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This chapter examines how nostalgia for the revolutionary past provides ideas for the contemporary TV drama market. The term “Red Classics” (hong se jing dian) has appeared with regularity in Chinese media. These classics were created in the modern era, a conscious endeavor by the Chinese State to promote a revolutionary culture which would mold the socialist subject. The chapter begins by briefly setting the cultural backdrop against which the interest in the Red Classics was rekindled. It then identifies television's main narrative strategies to capture audiences and also considers the role of the state in regulating the production, and influencing the reception of, the genre.

Ode to Yimeng (Yingmeng Song), a major ballet production created in May 1974, was based on the short story “Red Sister-in-Law” (Hongsao). It is one of the “red classics” that deals with a revolutionary “base area,” and in essence, is about how the Communist Party won the support of the subaltern, the backbone of Chinese society at a tipping point in modern Chinese history, when CCP triumphed over the Nationalist army. The story of heroine, Sister-in-Law Ying, who saved a seriously wounded Communist soldier with her breast milk and nurtured him back to life, was once metaphoric and metonymic of the symbiotic relationships between army and the people. This chapter argues that the post-Mao remake in the format of a television drama has significantly re-defined the essence of the “fish-and-water” relationship in the spirit of traditional Chinese values and, in particular, Confucian values.

 Red Crag, published at the end of 1961 under the names of Luo Guangbin (Luo Kuang-pin) and Yang Yiyan (Yang Yi-yen), initially aimed at depicting the painful experiences of its authors and other victims incarcerated and tortured at the Sino-American Cooperative Organization in Chongqing toward the end of the war between the Communist Party and the Nationalists, but was eventually transformed into a prototypical “red classic.” Through analysis of the editorial changes in different versions, this chapter demonstrates the methodology and mechanics of the production of the “red classics,” in the selection of data and narrative point of view that accord with “historical truth” juxtaposed with the CCP’s political agenda of the time, as well as the management of the text exercised by various cultural organs of the party.

Traditional Chinese art was tied closely to the ruling elites of imperial China and therefore presented a particular challenge to the new communist regime seeking to establish a new proletarian culture in the 1950s. This chapter throws light on the way established traditional painters and artists were managed and their art reshaped through the application of principles set down in the Yan’an Talks and a deliberate “modernization” of traditional Chinese painting. It argues that in the case of guohua the tension between old forms and new content was not just resolved but led to invigoration and innovation in the field and produced some of the greatest public artworks of the Maoist period

This chapter investigates how the animated film New Tunnel Warfare (Xin didao zhan, 2009), a remake of the red classic Tunnel Warfare (Didao zhan, 1965), reshapes the socio-political ideologies present in the original film for a twenty-first century child audience.  The chapter particularly focuses, firstly, on how New Tunnel Warfare re-inserts the biological family into Communist discourse, in contrast to the original film where the biological family was less important than the Communist ‘family’ of people unrelated by blood.  Secondly, the chapter analyses the overt representation of violence in New Tunnel Warfare and the responses of its characters to violent acts. Finally, the chapter examines the film’s revival of the intellectual as a positive figure in Communist mythology. The chapter argues that these changes have been made in New Tunnel Warfare to reflect the major socio-political changes in Chinese society between the 1960s and the early twenty-first century