ABSTRACT
It is a hoary Communist cliché that in the ‘old society’, folk musicians, such as the lowly shawm bands, were despised and rejected, whereas after Liberation they were esteemed and their lives improved radically. In fact, for the chuishou, as we found with the bards, any notional improvement in status after Liberation might seem to have been cancelled out by the collapse of their patrons and contexts. Nonetheless, chuishou kept active, after a fashion; most senior chuishou active since the 1990s learnt their trade in the first 15 years after Liberation, roughly from 1949 to 1964.
