Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure Series. 2025: Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian and Shaanxi Provinces’ Red Tour. Short videos, captioned photos, articles and commentary. The REAL Chinese people you don’t know!

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Notes on Red Theatre

By Amir Khan

One benefit of doing a red tour away from China’s flagship metropolises is the opportunity to see red in neither hearts nor minds but in the streets. Red cities do exist, at least at the level of superstructure—that is, culturally.

Set aside for now how wealth is actually distributed in places like Yueyang, Hengyang (Hunan Province), Jinggangshan, Xingguo, Yudu, Ruijin (Jiangxi Province), Changting (Fujian Province), and Yan’an (Shaanxi Province), these municipalities take the time to brand themselves Communist. Street lamps and store-fronts are adorned with red stars, and red parks and landmarks crowd out corporate logos. You don’t see gigantic and well-lit glitzy Dior, Omega, Nike, Balenciaga, and Chanel lettering along the skyline as you would in mega-cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or even Changsha.

Red sites exist in the mega-cites mind you, but you have to seek them out. In the rural municipalities, red sites are in your face. They are not quaint, hidden gems but on big, bold, and ostentatious display.

Red theatre versus blockbuster movies

Take red theatre for example. Red rural cities take the time to brand the revolution from their particular vantage point. These productions are less like the national epics you see onscreen but a writing into history of otherwise excluded local recollections lost or misplaced along the thoroughfare of the grand narrative. The rural element embedded in these productions removes them from the type of jingoism received as art at the cultural centres.

Box-office blockbusters consumed in urban locales necessarily have a homogenizing effect. In China, overarching national/historical narratives are produced and sustained at its urban centres. Films like The Eight Hundred (八佰), The Volunteers: To the War (志愿军：雄兵出击), and Born to Fly (长空之王) serve to create a stable historical horizon. The propagation of these narratives (via cinema screens and streaming sites) are both the prerogative and responsibility of power in creating social cohesion. Rural municipalities may have opportunity to “write back,” but primarily for localized consumption.

I am not suggesting that all national-historical narratives are jingoistic, but certainly from a Western vantage point, they necessarily are, as the impetus of Western bourgeois art and criticism is to dissolve all horizons.

Take this bit of commentary on The Battle at Lake Changjin (长津湖), for example, a Chinese military historical blockbuster released in 2021:

The movie has been described as propaganda. Sophia Yan of The Daily Telegraph wrote that it is an “anti-US propaganda film” that tapped into a “growing nationalist sentiment,” while BBC News described the film as “Chinese propaganda.” Stanley Rosen, a political science professor from the University of Southern California, stated that the release and popularity of the film “is definitely related to the ongoing tensions with the US, and has been promoted that way—sometimes indirectly, but still very clearly.” Sun Hongyun, an associate professor at Beijing Film Academy said that the film was “an extraordinary and perfect collusion of capital and political propaganda.”

What is lost of course to Sophia Yan, the BBC, Stanley Rosen, and Uncle Tom associate professor Sun Hongyun is that the knee-jerk obligation to rebuff any Chinese attempt to write its own history betrays the worst sort of propagandistic distortion; the Chinese perspective on historical events that took place 120 km outside of its own borders (Korean War) is dismissed by cosmopolitan tastes as propaganda!

To the deranged Western imagination, the only way to “produce” objective historical truth is to delegate the writing of it to disinterested market specialists who supposedly operate in as apolitical a headspace as possible. The assumption here being that the pursuit of commercial success and money has no distorting effect how history is told. In short, the consumption and production of history as a commodity guarantees its truth!

Any nationalist expression and consumption of community or togetherness threatens a global power structure that thrives on the atomized individual as the most pliable and productive economic unit. The hysterics over “growing national sentiment” reflects this.

However, make no mistake: blockbusters screened at the centre cannot train or uplift the masses but only keep them alienated, or alienate them further. A film like The Wandering Earth (2019), for example, which is certainly meant to heighten nationalist pride (and thus create a type of “collective” experience), nonetheless can do nothing to transpose this collective feeling directly onto the lives and experiences of the people. Despite its nationalist aspirations, the film remains trapped within neoliberal aesthetics.

