worship Mao during the Cultural Revolution through songs of praise has its odd side. We have to point out that the Chinese had no historical or cultural tradition of singing together in unison of prayer. The Buddhists don’t gather and sing. Using a choir and making it a routine ritual for everyday life was absolutely new to the Chinese people. Oddly enough, this taken-for-granted communal behavior found everywhere in the Christian individualist world had no parallel practice in collectivist Communist China. It must have seemed strange indeed to now be singing songs of praise together regularly and religiously.
After the morning song, instead of studying science or literacy the first class turned out to be reading Mao’s works, specifically his famous Little Red Book, fully titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. The book easily fits into the palm of one hand with 274 pages of cryptic political doctrine. It’s hard to think that young school children like Peng Liyuan could understand these quotes, but as millions of other Chinese children had to do, she had to know them by heart and study them with the utmost seriousness. Alongside Lenin and Engels, this was only the third official publication on Marxism allowed in the entire country for three years. Demand was so enormous that hundreds of new printing houses had to be hurriedly built just to keep up with it.
In fact Peng Liyuan and her schoolmates needn’t go to the school to learn Mao’s words. Now in every corner, in every family’s home, Mao’s Little Red Book could be seen. On the radio, in newspapers, on any wall along street, in buses, in shops and restaurants, even on stamps, in every possible place there was no way of avoiding Mao’s phrases. Very soon nearly everyone could remember every page of that Little Red Book as the goal had been set for 99% of the entire Chinese population to read it.
To study Mao’s words was not a task the school children were allowed to mess about with. But how could the young children sit for hours upon hours and listen to this tedious political teaching? Imagine young school children having to memorize and endlessly discuss the following quote from Mao?
”Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip service to Marxism; they too attack ‘dogmatism’. However, what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people’s democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. After the basic victory of the socialist revolution in our country, there are still a number of people who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. Moreover, their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists.”
Soon the students lost their patience. All schools lost a sense of discipline; the classroom became as chaotic as a Chinese tea-house. Boys and girls walked in and out of classrooms freely; the teachers had no power to control them and they were constantly afraid of being physically threatened or attacked by the more rowdy students.
Very little academics were occurring in the schools at all. Peng Liyuan’s math studies were a disaster. Her math teacher just wished she could make as much efforts for math as for singing, for in all this chaos, Peng Liyuan had found her refuge in the most important part of the Communist Party propaganda machine – singing. For where pseudo-academic study of Mao’s Little Red Book wouldn’t reach, the lighter touch of song and dance certainly would.
Singing turned out to be the most important part of the Party’s propaganda war chest. School children might not pay attention to the teaching of math, and rural peasants might care less about the slogans plastered all over buses and walls, but certainly everyone would turn out for a live propaganda performance. Each school developed a propaganda team during that time. Talent like that displayed by the young Peng Liyuan was much needed. The teams performed songs and dances for any political events being held in the area. They didn’t call themselves performers; instead they said they were “fighters”. After all, according to Mao’s wisdom in his Little Red Book,
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Typical propaganda shows usually started with an announcement to reinforce the revolutionary focus. A charismatic student would excitedly proclaim: “Mao Zedong’s thought! The art propaganda team starts to fight!’” Then the troupe would take to the stage and start singing songs and performing dances with titles like Red Guards Seeing Chairman Mao, Yanbian People Love Chairman Mao, Soldiers Missing Chairman Mao and so on. The cult of Maoism was definitely being hammered home but cloaked in colorful costumes and sweetly sung by cute schoolchildren. Not only that, it was literally the only show in town so sure to garner large and appreciative audiences.
For Peng Liyuan, this was the only type of performance art available to develop and display her considerable though youthful talent. Her clear and strong voice and natural ways in front of an audience were very much needed by her school’s propaganda team. And in a time without any other entertainment throughout China, her singing could bring some small joy to the people.
There was a dance called Four Old Men Studying Mao’s Work. On the stage four actors dressed like old man, each carrying Mao’s Little Red Book while dancing and singing. This performance tried to show people that everyone should study Mao’s work. The message was “You’re never too old to learn Maoism.” The four old men were usually played by young girls, just the opposite of traditional Chinese theater where sexism often meant that young men portrayed women as women were not allowed on the stage. This was very entertaining for ordinary people and quite brilliant for the troupe to turn the serious political propaganda into a novelty. At the same time it was subtly displaying the Communist agenda of promoting the new role of revolutionary women in public. As Mao was to famously proclaim in 1968, “Women hold up half of the sky”.
Just as there were no math and sciences, there was no decent arts education available to students in China at that time either. A decent music education didn’t exist for Peng Liyuan. All she could do was learn to sing the propaganda songs. There was no chance of learning to read sheet music, and learning to play a musical instrument was out of the question. Her natural talent for singing pulled her through. Peng Liyuan also had one other advantage in her favor. Besides her naturally good singing voice, she had spent a lot of time as a youngster following her mother around the countryside to see her performances. This intimate familiarity with her mother’s performing undoubtedly gave the young Peng Liyuan a degree of confidence in front of an audience, and soon she was also tapped to present the school’s propaganda shows as well as sing in them.
The shows Peng Liyuan’s mother performed in were also heavily censored directly by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qin. Jiang Qin had the absolute power to decide what the entire Chinese public could and could not see and hear in all the performing arts. One word from her could kill a drama, a song or even an actor’s career that she happened not to like.
Officially available to the Chinese public, generally speaking, were just eight dramas; two of them were ballets, the rest were Beijing Operas. Under Jiang Qin’s censorship, the whole country was confined to seeing just these shows for an entire decade. Repeated again and again and again, every word of those eight performances were eventually memorized by almost the entire Chinese population.
Prior to the Cultural Revolution, ‘Cultural Houses’ had been set up by the government throughout China with a main aim of promoting the Party’s agendas via the arts. Peng Liyuan’s father had been running the local Cultural House. But during the unofficial purging that occurred during the Red Guard years, many of the Cultural Houses were temporarily shut down and dismantled. They often
