Xiaofei Kang's "Enchanted Revolution"

Xiaofei Kang is Associate Professor of Religion at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China and co-author of Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion, and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland.

Kang applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953, and reported the following:

Religion has been commonly upheld as the archenemy of Communist revolutions around the world. Enchanted Revolution, however, goes beyond the familiar stories of suppression and resistance. It examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender, and revolutionary propaganda in the Chinese Communist Party’s quick rise to dominance from the 1940s to the early 1950s. The book demonstrates how Party propaganda deployed religious resources to implement Mao’s mass-line politics. Furthermore, it shows how the Party relied on traditional tropes of demonology and ritual exorcism to construct a new gendered narrative of salvation for the revolution.

Page 99 captures a critical moment in this process of propaganda production. It discusses a popular news story during the Party’s campaign to eliminate village shamans in 1944. The news story reports how grassroots Communist cadres successfully arrested a shaman villain who had presumably sent out a “Red-Shoed Demoness” to haunt people at night and to wreak havoc in village life. The proclaimed Party victory in the news story encounters unsettling realities on page 99. First, legal and ethnographic sources reveal that instead of incarceration, the shaman actually fled and resumed a prosperous career in the neighboring county. The shaman’s quick return to his trade suggests that the Party’s campaign may have barely scratched the surface of local society. Second, while the shaman faded from the campaign, popular fascination with female ghosts and ritual exorcism kept the “Red-Shoed Demoness” alive. Propaganda workers were compelled to create multiple versions of the same story, all revolving around the irresistable charm of the demoness that they were supposed to eradicate from rural life.

Page 99 comes from Chapter 5 of this nine-chapter book. The titular heroine, the “Red-Shoed Demoness,” appears in the aforementioned Party newspaper report, a folk drama, and two folk storytelling tales during the Communist campaign in 1944. The demoness stands at the center of multiple intersections: between Party directives and stage performances, between the historical narrative of ritual exorcism and the campaign’s political contingencies, and between rural “superstition” and the revolution’s anti-superstition claims. The different ways to tell the same ghost story testify that the Communist construction of a new rural culture rested on a foundation of the underlying attraction to its audience of ghosts, shamans, and exorcistic battles between officials and spirits. Moving from Chapter 5 to the final two chapters of the book, one will find that female ghosts evolved into a critical trope in the Maoist metanarrative of revolution. To save the female ghosts would be to liberate the peasants in the land reform, to civilize the minority nationalities on the ethnic borderlands, and to deliver the Chinese people from the historical darkness of class oppression to a new world busked in Mao’s radiant sun. Chinese religion was therefore not so much shunned as it defined the Maoist discourse of revolution.

Learn more about Enchanted Revolution at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue