Cathayplay.com [distributor], 2021. 1 online resource (60 min.). In English and Chinese with English subtitles.
My Name is Bai Sanming is an intriguing documentary that explores popular political culture in China through the work and life of a professional Mao Zedong roleplayer. Viewers may be initially attracted by its striking footage of commemorations of Mao Zedong and of Red tourism, and will find much more.
Bai Sanming (presumably a homonym) introduces himself as having been born surnamed Liu in a mountain village, and as having married uxorilocally into Xibaipo, Hebei, taking his wife’s surname for himself and their children. Bai had a history of performing traditional Chinese opera, as demonstrated in the opening of the film as his wife costumes him and he sings the role of Xue Pinggui. During filming from 2019 to 2020, he was nearing age 60 and had been a self-employed performer of the mature post-liberation Mao Zedong for several years. A physical resemblance to Mao enhanced by make-up and costume, as well as his presence in Xibaipo, the location from which Mao had commanded the final advance toward Beijing in 1949, gave Bai continuing acting opportunities on the grounds of the local museum. Bai’s performances and his own account of his work form the heart of this documentary, bridging his backscreen rural life with his specialized roleplaying as Mao Zedong.
This layered presentation is carried through a compelling sequence of varied performances. It starts lightly with his positioning outside the Xibaipo Museum offering to pose for photographs with visitors for a fee of RMB10, using their own cellphones. Their reactions range from bemusement to interest to the cheerful laughter from a youth on being able to pay her fee into Chairman Mao’s WeChat account. This work is repeatedly portrayed, complete with counting the money, as personally income-generating. What might Mao Zedong have thought? A continuing thread throughout the film is the pursuit of market socialism, as exemplified by this rural actor earning a modestly comfortable living for his family.
While Xibaipo provides a regular base, Bai Sanming’s work extends beyond tourism as this documentary shows through a series of vignettes. There is the incongruity of a corporate team- building retreat, where the grey-suited Bai-as-Mao leads the costumed company staff in performing a rural departure on the Long March, a calligraphy exhibition, a rural unveiling of a statue of Mao following a meeting in a village ancestral hall—where Bai-as-Mao lights incense— now also the site of the Party branch, a primary school song and dance performance featuring The East Is Red with Bai as himself watching his grandson perform, a commercial speech at a Chongqing liquor fair in a crowded urban mall, and an appearance on Mao’s birthday in his Shaoshan hometown, also attended by other Mao Zedong roleplayers.
Each of these is adeptly selected and presented briefly to evoke the resonance of images of Mao Zedong in everyday life, especially but not only for older generations, that is cultivated but far from being a fenced-off cult. Rather, Mao Zedong appears as a staple of marketing, of reminiscences of childhood performances, and of community events filled with popular art and culture. The threads are diverse and far from politically univocal, while invariably part of the orthopraxy of one era or another. The historical complexity and lived salience of Mao Zedong performances make them cultural creations that are “good to think with,” as Lévi-Strauss might have noted.
The greatest weight of the film and most of the footage rests on Bai Sanming himself, which gives the film its distinctive contribution. The vignettes are sprinkled within a larger set of self-accounts, interviews, and conversations about his life and work as a performing artist. These together generate a grounded picture of an articulate practitioner reflecting on his work as a popular artist, wholely and unpretentiously conscious of being an organic intellectual in rural society. Space limits prohibit full treatment of the political complexities involved, of which there are many. Chinese and China-informed viewers will recognize the connection of yangge dances celebrating the new Mao Zedong statue with the revolutionary period and Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. The interspersed snippets of Hebei clapper performances of Xue Pinggui, while fully acceptable now, can easily evoke recollections of the prelude to the Cultural Revolution. Bai recounts that he was once told by an official that his performance of Mao Zedong was not legal, about which he comments that he didn’t know if that were so. He simply carries on performing in contexts such as the local museum where he is loosely associated with official authority while autonomously self-employed. Bai consistently manages his performances to include only reading verbatim excerpts of Mao’s notably uplifting and unifying works—art he repeatedly legitimates as self-enterprise in modest support of his rural family.
The film turns in challenging directions toward its end—first following Bai Sanming and his wife paying their respects to Mao Zedong in 2019 in Shaoshan on Mao’s birthday along with other Mao Zedong roleplayers and hundreds of respectful and reverential ritual participants with mounting intensity enhanced by cinematography. This was followed by an uneventful overnight in Wuhan on their way home on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then by scenes in their home community of empty streets and walls marked with public health notices. Bai Sanming had no work as public gatherings were indefinitely suspended, and reluctantly wondered whether he would need to find a different line of work. He gives a possibly final performance, alone atop a bridge, dramatically declaiming (langsong) Mao Zedong’s famous 1936 poem, “Xue” (Snow), in its entirety, ending, “For truly great men/ Look to this age alone.” The final frames of the film show Bai Sanming on a motorcycle riding into an unknowable future.
Filmmaker Du Kangwei offers a richly layered and eloquent account of performing Mao Zedong in the present day, giving an artful window into the political complexities of popular cultural life and the artists who create it.
Ellen R. Judd
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver