Abstract / About the project

It examines the unique nature of socialist creativity in the People’s Republic of China through the song and dance epic The East is Red that was composed at the heel of the Cultural Revolution with the objective to demonstrate music’s various intersections with politics. By unravelling the work’s creative process and reception history, it advocates for the social and even aesthetic values of socialist creativities. It concludes “[if] we are to ignore socialist creativity, we are to deny the presence of a good chunk of human history and the efforts of those who put their hearts and souls to it.”

This article is published in: Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships, eds. Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, Manuel Deniz Silva. New York: Ashgate/Routledge, 51-68.