Market Success in a Planned Culture: Illegal Theatrical Performances in Post–Great Leap Forward China

Abstract

After 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought to transform the production of popular culture from a market-based business into a section of the planned economy under the party-state. I term this new cultural system “planned culture,” as it followed the same practices as the planned economy system. But in practice, a strong planned culture was hard to maintain with scarce fiscal resources. It faced constant challenges from the cultural market in the Mao Zedong era, especially when the state temporarily retreated from the economic and cultural fields in the post–Great Leap Forward period. By depicting the different faces of unofficial culture, ranging from villages and suburban townships to big cities, this article argues that the state’s cultural reach in the Mao era was limited both by a lack of capacity and sometimes by preference, and that planned culture in the post–Great Leap Forward period was concentrated only in big cities, even after a decade of institutional expansion.

The cultural policies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in its first three decades were experimental in nature. In general direction, the state hoped to apply the principles of the planned economy to cultural reforms in order to establish a new socialist cultural system. I term this system “planned culture,” as its ultimate goal was to incorporate the production, circulation, and consumption of mass culture into state planning, so that the state would become society’s sole cultural supplier and arbiter. The blueprint of the planned culture system consisted of two parts: One was the cultural departments at various levels, led by the Ministry of Culture, which were responsible for formulating and implementing cultural policies; the other was cultural institutions operated or sponsored by the state, including theaters, film projection teams, opera troupes, publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, museums, cultural centers, broadcasting stations, and so on, aimed at providing the people with cultural products that conformed to official ideology. However, because of the guerilla-style policymaking of the PRC central leadership, the state’s penetration into the cultural market varied over time, and the planned culture system was by no means absolute or uncontested at any point in the Mao Zedong era. ¹

Prior to 1956, establishing a socialist system in China was a long-range plan for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) top leaders. Similarly, the planned culture system was also understood as a future-oriented program. During this period, the new government had very limited fiscal resources to invest in the cultural field while focusing on economic recovery and socialist industrialization. Therefore, apart from monopolizing some key sectors of cultural production, such as film and publishing, the government encouraged private enterprise in most cultural industries and kept the first batch of state-run cultural institutions to a small number. However, such a gradual and pragmatic policy was interrupted by Mao’s radical line of rushing toward socialism, which accelerated nationalization and collectivization and led to the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1960. After 1956, the number of state-run and state-sponsored cultural institutions began increasing nationwide. The planned culture system reached its peak in the late 1950s, before the severe economic crisis caused by the GLF halted its expansion. In order to bring the country out of the rapidly escalating crisis caused by the GLF, the Central Committee of the CCP during 1960–1962 made a series of adjustments in major policy areas. Under these circumstances, the market was reintroduced to serve as an aid to the system of state supply (Feng, 2015: 38–53) and political control over the cultural field was loosened, creating a “cultural thaw” during 1960–1965. ²

The relaxation of economic policy and a milder politico-cultural climate in the early 1960s led to flourishing cultural markets. Unofficial cultural producers, such as private opera troupes, amateur rural opera troupes, itinerant performers, and self-employed storytellers, emerged in villages, suburban counties, and big cities in noticeable numbers. What worried the CCP’s cultural cadres was that these cultural markets could easily create the conditions for illegality. Driven by profit-seeking motives, some groups and individuals were found to be involved in, often highly profitable, illegal activities. These included but were not limited to performing banned traditional operas and participating in black market trade and profiteering. According to a series of official reports sent from provincial cultural departments to the Ministry of Culture in the early 1960s, illegal cultural markets existed nationwide, but were more prevalent and active in counties and villages, where state-provided cultural services were less accessible and cultural supervision was weaker than in big cities. These illicit cultural activities posed a threat to both the planned economy and planned culture systems and mirrored the mounting tension between state planning and the market in the early 1960s.

This article investigates the relations between the planned culture system and cultural markets, and between the state and society, in Mao-era China through an examination of illegal theatrical performances during the 1960–1965 economic and cultural thaw. In exploring the cultural history of the PRC, quite a few scholars focus on the processes by which official ideology established its dominant position in the cultural realm and depict the CCP’s cultural reforms in the “Seventeen Years” (1949–1966) as a precursor to the Cultural Revolution (e.g., Jones, 1992; Chang, 1997: 76–126; Hung, 2005: 82–99; Hung, 2011; Liu, 2009: 387–406). This trend also exists in the scholarship on culture and politics in other socialist countries, which emphasizes political interference in cultural production while paying little attention to the agency of society (Taylor, 1998; Harris and Norton, 2002; Dobrenko, 2005; Ezrahi, 2012). In the past two decades, scholars have started to shed light on the cultural market in Maoist China and have reexamined the effectiveness of state control over the cultural realm. For example, Jin Jiang’s study of the persistence of formal and informal cultural markets in 1949–1966 argues that the CCP’s cultural reform failed to break the cultural continuity between the Republican and socialist eras, nor was it able to completely incorporate popular culture into state planning (Jiang, 2005: 95–103). Qiliang He’s study of pingtan storytelling also contends that cultural markets were far from extinct in the 1950s and 1960s; rather, they played a significant role in shaping Chinese culture and the CCP’s cultural policy (He, 2010: 243–68, 2012). Brian DeMare’s study of rural performance in Shanxi in the early 1960s reveals that both professional and amateur opera troupes refused to stage didactic modern operas that were unpopular in the rural cultural market. Such contradictions between ideology and profitability resulted in difficulties in political work in the cultural field (DeMare, 2021: 187–215).

Recently, as academic interest in unofficial culture during the Mao era increases, more scholars have contributed to the reevaluation of the cultural reach of the Maoist state. For example, Matthew D. Johnson attributes the emergence of post-GLF unofficial cultures in Shanghai to the state’s weak supervision over the cultural realm and the corruption of grassroots bureaucracies (Johnson, 2015: 228–29). DeMare examines the trajectories of illegal opera troupes in Hubei province from 1958 to 1964 and contends that the CCP’s efforts in promoting party-reformed modern operas while blacklisting traditional artists only succeed in creating a cultural black market in rural areas (DeMare, 2017: 173–75).

