104, 104n67, 108, 112, 116 new 138, 169,194 performing, 27, 101, 137, 227, 228, 231, 260 political, 227, 235, 242, 243 in the radio, 216, 218 scheduling 115 story houses for, 103 Su Yuyin’s, 204, 225 types of, 44 on TV, 216, 217 writing of, 57, 58, 120, 235, 242 Gao, James, 5, 22, 30, 87 Gong Huasheng 龚华声, 146–148 Gong Lisheng 龚丽声, 139, 157, 165, 179 Government Administration Council (Zhengwu yuan 政务院), 70 Great Leap Forward disillusionment at, 188, 192 economic disaster of, 20, 46, 164, 167, 177

in pingtan stories, 237 zeitgeist of, 163 Great reunion” (da tuanyuan 大团圆), 96 Greatly Writing the Thirteen Years (daxie shisan nian 大写十三年), 32, 33, 46, 122, 181 Gu Chunlin 顾春林, 122–124 Gu Hongbo 顾宏伯, 158 Guangming Daily (Guangming ribao 光明日报), 172 Guangyu Public Society, the (Guangyu gongsuo 光裕公所), 131 Guangyu Society, the (Guangyu she 光裕社), 132, 147 Guangyu Story House (Guangyu shuchang 光裕书场), 146, 147, 149, 153 Guangyu Story House Incident, the (Guangyu shuchang shijian 光裕书场事件), 151 Huang Yi’an and, 146, 149 participation in, 155, 158 the Rectification Movement and, 156 as resistance, 161, 162, 179 Guanzi shu 关子书 (crisis episodes), 47, 48, 99; also see Longtang shu Guerrillas on the Railroad (Tiedao youji dui 铁道游击队), 189, 219 Guo Binqing 郭彬卿, 40, 124 Han Shiliang 韩士良, 64, 79 He Man 何慢, 70 He Zhanchun 何占春, 119 Heilmann, Sebastian, 32 Heroes at the Ocean (Haishang yingxiong 海上英雄), 123, 127 Hidden script, 23, 50, 54, 84 Hodes, Nancy, 48, 66 Holm, David, 10, 14 Hong Kong, 53 lives in, 186–188 performing tour by the Shanghai Pingtan Troupe (1962), 173, 174 in pingtan stories, 186–188 published in, 195, 236, 241 tour of (1950–1951), 73–75, 80, 83, 142 tours of (the 1980s), 194, 208 Hou Jiuxia 侯九霞, 155 How Green the Reeds Are (Luwei qingqing 芦苇青青), 102, 121, 122, 125 Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦, 243, 250, 251 Hua Guofeng 华国锋, 243, 244 Hua Mulan 花木兰, 65



index

Huai River, the (Huaihe 淮河) fixing 85 pingtan artists in, 87–91, 93, 94, 96, 116, 139, 141 in the pingtan story, 92, 94, 96, 100 also see We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River Huang, Joe, 97 Huang, the Blue Sky (Huang Qingtian 黄青天), 153, 154 Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong (Huang Huiru yu Lu Genrong 黄慧如与陆根荣), 203 bans on and criticisms of, 207–212, 226 central theme of, 212 as a full-length story, 191, 202, 204, 205 as a middle-length story, 109, 110, 204 recognition of, 213, 215–218 as a Shanghai story, 214–218 Huang Jingfen 黄静芬, 66, 67 Huang Yi’an 黄异庵 as a Communist collaborator, 57, 58, 67, 68, 83 as a dissident, 146, 149–152 in a middle-length story, 153, 154, 158, 162 the purge of, 155 telling classic stories, 69 Huangpu River, the (Huangpu jiang 黄浦江), 102 Hui 回 (act or chapter), 92 Huizhong Story House (Huizhong shuchang 惠中书场), 63, 68 Huju 沪剧 (Shanghai drama), 11 Humor is the treasure of storytelling (Xue nai shuzhong zhi bao 噱乃书中之宝), 45 Hung, Chang-tai, 11 Huzhou Culture Bureau (Huzhou wenhua ju 湖州文化局), 208 Improvisation, 32, 48, 50, 51, 101, 107, 234 Invisible Sentry (Anshao 暗哨), 183, 186, 187, 188 Jade Dragonfly (Yu qingting 玉蜻蜓), 61, 69, 120, 146, 169, 202, 204, 210 Jia Caiyun 贾彩云, 72, 146, 159 Jiang Atu [Atu] 姜阿土, 93, 94, 96, 100 Jiang, Jin, 17, 18, 166, 189, 269 Jiang Qing 江青, 242 Jiang Tune (  Jiang diao 蒋调), 95; also see Fast Jiang Tune

