Literature and art as political discourse: adapting The White-Haired Girl in the communist context of China

ABSTRACT

It is not only political actors but also the contexts, which make a text political discourse. This nuanced understanding turns political functions and implications into defining features of political discourse. Using the Chinese revolutionary work The White-Haired Girl as a case study, this paper argues that the constant adaptations of the work, in its various literary and artistic forms, are intrinsically political. Born out of a folktale, the work first assumed the form of literary non-fiction in 1940. Aligning with Chinese Communist Party’s evolving political agendas in the next few decades, The White-Haired Girl migrated across medial borders to take the form of a movie in the 1950s and a ballet in the 1960s. The highly ideological adaptations transformed the work into political discourse, with its life sustained not primarily by artistic merits but by political functions. The adaptation history of The White-Haired Girl reveals that intersemiotic translations of a work tend to complement their source text(s), and they also bear (intertextual) traces of their sociohistorical contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Political discourse
• The White-Haired Girl
• Chinese Communist Party
• intersemiotic translation
• Cultural Revolution

1. Introduction

Literature and art should reflect the life of the masses and serve politics: such is the key message from the monumental Yan’an Talks by Mao Zedong, one of the most influential communist leaders of China in the 20th century. Mao’s talks, which were first delivered in 1942 (McDougall and Mao 1980, 54), have exerted far-reaching influence by shaping the literary and artistic landscape in the communist context of China (Holm 1990, 4). Commemorative events have been held regularly at the national level in China to align contemporary creative industries with Yan’an Talks, with the most recent one held in Beijing in May 2022 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Talks (Xinhua 2022).

Bái Máo Nǚ (白毛女 The White-Haired Girl), which was heralded as the first xin geju (new musical opera) in China (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 105–106), was produced in response to Mao’s Yan’an Talks. Originally gained popularity as a communist opera in 1945, The White-Haired Girl was later adapted into other artistic forms including movie and ballet (Duan 2015, 8). Its motion picture adaptation in the 1950s was one of the earliest movies produced in the People’s Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when entertainment was politically regulated and confined to a limited repertoire of so-called model operas, The White-Haired Girl continued to prosper as a revolutionary ballet (Mittler 2003). Its ballet adaptation was believed to be the most performed work in China, with about 1,700 recorded stage performances (J. Yang 2010, 2). One of very few works that were born before the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) assumption to power and survived the Cultural Revolution, The White-Haired Girl serves as an ideal case study of adaptation across generic and medial borders, from a literary work to an opera, and from a movie to a ballet. For each of these adaptations, additional political messages were introduced into the story. The adaptational history of the literary and artistic work is therefore, simultaneously, a history about the theatrical incorporation of political discourse.

2. Theoretical considerations: literature/art as political discourse

Political discourse can be approached from different angles: it is either narrowly defined as institutional discourse of political elites, or employed as a catch-all term to cover general issues such as power, conflict, control and domination (e.g. Bourdieu et al. 1991; Chilton and Christina 1997; Giddens 2013; van Dijk 1993). Based on the latter, one may argue that any discourse may be considered political (Shapiro 1981). This, on the one hand, helps enrich critical discourse analysis, but on the other, significantly overgeneralises the concept of political discourse (Wilson 2005, 398), and consequently challenges its research worthiness as an independent field of inquiry.

However, the narrow confinement of political discourse to institutions and politicians also runs the risk of missing the opportunity of bringing the field to its full potential. For example, apart from politicians, many other institutions and individuals including pressure groups, voters, demonstrators and dissidents are also involved in political activities (Sidney et al. 1993). As such, defining political discourse in relation only to ‘participants’ is not likely to be fruitful: at any rate, ‘even politicians are not always involved in political discourse’ (van Dijk 1997, 14). To solve the problem, van Dijk contends that people and groups should only be categorised as political actors when they are ‘participating in political actions’, and this shifted emphasis on the context turned ‘political functions and implications’ into defining features of political discourse (van Dijk 1997, 14, original emphasis).

Indeed, with technological advancement, many more types and forms of discourse can now serve political functions. In the current media space, this could range from mediatised party-political conferences and news reports by journalists about elections, to grass-root politics and web-based discussion forums participated by laypersons (Berlin, Weizman, and Fetzer 2015; Fetzer 2013; Lauerbach and Fetzer 2007). In a similar vein, when serving an explicitly political purpose, art has also been considered as political discourse, in the form of what Vid Simoniti (2021) designated ‘politically discursive art’. The political exploitation of art works can effectively render the otherwise cultural artefacts into carriers of political messages.

