Red Detachment of Women and the Enterprise of Making "Model" Music during the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Abstract

The Chinese Cultural Revolution is often described as a period of cultural bankruptcy, a time during which creativity was suppressed to produce eight "model" propaganda pieces. This article seeks to rehabilitate these works as works of art by showing that the nihilistic portrayal of the Revolution in the dominant discourse is not completely accurate, that it is possible to recover the concept of ideal art that guided the production of the "model" works and thereby arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the form and content of these works. By adapting Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity so that any subjective identity negotiation may utilise the metaphor of an interstitial space, the Chinese Communists’ concept of art is presented as a negotiated hybrid identity between its self-defined pair of "others"—traditional Chinese and Western art. A "model" work, Red Detachment of Women, is then discussed to demonstrate how it realised this ideal. By showing that the concept of ideal Chinese Communist art was a complex hybrid of Chinese and Western art traditions, and that the characteristics criticised by detractors of the ballet were actually deliberately contrived in pursuit of the Communist concept of ideal art, this article argues that a fair evaluation of Red Detachment (and other "model" works) must be based on criteria for artistic excellence that are consonant with the Chinese Communist concept of ideal art.