Ballads And Politics:A Study On The Revolutionary Ballads Of Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area

The ballad originates from the call of human labor,which is a special linguistic form.In the long historical process,ballads have become a unique folk traditional culture.In modern times,China was faced with the crisis of extinction,advanced intellectuals were constantly exploring ways to save the nation.During the May 4th New Culture Movement,some intellectuals turned their attention to ballads that were closely related to the public,launched the Ballad Movement,and early marxists were also involved.Influenced by the Russian populist ideology and the October Revolution,they launched the "Go to the people" Movement which went deep into the grassroots to enlighten the masses.Together with the left-wing intellectuals strongly advocated proletarian revolutionary literature and literary popularization,which contributed to the politicization of ballads.The revolutionary ballads advocated and created by the CCP later were the result of the politicization and revolutionization of traditional ballads under the guidance of marxism-leninism.The Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area was an important soviet area initiated by the CCP in the period of Agrarian Revolutionary War.Located in the Dabie Mountain region at the border of north and south China,this soviet area has experienced several large-scale population migrations and cultural integration in history and formed unique,open,diversified and comprehensive traditional ballads.After the outbreak of the revolution in the border areas of Hubei-Henan-Anhui,under the guidance of the CCP Central Committee's strategy of ballad propaganda and education,the local Communist Party organizations gradually realized the effectiveness of ballad propaganda in the early revolutionary practice and promoted it throughout the region.A creative group of revolutionary ballads was formed,with revolutionary intellectuals as the forerunners,cultural propaganda cadres as the main body,and ordinary workers and peasants as the supplement.The creation of revolutionary ballads was a symbiotic product of the integration of tradition and modernity.On the one hand,it drew on the tunes,artistic forms and expression techniques of traditional ballads,andon the other hand,it filled in a large number of new contents expressing revolution and modernity,forming a form of communist revolutionary literature and art with strong local cultural color.With the wide interaction between the creative group of revolutionary ballads and the people in the soviet area,a relatively systematic system of revolutionary ballad dissemination was gradually formed in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area.Such a dissemination system was characterized by the combination of superior organizations and the people at the bottom,the combination of consciousness and spontaneity,taking modern dissemination paths as the main ways and traditional dissemination forms as the supplement.In the process of spreading revolutionary ballads,due to the change of social environment,regional culture and the need to express different revolutionary emotions,the lyrics and tunes of revolutionary ballads would be changed to some extent.These changes enriched the singing forms of revolutionary ballads,and enhanced its expressive force and dissemination capability.The creation and wide spread of revolutionary ballads in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area aimed to shape the different groups of the soviet people with targeted ideology,and enlighten the soviet people with modern democracy,freedom,equality and communism through the revolutionary adapted lyrics.The essence of the formation and enlightenment of revolutionary ballads was to mobilize the common people,which was a dynamic process.The effect of mobilization in different scenes depended on the reaction of the public,that is,how the public responded to the mobilization of revolutionary ballads.In the complex war environment,the soviet people were faced with the trade-offs and games of "public" and "private".Under the guidance of the Soviet regime,a large number of people were able to accept the collectivist values of revolutionary ballads,and actively participated in and supported the revolution.However,there were still some people who did not respond to the propaganda and mobilization of revolutionary ballads on the basis of personal family,emotions and other "private feelings".In order to cope with the negative reaction of the masses,the soviet government promptly adopted various ways such as education,system,organization,material and law to make up for the limitations of the mobilization of revolutionary songs,so as to ensure themasses of the soviet areas to move in the direction of revolutionary mobilization to the greatest extent,which reflected the complexity of the interaction between politics and society with revolutionary ballads as the media.Compared with other types of ballads in the same period,revolutionary ballads in Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area had their own uniqueness.First,compared with the revolutionary ballads of the Central Soviet Area,revolutionary ballads in Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area laid particular stress on practicality and lacked theoretical explanation,laid particular stress on popularity and lacked professional standard,which had strong regional traditional cultural brand.Second,compared with the ballads of Kuomintang territory,revolutionary ballads in Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area lacked overall planning,but more agreed with the reality.The level of creative group was generally lower,but closer to the public psychology.The propaganda was local,but it had a profound impact on local people's memory.Practicality,popularity and regionalism were the most prominent characteristics in the creation and application of revolutionary ballads in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area.After the founding of the People's Republic of China,revolutionary songs in the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Area became historical memories.Based on the different motives of preserving revolutionary memory,political propaganda and academic research,different cultural groups launched three waves of collecting and sorting revolutionary ballads in the border areas of Hubei-Henan-Anhui.They shaped the revolutionary memory in the form of text and completed the transformation from communicative memory to cultural memory.In this process of transformation,due to the influence of political orientation,memory limitations,the creation of new folk songs and other factors,the phenomenon of deliberately or unintentionally reconstructing revolutionary ballads emerged to serve the need of strengthening national identity and ideological shaping.No matter in the war times or after the founding of new China,revolutionary ballads,as the political products of ballads,had always played different political functions around political parties and countries.Entering into the twenty-first century,revolutionary ballads still have practical significance for today's ideological education.The practice and experience of theCCP using revolutionary ballads for ideological propaganda and mass mobilization in the war times may provide useful reference for the return of the ideology of the CCP to the folk culture and public psychology in the new era.