The Red Detachment of Women
홍색낭자군
A 1961 Chinese film by Xie Jin about a women's company on Hainan Island in the 1930s, with the 1964 ballet and other versions. A runaway servant, Wu Qionghua, grows into a soldier of the company. The ballet became a model opera and was performed for Nixon during his 1972 visit to China.
In depth
What is the story?
Yelin village near the Wanquan River on Hainan Island in the 1930s. Wu Qionghua, a servant of the brutal landlord Nan Batian, is caught again and again running away and finally escapes into the forest. The Communist Hong Changqing, disguised as an overseas merchant, guides her to a Red Army company of women.
Revenge is all she has in mind. On one operation she sees Nan and fires too soon, letting him escape and costing comrades their lives. Having paid in blood, she learns that the army is not for settling private scores but for freeing the poor. Hong is captured in battle and killed by Nan, and Wu leads the company with the main force into the village to wipe out Nan's militia.
Was there a real unit?
There was. In 1931 a women's special-duty company was formed in the Second Independent Division of the Red Army on Hainan. Its leaders were captured one by one in 1933 and freed in the amnesty after the Xi'an Incident of 1936. Their later lives were far from the film: some died in the war against Japan, while others married Nationalist soldiers and were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Heroes of the revolution on stage, they became its objects in reality. The last survivor, Lu Yexiang, died in 2014.
How was the film made?
The script, written on Hainan in 1958 by Liang Xin, a writer with the Central South Military Region, was turned down by the August First studio and travelled around before catching the eye of Xie Jin at Shanghai's Tianma studio. Its first title, "Heroic Flowers of the Qiong Island", was dropped. Just before shooting Xie found his lead, the Shanghai Theatre Academy student Zhu Xijuan. The film came out in 1961 and in 1962 won best picture at the first Hundred Flowers Awards. Its theme song was sung everywhere. The Hainan dramatist Wu Zhi, however, claimed that most of its material and plot came from a local-opera script he had organised.
Why did the ballet become more famous?
The ballet opened on 26 September 1964 at the Tianqiao Theatre in Beijing. Tian Han also adapted the story for Peking opera that year, but that version was largely forgotten as its authors were persecuted, while the ballet had Jiang Qing's backing. In 1965 she renamed the heroine Wu Qinghua and shifted the centre of the work to Hong Changqing. The gun-toting ballerinas became an emblem of the model operas, and in February 1972 Nixon watched the show in Beijing.
The makers' fates differed from the stage. The first lead, Bai Shuxiang, was denounced in the Cultural Revolution because her father had been a Nationalist soldier and was sent to labour reform, and the composer Wu Zuqiang lost his credit. The work's value is still fought over. Liang Xin sued the National Ballet over copyright and won in 2015, but the company refused to comply, and in 2018 the Supreme People's Court told lower courts not to order performances of "red classics" stopped.
Judgements differ too. The view of model operas as mere propaganda long prevailed, but the scholar Barbara Mittler argues that such works shaped collective memory and aesthetic experience.