Gansu: regions. Source.

The province of Gansu was chronically poor even before the horrifying abuses its people suffered under Maoism, culminating in (but not limited to) the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961. Nor should we forget the non-Chinese ethnic inhabitants of the region, who were targeted just as brutally through the period—see under Recent posts on Tibet, notably for Amdo (e.g. Labrang, here and here).

I was again reminded of Gansu by Ian Johnson’s fine book Sparks, highlighting a brave group of students in Tianshui denouncing the heartless, mendacious Party during the 1960 famine. Here I’ll reiterate themes that I began to explore in China: memory. music, and society, the Maoist labour-camp system, Famine and expressive culture, and Cultural Revolutions.

Many documents on Gansu are to be found in Yang Jisheng’s definitive exposé Tombstone, as well as the China famine 1959–1961 site. Before the studies of Frank Dikötter (Mao’s great famine) and Xun Zhou, Jasper Becker already gave a useful introduction to the disaster in Gansu in his 1996 book Hungry ghosts.

The Hexi corridor, leading deeper into the oasis towns of Central Asia, is perhaps most widely known by the early Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang, projecting a proud image of the glories of ancient Chinese culture. So again Ian Johnson does well to remind us of the memoirs of Gao Ertai, revealing bitter political turmoil there in the 1960s.

Looking again at this undated image (in the “Instrumental music” [sic] volumes of the Anthology) from the Qingshui Bureau of Culture (“Welcoming Water ritual of Huashan Daoists” 清水道教华山派科仪中的“迎水”), I surmise it was taken in the 1980s.

I’ve long felt that Gansu was a major lacuna in coverage of household Daoist ritual. I’ve noted recent developments in Wuwei (Another Daoist debate), and in Jingyuan county northeast of Lanzhou (Maoist worship in Gansu). Counties where some of the most active Daoist groups are based, such as Zhangye, Jingtai, and Tongwei, are among those where the famine was particularly severe (for the famine in Tongwei, see e.g. Dikötter pp.307–9).

More images from the “instrumental music” volumes of the Anthology for Gansu:
Daoists of the Daode guan temple, Zhangye county;
Cao Jixiang’s Daoist band performing the Ten Offerings ritual, Jingtai county;
Cao Jixiang’s band seated.

However, most scholars of Daoism still gravitate to the image of imperial grandeur, focusing on manuscripts with ancient ancestry rather than documenting transmission history since the mid-20th century, or people’s lives. But whether we’re interested in Daoist ritual before 1949 or before the Song dynasty, the condition in which we find it today is permeated by the bitter experiences of its practitioners and patrons since the 1950s.

The range of expressive culture in Gansu—folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, shawm bands, and so on, embodies the sound of suffering. Vignettes on some genres include

• Chinese shadows: the amazing world of shadow puppetry in rural northwest China
• Songs from Gansu, and blind bards
• note on the performance of “precious scrolls” in Gansu under Folk and temple ritual in Ningxia.

For Gansu in recent Chinese movies, see

•  Return to dust (Li Ruijun)
•  One second (Zhang Yimou).

In such extreme conditions of social disintegration, it seems most unlikely that anyone could muster any energy to perform, either for ceremonial or entertainment—but even in extremis (indeed, particularly in extremis), villagers resorted to their religious traditions, staging rituals to alleviate adversity and to resist collectivisation (note The temple of memories); and (as in Hunan and Hebei) refugee groups banded into itinerant folk performing troupes in a desperate bid to survive. Not just local archives, but some published county gazetteers (like that of Yanggao in north Shanxi), give impressively frank accounts of the famine years.

Source.

The great Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples may be flawed, but if used selectively it can yield useful material—particularly the Monographs on Opera and Narrative-singing (as I explain in my extensive review of the whole project, cited here). The Appendices of the Narrative-singing Monograph for Hunan reproduce concerned documents from regional Cultural Bureaus over the period, providing startling evidence of social disruption. I discuss the equivalent volume for Gansu in a separate post, but the Opera Monograph (Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Gansu juan 中国戏曲志, 甘肃卷 [1995]) doesn’t include such documents. The introductory Overview, under “Opera in Gansu since the founding of the PRC” (pp.25–34) has terse hints at the crisis.

