Opera Society And Politics In Modern China

Author : Hsiao-t'i Li
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 1684171016
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China written by Hsiao-t'i Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time."

Author : Jonathan P. J. Stock
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780197262733
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Huju written by Jonathan P. J. Stock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has over three hundred distinct styles of music drama, from exorcism theatre to farce, historical romance, and shadow puppetry. This study considers one of the newer operatic forms. Established just two centuries ago, huju (Shanghai opera), is renowned for its portrayal of ordinary people, not the emperors, courtesans, and heroes of older forms. Acting and make-up aim for realism rather than symbolism, and stories deal with contemporaneous themes: the struggles of lovers to marry, women's rights after the Communist revolution (1949), and life under the new social order established by Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s. Music ranges from local folksong to syncretic adoptions of Western popular music. Jonathan Stock is an authority on Chinese music, with previous books on Chinese flute and violin solos and Abing, a twentieth-century composer. Adding to his extensive research on Chinese music, Stock's eighteen months of fieldwork in Shanghai allows him to interweave material from historical reports, sound recordings, live performance, and the first-hand accounts of three generations of singers into a study of a unique Chinese opera form seen equally as historical tradition, venue for social action, and forum for musical creativity. Assessing first the roots of huju in local folksong and ballad, he looks at the enduring role of emotional expressivity. He next focuses on the rise of actresses, laying out a specially 'musical' reading of gendered performance. Further chapters reverse conventional ethnomusicological arguments that music constructs place by looking at how Shanghai's institutions before 1949 shaped the environment within which troupes developed new dramatic materials and competed for work. In considering reforms post-1949, the author shows how the infusion of explicit political content actually weakened the expressive impact of these dramas. Finally, developments since 1980 are reviewed. The book includes songs and illustrations of performance styles. An innovative combination of urban and historical ethnomusicology, the book's findings will engage the historian of China and general scholar of music alike.

Author : Jin Jiang
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295800135
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women Playing Men written by Jin Jiang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai's most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women's struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.

Author : Robert Culp
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231545355
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Power of Print in Modern China written by Robert Culp and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid early twentieth-century China’s epochal shifts, a vital and prolific commercial publishing industry emerged. Recruiting late Qing literati, foreign-trained academics, and recent graduates of the modernized school system to work as authors and editors, publishers produced textbooks, reference books, book series, and reprints of classical texts in large quantities at a significant profit. Work for major publishers provided a living to many Chinese intellectuals and offered them a platform to transform Chinese cultural life. In The Power of Print in Modern China, Robert Culp explores the world of commercial publishing to offer a new perspective on modern China’s cultural transformations. Culp examines China’s largest and most influential publishing companies—Commercial Press, Zhonghua Book Company, and World Book Company—during the late Qing and Republican periods and into the early years of the People’s Republic. He reconstructs editors’ cultural activities and work lives as a lens onto the role of intellectuals in cultural change. Examining China’s distinct modes of industrial publishing, Culp explains the emergence of the modern Chinese intellectual through commercial and industrial processes rather than solely through political revolution and social movements. An original account of Chinese intellectual and cultural history as well as global book history, The Power of Print in Modern China illuminates the production of new forms of knowledge and culture in the twentieth century.

Author : Ma Haili
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317003527
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Urban Politics and Cultural Capital written by Ma Haili and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male ’beggar’s song’ of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and economic reforms in the new millennium. Previous publications have focused mainly on the historical development of Chinese theatre, with emphasis placed on Beijing opera. This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.

Author : Chang-tai Hung
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520354869
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War and Popular Culture written by Chang-tai Hung and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.

Author : Jan Kiely
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231541104
Total Pages : 452 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Recovering Buddhism in Modern China written by Jan Kiely and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists both participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China. This volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China's twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating new narratives of Buddhism's involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, this book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history.

Author : Guobin Yang
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231520484
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China written by Guobin Yang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages, where they developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life. From this experience, an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, these relocated revolutionaries developed a new form of resistance that signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang's final chapter on the politics of history and memory argues that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along these lines of political division, formed fifty years before.

Author : Feiyu Sun
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9814407291
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Social Suffering and Political Confession written by Feiyu Sun and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ... volume ... examines one significant political phenomenon--Suku in revolutionary China through a matrix of western social theory: Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum. By interpreting Suku from the joint perspectives of political identity and subjective psychological identity, the book presents a new paradigm for discussing social suffering and collective confession in a context of revolutionary change in China's modern history."--P. [4] of cover.

Author : Rebecca E. Karl
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822328674
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staging the World written by Rebecca E. Karl and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVAn historical analysis of how the Chinese constructed their understandings of their place in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries./div