Over a century ago, the youth of China, through the May Fourth Movement, led the country in a national and anti-imperialist awakening. They knew that to build a new China and to resist imperialism, they needed to awaken the people, and for that, they needed to create a new culture. Lu Xun, credited as one of the forebearers of modern Chinese literature, had abandoned his medical studies to focus on literature, because he believed that it was the minds and the spirit of the Chinese people, rather than their bodies, that needed to be awakened and healed. He spent much of his time in Shanghai building the movement for new culture, as Marxist and other revolutionary ideas arrived in the country.
This awakening was not just China’s alone but forms part of the history of the awakening of the Third World that we saw throughout the 20th century, marked by the struggles and revolutions for national liberation and sovereignty for peoples across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Countless writers, journalists, and artists contributed to the struggles, helping to awaken spirit of the Third World, give expression to people’s aspirations, and to communicate them to the rest of the world. In other words, they were practitioners and theorists of the theme: Communications as Solidarity.
Today, we are seeing new rise and awakening of the Global South, as a legacy of the unfinished Third World project. We are seeing changes unseen in a century, and China and the Chinese people, as part of the Global South, are helping push this history forward. If we look back at this century marked by the May Fourth Movement, what have been the key processes and transformations that China has gone through? How has this story been told through culture, communication, and solidarity with the rest of the world?
In addition to Lu Xun, there is another doctor – a psychiatrist – who understood the importance of culture in the resistance to colonialism and for national liberation. Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary from the Caribbean island of Martinique who spent his life dedicated to the liberation of the Algerian people from French colonialism. One of his major works, The Wretched of the Earth (1963), helps us think about why, and how, we should look to the past of the Third World, which is much more than a mere nostalgic endeavor. “We ought to use the past,” Fanon writes, “with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis of hope.”
In this article, I will revisit historical examples of culture and communications over the past century in explaining and amplifying China’s revolutionary process, as an invitation for us to be bold and creative in confronting our present challenges and with the intention of opening the future.
A play.
In 1924, Sun Yatsen – China’s nationalist leader – returned to China after entering an anti-imperialist cooperation with the young Soviet Union. That year, Sergei Tretyakov, Russian communist playwright, moved to China to teach Russian Literature at Beijing University and be a correspondent for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s newspaper, Pravda. During his time, he wrote an important play based on a historical incident in Wanxian in which a businessman from the United States drowned after an argument with a Chinese boatman. When the two Chinese boatmen were not found, the captain of the British gunboat demanded that two randomly-selected Chinese workers be executed instead or he would bombard the town.
This play was called Roar, China and it helped introduce China’s “semi-colonial” reality and the aggression of Britain’s “gunboat diplomacy” to the world. In 1926, the play was staged in the Moscow, then later in Japan. In 1930, Herbert Biberman, a communist screen writer from the United States did a New York Broadway production of the play – featuring a cast made up of predominantly Asian American immigrant laundry and restaurant workers. Roar, China became a poem by African-American writer and journalist Langston Hughes published in communist paper during the Spanish Civil War. It was staged in India in 1942, translated and shared throughout the country by the Indian People’s Theatre Association, and even was performed at a concentration camp in Poland in Yiddish in 1944. In many of these places, not only was the semi-colonial situation of China communicated to the world through Tretyakov’s play, but the roar of China became a roar that resonated with the oppressed and the colonized of the world.
A song.
In 1934, Tianhan, a revolutionary playwright and multifaceted artist who emerged from the New Culture Movement, composed the lyrics of “March of the Volunteer,” the song that would later be adopted as the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). “We must achieve both ‘propaganda’ and ‘artistry,’” he said. “It is through artistry that one can better propagate!” The word “Arise!” that the song begins with, was a call not only to the Chinese people to stand up, but to all oppressed and colonized people to stand up.
In 1941, African-American communist singer, Paul Robeson recorded this song in Chinese and in English together with a Chinese chorus conducted by Liu Liangmo. This song and other revolutionary songs were released in the record, Chee Lai: Songs of New China (1941). Though Robeson was heavily persecuted by McCarthyism for his solidarity with communists around the world, he insisted: “The artist make take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.” Robeson’s recordings were a courageous act of solidarity with the Chinese Revolution and were played on the radios around the world in the 1940s, from the US to the USSR, from India to across Southeast Asia.
A film.
