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Jiang Qing and the “Year of Nora” 1935: Drama and
Politics in the Republican Period
Natascha Gentz
(Frankfurt University)
(Draft prepared for the International Conference „Women
in Republican China“, Berlin 6-11 October 2002. Please do not quote or
circulate without permission)
Jiang Qing, one of the main figures of the Cultural
Revolution (CR) and last wife of Mao Zedong, is doubtless one of the
most prominent and most controversially commented woman in modern
Chinese history. In most PRC life descriptions of Jiang Qing two
fundamental principles of the CCP historiographic method are applied:
one is, to denounce a person with incorrect political positions as a
fundamentally immoral person; the second is, to construct a life history
which reveals the basic evil character of this person from his or her
very beginning. In
Jiang Qing’s case, these evil beginnings are to be found in Shanghai.
Although her activities in Shanghai have rarely been studied from a
sound historical perspective, they have become a central point of
reference to latter evaluations of her political career respectively to
statements about her (evil) nature and character, which had inevitably
caused national catastrophe of the CR. Jiang Qing’s Shanghai sojourn
lasted from 1934-1937, during which she occurred on the surface of quite
many newspaper reports and articles, either as a rather successful
actress or a prominent social celebrity who had become the target of
reports because of private scandals.
A major part of this paper reconstructs the history of
Jiang’s „scandalous“ life as the actress Lan Ping in the context
of the rising cultural industry in Shanghai. Remapping the complex and
long-winded routes of her activities in this period is especially
difficult, as there is not much reliable material available. By
tracing down contemporary news reports, I will attempt to sketch a
picture of Lan Ping, as which she could have appeared to an audience in
Shanghai which did not know yet about a forthcoming Jiang Qing. Jiang
Qing’s most famous role was the main protagonist Nora in the play by
Ibsen and the Nora-theme seems to run
through her life and her life descriptions. Contextualizing her
activities and own statements in the cultural sphere of the mid 1930’s
in Shanghai shall explain, in which way she was attempting to dramatize
herself in a very ambivalent manner, as a modern, progressive and (yet)
attractive woman.
This approach
seems rewarding to me in a twofold way: on one hand it reveals the
struggles and possibilities for survival of a - certainly strong-willed
– independent individual women in the very uncertain and ever changing
situation of the cultural industry in Shanghai in the 1930s. On the
other hand it shows, how differently these struggles can be evaluated
from an ex posto perspective,
depending on whether the subsequent life of the person is seen as a
success or failure.
1. Biographical
Writing on Jiang Qing
The best-known account of Jiang Qing is certainly Roxane
Witkes semi-autobiographical record of her life (Witke 1977), which was
quickly repudiated by academic scholarship and gives a unfiltered
depiction of Jiang Qing as she wanted to present herself in the late
years of the Cultural Revolution. As far as I know, it was never
translated as a whole into Chinese, but is often quoted in Chinese
literature on Jiang Qing. Chinese
biographies or biographical sketches of Jiang Qing appear from the start
of the CR, many of them first published in Hongkong. Among the first
biographers are Zhong Huamin (Zhong Huamin 1967a), whose Jiang
Qing zhengzhuan was translated into English as Madame
Mao - A Profile of Jiang Qing (Miller & Zhong: 1968) and
Japanese (Zhong Huamin 1967b) and Ding Wang, who has compiled a short
biography in the same year (Ding Wang 1967).
Publications from the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, as e.g the
„Brief introduction of Comrade Chiang Ch’ing“ (1967), emphasize
her devotion to Mao Zedong as political leader, whereas they silence her
marriage with him in Yanan. Her contributions to the creation of the
model operas are emphasized and legitimized by her experiences as an
actress in the Lu Xun Academy in Yanan, -
whereas her professional experience in Shanghai is silenced out.
It is obvious that these CR-sources attempt to construct a
politically correct biography by focussing on her patriotism and
subsequent turn to the revolutionary cause, her promotion of the
„spirit of Yanan“, her immediate identification and support of the
correct party-line in the two-line struggle, her participation in the
liberation war (since she could not be merited for having taken part in
the Long March) and her absolute obedience to Mao and the Mao Zedong
ideas. Publications mentioning Jiang Qing’s activities in Shanghai
were banned in this period, as e.g. the prominent film history by Cheng
Jihua, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (Cheng
Jihua: 1981) and the rumour circulated for years that Mao had
ordered to destroy all her films after their marriage in Yanan (Witke
1977: 131). In her self-depiction, Jiang Qing is eager to either play
down her experiences as insignificant endeavours or integrate them into
a narrative of her life-long dedication to the revolution (Witke 1977,
chapter 1, passim) which was obstructed by the
bourgeois cultural leaders of Shanghai.
The latter sources after her arrest in 1976 work just to
the opposite: they discuss her dubious proletarian class background (The
Criticism Group 1979) and her activities in Shanghai are singled out as
examples of her vicious character (Renmin wenxue chubanshe pipanzu
1976). Instead of having been hindered by the „black line“ in
Shanghai - which was her interpretation – it is claimed that she
herself was promoting the black line (Wen Ping 1979: 56-57). Main
purpose of these reproaches was of course to undermine her authority in
the cultural realm, which she allegedly had entirely controlled and
homogenizised through the model operas. Moreover her ambitions as an
actress were interpreted as her fundamental desire to appear in public
and her ambitions to become a powerful public persona, just like those
heroic roles, she had played on stage. In this line of arguments, her
marriage with Mao was just a consequent step in her constant search for
a significant role, which she - because of her lack of talent - could
only gain through the support and promotion of a powerful man. Evidence
to this is given by the sudden publication of quotes from letters and
articles she had published in Shanghai (Wang Jiang Zhang Yao zhuan’an
zu 1976: 87).
