Jules Zhao Liu
in History and Anthropology, 2026
Abstract: In the early 1960s, ghost-drama performances鬼戏 sprang up in the countryside across China, stimulating religious activities. In response, the Chinese Communist Party Central Political Bureau accepted the Ministry of Culture party committee’s proposal and prohibited all forms of ghost plays across China. Under the draconian suppression, ghost drama continued to perform clandestinely in certain rural areas. Why did ghost drama that had once been stymied in the 1950s suddenly mushroom in the 1960s? This paper addresses this puzzle. Previous literature on ghost dramas relied solely on historical documentation; scholars treated them as a genre of Chinese dramas and therefore examined them from a literary perspective. By contrast, this study explores ghost-drama performances in rural areas through ethnography. My fieldwork finds that ghost drama was an exorcistic ritual designed to tackle the spirits of people who died unnaturally. As a great number of people died in the Great Famine (1959–1961), survivors of this disaster drew on this ritual to make the victims rest in peace and bring order to the chaotic society. So, ghost-drama performances revived in the aftermath of the Famine. Subsuming this case within religious studies in modern China, I argue that the disaster and religion relation provides a new perspective on religious revivals in China.
About the author: Jules Zhao Liu was a HYI Chinese Politics Training Program Visiting Fellow from 2016-17.