Farcical Singing and Dancing in China

For anyone who had paid attention to China, it would be to have missed the spectacular fall of Bo Xilai, the former Chinese Communist Party chief in Chongqing Municipality, a mega city with the statue of a province.

Following his successive stunts as mayor of Dalian, an important harbor city in Manchurian China, governor of Liaoning Province (also in Manchuria), and minister of commerce, he was sent by the higher-ups to the more remote southwestern Chongqing, in semi-exile.  In order to make a comeback and be promoted into the highest ruling body - nine-member Standing Committee of Politburo, he staged a highly controversial and visible "Chong Hong Da Hei" campaign, literally meaning Singing Red Hit Black.  Red was revolutionary red songs, many of them were popular in the crazy Cultural Revolution time in 1960s-1970s; while Black were crime bosses alleged had been running Chongqing when he arrived.

Incredibly, within two years' time, "since June 2009, some 2,000 people were detained in his sweeping campaign against gangsters in the city" [wikipedia].  57 were condemned to die and 17 had been carried out - most of them were politicians with connections to rivals, rich businessmen with huge properties to lose.

New York Times stated that 

Da hei, begun in June 2009, was Mr. Bo’s crown jewel, a strike against the corruption and law-flouting in China’s governing and business classes that ordinary Chinese deeply resent. It helped win Mr. Bo a national reputation as “a guy who gets things done,” Mr. Li of the Brookings Institution said.

In 10 months, 4,781 people were arrested, including business executives, police officers, judges, legislators and others accused of running or protecting criminal syndicates. In one celebrated case, Chongqing’s top justice official, found to have buried $3 million beneath a fish pond, was shot in July 2010, one of 13 da hei defendants who were executed.

Some sources even claimed that eventually, as high as 50,000 people had been investigated, detained, and/or arrested.

Cynically, his Singing Red campaign had grown so big that even 6 of 9 current member of the Standing Committee of Politburo made pilgrimage to Chongqing and he had organized countless rounds of singing contests and concerts at all levels, and spent enormous amount of money.

These were not hard to understand - a politician believed it was a good way to self-promote, using tax-payers money or money confiscated from "mafias" was as natural as sunrise and sunset.  What baffled me was the how easily people had been brought into this mass singing mania.

My report in May 2011 can give you For a glimpse of what went on then - at that time, Bo had his eyes on the position of Prime Minister:

Coinciding with the disappearance of internationally renown artist and social critics Ai Weiwei, and the "Singing Red" movement in Chonqing, championed by Prime Minister aspirant, Bo Xilai, China is making great leap backward, back to 1960s and 1970s.


Chongqing: Sing the Classic Red Songs, Summon the Spirit of Development

Chongqing: ten-thousand people renewed their vows to the [Communist] Party and Sung "red" songs in unison

I cannot help by wondering what those participants would be thinking and feeling, following the downfall of Bo, or not, of their own performances during his brutal and deceptively benign rule.

I am sure that there were willing participants, and some were forced, and others were drifting. A situation quite like the endless political campaigns had played out in China before, including the Great Cultural Revolution, during the time Bo Xilai's own mother had been tortured to death.

I was too young to have experienced the heightened mass hysteria.  According to my mother, my late maternal grandfather, not endowed with dancing talent, was forced to practice a certain "Loyal Character Dance", a pean to Chairman Mao in the form of stylized movements.  Mom told me that Grandpa used to practice for hours everyday, fearing any imperfection of posture of imprecise of rhythm would be interpreted as counterrevolutionary.

When I grew up, largely in 1970s through 1980s, the zeal had receded considerably, despite the fact that when we went to cinemas, we had to stand up before and after the show, listening to the revolutionary songs - "East Is Red" (hint: Mao as the benevolent sun) and "Internationale".  I cannot remember which one was played before and which after the show.  Always those two though.

Later, even that practice stopped, either gradually or suddenly, I cannot recall.

I had thought that I would never see those craze again in China, when Chinese people had experienced so much and had become so cynical.

Yet, I was wrong.

With the amazing economy growth there, the ever-increase nationalism became quite alarming, especially being fanned by cynical political leader, who happened to be charismatic.

Poor Chinese people.  Year after year, they polish their pipes and joints, sing and dance endlessly.  When they still believed, their zeal was misplaced and tragic; when they no longer believed but could not or would not stop singing and dancing, that became farcical.

The farce would not stop, unless they rid of their inner tarantula.

Another Farce - Vladimir Putin Awarded Confucius Peace Award

Another farce just staged in Beijing, where Confucius had been denounced in 1960-1990s and was invited back to buttress the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party, when the Confucius Peace Award Committee announced that the second such prize was to be awarded to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin, a favorite world leader in China for his telegenic appearances, was cited for resolutely fighting back the separatists in Chechnya, and for vocally opposing NATO's air bombing of Libyan arm which under Khadafi's command was killing Libyan people.

The committee's legitimacy in China is quite murky.  After the first such award given to a Taiwanese politician, who didn't attend the ceremony and a large bundle of cash was given to a little girl, people know nothing about, Chinese government determined that such committee didn't have the right permit to exist.

The current committee is either a reincarnation in China or in Hong Kong, consists mostly of die-hard Maoists scholars, who continue to champion the legacy of Mao Zedong, whom more and more Chinese deemed a tyrant who drove Chinese people to utter misery.

