Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953 by Xiaofei Kang (review)

Reviewed by: Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953 by Xiaofei Kang Linh D. Vu Xiaofei Kang. Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 288 pp. Hardcover ($110) or e-book. Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942–1953 by Xiaofei Kang discusses the Chinese Communist revolution of the 1940s and early 1950s through the lenses of gender and religion and through the media of art and literature. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to rid traditional culture of its old elements, which it considered superstitious and backward, it co-opted the same discourse and practices in its efforts to revolutionize society. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including newspapers, archives, and memoirs, as well as ethnographic observations, the author argues that the Communist revolution was not a step toward "secular modernity" but an "enchanted" one. The book is divided into three parts: the campaign against shamans, novels and plays about the campaign, and different renditions of the well-known tale of the White-Haired Girl. Part I of the book includes three chapters on the antishaman and public health campaigns in the Communist stronghold of Yan'an during the early 1940s. One particular case occurred in 1944. A male shaman named Yang Hanzhu (楊漢珠) was accused of killing a woman surnamed Bai, whom he claimed was "afflicted by a ghost" (23). The case was covered extensively in the Liberation Daily (解放日报 Jiefang ribao), the official newspaper of the CCP. Analyzing the various reports and editorials on the murder case, Kang argues that the CCP positioned itself as the new epistemic authority on the shamanic practices and as "the new ritual master" who rescued the "feminized rural people" from the backward and brutal traditions (25). In addition, à la Natalie Zemon Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre,1 Kang questions the validity of the accusation. Kang asks whether the shaman Yang did torture Woman Bai to the extent reported in the Liberation Daily. She reasons that since the matter of childbirth was traditionally in the domain of midwives and female shamans, it was unlikely that a male shaman would have been involved in treating [End Page E-5] the pregnant Woman Bai. The author also claims that it was unconvincing that family members of the poor woman would have allowed her to be stripped naked and sexually tortured in public. Moreover, Kang maintains that in shamanic rituals, the violence was usually doled out on effigies or the religious specialists rather than on actual patients of demonic possession. The antishaman campaign became a muse for propagandists in the creation of revolutionary art and literature, which is the topic of the book's second part. In the three chapters of part II, Kang examines how the old sensational tropes of ghosts and spirits came to haunt the pages and stages of some rather obscure stories, novels, and plays. The obscurity is due to the changing ideological landscape. The ghosts and spirits were deemed "superstitious" material by high-ranking literary cadres. Kang concludes that, over time, "Yan'an's antishaman campaign simply fell through the cracks in the PRC's political memory" (145). Nonetheless, by uncovering these lesser-known materials, Kang shows the complexity of the Communist revolution, particularly how the Yan'an period presented the CCP's vacillation between "the radical Soviet Marxist and wartime pragmatic approaches to religion" (9). Furthermore, Kang adds that Yan'an propaganda agents relied on their intimate knowledge of local culture rather than Communist ideology to bring some success to the anti-superstition campaign. Part III differs from the two previous parts in both length and subject matter. It contains only one main chapter and the conclusion of the book. Moreover, while the previous parts deal with the antishaman campaign and its related art and literature, which became insignificant after the party shifted its focus to other political and social issues, the penultimate chapter examines a revolutionary classic of far greater and more lasting political significance, The White-Haired Girl. In this "magnum opus," a woman who suffered at the hands of...