These studies insightfully reveal the competition and confrontation between official and unofficial cultures in the Mao era, but they still have some inadequacies. First, scholars tend to regard the CCP’s policymakers as a monolithic entity and ignore the conflicts between different policymaking styles among them. Second, the sources these studies are based on are either all from urban areas or all from the countryside, while a spatially comparative perspective is lacking in discussions of state–society relations in the Mao era.

Drawing on diverse sources, including newly declassified archives at the provincial, municipal, county, commune, and brigade levels in Fujian, Shaanxi, and Shanghai, published official documents, opera gazetteers, local chronicles, and newspapers, my study of illegal theatrical performances seeks to answer the following questions: Was the Maoist state’s cultural reach limited by a lack of capacity or by preference? Was the state’s control over culture fettered by organizational flaws in cultural bureaucracies, or did China’s cultural planners deliberately encourage the market at times? In addition, this article revises the conventional urban–rural dichotomy in exploring the PRC’s state–society relations by drawing counties into the discussion. As an intermediate administrative level between the city and the commune, the county seat in its official definition is classified as urban. However, illegal cultural markets at the county level had more similarities with those in rural areas than those in urban areas. Having the city–county–village structure in mind can help us better understand the trilateral dynamics among cultural markets, official cultural supply, and censorship in the Mao era.

The Economic and Cultural Thaw in the Early 1960s

The reason why Mao’s China exhibited a guerilla-like policymaking style was not that the CCP’s policymakers collectively favored experimentation or “permanent revolution” over regime consolidation (Heilmann and Perry, 2011a: 7). Instead, such a policymaking style arose from the unremitting conflict between two different political lines among the CCP’s top leaders after 1949. One was Mao’s radical line featuring high-speed, overambitious targets, and mass mobilization in socialist transformation and economic development; the other was the “conservative” or “anti-radicalism” line advocated by other central leaders like Liu Shaoqi (the vice chairman of the Central Committee of the CCP), Zhou Enlai (the premier of the State Council), Chen Yun (the vice premier of the State Council), and so on, which was in favor of a more orthodox Soviet style of bureaucratic control, as well as a gradual transition from “new democracy” to socialism by maintaining a measure of privatization and continuing to encourage the market over the course of several decades.

In the early 1960s, facing the grim economic and political situation caused by the GLF, Mao had to temporarily compromise with the anti-radicalism line, resulting in a series of adjustments in major policy areas. Since the Great Famine of 1959–1961 mainly occurred in rural areas, the focus of the CCP’s economic policy adjustment during this period was on such areas. The key measures included the following: Stopping the “wind of communization” 共产风, in which all resources were concentrated at the commune level, and letting the production teams 小队 regain ownership of the means of production and autonomy in production planning and income allocation; allowing small-scale private agricultural plots owned by villagers and side businesses run by production teams and brigades; reopening the rural markets as a supplement to the state supply system; and letting the villagers decide whether to keep operating public canteens on their own (“Regulations on the work of rural people’s communes,” 1997 [1961]: 385–411). These new rural policies fostered a certain degree of economic autonomy at the brigade and production team levels, and inevitably resulted in profit-seeking activities in both the economic and cultural fields and cadre corruption.

More relaxed cultural policies followed the adjustments in the economic field. On June 19, 1961, Zhou Enlai delivered a speech at the Forum on Literary and Artistic Work and Feature Film Creation Conference 文艺工作座谈会和故事片创作会议 organized by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the CCP in Beijing, proposing that the themes and forms of literature and art should be broadened, and that the cultural bureaucracies should develop a democratic style of work and manage literature and art in accordance with the laws of artistic production (Zhou, 1979 [1961]). This speech marked the beginning of the cultural thaw (Pickowicz, 2012: 213–14), in which cultural workers were given more artistic freedom to produce purely entertainment-oriented works that would be welcomed by the market. By loosening political control over cultural production, the government hoped that official cultural institutions could profit in the cultural market, reducing their dependence on national finances.

Moreover, facing the serious fiscal crisis caused by the GLF, the great scale of the planned culture system turned out to be an unbearable financial burden to the government. Taking opera as an example, prior to 1956, there were 112 state-run troupes around the country. After the nationalization trend (from 1956 to the beginning of the GLF), numerous private troupes had been drawn into the state-run system. By May 1962, the total number of state-run troupes had increased to around two hundred, and state-sponsored troupes that were partly reliant on state or local financial subsidies had soared to over two thousand (“Report of the Ministry of Culture Party Committee,” 1982 [1963], 314–19). In July 1962, the Ministry of Culture held a meeting with the directors of the bureaus of culture in each province to discuss methods and procedures for downsizing the planned culture system. In this meeting, Qi Yanming 齐燕铭, a vice minister of the Ministry of Culture, pointed out that the aim of the downsizing was to save financial resources for agricultural development:

Currently, the party-directed cultural undertakings have developed too fast with too many employees, and their scale is too large to fit with the status of the national economy. As there will not be a great increase in the total output of grain in the coming two to three years, we are in agreement that our work priority is the development of agriculture. The adjustments in the cultural field must follow the principle that all other undertakings should support the development of agriculture. (SMA, B172-1-410, July 14, 1962: 6–19)

Another vice minister of the Ministry of Culture, Lin Mohan 林默涵, further clarified the relationship between culture and the economy in the post-GLF period:

Should we revive the economy first? Or should we watch several theatrical plays first? The food supply issue 吃饭问题 is a matter of life and death today. Devoting too many resources to artistic production will do harm to the fundamental interest of the people, which is reviving and developing the economy. (SPA, 232-2-412, July 14, 1962: 2–13)

The outcome of the meeting was a decision to reduce the planned culture system to its 1957 scale by cutting the number of state-run and state-sponsored cultural institutions and slimming down the state-supported cultural workforce. According to the downsizing plan formulated in the meeting, around 128,000 employees of official cultural institutions would be laid off, among which 89,000 were in the opera field, 18,000 in publishing, 9,000 in the film industry, 6,000 in artistic education, 5,000 in cultural centers, and 1,000 in museums. In the opera field, the Ministry of Culture stipulated that all state-run opera troupes below the provincial level were to be converted to private troupes within two years, and those established after 1958 should be dissolved immediately (SMA, B172-1-410, July 14, 1962: 6–19).

