History as Farce and the Intellectual as Comedian: Li Jing’s Metahistorical Drama Comedies from the State of Qin

Abstract

With critical fabulation as its methodological starting point, this article analyzes the dramatic techniques used by contemporary Chinese playwright Li Jing to construct the figure of the intellectual-as-artist in her 2017 metahistorical drama Qinguo xiju (Comedies from the State of Qin). By locating historical farce as the origin of contemporary Chinese political thought, Li supplants today’s politically subservient intellectual with the character of the intellectual-as-comedian. When cast in this new light, Li endows Chinese theatre with a renewed sense of immediacy, namely to rescue everyday Chinese people from moral and spiritual degradation, a task at which contemporary Chinese intellectuals have failed.