As post-Mao CCP historiographers on the CR solved the
dilemma how to explain the catastrophy of the CR by maintaining the
picture of a great leader Mao Zedong and putting all the blame on the
Gang of Four and especially Jiang Qing, it was necessary to disintegrate
the relationship between Mao and Jiang Qing both on a political as well
as private level. Now it was important to give a correct depiction of
Mao Zedong’s attitude towards Jiang Qing, which would testify that he
was aware of Jiang Qing’s evil character, yet was not able to prevent
her ambitious activities. Therefore, together with the „Resolution on
Party History“ (Resolution 1981) a handful of
quotations by Mao were widely published, in which he had criticised the
conspiracies of the „Gang of Four“ or has made remarks on Jiang
Qing’s „yexin“ (mad ambitions).
After this official verdict, official statements about
Jiang Qing are rarely to be found. Most strikingly, the official
handling of her suicide reveals the attempt of the Party to erase this
person from the cultural memories of the people. The Renmin Ribao published only a
few lines more than two weeks after her death (Renmin Ribao, 5.6.1991:4),
the party-organ Xinhua yuebao, which has a special section for „deaths of
important inland personages“ does not list her. In the Renmin Ribao article as well
as in the PRC Dictionary of famous Chinese women, her marriage with Mao is
not mentioned.
Nevertheless, Jiang Qing remained a source of inspiration
for fictional texts in China as in the West, as e.g. Lucien Bodard’s
novel which describes in detail Jiang Qings early romances before Yanan
(Bodard 1992). Also Anchee Min just recently came out with a novel on
Madame Mao, which is allegedly based on historical archival material as
well as diaries, letters and newspaper clippings (Min 2000). The
constant popular interest in the person Jiang Qing in China is reflected
in numerous unofficial biographies and popular semi-fictional accounts
of her life which appeared to a large part in Hongkong but were
available in China already during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
Many of these accounts attempt to substantiate the reproaches made
against her in official post-CR documents by embedding them in fantasies
about scandalous intrigues. One such example is Zhu Shan, a doctor
responsible for high cadres before 1949, who sojourned - like Jiang Qing
- in Moscow during the 1950’s. Her first account Jiang
Qing yeshi appeared already in 1980, followed by another book
written in 1988 and published under two different pseudonyms in Hongkong
and the PRC (Zhu Shan 1988a and 1988b). Written as a novel that gives no
sources it is of course a dubious historical source. To the contrary,
popular historians like Ye Yonglie and Cui Wanqiu present some more
material-based studies of Jiang Qing, which also focus on the early
years of her life. Apart
from the mostly accurate sources also here we find interpretations of
her life which reflect the general verdict and present her as the active
and evil (selfish) part in a historical tragedy, in which Mao as a
rather passive male counterpart is overwhelmed, seduced and then
deceived by her sexual attraction. Again, the combination of sex and
power is a central theme in these accounts and they could be read as
direct counter-texts to Jiang Qing’s own politically motivated
self-presentation in Roxane Witke’s account. Most striking is that all
these depictions elaborate a parallel argumentation of Jiang Qing’s
strategies as an actress in Shanghai and part of the political elite in
Yanan: in both cases, it was because of her lack of talents in Shanghai
or a true revolutionary spirit in Yanan that she had to functionalise
men in power in order to achieve her goals.
In the following section I will confront these narratives
on Jiang Qing with reports and articles written on her or by herself,
which seem to allow quite a different picture of her as an actress in
Shanghai. By briefly discussing the various tasks and roles required to
be fulfilled by a „modern actress“ and positioning Jiang Qing’s
statements and activities within these various, often contradictory
claims, I would tend to argue, that the strategies she chose in order to
maintain a position on the new cultural market were just as ordinary and
most importantly rationally chosen as those of many other of her
colleagues of the time. Jiang Qing seems an especially rewarding example
to display the multifarious difficulties a modern actress had to face on
the new public stages, to show the ambivalent social and political
status of actresses as women as well as to reveal the range of possible
evaluations of their activities by contemporaries as well as latter
historians.
2. Jiang Qings long-winded way to Shanghai’s Nora
When Jiang Qing performed Nora in the Shanghai Jincheng da
xiyuan (Golden City Great Stage) on June 27, 1935, she was already
closely integrated into a social network of dramatic and literary
circles. She was asked to perform this role by the newly found Shanghai
Amateur Drama Association (Shanghai yeyu juren xiehui), into which she
had entered on recommendation of Tian Han (Guo Hua 1998: vol.1, 171). The association was one of the
first professional drama troupes found in the early 1930s whose success
marked a watershed in the development of a modern Chinese drama (Eberstein
1983: 112-114) which was partly due to its very successful performances
of Ibsen’s Nora, Ostrowskis Storm
and Gogol’s Revisor. It hosted important dramatists, directors and actors
as e.g. Tian Han, Yang Hansheng, Zhang Min, Jin Shan, Zhao Dan, Wei
Heling, Gu Erji, Wang Ying, with many of whom Jiang Qing had established
contact before.
