Revolutionary model operas
혁명 모범극
The stage works held up as models during the Cultural Revolution, known in Chinese as yangbanxi. In May 1967 the People's Daily named the first eight (five Peking operas, two ballets and one symphonic work), and by 1976 there were about twenty-six. Jiang Qing led the effort.
In depth
What are they?
The eight named by the People's Daily on 31 May 1967 were the Peking operas Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, On the Docks, The Legend of the Red Lantern, Shajiabang and Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, the ballets The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl, and the symphonic Shajiabang. All their heroes are modern Chinese fighting and working under the party. The stage had driven out the emperors, generals and lovely maidens of old.
Why did everyone come to know them by heart?
There was nothing else. In years when fiction, film and theatre had dried up, people joked of "eight operas for eight hundred million". The works poured from radios and loudspeakers; between 1969 and 1972 they were filmed and carried into the countryside by mobile units; over three hundred regional theatre genres adapted them. They appeared on records and posters, plates and teapots. People who knew nothing of opera could sing a few bars. The writer Anchee Min recalls pressing her ear to the radio to catch the singer's breath.
How was Peking opera changed?
First came a hierarchy of characters. The "three prominences" demanded that positive characters stand out from all others, heroes from the positive, and the main hero from the heroes. Villains got only short arias. Then the sound changed: a Western orchestra joined the opera band, fixed scores left little room for improvisation, and the traditional role types disappeared.
The mould was strict. Film, record and regional versions could not deviate. Artists who suggested changes early on were persecuted on the charge of "active counter-revolution sabotaging the model operas", with death as the top penalty, and even a mistaken line on stage could count as a crime.
How are they judged today?
It remains a sensitive matter. Some call them "conspiracy art" because Jiang Qing used them for her political ambition; others say many had taken shape before she touched them and that she merely seized others' achievements. Ba Jin wrote that the sound of them made his heart jump. Yet the scholar Kazushi Minami notes that many people, especially in the countryside, still cherish them. In 2008 the education ministry's proposal for opera in schools, with nine model-opera pieces among fifteen, set off wide controversy.