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The White-Haired Girl
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The White-Haired Girl
The White-Haired Girl (Chinese: 白毛女; pinyin: Bái Máo Nǚ) is a Chinese contemporary classical opera by Yan Jinxuan to a Chinese libretto by He Jingzhi and Ding Yi. It was later adapted to a ballet, a Peking opera, and a film. The ballet adaptation was regarded as a revolutionary opera.
The folklore of the white-haired girl is believed to have spread widely in the areas occupied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in northern China since the late 1930s. Many years later, a literary work was created in the liberated area controlled by the CCP in the late 1940s. The film was made in 1950 and the first Peking opera performance was in 1958. The first ballet performance was by Shanghai Dance Academy, Shanghai in 1965. It has also been performed by the noted soprano Guo Lanying.The opera was promoted by the Chinese Communist Party as a model revolutionary work. As Qi (2024) notes, its ideological function was to exemplify the Party’s narrative of class struggle and redemption through socialism, aligning cultural production with national political goals.
The libretto foregrounds class struggle between peasants and landlords in the old society, which forms a contrast with the new society established by the CCP, in which the people allegedly become masters of their own destiny. The central theme of the story, in the words of the opera, is that ‘the old society changed men into ghosts, while the new society changes ghosts into men’.
The opera is based on legends circulating in the border region of Shanxi, Chahar and Hebei, describing the misery suffered by local peasantry, particularly the misery of the female members. The stories are based on real-life stories of no fewer than half a dozen women, in a time frame stretching from the late Qing dynasty to the 1920s or 1930s.
In Bo Jia's article, the author emphasizes that Chinese women have not achieved individual liberation and have not been able to truly voice their opinions as women. Instead, they have been repackaged as tools for the Party and the state to prove that they have defeated feudal remnants. The identity of women has been reduced to a tool of national ideology.
Along with Red Detachment of Women, the ballet is regarded as one of the classics of revolutionary China, and its music is familiar to almost everyone who grew up during the 1960s. It is one of the Eight Model Operas approved by Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.The White-Haired Girl also intentionally showed the political meaning by creating a figure of diligent and beautiful country woman who was under the oppression of the evil landowner. As it aroused an emotion against the "old ruling class", it satisfied "moral ideas of the left-wing literary and artistic intelligence, the popular social and cultural values of rural and urban audiences". The film presented "the traditional Chinese agricultural lifecycle", where the poor lived in poverty no matter how hard they tried. It implied a revolution to overthrown the unchanging social structure. As the mise-en-scene of the film, it used a fair amount of medium-shot to define the character through facial expressions.[citation needed]
From a gender studies perspective, Xi'er's transformation from victim to heroine reflects the Party's construction of idealized revolutionary women. Scholar Kim argues that while this portrayal suggests empowerment, it also reinforces a utilitarian vision of womanhood in service of state ideology.
The daughter of a tenant farmer Yang Bailao and the fiancée of Wang Dachun. She was forced to sell to the landlord Huang Shiren to repay his father's debt. After suffering humiliation and mistreatment from the landlord and the landlord's mother, Xier eventually escaped and hid in a mountain temple while surviving on offerings. Due to lack of sunlight and little salt intake, her skin and hair gradually turned white causing local villagers to mistakenly perceive her as a powerful white-haired goddess. In the end, Xier was found by Dachun and they reunited.
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The White-Haired Girl
The White-Haired Girl (Chinese: 白毛女; pinyin: Bái Máo Nǚ) is a Chinese contemporary classical opera by Yan Jinxuan to a Chinese libretto by He Jingzhi and Ding Yi. It was later adapted to a ballet, a Peking opera, and a film. The ballet adaptation was regarded as a revolutionary opera.
The folklore of the white-haired girl is believed to have spread widely in the areas occupied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in northern China since the late 1930s. Many years later, a literary work was created in the liberated area controlled by the CCP in the late 1940s. The film was made in 1950 and the first Peking opera performance was in 1958. The first ballet performance was by Shanghai Dance Academy, Shanghai in 1965. It has also been performed by the noted soprano Guo Lanying.The opera was promoted by the Chinese Communist Party as a model revolutionary work. As Qi (2024) notes, its ideological function was to exemplify the Party’s narrative of class struggle and redemption through socialism, aligning cultural production with national political goals.
The libretto foregrounds class struggle between peasants and landlords in the old society, which forms a contrast with the new society established by the CCP, in which the people allegedly become masters of their own destiny. The central theme of the story, in the words of the opera, is that ‘the old society changed men into ghosts, while the new society changes ghosts into men’.
The opera is based on legends circulating in the border region of Shanxi, Chahar and Hebei, describing the misery suffered by local peasantry, particularly the misery of the female members. The stories are based on real-life stories of no fewer than half a dozen women, in a time frame stretching from the late Qing dynasty to the 1920s or 1930s.
In Bo Jia's article, the author emphasizes that Chinese women have not achieved individual liberation and have not been able to truly voice their opinions as women. Instead, they have been repackaged as tools for the Party and the state to prove that they have defeated feudal remnants. The identity of women has been reduced to a tool of national ideology.
Along with Red Detachment of Women, the ballet is regarded as one of the classics of revolutionary China, and its music is familiar to almost everyone who grew up during the 1960s. It is one of the Eight Model Operas approved by Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.The White-Haired Girl also intentionally showed the political meaning by creating a figure of diligent and beautiful country woman who was under the oppression of the evil landowner. As it aroused an emotion against the "old ruling class", it satisfied "moral ideas of the left-wing literary and artistic intelligence, the popular social and cultural values of rural and urban audiences". The film presented "the traditional Chinese agricultural lifecycle", where the poor lived in poverty no matter how hard they tried. It implied a revolution to overthrown the unchanging social structure. As the mise-en-scene of the film, it used a fair amount of medium-shot to define the character through facial expressions.[citation needed]
From a gender studies perspective, Xi'er's transformation from victim to heroine reflects the Party's construction of idealized revolutionary women. Scholar Kim argues that while this portrayal suggests empowerment, it also reinforces a utilitarian vision of womanhood in service of state ideology.
The daughter of a tenant farmer Yang Bailao and the fiancée of Wang Dachun. She was forced to sell to the landlord Huang Shiren to repay his father's debt. After suffering humiliation and mistreatment from the landlord and the landlord's mother, Xier eventually escaped and hid in a mountain temple while surviving on offerings. Due to lack of sunlight and little salt intake, her skin and hair gradually turned white causing local villagers to mistakenly perceive her as a powerful white-haired goddess. In the end, Xier was found by Dachun and they reunited.
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