By using the various adaptations of The White-Haired Girl as a case study, this paper examines the phenomenon of literature and art as political discourse in the communist context of China. Within the field of Translation Studies, Roman Jakobson (1959) famously identified three different types of translation: intralingual translation, interlingual translation and intersemiotic translation. For a long time, interlingual translation, which Jakobson labelled as translation proper, has received the majority of academic attention. In recent decades, with the rise of digital technology and multimedia, interests in intersemiotic translation have grown rapidly, as demonstrated in the copious scholarship on audiovisual translation (e.g. Diaz Cintas and Anderman 2008; Giovanni Elena and Gambier 2018). The case study in this paper is intersemiotic and intralingual by nature, with The White-Haired Girl travelling across generic and medial borders: folk tale, libretto, opera(s), movie, and ballet. However, with its focus on adaptation as a politically discursive instrument, the paper aims at reconstructing the evolution of the core story and analysing its political functions and implications, without exploring at length the multimedial constraints. Since the story was born prior to the assumption of power by the CCP and lived through the dramatic Cultural Revolution, this case study would shed light on how the literary and artistic have been manipulated to serve the political in the process of adaptations, and how this differs from one historical context to another.

3. The birth of The White-Haired Girl

In his 1942 opening remarks of the Yan’an Talks, Mao Zedong explicitly spelt out his intention for literature and art to better serve the revolutionary causes and to assist the CCP to ‘overthrow our national enemy and accomplish our task of national liberation’ (McDougall and Mao 1980, 57). Mao stipulated that revolutionary literature and art should serve the masses (primarily workers, peasants and soldiers) by telling their stories in languages they can understand and relate to. For example, writers and artists were encouraged to positively approach the budding literature and art of the masses, including wall newspapers, murals, folk songs and folk tales (McDougall and Mao 1980, 66).

The White-Haired Girl is among the most successful revolutionary works growing out of a folk tale. The story, which had been circulating in oral forms among villagers in Hebei Province, was first published as a non-fiction novel in a CCP newspaper in 1940 (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 27). In 1942, inspired by Mao’s Yan’an Talks, the author Li Mantian reframed the novel to highlight the class conflict and struggle between the exploiting landlords and the exploited peasants (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 29). In 1944, the reframed story was sent to Zhou Yang, the head of Lu Yi (shortened form of Lu Xun Academy of Art) which was a ‘cadre-training institution’ in Yan’an (Wilkinson 1974, 166). Zhou was, at the time, racking his brain producing a revolutionary opera, as a tribute project for the upcoming Seventh National Congress of CCP in 1945 (Mackerras 1981). Zhou considered The White-Haired Girl an ideal candidate, and soon commissioned a team of writers, composers, directors and performers to adapt the story into an opera (S. Tang 2003, 10).

The story describes the life of a peasant girl named Xi’er who lived a miserable life with her father under the oppression of a wicked landlord named Huang Shiren. On the pretext of collecting rent, Huang contrived to drive Xi’er’s father to commit suicide and raped the girl. Xi’er became pregnant but Huang secretly planned to sell her to the brothel. Xi’er subsequently fled into the mountains, where she gave birth to a son. The hair of Xi’er and her child gradually turned white because, according to folk belief, they had no salt in their diet. They lived surreptitiously scavenging the sacrifices in a local temple, and the superstitious villagers who accidentally caught sight of Xi’er believed she was a goddess. The ‘white-haired goddess’ thus continued to live in the mountains until her fiancé Dachun, who joined the Communist Eighth Route Army after Xi’er had been forcibly taken away by the landlord, returned to liberate the village.

The libretto foregrounds class struggle between peasants and landlords in the old society, which forms a contrast with the new society established by the CCP, in which the people allegedly become masters of their own destiny. The central theme of the story, in the words of the opera, is that ‘the old society changed men into ghosts, while the new society changes ghosts into men’ (Kuang and Pan 2006, 141).

4. The White-Haired Girl and its ongoing politicisation in adaptations

The political gene is intrinsic to The White-Haired Girl from the outset. Its migration from oral form among the labouring masses to the textual form as a non-fiction novel was motivated by CCP’s propaganda agenda. Its author was a journalist of a Communist newspaper, and he wrote in 1940 with the intention of exciting sympathy with the white-haired girl and hatred towards the vicious landlord. The author’s later revision, in 1942, of the same story was made to answer Mao’s call for literature and art to serve revolutionary causes (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 29). When it was selected for cross-genre adaptation into a libretto in 1944, the commissioner and the creation team had the attendees of the CCP National Congress as their primary target audience (S. Tang 2003, 10).

