A Communist Prepares

Abstract What does it mean to become a Communist who believes in Marxism-Leninism? This central motif in the history of the Chinese Communist Revolution has often been downplayed or altogether dismissed due to the longstanding tradition of treating Communist becoming as a passive process of ideological indoctrination. This study revisits the question by illuminating an “elective affinity” between two separate and concurrent campaigns carried out by the party community in Yan'an. On one side was the adoption of the Stanislavsky System of acting by the theater practitioners of the party's leading cultural institution, the Lu Xun Academy of Arts. On the other was the heightened demand for political cultivation, particularly the widespread movement of “learning from Marx and Lenin,” directed by party leaders. The uncanny affinity between a “good” Communist and a Stanislavskian actor reaches its apogee in the production of a Soviet play in 1941, which conjured up Lenin on the Yan'an stage for the first time. It bespeaks an extraordinary fusion of revolution and theater, of faith and performance—a fusion that continues to animate the political aesthetics of Chinese Communism in the early years of the People's Republic.