295

Jiang Yuequan 蒋月泉, 55 and Chen Linxin, 57, 116, 120 Founding the Shanghai Troupe, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 115 in Hong Kong, 73, 75, 142 in the Huai River valley, 89, 90 as a member of the Shanghai Troupe, 139, 142, 143, 150, 220 and new stories, 57, 61, 64–66 performances and singings by, 56, 94, 101, 108, 118–120, 170 singing style of, 95 and Su Yuyin, 136, 202, 216 and Zhang Hongsheng, 115 Jiang Yunxian 蒋云仙, 169, 181, 192, 193 Jiang Zemin 江泽民, 243 Jiangnan 江南, the (pingtan troupe), 161, 177, 178 Jiangyin Pingtan Troupe, the (  Jiangyin pingtan tuan 江阴评弹团), 207 Jiao Yulu 焦裕禄, 174, 175 Jiefang Daily (  Jiefang ribao 解放日报), 112 Jigong 济公, 68, 71, 72, 172–174 Jin Shengbo 金声伯, 48, 81 Jin Shiying 金士英, 145 Jingyuan Story House (  Jingyuan shuchang 静园书场), 39 Jinshan Pingtan Troupe, the (  Jinshan pingtan tuan 金山评弹团), 207, 211 June 4th Incident, the, 227, 234, 243, 250, 251 “Just in Personal Crisis” (Bao luonan 暴落难), 170 Kaikonen, Marja, 14, 113 Ke Lan 柯蓝, 125 Ke Qingshi 柯庆施, 181, 182 Killing Ma in Jinling (  Jinling sha Ma 金陵杀马), 168 KMT (Nationalist Party) agents of, 48, 158, 183, 185 bureaucrats or officers of, 74, 123, 134, 182 and the New Life Movement, 3, 57 regime of, 71, 184 surrender to, 184 war against, 9, 185 Kraus, Richard, 33, 200 Laboring people (laodong renmin 劳动人民), 97, 99, 105 Lantham, Kevin, 127 Laodan 老旦 (old female role), 124

296

index

Lau, Frederick, 8 Law Cases of Lord Peng (Penggong an 彭公案), 63 Leadership Work Committee for Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Pingtan (Jiang Zhe Hu Pingtan gongzuo lingdao xiaozu 江浙沪评弹 工作领导小组), 34 Lee, Ching Kwan, 246 Lei Feng 雷锋, 189, 219 Leisured class (youxian jieji 有闲阶级), 43, 54, 73, 99, 105 Levine, Lawrence, 1 Levenson, Joseph, 267 Li Bokang 李伯康, 65, 70 Li Gang 李刚 and the audience, 244, 253 and censorship, 235 market success of, 241, 242, 246, 253 as a pinghua storyteller, 222, 228, 229, 233, 239, 257 and stories about the Cultural Revolution, 240, 242, 243, 248, 252 the story about post-Maoist China by, 234, 242, 249, 250, 251 as a storyteller of the Suzhou Troupe, 245 as a TV talk show host, 253–256, 258; also see Li Gang Pinghua Li Gang Pinghua 李刚评话, 240, 253, 254, 256, 258 Li Qingfu 李庆福 comments on middle-length stories by, 102 after the Cultural Revolution, 215 and the Rectification Movement, 156–158, 160, 161 and the Shanghai Troupe, 115, 125–126, 127, 141, 142 Li Shaochun 李少春, 76, 116 Li Xin 李新, 103, 163 Lieberthal, Kenneth, 33, 34 Life of Wu Xun, the (Wu Xun zhuan 武训传), 76 Lin Biao 林彪, 233, 241, 250 Lin Chong 林冲 and anti-feudalism, 118 as entertainment, 119–121 as a full-length story, 57, 66 as a middle-length story, 115, 116, 116n106, 117, 123 “Lin Chong Treading on the Snow” (Lin Chong taxue 林冲踏雪), 118, 119

Ling Wenjun 凌文君, 144 Link, Perry on “other parts of China,” 127 on the “socialist literary system,” 25, 268 on villains, 183, 188 on xia (knight-errant), 98 on xiangsheng, 11, 45 Liu Housheng 刘厚生, 78 Liu Lianfang 刘莲芳, 112 Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇, 167, 237 Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping (Liu Shaoqi he Deng Xiaoping 刘少奇和邓小平) 226, 237, 240 Liu, Siyuan, 16 Liu Tianyun 刘天韵 as a Communist collaborator, 55, 56, 76, 77 and middle-length stories, 90, 101, 118, 120 and the Shanghai Troupe, 79–81 Long March, the (Changzheng 长征, pingtan troupe) establishment of, 161, 165 performers of, 169, 171, 173, 174, 192 performing tour in Beijing, 172 wealth of, 177 Longtang shu 弄堂书 (elaboration episodes), 47, 48, 207; also see Guanzi shu Lord Bao (Baogong 包公), 176 Louie, Kam, 14, 97 Lu, Hanchao, 17–18 Luojing Story House, the (Luojing shuchang 罗泾书场), 259, 262–264 Lushan Conference, the (Lushan huiyi 庐山会议), 237 “Miscellaneous Opening Ballad” (Shijin kaipian 什锦开篇), 169, 170 Ma Rufei 马如飞, 49 Mackerras, Colin, 13, 15 “Mantis’ Wedding” (Tanglang zuoqin 螳螂做亲), 170 Mao Zedong, Chairman, 毛泽东 and class, 237 cultural policy and cultural movement of, 58, 76 on fixing the Huai River, 91 in pingtan stories, 237, 250 Market competing for and success in, 6, 7, 21, 64, 73, 79, 83, 87, 98, 99,