Right from the 1949 “Liberation”, Gansu was part of the national drive to “rescue” the rich heritage of regional genres, led by the new cultural units set up at county, regional and provincial levels (for brief accounts of a plethora of state-funded and amateur groups, note pp.436–524) . But from 1957, Party “rectification” was infecting such institutions, and the ensuing Anti-rightist campaign was bitter and destructive. Even as society collapsed further with the 1958 Great Leap, leading to the famine, opera workers were regimented to create new dramas reflecting the agenda of high socialism.

The 1959 “celebrations” around the 10th anniversary of the founding of the PRC featured new items from eleven genres—not just qinqiang and Peking opera, but regional folk styles like shadow-puppetry of south Gansu 陇南影子腔, qingshui quzi 清水曲子, Yulei huadeng xi 玉垒花灯戏, Wuwei xianxiao 武威贤孝, and daoqing from east Gansu 陇东道情. The latter was now adapted into the staged form Longju 陇剧, with a newly-formed state troupe embarking on a prestigious national tour. But

From 1960, Gansu suffered a succession of natural disasters [sic], and opera work went into crisis; with a great increase in the proportion of sick and injured, many opera troupes were unable to maintain regular activity.  Some troupes used the pretext of touring to go to Xinjiang in search of food.

Again, fleeing to the northwest was a common measure—indeed, at the time, many Uyghurs were taking refuge even further northwest in the USSR (cf. the long migration of the Dungan people).

By 1962, in a common pattern throughout China, many county-level troupes were laid off, and many artists migrated or changed trades. At the same time (cf. Hunan),

some opera troupes and informal folk opera groups used the opportunity to perform bad and forbidden operas such as Shazi bao 杀子报 and Da shangdiao 大上吊, and in some regions harmful customs (louxi 陋习) from the past like “exorcising the stage” (datai 打台, jitai 祭台, pp.594–5), and singing holy dramas (chang shenxi 唱神戏) were revived, creating an adverse social influence. After the general improvement over the whole province from 1963, this was corrected [sic].

The “chronicle of major events” for 1959 to 1964 (pp.70–75), supplemented by lists of official opera festivals for those years (pp.684–98), has a typical list of glamorous official events, giving no hint of the unfolding disaster. As ever, we have to read between the lines. With a basic awareness of the disastrous social climate, even the roster of official festivals over the period makes disturbing reading. Those chosen for the state performing troupes were in a small minority of folk artists throughout the countryside. Life in the urban troupes might provide them with a tenuous lifeline as long as they were still able to function, but institutions were becoming ever more vulnerable: with political campaigns targeting “rightists” and anyone who dared speak out, they too lived in a climate of fear. One can only imagine that even the state performers would have been severely malnourished, at the risk of being sent to labour camp, while their families back in the countryside were starving (cf. household Daoist Li Qing in north Shanxi).

Even before the imminent casualties of the early Cultural Revolution, death rates around 1960 among folk performers would have been just as high as among the general population. Although I don’t find such dates prominent among the biographies of celebrated artists in either the Opera Monograph or other volumes for Gansu, among the countless lives cut short there are doubtless tragic stories to be told—like those of (p.674, above) qinqiang performers Xin Xing’an (1930–59), who died after being “struggled” at the height of the Anti-rightist campaign, and Chen Huiying (1930–61), portrayed as working herself to death in the spirit of self-sacrifice.

* * *

Like Henan and Anhui, Gansu was an extreme case, but most of the senior performers I was meeting in other regions from 1986 to 2018 shared similar experiences that were none too simple to elicit. The adjacent region of Shaanbei, with its barren loess hills, shares a history of poverty and famine, not least under Maoism: among posts listed here, note the work of Guo Yuhua.

The famine, and the whole Maoist era, are major themes in my own work on the Gaoluo village ritual association and the Li family Daoists, and in our fieldwork in Hebei and Shanxi (see under Local ritual). There’s always a complex story to be told, as in this extraordinary 1959 image of former Buddhist monk Daguang with his young ritual disciples in North Xinzhuang village in the Beijing suburbs—at the height of the Great Leap and the famine: