When Folk Dance Was Radical: Cold War Yangge, World Youth Festivals, and Overseas Chinese Leftist Culture in the 1950s and 1960s

Headnote

ABSTRACT This article challenges three common assumptions about Chinese socialist-era dance culture: first, that Mao-era dance rarely circulated internationally and was disconnected from international dance trends; second, that the yangge movement lost momentum in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC); and, third, that the political significance of socialist dance lies in content rather than form. This essay looks at the transformation of wartime yangge into PRC folk dance during the 1950s and 1960s and traces the international circulation of these new dance styles in two contexts: the World Festivals of Youth and Students in Eastern Europe, and the schools, unions, and clan associations of overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and San Francisco. By tracing the emergence and circulation of yangge and PRC folk dance, I propose the existence of "Cold War yangge" - a transnational phenomenon in which Chinese folk dance became a site of leftist political activism.

KEYWORDS: Chinese folk dance, World Festivals of Youth and Students (World Youth Festivals), global Cold War, Overseas Chinese, Sinophone socialism, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, anti-communism, Eastern Europe, PRC history.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)

Introduction

The idea that China was culturally insular and "closed off from the world" between the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the launch of Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the late 1970s is a common misconception that has been widely challenged in recent scholarship.1 Not only did China engage in frequent cultural exchange with other socialist bloc countries during this period, there was also significant cultural traffic between China and many parts of the capitalist and non-aligned world, especially in places with large Chinese diasporic communities and active struggles against colonial regimes. On both sides of the Cold War, culture served as a potent medium for political and ideological mobilisation, often with the express purpose of building alliances across borders. China was an active participant in this process, and this led to the rapid transnational circulation of Chinese leftist culture.

Prior to the founding of the PRC, one of the most important mediums for the spread of Chinese leftist culture domestically was yangge (⅜ ¾ also known as yangko), a type of Han folk song and dance from rural...