4.1. The White-Haired Girl as a communist opera

On 28 April 1945, the opera The White-Haired Girl premiered in Yan’an to CCP representatives attending the Seventh National Congress, with top Party leaders including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi in the audience (Y. Li 2015a, 89). The next day, the opera troupe received a letter from the General Office of the CCP Central Committee, which affirmed that the opera was topical and artistically successful, with its music bearing national characteristics. However, the letter also suggested that the fiendish landlord Huang Shiren should be executed at the end of the opera (G. Zhang 1995, 7). It was later revealed that the suggestion was personally made by Liu Shaoqi (Qu 1995, 5), one of the five CCP Secretaries elected at the Seventh National Congress.

The function as political discourse of the opera adaptation can thus be approached from different perspectives. In the first place, The White-Haired Girl was heralded as a work that invents, ‘on the basis of the yangge play, a new national form, opening a vital pathway towards the creation of a new type of opera’ (T. Tang and Yan 1980, 252). It was a direct political response to Mao’s advocacy for the popularisation of arts for revolutionary propaganda. Essentially, in the intersemiotic translation of the literary story White-Haired Girl into an opera, translation ‘does not just “carry across” meaning in its etymological sense, but partakes in the making of meaning’ (Lee 2013, 241) at multimodal and sociopolitical levels. By incorporating folk elements of performance such as the northern Chinese yangge (a folk song-and-dance genre), the Shaanxi qinqiang and the Hebei bangzi (both genres of folk Chinese opera), the so-called new opera (or new musical drama) effectively combined ‘western-derived theatrical and musical techniques with traditional Chinese cultural elements’ (Bohnenkamp 2021, 54). It not only makes the foreign serve the Chinese, but also makes the cultural serve the political. The White-Haired Girl, therefore, is among the first and most successful products of communist artists’ efforts to translate Mao’s political discourse as elucidated in his Yan’an Talks into theatrical practice.

Additionally, the influence of politicians extends beyond stimulating artists to employ or exploit various art forms for propaganda. The CCP members also actively participated in the revision of the opera after its debut. The politicians’ comments, or rather instructions, on how the story should be revised turned them into co-producers of The White-Haired Girl. Liu Shaoqi’s suggestion caused the landlord Huang Shiren to be executed in the following performances of the opera (Duan 2015, 24). The other Communist leaders also issued their instructions about how the opera could prepare the masses not just for the social reality of the present, but also for the upcoming political tasks in the near future. For example, Zhou Enlai told The White-Haired Girl crew that the Japanese imperialism was doomed in China, and once the war against Japanese aggression was over, the China–Japan conflict would become less important, and the domestic class struggle would become the dominant social conflict in China. As such, it was of critical importance to educate and mobilise peasants, numbered in the millions, to fight for their liberation (Ding 1995, 10).

Indeed, when The White-Haired Girl was first performed in April 1945, the CCP was still adhering to the principle of uniting all the forces that can be united to fight against Japanese aggression. They thus attempted to win over those from the landlord class who are ‘in the middle’ (Mao 1940). After the Japanese conceded defeat in September 1945, conflicts between exploiting landlords and labouring peasants became an urgent issue to be tackled. In order to liberate the masses, land reform was gradually and systematically enforced, with eliminating landlords as a class being one of its objectives (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 41). As can be seen from Zhou Enlai’s comments above, the CCP’s change of attitude towards the landlord class had already been in train during their Seventh National Congress. Therefore, the adaptation of The White-Haired Girl was, in this case, leveraged as an artistic instrument to prepare the masses for the Party’s upcoming political backflip. From the perspective of cognitive process, the CCP leaders’ contribution to the adaptation does not passively register reality, but actively structure it while they think and express their thoughts (Langacker 1990, 2).

In this case, CCP politicians are not just the target audience of the opera, their participation effectively turns them into co-translators. Their dual-role in the intersemiotic translation renders the opera into an entity with different layers of meaning and authorship (or rather, translatorship): a literary layer that harks back to the original story in the non-fiction novel, an artistic layer by the communist artists as well as by the performers, and an openly political layer that speaks directly to the political agenda of CCP leaders. At any rate, intersemiotic transposition aims to reinterpret the source text, not to replace it (Clüver and Watson 1989, 69). The opera version of the White-Haired Girl, with all its further politicisation, can be considered a ‘companion’ or even ‘competitor’ to the original story (Holobut 2013, 40).

4.2. The White-Haired Girl in movie adaptation

The motion picture adaptation of The White-Haired Girl was released in 1950. The movie was screened in more than 30 countries around the world, and became a prize winner in 1951 ‘at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in then Czechoslovakia’ (Chen 2020, 400). Domestically, it attracted 500 million viewers by 1956, a figure that is nearly equivalent to the total population of the country at the time (Dang 2012, 41). With land reform being enforced nationwide in China and class struggle between peasants and landlords becoming a main political focus, the movie became a timely and effective document to reveal the evil exploitation system of the old society and to support the new political agenda. To accomplish its mission as political discourse, further changes to the story were introduced in the movie adaptation.