Nora was directed by the prominent director Zhang Min and
the star actor Zhao Dan, who had seen a previous performance of Jiang
Qing through the introduction of Wei Heling and played the main
protagonist Helmer. Wei Heling, Wan Laitian and Wang Bosheng, who were
also involved in the productions as actors or second directors, were
acquaintances of Jiang Qing from earlier years Shandong time (Ye Yonglie
1993: 57).
The Nora performance was an instant success and was staged
an unheard of period of two months. Naturally, Jiang Qing’s
performance of Nora received especially great attention by the Shanghai
press. The Shishi xinbao even published a
special edition „Xin Shanghai Nala (Nora of New Shanghai)“ with a
picture of Jiang Qing on the cover page, and Jiang Qing’s performative
style was enthusiastically commented. As, at that time, the Nora theme
had become an important topic on China’s stages, it was a
distinguished honour to be invited to perform this role (that this has
not always been the case will be discussed in the latter part of this
paper). It thus seems puzzling, how Jiang Qing as an allegedly
untalented actress managed to enter and even dominate the stage for a
while as a Shanghai Nora.
All biographical sources agree on the point, that Jiang
Qing was an offspring of a poor family, (regardless whether her
background was proletarian or not). Born in Zhucheng, she left this
place with her mother after her father’s death in 1926 to seek shelter
with relatives in Jinan. Due to Jiang Qing’s poor education, she was
in constant lack of job opportunities and money. During her early
training as an actress in Jinan and Qingdao she had to support not only
herself but at times also her mother.
Her first professional acquaintance with modern Chinese
drama took place in Jinan, where she entered the Shandong
shengli shiyan juyuan (Experimental Academy of Shandong
Province) directed by Zhao Taimou. Zhao
Taimou had studied with Wen Yiduo in the U.S. and was the husband of Yu
Shan, a prominent actress who was closely associated with Tian Han and
his progressive Nanguoshe (Ibid. 89). Here in Shandong Jiang Qing
cooperated already with the above mentioned Wei Heling, a graduate of
this academy and later famous film actor in Shanghai (Guo Hua 1998,1:
44-49), and Wang Baosheng, who lead the theater department of the
Academy and succeeded Zhao Taimou as its director in 1934 (Eberstein
1983: 214). When the drama academy in Jinan was temporarily dissolved
for political reasons in 1931, Jiang followed Wang Bosheng to Beijing to
enter the Huiming jushe (Dark and Light Drama Troupe) and perform in the
Opera Yu Tangchun, albeit with little
success. Returning to Jinan she allegedly married the student
Pei Minglun and lived together with him for two months. More sources agree upon that she followed Zhao Taimou
to Qingdao where he provided a job for her in the Qingdao University
library, which he headed at the time. There she listened to lectures of
Wen Yiduo and Shen Congwen and started to write some pieces by her own,
a fact that she elaborates comparatively extensively upon in her
autobiography and ironically comments upon as her participation in the
„upper strata of culture“ (Witke 1977: 61-62).
During this period, she befriended with Yu Qiwei, brother
of Yu Shan and propaganda chief of the Communist underground apparatus
in Qingdao. It is generally accepted wisdom, that through Yu Qiwei Jiang
Qing made first contacts to the CCP, although sources differ on the
point, whether she was a regular party member at that time already;
moreover, she established contact to the Left-wing Drama League (Zuoyi
xijujia lianmeng). A
large part of biographical sources mention Yu Qiwei as Jiang Qing’s
first husband.
During her sojourn in Qingdao she joined the university
drama troupe Haiou jushe (Seagull Drama Troupe), a troupe closely
connected to the Left-wing drama league in Shanghai, and performed
together with Yu Qiwei (Ye Yonglie 1993: 37-38). Very
likely because of the arrest of Yu Qiwei in spring 1933 Jiang had to
leave Qingdao and went to Shanghai through the connection of Yu Shan,
who introduced her to the house of Tian Han, where she lived for a while
and met also with Liao Mosha (Ye Yonglie 1993: 41-3).
Tian Han’s brother arranged a job for her in Tao
Xingzhi’s School Chengeng gongxuetuan (Chengeng Work Study Group),
lead by the communist Xu Mingqing. According to Ye Yonglie and Jiang herself, Jiang lived
for about a year in the outskirts of Shanghai and spent her time
teaching singing and acting in different drama groups.
When the Chengeng school was disclosed as a communist base
after demonstrations in Shanghai in January 1934, Jiang fled with Yu
Qiwei, who had been released from prison, to Beijing. Soon after she yet
returned to Shanghai again and assumed a job as a teacher in the
nightschool of a tobacco factory, which was arranged by Xu Mingqing. When
Jiang Qing was put into prison by the Guomindang in September 1934 it
was also Xu Mingqing and her connection to the foreign community in
Shanghai in the YWCA that helped her release in January 1935. After
a short sojourn in Yu Qiwei’s family in Shanghai, she followed him to
Beijing again, where he had assumed a job as a teacher at Beijing Daxue.
Shortly after their arrival she received the invitation to play Nora,
which made her turn back to Shanghai again in April. Simultaneously she
entered the Diantong Film Co. (Diantong yingpian gongsi), one of the
large film corporations in Shanghai, which had engaged famous actors and
actresses like Yuan Muzhi, Zhou Boxun, Wang Ying.
