The Foreign-Policy Aspect of Mei Lanfang’s Soviet Tour in 1935
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/nts.v31i2.120123Keywords:
Beijing Opera, Chinese communist party, Cultural diplomacy, Guomindang, Lu Xun, Mei Lanfang's Soviet tour 1935, Sino-Soviet diplomatic relations, Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact, Socialist realism, Theatre historiography, Yan HuiqingAbstract
The Soviet tour in 1935 of the eminent Chinese male interpreter of female roles, Mei Lanfang, attracted justified international attention as a pioneering instance of cultural and aesthetic exchange. This is not least due to the fact that it was the first time a traditional Chinese theatre troupe made a guest appearance in Europe and that so many prominent Russian and other European theatre innovators consequently eagerly followed the event and reacted to the traditional Chinese stage conventions according to their very different aesthetic points of view. Complementing my published research over the years into the details of this major intercultural stage event, in this article I reverse my perspective and almost exclusively focus on its foreign-policy context. I demonstrate that from the more pragmatic point of view of international politics at the time, another aspect of Mei’s tour was much more important: It was an act of cultural diplomacy which helped break a deadlock in foreign relations between the Soviet Union and the Republic of China, and in so doing helped facilitate their formation of a defensive military alliance in response to the rapidly increasing Japanese aggression against them both. War memories, as well as memory wars, formed part of this foreign policy staging of Mei Lanfang’s Soviet guest appearance and its subsequent documentation.
References
АА. 1935. «Приезд посла китайской республики», Правда 1 March 1935.
Barnes, Ralph W. 1935. “Chinese Troupe to Show Soviet Its Ancient Art: Mei Lan-Fang Reaches Moscow to Give Plays, and City Opens Arms.” (Moscow, March 16). New York Herald Tribune 17 March 1935 (Sunday), Section V: Drama-Art-The Screen, 2 & 4.
Braun, Otto. 1973. Chinesische Aufzeichnungen (1932-1939), Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Braun, Otto. 1982. A Comintern Agent in China 1932-1939, translated from the German by Jeanne Moore with an introduction by Dick Wilson. London: C. Hurst & Company.
Carr, Edward Hallett. 1982. The Twilight of Comintern, 1930-1935, London: Macmillan.
Chen, Percy. 1935. “High Spots of the Recent Visit of Mei Lan-fang to the Soviet Union.” Shanghai, May 13, 1935. The China Weekly Review. 72:12, 394.
Clark, Katerina. 2011. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Crowley, Edward L. (ed.) 1970. The Soviet Diplomatic Corps 1917-1967. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press.
Dallin, Alexander & Firsov, Fridrikh Igorevich (eds.) 2000. Dimitrov and Stalin 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives, Russian documents translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Ge Gongzhen & Ge Baoquan. 1935. “Mei Lanfang zai Sulian” (‘Mei Lanfang in the Soviet Union’), in: Guowen zhoubao (National News Weekly) XII-22 (10 June 1935), Shanghai. 1-14.
Heller, Mikhail & Nekrich, Aleksandr. 1986. Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated from the Russian by Phyllis B. Carlos, New York: Summit Books. The 1st ed., in Russian, was published in London in 1982.
Jacobs, Dan N. 1981. Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China, Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard University Press.
Khlevniuk, Oleg V. 2015. Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Kuo Heng-yü. 1975. Maos Weg zur Macht und die Komintern am Beispiel der Bildung der “Antijapanischen Nationalen Einheitsfront” 1931-1938. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.
Lih, Lars T., Naumov, Oleg V & Khlevniuk, Oleg V. (eds.) 1995. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Lu Hsun [Lu Xun] (1960), “The Take-Over Policy” (7 June 1934), in: Lu Hsun (1956-1960), Selected Works vol. 4. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 49-50.
Mei Lanfang. 1959. chapter 9. ‘‘Shouci fangwen Sulian Shigei Eisenstein de jiaoyi“ (‘9. First Visit to the Soviet Union and Friendship with Sergei Eisenstein’). Dianying yishu (Film Art) 5/1959, 85-88.
Mei Shaowu. 1984, Wo de fuqin Mei Lanfang (My Father Mei Lanfang). Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe.
Risum, Janne. 2001a. “Mei Lanfang: A Model for The Theatre of the Future” in: Picon-Vallin и Щербаков (eds.) 2001. Meyerhold, la mise en scène dans le siècle, Moskva: OGI, 258-283.
Risum, Janne. 2001b. ‘Brechts “kinesiske” Verfremdung: Hvordan og hvorfor‘ [‘Brecht’s “Chinese” Verfremdung: How and Why’], in: Alette Scavenius & Stig Jarl (eds.) 2001. SceneSkift: Det 20. århundredes teater i Europa, København: Multivers, 194-206.
Risum, Janne. 2008. The Mei Lanfang Effect, Doctoral Thesis, Aarhus: Aarhus University. ISBN 978-87-87906-71-5. An enlarged edition is under publication.
Risum, Janne. 2016. “Press Reviews of Mei Lanfang in the Soviet Union, 1935, by Female Writers: Neher Versus Shaginyan.” in: CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 35:2, 114-133.
Li Zhan [Risum, Janne] 2018. “4 yue 14 ri (Zhouri) Sulian duiwai wenhua jiaoliu xiehui zuotanhui: fayanzhe yu fayan neirong de zhongzhong mituan” [The Forum on Sunday 14 April at the All-Soviet Society for Cultural Exchange with Foreign Countries: Speakers, Content, Myths], translated by Feng Wei. Xiqu Yishu 39:4 (November), 6-31.
Shum Kui-Kwong. 1988. The Chinese Communists’ Road to Power: The Anti-Japanese United Front, 1935-1945. Hong Kong/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Schlögel, Karl. 2008. Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937. München: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Wu, Aitchen K. 1950. China and the Soviet Union: A Study of Sino-Soviet Relations, foreword by W.W. Yen. London: Methuen. ‘Appendices’, 347-421 (Sino-Soviet agreements).
Yen, W.W. [Yan Huiqing] 1940. “Some Aspects of China’s Relations with the Soviet Union, Asiatic Review, XXXVI, August, 338-345.
Yen, W.W. [Yan Huiqing] 1974. East-West Kaleidoscope, 1877-1946: An Autobiography. New York: St. John’s University.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The copyright belongs to the authors and Nordic Theatre Studies. Users can use, reuse and build upon the material published in the journal but only for non-commercial purposes. Users are allowed to link to the files, download the files, distribute the files on a local network (preferably by links), upload the files to local repositories if their institutions require them to do so, but not republish the files without proper agreements with the journal and the author.