Apart from downsizing the planned culture system, the meeting acknowledged the need for a cultural market in a socialist regime. Qi Yanming stated that as the state finances were only able to cover a small number of elite opera troupes, private ownership would be coexisting with public ownership and collective ownership for a certain period in the opera field; therefore, the cultural market should be encouraged so that private troupes could make a living through it. Moreover, the competition brought by the existence of the cultural market would stimulate state-run troupes to improve their artistic level. The responsibilities of cultural bureaucracies were to strengthen supervision of the cultural market and prevent illegal performances or economic activities. However, administrative orders were not to be used to control the mobility of actors (SMA, B172-1-410, July 14, 1962: 6–19).

The CCP’s policy adjustments in the economic and cultural fields during the post-GLF period were oriented in the same direction: the state temporarily retreated while the market and the autonomy of society were restored to a certain extent in order to bring the national economy back from the brink of collapse. The nature of these new policies was an attempt to rescue the socialist economy with capitalist methods. In the cultural field, what happened after the GLF was a true “Great Leap Backward.” With scarce fiscal resources, the CCP chose to protect official cultural facilities and institutions in big cities and ceased supporting those in counties and villages. This strategy created a cultural vacuum at the county level and below, leaving folk cultural producers, both legal and illegal, to play an increasingly active role in meeting the cultural needs of the people.

Illegal Ritual Operas in Villages

As soon as it is certain that a particular village is to have a theatre, the whole surrounding country is thrown into a quiver of excitement. . . . In general it may be said that when a village gives a theatrical representation, it must count upon being visited, during the continuance of the same, by every man, woman and child, who is related to any inhabitant of the village and who can possibly be present. . . . Every family is overrun with such visitors, to such a degree that there is not space enough for them to lie down at night. . . . The cost of feeding such an army of visitors is a very serious one, and to the thrifty Chinese it seems hard that fuel which could ordinarily last his family for six months, must be burnt up in a week. . . . It is a moderate estimate that the expense of entertainment is ten times the cost of the theatre itself, realizing the familiar saying that it is not the horse which costs but the saddle. (Smith, 1899: 63–65)

As the above description by Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary who stayed in China from 1872 to 1926, demonstrates, rural opera performances in late imperial China were a frequently occurring form of collective revelry combining entertainment, socializing, and collective feasting. Different from drama performances in urban theaters, where the length of a performance was fixed to a few hours, a series of opera performances in rural areas could last for several weeks. Moreover, they usually took place during festivals and functioned as a religious ritual to entertain the gods or expel evil spirits. ³

After the founding of the PRC, the CCP made great efforts to propagate revolutionary culture in rural areas, but in effect, rural opera performances remained very similar to those of the imperial period, even after a decade of socialist cultural reform. In the early 1960s, local cultural cadres found that in spite of a downsized planned culture, rural opera performances provided by folk troupes became livelier than before. The expenditure on these performances was astonishingly large. For example, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month in 1961, the Qianpu Brigade 前埔大队 of Cizao Commune 瓷灶公社 in Jinjiang 晋江 county, Fujian province, invited seven opera troupes to perform, at the cost of around three thousand catties of grain and thirty thousand yuan (SMA, A72-2-936-1, Feb. 15, 1962: 1–9). Such a huge sum of money equated to the annual income of 673 peasants in 1961 (National Bureau of Statistics, 1984: 20). “Serious extravagance and waste” 铺张浪费 in staging operas also occurred in many other provinces. Most prominently, in twenty-two brigades of six communes in Luoning 洛宁 county, Henan province, the expenditure on opera performances in July 1962 totaled 15,201 yuan, 12,346 catties of grains, and 10 pigs. Elsewhere in Henan, Xizhai Brigade 西寨大队 in Ye 叶 county invited opera troupes to perform for four days in October 1962, at a cost of 1,318 yuan, 1,785 catties of grain, 316 boxes of cigarettes, 45 catties of liquor, 48 catties of sesame oil, and 2 pigs (“Henan Provincial Party Committee report on regulating rural amateur opera troupes,” 2013 [1962]: 281–83). The fact that the expenditure on opera performances in rural areas included not only cash but also items like food and goods could be partly attributed to the shortage of supplies, which led folk troupes to ask for remuneration in kind. More importantly, it indicated that the traditional costliness of rural opera performances had persisted. The expenditure thus included not only the remuneration for the opera troupe but also the expenditure on the accompanying village feast.

Similar to the late imperial period, watching opera performances was a major way of celebrating traditional festivals in post-GLF rural China. Among them, the Spring Festival and the Ghost Festival were two peak periods for opera performances. As DeMare (2017: 171) points out, rural audiences continued to prefer traditional operas in this period. To be more exact, what rural audiences preferred were not just traditional operas, but ritual operas, which often came with traditional themes. Folk opera troupes that were able to perform such ritual operas could be highly profitable at that time. Taking Fujian as an example, one amateur troupe organized by Yuyangli Brigade 渔洋里大队 in Xiapu 霞浦 county, Fu’an 福安 district (a sub-provincial administrative region in Fujian province), went on a month-long tour around the province during the Spring Festival period in 1962 and 1963, earning 6,100 yuan in 1962 and over 10,000 yuan in 1963 for their performances (FPA, 0154-002-0552-0025, 1963: 1–12). Its repertoire included various ritual operas, in which the actors would join the processions of the gods or take part in certain rituals—for example, the genre of baxian drama 八仙戏, which tells the stories of the legendary Eight Immortals 八仙, and Tiao jiaguan 跳加冠 (The Promotion of the Official), a masked mime praying for one’s promotion in the bureaucracy; both plays functioned as rituals for satisfying ancestors and praying for good luck in folk society. According to official statistics, during the season of the Spring Festival of 1963, the touring sites of this amateur troupe included many major towns in Fu’an district, such as Changchun 长春, Xi’nan 溪南, Shatang 沙塘, Chongru 崇儒, Baiyang 柏洋, Xibing 溪柄, Gantang 甘棠, Xiabaishi 下白石, and Wanwu 湾坞, with total audience figures surpassing one hundred thousand. The cultural cadres of Fu’an district apprehensively commented: “A very bad consequence of this troupe was that such a large audience in such a vast rural area has watched its performances and was poisoned by feudalistic superstitions” (FPA, 0154-002-0552-0025, 1963: 1–12).

