Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xvi, 260 pp. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9969070. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 978-0-472-05430-5.

Abstract

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . xvi,  pp. DOI: ./mpub.. Paperback $., ISBN ----. This short history book about a spooky subject takes first its readers to a dark corner of the history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: How did a kunqu 昆曲 “ghost play” (guixi 鬼戏) by a veteran communist writer named Meng Chao 孟超 became one of the earliest targets of what will be known later as the “Gang of four,” even before the attacks on the plays of the far more famous intellectuals Wu Han and Tian Han? If one of the merits of this study is to shed a new light on the attacks on culture that constituted the premises of the great turmoil of the late ’s—but the author had already publicized this historical “scoop” in an article from  —it is not the main point that this book-length study wants to make. This book has the wider ambition to retrace the resilience of an apparently forbidden topic in the early PRC, the “superstitious and feudal” ghost’s theme. The public appearance of this topic on the stage of the contemporary traditional Chinese theater (xiqu 戏曲) and, more in general, its enduring presence as a subject of heated debates is also explored. Let us first recall the play at the center of the book: the story of Li Huiniang 李慧娘, first appearing in the early Ming Qu You’s 瞿佑 collections in literary Chinese Jiandeng xinhua 剪灯新话, became well known to the Chinese public through the chuanqi 传奇 play “the Prunus pavilion” Hongmei ge 红梅阁. It tells how Huiniang, a concubine of the evil southern Song minister Jia Sidao 贾似道, is slain by her jealous and violent master for having looked tenderly at a young literati near Hangzhou’s West Lake. However, as Jia Sidao prepares to also harm the would-be lover of the late concubine, her ghost appears, chases the assassin away, and scares and humiliates the evil minister. Before coming to the story of Li Huiniang itself, Greene first analyses what happened after the initial chilling ban on a group of twenty-six “superstitious plays,” most of them ghost plays, in the early ’s. Greene shows how the ban initiated a time of confusion. Troops and local authorities were quite puzzled about what was allowed, while intellectual circles began to deploy a salvaging strategy of some of the traditional supernatural themes by drawing a Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press distinction between permissible “mythological” plays and damnable “superstitious” or “fearsome” works. The second chapter begins with the attempt by a playwright with an impeccable proletarian pedigree, Ma Jianling 马健翎, to produce a “politically correct” version of the story. In his  qinqiang 秦腔 play “Wandering West Lake,” You Xihu 游西湖, Ma does not present a ghost, but still uses the ghost element by staging a ghost-like character, making Huiniang pose as a ghost without being dead. To the author’s surprise, this attempt at a “ghostless ghost play” (which may be found in other genres of the same period, for example in some Hong Kong leftwing movies ) was greeted with harsh criticism in the higher intellectual circles of the PRC by several authors who, while voicing critiques on esthetic grounds against Ma’s play, expressed opinions that amounted to justifications of keeping “real” ghost on the Chinese traditional opera stage. The  relaxing of the initial ban on ghost plays encouraged troops to resume performances. Ma later reintroduced the ghost in the play, without receiving much more understanding from his critics. Chapter  takes the reader right to the middle of the complexity of the Hundred flowers’ time. It compares two contemporary productions, the anthology of classical tales “Stories not to be afraid about ghosts” (Bu pa gui de gushi 不怕 鬼的故事) and the rewriting in  in the kunqu opera form of the Prunus pavilion story by Meng Chao under the title “Li Huiniang.” While the first book, ordered by Chairman Mao himself, gave a new voice to ancient ghost stories by playing on a rhetoric associating ghosts with old and new class enemies (a rhetoric which won’t be forgotten during the Cultural Revolution), Meng Chao created with his “Li...