A new opera about Zhou Enlai says a lot about the state of public art in today’s China
music academy this month unveiled a full-length, Western-style opera about Zhou Enlai. The puzzle is that it took this long. Opera is arguably the only art form big enough to capture the contradictions of this brilliant moral failure of a man, Mao Zedong’s prime minister for over a quarter century.
When Zhou died in 1976 he was beloved by Chinese who did not know him well. Vast throngs of Beijingers filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of that year to mourn him, risking arrests and police beatings to remember a leader they credited with moderating the worst excesses of that fanatical era. Their lamentations were also a coded attack on ultra-leftist zealots who were circling the ailing Mao, now that Zhou was gone. Some praise was merited.
Alas, “Zhou Enlai” the opera, which premiered on October 15th in the former Red Army base of Yan’an, fails to capture the sweep of that life. This shrill, empty work—which Chaguan watched on October 20th at a gala performance in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province—says more about the state of public art in today’s China.
These cartoonish scenes involve both omissions—the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution are not mentioned and Mao is never seen—and distortions of the historical record. The real Zhou at the real Bandung Conference committed China to non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and cast America’s nuclear arsenal as the greatest threat to world peace.
Audience reactions show a generational divide. Though all spectators described an idealised Zhou, sketched out in the broad strokes of party propaganda, older Chinese at least nodded to the idea that the former prime minister suffered for the sake of the revolution, while trying to mitigate Mao’s worst mistakes. “He swallowed humiliations and bore a heavy burden,” murmured one old man, explaining his admiration for Zhou as he left the performance.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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