Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

prejudices against women. One accusation levelled at Jiang was that
she lived with men without getting married. However this could also
be seen as modern, progressive and revolutionary at that time. A
further counter to the accusation is to ask whether men are accused of
the same crime. Lan argues that it is not fair to accuse Jiang of marrying
Mao to advance herself. A woman cannot marry anyone without
having to answer charges of an ulterior motive. Liu Shaoqi married
five times and yet that was a non-issue in the official discourse.
Jiang Qing and the arts
Jiang Qing is often accused of not only being a third-rate actress but also
of being responsible for wiping out artistic expression and creativity. This
again is widely repudiated in the e-media. Yang Chunxia (2006), the main
female actor in the opera The Azalea Mountain, argues that the model
Peking operas, largely initiated by Jiang Qing, are still unsurpassed as
monumental productions. Ting Guang (2006) even asserts that the model
Peking operas were an unprecedented achievement in the history of
Chinese literature and arts. What Jiang was trying to do, with the full
support of Mao because the latter found her ideas inspirational, was to
create new arts both in contents and forms. The experiment of the Peking
opera clearly shows that Jiang and her followers were trying to achieve
something new by combing three elements into one organic performance
art: revolutionary content (women’s liberation and participation in society
as in The White Haired Girl and The Red Regiment of the Woman’s Army),
traditional Chinese art (Peking opera) and Western techniques of artistic
expression (ballet and wind and string music instruments). Of course
Jiang Qing could not take all the credit for this unprecedented artistic
revolutionary enterprise. Other Chinese artists had been doing this for
decades, even before the well-known talk given at an art forum in Yan’an
by Mao in 1942. But it was Mao who articulated this effort by popularizing
the idea of Yang wei zhong yong, gu wei jin yong (to use the foreign to
serve the Chinese and the past to serve the present). Jiang Qing was one
of the most articulate and most persistent in pursuing this goal. Because
of this she made many enemies among the artistic elite.
Resistance to revolutionary arts
THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
There was a powerful conservative establishment in the literary and arts
circles that not only wanted to maintain the content and form of the arts
that they know and cherish but also hated those who wanted to make
changes. It was precisely for this reason that Mao criticized the pre-
Cultural Revolution arts establishment in China for their failure to
produce literature and arts along the lines that were sketched out in his
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