In the opera version, after Xi’er was raped by Huang the landlord, she was misled to believe, for a while, that Huang would marry her. A solo dance was performed by Xi’er to show her excitement at the prospect of becoming the landlord’s concubine (Meng 2008, 153). From the perspective of dramaturgy, the portrayal of Xi’er’s illusion and excitement not only helped turn Xi’er into a round character, but it also foregrounded the evil of the landlord and the pathetic life lived by the peasants (Meng 2015, 72). This was, however, later interpreted as failing to convey peasants’ uncompromising hatred against the exploiting landlord class. Consequently, the Xi’er in the movie version harboured no illusion of marrying the landlord; instead, she remained consistent in her bitter resentment of Huang and faithful to her peasant-fiancé Dachun (Dang 2012, 39). The change, which to a certain extent manifests class solidarity, portrays a character who is politically steadfast.

In a similar vein, the earlier opera performances featured Xi’er giving birth to a child after being raped by the landlord. She therefore lived in the mountains together with the child until she was liberated by Dachun as a member of the CCP’s Eighth Route Army (X. Gao and Jiang 2016, 96). Given that Huang raped Xi’er and had plotted the death of her father, the opera version had Xi’er initially devoured by the desire for revenge, which was transferred to the child: ‘That bastard of the Huang family. I’ll strangle him, and then hang myself at the gate of the Huang residence […] I’ll take my revenge even as a ghost’ (Meng 2008, 154). However, Xi’er’s seemingly insuppressible hatred, which led her to call her child a bastard, soon gave way to her maternal instinct when she heard the child crying (Meng 2008, 154). The role of Xi’er as a victim of Huang’s crime and as the mother of Huang’s son thus created a conflict that may make the story and the characters more sophisticated, but the conflict posed a challenge to the political discourse about class struggle. Focusing too much on Xi’er as an individual through her multiple roles as a girl, daughter, and mother, the class conflict between peasants and their exploiters as a key theme was diluted. In order to highlight the political theme, the movie adaptation made Xi’er miscarry: Xi’er escaped from the Huang residence and ran into the mountains, and the exhaustion caused the premature birth (and death) of the child (Dang 2012, 39). In the movie adaptation, clarity of political messages took precedence over artistic portrayal of characters and sophistication of the story.

As Yeung observed from intersemiotic translation of Chinese poems in the German-speaking context, intermedial translators may show ‘no intention’ to create an authentic image of their original (Yeung 2008, 291), and ‘creativity and originality’ can be generated in the process of intersemiotic translation (Yeung 2008, 291). This is especially true when the translation and the original are functioning in different social contexts at different historical moments, which often entails a change in the audience, even when the adaptation is only intralingually confined. In the movie adaptation of The White-Haired Girl, the ‘creativity and originality’ was not a product of aesthetic or artistic pursuits, but motivated by the contemporary political context which differed greatly from the previous decade when the opera adaptation was staged.

4.3. The White-Haired Girl as a revolutionary ballet

The White-Haired Girl was further adapted into a ballet by the Shanghai Dance School in 1964. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the ballet adaptation became one of the eight so-called model plays (though the number later grew to 18), which were intended to be the only theatrical entertainment for the entire nation (Mittler 2003, 54). Due to the ostentatious political agenda of the Cultural Revolution, the nature of the artistic work as political discourse was even more conspicuous and straightforward during this period. Not only was the initiation of the ballet adaptation a political mission prescribed by CCP leaders, but its endorsement was also a process full of debates and conflicts of political nature.

The decision and process of choreographing The White-Haired Girl into a revolutionary ballet was politically inspired. In fact, it was the Japanese Matsuyama Ballet Troupe who first adapted the communist opera into a ballet. Matsuyama’s adaptation, premiered in Tokyo in 1955, toured China in 1958 upon the invitation of Zhou Enlai (Shimizu 1985, 60). Having watched the performance by the Matsuyama Ballet Troupe, Zhou raised the question that why could the Chinese not develop their own indigenous ballet adaption. Later, upon his proposal, the Shanghai Dance School was established in 1960 (J. Yang 2010, 9). Zhou’s thoughts on socialist culture also exerted direct influence on the agenda of the Shanghai Dance School. In 1963, Zhou initiated an effort to make literature and art ‘more revolutionary, popularised, and nationalised’ (Roberts 2008). Acting upon Zhou’s suggestion about moving beyond foreign ballet themes of ‘princes and fairies’ (Roberts 2008), the Shanghai Dance School staged their own ballet adaptation of The White-Haired Girl. Their innovative exploitation of the Western art form included supplementing the story with singing during the performance (J. Yang 2010, 90). The ballet adaptation incorporated 21 songs, the melodies and lyrics of which soon became widely known and circulated across the country (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 103). The songs, which would help the general audience to better appreciate the ballet performance, showcased the communist artists’ practice and support of Zhou’s political initiative to make art popularised and indigenised.