After the full-scale invasion by the Japanese in China on July 7, 1937, Dutch communist filmmaker Joris Ivens went to China for the first time. In 1938, he was received Tian Han, the composer of the “March of the Volunteers”. Ivens traveled throughout China to document the resistance of the Chinese people, led both by the nationalist and communist forces, against Japanese imperialism and produced the black-and-white documentary film, The 400 Million (1939). About the film, documented in the book, Joris Ivens and China (1983), Ivens said: The film achieved the good result of showing European and American audiences that the Chinese people had awakened and stood up to fight for freedom and independence, it gave them an initial understanding of the world significance of the Chinese people’s struggle. Intelligentsia and ordinary people alike thought highly of the film; even the bourgeois newspapers had to recognize it as a piece of art.
Ivens believed that we must use the tools of agitation and propaganda developed by the bourgeoisie and by the capitalist world – with Hollywood being the vanguard – to tell the stories of the people in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism, and to shape and share our own narratives. Over the decades, he made several films that helped document and communicate the transformations happening inside China to the world, from wartime resistance to the early socialist period. For him, he made films in a language that could be understood by the “intelligentsia” and the “ordinary people” of the West. His final documentary work, directed with his partner Marceline Loridan, was How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976). This series of twelve documentary films were shot over three years during the Cultural Revolution.
A photograph.
Perhaps one of the most well-known portraits of Mao Zedong of all times is photograph taken by US journalist, Edgar Snow, while he was visiting the Yan’an revolutionary base area while writing his 1937 classic book, Red Star Over China. Both his book, which contained the first interview of Mao ever conducted by a foreign journalist, and this photograph, were the first portraits – through text and image – of Mao. Through these portraits, Snow introduced the Chinese communist movement, the Long March, the revolutionary transformations in Yan’an to the world, which was still virtually unknown at the time. This book helped break the information blockade imposed by the Kuomintang (KMT) onto the communist movement – it was a tool in the media warfare. Since then, the book has been translated into 20 languages, and only this year – nine decades later – in Portuguese in Brazil, which I had the privilege of writing a review for.
A novel.
After the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature, a significant turn happened in the cultural production of China, affirming the ultimate aim of artistic and cultural work, which is to serve the people and to serve politics. By 1943, over 40,000 artists and writers, many from urban centres, had traveled to the revolutionary heart of Yan’an. There, writers, singers, actors, composers, painters, sculptors, journalists were sent to live and work in the countryside, to learn from the “big school” of peasant life.
Ding Ling was one of those people, who spent eight years learning form the peasants in rural Shaanxi. Her book, The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River, published in 1948, was a product of her time living and working alongside peasants in the land reform process. This novel won the second-class Stalin Prize for literature in 1951 and were among the many of the Yan’an period that were published, translated, and circulated to the world, especially after the establishment of the PRC. These novels were essential in transmitting the material dimensions of the revolution, from land reform to the establishment of agricultural co-operatives, from mass literacy and education to party building taking place in red base areas, and later in the construction of New China. Perhaps more importantly, they were able to convey the subjective dimensions of these processes – the thoughts and feelings of the people, their political conscientization, and the concrete challenges and contradictions in building a new society.
A mural.
José Venturelli was a Chilean painter, who worked with the celebrated Mexican socialist muralist Siqueiros and close friend of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Venturelli went to China as part of the global anti-war campaign, and even raised his daughter Paz, in Beijing, and became an informal cultural ambassador between left-wing Latin American and Chinese intellectuals and artists – an important bridge for cultural solidarity and diplomacy. Venturelli assisting Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in preparing for the Asia and Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing in 1952, which became a diplomatic milestone in for the young PRC, receiving 150 representatives from 11 Latin American.
A decade later, in 1962, Venturelli returned from Cuba – which had just gone through its own revolution three years earlier – to China, bringing news from the young revolutionary state. He had just finished a mural in memory of the guerrilla leader Camilo Cienfuegos, the first of three murals that Che Guevara invited him to paint in Havana. Zheng Shengtian, was a fine art student in Beijing at the time, was so impacted in seeing images of the murals from Latin America that brought fresh and new forms to socialist content that he dedicated the next decades tracing this history. In a conversation that I had with him in 2022, he told me that these murals helped him see that the struggles against imperialism in China were the same in Latin America, however distant those lands may be, and that these socialist struggles can be painted in many forms, styles, and colors.
