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Between accommodation and resistance: Pingtan Storytelling in 1960s Shanghai
Author(s)
Date Issued
2014
Publisher
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Journal
ISSN
0026-749X
1469-8099
Citation
Modern Asian Studies, 2014, vol. 48(3), pp. 524-549.
Type
Peer Reviewed Journal Article
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
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