The news of Putin's win apparently has been greeted by Chinese people with a collective jeer and suppressed by government run media.  Micro-blogs posted in many Chinese language sites even proposed to award future Confucius Peace Award to Hitler.

It is a farce indeed. Hopefully, Mr. Putin would attend the ceremony this time and hug his big bundle himself.

Illusion versus Reality, From Bake Sale in Berkeley to Molière at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The contrasts between illusions and realities are too stark to believe, yet, due to people's follies, they can often surpass the widest imaginations.

The Americans, who don't want the government to tax the super-rich more, because they had imaged that they belong to that most exclusive club, or that their grandsons might join it one day, while suffering the ever greater income inequality, is the prime example of that folly.

Last Tuesday, 26 September 2011, two such events took place in my immediate sphere, one in the place I live, Berkeley, California, and the other, on the stage of Angus Bowmer Theatre, Ashland, Oregon, as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2011, which I was visiting for the first time.

The former was a widely reported "bake sale" on the campus of University of California, Berkeley, - "Increase Diversity Bake Sale" hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans, who claimed that the minorities pay smaller share of tuition and fees to the university, and to the society, while white men shoulder the biggest burden.  In regardless if this sale was a racist, or sexist, event, their argument was full of holes.

The easiest argument is that the inequality between male and female workers - not just the costs but their income as well.  Let's look at the chart below (source: Wikepedia):


In every ethnic group in the US, men make way more than women.  This is not due to the nature of the jobs men or women hold.  For same jobs, men make more than their female counterparts.  In 2009, women's median weekly earnings were lower than men's median weekly earnings in all industries:


Therefore, the $0.25 off for all women did not reflect reality.  Instead, someone argued, white men need to pay way less than $2.00 to reflect the reality that their wealth-expense ratio was way greater than any other groups mentioned in this Bake Sale:


image source: L.A. Times

If the right-wing Republican student groups had their skewed illusions, so did the left.  On the same day of the Bake Sale, I arrived in Ashland, Oregon for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  That night, I attended a performance of a new adaptation of Molière's "Imaginary Invalid" (Le Malade imaginaire) at the Angus Bowmer Theatre.


Angus Bowmer Theatre

The play was heavily re-written and many contemporary references were thrown in.  The adapters, Oded Gross and Tracy Young, with the latter as director as well, changed Molière's naughtily humorous comédie-ballet into a grossed-out farcical musical.  Not entirely inappropriate.  However, the new version significantly changed one of the daughters (Louison) of the protagonist, from a healthy ten year old to an old maid with a hemp and pigeon-toed.  The adapters and director also gave another character, young Thomas Diaforious, a large belly and so they could heap endless humiliating jokes upon these two helpless characters, and every time they were ruthlessly laughed at, the audience roared with approvals.  I, however, winced every time.

In case my readers mistake the Festival and the audience for adherents of social Darwinism, I need to point out that they took great pride in their progressiveness - the adaptation made many references to the health care reform and pined for a public option, in ways not entirely inappropriate but utterly gratuitous, and the audience gave such references most hearty cheers and applauds.

Therefore, emerged the great divide of the illusion and the reality.  In reality, the creative team of this play, and the audience, behaved as the most heartless and cruel gang; yet, they congratulated themselves as the most compassionate.  It was beyond sickening.

In the next night, I saw Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, in which Sir John Falstaff and the gaggle of other tavern dwellers were laughed at constantly.  But, they were laughed at because of their "bad" deeds, and their being "bad" persons; which here, in the updated Molière, poor Louison and the Thomas, were laughed at purely for their physical deformity which did not grow out of their fault at all.  Through Thomas's mouth, we learned that he was not even a glutton, like Falstaff, rather he absorbed fat in an abnormal rate.

I am not a prude.  I am not allergic to comedy and farce.  I enjoy great farces as much as grand tragedies like Julius Caesar, which I saw three days later and was deeply moved and excited by it, and I will discuss it later, and appreciate the difficulties in staging a comedy.  I am also familiar with the idiom of commedia dell'arte, and can tolerate some crude jokes, like the endless body function jokes employed here to wring laughter out the guileless audience.  But laughing at weak characters' physical weakness really made me nauseated.

In the end, I was deeply offended by the heartless and the crassness of the production team and detested this update very much, in contrast to the uproarious approvals from the majority audience members who gave it an enthusiastic standing ovation.

There are two well-known hunchbacks in literature - Verdi's Rigoletto in the eponymous opera (based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse) and Quasimodo in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.  Rigoletto was a twisted character, but Verdi did not dwell on his physical deformity, rather, it was the deformity of his soul Verdi concentrated upon.  Being compassionate, Verdi presented Rigoletto as a passionate and selfless father, thus redeemed him from condemnation.  Hugo did not shy away from describing Quasimodo's ugliness but he used this physical monstrosity to offset his inner kindness.  Here, the adapters (not Molière), invented the physical deformities so as to invite the audience to laugh at them for no other reason other than being deformed.  Progressive?  No.  Regressive for sure.

On the OSF's official website, it stated such about the play, "set in the 1960s, this satiric comedy will be best enjoyed by playgoers 13 and up who can handle the potty humor, yucky medical remedies, and a few instances of suggestive gesture, innuendo and costuming."

I think it would be most sensible to require playgoers to be also 15 and below to enjoy the potty humor, yucky medical remedies, and a few instances of suggestive gesture, innuendo and costuming.