In 2017, half a century after he first was inspired by Venturelli’s mural in Cuba, he finished his own mural, as an homage to this legacy of cultural exchange between Latin America and China. This mural is called “Winds from Fusang”, which we featured in Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s Dossier: Looking Towards China: Multipolarity as an opportunity for the Latin American people. In my interview with Zheng Shengtian, he excitedly recalled how in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, him and his fellow art students made posters and went to the streets to show their solidarity with the Cuban people: Cuba Si! Yankee no! Today, we are trying to remember and recuperate that spirit of solidarity.
A ballet.
China’s first all-women military brigade in the 1930s in the southern province of Hainan, is one of the most memorable stories of the Chinese revolutionary process. Based on real events, The Red Detachment of Women tells the story of 130 women who escaped from semi-slavery to fight against feudalism and is likely the first and only classical ballet that features guerrilla women fighters dancing with rifles. This story has been told and retold over decades in the form of films, posters, and comics to the Chinese people and to the world, and it was even selected as the ballet to show US President Nixon and his wife on his 1972 visit in the period of US-China rapprochement. There has even been a theatrical play made about that visit.
The ballet has traveled internationally, being performed over 4000 times in the last half century. Today, there is a theme park dedicated to this red history in Sanya, Hainan that opened in 2018, receiving hundreds of young people and families every night. In each era, the story of the protagonist Qionghua, the enslaved women who escapes and joins the red army, has been told and retold, and has stayed contemporary. It has been deemed a red story still necessary to tell.
A book.
There is bigger success of socialist international communication than this – the “little red book”. Since Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was first published in 1965, billions of editions have been sold in over 30 languages, which does not account for the unofficial publications. This book, and the ideas of Mao Zedong, made its way into the hands of countless revolutionaries as one of the most circulated books of all time, second only to the Holy Bible.
The little red book was sold in bookshops and small towns in Tanzania in Swahili under Julius Nyerere’s leadership. Mao Zedong Thought was commingled with African socialist ideas and transmitted through the radio airwaves to reach illiterate and rural communities. The little red book’ includes excerpts from Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum for Art and Literature, and the second last chapter is dedicated to art and culture.
In my 2022 interview with Emory Douglas, the first minister of culture of the Black Panther Party in the United States, he recalled how their party sold the little red book on street corners along with their newspaper, each for 25 cents. He said that he was inspired by the message that art was a weapon in revolutionary struggle. Read by people Mongolia to Mozambique, from Argentina to Albania, from Peru to the Philippines, from Palestine to Congo Brazzaville, this book has had an impact that cannot be measured, and definitely not in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
As the PRC celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, and after the Communist Party of China celebrated a century since its founding in 1921, countless songs, poems, plays, novels, films, dances, and other cultural productions have accompanied this revolutionary process and have been essential tools in communicating this process to the world, and to the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, continue to be seeking their own path to liberation and sovereignty.
But since period of opening-up and reform in the 1970s, something did shift. As China opened up more to the world – particularly the West – the country’s international communication turned away from the revolutionary and red culture and the Third World, even though the country did not give up on socialism. As a result, people of the Left and the Global South, had little means to access information about China’s ongoing path to socialist modernization. In looking back at China’s impressive economic growth in the decades since, many people have wondered, is the country’s rise due to capitalism or socialism? What is the China model of modernization? What are these changes unseen in a century, and how are they being told? And are they being told well?
At the end of 2020, during the pandemic year, China made a historic announcement. It successfully ended extreme poverty in a country of 1.4 billion people. 850 million people were lifted out of poverty since 1978, contributing to over 76 percent of the global poverty reduction. 100 million of them during Xi Jinping’s targeted poverty alleviation campaign that began in 2014, mobilizing broad sectors of the society in this effort. Three million party members were sent to live in the countryside working until each and every family lifted themselves out of poverty. 1,800 lost their lives in this task.
This is a historic achievement for humanity. But how did this story get told to the world, and was it told well? Did this story reach the people who most needed to hear it, who also trying to combat the plagues of poverty and hunger, in Latin America, Africa, and Asia? Where were the new songs, novels, plays, poems, and films to explain these tremendous processes taking place in China?
On July 23, 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the CPC, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, which I am also a part of, published a study on this historic achievement of ending extreme poverty in China entitled, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China. In researching for the study, I had a chance to go down with a team to the countryside of Guizhou province, to talk with peasants, youth, women, party cadres, see the cooperatives, the private enterprises, the agricultural production. This study has since been published in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch, French, Malayalam in India, reaching audiences in the Global South, from leaders to intellectuals, and from peasants and workers. As professor Lu Xinyu said, in my interview with her for the study: This is not a Chinese story; it is a twentieth century story, a story of the Global South.
So how can we give stories like this the cultural forms they deserve, the audience they deserve, how do we use these stories to build solidarity between the Global South. In closing, I would like to share one of the stories from this study:
Grandmother Peng Lanhua lives in a two-hundred-year-old rickety wooden house in a remote village of Guizhou Province. Born in 1935, she grew up in a China that was under Japanese occupation and entered adolescence during the Chinese Revolution. She has lived over twice as long as she was expected to live… China’s life expectancy was only 35 when she was born.
Peng is one of the few people in her community who did not want to relocate as part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme when the government designated her house unsafe to live in. Since 2013, eighty-six other households whose houses were deemed too dangerous or for whom jobs could not be generated locally were moved to a newly built community an hour’s drive away. But Peng has her reasons for not moving. She is eighty-six years-old and lives with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to low-income insurance and a modest pension, she receives supplemental income from a new grapefruit company that leased her family’s land. The company, whose dividends are distributed to villagers like Peng as part of the national anti-poverty efforts, was established to develop the local agricultural industry. Peng’s daughter and son-in-law live next door in a two-storey house they built with government subsidies. Her children are employed. In other words, her basic needs are cared for, and relocation is voluntary.
‘We can’t force anyone to move, but we still have to provide the “three guarantees and two assurances”’, says Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre sent to live in the village to see that every household emerges from extreme poverty. He is referring to the government poverty alleviation programme’s guarantee of safe housing, health care, and education, as well as being fed and clothed. Liu visits Peng on a monthly basis, as he does with all the households in the village. Through these visits, he comes to know the details of each person’s life.
‘The floor is too messy’, Liu says, jokingly reprimanding Peng’s daughter-in-law as he enters the large wooden house. She is also a member of the Communist Party of China. On the wall, a poster of Chairman Mao and, next to him, President Xi Jinping, pay homage to two of China’s socialist leaders who bookend the course of Peng’s life. Below their portraits sit a weathered table and a dusty terracotta water jug, an internet router flashing green beside them. A string of ethernet cables and wires stretch to different corners of the house (each house gets free internet and CCTV satellite television for three years before a subsidised rate sets in). There are energy-saving lightbulbs in each room and a satellite dish installed next to Peng’s hanging laundry. An extension of the house was built with a toilet and shower equipped with solar-heated running water, the mud floor poured over with concrete. As Lenin said, ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. Strengthening the Party in the countryside and meeting the concrete needs of the people have been pillars in China’s fight against poverty. Liu’s visit to Peng’s house is just one everyday scene in that process.
The fact that Peng has lived in this house for half a century is also a product of the Revolution; in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, the house was confiscated from a rich landlord and redistributed to three poor peasant families, including Peng’s. That cadres like Liu visit her on a monthly basis, that her house has been made safe to live in through the recent renovations, and that there is internet to connect the poorest of rural villages with the world is a continuation of this revolutionary history. After all, ensuring that the country’s workers and peasants like Peng get housed, fed, clothed, and cared for is part of China’s long struggle against poverty and a fundamental stage in constructing a socialist society.
Conclusion
When I went to Yan’an in 2023, I had a chance to visit the historic Lu Xun Academy of Art on May 1st – international workers’ day – where a generation of red artists and writers were trained in the 1930s and 1940s, many of whom took on important cultural tasks in building New China and in promoting cultural diplomacy with the Third World. I sat at the table where Mao gave his lectures over eight decades ago at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature and reflected on how, despite being a period of extremely difficult conditions, great importance was placed on red culture, communications, and all the creative forms they used to carry the message of the communist movement to the Chinese people and to the world. In this article I have only shown a small sampling of the century of revolutionary, internationalist, and Third World culture that we can draw from. It is our collective inheritance.
I hope that you can join me in carrying the spirit of Yan’an forward, in our task of building global south communications and solidarity. Bringing forward the questions that Mao asked, who does our art serve and who is our audience? What kind of “cultural army” we need to build today and how do we speak the lively language of the people? To know the people means going to the people, and perhaps today going to the “countryside” means going home to the Global South.
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Tings Chak 翟庭君 is the art director and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and co-editor of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Tsinghua University in Beijing.