The importance of opera in late imperial and modern China cannot be overemphasized, as it involved all social classes, dominated Chinese cultural life in both urban and rural settings, and shaped social values. In recent decades, studies of Chinese operas have produced remarkable scholarship, to which Hsiao-t'i Li's book Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China is a new addition. What distinguishes Li's book from other recent scholarship is his macro social analysis, focus on intellectual discourses, and emphasis on continuity and change. The book charts the changing role of opera in society in the context of twentieth-century Chinese reform and revolution: from the traditional gentry-literati notion of jiaohua (moral transformation), through the reformist and May Fourth discourse of enlightenment, and finally to the revolutionary and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tool of political mobilization and revolutionary propaganda.
Chapter 1 builds on Tanaka Issei's influential socioeconomic analysis of Chinese opera and...
