The Chinese woman warrior in the yangbanxi in historical and cultural perspective

To date, studies of women warriors in China have tended to focus on traditional figures such as Mulan, while studies of the heroines of the yangbanxi - the model works of the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-76) - have tended to see them as part of an aberrant Maoist culture divorced from Chinese tradition. This study seeks to fill the gap between these two positions by examining the heroines of the yangbanxi in the context of the tradition of the woman warrior in Chinese cultural and literary history. It establishes the cultural norms delimiting the role of the woman warrior in historical records and literary tradition, and then 'reads' the roles of the major yangbanxi heroines against these norms to consider to what extent they conform to or challenge traditional paradigms. Scholars such as Allen have noted that in traditional Chinese tales of women warriors, typified by the story of Mulan, narratives are driven not by the need for the woman to esape the confines of her traditional female role, but by her need to return to that role. Woman warrior roles are a symbol of social and political chaos, while the return to traditional female roles symbolizes the restoration of the social/political order. In the traditional schema, women warriors have only two possible outcomes: either they return to traditional female roles or else they die. In this paper, case study analyses of yangbanxi heroines including Xi'er, Chang Bao, Ke Xiang, Wu Qinghua, Fang Haizhen and Jiang Shuiying, show that there is considerable variation in the degree to which they conform to or challenge the traditional parameters for the woman warrior. Drawing on reported responses to the yangbanxi heroines at the time, the paper also argues that the reception of the various yangbanxi heroines by Chinese audiences, even during the Cultural Revolution itself, can be directly related to their degree of conformity to traditional woman warrior paradigms. This reveals a high degree of continuity between cultural revolution culture and China's cultural traditions