China and the West

Henrik Ibsen : Rezeption in China.
Tam Kwok-kan : Ibsen has been considered by many literary historians as the most important source, besides Goethe, of Western influence in modern Chinese literary thinking. Most of Ibsen's major plays have been translated and staged in China, and scholars in the field of modern Chinese intellectual history fully acknowledge the contribution Ibsen made to the May 4th movement that marked the beginning of modern Chinese culture.
To the European critics, Ibsen belongs to the present and is mainly a dramatist, not a social critic. But in China, Ibsen is often considered a revolutonary figure and has been variously represented in Chinese politics in the past ninty years.
The 19th-century critics tended to think of Ibsen's plays as stage reproductions of actual experiences in life. In the reception of Ibsen in both the East and the West, there have been different emphases, each of which employs the use of a different interpretive strategy. The two kinds of interpretation, Marxist-socialist on the one hand and aesthetic-formalist on the other, are the result of not only a difference in reception strategies, but also a difference in politics.
In regarding Ibsen as a dramatist or as a social critic, the difference lies in the critics' choice of strategy whether or not there is the belief of correspondence between a dramatist's works and social reality.
Ibsen's works were introduced to China much later than they were in Japan and in the countries in Western Europe and North America. China's nation-wide reception of Ibsen occured around the end of the 1910s and was necessarily affected by the coexistence of the moralist and socialist-Marxist codes in European interpretations of Ibsen. From the beginning, the modern Chinese theatre was a social and political theatre. Although there were no distinctively formed Ibsenite groups in China, there were dramatists, such as Hong Shen and Tian Han, who openly professed themselves 'Chinese Ibsens'. Ibsen's influence in China is manifested in two aspects : sociopolitical and artistic (both literary and theatrical). Ibsen was regarded by the Chinese critics and dramatists both as a social-realist and as a romantic playwright. The history of the reception of ibsen in China can be divided roughtly into four major periods : 1908-1927, 1928-1948, 1949-1976, and 1977-present. In the first period, Chinese interpretations of Ibsen were closely associated with social movements and were greatly influenced by the moralist code then prevalent in Europe. Ibsen's social influence was first seen in the advocycy of individualism and iconoclasm in the writings of Lu Xun and Hu Shi. The social movements in China gave the interpretation of Ibsens's plays a new political context by which the critics conveyed their messages to Chinese readers. Ibsen was hailed as a champion of individualism, uncompromising moralist, and advocate of feminism. The iconoclastic elements derived from Iben's plays were most valued in this period as a means of resistance against the traditioal moral system deeply rooted in China's confucian collectivism. One of the major reasons for introducing Ibsen to China was that the messages derived from his plays constituted a powerful attack on the conventional moral institutions in China. Ibsen was hailed as a figure of hope and new values. Chinese dramatists werde more attracted to his explosive themes than to his dramatic subtlety. Almost all the social problem plays in the early 1920s were modelled after Ibsen's plays, without considering the appropriateness of such an approach to the theatre. The influence became so powerful that even well established Chinese dramatists could not resist the temptation to imitate Ibsen, which at that time was considered by some critics as an act of contempt equivalent to plagiarism.
The second period in the reception of Ibsen was accompanied by the gradual maturity of modern Chinese drama and literary criticism. Ibsen attracted the attention of more and more serious Chinese dramatists and critics, such as Xiong Foxi and Chen Zhice. Chinese dramatists gradually shifted their interest to the artistry in Ibsen's dram in the late 1920s when the zeal for social reform in China was in low tide. In the late 1920s and 1930s some Chinese critics called for a reconsideration of Ibsen from the perspective of art, still the general tendency was to moralize him, which was supported by the practical view that Ibsen's drama was useful for social reform in China. Unfortunately the war between China and Japan broke out and destroyed the hope of developing Chinese drama along a normal artistic path. Political considerations and the nationalist responsibility of saving China from disgrace and sufferings again became the first concern of serious, patriotic writers. The Chinese interest in Ibsen revived during the war years because of the need for a new dramatic form that could arouse the reader's emotional response. In a new context of oppression and invasion, the theme of A doll's house already interpreted as 'exploitation of women' was redefined as 'exploitation of Chinese women under foreign invasion'. Almost all the Chinese stage productions of A doll's house in the years from 1937 to 1945 were adaptations to serve as a nationalist discourse for the patriotic cause.
The third period in the reception of Ibsen in China started in 1949 and ended around 1976. In these years, Chinese interpretations followed closely the footsteps of the Soviet bloc. Friedrich Engels's analysis of Ibsen's plays in terms of 'class struggle' and the redefinition of the 'Ibsenian concept of majority', which were considered necessarily reactionary with reference to 'the bourgeois class in the 19th-century semi-feudal Norwegian society'. Although social and political events similar to those depicted in Ibsen's social plays did not exist in China in these thirty years, Ibsen was still revered in terms of his historic importance as a critic of the bourgeois social system and thus was taken as politically useful to the new socialist system. The well-made dramatic conflicts in Ibsen's plays were taken as reflections of class struggle in capitalist society. Hence, for the Chinese Marxists every reading of Ibsen's social plays was a lession on the evils of capitalism. For Chinese dramatists, Ibsen's plays, redefined in the light of socialist realism, were excellent examples to learn how to reproduce class struggles as dramatic conflicts on the stage.
The new social and political reality in China after 1976 allows Ibsen readers to see that there are alternatives to the vulgarized political doctrines in the interpretation of literature. There was in effect little literary criticism in the first thirty years of the People's republic. Government intervention in the interpretation of an author allowed little freedom beyond politics. The new political and social environment has given rise to the influx of the one-condemned 'Western bourgeois literary criticism' into socialist China. Chinese critics thus have an opportunity to come into contact with contemporary Western orientation in literary studies, resulting in the gradual adoption of the easthetic-formalist code.
One of Ibsen's contributions to the Chinese theatre is the inception of a realistic stage. For many years, illusionistic acting in the fashion of Stanislavsky's style and Ibsen's realistic drama has been the main-stream in the modern Chinese theatre. Ibsen's first and obvious impact on the Chinese stage was upon the style of acting, the use of props and stage design : the first elements of external realistic technique.
Ibsen was regarded as a realistic playwright in China mainly for the social implications of his plays, very seldom for the true-to-life presentation of his themes and even less often for the dramatic techniques, which enable his plays to be realistic. With regard to the stage conventions in contemporary China, Ibsen's social problem play and 'the fourth wall' mode of presentation, together with Stanislavky's acting style, have become the mainstream in Chinese theatre, which also affects the perspective of drama critics, who have gradually and unconsciously formed a fixed view of drama that excludes other possibilities of stage style.
In the reception of Ibsen, the Chinese views had been subjected to influences from both the Anglo-American and socialist sources. While the socialist views emphasized social reference and class struggle, the Anglo-American views tended to stress the aesthetic values of Ibsen's works.