Connelly (Connelly 2019, 218–236) views art work in intersemiotic translation as an event that is multifaceted, unstable and socially situated in the contemporary context. The ballet adaptation of The White-Haired Girl adopts an art form that was not indigenous in China, so in order for the form to be best appreciated by the Chinese audience, the communist artists made singing an integral part of the performance. This not only socially recontextualised ballet for the 1960s Chinese context, it also served its political functions well. By adopting a foreign art form, the intersemiotic translation may open up space for viewers to generate their own interpretation (Campbell 2017), but the singing came with its verbal elements that would help align viewers’ interpretation with political intentions embedded in the adaptation. The adoption of a new art and medial form also enables the plot of the story to be further developed.

The story thus underwent another round of revision to keep abreast of the contemporary political climate. In the opera version as well as the movie adaptation, Xi’er’s father, Yang Bailao, committed suicide when he realised that he could not protect his daughter from the landlord’s intrigue. This highlighted the tenant’s helplessness and powerlessness facing the landlord’s oppression, which had the effect of arousing in the audiences anger, hatred, and the desire to fight against the exploiting landlord class. In the late 1940s (opera version) when the CCP was waging a war against the ruling Kuomintang Party, and in the early 1950s (movie adaptation) when the newly established communist China was implementing a nationwide land reform, the tragic suicide of Yang won the sympathy of empathetic audiences and thus effectively supported CCP’s political agenda. After watching the performances, many soldiers wrote on their weapons slogans such as ‘revenge for Yang Bailao’ and ‘revenge for Xi’er’ when they went to the front (Duan 2015, 3), making the political functions and implications of the artwork stand out prominently. However, in the mid-1960s when the ballet adaptation was produced, the landlord class had been eliminated (and the peasants liberated), Yang’s suicide in the story began to be viewed as servile and thus politically incorrect. The contemporary political climate strongly disapproved behaviours submissive to exploiters. Consequently, in the ballet, Yang did not commit suicide, instead, he was shot dead when he rose up against the landlord with his shoulder pole (Meng 2015, 77).

The same political reconceptulisation of the relationship between the two classes also informed the change in Xi’er’s behaviour in the ballet. In previous versions of The White-Haired Girl, Xi’er was raped by Huang the landlord and got pregnant. She even, as discussed earlier, dreamed at one point of becoming Huang’s concubine. The ballet adaptation depicted Xi’er as a fighter, who defeated Huang’s attempt to rape her by throwing an incense burner at him (Sun 1999, 115). The new image of Xi’er in the ballet was in line with the cultural guidelines of the Gang of Four¹ (Yong 1967). The political adaptation of the performance deprived the character Xi’er of her individuality and dynamics. Xi’er used to be a round character, who was realistically depicted as a helpless tenant in the face of the landlord’s oppression. She only later gradually grew to be a fearless fighter through her interaction with the Huang family when all her hope for life was defeated. This was significantly simplified in the ballet adaptation, in which Xi’er was no longer an individual with her own realistic considerations and personal feelings, strengths and weaknesses; she became a carrier of romanticised or politicised characteristics of the oppressed class. The ballet adaptation, in this sense, is illustrative of Mao Zedong’s view that theatrical works are ideologies presented in the form of art (B. Gao 2007, 14). With The White-Haired Girl becoming increasingly political through adaptation, personal voices that are in reality diverse and dynamic are silenced to give way to the collective voice that remains uniform, consistent and politically steadfast. In other words, characters in the story are no longer ordinary individuals, they were transformed into politically ideal representatives of their class.

With the historical connection between the creation of The White-Haired Girl and Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks, one would think that political endorsement for transmedial adaptations of the work is guaranteed. However, since political discourses are highly dependent upon their dynamic context of production and consumption, it follows that literature and art as political discourse are subject to multiple and opposing interpretations at any given historical moment. During the Cultural Revolution, class struggle was a key theme that penetrated into all aspects of the Chinese society. Subject to the political stance of interpreters, The White-Haired Girl was approved by one group as a representative proletariat work and criticised by another as a work contaminated by bourgeois ideas (Wang 2010, 43–44). Despite the adamant support from Zhou Enlai, the debate caused the performance of the ballet adaptation to suspend in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started (J. Yang 2010, 121). Clearly, the life or death of the work in a given historical context is not dependent upon its artistic merits but on the political interpretation of its ‘functions and implications’. To be sure, Zhou Enlai was a top CCP leader, but during the chaos between 1966 and 1976, the Gang of Four, as the core of the Cultural Revolution group, has exercised power that was beyond the normal communist leadership regime. One way of circumventing the Gang of Four, it seemed, was to acquire the direct endorsement of Mao Zedong, whose deification peaked during the Cultural Revolution.

On 24 April 1967, amid the ongoing debate, Shanghai Dance School had an opportunity to stage their ballet performance of The White-Haired Girl to an audience including Mao Zedong and his wife Jiang Qing (People’s Daily 1967). The performance featured scenes of deification of Mao, which was typical of the Cultural Revolution. When Xi’er was liberated from the wild, against the backdrop of a rising sun, a chorus was heard in the background: ‘The sun is up; it is gloriously radiant; the sun is Mao Zedong! The sun is Communist Party!’ (Review 1967) Such unmistakable political messages foregrounded the role of art as political discourse and the fact that artistic adaptation tends to make an artwork more politicised to serve its evolving, contemporary context. They explicitly translated political discourse into theatrical performance (or vice versa), and their incorporation into a ballet performance is a clear example of Mao’s cultural principle ‘making the foreign serve China’ (Sharma 1960, 362). The next day, the photo of Mao standing among the performers dominated Chinese newspapers, which effectively terminated the debate about The White-Haired Girl. Jiang Qing immediately added the ballet to her list of model plays (Y. Li 2015a, 2015b). In this case, not only were the adaptation and production of the artwork intrinsically political, but its consumption, endorsement and reception were also politically motivated.

A text does not grow out of a vacuum (Lefevere 1992, 86). Instead, it is always born into a context, of which it is part and which is in turn, part of it (Kristeva 1980, 36). The study of their close relations could thus be summarised as the contextuality of texts and textuality of contexts (Qi 2018, 2). This is even more conspicuous in intersemiotic translation. The ballet adaptation of The White-Haired Girl not only has the original written story as its source text, it also necessarily refers back to the opera version and the movie adaptation of the story. As such, it has multiple source texts, to all of which it bears some resemblance, but with all of which it also differs, in terms of verbal elements in the story as well as non-verbal and multimodal elements in the performance. Significantly, due to its increasingly explicit political function during the Cultural Revolution, it creatively interacts with the sociohistorical context of the time, by textualizing, through intersemiotic translation, the reimagined and idealised characters of Xi’er and Yang Bailao by the Gang of the Four and the deification of Mao Zedong. To a certain extent, the historical context of the time also forms part of the source text for the ballet adaptation, and hence its unique features from all the other intersemiotic versions of The White-Haired Girl.

5. The White-Haired Girl and ballet diplomacy

The transmedial adaptations of The White-Haired Girl have also been actively employed for the purpose of cultural diplomacy, further underlining the artwork’s political ‘functions and implications’. The movie adaptation was screened in many countries around the world, and the ballet version has been performed not only for foreign leaders visiting China, but also for overseas audiences when the Chinese ballet troupe toured other countries. In China, the term ‘ballet diplomacy’ was closely related to The White-Haired Girl, despite two different versions of the narrative. One version has it that ballet diplomacy refers to the active role played by the Japanese Matsuyama troupe’s ballet adaptation of the Chinese opera in the China-Japan friendship (Qi 2023). The second version refers to Shanghai Dance School’s performance of their own ballet adaptation in Japan in 1972 which subsequently led to the normalisation of the bilateral relations between China and Japan (Clark 2008, 297).

The birth of the Japanese adaptation by Matsuyama Ballet Troupe was somewhat fortuitous. It originated from Shimizu’s encounter with the Chinese movie version of The White-Haired Girl, which was given by Zhou Enlai as a gift to a group of Japanese parliamentarians who secretly visited Beijing in 1952 (Yamada 2007, 102). After viewing the movie, Shimizu was deeply impressed by the story and saw its potential in becoming a ballet, and thanks to the assistance of communist artists from both China and Japan, he finished the choreographing in 1955 (Shimizu 1985, 37). In Japan, the audience of Matsuyama’s ballet adaptation was confined mainly to working demographics such as peasants, miners and young students, but in China, it achieved much greater success (Yamada 2007). Many CCP leaders including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai have watched Matsuyama’s performance, and the ballet troupe was regularly invited to tour Chinese cities, even during the Cultural Revolution when foreign art groups were extremely rare in China (Qi 2023, 23).

