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Three different Chinese plays have been based on the story about slavery that Harriet Beecher Stowe devised in 1852. The three works-by Zeng Xiaogu (1907), by Ouyang Quyian (1957), and by Nick Rongju Yu (2007, translated here)-are each representative of important issues in Chinese culture at the time the scripts were created. By considering these works we can understand the struggles of the dramatists of each period and their cries for freedom.
Black Slave's Cry to Heaven and the Birth of Spoken Drama
The first version of the story was used to reflect the abjection of China in her anticolonial struggle at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907 in Tokyo, members of the Chinese student organization the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu She) staged a play called Heinu yutian lu (Black Slave's Cry to Heaven) by Zeng Xiaogu based on a 1901 Chinese translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Lin Shu and Wei Yi.
This production is generally regarded as the beginning of the Chinese spoken drama (huaju). It was not the first Western-style play performed in China: as early as the 1860s, amateur dramatic clubs organized by the expatriate communities in Shanghai were staging Western plays, but these performances had little impact on the local community or development of modern Chinese drama. By the 1890s Chinese students at Shanghai's missionary schools began to put on modern-style plays without the songs and dances of traditional xiqu, including ones that they wrote themselves (see Ge 1997: 2-10). Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also advocated the introduction of Western fiction and drama along with Western science and technology to China as a part of their reform program. Liang Qichao (1873 -1929), scholar, journalist, philosopher, and visionary, in his famous essay "On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People" (1902), calls for the reform of fiction: "If we want to improve our governance, we must start with the reform of fiction. If we want to rejuvenate our people, we must begin with a new fiction." 1 Liang attributed so much power to fiction because it is widely read and can motivate its readers. Other reformers considered drama even more effective than fiction in bringing about social changes, because even...