The 'People's Artist' and his life's work

A dramatic work will occasionally gain importance for its place in history and occasionally for its exceptional literary value. Beneath the Red Banner (正紅旗下) is that rare dramatic gem that is endowed with both. That it stars one of China's official "top-tier" actors, Jiao Huang (焦晃), and is brought by the internationally renowned Shanghai Drama Arts Center (上海話劇藝術中心) certainly indicates the quality of the production, but more important is the subject matter of the autobiographical work.

Jiao plays Lao She (老舍), Red Banner's author, who weaves together stories of Beijing citizens witnessing the fall of the Qing dynasty.

"Lao She's story is more than just a story, it's an epic tale with great historical relevance," Jiao said while meeting reporters last Friday. "As someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution, I feel quite close to the suffering portrayed in the story."

To say that 1899, when the story is set and when Lao She was born, was a time of great upheaval for China is an understatement. The Middle Kingdom was decades behind a world that had recently and rapidly modernized. The Japanese had routed the Chinese military just four years earlier and foreigners in the Chinese countryside, both Japanese and Western, were growing in numbers and helping themselves to the nation's resources. An organization of outraged Chinese, the Fists of Righteous Harmony (義和拳), were intent on ousting all foreigners from China. To the foreigners they opposed, they were known as Boxers by virtue of their martial arts skills, which they believed made them impervious to foreign bullets. The Boxers also had a turbulent relationship with the imperial court, who first opposed, then supported their cause.

To the characters of Lao She's novel, all this was a source of particular consternation. Like the Qing rulers, they were themselves Manchurians, albeit of a low societal level, and had an undying faith in the divinity of the emperor and the power of his court.

But the Qing court was itself in a state of upheaval. In his late twenties, the Emperor Guangxu tried to assert power and instigate liberal reform in the kingdom. His efforts were opposed by the empress dowager Cixi, who had adopted Guangxu as an infant and seen to it that he was made emperor at the tender age of three.

A powerful woman who ruled China literally from behind a curtain, she served as regent while the young emperor came of age. When her power became threatened by Guangxu's reforms, she had him immured in a palace outside Beijing and resumed control of government.

She cunningly co-opted the Boxers' hate for foreigners and supported their efforts to kill missionaries and rid the kingdom of outside influence. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion would be quashed by an international military force -- 2,500 men from eight countries who had come both to rescue their missionaries and establish a permanent foothold for merchants. Cixi would flee the palace disguised as a peasant shortly before Westerners would enter the Forbidden City for the first time without an invitation.

The pain of military defeat, the strain of revolution and palace intrigue line the margins of Lao She's novel, but its pages are dedicated not to history's characters, but ordinary citizens of Beijing who bore witness to the upheaval.

This was Lao She's greatest strength as a writer. He left China and his job as the principal of an elementary school in 1924 to lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. While there, he polished his English by reading the works of contemporary masters like Mark Twain, whose wit and ability to fully develop characters he would later put to use in his own novels. He was expert at depicting detail and in using the color of the Beijing dialect to develop his characters.