The Heart of the Party: Gender and Communist Party Ideals in Tracks in the Snowy Forest

Abstract

In the mid-1950s, mystical old men, demonically evil villains, and valiant martial artists traveling through legendary landscapes populated a group of works known as revolutionary popular novels (革命通俗小说 geming tongsu xiaoshuo). These novels included Railroad Guerrillas, Martial Artists Behind Enemy Lines, and Wild Fires and Spring Winds Struggling in the Ancient Capital.1 The most successful of these was a 1957 novel by Qu Bo recounting the exploits of a small detachment of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers named Tracks in the Snowy Forest (林海雨原 Linhai xueyuan2). It is an episodic adventure novel in the style of The Water Margin or Journey to the West, in which a group of heroic soldiers roams the Northeast rooting out nests of bandits loosely tied to the Kuomintang (KMT) during China’s civil war. The novel was well received by both readers and critics, and its popularity led to numerous adaptations, including the 1960 film and a 1959 opera. These adaptations both focused on one particularly exciting scene in the novel, when the soldiers infiltrate a group of bandits on Tiger Mountain. This section was subsequently transformed into a model opera, Taking Tiger Mountain (智取威虎山 Zhiqu Weihu shan).3 KeywordsChinese Communist PartyFemale CharacterClass StruggleRomantic LoveLove StoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.