Catherine Vance Yeh

The Public’s New Darlings: Mass Media and the Birth of Modern Star Culture in China, 1890s-1930s

As China was struggling with the transition from dynastic to parliamentary rule during the first decades following the Republican revolution of 1911, a most unlikely public personality emerged on the national stage and took the public by storm. Once associated with being the ‘male flower,’ the call boys of the rich and the mighty, the young male Peking opera actors trained to play female roles, the dan, were suddenly competing on the national stage with men who enjoyed official position, cultural capital, or wealth. This rise had a political dimension by challenging a government propaganda that encouraged citizens to emulate male and martial role models, but it also came with a revolution in the aesthetics of Peking opera performance.

Scholarship on the rise of these actors during the 1910s-20s has generally regarded this rise as a coincidence: an older generation of actors specializing in the role of male power-holders was passing away and the most talented actors in the next generation happened to be dan. Two questions remain unanswered, however: at a time when the country’s political elite was calling upon its citizens to move away from their devotion to the sentimental and the romantic (epitomized by the hero and heroine of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber) and emulate the martial and manly spirit of China’s past popular heroes, why did society choose to abandon the traditional heroes on the opera stage and began a long-lasting romance with the “female” dan actors and the new heroines they helped create on stage? And second, how did this change come about?

In an effort to answer these questions, this project sets out to study the impact of a marginalized field (entertainment culture and its entertainment papers), marginalized figures (the dan), and a marginalized context (the transcultural element permeating all aspects) on the emergence of modern star culture in China.