Daniel Andrews asked to stop ballet Red Detachment of Women

Local Chinese have called on Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews to withdraw his endorsement of Maoist propaganda.

A scene from the ballet Richard Nixon witnessed in Beijing in 1972. Picture: Getty Images

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is being implored to reconsider backing “fascist aesthetics” after saying he “couldn’t be more thrilled” to host the Maoist ballet The Red Detachment of Women in Melbourne.

Chinese-Australian members of the Australian Values Alliance have already successfully opposed concerts celebrating Mao Zedong planned for Sydney and Melbourne town halls last month, causing their cancellation. Now they are drawing up a petition against four Australian performances of The Red Detachment of Women by the National Ballet of China in February at the Melbourne Arts Centre.

This debate — which Andrews may not have anticipated when signing off on a release that merely appeared to commend a cultural blockbuster — raises the question as to when propaganda becomes art, and vice versa.

It’s also an issue being invigorated within China with the return under President Xi Jinping to a greater respect for the three Mao decades, which he insists should not be considered less valuable than the Deng Xiaoping-inspired decades that followed. Mao-era works are being dusted off, with an opulent presentation of Cultural Revolution music controversially presented to a sold-out house at the Great Hall of the People a few months ago in Beijing, when two anthems to Xi’s greatness were also performed.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s third wife, former actress Jiang Qing, one of the Gang of Four, ruled that eight yangbanxi, model operas or ballets, were the only works that could be performed in public.

The most famous of these was The Red Detachment, which was based on a popular film released in 1962, winning from the government a First Hundred Flowers award — in reference to Mao’s invitation to “let a hundred flowers bloom”, encouraging creative thinkers and writers to express their feelings about his revolution. The campaign led to the mass arrest, imprisonment and execution of three million artists and academics dubbed as “rightists” (including Ai Weiwei’s poet father Ai Qing, who was exiled). The film The Red Detachment of Women was based on a 1958 novel by Liang Xin, in turn based on the formation of an all-woman Red Army company in 1931 on Hainan, China’s subtropical island province south of Hong Kong.

One apparent reason for its instant popularity was the then rare sight of women’s legs — the detachment wears grey military bermuda shorts.

One of the founders of the Australian Values Alliance, Shanghai migrant John Hu, tells The Australian: “The Chinese community is divided by their political opinions and many other matters. But we believe if you live here you should at least agree to the values of Australia — and if you don’t like this country’s values, and think constantly of another place as your country, then go back there.”

Hu summarises these values based on those supplied for immigrants by the federal government as freedom, democracy, equality and tolerance. The alliance says The Red Detachment was orchestrated by Jiang “to brainwash civilians during the horror of the Cultural Revolution”.

“All other traditional arts were banned and erased spiritually and physically from the national memory,” it says, with the ballet “designed to attack traditional Chinese civilisation itself, and all artistic freedom”.

The show concludes with a stirring rendition of the communist anthem The Internationale: “Arise ye workers from your slumbers/Arise ye prisoners of want … We want no condescending saviours/To rule us from their judgment hall … The law oppresses us and tricks us, / The wage slave system drains our blood …”

When he described hosting the show as a “coup”, Andrews also said: “The Red Detachment of Women has captivated audiences around the world for decades, and now for the very first time in Australia, this iconic work will be staged in the arts and cultural capital of our country.”

Victoria is the only state government to formalise a deal with the Chinese government to present such performances: a year ago, Andrews signed a five-year cultural exchange agreement with Culture Minister Luo Shugang.

The Australian Values Alliance says, however, that “it is inappropriate for any Australian government institution to sponsor such an attack against our main values and national identity”.

The plot, it says, is about “brutal revenge, mass slaughter of land owners, confiscation of private properties and looting the wealthy by the Red Army. It uses women as stage props. It is a venting of anti-humanitarian values.”

It was shelved following Mao’s death in 1976 and Jiang’s arrest as one of the Gang of Four.

According to the alliance, the work was revived after the Tiananmen Square deaths in 1989 in order “to restrain Western ideology”. But it is rarely performed in China, where such works remain highly contentious, and the other seven yangbanxi have virtually disappeared from sight.

The National Ballet of China’s production, mainly toured overseas, is full of colour and energy. It appears vigorously unapologetic, as is necessary for the coherence of a narrative that lacks shade, and where the characters are either evil or courageous. Audiences may perceive elements of camp knowingness. But they would have to bring such sentiments to the theatre with them. The production provides no visible sign that it is intended as pastiche.

A note of irony is more clearly present in John Adams’s appropriation of a scene from the ballet for his 1987 opera, Nixon in China, which depicts Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger being taken to view the ballet during their historic visit to Beijing in 1972.

Li Cunxin, the artistic director of Queensland Ballet, inevitably performed in the ballet, as it was one of the few permitted works during his earliest years as a dancer. It’s shown in a sequence in his filmed story, Mao’s Last Dancer.

The ballet tells the story of Wu Qionghua, the daughter of a peasant unable to pay his rent. She is whipped and left for dead by the landlord, rescued by the Red Army detachment; she then not only avenges herself by killing the tyrant but joins in the overthrow of the entire social system. Peasants kneel in adulation to the communist soldiers. Military triumph inaugurates an era of prosperity, order and gender equality.

The ballet was first staged only a few years after Mao’s Great Leap Forward triggered the worst man-made famine in human history, killing about 30 million people.

The controversy around the show — which follows well-received performances of Raise the Red Lantern in 2010 and The Peony Pavilion in 2012 by the Chinese National Ballet — risks overshadowing Melbourne’s inaugural Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, of which it is a core ­element.

Five years ago, while protesting a New York performance of The Detachment, Wei Jingsheng, who was imprisoned for 18 years after posting an eloquent essay on Beijing’s short-lived “Democracy Wall”, said: “It reminds me of the horrible violence and hatred of the Cultural Revolution era. I am shocked that they would perform this.

“If you think this is simply art, that’s already dangerous. The Chinese Communist Party itself says that the purpose of art is to serve politics …

“If you simply try to appreciate the artistry, then you’re already going along with the CCP.”

Controversy is often good for box office. But in this case there may be a credibility cost that reaches up to the Premier, depending on a verdict over whether even vibrant propaganda can be viewed as art.