Her Nora performance attracted large
public attention: numerous articles, stage photographs and interviews
with Jiang Qing in the Shanghai papers, mainly the Minbao,
Shishi xinbao, Shenbao
supplements and film magazines comment her performance in a
very positive tone. At the same time, combined with her role as a new
star, rumours about her private life arose and it is said that she was
already then the object of quite a few prominent men’s fantasies, which was not at all exceptional in view of the fact,
that many actresses had relationships with prominent producers,
directors etc. who functioned as their patrons and promoters and that
Jiang was new and still unattached in the film scene.
Thus, when Jiang Qing performed Nora,
she had already been actively engaged in different activities of leftist
„progressive“ drama troupes, educational institutions of leftist
reformers and underground institutions of the CCP under a very
repressive political climate of the GMD regime. Yet Nora
was also only a starting point for a more constant career in the
Shanghai film and theater realm, not the least also because she now
settled more firmly in Shanghai.
Her film activities brought her in relationship with the
literary critic Tang Na, a prominent journalist in Shanghaiwith a tendency to write
„progressive“ or leftist articles and critiques, a
fact that attracted quite some public attention.
Jiang Qing continued to appear in the pieces of the Left
Wing Drama League, in November 1935 in Gogol’s Revisor and, more
prominently, in Ostrowski’s The Tempest in the main role of Katharina in February 1937,
and in many other films and plays. In
May 1936 she entered the Lianhua Co. (Lianhua yingpian gongsi), after
the Diantong Co. was closed down and allegedly competed with Wang Ying a
few months later for the role of Sai Jinhua in a production by the
Amateur Drama troupe but failed. Zhang
Min is said to have asked her to play the main protagonist Katharina in The
Tempest, only in order to make up for her failure to receive
the role of Sai Jinhua. From
April to May she rehearsed Wang Laowu, also written by Cai
Chusheng, who had invited her to play the main protagonist. One month
later, in June 1937, her contract with the Lianhua Company was
cancelled. The last play in
which she appeared in Shanghai was „Qier“ (Abandoning
the Child) by Zhang Min, staged by the Minming jushe (People’s Life
Troupe).
Given Jiang’s strong official abjection of foreign
cultural products during the CR, it is not surprising that she hardly
mentioned the many roles she played on Shanghai’s stages or played
them down as bourgeois theatre, as almost all plays in which she
appeared were translations from European or Japanese authors. As for the
film parts she played, she did not, according to Witke, mention a single
film title in her account, „even in response to several direct
question“ (Witke 1977: 131).
3. An Actress in Distress
Jiang Qing had entered the Shanghai film scene at a time,
when certain shifts in the cultural policy of the „progressive“
actors in the cultural realm had taken place. Whereas the film industry
had been largely dominated by imported Hollywood productions, the
release of „guochan“ films (films produced in
China) had become increasingly popular after the bombing of Shanghai by
the Japanese in 1932 and the increasing political pressure of the GMD,
(Lee 2001: 85). A new official CCP cultural policy fostered the
orientation of dramatist and literati like Tian Han, Xia Yan or Hong
Shen from theater to film (especially in the Lianhua and Mingxing
Companies), in order to gain a broader and lower educated audience, and
because film tickets were much easier available to the lower strata of
the Shanghai society, which was the intended audiences of their
propaganda message. Also in terms of contents, there was a new
orientation towards social problems and labourers as main protagonists.
Women held a particular position in this public cultural
environment: the admission of woman as actresses on stages was
officially permitted only since 1911 and until the late 1920’s the
government still issued regulations that mixed seating in the theaters
was prohibited - it was universally permitted in the major big cities
only since the 1930’s - which
shows that the appearance of individual women in public was still
regarded as a controversial topic. On the other hand, women quickly dominated the
commercial realm by advertising a whole new consumer culture, fashion,
clothes, household consumer goods in films as well as women magazines
and the new print culture that was oriented towards women consumers. The
new film magazines, advertisements and film critiques in the newspapers
also arose curiosity and gossip about the private lives of the stars –
as an inevitable part of the emergence of a star system of glamorous
movie stars. Yet again, Leo Ou-fan Lee has observed how the new role of
the Chinese public women in film yet differed from the mainly sexualized
„fashionable feminity“ exhibited by the Hollywood stars, as it also
stressed certain new qualities a new woman should possess apart from
good looks that please the male gaze (Lee 2001: 93-94). Because of this merge of the political and commercial
realm, even in the political propaganda films female actors had to meet
expectations different from a pure conveying of a revolutionary message.
Jiang Qing’s participation in political films was most
likely as much an expression of her individual political devotion as it
reflected the general trend of a growing popularity of and interest in
such films. It was also the reaction towards an official Communist
cultural policy articulated by those in the cultural scene with whom she
was closely associated. Her example illustrates how the new woman
on stage or screen has to tackle with these different expectations that
a woman in public had to meet: to be strong willed, intellectual,
politically engaged and yet appear in public in a way that did not
offend or directly confront traditional moral virtues. These public
negotiations of new roles and expectations are reflected in the
historical judgements of some peculiar instances in Jiang Qing’s life
as an actress which will be dealt with here.
