For two books with a degree of intersecting content, the volumes here are substantially different. On the one hand, we have Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s, Siyuan Liu's impeccably researched, academically rigorous, nearly narrative account of the intersections of traditional xiqu (opera), modern xiqu, and various reform movements from before the Cultural Revolution organized under the concept of “gentrification” (1). This is a book that passionately argues for the traditional and modern relevance of xiqu and the connections between these, with an eye, despite the subtitle, toward contemporary relevance, as evidenced in the fact that chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. On the other hand, Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era, an edited collection, has a tighter temporal focus—reform during the revolution—but includes all manner of theatrical texts and performances (broadly defined to include film alongside all sorts of stage performances) and is structured primarily as a series of stunningly detailed, archivally rich academic essays by well-known scholars writing on distinct topics within this field. With the exception of Christopher Tang's exploration of China's internationalist impulses as manifested in theatre, “Staging World Revolution: Crafting Internationalism in the Chinese Dramatic Arts, 1962–1968,” which includes more contemporary criticism, the volume acts as a guide to rethinking the theatre that took place in the Mao era, rather than a rethinking of the scholarship on this material. Given the paucity of translations of theoretical and critical work from China generally and from the Mao era specifically, the detailed charting of the terrain is a necessary and welcome addition to the field (and timely in the contemporary political climate). As the Introduction notes, its contributors have all shaped the vital, ongoing project that treats the art of the Maoist era as worthy of scholarly examination, as opposed to dispensing with those decades with a few sentences. Each of the chapters is complete unto itself, and the topics are varied; they are joined together by a temporality rather than an overarching organizational scheme.

In that regard, both books are involved in the project of problematizing the received version of theatrical reform under Mao and, as significant, in challenging and nuancing the definitions of key words that emerge in such discussions. Whereas both books explore the relationship between the rural and the urban, a binary that gets recoded repeatedly during the era in question, both focus on cities as cultural centers. As someone with a journeyman's familiarity with the topic, I (who will doubtless return to these volumes for specific historical detail in the future) found the intervention into the vocabulary of the debates the most immediately rewarding aspect of both books. Indeed, the methodology of contesting easy, imported, exogenous understanding of key terms is clear enough that I will be using the Introductions to these works as models for my students, even in classes where the immediate topic of the volumes is not as relevant.

Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform opens with a question of the definitions of socialist theatre and reform. In each case study, it challenges the binaries surrounding these terms in Anglophone scholarly discourse: “text,” “archive,” “performance,” “revolution,” and “state” all come under examination in the Introduction. Much of this nuancing occurs between, rather than within, chapters. For instance, Emily Wilcox's “Aesthetic Politics at Home and Abroad: Dagger Society and the Development of Maoist Revolutionary Dance Drama” argues that the staging of the play evolved to emphasize various phases of China's anti-imperialist struggles, whereas Tarryn Li-Min Chun's “Sent-Down Plays: Yangbanxi Stagecraft, Practical Aesthetics, and Popularization during the Cultural Revolution,” an analysis of The Red Lantern, traces multiple productions to argue that “while production manuals and films do indeed imply the importance placed on standardization and reproduction of the ideal form, performance reports and anecdotes demonstrate the difficulty . . . of doing productions by the book as theater troupes and yangbanxi were ‘sent down’ to rural villages or up into the Mountains” (263). Each chapter, with a great deal of detail, traces a production through several moments in China's political history, but each reaches a different conclusion as to the motivations of each play's scenography, despite a shared focus on struggle. As such, the reader is left to discern the matrix connecting revolutionary stagings, standardization of staging, anti-imperialist struggle, and the education of the masses. Most other chapters consider both the articulated political motivations for theatrical choices alongside (and often in contrast to) evidence about the reception of these pieces.

That being said, the distinctions among chapters allow each author the freedom to trace pathways distinct to their case study, yielding moments like “Chasing Spirits in the Script: The Ambivalent Politics of Early Socialist Theatrical Adaptation,” Anne Rebull's fascinating discussion of Fish Spirit through theatre to film across China and Hong Kong. The deeper one dives into a given case study (e.g., Lang Luo's consideration of English translations of The Legend of the White Snake), the more difficult it becomes to connect these studies into an overarching pattern, but the richer the individual examinations become.

