One of the well-known Chinese revolutionary classics The White-Haired Girl (baimaonü, 白毛女) has gone through different adaptations as a propaganda of Chinese Communist Party from the 1940s to the 1960s. In recent years, the 2011 and 2015 operas are presented by the Ministry of Culture. The 2015 opera became especially widely known for Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan’s involvement as an artistic director. What is the purpose of remaking this outdated propaganda in post-socialist China? How can these new adaptations work effectively as a means of propaganda? My study on the new adaptations of the White-Haired Girl (hereafter WHG) can serve as an example of the changes of the propaganda in the age of post-socialism. To do so, this study will use the 2011 opera and the TV reportage program which analyzes the 2011 and 2015 opera in the following ways: examine the 2011 opera as a representative work of the 21stcentury adaptations and focus on the TV reportage program Cultural Focus (Wenhuashidian, 文化视点) which demonstrates the intention of the production through interviewing the main artists and staffs of the 2011 and 2015 operas, and the Chinese public. By doing so, I argue that the emphasis of propaganda is switched from class struggle to social harmony in the 2011 and 2015 operas compared to the film (1950) and the ballet film (1971). This social harmony is achieved by promotion of familial and generational harmony. Also, the heroine, Xi’er is represented as a female individual who can contribute to the unification of the nation instead of being presented as a class subject. In this regard, the endeavor of seeking social harmony through new adaptations reflects anxieties over social disintegration in contemporary China.

<p>My dissertation, "The People's Republic of Capitalism: The Making of the New Middle Class in Post-Socialist China, 1978-Present" draws on a range of visual cultural forms - cinema, documentary, and fashion - to track the cultural dimension of the emergence of the new middle class subject in China's encounter with global capitalism. Through cultural studies methodologies and critical theoretical practices, I explore the massive reorganization of national subjectivity that has accompanied the economic reforms since 1978. How, I ask, has the middle class replaced the proletariat as the dominant subject of Chinese history? What are the competing social forces that contribute to the making of the new middle class subject, and how do they operate? By considering these questions in terms of the cultural cultivation of new sensibilities as much as identities, I trace China's changing social formations through the realm of cultural productions. This project is organized into three parts, each of which attends to a particular constellation of middle class subjectivities and ideologies. In Part I (Introduction and Chapter 1), I explore how the Chinese middle class subject is shaped by historical, political-economic, and cultural forces. I show that the new social actor is structurally dependent on the national and transnational bourgeoisie and the post-socialist party-state. In Part II (Chapters 2-5), I focus on the relationship among fashion, media, and Chinese consumer culture in the socialist and post-socialist eras. By engaging with films such as Xie Tieli's Never Forget (1964), Huang Zumo's Romance on Lushan (1980), Qi Xingjia's Red Dress is in Fashion (1984), and Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) and Useless (2007), I suggest that the representation of fashion and consumption in Chinese cinema, documentary, and new media is a privileged site for deciphering otherwise imperceptible meanings of class, ideology, and history in the formation of the Chinese middle class subject. In Part III (Chapter 6), I attend to the repressed underside of Chinese consumer culture: rubbish. This project reorients our understanding of socialist and post-socialist China, seeing them as underpinned by the contradictions emblematized in the Chinese middle class.</p> / Dissertation