THE POLITICS OF DRAMA REFORM IN CHINA AFTER 1949--ELITE STRATEGY OF RESOCIALIZATION

This dissertation examines the politics of drama reform in China after 1949 from the perspective of social science concepts and theories. It deals with the following topics: functions of drama in traditional and modern China; the Communist rationale of drama reform; the interactions among the CCP elite groups in the political use of drama; relationship of Maoist ideology and the Revolutionary Model Peking Opera (yang-pan-hsi); and the intended value change as manifested in these officially sanctioned plays.; For this analysis, the author develops the concept of "political resocialization" defined as efforts of a revolutionary system to eradicate residual values of the old society and to promote elite-sponsored values among the masses with the practical intent of helping accelerate the nation's macro-development. This contrived resocialization differs from the more conventional concept of political socialization in every respect of the paradigm: Who learns what from whom, under what circumstances, for what purpose, and with what effects? Resocialization takes the entire population, especially adults and elite, as its targets, who are expected to internalize and practice the new ideology. The process is planned and centralized; and as China's ideological leader, Mao monopolized the Party's resocialization function, supervised its operationalization and intervened when deviation went beyond limits of tolerance. Since ideology may have to be re-interpreted in different political contexts to meet the contingent political needs, resocialization is a continuous and imperfect process. Above all, resocialization aims at systemic transformation.; The new concept is particularly useful in the study of China, because the Communist leaders have inherited a Confucian tradition of attempting at social and political control through the control of the belief system. The story of China's drama reform provides the empirical basis for testing the hypotheses associated with the concept of resocialization. The present study focuses on how and why the contending elite groups during the Cultural Revolution tended to manipulate cultural symbols for political gains, thus splitting the Party on ideological lines, and on how and why efforts at resocialization to bridge the ideological gaps tended to spill over into other areas, thus intensifying intra-elite antagonism.; The Communist leaders realized the political potential of Peking Opera and agreed on the need for its reform in order to get rid of undesirable values. But the extent and the exact shape the reform should take were subject to controversy and became a political issue immediately before the Cultural Revolution. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward debacle, Mao made repeated calls for the reform of art and literature. He had two purposes in mind: (1) By eliminating the elitist drama which criticized and ridiculed him by historical and allegorical analogies, he could minimize a significant source of criticism; and (2) By indoctrinating the masses with a uniform set of new values, he hoped to transform Chinese political culture and create a totally selfless socialist new man, to help accelerate the realization of his utopian vision (thus, to prove that his strategy of development was correct).; During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist Group under Chiang Ching increased its efforts at controlling the resocialization process, because its power base was precisely in the ideological realm. The yang-pan-hsi movement thus became a focal point for intra-elite struggles with far-reaching effects. The nature of drama reform changed into a zero-sum game from a non-zero-sum game in the 1950s. It was also responsible for the paucity of literary output.