User:Chinasaur/Model revolutionary operas

Background

 * "Mao Zedong Thought": "weed through the old to bring forth the new"
 * Of around 3000 theater companies existing in 1964, fewer than 100 were staging dramas while more than 2800 were specializing in operatic productions (Fokkema)
 * Opera more malleable than film or print, contrast to Soviets and Eisenstein (Fokkema)

Action

 * State Council's Cultural Group under Jiang Qing
 * 1963 sudden, politically motivated shift toward censorship of all traditional opera
 * Moderate reform movement predated eight model operas: against female impersonators and foot-binding stilts (Yang)
 * Peking Opera "has developed over the past century into a perfect art," and it "as a whole should be left as it is now." (Yang)
 * Sparks amid the Reeds a first modernist/Maoist revision

Five Model Operas (Yangbanxi)

 * 1) Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi baihutuan)
 * 2) Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu weihushan)
 * 3) Sha-chia-peng/Shajiabang (the artistic offspring of Jiang’s Sparks amid the Reeds)
 * 4) The Red Lantern/The Story of the Red Lamp (Hongdengji)
 * 5) On the Docks (Haigang)

Also:
 * The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun)
 * The White-haired Girl (Baimao nü)

Statistics from the texts

 * White Tiger Regiment: Mao mentioned 25 times, Mao quotes make up more than 3% of total text.
 * Trend away from secondary characters towards primacy of central character (Mackerras), consistent with perfect characters of "socialist realism"