One would assume that Chinese politicians could not exert their political influence on the artistic adaptation of The White-Haired Girl outside their jurisdictions, and by a foreign ballet troupe. However, CCP’s engagement with Matsuyama was essentially politically driven. To the CCP, the Matsuyama version of The White-Haired Girl was most significant not for its theatrical merits, but for its value in raising awareness of China–Japan connections and relations between the two peoples. In addition, the CCP did contribute to the revision of the Japanese adaptation. For example, in the original Chinese story, Xi’er was rescued by soldiers of the Eight Route Army, but Matsuyama presented it as the People’s Liberation Army in performances on their 1968 tour in China. This discrepancy, which was not significant or meaningful to the ballet’s target audience in Japan, did not constitute an error in artistic terms. Nevertheless, the CCP official Xiao Xiangqian raised his objections about it to Shimizu and demanded that it be corrected to remain faithful to the historical truth as in the original story (Shimizu 1985, 126). In the Chinese context, the original story had been rewritten and recontextualised multiple times to cater to the political interpretation of different historical moments. This means that the story of The White-Haired Girl was rightly considered fictional rather than a historical document. However, when Xiao made his comments on the infidelity of the Japanese ballet adaptation, he was approaching the story primarily from a historical or political perspective. His intolerance of the foreign adaptation of the Chinese story is thus eloquent evidence for the work’s nature or function as political discourse in international cultural exchange.

Such pursuit of political correctness in intersemiotic translations of revolutionary works is important in the communist context of China, particularly because The White-Haired Girl has also been routinely performed for foreign leaders who were in China for state visits. Zhou Enlai was believed to have watched the Chinese ballet adaptation of the story for as many as 17 times (M. Li and Yan 1995, 34). One of the reasons was that he accompanied many visiting leaders when they were entertained by Chinese theatrical performances. For example, Zhou watched the ballet version of The White-Haired Girl together with Mehmet Shehu (Chairman of Council of Ministers, Albania), Nicolae Ceaușescu (President of Romania), Phạm Văn Đồng (Prime Minster of Vietnam), Haile Selassie (Emperor of Ethiopia), Norodom Sihanouk (King of Cambodia), and Jaafar Muhammad an-Nimeiry (President of Sudan), among others (Wang 2010, 25). In other words, the Chinese ballet adaptation was directly sponsored by the communist government and served a diplomatic mission, which is understandably less tolerant of political inaccuracies.

Despite the disruption to cultural exchange caused by the Cultural Revolution, Chinese ballet troupes performed The White-Haired Girl in several countries in 1971 (Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia) and 1972 (North Korea and Japan) (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 73–74). In the post-Cultural Revolution era, the Shanghai Dance Troupe was the first Chinese art delegation on an overseas mission: they toured France and Canada in 1977 to perform The White-Haired Girl (Wang 2010, 100). Since then, the Chinese ballet has been staged in many countries including Indonesia (1995), Australia and Singapore (1996), and the US (2002) (J. Yang 2010, 160). Among these overseas tours, the most widely acclaimed is the second version of ballet diplomacy.

In 1972, influenced by the US President Nixon’s visit to China, there was growing desire in Japan for a normalised bilateral relationship with China (Hatch 2008). Invited by the Japan–China Cultural Exchange Association, Shanghai Dance Troupe visited Japan in July 1972 (Lu 2018). Although the visit was in the name of cultural exchange, the CCP’s arrangement made the mission conspicuously political. Sun Pinghua, who was at the time in a May 7 Cadre School² in the countryside of Shandong Province to undertake re-education through labour, was appointed the head of the Chinese delegation (L. Yang 2022). Sun was a seasoned communist official in dealing with Japan-related affairs, and his appointment was personally made by Zhou Enlai, with the approval by Mao Zedong (Wang 2010, 86).

When Sun and his delegation left for Japan by way of Hong Kong, the election of a new Japanese government was still in progress, but by the time they arrived in Tokyo, the new Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka has already sworn in (L. Yang 2022). At a press conference in Tokyo, Sun was candid about his role when answering questions from journalists. He acknowledged his total ignorance about ballet, saying that he had not even watched the ballet version of The White-Haired Girl, despite being the head of the delegation. His main focus on the trip, he explained, was to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 123). When pressed for clarification about which new friends he hoped to meet, Sun mentioned frankly key figures of the new Japanese government, including Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira (Q. Zhang, Zhang, and Chen 2016, 123). On 22 July, the Japanese Foreign Minister Ohira met with Sun and ‘both sides exchanged views in a friendly manner on the normalisation of China–Japan diplomatic relations’ (Review 1972a). This was followed by Prime Minister Tanaka’s meeting with Sun on 15 August, the day before the Chinese delegation’s planned departure from Japan. At that meeting, Prime Minister Tanaka confirmed his intention to visit China in the near future. A month later, Tanaka visited Beijing and the bilateral relations normalised between the two countries (L. Yang 2022).