index

102, 108–112, 115, 116, 119, 120, 125–129, 135, 138, 142, 174, 191, 192, 195, 196, 204, 209, 212, 222, 224, 226, 240, 242, 253, 269 demands of, 108, 113, 114, 125, 128, 129, 139, 167, 169, 197, 201, 209, 232, 239 de-marketization, 13, 17, 25 information of, 41 introduction of market and market economy, 7, 12, 13, 15, 19, 191, 268, 270 marketplace, 14, 15, 20, 25, 104, 270, also see Story house relationship with the state and artists, 5, 8, 17, 18, 19, 25, 28, 36, 37, 38, 68, 173, 177, 198, 215, 224, 225, 246, 268, 270 the role of, 8, 12, 17, 22 as a source of livelihoods, 6, 7, 21, 27, 53, 74, 84, 137, 153, 161, 165, 166, 178 Marriage Law, 55–56, 80, 208 Mazur, Mary, 30 McDaniel, Laura, 27 McDougall, Bonnie, 14, 97 McGrath, Jason, 268, 269 Mei Lanfang 梅兰芳, 53 Meiqi Story House, the (Meiqi shuchang 美琪书场), 240 Meisheng 梅生, 123 Meisner, Maurice, 92 Memory collective, 246, 257 critical, 247, 248, 252 and historical narrative, 248, 252 about Mao’s China, 226, 227, 233, 237, 238, 240, 245, 251 nostalgic, 247, 252, 253 about old Shanghai, 213, 214 also see nostalgia Middle-length pingtan stories (zhongpian pingtan 中篇评弹) audience of, 43, 102, 103, 104 creation of, 20, 87, 88, 92, 99, 100, 101, 106, 107 form of, 43, 99, 101, 106, 115, 120, 123, 128 and full-length stories, 104n67, 109 high-budget, 40, 106, 111, 129 Huang, the Blue Sky, 153, 154 market success of, 108, 109, 110, 115, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131

297

as political propaganda, 102, 105, 126, 127 performances of, 95 repertoire of, 87n3, 102, 108, 116, 122, 212 and Su Yuyin 204 Military Depot 51 (Di 51hao bingzhan 第51号兵站), 185, 187 Ministry of Culture, the (Wenhua bu 文化部) on banning classic stories, 31, 72, 173 and Chen Yun, 34 policies and instructions by, 114, 155, 167, 168, 172–174 and Shanghai government/local cadres, 32, 51, 71, 84, 172 Model play (yangban xi 样板戏), 186, 193 Nanjing Road (Nanjing lu 南京路), 63, 107 National community, 92, 94, 123, 127 New aged listener (laonian xin tingke 老年新听客), 231 New figure (xin renwu 新人物), 96; also see New man New Life Movement, the (Xin sheng huo yundong 新生活运动), 3, 57 New Long March Pingtan Troupe, the (Xin changzheng pingtan tuan 新长征评弹团), 193 New man [men, people], 92, 93, 97, 99; also see New figure New pingtan storytelling (xin pingtan 新评弹), 101; also see Middle-length story New story (xinshu 新书) and “category two stories,” 44n35 and classic stories, 50, 54, 57, 60, 67, 68 Lin Chong as a, 57 performing, 28, 56, 58, 62, 76, 78, 82, 84 promotion of, 63, 67, 75, 77, 83, 85, 88, 182 unsuccessful, 64, 65, 67, 69, 73, 140 writing of, 44, 58, 65, 66, 67, 75, 146 xuetou and, 45, 47 New Suzhou Daily (Xin Suzhou bao 新苏州报), 149, 151 Nostalgia, 168, 184, 192, 213, 214, 233, 247, 248, 252, 253; also see Memory Old Lady Zhong (Zhong laotai 钟老太) 122–124

298

index

Old Shanghai (lao Shanghai 老上海), 202, 204, 214 Old story (laoshu 老书), 44; also see Classic story Opening ballad (kaipian 开篇) composed before 1949, 168–170, 203 as popular songs/entertainment, 43, 124, 125, 228 as propaganda, 43, 56, 57, 163 writing of, 120 Opening and Reform (reform era, reform times, reform age) the age of, 12, 13 culture in, 13, 33, 269 Maoist times and, 18, 28, 38 in pingtan stories, 232, 243 Orient Radio, the (Dongfang diantai 东方电台), 61–63 “Ought to Emphasize the Discussion on The Life of Wu Xun” (Yingdang zhongshi dianying Wu Xun zhuan de taolun 应当重视电影武训传 的讨论), 76 Painting of Ten Beauties (Shimei tu 十美图), 60, 61, 75 Pair of Pearl Phoenixes (Shuang zhufeng 双珠凤), 182 Pan Boying 潘伯英 as a CCP member/official, 28, 29, 105 as a Communist collaborator, 55 in the Guangyu Story House Incident, 147, 149, 152, 154, 162 and the Shanghai Troupe, 80, 83 Pan Hannian 潘汉年, 235 Pan Liyun 潘莉韵, 146–148 Pan Wenyin 潘闻荫, 178, 179 Patron (patronize, patronage) re-patronization, 259, 267, 269 by the state (Party), 7, 15, 17, 21, 36, 41, 81, 84, 268 storytellers, 8, 28, 146, 195 subsidize (finance) and, 6, 14, 19, 167 Pearl Pagoda, the (Zhenzhu ta 珍珠塔), 49, 61, 65, 69 Peng Benle 彭本乐, 228–233 Peng Dehuai 彭德怀, 235, 237, 242 People’s Daily (Renmin ribao 人民日报), 76 People’s Political Consultative Conference of Suzhou (Suzhou shi zhengxie 苏州市政协), 148 Perry, Elizabeth, 11, 31, 32