Elisabeth Eide ; Neither Hu Shi nor Lu Xun ever evaluated Ibsen from an aesthetic point of view. Ibsen was constantly regarded as an ideological writer whose characters might be transformed into positive or negative stereotypes. The complexita of Ibsen's characters had to be reduced to schematically idealized stereotypes in order to function in the Chines society as generative models. The role of Nora could not be invested with sufficient positive elements to serve as an emblem for female emancipation in China.
Realism is one of the elements that was underlined in the transmission of Ibsen's ideas, but it must not be regarded as originating with Ibsen. Ibsen was regarded as a bourgeois author, and Chinese writers who took up his views also set them in a bourgeois context. They emphasized elements in Ibsen's creative works that are associated with a liberal bourgeois society such as freedom and liberation. Hu Shi introduced his concept of Ibsenism in drama as well as in intellectual debate.
The Chinese recrated the world that Ibsen had created and adapted it to Chinese circumstances. Ibsen's role was always that of an iconoclast. He was regarded as a representative of the new thought needed to transform the Chinese world. His dramatic version of topics such as heredity were taken as science dramatized.
Ibsen represented ideology more than aestheticism in so far as his plays were evaluated from the point of view of what model or ideal his characters might serve in the formation of a new, liberal policy in China.

He Chengzhou : The development of Chinese modern drama has been closely associated with the reception of Ibsen, which has undergone a process of widening vision of Ibsen from a realist, to a romantic and then to a symbolist.