One such instance is her sudden break with the Lianhua Co.,
which seems surprising, given her multifarious activities in the
Shanghai cultural sphere. By this she lost a stable link to a cultural
institution, which made her to leave Shanghai soon after in August 1937. One
reason why she was excluded from the Lianhua Company is said to have
been her impertinent insistence to play Sai Jinhua. According
to these accounts, Jiang Qing allegedly stirred up so much trouble among
the members of the drama amateur group that it split up and finally
dissolved. Only
Wei Shaochang questions this narrative rather convincingly. According to
him, Jiang Qing was never an option for the role of Sai Jinhua and
instead the split in the theater group was caused by inner struggles,
because some members opposed the election of Wang Ying as Sai.
These later historical accounts have of course to be read
with care, as this play later was labelled a
„traitorous“. Jiang Qing’s involvement therefore serves as another
evidence for her incorrect political behaviour. Jiang Qing herself of
course denies any involvement in this struggle. Even Wei Shaochang, when
explaining these historical circumstances feels compelled to explicitly
emphasize that he does not want to defend Jiang Qing as a person yet
wants to observe to historical fact as a historian, which shows, that it
is still very difficult for a historians to write against the mainstream
historiography of Jiang Qing.
Another reason for her disengagement with the Lianhua
Company is said to have been her affair with the actor and journalist
Tang Na, who was a close friend of her colleagues Zheng Junli and Zhao
Dan. As mentioned, this very complicated love affair was broadly covered
by the Shanghai press. Their relation had started in September 1935,
yet, according to Guo Hua, they separated already in spring 1936. When
Tang Na received a position as playwright in the Mingxing gongsi, they
reunited, Jiang Qing had an abortion and went to his family in Suzhou
for recovery (Guo Hua 1998: 173). The first separation (though not the
abortion) is confirmed by the account of Jiang Qing (Lan Ping) in her
„Yige gongkai xin“ (A public letter), in which she explains, that
Tang Na had threatened to commit suicide if they would separate. Their reunion was publicly affirmed by their
participation in a social event in April 1936, which aroused large
public interest of the newspapers and came to be known as the joint
„Wedding at the Liuhe Pagoda“. Yet, at the end of the same month, Jiang
went to Jinan to escape from Tang Na and seek for her former husband Yu
Qiwei. Receiving her farewell letter from the hands of Zheng Junli, Tang
Na immediately followed her to her family in Jinan, but was refused to
see her. Later he received news, that she had already left Jinan. At
this point he conducted his first actual attempt of suicide by
swallowing matches and drinking pure alcohol. Tang Na was rescued and
news about his attempt of suicide was quickly reported to Shanghai; they
were even spread in Beijing and Nanjing in the Zhongyang
Ribao.
Subsequently, Jiang Qing and Tang Na returned to Shanghai and lived (and
quarrelled) together again for almost a year.
During this time she was rather busy playing in films and
theater pieces, among them Katharina in The Tempest and a role in Zuisheng
mengsi by the Irish dramatist O’Casey. These two pieces
were both directed or translated by Zhang Min, the former director of Nora.
Jiang Qing now started a love affair with this most prominent director
in Shanghai, after having separated from Tang Na for the second time.
When learning about this affair, Tang Na undertook a second suicidal
„attempt“- by drowning himself in the waters of the Huangpu in the
middle of the day, from which he was hindered by a close friend. Because Zhang Min’s wife and mother of their child,
the teacher and actress Xiao Kun, immediately divorced from him after
news about his new relation spread in Shanghai, the press blamed Jiang
Qing for having destroyed the life of two men at the same time.
For Ye Yonglie and others, these events clearly reveal her
tactics to use men for her career:, she had seduced Tang Na, in order to
catch a prominent role in a movie, when she had no stage engagements.
Having noticed, that Tang Na’s connections weren’t very helpful, ,
she abandoned him and turned back to the theater stage, supported by her
new „victim“ Zhang Min. Apart
from the fact, that these narratives depict entirely passive males which
had but to surrender to the sexual attractiveness of an evil woman - not
a very charming picture for the male counterparts, yet a stereotype of
male anxieties of powerful woman in Chinese literature - the articles of Tang Na and Lan Ping published in
the press at the time reveal a somewhat different and more complex
picture and shows how the different values of a new social behaviour, of
revolutionary or progressive ideas and „traditional“ residuies were
negotiated in a seemingly „modern relationship“ in the public press.
When Lan Ping left Tang Na and went to Jinan she sent him a
good-bye letter, in which she laid down her motives for departing from
him: one reason was, that she had discovered his relationship with
another actress, with whom he had exchanged love letters that were
occasionally found by Jiang Qing. The other reason, which was also
according to her letter the main reason for their constant quarrels, was
her wish to leave the movie and theatre world in Shanghai and pursue a
somewhat more meaningful life - while Tang Na was addicted to the
seductions of the movie world and constantly tried to convince her to
stay with him. A seeming compromise had been found for a while, that she
would leave the movie after making one good movie. But Jiang had
realised that she would continue to cling to this life, which seemed
hopeless, frustrating and self-destructive to her. Jiang had decided to
leave that tempting life of prominence and position for a job in a
school, to which she was invited by a (CCP) person which could not be
named in the letter. Leaving
Tang Na, Jiang did actually go to Jinan to take up her old connections
to Wang Bosheng and subsequently went to Peking to re-establish contacts
with the CCP activist Yu Qiwei.