Transforming Tradition explores notions of modernization in both the sense of Westernization and, more significant, in the sense of what was appropriate for the communist project of modern China—specifically the administrative centers of modern China—which left little space for regional performance forms. To frame this in a different way, Liu argues that “the redefined relationship between form and content holds the key to our understanding of the entire reform campaign”—and then proceeds to provide a radically specific redefinition of form and content (7). This redefinition accentuates the degree to which the modern was both a mode of experimentation and a set of governmental strictures. This form and content debate intersects with constantly evolving notions of what might constitute realism (and what realism constitutes). Liu deftly creates a complex but coherent narrative out of the disparate scholars and artists taking positions and then recanting alongside the omnipresent, equally inconsistent government edicts. The narrative created is a mutual shaping of government policy and art that constantly demands redefinitions of key concepts. Framing this intervention in terms of revision rather than censorship certainly indicates a position on the part of Liu, one that emphasizes the artistic advancement in the fraught era of early Chinese socialism (as opposed to the social, artistic, personal and economic hardships of the era). For instance, Chapter 3, “Revision and Ideology: State Diplomatic Functions and the Theatrical Creative Process,” weaves those into the journey of the play Crossroads Inn through multiple revisions. The evolution of the text and performance provides a lively way of engaging with the precise governmental policies of any given moment within the era. The distinctions between the ideology and the practices are indications of the fact that censorship was not (and perhaps never is) as absolute as it pretends to be.

Although the nuancing of vocabulary should serve as a model for all scholars writing on Chinese theatre in English, Liu's book also has a quality far too rarely visible in academic publishing: passion. The exuberant effusions about various performances or texts that are interspersed through this narrative draw attention to the larger argument—that xiqu is not now and never has been a static, museum form. In Chapter 5, the palpable sense of sorrow with which Liu describes the death of the improvisational scenario play in favor of script-driven drama is as touching as the chapter is informative: “The contrasting fates of these popular entertainment forms in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s underscore the country's predominant emphasis on the social functions of artistic forms, an emphasis that left little space for entertainment. . . . [T]he elimination of scenario-based improvisation effectively decentered actors in performance and concentrated authority in playwrights, directors, composers, and designers” (245).

On quite a different note, both books deserve commendation for careful attention to the intersections between local and transnational theoretical models. Neither book falls into the trap of “translating” the relevant theories from the Cultural Revolution into Euro-American theories that deal with roughly similar concepts. Drawing fine distinctions between the various ways a given term is used within the Chinese context calls attention to the uniqueness of this context, even while detailing the international influences that shaped it. A diligent search through the works cited pages will, likewise, reveal the authors’ refusal to allow “imported” theory to erase the nuances of the Mao era. This project is even more admirable inasmuch as this radical specificity does not interfere with the legibility of the text.

Indeed, on the subject of legibility, the last hundred pages of Transforming Tradition are a variety of useful back matter. The Glossary notably includes Chinese characters and pinyin for key phrases and works, which is incredibly useful for a scholar like me who has some skill in reading Mandarin but is nowhere close to fluent.

This leads to the question of audience for these two volumes. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform provides an intricate, detailed dataset divided into distinct case studies. Scholars working on material closely related to one of these case studies, particularly those without a reading knowledge of Mandarin, will find these data invaluable (and, to my knowledge, at a level of detail not available in English anywhere else). The Introduction, with its challenges to binaries constructed by received scholarship, would fit nicely in an undergraduate syllabus on Chinese theatre or, indeed, in any class that took a world or planetary approach to theatre.

Transforming Tradition is a more comprehensive history that, though still aimed at readers with a background in the field, is leavened by the passion of the author. Each chapter may examine a different topic, but each of these fits into the overarching narrative of reform that the text deftly weaves. Despite its xiqu focus, this book could usefully serve as a framework for any project dealing with theatrical or artistic innovation in China from 1950 until the present moment. Beyond this, it serves as a model of how to write an engaging theatre history that involves both art and politics in equal measure.

Both books provide a thorough examination of the archives and a plethora of references (across several languages), but ultimately, what I found most valuable was the careful delineation of terms—and the decentering of UK and US theoretical models—which provides an all too rare model not only for this context but for work across the Global East and South.