The Ghost Festival (the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month) was another peak period for opera performances, and especially for ritual operas. In traditional Chinese culture, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called the Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, when ghosts and spirits, including those of deceased ancestors, are believed to come out from the underworld and visit the living. There is a long tradition of performing rituals to venerate one’s ancestors and to transmute and absolve the sufferings of the deceased during the Ghost Month in Chinese folk society. In the Fujian area, the ritual activities in the Ghost Month were called pudu 普渡 since the Song dynasty. This pudu tradition persisted in Fujian province until the early 1960s. According to an investigation by the Jinjiang County Bureau of Culture, from July to September 1962, there were 1,105 pudu-related theatrical performances in total, costing around 300,000 yuan. Among them, Anhai Commune 安海公社 in Jinjiang 晋江 county hosted 143 plays in thirty-six days, for which each household paid one hundred yuan on average; Zhanglin 张林 village in Cizao Commune, Jinjiang county, even had eighteen plays performed in one day. During the pudu period in Jinjiang county, there were twenty-four rural troupes participating in ritual opera performances, earning around 240,000 yuan in total, an average of 10,000 yuan per troupe (FPA, 0154-002-0218-0025, Dec. 16, 1962: 1–6).

Folk opera troupes able to perform ritual operas came in two types: one was rural amateur troupes composed of villagers; the other was the “illegal opera troupes,” or “black opera troupes” as they were called by cultural cadres—unlicensed private opera troupes that consisted of itinerant performers. In February 1962, the Ministry of Culture had received numerous reports from the cultural departments of Hubei, Hunan, Fujian, Hebei, and some other provinces stating that after the harvest in the autumn of 1961 there were a large number of rural amateur troupes and “black” opera troupes touring around villages and towns. Except for performing ritual operas, their illegal activities included the following: (1) disengaging from agricultural work and traveling outside of the brigade, the commune, the county, and even the province to conduct commercial performances; (2) luring actors, playwrights, or directors away from the state-run or state-sponsored troupes with high salaries; (3) masquerading as state-run troupes in order to make excessive profits; (4) participating in black market trade by profiting from buying and selling goods during their tours (SMA, A72-2-936-1, Feb. 15, 1962: 1–9).

Although a few ghost operas revised by elite cultural workers in state-run opera academies were staged after 1957 as a result of the short-lived Hundred Flowers Campaign, ritual operas involving ghosts were still deemed illegal or at least dangerous and problematic by grassroots cultural cadres for spreading feudalistic and superstitious ideas in the early 1960s. ⁴ Moreover, in the eyes of the cultural cadres, these illegal activities not only had a negative impact on social order and people’s minds but also hampered agricultural production and undermined rural markets. In other words, such operas defied both the planned economy and planned culture systems. Therefore, at the initiative of the Ministry of Culture, the State Council launched the “Four Nos” 四不 regulations for rural amateur troupes on February 15, 1962: no for-profit performances, no touring performances, no extravagance and waste, and no disengagement from agricultural production (SMA, A72-2-936-1, Feb. 15, 1962: 1–9). Later in November, the Central Committee of the CCP issued the “Three Prohibitions” 三禁 regulations for opera performances in rural areas, whereby communes and brigades were prohibited from organizing for-profit opera troupes and purchasing costumes, from spending collective funds and materials on opera performances, and from raising funds from villagers for opera performances (“Henan Provincial Party Committee report on regulating rural amateur opera troupes,” 2013 [1962]: 281–83). However, these regulations aimed at suppressing the thriving illegal theatrical performances in rural areas were bound to fail, as the grassroots cultural supervisors themselves were participants or organizers of illegal cultural activities. Since the understaffed county-level cultural bureaucracies were unable to send cultural cadres to supervise the cultural life in villages at regular intervals, this job was handed over to rural cadres at the commune and brigade levels. However, rural cadres were either occupied with economic work and had no time for the job of supervision and censorship or deliberately loosened their supervision to protect local interests.

Driven by the profit-seeking motive, it was a common practice for the communes and brigades to operate rural amateur performance troupes as a side business in the post-GLF period. Performances counted toward the members’ work points while the earnings of these troupes belonged to the communes and brigades (Chinese Opera Gazetteers Editorial Board, 1992: 735–40). To make this side business easier to manage, some brigades and communes brought members of rural amateur troupes together to form production teams, which were called “professional production teams” 专业队. In this way, the rural amateur troupe became a basic economic accounting unit. All its members worked in the professional production team, and the profits they made through commercial performances belonged to the team. For example, the amateur troupe in Jintao Commune 金陶公社, Nan’an 南安 county, Fujian province, had twenty members from different production teams. Under the instruction of the commune, they left their original production teams and formed a professional production team, in which they cultivated twenty mu (1 mu equates to roughly 0.06 hectares) of land together, and operated side businesses such as raising pigs and fish, growing vegetables, and producing rice noodles. After the busy season of agricultural work, a few members stayed to manage the daily work of the professional production team, while most members went out for commercial performances, earning 70 to 80 yuan per show. Their profits belonged to the team, and all members received salaries from the profits each month (FPA, 0154-002-0153-0001, Oct. 27, 1961: 1–7).

In some areas, the running of rural amateur troupes replaced agricultural production to become the new focus for rural cadres. They served as the heads of rural amateur troupes and led these troupes to conduct commercial performances. For example, as a professional production team authorized by the brigade, the Baihua Amateur Troupe 百花业余剧团 in Huayuan Brigade 花园大队, Minquan 民权 county, Henan province, was led by the secretary and the deputy secretary of the party branch of the brigade. In their commercial performances, these two cadres were both organizers and actors, one played Cai Dan 彩旦, a clownish female role with comic lines, gestures, and makeup; the other played Hualian 花脸 (Painted Face), a rough or martial male role, which, as its name suggests, involved heavy face painting. According to an investigation by the Henan Provincial Bureau of Culture, cadre participation in amateur troupes was common in Henan province from the winter of 1961 to the spring of 1962 (Chinese Opera Gazetteers Editorial Board, 1992: 735–40). In Fujian province, some rural cadres invested personal or public funds in troupes and became the biggest shareholders of those troupes. For example, the cadres of Yuyangli Brigade in Xiapu county appropriated 3,895 yuan in public funds for the amateur troupe of the brigade, in preparation for their commercial performances during the season of the Spring Festival in 1963. In the meantime, the amateur troupe practiced a joint stock system, soliciting an investment of 2,284 yuan from the local villagers in return for thirty-six shares in the troupe. During Spring Festival in 1963, the amateur troupe defied the “Four Nos” and “Three Prohibitions” issued by the State Council in 1962 by leaving Xiapu county for a long-distance tour, and earned more than ten thousand yuan in sixty-four days. After repaying principal and interest to the brigade and the shareholders, the profits were distributed to all members of the troupe according to their work. The local cultural department found that the accounts of this troupe were vague and imprecise, and that corruption existed among the cadres and shareholders (FPA, 0154-002-0552-0025, 1963: 1–12).

Supported by rural cadres and local communities, some rural amateur troupes exhibited the “art of being governed” when superior cadres came to check cultural activities. ⁵ For example, when the cultural cadres of Fu’an district came to the above-mentioned Yuyangli Brigade to investigate the amateur troupe in 1963, some party members and cadres at the brigade and production team levels came to negotiate with them, and tried to gain their support for the running of the profitable troupe. The accountant of the brigade, Lin Chaohong 林朝红, even tried to persuade the cultural cadres of Fu’an district to become business partners in the troupe by issuing a loan (FPA, 0154-002-0552-0025, 1963: 1–12). Another example was the amateur troupe of Zhongshan Brigade 忠山大队 in Yanqian Commune 岩前公社, Sanming 三明, Fujian province, which conducted profitable performances in the neighboring villages from June 1962. Headed by the chief of the brigade, this troupe had thirty-five members, including four party members and five members of the Communist Youth League. At the end of 1962, the cultural department of Sanming sent a working group, together with the cadre in charge of the Communist Youth League committee in Yanqian Commune, to stop their for-profit performances. However, these efforts failed and the working group was threatened with violence if they turned up again. Since the cadres of Zhongshan Brigade devoted so much time and energy to the amateur troupe, they became lax in their supervision of collective agriculture, such that seventeen of the twenty-five production teams in the brigade disengaged from collective agricultural production secretly and worked on their own (FPA, 0154-002-0552-0044, Aug. 10, 1963: 1–7).

The connections between rural amateur troupes and local interests reflected the complicated relations among politics, economy, and culture at the grassroots level. When collectivization finished in 1956, there were millions of rural cadres at the brigade and production team levels around the country. Too numerous to be incorporated into the bureaucratic system, this group of cadres received no salaries from the government, meaning that they had to earn their work points like ordinary villagers (Li, 2009: 107). Therefore, keeping rural cadres under its effective control and ensuring their conformity with state policies represented a significant challenge for the state after 1956. In the post-GLF period, rural cadres at the commune level and below found themselves bearing the dual responsibilities of local economic recovery and cultural supervision, which were sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, as a result of the CCP’s new rural policies, rural production units gained more economic autonomy and cadres could decide for themselves which side businesses to operate. Running amateur troupes was one of their best options because—with official cultural products unsuited to the preferences of rural audiences and the downsized planned culture having left a cultural vacuum in rural areas—it could be highly profitable. On the other hand, rural cadres were responsible for carrying out cultural policies like the “Four Nos” and “Three Prohibitions,” which were aiming at suppressing rural theatrical performances for religious and profit-making purposes and drawing the rural workforce back to agricultural production. Faced with declining economic productivity and material hardships caused by the GLF, the latter was much less attractive than the former to rural cadres in most cases.

Underground Storytelling Performances in Suburban Counties

Illegal cultural markets were not an exclusively rural issue. From 1962 to 1963, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Committee, Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture, and county-level cultural departments conducted investigations of the party’s cultural work in Shanghai’s peripheral counties. Their findings included evidence of the weakness of the party’s cultural leadership, a lack of official cultural services, the popularity of illegal theatrical performances and superstitious activities, and overlapping cultural and economic black markets. These accounts suggested that teahouses were the biggest loophole in the party’s cultural work.

Teahouses in twentieth-century China, as Di Wang depicts, were a very well-utilized public space for local residents to carry on commercial, social, and cultural activities important to everyday life (Wang, 2018: 11). Beginning in the Qing dynasty, teahouses in the Yangtze Delta would set up small indoor storytelling theaters, where the most popular genre was pingtan, a storytelling form delivered in the Suzhou dialect and usually consisting of two performers using traditional string instruments without makeup or costumes. After the founding of the PRC, even though state control over the cultural realm was gradually enhanced, pingtan’s individualistic mode of organization and flexible mode of performance made it an anti-collectivistic and censorship-unfriendly art form (He, 2010: 248–52).

In contrast to Wang’s depiction of Chengdu’s teahouses under socialism, in which public entertainment was redefined and politicized as a propaganda machine through government campaigning, teahouses in Shanghai’s suburban counties were far from being reformed as venues for socialist education in the early 1960s. Unlicensed storytellers and unrevised traditional plays were so prevalent that they could be found in almost every teahouse that contained a storytelling theater (SMA, B3-1-23, Nov. 1963: 3). For example, more than one hundred pairs of unlicensed storytellers were performing in Shanghai county in 1961, most of whom gathered in teahouses named Maqiao 马桥, Sumin 苏民, Zhagang 闸港, Zhuanqian 颛桥, Xinzhuang 莘庄, and Zhaolou 召楼. Due to their long-term contracts with unlicensed storytellers, some other teahouses in the county even refused the licensed storytellers arranged by the county cultural sector (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 26). In Jinshan 金山 county, there were fifty-one teahouses in total, among which thirty-eight had set up indoor storytelling theaters without the approval of the local cultural department, and sixty-three self-employed unlicensed storytellers took turns performing in them in 1962. Nearly a third of these unlicensed storytellers came from communes and brigades within Jinshan county and were supported by the rural grassroots leaders, who issued temporary performance permits to them without checking the content of their performance, counted their performances toward their work points, and shared their profits (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 24).

Collaborative relations between teahouse owners and illegal storytellers in profit sharing and tax evasion were widespread. To recruit unlicensed storytellers, the manager of Hezuo Teahouse 合作茶园 in Zhujing town 朱泾镇, Jinshan county, even publicly stated that “nothing is forbidden in the teahouse” (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 24). In Chuansha 川沙 county, as an outgrowth of the readjusted rural policy, indoor storytelling theaters emerged in teahouses, restaurants, and even so-called “laohu zao” 老虎灶, shops with big tiger-shaped stoves that served as a provider of boiled water, a public bath, and a public space. Most of these storytelling theaters were run as a side business by communes and brigades within the county. Unlicensed storytellers were preferred by the owners of these poorly equipped theaters because their repertoires contained a large number of unrevised traditional plays that were far more lucrative than revolutionary stories (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 36).

These phenomena made Shanghai’s cultural cadres believe that they had lost the battle on the cultural front in suburban counties and towns. They attributed this defeat to the downsizing of the state’s cultural undertakings after the GLF and to some grassroots cultural cadres’ misunderstanding of the party’s post-GLF cultural policy. From 1961, the number of the state-sponsored cultural undertakings, such as film projection teams, professional opera troupes, cultural centers, bookstores, libraries, and vocational training schools, substantially declined in Shanghai’s suburban counties. Some remote towns rarely encountered party-directed film projection teams and professional performance troupes (SMA, B3-1-23, Nov. 1963: 1). As a result, the retreat of planned culture created a vacuum to be filled by unofficial cultural suppliers. This situation was exacerbated by the practices of some grassroots cultural cadres, who either equated the state’s readjusted cultural policy with the abandonment of supervision over the cultural field or regarded cultural institutions as a sector of the local economy by focusing their efforts on maximizing profits, rather than on socialist propaganda and education (SMA, B3-1-23, Nov. 1963: 5–6). However, in essence, the weakness of the party’s cultural supervision at the county level was not merely a result of cadres’ personal misunderstandings of the official line or rent-seeking behaviors, but rather can be traced to longstanding organizational flaws within the bureaucratic system.

Official cultural investigations from 1962 to 1963 exposed poor coordination among different sectors of local governments. The supervising of teahouses and the storytelling theaters within them relied on cooperation between local economic and cultural departments. But in effect teahouses were under the sole supervision of the county bureaus of commerce after 1949, whose main focus was on business rather than the content of the storytelling performances (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 19–20). It merits mentioning that the state’s economic control over teahouses was much less extensive than its control over state-run enterprises. Since teahouses were small in scale but large in number and were scattered across cities and towns, the government had no intention of collectivizing all teahouses in the mid-1950s socialist transformation of private industry and commerce for fear that doing so would impose a huge fiscal pressure on the government. One 1961 survey showed, for example, that among the sixty-one teahouses in Chuansha county, only three were owned by the state while fifty-two remained self-financed. ⁶ Teahouses’ financial autonomy created breeding grounds for both cultural and economic black markets. Apart from the illegal storytelling performances, black market trade was also found to be prevalent in teahouses in Chuansha and Nanhui 南汇 counties. Local cadres described teahouses as a “free kingdom” 自由王国 for black market trade where ration coupons, cigarettes, food, industrial goods, gold, silver dollars, and so on were bought and sold (SMA, B172-5-717, 1962: 37).

County-level economic departments were not solely responsible for the teahouse issue. Throughout the 1950s, county-level cultural departments around Shanghai suffered from severe problems of understaffing and unclear division of work. Until 1959, among eleven counties around Shanghai municipality, five—Shanghai, Baoshan 宝山, Jiading 嘉定, Pudong 浦东, and Songjiang 松江 counties—had county cultural sections 文化科, while the other six—Nanhui, Chuansha, Qingpu 青浦, Jinshan, Chongming 崇明, and Fengxian 奉贤 counties—had county bureaus of culture and education 文教局. All of these county-level cultural departments were chronically understaffed, but the problem in the county bureaus of culture and education was more serious as the few cadres that they employed usually prioritized educational work and put cultural work aside (SMA, B172-1-323-7, June 20, 1959: 3). For example, the county bureaus of culture and education in Nanhui, Jinshan, Chongming, and Fengxian only had one cadre in charge of cultural work, but this cadre was in effect often occupied with political and economic work. In Chuansha and Qingpu, cultural work was handed over to the cultural stations 文化站 because the county bureaus of culture and education could spare no cadres for it; nonetheless, the cultural stations, as a mass organization, could hardly carry out the state’s cultural policies effectively because of its lack of political authority (SMA, B172-1-323-39, 1959: 1). With no or very few cadres focused on cultural work, the county-level cultural departments were incapable of maintaining strong cultural leadership on behalf of the central party-state. On December 11, 1965, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture held a conference with district- and county-level cultural cadres to receive their annual work reports. During this conference, most cadres complained that they were overwhelmed by educational work and could hardly spare any time for cultural work (SMA, B172-1-484-96, Dec. 11, 1965: 1–6).

Street Performance Activities in Big Cities

As an outgrowth of the cultural thaw and a downsized planned culture system in the post-GLF period, unofficial culture revived not only in rural and suburban areas but also in big cities, where official cultural facilities were more accessible and the cultural administration was much stronger than in the peripheries. For example, Shanghai, as an industrial, commercial, and cultural center of the PRC, found itself becoming a bustling hub for unlicensed opera troupes and performers in the early 1960s. Unlicensed opera troupes and their makeshift tents gathered in Zhabei 闸北, Yangpu 杨浦, and Pudong districts, where there was more open space, while unlicensed individual performers set up stalls in built-up Nanshi 南市 and Huangpu 黄浦 districts. Most noticeably, in the summer of 1962, fourteen unlicensed opera troupes performed along Yangzhou Road 扬州路 and Tongzhou Road 通州路 in Yangpu district. Bustling with performances and people every evening, this area was called the “Outdoor Great World” 露天大世界 by local residents (SMA, B172-5-545, Dec. 13, 1962: 42–48).

This name expressed nostalgia for the Great World 大世界, a famous amusement hall located in the French Concession in Shanghai during the Republican period. Opened in July 1917, the Great World had six floors and contained more than ten theaters with modern facilities and hundreds of stalls, offering motion pictures, local operas, and folkloric storytelling performances in a carnival atmosphere, attracting thousands of people every day at the height of its popularity in the Republican period (Wakeman, 1996: 105–106). After the founding of the PRC, the Great World became state-run and was renamed the Shanghai People’s Amusement Hall 上海人民游乐场 in July 1954. With the advent of the socialist cultural reform, the diversity of its repertoire sharply shrank because all opera performances and film screenings in the amusement hall came under the control and censorship of the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture. The amusement hall therefore became a venue for educating the new socialist citizens (Ke and He, 1956: 29–32).

However, in the early 1960s, the Shanghai audience found a diversity of opera performances in the “Outdoor Great World,” where they could watch not only operatic and storytelling performances in various local dialects such as Peking opera 京剧, Yue opera 越剧, Huai opera 淮剧, Yang opera 扬剧, Hu opera 沪剧, Yong opera 甬剧, Subei gushu 苏北鼓书, and Yangzhou pinghua 扬州评话 but also unrevised traditional plays. ⁷ Improvisational singing was a major component of these performances, during which some performers complained about their lives or made fun of the unpopular policies of the state. For example, one unlicensed performer acting as Baogong 包公, a legendary judge in the Song dynasty who represented fairness in traditional Chinese culture and whose traditional opera costume involves black face paint, improvised to make a joke in one performance: “Baogong I am, used to be black-faced because I was tanned when I did manual labor in Chongming [an island close to Shanghai]. Recently I resigned and stayed at home to let myself get well-fed and plump, so I have turned white-faced now!” (SMA, B3-2-145, Aug. 22, 1962: 14–15). The manual labor he performed in Chongming was probably assigned by the danwei 单位 (work unit) in which he worked, and this improvisational singing was aimed at criticizing life in the danwei and extolling his self-employed career as an unlicensed performer. ⁸ That he was “well-fed” alluded to the existence of the black market, where self-employed people without ration coupons could buy goods with cash. Another unlicensed performer sang a prologue in an improvised style: “Everyone listening to my singing, watch out for your pockets! All kinds of coupons in your pockets now, sugar, oil, meat, and fish coupons, plus a coupon to wipe your ass!” This prologue made the audience burst out laughing (SMA, B3-2-145, Aug. 22, 1962: 14–15). Both the form and content of these illicit theatrical performances troubled the cultural cadres: the “poison” of feudalistic, superstitious, even reactionary ideas was in all probability contained in these performances, but without fixed venues and scripts, it was hard to trace or censor them. ⁹

Opera performers found on the streets of Shanghai in the early 1960s were mainly of four types: (1) Self-employed opera performers who had registered with the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture in 1956 and held performance permits. These performers only accounted for a small proportion of the total. (2) Opera performers who had been dismissed from authorized troupes in Shanghai during the GLF. With the arrangement of the Shanghai government, some of them had found jobs in local factories, some went back to their original villages, and others performed in other cities and settled there. However, in 1962, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture found that more than one thousand of those who had been transferred from troupes to factories in 1958 had resigned from the factories and become unlicensed street performers. Opera performers who had initially returned to their home villages or relocated to other cities in 1958 were also found to be returning to Shanghai and engaging in street performance. (3) Opera performers in authorized opera troupes engaging in street performance as a part-time job to earn extra income. Some state-sponsored troupes were even engaged in street performance on a whole-troupe scale. (4) Amateur opera performers, either from factories or local residents, attracted by the cultural market and who sought to make a profit in it. The number of opera performers in the last three categories was huge and difficult to accurately count (SMA, B172-5-545, Dec. 13, 1962: 7–8).

Similar to the issue that famous actors masqueraded as “amateur” performers in order to escape censorship in Hubei province during the same period (DeMare, 2017: 165), the boundaries between legal and illegal and professional and amateur troupes and performers drawn by the allure of profits were blurred in the growing cultural black market in Shanghai. Participants in this market, though seemingly scattered around the city, had a complicated collaborative network. Fixers among them acted as liaisons with a clear division of work: some to recruit performers and others to connect performers and venues. Teahouses, which had always served as a location for self-employed storytellers to find employment in Shanghai and other Yangtze Delta cities before 1949 and during the early 1950s, continued their function as information centers for fixers, performers, and their employers. In addition, fixers set up their “offices” at hotels 旅社 like Wugong 吴宫, Xiangyang 襄阳, and Da shijie 大世界 to arrange performance jobs and introduce performers to troupes in other cities; they also made fake official seals and recommendation letters from cultural departments for troupes and performers who were in need (SMA, B172-5-545, Dec. 13, 1962: 7–8). Hardened and efficient as these underground agents were, party-directed professional troupes and even cultural departments of other cities bypassed the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and turned to them to recruit opera performers in Shanghai while hundreds of Shanghai-based self-employed Peking opera and Yue opera performers relied on them to find employers in other cities (SMA, A22-2-873, Jan. 25, 1960: 37–40). According to an investigation by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture, during Spring Festival in 1962, to conduct long-distance tours in towns and villages in other provinces, thirty-nine provisional “black” opera troupes, consisting of four hundred to five hundred performers in total, were formed with the arrangement of underground agents (SMA, B3-2-215-25, Sept. 10, 1962: 1–4).

