Zhang, Yi (2026) Remaking Yangbanxi : palimpsests of revolutionary memory and the politics of remembering. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Abstract

This thesis argues that works of yangbanxi (model theatre) are not mere relics of Maoist propaganda but contested battlegrounds where cultural and communicative memory collide and interpenetrate. It addresses a critical gap in yangbanxi studies by examining the overlooked role of their proliferating remakes, which have rarely been analysed as examples of memory politics. Building on Jan Assmann's concept of the 'gloating gap' (2011), I investigate how the Chinese Communist Party's mechanisms of ideological reproduction recalibrate revolutionary memory, and how artists, even under constraint, exercise creative agency. Understanding remakes as palimpsests that retain traces of previous inscriptions while layering new meanings, the thesis explores how revolutionary memory is overwitten rather than replaced. Instead of tracing a linear retreat of state power, I examine how yangbanxi remakes reflect shifting boundaries of permissible expression under varying degrees of Party involvement. This analysis unfolds within a discursive environment shaped by democratic centralism, where dissent may only circulate indirectly (berry, 2004). I begin with early remakes under the state-led assimilation of ethnic minorities into Han Chinese revolutionary culture, focusing on the Uyghur Qizil Chiragh (1975), where language recording and dramaturgical shifts both serve assimilationist aims and enable vernacular resistance. Next, I examine postmillenial commercial remakes, analysing Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), which grafts class-struggle tropes onto genre hybridity and diasporic framings. Then I turn to non-state performance through Wen Hui's Hong (2016), an avant-garde reinterpretation of The Red Detachment of Women, developed from archival and bodily memory. Through my practice-led interventions, I explore how adaptive performance resists retraumatization through Brechtian and absurdist strategies. Across these sites, I argue that the mnemonic friction between the ideological archetype and its mutable iterations destabilizes Party efforts to sustain a hegemonic narrative and offer insights into how revolutionary histories are remembered, embodied, and contested.