The reform era

In Shaanbei, as elsewhere in China, as the commune system began to be dismantled from the early 1980s, traditional culture revived more openly. We saw above that bards were active throughout the commune period, both in and out of the new teams; if the old contexts and stories had never died out, after the end of the Cultural Revolution there was no longer such need for collusion or duplicity. Li Huaiqiang recalled, ‘As soon as Mao Zedong died, they stopped controlling us bards.’ But like other traditional performers, they were soon competing with new economic pressures, TV and pop music taking their toll: where Communism had failed to marginalize tradition, capitalism looked like succeeding.