Before his suicidal attempt in Jinan, Tang Na responded in
a letter to Jiang Qing and her descriptions of the situation: there is
not a sign of reproach or rage against her, nor is he styling himself as
a victim of her evil doings. Instead he admires her strong-willed
devotion to the national cause and declares his intention to follow her
on this path of a truthful and sincere fight against imperialism. Among
many a romantic memories and words of desperation and self-critique he
depicts her as an upright, outspoken and sharp person and ends the
letter with his encouragement in her strenuous efforts to gain
independence and freedom for the whole nation. Interestingly, this
aspect of their personal differences - their different attitudes towards
the world of movies and political engagement - is not discussed in the
accounts on Jiang Qing’s life, most likely because it does not fit
into the intended picture of an ambitious actress seeking for fame on
the movie screens. Tang Na explains his suicide with his weakness to
follow up to Jiang Qings ideals, a failure which he is not able bear.
Suicide is a topic frequently taken up in these discussions
of their love affair, which is part of a self-styling and
self-dramatization of the actors in public as well as part of a
traditional way of „solving“ love problems. Jiang Qing admits that
she had thought of suicide but had rejected this idea because she would
not follow the tragic roles of a Lin Daiyu or even the more real model of Ruan Lingyu, the famous
actress who committed suicide in March 1935. Suicide
in China was a traditional model solution to problems for a woman in
distress, especially when female virtues were in question. And it had
become part of the May Fourth emancipation rhetoric to rebel against
this solution of female surrender. Had Jiang Qing committed suicide like
Ruan Lingyu, her fate would most likely have been commented as
„tragic“ and „unjust“, just like in the case of Ruan Lingyu, and
public opinion would have been made responsible for the „murder“.
Yet, this did of course not hinder the - male dominated - press from
accusing other actresses in the same way and for the same reasons as
Ruan Lingyu. Jiang Qing’s open rebuttal of this option instead seems
to have irritated parts of the public opinion at that time, respectively
contemporary historians today as her outspoken appearance is now
interpreted as part of her shameless, egoistic, self-centred character.
The conventional gender relations are turned upside down in
this affair, as it is Tang Na, who commits suicide and apparently takes
over the traditional female part. Yet, Jiang Qing repeatedly comes back
to Tang Na, because of this threat and her compassion and pity for him.
The male suicide - quite to the opposite to the traditional female one -
thus again becomes a means of oppression and forceful implementation of
a man’s individual interests.
Yet, this was also negatively commented and Tang Na was
accused for his „selfish“, romantic and un-progressive behaviour
represented by his suicide. Tao Xingzhi, for instance, the founder of
the Chengeng school, in which Jiang Qing had taught in 1934, published a
poem to Tang Na „To Mr. Tang Na“, in which he told him that „Lan
Ping is Lan Ping, she does not belong to you. ... How can you take
possession of her?“ and admonished
him to sacrifice is life for more meaningful purposes required by the
new times.
One of the main motives for the public exposition of these
private affairs was certainly the aim to gain attention. Getting
attention is one of the fundamental principles to survive in the world
of media until today, and this was also realised by the Shanghai
critiques of the time. One article about Jiang Qing starts with the
comment that the most important condition to survive in the metropolis (dadushi) is to gain
attention. Therefore everybody would look for means to get attention and
also the affairs between Tang Na and Lan Ping had this special function.
Although according to this article both had de facto a legitimate motive
to seek attention, Jiang had to do so because she lacked professional
qualifications (which is here „defined“ as the necessary good
looks), whereas Tang Na’s need for seeking attention through his
dramatic public suicide is not further explained.
The obviously different evaluations of public statements
made by men or women were also perceived and reacted to by the social
actors, which is in this case reflected in the public letters exchanged
between the two partners. When Jiang Qing published her last explanation
of the whole affair with Tang Na in her „Public Letter“ in May 1937,
she is on one hand strongly defending her case from the perspective of a
individual and independent woman: „I’m certainly not going to be
like Ruan Lingyu and kill myself because I am afraid what people say.
Nor will I retreat. No. Lan Ping is a human being and will never
retreat. Since in his eyes I had turned into such a shameful female, he
certainly did not need to worry about me anymore.“ On the other hand,
she argues from the perspective of a deceived, hurt woman, who was done
injustice, when lamenting about Tang Na’s secret love affair with this
other person (the actress Zhang Xingzhu), thus legitimizing her conduct
with public morals. At the same time she presents herself as a
self-confident woman mocking her male colleagues who are attempting to
„destroy“ her:
„At the same time I heard that Tang Na’s friends were
going to use some force in dealing with me. Ha, ha! Good Heavens! If
they would be so brave in fighting against XX, then, really, China would
definitely not be defeated. Unfortunately, to use it against one young
woman, ha,ha....“.
3. Lan Ping and Jiang Qing as “Nora”
Emphasizing that „Lan Ping is a human being“ in this
last “Public Letter”, Jiang Qing takes up the Nora theme, which certainly
did not escape the eyes of the readers. Yet also this role was more than
ambivalent and her performance of the role of Nora adds another, more
sensitive dimension to these negotiations, as Nora had (and still has) a very special status on Chinese stages.
