Singing turned out to be the most important part of the Party’s propaganda war chest. School children might not pay attention to the teaching of math, and rural peasants might care less about the slogans plastered all over buses and walls, but certainly everyone would turn out for a live propaganda performance. Each school developed a propaganda team during that time. Talent like that displayed by the young Peng Liyuan was much needed. The teams performed songs and dances for any political events being held in the area. They didn’t call themselves performers; instead they said they were “fighters”. After all, according to Mao’s wisdom in his Little Red Book,
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Typical propaganda shows usually started with an announcement to reinforce the revolutionary focus. A charismatic student would excitedly proclaim: “Mao Zedong’s thought! The art propaganda team starts to fight!’” Then the troupe would take to the stage and start singing songs and performing dances with titles like Red Guards Seeing Chairman Mao, Yanbian People Love Chairman Mao, Soldiers Missing Chairman Mao and so on. The cult of Maoism was definitely being hammered home but cloaked in colorful costumes and sweetly sung by cute schoolchildren. Not only that, it was literally the only show in town so sure to garner large and appreciative audiences.
For Peng Liyuan, this was the only type of performance art available to develop and display her considerable though youthful talent. Her clear and strong voice and natural ways in front of an audience were very much needed by her school’s propaganda team. And in a time without any other entertainment throughout China, her singing could bring some small joy to the people.
There was a dance called Four Old Men Studying Mao’s Work. On the stage four actors dressed like old man, each carrying Mao’s Little Red Book while dancing and singing. This performance tried to show people that everyone should study Mao’s work. The message was “You’re never too old to learn Maoism.” The four old men were usually played by young girls, just the opposite of traditional Chinese theater where sexism often meant that young men portrayed women as women were not allowed on the stage. This was very entertaining for ordinary people and quite brilliant for the troupe to turn the serious political propaganda into a novelty. At the same time it was subtly displaying the Communist agenda of promoting the new role of revolutionary women in public. As Mao was to famously proclaim in 1968, “Women hold up half of the sky”.
Just as there were no math and sciences, there was no decent arts education available to students in China at that time either. A decent music education didn’t exist for Peng Liyuan. All she could do was learn to sing the propaganda songs. There was no chance of learning to read sheet music, and learning to play a musical instrument was out of the question. Her natural talent for singing pulled her through. Peng Liyuan also had one other advantage in her favor. Besides her naturally good singing voice, she had spent a lot of time as a youngster following her mother around the countryside to see her performances. This intimate familiarity with her mother’s performing undoubtedly gave the young Peng Liyuan a degree of confidence in front of an audience, and soon she was also tapped to present the school’s propaganda shows as well as sing in them.
The shows Peng Liyuan’s mother performed in were also heavily censored directly by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qin. Jiang Qin had the absolute power to decide what the entire Chinese public could and could not see and hear in all the performing arts. One word from her could kill a drama, a song or even an actor’s career that she happened not to like.
Officially available to the Chinese public, generally speaking, were just eight dramas; two of them were ballets, the rest were Beijing Operas. Under Jiang Qin’s censorship, the whole country was confined to seeing just these shows for an entire decade. Repeated again and again and again, every word of those eight performances were eventually memorized by almost the entire Chinese population.
Prior to the Cultural Revolution, ‘Cultural Houses’ had been set up by the government throughout China with a main aim of promoting the Party’s agendas via the arts. Peng Liyuan’s father had been running the local Cultural House. But during the unofficial purging that occurred during the Red Guard years, many of the Cultural Houses were temporarily shut down and dismantled. They often were reorganized into new propaganda teams after some time of chaos. Their revised purpose was now simply to replicate locally the eight revolutionary dramas promoted by Mao’s wife.
But what were Jiang Qin’s own proclivities in entertainment? Would she spend all her time watching her own limited revolutionary creations, over and over? The answer is, “Certainly not!”
While millions of Chinese were forced to watch her handful of morally correct revolutionary dramas year in and year out, Jiang Qin spent a lot of her personal time privately watching western movies like Million Dollar Mermaid (The One Piece Bathing Suit), a 1952 American biopic about an Australian swimming star who created a scandal when her bathing suit was considered to be indecent, The Red Shoes, a 1948 British drama of a young ballet dancer torn between the man she loves and her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, the British action film Deadlier Than the Male, a 1967 James Bond take-off, and the highly innovative 1959 French film Hiroshima, Mon Amore (24 Hour Affair). She adored Greta Garbo so much that she is rumored to have said that she would like to give her an Oscar. Jiang Qin’s excuse for this perk of watching these risqué foreign films was that she could learn skills from the west in order to defeat them.
The great Mao, however, had totally different tastes from his wife in entertainment. He didn’t watch any foreign movies and preferred traditional Chinese operas, all of which were banned by his wife. Secretly, well-known actors would be summoned to perform privately for him. This double life was not just restricted to Mao and Jiang and the top echelons; it was reflected throughout Chinese society in the ordinary people’s attitude and behavior as well. On the top of students’ desks was Mao’s Little Red Book, but underneath the naughty boys were reading Chinese ‘pornographic’ novels such as The Heart of a Young Girl, meticulously copied by hand and spread from student to student under the tables.
Seeing the Countryside
By now the former privileged schools for the high-ranking officials were all disbanded. Xi Jinping and others were relocated to different schools. He was sent to the Middle School No. 25 which was built in 1864 by the American Congregational Church. The school had enjoyed a high reputation in the past and a great number of children with a strong background had studied there, including the son of Deng Xiaoping.
Xi Jinping was certainly not studying much in his new school as the academic curriculum was now in shambles. But to what avail or purpose anyway? All of China’s colleges and universities remained closed down. So even if students remained in high school and suffered through the non-academic curriculum and propaganda barrage, once they finished school they had nowhere to go. These young people had nothing to do in the cities except to cause all kinds of trouble. Hooligans and rival youth gangs were emerging like mushrooms.
Mao didn’t forget these troublesome, urban and privileged youths, especially the children of his mistrusted generals and high-ranking officials that had been relegated to the “Black Gangs”. These youths, just one generation away from their disfavored parents, needed a lesson, and a hard lesson at that. The children of the workers and the peasants were not Mao’s concern any longer. He saw no conspirators there. But for these city youth, Mao had a brilliant idea:
“Youth with education go to the countryside and receive the re-education from the poor and sub-poor peasant. This is very necessary.” Mao Zedong (Dec. 1968)
Mao’s new idea of shipping urban youth off to the impoverished Chinese countryside was soon celebrated and the cause taken up by his followers in the Red Guards. Of course, most of the urban young people were not fully aware of what was awaiting them in the countryside. Nor did they first realize this was a one-way expulsion from the life and family they had always