The Yan'an period (1936–1947) is pivotal in the development of a formidable propaganda culture in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and this culture continues to cast a long shadow over the present. Xi Jinping's current directive to state media to “tell China's story well” globally follows closely the sacred rule laid down by Mao Zedong in his famous Yan'an Talks (1942), namely, that art and literature must serve the Party.
Xiaofei Kang's absorbing book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953, enters the debate over what constitutes Yan'an's propaganda culture by focusing on the Party's anti-superstition campaign, which saw Party officials and cultural workers fusing popular religion and gendered symbolism to create a new propaganda strategy for building socialism.
The book is built around three of these anti-superstition themes: the anti-shaman campaign; Communist literature of ghosts and demons; and the iconic opera The White-Haired Girl. First, from 1944 to 1945, the Communists launched an anti-shaman campaign targeted at village shamans to promote public health in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia (SGN) Border Region (where Yan'an is located). This campaign saw the Maoist mass line in action, with public trials of shamans, confession meetings and temple fairs being used by the Party to eradicate folk beliefs, teach hygiene and transform so-called parasitic loafers (male shamans in particular) into productive labourers. All these activities were carefully supervised by the Party.
Kang then discusses Communist literature as a propaganda tool of the anti-superstition campaign. A notable case is the reworking of a news story, first reported in the Party's Liberation Daily (Jiefang ribao), of the Red-Shoed Demoness, who was wreaking havoc in northern Shaanxi villages. To eradicate superstition, cultural workers turned the news story into a literary exercise on the subject of ritual exorcism through two popular art forms: yangge (song-and-dance play) and shuoshu (traditional storytelling). Such endeavours were not always successful, however, as the Party's antireligious voice was often drowned out by the public's enduring fascination with ghosts and fairies.
In the third and the most inspiring part of the book, Kang reminds us of a clear shift in the course of the anti-superstition fight. Through an analysis of the opera The White-Haired Girl, debuted in Yan'an in 1945, she illuminates how a former fairy maiden story was revamped into a tale of heroic fight against oppression: a poor peasant girl is abused by an evil landlord, she escapes to hide in a mountain cave and her hair turns white. Eventually, she is rescued by the Red Army, after which she returns with determination to bring her former tormentor to justice. Class struggle, not religion, now occupies the centre stage, reflecting the CCP's change of political priorities. When the military conflict between the CCP and the Kuomintang resumed after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, the enemies were no longer shamans and ghosts but Western imperialists, the Kuomintang, capitalists and landlords.
Kang demonstrates cogently (and ironically) that religion mattered greatly for the atheist Communists. In its combat against superstition, the Party adopted an ingenious paradoxical tactic: ideologically it upheld class enmity toward all religious practices while pragmatically it freely appropriated traditional cosmological beliefs and exorcism rituals in its fight against shamans and spirits. Such a blending of two incompatible ideas demonstrates that the Party was never rigid but, rather, owed its endurance to its flexibility.
Another significant aspect of the book is its focus on gender. Kang argues that the female body was used metaphorically as a battleground for the bad (ritual healing, landlords, traditional patriarchs) and the good (medical doctors, the Party, labour heroines) in the new Communist-ruled society. In this anti-religion campaign, the CCP presented itself as a new ritual master, one that was resolved to liberate the peasants (especially peasant women) from religious oppression.
Kang argues persuasively that the methods of Mao's Rectification Movement (1942–1944) – confession, self-criticism and re-education – were unmistakeably enforced by the Party in the anti-superstition fight. Repentance of shamans, extolling labour heroes and heroines as models of production, and reforming storytellers into singers of socialism were all part of the Party's larger revolutionary commitment to creating a New Socialist Man.
This meticulously researched book occasionally proves frustrating. Kang writes with perceptiveness about the interaction of religion, gender and revolution, but she is on less sure ground when it comes to explaining the broader historical context. For example, the anti-shaman campaign was not “geographically limited” (p. 196) to the SGN Border Region as she claims; it extended to other Communist-controlled areas as well, including the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region. Shamanism was so rampant in that region that it prompted the New China Daily (Xinhua ribao) to urgently call for an “anti-shaman campaign” there to address this “grave problem” (15 April 1945, the Taihang edition).
Kang contends that “from the Yan'an period to the 1950s, the Party followed a more moderate path than the radical Soviet style in handling religion on the ground” (p. 203). Quite the contrary, the CCP's antireligious campaign returned with added ferocity after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. In the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, which included the anti-Yiguandao (Unity Sect) Campaign, in the early 1950s, the new rulers expelled Christian missionaries, imprisoned native priests, and ruthlessly crushed religious sects, especially the influential Yiguandao, denouncing them as imperialists’ agents, Kuomintang spies, capitalists or landlords. Mao called this effort “a great struggle” (Mao Zedong wenji [Collected writings of Mao Zedong], Renmin chubanshe, 1999, vol. 6, p. 162).
Kang challenges readers to broaden their perspective with comparisons “beyond China” (p. 4), but her comparisons are often thinly documented and sometimes disputable. For example, one may question her assertion that “the Chinese revolution's battle with ghosts and shamans differed from the battle against the Church and God in Soviet and Eastern European antireligious discourse” (p. 4). Stalin's anti-religion campaign in the 1920s, carried out by the League of the Militant Godless and Komsomol activists, did not just target the Russian Orthodox Church; like the Yan'an campaign, it also attacked peasants’ popular religion and their pre-Christian pagan past, which was a world populated by shamans, diviners and demons under the influence of what was known as “the mysterious force” (nevedomaia sila). Khrushchev's anti-religion campaign (1958–1964) continued the assault against such rural beliefs.
These are, nevertheless, minor criticisms, and Enchanted Revolution is a valuable contribution to a deeper understanding of the complex and multi-layered propaganda culture in the Yan'an period.