Superficially, Sun’s political mission may not seem to have much to do with the ballet The White-Haired Girl. However, it must be pointed out that the political mission was attached to, and enabled by, the cultural event, for which the ballet performance was a core element. In the absence of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, cultural exchange serves as a convenient mediator for the official visit by Sun Pinghua. Essentially, just as CCP’s appointment of Sun was based on Sun’s political capital and expertise, the selection of The White-Haired Girl for the performance tour in Japan was also based on the ballet’s political nature and connection. It is precisely the functions and implications of the artistic adaptation in its given context that define it as political discourse.

Therefore, when the political context on which the ballet is relied has evolved, The White-Haired Girl gradually lost its relevance to the audience. In 1981, when the Shanghai Dance Troupe performed The White-Haired Girl in Qingdao, they were booed by the audience (Wang 2010, 112). Since 1978, China has gradually implemented the Reform and Open-up policy, which introduced new and diverse cultural ideas and products into China. With the historical context for The White-Haired Girl fading into the background in the Chinese society, the political discourse as represented in the story no longer resonated with the new generation of theatregoers. Consequently, since the 1980s, The White-Haired Girl was only staged from time to time, mainly on occasions to celebrate political milestones such as the anniversaries of Mao’s Yan’an Talks.

6. Concluding remarks

Translation research will benefit from an expanded definition of political discourse to account for literary and artistic works that have political ‘functions and implications’. In this expanded understanding, literature and art as political discourse has two aspects to it: the intended political function and the actual political function. Ideally, the two aspects may remain in alignment, but in reality, the actual political function can be a far cry from the intended function, due to the often evolving and capricious contexts of consumption by individuals.

The first aspect involves the incorporation or ‘translation’ of political intention and messages into the literary and artistic works. In the case study of The White-Haired Girl, this process was participated by authors and artists as active translators of the CCP’s politic agendas (e.g. Mao’s Talks), and political figures as invisible co-translators. This is not a linear process, which remains dynamic as new participants make their contributions and as the literary or artistic work keeps trespassing medial borders.

The other aspect of literature and art as political discourse refers to the reception and interpretation of the embedded political messages when the literary or artistic products are disseminated and consumed. This could vary greatly depending on the context and target audience. For foreign audiences such as the government officials visiting China who were entertained by the CCP with the ballet adaptation of The White-Haired Girl, the nuanced political messages that are specific to the Chinese context may not be relatable. However, the message to the outside world that western artistic forms could be and had been creatively employed to serve the Chinese is fundamentally of a political nature. What makes a literary or artistic work political is not just the work and the actors involved, but also the context and function.

Intersemiotic translation often has multiple source texts. When The White-Haired Girl was choreographed into a ballet in the 1960s, it has all the texts before it as potential source texts, including the movie adaptation, the opera version, the first written publication as well as the oral story before that. With all their different medial forms, the different intersemiotic versions of the story can only complement each other, but none would be able to substitute the other. There is an intrinsic intertextual relationship between them, and each of the adaptations will also bear traces of the social context in which it was born. In the case of The White-Haired Girl, this process of textualising the context of its various intersemiotic translations represents its history of politicisation.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2024.2350782.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lintao Qi

Lintao Qi is Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the Master of Interpreting and Translation Studies at Monash University, Australia. His research focuses on the role of translation in literary migration, cultural encounters and sociopolitical interactions, including translation in the service of cultural diplomacy, and translation in the context of censorship. He is author of Jin Ping Mei English Translations: Texts, Paratexts and Contexts (Routledge, 2018), co-editor (with Dr. Leah Gerber) of A Century of Chinese Literature in Translation: English Publication and Reception (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor (with Dr. Shani Tobias) of Encountering China’s Past: Translation and Dissemination of Classical Chinese Literature (Springer, 2022). He has published papers in various journals such as Adaptation, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Target, and Perspectives.

Notes

1. The Gang of Four was a powerful political faction composed of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, who were the leaders of the Cultural Revolution.

2. May 7 Cadre Schools are farms set up during the Cultural Revolution in accordance with Mao Zedong’s May 7, 1966 Directive. The Directive calls for cadres in the urban areas to go to these farms to perform manual labour and undergo ideological re-education (Review 1972b).