At the cinema, collective pride can only be consumed transactionally and on occasion: we take pride in an idealized concept of nation at the movies, then return to our daily existence alienated from this very concept in our working, waking lives. Thus, even movies like The Wandering Earth or The Battle of Lake Changjin, despite neoliberal Western hysterics to the contrary, work to cement the status quo rather than reshape it. Marxist film scholar Dai Jinua puts it like so:

The cheers accompanying China’s global rise do not indicate the emergence of self-awareness of Chinese nationalism. Instead, they are cheers for the success of global capitalism.

In short, in class society, art is either urban or rural—or perhaps I mean central or marginal. Commercial success, even of supposedly nationalist cinema, is no index of proletarian awakening. The political is denied, as no outlet for real praxis exists. Red rural, or marginal, art (including its theatre and cityscapes), on the other hand, exists against a horizon that is political.

About those four red show we saw

I am here setting up a class antagonism in the production and consumption of art that is more fundamental than any China/Western binary. That is, both a Westerner and any city-dweller (say from Beijing, Shanghai, or Changsha) may enjoy productions like Jinggang Mountain (井冈山), The Dream Chasers by Yudu River (长针第一渡), Back to Yan’an (再回延安), and Red Show (红秀), but only as exhibition—not as art.

The question is not, “What can a Westerner learn from attending red performances in rural China?”, but what can any urban city-dweller (from China or elsewhere) learn from red theatre? Other than taking the family out for shits and giggles, what will someone like you (or me) get out of these performances?

Likely nothing. Ideological blinders are too strong and guards are up too high. City-folk who have spent their entire lives consuming art at the centre are incapable of appreciating the masses, i.e. their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and frustrations as existing threadbare on a marginal stage against a political horizon that people in the city are alienated from anyhow. I don’t mean people in the city don’t love their country. I mean even when they feel this love, such feelings remain stranded in the mind only. The day-to-day existence of urban dwellers, hustling under the parameters of wage slavery, alienates them from their fellow man and thus their country anyhow.

Put another way: since we, as city-dwellers, have spent a lifetime not thinking in any serious way about community, how can the aesthetic display of a communal idea (i.e. Communism) be perceived as anything other than quaint exhibitionism at best, totalitarian propaganda at worst?

For us, appreciating red art becomes a matter of letting down our guard. Intellectuals, the consummate city-dwellers, have the most difficult time doing this. They can see in these productions only party diktat come to life: Marxist intellectuals, on the one hand, feel duty bound to praise such productions without attending to requisite feelings; university intellectuals, on the other, default to patronizing such productions, even when praising them—for example, as panegyrics to a bygone era. Both miss the kernel of truth expressed in these sorts of productions.

Jinggang Mountain (Jinggangshan, Jiangxi Province)

Jinggangshan

The city of Jinggangshan brands itself the “cradle of the revolution.” Jinggangshan was predecessor to the later Jiangxi Soviet established in 1931 and the first significant revolutionary base established in the countryside from which to wage war against Jiang and the city-dwellers.

The Communist Party had existed since 1921, but they never became revolutionary until they established revolutionary Soviets to take complete control of their own destiny. You may think you are awakening the masses by giving lectures or appearing on television in the city; but you are nowhere near the masses. Furthermore, nothing revolutionary is going on until you pick up a gun. It was in Jinggangshan in 1927 where the Comrades first learned to spill blood.

The eponymously titled production, Jinggang Mountain (井冈山), is a textbook example of an iron-flower spectacle (打铁话), an intangible piece of China’s revolutionary heritage and a genre of theatre born out of fire and blood, both of which appear as stunning motifs. The outdoor production, both figuratively and literally, is emblazoned on an horizon. Six-hundred performers appear on a “stage” so vast and far off in the distance that we cannot see their faces. We are watching the entire production from a static, classical-era establishing shot, similar to those in the first half of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. This vantage point at the high periphery does not alienate us from the centre but provides a particular intimacy with the landscape. What Jinggang Mountain shows is how revolutionary energy is drawn from a mix of blood, iron, and soil. To paraphrase the chorus:

Martyred blood seeps into the land
To mix with earthly magma
And forge the steel of revolutionary weapons.

