EAST ASIAN STUDIES

The Red Detachment of Women, a feature film directed by Xie Jin, topped the list of fine screen works on women. It won the Best Feature Film Prize at the First Hundred Flowers Awards in 1962. However, before it was a feature film, the Red Detachment of Women was one of the few Ballets allowed by the wife of Mao, who cited the "Model Operas" as the only acceptable Ballets. In the ballet, Wu Qionghua is a twenty year old peasant  living on Hainan Island in the 1930s; she is from a poor family and has to work as a maid in the house of the local landed gentry. She also possesses a deep hatred for the rich, especially for her master Nan who torched her father to death simply because he kicked his family dog. Due to this hatred, she attempts to flee her master's compound but she each time she is caught. However, eventually, after she is given as a bound maid to the friend of her master, she is able to join the red detachment of women, a branch of the Red Army led by Chinese communist party.  In her career as an enlisted red army soldier, she shows great courage as she is driven by the need to avenge her father, and together with her detachment, she is able to finally kill her master Nan. However, this is only after she joins the communist party and truly understands, with the help of Hong Changqing, her army commander, that she is fighting not for personal reasons but to liberate all the poor and oppressed people in China and in the world. Essentially, the story represents the propoganda and control of the art forms such as Ballet that happened during the cultural revolution. The Ballet presents communism in a positive light, and the upper class elite as intrinsically evil.