When Hu Shi, one of the first to introduce Ibsen and Nora
in his famous article „Ibsenism“ (Xin Qingnian, 1918),
attempted to perform his own an adaptation of the Nora-theme Zhongshen
dashi (A Great Event in Life) in Peking in 1919, no female
actor was willing to play this apparently indecent role on a public
stage (Eberstein 1983: 49-50). Even more than a decade later, the „Nora incident“
that took place in Nanjing is an indication, that the content of the
play was reason for discriminating women who played this role. Thus,
the representation of a figure like Nora on stage was directly linked to
the social position of the actress in society. Such a reaction mirrors
the contradictory confrontation with demands of new qualities for women
formulated in - mainly male dominated - theoretical debates and the
simultaneous accusation for the actual realisation of such demands by
the society. Jiang Qing herself argues against such an identification in
her article about the art of acting, when emphasizing, that acting is
“art, not life”.
This inner contradiction is visible also in social comments
on the Nora performance by Jiang Qing. The ambivalence inherent in the
perception of an attractive actress playing a strong-willed woman which
wants to leave home might perhaps best be reflected in the different
usage of the metaphor of a „little bird“ (xiao
niao) in the following interview with Jiang Qing. That
Ibsen’s Nora on stage rebels against being a “bird in a cage” and
emphasizes to be treated as a human being, is well-known. While Jiang
Qing picks up this topic,
stating that „one should not be like a ‘little bird’, act like a
slave or playing of men, one should not offer one’s own life for men -
as woman we have to be independent (zili) and not be a
parasite!“, the interviewer from the Minbao,
Ji Cheng, uses the same metaphor when emphasizing Jiang Qing’s
attractive and refined way of behaviour and expression by comparing her
to a small bird with a clear positive connotation: „When Miss Lan
heard the noise of my leather shoes, she immediately turned around like
a „little bird“ and run over to me to welcome me“ or „while she
was speaking increasingly engaged (about Nora) she could not abandon her
natural and girlish attitude like a „small bird“.
To present oneself as a Nora, was therefore still not
unproblematic although the theme combined the most important features of
the debates on China’s woman emancipation. As such, the play gained an
important and positive status among the progressive and politically
engaged actors, authors and critics, and the year 1935 was called the
„Nora Year“ by Tian Han, and later also A Ying and Mao Dun, because
of its numerous performances on the stages of China’s larger cities (Eide
1987: 88). This above mentioned confusion of the representational space
on stage and the social space in the actresses’ actual life was not
entirely arbitrary, but also fostered by a specific and increasingly limited perception
of the function of drama (and literature) as realist literature of these
intellectuals.
Their emphasis on interpreting Nora as a realist play had a
political, connotation, which is most clearly revealed in the
discussions following up the Nora hype. Reposing Lu Xun’s famous
question of 1923 „What happens after Nora leaves home?” in 1934 a
lively theoretical debate started in journals like the Guowen
zhoubao and others about the role of Nora in the emancipation
of Chinese women, which emphasised the importance of female economic
liberty, gained through their participation in the production process.
In the official ideological view, realism, the most important lesson to
be learned from Ibsen’s play was seen in his propagation of
individualism which meant a rebellion against feudal family structures
and individual liberation and fulfillment. Nora’s rebellion was
represented in the sound of her shutting the door, a radical and
thorough break with her past. Yet, as was observed by Wang Zheng, for
the male intellectual part, Nora functioned more as figure to express
one’s own frustrations with the Chinese hierarchical and patriarchal
family, to reaffirm one’s own superiority by „identifying an
„‘oppressed’ and ‘inferior’ social group – woman” (Wang
Zheng 1999: 59).
The actress Jiang Qing, however, formulates the “problem
of Nora” in a much more poignant and radical way and addresses
questions of the female liberation which are not welcome in the
political scene of the underground CCP.
“I have played Nora in 1935, and more recently The
Tempest, both plays that have the woman question as their
central themes. Moreover, the performances had quite a great
significance. […] But, since not long ago a young girl was violently
kissed by a foreign seaman on the trolley bus, and reports that a woman
worker of such and such company was raped by such and such foreman
circulate widely in the newspapers, … - all this violence we have to
endure unresistingly. In fact, we are living under such conditions of
pressure. A single Nora leaving – can that be enough? No, it’s
absolutely not enough! We need more practically oriented, more awakened
woman! […] From the position of a woman and an actress, I demand from
the authors […] to represent us, to produce scripts for the
suffocating women!”
As Xu Huiqi has recently argued, the male discourse on the
Nora theme contained the attempt to desexualize Nora in order to present
her “door-shut” as a human act of individual liberation (Xu Huiqi,
2002), Jiang Qing is herewith re-sexualizing it against this dominant
Nora-discourse: the salient issue of woman’s liberation is in Jiang
Qing’s view not the question of political liberation through active
participation in the production process but in the first place a
question of liberation from physical male oppression. By this Jiang
addressed the question of female sexual liberation in a direct and
public way that transgressed even the “liberal” social norms and
values of her political comrades. Jiang repeatedly explained that she
objected marriage and that it was an open and accepted truth between her
and Tang Na that they would in some future time separate and find other
partners. As the values of individualism propagated by Hu Shi
via Ibsen, were not equally valid for men or woman, in public
interpretation there was only a thin line between a radical strong-will
and an alleged fake selfishness.
This can be seen most clearly in judgements about the
specific historical person Jiang Qing alias Lan Ping playing the Nora.