To the bourgeois intellectual, this unapologetic paean to violence could only be construed as fascistic. Blood, iron, and soil is a deadly mix to the tremulous temperament of any city-dweller; revolutions should draw strength from ephemeral and idealist spectres housed in the mind. Thus in the city, revolution is continually undermined by dinner-party rationality, logic, and philosophy.

The other red productions I mentioned, by the way, all take place indoors; thus they lose a significant amount of the revolutionary zeal animating Jinggang Mountain. All Comrades should make a pilgrimage to see this production especially. The Dream Chasers by Yudu River, and the two shows in Yan’an (Back to Yan’an and Red Show) play off the motifs first introduced in Jinggang Mountain.

The Dream Chasers by Yudu River (Yudu, Jiangxi Province)

Yudu

The Yudu production tells the story of loss. The establishment of the Jiangxi Soviet was not simply the establishment of a fighting force but the entire machinery of a self-sufficient polity: not only guns, but butter (farming), an economy (banks and money printing), a postal service, schools, and hospitals. Comrades had to make everything, including the linens to wrap their wounds, from scratch.

The Long March (beginning in October, 1934 from Yudu and Ruijin) was an abandonment of the Soviet and a deferral of its revolutionary promise. But only hindsight tells us it was a deferral. In the moment, the actors performing in Yudu are witnessing the end of the revolution, a winding down of the revolutionary achievements of the Soviet as traumatic as the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune, of course, never did return.

Back to Yan’an (Yan’an, Shaanxi Province)

Yan’an

Yet the two productions in Yan’an celebrate the cultural achievements of revival. The spirit of the revolution is not born in these productions but reborn. These productions remind us that revolutions do not occur in one fell swoop. Major revolutionary achievements are gained and lost continually, each cycle breeding both unbearable hope and terror. Successive battles (both victories and defeats) fill the revolutionary moment with considerable dread. Yet somehow, and miraculously, the blood, iron, and soil that lined the cradle of the revolution in Jinggangshan sprouts revolutionary cultural fruit in these two productions, including dance, poetry, music and song.

Red Show (Yan’an, Shaanxi Province)

Mao Zedong’s foundational Yan’an speech on art and literature

Yan’an, which hosted the 1942 Forum on Literature and Art, followed by the landmark Seventh Congress in 1945, is a reminder to any visitor that Sparta gives birth to Athens and not the reverse (the reverse being a Western delusion). As Mao put it on Day 3 of the Forum:

Let us consider the first problem. In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

Therefore, Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period. Opposition to this arrangement is certain to lead to dualism or pluralism, and in essence amounts to “politics–Marxist, art—bourgeois”, as with Trotsky. We do not favour overstressing the importance of literature and art, but neither do we favour underestimating their importance. Literature and art are subordinate to politics, but in their turn exert a great influence on politics.

Revolutionary literature and art are part of the whole revolutionary cause, they are cogs and wheels in it, and though in comparison with certain other and more important parts they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position, nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause.

Conclusion

Yet politics, like the revolution, is not a dinner party, nor is war simply an extension of politics. Indeed, during revolutionary times, the people have had enough: all politics is therefore an extension of war. Above all, the retreat to Jinggangshan is a reminder to Chinese middle-class urbanites that the revolution did not spawn from ideals, whether Mao’s, Marx’s or anyone else’s. The cradle of revolution is the earth, its minerals nourished with blood from which victory can eventually be mined and minted.

Jinggangshan emblazoned with the hammer and sickle.

Revolution is not the dialectical clash of ideas with reality, but of human beings with the ground beneath their feet.

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