Pheasant listeners (yeji tingke 野鸡听客) 104 Pickowicz, Paul, 11, 164n5, 167 Ping 评, 234 Pinghua 评话 stories, 181 storytellers, 64, 79, 81, 134, 157, 172, 179, 195, 222, 228, 229, 241, 242, 253 as a sub-genre of pingtan, 43, 44, 228 themes of stories, 195, 229, 241, 242, 248, 253, 255 also see Big story Pingtan academy of, 222 audience, 25, 43, 45, 74, 111, 155, 192, 194, 212, 227, 229–231, 247, 258 broadcast of, 53, 215, 216–218 and censorship, 20, 31, 49, 50, 51, 61, 210, 211, 221 as a community service, 264, 266, 267, 270 conservatism of, 203 copyright of, 224 decline of, 193, 194, 197, 228, 229, 241 definition and scope of, 1, 43, 44, 105, 195, 231 fans of, 4, 21, 22, 25, 29, 34, 102, 118, 168, 171, 208, 212, 230, 265 genres of, 20, 28, 41, 43, 44, 87, 87n3, 92, 98, 100, 174, 202, 228, 255 management of, 17, 34, 39, 60, 73, 83, 106, 123, 128, 158, 171, 180, 197, 198, 201, 211, 225, 230, 235, 263, 269 market/commercialization of, 8, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 39, 41, 74, 105, 115, 127, 129, 139, 145, 169, 170, 171, 191, 194, 228, 229 organizations of, 25, 26, 35, 36, 50, 51, 77–79, 109–111, 131–133, 135–137, 179 performances of, 21, 26, 27, 41, 42, 48, 102, 233 as political propaganda, 3, 16, 26, 43, 57, 78, 88, 99, 101, 171, 269 and quyi, 1, 78, 113 reform of, 6, 14–15, 30, 34, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, 63, 84, 104, 165, 201 scripts of, 48, 49, 66, 107



index

skills and styles of, 21, 25, 30, 45–48, 95, 104, 107, 118, 120, 122, 125, 162, 190, 206, 210, 232, 234 system of, 25, 50 164, 169, 170, 191, 231, 244 works of, 3, 17, 21, 30, 71, 87 writers of, 4, 21, 22, 57, 66, 87, 104, 119, 235 Pingtan storyteller accommodation of, 174–176, 189 and the Association, 36, 37, 129, 136, 137, 131, 144, 147 biographies of, 2, 21, 22 collectivization and reformation of, 20, 26, 51, 88, 109, 110, 137, 161, 165 differentiation of, 5, 28, 40, 43, 146 disciplining and transformations of, 3, 34, 46, 50, 54, 58, 59, 87–93, 107, 128, 190, 197, 198, 200, 201, 210, 220–222 during the Guangyu Story House Incident, 147–154, 161 as intellectuals/historians, 236 livelihoods of, 22 and the market/audience, 7, 17, 20, 84, 103, 106, 115, 168, 169, 193, 227, 242, 244, 257, 267 and the movement of Cutting the Tail, 60–72, 83, 138 patronization and subsidization of, 6, 7, 10, 19, 41, 138, 270 and political authorities/cadres, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 22, 26, 30, 31, 37, 54, 55, 56, 57, 70, 75, 132, 162, 164, 171, 235 purge of, 7, 20 as quyi performers, 1, 10, 27 during the Rectification Movement, 155–162, 174 resistance of, 4, 6, 21, 28, 31, 48, 72, 151, 161, 178–181, 189, also see Counter-propaganda and Story with Red Skins and White Hearts revenues of, 28, 38, 139, 140, 142, 164, 201, 261, 262 and the Shanghai Troupe, 6, 35, 36, 73, 79, 80–83, 120, 141, 142, 143, 173, 192 silence of, 2 star, 67, 120, 121, 136, 139, 145 as TV show hosts, 248–254, 258 Pingtan Association of the Wu County, the (Wuxian pingtan xiehui 吴县评弹协会), 132

299

Pingtan Experimental and Working Troupe of Suzhou, the (Suzhou shi pingtan shiyan gongzuo tuan 苏州 市评弹实验工作团), 35; also see the Suzhou Troupe Pingtan yishu, 评弹艺术 (pingtan arts), 21 Pioneer, the (Xianfeng 先锋, pingtan troupe), 161, 165, 177 Pipa 琵琶 (pipa-lute), 44, 124, 148 Planned economy, 113, 224 Poisonous elements of feudalism (fengjian dusu 封建毒素), 53 Political pingtan story as a counter-narrative, 248, 257, 252 the rise of, 21, 227, 241, 242 (self-) censorship of, 233, 250, 258 success of, 227, 228, 232, 233, 245, 259, 267 and TV talk show, 254 Professional listener (zhiye tingke 职业听客), 99 Programs in dialects (fangyan jiemu 方言节目), 254 Promptbook ( jiaoben 脚本), 48, 101 Propaganda, see Pingtan and Pingtan storyteller Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee (Zhonggong zhongyang xuanchuan bu 中共中央 宣传部), 32–34 Public Association of Pingtan Storytelling, the (Pingtan gonghui 评弹公会), 132, 135, 136; also see the Association Public accumulation fund (gongji jin 公积金), 160, 166, 177 Public space, 227, 248, 257, 258, 266–267; also see Story house Puyu Society, the (Puyu she 普裕社), 132 Qingwen 晴雯, 102 Queen of Tanci (tanci huanghou 弹词皇后), 56, 136; also see Fan Xuejun Quyi 曲艺 association for, 37 bans on, 72, 84 collectivization of, 26 commercialization of, 113, 114 decline of, 191 disciplining and management of, 10, 14, 26, 215 financial difficulties of 140, 191 performers of, 140, 155, 167, 223