Illegal cultural production in general, and street performance activities in particular, were not a new phenomenon in early-1960s Shanghai; they had existed since the Republican period and never went extinct after 1949. In order to regulate street performance activities, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture organized street performers into a Street Performers Labor Union 街头艺人工会 in 1950, which later changed its name to the Street Performers Reform Association 街头艺人改进协会, directed by the Theater Reform Association 戏曲改进协会 mass organization. From 1950 to 1955, the total membership of the Street Performers Reform Association increased from 315 to 1,361, yet there were still many street performers making a living outside of the official association, the number of whom was not included in the official statistics. To strengthen censorship and arrest the continuous expansion of this group, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture carried out registration of street performers in 1956; of 1,486 applicants, 860 were issued long-term performance licenses and 359 temporary performance permits, while 267 were blacklisted. During the GLF, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture initiated a rectification campaign in the opera field aimed at eliminating street performance activities; the measures included assigning some street performers to work in local or nonlocal factories and persuading others to engage in agricultural production in their places of origin. Under these arrangements, the number of street performers in Shanghai drastically decreased to sixty, who were collectivized into several groups directed by cultural departments at the district level. However, the effect of the political campaign proved to be short-lived as the targeted street performers gradually absconded from their government-arranged positions in the industrial and agricultural sectors and reemerged on Shanghai’s streets. Official investigations showed that the number of unlicensed street performers in Shanghai had increased to two hundred by 1960, five hundred by 1961, and over one thousand by 1962 (SMA, B3-2-215-34, Oct. 4, 1962: 1–9).

Being censorship-unfriendly did not necessarily mean that those itinerant street performers intended to work underground. From April to September 1962, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture received quite a few applications for a performance license from street performers and newly formed troupes. ¹⁰ Cultural cadres deliberated over whether or not to issue licenses to these applicants. From July to October 1962, several discussions on this issue took place among government departments at different levels in Shanghai. On July 5, 1962, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture put forward the “Report on Temporarily Rejecting the Registration Applications of Street Performers and Private Troupes” 关于流散艺人与私人办团拟暂不考虑申请登记的请示报告 and submitted it to the Publicity Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Shanghai Municipal People’s Committee. This report indicated two reasons for not approving the registration applications of street performers and newly formed private troupes: First, considering the vast number of them and their high mobility, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture did not have enough manpower to supervise them at regular intervals after issuing licenses. Second, the cultural cadres were worried that numerous street performers in other cities would flock to Shanghai after hearing that the existing ones has been allowed to register, and the increasing population would aggravate the food supply burden borne by the local government (SMA, B172-5-545, Dec. 13, 1962: 7–8). On August 6, 1962, the Publicity Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee approved the report (SMA, B172-5-545, Dec. 13, 1962: 9). Later, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Committee organized a meeting with Shanghai’s cultural departments at the municipal and district levels to discuss the street performers issue. Grassroots cultural cadres complained that they faced great difficulties in tracing these sly performers, who disappeared during political campaigns and reemerged soon after. After discussions, the cadres in the meeting were in consensus that street performance activities were longstanding and could be expected to remain so into the future; the best solution they could figure out was to “turn a blind eye to them, neither prohibit nor legalize” (SMA, B3-2-215-34, Oct. 4, 1962: 1–9).

The “licensing or not” dilemma mirrored the gap between the blueprint of planned culture and its reality. Officially sanctioned cultural services were not evenly distributed in big cities like Shanghai, with distant districts always having less access to official cultural facilities or even being totally ignored by professional opera troupes. Local residents in these areas, especially the low-income ones, welcomed the street performances, which fulfilled their cultural needs at a low price and at a short distance (SMA, B3-2-215-34, Oct. 4, 1962: 1–9). Aware that it was financially incapable of improving grassroots cultural facilities in a short time, as the state had ceased most of its cultural investments in order to save financial resources for economic recovery after the GLF, Shanghai’s cultural cadres deliberately tolerated the existence of unlicensed street performers and regarded them as a supplement to the official cultural supply system (SMA, B3-2-215-34, Oct. 4, 1962: 1–9). Although the cultural thaw was short-lived and the PRC’s cultural policy became increasingly radical in the mid-1960s, finally leading to the Cultural Revolution, the inadequacy of official cultural services was persistent, fettering the state’s cultural reach at the grassroots. In other words, a downsized planned culture system could not realize Mao’s cultural ideal.

Conclusion

This article argues that the state’s cultural reach in the Mao era was limited by a lack of capacity and sometimes by preference. On the one hand, longstanding illegal cultural markets demonstrated the persistent contradictions between the ambitious blueprint of planned culture and the state’s meager financial resources. Without enough financial support from the central government, the organizational flaws within the bureaucratic system—namely, the poor coordination among different sectors of local governments and the understaffing problem in local cultural departments—were hard to resolve, while the official cultural facilities at the grassroots were unable to be improved. The result of these problems was that planned culture was concentrated only in cities. However, it is inaccurate to say that planned culture was urban-centric by nature, both cultural administration and official cultural production proved weak to be at the county level, even though county seats were designated as urban.

On the other hand, the market in general, and the cultural market in particular, were largely influenced by the conflicts between two different political lines among the CCP’s top leaders in the Mao era. When Mao’s radical line gained the upper hand, the market experienced a significant shrinkage, as the CCP sought to eliminate private ownership and replace markets of all forms with the state supply system; when the anti-radicalism line that was advocated by other top leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai gained dominance, the market was tolerated, and even encouraged as an expedient helper to maintain the socialist system on a vast peasant social base, which was deemed less suitable than an urban-industrial environment for developing socialism by classical theorists of Marxism-Leninism.

Specifically, the resurgence of illegal cultural markets in the early 1960s was a result of a “Great Leap Backward” by the state in both the economic and cultural fields. Facing a serious fiscal crisis caused by the GLF, the state decided to downsize planned culture to its 1957 scale, leaving a cultural vacuum at the county level and below. In the meantime, the CCP’s famine-relief policy fostered a measure of autonomy at the grassroots, especially at the village (brigade) level. This fostered profit-seeking activities in defiance of both the planned economy and planned culture systems, which included but was not limited to organizing “black” opera troupes and participating in black market trade. These phenomena indicate that the interactions between state and society in the Mao era were by no means a linear process wherein state power kept strengthening while the agency of society continued to decline, but a dynamic one characterized by experimental state policies and constant resistance from society. I prefer to term this society a “folk society,” rather than Jürgen Habermas’s “civil society” (Habermas, 1989), as it seldom exhibited any explicit political intentions or open resistance to state power. However, it did resist the state covertly in its daily practices, for example, by producing and consuming unofficial cultural products. Such resistance in the early 1960s reflected a crisis of official ideology and widespread dissatisfaction with the state culture brought by the GLF, and demonstrated the failure of the CCP’s efforts in replacing “feudalistic superstitions” or other forms of folk culture with a single national culture.