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Between Accommodation and Resistance: Pingtan Storytelling in 1960s Shanghai

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2013

QILIANG HE
QILIANG HE*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina Upstate, 800 University Way, Spartanburg, South Carolina 29303, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper examines the resistance of pingtan storytellers to Communist political domination and economic exploitation on the eve of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In the early and mid-1960s, storytellers rarely mounted resistance through direct confrontations with the political authorities, but often in ‘everyday forms’ such as by libelling cadres, asking for sick-leave, refusing to conform to the dress code during performances, and threatening to withdraw from troupes. In order to vent their disappointment at the economic hardships following the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), storytellers resorted to the flexible ways of narrating and performing pingtan stories to manipulate the storylines and characterizations in their stage performances. Hence storytellers engaged in counter-propaganda by telling ribald jokes and distorting stories that were originally designed to praise Communist revolutions. This investigation of the resistance of storytellers, both on and off stage, is intended not merely to raise a long overlooked history of the 1960s from oblivion, but also to highlight the Party-state's inability to ideologically transform Chinese artists prior to the Cultural Revolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 524 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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