300

index

and pingtan, 19, 27, 54, 58, 59, 70, 71, 84 as a propaganda tool, 6 the scope of, 1 works of, 223 Realism, 96 Rectification Movement, the (Zhengfeng yundong 整风运动), 7, 34, 155–166, 174, 177, 180, 225 Reconnect the tail ( jie weiba 接尾巴), 69 Red Crag (Hongyan 红岩), 184, 187 Red Guards, 242, 251, 252 Red Lady, The (Hong niangzi 红娘子), 60 Red Lantern, The (Hongdeng ji 红灯记), 124, 186, 187 Red Sun (Hongri 红日), 185, 187 Reform-through-labor (laogai 劳改), 158 “Risking Life to Wait for Kinsmen” (Maosi deng qinren 冒死等亲人), 126 Robin Hood, the (Luobin han 罗宾汉, tabloid), 133 Romance of Three Kingdoms (Sanguo 三国), 43, 61, 69 Runyu Society, the (Runyu she 润余社) 132 Sanxian 三弦 (three strings), 44 Schmalzer, Sigrid, 59 “Scolding the Enemy” (Madi 骂敌), 124 Scott, James, 4, 5, 189 Searching the bottom of chests (fan xiangdi 翻箱底), 168 Section of Motion Picture (Dianying chu 电影处), 71 Section of Theater and Quyi (Xiqu chu 戏曲处), 71 Self-censorship, 4, 5, 16, 54, 61, 83, 84; also see Censorship Self-employed (self-employment) conflicts and competition with state-employed storytellers, 6, 7, 20, 28, 36, 38, 79, 81, 110, 128, 129, 142, 151, 192, 225, 269, also see the Guangyu Story House Incident disciplining and collectivization of, 7, 31, 34, 109, 118, also see the Rectification Movement and market, 6, 7, 22, 84 restoring the status of, 141, 144, 180 revenues of, 27, 28, 50, 140 also see Storyteller, Shen Dongshan, Su Yuyin, and Yang Zijiang

Shanghai Acrobatics Troupe, the (Shanghai zaji tuan 上海杂技团), 78 Shanghai Beijing Opera Troupe, the (Shanghai jingju tuan 上海京剧团), 78 Shanghai Cable TV, the (Shanghai youxian dianshi tai 上海有线电视台), 206, 215, 216 Shanghai Culture Bureau (Shanghai shi wenhua ju 上海市文化局) as a governmental institution, 71, 215, 220 policies/directives by 31, 77, 78, 119, 137, 159, 160, 166, 170, 207, 208, 210, 211, 221 registered with, 39 Shanghai Military Control Committee, the (Shanghai shi junshi guanzhi weiyuanhui 上海市军事管制委员会), 55, 59, 60, 74 Shanghai Municipal Food and Beverage Company, the (Shanghai shi yinshi gongsi 上海市饮食公司), 39 Shanghai municipal government and the Association, 61, 69 movements launched by, 32, 39, 89, 133 and pingtan storytellers, 29, 59, 69, 70, 76, 77, 174 policies/directives issued by, 140, 176, 219 and the Shanghai Troupe, 6, 36, 78, 138, 142, 209 also see Shanghai Culture Bureau Shanghai People’s Pingtan Troupe (Shanghai shi renmin pingtan tuan 上海市人民评弹团), 35, 110; also see the Shanghai Troupe Shanghai People’s Pingtan Working Troupe (Shanghai shi renmin pingtan gongzuo tuan 上海市人民评弹工作团) 6, 29, 30, 35, 40, 73, 78, 82, 85, 110; also see the Shanghai Troupe Shanghai People’s Radio (Shanghai renmin guangbo diantai 上海人民广 播电台), 53, 56, 57, 119 Shanghai Pingtan Troupe (Shanghai pingtan tuan 上海评弹团), 35, 82, 91, 95, 108, 143, 175, 193, 199; also see the Shanghai Troupe Shanghai story (Shanghai shu 上海书), 202, 212–214 Shanghai shutan 上海书坛 (The Circle of Storytelling in Shanghai), 63, 70



index

Shanghai Troupe, the conflicts inside, 141–144, 179 conflicts with the self-employed, 150, 160, 173, 192, 198, 201, 207–209, 211, 220, 221, also see Su Yuyin and Yang Zijiang founding of, 73–85, 164 as a governmental institution or state power, 36, 149, 166 and market, 131, 210 as a mediator between storytellers and story houses, 264, 265 and middle-length stories, 87, 87n3, 92, 96, 98–103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 116–121, 153, 212 profitability of, 113, 114 as a role model, 110, 112, 128 and the Shanghai municipal government, 36, 138 stars of, 120 as a state-owned enterprise, 35, 36 also see Li Qingfu and Wu Zongxi Shanghai TV, the (Shanghai dianshi tai), 217 Shen Dongshan 沈东山 in the movement of Cutting the Tail, 64 as a self-employed storyteller, 109, 137, 139, 140 in the Spark, 165, 174, 175, 219 in the 1980s, 207 Shen Shanzeng 沈善增, 212 Shen Xiaomei 沈笑梅, 62, 171–174 Shen Yanbing 沈雁冰, 72 Shen Zu’an 沈祖安, 194 Shi Ximin 石西民, 173 Siege of Mount Chong, The (Chongshan zhiwei 冲山之围), 122, 126 Silbergeld, Jerome, 15, 83 Situ Han 司徒汉, 88 Sky Riding, the (Lingxiao 凌霄 pingtan troupe), 161, 177 Slow Jiang Tune (man Jiang diao 慢蒋调), 94 Small story (xiaoshu 小书), 44; also see Tanci Smart Story House, the (Shimao shuchang 时懋书场), 204 Socialist literary system, 25, 268 Society for Storytelling Research of the Wu County, the (Wuxian shuoshu yanjiu she 吴县说书研究社), 132

