Cultural Articulation in the Chinese Countryside, 1937-1947

Those lines end Zhao Shuli's introduction to his innovative story of revolution in a northern Chinese village. The tale unfolds along with a recounting of the rhymes a poor peasant composes in the course of the action. The author's goal was evidently to use this structure as a way to incorporate popular storytelling techniques into the writing of modern fiction, but he simultaneously created a striking portrayal of rural artistic practice as it existed outside the approved official ambit, whether preor post-revolutionary. In the present article, I endeavor to recover the history of these rhymers as they practiced their various performing arts in the early years of the border region era. These artists and their history had a profound impact on the later popular art that emerged from the folk-elite artistic confrontation of those years, although they tend to disappear from discussion (Chinese or Western) carried on in terms of the writer-masses dichotomy. While the literary and art history of the border regions is quite accurately best known for the popular art (for but not by the masses) which emerged from a renewed folk-elite confrontation in those years, this confrontation took place in a milieu of living folk art. The active role of and