Reenacting the Battle of Defending Yan’an
In the mid-2000s, the local government of Yan’an recognized that the development of red tourism had reached a bottleneck. The growing number of tourists could no longer be accommodated at the revolutionary sites within the walls of Yan’an.
Protected by law as historical sites, they could not simply be expanded or restructured. In addition, the fact that most caves at the revolutionary sites were provided with a unified furnishing of “one chair, one table, one photo at the wall, one old telephone” (thus foretelling what the visitor could expect in the next cave) was considered to leave an unfavorable impression. To improve the situation, the city government decided in 2006 to develop alternative forms of representing the past by investing in a more dramatized form of historical memory that, by its setup, would allow the story to be told as the story of the visitor. This is the reenactment of a 1947 battle that is believed to have contributed decisively to the success of the Chinese Revolution and the founding of the People’s Republic two years later. Its title, “Remembering the Battle Defending Yan’an” (^0M⅜)⅛?¾ literally: “Returning to the Battle Defending Yan’an in one’s dream”), alludes partly to the famous poem Returning to Yan’an llllλlf⅛ by He Jingzhi. He (b. 1924), later a politician and vice-minister of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Propaganda, expressed his long-held wish to return to the cradle of revolution when traveling to Yan’an in 1956 after an absence of ten years. Similar to the travel report by Peixiang from the same year, the poem’s use of the first person for describing the traces of the revolution in Yan’an offers the reader the possibility of becoming a part of revolutionary history (He, 1984, pp. 218-223).The flyer for the performance taking place outside the suburban areas of the city makes a similar promise when inviting the tourist to return to the battle of the past.
Sold as part of package tours—with a regular entryticket costing 180 RMB (ca. ˆ23)—the performance is staged at an open-air grandstand that can accommodate up to 1,000 visitors during one show. Advertised by the local government as a cultural product of the local tourism industry, it also serves educational purposes (Han, 2017, p. 36). Before the start, the audience is informed that the performance was choreographed under the advice of Chen Weiya, who co-directed the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games together with the world-famous film director Zhang Yimou, which indicated the supposedly high quality of the performance.According to Daugbjerg (2020), the recreated battle is the most iconic form of reenactment. In Yan’an, it is based on the fictive account of a battle written by Du Pengcheng (1921-1991). Published in 1954, the novel Defend Yan’an is a classic revolutionary war novel. It belongs to the first generation of military fiction in Maoist China that depicts the battles of the Northwest Field Army in the hinterland of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces. At its center is the moral attitude and the fighting spirit of its protagonists, who sacrifice everything for the protection of the party center and chairman Mao Zedong, even their own lives. It exclusively puts the selfless, heroic struggle of soldiers in the foreground. Adhering to the doctrine of socialist realism (and thus conforming to the principles for literature and art as defined in the Yan’an Talks), it depicts the epic struggle between good and evil where the heroes—despite all vicissitudes—become larger than life. One of the most widely read novels in Maoist China10 and adapted several times in film and TV series, it has become part of historical memory and set the benchmark of how to re-narrate the CCP’s righteous fight against the corrupt and unpatriotic dark forces of the Nationalists under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, while the Communists appear to have the moral upper hand and stand on the right side of history.11
The performance itself begins with a short introduction where a narrator invites the audience to recall the events of international relations in the year 1947 when the fate of China was at a decisive turning point.
At that time, the audience is told, the most urgent task was to keep the United States out of China, while the efforts of the Soviet Union to establish a coalition of the CCP and the KMT to end the civil war were also seen critically. A meeting of the Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav M. Molotov (1890-1986) with Chiang Kai-shek not only contradicted the Soviet policy of nonintervention in China but was also considered to be a conspiracy against the Communists in Yan’an. The spontaneous reactions of the audience to this despicable plot were loud shouts of “Down with the KMT,” as I was able to witness in summer 2018. The unequivocal identification of friend and foe in this reenactment was surely intended to generate collective emotions (Lassig, 2006). It was facilitated by a bombastic display of mock-up tanks and army jeeps, along with KMT officers and female enemy agents on horses whose appearances fulfill the cliche of the evil soldier and attractive woman in contemporary war movies, conjoined by a deafening use of explosives and gunfire.12In the next part of the play, the solidarity of peasants and soldiers in daily life as well as in battle is displayed as a central element where the people’s self-sacrifices for the greater good are nothing of the extraordinary, leading to the CCP victory after six days and six nights of battle. When the narrator declared that with Mao Zedong being back in Yan’an, the final victory was on the horizon, the audience applauded frenetically. This contrasted with the lack of applause at the end of the performance, which concluded with a waist drum dance with more than 50 participants in colorful dresses (Figure 7.4). The heroic success of the chairman seemingly warranted the largest display of appreciation, as I witnessed when attending the performance in 2018. While the novel can develop the complex personalities of its protagonists, the actors on an open-air stage remain nameless, and this is no coincidence. The reenactment is an artistic emplotment that regards the historical outcome of China’s struggle as the dominant story, leaving no room for subversive deviation during the performance.