301

Soochow Creek, the (Suzhou he 苏州河), 53, 238 Southwestern Cultural Center (Xi’nan wenhua zhongxin 西南文化中心), 266 Spark, the (Xinghuo 星火, pingtan troupe) as a collectively owned troupe, 166 conflicts in 177–180 and counter-propaganda, see Counter-propaganda establishment of, 161, 164, 165 namesake of, 165 as a propagandist, 174–176 also see Shen Dongshan, Su Yuyin, and Yang Zijiang Spiritual Pollution (  Jingshen wuran), 196, 198, 225 “Stay for the New Year” (Liu guonian 留过年), 94 Story house (shuchang 书场) and the Association, 147 attendance rate in, 138, 240, 266 audience of, 43, 55, 62, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 258 ballrooms transformed (first-rate), 39, 40, 102, 109, 110, 112, 128, 144, 151, 171, 220 as a community service, 227, 230, 259, 263, 265, 267 control of, 198 differentiation of, 40, 41, 106 free, 265, 266 government funding of, 262–265, 267, 269 managements and staff of, 139, 159, 176, 200, 208 numbers of, 145n51, 197, 229 participation in the movement of Cutting the Tail, 69 and political authorities, 61–64, 67, 83, 210, 215 private owners of, 61–64, 68, 160 as a public space, 227, 231, 232, 257 relationship with storytellers, 79, 110, 114, 115, 139, 207, 210, 242, 243 supervision of, 168, 171, 181, 183 ticket prices of, 112, 113, 148, 220, 259, 260, 261 types of, 38 Story with Red Skins and White Hearts (hongpi baixin shu 红皮白心书), 182–189 Stuck-ins, 46, 47, 107, 128, 190, 207

302

index

Su Yuyin 苏毓荫, 21, 27, 39 as a member of the Association, 135, 136 as a member of the Spark, 163–65, 175, 176, 178, 179, 192, 205, 219 performing Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, 202, 204–218, 226 and Shanghai story, 212–214, 225, 226 playing middle-length stories, 109, 110, 204 during the Rectification Movement, 157, 158, 165 as a self-employed storyteller, 59, 191, 192, 201, 205, 224, 225 also see Huang Huriu and Lu Genrong and Shanghai story, 212–214, 225, 226 Sun Fangzhi, the Model Shop Assistant (Mofan yingyeyuan Sun Fangzhi 模范营业员孙芳芝), 112 Suzhou Bureau of Public Security, the (Suzhou shi gong’an ju 苏州市公安局) 148–149 Suzhou Culture Bureau, the (Suzhou shi wenhua ju 苏州市文化局), 49, 147 Suzhou dialect, 1, 74, 127, 253, 256 Suzhou Experimental Group of Pingtan Storytelling, the (Suzhou shi pingtan shiyan zu 苏州市评弹实验组), 137 Suzhou Municipal Bureau of Radio, Film and Television, the (Suzhou guangbo dianshi ju 苏州广播电视局) 253 Suzhou municipal government, 148, 264 Suzhou Pingtan Troupe (Suzhou pingtan tuan 苏州评弹团), 35; also see, the Suzhou Troupe Suzhou Troupe, the, 35 as a collectively owned troupe, 36, 166 and Huang Yi’an, 146, 153 lawsuit against, 221–224 and Li Gang, 245, 253 market success of, 109, 112 and middle-length stories, 106, 111 reform in, 200 revenues of storytellers in, 139, 140 and self-employed storytellers, 137, 146, 165 Suzhou TV, the (Suzhou dianshi tai 苏州电视台), 213, 216, 218, 222, 253, 254, 256, 258

Tairi Story House, the (Tairi shuchang 泰日书场), 260–261, 264 Taiwan 台湾, 53, 74, 183, 195 Tale of Chun Hyang (Chunxiang zhuan 春香传), 109 Tang Bohu 唐伯虎, 60 Tanci 弹词, 43, 44, 164, 195, 228, 255   also Small story Tang Gengliang 唐耿良, 2 autobiography, 22 as the CCP’s collaborator, 55, 61 as a Communist, 28, 29 in the establishment of the Shanghai Troupe, 79–82 during the Guangyu Story House Incident, 150 and the Huai River, 88–90 and middle-length stories, 91, 108 during the movement of Cutting the Tail, 68, 75–78 and the Shanghai Troupe, 114, 138, 142, 197, 220 during the tour of Hong Kong, 73–75 Tang Lixing 唐力行, 2 Tang, Xiaobing, 13, 126, 246 Tao Zhu 陶铸, 249 “Tavern” (  Jiudian 酒店), 119 Theatricalize (xiju hua 戏剧化), 65, 118 Thirteen Emperors in the Qing Dynasty (Qinggong shisan chao 清宫十三朝) 220, 222 Three Antis, the Campaign of, 100, 100n50, 109, 138 Three Smiles (Sanxiao 三笑), 60, 61, 169, 209 Thought Reform (sixiang gaizao 思想改造), 87, 88, 93 Tianlin Center of Community Services and Activities (Tianlin shequ fuwu huodong zhongxin 田林社区服务活 动中心), 260, 262 Tianlin Story House, the (Tianlin shuyuan 田林书苑), 232, 260, 262–264, 266 Traditional story (chuantong shu 传统书), 44, 168, 171; also see classic story Transforming intellectuals (zhishi fenzi gaizao 知识分子改造), 89 True Sentiments and False Emotions (Zhenqing jiayi 真情假意), 212 Tsao, Pen-yeh, 45