Also her performance was directly linked to her “real-life”
personality and not seen as an act of acting. Critiques of Lan Ping’s
performance always highlighted her fluent, natural and highly convincing
acting of Nora. As
Zhou Huiling has recently shown in a study on the role of actresses as
“social actors” this identification was strongly promoted by the
left wing social campaigns on actresses in the middle 1930s (Zhou
Huiling, 2002). Although frequently insisting on the artistic and
professional component of the work of an actress, Jiang Qing herself is
following this strategy of identifying her representational role with
her actual social role when she is repeatedly drawing comparisons
between her and Nora, for instance by emphasizing how close Nora was to
her own character, which made it so easy for her to play this role. This
shows how Jiang Qing is oscillating between her desire to have her
private and public identity separated and
the necessity to follow the opposite demands of a film industry
that did not distinguish between “acting well”
and “acting good” (Chang 1999:159).
Jiang Qing presented herself as threatening, on one hand,
and herself created the image of a birdlike “good girl”- Nora, on
the other hand. This
Nora metaphor was subsequently applied to her life in many following
accounts and she never got rid of the name of Nora in her later life.
Ross Terrill refers to this theme in his Prologue by stating that „Mao
treated Jiang Qing as Nora, his playmate and supporter. Jiang accepted
the role, bidding her time“- and he continues: „The theater,
politics - for Jiang the two realms were not very different“ (Terrill
1984: 17). According to Ye Yonglie and others, Jiang Qing played a
„fake“ Nora by functionalising the role for her own selfish purposes
- as she did with any other ideology. Only the Shanghai author Sha Yexin
came up with a different perspective in his „Jiang Qing and her
husbands“, written in 1990 (Sha Yexin 1991), by staging Mao Zedong in
the role of Helmer and let him explicitly act as this person. By this
Sha is for the first time presenting the inner conflicts of Jiang Qing
as a suppressed woman in relation to her lovers and husbands and insofar he is much closer to
the original version of Ibsen’s Nora, who leaves the oppositional
forces in a dramatic conflict without solving it. Jiang Qing’s radical rebellion against society’s
demands for conformity and subjugation were interpreted as ruthless and
selfish mainly from a historical perspective by latter historians. The
comparison between Jiang Qing and Nora was perhaps too tempting not to
be taken up time and again in the subsequent narratives of Jiang Qing,
it was at any rate functionalised just in the same way as Nora was
functionalised on China’s stages.
Conclusion
The discussion of Jiang Qings activities on and behind
Shanghai’ stages is a complex one, because it involves different
layers of perceptions. The theatre realm itself represents a complex
merger of social and representational spaces, which is extremely
revealing in terms of gender aspects. On one hand, on stages and
film-screens new roles of woman can be imagined, performed and tested,
whereas on the other hand, these actresses are evaluated according to
social standards apart from their fictional roles, which can differ
quite evidently. Discussions of Jiang Qing’s involvement in the
Shanghai cultural scene reveal this complex intertwinement of a social
and fictional person. The discussion of her self-presentation in the
Shanghai artistic world reveals constant negotiations between these
different expectations, claims and demands for a new woman in public as
articulated through a highly commercialised cultural, a politically
radicalised literature and a widening social space allowing for
individual searches of personal fulfilment.
At the same time, these negotiations were not accepted or
understood as such by a large part of the audience or readership of the
time and - especially in the case of Jiang Qing - by latter historians.
This is most evident in historical accounts, which evaluate her
activities from the ex posto perspective of her life as
Mao Zedong’s wife and prominent leader of the CR. All aspects
attributed to her in order to undermine her political authority in the
CCP leadership can traced back to her professional beginnings in
Shanghai: unrestrained desire for public attention, sexual seduction of
useful men, functionalising of political slogans for private interests
and using „feminism“ in order to pursue selfish goals. In order to
substantiate this point, stories, quotations or historical facts are
arbitrarily chosen and mixed together.
What I attempted to show is the on one hand the
unreliability of all these depictions in terms of historical evidence,
on the other, the ideological narrative which lies behind all these
depictions. Jiang Qing seems to be a person which cannot be dealt with
without a historical judgement, and this might be true (or political
correct) from a post-CR perspective. Perhaps, because of the political
sensitivity of the case, Jiang Qing is not the most suitable person to
study the complex struggles of actresses to defend a social and
political position. Yet it is also exactly her outstanding historical
position that brought forth such extreme evaluations, which again makes
her a rewarding object for studying on one hand, how complex the process
of maintaining a public social position was, and on the other hand, it
shows the variety of (until today) possible different interpretations of
her appearance
Most striking in respect to the historiography on Jiang
Qing is the narrational parallelism between her career as an actress and
the career as a political leader. For all authors it seems just as a
natural given that there is no separation between social and
representational spaces. To Jiang Qing, every act was performance, every
space was a stage. This is also the reason, why her starting point in
her professional career on Shanghai’s stages is taken as the starting
point of her development into the evil demon on the political stage.
Such an underlying assumption seems to reveal more about the authors
than Jiang Qing, as it shows their own confusion between a historical
and a fictional person. An „authentic“, reasonably thinking and
acting Jiang Qing might be very difficult to imagine, as her
„performances“ and activities during the CR are difficult to explain
in rational terms. Yet this problem is not a singular one of Jiang Qing
but applies to a large part of the society involved in CR activities, -
it is only discussed there in quite a different manner.
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Chang, Michael G., The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful:
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Yingjin (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai,
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Cheng Jihua (ed), Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi
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Chiang Ch’ing’s Farewell Letter to T’ang Na, in: Chinese Studies in History 14.2 (Winter 1980-81), pp. 77-82.
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