Studies on Contemporary ChinaThis series is edited at the Contemporary China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which is currently Britain's leading centre for Chinese studies. They hope to make the series one of the foremost collections of work on twentieth-century China in the world. Thebooks, by scholars worldwide, are selected for the series by an editorial board. They embrace a wide variety of topics, including economic development, politics and ideology, literature and art, and diplomatic international relations.This book is a pioneering study of the origins of the Chinese Communist Party's cultural policy and the development of the Chinese model of cultural modernization. It traces the development of Marxist literary theory in China and its application to the problems of propagandizing a mass audience ofilliterate peasants. The author looks in particular at the transformation of the folk dance and folk play in the Party's base areas during the 1940s.During this period, the CCP launched a series of mass campaigns in the arts designed to bring the benefits of the new culture to the peasantry, and to weld society in the base areas of North China into a cohesive political force. A key feature of these artistic movements was the way in which theParty sought to transform the traditional performing arts. While only partly successful artistically, these developments contributed to the Communists' propaganda victory in the Civil War and paved the way for their nationwide drive for cultural popularization after 1949.This is the first book-length study to investigate these crucial developments in depth. The author marshals an impressive array of contemporary sources and later reminiscences to investigate the link between policy formation and artistic practice.