index

Union for Writers of New Pingtan Storytelling (Xin pingtan zuozhe lianhe hui 新评弹作者联合会), 57 Wang Baochuan 王宝钏, 109 Wang, Ban, 13, 92, 93 Wang Boyin 王伯荫, 27 and the establishment of the Shanghai Troupe, 79, 80 in the Huai River, 89, 90 as Jiang Yuequan’s disciple, 66 as a member of the Shanghai Troupe, 142, 143 on self-employed storytellers, 138 during the tour of Hong Kong, 73 Wang Chiliang 王池良, 222 Wang, Di, 16, 31 Wang Jingwei 汪精卫, 186 Wang Ruyun 汪如云, 145 Wang, Shaoguang, 11 Wang Xiaohe 王孝和, 102, 108, 184, 185, 213 Wang Xiongfei 汪雄飞, 179 Wang Xiuying [Xiuying] 王秀英, 92, 95, 96 Wang Zhonghua 王忠华, 163 “Watching the Reeds” (Wang luwei 望芦苇), 124 Water Margin, The (Shuihu 水浒), 43, 57, 64, 79, 116, 118 Watson, Rubie, 236 We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River (Yiding yaoba Huaihe xiuhao 一定要把淮河修好), 89, 92, 101, 106, 123 aesthetic experience in, 127 market success of, 89, 98–100, 102, 116 staging of, 91, 95 writing of, 87 Webster-Cheng, Stephanie, 87, 94 Wei Wenbo 魏文伯, 105 “Whiskers” (Luosai hu 络腮胡), 170 White-haired Girl (Baimao nü 白毛女), 56, 57, 68, 123, 176 White Snake (Baishe zhuan 白蛇传), 68, 69, 120 Wild Boar Forest (Yezhu lin 野猪林), 116 Wild story (yeshu 野书) definition and scope of, 195 Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong as, 205, 207, 209 market success of, 196, 197, 201

303

opposition to, 198, 200, 226 and Spiritual Pollution, 198, 225 Wind and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution (Wenge fengyun 文革风云), 240, 242, 248 Wind and Clouds of the Reform (Gaige fengyun 改革风云), 240, 242, 248, 255 Wind and Rain in the Six Decades (Fengyu liushi nian 风云六十年), 243 Workers-peasants union (gongnong lianmeng 工农联盟), 93 Wu Jianqiu 吴剑秋, 77, 79 Wu Junyu 吴君玉, 195, 221 Wu Shouquan 吴寿泉, 148, 149 Wu Xun 武训, 76 also see Life of Wu Xun Wu Zi’an 吴子安, 101 Wu Zongxi 吴宗锡 and censorship, 210, 221, 222, 234 as the director of the Shanghai Troupe, 29, 98, 128, 141, 160, 220 disagreement and conflicts with other cadres, 31, 32, 34, 72, 173, 198 as the embodiment of the state, 31, 51 on the Guangyu Story House Incident, 149, 152 in the Huai River, 85, 88, 93 and Huang, the Blue Sky, 154 on middle-length stories, 102 on pingtan market, 109, 125, 133, 196, 197, 230 on pingtan styles and skills, 106, 118, 121, 123, 171, 209 as a pingtan theorist and cadre, 2, 3, 21, 29, 30, 35, 59, 63, 71, 115 relationship with storytellers, 30, 31, 210, 219 as a secret agent, 71 on storytellers, 138 on We Certainly Must Fix the Huai River, 96–101 Wuxi Pingtan Troupe, the (Wuxi pingtan tuan 无锡评弹团), 253 Wuxi Quyi Troupe, the (Wuxi quyi tuan 无锡曲艺团), 193 Xi Yunxia 席云霞, 148, 149 Xia 侠 (knight-errant), 97, 98, 127, 172 Xia Zhenhua 夏镇华, 65, 66, 107, 108, 120 Xiangsheng 相声, 11, 11n33, 27, 45

