THE BEAUTY THAT BROUGHT LIGHT TO ONE OF CHINA’S DARKEST PERIODS
They survived the war against Japan and became the pin-up girls of Mao’s communists, making movies to inspire the starving masses
Qin Yi was called the most beautiful woman in early Communist China. Now, at 93, as she sits in her apartment in Shanghai where she appeared in more than three dozen movies, her pale complexion and dark eyes are still charming. Qin is the last surviving member of a group once known as the “four great actresses”. Their glamour onstage and on screen stirred audiences during the turmoil at the birth of modern China, nearly 70 years ago. When the Communists took over, these actresses concealed their affection for Ingrid Bergman and Bette Davis, tucked away their love of fashion and steered their careers toward movies that promoted proletarian values.
The cinema was an important tool for the Communist Party as it strove to build a cohesive society, and as the sirens of the new leadership, the four women, often dressed in clean and pressed peasant clothes, played in heated antiJapanese war movies and slightly implausible family melodramas. Their beauty dazzled audiences starved for distraction from hard times and made the propaganda about the new revolutionary society palatable.
“The content was always designed to spread forward thinking,” Qin said as she recalled her starring roles in, among others, Railway Guerrillas, Woman Basketball Player No 5 and Loyal Overseas Chinese.
The lives of the four actresses were outwardly romantic: Qin married China’s most famous actor of the post-war period, Jin Yan, known as the Rudolph Valentino of Shanghai. But beneath the glamour lay the chaos of wartime Shanghai and the intrigue of Chongqing, a city filled with spies and soldiers and run by the Nationalists. Then came the treacherous roller-coaster politics of the Mao Zedong era.
Shanghai has always considered itself the birthplace of Chinese cinema, starting with the silent movies of the 1920s that blossomed into the golden era of lavish productions of the 1930s.
Now, on the outskirts of Shanghai, huge studios, some working in tandem with Hollywood, make multimillion-dollar blockbusters. People there take pride that the city is a relatively open place for movie-making, new genre animation and the best film festivals, setting it apart from staid and political Beijing to the north.
The heady days of 1930s Shanghai movies were slowing down when Qin, still a teenager, escaped the city and settled in Chongqing, the wartime capital to the west.
She slept in a tiny dormitory on a bamboo mattress on the floor with nine other girls, surviving on rice and soup. There, she met Zhang Ruifang, like her a fledgling actress, who had fled her bourgeois family in Beijing.
Two other up-and-coming stars, Bai Yang and Shu Xiuwen, were also in Chongqing, leading a Communist playwright and polemicist, Xia Yan, who had taken up residence there, to call the group “the four great actresses”. In 1946, after the defeat of the Japanese, the four returned to Shanghai, a cosmopolitan city of grand buildings and sleek bars, great wealth and terrible poverty. Three years later, the city fell to the Communists.
When Zhang had arrived at the city, she had styled herself after Ingrid Bergman, her favourite actress. Her second husband, Jin Shan, had served as a secret agent for the Communists in Chongqing.
A photograph of the couple in 1943 shows Zhang in a well-cut black jacket with a heartshaped silver pin on one lapel. Jin wears a tweed sport jacket, a shirt and tie, and a handkerchief in his pocket.
Beneath her persona of old Shanghai elegance, however, Zhang was also an undercover Communist spy, her grandson, Zhu Feng, a movie director, said. The two found out about each other’s clandestine work when party members informed them after Jin’s marriage proposal, Zhu said.
In Chongqing, Zhang’s controller had been Zhou Enlai, who ran the Communist intelligence operation in the city and went on to become prime minister and his grandmother’s lifelong friend, Zhu said. (Zhou, considered the intellectual of the Communist Party leaders, later called Qin the beauty of China.)
It was Jin, a bon vivant and denizen of bars, though, who was an especially skilled spy, maintaining good relations with the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai, Zhu said. Through Jin’s connections, a gang lord allied with the Nationalists married the couple in Shanghai.
In post-war Communist Shanghai, Qin and Zhang began making movies again. Railway Guerrillas called for the cast to go on location to Wuxi, a city west of Shanghai.
“It was summer and extremely hot, but we had to wear quilted jackets, as the scenes were supposed to be in winter,” Qin said. “The actors had to learn how to climb on and jump off a moving train. I learned to play the widow of a railway official killed by the Japanese. Then she cooked and spied for the guerrillas. It was 35 degrees Celsius and I had heat rash all over my neck.”
In 1963, Zhang won a national best actress award, and a grainy black-and-white image of her in Zhu’s collection of photographs shows Zhou grinning broadly as his protegee accepts the prize.
But again, not all was as it seemed. By then, Zhang’s marriage had broken up after Zhou’s goddaughter, Sun Weishi, a theatre director, had an affair with Jin, Zhu said. She later married him.
Then, during the Cultural Revolution, the lives of the four actresses fell apart.
Artistic figures who had been favoured by Mao and Zhou were singled out for vilification. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who had been an opera star in Shanghai, appears to have taken special pleasure in excoriating the women she had known in the 1930s.
Zhang, perhaps because of her Communist pedigree from World War II, suffered the least. Although imprisoned, she was released after a year or two, Zhu said. For Qin, there were six years of hard labour away from Shanghai.
Red Guards denounced Shu Xiuwen, who died of heart failure during the period. Bai Yang, who was deemed by the Red Guards to be even more bourgeois than her colleagues, was kept in solitary confinement in a dark cell for five years. She died in 1996.
Zhang and Qin resumed acting after the Cultural Revolution, but it was never quite the same. Even now, though, awards for lifetime achievement keep arriving for Qin, who flew to Los Angeles several months ago to be honoured by a Chinese American association.
Five years before Zhang died in 2012, Xi Jinping, now the president of China, visited her when he was mayor of Shanghai, in a sign of the deep respect the party held for her.
“Their careers flourished and then withered during the tumultuous Mao era,” Ying Zhu, a professor who studies cinema at the College of Staten Island, said of the four actresses. They believed in the Communist Party and immersed themselves in all their roles, she said, noting: “Given the little choice we had, many were indeed memorable roles that I grew up repeatedly watching.”
For the government, the actresses were vital, said Hao Jian, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. “Movies have been a very significant part of the red propaganda machine. The Chinese film-makers like to quote Lenin as saying, ‘You must remember always that of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.’ ”