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"

References

1. Mackerras, Colin. “Chinese Opera after the Cultural Revolution (1970-1972)” The China Quarterly 55 (July/Sep. 1973): 481.
2. Fokkema, D. W. “The Maoist Myth and its Exemplification in the New Peking Opera.” Asia Quarterly: a journal from Europe. 4 (1972): 341.
3. “Brilliant Example of the Revolution in Peking Opera Music.” Chinese Literature 2 (1970): 93.
4. Yang, Richard F. S. “The Reform of Peking Opera under the Communists.” The China Quarterly. 11 (July/Sep. 1962): 131.