It instead highlights the inevitable success of the revolution against all pushback while invigorating the Yan’an spirit as fundamental for today’s rejuvenation of China (Liu, 2015, pp. 4-6).Yet the lack of applause at the end does not imply an entirely passive reception of the performance. Rather, the idea of a battle reenactment as a
Figure 7.4 The waist drum dance after the victory of the CCP. The banner on the right side names the Spirit of Yan’an.
Source: © Marc Andre Matten. real and unfiltered experience (Handler and Saxton, 1988) is strengthened by the physical presence of the actors (as opposed to the dry representation in history books or conventional museums) and by the opportunity for tactile and bodily experience (Daugbjerg, 2020, p. 27). After the final scene, the audience rushed forward to become part of the performance by taking photos and singing revolutionary songs with the actors while collecting the used ammunition as a souvenir. Such action makes the performance more memorable: the collection of material artifacts allows audience members to take the experience home, and photos taken with cell phones are shared via social media to document one’s visit. This again allows the visitor to become an active part of the performance. In other words, by stating that the Battle Defending Yan’an was a battle for the people and by continuously emphasizing the historical significance of the Yan’an era for today’s China, the performance is not a piece of propaganda where the Party speaks via the actors to the audience, or where propaganda is exerted in a topdown fashion. Instead, the identification of the audience with the Party’s self-understanding of acting in the interest of society is so deeply ingrained in the audience’s consciousness that historical reenactments and cultural practices do not appear as efforts to mold people’s views and behavior where the latter is merely a passive recipient, but rather as the party-state’s appreciation of local forms of culture that are closely linked to the masses, as pointed out by Holm (1984).13 In Yan’an, the unquestioned convergence of state and society as identified by Davies (2009) for both the imperial and the modern era is communicated at museums and historical sites alike.
The state-cum-party is expected to pursue the well-being of the people and to fulfill the role of a benevolent ruler. The sacrifices of both party leadership and revolutionary heroes—examples of the Yan’an spirit—are part of China’s collective memory to such an extent14 that any doubt is hard to imagine (and indeed, I was not able to observe a single case during my visit). Although the battle reenactment is based on a literary source, there is no gap between the performance and “historical truth.” Du Pengcheng’s novel conforms to the story told in the loess caves, and the actors on stage fulfill the shared expectations of the party-state and the audience.15 However, while the CCP shapes performances and reenactments (primarily by censoring and approving their contents beforehand), it is not an active participant, in contrast to the 2012 republication of the Yan’an Talks, which was a state-driven and party-supported reenactment (Liao, 2012).The Party pursues two strategies when disseminating the right spirit among the population. Qilin Liu (2015) proposes in his work Narrative Space and Aesthetic Evolution of Red Memories to represent (and sell) the revolutionary sites by considering them more as an opportunity for entertaining tourists while limiting their function as a resource for Marxist propaganda with regard to class struggle and exploitation to an academic audience. This approach is viewed critically by Chinese historians who fear that commodification and eventization might result in a deviance from theReenacting the Revolution 139 state-orchestrated representation of the past. For instance, a 2015 issue of the leading academic journal Historical Research (Lishi yanjiu) critically discussed the acceptance of Western theories such as post-structuralism among Chinese historians. Pointing to the inherent danger of these theories in destroying historical truth, the authors identified historical nihilism as a dangerous trend that could lead not only to a general rejection of materialist historiography but much more to a rejection of the historical inevitability of socialist revolution (Zhao, 2016). This critique primarily addressed those historians who favored Western theories. It caused a strengthening of ideological training in academia, as well as in highbrow culture when literary writers were asked to hand-copy the Yan’an Talks.