304

index

Xianle Story House, the (Xianle shuchang 仙乐书场), 39, 40, 144 Xia Yan 夏衍, 172 Xiangyin Story House, the (Xiangyin shuyuan 芗音书苑), 216 Xie Yujing 谢毓菁, 76, 141 xiju 戏剧, 1 Xinmin Evening (Xinmin wanbao 新民晚报), 98 Xizang Story House, the (Xizang shuchang 西藏书场), 39, 144, 154, 219 Xu Changqing 徐长青, 250 Xu, Feng, 259 Xu Lixian 徐丽仙, 163 Xu Lüxia 徐绿霞, 69, 158, 159 Xu Qing 徐青, 260, 262–264, 266 Xu Xueyue, 徐雪月, 56, 80, 101 Xu Yunzhi 徐云志, 95 Xue Xiaoqing 薛筱卿, 65, 170 Xuetou 噱头 (xue 噱, humor) as an ad-lib element, 128 definition of, 45, 46 management and elimination of, 171, 190 as a means of resistance, 181 used by pinghua storytellers, 228 as a pingtan technique, 99, 107, 207 vulgar, 170 Xuguan Story House, the (Xuguan shuchang 浒关书场), 261, 262 Yalu Story House, the (Yalu shuchang 雅庐书场), 231 Yan Xueting 严雪亭 as the director of the Association, 67, 132, 137, 145, 150 during the movement of Cutting the Tail, 67, 70 Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai by, 134 “Emperor of Pingtan Storytelling,” 141, 143 during the Guangyu Story House Incident, 149, 150 in the Shanghai Troupe, 142, 170 Yan’an 延安, 64 Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art (Yan’an wenyi zuotan hui shang de jianghua 延安文艺座谈会上的讲话) 8, 9, 58 Yang Cunbin 杨村彬, 88 Yang Delin 杨德麟, 101 Yang Guanglin 杨广林, 93 Yang, Guobin, 246

Yang Lelang 杨乐郎, 133, 134, 158 Yang Lelang’s Empty Talks (Yang Lelang kongtan 杨乐郎空谈), 133 Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai (Yang Naiwu yu Xiao Baicai 杨乃武与小白菜), 67, 69, 134, 168 Yang Renlin 杨仁麟, 68, 69 Yang Zhenxin 杨震新, 146 Yang Zhenxiong 杨振雄, 101, 120, 154 Yang Zijiang 扬子江 and the Association, 134 bans on, 50, 210, 218, 220, 221, 225 lawsuit of, 222–224, 234–240, 244, 248, 253 market success of, 191, 192, 219, 220, 224, 225 on pingtan storytellers, 4 and political pingtan stories, 222, 226–228, 234–241, 245, 248, 253, 257 as a self-employed storyteller, 21, 201, 226 in the Spark, 164, 177–180, 189, 219, 220 on ticket prices, 260 Yangge 秧歌, 9 Yao Yinmei 姚荫梅 founding the Shanghai Troupe, 80, 81 on Huang Huiru and Lu Genrong, 211–213 performing middle-length stories, 120 writing and performing, 91, 101 Yaohua Glass Company (Yaohua boli chang 耀华玻璃厂), 102, 103 Yin Dequan 殷德泉, 213, 218 Yu Hongxian 余红仙, 207, 208 Yu Ling 于伶, 71, 72, 77, 78 Yuan Xuefen 袁雪芬, 53 Yue Opera (Yueju 越剧), 17, 53, 166, 269 Yuezuo (cross performances 越做), 79 Zawen 杂文, 236 Zhang Brothers, the, 60, 61, 73, 75; also see Zhang Jianguo and Zhang Jianting Zhang Guoliang 张国良, 61 Zhang Hongsheng 张鸿声 as an agent of story houses, 79, 114, 115 founding of the Shanghai Troupe, 79, 81



index

during the Guangyu Story House Incident, 150 in the Huai River valley, 89 performing middle-length stories, 101, 120 performing style of, 104 rumors about 157 xuetou by, 182 Zhang Jianguo 张鉴国, 60 also see Zhang Brothers Zhang Jianting 张鉴庭 fan of, 126 founding of the Shanghai Troupe, 80 income of, 142 performing middle-length stories, 101, 106, 119–121, 124–126 performing new stories by, 60 performing style of, 104, 125 singing by, 170 Zhang Shaozeng 章绍曾, 102 Zhang Tune, the (Zhang diao 张调), 121, 124, 126 Zhangjiagang Pingtan Troupe, the (Zhangjiagang pingtan tuan 张家港评弹团), 253 Zhao Gaishan [Gaishan] 赵盖山, 92–98, 100 “Zhao Gaishan Signs Up [for Fixing the Huai River]” (Zhao Gaishan baoming 赵盖山报名), 92

305

Zhao Jiaqiu 赵稼秋, 187, 203 Zhenjiang Quyi Troupe, the (Zhenjiang quyi tuan 镇江曲艺团), 219, 221 Zhou Enlai 周恩来, 118, 182, 237 Zhou Liang 周良, 2, 21, 49, 179, 196 Zhou Ping 周平, 228, 232, 243, 244, 249, 263, 265 Zhou Xiaoqiu 周孝秋, 158, 175, 176, 187, 188 Zhou Yang 周扬, 72, 99, 172 Zhou Yunrui 周云瑞, 73, 108, 120 Zhou Zhenhua 周震华, 209, 236, 259, 265 Zhu Ezi 朱恶紫, 57 Zhu Huizhen 朱慧珍 as a Communist, 28, 29 founding of the Shanghai Troupe, 77, 79 performing middle-length stories, 95, 101, 119, 120 Zhu Qinxiang 朱琴香, 184 Zhu Rongji 朱镕基, 251 Zhu Shouzhu 朱瘦竹, 133, 134 Zhu Xueqin 朱雪琴, 40, 124, 125, 170 “Zhu Zhishan Talks Big” (Zhu Zhishan shuo dahua 祝枝山说大话), 170 Zhuanqiao Park Story House (Zhuanqiao gongyuan shuchang 颛桥公园书场), 263